Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Yielding to a love most hallowed

  They won’t hang you from the gallows

  Wiggle your ass up and down—

  You’ll almost rip your dressing gown

  Whatever else you might exclaim

  Just don’t reveal the brownshirts’ names

  Remember as you move your hips:

  Loose lips sink ships!

  Spare a thought for your old man:

  Who in the heat of battle then

  Fought bravely, gave it all he had:

  Always such a fine comrade.

  Had a laugh with Max and Fritz

  At our dear Führer’s expense—

  But while he did so paid attention

  That no dirty Jew should join in

  If one did—oh man, oh my!

  How the shit began to fly!

  Out his ears and down his throat—

  So long, Jew! That’s all she wrote!

  For sure, there’s not a single bloke

  Who doesn’t like to laugh and joke—

  But none of us would ever shirk—

  Duty comes first.

  And so every veteran soldier

  Puts upon his joy a damper—

  If you risk playing the cut up

  Next day comes you might get strung up

  Better also not inquire

  About Göring’s Reichstag fire

  Or our fellow party brethren

  Who were shot in plain reaction—

  Good Jew haters, every one,

  Hayn and Strasser, Heines, Röhm

  Et cetera, et ceteree

  On a pretty Alpensee.

  And just as the old guys sang,

  So we boys can chirp and twang:

  To us the Führer is a god!

  Though every third shell is a dud

  Our belief is strong as ever

  In his wise battle maneuvers.

  And if in the Donets Basin

  Our advance stalled out, lost traction,

  Forced us for the nonce to beat

  A glorious tactical retreat—

  What’s it matter?! The Iranian

  Who became your war companion

  Also pulls back just in time

  From that fertile basin thine.

  And so no one gets to grouse,

  Or make a mess in his own house,

  It’s filled to bursting anyway—

  Crap everywhere, the enemy

  Makes for the home front, despite our objection,

  No exception.

  If Wedding burned and is no more

  Just lie down on the Wannsee shore:

  There amidst the gentle breezes

  You can find a spot that pleases

  Racial pigment, in the sun,

  Will tan an ideological brown

  Moan through love’s activities,

  Stretch various extremities

  Which otherwise would only languish

  Idly covered up by fabric

  And in this total war would be

  Of no utility

  For victory.

  If the fatherland should yield,

  Should find that its fate has been sealed,

  You can do your part and more

  By waging your own private war:

  Black-haired boys with curly locks

  With cameras hanging from their necks—

  Show them your gymnastics act

  They’ll photograph you on the mat:

  One hundred percent woman

  For the film industry’s stud farm.

  If we’ve got our skinny flanks—

  For which we’ve got Adolf to thank—

  And during this our healthy fast

  They roast up crispy, barely last,

  It’s not just a frivolous game

  But rather propaganda’s aim.

  The whole world must be made to see

  That we have no weak tendency!

  Babelsberg gives them their start:

  Our cinematic works of art

  Shall be presented far and wide

  And show what Germans can provide:

  Willingness to sacrifice

  At any price.

  When the winds of fate are shifting

  Film receives its lofty mission

  To instill in every breast

  The will to stand up to the test:

  Film can drive off with its power

  Sorrows from our heavy hours

  And move the hand over the heart

  Amidst the cinematic dark

  The eyes meanwhile look up and see

  A fellow Aryan on the screen

  Who battles death and devil

  While subsisting on nettles—

  So that in the end the beauty—

  Seeing him carry out his duty

  And rise to heroic fame—

  Lies with him in the final frame:

  He satisfies his mighty will

  While making sure she gets her fill.

  Don’t give in to hesitance—

  You mustn’t miss out on this chance

  To prove in such a prominent place

  That you’re a credit to your race

  And that even in the buff

  You’re up to snuff.

  All the Ku’damm conversation

  Touches on your fine proportions

  Few there are who’d disagree:

  For German ideology

  There’s quite a force to be deployed

  Contained in both your breasts and groin

  Soon the moment is upon you

  When good fortune shines upon you:

  That you might show the boys who fight

  And yearn for beauty’s sweet delight

  Just what those dirty crook-nosed ogres

  Would have chosen for their lecher’s

  Pleasure, had the boys not acted fast

  And cranked the gas.

  So wiggle your hips left and right

  Flaunt your bottom in plain sight

  Do a cartwheel, round and round,

  Splay your legs and leave the ground

  So that between your fleshy hams

  You highlight your erogenous zones

  While up above, as soft as butter,

  Beckons your fantastic udder.

  Thus it is you make apparent

  What the foe tries to keep silent:

  Even the worst terror acts

  Cannot suppress the simple facts:

  The truth that we call “strength through joy”

  Is unaffected by his ploy

  And gives us, even ’midst bombardment,

  Entertainment.

  Don’t listen to Mama’s protest

  When, clad in a high-necked dress,

  You appear on the silver screen,

  Crying for a Germany

  Brought low by base and shameless Jews,

  Choked by Versailles’s unfair dues,

  Sordid and pitifully quaking

  Till we received Hitler’s waking—

  Older ladies’ understanding

  Cannot grasp film’s inner workings.

  The path to film celebrity

  Begins with your virginity;

  But no star can begin to rise

  Unless she first should spread her thighs.

  The strictest virgin of her day

  Has more than once rolled in the hay

  Well before the film starts rolling—

  This is simply the beginning

  Of her rocket-like ascent

  Into the starry firmament.

  For the road to fame is arduous

  On this point there’s broad consensus

  Certain things you’ll find that slit

  Upon which German maidens sit;

  And as you climb up the ladder

  May your stride grow ever wider

  Should you find between each rung

  A colleague or two (all well hung)

  Waiting gamely for to lend
/>
  A helping hand.

  They’re all experts in the trade,

  In how Germanic glory’s made

  To reach the men of every station,

  Even ’midst the clash of nations.

  If morality is strict,

  Still, a luscious pair of tits

  Can boost the spirits of the people,

  Bringing joy that nearly equals

  That which fills a blue-eyed face

  On seeing some Jew put in his place.

  Besides, the boys in far Donets

  Expect the best and nothing less

  And sooner rather than later

  For our mighty German warriors:

  In times of Nibelungen need

  It’s not just bread that our boys need

  Gunther, Giselher, and Arno

  Need something to masturbate to

  And the Reich’s loveliest woman

  Makes them hard as iron.

  So climb the rungs to filmic glory!

  Never tell a soul you’re sorry!

  See your star higher ascend

  While back home mommy tells her friends

  Don’t mind that climbing to the top

  Means climbing on producers’ cocks,

  Or going with the fellas,

  Who are still behind the cameras

  Even though their parentage

  Requires a little subterfuge

  And lots of foreign currency

  To smooth away.

  A German mother’s plain good sense

  Is not without permissiveness

  If only for the race’s sake—

  And if the future’s what’s at stake,

  And it happens to be dawning

  ’Tween the legs of her sweet darling,

  Then a mother’s sure to foster

  Whatever prevents a stricture—

  She herself in proud grief might

  Regret that fate should deem it right

  To curse her with unwanted leisure

  When she’d rather have the pleasure

  Of herself comporting

  With the boys—it’s only sporting.

  If you manage to get cover

  For your plans from your dear mother

  You can finally be at ease—

  Put your feet up, feel the breeze,

  Close your eyes, relax, dear child,

  Let the rose-hued fingers mild

  Of sunlight play upon your face

  How nice, to laze here by the lake

  SA commander Roehm

  Doesn’t have it half as good.

  Nor do others have it better

  Lying beside other waters

  With their noses in the mud

  Eels swimming around through their heads

  Two-foot holes shot through their guts

  Mushrooms sticking out their butts

  So the Führer’s will to victory

  Could be fulfilled economically

  If Lebensraum is our desire

  It’ll cost us fertilizer

  Where blood mixes in with soil

  Germination knows renewal.

  Strength through joy: render it service

  For it passes through your cervix

  In Adolf ’s plans for living space

  The path from forebears of the race

  To proudly liberated grandsons

  Leads through the thighs of German virgins

  Happy then she who can say

  I’ve done my duty.

  Bear the hard times then with patience

  Cheered by German confidence

  Wait in silence, free of scorn,

  Necessity will break through iron

  If the iron won’t break, howe’er,

  We know of things that shall endure:

  Zille’s cast of characters

  On the Spree.

  Let that fire fill your lungs

  And you won’t have to hold your tongue

  Unless it suits you, then act meek

  But sometimes show a little cheek

  To let them know, time and again:

  You’re from Berlin!

  Admittedly, the poem wasn’t in the best taste. But it depicted the cultural background, the foil against which Astrid von Bürger had to be seen in order to be fully understood and appreciated. And that background could not be depicted in anything but our so-called stave rhyme, following the literary recipes of the greatest German: for a prose description, Goethe would have said, the subject was not important enough.

  As for Nagel, it was not only his lack of necessary familiarity with the milieu that kept him from a sociological understanding of the beautiful Astrid. He was in love. Had he known the obvious, he would no longer have believed in the survival of the formal energy of that milieu; he would have regarded the memory evoked thereof as arbitrarily and improperly quoted, and he would have labeled it a rather shabby ad hominem argument. But because he was in love, he took my poem without further ado as sheer perfidy on my part. There was a rupture in our friendship, and it could never again be glued together.

  Fine. I had no other choice but to feel ashamed. I had not only hurt a friend’s tender feelings but, far worse, transgressed against a tendency of the zeitgeist, against the collective desire to forget.

  For such was the situation in that legendary wintertide. People were willing to forget. The world was gray, but it was to be reborn. Yesterday was only a legend now. It had nothing to do with today.

  There was, of course, a terrible myth about it. Everyone knew the myth and was burdened with it, as if haunted by the memory of a bad dream. A deeply gnawing malaise, a dull, irrefutable sense of guilt, a constant reminder of an incomprehensible fall of man—this lay at the bottom of reality, padding it darkly and also casting its shadow into the future.

  Everyone knew: never again—even if the miraculous should happen, and the houses rose again from the rubble cities, the streets became filled again with the hustle and bustle of people, and there were all kinds of comforts again, some kinds of fullness and all kinds of change and variety, as well as summer skies, warmth, sunshine, instead of just frost and worry and gray wretchedness under hills of debris—never again would the world be the same as it had been an unimaginably long time ago (only yesterday, before its last great decline).

  That much was certain. The world had been reborn—but a shade grayer and bleaker. There would be no more carefree atmosphere, no cheery optimism, no happiness that did not taste slightly ashen . . .

  But even though everyone knew that lightheartedness, joy, and optimism were lost for all time, everyone pretended not to know for sure why and how they had been lost.

  The dead—it wasn’t the dead. We sow our grain in the dust of the dead. It was not the huge murdering. People have murdered since the world began. People will be murdering tomorrow. So, then, what was it?

  •

  In those days, snow fell from the iron sky in nastily beautiful crystals, and it bit painfully into the anemic eyelids of the lost, who trudged through the rubble fields with ashen faces and with sharp shoulders pulled up to their ears because of the cold and grief and misery, and the snow pitted and patted the frost-chewed ruin of a city into a glittering white-furred Arctic, over which the charnel-house reality of yesterday hung like the northern lights.

  Nothing was forgotten as yet (though everything was withdrawn into the mystical). Death still followed one step behind everyone like an aide-de-camp. Hamburg was stalked by the so-called rubble killer, who strangled his victims with a wire noose. They were found in collapsed rear buildings, stark naked and frozen stiff, with laced-in throats and bluish-red faces, tongues and eyes popping out of them like medieval gargoyles. No one knew the victims, no one knew where they’d come from, where they belonged, or where they’d been going. Hamburg, the Gateway to the World, a world that had become so suffocatingly confined, was a crossroads now for countless uprooted beings, who, with their lost papers, had also forfeited their names
, their backgrounds, their reality. Their murderer too lived among us, together with the many others. And now, twenty years later, gazing up at the rectangle of blue sky over the air shaft of a lousy cheap hotel on the place des Ternes in Paris, I felt as if I could have been that murderer—not necessarily the murderer of the nameless victims during the Hamburg rubble period but the murderer of my life-dream, the assassin of the promise into which I was born, into which every human being is born . . .

  But what did all that mean now? Around me everything was dead. Stella was dead and Uncle Ferdinand’s Middle Kingdom; Cousin Wolfgang was dead, and the Berlin of the gracious beginning of our life-dream. Stella was dead, and Gaia, and the beautiful city of Paris lay dying before me. The old Occidental Europe and with it I myself were a middle shadow kingdom, a myth, a literary invention like my friend Schwab. And it was left to me to take all of this to my grave.

  •

  The cremation of my friend Schwab took place three days after his demise on October 18, 1965. In the sympathetic presence of all who were near and dear to him. They turned out to be an amazingly presentable grouplet. It filled out the cremation pavilion at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery down to the last seat; in fact, a few people were even standing in back, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of what was happening. Very little was happening, but all sorts of things were going on. First during a worshipful silence, then during the scrambling clamber of pipe organ sounds in a fugue by Pachelbel (masterfully performed by a radio organist who used to frequent Lücke’s Bar and—as it turned out—was Schwab’s downtrodden first cousin twice removed. He was now rendering him his loving familial final service as a reward for lifelong scorn).

  Honey-golden smoke rose steeply from tall white tapers (Pre-Raphaelitely inspirited by clusters of lilies at their bases) into the vault of the fire temple, which curved through parabolic ribs into a kind of expressionist Oriental Gugelhupf Gothic (an architectural achievement of the 1920s that in the span of our generation’s lifetime has already become a historic document).

  I don’t know who paid for the considerable funeral expenses. Perhaps S. himself had taken care of them with regular payments to a burial society (back then I began to feel he might even have been capable of doing so).

  Be that as it may: the wealth of flowers was overpowering. The lily-gilded candles in the apse were foamingly encircled by sprays of white lilac like ostrich feathers on helmet adornments. And in the very midst, where an altar normally looms in a house of God, a blossoming mound of white roses and camellias ascended out of a declivity one step down.