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| Where the Nuremberg rallies were held |
Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt, this short book analyses the inadequate and perhaps criminal attempts to stop the rise of the Nazis.
It consists of a series of brief tableaux in which men meet. First up is a bunch of German industrialists being persuaded to donate money to the Nazi party to fund the forthcoming elections. There is an account of the meeting between Hitler and the Chancellor of Austria in which the latter was browbeaten into accepting impossible demands. There is a cringeworthy luncheon party in which Chamberlain hosts Ribbentrop at the moment that Austria is being invaded.
In summing up, the book says: “We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in the mixture of ridicule and dread.” (Who are all these people?) In each of the short chapters there is a (hindsight-driven) sense of inevitability worthy of a Greek tragedy. Yet, at the same time, the ordinary and the bathetic everyday turn the drama into comedy, such as when mechanical breakdown and fuel shortages turn the Nazi invasion of Austria into a traffic jam of tanks.
But is it fiction? The blurb describes this book as a novel. Yet it seems grounded in fact and meticulous research and the author provides a forensic analysis. Does this make it history, rather than historical fiction? I suppose it is the sort of 'true story' in which some episodes have been dramatised, like a TV drama-documentary, a work of faction. Something similar to Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally.
The author's detailed scrutiny apportions unforgiving blame. After the industrialists make their contributions the author comments: "Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political corruptions." But in the sentence before he has talked about "kickbacks and backhanders". These, he implies, are bribes. And in the final chapter he lists which of the companies owned by those 'captains of industry' profited from forced labour from inmates of concentration camps. As for Chamberlain's luncheon? “Before the war, Chamberlain, who owned several properties, apparently counted Ribbentrop among his tenants.” (Farewell Luncheon in Downing Street) Surely a conflict of interest! In the end, the author decides that Ribbentrop deliberately prolonged the luncheon to delay the British government's response, aware that the olde-worlde courtesy of the British would trump the urgency of business.
It is beautifully written. It reads as if the author has taken care in selecting every single word.
Selected quotes:
- “Most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” (A Secret Meeting)
- “Palladio rather nebulously defines a salon as a living room, the stage on which we play out the vaudeville of our existence.” (Masks)
- “The English aristocrat, the diplomat standing proudly behind his little line of forebears, deaf as trombones, dumb as buzzards, and blind as donkeys, leaves me cold.” (A Courtesy Call)
- “It rained outside and drops struck the pains like a piano sonata played by an inexpert hand.” (A Day on the Phone)
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