Masters of the World: Die Götterdämmerung

“The light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain…  Woe to the man who leaves behind him a shadow that bears his form.”
--Victor Hugo

“If the day should ever come when the Nazis must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in awe.”
--Joseph Goebbels

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?  And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.”
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Prologue

I started dreaming about angels. I would dream that I was trying to run down a street crowded with angels, but they got in my way.  It was always at night, and it was always raining, and the street was an unnamed city street.  The rain sparked orange and yellow in the streetlights and got in my eyes and plastered my hair to my face and it was cold, but I had to keep going.  At the end of a street was a light, and I had to get to this light, but I couldn’t because of the angels.  They were just milling around, the rain rolling off of their wings and off their bodies without them getting wet.  They murmured among themselves and flicked their wings indignantly as I passed, not noticing that I was the only living thing in their presence.

After sleeping in the cellar for months due to the incessant air raids, Jakob would sometimes shake me awake and tell me I’d been having a nightmare.  He said I was screaming like I was being tortured.  My body was damp with sweat and shaking, but I couldn’t remember at all what I’d been dreaming about.    

When war had come in 1939, we were beyond ready.  There were eight of us then.  We’d taken a picture of the eight of us the night before the boys all shipped out to Poland.  My mother had invited them and their families over for a last get-together before the war.  I was sitting with the boys all around the kitchen table, and my mother came over with a camera.  Max and I sit on the very far left.  I’m in his lap, my arms around his shoulders and head inclined toward his.  Max has his arms around my waist, hands clasped on my hip.  The only thing I never liked about the picture was that it had no color, and you couldn’t see the way the blue of his Luftwaffe uniform made his eyes stand out.  Erich stands behind Max, back straight, smirking and dignified in his pristine Waffen-SS uniform.  Jakob, Isaak and Stephen are clumped together, sitting around the back of the kitchen table, laughing.  Emil sits in front of the table, stopped in the middle of playing his violin.  He holds it halfway from his shoulder, the bow falling over the strings.  He had been taken in by the SS orchestra, so that he could serve his time in the military but his talent could remain protected.  Kurt stands behind Emil, off to the side of the rest of us.  His eyes are cast downward at the floor, and he looks like he’s about to say something, but can’t think of the right words to say.

It was only a matter of days before Poland fell under our control.  One by one, we began striking with the hammer of Blitzkrieg and each country fell into our hands: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France.  I received letters almost daily.  Isaak, Stephen, Jakob, and Erich were all on the front lines.  Max wrote me letters filled with color: the deep blue of a clear day, the violent pinks and oranges of sunset, the clear white of snow-covered field, and the depthless black of city blackouts, dotted with the orange fires of dropped bombs.  At night, I would sometimes find myself repeating the names of the airplanes to myself: Junkers, Messerschmitt, Stuka.

But England refused to fall.  It was brushed aside.  The radio and newspapers told us that England was too weak to be any threat to us, anyway.  Blitzkrieg came back across the Mediterranean and the Balkans: Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete, Malta.  I was sent a picture of Erich grinning at the foot of the Parthenon.  Panzer divisions swept across North Africa.  Then we turned to what we all along had known was our greatest enemy:  The Soviet Union.  She had been violating the non-aggression pact with her invasions of the Baltic States and Rumania, edging closer and closer to the Reich.  In the summer we took back Rumania and the Baltic States.  I received a letter from Kurt saying he’d been moved to Lithuania, even though he didn’t say why or what he was doing there.  The invasion left the Soviets chained, but, still she fought against her bands.  We almost made it to Moscow before the Russian winter came in and froze any movement forward.  Erich sent me a letter saying it was like three German winters in one.  There was no sunlight, only grey cloud and snow, ice and mist.

Jakob was wounded.  Hit by a shell, he lost his right leg and had burns reaching up his body. He came back to Berlin, unable to fight.  The burns turned into scars that looked like wax had been thrown across his skull and left to harden.

The first true shock of mortality came that summer: the Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated; struck down in Czechoslovakia when two fighters threw a hand grenade into the back of his open-topped car.  For weeks, I was numb in confusion.  Death didn’t work this way; it only sought the lowly, the mortal, not the gods.  Heydrich’s death mask was beautiful, peaceful, completely accepting of his fate.  It didn’t make any sense to me; Heydrich was still young man, why should a young man with so much glory before him welcome death, allowing himself to be extinguished like a fire with no fuel?  But such was the nature of war: the German man was a man of sacrifice.  To give any less would be to give nothing at all.  Heydrich was given the grandest funeral Germany had ever seen.  We said our prayers and our thanks, and looked ahead to our next battle: the conquest of a Soviet city called Stalingrad.

  I heard so many stories about the battle: about how the Soviet had surrounded the army there and cut off all supplies, all help, all hope.  The stories of starvation, freezing and disease were horrid.  Thousands of German soldiers died.  Herrmann was among them.  At his funeral, I heard the same lines that had been repeated at Heydrich’s funeral.  We were told to rally forth and fight in the name of the martyred, to avenge those who had been killed too early.  But Stalingrad was only the beginning of defeat.  New battles came, and the mighty Wehrmacht had lost its might.  Loss became a word every tongue was tired of pronouncing.  Those who had died early in the war were the lucky ones.  They died in glory, with the light of a Thousand-Year Reich still shining in their eyes.  I soon realized why Heydrich’s death mask seemed to welcoming of death.  He’d died at the right time, and he knew it.  He managed to die with dignity.

The Allies rose out of the sea at Normandy.  They slithered over France, seemingly swallowing the German Army wherever they went.  Back in Berlin, it was if the Allies had spit poison into the air.  People were starting to lose their faith in the war, even starting to doubt The Führer.  The war had moved to two fronts, which we didn’t have the strength to hold.

Max proposed to me as winter settled in again.  He was being shipped out to France, but he’d managed to get a day back home on the way.  He assured me that the Allies could be driven off and the war still won, and when that happened, we’d have a big, beautiful wedding with everyone there.  Through the government, he got us a little house that had belonged to a Jewish family that had been relocated.  It was a narrow brick building, four bedrooms, three baths.  Jakob would rent a room for himself with me until the war ended and he could get a home for himself.  

Distance hung between Max and me like a heavy untouchable curtain.  Jakob and I kept a map marking movements and battle lines.  I would spend hours sitting in font of that map, my fingers measuring out the distances.  I touched ink, imagining that I somehow had Max underneath my fingertips.  I saw my veins becoming the lines and borders of the map, troop movements becoming my blood flow.  I’d try to imagine that my blood cells were soldiers, and Max was one of them, safe within my body.  But distance still cleaved in between us.  Max could have been in Russia or France or defending Berlin; he was still too far away; I couldn’t hold him, touch his face.

The Soviets came bounding in from the east.  They burned everything in their path; raped and killed who they could.  I could only imagine what beasts these men must have been, flames shooting from their eyes and nostrils, blood dripping from their jaws.

When the Soviets began eating away at Berlin’s outer defenses, Jakob and I went underground permanently, taking our few valuables with us: the radio, the engagement ring Max had given me, and the trunk containing our favorite books.  Our families had ducked away into the country months ago, but Jakob and I stayed in the city.  When the rattle of machine guns and the thudding of bombs would fade away for short periods, Jakob would open the cellar door to let some fresh air and light in.  We read the books aloud until the bombs grew louder again, and we’d shut the door.   We’d go days without light.  The Soviets formed a gigantic gaping mouth, their airplanes scraping sky and tanks dragging across the ground.  With this mouth, they swallowed the sun.  I would sometimes recite Rilke from memory, just to remind us that we were still alive.  I re-told the Grimm’s fairy tales I’d heard so many times as a child.  But I could only remember so many poems, and there were only so many fairy tales to be told.  I tried singing, but the moldy cellar air grabbed at my voice and choked it, so I gave it up.  Jakob began getting pains in his leg; he said it was like getting it blown off a second time.  I told him it didn’t make any sense; he didn’t have that leg anymore.  Jakob just moaned and screamed if I tried to touch him.

I laid in the dark, trembling and sobbing, yearning for Max to come and rescue me from the darkness, to envelop me in his arms and be my shelter, my protection from bombs and bullets and the cruelty of fire.  I wanted to scream his name, to plead to God or no one to bring him back to me.  But my voice crumbled into whimpers and sobs, and I remained unheard and cold.  I was fading away into that darkness, and all I could do was imagine Max.  In my imagination, he saw me, held me, and into his ear I whispered, “Save me before I’m nothing…”

I began having my dreams about angels.  All I wanted was the light, but the more I tried to reach it, the more I was held back by the angels.  I would only wake up to darkness.  I imagined it must be what drowning feels like: struggling, grasping for the light, to breathe, but I could only touch darkness. All I could taste was darkness.  I felt he darkness seeping into my skin.  The darkness burst into my lungs, filling me, smothering me.  I struggled to reach upward for something to let me breathe, but I only sank further.  My dreams and my reality blended into one thing; all I wanted to do was reach forward and touch the light that was always so far from me.  If I couldn’t reach the light, couldn’t touch it, I knew I would die like that:  reaching forward, straining, struggling just to breathe.


From Chapter 1

“You know, this isn’t the end of the war,” said Max, “I still have faith.”

Jakob shook his head, “I don’t want any more war.  I’ve spent too many nights in the cellar waiting for a bomb to fall on my head. Besides, The Führer is dead, half of the military is wiped out, most of the other half is taken prisoner.  Everybody of worth within the Reich is dead or on trial.  And we’ve surrendered.  What can we do after we’ve surrendered?”

“It’s propaganda,” Max said, a sly smile coming over his face, “The Allies want you to believe that.  The Führer is still alive, and he’s waiting to gather everyone in Berlin, where we can propel off the Soviets and the Allies.”

Jakob laughed, “Max, I don’t know where you got that, but The Führer is as good as dead, anyway.  Have you heard about the trials in Nuremberg?  Everyone there says, yes, he’s dead, and Goebbels and Himmler… they killed themselves…” his voice trailed off and he cast his eyes over to me, “They found bodies… there were pictures….”  I looked away and shuddered with the recollection of the stories that had came to light about The Führer’s final days, hiding in a bunker beneath the city’s sewers.   Himmler gave The Führer a gun and cyanide before abandoning him.  The Führer tested the cyanide on his dog.  The six Goebbels children were given sleeping medicine and then poisoned.  When Soviet troops finally found the bunker, they discovered two funeral pyres, one with the charred bone fragments of a man, woman and dog, the other with the partially-cremated bodies of Joseph Goebbels and his wife.  There was no way of confirming if the first remains were those of The Führer.  They were of a man in his fifties who had apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but they were too incomplete to tell much else.   With the body of Joseph Goebbels, however, there was no need to guess, no need to take note of the shape of the teeth, the tiny build of the body, or the slightly dwarfed left leg.  His face, though blackened and burned, was still entirely recognizable.  In the pictures I would later see, his arms had gone up to his shoulders and his hands curled grotesquely upwards, claw-like, clutching but still too weak to grasp whatever they were reaching for.  He seemed to be clinging to something, but whatever it was would not hold.  His head tilted ever so slightly upward, his mouth open and facial expression slack, as if he were pausing to take in a final breath, as if to look upward to God and to say, “I’m done.  Release me.”

I heard Max sigh and shift in his seat.

“Himmler and Goebbels may be dead,” he said, “but The Führer is still alive.  You’ll be surprised.”

Jakob just shook his head, “And you, my friend, will be disappointed.”

From Chapter 2

The most striking thing about Heydrich was, simply, that he was beautiful.  He was a champion fencer and concert violinist who chose to devote the largest portion of his talents to serving his Vaterland.  It was no secret that Lorenz Gräbe despised Reinhard Heydrich.  It was no secret that many men loathed Heydrich.  They hated his arrogance.  They hated his youth.  Rival men hated his blondeness, hated his small glassy-blue eyes, hated the high cheekbones, square jaw and narrow, tapered nose of a classic Aryan face.  At twenty-six years old, he joined the SS.  At twenty-eight, he was appointed Gestapo head.  He ran it with a cold, logical brilliance that drove the claws of the secret police deep into the psyche of every citizen of the German Reich, giving it unlimited power in regulating the state.  When a false rumor that he was part Jewish broke out, Heydrich still proved himself invulnerable.  It was said that the rumor of his ancestry set his hatred of the Jewish race aflame.  He hated Jews with a righteous, untethered rage and would stop at nothing to take them out.  Soon behind him came the whispered expectation that he would be the next Führer.  He simply couldn’t be stopped.  And lesser men like Lorenz Gräbe remained below him, staring and grasping at prestige that was never to be theirs.

From Chapter 4

The walk to The Church of the Resurrection the next morning was long and slow.  The morning was dim, grey and misty.  Brown puddles hung in all the street corners; we had to take careful steps to avoid getting our feet wet.  Jakob, Max and I all walked in silence.  We all wore black, sliding rosary beads in between our fingers.  Passing soldiers glanced at us; civilians didn’t notice.  Another group of young people going to a funeral.  I crossed myself upon entry into the church, regarding the altar.  The inside of the church was cold.  I pulled my thin sweater tighter around my body.  The Gottlieb family sat in the front pews.  Herr Gottlieb was silent, his face stone-hard and expressionless.  Frau Gottlieb, Freija and Maria all sobbed quietly.  Johannes and Felix both sat, not making a sound, trying to act sad, not letting their boredom overtake them.  Max and I sat together in the pew behind Frau Gottlieb.  We crossed ourselves and prayed as the service began.

“I am the resurrection and I am the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”  The priest glided over the words, having said them far too many times in the past years.  I found myself wondering if he was more familiar with the funeral service than with the normal Sunday Mass.  I wondered if he was used to doing it without a body.  He must have been.  So many people had disappeared into the war, just like Isaak.  Just like Max’s father.

Last night, as we were falling asleep, Max told me he knew his father was dead.  His father wouldn’t have let himself be taken prisoner.  He was an old army man.  Death before dishonor.  If he hadn’t come back yet, it was pointless hoping.  

I reached over and touched Max’s hand.  He went on staring up at the altar.  The faint light from the stained glass windows reflected in the blue of his eyes.  The first funeral he’d ever attended was his mother’s, after she’d died giving birth to him and Erich.  My parents went and brought me, as well.  I was four months old.  Max and Erich were only four days old.  And that’s when we first met, if you could call it that.  Sometimes I would hear the story and try to imagine Herr Risinger at the funeral.  

Adam Risinger had been a soldier in the first war.  He told us stories about mustard gas and trenches and mechanized warfare.  He would say that the only time in his entire life when he’d been frightened was when he heard that the Kaiser had capitulated and it meant the war was over.  I knew he was lying when he said that.  I knew it because whenever I tried to think of Frau Risinger’s funeral, I’d see Herr Risinger holding two infant sons and trying to recite a prayer he didn’t know.  But Herr Risinger was an old army man.  He’d never admit he was scared.

I leaned over and nudged my face against Max’s as the priest’s voice droned on:
“Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”


***

 I could no longer believe what I used to believe about The Führer: that he was the all-powerful übermensch, that he was invincible, that he was destined to bring the German Reich to the great glory that it had always been fated to be.  My performance for him had changed that.  

It was very close to the end, shortly after the assassination attempt.  I was getting into my costume for the show when I was told that The Führer was in attendance.  I was initially shocked.  I knew the war was going badly.  It was to the point where even Goebbels couldn’t hide that.  I hadn’t received letters from anybody in weeks.  It worried me that the only thing I could know about anybody was that they weren’t safe.  Shouldn’t The Führer have been planning a way to save us from the war that he’d pulled us into?  But I wouldn’t dare say that.  Performing Wagner for The Führer was an extreme honor.  I went to peek out from the curtains.  It was from far away, but there was no missing him.  He sat up in the top box, with Joseph Goebbels and his wife, and a women I later assumed to be Eva Braun.

The show was one of the best I’d ever done.  My voice became my body, filling the theatre, nudging the cheeks of the audience, blowing cold discontent down their spines.  I was alone the center of the stage for the final aria, the immolation of Valhalla.  Brünnhilde loved Siegfried, and he’d been tricked into betraying her.  Now he had seen his mistake, and he was dead.  Brünnhilde still loved Siegfried, and if he was going down, she was taking the gods down with him.  I lamented over the body of Siegfried like I was lamenting over Max’s absence.  I sang the tender words of affection with Max’s face clearly visible behind my eyes, “Wie Sonne lauter, strahlt mir sein Licht…”   I reached the point where Brünnhilde looks upward and begins pleading with the gods.  I looked upwards to where The Führer was sitting.  I felt his eyes hook with mine.  He was smiling.  

A sudden hot rage exploded in my chest.  Didn’t he realize that our Siegfried was being played by a man far too old for the role because anyone younger was fighting a war for him?  I’d seen Stephan die for him, I’d seen Jakob wounded and scarred beyond recognition for him.  Because of him, Max had waited five years for the right chance to propose to me, and that he’d only done after he’d grown too impatient with the war.  I missed Max and I wanted him home with Erich so we could finally get married and get on with out lives.  I wanted to go to Bremen with Emil.  I wanted to live my life, and his war had held me back for years.

My performance of the rest of the aria was masterful.  For weeks afterwards, I would hear from people who’d seen the performance, telling me it was as if Wagner had written the role specifically for me.  People from the Kroll Opera House and the State Opera began asking me if I’d be interested in starring in one of the operas they were producing.  Old men who had been attending the opera their entire lives said that I was the best Brünnhilde they’d ever seen.  I kept hearing about how I’d grabbed people’s attention and held it there for the whole performance, that it was truly legendary.  I was up there singing directly at The Führer, “Turn your gaze on my great grief; see your everlasting guilt!”

But I was only an object to him.  And perhaps that’s all anybody else ever was to The Führer; objects to be controlled. I was pleading with him and he didn’t hear a word.  It infuriated me like nothing else had before, so that the rage screaming from within my chest grew with every note, every downward flick of his eyes.  By the end of the aria, I was shaking.  I sat atop Siegfried’s funeral pyre, grateful to be hidden behind the flames.  I felt violated, dirty.  I wanted to do what Brünnhilde was doing, and destroy the gods.  They’d destroyed me: they’d taken away my friends, taken away my love, sent my family away, and now they’d taken any will I had.  
After the applause and the bows, I went backstage and sat down.  Anger still ate at the inside of my chest, and it frightened me.  I wasn’t an angry person; I didn’t get furious like that.  And it was The Führer that I was mad at, a man at whose feet I had worshipped for so many years.  I was being irrational, I told myself.  We all had to make sacrifices for the war, and we certainly couldn’t win a war if we didn’t trust and respect the man leading us through it.

I was roused from my dressing room with a message that The Führer wanted to speak to me.  I couldn’t say no.  So I stepped out of my dressing room, to where the rest of the cast was gathered, in front of The Führer.
I’d seen his picture hundreds of time every day since I was eight, and what I saw standing before me wasn’t the same man as those pictures.  

He limped when he walked.  His voice had faded, and made me think of a great, dying animal.  It rasped and sagged, stumbling over the syllables.  Deep lines were carved into his face around his mouth and eyes.  His skin hung limp from the bones.  Heavy streaks of grey ran through his hair, and even in his moustache, his ridiculous little moustache that had become the most famous part of his face, it was turning grey.  Adolf Hitler was standing before me, undoubtedly mortal.  

He made a brief speech to the rest of the cast, telling us about his admiration for Wagner, and especially Die Götterdämmerung.  He said it was truly a monument to Aryan greatness, and our performance of it had done it great justice.
He spoke to me alone.  He told me I was beautiful.  The best Brünnhilde he’d ever seen.  He asked me if I was married.  I told him about Max.  He touched my face.  His hands were shaking.

I couldn’t sleep that night.  It was a peaceful night, too.  I was able to sleep upstairs in my own bed.  But images of the broken Hitler kept chasing away sleep.  It was then that I knew that the war couldn’t be won.  We’d trusted Hitler to be something above human, but we were wrong.  We had put our faith in someone who was very, very human.  I wanted to old anger in me to return, I wanted to hate Hitler.  But the anger that came was only anger towards myself.

From Chapter 5

It was warm inside Die Leopard, just as always.  I had stopped performing and taken up waitress duty so my voice could get a rest.  It was my job to serve drinks to the men crowded around the stage.  They tried to flirt with me, and I responded with an indifferent coolness.  I was allowed to slap them if they touched or said anything that I didn’t like.  They seemed to like getting slapped.  I usually got a big tip whenever I did that.  I served up a table full of beers, scanning each face, judging which soldier had the greatest propensity to be lewd, when I heard someone call my name from one of the isolated corners.  I turned around and saw a horribly familiar pinched face puffing on a cigarette and leering at me.  Helmut Finkel.  I’d gone to school with him.  He was a wretched boy, the kind who insulted girls and then tried to flip up their skirts.  I had always been one of his favorite targets.  He got in fights quite often.  It became a sort of game for boys to see who had the record for whoever gave Helmut the greatest number of bloody noses.  Max held the record at seven, followed shortly by Erich at five.

I walked up to him, grinding my teeth, hoping he’d changed, “Hello, Helmut.”  His face hadn’t changed much in the war.  The same cavernous cheeks, pale lips, bent nose.  His eyes were two discs of flat green.
He smiled up at me with crooked teeth, “Lilly Engels.  You have no idea how happy I am to see you.”

“It’s Lilly Risinger, now,” I said, giving a quick lie.

Helmut retained his lascivious smile, “Oh, really?  You managed to tell the difference between the Risinger twins enough to marry one of them?  Which one did you go with?  Erich?  Or did you just go with both?”

I sighed and asked, “Would you like anything to drink?”

“Oh, no, I’ve had plenty,” said Helmut, and he grabbed my wrists.  I tried to break his grip, but he held fast.  I tried to signal for Jakob to come over and help me, but he was out of his sight.

“I just wanted somebody to talk to,” Helmut said.

“Let me go!” I hissed.  He only held my wrists tighter, like a snake squeezing the life from its prey.

“You think I’d be happy to survive the war, right?” he said, his cold eyes locked into mine.

“If you don’t let me go, I’ll call Jakob over here,” I said.

Helmut laughed, “Call him over here.  I don’t care.  Do you know that my family is dead?”  I said nothing.  

Helmut went on, “My two brothers, both killed in action.  My parents and sister, bombed,” he gave a cold laugh, “Can you imagine, Lilly?  Six years gone, fighting for everything you believe in, for your grand and glorious Führer, and you came back and everything is dead, including Hitler,” he laughed again, “I used to adore that man, Lilly.  Every summer I went with my family to the party rallies on Nuremberg, and when I’d listen to Hitler speak, I knew everything he said was true.  I wanted more than anything to serve that man, and I’d make all the sacrifices I could to serve him, Lilly, I was ready to die for him!” he gave a sharp tug on my arm, jerking my face toward his.  I could smell the alcohol and cigarettes on his breath.

“But things change,” he went on, his voice lowered to a deadly calm, “Other people die.  Wars are lost,” he shook his head and took in a deep rattling breath, “He betrayed us, Lilly.  Hitler.  Killed himself when we needed him.  Couldn’t even take defeat like a man.”  Helmut let go of me with one hand and took a drag on his cigarette.  He then stubbed it out on the table as if he were putting it out in Hitler’s eye, “Mein Führer.”  

The next morning Max and I were on the way to the Retting when I stopped as we crossed the bridge over the Koenigskanal.  I had noticed a small cluster of American soldiers who were pointing to something frozen in the water.  I looked down, and there was Helmut, face above the ice, mouth open and frozen in a scream of betrayal.

“Oh my god,” I muttered, rubbing the bruises on my wrist.

“What?” said Max, “Do you know who that is?”  I nodded, and explained to him about last night.

“I think I was the last person to see him alive” I said, gripping the bridge’s railing.  I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut.  Max walked down toward the embankment the Americans stood on.  He told them that he knew who the person in the canal was.  I followed him.  One of the soldiers asked me questions about when I’d last seen Helmut.

“I have to make sure there was no foul play involved,” he explained.
“Why?” I asked, “Does it look like somebody did this to him?”

The American shook his head, “It’s pretty clear it’s just a simple suicide we’re dealing with.  Nothing to worry about.”  They worked quickly, cutting the body out with an ice saw.  They took hooks to the ice blocks and dragged the body to the bank of the canal.

“It’s nasty work, really,” said the soldier who had questioned me, “This one’s a clean death.  This is the sixth suicide I’ve had to clean up after.  The others…” his voice trailed off, but he shook his head, looked at me and said, “Just be glad cleaning up bodies is a job you don’t have.”

I gave him a small, false smile, and said, “You have no idea.”  The soldier said goodbye, and helped his group carry Helmut’s body into a waiting truck that drove off to the city morgue, where it could be treated properly and be given a decent burial.  I watched them until they turned a corner.

Max put his arm around my shoulder, “Come on, we should get going.”  I pulled away.

“Go ahead,” I said, “I want to stay a little while.”
Max sighed, “We have to get going.  We’re already late.”
“Then a few more minutes won’t matter,” I said.  I knew I was wasting our time; countless people who had been much more deserving weren’t even granted the dignity of a proper burial, much less had anybody to mourn for them.  But, still, I knew that I’d been the last person Helmut had ever spoken to.  Had he chosen to find someone he knew and stumbled upon me, or would he have ended with his face sticking out of the ice in the canal, anyway, with no one there to identify him?  I stayed on the canal’s bank until the hole in the ice had frozen over, and then began towards the Retting with Max walking in silence alongside me.  As we walked, the snow in the street had turned into a dirty muddy slush that got into my shoes and froze my feet.  People without homes came up to me, holding out their hands and asking for money, food or anything.  I shook my head and said I had nothing to give, holding out my empty hands.  A dog barked at us from an alley, startling me.  Max threw a handful of slush at it, and the dog ran away.  He put his arm around me and kept it there until we reached our destination.  We walked into the Retting to find rehearsals underway.  We stood in the aisles of the seats, waiting for someone to tell us what to do.  Max tightened his arms around my shoulders.

“Are you sure you are all right?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” I lied.  My eyes were drawn to the floor, to the bloodstains on the carpet.  I didn’t feel sorry for Helmut.  I’d wished him dead when we were children.  He hadn’t changed over the years, and my feelings toward him hadn’t changed, either.  But I still found it disturbing, somehow.  Helmut Finkel wasn’t the sort of person to accept fate.  He’d died too easily.  He could have at least gotten the Americans or Soviets to shoot at him.  But of course, when everything around you is dead, wouldn’t it be easier to die than to live?  I shuddered with the realization that I had, in some way, seen myself frozen in the Koenigskanal.  Stephen and Isaak were gone.  What if I got bad news about Erich, Kurt or Emil?  But no, I still had Max.  But if something had happened to Max…  

“You are late today,” a voice next to us said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to face Pasha, “I had to identify the body of someone I saw last night.”  

Pasha slid himself into a seat next to us and said, “What happened?”

I sighed, “He killed himself.  I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Ah, I see,” said Pasha.  He brought his hand to his chin and sat in thought for a moment.

“I am trying to think of German word for people like that,” he said.
“Selbstmord?” I suggested.

“No, no,” said Pasha, shaking his head, “Very many Russian words for what am thinking of…” he began listing off words.  I didn’t recognize any of them until he landed upon something that sounded like “idiot.”

“Idiot?” I said, voice raised in alarm.

“Ah!  Yes!  Idiot!” said Pasha, “That is German word I am looking for!”  He laughed and shook his head.  “Your friend is idiot,” he explained, “Why kill yourself, anyway?  He should want to live.”  I had to laugh.

Max sighed and shook his head, “It’s not that simple.”

“Nothing is more simple!” said Pasha, laughing and waving his arms, “What is purpose of life if you do not live it?”  I just looked at him, my mouth hanging open.  Max said nothing and walked away from us, going to work.

Pasha rolled his eyes to Max’s retreating back, “You Germans.  You try to take over world, but it does you no good.  The rest of world means nothing.  All you have is here and now.  To control world, you control that.”

From Chapter 9

When Himmler was found and identified, he killed himself before they had time to even finish arresting him, biting down on two cyanide capsules he had hidden in his mouth.  The British officers set to interrogate him tried to keep him alive, pumping his stomach, filling him with furious antidotes.  They simply had to keep him alive.  They had to get his story, hear about all the atrocities he’d ordered, every arrest, every raid, every attack, every death, all in lavish and disgusting detail.  They wanted to be the ones to kill him.  They had to be the ones who killed him.  But in the end, Himmler finally had his victory against the Allies, and he lay dead on the floor, eyes still open and staring from behind his spectacles.  He lay there for hours before anyone even closed his eyes.

From Chapter 10

After we’d finished and cleaned up, we went up on the roof, the boys carrying their bottles of schnapps.  We all sat down on some crates that Max had set up a while ago for looking up at the stars.  The sky was clear, and the moon hung in it like a spotlight.  I sat back and watched as the boys kept making toasts: to Kurt, to pardons, to cheap schnapps.  They kept clinking bottles and shouting “Prost!” until they were smiling like idiots and their eyes were all glazed over.

Max put his arm around me and murmured, “You know, you look really… pretty tonight.”  

I smiled and laughed, saying, “You’re drunk, Max.  Completely besoffen.”

“Drunk is a good thing to be!” shouted Kurt, “If everybody got drunk and stayed drunk, there would never be any wars to lose!”  Jakob and I both laughed.

Max pulled me in closer to him, saying, “I mean it!  You’re really pretty tonight.”  He put his hand on my belly and said, “You look like you swallowed the moon, and it’s still shining in there, and it’s coming out in your skin, and in your hair…”  

I blushed some and said, “Well, the world would certainly have more poets if we were all drunk.”

“Or just a bunch of pretentious arselöcher pretending to be poets!” added Jakob.

“Hey, speaking of pretentious arselöcher,” said Kurt, “I have a toast.”  He raised his bottle into the air and said, “To all the military sons-of-bitches that ruined our lives!” He raised his bottle towards Max, “Hermann Göring,” he raised his bottle towards Jakob, “Wilhelm Keitel,” he pulled the bottle in towards himself, “And Reinhard Heydrich.”

They all said “Prost!” and took a deep swig.

“Heydrich?” I said, “I thought your father was the one who hated Heydrich.  What did he do to you?”

“He thought up the Einsatzgruppen,” replied Kurt, “and he was the biggest arseloch I ever met.”

I laughed and asked, “So you actually met him?”

Kurt made a face and said, “In Lithuania.  Got invited to dinner with him and all the higher-up officers in gruppe A.  I guess it pays to have a father who works directly underneath someone like that.    Anyway, it was a big, fancy dinner at the gruppe’s headquarters.  Wine, steak, waiters and everything.   Heydrich said wanted to know how gruppe A’s actions were progressing.  I swear, I have never seen so many military officers kiss so much ass in my entire life.  I wanted to get up and say, ‘Why don’t you all just go and sacrifice a goat to him?  That might actually make him give a tiny bit of approval toward you scum of lesser rank.’”

Max and Jakob both threw their heads back and laughed.  I looked away and said nothing.

“Kurt?” I said, still not looking him in the eye.

“What?” asked Kurt.

I took a deep breath, trying to get my nerve up, “About the Einsatzgruppen.… and what they did…”

“Lilly,” said Max, sighing, “It was police work.  I told you.”

“Joe told me something different,” I said.  Max tried to say something, but I interrupted him, “He said that they killed Jews.  Rounded them up and shot them, men women and children.”  I looked over at Kurt.  He stared at his feet.

Max sighed, “That’s only what the Allies want you to believe.  Right, Kurt?”  Kurt didn’t say anything.  He just rolled his gaze up toward the sky.
Max looked around, perplexed, “I mean, surely it’s not true, is it?”

Kurt returned his gaze to the ground in front of him, sighing, pausing briefly in thought before he said, “After we’d finished eating, Heydrich, he took me aside personally.  Said he wanted to talk to me.  Took me outside in front of the HQ and offered me a cigarette.  It was snowing and absolutely freezing, and I kind of wondered why he’d want to go out here when he could talk to me inside, and then he asked me what I thought about what we were doing.  He said he knew that what the officers were telling him were a painted-up version of the truth, and he said he knew that the gruppen had trouble keeping men, and… and that among those who stayed… there were a lot of reports of mental illness… suicide… and he wanted my insight into that…”  His voice trailed off and he stared at the ground, brows knitted in thought.

“What did you tell him?” I asked.

Kurt closed his eyes and breathed out deeply, shaking his head slightly, “Everything.  I told him goddamn everything.  About the prayers… how they’re either praying or screaming or crying or pleading when they realize they’re going to die, pleading to spare their children but you can’t, you’re under orders to kill them all…  and there’s the smell… all the dirt and blood and gunpowder…  God, I never thought blood had a smell before, but once you start smelling it…  You go back to the barracks and the smell is in your clothes, in your hair, in your skin, and no matter how hard you scrub and try to get it away from you it’s still there.  And you never get use to it, either, so while you’re trying to sleep, the smell is still in your nose, and the screams and prayers and pleas are still in your ears and you can’t sleep because tomorrow you know you’ll wake up and it’ll be the same, still looking men, women and children in the eyes and killing them, over and over, hundreds and hundreds of times, and there’s more of it the day after that, and he day after that, and the day after that, until you’ve killed every last one of them.  And you try to rationalize things, keep repeating to yourself what you’ve been told all along: that Jews are the rats of the world, and exterminating them is no different than exterminating rats, but, goddamnit, rats don’t beg for their life…”

Kurt shuddered and took a deep swig from his bottle, his face contorting in disgust.
“Heydrich, he told me not to worry, that they had gas vans at Kulmhof and they were a more efficient solution, and that the gruppen would eventually be dissolved.  So I said, ‘This doesn’t end until they’re all dead.’  And Heydrich says, ‘Yes, of course.  I was given a job and I intend to finish it.’  And I just sort of looked at him…  I mean, he’s Reinhard Heydrich, for God’s sake, supposed to be the one man in the world with a righteous hatred for Jews that rivals Hitler’s, and here he is, talking about exterminating the Jewish population like it’s a job he has to do…  And so I ask him, ‘Do you believe in what we’re doing?’  And he starts to answer but I interrupt and say, ‘Honestly.  I’m sick of being fed all this bullshit… do you believe in this?’  And then… he just sort of looks at me… smiles, and then says, ‘Honestly, I don’t give a damn.  Himmler gave me an order, and I want his job, so I’m following this order as well as I possibly can.’”

Kurt took another deep swig from his schnapps, this time with his face snarling in disgust, and said, “I wanted so bad to believe he was everything that my father hated, that he was righteous and perfect… but he was just a monster… just a beautiful monster…”

I felt Max’s grip around me tighten some.  I only stared out at the ground in front of me in stunned silence.

“God, I wanted to be the one to kill him,” Kurt muttered.

Max straightened his back, “You don’t mean that.”

“Like hell I don’t,” Kurt snarled, raising to his feet, “He got taken out by two Czech fighters who threw a hand grenade in the back of his car, two Czech fighters throwing blind with someone telling them his car would have to slow down at this curve in the road.  Sheisse, they couldn’t even get their guns to fire!”

He stood up and began to pace back and forth, breathing heavily, “It still took him three days to die, three days of people trying to save him, to bring him back!  And I had the chance to do it, too, I could have grabbed my gun the moment he told me what a disgusting fake he was, I could have blown his beautiful blonde head off right then and there!  For once, I could have killed someone who deserved it!”  Max jumped to his feet.

“You shut up!” he snapped, “His death was the beginning of the end!  We could have damn well won the war if Heydrich hadn’t have been killed!”

“Please,” Kurt scoffed, not turning to face Max, “It’s fate.  Didn’t you ever listen to that bullshit they kept feeding us all those years?  About blood and soul and fate.  And man’s soul is determined by his blood, and his fate is determined by his soul.  Heydrich? Himmler?  Goebbels?  Hitler?  They’re all Aryans; they all have the same blood, same soul, same fate.  They all went to war, they all died!  Didn’t learn their lesson the first time around!”

“Shut up!” said Max.

Kurt turned around, sneering, “You’re right, I should have mentioned Göring and Keitel.  They’re as good as dead, anyway.  The war may be over but it still has yet to kill people.  It’s fate!  Determined by our great Aryan blood!  Hell, your father must’ve known it…”

“Shut up!” Max roared, “I believed we were rig ht when we invaded Poland and even after losing my friends and my father, I still think our cause is just!”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Kurt whipped around to look Max in the eye, “We lost!  We tried to exterminate the entire Jewish race!  We killed children!  We’re on trial for war crimes!  Crimes against humanity!  We’re the bad guys!”

Max shook his head, “Just because you never had any honor…”

“Honor?!” Kurt shrieked, “I am so sick of honor!  Why did I join the SS?  For the honor.  Why go with the Einsatzgruppen?  It’s an honor.  Why stay with it and kill children?  It’s a matter of retaining your honor!  I could care less about your goddamn honor!  I destroyed myself for honor and we lost!  All that honor I ever tried to achieve is nothing now!  Nothing!  All the martyrs and the heroes are the people we killed, and we are the evil ones!”
I sat back and braced for Max to hit him.  I’d seen him hit people for less and knew he wanted to hit Kurt.  But he just stood there.

“I’ve had enough of this,” he muttered, “I’m going to bed.”  He turned around and headed for the door, Jakob quickly following behind him.  The door slammed shut and I was left up there alone with Kurt.  I stood up and headed towards the door.  When I reached it, I stopped, turned around, and said, “Come on, Kurt.  Let’s go back inside.”

Kurt just stood there.  He was facing away from me, staring off into the distance.  He started walking, but instead of coming towards me, he went over to the edge of the roof.  He climbed up onto the ledge and stood there, eyes still scanning the black horizon.

“Kurt, come on,” I said, my patience starting to give way, “We’re all tired.  We all need sleep.

He turned his face to look at me, but he stayed standing on the ledge, a sly smile twisted across his lips, “I haven’t had any decent sleep in years.”

I shook my head and turned to the door.  I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard, “You know they destroyed an entire town when Heydrich died?  Killed everyone there and razed all the buildings, left nothing but a burnt expanse, just because the men who killed Heydrich were hiding out there.”

I turned back around and said, “If you killed Heydrich, your father wouldn’t be able to save you from that one.  They’d have you hanged the next day.”

“Exactly,” muttered Kurt.  He sighed and looked up above him, as if searching for a God that wasn’t there.  He then shut his eyes and turned his face to look down at the ground.  He held out his arms and held them there, as if either trying to gather in the darkness around him, or trying to fly.  He leaned forward, ever so slightly, his feet ready to leave the ground.  Without thinking, I ran forward and grabbed the back of his coat.  I pulled him backwards as hard as I could.  He fell back, and then lay there, sprawled out and motionless.  I could feel my heart pounding and hands shaking.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you,” I said, “I don’t know who you’ve become.”  Kurt opened his eyes slightly and stared up at me, his face blank.

I took a breath and went on, “But you’re alive at a time when everything else has been killed.  And you’ve at least given us a little hope.  We haven’t heard from Erich, and your return could very well mean something good is going to happen.  So just stay alive until we hear from Erich.”  Kurt didn’t move.  He just stared as blankly as before.  I sighed, turned around, and muttered, “And after that, I don’t care what you do.”

From Chapter 11

The news switched to the progression of the trials in Nuremberg.  Hermann Göring was giving his final testimony, saying that he’d only been following orders.  Kurt gave a small laugh when he heard that.

“It’s no good, Hermann,” he said, “They’re looking at you and deliberating how they’re going to get a noose around your fat neck.”  Max shook his head and went off.  Kurt rolled his eyes, took a final sip of his coffee and left, as well.

  I sat down, listening to the news, contemplating everything.  It didn’t make sense to me, to hear Göring talking about himself like he was a misbehaving little boy, pointing to his friends and saying, “They made me do it.”

From Chapter 13

I awoke in the morning to find that Max had left.  I found a note in the kitchen, written in pencil on a small scrap of paper: “Göring is victorious.”  I turned on the radio.  Hermann Göring had hung himself with a belt two hours before his scheduled execution.  Not to be deterred, the executions of the other defendants had gone on as planned.