The History of History (32 page)

“Now finally, at this late date, in the seventies, my brother talked openly about the boy’s Jewish background, his strange position in the HJ, that he died instantly when he fell. But of course, he neglected to mention his own part in the boy’s death.

“But still, after he gave his introduction, there would come a hush in the hall, an expectancy—a feeling of suspense and concentration. During the screening, the students’ faces were flushed and their eyes bright and slightly wet—one could not help but gain the impression that they
were, well—that they were achieving release from it—from watching the boy die.

“In the months after these screenings in the U.S. there was a change in my brother. He didn’t laugh all the time as he had before; he completely lost touch with his son, who was still in the GDR with his mother. He confessed as much to me on the phone, and oddly enough, he seemed to listen when I spoke, which he had never done before. Or maybe he was merely distracted, so it seemed as if he were listening.” The doctor drummed her fingers on the desk, her blank eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Then he moved back to Germany without warning, breaking a film contract. He showed the footage to a German audience, this time at the Freie Universität here in West Berlin, and I attended this screening, and I saw the hungry, excited look in the eyes of the young people here too, just as my brother had described it. What I remember most vividly is that he brought his cigarettes into the lecture hall with him. Even then, this was against regulations. He smoked them uninterruptedly during the screening and discussion afterward, dragging long and hard at each contact with the lips, his eyes protruding out of his well-formed skull with intense concentration. As we left the hall he continued to smoke and afterward in the car. He was deeply elated. He told me excitedly he thought the film was possibly the greatest thing he had ever done. He gave a little laugh. Then he added: ‘Perhaps it’s the greatest thing anyone has ever done.’ He continued to show the film all around the country for a few more years, usually under the aegis of ‘anti-fascism’—my understanding is that the film was read by the young people as an extraordinary artifact. I believe the idea was that they watched the film with analytical minds, taking apart the symbolism, considering it as a little piece of flotsam in the debate over the links between German romanticism and fascism. Several essays were published about it in very well-regarded journals. But that did not quite explain the strength of the crowds that turned up in the auditoriums where it was shown.

“Over time, my brother became maniacal. We fell out of contact—one year, two, three—I lost count. Then, out of nowhere, I received news that he was dead. He killed himself. It happened while he was abroad, visiting his East German son, who had defected to the States by then—a disastrous visit, obviously. All this, just as his reputation was enjoying a softer chapter.

“He left behind an elliptical, highly out-of-character suicide note,
which I have always assumed he pieced together from other people’s writings—it was plagiarized, I believe, mostly from the letters he received from the university students, but it was unsettling to me nonetheless. It ran to forty-five pages. He wrote, among other things: ‘I can no longer live with my love of the sublime. What are we, what sort of animal is man, that even our elite feeds off the slaughter of the most beautiful among us to satiate its aesthetic needs?’

“He went on to defend himself and his followers, drawing a parallel between Christianity—a religion built around the gruesome crucifixion of the ‘lamb of God’—and the religiosity surrounding the Holocaust, which rests on the invocation of the gruesome murder of the innocent.”

The doctor put her hands down on the desk. She was quiet.

Margaret could not breathe. The doctor was not going to continue. Margaret colored. Sweat raced down her nose. “But that’s ridiculous. There’s no connection between the crucifixion and the Holocaust.”

The doctor remained silent.

“Your brother, he was jumping on the bandwagon,” Margaret said. “Our culture—no—Christianity, the way it’s become, it doesn’t get a spiritual reward from human sacrifice—not as it’s practiced now.” Margaret coughed. The lights were spinning. She felt sick. “If there was interest in that movie,” she said, making a grab at an authoritative tone, “it was because people crave sensation, and the spectacle of the old Nazis is something morbid that everyone wants to see.” She sat up straighter, trying to catch her breath, thinking of her customers wandering around Sachsenhausen and her own loud voice ringing against its walls.

“But you,” she went on after a moment. The doctor wasn’t responding; she had dropped her head forward. “You—how could you show this movie to me?” Margaret said. “It’s nothing but a snuff film. You called it ‘the most meaningful thing ever made,’ wasn’t that it?” Margaret was stretching her neck up, swallowing the lump in her throat. “You were trying to hypnotize me.” She left off. Her temples jounced. She found she wanted to take the tiny old woman and shake her by her shoulders until the gigantic head fell off and rolled across the floor.

And then something occurred to her. Why was the doctor casting the whole thing in such an atrocious light? Why was she making Margaret feel such shame? Margaret burst out: “But what about it? What would be the problem if the crucifixion and the Holocaust were understood the same way? Christianity,” Margaret stuttered, “is a path of the
spirit. Why can’t the study of the Holocaust help the world in the same way—a spiritual path—if it can be that. If it can be that, then why not?” Her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.

But the doctor came back to life and laughed. “You mean, if the sadistic torture and murder of an innocent prophet can lead via proxy sacrifice to cathartic cleansing of guilt in third parties even two thousand years hence, then why can’t the more recent murder of six million European Jews have exactly the same effect? Remember what we are talking about, my dear: the death of
Jews
at the hands of those claiming to be redeemed by the crucifixion of a Jew. And now you want the killing of six million more to nourish the spiritual life of future generations, is that it?” The doctor tapped her fingers on the desk.

Margaret pulled her hands over her ears, and her voice, when she spoke, came out in puffs. “You’ve made this into a terrible thing. I know why you showed me the film. I see what you were driving at all along: you were accusing me. You think I am one of those young people in the university, slavering over the hallucination of the beautiful sacrifice. That’s why you showed me the film at the beginning—to expose me as a cannibal,” and the lights blinked before her eyes like strobes, and she was certain there were birds in the potted tree at her side.

Dr. Arabscheilis put her hands palm-down on the desk. She turned toward Margaret with her giant, bespectacled, golf-ball eyes.

“My dear, I genuinely had not thought of that,” she said. “But perhaps,” she went on, taking up a pen from the desk and making a note to herself on a pad of paper, “perhaps you
are
a cannibal. Think of what direction you are headed, comrade. Before his breakdown, when he was making
Heimat
films, my brother’s back-thinking, so proud and so corrupt, was largely aimed, like everyone else’s, like
yours
, my pet, at aestheticizing unbearable memory. Not
an
esthetizing—
aestheticizing
. The difference is everything.” The doctor, with her white eyes, stared in Margaret’s direction for several long seconds. “Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? The murder of the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century is
only
interesting to people for whom it is
not
unbearable. Interest in terrible things is always a symptom of detachment.”

Margaret’s face was pale. She did not speak. Then she said hoarsely, “But, Doctor, I
do
think it’s unbearable.”

“Precisely! You
think
it’s unbearable, and that is important for
your uses of it, and yet it is not unbearable to you, else you wouldn’t think of it.”

The doctor waited for Margaret to reply, but Margaret was silent, twisting in her chair. She coughed painfully.

“You’re not well, are you,” the doctor said.

“I feel sick.”

“I think you’ve gone a bit off. But this is natural. The remnants of an ethical system are holding you back from adopting your notion of beauty, corrupt as it is. And a sense of beauty, my pet, to each his own, is the weir that staunches the flow of madness.”

Margaret was silent. She pulled fitfully at the pills on her violet sweater.

The doctor spoke again. “When you first came here, I thought that moving your own life into the space directly in front of your eyes would just be a matter of brightening up your mind. I did not realize to what degree you’ve allowed other people’s lives to hijack your own.”

“But, Doctor, I’ve been trying to tell you that all along. I said it before. I’d like a reversal. I don’t want—whatever this is—I don’t want to do it any longer. Whatever you began in me, I don’t want to continue.” Margaret raised her voice further. “And I’m not who you think I am. You call me Täubner every single time, but all along I’ve been someone else.” She began to rummage in her bag. “Look, here is my passport”—and Margaret took it out and pushed it across the desk. “Get your magnifying glass and read it,” she cried. “Read it! Taub!”

The woman made no move. Her shoulders were slack and her hands still. The passport dropped heavily on the table. “Take your passport? Idiot child!” she whispered. “If only I could get my hands on that jezebel of a mother you have. You’re not entirely a Täubner, as we know well.”

“What?” Margaret looked at the doctor.

“And I did not show you the film because I thought you were like the youth at the university, nor to make you feel yourself any sort of cannibal. On the contrary, my dear, my reasons were much more prosaic. I knew you had already seen it. I thought it would remind you of our common past.”

“Our common past?”

“Yes.”

Margaret sat down quickly. She looked at the doctor. She began to feel as though she really would be sick after all. Her mouth watered and her eyes too, then her ears tingled and the tips of her fingers went
to sleep and her stomach lifted. She was embarrassed, her hair was cold with sweat.

She was forced to run out of the room, but she only made it into the hall, where an extravagant wave of weakness overcame her.

“Abandon reading!” the doctor yelled. “Go directly to the source. Go and meet the killers! See if they still call to you, when you see them in their stinking flesh!” The doctor’s voice was getting hoarse, “And if you can find a way to join the victims without gassing yourself, then go to them too! Go as close as you can!”

Margaret was already in the WC, hanging her head. After a few moments, the nurse receptionist appeared at the open door behind her. She did not enter. She looked at Margaret with wide eyes.

Walking through the waiting room, Margaret was still queasy. It was the heat of the place, she decided. It was the heat of the place that had made her sick.

Stepping out into the cold city, she breathed the pricking air, and her nausea abated.

Margaret did not
want to think about the doctor’s suggestion of a “common past.” Indeed, she pushed the Taub-Täubner opposition out of her mind entirely.

What resounded in her beseechingly, however, in the hours after she got home, was the idea that she had no right to her interest. She was a cannibal licking the bones of the past clean of flesh—she told herself this, as if it had not been the doctor’s idea, but her own.

M
argaret still smarted from the blow of the doctor’s lurid insinuations the next day. But it cannot be said that the following catastrophe was in any way related to her grief.

She was giving a very early morning tour of the city’s main attractions. Not quick to introduce himself, like a sly, lone wolf, running along behind and beside her, was a dedicated type: a young German academic. This was odd for two reasons. The first was that Germans almost never came along on the English-language tours. The second was that this German man knew a great deal more about German history than Margaret did. He was writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century Italian battle paintings: “panoramics,” he told her. But walking around Berlin, he slowly exposed the many years of his youth dedicated to German military history, and this included everything to do with both the old Prussian capital and the Third Reich. He had a wide, calf-like face, listened to her with an earnest, energetic ear. He was very tall, with a pronounced version of what some people call
O
-legs, over which he wore high-waisted black jeans. A little kepi from the First World War sat on his head. “Please call me Philipp,” he said to her, in excessively enunciated English.

Margaret saw quite soon that this man was one of the perennially shut-out of this world, who are so often the most knowledgeable and the most disciplined, but look unfairly ridiculous when they go out in society because they do not know anything about matters of the heart.

She moved the group down that street in central Berlin that was once called Hermann-Göring-Strasse. She felt ill at ease and exposed. The visit to the doctor had left Margaret’s self-esteem in ruins, and now here was this officious man—his face thrumming like a pocket calculator, checking and rechecking the accuracy of her tour.

So today Margaret did not go into any trance at all and even made an effort not to lie.

They came to the large raked-earth building site, where the new Holocaust memorial was under construction.

The monument was almost finished now, and only a few of the concrete slabs had yet to be installed, mostly down at the southern end. The rest, in their thousands, heaved up into the morning light.

Margaret frowned, looking backward into the light from the east. The monument was equal parts Black Forest and English garden maze, cast in shades of ash, slate, and metallic. The highest blocks rose up and caught the light and glowed white like chimneys. Margaret, squinting, caught sight of a little cat sitting on top of one of the concrete monoliths, crouching in wait. But she looked again and it seemed as if it were only the white morning sun cresting a slab. She moved along the flank; the group followed. They came abreast of each long aisle, trapezoids appeared, flattened, and then disappeared as the perspective changed, each long, empty aisle a reminder of emptiness to come. It made for a visual addiction, and Margaret could hardly tear her gaze away.