•
“The dreadful thing, the ridiculous thing, the poignant thing about the Nuremberg Trial is that it is built upon cant and thus has nothing else to put forward but simply cant. It is the desperate attempt at inflating the cant on which our civilization rests, the noble, sad, quixotic tilting of Western fictions at the windmills of the reality of human nature. Of course, the magic of these fictions is still powerful enough to keep the trial going. Their magic has sufficed not only to make the prosecutors act shocked, indignant, and full of holy zeal, and the judges dignified and aware of their high office (albeit with an occasional skeptical shake of their heads), but (more astonishingly) to make the accused perform their parts as lawful defendants. Yet that is precisely what makes the events here so spectral. It turns them into a ghostly spectacle. Nothing has any reality.
“The worldview of these men allowed them to, actually demanded that they, kill millions of people in order to guarantee the purity of their people’s blood. And it is not possible to accept that the defendants will now try to wriggle out of these charges like cheap crooks in a provincial court. It is a ghostly experience to see with what servile eagerness these cynics of the will to power, these fumigator executives of racism outdid themselves in lending a helping hand to the judicial process when they had to assign responsibility to a former brother-in-arms and present themselves as victims of misunderstandings. It was absurd and repulsive to watch these ever faithful, upright citizens with their miens of injured innocence and gestures of insidious hostility, with their attempts at self-justification by citing orders they had received and official duties they had had to perform as a matter of course. So that Jewish prosecutors, beside themselves with fury, despair, and mortification, were suddenly playing devil’s advocate, using arguments taken from Nazi ideology merely to attach to their defendants some small degree of freedom in having chosen to commit their crimes—and thus give them a final shred of human dignity, thereby rescuing the dignity of the court, which dignity threatened to dissolve in the miasmas of cadavers and the stale, stuffy smell of petit bourgeois order recipients and program executors.
“True, when Ribbentrop, as third speaker of the concluding statement, was talking, he said something about the incompetence of the court, arrogantly grumbling that if he were to be hanged, he would not formally recognize it. But it’s a bit too late for such protests, and his words go unheeded. They too remain cant. Besides, they sound like everything else coming from him: insolent, presumptuous, and stupid. And anyway, the real sensation has fizzled out: Rudolf Hess’s concluding statement.
•
“Now it’s his turn. He was Adolf Hitler’s deputy. His most loyal vassal. The John among his disciples. Here, he no longer seems to be of this world. He sits there, mentally departed, with a blanket over his legs, like a resident of an old-age home. A military policeman—his face contracted like a bulldog’s by the polished chrome-steel helmet with its tight chin strap—sticks out his junior-officer paws in their full-dress white-cotton gloves and shoves the microphone under Hess’s nose. But, with a motion like he’s brushing away a cobweb, Hess pushes it aside and raises his forefinger like a schoolboy who wants to leave the room.
•
“It is a pathetic little white worm of a forefinger. It rises, timorous and crooked, as if crawling out of a hole in the ground and peering into the hazardous world with a nauplius eye on the fingertip—a dwarf-like harbinger sent out for reconnoitering by its lord and master.
“His head also seems to be emerging from the primal ooze, it too squints perplexed into unknown creation. A saurian head: the weight of the upper skull has squashed the mouth into the flat lower jaw and distorted it into its breadth, hopelessly unsated. Yet this is a tame, a humble saurian. Its eyes are so gloomy with despair as they ogle out of the shadow of its Nietzsche brows, which hang bushily from the socket arches and grow together at the top of the nose as in a criminal’s face; indeed, the eyes exert an almost suction-like effect. One looks into them as into the apertures of two periscopes that are camouflaged for maneuver purposes and that are slowly screwed upward as they turn to and fro, scanning around.
•
“They turn on the pale stalk of a withered neck, which grows out of the now oversized shirt collar; with a male choir singer’s Adam’s apple whipping up and down between baggy skin and sinews, the throat emits a sullenly lamenting little voice. Extremely submissive, this little voice asks the High Court for permission to remain seated during the reading of the concluding statement.
“The black-smocked Punch-and-Judy torso of LORD JUSTICE Lawrence at the judges’ table opposite the defendants’ bar nods paternally as in a puppet theater, his iron-framed spectacles sliding down his nose; with the old-man tremolo of dignified Anglo-Saxon bombast in his voice, he proclaims that the request is granted in light of the defendant’s poor state of health.
“The defendant utters his thanks, audibly touched by such patriarchally strained humanity and, while his periscopes scan an imaginary horizon, he pulls a few sheets of paper from the folds of the blanket slung around his knees, the blanket of a Baltic Sea vacationer. The room is deathly still, the defendant’s fumbling very ponderous. Finally, he’s ready. In a droning voice, Hess begins to read off a text that was obviously prepared by his attorney.
“This too is merely cant. The protestations of a completely honest man who must deal with charges that are not quite groundless yet unjustly harsh, and who must now make a manly upright effort to kiss a few asses rhetorically, to creep into any available hole inside or outside the court, and to do so quickly, making the best possible impression before a general closing of sphincters.
“There’s a hollow feeling in the pit of everyone’s stomach, even, apparently, the defendant’s. He lowers the sheets of paper and shakes his head indignantly. No, he says resolutely, he won’t go on. They have forced him to read his text in order to hinder him from communicating something of extreme importance. He is visibly agitated and gets to his feet after all, but so shakily that the papers and the blanket slide from his lap. Göring, who sits next to him, tries to pull him back on the bench by the tail of his jacket. But Hess shoves Göring’s hand aside and hisses to him that he has to let him do his duty. He stands there, large. Stands there and moves the periscopes of his eyes about as though seeking something.
•
“He seeks it far, far beyond the table with the Last Supper figures of the eight judges facing him on the long wall, far behind the now empty witness stand on the short wall to his left and the glass lock-up booth next to it; behind it, the simultaneous translators are waiting for his next words in order to instantly recolor them into French and English and Russian and let them whir up like a bright flock of birds.
“As a rule, one scarcely hears it, this bright flock of words. It whirs up and scatters, slipping into the rusty and encrusted headphones made of former Wehrmacht supplies and hanging from every seat in the courtroom, albeit seldom used. And even though the words trickle out as dwarves from the uselessly dangling earphones, it is so still in this room that you can hear every one of them. The periscopes of the defendant Rudolf Hess sweep through the space.
“They scan an imaginary horizon. He turns them to the right, they sweep across the stunned heads of the attorneys, who are looking at him, and across the tables of the prosecutors and their astonished miens to his right, across the barrier separating the public, from which hundreds of pairs of eyes are staring at him—but what they seek lies far beyond, outside this room, far outside this building, guarded like a military camp, and beyond Nuremberg, shamefully bombed and flattened, and beyond Germany, covered with silent lunar craters, and beyond Europe, smashed and shattered, and perhaps even beyond this planet, which the mange of mankind has so dreadfully attacked and violated. And while they search, his saurian head speaks, and his sullen and exhausted little voice says that the important information which he has to communicate and which they have been trying to hinder him fr
om communicating concerns matters that the initiated have long been aware of, but that have not been made sufficiently accessible to the general public. During the great show trials in Russia, the press pointed out the incomprehensible self-accusations of the defendants and expressed the suspicion that these self-accusations could have been obtained only with the aid of drugs. Nevertheless, it still has not gotten around urbi et orbi that certain pharmaceutical preparations, in the form of injections or tablets, are able to transform the most solid character into a toy with no will of its own, a malleable tool for any intention whatsoever.
“Now, all at once, the suspense of sensation crackles in the room. All past events suddenly become more present. The light of the neon tubes becomes harsher. The nightmare mood becomes more intense in the small courtroom, which is almost boudoir-like, intimate, after nine months of horror-filled proceedings. Reality becomes real.
•
“This is now transmitted telepathically throughout the gigantic honeycomb of the Fürth Palace of Justice. Outside, the corridors and the other cells are alive. All at once, the termite hill teems. Even the most out-of-the-way nooks and crannies have been alerted that something is happening in the magically charged core cell, where, throughout these months of tenacious exposure of atrocities, horror has gradually become boring and indignant gestures have become bleak. At the same time, a sense of frustration has developed, arousing a universal wish for something extraordinary to happen, no matter what, no matter how, no matter to whom—merely to end the awful stagnation of horror, to stir it up, to bring the salvation of movement. No matter what might happen—the personal appearance of Hitler, still alive and remorsefully declaring his readiness to turn himself over to the Nuremberg judges; or the entrance of a host of angels, opening the prison cells with flaming swords, because the prisoners are innocent—even the most fantastical thing could happen so long as it occurred as an occurrence and released the events here from their state of static being.
•
“For this is the torment that everyone here feels, even a rubberneck sticking his nose into the Nuremberg Trial: the ineluctability of a state that cannot be changed. The static, immobile presence of horror (so oppressively depicted in the best present-day writing from Kafka to Beckett—isn’t it?). The omnipresence of hopelessness. The anonymity and ubiquity of evil. The continuous existence of murderousness in the condition humaine. The impossibility of eliminating that existence. . .
•
“The habituation to horror has paralyzed every person in the Nuremberg court. Its omnipresence has allowed no movement. One murder is dreadful and reprehensible. The murder of ten people is an abomination. The murder of one hundred people goes to the limits of the imagination. The murder of several million people is an abstraction, to be grasped only with statistics. Crime becomes a matter of quanta. The murderer cannot be placed in any conceivable relationship to his deed. One cannot imagine a just punishment for him. He is no longer a murderer by means of a direct deed. He is an executive particle of an overall executive action. He no longer acts. He performs his part in organic events. The causality of guilt and atonement is canceled. Indeed, all causality is thereby canceled. Time stands still . . . I don’t know who said that limbo must be worse than hell. So it doesn’t matter what the event may bring, it will bring temporary salvation. Even if it spelled an end to any further attempts at distinguishing good and evil, it would still be the final fulfillment of an increasingly vital wish.
“And this great moment seems to have come. The room fills up with people. No one hears them or sees them coming. They jam in. The room fills up like a pond with an underground source. Where one person was standing there are now three. Three heads stick together to hear the translations out of earpieces of antediluvian headphones from shot-up tanks or crashed airplanes or sunken U-boats, tangible testaments to the reality of the horrible. What will he say now, the defendant Rudolf Hess, the deputy of that “Üch” of March 1938 in Vienna? Will he reveal that the accused of Nuremberg are drugged? Or that they were drugged in the days of the Third Reich? Or the judges? The prosecutors? People wait in utter suspense.
“The defendant Rudolf Hess once again raises his small, white worm of a forefinger. This time for the oath. He pronounces the formula. He swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God.
“And even though the black-robed torso of LORD JUSTICE Lawrence at the judges’ table opposite him clears its throat, reminding him paternally that the defendant need not say the oath again, since all his statements here in the courtroom are under oath anyway, the defendant declares that he nevertheless wants to tell the truth this time and nothing but the truth.
“Then, he starts talking. He tells about his flight to England and the way he was received there after landing; his reception was at first formal and reserved, and then he was interrogated and taken to a camp, where he was treated with utmost courtesy and solicitude. In particular, his physician, a man named Dr. Johnson, soon grew so close to him and was so unreservedly friendly that he, the not yet accused, the as yet still interned Rudolf Hess, finally told him, Dr. Johnson, something that had been on his mind for some time: all the people he had come into contact with, all the officers and functionaries who had interrogated him, as well as all the guards in the camp, had strangely radiant blue eyes, as clear as water . . .
•
“Now, they all feel shudders up and down their spines: Everyone knows who had such strangely radiant blue eyes, as clear as water. Aryan eyes, the eyes of pretty much everyone in the Greater German Reich, and they know that those eyes supposedly exerted an irresistible fascination on everyone who encountered their gaze. Is this what the defendant Rudolf Hess is aiming at?
“Even though it’s not altogether clear, is he ultimately trying to say that when he was in England, he realized that Adolf Hitler, the man who led Germany to destruction, had been under the influence of drugs? Or was he the involuntary tool of the secret service or some far more obscure and anonymous power in the background? The Freemasons perhaps? Or the Elders of Zion? Or some mysterious Mr. X? Or the Jews themselves? . . .
“But this is too literary to be probable. Too parodic. Too artistically dramatic for the pulp fiction of life’s reality. Such spectacular devices are used only by the guild of adventure novelists and comic-strip authors. For the most intricate plots, reality has far less demanding dramaturgical devices. Usually, the crudest motivations and stupidest solutions. The suspense gets unbearable.
•
“Yet the defendant Rudolf Hess won’t let the cat out of the bag right away. He stretches the suspense to the limits of patience. He goes into detail about which people at the camp in England had these strangely radiant blue eyes, as clear as water. And he tells of how Dr. Johnson now observed the very same thing, coming to him every day with a newly discovered pair of blue eyes as clear as water. Until—yes, until he, the defendant Rudolf Hess, was forced to perceive that he too, Dr. Johnson himself, had these strangely blue eyes as clear as water . . .
•
“It was still deathly silent in the Nuremberg courtroom. No sound, no motion. Nothing stirred. The dammed-up human pond stood still. But all at once, the suspense was gone. It was gone in a bizarre way. It had not let up. It had not eased up little by little to tear off like a hanging thread. It had, so to speak, run out of this world. It had crossed some mysterious threshold and had run out into a different dimension. The pond was dead. It was no longer dammed up and it did not flow out. It stagnated, it began to decompose.
“And it remained so as LORD JUSTICE Lawrence, after clearing his throat with literary thoroughness, so to speak Dickensianly rapped his pencil on the tabletop and spoke in a paternally strict voice to tell the defendant Rudolf Hess that he should finally get to the point, he had already been speaking for twenty minutes, and he must bear in mind that twenty more defendants were waiting to make their concluding statements. And when the defendant Rudolf Hes
s responded by shrugging his shoulders and sullenly saying that if they didn’t want to hear what he had to say, he would simply stop; and he very ponderously rolled back into his wheelchair-invalid blanket and sat down to stare with empty periscope shafts into the void.
•
“Nothing had happened, and what had happened was meaningless, both for the defendant Rudolf Hess and the Nuremberg Court of Law, and for us who were permitted to witness this historic moment. And it was meaningless for the world outside, beyond the guarded walls. And certainly for the new youth of Germany who were growing up out there in the rubble dumps. All of us had long since passed into a different state, into a dimension that had not been human for a long time.
•
“Nothing more was happening to us. There were no murderers anymore and no victims, because there was no more human reason able to distinguish between good and evil. Madness was growing hybridly, welling and swelling and forming metastases like everything else around us. There was no more guilt and hence certainly no more atonement, hence no destiny and thus nothing more to narrate. We should have known this, my brother Schwab. We shouldn’t have pushed one another to write. Why? For whom? To what end? Peace could have been with us long ago, my brother Cain.”
•
Naturally, I said none of these things at Schwab’s flower hill. They merely passed through my mind while I said something totally different. What? I don’t even know anymore. And it made no difference at all, whatever it was. For I hadn’t noticed that a microphone was hidden by Schwab’s presumable head in his new condition as a flowery hedge. Without realizing it, I spoke right into the microphone, and even though I spoke softly, my voice boomed a hundred, a thousand times louder through the cremation temple, bellowing into the paraboloid vaults and thundering and crashing back upon itself—an acoustic pandemonium, deafening every eardrum in the place. Afterward, Carlotta told me that her ears kept ringing for hours.
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