The Order of the Day
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4.3 • 51 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Not what I expected
This is not a history. There are no citations, no references. There are ideas presented as facts, if you care to check them you might find them real, or not. The ones I know ring true, the many others I may try to verify because they may lead me farther on my quest. So what did I read? A rant, a diatribe, a lengthy complaint against the men complicit in Hitler’s brutal attempt at world domination. That’s it.
A true and inciteful condemnation of cowardly, ineffective leaders, greedy businessmen, and a non-existent response to Hitler’s first foray into another country. A raging madman, and no one willing to stand in his path. And it would have been so easy in 1938. Not so easy in 1942.
There are lessons in this book for America. I hope we are listening. Did I find what I was looking for? No. Is what I found useful? Maybe, time will tell.
Amazing, sad, compelling.
It is hard to describe the intensity and meaning of this brief work. The language is soaring as well as packing a gut-punch. It is an important work about humankind.