Götterdämmerung at all costs, and now Germany has to follow him to the end. Killing him now to save what’s left would be cheating, rigging the game. I told you, we have to drink the cup of sorrow to the dregs. That’s the only way for something new to begin.”—“Jünger thinks the same thing,” said Una. “He wrote to Berndt.”—“Yes, that’s what he let on between the lines. There’s also an essay of his about this that’s going round.”—“I saw Jünger in the Caucasus,” I said, “but I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with him. In any case, wanting to kill the Führer is an insane crime. There might be no way out, but I think treason is unacceptable, both today and in 1938. It’s the reflex of your class, condemned to disappear. It won’t survive any better under the Bolsheviks.”—“No doubt,” von Üxküll calmly said. “I told you: everyone followed Hitler, even the Junkers. Halder thought we could beat the Russians. Ludendorff was the only one who understood, but too late, and he cursed Hindenburg for having brought Hitler to power. I have always detested the man, but I don’t take that as a warrant that exempts me from Germany’s fate.”—“You and your kind, excuse me for saying so, have had your day.”—“And you will soon have had yours. It will have been much shorter.” He contemplated me fixedly, the way one contemplates a cockroach or a spider, not with disgust, but with the cold passion of an entomologist. I could imagine it very clearly. I had finished the Margaux, I was slightly tipsy, I uncorked the Saint-Émilion, changed our glasses, and had von Üxküll taste the wine. He looked at the label. “I remember this bottle. It was a Roman cardinal who sent it to me. We had had a long discussion about the role of the Jews. He maintained the very Catholic proposition that the Jews must be oppressed, but kept as witnesses to the truth of Christ, a position I’ve always found absurd. Actually, I think he defended it more for the pleasure of the argument, he was a Jesuit, after all.” He was smiling and he asked me a question, no doubt to annoy me: “Apparently the Church caused you some problems when you wanted to evacuate the Jews of Rome?”—“Apparently. I wasn’t there.”—“Not just the Church,” said Una. “You remember, your friend Karl-Friedrich told us that the Italians didn’t understand anything about the Jewish question?”—“Yes, that’s true,” von Üxküll replied. “He said the Italians weren’t even applying their own racial laws, that they were protecting foreign Jews from Germany.”—“That’s true,” I said, ill at ease. “We had some difficulties with them about it.” And this is what my sister answered: “That’s the proof that they are healthy people. They appreciate life at its full value. I understand them: they have a beautiful country, a lot of sun, they eat well, and their women are beautiful.”—“Not like Germany,” von Üxküll said laconically. I finally tasted the wine: it had the fragrance of roasted clove and a little of coffee, I found it broader than the Margaux, sweet and round and exquisite. Von Üxküll was looking at me: “Do you know why you’re killing the Jews? Do you know?” Throughout this strange conversation he kept provoking me, I didn’t reply, I savored the wine. “Why have the Germans shown so much determination to kill the Jews?”—“You’re wrong if you think it’s only the Jews,” I said calmly. “The Jews are only one category of enemy. We are destroying all our enemies, whoever and wherever they are.”—“Yes, but admit it, for the Jews you’ve shown a special determination.”—“I don’t think so. The Führer, in fact, may have personal reasons to hate the Jews. But at the SD, we don’t hate anyone, we objectively pursue our enemies. The choices we make are rational ones.”—“Not as rational as all that. Why did you have to eliminate the mentally ill, the handicapped in hospitals? What danger did they pose, those poor wretches?”—“Useless mouths. Do you know how many millions of reichsmarks we saved that way? Not to speak of the hospital beds freed for the wounded from the front.”—“I know,” said Una, who had been listening to us in silence in this warm golden light, “I know why we killed the Jews.” She spoke in a clear, firm voice, I heard her clearly and listened to her as I drank, having finished my meal. “By killing the Jews,” she said, “we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that which in us resembles the idea we have of the Jew. Kill in us the potbellied bourgeois counting his pennies, hungry for recognition and dreaming of power, but a power he pictures in the form of a Napoleon III or a banker, kill the petty, reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, kill the servitude of the Knecht, kill all those fine German virtues. For we’ve never understood that these qualities that we attribute to the Jews, calling them baseness, spinelessness, avarice, greed, thirst for domination, and facile malice are fundamentally German qualities, and that if the Jews show these qualities, it’s because they’ve dreamed of resembling the Germans, of being Germans, it’s because they imitate us obsequiously like the very image of all that is fine and good in High Bourgeoisie, the Golden Calf of those who flee the harshness of the desert and the Law. Or else maybe they were pretending, maybe they ended up adopting these qualities almost out of courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy, so as not to seem so distant. And we, on the other hand, our German dream, was to be Jews, pure, indestructible, faithful to a Law, different from everyone else and under the hand of God. But actually they’re all mistaken, the Germans as well as the Jews. For if Jew, these days, still means anything, it means Other, an Other and an Otherwise that might be impossible, but that are necessary.” She drained her glass in one long swallow. “Berndt’s friends didn’t understand any of that, either. They said that in the end the massacre of the Jews wasn’t really important, and that by killing Hitler they could lay the crime on him, on Himmler, on the SS, on a few sick assassins, on you. But they’re just as responsible for it as you are, for they too are Germans and they too waged war for the victory of this Germany, and not any other. And the worst thing is that if the Jews pull through, if Germany collapses and the Jews survive, they’ll forget what the name Jew means, they’ll want to be more German than ever before.” I kept drinking as she spoke in her clear, rapid voice, the wine going to my head. And all of a sudden my vision of the Zeughaus came back to me, the Führer as a Jew with the prayer shawl of the rabbis and the leather ritual objects, in front of a vast audience where no one noticed it, except me, and all of that suddenly disappeared, Una and her husband and our conversation, and I was left alone with the remains of my meal and the extraordinary wines, drunk, full, a little bitter, a guest no one had invited.