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The Order of the Day

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Boston Globe, and Literary Hub
Winner of the 2017 Goncourt Prize, this behind-the-scenes account of the manipulation, hubris, and greed that together led to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria brilliantly dismantles the myth of an effortless victory and offers a dire warning for our current political crisis.


February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi officials is being held in secret in the plush lounge of the Reichstag. They are there to extract funds for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its Chancellor. This opening scene sets a tone of consent that will lead to the worst possible repercussions.
 
March 12, 1938, the annexation of Austria is on the agenda: A grotesque day intended to make history—the newsreels capture a motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But behind Goebbels’s splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria. The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss—a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, and vulgar threats—all reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character or the determination of a people that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff.
 
With this vivid, compelling history, Éric Vuillard warns against the peril of willfully blind acquiescence, and offers a reminder that, ultimately, the worst is not inescapable.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 18, 2018
      In this brief volume, French filmmaker and writer Vuillard creates a philosophical, empathetic, and whimsically speculative reconstruction of a couple of events from the history of the Third Reich. This free-associative, melancholy ramble wends its way from a fateful February 1933 meeting of 24 German business leaders with Hitler that led to their funding the Nazis’ campaign, to some moments in the March 1938 German annexation of Austria—among them, a meeting between Hitler and Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, a tense lunch between the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and Austrians in the streets greeting German tanks. Vuillard homes in on bitter historical foreshadowing and ironies, such as the fact that gas service for many Austrian Jews was cut off following the annexation because they had used too much gas and not paid their bills—in many cases, because they had committed suicide using gas. “Don’t believe for a moment this all belongs to some distant past,” Vuillard writes, and this poetic, unconventional history compels the reader to agree.

    • Kirkus

      July 1, 2018
      A meditation on Austria's capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. "The play is about to begin," he writes on the first page, "but the curtain won't rise....Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime." Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria's captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. "The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding," writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army's entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. "For it wasn't only a few isolated tanks that had broken down," writes the author, "not just the occasional armored truck--no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!" In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria's fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn't pretty.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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