I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

It should by now be apparent that I’m no fan of mere brutality. Brutality is to evil what a Big Mac is to hunger: it gets a job done, it accomplishes something – but utterly without beauty. There is a job to be done, obviously. Big Macs from Moscow to Manhattan address hunger’s pragmatic agenda even if they leave the demands of its aesthetic untouched. I do require a certain quota of broken faces and crippled minds; there are targets. But what I’m looking for – what I’m really looking for – is the marriage of brutality to the higher human faculties: imagination, intellect, practical reasoning, aesthetic sense – and this pearl is found in but few oysters.

Consider, for example, my work in the thirties and forties. I’m not just talking about the boom, the record profits, the staggering numerical achievement (oh my brothers how the dark flowers bloomed in Hell, how we wallowed in blossom, how the odour dizzied us, how we swooned); nor am I talking merely of the clean lines of the System, nor the inspirational role of the mob. I’m talking, dear reader, of the sublime fusion of order and destruction. Like most alchemical grails it wasn’t sought or won without risk and hardship. (Speaking of grails, shall I tell you where the Holy Grail is? You’d never believe it. Actually I’ll save it for later. Some incentive for you to hang in there through the grizzly bits . . .) My boy Himmler spent a great deal of time worrying – about all sorts of nonsense (his bowels, whether he was undermined by his spectacles, whether his face really resembled – as an old school enemy had cruelly claimed – a brainless onion) but chiefly about the excruciating difficulty of torturing and murdering millions of people without damaging one’s humanity . . .

Tonight Heinrich addresses an assembly of SS brass in Berlin. He has his speech prepared, but the cases of Kreiger and Hoffman won’t leave him alone. The cases of Kreiger and Hoffman are telling Heinrich that the speech as it is won’t do. He’s drafting an addendum mentally, now, combing his hair at the mirror of his mistress’s bathroom. The bathroom, like the rest of the grand, cavernous house, used to belong to someone else . . . Gentlemen, there is, in addition . . . no. In addition, gentlemen, I must draw your attention – no. There is no getting away, gentlemen, from the fact that – no. ‘The fact that’ is always redundant. If you feel yourself to be in possession of a fact, then state it. Gentlemen, there is something I would like you to consider. I mean of course – but the addendum falters at the intrusion of a slight colonic spasm and a sequence of soundless farts escaping in malodorous ellipsis that bring tears of something – humility, relief, joy – to the Reichsführer’s eyes. He must begin again with his hair. It’s not widely known that our Heinrich suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder, that actions as mundane as combing his hair were hung around with curious methods and rituals. The floor of the bathroom is tiled in pale blue with blinding white grouting. He wonders about the workman who laid them, where he is now, whether he’s alive, whether he was a Jew. What I mean, gentlemen, is that there is a serious risk of – no. Fucking concentrate. But Kreiger and Hoffman won’t let him. Scylla and Charybdis, Kreiger and Hoffman. No point in mentioning them by name, obviously, but . . . Perhaps through the Scylla and Charybdis motif – though half that lot won’t even – he is thinning, he knows. Under the overgenerous light (the bathroom is big enough for a small chandelier) the pink of his scalp shows through. It is a great, dark, burden, gentlemen, and it is for us – it is for me – I will bear this burden . . . Remembering her soaping his hair in the bath, sculpting it into a single tuft like the stem of an acorn almost makes him laugh. He’s been finding in laughter of late hidden precipices, sudden sheer drops into the conclusion that he’s lost his mind. Laughter – genuine laughter, not the political variety – has of late had him slithering down unexpected tilts, arms windmilling, only to grab a halt at some vertiginous edge beyond which emptiness offers him the pitch into madness as his own final solution. So he doesn’t laugh genuinely of late. Instead he laughs strategically, loudly, letting each metallic ejaculation form its brilliant armour around him.

It’s a great difficulty for the Reichsfiihrer to ponder the wording of the warning Kreiger and Hoffman have made plain, without now, at this very moment, mentally re-living the two cases themselves.

Gerd Kreiger had done eight months at Buchenwald. (Marcus Hoffman had been there only three.) In December he’d been granted leave to attend his father’s funeral in Leipzig. Gerd hadn’t been close to his father (perhaps that, thinks Heinrich . . .?) and it was no secret among his colleagues in the camp that this two-day sojourn was cherished not as an opportunity for the formal expression of grief, but as a chance for a highly informal expression of lust: fortyeight hours in Leipzig would take him (once the onerous business with the old man’s corpse was concluded) into the arms of his fiancée, the tediously rhapsodized Wilhomena Meyer, or, as both she and Gerd preferred, Willie.

Heinrich, against his better judgement (he suspects not sentimentality, exactly, but some kind of weakness) has photographs of both Gerd and Willie (but not of Marcus) in the top drawer of his desk. Gerd is in uniform facing the camera: monstrously high cheekbones and giant grey eyes, a fulllipped mouth and a slicked-back widow’s peak so blond it shows up white in the print. (Just the sort of hair Heinrich himself would prefer.) Not quite the ideal – there’s a lopsidedness to the face as a whole, as if its components have been shaken by something and not come into correct realignment – but certainly nothing to arouse suspicion.

In the other photograph, Willie Meyer, Gerd’s intended, is bright-faced with dark eyes and her coppery hair wound up in an elaborate chignon. Her cheeks are on the heavy side, as is her jaw, and Heinrich suspects she would have thickened undesirably with age, but her throat is a pearly column of some loveliness, and you can see there’s a pair of formidable Teutonic Titten beneath the close-fitting blouse. The photograph shows her at twenty-two, seated at a piano but not playing, clutching, rather, her framed Certificate of Excellence from one of Leipzig’s private colleges of music. She looks genuinely happy, relieved, shyly proud of herself. Whenever the Reichsführer places their images side by side on the varnished oak of his desk he feels sure they would have had a good, stodgy, tolerably unhappy marriage and four or five clumsy children. He feels sure everything would have been all right.

Afterwards, he had sent officers to interview Gerd and Marcus’s crew at Buchenwald. A good poker player, they’d said of Kreiger. A practical joker, of Hoffman. The prisoners? What’s to say about that? They felt as we all do. It’s a headache, you know, a constant headache. Jews, Jews, Jews, fucking endless shivering Jews. Kreiger used to complain the whole thing was going too slowly, maybe that they were coming out of the ground at night like mushrooms! What? No, no, of course not. What’s this all about anyway?

The bathroom radiator shudders and clanks. Difficult to do this in your head, Heinrich thinks. Heated bathrooms are the hallmarks of . . . The point I want to bring to your attention, gentlemen, is that our destiny places us on a knife-edge . . . Yes but then you lose the Scylla and Charybdis image. They won’t even be paying attention, half of them. Too many of them don’t realise even now what we’re . . . what we . . .

Gerd got his night alone with Willie. It was a big night for both of them. A big night for Willie because she knew her mother didn’t believe her story of staying at Lisle’s, and though she didn’t quite wink at her daughter, there was a curious movement at the corners of her mouth that indicated some new and shocking female complicity, brought on by the war, Willie thought, with feelings of liberation and betrayal queasily mixed. (It must be said here that it was by no means a small night for Marcus Hoffman, either, since round about the time Gerd and Willie were getting down to business, young Marcus was putting the pistol in his mouth, pulling the trigger, and blowing most of his brain out of the top of his head.) A big night for Gerd, because sometime shortly after entering her (standard issue condom) he stabbed Willie through the stomach with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors that were lying on the bedside table. Then he stabbed her through the kidneys, then the lower bowel, then the heart. Then he had a bath. Then he dressed. Then he went out to a nearby café and had a drink. He was still there six hours later when the Gestapo came to arrest him.

Heinrich demanded the transcripts.

I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now so I’ll tell you. There was a woman in the camp. These things don’t matter to me now so what do I care? I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know about Marcus. He came in on us. I don’t know if it had ever occurred to him before. It soon did! She worked up in the kitchens most of the time, but sometimes I saw her. I’ll tell you, it’s a strange thing, sergeant, but I knew, you know, that it would be a defilement to let her touch me, to touch her . . . but it’s difficult to explain. What does it matter me saying this now? A strange thing. Really a strange thing. My mother took me to see my grandfather one time in Weimar, and he had a huge turd in his pocket, his own turd, you know? The nurse said it was common in the old. Not that I’m old. Touching something like . . . whereas you know . . . What? Yes. You know I can say these things now because it doesn’t matter. And what can it matter to Marcus, that idiot? They ran short of fuel up at the house and she came down to our shed. Franz was on duty and Dieter was playing solitaire – but they didn’t see her, you know. I went by myself. Marcus only came in by chance, I think. It was all very simple. The odd thing was neither of us said a word. What can I tell you? I remember her body was cold. She didn’t do anything, just let me move her arms and legs where I wanted. What is there to say? She felt like clay. Bits of clay from my old school in Leipzig, but a bit harder. She made barely a sound even when I stuck her. Couldn’t believe I got away with it. Well, I guess I didn’t, did I? Heh-heh! I don’t think the commandant believed a word. But what did he care? She never made a sound. Afterwards, I remember Marcus lifting up her arm and letting it flop back down. It had become dislocated – I don’t know how, she didn’t put up any kind of fight. Lifting it up and flopping it down. It was like he had a fixation or something. If you ask me he should never have been in the camp in the first place. No backbone.

Willie betrayed me, you see. When I touched her, she felt just like the Jew in the woodshed. Just like clay. I kept trying but I couldn’t feel any difference. Somehow I couldn’t stop myself. It seemed not to matter whether I did it or not. When I did do it, I felt a great calm peace all over me, you know, like when you’ve had a fever and then you wake in the morning and know that it’s gone, like magic . . .

Heinrich has been to see Gerd Kreiger in his cell. Kreiger read a two-week old newspaper. Didn’t bother saluting. Didn’t bother standing up. The cell was clean, but with an unpleasant smell, compressed and feral, as of a furiously alive rodent in a box no bigger than its body. Heinrich had insisted on going in alone. The bodyguard would have pistol-whipped Kreiger for his insolence – but how would that have helped? (Beyond, obviously, the minute addition to the wildly sculpted mass of the Reichsführer’s ego; astonishing, given the weight of power that already attended him, that Heinrich still noticed each new particle of another’s fear that increased it. He marvelled at it somewhat himself.) He went with the intention of questioning Kreiger, but found, when confronted with the youth’s recumbent body and mildly enquiring face, that he could not think of what to ask him. So the two had regarded each other in silence for a few moments, then the Reichsführer had turned on his heel and left.

There is also, gentlemen, a very grave matter about which I must speak. I mean of course –

Hoffman’s suicide bothers Heinrich, if possible, more than Kreiger’s murder, stirring up not just fear, but contempt. (One of the downsides of my work with the Nazi Party was that its evils threatened perpetually to become internecine, the brilliant by-products endangering the process as a whole. I felt like the parent of a gifted but hyperactive child: take your eye off it at the wrong moment – Stalingrad ’43, for example – and there was no calculating the damage it could do to itself.) He doesn’t know the cause of it, Hoffman’s suicide. He doesn’t know the particulars. (I do, obviously. I was there, believe it or not, on a flying visit, touching up details, checking loose threads, tensions, weights, contrasts – no rest for the wicked and whatnot.) Heinrich doesn’t know pins and needles killed Marcus Hoffman. An off-duty nap in his bunk. His left arm resting at an odd angle under his head. A cut-off blood flow. Pins and needles. He woke, as you do, with the sense that his arm was by his side, in some deadening pain – only to find, on investigation in the dark, as you do, that his arm wasn’t by his side at all, but in fact strangely elevated and seemingly possessed of a will of its own.

It was just that it had never happened to him before. It was just that he’d never touched his arm and not felt himself touching it. Manhandling it, in tingling increments, back to where it belonged, he was reminded of the Jew in the woodshed. Her arm had felt . . . Her arm . . .

Well. It’s a slippery slide, the imagination. Once you set off there’s no telling where you’ll end up.

Heinrich stands in front of the bathroom mirror washing his hands, scrupulously. The soap is good, and lathers as if with hyperenthusiasm. He is not satisfied with his hair. But against the odds – perhaps, perversely, because he has allowed his anxiety to take him through the two cases, the illuminated fear less potent than the one that still lurks in the dark – his addendum is finally starting to flow:

I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written . . . It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must . . . cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear . . .

Yet still it bothers him, later that night under the lights and the blood red banner with the stage wings like two dark beckonings into eternity, that the after-image of languid Kreiger and Hoffman’s hungry ghost are slipping away from him, their meaning, these unique bookends to the danger . . . and on the run, ad libitum, so to speak, he takes a risky detour from his belaboured and beloved script:

. . . must be accomplished without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. The danger is great indeed, for only the narrowest way stands between the Scylla of their becoming cold-hearted brutes unable any longer to treasure life where it must be treasured (he thinks of Willie, the chignon, the Certificate of Excellence, the five boisterous nippers that will now never be) where it must be treasured, gentlemen, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft, enfeebled, nervously debilitated, or in danger of mental breakdown . . .

You lose even your golden earthly students, eventually. As I did Heinrich to suicide (after continual problems with nausea, stomach convulsions, tics and a whole range of physical and psychological irritations, bearing witness that even the Reichsführer had difficulty quite practising what he preached) in 1945. But you’ve got to appreciate the sheer effort he made to hold on. You’ve got to appreciate the commitment to civilizing brutality. Nothing fucks the Old Man off more, believe me. He can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can’t forgive you inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.

But the system petered out, you’ll say. The death camps were liberated. The fucking Nazis lost.

Well, yes, my darlings, they did. But their victory wasn’t my goal. (Obviously it was their goal, the morons.) Their victory, ultimately, was neither here nor there, as long as, after they’d done their thing, millions of people could no longer sustain the preposterous fallacy that the Old Man loved the world.

Heinrich, by the way, was awfully surprised to find himself screaming in agony – I mean sipping his complimentary arrivals cocktail – in Hell.