Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  In a certain way, Night of the Aurochs, as it stands, represents not only Dalton Trumbo’s dilemma in the face of this monstrous problem but a continuing one. Each generation must find its own answers to Grieben and the crimes he committed in the name of idealism and national destiny. There are hints throughout of the way human beliefs and indeed human ways can be distorted into unimaginable cruelty and violence.

  Perhaps Trumbo could never have finished the Night of the Aurochs to his own satisfaction, perhaps it is the wrestling match rather than the verdict we must consider. He gave it his best, his considerable talents as a writer. The text is an anthology of his styles from the wry, satiric, ironic tones of his earlier work, through the screen treatment and synopses he did so well, to the lyrical and philosophical notes he lent to Grieben’s narration to give him life and human dimension. Trumbo’s notes are haunted by the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the process. Which one speaks when he says, “Dig beneath the surface of human character and you will come up with something ugly, be sure of it”? Or when Chekhov is quoted: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Many times it is hard to determine. Grieben explains: “With me the problem has always been one of belief. By that I mean that I cannot live without believing in something more important than myself. God is too remote for my need. My whole life has been lived in present time. From the day I was born I have watched present time become past and God, who lives in time future, has shown no interest. I reciprocate.”

  At the end, Trumbo and his fictional character, whom he can neither accept nor purge, seem to merge, share the same illness, In the hundreds of notes Trumbo left, one gives us the heartfelt cry: “Oh dear God, don’t drabble it out like this. Let me have it in one big lump.” It is not clear whether the dying Trumbo is speaking of his condition or of Grieben’s.

  Yet, Trumbo’s voice is unmistakable when he asks himself, as the writer, the oracular question: “Is this the story of man’s return to humanity?” The work itself may hold the answer.

  Part I

  THE TEN

  CHAPTERS

  ♦ 1 ♦

  I announce myself, confess my grief, and affirm my identity with God

  I sit in my little cottage in the village of Forchheim, from which Carolingian princes led forth the Frankish tribes to crown a German as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire a thousand years before the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of democracy and self-emasculation was ever dreamed of. Here in this village I was born seventy-three years ago and here at last, after all my wanderings, I have resolved to announce myself. I must be heard. My last cry must reach the world before I am choked altogether by sorrows, before my ears burst against the thunders of chaos, before I drift, like a drowning bird, deeply and ever more deeply into the endless black waters of night that await us all.

  I live alone in this cottage. When I go to the marketplace, I walk alone. They speak to me as I pass, of course, but they don’t want to. Secretly they wish I had chosen some other town in which to spend my dying years. My existence in their midst recalls what then they pretended not to know, what now they pretend to have forgotten.

  They wish I would go away but I will not do it. I will stay in this village until I die and I will be buried here. I will force them to remember me and what I did and why I did it and, most especially, for whom it was done.

  Loneliness is hard to bear as one grows older and I suffer from it. But I have always suffered, as men must who try to cleanse the world, and I have endured the pain without complaint as a decent fellow should. Even now I do not murmur except inwardly and to myself and then only of the stillness at night and the ghoulish chill of my bed. Through suffering alone have I learned better than they to understand why my fellow townsmen feel toward me as they do: I remind them of the truth about themselves and of this no man can bear reminding.

  I am their unspoken folk-will, the sword they longed for, directed, and applauded. What they passively desired to do, I did. What they merely dreamed of, I achieved. What they secretly imagined, I made real. And now that everything they wanted and were given has been destroyed and made to seem unclean, they cannot endure the sight of a man, a fellow townsman, a Franconian, and a German, who delivered up his soul for them in the fiery heart of that doomed struggle.

  Despite that there were excesses and even wrongs in our work, that some of our best intentions were imperfectly fulfilled, I am nonetheless completely unashamed to call myself Ludwig Richard Johann Grieben, volunteer at the age of seventeen in the 2nd Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, which in the last year of the first war was used as reinforcement for the 6th Bavarian Division of Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Sixth Army; member at eighteen of the Freikorps: member since 1926 of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; member from 1928 to 1934 of the Sturmabteilung, holding successively the ranks of Rottenfuehrer, Scharfuehrer, and Hauptscharfuehrer; in 1934 Untersturmfuehrer in the Schutzstaffel (SS Guard Unit Upper Bavaria) later incorporated into the Death’s-Head Formations; SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer, Concentration Camp Dachau; SS-Hauptsturmbannfuehrer, Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen; and from 1942 until the Communists overran the installation in January 1945, SS-Sturmbannfuehrer, Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  After the loss of Auschwitz we fell hack slowly, distributing our prisoners among other camps along the way, trying to preserve some measure of dignity and order and morale as enemy columns thrust themselves from all sides into the bleeding heartland of the fallen Reich. When finally, on 30 April 1945, it was made known that the Fuehrer had terminated his existence in the Chancellory at Berlin, I understood at once that still another battle in the endless war for German survival had been lost and that the engagement must be broken off without further loss. Assuming civilian clothes, I filtered westward through scenes of indescribable tragedy to seek refuge in my native Bavaria in the guise of a salesman. It was there, in 1946, in the jewelled cathedral town of Bamberg, that a German, a friend of my youth, a Social Democrat who safely rode cut the war years in snug protective custody at Theresienstadt, recognized and betrayed me to the Americans.

  I was taken in chains to Nuremberg, and there, after the most exhausting interrogations (before a court which consisted exclusively of foreigners), I was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for the crime of honoring this sacred vow:

  I swear by God this holy oath: that I will render unconditional obedience to the Fuehrer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready, as a brave soldier, to stake my life at any time for this oath.

  That is the vow I took. Could any man violate it and retain one poor shred of honor? When first it was administered on 2 August 1934, did one hear objections? To the contrary! The most enlightened elements of the Anglo-American financial community approved it as making for the Reich’s internal stability, and arranged their corporate relations and investment programs to correspond with the new realities it represented. Yet, only twelve years later, they were filling German prisons with German soldier; whose only crime was refusal to betray an oath which once the West itself had hailed as a guarantee of Europe’s last barrier against Communism and the mongrel hordes of Pan-Slavia.

  However fate decreed that I should not serve my sentence in toto. As sanity replaced the vengeful fury of those first postwar years and, more importantly, as our enemies in the West began to comprehend the truth of what we had told them from the beginning, my sentence was progressively diminished, first to fifteen years, and finally to six, which I served with honor.

  When at last the prison doors swung open and I was conceded no longer to be an animal that must be caged, but a man at the very least, even a free man, I walked forth into the brutal landscape of a nation ravaged, occupied, laid open and prostrate to her enemies. My only son frozen to death in some Russian marsh. My daughter married through premature and brutally enforced pregnancy to an English soldier, living now in the slums of London. My wife buried on 13 Fe
bruary 1945 in the ruins of our German Hiroshima called Dresden to which I had sent her for safety. My pension cancelled (only since 1957, after great legal cost, has it been restored to me). My properties confiscated on order of the enemy, sold by the German state to other Germans, and the proceeds turned over to Jews.

  Sick at heart, broken in health, the years bearing down on me like mountains, I came at last in 1952 back to Forchheim. I have lived here ever since. I have two stout pairs of shoes that will last the rest of my life with proper care. I have my heavy coat, a jacket, one serge suit and one to hunt in, some sweaters, my old Freikorps uniform, which no longer fits, my violin, my two guns, my walking stick, my shepherd dog Fritz, and my dying heart. Always and always this has been the story of Germany and German soldiers.

  Yet I am completely resigned. When in the newspapers I read that certain Party judges, who once so generously provided our SS camps with so-called victims, now occupy positions of responsibility in the government at Bonn and in the regional governments, I feel absolutely no resentment. To the contrary, I rejoice. When I read that some good friend of SS days has been restored to rightful rank in the Army, I wish him only well. A great movement has great casualties, among which I have the honor to count myself as one. The important thing is not that so many have fallen into impotence and obscurity but that so many have been spared to carry on their work. That is why I am not bitter to see old comrades prospering while I, forgotten, live austerely here in Forchheim.

  The townspeople are altogether a different matter. They belong to that bottomless cesspool of German acquiescence which accepts all and denies all, depending on which direction the wind comes from. They were happy enough to snap up Aryanized houses and shops and manufactories when they came onto the market. They danced with joy to receive perfume and silk stockings from Paris, furs from Poland, caviar and golden ikons from Russia, and Winter Relief allotments of Jewish shoes and coats and dresses and underwear and children’s toys from the great assembly depots of our SS concentration camps. How do they think those luxuries were come by? They do not know. They are vague about it, just as they are vague concerning my identity and even my existence when I walk through the square on market day.

  But about history, vagaries are impermissible. Although without formal education (I was engaged with life itself while my young contemporaries drowsed in lecture halls) I have always been philosophically inclined, studious by nature, and possessed of a mind which insists on penetrating to the heart of every problem, no matter how long it takes, no matter how distasteful the final truth may he. This hunger for knowledge I have nourished always on the great German classics, gladly avoiding popularizations and newsstand literature of every kind. During my six years of imprisonment I had the opportunity to devote myself exclusively to the study of history and from it I have drawn certain conclusions.

  I am profoundly struck by the similarity of our present German condition to that of the American South at the termination of its resistance in 1865. There as here a homogenous people was compelled to take up arms in defense of its racial integrity. There as here the liberal ideas of Marxian-Masonic-Judeo-Christian capitalism triumphed and sought to impose by force upon the occupied nation a solution and a philosophy that could not be supported in logic. There as here the vanquished were compelled to deny their past, to stamp out the memory of all in it that was brave and glorious, and to cover with filth that which memory insisted on retaining.

  Yet in the decades that followed, new generations of poets, musicians, storytellers, philosophers, and historians arose in the American South to reaffirm the glory of generously spilled blood and gallant struggle, just as will happen once more in Germany when poets begin again to sing. Today, almost a hundred years after that Civil War, young men all over the United States wear Confederate caps and fly the Confederate flag (as recently, according to Suddeutsche Zeitung of Munich, young men have begun to wear the swastika and affect the salute of the NSDAP). Banned at first (as in our own Horst Wessel), the Confederate marching song Dixie is greeted now with tumultuous enthusiasm wherever in America it is allowed to be played.

  In all of this there is a lesson for modem Germany. The great epic of America celebrates not the victory of the North but the terrible fall of the Confederate South. The American heart thrills not to the memory of Sherman and his march to the sea nor to Grant and the siege of Vicksburg but to J. E. B. Stuart’s two-thousand-saber sweep around the enemy before Richmond, to Jackson dying under the trees near Chancellorsville—yes, and to Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. Robert E. Lee. The nobility of that man in defeat…

  All would have been different if Hitler likewise had stood forth to surrender the German sword to masters only temporary. The sight of the Fuehrer himself delivered before that motley array of quarreling victors, robed in the terrible majesty of defeat, as serenely firm in his purpose as they were infirm, would have stirred the national soul and steeled its will in ways that only a German can understand.

  He chose instead to die by his own hand in the ruins of the lost capital. This I will never cease regretting. This I will never understand. This will ever bring tears to my eyes and a knife to my throat. It was the one inconceivable error of a life stupendously lived. Perhaps the mind faltered and finally broke beneath its frightful burden. Certainly it could not have been the heart.

  Ever since that incredible day I have felt myself alone and lost, even as now I am lost and alone in Forchheim: a mild-looking man of no importance who shows in face and body the ravages of struggle and who, on a day less distant than he wishes, will inconspicuously die.

  Yet I have lived colossally. Everything a man can do I have done. Every emotion a man can feel I have felt. Every sorrow, every pleasure, every triumph, every defeat the heart can know has been known to mine. I have ascended the utmost peaks of ecstasy and from them glimpsed the geography of paradise. Fainting with sorrow I have stumbled through black night and the fathomless slime of deeper voids than hell itself portends. And there I have found God.

  To whom is it not clear by now that God is neither good nor evil but simply All? My life is proof. God-endowed with marvelous capacities for good and evil (as are you), I used them all to the point of utter dissolution, I pursued each to its different, blinding, orgiastic end. And there stood God. And there, created in His image, stood I, no longer His likeness but His very substance, His son. As you also are His son. As you also will transform God-given capacities into action once you possess the power to do so.

  The secret, as you observe, is power, and the secret of total power is oneness with God. It is not the rare phenomenon you think. There comes a moment in every man’s life (if he is alert to it and understands its meaning) when complete power over something—a beast, a woman, even a man, and sometimes mankind—lies in his hands or the hands of his comrades like a fluttering captive bird. In that supreme instant man’s power fuses with God’s to become power absolute, that blinding apotheosis of divinity which no man, however base or cowardly, can reject.

  Just so, when your moment of power is announced you will do as I did. Without one qualm, without a single backward glance and even with joy you will embrace power absolute, and with it the good and evil of Godhood. Either that or you will weakly acquiesce to it, as acquiesced the people here in Forchheim.

  ♦ 2 ♦

  I pay homage to those who gave me life and commemorate their death

  My father was born one hundred and eighty kilometers south and east of the great port of Hamburg in the town of Ludwigslust beneath the shadow of the splendid castle built there in 1772 by Duke Frederick II. Like so many of the townspeople and nobility of both Mecklenburgs (-Schwerin and -Strelitz) his family was of Saxon origin, thereby differentiated from the Mecklenburg peasantry which in past times received heavy infusions of Slavic blood. Although not of the nobility he was connected in maternal line of descent with the family von Konneritz.

  He was by nature an artist born to an age when, for the first time in
Germany, moneygrubbers and commercial parasites of all kinds were clawing their way to power. At seven he was playing Mozart. Through his studies in Berlin he received at twenty-three the title of Professor. He became an immediate favorite at those small private concerts which once characterized the social life of the North German aristocracy.

  As moneychangers started vying with Herrenvolk to patronize the arts, he refused to compromise his talent to the increasing vulgarity of popular taste and settled down as music master, first in Munich, then in Forchheim. He played with equal skill the piano, violin, cello, accordion, and the French horn, which he considered to be the prince of wind instruments. He taught also the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, flute, and clarinet. He was for years Professor-Director of the Musikkapelle at the Gymnasium Luitpold II in Forchheim.

  My mother, born Maria Caroline Bierkamp, sprang as if nourished by the soil itself from Bavarian peasant stock, dating probably from the times of Arnulf in the latter half of the ninth century. Their lands lay always in the area between Erlangen and Bamberg. Her grandfather, who held minor provincial office during the reign of Ludwig I, was murdered by socialists in the disturbances of 1847-48, from which time their fortunes steadily declined until the disasters of 1919 and 1945 finished them off altogether. The family today consists exclusively of craftsmen, clerks, and factory hands or landless peasants. Deprived of tradition, place, and history, they have surrendered not only hope but also their complete identity to the monochromatic facelessness of this antlike postwar Reich.

  Through the union of these two persons—the Saxon music master Grieben from Mecklenburg and the peasant girl Bierkamp from Franconian Bavaria—I was brought into the world by midwife in my father’s house in Forchheim at four minutes past midnight (my whole life has been just a breath or two after the end or before the beginning) on 9 December 1898.