Alan Furst’s new novel takes place in the late summer of 1938, with Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl returning to Paris after 15 years to make a movie for Paramount France, about to find himself immersed in German efforts to degrade French morale.
No one captures the atmosphere of pre-war Paris better than Furst. Here he is describing Stahl walking to his hotel, sensing the city’s somber mood from the unsmiling downcast eyes of the people on the street, as they recognize that Germany may be about to march into Czechoslovakia:
Years earlier, in the last months of 1923, as Stahl was beginning a new life in Paris, war was a thing of the past -- the last one so brutal and vicious that all the world knew there could never be another. At least all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In the Left Bank cafes that autumn, the word was barely mentioned, the talk was about paintings, books, music, scandals, reputations, and who was in whose bed.
The movie Stahl is making is called Apres la Guerre -- three soldiers trying to return home from Turkey after the 1918 armistice, in a film that will be "an outcry against war." But as the novel unfolds, Stahl finds himself playing a crucial double role in the guerre that is about to begin. Here is how the U.S. consul-general explains what he is facing in France:
“The French know they were finished in 1917, and they were, until American troops showed up. So they’re scared to death they’ll push Hitler too far, scared to death of war -- they lost a million and a half men the last time, and more than twice that wounded. And they know they’ll lose again if the Wehrmacht crosses the border. …
“The Maginot Line is a political tactic of the French right. Supposedly it protects the nation, which believes in it as though it were magic, which means the French won’t fully mobilize, won’t spend enough money on armament, and won’t invade Germany. It virtually pleads for Hitler’s mercy, and it won’t work. It is meant to delay, as the French wait for the British to show up, and then they both wait for America. Meanwhile Hitler builds offensive weapons, tank and warplanes. …
“America doesn’t want to fight a war any more than the French do. We have our own Maginot Line, it’s called the Atlantic Ocean.”
It won’t spoil the book to reveal its last sentence, which is more of a chilling Afterword to a novel that gives the reader a sense of the sapped spirit that could allow all this to happen:
France was attacked by Germany on 10 May, 1940, and surrendered on 21 June.
From an interview of Furst in the Wall Street Journal:
A scene in your new book describes the Kristallnacht terror of 1938, but only in glimpses. Why?
I want the reader to experience it like most people experienced it at the time. Most people didn’t actually see it happening, but they could hear it, they could smell it; they knew something terrible was going on. Also, I’ve become averse to graphic depictions of violence. It was a much more brutal period than people really understand. Unimaginably bad things, unspeakable things happened.
Posted by: Rick Richman | June 20, 2012 at 11:19 PM
Perhaps France's worst problem in 1940 is that the French people were riven -- as they had been for more than a century -- over the identity of their own nation, what it stood for, and whether it was worth preserving. Since the Revolution of 1789 -- which never really ended -- the French tore themselves up over such questions as, "Should France be a monarchy or a republic?" ... "Should France be Catholic or secular?" ... "Should France enthusiastically embrace the Revolution or adamantly reject it?" Throughout the whole of the 19th century and well into the 20th the French argued over these questions, always venomously and sometimes violently. From a cultural point of view, the 19th century was, for France, a thing of glory (Would we even have such a thing as modern art today were it not for the 19th-century French?). But politically and socially, the 19th century was cataclysmic. The Franco-Prussian War settled nothing, the Paris Commune settled nothing, the Dreyfus Affair settled nothing -- the French simply could not agree on who they were or what kind of nation they wanted to be. The nation -- if that's what it can be called -- that went up against the Nazis in 1940 was as unfit to fight as any nation of modern times. It was a splintered, demoralized, and thoroughly confused mass of people who spoke French but could not agree on one sentence that would explain to themselves and the world what they were fighting for. Does the tragedy of 1940s France -- which has never been completely overcome -- have any resonance today? Perhaps. When one looks at the deep cleavages within our own country and within the State of Israel, one can only wonder: At what point does a disunited people become a suicidal people? I don't pretend to have the answer.
Posted by: Mannie Sherberg | June 21, 2012 at 08:34 AM
Thank you, Mannie, for another brilliant comment. It reminds me of the moment during the Altalena horror that Menachem Begin made the avoidance of a civil war the supreme value, when he would have been justified in acting differently. It saved a nation at the moment of its rebirth.
Posted by: Rick Richman | June 22, 2012 at 08:40 AM
In reference to your addendum, the Alan Furst quote about how people experienced Kristallnacht, I highly recommend this account by my dear friend Arthur Bierman, of blessed memory.
http://zioneocon.blogspot.com/2003/11/i-am-honored-that-arthur-has-allowed.html
Posted by: Yael | June 24, 2012 at 06:38 PM
I cannot resist adding this, from the Akiva Tatz book, Worldmask:
"This world is a mask which hides a higher world. But it is a unique mask: it hides, and yet it reveals. It is opaque and yet transparent. The face behind the mask [Gd particle?] hides or shines through, depending on the viewer.
Just as a human face is only an outer layer and yet is able to reveal that which is within... so too the world reveals its depth to the one who studies it carefully."
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