A great read about a sad & sorry topic and a great message for today. Kids should read it at some stage. ( )

When we think of Hitler and the Nazis in the years leading up to World War Two, we think of an unstoppable, unplacatable force. But were they really like that? Or were they just masters of the art of the bluff, taken too seriously by those they wished to cow? And what of those who enabled their rise to power - did they have a choice in the matter? This novel explores such questions, taking a fresh and critical look at the events of the 1930s, and some of the characters on the European stage at that time who might have shrunk from view, either by happenstance or by choice... ( )

A very short book. I'm not sure whether it is fiction or history. German industrialists who supported Hitler in the 30s and through the war and who today continue to make millions feature. As does the German invasion of Austria told via the key Austrian politicians. Interesting enough but It could easily have been a magazine article. ( )

Resoconto di dettagli, piccolezze, meschinità che la storia dimentica, purifica o a seconda dei casi, ingrandisce e glorifica perfino quando riguardano il Male. Riflessione sul potere di racconto e distorsione dei media, nonché sulle collusioni del "business" con la politica e il suddetto Male. Scrittura leggera e funzionale, libro molto bello oltre che necessario. ( )

"This great jumble of misery… is dominated by a mysterious respect for lies. Political manoeuvring tramples facts." (pg. 114)

Not short and sweet but short and bitter, Éric Vuillard's pseudo-novel The Order of the Day is a literary colonic: bracing and beneficial, but you're still not entirely sure you want this tube up your arse. It has that peculiar and pretentious French approach of meta-analysis, that complete negation of any attempt at storytelling that means you're unsure if you can even classify it as a novel.

The Order of the Day addresses, in a restless and flitting way, the collusion of businessmen in Hitler's rise to power and the general shabbiness of Europe's 'elites' in responding to his cheap depredations, focusing on a series of backroom meetings and diplomatic summits. Surprisingly, the Munich Conference with Chamberlain and Daladier is not the centrepiece (despite being on the book's cover), and Vuillard is more concerned with the incestuous dalliances of German businesses and the farcical Anschluss of 1938.

This is to the book's credit; rather than beat the dead Appeasement horse of Munich, Vuillard uses his literary license to expose some of the inconvenient truths that were quietly buried after the war. That the Allies at Nuremberg employed the Nazis' own prolific executioner to carry out their war-crime sentences (pg. 56) may be little more than trivia, but Vuillard hauls onto the centre of his stage the various German companies that facilitated Hitler's rise to power, profited from its slave-labour during the war and, sickeningly, thrived after it. No defeat for them, and some of the names remain familiar: Opel, Krupp, Bayer, BMW, Siemens, Allianz… the list is disconcertingly long. "They are here beside us, among us," Vuillard writes. "They are our cars, our washing machines, our household appliances, our clock radios, our homeowner's insurance, our watch batteries" (pg. 16).

Vuillard doesn't do much with this information, but it's refreshing to have it aired. Some of these companies "merged and formed omnipotent conglomerates" (pg. 127), but they maintained their scot-free influence on our world. Krupp, Vuillard notes, became a powerful figure in the EU's Common Market, "a pillar of Pax Europaea", and notes with appropriate cynicism that nowadays its "watchwords… are 'openness' and 'transparency'" (pp127-8) even as they obfuscate on their Nazi past and engage in that trend for corporate whitewashing which is a plague on any genuine openness in our societies. The Order of the Day is too brief in its haranguing to be a useful call-to-arms, and as literature it's non-descript, but as a brief and impotent squall of indignation at the tawdry compromises of our world it has some potency. ( )