Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  Carlo was well aware of the location of Gianfranco de Bosio and the Fedele group.

  A more complicated episode in the wartime career of the Bishop of Moneta involved the SS Gruppenfuhrer whom Reichsfuhrer Himmler had appointed to the task of supervising the transportation to the Reich and the disposition, in terms of slave labor and eventual liquidation, of the Jewish population of Northern Italy. This functionary was named Helmut Liebeneiner, a thin, bloodless, dyspeptic former schoolmaster from Westphalia. He had worked for a time as commandant of the camp at Oranienburg, was credited with the invention of a more vicious form of the Stahlruten than the SA, its first manipulators, had used, and was considered due for promotion. He was a busy man and intended his stay in Moneta to be brief but productive. All available German manpower was to be devoted not only to the rounding up of Jews but the public humiliation, before their own forced emigration to the slave camps of the Reich, of priests, nuns and monks. The stripping bare of a certain monastery load of Franciscans in a freezing piazza (it was early January) would disclose evidence of ritual circumcision. It was not yet certain what should be done with the Bishop of Moneta. He had on several occasions offered himself as victim at times of hangings in retaliation for terrorism, but his offer had not yet been accepted. Soon it might be.

  Allied bombing had severely damaged the railway line between Trento and Moneta, and Gruppenfuhrer Liebeneiner was compelled to travel from one town to the other in an Opel saloon. He did not enjoy motor travel, for his constitution was delicate and he was easily made carsick. Outside Mezzolombardo he was compelled to order his driver to stop a while, so that he might vomit at the side of the road. While he was still retching on a stomach now empty he was seized by partisans of the Fedele group. The driver was stabbed several times and then thrown into a wet ditch, though not before he had been stripped of his uniform. This, as well as the uniform of Gruppenfuhrer Liebeneiner, fitted tolerably a couple of partisans from Bolzano, whose first language was German. An Opel saloon arrived at nightfall in front of the bishop's palace in Moneta. With harsh German cries a bloody man in grey underwear was kicked out of the car and admitted to the palace. He had been expected. The counterfeit Gruppenfuhrer Liebeneiner went to the SS headquarters of the town, showed his papers, said there were no immediate plans for the rounding up of Judenscheiss in Moneta, then was heilhitlered off. Ironically, the counterfeit Gruppenfuhrer and his driver were shattered by grenades of the Diligenza group on the road outside Campolasta. Liebeneiner's papers were found on the otherwise unidentifiable body and Liebeneiner was written off. There were bloody reprisals, but the innocent of Moneta did not suffer.

  The real Liebeneiner was by now lodged in a chamber of the warren of cellars that lay, hacked out of rock, deep beneath the episcopal palazzo. He was not cold. He was dressed in six sets of the bishop's American woollen underwear, many pairs of thick Alpine stockings, fur-lined boots, and a beaver coat with hat to match. He had a mattress and eight blankets. He had a latrine bucket and a washbowl and towels. He had electric light and a select German library restricted to some of the greatest of the authors whom the Nazis had proscribed. The poems of Heine were there, and also the novels of the famous Austrian Jakob Strehler, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935. Liebeneiner was not permitted gas or electric heating, since he might use it as a weapon against his visitors or against himself, but Carlo brought in an electric fire whenever, which was for a total of about three hours a day, he came to talk to him. Carlo himself usually brought in also Liebeneiner's meals, which were as good as those times of privation allowed--a thick vegetable soup, roast boar or stewed rabbit or hare, the heartening wine of the region, grappa, no coffee since there was no coffee. We have to guess at their conversation, though we do not need to guess at Carlo's intention: he wished to convert a convinced Nazi into a free human being.

  His task was more difficult than he would ever have thought possible. It seemed to him that Nazi Germany had succeeded in producing a new type of human being, one that had abdicated the rights and duties of freedom of moral choice, that was capable of putting the abstraction of a political system before the realities of human life, that could obey without question, that was able, under orders, to perpetrate the most ghastly enormities totally without remorse, whose satisfactions were referred or collective, whose creed was mystical and insusceptible of any rational reduction. And yet this man Liebeneiner, who had after all taught the English language and analysed poems by Shelley and speeches by Shakespeare, who loved music and had wept at the death of his dog Bruno, who had a wife and daughter whom he claimed to adore and miss sorely, had to be considered one of God's creatures and capable of Christian redemption. Carlo and he spoke English.

  "You say you love your wife."

  "Yes. I adore her."

  "If it were to be established that she was of what is known as the Jewish race, would you still love and adore her?"

  "Of course not."

  "So a profound complex of human emotions, what even you might be willing to call a spiritual state of being, can be wiped out immediately at the behest of a spurious orthodoxy?"

  "I do not understand all your words. You speak too fast."

  "There is a line of Shakespeare you ought to know. 'Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.' Do you think this is true?"

  "I love my wife. She is not Jewish. She could never be shown to be Jewish. So I will always love her."

  "What does it mean--to be Jewish?"

  "To belong to a race that considers itself to be chosen by its tribal god to be above other peoples. It is a race with special physical and mental qualities. Its blood is different from Aryan blood. It has declared war on Aryan culture. And so it has to be destroyed."

  "Many ethnologists, free ethnologists, scholars unbound to a particular political orthodoxy, state that racial differences are very superficial. There is no such thing, for instance, as Jewish blood. All blood looks alike under the microscope."

  "This is not so."

  "You have had visual evidence of this?"

  "The ethnology of the Party says it is not so."

  "The Party is always right?"

  "Always."

  And so on. And, regularly, the question from Liebeneiner: what was to be done with him, when was he going to be thrown to the partisans to be torn to pieces shouting "Heil Hitler," why was he not put out of his misery now, what trickery was this of the bishop's?

  "No trickery. I believe humanity is above political ideology. I wish you to join the rest of your human brothers. You have nothing to fear. The war will end soon. Germany will be ruined, but a new Germany will arise. You will be a citizen of a free polity unanimated by false doctrine. But your career as a Nazi functionary is at an end. The Nazis are finished. God, man, is the entire world wrong except for Hitler's Reich? Is it not at least conceivable that a system built on the suppression of free thought and free speech, on racialism and genocide and the worship of power, might be an untenable system? Can you at least accept that possibility?"

  "You speak too fast but I think I understand. Can you accept that your Christian Church may be wrong?"

  "Every day I face that possibility. Every day I pray for faith."

  "I have faith too. And I do not have to pray for it."

  "The faith I represent has endured longer than yours. It is also faith in a spiritual essence, not in a mortal leader."

  "Adolf Hitler is as immortal as you believe your Christus to be. When he dies in the flesh as your Christus died he will be alive in the spirit. If Germany is destroyed by your Christians it will be only as land and fields and cities and people. But Germany as the great truth of the world cannot die. The Aryan truth cannot die."

  And so on and so on. Und so weiter. Meanwhile the replacement of Helmut Liebeneiner had arrived in the region, a certain Gruppenfuhrer Ernst Lamprecht. Lamprecht knew very well how the war was going and was perfunctory in his rounding up of Jews and cenobites. Moneta was gaining a bad
name for terrorism. The fascist mayor had been shot by partisans. A bomb had been chucked into the guardroom of a barracks taken over by the remnant of a Wehrmacht battalion, killing a sergeant, two corporals and three enlisted men. An SS firing squad, marching to its appointment with the innocent victims of reprisal in Piazza Clementi, was machine-gunned from a bombed villa. The partisans were taking control. Reinforcements were needed to stiffen the wavering Gothic Line further south. The occupying garrison heard rumours of a total German evacuation of Moneta and district. Lamprecht's polished jackboots were seen to be twinkling as he trotted to his Opel for a journey northwest. He wanted out. So did all the Germans. But one German remained, very safe, warm, well-fed, and obdurate.

  "I honestly," Carlo told him honestly, "don't know what to do with you." Liebeneiner sneered faintly but triumphantly. "But," Carlo said, "there's some truth in the view that only when a man is in severe danger or excruciating pain can his brain be jerked out of the torpor of an unquestioning conviction. Have you yourself, my son, ever participated in the administration of torture?"

  "I have ordered it, I have watched it."

  "And also massacre, or liquidation, or mass elimination, or whatever you people call it?"

  "It was a duty."

  "You felt no shock of horror, no sympathy, no remorse?"

  "It was a duty."

  "Well, God help me, I must do my duty too." Liebeneiner did not now sneer.

  He said, "I knew you would come to it. You preach mercy and kindness and tolerance and the other Jewish-Christian properties, but you find that you have to use cruelty in the end. It is in the history of your Church, with the Spanish Inquisition and the Saint Bartholomew Massacre and millions of martyrs burned in the name of your Christus." He spoke in German. So now did Carlo, who said: "Well, you should approve. It is the Nazi way."

  "It is in order when conducted against enemies of the Reich. It is not in order when used by inferior races against the master race."

  "Are you saying," Carlo said, "that I belong to a race inferior to yours? I speak an older Indo-European tongue or an Aryan tongue as you would have it. I have more claim in terms of history to belong to a superior civilization than do you. I am of the people of Virgil and Horace and Lucretius. Of Dante Alighieri and Leonardo and Michelangelo and--need I go on?"

  "Your civilization has been corrupted by Christianity."

  "My civilization is a product of Christianity. You Nazis have nothing except barks and yelps and marching songs. What you had as members of the Holy Roman Empire you have stupidly expunged. But there's not much point in appealing to your reason. It's your soul I'm after."

  To get at Liebeneiner's soul Carlo Campanati called in a couple of partisans, one of whom, Giuseppe Chinol, had worked in an abattoir, and the other, Enrico Tramontana, had made coffins. They were burly men but not naturally given to cruelty.

  Carlo said to Liebeneiner, "All this should be fairly simple. Your arm will be twisted to near breaking point behind your back. When the pain becomes intolerable I ask you to revile, curse, reject your Nazi faith and the monsters who represent it. Then the pain will stop. I will know and you will know that you will not mean what you say, scream rather. It will just be a device for stopping pain. But it will be something to hear the words of repudiation. For you as well as for me. It will be the first time you will have spoken them."

  "I will not speak them. You're a fool."

  "Oh, you'll speak them."

  And he did. Vomiting his breakfast into the latrine pail, sweating from pain and humiliation, Liebeneiner seemed to groan some ancient German prayer for forgiveness. Carlo listened kindly and with interest. "You're praying," he said. "To whom? Adolf Hitler? One of Wagner's deities? I do not know of any Teutonic tree god with the name Scheiss. But I should not be surprised if there is one."

  The Nazis had had little experience of martyrdom. On the fourth day of his reclamation treatment, with Giuseppe Chinol ready for the harmless but agonising twisting of his arm, Liebeneiner said surely the torture was unnecessary: he was quite ready to vilify his own faith and race and masters without torture. It was the formulae of apostasy that the bishop wanted after all, not the pain. It was not in his Christian office to want pain. Carlo shook his head sadly. He said, "If the pain is administered regularly, as it will be for as long as I think necessary, you will more and more find that you need to identify with some figure, real or mythical, who suffered even greater pain than your own. Such identification has always been necessary in the long history of religious persecution. It both exalts the suffering and eases it. Unfortunately you Nazis have no real mythology of persecution. Horst Wessel? Nothing. Thugs punched in the jaw in Nazi-Communist street fights? Hitler in jail? No. A Nazi in pain is in a situation for which his faith has not prepared him. You see your difficulty. Bene, Giuseppe. Adesso comincia la tortura."

  Liebeneiner screamed. "I hate Hitler, the Nazi creed is inhuman, the Germans are not the master race, for Christ's sake stop it."

  Giuseppe Chinol desisted. "What did you say then?" Carlo asked.

  "Bastard. Filthy barbarous swine. Filthy fucking barbarous decadent bastard."

  "Words," Carlo said, "you must have heard from the beaten-up opponents of your own regime. You see how it's possible to learn even from people you despise. I note that in your transport you called out the name Christus."

  "It was just a noise. It had no. I have to vomit."

  "Vomit, my son." And while Liebeneiner retched Carlo looked sickly through a deck of large-size glossy photographs. They were part of the record of Nazi infamy in the work and death camps. The Nazis themselves had compiled this record. Their philosophy told them that there was no infamy in it. So perish all the enemies of the beneficent darkness. The bundle of photographs had been left behind in the house on the Via Giuseppe Verdi which had served as headquarters for the SS. It was a spiritual document. It had been put into the hands of the spiritual leader of the community, who now puffed one of the rank last of his stored Tuscan cigars. "I'll leave these with you to look over," Carlo said when pale sweating Liebeneiner sat again on the edge of his cot. "You'll feel something you haven't felt before--a certain kinship with some of these victims. Of course, your sufferings have been nothing in comparison with theirs. The war, by the way, is as good as over. The American Fifth Army is in Milan. The Russians draw near to Berlin. You may not wish to believe me. But if I set you free now you will certainly be torn to pieces by Italian citizens who have liberated themselves from your nauseous yoke. Shall I set you free? Ah, so you believe me. Consider yourself fortunate to be in my charge. I assure you that you shall not leave it until you are a changed man. I will come to see you again this afternoon. Bringing the good Enrico with me. A fine strong boy who would not normally wish to hurt a fly. Ah, the things you people have made us do."

  Or words to that effect. It was only after a full month of beneficent torture that Liebeneiner began to see that his place was with the victims and that a philosophy of brutal overlordship availed him nothing in his sufferings. He had a vision of Adolf Hitler crucified--naked, with a creampuff paunch, quiff and little moustache intact, crying out Eli Eli lama sabacthani? The image was, of course, absurd. Hitler was by definition not one of the crucifiable. Yet he, Liebeneiner, faithful servant of the Fuhrer, had been granted by the Fuhrer no metaphysical or theological defence against agony of the body and humiliation of the soul. The Fuhrer had let him down. By accident Giuseppe Chinol broke his arm. He swooned. The bishop was extravagantly penitent. Dr. Praz was brought in to set the arm and bind it. There was no more torture for a time. Carlo waited patiently for Liebeneiner to experience a liberating dream. He knew that a change of heart was often signalled by a sequence of nightmares culminating in a sleeping vision of hell that turned into a revelation of light. The trouble with Liebeneiner's soul was that it was not much of a soul. It was a soul made for a simplistic philosophy like that of the Nazis. And yet it was a human soul that had issued from the hand of God.
God loved his own creation. He loved Liebeneiner. All he asked of Liebeneiner was such reciprocal love (and there was love in his name) as he was capable of giving, gratitude for the gift of moral freedom, a minimal charity to others, humility. Carlo came every morning with Liebeneiner's breakfast--goat's milk, mineral water, bread, jam--and asked him about his dreams. One morning Liebeneiner said that he had dreamed he was dead.

  "Ah. You are, of course, officially dead."

  "I saw my dead body. It was on a great battlefield. I looked down on my own body and thousands of others. I wept."

  "You wept for your own body or for all the bodies?"

  "I don't know. I wept. The bodies were of my comrades dead in battle."

  "You couldn't see that they were your comrades. They were just the bodies of dead men. And yet they were your comrades."

  "There were women too. Naked. Everybody was naked. I could not stop weeping. When I woke up my eyes were wet."

  Carlo looked at him kindly. Liebeneiner had not been permitted to shave since his delivery to the episcopal cellars. Nor had his hair been cut. He had been given regular warm water for washing and did not smell, except for a kind of spiritual stench that Carlo had found emanating from all the Nazis he had met, even when they were meticulously bathed and cologned. Evil and stupidity both had their distinctive odors, but it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Liebenejner did not now smell too bad. With his unshorn hair and beard, which were dark brown greying, he could have passed for the Nazi idea of a Jewish intellectual. "You'll be going home soon," Carlo said. "Somehow. MYnster's a long way away. And there's not much left of Minster. I pray your wife and daughter are still alive. Think what a joy it will be for them to see a husband and father resurrected from the tomb."

  "Is the war over?"

  "Very nearly. Your Hitler wasn't much of a prophet, was he? A thousandyear Reich, indeed. It was a stupid dream. What other dreams have you to tell me?"

  "I dreamed it was Christmas and I was a boy. And there was the Christchild in the manger."