The History of History

by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

  “Margaret,” she said. “Has it never occurred to you, as you’ve sat with me in this office, that I was once a Nazi myself?”

  Margaret looked at her. The walls were very close around her. To the front and back of her, time was contracting.

  “You didn’t suspect?” asked the doctor.

  Margaret was alone now. “I was naïve,” she said.

  “There are two types of naïfs—the one who is naïve because of lack of attention, seeing only what bounces naturally into his basket of personal greeds, and the one who notices everything but instead of weaving the hints into meaning, lets them lie in shards. Which are you?”

  “I’ll be going,” Margaret said. She stood up violently. Her chair fell over behind her.

  “Wait,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you my story.”

  And despite herself, Margaret stayed. She picked up her chair. She had always liked a story.

  THIRTY-TWO • The Doctors of Charité

  You already know what became of my brother, your nominal”—the doctor coughed—“your nominal grandfather.” Margaret cried out, but the doctor cut her off with a sharp wave of her hand.

  “Now, my brother—it has probably occurred to you that I was nothing like him. He was a talented man,” the doctor said, “but I was the true intellect of the family.” She smiled tightly. “Forgive my self-flattery. Although you probably also know that in those days, especially under the Nazis, women were encouraged to stick to the three Ks—Kinder, Küche, Kirche, it wouldn’t surprise me if you also knew that there were many exceptions to this, none more well known than the great Leni Riefenstahl herself, although how she managed to make her films in that man’s world, I’ll never know.

  “My parents valued achievement, even in women, and when it became apparent, as I say, that while my brother had charisma, I was the brains, it was not looked upon askance that I should go to university. And so I traveled every day from our villa on the Wannsee to the University of Berlin, traveling through the hustle and bustle of Alexanderplatz and the Scheunenviertel, where immigrants, crooks, and scalawags had their paradise—it was a different world than the one I knew.

  “I began at the university the same year as my brother’s incident in the Saxon woods, that is to say, in 1938. (My brother was only a year younger than I.) And I began to study medicine right away. Do you know who also did that? Hitler’s young niece, down in Munich back in 1931, although it seems she never went to a day of classes.”

  “The activities of Hitler’s niece do not interest me,” said Margaret.

  “Is that so?” The doctor showed a particular type of contempt at this, but let it drop. “All right then,” she said. “Well, I was a precocious student. My temperament is naturally scientific. Already in 1941, I received my diploma with a thesis on endoscopic abdominal surgery. This thesis put forth various proposals detailing how the practice of endoscopic surgery could be expanded to include many more types of gynecological surgeries than were performed in this way at the time. Endoscopy—the use of an instrument to see the inside of the human body without cutting it open, or making only a tiny incision. Also the mechanical alteration of the interior of the body through the use of such a device. Imagine, then, this idea that you could, for example, take out the appendix of a woman by going in through her vaginal canal and uterus, no major incisions necessary! Incisions can lead to infection, take a great deal of time for the surgeon, who must stop the flow of blood to the area, and are higher risk for the patient as well, who is usually, especially in that era, under general anesthesia.

  “But how does one conduct endoscopic surgery—perform a highly precise task, without being able to see? These days, they introduce tiny video cameras into the body at the end of tubes, which project everything onto a screen. But in my day we didn’t have video, much less exquisite little versions of same.

  “This is where an invention of mine came in. It was a device I dubbed, rather fancifully I now think, the Inner Eye. Think of the submarine periscope, which uses a system of lenses, prisms, and mirrors to see what is not in the direct line of vision. Now think of that on a very small scale and with hundreds more prisms and mirrors, all much closer to one another. Think of them jointed to one another with dozens of tiny joints, like a snake’s vertebrae, so that unlike the submarine’s periscope, which is rigid and only sees that which is directly perpendicular, the Inner Eye can bend, twist, curve, following the lines of the body’s canals whither they shall lead.

  “The only trouble is light. Can you understand that? How will it all be illuminated?”

  Margaret shook her head.

  “I hit upon it!” The doctor banged her fist on the desk. “Cyalume!” she cried out, old pride billowing from her voice. “Phenyl oxalate ester, the liquid ester which is used in a glow stick.”

  “I see,” Margaret said.

  “Once the ring around the head of the Inner Eye was made to glow, there was enough visibility to conduct simple operations.

  “My thesis, and this invention of mine, received a great deal of attention, and I was invited to work toward a doctorate. But there was something else that came of it. You see, I mentioned in passing at a conference the great possibilities of using my method in laparoscopic hysterectomies.

  “The man who became my advisor was a certain Professor Dr. Hermann Stieve, a well-respected anatomist and gynecological researcher. And he happened to be working, quite openly, actually, with the Gestapo, and had ties to the RSHA. It just so happened that both of these offices were very interested in how women might be sterilized more quickly and cheaply—how hysterectomies could be performed en masse. So I was recruited by Stieve to develop new and rapid methods of performing hysterectomies.

  “You must understand, these enormous feelings of enthusiasm around my work—” the doctor paused, “affected me greatly.” She sighed. “And at first it was pride that moved my heart toward cooperation.

  “But I do not think I would have gone along. Even I was not so callous. I would not have been so quick to conform if it had not been for something else. Before all this governmental interest began, I had a terrible experience. I was given the opportunity, you see, to try out this invention of mine, my lovely Inner Eye, in a civilian setting early on; it had nothing to do with the RSHA at all. It was the hysterectomy of a woman who had only one kidney and had almost died during the birth of her fourth child. A hysterectomy which was entirely called for and should have been an easy procedure.” The doctor spoke slowly.

  “It should have been easy. But unfortunately, I made a cut that was a few millimeters to the left. There was massive hemorrhaging. And I lost the patient.” The doctor’s eyes glowed remotely, blindly. She sat still for a moment.

  “Comrade, I wonder if you know that there are two types of disappointment: disappointment in oneself and disappointment in God. In other words: self-hatred and alienation.”

  Margaret didn’t say anything. The doctor sighed, and then went on in a grey voice.

  “So. Although I had made a strong start, I must say—I gave in. I abandoned my own work and became an assistant to Stieve almost full-time.” The doctor sighed again.

  “Stieve was interested in psychosomatic illness as it relates to fertility. In particular he was interested in the effects of environmental factors, psychological factors that is, on the female menstrual cycle.”

  Her voice changed yet again. It became very deep, uninflected. She stretched her words down to an ever lower pitch. “In our research, we were dependent on women who had come to death suddenly. Only in these women could the ovaries and uterus be removed instantly, almost the moment of death itself. The tissue was examined and correlated with the psychological circumstances surrounding the woman’s passing. Luckily for our research, there was a glut of women being executed by the Gestapo at just that moment in time, at the Berlin Plötzensee Internment Facility. In large part, ‘traitors to the Reich,’ political prisoners, mostly Communists.

  “At fi
rst Stieve merely made postmortem studies of the reproductive organs of these women and compared them with those of women who had died under natural circumstances. Later, however, he began to take a more active role in determining the ‘psychological circumstances’ that would surround these convicts’ deaths. For example, he would decide at which point before the execution date the victim should learn of her fate. We would tell them ourselves, and immediately begin recording menstrual patterns.”

  The doctor stopped and put both hands on the desk, with the palms, very soft and white, turned up toward the ceiling. What Margaret noticed were the veins of her narrow wrists, wrists that appeared naked and childlike.

  “My dear,” began the doctor, “you can’t imagine how losing my patient in that first hysterectomy affected me. It is a terrible thing, this responsibility for life, and her death convinced me I did not want to stand alone and carry it. Not as a scientist, not as a human, and not as a woman with reproductive capacity herself. Nor did I have a great faith in a higher power, else why should this have been allowed to happen? My wonderful Inner Eye, such a brilliant invention it was! I was disappointed both in myself and in the durability of the soul, which is another word for God. So from then on, I did not think it wise to work as an individual. Frankly speaking, comrade, I enjoyed this work with Stieve, I wanted this work in fact, for the simple reason that it removed the gamble with death: there was no mystery in our patients’ survival or failure to survive.

  “Do you know when you are greatly frightened, the color leaves your cheeks?”

  Margaret started at the direct question. “Yes,” she answered, although somewhat uncertainly.

  But the doctor took her answer warmly. “Precisely, my child. I know it too. I saw it many times even in this very office. Well, that’s what I observed in these women when they were told the date of their execution. It’s because the capillaries draw together—nervous vasoconstriction. But this is only part of a much larger response—all of the body’s systems which are not active in the fight-or-flight response shut down—the digestive tract, the skin, and the reproductive organs lose as much blood as can be spared. A third of the blood in the abdomen will be removed by the vasoconstrictors and sent to where it is most needed by a body in crisis: the brain and the skeletal muscles.

  “This research, then, was central in demonstrating that a woman living in the shadow of massive fears becomes infertile, and that menstruation has a strongly psychosomatic mechanism,” the doctor said, her voice ringing out. “No one had known that before,” she added plaintively, almost begging.

  Margaret’s own face turned a deep red, up through her cheeks and under her eyes. She could feel it. She was hot. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “My child. We did excellent work. We made an important contribution. Today, however, I dare not tell anyone about these studies. They would say what we did was unethical. Today it is so easy not to see that regardless of whether or not we had been there, broadening the circle of medical understanding, these women would have died anyway. That’s what has always comforted me. That’s what comforted me even then. These women were shielded from the doctor, because they were already dead.”

  Margaret’s face seemed to creak, so stiff was it. “When I first came here,” Margaret said, “you tried to give me a medical exam although you were blind—”

  “I know this must seem repugnant to you, but at the time it appeared a great good. To make something fine and enduring out of senseless death—”

  Margaret stood up. The doctor must have heard Margaret’s chair as it scraped away the shine of the wooden floor, because her face rearranged itself into an expression of panic, and even Margaret was surprised. “Wait!” the doctor cried, her voice cracking. She was unexpectedly earnest. “Wait, don’t you see! Margaret, you are too quick to judge! Nazism—listen to me—it signified then, and it will always signify, whether you want it to or not, much more and much less than what it has come to casually mean—which is death, and only death! But listen, my pet, it was an inversion of death. It spiritualized everything in its vicinity. God was bankrupt, it was the only alternative some of us thought we had. And it was not the Nazis who bankrupted God, no, that was done already long before. Even now the world is convulsing! And the Nazis offered one asylum.” The doctor’s hands, as she lifted them in the air, had the most powerful tremor. Her voice rang out, “Do we not yearn to be dissolved into a higher good? ‘Your god lies shattered in the dust and serpents dwell among his ruins and now you love even the serpents for his sake.’ Have you heard that, Margaret? Joining the Nazis was loving the serpents, yes, but for the sake of what did we love them?”

  Margaret stood. “You are a witch,” she said. Her stomach jumped straight up into her throat, and the nurse-receptionist popped her head in the door to see what was the matter. The doctor, hearing the door opening, thought Margaret was on her way out, and she became more agitated still. She began to feel her way around the desk with both hands.

  “It’s a higher history! Margaret! Do we not yearn to belong to this higher, more scientific world, you and I? In which mistakes are not failures of God, nor failures of mine nor of yours, but instead of nations running without consciousness on a wheel of fire! Would you not like your life to become art? You have said as much to me before!” The doctor was almost crying.

  Margaret, in anticipation of the doctor’s physical touch, began to panic. “I’m leaving,” Margaret whispered, as loud as she could.

  “Do not leave!” the doctor yelled. “Wait! There is something to be said for dynamism, for courage, for self-sacrifice, for the cult of beauty! Listen!”

  “I’m leaving now,” Margaret said again.

  “But wait! I am not trying to convince you of anything. These are not my views. I was only playing devil’s advocate. I too have repented! Listen! Don’t you want to know where I got my name? I told you, Arabscheilis is not my family name, nor my husband’s. Comrade! My girl, Margaret darling, comrade,” the doctor cried out, “just take a look at this, will you look at this?” And with amazing speed she moved back around and opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a mimeographed sheet, which she shoved toward Margaret. “You told me once that you go up there for your job. You’ll have sympathy for this, my dear. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  The paper was yellowed, and the words had been typed, to all appearances, very long ago. It read:

  After many years I came upon a report of a comrade about Sachsenhausen, a comrade who unfortunately is only known by his prisoner’s number. It’s the number 12983. Here is his report: A tablemate of mine, a Polish customs official from the area around Bromberg, was taken by the police president for interrogation. In the night after his return he died a horrible death from asphyxiation. He knew that they had poisoned him. I stayed by him throughout the night until he died in the morning hours. He made me promise to bring messages to his wife and children, and also made me promise to take revenge on his cruel murderers. His death inspired the greatest hatred in me against the Gestapo. His name was Arabscheilis.

  “I don’t understand,” said Margaret.

  “But don’t you see? I found this many years ago. You think I did not react to Albert’s death. But I reacted with every cell in my body. Do you think it meant nothing to me? That’s why I changed my name, in honor of the lost people, in honor of the unknown man, this Arabscheilis. Do you think I could love my brother? Don’t you think I noticed what he was? You—you and your kind—you think nothing has any meaning to people like me, who have failed ourselves morally, but we are the most sentimental people in the world!”

  Margaret turned a cold ear. She even kicked over her chair in protest.

  “Comrade, my dear! Don’t leave me! I am with you. I—” the doctor stuttered. “I could have betrayed you to your mother! How many times did she contact me, looking for you? But I never did.”

  “What are you saying?” Margaret turned her face back around.

 
“Your phone number, it went out of service two years ago, did it not? And you didn’t answer e-mails, did you? She called me! And I, an exhausted old woman, went on foot looking for you on her behalf. You were willing to meet your great-aunt then, give her obstetrician’s eyes a view of your shame—my vision was going, but I could see enough. But you, you got angry, you spat at me like a snake, just like now. All because I suggested you should contact that trollop of a mother you have!”

  Margaret stared at the woman. “But—” Her cheeks were aflame. “Why do you call my mother a trollop?”

  “Madness has its reasons which reason cannot know. I’ll give you that, my dear. But the man we call your father, poor Christoph, may he rest in peace—was never the same, not after he found out. It destroyed him, even if he did have, have a—well, a touch of the Greek about him! There are men for whom the unquestioned fidelity of a wife is the vertebrae of all independence!”

  “But—” Margaret said. She could not catch her breath. “But you’re wrong. My father—that’s not how it was.” Margaret still could not catch her breath. “Why do you pretend to think our name is Täubner?”

  “In good faith! So far as I know, my pet, your name is Täubner. If your name is no longer Täubner, I cannot say why. In any case you were certainly born Margaret Täubner. Just as I was born Gudrun Täubner. Your mother, may she never reenter Germany, did not explain this American turpitude in any of our correspondence. She gave me your address only, and I wonder if it wasn’t a deliberate evasion.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me this at the beginning, instead of wasting all this time?” Margaret was coughing and could not catch her breath.

  “Do you take me for a fool?” the doctor asked.

  “What—?”

  “Deranged! Deranged is what you have been, my shining pet, and the first principle in the treatment of the shell-shocked is this: no sudden moves. You were not ready, perhaps you are not ready still.”