When on Z-Day 1936 the Chancellor of Germany, a certain Adolf Hitler, orders twenty-five thousand soldiers across six bridges into the Rhineland Zone, he too fears the future. Unlike Gunnar, he appears pale. Frowning, he grips his left wrist in his right. He’s forsworn mead. He eats only fruits, vegetables and little Viennese cakes. Clenching his teeth, he strides anxiously to and fro. But slowly his voice deepens, becomes a snarling shout. He swallows. His voice sinks. In a monotone he announces: At this moment, German troops are on the march.
What will the English answer? Nothing, for it’s Saturday, when every lord sits on his country estate, counting money, drinking champagne with Jews. The French are more inclined than they to prove his banesmen…
Here comes an ultimatum! His head twitches like a gun recoiling on its carriage. He grips the limp forelock which perpetually falls across his face. But then the English tell the French: The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden.—By then it’s too late, too late.
I know what I should have done, if I’d been the French, laughs Hitler. I should have struck! And I should not have allowed a single German soldier to cross the Rhine!
To his vassals and henchmen in Munich he chants: I go the way that Providence dictates, with the assurance of a sleepwalker.—They applaud him. The white-armed Hunnish maidens scream with joy.
In an Austrian crowd gathered to celebrate his march into Vienna (triple-angled shadows of bodies on parade, boxy tanks, goosesteps, up-pointed rifles), a woman bays before the rest: Heil Hitler!—Children pelt his motorcade with flowers. His tanks fly both German and Austrian flags. He drafts a law to join Austria to Germany within twenty-four hours. He’s bringing them home to the Reich, he says, his smile as friendly as when he leans across a desk to sign another non-aggression treaty with the credulous dwarfs of Nifelheim.
Dwarfs indeed! With his hands raised up (he’s so pale against his own inkblot moustache), he imparts the following unalterable truth: In this world, there are only dwarfs and giants. And I know who is whom!
While the sleepwalker looks on, wolf-hearted Göring, his creation, explains that Czechoslovakia is a trifling piece of Europe. (Brownshirts have already appeared on the premises, welcoming the sleepwalker with their chin-straps, banners, wreaths. Soon they will write JEW on Jewish windows, and shake their fists. In the next act, as the curtains get drawn up from the stage columns, we’ll see police coming metal-headed and rigid in the tumbrils to take Jews and hostages away.) Göring continues: The Czechs, a vile race of dwarfs without any culture—nobody even knows where they came from—are oppressing a civilized race; and behind them, together with Moscow, there can be seen the everlasting face of the Jewish fiend!
And Czechoslovakia vanishes like a handful of books flying into flames by night. Children in England and France begin trying on gas masks in anticipation of the sleepwalker’s marching columns.
Now beneath the vast gilded eagle in the Reichstag, he sets herds of tanks browsing on the Polish meadows. Bombs fall like clashes of cymbals; arms swing in unison for his government of national recovery.
He hesitates again. He fears what lies before him in Myrkvith Forest. Not that hesitation’s practical—hasn’t he already accepted the aliens’ invitation to the contest? He dreads their spider-holes and deceits, but war’s begun; he must roll honorably forth.
He craves to clear his mind. Yes, the curtain’s risen, but he needs to lose himself one last time within the curved black Schalldeckel which conceals the tunnel to the orchestra pit beneath the stage. From nothingness he came. Would he’d come from a solid wooden hall like Gunnar and Hogni! Well, he’ll dream Germany solid. Homeless, amorphous, he relaxes into nothingness whenever no one can see. He needs to be a certain velvet-puddled something, but fears that that something might really be nothing. He imagines how Gunnar felt when the Huns buried him alive in the snakepit. In his dreams he sometimes becomes a black bag filled with serpents. He wakes up vomiting, but the serpents will not crawl out his throat.
Gunnar had a harp; he played the snakes to sleep—all of them but one. And the sleepwalker, he masks himself in music.
The sleepwalker’s minions have built him a dream called Eagle’s Nest—an eyrie rightly named, for doesn’t he possess the droning eagles of steel which are now preying upon Poland? (Each Stuka’s but an emanation of his right arm cutting through the air.) Eagle’s Nest is reached first by way of a winding mountain road, which conveys the accolyte to the bronze portal, then by a dripping marble corridor through the rock, and finally by a brass elevator up into the heights; the shaft is a hundred and sixty-five feet—why, that’s even taller than the chimney will reach at Auschwitz! Here he can gaze down upon his world of henchmen, kinsmen and foemen. All the way to Poland he can see pale, flashing hands clapping, and frozen, pale faces beneath steel helmets uplifted to seek out his hoarse, loud, bullying voice. Just as at Bayreuth one finds singers and listeners sharing the same darkness, so Hitler and his vassals now dream their way through the great night he’s spider-spun out of his own fear, weaving strands of blackness ever thicker across the sky until the lights have dimmed—indeed, indeed, just as at Bayreuth! (Before Wagner, frivolous music-munchers sauntered into an opera house whenever they felt like it, and illumination accommodated them, so that musicians and trappings could be seen, rendering the singers no more than human.) And at his command, liegemen launch eastward his bride-tokens of phosphorus, lead and steel.
Shooting down come the Stukas, straight down, Polish streets spreading out before them like bloodstains, then bombs fall; flames take wing; people scream and run right into the machine-guns. The Stukas soar, disdaining now those crooked blackened ruins which foemen deserve, their bridges brokenly dangling in rivers.
His pale, alert, immobile face watches the victory parade, his eyes like a bird’s. Wagner had steam machines and colored lights at Bayreuth; he has the many-plumed smoke of ruined Warsaw. And all is as it was before—the same long columns of listeners at Party rallies, long squares of people, mobile barracks drawn up to hear him shouting, warning and exhorting his children of all ages. In come the Gestapo, drawing up new lists of names, confiscating old ones. In Austria they’d accompanied their sleepwalker’s voice less obviously, in much the same way that the Wagnerian orchestra lurks in the darkness past the Schalldeckel. They arrested three-quarters of a million people in Vienna on the first day of reunification, but softly. In Poland they need not be soft. They’re backed by all good Germans, down to the last heil-smiling ladies and girls, each of whom agrees with him that his foreign adventures had better be, in his own terrifying phrase, sealed in blood. They seek themselves in the sleepwalker’s pale mute face, his wrist clasping wrist as he endures the honors on his fiftieth birthday, sipping at the rasping static of an infinite cheer.