Clouds over Paris
by Felix Hartlaub
Pushkin Press £14.99


Felix Hartlaub was the son of a German museum director who was sacked by the Nazis for supporting “degenerate” art. In late 1940 he was sent to Paris to undertake archival research for the German foreign office and in his spare time he began a diary chronicling life in Paris during the German occupation. He died in Berlin in May 1945.

When we think of wartime Paris we usually see it through French eyes, either those who served in the Resistance or Nazi collaborators. Then, of course, there is the tragic story of the Jews of Paris who were rounded up and sent to Nazi death camps.

What is so striking about Hartlaub’s wartime notebooks is that they barely mention the Resistance, collaboration or the Jews. This is Paris as seen by an ordinary German soldier, cultured, yes, but not an ideological fanatic or antisemite.

It is a strangely melancholic world of loveless encounters with women, especially Parisian prostitutes, and most of the people Hartlaub sees are lonely and friendless.

Many are grotesque, like something from German Expressionist art. He notices “a big man with no neck, oozing over his collar in all directions”. Then he sees “a podgy little major with a huge duelling scar across his chin”. He sees “a pair
of scrawny legs in bright stockings … obstructing the pavement. Evidently plastered, the poor old cow.”

He has surprisingly little sympathy for the French. “There hadn’t been problems with food in Paris for ages,” he writes. “There was no comparison with what Germany had to go through in 1917, ’18! Time to get that straight.”

Hartlaub constantly overhears snatches of conversation, usually about sex. “‘I don’t know about you, Max, but I wouldn’t say no to a bit of ‘racial defilement’…”

What is strange is the constant moving between sex and pornography, on the one hand, and reflections on French culture on the other.

Hartlaub is well-educated. He passes the house where Racine died, there are scattered references to writers such as Mauriac, Claudel and Maurois.

But most interesting of all are the absences. Just three references to Jews, one passing reference to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and nothing about the war or the occupation or about infamous Vichy politicians such as Laval or Pétain.

Clouds Over Paris is the most fascinating account of how normal war can seem, how the most everyday issues seem more important than the biggest historical issues of the day.