(To the German I pass by on the street.) I don’t know exactly what I feel when I’m near you. I don’t hate you, I don’t hate you anymore. I know you will never be my master. I pretend not to see you…
Photography print available at Found View Gallery.
(To the German I pass by on the street.) I don’t know exactly what I feel when I’m near you. I don’t hate you, I don’t hate you anymore. I know you will never be my master. I pretend not to see you. I act as if you did not exist. I promised myself never to talk to you. I understand your language, but if you talk to me, I raise my arms in the air and act like someone who doesn’t understand. And yet the other day on the Place du Châtelet, you walked up to me: you were wandering around like any lost little soldier, looking for Notre-Dame cathedral. So I pointed to the towers rising in the sky on the other side of the river, staring you in the face. You felt stupid, you blushed, and I was glad. It has come to this.
What do you think you look like with your green uniform on our streets, in our public squares? A soldier in Paris, in France, is blue, or dark red. You’re too buttoned up. And those gentleman’s gloves you wear? You’re far too proper. And what about your dagger? And your revolver? A gloved executioner. And your boots? How many pairs of shoes could be cut out of them for people who now go barefoot?
I do not hate you. I don’t know how to hate. When you get into the metro we squeezed together to make room for you. You are the Untouchable. I lower my head a bit so you won’t see where my eyes are going, to deprive you of the joy of an exchange of glances. There you are in the midst of us, like an object, in a circle of cold silence.
Jean Guéhenno
Notes:
• From Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944
• Jean Guéhenno was a French writer and intellectual who kept a diary during the WWII German occupation of France.
Ever Paris 