Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“I don’t understand, George. He’s asking us to reduce phenomena to pure consciousness, to a kind of cellar beneath which it cannot be reduced further. Can’t we excavate more, go deeper?”

“Well, I think that nature, the body, and the mind are in that cellar, as you call it. And that’s quite a lot. E doppo? Where does the old boy want to lead us?”

As if he were reading his students’ thoughts with his hawklike eyes, which contrasted so savagely with his stiff butterfly collar, his shirt-front, his vest crossed by a watch chain, his old-fashioned black frock coat, his trousers that tended to hang over his short black boots, Husserl told them that after the Great War, Europe’s spiritual world had collapsed, and that if he was preaching a reduction of thought to the very foundations of the mind and of nature, it was only the better to renovate European life, history, society, and language.

“I can’t conceive of a world without Europe or Europe without Germany. A European Germany that would he part of the best Europe has promised to the world. I’m not, ladies and gentlemen, creating an abstract philosophy. I’m firmly rooted in the best we’ve done. That which can survive us. Our culture. That which can inspire your children and grandchildren. I won’t see it. That’s why I teach it.”

Then Raquel and Jorge went out to celebrate in a jolly student Keller , which they usually avoided because of its noisy camaraderie, but that night everyone was shocked or amused at the toasts the couple made with their steins of beer on high: To intersubjectivity! To society, language, and the history that relates it all! We are not separated! We are a we, linked by language, community, and past!

They aroused laughter, sympathy, commotion, and shouts: When are you getting married? Can two philosophers get along in bed? Is it true you’re going to name your first son Socrates? Oh, intersubjectivity, come to me, let me interpenetrate you!

They went to the cathedral after running their amazed, intelligent, and sensual eyes over the outside, and discovered, in that famous minster, finished at the dawn of the sixteenth century, a perfect illustration of what concerned them, as if Husserl’s lessons had returned not to complement but to revive the tympanum of original sin which here, on one flank of the cathedral, preceded the Creation shown on the archivault. This told us that the Creation redeemed sin and left it behind; the Fall was not the consequence of Creation. There is no Fall, the Freiburg lovers told each other, there is Origin and then there is Creation.

On the west side of the cathedral, Satan, posing as the Prince of the World, leads a procession that walks away not only from original sin but from divine Creation. Facing this satanic procession, the main door of the cathedral opens, and it is there, not outside but inside, or rather at the very entrance to the interior, that Redemption is described and declared.

They went through that door, and almost as if at communion, kneeling next to each other, without any fear of seeming ridiculous, they prayed aloud:

we shall return to ourselves

we shall think as if we’d founded the world

we shall be the living subjects of history

we shall live the world of life

The Nazis forced Husserl out of Freiburg and out of Germany. The old exile continued teaching in Vienna and Prague, with the Wehrmacht always one step behind him. They allowed him to return to die in his beloved Freiburg, but the philosopher had said, “In the heart of every Jew there is absolutism and martyrdom.” By contrast, his disciple Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun after renouncing Israel and converting to Christianity, would say that same year: “Disasters will rain on Germany when God avenges the atrocities committed against the Jews.” It was the year of Kristallnacht, on November 9, organized by Goebbels to destroy synagogues, Jewish businesses, and Jews. Hitler announced his intention to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe once and for all.

It was the same year that Jorge Maura met Laura Díaz in Mexico and Raquel Mendes-Alemán, with the Star of David sewn to her bosom, greeted the SS in the streets with the shout “Christ be blessed!” which she repeated on the ground, bloody, kicked, and punched. “Christ be blessed!”

On March 3, 1939, the Prinz Eugen of the Lloyd Trieste line sailed from Hamburg with 224 Jewish passengers on board, all convinced they would be the last to leave Germany after the terror of Kristallnacht, and saved because of a series of circumstances, some attributable to the Nazis’ mathematical madness — who is Jewish? only the child of Jewish parents, but what about the child with one Jewish parent? what about those with fewer than three Aryan grandparents, etc., etc., traced back through the generations to Abraham — others to the wealth of certain Jews who could buy freedom by turning over to the Nazis their money, paintings, homes, furniture (this was the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family, when Austria was annexed to the Reich); still others thanks to old friends who were now Nazis but who kept a warm memory of Jewish friends; others deriving from amorous favors granted to a high-ranking officer in the regime in order to save parents and siblings, as Judith did in the Bible, though this Holofernes was immortal: ; still others indebted to consular officials who, with or without their government’s authorization, interceded on behalf of individual Jews.

The same day the SS beat her, Raquel began to wear the cross of Christ next to the Star of David, † , with the result that she was locked into her small apartment in Hamburg, the double provocation meaning that the SS would be waiting at the door of her house with ferocious dogs, clubs, warning her, come out, if you dare, Jewish whore, rotten seed of Abraham, Slavic infestation, Levantine flea, gypsy chancre, come out, if you dare, Andalusian hetaira, try to find food, scrape around in the corners of your pigsty, pig that you are, eat dust and cockroaches, if Jews can eat gold, they can also eat rats.

The neighbors were warned that if they gave me food, their rations would be taken away, if they did it again, they would be sent to a camp. I, Raquel Mendes-Alemán, decided to die of hunger for the sake of my Jewish race and my Catholic religion; I decided, George, to be the absolute witness of my age, and I knew I would have no salvation when the Nazis declared that “our worst enemies are the Jewish Catholics.” It was then I opened my window and shouted into the street, “St. Paul said, I am a Jew! I am a Jew!” and my neighbors threw stones at me and two minutes later a burst of machine-gun fire broke my windows and I had to curl up in a corner, until the Mexican consul, Salvador Elizondo, arrived with a safe-conduct pass and told me you’d interceded so I could board the Prinz Eugen and escape to the freedom of the New World. I’d sworn I would stay in Germany and die in Germany as testimony to my faith in Christ and Moses. Then I gave in, my distant love, and I knew why — not out of fear of them, not out of fear that I’d be taken to one of those places whose names we all knew by then — Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald — but out of shame that my own Church and my own Father, the Pope, did not raise their voices to defend us, to defend all Jews, but also Catholic Jews like me. Rome made me an orphan, Pius XII never spoke in defense of the human race, George, so it was not only that he did not speak up for the Jews but that the Holy Father never extended his hand to the human race. You did, Mexico did. There would be no better opportunity than the Prinz Eugen , which was going to take us to America. The Mexican President, Lázaro Cárdenas, was going to speak with Franklin Roosevelt to allow us to disembark in Florida.