Book review: Reading the History of Nazi Germany as a Cautionary Tale for Today
Eric Vuillard; The Order of the Day 2018
Reviewed by Brij Tankha
On February 20, 1933, 24 German industrialists were invited to meet Adolf Hitler as the March 5 elections approached, elections that Hemann Goering said may be the last for a hundred years. Hitler asked for their support to defeat the communists, crush the trade unions and ensure free enterprise. Hitler left and it was Goring who collected the contributions to the party – the real purpose of the meeting. Éric Vuillard, in The Order of the Day, winner of the 2018 Prix Goncourt, looks at the rise of the Nazi party in Germany to power. It examines the way the Nazi’s won over industry and foreign powers to annex Austria and establish their control. This short lapidary work may read like a historical essay, and much of it is, but it really is not a historical study. It is rather a self-conscious and questioning meditation on power, and its representation, one aware of the continuing links of this past with the present.
It is also not a novel
but what the French call a récit. Andre Gide, who distinguished his
novels from a récit, said the novels he wrote expressed the complexity of the
world, but he wrote a récit, notably The Immoralist, from a single
perspective. The Order of the
Day is about how fascist
ideologies seize power and win support using fear and bluff, and how the
business tycoons and politicians continue to flourish while ordinary lives are
extinguished. Recalling this dismal history is a job, as the title seems to
imply, of pressing concern today.
Vuillard’s each finely
sculpted chapter, with brilliant use of the telling fact, drives home the sorry
self-serving that eased the path as the Nazi juggernaut rolled on. The story is
not just about the past but its re-telling, and how these events have been
shaped by the media that is enmeshed in these power structures. The rising
concern with the how fascists came to power reflects the powerful tide of
populisms that have come to power across the globe and the challenges they
pose.
One crucial support to
fascism was industry. Historians may debate the exact nature of the ties
between German industry and the Nazi party, but it’s clear that industrial
leaders rarely resisted and benefited enormously from Hitler’s regime. The narration is
focused on the Nazi annexation, the anschluss, of Austria, but this
story is framed within the ties between the industrialists and Nazis. The heads
of these corporations, the Krupps, Opals, Fincks are “but a tiny mound of skin
and bone, like you and me”. It’s the companies – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Opel, IG
Farben – that are the true representatives, legal entities who like divinities
have their avatars. These avatars, writes Vuillard, are still with us, making
“our cars, our washing machines, our household appliances, or clock radios…”
He returns to this
theme at the end of the book to look at the close collaboration with the Nazis
and, and then the whitewashing after Germany’s defeat and the end of the war.
For instance, the Thyssen-Krupp website, he notes, underplays the collaboration
and suggests that it was minimal and reluctantly done. Gustav Krupp had
committed huge sums to the Nazis, and had benefited enormously by employing,
just as other German companies such as BMW, Daimler, Agfa, Telefunken did,
deportees from Dachau, Aushwithz, Papenberg, Buchenwald and other concentration
camps. The workers were
maltreated and worked to death: supper, Vuillard writes, took two hours not
because there was ample food but because they were not enough bowls for
everyone. IG Farben even had an official ‘IG Aushwitz’ listed as one of its
branches. And after the war, when compensation to the Jews became an issue,
Gustav Krupp’s son Alfred, a pillar of Pax Europaea and a leading light in
postwar Europe, negotiated a settlement to pay $1,250 to each Jewish prison
worker, but gradually whittled it down to $500. Then, as the number of
deportees claiming compensation grew, the company said they could not afford to
pay this any more.
Hitler, having won the
industrialists backing, had to get foreign support and that he does. Lord
Halifax, once a Viceroy to India, worked with Chamberlin to appease Hitler. He
visited Germany in 1937, in his capacity as Master of the Middleton Hunt, on
the invitation of Goering, who, amongst other titles bore Reich Master of the
Hunt as well, to hunt. In fact, he was the representative of the British
government to assure Hitler that his designs on Austria and Czechoslovakia were
legitimate.
Vuillard writes that
when coming to Berghof, Halifax writes in his memoirs that he had almost handed
over his overcoat to Hitler, thinking that he was a footman, but for a timely
warning. For Vuillard this is a telling instance of Halifax’s wilful blindness
to what was happening around him, a willingness to acquiesce to Hilter’s racial
and expansionist policies because he sympathised with them. Vuillard doesn’t
find the overcoat incident funny because the aristocrat Halifax and his
forbearers are “deaf as trombones, dumb as buzzards, and blind as donkeys”.
Halifax’s behaviour was the result of “social blindness and arrogance”.
Even as Hitler is
invading Austria, a farewell dinner for the German ambassador Joachim von
Ribbentrop is turning into a farce. During the dinner, Neville Chamberlain gets
a note saying that the Germans had crossed into Austria. He passes it on to
some of his colleagues, but everyone sits politely waiting for Ribbentrop get
up and say goodbye. Ribbentrop nonchalantly carries on regaling an increasingly
uncomfortable audience with his tennis anecdotes, knowing fully well what the
note is about. That a prime minister
would waste his time on meaningless social niceties captures the misplaced
priorities of some of those decision makers. Chamberlain was also, as Vuillard
points out, Ribbentrop’s landlord... read more:
see also
