† “pains” Gibbon validates this account of the old man’s experiments with soldiers, as well as his self-diagnosis, by remarking that “such pains are a thing which almost anyone who has known a soldier, sailor, or ordinary citizen who has lost a limb to war, mishap, or disease can confirm, and in which many scholars who were also medical professionals or simply possessed medically inclined minds took an interest. [René] Descartes [1596–1650] himself took welcome time away from his syllogistic aphorisms to investigate the subject, although praise for its initial identification rightly belongs to an earlier Frenchman, the surgeon and anatomist Ambroise Paré [1510–1590], royal physician to no less than four French kings, who described patients who had undergone amputation feeling continued pain, not at the sight of the severing, but in the missing limb itself. He noted, as well (further agreeing with our as-yet anonymous friend in the Manuscript), that this pain could be heightened with the onset of certain atmospheric conditions — what we have come to know as rapid changes in barometric pressure — as well as by the aggravation of the general state of agitation in which the patient lived: the root of this last assertion being that drugs which had sedative but no analgesic effects proved to be of use in reducing the distress. Many other, lesser lights have studied the phenomenon, but we are no closer to understanding it than was the former court physician of Broken.” Today, the psychogenic distress experienced by amputees — which was given its popular name of “phantom pain” by the American physician and surgeon Silas W. Mitchell, who, working in the 1860s, was provided with no end of subjects for study by the American Civil War — is better understood; but the entire subspecialty of neurology that deals with such problems as severed nerves, neural entrapment in scar tissue, etc., remains one of the most challenging fields in medicine, as the persistent distress caused by the cutting of nerves (which can be a result of surgical malpractice or even surgical routine, as much as or more than by amputation or accident) endures as a principal cause of chronic pain syndromes. —C.C.
‡ “… than logic might lead one to suspect.” Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors have discovered that gentle massaging of the parts of the body affected by an amputation does indeed afford many patients some mitigation of pain; and, as we will see, the particular way in which the old man’s companion “massaged” the stumps of his legs was quite unique, and generally successful. —C.C.
† Stasi A shortened version of Anastasiya. The full and pointed meaning of that longer name is explained in the text, as well as in the following note; but there is an additional and fascinating coincidence (or is it mere coincidence?) concerning this particular nickname in connection with the modern uses of the mountain Brocken that causes one to wonder if the narrator did indeed possess genuine gifts of foresight and prophecy:
As has already been noted several times, Brocken was, prior to the twentieth century, popularly considered the most sinister mountain in Germany and perhaps all Europe, the meeting ground not only for human witches and warlocks, but for the supernatural demons and other unholy creatures with whom those humans cavorted, as well. It is perhaps fitting, then, that after the assumption of national power by Adolf Hitler in 1933, the mountain found particular use to the propaganda machine of his Nazi party — as the site of the world’s first long-range television broadcasting tower. It was Brocken’s tower that broadcast the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to a very large (by the standards of that day) area of northern Germany: the first time the Olympics had appeared on television anywhere. A weather station and hotel had also been constructed; but Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, preferred radio to television, as a tool for indoctrinating the German people (and when one considers the physical peculiarities, not only of Goebbels, but of nearly all the Nazi leaders, one can understand why); all activity on Brocken, along with broadcasting from the television tower, was therefore suspended during World War II. The mountain was bombed by the Western allies at the very end of the European war (April 1945). Although the hotel and the weather station were destroyed, the television tower miraculously survived; and when American troops occupied the mountain, they rebuilt the weather station and used the television tower for their own propaganda purposes. But when Brocken fell into the Soviet zone of occupation in 1947, the Americans disabled both the tower and the station before relinquishing control of the mountain.
During the early decades of the Cold War, Brocken comprised a “security zone” for the Communist government of East Germany: it was the site of an enormously ambitious fortification project, one that recalled the achievements of the “Mad King” Oxmontrot some thirteen hundred years earlier. Recognizing both Brocken’s continued suitability as a site for a television tower and, even more importantly, the mountain’s larger strategic significance (in the wrong hands, Brocken could have proved a strong threat to the advance of East German and Soviet troops into West Germany along the route that eventually leads through the Fulda Gap to the southwest, popularly considered the primary path of entry for such an invasion by Western military leaders), the East Germans and their Soviet “protectors” in 1961 declared Brocken a top secret security zone. Large numbers of troops began using the area just as the army of Broken had once done, as a location in which to train for what seemed an inevitable war. The summit of the mountain was once again turned into a fortress, this time for the use of the East German and Soviet militaries; and construction soon mushroomed into one of the most ambitious Cold War building projects ever undertaken:
The military installation was enclosed by a massive concrete wall, built of 2,318 sections, each of which weighed two and a half tons, and the whole of which was of a scale almost equal to the natural stone walls of Broken. Within the new walls, the mountaintop became the site of a major Communist listening post, from which were monitored any and all broadcasts in West Germany, private and public, military and civilian — an operation that was controlled by the Soviet KGB and the East German Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (the “Ministry for State Security”), or secret police, whose popular name was the Stasi.
German reunification occurred before the long-expected invasion of Western Europe through the Fulda Gap by the forces of Eastern communism, and the massive concrete walls atop Brocken were dismantled along with the more famous wall in Berlin; the television tower now broadcasts one of the television stations run by the democratic government of the unified Germany. Tourism has come to the mountain, its former secret status having made it a haven for rare species of flora and fauna, and it was included in the Harz National Park in 1990; but memories of the Stasi remain burned into the memory of the people of East Germany — hardly what the old man had in mind when he named his savior and companion. —C.C.