Look Who's Back (11 page)

This holds as true today as it did back then. And now I came across an example of fanaticism that even I would have thought impossible. And yet it was perfectly genuine. I observed a man – an employee of my hotel, I presume – who was engaged in a fascinating new activity. In fact, I cannot be absolutely sure that this activity
is
new; it is just that I remember it being performed differently, that is to say, with a broom or a rake. This man wielded a completely new type of portable leaf-blowing
machine. A mesmerising apparatus with extraordinary blowing power, which I expect had become necessary to confront the more resistant forms of foliage that evolution must have given rise to over the intervening years.

I was able to infer from this that the racial struggle is far from over; on the contrary, it continues to surge in nature with greater intensity. Not even today’s bourgeois-liberal press dares to deny it. One reads of the American grey squirrel supplanting the indigenous red species, so beloved of the German Volk; of tribes of African ants marching across the Iberian Peninsula; of Indo-Germanic balsams naturalising and spreading in this country. This last development is to be welcomed, of course; Aryan plants have every right to colonise the space which is their due. Now, I had not seen this novel, more combative foliage at close quarters – the leaves on the hotel’s motor park seemed perfectly normal to me – but the blowing apparatus could just as easily be deployed against traditional leaves. After all, when driving a Königstiger tank you do not restrict yourself to taking on T-34s; if necessary you engage the old BT-7s too.

When for the first time I observed the man I was indignant. I had been woken that morning – it may have been around nine-thirty – by an infernal din, as if my pillow were nestling against a Soviet rocket launcher. I rose in a fury, hurried to the window, glared out and spotted that very man busily operating his blowing device. My wrath was only multiplied when I looked at the surrounding trees and saw that it was gusting. How absolutely preposterous it was to blow leaves from one place to another on a day like this! My first instinct was to race
outside, vent my anger and give him a proper dressing-down. But I thought better of it. For I was in the wrong.

The man had been issued with an order. And he was executing the order. With a fanatical loyalty my leading generals would have done well to imitate. A man was following orders – it was as simple as that. Was he complaining? Was he moaning that it was a pointless task in this wind? No, he was performing his ear-splitting duty bravely and stoically. Like a loyal S.S. man. Thousands of these had completed their tasks regardless of the burden placed on them, even though they could have easily complained, “What are we to do with all these Jews? It makes no sense anymore; they’re being delivered faster than we can load them into the gas chambers!”

I was so moved that I dressed swiftly, hurried out to the worker, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “My good man, I should like to thank you. It is for people like you that I will continue my struggle. For I know that from this leaf-blasting apparatus, indeed from every leaf-blasting apparatus in the Reich, blows the red-hot breath of National Socialism.”

That
is the fanatical will this country requires. And I hoped that I had aroused it in Sensenbrink too.

O
n the morning I strode into the office put at my disposal, I was reminded again of the long path down which I yet had to travel. I entered a room which was perhaps five by seven metres, with a ceiling two metres fifty high at most. I thought wistfully of my Reich Chancellery. Now
that
place had rooms; the very instant one entered one felt dwarfed, one trembled before such power, such high culture. Not on account of the splendour – the ostentation had always left me cold – but whenever I received someone in the Reich Chancellery, I noticed at once that he felt the superiority of the German Reich, felt it physically. Speer got everything so right. Just take the Great Reception Hall – each chandelier alone must have weighed a tonne; had any one of them come down they would have crushed a man below, turning him to a pulp, a mash of bones and blood and squashed flesh, with maybe some hair sticking out the side. I was almost afraid to stand beneath them myself. I never gave any hint of this, of course; why, I strolled beneath those chandeliers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was just a matter of getting used to them.

But that is exactly how things must be.

For how could one spend millions and millions on a Reich
Chancellery, only for someone to come in and say to himself, “Oh, I thought it would be bigger than this”? The point is, this man must not think at all, he must feel it viscerally, instinctively. He is nothing; the German Volk is everything! A master race! The edifice must emit an aura, like a pope, but a pope, of course, who smites the slightest contradiction with fire and sword, like the Lord God himself. The mighty double doors open, out steps the Führer of the German Reich, and foreign visitors must feel like Odysseus before the Cyclops, but this Cyclops has two eyes, over which no man will be able to pull the wool!

And there were no boulders at the Chancellery.

There were escalators. I almost felt as if I were in Kaufhof in Cologne, to which I had paid a visit immediately after its Aryanisation. You have to hand it to him, that Tietz; the Jews certainly know how to build department stores. But here is an important distinction: in Kaufhof the customer should think he is king, whereas when he came to the Reich Chancellery, the customer knew that he had to bow – in spirit at least – to something far greater. I was never in favour of having every Tom, Fritz or Heinrich crawling about, especially not on
that
floor.

The floor of the office at my disposal was made of a dark-grey compound. It was no carpet I recognised, but a type of covering fabricated from a tatty felted substance – but not at all the sort of material from which one would choose to tailor a German soldier’s winter uniform. I had seen its like many times in this new world; it was so ubiquitous that I did not need to feel humiliated by its presence in my office. It was plainly a
feature of these impoverished times. I vowed that in the future the German worker and his family would have different floor coverings from these.

And different walls.

The walls here were paper thin, no doubt due to a want of raw materials. I had a writing desk, which was manifestly second-hand, and was obliged to share the room with another desk, which must be for the typist I had been promised. I sighed deeply and gazed out of the window. It gave onto a motor park with dustbins in an array of colours, the reason for this being that waste was carefully separated, no doubt another consequence of the raw materials shortage. I shuddered to contemplate from which bin’s contents the wretched floor covering had been made. Then I chuckled to myself at Destiny’s bitter irony. If only the Volk had made a greater effort at the right time, there would be no need to collect refuse in this manner, given the wealth of raw materials in the East. All kinds of waste could have been happily tipped into just two dustbins, or even a single one. I shook my head in disbelief.

Rats scurried around in the yard below, alternating with groups of smokers. Rats, smokers, rats, smokers, and so it went on. I scrutinised once more my modest, nay pathetic writing desk and the cheap, whitish wall behind it. It would not look any better no matter what one hung up there, even a bronze imperial eagle. One would have to content oneself that the wall did not come crashing down with the weight. Once upon a time I enjoyed four hundred square metres of office; now the Führer of the Greater German Reich sat in a shoebox. What had become of the world?

And what had happened to my typist?

I looked at the clock. It was just after half past twelve.

I opened the door and peered out. Nobody was to be seen save for a middle-aged woman in a suit. She laughed when she caught sight of me.

“Oh, it’s you! Are you already rehearsing? We’re all terribly excited!”

“Where is my secretary?”

She stopped momentarily, to think about it. Then she said, “They must have given you a part-timer, which means she’ll probably only come for the afternoons. Around two.”

“Oh,” I said, dumbfounded. “What will I do until then?” “I don’t know,” she said, laughing as she turned to go. “Touch of Blitzkrieg, perhaps?”

“I will remember that!” I said, frostily.

“Really?” She stopped and turned again briefly. “That’s fab. It’d be great if you could use it for your programme! I mean, we’re all working for the same firm here!”

I went back into my office and closed the door. On each desk stood a typewriter without a cylinder, in front of a television set which must have been placed there by mistake. I decided to continue my research into broadcasting, but could find no operating box. It was deeply frustrating. I reached angrily for the telephone, but then replaced the receiver. I had no idea with whom the switchboard should connect me. The entire modern technological infrastructure was getting me nowhere. I sighed, and for a moment my heart pounded with an uneasy despair. But only for a moment. Resolutely I banished the temptations of weakness. A politician makes the
most of what there is. Or, as in this case, of what there is not. So I might as well go outside for a while and observe the new German Volk.

As I stepped out of the building I looked about me. Opposite was a small park, whose trees were already displaying the most intense autumnal colours. To the left and right stood more houses. Out of the corner of my eye I spied a madwoman on the edge of the park who was gathering up what her dog had just deposited. Had this creature been sterilised? I wondered, but came to the conclusion that she could hardly be representative of Germany as a whole. I headed off in the opposite direction.

An automatic cigarette dispenser hung on the wall, and I imagined it must serve the smokers who shared the motor park with the rats. My uniform seemed not to cause a distraction here, perhaps because it didn’t stand out. I encountered two men in passable Wehrmacht uniforms, as well as a nurse and two doctors. Ever since my release from prison, supporters were hot on my heels and their attention was not always welcome. Back then I had to outfox my adherents with small tactical manoeuvres, in the truest sense of the word, so that I could enjoy some brief moments undisturbed by photographers. In this particular environment, however, I was able to wander around as myself and yet remain incognito – ideal for allowing me to study the population. In the presence of the Führer, you see, many people begin to behave unnaturally. In such situations I always say “No fuss, please,” but of course the ordinary man pays no heed to this. In my Munich years the common Volk clung to me like mad. This was not what I
needed here. I wanted to see the genuine, unadulterated German: the Berliner.

A few minutes later I passed a construction site. Men in helmets were shuffling about; it reminded me of the time in Vienna when I was dirt poor, hiring out my labour to foremen in order to earn my daily bread. Out of curiosity I peeped through the fence, expecting to see the houses rise before my very eyes. But evidently technology had not made great advances in this area. On the upper floor a foreman was excoriating a youth, who may have been a student, a prospective architect, a young man full of hope, as I once was. He, too, had to subject himself to the fierce authority of the worker; the ruthless world of the construction site was still the same as it had ever been. Whatever insight the young man may have into philology and philosophy, it counted for nothing in this universe of steel and cement. On the other hand I could see that the brutal, unsophisticated masses still existed – all I had to do was awaken them. And the quality of the blood seemed acceptable as well.

As I strolled onwards I scrutinised the faces around me. Overall, not much seemed to have changed. The racial measures implemented during my time in government had evidently paid off, even if they had been abandoned by successive regimes. What struck me most of all was the apparent lack of half-breeds. I could see comparatively strong oriental influences, Slavic elements in many of the countenances, but that had always been the case in Berlin. What was new, on the other hand, was a substantial Turkish–Arab element on the streets. Women with headscarves, old Turks in jackets and flat
caps. To all appearances, however, there had been no racial mixing. The Turks I saw looked like Turks; I failed to detect any enhancement through Aryan blood, even though such a development must surely be of interest to the Turk. What such a large number of Turks was doing on the streets remained a complete mystery. Especially at this time of day. They did not look like imported domestics; there was no sense that these Turks were hurrying anywhere. Rather their manner of walking suggested a certain leisureliness.

I was jolted from my musings by a ringing, the pealing of a bell, such as would usually signal the end of a school lesson. Looking about I saw that there was indeed a school building fairly close. I quickened my pace and sat on a bench opposite it. It might be recreation, an opportunity for me to examine young people en masse. As it happened, a stream of individuals did pour out of the building at that moment, but it was impossible to tell in more detail what type of school this was. I was able to make out quite a few boys, but there appeared to be no girls of the same age. Those that emerged from the building were either elementary-school pupils or seemed capable of bearing children. It may be that science had discovered a way to circumvent those bewildering years of puberty and to catapult young women straight into reproductive age. A perfectly natural concept, for a process of toughening over the years of one’s youth only makes sense for males. The Spartans of Ancient Greece would not have thought any differently. Moreover, the young women dressed in such a way as to emphasise their figure, clearly signalling their intention to find a partner with whom they could start to breed. However – and this I
found most remarkable – very few of them were German. It appeared to be a school for Turkish guest pupils. And from the first scraps of conversation I picked up, an extraordinary, even gratifying picture painted itself.