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>> Barbara Will: The book started with some documents
that I found at an archive at Yale University
and they were very curious.
They were a set of speeches that Gertrude Stein translated
or was trying to translate into English,
speeches by Philippe Petain, who was the Chief of State
of the pro-Nazi collaboration of Vichy regime
in France during the Second World War.
A few scholars had already known about these translations
but nobody had ever really asked the question,
why was Gertrude Stein the sort of icon of modern literature
and art, a figure who we associate
with radical experimental writing, with modernism
at its most avant garde, and certainly of late,
with a certain kind of lesbian or feminist identity,
with progressive politics?
She's kind of in the last twenty or thirty years
since she's been rediscovered, she's kind of taken on the roll
of this great mother figure
for avant garde experimental modernism, in its best form.
And so it was kind of shocking to find
out that she was actually translating speeches
for a pro-Nazi regime during the Second World War.
And the question was, "why?"
You know, why would somebody like Stein and I mean,
obviously, another key part of this is a Jewish American woman,
who was obviously under great personal vulnerability during
the war, why would she be translating these speeches
for a pro-Nazi regime?
There were a couple possible answers that immediately sprang
to mind when I started thinking about this project.
The first one was that she probably may have been trying
to do these translations as a way of protecting herself,
as a way of sort of, you know, covering her traces by helping
out with the regime, by pretending to be a good citizen
and sort of hoping that she would be seen as somebody
who was not a threat to the regime.
And obviously this might have worked
for maybe the first few months of the Petain regime,
but very quickly into the Second World War into the Vichy regime,
it became clear that it was a virulently anti-Semitic regime.
And that somebody like Stein was actually
under great personal risk.
She started translating these speeches in 1941.
So a good, you know, eighteen months
after the regime had already started.
So it doesn't seem likely
that she would have simply been translating the speeches
in order to somehow to protect herself.
There had to be other motivations.
And then the question was, well what kind of motivations?
What was leading somebody like Gertrude Stein
to support somebody like Philippe Petain?
And it's at that point that my book really gets started.