The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  Could she grow out of its soil? What could this moral system teach her, inversely, about how to live and how to discriminate?

  Could she manage to reject its songs, its films? Yes, that easily.

  But could she reject its ideas, its only slowly dying people, its correlations, its loose ends? What was one to do with the truckloads of lost meaning? The correlations sat now in a garbage dump. Margaret put the heavy book down, her cheeks flushed with shame. She wandered away, so deep in herself she could not see.

  Maybe it was the intense of the blue sky over Holzmarktstrasse, or maybe she was tired from the nights of insomnia—but all at once she broke through a membrane and thought: I have nothing. None of these things once offered by fascism are things I have in my own life. Nothing means anything to me at all. How could it, without memory?

  She walked a few steps farther. She realized with a kind of surprise that her own life had no meaning at all, and with this she was not saying that it had no larger meaning—although it did not—but rather that there were no small correspondences either. Buoyant, frothy, wispy little life.

  She was drawn back toward the book. She took a few steps toward the table.

  Margaret’s mother’s family had been loud, her father’s family silent. When things happened in her father’s family (she remembered her grandfather), they disappeared forever, whether they be double-jointedness or stock market gains, failed marriages or stillbirths, they remained unnoted and uncorrelated. By contrast, in her mother’s family, events and characteristics were repeated endlessly, told to laughs or made into a refrain, until everything you did or had done to you was part of the pounding myth, a link in the chain, part of history, part of television. Margaret had not been able to stand it, she had gone the way of her father’s family—in silence.

  The city had turned to flesh. What if soon she had no choice but to decipher every sign, just as the doctor seemed to want?

  Margaret spun around. The young man with the red face looked at her. She said, before she had even made up her mind, so that the words surprised even her: “I’ll take it.”

  “You don’t have the cash,” the man said quietly. If he was surprised at her, he did not show it.

  “Yes, I do.” It happened that Margaret was carrying her work wallet with her, the one with the money from selling tickets for her tours. She decided that she would borrow from this wallet. It would make her month very tight. When she handed him the cash, the man did not even look at her; he took the money and made it disappear like a magician pressing it into his palm. Clearly he thought she might grab it back. And perhaps Margaret would have, too. But now it was too late. The man turned his back.

  Margaret gripped the book and put it in her backpack furtively, hoping no one had seen her. And just as quickly as the money was gone, her stomach churned. She was trembling, but she could not bring herself to ask for the money back. It was already done.

  She walked a few steps. She did not want her own life to signify. But she did want meaning—that sweet sensation of sphericity. The meaning of something else. The meaning of Magda Goebbels’s life—the meaning of the lost world.

  She would make good on her connection to the hawk-woman. Even if Magda Goebbels had not seen the irony linking her husband’s crimes and her children’s deaths, even if she had never recognized her guilt, Margaret would begin to know Magda Goebbels’s side of it: the primrose labyrinth leading her to justify a social movement of murder, maybe how the philosophy of the madman in his own words makes it all smooth and fine. Margaret thought this would be the single richest trick of her amnesiac’s brain. She would allow meaning—but only the meaning of a Nazi.

  Riding home on Linienstrasse, she passed a quiet entrance to an industrial courtyard. As she sped past the dark entryway on her bicycle, she caught sight of a sun-filled courtyard beyond a tunneling entryway. All she saw was instantly gone: the glinting windows, exposed pipes, the ivy and the smoky sunlight. The flashing pace of the view into the courtyard felt like nostalgia. To think of nostalgia, even without nostalgia itself, was painful and searing.

  She bicycled home. She sped down Friedrichstrasse. She flew through Potsdamer Platz. Slowly, she began to smile. She had Adolf Hitler’s book in her backpack. When she got home she would draw the curtains, shutting out even the hawk-woman, in order to read, and it would take the time out of time: not freeing her from her burden of guilt, not releasing her, no, even weighing her down all the further, but at least now with her cloudy burden no longer unpaired—no longer without an understanding of its kinship, as a small-time evil, with historical evil, which is large, large enough to rest on. For the great arduousness of guilt is its loneliness.

  In the next days, Margaret finished the portrait in oils of Magda Goebbels. It was a beautiful piece, and when it dried, she put it on the pillow next to her own. They slept, the flesh woman and the painted woman, one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open.

  She read Mein Kampf according to plan. At every turn, she looked for places where Hitler’s sensibility overlapped with her own. On page 65, Hitler asks:

  Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?

  And although Margaret knew that Hitler’s idea of “self-preservation” was built on a persecution complex, she was elated. In the year 1925, he acknowledged, even if later rejecting, the possibility that his right to act on that persecution complex was perhaps only subjectively reasonable. It seemed akin to her own constant inner quizzing. And it suggested to fervid Margaret that there might be something flaccid and forgiving—not in Hitler’s life, but in his character.

  Finally, she came to exactly what she had been looking for. She found it in a passage of no particular significance: Hitler’s description of himself as a soldier, on a transport train during the First World War.

  I saw the Rhine for the first time thus: as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old Watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my chest became too narrow for my heart.

  At this, Margaret’s own chest narrowed. Perhaps there was nothing in the quotation that justified it, but for one moment, Margaret saw Hitler as young and soft and grasping and sentimental. And she did the arithmetic and figured that Hitler must have been twenty-five when he was on that train. This year, Margaret was also twenty-five.

  So she saw herself there. And although to be like him was the opposite of goodness, and even the smell of it made her walk the house weak and bleary-eyed, without blood in her veins, not remembering to open the curtains in the morning or at any other time, afraid of all things light and springing, what could she do? The Nazi past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow.

  ELEVEN • Sachsenhausen

  In mid-December, a cold fell over the city. Much to everyone’s surprise—for it was uncommon in this part of the country and at this time of year—Berlin fell under a thick layer of ice. Temperatures dropped to twenty below zero, and people, streets, trees, and buildings shriveled into muted silhouettes of themselves. It was so freezing that Margaret didn’t know whether her flesh city was still living; the buildings had frozen, had become one with the sandy ground, indistinguishable from stone.

  On the coldest of these cold days, Margaret was assigned to give a tour of the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen. Surprisingly, given the weather, eighteen people booked places for the excursion. In the regional express train shuttling north of the city to the little town of Oranienburg where Sachsenhausen spreads its sad cloud, Margaret looked out the window, her eyes slack over the dead plains around Berlin. The open expanses of winter fields were punctuated by bails of hay tightly wrapped in plastic. In the morning light, their frost-covered surfaces smoked
like glass, dull with the secret of cold.

  She thought of Magda, and then of Minnebie, whom she had pictured in her mind as looking something like herself. The collapse of Magda into Minnebie into Margaret was not an unpleasant sensation. The sense of camaraderie since the hawk-woman had come and Margaret had begun to read Mein Kampf was familiar to her: a sense of sure-footedness, of buttressing, of walking with a phalanx.

  Whence did she know it? She racked her mind. She knew it from early childhood. To be dependent on others without resentment—what a sweet time.

  She thought back on her earliest years. The time before her father became sick. She did not have very much of it. She remembered that he sometimes played “Du Bist Verrückt, mein Kind” on the harmonica, and then sang the refrain in a language that, in those years, she did not know. And once, she remembered, he had pulled the Great Dane up on its hind legs and danced with it. How she had laughed! The man who danced with a dog was the man she had loved. This was before he shut himself in his office and before they got rid of the dog.

  So the feeling of walking with a phalanx, she decided, also had something to do with the sunshine of the psyche before it is hacked apart.

  Around the train car wafted bits and pieces of the sort of conversation that always preceded a visit to the concentration camp memorial.

  “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”

  “We’ll never know. Terrible.”

  “One of them bullied him as a child maybe. You know, innocent kids’ stuff, but he took it the wrong way.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Really, he was a weird man, wasn’t he.”

  “What we’d call today a sociopath—”

  “Like Pinochet.”

  “Yes, like Pinochet.”

  “But the Jews did have all the money, they never minded making a pretty penny off the Germans—”

  “But I’ve heard that his own mother was Jewish—”

  “Never mind that, I saw a documentary on BBC2 where you could see plain as day he was a homosexual.”

  “Bah! He wasn’t any different than the rest of us. Anyone might do the same thing for power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Say what you will, he was a sort of genius.”

  “The Germans were anti-Semites from the ground up, going back a thousand years,” said another voice. “No sense looking at Hitler out of context.”

  The quick rattling off of chestnuts never ceased to amaze Margaret. It was several British, Australians, and Americans who sat in a group of eight seats facing one another from across the aisle, while a Norwegian couple of middle age sat farther off, outside of the anglophone gathering. A group of Argentine students sat farther away still.

  Margaret herself sat with her back to the anglophone group, in a seat where she could hear them but not see them. She was seething with dislike for a particular English businessman. It was because he wore a trench coat—an inadequate coat, given the extreme cold. Margaret knew who would suffer, whose eyes would glaze over with dilettante misery. She knew it in advance. These people would be displeased with her tour no matter what she said, make her feel useless and inadequate, the tour into an endless plodding. And likely as not, she would attempt doggedly, with mounting sensationalism, to entertain them. And because she disliked the Englishman guiltily, for nothing but his coat, she felt the need to charm them all now, impress them, while still on the warm train.

  So she popped up from behind her seat and addressed the sitting customers. “Hitler didn’t come from an anti-Semitic family,” she said loudly. “Here,” she said, and reached into her backpack. She pulled out Mein Kampf. She waved it for them to see, and it was as if she had drawn a lizard out of her pocket: most drew away in disgust, but her despised English businessman leaned forward with a grim smirk that seemed to say, Finally we are getting down to business.

  She found the passage she wanted with little delay.

  She read to them:

  Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word “Jew” first gave me ground for special thoughts. At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father’s lifetime. I believe that the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less cosmopolitan views, which, despite his pronounced national sentiments, not only remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.

  “You see?” Margaret said. “He didn’t learn anti-Semitism at home.”

  “He learned it when he saw what the Jews were up to in Vienna,” said the businessman, smugly.

  “And what was that?” asked Margaret.

  “What was what?” he asked.

  “What were the Jews up to in Vienna?” Surely this little man could hear the poison in her voice.

  “Well, they had all the money, didn’t they now,” he said.

  Margaret noticed with discomfort that when he spoke she was aware of his social class; she disliked British English for its blatancy; she didn’t want the information, saw it as a premature intimacy. Far better, she thought, to preserve, between strangers, a veneer of sameness.

  “They didn’t have ‘all the money,’ ” Margaret said. “The idea is ridiculous. Why do people still believe the garbage spread by the Nazis?” Margaret jerked her head. “If you look at the facts, neither German nor Austrian wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Jewish people; it is horrible how Nazi ideas persist even today.” Everyone looked at the ground and there was a heavy silence.

  Margaret relented. She said, “But more important: how can you be sure Hitler hated the Jews?”

  “Ha,” the man scoffed. “Oh, I think he must have. Eccentric guide we have here!” he said to the Australian couple across from him. “Isn’t she? Imagine Hitler, wanting to have tea with his Jewish friends? Is that what you’ll argue?”

  “Hitler didn’t have to hate in order to destroy,” Margaret said. “He was evil—but evil doesn’t need any motivation.” She looked out the window of the train. “And people without hatred—are doing evil things everywhere.”

  As soon as she had said it, this idea struck Margaret very hard. It ground into her. She applied it to herself very broadly.

  But then she looked around, and all in a rush she seemed to see the faces of the customers before her as if for the first time. She told them brightly, as an addendum, that Hitler was a vegetarian. This was greeted with general disbelief. Theories of evil came and went. The train clacked northward.

  When they got up to the little town of Oranienburg, the wind whistled around the train as it left them behind, making a shriek that the businessman said sounded like an incendiary bomb blowing down from a plane. The remark was met with appreciation.

  Margaret marched them down the main street, past the gun shop and the florist, avoiding the proprietress of the sausage and beer house, who trailed Margaret in hopes of convincing her to bring the group back to her establishment for lunch.

  They walked the same route along which prisoners were once force-marched, all the way down the main road, then out of the center of town. Many of the buildings along the street were abandoned, with vacant lots overgrown.

  All around was a winter silence. The cold was so thick it was difficult to breathe. No one spoke, and the silence became tighter. They walked in an involuntary single file down the sidewalk covered with ice, and turned into the last street before the camp. The houses were small. Each one had a tiny garden, enclosed, still, and frost-covered, laden with ornaments; a sundial here and a gnome there. A small dog came and pressed its bugging eyes to a parlor’s picture window. When he began to bark machine-gun-like at them, everyone jumped, even though the sound was muffled through the glass. The trees on the street were old and much taller than the one-story houses, these houses both neat and run-down, in the East German way, the windows made into proscenia with plastic lace curtains.

  A chorus of cries began to echo in the distance then. No one knew
exactly what it was. The sound was horrible. The sounds became louder. As they neared one of the oldest trees, a tree whose roots had piled up the sidewalk, the cries were all around them, and Margaret and the customers looked up. A colony of crows was gathered in the frozen tree, branches spread in the skeleton of a canopy. Between them, the birds were fighting over the carcass of a large white bird. Some of the black birds had bloody beaks, and the snowy white bird’s feathers, as it was dismembered, became pinker. Margaret felt a drop of moisture on her face, and touched it. On her finger was a spot of blood, fallen from the tree above her. The group of tourists shuddered and skittered toward the camp hastily, like game pieces being slid into a box.

  Inside the camp the coniferous trees were low, and the sky tilted in an arch. The natural world made way for an open dreamscape, a geometry of cryogenics. Sachsenhausen, built by the SS in the childish shape of an isosceles triangle, with long walls rushing off to pine and guard-tower vanishing points, was a pedagogical place, giving lessons in sharp draftsmanship. The few barracks still standing smelled of paint, mildew, and ammonia; they called to the visitor for inspection, these lone seashells on the beach of weeds. This day, at Sachsenhausen, the great open space was shining with melted snow that had, in the extreme cold, refrozen, giving the open tundra a glassy surface reflecting the blue of the broad sky. Just inside the walls, Margaret noticed that underneath the snow there were mouse tunnels. That is to say, the snow was several inches thick under the ice, and the mice had tunneled inside it. The mice traced vaporous lines under the ice.

  The first stop was the roll-call square. Here, Margaret told the tourists, thousands of prisoners had assembled every morning and every evening. The coarse, sandy earth of the Brandenburg mark was stretched flat, stamped down ten thousand years ago by receding glaciers and sixty years ago by a cement wheel rolled about by prisoners. Today it was a shining mirror in its cloak of ice. The beech trees inside the camp were large, and their black branches stark in the cold. Margaret spoke of many things—margarine rations, suicide rates among the prisoners.