Douglas Mercer
January 7 2025
Continued from Empyrean (Part Seventeen)
A PLAY IN GERMANY
Let no one say that the German Spirit ever irrevocably lost its home so long as those bird voices can be heard telling us of that home and calling us to leave it forever. For now the Knight has awakened in all of the early morning freshness of his long sleep, we have slayed all the dragons, we have killed the cunning dwarfs, and roused the Valkyries for their eternal ride, and now not even the spear of Wotan will bar our way.
Only the poet will save us; or flame
The first thing one notices is that the noises have stopped. This past week knowing that I am near completion they have wanted me to visit them on the campus. I can say that no face I met betrayed that we are at a different time now, they are all as always masks of cheerfulness and irrepressible good will as any man must be when he nears accomplishing a long sought for task. For the most part I was left free to wander around to record my impressions of what, though no one says it, is surely a signal time in the life of our people. My overwhelming impression is of the immaculate whiteness of the place, where you walk is all white stone and the many buildings which are strung across the hill are clean and pure and white as well. When people are walking through the space from one building to the next they do so at a normal pace and all seem to know that what is going on in the main buildings (which they will only let me see after I have submitted this) is the culmination of the long arc of knowledge of our race on this planet.
From the aerial perspective of history many was the time when a day like this could not even have been dreamt and, if it could have been, would have seemed a most unlikely prospect. Naturally the Greeks were the first ones to probe into the logic of the world and in hindsight all of the necessary predicates were in place by the time they passed from the scene. Still the notion of applying such knowledge in the practical sphere, of becoming the helmsman of our own destiny, never could have dawned on them. That we would become pilots of this craft would have appeared ludicrous in the long years when the gods of our people were supplanted by an alien and exotic religion which exalted to preeminence of those who were not high born. And when the first stirrings of rebirth were upon it our people were like mad explorers groping in the dark, finding law after law, and presenting it to a world which knew not what to do with it.
It was the in the long nineteenth century when a new breed of men, unsatisfied with theoretical works, began the long and arduous process of making thought tangible in the world, of creating a world of men and for men, and making earth our home. We were the land’s before the land was ours said the poet—how true! But we made of it a habitation fit for ourselves and were then underway---but then as in the fairy tale the evil stepmother and the stunted trolls that live under bridges and scare small children by night saw that we had found the Rhine Gold and wanted to spirit it away and hoard it for themselves. Many of our people fell prey to their subtle blandishments which went under the name of justice, and peace and love—as if words sacred to our people could be used as facsimiles of themselves and acquire an opposite meaning.
But as we know by know a great Knight roused us and arose, was called by the name of Evil, but like in the fairy tales things are not what they appear to be. And so by the force or arms and with a long tutelage of our people as to the many strands of history, we have as if by mental force made our people come to its senses before it was too late for us. And the fruit of this is a world of peace and a world of prosperity and a world of hope, all of them real and not ersatz. And sometimes I like to think that it was all done only so our science and our scientists could carve for themselves that wonderful oases on the Northern Plain, where they could have the time to pore over the texts, pore over the lore of our people, and begin to put it all together. And so it seems they have. Time and Space they say, time and space, whoever can conquer both in the eye of their mind will master both and master matter and themselves and master the wide world. Did time precede space? Was time born with space? Or are the two actually the same thing just enfolded in different dimensions?
Certainly simple questions and one of my friends who had been on the inside claims that the most cardinal postulate of all is that any law of nature has to be elementary, must be simple in its elegance, and elegant in its simplicity—and if one has proposed a solution which seems to have an epicycle—you can reject it out of hand. I concur with this but I felt obliged to tell him that as to the answer to what lies behind it all the rubric is the opposite—if it is not strange indeed you can be sure it’s not true. He told me he could not speak to that, that was my bailiwick, as surely it is. And when I left that last time, which was the last stop on my itinerary before returning here to finish this off I walked through the calmness of the campus certain they had attained a final solution, plumbed the very heart of nature, and that the noises and the eruptions would not return, it would be plain sailing her ono out for our people, though the monster had begun its trek home.
In January 1943 just as we were homing in on our Victory both sides began to report strange sights over the North Sea, as pilots flying over Western Europe saw fast moving round and glowing objects following their craft. These objects were reported to be of a off white shining nature with tinctures of green or as balls of red and golden fire; but the most startling thing about them was their uncanny maneuverability and their lightning speed, as if they were immune to the law of nature and could break all barriers as if they were ad hoc rules, going up and down, backwards or forwards or just hover or hang in the air in one spot half the size of the full moon. I was flying and there was an object next to me. I couldn’t get rid of it, I slowed up, it was there. I sped up, it was there. I would dive, it would be there. I called. Nothing on radar—so one of the later recountings ran.
Naturally for a world at war each adversary feared that the other side had some new super weapon that was bound to tip the scales. And of course, as we all know such objects became the subject of vast moral panics in America all through the 1950s, particularly in its Southwest (where we had our ever-proliferating nuclear experiments at Los Alamos) most particularly the famous event at Roswell. It was this more than anything which fueled the Yankee craving for all things related to science fiction, spawning hundreds of novels and moviea the main theme of which was the day the earth stood still. One theory which still pervades is that whatever extraterrestrial or celestial beings there are began to notice that we earthlings (for so the American comically called us) were set to surpass our antiquated modes of being and begin the inevitable journey on the path through the stars.
As a historian committed to the value of objectivity I cannot pass judgment on the verisimilitude of this conjecture but can only notice the juxtaposition. And it is well to remember too that if one searches the annals of all peoples of the earth one will find written remembrances of such visitors long before the splitting of the atom was even a gleam in our eye. What I can tell you for sure, having inspected the archives of the three former combatants and believing them all to be sound Saxon solid plain dealing people, that whatever it was in the skies in those fateful months of early 1943, the years that history stood still as it were, whether they be electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena, reflections from light of ice crystals in our glacial north, or in fact exploratory pioneers from some advanced intergalactic civilization, their provenance most surly was not from the earth.
The term foo fighter (for so the American termed them) derives from American popular culture in cartoons by Bill Holman who peppered his Smokey Stover fireman cartoons with foo signs and puns. The Americans and their popular culture always baffle me—they came up with the folk saying Kilroy as well---kill the king—and it shows that in the realm of the volk and its native genius we all of us still have much to learn.
Now we are at the End Of German History, it’s culmination not in a cul-de-sac but like the Coast of Bohemia with an imaginary outlet to the sea. It is April 1981 and we are now in the most sacred part of our calendar. Adolf Hilter was born an obscure person in Braunau am Inn—on the 20th of this month 1889—some 91 years ago and what a revolution those 91 years have brought! We were teetering on the brink of disaster and man was playing with fire and was about to get burned—but where the danger is the power to save always lurks.
For whoever strives upward—he can be saved and only he can save the earth and its people. The poet said that April is the cruelest month—but that shows that he was speaking helplessly and heedlessly from a diseased culture on its way out, out of gas, out of ideas, when their only hope was to save a few broken statues and score of battered books. Rather April is the month of birth, not of death, the Crucified Icon was most untimely placed as that noble rider, the Procurator Pontius Pilate, well knew---April is the month of the re-birth of the people, Ostara is the time of the goddess Eostre—of life and renewal and natural regeneration.
And it was in another April, that of 1944—annus mirabilis—that I was privileged to attend at the Berlin Philharmonic a kind of solemn Victory Fest at the courtesy of my commander. It was the dark rumor in the Reich that should Germania lose, horrible thought, one would hear Bruckner on the radio played around the clock; one of course listened in trepidation for those majestic sounds but they never did come. But in Victory of course it had to be Wagner, for Hitler had said that in order to understand National Socialism one simply must understand Wagner; that man who delved into the myths, lore and legends of our people and represented it in sound and vision and so completed his work of total art even as we were the work of a total people. And of course the final work of the New Order will be to blow up the world, and to banish the gods—when on a flaming pyre we begin to live.
Finally, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde – Siegfried's lover and Wotan's daughter who lost her immortality for defying her father in an attempt to save Siegfried's father Sigmund – returns the ring to the Rhine maidens as she commits suicide on Siegfried's funeral pyre. Hagen is drowned as he attempts to recover the ring. In the process, the gods and Valhalla are destroyed.
The night itself had all the hallmarks of a sacred event. Hitler did not have pride of place but was down level with the orchestra and all in attendance had fought; all of us resplendent in our gray uniforms, aesthetically impeccable as always, as we filed in a kind of hushed awe hung over the room; this was our hallowed grove and we knew that upon our stage we would see a play that could only be performed in Germany, that we were going to see a ritual enactment of what would transpire in the future.
I am sure that I felt what everyone felt that the music we heard transported us to a place, a real place, that did not exist on earth or did not exist yet, that we had been translated and transposed into the isles of the blessed where the immortals reside and which they call home, into the pure ether and firmament of the Empyrean itself; a timeless word is perhaps a world where time stands still and does not move; and transfixed on the sounds that were vibrating in the void and the majestic voices inundating us with their pure passion all of us were mesmerized and held frozen for the duration if that is what it was, though in retrospect it seemed to elapse in an instant.
I have never yet to experience this feeling again though I know that it is real, more real than all the rest. And when the lights slowly came up all of the warriors sat in silence and contemplated that the ring that was grasped for was in our possession, that after the millennia we were then in the very heart of the magic circle and would never leave it again. As we made our way out I saw an old friend who had been in Leningrad but we did not exchange any news of our war; we only embraced and asked about our respective families, not did we discuss the music as it was something which by then went without saying. As we prepared to leave another solider came up and said that had we lost the sounds of the orchestra would have been mingled with the sounds of from the East of Soviet Ordinance, and that the two would have intertwined for the crescendo---and that right now as we hurriedly made our way to prepare to bug out Hitler Youth like hatcheck girls would be offering up cyanide tablets.
On my trip I went first to the East to see the Mausoleum. What I saw shocked me. As I made my way into its precincts I saw that all the august stone markers in what was after all a surprisingly small space were gone; and as I walked further in I saw too that the mounds where the remains lay looked to have been furrowed. I blinked my eyes but the only conclusion I could draw was that they were gone—the bodies were gone. The blood banners too were not present and what I saw was just a flat open space of grass and the bare pure white marble walls which enclosed it. I resolved right away not to speak of it or to ask; had I am sure no answer would have been forthcoming and the question uttered would have been considered to be in poor taste; if this was the German riddle of the Sphinx the answer was not to answer it, the answer lay in the emptiness and those white walls. I tarried for a while but not for long; and leaving I was sure I knew the solution.
My parents died some five years ago within two months of one another. We had been a close family and what they taught me I will never forget: loyalty, honor, truth, blood, race. Never either will I forget what my father told as he neared his end; that his generation was a generation which had seen the horror in full; that they had known from the beginning that they were witnessing the promised moment of maximum peril as sure as if all of life was on a stage acting out the moment of cataclysm; and that without hope or sentiment they had fought that something might come of it, that something might come, and that we could make it through this corridor or passageway to where they were sure was still the opening.
But that my generation, well, my generation had the great honor of being the called upon one; that steeled in the precepts of the people we had had the privilege of securing the future and securing it forever and we had not faltered or failed; but that in truth all the Germans and all the people of our race were but one generation, the generation of the sacred earth which thanks to the struggle we had inherited as the rightful lords; that he no more regretted that he would not be present at the final conflagration than that he was not present when Varus had been defeated; or when the thunder rolled over the battle of Worth; but that in a more real sense he was there, for wherever along the always circuitous path it goes the German spirit then all of the Germans are there.
I went to Heidelberg to see the home where I was born. I had not been there in some forty years, indeed the last time I did I was leaving for the war. My parents had moved to Berlin and had sold it and though many times I had meant to go there I never did; but now that we seemed to be on the precipice of something finally truly unknown I resolved that the time was finally right, to leave no stone unturned while tying up loose ends. When I got there I stood outside for a time and noticed that it seemed smaller than I remembered, smaller as if some wooden house in a long lost fable; knocking I met the couple and explained why I was there and they escorted me in.
When I told them who I was they thanked me and I noticed that they were the very image of Germany. He was an engineer and she raised the children and everything was gleaming and clean; we talked for a time and I told them that I was writing this paper; naturally they asked me if I knew anything of what was happening on the Campus and I told them not much more than they did and certainly nothing definitive. They then said that they were on their way out and that I was free to look around. When I did I went out into the back and saw so many scenes flood before my mind, something of late that I noticed had been happening more and more frequently, sequential sequences of memories that seemed to be attached to one another by some ethereal cord which was unwinding them as if in a film on a screen.
Indeed, if I would sit in repose the memories felt like they were never ending and though they seemed to be going towards some unknown source it was clear that they would just circle on and on; so many thoughts that had been long dead and buried came to life, odd things that I had said to people and people to me, locations that I had forgotten I had been to, all of it came before me as if in a panoply but now that I had been triggered by some primal and early scenes the phenomena was particularly intense; looking back on it from an outside perspective I must have seemed immersed or immured in a frighteningly internal space for how long I do not know; when I finally came to I looked up and it was as if I was looking at picture that I had long known but that subtle details of which had been switched in secret while I was not looking.
They say that when a man is near death he intuits this demise and the long held hopes and dreams of his life become like a nagging intensity as he longs to find an answer which despite his efforts had eluded him. It was not that. I was not dying, far from it. But realizing that this daisy chain of recollection if allowed to continue would leave me immobilized I set out about the rest of the home; to tell you the truth I was strangely unmoved; each corner and recess and alcove brought back with it the train of associations but the scene itself seemed to me not to be real; and after quickly finishing I left. I am glad that I came but I knew that there was nothing left for me there. Of my smaller and former self I was just an observer; but of where my thoughts were heading all I had to do was trail along.
They closed down the history building the other day, something they had been planning on doing for some time. For stragglers such as myself they moved us in with the rhetoriticians which is highly appropriate. If I recall correctly it was an American novelist who said that biographies were just novels with footnotes. This is quite true and it is true of histories as well. It’s not the famous qualms about eyewitness accounts; in terms of the eyewitness it depends on who the eyes belong to and the if the eyes of the beholder are sufficiently steady to transpose reality with transparence. It’s just that events begin as we move on to take on a life of their own, as if all the graves of the past stood tenantless and the sheeted dead walk like town criers to tell their story, but tell it in new and unsuspected ways, heroes may become villains and vice versa, and bit players the protagonist.
And as I sum up I think of what a student once asked me: why the Aryans? It was a simple question and there is a simple answer. The beginning is that there was a substratum of our race which was schooled and steeled in the savagery of the bitter cold of the North which brought to bear a hardened and magnificent race; but then so did the Japanese. What it really was that we were a people who had great imaginations, who never saw reality as a given but as a take off point for our spectacular leaps and flights of fancies, a canvas on which to paint our dreams; we were a gallant people in love with beauty, and a chivalrous people in love with the world of the fabulous; and when the time came we had built up a store of knowledge which with our superior intelligence we mobilized and set free; and being so plastic and free and open and flexible and versatile we were able to adapt to the point where we were the ones that were adapted to and we began to do the selecting and the steering. That and that we were able to make decisions and begin to plan and finally execute. For though most don’t like to talk or think about it anyone who has thought about it for two seconds knows that it is everyone’s deepest and most libidinal desire to live forever.
Germany now, what is it now? It is a people on a holiday. Of course the work goes on but we all see that there is kind of spreading contagion of giddiness across the land as if laughing gas had been spread through air or had infiltrated our drinking water. To call it euphoria is not hyperbole; to say that we are approaching the ecstatic is right too but no frenzy attends it, it is an irrepressibility that we see in people as if some sense tells them that they are learning to fly and they won’t need wings, and no one has any idea of coming down. Indeed, the general impression is that people will throw their hats in the air and they will never return to the earth.
It is a people who as they were free to obey now have become the masters of their own power and strength and joy. Or as if an infectious virus had become a feature of our system and as if Project Empyrean had some intentional gain of function which escaped their grasp in the laboratory and made it into everyone’s mind. The future is a child at play the Philosopher said and life now seems like one long vacation or a children’s holiday, the hysterical is the historical. A play in Germany it is, and has been, a convoluted story line, much backtracking and nail-biting hair pin turns but, in the end, just a straight line forever to the climax and denouement. Yet for all of that we really are an undramatic people and no high anxiety attends it and it will not be one of those cliffhangers that the Americans seem to enjoy so much in their films, where the fabricated melodrama intensifies. Any more we are schooled close to the quotidian and we have formally put things in order; so since the gun was placed on the mantle in the first act I cannot but imagine that in the end it will not go off.
During the war in their communications the Americans said roger this and roger that; or over and out; our call and response system was simpler, our vocalizations were stripped down. The first party gave an order, the second repeated it, and then the first said it again; but now the system of communication is nearing completion and the famous German mission is now culminated and German History is kaput; and as the last and most famous German communiqué said: The Eagle Has Landed.
I seem to see double and backwards through vast abysm and mists of time. And the last time I was in the Blue Building as I left I noticed a small hut like structure up a bit on the hill though it too was white just somewhat oddly shaped relative to the rest. What is that I asked. With deadpan nonchalance my escort said oh that’s where we cast the spells. I looked at him but his face was granite; having mastered ourselves we move others while we remain as stone, and his face as I looked at it betrayed nothing. He saw my perplexity and said what do you think all the psychologists are for?
And so that great reckoning in that little room bring us infinite riches with its burning glass; the poet wondered if that burning fire in our hearts was placed there by the god or if it was just our mad desire---but wisdom is that they are one and the same. Still and even so I must be objective here, for it is the main characteristic of the historian’s craft, and for the record say by rote what all of us know, namely, that no one really knows what they are doing up there on that Northern Plain. Flame light for us, call to us, and send us along the path from which there is no turning back. We have heeded your call. Strange days indeed; so strange you know: Victory.
***
Notes:
During April 1945, the US Navy began to experiment on visual illusions as experienced by nighttime aviators. This work began the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Medicine (BUMED) project X-148-AV-4-3. This project pioneered the study of aviators' vertigo and was initiated because a wide variety of anomalous events were being reported by nighttime aviators. Edgar Vinacke, who was the prime flight psychologist on this project, summarized the need for a cohesive and systemic outline of the epidemiology of aviators' vertigo: Pilots do not have sufficient information about phenomena of disorientation, and, as a corollary, are given considerable disorganized, incomplete, and inaccurate information. They are largely dependent upon their own experience, which must supplement and interpret the traditions about Vertigo which are passed on to them. When a concept thus grows out of anecdotes cemented together with practical necessity, it is bound to acquire elements of mystery. So far as vertigo is concerned, no one really knows more than a small part of the facts, but a great deal of the peril. Since aviators are not skilled observers of human behavior, they usually have only the vaguest understanding of their own feelings. Like other naive persons, therefore, they have simply adopted a term to cover a multitude of otherwise inexplicable events.
The objects were dubbed foo fighters because of a popular comic strip at the time called Smoky Stover. The character Smoky was fond of saying where’s there’s foo there’s fire and the objects seemed to be fiery rounded shapes (balls of fire). By 1944 for the Americans the term foo fighter was used by radar operators to describe a return on the radar screen of an object which might not actually exist.
Eoestre (Proto Germanic) is a West Germanic Spring Goddess. The name is reflected in Old English Eastre; Northumbrian dialect: Eastro, Mercian and West Saxon Dialects: Eostre, Old High German: Ostara, and old Saxon: Asteron. By way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian Eosturmonap, West Saxon: Eastermonab, Old High Germanic: Ostarmanoth. She is the namesake of the festival.
As soon as the last restraints of devastation are overcome and destructions are recognized as mere temporary passageways the prototypes can be rescinded overnight as they have served their purpose. Then there exists for the will to ordering the chance of a complete calculation of the globe in terms of its good and values and finally arrives the prospect of storing up a potentiality of powers which can be sufficient to deliver up the earth, along with it atmosphere, to an explosive charge. This blowing up of the globe by the Rational Animal will be the final act of the New Order.
THE END
