Read Online Fiasco by Imre Kertész - Free Book Online
Authors: Imre Kertész
Tags: General Fiction
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General Globocnik not think,’ ministerial counsellor Dr. Herbert Lindner poses the highly practical question to SS-Brigadeführer Globocnik, ‘that it would be more prudent to burn the corpses instead of burying them? Another generation might take a different view of these things!’ To which Globocnik replies, ‘Gentlemen, if there is ever a generation after so cowardly, so soft, that it would not understand our work as good and necessary, then, gentlemen, National Socialism will have been for nothing. On the contrary, we should bury bronze tablets, saying that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task!’ “
Yes, I wove my thoughts further, maybe the demon is lurking hereabouts: not in the fact that man kills but that he proclaims its indispensable virtues into a world order of killing. I took down a documentary compendium from my bookshelf and leafed through it for a photograph of Ilse Koch. The face, though it may once have been steeled with a hint of female allure, was certainly here ordinary, sullen, doughy-skinned, piggish—quite incapable of convincing me that I was beholding a figure of a stature who was grand even in her excesses, someone who had transcended good and evil and whose life had run its course in terms of a ceaseless, implacable challenge which spurned all morality. For Ilse Koch had not, in truth, opposed a moral order; quite the contrary, she herself epitomized it—and that is a big difference. Nor did I find in that documentary compendium any evidence that she took a special pleasure in music—Beethoven in particular—or that she had given herself to prisoners. She picked her lovers from the staff-officers—the camp doctor, Dr. Hoven, nicknamed ‘Handsome Waldemar,’ and
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Florstedt—as befitted her logic. Manifestations of her inventiveness were restricted to customs that were practices of the time. Shrunken heads and decorative articles of tanned human skin ornamented the villas and office desks of many officers in Buchenwald, and Ilse Koch too possessed a number of these. Possibly more than others, but then that would only have been her right—after all, she was the camp commandant’s wife, the “
Kommandeuse.’
She generally owned more of everything than the wives of subordinates: bigger villa, more opulent household, more privileges. Giving free rein to her fantasy—bolstered by who knows what kinds of reading matter just a few years before, when she was justa stenographer in a tobacco and cigarette factory—took her as far as bathing in Madeira wine and having a riding hall of four-thousand-square-metres constructed for her own use, none of which bears the least stamp of a solitary moral renegade. It is unlikely it ever crossed her mind that if there was no God, then everything was permitted; on the contrary, she needed a god above all else—more specifically a god who would set down in writing everything that he permitted her. Indisputably, the moral world order offered by Buchenwald was one of murder; but it was a world order, and that was good enough for her. She never went beyond the bounds of its logic: where murder is a commonplace, a person becomes a murderer out of zealotry, not revolt. Killing can become just as much a virtue as not killing. The spectacle of so many corpses, and so much torture, no doubt had its reward, now and then, in an exceptional moment of elation about existing, and simultaneous gratitude and pride in service.
But wasn’t that its
function
? I continued to brood. Is it not possible that a predetermined state of affairs—the state of affairs of a camp commandant’s wife—goes together with, so to say, predetermined feelings and actions that are prescribed in advance? That one and the same state of affairs—give or take a little, perhaps—could have been filled by essentially
anybody
else with similar feelings and actions, or would that person suddenly find himself in some other, likewise ready-made
Yes, I wove my thoughts further, maybe the demon is lurking hereabouts: not in the fact that man kills but that he proclaims its indispensable virtues into a world order of killing. I took down a documentary compendium from my bookshelf and leafed through it for a photograph of Ilse Koch. The face, though it may once have been steeled with a hint of female allure, was certainly here ordinary, sullen, doughy-skinned, piggish—quite incapable of convincing me that I was beholding a figure of a stature who was grand even in her excesses, someone who had transcended good and evil and whose life had run its course in terms of a ceaseless, implacable challenge which spurned all morality. For Ilse Koch had not, in truth, opposed a moral order; quite the contrary, she herself epitomized it—and that is a big difference. Nor did I find in that documentary compendium any evidence that she took a special pleasure in music—Beethoven in particular—or that she had given herself to prisoners. She picked her lovers from the staff-officers—the camp doctor, Dr. Hoven, nicknamed ‘Handsome Waldemar,’ and
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Florstedt—as befitted her logic. Manifestations of her inventiveness were restricted to customs that were practices of the time. Shrunken heads and decorative articles of tanned human skin ornamented the villas and office desks of many officers in Buchenwald, and Ilse Koch too possessed a number of these. Possibly more than others, but then that would only have been her right—after all, she was the camp commandant’s wife, the “
Kommandeuse.’
She generally owned more of everything than the wives of subordinates: bigger villa, more opulent household, more privileges. Giving free rein to her fantasy—bolstered by who knows what kinds of reading matter just a few years before, when she was justa stenographer in a tobacco and cigarette factory—took her as far as bathing in Madeira wine and having a riding hall of four-thousand-square-metres constructed for her own use, none of which bears the least stamp of a solitary moral renegade. It is unlikely it ever crossed her mind that if there was no God, then everything was permitted; on the contrary, she needed a god above all else—more specifically a god who would set down in writing everything that he permitted her. Indisputably, the moral world order offered by Buchenwald was one of murder; but it was a world order, and that was good enough for her. She never went beyond the bounds of its logic: where murder is a commonplace, a person becomes a murderer out of zealotry, not revolt. Killing can become just as much a virtue as not killing. The spectacle of so many corpses, and so much torture, no doubt had its reward, now and then, in an exceptional moment of elation about existing, and simultaneous gratitude and pride in service.
But wasn’t that its
function
? I continued to brood. Is it not possible that a predetermined state of affairs—the state of affairs of a camp commandant’s wife—goes together with, so to say, predetermined feelings and actions that are prescribed in advance? That one and the same state of affairs—give or take a little, perhaps—could have been filled by essentially
anybody
else with similar feelings and actions, or would that person suddenly find himself in some other, likewise ready-made
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