The Pietist Schoolman

After an off-day on Thursday, we concluded our visit with two morning walking tours, each telling the stories of people who, during and just after the war, had come to Paris in exile (voluntary or not) from their own countries.

First, on Friday morning Prof. Mulberry took us into the world of American expatriates who sought their muses (and a low cost of living) in Paris. Reading from Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, en route, Prof. Mulberry took us from the cafe where Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald to the apartments of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, poet Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein (who coined the phrase “Lost Generation” for the writers and artists she hosted in her salon), ending at the former site of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, whose owner, Sylvia Beach, lent Hemingway books and published James Joyce’s Ulysses. While only Hemingway had had direct experience of the war, all responded to the dislocation of a conflict in which — in the words of Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley — died a “myriad,” and all for “A botched civilization… / For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.”
(On this MLK Day I should also add that, in addition to selections from Pound’s poem, Friday we read civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois’ bitter postwar editorial, “Returning Soldiers,” which hailed African-American soldiers who had fought “For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult….” Alas, we didn’t have time to visit the Montmartre haunts of black expats like Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ada Smith.)

About half the students joined us after lunch in visiting two sites that previewed our course’s shift to Munich, and the connections between WWI, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust. First, tucked behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the rarely-visited memorial to the over 200,000 Jews, resisters, and others deported from France to German concentration and extermination camps between 1940 and 1945. Then, on the other side of the river in Paris’ former Jewish Quarter, the Shoah Memorial and Museum, whose extensive permanent collection ends with the wrenching sight of photograph after photograph of French Jewish children whose lives were extinguished in the death camps.

The relationship between modern warfare and genocide begins, however, with the murder of a million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during WWI. So before heading to the Gare de l’Est to catch our mid-afternoon train to Germany, we visited the Armenian Church of St. John the Baptist (just south of the Champs Élysées). The small Armenian colony for whom the beautiful church was built (about a decade before the war) swelled as tens of thousands of refugees made their way to Paris after the slaughter began in 1915. Sunday after Sunday, they came to church hoping to see lost relatives — or at least to learn of their fates. (The church also includes two monuments to Armenians — originally considered enemy aliens because they carried Ottoman passports –who fought and died for France in WWI.)

Before going to our train, we gathered at the Arc de Triomphe, where an eternal flame marks the site where France’s Unknown Soldier was buried in 1921. Individually, we paused to meditate on the death and sacrifice we had seen in our studies, and to pray for peace in our own time.