Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  Tuesday

  Dear Old Boy:

  I received your manuscript last Saturday and have been reading it with vast appreciation at every spare moment I could find since then. I am even more impressed with these eight chapters than I was with the four I read in Rome ten years ago.

  I wish some way could be found to prevent you from taking on more film work until you have finished the novel. It would be folly to rely on your own character for this essential discipline, because the mere jingling of coins triggers a conditioned reflex in your arthritic write [sic] hand. If your loving wife and younger daughter were made of sterner stuff, they could intercept calls from agents and producers and turn them away. Alas, they have the frailty of their sex and want you to be happy—and you are happy only when making lots of money. But I know—and perhaps even you now suspect—that Heaven did not give you your recent reprieve and let you remain in this vale of tears in order to be happy, but to finish this novel.

  I have a compromise solution. The Lenten season is fast approaching. Why don’t you give up screen writing for Lent? As I once, at the age of ten, gave up the reading of funny papers? This sacrifice would give you six weeks on the book, and only God knows how many words you can write in six uninterrupted weeks.

  My one negative observation on the first eight chapters has to do with the material about Inge. I have a hunch it is overlong in the total context of the novel. (This may he a foolish comment because I don’t really know the total context.) More important, a portion of the material about Inge strikes the only false note I find in the manuscript. Your celebration of the pubescent (or pre-pubescent) female form is pure Trumbo (which by definition means that it is very good writing indeed) hut it is not Grieben. The prose here is both lyrical and comedic, and if I understand Grieben he is incapable of combining these two qualities in one vision.

  Wednesday

  I have finished reading the entries from the diary. This is powerful stuff. I have a few questions about the diary—and I do mean questions, not criticisms. I’m not sure I understand its function within the body of the memoir. To begin with, the keeping of a diary would certainly he forbidden to anyone engaged in mass extermination. How do you propose to get around this fact? You see, Grieben would have been violating his oath and endangering his military career by keeping such a diary. Yet he decides to do so, to record the unspeakable for some possible future use. Therefore his very act becomes a kind of protest against the horrors he commits; it casts a shadow of doubt on the extermination policy itself. But that is not all. The diary is an anguished testament—wittingly or unwittingly, a confession of human misgivings. While Grieben might never admit to guilt or remorse, his nervous breakdown itself is a revelation that his soul is not yet dead and cries out against the atrocities the body must commit.

  How do you reconcile the diarist of 1945 with the memoirist of 1973? The old man is full of certitudes as an unregenerate and unrepentant Nazi. Would he not reject the man who wrote that diary as weak and vacillating? Would he not, indeed, destroy the diary, and retell the events of 1945 as seen from the lofty perspective of 1973?

  I am not suggesting that the diary be removed from the book. But since the elder Grieben is armored with self-justification, you and he must find a reason to justify its being there.

  I’ll send this letter along now and, with your permission, keep the manuscript a few days longer so I can reread certain portions.

  Love to you and all your clan,

  MIKE

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Wilson’s letter touched a sensitive spot: Trumbo’s habit of letting the novel dangle if screenplay offers were available. It also triggered the remarkable letter below in which Trumbo blames “that particularly malignant form of mysticism called morality” for the holocaust, and seems to explain the role of Nazis like Grieben as instruments of some larger and mysterious purpose. Trumbo wrote across the top of his copy of the letter, “Sometime in 1974.”

  Dear Lad,

  Thanks for your letter and thanks particularly for the questions you raised about (a) the Inge woman, and (b) the diaries. They are exactly the sort of thing I need, and very often. When I comment on both subjects here, I do so not to challenge what you said but to clarify my thoughts about them—and the only way I will ever be able to clarify a thought is to put the goddamn thing on paper. It is also easier to write to you about such thoughts than to write about them to myself.

  Your points about the Inge chapters are (a) that they are “lyrical and comedic” in a way the Grieben I have created can’t possibly be; and (b) that they are overlong.

  I completely agree with (a). The problem here is that Grieben, as presented, was written about ten years ago and the Inge stuff was in the last three years, and that possibly as I move ahead my concept of Grieben is changing somewhat from that of the man I started with so long ago. By the time I have finished the novel, if ever, it now seems quite clear to me that I shall have to go back and change the Grieben who opens the novel to match the Grieben he will have to become at the end. There are a good many reasons why I will have to do this in any event: he will have to be older (born in 1898) to participate in World War I, as I want him to, and his rise in the Party, SA and SS ranks will have to be considerably different than I made them in the first and second chapters. Not only this, but his experiences seem to be turning out to be somewhat different from the experiences I predicted for the Grieben I originally intended. I cannot make him a person who could recall Inge in terms of both lyrical and comedic (comedic in the sense of a mature man recalling the gaucheries of his boyhood). I will simply have to cut such passages, or change them to conform to his character. However, I feel I need this lyricism because so much of his life is concerned with problems of sexual love.

  (I wonder here if, in dwelling on Inge as lyrically, as comedically as I have, I have not sunk to the level of pornography? If that which is lyrical is not made so in order to titillate the reader sexually? If that appears to the reader to be his intent, then it is pornographic, no matter how I try to defend it. I would like to hear your thoughts about this.)

  Point (b) on overlength may also be true. I dwelt on Inge and the Inge business so long and in such detail because it presages other sexual events to come—events which establish the cultural and sexual obsessions which cause Grieben to abuse women in the guise of loving them. He is incapable of genuine sexual love. When I say cultural as well as sexual obsession, I mean that aspect of Teutonic culture which seems always to have drawn German males together in great marching herds, to almost complete exclusion, separation, and segregation of women. It was, in a sense, the passive homosexuality of the locker room, rather than the active homosexuality of the closet or the drag hall.

  But it is not really a question of homosexuality; it is a question of the male herd in the development of the German nation. The male herd as tribal warriors. The male herd against the invading legions of Rome. Here, in my view, occurred one of the great disasters in German, or Teutonic, history: the male herd, the Germanic tribes, halted Rome’s advance with the result that Roman civilization did not for centuries penetrate beyond the Rhine. Thus, the benefits of Roman law, Roman technology, and later of Christianity, were for centuries denied the German people, nation, community, tribe, or whatever you wish to call it.

  Whether the civilizing influence of Rome was good or bad is quite beside the point that it became the dominant factor in the development of the rest of Europe, and that the Roman-civilized portion of Europe became the dominant force in the development of the entire continent. The Germans thus came to it late, which meant that as England, France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain and even Russia became nations the Germans still remained, in effect, a group of tribes, each tribe defended by its separate male herd, rather than the amalgamation of tribes (a nation) defended by a professional army.

  Thus for two centuries, the principalities, kingdoms, duchies, and electorate of the German tribes had been little more than
highways for the conquest and passage for foreign armies—French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, etc., etc. When not prostrate beneath invading armies of one European power or another, the fragmented German states, manipulated from within and without, engaged in terrible social and religious wars against each other—wars which were always exploited by those European powers which had become what the Germans had not—i.e. nations. During the Thirty Years’ War, the stature of German adults diminished by one inch!

  The truth is that the German tribes, dominated by their male herds, never truly accepted Roman law, or Christianity, or Western philosophy or, after Napoleon, the concept of the Enlightenment, revolution, and libertarian democracy. Indeed, having suffered so much at the hands of those who accepted or inherited such concepts, why should they have felt impelled to accept them?

  What did take root amid these centuries of misery was a terrible and quite understandable longing for nationship (which they didn’t get until 1870, and then imperfectly). A nation could not come into being without leadership, hence their terrible longing for, need of, and dependence on, a leader. In order for the leader to preserve the nation he needed authority. The absolute authority of the absolute leader of the absolute State supported by the authority of the male herd, hence of the male. Male authority in the State, the church, the school, the home.

  The absolutism of male authority is what Bismarck gave them, and later Wilhelm II. When it collapses at the end of World War I, it did not blame its collapse on its absolutism but on its “corruption” by Western liberalism which is riddled with Social Democracy (Marxist and Jewish), and city-oriented (feminine and Jewish) rather than nature-oriented (masculine and Aryan-Teutonic). Thus, the apocalyptic male absolutism of the Nazi which, aside from its political and territorial ends, resulted in the total subjugation of woman, and extermination of the Jews.

  German history in populist literature is filled with examples of German desire to be loved by the world—a desire constantly frustrated by the not uniquely Teutonic conviction that the only true love is that which follows total subjugation. Just so with the man Grieben. His whole personal life is a yearning for a woman’s sexual love, a yearning that is never fulfilled, because love to him is conquest, subjugation, and abuse of the beloved. Thus,

  1) what could have been a rather pleasant pubescent adventure for both him and Inge degenerated into attempted subjugation and fantasies of genuine abuse.

  2) the next woman in his life, Beata, he married only because she owned a cottage free and clear during the inflation. Although with her he has two children and ultimately at Auschwitz a third, his rare sexual interludes with her are quick and brutal, and his abuse of her takes the form of complete sexual neglect.

  3) the only woman he truly loves, almost to the point of distraction and insanity, is a member of the corps de ballet of the Berlin Opera. Because of his SS uniform she is afraid of him, hence goes out with him, but really resists seduction and even refuses his offer to divorce his wife and marry her. On the night of the great book bonfire in the square in front of the Berlin University, he takes her to a park across from the University square, and there rapes her, except for the fact that he ejaculates a quarter second before entry—ejaculates and soils her. In the midst of his anguished apologies for what he calls an excess of masculine sexuality, she vanishes into the darkness.

  4) From that moment forward her disappearance is complete. She never returns to the opera; she never returns to her apartment; she simply ceases to exist. All Grieben and his comrades can discover about her is that she has one Jewish grandparent.

  5) Years later, when Grieben, a major at Auschwitz, visits Berlin, he spots her on the street and puts an SS check on her. She is the wife of a professor at the Max Planck Institute and the mother of two young children.

  6) Without knowing that Grieben has had anything to do with it, the young woman (Liesel) is picked up and sent to Auschwitz. There Grieben comes across her, “rescues her,” has her assigned to his personal service. There, with total power over her person (and “loving” her to the point of madness) he does every sexual thing to her in fact and life that actually he only fantasized doing with Inge. The pornographic fantasy of the child becomes a terrible reality of the man. What was completely innocent in Grieben the boy turns Grieben the man into a killer—not only a mass killer of the detested Jew, hut the personal killer of the only woman he ever loved. Liesel dies, not at his hands, hut in the general confusion evacuating Auschwitz in the face of the Russian advance.

  7) While in Fulgenberg Prison, Grieben reads the first German translation of Anne Frank’s diary and denounces it in his diary as a forgery, a plot of the Jews. However, 900,000 copies of the diary are printed in Germany alone and in its wake some books which confirm not only the validity of the diary, but reveal that Anne Frank and her family arrived at Auschwitz in September 1944.

  8) Knowing now that the diary is undoubtedly valid and that Anne was actually an inmate at Auschwitz (transported to Bergen-Belsen when the Russians drew close), he begins to believe that he knew this 15-year-old child at Auschwitz, and that while she was there he helped her, and that in the course of helping her she began to love him. And he her.

  9) When he is released from jail in 1953 (after six years) the first thing he does after settling in his tiny house in Forchheim, is to sell a few small possessions in order to go to Amsterdam, where the hiding rooms of the Franks had become a war memorial open to the public.

  10) He arrives in Amsterdam, a man of 56, pays the admission fee, and wanders through the rooms remembering every incident in the life of the girl who celebrated her 15th birthday there. He sees the room in which she slept, the downstairs cubicle in which she and her sister bathed (and almost sees the bathing there); the attic window from which Anne and Peter looked down on the nightscape of Amsterdam below; the room in which she and Peter spoke “quite frankly” about menstruation—and the spot on which she kissed Peter on the mouth for the first time.

  11) That night he wanders to the canal at the rear of the Franks’ warehouse, and sits down on its bank, stares at the blind windows of Anne’s hiding place. And then, quite suddenly, she appears beside him—a young woman of 24. She thanks him gently for all the kindness he did her at Auschwitz, when he begs her forgiveness for what his duty as a soldier compelled him (as others) to do to her—i.e. to kill her—she forgives him completely.

  12) For years thereafter in Forchheim she comes to him at night as a sexual fantasy of perfect sex. She becomes the only woman in his life who ever truly loved him. She becomes his salvation, his consolation, his life. When he is 60 she comes to him as a woman of 29. When he is 65 she comes to him as a woman of 34, always loving him, always forgiving him, and then when he is 68 and his beloved Anne is 37—the age at which Liesel died in Auschwitz—she dies in his bed. He buries her in the woods outside Forchheim near the point where he killed the squirrel while a boy, just as he buried Liesel in the woods outside Auschwitz.

  It is the death of his spectral and beloved Anne Frank which sends him, in his 70th year, on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. The book ends as he looks down this horrid landscape, sees the chimneys belching forth their smoke, envisions once more the death of Liesel, the lovely presence of Anne Frank, sinks to his knees and cries out, “Remember, remember me Israel, for here in this holy place gave I unto thee thy soul!”

  What I am after here, without being able to state it very clearly, is the sexual, political, and mystical fuck up which seems to me to be inherent in the history of the German people, and particularly in the Nazi period. The immolation of six million Jews was a God-like act. It is true that between five and six million non-Jews also met death in the extermination camps, just as it is true that perhaps fifty millions died in the course of the entire war. But the death of those six million Jews was unique, unprecedented, a completely new event in man’s history. It was so far beyond war and peace and human nature and natural evil as to become a spiritual event, a mystic
al event, a true “act of God” which is to say the ultimate madness, the final insanity, the apocalypse.

  Anyhow, that is the direction my thoughts have taken.

  About the diary. There are no more confirmed diarists than the Germans. The more hideous their crimes, the more detailed the records they make of them. It is my intention to have Grieben, on the advice of his father, begin to keep a diary when he volunteers at the age of 17 for service in W.W. I. I think I can find believable reasons why, despite military regulations and oaths, he continues to keep his diary from W.W. I to the end of his life. Most of the photographs we have of atrocities—both in the occupied territories and in their camps—were taken by German soldiers in flagrant disobedience of orders. Letters and diaries, against all odds, further enrich the record. Throughout two horrible wars the German soldier marched into battle with the absolute conviction that he was, individually and as a group, writing a glorious new chapter in the history of the world, and he wanted to keep a record of his contribution to that history and that glory. (Let me kill the generalization here by saying that Grieben wanted to keep such a record.)

  The reason that I, his biographer, need his diary to refer to from time to time throughout the last three quarters of the book, is that a diary records the emotion of an event at the time it occurred—a diary is the present time—whereas the narrative method of his autobiography tells only what he remembers of an event twenty or thirty years later. I desperately need both modes, both methods of narration.

  In the opening chapter I intend to have him stare at two cardboard cartons held together by ropes, and to realize that those two shabby cartons contain the whole history of his life. He could die tomorrow, and it would really make no difference, his actual life would remain behind from birth certificate to the pension receipt he signed yesterday. The boxes where some men leave monuments, buildings, highways, palaces, histories. Two shabby boxes represent all that needs to be known, or will ever he known, about his life. Unless, of course, he clarifies the record by the book he is now beginning to write: the final cry of justification, necessarily of self-pity, the latter being one of the constant factors in popular German philosophy, history, memorials, and autobiography.