Yes, I wove my thoughts further, maybe the demon is lurking hereabouts: not in the fact that man kills but that he proclaims its indispensable virtues into a world order of killing. I took down a documentary compendium from my bookshelf and leafed through it for a photograph of Ilse Koch. The face, though it may once have been steeled with a hint of female allure, was certainly here ordinary, sullen, doughy-skinned, piggish — quite incapable of convincing me that I was beholding a figure of a stature who was grand even in her excesses, someone who had transcended good and evil and whose life had run its course in terms of a ceaseless, implacable challenge which spurned all morality. For Ilse Koch had not, in truth, opposed a moral order; quite the contrary, she herself epitomized it — and that is a big difference. Nor did I find in that documentary compendium any evidence that she took a special pleasure in music — Beethoven in particular — or that she had given herself to prisoners. She picked her lovers from the staff-officers — the camp doctor, Dr. Hoven, nicknamed ‘Handsome Waldemar,’ and SS-Hauptsturmführer Florstedt — as befitted her logic. Manifestations of her inventiveness were restricted to customs that were practices of the time. Shrunken heads and decorative articles of tanned human skin ornamented the villas and office desks of many officers in Buchenwald, and Ilse Koch too possessed a number of these. Possibly more than others, but then that would only have been her right — after all, she was the camp commandant’s wife, the “Kommandeuse.’ She generally owned more of everything than the wives of subordinates: bigger villa, more opulent household, more privileges. Giving free rein to her fantasy — bolstered by who knows what kinds of reading matter just a few years before, when she was just a stenographer in a tobacco and cigarette factory — took her as far as bathing in Madeira wine and having a riding hall of four-thousand-square-metres constructed for her own use, none of which bears the least stamp of a solitary moral renegade. It is unlikely it ever crossed her mind that if there was no God, then everything was permitted; on the contrary, she needed a god above all else — more specifically a god who would set down in writing everything that he permitted her. Indisputably, the moral world order offered by Buchenwald was one of murder; but it was a world order, and that was good enough for her. She never went beyond the bounds of its logic: where murder is a commonplace, a person becomes a murderer out of zealotry, not revolt. Killing can become just as much a virtue as not killing. The spectacle of so many corpses, and so much torture, no doubt had its reward, now and then, in an exceptional moment of elation about existing, and simultaneous gratitude and pride in service.
But wasn’t that its function? I continued to brood. Is it not possible that a predetermined state of affairs — the state of affairs of a camp commandant’s wife — goes together with, so to say, predetermined feelings and actions that are prescribed in advance? That one and the same state of affairs — give or take a little, perhaps — could have been filled by essentially anybody else with similar feelings and actions, or would that person suddenly find himself in some other, likewise ready-made state of affairs, like political prisoner Glas, who was unwilling to conform to his state of affairs in 340 stony deaths, and for that reason ended up in a punishment brigade? One state of affairs created Buchenwald; Buchenwald — among numerous other states of affairs — created a state of affairs for the camp commandant’s wife; that state of affairs created Ilse Koch who — let us put it this way — gave her life for that state of affairs, and thereby she too created Buchenwald, which now is no longer imaginable without her. How many more states of affairs were there just in the totalitarian world of Buchenwald alone? I hardly dare pose the question that lurks, seemingly inescapably, in my mind: whose handiwork, in the end, were those skull paperweights, the lampshades and bookbindings of tanned human skin?…
I laid Ilse Koch’s photograph aside. I shall never know what she herself thought about her own life as ‘Kommandeuse.’ Since she kept silent about it, she barred herself from interpretability. I shall not become acquainted with her mundane experiences and grey everydays among the bondsmen of murder. I shall be unable to discover whether it was libido or boredom, fulfilled ambition or irksome minor frustrations which preponderated in her emotional balance, unable to unravel her wholly personal neurosis, her compulsive psychosis — in a word, the secret of her personality. I can view her as a humdrum sadist who found a home for herself in Buchenwald and was at last able to give free run to her repellent instincts. Or, if I want, I can also imagine her to have been a more complex being: perhaps she only tried to order her unexpected and incomprehensible state of affairs with even more unexpected and incomprehensible gestures simply to make it cosier, more habitable for herself, and see the proof, day by day, of how it is possible to live the unliveable, how natural the incredible …
None of this is a bit important. Ilse Koch fits a mean that can be extracted between her and her state of affairs, a formula in which she herself is not necessarily present. Yes, her character is only interpretable if we abstract her, look at her separately, so to say, from herself. The greater we imagine her significance, the more we downgrade what surrounded her: the reality of a world equipped for murder, because the essence that we would be attributing to her could only be abstracted by taking it from that reality.
Perhaps it is this, I speculated, this lack of essentiality, which is the tragedy. Except that, from another angle, this dashes to pieces any attempt at interpretation which insists on imposing figures. Because tragic figures live in a world of fate, and tragedy’s perspective is infinity; the world of violence of totalitarian systems, by contrast, is a circumscribed and insuperable world, whereas their perspective is merely the historical time for which they happen to endure. How, then, could one hope to interpret an experience that cannot, and does not even wish to, transmute precisely as experience because the essence of their states of affairs — states of affairs that are at once all too abstract and all too concrete — is an inessential and at any time exchangeable figure which, in relation to the state of affairs, has no beginning, no continuation, and no analogy of any kind — and in relation to reason is thus improbable? Perhaps, I mused, one should construct a device, a revolving machine, a trap; the characters who fall into its grasp would scurry about ceaselessly, just like electronic mice, on tracks that look labyrinthine but are actually always unidirectional, pursued by a single automaton. Everything would be wobbling, rattling, everyone trampling on one another, until the machine suddenly explodes; then, after a pause for startled, dazed astonishment, they would all scatter in every direction. That still leaves the secret, figuring out the principle on which the machine operates, which is both too simple and too humiliating for them to listen to, and that is the mechanism for the pursuing automaton utilizes the energy derived from their own rushing about …
But I had better break off here before my pen runs away with me, as they say. Why am I poking around, anyway, in those exercise books which I put aside long ago, that impressive-looking pile of dog-eared notes? Why am I copying out the outline of this never-to-be-completed essay? As a symptom, a characterisation of my state at the time. I had just then started to think these things over, but to publicize the mere fact that I was thinking had never even crossed my mind until then. Obviously, I had written my novel out of some sort of conviction, but not with any aim of convincing anyone about anything. I had written my comedies without any conviction at all, yet was paid money for them. But now a theoretical work: to pore over things, to form an opinion with knowing superiority and self-confidently step forward with that opinion — to do that I also had to possess the added conviction needed to convince others. And so I have to suppose that after finishing my novel some sort of change has taken place within me, or at least the proclivity for such a change was present within me.