Iran Resources — Weaving Our Worlds        finally, ossified into a scientific formula and turned into a spell, there was the ‘new weapon’, the magic letter V that could always be heightened. If the V1 wasn’t up to it and if the V2 remained ineffective, why shouldn’t one keep one’s hopes alive by banking on the V3 and the V4? The magic letter V takes a strange revenge: V was originally the secret code used by the illegal freedom fighters in the occupied Netherlands to identify themselves, V stood for Vrijheid, freedom. The Nazis appropriated the sign, reinterpreted it as standing for ‘Victoria’ and shamelessly forced Czechoslovakia, a country more cruelly tyrannized than Holland, to display this conceited and long-since fraudulent sign of victory on its postmarks, on the doors of its cars and its railway coaches. and then, in the final phase of the war, V became the abbreviation for Vergeltung {vengeance}, the emblem of the ‘new weapon’ which would avenge and bring to an end all the suffering inflicted on Germany. The Olympics of 1936 were a further factor in the popularization and glorification of sport. It matters a great deal to the Third Reich that in the eyes of everyone at this international event it should appear as a leading light in the civilized world, and in accordance with its whole outlook – which places physical prowess on a level with intellectual achievement, or rather above it – it surrounds the Olympics with an incredible splendour, to the extent that for an instant even racial differences are forgotten in the glitter: the Jew Helene Meyer, ‘blonde He’, is allowed to contribute her skill at foil to the victory of the German fencing team, and the high jump of a black American is celebrated as if the leap had been achieved by an Aryan and Nordic man. Thus the Berliner Illustrierte can carry the phrase ‘the world’s greatest tennis genius’, and straight after, in all seriousness, compare an olympic achievement with the actions of Napoleon I. The reputation of sport is heightened and promoted thirdly through the importance attached to the automobile industry, through the ‘Führer’s roads’ and all the exalted road races held at home and abroad; here all the factors which pertained to military sport and the olympics also play a part, coupled with the crucial problem of job creation. But long before military sport and the Olympics and the Führer’s roads could make an appearance, Adolf Hitler had a simple and brutal passion. In Mein Kampf, when he sets out the ‘fundamental principles of education in the völkisch {national} state’ and discusses sport in detail, he talks more about boxing than anything else. His observations culminate in the following sentence: ‘If only our entire intellectual elite had not been educated so exclusively in the refined codes of polite behaviour, had it instead learned how to box properly, the German revolution of pimps, deserters and other such riffraff would never have been possible.’ A moment or two earlier Hitler had been defending boxing against the accusation of exceptional brutality – probably with justification, I’m not an expert; but in talking about boxing he turns it into a plebeian activity (neither proletarian nor traditional), accompanying, or resulting from, a furious row. But the vast majority of images, the ones most easily remembered and by far the most brutal, were always taken from boxing. It is futile trying to examine how the connection with sport, and boxing in particular, actually came about – one is still struck dumb by the complete absence of human emotions on display here. Following the catastrophe at Stalingrad, which had devoured so many lives, Goebbels is able to find no better expression of unbroken courage than this sentence: ‘We wipe the blood from our eyes in order to see clearly, and, when it is time to enter the ring for the next round, our legs stand firm once again.’ And a few days later: ‘A people who so far has only boxed with its left hand, and is now in the process of bandaging up its right ready to employ it ruthlessly in the next round, has no reason to be soft.’ In the following spring and summer, as German cities everywhere collapsed burying their occupants beneath them, as the hope of final victory could only be kept afloat under the most ridiculous pretences, Goebbels finds the following images to capture the situation: ‘On becoming world champion, a boxer does not normally become weaker than before, even if his opponent has broken his nose in the process.’ And ‘. . . what does even the most refined gentleman do when three common thugs attack him, wanting to box him into submission rather than adhere to a strict code of conduct? He takes his coat off and rolls up his shirt sleeves.’ This is a precise imitation of the plebeian admiration of boxing peddled by Hitler, and what is behind it, openly for all to see, is an attempt to make people wait patiently for the new weapon which does not adhere to any code of conduct. At that time an ‘asphalt flower’ was a Berlin prostitute. It implied little or no censure, because in these poems the prostitute was a more or less tragic character. In the case of Goebbels an entire asphalt flora blossoms, and every one of its flowers is poisonous and proud of the fact. they have been ‘rooted to the soil since time immemorial’, the bedrock of the local population consists of ‘long-established Westphalians’. Thus at the beginning of the ‘thirties Goebbels still adheres to the traditional Blubo cult and sets the soil off against the asphalt. Later he becomes more cautious in expressing his preference for the farmers, but it was to be twelve years before he would take back the defamation of the asphalt people, and even in this retraction he remained a liar, refusing to admit that he himself had taught people to despise the city-dwellers. ‘We have great respect’, he writes on 16 April 1944 in the Reich having experienced the terrible bomb damage at first hand, ‘for the indestructible rhythm of life, and the rugged will to live demonstrated by our metropolitan population. They have not become as rootless on the asphalt as we were led to believe by many a well-meaning but overly theoretical book . . . The vital energy of our people is as dependable here as it is amongst the German farmers.’ When Jews were banned from driving cars in the wake of the Grünspan affair, Himmler, minister of Police at the time, justified the step not only on the grounds of the ‘unreliability’ of the Jews, but also because their driving was an insult to the ‘German driving community {deutsche Verkehrsgemeinschaft}’, especially since they had had the impertinence to drive on the ‘motorways of the Reich, built by the hands of German workers’. Yet the mixture of emotion and traditionalism leads first and foremost to the farmers and country customs – ‘Brauchtum {customs}’ is also one of those sentimental words with a poetic, old German root. In march 1945 I racked my brains every day to understand a picture in the display window of the Falkensteiner Anzeiger. It showed what was undoubtedly a very pretty half-timbered village house and, below it, a quotation from Rosenberg to the effect that one old German farmhouse accommodates more ‘spiritual freedom and creative potential than all the skyscraper cities and corrugated iron huts put together’. I have attempted in vain to find an explanation for this sentence; it can only be found in Nazi-Nordic hubris and its substitution of emotion for thought. The expression ‘Winter Charity {Winterhilfe}’ is on a par with the Eintopf. What in reality was an obligatory contribution was disingenuously turned into something voluntary, an emotionally prompted donation. Of course, in this case it is a sentimentalizing with a deliberate minus sign attached to it: Junge and Mädel don’t only sound more traditional and hearty than Knabe and Mädchen, but also earthier. For what, after all, was the ultimate purpose and eventual success of all these overblown emotions? Emotion was not itself the be-all and end-all, it was only a means to an end, a step in a particular direction. Emotion had to suppress the intellect and itself surrender to a state of numbing dullness without any freedom of will or feeling; how else would one have got hold of the necessary crowd of executioners and torturers? What does a perfect group of followers do? It doesn’t think, and it doesn’t even feel any more – it follows. In the early days of the movement chanting was very much in vogue, and had reappeared out there during the catastrophe of Stalingrad; they were hardly ever to be heard at home any more, and banners, like dormant notes, were the only reminders that they had once existed. I have often asked myself, and it crossed my mind again now, why it is that chanting sounds so much more powerful and brutal than communal singing. I think the reasons are as follows: language is an expression of thought, chanting hits out with a bare fist at the good sense of the addressee, and endeavours to subjugate it. In the case of a song, the melody is a soothing mantle, and good sense is won over in a roundabout way via the emotions. Moreover, the song of people marching past is not really sung directly to the listeners on the wayside; they are simply captivated by the roaring of a river flowing past for its own sake. And this river, the communality of the marching melody, can be achieved more easily and naturally than the communality of chanting, because in song, in the melody, there is a meeting of moods, but in a communally spoken text there is supposed to be a convergence of thought within a group. Chanting is more artificial, more rehearsed and promotes its cause more violently than song. Hitler is an autodidact, and not so much half-educated as at most one-tenth educated. (You only have to listen to the unbelievable farrago of his Nuremberg speeches on culture; the only thing more dreadful than the rubbish of this Karlchen Miesnick is the grovelling way in which it was admiringly received and quoted.) As the Führer he is proud not to be weighed down by ‘education in the traditional sense’ and in the same breath proud of the knowledge he has gathered for himself. Every autodidact shows off with foreign words, and somehow they always manage to take their revenge on him. during the final three months of the war, we passed through innumerable towns and villages in Saxony and Bavaria, and in countless railway stations, in countless barracks and bunkers, and again and again on interminable country roads, we came into contact with people from every region, every nook and cranny, every municipality in Germany, people of all classes and ages, of every imaginable educational background or lack of it, of every persuasion, with every shade of enmity towards and – as ever! – resolute faith in the Führer: and all of them, without a single exception, spoke exactly the same LTI that I had heard at home in Saxony, sometimes with a southern or western accent, sometimes with a northern or eastern one. All that I had to add to my notes during this flight were additions and confirmations. For the one and only new Nazi word I came across here was written on the arm-bands of some of the soldiers – ‘Volksschädlingsbekämpfer {people’s pest control}’. It was invariably a torture to walk down the street, and in particular to enter a restaurant; as soon as someone caught my attention I was barely capable of returning his gaze with any degree of composure. I read whatever I could catch sight of, and everywhere I saw traces of this language. It was truly totalitarian; here in Falkenstein this became abundantly clear to me. I found a little book on Sch.’s writing desk, he told me that it had appeared at the end of the 1930s: ‘The medical recipe for Tea, published by the German Association of Pharmacists’. Initially I saw it as a comic document, then as a tragi-comic one, and finally as a truly tragic one. Not only because it expressed in non-committal phrases the ugliest form of obsequiousness towards the prevailing, universal doctrine, but also because it toned down a necessary protest in the most servile manner, thereby rendering it null and void as soon as it was uttered, and revealing in the process the full extent of the conscious sleaziness of a scientific future. I noted down for myself a few sentences in extenso. ‘Across wide sections of the population there is an unmistakable reluctance to take chemo-therapeutic medications. In contrast, the desire for prescriptions of natural remedies untouched by laboratories and factories has arisen again in recent times and has met with approval. Herbs and herbal mixtures from our meadows and woods undoubtedly have something reassuring and wholesome about them. Their medicinal use is supported by traditional and successful cures from the dim and distant past, and the idea of the kinship of blood and soil reinforces the confidence in native herbs.’ Thus far, the comic element holds sway in these remarks, because it is comic how the universal slogans and tenets of Nazism have worked their way into this specialist scientific text. At this point, however, after the humble genuflection and captatio benevolentiae, a spirited defence in the interests of both business and medicine cannot be avoided. Under the guise of Teutonic traditionalism, the fellowship with nature and anti-intellectualism, together with the ‘recurrent, insidious rumours about the toxicity of chemicals’, quackery flourishes, making money out of ‘uncritically’ concocted medicinal German teas, driving customers away from the factories and patients away from their doctors. But how this attack is toned down through apologies and compliance, and how deep are the steadfast author’s repeated obeisances to the tenets and the will of the ruling party! After all, we registered pharmacists, chemists and doctors also use native medicinal herbs, but not exclusively and indiscriminately! And now ‘the desire on the part of the medical profession to expand therapies using herbs and teas, and the endeavour, wherever feasible, to accommodate the wishes and natural sensibilities of the people, is evident amongst all progressive practitioners. Therapies using herbs and teas, otherwise known as phytotherapy, are only one aspect of the whole medicinal therapy, but a factor which cannot be underestimated if the trust of the patient is to be maintained and secured. The people’s trust in their doctors, who in turn have always been at pains to foster a methodical, conscientious approach to their work based on sound knowledge, must not under any circumstances be shaken by insinuations of the above- mentioned kind . . .’ The initial captatio has become a barely disguised capitulation. I came across individual issues of pharmaceutical and medical journals, and in all of them I hit upon the same style and the same stylistic howlers. I made a note to myself: ‘Remember the Nordic mathematics, which on one occasion in the early days the Freiheitskampf quoted from our colleague Kowalewski, the first Nazi vice-chancellor at our Institute of Science and Technology; don’t forget to investigate the spread of the LTI epidemic to other branches of science.’