'"Un livre pour enfants'": Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book

Abstract

'"Un livre pour enfants'":Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book Philip Smith (bio) The Gurs camp was the largest internment center in occupied France. Despite hunger, thirst, separation from loved ones, scarcity of even the most basic resources, an uncertain future, and widespread sickness, its occupants actively sought to maintain signs of culture within the camp, including hosting lectures, staging plays, performing music, and creating visual art. One work to have emerged from Gurs is Horst Rosenthal's Mickey au Camp de Gurs, which uses Disney's Mickey Mouse as a representative camp prisoner. Rosenthal's use of irony, gallows humor, and satirical wit is all the more remarkable for the fact that he produced the work while under such terrible conditions. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a visual vocabulary borrowed from the picture book and the comic book to offer a double-voiced criticism of Vichy racial politics, highlighting not only the violence of the regime, but the ways in which it sought to legitimize that violence through bureaucracy and nationalist rhetoric. In criticism to date, Mickey au Camp de Gurs has often been associated with Art Spiegelman's Maus and, as such, has received significant attention from comics scholars. This essay instead reads Rosenthal's work as one that shares certain generic conventions with the picture book. It draws out Mickey au Camp de Gurs from the shadow of Maus to explore it using analytical tools from children's literature. It shows, first, that approaching Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a picture book yields readings beyond the codes found in comics, and, second, that Mickey au Camp de Gurs's primary target is not German anti-Semitism as in Maus, but rather the officiousness, xenophobia, violence, and hypocrisy of the Vichy regime. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a form of double address to ridicule the Vichy regime's treatment of foreigners, and Jews in particular, as a danger to French ideals. In order to appreciate the import and context of Rosenthal's work, we must begin with his biography. Horst Rosenthal was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1915. Faced with rising anti-Semitism and an uncertain future, he fled to France in 1933—the year Hitler [End Page 104] came into power. At first, he lived in Paris, on rue de Clignancourt and then rue Richomme. After war broke out, he was arrested in a round-up of French Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany. He was held first in Buffalo Stadium in Paris, then Marolles in Loir-et-Cher, Damigny, Dreux, Tence, and finally the camp in St. Cyprien. As he was moved between these camps, in 1940, northern France fell under German control. Most of France was occupied by the German military, and the remaining regions were administered by the Vichy regime in accordance with the terms laid out by Germany. The Vichy regime was, as Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton contend, "authoritarian, traditionalist, pious, and neutral in the war between Hitler and the Allies" (xvi). They were also nationalistic and deeply anti-Semitic, blaming immigration and foreign influence for, as they saw it, the degradation of French society. The persecution of Jews, Marrus and Paxton argue, was not purely a case of the Vichy government aligning their policies with those of the German occupiers, but also a project of recovering (in their eyes) French values by purging France of those considered a threat to national unity—the most demonized among these groups being communists and Jews. Their policy was not of extermination but of forced relocation or (in a minority of cases) assimilation with the goal of building a "homogeneous French nation" (xvii). A series of laws came into place, denaturalizing French Jews, closing Jewish businesses, barring Jews from certain occupations, and allowing for the internment of foreign Jews. The anti-Semitism that Rosenthal had sought to flee had found him in France. After the St. Cyprien camp was destroyed in a flood, Rosenthal was transferred to Gurs in late 1940 (Rosenberg 274). Gurs was the largest camp in occupied France. It had originally been intended to house refugees from the...