Read Online Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online Page B

come
across it in a bookshop on the Champs-Élysées. I had never
heard of this writer. But even before opening the book, I had
divined its tone and atmosphere, as though I had already read
him in another life.
    Friedo Lampe. Au bord de la nuit . For me, name and title
evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear
your gaze. You are persuaded that, behind them, somebody
whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for
years, or else that there is no longer anybody there. Only a
lamp, left burning in the empty room.
    Friedo Lampe was born in Bremen in 1899, the same year
as Ernest Bruder. He had gone to Heidelberg university. He
had begun his first novel, Au bord de la nuit , in Hamburg,
where he worked as a librarian. Later, he took a job with a
publisher in Berlin. He took no interest in politics. His passion
was for writing about the port of Bremen at nightfall, the
lilac-white of the floodlights, the sailors, the wrestlers, the bands,
the whistling of the trains, the railway bridge, the siren of a
steamship, and all those who seek out their fellow beings at
night  .  .  .  His novel appeared in October 1933, by which time
Hitler was already in power. Au bord de la nuit was withdrawn
from the bookshops and pulped, and its author declared
“suspect.” He was not even Jewish. To what, then, could they
possibly object? Quite simply, to the charm and nostalgia of
his book. His one ambition—he confided in a letter—was “to
bring alive the atmosphere of a port for a few hours in the
evening, between eight o’clock and midnight. I’m thinking
here of the Bremen district where I grew up. Of short scenes
unfolding as in a film, interlocking people’s lives. The whole
thing light and fluid, linked together very loosely, pictorial,
lyric, full of atmosphere.”
    Toward the end of the war, at the time of the advance of the
Russian troops, he was living in a Berlin suburb. On 2 May
1945, he was stopped in the street by two Russian soldiers who
asked him for his papers, then dragged him into a garden. And
there, without having taken the time to distinguish between the
good and the wicked, they beat him to death. Some neighbors
buried him nearby, in the shade of a birch tree, and arranged
for the police to receive his remains: his papers and his hat.
    Like Friedo Lampe, the German writer Felix Hartlaub was
a native of the port of Bremen. He was born in 1913. During
the Occupation he found himself in Paris. He had a horror of
this war, and his uniform the color of verdigris. I know very
little about him. In the fifties, a magazine published an extract,
in French, from a short book of his, Von Unten Gesehen , the
manuscript of which he had entrusted to his sister in January
1945. This extract was entitled “Notes et impressions.” In it,
he observes a Paris station-restaurant with its typical crowd,
and the abandoned Ministry of Foreign Affairs as it was when
the Germans moved in, with its hundreds of empty, dusty
offices, the chandeliers left burning and the clocks all
chiming incessantly in the silence. At night, so as to forget the war
and merge with the Paris streets, he puts on civilian clothes.
He gives us an account of one of these nocturnal excursions.
He takes the métro from Solférino. He gets off at Trinité. The
night is dark. It is summer. The air is warm. He walks up the
Rue de Clichy in the blackout. On a sofa, in a brothel, he spots
a solitary, pathetic Tyrolean hat. The girls file past. “They are
in another world, like sleepwalkers, under the effects of
chloroform. And everything is bathed”—he writes—“in the eerie
light of a tropical aquarium under overheated glass.” He too
is in another world. He observes everything from a distance,
attentive to atmospheres, to tiny, mundane details, and at the
same time detached, estranged from everything around him,
as though this world at war was no concern of his.