Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I argued that “ Heil Hitler ” would mean the death of millions of Jews. All the rest, all the so-called political aims of the Nazis, didn’t concern me in the least, as I had no comprehension of them. I had never read the editorials in newspapers anyway, and had never gone to the voting booth because, seeing that I was never able to get straight about my own self, I doubted that I could play any constructive role on behalf of an entire nation. Catholic Center? Social Democrats? Communists? Nationalist groupings of all stripes? I had got to know good guys and bad guys in all of these sects. But: “Let Judah perish”? No, no! A thousand times No!

After the fall of the Spanish monarchy, the mob started harassing priests and nuns in public. Miguel de Unamuno, the arch-enemy of the monarchy and the clergy, hung a big crucifix around his neck — and woe to whoever dared to point a finger at him! Abajo el Cristo ? “Let Christ perish”? Nevermore, said Unamuno. But as for priests who financed bull-fight arenas, brothels, and railroads in Christ’s name — down with them! In my letter to Mother I mentioned this exemplary form of tolerance. How can somebody’s mother shout “ Heil Hitler ”? My filial communication ended with the announcement that as a result of the German Revolution, no one should expect me to return home within the foreseeable future. I suggested that they wait until Hitler had prepared, unleashed, and lost his war. If I hadn’t been made to perish by then, I would come back home. But of course I would telegraph ahead.

The Führer kept his word, but Vigoleis did, too. Mother received the telegram. She had waited eighteen years for it. Bombed out of her home and starving, she fell into my arms — the return of the prodigal son to a prodigal hearth.

The reply to this letter caused Beatrice to reach once again for our self-help medical book. Although our copy was the 11th revised and expanded edition, she hunted in vain for the drops that would cure my symptoms. She looked up under “anguish,” “anxiety,” “distractedness,” “fluids, loss of,” “hair, greying of leg,” “hair, sudden rising of head,” “homesickness,” “shaving, avoidance of,” “mouth, sudden closing of with danger of biting the tongue”—and she found nothing. My syndrome was beyond the purview of the great guttologist. He prescribed mercurius to counter the ill-effects of eating beef, but what to do for the ill-effects of bull-headedness? Or for infamy? My bile was aroused mainly by Mother’s pastor, who had heaved the mothers of the Catholic Mothers’ Society onto the patriotic track. Mother wrote me that she was a simple woman, ignorant of politics. She was only following her pastor’s recommendations from the pulpit. The Church did not condemn the Führer . She, Mother, was praying for him — and for me and Beatrice, since we were in need of divine grace. Our counterfeit marriage was sinful…

The murdering continued in the Reich. Christ and the Antichrist: ecce homo , Pascoaes says. Beatrice decided to try out antimonium crudum , as my tongue now had a coat of white fur.

“When I think of Germany in the night, / I find I cannot sleep aright.” The verse is by Heine, and after 1933 they were his most-often-quoted lines.

My grandfather proved his Christian worth by providing hot water for Kevelaer pilgrims, showing that he was a man of action. But he also became a man of words when he bought an old printing press at an auction, started a newspaper and, with the aid of a deaf, dumb, and blind woman of prodigious muscular strength who could yank the press lever, produced every separate issue. This little operation was the forerunner of our town’s regular paper, a Catholic sheet that, together with “The City of God” and “The Steyl Missionary Newsletter,” represented periodical world literature in our household. My father sent it to me regularly in Mallorca, which is how I learned of the “political coordination” of my home town, a community that sports in its coat of arms the image of a chapel dedicated to a virgin whose holiness is confirmed in the Acta sanctorum of the Bollandists. The little place of worship is located on the wooded slopes outside of town, where you can also find a famous mental asylum. The Director’s kids were schoolmates of mine, as were the kids of one of the teachers at the institution, and that’s how I eventually got to enter a place where the human mind goes off in strange directions, just as it has so frequently done with geniuses whose acquaintance I have made face-to-face: Napoleon, Nietzsche, Buddha, Christ. I spent time with inmates at the asylum, as I did with the crippled wreck of a man who did the hoeing in my parents’ garden. Each one of these people had his own Mémorial and his own St. Helena. Once in a while a patient escaped and ran through the town chased by orderlies, causing the populace to disperse like the citizens of Palma at the approach of the Sureda’s stampeding dogs. On one occasion a patient ran amok, brandishing a fence-post as his make-believe Malaysian dagger. The panic was indescribable. The only people in town who kept their wits about them were two policemen, who calmly drew near to the places where rumors told them the madman was lurking.

Wherever this doubly insane fellow had passed, so the local stories had it, he left corpses in his wake. Eventually members of the asylum staff were able to subdue the escapee, and the town could breathe free again. Many people considered it a miracle that nobody had run afoul of the sick man’s dagger. It’s so easy to stab somebody to death.

When Hitler ran amok with his patriotic rage in 1933, the asylum opened all its cells and released the inmates into our town. From the Mayor on down to the lowliest Town Clerk, from the Pastor on down to the smallest altar boy, everybody was caught up in the crazed St. Vitus dance. A few normal types unaffected by the epidemic were taken into custody. I read about this in my hometown paper. Every day a new miracle, every day some new recruit for the Party. Everywhere you looked, people were shucking off the old inner man and putting on the new outer man. To me, as I harkened here on Mallorca to the echo of my country’s self-debasement, the greatest miracle of all seemed to be that our town’s patron saint, the noble Irmgardis, Countess von Zütphen, Mistress of the Townships of Rees, Emmerich, Straelen, and Süchteln, was no longer performing miracles. According to legend, she lived in pious seclusion inside a hollow tree in a nearby forest among the deer and the owls, the otters and the squirrels. Once she was pursued by lascivious knights, and a single word from her mouth sufficed to make these libidinous barons’ castles suddenly go up in flames. Ten centuries later, as the walls of the towns under her blessed patronage echoed shouts of “Heil!” the saintly virgin’s word remained unspoken. Just one single word, I thought, and my home town would be reduced to a pile of ashes, Germany would reconsider, and a minor saint would have rescued the entire nation! But our little saint remained silent. She had no power over the Knights of the Crooked Cross.

My homeland was now “coordinated.” Overnight, the Movement got moving, and the populace of my home town was scrambling all around. Everybody is familiar with the experiment: take a water glass and a handful of hay, place the mixture out in the sun until muck starts to form, and then put a drop of it under a microscope. You will witness a back-and-forth teeming of the organisms called “infusorians.” When an entire country begins to putrefy, it likewise gives rise to infusorians, the swarming animalcules of the Movement. But these are visible to the naked eye. When they scramble toward you, and you refuse to lift your arm, they reach out and strike you dead.