: Felix Hartlaub
: Clouds over Paris: The Wartime Notebooks of Felix Hartlaub
: Pushkin Press
: 9781782278450
: 1
: CHF 9.50
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 176
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
New paperback of the acclaimed, sharply immediate diary written from the heart of Occupied Paris by a classic German writerThe writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters. Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafés, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.

FELIX HARTLAUB grew up in Mannheim, the son of an art historian and museum director who was ejected from his post by the Nazis in 1933 for his support of 'degenerate' art. Hartlaub studied history and was called up immediately upon graduating in 1939. Initially serving in a barrage balloon unit, he was sent to Paris in late 1940 to do archival research for the German foreign office, using his spare time to document the city in the notebooks that comprise Clouds Over Paris. He would continue writing diaries throughout the war up until he went missing in Berlin in May 1945.

I


“On the meaning of diaries. They can only refer to a certain layer of occurrences that happen in the intellectual and physical sphere. What concerns us most intimately resists communication if not our very own perception of it.” So wrote Ernst Jünger, the German officer and well-known writer of First World War memoirs, in hisParis Diary on 18th November 1941. Jünger wrote this about a year after the young unknown lance corporal Felix Hartlaub first prepared to be relocated to Paris, where he also would begin keeping a diary, one more impressionistic in style than that of literature’s most famous Wehrmacht officer. The two men’s paths could have easily crossed, though, on the German-occupied banks of the Seine or elsewhere. The one thing they shared was a sense of the surrealism of their situation, which the young soldier Hartlaub found oppressive. Jünger, the established author and high-ranking officer, was to receive a ticket from Jean Cocteau himself for a viewing of the surrealist filmLe sang d’un poète (“The Blood of a Poet”).

But who, then, was Felix Hartlaub (1913–1945)? A Francophile loner in German-occupied Paris, where he worked for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs from December 1940 to August 1941 as a historian at the Quai d’Orsay. Later, in a letter to his father, he called it the “Cabinet du Sinistre”. For after the French surrender to the Germans, the Quai d’Orsay appeared ghostlike, void of real life like most of occupied Paris, or so it seemed to Hartlaub, the diarist and detached observer, who was mostly embarrassed by his and his fellow Germans’ presence in the then half-deserted metropolis on the Seine, the old capital of the nineteenth century.

Literary history was Hartlaub’s vocation, but military history was his profession: he wrote his doctorate on the sea battle of Lepanto (1571) and the role of Don Juan d’Austria, a battle in which, incidentally, the future author ofDon Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, had fought, and in which he had lost the use of his left arm. In fact, this turned out to be Hartlaub’s only publication during his short life. It was not by choice but sheer destiny that he eventually found himself in a small circle of historians in the closest vicinity of theFührerhauptquartier recording