Eric Vuillard recounts certain scenes from the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to power: German business titans giving money to fund his political campaigns, Hitler bullying Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg into agreeing to the Anschluss, and Neville Chamberlain and co.’s failed attempts at appeasement.
This isn’t fiction; this is narrative history. So why does the blurb describe this as a “novel” and how did it win the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary prize for fiction?
Well, possibly for a couple of scenes that Vuillard may have fabricated: the German army breaking down on the Austrian border before the reunification and Ribbentrop and his wife messing Chamberlain around at a dinner party before leaving Britain for good. I’m familiar with this era of history but I don’t think either of these events happened. I remember reading about the German tanks getting lost on the way to Austria but not all of them breaking down on the side of the road. And did Ribbentrop know about the Anschluss before Chamberlain? Unlikely - what would be the point?
And that’s mostly why I didn’t like this book much: I know all of this already. I’m fascinated by World War 2 and I’ve read numerous books on the conflict so I was acquainted with a lot of this stuff, barring the above, before. I feel like it’s a bit of a cheat though - Vuillard doesn’t use much imagination to slightly tweak this nonfiction piece into a fictional one.
I can sort of see why he did it: in the same way that the Nazis bluffed their way to power, Vuillard is bluffing the reader by presenting some minor fiction as nonfiction. But it’s blurbed as a novel and won a prize for fiction so what’s the point…?
A large part of this short book is Vuillard getting on his soapbox about how corporations are to blame for all of this - if they hadn’t funded Hitler to begin with, he’d never have had the capital to do what he did, and that we shouldn’t use these brands (many of whom are still around today and doing very well). But that’s a bit too simplistic. You can’t blame everything that happened to what was basically everyday political fundraising, which continues to happen in every democracy around the world today. Yup, corporations drove the political agenda back then and continue to do so today. I agree, it sucks. But they didn’t cause what the Nazis did - I mean, corporations fund numerous political candidates, so should they take credit for the good they do as well? And sure, they were part of a larger problem but not the sole cause of it. It just feels like Vuillard is belatedly and uselessly virtue-signalling, decades after god knows how many other people have done the same. How brave of him to denounce these people so long after they’ve all passed away!
Sure, boycott these companies for their role in WW2, using prisoners in their factories until they dropped dead, or accept that those companies then aren’t the same companies today and that the circumstances were more complex than black and white morality allows. I mean, should we boycott/shame NASA for having Wernher von Braun as one of their directors? He made V2 rockets for the Nazis and then, post-WW2, thanks to Operation Paperclip, he was whisked away stateside to work on the space programme where his same rocket technology took Neil Armstrong to the moon. He also hanged the slowest workers outside of his rocket factories every week as incentive for high productivity. He was never tried for his crimes and lived peacefully in America well into the 1970s.
The Order of the Day is well-written and informative to those who won’t be as well-versed in these events. I suppose it underlines how remarkably the Nazis were able to bullshit their way into getting what they wanted, which I’m always amazed by. If only the Allies had had the balls to stand up to Hitler’s empty posturing in the first place, they’d have found just how unprepared Germany was for a war and WW2 and the Holocaust could’ve been averted! I guess never play Germans at poker?
Recounting certain well-documented historical scenes from the 1930s and name-and-shaming corporations who worked under the Third Reich wasn’t enough for me and I certainly don’t think this very ordinary book should’ve won any prizes, particularly for novels!
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