The Kindly Ones

About what happened in that beautiful empty house, I don’t know if I can say much. I have already written an account of these events, and when I wrote it, it seemed true to me, equal to the reality, but apparently it doesn’t actually correspond to the truth. Why is that the case? Hard to say. It’s not that my memories are confused, on the contrary, I have many of them and very precise ones, but many of them overlap and even contradict one another, and their status is uncertain. For a long time I thought that my sister must have been there when I arrived, that she was waiting for me near the entrance to the house in a dark dress, her long, heavy black hair mixing with the mesh of a thick black shawl wrapped round her shoulders. We had spoken, standing in the snow, I wanted her to leave with me, but she didn’t want to, even when I explained to her that the Reds were coming, that it was just a question of weeks, or even of days, she refused, her husband was working, she said, he was writing music, it was the first time in a long time and they couldn’t leave now, so I decided to stay and sent Piontek away. In the afternoon, we had had tea and talked, I had told her about my work and also about Helene; she had asked me if I had slept with her, if I loved her, and I hadn’t known what to say; she had asked me why I didn’t marry her and I still hadn’t known what to say, finally she had asked me: “Is it because of me that you didn’t sleep with her, that you won’t marry her?”; and I, ashamed, had kept my eyes lowered, lost in the geometric patterns in the carpet. That is what I remembered, yet it seems that things didn’t happen that way, and now I have to acknowledge that my sister and her husband were probably not there, and that is why I am starting this story over from the beginning, trying to hold as close as I can to what can be affirmed. Käthe arrived in the evening with some provisions, in a little cart drawn by a donkey, and prepared a meal for me. As she cooked, I went down to look for wine in the long, vaulted, dusty cellar full of the pleasant smell of damp earth. There were hundreds of bottles there, some of them very old, I had to blow the dust off to read the labels, many of which were completely mildewed. I chose the best bottles without the slightest hesitation, there was no point leaving such treasures to Ivan, anyway he just liked vodka, I found a Château-Margaux 1900 and also took an Ausone from the same year, along with, somewhat at random, a Graves, an Haut-Brion from 1923. Much later, I understood that this was a mistake, 1923 wasn’t really a great year, I should have chosen the 1921, better by far. I opened the Margaux while Käthe served the meal, and arranged with her, before she left, that she come by every day to make me dinner, but would leave me alone the rest of the time. The dishes were simple and copious: soup, meat, potatoes roasted in fat, all the better to savor the wine. I had sat down at the end of the long table, not in the host’s seat but on the side, with my back to the fireplace, where the fire was crackling, with a tall candelabrum beside me; I had turned off the electric light and ate in the golden light of the candles, methodically devouring the rare meat and the potatoes and drinking the wine in long draughts, and it was as if my sister were sitting opposite me, also eating calmly with her beautiful floating smile, we were sitting opposite each other and her husband was at the head of the table between us, in his wheelchair, and we were chatting amicably, my sister spoke in a gentle, clear voice, von Üxküll cordially, with that stiffness and severity that never seemed to leave him, but without ever relinquishing all the thoughtfulness of a born aristocrat, never putting me ill at ease, and in this warm, shifting light I saw and heard our conversation perfectly, it occupied my mind as I ate and finished the bottle of unctuous, opulent, fabulous Bordeaux. I was describing the destruction of Berlin for von Üxküll. “It doesn’t seem to shock you,” I finally remarked.—“It’s a catastrophe,” he retorted, “but not a surprise. Our enemies are imitating our methods, what’s more normal than that? Germany will drink her cup of sorrow to the dregs before it’s all over.” From there, the conversation moved to July 20. I knew from Thomas that several friends of von Üxküll’s were directly involved. “A large part of the Pomeranian aristocracy has been decimated by your Gestapo since then,” he commented coldly. “I knew von Tresckow’s father very well, a man of great moral rigor, like his son. And of course von Stauffenberg, a family relation.”—“How is that?”—“His mother is a von Üxküll-Gyllenband, Karoline, my second cousin.” Una listened in silence. “You seem to approve of their action,” I said. His answer came to my mind on its own: “I have a great deal of personal respect for some of them, but I disapprove of their attempt for two reasons. First of all, it’s much too late. They should have done it in 1938, during the Sudeten crisis. They considered it, and Beck wanted to do it, but when the English and French turned yellow in front of that ridiculous corporal, it took the wind out of their sails. And also Hitler’s successes demoralized them and finally swept them along, even Halder, a very intelligent man, but too cerebral. Beck had the intelligence of honor, he must have understood that now it was too late, but he didn’t back down, to support the others. The real reason, though, is that Germany chose to follow this man. He wants his Götterdämmerung

at all costs, and now Germany has to follow him to the end. Killing him now to save what’s left would be cheating, rigging the game. I told you, we have to drink the cup of sorrow to the dregs. That’s the only way for something new to begin.”—“Jünger thinks the same thing,” said Una. “He wrote to Berndt.”—“Yes, that’s what he let on between the lines. There’s also an essay of his about this that’s going round.”—“I saw Jünger in the Caucasus,” I said, “but I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with him. In any case, wanting to kill the Führer is an insane crime. There might be no way out, but I think treason is unacceptable, both today and in 1938. It’s the reflex of your class, condemned to disappear. It won’t survive any better under the Bolsheviks.”—“No doubt,” von Üxküll calmly said. “I told you: everyone followed Hitler, even the Junkers. Halder thought we could beat the Russians. Ludendorff was the only one who understood, but too late, and he cursed Hindenburg for having brought Hitler to power. I have always detested the man, but I don’t take that as a warrant that exempts me from Germany’s fate.”—“You and your kind, excuse me for saying so, have had your day.”—“And you will soon have had yours. It will have been much shorter.” He contemplated me fixedly, the way one contemplates a cockroach or a spider, not with disgust, but with the cold passion of an entomologist. I could imagine it very clearly. I had finished the Margaux, I was slightly tipsy, I uncorked the Saint-Émilion, changed our glasses, and had von Üxküll taste the wine. He looked at the label. “I remember this bottle. It was a Roman cardinal who sent it to me. We had had a long discussion about the role of the Jews. He maintained the very Catholic proposition that the Jews must be oppressed, but kept as witnesses to the truth of Christ, a position I’ve always found absurd. Actually, I think he defended it more for the pleasure of the argument, he was a Jesuit, after all.” He was smiling and he asked me a question, no doubt to annoy me: “Apparently the Church caused you some problems when you wanted to evacuate the Jews of Rome?”—“Apparently. I wasn’t there.”—“Not just the Church,” said Una. “You remember, your friend Karl-Friedrich told us that the Italians didn’t understand anything about the Jewish question?”—“Yes, that’s true,” von Üxküll replied. “He said the Italians weren’t even applying their own racial laws, that they were protecting foreign Jews from Germany.”—“That’s true,” I said, ill at ease. “We had some difficulties with them about it.” And this is what my sister answered: “That’s the proof that they are healthy people. They appreciate life at its full value. I understand them: they have a beautiful country, a lot of sun, they eat well, and their women are beautiful.”—“Not like Germany,” von Üxküll said laconically. I finally tasted the wine: it had the fragrance of roasted clove and a little of coffee, I found it broader than the Margaux, sweet and round and exquisite. Von Üxküll was looking at me: “Do you know why you’re killing the Jews? Do you know?” Throughout this strange conversation he kept provoking me, I didn’t reply, I savored the wine. “Why have the Germans shown so much determination to kill the Jews?”—“You’re wrong if you think it’s only the Jews,” I said calmly. “The Jews are only one category of enemy. We are destroying all our enemies, whoever and wherever they are.”—“Yes, but admit it, for the Jews you’ve shown a special determination.”—“I don’t think so. The Führer, in fact, may have personal reasons to hate the Jews. But at the SD, we don’t hate anyone, we objectively pursue our enemies. The choices we make are rational ones.”—“Not as rational as all that. Why did you have to eliminate the mentally ill, the handicapped in hospitals? What danger did they pose, those poor wretches?”—“Useless mouths. Do you know how many millions of reichsmarks we saved that way? Not to speak of the hospital beds freed for the wounded from the front.”—“I know,” said Una, who had been listening to us in silence in this warm golden light, “I know why we killed the Jews.” She spoke in a clear, firm voice, I heard her clearly and listened to her as I drank, having finished my meal. “By killing the Jews,” she said, “we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that which in us resembles the idea we have of the Jew. Kill in us the potbellied bourgeois counting his pennies, hungry for recognition and dreaming of power, but a power he pictures in the form of a Napoleon III or a banker, kill the petty, reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, kill the servitude of the Knecht

, kill all those fine German virtues. For we’ve never understood that these qualities that we attribute to the Jews, calling them baseness, spinelessness, avarice, greed, thirst for domination, and facile malice are fundamentally German qualities, and that if the Jews show these qualities, it’s because they’ve dreamed of resembling the Germans, of being

Germans, it’s because they imitate us obsequiously like the very image of all that is fine and good in High Bourgeoisie, the Golden Calf of those who flee the harshness of the desert and the Law. Or else maybe they were pretending, maybe they ended up adopting these qualities almost out of courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy, so as not to seem so distant. And we, on the other hand, our German dream, was to be Jews, pure, indestructible, faithful to a Law, different from everyone else and under the hand of God. But actually they’re all mistaken, the Germans as well as the Jews. For if Jew

, these days, still means anything, it means Other, an Other and an Otherwise that might be impossible, but that are necessary.” She drained her glass in one long swallow. “Berndt’s friends didn’t understand any of that, either. They said that in the end the massacre of the Jews wasn’t really important, and that by killing Hitler they could lay the crime on him, on Himmler, on the SS, on a few sick assassins, on you. But they’re just as responsible for it as you are, for they too are Germans and they too waged war for the victory of this Germany, and not any other. And the worst thing is that if the Jews pull through, if Germany collapses and the Jews survive, they’ll forget what the name Jew means, they’ll want to be more German than ever before.” I kept drinking as she spoke in her clear, rapid voice, the wine going to my head. And all of a sudden my vision of the Zeughaus came back to me, the Führer as a Jew with the prayer shawl of the rabbis and the leather ritual objects, in front of a vast audience where no one noticed it, except me, and all of that suddenly disappeared, Una and her husband and our conversation, and I was left alone with the remains of my meal and the extraordinary wines, drunk, full, a little bitter, a guest no one had invited.