Lucifers stay in shadow. Recorders remain pallid. The loud tie of the chronicler may meet with admiration, but it has no place in the chronicles.
If I – or to be a little more forthcoming, if I, Viktor Busch – have chosen this moment to step forward, then it’s only to reply to those fashionably skeptical individuals who take it upon themselves to ask who here is giving out information about Zündel: let me say then that I know Zündel’s notebooks, I know Zündel’s verbal protocols, and I know (or rather: knew) Konrad Zündel well – with all the usual limits that are conventional and perhaps applicable when it comes to claiming “knowledge” of another human being. I liked him. At the same time, I am not (was not) in thrall to him any more than he was to himself. Quite the opposite. All too often my view of Konrad’s life was and is the same as his own: namely that of the habitual spectator and commentator.
Regardless of how well acquainted I am with the source materials, I feel no inclination to provide attributions for every last detail: this was in Zündel’s notes, this was something he told me personally, this is something I heard from others, this is purely conjectural. If I had felt any such obligation to pedantry, then I would hardly have had the courage to tackle my friend.
A further word on the aforementioned “Notes.” I was aware that he wrote, and it was palpable that he was ashamed of the fact. Once, I ventured to ask him what he was writing. Konrad said (and here, for instance, it is the gist of his reply I am giving, not his actual words): Oh, nothing, nothing, just for myself, so to speak therapeutic. – And after a while he said abruptly: You know, all those secret writers, with their desk drawers full of yellow pads, schoolteachers in the main (but other professions too), those writers-on-the-side, who exceed the median by that one hair’s breadth that you need to be aware of your own mediocrity and suffer from it – isn’t it disgusting and pathetic!
Ten weeks after Konrad’s – what to call it?! – disappearance, I received a parcel from Canada. It contained a piece of plaster cast.
On a piece of card slipped in with it, I read – scrawled, no date – this odd sentence: For Pastor Busch, on the instructions of my apparently hopelessly lost son Konrad (see verso), the herewith enclosed. (signed) Hans Fischer, Vancouver. – P.S. Documents will follow under separate cover.
And on the back (in Konrad’s equally scrawled hand): Father! You never clapped eyes on me. You got Johanna pregnant that time in Genoa. Then you headed back north. Didn’t know I had gray eyes, didn’t know the least thing about me. Take this plaster cast, take these few sheets, they’re a scanty lead to your son. Later, send everything to Pastor Busch in the horrible city of Zürich, he lives at 12 Birkenstrasse, and was kind to me. Must go now, cross my name off any lists and files.
In great haste, Konrad.