Ein Brudermord

A very short story ("A fratricide") by this Czech writer.  You can read the original here.

It has been proven that the murder occurred in the following manner:

At around nine o'clock on a clear, moonlit night, Schmar, the murderer, positioned himself on that precise street corner where Wese, the victim, had to turn from the street where his office was located onto the street on which he lived.

Cold, all-penetrating night air.  Yet Schmar had on only a thin blue coat; what is more, the coat was unbuttoned.  He felt no cold; he was also always in motion.  He held his murder weapon, half bayonet, half kitchen knife, wholly exposed in his clenched fist, then ran it against the brick of the cobblestones until it gave out sparks.  Perhaps he regretted his actions; to make up for the damage, he stroked the blade like a violin bow over the soles of his boot while he, standing on one leg, bent over listening at once to the sound of the knife on his boot and the sound of the fateful alleyway.

Why did private citizen Pallas, watching from his window on the second floor nearby, tolerate all this?  Human nature, that's why!  Shaking his head with his collar turned up and his robe belted around his wide frame, he looked down.  

And five houses down, diagonally across from her, Mrs. Wese, her fox fur over her nightdress, looked here and there for her husband, who today had been delayed for an unusually long time.

Finally the door bell in front of Wese's office rang – too loud for a door bell – all through the city and up to the heavens.  And Wese, that diligent night worker, stepped out of his building and into the street, still invisible, only announced by the clock; and the cobblestones counted his placid steps.

Pallas bent out even further; he did not want to miss a thing.  Mrs. Wese closed up, calmed by the clock rattling her window.  Schmar, however, kneeled down; since he momentarily had no other bare spots, he pressed only his face and hands against the stones; where everything freezes, Schmar glows.

Wese was standing just on the dividing line between the streets, supporting himself with only his stick. 

A whim.  The night sky seduced him, that dark blue and gold.  Absent-mindedly he gazed upon these colors and stroked the hair beneath his propped-up hat: nothing over there conspired to hint at his immediate future, everything remained in its senseless, inscrutable place.  That Wese proceeded was in and of itself very reasonable, but he proceeded into Schmar's knife.  

"Wese!" screamed Schmar, standing on his toes, his arm stretched out, the knife sharply drawn down.  "Wese!  Julia waits in vain!" and Schmar stabbed him on the left side of the neck, then the right side of the neck, then deeply in his stomach.  Wese emitted a sound similar to that of water rats when sliced open.

"Done!" said Schmar, and then threw the knife, the superfluous, bloody ballast, towards the nearest house's façade.  "The bliss of murder!  Winged relief by the spilling of another's blood!  Wese, you old night shade, friend, drinking chum, you ooze upon the dark streets.  Why aren't you simply a bubble stuffed with blood so that I could sit on you and you would completely and utterly disappear?  Not everything has been accomplished; not all budding hopes ripened.  Your heavy remains lie here, already inaccessible to any approach.  What is, in so doing, that silent question that you ask?"   

Pallas, choking on all the toxins in his body, stood at his double-wing door as it sprang out.  "Schmar!  Schmar!  I saw everything, I missed nothing!"  Pallas and Schmar sized each other up, which satisfied Pallas.  But Schmar could not be satisfied.  

Followed by a crowd of people at the sides of both men, Mrs. Wese hurried over with a face aged violently from the horror.  Her fur opened and she tripped over Wese because her nightshirt-covered body belonged to him; the fur coat that covered the married couple like the grass plot of a grave, however, belonged to the crowd.

Schmar, stifling his last qualm, pressed his mouth into the shoulder of the police constable leading him ever so gently away.

Fitzcarraldo

At almost precisely the halfway point of this film, the crew of the Molly Aida espies a small black object floating down the Pachitea (an Amazon tributary) towards their large white vessel. It is revealed to be an umbrella, the only remnant of an extremely ill–fated mission to the Jivaros tribe, and, one would think, a logical appurtenance to take into a rain forest. The first mate of the ship, knowing the ways of these "bare-asses" (as they are referred to the entire film), selects for his carry-on luggage a much more appropriate invention from that most civilized of Europeans. Perhaps because he understands that, ultimately, mother nature will be the least of the expedition's obstacles.
 

Although the titular character (Klaus Kinski) insists that his name is a lazy indigenization of "Fitzgerald," the story is remotely based on that of a real rubber baron, a ship, waves of overtaxed natives, and a mountain (even Cortés himself is said to have tried such a stunt). His predecessor had the good sense, however, to dismantle the craft before obliging the local tribesmen to do his dirty work. But Fitzcarraldo has no such sense, nor is he really a rubber baron at heart. His passion is and always will be opera, specifically Verdi and more specifically Caruso (whom he travels hours to hear in the opening scene). By becoming rich off the last unclaimed rubber parcel in the region, Fitzcarraldo hopes to build an opera house that will attract the greatest voices from around the world. Yet there are, one might imagine, some very good reasons why that parcel has remained unclaimed. One reason are the Jivaros, plague-ridden for over a decade and insular since the dawn of time. We are told with the opening credits that they await the advent of an alleged messiah, a "great white God." A second is the parcel's location, between two rivers and rapids such as those that actually swallowed up Fitzcarraldo's namesake. The only way around is, well, over a mountain.
 
The allegorical Ahabian elements are certainly present, Herzog does recycle some stock characters (the brooding and mysterious first mate, the drunk and carefree cook, the captain constantly warning Fitzcarraldo of his impetuous folly), and the Molly Aida (Molly is Mrs. Fitzgerald, and thankfully for her, not along for the ride) is a "great white vessel," a bit bigger than a whale, but still comparable. Yet for all his monomania, Fitzcarraldo's quest is the benevolent pursuit of an aesthete. The only things whiter than his ship and his suit are his teeth. When the cook, who is also the interpreter, tells him that, "they know we are not gods," Fitzcarraldo is more worried about his opera house than his own stature. His hubris has a good end in mind, and maybe that will entice the gods to spare him the disasterous fate that should rightly befall such a ridiculous venture.  
 
Much has been made of the difficulty of filming Fitzcarraldo, and, like it or not, both Herzog and Kinski are shackled together in eternal infamy for their parts. That the two Germans overcame their differences and the easy critique of colonialism to make it into, at times, an amazing artistic achievement, speaks volumes about the film's vision, inevitably ratcheted down into the movie poster of Fitzcarraldo pointing at the ship as it heads uphill. But scenes such as the natives' first contact with ice (for which, the cook says, they have no word) really make the film: after holding then sniffing this fantastic object for a while, the puzzled chieftain turns to his people triumphantly. He is on a deck three stories above them and that much closer to these gifts from heaven.    

Downfall

Happy families, begins a famous Russian novel, are all alike in their felicity; unhappy families, however, are all unhappy in their own way. The sad nonsense of such a generalization notwithstanding, one notices a grain of truth: we are fascinated by what is not right probably because most of the world is more or less right, and good and evil prove to be no exceptions. Throughout man's history what has been deemed good has simultaneously been deemed boring – much sadder nonsense than Tolstoy's gimmicky opening – because it is always difficult to live among people who are your superiors in piety, righteousness, or goodness. No one, you will hear ironically, wants to marry a saint. For that reason as well as from our inherent attraction to people and ideas which seem to offer us radical change, freedom, and a break from the commonness of the everyday, we tend to trust rebels, firebrands, and revolutionaries. True enough, they are often exciting and charming demagogues who will lie without compunction until they gain what they want. Yet what is remarkable about evil and the despots who espouse it is their uniformity. They all want absolute trust, absolute power, absolute obedience, absolute credit, and no responsibility; they all want to exploit others to fulfil the dreams they are too weak to realize themselves; they all want others to die so that they can live on in glory. Whenever one order is not obeyed, they claim they have been betrayed from the very beginning, that everyone has failed them, that they alone were able to accomplish the goals that took the lives of millions, that they alone deserve their honor and power. Such rantings may incur the label of asylum chants, but it is always too easy to impute evil to insanity (a favorite tactic of modern jurisprudence). Real reptilian evil is cold, calculating, and inexorably vengeful, quite the opposite of the madman who will often inflict his punishment on random people without cause or concern. And if you have always pictured the main character of this fine film as a lunatic, you may soon change your mind.

We begin with the real Traudl Junge, née Humps, shortly before her death a decade and a half ago, and we can say without fear of perjury that she does not rank among the earth's brightest mammals. Her tediously hackneyed comments might trick an ingenuous listener into thinking that she is both contrite and profound, but these are words that should never be used in conjunction with Traudl Junge. Junge belongs to that group of people who are easily impressed with the world (and, consequently, with the faces whose fame wreathes every newsstand) because they have nothing to contribute to it. So after we hear the real Junge, we meet her fictional understudy (Alexandra Maria Lara) trudging through the woods behind German soldiers in 1942 Munich. She is one of five young women who have volunteered to serve as the secretary to the Reich's chancellor (Bruno Ganz, in a role that guarantees his immortality), and you can see this obsession on their soft white faces as they lean over in unison to peer into his office. This is a matter of being a superstar, not a mass murderer the likes of which history has rarely seen. Ganz, like the historical figure he plays, is not a tall man, stooping, grizzled, his left hand fluttering behind him like wounded, dying game. He interviews the secretaries and picks Humps because she is from Munich and also probably because she is not too hard on the eyes. Despite her miserable failure in her first dictation she is awarded the job, yet another example of the typical impulsive and non-competitive methods of a totalitarian regime – which is where we realize this regime has much in common with a spoiled child who requires that his petty demands be met immediately. And at the peak of National Socialism's dominion another young person has been converted into a willing accomplice, if a rather clueless one. 

This brief introduction takes no more than ten minutes of a film that approaches one hundred and fifty. The rest will bring us to Berlin at the end of April 1945, starting from April 20, the leader's fifty-sixth birthday. The war has long since become an exercise in futility, the German population has been massacred, and even the mastermind behind the chaos wallows in self-doubt and, to a lesser degree, self-pity. Our film will cover his last ten days, from a celebration of his birth that involves no celebrating to his marriage that lasts barely a day, to his death by his own wicked hand. In a way, this is a biography of all he has wrought, from the destruction of his forces to his own, because all he left us with was destruction. He will walk, hunched over in imminent defeat, among his child soldiers and praise them for having greater fortitude than his generals; he will claim that the German people should be exterminated because this was their choice and they failed in their endeavor; he will scream at anyone who dares disobey the mildest of his whims, although he apparently has no idea about the debilitation of the German forces and their looming surrender. What you will never hear, however, is any self-rebuke. Not a word, not a phrase, not the hint of regret. When he confesses to an officer that he and his longtime companion Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) will be committing suicide, his main preoccupation is preventing the Russians from "displaying his body in a museum" like a stuffed beast plucked from the wilderness. That he is ignorant or blind or stupid about Germany's actual military might during his last inglorious days makes for an easy conclusion that he is mad. But he is not mad; not in the least. He is still the child that wants his will imposed above all else. When he orders the court martial and execution of his brother-in-law Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann) and Braun pleads for the life of her sister's husband, he bristles at any resistance "to his will." His "will" – the same "will" in this film – suffices as an explanation because and only because he is their Leader. A fact that Braun accepts as she has accepted so much the last fifteen years without "actually knowing anything about him."

And it is here that all his propaganda, every last sentence dripping with hatred, intolerance, and misanthropy on the behalf of the Germanic peoples, is revealed to be nothing more than a prism for his own shortcomings and neuroses. He is not embodying the resentment of Versailles for the Germans; a whole nation is embodying his own resentment towards his own failures. A whole nation must fight his battles for him because he is a coward, a bully and, ultimately, a wretched excuse for a human being. He screams in histrionic tones about destiny, loyalty, and courage, but what of these noble characteristics has he ever shown Germany? In his "political testament" (which he dictates to Junge, who floats in and out of the film as scared and stupid as she was at the beginning) he announces that he has committed more than thirty years to the good of the German people, the same people he claims deserve their doom. Now it is true that he volunteered as a foreigner to fight in their ranks. But he fought for a sense of belonging, and out of despair, loneliness, and desire to join a violent cause to express his violent intentions. Germany and their allies served his purposes as much he served theirs. That equilibrium would soon be shattered by his insufferable arrogance and loathing of everyone and everything, and his debt to humanity may be greater than that of any other human being. This makes him a monster; but not in any way a madman.

On that point about human beings. Much positive and negative criticism of Downfall has focused on the humanization of the dictator who permanently ruined Germany's reputation (importantly, this was the first time in German cinema that he was featured as a protagonist), but such commentary misses the mark. The film's aim is not to humanize at all – their dictator was a human being, of course, albeit as close to devilry as man can come – but to depict events and interpretations of events without one key character missing, the centripetal force of the maelstrom that engulfed the center of European culture and ingenuity and turned it into one of history's most hideous regimes (making the title also an allusion to this famous work). Ganz's mannerisms and ticks are breathtakingly polished, and his voice has been said to be a near-perfect mimic of the original. When Braun gazes at a picture of him on a table, we have to blink a few times before deciding whether or not it is Ganz, since his performance in conviction and fluidity easily surpasses all other portrayals of the dictator ever made. Why Downfall is so perfect in its tones and colors is because it could be the template for the twilight of any despotic regime, any governance by force and hatred which attempted to take full control and no responsibility for an endless thirst for power, wealth, and honor. It is always the people's fault for voting for a megalomaniac, never the megalomaniac's fault for devising a plan to take over the world; it is always those who empower, often in very dire circumstances, rather than the empowered, who are to blame. And so why does he end up, as Braun laments, talking about nothing more than "dogs and vegetarian food"? Because one represents his distance from men and the other his distance from conventional habits and mores; one supposes that his vegetarianism also has to do with his love for animals and contempt for men. Yet both are individual urges that guide him, habits that interest no one else and which, in truth, have nothing to do with human interaction. That is why there might be nothing more evil than an abominably spoiled child who thinks he can do anything with impunity. And those initially deprived of such privileges often spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up.

Phoenix

This film will be always be known for its final scene, one of the most magnificent in late memory. But it is all that comes before it – the simple chamber drama of diffidence and greed, the apocalypse that nearly ended all chambers, all dramas, all greeds – that seems underwhelming until the viewer apprehends the coda. Indeed, he hears the coda before it is actually played, much as one might anticipate the final movement in a symphony because all prior movements must disembogue into a solitary note.

We begin with a most unusual scene: a female driver navigates a recently – from all indications, very recently – demilitarized zone. Now all is quiet and bright, like the future of this once-great country, but the scars remain. Scars in the literal sense when a sort of mummy appears in the passenger seat. The car is halted by a brash English-speaking soldier, whom the driver insists has not stumbled upon “Eva Braun,” which settles our time and place. The soldier nevertheless demands a closer inspection and, in short order, solemnly withdraws and apologizes. The women proceed – a reference to one of history’s most notorious concubines was not necessary to establish the figure’s gender – and arrive at a clinic for most desperate clients. There the surgeon identifies Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) as a member of a massacred minority, and yet the camera lingers on the woman still cloaked in plaster. Some options are confronted (“One cannot look exactly the way one was before”), and some decisions made. While overnighting in the hospital, our mummy wanders into the hallway only to spot a parallel shape and ambition a few doors down. They both end up in a room neither should have entered, a cabinet of memories, and who we think is our invisible woman cradles a photograph pinned to the wall. The picture may or may not contain her former self, but it is certainly outshined by the loutish smile of Johnny Lenz (Ronald Zehrfeld).

The lady who slowly unravels herself – literally and figuratively – is Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss). Nelly has just survived an unspeakable evil, one so incredible and all-encompassing that its mere endurance is considered a death of sorts; in fact, Nelly is presumed dead by her loutish husband and everyone else. Black-eyed and dented, she is driven by Lene to a pile of ghastly rubble only to be informed that what remains of her home is roughly akin to what remains of her immediate family, prompting Lene to propose a special ascent. Yet Nelly hesitates, and she hesitates because of a certain loutish smile. Nelly will seek out Johnny, because she believes only Johnny will be able to look past the internal and external wounds that have reduced her into a shadow, a grey pile of ash just like her namesake. She will find him as she left him, in a bar also named after a mythical bird, a bar once filled with the stiff, merciless soldiers who sought the annihilation of a people and a continent, now a venue of the vulgar filled with servicemen who obliterated those annihilators. But somehow he does not recognize her. She only resembles his wife, who cannot be anything except dead – and here I will permit myself an aside. We should not find it absurd that a woman could wish to remain in a country that tried to destroy her, especially if that country echoes with her language and her entire history. We should likewise eschew the temptation to judge survivors who simply wish the past to vanish during the day and resign themselves to hellish reminders each night. But what we can and should find absurd is that a woman like Nelly Lenz, once a well-known cabaret singer, could overlook a loutish smile and barrel of a gut, the only two features the viewer will ever remember about Johnny Lenz, once her accompanying pianist.  So when Johnny is arrested one terrible October afternoon when the war has already assumed its final turn, it will only take two days for his wife to be detained as well.  The trouble with this whole story, according to Lene, is that the accompanying pianist does not accompany his wife on what will likely be her final march, having been released the very same day of her arrest – and we should stop our revelations right there.

Some implausibilities surface in Phoenix that will distract the inexperienced viewer, until we realize that we are not being asked to measure plausibility. Instead, our task involves the will to live on the part of someone who has been subjected to atrocities no human should imagine much less sustain. Is the desire to regain what has been lost in whatever form possible, even if that form possesses but a loutish smile and a claim on an inheritance? Or is it the desire to recreate what once was yet in a different form, much like the holy land that Lene assures Nelly will provide them both with peace of body and soul? The question is never quite answered, because this is a Petzold production, and because Nelly has already ingested far too many questions. What she really wants is to become again the cabaret singer who, by dint of stealth, her husband's ingenuity, and a handful of friends, remained untainted by the evil around her for the vast majority of these wicked years. So when Lene shows her a picture of former acquaintances, she safely presumes that the crosses above their heads indicate their current non-existence on earth. "And what about the ones with circled heads?" she asks innocently, and is informed that those were the very opposite of innocent. Those familiar with German cinema and literature will detect a cynicism and slenderness of character development much more typical of their Gallic counterparts, which is unsurprising given the original story. They will also detect echoes of a French tale about a drowned woman in the Seine and a deranged surgeon, and yet another French tale that in time became one of the greatest of all cinematic accomplishments.  Unlike those two unusual productions, Petzold's work relies on its actors, especially on Hoss's superhuman talents, to render a very simple tale with steadily rising power. The film, grey and unsubstantial at its onset, resolves itself into concrete and glorious hues. And, as a certain cabaret singer might whisper, my ashes like the Phoenix may bring forth a bird that will revenge it on you all.

Die Panne

The unacted crimes on our conscience might not be subject to prosecution or trial, but we cannot so quickly dismiss them (and they never quit the territory of our nightmares). At many junctures of our life we will face a moral question that may be interpreted as envy but is better understood as learned ambition. We see what others have – a home, a career, wealth, a spouse, children, fame – and we wish the same for ourselves. The worst among us simultaneously desire their own gain and concomitant loss for the envied, and it should not surprise us that these are the sort of people whose unacted villainy often devolves into the stuff of police blotters and true crime bestsellers. Yet there is a third category of observer, he whose crimes are far more attenuated and remote. He did not pull the trigger as much as find the coin that slipped under the floor mat of a car at a toll that drove to a house where a bullet was found on a carpet next to a body whose fist was still clutching a list of names of people working at the toll. If this sounds a bit like a famous nursery rhyme, we should consider all the unacted deeds that nursery rhymes tend to enumerate. We should also consider this well-known tale.

The hero, so to speak, is a certain Alfredo Traps, a traveling textile salesman and a well-off citizen of notoriously well-off Switzerland, his choice of travel in his landlocked native land being a fancy car, more specifically a red Studebaker. My profound ignorance of cars, Studebakers and all others, prevents me from offering an opinion of any value on the object in question; but Traps will later confirm that its acquisition, a year ago now, fulfilled a long-time dream (Traps is the type of person who does not have cheap long-time dreams, unless you count his floozier extramarital episodes). As sole account manager of the Hephaestus plastic product, he assures us as all well-trained salesmen must that it is the "king of plastics, untearable, transparent ... as good for industrial use as for fashion, for war and for peace." From this diatribe we get the feeling that Traps is not only talking about Hephaestus – but anyway. Traps is somewhere on the way back from his habitual "four-hundred-kilometer" business day when his beloved Studebaker endures a breakdown, our story's ostensible namesake, and the towing authorities inform him that repairs will keep the car garaged overnight. As he contemplates the nearest village, we get a brief but telling glimpse into our traveler:

There was also a little factory nearby and numerous bars and inns which Traps had heard much about, but the rooms were full, a meeting of small livestock breeders having claimed all the beds, and the textile salesman was directed to a villa where people were sometimes put up for the night. Traps hesitated. It was still possible for him to head home by train, but he was tempted by the hope of having a little fun, as there were often girls in these villages – as there had been in Großbiestringen recently – who appreciated textile salesmen.

There remains little doubt as to the mores of our Traps, whom relativists would immediately exonerate for being a child of Catholic oppressiveness that does not allow for divorce – but relativists can go relativize elsewhere. No, we are dealing with someone of loose virtues who remains on constant vigil for advantage, be that advantage material or maidenly, a trait swiftly detected by the four grizzled widowers at that famous villa.

Villa or not, an evening with four old widowers certainly does not sound like what Traps had in mind. Yet his destiny has already been chosen when the condition of a free room for the night entails keeping four old men company for dinner. Traps being, despite a later claim, unalterably bourgeois as well as someone of "adequate manners," accepts the offer and sits down to a decadent meal the likes of which he has never had. His commensals are: Pilet, the sommelier and manager; his nameless moustached host who occupies, in apparent creeping senility, a footstool; Kummer, a red-faced salami of a man in a rocking chair; and the monocled Zorn, a "long and haggard" fellow with a hooked nose and unmatched socks whose "vest is incorrectly buttoned." German speakers will know that Kummer means "worry" or "concern" and Zorn "wrath," which will make sense given their former professions. And our aged quartet are also all members of the Schlaraffia, an organization I think I will leave to the curious to investigate through the intergalactic weapon known as Google; suffice it to say that "the land of milk and honey" can be translated into German as Schlaraffenland (we add that pilet is French for a pintail, a duck with a knife-like appendage). What were these former professions? The salami was once a defense attorney, the monocled icicle a prosecutor, and the budding dementia case – a very long time ago, it seems – a judge. Pilet was involved in the field of law enforcement, but his exact role is discussed towards the middle of our tale and does not need to be mentioned here. That said, careful artists pay close attention to the exact center of their works (Dürrenmatt is generally a careful artist), and at the center of Die Panne we find the following:

'Bad luck, I'm afraid, Mr. Prosecutor,' yelled Traps boisterously, 'terribly bad luck.  Gygax died of a heart attack, and it wasn't even his first. Years ago he had been victim to one, and was told that he would have to be careful. He tried to keep up the appearance of a healthy man, but every time he got anxious or worked up, one feared a relapse. I know this for a fact.'

'Ah, and from whom, then, do you know it?'

'From his wife, Mr. Prosecutor.'

'From his wife?'

'Be careful, for Heaven's sake,' whispered the defense attorney.

Who is Gygax? Traps's former boss. When did Gygax die? Oh, about a year ago. And why is Gygax's sad lot a subject of discussion? Because Gygax's timely decease allowed Traps to take his job, which he celebrated with the purchase of a certain red Studebaker, a car he needed since his last car suffered a breakdown also about a year ago, and we have said more than enough. 

Die Panne has been hailed as one of the finest German-language prose works of the twentieth century, and its accolades are not unmerited. Had it been originally composed for the screen, we could imagine another fate for Mr. Traps (oddly, the book, play, and film all feature somewhat different dénouements), one that bespoke his remorse in all its devastating hues. But Traps has been living in that oblivion unique to the bourgeois everyday: a land of milk and honey and Studebakers. The other oddity about the book must be its introduction, a regrettably topical rant about how almost every tale has already been told (providing the novella's subtitle, "A still-possible story"), considering that a mock trial is one of fiction's oldest conceits and the backhanded modesty of exhausted storytelling even older. Still, we read on with more than amusement and enthusiasm: we actually begin to wonder about Traps, about what he may or may not have done, about why he is so willing to go along with such geriatric nostalgia and throw himself headlong into the theatrical aspect of this extraordinary 'dinner theater.' One also gets the distinct impression that a little slap-and-tickle with the local barmaid would never have been as fulfilling.