Exchange and misunderstanding: Jacques Decour, Philisterburg

The in-between as a literary principle

Jacques Decour, Philistine Castle, Paris: Gallimard, 1932 / Éditions Allia, 2023.
Jacques Decour, Philistine Castle, Translated by Stefan Ripplinger, Andere Bibliothek, 2014.

There are books that capture their historical moment with a precision that makes subsequent interpretation almost superfluous – and yet possess so much literary originality that they do not become mere documents. Philistine Castle (cited as PHB), published by Gallimard in 1932, by Jacques Decour (real name: Daniel Decourdemanche, 1910–1942), is one such book. It originated from a stay in Magdeburg during the 1930/31 school year by the twenty-year-old Parisian German studies student, which he renames "Philisterburg" in the text, a fictional Prussian provincial town. This renaming already contains the literary program: the name is culturally and historically charged – since the Sturm und Drang movement, "Philister" has denoted the narrow-minded, art-hostile citizen, and it also refers to the Old Testament enemies of Israel, a semantic multiplicity that was no longer harmless in Germany in 1930.

What Decour writes defies easy categorization: it is diary and essay, school trip report and political diagnosis, character study and poetics all in one. Written in French, it deals with Germany; it employs the genre of "littérature de voyage" while simultaneously subverting it through reflexive self-examination. Thus, it fulfills all the criteria that the "Romans croisés" section sets for its texts: formal interweaving of two cultural spheres, spatial and historical depth, and a discernible reflection on the in-between as a literary principle. PHB is not a book. over Germany from a French perspective – it is a book that arises in the gap between the two cultures and makes this gap itself its subject.

The tragic dimension is clear: Decour, who co-founded a Resistance magazine in 1942 (Les Lettres françaisesThe author, who is handed over to the Gestapo by the French police and shot dead, observes with disturbing clarity in PHB what is dawning in Germany. His book causes a scandal in France – because it spares neither the German nor the French side, because it demands understanding for Germany's plight and at the same time recognizes the danger of German nationalism. This twofold discomfort, the refusal to take sides and yet to think politically, is the true literary achievement of the text.

A French perspective on Germany before 1933

The novel – for the sake of simplicity, let it be called that, although Decour himself speaks of “Notes sur un séjour en Prusse” – is divided into three parts: a short “Prélude” (prologue) and an extensive journal, as well as the concluding essay “Goethe et la jeunesse allemande”.

In the prelude, the first-person narrator describes the train journey from Paris to Philisterburg in October 1930. Two fellow passengers—a banker with a mustache, another with horn-rimmed glasses—reveal themselves to be petty representatives of a self-satisfied French nationalism: they speak of the young teacher's "sacred mission" as a cultural ambassador, demand uncompromising stance toward Germany, and insist: "Not a penny less!" A third passenger reads proofs of a cosmopolitan manifesto—a "young European" whose effeminateness is caricatured. This scene already establishes the entire coordinate system of the text: the self-satisfied chauvinist, the hollow pacifist, and the observing narrator in between.

The diary begins on October 14, 1930, and extends into February 1931. The narrator describes his arrival at the Gymnasium (grammar school) – his meeting with the headmaster, Dr. Bär (modeled on the real headmaster, Bruns), an idealistic, moralizing educator of the old school; his boarding accommodations with the widow Bügler and later the even more bigoted widow Grimm; his encounters with the convinced National Socialist Adler, his roommate; with the student Kraus, a German-speaking Czechoslovakian full of revisionist resentments; with the refined history teacher, Dr. Apel, considered a shining exception; and with the pedantic French teacher, Bruneau. He also describes the streets of Philisterburg, National Socialist and Communist rallies, the political conflicts, the newspaper landscape, and the everyday life of the Prussian lower middle class. Reflections on school pedagogy, national characters, Franco-German relations, and the role of the writer permeate the text.

The diary culminates in an extensive political analysis of Franco-German relations: Decour maps the political camps of both countries, dismantles mutual stereotypes, diagnoses a structural inability to understand one another, and formulates – in one of the most memorable sentences of the text – that the current course is leading to catastrophe: “Hitler est le fils du traité de Versailles.” ¹ The concluding essay on Goethe and German youth uses the Goethe anniversary of 1932 to show how far German youth has strayed from that humanistic, cosmopolitan heritage which the narrator considers the very substance of the Germany he loves.

Proximity and distance

PHB is a hybrid text, and this hybrid genre form is not an aesthetic shortcoming, but rather the actual carrier medium of its message. The diary as a leading genre creates the illusion of immediacy and guarantees authenticity, but Decour himself undermines this illusion in the text when he writes: "I reste encore à noter une 'prise de contact' (style de journaliste) avec les élèves, et mon emménagement. Si j'avais le courage de lire ce qui précède, j'y trouverais sans doute, autour du noyau des petits faits réels, une épaisse couche de faits mentaux: peu de substance et beaucoup de bavardage.” ² This mise en abyme of the diary form – the narrator criticizes his own writing within the act of writing – is an essential element of Decours. autopoetological dimensionThe book constantly reflects on what it is and what it is capable of achieving.

The narrative perspective is strictly personal and told from the first-person point of view of a young Frenchman who doesn't deny his own subjectivity but explicitly displays it. Decour has his narrator confess: "Ces notes, rédigées sans le moindre souci des conséquences, n'ont rien d'un reportage. Elles ne recherchent pas l'objectivité, mais l'impartialité." ³ The difference between "objectivity" and "impartiality" is programmatic: the aim is not neutrality—that would be a lie—but justice despite and through subjectivity. This epistemological modesty protects the text from the arrogance of the ethnological observer and makes it literarily productive.

The construction of proximity and distance is particularly ingenious: The narrator takes care not to caricature the Germans, but in the same breath admits his aesthetic aversions and political reactions. In a curious liminal space between fascination and alienation, he observes the SA march one Sunday: "I was gradually swept away by the shared atmosphere that filled them; I almost joined in the singing." ⁴ The narrator honestly admits to being swept away by the collective rhythm – this honesty lends credibility to the analysis. He is not a superior observer, but someone affected, who catches himself in his own vulnerability.

The text adds essayistic interludes to the diary, in which the boundary between narrator and author is almost entirely dissolved. These interludes address questions of educational theory, nationalism, press manipulation, and the role of the writer—all revolving around the Franco-German antagonism as their epistemological center. Thus, the text formally transcends the mere travel diary and approaches the intellectual essay in Montaigne's sense: thinking as a process, not as a finished product.

Character constellation and the Franco-German region

The constellation of characters in PHB is not a mere collection of personalities, but a system of types that maps the entire Franco-German sphere. Already in the train scene, the prelude sketches the French spectrum: the bankers as representatives of a national-conservative France driven by economic self-interest, which despises Germany but wants to exploit it financially; the "young European" as the representative of a hollow cosmopolitan idealism. Both positions are dismantled by the narrator's ironic distance.

In Philisterburg, the narrator encounters a multifaceted cast of characters. Dr. Bär, the headmaster, is the comically pathetic embodiment of old Prussia: a Protestant moralist who elevates the education of youth to a sacrament – ​​“For him, teaching is a calling, one of the most beautiful professions of all: to educate young people, to shape them, to show them the path to truth and goodness.” ⁵ —and in doing so, completely misjudges the real political situation. His concept of “moral individuality” as an educational goal has something touching and at the same time dangerous about it: it keeps the 19th century going while the 20th century marches on.

Adler, the roommate, is the real discovery of the text: a young, orderly, rational National Socialist who embodies not irrationalism, but a cool pragmatism. His worldview is closed – “There is only one truth,” he thinks without the slightest hint of arrogance, “and I am the one who possesses it. Everyone who isn’t a National Socialist is mistaken or deceiving the country.” ⁶ —but not hysterically. Decour thus reveals something unsettling: that the danger lies not in madness, but in the perfect organization of resentment. The contrast between Adler and the narrator is also a cultural one: "What abyss of skepticism an eagle wouldn't find in every single Frenchman!" ⁷ The Frenchman, due to his inevitable relativism, is structurally incapable of the kind of certainty that characterizes Adler – a cultural difference that the narrator does not conceal.

Dr. Apel, the history teacher, is the positive counterpart: a man with “goethéens’ eyes” ⁸, who teaches history not as a memory but as a tool for thought, who instructs his students to recognize economic interests behind diplomatic phrases, and who – according to the narrator – “works for the United States of Europe.” He is the exception that proves the rule, and his subsequent dismissal – denounced by his colleagues after the book's publication – is part of the text's tragic aftermath.

The two widows, Bügler and Grimm, are not comical characters, but figures of sociological precision: two women who embody the economic catastrophe of inflation and have been broken by it. Mrs. Grimm, who treats the narrator with undisguised mistrust because he is French and the French are "to blame for the inflation," demonstrates in essence how economic misery is transformed into political hatred. The conversation about Goethe—Mrs. Grimm asks if France also has any important writers, to which the narrator laconically replies: "Not a single one," I answered calmly. "Imagine, we read exclusively books translated from German." ⁹ – is an example of the biting irony with which Decour dismantles cultural nationalism.

Forms of communication and the role of the foreign language

PHB is also a book about successful and failed communication between cultures. The foreign language – both French, the narrator's language in Germany, and German, which he learns and observes – is not merely a medium, but a subject in itself.

The linguistic asymmetry is noticeable from the very first page: Dr. Bär, who receives the narrator, speaks almost no French beyond the greeting "Comment ça va, à Paris?" – and the narrator has to endure two hours speaking German. This scene establishes the basic pattern of the entire stay: The Frenchman understands the language but is not truly understood; he is the stranger who simultaneously serves as the representative Frenchman, with whom Philisterburg constructs his image of France for decades – "My stay in Philisterburg will serve them for twenty years as a model for their ideas about the French." ¹⁰ The burden of representation that the narrator feels is both an expression and a critique of the stereotype mechanism.

Particularly revealing are the scenes in which the failure of the translation is made explicit. The term ‘student material’ – the word appears in italics in the original text with a footnote: “Intraduisible” – points to a pedagogical attitude for which there is simply no equivalent in French, because it presupposes a culture-specific conceptualization of students as material to be managed. Decour notes programmatically: “There are no perfect correspondences between the abstract concepts of the two languages; even the best translations are only approximations […]; even the way of thinking and ordering thoughts is completely different. However educated and attentive they may be, a German and a Frenchman can only understand each other to a limited extent.” ¹¹ Language here is not merely a means of communication, but a worldview – an insight that sounds like Sapir-Whorf avant la lettre.

The role of the learners is particularly interesting. Decour observes the lessons and notes that in German secondary school, the teacher's question is considered the primary pedagogical tool—the student who asks the best question has learned more than the one who already knows the answer. In French history lessons, however, the teacher's narrative monologue dominates. These structural differences in the methods of learning are simultaneously differences in the students' relationship to knowledge and authority. The discussion about the meaning of student duels—Adler defends them as a school of courage, while the narrator rejects them as barbaric—is also a scene of communication in which two cultures with differing concepts of masculinity, honor, and civilization clash.

The conversation with the student Kraus, who speaks fluent German and French. ¹² – is the only scene of genuine linguistic transgression in the text. This Czechoslovakian of German nationality, a living example of Versailles damage, embodies in his bilingualism what the text stands for on the level of genre: that identity takes place in transition, not in pure national forms.

School comparison and educational concept

The comparison between the two schools is one of the most detailed and literarily rich threads of the novel. Decour observes both sides – the German Gymnasium and the role he himself plays within it as a French assistant – with the keenness of a self-observing participant.

The German Gymnasium initially appears as a place of strict hierarchy and religious constraints. The Monday service, during which Dr. Bär preaches about the godless individual who, without faith, is not truly human, is, in its entirety, a culture shock for the Frenchman (who comes from a secular school system where the Loi Combes has banished religion from schools). The narrator sings along to the Lutheran hymn – “I have, it seems to me, even more energy than my neighbors. I shout.” ¹³ —and even comments on this curious adaptation. The footnote laconically states: “There is no Combes law here.” — “Ici, pas de loi Combes.”

But the picture of the German Gymnasium (grammar school) is more nuanced. In Dr. Apel's history class, the narrator experiences a lesson he will simply never forget: students reconstruct history through dialogue instead of passively absorbing it; the teacher battles euphemistic diplomatic language; political reality is conceived as structured by economic interests. The comparison with French teaching is devastating: "In France, history and geography are considered by most students to be the most boring and useless subjects." ¹⁴ The German model of discovery-based, debate-based learning contrasts with the French narrative monologue – a difference that Decour attributes to deeper differences in the relationship between individual and community, between student and authority.

At the same time, he reveals the other side: The students he tutors in conversation classes are shockingly mature for their age. They have no romantic phase, no egotistical self-discovery; at seventeen, they are fully formed on every question. Heine? "Not German, he's a Jew." This scene, recorded in 1930, carries the weight of a prophecy. The educational concept of the German Gymnasium—as Decour observes it—is not emancipation, but rather integration into a collective value system. The individual is not educated for freedom, but for community.

The contrast between two teachers – Apel and Bruneau – symbolizes these tensions: Apel teaches thinking; Bruneau teaches taxonomy. Bruneau searches the map for the exact location where Maupassant's "Les Deux Amis" is set. Learning as cataloging, knowledge as encyclopedic factual knowledge – a pathology that, as Decour concedes, is not limited to Germany: "This disease, by the way, is not confined to Prussia; it is also rampant in France, and the Sorbonne is still partly afflicted by it." ¹⁵ The self-critical turn against his own system is characteristic of Decour's writing style.

Spatial structure and the topography of the foreign

Philisterburg is a meticulously constructed space. The city is divided into distinct zones, each representing a different layer of social reality. The main street, with its Bismarck statue and shop windows filled with Prussian bronzes (soldier, blacksmith, dog – each a symbol of heroism, labor, and loyalty), represents the city's bourgeois character; the working-class district in the north, which the narrator prefers because it is "brutally material" and makes no intellectual demands, forms its antithesis. Between these poles lies Bismarck Street, where the narrator initially lives: an anonymous liminal space of uniform apartment buildings, dusty cacti behind perpetually closed windows, and the smell of cabbage and lye. This spatial structure is not mere scenery, but a vehicle of meaning: the windows remain closed, the apartments are hermetically sealed – Philisterburg is a city of closed systems that allow no outside air to enter.

The only exception is the Dom-Café, where newspapers from all political camps lie side by side – a heterotopic place where the contradictions of the time become spatially visible. There, the narrator reads the Volksstimme, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Völkischer Beobachter, L'Œuvre – a contradiction in terms that dramatizes the impossibility of a sovereign observer position: One leaves the café with a fevered head and frayed nerves.

That Philisterburg “has produced no important people” ¹⁶ —is stated in the very first diary entry. This terse observation is more than just a tourist's judgment: it portrays the city as a place of intellectual emptiness, a gathering place for mediocrity. The name PHB encapsulates this message as the heading of the entire text. The Gothic cathedral, representing the city's pious aspirations, stands next to the tax office—divinity and calculation as two sides of the same Prussian coin.

The spatial structure of the text is also a temporal structure: Philisterburg is a place stuck in the 19th century. Frédéric II, Bismarck, Hindenburg on every wall – the town hangs its past as its present. In contrast, there are the modern, low-rise buildings of a new district, behind whose functionalist facades reside the same bourgeois souls as in the Gründerzeit buildings: geraniums and newspaper racks. The modernity of form does not change the substance.

Time structure and historical context

PHB's temporal structure is threefold: there is the narrated time of the stay (October 1930 to February 1931), the time of writing (the text is published in 1932, the preface is dated "July 1932"), and—implicitly—the reader's future, to which the text constantly points. This teleological dimension makes the book more than a snapshot: it is a diagnosis with a prognosis.

The year 1930 is a historical turning point. The Great Depression after 1929 hit Germany with full force; the September 1930 elections made the Nazi Party the second strongest party; four million unemployed demonstrated the untenability of the Versailles system in its then-current form. Decour witnessed all of this: the Nazi rally in the town hall, the Communist rally next door, the political violence in the streets, the dead. “November 5th. The Nazi Party is holding a meeting in the large community hall. The Communist Party is holding another in a neighboring hall. […] There are dead.” ¹⁷ This laconic note – devoid of excitement, almost protocol-like – is one of the most striking examples of Decour's style of controlled horror.

The historical context also structures the perception of the characters. The schoolgirl who shows the narrator a photograph of her first lover—a soldier killed in France, buried on French soil—makes the First World War the backdrop to all the human encounters in the text. Mrs. Bügler, who loses her son to unemployment; Mrs. Grimm, whose husband died as a result of inflation—all the characters carry the history of the last fifteen years on their bodies. In this sense, PHB is also a novel of the interwar period, a text written between 1918 and what had not yet come to pass, but was already palpable.

The mention of Remarque nothing new in the West Adler is outraged by the film and the novel, which he believes damages the German image of the war – and situates the text within the contemporary debate surrounding war memory and war myth. The gap between the end of the First World War and the looming Second World War is experienced in the text as a productive tension.

Stereotypes, enemy images and national semantics

One of PHB's most valuable contributions to the literary history of Franco-German relations is its explicit engagement with stereotypes. Decour presents the reciprocal clichés and subjects them to a simultaneously culturally critical and self-reflective analysis.

The French image of Germany, as reconstructed by the narrator, consists of a manageable repertoire: Germans are ugly, drink beer and eat sausages; the men are bald and wear gold-rimmed glasses, the women red and inelegant; they copy others' inventions, produce imitations, are pedantic, and lose themselves in metaphysical fog; their national character is profoundly dishonest, their fundamental emotion mistrust and falseness. And then, as a second element, fear: The Germans are "calés," they are stronger, they want revenge. "Help, help, Maginot, build us cannons!" ¹⁸ – this paraphrase of the French nationalist discourse is simultaneously a parody and an analysis.

The German image of France, which Decour reconstructs from newspapers and conversations, is structured in a mirror image: France is the smothered dragon sleeping on its war laurels; France is complacency and moral disarmament; France is the enemy that starves the Germans and then demands interest payments. "Politically speaking, France is the gold-stuffed dragon resting on the laurels of war and letting its neighbor starve." ¹⁹ The fact that the German press interprets a newspaper article reporting that in France one drives on the right (à droite) as proof that cars in France have the right (le droit) to drive everywhere – this anecdote is one of the funniest and most apt illustrations of the mechanism by which national enemy images are built from minimal misinformation.

What Decour identifies as the core problem is not the feeling of animosity, but the structural impossibility of translation: “Géographie, l'histoire, la culture ont donné aux mots un contenu tout différent.” The words ‘politics’ and ‘history’ have a different meaning on the other side of the Rhine than on this side. The concept of political responsibility, which for the German citizen (in the narrator’s perception) carries a quasi-religious seriousness, is for the French bourgeois an object of cynical irony. This semantic incommensurability is—deeper than all political differences—the real reason for the lack of understanding.

Gender roles and the women of Philisterburg

PHB is also a text about gender orders—less explicit than the political analyses, but all the more revealing in its observations. The women in the novel are consistently figures of loss: Landlady Bügler has lost her husband, her son drinks away her unemployment benefits; Landlady Grimm was separated from her husband by inflation—he died from the economic consequences. Her authority is maintained by the portrait of her husband in a gold frame on the wall: “Mrs. Grimm commemorated the anniversary of her husband’s death today. She mourns not her husband, but the fortune he had accumulated, the strong and demanding man who knew how to command with a sharp voice. Such a woman must feel like a servant.” ²⁰ This observation by the narrator is a rather harsh psychological diagnosis: The woman has internalized her own subjugation and mourns not the person, but the form of rule.

The Bügler daughter is the only female character to whom the text grants an independent emotional scene: she shows the narrator a photograph of her fallen first lover, buried on French soil. In this brief exchange, the abstract antagonism between two nations is reduced to the simplest human level: a girl, her dead first lover, a Frenchman as her interlocutor. The narrator describes the scene with unexpected tenderness. The commentary on the Prussian gender model remains, overall, sporadic and ironically detached, but the conclusion is clear: the women of Philisterburg are custodians of loss—of husbands, wealth, and order. They bear the consequences of the historical catastrophe on their bodies.

Themes, semantic fields and metaphors

The central semantic field of the text is that of the border: national border, linguistic border, mental border, temperature border. Philisterburg is cold—the windows remain closed, the narrator opens them against the wishes of his landlady, who doesn't want to waste the heating oil. This window scene is one of the strangest and most revealing in the entire book: the Frenchman needs air—exchange with the outside world—while the Prussian woman guards against heat loss. It is an image for the entire cultural pattern: the closed nature of the Prussian bourgeois house, the absence of ventilation as a cultural condition.

The metaphor of the organic permeates the text: the relationship between France and Germany is described as an illness, nationalism as a symptom, not a cause. Decour explicitly states that one must not cure the symptoms, but rather eliminate the causes. This medical metaphor is consistent: it is a sick system, but one that could be cured if the political will existed.

The theme of "Franco-German rapprochement"—Franco-German rapprochement—runs through the entire text like a melancholic leitmotif. It is invoked by figures of widely varying political persuasions, but always presented either as an empty phrase or as structurally impossible. Decour himself states in the preface: "A 'Franco-German rapprochement' is currently impossible, but concessions to Germany are necessary." ²¹ This formulation – the impossibility of the project, the necessity of the steps – is the paradoxical conclusion of a political realism that is neither hopeless nor naive.

The semantic field of war—latent, omnipresent—structures the text. The past war is present in all the biographies (the teachers are all former front-line soldiers who know the topography of France from the trenches); the coming war is always already present in the structure of enemy images and political dynamics. Decour astutely states: “This is how world public opinion is being prepared for it. Should a new war break out, there is no doubt that France, due to its policy of restraint, would be held responsible.” ²² In 1940 this prediction would come true – not in its attribution of blame, but in its description of the dynamics.

Intertextual and intermedial references

PHB is rich in intertextual references, consistently interwoven across German and French traditions. Goethe is the central figure of reference: not the canonized, revered figure, but the Goethe of relativism, of impartiality, of humanistic cosmopolitanism—the Goethe whom German youth of 1930 no longer understands and no longer wants to read. Nietzsche, who quotes Goethe's statement about the utility of history, appears as a mediator. Thomas Mann with his appeal to reason, Börne and Heine as representatives of a Jewish-German Enlightenment culture, Lessing and Herder as the founding fathers of a German cultural tradition closer to the narrator than the present one—all these references construct a counter-image to contemporary German reality.

On the French side, Stendhal and Montaigne serve as stylistic and epistemological models: Stendhal for the cool observation of even inconspicuous facts, Montaigne for essayistic thinking as self-examination. The allusion to "Beyle, Milanese"—Stendhal's famous self-alienated name—appears explicitly as "fantaisie ou absurdité": national identity is not a matter of choice, but neither is it necessarily the final word about an individual.

The counterfact of Goethe's attitude towards the present is one of the most literarily effective passages in the text: "If he were to see the young people today with swastikas marching through the streets and singing war songs, he would retreat to an ivory tower where he would be riddled with bullets from both sides." ²³ Here, Goethe enters the contemporary space as a literary figure – an intertextual intrusion that simultaneously marks the magnitude of the legacy and its irretrievability in the current situation.

Intermedial, as indicated above, is the mention of Remarque's nothing new in the West – both as a film and as a book – centrally, Adler's outrage at the pacifist war novel points to the competition between two discourses of remembrance. The book (Remarque) and the film (Milestone) have been banned in Philisterburg – an act of censorship that Decour interprets as a symptom of the prevailing discourse on war remembrance.

The text's footnotes also belong to the intertextual dimension: they comment, supplement, and relativize—a dialogue between the text and itself. One footnote laconically observes: "What a lot of philistines there are in France!" ²⁴ – a clue that turns the nationalist reading of the text against itself.

Poetics of the novel and autopoetological dimension

PHB's poetics is a poetics of the in-between. Decour formulates her program in the sentence: "I belong to those who believe that opinions entail obligations." ²⁵ This is a position between the ivory tower and party affiliation: the writer takes a stand without selling out to a doctrine. The ivory tower is neither honest nor possible, but taking the party card is a betrayal of the spontaneity of literary writing. What remains is engagement as a form of thought, not as submission to a system.

This autopoetological position is developed in a lengthy section that forms the actual literary-theoretical core of the text. Decour describes the literary writing space as a "monde fermé, intérieur, inutilisable"—closed, internal, unusable—which, however, requires an opening to the outside, otherwise writing remains mere craftsmanship: "Otherwise, his activity would be just work and his work just a craft. But he must also go beyond that, turn his gaze outward and take a stand on the problems of his time." ²⁶ The formulation precisely captures what PHB itself is: not a political pamphlet and not a pure work of art, but a text that steps out of the closed literary interior without dissolving into the outside world.

The choice of the diary as a genre is itself a poetics decision: it prevents retrospective coherence, a neat conclusion, a final judgment. The diary writes in the process of understanding, not after it. When Decour notes: “This diary bores me. It worries me. I sense a stranger in it, an enemy. It is lurking, waiting for me.” ²⁷ – then this is the autopoetological reflection on the compulsion to keep a diary itself: The medium begins to haunt its writer, to force him to give an account that he may not want to give.

From caricature to shared responsibility

The beginning and end of the novel mark two poles of an intellectual journey that does not represent a well-rounded coming-of-age story, but rather an increasingly serious realization.

The prelude begins comically: two pompous bankers in a railway compartment explain to the young teacher his "sacred mission" as a cultural ambassador and send him off with slogans – "Don't let the steel helmets get you down! Show them! No re-examination! Security before disarmament!" ²⁸ This is satire in the style of Voltaire: the self-satisfaction of bourgeois nationalism caricatured in its own phrases. The narrator remains silent, nods, and observes the panorama.

The conclusion of the Goethe essay—the final part of the text—is written in a different tone: calm, sad, without malice. Goethe, the greatest German poet, has become a "grand homme de vitrine," a shop window display, admired without reading him. The youth who reject him are young and their opinions are not yet fixed—but the system that produced them is the problem: "Would we do better in his place?" ²⁹ This concluding question turns the gaze back to France and to the reader. The comedic element of the beginning has given way to the seriousness of self-examination.

Between beginning and end, the text undergoes a transformation that could be described as a process of de-caricature: the initial willingness to view Germans as jokes has given way to a more nuanced perception – one's own, the French, the European. The train journey from Paris to Philisterburg is a voyage from complacency to the difficult realm of shared responsibility.

Identity as something translatable and never truly finished

PHB is one of those (rare) books that clearly articulate what people don't want to hear – and which, as a result, went unheard in both countries. In France, the text caused a scandal because it showed understanding for Germany; in Germany, when the conditions Decour described came to pass, it was no longer discussed.

What makes this text a paradigm of the "Romans croisés" category? It doesn't poeticize the in-between as a harmonious synthesis, but rather as a productive contradiction. The Franco-German border isn't abolished, but used as a site of insight: from it, what remains invisible from either bank becomes visible. The formal interweaving of diary and essay, of observation and reflection, of close-up and panorama, corresponds to the content: a refusal to resolve complexity through taking sides.

The central question of the column – how literature doesn't dissolve difference but makes it productive – is answered by Decour himself through his writing. Meaning arises in the transition between languages ​​where a word has no exact equivalent ('student material', untranslatable), where the narrator sings along to the Lutheran hymn and catches himself being swept away, where a student mixes French and German and thereby gives voice to his divided national fate.

Decour's portrayal of neighborliness and conflict is not folklore, but rather a political structural analysis: the two nations are like two people who have stopped speaking to each other and are arguing about who should speak first, while their shared apartment burns down. The narrator's own identity remains fluid, translatable, and incomplete: he is French, but not a chauvinist; he loves Goethe, but he does not idealize Germany; he sees the danger coming, but he refuses the comfortable superiority of a prophetic pose.

The fact that Jacques Decour was shot by the Gestapo twelve years later lends his text a dimension that transcends literary studies. But as a literary document, PHB stands on its own merits: as one of the most insightful, honest, and formally consistent accounts of Franco-German relations in the decade that led Europe to catastrophe—and as a testament to the fact that thinking in the in-between is not only possible but necessary.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. “Hitler is the fils of the traité de Versailles.”, p. [2084f.]>>>
2. “If you have the courage of your life to prepare yourself, you will find something without doubt, you will have the right to buy the little things you need, and you will have the opportunity to think about it: a lot of substance and beauty in bavardage.”, p. [816ff.]>>>
3. "Ces notes, rédigées sans le moindre souci des conséquences, n'ont rien d'un reportage. Elles ne recherchent pas l'objectivité, mais l'impartialité.", Préface, p. [58f.]>>>
4. "J'étais peu à peu entraîné par le sentiment collectif qui les animait ; pour un peu, j'aurais chanté avec eux.">>>
5. “Le métier, c'est pour lui un sacerdoce, c'est one des plus belles professions qui soient: élever la jeunesse, former des hommes, montrer aux adolescents les voies du vrai et du bien”>>>
6. "Il n'y a qu'une vérité, pense-t-il sans le moindre orgueil, c'est moi qui la détiens. Tous ceux qui ne sont pas nationaux-socialistes se trompent ou trompent le pays.">>>
7. “Quel abîme de skepticisme un Adler ne trouverait-il pas dans le moindre Français!”>>>
8. “With his messy hair and his Goethe eyes behind his glasses, he has a brilliant look.” – “Avec ses cheveux hirsutes, ses yeux goethéens derrière les lunettes, il a une physionomie géniale.”>>>
9. "Pas un seul, ai-je répondu tranquillement. Figurez-vous que nous ne lisons que des livres traduits de l'allemand.">>>
10. “Mon séjour à Philisterburg leur fournira pendant vingt ans leurs idées sur les Français.”>>>
11. "Il n'y a pas entre les mots abstraits des deux langues d'équivalences parfaites ; les meilleures traductions ne sont que des approximations [...] même la façon de penser, d'ordonner les pensées, different complètement. Si cultivés, si attentifs qu'ils soient, un “Angeland et un Français ne peuvent se comprendre qu'à demi.”>>>
12. “Kraus, petit brun au regard malicieux, mélangeait plaisamment le français et l'allemand.”>>>
13. "J'ai, me semble-t-il, encore plus d'entrain que mes voisins. Je hurle.">>>
14. “In France, l'histoire et la géographie sont, pour la plupart des élèves, l'étude la plus ennuyeuse et la moins utile.”>>>
15. “La maladie n'est d'ailleurs pas réservée à la Prusse, elle sévit aussi en France et la Sorbonne en est encore partial infestée.”>>>
16. “Grands hommes nés à Philisterburg: néant.”>>>
17. "The 5th of November. The parti national-socialiste organized a reunion in the grande salle municipale. The parti communiste en organizede une autre dans une salle voisine. [...] il ya des morts.">>>
18. “Au secours, au secours, Maginot, fais-nous des canons!”>>>
19. “Sur le plan politique, la France est le dragon gorgé d'or, qui s'endort sur les lauriers de la guerre et laisse le voisin mourir de faim.”>>>
20. "Mme Grimm a célébré aujourd'hui l'anniversaire de la mort de son mari. Ce n'est pas son mari qu'elle pleure, c'est la fortune qu'il avait gagnée, c'est l'homme fort et besogneux qui sait commander d'une voix tranchante. Une telle femme a besoin de se sentir serve.">>>
21. “The 'rapprochement Franco-Allemand' is actually impossible, mais des concessions à l'Allemagne sont nécessaires.” Preface.>>>
22. "C'est ainsi que l'on prepare l'opinion mondiale. Si a new guerre survenait, ne doutons pas que la France, grâce à sa prudente politique de conservation, en serait regardée comme responsable.">>>
23. “S'il voyait aujourd'hui les adolescents à croix gammée marcher dans les rues en chantant des hymnes guerriers, il se retirerait dans une tour d'ivoire dans laquelle il serait criblé de balles par les deux partis.”>>>
24. “Mais que de Philistine bourgeois en France!”>>>
25. “Je suis de ceux qui crient que les opinions engagent.”>>>
26. "Sans quoi son occupation ne serait qu'un travail et son œuvre ne serait que de l'ouvrage. Mais il faut aussi qu'il en sorte, qu'il jette les yeux au-dehors et qu'il prenne position vis-à-vis des problèmes de son temps.">>>
27. "Ce journal m'ennuie. Il m'inquiète. Je sens en lui un étranger, un ennemi. Il me guette.">>>
28. "Ne vous faites pas avaler par les Casques d'Acier ! Faites-leur la leçon ! Pas de révision ! La sécurité avant le désarmement !">>>
29. “Ferions-nous mieux à sa place?”>>>