A Perfect Vacuum (7 page)

And at last the biological sciences are nearing the complete elimination of sexual reproduction, that superfluous and prehistoric relic. Embryos will be conceived synthetically and grown according to programs of genetic engineering. From them will come neuter individuals, and this finally will put an end to the terrible memories that linger in the minds of all who have lived through the catastrophe of sex. In bright laboratories, those temples of progress, there will arise the magnificent hermaphrodite or, rather, the neutrone, and then humanity, cut free of its former disgrace, will be able, with ever-increasing relish, to bite into every fruit—now only gastronomically forbidden.

(Suhrkampf Verlag, Frankfurt)

 

Gruppenführer Louis XVI
(or
Nazi Squad Leader Louis the Sixteenth)
is the fiction debut of Alfred Zellermann. Zellermann, practically in his sixties, is a well-known literary historian and a doctor of anthropology. He spent the
regnum Hitleri-anum
in Germany, in the country with his wife's parents, having at the time been relieved of his university position; therefore, he was a passive observer of the life of the Third Reich. We venture to call this novel an excellent work, and add that probably only such a German, with such a fund of practical experience—and with such theoretical knowledge of literature!—could have written it.

Despite the title, it is no work of fantasy we have before us. The setting: Argentina in the first decade after the conclusion of the war. The fifty-year-old Gruppenführer Siegfried Taudlitz, a fugitive from the crushed and occupied Reich, makes his way to South America, carrying with him a part of the “treasure” amassed by the notorious Academy of the SS (“
Ahnen-erbe
”), a trunk bound with steel bands and filled with dollar bills. Gathering about himself a group of other fugitives from Germany, including various drifters and adventurers, and moreover having taken on a dozen or so women of doubtful character for services unspecified for the time being (some of these women Taudlitz himself buys out of brothels in Rio de Janeiro), the former SS General organizes an expedition deep into the Argentine interior. This, with a skill that reveals his talents as a staff officer.

In a region several hundred miles removed from the last outposts of civilization, the expedition comes upon ruins that are at least twelve centuries old, ruins of buildings that were raised in all likelihood by Aztecan crews; the expedition takes up residence in these. Attracted by the possibility of earning money, Indians and mestizos of the area show up at this site, which has been immediately named by Taudlitz (for reasons not yet disclosed) “Parisia.” The former Gruppenführer makes efficient work brigades out of them and sets his armed men over them as taskmasters. Several years pass, and from such activity emerges the shape of the realm that Taudlitz had envisioned for himself. In his person he combines a ruthlessness that stops at nothing with the addled idea of re-creating—in the heart of the jungle—the French State in its heyday of monarchical splendor, for he himself is to be the reincarnation of none other than Louis XVI.

An aside here. The above does not summarize the novel, nor does what follows, for the progression of the action in the novel does not conform to the calendar chronology given in our account. We are well aware of the demands of artistic composition that governed the author; however, we wish to reconstruct in chronicle fashion, as it were, the train of events, so that the central concept, the idea of the work, will stand out clearly and with particular force. At the same time, we are passing over, in our “chronologized” recapitulation of the work, a multitude of side issues and minor episodes, because it is plainly impossible to contain in any capsule form a whole, when that whole runs to two volumes of over 670 pages. But we will attempt in the present discussion to deal as well with the sequence of events that Alfred Zellermann implements in his epic.

Thus is created—to return to the story—a royal court, with a host of courtiers, knights, clergy, lackeys, and a palace chapel and ballrooms amid the fortress battlements, into which have been transformed the venerable ruins of the Aztec buildings, their rubble rebuilt in a manner architecturally absurd. Having at his side three men blindly loyal to him—Hans Mehrer, Johann Wieland, and Erich Palatzky (soon they become Cardinal Richelieu, the Duc de Rohan, and the Duc de Montbazon)—the “new Louis” manages not only to maintain himself on his bogus throne, but also to shape the life going on about him in accordance with his own designs. At the same time—and this is important in the novel—the historical knowledge of the former Gruppenführer is fragmentary at best and full of gaps. One can hardly say he possesses such knowledge at all; his head is filled not so much with bits and pieces of the history of seventeenth-century France as with tripe carried over from his boyhood days, when he would lose himself in the adventures of Dumas, beginning with
The Three Musketeers,
and later, as an adolescent with “monarchistic” leanings (that is what he called them; in fact they were merely sadistic), would pore over the books of Karl May. And since onto the memories of this reading cheap romances were afterward added, voraciously devoured and thumbed, it is not the history of France that he is able to bring to life, but only the brutally primitivized, outright imbecilic hodgepodge that in his mind stands for it, and that has become for him a profession of faith.

Actually—as far as one can gather from the numerous details and references scattered throughout the work—Hitlerism was for Taudlitz only a choice of necessity, the alternative that, relatively speaking, suited him the most, being the closest to his “monarchistic” fantasies. Hitlerism, in his eyes, came close to the Middle Ages—granted, not half so close as he would have liked! But it was, in any event, more welcome than any form of institutional democracy. On the other hand, having his own private, secret “dream of the crown” in the Third Reich, Taudlitz never succumbed to Hitler's magnetism; he never believed in Hitler's doctrine, and for this reason was not obliged to mourn the fall of “Great Germany.” Instead, having wit enough to see it coming, particularly since he had never identified himself with the élite of the Third Reich ( though belonging to it), he prepared himself for the disaster appropriately. His cult of Hitler, universally known, was not even the product of self-deception; for ten years Taudlitz played a cynical comedy, for he had his own myth, which gave him a resistance to Hitler's, and this proved especially convenient for him, because those disciples of
Mein Kampf
who made even a small attempt to take the doctrine seriously, more than once—as in the case of Albert Speer—felt themselves alienated from Hitler later on, whereas Taudlitz, as a man who only outwardly professed each day the views prescribed for that day, was immune to any heresy.

Taudlitz believes implicitly and without reservation only in the power of money and force; he knows that with material goods people can be persuaded to go along with any plan of a sufficiently openhanded master, provided that master be also duly resolute and uncompromising in the carrying out of commitments once made. Taudlitz does not in the least trouble himself about whether his “courtiers,” that many-colored throng made up of Germans, Indians, mestizos, and Portuguese, really take seriously the vast spectacle imposed over many years, which he has staged in a manner that is—would be, to an outside observer—unspeakably insipid, uninspired, crass, or whether any of the actors believe in the reasonableness of the court of the Louis, or are instead only playing a comedy, reckoning on the payment, possibly also on making off with the “King's bundle” after the death of the ruler. The problem does not appear to exist for Taudlitz.

The life of the court community is so patent a forgery, and a clumsy one at that, it is such a piece of unauthenticity, that at least the more clearheaded of the people, those who came later to Parisia, as well as all who with their own eyes saw the origination of the pseudo-monarch and the pseudo-princes, cannot—even for a minute—have any doubt in this regard. And therefore, particularly in its early days, the kingdom resembles, as it were, a person schizophrenically split in two: one speaks one way at the palace audiences and balls, especially in the vicinity of Taudlitz, and quite another way in the absence of the monarch and his three confidants, who ensure in a most ruthless manner (with torture, even) the continuation of the imposed game. And it is a game decked out in rare splendor, bathed in a glitter now not false, for a stream of caravan supplies, paid for with hard currency, has in the space of twenty months raised castle walls, covered them with frescoes and Gobelins, dressed the parquet floors with elegant carpeting, set out endless pieces of furniture, mirrors, gilt clocks, commodes, built secret doors and hiding places in the walls, alcoves, pergolas, terraces, encircled the castle with an enormous, magnificent park, and, beyond, with a palisade and a moat. Every German is an overseer and keeps the Indian slaves under thumb (it is by Indian sweat and toil that the artificial kingdom comes into being); he parades attired like a true seventeenth-century knight, but wears on his gold belt a military handgun of the “Parabellum” make, the final argument in all disputes between feudal capital and labor.

But the monarch and his confidants slowly, and at the same time systematically, eliminate from their surroundings every manifestation, every sign that would immediately unmask the fictitiousness of the court and the kingdom. So first a special language comes into use; in it may be worded any news that makes its way—roundabout, to be sure—in from the outside world, such as the possibility that the “nation” may be threatened by intervention on the part of the Argentine government; meanwhile these wordings, conveyed to the King by his high officials, dare not lay bare—that is, state point-blank—the unsovereignty of the monarch and the throne. Argentina, for example, is always called “Spain” and treated as a neighboring country. Gradually they all become so much at home inside their artificial skins, and learn to move about so naturally in splendid robes, to wield the sword and the tongue with such address, that the lie sinks deeper—into the very warp and woof of this fabric, this living picture. The picture remains a humbug, but a humbug now that throbs with the blood of authentic desires, hatreds, quarrels, rivalries; for at the unreal court are hatched real intrigues, courtiers strive to undo others, to draw nearer the throne over the bodies of their rivals, that they may receive from the hands of the King the high ranks and honors of the toppled; therefore the innuendo, the cup of poison, the informer's whisper, the dagger, begin their hidden, altogether genuine work; yet only so much of the monarchistic and feudal element continues to inhere in all of this as Taudlitz, the new Louis XVI, is able to breathe into it from his own dream of absolute power, a dream dramatized by a pack of former SS men.

Taudlitz believes that somewhere in Germany lives his nephew, the last of the line, Bertrand Gülsenhirn, whose age was thirteen at the time of the fall of Germany. To seek out this youth (now twenty-one) Louis XVI sends the Due de Rohan, or Johann Wieland, the only “intellectual” among his men, for Wieland had been a physician in the Waffen SS and had carried out, in the camp at Mauthausen, “scientific studies.” The scene where the King entrusts the Due with the secret mission to find the boy and bring him to the court as the Infante is among the finest in the novel. First the monarch is gracious enough to explain how he is much troubled by his own childlessness, out of consideration for the good of the throne, that is, the succession; these opening phrases help him continue in this vein; the insane savor of the scene lies in this, that now the King cannot admit even to himself that he is not a real king. He does not, in fact, know French, but, employing German, which prevails at court, he maintains—as does everyone after him, when the subject arises—that it is French he is speaking, seventeenth-century French.

This is not madness, for madness would be—now—to admit to Germanness, even if only in language; Germany does not exist, inasmuch as France's only neighbor is Spain (that is, Argentina)! Anyone who dares utter words in German, letting it be understood that he is speaking
thus,
stands in peril of his life: from the conversation between the Archbishop of Paris and the Due de Salignac (Vol. I, p. 311), it may be inferred that the Prince de Chartreuse, beheaded for “high treason,” in reality had drunkenly called the palace not simply a “whorehouse,” but a “German whorehouse.”
Nota bene
: the abundance of French names in the novel, which bear a striking similarity to the names of cognacs and wines—take, for example, the “Marquis Châteauneuf du Pape,” the master of ceremonies!—undoubtedly derives from the fact (though nowhere does the author say it) that in the brain of Taudlitz there clamor, for readily understandable reasons, far more names of liquors and liqueurs than those of the French aristocracy.

In addressing his emissary, then, Taudlitz speaks as he imagines King Louis might speak to a trusted agent being sent on such a mission. He does not tell Monsieur le Due to put aside his sham apparel, but, on the contrary, to “disguise himself as an Englishman or a Dutchman,” which simply means to try for a normal, up-to-date appearance. The word “up-to-date,” however, may not be uttered—it belongs among those expressions that would dangerously weaken the fiction of the kingdom. Even dollars are called, always, “thalers.”

Provided with a considerable amount of ready money, Wieland goes to Rio, where the commercial agent of the “court” operates; after acquiring good false identity papers, Taudlitz's emissary sails for Europe. The book passes in silence over the peregrinations of his search. We know only that they are crowned with success after eleven months, and the novel, in its actual form, characteristically opens with the second conversation between Wieland and the young Gülsenhirn, who is working as a waiter in a large Hamburg hotel. Bertrand (he will be allowed to keep the name: it has, in the opinion of his uncle Taudlitz, a good ring) is first told only of his millionaire uncle who is prepared to adopt him as a son, and for Bertrand this is reason enough to leave his job and go off with Wieland. The journey of this curious pair serves as an introduction to the novel and performs its function brilliantly, because we have here a moving forward in space which at the same time is, as it were, a retreating back into historical time: the travelers change from a transcontinental jet to a train, later to an automobile, from the automobile to a horse-drawn wagon, and finally cover the last 145 miles on horseback.