On 23.07.40 he meets Kubizek at Bayreuth. Kubizek’s his old friend from his student days (if we grant that he ever had a friend). Rejected twice for artistic studies, the sleepwalker had stolen away from the unfated other boy to become a tramp. Years he’d spent then imprisoned within the Schalldeckel! His life had supplied him with no indications of scale whatsoever; he could have been a giant or a dwarf depending on the size of the trees in the painted backdrop where the aliens, solid people, applauded far above his head. But then came a magic drumbeat; and suddenly our sleepwalker became one of the soldiers waving from the troop trains of 1914, and very soon he found himself desperately running through sharp-angled trenches, fleeing the gas bombs against which the handkerchiefs tied over their mouths could do far less than Gunnar’s harp. Kubizek might have admired him then, for he’d distinguished himself, but… Well, now that he’s the Führer he need be ashamed of nothing anymore. Troops are waving from the trains again. A huge swastika has overhung him ever since he became legal dictator.
He’s already promised to support the artistic studies of Kubizek’s children at the expense of the state. He’s taken a very kind interest, yes, he has. He’s even sent Kubizek tickets to the Ring.
Of those four operas, “Das Rheingold” is his favorite. (The dwarfs are starving Jewish children with weary old faces, and men with pipestem arms.) Could it be his fondness for the music which enthralls him too deeply to remember Kubizek here? Actually he’s very interested in the directing. Next comes “Die Walküre,” where at the Magic Fire music, the self-willed, virginal heroine gets safely walled to sleep by searchlights like the flames inside the skeletons of French and Belgian houses, where weeping, gesturing neighbors bury the dead in deep craters. The sleepwalker has already noted Kubizek’s frantic applause during the “Ride of the Valkyries” (a stunning, chilling, remorseless hymn to war, which thanks to the subterranean architecture gets necessarily softened and diffused a little at Bayreuth). Wanting to re-ignite the friendship, he thinks to invite him up to his private box, but just then Frau Goebbels and her husband make a scene about some infidelity… Now it’s already time for “Siegfried,” which he wishes to enjoy almost alone with Speer, so that they can whisper in each other’s ears about new buildings.
At last, during the first intermission of “Götterdämmerung,” he finds time for the meeting. He dreads it; he wishes he’d never been persuaded into it by his own sentimentality. He has no time for such nonentities as August Kubizek.
Shyly, Kubizek congratulates him on conquering France. He replies: And here I have to stand by and watch the war robbing me of my best years… We’re getting old, Kubizek.—Kubizek bows and nods, not knowing what to say.
And yet, the sleepwalker says, and yet, this… You remember how we used to stand for hours on end for Wagner, because we could not afford to sit? You remember how “Götterdämmerung” made us weep?
Yes, my Führer…
It’s like a bath in steel, I tell you. After Wagner, I feel hardened and refreshed…
He returns to his box to sit rapturous until the end of the final act, when the devoted woman sets everything she loves on fire, and buildings collapse like sand castles, windowed facades slowly falling to the street, becoming dust and broken glass.
Kubizek in his humbler box remembers how when they were youths together the sleepwalker once wrote a Hymn to the Beloved to a tall and slender fairhaired girl named Stephanie Jansten, but never ever spoke to her. (That is exactly how our ancient heroes fell in love, too. Siegfried and Gunnar hadn’t even laid eyes on the princesses they pined for.) O yes, fairhaired! Why, she was as blonde as the smoke which now rises up from all the synagogues! Sometimes the sleepwalker had been resolved on suicide; this mood lasted for hours on end, but the trouble was that Stephanie must be ready to die with him.
To the stage comes torchlight, wavering columns of light. When the sleepwalker shouts, they shout and thunder, their arms flashing up and down while his stiff boys bang drums. The sleepwalker speaks, or Siegfried sings; it matters not to the rigidly attentive faces. Light gleams on the side of his face.
In 1941 he attacks his ally Russia. War on all fronts! Now Germany’s safely surrounded by a wall of fire! How long will it take to reduce that empire to a smear beneath his boot? Three weeks, probably, but in this world exactitude sometimes fails. At Bayreuth, for example, the “Rheingold” has been performed in two-and-a-quarter hours, but occasionally it can take as long as three.
For this Russian campaign he selects a snippet of Liszt’s Preludes to be played on the radio as a victory fanfare.
The sleepwalker charmingly smiles as with both his hands he clasps the wrist of Wagner’s granddaughter Verena.
Yes, Uncle Wolf, she murmurs. I will give orders that no one is to disturb you.
He enters his private box at the rear wall. He gazes down across the empty seats, which resemble the keyboard of an immense typewriter upon which he might compose any musical score he pleases.
I will not allow this war to hinder my objectives, he whispers to himself. Russia will not die. Russia is coming at him like the dragon-worm which will rise up at the end of the world, bearing corpses in its claws. The aliens have tricked him, as he always knew they would. But he’s raised the goblet of promise. He must continue on.
Another weakling, another little shirker requests permission to report. The sleepwalker gazes at him with angry eyes.
The shirker complains about certain extreme measures. What a gallows-raven he is! He croaks and croaks. (In the Ring, don’t even gods have to trick the dwarfish Jewish capitalist and even rob him in order to save the world?) The sleepwalker stares him down, but the shirker will not dwindle. Where’s Keitel? Where’s Jodl? Someone should show him out! On the conference room table there at Wolf’s Lair, the shirker lays out photographs of hungry street-crowds in the Warsaw Ghetto, of children’s faces like weeping skulls, pale, immobile bodies on the pavement, skinny, pale people lying in crowds on hay mattresses.
A typist gasps.
The sleepwalker whirls to kiss her hand.—Never mind, child, he comforts her. She smiles, rushes from the room.
The shirker whines on and on. He’s sure that this matter was never brought to the Führer’s attention before. Of course the Jews are our misfortune, but this…
And the sleepwalker? He flicks at one of the photographs with his thumb-nail. The mouth tightens.
Another general insists on disturbing him with bad news of the Russian advance. He says that conditions are degenerating along the entire front.
Well, let them degenerate! he rages. All the better for me!
Yes, my Führer. But our own troops are freezing to death. Just yesterday I saw—
The sleepwalker covers his ears.—Perhaps I’m too sensitive, he replies.
The workers have gathered before him into rectangular armies. Swastika standards begin marching in file down a long well of futurity. They shout; he waits, expressionless and dour. Long before the first Blood Purge of 1934 they’d seen him striding up to the dais of destiny, standing atop an immense dais with a swastika on the wall nearest his feet. Now they must all be conscripted, their factories to become still another front. He needs gold rings and henchmen.
He speaks of spiritual matters. Only they can save his grey cathedrals and greatcoats from the Russian Jews, who return to life no matter how many of them he burns. The workers must build new breastworks. Aren’t they all answerable to the war dead? Even women will have to labor now, in spite of all his principles. Emergencies require extreme measures. Didn’t Siegmund mate with his own sister to save the blood of their race?