JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

La Vie en Allemagne, l’Habitation Allemande is a soft, no-edge piece of propaganda produced in Nazi Germany and meant for distribution in France.  (The pamphlet has no place or date of publication, though WorldCat guesses 1941/2, which I’m inclined to agree with–in any event it is appropriate for it to not have identifiers like that as it is, after all, all made up.)  I am pretty sure that pictures such as these printed during wartime for the population of an occupied country could not get any more vaseline-lens-coated or syrupy than these images. They are in the best tradition of a Lena Wertmueller movie, where the working class is perfect as are their homes and children. And if Ms. Wertmueller used for a background artist someone like Maxfield Parrish working in black & white, these images would no doubt seem familiar to him. That said, this is a propaganda vehicle showing the working and living condition of worker “colonists” in Germany and their supposed standard of  living, which as good National Socialists would have been far away above that of blue collar worker in France.  Anyway it was a dreadful piece of dangerous fluff to dangle in front of a captured population–no doubt this little publication found itself replacing paper conveniences in the toilet, and used as fire-starter, but no doubt some poor soul somewhere in France was confused by it, and wondered.

WorldCat/OCLC locates only five copies (three in France and two in Germany), and no copies in the U.S.