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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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my Wandering Jew, had not been to. He had just come
out on top in the competitive examination for assistant director of the French
National Radio and Television System (ORTF). In July 1964, be was promoted to
work with the deputy director of radio broadcasting. And I had left my job with
a firm of Lyon silk manufacturers and taken another as a bilingual secretary
with the Franco-German Alliance for Youth (OFA), which de Gaulle and Adenauer
had just established.
We had set the scene to live a stable, orderly
life like that of thousands of other young couples.
I was very
enthusiastic about the OFA. I even offered to write a handbook for young German
girls working au pair in Paris. The book made a big splash in Germany,
for it came out just at the right time: a German au pair girl had
recently been murdered in Neuilly, and the German papers were full of the
details.
My handbook was also the beginning of a great deal of friction
between me and the OFA, its secretary general, François Altmayer, who
was then in the Bonn office, and the director of the French wing, Robert
Clément.
Although the OFA had approved of my writing the
handbook, and although in the final analysis it subscribed to the line I took
in it, it did not like to admit that the ideas of a young stenographer could be
important. When I was invited to speak at conferences on Franco-German
exchanges as a kind of expert, the OFA directors were quite cool to me, and
they would always be careful to make it clear that "Mme. Klarsfeld is
expressing only her own opinions. . ."
An incident with Voggenreiter,
the publisher of the German edition of my handbook, further chilled my
relations with the OFA by revealing how dependent the German branch was on the
Bonn government, even though it was theoretically part of an independent
bi-national agency.
I had listed among the cultural associations the
Franco-German Exchange, which sponsored seminars in German history at the
Sorbonne. Now, this was a French friendship association with the German
Democratic Republic [East Germany]. My German publisher, who was hoping to sell
a good number of my handbooks to the various state education ministries, had to
withdraw all copies to revise the page with the address of the Franco-German
Ex- […change]
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Back |
Page 15 |
Forward |
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