Oh, God! How they have crushed you! He didn't even want to weigh and balance any more, to consider in historical perspective, though apt parallels had brought him considerable advantage while the cases of Amanda Woyke and Sophie Rotzoll (and I in relation to them) were under discussion. Never again did the Flounder introduce an interminable speech with the little words "In short."' Never again did he display his wide reading. Nevermore did the Church Fathers or the heretics speak from his lips. He had understood that in prosecuting him, the Womenal was also prosecuting Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. Hadn't all the intellectual giants, from Erasmus to Marxengels and even — while the case of Lena Stubbe was under discussion — good old Bebel, been accused? Weren't three thousand years of history being condemned with him? Might not the Flounder, in his concluding statement, have let his voice ring out once more, have sung the swan song of his epoch, drawn up a deep-thundering balance sheet, writing off the male cause and with it civilization as a failure, yet at the same time illustrating its tragic grandeur, populating it with rhetorical figures, showing it ascending the grandiose staircase of cultural progress, and celebrating its demise, if not with a hymn then at least with a richly orchestrated symphonic poem, whose basses spoke of enduring achievement (the Strassburg Cathedral, the diesel engine), its high notes of guilty entanglements (the moon rocket, the splitting of the atom), and its middle register of the man in the street and his troubles (a family to support, tax bills)?
But he pulled no stops. Though his final statement was termed interesting and left what is known as a lasting impression, this was no longer the old Flounder I knew so well, but a new Flounder, a stranger. He, the jester, the concocter
of droll anecdotes which had brought smiles even to the refrigerated faces of the ladies here assembled, he, who had found everything, even the death of poor Sibylle Miehlau, laughable, had become dead serious, though I'm sure he was snickering somewhere in the fishy depths of his existence.
Be that as it may, the Flounder tilled word fields in which only morality gave promise of harvest and bread. He, the talker, the master of digression, he, the slyboots versed in every dodge, laid himself bare, as if he had been vulnerable. When the prosecution attacked him for the last time, he didn't even take refuge in his sand bed. Though as transparent as glass, he nevertheless exposed himself; every word struck home. Fragile, he hovered in his tank. No longer palpable and yet (as photographs have shown) all there. Wholly at the mercy of the Womenal, the many Ilsebills.
They had dressed up for the occasion. Exotic silver jewelry dangled; feathers and flowers were stuck in their hair. Ruth Simoneit sat wrapped in a shawl. Ulla's hair pinned high to display gold earrings. Even Erika Nottke wore jewelry, a pearl necklace. Jangling bracelets lent emphasis to each of the prosecutor's statements. Sieglinde Hunt-scha called the Flounder "Spirit of violence. Father of war. Instigator of all wars." She cried out, "We know you. You are the destructive, life-negating, murderous, male, warlike principle!"
To which the Flounder replied: "Yes. That's how it is. That's how it has been up to now. I declared war to be father of all things. On orders from me, positions, from Thermopylae to Stalingrad, were held to the last man. Relentlessly I said: Hold out. Time and time again I commanded death for one thing or another — the greatness of the nation, the purity of some idea, the glory of God, undying fame, an abstract principle such as the fatherland — my invention, incidentally — and exalted death as the essence of life. The balance sheet is known. In killing and in counting the dead, men have been thorough. Almost everywhere in Europe, as vacationing motorists can see by their road maps, far-flung military cemeteries, most of them charmingly situated, have become part of the landscape. Mass-produced crosses bear witness to the First and Second World Wars; in village churches one can
read, incised on slabs of marble, the names of men who fell in one or the other war. What were they fighting for? Even I, the prime mover, am not sure. Of course I hoped that after the wars — what? That men would come to their senses? Transvalue all their values?
"The peace that broke out in 1945 has admitted only of limited conflicts; this much, thanks to the balance of nuclear terror, the Great Powers could promise one another. But these limited conflicts also brought millions of deaths, even though — since the advent of global politics — the counting has no longer been done with the old European precision. I am referring to the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, the decimation of a people in the so-called Biafra conflict, the war of annihilation against the Kurds, all the wars in the Near East down to the most recent Yom Kippur War, the wars between India and Pakistan, and, a relatively minor example, the never-ending war-in-peace situation in Northern Ireland. And last but not least: in December 1970, the Polish People's Police fired on the striking shipyard workers. Deaths I Deaths! In two, four, six digits.
"Who is responsible? Who drives people to destroy one another? Can one speak of human reason when an appreciable percentage of the product of workers' toil is invested in a more and more highly perfected technology of destruction? What secularized Devil furbishes your portraits of the enemy so bright that in the midst of declared peace the nations, groaning under the burden of their armaments, confront one another eye to eye, deluded, dead sure? Can it still be Beelzebub? Or the so-called death wish? Or is it I, the Flounder out of the fairy tale? The warlike and therefore masculine principle?
"As the Womenal has rightly recognized and aptly stated, all this, this living toward death while parroting peaceful intentions, is pursued with resolute seriousness, with pragmatic know-how and moral pretensions, by men and men alone. With the blessings of the priests of this and that religion, all this has been planned and efficiently executed — in spite of a breakdown now and then — budgeted and endowed with meaning by men and men alone. I know whereof I speak. Peace and war have been my doing. My program was as follows: Men will make history. Men will resolve conflicts.
Men will stand and fall — to the last man. Men will fear the day of wrath — and dream of it. Men will be trained to the hilt for premature death. Men will be buddies with death. And the rifle, to cite an old saw, will be 'the soldier's bride.'
"And this is how it will be as long as I keep at it, squandering my advice. As long as historiography sets dates. Grandiose in their exaltation, men, heroes out of stupidity, masking their fear of death with contempt, will continue to press forward — forward over graves. Permit me to remind you of Lena Stubbe's husbands: they got theirs at Mars-la-Tour and Tannenberg. Two run-of-the-mill heroes.
"But wars aren't the whole story. Every revolutionary process known to us has served up orgiastic rites of death, massacres drawing their justification from some masculine purity-principle or other. The guillotine was celebrated as humanistic progress; the Stalinist show trials met with the blessing of the knowing and the unknowing; in the Nazi concentration camps re-education for death ceased to be anything more than a bureaucratic, administrative measure — in every case it was men, males, who with cold passion sprung from faith, with devotion to a just cause, with eyes fixed on the ultimate goal, with the chilling single-mindedness of archangels, have antedated the deaths of fellow humans-pious, self-assured males, far from their wives and families, but in love with the instruments of death, as though killing were the continuation of sexuality by other means. You have only to look in at the dances of marksmens' associations, watch young ruffians punishing one another, go to a soccer game, or mingle with the crowd when Ascension-Father's Day is loudly celebrated here in Berlin: that damned-up aggression looking for an outlet. That fierce, destructive lust.