•
“He who writes takes revenge—wasn’t this too a discovery that mellowed our suffering, that gave us a feeling of majestic superiority? Now, we have the choice: either nobly to forgo revenge and hence final salvation and enter the icy void without further ado—like you, my dead friend—or else clamp our teeth into our neighbor and proliferate with him in the slow-motion explosion of metastases, and, as everyone knows, one’s neighbor is really oneself, right?
“This is the final, macabre joke of the middle-class jokesters: the hara-kiri of the brains. The voiding of the contents of brains for a trichinosis inspection before blue philistine eyes. The presentation of the no longer expressible SELF in its timeless presence, in which the past and the future are shuffled together, memories and wishes, traumas, anxieties, and fears, like a well-shuffled pack of cards, and formless, proliferating with millions of its kind in a fermenting dough—SELF split up into millions and proliferating into a monstrous cancerous tumor with rapid hybrid growth—an explosion in slow motion—
“and we have tried to keep living individually, have stubbornly and contrarily kept believing in ourselves and our mission, have tried to fulfill our promise, as if we didn’t know any of this—
“and yet we knew it ever since the days that cut us off from the first half of our lives. I, at any rate, knew it since 1938.
•
“It was on a day in Vienna—the last of the three days on which, as I stubbornly maintain, the sun stood still in the heavens. The Führer and Reich Chancellor of the now truly greater Greater German Reich was staying at the Hotel Imperial—the world comes to an end nobly and symbolically!—and now he wanted to show himself to the ecstatic people of the Ostmark. Not just whooshing by, as on the second day—through the dividing sea of the people, hurrying as though fleeing—but static at last, lapidary, and entire: that is, as a bust. For unless, in accordance with nature, we place a great personality on four legs by inserting a horse underneath him, then he is most effective as a bust—there must be something wrong with our extremities, they seem humanly convincing only on crucified bodies.
“The Führer and Reich Chancellor knew this, of course. He wanted to show himself to his Ostmark people as monumental, as rut-breasted, so to speak: I embrace you, all you millions. Let me kiss the whole wide world! (In the enveloping battles later on, the text was varied: Let me kill the whole wide world!) And the ecstatic people of Vienna came swarming out in oppressively full attendance to throw themselves at this bust. The Heldenplatz was packed full. Vienna was empty again. As shiny as a shell washed ashore. It became clear what a city really is: this enormous hive, this once so beautifully formed and now stone honeycomb, proliferating hybridly and pumping millions of human beings through itself in a pulsating osmosis—but only so long as it’s alive, of course: and once it dies, it’s nothing but a many-pored crustacean shell grown into and carved out of the earth, produced by the unconsciously guided will to form of the particular species of life-form that lived within: witness of this strange collective urge toward form (which WHAT directs? WHO? With what intention? According to what plan? To what end? . . .
“You see, friend S.: the difference between our current states of being—mine here at your flower mound, and yours underneath it or perhaps dissolved in the air we breathe, in the heavenly blue with which even this rainy-gray day may be lined—this difference only in degree between two varieties of dead man boils down to the fact that I have to keep asking the same old questions, while you—unlike the pastor, who believes he has an answer to these questions—no longer have to ask them. Witness to your satisfaction that this time it is I who envy you).
•
“Back then, in Vienna (and we must not forget: it was always the same weather, beribboned with springtime blue but arctically cold, and the sun stood still in the heavens), back then this honeycomb was pumped empty, down to the last rat hole. Anyone with legs or even without, anyone who could at least manage to creep or crawl or drag himself along on crutches or on the leather seat of his pants, or roll himself along on a rolling board, or be supported, carried, or pulled along by a nurse, a son-in-law, a daughter, a grandchild, on litters or in a mackintosh sack; everyone, down to the last man, the last woman, the last child, the last old man, the last old hag not yet dead in some cellar was sucked out of his home and had flooded to Heldenplatz, Heroes’ Square, and was damming up into an enormous gruel of human flesh, thickening into a human dough strewn with particolored sugar and proliferating and fermenting and rising higher and higher: the horses of the rescuer from the Turks and of the victor of Aspern reared in vain to escape this human dough, which welled and swelled up to them and eventually covered them, a dreadful cake of millions of individual creatures—and it roared.
“The human dough palpitated and roared in short, gasping breaths at the icy blue sky stretching overhead: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .
“The individual voice might have been articulating the flower woman’s hysterical Siegheil! on the first day; but in millionfold accumulation, it was a fluttering, shallow-breathed roar. And it rose all the way to the celestial vault, which sent back a ruthlessly icy smile, and the roar reverberated back, echoed hauntingly through the empty city, which had now become its own charnel house: Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .
“And then it choked, whirling and retching, bellowing in a vomitatio that turned the innards inside out and burst into the cosmos . . .
“for far, far beyond the vast square, over there on the sandstone-colored façade of the imperial castle, where the thick black-and-white swastika spiders of the national insignia billowed restlessly in a tangle amid the bloody surge of flags, a microscopically tiny, mustard-brown manikin had stepped out on a tiny balcony and shoved his chest against the balustrade and raised a tiny arm for the Nazi salute and turned his minimal tiny head (now without the oversize doorman’s cap but merely smeared by the skewed ink-wiper of a strand of hair), turned it to and fro, slowly—a tiny mustard-brown particle, a single part in the proliferating human dough (think how infinitely tiny his snuffling pleasure-seeking mustache must have been!) . . .
•
“You must forgive me, but I was really standing very far away—or rather, hanging very far away from the manikin, hanging in a cluster of people, with Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma, on the shaft of a candelabrum beyond the vast square at the gates of the Volksgarten. We had not been able, alas, to conquer any better places in the human dough; Cousin Wolfgang, however, had been rewarded for hush-hush underground loyalty and, freezing in the white shirt and black-booted trousers of the national warrior, he was permitted to stand in the middle of his marching column barely a hundred and fifty yards away from the Führer and palpitate in the rhythmic Siegheil! of the mass beast—again in rhythm, I say. For after the mustard-brown manikin on the far, far balcony let the booming incense of the shouts rise to the heavens for a while, he lifted his hand, and the roar was now chanted as a stomping hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .
“And the manikin (he was now surrounded by a bronze-brown and blood-rippled general-gray retinue—and Cousin Wolfgang told us afterward he had even seen the blue eyes of the Führer surrounded by his henchmen), the manikin let the hee-ha boom into the heavens for a while and reverberate from the emptied Nibelung city (and Uncle Helmuth bellowed into my ear that such a concentrated, rhythmically organized discharge of sound from such a tremendous human aggregate had to transform itself into energy waves, which charged the willpower accumulator of the manikin up there on the balcony with unbelievable tension). And then the manikin lifted his hand again, and silence reigned—what am I saying: a column of silence descended from the heavens and pressed down upon the human cake and choked every sound . . .
“and the manikin began to speak (and his voice thundered through the aggregate of the many hundreds of loudspeakers suspended among the chestnut candles, and his voice was almost as tremendous as the roar of the mass monster),
/> “the manikin began to speak and he said, ‘I . . .’
“and whether it was the fault of the metallic tone of the loudspeakers or the rapscallion baritone of the manikin or his understandably profound emotion (for, after long years of struggle, he was back in his homeland for the first time, returning triumphally as her greatest son—recognized at last in his greatness and at last victorious)—
“in any event, this ‘I,’ this ‘Ich,’ came out as a shaky umlauted ‘Üch’—and was instantly reattacked by the driving hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha of the beast, a human tumor—
“and it was repeated lamentably: ‘Üch . . .’ And once again, the roaring predator’s breath of the monster, a human metastasis, pounced upon this yearning umlaut and yanked it down and into its panting hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .
“and the manikin courageously reiterated his lamentable ‘Üch . . .’
“the tension of the willpower accumulator did not yield, but the record evidently was scratched or cracked: the needle kept hopping in the same groove: ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . . ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha. ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . . ‘Üch . . .’ Hee-ha, hee-ha, hee-ha . . .
“and finally the manikin managed to blurt out, ‘Oy am sooo happppy. . .’
“But this was just so much blubbering: it sounded squashed and washed out and dull, like a fart in the bathtub: vanderLubbevander-LubbevanderLubbe . . .
“Yet the thing that rose grandly to the heavens, where it was eerily registered for the rest of my life, was that apocalyptic cry, rising heart-burstingly above everything else, that toad’s croak: ‘Üch . . .’—oh no, no majestic manifestation of sovereign self-assurance, but a fluttery call for help, which rose, forsaken, from the fermenting human dough: a cry for help from this very mass of people.
•
“The manikin had vanished from the balcony. And the human dough kept palpitating in its resonant, million-throated hee-ha, hee-ha, heeha. . .
“and flattened it again into a shallowly surging roar, for now the manikin was suddenly in the midst of the human dough and cutting through it.
“This time, he sliced through it like a shark’s fin, slowly and calmly—after all, he was entirely in his element. He stood upright and exposed in his bulletproof but open Mercedes, but neither the car nor the cops encrusting it were visible, they were kneaded into the fermenting dough. Only the manikin loomed above it and sliced closer, ringed by the roaring madness of ecstasy all around him. And he kept slicing closer through the human dough, closer and closer, toward me, until I could look into his eyes.
“He had put his oversize doorman’s cap on again and was snuffling morosely on his minimal mustache. Very slowly, like one of the automatons in the Prater that begin to move when you hit the bull’s eye on their bellies, he lifted and lowered his right arm, displaying his slightly curved palm. His left hand held tight to his belt buckle, as though he were afraid that his pants might fall down. He seemed withdrawn, pensive, and very solitary. And his eyes radiated, sky-blue and foolish.
•
“Eight years later I managed to witness another historic event, which, after this and several subsequent ones, more or less summed things up.
•
“At the defendants’ bench in the Nuremberg court, one defendant gets to his feet, eerily lizard-like, a saurian emerging from the primal ooze: Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s deputy. He lets his arm move up in order to be sworn in as a witness with a lamentably raised forefinger. It is impossible to say whether he is merely pretending to be crazy or really is crazy. If he’s just pretending, his act is brilliant, with a highly effective dramatic climax at just the right moment.
“It is the tormenting hour when the defendants make concluding statements before judgment. For nine months, this hour has been marked in all minds as a coming event. For nine months, they have looked forward to it impatiently. More and more hope has adhered to this hour. The hope that these final words of the defendants would make it clear what monsters and monstrosities have been on trial here. The hope that this leadership elite of the Third Reich would finally own up to being the true perpetrators of the crimes they are being tried for here: the destruction and conflagration of a continent; the rape of a civilization professing Christian principles; the bloody besmirching of the name of a once great nation until the end of history; the final annihilation of faith in the moral reliability of mankind.
“For nine months in Nuremberg, people have been waiting, in greater and greater despair, for one of the twenty-two prisoners at the bar to step forth from behind the mask of a banal average man, a mask that has made it impossible to comprehend that he—an irreproachable officer, an excellent office manager, a solicitous paterfamilias—had allowed what happened to happen, a mask that made it hard to believe it really had happened and had not just been dreamed or invented by sick minds. Nine months, prolonged more and more unbearably, with weeks of tedious readings of documents and interrogations of witnesses, days in which horror has become an everyday routine and finally a matter of the bleakest boredom. And throughout these nine months, one has looked forward to the moment when some dark confession, some satanic word, some perverse thought—expressed defiantly or involuntarily—might reveal that a drive, a desire for evil had been operating, and that the dreadful things exposed and testified to every day had not taken place only because they had not been prevented.
“Such a revelation would give the prosecutors and judges the security that righteous men feel toward insane criminals and monstrous evildoers. This trial has been put on too hastily, with too much governessy indignation and idealism and on a very flimsy legal basis, and the hoped-for revelations will make it look more like an act of justice and not just a superfluous humiliation, a process of revenge wreathed in embarrassing cant and carried out against inferior losers by men who just barely won, and who might be accused of the same crime tomorrow, since they too had failed to prevent what had happened from happening.
•
“However, the expectations are not realized. The evil won’t be grasped. The defendants of Nuremberg cannot be made to fit the proper dimension and proportion in regard to the crimes they are being tried for. No dolus can be demonstrated. Their crime is that of mediocrity.
•
“They are a representative average. The incarnation of everything that John and Stella hated about the bloody fucking middle classes; everything that today is hated, despised, and blamed by itself for the betrayal of the dream of man in the name of bourgeoisie. Their demonic quality is that of utter lack of imagination. Their perversity is the fundamentalist attitude toward rules and regulations. They merely did their duty. They remained true and loyal to their Führer through thick and thin and night and fog, that’s all. It never occurred to them that they were dangerously behind the times, and that in the world of relativity, they were practicing the unconditionality of the virtues of medieval vassals. As average Europeans, they drew their models from the dumping grounds of history. They learned how to obey in silence. They signed thousands of death warrants in their bureaucracy and were responsible for running it smoothly. That was their job, and that was what they got paid for. They can cite this fact. This too is law. It was valid for their accusers and judges too. They have nothing to reproach themselves for.
“They have insisted on this for nine months. Was it not naive to expect that now, at the last moment, they might admit to being artful scoundrels, and that, in their last words to the public, before a noose around their necks cuts off any possibility of further utterance, they might reveal something of the secret of how the evil nesting in souls erupts suddenly and leads to the annihilation of the world?
•
“One of the concluding speeches has already been given. Amid an embarrassed silence in the courtroom, Göring, the first to speak, has cast down a bit of nasty, bumptious cant. He was plainly nervous, annoyed and muddled. Even he, who, with his occasional vestiges of personalit
y and authority, had maintained something like the dignity of a gang boss and something like gallows humor, now seems pathetically second-rate and humanly shabby. His words are cheap rhetoric. Whatever the court decides, he sullenly barks, he leaves the actual and final judgment to history: the future youth of Germany will pass the just verdict on him and his comrades. Period. He sits down again, fat, pale, disreputable.
•
“If everything else had not been in this style, then his words would sound horrifying. The future youth of Germany is growing up out there, in the rubble fields beyond the walls of this courthouse, guarded like a fortress, beyond its barriers, beyond the heated rooms, all the food in the cafeteria, the fragrant cigarettes and manicured fingernails of the secretaries and all the grandiose fictions and abstract rules of the court proceedings. There, beyond this Middle Kingdom here, an entirely different reality prevails. The youth growing up out there was conceived in Quonset huts by more or less maimed fathers and dropsical mothers; no sooner could this youth crawl than it learned how to pilfer potatoes and risk its life gleaning coal chips on railroad embankments and filching cigarette butts from the fingers of Allied soldiers. In all likelihood, this new generation will create its myths independently of moralistic reflections on history. Yet here, in here, those words sound like dreadful cant. Embarrassing cant: they remind everyone that here, everything is cant and must remain cant. That the more and more threadbare, more and more brittle as-if—which was meant to apply the legal conception of the civil code in punishing the deliberate and generally perpetrated annihilation of entire human races—cannot end in anything other than cant.
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