"Him too? Jean Genet, saint and martyr for an entire epoch, was also a Nazi?" asks Jürg Altwegg, reviewing Ivan Jablonka's biographical study "Les vérités inavouables de Jean Genet" (Seuil). In the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre elevated the French dramatist to "Saint Genet, actor and martyr". Later, Michel Foucault saw in Genet the figure of a lunatic and criminal created in the mould of inhuman institutions. Jacques Derrida, for his part, exalted Genet's "subversive instinct". Now this myth is being subverted. "Jablonka's study reveals that Genet's legends and lies are at least partially rooted in the Second World War. Before chanting hymns to Palestinian terrorists and the Baader Meinhof Gang, Genet had sung praises of Hitler and the Nazis no less enthusiastically than Louis Ferdinand Céline. Genet was the lover of a French SS officer. He raved about 'blonde warriors' and praised the massacre at Oradour as pure 'poetry'. [emphasis mine] For Jablonka, Genet's Nazi leanings were the result of an 'intellectual and erotic fascination'. He did not expect anything good from Hitler, he was just delighted by all the horror." [emphasis mine].
Read it here.
Oh my! I'm old enough to remember the adulation heaped on this monster. But the question that springs to mind is whether or not he was any less a monster during his leftist "phase" than he had been when he was a Nazi? I think not. He was just a monster plain and simple.
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