The History of History

TEN • The Concubine’s Mind


How to describe what happened next? The historical ones—Magda, but not only Magda—were rising around Margaret like ocean waters filling in cavities. They flowed according to the justifications already written in the land, deep where deep, curved where curved. Margaret’s self-examination was finished now, and the era of the dead Nazis had begun.

Yes, when Margaret awoke the next morning, she went to the window, and the hawk-woman was standing at attention on the balcony across the way, even larger now, hulking and frivolous. The lady pulled a compact out of her kit and made up her face under its heavy, brilliantine waves, her attention directed languidly at Margaret’s three windows, and the sight burned Margaret’s eyes and could not be fled.

Margaret was looking at the hawk-woman through a single rotated slat of the venetian blind. She kept the blinds closed all day and checked after the monster only surreptitiously. The woman perched with a live mouse in her beak sometimes, and in those cases her face was all bird, her head cocking jerkily around, and around, and around, until she seemed to be looking at Margaret from behind. Sometimes she winked at Margaret conspiratorially.

And then, as the days went by, Margaret did not always close the blinds. As she fell asleep, she began to be not frightened but preoccupied—with the question of whether she would find the hawk-woman at her perch on the following morning. She began to develop methods of prediction, ideas halfway between superstition and science: when it rained and the street was empty, the bird was likely to be in attendance (but not always). When it was sunny and the street was full of traffic, the bird was likely missing (but not always).

And then Margaret found herself not afraid—not at all. Instead, when the hawk-woman was not there, she longed for her. She came home in the afternoon and if she did not find the enormous bird preening her feathers on the terra-cotta balcony cattycorner right away, she ran back to the window again and again, to see if the bird had finally come.

She did not like it. She did not like that she was broken in. She said to herself that only a corrupt person could become a friend to a vision at the window of the deceased Magda Goebbels.

Yes. This was patently so.

But for the life of her, she could not arrest her fascination.

And so, seeking to justify herself, she began to study the life of the woman with great seriousness. She was looking to find something. Margaret wanted to find an element in Magda Goebbels’s biography that would make the hawk-woman’s presence outside the window proud and fine, not shameful, not wrong.


And who knows why, but it did not take her very long. Only a few days into her focused studies, Margaret made a crucial discovery regarding Magda Goebbels.

Margaret read what the woman allegedly said to a friend a few months before she killed her children.

For me there are only two possibilities: if we win the war, then Joseph will be so high and mighty that I, an aging, used-up woman, will be finished. And if we lose the war, then my life will be at an end anyway.



Margaret jerked her head up from the book.

The Magda Goebbels of this quote was not the woman who so bombastically wrote to her son in North Africa. This was someone else. This was someone in an advanced stage of self-loathing. Margaret was sitting at the desk, but the book before her seemed suddenly lashed to the room around it, a beetle caught in an invisible web. And later, Magda Goebbels wrote to the same friend:

Don’t forget, Ello, what has gone on! Do you still recall … I told you about it hysterically back then … how the Führer in Café Anast in Munich, when he saw the little Jewish boy, said he would prefer to flatten him into the floor like a bug? Do you remember that? I couldn’t believe it, I took it as nothing but provocative talk. But much later he really did it. Unspeakably cruel things have happened, done by a system that I too have represented. So much vengefulness has been collected in the world … I can do nothing else, I have to take the children with me, I must! Only my Harald will be left behind. He is not Goebbels’s son, and luckily he is in English captivity.



Margaret glanced sharply around the room, almost blushing, embarrassed at the enormity of it. She stood up and began to pace.

But she was too moved to walk. She took hold of her woolen trousers lying on the floor whose hems had come undone. She backed into the Biedermeier sofa. Straw butted out of its red velvet where the cushion had ripped, but she sat down hard. She grabbed the shoebox of thread and needles from beneath it. Her mind was clacking at high speed.

If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything.

Magda Goebbels wrote to her son stationed in North Africa that it was because her children with Goebbels were too good for the later world that they must die. But to her friend, she said it was because they were too soiled for it.

Margaret’s eyes narrowed onto the sewing before her. She felt something hardening in her throat.

She threaded her needle. Perhaps in a good and just world, children are not murdered for their parents’ crimes.

Margaret plunged the needle into the wool that was stiff, stiff as sycamore bark, where the hems had dragged in slush and dried. Perhaps in a good and just world, children do not die as payment.

Perhaps so, Margaret thought, but it is not Nazi justice. The Nazis saw humans as carrying political guilt in their blood, with their birth, before their naming. This was the very axiom of the Nazi crime.

Here is what Margaret knew. At Joseph Goebbels’s incitement, ninety percent of Jewish children—Jews under the age of twelve—who were alive in Europe in 1938 were dead in 1945. Ninety percent of the Jewish children of Europe were tortured to death. These tortured and murdered children will never have children, and these children will never have children. With every generation, there will be a new wave of the unborn.

Margaret began to stitch, her throat stricken, her eyes shaking, pushing the needle in and out guttingly.

And the world after the war—it left the children of Nazis alone. Only last week, she had read a firsthand account in Niklas Frank’s memoir. Oh, he went on and on with the following bitter cheer.

There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic [of Germany] as the son of a major Nazi war criminal. [The] help was especially beneficial when it came to hitchhiking.… From the moment somebody stopped to pick me up, my path to success was assured. All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, “Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremburg as a major war criminal?” … It wasn’t long before the driver indulged himself in glorious reminiscence (omitting all mention of his somewhat lesser crimes); for as a soldier, either on the march to the East or on the way back, he had crossed through [Poland]. Then came the inevitable moment I would be waiting for, the moment when his emotions would be touched, when he lamented the unjust sentence that ended [my father’s] life, and said it was so obvious that I, skinny little fellow, was now so bereft and impoverished, and when you think how the English had bombed Dresden, and that he himself had seen how two SS men had dragged a wounded American GI out of the line of fire at Monte Cassino and taken him to a German doctor, and that really the Jews were to blame for what happened to them because it was true that everything had been in the hands of the Jews, and just take a look at this marvelous autobahn we’re driving on, my friend—may I call you that? In memory of your father?—the Führer built this autobahn, and now I have to get some gas and you’re going to get a fine lunch on me. Only one person …, only one solitary postwar German automobile driver in all those years of hitchhiking (it was in 1953, near Osnabrück), turned onto the shoulder of the highway and without saying a single word, in silent disdain, let me out of the car. The memory of that still makes my ears burn. I wonder if he is still alive. Democrats usually die so young.



The very opposite of Magda’s fears! (Margaret took out a thimble, her finger already bleeding with rage and frustration.) Nazi children lived on, under the impression that it was democrats who died young. And young Frank’s experience was paralleled in the lives of the Bormann children; in the life of the medical technician, Edda Göring, in the life of the architect whose name is Albert Speer Jr., who even now, Margaret knew, was in the process of designing a stadium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Even the daughter of Heinrich Himmler—she, too, was smuggled, effortlessly snuggled, into everyday life. The actual retribution against the Nazis’ children, the penalty that would have been meted out to Goebbels’s offspring had their mother and father not murdered them, was a pair of shamed ears once a decade or so, and this was assuming they ever developed a sense of shame, which was not a given by any means. Margaret’s stitches picked up the exterior fabric. Her eyes rattled.

If the second version of Magda’s motivation were to be believed, then Magda was the only Nazi parent, indeed, the only tribunal in the world, to understand and confirm the Nazi crime—as a Nazi, for she was the only one to inflict upon her own family the Nazi penalty: death for the crime of evil-in-the-blood.

And now Margaret already knew what she thought. She threw down the heavy wool. She stood up. Magda was right.

It was right the Goebbels children died. Margaret wanted it by any means at all. She wanted it—not for the sake of vengeance, she told herself, her footsteps watery as she walked back toward the bedroom. She wanted it for the sake of equity. For the sake of the generations who will be born one day empty of all of us: who will have, from their ancestors, all genes and no memory.

If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything. The monster loose on the streets of Berlin would no longer be a symbol of fanatical evil, but a symbol of fanatical shame.

On the mattress on the floor of the bedroom, Margaret sat down. All she had to do was verify that Ello Quandt was a reliable source. It didn’t matter whether Magda’s action was out of fear or out of repentance; all that mattered was that she knew. Margaret only needed to verify that Magda killed her children thinking of the evil that ran in their bloodline, and Margaret would change the categorization of Magda’s crime for good. She would call the crime consistent. And consistency, after all, feels exactly like justice.


The verification was going to be difficult. According to the notes in the end pages of the Anja Klabunde biography, Ello’s testimony came not from an interview with Ello Quandt herself, but from another, earlier, biography of Magda Goebbels. This earlier biography was written by a contemporary of Joseph Goebbels who worked at the Propaganda Ministry, a certain Hans-Otto Meissner. When Margaret searched the Internet, she found the Meissner biography was available in France, America, and the UK, but not in Germany.

But she did not lose heart.

The flea market at Ostbahnhof occurred to her. At Ostbahnhof, the blustering men with their long mustaches, the military history buffs, selling books about bunker engineering, FlaK guns, and Werner Heisenberg, would certainly have the Klabunde biography. They had everything that was difficult to find.

Margaret went to bed hopeful. Her speculations would perhaps be confirmed. She would read the testimony of this Ello Quandt the very next day, and perhaps make of Magda Goebbels a heroine of consistency—the hawk-woman at the window a fine and permanently reennobled sort of Lucifer.


Of course, Margaret still couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed not unhappily, however, going over the details of Magda Goebbels’s life, becoming more and more entranced by the idea of the woman as self-entrapped intellectual initiating and carrying out her own form of justice. The bedroom, as Margaret had these thoughts, was lifting; the bedroom was lifting and flying.


In the morning she rode her bicycle a long time to reach the Eastern flea market.

A great swoosh of upward feeling buoyed her when she was there. The flea market ran in a trough of flesh behind the looming S-Bahn station, parallel to the tracks. The station hovered over it like a giant with wide-open throat. When Margaret emerged into the light and saw the stands crackling with people, she began to buzz happily.

A souvenir collection of ten high-gloss photographs of the town of Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland; a series of 1930s brochure books, showing large pictures of the Tyrolean alps: Du Mein Tirol, one was called; an aluminum cigarette etui from the Ukraine, emblazoned with the slogan “Slava Oktyabryu” and a rendering of the October Revolution in formalist strokes; a brown leather GDR pencil case decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys; a Berlin guidebook from 1902 with four-color map—Margaret bought all of this, in a burst of something like affection.

Then she got down to the work of finding the Meissner biography. She went to each bookstall in turn. All the booksellers with their beards and gruff ways, heavy books encased in plastic, had indeed heard of it; no one had it for sale. Each one said he was sure another one did, but no sooner was the next man found than he referred her away again. She went down a grapevine of rebuff through the market, all the way to the end. The biography was nowhere to be found.

Now Margaret felt a bit of fever, the kind that had come once when she couldn’t find Magda Goebbels’s letter. She felt as though everything were riding on not just the content, but the tone of this biography she was seeking, as if it would reveal some shining, heretofore unimagined subtlety to Magda’s friend Ello Quandt, or even suggest some soulful depth to Magda Goebbels’s own character.

Beyond the lines of tables, around the corner on a cobblestone side street, the market continued unofficially. In this impromptu aisle, the wares were on card tables brought from home. It was a sad-looking market. A young man with a red face was shouting with another man farther on. “Leck mich am Arsch, du Arschloch.” His Berlin accent was heavy. The other man became sullen and silent, his gaze fixed ahead. Margaret glanced over their tables, without any particular hope.

The table before her, for instance, was almost entirely empty. There were only two heavy books lying on it. These were sitting wide apart from each other, carefully placed. Margaret glanced at them and thought they were ornamental Bibles. The books were very thick, bound in leather with gilt pages, Gothic type on the spine. Margaret put her hand out to examine one of them.

She had approached casually, but the young man with the red face whipped around and fixed her with fury. She regretted going near, but she was already in motion—she could not stop herself; she went ahead and opened the book and began to fumble with the tissue-thin paper as if to see the title, although after she saw the man’s face—it was funny, but she already knew: she was holding Hitler’s diatribe, Mein Kampf.

The book was illegal in this country. She had never seen it for sale; she had in fact never seen an unabridged German edition with her own eyes anywhere at all. Two generations after the war, and the book that had once been in every house was nowhere to be found. She did not know whether the man could be arrested for selling it, or whether she could be arrested for buying it.

It is impossible to overstate how much it meant to Margaret in her present mood—precisely this book.

She asked: “How much?” in a low voice. The man snapped up the other copy and packed it away. At first she thought he would not answer.

Finally he said: “That one is two hundred euros. This one here is two hundred fifty.”

Margaret was shocked. “That’s far too much.”

“Don’t buy it then.” He turned his back on her.

Margaret had Mein Kampf in an English translation at home, but the German edition looked nothing like it. What struck her was how carefully the book she held had been designed to look like a religious text. That would be Goebbels’s work. She noticed a tiny embossed gold swastika on the leather cover where a cross would usually be. Margaret had a Bible at home that felt just like this, the same weight and leather flop in the hands. The pages in both books were like onionskin, and the smell was also the same.

She was holding the book under her nose. And right then, to her surprise, just as Goebbels had meant her to, she saw Nazism as a religion. In a flash, she felt the scope of it, bigger than ever. It was a religion because it steeped everything in Germany in meaning. Fascism had made the world’s fluttering sights and frothy sounds, buoyant wares and technicolored sensations full of weight and pith and awesome death for those who could manage to live with its cruelty. Even now: here was Margaret herself, borne up on the tide and design of it, all her landmarks came out of it, her compass was calibrated to those lodestones. How could it not excite her? Margaret’s own identity, blank as it had become—her own sense of herself as redeemable—was dependent on it as on the devil; what a role it had to play, if you would let it!

Could she grow out of its soil? What could this moral system teach her, inversely, about how to live and how to discriminate?

Could she manage to reject its songs, its films? Yes, that easily.

But could she reject its ideas, its only slowly dying people, its correlations, its loose ends? What was one to do with the truckloads of lost meaning? The correlations sat now in a garbage dump. Margaret put the heavy book down, her cheeks flushed with shame. She wandered away, so deep in herself she could not see.

Maybe it was the intense of the blue sky over Holzmarktstrasse, or maybe she was tired from the nights of insomnia—but all at once she broke through a membrane and thought: I have nothing. None of these things once offered by fascism are things I have in my own life. Nothing means anything to me at all. How could it, without memory?

She walked a few steps farther. She realized with a kind of surprise that her own life had no meaning at all, and with this she was not saying that it had no larger meaning—although it did not—but rather that there were no small correspondences either. Buoyant, frothy, wispy little life.

She was drawn back toward the book. She took a few steps toward the table.

Margaret’s mother’s family had been loud, her father’s family silent. When things happened in her father’s family (she remembered her grandfather), they disappeared forever, whether they be double-jointedness or stock market gains, failed marriages or stillbirths, they remained unnoted and uncorrelated. By contrast, in her mother’s family, events and characteristics were repeated endlessly, told to laughs or made into a refrain, until everything you did or had done to you was part of the pounding myth, a link in the chain, part of history, part of television. Margaret had not been able to stand it, she had gone the way of her father’s family—in silence.

The city had turned to flesh. What if soon she had no choice but to decipher every sign, just as the doctor seemed to want?

Margaret spun around. The young man with the red face looked at her. She said, before she had even made up her mind, so that the words surprised even her: “I’ll take it.”

“You don’t have the cash,” the man said quietly. If he was surprised at her, he did not show it.

“Yes, I do.” It happened that Margaret was carrying her work wallet with her, the one with the money from selling tickets for her tours. She decided that she would borrow from this wallet. It would make her month very tight. When she handed him the cash, the man did not even look at her; he took the money and made it disappear like a magician pressing it into his palm. Clearly he thought she might grab it back. And perhaps Margaret would have, too. But now it was too late. The man turned his back.

Margaret gripped the book and put it in her backpack furtively, hoping no one had seen her. And just as quickly as the money was gone, her stomach churned. She was trembling, but she could not bring herself to ask for the money back. It was already done.

She walked a few steps. She did not want her own life to signify. But she did want meaning—that sweet sensation of sphericity. The meaning of something else. The meaning of Magda Goebbels’s life—the meaning of the lost world.

She would make good on her connection to the hawk-woman. Even if Magda Goebbels had not seen the irony linking her husband’s crimes and her children’s deaths, even if she had never recognized her guilt, Margaret would begin to know Magda Goebbels’s side of it: the primrose labyrinth leading her to justify a social movement of murder, maybe how the philosophy of the madman in his own words makes it all smooth and fine. Margaret thought this would be the single richest trick of her amnesiac’s brain. She would allow meaning—but only the meaning of a Nazi.

Riding home on Linienstrasse, she passed a quiet entrance to an industrial courtyard. As she sped past the dark entryway on her bicycle, she caught sight of a sun-filled courtyard beyond a tunneling entryway. All she saw was instantly gone: the glinting windows, exposed pipes, the ivy and the smoky sunlight. The flashing pace of the view into the courtyard felt like nostalgia. To think of nostalgia, even without nostalgia itself, was painful and searing.

She bicycled home. She sped down Friedrichstrasse. She flew through Potsdamer Platz. Slowly, she began to smile. She had Adolf Hitler’s book in her backpack. When she got home she would draw the curtains, shutting out even the hawk-woman, in order to read, and it would take the time out of time: not freeing her from her burden of guilt, not releasing her, no, even weighing her down all the further, but at least now with her cloudy burden no longer unpaired—no longer without an understanding of its kinship, as a small-time evil, with historical evil, which is large, large enough to rest on. For the great arduousness of guilt is its loneliness.


In the next days, Margaret finished the portrait in oils of Magda Goebbels. It was a beautiful piece, and when it dried, she put it on the pillow next to her own. They slept, the flesh woman and the painted woman, one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open.

She read Mein Kampf according to plan. At every turn, she looked for places where Hitler’s sensibility overlapped with her own. On page 65, Hitler asks:

Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?



And although Margaret knew that Hitler’s idea of “self-preservation” was built on a persecution complex, she was elated. In the year 1925, he acknowledged, even if later rejecting, the possibility that his right to act on that persecution complex was perhaps only subjectively reasonable. It seemed akin to her own constant inner quizzing. And it suggested to fervid Margaret that there might be something flaccid and forgiving—not in Hitler’s life, but in his character.

Finally, she came to exactly what she had been looking for. She found it in a passage of no particular significance: Hitler’s description of himself as a soldier, on a transport train during the First World War.

I saw the Rhine for the first time thus: as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old Watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my chest became too narrow for my heart.



At this, Margaret’s own chest narrowed. Perhaps there was nothing in the quotation that justified it, but for one moment, Margaret saw Hitler as young and soft and grasping and sentimental. And she did the arithmetic and figured that Hitler must have been twenty-five when he was on that train. This year, Margaret was also twenty-five.

So she saw herself there. And although to be like him was the opposite of goodness, and even the smell of it made her walk the house weak and bleary-eyed, without blood in her veins, not remembering to open the curtains in the morning or at any other time, afraid of all things light and springing, what could she do? The Nazi past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow.