The Last Letter
aeon.co
aeon.co
1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.
3) I wonder, is the line
> Today, I will have lived.
An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that, in French? As the article notes
> This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on.
It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into, basically, a choice of tenses.
I was reminded of an interview on Fresh Air around 10 years ago or so where a director was talking about going through casting photos looking for people who “looked like“ they belonged in the WWI era. Terry Gross knew exactly what he was getting at (as did I), in that outside of clothes and hairstyle, some people seem to just seem like they belong in different historical contexts (conversely, there are plenty of old portraits of people who see, like they belong more in the 21st century than the 18th).
Not to mention diet, environment etc that also takes different tolls on our faces depending on the period.
By that logic there is such a thing as someone who looks like they lived in a different time, and would be rare to see today (and vice versa).
He arrived in France between his 12th and 15th birthday, and then became a philosophy professor, and a communist one at that.
This guy was very much an intellectual, which explains the pretty and unusual "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vécu" (Today, I will have lived). I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere, so he probably came up with it himself.
His wife was arrested too but survived the war and went on to continue her communist activism.
So yeah, definitely an interesting couple.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu%E1%BB%B3nh_Kh%C6%B0%C6%A1ng...
Funnily enough "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vécu" translates to "Today, I would have lived", which oddly enough kind of fits and is somewhat poetic too.
In Dido's last speech in the Aeneid, before committing suicide, one of the things she says is "vixi" ("I have lived"). Cicero is also known to have used "vixerunt" ("they have lived") as a euphemism for reporting on how he had people executed.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vixerunt
So maybe this is a classicism in French, or maybe the author just thought of it spontaneously.
Latin also has a future perfect like this ("vixero", "I will have lived"), but I can't think of an example of people using it to talk about imminent deaths.
Aside from being black and white, photos tend to look old because of hairstyles and clothing. The "time traveling hipster" [2] is a good example of someone in an old photo creating dissonance by not conforming to expectations
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=Sergei+Mikhailov...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/timetravelercaught/comments/e82116/...
This is one of those constructions that works better in French than in English. It has future tense and perfect aspect (so, "future perfect"), which gets muddled in English since English generally muddles tense and aspect.
Foreign languages always sound strange. There are rules that are invisible even to the native speakers who know them. The romance is not in knowing them, but the fun of figuring them out.
To me, "lived" is used metaphorically so often that to say "I lived" or "I have lived" does not, by default, connote death. It just reflects on an especially vivacious moment.
I think it's sometimes easy to get tripped up by funny clothes or hairstyles, and forget the people in the past were just like us. But there are only so many ways one can do their hair, and an oddly contemporary hairstyle can pull us back to the reality we're not that different.
I’m at a loss as to why the Nazis would put their foot down over a last smoke or a last letter.
It is wholly incongruous with the simple courtesy afforded most death-row inmates, by contrast.
No it isn’t. I know it might seem to be the most maximally woke position to get shocked when Nazis did something apparently nice that they apparently wasn’t forced to do. But it really isn’t. The Nazis killed millions of people and tried to conquer the world for their Reich. Meanwhile they were also people. They were fathers and mothers and friends, heck even polite patrolling soldiers, They didn’t live in caves and eat each other. They lived normal European lives (for war time anyway) and went to their jobs. Some of which directly or indirectly involved systematically slaughtering whoever the non-Germanics were considered to be. Or other “undesirables”.
They also did apparently nice things for resistance fighers. That they were about to execute. Why not.
The Nazis were humans. They were us.
No person is completely evil, nor completely good. Even Nazis could be capable of kindness amidst the cruelty (Hitler was famously kind to his dogs, for example). Those bits of good don't wipe out the bad, but vice versa the bad doesn't mean the good wasn't a real part of them either. People are just complicated and hard to judge with complete accuracy.
One should be more precise here.
France wasn’t occupied by the SS, but by the German Army, with many officers/Generals being from old aristocratic stock and its old ideals of knightly warrior ethos. For example in 1944 the military commander of France himself was part of the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and coup angainst the NSDAP (for which he was of course executed).
It is not that the Wehrmacht or common soldiers didn’t do war crimes, and of course there was a command chain to Berlin and Hitler, but a German officer in Paris had a way different outlook on life (drinking good wine, having an affair with a Mademoiselle, going to the theatres, enjoying life at the Seine, waiting that the Americans come so the war can finally be over) than a Waffen-SS brutalist murdering his way through the eastern front.
Side note: The communists were totally confused by the Hitler-Stalin pact. Wiki:
> the French Communist Party had long denounced Nazism and Fascism, but after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on August 23rd 1939, had to reverse direction. The editors of the Communist Party newspaper, L'Humanité, which had been closed down by the French government, asked the Germans for permission to resume publishing, and it was granted. The Party also asked that workers resume work in the armaments factories, which were now producing for the Germans.
The letters were going to be checked by the people that were killing you — the nazis in this example — so your letter was never going to be “fuck those utter pigs” or anything resentful of the people that were going to be your murderers because they would just be shredded or burnt or destroyed in some way. So this has a massive impact on the contents of the letters.
Then there’s the unreliability of the narrator on the deathbed, I recently read a beautiful article about this about why you should not take advice from people on their deathbed or from yourself on your deathbed, the inherent bias you have will make you unreliable and the things you value and take for granted on your deathbed will not necessarily have been things you have always had but instead may be things you have worked hard for in your life. [1]
Now that’s not to say their words are nothingburgers but when you have to wholly draw your own conclusions from inherently biased letters it starts to feel like we are all pretending to care more about these words because of the sacredness of death. No one wants to disrespect the dead, no one wants to say “wow, he must have been really losing it at the end” and that’s a given, not to be rude to dead people. That’s like punching down to the first degree. But like even things that would be considered light critiques or nice criticism don’t get to be said about take it or leave it bodies of work from dead people, because they are dead. On the one hand that’s a beautiful thing because let’s not start disrespecting dead people but on the other hand let’s keep it real.
[1] https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-fallacy.h...
Rather, they're grieving and saying goodbye to loved ones. And the author wonders, how might we live more present to cherish our loves ones and feel the moments more deeply?
edit: sometimes though, if you're willing to face the consequences, it allows you to write things about your jailers knowing that they are forced to read it. I remember a US federal 1st Amend. case where the prisoner had written that the mailroom lady was fond of sex with her cat. Said maillady refused to deliver the mail and it became a protracted law suit and therefore brought much more attention to the maillady's alleged proclivities.