The Shanghai ghetto, a "bûddha affair that will break out"

The Tsars are back at Delcourt with D-Day

This month, volume 43 of "D-Day" has just been published by Delcourt ! Screenwriters Fred Duval and Jean-Pierre Pécau invite us to rewrite history. What if the Nazis had won the war? This uchrony above all thought as a chase against the agents of evil presents a Third Reich more powerful than ever, having only as enemies the soldiers of truth, like our heroine Mary Kate Danaher.

See you in Asia

Asian landscapes are in these latitudes that make Europeans say that they are lands of poetry and infinity. Through Europe's centuries-old fascination with the Far East, this volume reflects something akin to a historical rendezvous between the imaginary and the cliché of an old poet. However, the roads of Asia lead in this volume only to a surprising pandemonium: allies, Germany and Japan could collaborate to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The famous fugu plan constantly repeated in the album is the key to a more global understanding of the world: it is a Japanese proposal to transfer the Jews of Europe to Asia to repopulate Manchuria. This transfer had already begun and a ghetto was formed in Shanghai, where Jews received proper treatment. For NOW. Because the Nazis want to propose, through the action of the SS Meisinger, to the Japanese allies to take advantage of the recent presence of Jews in Asia to exterminate them there.

The writers revisit the plan of the Final Solution by lending it Japanese accents since Herr Meisinger must convince his ally that the Jew is the common enemy of all nations, since stateless and apparently endowed with multiple resources.

The only Asian person who speaks in this volume is a certain Sugihara, a professor explaining to Bob Simon this famous plan to turn into the massacre of the Jews. One might regret that in this volume taking place almost exclusively in Shanghai, there is only one Asian person who has something to say. The other Asians present are henchmen with limited vocabulary and actions, sworn, paid to serve a fascist regime and become one with the devil.

Also, do not expect the decorations of the Blue Lotus or the steles of Segalen, the atmosphere in this volume is powerfully "westernized", we see mainly Europeans, henchmen, Nazis or weapons, but no trace for the moment of Asian families and transcription of traditions, lifestyles, In short, no local footprint to declare, except the mention of the fugu fish, analogon of a vicious plan. Although we are dealing here with an international concession of Shanghai, it might have been pleasant for the reader to feel immersed… in Asia in the 40s

Saving one's honour beyond war is possible

Although the situation is most critical, characters show us how it is possible to resist the Nazi yoke. Professor Sugihara's brother arranged for Lithuanian Jews to leave Europe for safety in China. This kind of act of resistance ridicules the "butcher of Warsaw" (the SS Meisinger) all the more because there are ways to make an opinion heard other than by killing, but rather by survival. Survival is what everyone does, survival is the essential tunnel that Truth takes to triumph against a fascist society. Courage is therefore the key word and it is illustrated by other characters than Mary. The moving scene of the album is the act of bravery of Mr. Sidel, an elderly Jew and father of an adult daughter, who sells diamonds in order to raise enough money to leave Shanghai, soon occupied by the Nazis. While receiving the sum after transaction, he grabs a gun and shoots the SS Meisinger, knowing full well what this act will cost him. This outburst of heroism in the person of an old hunted Jew is the image of a society that creates new figures of the Good. By dying as a martyr, Mr. Sidel is both recognized by the reader as a man whose act was ordered alone but part of a whole called the Resistance. Thus, Mary's action in her investigation of the Nazis is helped by small hands who assert their respect for women of conviction like her. Mary, incredibly isolated in her journey, is finally far from alone.

Stewart and Sterling, his bodyguards, quickly died while doing their duty, which adds to this album a dimension of solidarity between people fighting against the Nazi regime.

"A Clockwork Orange" companies

Despite this momentum, it is with a series of nightmares that the album begins, while Mary is recovering after being the victim of an attack. Finally safe and sound, the violence of war is above all portrayed here as a pet peeve, if Mary is not physically injured, she is permanently haunted by the corpses dancing around her. Several times in this volume, dead men collapse on top of them or die to protect her. If war is a matter of living people wanting to cause deaths, it is precisely determined to wrest all vitality from the bodies of the existing.

Mary, a daring journalist directly connected to Roosevelt, sees her body and mind decay. Thus, the writers show that although she lives and is driven by her desire to destroy the Reich, Mary is a prisoner of war, like everyone else. A prisoner of war whose body no longer belongs to her since she is forced to hand it over to the SS Meisinger to hope to collect documents specifying her presence in Shanghai. Mary's blonde beauty is only the high expression of the darkness of the fate that awaits her, first as an enemy of the Reich, but also as a woman. It was as a woman that the American secret service sent her to Shanghai so that she could "convince" Bob Simon to give him information about recent events. Because they have been lovers in the past, Mary apparently has to play as a woman to play on her seduction to convince men to help her, first Bob Simon and then the SS Meisinger. This alienation makes Mary an additional victim because because of her sex men, even her allies, expect her to play her role as a woman. Woman who ends up in distress at the end of the volume, prisoner of the Nazis, saved of course by her former lover Bob Simon.

The writers probably necessarily wanted to show by making a woman the heroine to what extent the resistance to the Reich leads to self-suppression. Mary may be smart and ambitious, but she is expected to undress.

This bullet embedded in the head of Klimpt, Bob Simon's comrade-in-arms, is certainly much more violent than a pair of panties at the ankles, but the writers demonstrate the violence of war by the behavior that the characters adopt to face it, so all the base instincts and old predicates stand out because apparently the only way to fight against the brown-shirted enemy.

Finally, the knights of the Apocalypse with swastikas as shields that Mary dreams of at the beginning of the volume are her enemies lined up one by one: sexism, misogyny, fear of dying, fear of failing.

D-Day is a well-crafted uchrony with very realistic drawings, changing of course since the writers work with a different cartoonist per volume, essential for our contemporary era where we constantly question history, especially these world wars that constitute our heritage and our fear of falling back into them.