Le Ciel de Nieflheim

First edition printed in small numbers at the author's expense. This book exists only in proof state with blank wrappers and was never commercially sold. There were no deluxe copies printed.

The author distributed to his friends this set of printed proofs, with blank wrappers. The first cover, also blank, bears a printed stamp "proofs".

Foxing to covers, joints lightly rubbed.

Exceptional presentation copy: "to Monsieur Mauge this clandestine book most cordially Jacques Chardonne."

Jacques Chardonne participated in the international writers' congresses in Weimar in 1941 and 1942, and drew from this experience this literary essay glorifying National Socialism, in which "His individual impressions of his travels in Germany are combined with images of rural France to form a reactionary vision of a cultural Europe that was to be collectively protected against the Soviet Union" (Olivier Lubrich). The title refers to the "world of mists" from Nordic mythology, a primitive region located in the far north, which later came to refer to the kingdom of the dead. Chardonne takes it from a phrase in Maurice Barrès's 'Le Génie du Rhin' (1921), which the latter in turn attributes to Goethe: "Ah! I do not love the sky of Nieflheim". On the advice of German friends or collaborators, and following the deportation of his own son by the Nazis, Chardonne renounced publishing what he calls in this inscription his "clandestine book". As the Axis forces no longer had the upper hand, Jacques Chardonne even attempted to retrieve most of the copies he had given away with the aim of destroying them.

Handsome copy, given the very poor quality of wartime paper, of this cursed book - an astounding example of a French intellectual's fascination with Nazism.

Extremely rare, especially inscribed.