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A few months later I spent four weeks in Tirana. I walked, I observed, I listened and I sorrowed. In Tirana I wrote.
In Paris I almost always visit Café Tournon, where I sit for hours because of Joseph Roth. I reread Joseph Roth’s books, the ones about drunkenness, literal, alcoholic, and the one about the delirium of the dead age of a dead empire (Austro-Hungarian), listening to the way Roth’s works emit a doleful lament that warns of looming catastrophe. I sit in Café Tournon also because of Roth’s fucked-up life, because of his homelessness, trying to grasp how and why the whole civilizational nausea drags after us like a slimy trail or blocks our way. How and why the excellent journalist — “Red Roth,” “Red Joseph” — writing superb texts in Austria, Germany and France, in Holland, the Soviet Union, Poland, Albania and Italy, ends up in the corner of a small Parisian bar in which, with a cognac in one hand and a pen in the other, working for up to eight hours a day, he creates some of his best works. Roth and Zweig were friends, perhaps that’s why I look for Zweig in Paris. With Hitler’s coming to power and shortly before his annexation of Austria to Germany, in February 1933 Roth leaves Berlin and goes to Paris, from where he writes to Zweig in Vienna:
Now you can already see that we are drifting toward catastrophe. Apart from our personal existence, our literary and financial existence too have been destroyed; all this is leading to a new war. I wouldn’t bet on our lives. They have succeeded in bringing in the domination of barbarism. Don’t be deceived. Hell reigns.
I tried to understand how Roth, and not only Roth, as early as 1933 saw all that was happening, what was coming, although for many nothing was happening, and now again the trumpets of Jericho sound while we blissfully roll our tiny barren days along. I thought of Roth also because today Croatia is basking in a swamp of historical revisionism that is becoming fascistized and Ustashaized, all around us dark figures leap out, violent and inarticulate, crazy, mental invalids maddened by abstractions that conceal the disastrous concept of the destruction of all this world’s joys and freedoms, entranced by abstractions such as the homeland and the Church, abstractions too big to nest in my small heart. I thought about Roth because, in addition to the hooked cross on that Croatian football stadium that has mysteriously surfaced from the depths of Croatian soil, and which I see as the subversion of the overwrought, helpless libertine who says, There you are, look, this is who you are, little Croatia has now also dug in its heels in its hysterical defense of a beatified archbishop and cardinal, in a pathetic campaign to proclaim him a saint. An incomprehensible autistic blindness reigns over the question of the clerical-political-moral activities of this archbishop and cardinal, disgusting lies are proclaimed truths, this refusal to see the way certain dignitaries of the Catholic Church walk on tiptoe in the dark, in its catacombs, Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte, frightened, cowardly, sunk in the stagnant waters of their imaginary power; their inactivity is terrifying, in the way, as in horror films, it metamorphoses into a misdeed, a pathetic endeavor to serve two contradictory ideas at the same time, one of freedom and the other of submission and servility, so that life is being reduced to “both . . . and . . . ,” to “but” when “and” means the eradication of the human race, before which every “but,” including God’s, must give way, because there is no faith that is greater than the life of one innocent person. That military vicar of the Independent State of Croatia could have not offered comfort to the future butchers, he could have said that the NDH, Independent State of Croatia, was not at all a work of God, but hell, the essence of human evil, the creation of morbid dreams, extirpated intelligence, eclipsed reason, just as back in 1934 the Lion of Münster, Bishop Clemens August von Galen, roared when he publicly attacked the Nazi ideology of blood and soil, when he said that unconditional loyalty to the Third Reich was becoming slavery, when he led protest groups against Nazi euthanizer rampaging, and was quite justifiably beatified. As far as open, uncompromising concrete anti-Nazi struggle goes, here is the Berlin Bishop and Cardinal Konrad von Preysing, a German prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. As far as I know, Konrad von Preysing was not beatified (he died in 1950) and there was never any discussion of his being proclaimed a saint.
That Croatian archbishop and cardinal could have not accepted, that is refused the Poglavnik Pavelić’s decoration “Order for services rendered — Supreme Order with Star,” that archbishop and cardinal, instead of directing anemic appeals for improving living conditions, or rather dying conditions in the Jasenovac concentration camp, could have gone to that lively camp and he would not, oh irony, oh sarcasm, have heard from various sources that here and there some behave inhumanely and cruelly with non-Aryans as they are deported to collection camps, and also in those same camps; what is more, that such behavior does not spare either children, or the old, or the sick, he would perhaps have been able to see what he had heard, although it is debatable whether even then he would have done anything about it. So, the deportation of non-Aryans — oh, how graphically the archbishop accepts the Nazi terminology — is all right, by the book, except that the delivery of parcels of food and clean clothes might have been more effective and better organized (insofar as there remained relatives who could prepare and send such parcels).
I “kept company” in Paris with Joseph Roth, also because, while he was despairing about the fate of Europe, his private life was disintegrating into chaos and pain. After five or six years of a relatively harmonious marriage, his wife Friederike Reichler Roth, known as Friedl, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and at the end of the 1920s placed in the famous Viennese Steinhof sanatorium, then the most state-of-the-art European psychiatric hospital. When Hitler came to power, Steinhof became a lair of arrogant and disgraceful figures who, through their experiments, exterminated those who were undesirable to the Reich, including many children. While in the 1930s, and up until the end of the war, “specialists” in the brain dug around in the cerebral mass of their patients, the park of the Steinhof hospital, a lovely spacious park dominated by the famous white church with its golden cupola, masterpiece of the architect Otto Wagner, remained untouched; what is more, an army of trained horticultural workers tended to the preservation of its luxuriant beauty. Otherwise, which is completely morbid, psychiatric hospitals are by default surrounded by elegant and heavenly parks, as are the majority of the former concentration camps.
But in mid-1940, Roth’s Friedl was moved by the Nazi experimenter-exterminators to the splendid Renaissance castle Schloss Hartheim, not far from Linz, expressly transformed into a Nazi euthanasia center that functioned according to the guidelines of the Aktion T4 Program. The castle had already been adapted as a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was known as the Psychiatrische Anstalt, later popularly cruelly renamed Idioten-Anstalt.
In Hartheim, between May 1940 and December 1944, 18,269 physically and mentally handicapped people were killed by carbon monoxide and lethal injection, plus more than 10,000 camp inmates, exhausted by labor and hunger, sick and suffering from tuberculosis, brought from Dachau, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück. Hartheim was the only killing center in the Second World War from which not a single person emerged alive.
When in June 1945 members of the American armed forces began to investigate Schloss Hartheim, they found a steel safe in which the Nazis had stored statistical data about the killings carried out. A brochure of some forty pages contains monthly reports of the killings, which they called “disinfection.” Among the statistical data found at Hartheim, there is a note with the estimate that through the “disinfection of 70,273 people with a possible life span of another ten years,” food was saved to the value of 141,775,573.80 Reichsmarks.
First phase of extermination:
Trial for the killings at Hartheim:
In the main trial for the murders in Hartheim, sixty-one people were accused, including the doctors in charge of the program, Georg Renno and Rudolf Lonauer.
Judicial proceedin
gs:
The accusations against thirteen people were withdrawn, and the trial of twenty-two people was postponed because they could not be traced. The accusations against seven people were thrown out because the accused had died. Two of the accused were given prison sentences, and the trial of thirteen of the accused was postponed to a later date. The fate of three of the accused remains unknown.
Sentencing:
The sentences were handed down on July 7, 1947. The state prosecution sought the death penalty for nine of the accused, but only two of the sentences were carried out. The sentences for nurses were more lenient than had been requested. The death sentences were carried out in Dresden in March 1948. Those who were sentenced to long-term imprisonment were amnestied in 1956 and freed.
Friederike Reichler Roth disappeared in Hartheim, but Joseph Roth would never know that. At the news that his friend, the playwright and poet Ernst Toller, had killed himself in a New York hotel in May 1939, Roth’s contracted heart burst and his cirrhosis-riddled liver disintegrated, and four days after Toller’s death, with pneumonia, in delirium tremens, he sailed into memory.
So I remembered Joseph Roth also because of Friedl, because along with Friederike Reichler Roth, these people vanished in Hartheim:
Jan Maria Michał Kowalski (1871–1942), Polish priest and first Minister Generalis of the Mariavitski Order;
Bernhard Heinzmann (1903–42), German priest of the Roman Catholic Church, proclaimed a martyr. He publicly opposed Hitler’s frenetic drivel about the superiority of the Aryan race. In 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo and transported to Dachau. Prisoner number 24433. He was killed in Hartheim with carbon monoxide, then burned;
Friedrich Karas (1895–1942), Austrian Roman Catholic priest. In 1942, arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. Killed in Hartheim;
Werner Sylten (1893–1942), Evangelical theologian. Arrested in February 1941 and sent to Dachau. Seriously ill, he was transferred to Hartheim in 1942, in a “contingent of invalids.”
Several other concentration camp inmates were transferred from Dachau to Hartheim (and killed): three hundred and thirty (330) Polish, seven German, six Czech, four Luxembourgian, three Dutch, and two Belgian priests. I won’t think about the Istrian priests, men of the people, who with a partisan cap on their heads joined the National Liberation Movement and fought against Fascism, that upsets me even more because of all the hysterical propaganda in the name of the canonization of a long since dead bishop and cardinal who was beatified twenty years ago, because of so much senseless fanaticism, so much virulence, the sick obsession that one controversial figure of this world should be placed on the throne of the saintly. There are no saints and it’s good that there aren’t. Who has been given the task of judging the sinlessness of some and the sinfulness of others?
In January 2013 a European Union directive came into force whereby pig farmers had to ensure that their pigs had manipulative objects to make them happy, so as to satisfy their need for rooting and stop them chewing their own tails or those of other pigs. Among the various toys on offer, little balls were favored, yellow ones. The design of this yellow toy for local pigs (which the pigs were able to chew) was developed by a research team at the Faculty of Organic Production at the University of Kassel, Germany, over eight years. As far as the choice of color was concerned, victory went to yellow because, the scientists affirmed, pigs immediately notice anything yellow, given that in their porcine world the color yellow is a rarity, so little yellow balls attract their attention, which would not be the case if the balls were red, because, the experts say, pigs are somehow blind to everything red. After the pig-entertainment law was passed, farmers were given three months to implement it — they had to throw several toys, preferably little yellow balls, into every sty. Failure to comply with the law on the wellbeing of pigs entailed financial and custodial sanctions. Later research has shown that, today, European domesticated pigs, piglets, sows, boars and farrows are merry and carefree animals and, thanks to the little yellow balls, entirely free of stress.
I don’t know what compelled me to offer the story of the yellow balls for European pigs to a Goethe Institute director at a literary gathering abroad, because the story had no connection whatsoever with the mostly empty literary-philosophical presentations. I blathered on, partly as a joke, partly with irritation in my voice, about the Orwellian undertaking of the present-day European Police, and at the end of my tirade the Goethe Institute director said, with a polite smile, Oh, no. I have a pig farm, and now that they have their yellow balls, my pigs are happy and relaxed.
So, yellow is in again. Stray dogs are marked with a yellow chip in their left ear (just as under the Third Reich they identified Jews in passport photographs by obligating them to have their left ear exposed), and smoking zones are marked with a yellow geometric shape on the pavement.
Some ten years ago, in a psychiatric hospital in France, a double murder occurred. Arriving for work one morning, staff saw that the head of the nurse on duty that night had been placed on the TV set in the hospital day room; the nurse’s body was found by the door leading to the fire escape. Another nurse lay in a pool of blood, her throat slit, butchered, with multiple stab wounds to her body and neck. Both victims were around forty years of age, married, and mothers to small children. The weapon with which the murders had been carried out was not found in the hospital. It was presumed to be a sabre or a machete.
The hospital building is set in well-tended parkland of some forty hectares, in a forest at the foot of the Pyrenees.
On the cover of the first issue of the magazine Acéphale (1936, edited by Georges Bataille) there is a drawing by André Masson inspired by da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The drawing shows a naked but headless human figure holding in his raised right hand a flaming heart, in his left, a dagger, and in his groin sits his skull. Under the title Acéphale are the words Religion • Sociologie • Philosophie • and the statement: LA CONJURATION SACRÉE, in other words “sacred conspiracy.”
Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison. He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.
Georges Bataille
To minimize the possibilities of such outbursts by psychiatric patients, psychiatric patients are pacified with medication and occupational therapy. Occupational therapy consists of physical work — which can be creative, but generally is not. Occupational therapy for psychiatric patients might be collecting withered leaves in the hospital garden, washing floors and so on, but also drawing, painting, making little clay sculptures (work that can be done by hand), through which the psychoanalysts try to penetrate the underground of the human soul. Sometimes, along with physical therapy, they throw in musical exercises, listening to music and singing. A fairly common therapy for psychiatric patients is dramatic performance, which does not require the mental engagement of the “sick,” because their engagement frequently amounts to being obedient, that is, to taking direction from those who dream up the performances. Nevertheless, occupational therapy is more a passive than an active pastime. Does this mean that intellectual work leads to madness or that the “mad” are not in a state to form judgments independently, that is, that even the attempt at independent reasoning and individual action excludes a person (the madman) from the group, which then proclaims him trash, that is, a “case,” and places him in an isolation cell, prison, psychiatric, social, whatever?
A few years ago, the staff of the psychiatric hospital in Popovača brought its charges to the island of Ugljan to show their “peers” their production, “Hedgehog’s Home.” The press release said that the patients had rehearsed diligently to demonstrate that what was best for them after leaving the hospital was to continue the treatment at home, with prescribed therapy. The director of the production was a nurse, and the costume designer was her colleague, also a nurse. The press release said that the show’s producers “had visited many hospitals in Croatia with their little acting company.” It is enough to look at photographs from that melancholy, dilettante carnival, that hideous manipulation of human pain, that empty, shabby entertainment, that eerily bounded existence, that little, submissive, disciplined company, that world at the end of the world, to see a copy of one’s own existence, here, allegedly — from the outside.
With the decapitation of those nurses, the perpetrator had crossed the threshold that protects the boundaries of the body. The body disintegrates, fragments, bursts, and its parts float through despair, suffering, agony and sorrow, through waters without embankments or dams, through barely navigable waters, muddy and destructive. The body no longer has borders, it is dismembered, scattered, wild, but again, preserved in pieces.
I have a collection of the dreams of Adam’s and my patients, the majority of whom were not seriously ill. Many of these dreams (like some of my own) are about precisely that, about the fear that we are going to disintegrate, fall apart, burst, break, that we will no longer be whole, that we are reverting to a mirror from which we are observed only by little pieces of what we believe is our self, our shattered “I.”