Europe Central (22 page)

—George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (1898)

1

Their slave-sister Guthrún, marriage-chained to Huns on the other side of the dark wood, sent Gunnar and Hogni a ring wound around with wolf’s hair to warn them not to come; but such devices cannot be guaranteed even in dreams. As the two brothers gazed across the hall-fire at the emissary who sat expectantly or ironically silent in the high-seat, Hogni murmured: Our way’d be fairly fanged, if we rode to claim the gifts he promises us! . . .—And then, raising golden mead-horns in the toasts which kingship requires, they accepted the Hunnish invitation. They could do nothing else, being trapped, as I said, in a fatal dream. While their vassals wept, they sleepwalked down the wooden hall, helmed themselves, mounted horses, and galloped through Myrkvith Forest to their foemen’s castle where Guthrún likewise wept to see them, crying: Betrayed!—Gunnar replied: Too late, sister . . .—for when dreams become nightmares it is ever too late.

When on Z-Day 1936 the Chancellor of Germany, a certain Adolf Hitler, orders twenty-five thousand soldiers across six bridges into the Rhineland Zone, he too fears the future. Unlike Gunnar, he appears pale. Frowning, he grips his left wrist in his right. He’s forsworn mead. He eats only fruits, vegetables and little Viennese cakes. Clenching his teeth, he strides anxiously to and fro. But slowly his voice deepens, becomes a snarling shout. He swallows. His voice sinks. In a monotone he announces:
At this moment, German troops are on the march.

What will the English answer? Nothing, for it’s Saturday, when every lord sits on his country estate, counting money, drinking champagne with Jews. The French are more inclined than they to prove his banesmen . . .

Here comes an ultimatum! His head twitches like a gun recoiling on its carriage. He grips the limp forelock which perpetually falls across his face. But then the English tell the French:
The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden.
—By then it’s too late, too late.

I know what
I
should have done, if I’d been the French, laughs Hitler. I should have
struck!
And I should not have allowed a single German soldier to cross the Rhine!

To his vassals and henchmen in Munich he chants:
I go the way that Providence dictates, with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
—They applaud him. The white-armed Hunnish maidens scream with joy.

2

In an Austrian crowd gathered to celebrate his march into Vienna (triple-angled shadows of bodies on parade, boxy tanks, goosesteps, up-pointed rifles), a woman bays before the rest:
Heil Hitler!
—Children pelt his motorcade with flowers. His tanks fly both German and Austrian flags. He drafts a law to join Austria to Germany within twenty-four hours. He’s bringing them home to the Reich, he says, his smile as friendly as when he leans across a desk to sign another non-aggression treaty with the credulous dwarfs of Nifelheim.

Dwarfs indeed! With his hands raised up (he’s so pale against his own inkblot moustache), he imparts the following unalterable truth: In this world, there are only dwarfs and giants. And
I
know who is whom!

While the sleepwalker looks on, wolf-hearted Göring, his creation, explains that Czechoslovakia is
a trifling piece of Europe.
(Brownshirts have already appeared on the premises, welcoming the sleepwalker with their chin-straps, banners, wreaths. Soon they will write
JEW
on Jewish windows, and shake their fists. In the next act, as the curtains get drawn up from the stage columns, we’ll see police coming metal-headed and rigid in the tumbrils to take Jews and hostages away.) Göring continues: The Czechs, a vile race of dwarfs without any culture—nobody even knows where they came from—are oppressing a civilized race; and behind them, together with Moscow, there can be seen the everlasting face of the Jewish fiend!

And Czechoslovakia vanishes like a handful of books flying into flames by night. Children in England and France begin trying on gas masks in anticipation of the sleepwalker’s marching columns.

Now beneath the vast gilded eagle in the Reichstag, he sets herds of tanks browsing on the Polish meadows. Bombs fall like clashes of cymbals; arms swing in unison for his government of national recovery.

3

He hesitates again. He fears what lies before him in Myrkvith Forest. Not that hesitation’s practical—hasn’t he already accepted the aliens’ invitation to the contest? He dreads their spider-holes and deceits, but war’s begun; he must roll honorably forth.

He craves to clear his mind. Yes, the curtain’s risen, but he needs to lose himself one last time within the curved black
Schalldeckel
which conceals the tunnel to the orchestra pit beneath the stage. From nothingness he came. Would he’d come from a solid wooden hall like Gunnar and Hogni! Well, he’ll
dream
Germany solid. Homeless, amorphous, he relaxes into nothingness whenever no one can see. He needs to be a certain velvet-puddled something, but fears that that something might really be nothing. He imagines how Gunnar felt when the Huns buried him alive in the snakepit. In his dreams he sometimes becomes a black bag filled with serpents. He wakes up vomiting, but the serpents will not crawl out his throat.

Gunnar had a harp; he played the snakes to sleep—all of them but one. And the sleepwalker, he masks himself in music.

4

The sleepwalker’s minions have built him a dream called Eagle’s Nest—an eyrie rightly named, for doesn’t he possess the droning eagles of steel which are now preying upon Poland? (Each Stuka’s but an emanation of his right arm cutting through the air.) Eagle’s Nest is reached first by way of a winding mountain road, which conveys the accolyte to the bronze portal, then by a dripping marble corridor through the rock, and finally by a brass elevator up into the heights; the shaft is a hundred and sixty-five feet—why, that’s even taller than the chimney will reach at Auschwitz! Here he can gaze down upon his world of henchmen, kinsmen and foemen. All the way to Poland he can see pale, flashing hands clapping, and frozen, pale faces beneath steel helmets uplifted to seek out his hoarse, loud, bullying voice. Just as at Bayreuth one finds singers and listeners sharing the same darkness, so Hitler and his vassals now dream their way through the great night he’s spider-spun out of his own fear, weaving strands of blackness ever thicker across the sky until the lights have dimmed—indeed, indeed, just as at Bayreuth! (Before Wagner, frivolous music-munchers sauntered into an opera house whenever they felt like it, and illumination accommodated them, so that musicians and trappings could be seen, rendering the singers no more than human.) And at his command, liegemen launch eastward his bride-tokens of phosphorus, lead and steel.

5

Shooting down come the Stukas, straight down, Polish streets spreading out before them like bloodstains, then bombs fall; flames take wing; people scream and run right into the machine-guns. The Stukas soar, disdaining now those crooked blackened ruins which foemen deserve, their bridges brokenly dangling in rivers.

6

His pale, alert, immobile face watches the victory parade, his eyes like a bird’s. Wagner had steam machines and colored lights at Bayreuth;
he
has the many-plumed smoke of ruined Warsaw. And all is as it was before—the same long columns of listeners at Party rallies, long squares of people, mobile barracks drawn up to hear him shouting, warning and exhorting his children of all ages. In come the Gestapo, drawing up new lists of names, confiscating old ones. In Austria they’d accompanied their sleepwalker’s voice less obviously, in much the same way that the Wagnerian orchestra lurks in the darkness past the
Schalldeckel.
They arrested three-quarters of a million people in Vienna on the first day of reunification, but softly. In Poland they need not be soft. They’re backed by all good Germans, down to the last
heil
-smiling ladies and girls, each of whom agrees with him that his foreign adventures had better be, in his own terrifying phrase,
sealed in blood.
They seek themselves in the sleepwalker’s pale mute face, his wrist clasping wrist as he endures the honors on his fiftieth birthday, sipping at the rasping static of an infinite cheer.

7

On 23.07.40 he meets Kubizek at Bayreuth. Kubizek’s his old friend from his student days (if we grant that he ever had a friend). Rejected twice for artistic studies, the sleepwalker had stolen away from the unfated other boy to become a tramp. Years he’d spent then imprisoned within the
Schalldeckel
! His life had supplied him with no indications of scale whatsoever; he could have been a giant or a dwarf depending on the size of the trees in the painted backdrop where the aliens, solid people, applauded far above his head. But then came a magic drumbeat; and suddenly our sleepwalker became one of the soldiers waving from the troop trains of 1914, and very soon he found himself desperately running through sharp-angled trenches, fleeing the gas bombs against which the handkerchiefs tied over their mouths could do far less than Gunnar’s harp. Kubizek might have admired him then, for he’d distinguished himself, but . . . Well, now that he’s the Führer he need be ashamed of nothing anymore. Troops are waving from the trains again. A huge swastika has overhung him ever since he became legal dictator.

He’s already promised to support the artistic studies of Kubizek’s children at the expense of the state. He’s taken a very kind interest, yes, he has. He’s even sent Kubizek tickets to the
Ring
.

Of those four operas, “Das Rheingold” is his favorite. (The dwarfs are starving Jewish children with weary old faces, and men with pipestem arms.) Could it be his fondness for the music which enthralls him too deeply to remember Kubizek here? Actually he’s very interested in the directing. Next comes “Die Walküre,” where at the Magic Fire music, the self-willed, virginal heroine gets safely walled to sleep by searchlights like the flames inside the skeletons of French and Belgian houses, where weeping, gesturing neighbors bury the dead in deep craters. The sleepwalker has already noted Kubizek’s frantic applause during the “Ride of the Valkyries” (a stunning, chilling, remorseless hymn to war, which thanks to the subterranean architecture gets necessarily softened and diffused a little at Bayreuth). Wanting to re-ignite the friendship, he thinks to invite him up to his private box, but just then Frau Goebbels and her husband make a scene about some infidelity . . . Now it’s already time for “Siegfried,” which he wishes to enjoy almost alone with Speer, so that they can whisper in each other’s ears about new buildings.

At last, during the first intermission of “Götterdämmerung,” he finds time for the meeting. He dreads it; he wishes he’d never been persuaded into it by his own sentimentality. He has no time for such nonentities as August Kubizek.

Shyly, Kubizek congratulates him on conquering France. He replies: And here I have to stand by and watch the war robbing me of my best years . . . We’re getting old, Kubizek.—Kubizek bows and nods, not knowing what to say.

And yet, the sleepwalker says, and yet,
this
. . . You remember how we used to stand for hours on end for Wagner, because we could not afford to sit? You remember how “Götterdämmerung” made us weep?

Yes, my Führer . . .

It’s like a bath in steel, I tell you. After Wagner, I feel hardened and refreshed . . .

He returns to his box to sit rapturous until the end of the final act, when the devoted woman sets everything she loves on fire, and buildings collapse like sand castles, windowed facades slowly falling to the street, becoming dust and broken glass.

Kubizek in his humbler box remembers how when they were youths together the sleepwalker once wrote a
Hymn to the Beloved
to a tall and slender fairhaired girl named Stephanie Jansten, but never ever spoke to her. (That is exactly how our ancient heroes fell in love, too. Siegfried and Gunnar hadn’t even laid eyes on the princesses they pined for.) O yes, fairhaired! Why, she was as blonde as the smoke which now rises up from all the synagogues! Sometimes the sleepwalker had been resolved on suicide; this mood lasted for hours on end, but the trouble was that Stephanie must be ready to die with him.

To the stage comes torchlight, wavering columns of light. When the sleepwalker shouts, they shout and thunder, their arms flashing up and down while his stiff boys bang drums. The sleepwalker speaks, or Siegfried sings; it matters not to the rigidly attentive faces. Light gleams on the side of his face.

8

In 1941 he attacks his ally Russia. War on all fronts! Now Germany’s safely surrounded by a wall of fire! How long will it take to reduce that empire to a smear beneath his boot? Three weeks, probably, but in this world exactitude sometimes fails. At Bayreuth, for example, the “Rheingold” has been performed in two-and-a-quarter hours, but occasionally it can take as long as three.

For this Russian campaign he selects a snippet of Liszt’s
Preludes
to be played on the radio as a victory fanfare.

9

The sleepwalker charmingly smiles as with both his hands he clasps the wrist of Wagner’s granddaughter Verena.

Yes, Uncle Wolf, she murmurs. I will give orders that no one is to disturb you.

He enters his private box at the rear wall. He gazes down across the empty seats, which resemble the keyboard of an immense typewriter upon which he might compose any musical score he pleases.

I will not allow this war to hinder my objectives, he whispers to himself. Russia will not die. Russia is coming at him like the dragon-worm which will rise up at the end of the world, bearing corpses in its claws. The aliens have tricked him, as he always knew they would. But he’s raised the goblet of promise. He must continue on.