Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  Thereupon Traetta devised a scene in which King Creon experiences a “conversion” (METANOIA). Before it’s too late, he realizes that the next step in the plot will be for him to lose his son. What is the use of a reign that is not perpetuated in his lineage? And so he is transformed into the most active instigator of the young couple’s rescue. In the opera’s final scene, reality, substance, calculation, and the amiable nature of the Enlightenment appear as a quartet.

  The opera director in the German city was unwilling to accept this version, which completely contradicted Sophocles. At the same time, the conductor insisted on playing the music to the end, that is, with this finale. Four weeks were planned for the attempt to change Traetta’s model opera, including new rehearsals. In this crisis, the singer of Antigone ultimately tipped the scales. She pointed out that she was coming down with bronchitis. The premiere must take place immediately, otherwise she couldn’t vouch for her voice. Doubts about Irina’s respiratory tract seized the team. No one wanted to go without this voice that had emerged so unexpectedly from the Balkans. All this Irina did out of loyalty to her nighttime confessor.

  The Impotence of an Ordinary Understanding when Faced with Kaltenbrunner’s Men

  Puccini’s TOSCA was performed at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in the fall of 1943, as it is every year. In the third act we see day dawn over Rome. The tenor, a condemned man, takes leave of his life. The music describes the fresh breeze over the ancient city, the vibrant chorus in the living cells of the prisoner’s body, and the man’s anticipation as he imagines that he might yet have a chance to flee with his beloved and escape this tyrannical state by ship. A short while later he’s shot by a firing squad. Rome’s chief of police, Scarpia, had promised Tosca to spare her beloved. He doesn’t keep his word. And so the audience feels a sense of rightness when Tosca kills him. Many German officers and their Fascist comrades, as well as members of Rome’s apolitical high society, had this sequence of scenes etched into their minds, whether they were operagoers or not.

  The head of the German Security Service (SD) in Rome, SS-Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, did not derive his ideas or decisions from artistic considerations. He was a practical man. From his office he could see far across the city. The police forces at his disposal were inadequate. The chiefs of the Carabinieri had been arrested, and he was preoccupied by the dangers they posed, as well as worries about how to control the population when disarmed but still dangerous Carabinieri units were at large. According to an order from Himmler, he was to use the German occupation of Rome to move the Roman Jews north. At this point in time such deportations were as far from Kappler’s mind as were executions by firing squad. He wanted to use the available freight trains to transport some of the arrested Carabinieri to Northern Italy. Summoning the two most prominent leaders of the Jewish community, Ugo Foà and Dante Almansi, he demanded that they muster Jewish sapper battalions to strengthen Rome’s defenses, and also deliver up fifty kilos of gold as BLOOD MONEY within thirty-six hours. In return, quid pro quo, the Jewish population of Rome would be left in peace.

  It also struck him that persecuting the Jews in Rome would involve structural inequities. The rich Jews lived scattered throughout the city, and one could not be certain of apprehending them, whereas the poor Jewish population was stuck in the Ghetto near the Vatican. For days the security chief bathed in a sea of consensus. The Vatican offered the Jewish community a papal loan to raise the fifty kilos of gold. Kappler garnered praise from all sides for the “elegant solution,” whose details remained secret. On October 7 the collected gold was sent off to the Reich Security Head Office in the sealed car of an express train. LATER, AS IT TURNED OUT, KAPPLER WAS UNABLE TO KEEP HIS WORD.

  Embassy counsellor Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen sent telegrams to the Foreign Office in Berlin in support of Kappler’s policy. That network of agreement included General Rainer Stahel, the city’s Wehrmacht commander.

  Then a group of twenty-five SS officers arrived from the Reich: Dannecker’s unit. Relatively low-ranking. They came with instructions from the Reich Security Head Office. On October 16 they arrested 1,259 Roman Jews. The action precipitated 288 telephone conversations and telegrams picked up by the British monitoring service. Involving matters of leniency, appeals. Thus people of mixed blood or from mixed marriages were separated out from the group of detainees. 1,007 Jews remained, including 200 children under ten years old. They were placed under guard in the military academy. From there they were escorted to Tiburtina Station. From there to Auschwitz.

  On the morning of the raid, Countess Enza Pignatelli alerted the Vatican. Asserting herself with the switchboard operators, she managed to reach Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione. And for one moment (pulling rank), she even got as far as the Pope. The Cardinal Secretary of State summoned the German Ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker. If the raid continued, Maglione said, the Pope would protest. Weizsäcker replied: Such a step could prompt a German reaction AT THE VERY HIGHEST LEVEL. Did that mean the Pope would be arrested and the Vatican occupied by German troops? asked the church dignitary. Would Maglione permit him not to report this conversation? Weizsäcker asked in return.

  Up to this point, the British monitoring service, reconstructing the substance of the discussion from the immediately ensuing phone calls in the Vatican, as well as the ambassador’s telegrams, was able to follow the course of events. What is not known is Maglione’s exact response to von Weizsäcker’s proposal. The Cardinal Secretary of State is said to have agreed that the conversation could be described as “friendly” and left further proceedings up to the discretion of the skilled German diplomat.

  In the end, ninety high-ranking officers, diplomats, and other influential figures, both Italian and German, were involved in the attempt to reinstate Kappler’s original policy and “save what could still be saved.” They could make no headway against the gang of twenty-five DETERMINED MEN who by now had already commandeered the trains; the deportees were rolling away down the railroad tracks in Central Italy.

  In 2012, at New York’s Columbia University, scholars asked how it was possible for a network of authorities, safeguarded by rank and professional ties, supported by a web of practical rationales, reinforced by considerations of how (morality-wise) these events would be viewed AFTER THE WAR, to find their plans so utterly thwarted by a small group of carpetbaggers (by no means true believers, merely men following orders). The New York conference was jointly organized by the “Corporate Management” and “Contemporary History” faculties. Under today’s conditions — the question was posed — how does one respond to the persistent will of a small minority acting on authority of a central command network? How can the majority of the people involved, seeking to follow a contrary plan of action that derives not from central headquarters, but from previous traditions and inertia, prevail and patch its torn network? It seems to me, Anselm Haverkamp expounded, that the WILL that is so much in evidence is not strong in itself. It is an artefact. Would it be comparable to the proverbial “will to power”? asked one of the Americans from the camp of the business economists. Not in the slightest, Haverkamp replied. The concentrated force that works only at that moment, tearing the well-spun net (even just one or two of the twenty-five men could do that much), arises from the energy of the chain of command that reaches all the way to Rome. From a grammatical perspective, such a chain of command consists of threats. Can a threat be met with a counterthreat? came the question in response. The group of twenty-five men, like ambassadors from an alien world, always act as a concerted force, like barbarians, the reply came from the audience. They were capable of isolating any one of their adversaries. That is where the threat lies: anyone who drew his service pistol against them and showed them the door would be isolated an hour later.

  The conference went on for hours. The participants expanded on the topic, arguing that when speaking of concrete incidences of a RUTHLESS WILL that breaches the net of civ
ilization, examples from our time had to be included. Haverkamp gave the account of a fourteenth-century Dominican monk who marched into an imperial city with seven companions and established a terror regime for an entire year, even though the city council, the leading guilds, the common people, and the nobility all resisted his tyranny. Haverkamp compared this with the stubbornness of Admiral Tirpitz in 1912, when he used the Navy League he had organized in order to extort the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and the Reichstag into continuing the construction of battleships: a small group dominates the whole. The organizational theoreticians refused to see things in this light, claiming that Haverkamp’s thesis was psychologistic. No, he replied, it is literary: it comments on the examples. Was it perhaps their single-mindedness, the primitive nature of their ambitions, that made the group of twenty-five men in Rome seem so powerful? As the daylight waned, the conference devolved into jocularity. The majority of the participants felt tormented by the questions raised. They would have liked to see the events of October 1943 in Rome swept away as by a wind. Hans Thomalla, a composer invited from Baden-Württemberg, proposed writing an opera with the working title “Tosca 2.” A sequence of short scenes would depict the deaths of police and security chiefs or henchmen and executioners; in each case death would intervene before their evil deeds could come to fruition. The majority of those present came to the conclusion that the only way to combat the fanaticism inherent in a chain of command that prevails through the threat of isolation is to destroy that chain before it comes into being.

  An Emotional Weapon of Terror

  Christoph Schlingensief’s film Mother’s Mask is a remake of one of the Third Reich’s last feature films: The Great Sacrifice by Veit Harlan, based on a novella by Rudolf Binding. Typhoid abruptly ends the amour fou between Carl Raddatz, a genteel horseman returned from the African colonies, and the seductive Kristina Söderbaum, whom he sees riding along the beach like an Amazon princess, dressed in fur and brandishing a bow and arrow. Long after the horseman’s death, his abandoned wife (Irene von Meyendorff) disguises herself as her husband and rides past the window of his beloved, who gazes out, haggard from her illness. Irene von Meyendorff waves up at the window just as her adulterous husband once did each evening. That is her sacrifice. And it is the proof of her love for the man she refuses to forget (although he abandoned her). Christoph Schlingensief transplanted all this into down-to-earth, North Rhine-Westphalian surroundings. The screenplay unchanged. A pony instead of the gentleman’s racehorse. Carl Raddatz’s brother is played by the comedian Helge Schneider. The brothers are enemies. Events are stage-managed by a mother who does not appear in Harlan’s film.

  Like bacteria superinfecting a wound, in the late 1930s and during World War II a NEW OPERATICITY came to dominate all serious subjects. As few new operas were composed, the effects were seen mainly in the cinema. But Hitler, citing a NEW SERIOSITY, also tells the tale of a “simple woman from Vienna” who, pregnant out of wedlock and abandoned by her lover, embraces death rather than live in dishonor. The Führer applies this lesson to a general who was unwilling to shoot himself following a military catastrophe and preferred to be taken prisoner by the Russians. Hitler expects “existential seriousness,” not some cheap sort of pragmatism.

  The emotional comparative of those years unfolds as follows: suffer misfortune — allow yourself to be profoundly stirred by art — develop such an ardor that total commitment, the commitment of your life, is worthwhile — set off for the front.

  Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, a fanatical Nazi who headed a department in the Reich Propaganda Ministry and served as an advisor to Rommel, lauded this NEW ATTITUDE, calling it a “liberation from the bourgeois view of art” and “art as action.” However, he added, not every furnace of feeling should be transformed into a deadly missile. If even the soul’s blast furnaces were turned into weapons, that would be equivalent to the Japanese kamikaze attacks, which we European National Socialists reject.

  Dark Tidings from Days of Splendor

  My name is Alfred-Ingemar Berndt. I am the author of REMEMBRANCES OF GREAT DAYS, dedicated to my comrades from the German press. It is I who composed the rhyme:

  Führer, you raised us when we lay low,

  Now show us your face at the window!

  Though I am long dead, those Great Days still stir me. On June 14, 1934 — a day of awe-inspiring events — I was in the Führer’s D-2600 eight-motor plane when it landed at San Nicolò airport on the Lido. The scene cries out to be captured in words. The first exchange of glances between Il Duce and the Führer was penetrating, appraising. My impression was that they didn’t trust each other. Around the two leaders stood grandees of Fascism like Starace and Teruzzi. What I thought was: dolled up like ladies. What I wrote was: “leading fighters in the Fascist Party.” It isn’t that an experienced propagandist lacks a critical gaze. There are always two levels of consciousness. One from the underside, one for the top.

  We boarded the motorboats. Passed a torpedo boat flotilla. The crew at attention on deck in their white dress uniforms. Across to the Doge’s Palace. At the Palazzo Vendramin the Führer doffs his visor cap to ride bare-headed past the place where Wagner died. Green afternoon water.

  We land at the Piazzale Roma, where the Autostrada ends. In automobiles down the Brenta Canal to Stra. The Führer’s weak stomach rebels at the swaying, at being transported back and forth. There, too, I have nothing edifying to write. Even in the airplane no beverages were served. The bladder must hold out until the final destination. The Führer’s room was designed by Veronese. A thick layer of history covers everything we see.

  It is now two hours before midnight. The two rulers “stride” (you can’t write “go” or “walk”) up the GIANTS’ STAIRCASE to the second floor of the Doge’s Palace. In the arcade court, on a gallery between the distractingly splashing fountains: the Venice Opera Orchestra. VERDI and WAGNER. A potpourri from La forza del destino, followed by Brünnhilde’s sacrificial death from the Ring of the Nibelung. Orchestra only. Wan light from the courtyard’s cast-iron lamps.

  The choice of the two long musical pieces strikes me as questionable. I am judging things as a netherworldly newspaperman, looking back from the end of the story. Incidentally, I also reported from Rommel’s headquarters outside Cairo, and even in Breslau during the siege (we didn’t surrender the city to the Russians until two days after May 8), I published pamphlets for Operation Werwolf in the north of the city, using a hand press and my colored pencils (for portrait drawings). To impress the people with their distinguished taste these two statesmen chose two depressing, nocturnal pieces. But the music, like the underside of my observations, of which I note nothing down, betrays the true current of events to which the momentary incidents of great days are oblivious.

  “How Much Blood and Horror Lies at the Root of all ‘Good Things’!”

  Some beasts of prey have limbs designed for strangulation. But CALCULATION, the stranglehold of the mind, was introduced into the evolutionary process by the species Homo sapiens. It defined the primal conflicts within families and clans. This civil war in the earliest human groups, at the interfaces between generations (father and son, brother and sister, brother and brother, matriarchs and excess children in hard times) lasted 100,000 years, according to the research group headed by Lindsay Zanno in North Carolina. Zanno called attention to the eyes of small children; before they can see a thing, their wide-open eyes act upon the mother, swearing to her: “Don’t kill me, and I’ll be of use to you in your old age or cold weather!”

  This, claims the paleobiologist, is one of the oldest oaths in the world. Alfons Hirte from Potsdam disagreed with the American scientist. Nothing that “rational” and directly “confrontational” can come about over a period of 100,000 years, he argued. There are no intentions and no subjects capable of upholding decisions over the long spans of time evolution requires. Lindsay Zanno found this objection unpersuasive. She merely allowed that it wa
s not an oath that ended the killing. Rather, the peace settlement, the contrat familial, came about because the children who survived were those with this type of behavior pattern stored in their germline, whether it arose by chance or from necessity. Those lacking this behavior pattern died out. An echo of grisly incidents that served to dispose of excess progeny does live on in the genome, Alfons Hirte conceded. This echo, as Hirte put it, must be sung of in the sleep of the millennia. Among paleobiologists, Hirte’s manner of expressing himself was regarded as slightly eccentric.

  Verdi. Rigoletto or La Maledizione. Genealogy

  One of the briefest bass roles in opera history is that of Monterone in Verdi’s Rigoletto. Condemned to death as a rebel, he appears briefly in two scenes and is led away to his death. Rigoletto mocks him, and Monterone curses him for his mockery. Thus the original version of Verdi’s opera was called La Maledizione (The Curse), not Rigoletto. The theme of a father killing his daughter (willingly or unwillingly) in order to defend her chastity goes back to antiquity. Lucrecia’s rape by a corrupt prince (outrage over the deed led to the downfall of the Roman kings) is echoed by the story of Virginia. A powerful judge desires the girl and seeks to subjugate her. The powerless father kills his daughter. The story wandered from culture to culture, and Lessing turned it into Emilia Galotti. Emilia’s father kills his daughter in order to put her out of reach of the prince’s lust. This story served in turn as the basis for Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse: the father, once a revolutionary, now a courtier at a corrupt princely court, sacrifices his daughter to protect her virtue. This was the prototype for the libretto of Verdi’s opera.