After the defeat, when we had settled in Kiel, he had had to leave again—we didn’t really know where or why; from time to time he returned to see us, then he would disappear again; he didn’t settle down with us for good till the end of 1919. In 1921, he fell seriously ill and had to stop working. His convalescence dragged on, and the atmosphere at home grew tense and gloomy. Around the beginning of the summer, still gray and cold as I remember it, his brother came to visit us. This younger brother, cheerful and funny, told wonderful stories about the war and about his travels that made me roar in admiration. My sister didn’t like him so much. A few days later, my father left with him on a trip, to visit our grandfather, whom I had seen only once or twice and whom I scarcely remembered (my mother’s parents, I think, were already dead). Even today I remember this departure: my mother, my sister, and I were lined up in front of the gate to the house, my father was loading his suitcase into the trunk of the car that would take him to the train station: “Goodbye, little ones,” he said with a smile, “don’t worry, I’ll come back soon.” I never saw him again. My twin sister and I were almost eight then. I learned much later that after some time my mother had gotten a letter from my uncle: after the visit to their father, it said, they had had a falling-out, and my father, apparently, had left in a train for Turkey and the Middle East; my uncle didn’t know anything else about his disappearance; his employers, contacted by my mother, didn’t know anything either. I never saw this letter from my uncle; it was my mother who explained it to me one day, and I could never confirm what she said, or locate this brother who nevertheless did exist. I did not tell all of this to Partenau: but I am telling it to you.
I spent a lot of time with Partenau now. Sexually, he left me with an uncertain impression. His rigor and his National Socialist and SS enthusiasm could turn out to be an obstacle; but deep down, I felt, his desire must not have been more oriented than anyone else’s. In high school I had quickly learned that there was no homosexuality, as such; the boys made do with what there was, and in the army, as in prisons, it was certainly the same. Of course, since 1937, the date of my brief arrest for the Tiergarten affair, the official attitude had grown considerably harsher. The SS seemed particularly targeted. The previous autumn, when I arrived in Kharkov, the Führer had signed a decree, “On the Maintenance of Purity Within the SS and the Police,” condemning to death any SS man or police employee who engaged in indecent behavior with another man or even permitted himself to be abused. This decree, out of fear it might give rise to misinterpretation, had not been published, but in the SD we had been informed of it. For my part, I thought it was mostly rhetorical posturing; in actual fact, if you stayed discreet, there were rarely any problems. It all depended on not compromising yourself with a personal enemy; but I didn’t have any personal enemies. Partenau, however, must have been influenced by the hysterical rhetoric of the Schwarzes Korps and other SS publications. But my intuition told me that if one could provide him with the necessary ideological framework, the rest would come on its own.
It wasn’t necessary to be subtle: it was just a question of being methodical. In the afternoons, occasionally, if there was some free time, we would go out and walk about town, strolling through the little streets or along the quays lined with palm trees; then we would go sit in a café and drink a glass of Crimean muscatel, a little sweet to my taste, but pleasant. On the esplanade, we met mostly Germans, sometimes accompanied by girls; as for the men of the region, aside from a few Tatars or Ukrainians wearing the white armband of the Hiwis, we didn’t see any; in January, in fact, the Wehrmacht had evacuated the entire male population, first to transit camps, then to the Nikolayev Generalkommissariat: a radical solution indeed to the problem of partisans, but it must be acknowledged that with all those wounded or convalescent soldiers, they couldn’t take any risks. Before springtime, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, aside from the theater, or some movies arranged by the Wehrmacht. Even bacilli fall asleep in Yalta, wrote Chekhov, but this slow boredom suited me. Sometimes several other young officers joined us, and we would go sit on a café terrace overlooking the sea. If we found one—provisions from the requisitioned supplies were ruled by mysterious laws—we’d order a bottle of wine; along with the muscatel, there was a red Portwein, just as sweet but suited to the climate. Talk centered on the local women sadly deprived of husbands, and Partenau didn’t seem indifferent to this. In the midst of bursts of laughter, one of the bolder officers would accost some young women and, talking gibberish, invite them to join us; sometimes they blushed and went on their way, and sometimes they came and sat down; Partenau, then, cheerfully joined in on a conversation made up mainly of gestures, onomatopoeia, and isolated words. This had to be cut short. “Meine Herren, I don’t want to be a spoilsport,” I began on one of these occasions. “But I should warn you of the risks you’re running.” I rapped sharply a few times on the table. “In the SD, we receive and synthesize all the reports on incidents in the rear zones of the Wehrmacht. That gives us an overview of problems that you can’t have. I should tell you that having relations with Soviet, Ukrainian, or Russian women is not only unworthy of a German soldier, but dangerous. I’m not exaggerating. Many of these females are Jews, whose Jewish origins can’t be seen; that by itself is already risking Rassenschande, racial soiling. But there’s something else. Not only the Jewesses but also Slav females are in league with the partisans; we know that they make unscrupulous use of their physical advantages, and our soldiers’ trust, for espionage. You might think you can hold your tongue, but I can tell you that there’s no such thing as a harmless detail, and the work of an intelligence service consists of creating giant mosaics from minuscule elements that are insignificant if taken individually but, when connected to thousands of others, make sense. The Bolsheviks don’t go about it any differently.” My pronouncements seemed to be putting my comrades ill at ease. I continued. “In Kharkov, in Kiev, we had many cases of men and officers who slipped off to a rendezvous and were found horribly mutilated. And then of course there are the diseases. Our health services believe, based on Soviet statistics, that ninety percent of Russian females are afflicted with gonorrhea, and fifty percent with syphilis. Many of our soldiers are already infected; and these men, when they go home on leave, contaminate their wives or their girlfriends; the medical services of the Reich are horrified, and are talking of an epidemic. Such a profanation of the race, if it isn’t violently combated, can lead in the end only to a form of Entdeutschung, a de-Germanizing of our race and our blood.”
My speech had visibly affected Partenau. I didn’t add anything else; it was enough to disturb him a little. The next day, when I was reading in the sanatorium’s beautiful park of cypresses and fruit trees, he came to find me: “Tell me, do you really believe what you were saying yesterday?”—“Of course! It’s nothing but the truth.”—“But then how do you think we should manage? You understand…” He blushed, he was embarrassed but wanted to speak. “You understand,” he went on, “soon we’ll have been here for a year, without going back to Germany, it’s really hard. A man has needs.”—“I understand very well,” I replied in a learned tone. “All the more so since masturbation, according to all the specialists, also involves grave risks. Of course, some people argue it is only a symptom of mental illness, and never the cause; others, however, like the great Sachs, are convinced it’s a pernicious habit that leads to degeneracy.”—“You know your medicine,” Partenau said, impressed.—“I’m not a professional, of course. But I’m interested in it, I’ve read some books.”—“And what are you reading now?” I showed him the cover: “The Symposium. Have you read it?”—“I must confess I haven’t.” I closed it and held it out to him: “Take it. I know it by heart.”
The weather was getting warmer; soon we could go swimming, but the sea was still cold. You could sense spring in the air and everyone impatiently awaited its arrival. I brought Partenau to visit Nicholas II’s summer palace in Livadia, burned out during the fighting, but still imposing with its regular and asymmetrical façades and its beautiful Florentine and Arabic-style courtyards. From there we climbed the Sunny Path that leads, between the trees, to a headland overhanging Oreanda; one has a magnificent view of the coast there, of the tall, still snow-covered mountains dominating the road to Sebastopol and, way down below, of the elegant building made of white Crimean granite we had set out from, still black from the smoke but luminous in the sunlight. The day promised to be magnificent, the walk to the headland had us dripping with sweat and I took off my uniform jacket. Farther away, to the west, you could make out a construction perched on the tall cliffs of a promontory, the Swallow’s Nest, a medieval fantasy thrown up there by a German baron, an oil magnate, not long before the Revolution. I suggested to Partenau that we push on to this tower; he agreed. I started out on a path that ran along the cliffs. Below, the sea calmly beat on the rocks; above our heads, the sun sparkled on the snow of the jagged peaks. A delicious odor of pine and heather scented the air. “You know,” he said suddenly, “I finished the book you lent me.” For some days now we’d been addressing each other with the familiar du. “It was very interesting. Of course, I knew that the Greeks were inverts, but I didn’t realize how much they’d made an ideology of it.”—“It’s something they thought a lot about, for centuries. It goes much further than simple sexual activity. For them, it was a complete way of life and organization, which embraced friendship, education, philosophy, politics, even the arts of war.” I stopped talking; we continued in silence, our jackets thrown over our shoulders. Then Partenau continued: “When I was little, in catechism, they taught me that it was an abomination, a horror. My father talked about it too, he said homosexuals went to hell. I still remember the text by St. Paul he quoted: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. I reread it the other night in the Bible.”—“Yes, but remember what Plato says: On this subject nothing is absolute; the thing is, in and of itself, neither beautiful nor ugly. I’ll tell you what I think: the Christian prejudice, the Christian prohibition, is a Jewish superstition. Paul, whose name was Saul, was a Jewish rabbi, and he couldn’t overcome this prohibition, as he did so many others. It has a concrete origin: the Jews lived surrounded by pagan tribes, and in many of them the priests practiced ritual homosexuality during certain religious ceremonies. It was very common. Herodotus relates similar things on the subject of the Scythians, who peopled this region and later the whole Ukrainian steppe. He speaks of the Enarees, descendants of the Scythians who supposedly pillaged the temple of Eskalon and whom the goddess struck with a female sickness. According to him they were soothsayers who behaved like women; thus he calls them androgynoi, men-women who had their periods every month. Obviously, he is describing shamanic rituals that he misunderstood. I’ve heard it said that you can still see such things in Naples, when during pagan ceremonies a young man gives birth to a doll. Note too that the Scythians are the ancestors of the Goths, who lived here, in the Crimea, before they migrated west. Whatever the Reichsführer may say, there are strong reasons to think that they too were familiar with homosexual practices before they were corrupted by Judaicized priests.”—“I didn’t know that. But still, our Weltanschauung condemns homosexuality. In the Hitlerjugend they gave us a lot of speeches about it, and in the SS they teach us that it’s a crime against the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people.”—“I believe that what you’re talking about is an example of poorly assimilated National Socialism, which serves to hide other interests. I know the Reichsführer’s views on the subject very well; but the Reichsführer, like you, comes from a very repressive Catholic background; and despite all the force of his National Socialist ideology, he couldn’t get rid of certain Catholic prejudices, so he confuses things that shouldn’t be confused. And when I say ‘Catholic’ you understand very well that I mean ‘Jewish,’ Jewish ideology. There’s nothing in our Weltanschauung, carefully considered, that could object to a masculine eros. Quite the contrary, and I can demonstrate it to you. You’ll notice that the Führer himself has never really said anything about the question.”—“Still, after the thirtieth of June, he violently condemned Röhm and the others for their perverse practices.”—“For our nice German middle class frightened by everything, it was a strong argument, and the Führer knew it. But what you might not know is that before the thirtieth of June, the Führer had always defended Röhm’s behavior; within the Party there were a lot of critics, but the Führer refused to listen to them; he told the malicious gossips that the SA is not an institute for the moral education of genteel young ladies, but a formation of seasoned fighters.” Partenau burst out laughing. “After the thirtieth of June,” I went on, “when it turned out that many of Röhm’s accomplices, like Heines, were also his lovers, the Führer was afraid that the homosexuals might form a State within a State, a secret organization, like the Jews, which would pursue its own interests and not the interests of the Volk, an ‘Order of the Third Sex,’ like our Black Order. That’s what was behind the denunciations. But it’s a political problem, not an ideological one. From a truly National Socialist point of view, you could on the contrary regard brotherly love as the real cement of a warlike, creative Volksgemeinschaft. Plato thought the same thing, in his way. You remember Pausanias’s speech, where he criticizes the other nations, such as the Jews, that reject masculine eros: Among the barbarians, that is deemed shameful, along with the love of knowledge and physical exercise…. Thus, where it is deemed shameful to yield to a lover, custom is based on the moral defect of its authors: a wish for domination among masters, and cowardliness among subjects. I have a French friend who regards Plato as the first authentically fascist author.”—“Yes, but still! Homosexuals are effeminate, men-women as you said. How do you think a State could tolerate men that are unfit to be soldiers?”—“You’re wrong. It’s a false notion that contrasts the virile soldier with the effeminate invert. That type of man does exist, of course, but he’s a modern product of the corruption and degeneration of our cities, Jews or Jewified men still caught in the clutches of priests or ministers. Historically, the best soldiers, the elite soldiers, have always loved other men. They kept women, to watch over their household and give them children, but reserved all their emotions for their comrades. Look at Alexander! And Frederick the Great, even if no one wants to acknowledge it, was the same. The Greeks even drew a military principle from it: in Thebes, they created the Sacred Band, an army of three hundred men that was the most famous of its time. The men fought as couples, each man with his lover; when the lover grew old and retired, his beloved became the lover of a younger man. Thus, mutually, they stimulated their courage to the point of becoming invincible; neither of them dared turn his back and flee in the presence of his lover; in battle, they pushed each other to excel. They were killed to the last man in Chaeronea, by Philip’s Macedonians: a sublime example for our Waffen-SS. You can find a similar phenomenon in our Freikorps; any honest veteran will acknowledge it. You see, you have to consider it from an intellectual standpoint. It’s obvious that only man is truly creative: woman gives life, she brings up children and nourishes them, but she doesn’t create anything new. Blüher, a philosopher who was very close in his day to the men of the Freikorps, and who even fought alongside them, showed that intramasculine eros, by stimulating men to rival each other in courage, virtue, and morality, contributes both to war and to the formation of States, which are only an extended version of masculine societies like the army. Thus it’s a question of a superior form of development, for intellectually evolved men. A woman’s embrace is good for the masses, the herd, but not for leaders. You remember Phaedrus’s speech: As we see clearly, the beloved is most ashamed in front of his lovers, when he is surprised doing something shameful. If there were a way to form an army, or a city, with lovers and their beloveds, there could be no better government for them than rejecting everything that is ugly, and rivaling each other in the way of honor. And if such lovers fought elbow to elbow, even if they were only a handful, verily they could conquer the entire world. That is certainly the text that inspired the Thebans.”—“This Blüher you talked about, what became of him?”—“He’s still alive, I think. During the Kampfzeit, the ‘time of struggle,’ he was very widely read in Germany and, despite his monarchist convictions, was much respected by certain rightist circles, including National Socialists. Afterward I think he was too closely identified with Röhm, and since 1934 he has been banned from publication. But someday they’ll lift that ban. There’s one other thing I’d like to tell you: even today, National Socialism makes too many concessions to the Churches. Everyone is aware of this, and the Führer is troubled by it, but in wartime he cannot allow himself to oppose them openly. The two Churches have too much sway over the minds of the middle class, and we’re forced to tolerate them. That won’t last forever: after the war, we’ll be able once again to turn against the internal enemy and break this stranglehold, this moral asphyxia. When Germany is purified of its Jews, it will have to be purified of their pernicious ideas too. Then you’ll see that many things will appear in a different light.” I stopped speaking; Partenau didn’t say anything. The path plunged along the rocks to the sea; then we walked in silence alongside a narrow empty beach. “Do you want to go swimming?” I suggested.—“It must be freezing.”—“It’s cold; but the Russians go swimming in winter. On the Baltic they do it too. It gets your blood flowing.” We stripped naked and I ran into the sea; Partenau followed me, shouting; for a few instants the cold water bit into my skin, we shouted and laughed and wrestled with each other, staggering about in the waves, before running back out just as quickly. I lay down on my jacket, on my stomach; Partenau stretched out next to me. I was still wet but my body was warm, I felt the drops and the pale sun on my skin. For a long while I voluptuously resisted the desire to look at Partenau, then I turned to him: his white body was gleaming with seawater, but his face was red, speckled beneath the skin. He kept his eyes closed. As we were getting dressed, he looked at my penis: “You’re circumcised?” he exclaimed with surprise, blushing. “I’m sorry.”—“Oh, it’s nothing. A teenage infection, it happens quite often.” The Swallow’s Nest was still two kilometers away, so we had to climb back up the cliffs; on top, on the terrace behind the crenellated tower, there was a little bar, empty of customers, perched over the sea; the building was closed, but they had some Portwein and an immense view of the coast and the mountains and Yalta nestled in back of the bay, white and vague. We had a few drinks, speaking little. Partenau was pale now; he was still winded from the climb and seemed withdrawn into himself. Then a truck from the Wehrmacht brought us back to Yalta. This little game lasted a few more days; but finally it ended as I wanted it to. It hadn’t been so complicated in the end. Partenau’s solid body concealed few surprises; he came with his mouth wide open, a black hole; and his skin had a sweetish, vaguely nauseating smell, which wildly excited me. How to describe these sensations to someone who has never experienced them? In the beginning, when it enters, it can be difficult, especially if it’s a little dry. But once inside, oh how nice it is, you can’t imagine. Your back arches and it’s like a blue, luminous stream of molten lead filling your pelvis and rising slowly up your spine to seize your head and erase it. This remarkable effect might be due to the contact of the penetrating organ with the prostate, the poor man’s clitoris, which, in the one penetrated, sits just against the rectum, whereas in the woman, if my notions of anatomy are correct, it’s separated from it by a part of the reproductive apparatus, which would explain why women, in general, seem to have so little taste for sodomy, or else just as an intellectual pleasure. For men, it’s different; and I’ve often told myself that the prostate and war are God’s two gifts to man to compensate him for not being a woman.