Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “Where in all history can we find another idealism comparable to this? Hitler did what we have always been told is the supreme glory of man, and apparently impossible to a god—for what chance did Jesus of Nazareth take if he was immortal?—Hitler sacrificed himself for that which is greater than the self, for he stuck to his guns and he is dead now. I think a name for that is Love.

  “With the Soviets, however, no man is judged by what he is but rather by what he can become. Their favorite prisoner is the man capable of learning the error of his ways. He must do this through hard labor on projects useful to the state, and hence to mankind, and thus there is no waste. The penal system of a faith as inclusive as the Nazis’ was exclusive, and for that reason psychologically superior to the latter. Here at last the Jew, for example, is not a second-class citizen: he can be as great a swine as a gentile. Did you know, until that desert tribe of Hebrews found the one authentic God and that they were His chosen, an exclusive religion had never been invented? Ever since, the gentiles, who never could take a joke, have been punishing the Jews for being so damned clever. To the Communists, however, this old strife is a great bore. A man’s a man, and is capable of anything. And of course when you believe that, you are loving one another.”

  “Excuse me, Doctor,” said Reinhart, adjusting a prickling shoulder under Lori’s weight, “when you opened your coat I saw your shirt. It looks like part of a uniform, but not quite the color of a U.S. Army shirt—”

  “I should not suppose it does.” The doctor’s whisper lost strength in extended speech; Reinhart really helped him by interrupting. He cleared his throat with the soft yet dynamic sound one might make shaking out a floormop. “You are wrong if you think the average German feels no guilt; he simply will not dance it to the tune of you people who were not involved. My widow gave me this shirt. I suspect it is a storm-trooper’s garment, but naturally I cannot see it. ...

  “Also, Lieutenant, we have looked precisely at the differences. My brother-in-law insists, however—since he cannot forgive himself for being a gentile German [Bach flushed and looked at his legs]—on their similarities. His interest lies in proving Communism worse. Because I was once a Communist I am inclined to agree. The conscience is a Himmler as demented as the real one. Remorse, whose seat is in the memory, has a purpose. Guilt, the product of the conscience, is always useless, the wrong kind of self-concern, cheating, cowardly, immoral.”

  Since the doctor’s comments on his shirt, which had proved him as false as anything could, Reinhart had been rather nursing his shock than listening. He came back now to strike another blow for virtue.

  “It isn’t hard to be a murderer. The tough thing is to be a victim.” He smiled so bitterly that Lori woke up on his shoulder, saying “Wie bitte?” to which he answered, “Nichts, schlafen Sie noch.”

  For the first time, Bach, who had been frozen in wonder and delight, noticed her.

  “Rude!” he cried in outrage. “Your brother is speaking!”

  “Ach,” she said, “was kann man tun? He hasn’t stopped since I was a little girl.” Her head sank again.

  The doctor laughed and laughed at the awful thing—if he was an authentic ex-prisoner—she had said to him. “When we were small she used to punch me if I talked too much. In the solar plexus. Very effective when struck just right: I couldn’t speak for half an hour. Therefore would I take revenge by playing the Leonore Overture on the gramaphone, which, because I insisted she was named for it, she detested. Then in would come brother Leo, who couldn’t study mathematics for the din, and he would shout in his shrill voice: ‘Twins have only half a brain each.’ But if the altercation continued until Father had to come upstairs, we were all for it. Father had a face like a weapon. He was a very severe man. I can recall nothing loving about him but much that was precise.

  “Once when at table I spoke without permission he afterwards beat me so strenuously he sprained his arm. Feeling guilty, as I usually did upon such an event, but not remorseful, I offered to fit him out with a sling—already, you see, the future physician. ‘Do you want another whipping?’ he asked. ‘This time for being a fool? From your point of view my sprain is richly deserved.’ That is to say, he was a self-respecting man. I hated him for years. But now I think he must have died well.”

  “That old Prussian authoritarianism,” said Reinhart, remembering an argument of Cronin’s. “There you have the origin of Nazism.”

  “Except that my father was a Jew,” said the doctor.

  “Jews can be tyrants, too.” Reinhart was earnest, no longer baited or tested the doctor. “Isn’t that what we mean when we say racism is a lie? Everybody gets his chance to be a bastard.”

  “Yes, and we should not deny it even to, especially to, a victim. For there are victims and there are victims. If you read Mein Kampf you will find Hitler believed himself a victim, and because when he became a master he failed to do his job well, I am still able to agree with him in that early appraisal of himself.”

  “Haha,” jeered Reinhart. “Victim of what?”

  “Of indifference. The German people never understood what he wanted of them. Being normal people, they were always interested principally in themselves.”

  “While the innocent were being murdered all around them... to you this is right?”

  “If you think I shall tell you what is right or wrong, my friend, you are mistaken. That is your own affair. I care only for practical matters.”

  Reinhart rubbed his head. Fresh from yesterday’s close haircut, it felt to his hand small, hard, monkeylike, and shiny as a convict’s.

  “I give up,” he said, without knowing whether the idiom was feasible in German. “The trouble is, Doctor, I just don’t know what you want. If everything we have always thought is decent, is wrong, false, misguided, or useless, what alternative is there? The only thing I can see is the contradiction of decency; Nazism is as good a name as any, so long as we understand that Nazism in this sense is not just a German but a human thing. The Russians, then, if they have concentration camps, are Nazis. Perhaps there was some Nazism in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, which must have killed a lot of women and children and at least some Japanese who never wanted to go to war in the first place.

  “The British, someone once told me, invented the concentration camp during the Boer War. The French, so I heard, put German refugees in concentration camps at the beginning of this war. In democracies there are white people who lynch Negroes; there is anti-Semitism. I have been guilty of Nazism when I used force or threatened to on someone weaker than I or outnumbered, or when I had bad thoughts about Jews and other defenseless people—because I have done these things.” He looked proudly guilty.

  “I should hope so,” said the doctor. “What’s good enough for everybody else should be good enough for you.”

  “But isn’t selfishness the terrible crime of the modern era, selfishly being concerned with oneself and therefore thinking the other fellow is garbage?” He took his arm off Lori’s shoulder so that he could rub his head with both hands. “I want power, I want money, I want to be superior to a man with a colored skin or with a hooked nose”—from his tumult he was able to call time, to say “Excuse me, it was just an example” to Schild, who, in the reverse of Schatzi’s habit, was looking at him but not seeing—“therefore I tell myself he does not matter, is not even human. Then I can go on to do what I wish with him, slavery, torture, murder.”

  “Imagine yourself a citizen of the American South,” said the doctor, “a person who is in daily contact with Negroes and thus must come to terms with the fact of their existence. Would you mistreat them?”

  “God, I should try not to.”

  “You might occasionally fail, ja?”

  “I am just a human being.”

  “No question of that, and so was Julius Streicher, as Hitler, who was no man’s fool, said so well: ‘He may have his faults, but well, probably none of us is entirely normal, and no great man would pass.’ Yes. But why w
ould you try not to mistreat Negroes? Is there profit in it?”

  “It would mean something to me,” said Reinhart.

  “So there is a profit after all.” The doctor spoke as if he, himself, were making the discovery. To be sure, his manner throughout had been rather seeker than owner of fact; did he lack the courage of his confusions? “You cannot get respect for yourself by robbing it from another man. As to the Negroes, they might not know or understand what you were doing and therefore show no gratitude, ja? But to a healthy man this would make no difference. The self is not a gallery with a claque. And it would not be necessary for him to love the Negroes or hate the brutal whites, or worship a god or history, or be a radical or conservative. Just to be a man were sufficient, ja?”

  “Your example is too easy. Excuse me for trying to tell you about life, but is it not more complicated than that? I am not likely to live where Negroes are mistreated. I did not live in Germany in Hitler’s time or in Russia. I am not a Jew, my father is not an oppressed worker or sharecropper. On the other hand, neither am I a fascist or a boss—well, let’s face it, I am nothing in particular, but you know what I mean. What would I do in a situation where an Auschwitz is possible? ...I have not told you—somewhere in Berlin, if they are still alive, I have some relatives. I hired a man to find them, but just now I realized I have always hoped he never could. What if they were Nazis?”

  As a further twist of the knife, the doctor removed his glasses and began to clean them with breath and handkerchief. Reinhart averted his eyes.

  “Since I can’t see through these things,” said the doctor, “I clean them from a motive of pure vanity. I do not wish to be thought a sloven.” He replaced his spectacles and took up his cane. “I should like to meet your relatives if you find them. By various accidents and choices, I have a foot in everybody’s camp. I am a halfbreed of every persuasion. You claim to have done nothing. I have done everything. Every individual life is a questioning of the validity of all others.”

  “And also a confirmation of it?” asked Schild.

  “Ah now,” answered the doctor, “that is irrelevant, for why should I need you, or you need me, or either of us need, say, Hitler or Stalin to tell us what we are? Ich bin kein Weltverbesserer und lasse Sie liegen.”

  “Then you should be satisfied with your lot,” said Reinhart, “neither were the Germans who were not Nazis world-reformers, and they let you lie.”

  “True,” said the doctor cruelly, “and they were not the ones who killed my family and took away my freedom, were they? They heard the cries and turned away, but at least they did not come and help fire the ovens.”

  Reinhart had chewed his gum too long. It disintegrated. He tried to reassemble it with his tongue. He failed. Ashtrays here were unknown; the smokers had crushed out their butts on the floor. He swallowed his fragmented Spearmint and said—

  But the doctor had not waited for him: “There is but one demand we can make on others: that they let us alone. Anything beyond that is a corruption or will be one within the hour.” He rose easily and hunched over his cane, which his fingers grasped as an owl a branch. “Do you think I say this because of what the others did to me? The others, I tell you, are irrelevant.

  “I was a Communist. The day after Hitler came to power I fled to the Soviet Union with my family. Thanks to the tactics imposed on it by Stalin, the German Party was shortly wiped out by the Nazis. But we all knew that history was using the Nazis for our ends, so we—those of us who got out in time, that is—did not despair. The Jews? A kind of vermiform appendix on the body of history. An illusion. Science knows no definition of Jew or gentile. ... In Moscow I had a good job in the Medical Institute, doing research on skin cancer. I won two decorations for my work and soon rose to head my section. My family and I, four of us, lived in a modern apartment of four rooms—had four times the space, that is, of the average Russian family. After the required time, we became citizens.

  “My chief assistant, at whose cost I had been promoted, for he had worked there since its founding, was an old Russian Jew with, like so many of them, a German name: Kupstein. He was the sort who would always be an underling. He did nothing well, but what was worse he knew and admitted it. He broke slides, he misread calibrations, once he managed to fracture the lens in a microscope—rather a difficult thing to do under ordinary conditions.

  “But we human beings were not so ready to exploit our power over him. Obviously he could not help it, and his constant contrition! He could, naturally, not only have been discharged but also imprisoned for his failures. Indeed, in the Soviet view he should have been; insofar as I made allowances for his good intent I was a bad Communist and perhaps an outright traitor—and when I say this I do not refer to the disguised GPU informer on our staff. I speak of my Communist conscience. The secret police are given too much credit; for the important things we never need them.”

  Crazed old man, leaning on a cane, rasping in Deutsch. Why had Reinhart almost flunked German 2? He understood every word, every nuance. The doctor condemned guilt in others but loved his own. He suffered retroactively for being sloppy years ago in Russia. ... If he had been in Russia how could the Nazis have got at him? Lori stirred. Without prior planning he whispered in her ear: “I love you.” She smiled sleepily and closed her lashes again, muttering “Knorke mit Ei.” Something with an egg. Total misunderstanding.

  “... after that episode I had no choice but to relieve him of his duties. We could all have been killed. Yet I still could not report him, sentimentalist that I was. And quite rightly was I punished for that weakness. With nothing to do he hung about my elbows all day and interfered with my own work. Titration tube in mouth, I would hear his squeaky voice and almost swallow some septic liquid. Bending over the microscope I would suddenly smell his breath, vile from some horrible cheese, as he bent alongside.

  “And what did he speak of? Palestine, which he called Israel. He had been there for two weeks in the 1920’s with a Soviet scientific team and was terribly impressed by everything from communal farms to climate. ‘Believe me, my dear Doctor,’ he would squeak, ‘working on the kibutzim seems a pleasure for these strange Jews. Imagine Jews as farmers! The sun turns their skin black as Africans’ and has bleached the hair of some as blond as a Pole’s—or, as your own. Sabotage is unknown, yet one never sees a policeman. Is this possible? I doubt it. But it is the witness of my own eyes. And oranges! As many as you can eat. And the young people. Imagine happy Jews!’

  “ ‘Hirsch Davidovitch,’ said I, ‘your satires are very clever but they may be misunderstood. Besides, you are interfering with the experiment. Really, this sort of time-wasting is more appropriate to a bourgeois-capitalist laboratory’—I spoke that way in those days, and not simply for the GPU informer—‘we work here for the health of the international working classes and have not a moment to spare, please.’ But next day he would start in again: ‘My dear Doctor, the olives! I have seen them large as this.’ Pointing to the bulb of a Florence flask, he would knock over a rack of test tubes and then, sponging up the mess, strike the flask from table to floor.

  “Kupstein, Kupstein, of course you were winning,” said the doctor, sinking an inch into the orifice of his coat collar; he had once been a tall man, but that too was now a memory. “From the first time I had tolerated his statements without an effective rebuttal, I was a fellow conspirator. It was 1938. In Germany the Nürnberg Laws had sealed the fate of the Jews—foolish Jews, one beats another and shouts ‘help,’ as the saying goes. My father, the lifelong reactionary who ordered me from his house when he found my copy of Marx, loses his department store to the Nazis, brings suit in the bourgeois courts he trusts so much, leaving the Nazis no choice but to send him to Buchenwald. Almost did I ask: well, what does he expect? With my brothers Leo and Viktor, who had given neurotic importance to their Jewish halves and turned active Zionists, they had been doomed by their stupidity and cowardice. Marxism, they agreed, was ‘no answer.’

  “I
n the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the great purges which had begun in 1936 were now in full fury; among the high Government and Party officials only Stalin seemed secure. Could our entire leadership, except Stalin, be corrupt? Yes, no question that it could be. Communism, as I said before, admits unlimited possibility. A man can be anything history needs him to be. No chosen people here, either for good or evil. For example, among the condemned officials were many Jews, and of course the commander-in-chief of the whole plot was Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein. He had conspired with Nazi Germany to destroy the Soviet state. Impossible? But nothing is! By definition a state built and maintained by the proletariat is just, and whom it charges with a crime is guilty.

  “When the rosters of the eminent were depleted, the purge began to claim the malefactors among the technicians and managerial workers. I at last discovered who had been the police informer in my department—Rostov, a biochemist—for he disappeared soon after Yezhov, the head of the GPU, was purged. The director of the institute had not survived through 1937; three successors, with only a month or two between turns, followed him to the wall or to Siberia. Dr. Narovkin, in effect my chief assistant, though Kupstein still held the title, was called to a corridor telephone one afternoon and never came back. His replacement, a simian type by the name of Gorky, sent by the personnel section without consulting me, did not bother even to imitate a scientist. All day long he sat in a corner of the laboratory, behind two carboys of acid, watching the rest of us.

  “Dr. Narovkin’s work had been essential to the experiment. He had done months of research on malignancies in lymphoidal tissues. If I could at least have had his notes! But they too had vanished, the day after his own disappearance. The project was hopeless? You must remember that this was a Soviet laboratory. We had been ordered to discover, first, a preventive against sarcoma and, second, a cure for it. I reinstated Kupstein in his old post. What difference could it make now? None but for the better. Kupstein had worked in Soviet laboratories since 1919, and one thing he could do well was write reports. On his own initiative and with a perfectly straight face he now composed a manuscript of fifty thousand words reporting the successful achievement of our goal: we had found both a preventive and a cure for fleshy malignancies, and in one year less than our allotted time. I solemnly read and appended my signature to this handsomely written nonsense and forwarded it to the newest director of the institute. Not long afterward I received another decoration.”