But now that everything has gone so wrong, I wonder which fairy god-mother we forgot to invite to the christening of Operation Magic Fire?
One evening almost five years later, Colonel Hagen and I agreed to meet for a steak dinner at the Ausland Club on the Leipziger Platz. I arrived early, so I had a beer and sat reading in the newspapers about the China Affair. Speaking frankly, even though the Japanese were now our allies and had even been labeled “honorary Aryans,” until then I had never been very much interested in the atrocities and conquests of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. No doubt this reveals my own limitations. I don’t know why I even remember the China Affair now. After all, I was never in China.—And we were having our own difficulties by then; let’s call them harmonic stresses. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, even Norway, those operations had all gone satisfactorily (no one would deny that it’s healthy for us Germans to try to get what we want), but now the most powerful nations on earth were against us—naturally I didn’t count Russia in their number, since the sleepwalker had informed us that we only had to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down; moreover, we’d signed a treaty of near-eternal friendship with those Russians. What next? Our German machine-guns were faster than most other varieties, the French for instance, but a drunken gunner whose legs had gotten blown off in the siege of Warsaw wanted me to tell him whether we could keep making enough machine-guns to take on the whole world.—Absolute confidence, I replied to him, that is our capital. That’s what will see us through.
But I wasn’t confident myself. I was whistling in the graveyard. For months, British time bombs had been falling in the Tiergarten, and yet the sleepwalker had aborted Operation Sea Lion; he knew he couldn’t conquer England. Franco wouldn’t help us, either; the sleepwalker had made a personal appeal, which went nowhere; Franco merely smiled and smoked another cigarette; I don’t know what to say about a man like that.
And so the sleepwalker occupied himself in covering central Europe with Wagner’s melodic castles, which are built up of varied repetitions. But England was getting stronger. The Amis,16 manipulated by their Jew President, Roosevelt, were helping them and might enter the war at any time. Meanwhile the sleepwalker was reasoning: Eastern Poland is now a Communist satellite. If we don’t step in soon, our own new eastern lands will be imperiled; the Russians can break through the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line before we know it. Reacting to that won’t be quite as easy as organizing one of our motorcycle parades! In short, everything good was already rationed; everything bad was coming. So what did I care about China? And yet I remember everything about that night so perfectly! Let’s not call it a Wagnerian presentiment.
Speaking of presentiments, I now feel confident that Hagen already knew about Operation Barbarossa. We were all going to have to be brave, brutal and loyal.
When he came, he looked grimmer than ever. He didn’t want to drink beer, so we ordered a bottle of blackish-red Romanian wine. He said to me: How well do you remember our national epic?
The one that’s seven hundred years old, or the one we’re writing now? They’re the same. Do you remember how Siegfried bled anew in his coffin when the murderer passed by? That’s why I ordered the dark wine.
An ancient German touch! I said to him. But blood is only blood. When Siegfried was killed, his wife wept tears of blood. What did that signify? The poet wrote it in to give us a hint of what’s coming. The intention must have been to unify past and future, but to me it’s a cheap touch, like your drinking wine to make a point. You don’t even like wine.
I stand guilty! he replied with a laugh. But next time we meet at Bayreuth, I expect you to protest those gloomy leitmotivs in the Ring! Of course, then Verena Wagner won’t smile at you anymore…
When I think back on Operation Magic Fire, I seem to see Verena Wagner in her slim-waisted white dress (it was so white that it was really cotton-white, like a puff of antiaircraft smoke); she was pouring tea for her Uncle Wolf, who was our uncle, too (Meyers Lexikon, 1938: He is no dictator, suppressing the disenfranchised, but Führer of a believing people, who fully trust in him and enclose him in their utter love), her wrist displaying sequence and variation;17 and for some reason I also visualize that perfect antiaircraft light on the wall of swastika standards and on the long glittering rectangles of steel men; that was the Berlin Nazi rally of 1.5.36, half a year before Verena Wagner served Magic Fire’s tea; Franco remained a nothing then; even after Magic Fire had surrounded Spain, and the sleepwalker shut that case folder for good, life was almost the same; the British still believed in peace in our time! So had Siegfried’s wife.
Magic Fire’s ambiguous, almost keyless chords have fooled many listeners. The tone color is red and orange; everything seems cheerful; as the Amis say, it’s only the hearth fires burning. Condor legionnaires sang round the campfire; Franco handed out medals from a little white-clothed table. Barbarossa beckoned; Verena Wagner wiggled her wrist enchantingly; she poured us a war whose various cases, maneuvers and operations would be as tight as the berets of the clean young men in our Condor Legion. And so the leitmotiv was vindicated. ‣
AND I’D DRY MY SALTY HAIR
And I’d dry my salty hair on a flat rock far from land.
On 23 August 1942, when Air Fleet Four’s Stukas and Ju-88s were bombing Stalingrad, our Komsomol members rallied to the assistance of citizens who came out between waves of planes to sort corpses and ruins. Whenever anyone recognized a body, the Komsomols instantly embraced him. This made a valid contribution to our defense; I’m not against using children where they’re needed. And the previous September, A. A. Akhmatova had spoken on the radio to extol the bravery of Leningrad’s women, who were already dying by the thousands. In light of her fame (the sole reason her punishment had been delayed), this broadcast must be considered the equivalent of ten Stalin tanks sent directly to the front. At least that’s what Comrade Zhdanov said to me. From my point of view, the correct thing to do would have been to erase her from the picture and then blame the Fascists. (A German shell landed; brown smoke rose up.) But nobody listens to me. I’m certainly willing to agree that a consistent policy is better than no policy, which is why we demanded that Shostakovich complete his Seventh Symphony, the one now known to the world as the “Leningrad.” This task he successfully fulfilled in December. Upon the personal recommendation of Comrade Zhdanov we’d even evacuated the bastard, and his family, too. Akhmatova got the same treatment. As Comrade Zhdanov remarked to me, we could deal with her later.
She was said to be rather freakish, I mean exotic, in bed, probably on account of her well-known talent for hooking her leg behind her neck. What she did with A. Lourie you wouldn’t believe. Yet she was equally renowned for her coolly retiring politeness. Oh, ice wouldn’t have melted in her mouth! That’s why my job is so important; I expose those people! I’ve seen that drawing of her, the one we should have seized and sold abroad; those libertine Counts they still have in the West would have paid enough to endow an orphanage or a collective farm. Pyotr Alexeev has informed me that it’s her souvenir of a rose-strewn tryst with Modigliani in Paris shortly after her first marriage.
17
In old days, kings gilded the horns of their favorite cows, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that gold bracelet she wore was from Uncle Wolf.