The lightning-quick German invasion of Belgium took place
in May 1940. De Man’s articles in Le Soirappeared shortly af-
terwards, between December 1940 and November 1942 .De
Man’s uncle, Hendrik de Man, had been the leader of the Bel-
gian socialist party. In 1940 , after the Nazi invasion, he dis-
solved the party, bowing gladly to German control. “For the
working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit
world is, far from a disaster, a deliverance,” Hendrik de Man
wrote (Responses 159 ). The twenty-one-year-old Paul de Man
joined his uncle’s celebration of the German victory. In the
course of his writings for Le Soir,which consist largely of cul-
tural commentary and book reviews, he urged the acceptance
of German domination and applauded the demise of liberal
democracy as the necessary price for a renewal of Belgian
national greatness. One de Man article, from March 1941 ,is
overtly anti-Semitic, and it created great obstacles for de Man’s
defenders. In this essay, entitled “The Jews and Contemporary
Literature,” de Man sees the Jews as a “foreign force,” alien to
European culture even when they seem most assimilated: a
classic anti-Semitic canard.
I was still at Yale, de Man’s intellectual home, at the time
of these revelations, and I remember the range of responses. A
few students who had never liked de Man reacted to the news
with cold satisfaction, but most were shocked. De Man had
seemed so simpatico: generous, friendly, always with a sly twin-
kle in his eye.
At de Man’s funeral service, held in January 1984 at the
Yale Art Gallery, he was eulogized as, in effect, a saint of liter-
ary criticism. Barbara Johnson, the influential deconstruction-
ist and student of de Man who had just been hired at Harvard
(a watershed moment, since until then Harvard had been
largely resistant to French theory), stated solemnly, “In a pro-
194 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger