What Can We Learn From This Queer Couple’s Anti-Nazi Resistance?

How can we resist without the use of identity politics or the politics of victimhood?

Photo by DanielGoldhorn, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

You might think that surrealism, the avant garde 20th century art movement focused on the unconscious, might be a poor starting point for resisting Nazi occupation, but you would be wrong.

Enter Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, the queer, surrealist lovers who turned their artistic explorations of gender and the unconscious into a campaign of anti-Nazi resistance quite unlike any other.

I think we can learn a lot from their story, especially in the context of an ascendant far-right across the Western world and the apparent failure of our current approach to activism vis-a-vis identity and victim politics.

Cahun and Moore are fascinating people. To start with, their names are pseudonyms — or perhaps more. Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, and Moore was born Suzanne Alberte Malherbe.

Both born in Nantes, France, Moore and Cahun met as teenagers in Paris, beginning a lifelong romantic and artistic relationship. They adopted pseudonyms after becoming involved with the surrealist movement while living in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. They are remembered by these names because these are the names under which most of their art, including photography, poetry, and sculpture, was produced.

While Moore’s pseudonym is undoubtedly masculine, Cahun’s nom-de-plume is somewhat more ambiguous: “Claude” is a gender ambiguous name used by both men and women in France, while “Cahun” was Schwob’s maternal grandmother’s maiden name. Notably, Cahun previously went by other, more masculine names including “Daniel Douglas”, after Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover and author of the infamously queer line “the love that dare not speak its name”.

The ambiguity of Cahun’s name is fitting, and I doubt incidental, given Cahun’s own gender ambiguity, which is often expressed via Cahun and Moore’s art. Like many queers of the past their identities are an ongoing debate and it’s difficult to find writing about Cahun that doesn’t try to claim them as either a lesbian woman or transgender. I’ll let Cahun speak for themselves as to their gender identity:

Masculine, Feminine? That depends upon the occasion. Neuter is the only gender that suits me. If it existed in our language, one would not observe this oscillation in my thinking.

— Claude Cahun, quoted by the Jewish Women’s Archive

This seems to me to indicate a desire for a gender-neutral or gender-ambiguous identity which didn’t have a name — there was no gender-neutral pronoun in French at the time, either — and still might not today.

I’m choosing to use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to both Moore and Cahun to honour their ambiguity rather than attempt to fit them into a modern identity category. I use the term “queer” to describe both Cahun and Moore’s identities and relationship because it’s about as broad a label we have to indicate non-belonging to the heterosexual, cisgender, gender-conforming norms of both then and now.

I’m always uncomfortable applying modern labels to queer figures of the past, not least because I’m conscious that I use labels which have always felt like more of an approximation rather than a tight fit — language has its limits and in turn can be limiting — and because, as a transgender person, I am well aware of how disrespectful it is to be put into a box not of one’s own choosing.

I think we can recognise those who are a part of our history — women’s history, queer history, or both — without trying to fit them into a box they might not have liked being put into.

A debate about the specifics of Cahun and Moore’s identities is, at any rate, somewhat beyond the point — it’s enough to know that they were queer and that they “played” with gender and other social norms in both their art and their lives, and that this had a profound effect on how their anti-Nazi resistance would take shape.

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Prior to the rise of the Nazis in Europe, Cahun and Morre had both been involved with the surrealist anti-fascist movement. They were both part of the group Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (The Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers), and later, the association and publication Contra Attaque, focused on the use of art as propaganda and opposing fascism.

Both groups were allied with the French Communist Party and thus the Soviet Union — though Cahun and Moore quickly came to hold the same disdain for Stalinism as they did for Nazism, French Nationalism, and European imperialism more generally. Both groups were disbanded, in part due to disagreements over communist politics.

Cahun and Moore’s activities were focused on “aggressive pacifism”, challenging all forms of warmongering and opposing the impending war. They saw war in Europe as being contrary to “revolutionary defeatism”, the notion that the international working class should not be brought into a capitalist war against itself at the behest of national leaders. They viewed the working class and the nations (in the cultural sense) they belonged to as distinct from the ruling class and the state — a view that would be central to their anti-Nazi propaganda.

Cahun and Moore moved to the Island of Jersey in 1937 to escape the rising climate of far-right sentiment in Europe, which posed a great deal of risk to the couple; in addition to their anti-fascist activities and being openly queer, Claude’s father was of Jewish heritage.

Jersey is the largest of the Channel Islands, geographically closer to France than England, but a self-governing protectorate of the United Kingdom. In 1940, just three years after Cahun and Moore relocated to the island, Jersey became the only British territory to be occupied by the Nazis.

When Cahun and Moore fled to Jersey, they used their birth names and hid their relationship, seeking isolation and escape. The fact that they were already laying low when the Nazi occupation began set them up perfectly for their clandestine resistance campaign, in which they would combine their gender-bending art and their surrealist philosophy into what they termed “indirect action”.

Cahun’s and Moore’s photography, which is often mistakenly only attributed to Cahun, despite Moore appearing in subtle ways (as the photographer’s shadow or in a framed picture on the edge of the scene), often centred around the disruption of gender norms. In their photos, Cahun takes on many different identities, parodying gender norms and even antisemitic tropes.

This “dress up”, central to their art, would become central to their resistance campaign. The pair would disguise themselves as old ladies to enact their campaign of psychological warfare on the German soldiers. They would do this under another assumed identity, using the pseudonym “The Soldier with No Name” (“Der Soldat ohne Namen”), this time posing as a young, male soldier speaking from within the Nazi regime.

The content of their propaganda was directly inspired by their surrealist art and the notion of extracting multiple meanings from art or writing, forcing the audience to engage the unconscious and question taken-for-granted meanings.

The voice of the disaffected soldier, says academic and filmmaker Lizzie Thynne, “provokes rather than commands, encouraging the readers to question their roles in the war and the worth of giving their lives for their murderous leaders”. Cahun and Moore’s notion of artistic propaganda as “indirect action” requires “active participation on the part of the reader in divining the subtext of what is being said, and thus pushing them to advance to a higher level of comprehension, or rather of questioning the status quo”.

The couple produced leaflets and flyers that they would place on barbed wire fences or drop into German staff cars — even slipping notes directly into the pockets of German soldiers.

In their “traps”, as they called them, Cahun and Moore would would mock the Nazi leaders and the ideology of national Socialism with dark humour, highlighting the exploitation of the soldiers with slogans like “Jesus died for us but we must die for Hitler” (on a banner in the churchyard where German soldiers were buried).

In one the couple’s leaflets, the lyrics of a song start by boasting about being heroes who have besieged all of Europe before going on to tell the tale of a German soldier who returns home to find his wife pregnant by another man:

And when I came home on leave,

My wife was pregnant.

Don’t be cross, my little boy, she said,

The Fatherland needs soldiers!

Another flyer claims to quote the Nazi commander Goebbels by twisting the Nazi slogan “Strength through Joy” (‘Kraft durch Freude’) to instead state “Strength through Flight” (‘Kraft durch Verzweiflung’).

Other leaflets encouraged sabotage, highlighting the detrimental effect the war was having on German soldiers and their home country:

Do not wait until the flames of hell have burnt our houses to ashes! Slow down your machines. . . . Tamper with them in a clandestine manner. . . . PUT a STOP to them . . . if you want to put a stop to the war!

Some of the propaganda more directly called for the soldiers to rise up against their officers. One leaflet, especially troubling to the Nazi investigators trying to figure out just who this “Soldier with No Name” was, read:

— Alas, I rather wish I were captured!

— If you surrender, then you will be shot dead by the officer.

— Let him come then! With such an officer, I will be the first to shoot!

(All the above propaganda pieces by Cahun and Moore are quoted in Lizzie Thynne’s paper Indirect Action and the book Paper Bullets by Jeffrey H. Jackson.)

As well as notes of their own, the couple would reproduce and distribute BBC news reports about Allied victories and nazi defeats, which they would listen to on a banned radio, which were crucial since the occupying soldiers were without any source of news except that filtered through their commanders — the local newspaper was also under the control of the Nazi propagandists of the secret police.

The adoption of various disguises and different voices — as a soldier, as a man, as old ladies — was highly effective in throwing the German secret police off their trail. For a time, the Nazi agents were sure that the propaganda campaign was coming from inside the German military itself, possibly even from within the secret police given the sophistication of the propaganda.

Nobody in the Nazi secret police suspected the couple of being behind the campaign; when Cahun and Moore were eventually caught, their Nazi interrogators couldn’t believe that these two apparent women, one a Jew, had acted without the guidance of a man. As Thynne writes:

The totalitarian desire to fix subjects and meanings was undermined by the couple’s radical relativism, their ability to blur the reified distinctions of Jew/Aryan, male/female, to hide their radical politics and to pass, when necessary to subvert the absurd categorizations of Nazi thinking, as both ‘quiet bourgeois ladies’ and a seditious young soldier.

And it worked. When Cahun and Moore were eventually caught and imprisoned (the two were sentenced to death but escaped their sentence due to the war ending), they shared cells with German soldiers who had been affected by their propaganda and gave up, refusing to fight and being imprisoned for insubordination by their commanders.

In his book Paper Bullets, Jeffrey H. Jackson relays an interaction between Cahun and Moore (Jackson uses their birth names, Suzanne and Lucy) and a German soldier they were imprisoned with, later recorded in one of the couples’ diaries:

On May 5, while they were talking with several German prisoners, Karlchen expressed his great gladness that the war was finally ending.

“Thank heaven that’s done with and I’m no longer a soldier,” Suzanne remembered him saying.

“But you’re still wearing the bird,” another said to him, referring to the German eagle on every German uniform.

Karlchen took off his tunic, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pair of nail scissors. He cut the bird off his uniform. According to Lucy, he called it “the dirty bird.”

“What shall I do with it?”

“Give it to me,” Suzanne said, thinking it would make another souvenir for her collection. Karlchen smiled at her. “I did not know whether you would like to have it.”

An image of Cahun dressed in one of her disguises as an old lady and holding the German soldier Karlchen’s “dirty bird” between her teeth is part of the Jersey Heritage Collection — you can see it here.

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One of the things I find so interesting about Cahun and Moore’s propaganda campaign — their activism — is how different their approach was to the kind of activism women and minority groups engage in today. Modern activism is often rooted in identity politics and the politics of victimhood and subsequently often relies on an “us vs them” mentality. Such an approach was anathema to Cahun and Moore, despite being potential targets exactly because of their identities. According to Thynne:

The intention… is not to represent all ‘the enemy’ as vicious aggressors, reinforcing simple binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’; rather it is to encourage the Germans themselves to doubt the validity of the war, specifically appealing to the rank and file to reject their leaders and disobey orders. The intention is to spur the German troops into action, or rather inaction, without ‘cretinizing’ by facile exhortations but by highlighting the contradictions and injustice of their position.

This approach of taking on the role of the occupying soldier — of “the enemy” is in stark contrast to the voice of the outsider used in today’s activism, which is centred, as professor of sociology Laurel Westbrook argues in her book Unlivable Lives, around the creation of homogenous identity categories constructed in part through portrayals of victimhood and marginalisation.

Anything resembling identity politics, apart from not being a popular or fully developed focus of activism at the time, just was unthinkable for Cahun and Moore. They couldn’t evoke the empathy of either their oppressors or the general public with appeals to humanity because their identities weren’t just illegal but also morally despised by many — to even sympathise with those of a certain religion or sexuality was dangerous.

To reveal themselves as lesbians, as queer, as gender-nonconforming, and in Cahun’s case, as Jewish, would have made them instant candidates for the Nazi death camps. The politics of victimhood, which have become common in movements like #MeToo or the trans rights movement, just weren’t an option.

It’s interesting to highlight an alternative approach used in this context because it’s possible that this might become the reality again, as far-right groups and their misogynistic, queerphobic, racist and antisemitic ideologies are once again on the rise — in the case of trump’s Republicans, in government and behaving in ways that are eerily similar to that of Hitler’s Nazi party.

This rise of the far-right and the rise of anti-minority hatred shows that appealing to the humanity of the wider working class — which, contrary to what some seem to think, women, queers, migrants, the disabled and other minority groups are also a part of — hasn’t worked. Many of the working class (minorities included) are turning to right-wing ideas as a solution to the failings of neoliberal capitalism regardless of the impact that it has on the working class’s more vulnerable members.

Perhaps, instead of of highlighting our own plight, a more effective approach might be to speak not as outsiders, but as part of the working class, and highlight that negative impact that far-right ideologies have on all of us — the negative economic impacts of Trump’s second term in government are already starting to show, and that will impact all but the richest of Americans.

Cahun and Moore didn’t wait for some mythical hero or the rest of society to come and save them, they took matters into their own hands via “indirect action”. They tried to show the German soldiers, who they recognised as part of the international working class, that were also being exploited by their masters. They tried to show the German soldiers that they, too, were victims of fascism and encouraged them to save themselves.

I can’t help but think there’s an analogy here with trying to highlight to the voting public just how much their vote for people like Trump is going to hurt them, rather than how much it will hurt us (if such a distinction even makes sense).

One of the advantages we have is that the kind of propaganda Cahun and Moore engaged in isn’t currently illegal in the US, UK and Europe (yet). We are still able to openly mock and challenge the ideology of the far-right (though as I write this, Trump’s Department of Justice has begun harassing lawmakers for criticising Elon Musk) and highlight its contradictions and the harm it will cause for everyone, not just minorities.

I doubt this could ever be the whole solution to what we’re currently facing in the Western world, but to me, it seems at least one option with some hope. To be sure, the kinds of activism we’ve been engaging in for the past couple of decades aren’t working, or we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. We need to look to alternatives, both new and old, and I think Cahun and Moore’s surrealist-inspired, gender-bending campaign of Nazi-resistance holds some important lessons.