Where It All Goes Down
1920s-1950s, Southwest England
Stevens travels—road trip! Woo-hoo!—through southwest England in August 1956. His memories, though, revolve (and revolve and revolve and revolve) around the events that took place when he was a butler for Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall, in the years between the two world wars.
It might seem hard to believe that there could be any moral gray areas when it comes to cooperating with the Nazis—we've seen the Indiana Jones movies: we know that Nazis = evil—but Stevens is trying to understand how a perfectly good and decent "gentleman" could end up associating with the "ugliness" of fascism.
So it might help to get a little background on the time period—not to excuse Darlington's actions, but to understand his historical climate. So buckle yourselves in, Shmoopers. It's history-in-literature time.
Ahem. Ahem-hem-hem. Here we go:
By 1923, the year Darlington holds his first international conference, a lot of people had grown increasingly critical of the Versailles Treaty, the peace treaty that ended World War I. Why? The Versailles Treaty had imposed such super-strict sanctions on the German government that Germany was crippled with high inflation and a depressed economy, leading to widespread poverty. These conditions only fueled popular resentment against the Allies in Germany, which the Nazis would exploit in their rise to power. But Darlington, as Stevens makes clear, is motivated out of concern for the German people and their suffering.
Fair enough. After all, the average German after WWI just wanted to live and eat and be happy. Grueling poverty makes that hard.
England also experienced an economic crises—it was affected by the Great Depression that spread throughout the world in the early 1930s. In the face of widespread unemployment, many found a convenient scapegoat in the Jewish population, some of whom were immigrants fleeing Germany. Not cool. Lord Darlington buys this rhetoric hook, line, and sinker.
A guy named Sir Oswald Mosley, who makes an appearance in the novel, was the charismatic leader of the English Fascists, who actively sought to spread their anti-Semitic message and attempted to foster closer relations between England and Germany. If Lord Darlington found Mosley's message appealing, it's because it seemed to square with his own humanitarian goals…which were super lopsided. He wanted to help Germans thrive, but he was apparently totally cool with pinning everything bad that happened after WWI on the Jews.
After World War II, many Nazis were put on trial as war criminals. The most famous of these trials took place in the German town of Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949. Stevens's own consideration of his possible guilt (could he have convinced Lord Darlington not to hang out with Fascists? Or to not fire two Jewish maids?) has an echo in the so-called Nuremberg defense: the claim that one was acting under orders and thus was not responsible for one's actions.
Stevens, however, does feel guilty, and rejects the Nuremberg defense. He's stodgy and repressed, but he is a good guy.
While the countryside Stevens ends up driving through is certainly postcard-pretty, and gives us a broader sense of what English identity might be, it is also an area that hosted the enormous build-up of armies and equipment associated with the Allies' D-Day offensive. Tellingly, the novel ends in Weymouth, an important staging area for the Allies' offensive.
So Stevens is travelling both through the super-beautiful English countryside and through history: from Darlington Hall (former home of Treaty of Versailles-hating, Nazi-sympathizing Lord Darlington) to Weymouth (which is famous for helping launch the D-Day offensive against the Nazis). In essence, the guy travels from the English idea that "Oh, those poor Germans, let's help 'em," to "Oh, those evil Germans, let's kill 'em."