Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  Members of the SA and the SS—all volunteers, all probably fanatics, all opportunists—nonetheless were called upon (even compelled) to commit acts and carry out operations which would have been unthinkable to the regular combat forces of the Wehrmacht, or regular army. Indeed, the army was protected from the necessity of committing such atrocities and, insofar as possible, was kept in relative ignorance of them. But those swaggering bullies who survived the purge of the SA and those who comprised the vast forces of the SS were called upon hourly and daily and always to commit crimes against humanity which the most diseased and opportunistic conscience cannot tolerate or carry through without suffering hideous psychic damage. Although individuals here and there are quite comfortable in the commission of monstrous crimes, it seems to be quite true that, as a generality, there is a limit to the evil man can bring to pass without destroying himself.

  Thus it occurred that a major problem of those in high echelons of the SA, and particularly the SS, was the maintenance of anything resembling morale among the hundreds of thousands in the lower ranks who carried through the tortures and did the actual killing. The worst brutes and the most fanatical killers consumed enormous amounts of spirits, drugs, women, or whatever else was on hand to dull the anguish and malaise that were slowly robbing them of their humanity. They felt ill, they ran berserk, they went mad—apparently in large numbers—without once losing faith in their cause, without the slightest understanding of what it was that was driving them mad; without, in fact, knowing that they were mad or being driven so.

  The leaders knew what was happening to them and reinforced their disease-ridden symptoms with special privileges, special dispensations, special philosophical reassurances, rewarding advances in rank, and promises of great honors and awards to come when the hopeless battle was won. Curiously enough, in all its operations, there were two crimes in the SS which carried severe punishment at the very end: (a) individual and unauthorized acts of sadism, and (b) theft. How crazy can a system be or become? Apparently there is no limit. Good Nazis spent every hour of their lives from 1925 to 1933 pursuing a holy fantasy and from 1933 to 1945 making of that fantasy an historical truth. Thus, when I deal with Grieben, I am dealing with a madman.

  I wish to present him, to the very end of his life, as a convinced and even a fanatical Nazi, who nonetheless was fatally wounded by the atrocities he was obliged to commit which violated his humanity, yet were carried through manfully and resolutely in the course of duty to a holy cause. Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac, his son, in fulfillment of his duty to, and his love of, God. Also, blessed sacrifice has always been the test of man’s devotion to a holy cause. Grieben did his job and suffered his punishment for a cause he believed encompassed the salvation of mankind. In doing the job he destroyed his spirit, he spoiled his life, and violated the essence, the spirit, the conscience, the very soul of a young boy who once grieved for a squirrel he brutally shot, and wept for an infant rabbit he had tortured to death. And despite all his grief, all the anguish and revulsion he feels for a lifetime’s horrible crimes, he committed them for a high purpose, a shining cause. He was, therefore, by definition a hero. Even a moral hero if one wishes to put the matter in those terms. True he was a hero of a Satanic rather than a godly morality, but nonetheless the hero of a morality which after all was a morality of the spirit.

  I am convinced that it is only in the context of mysticism—false mysticism, if you wish (but does that not imply the existence of a true mysticism?)—that the holocaust can be explained. Economics doesn’t explain it, politics doesn’t explain it, history doesn’t explain it, sociology doesn’t explain it, psychiatry doesn’t explain it, Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil doesn’t explain it, nothing but mysticism can explain it and, specifically, that particularly malignant form of mysticism called morality. Since no person is uncertain in his own mind about what morality is, what it means, or that it is good, it follows there can be no doubt or uncertainty about the wisdom [a line is dropped in the letter] the rest of the world; and that in the cause of such imposition, such replacement of evil with good, no necessary act, however violent (Hiroshima) or cruel (Auschwitz), can be ruled out by truly believing moral men.

  Do you see how suspicious I have become in my autumnal years of the very idea of morality as a fact or a cause? A great many Nazis remained, even in defeat, convinced of the righteousness, morality, of then ends, yet emerged (many of them) from the ordeal tormented and psychically wounded by memories of the means they had used to achieve their ends. There was also a measure of disappointed opportunism in their regrets. They had set out to conquer the world, to impose upon it a new order which would endure for a thousand years. When the great moral crusade ended in unconditional surrender, what had they gained from a lifetime struggle and a generation’s blood?—the death of six million defenseless Jews! And it was precisely for this small end (world conquest would have been so much better) that they committed their most terrible atrocities, befouled themselves and their country, and lost their souls.

  The memory of the holocaust is still so terrible to those who had a hand in it that most of them swear that they didn’t know anything about it, or if they knew about it they opposed it, or that if they participated in it they were compelled to do so against their will. They make these assertions not only as a legal defense while on trial, but in memoirs written long after they had paid the price for their crimes. The thing is simply too horrible to be admitted. Julius Streicher’s tears when he was shown photographs of tortured Jews at Nuremberg were nonetheless real tears, despite the fact that to the very end he was a real Nazi. Just so, Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, asserting at his trial that the public would have never understood of the Commandant of Auschwitz that “he too had a heart and that he was not evil.”

  Anyhow, so it goes, and so do I blunder toward the heart of this goddamned book I should never have started. And because of Johnny. And the enormous (for me) sums I lost on it, and the hundred thousand dollars I still owe, partly to [name deleted] which financed it under Harry Margolis (and holds in trust everything we own—everything) and partly to the law firm of Margolis, MacTerman, etc., I am driven by sheer economic necessity to scramble (at the age of 68) for every movie dollar that passes my door. Since the offers still come in (for reasons I can’t explain) that alone represents a triumph of age over obsolescence which ordinarily would give me a certain sense of satisfaction.

  At the moment, as you know, I am finishing a script for the […] Scarlatti inheritors. Four to six more weeks should do it. However, no matter what I am working on, not a week passes that I don’t get something written on Aurochs or Grieben, or whatever the hell it will end up being called. Provided I can make certain minimal arrangements when I finish the Scarlatti, I intend to take at least four to six months from everything and finish the book.

  As to health, everything seems okay as it can be for an idiot my age. My squadron of quacks at last have worked out the proper digitalis balance. Now that that’s done—and it took them four months to do it!—the heart is no problem. The right lung keeps on doing the work of two as well as can be expected. I don’t lift heavy things or take long walks or run after lost opportunities anymore, but I can still put in a good 9 to 5 day, and the quacks, ten months after the event, find no suspicion of recurrence of the cancer which convinces them they got it all. If so, fine; if not, fuck it. Incidentally, your letter stirred my mind to some rather active thinking for which I am extremely grateful.

  Love to all the Wilsons

  DALTON

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Trumbo wrote his agent Shirley Burke the following undated letter enclosing some rewrites from the novel. It was undoubtedly written a few months before his death on September 10, 1976. Some material, where indicated, relating to contract negotiations, has been left out. He explains the parallels between his own life and Grieben’s, speaks with amazing detachment about the fatal condition he has decided to incorporate into the cha
racterization of Grieben.

  Dear Shirley,

  I am enclosing a few re-writes from a novel which will probably undergo a considerable sea-change before it is finished. This is my first uninterrupted prose work in years and I am enjoying it immensely. I will, of course, enjoy it much more if it turns out to be any good.

  What I am sending you begins with a chapter five that didn’t exist earlier and ends in the middle of a new chapter ten. What I am trying to do is trace the pattern of human cruelty from early childhood to the slobbering senility of old age. I am not trying to trace a consistent pattern because I don’t think there is one. The pattern changes with individual growth and circumstances.

  Insofar as my personal knowledge and even memory goes, all children are cruel, a few of them unwittingly, but most of them not. There may be an occasional saintly exception, but I doubt it. Very few of them are cruel all of the time, and all but a few of them are kindly part of the time, but cruelty is always there. They are cruel to creatures weaker than they, to creatures stronger if they dare; to those who love them and those who hate them—they are often especially cruel to each other.

  I am sure there are almost as many scientific explanations of cruelty as forms of it; but I suspect that the simplest explanation lies in the fact that cruelty is fun; that it gives pleasure, and that the pleasure it gives is like no other because it is not really pleasure, but that most delightful masquerade for pleasure which is debauchery.

  As we grow older our natural pleasure in cruelty yields to the pleasure of society, the cultural influences which surround us, and perhaps, more than anything else, to the urgent need for love and its rewards. Result: an organized society and a civilized world. Occasionally, however, the cruelty which is dormant in all of us breaks forth along the Somme, in Verdun, Stalingrad, Dresden, Hiroshima—and Auschwitz.

  That is why I have devoted so much space to my protagonist’s almost banal childhood cruelties. Unhappily, the social pressures and cultural influences which shaped him from, say, 1910 through 1923, far from diminishing his natural pleasure in cruelty exalted it to a virtue, made it the cornerstone of a new and brutal ideology, and used it as a weapon for the murder of millions.

  With that explanation, or apology, or whatever else one might call it, I will move forward to the publishing contract which I have just given a careful reading:

  [Several pages dealing with contract negotiations are left out.]

  One thing I have forgotten to mention: a new element has entered the novel about which I have said nothing, either to you or to Marc. Originally, Grieben was my age (born in 1905)—an old man trying to tell a story of his life, or at least explain its failures. However, in order to get him into World War I, I had to make him older than I. Born now in 1898, he is probably 77 or 78 when he begins to tell his story.

  Now here is where life sometimes comes to the assistance of fiction (I refuse to use the word “art”) and the author’s good or bad fortune adds not only to the drama of his fiction, but to his personal knowledge of what he is writing about. As you know, I had my left lung removed for cancer in 1973 at the age of 68, and three days later suffered what was misdiagnosed as a coronary infarction, but was really the onset of an irreversible but often controllable heart disease called chronic corpulmonale.

  At a certain point in the novel it will become known that this is exactly what happened to Grieben at the age of 73 or 74—a pneumectomy plus chronic corpulmonale. He survives them, just as I have survived them for the last three years. (With any luck it is not unreasonable of me now to hope for another two or three years—as could be true with Grieben, despite the fact that he is somewhat my senior.)

  Knowing that his life is almost at an end, he finds himself seized with a passion to record it on paper, to clarify the record, to leave behind him at least one bit of evidence to prove that once he existed on this earth and played at least a small part in its affairs. Medically, there are two reasons why the chances are fair that he will live long enough to finish the project: a) although after three years he is not completely safe from cancer, the disease gives fair warning of its presence, and death from it would come slowly enough to give him time to finish his job with the aid of pain-killers; and, b) chronic corpulmonale is not one of those dramatic affairs which kill swiftly and without warning. Death comes much more slowly—a steady weakening of the heart’s ability to perform its job until it simply wears out, becomes too congested to function, yields to a siege of pneumonia or any other convenient disease. There is really nothing to it at all in the nature of surprise.

  Grieben, in short, is engaged in a life and death struggle to finish the story of his life before the end of his life. Since either of the diseases which will ultimately kill him is the sort that gives weeks, more likely months, and possibly even a year or more’s notice, before it finally does him in, there is a good chance that he can bring it off.

  In Grieben’s race against death to finish something which he feels must be finished, I am sure you can see certain parallels with my own situation—parallels which by their mere existence (and not because of anyone’s knowledge) should add substance or reality to the book. Or so, at least, I hope…

  DALTON

  Part IV

  DRAFTS

  AND

  NOTES

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  “In the opening chapter,” Trumbo wrote to Wilson, “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.” Two such cartons contained the manuscript, drafts, notes, and research materials Trumbo had gathered for Night of the Aurochs. Most of the material was in the form of research notes on German history and particularly the history of the Nazi period. None of this has been included with the exception of a few sample quotations from Luther and Chekhov, which Trumbo kept in his notes on the writing of the book. Several variant beginnings and endings are here, a long section of fragments which fill out the characterization, biography, and views of Grieben, and finally a section called Random Notes, which are from Trumbo to himself as author. Only those which seemed germane to the story are reprinted. The notes on anti-Semitism and the curious episode of Grieben’s obsession about Anne Frank are included as examples.

  ALTERNATE BEGINNINGS

  I am willing to grant memory, especially in a man of my years, is more errant than the course of a fallen leaf on a windy day. Although a graph of its movement in any given week would describe a pattern of chance too idiotic to explain. If the leaf is real, and for its every mindless movement there is a reason; not a purpose, unless one wants to drag God into the matter, but certainly a reason. Thus understood, the imprint of a single leaf upon the autumn air becomes an exercise in logic as majestic as the endless generation of celestial time. Just so, an old man’s memory. For each unsettling disconnection, each wild leap through time and substance, there is a reason, a consistency, a logic of this spirit, which verge more closely on the truth than any possible sequence of sworn to and attested facts.

  Why is this? Because without memory there is no way to comprehend the meaning of factual truth, or to put the matter more directly, of reality. The recollection of a rose smelled fifty years ago contains more of objective reality than the most authentic analysis of the perfume that emanates or the chemical elements of which its scent consists. Only in relative terms (the smell of shit being inescapable while that of roses must be pursued) is it possible to describe the fragrance of a rose (“its smell is more agreeable than that of shit”) to those who have never smelled one.

  ♦

  Everything that I am putting down in these tablets will be based on memory or the written record. Memory, of course, moves as erratically as a butterfly. Like the flashings of a butterfly, which leaves on the summer air the imprint of an idiot’s maze.

  Memory, they say, is not the best witness. Perhaps not. One thing, however, I am certain of: no man can describe the fragrance of a rose a
s vividly as he can remember it.

  In the end, a man’s life comes down to paper and memory. In my case the paper filled less than two cardboard cartons of the kind that were filled with bottles of dark Bavarian beer.

  ALTERNATE ENDINGS

  Yes. I know. We killed God. But in killing him we killed a corpse. I bid you goodnight. Sweet dreams. Sleep.

  I believe it is all a joke, a monstrous joke. We thought we were killing God, when he was already a corpse. What a joke it really was. We thought we were killing God.

  The noblest crime of all of them is deicide. Is not deicide the noblest of all crimes? That was both a dream and a joke. We spent our lives, our blood, and our homes on the impossible task of murdering a God already dead. Belaboring a corpse. (Thus the dream became a joke.) Jews murdered the Son. We set out to murder the Father.

  We thought not only to equal the Jews but to excel them. They killed the Son, we would kill the Father. Is not deicide the noblest crime of all? To kill God Himself. In that one instant of life between the void and the void, we sought to kill God.

  Israel, oh Israel—here gave I unto thee thy soul—and here thou gavest unto me mine. Here was the unforeseen comforting circle of the imagined universe dissolved into something which has become a straight line—a continuum without beginning and without end—the inconceivable truth of infinity, which God invented, designed, perfected, and made eternal for no better purpose than to drive us mad—and here we stand for all time—the hunter and the hunted—the killer and the killed—confirmed through time and depth and hunger and space beyond dimension and measurement because they never began and cannot end—what we have done here is forever and ever, Amen. Gloria in excelsis.