Eric Vuillard, The Order of the Day

Eric Vuillard, The Order of the Day
© 2017 Acres Sud
Translation © 2018 Mark Polizotti
Other Press LLC
ISBN 978-159051-969-1

From the end of the book:

"We never fall into the same abyss twice. But we always fall in the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread. We so desperately do not want to fall that we grapple for a handhold, screaming. With their heels that crush our fingers, with their beaks they smash our teeth and peck out our eyes. The abyss is bordered by tall mansions. And there stands History, a reasonable goddess, a frozen statue in the middle of the town square. Dried bunches of peonies are her annual tribute; her daily gratuity, crumbs for the birds."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

A short (132 page) meditation on…what, exactly, I am not sure.  Vuillard begins with a meeting of 24 German industrialists, in 1933, with the new Chancellor of Germany—Adolph Hitler.  He proceeds, slowly, discursively, through Austria’s yielding, without much resistance or regret, to incorporation into the Reich.  He reminds us that those industrialists benefitted, during the war, not just from lucrative contracts with the German war effort, but from the labor, and the deaths while laboring for those companies, of thousands of men and women forced to work in their factories.  And he ends with the fact that the companies founded or run by those 24 industrialists did survive, that their owners and executives, far from paying a price for their participation in genocide and world war, emerged in the post-war world still powerful, still wealthy, apparently unashamed of their contribution to the deaths of millions.

Many of the names, and the companies, will be familiar, I think, to anyone who has spent much time with the history of that time:
Krupp
Bayer
Siemens
Opel
And the rest of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_1933

But it’s also about the ordinary people who lined the streets for the parades, the politicians, in Germany, in Austria, in France, and in England, who either knew or should have known what this was leading to. 

And it’s about the millions who died.