I'm reviewing Clouds over Paris...

... by Felix Hartlaub.

Felix Hartlaub was born in 1913 in the city of Bremen. His father, Gustav, was a museum director and art historian who was the son of a merchant family. Gustav studied with Franz Wickhoff in Vienna, Heinrich Wölfflin, a Swiss art historian, in Berlin and worked with Fritz Wichert, a German art historian and principal director at the Mannhiem Art Gallery.  Wichert encouraged Gustav to move his family to Mannheim in 1914.

In 1923 Gustav became director of the Mannheim Gallery/Museum and took a particular interest in Expressionism as a school of art.  Felix was educated and grew up in the city and remained there until, at the age of 15, he began to study at Odenwald, a privately funded boarding school in Heppenheim.

At the age of 19, in 1932, Felix returned to his home town of Mannheim to study at the commercial college and then followed this with a period of study in Romance languages and history at Heidelberg University.

In 1933, his father was dismissed from his post at the gallery as part of the spread of Nationalist Socialist policies within Germany at that time.  Effectively, this made the family pariahs within their community, his father being labelled a ‘cultural Bolshevik.’

Felix went on to study in Berlin and received his doctorate in philosophy in 1939 – a most significant year in Europe for anyone alive at the time.  Within weeks of completing his studies, Felix was drafted into the Wehrmacht and from September 1939 to November 1940, he was part of a barrage balloon unit.

Perhaps in December 1940, his skills were recognised because he was assigned to the Historical Archives Commission on secondment.  This unit examined files looted in Paris.  He did serve again for a short time as a soldier, but the bulk of his time between 1940 to 1945 was spent working as a historical clerk at the Wehrmacht High Command, editing War Diaries and at the Führer’s headquarters in Winniza, Rastenberg and Berchtesgaden along with a period spent in occupied Paris.  This period of Hartlaub’s life is captured in Clouds Over Paris. It is not a narrative nor a day-by-day memoir, but it is a set of observations and notes about what Hartlaub witnessed, talked about and understood from his time in the city.

The language of his writings is lyrical and brings to life the city’s colour, sights and sounds in its darkest period in modern history.  There’s an initial naivety about his role and presence that comes across clearly, and I was left wondering to what extent – if any at all – he openly questioned the occupation.  What is abundantly obvious is that the naivety soon dissipated. Towards the end of the war, his notes become darker and more heavily tainted with despair and disbelief.

In April 1945 – just weeks before the armistice – Hartlaub was posted to an Infantry Unit on the front near Berlin.   He was listed as missing in May 1945, and from then on, nothing is known about his whereabouts.  He was formally declared dead in 1955, with the date of his death being accepted as December 31st, 1945.

He published little within his lifetime, but the scraps of notes and observations that still exist are a testament to a writer who might have achieved much had he survived.  His keen insights and eye for detail might have given us, here in the 21st century, a compellingly different story of the 1939/45 conflict.