Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  After all, two scientific truths could not exist side by side.

  In this game of higher stakes, he was forced to enter a great trial of strength, which also promised to be a showdown with the powerful Himmler. Who, at least on the face of it, respected his scientific prestige and achievements. Baron Schuer knew from his own assistant, Mengele, that Sievers had had his eyes on the Wolkenstein house for a good many years and had spoken several times with the baroness about purchasing it. Schuer was no more convinced of Mengele’s loyalty than he was of his scientific abilities, but he needed Mengele now. He was afraid that Sievers would take over the house and simply throw out the research material so diligently collected from the children, who had grown used to continued investigation. The baroness herself was also a source of concern: not only did she want to head the institute in Rome in return for the house, but she also meant to raise the rent on it. For his progeny purification institute Sievers looked for houses that were far from any kind of human settlement. He was a long way from having established his network, but dark folk imagination had already given a name to these institutes. Lebensborn: the word itself contributed to the institute’s dubious reputation. A place where life is created. And the baroness intended to raise the rent by the very amount that, with the budget at his disposal, Baron Schuer could not afford to pay.

  Which clearly showed that the baroness realized her advantageous business position and wanted to extort as much as she could from him.

  Which Mengele must also know, since nothing happened without Himmler’s and Sievers’s approval.

  He had turned a haunted, musty hunting lodge into a well-functioning institute with the highest standards of hygiene, and now these people were trying to push him out and settle into a well-established place.

  Mindful of the many valuable objects, some of them dating back to the Middle Ages, the old family pictures, the somewhat worn furniture that had reached a critical age, the many fragile historical fripperies, the so-called ornamental pieces, and the heavy hand-woven silk Venetian tapestry, students were not allowed in the knights’ hall except on Christmas Eve. Christmas celebrations were held in the large dining hall on the main floor, which had two stoves built of ancient tiles and walls decorated with trophies. At the completion of the festive meal, music-loving pupils were allowed to enter the knights’ hall and listen to a few recordings of classical music.

  Schultze came from Leipzig too. When one boy left his office, a good half hour, sometimes even forty minutes would go by before he would order up the next one. Nobody knew what he did in the interim—how he evaluated the results, and whether the results had anything to do with whom he called for next.

  Whether he had a list.

  Hans, together with Hendrik Franke, the oldest of the boys, somewhat overage, whom everybody admired for his calm, deliberate manners and who, right now, was arguing with Kienast in the botanical garden, had managed to sneak into Schultze’s office several times. They wanted answers to their worrisome questions; they searched the place thoroughly, took some documents, even destroyed them, but found no list. Schultze always arrived with a large bag; he must have kept his important papers in it.

  Which meant they had to get to the bag; and they were determined to do just that. It wasn’t impossible, since Schultze often sat in the second-floor hall and listened to music. He would sing to himself endlessly, even when entering his latest results into his carefully prepared tables, comparing them to earlier results about the same person and to other persons’ results at different times and different places. With a practiced eye, he would check or modify the hypotheses emerging from his research. He would draw up charts of the rhythm of bodily development; he’d compare them but had only a passing interest in them.

  No definitive conclusion now was allowed to influence his pending conclusions later.

  Well then, let it be him, he sang and ruminated, let it be this one or that one, as he went on with his seemingly mechanical work—based on his familiarity with the physical attributes of boys and on strictly physical measurements—work that in essence, however, proved to be intuitive. The boys could not even begin to deduce what guided Schultze’s decisions or what consequences his maniacal series of measurements might have for them. Because not everybody had a turn on each occasion, and—perhaps because of Schultze’s scientific whims—several boys were left out of the measuring sessions for quite some time. There were his favorites, boys he may have enjoyed measuring, and there were others to whom he paid no attention at all. Or on whom he did the work perfunctorily. Sometimes the boys in the latter group became very anxious that they meant nothing to Schultze anymore. This feeling was unendurable in the long term; it was very like jealousy. While the other boys were watching, enviously or disdainfully. They could not fathom the reason for their exclusion. Why was Schultze not interested in their measurements. In what way did they differ from the others; was it something the naked eye could not see or was it covered by their clothing.

  And this watchfulness, intensified by base emotions, made the atmosphere among them ominous and depressive; they could not forgive one another for it.

  If there is equality, then let there be equality.

  And from a higher viewpoint on the persons or limbs or other body parts chosen to be measured, there were still issues that could be neither followed nor understood. The more and more detailed the data, the more clearly Schultze saw that strength, or energy, or the principle of love or that of equality did not function in organic nature, and that, with regards to judging single individuals, uniformly applied and authenticated units of measurement had been misleading him. Only the exceptional exists; the individual has its laws, very intimate and from the outside impenetrable laws; but the individual is not linked to the group through its exceptional characteristics.

  Strength, energy, love, and equality are ultimately kinds of political fiction based on a statistical fiction about the average, and they have nothing to do with physics or biology.

  As if he were saying to himself that these sciences must first be cleansed of political fictions, or that he must first occupy himself with metaphysical questions, and only then could he do something with the results of the mechanical measurements.

  Maybe not even then.

  In the evenings, Schultze sat singing to himself in one of the comfortable armchairs in the great hall. He remained alone with his thoughts even as, around him, other teachers were reading or talking among themselves. He agonized about the desirable metaphysical foundation for the so-called final questions. He did not even notice when a record ended and kept spinning on the turntable, empty and crepitating under the needle. He also managed to talk himself out of looking for connections, relationships, or parallels in his intuitively collected mass of data.

  He whistled classical melodies, always repeating them, the same way and always the same ones, maniacally.

  At the same time, he drank quite a bit of red wine.

  Every time he finished his work, he had to wait for Geipel, another teacher, from Berlin, a renowned expert on the genetic determinations of the palm and fingers, who did not always come alone but in the company of several guests, all of them scientists. Geipel was the scientific supervisor of the examinations, and because of his humorous ways, the boys had very quickly, not as with Schultze, come to like him.

  They could more easily understand the rhythm and sense of this embarrassing, oppressive activity called supervision than the meaning of Schultze’s perpetual examinations. The supervisions were carried out at least three times a year. That is when they found out who among them were considered very interesting or problematical—which, theoretically, they should have known earlier, since they involuntarily followed the measuring technique’s secret instructions and made them their own with their own eyes, except that they could never decide why and from what viewpoint this or that fact would be decisive or interesting. Once Schultze had measured something, they observed that thing on themselves and on one a
nother, so together they probably reached a more profound level of observation than Schultze ever did with his exact measurements. They knew everyone’s measurements in any part of his body, what any of them preferred to keep quiet about and, to avoid comparisons, what they wanted to keep a secret and from whom.

  Vigilantly they watched one another’s features, limbs, and colors, the changes in their attributes and physical inclinations.

  The fruit of this vigilance ripened during the times of supervision.

  Schultze’s monkish strictness repelled and disgusted them.

  Didn’t I tell you, I also saw it, see, I knew it in advance.

  However, they enjoyed the subtle knowledge they gained by studying individual cases.

  Involuntarily they became attuned to the scientific presuppositions Schultze studied so diligently, but since they did not need to strive for a scientific outcome, they were free to associate their observations with feelings and emotions. This was not without danger, because they could not ascertain the consequences of their individuality, of their exceptional or problematic qualities, though that might be the fount of their knowledge. That everything had grave, even dire consequences—of that they had no doubt. Nor could they discover whether there were prescribed units of measurement by which to gauge their being problematical. Hendrik and Hans found no papers relating to this question when on two consecutive nights they broke into Schultze’s office. Sometimes it seemed that the committee found the exceptional to be the norm; at other times the norm seemed to mean average or desirable, which again should have been designated by a number or series of numbers, which the boys could not find anywhere.

  They also understood that a questionable number was nonetheless a number, its symbol x, just as in the periodic table there are empty spaces. But the empty spaces become visible with the filled places; thus it was not unreasonable to look for the latter. Boys considered problematical were not only exposed to merciless repetitions of previously assessed measurements but, in the silent presence of committee members, also subjected to measurements other boys were not. In any case, the boys had to strip naked for the measurements when Schultze measured the distance between chin, Gnathion, and the tip of the sternum, Suprasternale, and again for the supervisions.

  If anyone thought of not stripping voluntarily, Schultze would demand it, on every occasion.

  Kienast was considered a difficult case.

  Let’s take off those shitty little drawers, Schultze sang, come on, get rid of those stinking socks.

  The boys in the boarding school changed underwear once a week, and Schultze was particularly sensitive to the inevitable bodily emissions. He could barely forgive the boys when their bodily data were linked to organ functions. Another reason that made it hard to judge one’s own situation by the measurements of others was that not everyone liked to report on what happened to them in Schultze’s office, what irregularity was discovered or which body part was the focus of interest during a certain visit. Many of them tried to make their reports innocuous, which stood to reason, while others exaggerated theirs shamelessly. Even though no one knew what would result from either of these distortions, and it was impossible to gauge which was the better self-defense in the secret war against being scientific.

  To keep quiet about the embarrassing experience of being measured, or to brag, exaggerate, and outdo the others.

  They were all bastards, that was the truth.

  The adults would never have said this aloud about them, and the boys were even less likely to mention it among themselves. They could not help thinking about it, because not only science but also the law declared them bastards. Nevertheless, the education these misbegotten children were given was in accordance with the most progressive, modern pedagogical theories. Most of the boys considered this an illusion intended to deceive them—a correct assumption—but they could not ignore the scientific level or quality of their education.

  Fifty-nine boys, the number hardly changed over the years because the suicides were always replaced with others. They studied in small groups, and these groups were divided roughly by age. Mainly they studied classical sciences, mathematics, physics, botany, chemistry, but also ancient languages, Latin and Greek, literature and history, especially ancient history, and subjects such as archaeology and ethnology that were not usually in the curriculum of midrange schools. Their physical achievements and mental capacities were monitored, and they were given the results of this monitoring because they were asked to do achievement-increasing exercises for the proper assessment of which it was required that they strengthen the spirit of competition among them. Their mental capacity and their intelligence were tested, and copious notes were taken of their behavior in many different circumstances.

  The boys could not imagine their instructors without their notebooks. They had to feel privileged to be living and studying in such an environment, and they knew that the highest levels of German science would use the data resulting from this. But they were repeatedly told that they were the same kind of person, birds of a feather, all in the same boat, tied by a bond that could never be broken. Whatever might happen, they could not—and they knew this—not even at the cost of their lives could they leave before high-school graduation. This was so far in the future for them that they couldn’t imagine a world with different conditions.

  They could not decide what they should be like, since they were already the way they were.

  Or how they should behave, so that despite their unfortunate birth, they might seem to be what in all probability they never had been and never could be. Yet in this way, given who they were, it filled them with satisfaction to think they performed a great service to German science. If Schultze were to succeed one day in defining the norms of racial desirability, based on the boys’ data, their stunted racial development would become their merit.

  These mainly intellectual broodings touched Hans less than they did the other boys, and they touched Hendrik only for practical reasons. About as much as did the others’ silently endured pain and self-doubts. Tension and anxiety about a lack or an injury that none of them could avoid. But regardless of the effect of these thoughts on them, Hans and Hendrik, for different reasons and in different ways, were able to keep a distance from them, and even physical intimacy could not have brought them closer than this shared ability.

  To their great good luck, they also managed to keep the strong physical signs of this feeling at a certain distance. They could not afford to wind up in a situation where they’d have to explain things to their friends or be suspected darkly by their instructors.

  The instructors paid special attention to such matters; moreover, they gave the boys the opportunity to observe for themselves the purity of their own inclinations or the nature of their own deviations.

  The two boys were especially sensitive to the exceptional atmospheric pressure of the locale, and also to the scientific aims of the place as they understood them, though neither of them had ever shown any touchiness; their reputation was firmly based. Hans always behaved as if he stood above everything that had happened or might happen to him; he was looked upon as privileged in the school, where being privileged was usually considered as being at odds with the communal spirit and the boys were contemptuous of it. The service personnel were forbidden to establish personal relationships with the boys. Any kind of bias or self-consciousness might threaten the accuracy of observation. Yet the men and women on the staff, who came from nearby villages and the little medieval town nearby, could not treat Hans as anyone but the lord and master of the place. Bastard or not, they did not much care.

  They tried to please him in small things—even when unnoticed, as it were—and he shared these friendly benefits and advantages fairly with Hendrik. The imperceptibility of these activities was what convinced the others that Hans had real historical prerogatives, which was a good reason they should listen to him. The scientific supervisors of the institute erred, however, in thinking they controlled ev
ery aspect of their observations. What is more, not only the kitchen personnel, the stokers and scullery maids, but the teachers and of course the boys all knew that Hans’s mother owned the two ancestral homes, the enormous forests between Thum and Wolkenstein, the lumberyards, and even the small forest train that, with much whistling, ran across the Wiesenbad viaduct every afternoon, and that she was also connected at the highest level to the scientific research being conducted here.

  It was naturally humiliating to think they were objects of a scientific experiment, yet all of them went to sleep and awakened with this unpleasant thought.

  Knowing they were here at the express wishes of their parents should have made the boys consider the matter settled. Yet it gave them no rest. When they went home for three weeks each summer, they dared not ask if their parents had any knowledge of the experiments or what sort of papers they had signed regarding their sons’ placement in the school and their being subject to hygienic observation. That was the key phrase. The boys searched and several of them found such papers among their parents’ documents; indeed, the parents had signed binding notes that referred to the appropriate law and clearly spelled things out.

  This summer, Hans was not allowed to go home because the consulting committee members thought an extreme session of observation was necessary in his case. They inflicted this punishment on him because of the break-in. They exposed the boys in an embarrassingly elaborate way, for the process of exposure itself became the object of the observation. The baroness, helpless against a scientifically defended order, was in fact relieved to hear of it. Then she wouldn’t have to waste three summer weeks in hopeless family time. She preferred not to acknowledge what sort of danger awaited her son during the extreme observation. She was also afraid of him; the boy’s sheer physical existence filled her with aversion.