The following is typical of what is happening. The technician in charge of this poison stockpile, a gentleman from Prussia who left the honourable profession of fireman to begin his rise to the rank of captain, one night began drunkenly shooting at the guards at the depot, and when they protested, hit them with his fists. The next morning he attempted to bribe the corporals who had been on guard. The enlisted men, however, all Bavarians, simply laughed at him. He was reported, and disappeared overnight, swallowed up somewhere in the cogs and wheels of the Nazi military machine. Since, except for this mishap, he was perfect in every way, he will probably reappear somewhere else: this time, perhaps, as satrap of a little supply point in Poland, where he will be master of life and death over the inhabitants, and can shoot undisturbed at living targets.
So much for the functionaries who are named to administer chemical hells, and who through some slight error can cause the most beastly of deaths to an entire region—man and animal, tree and grass.
As regards the bombing of Rostock, a relative of mine who is a well-known gynaecologist lost his private clinic on the first night of the attack. The second night, his apartment was destroyed, along with all his possessions. Pyjama-clad, the sixty-year-old man managed to squeeze through a window in his cellar and escape—his bare existence was all he could salvage out of a lifetime of hard work.
I have word that Ernst Niekisch,[57] who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Nazis four years ago after a sensation-filled trial closely followed abroad, has been murdered in prison. Niekisch, a simple schoolmaster of Bavarian origin, was, nevertheless, one of the cleverest and most unusual men I have ever met. The winter of 1919, during the Munich Revolt, I was a voluntary prisoner in the Bayrischer Hof Hotel, together with fifty other gentlemen, all adherents like me of old Prince Leopold of Bavaria. Niekisch, a prominent political figure and chairman of the Soldiers’ Council, did everything he could to ensure decent, I might almost say gentlemanly, treatment for his prisoners. Niekisch had an obvious partiality for everything that connoted ancien régime—as contrasted with capitalist—and the result was that we ended by having our own roulette wheel, even, on which we gambled away the last of our reserve money, ringing old silver thalers from before 1870.
The second time I saw him, in 1930, Niekisch had become the leader of a small, but fanatically devoted group on the order of the Tannenberg Bund of Ludendorff. This assortment of ex-Army officers, Free Corps adherents, and starving students was supported by an extraordinarily well edited newspaper, the organ of the Russophile section of the General Staff. Of course, this involved them in deadly conflict with the Hitlerites, who were apoplectic in their hatred of the Russians.
I was twice a guest at Niekisch’s ‘Days’, held behind barred doors at the old Leuchtenberg Castle, or else under tent cover in the midst of the Thuringian forest. The programme included frugal, Army-style meals, sports in the morning, and very clever talks in the evening, given for the most heterogeneous company I have ever seen. Included were secret agents for all parties, right to left; poverty-stricken little high-school and college students who, after long and weary peregrinations across the Reich had finally pitched their tents here; dubious left-overs from the Rossbach[58] group; stigmatised former divisional chaplains; superannuated generals; undercover Reichswehr officers; political scum; and even a few SA men of the opposition wing which was destroyed two years afterwards in the Röhm affair.
Niekisch himself, round as a ball, with the piercing look of a Hippocrates and eyes which looked narrowly and somewhat pessimistically out into the world, was, of course, anything but an ‘arch-traitor’. But he was doomed from the time he began striking with biting irony and ferocious hatred at the Nazis and at Hitler himself. And his fate was sealed by the lack of character of the men on the General Staff. Since 1918, utilitarianism, political opportunism, and the breaking of one’s word have become something like the tradition among the new breed on the General Staff. It was taken for granted that Niekisch’s backers would drop him the moment Hitler set himself up as the Germany’s Man of Destiny and one-man military government.
The whole of Niekisch’s high treason undoubtedly was because of the fact that his publication, which for some reason was allowed to go on until 1935, aroused the displeasure of the Nazis’ evil genius, Herr Rosenberg, and that Niekisch took every opportunity to poke fun at the Great Manitou—who has now taken to comparing himself to Scipio Africanus, and even to Cromwell.
Irony in regard to the dictator can bring death to the man who cannot help expressing it. But I wonder: Do the judges of Niekisch who four years ago took on themselves the responsibility for his imprisonment and therefore of his political murder—do they feel quite secure inside their skins?
June 1942
In Stuttgart to see my publisher, I met an old lady who survived the sinking of the Titanic thirty years ago, a catastrophe shrouded in obscurity to this day. This lady told me about an incredible thing that happened while the boat was sinking, and as the water was already lapping at the promenade deck and the boats were being let down into the water. At this very moment, the ship’s stewards were going about the deck carrying trays full of sandwiches, and murmuring, ‘May I offer you a sandwich?’—never-failingly good-humoured, remaining on duty to the end. Here, in a place where one would hardly look for it, a representation of the soul of an Englishman and with it an episode worthy of Joseph Conrad.
I have been with my dying Clemens von Franckenstein, whose cancer is in its terminal stage. I went with him for a consultation with my doctor, since Clemens imagined it might do some good: this proud man, who only a short time ago delighted in his own physical power, and exuded strength, and who today could not get into the car without my help; he sat in a waiting room filled to suffocation with fat bourgeois and hysterical actresses and the pitiless light of a burning hot day.
Naturally, this consultation could have only fictive value; naturally, he knew that his condition was hopeless; naturally, it was all a little comedy he was playing, conceived out of tenderness and consideration for his wife, in an attempt somehow to allay her desolation a little.
There we sat, playing out to the end our macabre roles, and then had breakfast with Walterspiel, who did not recognise Clé, so much had he changed. We knew that we had come to the end of a friendship of thirty years, that we were sitting opposite each other for the last time.
Never again to enjoy those analyses of yours, never again to be amazed by the contrast: at first sight, the impression of cool poise—and then the gentle heart that lay behind, most ready to help.
We went to see Clé’s cousin, Erwein Schönborn, who is a patient at the Neuwittelsbach Clinic. His letters seemed to indicate that he was not seriously ill. Instead, I found to my horror that he is terribly changed—shrunk to a skeleton, marked with death as Clé is.
Now with Clé, formerly a partner in conversation that was generally ironic, that tended even to cynicism, the conversation took on a tone I had never heard before. There was a note of gentleness in the talk of the two men, a kind of brotherly consideration, a delicate and melancholy opening of the heart peculiar to those bound by blood who now are separating for life.
I am going to lose both of them. They were my companions and my friends, they represented for me the ideal of the kind of man almost extinct in Germany. Far-seeing men, men of the world; large-hearted, great-spirited friends of all that is human; my fellow workers, I hoped, in the task of building a new Germany, new from the ground up.
Outside, the pitilessly full life of summer, and the harsh sounds of the city we loved so much, which now has become so strange. Inside, the dying men, and the gentle voice of suffering and of hopelessness; sad and heavy recollection of the past, past skiing adventures, past discussions, past festivities, all our shared experiences.
I went home, deeply alone, unutterably impoverished. It is as though all the light has gone out of the world. It is as though our lives are an ebbing tide that recedes f
arther and farther down a sandbank—and you think that the tide will never come back again, never in your life. It is as though the sun has become smaller, as though, one by one, the stars are going out.
There are those blessed ones who understand the mystery of God’s dealing with his children: Joseph Conrad, in The End of the Tether, in the story of the martyrdom of Whaley, the blinded sea captain—Joseph Conrad, whose work, I need scarcely add, has been placed on the Index by Herr Joseph Goebbels. . . .
But I, on this summer night, hot as cobalt, have lost myself. The distant worlds are enclosed in icy separation. The Throne of God is even farther away, and with it the great Book of Wisdom, whose pages my friends will soon be reading. My life is loneliness, and the growing awareness that it must be so—loneliness among a people whom Satan has overcome, and the awareness that only by suffering can the future be changed.
Isolation, with one last chance given one in this life: the chance to affirm truth by one’s death.
But you, who are still living in the world of yesterday, that comfortable world, that world where sound still exists: do you know anything, really, about this blackness in which we live? Do you know that the way to the Absolute is through the deep vale of suffering? And do you know that only out of our passion and out of our suffering can the seed be sown for the new day?
30 October 1942
I watched the first bombing of Munich from a hotel room in Alt-Ötting, where I have come to examine the material on Tilly located here; a hideous red glare, transforming the autumn night and its full moon. I heard in the distance the muffled booms, and it was calculated that since the bombs were dropping eighty kilometres away, it had taken three minutes for the sound to carry—three minutes during which the victims at the scene had been gasping and gagging and dying. Finally, the whole of the sky to the west was a gigantic sheet of fire.
In the days that followed, people spoke of fantastic losses, largely due to suffocation. People were still being dug out five days later, wedged in among fallen beams and rubble, where they had been unable to move. And then there were the dead, whose faces still bore the marks of their last agonies.
Since many high-ranking Nazis have private and luxuriously appointed residences in Solln, which the English evidently know, that unlucky suburb was bombed three times in succession. Werner Bergengruen, who lives there, lost all his manuscripts, his collections, the whole of his possessions when his house went. He was seen the next day in a state of shock and despair, perched on the pile of ruins that had been his house, offering passers-by the few things that had survived the holocaust: a Latin primer, a small bronze, a couple of Chinese objets d’art. Alongside was a hand-lettered placard announcing that this was a special sale by a German writer of the remains of his possessions. The police tried to drive him off, but he defended himself so energetically, and the crowd standing about was so sympathetic, that the gendarmes had to retreat.
Herr Hitler happened to be in Munich the night of the air-raid, and before the alarm had been sounded for the misera plebs, he was already safely tucked away in a private shelter complete with rugs on the floors, baths and, reportedly, even a movie projection-room. Thus, while hundreds and hundreds of people buried under rubble struggled horribly to breathe, he might well have been watching a movie. . . .
Naturally, he announced after it was over that everything would be rebuilt, far better than before. Presumably, after some young Canadian turns the Frauenkirche into a pile of rubble, he will assign Herr Speer to help us reconcile ourselves to the loss of this and other cathedrals. I would assume that he is secretly delighted over the loss of our Gothic masterpieces, since he has always wanted to become one of the immortals of architecture—hasn’t he already threatened to pull down the Theatinerkirche, the Hofgarten arcades, and the Leuchtenberg Palace to make room for a colossal opera? Here, at Chiem, we are supposed to be getting a Leaders’ School, a kind of stud farm for future chancellors, which would run for a kilometre and a half along the eastern shore of this peaceful lake. The whole quiet shoreline would be transformed into a mass of stone, dominated by a tower 130 metres high. One assumes that the task of his personal architects is to carry out orders, and keep quiet.
With the malignant narrow-mindedness of the man marked by the Devil, he hates everything that has grown up straight and healthy, and the opposite of himself. With the hatred of the illegitimate, he hates everything that belongs among the precious elements of our tradition, and which does not flatter his vanity. Is it really too much to say, when we view this dangerous gorilla, that we are prisoners of a Neanderthal man who has got loose from his chain?
And so we continue to vegetate in our life of shame, our life of dishonour, our life of lies. And our protest, at least the protest of our cowardly bourgeoisie, is in the retelling of old jokes about the regime, while their remaining days are spent swallowing propaganda.
Following a series of articles placed by Goebbels in the newspapers, the wife of a tenant came to see me in fear and trembling. In Jesus’ name, how was she to protect her children? They were all going to be dragged off to be raised in English, American, or Russian orphan asylums, according to newspapers! Nota bene, this woman spent several years in America, as a laundress; she still speaks a little English, and she has a number of quite warm recollections of Boston—yet she believes these stories about the foreign devils. Really, this people, only yesterday so intelligent and discriminating, seems to have been overcome by a disease of the mind. They now believe everything they are told, provided it is done with sufficient aplomb.
The latest is a story concocted by Goebbels that our so-called ‘Leader’ appeared in some town without previously announcing that he was coming. Nevertheless, there the whole town was, lined up awaiting him, as though some kind of radiance emanating from him had made itself felt in advance! If an official of Imperial or Weimar Germany had dared put out such a story, the shout of laughter that would have gone up would have sufficed to send him flying out of office, and would have followed him for the rest of his days. But this is broadcast by the networks, and believed, and digested, without a soul’s daring to so much as smile.
Literally everything is believed today, if it is printed, or broadcast, or publicly proclaimed under official auspices. If Herr Göring suddenly, and with the requisite blare of trumpets, proclaimed one of his hunting dogs King of Bavaria, I really believe that the same people who only yesterday were so proud of their differentness vis-à-vis the north German ant heap, and so jealously guardian of their own special characteristics, would shout hurrah and bow down.
There is some eerie, impending thing in the air, the whole physical structure of our lives seems to have broken down under the weight of these never-ending lies. For the last nine years, since the coming of Hitlerism, the summers have been concepts on a calendar only, and have drowned us in rainfall like the original Flood. Year after year, the vintages have failed. The botanists say that certain plants which normally bloom in the autumn now come up in spring, while there are spring-blooming plants which now emerge in late autumn. I have heard from zoologists on the Eastern Front, in the northern Caucasus, that tropical snakes formerly native to India are now to be found in the vicinity of the Volga, on the threshold of Europe. Thus, everything is out of joint, the usual order of things has been overturned. And what is this plague that now afflicts Germany, but a disgusting symptom of the same thing?
Clé died in August, bitterly, painfully, calling in his death agony to the brother in England he loved most dearly. Eight weeks before that, while black storm clouds lay over the little house on the Pilsensee, he had played for me my favourite song from his opera, Li Tai-Pe, the melancholy Song of the Cormorant. I sat beside him, heartsick at those fingers grown thin as matchsticks. Then, in the midst of his playing, blue flame shot between us as lightning ran down a conductor. The lights went out, the fuses were shattered into pieces. It was as though nature was already separating us.
Now, I expect every day to he
ar of the death of his cousin, Erwein von Schönborn, who is in agony in Munich.
Yesterday, I was discussing with H. the changing forms of man’s cruelty, with particular reference to the horror the Eastern Front has now become, and I remembered something which happened to me almost forty years ago, but which is still, today, fearfully present to me in all its grisly details. I was still a cadet at the time, on a short leave in Königsberg, and a friend of mine from school days invited me to go with him to a session on anatomy.
Most of the students were away for the holidays, and only one of the greasy-looking dissecting tables was in use. This was being serviced by an old attendant with a bushy, dirty, gray beard, who was busying himself, at the moment I walked in, with removing the head from a newly arrived corpse. This head had been completely smashed by a revolver shot.
I fled, but this old man followed me like a vampire, brandishing his fatty knife, and there, in the corridor, related the story of the corpse. The case was that of a homosexual druggist, who had shot his lover and would-be blackmailer, and then had killed himself. As no one claimed the despised remains, the one-time druggist had ended in the dissecting-room.
Some cynical twist of fate brought me into contact with the same corpse two years later. Now a medical student, I entered the same room for my first session in dissection, and found before me the livid flesh of the former apothecary. I recognised it at once as the remains of the man who had been brought by his equivocal inclinations to this miserable and apocryphal end. If there had been any doubt, the attendant removed it. That hideous old man served as a kind of ambulatory obituary notice for the poor, disgraced figures on the tables.
Diary of a Man in Despair Page 15