Night of the Aurochs
Page 18
♦
My virility is to reject. I reject everything by which you live. I see the falseness of it. Realizing it, I hate it. Hating it, I will destroy it I am the avenging evil. Anything is preferable to the nothing that is you and they. Blood in the veins of yea-saying slaves is no blood at all. It becomes real only when you shed it. Let it flow. Let reality reign.
♦
Are we falling in love again? I do not know. My life is a waste, a scum. There are new flavors here. There is a new kind of death, a death of the spirit, out of which we have created a new nation. Oh Israel, Israel, here gave I unto thee thy soul! The clouds glower, the air grows chill, gray wind through gray, lifeless trees, dead souls in the mist, a moaning, a sigh. Are we falling in love again?
DOG BARKS
Tonight, after listening to the news, I left the house to sit and think and inhale the dry air of a late August night—an atmosphere which to me has always carried the smell of an herb cellar: dry grasses, fallen leaves, pods of parched seeds, a rotted wild cucumber, the cast-off husks of grasshoppers and garter snakes, the hollow corpses of exiled drone bees, the flutter of disconnected moth parts—the whole gaudy corpse of summer decked with shabby flights of mortuary art: a sunflower stalkhead bowed with grief, thorns of a dry locust for the making of crowns, the spear of an infant poplar tree that survived its first season, straight and sharp and deadly, and, far and high to the north, the pole star pointed to the Big Dipper for the convenience of lost children, while nearer at hand a telephone pole stood stark against the horizon for emergency crucifixions. The distant hum of motor traffic could be heard rushing about on errands of absolutely no importance, a sound never heard in my youth. A train whistle announcing from far off the miracle of its determined passage from Erlangen to Bamberg. The shouts of children, loud and deceptively raucous, save from time to time as they start to disguise suspicious nighttime games with giggles and suppressed laughter. From somewhere near the river came the howling of a dog—just one dog, no more—a tireless howl without change of rhythm or tone or passion or, which is more interesting, response. The mindless boredom of that howl, its dismal monotony, the feeling it conveyed, that one no longer existed in the world but in a state of temporarily violent void, and that the awesome horror of the world is its truth, perhaps the only incontestable truth that neither the human mind nor the cleverest computer can either prove or disprove.
There must be four thousand persons who live in Forchheim. Because it is a rural area, almost everyone in the village and countryside keeps a dog. On an ordinary night several dogs are barking at the same time—a blended chorus of sounds so ordinary, so expected, and not to be consciously heard at all, just as one doesn’t hear the singing of crickets. It is simply a rule of nature that dogs bark at night; that occasionally one of them howls; and that there are times when, stirred by some spiritual madness, the whole community of dogs takes to howling en masse. But I had never before known a night when, for the lamentations of one howling dog, the universe gave forth no sound at all.
Old Fritz, who dozed at my feet, twitching and hyperventilating occasionally at the dreamed memory of some ancient canine horror, remained as soundless as the rest. Then, like the crash of thunder heard from on the other side of the world, there was a gunshot. The howling stopped, old Fritz looked up, surveyed the night with rheumy eyes, drew his conclusions, and allowed his head to collapse with a soft thump against the stoop.
Then, now far from the river a Great Dane broke the silence, after which every dog in Forchheim and on all the farms just around it joined the chorus. The crisis was at an end. Even the crickets sounded louder than when the original dog sent forth its first howling lament. I know it was a Great Dane that terminated the weird enchantment of the dogs in Forchheim that night because Gunther’s dog was a Great Dane, and the sound of their bark is not to be mistaken.
I picture myself sitting there on my stoop in the darkness, an old man of seventy-one, thinking not of the dry autumnal earth, nor of the gunshot, nor the growing chill as the moon sailed higher, but staring up at the night sky, listening across half a century to the hark of Gunther’s Great Dane, and the sound of Gunther whistling it down, and for the sound of Gunther’s voice on Hoher Meissner singing side by side with mine on that miraculous star-clustered night that marked both the end of my life and its beginning.
Grieben: Biography
CHRONOLOGY
Events
Grieben’s Age
Grieben born, 1898
Wandervogel in 1913
15
Joins Army, 1916
18
End of War; joins Freikorps
Freikorps
Married in 1923 or 1924
25-26
Son born in 1925
27
Joined the Party, 1926
28
Daughter born in 1928
30
Leaves SA, joins SS in 1934
36
Killer unit, Russia, 1941-42
43-44
Auschwitz, 1942
44
Second daughter born, 1944
(Note: the baby was killed with the mother in Dresden)
46
Grieben caught in 1947
Freed seven years later in 1954
Grieben: Autobiography
Seven stiff cardboard boxes, each firmly bound on all four sides with strong, cheap field rope; three duffel bags of canvas, waterproofed and well protected from all but fire; ten melon boxes for objects that don’t require too much protection against the wet. I sit here in my cubicled bedroom at Forchheim and wonder how they packed so much of the damned stuff into it (although I watched them carefully, checked each item against the carbon that should, at least, have rendered full account of them).
The problem, as any kind of fool can see, is autobiography. How is it possible to write about one’s self and still tell the truth? Or, just as difficult, even to write truly what one thinks to be the truth?
♦
Fairs were much simpler when I was a boy; there were wild horses, of course, and holy dwarfs, and every third female child was christened Ptomane, and when the face of the inviolate morn turned ever so slightly toward the equinox, hundreds of millions of holy elvers swarmed seaward down almost every scenically important European river. They squirmed and jostled and wept, being borne with foreknowledge and therefore understanding how few their survivors would compare to the staggering mass of them who set forth upon that long and perilous journey.
Grieben: Biography
He loves to read American reports about Charles A. Lindbergh, Senator Nye, Father Coughlin, Hearst papers, and the Chicago Tribune.
♦
Grieben’s parents lost their house and everything during the inflation. By 1924 he is thoroughly declassed.
♦
Grieben gets a job during inflation, hunting out and paying off mortgage holders who are hiding to avoid paying. One of them shoots himself as Grieben closes in on him. He quits.
♦
Grieben has a friend who rises fast in the SS. He envies him—but he has learned many official secrets from him also—Grieben, beautiful failure—his friend, assured success: until the end, where the friend, disgraced, arrives at Auschwitz for execution. Grieben does it.
The man who tipped Grieben off to the coming purge and recruited him into the SS and saved his life—was his closest friend—is the SS man he has to kill at Auschwitz.
♦
The same atom of ergone which quite accidentally left my lungs for Liesel’s in our last kiss may itself have drifted across the cheek of Jesus from Judas’s last kiss as he suspended in air at this moment and at this moment […] the seeking lips of the foulest whore in […]. Not as like, but the same one.
Thus it was that night as I knelt on the hillock in the gray twilight of Auschwitz. The giraffes were grazing. Smoke poured from their ears, and their cheeks glowed red as their teeth ground hot bone to ash. Lifted thei
r heads, regarded the horizons, calmly continued their grazing.
♦
At his trial Grieben is very proud to have referred to the American flag as an “accountant’s flag.” It is the only flag in the world that changes when a new state is united with the rest of the states. It is a flag that counts, enumerates. Hence, it is never permanent, as all other national flags are. It is always temporary. There will be fifty-one, fifty-two, etc., stars.
Grieben: Diary Insert per Russia
It is out at last, the incredible news which we, who were ordered to assemble in Pretzsch, have known since the second of June: yesterday at dawn we crossed the frontiers of Communist Russia on a 2000-mile front, objectives Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the west, Odessa to the south.
Looking like a newborn child, the map of a Europe that we have [moot?] never existed before. Of France, including that great whore of whores which is Paris; Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, White Russia, the Ukraine, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Italy, and North Africa from […] to […].
In the face of all this glory, in the seat of this unparalleled empire, in the midst of all these riches, we now move in an irresistible tide against St. Petersburg’s frozen palaces and the golden domes of Moscow. God be with us.
Grieben: On Women
Women as available everywhere; they are common; man is the greatest quarry, the best of all game. Have him and you have something. Have a woman and you have all of them—they are always there, all to be fucked—man is different.
♦
Grieben’s relationship with women somewhat parallels Germany’s historical relationship with non-German people. He has always translated love as power, and power is the right to use, misuse, or abuse the beloved as he wishes. Thus, after his great years are over, he realizes with a tragic sense of loss and yearning that never in his life has he been truly loved by a woman.
His childhood venture with Inge degenerated into fantasies of abuse, and she ended hating him. Beata, the plain woman he married because she owned a cottage free and clear and hence was at the peak of German inflation, he never loved nor pretended to. Not loving her, he didn’t abuse her; he simply used her as a cow, a household servant, and, when unavoidable, as a sexual obligation to be dealt with as swiftly and brutally as possible.
Liesel, who became the one great love of his life, so successfully avoided his sexual advances that on the night of the great book-burning in the square of Berlin University he took her into the park across from the University and attempted to rape her. However, at the moment of genital contact he prematurely ejaculated, merely soiling her loins. While he tearfully apologizes for what he calls his excess of masculine sexuality she vanishes into the night. Vanishes completely; never returning to the opera, never returning to her apartment. His frantic search and a consequent SS investigation reveal only that she is descended from one Jewish grandmother. Years later when he is a power in Auschwitz, he spots her in the street during a visit to Berlin and he sets the SS on her. He discovers she is married to a professor at the Max Planck Institute and has two young children. He has her kidnapped and brought to Auschwitz, where he arranges to save her from the ovens at the last moment and use her thereafter as his personal slave. She feigns gratitude because she must satisfy every demand he makes of her, and actually pretends to love him in order to survive and ultimately return to her husband and children.
All the horrors of love and sexual abuse which he merely fantasized or played at with Inge became a daily reality with Liesel. Why? Because he loves her so desperately.
When she is inadvertently killed during the evacuation of Auschwitz in the face of the Russian advance, he buries her in the woods near the camp. Only after death, and at the very peak of his terrible grief, he discovers that far from loving him as he thought, she loathed and feared him to a point of hatred. That behind each protestation of love, each kiss, each caress, each act of sweetness and submission, there had been nothing but fear, loathing, and a hatred too terrible to be imagined.
Thus, at fifty-four, having given his whole life to the lost German cause and now rotting in prison for fidelity to his oath, he comes to the terrible realization that he is approaching the end of his life without, even for one fleeting moment, having been truly loved by a woman.
The recognition of this horror arouses in him a terrible hunger for the one experience that justifies human existence and enables man to contemplate the inevitable approach of his own dissolution without going mad.
Let me have one moment, give me one moment. In his black despair he prays to God to grant him for just one moment, for only one fleeting moment, the experience of being loved by a woman.
Thus, in 1952, while in […] Prison, he reads the first German translation of Anne Frank’s diary. It infuriates him. He and all his fellow prisoners, and a large section of the German community, denounce it as a Jewish forgery. However, 900,000 copies of the diary are printed in Germany alone, and public opinion changes; and in the diary’s wake come other books that not only confirm the diary’s validity, but establish that Anne Frank and her entire family arrived at Auschwitz in September 1944.
Knowing now that Anne Frank was a real person, and that for at least three months (until camp evacuation and her transfer to Bergen-Belsen and death), he and fifteen-year-old Anne shared the spiritual and emotional trauma of Auschwitz, breathed the same air, felt the same autumnal chill.
The knowledge that this fifteen-year-old girl actually […], he begins to identify his life with hers. For at least three months, he and this fifteen-year-old girl beheld the same chimneys, looked up at the same smoke-fogged skies, breathed the same air, and inhaled smoke from the same crematory chimneys, shivered with the chill of the same autumnal winds, and dreamed of a future neither could predict or understand.
Since he had frequent […] in the […] area of the camp where the women were employed, it seems likely that he actually saw this girl and that she actually saw him. Even more, it is probable that they actually spoke to each other, and even in some curious way came to know each other.
With the ascendance of Dr. […] and others, he spends the rest of his prison term learning everything about Auschwitz in the last four months of 1944. It was not difficult to get research material, since the conditions of imprisonment for people like Grieben were far from severe.
♦
Every man can have a woman—many women can have a woman—but to have had a man! That no woman has ever had.
Grieben: On Conscience
There were, even in my circumstances, moments of clarity, instants of illumination, those strange split-seconds of time when all is seen, observed, analyzed—and nothing is understood. It is there, no question about that. The light reveals it. The eye sees it. But the spirit, the mind, the conscience of man—whatever you want to call it—turns blind and will not see it. It will not see because it cannot and still live. I mean, live in the same way, by the same right. That is because the right is from a different world and that world we dare not enter without abandoning ourselves. I speak of the world of anti-matter, of the anti-world, that positive negation, which scientists say is so complicated and mysterious that it cannot be understood; but of course when they say that to us, they are lying. They see, and they understand perfectly, and they deny it because they fear it. He was no fool who urged us not to bring the Visigoths to save us from the Scythians.
Grieben: On Leadership
The search for leadership is the search for love. Someone to love, to trust, to obey, to die for. If there is nothing to die for, there is nothing to live for. To live for, so intensely, so all consumingly that it is the apotheosis of life and love. We walk from the day we are born toward the past, toward the night, toward extinction, toward the nothingness whence we came. I see there is no purpose but to be, but to act, but to declare life everywhere and in every form before we go out.
Grieben: On Leaders
hip and Death
Toward the end do they not realize that our innocent young boys died on our side too? Curse the leadership on both sides. Damn the generals and kings and presidents on both sides. Curse them, curse me! My mother! curse her private parts that they did not strangle me at birth! Curse God—the world—life—the dead are all innocent! Can’t you understand that? They are paid by the millions! Let me join them in their wormy dust!
Grieben: On Power
List of Grieben’s power relationships. Power:
Over squirrel
Over rabbit
Over Inge
Over Liesel
Over Gunther
Over farmer
Over wife
Grieben: On Germany
Here we were, a few tens of millions of Germans, the gathering together of all the Teutonic tribes, surrounded by the intolerable pressure of earth’s hundreds of millions, a world overflowing with enemies, hating us, envying us, wanting to trick us, to trample us into the mire as they had in the past—not a people but a folk, a family, a tribe, blood brothers together, living in this beautiful German land, these haunted German forests, these ordered German fields, these rivers, these lakes, these waters and marshes bounded by gray seas, these bitter shores.
♦
In these days, or years, there arose from every point of Germany’s pulsing heart what became known as the Y.M. (Youth Movement), a time when the very best of German youth took to the roads and fields, the rivers and trails, to the forests and mountaintops in search of—of what? Of ourselves, really; of our true selves; of something beyond ourselves, something larger than the loneliness of the individual; a search, in short, for brotherhood and for fatherhood—a true father, a leader, a Christ, a Messiah, a Wotan, if you wish—someone whom we could trust and love and follow; someone to whom in perfect faith and love we could surrender ourselves and our lives in a moment of communion when he surrendered himself and his life to us.