Paper Bullets: Two Women Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis Jeffrey H Jackson

Abstract

Until the publication of the English-language translation of Michael Löwy’s L’Étoile du matin (Morning Star) by the University of Texas Press in 2009, the remarkable story of the Second World War resistance activities of Claude Cahun—the gender-bending writer/photographer/montage artist with ties to Surrealism—was unknown to English-speaking audiences. Now Löwy’s story has been considerably fleshed out and told by historian Jeffrey H. Jackson in a beautifully written and carefully researched book that reads like a novel. The book is also a love story. One of the most admirable aspects of this book is the balance Jackson maintains between Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her1 lifelong partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe). Cahun is the more famous, but as the author points out, Moore was the one operating the camera in all of Cahun’s self-portraits; she also contributed art and photomontage to Cahun’s published writings. The two met as children in Nantes and were the daughters of influential and prosperous families. Lucy’s father was the Jewish newspaper owner and publisher Maurice Schwob; Suzanne was born the daughter of a Catholic doctor. In their teens, their friendship blossomed into love; by a twist of fate, they also became step-sisters when Cahun’s father married Moore’s mother. In 1920 they moved to Paris where they quickly became part of the literary and artistic avant-garde whose geographical center was the Left Bank and Montparnasse where they used their adopted names, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. They also frequently visited their family vacation retreat on the Isle of Jersey, whose peaceful setting was helpful to Cahun’s poor health. In April 1937, as war approached, the pair moved there permanently, only to be caught up in the Nazi occupation of the island in 1940.