Grieben: On Anti-Semitism
Grieben realizes that in embracing anti-Semitism he has forsaken Germania and accepted Christianity!!!
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It amazes him when the haughty, anti-Semitic (i.e., anti-Eastern) Jews of Germany discover their fate to be no different from the Jews they hold in such contempt. Important. Grieben exults over this because German Jews, in their contempt for and characterizations of Eastern Jews, have defined and subscribed to the views of anti-Semitism which will soon be applied to them.
Grieben: On Old Age
The idiot who called old age “the golden years” was full of shit. They are the lonely years, the regretful years, and if one is lucky, as I consider myself to be, they are filled almost daily with previously undiscovered little pains. For the unlucky ones the pains grow into an agony of the mind and body that reduces them to blabbering, bed-shitting constructions of bone and gristle and scaling skin. I would gladly give up these golden years tomorrow, did it not take so much longer than I had calculated to set down these notes about my life and what it has meant to me and others. I am determined not to until the task I so foolishly set for myself is finished. “Who do you think will read it?” I ask myself. “No one,” I answer. “Then why?” “Because I was here,” I tell myself. “I was once an inhabitant of this earth, and that is a fact that should be recorded. A record must be made. Also explanations, even if they are made only to myself.”
I used to have my shepherd dog Fritz to while away the hours with me—particularly the night hours. It was a good feeling to feel the warmth of his body as it lay sleeping on the quilt at the foot of my bed. But I was too kind to him. I fed him too much, and he grew fat and one morning I found his body on the quilt stiff in death.
I buried him in the woods as I had buried Liesel so many years before, and occasionally I take a flower to his grave. However I soon discovered that I could not bear life without something that was also alive around the house. It had to be a dog, of course, because I am not at all fond of cats. Also, since my increasing frailty made it difficult to hold the leash on a dog of Fritz’s size, I purchased a three-month-old dachshund pup, which I named Willy. Although he had all the charm of a mournful clown, both of us were too old for efficient training. The warmth of his small body against my feet at night was of course the purest pleasure, which I tolerated despite the fact that for all my watchfulness, he deposited his dung where he wished, pissed dutifully and copiously wherever old Fritz’s scent was strongest, and could not be prevented from running out into the street. Finally, for his own good as well as mine.
Grieben: On Dying
The plain truth is that I am dying. First the excision, at age seventy-four, of a cancerous left lung. Then the heart attack. And finally, after many tests, the diagnosis of chronic corpulmonale, which in my case is progressive and not subject to arrest or cure.
Six months after the surgeon’s knife first had its way with me, I could walk a slow mile with moments out for rest without too much difficulty in breathing. Today, a year and a half after surgery, I cannot move from bedroom to front-door stoop without panting like a dog. That is a measure of the rate of deterioration which has set in and will continue.
A year from now, or perhaps sooner, I shall be dead. Since the cancer has given no signals of metastasis, I can even look forward to a fairly easier but earlier death: a heart attack, which is quick and merciful, or the slower but not too agonizing process of pneumonic strangulation caused by a tired heart’s inability to clear the body of liquid waste. Considering that every man must die of something, my death at the age of seventy-six or seventy-seven will not be a bad one nor certainly premature.
Grieben: Views
What Grieben must finally realize is from Sartre:
1. There is no redemption for evil.
2. The ultimate and only freedom is the right to say “No” and die for it. Man’s freedom is to say, “No!”
I shall continue to be as dust, creative, organic matter and thus am comfortable because I shall mulch new life and live in it. No. There is no comfort because it is not true! I shall die and be nothing! Therefore, why did I live? Or did I? Was I nothing from the moment of my birth? Yes! There’s the horror!
I am a copulating vegetable. Shake the carrots together in a sack and their passion is just as great as mine.
Through Sartre:—that man is an alien in the universe, unjustified and unjustifiable; there is no reason sufficient to explain why man or his universe exists. No purpose. No goal. Death is life. Life is death. Let them die. There was actually a better reason for killing them—or any other group of people—than for rescuing them.
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As a child I always felt secure. I was glad to be what I am. I would lie in my bed before going to sleep, and in those moments just before rising to the magical realm of the unconscious, my mind would wander the world to marvel at the luck which had made of me me against such terrible odds. But for chance I could have been an African child, a Mongolian, an American, an Aborigine, even English. But that I had been born white, a German, a Franconian, that I had been born in this particular town in this precise house of these very particular parents—the odds against it were too enormous to be believed. Yet there I was, blessed beyond the mind’s wildest dreams, safe, secure, confident, ready to approach even the terrors of sleep with a sense of well-being that comes only to gods. Or so I thought.
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Although armies may be maneuvered into war by cunning and hostile statesmen for monetary or other reasons, the armies fight well only for what strikes them as moral or spiritual reasons. When the leaders take their departure from the battlefield (which is what defeat means) so does the soldier’s moral and spiritual passion send him off in close pursuit of his betters. The great man wages war for reasons of state: the little man follows and fights only for reasons of passion.
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He wants not to give himself to those he loves, but to rule over them, possess them, and the only true way to evidence possession is abuse.
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We stumble into our graves knowing so well how to have done better.
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One of the curious things about survivors is that to the last man each of them felt that he survived through merit because he deserved to survive.
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Death is sleep without knowledge of the pleasure of life.
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His conviction that in the end peace, order, prosperity, full employment will drive the world mad with boredom—and that they will rise up finally against it.
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The worst criminals on earth are those who toy with love.
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The intensity of his love for young girls as he grows very old. He regrets—really—that he didn’t take every young girl he ever saw—he who had so many opportunities for seduction or rape.
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Grieben: “The generals are fat! Only the foot soldiers are slim.”
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I am trying to penetrate the mystery of why I am as I am—what I am—I have done everything well and right—and it can’t be wrong because it was right.
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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.
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Don’t worry about the skies. There is nobody out there. You are alone. You are alone in the universe. Stop looking. (And here you are all alone.)
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There are two great hatreds men are heir to: the hate of life and the hate of death. The first leads to death, the second to life.
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I come of a race that scooped its grandmother’s brains out with a jagged stone spoon and ate them in the glow of the norther
n lights.
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The child tortures the fly because he has the power to do so, and had not yet learned how mercifully to kill.
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The sense of rising again to world leadership, which must be apparent in latter sections of book. We are on the march again, with arms our eternal enemies have given us as allies. This time we shall not fail, for we are the leader of Europe—something we never were before. We are first on the Continent, hence we shall be first in the world. This is a totally new situation.
Trumbo: Note for Novel
Our man considers the Romans—the chief civilizing influence of their day—in relation to Daniel P. Mannix’s book called Those About to Die. The point that he makes is simply this: The Romans were no less cruel than the Nazis, no less inhuman in their amusements and in their terrible vengeance against certain classes and kinds of people. Yet the Romans were also a highly civilized and cultivated people. Just so were the Germans under the Nazis a highly cultivated and highly civilized people. The point he is making is that a man or a nation does not have to be insane to give way to this human impulse for mass murder. This idea of the insanity of Hitler and of his henchmen is an idea that our narrator wishes to kill. It is also an idea that must be killed. The fact is, of course, that most of the Nazi leaders were perfectly sane. They were giving vent to passions that are felt by all kinds of men all over the world.
Is it absolutely true that culture and science can progress only under conditions of individual freedom? This is a point often made in democratic societies—that the inquiring scientific mind must lie in a climate of intellectual freedom. Yet it is probably not true. Art, science, and culture have flourished under despotisms as well as under democracies. Does anyone, for example, feel that Soviet scientists for the past fifteen years have enjoyed that “climate of intellectual freedom,” which we assert exists in Western society? Yet they have made great strides forward, in some ways even surpassing Western society. We must reevaluate this cliché because if it is not exploded we shall never understand the meaning of freedom or of intellectual independence. Perhaps the truest freedom is that in which the individual declares his own mind to be free and clings to that freedom in spite of the exterior restraints of state and society. But if we assert that intellectual achievement is possible only under the circumstances of freedom as freedom is understood in the West, then we shall be compelled to believe that they are impossible in Russia and in the East. We shall, in other words, be compelled to believe an untruth. If we truly believe what we say, then we shall never be concerned about the achievements of the East because we have already proved they cannot exist, since the circumstances favorable to their growth do not exist. In this way do men deceive themselves by setting forth a philosophical principle, then curiously declining to examine the realities by which the principle can be tested. This is another thing that our man is interested in. He is, in fact, simply trying to prove that the Nazis were perfectly normal intelligent people, and what they did had occurred previously in other societies and times—in nations that were leading the world at the very time they were engaging in the most bestial crimes.
Virtue, given absolute power and if it ever has been given absolute power, has never produced a society which is virtuous. The power of evil when it is absolute has always been able to produce evil unvaryingly and constantly.
We have Angus Cameron’s point: All of the progress of the world has been made in a society which, by definition of good and evil, is evil, or at least is not virtuous since a virtuous society has never achieved the ascendency of power. Might it not be that the reason is that a virtuous society never seeks power—that power itself is evil?
Now the point of this is simply as follows: Everything that man has done in this perpetual progress course toward something better has always been done in the midst of savagery, savage societies, and terrible inequities. It would not necessarily follow that the conditions of progress as previously observed are conditions for further progress if we get rid of the savagery.
Our hero Grieben has in the course of his life three male friends. The first one is blinded in the closing phase of World War I. The second one becomes a male prostitute in Berlin in 1925. And the third one Grieben betrays to the SS on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. After that he really has no male friends. He is actually afraid to have any.
Grieben: A Real-Life Novel
Listen for a moment to a voice which is not Grieben’s. It is the voice of Rudolf Hoess, SS commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from the beginning of its construction in 1941 to the day of its evacuation in January, 1945:
I…see now that the extermination of the Jews was fundamentally wrong. Precisely because of these mass exterminations Germany has drawn upon herself the hatred of the entire world. It in no way served the cause of anti-Semitism, but on the contrary brought the Jews closer to their ultimate objective.
My life is now clearly at its end. I have given an account here of everything that was important in that life, all of those things that impressed me most strongly and affected me most deeply…I have described myself as I was and as I am. I have led a full and varied life. I have followed my star wherever it led me. Life has given me some hard and rough knocks, but I have always managed to get along. I have never given in.
My unalterable love for my country brought me into the NSDAP and the SS. I regarded the National Socialist attitude to the world as the only one suited to the German people. I believed that the SS was the most energetic champion of this attitude and that the SS alone was capable of bringing the German people back to its proper way of life.
I remain, as I have always been, a convinced National Socialist in my attitude toward life. When a man has adhered to a belief and an attitude for nigh on twenty-five years, has grown up with it and been bound to it body and soul, he cannot simply throw it away…I, at least, cannot.
Let the public continue to regard me as the bloodthirsty beast, the cruel sadist, and the mass murderer; for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light. They could never understand that he, too, had a heart and that he was not evil.
Random Notes
I sat last night on my front stoop making designs with the tip of my cane. I did it without looking at the earth as really not paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. Actually, I was looking up into the stars. Depths of the depths of them, great powder-sprinkled vulva receding forever, yet the whole of them is so near that one could bathe in the stars and float on them.
Use this as a lead-in to seduction on Hoher Meissner. The design of the whole is vulvaform (find the words).
This is its literary form, its visual form, its psychological form. Vulvaform represents the seduction of Gunther after the wrestling. Beauty here, poetry, tears, love—and always the receding infinity of the vulva-formed galaxies as the old man thinks and remembers.
Device execution of Gunther at Auschwitz—as it is discerned in others. Other notes about […].
Old man on front stoop—dreaming in starlight, dreaming of the night on Hoher Meissner—the vulvaform shape of the galaxies are equated with Gunther’s […]s.
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Do not fall into the pit of characterizing “German people.” It is always false, always dangerous, and always wicked.
I must make certain to account for the postwar generation in the 1960’s.
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Grieben hates killing, he constantly tries to escape it, and constantly kills more. He concludes that the whole world’s hostility to Jews (and the rejection of them) has compelled Germany (and himself) to accomplish the task which they all wanted to be carried through.
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He was in the socialist wing of the SA. Then he saw that there must be an elite of brotherhood leading to a mass of volk […] like Sparta. This is a totally new situation.
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“I do not admit that my doctrine can be judged by everyone, even by the angels.”—Martin Luther.
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“As the ass will have blows, so the mass can be ruled by force.”—Martin Luther.
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Dig beneath the surface of human character and you will come up with something ugly, be sure of it.
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“Man will become better when you show him what it is like.”—Chekhov.
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The Freikorps: “I want the fight, and man naked and unashamed with his sword in his hand; and behind the stars sweeping westward, and before the wind in the grass. It is enough, brothers. […] the word is spoken.”
Is this the story of man’s return to humanity?
“If I had to do it over again”—what would he have done?
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Oh dear God, don’t drabble it out like this. Let me have it in one big lump.
Night of the Aurochs Page 20