Clouds Over Paris is the diary of Felix Hartlaub, a German lance corporal serving in Paris in late 1940. He had studied history at the University of Heidelberg then gained his doctorate at the University of Berlin. He was employed doing archival research for the German foreign office.

It is enlightening to read the point of view of the reluctant enemy occupier in Paris. It’s not the view we normally get. The writing is exquisite, albeit with the occaisional blanks where perhaps the handwriting was unreadable. In places, French, German, and English rub shoulders.

There is one section that brought me immediately back to the present. 

At dinner there had been talk of the article which had appeared in the evening edition of “Je suis partout”, with a load of photos in which one could not see anything apart from a couple of faces, bleached white by the flash. And the raid at the Soviet embassy, which was carried out yesterday, including horror stories of trap doors, dungeons, electric vats for burning body parts which had been found, and which provided an immediate answer to a whole series of unexplained occurances from recent years.

What a fleeting ray of sunshine Mikhail Gorbachev was between the dark, threatening, clouds stretching from Stalin to Putin. Felix Hartlaub disappeared without a trace from Berlin in the final days of the Second World War aged 31. Clouds Over Paris is a remarkable legacy of a great writer.