Ice trachetening hitting the chewling metal no longer stops listening to transfer the door of that mythical universe trapped between the walls of the small bar of the Ritz hotel in Paris. The place, somewhat sweetened today, evokes on its walls and tables, with all kinds of paraphernalia, glorious times and the work of one of its best clients, the writer Ernest Hemingway. But for a time it was also the place where Frank Meier, a legendary cocktailbox, saw the protagonists of one of the most convulsive times in France parade. The arrival of the Nazis to Paris and the occupation caused a massive exodus in the city. And the Ritz, owned by a Swiss family, with the advantages of that neutrality that the small country brings, was the only luxury hotel that remained open. Behind the bar, Meier attended the ethyl metaphor of what was happening in the rest of the country: officers of the Power drunks, collaborationists, resistant, spies. The last border between human dignity and evil.
The material, a collection of oral files and stories, served the historian Philippe Collin (Brest, 50 years) to build The Ritz bartender (Gutenberg Galaxy), a novel inspired by that ecosystem emerged those days in the social fog of the famous hotel during the Nazi occupation. Collin, a Breton of humble origin, producer of the radio France Inter and author of Fabulosos podcasts In history, he met Collin Field in 2002, who was Meier’s successor. After many Sunday afternoons, he began to tell him the story of those who had preceded him preparing concoctions on the edge of that legendary hinge. “I had forbade me here when I arrived in Paris, as if it were a social barrier. But in 2002 I had to come to interview Yoko Ono. It was an opportunity to enter with a professional legitimacy. At the exit, I told myself: ‘Go, you are in the Ritz, who knows if you will return. Bars of the Hotel de la Place Vendôme, about the first time he stepped on the establishment.
Collin, Abstemio since he saw that the hours of the day were not enough for his new projects, he became a celebrity among Ritz employees after the publication of the book, which has already dispatched more than 300,000 copies in France. “The time that Frank lived – a Jew that hides his identity before his customers of the SS – is distantly seems to the one we are going through. The questions are similar to a situation that is changing,” he points out while advising to take a sidecar, a cocktail designed by Meier himself, without realizing that he is publicized as the most expensive in the world: 3,000 euros. After agreeing that someone in Madrid’s writing could disagree with the bill, Collin suggests a kind of Dry Martini with honey touches, also invented by Meier. One of the favorites of the SS. “The officers were delighted with Frank’s bar. It was a place of reception for those who came to visit, such as Goebbels, or for those who settled here, such as Hermann Göring, who lived in the suite Imperia when I came to steal works of art to Jews. ”
Meier, tanned in New York, always near experts in liquid euphorias such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, prepared the best concoctions of the occupied Paris. But he was also in itself a kind of cocktail that contained the ingredients that constituted the French emotional fan. Moderate collaborationist, but resistant in its own way. Ambiguous and Lax. But also uncomfortable, disturbed. “The situation was acclimatized very well. It served the cocktails to the Nazis, but when time went by many things became unbearable and wanted to react. He would have wanted to be brave, but he did not succeed. And it is something very human and common then.”
Meier, or the character that makes Collin through that balance of imagination and history, is glad of the arrival of Marshal Pétain, a symbol of collaboration and surrender to the Nazis. “I used Frank to tell the psychology of the French. His moral and personal path evolves as that of many compatriots. At the beginning, in June 1940, France panicly lived in the catastrophe. Then Pétain signs the armistice and the end of the war arrives and that relieves many people. You have to remember that he had beat the Germans in World War I He thought we were saved.
Life, however, continued only for some between those walls. “Luxury, like the one who breathed here, blind,” says Collin. But the hotel was more than that. Or not only. The place, founded by the Swiss Cesar Ritz next to the chef Auguste Escoffier, opened on June 1, 1898, in full Case Dreyfus And it was expected to breathe a thought against everything that the Jewish captain represented, falsely convicted of high treason and used to promote a certain nationalism and anti -Semitism that divided French society. But Escoffier lover was actress Sarah Bernhardt, convinced Dreyfusian. “And she organized in the Ritz debate rooms in favor of the general. So a conservative place arrives a movement of progress. And the whole story of the Ritz will then be crossed by those two opposing elements. If you spend here enough time, you will see that there is still that dichotomy,” adds the scholar.
The success of his book, which is already preparing a film, also has to do with that search for responses to the cyclical repetition of the story. “When the last witnesses disappear, the deportees, the resistant, the escapes of the fields, resurfaces what we have seen a few weeks ago. We celebrated the 80 years of liberation of Auschwitz and, at the same time, there are people in the United States doing the Nazi greeting. It is scary, terror. Because when the memory fades, when the dead will be more dead, the reflexes of fascism will return. Exaggerate, ”he says.
In our time, another echo of that time resonates, believes Collin: the loss of shared values as a society that keep us together. “And then we return to ourselves, on the family. And that is the perfect land for fascism, which seeks to fracture society. Without civil war there is no fascism,” he says. And he concludes: “When war and occupation began, there was no French intellectual, nor social and civil structures, such as the army or the Church, which they called for resistance. But when France received Pétain, many people then unknown were sewn in the chest those shared values. They were the resistant. People who had republican and human values. And I am sure that there is still and will resist if things are still worse. Iran