object:Deutsches Requiem
class:Fiction
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
book class:Labyrinths
Deutsches Requiem
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.
Job 13:15
M
y name is Otto Dietrich zur Linde. One of my ancestors, Christoph
zur Linde, died in the cavalry charge which decided the victory of
Zorndorf. My maternal great-grandfather, Ulrich Forkel, was shot in the
forest of Marchenoir by franc-tireurs, late in the year 1870; my father,
Captain Dietrich zur Linde, distinguished himself in the siege of Namur in
1914, and, two years later, in the crossing of the Danube. 23 As for me, I will
be executed as a torturer and murderer. The tribunal acted justly; from the
start I declared myself guilty. Tomorrow, when the prison clock strikes nine,
I will have entered into death's realm; it is natural that I think now of my
forebears, since I am so close to their shadow, since, after a fashion, I am
already my ancestors.
I kept silent during the trial, which fortunately was brief; to try to
justify myself at that time would have obstructed the verdict and would have
seemed an act of cowardice. Now things have changed; on the eve of the
execution I can speak without fear. I do not seek pardon, because I feel no
guilt; but I would like to be understood. Those who care to listen to me will
understand the history of Germany and the future history of the world. I
know that cases like mine, which are now exceptional and astonishing, will
shortly be commonplace. Tomorrow I will die, but I am a symbol of future
generations.
I was born in Marienburg in 1908. Two passions, which now are
almost forgotten, allowed me to bear with valor and even happiness the
weight of many unhappy years: music and metaphysics. I cannot mention all
my benefactors, but there are two names which I may not omit, those of
Brahms and Schopenhauer. I also studied poetry; to these last I would add
another immense Germanic name, William Shakespeare. Formerly I was
interested in theology, but from this fantastic discipline (and from the
23
lt is significant that the narrator has omitted the name of his most illustrious ancestor,
the theologian and Hebraist Johannes Forkel (1799-1846), who applied the Hegelian
dialectic to Christology, and whose literal version of several books of the Apocrypha
merited the censure of Hengstenberg and the approval of Thilo and Gesenius.
(Editor's note.)
141Christian faith) I was led away by Schopenhauer, with his direct arguments;
and by Shakespeare and Brahms, with the infinite variety of their worlds. He
who pauses in wonder, moved with tenderness and gratitude, before any
facet of the work of these auspicious creators, let him know that I also
paused there, I, the abominable.
Nietzsche and Spengler entered my life about 1927. An eighteenth-
century author has observed that no one wants to owe anything to his
contemporaries. I, in order to free myself from an influence which I felt to
be oppressive, wrote an article titled Abrechnung mit Spengler, in which I
noted that the most unequivocal monument to those traits which the author
calls Faust-like is not the miscellaneous drama of Goethe 24 but a poem
written twenty centuries ago, the De rerum natura. I paid homage, however,
to the sincerity of the philosopher of history, to his essentially German
(kerndeutsch) and military spirit. In 1929 I entered the Party.
I will say little of my years of apprenticeship. They were more
difficult for me than for others, since, although I do not lack courage, I am
repelled by violence. I understood, however, that we were on the verge of a
new era, and that this era, comparable to the initial epochs of Islam and
Christianity, demanded a new kind of man. Individually my comrades were
disgusting to me; in vain did I try to reason that we had to suppress our
individuality for the lofty purpose which brought us together.
The theologians maintain that if God's attention were to wander for a
single second from the right hand which traces these words, that hand would
plunge into nothingness, as if fulminated by a lightless fire. No one, I say,
can exist, no one can taste a glass of water or break a piece of bread, without
justification. For each man that justification must be different; I awaited the
inexorable war that would prove our faith. It was enough for me to know
that I would be a soldier in its battles. At times I feared that English and
Russian cowardice would betray us. But chance, or destiny, decided my
future differently. On March first, 1939, at nightfall, there was a disturbance
in Tilsit which was not mentioned in the newspapers; in the street behind the
synagogue, my leg was pierced by two bullets and it was necessary to
24
Other nations live innocently, in themselves and for themselves, like minerals or
meteors; Germany is the universal mirror which receives all, the consciousness of the
world (das Weltbewusstsein). Goethe is the prototype of that ecumenic
comprehension. I do not censure him, but I do not see in him the Faust-like man of
Spengler's thesis.
142amputate. 25 A few days later our armies entered Bohemia. As the sirens
announced their entry, I was in a quiet hospital, trying to lose and forget
myself in Schopenhauer. An enormous and flaccid cat, symbol of my vain
destiny, was sleeping on the window sill.
In the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena I read again that
everything which can happen to a man, from the instant of his birth until his
death, has been preordained by him. Thus, every negligence is deliberate,
every chance encounter an appointment, every humiliation a penitence,
every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide. There is no more
skillful consolation than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes;
this individual teleology reveals a secret order and prodigiously confounds
us with the divinity. What unknown intention (I questioned vainly) made me
seek, that afternoon, those bullets and that mutilation? Surely not fear of
war, I knew; something more profound. Finally I hit upon it. To die for a
religion is easier than to live it absolutely; to battle in Ephesus against the
wild beasts is not so trying (thousands of obscure martyrs did it) as to be
Paul, servant of Jesus; one act is less than a man's entire life. War and glory
are facilities; more arduous than the undertaking of Napoleon was that of
Raskolnikov. On the seventh of February, 1941, I was named subdirector of
the concentration camp at Tarnowitz.
The carrying out of this task was not pleasant, but I was never
negligent. The coward proves his mettle under fire; the merciful, the pious,
seeks his trial in jails and in the suffering of others. Essentially, Nazism is an
act of morality, a purging of corrupted humanity, to dress him anew. This
transformation is common in battle, amidst the clamor of the captains and
the shouting; such is not the case in a wretched cell, where insidious
deceitful mercy tempts us with ancient tenderness. Not in vain do I pen this
word: for the superior man of Zarathustra, mercy is the greatest of sins. I
almost committed it (I confess) when they sent us the eminent poet David
Jerusalem from Breslau.
He was about fifty years old. Poor in the goods of this world,
persecuted, denied, vituperated, he had dedicated his genius to the praise of
Happiness. I recall that Albert Soergel, in his work Dichtung der Zeit,
compared him with Whitman. The comparison is not exact. Whitman
celebrates the universe in a preliminary, abstract, almost indifferent manner;
25
It has been rumored that the consequences of this wound were very serious. (Editor's
note.)
143Jerusalem takes joy in each thing, with a scrupulous and exact love. He
never falls into the error of enumerations and catalogues. I can still repeat
from memory many hexameters from that superb poem, Tse Yang, Painter
of Tigers, which is, as it were, streaked with tigers, overburdened and criss-
crossed with transversal and silent tigers. Nor will I ever forget the soliloquy
called Rosencrantz Speaks with the Angel, in which a sixteenth-century
London moneylender vainly tries on his deathbed to vindicate his crimes,
without suspecting that the secret justification of his life is that of having
inspired in one of his clients (whom he has seen but once and does not
remember) the character of Shylock. A man of memorable eyes, jaundiced
complexion, with an almost black beard, David Jerusalem was the prototype
of the Sephardic Jew, although, in fact, he belonged to the depraved and
hated Ashkenazim. I was severe with him; I permitted neither my
compassion nor his glory to make me relent. I had come to understand many
years before that there is nothing on earth that does not contain the seed of a
possible Hell; a face, a word, a compass, a cigarette advertisement, are
capable of driving a person mad if he is unable to forget them. Would not a
man who continually imagined the map of Hungary be mad? I decided to
apply this principle to the disciplinary regimen of our camp, and. . . 26 By the
end of 1942, Jerusalem had lost his reason; on March first, 1943, he
managed to kill himself. 27
I do not know whether Jerusalem understood that, if I destroyed him,
it was to destroy my compassion. In my eyes he was not a man, not even a
Jew; he had been transformed into a detested zone of my soul. I agonized
with him, I died with him and somehow I was lost with him; therefore, I was
implacable.
Meanwhile we reveled in the great days and nights of a successful
war. In the very air we breathed there was a feeling not unlike love. Our
hearts beat with amazement and exaltation, as if we sensed the sea nearby.
26
27
It has been necessary to omit a few lines here. (Editor's note.)
We have been unable to find any reference to the name of Jerusalem, even in Soergel's
work. Nor is he mentioned in the histories of German literature. Nevertheless, I do not
believe that he is fictitious. Many Jewish intellectuals were tortured at Tarnowitz
under orders of Otto Dietrich zur Linde; among them, the pianist Emma Rosenzweig.
"David Jerusalem" is perhaps a symbol of several individuals. It is said that he died
March first, 1943; on March first, 1939, the narrator was wounded in Tilsit. (Editor's
note.)
144Everything was new and different then, even the flavor of our dreams. (I,
perhaps, was never entirely happy. But it is known that misery requires lost
paradises.) Every man aspires to the fullness of life, that is, to the sum of
experiences which he is capable of enjoying; nor is there a man unafraid of
being cheated out of some part of his infinite patrimony. But it can be said
that my generation enjoyed the extremes of experience, because first we
were granted victory and later defeat.
In October or November of 1942 my brother Friedrich perished in the
second battle of El Alamein, on the Egyptian sands. Months later an aerial
bombardment destroyed our family's home; another, at the end of 1943,
destroyed my laboratory. The Third Reich was dying, harassed by vast
continents; it struggled alone against innumerable enemies. Then a singular
event occurred, which only now do I believe I understand. I thought I was
emptying the cup of anger, but in the dregs I encountered an unexpected
flavor, the mysterious and almost terrible flavor of happiness. I essayed
several explanations, but none seemed adequate. I thought: I am pleased
with defeat, because secretly I know I am guilty, and only punishment can
redeem me. I thought: I am pleased with the defeat because it is an end and I
am very tired. I thought: I am pleased with defeat because it has occurred,
because it is irrevocably united to all those events which are, which were,
and which will be, because to censure or to deplore a single real occurrence
is to blaspheme the universe. I played with these explanations, until I found
the true one.
It has been said that every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.
This is the same as saying that every abstract contention has its counterpart
in the polemics of Aristotle or Plato; across the centuries and latitudes, the
names, faces and dialects change but not the eternal antagonists. The history
of nations also registers a secret continuity. Arminius, when he cut down the
legions of Varus in a marsh, did not realize that he was a precursor of the
German Empire; Luther, translator of the Bible, could not suspect that his
goal was to forge a people destined to destroy the Bible for all time;
Christoph zur Linde, killed by a Russian bullet in 1758, was in some way
preparing the victories of 1914; Hitler believed he was fighting for a nation
but he fought for all, even for those which he detested and attacked. It
matters not that his I was ignorant of this fact; his blood and his will were
aware of it. The world was dying of Judaism and from that sickness of
Judaism, the faith of Jesus; we taught it violence and the faith of the sword.
145That sword is slaying us, and we are comparable to the wizard who
fashioned a labyrinth and was then doomed to wander in it to the end of his
days; or to David, who, judging an unknown man, condemns him to death,
only to hear the revelation: You are that man. Many things will have to be
destroyed in order to construct the New Order; now we know that Germany
also was one of those things. We have given more than our lives, we have
sacrificed the destiny of our beloved Fatherland. Let others curse and weep;
I rejoice in the fact that our destiny completes its circle and is perfect.
An inexorable epoch is spreading over the world. We forged it, we
who are already its victim. What matters if England is the hammer and we
the anvil, so long as violence reigns and not servile Christian timidity? If
victory and injustice and happiness are not for Germany, let them be for
other nations. Let Heaven exist, even though our dwelling place is Hell.
I look at myself in the mirror to discover who I am, to discern how I
will act in a few hours, when I am face to face with death. My flesh may be
afraid; I am not.
Translated by Julian Palley
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