OPERATION MAGIC FIRE
And it’s in that vague grey middle ground that the fundamental conflicts of our age take place. It’s a huge ant hill in which we all crawl.
The Poles say that life itself is a long smelly train of refugees which travels Europe’s slowest tracks, getting shunted aside to make room for military transports and industrial freight; there everyone sits, sweltering, stinking, fearing and grieving. The whistle shouts; time to move again! Here comes the next border, where policemen and plainclothesmen will winnow more of us away (her visa is incorrect; he’s actually an escaped Jew). The most laughable thing is that we hated life; we wanted to “get somewhere”; and now that they’re taking us somewhere by the truckload, we wish that we were still on that long train where everything stank! Well, that’s life, all right.
The story goes, and for all I know it hasn’t yet been discredited, that a quarter-hour after the best performance of Wagner’s “Siegfried” since our German recovery began, a certain sleepwalker retired to Haus Wahnfried, where the composer himself once lived, and as soon as Winifred Wagner had poured the tea and he’d kissed Verena Wagner’s wrist, those two ladies withdrew, Göring shut the door behind them, and Colonel Hagen, who’d been waiting in the corridor, led in a German businessman whose financial interests coincided with those of General Franco. This was the summer of 1936, when Franco’s cause remained desperate. Indeed, our Foreign Office most earnestly advised the sleepwalker not to involve himself, especially since the rebels needed not only bombs, but money. Herr Schacht at the Reichsbank kept warning that we couldn’t afford to rearm ourselves, let alone underwrite other people’s adventures. The sleepwalker, however, reasoned as follows: If Franco fails, then the leftist government in Spain will surely become a Communist satellite. And if that happens, France will also go Red, at which point our Reich will be menaced both from the East and from the West.—And wasn’t he correct? What brought us down in the end, but a two-front war?—In short, he agreed to help the Falangists. On the desert airstrip, our long line of propeller planes stood ready to stab the air with their needle-noses. (Incidentally, he also dismissed Herr Schacht, thereby saving him from getting hanged by the victors of 1945.)
And so our Condor Legion drew first blood; the Blitzkrieg got worked out. The aerial bombardment of Guernica turned out to be a contrapuntal masterpiece, and our new machine-guns didn’t jam, either. We did what we chose to; Mussolini’s Blue Arrow troops took up the slack. I think we can all agree that the war advanced rapidly. Three years later, there was Franco in the capital, with his trademark cigarette half burned down between his fingers. Mussolini sent him a bill, but we were more generous; we took the longer view.
The sleepwalker not only initiated this exercise, he also named it: Operation Magic Fire.
Now, in point of fact, it’s at the very end of “Die Walküre,” not in “Siegfried” at all, that the famous Magic Fire music occurs. Traditionally the four operas in the Ring Cycle get performed in an afternoon and three evenings; so when Colonel Hagen led in the businessman and Verena Wagner poured tea, it would have been only the previous night that “Die Walküre” was sung. I grant that that’s well within the bounds of a memory which was always supposed to be perfect; I’m referring to those statistics on troop dispositions and tank production, eternally ready on our Führer’s lips! If anybody on earth knew the Ring by heart, it would have been he. That’s precisely the reason I want to know why he didn’t draw on “Siegfried” when he christened the operation. After all, that opera offers plenty of dramatically appropriate music to choose from: the reforging of the sword, the slaying of the dragon, etcetera.
One of my most plausible speculations (I adore inventing those, since I can’t be held responsible for them) is that he’d already made up his mind to aid the Falangists on Valkyrie Night. After all, why would he have troubled himself to meet the businessman at all if he hadn’t already made his decision? For he was not exactly the sort of fellow whose conclusions could be altered by discusssion.
But it is also possible that the magic fire in and of itself means something in our Spanish context. Recapitulation: Brunnhilde has disobeyed Wotan by doing what he would have done himself, had he not been constrained by his own resentful promise: she saves Siegmund from death in his duel with Hunding, who’s an impure, un-German element. (Our sleepwalker could empathize with Wotan. He got quite angry whenever he had to pretend to endorse this or that non-aggression pact.) Wotan accordingly slays Siegmund for duty, Hunding for pleasure, disowns Brunnhilde, casts her into a supernatural sleep, and finally rings her round with flames which only a hero (Siegmund’s son Siegfried, as it will transpire) would dare to cross.
The scene is touching. Wotan, doomed and perjured ever since the very first opera, “Das Rheingold,” knows all too well that Brunnhilde is right. This correctness of hers springs from instinct; as such, it’s as impossible to “disprove” as Aryan superiority. Brunnhilde is Wotan, more than Wotan is himself. This is why he loves her so much.
He rumbles out a lullaby whose last words are: For so goes the god from you; so he kisses your godhead away. His voice cherishes and broods. Then it trails off. After a moment of silence, the music becomes tense, imperious. Wotan is now invoking Loki, the amoral fire-spirit. (I seem to see the Condor Legion in a triple line at the edge of their airstrip as a uniformed figure gazes down at them from a hill of flowers and desert shrubs, with their biplanes waiting.) He strikes his staff upon the ground. Instantly the fire springs up, walling in the sleeping woman who was once a Valkyrie. The biplanes take off! Wagner’s genius makes the fire music pleasant, not threatening. Loki is all play. He’s anything and everything. He eats a bad woman’s half-burned heart, gets pregnant, and gives birth to the race of ogres. He saves us from cold and he roasts us to death. His essence dances with equal gusto atop Brunnhilde’s mountain and the pyres at Dresden. Probably it is for this reason that when I hear the Magic Fire music I imagine not the rainbow of flame which the motif, played in isolation, might suggest, but the blue and green flames which spring from sea-salted driftwood. Wotan sings no more; the opera is ending now; but I seem to see him, black-cloaked and leaning on his staff, as he stands outside the circle which protects the daughter he has lost.
So let’s kiss away democracy from Spain! Let’s put her to sleep for a hundred years! Now here comes the wall of flame, flowering up from the metal seeds we’ve sown; and if you care to know how we planted them, I’ll draw you a full-page, double-column illustration of airplane formations: the Gruppen-winkeclass="underline" three V’s in a row; the Gruppenkeiclass="underline" three groups of three V’s, each of which consists of three machines, with the center one below the other two; meanwhile the centermost of the three groups likewise flies below its neighbors so that this constellation itself forms one more immense V; I should also mention the Staffelkolonne links, the Staffelwinkel. When we flew to Valencia, our Gruppenkeil dropped many seeds at once, each one something between a bullet and a dart, with a stinger on its end; they tumbled two by two through the air.