Review – The Order of the Day, by Eric Vuillard

Can any more be said about “appeasement”, a word so scarred by association with the 1930s that it has lost any general utility? In truth appeasing an enemy may at any time be a perfectly sensible option when faced by the prospective use of overwhelming military force; but the notorious efforts to contain the rise of Hitler and the Nazis through demeaning and counter-productive acts of accommodation has sullied the word and deprived it of any justifiable moral basis.

For Britons born in the long shadow of the Second World War, the appeasing men (and they were all men) of the 1930s are forever guilty, forever condemned; so much so that we may think nothing more can usefully be said about them. But we would be wrong to draw that conclusion.

There were many “guilty” men and they were not only British. Appeasement was a Europe-wide phenomenon and the continent still lives with its consequences. But our palettes are perhaps jaded by a continuing preoccupation with the Nazi period and, to use the modish cliché, many of us want “to move on”. That too would be a mistake. As so often, fiction has come to the rescue and resuscitated the traumas of the 1930s and coloured and framed them in ways to command our attention.

There have of course been a number of relatively recent thrillers which have used the events of 1938 as their focus, notably Robert Harris’s Munich and George-Marc Benamou’s The Ghost of Munich. But Eric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day is quite different and, in its own way, quite devastating. Newly translated from the original French (by Mark Polizzotti) its only characters are the actors of the time and the fictional element is merely interpretative commentary. Of course the usual suspects are on parade in London (and Lord Halifax among others is treated with utter disdain) but the cast in the drama of appeasement is enlarged and includes Germany too.

For Vuillard begins and ends his account with the industrial magnets who accepted the mix of blandishment and threat which Hitler and Co extended to the men who owned and ran the companies (Bayer, Siemens, Farben, Allianz and the others) that in turn formed the industrial-military complex that nearly conquered all of Europe. In a mere seventeen initial pages the secret meeting attended by the kingpins of German industry at the Villa Godi Malinverni in February 1933 is coldly described in all its banality. Here was perhaps the original appeasement, the original failure to call Hitler’s bluff. As the names of the German companies who sat around the Villa table are recalled, Vuillard comments: “We know them very well. They are here beside us, among us. They are our cars, our washing machines, our household appliances, our clock radios, our homeowner’s insurance… Our daily life is theirs. They care for us, clothe us, light our way, carry us over the world’s highways…”

And they and their antecedents’ decisions in 1933 are core to Vuillard’s theme: Hitler was a bluffer and one by one his antagonists and his interlocutors at home and abroad fell for it. Vuillard is a filmmaker as well as a writer (he won the Prix Goncourt for The Order of the Day) and his cinematic skills help the reader to see the familiar afresh, partly by recalling newsreel images we know all too well and then forcing us to look more closely. The Anschluss is a case in point as Vuillard focuses not only on the crowds who welcomed Hitler into Austria but on the excruciating encounter at Berchtesgaden at which Hitler systematically intimidated Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg. Schuschnigg never managed to say “no” or even to salve any dignity by walking out from the daylong meetings.

But the author’s waspish pen is equally shocking as he recalls the farewell lunch at 10 Downing Street given by Neville Chamberlain in 1938 for the departing Nazi Ambassador von Ribbentrop. The courtesies were extended by the Prime Minister to a man who knew that the invasion of Austria was imminent and who deliberately kept him at the table like a cat dallying with a compliant mouse.

And as Vuillard draws his “fiction” to a close he returns to his original participants in the drama, the industrialists. In a few heavily sarcastic sentences he touches on Alfred Krupp: “[who] would…become one of the powerful figures in the Common Market, the king of coal and steel, a pillar of the Pax Europaea”. He also glosses the reluctantly conceded and minimally funded reparations paid to those who had worked as slave labourers for his family’s company. In a final Delphic phrase Vuillard remarks: “we never fall twice into the same abyss” but states that the abyss when it comes “is bordered by high mansions”.

Do read the book, which is more unsettling in 129 pages than many much longer fictions and treatises.