Here came the courier now, bearing more bad news about Operation Barbarossa. He steered his motorcycle between the long double line of shiny beetle-backed limousines on the Wilhelmstrasse (another diplomatic reception was in swing) and showed his pass to the guards. It was already seventeen-o’clock. The courier must be in the Mosaic Hall now. Soon he’d be in the Runde Saal. No, already the sleepwalker could hear his jackboots echoing louder and louder as he came down the Marble Gallery.
The sleepwalker wanted to be at Wolf’s Lair. He was returning there tomorrow. Then it would be more difficult for bad news to reach him.
He rose, walked to the door, where the two sentries clicked their heels, and he said to them: I mustn’t be disturbed. Don’t let anybody in, unless it’s for the Anti-Comintern Pact.
Yes, my Führer.
Turning his back on them, he closed the door. The Russian army was essentially annihilated. He sat down at his desk and waited for the telephone to ring.
At twenty-o’-clock precisely we buried the Panzers in straw-colored holes at Millerovo, so that they’d stay untouched by Russia’s freezing cold; but mice ate the wires. Operation Barbarossa had burst out of its folder in a great white explosion, and now those snowy pages began to swirl down out of the sky, burying us alive in maps. We couldn’t understand them.
At twenty-ten I caught hold of a top-secret Soviet document whose nested hexagon diagrams and inverted-Y insigniae strangely resembled the sketches of the abstract sculptor Rodchenko; it might have explained everything, so I delivered it to Headquarters with my own hands; unfortunately the courier plane which was supposed to convey it from Headquarters to Wolf’s Lair got shot down, so…
At twenty-twenty, the sleepwalker sent us a message by teleprinter from Wolf’s Lair. He said: The attack’s not as serious as all that. I’m definitely keeping these forces right here. If we could just be certain that the Westfront would stay untouched for six to eight weeks…
He’d promised us that the Reich would never be touched, but after Dresden, Berlin and all the rest, what were we to make of that? By twenty-one-o’-clock, the Foreign Office (number seventy-six, Wilhelmstrasse) was a war-gnawed shell whose facade had been death-licked here and there right down to the white-dusted skeleton and whose serene, round, curly-haired stone face above the double doors would soon be punched out by a Russian rocket; on the other hand, even the Russians would prove limited in what they could touch: even after we’d lost everything, that stone face’s twin would still gaze meditatively out on those of us who survived to walk with downcast heads along the ruler-straight wormtracks between rubble piles.
From the sleepwalker’s point of view, everything remained untouched and perfectly proportioned, at least in the universe of potentiality. (Dr. Morell prescribed two tablespoons of Brom-Nervacit before bedtime.) Decades ago he’d memorized the map of Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Berlin’s triumphal arch and Nazi meeting hall would dwarf all that. Göring’s new ministry would get what Göring longed for: the greatest staircase in the world. He’d better lose a few kilograms if he wanted to climb it! Dr. Goebbels would get a new ministry, too. (I’m told that he was still intimate with the Czech movie actress Lida Baarova.)—Unrolling Speer’s latest blueprint and pinning down its corners with antitank shells, the sleepwalker knelt over his Soldiers’ Hall, which would house Germany’s greatest treasures: the crypts of our Emperors, Führers, Field-Marshals. Meanwhile, the plaza of the nascent Central Railroad Station would be adorned with captured enemy weapons. His cinema, opera houses, hotels and electric signs already existed as cabinetmaker’s models. They’d be ready for the World’s Fair of 1950. Himmler guaranteed to supply the granite blocks for everything.
Oh, but the sleepwalker built well! In the Occupation years, our Zoo Flak Tower would defeat the British victors: They planted twenty tons of TNT beneath it, and it was still untouched! They had to drill it full of thermite charges! Or what about Berlin Cathedral, where Hermann and Emmy Göring got married? An honor guard of two hundred war-planes flew over their heads at the end of the ceremony. Berlin Cathedral was certainly still undamaged; it wouldn’t be firebombed until 1945. Meanwhile, and we’re back in wartime now, the tall windows of the Schauspielhaus, the coffeehouses of the Kemperplatz, the stone eagle and twin sentries of the Chancellery, weren’t they all still there?
At twenty-one-forty, an aerial bomb set the cupola of the French Cathedral on fire, but by twenty-two-forty-five Berlin was back in operating condition. At twenty-three-fifteen the Russians still hadn’t overrun Wolf’s Lair. Until nearly midnight Dr. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry remained untouched…
At one minute before midnight, I myself was saved by a woman whose pubic hair was as soft as the reddish brick-dust upflung in the Tiergarten’s very last explosions when the Reich came to an end. She let me hide inside her womb, and the Russians never found me. As for the sleepwalker, some say he closed the hatch upon himself and vanished forever. This reminds me of the Norse legend of the Serpent of Midgaard, who swallowed his own tail. I myself tend to suspect that he’s waiting it out inside that cuckoo-clock over there. A Russian bullet stopped its hands at ten seconds to midnight. ‣
FAR AND WIDE MY COUNTRY STRETCHES
Seeing this film, involuntarily one clenches one’s fists in wrath… This film incites one to fight and inspires one with the certitude of victory.
Europe is Europa; Europe is a woman. Europa’s names are Marie-Luise Moskav and Berlin Liubova; Europa is Elena Ekaterinburg and Constanze Konstantinovskaya, not to mention Galina Germany, Rosa Russkaya; Europa encompasses all territory from Anna to Zoya, not omitting the critical railroad junctions Nadezhda, Nina, Fanya, Fridl, Coca (whose formal name was Elena), Katyusha, Verena, Viktoria, Käthe, Katerina, Berthe, Brynhilda, Hilde and Heidi; above all Europa is Elena.
She was as delicious as the white Viazma gingerbread which they used to sell during Palm Week in old Petersburg, and she almost remembered the taste of it; thanks to her police file, I’m aware, as she would never be, that until she was three years old, and our Revolution ended Palm Week, her mother used to break off a piece and put it in her mouth. That is why sometimes when she was very happy she could almost taste gingerbread. I repeat: She was as delicious as white Viazma gingerbread and she didn’t even know it! Nor did so many others. No exegesis of her exists but mine. No matter what they say, she wasn’t blonde; she had dark hair. She died in 1975; I do agree with that. She was too modest to wear her Order of the Red Star very often. The apparatchiks for whom she interpreted failed to recognize her face if they passed her in the street. Her colleagues ignored her; her students never saw beyond her spectacles. Search the index of any Shostakovich biography (Khentova’s excepted) and you’ll find the meagerest references to her, never a photograph. And yet she was the most perfect of us all, as white and sweet as gingerbread! In Shostakovich’s illicit operas she was the flash of light in the troubled skies of chromatism.