Douglas Mercer
December 8 2024
Flames announce to us, light to us and call to us, and show us the path from which there is no turning back.
No one can say exactly what they are up to there on the Northern Plain, for a long time we have prided ourselves on prohibiting locks of any kind and even any fences except what might be aesthetically appropriate. But the Fortress, as it is officially called, is guarded well enough and concrete walls ring it about even as it is inconceivable that anyone uninvited should go near. Our honor is our loyalty after all, and like the Spartans we now have a perfectly communitarian spirit. But something of tremendous importance is happening for sure, some Event is in the works, and German science and German ingenuity have led us to marvel upon marvel, but everyone expects that this will, whatever it is, be of a different order.
First off, there are the noises. Blasts I suppose you can say and they are heard for miles around; some even say that windows somewhat nearby have been shattered but these could just be tall tales; we are an ordered people hardened by war but a bit of the human still survives in us and gossip will always make the rounds. All in all we are in a rather good mood in our office, and I’ve noticed that the joy that has by now long been the hallmark of this society is now veering toward the giddy and the ecstatic—alcohol is now long a thing of the past, so it’s not that—but it seems to me that when I make it into town an irrepressible state of high spirits has infected the people, as if at any moment balloons will head toward the sky and the people will throw their hats in the air and they will never come down.
As I indicated the official name of the locale is the Fortress, but the younger wags in my office have ironically taken to calling it the Space And Time Museum, or the Building Of The Blue Flame. The former is readily understandable, but the latter eludes me, and I see that is as it should be, that the younger generation has their own preoccupations.
***
What I have been tasked to do in this essay is write a History Of The German People. Wide and great is the topic and though I fear that it will ramble on for too long I hope I know when to complete it. Who it is for is unclear, perhaps only for our by now surprisingly sparse archives, but my guess it is just part of a holdover from the famous German penchant for meticulousness and keeping an accurate record. I doubt it will be published, more likely only printed in a limited edition with special insignia and distributed among the leaders for a souvenir. This is as it should be as for the most part in the 1960s the publishing houses were shut down as we are blissfully no longer a people of the word, and when reality shines this much anything printed begins to seem superfluous. This was naturally dubbed the Kill The Paragraph movement, as I have noticed that nothing can transpire and the wags won’t have their say.
Many purple patches could be written on this subject, the greatest of them all. Scarcely a topic of more endless fascination, the Promethean people sprung from the earth who finally eluded the grasp of the other races and was able to develop along its own lines according to its own inner logistics. Secret fantasist that I am I do have a predilection for such high-flown rhetoric but I will try to keep it under control. I was told specifically that though writing on the German People could be a never-ending process to keep it to the length of what they called in former time a novella. That seems about correct to me as broad brushes are best and all us by now of have many more great things to do than read or remember; as the future is a time-consuming thing.
Why was I chosen? I like to think that it is my reputation for accuracy and my erudition. Also, the fact that I was at the Stalingrad Battle and fought in the ranks as an officer probably had something to do with it. Certainly, our Department Of History (not so large anymore) has others who could do this as well, if in a different style than I will present. But I think that the leaders thought that Stalingrad so important that they wanted to reward this signal honor to one who was there and who could give at least a few intimate details of what happened.
I also think that it is my reputation (once considered fearsome) for strict ideological precision that led them to my door. This perfection of the idea is not so important any more as Full Coordination has been achieved, and the possibility of lapse is now no longer present. But among the older generation many Old Fighters are still around and I like to think that after the war they saw in me one who shared their passion for the lore of the Struggle; as if on any given day I would like nothing more in this time of Golden Peace to dip a banner in blood and consecrate it in the public gardens, and go to the old city of Nuremberg and recall the depths of the soul of our people. At any rate, as they say, here I am.
***
It's an old story by now that once the Allies were totally quelled (Russia having fallen long before and International Communism become a museum piece, having been shut up behind the Urals and then wiped from the face of the earth) it became apparent to all that like Gaul of Old the Earth was to be in three parts: Germany, England and America. I must admit in the aftermath, when we saw that it was really all sewn up, it was like a dream. For now the old dream, the dream of living space, seemed like it had not been nearly ambitious enough.
An old canard in history is that there are no decisive moments, the cynical history is but one thing after another school; but here we had proven them incorrect; this was a decisive moment when it became apparent and visible to all that America and England were going to join in the future.
When that old cripple Roosevelt (who for some odd reason always hated us) died the last gasp of the Jews in America was in sight and a new generation, dedicated to order and peace, arose; England being nearer went faster and the order of 1940 was overturned and the rightful pro German aristocracy came to the fore. Certainly there was some evidence of expedience involved in this rapid volte face but when they saw that Hitler has been genuine with his olive branches set toward a pan Anglo-Saxon world a true comity emerged which has only grown stronger since. And anyway the law of History, which is the mother of truth, is the law of Necessity.
When this seeming dream was seen to be real all across the German lands a kind of near hysteria came about as if the gods themselves had turned woozy at the unprecedented nature of the turn of events; it has ceased over time but now is risen again when all sense some wordless brink. One pinches oneself to know that something is real and in Berlin in those days it was like that.
I must say, however, that when I came back from the war, there was some disgruntlement about the idea of Peace. Some of the Old Fighters believed that in the Euphoria of Victory too many things were being forgotten, and that some March Violets and their various and many fellow travelers across ideological lines would simply be grandfathered into the New Order. Justice first one always reminded me; then the Mercy, which was a good joke (an in joke really) among those who had long since outgrown the Hebrew Creed and who now subscribed to be God Lovers.
First and foremost there was Heidegger. We did not exactly have a list, more like scuttlebutt around the coffee klatch that something (very unofficially of course) should be done about those who had prevaricated in the time of Crisis. Heidegger of course was sui generis, living up in his Hut like a wizard king, the man had not gone to the Himalayan Highlands and was not quite a hermit, but he gave off the air of a seer or a holy man or adept; in the Weimar years had not they said that a new king of thinking has arisen, a secret king? And his often tortured and convoluted prose and weakness for gnomic utterance had completed the picture.
Naturally to war steeled men such a figure would be met with skepticism. My degree in philology had itself marked me out as suspect though no one of my comrades in arms would hear of it. So when the time came I, with my jokingly disreputable reputation as the dreamy fanatic, who was chosen; one who as Voltaire said of the life at Sans Souci, drill in the morning and give the afternoon over to the dream of the muses; and so in late 1945 I was selected to pay a visit to Dr. Heidegger, who accepted my invitation gladly.
I had met him once before. In a lecture hall after a spellbinding address I had asked him if he knew of Kierkegaard’s notion that there is no direct transition from the world of history to the world of eternity. I think he got the meaning and said they are one and the same. I know this kind of thing is caviar to the millions but for the dyed in the wool it is a matter of some importance. When I sat down to meet him I reminded him of his remark and he said that time had proven him right, and as we both contemplated the events of the past year neither of us could have had any doubt.
When I returned I assured my cohort that the man was totally ideologically coordinated. It was an understatement. For my hearers one such as this was always to be looked at askance; they prided themselves on having put the notion of a nation of poets and thinkers behind them, and the doctor was the epitome of that. The fact that he had so openly and nonchalantly consorted with Jews did not help matters. But I assured the more hardened among them that Germany was the life of the mind and the life of steel, was Athens and Sparta combined, a completion of the historical dialectic, and that one without the other would mean something less than completeness. And that more than one dead hero had spilled his German blood with a dog-eared book of Hölderlin in his kit bag.
To call the great philosopher correct in his thought is also to say too little. With a wave of his hand he conceded all my points one by one in advance. He said that his worries about the excessive emphasis on production had been premature, he sees now that it was but a temporary expedient; and alluding to the famous blast furnace of America that had underwritten Russia he smiled and said he knew now that one must fight fire with fire but that our people knew how not to get burned! I had always loved his work, so careful and prophetic and profound, he was the apotheosis of German Idealism, its wonderful final fruit, and it's culmination, and I detected absolute sincerity in the gleam in his eyes.
He talked about the philosopher so dreamy he fell into a well and that he too had had his head in the clouds; but that he never lost faith in the idea. All in all it was a most satisfying visit and I assured him that I would give him a clean bill of health and he thanked me. I also assured him that though we planned to rapidly curtail the producing of books he would be an exception, that all he had to do was say the word. As he escorted me to my car he pointed out about him and told me that this was that transition I had alluded to at our earlier meeting. I said I was sure of it, we shook hands and I left.
***
Junger was another case all together and whatever fame I have in certain circles is due largely to my battle with him. The man vaulted to fame on the back of his enormous Storm And Steel; while others like Hemingway and Remarque were penning pacifist creeds Junger had said that he loved war, loved everything about it; that only in the crucible of war could man find out who he was. And in hard yet graceful prose he spoke the soul of the German people. But over time true colors show. An aristocrat of the mind he looked down on what he took to be the petty bourgeois nature of National Socialism, though if he had been looking he would have seen this was but one aspect of it, and that there was a true world view behind it, an intellectual ethos.
But of course, what really made him suspect was his depiction of Hitler as the baleful Forrester in On The Marble Cliffs; and I still suspect that it was published only in order to give him enough rope to hang himself; which in fact he did. And there were rumors (more than rumors) of his involvement in what we now simply and in hindsight call The Plot which sent more than a few to the razor wire. But what really got my gall was how the gray uniformed grandee set himself up in the Paris cafés as some kind of cultural arbiter. As an aficionado of the conservative revolution he was a patrician of the spirit (as he would be the first to tell you) and he would have been as at home with Picasso and Joyce as a solid German officer; more so in fact. Thus it was in 1946 I circulated an essay questioning his loyalty and enumerating the many gaps and lacunas in his record. This lit a fire and many came to me and said this was a test case.
I selected myself and went out to meet him and like two wary boxers we fended each other. But he knew what he had done and he knew what I represented. We spoke some of Stalingrad and I complimented him on Storm. But I told him that regrettably we would not be publishing him, couching it in terms of the fact that we wanted less reliance on the written word to augment the health of the people. But he took my meaning. Later he got a curt letter saying that he might not even write for private consumption and from time-to-time polite searches were made, among friends you understand.
As befits one to the manner born he took this all in good stride. He knew he got off lucky and was canny enough not to tempt fate—a trimmer at heart. And as far as I know he is still a hale and hearty eighty living out in the hinterlands dreaming whatever dreams he has. He will probably live to be a hundred the old bluffer---will probably out live us all.
And so the case of Junger made my name, was where I cut my teeth as I have since learned the Americans like to say, I spoke for so many who wanted to be sure that the peace would not bring forgetfulness. And so this deed made me very well known, and decades of solid if circumspect scholarship on subjects near the hearts of the leaders (race chaos in Rome, the satirical aspect in Marr, and a detailed history of the time of struggle, among others) made it that when the time came they plucked out my name and here I am writing this.
As a note for posterity, we shot Mann in Malibu in 1950 and the American government wrote it off as the cost of doing business, all being fair in both love and war. For it is time honored wisdom that some things are best left alone. After all Stalin took out Trotsky and thirty-four years after the event a distant relative of Caesar’s knifed to death an equally distant relative of one of the assailants in a Roman street; revenge is just so long as it is done with a cold heart. I was intimately involved in this quest and even bruited about the idea that I should do it which was nixed on practical grounds. So I have it on good authority that he was shot in the face—as a great people never leave a stone unturned. We let Hesse live as we all knew that it was impossible for him to hurt a fly, he died some twenty years ago fluttering, I suppose, in some mystical and imagined internal migration.
As for me I work at Berlin University in the History Department and have been given a two-month sabbatical to write this paper which is so important to our leaders. My guess is I can complete it in half that time. My wife is well, I have a son who is an engineer, another who is an architect and a daughter who writes music. We Germans have our priorities together and this signal year of 1980 bodes well to be an auspicious one in the history of our people, the greatest one of all in the grand journey of our special and sacred path. They say that I will finish before the project bears its fruit so I will confine myself to our special and sacred past.
I still hear tell of noises on the Northern Plain and when asked about them I repeat my stock phrase that no one knows exactly what is going on and that time will tell. Is time becoming space as some like to venture? Will a chain reaction be set off? Or is time really a place? I consider these but idle if understandable questions and I am content to remain in my cell, imagining that I write only for myself, but knowing that I write for the ancestors and for their posterity. I have my books about me but these are memory aids that I will not need, I have the history of my people at my mental fingertips, these are the words I was born to write, these are the words that our people was born to have written about them; and I see that in the long van of being it is this, and this alone, that I was put on earth for.
May the lightening light our way—now that there is no turning back.
Heil Hitler
Heil Kammler
Germany Over Everything
Continued at Empyrean (Part Two)
