The Kindly Ones

At bottom, the more I managed to observe clearly the maelstrom of intrigues in the high spheres of government, the less interested I was in taking part in them. Before reaching my present position, I had, naïvely no doubt, thought that major decisions were made on the basis of ideological correctness and rationality. I now saw that, even if that remained partially true, many other factors were involved, conflicts of bureaucratic precedence, special interests, or the personal ambition of some. The Führer, of course, couldn’t settle all questions himself; and his intervention aside, a large part of the mechanisms to achieve consensus seemed distorted, even warped. Thomas, in these situations, was like a fish in water; but I felt ill at ease, and not only because I lacked talent for intrigue. It had always seemed to me that these lines of Coventry Patmore would be borne out: The truth is great, and shall prevail, / When none cares whether it prevail or not

; and that National Socialism could be nothing but the common search for this truth, in good faith. For me it was all the more necessary since the circumstances of my troubled life, divided between two countries, placed me apart from other men: I too wanted to bear my stone to the common edifice, I too wanted to be able to feel a part of the whole. Alas, in our National Socialist State, and especially outside the circles of the SD, few people thought as I did. In this sense, I could admire the brutal frankness of an Eichmann: he had his own idea—about National Socialism, about his own place, and about what was to be done—and he stood by this idea, he put all his talent and stubbornness at its service, and so long as his superiors confirmed him in this idea, it was the right one, and Eichmann remained a happy man, sure of himself, leading his office with a firm hand. That was far from being my case. My misfortune, perhaps, came from the fact that they had assigned me to tasks that did not correspond to my natural inclination. Ever since Russia, already, I felt out of place, capable of doing what was asked of me, but as if I were limited in terms of initiative, for I had indeed studied these tasks—first police-related and then economic—and mastered them, but I hadn’t yet succeeded in convincing myself of their rightness, I couldn’t manage fully to grasp the profound necessity that guided them, and so find my path

with the precision and sureness of a sleepwalker

, as did the Führer and so many of my colleagues and comrades who were more gifted than I. Could there have been another realm of activity that might have agreed with me better, where I would have felt more at home? There might have been, but it’s hard to say, for it didn’t happen, and in the end, the only thing that counts is what was, and not what could have been. From the very beginning, things weren’t as I would have liked them: I had resigned myself to that a long time ago (yet at the same time, it seems to me, I never accepted things as they are, so wrong and so bad; at the most, I finally came to acknowledge my powerlessness to change them). It is also true that I have changed. When I was young, I felt transparent with lucidity, I had precise ideas about the world, about what it should be and what it actually was, and about my own place in that world; and with all the madness and the arrogance of that youth, I had thought it would always be so; that the attitude induced by my analysis would never change; but I had forgotten, or rather I did not yet know, the force of time, of time and fatigue. And even more than my indecision, my ideological confusion, my inability to take a clear position on the questions I was dealing with, and to hold to it, it was this that was wearing me down, taking the ground away from under my feet. Such a fatigue has no end, only death can put an end to it, it still lasts today, and for me it will always last.