Le Voyage d'automne

They numbered seven, the French writers Dr. Goebbels invited to Weimar in 1941. No Jews, just "purebloods". The group was to participate with others writers - Belgian, Swiss, Finnish, German, etc. - in the book festival commemorating the war. We accompany these pro-Geman collaborators on a sightseeing tour of beautiful Thuringia, during their visit to Adolph Hitler's office, we see them bow before the graves of Goethe and Schiller, and attending a concert in a Viennese castle. In counterpoint to the filmed footage and the reading of excerpts from their books, historians comment upon and put in perspective this "treason of the clerks", whose vanity went hand-in-hand with the pro-nazi commitment - and above all with anti-Semitism - backed up by dubious esthetics. Cruelly accurate, the film raises many questions. On the clemency that some of these writers benefited from at the end of the war. On the way in which we judge them today. Fraudulent links betwen writers and power after the war and which still occur today bear witness to the fact that vanity and the abdication of any critical sense remain very much alive.