Part Seven: Winds of Change — Chapter 8 - The Barman of the Ritz

AUGUST 25, 1944

The fate of Paris was decided in the early hours. For two days, the Allies had been stationed in Rambouillet, in one of those moments when history is at a tipping point. The Americans wanted to take a more circuitous route; the British were keen to advance on Germany and hasten the end of the war. General Leclerc, leading an armored division, was impatient. As for de Gaulle, he preferred to wait for a political agreement and to contain the communists before retaking the capital. Street battles and backroom deals: it all came together at the last minute, and, at dawn, the Allies set off. Hundreds of journalists from all over the world rode alongside, eager to cover the liberation of the City of Light. Among them are two men who have been engaged in a fierce battle of egos ever since the Normandy landings, an old hand and an ambitious young upstart, the power of the pen against the power of the image: Ernest Hemingway, from Chicago, and Robert Capa, a photographer from Budapest. They have taken different routes into Paris, far from the columns of soldiers. They both have the same goal: to get to the Ritz before the other.

Needless to say, Frank Meier knows nothing about this. Just as he does not know that Choltitz has planted landmines in Notre-Dame and beneath one of the bridges that spans the Seine, but in all other respects has defied Hitler, who demanded that the whole city be destroyed. The Nazi general wants to save his skin.

Paris will not burn.

Diary of Frank Meier

August 25, 1944

The Allies have marched into Paris.

I should be jubilant, but I am exhausted; I no longer recognize this world. And if I don’t recognize it, will it have a place for me? Deep down, I’ve always known that if I disowned my parents, it was because I was ashamed to be their son. It was how I saw them, more than anything else, that led me to despise them. How could my father have fallen in love with a woman who had no ambition? How could she have slept with my bastard of a father? It took me a long time to understand that I saw myself as living proof of their mediocrity. I had to run away from them, I had to keep them at a distance if I was to forget them and invent another life.

But now, to tell the truth, the ordeal of this Occupation has changed me. War has changed me—is that a cliché? I find myself thinking of my parents more and more.

I have begun to see things differently. The petty, disloyal, cowardly behavior I saw in the bar over the past four years has shown me that my parents were not bad people. They were simple people. Perhaps I am finally coming to terms with being their son, with being who I am, Frank Meier, head barman of the Ritz, veteran of Vimy, and the son of working-class Jews.

Did it have to take these years of serving drinks to collaborators and Wehrmacht officers to come to this realization? Did I have to try and fail to become a part of the ruling class in order to make peace with myself and my parents? Luxury isolated me and blinded me, just as it did Jünger and Guitry, to the hideous realities of this war. They were wrong, and so was I. And I have no one to blame but myself. Will the victors be merciful? I would like to be able to tell them how at the Ritz, between the wars, I witnessed the bourgeois values of honesty and dignity wither away.

I ask myself this question: can we curb our greed and once more rediscover the dignity of ordinary human life?

“You have to know that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to change them,” Fitzgerald told me before he left Paris in the autumn of ’38.

Those words sum up my whole life.