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than any form of institutional democracy. On the other hand, having his own private, secret “dream of the crown” in the Third Reich, Taudlitz never succumbed to Hitler’s magnetism; he never believed in Hitler’s doctrine, and for this reason was not obliged to mourn the fall of “Great Germany.” Instead, having wit enough to see it coming, particularly since he had never identified himself with the élite of the Third Reich ( though belonging to it), he prepared himself for the disaster appropriately. His cult of Hitler, universally known, was not even the product of self-deception; for ten years Taudlitz played a cynical comedy, for he had his own myth, which gave him a resistance to Hitler’s, and this proved especially convenient for him, because those disciples of
Mein Kampf
who made even a small attempt to take the doctrine seriously, more than once—as in the case of Albert Speer—felt themselves alienated from Hitler later on, whereas Taudlitz, as a man who only outwardly professed each day the views prescribed for that day, was immune to any heresy.
    Taudlitz believes implicitly and without reservation only in the power of money and force; he knows that with material goods people can be persuaded to go along with any plan of a sufficiently openhanded master, provided that master be also duly resolute and uncompromising in the carrying out of commitments once made. Taudlitz does not in the least trouble himself about whether his “courtiers,” that many-colored throng made up of Germans, Indians, mestizos, and Portuguese, really take seriously the vast spectacle imposed over many years, which he has staged in a manner that is—would be, to an outside observer—unspeakably insipid, uninspired, crass, or whether any of the actors believe in the reasonableness of the court of the Louis, or are instead only playing a comedy, reckoning on the payment, possibly also on making off with the “King’s bundle” after the death of the ruler. The problem does not appear to exist for Taudlitz.
    The life of the court community is so patent a forgery, and a clumsy one at that, it is such a piece of unauthenticity, that at least the more clearheaded of the people, those who came later to Parisia, as well as all who with their own eyes saw the origination of the pseudo-monarch and the pseudo-princes, cannot—even for a minute—have any doubt in this regard. And therefore, particularly in its early days, the kingdom resembles, as it were, a person schizophrenically split in two: one speaks one way at the palace audiences and balls, especially in the vicinity of Taudlitz, and quite another way in the absence of the monarch and his three confidants, who ensure in a most ruthless manner (with torture, even) the continuation of the imposed game. And it is a game decked out in rare splendor, bathed in a glitter now not false, for a stream of caravan supplies, paid for with hard currency, has in the space of twenty months raised castle walls, covered them with frescoes and Gobelins, dressed the parquet floors with elegant carpeting, set out endless pieces of furniture, mirrors, gilt clocks, commodes, built secret doors and hiding places in the walls, alcoves, pergolas, terraces, encircled the castle with an enormous, magnificent park, and, beyond, with a palisade and a moat. Every German is an overseer and keeps the Indian slaves under thumb (it is by Indian sweat and toil that the artificial kingdom comes into being); he parades attired like a true seventeenth-century knight, but wears on his gold belt a military handgun of the “Parabellum” make, the final argument in all disputes between feudal capital and labor.
    But the monarch and his confidants slowly, and at the same time systematically, eliminate from their surroundings every manifestation, every sign that would immediately unmask the fictitiousness of the court and the kingdom. So first a special