Armageddon (22 page)

On the surface of it, Sean saw no harm. So far he had forbidden large gatherings, but it could easily be controlled by the forces he had at hand. Blessing’s authority was respected by them all. A reunion with traditional life would be good for morale ... but ... one thing annoyed Sean. The
Legend of Rombaden
was read and the pageantry had continued during the Nazi era.

“I’ll read the poem tonight and give you an answer tomorrow,” he said.

That was what the German Council liked—a quick final answer. “There being no further business ...” he said, standing. They came to their feet and waited until he left the room.

Sean left his office assured that everything was as ready as possible for the new commander. A quick briefing could be made and that would be that. The command could be turned over even quicker if Duquesne were selected.

He ordered a light dinner to be brought to his study and asked that no one disturb him. He opened the book of poetry by Hinterseer and began to read with great care the German text of some forty pages. Of course, Sean knew something of the Legend of Rombaden. He had studied it as a segment of German mythology in college and in summations in military government texts.

To Sean, German poetry was truly one of the most magnificent forms of man’s self-expression. Furthermore, he had flirted with German literature and poked about for the answers to the German riddle since he left high school.

The
Legend of Rombaden
was from the mythology of the Black Forest Trilogy. Sean was soon drawn in by verse of Goethe-like perfection.

Wolfram, King of the Gods, reigned over a mythical kingdom deep within the Black Forest. Although Wolfram had a powerful human body, most of his other attributes were those of animals: the rage of a boar; the speed and beauty of the buck; the strength of the bear; the whiteness of the swan; the instincts and cunning of the fox. He was all that was great and beautiful of each animal in the body of a man.

His only son, Berwin, was a warrior of incredible bravery, as befitted the Son of the King of the Gods. Wolfram ordered his son to find the purest people upon earth, with which he would populate his kingdom. Berwin wandered from land to land until he came upon the Aryans of Rombaden; and they became the chosen ones.

In Rombaden dwelled Helga, Goddess of Fertility, with whom Berwin fell in love. Before Berwin and Helga could consummate their love, the God of Snow and Mountains, Ernald, swept down from his mythical kingdom in the Alps and kidnaped Helga.

Berwin realized that the pure race would be contaminated if Helga was violated by Ernald. He gathered about him the warriors of Rombaden. In a fiery speech he exhorted them to die in battle, for only by giving their lives in the fray would they know a moment of ecstasy beyond earthly dimensions. Those who die in battle, promised Berwin, would go to Wolfram’s Kingdom in the Black Forest, and live as the purest of all people.

In the final battle, Wolfram transmits to his son all of his own animal strength and cunning to help him destroy his adversary. But, in the victory, Berwin is slain.

He and all the fallen warriors of Rombaden are placed aboard flaming rafts to be drifted upstream on the Landau and into the Black Forest and the promised kingdom.

Helga, watching them float away from the shore, plunges Berwin’s dagger into her breast and is then carried to Berwin’s raft by a great bridge of lightning. She lies beside her dead hero on the flaming pyre and as the fire and wound end her life she extols this moment of exaltation that only death can bring. She cries out that she is being transformed into a superior form of being through death. And, in death, she consummates the relationship with Berwin, denied them in life.

And so, the daughters and sons of Rombaden who came from that union of Berwin and Helga became the purest on earth.

Sean O’Sullivan closed the book. For so many years he had probed and prodded for answers ...and now ...strangely ... on the eve of his departure from Germany some of these answers were coming to him.

Was not the Legend of Rombaden in fact the story of the German people?

He began to thumb through the thin book for clues, passages to clarify a hundred hazy thoughts. And then, nagging unanswered questions began to be answered with a strange clarity.

When he had been in college and was chosen for military government, there had been endless arguments and discussions about the German mind. Scholars and practical men argued logic and theory, and then, at a certain point in every discussion, all logic about the German people dissipated into confusion. The German always ended in a cloud of mystery ...the eternal enigma.

But here, in Hinterseer’s pages, the German showed himself. Here was Siegfried! Here in the Legend of Rombaden was that longing to be the super race! Here was that strange elation at the moment of death so prevalent in the German culture! Here was the hero’s reward for death in battle!

In the legend they looked upon themselves as the “chosen” people of God. But, what kind of a god? This was
not
the God of Jesus Christ! The god that they longed to identify themselves with was a pagan god! Wolfram was a god who lived in the forest and was more animal than human!

Did not the Germans, indeed, identify themselves more with the pagan than with monotheism, the Western concept of one God? Sean pondered. Once he had written what was termed a brilliant paper, on the “Origins of Anti-Semitism in the German Mind.” By chance, General Hansen, in his search to find German experts, read the paper. It was this paper by an obscure political-science instructor at the University of California which brought Sean O’Sullivan into military government before the age of thirty.

Sean now tried to link his paper to the Legend of Rombaden. He had written:

No people in all of the Western world live closer to their mythology than the German people. Siegfried and other legendary figures, particularly warriors, are deep within the soul of the German people.

The German people have identified themselves indelibly with the forest, with nature, and with animals. This powerful lure of the forest has given vent to the mysticism that always follows “forest people” and a relationship to animals peculiar to them.

Take, for example, the German hunting rituals. After an animal has been slain, the German hunter cuts the throat with a special knife. The “Forest Master” dips a stick into the animal’s blood and anoints the hunter’s forehead. The stick is a pure phallic symbol and the purpose of the ceremony is to endow the hunter with the potency and power of the animal he has just slain ...just as Siegfried bathed in the blood of the dragon he had killed.

The Jews gave to the Western world a formal conception of one God. The Jews handed down from Sinai the basic “laws” or rules of Western morality, the Ten Commandments.

The German hates both the one-God concept and the stringency of the “laws” in his subconscious mind. On the surface and to the world at large he is both a Christian and a product of Western culture.

However, he is a split personality. Another part of him, a vital part of his soul, remains in the forest. The German is, therefore, civilized in much the same way as a domesticated animal, for part of the German is always animal.

Despite his trappings, part of the German is pure pagan. In order for the German to become the pagan his unconscious desires he must throw off the formal concept of one God, and God’s laws. Therefore, the German must destroy the Jew, who stands between him and his pagan desires.

Sean always felt that Germans hated Jews because they wanted to return to the forest. He felt the Germans loved their warrior gods; the Berwins and the Siegfrieds and identified with them more than they loved Christ and more than they identified themselves as Christians. Sean knew the old thesis that to be truly anti-Jewish, one must be anti-Christ. When you destroy the Jew, you also must destroy Christ. Therefore, the German protests Christianity by destroying the Jew.

A doctor of the mind would call the German a schizophrenic. He is, in truth, two distinct people.

One part of this two people gave man its highest and most enriching contributions to civilization through the Beethovens and Bachs and Kants and Schillers and Freuds and Mozarts and Goethes.

But the other! The hate-filled and muddled ramblings of Nietzsche and of Schopenhauer and of Hegel, of Treitschke and Fichte. And the staggering genius of Richard Wagner whose magnificent sounds extolled the glory of death, the fatherland, the chosen people ...
chosen of pagan gods.
And who is to say that Wagner is not part and parcel of the soul of the German people?

Adolf Hitler understood this desire for paganism in the German people and exploited it. The uniforms, the blood ceremonies, the rallies were nothing more or less than pagan rituals. Hitler deliberately played to the German people’s desire to identify themselves with paganism by the destruction of the Jews.

Hitler was indeed another pagan god, calling for the German people to destroy themselves in a death orgy and they answered with “sieg heil.”

Sean began to recall the ramblings of the sick philosophers. Schopenhauer ... the only honest wish man could have was that of total annihilation. Hegel, a personal beloved idol of Adolf Hitler who wrote ... the spirit dies in order to live and that he who yields himself in death is merely yielding one’s self to his other self for life is death; and Hegel wrote further that ... every state must accept the divine right of oppression that belongs to it as a necessary state in the evolution of government; Nietzsche ... I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud; Fichte, who named the Latins and French and Jews as subhumans, and Treitschke, who put the final amen on the German character ... it does not matter what you think as long as you obey.

So, it all fit together, Sean thought. The Legend of Rombaden had produced a magic key he had sought for years that explained the anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Jewish perversion as a drive to return to paganism.

This, then, was the answer to Count Ludwig Von Romstein and the others who argued that the Nazi era was a unique phenomenon that resulted from the First World War and a set of following crises. This was a lie, for the roots of Nazism were deep within the hearts and minds of the German people, and all of it, Aryanism, paganism, love of death, the forest, superhumanism, had been part of them for centuries and centuries!

The Nazi era then was a combined will of most of the German people over hundreds of years of cultivation and growth. The drive toward self-destruction was inevitable!

To Sean, Hinterseer and the
Legend of Rombaden
even spelled out more. The startling discovery that the
Germans worshiped death!
The German approached death in a different manner than any other Western people, who either feared it or looked upon it as an end of mortal suffering. To the German, death alone was a state of existence more wonderful than life, and the moment of death was to be worshiped as the moment of supreme exaltation!

Did this not begin to give answers, that such a people were capable of running death factories in Dachau and Schwabenwald? If death is a desirable superstate in their mystic and pagan subconscious, then it is not a mortal “Christian” sin to commit murder.

Assembly-line death could only be accomplished by an astute Western mind. It could be “justified” when the pagan overwhelms the Christian morality. The split personality in the German character made it possible.

Hinterseer and Richard Wagner told a puzzled world about the perplexing contradictions in the German. And what is more, no one is more perplexed, searches more for his own identity, is more of an enigma than the German is to himself.

Chapter Thirty-two

E
LEVEN O’CLOCK.
T
HE
G
ERMAN
Council assembled. Sloe-eyed Ulrich Falkenstein appeared deceptively serene as he sat at the opposite end of the long table from the commander.

The council sat on both sides of the table, a half dozen of them former inmates of Schwabenwald whose years in the concentration camp had earned them a badge of respectability. The others had somehow kept themselves clear of all Nazi entanglements, remnants of the old Social Democratic Party for the most part. Almost all of them were without previous government experience; five of the council were women, something new in German politics.

“I would like to poll you,” Sean said, “to see if any of you have objection to the reading of the
Legend of Rombaden.”

They looked at one another a bit puzzled, each shrugged in turn, then shook his head. No, there were no objections. Ulrich Falkenstein was not taken in; he studied Sean closely knowing the major was up to something. Sean’s eyes were sharper this morning, the brow furrowed more deeply as he scanned their faces. Falkenstein knew how to read this expression.

“Frau Meissner,” Sean said, “you are a native of Rombaden. Just how significant is this event to you?”

“Ach, what a question, Major. Hinterseer Day is our most important holiday. And the
Legend of Rombaden
is very close to all of us.”

“You grew up with it?”

“You don’t know. Among the actors at the Rombaden Theater the competition for roles in the reading was very great. It was discussed in every home, in the Ratskeller ...even in Princess Allee. For the children, the legend was performed in the puppet theater. As a schoolgirl, the mark of my accomplishments was the memorizing of new passages.”

And then, one by one, they attested to the integral part of their lives that the legend played and they praised the stature of Hinterseer and their pride in him.

Professor Hans Moltke was the intellectual of the council. He had been a teacher of German Literature until the Nazis drove him from the schools. Moltke kept himself and his family alive by losing his former identity and becoming a bank clerk during the Nazi era. “The poem,” he said, “certainly must be considered among a few dozen of the world’s masterpieces from the standpoint of pure literature, pure verse. Secondarily, it has attained extraordinary meaning to the people of this district. Hinterseer is Rombaden’s greatest son ... the link with immortality ... this means provincial pride. Moreover, the reading of the legend signifies the coming of summer. The people know they will again take trips to the forest and commune with nature. The legend brings them close to nature. As you know, Major O’Sullivan, we Germans have an uncommon love of the forest.”