Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I lied and said, “Yes!”

In the tenth grade I switched to another “Christian” seat of learning. At this one the religion teacher had the title “Professor,” and he was feared for the questions he asked during the tests at Easter. He never gave answers. He was just as unable as his curate colleague to tell me why God had singled out German bellies for wearing His slogan, and he drew a blank at other queries about things that gave me concern. Upon hearing my third hesitant inquiry, he made sure that I kept seated in class forever. From then on, he gave me the go-by. Erich, who sat next to me, likewise got the go-by. So there we forever sat, two humiliated but by no means dishonest cases.

The Kaiser gave up the war. Instead of counting the corpses, he counted his money and left the fatherland. In those days, George Grosz drew the crucified Christ wearing a gas mask. A storm of protest broke loose. The Belgian artist Albert Servaes delivered his Fourteen Stations of the Cross to their destination, the Carmelite church in Luythagen. Public indignation at this Expressionist depiction of the mystery of faith was so vehement that the Pope himself was asked to condemn the work. That was in 1919.

In 1933 Christ was nailed to the swastika amid the thundering jubilation of millions and the tacit approval of billions. People were not as narrow-minded as after the Imperial War. They all went along with this newest Expressionist work of art — all but a few of them, the obtuse art-lovers you can always find, the hecklers and fault-finders. Such people just don’t count. Vigoleis and Beatrice didn’t count, either. They got the go-by.

If on the day Hitler seized power all the people in Germany who called themselves Christians had acted in the spirit of Christianity, then this man made in the Lord’s image would have wandered off into a sanatorium to be cared for at state expense until the end of his days. The Führer would be a case study for university professors, a laboratory specimen for students to learn from. But there were no more Christians in Germany. God was dead, Christ was dead, only the Führer was still alive. When people woke up from their frenzy and their rigid fast, it was too late. Heart failure.

The history of National Socialism can never be written as long as Christian hypocrisy persists. Such an invasion of pagan barbarism would not have been possible without the de-Christianization of Western Europe. But we are still far from realizing that ours is no longer a Christian world. Theology is still getting taught, and the name of God is still invoked for a morsel of bread. Bones are filled with gunpowder, and swords are forged in juicy streams of blood.

The year 1933 was also a milestone for us on our island. What business of ours was that mess, Don Matías asked, so far away from the scene? He was wrong. Hitler was no Don Patuco. Even though he could lift only one of his arms, that one arm of his reached much farther than the Honduran warrior’s. Soon he had the island in his grasp. Fellow countrymen who every day made the sign of the swastika in the name of the divine Führer , Amen, wanted to kill Vigoleis and his suspiciously un-Aryan-looking Beatrice because we were refusing to tithe to the new God. Apart from the fact that it was filthy, we didn’t believe one word of this swindle. We would sooner have believed the Beverwijn dog story. Mevrouw van Beverwijn herself immediately believed in the new Savior. She became angry once when I made fun of the Führer before an audience of female Christian Scientists. Many of these enthusiastic ladies, who were already piqued because Mamú didn’t eject me from her house, became ominously starry-eyed whenever there was talk of the Redeemer of the Germans. It wasn’t possible just to keep silent about the man, as one did with Don Patuco. The Honduran wasn’t one for counting corpses, either, but otherwise he seemed to me to be doing everything wrong, while Hitler was doing everything right. The German Führer had figured it all out right away: God is dead, not a single soul believes in Him any more, but they all keep on acting as if they did, so this is my big chance.

But what did Mamú think of all this Führer business? On this matter, too, she was marvelous. In spite of her millions, in spite of the important market for the baking powder that was still her baking powder, she rejected the Savior of Germany. She felt pity for the ladies of her bible-study circle, explaining that you can’t change the ways of old spinsters. They had missed their chances all through their long lives, and now, as things were heating up, they were beginning to feel warm and cuddly. There was, Mamú added, a purely sexual explanation for this phenomenon. She was quite familiar with such symptoms of repression. She had known Freud very well, and often cited his opinions. Weren’t the ladies getting enough satisfaction from their Biblical Jesus? Wasn’t he beautiful, too? Mamú put her finger to her lips and said, “You bet your life!”

The nanny, who wanted nothing to do with Bible Science, but who came from the Black Forest, worshiped the Führer as a leader after her own heart, a heart grown senile in foreign climes. All at once she wanted nothing more than to return to Germany. And suddenly she perceived it as an ethnic disgrace that she had let herself be persuaded years ago by her mistress to become an American citizen. She constantly badgered Mamú to forbid us from entering the house, for she regarded it as the height of depravity to believe neither in God nor in the Führer . Mamú raised her wage and things stayed calm for a while.

The state’s attorney, pleading his amatory case so poorly that he was still unable to hold Auma’s conch shell to his ear in a way that would have been good for both of them, likewise declared for the Führer . Auma was against him. This increased the tension to the point where they began to hate each other at the same time that each one’s unpolitical flesh desired the other’s more than ever. The pair was approaching the boiling point. Mamú would have liked to toss them both into bed together — the way things like this got done in Vienna. But in Spain? Not on your life. I have no idea how the Finns handle such a situation.

At the tertulia , as I have mentioned, I was considered the spokesman for German destiny. They thought of me as something like a prophet, albeit a bad one. All I did was take at face value the daily pronouncements of the Führer and his propagandists, which pointed to war as the goal of all national uprisings. This was the reverse of insurrections of the Patuco variety, which begin with a ruckus that stirs up nationalistic emotions, which in turn don’t last very long because they soon unleash just another ruckus.

Following extended flour-sack discussions, Matías and Gracias a Dios turned anti-Hitler and more and more pro-Patuco. Patuco: for them he meant Honduran Liberty, Equality, Independence, the chance finally to marry those brides yearning for them so chastely all this long time, an end to their impotence one way or the other, peace at the point of a sword wielded by a doubly armored fist.

Pedro Sureda remained unmoved. German saber-rattling made just as little impression on him as had his soldier’s colorful uniform. It simply wasn’t his affair. Papá, on the other hand, was delighted. He thanked his lucky stars during his daily blood-letting that now he could read the Völkischer Beobachter in the original. He also approved of the Catholic Church’s pact with the heathens. Our discussions got louder and louder. Finally I had to bellow like a Nazi to make myself understood through his stubborn horn.

The German shop adopted a wait-and-see attitude. A businessman must not show his political colors. The little Swabian maintained a busy silence. Two new arrivals, business partners of some kind, huge fellows, Germans from head to toe, sensed the profit to be earned by declaring in favor of the swastika. But they, too, kept their own counsel. There was jubilation in the palaces of the counts, the princes, and the vice-princes. Soon their own Don Francisco Franco would also be a Führer ! And he was a general to boot, not some measly corporal. When that happened, woe to the sub-human Germans!