A topography of menace, a map of fear
Richard Cobb
THE BUTCHER OF LYON: THE STORY OF THE INFAMOUS NAZI, KLAUS BARBIE by Brendan Murphy
Empire Books, $13.95
KLAUS BARBIE: THE BUTCHER OF LYONS by Tom Bower
Michael Joseph, £10.95; Corgi, £2.50
THE FOURTH REICH: KLAUS BARBIE AND THE NEO-FASCIST CONNECTION by Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson
Hodder & Stoughton, £9.95
KLAUS BARBIE: THE UNTOLD STORY by Ladislas de Hoyos W.H. Allen, £10.95 Lyon, Lyons (`the Butcher of one can take one's choice, there is no German name for the city, though one of the authors, de Hoyos, thoughtfully supplies its Roman one of Lugdunum. We are informed, in all four books, that Barbie spoke very good French, and so we must, I suppose, take them at their word, even though they all write very bad English (or, in the case of de Hoyos, his translator does); maybe he did, but it is doubtful whether he could have pronounced those two beautiful syllables with the rather lazy, drooping tone of the locals, extending the `y' and achieving a dying fall on the 'on'. In all four books we encounter a topography at first sight so innocent, so everyday, as predictable as the route of tram 13, as it leaves Perrache eventually to climb up the heights of la Croix Rousse, so wonderfully provincial, old-fashioned, and a bit prissy, and therefore so reassuring. Here is a city that offers more than a score of steep uphill climbs, its narrow streets cutting between the tall ochre houses, its two rivers, the crowded peninsular entre Rhone et Sa6ne, the wide quays, 20 or so bridges, a topogra- phy familiar to the sturdy walker as he climbs up one of the montees, holding onto the handrail, or struggles up the precipi- tous Grande Cote. There is a choice of three cable-cars, known locally as ficelles, two that deliver the traveller up to the high plateau of la Croix Rousse, one of them in sight of le Gros Caillou, the third carrying the pilgrim to the archiepiscopal heights of Fourviere and an astonishing view of the city and of Ia Guillotiere and Villeurbanne beyond it. It is certainly the most dramatic urban landscape in the whole of France; and yet it is only semi-urban, containing large enclaves of rural greenery and of walled gardens topped with exotic trees.
Beyond the heights of la Croix Rousse lie the suburban, semi-rural villages, of Cuire and Caluire. Difficult to pronounce and eminently reassuring in a sort of rustic provinciality. So too are the addresses and localities that figure in all four books and that seem to spell out a familiar banality, whether in their rusticity, or in their echoes of the first world war: quai de Serbie, boulevard des Belges, boulevard des Hirondelles, rue Sainte-Catherine, quai Saint-Vincent, place des Freres, place Car- not, place des Cordeliers, le Pont Morand, la Croix-Paquet, even the old prison of Saint-Joseph, because one gets a glimpse of it from the train as it approaches Perrache from the north — a leprous, peeling sentinel of the longed-for city.
Yet, in this particular context, that of 1942, 1943, and 1944, in mounting horror, it is also a topography that is full of menace, a map of fear, evil and death superimposed on the familiar grid of streets, montees, stone stairs, quays, bridges, amphitheatres and parks and hid- den gardens, tiny squares perched on rare pockets of level ground. It had always been a very secret city; now it had become a very dangerous one. Yet what could be more banal than the means by which the mem- bers of the Comae National de Resistance approached their fatal rendez-vous in the tall yellow house of Dr Dugoujon in Caluire (one is relieved to learn that, 40 years later, the doctor still lives there)! One of them, a Lyonnais, takes his bicycle with him on the ficelle, mounts it at the top, near le Gros Caillou, and sets off past the statue of Jacquart and his loom, to- wards the place des Freres. Others take the tram No 33 from the place Carnot and la Croix-Paquet. Two of them, unfamiliar with the city, take the wrong ficelle, end up lost, and arrive half an hour late. There had been previous sightings on the Pont Morand (Barbie, on a bench, hiding be- hind a paper), meetings in the Parc de la Tete d'Or, as if they had been the week- end rendez-vous of two young lovers. Barbie himself had moved from the old- fashioned splendour of l'Hatel Terminus, opposite Perrache and in sight of the trains that might take a German officer to Paris, on the first limb of the long journey to Poland and beyond — I don't think Barbie would have been put off by such a visual reminder; the trouble with the Terminus was that it was ill-equipped for torture to the Ecole de Sante Mililaire, on the far side of the Rhone, and in the ancient badlands of 'la Guille'. He had finally settled in the very centre of the city, the wide and windy Place Bellecour, 'Place des Angoisses' for those who headed for the consulting-rooms of one of the famous doctors and who emerged from them with the certitude of creeping death. Barbie was to mark his stay there by having five young men shot on the corner of the Place and the rue de Ia Republique. L'Antiquaille, half- way up to Fourviere, is a charming leafy spot, a small park with the pink remains of a Roman amphitheatre; but it is also a hospital. Barbie, who enjoyed his evenings out, presumably ate in the swish black- market restaurants of the rue de la Moran- diere and patronised the girls now in clacking wooden cothurnes, of the rue Comfort. Even the discreet and, in the summer, delightfully cool and dark rue Bouteille, is mobilised as a letter-drop once used by Hardy, and well-known to the SD.
But Barbie can only have been aware of the surface of things, of a more public and administrative topography of prisons, bar- racks, hospitals, law courts and requisi- tioned torture places ( in 1943, the Milice moved into the former building of Le Progres de Lyon). He was, after all, only a tourist of a different kind. The secret itineraries of the traboules, the semi-rural houses with long walled gardens and tun- nels leading out of them on the steep banks of the SaOne, would have escaped him, as well as the poetry of a city that only reveals itself by slow degrees and over the seasons. The German was vulgar, flashy and quite unimaginative; his sense of fun would express itself in banging out Parlez- moi d'amour on an upright piano between his heavy-handed and heavy-footed torture sessions. No doubt he enjoyed himself in Lyon, because it was the centre of the large fief assigned to him, and, like one of his superiors, he was well aware that as a billet it was greatly preferable to a posting to Minsk. But I doubt if he ever paused on one of the bridges to watch the swift green waters of the RhOne or the sluggish brown waters of the Saone, or if he ever took one of the ficelles or red trolley-buses. The only time he went up to the heights of Sainte- Foy was not to picnic, like Lyonnais week-enders, but to organise an extra large massacre. The association between Barbie and the Second City was fortuitous; the torturer had previously got his hand in first in Amsterdam, then, briefly, in Dijon. Indeed, when one thinks of this sinister period, it is not even Barbie who would first come to mind, but the unfortunate Hardy, still the object of mystery and dispute. The association between the seat of the archdiocese of the Primate of the Gauls, and the flashy, boastful SS sous- fifre seems more than unfair on Lyon, as if the city had been subjected to a totally unsuitable twinning. Yet it is Lyon that is at the centre of all four books, not so much on account of Barbie himself, who was certainly not as important as both he thought himself and his teams of biog- raphers think him, as of what happened in the tall house in Caluire on 21 June, 1943.
All four books have a common subject in the person of the crass and quite beastly Barbie; all seven authors — one of the books runs to the luxury of three, with a further three strap-hangers added as bal- last — share a marked literary clumsiness, as if it were somehow inescapable to write badly about a bad man and trashily about a trashy one, though there are degrees to the shared awfulness of their prose styles. The threesome collective manages to achieve an unequalled low. De Hoyos may have suffered at the hands of a translator. Murphy indulges in lush phrases; Bower is merely rather turgid. These from de Hoyos, in translation: 'On that morning of 1951 the palm trees of South America beckoned to Klaus Barbie.' Later we are served 'the stone walls in La Paz did not a prison make.' Murphy comes up with: "'Hands up", he snapped, in excellent French'. The Triumvirate are keen on History: 'Back in Dijon, she . . . waited for history's next surprise'. 'History was somehow repeating itself in a looking- glass'. We are introduced to 'stout, good- natured Kurt Merk' (yes, that is his name!), and later we hear that poor Kurt Merk is 'out of control', like a runaway robot. There is a reference to 'desk-bound dunderheads'. Then, more History: 'his mind reeling from the crash-course in Nazi history. . .' There is even a German char- acter who manages to trump the ubiquitous Kurt Merk (a 'journalist' called Gerd Heidemann is equally ubiquitous, manag- ing to thrust his way into three of the four books); the various authors tell us, without the trace of a laugh, that his name was Fridolin Becker.
The Ascherson book is most informative on Barbie's local French collaborators. Murphy comes out with the interesting information that Lecussan, the head of the Lyon milice, was a former naval officer. Bower is very well documented on the reorganisation of the Lyon police after the Liberation. Ascherson and his team give a very detailed account of the Croatian escape network run by Dragonovie in close cooperation with the Vatican. All follow in varying detail Barbie's subsequent career M Bolivia. Now Barbie, a fragile and no doubt despairing grandfather aged 72 more than 40 years on from skittish Parlez- moi d'amour days — is back in Lyon, awaiting trial in Saint-Joseph. What does seem a bit unfair on the Second City is that Lyon and Barbie should thus have been brought together a second time. A poisoned gift indeed to the city and no doubt to France as well.
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