Why had I asked him that idiotic, useless question? How did that concern me? It had been nothing but morbid curiosity, and I regretted it. I wanted to take an interest in nothing but positive things now: National Socialism still had a lot to build; that’s where I wanted to direct my energies. But the Jews, unser Unglück, kept pursuing me like a bad dream in early morning, stuck in the back of my head. In Berlin, though, not many were left: all the so-called protected Jewish workers in the arms factories had just been rounded up. Yet fate decreed that I would meet up with them in the most incongruous places.
On March 21, Heroes’ Memorial Day, the Führer gave a speech. It was his first public appearance since the defeat at Stalingrad, and like everyone else, I awaited his words with impatience and anxiety: What was he going to say, how would he seem? The wave of shock from the catastrophe was still vividly felt; the most varied rumors were running rampant. I wanted to be present at this speech. I had seen the Führer in person only once, a dozen years before (I had since then heard him often on the radio and seen him in newsreels); that had been during my first trip back to Germany, in the summer of 1930, before the Seizure of Power. I had extorted that trip from my mother and Moreau, in exchange for my consent to continue the course of study they demanded. Once I had passed my baccalauréat (without honors, which meant I had to take a preparatory class to pass the ELSP entrance exam), they let me go. It was a wonderful trip, from which I came back dazzled, bewitched. I had gone accompanied by two high-school friends, Pierre and Fabrice; and we, who didn’t even know what the Wandervögel were, followed their traces as if instinctively, heading for the forests, walking during the day, talking at night around little campfires, sleeping on hard earth and pine needles. Then we went south to visit the cities of the Rhine and ended up in Munich, where I spent many hours in the Pinakotek or wandering through the streets. Germany, that summer, was growing turbulent again: the aftereffect of the previous year’s American stock market crash was making itself harshly felt; elections in the Reichstag, planned for September, would decide the future of the nation. All the political parties were agitating, using speeches, parades, sometimes violence and brawls. In Munich, one party clearly set itself apart from the others: the NSDAP, which I heard about then for the first time. I had already seen Italian Fascists on the news, and these National Socialists seemed to draw inspiration from their style; but their message was specifically German, and their leader, a frontline soldier who was a veteran of the Great War, spoke of a German renewal, of German glory, of a rich, vibrant German future. This, I said to myself as I watched them march by, was what my father had fought for during four long years, until he was finally betrayed, he and all his comrades, and lost his land, his house, our house. This was also everything that Moreau, that good French patriot and radical, who drank to the health of Clemenceau, Foch, and Pétain every year on their birthdays, detested. The leader of the NSDAP was going to give a speech in a Braukeller: I left my French friends in our little hotel. I found myself at the back, behind the crowd, and could scarcely hear the speakers; as for the Führer, I just remember his gestures, made frenetic by emotion, and the way his hair kept falling over his forehead. But he was saying, as I knew with absolute certainty, the things that my father would have said, if he had been present; if he had still been there, he would certainly have been on the platform, one of the men close to that man, one of his foremost companions; he might even, if such had been his fate, who knows, have been there in his place. What’s more, the Führer looked like him, when he stood still. I returned from that trip now for the first time with the idea that something was possible besides the narrow and stifling path outlined for me by my mother and her husband, and that my future was there, with this unfortunate people, my father’s people, my people too.
Since then, many things had changed. The Führer still had all the confidence of the Volk, but the certainty of final victory was beginning to ebb away among the masses. The people blamed the High Command, the Prussian aristocrats, Göring and his Luftwaffe; but I knew too that within the Wehrmacht some were blaming the interference of the Führer. Within the SS, it was being whispered that he had had a nervous breakdown after Stalingrad, that he wasn’t talking to anyone anymore; that at the beginning of the month, when Rommel had tried to convince him to evacuate North Africa, he had listened to him without comprehension. As for the public rumors, in the trains, the tramways, the lines, they were becoming downright ludicrous: according to the SD reports that Thomas received, people were saying that the Wehrmacht had put the Führer under house arrest in Berchtesgaden, that he had lost his reason and was kept under guard, drugged, in an SS hospital, that the Führer we saw was just a double. The speech was going to be given in the Zeughaus, the former arsenal at the end of Unter den Linden, right next to the Spree Canal. As a Stalingrad veteran, wounded and decorated, I didn’t have any trouble getting an invitation; I suggested to Thomas that he come with me, but he replied, laughing: “I’m not on leave, I have work to do.” So I went alone. They had taken considerable security precautions; the invitation said that service weapons would be forbidden. The possibility of a British raid frightened some: in January, the English had reveled at launching a Mosquito attack on the anniversary of the Seizure of Power, producing many victims; yet now the chairs had been set up in the Zeughaus courtyard, under the large glass cupola. I found myself seated in the center, between an Oberstleutnant covered with decorations and a civilian wearing the Gold Badge of the Party on his lapel. After the introductory speeches, the Führer made his appearance. I opened my eyes wide: on his head and shoulders, over his simple feldgrau uniform, I seemed to see a large blue-and-white striped rabbi’s shawl. The Führer had started speaking right away in his rapid, monotone voice. I examined the glass roof: Could it be a play of the light? I could clearly see his cap; but underneath it, I thought I made out long side curls, unrolling along his temples down over his lapel, and on his forehead, the