The Castle in the Forest (48 page)

7

Y
ears later, a girl who went to Paula's school often saw her walking with Klara. Until recently, this girl had lived on a farm, but now almost every weekday she would watch Klara take Paula all the way to school before saying goodbye with a kiss. Nothing like that ever happened to the farm girl. Her mother had always been too busy. So it did not matter to the girl that Paula was backward in class and had been left behind—the farm girl envied her all the same. A mother's love, she decided, must be as sweet as honey.

Indeed, we are there to enjoy it as well.

I
n the beginning, I said that my name was D.T., and that was not wholly inaccurate. It had been a nickname for Dieter while I was occupying the body and person of an SS man, an installation that did not terminate until the end of the Second World War. (At which time Dieter did have to get out of Berlin in a hurry.) That, in brief, is how I came to be at the edge of an uproar on a field where a celebration was continuing through the night. A concentration camp had just been liberated by American soldiers on the very last day of April 1945.

Installed in a small cubicle, I was being interrogated by a psychiatrist, Captain in rank, assigned to the U.S. division that had captured the camp. Given the tumult of the last few days, he had been issued a .45 and it now lay on the table near his hand. I could see that he was not comfortable with the weapon, but then he was a doctor and not practiced in sidearms.

The name tag on his lapel was Jewish and, needless to say, he was unhappy with what he saw.

A pacifist by temperament, this Jewish officer had done his best to withdraw from the worst of these surroundings—which is equal to saying that he was looking to flee from some most offensive human odors. Rank effluvia certainly accompanied the former prisoners' cries of joy. Indeed, it was sufficiently pestilential for the American to order me, his only available opposite number, to remain with him in this office. There, after midnight, I gave answers to his inquiries.

As alone with each other as two souls out in the ocean on a rock not large enough for three, I confess that I played with his sentiments. It was a time of defeat for me. I was nearly out of games. The Maestro had just relieved me of service. “For now, fend for yourself,” he said. “I will be moving our operations to America and will call on you again once I have come to a few determinations as to what we are ready to do over there.”

I did not even know if I could believe him. Rumors were rampant among us. One devil had even dared to suggest that the Maestro had been demoted.

This possibility—if it was true—suggested that there were elevations and depths to the Maestro's domain that were altogether beyond my comprehension. So I acted as humans might—I chose not to think about it. I thrust myself into another game altogether. I decided to play with this Jewish psychiatrist by pretending to explain the worldview of those among whom I had served. I elaborated on the psychological ventures we Nazis had taken into uncharted regions.

I was not without effect. Dieter had been a charming SS man, tall, quick, blond, blue-eyed, witty. To give a further turn to the screw, I even suggested that he was a troubled Nazi. I spoke with a fine counterfeit of genuine feeling concerning the damnable excesses that were to be found in the Führer's achievements. Outside the room, former inmates were rampaging up and down the parade field. Those who still had the strength to give voice were screaming like loons. As the night went on, this Jewish Captain could not endure his situation. Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist—as one will invariably discover—resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place. Now, given my subtle assault upon what he believed were
his
human values, the American picked up his .45, knew enough to release the safety, and shot me.

I can say that I have had to vacate a body more than once. So I did move on. I traveled to America. I spoke to the Maestro. He did remark, “Yes, that Jewish Captain showed the way. We will invest in Arabs and Israelis both!”

Upon which he wished me good luck and I was left to fend for myself in America. That is another story but less interesting, I fear. The figures, including myself, are smaller. I am no longer part of history.

All that remains to discuss is why I have chosen this title,
The Castle in the Forest.
If the reader, having come with me through Adolf Hitler's birth, childhood, and a good part of his adolescence, would now ask, “Dieter, where is the link to your text? There is a lot of forest in your story but where is the castle?”

I would reply that
The Castle in the Forest
translates into
Das Waldschloss.

This happens to be the name given by the inmates some years ago to the camp just liberated. Waldschloss sits on the empty plain of what was once a potato field. Not many trees are in sight, nor any hint of a castle. Nothing of interest is on the horizon. Waldschloss became, therefore, the appellation given by the brightest of the prisoners to their compound. One pride maintained to the end was that they must not surrender their sense of irony. That had become their fortitude. It should come as no surprise that the prisoners who came up with this piece of nomenclature were from Berlin.

If you are German and are possessed of lively intelligence, irony is, of course, vital to one's pride. German came to us originally as the language of simple folk, good pagan brutes and husbandmen, tribal people, ready for the hunt and the field. So it is a language full of the growls of the stomach and the wind in the bowels of hearty existence, the bellows of the lungs, the hiss of the windpipe, the cries of command that one issues to domesticated animals, even the roar that stirs in the throat at the sight of blood. Given, however, the imposition laid on this folk through the centuries—that they be ready to enter the amenities of Western civilization before the opportunity passes away from them altogether—I do not find it surprising that many of the German bourgeoisie who had migrated into city life from muddy barnyards did their best to speak in voices as soft as the silk of a sleeve. Particularly, the ladies. I do not include long German words, which were often a precursor to our technological spirit today, no, I refer to the syrupy palatals, sentimental sounds for a low-grade brain. To every sharp German fellow, however, particularly the Berliners, irony had to become the essential corrective.

Now, I recognize that this disquisition leads us away from the narrative we have just traversed, but then, this is what I wish to do. It enables me to return to our beginning, when Dieter was a member of Special Section IV-2a. Needless to remark, it is my hope that we have come a long way since. If the act of betraying the Maestro does not succeed in obliterating me, perhaps I will be able to go back someday to a further account of my share in the early career of Adolf Hitler, up even to the late 1920s and the beginning of the '30s, because in that period, Adolf had the love affair of his life, and it was with Geli Raubal, Angela's daughter. Geli was full-bodied, good-looking, and blond. Hitler adored her. They had the most perverse relations. As a high subordinate, an accomplished piano player and socialite named Putzi Hanfstaengl, was to put it, “Adolf only likes playing on the black keys.”

In 1930, Geli Raubal was found dead on the bedroom floor of the chamber she occupied along one wing of Hitler's apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich. She had been shot. Either that, or she had killed herself. This answer was never established. The immediate business was, of course, wholly covered up.

Nor can I satisfy myself in regard to this question. Shortly before the event, I was relieved of my continuing assignment to Adolf Hitler. The Maestro had decided that the Führer-to-be was now of sufficient importance to be guided by a presence higher than myself. Indeed, I suspect it was the Maestro who replaced me. In any event, I never learned more about Geli's death. An absolute silence was the only emanation from that event. Three years later, Hitler and his Nazis were in power, and I was then assigned to enter the body of that good SS man Dieter. I confess that I could not forgive the Maestro for my demotion, which is perhaps the best single explanation of what led me to write this book.

There could, however, be another motivation. One theme does return. Can it be that the Maestro, whom I served in a hundred roles while holding to the pride that I was a field officer to the mighty eminence of Satan, had indeed deluded me? Was it now likely that the Maestro was not Satan, but only one more minion—if at a very high level?

There was, of course, no answer to be received, but the question may have encouraged the seed of my rebellion to take root.

If this leaves the reader with new discomfort—not even to know now whether it was Satan's words that were reported or no more than the sardonic insights of one more intermediary—I will confess that I remain enough of a devil to feel no great sympathy. What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.

Yet is it not also true that one cannot find a devil who will not work both sides of the street? So I must admit to a surprising degree of affection for those of my readers who have traveled all this way with me. I have come so far myself in offering this narration that I can no longer be certain whether I still look for promising clients or search for a loyal friend. There may be no answer to this, but good questions still vibrate with honor within.

Acknowledgments

T
o my fine assistants, the late Judith McNally and Dwayne Prickett; to my good friend and archivist, J. Michael Lennon; to David Ebershoff, my editor, and to Gina Centrello, my publisher, for their ready cooperation and sharp insights; to Jason Epstein for his generous perusal of an earlier draft; to Holly Webber and Janet Wygal for excellent copyediting; to my good friends Hans Janitschek and Ivan Fisher for their readings of the manuscript; to Elke Rosthal for lessons in German; to my wife, Norris, and my nine children for the warmth they offer to my life; and to Andrew Wylie and Jeff Posternak, my keen and formidable agents.

Bibliography

Some of the books listed in this bibliography have been given an asterisk for their historical or thematic relevance to
The Castle in the Forest
. It should be unnecessary to add that the other works cited also enriched many a fictional possibility. Those titles to which an asterisk is attached did provide me, however, with a bounty of factual and chronological references that a novel in this form can never ignore. With all else, character is sequence.

—Norman Mailer

         

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