So even in this war we found a new kind of beauty, eerie and cruel and exhausting — a different possibility of beauty, which caused us anguish, which seemed to be constructed of a more solid reality, and which positioned itself behind every other image of beauty, shining through, dissolving, distorting, and making them cruel with satire.
Later, when those images no longer carried the same weight and force, but — as with everything experienced early in life — were removed and reflected many times over, suspended, as it were, one of us made the pronouncement that everything undergoes the same transformation as our perception of the war, as if Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander had been repainted stroke by stroke by Breughel the younger, known as “Hell” Breughel — who would have also depicted the humor in the horror, which was always present and intensified by the dreadful surroundings.
In this way we finally stumbled onto the secret we had sought so urgently and persistently without achieving anything more than a vague intuition. I’m talking about the physical principle that kept the whole mechanism running, the interaction between the beingless larvae and their grand leaders—as well as its metaphysical sense. And we found it in the tension between chaos and order in that mythically monstrous picture of battle. In an instant it became clear to us that the nearly — but not quite — perfect uniformity of the advancing columns, dissolving chaotically in the clash of the fronts, reformed itself after the battle in a far more perfect form: as the utterly precise, utterly indistinguishable rows of crosses in the heroes’ cemeteries, where the lines spread out into a broad perspective, moving in its spare monotony, cut at right angles and chopped in blocks, so that an absolute order was finally achieved.
And so the highly explosive iron larvae, the unreleased fire butterflies, for whom the intensity of life was compressed into the fraction of a moment before bursting into flame, and who had caused us to realize, in the strangest way, what it meant for them to light into the enemy, were granted one last metamorphosis toward perfection.
With that the sacrifice acquired its valid symbolism — along with its meaning. Little Hans Kitchenmaster died so as to rise again, purified, in perfect orderliness. Even his dearth and deprivation found its apotheosis in the divine acres where the crosses sprouted like seeds at measured angles.
The brothers Ludenburg, too, moved from the windy reaches between thunderhead gods and light-headed balloons into a firmer station, which did acquire a kind of high-priestly consecration — as the highest functionaries of the total order.
Nevertheless, back in the days of our childhood, we were still disinclined to fully abandon our perception of beautiful war, which we saw expressed in Tildy, the hussar, pliant as a windblown sleeve and ready to strike — exuding the aura of a bold and shiny knightly past. In him we rediscovered the grand fluttering of silken banners embroidered with gold, the flash of the saber wielded by a man’s hand, the mystery of bloodletting, and a different proximity of death that made one proud and unworried, because it was fervent, full-blooded, and full of life.
Nothing we thought we knew about Tildy fit with the impression we had acquired of our German brothers-in-arms. But it was even harder for us to imagine him alongside the Germans of Czernopol.
8. The Volksdeutschen: Professor Feuer, Herr Adamowski, and the Smirking Kunzelmann
THE CITY of Czernopol cannot be imagined without its Germans. Franconian settlers directed to Galicia under Kaiser Joseph were among its putative founders, and their descendants comprised nearly a third of the population. Of course, they became so mixed with the original inhabitants and other migrants who arrived before or after, and their language was so corrupted, that they could hardly be considered children of the same nation as the famous stone Horseman inside the Bamberg Cathedral — though that didn’t stop them from invoking him and all other good Germans as part of their crude and pushy jingoism. But today a pedigree like that is hard to believe even for the ones who stayed in Franconia, so that it’s tempting to suspect some puzzling cosmic event caused one large nation in the heart of Europe to be replaced overnight with a different one, completely alien and incomparably inferior.
The head of the ethnic confessors, the honorary president of the German Men’s Chorus and the Turnvater Jahn Athletic Club, a fanatically nationalistic polemicist and fervent anti-Semite, was a certain Professor Feuer, whom we called “Champagne Bottle” because of his steeply falling shoulders. I have difficulty describing him because his external traits — and undoubtedly his character as well — seem such a clichéd picture of the disciple of Wotan and the cranky high school teacher: tall and ungainly, with enormous feet in ridiculous orthopedic lace-up boots, with a cycling jacket and a broad, Odin-style slouch hat over his petit bourgeois clothes, and their stiff propriety stood in contrast to the threadbare condition they showed from everyday use. He would step along, craning his head like a madman, casting fiery glances this way and that, his long white neck jutting out of his collar like a singer preparing to deliver the highest note his vocal cords can muster. But it wasn’t just his dress, bearing, and demeanor that made him seem comically operatic and anachronistic: he was one of those men whose bodies never reach their full maturity, or else skip over manhood and proceed straight to a eunuch-like old age, while they themselves remain stuck in a transitional period of development, like giant boys, who along with their laughable and pronounced erotic traits have something angelic about them. Not until later, long after we had left Czernopol, did we realize how much he looked like Strindberg: he wore the same thick, salt-and-pepper mustache, with the ends loosely brushed up and recurved like cupid’s bow, and a soft, reddish, and seemingly moist little spot beneath his lower lip. Perched above his finely modeled chin like that, framing his responsive, highly elastic mouth, the beard seemed as fake as the beards donned by participants in historical pageants, the sort who reenact the Swedish siege of Rothenburg, when after everything has ended they sit down in the pub, in full costume but with none of the fun and foolishness of carnival, still ostentatiously seeking respect for the greatness of the past which they embody — while wolfing down sausage and swilling beer.
Perhaps Professor Feuer knew of his resemblance to Strindberg and deliberately cultivated it, because if I remember right, the impression was undeniable. It could be seen in his conspicuously small, nervous hands as well as in his unusually handsome forehead and his soft, defiant mouth, but above all in his eyes, their fundamental tragic crazy-headedness, which had also given the brilliant Son of a Servant his torn, youthful expression. We of course had never even heard of Strindberg, and had certainly no inkling of his importance, so we were unable to transfer the respect for the original onto his Czernopolite doppelgänger — in fact, later just the opposite would happen — and so Professor Feuer’s exaggerated soulfulness struck us as hilarious — I can no longer remember whether on its own or if we were influenced by some ironic remark, a sardonic smile, or simply a general repudiation on the part of the grown-ups, presumably never voiced, something children always keenly sense. Because for a very strange reason, namely his strident anti-Semitism, the mere mention of his name at home evinced a silent but clearly palpable disapproval. This must seem odd, to say the least, considering the continued digs against the hapless Miss Rappaport, which were hardly evidence of an unbiased attitude toward the Jews. But in families with a strong sense of identity you frequently find the strange tendency to appropriate the most common and widespread maxims on decency, honor, virtue, or taste, as well as all manner of questionable attitudes temporarily in vogue, and consider them a kind of familial prerogative — with the result that any attempted influence by so-called outsiders is rejected as presumptuous and unseemly. Such an attitude is widely but mistakenly designated as conservative. While the family members usually reacted to supposed infringements of this sort with no more than raised eyebrows and a tense, oppressive silence, the servants reacted with considerably less restraint, as they considered it their privilege to keep guard over everything in the house. And in the same way that our cook, for example, felt excited that our much wealthier neighbors served game the exact same way we did, so our coachman gave us a stern lecture about how inappropriate it was for someone of Feuer’s social position to broadcast his political views.