Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

“She’d have had to, if she hadn’t run away.”

  “I don’t know.”

  (note by TRUMBO: A thought—then the pre-play begins, ultimately connection.)

  ♦

  Paul and Karl had separated from us long ago. Fenri had stayed beside the council fire of the Youth Brotherhood. Gunther and I had made a bed of pine branches, spread our blankets, and left our rucksacks and most of our clothes beside it.

  Part II

  TRUMBO’S

  SYNOPSIS

  ♦ 1 ♦

  Grieben and the Rise of the Third Reich

  In the last year of the war Ludwig Grieben, at the age of seventeen, joins the Bavarian Army, together with his friend, Gunther Blobel. They are part of what the Germans called the Children’s Brigades, which drew off and slaughtered the last available reservoir of young German manhood. The generation immediately preceding having been wiped out, only boys were left to fill the reserve units of the tottering German Empire. They were trained in six weeks and rushed into combat with inadequate equipment against Allied forces that were steadily increasing in numbers, strength, and firepower. Result: They were killed or maimed by the hundreds of thousands.

  When they march proudly to the front, Ludwig and Gunther, like all of their contemporaries, are drunk with the glory of war, with the myth of inevitable German victory, with adoration of the God-Emperor who (as they presumed) stood at the forefront of the struggle and had (as they were told) moved his person and imperial headquarters from Berlin and Potsdam to the front so that the Supreme War Lord could live in closer communion with his men. In the East the Russian autocracy had collapsed, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had added tens of thousand of hectares to the Greater Germany and, at least to the uninitiated, there was glory to be won, a nation of heroes to be birthed. To German youth it was still the most romantic of wars.

  What they find when they reach the front is something quite different: the energetic stupidity of Ludendorff, the massive imperturbability of Hindenburg, the hysterical uncertainty of Wilhelm II, the murderous fool’s vanity of his Crown Prince; the average strength of a battalion sunk to 660 to 665 men; food, clothing, transport, artillery and even ammunition in short supply. What they find, in short, is mud, hunger, deprivation, blood, and death.

  As the army reels back from the American breakthrough in the Argonne and begins its vast general retreat toward the boundaries of the German homeland, the military atmosphere turns acrid with the stench of death and defeat. It is those bitter years of 1917-1918 which conditioned a whole generation of German youth, the controlling generation of the future, for revolution: revolution from the right, revolution from the left, revolution from below or above, but in any and every event—revolution.

  In the midst of it all they read a news dispatch: “This evening His Majesty returned from Avesnes bursting with the news of our success. To the guard on the platform he shouted as the Imperial Train pulled in: ‘The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated.’ There was champagne for dinner. A communiqué was prepared telling of our great victory under the personal leadership of His Majesty the Emperor…”

  The preconditions for revolution which prepare Grieben and Blobel for the lives they are to lead, as well as Klaus Winterfeld and Helmuth Morgen, their two closest comrades-in-arms, were these:

  1. Complete separation of the officers corps, with its inherited privileges, from the foot soldier who had no privileges at all.

  2. The alienation of the aristocracy from the newly risen class of bourgeois industrialists and mercantile bankers who were charged with enriching themselves while the army bled to death.

  3. The alienation of front-line soldiers from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and even from workers and peasants on the home front.

  4. The abject surrender of the Reichstag to Imperial authority, and the complete inability of the Emperor and his court to lead, move forward, retreat, or even govern.

  5. News reaching the front (mostly in letters from families or friends or those returned from home leave) of deprivation, hunger, bankruptcy, stagnation, and disintegration.

  6. Disloyalty in the ranks, covert violence against the officer corps, revolutionary agitation, even mutiny.

  7. The defeat of German allies in the East; the loss of conquered provinces, even conquered nations—Bulgaria, Greece, most of what is now Yugoslavia, Albania, Montenegro; the rout of the Turks; rumors of the impending Austro-Hungarian defection.

  8. The overwhelming (and steadily growing) superiority of the Anglo-French-American coalition in the West; the agony and slaughter of the stubborn German retreat; the adamant refusal of the Western Powers to offer any terms but capitulation; the (by now) obvious certainty of German defeat.

  9. The presence in the East of a Russian government which has placed world revolution on its agenda, thereby arousing fear and hostility in the propertied and peasant classes, and romantic hope in many in the working class who stood on the brink of abandoning the Social Democratic Party, which to now had claimed most of their loyalties, in favor of new groups and organizations which advocated open and immediate and violent revolutionary action.

  Such are the conditions in which Ludwig Grieben, Gunther Blobel, Klaus Winterfeld, and Helmuth Morgen fight their war for the glory of the Fatherland and the honor of their Emperor. In the course of that last year of butchery and betrayal, Morgen becomes a revolutionary (and will die a Communist); Blobel falls violently in love with Winterfeld (a tall, fair, slender youth with the eyes of an angel and the soul of a bad poet)—an affair that Grieben at first threatens to denounce to his superiors but later accepts with no diminution of his comradely affection for his boyhood chum; while Grieben himself kills five Frenchmen and two Senegalese in hand-to-hand combat, murders his captain (a fool, a martinet, and a count) by a shot in the back on a dark night, twice wins the Iron Cross, and emerges from the war (a) loveless and (b) a loner.

  That portion of the novel dealing with the experiences of our characters in actual combat will be much shorter than the outline indicates. World War I itself has been more than adequately dealt with in fiction. It is important to the novel only in the degree to which it has formed a very young and ongoing generation for whom defeat has destroyed every value, every reality, every moral standard, which they were trained to accept, without offering them anything to replace it.

  Thus, unlike the English or the French or the Russians, each of whom shed as much or even more blood than their principal enemy, the Germans of eighteen to twenty who survived the slaughter emerged from the Army into a world quite unlike that of their Western contemporaries—a world conditioned by defeat, violent revolutionary ferment, economic collapse, unemployment, the wildest kind of inflation, and the geographical accident which made their country a buffer between the revolutionary East and an increasingly counterrevolutionary West.

  Denied any hope of education beyond the minimal level they had achieved before entering the Army, rootless, propertyless, declassed, unemployed, hating the aristocracy who had failed them, the bourgeoisie who had exploited them, the intellectuals who had betrayed them, and the new government which represented all three of their enemies, large numbers of them emerge from the armed forces as freebooters—angry, cynical, frustrated, vengeful men, eager to dispossess others as they themselves had been dispossessed, ready to use anything—fists, knives, clubs, guns—for the destruction of a society they despise, crying out for a leader—any leader—who will identify their faceless enemy and point the way to his destruction.

  For a full decade the divided world powers watch Germany’s agony with bated breath: would the left prevail over the right, or the right over the left? The country was flooded with spies, agents, money, trade agreements, treaties, arms until at long last the decision made itself apparent. The road to victory lay on the right. Christendom sighed with relief and thanked God.

  Thus Hitler, the Nazi Party, the Third Reich, salvation from the great pestilence to the East, and justice
for the Jew.

  The personal stories which comprise the novel are these:

  The homosexual relationship between Blobel and Winterfeld, which begins in the trenches, comes to Grieben as a profound emotional shock, since to him it represents the loss of another love. Only when he understands Blobel’s infatuation with Winterfeld as comparable to that of a man for a woman is he able to forgive him and return to their former relationship as friends and comrades.

  In the last days of the war, Winterfeld is totally blinded by premature explosion of a star shell. Blobel is desolated, not only by the tragedy itself, but by their physical separation while Winterfeld is hospitalized. Grieben and Morgen console him: by the time their unit is dismantled and its members dismissed, the three have become inseparable companions.

  They emerge into a German Republic wracked by hunger and revolution. Morgen goes to Munich where he joins the Red Front in support of the new Social Democratic government under Kurt Eisner and engages in the first street fights with units of the Socialist Workers Party, forerunner of the NSDAP.

  Grieben and Blobel join one of the many Freikorps—small private armies of freebooters secretly armed by the Reichswehr from hidden arsenals. They roam the disputed areas of Silesia and the Baltic and Polish borders, robbing, plundering, raping, killing—all in the name of the Fatherland and its defenseless frontiers. The victors have limited the Reichswehr to 100,000 soldiers: the response is 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 armed men, working sometimes with the Army, sometimes against it, but never of it—a ruthless revolutionary or counterrevolutionary force, sometimes for hire, sometimes not, and never under the control of national or provincial authorities. They rage through Thuringia and Hamburg fighting the Spartacists, infiltrate the Ruhr valley to harass French occupation forces, and sometimes sweep down on private enemies for private vengeance. It is a good life for young men who have no hope of a permanent home or steady employment: uniforms, food, lots to drink, lots of girls, hearty German comradeship and a little plunder.

  In May of 1919, in conjunction with the army, they move against the newly established Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, overthrow it and engage in a general massacre. It is Grieben’s firing squad which, to his and Blobel’s horror, is assigned the task of executing Helmuth Morgen. They loathe the job, but they carry it through as good fellows must.

  Their Freikorps is absorbed into the Ehrhardt Brigade, which marches on Berlin in March, 1920, and there, while the Reichswehr stands aside and the government flees to the west, installs Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor and putative dictator. Only a general strike restores the republican government to power.

  A year later, still in the madhouse of postwar Berlin, Grieben and Blobel hear Adolf Hitler speak for the first time, and lose both their hearts and their heads to him. They abandon the undisciplined life of the Freikorps to join first the Nazi Party, and then the Sturmabteilung, or SA, under the command of Goering and Captain Ernst Roehr.

  In 1923 Blobel discovers Winterfeld, his blind eyes concealed behind dark glasses, playing the piano in a homosexual nightclub patronized almost exclusively by industrialists, foreign diplomats, and the Reichswehr elite. They immediately resume their old relationship.

  Although his days are filled with SA activities and street brawls, Grieben, deprived in the evenings of Blobel’s company, grows lonely. He thinks of Inge. He thinks of Morgen, murdered and buried in Munich. He thinks of Blobel and Winterfeld. He meets, courts, and marries a young woman two years older than himself, not because he loves her but because he is depressed and lonely. Also she has inherited a small house completely free of encumbrance.

  It is a time in which the mark was 75 to the dollar in 1921, 400 in 1922, 18,000 in January of 1923, 160,000 on July 1, a million on August 1, four billion in November and into the trillions before New Year’s Day of 1924. To acquire not only a wife but a decent debt-free house in the Berlin of 1923 is a much larger piece of financial luck than it seems.

  His wife presents him with two children in quick succession—children he doesn’t very much want but doesn’t actually dislike since he spends most of his time in the streets with SA comrades brawling for control of strategic corners, breaking up opposition political rallies, and prowling the industrial districts for striking workers. The easy communal barracks of the SA are pleasant places to be—almost clubs—with rallies and beer and music by night and always the sport of catching a few Jews or Communists or Social Democrats unwary enough to walk the night streets with only one or two of their kind for protection.

  As Grieben’s wife conceives and delivers his two children, as Berlin becomes the hunting ground for sexual exotics and political quacks from all over the world, as the sharp satire of cafés and nightclubs slowly changes (with, of course, changing personnel) to timid orthodoxy, as elections wax and wane, as the enfeebled Weimar Republic stumbles toward the grave (although not the undertaker) it so richly deserves, Ludwig Grieben advances from Rottenfuehrer in the SA to Scharfuehrer and finally, in 1932, to Hauptscharfuehrer. His advance is neither swift nor very high. It is the advance of an ordinary man who believes in his profession and tries hard to learn it.

  He begins to delve into German philosophy (always a murky and dangerous enterprise), into German history (even more dangerous and far less informative), and into political science as exemplified by the works of Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Haushofer, Anton Drexler, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the like. From these sources and close study of the Party press, he comes to certain rather shrewd conclusions about the future of the SA under the command of Ernst Roehm as opposed to that of the SS under the command of Heinrich Himmler. He resigns from the SA and applies for admission to the SS, which he enters late in 1932, with the rank of Untersturmfuehrer in a Guards unit of the Schutzstaffel later to be incorporated into the Death’s-Head Formations of Himmler’s reorganized security forces.

  In the same year, resplendent in his new SS uniform, he also falls desperately in love with Liesel Dahlem, a young and extremely beautiful ballet dancer—not ballerina—in the Berlin Opera: She is attracted to him, but at the same time shy, perhaps even afraid, when she is with him. He begs her to sleep with him; she refuses. He begs her to become his mistress; she refuses. He begs his wife for a divorce; she refuses. Through the fading of 1932 and the political campaigns of 1933 (which begin with the national boycott of Jewish shops and reach their brilliant climax in the March elections with a Nazi victory, Hitler’s legal ascension to the Chancellory, and the death of the Weimar Republic), Grieben’s political passions, though strong and effective, are nothing compared with a passion for Liesel which is far stronger and maddeningly less effective.

  He is with Liesel on the night of May 10, 1933, when tens of thousands of students, carrying torches and singing the Horst Wessel, march down the Unter den Linden to a rendezvous opposite the University of Berlin, and there consign to kerosine and torch every book which, by definition of the students’ resolution, “acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people.”

  The flames…the dancing torches…the chants…the shouts…the songs. Youth everywhere, boys, girls, SS, SA, fresh, rose-tinged cheeks, strong backs, tireless legs—the sounds and smells and movements of an emotional explosion almost orgiastic in its fusion of flesh with ideology. And Liesel beside him, clinging to his arm, shrinking against him, afraid of this splendid sight, needing his protection.

  Grieben skillfully separates her from the crowd, takes her to a small park within sight and sound of the book-burning, and rapes her. Like all of his attempts at love, even rape is a failure. In that flash-second before penetration he ejaculates prematurely and merely soils her. While he is still trying, in his shame, to explain and apologize for what he defines as the curse of excessive virility, she springs to her feet and vanishes; vanishes not only from his sight but from the opera, from her rooms, from the places in which she once ate, from her friends, from Berlin, p
erhaps from the world. Years will pass before he sees her again.

  FROM TRUMBO’S NOTE ON LIESEL

  The instant falling in love with Liesel onstage (he progresses from balcony to orchestra at great cost), convinced that onstage she is looking and responding to him.

  The idiotic fantasy of instant love—and first.

  ♦

  Use expression such as “He requires to fall in love…” etc.

  ♦

  In the course of his infatuation with Liesel, his new treatment of his wife. No more underpants. Her pussy must always he available to his touch, his hand. The first thing he comes home. Anytime. And even once in church. Never in front of the children, of course. Can’t […].

  And she liked it. It gave her pleasure. And like a good German girl she understood she must always be instantly available to love. To him, who is her master. To him really—not me, but him. His whim enmeshed both. She knelt before him, caressed him with her […] soft hand, her cheek, kissed his blazing fountain and drank.

  Scrap of a letter from his wife telling how in the past months his love (sensual) has flowered and grown and quite engulfed her in this different flood of love she feels for him. (This, of course, is while he is meeting and courting Liesel, who will have nothing to do with him.)

  ♦

  Her small size. 95 pounds. Five feet, two inches. She says she is afraid. He thinks it is because of the size of his penis. His new uniform (SS) tight and black he dresses to the left. He has admired the bulge there. He has seen women look at the bulge. So that, he says, it is what she is afraid of. He tears her pants off, crouches on his knees above her, his knees between her outspread legs. His right hand on her buttock, the index and third fingers of his left hand spread her vulva while his second finger explores the trimness of her entrance hole, the shy covering of the clitoris; he thrusts gently inward, she protests, he soothes her, reassures her, explains to her, forces her hand to his penis, explains how he will insert the head first, very gently—she will stretch, in a week she will accommodate him perfectly—then as the head of his penis touches the moisture he showers her, pumping frantically, left groin, right groin, crack of her buttocks […] the mons veneris—horror—disgust—she is covered with glue—she flees.