Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “Totalitarianism provides his most congenial society, with its stupid calls and alarms, its aping of the Jew’s own tricks, such as the obliteration of time and the fierce attack on moderates, and—its persecution of the Jew! When he becomes an obsession, he is on the threshold of victory.”

  Bach retracted his big head into layers of neck-flesh, recovered, then began again, right forefinger extended:

  “I do not mean to claim that I quickly saw the light. Young and innocent as I was, I determined after each rejection to redouble my efforts at understanding, feeling still that it was our responsibility that this strange people faced the world in a crabbed, distorted way. How very close was I to the truth! A human being if thrown into water at birth can swim. A few years of growth and this talent is gone, to be regained only by artifice. Yet, this is as it should be. Artifice is what makes us human. It is morally necessary to withhold this function from a child until he has lived long enough to learn the properties of water and the human body, and to experience a sense of achievement in placing them in a new relationship. So with me. By the heart, I had arrived at the proper relationship with the Jews, the masterly one, but I was condemned to tread the earth for some years in ignorance before returning to it by ratiocination.

  “But, to proceed. I told myself again that the Jews had no reason to think kindly on their oppressors, and that it was only natural they would out of pride decline any aid that tended to imply a lack of self-competency on their part. I summoned up my resources of love, decency, intelligence. They might deny me, but I would not deny them. I suddenly took on, through the force of my commitment, the identity of a Jew; and the soma reflected the psyche: the cartilaginous tissue of my nose thinned, my eyebrows thickened, and my shoulders developed a nervous twinge.

  “At first, my gentile friends derived much fun from this state of affairs, and would jokingly call upon me for the Jewish point of view on every question (this “Jewish opinion” is a favorite delusion of gentiles, and one which while ostensibly deploring, Jews enjoy enormously). But it did not take long for them to discover that what was an idle jest to them, was deadly serious to me. As my philo-Semitism became firmer and firmer, I felt a wall rising between us. The last brick fell into place when a story began to go around that I was really half-Jewish, and had thrown my lot with the alien part of my heritage. This fiction, I realized, was only their defense against accepting the terrible fact that I had, in free will, abdicated from the gentile’s estate.

  “But, of course, neither was I received as a fellow by the Israelites. Here there existed no solid wall—this people could not have survived all those agonizing centuries by material means. (The Jew, by the way, has always deluded his enemies into thinking he is materialistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth, which you can appreciate when you observe that he has flourished in the West under capitalism, a philosophy which above all others is abstract and visionary, and based on the intangibles of faith and spirit. He is, however, naturally opposed to the recent developments of capitalism. If it becomes humane, that is to say, evolves into true socialism—which is absolute materialism—we have a chance of conquering him. Vain thought!)

  “So I was with and around the Jews without being of them. Oh, they don’t hold secret meetings, like the mythical Elders of Zion (that wonderful legend, which is far too gross to be of Jewish origin—you know they, themselves, ‘plant’ most of the anti-Semitic fairy tales—is an example of the gratuitous aid they are often rendered by moronic gentiles), they have no arcane signs or handgrips, no insigne. How they communicate their identity to each other is so mysterious that it exceeds mystery, as does the manner in which a single spermatozoon out of ten thousand penetrates the egg. The important thing is that it happens. And, if we cannot grasp it, no Jew can fail to. Which is why no Jew can truly forsake his people, and why the Jews display that odd combination of mockery and pity towards those of their fellows who vainly toy with religious ‘conversions’ and facial surgery.

  “The great reversal (from philo- to anti-Semitism) came, as those things do, all at once. I was in the habit at that time of spending the evenings with my Jews in a cellar-cafe where over a single glass of beer or cheap wine we would exhaust hours talking art, literature, philosophy, and those other diversions of the young, including politics, of which ours was, in that day—1927—communism. All in what I cherished, despite numerous disillusionments, as the intimate atmosphere of brotherhood. One evening a newcomer appeared at our table, a fierce, hideous, wooly-headed young Israelite, looking like the pictures one sees of Trotsky as a youth. He was discoursing passionately on some topic, political I should imagine, but as I took a seat, he terminated abruptly. ‘It’s all right,’ one of the others told him, ‘Bach is all right.’ He nodded amiably at me, and rather transparently began to comment on inconsequential matters. Later, when I had left the table briefly to speak with a friend across the room, I saw on returning that he and Schwartz, whom I regarded as my closest comrade, had their heads together, snickering. The object of their amusement was obvious. Now, lest you think me hypersensitive, I must explain to you that the Jew’s humor is concerned solely with satire; he does not laugh at things, but always at people. That is to say, he finds funny not what occurs by chance, such as a stout man’s tumble on the ice, but what has taken place by human will, and the involvements therefrom, such as, say, a gentile posing as a Jew. This temper stems first from the Jews themselves having suffered too much from chance to find comedy in the fortuitous, and, second, from their great reverence for the given, the inanimate, the timeless. One might almost say the Jew would see the ice mocked by the stout man’s hindquarters.

  “I felt a rush of loathing at that moment, as one about to vomit feels the bile-bitter fluid rise in his throat, and not at the Jews, but at myself. For a moment I had seen in those mirrors of degradation that dreadful, abominable specter that no one can face with composure: my naked self. But I choked it down and took my seat, for the deepest self-knowledge bears with it the deepest cowardice. The impulse to action was to come almost an hour later. The conversation had continued in the same silly direction the newcomer had indicated: tastes in wine, the beasts at the Zoo, a job a friend had lately got on one of the Ullstein papers—B.Z. am Mittag, I believe—and so on. Finally, the group began, only half-seriously, to plan an outing in the next week. Half-seriously, I say, because we were all unemployed, and could not have raised the money for the elaborate refreshments listed as the minimum fare. ‘Where shall we go?’ cried Schwartz. Someone named a favorite section of the Grunewald. The eternal dupe, I had been swept up again into the warmth of the fraternity, and was adding my bit. I noted with good humor that we should avoid the spot named, because on a recent Sunday stroll I had marked that it was uncomfortably crowded.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said the young Trotsky, ‘too many Jews.’ I think now that he was merely passing a harmless, if masochistic jest, as Jews often do, but, then, it struck the spot that had been worked raw by the earlier incident. I broke down and wept. God, there is nothing more terrible than a young man’s sorrow! But not even that will move a Jew! I sprang to my feet. ‘Yes,’ I sobbed, ‘just as here,’ and fled from the café. From that moment on, the battle was joined.

  “I had been a fool, but my greater folly was yet to come. I fell prey to the subtlest device of this devil, and joined the ranks of his greatest ally, the National Socialist Party.

  “To war on decency, love, truth, freedom, is to permit the Jew to mask himself with the Good, and thus to embrace him. Through our aid, the Jew was able to achieve what in all the anguished millenia before he was not. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice! We weeded out his weaklings, while increasing his moral capital with every one we destroyed. We hardened him with our tortures. We tempered him, refined him in our fires, we polished him down to the indestructible core. Today you can see the results of our craftsmanship: he is pure hard diamond, and his radiant leer sparkles in triumph over his fallen forge-slave.”
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br />   In conclusion Bach reached over and dropped his hand on Reinhart’s knee with a startling weight. Startling because when he had held it earlier in greeting, it was light, and since it was clammy as well, reminiscent of a damp sponge. Now it hit with a plop like a waterlogged sponge, and, sure enough, when Reinhart looked down he saw a faint wet stain melting the crease from his trouser-knee. This oddity was as full of liquid, it occurred to Reinhart, who remembered both the tears of gratitude at the cigarettes and the weeping in the story, as a cheese is full of “whey” in all the best fairy tales. As the first occasion on which he had come across anyone whose hands genuinely dripped with perspiration, it was worthy of cataloguing. Then too, in this damp cellar nothing dried. His own sweat, while not as plentiful as Bach’s, sheathed him like a trout’s mucous envelope. A strip of stagnant water lined the base of the wall; the concrete blocks above had sieved out a patina of mineral salts.

  Bach’s rhetoric had made poor Reinhart’s head reel, from amusement through indignation to logical vertigo. He repeated the process, this time at greater cost, that he had undergone in Philosophy 100, where the splendid promise of the fall catalogue—“The major traditions of European thought”—was blighted by the inevitable petty-Machiavelli of a lecturer with his cul-de-sacs: “Epimenides, a Cretan, said all Cretans are liars. Was he telling the truth?” And even if he understood, he was lost, and guilty, guilty.

  At last, in desperation, he said: “Just let me get hold of this. You want to kill the Jews with kindness?”

  Bach made his giggle, and the hairs rose on Reinhart’s neck.

  “Leave it to the American to put things without equivocation!”

  Reinhart took his advantage to steer into the congenial area of behaviorism. “But all this is in terms of feelings and ideas. What exactly did you do, as a Nazi?”

  Bach withdrew the sponge to his own knee, his eyes bagging in disappointment.

  “I should have thought the intellectual history to be the more valuable. Well, then, if you insist, I can produce a few crumbs of physical activity. Humiliating, but perhaps useful as an index to the nightmare from which it took me so long to awaken.

  “I joined the Party in November, 1938. I shan’t dwell on the scruples the conquering of which took me an entire decade from the aforementioned events. I placed the button under my lapel a few days before the celebrated Kristallnacht when, in retaliation for the murder by the Polish Jew Grynszpan of an attaché at the German Embassy in Paris, the Nazis instituted an action against Jews and Jewish property throughout the Reich. It may sound queer to you that I participated in some of the raids in Berlin. Yes, I the aesthete! My request for a role was most suspiciously received, the storm troops being constituted of the most ungodly scum you can imagine, whose motivation was not a holy passion against Jews but a simple nihilistic lust for destruction. However, a fanatical eye is an effective persuader. I managed to win a position on one of the flying squads that swooped on the Jewish shops in the Kurfürstendamm. You cannot understand, nor can I describe the exultation with which I plied my axe, even astonishing the thugs whom I accompanied, so that by the end of the night there was a tacit agreement among these canaille that I was their leader.

  “In a china shop, where we had done a job worthy of your proverbial wild bull and were ready to depart, one of my companions came upon a hidden safe, buried in the rear wall. We had to send out for explosives to open it, it being impervious to the pick, and I was all for abandoning the project for better work elsewhere. But the cupidity of these swine was aroused; they were convinced the Jew had cached his treasure there. The door was eventually burst, revealing an empty chamber save for a single object, a small vase, which on examination I determined to be a piece of thirty-pfennig trash from Woolworth’s.

  “Now why the Jew would have placed such a thing in his vault I could not at first explain, and, indeed, was about to pitch it aside, when the thought struck me that the scoundrel had got intelligence of the raid, and, lacking anything better, had employed this means of retaliation, with a sense that Nazis of the common stripe would be certain to think it valuable and demonstrate their idiocy by confiscating it unbroken. A very deep joke, typically Jewish. But I knew, with the penultimate hatred which is, as I now know, stupidity, but which then seemed wisdom, that at last I had in my hands an instrument to enable me to top the Jew at his own game. I led my men in another diligent round of razing. When we had done, the showcases were flinders, the walls demolished to the lath, the woodwork a pile of faggots for the stove, the wiring ripped out—in short, a reduction that could have qualified us journeymen house-wreckers. A tiny table was spared, and placed in the center of the room. On it, I centered the vase, filled to the rim with my ordure.”

  For all the foliage, thought Reinhart, he is a clown at the core. “That was sort of childish, wasn’t it?”

  Bach could not be conned. “No, with gratitude, if you mean ‘and therefore not responsible.’ ” And, not seeing Reinhart’s grin grow dim, he struggled to his feet without assistance; swaying over him, face contorted, arms rising and falling like a crazy windmill, he screamed in the voice of his giggle, piercing, forceful, but not loud: “Oh no, no. Can’t you understand? In Auschwitz we of the SS could kill two thousand head in half an hour, but it was burning the bodies that took time.”

  He produced a cavernous belch that shook him to the fundament, and toppled backwards, ever so slowly, onto the couch, which recoiled to the floor and recovered. Massively he slept.

  Lori, too, slept in the chair, but the absence of sound as Reinhart rose and prepared to creep away, awakened her.

  “No, are you leaving?”

  Reinhart pointed to the sofa.

  “He is spent, poor man!”

  At the purity of her look, Reinhart seized her bony shoulders and shook them violently as he might have washed his overcoat with air. When he had exhausted the brutality of his violated virtue and summarized Bach’s dissertation, she tossed back her head and laughed extravagantly.

  “Bach in the SS! Pardon my rudeness. Perhaps one must be German to see the joke. The SS had most severe physical requirements.”

  “Why would he tell such a story?” asked Reinhart, aloud but to himself, as the chair again received his mass. “If he concocts this out of the thin air the man is surely mad.”

  “No, he is not insane. The minds of the insane run in straight lines, not always Euclidean, but always straight. The job there is to find the geometrical system by which to measure them. Here, if you insist, we have something eccentric, twisted but normal. In fact,” she added, “normal is twisted.”

  “But why evil?” he wailed. “When people lie they make themselves better, not worse.”

  “No, you foolish boy!” She thrust her face up at him. “No, they first make themselves something, whether good or bad, but something. A man cannot live without a function. Can you understand that, you American?”

  He had never in all his life heard the national adjective pronounced with contempt. Amerikaner: he loathed it for a moment himself, but there was yet one more hateful.

  “You German!” he ranted. “Can you understand this: I am ashamed to be of German descent! It makes me sick to my stomach. I might lie to make myself worse, as you say, but not to claim I hurt defenseless people. You once asked about my relatives—I hope they were killed in the bombing! And if they weren’t, they are dead anyway in their souls. Do you know what you did when you murdered the Jews? You committed suicide, all of you!” Of course, no sooner was it out than he realized he echoed Bach to the letter, and was ashamed.

  “Don’t talk of things you cannot understand.” She turned her back.

  He reclaimed from the table the pack of cigarettes he had given Bach and made for the door. Lori pursued him. In the dank passageway, in the pale light that reached there from the lamps within, they grappled, she shrilling: “I must make you understand about Bach. It is simply an overactive anterior pituitary. Not only does this outlaw of a glan
d produce great size, but it also eliminates the sexual urge!”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care.” Saying which again and again, he nevertheless permitted her to pull him back inside. He knew now of his own impotence: his great moral address had been delivered, every word, in English.

  Lori drew him to the chair and notwithstanding their differences in size, literally knocked him into it, all that was necessary being one good push in the midsection.

  “Now,” she cried, standing militantly before him. “It was you who insisted on coming here. You forced me to bring you against my will. Therefore you will stay until I finish. Bach has done as much for me as one human being can do for another. He has saved my life, my very life!, every single day for three years.”

  “You were anti-Nazi?” asked Reinhart in rapturous awe, but she paid him no mind.

  “And it involved more than simply not turning me in to the Gestapo—you perhaps think in your naïve way that that much could be expected of a husband; you have not lived in Germany—and more than concealing me, too, although that at the daily risk of his own life.”

  Beneath the vast, important feelings Reinhart had a little tickle of pride, no less important, at her ceasing to speak so as to favor his imperfect knowledge of the tongue. She spoke swiftly and with the full resources of idiom and construction, and he did not miss a word.