Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

On the contrary, Frau Professor, my perfectly reliable secretary informed me about what the Frau Professor knew when she showed up in my office and what she did not know.

I have no reason to confirm or doubt your secretary’s claims.

It would never have occurred to me to trouble the Frau Professor with a request of such a nature.

And I can only repeat myself, but I am not keen on boring the Herr Professor.

I have always found the Frau Professor’s politeness fascinating, yet I must call your attention to the fact that order must be maintained in the institute, and not only in formal terms.

Thank you, Herr Professor, you may be certain that I shall not forget your hortatory words.

But I suggest, having seen the proofs of your booklet, and let this be friendly advice, Frau Professor, that with one quick decision, like jumping into cold water, you correct not the proofs but the larger mistake of wanting to publish the booklet.

They went fairly far with their insults, reaching great depths together, and they could not but enjoy this eternal contest; neither of them lost patience in the bout, and in this virtue they found each other.

Take a deep breath, added Baron von der Schuer very quietly and obstinately, and either withdraw the shameful booklet or take your name off it. Otherwise, we shall not be able to solve this delicate problem.

As if with these sharp words they were testing their origins and their manners.

They could not afford to go too far, they had to be on guard because they each were aware of the not quite clean methodology of the institute’s research. They could not use against each other this secret, not even as a means of extortion. Against the outer world of science, they were bound together more strongly by their silence than by their tolerance — a function of their distinguished personal backgrounds — though neither of them could be certain that the other, eager to gain advantage, might not be the first to reveal the shared secret.

They could not name their subjects or the source of their experimental data in every case, which is to say that in certain cases they had to list false sources.

As a result, they had quickly and smoothly developed an argot which they used in the publication of their data. Of course, their silent agreement about this argot characterized not only the scientific communications and research documentation of Baron von der Schuer and Baroness von Thum, not just research done on twins or on the colors of the human eye. Their method seemed to spill over from one research area to other related ones. Several of their colleagues — in the Dahlem institutes and in public-health institutions elsewhere who were willing to be falsely listed as sources — used and understood the secret scientific language.

Claus Clauberg,* doing hormone research, was probably the first to think of looking for subjects in a place where he could check and supervise them at any time, where he would not have to chase after propositi, then convince or reassure them. When he found the place, he thought it a bit awkward; he spoke of it to no one for a long time, but the results later justified his choice, even to himself. This encouraged him to share his secret with his colleagues, though he dared not tell his mother or his wife. He was the one who gave the idea to Adolf Butenandt, who wanted to transfer his extremely successful sterilization experiments with rats to a larger, human group than he had. Researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute lunched together every Wednesday in the institute’s new dining hall, and there, amid the banter, Professor Butenandt complained to his colleagues about how complicated and humiliating it was to conduct experiments on the mentally ill.

Schuer listened quietly, rather shocked by both the complaints and Clauberg’s temperate response to them.

But Butenandt went on asking Clauberg questions with animated interest, curious about the smallest details; he wanted to be free of the mentally ill patients, who were neither funny nor innocent.

Then a moment came when their give-and-take faltered in mutual embarrassment.

Coffee was served in the large salon, where each of the three men rather abruptly — and separately — sought out the company of others.

One cannot say that their serious doubts concerned only the scientific purity of their published data.

But since they were constantly pressed for time in their research programs they were in no position to dismiss the idea: why couldn’t they consider these unfortunates as propositi, since they had to be isolated anyway because of their antisocial behavior. That was one side that had to be considered. The other side was that race-protection laws and measures promoting ethnic cleansing had loud and very positive echoes in the scientific world, even though the scientific hypotheses on which these laws and measures were based statistically had not been adequately verified. American, Scandinavian, and French researchers also had their own genetic-pathological hypotheses, and they earnestly hoped their governments would follow Germany’s brilliant example, so that they could raise their research from the level of scientific pastime to that of a national cause.

Clauberg and Butenandt had reason to fear international competition, but since they were not overly ambitious, they wished only to speed up their research a little when they agreed to this dubious solution. Perhaps they did not fully appreciate that many things run on parallel tracks in the scientific world and therefore the effect of moral scruples on the result might on occasion prove fatal.

So when Karla von Thum zu Wolkenstein unexpectedly showed her boss samples she had received from a hitherto unknown anatomical and dissecting center in the Weimar area, and without having asked for them, her face literally beamed. Of course Baron von der Schuer did not believe that it was a surprise — come, come, several dozen pairs of eyes without asking for them, come now, there are no coincidences like that — but it was clear to him that the baroness, in possession of such a rich supply and promises of even richer supplies in the future, would soon establish a new system for defining genetically the color of human eyes, a subject on which he had been working for more than five years, struggling with a constant dearth of human material. He decided immediately that he too would put an end to the era of dilettante improvisations.

He wouldn’t be bashful anymore either.

He’d take the matter in hand, organize it properly, and above all would accept the support that, with the intercession of his assistant at the university, Himmler had already offered him.

Because of his foolish scientific attitude, he hadn’t accepted it the moment it had been offered.

What idiocy.

The richness of the pool from which he could now draw dazzled him, and for a long time it compensated for the missed opportunities of the past.

At least it considerably calmed his doubts.

Yet those doubts gained strength for a short while when the pastor of St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, after several warnings by the authorities, was taken into custody and, if one could trust hearsay, sent to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Pastor Niemöller had been his spiritual guide, one might say his paternal friend.*

To be honest, many people, including some from the highest circles, had warned him to be more careful with his sermons.

Schuer was sorry that he himself had never warned him, though he had always known he should have.

And lately, thanks to her achievements, Baroness Thum was making herself independent, so much so that with the support of her highly placed patrons she was appointed full professor and he had to free her from some of her former duties at the institute.