 There was a terrible contradiction at the center of Django Reinhardt’s life during the German occupation of France.
The Germans loved jazz. Or at least many German soldiers and officers loved it, whatever their government might say about “degenerate” music. And they loved Django. They crowded into the clubs where he played, requested his music, sought his company and treated him as a celebrity. But Django was Manouche, and throughout occupied Europe Roma and Sinti were being registered, confined, deported and murdered by the same regime whose officers applauded him. His fame offered him a measure of protection, but it could never make him safe. Nor could it separate him from the fate of his people. When war began in September 1939, Django and the Quintette du Hot Club de France were touring England. Stéphane Grappelli chose to remain there. Django returned almost immediately to France. It seems a reckless decision when viewed from the safety of another time. Yet Django’s life was in France. His mother, his brother, Naguine and the extended Manouche family to which he belonged were there. Returning to them may have been less a decision than an instinct. He could not imagine himself apart from his people. In occupied Paris, he continued to play. With Hubert Rostaing’s clarinet replacing Grappelli’s violin, he formed a new quintet and became more popular than ever. His “Nuages,” recorded in 1940, seemed to express something the French could not openly say. Its melancholy carried both sorrow and hope, and audiences demanded to hear it again and again. German officers heard it too. Some of them genuinely admired Django’s music. Among them was Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, known in jazz circles as “Doktor Jazz.” He collected records, wrote about jazz and moved freely within the musical world of occupied France. For years, it has been said that Schulz-Köhn intervened after Django was detained and saved him from arrest. That dramatic story may be true, but firm documentary evidence has proved difficult to find. What is certain is the disturbing relationship itself: a German officer could admire and perhaps assist one celebrated Manouche musician while serving the military power that was persecuting Roma and Sinti throughout Europe. Django lived inside that contradiction. The Germans wanted his music, but they wanted to control it. A proposed tour of Germany would have placed Django’s genius at the service of the Nazi cultural machine. He refused to go. This was not the action of a conventional political hero. Django did not speak in manifestos, and he did not present himself as a member of the Resistance. His resistance was more personal and instinctive. He would play, but he would not allow the Germans to determine entirely what he played or where his music would take him. Eventually, however, refusal was not enough. In 1943, as the danger intensified, Django attempted to take his family across the border into Switzerland. By then Naguine was pregnant with Babik, who would be born in June 1944. What might otherwise sound like one of Django’s impulsive journeys becomes something very different when we remember her pregnancy. They were not merely fleeing for themselves. They were carrying the family’s future with them. The women are essential to this story. Django’s mother, Laurence Reinhardt—Négros to her family—had supported him from childhood. She had been a dancer and jewellery maker, a formidable woman who raised her sons within the independence and communal life of the Manouche world. Naguine possessed a quieter but equally necessary strength. She had lived through Django’s absences, enthusiasms and unpredictability. During the war she faced something greater: the possibility that her husband’s fame would not be enough to save them. Pregnant and surrounded by uncertainty, she continued forward with him. The women were not standing outside Django’s story, waiting for him to act. They were protecting the continuity of the family while the world around them threatened to destroy it. The attempted escape failed. Swiss border guards refused Django entry and sent him back into occupied France. He and his family survived, but survival should not be mistaken for security—or for proof that the danger had been exaggerated. Django survived because of fame, luck, the assistance of others and perhaps because the machinery of persecution did not close around him quickly enough. Countless other Roma and Sinti were not so fortunate. We cannot know entirely how Django absorbed what was happening to his people. He was not a man who explained himself readily. Much of what mattered most in him emerged through music rather than speech. But in 1944 he began composing something unlike anything he had attempted before: a Mass for his people. The film Django ends with a great performance of this sacred work as a requiem for murdered Roma and Sinti. It is a powerful scene, but the historical truth is quieter. Django never completed the Mass, and no such wartime performance is known to have taken place. What survives is an approximately eight-minute fragment and a recording of Django speaking about it. Because Django could not write musical notation, he dictated the composition to Gérard Lévêque, the clarinetist in his quintet, who put it onto paper. In 1944, pianist and organist Léo Chauliac played the fragment on the organ in the chapel of the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris. A radio interviewer was present. Django was hearing his composition played on the organ for the first time. When asked why he had written it, he explained that Roma throughout the world had used the masses of other peoples for centuries. He wanted to create a Mass of their own, to be performed by choir and organ. The interviewer then mentioned that Django was sometimes called the king of the Gypsies. Django rejected the title, although with a characteristic glimmer of playfulness he allowed that perhaps it might happen someday. Then he said something much more revealing: he was greatly loved by his people, and he thanked them by offering them this Mass. The work remained unfinished. Django admitted that he did not yet know its ending. Perhaps an unfinished Mass is the most truthful memorial he could have left. It does not resolve what happened. It cannot account for the people who disappeared, or reconcile the Germans who applauded Django with the Germans who hunted Roma and Sinti. It cannot explain why Django and his family survived while so many others did not. But the surviving fragment tells us something about where Django’s deepest loyalty lay. The Germans may have wanted his music. Paris may have claimed him as its great jazz musician. The world would eventually celebrate him as the first European jazz genius. Yet in that chapel, listening as an organ gave voice to music he had carried within himself, Django offered it to his people. It belonged to them. Click here to continue to next chapter: A New Man St. Germain des Pres Comments are closed.
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