Dismantling German-French historical myths in Eric Vuillard's récits

The Franco-German imaginary as a magnifying glass

Eric Vuillard, La bataille d'Occident: récit (Actes Sud, 2012, quoted as BOC)
German translation by Nicola Denis: Ballad of the West (Matthes & Seitz.

Eric Vuillard, L'ordre du jour: récit (Actes Sud, 2017, quoted as ODJ).
German translation by Nicola Denis: The agenda (Matthes & Seitz.

One can still picture those twenty-four coats—cognac brown, black, maroon—as they step out of their limousines on February 20, 1933, and disappear beneath the sandstone columns of the Reichstag President's Palace in Berlin: Krupp, Opel, Siemens, Flick, Quandt, the cream of German heavy industry, preparing to pledge three million Reichsmarks to Adolf Hitler for his election campaign. Éric Vuillard describes this scene in ODJ with a precision that is both physiognomic and analytical: twenty-four felt hats are removed, twenty-four bald heads and silver crowns are revealed, hands are shaken "avant de monter sur scène"—as if the gentlemen were invited to a garden party and not about to liquidate a democracy. Switching to the earlier book, BOC, a similarly ironic perspective opens up on the other side of the Franco-German relationship: General Joffre sits at lunch and fantasizes aloud about the culinary specialties of Alsace, lost in 1870, while his armies exploit the gaps in Plan XVII, which the Germans had long planned; and a few pages later, the cavalrymen of the French Republic march into the drumfire in bright red uniform trousers, visible from a thousand meters away, while the German soldiers are already disappearing in field gray – “c’est plus moderne, mais plus triste,” notes Vuillard. Against these two national self-images—the German one of the unstoppable war machine, the French one of radiant "gloire militaire"—he ultimately sets the image that most profoundly shapes his work: the Wehrmacht tanks, lying in rows with engine trouble on the road to Linz on March 12, 1938, while the Viennese wait in vain for the victors and the Blitzkrieg legend ends in a traffic jam from which Hitler, in his Mercedes, has to be coaxed out with "contempt." It is these scenes—the bourgeois complicity in the Berlin palace, the dreaming general, the red trouser legs, the stationary tank—that make Vuillard's two books one of the most distinctive contributions of contemporary French literature to Franco-German memory history: texts that do not refute national myths, but rather present them in their concrete, physical, often grotesque materiality, thereby giving space to the question of how a civilization fails to see—or refuses to see—its own catastrophe.

Vuillard portrays the industrialists not as individual biographies with extended life stories, but with carefully placed brushstrokes. The real point lies not in the individuals, but in their transformation into corporate brands. Vuillard portrays the industrialists in precisely chosen physiognomic and genealogical snapshots that together form a group portrait of complicity. Therein lies Vuillard's real point, which he makes explicit towards the end of the chapter: The men are cryptonyms – cover names for the real players, the corporations. "These are no longer Günther Quandt, Wilhelm von Opel, Gustav Krupp […] who are there […] these are other names that must be said." The twenty-four individuals dissolve into BASF, Bayer, Opel, Siemens, Allianz, Telefunken – names the reader recognizes because they are still around, as washing machines, radios, insurance companies, car batteries. What took place on February 20, 1933, in the Reichstag President's Palace was not a singular moment of crime committed by individual men, but rather the routine lobbying work of institutions that financed Hitler just as they had financed other parties before and after – and which were known as "twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of hell". ¹ Continue calculating undisturbed.

Éric Vuillard, born in 1968, a writer and filmmaker from Lyon, is one of the voices of contemporary French literature whose work consistently operates at the intersection of history, literature, and political critique. His two novels, BOC (2012) and ODJ (2017), are connected by more than just the epochal proximity of their subjects—the First and Second World Wars. They share a method, a poetics, a moral urgency, and above all: a profound, obsessive engagement with Germany and the Franco-German relationship as a core problem of European modernity. A central thesis of this essay is that both texts can only be fully understood if they are read as documents of a specifically French observation of Germany—as a literary engagement with the foreign neighbor, who is simultaneously a mirror, an enemy, a source of fascination, and a structural explanatory problem for French history. Several key questions arise from this: How does Vuillard construct German as a cultural and political category, and what constitutes the implicit comparative horizon of French? Which stereotypes are employed, which are subverted, and which are newly created? How does the narrative perspective of the ironic, morally engaged French intellectual relate to German history? How do the two texts function as genre experiments, moving between historiography, essay, novel, and pamphlet? And finally: What do they say about the present, about the Europe of corporations and complicity that was built on the ruins of war after 1945?

The Battle of the West (2012)

BOC is Éric Vuillard's first major historiographical work in his Récits series published by Actes Sud, and it focuses on the First World War, that "seminal catastrophe" of the 20th century that devastated Europe between 1914 and 1918. The text does not begin with the assassination in Sarajevo, but rather with a ceremonial overview of the incestuous European aristocracy—cousins ​​on English and German thrones, shared summer residences, and mistresses—before delving into a detailed analysis of the German war planning machinery. At its heart is the Schlieffen Plan, that meticulous document by the Prussian Chief of the General Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, which envisioned the swift defeat of France through a flanking maneuver via Belgium, followed by the transfer of all forces against Russia. Vuillard describes this plan with a mixture of fascination and horror: He dissects the obsessive, almost poetic passion with which Schlieffen brooded over the map of France throughout his life, covering the Flanders fields and Burgundian valleys with pencil, as if he were waging an imaginary war through the body of the neighboring country.

A second thematic thread of the book examines the mechanisms that triggered the war: the dense network of reciprocal alliances, the diplomatic dinner parties where alliances were negotiated over lobster and crayfish, and the assassination of Jean Jaurès on July 31, 1914, which Vuillard describes with harrowing physical precision—the bullet penetrating the back of the socialist's head and embedding itself in the wood paneling of the Café Le Croissant. The text then unfolds the panorama of the actual war years: the trenches of the Western Front, Verdun, Gallipoli, the exhaustion of the armies. The book extends far beyond the European context, drawing connections to the American bankers J.P. Morgan and the anarchist Czolgosz, to the assassination of President McKinley, and to the war's financing structures. It ends with a shocking, almost cosmic final image: men waiting in the grass, holding nothing in their hands, and the laconic sentence: “C'est tout ce qu'on sait faire.”

L'ordre du jour (2017)

ODJ, for which Vuillard received the Prix Goncourt in 2017, is more focused, more sharply defined, and follows two interwoven narrative threads. The first begins on February 20, 1933, in Berlin, when twenty-four of Germany's most powerful industrialists—including Gustav Krupp, Wilhelm von Opel, Albert Vögler, Georg von Schnitzler of IG Farben, and Günther Quandt—are invited to the palace of Reichstag President Hermann Göring. In a discreet, seemingly innocuous meeting, these men pledge millions to Hitler to finance the Nazi Party's election campaign. Vuillard portrays these men individually, unfolding their corporate histories and their social positions, while simultaneously revealing how their banality enabled evil—without direct orders, without overt cruelty, through sheer calculation and indifference.

A second narrative arc deals with the annexation of Austria in March 1938, following the events chronologically from the Berghof meeting between Hitler and Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, through the dramatic telephone negotiations of March 11, to the Wehrmacht's invasion on March 12. Vuillard meticulously dismantles the myth of an irresistible German military: the invasion was an organizational disaster; hundreds of tanks with engine trouble were stranded on Austrian roads, and the Wehrmacht had to load its vehicles onto railway wagons to arrive in Vienna in time for the parade. The chapter "Un embouteillage de panzers" (A Tank Jamming) is a prime example of demystifying historiography in contemporary French literature. The book concludes with an account of the deportees and forced laborers in the Krupp factories, particularly the Jewish Viennese citizens who took their own lives during the Nazi era.

Refutation of the hereditary enmity with Jean Jaurès

Vuillard doesn't refute the idea of ​​hereditary enmity with a counter-argument, but with a more radical thesis: He shows that Germans and French are not nearly as different as the myth of hereditary enmity claims—and that this is precisely the problem. The twenty-four industrialists in ODJ who finance Hitler look like any business meeting in Paris or London; Krupp and Schneider, Siemens and Saint-Gobain belong to the same class, think in the same categories, and protect the same interests. In BOC, Schlieffen constructs his plan of annihilation against France using a logic he inherited from Clausewitz—who, in turn, had distilled it from observing the French revolutionary armies. French and Germans learn from each other, copy each other, and mirror each other: The French offensive spirit of 1914 is a plagiarism of the German idea of ​​aggression, which is itself a plagiarism of the French revolutionary fervor. For Vuillard, the hereditary enmity is not a fundamental cultural difference, but a political construct that is instrumentalized by both sides to obscure what really drives the catastrophes – namely, capitalist interests, class logic, and the collective willingness to treat one's own soldiers as expendable material, on both sides of the Rhine.

For Vuillard, the assassination of Jaurès initially has no explicitly Franco-German dimension – Raoul Villain is a French nationalist who shoots a French pacifist, and Vuillard does not interpret either the act or the perpetrator as being directed toward Germany. The Franco-German significance lies structurally deeper: Jaurès was the only political figure in France who, through his connections to German social democracy – to Bebel, to the SPD, to the idea of ​​the International as a transnational counterforce – could have built a bridge across the border. With him dies not only a politician, but a possibility: the possibility that the French and Germans have more in common than their general staffs. Vuillard underscores this with a single, laconic observation: No sooner is Jaurès dead – napkin still in his fingers, mouth still full – than the socialists join the national consensus: The International capitulates to nation-states, and the only political bridge between France and Germany collapses.

What follows is a dense scene of Franco-German linguistic contact: the European telephone exchange, where declarations of war crackle – “Who’s speaking? What? Hello!” – and where the word “war” spreads simultaneously in all languages: “Voeina, savash, rat, Krieg, war.” The German “Krieg” sits at the center of this series, as a syntactic hinge, as if it were the core around which all other concepts of war revolve. Jaurès’ death and this German word follow one another immediately – not causally, but rhythmically inseparable, like cause and sound of the same movement. What Vuillard demonstrates with this is not an accusation against Germany, but something colder: that the murder of the man who embodied Franco-German workers’ solidarity and the subsequent mobilization of both nations for each other are not contradictions, but two sides of the same defeat. Vuillard’s character Jaurès carries the idea that the war was not a national, but a class interest – on both sides. This makes his death a statement about the Franco-German relationship in a negative sense: What dies is not just a man, but the idea that the French and Germans could have more in common than their governments.

Vuillard's use of stereotypes

Vuillard deals with stereotypes in a characteristic way: he invokes them in order to simultaneously confirm, complicate, and ultimately dismantle them. This is not a naive reproduction of clichés, but a literary engagement with them.

The dominant image of the German in BOC is that of the rational, cold-blooded organizer – and Schlieffen is his perfect embodiment: “A life of maps, calculations, cold speculations.” ² The hand, “rosy and smooth like that of someone who has never hammered a nail.” ³He holds the sword, but has never done any physical labor. This hand is the image of the German military intellectual as a pure abstraction machine: he moves “des hommes de papier sur un pays de noms,” paper men across a land of names, and this phrase contains an implicit cultural diagnosis—the inability or unwillingness to see France as a living reality rather than a topographical problem. Schlieffen looks at the map of Flanders “comme s’il y cherchait la résolution d’une énigme”—a man who spends thirty years of his life thinking through a foreign land without ever seeing the villages, the people, the fields he sacrifices in his calculations.

But this obsession also carries a tragicomic, almost touching quality in Vuillard's work: The elderly Schlieffen sits at night in his Berlin apartment, his daughter brings him something to drink, and he reads to her from Clausewitz. "His wrinkled hand will continue to draw lines on yellowed maps." ⁴ The image of the bitter, thin old man, who refines his plan until death, is not that of a monster, but that of an obsessive – a man who, as Vuillard puts it with bitter irony, views war preparation as a means of getting rid of war once and for all: “If he has thought about it all his life, it is only to get rid of it once and for all.” ⁵ The German stereotype of thoroughness and planning rationality is thus simultaneously confirmed and transformed into something pathological.

The same pattern applies to the Prussian war academies, which Vuillard describes with subtle irony: "Officers are manufactured like cannons." ⁶ For Vuillard, the industrialization of military training after 1870 is a sign of a specifically German logic of modernization – efficiency as an end in itself, systematization for its own sake. "Reason prevails, that is: time, numbers, and a sober weighing of resources." ⁷ The ice-cold assessment is the decisive expression here: It is not rationality per se, but a rationality from which everything human has been cooled out.

In ODJ, this image continues, but with a crucial twist: the German industrialists around Krupp and Siemens appear as representatives of the same cold rationality in civilian attire. They sit around the table with "reasonable faces" and make their decisions with the same accounting detachment as Schlieffen made his troop movements. Vuillard explicitly points to this continuity at the end: "They are the same suits, the same dark or striped ties, the same silk pocket squares, the same gold-rimmed glasses, the same bald heads, the same sensible faces as today." ⁸ For Vuillard, the rationality of the German business world and the rationality of the German General Staff are expressions of the same character trait – and this trait is not nationally genetic, but historically and structurally produced.

The opposite is true of the French: sensual, aesthetic, concerned with appearance, but politically and militarily unprepared. Red military trousers are a striking symbol of this. While Germans and English wear "khaki or grey-green" ⁹ wearing – “That’s more modern, but sadder” ¹⁰ —the French appear in the vibrant colors of the Napoleonic era: crest hair, epaulettes, plumes, gloves. The Saint-Cyriens, the recent graduates of the military academy, march with "cassowaries and white gloves." ¹¹ Directly into machine-gun fire. The stereotype of the Frenchman as aesthetically refined but strategically naive is presented here with a cruelty that allows for no national pride whatsoever: The beauty of the uniforms is the death sentence of their wearers.

The French counterpart to Schlieffen's planning rationality is not irrationality, but another, equally fatal principle: "élan," the spirit of attack, which is elevated to official military doctrine. Vuillard describes the paradox precisely: The defeat of 1870 is attributed to the "defensive and timid attitude" ¹² The blame was placed on the troops, leading military theorists to conclude that even more aggressive attacks were necessary in the future. "Despite the defeat of 1870, which was attributed to a defensive and timid stance, enthusiasm was preached everywhere. The lives of soldiers counted for little." ¹³ French military thinking drew the wrong lesson from defeat, creating a doctrine that treated soldiers' lives as secondary. "Élan" is the French equivalent of Schlieffen's calculus – both processed the trauma of 1870, and both led to catastrophe in 1914, each in its own way.

The Joffre scene with the Alsatian food is a comical yet revealing image of the French stereotype: pleasure as a political program, culinary desire as a substitute for strategic thinking. Joffre dreams of delicacies while the Germans invade. This is not just a joke at the expense of a general, but at the expense of an entire cultural attitude—the conviction that the reconquest of Alsace is a matter of national sentiment, not military analysis.

What distinguishes Vuillard from a mere reproducer of stereotypes is the analytical step he takes beyond the stereotypes themselves. He demonstrates that both national characterizations are historically produced and mutually conditioned. The German stereotype of planning rationality arises as a reaction to the French revolutionary energy – Clausewitz steals the "élan" of the people's armies and transforms it into military science, "without the political ideas of the revolution." ¹⁴The French stereotype of aggression arose as a reaction to Prussian superiority in 1870. Both self-images are reflections of each other – and both lead to the same catastrophe.

Vuillard doesn't show that the stereotypes are wrong, but rather that once elevated to doctrine, they become self-destructive. That's the real point: it's not the mentality that kills, but the mythologizing of the mentality.

Excursus: The role of Jews in Vuillard

In ODJ, the Jews are not characters in the narrative sense – they do not appear as characters with a voice, biography, or agency. This is structurally significant and was apparently a conscious decision by Vuillard. They appear in three increasingly weighty roles.

Initially, they are victims of the immediate Anschluss: In Vienna, on the morning of March 12, 1938, while the crowds cheered, Jews were dragged through the streets, forced to scrub floors on their knees, and marked with swastikas. These images appear in Vuillard's work only through the eyes of others—namely, as what Alma Biro, Leopold Bien, Karl Schlesinger, and Helene Kuhner see or sense before taking their own lives. Herein lies Vuillard's most peculiar literary decision: He does not describe the fate of Viennese Jews directly, but rather through the four suicides of Austrian Jews, whose full names, professions, and ages he gleaned from a newspaper article. New Free Press distilled. “Alma Biro did not take her own life. Karl Schlesinger did not take his own life.” ¹⁵ The categorical refusal to recognize these deaths as suicides – “Their suicide is someone else’s crime” ¹⁶ —is the ethical core of the book: The language of bourgeois normality, the vocabulary of privacy and individual choice, fails in the face of a collective crime.

Then they appear as the raw material of capital: the forced laborers in the Krupp factories, hired from Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, with a life expectancy of a few months – “Of the six hundred deportees who arrived at the Krupp factories in 1943, only twenty were left a year later.” ¹⁷ This passage directly alludes to the book's opening scene: the twenty-four industrialists who financed Hitler in 1933 are the same ones who, ten years later, recorded concentration camp prisoners as temporary workers. The connection is not a metaphor, but an accounting fact. Vuillard illustrates this with a list of company and camp names that is unbearably cold: BMW in Dachau, Siemens in Auschwitz, IG Farben with its own factory in the camp, which in the organizational chart is simply called "IG Auschwitz."

Finally, the Jews appear as creditors who are not paid: In the post-war passage about Alfried Krupp, who accompanied the compensation negotiations with Jewish survivors from Brooklyn for two years with anti-Semitic remarks, reduced the sum from $1.250 per person to $750 and then to $500, and finally declared that further payments were unfortunately not possible – “The Jews had become too expensive.” ¹⁸ —and so the book comes full circle: Capitalism, which financed the destruction, refuses reparations. And yet the press celebrates Krupp's "gesture" nonetheless.

What Vuillard does with the Jewish characters is a deliberate reversal of narrative weight: the perpetrators and accomplices are given physiognomy, genealogy, bodies, and language; the victims are given names, professions, ages—and silence. This is not indifference, but rather a poetics of dignity: Vuillard refuses to instrumentalize Jewish suffering as dramatic material and instead insists on the bureaucratic, accounting, capitalist character of the extermination—on the statement that the Jews had become too expensive, which says everything about the logic that killed them.

Myths, reflections, hereditary enemies: a Franco-German history of perception

Capital, Body, Theatre

The question of myths—both German and French—and of the historical dimensions of mutual perception is among the most fascinating aspects of Vuillard's two war narratives. Both texts are not neutral historiographical accounts, but rather literary deconstructions of self-images and perceptions of others that have accumulated over centuries. What specific national myths does Vuillard invoke? How does he stage the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 as a structuring historical trauma? Which cultural stereotypes does he employ or subvert? And how is the mutual observation of both nations negotiated in the texts?

Both texts are linked by a rich and coherent network of semantic fields that extends far beyond the German-French context, but takes on a specific meaning within this context.

The first and most important semantic area is that of theater and staging. In ODJ, the meeting of the industrialists in the Reichstag President's Palace is immediately introduced as a theatrical event: "The stage manager struck three blows, but the curtain did not rise." ¹⁹ The image of the director and the curtain that never rises suggests that what follows is a theater without transparency—a theater that doesn't reveal its backstage area. This metaphor recurs in the scene from the Nuremberg Trials, when Alderman reads the Göring-Ribbentrop conversations aloud as a theatrical dialogue, and Göring briefly rises upon hearing his name, only to realize that he is not being called, but rather portrayed. Theater as a metaphor for the staging of power and history—this is a core motif that connects both texts.

A second area of ​​focus is that of the body and vulnerability. Vuillard's texts are strikingly physical. The assassination of Jaurès is described in BOC with anatomical precision: the bullet piercing the bone, its movement through the brain tissue, its exit through the forehead. This physical precision is political: it rejects the abstraction that often glorifies stories of war and murder. In contrast, there is the physical banality of the powerful: Göring, drinking coffee under blankets on his balcony, the industrialists with their pleated skirts and gold rings. The bodies of the powerful are comfortable and protected; the bodies of the subjugated are vulnerable and wounded.

A third area is that of money and capital. In ODJ, capital is literally the plot: the three million Reichsmarks that the industrialists give Hitler are the engine of the story. In BOC, Morgan is the one who manages the capital of the war: “He lent France and England the money with which they bought weapons from him. And later, long after the war, he will lend money to Germany, and Germany will make its reparations payments to France, and Morgan will demand that France settle its bills.” ²⁰ This cycle of money – credit, war, reparations, renewed credit – is Vuillard's explanatory model for the continuity of European power relations. It should be noted that this model is more closely tied to the American-Anglo-Saxon financial architecture than to the Franco-German antagonism – which underscores the thesis that Vuillard embeds the Franco-German relationship within a broader capitalist explanatory framework.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 as a historical primal trauma and axis of symmetry

The foundation upon which both Récits stand is not the First or the Second World War, but the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 – the event that left deep wounds in both nations, wounds that would reverberate through the next eighty years of European history. Vuillard does not explicitly make this trauma the subject of his books, but he uses it as a structural horizon, as the unspoken origin of everything that follows. Only those who recognize the references can fully grasp the depth of his ironic deconstructions.

In BOC, Sedan in the Ardennes is the center of this memory. The city where Napoleon III capitulated in September 1870 and the Second Empire collapsed is treated by Vuillard with casual, almost flippant laconicism: “Mac-Mahon finally decides to cross the Meuse and march to Sedan, where two German armies will unite. Mac-Mahon orders: ‘Tomorrow, September 1st, a day of rest for the entire army.’” ²¹ This is a devastating, concise characterization of the French military failure: The marshal orders a lull while the Prussian pincer attack forms. He "burns no bridges." ²²He camps on a hill, makes a fire, eats – and then disaster strikes.

The scene, in which Wilhelm I. watched the spectacle “from a hill near Frénois, accompanied by his staff and Bismarck” ²³ Viewed in this light, it has the character of a theatrical satire on the myth of German military superiority: "They had a good time. Guillaume is constantly smoothing his magnificent sideburns." ²⁴ The German emperor as a serene spectator at the downfall of France – with a well-groomed mustache, in pleasant company. The banality of the triumphant moment, its touristy character, is Vuillard's literary strategy to dismantle the myth of Prussian irresistibility by reducing it to the comfortable, the bourgeois. The triumph over France appears not as a heroic event, but as a picnic with a view.

The juxtaposition of the two protagonists of the moment – ​​Wilhelm, smoothing his mustache, and Napoleon III, mechanically plucking at his goatee – is an equation of helplessness. ²⁵ Two men with facial hair as a symbol of their respective national self-representation, both in their gesture automatic, as if they were clockwork figures, not actors in history. This is Vuillard's technique of double irony: he mocks both sides simultaneously, thus preventing either side from being considered a morally superior observer of the other.

Even more significant is the causal line that Vuillard draws from 1870 to 1914. The Franco-Prussian War is the birth of modern German military logic, which is BOC's primary focus. "Prussia's devastating victory over France in 1870 was to change these old habits." ²⁶Vuillard writes, in the context of the establishment of the Prussian war academies, that the defeat of 1870 prompted France to build a dense system of border fortifications—precisely the system that Schlieffen then sought to circumvent. Conversely, the defeat of 1870 was the traumatic trigger for French military thinking, which in turn led to the disastrous doctrine of "excessive offensiveness." ²⁷ leads to: the excessive attack at any cost, which in 1914 sent tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths.

Vuillard describes this cycle with an uncompromising sharpness: “Despite the defeat of 1870, which was attributed to a defensive and timid attitude, enthusiasm was taught everywhere. The lives of soldiers counted for little.” ²⁸ The German defeat of 1870 thus paradoxically spawned a French military tactic that killed just as much as the German one in 1914. The trauma of the defeated reproduces the logic of the superior. Herein lies the true analytical core of the book: Franco-German military history is not a simple antagonism, but a mirrored relationship in which each side, out of its fear of the other, adopts what it fears.

Particularly striking is the passage on Clausewitz, which philosophically unfolds this mirroring mechanism. Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist, is not celebrated by Vuillard as a genius of warfare, but rather understood as someone who, after Prussia's devastating defeat by Napoleon, attempted to steal the secrets of the French victory and recast them into a new Prussian military ideology: "He must therefore develop an ideology that appropriates from France what led to victory there, but whose content will be entirely different." ²⁹ Clausewitz observed France in order to arm Germany. He took the republican "élan vital" of the revolutionary armies—the enthusiasm of the people's armies—and distilled from it a philosophy of willpower devoid of political content: nationalism instead of popular democracy. This theft from France, this appropriation of a foreign principle of victory without its humanistic foundation, is, for Vuillard, the birth of German military nationalism: "Nationalism will imitate the passion of the republican armies, without, however, sharing the political ideas of the revolution." ³⁰ The Germans are learning from France – but they are learning the wrong things.

The myth of the German war machine: Construction and dismantling

The dominant German myth in both texts is that of the unstoppable war machine – the technically superior, rationally managed, irresistible German military apparatus. This myth has been widespread in Europe since 1870, was further fueled after 1914 by the legend of German fighting power, and reached its culmination in the Blitzkrieg mythology of the Second World War.

Vuillard systematically dismantles this myth in both texts, with great literary pleasure.

In BOC, the deconstruction begins with a description of the Schlieffen Plan itself. The plan is presented not as a sign of German genius, but as an expression of a pathological obsession. Schlieffen – “maigre vieillard aigri,” a bitter, thin old man – holds the pommel of his sword “with the delicate, smooth hand of a man who has never driven a nail.” ³¹These very hands are planning the annihilation of millions. This is not admiration, this is sarcasm. The description of Schlieffen's night work—how he places pins on maps, moves imaginary soldiers, reads Clausewitz with his daughter by the fireplace—has something ridiculous, almost theatrical about it. The great German war machine turns out to be the work of a solitary pedant in a leather armchair.

The plan itself is relativized by an explicitly financial-analytical metaphor: "This is somewhat reminiscent of those far-reaching profit expectations that have arisen since John Law to this day with the involuntary participation of a large crowd and inevitably entail the sacrifice of a large number of people." ³² The Schlieffen Plan as a speculative bubble – a kind of military Ponzi scheme where the profits (victory in 42 days) are based on completely unrealistic assumptions and the losses (millions dead) are borne by others. This metaphor is intellectually brilliant and culturally significant: it links the German military myth with the general myth of rational planning, the capitalist belief in the controllability of the future through calculation – and shows that both are based on the same illusory logic.

In ODJ, the dismantling of the German war machine myth reaches its comical climax in the chapter "Un embouteillage de panzers" (A Tank Jam). The invasion of Austria on March 12, 1938—the first act of Nazi expansionism, intended to symbolically demonstrate the Wehrmacht's irresistible power—ends in a traffic jam. The tanks are stuck at the roadside with engine trouble; Hitler, whose Mercedes has to weave its way around the stranded vehicles, regards them with contempt. The Blitzkrieg legend, even before it has been named, is revealed as an illusion: "The task was to clear the heavy vehicles out of the way, tow away some tanks, and push a few cars so that the Führer could pass." ³³

Vuillard describes the tanks' technical failures with undisguised glee. He has his narrator briefly comment on the fascination of the engine and its unfathomable irrationality: "An engine is a wonderful thing, a real miracle when you think about it. A little fuel, a spark, and off you go! [...] But that's exactly it: On paper it looks simple, but as soon as it breaks down, it's a real nuisance!" ³⁴ The irony is multifaceted: The engine – the symbol of industrial modernity, of German engineering, of technological superiority – fails. The Wehrmacht, which was meant to be portrayed as an expression of a superior civilizational force, is reliant on Austrian country roads like any other motorist. And the solution – the tanks are loaded onto trains and transported through Austria at night “like circus equipment.” ³⁵ – shows that the planned demonstration of military power literally arrived by rail.

The effect of this episode is not merely comical. Vuillard explicitly draws the conclusion: "What is astonishing about this war is the incredible success of audacity, from which one must learn a lesson: The world succumbs to it." Bluff. " ³⁶ The German military myth is a bluff – and the rest of the world fell for it. This thesis has political implications: Great Britain and France believed the myth of an invincible German war machine more than their own analysis of the facts. For Vuillard, the policy of appeasement towards Hitler is a consequence of this disastrous thinking: if you believe the enemy is invincible, you capitulate without fighting.

The myth of French war honor: uniforms, offensive spirit, and self-deception

The German myth of the war machine is countered by an equally powerful French myth: the myth of "gloire militaire," of martial honor and the self-sacrificing spirit of aggression. This myth has deep historical roots—in the revolutionary army, in Napoleon, in the gleaming uniforms of the great era of French military power. Vuillard treats it with the same destructive irony he applies to its German counterpart.

The most striking image of the French military myth is found in the description of the uniforms at the beginning of BOC. For Vuillard, the cavalry in 1914 is a visual manifesto of anachronism: "There you see the whole outfit of a sandal film: mane of hair, madder-red trousers, an extensive array of belts." ³⁷ The red “pantalons garance”—those red trousers worn by French soldiers at the beginning of the First World War, which made them deadly targets in trench warfare—are the symbol of French anachronism in modern warfare. Vuillard compares the image of the assembled armies to a costume party: “Kilts, pom-poms, those colorful field caps and pointed helmets, all sorts of Picardy or Batavian headgear, whistling, marching in step, in a great patch of sunlight.” ³⁸ The war appears here as a fashion show, a costume ball, where the uniforms still come from a bygone era of battle aesthetics.

The remark about the English and Germans – “The English and the Germans, on the other hand, wear khaki or grey-green – that is more modern, but also sadder.” ³⁹ – precisely establishes the asymmetry: The French (and Austrians) are colorful and anachronistic, the Germans and English are gray and modern. Beauty is on the side of doom; efficiency is dreary. It's a joke at the expense of the values ​​that France celebrates: aesthetics, the "panache," the splendor – all become a death sentence when modern warfare begins.

Vuillard's narrative of the catastrophe of August 1914—the offensive in Lorraine, the retreat, the defeat—is a single, sweeping indictment of Plan XVII, the French equivalent of the German Schlieffen Plan. This plan, too, rests on a mythological assumption: that the Germans will attack precisely where France expects them to (through the Vosges Mountains and Alsace), and that a vigorous offensive by the French armies can seize the initiative and surprise the enemy. The plan is a projection of French wishful thinking: "A grand little plan. A plan that has stalled." ⁴⁰ The irony in the tone – “formidable petit” – shows Vuillard’s contempt for this military theater of self-deception.

The real issue is that the Germans did not invade where the French expected them to: "The Germans, who hoped that the French would only dream of such a thing, had absolutely no intention of invading France via this route." ⁴¹ This is the structural symmetry that Vuillard finds in both plans: Schlieffen errs in his fundamental assumptions about France; Plan XVII errs in its fundamental assumptions about Germany. Both plans are wars against an imaginary country, against a mythologically constructed enemy, not against the real adversary. And both lead to catastrophe.

The most comical moment of French self-deception is the description of General Joffre, who, during the German invasion, enjoys a good lunch every day, fantasizing about the specialties of Alsace, which is yet to be reclaimed. For Joffre, Alsace is less a political project than a culinary one. The reconquest of the provinces lost in 1870—the heart of French revanchism for half a century—appears here as the general's personal indulgence. The myth of "revanche," of revenge for 1870, is revealed as hedonism in uniform.

Alsace-Lorraine: The mythologically charged space

No geographical area is more fraught with tension in Franco-German history than Alsace and Lorraine – annexed by Germany in 1870, returned in 1918, annexed again in 1940, and finally returned in 1945. Vuillard treats this region in BOC with particular historical and cultural attention.

The passage on the Lorraine offensive contains a historical mini-essay that exemplifies Vuillard's approach to the Alsace-Lorraine myth: "Here, the old disputes between Gauls and Germans, between Salians and Ripuarians, between Neustria and Austrasia are still playing out – all the unhappily divided Alsace and Lorraine, which speak two languages, the Gallo-Roman and the Germanic, one Christian, the other pagan." ⁴² This historical deep dive reveals that the struggle over Alsace-Lorraine is not a modern problem of the nation-state, but a millennia-old border conflict dating back to the Carolingian era: Francia occidentalis versus Francia orientalis, the Carolingian Empire, which was divided between the sons of Louis the Pious after his death.

Vuillard's formulation – “an old, old boundary between body and soul” ⁴³ —is of great semantic density. The border is not merely a political and administrative line, but a border of bodies and souls, of languages ​​and religions, of cultures and identities. Alsace is a space that has never aligned itself with either side, and this state of non-belonging has been violently ended by both. Vuillard defends neither national claim; he demonstrates that both are based on mythological constructions, on a retrospective projection of national identity onto a pre-national history.

The transition to Joffre's culinary fantasy is no mere joke. The enumeration of Alsatian specialties – "kouglofs, strudel, bereweckes" – is a list of German loanwords in French, of dishes whose etymology and recipes attest to the German-speaking cultural heritage of Alsace. By fantasizing about these dishes as the target of the French reconquest, Joffre unconsciously desires German culture in the French provinces. This is a subtle point by Vuillard: The French military leader wants to reclaim Alsace without realizing that Alsace as a cultural space is neither French nor German, but something else entirely – and that his desire itself is shaped by the German cultural presence in this province.

The German myth of encirclement and the French counter-mythology of revenge

Both texts make it clear that the Franco-German antagonism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was fueled by two complementary myths that reinforced each other and produced a dynamic of escalation.

On the German side, there is the myth of encirclement: Germany, as a rising power in the heart of Europe, sees itself surrounded by hostile powers (France in the west, Russia in the east, England at sea) and must act preventively to avoid being crushed. Vuillard analyzes this myth in the Schlieffen chapter: "And what does this plan entail? It entails that the Franco-Russian alliance will force Germany to fight on two fronts." ⁴⁴ The plan is the military-strategic materialization of the encirclement myth. The problem, as Vuillard points out, is that encirclement is to a considerable extent a German product: Bismarck's treaty system initially isolated France successfully; only Wilhelm II's termination of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia allowed for rapprochement between Paris and St. Petersburg. The myth of encirclement is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy: Germany acts as if it were encircled, and thereby produces encirclement.

On the French side, there is the idea of ​​"revanche"—revenge for 1870. The defeat, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the humiliation of defeated France—all of this has been etched into the collective memory of France as a wound that can only be healed by a new war and the recapture of the provinces. In BOC, Vuillard alludes to this myth without explicitly naming it, through the description of Joffre's Alsatian fantasy, through the passage about the "vieilles querelles" on the Lorraine border, and through the implicit continuity between 1870 and 1914.

Vuillard's crucial point is that both myths are functionally equivalent: they both produce the war they claim to prevent or avenge. The encirclement myth makes preventive war a duty; the revenge myth makes the offensive spirit a doctrine. Both myths transform political decisions into historical necessities, thereby robbing the actors of their moral responsibility. The aim of Vuillard's literary method is to deconstruct this mythologization: to show that history could have unfolded differently, that the decisions were free choices, that the catastrophe was not inevitable.

Prussianism and France: two paths to modernity

One of the intellectually insightful passages in BOC is the one that contrasts the two Prussian paths to enlightenment: Kleist's path and Clausewitz's. Vuillard writes: "For a Prussian, there are two paths to enlightenment. Kleist's, who [...] lays down his arms, goes to university, then, overwhelmed by uncertainty, becomes a poet and dies from a gunshot wound to the head. But there is also the unexpected and very Prussian connection between knowledge and war." ⁴⁵ This dichotomy—Kleist or Clausewitz, poetry or military science—is a literary construct with profound consequences for Franco-German relations. Kleist, the poet, is, for Vuillard, the figure of the missed opportunity: the Prussian intellectual who abandons arms, ends up at the university, is torn apart by uncertainty, and ultimately shoots himself. Clausewitz is the realized opportunity: the Prussian intellectual who combines philosophy and warfare, thereby creating the ideological formation that legitimizes German militarism.

In this constellation, France appears as the third actor, unconsciously providing the conditions for both: the Napoleonic Wars forced Prussia to reinvent itself; the French revolutionary armies were analyzed by Clausewitz, whose energy he attempted to transform into a new German military rationality. France is the model against which Germany defines itself—and the fact that this model provokes both poetic reflection (Kleist) and military ambition (Clausewitz) reveals the ambivalent function of France in the German self-understanding: admired role model and feared enemy at the same time.

Vuillard draws the conclusion explicitly: Clausewitz's learning from France without adopting republican ideas produces a fatal hybrid – a nationalism that combines the energy of the popular revolution with the values ​​of the old regime: "Nationalism imitates the passion of the republican armies without, however, sharing the political ideas of the revolution; it expresses a theory of suffering through the fate of a people." ⁴⁶ This is a historical argument of analytical force: German military nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries is, in Vuillard's reading, a plagiarism of the French – a plagiarism that has omitted the essential element (the democratic content).

The myth of the leader and the myth of democracy

In ODJ, the mythological terrain is different, but structurally related. Here, it is not about the war myth, but about the leader myth – and its democratic counter-myth, the idea that Western democracies embody resistance against totalitarianism.

Vuillard systematically undermines both myths. He dismantles the Führer myth by deconstructing the Blitzkrieg legend and portraying Hitler as an angry, impatient man with a telephone in each hand, unable to overcome the bureaucratic resistance of Austrian President Miklas. The Führer's omnipotence, as claimed by his myth, collapses under the weight of Austrian constitutional law: he cannot force Seyss-Inquart to sign the telegram that would legalize his invasion. The tyrant's power depends on the cooperation of the subjugated – and this is a statement rooted in democratic theory, not merely historical observation.

Vuillard destroys the democratic counter-myth – the idea that Western democracies constituted a fundamental counterforce to fascism – through the juxtaposition of Lebrun and the Anschluss, through the sentence: “The English, who knew of the impending development, had warned Schuschnigg. They did nothing more.” ⁴⁷ The laconic tone is devastating. The democracies knew; they warned; they did nothing. This is not an apology for fascism, but it is a rejection of the myth of democratic innocence.

The character of Schuschnigg is particularly revealing in this respect. He is no democrat—he abolished democracy in Austria, banned trade unions, and imprisoned political opponents. He is a petty dictator standing in opposition to the great dictator. Vuillard treats him with a precisely calculated mixture of compassion and irony. When Schuschnigg is ultimately described as "The Man of No, Negation as Dictator" ⁴⁸ The fact that Austria, as described, then yields to Hitler's pressure is not a triumph of Hitler over freedom, but rather the triumph of a more totalitarian will over a half-hearted authoritarianism. The Austrian myth of independence, which Schuschnigg claims to uphold, is hollow because Austria under Schuschnigg himself was not a democracy.

Beethoven, or: the question of cultural heritage

The episode in which Schuschnigg invokes Beethoven as an argument for Austrian independence, and Hitler counters that he is German, is far more than an anecdotal curiosity. It is a key cultural document for the complex web of German-Austrian-French relations.

Beethoven, born in Bonn, died in Vienna, represents the linguistic and cultural unity of the German-speaking world, which is not transcended by national borders. He is a German in Austria—or an Austrian with German roots, depending on which national narrative one wishes to promote. Hitler's response: "Beethoven is not Austrian […] he is German." ⁴⁹ – is the application of the Greater German myth to cultural history: What speaks German and thinks German is German, regardless of national borders. This is the basis of the Anschluss project: not the mere expansion of power, but the cultural and ethnic reunification of an imagined German people.

Vuillard deconstructs this myth through the precision of his location: “Beethoven is German, that is beyond question. He was born in Bonn. And Bonn – however you look at it […] Bonn was never an Austrian city.” ⁵⁰ This is legal precision in the service of irony: Of course, Bonn is not Austrian. The self-evidence of this statement reveals the absurdity of the argument. Beethoven is no proof of Austrian independence; but neither is he proof of Germany's right to annex Austria. He is simply a musician who was born in Bonn and died in Vienna.

For Vuillard, the Beethoven episode is therefore far more than an anecdotal humiliation of Schuschnigg. It encapsulates questions of cultural appropriation, European memory, and competing historical myths. Beethoven does not belong exclusively to the German national canon. Since the 19th century, he has also been a prominent figure in French cultural memory: composer of the revolutionary era, musical heir of the Enlightenment, artist of universal pathos. The "Eroica" Symphony, in particular, possesses a special symbolic charge in France because it was initially dedicated to Napoleon, before Beethoven famously angrily erased the dedication after Napoleon's coronation. This scene has repeatedly been interpreted in French reception as a dramatic moment of disillusionment with the revolutionary ideal: the liberator of Europe is transformed into a new Caesar. Beethoven thus appears as an artist who remains committed to a universal idea and resists its national or imperial appropriation.

When Hitler, in his Berghof conversation, summarily declares Beethoven a "German" composer, it is therefore not merely a matter of music history. The National Socialist appropriation symbolically lays claim to the cultural heritage of Europe itself. Conversely, Schuschnigg's use of Beethoven as an argument for Austrian independence demonstrates how geopolitical culture had already become. Vuillard stages the scene as a struggle for interpretive authority: whoever possesses Beethoven claims not only a composer, but the legitimacy of a historical tradition – humanism, classicism, the Enlightenment, Europe.

This gesture carries particular weight for a French author. France has never interpreted Beethoven merely as a “foreign” German musician. From Romain Rolland to the post-war period, Beethoven functions instead as a figure of a transnational Europe that transcends national borders. Hitler's ethnically and nationally defined interpretation of him thus exemplifies the transformation of European culture into an identitarian possession, a transformation against which Vuillard's entire oeuvre is written. Beethoven becomes the emblematic figure of a Europe whose universalist heritage is usurped by nationalism. At the same time, this reveals another mirrored structure of Franco-German mythologies. France, too, has repeatedly integrated Beethoven into its own republican self-description: as a musical expression of revolutionary energy, moral greatness, and humanistic transcendence. The figure therefore shifts between multiple cultural memories. It is precisely this ambiguity that interests Vuillard. It contradicts the national certainty that authoritarian politics seeks to establish.

Quote and mutual observation: how the Frenchman sees the German

Vuillard's literary technique of mutual observation is subtle and consistent. He writes as a Frenchman about Germans – but he writes in such a way that the Frenchman's own position becomes visible and thus accessible to criticism.

The Frenchman's view of the German in BOC follows a pattern that could be described as ironic admiration. The Prussian general staff officers are described with a precision and detail that lends them peculiar contours: Schlieffen is not simply evil, he is an obsessive with genuine obsessions; Clausewitz is not simply a warmonger, he is a thinker with genuine philosophical ambition; Hindenburg has "the same mouth as Schlieffen's, the corners of his mouth drooping along with his mustache, the same kind of hardness permeated by sadness, a deep bitterness." ⁵¹ These physiognomic descriptions, which connect a generation of German military personnel through shared facial features, belong to the tradition of literary physiognomy—a tradition that itself perpetuates national and cultural prejudices. Vuillard satirizes this tradition by exaggerating it: the Germans all look the same—equally bitter, equally ambitious, equally incapable of joy.

In contrast, there is the German perspective on the French, which in both texts is represented by the figure of German military planning. For Schlieffen, France is a topographical problem – a territory with roads, bridges, rivers, and fortifications that must be overcome. This reduction of France to mere terrain is the most extreme form of the foreign gaze: the country as a purely physical entity devoid of cultural, political, or human dimensions.

In ODJ, the mutual observation is more concrete and personal. The conversation between Hitler and Schuschnigg is a scene of asymmetrical perception: Hitler sees Schuschnigg as an insignificant obstacle on the path to annexation; Schuschnigg sees Hitler as a threat he still hopes to avert through diplomatic means. Both misjudge the other—and the narrator, Vuillard, sees them both with the superiority of historical hindsight, knowing how the story ends.

The soldiers without names: against the myth of the heroic death

One of the most striking strategies in both texts is the naming of the dead – and the refusal of anonymity, which is characteristic of national myths. In national war myths, heroes or victims die for a higher purpose; in Vuillard's texts, people die whose names and life circumstances are made as concrete as possible.

In BOC, one of the most striking passages of this kind can be found in the description of the mobilization: “Fritz Haeckel, Otto Bleiss, Jürgen Reinhard, Karl Moser, Frederich Hein, Henry Floch, Gustave Berthier, Gervais Morillon, Marcel Rivier, Roland Deflesselle, Georges Gallois, Jean Mando.” This list of names is structurally significant: German and French names are intertwined, as if they were all participants in the same enumeration, the same logistics, the same fate. This is, of course, a literary construct—in reality, they were mobilized separately and pitted against each other—but the connection makes a historical point: These young men, whether Fritz or Marcel, were caught in the same historical mechanism, the same surrender to forces beyond their control.

The name "Frederich" is striking. It is neither "Friedrich" nor "Frédéric," but rather an orthographically hybrid form that falls somewhere between the two. Given the context—a list in which German and French names are deliberately mixed—this is very likely a conscious decision by Vuillard: The name "Frederich Hein" is neither entirely German nor entirely French; orthographically, it marks the undecidability that characterizes Alsace and the Franco-German border region. It is the only spelling on the list that cannot be clearly assigned to either national language.

The description of the dying on August 22, 1914 – the deadliest daytime battle in history – then takes up the individual names again: “Imagine Auguste Piel, Joseph Loeb, Victor Metz, imagine each one in his entirety, lying there. And then there are thousands of Charles, Célestin and Paul, hundreds of Otton and Karl.” ⁵² The German names (Karl, Otton) appear alongside the French ones – dead enemies listed in the same sentence, because Vuillard rejects the national mythology of heroic death: there is no German and no French death, there is only the death of individuals caused by the collective mythology of national honor and military glory.

Otton is the French spelling of the German name Otto – it corresponds to the medieval Romance Latinization of the Germanic name as it is traditionally used in French historiography: The German emperors Otto I, II, and III are called "Otton Ier," "Otton II," etc., in French. It is therefore not an error, but a historically established form. The Ottonians were the first royal dynasty of the East Frankish-German realm in the 10th and early 11th centuries, named after their most important representative, Otto I (912–973), known as "the Great," whose coronation established the Holy Roman Empire (an act that cemented the German-Roman imperial tradition for almost a thousand years). For Vuillard's Franco-German context, the Ottonian realm is particularly significant: It was a genuinely East Frankish-German realm, but it claimed the Carolingian universal tradition – the same heritage that France also claimed for itself. The question of who is the legitimate heir of Charlemagne, Germany or France, is essentially the fundamental question of Franco-German antagonism. When Vuillard calls the German fallen of 1914 "Otton," the entire medieval layer of this rivalry resonates—consciously or unconsciously.

The point lies in the parallel: “des centaines d'Otton et de Karl” – the two names stand side by side as representatives of the German fallen, but “Otton” is the French perspective on the German name: the German, named through the French, alienated and at the same time historically ennobled by imperial tradition. “Karl,” on the other hand, remains German – or is he French (Charles is mentioned shortly before, Karl follows separately)? The procedure is thus the same as with “Frederich”: Vuillard does not write the dead Germans in their own language, but allows them to shine through the French – a gentle, non-hostile appropriation that accomplishes precisely what the sentence as a whole achieves: to bring together the dead of both nations in the same language and the same grief.

The Bismarck icon and the mnemotopography of war

In ODJ, a short but significant episode appears: When Schuschnigg enters the dining room during his visit to the Berghof, his gaze falls upon a portrait of Bismarck: "Schuschnigg is impressed by a portrait of Bismarck: The Grand Chancellor's left eyelid falls inexorably over the eye, the gaze is cold and disillusioned; the skin appears slack." ⁵³ Bismarck – the face of German nationalism, the architect of German unification, who orchestrated the humiliation of France in 1870/71 and had the new German Reich proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles – hangs in Hitler's dining room. This is no random decoration. It is a self-positioning: Hitler sees himself in Bismarck's tradition, as the one who completed the German nation-state project.

Vuillard describes Bismarck's portrait with physiognomic precision that simultaneously demystifies him: the drooping eyelid, the cold gaze, the sagging skin – this is not a heroic image, but that of an old, cynical man. In light of this description, Bismarck as Hitler's guiding figure is not an ennoblement, but a mockery: the Iron Chancellor appears as a weary old man.

For the French reader, the Bismarck portrait in the Berghof carries an additional historical charge: for France, Bismarck is not merely a German statesman, but the personified enemy, the one who humiliated France in 1870 and annexed Alsace-Lorraine. The portrait in Hitler's dining room connects the two chapters of German aggression against France—1870 and the subsequent war years—and suggests that Hitler sees himself as the continuation of a Prussian-German tradition against which France has always had to struggle.

Against the mythology of history

Vuillard's two Récits are, at their core, anti-mythological texts – but not in the sense of a naive positivism that simply replaces myths with facts. They are anti-mythological in a literary sense: they show how myths function, how they are produced, what social and political interests they serve, and what human costs they incur.

The German myth of the unstoppable war machine ends in a tank jam on the road to Linz. The French myth of "gloire militaire" ends in the red trousers of soldiers who serve as targets for the artillery barrage. The myth of "revanche" ends in Joffre's whirlpool fantasies. The myth of the democratic counterforce ends in appeasement and the Juliénas Decree of Lebrun. The myth of the Führer ends in the telephone scramble over Schuschnigg's resignation.

What remains when myths fall? Vuillard offers no easy answer. But in the figure of the senile Krupp, who rises at the dinner table and points to the corner where the dead are – “‘Mais qui sont tous ces gens?’” – there lies perhaps a kind of anti-mythological truth: truth is what those who see do not want to see. Madness sees more clearly than reason when reason is in the service of myth.

The Franco-German relationship, as Vuillard develops it in his writing, is not a relationship between nations, but between myths—German myths about themselves, French myths about themselves, and the shared myths of European civilization that, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, led to the massacre of its own inhabitants. Literature, and this is Vuillard's implicit credo, is the counter-archive of these myths: the archive of tanks that stand still, trousers that glow, generals who dream of whirlpools, and the dead who emerge from the darkness to ask the question: "But who are all these people?"

The Récit as a hybrid form of the ironic historian

Both texts are labelled 'récit' on the title page – a genre designation that, in French, deliberately claims a middle ground between novel, short story, eyewitness account, and essay. This designation is programmatic, as it signals Vuillard's refusal to be pigeonholed into established categories. 'Récit' traditionally denotes a narrative based on first-person presence, on experience and testimony – and indeed, Vuillard's voice is unmistakably present in both texts, commenting, digging, and at times polemical. At the same time, both texts are historical works: they draw on archival sources and memoirs (Schuschnigg's). Requiem for Austria in ODJ), on trial transcripts (Nuremberg), on photographs. The genre designation 'récit' allows Vuillard not only to quote these sources, but also to illustrate, dramatize, and interrogate them. In BOC, he proceeds similarly with Clausewitz, the Schlieffen Plan, and parliamentary transcripts.

The term 'récit' carries yet another dimension in the Franco-German context. Unlike the German term 'Erzählung' (narrative), which focuses more on narrative structure, the French 'récit' emphasizes reference to events, to facts, to what actually happened. Vuillard, however, rejects the naive positivist trust in factuality: his texts repeatedly address the problem of transmission, photography, and the archive—and thus the fundamental question of where the boundary lies between factual report and fiction, between history and literature. In a pointed moment in ODJ, he analyzes a photograph of Schuschnigg that has been cropped and reframed to force a specific interpretation: 'That is the art of récit: nothing is harmless.' ⁵⁴ This autopoetological reflection is emblematic: Vuillard places the medium in which he works under observation.

The narrative perspective in both texts is that of an omniscient, but by no means neutral, narrator—an entity that could be described as the “ironic historian.” This perspective is inherently culturally positioned: it is the perspective of the French intellectual looking back on German history, cultivating both horror and a certain sense of superiority. Vuillard, however, transcends this stance by simultaneously making it self-reflexive. He does not simply condemn the Germans; he condemns the structures, the classes, the capitalist interests—and he explicitly includes the French in this condemnation. In ODJ, for example, the French President Albert Lebrun appears on March 11, 1938, the day of the Anschluss, as a comical counterpoint to the events in Vienna: while Hitler annexed Austria, Lebrun carefully signed a decree on the “protected designation of origin Juliénas.” ⁵⁵ and ponders whether the wines of Émeringes deserve this designation: “In Vienna, Chancellor Schuschnigg receives an ultimatum from Adolf Hitler. Either he withdraws his plan for a plebiscite, or Germany will invade Austria.” ⁵⁶

This juxtaposition is literarily precise and politically uncompromising. France is not portrayed as an innocent bystander, but as a participant in the collective blindness and cowardice that enabled the Anschluss. The narrator, therefore, does not look down on Germany from an imagined French standpoint of moral superiority, but rather offers a comparative critique that encompasses both nations. This stance distinguishes Vuillard from a simplistic nationalist interpretation and lends his texts their analytical sharpness.

In BOC, the narrative perspective is even broader: Here, the difference between Germans and French repeatedly appears as the difference between two versions of the same disastrous European project. The Germans plan the war with mathematical obsession; the French wage it with military incompetence. None of the participants emerge as a hero. The Prussian general staff officers Schlieffen, Moltke, and Hindenburg are portrayed with the same ironic detachment as the French generals MacMahon or Joffre. The narrative perspective produces a symmetry of critique that presents the Franco-German relationship not as an opposition between good and evil, but as a structural co-production of a European disaster.

Collective subjects and individual profiles

A striking compositional feature of both texts is the construction of constellations of characters that consciously shift between collective and individual levels of description. In ODJ, the narrative begins with the aforementioned image of the twenty-four industrialists. The anaphoric repetition of the number twenty-four initially establishes a collective subject of complicity. Then, however, in the following chapters, individual figures are brought into sharp focus and traced back to their dynastic origins: Gustav Krupp, Wilhelm von Opel, Albert Vögler. The genealogy of capital is reconstructed, from the blacksmith's forge and the sewing machine to the automobile and finally to arms production.

This technique of zooming in between the collective and the individual is of profound literary significance. It produces an image of German industry as a class with its own history, its own interests, its own rationality—and thus an explanation of National Socialism that is not reduced to the irrationalism of a "Führer," but rather makes visible the structural economic preconditions. Vuillard follows an implicitly Marxist explanatory logic here, without explicitly arguing in a Marxist manner. This perspective is itself part of a specifically French intellectual tradition: reading German history through the lens of class struggle and capitalist interests—a tradition that extends from Sartre through Althusser to Pierre Bourdieu.

In BOC, the constellation of characters functions differently: there are no true protagonists, but rather a gallery of types and functions. Schlieffen represents obsessive planning rationality, Jaurès the figure of suppressed resistance, and J.P. Morgan the figure of anonymous finance capital. These characters appear and disappear without ever being given the consistency of a typical novel character. The true protagonist is the story itself—or more precisely, its mechanism, which becomes a kind of anonymous machine operating over the heads of those involved.

The Franco-German relationship is staged in a specific way in the constellation of characters in both texts: The Germans tend to appear as figures of planning, will, and rational calculation—Schlieffen poring over his maps, Göring on his telephones, the industrialists around the conference table. The French tend to appear as figures of negligence, distraction, and belated awakening—Lebrun with his Juliénas decree, MacMahon in his slump. This asymmetry is, of course, a literary construct, and it reflects a particular self-image of the French intellectual vis-à-vis the German: The Germans are dangerous because they are efficient; the French are threatened because they are careless. Vuillard partially breaks this stereotype by showing that the supposed efficiency of the German war machine was a bluff.

Topography of loss and history between anachrony and prolepsis

Both texts are obsessively topographical. The spaces they describe are not merely settings, but semantically charged fields in which Franco-German history is inscribed. In BOC, the central space is France itself, viewed through the prism of the Schlieffen Plan: the map of France becomes the obsessive object of German planning. Schlieffen moves “des hommes de papier sur un pays de noms” – people made of paper across a land of names. This formulation is significant: for the German General Staff, France exists as an abstract territory, as a geometric surface, as the sum of road widths, bridge capacities, and railway kilometers. The Prussian perspective on France reduces the country to its military utility.

In contrast, there is the experience of space through the French characters and the nameless soldiers. The space of the trench, “at Verdun, at Gallipoli, or in the Hedjaz,” is a space of exhaustion, suffering, and waiting: The men, sitting “in the grass, with empty eyes, empty hands, and an empty heart,” experience the space as a place of utter helplessness. Between the abstract map of the general staff officer and the soldier’s experienced space lies an abyss—and this abyss is the true subject of the book.

In ODJ, spatial structure is more closely tied to political institutions and their representative architecture. The Reichstag President's palace, where industrialists are received, is a space of political representation, whose splendor and symbolism evoke the dignity of a democratic state—which, however, as Vuillard immediately adds in his prolepsis, will soon exist only as "houses of smoking trinkets." The Berghof is another space: the dictator's private residence, which, through its remoteness, its panoramic windows, and its alpine proportions, creates an atmosphere of intimidation. The Austrian country roads, where the tanks are parked, are a space of failure, of embarrassing comedy, of the contrast between the Wehrmacht's mythological self-image and mechanical reality.

The space that most succinctly articulates the Franco-German tension is Vienna: a city that is both German-speaking and not German-nationalist, hovering between two cultural and political identities. In ODJ, Vienna appears as a place of waiting and ambivalence: the Viennese eagerly await the German troops, but the troops do not arrive. This delayed arrival—the comic core of the book—transforms Vienna into a space of disillusionment: what was expected, what was feared, what was desired does not come in the anticipated form; the Blitzkrieg mythology collapses on the dusty streets of Austria.

Vuillard's handling of time is one of the most formally striking features of both texts. Both work intensively with anachronism—with references to past and future events that systematically undermine the linear chronology of the narrative. This technique is epistemologically and ethically motivated: it poses the question of whether the historical catastrophes were avoidable and implies an answer that arises from the retrospective nature of the narrative.

The prolepses in ODJ are particularly effective. Upon entering the Reichstag President's Palace, the narrator anticipates what will become of this institution: "But soon there will be no National Assembly, no President, and in a few years there won't even be a parliament anymore, but only a pile of smoking ruins." ⁵⁷ This prophetic anticipation places the reader outside the characters' time: We know what the industrialists involved do not know (or do not want to know), and this asymmetrical construction of time produces that special effect of Vuillard's narrative which could be described as "prophylactic pity": The horror at what is to come is at the same time a critique of those who could have prevented it.

In BOC, the temporal structure becomes even more complex because the text itself does not follow a chronological order. It jumps between eras, between 1870 and 1914, between the narrator's present and the past of history, between the theory of war and its practice. This chronological freedom is the formal counterpart to the book's thesis: that the war of 1914 was not a sudden event, but the product of long preparation, of a rationality of violence accumulated over decades.

Within this temporal framework, the Franco-German relationship appears as something cyclical and repetitive: 1870, 1914, and 1938 are not isolated events, but rather expressions of the same structural tension. The sentence with which ODJ concludes makes this cyclical conception of time explicit: “You never fall into the same abyss twice. But you always fall in the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and horror.” ⁵⁸ This sentence is not pessimistic; it is analytical – and, like the entire conclusion, it is aimed at the present, at the Thyssen-Krupp corporations that still exist, at the great fortunes that have continued to grow, at the economic empires that have escaped the catastrophes of the century.

The writer as a counter-witness

In this narrative structure, the Franco-German relationship is not conceived as a duel between two nation-states, but rather as the entanglement of two societies in the same structural mechanism. Schlieffen plans for France; France rearms because it lost in 1870; Germany rearms because it believes it is being encircled by France and Russia. This paranoia of mutual threat—which Vuillard dissects in both texts—is the true Franco-German legacy that he explores in his literary work.

It is revealing to identify the specific stereotypes Vuillard employs—not to accuse him of naivety, but to demonstrate how he processes and transforms them in his writing. The dominant stereotype of the German in both texts is that of organizational rationality, which, however, proves to be ambivalent. Schlieffen as the obsessive planner, the German industrialists as sober capitalist rationalists, the Wehrmacht as the epitome of the Blitzkrieg legend—these are figures of German organizational genius. But Vuillard shows that this genius stands on shaky ground: The Schlieffen Plan fails; the Blitzkrieg tanks are stuck in a traffic jam. The supposed German efficiency is a self-perpetuating myth that frightens the enemy—and thus, in a certain sense, even more dangerous, because it is based on a bluff.

The corresponding stereotype of the Frenchman is that of esprit de finesse, intellectual agility, ironic detachment—but also of political indecisiveness and institutional failure. Lebrun, with his Juliénas decree, is the comical image of this indecisiveness; the “ministerial crisis” on the day of the Anschluss is its political emblem. Vuillard does not gloss over these French weaknesses; but he exposes them with a self-critical irony that reveals German criticism of France as equally stereotypical.

The most important result of this analysis of stereotypes is that Vuillard dismantles both. What remains is the picture of two societies that misjudged each other – and whose mutual misjudgment was part of the disaster.

Both texts pay extraordinary attention to the communication between the characters, and this attention is itself culturally positioned. In ODJ, the central chapter "Écoutes téléphoniques" (Telephone Listenings) is a masterpiece of the literary analysis of linguistic deception. On March 13, 1938, Göring and Ribbentrop conduct a telephone conversation designed to be intercepted by British intelligence services—a performance for the enemy, a theater of innocence: "Göring. — Mr. Ribbentrop, as you know, the Führer entrusted me with the responsibility for the Reich in his absence. I therefore wanted to inform you of the immense joy that fills Austria." ⁵⁹ Vuillard then has the same conversation read aloud seven years later in the Nuremberg trial room, creating a dizzying duplication: the conversation, which was a lie, becomes evidence against the liars.

The motif of treacherous language is particularly charged in the Franco-German context. It refers to the classic French conviction that the German language has a special affinity for dissimulation, philosophical obfuscation, and ideological deception – a conviction that originated with Madame de Staëls. De l'Allemagne from Nietzsche to Victor Klemperer LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) suffices. Vuillard draws on this tradition without succumbing to it: He portrays Göring and Ribbentrop not as bearers of some inherently evil German language, but as actors who use language instrumentally – and, like all rulers, operate under the assumption that no one is listening. The comic dimension of this scene – Göring talking about birds and coffee while having just annexed a country – is Vuillard's literary device for making a banality of evil visible without explaining it.

BOC begins with a picture of the European aristocracy as a community of inbreeding: “First, there was a shared taste. A cultured and proud elite. The grandchildren of Queen Victoria sat on the thrones of England and Germany – one and the same buttocks had sat on two chairs.” ⁶⁰ This crude phrase – “un même derrière avait posé ses fesses sur deux chaises” – immediately sets the tone: European history is not made by ideas, but by bodies, dynasties, and interests; the apparent cultivation of the aristocracy is a surface beneath which biological and economic factors are concealed. The end of the book is a counter-image: no aristocrats, no general staff officers, no bankers, but anonymous men in the grass: “And what are they waiting for, these men sitting in the grass, with empty eyes, empty hands, empty hearts? They are waiting for the world to collapse, for the grass to freeze, for night to fall. They are in Verdun, in Gallipoli, or in the Hejaz, wherever misery has found its way.” ⁶¹ The contrast between the beginning (abundance, dynastic power, comfortable lifestyle) and the end (emptiness, exhaustion, waiting for the end) is the structural meaning of the book: The war, which arose from the abundance and lust for power of the elites, ends in the total deprivation of the subjugated.

The final image in the text, however, is not emptiness alone. It is followed by an apotheosis of simple human creativity: “In the beginning, there is a bed to which a man and a woman are chained. And then, all around the bed, there is a swarm of children, very small children, who are thirsty and hungry. So, one makes soup from nettles, a theater from fire, God from snow. That is all one can do.” ⁶² Vuillard here articulates the counterweight to the mechanical machinery of destruction that is war. It is not a triumphant conclusion, but neither is it nihilistic; it is the image of a tenacious, humble, indestructible human dignity.

ODJ begins with the image of the money-giving industrialists, which we have already analyzed. But the first sentence of the actual first chapter, which describes the weather, is equally important: “The sun is a cold celestial body. Its core consists of ice peaks. Its light is merciless.” ⁶³ These sentences are not realistic descriptions of nature; they are moral pronouncements about a cold, prickly, merciless world—a world in which the sun, the symbol of enlightenment and life, is cold and unforgiving. This opening heralds a story of betrayal of humanity.

The ending of ODJ returns to Krupp and concludes with a final, aphoristic sentence:

The “hautes demeures” on the edge of the abyss—these are the villas and palaces of the industrialists; history as a “reasonable goddess,” surrounded by dried flowers and birdseed—this is the image of a history that has become a folkloric affair in the present, harmless and domesticated, while the structures of capital and power persist. The contrast to the beginning—the cold, merciless sunlight that greets the industrialists—is a contrast between the horror of history and its subsequent trivialization. This is Vuillard’s final accusatory gaze: not at the past alone, but at the way the present deals with the past.

Éric Vuillard's BOC and ODJ, taken together, represent two significant contributions of contemporary French literature to Franco-German memory history. As Franco-German novels—or rather, as narratives that make the Franco-German relationship the structuring principle of their critique—they accomplish two things: they dismantle the myths with which both societies have legitimized their histories, and they develop a poetics of the counter-archive that makes the suppressed testimonies, the lost names, the collapsed machines visible again.

Vuillard's observation of Germany is that of a French intellectual who is not content with merely condemning his neighbor, but who also considers the complicity of his own society. This makes his texts contributions to a reflective, self-critical European consciousness, which is more necessary than ever today—in a time when the Franco-German axis is once again under pressure, when national narratives are being reshaped. The twenty-four coats entering the Reichstag President's palace are not merely historical figures. They are archetypes of a complicity that can be found in every economic system, in every arrangement between capital and power. And the immobilized tanks are not just a comical moment in the history of National Socialism. They are the image of a hubris that is reflected in every myth of irresistibility.

Vuillard doesn't write to correct history. He writes to show that history needs correcting—not because it has been misrepresented, but because it has been too hastily carved in stone, too quickly relegated to the niche of the Déesse Raisonnable, the domesticated, decorative goddess of reason, as a republican statue in the town square, adorned with withered flowers and birdseed. The past is thus monumentalized, aesthetically pacified, and made part of a public ritual of remembrance. Venerable, yet dead, it loses its political power. As long as Thyssen-Krupp remains one of the world's largest steel companies and its website makes no mention of forced laborers, Vuillard's writing is not historiography, but a necessity: not merely a factual revision, but a disruption of the official historical sedimentation. Éric Vuillard attempts to destabilize history once more: to keep visible its repressed economic interests, its moral complicity, its enduring forms of power. The polemic is directed against a historiography that transforms the past into a closed monument.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. “vingt-quatre machines à calculer aux portes de l'Enfer”>>>
2. “Une vie de cartes, de calculations, de speculations froides.”>>>
3. “Rose and little flower that is a jamais plant and a highlight”>>>
4. “Sa main ridée continuera de tracer des lignes sur des cartes jaunies.”>>>
5. “S'il a passé sa vie à l'envisager, c'est seulement afin de s'en débarrasser une fois pour toutes.”>>>
6. “On fabrique des officiers comme on produit des canons.”>>>
7. “La raison domine, c'est-à-dire le temps, le nombre et l'addition glacée des forces.”>>>
8. “Ce sont les mêmes costumes, les mêmes cravates sombres ou rayées, les mêmes pochettes de soie, les mêmes lunettes cerclées d'or, les mêmes crânes chauves, les mêmes visages raisonnables que de nos jours.”>>>
9. “kaki ou vert-de-gris”>>>
10. “c'est plus modern, corn plus dreary”>>>
11. “casoars et gants blancs”>>>
12. “esprit defense and timoré”>>>
13. "Malgré la défaite de 1870, qu'on imputa à un esprit défensif et timoré, partout on enseigna l'élan. La vie des soldats comptait peu.">>>
14. “Sans the political ideas of the revolution”>>>
15. "Alma Biro is not a suicide. Karl Schlesinger is a suicide.">>>
16. “The suicide is another crime.”>>>
17. “On the arrival of six cents deported, in 1943, from the Krupp factory, it will not be left until the end.”>>>
18. “Les Juifs avaient coûté trop cher”>>>
19. “Le régisseur a frappe trois coups mais le rideau ne s'est pas levé.”>>>
20. "Il prêtait à la France et à l'Angleterre l'argent avec quoi elles lui achetaient des armes. Et plus tard, bien après la guerre, il prêtera à l'Allemagne, et l'Allemagne paiera ses indemnités à la France, et Morgan exigera que la France lui règle ses facts.”>>>
21. "Mac-Mahon decided finalement de passer la Meuse et de marcher vers Sedan, où deux armées anmanandes fromt se rejoindre. Mac-Mahon décrète: 'Repos pour toute l'armée demain, 1er septembre.'">>>
22. “coupe aucun pont”>>>
23. “depuis une colline near de Frénois, en compagnie de son état-major et de Bismarck”>>>
24. "ils ont passé un moment agréable. Guillaume lisse sans arrêt ses formidables bacchantes.">>>
25. "Guillaume lisse sans arrêt ses formidables bacchantes; Napoléon III tire machinalement ses poils de barbiche.">>>
26. “The victory of the Prusse in France in 1870, which modifies the ancient habits”>>>
27. “offensive à outrance”>>>
28. "malgré la défaite de 1870, qu'on imputa à un esprit défensif et timoré, partout on enseigna l'élan. La vie des soldats comptait peu.">>>
29. “Il lui faut donc formuler une pensée capable d'emprunter à la France ce qui l'a menée à la victoire, mais dont le contenu sera toutre.”>>>
30. “le nationalisme imitera la ferveur des armées républicaines sans les idées politiques de la Révolution.”>>>
31. “The main rose and the flowers are a highlight of the plant”>>>
32. “A ressemble un peu à ces vastes anticipations de profits qui, depuis John Law jusqu'à nous, se font avec la involontaire d'une masse de gens, et en entraînent infailliblement le sacrifice d'un grand nombre.”>>>
33. “Il fallait dégager les véhicules lourds, tractor quelques tanks, pousser quelques automobiles, afin de laisser passer le Führer.”>>>
34. "C'est sublime un motor, un vrai miracle si l'on y pense. Un peu de carburant, une étincelle, et hop ! [...] Mais voilà, ce n'est simple que sur le papier, dès que ça tombe en panne, quelle mouscaille !">>>
35. “Come on convoie les equipment d'un circus”>>>
36. “Ce qui étonne dans this guerre, c'est la réussite inouïe du culot, dont on doit retenir une chose: le monde cède au bluff. ">>>
37. “On y voit tout un attirail de péplum: crinière, pantalons garance, grand équipement de ceinturon.”>>>
38. “Kilt, le pompon, ces képis colorés et ces casques à pointe, toutes sortes de hures picardes ou bataves, sifflant, marchant au pas, in a grande flaque de soleil.”>>>
39. “Les Anglais et les Allemands, eux, sont vêtus de kaki ou de vert-de-gris, c'est plus moderne, mais plus triste”>>>
40. "Un formidable petit plan. Un plan d'embâcle.">>>
41. “Les Allemands, espérant que les Français feraient un rêve de ce genre, n'ont pas du tout prévu d'entrer en France par là.”>>>
42. “C'est toujours là que se jouent et rejouent les vieilles querelles de Gaulois et de Germains, de Francs Saliens et de ripuaires, de Neustrie et d'Austrasie, toutes les Alsaces et les Lotharingies mal partagées, parlant deux langues, Gallo-Romaine ou Germanique, l'une chrétienne, l'autre païenne.”>>>
43. “Vieille, vieille frontière de corps et d'âme”>>>
44. "Et que dit ce plan? Il dit que l'alliance franco-russe va contraindre l'Allemagne à se battre sur deux fronts.">>>
45. "pour un Prussien, il ya deux chemins vers les Lumières. Celui de Kleist qui […] abandonne les armes, entre à l'université, puis foudroyé par l'incertitude, se metamorphose en poet et meurt, d'une balle dans le crâne. Mais il existe aussi le mariage inopiné, et très Prussia, you savoir et de la guerre.”>>>
46. "le nationalism imitera la ferveur des armées républicaines sans les idées politiques de la Révolution ; il expresse une theory des douleurs à travers la destinée d'un people.">>>
47. "Les Anglais, qui étaient au courant de son imminence, avaient averti Schuschnigg. C'est tout ce qu'ils firent.">>>
48. “l'homme du non, la négation faite dictateur”>>>
49. “Beethoven is not in Austria [...] is in Germany”>>>
50. "Beethoven is German, it's indisputable. It's not in Bonn. Et Bonn, quelle que soit la manière dont on s'y prend [...] Bonn n'a jamais été une ville austrichienne.">>>
51. “The même bouche que Schlieffen, les commissures tombent with les mustaches, a même genre de dureté corrompue de tristesse, une amertume profonde”.>>>
52. "Qu'on imagine Auguste Piel, Joseph Loeb, Victor Metz, qu'on imagine chacun dans sa plus exacte personne, allongé là, chacun. Puis ce sont des milliers de Charles, de Célestin, de Paul, des centaines d'Otton et de Karl.">>>
53. "Schuschnigg is frappé par a portrait of Bismarck: the paupière gauche du grand chancelier tombe inexorablement sur l'œil, le regard est froid, désabusé; la peau paraît flasque.">>>
54. “Tel est l'art du récit que rien n'est innocent.”>>>
55. “Appellation d'origine contrôlée Juliénas”>>>
56. "A vienne, the Chancellor Schuschnigg receives an ultimatum from Adolf Hitler. So it will retire on the project of plébiscite, so it will be delivered to the Austrians.">>>
57. “Mais bientôt, il n'y aura plus d'Assemblée, il n'y aura plus de president, et, dans quelques années, il n'y aura même plus de Parliament, seulement un amas de décombres fumants.”>>>
58. "On a tombe jamais deux fois dans le même abîme. Mais on tombe toujours de la même manière, dans un mélange de ridicule et d'effroi.">>>
59. "Goering. – Monsieur Ribbentrop, comme vous le savez, le Führer m'a confié la charge du Reich en son absence. Je voulais donc vous informer de l'immense joie qui submerge l'Autriche.">>>
60. "It's a great gift for the community. An elite refinement and fière. Les petits-fils de la pure Victoria occupaient the trône d'Angleterre et d'Allemagne, a même derrière available posé ses fesses sur deux chaises.">>>
61. "Et qu'attendent-ils, ces hommes assis dans l'herbe, le regard vide, les mains vides, le cœur vide ? Ils attendent que le monde s'effondre, que les herbes gèlent, que la nuit tombe. Ils sont à Verdun, à Gallipoli ou dans le Hedjaz, Partout où la misère s'est trouvé un chemin.">>>
62. "Aux commencements, il ya un lit où sont enchaînés l'un à l'autre un homme et une femme. Et puis des enfants grouillent autour du lit, de tout petits enfants qui ont soif et qui ont faim. Alors, on fait avec des orties de la soupe, avec du feu un théâtre, avec de la neige Dieu. C'est tout ce qu'on sait faire.”>>>
63. "Le soleil est un astre froid. Son cœur, des épines de glace. Sa lumière, sans pardon.">>>