TE23 Double Feature

Anne Weber

Fatherland

your working life toward the enhancement of lives that can be enhanced, instead of to the preservation of lives that can’t achieve anything, and I looked at all us blackcoats, and I said to myself, it’s because we clerics are afraid, and we’re terrifying in our fear, the way we whimper for our poor lives, even if we disguise it as eternal life, because for us there’s nothing greater than to live quand même, that’s why we tie the hands of everyone and prevent anyone from taking another’s life. That’s why you preach the way you do, Hesekiel, that’s why you doctors toe the line, and I asked the assistant doctor I’d joined, why don’t you poison these people? The man smiled ironically. His smile meant: Why do Christians forbid it? But how marvelous, one of the patients said it himself, a splendid man, a Rubenesque Hercules. He stood naked by the wall of his room or his cell: Kill me, he yelled at the doctor when we entered. There followed a stream of insults and a stream of accusations, which conveyed that he was 158

suffering atrociously. Kill me! but you don’t have the courage. We were pulled back, and the door quickly closed. The fine young doctor next to me was still smiling ironically. In my heart, I applauded him for that, since I thought more highly of him than of us priests. But the most impressive person, inwardly, I saw today was the insane Hercules, and I applauded him in my heart as I swore to myself: I don’t wish to be smaller than you, I don’t wish to be as small as the Christian God. It begins with my password, which is “Panzerdivision.” That was the first sentence of this book. Now, after a few dozen pages, it seems to me that there’s another starting point, further and deeper back in time. How does it really begin? I’m no longer sitting in Berlin, but at a window in Normandy. Around me, all is quiet and peaceful, outside it’s calmer than it 159