Pahl and Kroysing protested, and Father Lochner wasn’t happy either. The first two didn’t want to hear such superstitious nonsense, while Father Lochner wanted more recognition to be given to the reality of the devil.
‘Oh dear,’ said Bertin, ‘I’m in hot water now. They don’t want to acknowledge the devil’s existence, and for you, Father, he’s not real enough. What am I to do?’
‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ muttered Kroysing. ‘Let’s forget the bogeymen, eh? And we don’t need any riddles either.’
Pahl said nothing more, but made a mental note to box Comrade Bertin’s ears for coming out with such embarrassing antiquities, which would’ve made any young worker roar with laughter.
Karl Lebehde opened his mouth, which he’d thus far not done in that company. If the gas man came demanding payment for January in March and there was no money left to pay the bill, he explained, his wife would say the gas man was the devil incarnate. For there was only one gas cooker in their flat, provided by the state, and if the supply were to be cut off she wouldn’t be able to cook or eat. For his wife that would be the devil incarnate appearing. ‘If my wife were stupid,’ he said, ‘she’d have a go at the gas man, as if he could do something about it. If she weren’t so stupid, and I don’t think she is, then she’d work out where the real devil lies. For there must be one. She’d just have to ferret him out. Is he at the gasworks? No. In the city of Berlin? Again, no. At the provincial administration? Who knows. In the State of Prussia? That’s what the British think, as if their gas men were angels. Among the whites? That’s what the Indians and blacks are saying now. And so we come back to the Father’s view that he’s got the whole world firmly in his claws.’
‘Slow down,’ said Pahl. ‘I think you skipped a few stations there.’
‘No,’ broke in Father Lochner. ‘Our Landstürmer hasn’t skipped any stations at all. The harshness of life, the lack of brotherly love, our un-Christian society: the spirit of the nation expresses all that in horns, hooves and the hairy tail of a cold, jeering monster, and there’s no point getting angry about it. The wise old Egyptians wrote in pictures, and nations are like children and Egyptians and poets: they think in pictures. The only fools are those who take the pictures literally and act as if the others were stupid. And yet no one thinks that lightning is really a jagged, shining wire thrown down from on high, even if that’s what it looks like.’
‘That’s one way to redemption,’ observed Kroysing drily.
Some of the men laughed. They always enjoyed listening to the tall lieutenant. He didn’t let these boring speechifiers pull the wool over his eyes.
‘So the devil is the capitalist system.’
Father Lochner frowned. That was trivial, he said sharply. Any economic system that knew no charity could degenerate in exactly the same infernal way. They’d been discussing fundamental forces, which were the message of Easter and the objective of religion when it tried to look after people’s souls.
Suddenly Sister Kläre pushed through the circle of seated and standing men, radiantly white in her apron and starched head covering. She whispered a couple of figures to the medical officer, which she read from her chart, a long slip of paper that trembled in her hands. The doctor nodded at most of them, frowned at a couple and shook his head angrily at a few: ‘The devil is our stubborn flesh,’ he said. ‘Our accursed organic state that we’ll never fully understand. And redemption, if I may speak bluntly, is and remains death. As long as flesh lives it suffers, and our tricks for deadening pain turn out to be a swindle when the chips are down.’
And, guess what? At that, the adversaries of a moment ago suddenly united in protest. ‘Impossible!’ they almost shouted.
Death, wheezed Father Lochner fiercely, was a gigantic folly that had first been brought into the world by sin. It crushed everything under its clumsy feet. It had trampled Novalis into his grave and destroyed thousands of fresh talents and new beginnings.
Yes, agreed Kroysing, it was a point of honour with soldiers never to have a good word to say about death. In the trenches, death was the ultimate treachery and desertion. A man who died left the Fatherland and the cause in the lurch, so to speak. He couldn’t help it if war was eternal and men were imbued with an inextinguishable desire for conflict, and all warrior religions had to take that into account. Given the choice, he at any rate would prefer to roam the earth as the Wandering German, like the Wandering Jew, plunging into every conflict and joining in every victory.
Pahl’s pale eyes lit up. That was fine so long as there were an idea behind it, if it were about liberating a vast, productive section of humanity from oppression, exploitation and injustice. It was for those kinds of ideas that the fighting spirit should travel the earth, building a new platform so that future generations would have a better starting point and every Pahl, Bertin and Kroysing would be able to fulfil their talents to the benefit and redemption of humanity.’
‘There it is again,’ said Kroysing. ‘Redemption.’
But Bertin, pale and trembling, said that if anything were the devil it was the use of violence, trampling people underfoot in a murderous, silencing frenzy. Death wasn’t evil. Death had wonderful, alluring depths – to lie down as your ancestors had lain down, to understand nothing, answer nothing, ask nothing. It was the business of murder that was infernal, the thousands of ways of achieving extinction, the executioner’s axe crashing down. If everyone’s life ran out as a candle burns down, then there would be nothing to say against death. But if an individual – or a whole generation – had his life and rights ripped out from under him like a chair wrenched from him by a stronger person, then we should combat that with all available means, join the fight and ally ourselves with those who, like ourselves, were under threat.’
The man’s gone mad, thought Sister Kläre. He’s talking himself into trouble. ‘Bed rest!’ she cried. ‘Time for quiet!’
The men muttered. They wanted to hear more. The man was right. Everyone had the right to live.
‘You’ll make yourself very popular with the Prussians with those opinions,’ said Father Lochner sharply but with respect.
‘If you’re against violence, then you must be against life, young man,’ added the medical officer. ‘I’m afraid your indignation is blinding you to the facts of life. People create suffering; it’s the first thing they do. Before birth, during birth, after birth – it’s all the same. A baby makes its way into the world by force, or more correctly, is thrust into it when its time comes. There’s force, pressure, blood, screaming. That’s how a young hero appears – you, me, all of us. And if these basic facts mean anything to you, how does he reply? What does he do to greet existence?’
‘We scream?’ asked Bertin. ‘We scream furiously, rebelling against our delivery?’
No one listening knew why he was so eager to hear the answer.
The doctor had an inscrutable smile on his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, speaking slowly in the silence, ‘if you’ll be satisfied with my answer. You want me to verify the revolutionary principle, and I will in a certain way. But it’s not very appetising and it’s bound be too much for you. In order to make a newborn baby cry, we slap it. Blows are the first thing it experiences. That’s the only way to get it to take its first breath.’