Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Embarrassed silence and uncontrollable agitated movements as after an unpleasant coup de théâtre. S. huffs uneasily. Christa’s blue lights tinkle solo. Her little mouth is disdainfully shut. Once and for all.

  • • •

  At night, took out Nagel’s Craterland again and read it into the gray dawn. Some depictions (returning home) excellent. Very vivid scenes of combat. Fundamentally different from what I experienced under the hail of aerial bombardment: the illusion of being able to influence fate. (“The wise man smiles.”) His depiction of people, formulaic; of human relations, disarmingly naive. I found myself getting angry about it. I had expected him to produce something better than what I could have done better, even with my left hand. In one of my ugly moods I wrote a poem about Astrid von Bürger. The tombstone of our friendship. All the more shameful because it’s a shame it’s over.

  • • •

  Draft:

  He’s been invited to dinner at Witte’s. The reason why is undoubtedly Christa: she and her East Elbian entourage are an extremely convenient avenue for Witte to procure an entrée into the Holstein aristocracy, possibly even to Bismarck’s descendants in Friedrichsruh (“civil pride before the thrones of power!”). And in fact, among the guests is—along with Rönnekamp and just as queer—a Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel, doubly interesting because on his mother’s side, he comes from a patrician Hamburg family (the Timermanns, with two m’s, as opposed to the proletarian Timmermanns with three). Everyone else present is only family. A niece among them deserves special mention, a widow (husband fell early, in Poland) with a pair of fourteen-year-old twin daughters. Witte, magnanimously presiding at table, drones out praise for the “valiant commitment” with which the mother got herself and her children through the difficulties of the war and the still greater difficulties of the postwar years without masculine protection and support, all the while seeing to it that her daughters received a perfect upbringing. “To have achieved what you did, my dear Helga, you owe wholly and completely to the ironclad rigor with which my beloved sister, Wilma here” (she sits facing him at the other end of the dining table as ersatz lady of the house, bolt upright, ice-gray bob, a schoolmarm’s steel-rimmed spectacles) “raised you, according to family tradition, in the spirit of our unforgettable mother, your grandmamma” (that presser of gentlemen’s fine under-garments), “who never let us get away with anything either. If even the smallest thing was not as it should be, she said: Children OUT!—” The word isn’t yet fully articulated, its final, explosive t yet to sound, when the twins leap up and start to leave the room in lockstep. Everyone calls them back amid general hilarity. No, no, Uncle Witte didn’t mean you (this time). He was only showing how things were when he was a kid. Obediently the twins sit back down.

  There are other children at the table, the youngest among them showing signs that the traditional rigor of a Witte upbringing was not as ironclad as it had been two generations ago. A particularly cheeky little miss insists on telling them a riddle. Witte—obviously it’s a favorite niece of his—gives his permission. The child blares, “What’s the difference between a squirrel and our head teacher, Herr Müller?” Everyone pretends to ponder this question seriously; at last they ask for the answer. The girl merrily crows, “The squirrel has a long, red appendage and Herr Müller doesn’t.” A second of shock, embarrassed silence, nervous clearing of throats; then someone (probably Rönnekamp, glancing imploringly at Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel): “Can anyone fouch for zat?” The girl’s mother feels called upon to reply with dignity, “The child means on the backside, of course.”

  For dinner there’s eel soup, a Hamburg specialty. Piping hot and fatty, it’s prepared only in the summer, unfortunately. Served with Rhine wine. Conversation wanders from one topic to another—that is, everything that comes up here or there is taken up by Witte and dispensed with apodictically. The Economic Miracle, for example: Rönnekamp (cynically) voices the opinion that it could be attributed to the Allies’ stupidity. “What did you expect? If you bomb a country flat and then equip” (he says “eekvip”) “its rebuilt industries with the most modern machinery, it’ll outstrip other countries with their out-of-date paraphernalia.” Witte sends a shot across his bow, “But without our German work ethic it wouldn’t be possible. Machinery isn’t everything. What counts is human material. I’d like to see if others could do what we’ve done if we’d ironed them flat.” Once, Witte’s sister Wilma joins the conversation. They’re talking about the revival of horse shows. Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel describes with indignant giggles the outfits of the farmers’ sons who jump the course these days (and admittedly, perform equestrian miracles) instead of the gentlemen jockeys of bygone days. All the more shocking are their violations of etiquette, especially when one is trying to rebuild social life. “Instead of a riding stock, these people wear white bow ties as if they were going to a farmer’s wedding. And then, you don’t see any properly made boots anymore. These people wear rubber boots with their red coats!” Lying in wait, his giggle breaks forth with a highly indignant snort. One of Witte’s younger nieces, obviously emancipated, declares that boots are a Freudian symbol. “Boots? A Freudian zymbol? How zo?” asks Rönnekamp incredulously. Aunt Wilma’s stern warning can be heard from the lower end: “Not at the table, if you please!”

  (Attention! Abel!)

  Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—is also brought up. Now Rönnekamp gets on his soapbox, frequently seconded and supported by Witte. For all his affected Sherlock-Holmesian coldness, even Rönne can’t completely conceal his indignation. It is directed at the falsification of history now under way with the apparently universal assent “of every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” It’s not a question of the fact that every single German claims never to have been a Nazi, although the number of former Party members stands in “appzolutely appaling contradiction” to that claim; that, says Rönne, is all too transparently an act of cowardice and lack of character, in a word, of opportunism, and nobody believes it anyway. It is indeed a historically misleading falsification. What caused it—and, if one will, what even excuses it—was the depiction of National Socialism as being from the beginning the embodiment of everything evil and inhuman. At first, National Socialism did not appear to be a criminal movement at all. On the contrary, it was full of promise. (Witte: “Absolutely right!”) The violent acts of the early years were just part of the times. The whole epoch was a priori inclined to violence. So bands of marauding SA men beating up opponents were the excesses of a rowdiness potentially lurking in any human community and especially virulent at that time. If their violence took place with the overtly malicious assent of many people, that was attributable to a population generally coarsened and embittered by the aftereffects of the First World War; the collapse after 1918 was much more harrowing than after 1945. “Back then, after the shock of the first genocide, the old order was destroyed from the ground up.” (Interjection by Witte: “Very true! The citizenry was completely disoriented!”) “In the meantime, from 1919 to 1939” (Note: John says those years were just a ceasefire in the same conflict), “no stability was created. On the contrary: every damaged institution that continued to exist was robbed of its last shred of”—shrett off—“credibility.” Again, Witte agrees: “Totally congruent with what I’ve always said.” “It’s patently obvious,” Rönne continues, “that in such an epoch of uncertainty and the re- and devaluation of all values, the promise of order had to strike a spark, no matter who claimed to produce that order. Of course, the Reds didn’t do that. On the contrary: their program was to continue the destruction of the old capitalistic system. So only the conservative forces remained.” (Witte: “Just like today!”) With the diabolical element at the heart of every political manipulation, Rönne says, the National Socialists understood just how to present even the excesses of their goon squads as a service to the restoration of order.

  With cutting irony, Rönne defends himself against the suspicion of being a fellow-tr
aveler: “Now you can probably guess that I had no reason to love the Nazis—although” (a coquettish sidelong glance at Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel, mother a Timermann with two m’s) “there were some pretty gorgeous boys in those chic uniforms, especially in the SS . . .” (General chuckles of understanding, tactfully suppressed: when the lock of hair makes the man, you have to speak the truth in dulcet tones.) But with a sudden return to intellectual seriousness, Rönne continues in an almost passionate voice, “What people today suppress” (“Vat beeble today subbress”—as Rönne gets more involved, you forget his knotty Baltic accent) “is Nazism’s irresistible seductiveness in its early stages. Its timeliness.” Now Rönne is speaking with the razor-sharp clarity of a master sleuth analyzing a case. His audience is enthralled by how his incisors drop shut and get readjusted. “Besides their idiotic party platform consisting of nothing but half a dozen barely comprehensible slogans like ‘smashing the feudal system’ and similar nonsense, the Nazis were ready to catch every current of the times. Meanwhile and quite independent of them, the promise of a new world order was in the air in any case. The Bolsheviks were promising one too. In this general proliferation of ideologies and utopias, the Nazis had all sails hoisted for every wind, especially the wish for a reform of every aspect of life, from health sandals to Teutonism, from tarot card reading to phrenology, from Coué’s autosuggestion to Sylvio Gesell’s ‘shrinking money.’ Everything and everybody needed to be—and wanted to be—reformed, rethought, renewed—it’s not as though that was dictated to the people from above.” (Witte: “Exactly. Nobody forced us into anything!!!”) “It took root and thrived in everyone’s mind.” The epoch’s expectations of life and hope for the future were virulent in every individual. And despite the obvious trend toward mysticism and arcana in this evocation of the future, the belief in the rational progress of technology remained unshaken. It was technology above all that would liberate humanity from the drudgery of their former blind enslavement to work.” Rönne waxes lyrical. “It’s almost impossible today to imagine the strength of that trust in the coming of a new world era. Today, we no longer harbor any hope. Quite the contrary: we look bleakly into the future. Especially threatening is the promise technology holds. Even optimists live from one day to the next as if traveling through a tunnel: it’s possible we’ll emerge, but no telling when. In the years after 1918, it was utterly different, and you’ve got to grant that fact to the poor stiffs who followed the pied piper Adolf Hitler. The so-called weltanschauung of the Nazis, their philosophy and ideology, was larded with promises that played to the needs of those poor saps. Because they suffered privation during the inflation—déclassé, plundered, unemployed, starving—and intellectually starving because the traditional ideas meant nothing to them anymore—they wanted to take part in the creation of a new reality from which everlasting injustice and everlasting suffering were excluded.”

  Rönne now turned to me. “In your gatherings in our host’s garden house, dear chap, you and your young friends—especially your fraternal buddy Nagel—used to knock together all sorts of utopian models. And if all that was—if you’ll pardon the expression!—almost touchingly irrelevant, it wasn’t just on account of the hopelessness that followed the terrible disappointment every German—Nazi sympathizer or not—had to feel after 1945 at the collapse of the general expectation of salvation. It emerged from the spirit of the times as well. It wasn’t just the Germans who had been bled dry, it was the entire world, the times. You and everyone around you were too anemic to produce anything new from the German world lying in ruins. You didn’t lack for noble intentions or spirit, just for an impulse from the zeitgeist. It had been the zeitgeist of the still-young century that like a bowstring had launched the arrow of National Socialism, and although its tip was poisoned and flew into the eye of the bowman, the audacity at the heart of the ideology had something infectious. You’re going to say it was a cynically misunderstood Nietzscheism, exaggerated to the tipping point. Agreed. A mortally dangerous field of thought to enter, but watered by arch-Occidental springs, out of a need for order and purity on the highest intellectual level. Already expressed, if you will, by the wishful thinking—widespread at the time—about reviving knightly orders—what Ernst Jünger and Hermann Hesse have in common: the dream of selecting the most highly developed intellects to brew up an alchemical concoction, the essence of all Western thought, out of which would precipitate the philosophers’ stone, a monastic elite of unheard-of intellectual freedom” (Witte’s interjection: “Right! I’m with you one hundred percent!”), “which elite, however,” (with subtle sarcasm, Rönnekamp purses his razor-sharp detective lips while his teeth remain obediently in place) “—and this reveals the cloven hoof of Nazi thought—would forgo any pretention to power. Obviously not the case with the Nazis.” (Witte, subdued: “That’s for sure!”) “But even the blatant thirst for power—i.e., in a conception of power as a necessity in the service of an ethos—was a temptation that was hard to resist. The individual in the onslaught of the masses: that was the idea, to be defended against the dissolution of individuality in the distorting mirror of Leninism. The Nazis wanted to do something audacious: salvage the individual in Socialism.”

  Witte’s sister clears her throat as if to suggest that the monologue was depressing the mood of this social gathering.

  “And the decisive thing,” Rönne continues in Baltic indifference, “the thing that distinguished the forerunners of the National Socialist ideologues from the crude revivalists of early Christian ideas in the era of mass culture, was their aestheticism. Even the promise of order—from the highest intellectual level of the last of the knightly orders right down to the trivial obsession with the political and moral housecleaning of corruption and perversion and every variety of dissident and minority—all that had more of an aesthetic than a moral character. Aestheticism was a basic characteristic of the epoch’s sense of the world. ‘Strength through Joy,’ ‘Joy through Beauty,’ etc., slogans everyone endorsed; just think of the choreographed masses in Moscow as well as Nuremberg: pretty, club-swinging lads and maidens—the new humanity was blond, strong, and beautiful. The unbeautiful was denied the right to exist. Hence the silent agreement of just about everyone on the extermination of the Jews.” (Witte again, robustly: “Jawohl! That’s how it was!”) Rönne smiles and continues. “But these are subtleties that the flat-footed, polemical ignorance of present-day historians doesn’t get into. Both sides work to falsify what happened, both the prosecutorial standpoint of former pacifists and the guilt-denying standpoint of the Germans themselves. Both pillory the evil of National Socialism as an ideological project and not, as would be more appropriate, its execution by the filthiest of the minds it swept up. Hitler, Göring, Goebbels at the tip of a pyramid of criminals and ghouls, based on the worst petit bourgeois resentments—that’s not the only thing that’s meant by National Socialism. And that’s why I wish someone would correct the conception widespread here and everywhere: it wasn’t the Nazis who were responsible, but the greatest enemy of all humanity: stupidity. The Germans weren’t led astray by a group of conspiratorial villains like children by the Pied Piper of Hamelin; instead, the German philistine with his well-known musicality composed the most sublime, poisonous, and seductive flutings of the zeitgeist into a march, and marched off to his own perdition in stalwart lockstep. A perdition, by the way” (with an eloquent gesture that comprehends the sumptuously set table), “that ironically enough seems to be turning into salvation.”

  Awkward silence around the table, broken after a while by Witte’s sister Wilma with the brittle sentence, “I don’t think you can call Hermann Göring a filthy mind.” (His peccadillo: art theft. Speaks for his good taste, doesn’t it?)

  • • •

  Report from Nuremberg:

  Sentencing. Although everyone knows what the verdict will be (and the rationale for it will be much more important for the significance of the proceedings), tension is at a peak. All security pr
ecautions have been doubled. Every entrance and exit to the Fürth courthouse is being guarded by heavily armed units. Fürth’s Palace of Justice is bristling with weapons as a bulwark against an attack by unarmed, edematous Germans. The nucleus of the place, the small hearing room in the center of the gigantic hive, is full to capacity with VIPs from every faction. The accused are fetched from their cells individually and led in through a barred walkway like big cats into the caged ring of a big top. First comes Göring. He’s wearing the togs of demobbed camp kapos and Gestapos: a civilian jacket, jodhpurs, and high boots—but the jacket’s a festive silver-gray. The general field marshal’s trouser stripe on his jodhpurs is a bloody red. If it were not so full to bursting, his double-breasted jacket would look as elegant as a gigolo’s. His boots are as soft as a Krakowiak dancer’s. (Eerily enough, it’ll become the standard getup of the black marketeers who survived the death camps.) Göring enters the room as self-confidently as ever, emanating unmistakable irony. Relaxed and in mocking expectation, he looks toward the judicial bench across the room where Englishmen and Americans in carelessly donned robes, Frenchmen in the bat-wing sleeves of Daumier’s lawyers, and Russians in field jackets with epaulets stiff as ironingboards are staring at him as if he were a poisonous insect. Lord Justice Lawrence rises to read the sentence. Göring puts on the headphones that connect him to the glass-enclosed chatterbox of simultaneous interpreters. Lord Justice Lawrence reads a long, formulaic sentence that ends with the words “. . . condemned to death by hanging.” The last word “hanging” rings out in the deathly stillness like the crack of a whip. Göring shrugs his shoulders and points to the headphones. Some disturbance in the line: the sentence has not gotten through to him. One of the guards standing next to the defendants’ benches in a mirror-bright helmet and parade uniform hurries to fix the defect with his praetorian mitts sheathed in white cotton gloves. After some fumbling around he roughly prompts Göring to listen better through the headphones. Lord Justice Lawrence repeats the sentence. Again, the words “death by hanging” snap through the packed room where everyone is holding their breath, and Göring—by now obviously amused—again shrugs his shoulders: he still can’t hear anything. With a grin, he hands the headphones to the praetorian guard. The hulking fellow kneels down, red in the face, and fiddles with the cords under the bench, then gives the headphones back to the recalcitrant Göring, still deaf to his death sentence. For the third time, Justice Lawrence repeats the sentence, “. . . condemned to death by hanging.” Now Göring dispenses with his irony. The equipment is still not working and as a former pilot, he’s interested in finding the problem; he kneels down next to the perturbed guard and fiddles with the connections himself. As the nerves of all those present are just about to snap, with the patience of Job Lord Justice Lawrence reads once more, “. . . condemned to death by hanging!”—and behold, Göring’s intervention has worked. The connection is restored. The news has reached him, the headphones have functioned. And Göring beams. The news has reached him: “condemned to death by hanging!” He pulls off the headphones, slams them onto the bench, turns on his heel, and disappears down the walkway. Next, please.