France’s best-known hunter of Nazis, Serge Klarsfeld, and the CRIF, France’s umbrella Jewish organisation and EJC affiliate, have protested a publisher’s plan to print antisemitic essays by the author Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, also known as Céline.
Klarsfeld, a historian and vice president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told Le Parisien that it would be “unbearable” to find at a French library the essays by the celebrated novelist, which he published under the pseudonym Louis-Ferdinand Céline between 1937 and 1941, the paper reported last week.
In a statement, CRIF said that it opposes the plan by Editions Gallimard to publish later this year the three “racist, antisemitic and pro-Hitler” essays titled “A bagatelle for a massacre,” “The school of corpses” and “Beautiful sheets.”
The plans to publish the essays were made known in November but formally announced only in recent days. A spokesman for Editions Gallimard, one of France’s most prominent publishing houses, told L’Express the essays would be edited “in a scientific style” that would expose and explain their antisemitic content.
Céline, a physician and open supporter of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, published “Journey to the End of the Night” in 1932 about his experiences fighting in World War I. Celebrated as a timeless masterpiece about the horrors of war, it influenced Joseph Heller, author of “Catch-22,”.
Reviled and detested in his native France for his support of the Nazi occupation, Céline left for Germany and Denmark after France was liberated. He returned in 1951, a decade before he died.
In one of the 176 pages that comprise “Beautiful sheets,” Céline writes: “More Jews than ever before on the street, more Jews than ever before in the press, more Jews than ever before on the bar, more Jews than ever before at the Sorbonne, more Jews than ever before in medicine, more Jews than ever before in theatre, in the opera, in industry, the banks. Paris, France more than ever before ceded to the masons and Jews, more insolent than ever before.”
