CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

A Meditation on Éric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day

The thing about history I love most is that we know how certain events came to an end. Or we think we know. Most of the time, that is. Living through historical events, on the other hand, presents challenges, often life-threatening, with the outcome never certain.

Rather like the world we’re living in today.

Most scholars agree the old adage – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –  came from the pen of Spanish philosopher George Santayana in his work, The Life of Reason (1905).

While reading Éric Vuillard‘s Prix Goncourt winner, The Order of the Day, brilliantly translated from the original French L’ordre du jour by Mark Polizzotti, I continually thought of Santayana’s quip. I also experienced déjà vu, the French equivalent of “been there, done that.” A strong sense of history repeating itself never left me for a second as I thumbed my way through this 132-page book, neither a novel nor non-fiction. It is, as Vuillard himself says, a récit, or a narrative, a tale, a story.

And what a story it is.

Broken down to its essence, The Order of the Day relates the horrifying story of how Adolf Hitler began his game of smoke and mirrors, leaving millions dead, maimed, and homeless. Of how he manipulated German financiers into supporting him by promising them profits. Of how he misled European leaders into believing he only wanted peace. Of how he read the disaffected mood of the German people.

Vuillard writes with a satirical slant that would have seen him ushered immediately into a Gestapo cell or KZ camp at the time. Or perhaps those thus satirized would have simply summoned six sharpshooters, tied the author to a bloodstained pole in a muddy prison courtyard, and screamed “Fire!”

“They say that literature gives you license,” Vuillard says. He uses irony, satire, and a certain sleight of hand as he digs out peculiarities of the past. Not fiction, but unfolding page by page like fiction, The Order of the Day is frankly one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.

Thus Vuillard proceeds to describe the twenty-four titans of German industry who met with Adolf Hitler on February 20, 1933. They waited in a large ornate room, fumbling with their wire-rimmed glasses, their shining leather briefcases, their starched ties. And then “… suddenly, the doors creaked, the floorboards groan; sounds of talking in the anteroom. The twenty-four lizards rose to their hind legs and stood stiffly. … And finally, the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Goering himself, strode smiling into the room.”

Behind that friendly facade lay something sinister, normal for men of their caliber.

The new German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, followed shortly afterward.

He spoke for half an hour, making it clear to the lizards that they were there for one reason: “to put an end to a weak regime, eliminate trade unions, and allow every entrepreneur to be the führer of his own shop.” In other words, the upcoming March 5 elections demanded their support.

And their money. “Most of the guests immediately handed over hundreds of thousands of marks.” Vuillard calls them “the high priests of Ptah.”

Now flush with the industrialists’ money, the Nazi party grew and the Stormtroopers marched, while Goering and an English nobleman, Lord Halifax, became fast friends. Of this relationship, Vuillard says it best: “We might say that the great huntsman [Goering] enveloped Halifax in a scarf of fog and dust.” In fact, Halifax appeared to encourage Hitler’s desire to annex Austria and part of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Appeasement!

Next on the chopping block was Austria, headed by Kurt von Schuschnigg, now the Austrian chancellor after Austrian Nazis assassinated the former chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934.

On February 12, 1938, Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden for talks.

Using Schuschnigg’s own memoirs of the meeting as scaffolding, Vuillard creates the scene. The Anschluss eventually went through on March 12. Germany sucked Austria into its gullet, like a python swallowing a helpless baby deer whole.

Vuillard also teases out the incredulous story of the mighty German Wehrmacht’s Panzers, tangled in traffic jams, with exuberant Austrians lining the roads, waiting, waiting, waiting. Blitzkrieg came later. The Anschluss was no Blitzkrieg.

I won’t say more, because Vuillard says it all so much better. Or maybe French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier did. When he saw the cheering crowds in Munich on September 30, 1938, after signing the Munich Pact, he mumbled:

“Those morons, if they only knew!”

Vuillard ends The Order of the Day with a blatant, if muffled warning: “We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread. … The abyss is bordered by tall mansions. And there stands History, a reasonable goddess, a frozen statue in the middle of the town square.”

And here we stand, staring into the abyss once again.

Irony.