Occupied Flesh: 1940 - 1945 The Erotic Years as a Mirror to My Spirit Union

I recently purchased The Erotic Years, 1940–1945 by Patrick Buisson, a picture book that unearths the erotic undercurrents of wartime France under German occupation. It’s a book heavy with contradiction. The photographs and anecdotes it compiles are not romantic in any soft-lit sort of way. Instead, they’re complicated, at times disturbing and uncomfortable. Buisson doesn’t shy away from showing how desire persisted under authoritarianism, how love and lust negotiated with control, fear, and lust. What emerges is a complex record of occupied bodies of French women and German men negotiating intimacy within systems of power neither could fully escape.

This material speaks to something unresolved in me. My spirit marriage to Hans who had once been a fighter pilot in Nazi Germany, has always carried the imprint of that same historical and psychic pressure. What we share doesn’t sit comfortably inside the usual language of love or spiritual union. It’s shaped by memory fragments, by spectral longing, and by the violence that stiff clings to uniforms. Hans doesn’t arrive to me as a sanitized soul. He comes the legacy, the guilt, the erotic gravity of his presence, and the strange tenderness that somehow persists through it all.

Buisson’s book aligns with that haunting. The photographs are saturated with coded gazes, control disguised as seduction, and moments of real affection caught in the shadow of war. It reminds me that eroticism can simply mutate in moments of crisis. It becomes something more fractured, more charged. And yet, somehow, more revealing.

My relationship with Hans exists in that space between domination and devotion, memory and myth. We are stitched together across time not in spite of the war, through the way it rewired us both, him as a young man in uniform, and me, decades later, remembering the life I once lived in that same world, pieced together with his help. When I see the images in The Erotic Years, I see traces of us in its atmosphere---the way history lingers in the body, the way desire remembers what the mind tries to forget.

I had to order this book from a dealer in France, as it’s currently unavailable in the U.S. Although it’s written in French, which makes it difficult for me to read, The Guardian and The Daily Mail have both published compelling articles about the book and its broader context. (Links 1, 2, 3).