Georg Letham

 

 

 

 

 

Ernst Weiss

Georg Letham

P
HYSICIAN AND
M
URDERER

Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg

 

 

archipelago books

 

 

English translation copyright © 2010 Joel Rotenberg

Georg Letham. Arzt und Mörder
© Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien 1931

First Archipelago Books Editions 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiss, Ernst, 1882–1940.

[Georg Letham. Arzt und Mörder. English]

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer / by Ernst Weiss ;
translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg.

p. cm.

ISBN
978-0-9800330-3-8

I. Rotenberg, Joel. II. Title.

PT
2647.
E
52
G
413 2009        833'.912–dc22

2008048790

Archipelago Books

232 Third St. #A111

Brooklyn, NY 11215

www.archipelagobooks.org

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

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Jacket art: Folkwang-Auriga-Verlag

This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation,
The National Endowment for the Arts,
and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Georg Letham

P
HYSICIAN AND
M
URDERER

Contents

FOREWORD

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

Whether we appear as defendant or as witness, we unfinished human beings are not spared the trials of this even more unfinished world. Cruelty and futility are what we meet with, and during our brief existence we see them ad nauseam. No one can avoid this first philosophy. Constant hardship for the individual who battles in vain in the grim war of all against all; in this best-ordered of all possible worlds, pain, affliction of mind, inconceivable physical suffering, together with an idiotic waste of the energy and means given by nature. Who could make sense of it?

To make some sense of the world, to gain knowledge–this is what one tries to do every day of one's life, without success. So what is a thinking man with any strength of will going to strive for, if not fleeting pleasure? And what can this pleasure be, if not a delirium that, to be replicated, requires greater quantities of deliriant each time? But if increasingly violent efforts are needed simply in order to make life bearable, the moment will soon come when one will violate the law of the polity and of human solidarity and recklessly infringe upon the rights of others. And, very naturally, those others will try to protect themselves and stop the violator from doing what he is doing.

The profound, truly disastrous disorder and futility of nature and the world–what in the scientific realm we call the pathological, in the moral realm the criminal–these are constant, they will always be with us no matter what the future brings. Even after the most terrible catastrophes have happened, nature and society will still gaze at us with the same expression of mindless, animal earnestness. But it is only the thinking man who must watch all this with awareness and understanding, and that is why he is to be pitied. Find a place for yourself! But how? Nations are as mindless as individuals. Pitch in, contribute what you can! Help out! Try to change things! Change? But where to begin? If only it were possible to help. But in nine hundred ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, the individual will not be strong enough. If only one could at least believe in a transcendent order, find a big idea to hang on to, call it Jesus Christ or love of country or–science!

Beauty, peace, harmony–all this, too, is no more than a delirium. Only wealth and knowledge give the individual a bit of a foothold.

Too weak to be of help and lost to faith from childhood; given over to all the antisocial urges of his heart (the original sin?); never understood by his fellows and thus always profoundly alone; tugged this way and that by internal contradictions, like a malaria patient who sweats and shivers as he oscillates between subnormal and supranormal temperatures; with scientific ideas in his mind, but no hope in his heart, a heart that ages year by year yet never grows up; with a human life on his conscience, but no real conscience among his contradictory and self-canceling character traits–is all that my self? No, only part of it.

Yes, to give an account of such a life–not just some of it, but all of it–this might be a task for the modern novel.

That I have not only passed through my life but am also attempting
to give an account of it–is this not already a great deal? Such an attempt requires strength and clarity of mind, more strength and clarity of mind, perhaps, than I can credit myself with. Already I feel the difficulties of a coherent confession and work of art that will move and enlighten. My greatest fear is that I will not be understood, and fail for that reason.

If only I can convey all I have gone through! That is everything. I will try. Let it be an experiment. My last, perhaps.

It will not be easy. I am the protagonist who both acts and is acted upon. Scientist and criminal. Physician and murderer. The two are difficult to reconcile. Inevitably I will stumble. But will I be able to record my errors faithfully? Or will I be content simply to record the events as I see them? The rules of art are foreign to me too, I have no art at all. As I write this, at the age of more than forty, I know little of aesthetic laws, notwithstanding the odd love I have for the beautiful and the perfected–for the perfect. My hand is not clumsy and is fairly steady when doing experiments, but it lacks such art.

I set to work without great faith, without optimism. But where there is no optimism, is realism possible, can there be a work at all? I will try nonetheless. I will hold up a mirror to myself. With a steady hand. With the exacting eye of a scientist. Without mercy toward myself, just as I showed none toward others. What is man, that he shows mercy toward his own kind?

This is the best I can do. Perhaps someone else will be able to create a realistic novel out of my report on these “experiments on living souls.”

How could I, Georg Letham, a physician, a man of scientific training, of certain philosophical aspirations, let myself be so far carried away as to commit an offense of the gravest sort, the murder of my wife? And to commit this crime chiefly for financial reasons? Or so it would appear to the outsider. For money was in fact the one thing I could never get from that woman, who was doglike in her attachment to me. Am I reviling her with this word “doglike”? No. I am only attempting to explain, and so far I have not succeeded. There is a gaping internal contradiction here, and yet that is how it was.

There was astonishment in legal circles and among the general public, as represented by opinions in the metropolitan press, that during my trial, when it was a matter of life and death to me, I yawned. It was the third day of the trial, the heat was oppressive, the oral arguments were telling me nothing new, and yet–how could a person accused of such a crime be so blatantly uninterested in the outcome of his trial? But this contradiction is only apparent, unlike the many true contradictions in my character. It may have interested others what became
of me. But it could not interest me what others thought of my crime or by what “punishment,” under what section of the law, they exacted redress for the purpose of “retribution and deterrence.” I could not have gone through all I had gone through and still acknowledged the logical connection between crime and punishment. What law would apply to me? Common law and traditional law do not do me justice. And natural law? Too often I had seen the innocent suffer, while the guilty–vile and despicable creatures–attained happiness. They could sentence me. But they could not force me to recognize this sentence, execution or exile to C., where yellow fever and other tropical scourges were at that moment raging, as punishment.

Or were these arguments supposed to be enlightening me about my antisocial nature, about my “morbid character,” about my unfitness to live as a respectable citizen in a well-ordered state? My own experience of this “well-ordered state,” as whose moral exponent the court presented itself, had shown me that it was anything but a healthy, moral organism of orderly character.

But I had done the deed. Indeed I had, and nothing else mattered. And if a human being has on his conscience a crime so irrefutable that it can never be denied or glossed over or excused–if I had actually been driven to extinguish a human life, what is the good of talk, of lengthy oratory and presentations of evidence? The one who committed the crime cannot save himself now. But then he never could, not even
before
his crime. Even if he had foreseen
everything
, would not the internal forces that drove him still have been stronger than the counsel of reason?

His outward fate may be decided now. There is hardly anything left to hope for. If my skin is thick, I will survive a good deal. If I am sensitive,
I will perish. What is, is. Everything has happened. Everything is over.

In my youth, after my father had carried out his educational experiments on me, I worshipped objective knowledge in the form of natural science and subjective enjoyment of life in the form of money. Money was more than a superficial pleasure–it seemed to me the only and therefore the best substitute for God in our otherwise faithless time. Money is the ground beneath one's feet. He who has money at least has something. He is standing on the securest foundation there is in the contemporary world order.

To know and to possess as much as possible–such a simple recipe, and yet so difficult to follow! How devotedly I toiled, in my heart always disinterested, cold, and isolated, in the service of these two gods, spending my nights in experimental bacteriological facilities and pathology laboratories or at the gaming table–and in both my endeavors I had luck. With the help of my winnings, I carried out the most extravagant experiments (chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys are incredibly expensive). I sought distraction in work when I was tired of gambling, and sought distraction in gambling when I no longer had the drive and concentration necessary for intellectual work. At the green baccarat table, I had new ideas for scientific experiments. My fortunes were happy, but I was seldom happy myself.