The Vanishing Threshold
Erin Byrne
Image by Matthew Felix
It’s sunny in modern-day Seattle, but outside my writing room window, snowflakes slant down onto black iron balconies and pelt the swastika atop the Arc de Triomphe. In this area of my house, it’s January, 1944.
I’m writing a novel series about occupied Paris and this is the space where it unfurls. The walls are a creamy hue, decorated with maps and black-and-white photos. Piles of books cover every surface—When Paris Went Dark, Is Paris Burning?, The Nuremberg Trials. One desk overlooks the snow scape; the other is next to the heater. In Seattle it’s August and seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, in Paris, it’s minus five Celsius.
I labored to create this enchantment, relegating all un-novel-related tasks to the extra computer on my dining table, which overlooks the living room where each morning I sit in a corner with a view of the Olympic Mountains and read the newspapers, or in the evenings serve champagne to party guests, or lounge in the white chair watching TV. Out there it is 2024 in the United States of America, far away in time and place from German troops goose-stepping down the Champs Élysées, diminishing ration coupons, yellow-starred citizens rounded up by gendarmes. And yet.
We writers are a strange lot: We’ll do whatever it takes to conjure this magic. We may be unconcerned with feng shui elsewhere in our homes, but we’re obsessed with it inside our sacred creative spaces. It’s as if our stories are being spun somewhere in the universe, and we must have the perfect place to gain access to them.
In mine, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is on his twentieth trip to Paris, staying in the Imperial Suite at Hôtel Ritz, where he keeps a cut-crystal bowl of gems for his fingering pleasure. He’s devouring French cuisine, looting the Louvre, and plotting atrocities, unaware that a fictional Resistance plot aiming to assassinate him is in progress.
Later, Göring would articulate the Nazi philosophy that “people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
He confided this to a psychiatrist after Nuremberg, who then concluded, “the near destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces that produced such chaos. We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”
Though he considered himself universally admired, Göring was hated by many, especially in Paris. In my pages, Resistance leader René Guiraud visited Germany often in the twenties and thirties and describes to other resistants just how the Nazis gained power. In 1923 in Munich, a small group of right-wing extremists staged the violent insurrection known as The Beer Hall Putsch, where they battled the Munich police force and military units.
After this, the future Führer held rallies during which he railed about Jews, who he said multiplied like vermin, contaminating the blood of the country. But he promised to make Germany great again from its “pathetic present-day state.”
Paramilitary groups emerged, and the Nazis evoked a future of carnage if their leader wasn’t chosen. They came to power in 1933.
Because no one could accuse him of being a Neo-Nazi back then, Hitler was able to come out of the gate as dictator on Day One, berating and villainizing “the enemies within” and the unfair press, using any misfortune as a cudgel, hypnotizing his arm-raising, chanting supporters. In order to make Germany safe from Jews and foreigners, the Nazis planned deportations. Camps were necessary, violence required. Soon, as has too often happened throughout history, the cruelty was the point.
In 1934, the German Justice Department underwent “coordination” with Nazi goals, and the People’s Court replaced the Supreme Court. With no appeal, and death or hard labor sentences for anyone who went against the regime, loyalty had become a life-or-death litmus test. It was easy for Hitler to surround himself with acolytes, with “yes men.” As Göring later said to the psychiatrist, “Please show me a ‘no man’ who is not six feet under the ground today.”
On the nineteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler didn’t have the technology to pipe in a choir performance of those convicted, or show a highlight reel of the insurrection, but he played the victim card deftly, outlining the “plunder and oppression” of Germany to stoke grievance. His followers were afraid, and the Nazis were “the power which alone was capable of opposing this danger.” The Third Reich alone could fix it.
In my novel, after observing this unfold, René returns to Paris. In 1940, Hitler perused the Opera Garnier, Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe only once, but afterward sent the Reichsmarschall as his representative in Paris. Göring visits often to indulge his ego, his greed, and his gluttony, and René hatches a plan to poison him.
This book has taken me eight years to write. In its early stages (2016-2020) when I walked across my writing room threshold at the end of the day, rain would patter on the roof of my house, the scent of lemon and rosemary would waft from a chicken roasting in the oven. As evening approached, Paul Desmond lulled the mood, and candles were lit, causing my cells to rearrange themselves as I returned to the here and now.
This separation of worlds is essential for writers. We must immerse ourselves in the universes of our stories fully, as if diving into a pool, and climbing out of these settings of time and place offers us perspective, even preserving our sanity at times, for it is possible to fall so fully under our own spells that it’s difficult to emerge and reclaim our lives, and ourselves, once again.
Truman Capote’s internal balance was so disturbed as he finished In Cold Blood that when writing the last six or seven pages, though he usually wrote in longhand, he suffered from hand paralysis and had to use a typewriter. He told George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, in a 1966 New York Times interview, “I’ve always been overly aware of the precipice we all walk along, the ridge and the abyss on the other side; the last six years have increased this awareness to an almost all-pervading point.” After finishing In Cold Blood, Capote visibly deteriorated, descending into heavy drinking and drugs.
Twentieth century French philosopher/writer Simone Weil tried to experience every topic she wrote about, from labor strikes to religious turmoil to war, seemingly setting out to suffer every harrowing working condition, each indignity of her time. A secular Jew, she fled Paris in 1942 to eventually end up working for the Free French in London, where she refused to sleep in a bed so as to align with those who were without that luxury, and ate only the rations accorded French soldiers and civilians, which led to malnutrition. Weil had no threshold between her work and her life, and she died in an English sanatorium in 1943. The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as cardiac failure from self-starvation and tuberculosis. She was thirty-three years old.
I’ve known writers who have mindfully backed away from the chasm. One friend who wrote a book about a serial killer said that “three years of living in the sewer of this guy’s mind” meant he was forced to reset his own. Another who is writing a novel about her family’s history in Israel had to take time away from it after the events of October 7, 2023, when her worlds collided.
Thus, I took care after my daily forays into 1930s Germany and 1940s Paris to walk the hills of my leafy-green neighborhood, to dine and attend events on the waterfront in Seattle, and to tell stories and laugh with friends.
One morning when I was on the third draft of the book, I decided to take some time off and watch the traditional exchange of power in Washington, D.C., so I crossed over from January of 1944 to 2021.
There had been dark signs during the past four years—a group banned from the country because of their faith, an increasing insistence on loyalty to the leader, white supremacists being described as “good,” paramilitary groups summoned to stand by—that had jarred my sense of equipoise, but that was to be put in the past on this day.
I sipped a second cup of coffee as I turned on the TV and settled in the white chair. Preparations were underway for members of the House and Senate to gather in our government’s innermost sanctum, while outside nearby the outgoing President had gathered his followers. After weeks of promising something wild, he delivered the kind of speech that a general might give his legions on the cusp of battle.
Inside the House of Representatives, the Speaker banged the gavel, calling the joint session of Congress to order.
Outside, instead of dispersing, the incited citizens slogged toward the cupola of the Capitol brandishing weapons and flags—American flags (right side up and overturned), Confederate flags featuring black assault weapons, Nazi flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and strange ones I didn’t recognize.
But swastikas were supposed to be flown only in the January, 1944, room.
They wore red hats, black hats with yellow writing that said “Oath Keepers,” blue stocking caps brandishing the name of the soon-to-be-ex-President. One man wore a “Camp Auschwitz” shirt, others had “MAGA Civil War” brandished across their chests.
As the angry amoeba scaled the walls outside the Capitol building, snarling and filling the air with their howls, my sense of reality slipped.
A man whose face twisted with rage smashed a club into a window, which became my television set, and the attackers climbed through and marauded around my living room, shattering glass, screaming. A police officer sunk onto all fours, beaten about the head with a club, as my own head pounded. A wooden gallows appeared, a red noose. The chant “Hang Mike Pence” thundered in my ears. I was jostled, shoved, yanked, and pumped the remote to no avail.
Since that day, there has been an unceasing rip in the veil between my worlds. A man who turned out to be a convicted felon, who had beaten police officers with a flagpole that day, was discovered to have turned toward the Capitol and given the Nazi salute. His phone was riddled with images of Hitler, swastikas, SS bolts, and he posted that “the only tragedy that happened was that Hitler didn’t finish the job.”
The ex-President, who had maintained that the election was fraudulent although his own head of security had called it “the most secure in American history,” declared that he would run again. The next month a bi-partisan committee released its final report about the insurrection, referring him for criminal prosecution, and a few months later, he began kicking off his rallies with a video of the January 6 violence and audio of a group of convicted rioters singing our national anthem from prison.
His former chief-of-staff released a book confirming that this man feels that “Hitler did some good things,” and I remembered that the candidate’s first wife had recalled that he’d kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.
By the time the summer of 2024 hit Seattle, more and more things seemed eerily familiar as I continued to swoop between the Nazi past and the political present.
I considered how this same man, now the Republican candidate for President, had pontificated that immigrants were poisoning the blood of our country, and invaders were flowing in from all parts of the world, from prisons and mental institutions, “from places unknown, from languages that we haven’t even heard of,” which caused millions of people to think that we were being attacked. Anyone who disagreed was accused of exposing the country to danger.
When this candidate said of Colombia-born judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the trail in which he was found guilty of thirty-four felony counts: “Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes from,” I thought of the Nazis taking measurements of Jewish people’s noses, skulls, eyes, and hair. I was often unsure whether it was 1944 or 2024, and it had become my all-pervading goal to stay on the cliff’s edge.
In an April 30 interview in Time magazine, the man whose name will appear on the November ballot outlined his plans to use the military to remove fifteen to twenty million people from the country in what he referred to as round-ups, which, as it has before, could require deportation camps. He would co-opt the Justice Department, using US attorneys and judges as chess pieces in a quest to dominate.
He would pardon the January 6 criminals, whom he says had “love in their hearts” on that day, which he called beautiful.
I noted that, with his fist raised, he frequently referred to his opponents as vermin, the press as unfair, and often echoed the dangers of “the enemy within.” He said he’d be dictator on Day One. In case this wasn’t clear, he flashed a post calling for a “unified Reich” if he were elected. The Supreme Court that he’d shaped ensured that if he is elected or finds another way to seize the presidency, he would be immune from prosecution no matter what he does to unify his Reich.
This candidate’s choice for Vice President once referred to him as “America’s Hitler,” and has urged him to fire every civil servant and replace them with yes men-and-women.
The snowstorm outside my writing room window gradually invaded its cream-colored walls. My manuscript was trapped under icy white layers that grew thicker each day, obscuring the view of my map of Paris, of a black-and-white photo of the Arc de Triomphe. Swirling static of snow emerged from the door, into the hallway, into the dining room, burying my extra computer, chilling the air, obscuring my vision, upturning my inner life.
I didn’t know where I was—inside or outside of history. As I worked to clear my living space of toxicity, I thought of some lyrics from the song, “The Future,” by Leonard Cohen:
Things are gonna slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul
This was the closest description of what had happened to my perception after the failed putsch—I didn’t know whether to refer to it in German or in English. The next book in my series will be about hiding Jewish children in Paris—I could not envision immersing myself in stories of people creeping about in attics, flinching in fear at every sound below, once I learned that the candidate wanted to use the National Guard to conduct his round-ups. I wondered: If I stopped writing about these things in my enchanted world, would this bizarre re-enactment cease?
I mentally swept the snow from my living space by repeating the current year like a mantra. January 1944 existed in only one room in the house, which fluctuated between order and chaos. Throughout winter and spring, I continued writing there, but the storm raged inside of me, fraying my edges. The story felt out of reach. By early summer, I was unable to cope, and shut the door.
I’ve kept out of my writing space for a month. But my equilibrium is now buried under white drifts. I have to get it back, so I venture in. To drive the snowstorm outside, I light candles, squeeze my eyes shut, and remember that it is August, 2024, and this is still the United States of America.
I contemplate snowy-white hydrangeas and ice-tipped pink roses outside the window. As soon as I start working on my book again, the Louvre will appear, the Seine will churn. But the blizzard is barely kept at bay by a little sage burning and a lot of mental trickery, and it rages—on the periphery of my vision, outside the window in all directions. Its threat to invade again knocks me off-kilter as I maneuver the precipice.
I don’t know if the blizzard—or the candidate—can be kept out.
I will let others determine whether this man is a fascist, a white supremacist, or a lunatic, but to me his plans seem to presage the recurrence of past evil. I am tired of living in the sewer of this guy’s mind, and it is my suspicion that all of this has shattered my stability not because it is analogous or similar to Nazi Germany, but because it is the same.
The tempest persists. The fearful have been brought to the bidding of their leader and raise their fists, waving signs that say “Mass Deportation Now.” I don’t know which is more frightening, the idea that they are unaware of history or know precisely what they seek to replicate.
It seems that the only way to shore up the boundary between my fictional and real worlds is to keep this malignant candidate out of power. On November 5, I’ll cast my vote in the hope of preserving the integrity of American institutions, the decency of the society that surrounds me, and perhaps even the order of my soul. If enough people do this, the worst can be averted. It works the same way in any country.
Photo by Lone Mørch
Erin Byrne is the author of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life, and Travel in France, editor of Vignettes & Postcards from Paris and Vignettes & Postcards from Morocco, and writer of The Storykeeper film. She has written dozens of essays that appear in The Best Travel Writing and The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Hidden Compass, The Smart Set, and many other publications. Awards for her work include a 2021-22 Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation, the 2020 Grand Prize Solas Award for Travel Story of the Year, three Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and an Accolade Award for film. Erin is host of the LitWings event series in the Bay Area and Paris. In the past, she has taught writing at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris, The American Library in Paris, Book Passage bookstore, and on Deep Travel trips, and is travel writing and photography curator for The Creative Process Exhibition. Erin has just finished her first novel, Illuminations. www.erinbyrnewriter.com