The Kindly Ones

It was my birthday: my thirtieth. As in Kiev, I had invited Thomas to dinner, I didn’t want to see anyone else. In truth, I had a lot of acquaintances in Berlin, old friends from university or the SD, but no one aside from Thomas whom I regarded as a friend. Ever since my convalescence I had resolutely cut myself off; plunged into my work, I had almost no social life, aside from professional relationships, and no emotional or sexual life. Nor did I feel any need for that; and when I thought about my excesses in Paris, it made me feel ill at ease, I didn’t want to lapse into those murky pursuits anytime soon. I didn’t think about my sister, or about my dead mother; at least, I don’t remember thinking about them much. Maybe after the horrible shock of my wound (although it was completely cured, it terrified me every time I thought about it, it stripped away all my abilities, as if I were made of glass, of crystal, and might shatter into pieces at the slightest jolt) and the nightmarish events of the spring, my soul aspired to a monotonous calm, and rejected anything that might trouble it. That evening, though—I had arrived early, to have time to think a little, and I was drinking Cognac at the bar—I thought again about my sister: it was after all her thirtieth birthday too. Where could she be celebrating it: In Switzerland, in a sanatorium full of strangers? In her remote home in Pomerania? It had been a long time since we’d celebrated our birthday together. I tried to remember the last time: it must have been when we were children in Antibes, but to my utter confusion, no matter how hard I concentrated, I was incapable of remembering, of visualizing the scene. I could calculate the date: logically, it was in 1926, since in 1927 we were already in boarding school; so we were thirteen, I should have been able to remember, but it was impossible, I saw nothing. Maybe there were photographs of this party in the crates or boxes in the attic in Antibes? I was sorry I hadn’t looked through them more thoroughly. The more I thought about this rather idiotic detail, the more the defects of my memory upset me. Fortunately Thomas arrived to draw me out of my funk. I’ve probably said this already, but it bears repeating: What I liked about Thomas was his spontaneous optimism, his vitality, his intelligence, his calm cynicism; his gossip, his chatter sprinkled with innuendos always delighted me, for with him one seemed to penetrate the underside of life, hidden from the profane gazes that see only people’s obvious actions, but as if flipped over into the light of day by his knowledge of the hidden connections, secret liaisons, closed-door discussions. He could deduce a realignment of political forces from the simple fact of a meeting, even if he didn’t know what had been said; and if he was sometimes mistaken, his avidity in gathering new information allowed him constantly to correct the chancy constructions he devised in that manner. At the same time he had no imagination, and I had always thought, despite his ability to paint a complex scene in a few strokes, that he would have made a poor novelist: in his reasoning and intuitions, his polestar always remained personal interest; and although, sticking to that, he was rarely wrong, he was incapable of imagining any different motivation for people’s actions and words. His passion—and in this he was Voss’s opposite (and I thought back to my previous birthday, and missed that brief friendship)—his passion was not a passion for pure knowledge, for knowledge for its own sake, but solely for practical knowledge, providing tools for action. That night, he told me a lot about Schellenberg, but in a curiously allusive way, as if I were supposed to understand on my own: Schellenberg had doubts, Schellenberg was thinking over alternatives, but what these doubts were about, and what these alternatives consisted of, he didn’t want to say. I knew Schellenberg a little, but I can’t say I liked him. At the RSHA, he had a position that was somewhat apart, thanks, above all, I think, to his special relationship with the Reichsführer. By my lights, I didn’t regard him as a real National Socialist, but rather as a technician of power, seduced by power in itself and not by its object. Reading over what I’ve written, I realize that, judging from my own statements, you might think the same about Thomas; but Thomas was different; even if he had a holy terror of theoretical and ideological discussions—which explained, for example, his aversion to Ohlendorf—and even if he always took great care to look out for his own future, his slightest actions were as if guided by an instinctive National Socialism. Schellenberg was constantly changing his mind, and I had no trouble imagining him working for the British Secret Service or the OSS, which in Thomas’s case was unthinkable. Schellenberg had the habit of calling people he didn’t like whores

, and this term suited him well—and when I think about it, it’s true that the insults people prefer, the ones that come most spontaneously to their lips, often in the end reveal their own hidden faults, since they naturally hate what they most resemble. This idea stayed with me all evening, and when I was back home, late at night, a little drunk perhaps, I took down from a shelf an anthology of the Führer’s speeches that belonged to Frau Gutknecht and began leafing through it, looking for the most virulent passages, especially on the Jews, and as I read them I wondered if, when he said, The Jews lack ability and creativity in every walk of life but one: lying and cheating,

or else The Jew’s entire building will collapse if he’s refused a following,

or They are liars, forgers, deceivers. They only got anywhere through the simplemindedness of those around them,

or We can live without the Jew. But he cannot live without us, the Führer, without knowing it, was really describing himself. Yet this man never spoke in his own name, so the accidents of his personality counted for little: his role was almost that of a lens, he captured and concentrated the will of the Volk to bring it into focus always at the right point. Thus, even if in those passages he was speaking about himself, wasn’t he speaking about us all? But it is only now that I can say that.