Original subtitles

It began, of course,

with my father's friendship with Roché,

and my mother came info the middle of it, so fo speak.

If we look at it from my mother's point of view,

first, she loved Hessel very much

because he was who he was.

That is, so friendly and loving,

and also very understanding,

because, after all, she was a German woman

who had come to Paris before the war —

World War I, that is —

and she wasn't always comfortable

at the Café du Déme,

Just like my father.

But the influence he had on her

was most profound in their early years together.

He was her mentor in all things cultural.

She wasn't a very sophisticated young girl when she met him,

and that always remained very important to her.

That was the good part,

but when she later realized...

that he didn't love her precisely the way she wanted...

she reacted in that feminine way

and dropped him for Roché,

who said just the right things

to please her.

She dropped my father for Roché.

My mother had hoped to find in Pierre

what she had failed to find with Franz,

but she may not have quite found it with him either.

She had sex appeal.

There's no doubt about it.

You can see it in the pictures. She was very sexy.

Otherwise things wouldn't have happened as they did.

You can see that in the pictures. I was totally amazed.

The picture I took of her isn't half bad.

You can see the character of the person,

though you see nothing but an eye and a chic hat.

It could still pass foday for a modern phofograph.

It's obvious that this is a very elegant woman.

She must have been very beautiful in her youth.

I think that the erofic was very important fo her.

It was the center of her life.

She was very charming

and extremely smart.

1 took a picture of her with her two sons.

Yes, that's a beautiful picture.

This may have been sometime...

around 1938-40, I think.

Quite typical. Really pretty.

And she's wearing that beautiful necklace

that's been passed down in the family.

She was very beautiful.

It was exquisite how she wore her long blonde hair...

that reached all the way down to here

in the late 1920s.

And she had a striking personality.

Of course, as a child and even as a young man,

I was very much in love with my mother.

So I will of course depict her as a very beautiful woman,

which might not have been so evident to others.

She was very blonde.

She had that light blonde coloring

that children especially love,

blue eyes and a slim figure.

I met Mrs. Hessel in 1936...

after she had written...

a very interesting essay on fashion.

As far as I remember, she represented a large women's magazine.

She was an extraordinarily charming woman.

She had a limp from a horseback riding accident in which she broke her foot.

She was among the first to drive a car here.

In those days there were very few cars in Paris.

She was very chic and elegant and knew exactly what she wanted.

Whatever suited her was important.

She didn't care too much whether other people went along.

Also, she didn't necessarily treat very fairly

the men who were in love with her.

One could have held all kinds of things against her.

But no one did, because she was very charming

and very attractive and expressed herself extremely well.

She was a very liberated women, all her life.

I don't think she had any kind of prejudice.

First, she was married to a Jew,

and she came from an officer's family.

Secondly, in Paris she was friendly with the avant-garde,

so she was by no means bourgeois, as we would say,

yet she was someone with the best breeding.

She was extremely cultured and knew how to behave.

La grande dame, as we would say in France.

C'était une grande dame.

We usually met at a café in Montparnasse,

which in those days was the center of art and literature,

before Saint Germain des Prés.

One day she gave me a journal she'd been keeping,

and it contained pretty much the whole story of Jules and Jim.

I think that Helen Hessel...

was very interested in human relationships...

and in love, in a general sense.

And this love of hers captured in Jules and Jim

was based on real experience.

She had a long life.

She outlived her husband by so many, many years,

and Roché likewise, by many years.

You could discuss much that happened to her in later years...

when she became a translator and translated Lo/jfa.

That was an incredible thing for a woman over 70,

to translate this particularly strange novel.

I met her only once very briefly.

I think she may have paid a short visit to the publishing house.

She was a very old lady then, well advanced in years.

To help her, I entrusted her with the translation

of Nabokov's Lolita.

But it turned out — she completed the translation —

that she wasn't quite able to do justice to the special,

capricious, and occasionally even —

how shall I say? —

demonic element in Nabokov.

Nor was she able to come to terms with his new vision.

She was too conservative.

After Jules and Jim was made into a movie, I visited her.

She was over 90 at the time, I think.

She asked if I recognized what it was based on.

I said, “Yes, many years ago you showed me your journal.”

That was the story.

She was a tyrant, but toward her children, for example,

she was mostly very gentle.

She was a very gentle mother

who would always hold us close to her heart.

The only difference between my parents was

that I felt more admiration for my mother

and more frust for my father.

Both our parents were almost mythological figures to us.

He was the great writer and the great translator.

We greatly admired his command of German and French.

That's when we were in Hohenschaftiarn,

near Munich.

It was a wonderful time.

I remember we were all living

together in a house

situated af the fop of a small hill.

I remember that we even went fo school there.

Koch would sunbathe in a meadow,

and Roché would skip stones on the lake.

And there was a balcony, and a country road foo.

And there was this free

that to me was like paradise.

The first image of my father that emerges

from when I was a small child

was that he had such a beautiful round head.

My brother and I loved him very much

as some kind of benign moon spirit.

I could say that I resemble him very much physically.

He looked like a man of letters.

He never paid much attention to clothes,

but he was always quite neat and good-looking.

He wasn't very tall in stature,

and this very formidable-looking head

had a fouch of Asian features.

He was always in his little room, in his study,

which smelled very much of cigarette smoke,

which we especially loved.

He'd take us in his arms and tell us stories

from The liad or The Odyssey.

When he would help me with homework,

that is, Latin or Greek,

he was often strict,

but almost against his will.

I loved Hessel very much

because he had such a gentle disposition.

He was tolerant, lovable...

always friendly, and a peacemaker whenever an argument erupted.

I've never met another human being like him in my whole life.

In terms of character, he's like me

inasmuch as he was —

I don't exactly want to say a passive man.

In his view it was better to undertake as little as possible

in order to fully understand whatever you did undertake

and share it with others.

Without exception they loved him,

but of course they also laughed at him.

I laughed at him myself.

He drew a smile from you

because his view of the world

had a childlike quality

that would unfortunately make us smile condescendingly on occasion.

I think that as a young man

he was very spoiled.

He believed he could devote himself entirely to beauty and art.

But then came WW I, and all those complicated times.

Perhaps he didn't feel very confident

as a man of action,

but he felt very confident as a man of knowledge,

a man who lovingly embraced all that the world brought his way.

He was the son of a banker

who lost his money during the Inflation.

He led a life that allowed him to devote himself to his passions,

to literature and the literary life.

Then, affer the losses in the 1920s,

he had fo become a book editor.

He was also a wrifer,

though his books were never successful enough fo earn him a living.

But for many years he was my father's chief edifor

and introduced him fo many German authors.

Benjamin, whom [ve already mentioned, and Mascha Kaléko.

And, of course, he also infroduced us fo French literature.

He also frans/ated Proust, fogether with Walter Benjamin.

He was also good friends with Mascha Kaléko,

one of his platonic relationships.

He was a great admirer of women,

but without, I think, acting on it.

I learned fairly late

about Jules and Jim

and that the lady in question

was Helen Hessel

and that Franz Hessel

and the author Roché were the friends.

Actually, I haven't read Jules and Jim.

I saw the film first.

He'd given me the book two years earlier.

It had come out three years earlier.

But I hadn't taken the time to read it.

I saw the film first

without having read the book,

and I recognized the character of my father perfectly.

But I recognized him not only in Jim,

but in Jules as well, on a philosophical level.

Jules' and Jim's philosophy of life was that of my father.

My father wrote it as a dialogue,

but I found it more in Jim but also in Jules.

He was a man with two lives.

He had an exterior life, a worldly life.

He saw lots of people in artistic circles,

and he traveled to India and the United States.

In this life he was regarded as quite exceptional in every way.

He was extremely brilliant and friendly and kind, and so forth.

Then he had another life as well,

a life of contemplation and writing.

He lived this life at home.

In this life he wasn't very accessible to those around him.

I don't think he gave much to his wife,

and he gave very little to me, his son.

There were moments of great camaraderie,

but he never paid attention to me as a child or took me in his arms.

He never really took the time to raise his child.

Roché in Hohenschaftlarn

was very pleasant as a friend.

Once I saw my mother being carried,

either in his arms, or perhaps it was Koch or Hessel.

She was being carried around the room.

She had that long, as yet uncropped blonde hair,

and she was laughing at it all.

That made a big impression on me.

I always thought my parents were married.

They never said a word to me about it.

One day, when I was about 21 or 22, I was skiing,

and I received a postcard that said,

“We got married.”

That's when I learned I was actually an illegitimate child

and that I shouldn't even have been using my father's last name.

He had bribed a clerk at city hall

into adding Roché to my name,

but technically I was a fatherless child.

I never knew.

I'd only noticed that he'd spend a week or two at the house,

and then he'd leave for a month or two.

I was small at the time, but I think he had other women,

though I didn't know it.

He was a very tall man,

exceedingly tall,

at least 64” — I don't know exactly.

He was rather thin, foo.

A very good-looking,

tall young man.

He was over six feef tall.

He had a slim figure, a large nose,

and an expression

of great self-confidence.

I only knew him in his later years, because he was 52 when I was born.

So I grew up with a man who was 60 or 70 years old.

He was tall but a bit stooped over.

He had blonde hair and a triangular face.

He looked very Anglo-Saxon. Everyone took him for English.

And he'd been educated in a somewhat English fashion,

a certain way of being discreet, of listening to others,

of being measured in his speech.

He was quite English.

He was athletic.

He firmly believed

that young boys must play sports.

He wanted us to learn to box.

We never did, but he himself was a boxer.

He also wanted us to play tennis, which we did.

He was always very athletic and lively,

taking long walks and so on.

So he was certainly a pleasant companion for children,

but somewhat detached when it came to feelings.

When he was 70 and I was 20,

we'd play Ping-Pong together,

and he could still beat me.

He had a good eye and very good reflexes.

He was very kind and charming

and loved to joke around,

and even to us children he was a representative of French culture.

He knew all the big French names:

Marcel Duchamps, André Breton, and so forth.

So he was to us the transmitter

of this culture that was still new fo us.

In his room in Paris,

and later in Sévres, my father had lots of paintings.

But they were constantly changing, because he would sell them.

Paintings by Picasso, Braque, Modigliani,

as well as Chagall, Max Ernst and others.

They were always changing,

but two things never changed:

a row of dolls from the Hopi tribe, North American Indians,

which he later sold.

And he had this behind his bed.

So my mother was in Paris in the early years,

when she was living with Roché,

and my father would come on occasion.

But the focus was on Roché and his friends.

So she was surrounded

by this group of people with whom she had a relationship,

who were also my father's relationships.

Later on, as a fashion journalist,

she took us along fo her shows,

and we saw all the pretty models.

She was very busy at the time

earning a living for us,

because she was the family breadwinner.

My father was self-employed

but my mother —

Because she had gone to Paris in 1925

and had lived with Roché,

and up until 1928, when she was with my father...

she oversaw our education...

more than my father did,

who had withdrawn from this fask.

She probably didn't get

all that she might have wanted from Roché.

She wanted to build a great love with him and have kids.

As we know, that hope was dashed,

so that she grew disappointed in him,

although she had invested a lot in this passionate relationship.

She felt much more passionately toward him

than he probably felt toward her.

I think my father was very hard on women.

He lived with three women, and he said,

“I'll marry the one who survives the longest.”

So if two were to die, he'd marry the third.

I think all three suffered quite a bit.

Each was quite aggressive towards the other two.

But I never heard a word about anything at all.

I can simply say that my mother was unhappy

and that there were stormy times with my father,

and they'd come to blows. Not a good couple at all.

When I was in Berlin

around 1934,

when the break occurred

between my mother and Roché,

she wrote to my father that as far as she was concerned,

the “false friend” no longer existed for her

for this or that reason, and she explained why.

And my father went obediently along with my mother

and likewise broke off all contact with Roché.

Of course, he was no match

for the brutality that was rampant then.

Actually, he was never really confronted with it.

In the final years of the Nazis, when he was working for us,

he lived a somewhat withdrawn life.

But we stood by him. Certainly my father did,

which remained under wraps for a while but later came out

and led to a Nazi trial against my father

for having employed Franz Hessel and Paul Meyer,

both of whom were Jews. He was viciously attacked for it.

But he must have felt some bitterness

at suddenly finding himself a pariah.

1 think if there had only been Jews like my father,

fascism would have had an even easier time of it.

You can make that criticism of him.

He always spoke against the Nazis, of course,

but he never saw the need

fo join any kind of group fo fight them.

He was against Hitler, of course,

but in a “belles lettres” sort of way.

He probably had no awareness of the great danger he was in.

He could easily have come to a very bad end.

And if my mother hadn't gone to Germany in 1938

and almost forcefully taken him along, he'd probably have met a bad end.

He didn't live this way for much longer,

but at least he lived in freedom.

My father had been in India,

where he'd worked for the Maharaja of Indore.

He saw how they cremated the dead there,

and he thought it was a beautiful custom.

I think he'd also read many works

on Buddhism and religions of the Far East.

He found cemeteries quite ugly.

He didn't want his body cluttering up the earth

or other people coming across his bones.

It was a sense of purity.

He wanted to cleanse the earth of his body.

So he asked to be cremated, and so did my mother.

He asked for the ashes to be placed in some beautiful spot.

This is the spot, here at the foot of this tree.

Here I am at my mother's grave.

She died in 1982 in Paris.

My father died in 1941 in Sanary.

My mother was 96 years old, while my father only lived to be 60.

A little over 60.