WHEN PARZIVAL KILLED THE RED KNIGHT
’Twas in olden times when eagles screamed…
When Parzival killed the Red Knight simply because he longed to wear his armor, the King felt sad and the court damsels wept; all the same, one couldn’t blame Parzival any more than one can the kitten who proudly slays his first robin redbreast. Action is what it is: scarlet feathers, red blood, grey guts and a stench. Cruel? Yes. Useless? Not at all. That’s how they learn.
When a certain sleepwalker liquidated the Brownshirts, don’t think he didn’t have his reasons! All the same, his heartbeats rushed away like machine-gun bullets, thanks to the novelty. He was just beginning; he was still kittenish.
The telephone rang.
We have Röhm in custody, it said.
Tell me.
Yes, my Führer. We caught him in bed. With a man. They kissed each other goodbye.
The kitten didn’t need to think; Parzival saw the red armor and knew in his bones what would make him happy, but the sleepwalker hesitated. Röhm had been his friend. Röhm had helped him—
Well, no damsels were going to weep this time. He mounted the red horse; he slammed on his new armor, which was so red that it made one’s eyes red just to see it.
He derived himself as perfectly from legend as Parzival ever did. To prove it, let’s open his storybook.
If we page through volume five of Meyers Lexikon we come in time to Hakenkreuz, illustrated with an ancient white pictograph in Sweden, a bronze shield (Nabel) with four curly arms each ending in a three-knobbed pommel; then a chandelier (Gewandspange) in swastika form, each arm spiraling inward to its candle-socket; then an old pot from Hannover with swastikas marching around its sides; a skeletonized bronze disk from Baden, with a swastika in the center, followed by a longish entry which ends with this quotation from Mein Kampf: And simultaneous with him stands the victory of the reified Idea, which has ever been, and ever shall be, anti-Semitic.
Now for the full page galleries of black-and-white plates: ADOLF HITLER I and ADOLF HITLER II:—look! His father, his mother, his birthplace! Here he is with his comrades in the World War (there will never be another war); it’s a snapshot of soldiers in their uniforms and caps, all sprawled carelessly in front of trees; in the center of the front row, one man has his hands in his pockets, but he’s too relaxed; after all, romantic heroes must begin in star-crossed obscurity. So maybe Parzival’s the one on the far left, he seems lonelier, as befits that night-born man, foredoomed to sink a hoard of German fighters deep down below the sun; he already wears the moustache. On the next page, in ADOLF HITLER II, we see him going over city plans with Albert Speer; Berlin’s roads will now crack apart the whites and greens of our mapped German landscape! ADOLF HITLER II also depicts him receiving flowers from German girls in traditional dress; in ADOLF HITLER II he’s embracing a fellow Old Fighter, his head low and sideways against the man’s chest as he grips his shoulders.
Do you want to know how modest he is? Although he’s already killed the Red Knight and his whole race screams for encores, although he’s Führer und Reichskanzler, although he’s Gründer und Führer der nat.-soz. Bewegung, he insists that the curtain fall after ADOLF HITLER I and ADOLF HITLER II. In comparison, GARTEN I doesn’t end with GARTEN II (a victory garden, so I recall); oh, no, GARTEN III joins the attack, which successfully terminates with GARTEN IV. And that’s nothing! GERMANEN I reaches all the way through GERMANEN VIII—a stretch nearly as vast as Operation Barbarossa itself!
In volume eight, in the National Socialism entry, there he is again, full page and in color, glaring.
When Parzival killed the Red Knight, it happened to be 1934, a good year for Käthe Kollwitz’s “Death” series. I especially admire Leaf 1, Frau vertraut sich dem Tod an: A woman who resembles the artist is holding her child in against her skirts, stretching out her hand to entreat bony Death. But Death follows orders.
In Leaf 4, Tod packt eine Frau, one of her most powerful compositions, the skeleton seems to be embracing a woman from behind, biting her in the back of the neck while she turns toward him screaming and the little child reaches up, trying to fight him off. Nor should we forget Tod hält Mädchen im Schoss (catalogue number 153): The child’s lip draws back as if in a sob as she sits in the lap of maternal Death whose face is black like a veiled Muslim woman’s; her face lies against Death’s dark head. Oh, and Tod greift in Kinderschar, ha, ha! The bony angel with black wings like a paratrooper and wasted flesh around its skeleton comes swooping down to grab wide-eyed, uncomprehending children, just as Skorzeny will seize Mussolini in 1943. By then, we’ll all have become characters in Parzival’s fairytale.14 We could have won the World War! Don’t you remember how our three-oh-fives blasted right through the French battery at Verdun? Unfortunately, the Jews got to us. That won’t happen again. On every canted, bird-inscribed Iron Cross we wear, the white bird will clutch the white bones of a swastika. We’ll become as hard and fundamental as skeletons. And Parzival’s most fundamental of all; his skeleton’s invulnerable, ceaselessly growing; his heart-pistons pound behind a bridge’s steel ribs.
But this is still 1934, when a woman embraces Death and gazes on his dark face as lovers do, drawing his head close to hers. The title: Tod wird als Freund erkannt, death perceived as a friend.
When Parzival killed the Red Knight, he did it for white-armed Lina and for Freya and Elena, not to mention white-armed Lisca Malbran.
In olden times, wars were waged by heroes who admired one another but found themselves forced by fate or blood revenge to do each other harm. In our time, we fought for hateful ogres against other ogres equally hateful. From a practical point of view, can’t it be argued that nothing has changed?
Parzival killed the Red Knight for us. In our name, bloodstained tank treads will soon grind down the corn. Tod wird als Freund erkannt.
Don’t shun the shock! Grind out more gold for him! He knows how to make it red.
What else was happening when Parzival killed the Red Knight? On the far side of Myrkvith Forest, where ogresses ride wolves and use snakes for reins, past Sun Fell and Snow Fell, in Sowjet-Russland, another Red Knight (I mean Kirov) fell to Russia’s Parzival, who attended the funeral, called for vengeance, and launched his Great Terror.
14
Even Käthe Kollwitz herself copied out in her daybook Nietzsche’s letter to his sister rhapsodizing over Wagner’s “Parsifal.”