Before the beginning of classes, Zündel sat in the teachers’ common room, staring into space, apparently intent on not being spoken to by anyone. He wasn’t completely able to evade the general round of handshaking that went on, but if a colleague ventured a comment on his new haircut, then a stone-faced Zündel turned away.
The kids giggled. One asked whether he – Zündel – had fallen under a tram. Another asked if he had had to repeat recruit school, or was converting to Buddhism.
It was all good-natured banter.
But no smiling here either! Zündel kept silent till the class fell silent, and every last one of them sensed that the man standing rigidly in front of them was in no mood for pleasantries.
Finally Zündel said softly: Watch out, you watch out, no one is blessed from the womb, and a pair of shears will come for every head.
Then he sat down and pulled two books out of his briefcase. – I will begin by reacquainting you, he said, with the seventeenth century. Fresh and well-rested and nut-brown as we all are, we will tackle the Thirty Years’ War. But first I need to attune you, to familiarize you with the sensibility of a bygone age of suffering, an age that is also a valedictory age, because it is the last that would not allow life to pull the wool over its eyes, that declined to wallow in the mire of false optimism. Verily, grisly things have happened since. Two global conflagrations in our century alone. And the third wiping its feet at the door. Meanwhile humanity, sunk in ever deeper gruntlement, worships at the altar of positivism, adores the doddering politicians who steer our destinies and stride around and shout and rattle their sabers only because they want to displace death. They survive as long as they project strength! And humanity the same, besotted with muscles, adores iron and steel and concrete and all things that are durable and hard and less transient than we ourselves. – Are you familiar with the neutron bomb? Yes? Did you know it is a product of modern love? A product of that worship of which I spoke a moment ago? Are you aware that it – this innocent snowflake of a weapon – will spare the bunker and the tower block, the motorway and the runway, and will confine itself to the annihilation of frail Mother Nature? – Well, there was a time when man was not ashamed of his infirmity, when he did not seek to cover over his forked nugatoriness either with body building or with cruise missiles, when man dared to see himself in his full wretched frailty. – And it is of this time that we will today speak. We will listen to two witnesses from this time.
Zündel made a long pause. Then he opened the first of the two books he had brought with him.
He said: I will read a few words from our first witness, kindly open your ears to him.
He read: “I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tethered to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinites on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape. As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go.”
Zündel set the book down, made another long pause, then reached for the other book and said: I will read a few words from our second witness, kindly open your ears to him!
He read: “Adieu, O! World, for in thee cannot be trusted, from thee is nothing to hope; in thy house the past is already vanished, the present vanishes under our hands, the future has never begun; the all secure falls, the all strong breaks, the all eternal comes to an end; so that thou art dead among the dead, and in a hundred years sufferest us to live not an hour. For here every man crieth, waileth, groaneth, lamenteth and is undone. In thy house one sees and learns only to hate to the point of asphyxiation, to talk to the point of lying, to love to the point of despairing, and to sin to the point of dying. –
“May God stand by thee, world, because thy conversation vexeth me; the life thou givest us is a wretched pilgrimage, an inconstant, uncertain, hard, rough, fleeting and unclean life, full of poverty and error; it is to be called death rather than life; for we all die in it every moment, through the many frailties of inconstancy and the manifold ways of death. From the golden chalice that thou holdest in thy hands thou givest us bitterness and falsehood to drink, and makest us blind, deaf, mad, drunk and without reason. Thou makest of us a dark abyss, a miserable clod of earth, a child of fury, a stinking carrion; for when thou hast long beset us with flattery, caresses, urgings, blows, plagues, tribulations, martyrdom and pain, then thou givest the ill-used body unto the grave. But woe then unto the poor soul that has served and obeyed Thee, O World!”*
Hereupon – visibly exhausted – Zündel clapped the book shut, and even though the bell was fully twenty minutes away, he stood up and said: Here endeth the lesson. – He picked up his briefcase and walked slowly out the door.
The ensuing free period found him again sitting silently in the common room.
He tied four knots in his handkerchief, one in each corner. Then he found a cork in his trouser pocket and sniffed at it. – Nearby two German teachers were in conversation. – I have, said the one, I have used the holidays to reacquaint myself with Goethe’s Sesenheimer poems, and I must say, it was a real treat. My wife found them accessible as well.
Suddenly Zündel spoke up. Aloud. So loud that everyone else in the room fell silent. He said: I hope your principal access to your wife isn’t bunged up with poems, that would be a pity.
His colleague looked at him with utter blankness. Zündel however – ignoring the general embarrassment – spoke on. He asked: Do you know what a tanga is? – You mean tango? his colleague replied politely. – No, cried Zündel, I don’t mean tango, I mean tanga!
Now Dr. Wipp, a geography master sitting two tables away, joined in the conversation, and said: Tanga is a port city in Tanzania in east Africa, at the beginning of the so-called Tanga rail line, which leads to Kilimanjaro!
The assembled teachers were astounded. Zündel said impressed: Very good, Herr Wipp, very well informed. My question though, was, what a tanga was, and that’s not the way you would ask a question about a city, is it now? So I’m afraid I can’t give you top marks for your answer, Herr Wipp. No, no, gentlemen, tanga – a tanga – is something else, namely a sophisticated form of ladies’ underwear that leaves the buttocks bare, a cheeky minimalist symphony of satin and tulle, also available in lace – that’s what a tanga is!
And returning to the German teacher, he said: Why don’t you buy her one of those, who knows, maybe it’ll animate your arid Sesenheimer sex life!
Deathly silence.
The colleague thus addressed, in consternation but calmly, finally asked: What’s the matter with you, Konrad?
Someone else, further off, asked: Are you crazy?
Oswald, an English teacher and a good friend of Zündel’s, jumped up, clasped him by the shoulder, and said: Koni, come on, what’s the matter, aren’t you feeling well? I’ll take you home.
But Zündel, evidently not in control of himself, shook Oswald off, and shouted: Don’t you act so sanctimonious, you bunch of pricks, you rancid humanists, you purple bumfaces, you poor, pathetic, deceitful, perverted pedagogical shits, you smeary peddlers, you blinkered purveyors of ignorance – can’t you hear it ringing?
He picked up his briefcase and ran out of the room.
Of those left behind, not one doubted that their generally so reticent, yes, buttoned-up colleague had lost his mind. But no one was willing to go after him and spare him the next lesson.
It was a senior class, consisting of just fifteen pupils with which Zündel had his final lesson, a class he generally liked teaching.
Good holidays? he asked, then without waiting for a reply, he continued: I take it there isn’t anyone sitting in these halls who thinks our seven State Councilors are not just boring old farts as we often get to hear, but cunning and unscrupulous evildoers?
The pupils looked at Zündel in bewilderment. What perplexed them wasn’t so much his question, which they failed to understand right away on account of its construction, as the term “halls” for their seminar room, which was one of the smallest in the building.
Well? asked Zündel.
Someone raised his hand and asked: Would you mind repeating the question, sir?
Zündel thought about it for a while, and finally replied: No, that’s asking too much of me. Nor was I asking a question as such. But one thing I will say to you: Be on your guard! Beware of fraternizing with reality! As soon as you come to an accommodation with it, be it out of a desire to lean on something, be it the wish to get ahead in life, you’re done for. And do you know why? The real and the divine were once one and the same thing. But the history of the world is a process of mangling. And today it is Satan who is sitting on the last, remotest tip of reality, which therefore has become one and the same as the diabolical! – What is the contemporary CV? Nauseating. Nauseating in three acts. Three acts, like a comedy. Act One: Rebellion against the pre-existent, i.e., evil. Act Two: Adjustment to the existing, i.e., evil. Act Three: Affirmation of the existing, i.e., evil. – But I forget, the language of truth is unfamiliar to you. You’ve learned it this way: Act One: Pubescent idealism. Act Two: Maturity. Act Three: Completion of maturity, wisdom, serenity. That’s the way you learned it, and so for you there is nothing more desirable than to be intimate with the real, which is to say the diabolical. So you sit on these benches year after year, staring into the grim features of hopeless trainers, and listening to the spastic feeblemindedness that falls from their lips. Has it not dawned on you that all your teachers, among whom for purposes of argument I include your parents, are nothing but crooked pimps and procurers, seeking to drive you, come what may, into the arms of reality? And do you want to know their method? – Fear! They frighten you with orders, instructions, grades, punishments, humiliation, with pressure, duress, threat and loss of love. Education is nothing but the deliberate, persistent, inexhaustible production of fear, and whoever would seek to deny that is a corrupt sonofabitch, and is crying out for treatment with red hot irons! – But what do you do meanwhile with the chronic fears that have been bred into you? – There is only one way, one method, to get rid of them: self-subjugation, assimilation, identification with the tormentors, the yelped Oh yes! to your own mutilation, the French kiss with the status quo, the ostentatious coupling with reality. – I should like to be more emphatic here, stuff it in your pipes and smoke it: existence is dying to be fucked by you, and your teachers would like nothing better than to watch you at it. And the more enthusiastically you go about it, the more relaxed, benevolent, radiant is the expression on their faces. – That’s just the way it is. End of story. – And so our lesson has come to a natural end, and it would be craven to wait for a bell to ring.
Zündel made to leave the room, but missed the door handle several times.
He turned back to the class which was sitting there in silent bewilderment, and said quietly: They’re trying to lock me up. Note the double meaning.
With that he tottered back to his desk, sat down, and wrote in his class log: Nothing out of the ordinary.
His face turned pale, his features grew sharp, suddenly he vomited. He tried to get up, probably to run to a washbasin, pushed himself upright, smiled, said “Hup!” and again ”Hup!” and slumped down in a heap.
* Translator’s note: From Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus; the previous quotation is from Pascal. The translator thanks the author for the information in both cases.