The New York Times by New York Times

Author:New York Times
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Originally published in October 2009.

Elaine Sciolino is a contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of the New York Times best seller The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs.

Amid the Menace of War, Sanary-sur-Mer Was a Refuge Under the Sun

Antonia Feuchtwanger

It is afternoon in the garden of a white Belle Époque town house shaded by two umbrella pines, the rocky shore just a short walk away. Cicadas buzz. Young men windsurf in the shimmering water. The place is Sanary-sur-Mer, in the South of France, thirty miles from Marseille, and an inviting spot for present-day travelers.

But for those who know the history of this small, sunlit town, there is a powerful pull of the past, an undercurrent from the extraordinary time when Hitler was in the ascendant and Sanary was, for a few years, the capital of German literature in exile.

That world is evoked by Sybille Bedford, the English German novelist, in her autobiographical novel Jigsaw and in Quicksands, her memoir. In the books, the first of which was short-listed for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, she recalls her life during the 1920s and ’30s in this little fishing port that became, briefly, a safe haven for those whose lives were at risk.

Sanary, on a bay shielded from the wider Mediterranean and circled by hills, is not far from the Riviera’s fancier destinations, but it is little known outside France. It attracts virtually no Americans and few Britons, and has no high-rise hotels. But a visitor can drink an espresso alongside locals reading their local newspaper in cafés on the quay, take a small motorboat to explore the coastline, watch the fishing boats bringing in their catch, head for the nearby beach at Portissol, or wander through narrow, car-free backstreets lined by boulangeries and boutiques.

In the era chronicled in Quicksands, the Côte d’Azur was already a playground for sun worshippers, writers, artists, and the fashionable, but when the Nazis began to strip political opponents of their citizenship, little Sanary was still peaceful and affordable.

Aldous Huxley—always Aldous to Bedford—had bought a house in Sanary in 1930. In 1933, Thomas Mann took a villa there, encouraged by his son Klaus, who, according to Bedford, used to smoke opium with Jean Cocteau at Toulon, nine miles away. In a garden above the Sanary bay, the exiles clustered together as Bertolt Brecht, with his leather jacket and Bavarian accent, sang his latest anti-Reich songs.

Sybille Bedford, born von Schoenebeck, lived in London up until her death in 2006 at the age of ninety-five. She had always written in English—much, she wrote, to Thomas Mann’s pained disapproval. Her father was a Southern German Catholic baron and her mother was English and partly Jewish—as for “how partly,” she wrote, “no one cared much—or had to.”

Her life began in the splendor of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Berlin. In time her mother disappeared to Italy, leaving the young Sybille to aristocratic poverty with her father in a Baden country house. As

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.