An Uncertain Hour; The French, The Germans, The Jews, The Klaus Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940-1945
Joseph Beuys (illustrations), and Tom Victor (back New York: Arbor House/William Morrow, 1990. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. 416 pages. Endpaper maps. Illustrations. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Minor edge soiling noted. Includes Illustrations, Chapter 1--Lyon '87; The Funny War; Vichy; Sonderbehandlung; Lyon '43; Lyon 44: Last Train to Auschwitz' Acknowledgments, Note 0n Sources; Notes; and Index. Ted Morgan obtained copies of the ten thousand pages of secret documents prepared for the Barbie trial, including several hundred depositions that were not made public, and it is from this source that he can relate so many hitherto untold narratives about the occupation in Lyon. An Uncertain Hour is an involving journey into the hidden landscape of an occupied city. It includes definitive accounts of the capture of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the raid on the Jewish welfare office in Lyon, the seizure of the children's home in Izieu, the struggle for the mountain redoubt of Vercors, and the hallucinatory itinerary of the last train to Auschwitz. It explores the minds and motives of the Vichy leaders and German occupiers, moving from their gilded offices to prison cells and furtive meeting places. The illustrations in this book are the work of the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921 - 1986). Beuys joined the Hitler Youth and then the Luftwaffe, and became a dive-bomber pilot in 1941. Stationed in Nazi-occupied Crimea in 1943, his JU-87 was hit by Russian flak. Beuys returned to Germany with severe injuries and combat fatigue, and began to produce sculpture and objects that were his own postmodern "Horrors of War." Beuys conveys a powerful sense of what war is and what war does than traditional military artists who paint battles. Morgan was born Count Sanche Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont in Geneva. He is the son of Gabriel Antoine Armand, Count de Gramont (1908–1943), a pilot in the French escadrille in England during World War II. Gramont is an old French noble family. After his father's death in a training flight, Morgan began to lead two parallel lives. He attended Yale University and worked as a reporter. But he was still a member of the French nobility. He was drafted into the French Army where he served for two years from 1955 to 1957, during the Algerian War, initially as a second lieutenant with a Senegalese regiment of Colonial Infantry and then as a propaganda officer. He subsequently wrote in frank detail of his brutalizing experiences while on active service in the bled (Algerian countryside) and of the atrocities committed by both sides during the Battle of Algiers. Following his military service, Morgan returned to the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, Edition Time in 1961 for what was described as "his moving account of the death of Leonard Warren on the Metropolitan Opera stage." At the time, Morgan was still a French citizen writing under the name of "Sanche de Gramont". In the 1970s, Morgan stopped using the byline "Sanche de Gramont". He became an American citizen in 1977, renouncing his titles of nobility. The name he adopted as a U.S. citizen, "Ted Morgan", is an anagram of "de Gramont". The new name was a conscious attempt to discard his aristocratic French past. He had settled on a "name that conformed with the language and cultural norms of American society, a name that telephone operators and desk clerks could hear without flinching". Morgan was featured in the CBS news program 60 Minutes in 1978. The segment explored Morgan's reasons for embracing American culture and showed him eating dinner with his family in a fast food restaurant. Morgan has written biographies of William S. Burroughs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The last-named was a finalist in the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His 1980 biography of W. Somerset Maugham was a 1982 National Book Award finalist. He has also written for newspapers and magazines. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Two themes dominate this wide-ranging look at the 1940 German invasion and subsequent occupation of France: that nation's vulnerability, and the deportation of French Jews to Nazi concentration camps. Morgan also explores the attempts of the Vichy government to work out a compromise with the German authorities; recounts the destruction of the maquis stronghold at Vercors; and describes the activities of Klaus Barbie during and after the war. Chief SS officer in Lyon, France, he was extradited from Bolivia in 1983, tried in Lyon in '87 for crimes against humanity and is presently serving a 20-year sentence in France. Morgan's account of Barbie's role in the deportation program is detailed, and shows how the Germans, in their attempt to eradicate Jewry, adopted a corporate model complete with production goals, a system by which human tragedy was converted to logistical tasks. The book is based on depositions and documents collected for the Barbie trial. Morgan, who was living in France in 1940, includes material on the fate of his relatives during the Occupation. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Jean Moulin, Izieu, Vercors, Military Occupation, Jews, Deportation, Holocaust, Klaus Barbie, Joseph Beuys, Maquis, Auschwitz, Leon Blum, Dannecker, Concentration Camps, Drancy, Adolf Eichmann, Pierre Laval, Petain, Resistance, Vichy Government
ISBN: 0877959897
[Book #83666]
Price: $37.50