The recorder switched itself off with a click.
SEVENTEEN
“Our plane leaves at eight-thirty,” said Maria, turning the tiny tape for him.
“Bags of time.”
“You’ve still got to pack.”
“It will all be fine,” he said impatiently. “If necessary, we’ll miss the flight.”
“You do know that Olga and Marnix are meeting us? He thought it was wonderful being able to stay up so late.”
“We can always phone them and put it off.” He switched the machine on again, put a finger briefly to his lips, and said, “Right. Second step. Nietzsche. Now things get difficult. He, too, was a follower of Schopenhauer as a young man, and in addition an admiring houseguest of Wagner’s. He wrote enthusiastic pieces about both, but as his own ideas developed, he distanced himself from them. Schopenhauer’s abstract Will underlay the Dionysian primeval force in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, which as a twenty-seven-year-old he had dedicated to Wagner in 1871. I know all that very exactly; I read him when I was no more than nineteen, just after the war; I think I identified with him a little at the time. At the end of the short period in which Nietzsche had his sanity, seventeen years later, Schopenhauer’s musical Will became even more concrete in his own Will to Power. Add the two quotations here,” he said, suddenly toneless, in a deeper voice.
“What’s that?” asked Maria, again cocking her head slightly again.
“Don’t worry. It’s something I want to insert later.”
He had once made an astonishing discovery. In the passage where Schopenhauer talks of the hypothetical translation of music into true philosophy, he says literally “. . . that supposing that it were possible to give a totally accurate and complete explanation of music that dealt with particulars, that is, an extensive repetition of what it expresses in concepts, that would immediately be a sufficient repetition and explanation of the world in concepts, or one that is identical, and hence the true philosophy. . . .” Decades later the complicated melody of that sentence returns in Nietzsche: “Supposing finally that it were possible to explain the whole of our instinctual life as the representation and suppression of a basic form of Will—namely the Will to Power, as is my proposition; supposing that one could trace back all organic functions to this Will to Power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is a problem—would have thereby have earned the right to determine all active force unambiguously as: Will to Power.” As far as Herter knew, the chromatic similarity of those two crucial texts had never struck anyone before. Had it struck Nietzsche himself? Was it a covert homage to Schopenhauer? Probably it was more an unconscious reminiscence of his reading of Schopenhauer. The “unconscious” . . . the last shoot, in Freud, from this murky family tree.
“Haven’t you had enough of my lecture by now?” asked Herter.
“As if that would make any difference to you.”
“That’s true. By the time his Will to Power had dawned on him,” he continued, “Nietzsche had already put a few other shocking things on the agenda in his Thus Spake Zarathustra, such as the concept of the Superman, the domination of the strong over the weak, the abolition of pity, and the assertion that God is dead. Yes, he had quite some nerve. The deeply unhappy Fritz suffered under his own daring; what he most wanted was that someone should demonstrate that his ideas were wrong.”
Maria looked at him sharply and asked, “Am I seeing things, or are there tears in your eyes?”
Herter put the cassette recorder aside for a minute and rubbed his eyes. “Yes, you’re right.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake? I always understood that his brain waves inspired Hitler.”
“In that case you understood incorrectly, and you’re not the only one. He was the first victim of Hitler.”
“If you ask me, Hitler wasn’t even born at that time.”
“You’re right. And there you immediately touch on the point that I am after. Listen,” he said, picking up the recorder again, “I’ll try to explain, to myself, too. I can’t quite believe it myself yet. Nietzsche died at the end of August 1900: exactly a century ago next year. By that time he was completely mad, finally more of a vegetable than a human being, nursed first by his mother, then by his sister. How did that outbreak of madness proceed? Pay attention. I’m going to look more carefully at the dates. I haven’t got everything to hand, but I do have them in broad outline—I’ll chase everything up at home: I’m already looking forward to that. What can be finer than to have to study in the wake of an idea? I’ve never been able to study without an idea, not even at school. Right. When he wrote his Zarathustra, in the first half of the 1880s, he was still perfectly mentally in order. In the next few years, he published a number of important titles. In addition he wrote down in this period more than a thousand aphorisms, which were intended to lead to a philosophical counterpart of Zarathustra but that never materialized. In the summer of the year 1888, when the preparatory work had probably been done, things went wrong, like a cloud passing across the sun. After his death the material was arranged by his rather fraudulent sister and published under the title The Will to Power, and in that form it had a huge influence. It is more a prophet than a philosopher talking: he calls himself a ‘prophetic bird spirit.’ He said that he was writing the history of the next two centuries; we are now halfway, and in the first quarter everything was exactly as he predicted. It happened faster than he thought. Or perhaps we should say that the twenty-first century will also be under the spell of Hitler. The corrupt edition of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche begins with the famous sentence ‘Nihilism is at the door; where does this most horrific of all guests come from?’ Isn’t that odd? Here nihilism appears as a guest, as a person. That has always been regarded as a stylistic flourish, but I read it differently now. The term ‘nihilism’ is derived from nihil, ‘nothing’—so what is being said, in a nutshell, is, ‘Hitler is at the door.’”
“Do you know what I think, Rudi?” said Maria. “That you’re making yourself ill.”
“I suspect Nietzsche was sometimes told that, too.”
“And because he didn’t listen, he came to a bad end.”
“Exactly. And I’m going to explain to you how that may be Hitler’s doing. It’s the summer of 1888. Suddenly a shadow obscures the sun, and he puts aside his notes for The Will to Power and in the following months publishes in rapid succession a number of studies in which the destruction of his mind is clearer and clearer. Wagner, the arch-anti-Semite, is once again given both barrels; he writes sentences like ‘I shall simply have all anti-Semites shot,’ and in his autobiographical sketch Ecce Homo, he says that all the great figures of world literature could not have written one speech of Zarathustra between them. He regards himself as the successor of the dead God and wants to introduce a new calendar. Everything becomes increasingly megalomaniac: he signs letters ‘Dionysus,’ ‘the Crucified One,’ ‘Antichrist,’ and in his final, posthumously published notes of January 1889, he shows himself ready to rule the world. Then night finally falls on his mind. When he passes a cab stand in Turin, like the one opposite here, he sees a coachman mistreating his old horse with a whip. He rushes up, and he, the great despiser of pity, falls around the horse’s neck in floods of tears. . . .”
For a moment Herter could not continue and felt his eyes again filling with tears. Maria got up, glanced at the carriages on the square, and sat down next to him on the bed.
He cleared his throat and said, “The director of the psychiatric clinic to which he was admitted was called Dr. Wille.”
“What a coincidence.”
“What a coincidence indeed. And there are more coincidences. In his view and that of all later doctors, the patient was suffering from a progressive, postsyphilitic paralysis.”
“But?” asked Maria.
He looked at her. His hand holding the recorder was trembling slightly. “Do you know when Hitler was born?”
; “Of course not.”
“On April 20, 1889.” He sat up. “Do you realize what that means?” And when she raised her eyes in a questioning expression: “That he was conceived in July 1888—exactly at the moment when Nietzsche’s decline began. And when he was born nine months later, Friedrich Nietzsche had ceased to exist. The brain in which all those thoughts had arisen was destroyed in the months when their personification, no, depersonification was growing in the womb. That is my ontological proof of Nothingness.”
Maria’s mouth dropped open slightly. “Rudi, you’re not crazy enough to—”
“Yes I am crazy enough. His destruction was not paralysis progressiva but Adolf Hitler.”
Speechless, Maria stared at him. “I’m starting to doubt your state of mind, too. It’s all complete coincidence!”
“Oh? And when does coincidence stop being coincidence? If someone throws a six a hundred times in succession with the dice, is that still coincidence? In the strict sense yes, since no one throw has anything to do with the preceding one; still, it has never yet happened. You can happily bet your bottom dollar that if it did happen, the dice were loaded. Check it out. On the one hand we have Nietzsche, who writes prophetically on all the things I mentioned, and on the other Hitler, who fulfills them. A few days before his final collapse—when Hitler was six months old—Nietzsche wrote literally that he knew his fate: that his name would one day be linked to something monstrous, to a crisis such as there had never been on earth, to the deepest conflict of conscience, to a decision, taken against everything that had been believed, demanded, held sacred up to then. At the time no one could understand what he was talking about, but now we know. It was Hitler who took the predicted ‘monstrous decision’: it turned out to be his central obsession—the Final Solution of the Jewish Question—their physical extermination, which Wagner had been the first to threaten them with and precisely what Nietzsche despised in him. From a childhood friend we know, by the way, that the future murderer of peoples hung on every word of Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings. Hitler also read Nietzsche as a young man, but, significantly, the unstoppable young talker did not want to discuss him with his friend; of course, because it was too close to the bone. Anyway, he was not that fond of philosophy and literature; his passions were architecture and the musical theater, especially Wagner, and even there mainly the sets and staging. In a different way only Nietzsche was as obsessed with Wagner as Hitler was. Apart from that Hitler, too, had decided to rule the world, he also toyed with the idea of a new calendar, and so on and so on—I could continue for a lot longer. With Hitler, Nietzsche’s megalomania and his anxieties became reality from A to Z; it all fits like a glove. Later, when as chancellor he was visiting Nietzsche’s sister in Leipzig, he even had something of a mystical experience there: it was as if, he said, he had seen her dead brother physically in the room and heard him speak. And is that precise coincidence of Hitler’s origin and Nietzsche’s downfall suddenly coincidental? And is it coincidental that they lived to be precisely the same age: fifty-six? Is it also coincidental that Nietzsche’s madness lasted exactly as long as Hitler’s time in power: twelve years?”
Maria raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But how? How am I supposed to picture all this? What in heaven’s name can a fetus in the belly of a woman in Austria have to do with the mental state of a man in Italy? It’s too crazy for words!”
“It is, it is,” said Herter, nodding his head quickly, “and yet it’s true. Surely you can see with your own eyes. It’s a grotesque miracle. He was never an innocent infant. Even as a fetus he was a murderer, and in a certain sense he always remained that murderous unborn child.”
Maria almost screamed, “But how then, Rudi? For God’s sake! How were those dice fixed? It’s as if you’ve gone mad. What happened this afternoon at those old people’s place? Come to your senses!”
“That’s just what I’m doing, that’s just what I’m doing. But not to reduce the matter to something everyday and then shrug my shoulders and turn away; but to go further, because this is not an everyday matter, for Christ’s sake. Do you realize what we’re talking about? We’re talking about the worst thing imaginable. And the only thing I can think of is with Hitler we are dealing with something like a metanatural phenomenon—comparable with the impact of that meteorite in the Cretaceous period that wiped out the dinosaurs. Except that he was not an extraterrestrial creature but an extraexistential being: Nothingness.”
Maria forced herself to be calm. “Okay, I’m trying to follow you. But I still don’t understand it. Somewhere in an Austrian village . . . where was he born?”
“In Braunau.”
“In Braunau, Hitler Senior crawls on top of his wife and comes, groaning with pleasure.”
“Yes,” said Herter. “Just imagine that. It all began with pleasure.”
“And at that moment something starts to go wrong in Nietzsche’s brain, hundreds of miles away in Turin.”
“Yes. The night that fell in Nietzsche’s mind was the darkness of the womb in which Hitler’s body was taking shape.”
“But that can’t have been caused by that fertilized ovum in Braunau. At least I assume that you don’t believe in some mysterious radiation.”
“Of course not. There is a third way that caused both of them.”
“Which is?”
Herter closed his eyes for a moment. “Nothing. That is precisely the miracle. After the death of God, Nothingness was at the door, and Hitler was its only born son. In a certain sense he never existed; he was, as it were, the Hitler Lie made flesh. The absolute, logical Antichrist.”
“It’s just as well no one but me can hear all the things you’re saying. If you ask me, no one on earth can still follow you.”
“That might be the proof that I’m on the right track. You must dare to think as ruthlessly about Hitler as he acts. I learned that from Nietzsche: he was before Hitler in the same way as I am after him.” A strange, short laugh that mildly alarmed Maria escaped from his mouth. “Together we’ve caught him in a pincer movement. The circle is closed.”
“And why did that Nothingness of yours precisely single out that family in Braunau?”
Herter turned his face away for a moment and sighed. “Why did Being choose that family in Nazareth at a particular moment at the beginning of our era? Hitler was more the founder of a religion than a politician. He said that he had been sent by providence, and the Germans believed in him—all his nocturnal mass rituals with torches and flags were religious in nature, all witnesses confirm that. The devil only knows; perhaps Klara Hitler was impregnated not by her Alois but by the Unholy Unspirit.”
“Hitler has obviously converted you to the faith, too.”
“Yes. Belief in Nothing, and Nietzsche is its prophet. And at the risk of your regarding me once and for all as mad, I’ll tell you something else. Not only did he, with the destruction of his mind, represent Hitler’s physical creation, not only did he herald in his writings much of Hitler’s later philosophy; he also foresaw Hitler’s end in detail. In one of his very last notes, entitled Last Reflection, he says literally, ‘One may deliver the young criminal to me; I shall not hesitate to destroy him—I myself will make the torch flare up in his accursed spirit.’ That referred to the German emperor. He died peacefully in Doorn in 1941, but four years later it befell his successor physically. In the bunker beneath the Chancellery, he shot himself in his right temple, Eva Braun took poison, after which their bodies were carried upstairs to the garden, hers by Bormann. There it was an inferno of bombing and shelling, the whistling of Soviet rocket launchers, the rattle of machine guns, smoke, stench, the screams of the wounded, the Russians, and all around, the city burned like Valhalla in The Twilight of the Gods. The bodies were laid in a grenade crater close to the exit and quickly had gasoline poured over them. Because no one dared venture into the ring of fire again, Adjutant Linge threw a burning cloth on top—and a policeman who saw the scene from a distance testified la
ter that it was as if the flames flared up from their bodies of their own accord. Of their own accord! So that was Nietzsche’s torch!”
Suddenly Herter’s hand fell limply to his side, without switching off the recorder. “I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.”
“I can imagine,” said Maria, who looked at her watch and got up. “Go and sleep for a bit; you’ve got half an hour or so. The embassy car will be here in an hour. I’ll go downstairs and have a Viennese coffee—to bring me around. If you need me, just ring.” She pressed a kiss on his closed eyes and left the room.
Herter felt as if he could sleep for a hundred years. Siegfried. He thought of the decorated S, the logo of the hotel that was repeated everywhere thousands of times: in the carpets in the corridors, on the coasters, the matchboxes, the bases of the lamps, the sachets of sugar, the pads by the telephones, the ballpoints, the cutlery, the ashtrays, the dressing gowns, the slippers . . . Siegfried . . . Siegfried . . . Siegfried . . .
To what extent was Hitler really a human being? He had the body of a man—although . . . there was something funny about that body from the start. At any rate in his description of “the Jew” who desired world domination in order to destroy mankind, he had given a strikingly realistic self-portrait. Herter thought of a sentence from Mein Kampf that had etched itself into his memory: “If the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumphs over the peoples of this world, his crown will be humanity’s dance of death, and this planet, like it once did millions of years ago, will move through the ether empty of people.” Empty of people! In other words, the remaining Jews on the planet were not people—any more than he was. But his own dance of death was a degree more terrible still, since nowhere does he write that the victorious subhumans led by their verbal-mythical leader THE JEW would finally wipe themselves out, too, just as he did. And the fact that he chose precisely the Jews as the focus of his own nihilistic, total urge to destroy everything that existed was of course because of their realization of his own great ideal, the “racial purity” that they had managed to preserve for thousands of years.