Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  ♦

  There is a loneliness at the heart of the German mystery—a loneliness that springs from—

  You don’t know us, you of the outer world, you don’t understand us for what we are and you never have. You don’t know us because you look at us as Germans, whereas we look at ourselves as the German folk, which is something altogether different. You understand neither us nor our loneliness.

  Here we were, a few tens of millions of Germans, the gathering together of all the Teutonic tribes, surrounded by the intolerable pressure of earth’s hundreds of millions, a world overflowing with enemies, hating us, envying us, wanting to trick us, to trample us into the mire as they had in the past—not the people but a folk, a family, a tribe, blood brothers together, living in this beautiful German land, these haunted German forests, these ordered German fields, these rivers, these lakes, these waters and marshes bounded by the gray seas, these bitter shores.

  Grieben: On German Gods and History

  These were our Gods before Christianity—and we knew they had died because the old Norse were the only people on earth who had Gods they knew would die. To worship a mortal God is to be thrown back on oneself as we were and are, and yet be a Christian.

  We of the North had no such sunny expectations. We knew that the Gods we worshipped—Woden, Thor, Tiw and their blood kin and allies—were constantly beset by treachery of enemies as strong as they, and which […] we knew that one day the enemies would triumph—in Icelandic, the term is Ragnarok: “The fatal destiny, end of the Gods”—and that our gods would die. It is one thing to worship Gods who could not possibly die, or fail, or be overthrown or cast aside or in any way brought low; it requires an entirely different kind of man, sterner, stronger, and infinitely more tough-minded, the stake of destiny of a whole people on the service and worship of Gods who were, like the worshippers themselves, doomed to mortality and death. Where is the profit in worshipping Gods who cannot save themselves from death, much less their followers? That, of course, is the point of the whole matter. There was no profit, or any expectation of it: the Western commercial concept that worship is something to be rewarded is utterly, absolutely incomprehensible to anyone of German birth or blood or soul. In matters spiritual we have always preferred to give rather than to take. It is for this reason, perhaps, that our Western friends have so often charged us with savagery. Who but a savage would worship rather than bargain with his Gods?

  Twenty years of war, in the course of which hunger alone diminished the height of a single generation by half an inch; the War of the League of Angsling, which lasted nine years; the twelve-year War of the Spanish Succession followed by the first Northern War, which lasted five years and the Second, which lasted twenty. Then, beginning with the war of the Polish Succession, a quarter century of warfare, which included the Silesian War, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, after which the Napoleonic Wars tormented Europe, but primarily the Germans from 1792 to 1814.

  Thus, in the 196 years between the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 and the final deposition of Napoleon in 1814, the German people endured 123 years of war, raping, invasion, occupation, pillage, dismemberment, defeat.

  For over two centuries and far into a third, their central position in Europe had made German lands the tramping ground of Europe and the […] point between Roman West and Byzantine East a mere transit area for all the armies of Europe.

  What made it even more horrible is that there seemed no way out. During the centuries of German torment, Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, Russia, and even tiny Denmark had become nations, each a unified people with a central government and a historical identity, while we, the Germans, remained a segment and collection of kingdoms, grand duchies, principalities, free cities, and leagues of cities—in short, a concourse of medieval states and fiefs as out of place in the nineteenth century as, let us say, Afghanistan in the twentieth century.

  Not until 1870 was there truly a German state, but even then, forty-three years later, in 1913, it was a Germany with four regnant kings, five grand duchies, and thirteen duchies and principalities, all with their separate courts and ruling parties, ranking in power and glory from Wilhelm II, the King of Prussia and German Emperor, to his Serene Highness the Count Regent of Lippe-Detmold.

  Grieben: On Wandervoegel

  What no one understood about those thousands of campfires that winked like stars from the crest of Hoher Meissner during the warm July nights of 1913—indeed, what no non-German has ever understood about the German people themselves—is the loneliness, the lovingness, the longing, the overwhelming melancholy the campfires symbolized, which the true German has felt in his heart since the beginning of time.

  Of all the world’s great peoples, we alone, Teuton, Nordic, Aryans—call us what you will—and from the very beginnings of our history, did not believe the world would endure forever, or that the gods were immortal. Other ancient peoples—the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans—had pursued their racial and national destinies under the rule and patronage and laws of immortal gods whose dominion would endure, as would they themselves, until all eternity.

  Grieben: On Religion

  Don’t talk to me about God or Jesus or faith or religion. I appeal to God only with exclamation points, I cry out to Jesus from an excess of bad temper, but I do it only because I am lonely and I know they aren’t there anyhow. If they were there I would maintain perfect silence and so would everyone else, because only a fool would expose himself.

  But they aren’t there, and they never were there, and they never will be. We are taught to believe in them (or else we invent them for ourselves) because we are all so milk-minded that we can’t face up to the simple truths of a world and an existence without them. We loathe or fear ourselves so terribly we simply can’t believe that we alone are the only help we shall ever have. Bishops, cardinals, popes, prophets, shamans, lamas, gurus, and muezzins daily and newly bewitch themselves and the world. Look at the scientists, for God’s sake, observe them carefully as they contemplate the idea of an infinity that drives them insane because it doesn’t conform to what they know about their own measurable lives—that they are conceived, are born, grow old, wear out, and finally cease to exist. To straighten matters out and soothe their quivering bowels at three o’clock in the morning they dream like imaginative children or Old Testament prophets of a universe that began as precise but imprecisely known into the eternal time that will end at a time equally precise but just as imprecisely known.

  What are they looking for when they project a universe that began with a cosmic bang, expanded to outer reaches so distant that they can’t even be imagined by man, and will end, like Saint John’s great gathering of souls, in a cosmic collapse as its elements rush back upon themselves to borrow what they were before the universe began?

  They are searching for an act of creation, aren’t they? Of course! They are searching for the moment when the universe and everything that is or ever was in it came into being, for the means by which it came into being, and for the power that activated those means. They are searching, in short, for the God who created this universe, and nothing less will satisfy them. Instead of the Old Testament God who created all in seven days they are searching for a new God, a force, who created all with a big bang. Is the first God more a product of superstition or less philosophically believable and satisfying than the second?

  Not at all. Why not? Because the God-created universe of Genesis and the bang-created universe of modern science derive from the most primitive of all man’s superstitions—that there was a beginning and hence that there can be an end.

  Because there isn’t. There is neither beginning nor end to truth, to infinity, to eternity, to the universe. That is the Genesis and the bang-created universe of modern astrophysics derive from the most comforting of man’s primitive superstitions—that there was a beginning, a marvelous act of creation that caused the universe to become, hence that there can be
an end of Genesis and the bang-created universe of modern astrophysics, both derive from man’s most primitive and comforting superstition—that the universe began with a marvelous act of creation that will end in apocalypse.

  But despite the prayers of scientists and the best calculations of theologians it isn’t true. The fact that the universe never began deprives them of their creative act. The fact that what never began can never end deprives them of surrender’s sweetest consolation. Thus, for endless generations…

  Grieben: The Ultimate Horror of My Life

  The ultimate horror which my life and my sufferings and the sufferings of others have taught me.

  Because it isn’t. The universe never began because it has no beginning, and because it has no beginning it can have no end—it is eternal. It is infinite. It is completely without dimension. That is why good theologians and our theology have told billions of solemn, mindless, lonely, frightened idiots that there is something divine out there that has meaning. If you told them it isn’t there and never was there, they would go mad.

  Look at the scientists, for God’s sake. Observe them carefully as they dance like dervishes in maniacal search for a neat little beginning of the universe and rounded off by a neat little end.

  But it isn’t there. Despite the prayers of scientists and the cunning miscalculations of theologians, the creative act of beginning for which they search never was, and the merciful act of final destruction, the hope of which they are inconsolable can never be. They are left only with that which they will not see—the shuddering horror of a universe both eternal and infinite without beginning, without end, without dimension, without time, without hope.

  The cosmic bang will end as a vast inward cosmic collapse on itself. One theory is that the universe curves in upon itself and that beyond the curve there is nothing.

  The terror of a void is not that it is nothing but that it is something. It is real and—unendurable.

  Grieben: On Killing and Guilt

  You killed the Greeks. You killed the Armenians. You killed the Huguenots. You killed the Protestants. You killed the Catholics. You killed the Gypsies. You killed the Poles. You killed the Ukrainians. You killed the Indians and the Malaysians and the Ceylonese. You killed the Bantu and the Riff and the Egyptians and Arabians and the Indonesians and the (here we shall add a large number of Colonial peoples who were killed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).

  And what have we done? We have killed a handful of Jews, for Christ’s sake—and a handful the world wanted to get rid of in any event.

  God in heaven, is it all guilt? everywhere? we know there is guilt in hell. We know that day in and out we sweat beneath the burden of our intolerable guilt on earth. Is it possible then, that there is no guilt in heaven also? Ah yes, of course. There is guilt everywhere and there is repentance everywhere, but where is there forgiveness? I think there must have been a moment in time whilst I, pale as a grub and insatiably greedy for the rotting red flesh of my mother’s womb, caught my first wish of guilt without sin, of sin without repentance, and of repentance without forgiveness. And in that moment of larval cannibalism I reached, without knowing it, the conclusion which inevitably was to govern my life: Fuck it; fuck it all. If I am not to be forgiven then I shall not repent.

  Grieben: On Killing and the Camps

  Most of them drink but I resist the temptation. I will not make it easy. I will take the full burden of guilt.

  ♦

  Effect of Concentration Camp Work on the Sexual Drive of the Personnel If the sexual drive constitutes an essential or even an important part of man’s psyche, the effect of our work in Auschwitz was almost as crippling to us of the SS as to the unnumbered tens of thousands of females who passed each week from our custody into God’s. To this today […] misbegotten travel agents have caused them to pay good money for a “guided tour” through Eastern Poland—a tour to what remains of the great encampment between the waters of […] and the […] rivers are now labeled on the map, but once properly called Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau, are exhibited as lovingly as remains of the Imperial Forum by the Romans or the eternally silent pink facades of Petra by those degenerate heirs of what we once […]. Let those who pass through the narrow streets and still well-stuffed warehouses of Auschwitz remember that here a thousand troopers of the SS sacrificed their natural instincts, their innate capacities for…

  (The idea of nude women as meat in transit—and what it is like to SS personnel—the sexual appetite can no longer be stimulated by the old means—the nude female body, for example. It calls for new and different stimuli, or else it dies altogether, or turns sick, perverse, corrupt.)

  ♦

  I have no humanity in me.

  Grieben: The Camp

  In dark moments he hears the music of the camp orchestra. One night in Forchheim, it awakens him. He knows something is wrong. The orchestra never plays at night, because night shipments are always held in the train cars until morning. He gets up, goes out in his nightshirt, stares into the quiet night. Yes. They’re playing, all right. Over there. On the verge of the forest, the Jews are playing Mozart! He sits down on his step, listens. When the piece is ended and silence comes to the scene, he sighs, arises, and goes back to bed.

  Grieben: On the Jews

  The intense desire for nationhood which animated the Nazis produced in their Jewish victims, who had never yearned for it, their own drive for nationhood.

  ♦

  The personnel (Jewish) who mysteriously challenge him, even before the prisoner himself is aware that Grieben feels challenged. Grieben seeks him out (indirectly), manipulates him. Prisoner unaware. Grieben cannot believe the man’s nobility, cannot believe he is a Jew. Makes elaborate checks into his ancestry (all of which, naturally, prolong the prisoner’s life). The man is a Jew. All the way a Jew. To corrupt the prisoner, of which the prisoner is totally unaware. At the very end, he does corrupt the prisoner. His rage, his anguish, his terrible disillusionment.

  He charges prisoner: the mutual recognition: something terrible emotional and moral […]: sends prisoner to his death. Prisoner has betrayed far more than he. Grieben, has.

  I do not understand these people, and because I do not understand them I kill them. Oh God, how I hate these somber-eyed, accommodating, acquiescing Jews! How meekly they walk to their deaths. Nietzsche was no fool when he wrote of the terrible meek, and their meekness shames death itself. Reduces death’s messengers to the status of clerks, of […]. I hate these somber-eyed, accommodating, acquiescing Jews who walk so meekly to their deaths. Their acquiescence denies you combat, denies you struggle, and when they descend at last into the common ground they take not only your honor with them but your humanity as well.

  On order they dig their graves, strip off their clothes, march to the killing place.

  Birth, through accidental coincidence of concupiscence with ovulation, is the gift of man; death is the gift of God, and to ridicule death by acquiescence is to make a fool of God himself.

  There is no accounting for these Jews. You threaten them, they yield; you order them out of your country, they dig in silently, sullenly, tenaciously, remain; you tell them that if they don’t go you will throw them in jail, they remain and go threateningly, terrifyingly to jail; you tell them you will kill them, they defy you to kill them; you tell them to march to their deaths, they march to their deaths; you tell them to dig their graves, they dig their graves; you tell them to undress on the brink of their graves, they undress on the brink of their graves; you tell them to stand for the death blow, they stand for the death blow; you tell them you are going to kill them, they force you to kill them; and while they so arrogantly, so carelessly degrade you to animals, they deny you combat, deny you the struggle, deny you your soldier’s function and purpose, they deny you the right to combat; and when they descend into their graves they take not only your soldier’s honor but your manhood and even your humanity with them. Nietzsche was no fool when he wrote
of the terrible meek; their meekness defies death itself and reduces death’s messengers to the status of ribbon clerks and delivery boys, is to reduce God to a mindless idiot.

  I hate these accommodating, acquiescing Jews. When they walk so meekly to their deaths there is no dignity left over for their executions. By acquiescence they degraded us all…What a horrible, aggressive, terrible ferocity is their acquiescence! They cannot be human because if they were we, too, would share in their acquiescence, and this no man could do and still remain a man.

  On they come, naked as children, skinny old men with beards, women with thick legs and stout, rolling menopausal haunches, mothers with huddled, bare-skinned children, limp-penised fathers shamed by their helplessness, boys white as newly dug grubs, girls in bud with huge eyes, if right-handed, covering their genitals with the left, and if left-handed, with the right, others enfolding their tough little breasts—and looking at us—all of them looking at us as if we weren’t there—or if there, not human—as if we were beasts—not recognizing that we, like them, are under orders; that we, like them, only obey or die; that we, like them, are also human beings.

  Why do they yield like this? Why do they drag us down? Why do they […]?