by Paulo Coelho
Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results in stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humour easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the story told by Eichmann during the police examination about the unlucky Kommerzialrat Storfer of Vienna, one of the representatives of the Jewish community. Eichmann had received a telegram from Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently requested to see Eichmann. ‘I said to myself: OK, this man has always behaved well, that is worth my while… I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo in Vienna], and Ebner says – I remember it only vaguely – “If only he had not been so clumsy; he went into hiding and tried to escape,” something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the Reichsführer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing could be done, neither Dr Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do anything about it. I went to Auschwitz and asked Höss to see Storfer. “Yes, yes [Höss said], he is in one of the labour gangs.” With Storfer afterward, well, it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow. I said: ‘Well, my dear old friend [ Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!’ And I also said: ‘Look, I really cannot help you, because according to orders from the Reichsführer nobody can get out. I can’t get you out. Dr Ebner can’t get you out. I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do.’ [Eichmann meant that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation.] I forget what his reply to this was. And then I asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn’t be let off work, it was heavy work. And then I said to Höss: “Work – Storfer won’t have to work!” But Höss said: “Everyone works here.” So I said: “OK,” I said, “I’ll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom” – there were little gravel paths there – “and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.” [To Storfer] I said: “Will that be all right, Mr Storfer? Will that suit you?” Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other.’ Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead – not gassed, apparently, but shot.
Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevsky once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? Yet Eichmann’s case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of ‘the battle of destiny for the German people’ (der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes), coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.
Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. ‘Of course’ he had played a role in the extermination of the Jews; of course if he ‘had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher’. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is there to “admit”?’ Now, he proceeded, he ‘would like to find peace with [his] former enemies’ – a sentiment he shared not only with Himmler, who had expressed it during the last year of the war, or with the Labour Front leader Robert Ley (who, before he committed suicide in Nuremberg, had proposed the establishment of a ‘conciliation committee’ consisting of the Nazis responsible for the massacres and the Jewish survivors) but also, unbelievably, with many ordinary Germans, who were heard to express themselves in exactly the same terms at the end of the war. This outrageous cliché was no longer issued to them from above, it was a self-fabricated stock phrase, as devoid of reality as those clichés by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an ‘extraordinary sense of elation’ it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his mouth.
Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such sentences. His memory proved to be quite unreliable about what had actually happened; in a rare moment of exasperation, Judge Landau asked the accused: ‘What can you remember?’ (if you don’t remember the discussions at the so-called Wannsee Conference, which dealt with the various methods of killing) and the answer, of course, was that Eichmann remembered the turning points in his own career rather well, but that they did not necessarily coincide with the turning points in the story of Jewish extermination or, as a matter of fact, with the turning points in history. (He always had trouble remembering the exact date of the outbreak of the war or of the invasion of Russia.) But the point of the matter is that he had not forgotten a single one of the sentences of his that at one time or another had served to give him a ‘sense of elation’. Hence, whenever, during the cross-examination, the judges tried to appeal to his conscience, they were met with ‘elation’, and they were outraged as well as disconcerted when they learned that the accused had at his disposal a different elating cliché for each period of his life and each of his activities. In his mind, there was no contradiction between ‘I will jump into my grave laughing’, appropriate for the end of the war, and ‘I shall gladly hang myself in public as a warning example for all anti-Semites on this earth’, which now, under vastly different circumstances, fulfilled exactly the same function of giving him a lift.
These habits of Eichmann’s created considerable difficulty during the trial – less for Eichmann himself than for those who had come to prosecute him, to defend him, to judge him and to report on him. For all this, it was essential that one take him seriously, and this was very hard to do, unless one sought the easiest way out of the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them, and declared him a clever, calculating liar – which he obviously was not. His own convictions in this matter were far from modest: ‘One of the few gifts fate bestowed upon me is a capacity for truth insofar as it depends upon myself.’ This gift he had claimed even before the prosecutor wanted to settle on him crimes he had not committed. In the disorganized, rambling notes he made in Argentina in preparation for the interview with Sassen, when he was still, as he even pointed out at the time, ‘in full possession of my physical and psychological freedom’, he had issued a fa
ntastic warning to ‘future historians to be objective enough not to stray from the path of this truth recorded here’ – fantastic because every line of these scribblings shows his utter ignorance of everything that was not directly, technically and bureaucratically connected with his job, and also shows an extraordinarily faulty memory.
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (‘Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement, to declare something under oath as a witness. I refuse it, I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or any other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me’), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defence he might ‘do so under oath or without an oath’, declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy – and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document, containing his plea for mercy?
As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content, without ever becoming aware of anything like ‘inconsistencies’. As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés did not leave him in the hour of his death.
W.B. YEATS
from Selected Poems
He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
D. H. LAWRENCE
from Lady Chatterley’s Lover
‘But I wouldn’t preach to the men: only strip ’em an’ say: Look at yourselves! That’s workin’ for money! – Hark at yourselves! That’s working for money. You’ve been workin’ for money! – Look at Tevershall! It’s horrible. That’s because it was built while you was working for money. – Look at your girls! They don’t care about you, you don’t care about them. It’s because you’ve spent your time working and caring for money. You can’t talk nor move nor live, you can’t properly be with a woman. You’re not alive. Look at yourselves!—’
There fell a complete silence. Connie was half listening, and threading in the hair at the root of his belly a few forget-me-nots that she had gathered on the way to the hut. Outside, the world had gone still, and a little icy.
‘You’ve got four kinds of hair,’ she said to him. ‘On your chest it’s nearly black, and your hair isn’t dark on your head: but your moustache is hard and dark red, and your hair here, your love-hair, is like a little bush of bright red-gold mistletoe. It’s the loveliest of all!’
He looked down and saw the milky bits of forget-me-nots in the hair on his groin.
‘Ay! That’s where to put forget-me-nots – in the man-hair, or the maiden-hair. – But don’t you care about the future?’
She looked up at him.
‘Oh, I do, terribly!’ she said.
‘Because when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness – then I feel the colonies aren’t far enough. The moon wouldn’t be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I’ve swallowed gall, and it’s eating my inside out, and nowhere’s far enough away to get away. – But when I get a turn, I forget it all again. Though it’s a shame, what’s been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can’t, an’ nobody can, I’d better hold my peace, an’ try an’ live my own life: if I’ve got one to live, which I rather doubt.’
The thunder had ceased outside, and the rain, which had abated, suddenly came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of departing storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now – and he was really talking to himself, not to her. Despair seemed to come down on him completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She knew her leaving him, which he had only just realized inside himself, had plunged him back into this mood. And she triumphed a little.
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed, keen animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-coloured in the greenish light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the eurythmic dance-movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance.
He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard, slanting rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement, as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping her. She ran, and he saw nothing but the round wet head, the wet back leaning forward in flight, the rounded buttocks twinkling: a wonderful cowering female nakedness in flight.