The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  The moment fell over her; the burst of a honey bubble. The collapsing that began at Sachsenhausen accelerated in a rush.

  It was the plainly cheap and inauthentic quality of the available paths into Magda Goebbels’s mind. The situation could not be a matter of chance. The way Margaret saw it now, the smoke-and-mirrors, mirage-like quality of access to such minds must be intrinsic to the very stuff of such minds. A cephalopod builds its multichambered shell according to the nacreous laws of its species, and so too, this flickering figure of Magda Goebbels, without hardly meaning to, vanished inside layers of narrative artifice—whether by the euphuistic friends she kept, the rhetoric-heavy letters she wrote, the genre-distorted portraits she commissioned, the bombastic films and men she adored—all emanations from her personality which built rightness and naturalism, in layer upon layer, for things that were beyond right or nature. Margaret had thought she would read Mein Kampf and enter into communion with Magda Goebbels, but now she saw that without having even planned it for herself, Magda Goebbels would remain an icon on the outside, unreal on the inside, forever and ever.

  The characteristic of storytelling that had first become manifest when Margaret was at the doctor’s—that the meaning generated through it was not only one great falsifier but the great falsifying agent at the disposal of the human mind—Margaret saw as the lurking bogey. Stories themselves were the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she came into contact with meaning, and meaning was the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she heard any story.

  Margaret trembled. She left the university in haste.

  FIFTEEN • Tales of the Overripe

  Erich the Hausmeister was having strange days.

  He read the diary of the American further. He rubbed his chin, inclined his head, and found that the girl had become obsessed with her older German lover, had even begun to spy on him. She was obsessed in particular with her lover’s connection to her parents—the dead father and the estranged mother. It seemed that she had been collecting—nay, stealing—bits of Amadeus’s personal papers, and as Erich became more interested, he read these as well.

  Margaret had written:

  August 15, 2000

  Dearest diary,

  I looked through Amadeus’s file cabinets this afternoon after he went to teach his class; I know he keeps the file cabinet in the second apartment because he doesn’t want even his wife to see certain letters. But the main thing is, the best thing is: I found a copy of a letter he sent to my parents and also a few of my mother’s she sent to him after my father was sick. So far as I can see, they started writing in November ’89. I’m surprised. To hear my father talk, it always seemed like Amadeus was lost forever. But then, my father was not reliable.

  Here are the letters (I copied them!):

  November 19, 1989

  Hello Christoph and Sarah,

  It’s cold tonight, and I write to you from the Isle of Youth, where the three of us were once together, do you remember? I’m looking out into the widest part of the river, to the Oberbaum Bridge, and your letter from the third is in my pocket.

  I know you’ve heard the news: the world exploded. Ha-ha! The wall opened while I was sleeping. We were all sleeping, and the city cracked. It was overripe, that old melon. Juice and seeds are spilling everywhere now, and we don’t have to be strangers to one another any longer.

  I wanted to tell you and Christoph just how it was. I didn’t go to the institute on Friday. Do you remember Florian? I walked with him up to Bernauer Strasse. The checkpoint was streaming. Florian thought we should walk over into the West right then. I said no! Ha-ha! The border would close up again while we were gone, that was what I thought. I’ve survived everything pretty well by never underestimating Honecker and I didn’t believe it, even if the man is deposed. I thought if we went through, we’d never get back, and you have to think about something like that. Honestly I kept thinking of trips into Hades, how you’re supposed to get stuck there forever. Sure, I’m a coward. They made us all into cowards, cowards and spooks. Although the spooks, they’re cowards too.

  But anyway, Florian was annoyed with me. He didn’t understand, but he wouldn’t go alone. He stood next to me for a while on the Eastern side and we watched the other people crossing over, and I smoked for a while and then, I didn’t expect it, I hardly noticed it, I was crying like a baby. Everyone who saw my tears stopped and embraced me, that’s the kind of day it was, isn’t that nice? So you know, we decided to go through after all. I saw the chapped lips on the border guards, overnight they looked like nothing but boys. We walked into Wedding. I swear to God, the air smelled like it has never smelled. People’s faces looked different, their expressions changed. We walked between the Western houses, fine, bright, colorful houses. We passed a Turkish grocery and thought we’d go in. I touched the fruit. I thought of Persephone eating four seeds in Hades. (Why did she eat the seeds? Was she hungry? Or just curious? Or was it—and this is my theory—in order to taste something to remember the day by?)

  I touched the fruit. I didn’t really feel like eating it. I’ve never had bananas and oranges and I don’t lust after them, I’ll leave that for the decadents. The fruit was interesting, though, for the sake of the day. I thought I’d eat it. But you know, I didn’t have the deutsche marks, the banks weren’t giving them out yet. But, ha-ha, you know, Christoph once gave me some deutsche marks. I never used them; I’d never dared. I walked all the way back home and got them out from under the floorboards, this all seems so ridiculous to me now, all these years we’ve spent under lock and key, it seems like a big joke already.

  Florian waited for me the whole time on the other side. We bought almond-stuffed olives, oranges, and Gruyère. I stopped thinking about Persephone. The food was good, Sarah.

  I got your letter when I got home. They’re still delivering mail!

  Well, that’s all the news here. I send my greetings to Christoph in particular. I wish him a speedy recovery. Please relay to him, Sarah, whatever of my news in this letter you think might be appropriate. I realize he is sensitive and I leave it to you to decide what is best. Maybe now I’ll come and see him. I can go wherever I want now. That would be something.

  Yours,

  Amadeus

  January 14, 1990

  Dear Amadeus,

  I’m sorry we are only writing back to you now. Christoph enjoyed your letter. I know that he, for one, still thinks very fondly of you. He still refers to you as his best friend.

  You may have heard from Petra already, the news about him. Two months ago I put him in a hospital. I could have stood it myself, but Margaret and the dog (and I include the dog in this, because Christoph treats Alphonse like a second child) have become very sensitive to the worst of it. The dog—can you imagine a dog that howls every time his master cries?

  If you want to reach Christoph, you can write to him at the hospital. I know he would enjoy that. You don’t need to be so guarded.

  I too would like to be forthright with you: I have believed for a long time that Christoph was in love with you, and maybe he still is. He was heartbroken you did not let him help you get out. Do you think I’m crazy for imagining that he might never have had as many troubles as he did, if he hadn’t lost you? Sometimes I wish that he had stayed in the East.

  Sincerely,

  Sarah

  Included was an address for a mental hospital in New Rochelle.

  July 2, 1990

  Dear Amadeus,

  I brought Christoph home yesterday from the hospital. He seems much worse, and it relieves me to have someone to tell.

  Well, he had been gone from us for eight months. His eyes are blank, I’m not sure he recognizes me, even after all the visits, and he only speaks in German now, which—I don’t know if you are aware—I’ve still never really mastered. When we got back to the apartment, his performance was pretty typical. He did not look at Margaret, poor little child. She stood behind the coatrack in the hall. She wa
s smiling at him, though, enough to make her face break. He didn’t speak to her but when he went by, he put out his hand, as though by accident, and rubbed the top of her head. It looked as though he were looking at a tablet behind his eyes, not out at the world, not at me, and certainly not at Margaret. His lips moved. That’s what it’s like. That’s what it’s almost always like with him. I took him to his study, he sat down, he thanked me in German. He picked up one of his legal pads as if he had never been gone, and started writing.

  I looked over his shoulder. He had written:

  ATT: FBI

  I am Christ, the only son of Lucifer.

  Why did I bring him home? I bet that’s what you’re wondering. There were recommendations against it actually. It seems he has managed to make it appear as if he were taking his medication, while at the same time slipping it down the toilet to avoid allowing the CIA to infiltrate his body—with its tiny cameras. The CIA, he tells us, is working with the reconstructed Nazi party, the one that operates out of Argentina and southern Brazil, which is working with the KGB(!!?), and this party wants to kill him. That said, he is very calm, does not get in anyone’s way, and oddly, I don’t feel afraid of him. Most of the time, except for the German, when I meet him at the hospital, he behaves like a preoccupied professor, the one he was meant to be. It’s true he made me get rid of both televisions; “the eyes in the television are unblinking,” he told me. But you know, I didn’t mind that either, I was glad really. It’s just that Margaret, at the loss of the TV, seems to have only become more inarticulate. Sometimes I think she’s gotten too much from her father’s side. I worry for her, but what can I do? I took her to the child psychiatrist for a while, but she throws fits every time. She hates the doctor, really hates her. And the doctor did say the girl was making progress at our last visit, but the child is so good at putting on a show for her … What bothers me the most, really, is that Margaret is such a quiet little thing, so tongue-tied, and I like to talk to her, especially now that Christoph is gone. Why did I end up with such a quiet child?!

  Well, after I left Christoph in his study the other day, I came here into the kitchen and found your letter on the counter.

  Amadeus, I’m not playing things as coolly as I would like. I can’t tell anyone here about that part of it. It’s nonsensical, but sometimes I do things to provoke Christoph deliberately, things I know will set off his paranoia. There was one occasion, for example, when I took Margaret and left for a vacation in Wyoming without telling him. It was only to avoid having to go through weeks of his accusations beforehand. But when I came back, he started looking at me with a sly, mistrustful gaze. You know that gaze of his—he had a similar suspicious expression before he ever got sick, through those thick glasses of his. Later, I read his legal pad (I always read them, or have them translated, just to keep track of his thoughts, but that too, he notices. In fact he thinks it’s CIA surveillance).

  He wrote: “They have made a new Sarah, almost a perfect facsimile. But the moles on the upper arms of the new Sarah are misplaced, and their constellation bears witness to the truth.”

  Then there is also the fact that I’ve been snapping at Margaret, saying cruel things.

  But the worst thing, the single worst thing, is that while he was in the hospital I got rid of his dog, his beloved dog. I told him Alphi was dead. Don’t you see, Amadeus, with the girl, and now with Christoph’s father staying in the back room sometimes when he’s not in California (that has really made Christoph worse, I think. How he hates his father!) I just couldn’t handle the dog as well. But maybe it was also a matter of vengeance.

  We both miss you, Amadeus! If only you could come to us. Are you still thinking of coming? I hope you will think of it.

  Yours,

  Sarah

  PART II

  ROPE

  The fascination aroused by Hitler and his demands on the nation did not only have to do with sadism but also very much with masochism, with the appetite for submission, behind which stood an impulse toward the desecration of authority that was much farther from the surface of consciousness (one thinks of Luther’s tone on the topic of the Pope).

  —MARGARETE AND ALEXANDER MITSCHERLICH

  THE INABILITY TO MOURN

  SIXTEEN • Redemption Beckoning

  It all began on the way to the Schöneberg archive. Although Margaret had painted a portrait in oils of the Nazi propaganda minister’s wife, photographed it, uploaded it, and retouched it, made shining digital variations, and all of this was done in a spirit of finding beauty in the woman’s face, and although she had read Mein Kampf as though it were a Bhagavad Gita, writing out many of the dubiously sympathetic passages in a tight hand in her own notebook, in the end, she had still not quite been able to stretch her brain far enough.

  And after the Meissner biography was revealed as a sham, a despondency settled over her. The hawk-woman at her window was oppressive—nothing, really, but an instrument of terror, and the terror breathed down her neck day and night, infecting her small pleasures. Nightly dinner had a vague smell of guano.

  On that fateful evening when everything changed, Margaret was in fact still trying: she was intending to find Magda Goebbels’s birth certificate and prove to herself conclusively that the woman had been born out of wedlock—she was already ninety-five-percent certain—but this was the way it was with her, everything shifted, her mind’s promises to itself were never kept. And so she was setting out doggedly, heading for the Schöneberg archive.

  Down the Grunewaldstrasse she went, west toward Rathaus Schöneberg and John-F.-Kennedy-Platz.

  The sky was a shade of blue that appeared wet, like new paint, and everything in the city, the buildings too, seemed restless.

  Already when Margaret turned onto Martin-Luther-Strasse, she saw something in the distance: not a single bird—no—today it was a large swarm. Thousands of birds, and at first, reflexively, she mistook them for a convention of the taloned sparrow hawks of the Magda kind, and with all her soul she wanted to turn back toward home. But only a moment later, before she could swing around, she saw that it was not birds of prey after all, but swallows. Of course, it was only swallows. It was that time of twilight when swallows dive, in the light-filled evening, in the sleep-filled sky, and thousands of them moved in a globe of motion, according to their own complex design, around the spire of the massive city hall at John-F.-Kennedy-Platz, which rose like a fist of flesh in the early dusk.

  There was something strange about the birds. Even if they were not the hawks, there was something unsettling. It took Margaret a moment to identify what the irregularity was, but finally she realized: the birds were silent. These birds did not make a single cry. The effect was almost to make her feel as if she were bicycling in a muted digital rendering, or—another thought—as though the birds were in that phase of rage where speech becomes impossible.

  Margaret stopped her bicycle on the wide square and watched. The edges of their swarm were camouflaged by the late shadows, and she could not see how far into the distance their numbers spread. In silence, they made slow circles, sweeps, and caesuras, their shapes so dark, they seemed to leave trails of smoke behind them.

  And then, almost imperceptibly, there was a change. They began to spiral downward. They were circling toward the open square and the surrounding canyons and depressed rooftops; they were beginning to alight on the ground. And as they did, their black forms broadened and stretched. Each bird was elastic, each bird was lengthening. Each bird grew a face. Each bird stretched into a long, thick, humanoid shadow.

  The masses of black shapes, the birds in human shadow form, they moved down out of the sky, floating like dry leaves into the streets, quickly gaining detail: men and women, old and young, all of them withered and tarnished silvery like daguerreotypes. Their garments reeked of mothballs—woolen, worn and ash-smeared. A watch chain on the body of an old man; two grey, moon-shaped faces—sisters—moving at a loping pace arm in arm, their hair curled into smal
l circles ridging their brow; elsewhere a thin baby; a flirtatious pair of platform sandals on the small feet of an adolescent girl. Deeper and deeper into the throngs of shadows Margaret went, rustling with them across the square.

  Here they were, Margaret thought. So they had not evacuated. So this kind of ghost was in Berlin too. For a moment, she felt the flushest sort of excitement it is possible to feel. They were coming for her.

  She reached in front of her. She took an arm in her hand and looked down to see it. It was encased in plaid wool. She pulled on the sleeve and turned her eyes toward the place where a face should be, her vision patched around on all sides, and saw as though through the wrong end of a telescope, the grey face of a young man, not fully mature, with wavy black locks.

  The boy looked away from her in the direction of the spire of the town hall. He pointed to the clock. Then he too looked up at it with a steady gaze. Margaret turned her head. The hands and notched numbers of the clock rushed toward her eyes in a blur of movement. Whether the graphology had physically come free, or whether she had simply lost the ability to tell time, she could not say. The boy, for his part, shook her hand from his sleeve and walked backward into the throng, where he was lost from sight.

  Margaret got back on her bicycle and pedaled furiously. She arrived at the archive. The fluorescent lights of the entryway were heavy on her face, and she stood for a moment to catch her breath. She closed her eyes.

  There it was. Margaret saw the woman in the dress walking up the oval staircase. Margaret saw her from a blue distance, and then the fist of a thing crashing through the skylight, coming down from the roof above. And it fell, fluttering like ash, through the central shaft of the stair’s helix down to the mosaic on the basement floor. Her inner eye’s lens darted down now toward the fallen thing and she could see it, she could see what it was: it was a bird. It was just a bird. Light and small, it should not have broken the glass. Why did the bird break the glass?