Germany

Germany appears in the memoir less as a visited place than as a force shaping events elsewhere: its advance challenges the narrator’s confidence in France, its cities populate his mother’s imagined accounts of his exploits, and Berlin is identified as the home of a specialist called to treat him. The country’s narrative presence is therefore mediated by war, family imagination, and one medical crisis rather than by a sustained depiction of life within Germany.

Wartime Advance and French Miscalculation

In June 1940, as the French front collapsed, the narrator still believed the German offensive could be reversed. He treated the rapid advance as a familiar military pattern and imagined that the tanks breaking through the Sedan gap were entering a trap prepared by the French General Staff. His confidence was not simply strategic: he describes belief in his fatherland’s destiny as something inherited through his Jewish and Tartar ancestry.

That faith shaped his duties at Bordeaux-Mérignac. He and other crews were assigned low-altitude patrols over working-class districts of Bordeaux and told that they were protecting Philippe Pétain from a Communist fifth column. The narrator accepted this explanation and was prepared to use his aircraft against a suspected crowd. Only in retrospect does he recognize the briefing as a deception: the danger had already taken hold through a political process that weakened the will and judgment, rather than through an openly marching force. Germany thus enters this episode both as the invading power and as the external threat used to make a false account of events seem credible.

An Enemy Seen from a Distance

The airfield at Bordeaux-Mérignac, where aircraft and their passengers gathered during the French collapse, gives the crisis a material setting, but the account does not follow the narrator into Germany. His understanding of the enemy remains framed by the French defeat and by expectations of a future struggle. After deciding to follow Charles de Gaulle to England, he and his companions express confidence that their allies will receive them and that they will eventually confront the forces threatening human freedom. Their arrival in Gibraltar, however, brings news of the British fleet’s attack on French ships at Mers-el-Kébir, a blow to the hopes on which they had been relying. The scene complicates any simple division between a French self and an enemy abroad: the immediate shock comes from an action by the side they had expected to join.

Later, Germany becomes the imagined setting for the narrator’s mother’s accounts of his wartime heroism. In her letters, she pictures him taking part in Royal Air Force raids over Cologne, Hamburg, and Bremen, and credits him with victories achieved by British fighters. The narrator understands how she constructs this version: whenever the Royal Air Force attacks, she imagines her son among the airmen, and the market in Nice becomes an echo chamber for the deeds she attributes to him. The imagined German skies give her a way to make his distant service vivid, even though he admits that he had not yet managed to encounter the enemy in combat.

Berlin and the Medical Crisis

Germany also has a specific, non-combat connection to the narrator’s life. During a severe kidney illness, doctors agreed that his right kidney should undergo an operation and summoned a distinguished German specialist from Berlin at considerable expense. His mother forbade the procedure despite the doctors’ insistence. The narrator later connects her resistance to her belief that a man’s kidneys were closely linked to his sexual capacity, and recalls that assurances about retaining a merely normal sex life did not persuade her.

The specialist returned home after predicting that the narrator would die within days, but the narrator survived with his kidney intact. This episode gives Berlin a concrete place in the story, while keeping Germany’s broader significance distinct: the specialist is an individual brought into a family and medical crisis, not a representative of the wartime enemy. Across these different appearances, Germany remains a country encountered through the pressures and stories it generates beyond its borders.