Françoise Frenkel, Simon Raichinstein et la Maison du livre français de Berlin (1921-1939). Histoire d'une quête

The re-edition in 2015 of Françoise Frenkel's testimony (1945) - that of a Polish Jewish woman who escaped the police of the Vichy Regime by flying to Switzerland - provides a new trace of the past and allows us to reopen the enquiry into the French book store in Berlin in the interwar period. Frenkel had taken the almost crazy decision to found a "Maison du Livre" in 1921 in one of the most Francophobic cities in Europe after the defeat of the German Reich. With or without her husband Simon Raichinstein, she ran this little French cultural center until summer 1939. Her voluntarily incomplete narrative is ambiguous. While other sources shed a different light onto this milieu where French, Germans and stateless Russians met each other in various configurations, depending on the international situation.