Regarding him, they became unsuspecting.
He could not but feel that with his war experiences, with everything he had done for the homeland, he was basely misleading his parents, and that with the moral state of his inner life he was deeply disappointing them. He could not play the good boy for them much longer. He carried with him everywhere his life of lost innocence. Which is to say, he did not understand how he might come to love, passionately and irresponsibly, another person of any rank or sex — an injured comrade or an unkempt Ukrainian whore whom he twice used, with their smell, their weeks-old stench — if at the next moment he could hand them over to death without a second thought. He could not get over the dreadful shadows of his own bravery and steadfastness, over the mass slaughter that he had participated in from start to finish and that, for the first time in the history of warfare, technology had required as a condition for military victory. He always had to be conducting something — given his responsibility to others he had no choice — but what happened never turned out to be what he had intended. When five years later he returned to his completely unfamiliar civilian life, where to his great surprise everything was predictable, his difficulty was not in forgetting the fallen or the images of hand-to-hand combat, but in being unable to forget those of his own comrades who had been maimed by bullets and whom no one could help, or those who had gone insane and whom he had to shoot or have shot.
Willi, for example, who for two difficult years had been his orderly and whom he had been calling sweet little Willi ever since, even though the resourceful, round-faced, always grinning peasant from Eifel had been everything but sweet. He ate human flesh and not because he was hungry; he was fascinated by the taste and offered it to everyone, since they all, being cut off from their supplies, were starving; he did this because he had gone mad, or he went mad because he ate human flesh. Sometimes, when he was lost in these thoughts, Baroness Erika had to raise her voice and call her husband two or three times before he realized she had been invoking his name.
The barrel of the pistol raised for firing probably sobered up the madman for at least a second; with his arms spread wide, he clung to the slippery wall of the dugout, his alert eyes sparkling, hoping that Baron von der Schuer would not do it.
Not to him.
The baroness had to call him ever more loudly until he finally came around and not only saw but knew where he was. Luckily, the naturally lively little woman probably thought her husband was preoccupied with some scientific question. In fact, his thoughts ventured into areas not yet illuminated by the sciences precisely because he had been thinking of scientific questions.
He was looking for the basis on which he could build his science.
That he was a nobleman, scion of an ancient clan, raised to behave honorably and chivalrously, and that he had been entrusted with the lives and fate of others — these facts had lost their purpose and significance in the war he had left behind. There, bare undisguised fear of death ruled, a mere desire to survive; no discipline or self-discipline could spare anyone’s body from it.
He had not been afraid; his body was afraid in his stead. He began to search for God in this bodily fear, sitting inside the fear, desperate and full of doubts; he searched for God so that in the blood, snow, mud, and feverish shivering he should not falter or go insane.
In the mass fear and suffering, God seemed very different from the God of his hours of childhood gullibility and adolescent rebellion. This God probably had no place in human events, and for Him to be absent He did not have to leave the stumps of bombed-out trees or bodies abandoned in their pain. In the absence of gullibility, Schuer wanted first to understand the body — easily offended, exposed to desires, subject to feelings, in which it is so simple to silence or snuff out reason and soul. For theological reasons he had confidence in the sciences of human anatomy and biology. He was interested in the body’s mechanics and chemistry; he had confidence, one might say, only in his apostate mind’s ability to reach a higher sense of bodily functions and then, perhaps, to find a god higher in rank or more ancient than the God of Christianity. He had once enjoyed reading Silesius, and because of him he fantasized about the god who lived separately in individual bodies, about traces of this god that had been left in each organism and could be measured by natural-scientific or mathematical means. He wanted to find that quality which everyone chatters irresponsibly about because it’s the primal reason for everyone’s existence, but which has no palpable sign either in history or in any form of man-made matter. He was so confident that in the body he would find this ancient sign, a trace of its origin, that he was ready to transfer his faith and conscience to science.
In this state of mind he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Marburg, where, after a few months spent in spiritual daydreams and mental convalescence, he could not avoid being entrusted again with a military mission. There might have been other candidates suited to the job — in those postwar semesters the student population was swarming with demobilized soldiers — yet they made him the commander’s adjutant because he had spent the most time in a staff position and in combat. General Walther Baron von Lüttwitz* was himself considered a very good-looking man, and he insisted on Schuer. He had kept his eye on this attractive, wealthy young man from a splendid family; frankly, he wouldn’t have minded if his daughter married him. As if he were saying to himself, yes, I would like to have my grandchildren come from this bright-faced, slightly indolent fellow. He evaluated the young man’s physical attributes with the reckoning of an experienced horse breeder. He was very proud that in his own case, past fifty, his muscles remained not only hard but also boyishly supple.
When a communist uprising began in Thuringia, at Lüttwitz’s wish Schuer, alongside his commander, led units of the Studentenkorps against them. Lüttwitz expected a lot from the difference in the condition of the two leaders’ musculature. Sometimes he’d grasp Schuer firmly by the shoulder, pat and squeeze him, or press his hard arms to feel what he saw. The homeland faces the greatest danger, godless civil war, brother against brother, as he put it in a famous public address. Armed bandits plunder, pillage and fornicate, murder, rob, ransack, and set things afire in ancient German cities.
Of which not one word was true.
In hours of need, everyone should suspend all personal concerns and devote everything to the cause of the nation.
Schuer did not have to suspend his personal concerns; on the contrary, in his heart he was happy about his new assignment, which he was to carry out alongside Frigate Captain Baron von Selchow, only a few years older than he. It offered him a good pretext, his intellectual doubts and devastating loneliness notwithstanding, to enter military service again and, on an apparently not too dangerous excursion, to reimmerse himself in a familiar milieu of simpler, rougher things.
Though cleansing operations and methodical house searches were not exactly to his liking, after the suppression of the rebellion and the temperate carrying out of the inevitable retaliations, he received the Large Cross, decorated with a saber, of the Order of the Lions of Zähring, Germany’s highest decoration for a soldier.
He could thank Lüttwitz’s silent intervention for this.
This police venture — it could hardly be called a military operation — which ended by early April with very few losses to his men, brought about a thorough change in Schuer’s life. Once the Spartacist uprising had been put down and republican forces throughout Germany had triumphed over the mostly monarchist advocates of a coup d’état, the Weimar authorities charged Lüttwitz with a long list of terrible crimes. To avoid arrest, he and his family escaped to Budapest, where the godless reds were routed by August and there was no fear of republican rule.