BENJAMÍN LABATUT
WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD
Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
Pushkin Press
CONTENTS
Title Page
Prussian Blue
Schwarzschild’s Singularity
The Heart of the Heart
When We Cease to Understand the World
The Night Gardener
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PRUSSIAN BLUE
In a medical examination on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, the doctors found the nails of Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court. This was not easy. When the Allied forces caught him, the Nazi leader was dragging a suitcase with more than twenty thousand doses, practically all that remained of Germany’s production of the drug at the end of the Second World War. His addiction was far from exceptional, for virtually everyone in the Wehrmacht received Pervitin as part of their rations, methamphetamine tablets that the troopers used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor, with overexertion leading many to suffer attacks of irrepressible euphoria. “An absolute silence reigns. Everything becomes alien and insignificant. I feel completely weightless, as if I were floating above my own airplane,” a Luftwaffe pilot wrote years later, as though he were recollecting the silent raptures of a beatific vision rather than the dog days of war. The German writer Heinrich Böll wrote letters to his family from the front asking them to send him additional doses: “It’s hard here,” he wrote to his parents on November 9, 1939, “and I hope you understand if I can only write you every two or three days. Today I’m doing so chiefly to ask for more Pervitin … I love you, Hein.” On May 20, 1940, he wrote them a long, impassioned letter that ended with the same request: “Can you get hold of a bit more Pervitin for me, so I can have some in reserve?” Two months later, his parents received a single scraggly line: “If at all possible, please mail me more Pervitin.” Amphetamines fuelled the unrelenting German Blitzkrieg and many soldiers suffered psychotic attacks as they felt the bitter tablets dissolve on their tongues. The Reich leadership, however, tasted something very different when the lightning war was extinguished by the firestorms of the Allied bombers, when the Russian winter froze the caterpillar tracks of their tanks and the Führer ordered everything of value within the Reich destroyed to leave nothing but scorched earth for the invading troops. Faced with utter defeat, staggered by the new horror they had called down upon the world, they chose a quick escape, biting down on cyanide capsules and choking to death on the sweet scent of almonds that the poison gives off.
A wave of suicides swept through Germany in the final months of the war. In April 1945 alone, three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin. The inhabitants of the small town of Demmin, to the north of the capital, some three hours away, fell prey to collective panic when the retreating German troops destroyed the bridges leading west, leaving them stranded on their peninsula, surrounded by three rivers and defenceless before the dreaded onslaught of the Red Army. Hundreds of men, women and children took their own lives over the course of three days. Whole families walked into the waters of the Tollense tied together with ropes around their waists, as if to play a gruesome game of tug of war, the smallest children weighed down by their schoolbags, laden with rocks. The chaos was such that the Russian troops—who had, up to then, devoted themselves to looting homes, burning buildings and raping women—received orders to put a stop to the epidemic of suicides; on three separate occasions they had to cut down a woman who tried to hang herself from the branches of a massive oak tree in her garden, at the roots of which she had already buried her three children, after lacing their cookies—a final treat—with rat poison. The woman survived, but the soldiers were unable to prevent a young girl from bleeding to death after she opened her veins with the same razor blade she had used to slice her parents’ wrists. A similar death wish took hold of the upper echelons of the Nazi party: fifty-three generals from the army, fourteen from the air force, and eleven from the navy committed suicide, along with the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Justice, Otto Thierack, Field Marshal Walter Model, the “Desert Fox” Erwin Rommel and, of course, the Führer himself. Others, such as Hermann Göring, hesitated and were captured alive, but this merely postponed the inevitable. When the doctors declared him fit for trial, Göring was found guilty by the Nuremburg Tribunal and condemned to death by hanging. He requested a firing squad: he wished to die like a soldier and not a common criminal. When he learned of the refusal of this last request, he killed himself by biting on a cyanide capsule he had hidden in a jar of pomade next to which he left a note explaining that he had chosen to die by his own hand, “like the great Hannibal”. The Allies attempted to wipe away all traces of his existence. They removed the shards of glass from his lips and sent his clothing, personal effects and naked body to the municipal crematorium at the Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich, where one of the gigantic ovens was fired up to incinerate Göring, mingling his ashes with those of thousands of political prisoners and opponents of the Nazi regime decapitated at Stadelheim prison, the handicapped children and psychiatric patients murdered by the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, and countless victims of the concentration camp system. His remains were scattered late at night in the waters of the Watzenbach, a small brook chosen from a map at random. But these efforts were in vain: to this day, collectors from all over the world continue to exchange keepsakes and belongings of the last great leader of the Nazis, commander of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s natural successor. In June 2016, an Argentine man paid more than three thousand euros for a pair of the Reichsmarschall’s silk underpants. Months later, that same man spent twenty-six thousand euros on the copper and zinc cylinder that had once concealed the glass vial Göring ground between his teeth on October 15, 1946.
The National Socialist party elite received similar capsules at the end of the last concert given by the Berlin Philharmonic before the city fell on April 12, 1945. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production and official architect of the Third Reich, organized a special programme that included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, followed by Brückner’s Fourth Symphony—The Romantic—and ending, appropriately, with Brünnhilde’s aria, which closes the third act of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, in which the Valkyrie immolates herself on an enormous funeral pyre, the flames of which spread to consume not only the world of men but the halls of Valhalla and the entire pantheon of the gods. When the audience filed towards the exits, Brünnhilde’s cries of pain still resounding in their ears, members of the Deutsches Jungvolk—a section of the Hitler Youth composed of children under ten, as the teenagers were already off dying at the barricades—handed out cyanide capsules in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at mass. Göring, Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler used these capsules to commit suicide, but many of the Nazi leaders chose to shoot themselves in the head at the same moment they bit down, afraid that they had been sabotaged, that the capsules were deliberately adulterated to provoke not the painless, instant death that they desired but the slow agony they deserved. Hitler became so convinced that his dosage had been tampered with that he chose to test its effectiveness on his beloved Blondi, a German shepherd that had accompanie
d him to the Führerbunker, where she slept at the foot of his bed, enjoying privileges of all kinds. The Führer preferred killing his pet to letting her fall into the hands of Russian troops who had already surrounded Berlin and were inching closer to his subterranean refuge by the minute, but he was too cowardly to do it himself; he asked his personal doctor to break one of the capsules in the animal’s mouth. The dog—who had just given birth to four puppies—died instantly when the minuscule cyanide molecule, formed by one atom of nitrogen, one of carbon and one of potassium, entered her bloodstream and cut off her breath.
The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P. Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life. The liquid form of the poison, known in Germany as Blausäure or blue acid, is highly volatile: it boils at twenty-six degrees Celsius and gives off a slight aroma of almonds, which not everyone can distinguish, as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity. This evolutionary caprice makes it likely that a significant number of the Jews murdered with Zyklon B in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Mauthausen did not even notice the scent of cyanide filling the gas chambers, while others died smelling the same fragrance inhaled by the men who had organized their extermination as they bit down on their suicide capsules.
Decades before, Zyklon A—a precursor to the poison employed by the Nazis in their concentration camps—had been sprayed on California oranges, as a pesticide, and used to delouse the trains in which tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants hid when entering the United States. The wood of the train cars was stained a beautiful blue, the same colour that can be seen even today on certain bricks at Auschwitz; both hearken to cyanide’s authentic origins as a by-product isolated in 1782 from the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.
As soon as it appeared, Prussian Blue caused a sensation in European art. Thanks to its lower price, in just a few years it had all but replaced the colour that painters had used since the Renaissance to depict the robes of the angels and the Virgin’s mantle—ultramarine, the finest and costliest of all blue pigments, which was obtained by grinding lapis lazuli brought up from caves in Afghanistan’s Kochka river valley. Crushed to a fine powder, this mineral yielded a lavish indigo, which proved impossible to emulate by chemical means until the eighteenth century, when a Swiss pigmenter and dyer by the name of Johann Jacob Diesbach discovered Prussian Blue. He did so by accident: his aim had been to mimic the ruby red made by crushing millions of female cochineals, small parasitic insects that grow on the nopal cactus in Mexico and in Central and South America, creatures so fragile that they require even greater care than silkworms, since wind, rain and frost can easily damage their downy white bodies, while rats, birds and caterpillars continually prey on them. Their scarlet blood—along with silver and gold—was one of the greatest treasures the Spanish conquistadors stole from the American peoples, and it allowed the Spanish crown to establish a monopoly on carmine that would last for centuries. Diesbach tried to put an end to it by pouring sale tartari (potash) over a distillation of animal parts mixed by one of his apprentices, the young alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel; but the concoction, instead of producing the furious carmine of the Dactylopius coccus, yielded a blue of such beauty that Diesbach thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods. Passed down across the centuries, closely guarded by the priests of Egypt as part of their divine covenant, its formula was stolen by a Greek thief and lost forever after the fall of the Roman Empire. Diesbach dubbed his new colour “Prussian Blue” to establish an intimate and long-lasting connection between his chance discovery and the empire that would surpass the glory of the ancients, as it would have taken a much more gifted man—one endowed, perhaps, with the curse of foresight—even to conceive of its future fall. Diesbach lacked not only this sublime imagination, but even the most basic skills of commerce and enterprise needed to enjoy the material benefits of his creation, which fell, instead, into the hands of his financier, the ornithologist, linguist and entomologist Johann Leonhard Frisch, who turned his blue into gold.
Frisch amassed a fortune as a wholesaler of Prussian Blue to shops in Paris, London and St Petersburg. He used his profits to buy hundreds of hectares near Spandau, where he established the first silk plantation in Prussia. A passionate naturalist, Frisch wrote a long letter to the emperor exalting the singular virtues of the tiny silkworm; the letter also described an ambitious, transformative agricultural undertaking, an idea that had come to him in a dream: he had seen mulberry trees growing in the courtyards of all the churches of the empire, their verdant leaves feeding the offspring of the Bombyx mori. The plan, timidly put into practice by Frederick the Great, was taken up with violence one hundred and fifty years later by the Third Reich. The Nazis planted millions of such trees in abandoned fields and residential quarters, in schoolyards and cemeteries, in the grounds of hospitals and sanatoria, and on both sides of the highways that criss-crossed the new Germany. They distributed guides and manuals of all kinds to small farmers, detailing the state-sanctioned techniques for the harvesting and processing of silkworms: they were to be suspended over a vessel of boiling water for more than three hours, the minimum time required to kill them without damaging the precious material of the cocoons they had woven around themselves. Frisch himself included this procedure in an appendix to his magnum opus, an eighteen-tome work to which he dedicated the last twenty years of his life; these books catalogue, with a scrupulousness bordering on madness, the three hundred species of insect native to Germany. The final volume details the complete life cycle of the field cricket, from its nymph stage to the courtship songs of the males, a chirrup as shrill and piercing as the whistle of a train. Frisch describes this along with their reproductive habits and the oviposition of the females, the eggs of which are surprisingly similar in colour to the pigment that had made him a wealthy man, and which artists across Europe adopted as soon as it became commercially available.
The first great painter to make use of it was the Dutchman Pieter van der Werff, in 1709: in his portrayal of The Entombment of Christ clouds mask the horizon, and the blue cloak that darkens the Virgin’s face shimmers, reflecting the grief of the disciples who surround the naked corpse of the Messiah, his skin so pallid it illuminates the face of the woman kneeling to kiss the back of his hand, as though wishing to cauterize with her lips the wounds opened by the iron nails.
Iron, gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, phosphorus, arsenic; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, mankind was aware of only a handful of pure elements. Chemistry had not yet branched away from alchemy, and the compounds known by a myriad of arcane names such as bismuth, vitriol, cinnabar and amalgam were a hatchery for unexpected, often happy accidents. Prussian Blue, for example, would never have existed were it not for the young alchemist working in the pigmentary where the colour was first synthesized. Johann Conrad Dippel presented himself as a Pietist theologian, a philosopher, artist and doctor; his detractors thought him a simple quack. He was born in the small Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt, and possessed from childhood a strange charisma that affected anyone who spent too much time in his presence. He even took in, for a time, one of the great scientific minds of his era, the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who became one of his most enthusiastic disciples, and later his sworn enemy. According to Swedenborg, Dippel had the gift of dispossessing people of their faith and depriving them of all intelligence and goodwill. He would entice his followers with promises of apotheosis only to “abandon them in a state of delirium”. In one of his most impassioned diatribes, Swedenborg likens him to Satan himself: “He is the wickedest of demons, bound by
no principle, indeed, generally opposed to all of them.” His criticisms had no effect on Dippel, who was immune to scandal after spending seven years in prison for his heretical ideas and practices. His sentence served, he renounced all pretence to humanity, and engaged in countless experiments on live and dead animals, which he dissected with unnatural fervour. His aim was to enter history as the first man to transplant a soul from one body to another, but, in the end, he became infamous for his extreme cruelty and the perverse joy he took in manipulating the remains of his victims. In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.
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