“Those are nice boots,” Albert said unexpectedly. His tone was petulant. He stared at Ingo's feet. “When I went for training they didn't have boots to fit me. I kept getting blisters. Finally they got a new shipment from somewhere and they said, Here, try these. So I got this pair that fits, only the leather's too thin. My feet are cold all the time. I bet they came off some schmutziger Jude who sat indoors all day, counting his money. I wish a had a pair like yours.”
There followed an uneasy silence during which everyone seemed to be looking at Ingo's boots. Were they waiting for him to offer some explanation?
After several moments the Professor said, “Jaekl, why don't you pour us some brandy.”
The thin man stirred himself, crossing the room to a sideboard.
“Why can't we have beer?” said Albert. “It's been an age since I've had a beer.”
Cheruski studied him for a moment—an expert, a specialist, making a cool and detached observation—and Albert stared back. At last Cheruski said, “I believe there is beer in the cellar. Go ask Magda to fetch you some. And drink it upstairs, why don't you?”
Albert stood, pleased with himself, failing to understand, or not caring, that he'd been dismissed. Jaekl served brandy to the others and Cheruski began speaking before Albert had left the room, as though the boy had ceased to exist.
“And so”— raising his glass—” I should like to say how pleased I am by the appearance of our guest from America. This seems to me more than simple coincidence. Does it not, Jaekl? I feel there must be some deeper meaning here—that Müller's appearance must be taken as a kind of omen. Or, if you will, an affirmation. For those inclined to doubt the fundamental premise of my research.”
Ingo couldn't help noticing—nor did Jaekl make a particular effort to hide—how Cheruski's words caused him to fidget in his seat. As lightly as possible, Ingo said, “You mentioned you were doing some kind of special research? Something for the Reichsführer?”
Cheruski's eyes twinkled. Clearly this was something he longed to talk about. His eyes flicked over toward Jaekl, who sat glowering. “I work, of course, at the Reichsführer's direction. But I may say, with no false modesty, that the project I am now engaged in derives purely from my own research, conducted over many years now. When I put it to the Reichs-führer at Posen last spring, he was most enthusiastic. It tallied quite nicely, so he told me, with a certain urgent undertaking of his own.”
Jaekl could not contain himself. “Do you really feel, sir, we should be speaking of such matters in front of this stranger?”
“What do you imagine?” He spoke sharply, as in a household quarrel. “Do you suppose this man is an American spy? Tramping about like a Wandervogel on the chance that some high-ranking person might give him a lift? Snooping into rear areas our own General Staff does not see fit to defend? God in heaven, Jaekl, the man is SS, like ourselves. He comes from America, which means that he has chosen to join us in our time of national struggle. Unlike the traitors of 20 July, who were, every one of them, native-born.” He tightened his lips.
Jaekl fell into a surly, resentful silence.
“It can be no secret,” Cheruski resumed, pointedly now speaking only to Ingo, “there are those in our government, including persons I shall not name, quite close to the center of power, who would like to make a separate peace with the Anglo-Americans. For some, this is purely a tactical matter. Concentrate our defenses on a single front. But for many of us—I speak here of persons at the very highest level—this war with the Anglo-Americans is a regrettable lapse, on everyone's part. I do not exempt Germany itself from this error! For do we not, on both sides, share the same Northern heritage? Does not the same Aryan blood flow through our veins? Are we not equally opposed to the evil of Bolshevism that has arisen among the yellow-skinned people of the East?” He paused, but only for effect: the classroom rhetorician. “The hour has arrived when we must end this awful bloodshed. Our great nations ought rightly to see themselves as cousins. Any quarrel among us must be resolved in a manner that spares the blood of our youth, while preserving the national honor.”
Ingo tried to keep his expression blank and attentive. Cheruski drained his brandy in a long swallow.
“Unfortunately,” said Jaekl, leaning in to pour another, “there is the slight problem of unconditional surrender, upon which the Allies now insist.”
Cheruski snatched his glass away. “Anyone with the least understanding of diplomacy—let alone the shades of meaning in even the simplest phrase—should understand this is a question of semantics, of a political utterance that need not be taken literally. Naturally there must be some pretense of an Allied victory, to satisfy the public over there. But I tell you—and I have seen the reports on this myself—the British people have no wish to drag this war out. They are sick of it, of having their cities bombed, cowering behind blackout curtains. And it goes without saying they are terrified of our new V-weapons. I assure you, they are eager to make peace. Still, it is a delicate matter. It is the same as any other proposition—an offer of marriage, for example. Both parties are ready to agree. Yet the question must be put forward very carefully. One false word, a misjudgment in timing, and everything falls apart.”
Jaekl gave his master a sullen look and rose stiffly from his seat. “Unless you have further need of me, sir, I shall retire now. It has been a most wearying day.”
“Yes, yes.” A wave of assent. “Good night, then.”
Ingo said, “Sleep well, Herr Untersturmführer.”
With a cold nod Jaekl slunk off into the shadows. Cheruski swallowed more brandy. He was drinking now, not sipping.
“So, this project of yours.” Like warming a pitcher up, Ingo thought; just keep tossing the ball back. “It has to do with the British?”
Cheruski gave a conspiratorial glance around the room. The stag's blood on the tapestry had turned black in the firelight. “I went to Posen last spring,” his voice pitched low, “to hear an address by the Reichsführer to his higher SS and police leaders. It was quite a distinction, to have been summoned there. In those weeks, we were expecting at any time the Allies to launch their invasion. Meanwhile there were problems in Hungary, the Red Army was preparing its summer offensive. Everyone was anxious to hear what the Reichsführer would say.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, any number of things. The need to stiffen our resolve. The heroism of the ordinary German people, our duty to protect them from the Asiatic hordes. He assured us that this time around, there will be no stab in the back, as there was in 1918. Because this time the backstabbers have already been gotten rid of. He meant, you see, there are no more Jews to betray us. So the Reich is safe from the enemy within, all that remains is to deal with the enemy at the gate. At last he alluded to peace, the sort of peace he hopes to attain.”
“A separate peace in the west.”
“He did not say this directly! No—he only alluded. It was not until afterward, when I spoke with him in private…”
He paused for another swallow. The brandy was making him expansive, but before long it would make him groggy. Ingo could read the signs.
“I spoke with him after the address,” Cheruski went on. “The Reichs-führer was of course familiar with my work. He took me aside, just the two of us, and he said to me, ‘Herr Professor, I wish to ask you a question.’ “He paused, savoring this prized memory. A cozy chat with Heinrich Himmler. “‘ Herr Professor,’ he asked me, ‘what is the key to understanding a people—to knowing how they think, why they choose to act or not to act in a given situation?’ I replied without hesitation: It is their literature, Herr Reichsführer. The stories they tell of themselves. Above all, the very oldest ones, the stories that have no author. The tales that seem to have sprung from the depths of their folk-soul.
“Upon hearing this, the Reichsführer grew very thoughtful. ‘Now I ask you this, Herr Professor. If one were to examine closely the literature of, shall we say, the English—if, that is, an
expert were to do so, a man such as yourself—might one discover perhaps some formula, a sort of code, an equation, something scientific, that would make it possible to communicate with these people in absolute sympathy? So that, should one make them a proposal, an honorable proposal, presented in good faith, they could not fail to agree?’
“Well, by this time, putting one thing with another, I understood what the Reichsführer was asking of me. He was saying, ‘Can you find a way to make the British accept my peace offer?’ “
Ingo waited out the melodramatic pause.
“‘ Yes,’ I told him. ‘Yes, my Reichsführer, in principle, one can do this. One can discover such a formula, such an equation.’ What I did not tell him was ‘If one has time enough to look.’ Because you know, people in such positions are accustomed to giving an order and, knick, the task is done. But I assured him that every tool of modern philologic science would be placed forthwith at his disposal. After that, we had no more time to talk. Such a man naturally has many demands upon his schedule.”
Ingo did not care to hear about the busy life of Heinrich Himmler. “So you went back to Prague”— nudging harder, the old man's eyes were starting to glaze—” and got down to work.”
“I was already down to work.” The voice became briefly mocking. “Our task in the Race History Department—this may not be generally appreciated—is to correct the many errors that have accumulated over the centuries concerning the role of the Germanic people in shaping Western culture. How many great accomplishments, how many works of art and literature, how many scientific advances, have wrongly been attributed to other peoples? To the Romans, for instance, or the French—even the Italians. Scholars like myself have worked for years to set the record straight. My own contributions have been, I say with modesty, solid but unspectacular—my specialty is ancient texts, and this is felt to be rather an out-of-the-way line of inquiry. Now suddenly, I found myself thrust into a timely, indeed historic, situation. My Leader had called upon me for a vital mission. I had been asked, if I may put it so, to provide him with a new weapon, a Wunderwaffe of the mind. I assure you, my friend, I got down to work.”
He looked at Ingo but his thoughts were swirling within. It was easy to imagine him teetering with an expression like this before a roomful of undergraduates. Dotty old Cheruski, they must have thought.
“Now straight off, in this sort of inquiry, one faces a problem. It's easy enough to say—I have just said it—that we Germans and you Anglo-Americans are, in essence, the same people. That is true, it is a biological fact. We belong to what Professor Steiner calls the same root-race. Yet we speak different languages, we govern ourselves in different ways, and now a terrible war lies between us. Clearly then, from our common racial root has grown, in a manner of speaking, a widely branching ancestral tree. So”— crisply now, with a slap on the knee—” what one first must do is to locate precisely the point of division, the historical moment at which our respective national limbs began to diverge.”
“And you've done that?”
“I have. Were there a slate board, I could draw you a diagram. But I can tell you, with a high degree of specificity, on the strength of detailed inquiry, that the break occurred around the year 1203, along a fault line that corresponds approximately with the rivers Rhein and Donau.”
For an instant, Ingo wobbled at the edge of laughter. But having heard wilder theories at the bar of the Rusty Ring, he managed an encouraging nod.
“Do not imagine,” Cheruski warned him, leaning forward, “that I am blind to your reaction. Listen to this old crack-brain, you think.”
His eyes took on the sage look that comes to some men when they are about two-thirds drunk. The trajectory from that point is predictable. Were there a slate board, Ingo could have drawn a chart of his own.
Cheruski eased back in his chair. “I cannot, of course, lead you through the entire chain of reasoning—this is a technical matter, it would take up a full university course. But you have read Platen, you speak rather intelligently, I'm sure you can follow the basic thrust. My research has come to focus upon two things: the Matter of Britain and what I choose to call, by analogy, the Matter of Germany.
“With the first, you are no doubt familiar. It comprises a body of material known popularly as the Arthurian romances—though that term is inadequate, there's more to it than the frivolous business of the Round Table. The tales themselves, in their earliest versions, seem to be quite older even than the historical Arturius, who was a general, not a king, and whose task was to defend the island in the wake of the sixth-century Roman withdrawal. It appears that this Arturius or Arthur became a convenient national figurehead upon whom to drape a body of legend that had existed long before him, whose origins are now obscure. By the time the source material got cobbled into something like canonical form—that is, the form in which it comes down to us—it encompassed matters as diverse as courtship rituals among the ruling classes of feudal Europe, the life and teachings of a Druidical figure called Myrddin or Merlin, exciting battle stories, reports of jousting tournaments, an allegory about the slaying of the Green Knight, another about an incestuous union and a mystical, messianic birth, and—most puzzling of all—the distinctly eerie and symbolic quest for the Holy Grail. This mishmash is called the Matter of Britain because…well, what else could one possibly call it?”
Ingo wasted a moment pretending to think it over. “And the Matter of Germany, that would be what—Siegfried, the Ring, all that?”
Cheruski raised his nose, like a snob on the sidewalk. “Please, put every thought of Wagner out of your mind. Every note, every syllable of that outlandish opus, whatever their musical merits might be—of that I can offer no informed opinion—is the grossest imaginable corruption of an ancient, untainted and astoundingly well-preserved body of national mythology. Unlike the British material, whose origins are lost in prehistory, our Germanic legends have been passed down in something very like their original form, in such rich sources as the Nordic lays, Snorri's Edda, the early heroic poems and ballads, and above all, the Song of the Nibelungs—a medieval masterwork that, as my colleague Professor Burdach in Stuttgart points out, succeeds so wonderfully at invoking the spirit of its subject matter that it promptly dispatched all other contenders. It alone has come down to us.” He rapped on the table, as if to make sure he had Ingo's full attention. “It is here that we come to the break point. This is precisely where we part company with our oceanfaring cousins.”
The Professor poured himself another cognac. Ingo did likewise: why not? It was getting late; they were sitting in a drafty old mansion, rambling on about literature; they had passed, some while back, the last road marker of objective reality. The scene took him back to his last year at Catholic U., after coming home from Germany, when he discovered the tonic and mind-cleansing properties of alcohol. Sure, one more, a nightcap. Then off to our lonely bed.
“It is a remarkable fact,” Cheruski said, twirling his glass in the firelight, “one of those coincidences that occur not infrequently in the history of ideas, that this masterwork was written at precisely the same time as the greatest, most elegant and comprehensive account of the Matter of Britain—and written moreover in very nearly the same place. Certainly the same kind of place. I refer of course to Wolfram's Parzival, which was begun around the year 1200 and finished no later than 1205. Its most crucial passages, recounting the Grail story, were composed in the winter of 1203–04 at the castle Wartburg in Thuringia, in honor of Wolfram's patron, the Landgrave Herman.”
Thuringia, Ingo thought dreamily. A castle in Thuringia.
“Simultaneously, the Nibelungenlied was being composed by another court poet a short distance to the south, near Passau. In this case, we do not know the poet's name—and that is a cardinal point, because the anonymity was deliberate. By this time, you see, it was commonplace for a court poet, even an ordinary minstrel, to be identified with a particular work. We know about Chrétien, about Otto of Freisling, about
Walther and Lucidarius. We know about Wolfram. But the man from Passau chose to hide himself, as it were, behind the work. And by so doing, he makes clear his connection with an older and more purely Germanic tradition, that of the tribal bard, the imbiber of Wotan's mead of poetry, who, in singing the great stories of his Volk, becomes, in effect, the voice and the memory of his people. That is the first point of divergence.
“The second is more blatant. Even at a casual reading, the two works could not be more distinct. You begin with roughly the same raw subject matter—kings and queens, oaths and champions, sacred objects, castles besieged, realms ravaged and restored—yet in each poet's hands, the material is fashioned into radically distinct form. In simplest terms, Parzival has a moral. The Nibelungenlied does not.
“All the Arthurian material, Parzival included, reflects the great change that had come over the European mind during the preceding three centuries: in becoming Christianized, it trained itself to think in dichotomies, good and wicked, sin and salvation, now and Hereafter. This binary thinking is present, often in quite explicit form, but always there at bottom, in even the most simple of the British legends, the pure diversions. Dragon meets slayer. Black Knight versus White Knight. The stories are quite varied but the moral is approximately the same, and it is the fundamental teaching of Christianity: If you do something good in the here-and-now, then you will be rewarded at some time in the future.
“Not so with our German legends. This is not to say they negate or deny such a meaning. It is simply that the question of lesson-teaching, or moral-drawing, or indeed any line of thought pointing to a reality outside the story itself, does not arise. The legend of the Nibelungs simply is. This is who they were, this is what they did, this is how it ended. Finis. At no time during all those adventures and surprises and betrayals and bloody disputations does any participant pause to give thought to any larger issue— neither the morality of his actions, nor the effect of those actions upon his own eventual fate, still less the fate of others. Above all, there is no thought whatever to the possibility of an afterlife, heavenly or otherwise.
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