The girls are mistaken. They don’t know him yet. He has only recently been released from a POW camp. Though he was born here and was a longtime resident, the business of committing genocide has estranged him. In a city where in good times everyone knows everyone else and everything about them (a truly democratic city: the mayor is the cousin of the waiter serving the soup at the banquet for the town council), now he’s just another of the countless people who’ve washed up here: refugees, forced laborers, the stateless . . .
The girls have no way of knowing that someone will write of him:
Because he exudes an aura of weighty destiny—or at least, an extraordinary sensitivity, a bitter consciousness of being helpless in the face of the termite-like power of all the vulgar, malicious, stupid people in this world, a consciousness that cripples him and lends him the pathetic unwieldiness of a fallen giant, a Titan with severed tendons—one can’t help but perceive all his impulses as much too forceful, much too sweeping and tragic, all his utterances as grandiose and brittle, his person as an ivy-clad ruin, thereby overlooking the alertness of a sensitive and vulnerable person as well as the quite concrete stratagems by which he copes with daily existence: his healthy sense of the practical and merciless eye for the ridiculous, his shrewd and often hard-nosed tactics for handling others—in short, all the routines that make possible the paradox of an emotional economy that keeps the hatefulness of his environment at arm’s length and at the same time allows him to wallow all the more extravagantly in his melancholy—
majestically, of course, behind a decisive “No!” to everything mediocre, banal, and sentimental (under present circumstance a suicidal line to draw)—and majestically unconcerned with the damage he does to himself thereby (as well as via hard liquor and pills)—
What he’s looking for in Whores’ Alley is a manuscript. Another of Gisela’s customers left it with her by accident. He doesn’t know him, hasn’t seen the manuscript either, but only knows about it from the account of the man he fetched out of here after having seen to it that the latter’s three-day absence from home and workplace did not result in a missing-person bulletin. The manuscript is supposedly a film script and apparently extraordinarily brilliant and inventive. As an editor in a publishing house, he works with manuscripts professionally, and the man he led away from here, the discoverer of the manuscript, is a publisher. How the latter was able to get a look at it in the midst of a seventy-five-hour frenzy of torment and lust, an organ symphony of alcohol and drugs, can only be understood as an unbounded déformation professionelle.
Gisela’s “treatment” is symbolically organized. She begins by undressing the john and putting him naked into a crib as if recently weaned. Gisela kisses and hugs him like a good mommy, fondles his member, but punishes him—still laughing and joking—when it gets stiff. That’s cute and all, but not allowed yet. And then things get stricter: he’s gone pee-pee in bed, bad boy! He gets it—whack, whack—on his bare bottom. Then more tenderness and a treat—don’t ask about its pharmacological ingredients. Now the little guy is wide awake. He’s reached school age, wears short pants, little socks, a school shirt, and a big polka-dot bow under his chin. She sits him down at a little desk and gives him assignments. But the bad boy has blotted his paper. That’s going to cost him a caning. At his age, there’s plenty of lesser and greater offenses he’s guilty of. The day passes, full of praise and punishment. Mommy Gisela is strict. Fair, but strict. The punishments are more elaborate than the rewards, but the latter are also excitingly painful. Now he’s in puberty. Gisela temporarily plays a new role. As his fellow pupil, she introduces him to the anatomical differences between boys and girls. But alas! He goes too far during the inspection. His playmate is insulted, angry, and uncommonly inventive in the half-kidding, half-malicious infliction of pain; she pinches and jabs and scratches and bites. Then Gisela, once more in the role of governess, catches him at the vice of self-abuse and exposes him publically as a masturbator. She invites in a group of her girlfriends and puts him on display. The girls mock and scold him appropriately and make cruel jokes about the size of his member. They try pulling it to make it longer. More blows rain down since no erection is forthcoming; then even more when it finally begins. His back is striped with bloody welts. That night, he’s permitted to chat with Gisela and sleep a bit.
Day two: now comes the manhood phase. His virility must be tested. Gisela finds occasion to punish him cruelly for his failures. They copulate continuously. Her ability to spur him on to climax after climax is stupendous. As is her ability to invent more and more reasons to mistreat him. Nor is the element of surprise lacking: a supposed pimp invades the room while the two are lying in bed, takes him unawares, thrashes him good and proper, and robs him of his last penny. Gisela watches with a wicked smile, calling words of encouragement to the pimp. The line between pretending and real life blurs. Gisela forgoes her roles and presents herself frankly as what she is: a heartless whore. “As-if” becomes nightmarish reality. She makes continuous demands, expresses expensive wishes. He is in a condition of utter lack of will, completely exhausted mentally and physically. His head is seething with drugs and alcohol. He writes checks for sums that really frighten him. He wants to flee but finds himself at her mercy, powerless and even enjoying it.
Day three: now he gets chained up. It’s done with such skill that he can’t move a finger without excruciating pain. He hangs in his chains, his arms extended, crucified. Gisela ridicules him, belabors him with a whip, and leaves him alone. Hours go by. He starts to cry for help, but no one comes to release him. At last the cleaning lady shows up but pretends he isn’t there. She starts to straighten up, all the while uttering complaints about what a mess the room is in. She tosses his clothes into the trash can and pays no attention to his cries. After scrubbing the floor, she leaves. After another eternity, they finally set him free. They say one of his employees is waiting for him downstairs. He’s there to gain his release with a hefty ransom of several thousand marks. (Later, the police would suggest that Gisela not overdo things; the Hanseatic town’s reputation was at stake.)
And yet the object of such treatment was so eager to find as yet unpublished material that in one of the pauses to catch his breath, he was able to take a look at a pile of typewritten pages one of his predecessors had forgotten among the illustrated magazines on Gisela’s bedside table.
• • •
—and I wear his clothes: his shirts, his pants, vests, and sport coats, his tweeds and flannels, he has to hang onto his dark suits for official occasions. He dresses me just as his wife once dressed me a dozen Ice Age years ago, me, a youthful pavement pounder who became a dandy at the hands of a woman of the world—no, not by any means a gigolo, no cold-blooded lounge lizard or gold digger. I was too sentimental for that. I loved Stella and wouldn’t have traded her for Garbo, to say nothing of Dietrich. I didn’t know any other worldly-wise women, my memories of the Côte d’Azur having been buried under twelve years of schooling in the lap of my relatives’ family: Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Cousin Wolfgang. Even the fashion magazines Aunt Selma bought on the sly didn’t excite my daydreams as much as the movies. The “wide world” was the one on the screen: Adolphe Menjou in a silk suit and Panama hat brings Marlene Dietrich a fresh, dewy bouquet of roses at the edge of the Moroccan desert, but she won’t stay with him. She’ll follow me, the French Foreign Legionnaire Gary Cooper, into an uncertain future. Stella doesn’t give a fig what John, his fellow diplomats, or Viennese or Bucharest high society think or say about her either. Nor does she have to throw away her high heels like Dietrich to walk more easily through the sand (how her tender soles will soon be burning!); she doesn’t have to grab a goat by its horns and drag it along in my wake either. She, Stella, takes me by the hand and leads me to Prix and Knize and has me measured for half a dozen suits. A woman of the world likes to dress up her baby doll—and John grins and bears our game. He grins and bears all the games here in Nuremberg too
and assumes—no, uses his grin to force the others to grin and bear his game, for example, the absurdity that he’s brought me here to testify about Stella’s murder. Just imagine testifying about the murder of a single, solitary person when what’s at issue is the murder of millions. Why does he do it? It can’t be for my sake; I’m not important to him. It was purely by accident that our paths crossed again in Hamburg, in front of the Hotel Atlantic. The thing that led me to be walking past was my aimless wandering through Hamburg’s construction sites and the fields of rubble where some testimonies to the city’s proud past were still standing: the town hall and the stock exchange, some luxury hotels, the villas of the moneybags on the banks of the Alster, the dance halls on the Reeperbahn, a few churches, and the gingerbread cottages of Whores’ Alley, all surrounded by ruins, rubble dumps being shoveled out for new foundations. I wandered through this Baalbek with my ribs showing and happened to pass the Atlantic just as he, John, was coming out with a group of resplendent top brass from the occupying army. He spotted me and couldn’t believe his eyes at how sharp-featured and run-down his wife’s youthful lover had become, but it couldn’t have moved him a bit. John was anything but softhearted. So why did he unceremoniously pluck me off the street with the same cold-bloodedness with which Uncle Ferdinand had welcomed me back to Bessarabia in 1940 after fourteen years (“Ah, te voilà, finalement, il était grand temps qu’on te voie . . .”). It’d been seven years since John last saw me in Bucharest. Back then I too was in uniform, but with much less brass on my lapels than his friends in front of the Hotel Atlantic had. Then as now, he was wearing one of his Saville Row suits that now fit me like a glove. I’m again part of the civilized world of the victors, but in front of the Atlantic in the condition of a raggedy refugee driven from his homeland, it required the exorbitant self-confidence of a John to introduce me to his entourage of brigadiers and wing-commanders as if it was only yesterday that the two of us were together for a weekend at the Duke of Westminster’s. Why did he do it? What moved him to quarter me forthwith in the Atlantic, feed and clothe me, once again provide me with dubious papers which, however, commanded respect from dutiful officials (a travel document from the military government for an “individual of doubtful nationality”), and finally to order me to Nuremberg? Was it the memory of my mother, the high-class courtesan he had had a stormy relationship with—so stormy that he almost couldn’t grin and bear her cruel game before she found eternal rest in a pond in Bessarabia? . . . Stella had been much more passionate about memorializing her. She took a literary interest in the career of Ilse Subicz, who gave herself the stage name Maud (the bed as stage?). Stella found her exceptionally audacious. An officer’s daughter from the world of Austro-Hungarian garrisons that stretched from Udine to Kecskemét to Zhytomyr and a beacon of emancipation, she turned the heads of the richest, most pampered and hard-nosed men of the era until they jigged before her like organ-grinders’ monkeys. Stella collected everything that could document that career. Some things—photos, clippings—I still have, preserved in my magic box—that was all that I could call my own except my rags, a comb, a toothbrush, and a fingernail brush when I washed up in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, of all places! It all served to confirm my mother’s legend, the legend of the beautiful Maud; and so it also served to confirm the legend of me, her love child. But what’s all that to John? It’s a million miles removed from even the remotest likelihood that John could regard the earthly existence of his onetime mistress, my mother, with the same literary interest as Stella, to say nothing of being so fascinated by the legend’s factual aspect, congealed into the concrete existence of a bastard child, that he would feel compelled to take this living evidence—me—under his wing . . . so what did he want from me? In some complicated way, am I supposed to help him take out his anger on the Americans? It’s so obvious he hates them that I’m often embarrassed to be seen with him. They’re in charge here in Nuremberg, and I get the jitters when he starts in in my presence about how one nation founded on genocide—the extermination of the redskins who owned the land where the stars and stripes now wave—shouldn’t presume to sit in judgment on another, much older, incomparably more civilized, nation that did nothing but undertake the elimination of a foreign body from its own organism. The people he says this to can’t believe their ears: their shocked gazes slide involuntarily in my direction. What’s my connection to such a madman? In intimate contact with the most prominent figures of this “show trial,” as he calls it, he can afford to act like that. Although nobody knows exactly what role he’s playing here, the more obscure it is, the more important it seems to be. I, on the other hand, the stray nobody at his side, an “individual of doubtful nationality,” still half-starving but accoutered (if only in hand-me-downs) by Turnbull & Asser and Huntsman, supposedly a witness in the trial—called by whom? testifying for or against what?—I am an extremely suspicious figure. They let me know it wherever I appear. They give me the cold shoulder. So I stay in the background as much as possible and wander the labyrinthian corridors of the gigantic courthouse in Fürth. I don’t eat in the Allies’ canteen, but with the untouchables: the Germans and stateless, displaced persons like myself. The food is the same as in the Allies’ canteen, but for the likes of us, it’s dumped out like slop for pigs. Whether they’re a certified defense attorney for the accused, a worn-out general who avoided indictment and hanging by a hair’s breadth thanks to the Twentieth of July, or a newly appointed party chairman and future chancellor, they’re all under the thumb of an officer of the court whose job is to keep order in this swarming nest of termites and who, as a praetorian guard, has nothing but contempt for them. The other thumb they’re under belongs to a highly suspicious individual by the name of Gaston Oulman, his ancestry as indefinable as mine, who styles himself the beadle of the German press corps, runs around in a homemade uniform of highly martial cut, and is treated with corresponding respect. Everyone fears him. Everyone dances to his tune except me, and he knows exactly whose protection I’m under and avoids crossing paths with me but doesn’t exactly contribute to my feeling at home here—“at home,” yes, that’s exactly the term for it. The historic significance of this trial, the polarity of good and evil, of glorious victors and bloodstained vanquished, the back and forth and up and down, the tension between right and wrong, moral outrage and hypocrisy, heart-stopping horror at inconceivable crimes and forensic hairsplitting, shock and indifference, the daily emotional roller coaster under the downpour of newly discovered, monstrous evil and the excruciating doggedness and bureaucratic pigheadedness of procedural process, the banality of evil and habituation to dealing with monsters—all that squeezed into the beehive of Fürth and its queen-bee cell, the smallish courtroom at its center, all heavily guarded, sealed off, a fortress bristling with checkpoints, encircled by tanks and ordnance in a landscape pockmarked by bombs—all that, I say, constitutes a biotope, a cramped little world whose spell no one can escape. Everyone is marked by it like the participants in a battle—Verdun or Stalingrad—there’s even a certain camaraderie. I sense that one can be incorporated and begin to feel at home in it. I can see it in those who work here writing press reports, wading through files, writing out affidavits, working for the prosecution or the defense. But here too I’m just a flaneur, suspiciously idle, an outsider with no real connections, no obligations, but sharp-eyed, a silent observer, so probably a spy. People can’t see my uneasiness. Not a syllable, not an expression, not a look betrays how the conflicts, the contradictions, and the absurdities here are eating at me. John doesn’t hold his tongue when the talk turns to the world-historical significance of this trial: “World-historical significance!” he sneers. “It’s a scandal, a farce that will permit us to play the Last Judgment through the next century and always be the judges, never the accused . . . Who set up this Punch and Judy show? What does the Nuremberg Tribunal represent? Surely it’s not a show trial for the victors to humiliate the vanquished? No no, we’re much too pure and noble for that.
We believe in the rule of law; didn’t the Hague Convention of 1926 brand war a crime? All well and good, but it didn’t provide us with the legal tools to try to punish those responsible. That’s what we’re out to accomplish here. To condemn the intention to go to war when you have to go to war? A moral analysis of the reasons to do so, after the fact? How are you going to accomplish that? With the flimsy charge of conspiracy? When the next conflict breaks out, would anyone have the nerve to indict the presidents and prime ministers of the nations involved for conspiracy—I mean, without making himself a laughing stock? And how would he proceed? According to what legal principles? Germany and most other European countries follow the ancient Roman principle of nulla poena sine lege. On the other hand, there’s the Anglo-Saxon conception that the judgment arrived at and carried out in a proper trial sets a legal precedent, i.e., has the power of a law that can be invoked in future cases. So here in Nuremberg we have an Anglo-Saxon court judging Germans, i.e., a court imposed from without, a court of victors. But no, that would have been immoral; that would not have been in line with our lofty ethical principles. The Nuremberg Court, so they say, was installed by the Germans themselves. To be sure, there was no German sovereignty to install it, so the Allies had to jump in. On the basis of Germany’s unconditional surrender, the four victorious powers comprise the present German government. And this government installed the Nuremberg court. And that’s why it’s judging not according to German law but to Anglo-Saxon law. What may have been overlooked in the process was this: Which German signed the unconditional surrender and may perhaps be strung up—General Jodl, for example, or Admiral Reeder—and has thus signed his own death warrant . . .” John is immune to the babble the follows his words. He cold-bloodedly plays the bull in the china shop and doesn’t care if they openly accuse him of being a German sympathizer. He knows only too well that most people here agree with his most cynical statements, especially the anti-Semites among them. Besides, he’s invulnerable because all his encounters and contacts are open to view. He’s never alone with anyone but is always accompanied by officials of the relevant authorities. As his protégé, however, I hang around with the reptiles in the undergrowth of this jungle. What reports about them do I deliver to him? What messages do I carry back to them? . . . and yet I know that my activities don’t interest him in the slightest. They float above—or rather, slip below—the horizon of his concerns, are too far removed from the world of his thoughts for him to pay them any heed. Should he really need me for anything, he’ll make use of me (and devote about as much thought to me as he does to the bootjack in his dressing room), and if he should lose track of me as he did when Maud drowned in the pond in Bessarabia, he’ll make as little effort to find me as he did in the fourteen years after Maud’s death and the last seven years since we parted in Bucharest. Our encounters are planetary; each of us follows his own orbit and eons pass without them intersecting. And if they do, neither one is diverted. Uncle Helmuth would surely be able to explain that using Hindu cosmology. . .
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