Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Some people enter this life as Guides and Leaders, able to lift the world right out of its hinges. But it also is possible to learn to be a Leader of the masses. A Leader, a Führer who learns on the job, goes through life with an aura of amateurishness, as with any occupation that one prepares for by sheer drudgery. He goes through the motions, satisfies his customers and earns his wage, and that’s about it. How different it is with the blessed ones who are born to lead others. Everything they do comes naturally, and if their chosen profession brings them into direct contact with people — if, for example, they are murderers, or officials who serve the public from behind post-office counters — then their work is simply a form of play. When human lives are part of the job, they play with those too, just as if they were engaged in some shrewd card game or other.

Accepted for service as Leaders, we took the oath of fealty with a handshake. We had certain definite qualifications for this line of work: our ability with languages (especially Beatrice’s ability) and our educational backgrounds. Our boss even complimented us for being “cultured individuals.” Our outward appearance: satisfactory. He gave us a tour schedule which we were to study carefully. In case we hadn’t already done so, we were to familiarize ourselves with the points of interest on the island — though as the manager said, we surely had lived here long enough for that. He could also provide us with descriptive literature. There was a “sssstrict” rule to be followed. A Tour Leader must never leave unanswered a question from one of those he was leading! “ Der Führer knows everything! Just remember that, and you will be excellent Leaders!”

I already knew that a Führer not only was supposed to know everything, but that he actually knew it. To come up with proof of that insight, I didn’t have to reach very far back into my Vigoleisian past. Let’s go just four short years back to 1928. We’re in Cologne on Germany’s Great River Rhine (but, unfortunately for some, not Germany’s Great Western Border), in a former army barracks. There I find Vigoleis as a scholarly tour guide in the Hall of Cultural History at Cologne’s renowned and fiscally ruinous “Pressa,” the enormous exhibition devoted to the public media. For months he had worked on the staff assembled by the academic historians Karl d’Ester, Günther Wohlers, and Albert Bruckner, and had helped them put together their portion of the exhibit. Vigoleis knew exactly what lay or stood in every single glass case, and consequently he knew that everything in them lay or stood wrong. “Let’s not lose time with trivial details,” said a relaxed Professor Günther Wohlers, the greatest and most amiable beer-guzzler ever to grace a German university faculty. “After the opening,” he declared, a full liter mug standing within easy reach on his seminar desk, “we’ll change everything around. The politicians won’t notice a thing. Not a single one of those bigwigs will notice anything while they’re getting pushed through the halls on opening day.”

Even after opening day, things stayed just as they were; Professor d’Ester was muzzled by his garrulous colleague. Thus our exhibit displayed the false cheek-by-jowl with the genuine, as is fitting for scholarship in general and for the discipline of history in particular. Then I made the discovery that a guide, i.e., a Führer , is an authority and has immense power. I invented explanations out of whole cloth, and soon I was the most sought-after tour guide — and the most knowledgeable. When famous visitors came, or especially learned or picky experts, the call went out for Vigoleis. Now there was a fellow who knew so much about all branches of literary and press history that he never was at a loss for an answer. That made him the ideal candidate for doctoral oral exams, and that was the very reason he never took them. Superannuated Cologne pols, Mayor Konrad Adenauer himself, and scholars from the world over, all shook his hand at the end of the tour. Dreyer of Dreyer Films wanted to hire him on the spot as a writer and narrator for his educational movies. Bodo Ebhardt wanted him as a scholarly assistant for his ritzy tours of castles and his phenomenal library at Castle Marksburg. The cruise-ship mogul Krone thought he could do wonders for his world-wide advertising. A laundry-soap company wanted to engage him as a factory tour guide for visiting housewives. An ordinary Cologne housewife asked me to visit her evenings after her husband had left for the night shift…

All this expertise began to give me the shivers, and eventually I quit. But not before the crown of scholarship had been placed on my head by the Berlin Institute for the History of the Press. The director of this illustrious enterprise came to Cologne one day with his students and joined in on my tour — incognito. At the end he presented me his business card. I knew his name, of course, from the scholarly journals. He asked me to take his place for a session of his Berlin seminar with a talk on a particularly knotty problem I had alluded to in the Broadsheet Room — a place where my imagination had an inordinate tendency to run riot. I stammered a few words in reply and was about to explain that not everything in the glass cases was entirely correct, when it occurred to me that this fellow hadn’t noticed anything wrong at all. So I said nothing, and that evening I consulted with Dr. Wohlers, whose star pupil at Münster University I was at the time. Wohlers said, “Go to it, show them just what a Führer can really do. When this farce is all over with, you can get your degree with me with a thesis on ‘Historical Hoaxes.’” I passed my Leader’s exam at the exalted seminar in Berlin, and later received handwritten certification — from Prof. Dovifat or Prof. Heide, I no longer remember which.

“See?” said Günther Wohlers when I showed him my letter from the Berlin Institute. “That’s how things are in this racket — just like a traveling circus. You just can’t let up with the whip, that’s all. You can always put things over on the biggies. It’s the little two-bit know-it-alls we have to watch out for.”

It was just such a half-pint smarty-pants, a high-school teacher from the Rhineland backwoods, who was almost my undoing. He arrived with pince-nez, salami sandwich, knapsack, puttees, and his eleventh-grade class. He tripped me up in the Napoleon Room. A Napoleon expert on the side, he was specializing in the Wartburg Festival and the book-burnings that had taken place there. A dangerous amateur historian.

In our exhibit on “Napoleon and the Rise of German National Pride,” we had done more violence to historical authenticity than had already been committed in reality. During my spiel the teacher kept frowning and rubbing his sandwich paper against a glass case that was bursting with historical fakery. Then he started objecting: “Enough of this violation of German liberty!” The eleventh-graders, up to then more interested in a class of girls nearby than in my soporific lecture, suddenly were all ears. The teacher took the floor, pushing me against a wall that likewise bristled with distortions of history. The kids all grinned. The reputation of the exhibit was at stake, and along with that of the entire scholarly field of press history. More than that, my de jure employer, Mayor Adenauer of Cologne, would stand or fall with the fortunes of his brainchild, the “Pressa” exhibition. This mutiny, incited by a mere corporal in the ranks of public education, had to be nipped in the bud.

In front of his class I asked this puny know-it-all to take over the tour in my place. It was obvious, I said, that he knew much more about this stuff than Professor d’Ester, the doyen of our fledgling discipline. “Please, sir, go ahead and explain this document to your young gentlemen. It is the most important piece in the entire exhibit, but historically, also the most difficult to interpret.” I led him to a case containing a single and very significant-looking document. It was significant, too, not because it was in the Italian language, but because it belonged in a completely different room. The caption was also totally wrong, though beautifully calligraphed on a gold card in Ehmcke Gothic, inscribed by one of Ehmcke’s glamorous pupils. His artists had painstakingly lettered these gold cards by the thousands. Our archive contained stacks of them, but nobody knew where they all belonged. Not one of the professors could unravel the mess. Karl d’Ester, arriving one morning with egg on his face from a hurried breakfast, wrung his hands. Economists with doctor’s degrees came by and weren’t any help either. Finally Wohlers came to the rescue: “Put out cards in all the cases. If some are left over, get rid of them. Wrong cards can get changed around later.” König, the archive messenger, brought in a bottle of beer, and all was hunky-dory.