Transatlantic Intelligencer: 'Banlieue' Voting, and Poles and the German Occupation

By John Rosenthal, on , Briefing

FRANCE: THE 'BANLIEUES' VOTE FOR THE RIGHT? -- Municipal elections are upcoming in France in the next weeks. A front-page headline on the subject in the Feb. 17-18 of the daily Le Monde would undoubtedly shock many readers of traditional English-language new sources. "Municipal Elections," it reads, "Banlieues on the Right, Downtown on the Left." Banlieues on the Right? The very word "banlieues" became widely-known to English speakers last year not only on account of the violence with which the outskirts of France's major urban centers are regularly afflicted, but also because of the supposed hatred of their residents for the presidential candidate of the French Right: current French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Writing in the New York Times magazine, author David Rieff went so far as to begin an article on the banlieues by quoting a young "banlieusard" proffering a death threat against Sarkozy.

But as I pointed out in a response to Rieff's article on WPR, the notion of Nicolas Sarkozy being the "Scourge of the Banlieues" was always a myth. The very town where Rieff met his fierce young interlocutor who wanted to "kill" Sarkozy, in fact voted for Sarkozy by a comfortable margin. More generally, while the election data showed many of France's banlieues tilting to the "Left" and Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, the tilt was by no means as pronounced as one would have been led to believe by tendentious and factually-challenged reporting like that of Rieff.

Now, however, Le Monde reports that Socialist Party officials are concerned about "an irresistible move to the Right" of the banlieues. On the other hand, the paper suggests that President Sarkozy's UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) will have trouble holding on to downtown districts "affected by the arrival of well-to-do couples with new 'qualitative' expectations." As I noted in my earlier article, chic downtown neighborhoods in Paris in fact already massively voted Socialist and Royal in the 2007 presidential elections: another detail that does not jibe with the vision of French "class politics" commonly conveyed by the established American media.

Le Monde cites the views of Jean-Jack Queyranne, the Socialist President of the regional council of the Rhone-Alps region. Referring to the population of downtown Lyon, Queyranne

. . . thinks that this electorate -- largely influenced by questions of lifestyle, culture and the environment -- matches up well with the political program of the PS. . . . On the other hand, certain traditional strongholds of the Left -- Saint-Priest or Meyzieu in the banlieues of Lyons -- have swung to the Right in recent years.

Queyranne and Le Monde offer a rather tortured sociological explanation for the phenomenon, claiming that a higher rate of home ownership in the banlieues accounts for the growing appeal of the "Right." But the more obvious explanation is that the residents of the banlieues themselves are the ones who suffer the most from the violence in their neighborhoods. To this degree, it is only normal that many would be drawn to a party that proposes to crack down on the violence, rather than one that seems often to justify it or even to pander to its perpetrators. (See my December WPR report "Ségolène Royal and the War in France's Banlieues.")

This explanation, however, is given predictably short shrift by Queyranne and Le Monde. "Behind the resonance of questions of security or the fear of finding oneself in competition with other social categories," Queyranne observes, "one senses the influence of the mode of housing."

SKIERBIESZOW: POLES AND THE GERMAN OCCUPATION -- German President Horst Köhler turned 65 Feb. 22. In the Feb. 19 of the German daily the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Thomas Urban reported on the Polish town of Skierbieszow where Köhler was born. Köhler's parents were "ethnic Germans" from Bessarabia in the current Republic of Moldova. They moved to German-occupied Poland in late 1942 as part of the massive "resettlement" program organized by Heinrich Himmler and his Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German People. As Urban reports, the entire district of Zamosc, where Skierbieszow is located, was supposed to be transformed into a "model" German settlement.

Largely as a consequence of the wide publicity given to the writings of historian Jan T. Gross, it has become extremely common in English media nowadays to treat Poles as if they were willing accomplices in the Holocaust or even somehow bore greater responsibility for the persecution and murder of Polish Jews than the German occupiers. The fact that millions of non-Jewish Poles met the same fate under the German occupation as their Jewish neighbors is made to disappear in such treatments.

For example: Citing recently published German documents, Urban describes what was done to the Polish inhabitants of Skierbieszow to make way for the "ethnic German" settlers:
The orders given to the occupying troops were unambiguous: surround and seal off the town. Round up the residents to be deported. Anyone who resists is to be shot on the spot. For the most part, the shocked locals had only minutes to get dressed warmly and to pack up the bare necessaries. In Zamosc, they were divided into different groups. Whoever was young and strong was put on a cattle car to be shipped to the Reich to do forced labor. Old persons who were no longer able to work and children under 10 years of age were sent to "retirement villages." What was hidden behind this description was in fact the plan to leave them to their own devices, without providing them food, in order to have them "die off at an accelerated pace" -- as an SS directive put it. Invalids, the mentally ill and persons who were seriously ill -- but also many people who were able to work -- were put on the list marked "Auschwitz."

It is perhaps not irrelevant that Jan T. Gross's latest book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" is published in English by Random House, the publishing arm of the German media giant Bertelsmann. As only came to light thanks to the investigations of the journalist Hersch Fischler, the late Bertelsmann chief Heinrich Mohn was an honorary SS member who owed his fortune in large part to the massive business the company did publishing texts for the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. More to the immediate point, when challenged to clarify the firm's Nazi connections, the current Bertelsmann chief, Heinrich's son Reinhard Mohn, proposed to assign the task to none other than the openly revisionist historian Dirk Bavendamm, who has labeled WWII "Roosevelt's War." (For more on Bertelsmann, Bavendamm and the Mohns, see my "Bertelsmann's View of America?" or "Bertelsmann's Revisionist" by Hersch Fischler and John Friedman.)

John Rosenthal is World Politics Review's translations editor. He writes Transatlantic Intelligencer, which examines Europe and transatlantic relations, often drawing on European press sources, every week.