Renate put down her cup and turned to her man:
“You’re pretty original. Operational Scout, it sounds appealing…! Maybe you should become a philosopher. Create a new doctrine: Scouting for Fire-Eaters…!”
Arno smiled. And the more he thought about it, this might really be the time to summarise his creed. He had often thought of it before of course, but he had lacked that extra inspiration, that catalyst to write down his thoughts.
Arno had already coined the concept “Operational Scout”. This was the symbol figure of his creed, this he knew, this he was sure about; this was the starting point. He had thought about being an “Operational Scout” earlier on, in Tarnopol, in Berlin and in Aspeboda. Now was the time to formalise the creed. As for writing Arno wasn’t a man of the written word, however, writing reports as a scout in Bauer’s firm had taught him some typing and writing skills, making Arno “a writer in spite of himself”. And so, somewhat later, one weekend in the autumn of 1966, he got going with writing the Operational Scout Document.
He quickly summarised it into key points, like “Memento Mori,” “Assuming Responsibility,” “Living on the Edge” and the like. As for “Memento Mori” this was his old creed of getting used to the idea of death. He used to talk about it in terms of “The Valley of the Shadow of Death”. Now he had learned the Latin phrase, Memento Mori, “remember that you’re mortal,” and in his 1966 memo he formulated this as, “You’ve to get used to the idea of death, of yourself being mortal. This might upset you at first but in the long run it gives you inner calm.”
In his memo he elaborated on this, and he quoted other thinkers who stressed the need to realise the reality of death, like Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil. But more than being a scholarly theory focusing on Great Quotes, this was essentially Arno’s personal creed, the one he had lived in the combat zone and beyond. Memento Mori had taken him through the storm of steel. Acquainting himself with the idea of death, not being afraid of dying, had saved him a lot of anguish.
Next in his memo Arno deliberated on the idea of “Assuming Responsibility”. Taking responsibility for your actions, for yourself as a man in the flurry of existence, was imperative. You couldn’t blame everything on the System, Society, the Man and whatever. We are here for a reason. Here Arno quoted some lines of the Italian thinker Julius Evola, arguing against the venerable Heidegger. Heidegger in some respects lacked some insight, saying that we as humans are “thrown out in the world,” German, geworfen. But in a certain study Evola had rejected this and said that we are not geworfen, instead, we are who we are because of karma. Arno acknowledged this Oriental concept of karma, and the reincarnation idea that went with it, the idea of human existence as a necessary learning time, but he didn’t deliberate on it in the memo. He just said: take responsibility for your life.
Responsibility! This is the life for a man. Soldiering. Back in the day the German Army that Arno knew had talked about “the joy of responsibility,” Verantwortungsfreude, and Arno acknowledged this to the full, then and now. As a soldier in the combat zone you had to do what had to be done, above and beyond the mere duties of your position at hand. The whole German Army was educated in this spirit, both before, during and after World War II, and now Arno incorporated this in his creed, taking it to a higher, spiritual level.
Arno wrote these things, and more besides, in his paper on “Operational Scouting”. By the time he had finished he had a 30-page document, single-spaced. The general character was rather peculiar. There was some “grey-area, No Man’s Land” character to his philosophy: there is no right or wrong, good and bad, there is just the Action. Indeed, Arno thought, this is some fine nihilism, active nihilism, somewhat approaching atheism. Arno still believed in God, as a supreme Primeval Light of which his personal, eternal soul was a spark, but other than that he was not a godly, pious man in the ordinary sense. And his Operational Scouting memo mirrored this.
In the memo Arno wrote things like, “Nihilism isn’t altogether bad, nihilism of the active kind can be fruitful; rather be a critical, active nihilist than a listless, customary cliché.” And, “Willpower is a spiritual thing. For instance, you never start meditating by chance. It’s an act of will.” And, “I don’t live on the edge, I am the edge.” And this led to the central piece of his creed, the saying that had kept him going through the war, maybe even more than the varieties of Memento Mori, and this was: I Am.
Thus Arno wrote on the final page of his memo: “The ‘I Am’- saying is the fusion between morality and ontology, the formula on which everything in this world is based, regarded from the view of a sentient human being. “I Am”: everyone can say it. And an Operational Scout is the very embodiment of the I Am-motto.”
These were some aspects of the Operational Scouting creed. And when the weekend was over, Arno had Renate read what he had written in the memo. And having read it all, she said:
“Good job, Liebchen. And it’s quite easy to understand. But how would you sum it all up? What’s the kernel of your wisdom?”
“I Am,” Arno said. “The thing I mentioned at the end.”
“Ahh, yes, I Am. How curious. So easy and so enigmatic at the same time. I guess that I can say it too: I AM.”
“Exactly,” Arno said. “I am, you are. We all can say I AM. We’re all part of existence.”
“I am,” Renate said.
“And I am you.”
“And you are me.”
39
Tanz
In November 1966 Arno had a job in Berlin. He was following up leads on a gang stealing cars. The details of this reconnaissance are of no interest here. In any case Arno had to go there, to the former national capital. He took Renate along, she wanted to get out and get moving, she said.
They rented a new Ford 17M from Renate’s company, dark green = Dunkelgrün. They took the Autobahn north. Since West Berlin was an enclave in East Germany, to get there from Lower Saxony they had to take a special motorway east to the divided city. This was, indeed, done. The controls at the border were quite strict but the pair were allowed through without incident. Arno said they were going for a holiday. This white lie made the passage easier. Once arrived in Berlin they took residence in a hotel in Kreuzberg, Le Nouveau Monde. The next day they headed out and looked around, pursuing leads in the criminal case. The next day took them into East Berlin. They got entry visas there and could then continue scouting. They left the car in West Berlin and went by public transport. The trail led to a particular hostel at Tierpark, Jugend Tourist Hotel am Tierpark. It was an uninviting 15-storey concrete building. Arno led the way from the foyer in the separate two-storey bunker, along a path in the open over to the tower block in question. They went into the entrance hall, a bare, frugal affair with white walls and grey-and-brown flooring. The lift took them seven floors up. Arno headed for the room where he was due to meet his contact, a certain Uli Lehmann.
But having got to the room they found that Lehmann wasn’t there. It was empty. Arno went to the window and looked out over the greenery.
It was green. It was a park: Tierpark. It seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. This was in East Berlin at that particular Zoo, not to be confounded with the Tiergarten in West Berlin. Somewhere down in this greenery was the eastern Berlin Zoo.