Infinite Reich: a détournement

By Patricia Kirgo

A postmodern, satirical look at the Third Reich and its aftermath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: sirin
• Release date: Mar 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9788826065373

Book preview

BEELITZ

Infinite Reich

A détournement

It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.

- Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman (1956)

20 APR 1945 - DAY OF DOOM

The war is lost. I could’ve been the flawless fatality of a political assassination or a freak accident and be knocked from the game while still on the ascendant. Becoming the object of compassionate sorrow rather than disappointed sorrow. Now it’s too late.

I am stucked into this bunker with my Deans of War Affairs: Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Naumann, Bormann, Keitel, Weidling, Burgdorf, Krebs, Baur, Mohnke, Hewel and Voss. Their masks line up above winter-weight military attire and Ritterkreuzes and half-Windsors, around a pine conference board dazzling with the glimmer of Osram lightbulbs with a crate over them.

The room is shielded from above acoustics by a concrete roof which is 3 meters thick. 8.5 metres below Chancellery’s garden. Conditions are dank. It’s my birthday. I’m 56. I am in here.

My legs are crossed ankle on ankle, my fingers are clasped into a sequence of X in the lap of my pants. I don’t offer affable smiles.

Goebbels, sitting at my left, tinkles pocket-change. He’s a skimpy man whith a hooked smirk, and the temperament-type I don’t welcome, the type who retells my slant on the story to me. I grasp something muddy about his visage, an anemic ambiguity that strikes me as unpleasant and shifty. I remember an early focus-group survey that was overlooked in the enthusiasm for a storm of military victories: almost 60% of respondents who got visual access to Goebbels’ expressions during speeches used the terms untrustworthy, unpleasant, or hard to like in describing his features’ appearance, with an ominous 71% of senior-citizen respondents comparing his face to that of Max Schreck in Murnau’s Nosferatu.

The other Deans sit, or stand, at the confine of my focus. A few minutes ago SS-Brigadeführer Ambassador Hewel handed a bunch of sheets to General Keitel across the table. Keitel spoke more or less to these pages, grinning down. He pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said: The British crossed the Rhine. The Americans crossed the Elbe. The top page was taken off and brought around neatly to the bottom of the sheaf, at intervals. The Russians crossed the Oder. They are encircling Berlin, Keitel said, one hand now pressed thoughtfully to the side of his face.

The room is quite quiet now except for the hiss of the vents.

Bormann is looking at my face oddly.

General Weidling, a stout lion, says that though Germany’s military situation is on the verge of total collapse, he can assure me and the assembled Deans that all is not lost, and that the German Army has presently in trenches no fewer than a third of the continent’s top soldiers.

As front and second-row Deans nod nervously, Keitel clears his throat: These news, he either says or reads, removing a page, are from a BBC radio broadcast.

"Mein Führer, the boys from the Jugend are waiting in the garden," says General Krebs, his cocked head showing a flaked scalp.

They are excited to be invited to Berlin’s last defense, excited to play their part in the Reich’s resistance against the Bolshevik’s hordes from the East, and the Anglo-American gangsters from the West, General Burgdorf inserts.

Just so, Wilhelm, says Krebs.

The teeth of Burgdorf’s awkward smile are radiant against his violent African sunburn. The divergency between his hand- and face-color is bizarre. He crosses his arms casually and looks at me.

Goebbels snorts and says: Of course. But most of all to have a chance to meet their Führer. His high-pitched voice has a didactic trait, as if always speaking to not-too-bright children.

Nobody else says anything. I don’t need anybody to say anything. There is a silence.

The room’s faces are turned my way, befuddled. State Secretary Naumann, who’s standing behind Krebs, crossed arms on chest, shifts his back against the wall and rebalance his weight.

I raise a smile. I swivel this way and that, addressing the countenance to everyone in the room.

Weidling considers the cage his hands have made on the table and keeps deftly modifying its architecture. The two halves of his mustache don’t match.

Göring stretches his golden watchband.

There is a new silence.

Bormann’s eyebrows jerk up. Two other Deans look to Himmler. He has moved to stand by the air vent, feeling at the back of his neck. His shadows glided over the concrete walls like Valhalla’s ghosts.

Göring strokes the forearm above his watch with his callused thumb.

Is Mein Führer all right? SS-Brigadeführer Mohnke asks. He just seemed to... well, grimace. Is Mein Führer in pain?

The Führer’s right as rain, says Goebbels, caressing the air with his flexible hand. Just a bit of let’s call it maybe a facial tic, slightly, at all the adrenaline of being here in this distressing bunker during distressing times. Then he looks to me. I do the safe thing, loosening every muscle in my face, blanking my mug. I stare thoroughly into the knot of Goebbels’ necktie. It’s not possible to account historically for the speed with which the whole Third Reich thing is spiralling totally out of control.

I hold tight to the sides of my chair.

We need frankly to chat about potential problems with the Soviet artillery, they and I, Keitel is beginning to say. Goebbels makes a joking reference to fireworks on birthday. The issues my office faces with the Red Army tanks involve the outskirts of the city, Keitel says. He glances down at the sheet of paper in the trench his arms have made. Steiner’s Army must move to the rescue of Berlin.

The facial furrows of Bormann are now ruffled in a kind of detached miff, a pout that suggests both the strategic skepticism of a skilled soldier and his effortless loyalty to the Reich.

Goebbels looks to Keitel as if puzzled. He shifts subtly in his chair. I’m sure you know and can explain… the little birdlike figure says.

In Italy, we are withdrawing north, Keitel clarifies. Troops’ morale just quite a bit closer to zero than we’re comfortable with. He’s reading directly out of the sheaf inside his arms’ ellipses.

"Yes, it’s fallen off a bit, but by fallen off I mean striking in respect to five previous years of frankly incredible," Goebbels declares.

The materialization of this fact, if not outright rubbish, Krebs continues, his delivery frank and tense, sends up a red flag of potential worry. He has a tiny shrilling voice that’s ludicrous coming out of a face this big.

"And by incredible I meant very very very impressive, as opposed to literally incredible, surely," says Goebbels, looking to Himmler looking back at him.

Krebs turns his eyes to me. "Then there is before us the matter of not the required Ardenne Offensive but nine separate defeats, each without exception being — different sheet — the adjective various evaluators used was not superlative."

I’m not sure he’s sure just what’s being implied here. One Dean at center is fiddling with his lapels as he makes sense of the alarming data.

Hewel, showing broad stretches of receding gum: "I made deliberate use of poor and second-rate in my assessment."

What the facts are saying here is that from a strictly military point of view there are security issues that Steiner needs to try to help us get rid of, Burgdorf says, head raised so he’s including the person behind him in the address somehow. A General’s first role at the war is and must be as a fighter. We must not have reason to suspect he can’t cut the mustard, no matter how much of an asset he might be on the field.

Krebs glances at the files before Keitel as if they were a plate of something rotten. Assuming these accounts are accurate mirrors of true competence in this case, he says, his hoarse somber voice in an undertone, they’re unfair to the German soldiers community. He looks to me.

My chest bumps and thuds. The usual dread of feeling inadequate is rising, and I dissipate energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, my eyes vacant.

VizeAdmiral Voss is asking SS-Gruppenführer Baur to ask Keitel whether the weather over scores would be as heavy if we had, say, von Braun’s Ultimate Weapon.

Goebbels has the hurt look of the trapped. His voice takes on an odd timbre when he’s trapped, as if he were shouting as he retreated. He stands up. The Reich is focused on the total needs of the German citizen; it has been founded by a towering intellectual figure and it’s a school of life fully staffed by a fully certified staff. Steiner can cut just about any mustard that needs cutting, he says as I listen, composed and staring. And I’m sure the boys will validate their German seed against the Soviet troops.

Himmler, with a roll to his shoulders, is moving toward Mohnke, who is shaking his head. The room’s silence is now hostile.

We’re all friends and colleagues here, Himmler says very quietly, left hand on Monhke’s left shoulder. I think it’s time to let Our Führer himself speak out. He smiles tiredly into my unfocused eyes under the hand that rubs the bridge of his nose.

This isn’t going well. I would succumb to the urge to scoot through the door ahead of them if I could know that scooting through the door is not what the men in this room would see.

Burgdorf is murmuring something to Bormann. Bormann replies something else, cupping a hand over Burgdorf’s biceps.

Sounds of typewriters and phone consoles as the door is briefly opened by Traudl Junge, then firmly shut.

Goebbels tinkles change as he pulls up his pants as he slides again into the chair I guess is still warm from his bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him well into my personal space, so that I can smell fabric-cleaner and the remains of a breath-mint.

I have been coached for this. A neutral and affectless silence. The sort of all-defensive game my father, an Austrian civil servant, used to have me play in the Hobbesian sewers down there. The best defense: let everything bounce off you; do nothing. He and his fucking bees.

Bormann: Look here, Hewel: please just explain to Our Fürher and to ourselves why we couldn’t be accused of being the worst. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, Nazis, here you are treating boys as expendable in the face of enemy fire, boys so shy and withdrawn they won’t speak up for themselves.

I can picture Hewel and Bormann sitting with their arms on their knees in the pooping posture of all athletes at rest.

The caged Osram lightbulb on the ceiling looks like a rose flush behind my closed lids. Blutrote Rosen, soll’n Dich umkosen.

It’s funny what you can recall. Our home in the suburb of Lambach, 50 km. southwest of Linz — Paula said she could remember being in the home’s backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping Mom till the garden. She remembered that in the middle of the tilling I’d come out the door and into the backyard crying, holding out something ugly in my upturned palm. She said I was around nine and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; she couldn’t make it out until our mother’d seen me and shut down the tiller, and come over to see what I was proffering. This turned out to be a large patch of mold, maybe from some dark corner of the mushy basement. The patch itself was eerie: darkly green, shiny, vaguely pilose, mottled with fungal batches of yellow, orange and red. Worse, the patch looked munched-on, and some of the disgusting stuff was smudged around my crying mouth. I’d held the patch out to Mom. She’d bent down to me, hand reaching, and suddenly had frozen. Paula remembered her face as past describing.

I ate this, I said, holding out the mold, dramatically.

Neighbors’ heads appeared in windows and over the fences, looking, as Mom began to run around and around the garden’s rectangle in a broad circle of hysteria screaming God! and Help! My son ate this! before Paula’s memory ebbed away.

I look around, nodding at nothing and say: Maybe you could all share how much you’re caring for me and my Inner Infant right now, in his pain. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.

Good God, whispers Keitel. Directed my way is horror. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white.

Don’t worry, I say. I rise from my chair. The chair recedes below me. My rising is more like the floor plummeting. I wobble like a toddler. Then when I put my foot down there’s nothing there. The floor dodges my foot and rushes up at me and knocks me in the temple. I taste floor.

Get help! cries Göring.

"It’s all right! I’m here!" a hunched Bormann is calling into my ear.

" God!"

" Help!"

There are clicks of a phone console’s buttons, shoes’ heels moving, pivoting, a sheaf of flimsy pages falling.

The door’s base opens at the left periphery: a wedge of Osram hall-light, black boots and scuffed Dassler sneakers.

Let him up! That’s Himmler.

There is nothing wrong, I say slowly to the floor.

I’m raised by the crutches of my underarms. A purple-faced Göring says: Get a grip, Wolf!

I am not what you see and hear.

Forms at the door. A young woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking.

I’m not, I say.

The disorder I’ve caused whirls all around. I’ve been half-dragged through a loose mob of staff people, whose faces are webbed with fingers, by Bormann — who appears to have thought variously that I am having a seizure (prying open my mouth to check for a throat clear of tongue), that I am somehow choking (a textbook Heimlich that left me whooping), that I am psychotically out of control (various postures and grips designed to transfer that control to him) — while about us roil Goebbels, speaking in rapid combinations of polysyllables to a trio of Deans, who variously gasp, wring hands, loosen neckties, waggle digits in each other’s face, and make pases with sheafs of now-superfluous news sheets. A couple sobs break out across the hallway.

I am rolled over supine on my bed, my face being swabbed with dusty-brown institutional paper towels by a knelt nurse. She received them from some hand out of the crowd overhead. I’m staring with all the blankness I can summon into her jowls’ small pocks, worst at the blurred jawline, of scarring from long-ago acne.

Goebbels is trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I. He’s fine, he keeps saying. Look at him, calm as can be, lying there.

Didn’t you see what happened in there? a hunched Bormann responds.

Goebbels: Excited, is all he gets, sometimes.

But the sounds he made.

Undescribable.

"Like a drowning goat. A goat, drowning in something viscous.’

His face. As if he was strangling. Burning. I believe I’ve seen a vision of hell.

He needs care.

Nor let’s not forget the gestures.

Have you called Dr. Morell?

Didn’t you see? His arms were —

"Flailing. This sort of awful reaching drumming wriggle. Waggling," the group looking briefly at someone outside my sight trying to demonstrate something.

Yes they waggled. So suddenly a bit of excited waggling’s a crime, now? Goebbels says. "Our Führer’s right side is still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life. You, sir, are in trouble. You are in trouble."

I start scrolling through an alphabetical list of the faraway places I’d rather be right now. I’m not even up to Addis Abeba when an expensive pair of Italian shoes goes by on the left and enters the room. The shoes come around and face me. Dr. Morell’s. He has an arrival routine where he skips the front entrance and comes in through the back meatus.

Goebbels to hunched Bormann again: Our Führer is fine. Yes he has some trouble with excitability in conversation. Did you once hear him try to deny that?

Dr. Morell: How’s Our Führer doing down there, nurse Flegel?

He’s barely here, his eyes are fixed and dilated. He tried to stand and was rudely assaulted by the floor, and wet his own pants.

Don’t you guys listen? I’m telling you he’s —

The crackle of Dr. Morell’s knees. Mein Führer?

I simply lie there, listening, smelling the nurse.

The same Voss I’d dismissed for years as a 2-D martinet kneels meside to squeeze my restrained hand and say Just hang in there, Mein Führer, before moving back into the staff fray at my bedroom’s door.

Dr. Morell, now standing up, his back to me, is in dispassionate mediation between Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels, who keeps stabbing skyward with his finger as if it were a bayonet, outraged that I’m being needlessly carried off to an Emergency Room against my will and interests. "Why not? The best reasoning you can contrive is why not? Why not not, then," says Goebbels’ voice, receding with outrage.

The issue whether the damaged even have interested wills is shallowly hashed out as some sort of ultra-mach fighter too high overhead to hear slices the sky from south to north.

Dr. Morell has both hands up and is patting the air to signify dispassion. He’s a big fat physician, scrubbed to an antiseptic glow.

Göring grunts in a frantic way that suggests the phoneme ü, his expression blank.

The back of Himmler’s head is that shark-belly gray-white of crew cuts so short the scalp shows through. The back of Himmler’s head doesn’t move.

I lay very still and soundless, my hands folded on my chest, as if awaiting a lily.

At the only other emergency room I have ever been in, almost exactly one year back, the chairs were designed by de Groot; three of them down the row were occupied by different people all of whom were holding empty prescription bottles and perspiring freely.

I am forced to roll my closed eyes either up or to the side to keep the red cave from bursting into flames from the lightbulb’s light. Only the gallant stabs of Goebbels’ finger are now visible, just inside my sight’s right frame. I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be sedated. I think very briefly of Mom, alphabetizing cans of soup in the cabinet over the stove. Of father’s umbrella hung by its handle from the edge of the table just inside the house’s foyer. I will play either Stalin or Roosevelt in Sunday’s final. Triumph of the Will. There are, by Kittel’s dictionay’s count, twenty archaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Sanskrit and eleven Greek.

Dr. Morell catches, looking down, my eye and asks:

Mein Fürher, what’s wrong?

26 JAN 1945 – FÜHRERBUNKER, BERLIN

Where’s Morell with his small, goldfoiled packets? Vitamultin. I sit and recollect. The bright-white clouds above Nuremberg. Two ducks spitting water. I was in my Deutscher Hof Hotel room’s living room. One window was full of light and cast a white rectangle across the floor. There was a blow fly on the window pane. I was still sitting waiting as that rectangular bar of light began to wane and was intersected by a gleaming parallelogram from a different wall’s window. The fly was dark and had a shiny green body. I kept looking over at it. Once or twice I started to get up to go over closer to look at it and kill it. I was not afraid to kill a blow fly before I knew Dr. Morell.*

Eva knows I have tried to stop. I always lasted a day, or two days, or maybe two hours, and then I’d think and decide to have some in my apartment at the New Reich Chancellery one more last time. My tongue almost bloats at just the thought. Also I considered myself creepy when it came to dope.

The blow fly disappeared into some hole in the sill.

I sit and brood and wait in my bedroom. Once or twice I look at the phone. Dr. Morell promised to come at one certain time, and it’s past that time. Finally I give in and order my valet, SS-Sturmbannführer Linge, to call his number. I don’t want Dr. Morell to know how much now I feel like I need him. He is not a charming person at all, but the guy now shots dope to a lot of Nazi leaders, thanks to me, and has an ardent following. I’m trying to remember when was the first time I’d shot any, it has been so long.

I look at the phone and the clock. I imagine windows, and foliage and gravel driveway beyond the imaginary windows.

From the street outside comes the racket of a dumpster being emptied into a land barge. Hope it’s not a Russian tank.

I have to use the bathroom.

It’s now almost three hours past the time when Dr. Morell said he would come. I always feel a sense of optimism and firm resolve after a shot. I consider getting up to check the watch on the desk but decide that obsessive checking could compromise the mood of casual self-control I need to keep up while I wait, not moving, for the doctor.

Once I met a woman at the Degenerate Art Exhibition. She talked about her small theater company’s new Wedekind festival. I had intercourse with her twice, trying to decide whether she was pretty. During both intercourses she sprayed some sort of perfume up into the air from a mister she held in her left hand as she lay beneath me making an immense medley of moans and spraying perfume up into the air, so that I felt the cold mist of it settling on my face and shoulders and was chilled and aroused. I had to have my bedding washed twice to get the smell of the perfume out. My last piece of contact have been a card she mailed that was a pastiche photo of a brown doormat with WILLKOMMEN on it and next to it a flattering publicity photo of a degenerate artist from her gallery, and between them an obscenity I assumed was directed at me in red grease pencil along the bottom, with multiple exclamation points. I never contacted her again. Now I feel tempted to call her. This line of thinking almost causes me to become angry. To ensure the self-assurance with which I sit waiting in my chair I focus my senses on my surroundings. The clicks of the watch on the desk are really composed of three smaller clicks. They mean preparation, movement, and readjustment.

I begin to grow disgusted with myself for waiting so anxiously for the promised arrival of something that has not stopped being fun. I know why I like it. It makes my mouth dry and my eyes dry and red and my face sag, and I hate it when my face sags, it is as if all the integrity of all the muscles in my face is eroded by dope; but the dope makes my thoughts jut out crazily in jagged directions and makes me stare raptly like a child at Hollywood’s entertainment. I like comedy in which a lot of things crashes into each other, which I’m sure an unpleasant-fact specialist like Freud would point out has implications that are not good.

The insect on the sill sat inside its industrial green case with an immobility that seemed like the gathering of a force. No insect is now visible anywhere.

I walk toward the bathroom, past Eve’s room, to use the bathroom, making it a point to avoid looking to the left at the telephone console on its lacquer workstation in my office.

In the bathroom my throat suddenly closes and I weep hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stops abruptly and I can’t get it to start again.

Where is the doctor who said he’d come.

I pull my necktie down smooth while I gather my intellect, will, self-knowledge, and conviction. I decide that I want to do dope forever and ever. Dope doesn’t scare me and it makes me unafraid of dope and everything else. It has never stopped being a release or relief or fun. I’ll use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so pleasant, so fullfilling and pleasant, that my behavior will be henceforward modified. I’ll be like a superman forever. I predict that nurse Flegel, when she’ll see the stunning outcome, would begin to shoot dope herself with me, hang out, hole up, listen to some of my impressive collection of Enrico Caruso recordings, and probably have intercourse. She is pretty in a faded withered Münich way that makes her look sexy. I have never once had actual intercourse on dope. Frankly, the idea attracts me. Two superhumans bumping at each other, kissing, my thoughts twisting around on themselves like snakes while I buck and snort above her. The thought is captivating. I’ll tell her not to let the door hit her on the butt on the way out. I’ll say ass instead of butt. I’ll be so rude and unpleasant to her that the memory of my lack of basic decency and of her tight aroused face would be a further incentive, in the future, to call her and repeat the course of action I have now commit myself to. I’ve no shame at what she might perceive as my slimy conduct toward her. It’s not even not shame. More like being comfortable at the thought of it. I feel she likes me. It’s more of an impression I convey and nurture and allow to gather its own life and force. I’ll doubtless call her later, and she’ll drive away in her rusty unmuffled car, and I’ll have my schedule changed to one that suggests an emergency departure from town, and we’ll share a moist kiss, and she’ll say she can feel my heart pounding right through my military coat, and we’ll not be seen for three days, and I’ll ignore over two hundred dozen messages and protocols expressing concern over my emergency.

Back in my bedroom, I turn on the radio. Reading while waiting for dope is out of the question. I considered masturbating but didn’t. I didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watched as it floated away.

I’m unable to stay with any one station for more than a few seconds. The moment I recognize what exactly is on one station I have a strong anxious feeling that there is something more entertaining on another station and that I’m potentially missing it; then I realize that I have plenty of time to enjoy all the stations, and that the feeling of panic over missing something makes no sense.

I scan stations for some time. The telephone sounds during this interval of scanning. I’m up and move back out toward it before the first ring is completed, flooded with excitement and relief, but it’s only Göring calling, and when I hear the voice that is not the doctor who had promised to bring what I committed to enjoy forever I’m almost sick with disappointment, with a great deal of mistaken adrenaline now buzzing in my system, and I get off the line with Göring to clear the line and keep it available for the doctor so fast that I’m sure Göring perceived me as either angry with him or just plain rude. Who cares.

It is now over four hours since the time the doctor committed to come. I sit on the edge of my bed like the hull of a vehicle from which the engine had been for the moment removed.

The light through the window was coming at an angle more and more oblique. The light through the southwest window was straight and yellowing.

At this precise time the door’s buzzer sounds, so loud and abrupt it sounds yanked through a big bullhorn into the gray silence I sit in, waiting, with just one thought in my head.

* Dr. Morell gave Hitler a variety of drugs and tonics: amphetamines and methamphetamine (crystal meth); barbiturate and bromides to help him sleep, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking him up in medias res for weeks and grinding him down and causing some slight deterioration in performance; caffeine; cocaine; oxycodone; morphine; testosterone; and synthetic alcaloids, which worked like a charm.

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, Hitler is standing inside an inverted glass. The inverted glass is the size of a cage or small jail cell, but it’s still recognizably a bathroom-type tumbler, as if for gargling or post-brushing swishing, only huge and upside-down, on the floor, with him inside. The tumbler is like a prop or display; it’s the sort of thing that would have to be made special. Its glass is green and its bottom over his head is pebbled and the light inside is the watery dancing green of extreme ocean depths. The glass is too thick to break or to kick his way out, and it feels like he may have possibly broken the leg’s foot already trying. There are some green and distorted faces through the glass’s side’s steam. The face at eye-level belongs to the latest Subject, a dexterous and adoring Swiss hand-model. She stands looking at him, her arms crossed, seeming to float at about waist-level. The Subject behind the glass meets Hitler’s eye steadily but doesn’t acknowledge him or anything he shouts. Every few seconds Hitler wipes the steam of his breath away from the thick glass to see what the face is doing. His foot really is hurt, and the remains of whatever has made him fall asleep so hard really are making him sick to his stomach, and in sum this experience is pretty clearly not one of his bad dreams, but Hitler is in deep denial about its being a dream. Plus the bizarre anxiety of not being able to get the adoring Subject to acknowledge anything he says through the glass.

15 APR 1945 - VORBUNKER

HELGA: In school, my friend Willi Hubner fell unlikely in love with Holdine. The love was unlikely because if ever a boy looked like Göring or something like that, it was Willi. Holdine is the kind of pretty figure who glides through the school corridors of every boy’s dreamscape. Hair that a teacher described as flaxen ; a body which the angel of puberty had visited and kissed; legs which not even tennis shoes could make unserious. Pelvically twisting, amply busted, shy, she is given to movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of forehead which drove Willi up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and espadrilles . Holdine. She chews gum, her dear face now a diffident mask of attitude. Last time I saw him, Willi was practicing attitude on me who’d taken him in. For a while life was more or less one big party.

SEPT 1938 - REICHSPARTEITAG GROSSDEUTSCHLAND, NUREMBERG

Morning is the soul’s night. The day’s best time, psychically.

- Goebbels’ Memo to the Führer, #71

Most mornings I wake up soaked, lying on my back with my legs stretched out and my arms stretching up by my head, facing that kind of psychic clarity where you’re dreading the inevitability of your death.

In Nuremberg with the Party, I wake up alone at 0930h. amid a damp scent of Chypre and on the other side’s dented pillow a note with phone number in a loopy schoolgirlish hand. There’s also Chypre on the note. My side of the bed is soaked.

The warm light through the windows tightens my scalp. I sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, where I take a shit and think about the day ahead. Then I call Wilhelm. He brings the Beobachter and breakfast by Otto: honey-toast, cheesecake, steaming coffee. He takes the tray to an earth-tones table next to the sunny windows, then does his noiseless gliding out.

I sit at the table in dumb animal pain. My mustache is sweaty and itchy.

The room’s furniture reminds me of my home in Obersalzberg. In November Homes and Gardens will publish a story on it. They wrote my house is bright and airy, says Goebbels. It’s good advertising, and it’ll counteracts the sarcastic portrait Life magazine is about to publish in October. And now Goebbels pressures me to cooperate with some sort of insipid-type personality-profile series of interviews with some profiler from Time magazine, with personal backgroundish questions to be answered in some blandly PR-sincere way, the stressing thought of which now drives me to start reading the note from last night’s Subject while I eat the cheesecake. The note’s interesting thing is that every single circle — o’s, d’s, p’s — is darkened in, while the i’s are dotted not with circles but with tiny little hearts, which are not darkened in. The cheesecake is mainly an excuse for the quark cheese and it’s delicious. I use my right arm to eat and drink. My left arm holds the note.

A small breeze make the trees along the hotel’s stone walls rustle, and brown leaves detach and spiral down. Nature here is benevolent and sharp. A week ago at Bormann’s Obersalzberg chalet I was sitting in the radiant day light by the pool with my legs in the water. Watching the water around the leg. And out of nowhere a bird all of a sudden falls into the pool. With a flat plop. Out of nowhere. Out of the wide empty sky. Maybe a coronary or something. The bird landed dead in the pool, right by my legs. I brought my sunglasses down onto the bridge of my nose with a finger and looked at it. It was a a distinguished kind of bird. A predator. I just sat there squeezing the ball, looking at the bird, without a conscious thought in my head. Today, waking up, it seems like a bad sign, though.

I always gets the shower so hot it’s to where I can just barely stand it. The hotel’s whole bathroom is done in a kind of minty yellow tile I like. A roach comes out of the bathroom drains. Really huge. Armored-vehicle-type bug. Totally black, shiny, the works. And fearless: I turn on the water and he doesn’t run for his life. I take a glass tumbler and when he reaches the bathroom’s floor I put the glass down over it, trapping it. After a few hours the glass will be all steamed up and the roach asphyxiated messlessly.

Sometimes I dream spider-and-heights nightmares which give me the creeps. It takes sometimes three coffees and two showers and sometimes a brisk walk to loosen the grip on my soul’s throat, and these post-dream mornings are even worse if I wake unalone, if the previous night’s Subject is still there, wanting to cuddle and spoon, making little noises, asking what exactly is the story with the foggy inverted tumbler on the bathroom floor, commenting on my night-sweats. The bad dreams have gotten worse since I fled my hometown, long ago, as an unhappy youngster, especially when the day is not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then going to sleep again at the end of it is like falling off something tall. As a nod to my unhappy youth, all the nightmares seem to open briefly with me and my father in some sort of competitive situation which usually ends with his disconnected head. The one I had last night abruptly dissolved to the blank dark rose color of my eyes closed against bright light. Subject's note cheerfully indicates that at some point last night I stiff-armed her head. The amputation of Dad’s head from the rest of Dad appeared in the dream to be clean and surgically neat: there was no evidence of a stump or any kind of nubbin of neck, even, and it was as if the base of the head had been sealed, so that his head was a ball, a globe with a face.

The Subject with the Chypre scent and the hearts over i’s is an Opera singer with two kids and penchants for jewelry, chocolate, and German dictators. Not real bright — she doesn’t know anything about the time of Germany’s deepest humiliation, to give you an idea. She is more or less hopeless as an institutional functioning unit, but, on the up-side, I could give her existence some sort of meaning by fucking her very carefully. Yesterday she mailed her children expensive toys.

I shave upward, with south-to-north strokes, as I was taught.

And then the matter of the dead bird, out of nowhere.

23 APR 1945- BERCHTESGADEN

Here’s Göring, age fiftytwo, getting covertly high in his Berchtesgaden villa’s bunker. It’s the sad interval between bad news from Berlin. Göring is by himself down here and nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing.

Göring likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high. A hundred 30mgs paracodeine tablets hit has on him a very beautiful dreamy effect. He enjoys the highs listening to his favourite music and relaxing. The bunker is underground and accessible only by tunnel. Nazi chiefs’ Berchetsgaden villas are abundantly, embranchingly tunnelled. This is by design.

As far as Göring knows, colleagues Hitler, Goebbels, Heinrich The Darkness Himmler, and possibly Hess, and remotely possibly Heydrich, and obviously Dr. Morell, all know Göring gets regularly covertly high. It’s also not impossible that his wife Emmy knows, actually; and of course the unpleasant Bormann always has suspicions of all kinds. And Göring’s brother Albert knows a thing or two. But that’s it, in terms of public knowledge. Albert, mysteriously, even long-distance, seems to know more than he’s coming right out and saying, unless Hermann’s reading more into some of the phone-comments than are there, for example when Albert says Hermann looks like a cube that has swallowed a ball too big for its stomach.

Though Hitler is known to get high also, Göring has never actually gotten actively high with him.

Göring’s mother, Mrs. Franziska Tiefenbrunn, and her lover for fifteen years, Dr. Hermann Epenstein, a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman, both know Hermann drinks alcohol sometimes, like on weekend nights at Hitler’s Great Room gatherings (news clips, movies, etc.) and with Ritter von Greim or maybe Stumpff at the Luftwaffe club in Berlin. Mrs. Franziska Tiefenbrunn isn’t crazy about the idea of Hermann drinking, mostly because of the way his father had drunk in Africa; but Hermann’s academic precocity, and especially his late competitive success on the Nazi circuit, make it clear that he’s able to handle whatever modest amounts she’s pretty sure he consumes — there’s no way someone can seriously abuse a substance and perform at top scholarly and military levels, a SS medical authority, Dr. Lonauer, assures her, especially the high-level-military part — and Franziska feels it’s important that a concerned parent knows when to let go somewhat and let the one high-functioning of her three sons make his own possible mistakes and learn from his own experience, no matter how much the secret worry about mistakes tears her intestines out. Having a few glasses of beer every so often makes his day less boring and is something worth looking forward to, this is what she thinks. And ultimately, she’s told Dr. Lonauer, she’d rather have Hermann abide in the security of the knowledge that his mother trusts him, that she’s trusting and supportive and doesn’t judge or wring her fine hands over his having for instance a glass of ale with friends every now and again,