Time of the Ostriches

The Time of the Ostriches is the name given to a stretch of life in occupied Saint-Malo when familiar routines persist even as the occupation reshapes them. The phrase arises from a dispute over whether residents are avoiding the truth or simply trying to live within circumstances they cannot control. The period’s defining tension is not a clean division between resistance and collaboration, but the uneasy coexistence of daily adaptation, public disagreement, and acts that quietly disrupt German authority.

A name for looking away

Life continues along the city’s walls: military boats move offshore, flax is bundled and shipped to be made into rope, cables, or parachute cord, and gulls drop shellfish onto roofs. The ordinary work and sudden interruptions of this landscape provide the backdrop to a new tax announced by the mayor. Some of Madame Manec’s friends accuse him of selling them out and call for a strong leader; others ask what he is supposed to do. Their disagreement gives the period its political texture: occupation narrows the choices available to civilians, but does not settle how they judge those choices.

Madame Manec asks whether the residents have their heads in the sand, or whether the occupiers do. Her quiet answer—that perhaps everyone does—refuses to place denial neatly on one side. The image of ostriches therefore names a shared condition of evasion and uncertainty, rather than simply condemning one group. The phrase holds together awareness of danger and the temptation to carry on as if ordinary life might still be possible.

Rules enter ordinary life

The occupation becomes harder to ignore when a notice orders residents to surrender all radio receivers to 27 rue de Chartres by noon the next day. It threatens arrest as a saboteur for anyone who fails to comply. Marie-Laure LeBlanc has to press her father three times before he reads the notice aloud, a small domestic pause that makes the order’s pressure tangible: an official command reaches the household through a family member and a forced act of reading.

Radio is more than an object subject to confiscation. In a letter to a professor, Frau Elena wonders whether her messages are reaching him and whether the station is still broadcasting; she and her neighbors have heard nothing for at least two months. She reports that a powerful transmitter in Brandenburg, Deutschlandsender 3, pushes other signals off the dial. Her account also preserves a neighbor’s speculation that radio might be heard through tooth fillings, a fanciful image of how far signals—and the longing to receive them—can travel. Set beside Saint-Malo’s surrender order, this exchange shows broadcasting as both a tenuous connection across distance and a medium that authorities seek to control.

Everyday resistance and its risks

The period is not one of uniform passivity. At dusk, Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, straps a stepladder to her husband’s car and drives the Route de Carentan with Madame Guiboux. Using a ratchet set, they rearrange road signs, then return laughing and drunk to Number 4 rue Vauborel. The episode makes resistance practical and collective: women alter the signs that guide movement, using an ordinary vehicle and tools, and return to a domestic setting. Its humor does not erase the risk implicit in interfering with occupation infrastructure.

Elsewhere in the wartime narrative, the consequences of suspicion and control are more overt. Daniel LeBlanc is seized outside Vitré while travelling toward Paris. French policemen take him from a train in front of watching passengers; French interrogators question him before German officials do. They scrutinize his notebook, tool case, seven skeleton keys, and small files and saws, and later seem to suspect him of plotting to destroy the castle in Saint-Malo. They deny him paper, linens, and a telephone. The episode shows how ordinary tools and professional materials can be recast as evidence under occupation, while the questioning offers few procedural protections. It sharpens the contrast between everyday adaptation and the arbitrary force that can interrupt it.

From evasion to explicit coercion

Other wartime details reveal how scarcity and censorship reach beyond Saint-Malo. In a letter to Werner, Jutta describes foundries working day and night, cold weather, and people burning whatever materials they can find to stay warm. At the laundry, she and others mend tunics and trousers amid shortages of fabric; she compares the salvage of usable cloth to the way people themselves are being used. Censor marks interrupt her account, making the limits on communication visible within the letter itself.

Werner’s own letter to Jutta is also heavily obscured by censor marks. What remains refers to hardship and to Frederick’s belief that each person’s path is predetermined, but the redactions prevent the reader from recovering the full account. Later, Werner sees Frederick being fed porridge from a spoon; Frederick wears his familiar black-framed glasses, and Werner cannot look at the food on the table. The scene registers a personal consequence of wartime events without turning it into a public declaration. Together, these letters and encounters show how war narrows both what can be said and what can be faced directly.

The movement from hesitation to coercion is clearest in the order to detain every man between sixteen and sixty. They are told to assemble at the tower of the castle and then to be marched to Fort National at low tide. The instruction gives a route, an age range, and a destination; its administrative precision contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding the mayor’s earlier tax and the residents’ argument over what anyone can do. The Time of the Ostriches thus names neither simple denial nor a stable political position. It marks a precarious interval in which routines and debate continue, small resistances remain possible, and the occupation’s rules increasingly make the cost of refusal plain.