Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Risen from the dead is solely Captain Heinz Kraschutzki, about whom I reported previously that he was executed, and about whom I report that he was involved in the 1918 naval mutiny at Kiel, and that he raised chickens on Mallorca. I wrote this in response to what I heard about him on our island at the time, an account of his life that none of my painstaking research in libraries in Amsterdam and The Hague has put into question. I am not one of those writers who invent things from whole cloth, nor could anything be further from my intentions than to besmirch any person’s reputation, either by detracting from his real life or by concocting a phony life for him.

This particular hero of my applied recollections wrote to me in the spring of 1957, saying that everything I said about him in my book was wrong. But unlike what I might have expected of him in accordance with my further advisory to accept the characters “in dual cognizance of their identity,” he submitted his complaint in full cognizance of his own person, which he claimed was the victim of mistaken, though happily not willfully falsifying, assertions. First of all, he explained, he never took part in a mutiny in Kiel. At the time in question — I am keeping strictly to what he told me in his letter, which is no doubt of importance for the history of World War I — he was captain of the minesweeper M 100 , whose home port was Bremerhaven, and he was on the high seas when the naval mutiny occurred. Upon returning to port, where the city had already fallen into the hands of a military soviet, his crew unanimously elected him as a delegate to the existing revolutionary council. Thus it was only after the uprising that he entered the Bremerhaven military regime. Hence, I read further in this admonitory letter from a sailor I thought was dead and who was claiming to have been mistreated by others as well, there was no mutiny on his ship. If the relationship between captain and crew had in all cases been like that on M 100 , he went on, there would never have been any mutinies at all.

Secondly, he wrote, he never engaged in chicken farming on Mallorca. In fact he had never in his life owned a single chicken. Thirdly, he was never executed there, although the radio and three newspapers of national renown had published obituaries (incidentally, they also published my own obituary). He cited the newspapers by name, and one of the obituaries was printed under my byline. When I wrote it, I had no idea at all that sometime later my pen would bring forth my insular recollections, including an account of the execution of Herr Heinz Kraschutzki. He was still very much alive, he wrote, despite the fact that in Spain he had been sentenced to “only” thirty years in prison, of which he served nine years, two months, and four days.

In addition, this resurrected man complains in his letter that I had no right “ an sich ” to publish details of the life of living person that could potentially harm that person. But he was reluctant to make a direct accusation against me, since I had presumably been misled by the press accounts of his passing.

I was not particularly moved by this message from what I had been thinking was a voice from the next world. My joy at a man’s resurrection, coupled with my shame at having offended the same man’s reputation — these things lay far behind me. For in the meantime I had learned from my friend, the writer Karl Otten, who like Kraschutzki and all the rest of us was a victim of Nazi persecution on the explosive island of Mallorca, that the information given to me by the German Consul, which was the basis for the account in my book, was erroneous. In a later letter, Herr Kraschutzki asked me what possible motivation the Hitlerian Consul might have had to list a person among the deceased, when he knew full well that this person was still living.

In times when murder is rampant, puzzles will multiply. Even so, I hastened to reply to the ex-captain of the German Navy that in a subsequent edition of my book, in accordance with his wishes, I would duly absolve him of (1) mutiny and (2) chicken-farming, and I promised (3) that I would restore him to life in all its blissful abundance. I should add that I could not resist expressing my disappointment that he had never made personal acquaintance with a chicken, in the legal sense of “chicken ownership” (detentio gallinae) . I informed him that I myself had never owned a single chicken, although for several years I had intercourse with chickens, with thousands of chickens to be exact, on my brother’s farm, where I also had found opportunity to observe their egg-laying secrets and repeatedly to be amazed by their proverbial stupidity. Yet I was also aware, I told Mr. Kraschutzki, of their obsession with any and all forms of chicken feed, as with their active herding instinct, which one might refer to as a biological extension of their hunger for corn kernels. Beyond this, I knew of the frustration experienced by chicken breeders in seasons when the eggs yield more roosters than hens — a state of affairs in the barnyard that could be called, if I remember correctly, a form of sexual mutiny.

I am mentioning all this simply as a marginal comment on the recantation I sent to Herr Kraschutzki, although my reader will have noticed that here, too, one thing quickly leads to another. I wrote to the sailor further that I was sorry he hadn’t been a mutineer. I would have liked him better as a mutineer. In fact — and this has nothing more to do with the special case of a man who avoided getting murdered against all sense of law and liberty — in fact, I consider military revolts on land, on the sea, and in the air as a distinctly honorable method of atoning for the type of sins one has committed by putting on a killer’s uniform in the first place. As I see it, a rebellious soldier is more courageous than one who sticks to his post wearing a murderer’s decoration on his cowardly breast until he hears the trumpet calling him to his own demise.

This completes my act of contrition with respect to Captain Heinz Kraschutzki. Let him now rejoin the living characters in my book— sans chickens, to be sure, and absolved of being a mutineer against God, King, and Fatherland, those three entities that have caused so much trouble for humankind in the upwards as well as the downwards direction, but especially downwards, where the soldier makes his appearance, standing rigidly at attention with his brain in his boots. Since the Stone Age we have never come to grips with spiritual ossification. Perhaps there are some who wish to believe that man is a rational being who can get beyond acting with tooth and claw. But here, too, let truth be told.

I cite a character in my island memoirs, Bobby, as presenting his business card with the same typographic design as the printing of this book. This refers solely to the first edition, whose colophon reads as follows:

“ The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen was set in Poliphilus and printed in the autumn of 1953 by Drukkerij G. J. Thieme in Nijmegen, under commission from G. A. van Oorschot, publisher on the Herengracht, Amsterdam, and bound by Elias P. van Bommel in Amsterdam. The typographic design is by Helmut Salden, Wassenaar. The licensed German-language edition is published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf.”

For years there have been reports that I was dead. Yet it is not the purpose of this supplement to my island recollections to contradict advisories concerning my interment. Recently the announcements about my biting the dust have become more numerous. There have even been some messages of condolence, which I have found just as touching as they are amusing, because when the fateful hour finally arrives I’ll be in no position to savor them, either in heaven or in hell. I will have disappeared into the void, dans le néant . And that’s just as it should be.