Home

Tintin and the war

31.12.69

Peter Jackson, the film’s producer, irritably waves off the age-old insinuations that Hergé was pro-Nazi. People who say that just want “to sell newspapers or books”, the New Zealander told France’s Le Figaro newspaper. It’s too easy, he added, to attack somebody who can no longer defend himself, or to judge the war years from our own comfortable perch. If Jackson is right, nobody should ever write history. Yet the wartime Tintins are a fascinating topic for historians. The books provide a key both to Hergé’s art and to the central trauma of his life.

Georges Remi was born into a lower-middle-class family in Brussels in 1907. He would later remember his childhood as grey and uneventful, and yet there were oddities. His mother, Elisabeth, would end up in a mental institution; his father Alexis and uncle Léon were identical twins of mysterious paternity. Elisabeth was known to interrogate the two in the evening to make sure she didn’t accidentally retire to bed with the wrong brother. In the excellent Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, the twins peer out from a marvellous 1928 photograph. It hits you at once: with their hats, moustaches, suits, sticks and general stiffness, they are the hapless twins Thomson and Thompson in the Tintin books. Another relative whose physique inspired Hergé was his own younger brother Paul. Later, in the Belgian army, Paul’s fellow soldiers instantly spotted the resemblance and nicknamed him Major Tintin.

Source: Financial Times