A horizontal salute from Hitler in the clouds! The sleepwalker dreams his face away from the long line of German prisoners of war so ragged and dirty, who march off to Soviet Arctic prisons, their jaws bound up in blankets and rags. Meanwhile, his own lines of slave workers march feebly past ruined apartments and railroad sidings. His dreams are shriveling and scorching. His henchmen have given over running across each other’s corpses in Africa. Shells and flames, tanks in snow, ice-maned horses, siege guns echoing in the wind, all these assault his dreams as the Russian Frost-Giants come west.
Now he dwells within walls of smoke. Flames rush up his staircases; chandeliers transform themselves into scorched spiders. The light excites him. In the distance he can see electric glows of barbed wire. To fight the Jews, his henchmen have built many a city of factories in the snow whose long alleys of barbed wire are signposted by frozen, snowy corpses with outstretched arms. Heaps of jawbones, mountains of pliers mark the spots where his vassals extract gold teeth from the living and the dead. Lives blow away like waves of sand. If he can only dream this dream a little longer, they’ll all be safely up the chimney. But where are his muscled heroes with their swords? Are they all dead? Snowy Russian tanks breast bluish flames and bluish snow to conquer Auschwitz, where more than seven tons of human hair await transshipment. A parade of skinny, desiccated corpses comes forth to tell lies and inspire new Jewish conspiracies.
When the captive Gunnar told the Huns that he’d only reveal to them the hoard of the Niflungs (whose gold shone even brighter than the vertical gleams of sunlight upon marching 
boots) on condition that they cut out Hogni’s heart, they tried to trick his rich-wrought mind by carrying to him a mere thrall’s heart upon a board; but he knew his brother’s heart would never quiver in terror as that one did even in death. Helpless before his cleverness, they killed Hogni then, who laughed as he died. Then Gunnar said that since only he remained to tell the secret, he had no more fear, for tell he never would.
When they lowered Gunnar into the slimy dungeon of adders, he played upon his harp so beautifully that all the serpents slept. Yet finally he wearied, and from that ball of reptiles he perforce lay upon rose up one to bite his liver, and so he perished there in the darkness of snakes.
Knowing her duty, valiant Guthrún served up her own sons’ hearts to the husband who’d slain her brothers. After that she razed the castle by fire.
The sleepwalker in his pale grey coat (our memories of him have become so grey and grainy) craves to be another Gunnar. Isn’t he a harpist, too? Hasn’t he always been able to lull all snakes to sleep until now? And his Germany, she shall be Guthrún. Germany must die ferocious, burning down everything…
On 12.04.45, the Berlin Philharmonic presents Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from “Götterdämmerung.” He’s seen “Götterdämmerung” more than a hundred times. Each time, his brain burns anew in flames of salmon-colored gold. Silhouettes of hanged corpses comprise the perimeter of his now minuscule empire. A civilian hostage raises both arms. Where now his cruelly smiling pale young faces under steel helmets? Where now his myriad marchers on a hill, following the swastika flag?—In Siberia, or dead under mud or pale cobblestones!—The radio which once spread his words like epidemics now pulses meaninglessly: Complete obliteration… shameful… solemn promise… The Russians have already reached Myrkvith Forest; waves of American Jews hem them in on all other fronts. Verena Wagner decides to plan a Ring without swastikas for 1946. Shadowy night-crowds burn what they’ve worn for a dozen years, their livery sewn and ornamented in his image. Other crowds in striped uniforms begin emerging from the lane of barbed wire. Mountains of shoes which from a distance resemble herrings in a tin memorialize those who will nevermore come forth. And the sleepwalker dreams. He gives orders to execute all the new traitors. Germany will be safe. Smiling at last in his address to the schoolboys who’ve hopelessly fought for him against the parades of Russian tanks now entering Berlin, he speaks of their common lineage, then hands out tokens like unto the ancient rings of red gold. The boys shout: Heil Hitler! Closing his eyes, he remembers how five years ago his long lines of victorious warriors passed through the Arc de Triomphe while he paid homage to Napoleon. But the world of the old gods was corrupt; it had to be smashed. He does not tell the boys this. It is too late for any explanations. A few days later, weird-ringed by Russian flames, the sleepwalker and his secret bride kill themselves.
In his very first speech as Chancellor he’d cried: I have steadfastly refused to come to the people with cheap promises!—Then he’d pointed to his heart. But now what promises has Gunnar to harp on for all these ungrateful snakes? He tires now; his music stops. Shyly he confesses: On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival, I’m gripped by a great sadness—as when one strips the Christmas tree of its ornaments…
His music stops, his Berliners running behind mounds of rubble, flames winging out of windows, for he’s lost this game of draughts which the gods once played with golden figurines, but even yet he guards hope, for Roosevelt is dead; Stalin and Churchill are falling out; and that most ancient of all Norse prophecies sighs upon the lips of the moldy, grassy Mother who periodically arises from this grave-infested earth: Someday, perhaps even in the meadows of Poland where his herds of tanks recently gamboled, the golden figures, the far-famed ones, will be found again, which they possessed in olden days. And then, beneath an even, searing light, he’ll win back his city all of gold, whose monuments and plazas remain unmarred by humanity. ‣
THE PALM TREE OF DEBORAH
You know, to a certain extent I think the formula “the end justifies the means” is valid in music.
Barbed wire like music-lines taut in bunches of five, claimed either by the bass cause or the treble—for there never was nor can be a neutral instrumental zone—now embraced Leningrad, that so-called “cradle of the Proletarian Revolution.” The bass command’s kettledrum melodies of artillery would be performed by Army Group North: thirty-two divisions, seven hundred thousand German Fascists, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb conducting. From within the city (treble, tremolo) arose the countervailing piccolo music of screams. (How could I somehow possibly, wondered the nearsighted fire-warden on the Conservatory roof, let alone passably represent us pianissimo, before the snare drum creeps in? Because we’re not pianissimo at all. We’re, um, you know. That’s what they’ll expect, even though we also have to be the loudest. They want me to, to, you know, to signify this into something they can feed people instead of sausage! Without formalism while I’m at it! To hell with them. I can hold my own.) In the opening bars of those Nine Hundred Days, the chorus comprised three million Leningraders, but a third of them perished. Too weak to push her way through the bread queue, a widow fell in the snow. A sexless child was chewing on coffee grounds. A family was eating oilcake with celluloid in it. Comrade Zhdanov called Stalin on the VC phone, but Stalin would not answer.