“…Brigitte, I only have tonight to write you the truth of my soul. I know I am hurting you, but I have no one else in the world with whom to share the bitterness of a cup I must drink to the dregs. And since you are my wife in spirit, you must find the courage to drink this cup with me, even if your reason is shaken, as mine often is. The single absolute duty of those alive today is to drain the bitter cup to the last drop, overcoming our shaking limbs and minds, perhaps in order to be able to say afterward: Everything is accomplished. Here I am.
“…I can’t tell you all of it, it’s impossible to tell it all, even more to see it all and to understand it all. We are moving through the banality of chaos and I can only recall minor, episodic things, poor simple things that sometimes enlighten me. I am a man without grandeur, a humble man unable to take in big events… But don’t doubt me, Brigitte, I am a very good soldier who fulfills his duty at every moment, conscientiously, as if I had no conscience. They’re going to put me up for another decoration, which would mean a few days’ special leave to see you, and then they’ll make me a noncommissioned officer. I’m not especially eager, having no wish for personal responsibility, but do I have the right to abandon it to others? If I’m chosen, I will obey. My body and my will obey, my spirit remains free and refuses. What more can I do? If it weren’t for you, I would consent to be shot. Through you, I perceive a living world for whose sake the survivors must live. They alone will know, will reflect unceasingly upon what must never happen again, upon that which must be excised from mankind. I live in remorse and apprehension because I dread betraying our people’s cause in my thoughts, but I also fear to betray the universal principle of which our people is just one moment, one face. Maybe that’s the truly unpardonable war: between a people and its universal homeland…
“…Was it necessary to unleash hell on earth, did we have to do what we are doing? I have no right to stand apart from anyone, not from the Jews and not from M, who desires the death of the Jews; I’ve no right to consider myself superior to anyone. The only thing I’m certain of is that this crime is the crime of all men. We were the victims of tremendous historical injustices, but every country can say the same, and we’ve inflicted injustices on others — it goes around and around. Were we really so stifled by the Treaty of Versailles? I don’t know anymore. I do know that the world is far more stifled today, and we’re the ones who beckoned to the avalanches and told them: Fall! If the unparalleled energy we devoted in central Europe to a reenactment of the conquests of Sargon and Ramses had been used to build a new, just, dignified nation at the service of the Universal, what an ideal victory we should have won! All the wrongs would be put to rights on a higher plane than that of borders, and what border would not dissolve before the mere presence of a superior humanity?
“…Now the whole world is against us and we are alone. I wonder whether the Seer, in whom so many of the disheartened believed so as to escape from their small despairs, may not be mad. However many gallons of blood we shed, our own or that of others — for human blood is a single substance — we’ll never reach New York, or Tobolsk, or San Francisco, or Baghdad, and that being so we will never gain victory, or peace, or pride (for those who feel compensated by pride), or forgiveness. Our pitiable armies are on the run, our pitiable dead remain as sole occupiers of the conquered lands, sole fraternizers with the dead of other peoples. The Seer should have foreseen it, the Seer was blind! The murder and destruction we have dealt out are turning around to devour us. We should never have followed the Seer! We should have kept our reason, but had we any other choice? I could have let myself be sent to Dachau — I thought about it. Can I be more useful there? I asked myself. Now I see that I might have been more upright, more faithful there. But how could I have known then what I know now? There are plenty of sleepwalkers in our ranks, but almost all of them are beginning to feel, deep down in their hearts, however confusedly, something of what I write here. We are prisoners, all of us. We condemn ourselves…
“…The death of another man is my own death. A man who kills may not know it, but in reality he is killing himself. The frenzy of certain warriors — even more that of the exterminators, whose baseness places them a thousand million leagues below the warriors — is a suicidal frenzy…
“…But is it still permissible to believe in mankind? If our side alone were to blame, it would fill me with relief, it would help me to regain my trust. But I’ve seen too much to believe that… Is it all the fault of the system? Systems are such heavy chains that they exonerate the infinitesimal individual, the thinking reed, the trampled reed. What would Pascal or Spinoza have done in Dachau? Or at the front, under a helmet? The reed stops thinking, becomes malleable matter, identifies with its chains. The system is the work of men, after all, men who are made by it as much as they were makers of it. And not all of them are deranged, clearly; most aspire simply to live off it in peace, killing with the calculated, businesslike temperance of their mentors. I am wrestling with these problems, but, I am and I do not consent! Since I said these salutary words to myself, weak as I am, groping in darkness, I felt I was at the dawn of deliverance. And you’ll know that if I fall, the end will have been the lighter for it. Proof exists that a man need not necessarily consent to what he does. Obey and disobey. Submit to earthly solidarity — or to the crushing weight of the chain — while salvaging something more essential. If I woke up the men who are lying asleep around me in this derelict schoolroom and asked each one (even the incredibly brutal elite soldiers, prey to regressive neuroses): What do you wish for the most? they would all answer: The end! Some would unconsciously be including their own end in that of the nightmare. Of course, one out of three would turn me in, and I’d be shot before the day was out. A curse on the blind Seer, a curse on ourselves!
“…We have been defeated. Even the fanatics can’t help but see it. Someone was saying that we should hold up to the whole world our refusal to capitulate by committing mass suicide. I managed not to ask the question that was on the tip of my tongue: Have the whole people commit suicide? The Race? (For that matter, didn’t we begin the suicide? Not only ours, but Europe’s?) A single word can become deadly dangerous. I’ve learned of a secret order for the immediate execution of suspects. Too little, too late, according to M. He feels that the elimination of two million Germans during the early days of the regime would have made the regime more exemplary, more homogeneous, and might even have avoided a war by scaring the daylights out of international Jewry… I pointed out that a lot more than two million Germans have died as it is. He was so caught up by his reasoning that he stared at me pensively through those stony blue eyes without losing his temper. He then produced a theory — I believe that disaster stimulates his brain. The trick, he said, would be to select death itself, a selection that would be the apotheosis of eugenics…