“A guest speaker from the Reich said that Paris today is nothing more than a provincial European city,” wrote Felix Hartlaub in April 1941. “[That] there is no longer any need to approach it with reverence.”
Clouds Over Paris, the wartime journals of Hartlaub, a German researcher posted to Paris during the second world war, suggest the author did not take this advice to heart. The mere existence of a diary is proof that he thought the city worth observing; the quality of its descriptions speak to the regard in which he held it. It is impossible to read his snapshots of a city that only briefly existed between 1940 and 1944 and not instantly recognise that familiar, foreign fascination with Paris.
To call them snapshots, though, would be to ignore the incompleteness of many entries that break off mid-sentence or are riddled with omissions. Hartlaub disappeared during the defence of Berlin in 1945: the blanks in the text were never filled in, and no novel was ever adapted from it.
Such is the uniqueness of his perspective, however, that the work is not entirely overshadowed by the omissions: writing in a detached third person, Hartlaub makes no secret of the discomfort he feels as an intruder in the city. He views his writing as a means of redeeming his position, a means of rapprochement with a city that he knew from before the war but whose relationship with him is now defined irrevocably by his nationality.
Where his colleagues appear imperious, Hartlaub is plagued by paranoia: about showing his German pass to the ticket inspectors, about his faltering French, about the “highly suspicious zigzag” with which he negotiates the cobbles. Nor is it just the locals in front of whom he feels awkward. The Wehrmacht squaddies eye him warily on the Métro and in the cafés: he knows that his job as a researcher is a privileged position, one that keeps him in the relative safety of the archives and off the front lines of the war.
Lonely, he seeks refuge in the details of the city’s facades, rooftops and nightclubs. Chestnut trees “fill the courtyards as lungs fill a rib cage, a deep breath of air the lungs”, churches are “the colour of cobwebs”, a brothel’s champagne tastes like “warm feet gone numb”. His descriptions are delicately drawn, inventive and unmistakably Parisian — albeit a Paris steeped in interminable cloud and temporarily decked in swastikas.
The tension that grips the city is ably captured by Simon Beattie’s translation; first published by Hartlaub’s sister in 1955, this the first time the diaries have appeared in English. With so little to go on biographically, you wonder at times if the author — like the artist Nat Tate — could be the improbable invention of a novelist. But just as Hartlaub selectively sketches his scenes, vividly shading certain sections and letting the rest tumble off the side of the page, so too is our portrait of the writer heightened by its omissions.
After leafing through Clouds Over Paris, I found the notes I’d taken were curtailed. There were none of the impractically polished paragraphs I’ve found myself writing since university. Instead, like the glimpses of the city offered by the German occupier, they would trail off, end mid-thought, lack key nouns or appropriate adjectives, or dart unexpectedly from theme to theme.
Yet there was the essence of Hartlaub’s work all the same: a portrait that intrigues all the more for its half-finished format and its curious provenance. For better or for worse, it is, like its author, an intriguing anomaly, an unsolvable enigma, and, ultimately, a story cut short.
Clouds Over Paris: The Wartime Notebooks of Felix Hartlaub translated by Simon Beattie with an introduction by Rüdiger Görner, Puschkin Press £14.99, 176 pages
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