Siegfried Read online

  “Did you visit his grave later?” he asked Julia.

  “No. There was going to be a headstone with his name on it, but by that time we had already been transferred.”

  “To The Hague, that is.”

  “Yes, just a week later. Mittlstrasser said that different surroundings would help us to forget the tragic accident.”

  “Did Seyss-Inquart know the full story?”

  “I don’t know,” said Falk. “I don’t think so. The first thing he did when he met us was to express his condolences at our loss. What reason could they have had to let him in on the secret?”

  “None.” Herter nodded. “For Hitler, Seyss-Inquart was just a lowly subordinate, even though he had delivered Austria to him.”

  The mobile telephone in his breast pocket vibrated. “Yes?”

  “It’s me. Where have you got to?”

  “To the war.”

  “You won’t forget our plane?”

  “I’ll be right back.” He ended the call and could finally look at his watch again: three-thirty. “That was my girlfriend. She’s worried we’ll miss our plane.”

  “You’re going back to Amsterdam today?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was there once,” said Falk, getting up, “in the middle of the so-called Hunger Winter. Everything was still standing, but it was a burned-out, fatally wounded city. I remember that the canals were full of floating rubbish from one side to the other.”

  Before getting up himself, Herter took the copy of The Invention of Love and with his fountain pen wrote on the title page:

  For Ullrich Falk,

  who in the days of evil

  made an unimaginable sacrifice

  to love.

  And for Julia.

  Rudolf Herter

  Vienna, November 1999

  He blew on it for a moment and closed the book, so that they would not read it until he had gone.

  “Do you have a visiting card?” asked Falk.

  “I haven’t made it that far yet,” said Herter, “but I’ll write it down for you.” On a page from his notebook, he noted down his address and telephone number and tore the page out. “You can always write to me or phone me—at my expense, of course.”

  “I shall give this to Mrs. Brandstätter and tell her to let you know when the last of the two of us has died. After that you are free to do or not do whatever you want.”

  Herter shook his head. “You won’t be dying for a long time yet, I can see that. You’ve almost started the next century.”

  “This one’s enough for us,” said Julia stiffly.

  They said good-bye. Herter kissed Julia’s hand and thanked Falk for confiding in him.

  “On the contrary,” said Falk, “we thank you. If you had not been prepared to listen to us, nothing at all would have been left of Siggi. It would have been as if he had never existed.”

  SIXTEEN

  When he arrived back in the hotel room, Maria was packing. He closed the door behind him and said, “I’ve understood him.”

  “Who?” she asked, straightening up from bending over the case on the bed.

  “Him!”

  “You look a bit disheveled, Rudi. What’s happened?”

  “Too much. I’m beaten. The imagination counts for nothing. Exit Otto.”

  “Otto? Who is Otto?”

  “Don’t bother, he no longer exists. There will be no Enemy of Light. The imagination cannot challenge reality; reality bats the imagination into the stratosphere and roars with laughter.”

  “Have you been drinking, by any chance?”

  “A glass of cheap wine, but now I want a glass of nectar to drink to Minerva’s owl, which flies out at dusk.”

  “What on earth are you going on about?” asked Maria, kneeling down at the minibar.

  “That insight is a melancholy dessert to creativity, a poor consolation for those who fail.”

  “Fortunately I know you. Otherwise I would think you were just ranting. I don’t think you look well.”

  “I am mortally sad.”

  “Lie down for a bit.”

  He shoved the case aside and did as she had said.

  “Did you learn anything from those old people?”

  “Those old people, as you call them, were the personal servants of Hitler and Eva Braun, and I learned something earth-shattering, something completely unbelievable and blood-curdling and at the same time utterly incredible—but I swore with two fingers raised that I would not tell anyone while they are still alive.”

  “Not even me?”

  “The problem is that you’re someone, too.”

  “But what if you’re run over by a streetcar tomorrow?”

  “Then no one will ever know. But I shall write it all down at home and deposit it with the lawyer. Get me the dictating machine—it’s over there next to my eyedrops. There’s someone who is no one, and I’ve just got to get my thoughts in order about that person.”

  “It would be better if you had a quarter of an hour’s sleep.”

  “No. If I do, it may slip through my fingers.”

  Maria switched the machine on and gave it to him.

  He thought for a moment, brought it to his mouth, and said at dictation speed, “Hitler’s chief of staff, General Jodl, who spent hours with him every day, once said that for him the Führer always remained a closed book. Today I have opened the book. It turns out to be a dummy, with nothing but empty pages. He was a walking abyss. The last word on Hitler is ‘nothing.’ All those countless essays on his person fall short, because they are about something, not about nothing. It was not that he did not let anyone get close, as everyone says who knew him, but that there was nothing to get close to. Or no, perhaps I should put it the other way around. Perhaps the way to see it was that the vacuum that he was sucked into was itself full of other people, who as a result were also destroyed. In that direction, then, lies the explanation for the inhuman acts of his morally dehumanized followers. In fact, the whole thing now reminds me of a black hole—a monstrous astronomical object, a pathological deformation of space and time, created by the catastrophic collapse of a heavy star, a maw that devours everything that comes near it—matter, radiation, everything—from which nothing can escape. Even light is caught in its gravitational field, all information is cut off from the rest of the world—it is true that it glows, but nothing can be concluded from that amorphous heat. In its center is a so-called singularity. This is a paradoxical entity of infinite density and infinitely high temperature, with a volume of zero. Hitler as a singularity in human form—surrounded by the black hole of his retinue! If you ask me, no one has yet come up with that idea. Right. I am not going to give this all-devouring Nothingness a psychological foundation, as is always attempted in vain, but a philosophical one, since it is first and foremost a logical problem: a cluster of predicates without a subject. This makes it the exact opposite of the God in the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, from the fifth century: in that God is a subject without predicates, since he is too big for us to be able to say anything about him. So you could assert that, in the framework of negative theology, Hitler is the devil—but not in the official, positive theology of Augustine and Aquinas. Anyway, enough.”

  He drank a mouthful of the Chablis that Maria had put beside him and continued into the machine:

  “Pay attention, the excursion becomes even more instructive. In the wake of Hegel, but in opposition to him, Kierkegaard said that Nothingness gives birth to fear. He wrote of Nero that he was a mystery to himself and that his essence was fear: that was why he wanted to be a mystery to everyone and revel in their fear. Later Heidegger turned Kierkegaard’s proposition on its head and said that fear reveals Nothingness—and that ‘in the Being of being the annihilation of Nothingness’ takes place. Jeering laughter from the logical positivists, of course, especially the Vienna Circle, with Carnap at their head—but does not the explanation of Hitler lie in the direction of that negativistic concep
tion? That is, as the personification of that angst-creating, annihilating Nothingness, the exterminator of everything and everyone, not only of his enemies but also of his friends, not only of the Jews, the Gypsies, the Poles, the Russians, the mentally defective, and so on and so on but also of the Germans, his wife, his dog, and finally himself ? Perhaps in this case Carnap should first have thought of his favorite science: mathematics. In it the paradoxical number zero is nothing less than a natural number, which through multiplication destroys every other number. In mathematics the function of zero is to zero—the zero is the Hitler among numbers. Is it at the same time a possible explanation for Heidegger’s metaphysical fraternization with that zero among human beings, whom he, suffering from a case of optical illusion, had taken to be the personification of Being? After all, the philosopher with the nightcap and admirer of the ‘primeval rock, granite, hard will’ such as you see on the Obersalzberg, had an SA uniform hanging in his wardrobe. And then there is Sartre, who is part of the same tradition, but with whom things land on their feet again when he wrote that the anti-Semite is a person who wants to be a stubborn, hard rock, a seething river, a devastating flash of lightning—everything except a human being. And in the background of all this is the vague ecstatic form of Meister Eckehart, whose mystical obsession, seen from this perspective, suddenly takes on demonic features, he, with his ‘dark night of the soul’ and becoming nothing . . . which is subsequently monstrously staged in the black hole of the party rallies in Nuremberg, after sunset, surrounded by pillars of light that merge with the starry sky, with Hitler as the paradoxical singularity in the center of thousands of men in uniform, the only one bareheaded. . . .” Herter shivered. “I’m shivering, but that shivering of course points precisely in the right direction: that of the horrific, the ghastly, the mysterium tremendum ac fascinans.”

  “The what?” asked Maria with her head cocked to one side.

  “Hey, are you eavesdropping on me, by any chance?”

  “I can’t help it, but don’t worry. Probably new worlds open up to you when you say these kinds of things, but I understand less than half. Should I go?”

  “No, of course not. On the contrary, it’s good if someone listens with me.”

  “I thought it was secret.”

  “I’m not going to be talking about that secret, only about the explanation of the secret that Hitler was.”

  The mysterium tremendum ac fascinans, he explained, was a term that had been coined over eighty years ago by Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy. Herter had reread it a few weeks ago, obviously because of a kind of premonition. As a young man, Nietzsche had written The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, which Herter had been talking about only yesterday. In that book he supplemented the “noble simplicity and silent grandeur” of Winckelmann’s Apollonian, peaceful, harmonious vision of Greek culture with its Dionysian, ecstatic, irrational, terrifying counterpart. You could say that following on from that, Rudolf Otto had pointed to the core of all religion: the terrifying “Totally Other,” the absolutely foreign, the denial of everything that exists and can be thought, the mystical Nothingness, the stupor, the sense of being “knocked out cold” that both attracts and repels. That was a different tune from the Christians’ benign “dear Lord.” He was an asthmatic descendant of the authentic, wild heavenly men and women—who, by the way, did not shrink from sacrificing his own son, an act he had once forbidden Abraham from committing. No, only Hitler was the epiphany of that chilling tradition.

  “I’m doing my best,” said Maria.

  In the course of time, he continued, countless experts had racked their brains over the question of when Adolf became Hitler. First he was an innocent infant, then a delightful toddler, then a growing child, then a young man eager to learn—where, when, how, as a result of what had he changed into absolute terror? No one had yet given a satisfactory answer. Why not? Perhaps because the psychologists were not philosophers, and especially not theologians. And perhaps in turn the monotheistic theologians gave Hitler a wide berth and became caught up in theodicy: how could the one God allow Auschwitz? Yes, he was suddenly sure of it. None of the theologians dared go to the ultimate extreme, like Hitler himself. Fear of the Totally Other had paralyzed them, too. Hitler had knocked them out cold, too—some even regarded it as immoral to try to understand him. But now Hitler found him, Herter, on his path.

  “Perhaps, Rudi,” said Maria, interrupting him thoughtfully, “it would be sensible to stop. Aren’t you frightened of being knocked out cold yourself?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t go back anymore; it’s too late. I have realized why Hitler is incomprehensible and will always remain so: because he was incomprehensibility in person—that is, in nonperson. An old star changes through particular causes into a singularity surrounded by a black hole, but Hitler did not change at a certain moment in his life into that infernal horror—for example, through the violence of his revolting father or the grisly death from cancer of his mother, who was treated by a Jewish doctor, or a gas attack in the First World War, which left him temporarily blind. Other people have been through worse horrors and yet not become Hitlers. They simply did not fulfill the preconditions that Hitler did before he had experienced anything at all—precisely the absence of all values. It was not a specific experience that ate away his soul; he was terror itself from his very birth. Nero had the status of a god, but that was an apotheosis conferred one day on Nero the human being by other human beings: all positive facts. But Hitler was from the very beginning the manifestation of the Totally Other: the zeroing Zero incarnate, the living singularity, who of necessity would become visible only as a mask. This made him therefore no actor, not a thespian, as he is commonly regarded, but a mask with no face behind it: a living mask. A walking suit of armor, with no one inside.” He thought for a moment of Julia, who, unlike her husband, had seen only an actor in him.

  “So according to you, he was unique,” said Maria with her eyebrows raised skeptically.

  Herter sighed. “Yes, I’ve a nasty feeling that he was unique.”

  “He thought that himself. So he was right.”

  “Yes, we must finally face up to the fact. Except that there was no question of a ‘self.’ That’s why you can’t really call him ‘guilty’; that is already according him too much honor and shows a lack of appreciation of his zero-value status. But I understand what you mean. With such a paradoxically inhuman nature as his, something unbearably sacred clings to him, albeit in a negative sense. That is acceptable only if it can be proved in some way. But how can ‘nothing’ be proved? How can something supernatural be ‘proved’?”

  Suddenly he sat up straight, stared ahead with his eyes wide. To his dismay—but at the same time to his joy, for such is the dubious nature of thought—something occurred to him that seemed to come close to a proof.

  “Wait a moment. . . . Damn it, Maria, I believe I’m making a discovery,” he said into the cassette recorder, as if it were called Maria. “It’s too crazy for words, but perhaps . . . I’m excited, I must take it easy, easy, easy, step for step, the ice is slippery. . . . Listen. A thousand years ago Anselm of Canterbury came up with a crushing proof of God’s existence, which is more or less: God is perfect; therefore he exists; otherwise he would not exist. Later Kant called that the ‘ontological proof,’ but of course it is no such thing, since it appears only to make the transition from thought to real existence. On means ‘what exists’ in Greek. It is more a ‘logical proof of God.’ But now I really think that I have hold of its mirror image: a truly ontological proof for the proposition that Hitler was the manifestation of the nonexistent, annihilating Nothingness.”

  Maria looked at him ironically. “That’s a whole mouthful for precious little.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to say the unsayable?”

  “Didn’t Wittgenstein say that you should be silent about it?”

  “That means you never make any progress. Another Viennese, by the
way. I am not going to be silenced by Viennese; my father was the last person with the power to do that, but not for very long.”

  “It’s as if you still can’t stand it.”

  Herter shook his head impatiently. “For God’s sake, leave psychology out of it, Maria. Nothing ever gets better. Right, here we go. I need to take a run at it.”

  The drama of the twentieth century, he lectured, began with Plato and his installation of a World of Ideas beyond the visible one. That led directly to Kant’s unknowable thing in itself. After him the development split into two currents, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one. The optimistic one was Hegel’s rationalist, dialectic method, which led via Marx to Stalin—or, perhaps it would be fair to say, to Gorbachev. As he already asserted, the tradition of Nothingness also started from Hegel, with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre as an existentialist side branch; he must think a little more about how it precisely fitted together. The founding father of the pessimistic, irrational current was Schopenhauer. With him the eternal thing in itself evolved into a dogmatic, dynamic “Will,” which ruled the whole world, including the orbits of the planets, and which in the individual had taken the form of his body.

  He looked at Maria. “Can you feel that we’re getting close?”

  “To tell you the truth . . .”

  “No, let me go on, before I lose the thread. When you’ve typed it out, I’ll explain it. And pour me another glass, because we’re approaching the heart of the matter: music.”

  Since Plato, Herter said, who, in the spirit of Pythagoras, had the world created according to the laws of musical harmony, no one had played greater homage to music than Schopenhauer. For him it was nothing less than the illustration of his world Will. If anyone were to succeed, he once wrote, to express in concepts what music was, that would be at the same time the explanation of the world—that is, the true philosophy. Two more steps, said Herter, and he would be where he wanted to be. First step: Richard Wagner. The great composer of enchanting operas was both a lifelong follower of Schopenhauer and also an anti-Semite of a new kind. The Jews must not merely be combated and restricted because they supposedly had disproportionate power and influence in all fields of civilization, as traditional anti-Semites had been saying since time immemorial and still are, resulting in an incidental pogrom here and there—no, he was the first to proclaim in his writing that they had no right to exist, that they should disappear without exception off the face of the earth. With him the metaphysical anti-Semitism of extermination was born. Not even by having themselves baptized could they rid themselves of the curse upon them, as the Christians and Muslims conceded. He tried in vain to harness his devoted admirer, the unstable King Ludwig II of Bavaria, to his bloodthirsty bandwagon, but Ludwig found Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism vulgar—proving that he wasn’t so unstable after all.