Porisch thanked him, feeling almost moved, returned his good wishes and left. Afterwards, he’d maintain he could still feel Mertens’ small-boned scholarly hand in his great mitt years later.
As the door clicked shut behind Porisch, Mertens breathed a sigh of relief and his dark-ringed eyes lit up for a moment. Porisch was a decent man who meant well, but he was a human being, and Professor Mertens had had enough of that species. That particular animal’s flat, flesh-coloured face with its holes leading behind the mask to the inside gave him the creeps: the mouth cavity, the nose vents, the wedge-shaped depths from which the eyes stared – to say nothing of the ears, receivers of noise but never of understanding. It was a wretched thing when a man had so completely lost respect for his own species that he no longer saw any point in life – his own or other people’s. What was he to do then?
A new year was beginning – what a gruesome prospect. He’d seen in 1914 and 1915 in an orderly manner with his Landwehr company in northern Poland, surrounded by sparkling snow, full of hope for an early peace, believing in a vastly improved post-war Europe. The following year he’d been home on leave, and there had been much solemn debate over punch and pancakes in the quiet, candlelit home of Herr Stahr, a king’s counsel and his father’s last surviving boyhood friend. The house had already experienced death, as the youngest son had just been killed. And the composure with which the family bore their pain, the dignity they drew from their terrible loss, afforded a glimpse of the enormous obligation the heroic deaths of this generation of young men would place on those left behind. ‘So many noble dead dug into the foundations of this new Reich,’ said the tipsy, white-haired old man as the New Year bells rang out from the cathedral, the Memorial church, St Matthew’s and St Ludwig’s – all the churches of western Berlin. ‘They’ll have a job proving themselves worthy of it.’ And they drank to the freer, less prejudiced Germany they were sure would be the reward for the terrible sacrifices the nation had made. And Professor Mertens had believed it all.
He shivered and pulled his father’s long-fringed travel rug back up under his chin. The deep green hues of the soft Scottish wool merged with the sleepy cosiness of the twilit room. He no longer had beliefs or hopes. During the past year, all his illusions had been shattered; the whole beautiful sham, so wonderfully embellished by poets and so pitilessly blasted by the philosopher Schopenhauer, to reveal the agonised world underneath, was gone. If Schopenhauer himself, son of a Danzig salesman, hadn’t been such a nagging old woman, filled with unbridled hate of everything he was not, he could have been a great source of comfort. As it was, he was no use to anyone; his gifts sparkled and faded into the night like the fireworks the Bavarians lit on New Year’s Eve, and his wonderful phrases left nothing behind but emptiness and the desolate night.
Mertens sat up. His eyes, seeking the light switch, glided over the orange folder, a splash of light on the black table. His eyelids twitched, and there was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He sank back. It was that business there that had started it all. The pathetic little case of Sergeant Kroysing had been the catalyst, a minor catalyst but enough for someone like Mertens, who perhaps already harboured concerns. But now it wasn’t about individual cases. Man’s whole dubious existence stood ready to be sentenced before the spiritual jury of a man who, guided by his father, had spent his first four decades searching for truth and justice. Things had become so bad that he couldn’t hear certain words without coughing and feeling sick, above all the German word for nation: Volk. If you said the word Volk over and over to yourself – Volk, Volk, follow, follow, follow – you ended up with nothing but herds following. You should follow, you must follow, and never mind whom. Aristotle had known that, and Plato had known it even better. People were zoon politikon, political animals: what else could that definition mean but that they were condemned forever to wretched dependency? Except that for the two Greeks and their scholars in Europe this fact of nature laid a great moral imperative upon individuals and intellectuals to improve this deplorable state of affairs, to create balance through wisdom and insight, to convert and reform humanity through moral duty and kindness, patience and self-control. Churches and intellectuals worldwide had ceaselessly tried to fulfil this duty since the renaissance of reason in the Italy of Lorenzo the Magnificent, triggering religions, reformations, revolutions – with the result that in this war the pinnacle of our development had become blindingly clear. The spirit of Europe was prancing about in uniforms, and there were only nations, peoples, Völker, standing there in the scarlet, black and white of their sacred egomanias, and civilisation served at best as a technology for killing, a means of whitewashing, as a phrase to justify the conquering zeal that had rendered the world too small for Alexander the Great. At least the Romans had paid for their conquests with a paltry 500 years of peace and a world civilisation. How would they pay? With goods and lies.
Carl Georg Mertens’ heart felt like a soft clump hanging in his chest. He threw the blanket back and, shivering slightly, walked through his rooms, which had been put at his disposal by headquarters after expelling the owner. How long had this house been here? More than 100 years for sure. When it was new the names of Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel had shone over Germany, and Europe stood in the shadow of Napoleon I, who had at least atoned for the devastation caused by his campaigns through comprehensive political and legal reforms. Now, 100 years later, conquests brought nothing but moral disintegration, obliteration of all individual values, an ardent wearing down of the moral culture that had revived since the Thirty Years’ War. He wondered what his father would have made of this war, of its unanimous glorification by Germany’s intellectuals – a war they knew nothing about but that they were all resolved to whitewash and falsify, to distort until it fitted with their view of the world. Lawyers and theologians, philosophers and doctors, economists and history teachers, and above all poets, thinkers and writers, spread deceit among the people with every word they said and wrote in the newspapers. They rushed to confirm that which was not and disputed that which was, were naïve and ignorant, putrid with self-assurance, and didn’t make the slightest attempt to establish the facts before giving the benefit of their views.
Professor Mertens was a short-sighted man but he could see well in the dark. He went to his wardrobe and put on a warm dressing gown and slippers, then he wandered through the three rooms that until now had been his billet, opening and closing drawers. He searched his desk for a particular object, eventually found it and put it to one side, looked in the bedroom for things he might need and laid them out. There was no point in maintaining illusions in the last hours of a year when his eyes had been opened, even with regard to his dearest and most firmly held values, for example about his father. Would the venerable Gotthold Mertens, descendant of protestant pastors and Mecklenburg officials, have rejected the illusions established by the Fatherland to conceal and justify all the horrors brought by its lust to conquer? Of course not. Let’s not kid ourselves. At the outbreak of war, the great man would have rallied the young men and sent them into battle. Throughout the first year of the war, operating from a deep sense of justice, he would have championed Germany’s actions as a necessary mission. In the second year, he would have invoked his country’s destiny, called for stout hearts and endurance in the face of a holy necessity, certain that he was fulfilling his duty, dealing with reality and promoting the survival of the nation. And if his son, who now knew how things stood, had then set out what he knew, what was the best Gotthold Mertens might have done? Said nothing in public and approached his former pupil the Imperial Chancellor in private. Then he would have given up in the face of the Army Command, taken comfort from past glories and dark allusions to the spirit of European legal history, whose aim was to tame the passions, establish inalienable civil rights, provide peaceful citizens with security, improve public morals, and promote intellectual enlightenment and the cultural heritage that alone made life worth living. But he, his son, no longer believed in all these wonderful claims and illusions. A sapper lieutenant had opened his eyes. During the past half year, he’d learnt to look more closely, and his suspicions had grown. And now he knew more: the gaps had been filled in by that same sapper lieutenant and by his murdered brother in the shape of two brief reports.