I opened the folder.
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My dear Fräulein Beate:
All is right with the world: there is a rightness about your being where life is whole and my being where it is coming apart at the seams, a rightness about our having met, a rightness about your not loving me.
It is three days since you told me. With so much grace, so much kindness, so much warmth that while I failed to find the happiness I sought I am still, after a fashion, happy. One can love and not be loved in return and feel it as an injustice. But there is also a justice to unrequited love.
I arrived here yesterday evening. Fighting began early this morning. It is splendid.
I thank you for allowing me to make you the witness of my thoughts while I was in your midst. May I continue to write?
Yours,
Volker Vonlanden
17 January 1942
The next letters, written several weeks apart, were similar: a few sentences about the world, a few about the war, and a few about Beate. Volker Vonlanden compared Beate to the dawn, to the evening and morning stars, to warm rain, the air after a storm, a drink of water after a day in the sun, and the warmth of an oven after a night in the snow. I found the dawn passage particularly fetching:
No, Beate, you do not remind me of the gentle dawn that slowly bathes the world in ever more radiant light. There is another dawn, brief in duration and great in strength, which frightens off the night, drives away the mist, and ushers in the day. This is the dawn you remind me of. Once there was a revolution initiated and won by a single shot from a warship. That ship bore the name of Aurora, dawn. You know, do you not, that you can revolutionize my life with a single word?
After summer there is a break in the letters. A Christmas letter explains why. The letter also makes it clear that his spring and summer letters have touched Beate's heart and brought her around.
Dear Beate,
Last winter I wrote to you that you had opened my eyes to the justice of unrequited love. What did you think I meant by that?
Unrequited love does not rest until it can reject the love that rejected it. Either it thereby creates its own justice or it deserves none.
We enjoyed our summer days together, but what is past is past. Farewell! On my way back to the front I met a girl I like. You know how it is.
Volker
Christmas 1942
The next letter dates from a year and a half later. There is a newspaper article enclosed.
Dearest and much esteemed Beate:
You must not take offense at the portrait. I know you do not make a great fuss about yourself or wish that others should do so, but that is not why I undertook to write the piece. I wrote it not so much for you as for the men in the field. That you were there before my eyes and are now before theirs—does this not make you ever so slightly proud?
I feel it should.
Yours,
Volker
12 June 1944
The article, which covers half a page, is entitled “Yet Another Cause” and signed by Volker Vonlanden:
She loves me not. She told me so during my last leave. She is fond of me, but I am not the one, and she is certain he will come one day; she is waiting for him. Sometimes I wonder where he is fighting: in Italy, in France, in Russia? Or here at my side perhaps.
She is a girl with blond hair, blue eyes, and a smiling mouth. She loves to laugh out loud. You can tell by her forehead that she has many thoughts and by her chin that she will give in to no one. When bombs fall, she laughs defiantly and gets to work. She has strong arms and can pitch in. She is tall and straight, and when you see her walk you want to dance with her.
She loves me not. One day she will love someone, the one. And one day someone, the one, will love me. She, too, laughs defiantly when the bombs fall; she, too, pitches in clearing rubble, turning lathes, bringing in the crops; she, too, is waiting for me. She just does not know it.
Many of us are fighting for our wives and children. We know that every shot which finds its man, every attack which makes its mark, every defense which holds the line saves German lives. You say you have no wife? You say you have no child? You say you have no girl or had one and she loves another? You love a girl who loves you not? Even though you do not know her, somewhere there is a fine German girl who is the one for you, a girl who is laughing defiantly and pitching in while she waits for you, who needs your protection as much as your comrades' wives and children.
Yet another cause to fight for: the joys to come. We may not know when and how they will come, but that they will come we know.
The next and last letter also mentioned an enclosed article, but I was unable to find it.
Dear Beate,
You may be interested in my latest article. Much around us is falling apart, and many people are following suit. As if men were buildings.
What are the ruins, the ashes of buildings to us! Let us celebrate what cannot be destroyed and what will protect and restore us wherever we go.
I hope to see you again.
Yours,
Volker
16 March 1945
But there was more in the folder after the last letter. I found a twenty-page undated typescript, “The Iron Rule,” under Volker Vonlanden's name. Were these the thoughts Volker had made Beate witness to?
It began with three great epochs of world history, the first recognizing the law of nature—brute force, combat, and victory—and calling for the annihilation of the weak, the alien, and all enemies; the second following the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one's neighbor; the third returning to the priorities of the first. The third epoch was now beginning; the second had begun with the fall of Rome. The next part dealt with the ban on killing and the killing of prisoners by the Aztecs, of wounded Spartans by the Spartans, and of diseased Roman children by the Romans. Then came the passage that gave the text its title:
The golden rule in its various formulations forbids one from doing to another what one would not oneself wish to suffer. At times the prohibition is complemented by an exhortation, encouraging one to do for the other what one would oneself wish to experience. In either case the golden rule is a rule of submission. What is its relationship to the law? It goes against the very first of all legal rights: the right to defend oneself against attack. It tells us that since we do not wish to meet with defense when we attack, we should offer none when we are attacked.
The law rests not on this golden rule but on an iron rule: whatever you are willing to take upon yourself you have the right to inflict upon others. The iron rule too comes in various formulations. If you are willing to subject yourself to something, you have the right to subject others to it; what you demand of yourself, you may demand of others, and so on. It is the rule that supplies the foundation for all authority and leadership. The hardships the leader imposes upon himself he has the right to impose upon those whom he leads; indeed, it is because he imposes them upon himself and them that they recognize him as their leader.
After appending a number of examples, the author returned to the ban on killing. A ban on killing would not make the law more right or people more righteous. The iron rule applied to killing as well:
If I am prepared to be killed, I have the right to kill. I am prepared to be killed when I enter into a life-and-death struggle, be it declared or not and no matter who declares it. The Jews do not attack us? All they want is to make deals, jack up prices, and charge high interest? The Slavs do not attack us? They care only about plowing the land, baking bread, and making moonshine? Neither Jews nor Slavs will be saved thereby. Germany has entered into a life-and-death struggle with them.
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AS IF SHE had been spying on my reading, Margarete Bindinger turned up in the doorway the moment I was through. “I have no way of answering your questions. I don't know if he came to the house after the war. I have no idea if my mother was pregnant when she met my father and if the marriage was a rush job. Is Vonlanden my father? I was born fiv
e months after the wedding and am told by my relatives that I look like my father. Those were your questions, weren't they?”
I nodded. “When did the wedding take place?”
“October 1942.”
So Beate had realized that Volker Vonlanden was not the one soon after the summer they had spent together; it did not take her until Christmas.
“Did your mother ever speak about him?”
“No.”
“I don't imagine she gave him much thought. He was . . .”
“. . . an unpleasant character? Well, he definitely was not pleasant. But Mother had a way of dumping people, and if that's what she did to him I can see why he wanted to get back at her.” She was looking straight ahead, frowning, pursing her lips, as if recalling all the times her mother had fobbed her off onto somebody.
“I'm less interested in his need to get back at your mother than in what he has to say about justice and—”
She gave a derisive snort. “She never loved me back, much as I would have liked her to, but where's the injustice in that?” She looked at me for a moment as if expecting an answer but then lost interest in her question. “Whatever. It's the kind of thing you keep to yourself.”
“Why did your mother preserve all this?”
“Another question I can't answer. She wasn't one for reminiscing. You know what I mean: making picture albums, collecting souvenirs, keepsakes, memorabilia, passing them around at family reunions—there was none of that. The letters she kept she kept for herself.”
I unwound the cord I had wound around the copier, plugged the machine in, and said, “I'd like to make copies of everything, if you don't mind.”
“You know the rules: One copy of anything published on the basis of archival materials must be submitted to the archive. So we agree you'll let me know what else you find out?”
“It's a deal.”
She stood there in the doorway while I copied page after page. I could not tell whether she was trying to make sure I did the materials no harm or took any away with me, or whether it was simply a diversion for her to have somebody around the house. It was quiet, the hum of the machine being the only noise. I knew Margarete Bindinger had no husband or children, but the quiet was such that it gave me the feeling she not only lived alone but didn't even live there. When I was through, I rolled up the cord and placed the copies on the copier and the cord on the copies. Then I tucked it all under my arm and stood up.
“Why don't you ask? Don't you dare?”
I did not understand.
“Don't you want to know about Barbara?”
“I . . . I don't know,” I said, feeling as I said it that it was not true. Of course I wanted to know what Barbara was up to. That was why I had been so elated on the drive here and while preparing my route the day before.
“You don't know if you want to know about Barbara?” She shook her head and laughed a scornful laugh. “Then I won't tell you anything.” She went up to the front door.
“I . . .” I was going to thank her.
“So you do want to know.”
I was unable to nod or shake my head or repeat that I didn't know. I just stood there. She looked at me expectantly, and what I saw was not so much scorn as cruelty: she was playing a nasty little game with me and enjoying every minute of it. By then I would rather have bitten my tongue off than ask about Barbara. But when she noticed the defiance in my eyes, she lost interest in the game and said, “She spent a few years in New York with her husband but has been living here since the divorce.”
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I TOOK A DETOUR and drove past Barbara's house. The Friedrichsplatz market was packing up, the stands coming down. The few apples and potatoes I got I bought for a song: the woman had no desire to take out her cash register and scales again. The ground was so full of rejects I had to watch my step.
Barbara's house looked just as I had remembered it. After a few minutes of trying to make myself believe I was not waiting for the door to open and Barbara to come out, I drove off.
The weekend after next Veronika would be coming home and taking back Max. I had grown used to him. I had been unaware how much the need satisfied by living with a woman can be satisfied by living with a child: the need for daily, undemanding togetherness, for exchanges about what one is involved in, for the input and output of sympathy, for minor rituals. Instead of ingesting a cup of instant coffee while dressing and a banana while driving, I would sit down to a real breakfast with Max. When we went to the pool or a hotel in the evening and I was quiet, he would say, “I bet you worked hard today” or “We're lucky. The day is over and we can do what we like.”
Every day I looked forward to telling him his bedtime story. After the first homecoming story he kept wanting to hear more. The story of the man who, when his wife fails to recognize him, puts her to the test by courting her, and rejoices when she rejects him—out of fidelity to himself. Or the one in which the man confirms his wife's devotion by telling her about her husband's supposed family happiness abroad and watching her sad but ungrudging, loving reaction. The story of the man who finds his wife with another man and moves on without identifying himself because he had been declared fallen in action and does not wish to trouble the happiness his wife has found after her long mourning. In one story a man spreads the false rumor that the man who has now come home died in the war, and the latter takes his revenge on the former by killing him, while in another the man who returns reveals his identity and, having thus exposed and won out over the man who spread the rumor, saves his wife from a bogus happiness. Max was especially partial to the variation in which the man happens to arrive on the wedding day and must decide what to do when he sees them on their way to the ceremony. He also liked the one in which the two men become friends and try to find a way out of the impossible situation together.
Then there were the stories about the man who comes home with another wife, because he had been mistakenly informed about his first wife's death or because the other woman had helped him to flee or had saved his life in one way or another. There were stories of a returning son with and without an evil brother, with and without an evil stepmother, with a good or hard-hearted father. There were stories about a returning man—father or son—who after his long absence feels so alien, so out of place, and is so cold or downright ornery and unjust that he drives his family to despair and out of the house. Only as Max clamored for more did I realize how many homecoming stories I now knew. And I kept finding and reading new ones.
What would I do once Max was gone? Would I work more, travel more? Resume my search for Odysseus' last women? See more of my friends? Take up tennis or golf ? None of the above, I decided as I drove home after dropping him off. But what?
It must be my midlife crisis, I thought. By giving my problem a name, I felt a sense of reprieve. But it was soon over, and I took a good look at myself: a man in his midforties, a somewhat successful and accomplished editor with a boring car and a tidy flat. Family—none. Love—none. No change for better or worse in the offing. I began to take pity on myself but then thought of the dead Achilles, who tells Odysseus he would rather be a hired hand on Earth than a monarch in Hades.
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I WROTE TO THE Institute for Military History in Freiburg and inquired about Volker Vonlanden. The answer came after two weeks: they had three articles appearing under his name, but they knew nothing about his person; the name might be a pseudonym, pseudonyms and altered names having been common among war correspondents.
They enclosed copies of the pages, complete with heading and date. “Yet Another Cause,” the article I was acquainted with, had appeared on June 10, 1944, in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, “The Battle” and “Indestructible” on August 16, 1942, and February 4, 1945, in Das Reich. Both papers—the former a daily, the latter a weekly—were published in Berlin, but since neither was a Berlin paper they established no relation between Vonlanden and the city. I knew that Das Reich had been Goebbels' organ and had a certain in
tellectual and programmatic cachet. Vonlanden could not have got published there without connections.
I presumed “Indestructible” to be the article Vonlanden had enclosed in his last letter: both date and topic tallied.
We need not go into the hardships of the current situation: we are all experiencing them. Nor need we point out that many are growing weak, wavering in their faith or losing it completely. Such is always the case when the going gets rough. As long as they carry out their duty, however, we must not condemn them; we must help them to regain their strength.
We must remind them of what is indestructible, remind them what endures in all our hardships, through all our hardships. We were a people divided, a people in which the poor were pitted against the rich, the factory workers against the factory owners, the commoners against the nobles, mammon against intellect. In the past twelve years these rifts have been mended. We have become united. We were a people diseased—our culture degenerate, our society jewified, our heritage contaminated. In the past twelve years we have rooted out and obliterated everything that had so polluted our minds and bodies. We are cured. We were an indecisive people: we could not decide what sort of future to envision, what sort of path to follow, whom to regard as friend and whom to fight as foe. In the past twelve years we have become secure in our mission: the thousand-year Reich exists in our hearts. Yet in the world the thousand-year struggle has only begun.
There are those who wish to abandon us and betray us, who will try to take what is rightfully ours. They shall not succeed.
The article entitled “The Battle” was about the siege of Leningrad. All I knew about the siege was that it had been particularly hard on the population and had failed in the end, so I did some research and learned that on July 8, 1941, Hitler had proclaimed he would raze Leningrad; on September 8, 1941, he had ordered the city to be besieged and starved into submission instead; and on September 14, 1941, he once more ordered its destruction. By then it was too late: the Wehrmacht had other, more urgent tasks, and on January 18, 1943, the siege was broken and on January 14, 1944, the besiegers expelled.
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