A couple of days later, with Colonel Dragan’s letter to his daughter, Dalia, in my tunic pocket, and Geiger’s cynical words still ringing in my ears, I was back at the Esplanade in Zagreb and, with nothing better to do with myself until I could fly gratefully back to Berlin, I became a German tourist. I might just as easily have stayed in my room at the Esplanade and drunk myself into oblivion with the flask of rakija I had brought back with me. It’s what I felt like doing. I would have done it, too, except for the fear that once I’d started to drink like that I would never stop. Among so many others who were intoxicated with cruelty, who would have noticed one man intoxicated with drink? So, I begged the loan of a map from the concierge and went to explore the city.
In Zagreb it seemed there were more Roman Catholic churches squeezed into one small space than in the Vatican telephone directory. One of these, St. Mark’s, had a fairy-story roof that was seemingly made of thousands of Haribo candies. On the façade of every other building were Atlantes, as if the place were weighed down with its own history. It was. Between them, the Habsburgs and the Roman Catholic Church had crushed all the tomorrows out of this place so that all that remained was the past and, for most people, a very uncertain future. It was the kind of place you expected to find a Dr. Frankenstein listed in the telephone book, although the last time the scrofulous citizenry had rioted it wasn’t to burn some mad scientist’s castle but the shops and homes of innocent Serbs. Most of the swivel-eyed locals still looked as if they kept a burning torch and a pitchfork behind the kitchen door. I walked along uneven cobbled streets lined with mustard-colored houses, up and down vertiginous wooden stairways and past steep garden terraces with urban vineyards, through open squares the size of Russian steppes with public buildings, many of these a forgotten shade of yellow, like old icing sugar. Approaching the old city gate, I heard a low, human sound, and when I turned the corner I found myself in a vaulted archway where a hundred or so hawk-faced women and potbellied unshaven men stood mumbling their adoration of a shrine to the Virgin Mary, which occupied a place behind a baroque iron fence. But to me it looked and sounded like a satanic mass. Later on I saw a gang of loud young men approaching. It gave me pause for thought when I saw they were all dressed in black. I thought they were Ustaše thugs until I saw their collars and realized they were all priests; and then I asked myself, “What’s the difference?” After what I had seen at Jasenovac, Catholicism didn’t seem like a faith so much as a kind of curse. Fascism and Nazism were bad enough but this more ancient cult seemed almost as wicked.
I walked along to the city’s cathedral and found other German soldiers already there seeking respite against the heat of the day, or perhaps, like me, they were looking for something spiritual. As he came in through the door, one soldier crossed himself reverently and genuflected in the direction of the altar. A pinch-faced nun told him sternly to roll down his shirtsleeves out of respect for God, and meekly he obeyed, as if God actually cared about such observance in a country where, less than a hundred kilometers away, his priests were butchering women and children. Having delivered her rebuke, the nun took herself off into a chapel that was a little Gethsemane of twinkling candles and set about cleaning Christ on the cross with a long feather duster. He didn’t bat an eyelid. I expect it made a welcome change from a Roman spear in his side. I wondered what either one of them — Christ, or the nun — would have made of what I’d seen at Jasenovac. For all their pagan cruelty, I doubt the Romans could have devised anything more bloodthirsty than the scenes I’d seen in that swamp. Then again, maybe the Ustaše belonged in a much older tradition of persecution than I had imagined.
Before we’d left the malarial insanity of Jasenovac, Colonel Dragan had proudly shown me his special glove — more of a leather mitt, really, and properly used for cutting wheat sheaves — with a razor-sharp, curving blade sewn onto the underside so that he might cut throats with greater speed and efficiency. With this Srbosjek — his Serb cutter — the unspeakable colonel had boasted to us of having cut more than thirteen hundred Serbian throats in a single day.
But I could restrain myself no longer and to this I replied: “That such a beautiful woman as Dragica could have a father like you simply beggars belief.”
At which point Geiger hustled me back to the car and we drove quickly away before the mad Croatian colonel could say or do anything.
Now, as I sat there in the cathedral, the confessional door opened and a young officer of the SS stepped out of the booth, and I wondered to what it was he had just confessed. Murder, perhaps? And could absolution ever be given for what we Germans had set into motion in that country? The Roman Catholics probably thought it could. That was the belief they lived by. Me, I rather doubted it. Later on, I walked to a jewel of a park, lay down, and stared numbly at the shiny grass and thought the ants and the bees were more deserving of God’s mercy than me. For was I not German? And had not we Germans put dreadful monsters like the Ustaše and Colonel Dragan into power? Then again, maybe Geiger was right after all. Maybe all men were somehow at fault. The Belgians had done some dreadful things in the Congo, as had the British in India and Australia. The Spanish had little to feel proud of in the way they had raped South America. Would the Armenians ever forgive the Turks? And the Russians — well, you could hardly leave them out of the evil equation, either. How many millions of deaths had Lenin and Stalin ordered? I had seen the evidence of that at Katyn. Were the Germans so very different from everyone else? And would an apology ever be enough? Only time would tell. One day in the future the dead would speak from the past about what was being done here in the present.
Twenty-four
Goebbels listened carefully to what I was saying.
It was just the two of us, in his vast office at the ministry again. Given who he was, it was hard to imagine me talking and him just listening, but that’s how it was. The monkey instructing the organ-grinder. I wondered if anyone had ever told him of some of the terrible things that were being done in Germany’s name. While I seemed to be talking only about what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, I was also indirectly referring to what was happening on our Eastern Front. I certainly wouldn’t and couldn’t have mentioned this in any more of a direct way. And Goebbels was much too intelligent not to realize this. If anyone knew when words could mean more than they appeared to mean, it was him. With a PhD from Heidelberg, Goebbels was perhaps the most intelligent Nazi I’d ever met; certainly more intelligent than Heydrich, and that was saying something. I suppose he must have let me talk like this for ten or fifteen minutes without interruption. The head of the film studio had given me this supporting role, and now he was obliged to see and hear what I’d made of it. But finally he sat forward on the sofa and lifted one of his delicate, womanly hands to say something:
“There’s no doubt that some terrible things are being done in this war, on both sides. Let’s be clear about that. Last night there was an exceptionally heavy raid on Hamburg with most serious consequences for the civilian population. Five hundred British planes attacked and bombed the city indiscriminately. For the moment no one can estimate how many German women and children were killed. But I can tell you it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands. Not only that, but almost two hundred thousand people have just been made homeless, and I don’t know how we’re going to solve that problem. Altona was especially hard hit. That’s a real catastrophe, just as what’s happening in Croatia is a catastrophe, too. I’ll admit that. But this stupid historic enmity between Slavs is a complete sideshow to the real war. Germany’s war. So our first thoughts have to be about what’s happening here, at home. If our people ever lose their will to resist, I don’t have to tell you what will happen. The most serious crisis this country has ever faced. The Russians will do to this country and to our people what the Ustaše are doing now in Croatia. There can be no doubt about that. I know you don’t want that, Gunther. No one does.”