No fairy tale - Review

Commonweal, August 13, 1999 by Daria Donnelly

Tomi

A Childhood under the Nazis

Tomi Ungerer

Tomico, $29.95, 175 pp.

Alsatian graphic artist Tomi Ungerer is best known for the children's books he made between 1957 and 1974 while living in New York City. Sophisticated, satiric, and haunting, this body of work (twenty-two original books and forty others illustrated) is accurately measured by Maurice Sendak's blunt praise: "Tomi Ungerer has never failed the picture book." Adults of that era may also remember Ungerer's bitter sexual cartooning, his searing and macabre posters opposing the Vietnam War, and the specific impress he made on the New York streetscape with irreverent billboards designed for the New York Times, the New York State Lottery, and the Village Voice, among others.

Since the late 1970s, Ungerer has divided his time between his father's house in Strasbourg and a home in rural Ireland, where an American neighbor, Jack Van Zandt, importuned Ungerer to publish the books he had continued to make over the last twenty-five years. Tomi: A Childhood under the Nazis is the third edition of a largely visual memoir first published in French (1991) and, subsequently, German. In it, Ungerer fills out the story of a childhood which underlies the vision and imagery of his early and more recent (Flix, Tortoni Tremolo) picture books.

Ungerer was eight when Germany invaded Alsace in June 1940. As a result of the Franco-German War, the region had been part of Germany from 1871 to 1918, and the invading Nazis were determined to purge all evidence of an indigenous Gallic culture. The Nazi administrators immediately outlawed the French language in school and home. They burned French books, sent Alsatian teachers to Germany for reeducation, renamed streets, and criminalized the wearing of berets. They even required that Alsatians Germanize their children's names. Thus, Tomi, ne Jean Thomas, was called Hans throughout the German occupation and annexation of Alsace, to which Vichy France formally consented in June 1941.

Already a talented draftsman, young Ungerer began a double life, both of which he considers "distorted." At school he obediently fulfilled assignments to copy out Hitler's sayings and draw a Jew. At home, he ferociously made caricatures-among them a pack of playing cards with Hitler as the Old Maid and portraits of loutish German soldiers, influenced by the Alsatian artist Hansi. From his apartment in Logelbach, just opposite a prison camp that housed first French, later Russian, and finally German soldiers, Ungerer took in and recorded the sheer spectacle of occupation and liberation.

Ungerer's mother saved everything: Tomi's school notebooks, drawings, magazine clippings, and secret diary, along with heaps of other artifacts from the period. Using a generous selection of these objects, Ungerer tells the story of his coming of age and documents how the Fascist propaganda machine invaded the child's world of school and play. This outstanding book's power stems from Ungerer's attention to visual detail and echo, and his honest expression of vivid and contradictory emotions. In his tone, Ungerer keeps faith with adolescence and its equal measures of agitation, detachment, and vulnerability. Ungerer designed Tomi for children and adults, and it is appropriate for both, though he pulls no punches.

Above all, Ungerer makes us feel the depth of the Nazi invasion of childhood. The children of this era can never return to innocence nor draw upon resources of childhood that are untainted. Ungerer confesses that when he is overwhelmed by the anxiety and insecurity to which he is prone, and which this period surely bequeathed him, he is cheered best by the Nazi marching songs of his school days. He shows us dozens of delicate miniature figurines that Alsatian children sold on the street on behalf of a Nazi organization to aid indigents. Later Ungerer discovered that these highly prized collectibles were made by concentration camp internees.

Ungerer refuses to simplify or render merely ironical the contradictory nature of his childhood experiences. This lends the memoir an unusual moral authority not only as it touches on fascism but on family life as well. In particular, he portrays his mother, widowed when Tomi was three, with a tumult of feeling. Alice Ungerer is shown as resourceful and suffocating, freethinking and elitist. Throughout the occupation, she kept the house full of books and maintained an atmosphere in which Tomi and his siblings could pursue their passions (his were drawing, reading, mineralogy, and chemistry). With great daring and surreal obfuscation, she protected them from the worst of required obeisance to the Nazis, for whom she had nothing but contempt. Her prejudices and smothering affection enraged young Tomi, and filled him with shame. It did not help that many of her protective schemes involved exaggerating his inborn fragility.

Liberation was as filled with contradiction as occupation. For the young boy who dashed out of his basement shelter to collect hot shrapnel after bombing raids, the long-awaited demise of the Nazis was exciting and terrible. But when he saw French troops beating German POWs, Ungerer was devastated: "This disturbing vision canceled out whatever hope and innocence I had left." The liberating French moved swiftly to erase not simply Nazi but German culture from Alsace: destroying, among others, Ungerer's own school library, and forbidding Alsatian, a German dialect and the lingua franca of the region, for the next twenty-five years. Ungerer documents the weird likenesses in the double purging of his region, down to the cards placed on cafe tables which urged the language of the moment.