Journey to the End of the Night
Céline's first novel, with the same narrator (Ferdinand) and the same voice, twenty-five years earlier.
Read our takeCastle to Castle
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Castle to Castle
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1957 novel — the first of the German trilogy — about the last months of the Vichy government-in-exile at Sigmaringen.
- 1957
About Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeIn the final months of the Second World War, Céline, his wife Lili, their cat Bébert, and thousands of French collaborators find themselves stranded in the German town of Sigmaringen, where the remnants of the Vichy regime have established a surreal government-in-exile. Surrounded by shortages, illness, political fantasies, and the approaching collapse of Nazi Germany, the narrator observes the disintegration of an entire political world with savage humor. The wartime story is framed by an older Céline living after the war in Meudon, embittered, isolated, and attempting to rebuild his life as a doctor and writer.
The story, in more detail
The novel begins not in Germany but in postwar France. Céline complains about his poverty, his publishers, his ruined reputation, his dwindling medical practice, and the literary establishment he believes has abandoned him. A visit to a patient and an encounter connected with his former companion La Vigue lead his thoughts backward to 1944.
From there, the book plunges into Sigmaringen. The château still houses Marshal Pétain and the remnants of the Vichy leadership, while officials, collaborators, soldiers, refugees, mistresses, opportunists, and frightened civilians crowd into the surrounding hotels and buildings. Céline resumes work as a doctor and sees the physical misery concealed behind the rituals of government: poor food, inadequate medicine, disease, cold, gossip, black-market dealings, sexual intrigues and endless rumors that Germany might somehow still win.
The full plot
Céline and Lili live at the Löwen hotel while Sigmaringen becomes a grotesque imitation of a functioning French state. Pétain continues ceremonial walks; ministers and officials hold meetings and receptions; political figures speculate about miracle weapons and counterattacks even as the military situation deteriorates around them.
Céline moves between his medical duties and the extraordinary characters collected in the enclave. He describes the monotonous ration food, epidemics and sanitation problems, drunken gatherings, bureaucratic disputes and the bizarre social hierarchy maintained by people who are effectively fugitives. Historical figures including Pétain, Pierre Laval, Fernand de Brinon, Otto Abetz, Jean Bichelonne and others pass through the narrative, but Céline refuses to organize them into a conventional political history. Instead, their world appears as a procession of humiliations, ceremonies and absurd episodes.
One extended episode involves an official journey connected with the funeral of Jean Bichelonne, another example of the refugees attempting to preserve ceremony and status while everything around them is collapsing.
Throughout the Sigmaringen narrative, Céline repeatedly interrupts himself and returns to his postwar existence in Meudon. The two periods begin to mirror one another: the sick, besieged Céline of the present and the collapsing Vichy enclave of his memory.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
Castle to Castle does not end with Céline escaping Germany. That part of the journey belongs to the later books in the trilogy.
Instead, the Sigmaringen recollection gradually gives way to the postwar frame. Céline recovers from the illness that helped trigger his memories and returns to the mundane concerns of his medical practice and his patient Niçois. The enormous historical catastrophe has effectively become a long digression inside the life of an aging doctor.
It is a deliberately anticlimactic ending: Sigmaringen remains suspended in memory, while Céline returns to the diminished present from which he has been narrating it.
Themes and analysis
References
- Henri Godard's Pléiade edition of Céline's Romans II is the standard scholarly text of the German trilogy. Its 'Composition de la trilogie' (pp. 955–961) and its Notice for D'un château l'autre (pp. 963–1022) are the primary references behind the account of the novel's writing, publication, and Sigmaringen material.
- Christine Sautermeister's book-length study is the reference behind the separation between the historical Sigmaringen experience and Céline's fictional transformations of it.
- Suzanne Lafont's peer-reviewed article in Études françaises frames the trilogy's refusal to organize history into conventional narrative — the reference behind the description of Sigmaringen as procession rather than political history.
- Céline's own 1957 interview with Louis-Albert Zbinden, broadcast by Radio Suisse Romande around the publication of D'un château l'autre, is the primary source for how Céline framed the book on release.
Why we recommend it
The Vichy government-in-exile
Castle to Castle is the only French novel that fully occupies Sigmaringen — the enclave the remnants of Pétain's government held under German protection in the last months of the war.
The German trilogy begins
The first published of the three books that turn Céline's 1944–45 flight through Germany into late fiction. Read it first, then North and Rigadoon for the earlier and later events.
The Meudon frame
The novel is narrated from Céline's postwar house at Meudon, where a poor, embittered, aging doctor keeps returning from Sigmaringen memory to a diminished present. The two periods rhyme.
What this book explores
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
- Dalkey Archive Press
- Ralph Manheim
Paperback
- Paperback
- Gallimard Folio
Reader reviews
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Death on the Installment Plan
Céline's childhood novel, the second full-length work before the German trilogy.
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