Danube

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Lucette Destouches , widow of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Seen here in April, 1969

If you are using a very Old Woman , died In Paris on Friday, 8. November, her death prompted a couple of paragraphs in the Newspapers.

Lucette Destouches , was 107 years old and already had a name in the past few years. A dancer, and The Wife , then widow, France's most controversial writers of The Last century, Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

she was also The Last surviving witness of the tragic resolving taxonomic, last Days of the French collaborationist regime-Days that were lived, not in Vichy but in a bizarre French microstate in a southern German Castle .

fly of employees, the support for the Nazis

It is September 1944 and the second World War comes to an end in France. Paris to the allies. The Germans are pulling back.

What do you do then, if you already have a Partner?

No run-of-the-mill, low-level, keep-you-your-options-open kind of employees. You would just keep your head down and trust that you were not important enough to be noticed.

The Reputation of The French Author Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Seen here in 1932, was marred by the sharp anti-Semitism

no, we're talking about The Real cheer leaders. Those who receive had, the Germans had the Political Parties to support the Germans who had run a pro-German militia to hunt down The Resistance , and sent troops in combat with the Germans on the Eastern Front .

Or, perhaps, an award-winning writer, made it as a great new voice in French fiction a few years ago, but who had since turned his pen to the poisonous anti-Semitic hate-speech, of a kind that are actually embarrassing to the Germans, and under German occupation In Paris , quite demonstrative with the occupiers.

So, too, was Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches), in General simply as Céline, Author of the book " the journey to the end of The Night , which is cited Still today as One of the great works of European literature.

Escape to Knew a German Castle

Celine that he had to Get Out . He was a viande à poteaux - Gallows fodder. The Mob caught he would be lynched. Tried, he hung would be executed.

So, Celine Paris, Fled and after various adventures, landed in the surrealist backdrop of a Small Town in Germany called Sigmaringen .

Sigmaringen is also the 1000 year-old Castle was part of the Hohenzollern dynasty, is perched on a rock high above the Danube .

Sigmaringen , The Castle , in the South-Western German state of Baden-Württemberg

And it was here, in September 1944, its noble owner kicked out of Adolf Hitler were out, the diehards were brought by the French cooperation, and allows for a couple of months to Set Up , a strange facsimile of a French government in exile, complete with flag, border controls and the foreign embassies.

a Total of More Than 1,000 French people, among them Céline, accompanied by his wife, Lucette, and then at the age of 32 years came and lived here.

Lucette was The Last witness to this most peculiar of notes, the shame of Vichy France, the collaborationist regime.

A French soldier guarding rings the entrance to The Castle in Sigma, April 1945

In September 1944, Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval , the head of the collaborationist government, were forcibly open to keep to Sigmaringen by the Germans, the wanted, the possibility of an eventual return.

Pétain and Laval, however, refused to cooperate, so that instead of a ragtag band of ultras to run under A Man named Fernand de Brinon, a kind of Vichy government-in-exile.

Pétain lived in The Top floor of The Castle , Laval on The Floor below. They hated each other, and including the various so-called Minister, scurrying around and setting up your microscopic bureaucratic empires in The Corridors of the old Castle , all hung with tapestries and hunting trophies, and martial portraits of long-forgotten Hohenzollern were.

One of the offices in The Castle Sigmaringen , Seen here in 1945,

So the facts were. Far more interesting is the idea that what on earth it must be so, and here we have Céline Himself as aide-de-camp.

Back In Paris in the 1950s, and life with Lucette in Meudon, on the outskirts of the French capital, he wrote the book translated into English as The Castle Palace, in which he recalls, Sigmaringen interlude. How much of Céline, it reads like the frenzy of a tormented spirit.

But behind the staccato, the flash-bomb prose, you do get a glimpse into the madness of it all. Waves of RAF bombers constantly overhead pass; in the city there is no food beyond cabbage and beetroot, and the toilets in the hostel are crowded.

Lucette Destouches lived with Céline in this property in Meudon, near Paris in the 1950s

In The Castle , Céline, a physician by Trade , visited his patients: some claim it can all be saved and speaking of secret weapons, and gangs of partisans in the forests; others resort to a grim black sense of humour; to be some literally insane.

all that in Sigmaringen , you have stripped away all hope of rehabilitation. They are traitors, and the end will come. But life must be lived - even.

Lucette Destouches with a portrait of Céline

In the end, Céline survived somehow, and so also his wife. After a few years in Denmark, some of which spent in prison, they were allowed to return to France.

If Céline died in 1961, had enrolled his widow, a common grave stone in the cemetery with your name and the dates "1912-19. ".

she had accepted, you would be dead by the end of The Century . She has worked for 20 years.

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france, paris, anti-semitism, books

Source of news: bbc.com