Siegfried Read online

  Sabine looked up from her notes with a smile and said, “‘Eternal Womanhood leads us above.’”

  The sound man, who had probably not even realized that the climax of Faust was being quoted but had simply adjusted the volume, nodded. “Running.”

  “Running.”

  Although he had been in front of the camera hundreds of times, for almost as long as television had existed, he was still invariably overcome by a mild excitement when it came to the point. It had nothing to do with stage fright, because he knew he would get by easily, but more with the alienating effect of the situation: he looked into Sabine’s eyes and then into the all-seeing third eye, glassy and pale as that of a dead fish, which would ensure that this evening would be a conversation watched by hundreds of thousands of eyes, now all focused on something different.

  “Welcome to Vienna, Rudolf Herter from Amsterdam. Tomorrow evening in the National Library, you will be reading from your magnum opus, The Invention of Love, which has found countless enthusiastic readers in Austria as elsewhere. It is a modern version of the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde, a moving novel of almost a thousand pages, though for many people that is still too few. Can you give viewers a brief notion of your book?”

  “No, I can’t, and I’ll tell you why.” He was of course an old hand; the question had been put to him scores of times, and he knew exactly what he was going to say. That the subject itself didn’t matter that much. That one could, for example, decide to write a play about a young man whose father had been murdered by his uncle, who then went on to marry his mother, whereupon he resolved to avenge his father but did not manage it. That could result in a melodrama that no one wanted to see, but if one were called Shakespeare, the result was Hamlet. That what mattered in art was always the how, never the what. That in art the form was the real content. That his own book was indeed a variation on the theme of Tristan and Isolde, but that could equally well have resulted in a cloyingly sentimental novel.

  “Which is not the case,” said Sabine. “On the contrary, it is the compelling story of two people who are not soul mates but through a fatal misunderstanding—which I won’t give away—conceive a passionate love for each other. They deceive each other, are constantly driven apart, but are still reunited until, again as a result of lies and deceit, they finally die their harrowing lovers’ death.”

  “Goodness me,” said Herter with a smile. “Now you’ve given viewers a notion of my book.” His German was a little old-fashioned, from before the First World War, but virtually without accent.

  “Of course you are right. This in itself means nothing. What matters is the fantastic fantasy with which it is written. Can I put it like that?”

  “You can put it any way you like. ‘Fantastic fantasy’ . . . to tell you the truth, I always have a bit of a problem with the term ‘fantasy.’ It smacks of something active, like a water-skier behind a roaring speedboat, where a better image would be a surfer riding the ocean passively and silently and letting himself be carried along by the waves.”

  “What should I call it then? Imagination?”

  “Let’s go on calling it fantasy.”

  “I’d like to talk to you a little more about that. Is creative fantasy like dreaming?”

  “Not only that. It is also a way of understanding. In that, I appear to be following in the footsteps of your venerable fellow townsman Sigmund Freud, but that is not so. For him dreams, daydreams, myths, novels, and everything related to them were objects on which the understanding focuses, but what I mean is that they themselves are the understanding.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t quite follow you.”

  “It’s a problem for me, too, but I’ll do my best. I mean that some types of artistic fantasy are not so much something that must be understood but rather something with which you understand. Fantasy of this kind is a tool. I’ll try to turn everything around. Turning things around is always fruitful. Let me give you an example. . . .”

  “Please do.”

  With half-closed eyes, Herter nodded briefly and said, “Take a realistically painted theatrical set, as you occasionally see at the opera. For example, the sea, a fishing village, the dunes. That is extended onto the stage with an assortment of real objects, such as sand, fishing nets, rusty buckets. And what do you see? The painted backdrop seems like reality, but under artificial lighting and in the still air of the theater, all those real objects have taken on an unreal, artistic appearance. Am I making myself clear?”

  “To tell the truth . . .”

  “Right. Let me approach it differently.” Herter thought for a moment, feeling that he was on the track of something. “Take someone who actually exists but whom you don’t understand completely or don’t understand at all.”

  “Rudolf Herter,” said Sabine with an acute smile.

  “That would be someone else’s job,” said Herter, also smiling. “Yours, for example. No, I don’t mean a man whose words you can’t understand, but a man whose nature you can’t fathom. Or a woman, of course. Suppose I know a woman who is a mystery to me—”

  “Do you know a woman like that?” asked Sabine, interrupting.

  “Yes,” said Herter, thinking of the mother of his daughters. The idea began to take shape in his head like a gathering storm. “If I’m correct in my view of fantasy, it must be possible to understand her better by placing her in a completely fictional, extreme situation and seeing how she behaves. By way of an intellectual—no, imaginative—experiment.”

  “I’m glad I’m not that woman,” said Sabine with a hint of horror in her voice. “I don’t know . . . experimenting with people . . . it sounds horrific to me.”

  Herter raised his arms. She now obviously regarded him as a kind of literary Dr. Mengele, but he was careful not mention that name.

  “You’re right! Perhaps it is not without danger to do such things with a living person whom you care for. Perhaps you can do it only with a dead person whom you hate.”

  “And do you know someone like that?”

  “Hitler,” said Herter at once. “Hitler, of course. I mean, I don’t know him at all. Another fellow townsman of yours, by the way.”

  “Of whom we prefer not to be reminded,” added Sabine.

  “But it will continue for centuries. By now a hundred thousand studies have been devoted to him, if not more: political, historical, economic, psychological, sociological, theological, occult, and so on ad infinitum. He’s been examined from all sides, a line of books has been written about him that would reach from here to the Stefansdom, more than about anyone else, but it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. I haven’t read everything—one lifetime is too short for that—but if anyone had explained him satisfactorily, I would know. He has remained the enigma that he was to everyone from the very beginning—or no, he has simply become more incomprehensible. All those so-called explanations have simply made him more invisible. If you ask me, he’s sitting in hell laughing himself silly. It’s time that was changed. Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in.”

  “So a historical novel, in fact.”

  “No, no, that is a well-behaved genre that takes historical fact as its starting point and then tries to put, more or less plausibly, flesh and blood on the bare bones. Your fellow townsman Stefan Zweig was a master of that. Sometimes things become very intense, as in all those books and films reconstructing the assassination of President Kennedy, but the point I am getting at is the understanding of an event, not of a human being. A rabid moralist like the German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth starts with a fact from social reality, as in The Representative, about the fateful role of the pope in the Holocaust, and then lets his imagination loose on it; but I am thinking more of doing it the other way around. I want to start from some imagined, highly improbable, highly fantastic but not impossible fact and move from mental reality into social reality. That is, I think, the way of true art: not from the bottom up but from the top down.”

  “Hasn’t that, too, already b
een done countless times with Hitler?”

  “No doubt. But not yet by me.”

  “Well, we look forward to your story with curiosity. I’m sure you’ll be able to bring it off.”

  “If the gods are well disposed, yes.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “God is a story, too, but I am a polytheist, a heathen; I don’t believe in one story, I believe in many stories. Not only Hebrew ones but also Egyptian and Greek. I myself have also—if I may be so bold—written more than one story.”

  “And are you working on a new story at the moment?”

  “Always.”

  “How far have you gotten?”

  “About a tenth of the way through, I estimate. You never know exactly beforehand, and that’s just as well. If I had known that The Invention of Love would run to almost a thousand pages, I would never have begun it.”

  “Can you give us a sneak preview of your new novel?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to.”

  “Mr. Herter, I wish you every success for tomorrow, and thank you for the glimpse behind the scenes you have given us.”

  “On the contrary. I thank you. You have given me an idea.”

  THREE

  “You’re very quiet tonight,” said Maria as they stood in the elevator after dinner, coffee, and chocolate. “Is something the matter?”

  “Yes, something’s the matter.”

  He gave her a dark look, and he saw that she realized it was something to do with his work and therefore did not question him further. They had drunk a bottle of wine each, too much in fact, but too much wine in Vienna is different from too much wine in Amsterdam. In his literary laboratory, he was constantly searching for an imagined experimental setup in which he could place Hitler in order to lay bare his underlying structure, and it disturbed him that he did not immediately know how to go about it. He took his mechanical pencil from his pocket and put the manager’s welcome note on his lap. Beneath the logo of the hotel, which was stamped into the thick paper, an S in a laurel wreath surmounted by a crown, he wrote in block capitals:

  ADOLF HITLER

  He stared pensively at the words, but without reading them—he looked at the eleven letters as if at a drawing, an icon: the severe composition of horizontals and verticals, with the graceful concluding sweep.

  I, DART OF HELL

  HALF RIOT-LED

  He looked at his watch, turned on the television in the sitting room, and found the channel.

  “In five minutes I’m going to tell you on-screen what the matter is.”

  Seated side by side on the sofa, Herter and Maria watched the end of a report on an exhibition of Dürer: watercolors of birds’ feathers in brilliant hues. He absorbed it intensely; whenever he was working on something, everything he saw and experienced was tested against the criterion of whether he could use it and fit it in. He suddenly remembered the gray pigeon’s wing with which he used to brush the remnants of rubber off the sketchpad in drawing class—had Dürer used his pigeon wings for the same purpose? Wings, flying, flying away, freedom, Daedalus, Icarus . . . but cut off, torn out . . . No, the link between Dürer and Hitler had already been made by Thomas Mann in his Doctor Faustus, and he must keep away from that.

  Titles, music: something from a Schubert piano sonata. A moment later he was looking at himself: but the man there on the screen was looking not at him but at someone next to him, in the place where Maria was now sitting.

  “Welcome to Vienna, Rudolf Herter . . .”

  He stretched his legs, put his hands, with fingers intertwined, behind his head, and listened to his argument about the what and the how in art. Of course, he should have said that in music, the highest of the arts, no what even exists, only a how. When he said that imagination was not like a water-skier but like a surfer, he remembered an old observation that he had always wanted to find a home for but that he had still not been able to fit in anywhere: that technical development after the war had changed the silence of the beach into a constant din of speedboats and portable radios. But that with the further development of technology, prewar silence had returned: new materials had made windsurfing possible, which meant the end of waterskiing, and Walkmans were ousting radios.

  He could be seen in thousands of Austrian homes; his voice was echoing through all those rooms, although he was now sitting here silently on the sofa. All quite normal—no one was astonished by it any longer—but at the same time it was an impossible miracle. He had preserved that astonishment from his childhood; and when he thought of himself, he did not think of a man of over seventy but of a child.

  “Suppose I know a woman who’s a mystery to me . . .”

  “Do you know a woman like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean Olga,” said Herter.

  “Is that a fact?” asked Maria with an ironic smile.

  Imagination as the tool of understanding. Without Sabine he would never have had the idea.

  “Hitler. Hitler, of course.”

  When the interview was over, he turned off the sound and asked, “Do you understand?”

  “Yes. But only because I know you.”

  “We might as well drink another glass to our meeting, then.”

  As the bottle of sparkling wine was now standing uselessly in water, he called room service for a bucket of ice.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” said Maria. “Why Hitler, of all people? You want to place him in an extreme, fictional situation, but how can you dream up a more extreme situation for him than the one he dreamed up and realized himself? Why don’t you take someone more moderate that you don’t understand? There must be someone like that.”

  “He’d like that. Then he’ll have been let off the hook yet again. No, it has to be Hitler. It has to be the most extreme figure in world history.” Herter lit up a pipe and patted down the tobacco with his index finger for a moment. “But of course you’re right; that’s exactly the problem. That’s what I’ve been walking around thinking about. Up to now I haven’t gotten beyond one scene. We know that he never visited a concentration camp, let alone an extermination camp. He left that to Himmler, the head of the SS, and the police. Let’s assume that one day he decided to go to Auschwitz to take a look at the daily gassing of thousands of men, women, and children, which he had ordered. How would he have reacted to that sight? But for that I must change his character, since that is precisely what he never did, and then I would have failed to understand him yet again.”

  “Was he too much of a coward?”

  “Coward . . . coward . . . it’s not as easy as that, of course. In the First World War, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class for bravery as an orderly—very unusual for a corporal—and he always wore it. It was pinned on him by a Jewish officer, by the way. So he must have been exceptionally brave, but as far as I know, he never revealed what he won it for. I suspect he wanted many, many people to die because of him, not only in his concentration camps but also at the fronts, in the occupied territories, and in Germany itself—tens of thousands every day. Blood, blood must flow—but in his absence. He never visited a bombed German city either, as even his sinister henchman Goebbels at least did. When his train passed through the ruins of a city, the curtains had to be drawn. I think he wanted to be the eye of the hurricane. Around him everything is destroyed, but in the eye the weather is wonderful with blue skies. His villa in the Alps, the Berghof, was the symbol of this. That was where he hatched all those terrors, yet nothing penetrated that idyllic retreat.”

  “But why did he want people to die around him on a massive scale?”

  “Perhaps he thought it was a way of warding off his own death. For as long as he could kill, he would stay alive. Perhaps his own death was the only thing he was really afraid of. Perhaps he thought that those huge sacrifices would make him immortal. And in a certain sense, that is what has happened.”

  “So haven’t you already arrived where you want to be? Haven’t you
grasped everything through your imagination?”

  Herter put his pipe in the ashtray and nodded. “There’s something in that. Reductio ad absurdum. Right, let me think. So I’ve already taken a step; the idea is fruitful. But now I want to find something else that is not in conflict with his nature, something that really might have happened but did not happen as far as we know.”

  “You’re sure to find something.”

  “If anyone can, I can.” Herter nodded. He looked at her as a broad smile crossed his face. “Perhaps that’s why I’m in the world.”

  Maria raised her eyebrows. “Are you saying that he has you in his service, too?”

  Herter’s mood darkened. He crossed his arms and looked at the silent images on the television screen without seeing anything. This was exactly the remark he had not wanted to hear. Sabine, too, had realized that his experiment was a morbid one, but he felt that he already had too strong a hold on the subject to let go. If he were to break all his teeth on it, so be it; he could always get a false set.

  A girl in a pristine white Austrian apron appeared with the ice. It rattled as she poured it into the cooler and uncorked the bottle, after which she prepared things for the night in the bedroom. While she was in their suite, they did not talk, as if matters of the greatest secrecy were being discussed that must not be heard even by someone who did not understand their language.

  “In fact,” said Maria once the brass door handle had risen quietly back into position, “you owe everything you have to your imagination, to something that does not exist in the real world.”

  “Except for you and Olga, that is. Although . . . maybe even you two. Apart from my children.”

  “Come on,” said Maria, “don’t be so timid. Them, too.”

  “You’re right,” laughed Herter, turning the bottle around a few times in the cooler. “No beating around the bush. Myself, too.”

  “And where does it come from? For you it’s perfectly normal, but most people haven’t an ounce of imagination.”