Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (39 page)

Out of the communicative interplay within a group emerges a series of “fantasy themes,” a term that does
not
mean that the stories told are imaginary. Usually our fantasy themes deal with actual people or events, with real heroes or villains, with projections into the future or common understandings of the past.
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To give a simple example, a group of professors might meet over coffee and chain out stories of their students. Through these narratives, the professors “make visible (understandable) a common experience and shape it into common knowledge.”
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They develop a shared understanding of each new crop of students, sometimes in positive and sometimes in negative ways. Of course, the students are simultaneously developing their own fantasy themes concerning their professors. Particularly fascinating are such “mirror image fantasies,” where the “heroes of one account are the villains of the other, the laudable actions in one becoming the deplorable actions in the other.”
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What Ernest Bormann calls the “fossilized remains” of these fantasies continue to exist as these stories are shared with others. What are left behind are remnants that can be read to
understand a group's sense of “social reality.” One interesting aspect of fantasy theme important to understanding narratives of the Guernsey Occupation is the “inside joke,” where speakers (or writers) reference a shared fantasy by a gesture, coded term, or other symbol.
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Often such inside jokes remain mysterious to those outside the original group, leading to misunderstandings and false readings.
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Average Guernseymen and women, excluding the minority of collaborators, fraternizers, or profiteers who functioned outside the mainstream, formed a “rhetorical community”
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of shared values and common perceptions. In their stories, jokes, and metaphors are the traces left behind of a sense-making process used to give meaning to their confused and stressful experience of Occupation.

To capture the mindset of Islanders and understand the narrative they constructed informally, it is important to seek clusters of stories that portray recurrent “fantasy types.” Sometimes the same story or joke appears, with only slight variations, in more than one account. More often, the fantasy type is composed of narratives that vary somewhat in their characters and plots but nonetheless possess an essential similarity.
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Not surprisingly, given all the control over information, one cluster of stories that made the rounds dealt with propaganda and the German use of the Channel Islands as a propaganda device. One story conveyed early on by Winifred Harvey also took the form of a warning narrative, a major fantasy type that appears in a variety of settings.

Winnie introduced this tale with “The story goes…,” an indicator that she did not necessarily accept it as true, but perhaps recorded it as instructive and fairly widespread. At a German concert in Jersey, the commandant stepped forward to speak to the crowd, asking who among them could speak German. Only three or four raised their hands in response. With such a small response, he switched gears and asked those who did
not
speak German to raise their hands. Of course, the hundreds in attendance raised their hands, and at that moment, the German photographer took a picture. This, then, was published in Germany “as the Jersey people ‘heiling’ Hitler.” Winnie concluded that the moral of the story was “keep away from crowds.”
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It is fascinating to see a variation of this story appear in a modern recollection by Maurice Green, a man who was a schoolboy in Jersey during the Occupation. As recorded by Madeleine Bunting, in Green's memory the Germans gathered together elementary schoolchildren, and a German officer said, “Hands up all the children who would like to have a bar of German milk chocolate.” Film was then made of the children purportedly doing the Heil Hitler salute. In Green's account, he did not want the chocolate and did not raise his hand, thus making him the one not caught in the propaganda. There are multiple difficulties with this story that, assuming the sincerity of the interviewee and the accuracy of Bunting's report, point to it as a false memory. However, even if such is the case, this simply highlights that the story was so common as to become embedded in a child's mind, later to be recalled as a personal event.
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This story in its various iterations reflects Islanders' awareness of their potential usefulness to further the German cause, if only as unwitting players in a German propaganda script. Hearing this tale when it was making the rounds in August 1940 would only strengthen Guernsey's resolve to avoid contact with their new masters, avoidance being one of the most basic levels of resistance to power. While many narratives portray Germans as duplicitous, the outward friendliness sheltering negative intentions, some of the stories passed around as true possessed a tinge of sympathy for the common German soldiers as co-victims of the Nazi regime. Such stories of revelation, of Germans forced to confront the truth of either their own nature or that of the regime they supported, were prevalent throughout the Occupation.

During the fall of 1941, after a series of evictions and confiscations of Islander houses, Rev. Ord wrote of one German, adept at colloquial English and dressed in civilian attire, who had entered Miss Gaudin's shop. She knew perfectly well his country of origin, but Miss Gaudin asked, “Are you a Frenchman?” The German's reply was phrased, according to Ord, “with a grasp of Shakespearian English that shewed what a good school he had attended.” The man answered, “No, I'm one of your bloody Germans.” His “thoroughly crestfallen and ashamed” manner, Ord believed, reflected his awareness of the newly stigmatized reputation of Germany.
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If there was the occasional story that differentiated a particular soldier from the mass or portrayed them as unwitting dupes of the Nazi regime, these tales were far outweighed by warning stories. As mentioned previously, the warning story was a preeminent fantasy type and often dealt with the need to see through the friendly and polite guise of the Germans to the dark heart beneath. One story was shocking enough to have been repeated broadly. It appeared in the diary kept by Kitty Bachmann in November 1941 and then was repeated as a complete story in Violet Carey's diary in October 1942. It is worth examining in its entirety as an indication of the function of warning narratives, and as an insight into how oral stories “morph” as they are passed from person to person over the course of a year.

I will start with Kitty's version of the story, which she introduced with the common device of “the story goes,” and without indicating by whom the story had come her way. The story involved a “certain family who entertained the Germans” and who had a young son that was a great favorite of a particular German guest. This German soldier “would dandle the child on his knee and make a great show of affection.” The father of the child decided, for unspecified reasons, to test the German and asked, “If you were ordered by the Führer to destroy this child, would you do so?” The German soldier replied without pause, “I would have no choice but to obey!” Shocked by what Kitty called “this admission of weakness,” the parent told the soldier to leave the house and never return.
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Now let us turn to the version recorded by Violet Carey the following year. In Violet's version, the incident occurred in a “family who has a soldier billeted on them and with whom they have become very friendly.” This time the child who had become a favorite of the German soldier was a little girl. One day, as the soldier was stroking the little girl's hair, he said, without prompting or questioning, “If Hitler ordered me to shoot this little girl I would shoot her.” Violet reported that she was “glad to say they [the family] had the spunk to turn him out of their room and to have nothing more to do with him.”
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The differences in these warning stories are notable. Kitty's version involves a family with whom few Islanders would have been sympathetic, for they had chosen to entertain the Germans voluntarily. In a sense, these quislings got what they deserved in the shocking revelation that their houseguest was not a fond uncle to their little boy, but a thoroughgoing Nazi. It is a story that implies that those foolish enough to have voluntary contact with the Germans would rue the day when the evil nature of their new friends emerged in full force.

Violet Carey's version was told after a period of intense billeting and confiscation of Islanders' homes. In this case, the innocence of the Guernsey family is heightened in a number of ways. First, the German is not a voluntary houseguest, but a soldier they were forced to billet in their home. Even the child in question is made more vulnerable and innocent by the change from a boy to a girl. The mistake made by the family pointed to an error possibly being made by many now forced to billet German soldiers: to see these young men as friends, much like their own sons serving in the British forces, and innocent of attachment to the Nazi
cause. As discussed earlier, this actually was the experience of some of those billeting German soldiers. In this case, the German, unbidden, dramatically reveals his Nazi fanaticism hidden under the guise of friendliness. This is a version that is far more chilling, and one that allows the Guernsey family to win the day by showing the “spunk” necessary to avoid further close contact, despite his continued presence in their home. Anyone hearing this story would put a new frame on the pleasant young man now housed in the bedroom down the hall.

And that is the important aspect of warning narratives; they reframe something that the teller and listener have in common and thus provide both admonitions for past behavior and implied advice for the future. Some early stories related to the dangerous combination of armed soldiers and a language barrier. One apparently true tale from the first month of Occupation involved E. H. Ogier of Duvaux Farm, who fell asleep in his armchair before night had fallen. He was awakened at 2
A
.
M
. by a pair of German soldiers knocking on his front door. The German soldiers did not speak English and Mr. Ogier did not understand German, so there seemed to be an impasse. That is, until one soldier pointed to the electric light and fired off two rounds. Both missed the target, but “Teddy Ogier then understood what was wanted and switched off the light.”
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In this story, Teddy Ogier could be considered the target of the humor. In most of the stories and jokes, however, we generally see this same designation of the “butt of the joke” as someone other than the average Guernsey Islander, and thus as someone other than the person relating the story. Self-deprecating humor is a luxury of the powerful, or at least of those with some modicum of control over their own lives. Among those with limited to no power, the humor is often at the expense of others, generally based on a comparative that makes the teller feel momentarily one-up on another person or group.
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Stories about propaganda generally implied superiority over the Germans, particularly in Islanders' ability to obtain British information despite the German ban. Of course, many of these stories involve the civilians' ability to retain and read leaflets. One classic reversal story was related by Ambrose Robin on October 10, 1940, and involved a Guernsey special constable impressed by German soldiers into collecting leaflets dropped by the RAF. The soldiers and constable went door to door together for a while before coming to a neighborhood with houses on both sides of the street. The German corporal directed the special constable to take the houses on one side, while the Germans approached the houses on the other. At the first house, the constable, as he had been directed, asked the homeowners, “Have you any leaflets—if so, you must give them up.” When the occupants replied, “No,” the constable said, “Well, here's a couple,” and handed over several leaflets collected earlier in the day.
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This story was similar to a pair of matching tales related on the same day by Rev. Ord. The first involved a young lad in Grande Rue, St. Martin. He was walking along the road reading a dog-eared copy of “Comic Cuts,” or “some similar literature,” when he was stopped by a large German soldier. The soldier examined the paper the boy was carrying, satisfying himself that it was not a British leaflet, and then let the boy go with an admonition to turn in any leaflets he might find. The boy went home and told his parents about his conversation with the German, and his father took the opportunity to tell his son to be very careful. The boy agreed readily and then, “diving into his inner pocket,” produced the leaflets he had been carrying the entire time he was questioned by the German.

The second incident occurred in a field where a farm worker was milking cows, each tethered to her own rope, taking advantage of the lush grass. A German soldier came by looking for leaflets, and the farm worker truthfully told him that he had seen none. Having milked
“Mabel,” he went over to “Susan.” When Susan got to her feet in preparation for milking, it turned out that she had been “lying on a thick wad of leaflets.” Thus, the worker had many leaflets to distribute to those who had yet to read one. And it was all because the German “had not been sufficiently ‘efficient’ to question” Susan as well!
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What makes these three stories work as a fantasy type is the juxtaposition of force, as represented by the Germans' power to commandeer, question, and confiscate, with either cleverness or a complete innocence that manages to thwart that force. In the latter stories, the German is outwitted first by an innocent child and—the greater insult—ultimately by a cow. It could be expected that stories about the Germans would show them up or portray them in a state of discomfiture. It is a desire for “negative reciprocity, a settling of scores when the high shall be brought low and the last shall be first.”
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What cannot be achieved by counterforce can easily take place in narratives, some factual and most fictional.