16 Possessing Power
To possess a relic was to possess power. As Peter Brown shows, at its origins the cult of relics was carefully controlled precisely so as to maintain the aura of the relic and to lead the pilgrim to recognise that distance was an essential component praesentia. In this way the pilgrim would be led to place the relic within the context of a narrative at whose centre stood the death of the first martyr, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who had died that mankind might be saved. By the time of the Reformation, as we can see from the many satires on relics and indulgences, on greedy clerics and gullible consumers, that sense of aura had all but vanished. A fragment of the true cross or a piece of saint's clothing could be thought as likely to protect you from death or disease as the magic girdle which Gawain so gratefully accepted. Yet the need to displace yourself and go to seek such relics still, to some extent, preserved the sense praesentia, and the evidence at the shrines of the wonders and cures associated with the relics still conveyed powerfully the sense that, even if no one else did, God still cared for the poor, the excluded and the sick. A couple of centuries on and we see, in Tradescant's collection, and in the German visitor's response to it, that ‘a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ’ has become simply an object of natural curiosity, like a flying squirrel or the hand of a mermaid. What seems to happen in what French historians have called ‘the history of everyday life’ is that when certain social practices and assumptions are discarded as false and fantastic the needs they fulfilled remain and, with nothing now to acculturate them, become a source of pain and anxiety and the generators of dangerous dreams and desires.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the repulsive trade in Nazi memorabilia which has gone on unabated since the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Third Reich. Robert Harris, who dug deep into dais cesspit when researching for his book on the bizarre episode of the forged Hitler diaries, has come up with some startling figures (at least they startled me). ‘It has been estimated’, he writes, ‘that there are 50,000 collectors of Nazi memorabilia throughout the world, of whom most are Americans, involved in a business which is said to have an annual turnover of $50 million.’ In the United States a monthly newsletter, Der Gauleiter, keeps up to five thousand collectors and dealers informed of the latest trade shows and auctions. In Los Angeles one collector amuses himself in private by wearing Ribbentrop's overcoat. In Kansas City another serves drinks from Hitler's punch-bowl. In Chicago a family doctor has installed a concrete vault beneath his house, where he keeps a collection of Nazi weapons. In Arizona a used car salesman drives his family around in the Mercedes which Hitler gave to Eva Braun. In England, at his ancestral home, Longleat, the Marquess of Bath has gathered the largest collection of paintings by Hitler, worth, according to one estimate, ten million dollars. In the room with the paintings were to be seen as well ‘a life-size wax model of Hitler wearing a black leather overcoat and a swastika armband …, Himmler's spectacles …, the Commandant of Belsen's tablecloth’.
In the course of his book Harris introduces us to a number of dealers and their collections. Konrad Kujau's ‘included an almost complete set of Third Reich decorations, 150 helmets, 50 uniforms, 30 flags, and, according to Kujau, the largest collection of military jugs in West Germany’. In Goering's yacht, which he had bought, the journalist Gerd Heidemann set out Goering's dinner service, tea-cups, drinking goblets and ashtray. In the cupboard was Goering's uniform; the cushion covers were made from Goering's bathrobe. With the money paid to him for the Hitler diaries by Stern magazine Heidemann bought three hundred paintings, sketches and water-colours by Hitler, as well as Nazi party uniforms, banners, flags and postcards, as well as the actual revolver Hitler used to shoot himself. Most of these, it turned out, were fakes, sold to him by Kujau, the forger of the Hitler diaries. But of course, as with Minoan and Egyptian antiquities earlier in the century, where there is a ready market fakes will abound.
Before he shot himself Hitler tried to ensure that his personal papers would all be destroyed. But already those around him had started collecting. When, on 24 August 1945, American agents raided a house in Schladming, Austria, they found Eva Braun's private photograph album, the notes she had made of her letters to Hitler, and a Hitler uniform. In October they carried out another raid and found twenty-eight reels of colour film, Eva Braun's home movies of her life with Hitler.
As one can see from all this, it is difficult to tell where devotion to Hitler and sheer greed begin and end. As with many late medieval relics, there is a grey area here, and probably a few of the dealers and collectors could themselves say truthfully whether they were in it for the money or for the sense that they were handling what was, after all, a part of history. There is also the sense, exploited in a specific genre of post-war art, film in particular, of the thrill of transgression, of that stagey fetishism which Proust analysed so lucidly and which has rightly been described as camp or kitsch, though unfortunately of a rather more public and dangerous kind than that which the young Marcel so surprisingly came upon that day in Monjouvain.
Konrad Kujau managed to carry on his lucrative trade in forged Nazi memorabilia for many years, until the grandiose scheme of the Hitler diaries caused him to overreach himself and he was finally caught. Harris concludes his book with a question: ‘Why should anyone pay $3500 for a few strands of human hair of dubious authenticity?’ And he answers:
Because, presumably, he might have touched them, as he might have touched the odd scrap of paper, or painting, or piece of uniform — talismans which have been handed down and sold and hoarded, to be brought out and touched occasionally, as if the essence of the man somehow lived on in them. The Hitler diaries, shabby forgeries … were no different. ‘It was a very special thing to hold such a thing in your hand’, said Manfred Fisher, trying to explain the fascination which he and his colleagues felt when the first volume arrived. ‘To think that this diary was written by him — and now I have it in my grasp …’
But this, after all, Harris adds, was ‘a phenomenon which Chaucer's Pardoner, six centuries ago, with his pillow cases and pig's bones, would have recognised at once’.
I think though that we should be wary of making too direct and immediate an identification of Nazi relics with those of the late Middle Ages (just as we should of calling the exhibits in a modern museum ‘secular relics’, as some historians of museums have done). In Chaucer's tale we are still in a world which, for all the abuses it could see in the Church and its ways, still believed that Christianity was somehow coterminous with the universe. The Pardoner is a tragic figure as Kujau is not, partly because what he has to offer is after all a promise of healing and redemption, and partly because his insistence on the fact that his only creed is cupidity is always shadowed by his refrain: radix malorum est cupiditas — the root of all evil is cupidity. In other words, he knows that he himself is damned, as Kujau never does.
The power of the relics Kujau handles depends partly on the horror associated with them and partly on the sense that by handling them one is taking part in a giant play, a play which for a while threatened to overwhelm reality, a play in which the very impulse towards annihilation of others and oneself was for a while given free rein, but which has long since been shown up for the hollow sham it always was. Or — and this is the ultimate source of the frisson which handling such things no doubt conveys — was it?