Friendship in unlikely places: Exploring professor Elana Passman’s new book on France and Germany’s history

Professor of History Elana Passman’s historical research has taken her far from Richmond, Indiana, to archives throughout France and Germany in search of stories of cooperation and friendship between two countries often portrayed as eternal enemies in history. Her new monograph, The French-German Dynamic in an Age of Conflict, 1925-1963: Enemies, Collaborators, Friends was published earlier this year by Routledge. The book moves away from the dominant narratives about war or diplomacy to focus on the work of little-known activists.

Passman’s origins for this book start earlier than you might think: her mother was a French teacher, so learning French early on was a core part of her childhood. At the same time, her father’s side of the family was Jewish and had roots in Germany; Elana was very close with her paternal grandmother who spent the 1930s in Germany and had many stories to tell.

These influences primed Passman for her college and graduate school studies, where she explored not only Nazi influences during the war itself, but also “Nazification” that sometimes occurred even before Germany invaded France.

“My senior thesis in college was about a 1942 exhibit in Paris of the work of Nazi sculptor Arno Breker,” says Passman. “In an era of censorship, I found that the coverage of art was really politicized, and you could see French critics and public intellectuals wrestling with difficult political questions in an area that might seem on the surface fairly innocuous.”

Passman developed an ability to read “against the grain,” looking for both resistance to and acquiescence to fascist thinking. This work would serve her well as she expanded her research to French-German relations more broadly from just after World War I through the early 1960s.

With her background knowledge of diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history, Passman chose to focus her book on a particular suite of characters and organizations that dared to question the status quo between these two nations.

“My book traces successive generations of activists who contrived alternate frameworks through which to imagine the enemy and put in place mechanisms to engage with one another,” explains Passman. “It examines their struggles from the ‘demobilization of minds’ after the First World War through the rise of fascism, the Second World War, and the postwar years. Through most of this period, the French and Germans were at war or living under occupation.”

Passman’s research into these tumultuous years allowed her to find her narrative arc, a thesis that the archives support with thousands of pages of evidence.

“Choosing cooperation, I argue, entailed a ‘constant negotiation of identity, history and ethics,’ and its pursuit was often far from heroic. My book makes the case that collaboration with the Nazis was critical to the longer story of French-German cooperation. Collaborationists built on the legacies of idealists of an earlier age. And after 1945, proponents of reconciliation had to reckon with that tainted history. There were lots of twists and turns to this history, but the revolution in French-German relations could only be possible thanks to activists’ efforts to transform mentalities and activate cross-border relationships.”

Even history in the past 100 years can require painstaking efforts to find the artifacts that offer a paper trail to understanding countercultural movements. While many of the documents she discovered in European archives changed her wider understanding of the time, she was occasionally taken by surprise in her research.

“I had an ‘aha!’ research moment at the Foreign Office Archives in Berlin,” says Passman. “I had eaten lunch with a fellow scholar from Romania. One day, she handed me a file she’d found among Romanian materials that contained audits of one of the French-German friendship societies I study. These audits offered concrete proof that Nazi money was being funneled into this organization. I suddenly had a financial record that demonstrated not just how Nazification works but how money is part of the story of how a civil society can be invaded by an ideologically driven force.”

Passman was also often touched by the documents she found in the writing of this book. “The human stories that emerge from archival traces are incredible,” she said. “A woman in the early 1950s explained that the reason she wanted to be a host mom for a German refugee was because her own child had been murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. It was so powerful and surprising that this was her motivation.”

From the many surprises, twists, and turns of the literature, Passman has integrated a detailed historical account that acknowledges the immense conflict of the time but dares readers to foreground instances of revolutionary cooperation too.

In her introduction, Passman summarizes it best when she emphasizes the people who this made reimagining possible: “Journalists and intellectuals, academics and students, industrialists and priests who founded associations that sought to overturn the primordial hatred. Together, they developed cultural exchanges, published journals, and arranged events geared toward cultivating friendship. Their cumulative legacy was to fashion a set of conceptual and rhetorical tools that rendered the wildly implausible thinkable.”

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About Earlham College 

Earlham College and Earlham School of Religion foster a collaborative learning community that inspires and motivates students with transformative opportunities and experiences so they can become catalysts for good in a changing world. Located in Richmond, Indiana, Earlham is one of U.S. News & World Report’s Top 75 national liberal arts colleges and offers one of the top 20 classroom experiences in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.