I’ve watched those films again. No question that Nazi militants were brought in from all over the country, while dissidents and Jews were arrested – it’s a handpicked crowd. But still, those are Austrians there, not a throng of extras. Those joyful young girls with their blonde braids are indeed there, as is the couple who shouts while beaming – oh, all those smiles, all those waves! The banners quivering as the motorcade passes! Not a single shot was fired. How sad!
Things had not gone entirely as planned, of course: the ‘best army in the world’ had just demonstrated that it was still no more than an assemblage of metal, hollow sheet metal. And yet, despite the lack of preparation; despite the defective equipment; despite the fact that, not long before, the zeppelin Hindenburg had burst into flames while docking in New Jersey, killing thirty-five passengers; despite the fact that most generals of the Luftwaffe still knew little about air combat aviation, and that Hitler appointed himself supreme military commander without any experience – despite all this, the newsreels of the time give the impression of a relentless machine. In these newsreels, in cleverly framed sequences, we see German tanks advancing amid jubilant crowds. Who could imagine that they’d broken down only a short while before? The German army seemed to march on the path to victory, a simple victory, paved with flowers and smiles. Suetonius tells us that the Roman emperor Caligula had similarly transported his legions to the North, and that during a momentary lapse or giddy spell he lined them up facing the sea and ordered them to gather shells. Watching the French newsreels, one gets the impression that the German soldiers had spent their day collecting smiles.
Sometimes it seems that what happens to us was written in a newspaper that is already several months old, or is a bad dream we’ve already had. Barely six months later, six months after the Anschluss, on 29 September 1938, we find ourselves back in Munich for the famous conference. And as if Hitler’s appetites could be sated, they gave away Czechoslovakia. The French and English delegations went to Germany. They were well received. In the great hall, the chandelier tinkled; the crystal pendants, like wind chimes ruffled by the breeze, played their aerial score above the heads of the bogeymen. Daladier’s and Chamberlain’s teams tried to wrest from Hitler a few paltry concessions.
We shower History with abuse, claiming that it makes the protagonists of our torments strike poses. We never see the grimy hem, the yellowed tablecloth, the cheque stub, the coffee ring. We only get to see events from their good side. Still, if we look closely, on the photo showing Chamberlain and Daladier in Munich beside Hitler and Mussolini, just before signing the agreement, the English and French prime ministers do not look very pleased with themselves. Nevertheless, they signed. After rolling down the streets of Munich under the cheers of the masses, who welcomed them with Nazi salutes, they signed. And we can see them in the newsreels: Daladier, chapeau on his head, looking a little sheepish, saying hello to the camera; Chamberlain, hat in hand, with a broad grin. That tireless ‘artisan of peace’, as the newspapers of the time dubbed him, stands on the steps, for all black-and-white eternity, between two rows of Nazi soldiers.
Meanwhile, the enthusiastic announcer intones nasally that the four heads of state, Daladier, Chamberlain, Mussolini, and Hitler, driven by the same devotion to peace, are posing for posterity. History reveals the deplorable meaninglessness of this commentary and discredits all future news reports. They say that Munich inspired great hope, but those who say it don’t know what words mean. They speak a utopian language in which, supposedly, all words are equal. Not long afterward, Édouard Daladier, on Radio Paris, 1648 metres (182 kHz) on the longwave, after a few notes of music, spoke. He was convinced of having saved peace in Europe: that’s what he said. But he didn’t believe it for a second. ‘Those morons, if only they knew!’ he apparently muttered as he got off the plane to the cheering crowds. This great jumble of misery, in which horrific events are already taking shape, is dominated by a mysterious respect for lies. Political manoeuvring tramples facts. And the declarations of our leaders will soon be blown away like tin roofs in a hurricane.
THE DEAD
In order to sanction the annexation of Austria, they held a referendum. They arrested the few remaining dissidents. From their pulpits, priests called upon the faithful to vote Nazi, and the churches bedecked themselves in swastika banners. Even the former leader of the Social Democrats endorsed a ‘yes’ vote. There were practically no dissenting voices. Ninety-nine point seven-five per cent of Austrians voted in favour of incorporation into the Reich. And while the twenty-four gents from the beginning of our tale, the high priests of German industry, were already studying how to carve up the country, Hitler had made what we could call a triumphant tour of Austria. On the occasion of that fantastic homecoming, he had been cheered everywhere he went.
And yet, just before the Anschluss, there were more than one thousand seven hundred suicides in a single week. Soon, reporting a suicide in the press would become an act of resistance. A few journalists still dared to write ‘sudden demise’, but swift reprisals quickly silenced them. They looked for alternative, safe expressions. And so, the actual number of those who took their lives remains unknown, as do their names. The day after the annexation, we could still read these four obituaries in the Neue Freie Presse: ‘On 12 March, in the morning, Alma Biro, civil servant, aged 40, slit her wrists with a razor and turned on the gas. At the same moment, the writer Karl Schlesinger, aged 49, shot himself in the head. A housewife, Helene Kuhner, aged 69, also committed suicide. That afternoon, Leopold Bien, civil servant, 36, leapt from a window. We are unaware of his motives for this act.’ This bland annotation is shameful. For on 13 March, no one could have been unaware of their motives. No one. Moreover, it’s not about individual motives, but about a single, shared cause.
Alma, Karl, Leopold, or Helene might have seen, from their windows, the Jews being dragged along the streets. They would only have needed to glimpse those whose heads had been shaved in order to understand. They would only have needed to see the man on whose head a Tau cross had been painted, the cross of the Crusaders, which Chancellor Schuschnigg had worn on his lapel just one hour earlier. Even before this, it would have been enough to hear it, to guess it, to intuit it, to imagine it. It would have been enough to see the smiles on people’s faces in order to know.
And what difference does it make whether, that morning, Helene did or didn’t see the Jews down on all fours amid the bellowing crowds, forced to scrub the pavements under the mocking eyes of passers-by? What difference whether or not she witnessed the vile scenes of them being made to eat grass? Her death expresses only what she felt, the great sorrow, the hideous reality, her disgust with a world that she had seen display itself in all its murderous nudity. For ultimately, the crime was already there, in the little pennants, the smiles on girls’ faces, in that entire perverted spring. And even in the laughter, in that unchained fervour, Helene Kuhner must have felt the hatred and the giddiness. Behind those thousands of silhouettes and faces, she must have glimpsed, in a terrifying rush, the millions of prisoners. She must have divined, behind the horrifying jubilation, the granite quarry of Mauthausen. And then she saw herself dying. In the smiles of the young women of Vienna, on 12 March 1938, in the midst of the shouting crowds, in the fresh scent of forget-me-nots, in the heart of that weird mirth and all that fervour, she must have experienced a black grief.
Streamers, confetti, pennants. Whatever became of those young girls and their wild enthusiasm? What became of their smiles, their carefree faces so earnest and joyful? And all that jubilation from March 1938? If today one of them were suddenly to recognize herself on-screen, what would she think? Our true thoughts have always been secret, since the beginning of time. We think in apocopes, apnoeas. Underneath, life flows like sap, slow and subterranean. But now that wrinkles have gnawed at her mouth, made her eyelids iridescent, dampened her voice – her eyes skimming over surfaces, between the television spitting out its archival images and the yogurt,
while the clueless nurse goes about her business with never a thought for the World War, the generations having succeeded one another like sentinels in the dark night – how does she separate the youth she lived, the scent of fruit, that breathless rise of sap, from the horror? I don’t know. And in her retirement home, amid the insipid odours of ether and iodine, in her birdlike fragility, does the wrinkled, aged child – recognizing herself in the film clip, in the cold light of the TV screen, she who has survived the war, the ruins, the American or Russian occupation, with her slippers trailing on the linoleum, her warm liver-spotted hands falling slowly from the rattan armrests when the nurse opens the door – does she sigh sometimes, extracting the painful memories from their formaldehyde?
Alma Biro, Karl Schlesinger, Leopold Bien, and Helene Kuhner did not live that long. Before throwing himself from the window, on 12 March 1938, Leopold must have confronted the truth several times, then the shame. Wasn’t he, too, an Austrian? And hadn’t he supported, for years, the grotesque farce of National Catholicism? When two Austrian Nazis rang at his door that afternoon, the young man’s face suddenly looked very old. For some time, he had been seeking new words that would express something other than authority and violence; but he couldn’t find any. He spent entire days wandering the streets, fearful of meeting a hostile neighbour, a former colleague who would look away. The life he loved had ceased to exist. Nothing was left: neither his pride in his work, which he took pleasure in doing well, nor his frugal lunch, which he ate while people-watching on the steps of an old building. Everything had been destroyed. And so, on that afternoon of 12 March, when his buzzer rang, his thoughts enveloped him in fog, and for an instant he heard that faint inner voice that always resists long intoxications of the soul. He opened the window and jumped.
In a letter to Margarete Steffin, with a feverish sarcasm that time and post-war revelations make unbearable, Walter Benjamin relates how they had suddenly cut off the gas for Vienna’s Jews: their consumption was costing the gas company too much money. The biggest consumers were precisely the ones who never paid their bills, he adds. At that point, Benjamin’s letter to Margarete takes a strange turn. We’re not sure we’ve understood correctly. We hesitate. Its meaning floats amid the branches, in the pale sky, and when it becomes clear, suddenly forming a little pool of sense out of nowhere, it becomes one of the saddest and most insane statements of all time. For if the Austrian gas company refused to provide service to the Jews, it was because they were killing themselves, preferably by gas, and leaving the bills unpaid. I’ve wondered if this was true – the times gave rise to so many horrors, in the name of senseless pragmatism – or just a joke, a ghastly joke, invented by gloomy candlelight. But whether a bitter joke or reality, no matter: when humour tips into such darkness, it speaks the truth.
In the face of such adversity, things lose their names. They recede from us. And we can no longer speak of suicide. Alma Biro did not commit suicide. Karl Schlesinger did not commit suicide. Leopold Bien did not commit suicide. And neither did Helene Kuhner. None of them did. Their deaths cannot be linked to their mysterious individual sorrows. We can’t even say that they chose to die with dignity. No. They were not ravaged by private despair. Their pain was something collective. And their suicides a crime committed by someone else.
WHO ARE ALL THOSE PEOPLE?
Sometimes a single word is enough to make a sentence take shape, plunge us into reverie. Time is unaffected by this; it carries on, heedless of the surrounding chaos. And so, in the spring of 1944, Gustav Krupp, one of the high priests of industry who, as we saw at the beginning of our story, made his offering to the Nazis and backed the regime from the outset, was dining with his wife, Bertha, and eldest son, Alfried, heir to the Konzern. It was their last evening in the Villa Hügel, the vast palace that was their residence and the seat of their power. By now, things had taken a bad turn. Everywhere, German forces were retreating. The Krupps had resigned themselves to giving up their domain and heading for the mountains, far from the Ruhr, to the cold white peace of Blühnbach, where the bombs wouldn’t find them.
Suddenly, old Gustav rose from his chair. It had been some time since he’d lapsed into hopeless imbecility. Incontinent and senile, he hadn’t said a word in years. But that evening, in the middle of dinner, he suddenly jerked to his feet, hugging his napkin to his chest in a gesture of terror; he pointed a long, bony finger towards the back of the room, just behind his son, and murmured, ‘But who are all those people?’ His wife turned her head, his son looked around. They were very afraid. The corner was submerged in darkness. It was as if the shadows were moving, and silhouettes were crawling in the blackness. But it wasn’t ghosts that had frozen his blood, not figments or phantoms, but actual men, with actual faces that stared out at him. He saw enormous eyes, figures appearing from the dark. Strangers. He was terrorstricken. He stood there, petrified. The servants froze. The curtains were like ice. And at that moment, he had the impression of truly seeing, as he’d never seen before. And what he saw, what slowly came from the shadows, were tens of thousands of corpses, slave labourers, the ones the SS had supplied for his factories. They emerged from the void.
For years, he had borrowed deportees from Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen Auschwitz, and many other camps besides. Their life expectancy was a few months. The prisoners who managed to avoid infectious diseases literally died of starvation. But Krupp wasn’t the only one to hire such services. His tablemates from the meeting of 20 February 1933 took equal advantage; behind all the criminal enthusiasm and political posturing, they did very well. The war had been profitable. Bayer took on labourers from Mauthausen. BMW hired in Dachau, Papenburg, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Buchenwald. Daimler in Schirmeck. IG Farben recruited in Dora-Mittelbau, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Mauthausen, and operated a large factory inside the camp at Auschwitz, impudently listed as IG Auschwitz on the company’s organization chart. Agfa recruited in Dachau. Shell in Neuengamme. Schneider in Buchenwald. Telefunken in Gross-Rosen, and Siemens in Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Auschwitz. Everyone had jumped at the chance for such cheap labour. So it wasn’t Gustav who was hallucinating that evening in the middle of a family dinner; it was Bertha and her son who refused to see. For all those dead were indeed there, in the shadows.
Of the six hundred deportees who arrived at the Krupp factories in 1943, only twenty remained a year later. One of Gustav’s last official acts, before handing over the reins to his son, was to create Berthawerk, a forced-labour factory named after his wife, which he probably meant as some kind of tribute. The workers there were black with filth, infested with lice, walking three miles in winter as in summer in bare clogs to go from camp to factory and factory to camp. They were yanked out of bed at four-thirty, flanked by SS guards and trained dogs; they were beaten and tortured. As for supper, it would sometimes last for two hours – not because they were allowed to eat at their leisure, but because they had to wait: there weren’t enough bowls to go round.
Now, let us return for a moment to the very beginning of our story and take another look at them, the twenty-four men, all around that table. It seems like any meeting of business leaders. They’re wearing the same suits, the same dark or striped ties, the same silk pocket handkerchiefs, the same gold-rimmed spectacles, the same bald heads, the same reasonable faces as we might see today. The basic style hasn’t changed much. Not long after this, in place of their Golden Party Badge, some would proudly wear the Federal Cross of Merit, as a Frenchman might wear the Legion of Honour. The regimes commended them in the same way. Look at them waiting, that 20 February, calmly, sagely, while the devil passes right behind them, on tiptoe. They’re chatting; their little consistory is just like hundreds of others. Don’t believe for a minute that this all belongs to some distant past. These are not antediluvian monsters, creatures who pitifully faded away in the 1950s along with the poverty depict
ed by Rossellini, or were carted off with the ruins of Berlin. These names still exist. Their fortunes are enormous. Their companies have sometimes merged and formed omnipotent conglomerates. On the website of the ThyssenKrupp group, a world leader in steel, whose headquarters are still in Essen and whose watchwords these days are openness and transparency, we find a brief note about the Krupp family. Gustav did not actively support Hitler before 1933, we read, but once the latter had been elected chancellor, he demonstrated loyalty to his country. He only became a member of the Nazi Party in 1940, it specifies, upon his seventieth birthday. Deeply committed to the social tradition of the company, Gustav and Bertha never failed, come what may, to visit long-standing employees on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary. And the biography ends with a touching anecdote: for many years, Bertha devotedly cared for her invalid husband in a small building near their Blühnbach residence. No mention of factories near the concentration camps, or of forced labour, or anything.
During their last meal at the Villa Hügel, once his terror had passed, Gustav quietly took his seat and the faces returned to the shadows. They would emerge one more time, in 1958. Jews from Brooklyn demanded restitution. On 20 February 1933, Gustav had unhesitatingly committed astronomical sums to the Nazis, but now his son Alfried was proving less profligate. The man who claimed that the Allies had treated the Germans ‘like niggers’ would nonetheless become one of the most powerful figures in the Common Market, the king of coal and steel, a pillar of Pax Europaea. Before finally deciding to pay reparations, he made the negotiations drag on for two long years. Every meeting with the attorneys of the Konzern was punctuated with anti-Semitic slurs. They nonetheless managed to reach an agreement: Krupp would pay each survivor one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, which as a settlement for all claims was not much. Still, Krupp’s gesture was unanimously hailed in the press, and it earned him a gold mine of publicity. Before long, as survivors started coming forward, the amount allocated to each became smaller. They revised it down to seven hundred and fifty dollars, then five hundred. Finally, when more deportees filed claims, the Konzern notified them that it was unfortunately no longer in a position to honour these voluntary payments: the Jews had cost too much.
The Order of the Day Page 7
