The History of History Read online

  Oh, she had felt things, and smelled things, and lived things—all things that had a different feel, a different smell, a different organization, than this cold and forsaken life she was leading here.

  The morning sun was burning brightly in the room. Margaret was still sitting on the bed, motionless. In the moments she had been there, her mind had wound around, considering every angle. And now—

  She had made a decision. She would fold.

  She did not want to find out anything at all. Job was an innocent—an innocent trapped between God and the devil. But she, Margaret—she did not know how or why, but she was guilty.

  She must fold. The stakes were too high. Uncertainty was preferable to certainty, and although the peace she would win would be a shallow one, she need not play the dangerous game.

  Yes, she would fold her hand. Let the others go on playing without her. Now she wanted to be still.

  Because whether or not she found evidence, it did not matter. She could smell it on herself and on the wind, in how her heart raced every day, how her mind craved an escape: she was guilty. The wind came in the open window. The smell of it was nothing but threat.

  TEN • The Concubine’s Mind

  How to describe what happened next? The historical ones—Magda, but not only Magda—were rising around Margaret like ocean waters filling in cavities. They flowed according to the justifications already written in the land, deep where deep, curved where curved. Margaret’s self-examination was finished now, and the era of the dead Nazis had begun.

  Yes, when Margaret awoke the next morning, she went to the window, and the hawk-woman was standing at attention on the balcony across the way, even larger now, hulking and frivolous. The lady pulled a compact out of her kit and made up her face under its heavy, brilliantine waves, her attention directed languidly at Margaret’s three windows, and the sight burned Margaret’s eyes and could not be fled.

  Margaret was looking at the hawk-woman through a single rotated slat of the venetian blind. She kept the blinds closed all day and checked after the monster only surreptitiously. The woman perched with a live mouse in her beak sometimes, and in those cases her face was all bird, her head cocking jerkily around, and around, and around, until she seemed to be looking at Margaret from behind. Sometimes she winked at Margaret conspiratorially.

  And then, as the days went by, Margaret did not always close the blinds. As she fell asleep, she began to be not frightened but preoccupied—with the question of whether she would find the hawk-woman at her perch on the following morning. She began to develop methods of prediction, ideas halfway between superstition and science: when it rained and the street was empty, the bird was likely to be in attendance (but not always). When it was sunny and the street was full of traffic, the bird was likely missing (but not always).

  And then Margaret found herself not afraid—not at all. Instead, when the hawk-woman was not there, she longed for her. She came home in the afternoon and if she did not find the enormous bird preening her feathers on the terra-cotta balcony cattycorner right away, she ran back to the window again and again, to see if the bird had finally come.

  She did not like it. She did not like that she was broken in. She said to herself that only a corrupt person could become a friend to a vision at the window of the deceased Magda Goebbels.

  Yes. This was patently so.

  But for the life of her, she could not arrest her fascination.

  And so, seeking to justify herself, she began to study the life of the woman with great seriousness. She was looking to find something. Margaret wanted to find an element in Magda Goebbels’s biography that would make the hawk-woman’s presence outside the window proud and fine, not shameful, not wrong.

  And who knows why, but it did not take her very long. Only a few days into her focused studies, Margaret made a crucial discovery regarding Magda Goebbels.

  Margaret read what the woman allegedly said to a friend a few months before she killed her children.

  For me there are only two possibilities: if we win the war, then Joseph will be so high and mighty that I, an aging, used-up woman, will be finished. And if we lose the war, then my life will be at an end anyway.

  Margaret jerked her head up from the book.

  The Magda Goebbels of this quote was not the woman who so bombastically wrote to her son in North Africa. This was someone else. This was someone in an advanced stage of self-loathing. Margaret was sitting at the desk, but the book before her seemed suddenly lashed to the room around it, a beetle caught in an invisible web. And later, Magda Goebbels wrote to the same friend:

  Don’t forget, Ello, what has gone on! Do you still recall … I told you about it hysterically back then … how the Führer in Café Anast in Munich, when he saw the little Jewish boy, said he would prefer to flatten him into the floor like a bug? Do you remember that? I couldn’t believe it, I took it as nothing but provocative talk. But much later he really did it. Unspeakably cruel things have happened, done by a system that I too have represented. So much vengefulness has been collected in the world … I can do nothing else, I have to take the children with me, I must! Only my Harald will be left behind. He is not Goebbels’s son, and luckily he is in English captivity.

  Margaret glanced sharply around the room, almost blushing, embarrassed at the enormity of it. She stood up and began to pace.

  But she was too moved to walk. She took hold of her woolen trousers lying on the floor whose hems had come undone. She backed into the Biedermeier sofa. Straw butted out of its red velvet where the cushion had ripped, but she sat down hard. She grabbed the shoebox of thread and needles from beneath it. Her mind was clacking at high speed.

  If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything.

  Magda Goebbels wrote to her son stationed in North Africa that it was because her children with Goebbels were too good for the later world that they must die. But to her friend, she said it was because they were too soiled for it.

  Margaret’s eyes narrowed onto the sewing before her. She felt something hardening in her throat.

  She threaded her needle. Perhaps in a good and just world, children are not murdered for their parents’ crimes.

  Margaret plunged the needle into the wool that was stiff, stiff as sycamore bark, where the hems had dragged in slush and dried. Perhaps in a good and just world, children do not die as payment.

  Perhaps so, Margaret thought, but it is not Nazi justice. The Nazis saw humans as carrying political guilt in their blood, with their birth, before their naming. This was the very axiom of the Nazi crime.

  Here is what Margaret knew. At Joseph Goebbels’s incitement, ninety percent of Jewish children—Jews under the age of twelve—who were alive in Europe in 1938 were dead in 1945. Ninety percent of the Jewish children of Europe were tortured to death. These tortured and murdered children will never have children, and these children will never have children. With every generation, there will be a new wave of the unborn.

  Margaret began to stitch, her throat stricken, her eyes shaking, pushing the needle in and out guttingly.

  And the world after the war—it left the children of Nazis alone. Only last week, she had read a firsthand account in Niklas Frank’s memoir. Oh, he went on and on with the following bitter cheer.

  There really were advantages to growing up in the Federal Republic [of Germany] as the son of a major Nazi war criminal. [The] help was especially beneficial when it came to hitchhiking.… From the moment somebody stopped to pick me up, my path to success was assured. All I had to say after a couple of kilometers was, “Do you happen to realize that I am the son of the Minister of the Reich without Portfolio and Governor General of Poland, executed at Nuremburg as a major war criminal?” … It wasn’t long before the driver indulged himself in glorious reminiscence (omitting all mention of his somewhat lesser crimes); for as a soldier, either on the march to the East or on the way back, he had crossed through [Poland]. Then came the inevitable m
oment I would be waiting for, the moment when his emotions would be touched, when he lamented the unjust sentence that ended [my father’s] life, and said it was so obvious that I, skinny little fellow, was now so bereft and impoverished, and when you think how the English had bombed Dresden, and that he himself had seen how two SS men had dragged a wounded American GI out of the line of fire at Monte Cassino and taken him to a German doctor, and that really the Jews were to blame for what happened to them because it was true that everything had been in the hands of the Jews, and just take a look at this marvelous autobahn we’re driving on, my friend—may I call you that? In memory of your father?—the Führer built this autobahn, and now I have to get some gas and you’re going to get a fine lunch on me. Only one person …, only one solitary postwar German automobile driver in all those years of hitchhiking (it was in 1953, near Osnabrück), turned onto the shoulder of the highway and without saying a single word, in silent disdain, let me out of the car. The memory of that still makes my ears burn. I wonder if he is still alive. Democrats usually die so young.

  The very opposite of Magda’s fears! (Margaret took out a thimble, her finger already bleeding with rage and frustration.) Nazi children lived on, under the impression that it was democrats who died young. And young Frank’s experience was paralleled in the lives of the Bormann children; in the life of the medical technician, Edda Göring, in the life of the architect whose name is Albert Speer Jr., who even now, Margaret knew, was in the process of designing a stadium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Even the daughter of Heinrich Himmler—she, too, was smuggled, effortlessly snuggled, into everyday life. The actual retribution against the Nazis’ children, the penalty that would have been meted out to Goebbels’s offspring had their mother and father not murdered them, was a pair of shamed ears once a decade or so, and this was assuming they ever developed a sense of shame, which was not a given by any means. Margaret’s stitches picked up the exterior fabric. Her eyes rattled.

  If the second version of Magda’s motivation were to be believed, then Magda was the only Nazi parent, indeed, the only tribunal in the world, to understand and confirm the Nazi crime—as a Nazi, for she was the only one to inflict upon her own family the Nazi penalty: death for the crime of evil-in-the-blood.

  And now Margaret already knew what she thought. She threw down the heavy wool. She stood up. Magda was right.

  It was right the Goebbels children died. Margaret wanted it by any means at all. She wanted it—not for the sake of vengeance, she told herself, her footsteps watery as she walked back toward the bedroom. She wanted it for the sake of equity. For the sake of the generations who will be born one day empty of all of us: who will have, from their ancestors, all genes and no memory.

  If Magda knew what the Nazi government was guilty of—it would mean everything. The monster loose on the streets of Berlin would no longer be a symbol of fanatical evil, but a symbol of fanatical shame.

  On the mattress on the floor of the bedroom, Margaret sat down. All she had to do was verify that Ello Quandt was a reliable source. It didn’t matter whether Magda’s action was out of fear or out of repentance; all that mattered was that she knew. Margaret only needed to verify that Magda killed her children thinking of the evil that ran in their bloodline, and Margaret would change the categorization of Magda’s crime for good. She would call the crime consistent. And consistency, after all, feels exactly like justice.

  The verification was going to be difficult. According to the notes in the end pages of the Anja Klabunde biography, Ello’s testimony came not from an interview with Ello Quandt herself, but from another, earlier, biography of Magda Goebbels. This earlier biography was written by a contemporary of Joseph Goebbels who worked at the Propaganda Ministry, a certain Hans-Otto Meissner. When Margaret searched the Internet, she found the Meissner biography was available in France, America, and the UK, but not in Germany.

  But she did not lose heart.

  The flea market at Ostbahnhof occurred to her. At Ostbahnhof, the blustering men with their long mustaches, the military history buffs, selling books about bunker engineering, FlaK guns, and Werner Heisenberg, would certainly have the Klabunde biography. They had everything that was difficult to find.

  Margaret went to bed hopeful. Her speculations would perhaps be confirmed. She would read the testimony of this Ello Quandt the very next day, and perhaps make of Magda Goebbels a heroine of consistency—the hawk-woman at the window a fine and permanently reennobled sort of Lucifer.

  Of course, Margaret still couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed not unhappily, however, going over the details of Magda Goebbels’s life, becoming more and more entranced by the idea of the woman as self-entrapped intellectual initiating and carrying out her own form of justice. The bedroom, as Margaret had these thoughts, was lifting; the bedroom was lifting and flying.

  In the morning she rode her bicycle a long time to reach the Eastern flea market.

  A great swoosh of upward feeling buoyed her when she was there. The flea market ran in a trough of flesh behind the looming S-Bahn station, parallel to the tracks. The station hovered over it like a giant with wide-open throat. When Margaret emerged into the light and saw the stands crackling with people, she began to buzz happily.

  A souvenir collection of ten high-gloss photographs of the town of Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland; a series of 1930s brochure books, showing large pictures of the Tyrolean alps: Du Mein Tirol, one was called; an aluminum cigarette etui from the Ukraine, emblazoned with the slogan “Slava Oktyabryu” and a rendering of the October Revolution in formalist strokes; a brown leather GDR pencil case decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys; a Berlin guidebook from 1902 with four-color map—Margaret bought all of this, in a burst of something like affection.

  Then she got down to the work of finding the Meissner biography. She went to each bookstall in turn. All the booksellers with their beards and gruff ways, heavy books encased in plastic, had indeed heard of it; no one had it for sale. Each one said he was sure another one did, but no sooner was the next man found than he referred her away again. She went down a grapevine of rebuff through the market, all the way to the end. The biography was nowhere to be found.

  Now Margaret felt a bit of fever, the kind that had come once when she couldn’t find Magda Goebbels’s letter. She felt as though everything were riding on not just the content, but the tone of this biography she was seeking, as if it would reveal some shining, heretofore unimagined subtlety to Magda’s friend Ello Quandt, or even suggest some soulful depth to Magda Goebbels’s own character.

  Beyond the lines of tables, around the corner on a cobblestone side street, the market continued unofficially. In this impromptu aisle, the wares were on card tables brought from home. It was a sad-looking market. A young man with a red face was shouting with another man farther on. “Leck mich am Arsch, du Arschloch.” His Berlin accent was heavy. The other man became sullen and silent, his gaze fixed ahead. Margaret glanced over their tables, without any particular hope.

  The table before her, for instance, was almost entirely empty. There were only two heavy books lying on it. These were sitting wide apart from each other, carefully placed. Margaret glanced at them and thought they were ornamental Bibles. The books were very thick, bound in leather with gilt pages, Gothic type on the spine. Margaret put her hand out to examine one of them.

  She had approached casually, but the young man with the red face whipped around and fixed her with fury. She regretted going near, but she was already in motion—she could not stop herself; she went ahead and opened the book and began to fumble with the tissue-thin paper as if to see the title, although after she saw the man’s face—it was funny, but she already knew: she was holding Hitler’s diatribe, Mein Kampf.

  The book was illegal in this country. She had never seen it for sale; she had in fact never seen an unabridged German edition with her own eyes anywhere at all. Two generations after the war, and the book that had once been in every house was nowhere to be found.
She did not know whether the man could be arrested for selling it, or whether she could be arrested for buying it.

  It is impossible to overstate how much it meant to Margaret in her present mood—precisely this book.

  She asked: “How much?” in a low voice. The man snapped up the other copy and packed it away. At first she thought he would not answer.

  Finally he said: “That one is two hundred euros. This one here is two hundred fifty.”

  Margaret was shocked. “That’s far too much.”

  “Don’t buy it then.” He turned his back on her.

  Margaret had Mein Kampf in an English translation at home, but the German edition looked nothing like it. What struck her was how carefully the book she held had been designed to look like a religious text. That would be Goebbels’s work. She noticed a tiny embossed gold swastika on the leather cover where a cross would usually be. Margaret had a Bible at home that felt just like this, the same weight and leather flop in the hands. The pages in both books were like onionskin, and the smell was also the same.

  She was holding the book under her nose. And right then, to her surprise, just as Goebbels had meant her to, she saw Nazism as a religion. In a flash, she felt the scope of it, bigger than ever. It was a religion because it steeped everything in Germany in meaning. Fascism had made the world’s fluttering sights and frothy sounds, buoyant wares and technicolored sensations full of weight and pith and awesome death for those who could manage to live with its cruelty. Even now: here was Margaret herself, borne up on the tide and design of it, all her landmarks came out of it, her compass was calibrated to those lodestones. How could it not excite her? Margaret’s own identity, blank as it had become—her own sense of herself as redeemable—was dependent on it as on the devil; what a role it had to play, if you would let it!