“Le Verfügbar aux enfers” is a lyrical work written by Germaine Tillion in Ravensbrück in 1944. The work was never performed in the camp, but the prisoners hummed tunes during roll calls – as if singing and laughing were resistance.
For those who had the privilege of attending the first performance, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, on June 2, 2007, of the operetta written by Germaine Tillion, The Available in Hellthe memory of it remains striking. The recognition, the sudden officialization, on one of the great Parisian stages, in a careful staging and carried by professional performers, of this work written clandestinely in Ravensbrück itself, was a very curious irony in a tragic story.
Hidden in a crate
Germaine Tillion, who was a hundred years old at the time of the first performances, was too weak to move to the Place du Châtelet, but she had, three years earlier, from her bed, helped to reconstruct the airs that were to accompany the libretto saved from the camp. At the end of the show, a gigantic portrait of her came down as a stage curtain and Anise Postel-Vinay, a fellow deportee, came on stage to say a few words. Since then, The Available in Hell has been staged many times, performed, reinterpreted. The work does not leave one indifferent, and it is an understatement to say that it is unique, both by the history of its writing and its creation, and by its very character. And it is truly an artistic work, and not just a work of memory.
The volume in question here is the result of two scientific conferences, one organized in July 2016 at the University of Saarland and the other in October 2016 at the University of Montreal. In eleven chapters preceded by an introduction by Esteban Buch, specialists in the French Resistance and the history of the Nazi concentration camp system were joined by musicologists to examine this work with a curious destiny. The volume draws heavily on the publication of the libretto by Germaine Tillion, which accompanied the performances at the Châtelet.
It is therefore a lyrical work, the texts of which were all written by Germaine Tillion in Ravensbrück itself. In the interviews she gave after the war, in the scattered memories she wrote about her deportation, we can reconstruct the history of this writing: Germaine Tillion was ” Available “, which, in the specific vocabulary of the Ravensbrück camp, meant that she had not been sent – had refused to be sent – to a workshop and that she was therefore available, subject to forced labour at will, depending on the needs of the SS.
The author hid for about ten days in October 1944 in the workshop that sorted the clothes and objects arriving from the East, the fruits of Nazi pillaging and the recovery of victims’ belongings. She hid in a crate, a burlesque moment when it is recounted, eminently dangerous in reality. The burlesque was also reinforced when one day, Tillion recounts, SS came to sit on the said box.
In her shelter, she remembered familiar tunes,Orpheus in the Underworld Offenbach, naturally, to refrains popularized by advertisements heard on the radio. The tunes were therefore a composite choice, emanating from bourgeois culture – even scholarly – and also the most trivial. The prisoners around the cash register, those found in the barracks in the evening, brought ideas, tunes of their own, which Germaine Tillion integrated into her writing.
THE Available is therefore also a collective work of resistance. We know today that, among the French women deported to Ravensbrück, resistance was constant, to the point of hiding the “rabbits”, these Polish women who were victims of pseudo-medical experiments on bone gangrene.
Ethnology of the concentration camp system
The operetta was completed quickly, it was recorded in a small notebook, in handwriting without erasures (there was only the text, not the musical scores, the music was only remembered). The work was never staged in Ravensbrück itself, but the French prisoners made it their own, humming tunes during roll calls, singing in the evening in their barracks. When one of the prisoners, Jacqueline d’Alincourt, was freed thanks to an intervention by the Red Cross in April 1945, she took the text of the Available.
The original text is now deposited at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Besançon. Germaine Tillion, if she mentioned it in her writings, no longer attached great importance to this manuscript. Or else, she would have been embarrassed by the black and scathing humor that transpires in her work, a humor that she saw as difficult to understand for an audience that had to be educated about the horror of the camps. It was up to Nelly Forget to reconstruct the musical framework of the operetta, for the staging at the Châtelet, a work that is taken up and continued (if not completed, because it lacks airs) at the end of the volume. Sing, laugh and resist in Ravensbrück.
The work is complex, showing a narrator, the “naturalist”, giving a lecture on the Availablea hybrid creature – like the work – born from a deportee and a SS. During the operetta, the naturalist is overtaken by the creatures he describes, by the deportees themselves, who speak and recount daily life in the camp, its horror, its absurd rules, and its rituals too. The work is, in a way, an ethnology of the concentration camp system, as Germaine Tillion would have it in her writings on the camps.
It is also a work of reflection on one’s own condition as a prisoner. It is also part army theatre, part political cabaret, part testimony, part work of memory. Available was also played on April 17, 2010 in Ravensbrück itself, to mark the 65the anniversary of the liberation of the camp.
“Having fun between two murders”
The directors of the work wanted to “put into perspective, on a micrological scale, The Available in Hell as the place of a double memory: memory of the Resistance and of the deportation around the figure of Germaine Tillion first, but also a place of memory testifying to the specific force of a reclusive creativity, now an integral part of the history of the camps”.
Articles in the volume Sing, laugh and resist in Ravensbrück sometimes appear as eclectic as Available themselves and are sometimes redundant. They contribute to many ongoing studies and in no way close a research to be continued. They would sometimes have benefited from a comparative approach with other works created in the camps and ghettos; there is a historical literature on this subject that is in full renewal.
Insa Eschebach describes the cultural activities in the Ravensbrück camp, which are known to have been numerous, organized by national groups, places of reaffirmation of political and national identities, sometimes also, it seems, authorized by the SSeven if they are always remembered as a moment of endangerment of the group. The historian Julien Blanc writes about humor as a form of resistance in Germaine Tillion, showing that it was used from the beginning of the Occupation by this remarkable woman.
Françoise Carasso studies the styles of the work “between relevance and impertinence”. The manuscript’s journey is reconstructed by Nelly Forget in a fascinating chapter, which bears witness to Germaine Tillion’s incredible musical culture, probably acquired in part in her youth, in her family where music held a predominant place. “She also says she memorized the “rengaines”, variety songs and advertisements probably poured out by the TSF and the phonograph of a neighboring baker” (p. 101).
Among the chapters by musicologists, one will read with particular interest that of Djemaa Maazouzi, “On a paradoxical “distraction” in Ravensbrück”. The operetta is described there as a revue-operetta, “a tool for distancing oneself from the ordeal in the midst of the ordeal; the revue-operetta as a test (production, deformation – with literary, musical and artistic means) of the concentration camp ordeal and finally the revue-operetta as a means of “distracting” oneself from the horror and the pain”.
Finally, in a useful text, Cécile Quesney describes the different stagings of the Available in hellsince its creation at the Châtelet. Performing the work also means confronting the question of the stage representation of the camp. It is also delicate to put on a stage a work designed for internal use at Ravensbrück. In the middle of the volume, the editors of the work have placed an interview with Germaine Tillion dating from 2002 (with Mechtild Gilzmer). She discusses her Available :
I was a digger, I pulled a big haystack to make roads and after that, I was a stevedore, to unload the trains of everything that had been stolen all over the world. So I did that stuff and in the meantime, I wrote an operetta to amuse myself between two murders. That’s how you survive, or you don’t survive (p. 78).