商品簡介
Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt, this behind-the-scenes account of the manipulation, hubris, and greed that together led to Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria brilliantly dismantles the myth of an effortless victory and offers a dire warning for our current political crisis.
February 20, 1933, an unremarkable day during a harsh Berlin winter: A meeting of twenty-four German captains of industry and senior Nazi officials is being held in secret in the plush lounge of the Reichstag. They are there to extract funds for the accession to power of the National Socialist Party and its Chancellor. This opening scene sets a tone of consent that will lead to the worst possible repercussions.
March 12, 1938, the annexation of Austria is on the agenda: A grotesque day intended to make history--the newsreels capture a motorized army on the move, a terrible, inexorable power. But behind Goebbels's splendid propaganda, an ersatz Blitzkrieg unfolds, the Panzers breaking down en masse on the roads into Austria. The true behind-the-scenes account of the Anschluss--a patchwork of minor flourishes of strength and fine words, fevered telephone calls, and vulgar threats--all reveal a starkly different picture. It is not strength of character or the determination of a people that wins the day, but rather a combination of intimidation and bluff.
With this vivid, compelling history, Éric Vuillard warns against the peril of willfully blind acquiescence, and offers a reminder that, ultimately, the worst is not inescapable.
作者簡介
Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 and has written nine award-winning titles, including Conquistadors (winner of the Ignatius J. Reilly prize 2010), and La Bataille de l'occident and Congo (both of which received the 2012 Franz-Hessel prize and the 2013 Valery-Larbaud prize). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for L'Ordre du Jour. His most recent book, Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, and the Tragedy of Show Business, was his first published in English--The Order of the Day is his second. He lives in Rennes, France.
Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Best Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
