Paper bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson
Paper bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson
Paper Bullets is the first book to tell the history of an audacious resistance campaign undertaken by an unlikely pair: two French women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe (better remembered today by their noms de plume, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore), who drew on their skills as Parisian avant-garde artists to write and distribute "paper bullets" -- wicked insults against Hitler, calls to rebel, and subversive fictional dialogues designed to demoralize Nazi troops occupying their adopted home on the British Channel Island of Jersey. Devising their own psyops campaign, they slipped their notes into soldiers' pockets and tucked them inside news-stand magazines.
Hunted by the secret police, Suzanne and Lucy, who was half Jewish, were finally betrayed in 1944; the Germans imprisoned them and tried them in a court-martial, sentencing them to death for their actions. Ultimately they survived, but even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners and spreading a message of hope.
The couple's actions were even more courageous because of who they were: lesbian partners known for cross-dressing and creating the kind of gender-bending work that the Nazis would come to call "degenerate art." In addition, they had communist affiliations in Paris, where they attended political rallies with surrealists and socialized with artists like Gertrude Stein.
Paper Bullets is a suspenseful and inspiring World War II story about the galvanizing power of art and resistance and of love.
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.