SIN'S TRUE NATURE
"...in seeking to represent himself, man makes himself a monster." (Dr. Daniel Cottom, on the moral of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein)
As a young diplomat graduated from the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, in 1928, I was offered a job in the embassy in Berlin as an assistant to the ambassador.
Most of my days were spent reading papers and applying the scissor to every article in which Netherlands or any of a highly specified list of topics of national interest to my country were mentioned.
I filed all such mentions from the rich portfolio of German papers available, submitting some for immediate reporting over the telephone and others for postage and again others for archives.
It was a fairly tedious job and far from the exciting and tumultuous existence of a spy I had secretly fantasized about during my studies. It was also a good career move, and a leisurely position in which I had plenty of time to also organize my personal scrap book with photos of Marlene Dietrich, reviews and articles by Berthold Brecht and the interesting new structures created by the Bauhaus movement.
Occasionally Godfried Bruin brought me along to formal meetings as a secretary of sorts, and to less formal meetings in which I met some rather interesting people, including Ulrich von Ribbentrop, who was later to become the foreign minister of Nazi Germany.
At this point Ribbentrop was not a Nazi, but simply an important businessman with many foreign relations.
I am very old now, and most of the details of these occasions escape my memory. Dates, even years, and the order of events, get confused over time.
Sometimes an arbitrary recollection will surface, such as the other day when I was talking to the lovely Marina – my young Polish maid who comes to help me with light cleaning and cooking.
We were discussing the affairs of the World War when, and she gave me some very interesting descriptions of life in Poland during the German occupation, based on what her grandparents had told her.
Then I remembered a little personal anecdote about von Ribbentrop:
He said, at one point during a fundraising event for night illumination of the Reichstag, that he had reached a point of magnitude – grössenklasse – that he found himself bored by mundane activities associated with his class, even the game of making money procreate, which he felt he mastered to an extent where it was nearly automatic.
Ribbentrop compared it to having rabbits in a cage:
“At a certain point of grössenklasse you need not do much but to provide the beasts a little fodder now and then. They will do the rest, according to their nature. Money is not complicated to manage. The only thing that interests me at this point is to know what level of power I really hold. I want my opponent to throw down, to look him straight in the eyes and to challenge him for a duel. I want to know how much I can accomplish in this lifetime. I want to find out how powerful I am.”
This was not an unusual statement, even if in hindsight it may sound eerie. I don’t even know why I remember it so well. I may misquote it a bit, but it is one of the few encounters with the Nazis I remember very clearly.
Having taken a course in stenography and often assigned to take dictations or minutes of meetings, my memory was once very sharp, and friends jokingly accused me of being a spy because I had what they called phonographic memory – whatever I heard I could very accurately recount, even in the tone of voice the words had been spoken.
The guests at the fundraiser just laughed at Ribbentrop’s remark, and some commended him for it, while others felt encouraged to share their own ambition or flaunt their egos, and grössenklasse was one of the words they took delight in repeating.
They were all notable industrialists and politicians, aside from some minor celebrities and some artists called in to entertain, and some selected journalists reporting from the event. The fundraiser fell apart later, after the pledges had reached the desired goal, because of some political or technical hindrances.
I do not even know why I start out with this anecdote, except perhaps for the word grössenklasse, which somehow embodies my view of the transition from the liberal haven of Berlin during the Weimar days to the ghoulish and fearsome reign under the pompous Nazi standards.
Strangely, everything I have done in my life seems to have come to naught. When I look back I cannot think of one single significant thing I contributed, except perhaps for a warm and loving upbringing for my two sons.
But both my sons died during the World War, one during the Rotterdam Blitz in 1940, and the other in the bombing in March 1943.
Neither the fighting nor the death tolls were the most intensive in the case of Netherlands, so it was a twisted stroke of misfortune to lose both my sons in this manner and so young. I cannot complain about fate considering the terrors that took place during the war, in the battlefields and in the camps.
Still, it was like something died inside me, which has never healed. One cannot help feeling, having buried your children, that you have lost all investments in life. I am guilty of lethargy, of emotional withdrawal and, to some extent, resignation.
My wife stayed loyal for as long as she could, and when things did not work out, she left me for the American captain and became, in turn, American. I took the job in South Africa, until the inner contradictions became unbearable to me, and I returned to a much less prominent position as a lecturer at the institute.
But my mind is drifting. The point to all this reminiscence is just simply that of all the things I have experienced in life only one seems to still stand out as something of value, a contribution to the world that may actually be meaningful to leave behind, as I stand in the darkened hallway, ready to head out into the mist of night.
You see, I made three good friends in Berlin, and one was an artist, and one was a small entrepreneur, a dealer in German wine, and the third was a jazz musician who often played in the cabarets.
My God, I can still recall their faces, but what happened? It is as if their gradual transformation and the alienation I felt witnessing it over the years quite accurately reflect the changes of Germany as a whole.
When we met they were open-minded, liberal leaning bohemians, ambitious, up-and-coming, but also charmingly distraught, even from their constant economic problems that often led me – the foreigner with the well paid official position – to pay for our nights out in town.
It was as if nothing bothered them, except of course politics, of which they spoke incessantly and in aggravated tones. They were Socialists, Marxists, even Gerner, the wine dealer. They cared nothing for the greatness of Germany, even if such thoughts were also prominent at the time.
They were cosmopolitans with an empty pocket and an insatiable appetite for the world, for devouring life to the fullest, even to the point of running off with the first the best skirt and sometimes paying for professional services in some stinking lurid back alley and reporting about it, as if the lowness of the act in itself made it adventurous.
I was drawn to this leisurely lifestyle, but not enough to really participate.
I always felt strange about the inner contradictions of their lives – their personal ambitions and their struggle to make economic progress with whatever talent they possessed, in stark contrast to their alleged loyalty to Marxist doctrine.
My academic background and the objective measures it had instilled in me made me the perpetual observer, a role for which I was often ridiculed by them, or even criticized.
My shyness with the opposite gender, my reserved appearance and my occupation made me bourgeois, as well as dull, and I was only interesting because I was a foreigner and carried the air of the great outside with me.
“I swear you are the most judgmental person I have ever met”, my friend Burkhardt once said when I once aired my objections to the use of prostitutes.
They knew I was a Catholic, even if I was not devout, and I suppose I had hit a nerve with his conscience and he felt the need to retaliate.
One time, on a café named Engel, I further transgressed by airing some concern about Zionist terrorism and the Jewish bankers.
They immediately corrected me according to what was proper Marxist doctrine at the time, stating that anti-Semitism was a reactionary ploy and that my mind had become infected by the imperialist thinking of my employers, and so on and so forth.
I felt truly ashamed, most of all because I was aware I did not fully know what I was talking about. It was marginal to my education and really not a subject of interest to me.
I just felt that the reports about Jewish militia in Palestine having Jewish financiers in Europe fell under the banner of imperialism, and I suppose I was eager to gain some sort of approval from my peers.
The accusations of anti-Semitism silenced me, and we spoke no further of the matter, since I did not want to discredit myself, and they were too good friends to hold a moment of naivety against me.
At the time nobody had any idea that the sporadic clashes would turn out to become an international hot spot, and I suppose I did express some anti-Semitism.
That was not uncommon, not even before 1933.
I lost contact to my three friends, when the entire climate of the society changed. There is no specific date or occasion that comes to mind. I remember standing by the window, wondering how we lost touch, and missing their company in the evening, but also feeling no impulse to seek them out.
I also remember being increasingly occupied in my office, and drawn into many more affairs than before.
Godfried Bruin was replaced, and my new employer felt that he could make better use of me, and it was time to give me some real training, and to introduce me to the diplomatic circles, an informal promotion I enjoyed for the brief moment it lasted.
I worked in Berlin until 1934, where I returned to Netherland, settling in Rotterdam, where I was also married.
My German friends – I only met them one more time, and what a transformation:
Gerner, the most laviscious of them all, had completely changed his appearance. He was no longer the gritty looking artist imitating Berthold Brecht’s studied industrial worker look, but wore a short tight haircut and a new suit.
His story was odd: He had been on his way to a Socialist demonstration, but missed or forgot the meeting point because he was dizzy from insomnia, which he frequently suffered from.
When he had asked some men for direction, they had engaged him in discussion about worker’s rights, and he had spoken so vividly and in so close alignment with their case that they had immediately invited him to come and give a speech at their own rally.
This speech had been received with tremendous applause from the audiences, and Gerner was given not only a new suit, but also a small office to work in as a propaganda officer. Short after he had met women who had taken his fancy, and they were now engaged to be married.
His success had appealed to his two friends, who at first had merely acquiesced to visit him in his office and take a look at the pamphlets he produced.
But soon they were both employed in his burgeoning enterprise – of which the publication of a hugely popular magazine devoted to exposing the Jewish conspiracy was the epicenter.
They spoke with casual disdain of Jews, and how they undermined the cultural greatness of Germany, and how they had grown to a worldwide threat through the snares of Bolshevism.
This was only three years after I met them. I was astonished.
None of them mentioned the conversation we had that night about anti-Semitism, and I suspect they had forgotten all about it. They were caught up in a momentum.
Even as we stood still in the street and talked, as if nothing had changed between us and only a little time had passed I sensed that they carried with them a kinetic energy struggling to tear them loose from the spot, where they for a moment gave into a common human impulse.
They were now driven, and they were now the ones carrying the air of the great world, the grössenklasse. Their nation had given them pride and purpose, and a sense of power to achieve even the impossible.
My former friends were full of energy, and I was still, aware that I was about to depart from their country and also sensing how things would somehow change. I was not among those who trusted the Treaty of Versailles, recalling that common saying in diplomatic circles that a peace treaty is a timetable for war.
It would be wrong to say I was shaken to my core by this accidental meeting. I did not see that clearly at the time. But the befuddlement about their disturbing transformation remained with me.
Back in Holland as we debated the role of Germany in Europe, the possibility of war, and our own neutrality, my mind often drifted to the seemingly inconspicuous situation in Schönhauser Alle, where my former liberal friends stood in their long suave leather jackets, talking about how Germany was now in a position to reject the compensations imposed on them from the previous war.
They were grinning as they took long drags on their cigarettes, telling me how “everything had fallen into place for them”.
“No more of that weltzschmertz and existential angst”, Hebert said. “It all dissipates, once you realize it is a product of decadence.
He also said something that has startled me ever since:
“To become who you are meant to be, you must free yourself from guilt, and from anxiety about whether what you do is right or wrong. You must do what is necessary. You must do what is required of you. In this life, it is better to be guilty of something than to be a victim.”
Now, when I look back on many events in history, where people have sought to represent themselves and formed grand ideologies to pave a way for a place in this world for themselves and their kind, I cannot help but feel despair.
Why I would feel such despair I don’t know. I am old. My body is falling apart. I want to die soon. Perhaps I will meet my sons in Heaven, but I don’t think I will. I find it hard to imagine there is a Heaven, or a God. It is not so much because of science and rationality, as it is a matter of simple experience and observation.
There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or a reason to anything, except… as much as I hate to admit it, I cannot deny the truth in the statement Hebert made:
“It is better to be guilty of something than a victim.”
To remain innocent and, thus, to become the victim of someone else’s cruelty is terrifying. Ghandi had not really processed the meaning of Holocaust, when he tried to align the experience of the Jews with his doctrine of non-violence.
Even Sophocles wrote that the greatest tragedy is to know that you are solely responsible for your own misfortune. I suppose it is a thought that appeals to many today, in an age where the memory of the great wars is passing away.
The sad thing is that it is not even true. It is easier for man to live with being guilty and have a place in this world than it is to suffer unjustly at the hands of an oppressor. This became clear to me, as I witnessed the struggle of the black South Africans to free themselves from apartheid.
Even if many events in the struggle, and developments after the liberation, are unfortunate, it occurs to nobody to blame them for striving to be free.
I see it even more clearly in the case of Palestine today; it is the tragedy of our age that the Jews were traumatized by the massacre in the German camps and now see no way out but to take upon themselves a considerable guilt in exchange for power. Thus one horror begets another, and breeds more conflict.
For the Palestines, similarly, there is no option but to fight for their right to freedom and autonomy. It is the bitter irony of fate how their cause now so resembles that of the European Jews.
People usually say that it is common to blame others for your own shortcomings, but it is equally tempting to blame yourself for what the harm the world does to you.
By taking the blame on yourself, at least, you get the relief that you have some sort of power over your life. I think it is very difficult for humans to face – perhaps the most difficult thing at all – that this is not the case.
It is not even the case, when you hold power in your hands, and it is as if you are in control of the firmament of heaven.
As you move, something else is moving you; something stronger is moving through you – a greater collective purpose in which you can never be more than a cog, and in which no one is but expendable.
Maybe I should not speak like this as a Catholic. I have lived a life of politics, and maybe that has destroyed my humanity. But no matter how hard I try to see it another way, I cannot.
In the dedication to my book, which was not very successful, I must admit, I put a quotation from Hamlet. It is Ophelia that speaks to Hamlet, saying:
“…we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
At the time I imagined that Mutable Boundaries was what I would have told my sons, if they had grown up to become old enough to understand such matters, and take life lessons from their father.
The Shakespeare quote was the summary of my experiences. It would also serve well as my parting words to the world in the absence of something more original to contribute.