TOWNANDCOUNTRYMAG.COM | SEPTEMBER 2019 151
autonomous French
government installed by the Germans was
not loyal to republican principles at all, how-
ever, he realized he had to go. Along with
several other government ministers, he set
sail on the SS Massilia for France’s colonies
in North Africa on June 21, 1940. Their plan
was to organize a colonial militia that could
rise up against the Nazis and take back con-
trol of the mainland. Mandel’s life had been
uprooted, but not entirely: The Massilia’s reg-
ister records that he traveled with both his
official girlfriend and his mistress.
The North African resistance was a dream
that never materialized. In August 1940, Man-
del was captured in Morocco by the Vichy
authorities and returned to France. He was
handed over to the Germans and deported to
the Buchenwald concentration camp, where
he was kept alongside Léon Blum, France’s
left-wing (and first Jewish) prime minister. In
1944, Mandel was returned to France as a polit-
ical hostage. On the night of July 7, as he was
being transferred from one prison to another,
he was shot 16 times by the Milice, the Vichy
government’s paramilitary force.T
he painting had a hole in it. That’s how
the Germans who ended up with it
determined earlier this year that it was
Mandel’s. The title of the painting, which
dates from the 1850s, is Portrait of a Seated
Young Woman, by Thomas Couture, and the
hole was near the young woman’s left hand,
which clutches a cross pendant. The subject is
a classic example of a mid-19th-century bour-
geois Parisienne; her glance is either a smile
or a judgment.
In early January the German government
returned the painting, which had hung in
Mandel’s Paris apartment, to his last sur-
viving relatives, his son-in-law Franz Reiner
Wolfgang Joachim Kleinertz and his grand-
daughter Maria de las Mercedes Estrada.
In 1940 the painting had been confiscated
by Nazi agents, and it ultimately ended up
in the infamous hoard illegally amassed by
Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, which
the German authorities would not discoveruntil 2013, in the Munich apartment of Gur-
litt’s 80-year-old son.
The theft or destruction of personal prop-
erty was a central aspect of the Holocaust: It
was how the perpetrators emphasized the fact
that the victims no longer existed. The victims
whose belongings did somehow survive—col-
lections that resurfaced, canvases that were
reclaimed—were often prominent collectors,
the works Klimts and Chagalls. But the full
reality of Nazi plunder was far more mun-
dane, which was perhaps the essence of its
cruelty. It was never about money, it was about
liquidation, about taking the things that gave
joy to ordinary people in order to deny that
they were in fact people.
The news story I had seen, about the return
of the painting, included photographs of the
repatriation ceremony—there were Klein-
ertz and Estrada, a dignified old man with a
beard and a beaming old lady wearing tor-
toiseshell glasses, both wearing white gloves
as they embraced Couture’s painting, looking
a mix of stunned, proud, happy, and awkward.
Kleinertz lives in Paris and Berlin, and he
was in Berlin when I reached him by phone.
He told me a story that his late wife, Georges
Mandel’s daughter, had been fond of tell-
ing about her father. One day a politician
came into Mandel’s office during his tenure
as France’s minister of posts (basically post-
master general). The politician, apparently as
a way of breaking an awkward silence, made
a joke about them both being Jewish. But
Mandel did not find it funny. “I am a min-
ister of the republic, not a minister for the
Jews,” he replied. “That won’t earn you any
special privileges from this office.” To Klein-
ertz, this was Mandel’s essence. “He was really
someone attached to parliamentarianism and
democracy. It’s the reason he was assassinated.”T
o get to Fontainebleau Forest, where the
Mandel monument stands, you drive
out of Paris on Route Nationale 7, a
highway that runs south from Orly Airport
all the way to the Mediterranean coast. In
the town of Fontainebleau there is a palace,
the Château de Fontainebleau, a storied res-
idence of the kings of France, which you can
visit for 12 euros, plus four euros for the audio
tour. And there is the forest, a 250-square-mile
protected area, where, not too far from the
obelisk in the center, the five-foot concrete
block bearing Georges Mandel’s likeness sits
in the waving grass.
The month after Kleinertz reclaimed the
Couture portrait, the French interior minis-
try announced that anti-Semitic violence in
the country had increased by 74 percent in- France, home to Europe’s largest Jew-
ish community, is also the only country in
Europe where Jews are periodically killed for
no other reason than for being Jewish, and
more and more French Jews have begun to
leave for Israel.
The interior ministry’s announcement
came right around the time Yellow Vest pro-
testers attacked Alain Finkielkraut, a prom-
inent French-Jewish intellectual, as he was
walking down the street. Anti-Semitic graffiti
appeared all over the normally resplendent
French capital; to cite but two examples, there
was the word “Juden” scrawled in yellow paint
on the window of a bagel shop, and there was
a swastika drawn on a tribute to the Holo-
caust survivor and women’s rights advocate
Simone Veil, a French national hero.
These felt both shocking and common-
place. There had also been a swastika spray-
painted on the Left Bank apartment building
next to my own, between the presidential
election in 2017 and early 2018. It was nearly
a year before anyone scrubbed it away; after a
while the swastika had begun to seem part of
the landscape, something no one could miss
but that no one seemed to notice.
At the bottom of the spartan concrete
memorial, below Mandel’s head, is an inscrip-
tion from Tristan l’Hermite, the 17th-century
French dramatist: “And when he was falling
in the dust, the hands of victory closed his
eyelids.” Indeed, the Vichy government fell,
the republic was reborn, and Mandel’s ideals
and his efforts—notably his dogged commit-
ment to resisting fascism—showed him to be
ahead of his time.
But the inscription may be a tad grandiose.
To Berl it seemed that his friend had failed to
understand what France had become under
Nazi occupation, and also the reactionary
forces that had always lingered beneath the
surface and that manifested themselves during
the Vichy regime. Mandel was so enchanted
by the romance of the French Republic and
its universal values that he failed to see the
human frailty behind those values. “The admi-
ration and affection I had for him prevented
me from resigning myself to the fact that he
had seemed duped, which he was so little
suited to being,” Berl wrote. Then again, Berl
wrote, “At least his death looked like him. He
would not have repudiated it.”
The painting is now back in the posses-
sion of his family, but while a painting can
be reclaimed, a man’s life cannot. “It’s very
difficult to obtain satisfaction, in the end,”
Kleinertz told me. I think this is what struck
me most about my visit to Mandel’s monu-
ment. No one else was there.
THE HAUNTING OF PARIS
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