The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

39 Birthday Boy 1940

The jewellery box turned out to be the last gift from Anneli because the next day she didn’t come to the door, nor did she answer later that day after I’d roamed through the museum and gardens, with flashes of anxiety. Maybe she was dead or maybe just bored with me? Maybe she would spend the next four years in bed writing an immortal love story that would never be published, because no one would suspect that such a beautiful woman could write.

The war more or less revolved around breaking people apart, making them lose each other. In war everyone was alone. Even the soldier who trained to be a helmet in a squadron of a hundred. Even his wife who worked on an assembly line back home with hundreds of others. Even the prisoner who slept in a jam-packed cell.

But no one was so desperately alone as the Führer. I doubt if any figure in history was ever as lonely as Adolf Hitler. He therefore insisted on everyone in his territories greeting him by name: ‘Heil Hitler!’ And never has so much been done to soothe the psychological hang-ups of one man. First, a whole nation was turned into one giant daily birthday party in his honour, with everyone in their finest outfits and water-combed hair, both friends and foes sporting armbands for the sake of clarity, singing in his honour, showering him with gifts (generally their lives) and clicking to attention before him, forming giant birthday cakes and thrusting their arms in the air to symbolise candles, a thousand candles for the Millennial Reich, for the lonely little boy to blow out and boo at from his rostrum, his high chair: Adolf Hitler, the eternal birthday boy. But that wasn’t enough, because after the cake the boy wanted to play with his tin soldiers, and get to use all his new toys…

Little Hjalti’s solitude was so great, in fact, that it was a black hole, an over-famished vacuum that sucked in everything on its path, that constantly demanded new victims to prevent himself from being sucked into the hole. ‘Blut muß fließen!’ ‘Never enough human sacrifices!’ But once all the blood had been consumed, the black hole swelled up over his head and he drowned in his own isolation. Yes. The last war was more or less about making all the inhabitants of this planet about as lonely as the one who started it.

In war one is always alone and, frankly, I think this solitude has shaped my life; I always thought it a bit pathetic, this need to spend one’s life living with the same people.