André Germain (writer)

André Benedict Henri Germain (12 August 1882 – 15 September 1971), also known by the pen name of Loïs Cendré, was a French journalist, essayist, poet and writer.

Biography

André Germain was born in Montvicq, Allier, the son of Henri Germain, a banker who had made a considerable fortune as the founder of the Lyon Credit bank and his wife Blanche, daughter of Adolphe Vuitry. As heir to the family fortune, Germain owned several million francs as well as a famous villa above Florence, to which he invited German artists and intellectuals in particular in later years. Germain was influenced early on by his parents' cultural salon in Paris, a typical Belle Époque salon with a strong political flavour. On October 10, 1906, Germain married Rosalie Anna Marie Edmée (1886–1937), only daughter of Alphonse Daudet. The marriage, which is said to have been "gruesome", — Germain was part of the Parisian fashionably homosexual circles — was annulled after fourteen months on 16 January 1908.

From an early age, Germain placed the various aspects of art and culture, and literature in particular, at the centre of his interests. Even before the First World War, as a dandy and author of poems and texts with feuilletonistic and cultural content, he became a well-known personality on the cultural stage in his home country and later also in Germany — for which he developed a particular soft spot — as well as in other European countries.

Germain founded the literary periodical Le Double Bouquet (1911–1917). From 1913 to 1914, he entrusted the management of the magazine to Pierre Perrot, who died for France. After the Great War, André Germain was co-editor of the magazine Revue Européenne under Edmond Jaloux. At this time, he lived in a splendid Hôtel particulier in Paris behind the Hôtel de Ville, with a view of Notre Dame Cathedral.

From the 1920s onwards, Germain, who spoke excellent German, often spent long periods of time in Berlin and other major German cities. In the early 1930s, he had recognisable sympathies for National Socialist ideology and the Third Reich. Germain wrote a book entitled Hitler or Moscow?, in which he revealed that, given the choice, he was more in favour of the former option. During the Vichy period, however, Germain clearly kept his distance from the representatives of the occupying power.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Germain met numerous important exponents of the Germanic cultural life of the time, such as the writers Gerhart Hauptmann, Ernst Jünger, Kurt Tucholsky, Bertolt Brecht and the siblings Klaus and Erika Mann in particular. He also had close relationships with Carl Schmitt and Harro Schulze-Boysen, who travelled with him through France for a while as his private secretary in 1931. His relationship with Klaus Mann was particularly significant in terms of literary history: after a long period of friendship, the two men became estranged as a result of personal jibes — Germain summarily labelled Mann a "narcissist of the swamp" after the latter approached him seeking money, for which the latter returned the favour by mocking Germain as the "last cry of Lyon Credit". Mann took Germain's closeness to and sympathy for the National Socialists as an opportunity to attack him in literature: For his novel Mephisto, he chose Germain as the model for one of the more negatively portrayed characters in this work, which was conceived as a parable of the panorama of theatre and cultural life in the early Nazi state. In particular, Germain appears there in a less ciphered form as a French diplomat and the proverbial "lion" of the salon who seeks the proximity of the National Socialists and ingratiates himself with them.

Among the cultural greats of his time, his reputation was mixed: for Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for example, he was "the cerebral homunculus from Paris". Nicolaus Sombart remembered Germain: "He is one of those legendary figures of old Europe that everyone has met at least once in their lives, that everyone has heard of. He was somehow ageless, like Cagliostro." In the research literature, he is included in the panorama of his period of influence with phrases such as "a restlessly wandering art enthusiast" or "an original spirit and aesthete who possessed his keen powers of observation".

André Germain died in Paris.

Works

• Le Peintre Franz von Lenbach (1902)
• Les idées dans la peinture allemande contemporaine: Franz Stuck und Leo Samberger (1903)
• Les Idées religieuses de M. Ferdinand Brunetière (1904)
• Pour un anniversaire, 1863-1913: le fondateur du Crédit Lyonnais (1913)
• Renée Vivien (1917)
• Portraits parisiens (1918)
• Têtes et fantômes (1923)
• Pèlerinages européens (1924)
• De Proust à Dada (1924)
• Chez nos voisins (1927)
• La Révolution espagnole en vingt-cinq tableaux (1931)
• Les anciens châteaux de France (1933)
• Guerre civile (1934)
• Der Weg zur Verständigung, die politische Lage in Frankreich und ihre Auswirkung auf Deutschland (1935)
• Souvenirs de famille (1936)
• Goethe et Bettina. Le vieillard et la jeune fille (1939)
• Le désir et les lèvres (1944)
• Nouveaux pèlerinages savoyards (1946; illustrated by Yves Laty)
• Les Grandes favorites: 1815-1940: l'amour et la politique (1948)
• Intima (1949)
• Les idylles du Léman (1949)
• Les rois ont-ils droit à l'amour? (1949)
• La bourgeoisie qui brûle: propos d'un témoin (1890-1940) (1951)
• Florence et Ascona (1952)
• Les Clefs de Proust: suivi de Portraits (1953)
• La vie amoureuse de D'Annunzio (1954)
• Les fous de 1900 (1954)
• Les Croisés modernes: de Bloy à Bernanos (1959)

References

• Liebold, Sebastian (2013). Kollaboration des Geistes. Deutsche und französische Rechtsintellektuelle 1933–1940. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

External links

• Works by André Germain at Gallica