by Daša Drndic
The Nazi plan for conquering the world is built on secrecy, founded on institutions, confidential documents, dark experiments, obscure war plans, mystical phantasms, occult dreams, hidden factories, camouflaged camps, fake hospitals and cryptic conferences, on dubious industry and esoteric production, vague warfare and ambiguous military campaigns. And at the centre, the axis around which this rotten cosmic vision spreads, ever more like the gigantic cocoon of some freak insect, are sexual organs, the cunt and the cock, their utilitarian and market value, their messianic mission, their battle cry, in other words—fucking, coitus vulgaris, which is designed to create a new man and a new age. The cunt makes a difference, the cock defines the difference. Castration, sterilization, controlled procreation, fornication and prostitution are the most powerful weapons of the Reich, the greatest obsession of the Reich, and, furthermore, of the Church.
Whether this took the form of an inflatable doll or a Salon Kitty or a Lebensborn farm is immaterial. The brothels in 1943 function smoothly for Himmler’s unmarried and married warriors along all fronts, including the Adriatisches Küstenland. To the more than one hundred official houses of ill repute, faced with a shortage of local floozies, vamps and easy women, they bring in puellae publicae, dedicated to the “great cause of mankind": women from Paris, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, even Berlin, some under coercion, some lured by promises, six hundred of them or more to service at least fifty clients a day, while those from the bordello on Klosterstrasse in Stuttgart, for example (and not only they), are put to work for science, using diaphragms in which they collect the semen of their studs for future (secret, of course) experiments.
The Trieste courts under German jurisdiction work at full throttle. There are no verdicts of not guilty. People play the lottery. The newspapers are full of classified ads: all sorts of things are being sold, clothing, jewellery, artworks, houses, as if a huge general migration were under way, although many have already been moved.
Life is stronger than war. For most people, for the obedient and the silent, for those on the sidelines, for the bystanders, life becomes a small, packed suitcase that is never opened, an overnight bag slipped under the bed, baggage going nowhere, in which everything is neatly folded—days, tears, deaths, little pleasures, spreading the stench of mould. For those on the sidelines there is no telling what they are thinking, whose side they are on, because they do nothing but stand and watch what is going on around them as if they don’t see a thing, as if nothing is happening, as if there is nothing going on. They live according to the dictates of everyone’s laws, and when the wars end this serves them well. There are many bystanders. They are the majority.
Blind observers are “ordinary” people who play for low stakes. They play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded. In war and skirting war, these blind observers look away with indifference and actively refuse to feel compassion; their self-deception is a hard shield, a shell in which, larvae-like, they wallow cheerfully.
They are everywhere: in the neutral governments of neutral countries, among Allies, in occupied countries, in the majority, in the minority, among us. Bystanders. That is who we are.
For sixty years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting, We are innocent because we didn’t know!, and with the onset of new wars and new troubles, new observers crop up, armies of young and powerful bystanders are born, blindfolded, feeding on their innocence, on their indestructible compatibility, these yes-men, these enablers of evil.
Little stories are forever surfacing.
When Herbert von Karajan dies in 1989 at the age of eighty, Haya learns of his membership of the Nazi Party, which made it possible for him to conduct whatever orchestra he wanted. Although Karajan is banned from working after the war, the ban lasts only until 1948, after which the audiences flock to his performances again and applaud him with rapture. Ten years later, in 1958, Karajan is named lifelong conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. His popularity soars and the soil soaks up the past like rain sinking into its belly.
Haya learns of Tom Stoppard, too. She hears that Stoppard was born Tomás Straussler in the town of Zlin, Moravia, where Bata sets up his famous shoe factory. She learns that until 1999 Tom Stoppard has no clue he is Jewish; then (by chance) he finds out that he is. Tomás’ father Eugene Straussler works at the factory hospital as a physician. Immediately after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, Mr Bata decides to save his employees, including the physicians, by sending them off to the branch offices he owns all over the world. The Straussler family relocate to Singapore, but before the Japanese occupation, Marta Beck (Straussler by marriage) leaves with her two sons and goes first to Australia, then to India, while Eugene Straussler boards a ship full of refugees somewhat later. The Japanese shell his ship and with it sinks Eugene. In India, Marta Straussler meets a British officer by the name of Stoppard who asks her to marry him. He gives her boys his last name and together they return to his homeland, England, where they live happily ever after, as if their earlier life had never happened, as if there had never been a family, a war, camps, another language, memories, not even a little Czech love. In 1996 Marta Beck (Straussler by marriage, Stoppard by marriage) dies, and at that moment Tomás, no longer a boy, born Straussler, re-born Stoppard, starts digging through his past now that he is tired of writing plays or now that his inspiration has dried up—who knows?—and time unfolds before him. In the Czech Republic Tomás learns that his grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, cousins, all of them disappeared as if they had never lived, which, as far as he is concerned, they had not, and he goes back to his lovely English language and his one and only royal homeland, to sort through his impressions of this excursion into his own life.
Or Madeleine Albright, born in 1937 as Madlenka Jana Korbel, who also learns, with a sixty-year delay, that she is Jewish and that her grandfathers and grandmothers, her uncles and aunts, cousins, have disappeared as if they had never lived. Madeleine learns this only when she is contacted by the descendents of a Mr Nebrich, who, though never himself a member of the Nazi Party, lives comfortably throughout the war as a citizen of the Reich (a bystander) in a spacious and luxurious flat in the heart of Prague, at Hradcanski Námestí 11. Madeleine doesn’t learn she is Jewish even when her father Josef Korbel returns to Prague in 1945, after having fled to London in 1939. The new government gives Josef Korbel Mr Nebrich’s expropriated flat with all the furniture, Persian carpets and paintings. Today Karl Nebrich, a citizen of Austria and a powerful industrialist, son of the bystander Nebrich, is accusing the late Josef Korbel of absconding with art worth millions of dollars, art that by now late father, including a Tintoretto and an Andrea del Sarto, and then seeking political asylum in the United States for himself and his family.
Then there’s the Red Cross, which helps the Nazis launder the money of their deported victims, and the Ford Motor Company, which spreads the infectious poison of anti-Semitism, and Singer, and Bayer, and Krupp, and Jena, and Agfa, I. G. Farben, Siemens, Bayer AG, B.M.W., Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, there is no end to the list of firms and their owners who exploit starving camp internees for material gain, for the love of their homeland, before the Nazis say This way to heaven, ladies and gentleman. This way to the showers.
The Tedeschi family are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism.
In Trieste, in September 1943, the new head of the S.S. police for the Adriatic Littoral, Gauleiter Odilo Globočnik,* lives at Via Nizza 21. Reichsführer-S.S. Heinrich Himmler, head, at the time, of the Gestapo and Minister of Internal Affairs, orders his friend Globočnik to push political, racial and anti-partisan repression throughout the district. Three doors away is Casa Germanica at Via Nizza 15, and there Globočnik, while waiting for the arrival of his new fianceé Lora Peterschinegg, who is president of the Carinthian League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), enjoys the occasional black risotto, goulash with bread dumplings, or rabbi
t stew, takes in a nice film from time to time, and jokes with the servants, because Globočnik is an unusual policeman, a mischievous policeman, fond of social life. Haya meets Globočnik in May 1944 when she comes to the Casa Germanica with Mr Kurt to watch the Austrian movie Eine Frau wie Du, and when Mr Kurt holds her hand in the dark, in secret.
Haya cannot remember the house in which she lives at the time. Some details she has no recollection of, while others she recalls clearly. The winter of ’43 and ’44 is cold and snowy, a harsh winter, that much Haya remembers. In February 150 grams of cooking salt is distributed per person, and one Wednesday she goes to get cheese with her coupons from the 243 series, and buys a piece of Gorgonzola for 18 lire, Provolone for 19 lire and Montenara for 20 lire. This she remembers. In fact, Haya remembers that February clearly. Ada’s friend Lucia de Martin receives 8,000 lire from Mussollini in gratitude for bearing and raising fourteen sons, of whom four are fighting at the front, one is a prisoner of war with the British, one is unfit for work because he suffers from war-induced trauma, and the other sons are in the Fascist Night Guard (the Isonzo Istituto de Sorveglianza Notturna, Corso Verdi 28). Haya remembers how a shipment of cooking oil comes in, with a decilitre allotted per person, per month, and tomato paste, 50 grams each. She recalls that the theatre season is lyrical. At the Teatro Verdi they give Aida, La Traviata, Rigoletto, The Barber of Seville and Carmen, sung by Favero, Malipiero, Casteliani and Filipeschi; she goes to La Traviata, after which she cries in her cold bed until dawn for altogether different reasons, not the least operatic. She remembers the curfew from 10 p.m. to 5.30 a.m. and how she hurries home . . . She remembers how the whole family fear thieves and Tito’s partisan bandits, bandits most of all. Haya doesn’t know how the Germans occupied Gorizia, because at the time, in September 1943, she was not living in Gorizia, so this is not her concern. The cinemas are working: Cinema Teatro Vittoria, Cinema Savoia, Cinema Moderno and Cinema Italia. All of them are owned by Gaier and Gnot, and they show the latest hits, Italian and German, whichever. Gale-force winds howl, the snows pile up, and when she closes her shop, the tobacco shop, the stationery shop, whatever, there at the intersection of Seminario and Ascoli, the shop where her mother worked twenty years before, though the owner is no longer Zora Hochberger, who got lost along the way, but Caterina Cecotti, when Haya shuts up shop, she plunges, bundled like a Russian countess, through the dreamy white silence, into worlds which, she already knows, will elude her grasp. Oh, yes, she remembers, she remembers, and even when she doesn’t, here at her feet in the red basket are all manner of old programmes and tickets, two for some shows, one for others, big and little colour posters and black-and-white posters, photographs of movie stars, a coaster or two from the La Perugina sweet shop, all of it arranged for old age, for memories, which now that Haya rummages through them, seem to be porous memories, hollow and spent.
Ah, Kristina Söderbaum, so golden-haired, blue-eyed and virtuous, the perfect incarnation of Aryan femininity in La Città d’Oro (Die Goldene Stadt), so cruelly punished for a small digression from the “natural” female environment, like Haya, isolated, rejected, abandoned, broken, because of dreams of another life. Oh God.
Haya knows nothing of Kristina Söderbaum, born in Stockholm in 1912, except that Kristina Söderbaum is beautiful the way she, Haya, would like to be beautiful and that Kristina is most certainly as happy and famous as she, Haya, would like to be happy and famous, or maybe only happy, that year, 1943, in her little Gorizian existence, built on the most ordinary of lives. Why should Haya back then, in 1943, have known that Kristina Söderbaum was starring in bad Nazi films, some of them shorts, others feature-length, all of them moralizing Nazi films of the Third Reich? Haya did not go to see the anti-Semitic historical melodrama Jud'Süss, because when it was released she was in Valona, and the movie Jud'Süss did not come to Valona; no, definitely not, because had the anti-Semitic historical melodrama been on the repertoire of the Valona cinema she, Haya, would definitely have gone to see it. And Haya doesn’t read the autobiography, Kristina Söderbaum’s autobiography, Nichts bleibt immer so, in which she counsels people to change, to move forward in life, especially after they have done their patriotic duty, made their patriotic efforts, no matter what these efforts might be, no matter how little, innocent and artistic, such as, for example, acting in the movies. Haya does not read this autobiography written much later, in 1983; in fact, after 1943, Haya no longer keeps track of Kristina Söderbaum’s life story, because after 1943 she gets her own life, a life altogether different from the life she had dreamed of. And when Haya learns, in 2001, already moored in her Gorizia outward calm, paralysed by her wait, which has been eating at her just as rust or salt eat little holes, soundlessly, in base metals, so, when from a German newspaper (she still reads the German papers) Haya learns that Kristina Söderbaum has died as an accomplished fashion photographer, that the post-war trial of her husband and director Veit Harlan has been completely forgotten, she merely rocks a bit harder, a little nervously in her rocking chair, One more yellowed page of history, she says, and that’s that.
But when, sitting under a hood dryer having her hair done at Marisa’s styling salon in 1973, Haya reads in a magazine that Hungarian-German-American diva Käthe von Nagy, born in Subotica in 1904, had died of cancer at the age of 69 in California, she lets out a brief glassy cry Oh Käthe! In her memory, there at the base of her skull, a long-preserved image, all fashioned of dreams—shatters.
Kristina Söderbaum was going to be the model for the famous “disinfected rubber doll in natural size” to be manufactured by Franz Tschakert and Company, the birth of which is the brainchild of Reichsführer-S.S. Heinrich Himmler, fanatic Catholic and poultry farmer, in order to preserve the health of his potent soldiers, so that they do not mate with the “infectious female herds” while dreaming far from home of their stolid and fertile spouses, who never unbraid the braids coiled around their ears, even when their legs are spread, so they won’t mess up their Schneckenfrisure. The doll could just as well be a brunette, suggests the Dane, S.S. physician Olen Hannussen, and psychiatrist Dr Rudolf Chargeheimer exclaims, Of course! What matters is that the doll offers our soldiers relief, because struggle and only struggle is their goal! So playful Käthe von Nagy enters the competition with Kristina Söderbaum, except that Käthe von Nagy says Out of the question. I am not giving my face away to anyone. So it is that athletics stars, Olympic medallists Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette Walter, are ultimately selected. S.S. physician Joachim Mrugowsky is withdrawn from the Geheime Reichssache, the project cloaked in the highest level of secrecy, because he is off voluntarily to do the most important task of all—running medical experiments on prisoners from various concentration camps. Later, in 1947, he goes, though not voluntarily, to Nuremberg, where he is condemned (nevertheless) to die. When Mrugowsky leaves the project, the Dane Hannussen exclaims, But, no! Certainly not beauties! The doll must in no way supplant the honourable mother and the wife, the protectress of family sanctity, the family hearth, the angel of our tomorrows! When a soldier makes love to Borghild (is the doll called Borghild because she is female cyborg Hilda?), when a soldier copulates with Borghild, this has nothing to do with love! Borghild will have a boyish haircut—she is part and parcel of our armed forces. She is a field whore, not the Mother of our Homeland. Borghild is to be produced in three types: Type A (5’6"), Type B (5’9") and Type C (5’11"). They decide to start serial production with Borghild B first, but the members of the project are of two minds as to Borghild’s breasts. The S.S. favours them round and full, while Dr Hannussen says, I want little tits in a rosehip shape; tits that fit snugly in the hand. Hannussen prevails. In September 1941 Borghild B is born, a Nordic type par excellence. The première of Borghild in Berlin is greeted with enthusiasm by S.S. officials, and Himmler immediately orders fifty. Terrible things happen, however, on the Eastern front, and the Borghilds never reach the soldiers. The only Borghild throughout the war is the prototype, left t
o languish in the office of her father Franz Tschakert, without satisfying a single lusty soldier. Then, in February 1945, Borghild disappears in the rubble of Dresden.
Going back to the 1930s in Berlin, at Giesebrechtstrasse 11, a fabled (and swanky) brothel run by Madame Kitty Schmidt, known as Salon Kitty, is working flat out. Foreign diplomats and the cream of German public, quasi-social life stop in at Salon Kitty: bankers, industrialists and politicians. Discretion is guaranteed, the services are first class, and the prices are out of this world. But Hitler grows ever more powerful and Kitty Schmidt gets nervous. By 1939 Salon Kitty is no longer frequented by refined Jewish businessmen, because the Brownshirts are beating up the refined Jewish businessmen, shutting down their companies, destroying their property, and then, rough and ready, sweaty and drunk, they come barging into Kitty’s to “get relief”. The police are running raids more often. Kitty is no fool. Kitty is, in fact, alarmed, and her business losses mount. Through Jews who are leaving Germany, and whom Kitty Schmidt is secretly helping to escape, she transfers her considerable takings to British banks and on 28 June, 1939, she leaves Berlin, meaning to join the riches that await her in London. But the Gestapo functions without a hitch. Kitty Schmidt arrives at the German-Dutch border, where she is immediately arrested by members of the secret police and taken straight to Walther Schellenberg, cunning and powerful head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the State counterespionage service, later a major general of the Waffen-S.S. and one of the organizers of the hunt for the Red Orchestra Soviet spy group. They introduce the 57-year-old madam Kitty Schmidt to the darkness of the infamous Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where Walther Schellenberg shoves a fat file under her nose that bulges with her subversive and illegal activities. Now take a look, dear Kitty, Walther says. These accusations guarantee you an unlimited amount of time at some cosy concentration camp. But, Walther Schellenberg continues, if you do something for us, perhaps there is something we can do for you.