The History of History

TWENTY-THREE • Beautiful Albert


More than twenty years ago, my brother died,” the doctor said. “But let me start even many years before that, when he was still a promising young man; this would be in 1938. Young people were in the youth groups they had then. My brother was an unusually talented, bright young man. Very high-spirited. There was nothing he couldn’t do, nothing he couldn’t do extremely well. He was with the HJ photographic society, and they were in the mountains, what we call Saxon Switzerland. They were taking pictures and making films for the Youth Sports and Games Party Congress Exhibition.

My brother was the sort beloved for his iconoclasm. He always could push through a new and startling idea—for a wild stunt, a fabulous show. He was also remarkable for his collectivist spirit, his indifference to danger, and his natural tendency to look out for the younger and the weaker. These were the days of ‘Führung der Jugend durch die Jugend’—in other words he was a natural leader, a lover of excitement and action at the helm of a happy, singing, strapping passel of young men. If he had a fault, it was his carelessness when it came to his personal well-being—his sweaty, relentless physicality. His indifference to pain and discomfort, and the pain and discomfort of others—it was something he simply couldn’t understand.

“And then there was the little issue of pyromania. He had a sort of arousal, an overweening vivacity that I often observed myself, at the mere thought of watching something go up in flames. And when he and his boys set something on fire they responded, I do not shy away from telling you, by jumping up and down, hitting their own faces with excitement and arousal.

“In any case, my brother had an idea, an elaborate vision that even in the planning phases brought him the most zealous admiration of his compatriots: he wanted to make a film that would depict the legend of a youth rising out of a lake of fire in a ring of flames, the half-human, half-god foundling child of the fire giants, Surtr and Sinmore, come with sword in hand to fight at the helm of the Wehrmacht. He chose a point where there was a craggy, romantic outcropping of rock, and a slightly higher rocky ledge upon which the camera could be perched.” The doctor stopped for a moment. “Is this constellation familiar to you, my pet?”

“Yes,” said Margaret, darkly.

“Good,” the doctor said, beaming. “In any case, he convinced the boys of his group—and they were easily convinced, let me tell you—to trek the distance from Dresden to the mountains rather than ride via omnibus, so that he could appropriate the gasoline they would have used. He meant to set the lake on fire by pouring the petrol over it and dropping a lit match. Then, the next thing was, a boy was meant to walk backward off the ledge into the flaming lake and swim down under the water. The idea being that later the film would be played back in reverse, and the youth would appear to be rising out of the flaming depths. I myself was invited to come along on the trip,” the doctor said, with a little shake of her head, her lips drawn as though she tasted something sour. “I saw all of it.” She paused. She moved her tongue.

“The trouble, as it were, was in finding a suitable ‘actor’ to play the fire child. My brother felt it should be a boy of great physical beauty. Further complicating things, there were not many boys, when the day finally came, willing to walk backward into the fiery lake. My brother had only a few in mind who he felt had features fine enough to come into question, and of these, the first two bowed out.”

Margaret listened. The tips of her fingers grew cold.

“There was one boy in the group, a youth of sixteen, who was very beautiful and something of a maverick for those times. He let his hair grow long in black Indian waves, bucking every tenet of his milieu. He was unusually haunting of face and charming of spirit.

“Now it happened that about this boy, my brother had some special information. He knew that his father’s mother was Jewish and that his mother’s father’s mother was a Jewess as well, although up to this point the boy’s family had managed to keep it quiet. And taking this boy aside into a glade, on the day filming was meant to go forward, my brother told him—all in the spirit of realizing his creative vision, mind you—that if the boy didn’t volunteer for the stunt, my brother would have no choice but to tell the rest of the group about his mixed heritage.

“So the boy—he conformed.

“The tragedy, however, was that walking backward, and deliberately avoiding taking a strong jump away from the cliff, so as not to compromise the look of the thing when reversed, the young man, Albert was his name, did not manage to get far enough away from the edge. As he tumbled downward, because the cliff was not sheer, his neck snapped.”

The doctor got up from her desk and took several steps to the side of the room, away from Margaret.

“The story does not end there. After Albert’s death the fact of his partially Jewish roots came out, via an anonymous tip to the Gauleiter. Where the tip came from, we’ll never know, although I have my suspicions; I know my brother too well. In any case, the boy’s family quietly prevented an investigation into the incident, so as to prevent further misfortunes.

“As for my brother—the event never cast a shadow. He became ever more boisterous, more hail-fellow-well-met—more beloved than ever of his peers. Our villa on the Wannsee was the scene of picnics, barbeques, boat races. The basement den smelled of cigar smoke and the meaty sweat of boys. This was where my brother and his friends had their powwows. They played darts or table tennis.

“A year later, my brother volunteered for the Wehrmacht. He was sent first to Riga. I heard some stories about his life on the Eastern Front, or behind the front, as it happened—but let’s not make things complicated. The upshot is: after spending several years in Russian captivity, in due course he came home, one of the lucky survivors.

“Back in Germany, he did a bizarre thing. He made a sort of conversion. He had a strange and unexpected relationship with a bohemian, a floozy, a rabid socialist. No one could understand it. What did he want with the Marxist strumpet? Her skirts showed her hairy knees.

But I understood him. She was not so different from my brother. A theater director and “dance poet” she called herself. And in fact they quietly married, had a son together. Soon after, however, the radical woman insisted on moving to East Berlin, where she meant to be part of a new, socialist dawn. She took the child with her. My brother never spoke to her again.” The doctor focused her blind eyes on Margaret, with a slightly curling lip.

Margaret felt her fingers grow colder still.

“Well.” The doctor sighed, turning her head away. “My brother became a successful film director. In Munich. And although he never remarried, he gradually made a complete return to his old politics. He made a series of successful films through the nineteen-fifties, Heimat films, sentimental tripe, mostly, but he made a name for himself and was ultimately invited to Hollywood, where he had a measure of success once again. And then in the early seventies, I don’t know what—something in the mood of the times, perhaps, moved him to make the second highly peculiar swerve of his life.

“He was invited to lecture at the film school at the University of California in Los Angeles. I believe the first lecture was there. When he came on the stage, the kids booed him because of the type of thoughtless films he made in Hollywood; he was considered very retrograde—but that’s an aside. In any case, my brother, he thought back on his life and what he could show the young people, what he was truly proud of—to teach them about filmmaking. And do you know what he pulled out? The old scraggly footage from the HJ. That is, the one hundred and thirteen seconds of Albert’s death.

“The film of this, the ever-so-silent film, my dear”—and she inclined her head toward Margaret—“had survived, of course. My brother saved it carefully, hiding it in a metal box at the back of his closet, with his pornography collection actually, as he told me once, not without some of his old bravado,” the doctor said, in a tone of great detachment. “He showed this film, still somehow proud of his creation—with its brazen swarms of light, the fire in the lake and, moving liquidly, in the center, the young Albert himself, floating up out of the lake and across the screen in a black-and-white haze. That’s how my brother described it—how it stood in such contrast of purity with the coed bunch in their modern lecture hall. That there was a pristine, Wagnerian horror-beauty to the sight of the boy in his medieval costume, his sword clutched tightly in his long-fingered hand, rising up from the fire below. The flickering of the flames twisting like lightning across the shimmering lake—” The doctor turned her head. She looked at where she could see Margaret as a dark shadow.

“Now finally, at this late date, in the seventies, my brother talked openly about the boy’s Jewish background, his strange position in the HJ, that he died instantly when he fell. But of course, he neglected to mention his own part in the boy’s death.

“But still, after he gave his introduction, there would come a hush in the hall, an expectancy—a feeling of suspense and concentration. During the screening, the students’ faces were flushed and their eyes bright and slightly wet—one could not help but gain the impression that they were, well—that they were achieving release from it—from watching the boy die.

“In the months after these screenings in the U.S. there was a change in my brother. He didn’t laugh all the time as he had before; he completely lost touch with his son, who was still in the GDR with his mother. He confessed as much to me on the phone, and oddly enough, he seemed to listen when I spoke, which he had never done before. Or maybe he was merely distracted, so it seemed as if he were listening.” The doctor drummed her fingers on the desk, her blank eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Then he moved back to Germany without warning, breaking a film contract. He showed the footage to a German audience, this time at the Freie Universität here in West Berlin, and I attended this screening, and I saw the hungry, excited look in the eyes of the young people here too, just as my brother had described it. What I remember most vividly is that he brought his cigarettes into the lecture hall with him. Even then, this was against regulations. He smoked them uninterruptedly during the screening and discussion afterward, dragging long and hard at each contact with the lips, his eyes protruding out of his well-formed skull with intense concentration. As we left the hall he continued to smoke and afterward in the car. He was deeply elated. He told me excitedly he thought the film was possibly the greatest thing he had ever done. He gave a little laugh. Then he added: ‘Perhaps it’s the greatest thing anyone has ever done.’ He continued to show the film all around the country for a few more years, usually under the aegis of ‘anti-fascism’—my understanding is that the film was read by the young people as an extraordinary artifact. I believe the idea was that they watched the film with analytical minds, taking apart the symbolism, considering it as a little piece of flotsam in the debate over the links between German romanticism and fascism. Several essays were published about it in very well-regarded journals. But that did not quite explain the strength of the crowds that turned up in the auditoriums where it was shown.

“Over time, my brother became maniacal. We fell out of contact—one year, two, three—I lost count. Then, out of nowhere, I received news that he was dead. He killed himself. It happened while he was abroad, visiting his East German son, who had defected to the States by then—a disastrous visit, obviously. All this, just as his reputation was enjoying a softer chapter.

“He left behind an elliptical, highly out-of-character suicide note, which I have always assumed he pieced together from other people’s writings—it was plagiarized, I believe, mostly from the letters he received from the university students, but it was unsettling to me nonetheless. It ran to forty-five pages. He wrote, among other things: ‘I can no longer live with my love of the sublime. What are we, what sort of animal is man, that even our elite feeds off the slaughter of the most beautiful among us to satiate its aesthetic needs?’

“He went on to defend himself and his followers, drawing a parallel between Christianity—a religion built around the gruesome crucifixion of the ‘lamb of God’—and the religiosity surrounding the Holocaust, which rests on the invocation of the gruesome murder of the innocent.”

The doctor put her hands down on the desk. She was quiet.

Margaret could not breathe. The doctor was not going to continue. Margaret colored. Sweat raced down her nose. “But that’s ridiculous. There’s no connection between the crucifixion and the Holocaust.”

The doctor remained silent.

“Your brother, he was jumping on the bandwagon,” Margaret said. “Our culture—no—Christianity, the way it’s become, it doesn’t get a spiritual reward from human sacrifice—not as it’s practiced now.” Margaret coughed. The lights were spinning. She felt sick. “If there was interest in that movie,” she said, making a grab at an authoritative tone, “it was because people crave sensation, and the spectacle of the old Nazis is something morbid that everyone wants to see.” She sat up straighter, trying to catch her breath, thinking of her customers wandering around Sachsenhausen and her own loud voice ringing against its walls.

“But you,” she went on after a moment. The doctor wasn’t responding; she had dropped her head forward. “You—how could you show this movie to me?” Margaret said. “It’s nothing but a snuff film. You called it ‘the most meaningful thing ever made,’ wasn’t that it?” Margaret was stretching her neck up, swallowing the lump in her throat. “You were trying to hypnotize me.” She left off. Her temples jounced. She found she wanted to take the tiny old woman and shake her by her shoulders until the gigantic head fell off and rolled across the floor.

And then something occurred to her. Why was the doctor casting the whole thing in such an atrocious light? Why was she making Margaret feel such shame? Margaret burst out: “But what about it? What would be the problem if the crucifixion and the Holocaust were understood the same way? Christianity,” Margaret stuttered, “is a path of the spirit. Why can’t the study of the Holocaust help the world in the same way—a spiritual path—if it can be that. If it can be that, then why not?” Her eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.

But the doctor came back to life and laughed. “You mean, if the sadistic torture and murder of an innocent prophet can lead via proxy sacrifice to cathartic cleansing of guilt in third parties even two thousand years hence, then why can’t the more recent murder of six million European Jews have exactly the same effect? Remember what we are talking about, my dear: the death of Jews at the hands of those claiming to be redeemed by the crucifixion of a Jew. And now you want the killing of six million more to nourish the spiritual life of future generations, is that it?” The doctor tapped her fingers on the desk.

Margaret pulled her hands over her ears, and her voice, when she spoke, came out in puffs. “You’ve made this into a terrible thing. I know why you showed me the film. I see what you were driving at all along: you were accusing me. You think I am one of those young people in the university, slavering over the hallucination of the beautiful sacrifice. That’s why you showed me the film at the beginning—to expose me as a cannibal,” and the lights blinked before her eyes like strobes, and she was certain there were birds in the potted tree at her side.

Dr. Arabscheilis put her hands palm-down on the desk. She turned toward Margaret with her giant, bespectacled, golf-ball eyes.

“My dear, I genuinely had not thought of that,” she said. “But perhaps,” she went on, taking up a pen from the desk and making a note to herself on a pad of paper, “perhaps you are a cannibal. Think of what direction you are headed, comrade. Before his breakdown, when he was making Heimat films, my brother’s back-thinking, so proud and so corrupt, was largely aimed, like everyone else’s, like yours, my pet, at aestheticizing unbearable memory. Not anesthetizing—aestheticizing. The difference is everything.” The doctor, with her white eyes, stared in Margaret’s direction for several long seconds. “Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? The murder of the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century is only interesting to people for whom it is not unbearable. Interest in terrible things is always a symptom of detachment.”

Margaret’s face was pale. She did not speak. Then she said hoarsely, “But, Doctor, I do think it’s unbearable.”

“Precisely! You think it’s unbearable, and that is important for your uses of it, and yet it is not unbearable to you, else you wouldn’t think of it.”

The doctor waited for Margaret to reply, but Margaret was silent, twisting in her chair. She coughed painfully.

“You’re not well, are you,” the doctor said.

“I feel sick.”

“I think you’ve gone a bit off. But this is natural. The remnants of an ethical system are holding you back from adopting your notion of beauty, corrupt as it is. And a sense of beauty, my pet, to each his own, is the weir that staunches the flow of madness.”

Margaret was silent. She pulled fitfully at the pills on her violet sweater.

The doctor spoke again. “When you first came here, I thought that moving your own life into the space directly in front of your eyes would just be a matter of brightening up your mind. I did not realize to what degree you’ve allowed other people’s lives to hijack your own.”

“But, Doctor, I’ve been trying to tell you that all along. I said it before. I’d like a reversal. I don’t want—whatever this is—I don’t want to do it any longer. Whatever you began in me, I don’t want to continue.” Margaret raised her voice further. “And I’m not who you think I am. You call me Täubner every single time, but all along I’ve been someone else.” She began to rummage in her bag. “Look, here is my passport”—and Margaret took it out and pushed it across the desk. “Get your magnifying glass and read it,” she cried. “Read it! Taub!”

The woman made no move. Her shoulders were slack and her hands still. The passport dropped heavily on the table. “Take your passport? Idiot child!” she whispered. “If only I could get my hands on that jezebel of a mother you have. You’re not entirely a Täubner, as we know well.”

“What?” Margaret looked at the doctor.

“And I did not show you the film because I thought you were like the youth at the university, nor to make you feel yourself any sort of cannibal. On the contrary, my dear, my reasons were much more prosaic. I knew you had already seen it. I thought it would remind you of our common past.”

“Our common past?”

“Yes.”

Margaret sat down quickly. She looked at the doctor. She began to feel as though she really would be sick after all. Her mouth watered and her eyes too, then her ears tingled and the tips of her fingers went to sleep and her stomach lifted. She was embarrassed, her hair was cold with sweat.

She was forced to run out of the room, but she only made it into the hall, where an extravagant wave of weakness overcame her.

“Abandon reading!” the doctor yelled. “Go directly to the source. Go and meet the killers! See if they still call to you, when you see them in their stinking flesh!” The doctor’s voice was getting hoarse, “And if you can find a way to join the victims without gassing yourself, then go to them too! Go as close as you can!”

Margaret was already in the WC, hanging her head. After a few moments, the nurse receptionist appeared at the open door behind her. She did not enter. She looked at Margaret with wide eyes.

Walking through the waiting room, Margaret was still queasy. It was the heat of the place, she decided. It was the heat of the place that had made her sick.

Stepping out into the cold city, she breathed the pricking air, and her nausea abated.


Margaret did not want to think about the doctor’s suggestion of a “common past.” Indeed, she pushed the Taub-Täubner opposition out of her mind entirely.

What resounded in her beseechingly, however, in the hours after she got home, was the idea that she had no right to her interest. She was a cannibal licking the bones of the past clean of flesh—she told herself this, as if it had not been the doctor’s idea, but her own.