But perhaps you really don’t care about any of this. Maybe, instead of my unwholesome, abstruse reflections, you would rather have anecdotes, spicy little stories. For my part I don’t know anymore. I’m quite willing to tell you a few stories: but then let me just dig at random among my memories and my notes; I’ve told you, I’m getting tired, I have to start bringing this to an end. And also if I still had to recount the rest of 1944 in detail, a little like I’ve done up to now, I’ll never be done. You see, I’m thinking of you too, not just of me, a little bit in any case, there are limits of course, if I’m putting myself to so much trouble, it’s not to make you happy, I will willingly admit, it’s above all for my own mental hygiene, like when you’ve eaten too much, at some point you have to evacuate the waste, whether or not it smells nice, you don’t always have a choice; but here, you have an irrevocable power, that of closing this book and throwing it in the trash, a final recourse against which I am powerless, so I don’t see why I should wear kid gloves. And that is why, I’ll admit it, if I change my method a little, it’s mostly for me, whether you like it or not, another mark of my boundless selfishness, certainly a fruit of my bad education. Maybe I should have done something else, you’ll tell me, that’s true, maybe I should have done something else, I would have been delighted to play music, if I had known how to put two notes together and recognize a treble clef, but there it is, I’ve already explained my limits in that field, or else painting, why not, that seems a pleasant occupation to me, painting, a quiet occupation, losing yourself that way in forms and colors, but what can I do, in another life maybe, for in this one I never had a choice, maybe a little, of course, a narrow margin for maneuvering, but limited, because of the weight of fate, and lo, we’re back just where we started from. But let us return to Hungary.
About the officers around Eichmann, there’s not much to say. They were, for the most part, peaceable men, good citizens doing their duty, proud and happy bearers of the SS uniform, but timorous, with little initiative, always going “Yes…but,” and admiring their leader as a great genius. The only one who stood out a little was Wisliceny, a Prussian my age, who spoke very good English and had an excellent grasp of history, and with whom I liked to spend my evenings discussing the Thirty Years’ War, the turning point of 1848, or else the moral bankruptcy of the Wilhelmine era. His views weren’t always original, but they were solidly documented and he could work them into a coherent narrative, which is the foremost quality of the historical imagination. He had once been Eichmann’s superior, in 1936 I think, in any case during the time of the SD-Hauptamt, when the Department of Jewish Affairs was still called Abteilung II 112; but his laziness and indolence had quickly led to his being surpassed by his disciple, which he didn’t hold against him, they had remained good friends, Wisliceny was a close family friend, they even publicly called each other by their first names (later on they had a falling-out, for reasons I am unaware of). Wisliceny, a witness at Nuremberg, painted a negative portrait of his old comrade that for a long time helped to distort the image that historians and writers had of Eichmann, some even going so far as to argue in good faith that the poor Obersturmbannführer gave orders to Adolf Hitler. You can’t blame Wisliceny: he was trying to save his neck, and Eichmann had disappeared, at the time it was customary to incriminate the absent, though it didn’t get poor Wisliceny very far; he ended up at the end of a rope in Pressburg, the Bratislava of the Slovaks (and it must have been solid, that rope, to support his corpulence). Another reason that made me appreciate Wisliceny was that he kept a level head, unlike some others, especially the Berlin bureaucrats, who, having been sent to the field for the first time in their lives and seeing themselves suddenly so powerful compared to these Jewish dignitaries, educated men sometimes twice their age, lost all sense of moderation. Some of them insulted the Jews in the coarsest and most unseemly way; others succumbed to the temptation of abusing their position; all of them demonstrated an arrogance that was unbearable and, in my opinion, utterly inappropriate. I remember Hunsche, for example, a Regierungsrat, that is, a career civil servant, a jurist with an accountant’s mentality, the little gray man you never notice behind the desk of a bank where he patiently shuffles paper as he waits till he can draw his pension and go out in a cardigan knitted by his wife and grow Dutch tulips, or else paint Napoleonic lead soldiers, which he will arrange lovingly, in perfect rows, nostalgic for the lost order of his youth, in front of a plaster model of the Brandenburg Gate, what do I know of the dreams that haunt this sort of man? And there, in Budapest, ridiculous in a uniform with an extra-baggy pair of riding breeches, he smoked expensive cigarettes, received Jewish leaders with his dirty boots resting on a velvet armchair, and shamelessly indulged his slightest whims. In the very first few days after our arrival, he had asked the Jews to provide him with a piano, saying negligently to them, “I’ve always dreamed of having a piano”; the Jews, terrified, brought him eight; and Hunsche, right in front of me, planted in his tall boots, reprimanded them in a voice that was trying to sound ironic: “But meine Herren! I don’t want to open a store, I just want to play the piano.” A piano! Germany is groaning under the bombs, our soldiers at the front are fighting with frozen limbs and missing fingers, but Hauptsturmführer Regierungsrat Dr. Hunsche, who has never left his Berlin office, needs a piano, no doubt to calm his frayed nerves. When I watched him prepare orders for the men in the transit camps—the evacuations had begun—I wondered if, as he appended his signature, he didn’t get hard under the table. He was, I’m the first to acknowledge it, a truly poor specimen of the
Herrenvolk: and if you are to judge Germany from this kind of man, alas only too common, then, yes, I can’t deny it, we have deserved our fate, the judgment of history, our dikè.