Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  He asked it now: And what of St. George, l’homme moyen sensual, could there be a more ruthless overbearing than that on which his bovine assurance was fixed? In his mood Schild held it outrageous that St. George had not that first morning after Lovett’s party turned in Lichenko to the MPs as a deserter from the Red Army. Which was his clear duty, the Yalta Agreement standing as witness. Indeed, St. George could be court-martialed for malfeasance of office, were it known, and reduced to his permanent rank of PFC or whatever was the breath-taking altitude to which he had mounted in the fifteen years before Pearl Harbor.

  Thus as always, Schild in his deliberations surrendered to irony, the only weapon whose victories were won exclusively from its wielder, the sword with which the Jews, like Samurai, disembowel themselves to spite their enemies. He knew now, in retroactive projection, that he had always known Lichenko was a deserter, even as early as that first rap on Lovett’s door, and in full cognizance encouraged him in the defection. He, Schild, was a traitor; he denounced himself in the dock, took himself to the cellar, shot a revolver into the base of his own skull, and did not weep over the loss of one more counterrevolutionary.

  Who wept for a Jew? He derived from the question a brutal, hurting pleasure, of the kind one feels as a child, scratching an itch till it bleeds. And whether it was the pain, the pleasure, or the warmth of blood that gave him courage to press on, on he went with sharp nails through the soft flesh and webbed sinews to the nerve core. In twenty-eight years, among the regiments of shadows which had come and gone, wearing whatever badge of unit—no matter whether Star-of-David or even hammer and sickle; no matter whether in love or hatred, sympathy or suspicion—he had met one man alone who did not treat him as a Jew.

  Who would weep for a Jew? Lichenko would not. Deserter, drunkard, schnorrer, leech, to the undeluded eye he was a compound of the baser failings—indeed he was what Schild’s father had always predicted Schild himself would grow up to be—and very likely a liar as well, for when a man is one thing, it is natural to suppose he completes the series, and it seemed appropriate to Schild, perhaps desirable, that Lichenko had not been a valiant warrior, either, but was rather a coward wearing counterfeit or stolen medals. If he would grant him all, he must begin by giving him nothing.

  The final solution will have arrived that day on which one man admits to another that he is a Jew and the second neither laughs nor draws his revolver nor melts in feigned, or more dreadful yet, authentic sympathy, but rather collapses in boredom—as Lichenko at the party indicated he might if Schild said another word on the subject. In Lichenko’s egocentric vision he knew now that he had never been more, or less, than a host fat for the parasiting, a mere object, a thing to be used, not comrade nor ally, not even a man—and therefore not a Jew.

  Lichenko was the new man who had sprung, unarmed, from the forehead of the Idea, with no chains, no history, and a concern only for himself, the product of a proposition that worked. Never say that new kinds of creation are impossible; if you can build a bridge, you can make a man with the sensibility of a bridge, without debts, incapable of guilt, and lacking all purpose beyond his immediate function—and therefore neither a Jew nor interested in one. It had been worth the effort, was Schild’s thought, and the thought was also new: for not one moment of his service had he sought any manner of payment, any proximate hope.

  One day in August 1939, Ribbentrop’s plane descended on Moscow, where the airport building flew the swastika and the band played the Horst Wessel Song, Molotov called fascism a matter of taste, and Stalin signed the pact with Hitler. In New York, Schild straightaway joined the Party. Truth is never literal: he was already a member for some months, and his first response to the Pact was a suicide of all that was not his body.

  ‘If a universal proposition is true, the particular which stands under it is also true; but if the universal is false, the particular may or may not be true.’ The merciless clarity of the Greek logic; before it, the Hebraic superstitions were quaintly impotent. If you say A, you must also say B. Those who are not with us are against us. What does it matter, said Lenin, how the chicken is carved, so long as it is finally in pieces?

  Alternatives to these were the Munich Agreement; Roosevelt in his wheel chair; the furniture of the Seder—roasted egg, bitter herbs, piece of bone, eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, presided over by Schild’s father, an unbeliever; and millions of weak little Jews chanting the Kaddish for the dead. Now they could pray for the latest corpses, those “anti-fascists” who fled this Party and its compact with the devil.

  Schild would stay. And he did not simply stay but joined, took that second breath to which all earlier belonging was mere apprenticeship. For a cause, a real cause, a man first forsakes all others to become one; and then, if he has the true vocation, denies the one to become many. First gives up women, if he is a monk, and then gives up the desire for women; if a Nazi, first tolerates the murder of the Jews, and then after that second breath, himself shoots the revolver.

  If a Communist... the only virtue Schild would grant himself was that in his internal dialogues he never lied: that was for the liberals. Certainly the NKVD, like the Gestapo, pays its call without warning, in the small hours; surely “we” have our concentration camps, our dictator, our elite, our peculiar truth which denies the witness of the uninstructed eye, and if your métier is opposition to the regime, you did no better to migrate to the Worker’s Homeland than had you tried it with Hitler. We wish to hear no exotic points of view; we will not suffer variety; our conscience, too, is corporate. Now we have entered into a pact with what we so much resemble in our means that the cowards and opportunists can cry: all enemies of “decency” are together in one basket.

  We do not cavil: it is precisely your “decency,” a world in chains, that we would destroy, and if Hitler can hasten its end, he will be used until history is ready to fling him aside. The difference between us and you is that we will do anything to prevail; between us and Hitler, that we are right.

  Thus had Schild accepted reality. In the destructive element, immerse! To create that future life in which there will be no separations of one man from another, which is to say that time when no one is a Jew real or symbolic, when all the old rises and falls are planed away and men are simply man and he a stranger to passion, one must first, in the now, act upon the reverse of that vision, be separate—be a Jew, that is, in extremis; if necessary, as it was, ally with an anti-Semite.

  Schild’s progress had not been easy, or of short duration, and whether the end was serene he did not know, to date not having reached it. In particular, he was corrupted by a special feeling towards the Germans, throughout and in spite of the ideological transformations. With Hitler’s invasion of the USSR the pact of course fell from memory. From then until the final victory was apparent, the eye was shifted from sharp focus on fascism-versus-the-Socialist-ideal to the less demanding Gestalt of Germans-against-humanity, the latter represented most crucially by the Russian people, who incidentally had a government which tried new things but was essentially a Slavic branch of that general democracy now menaced by barbarism.

  True, to the professionals Nazism was still finance capital in the last terrible flush before death, and the Western Powers, temporarily useful, were the same thing not yet so far advanced that they themselves knew it. Nazism was fascism and fascism, capitalism; nowhere was the specific quality of Germanness material. And no sooner did the Red Army take Berlin than it erected its billboards: The Hitlers Come and Go, But the German People Remain.

  Insofar as the populace had connived with the Nazis they had seriously erred and must not now resent their rightful punishment by the Soviet troops. But more important, what was past was past and the future stretched out bright and grand, offering that great opportunity which so seldom comes to a people: to start out new, from nothing. Crushed and smoking lay everywhere at foot the best evidence of the failure of all hitherto existing societies. The Germans were wron
g, and guilty—guilty of following an extreme reactionary in his mad-dog assault on the Socialist homeland—but were neither fundamentally mad-dog themselves (for peoples can be misguided but are never bad) nor in any way hopeless of reclamation; indeed, by so simple a measure as prompt adherence to the correct ideology they could enter immediate partnership with the Soviet Union itself, as magnanimous in victory as it was invincible in war.

  A historical crisis, admittedly, capitalism being done in by its inherent contradictions—yet why Germany? No, excuse me, that is of course understood: the most advanced capitalist country of Europe; inevitably the agony would there have its nucleus. But why the one peculiar feature. Why the Jews?

  To answer the first question is not to need the second: in its desperation, crumbling capitalism will seek a scapegoat on whom to hang its failure. As simple as that, comrade, nothing Dostoyevskian—unless you will admit that Dostoyevsky, too, was a byproduct of the social decay preceding the Revolution—and above all do not quote me Heine: “It is indeed striking, the deep affinity between these two ethical nations, Jews and old Germans. This affinity has no historical origin... basically the two people are so similar that one might regard the Palestine of the past as an Oriental Germany...”

  With full respect to all cultures and races, comrade—after all, it was Lenin who with the brilliant collaboration of Stalin, always the foremost of his colleagues, drew up that system by which for the first time in history Russia’s many and diverse subnational cultures live today in peace and harmony, each with its own autonomous state, including even the Volga Germans (unfortunately the presence of certain fascist agents provocateurs and counterrevolutionaries concealed among the predominantly loyal mass of the latter made necessary certain rearrangements when the area was threatened by the Hitlerite invasion, and the patriotic Volga Germans themselves requested to be transported elsewhere in the Soviet Union, which plea was granted; a far cry from the concentration camps to which the Nisei were sent in America). With full respect to all cultures, comrade, and to their interesting and colorful traditions each of which symbolizes some old socio-economic thesis or antithesis, it is fruitless and perhaps heretical to stagnate with the past. Not what peoples have been but what they will be, is our sole concern.

  Hatred of the Germans, therefore, is not valid, and if persisted in might become a dangerous malady. Similarly with the obsession that one is a Jew, which incorrectly puts too much stress on two delusions: (1) that Jews are that important, and (2) that oneself is.

  By the Central Committee in his own skull, then, the first, the last, and the most ruthless of the Party’s disciplinary boards, Schild had long before the arrival of Lichenko been granted only one more chance to rectify his errors. Had there been a thousand, he now realized, he would have spoiled them all, because he was not, and could never be, pure, adamant, resolute, unilateral; that is, could not be a Lenin. Lenin was not a Jew.

  But Trotsky—yes, regard that classic example, that bright needle of a Jewish mind and its corrosion from pride, which is a Christian sin. And Milton Grossman, who at twenty-five had collected no excess in his passage through the world, who had seemed only a disembodied conscience and a pair of black eyes fixed on a morning horizon. He was to leave for Spain on a tramp merchantman of which he would say no more than that it sailed soon from Halifax. In his room behind the shop he had packed the knapsack which yet bore the symbol of the Boy Scouts of America. The irony of this had been funny, and Schild laughed, but then seeing that Milton did not, he knew it was no irony, which is the tension between the way things are and the way they are imagined, but rather another marker on Milton’s undeviating and dedicated road.

  Schild, too, had been a scout, in the same troop. It had of course degenerated by his time—bullying by the patrol leaders, petty thefts in the tents at the Alpine camp, obscene language and practices—Milton, with his thirty-six merit badges, was by then only a distant legend, and it meant nothing to the others that Schild was his friend. Not until years later did Schild come to know that at the arrival of the Miltons, too, the grosse Männer, the troop is always in decay—and falls again upon their passing from the scene, because without a constant image of strength before their eyes men, or boys, see nothing.

  At nineteen, Schild was big enough to go to Spain himself, that is, old enough and large enough in size to be in his first year at City College, to sit through purposeless lectures, to sign petitions and stand with a claque at anti-fascist rallies and peace movements and enlist in involved conspiracies to stop the Socialist candidates for student council, to study the terrain of the essential American ground: folk songs, baseball, comic strips—and to report at four o’clock each afternoon to the squalid office which his father kept on Broadway just above the northern boundary of Union Square, there to involve himself for two and a half hours in the commerce of buttons.

  But he was not big enough to go to Spain. It was characteristic of his friend that Milton did not suggest it. What we admire in those who stand above us is their assurance that they do, truly, see over our heads. He had similarly never suggested that Schild join the Young Communist League, never indeed that he so much as become intellectually a Marxist. Milton went towards the truth, the true was the necessary, follow if you will. Of the pre-Marxian thinkers Milton’s favorites were the Stoics, whom he had read as a college freshman and shared with Schild, then on the bottom rung of high school and still a simple idolator of athletes and a noisy drinker of cokes at Mrs. Grossman’s counter. “Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling by the neck. But they both go.”

  It was the first genuine idea that Schild had ever heard, and its function in his Bildung was that upon its movement he had twice passed from adolescence into maturity. The second time—and not a piece with his second breath of commitment to the Party, because it both pre- and post-dated that event, had really no fixed duration, continued still—his second transformation began when he understood its heresy.

  Milton Grossman died in Spain, in July 1937. As to the means of his death there could be no question; this was one of the rare times the fact followed from the simple conditions of time, place, character. He had achieved the herohood for which his progress through twenty-five years, from Washington Heights to a Catalan field, had been apprenticeship. And so it was assumed, without the spelling out, for reports were necessarily fragmentary and cryptic, the Lincoln Brigade was outside the law of the country of its origin, and Spain under its cumulus of gunsmoke lay three thousand miles across the sea.

  Another year, and someone was returned, or someone knew someone who had come back, who knew someone in Valencia who had seen Milton in the hospital, felled by tetanus, and since the shortage of serum was notorious. ... Yet the achievement was not diminished; Byron, who had gone to fight for Greek liberty, died of meningitis, and the shorter literary dictionaries, with no space for elaboration, read: “died, for the freedom of Greece, Missolonghi, 1824.”

  ... but what did those rarer reference books on the shelf of some terrible agency tell of Grossman, Milton? “Found guilty of Trotskyist wrecking. Liquidated.” “Executed after investigation uncovered his role in the conspiracy of the Fascist gang known as P.O.U.M.” “Agent provocateur in the pay of Franco. Sentence carried out, July 1937.” Or perhaps only a sparrow-track of cypher. The world had not become more cruel since Byron, but its truths were more devious, less capable of proof, yet, for all that, truer. The real story of Byron, the concrete one—a term of Milton’s for a quality he always sought beneath the capitalist veil of lies—might be of another order, the mission to Greece a shabby quest of ego, a Trotskyism of that time, and who knew but what the meningitis were some Aesopian code-name for the ‘control of disorderly elements’?

  But surely it was unprecedented that at home a friend dare not speak his name. For Schild naturally had gone with his questions to those who returned. The cause had been lost and they were weary and older than their years, but they were also proud and illuminated with wha
t could only be called the sad joy of men who have wet their comradeship in blood. They sang fierce, exuberant songs, were curt, succinct, yet eloquent in a language which was properly half-alien to the beneficiaries of their sacrifice.

  But for Milton Grossman not even Spanish idiom would serve. There had not, to their memory, ever been such a person, or if there had, no doubt he was overlooked in the terrible struggle against the open fascists on the other side of no-man’s-land and the fifth columnists behind our own lines.

  Of course Schild knew of the wreckers, the anarchists, the hirelings of Trotsky, those worst of all enemies because they are one’s own kind, who extend a hand as comrades and with the other clasp their dagger. The greatness of a cause can be measured by the decadence of its adversaries; we can be proud of the very rottenness of those we have cast out. For all their mumbo-jumbo, and all matters of clerical fascism aside, the Catholics have a valid principle: he who embraces the incorrect faith in ignorance may be saved; only he who knows the true faith and rejects it is certain to be damned. It could never be said that Milton Grossman was ignorant; like Trotsky he was all mind, his mind all blade, and that all edge, the Jewish edge... and behind it, the abysmal weakness.

  To continue the inquiry was to make oneself suspect. And needlessly—for Schild asked the questions only to test the answers already in his possession. No doubt the flaw had always been there, waiting for the day when the force of concrete, historical events would burst it wide. But it had been the earlier Milton in whom Schild had seen the Way, who had armed him with the weapons. There was ironical justice, but justice, in turning them now against the too-competent teacher. And his oddest feeling was that in so doing he did Milton an honor greater than he deserved; that in the measure of its being undeserved, Milton would be pleased; that, finally, he deserved to be pleased.