The Order of the Day

by Éric Vuillard

  The Versailles Treaty had forbidden Germany from manufacturing tanks, so German factories produced them through shell companies abroad. Creative accounting has always underwritten the most toxic manoeuvres. In secret, then, Germany had built itself a prodigious war machine, or so they said. And it was precisely that new army, that promise finally fulfilled in broad daylight, that all of Austria was awaiting by the roadside on 12 March 1938. And so they must have been getting a bit worried, a bit anxious under the dazzling sky.

  It was then that the formidable German war machine hit a snag. First there was an entire line of tanks motionless on the side of the road. Hitler, whose Mercedes had to go around them, glared contemptuously. Then came other heavy artillery vehicles, stalled in the middle of the road; and they could honk their horns all they liked and yell that the Führer had to pass – the tanks remained stuck. A motor is a sublime thing, a real miracle if you think about it. A bit of fuel, a spark – pressure builds up, pushes the piston, which makes the crankshaft turn, and bam, off you go. But in fact, it’s only simple on paper, and when it stops working, what a hassle! None of it makes any sense. You have to stick your hands in a dirty, oily mess, unscrew this, tighten that . . . And that 12 March, despite the blazing sun, it was cold as all hell. So it was no fun dragging your toolbox along the side of the road. Hitler was fit to be tied: what was supposed to be his day of glory, a swift, spellbinding passage, had morphed into a traffic jam. Instead of speed there was congestion; instead of vitality, asphyxiation; instead of a surge, a bottleneck.

  In the small towns of Altheim and Reid, and pretty much everywhere else, young Austrians waited, their faces reddened by the wind. Some of them wept from the cold. Back then, in the great round-robin of celebrities, the French cheered for Tino Rossi at the Galeries Lafayette and the Americans swung to the tunes of Benny Goodman. But the Austrian girls didn’t give a hoot for Tino Rossi or Benny Goodman: they wanted Adolf Hitler. And so, you could regularly hear them screaming on the way into town, ‘Der Führer kommt!’ And then, when nothing came, they went back to chatting about this and that.

  For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down, not just the occasional armoured car – no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy! A purple-faced Führer, mechanics running around the roadside, orders being yelled back and forth in the harsh, feverish idiom of the Third Reich. And besides, when an army hurls itself at you, parades by at twenty miles per hour under the brilliant sun, it can be quite a show. But when an army’s out of order, it doesn’t look like much. A broken-down army is guaranteed ridicule. And man, did the general get raked over the coals! Screams, insults. Hitler holds him responsible for this fiasco. They had to shove aside some of the heavy vehicles, tow away a few tanks, and push some cars so the Führer could get through. He finally arrived in Linz after nightfall.

  During this time, beneath the icy moon, the German troops loaded as many tanks as they could onto railway cars. They no doubt rushed in engineers and crane operators from Munich. And so the trains hauled away the armour the way you’d transport circus equipment. They simply had to be in Vienna in time for the official ceremonies, the grand spectacle! It must have been a bizarre scene, those sinister silhouettes, those trains rolling across night-time Austria like hearses, with their cargo of armoured cars and tanks.

  WIRETAPS

  On 13 March, the day after the Anschluss, the British Secret Service intercepted a curious telephone farce between England and Germany: ‘Mr Ribbentrop,’ complained Göring, who was looking after the Reich while Hitler flew back to his homeland, ‘the story about our having given an ultimatum to Austria is, of course, nonsense. Schuschnigg is lying. It was Seyss-Inquart, brought to power by popular demand, who asked us to send troops. If you knew how brutal the Schuschnigg regime has been!’ And Ribbentrop came back with, ‘That’s incredible! Why, the whole world must know of this!’ The conversation continued in this vein for a good half-hour. And we can only imagine the faces of those who were jotting down those peculiar statements, and who must have felt like they were standing backstage at a theatre. Then the dialogue ended. Göring spoke of the lovely weather. The blue sky. The twittering birds. He was standing on his balcony, he said, listening on the radio to the enthusiasm of the Austrians. ‘Oh, that is marvellous!’ exclaimed Ribbentrop.

  Seven years later, on 29 November 1945, the same dialogue was heard. The same words, perhaps a bit less hesitant, more written out, but exactly the same casual phrases and sense of mockery. This took place at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The American prosecutor, Sidney S. Alderman, to buttress his indictment of crimes against peace, pulled a sheaf of papers from his folder. The conversation between Ribbentrop and Göring seemed very illuminating to him. They used a kind of ‘doubletalk’, he said, intended to mislead other nations.

  Alderman then began to read. He read the little dialogue as one might read the lines of a play, so much so that when he spoke Göring’s name, as a character in the script, the real Göring seated in the dock began to rise. But he soon realized he was not being called. They were simply going to play his part right there in front of him and read out his tirades. In a heavy, monotonous voice, Alderman recited:

  GÖRING: You know already that the Führer has charged me with the running of the government, and I thought I would ring you and give you all the necessary information. The jubilation in Austria is indescribable – you can hear that on the radio.

  RIBBENTROP: Yes, it is fantastic, isn’t it?

  GÖRING: Seyss-Inquart – who at this time was already in charge of the government – asked us to invade immediately. We were already at the border with our troops because we could not know in advance whether there would be civil war or not, you see?

  But what Göring didn’t know at the time, on 13 March 1938, was that one day someone would get hold of more truthful exchanges. He had asked his own secretaries to take down his significant conversations; it was important that someday History should inherit them. Who knows, perhaps in his old age he’d write his own Gallic Wars. And he would base it on notes taken on the fly at major moments in his career. What he didn’t predict was that those notes, instead of sitting in his desk drawer after his retirement, would end up in the hands of a prosecutor at Nuremberg. And so we can hear other scenes, those played out between Berlin and Vienna two days earlier, on the night of 11 March, when he thought no one was listening but Seyss-Inquart, or Dombrowski of the German embassy in Vienna, who acted as go-between, and of course, the person who was taking down their momentous conversations for posterity. He didn’t know that in reality, the whole world was listening in. Maybe not while he was actually speaking, but from the future, from that very posterity he had in mind. That’s the way it is. All the conversations Göring held that evening are scrupulously archived and available. Miraculously, the bombs spared them.

  GÖRING: When will Seyss-Inquart have formed the new cabinet?

  DOMBROWSKI: Oh, perhaps by nine-fifteen p.m.

  GÖRING: The cabinet must be formed by seven-thirty.

  DOMBROWSKI: Seven-thirty. Yes, sir.

  GÖRING: Keppler will bring you the names. The Austrian army is to be taken by Seyss-Inquart himself and you know who gets the Justice Department.

  DOMBROWSKI: Oh, yes, indeed.

  GÖRING: Tell me his name.

  DOMBROWSKI: Well, your brother-in-law, isn’t it?

  GÖRING: That’s right.

  Hour after hour, Göring dictates his orders. Step by step. And in the brevity of the replies, we can hear his imperious tone, his disdain. The Mafioso aspect of the whole business is plain to see. Barely twenty minutes after the above scene, Seyss-Inquart calls. Göring orders him to go back and make Miklas understand that if he does not name Seyss-Inquart chancellor before seven-thirty, German troops will march and Austria will cease to exist. This is a far cry from the nice little exchange between Göring and Rib
bentrop for the English spies’ benefit, a far cry from the liberators of Austria. And still another thing draws our attention: Göring’s choice of expression, the threat of Austria ceasing to exist. They go straight for the most extreme formulations. To fully appreciate this, we have to rewind the tape, forget what we think we know, forget about the war, set aside the newsreels of the time, Goebbels’s montages and all his propaganda. We have to remind ourselves that, at that moment, Blitzkrieg was nothing. It was just a bunch of stalled Panzers. Just a monstrous traffic jam on the Austrian motorways, some furious men, a word that was coined later, like a gamble. What’s astounding about this war is the remarkable triumph of bravado, from which we can infer one lesson: everyone is susceptible to a bluff. Even the strictest, most serious, most old-world souls: they might not give in to the demands of justice, they might not yield to an insurgent populace, but they’ll always fold before a bluff.

  In Nuremberg, Göring listened to Alderman’s recital with his chin resting on his fist. Now and then, he smiled. The protagonists of the play were all gathered in the same room. They were no longer in Berlin, Vienna, and London, but mere yards from one another: Ribbentrop and his farewell luncheon, Seyss-Inquart and his kapo toadyism, Göring and his gangster methods. Finally, to conclude his demonstration, Alderman returned to the thirteenth of March. He read the end of the brief dialogue. He read it in a monotonous tone that stripped it of all prestige and reduced it to what it was: pure and simple sleaze.

  GÖRING: The weather here in Berlin is wonderful. Blue skies! I am sitting here wrapped up in blankets on my terrace in the bracing air and drinking my coffee. The birds are twittering, and every now and then I can hear through the radio the outburst of joy and jubilation over there. It is colossal.

  RIBBENTROP: Oh, that is marvellous!

  At that moment, beneath the huge clock face, in the dock, time stopped; something happened. The whole room turned to look. As reported by Kessel, France-Soir’s special correspondent to the Nuremberg Trials, when Göring heard the word marvellous, he burst out laughing. At the memory of that overplayed exclamation, perhaps sensing how dissonant that stagey bit of dialogue was with History-capital-H, with its decency, the image it conveys of great events, Göring looked at Ribbentrop and guffawed. And Ribbentrop, too, was shaken by nervous laughter. Sitting opposite the international tribunal, opposite their judges, opposite journalists from the world over, amid the ruins, they could not help laughing.

  THE PROP SHOP

  Truth is scattered into many kinds of dust. Well before he took the pseudonym Anders (‘Otherwise’), the German intellectual Günther Stern, who had emigrated to the United States, poor, Jewish, living off odd jobs, became a prop man when he was in his forties. He worked at the Hollywood Custom Palace, whose showrooms harboured the entire sartorial history of humankind. The Hollywood Custom Palace rented costumes to movie studios. Outfits for Cleopatra or Danton, medieval jugglers or Burghers of Calais. You could find anything there, all of humanity’s castoffs, scraps of glory lying on the shelves, sham memories. Wooden swords, cardboard crowns, paper walls – everything was fake: the coal dust on a miner’s collar, the wear on the knees of a beggar’s trousers, the blood on a convict’s neck. History as spectacle. At the Hollywood Palace, you would come across everything that had been, without distinction: martyrs’ rags hung out to dry with patricians’ togas. They say that images, movies, photos are not the real world, but I’m not so sure. The twelve storeys of this colossus, featuring heaps of garments from different eras, leave an impression of absurdity or folly. As if we were at the heart of grandeur, but wedged in, shrunken; as if dust were only powder, wear only illusion, filth merely makeup, and appearance the reality of things. But all of humanity – that’s excessive. The Hollywood Palace piled up too many castoffs, amassed too many variants, accumulated too many epochs. You could find B-movie Roman, tacky Egyptian, circus Babylonian, contraband Greek, as well as every variety of loincloth and leggings, coloured saris for women of Gujarat, rich Baluchari silk from Bengal, light cotton from Pondicherry, and Malayan sarongs. You could dig out ponchos, hooded cloaks, paenulae, early sleeved garments, tunics, shirts, blouses, caftans, the skins of prehistoric beasts, and all manner of trousers. It was a magic cave, that Hollywood Palace. Of course, working there was not exactly glamorous: folding the clothes of Pancho Villa’s corpse, altering Mary Stuart’s collar, putting Napoleon’s hat back on the shelf. But still, what a privilege to be History’s prop man.

  In his diary, Günther Stern stressed that they had it all, from the outfits of circus animals to Adam’s fig leaf to SA jackboots. But what’s most surprising is not that you could find so many costumes, but that you could already find the costumes of Nazis. And the irony, as Stern noted, was that a Jew was shining their boots. Because all those togs had to be maintained. And like any other employee of the Hollywood Palace, Günther Stern had to polish the Nazis’ boots as scrupulously as he brushed gladiators’ buskins or Chinese sandals. No place for real drama here, the costumes had to be ready for the shoot, for the great stage production of the world. And ready they would be. And they were truer than life, more exact than the ones hanging in museums. Perfect replicas, missing not a button or a thread, and available in every size, just like in clothes shops. But also threadbare, dirty, ripped, and torn. Because after all, the world was not a fashion show, and the movies had to create an illusion. So they also had to maintain false rips, false rust. They had to give the impression of time having passed.

  And so, well before the Battle of Stalingrad was fought, before Operation Barbarossa was being planned, before the French campaign was a twinkle in the Germans’ eye, the war was already there, on the shelves of showbiz. The great American machine was already capitalizing on the upheaval. The war would become only an exploit to be recounted and turned into revenue. A theme. A profitable deal. In the final account, it was not the Panzers, or the Stukas, or Stalin’s organs that changed the face of the world, remodelled and creased it. It was over a few square blocks of industrious California, at the intersection of a donut shop and a gas station, that the substance of our lives gained its tone of collective certainty. It was there, in the first supermarkets, in front of the first TV sets, between the toaster and the pocket calculator, that the world’s story was told with its true cadence, the one it would adopt for ever after.

  And while the Führer was busy preparing his attack on France, while his general staff were still dithering with Schlieffen’s outmoded plans and his mechanics were still repairing their Panzers, Hollywood had already deposited their costumes on the shelves of the past. They were on the hangers of yesterday’s news, folded and piled on the rack with the other old junk. Well before the war had begun, while blind, deaf Lebrun was signing his decrees about the lottery, while Halifax was aiding and abetting, and the frightened population of Austria entrusted its hopes for the future to a raving lunatic, the costumes of Nazi soldiers were already on markdown at the prop shop.

  THE SOUND OF MUSIC

  On 15 March, in front of the imperial palace, covering the entire surface of the plaza and even on the great equestrian statue of Archduke Charles, the crowds, the poor crowds of Austria, abused, mistreated, but ultimately acquiescent, came to cheer. If we lift the hideous rags of History, we find this: hierarchy versus equality, and order versus liberty. And so, misled by a petty and dangerous idea of nationhood, one with no future, this vast crowd, frustrated by a prior defeat, thrust their arms in the air. There, on the balcony of Sissi’s palace, speaking in a voice that was terribly strange, lyrical, and disturbing, ending with a hoarse, unpleasant cry, was Hitler. He screamed in a German very close to the language later invented by Chaplin, full of vituperations, in which they could make out only a few scattered words: war, Jews, world. The multitudes roared. The Führer had just declared the Anschluss from the balcony. The cheering was so unanimous, so powerful, so fulsome, that we might well wonder if it isn’t always the same crowd we hear in the newsreels of the
time, the same soundtrack. For those are the films we watch; those newsreels and propaganda sequences are what show us this history, shape our intimate knowledge of it. All our thinking derives from this homogeneous backdrop.

  We can never know. We no longer know who’s speaking. The films of that time have become our memories, as if through some horrendous magic spell. The World War and its preamble are swept along in this endless movie, leaving us unable to distinguish between true and false. And since the Reich recruited more filmmakers, directors, cameramen, sound engineers, and stagehands than any other protagonist in this drama, we can say that our images of the war, at least before the Russians and Americans entered it, will for ever be directed by Joseph Goebbels. History unspools before our eyes, like a film by Joseph Goebbels. It’s extraordinary. German newsreels become an exemplary fiction. As such, the Anschluss looks like a phenomenal success. But the cheering was evidently added to the images, dubbed. And it’s quite possible that none of the insane ovations that greeted the Führer’s appearances are among the ones we’ve actually heard.