If my work on this book has taught me one thing, it is that I would have no future as a crime writer. The aim of the investigation was to discover the truth about Felicity, but I am left with more – and more disturbing – questions than when I began. I have come to suspect, however, that the project was doomed from the start and that, even had Felicity survived the attack and spent the rest of her life giving interviews inside Stammheim prison, her motives would have remained opaque.
My disillusion was increased by my meeting with Thomas Bücher, whom I soon identified as the ‘mysterious money man’ of Carole Medhurst’s account. I had long despaired of making contact. Liesl Martins and Manfred Stückl both claimed to have no recollection of him and Renate Fischer no interest. My approaches to various British officials in Germany likewise yielded nothing. Then, in May 2002, Andreas Forst, whom I had met at the bedside of his friend Dieter Reiss the previous July, paid me a visit in London. In his student days, Forst had made two films for Bücher’s company and he volunteered to act as intermediary. Bücher readily agreed to see me and I travelled to Munich later in the month. It seemed to me strangely fitting, given the course of my enquiry, that it should conclude in a pornographer’s office.
We arranged to meet at the company’s headquarters above its new erotic emporium in Landshuter Allee. As he was busy when I arrived, Bücher dispatched one of his assistants to give me a tour. The man, a clean-cut, fresh-faced twenty-five-year-old, discussed the marketing of ‘the product’ as though it were margarine. He led me around the ground floor which, dominated by a display of sex aids, resembled a cross between a medical supply store and a morgue. Next, we moved up to the mezzanine where films and magazines to satisfy every taste were set out in carefully segregated bays. We passed from Pregnant Beauties through Bestiality to Family Sex, where I struggled to maintain my composure at my Virgil’s assurance that the children were played by midgets. We then walked down a corridor of viewing booths to a surreal auditorium where a tower of competing video screens stretched up like a sexual Babel.
Finally, we were summoned to the Chairman’s office, a room of ostentatious minimalism, its white walls relieved only by four Picasso etchings of a maiden being ravaged by the Minotaur. Bücher greeted me with a formal, firm-for-his-age handshake and invited me to take a seat. I was somewhat put out to find that, while I was setting up my cassette recorder, he instructed the assistant to switch on one of his own. The assistant then left us and the interview began. It was conducted entirely in English, which Bücher spoke with idiomatic precision. Although at the time I felt frustrated at how little he mentioned Felicity, I realised on playing the tape that he had revealed far more than I thought.
The unease which I shared with Luke in the face of a man who had endured such horrors was compounded by his response to them. Nazism, in his view, was not an anomaly but a microcosm of human nature. Mankind was prone to evil and Hitler’s role had been simply to bring out its full scope. But, rather than rebel against this or work to change it, he had accommodated himself to it. While no one would deny that the world of the camps was pornographic – the men who forced Bücher to urinate stand alongside Irma Crese, the Auschwitz guard who reached orgasm by whipping women to death, and the commandant of Flossenbürg who masturbated openly while prisoners were being beaten – to devote the rest of one’s life to producing pornographic films would seem to grant the Nazis a posthumous victory.
Bücher is not alone in his dystopian vision. Several leading post-war film-directors, among them Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Passolini and Liliana Cavani – not to mention Wolfram Meier – have placed sexuality at the heart of their discourse on fascism. My own qualms about this approach resemble Ralf Heyn’s about Meier’s coprophiliac interpretation of Hitler. While it undoubtedly makes for powerful cinema, the lurid imagery precludes a more measured response. On the evidence gathered here, however, I am forced to concede that their viewpoint may be justified. Whether it be in Luke’s father’s shocking personification of the violence lurking between our legs or Sir Hallam Bamforth’s secret indulgence of his SS guard fantasies, the links between sexuality and fascism are clear. Moreover, they are not limited to men. Unity Mitford’s worship of Hitler was just one manifestation of the impulse that led thousands of women to offer to bear his children and thousands more to line the roads, baring their breasts as his motorcade sped past.
It is an irony which he may or may not welcome that the emphasis Bücher lays on the dominance of sexuality mirrors that in orthodox Catholic teaching on Original Sin. Furthermore, like the Church, he appears to be marketing his own despair (a charge he refutes with his claim of responding to market forces). It was only after meeting that I was able to make sense of Meier’s remark (quoted in Luke’s letter of 2 October 1977) that no one would understand Hitler who failed to understand the universal human need to inflict pain. At the time, I read it as an expression of sadism: Meier’s more than Hitler’s and, certainly, more than humanity’s. Now, I wonder if inflicting pain may be the way we choose to transcend it: whether it be on others, as in the Nazi atrocities; on ourselves, as in the body-piercing practised by Bücher’s actors; or at one remove, as in the concentration camp pornography which enjoys such a distressing vogue.
Bücher’s zeal for pornography was shared by Meier who, according to Renate Fischer, regarded it as the highest form of film-making. As one whose acquaintance with him was confined to a snub in a crowded dressing room, I am ill-equipped to comment on Meier’s sincerity. His assertion may simply have reflected his taste for an acting style which, to judge by his films, was painfully raw, but it may also have reflected a belief that it wasn’t just the classics (the subject of his spat with the Edinburgh critic) that were suspect in a post-Auschwitz era but art itself. That he persisted in his artistic enterprise was a paradox that both tormented and fired him.
While Bücher felt no such qualms about his medium, he made no claims for it either, laughing – politely but still in my face – when I suggested that he was performing a moral function by providing society with an outlet for its baser instincts. His contempt put me in mind of Luke’s college friend, Simon Lister, who objected to the accepted consensus on the Holocaust because it legitimised Jewish suffering in Christian terms. By identifying the victims with a culture whose most sacred image was a man being tortured, Auschwitz had become the ultimate assimilation.
I trust that I will not raise similar objections by reiterating that it is because of my faith that I am unable to regard the Holocaust – or, indeed, anything else – as an expression of pure evil. I appreciate that my claim must appear meaningless – even contradictory – to many churchgoers, but I find it incomprehensible that anyone who believes in an all-loving, all-powerful God can picture Him locked in a cosmic tug-of-war with the Devil while a downtrodden humanity slides back and forth in-between. Nevertheless, I admit that my faith has rarely been subjected to so strong a challenge as it received from Bücher. The impregnable logic of a man who had known the world at its worst forced me to question whether my own beliefs might not simply be the product of privilege – the spiritual equivalent of the insularity that Meier so scorned.
In the Introduction, I argued that a belief in an objective force of evil absolved mankind of responsibility (which surely accounts for the strength of its appeal). I would like, nevertheless, to preserve one element of the traditional story of the Fall – that of wilfulness – as I propose an alternative version, based not on sin but on solipsism. Everything that I have discovered in the course of compiling this book bolsters my conviction not that human nature is evil and needs to be redeemed, nor that it is wild and needs to be tamed, but that it is selfish and needs to be socialised.
After his visit to Dachau, Luke wrote of the imperative to build our morality on the inviolability of every human life: a phrase that came back to me during my conversation with Bücher. I suggested then that we should redefine evil as inhumanity but, on reflection, I opt for dehumanisation: a denial of another person’s needs or pain or, even, basic right to exist; whether that denial be systematic, as in the Nuremberg Laws, or maverick, as in a terrorist’s bomb. The one link between the otherwise very different figures in this book – Felicity and Meier, Geraldine and Samif, Unity and Hitler – is their absolute confidence in the supremacy of their own cause. To use a metaphor from the world that we have been exploring, they saw their own life in Technicolor and everybody else’s in black-and-white.
M.A. I don’t know how much you remember about Felicity.
T.B. I remember that she cost me a very great deal of money.
M.A. I meant more in the line of private conversations – hints that her attitudes were hardening.
T.B. I don’t think that we ever exchanged more than a Morgen.
M.A. I’ve spent the best part of this year on her track and I’m still no closer to accounting for her action.
T.B. If you don’t mind my saying, you’re a little old to believe that human nature obeys discernible laws of cause and effect.
M.A. But that’s the basis of all practical morality.
T.B. So?
M.A. Not to mention most serious literature. By learning why people behave as they do, we become able to understand one another better and, hence, to prevent another such outrage taking place.
T.B. A laudable aim but a futile one. I read the documents you sent me with care – even with interest – but without, I’m afraid, much understanding. Who can say what led your friend to act as she did: whether it was love for Meier or the Arab; rebellion against her family at home; revulsion with the English actors out here; genuine sympathy for the victims? We can never know, any more than we can know what motivated Hitler. I remember all the disputes that caused on set. Everyone with his own pet theory – or, rather, his own neurosis. The truth doesn’t lie in any particular circumstance but in the heart of human nature which inclines us to do evil.
M.A. That sounds like a recipe for despair.
T.B. Not once you’ve accepted it. Most people never do. But then most people never scratch beneath the surface. You appear to be an exception. Which means that you can’t complain when you draw blood … I’m sorry. You came to discover some answers not to listen to an old man’s prattle.
M.A. Please don’t apologise. I’m interested in anything you have to say. I’m relieved to have made contact. You’re extremely elusive. I tried Liesl Martins and Manfred Stückl, even Renate Fischer, all of whom have been most amenable to my other requests, but they denied any knowledge of you.
T.B. There are many people who’d prefer that I didn’t exist. Some of them tried to shut down this store. They object to its being here on a busy street, squeezed between a music shop and a butcher’s.
M.A. Fortunately, I saw a friend of Dieter Reiss.
T.B. Ah yes, Dieter. He was the best of them. How is he?
M.A. Still alive, which is more than anyone could have predicted. To be honest, I’ve put off visiting him this time. I found it too disturbing last year. And from what Andreas – Andreas Forst: he did some work for you …
T.B. So I gather.
M.A. What he told me disturbs me even more. He – that is Dieter – is very weak and very bitter. There’s a passage in Geraldine Mortimer’s journal that describes how he felt tortured by his sadistic tendencies. Now he appears to be reconciled to them.
T.B. At long last.
M.A. He spends his days on the Internet, making contact with men – uninfected men – who want to have sex with him – unprotected sex – in full knowledge of his status. A Russian roulette for an age with gun laws.
T.B. And you have a problem with that?
M.A. Don’t you?
T.B. There’s no deception? The men are all aware of his condition?
T.B. Then, no. I don’t have any problem. On the contrary, I applaud his spirit. By refusing to compromise, he has eroticised death.
M.A. Surely one of the responsibilities of living in a society – that is a civilised society – must be to try to protect your fellow members?
T.B. But if it’s what those men want: if it makes them happy.
M.A. Yes. There you have it. We live in a world where the first consideration is happiness rather than decency or virtue. The accepted creed is that people should be allowed to do what they want rather than encouraged to seek for something better, either because no one can agree what that better is or else because they believe that nobody has the right to impose his or her better on anyone else. I’m sorry: I don’t mean to harangue you, but I feel very strongly.
T.B. So I see.
M.A. The pursuit of happiness is actually enshrined in the constitution of America – although it has degenerated into the pursuit of pleasure. We, on the other hand, don’t even have that excuse.
T.B. Morality changes. We cannot live as we did in a world where we no longer have seasons, we have supermarkets. Politicians and pundits complain that nowadays no one knows the name of their neighbours. What does it matter when, by switching on their computers, they can talk to people on the other side of the globe?
M.A. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not arguing for a return to a puritanical code. I myself am a prime beneficiary of liberalisation. I just think that there’s a serious flaw in a society where the prevailing ethic is that people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.
M.A. That they’re hurting themselves. Often literally. The current fashion for body piercing can be no coincidence. One of the films playing downstairs shows men and women with so much metal embedded in their flesh that traditional distinctions between animal and mineral break down.
T.B. Don’t people have a right to control their own bodies?
M.A. They should also be protected from the consequences of their desires.
T.B. I only hope that everyone who holds that view is as well-intentioned as you. I saw what happened the last time it was put into practice. There’s no such thing as an absolute morality. All our lives are simply negotiations between our appetites and our ideals: a fact that frightens our masters. Take the supreme example: the Church. In the Middle Ages, people believed that the essence of life was contained in a man’s sperm. A woman was simply the receptacle. So it’s no wonder that the Church was so hostile to masturbation and contraception. But times change. We’re now told that ejaculation is essential to avoid the build-up of poisons in the prostrate while condoms save lives. And yet the Church continues to hang on to its antiquated values. So where would you say that morality lies? With the Pope who refuses to accept the evidence or the pornographer who provides release?
M.A. That reminds me of Dieter’s maxim: ‘Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone to whose viruses you’re immune.’
T.B. I shall bear it in mind.161
M.A. And if I may return to Dieter for a moment. in March, I asked him about the incident at the hotel that provoked Sir Hallam Bamforth’s collapse.
T.B. If I learnt anything from Unity, it was to stick to what I know. Here, we make a film in four days. Elsewhere, it’s nothing but problems.
M.A. Geraldine was right. Bamforth’s offer of coaching came at a price. He aimed to reconcile Dieter to the violence in his character by taking the blows on himself. So far so perverse. But what if there were something else? A few days earlier, a man called Per – another concentration camp victim – had turned up at the hotel.
T.B. I remember. Meier gave him a small part. He was fascinated by the coincidence.
M.A. According to Geraldine, Bamforth was racked with guilt at having ignored his appeal for help to flee from the Nazis. So, what if he were doing penance? And Dieter’s – or rather, Streicher’s – whip became the scourge?
T.B. Would it comfort you to learn that he was looking for forgiveness rather than pleasure?
M.A. No. Well, yes, to be honest. I find the image of that distinguished old actor submitting to a Nazi thug extremely distressing.
T.B. Then go to see Per. Perhaps he can put your mind at rest.
M.A. I’d no idea he was still around. Do you keep in contact?
T.B. Not at all. But I know how you can reach him. I read an article about Hannelore Kessel in Stern only the other week. It mentioned his name as her secretary.
M.A. How bizarre!
T.B. Not really. They became friends during the shooting of Unity. For Per it was a dream come true. And Kessel is suddenly in vogue again after fifty years. There’s been a revival of interest in her films. With the passage of time, the propaganda purpose has faded. It’s possible to see them purely as cinema: full-blooded melodramas and light-hearted musicals.
M.A. But they were made by Nazis.
T.B. They’re not being viewed by Nazis. Or are you afraid that they might spark a right-wing revival? Now whose is the recipe for despair?
M.A. I don’t think that any work of art can be divorced from the circumstances of its creation.
T.B. Most Third Reich architecture was destroyed by bombs, so you needn’t worry about that (although we were very grateful for what remained when we were choosing locations for Unity). But what of futurism? Would you damn an entire cultural movement because of its links – very intimate links – with fascism? You’ll end up like the Israelis banning Wagner.
M.A. Given Wagner’s rabid anti-Semitism, it strikes me as one of the country’s saner attempts at self-protection.
T.B. It’s just music. You either respond to it or you don’t.
M.A. In my view, music – like all art – has to be judged by more objective criteria. But I feel embarrassed talking about such things to you.
T.B. Don’t worry. I can stand it.
M.A. When one of the most painful paradoxes of the entire Third Reich is that of the torturers who liked Mozart.
T.B. Why? The idea that art civilises is sentimental nonsense. You need only go to any opera house – not just Bayreuth – to understand how the Nazis could sit through a performance and then the next day commit mass murder. Music doesn’t fill us with finer feelings but rather purges us of baser ones. By giving people a glimpse of beauty, it enables them to live with their own ugliness. Far from wondering how Beethoven and Auschwitz and Mozart and Dachau could co-exist, we ought to acknowledge that the one creates the conditions for the other.
M.A. I don’t – I can’t – agree.
T.B. That’s your privilege.
M.A. I still find it disconcerting that a concentration camp victim –
T.B. The accepted term is survivor.
M.A. Yes, of course, survivor should be working for one of Goebbels’s starlets.
T.B. And mistresses.
M.A. Really?
T.B. Oh yes. It was revealed in Goebbels’s diaries, brought to us courtesy of your Mr David Irving.
M.A. That may be but, as Geraldine describes it, she only gave in to Goebbels’s demands on condition that her friend was allowed to leave for Switzerland.
T.B. One of the benefits of the current surge of interest in her career is that we now have a chance to examine the sources. Kessel may have been an attractive woman but I wouldn’t have rated her bargaining power so high. Her story was taken straight from the plot of Viktoria,162 in which she agreed to become the mistress of a Jewish landlord on condition that he promised not to evict his tenants. In the film, however, she killed him before yielding to his lust – which seems not to have been the case in life.
M.A. How could she have done it?
T.B. Oh I don’t suppose it was too painful. He was a man of enormous influence. He may have been dwarfish and cursed with a club foot, but he appears to have been very potent. He had six children with his wife, while maintaining a string of mistresses.
M.A. I meant: how could she have done it morally? Shouldn’t it be brought to public attention?
T.B. What purpose would it serve? This is the new Germany. We’ve drawn a line under the past. If Hitler were discovered tomorrow, alive and well and living in Argentina, the next day he’d be appearing on chat shows, explaining how his ideas had been misrepresented, while his lawyers plea-bargained for him to be allowed to spend a peaceful retirement in the Black Forest.
M.A. I’m surprised you’re able to joke about it.
T.B. It’s no good being solemn about such things. You’ll end up like one of those seventies radicals who had such a damaging effect on your friend Felicity. Their mistake was to suppose that people cared. Which they didn’t. Any more than their parents had cared when they watched us being led away. It wasn’t that they were especially hostile or anti-Semitic. They just didn’t want to become involved. People don’t, you see. And they resent anyone who tries to make them. But the radicals refused to acknowledge it. They read the teachings of their pet philosophers and waited for the workers to fulfil their historic role. Except that they were happy enough with the role they already had. So the radicals resorted to extremism, romanticising their despair.
M.A. But that doesn’t invalidate their ideals. The means may have been misguided, but not the goals.
T.B. I disagree. They wanted to impose a Marxist system. They berated the country for having abandoned ideology in favour of materialism. What they failed to understand was that, for the Germans, materialism is ideology – or, at least, it acts as a corrective to the ideologies of the past. Besides, no one who has been through the camps can have anything but scorn for Marx. You only had to witness our market (Bread for soup: soup for tobacco: tobacco for shirt: shirt for bread) to realise that commerce, not production, is the basic human activity. Meier knew that, which is why he could never make common cause with the extremists. His position was a mark of intelligence not cowardice or self-interest. He wasn’t a Furtwängler or a Riefenstahl163 neatly sidestepping the corpses on the way to work.
M.A. Is that why you backed him?
T.B. I’m a businessman. I backed him because I expected to make money. Bread: soup: tobacco: shirt: I practise what I preach. Besides, it was an excellent tax loophole. We could use the government credits we were given for the Unity equipment to write off the debt on our own. The one thing I wasn’t looking for – whatever anyone may say – was respectability. I’m proud of what I do. What’s more, I take an interest in my medium. Meier agreed to direct a film for me. I was keen to find out what he’d bring to it.
M.A. You mean to see whether pornography could become art?
T.B. No, I mean to show that, like everyone else, the artist has pornography in his soul. And Meier was an artist: perhaps the finest of his generation: the only one who told the truth about what he saw. He taught us to trust nothing outside ourselves. No gods or prophets. No gurus or seers. The irony is that his vision was so powerful that he himself became a seer. Audiences were desperate for authority. It came of living in a century with too many memories and too few myths.
M.A. Do you have any recollections of my other friend, Luke Dent?
T.B. Yes, indeed. Many happy ones. An amiable man. Attractive. Warm. We had several fascinating talks.
M.A. Really? You surprise me. In none of his letters does he mention what you do.
T.B. Look out of the window.
M.A. I beg your pardon?
T.B. Walk over and tell me what you see.
I do as he asks.
M.A. A busy street. Pedestrians. Cars. Oh, there’s an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy!
T.B. Now close your eyes.
I do as he asks.
So what do you see?
M.A. Why, nothing.
T.B. Neither did he.
I turn back into the room.
M.A. I’m finding it increasingly hard to maintain an optimistic outlook on the world.
T.B. Then why try?
M.A. It’s an article of faith. I understand why it must be different for someone like yourself who’s seen people at their worst. But I remain convinced that that was an aberration.
T.B. Was it?
M.A. I can’t accept that human nature is fundamentally wicked.
T.B. Nature has no moral faculty. It simply is. And human beings are a part of it. Let me tell you a true story. It took place in Munich, a few weeks before my family was rounded up. I was gazing idly out of the window when I saw a cat stranded on a nearby roof. It had somehow clambered up there and was stuck. I continued to watch as a young SS officer fetched a ladder and climbed to the rescue. The ladder was too short and he reached across at his considerable peril. He risked his life to save that cat and yet I knew that, under different circumstances, he would have had no compunction about shooting me.
T.B. No, he wasn’t a bastard. That was what confused me. I wanted him to be one, but he’d shown himself to be a kind of hero. So either it was an anomaly, or else goodness and wickedness were more closely entwined than I’d thought.
M.A. There’s a difference between goodness and sentimentality. Hitler was fond of children and animals. He was a vegetarian. His favourite actress was Shirley Temple, for Heaven’s sake! Such people have to wear their heart on their sleeve to prove that they have one. Besides, it’s easy to warm to ‘innocent’ (in inverted commas) children, far harder to do so to complicated, compromised adults. Accepting them means accepting ourselves. Which is the one thing that sentimentalists can never do.
T.B. What about you?
M.A. I believe that human beings were created by God and that they occupy a unique place in a divinely ordered universe.
T.B. I’ve seen a woman with a mastectomy having her other breast cut off by so-called doctors for the sake of balance. I’ve seen men punctured like targets in a shooting gallery. I’ve heard the howling of children wrenched from their parents: a howling that never fades away. It seems to lurk under your bunk, waiting for nightfall in order to rise up and overpower you. What place does that occupy in your divinely ordered universe?
I wait for him to fill the silence.
I’m sorry. I’ve done the very thing I most despise: claiming authority by dint of an experience that you are too young and too fortunate to have known in order to win an argument that I don’t even recognise.
M.A. No, it’s me who should be sorry. I came here to jog your memory, not to pick at a scab.
T.B. Tell me, what was the saddest moment of your life? Of course, you’re young; you’re English; you may not have one.
M.A. The death of friends. The loss of dreams. The acceptance of failure.
T.B. Do you spend your whole life agonising over them?
M.A. I hear what you’re saying, but surely it’s different?
T.B. Why? If I make Hitler the defining factor of my life, then he’ll have won. The camps are closed. I have a business to run.
M.A. But you must have an opinion about the people who tortured you.
T.B. Of course.
M.A. May I ask what it is?
T.B. That they were men – and some women – who were behaving as all men and women would when relieved of the moral and social constraints that the world had imposed. Have you ever wondered why it is that the Nazis have become such a potent source of fantasy? It’s because they dared to do what others only dream of. They acknowledged the paradox at the heart of being human: the violence in the act of making love. And it wasn’t just in the camps: the secret experiments in far-off locations with only the all-seeing, all-justifying cameras to bear witness. Remember what happened in Lithuania where commando units clubbed Jews to death in front of cheering crowds, while mothers raised children high on their shoulders to make sure that they didn’t miss any of the fun. German soldiers travelled to the massacres the way that their parents had booked for the opera. There were even some couples who chose to spend their honeymoons at these festivals of blood.
M.A. It’s beyond my comprehension.
T.B. No. That’s too easy. There are two things that are always said to be beyond our comprehension: the crimes of the Nazis and the ways of God. And I make no apology for connecting them since they were dreamt up in the same place.
He taps his index finger against his skull.
Nor does it come as any surprise that it was God’s representative on earth, the Pope, who, at the end of the War, authoritatively dubbed Nazi crimes satanic as if absolving humanity of guilt – while conveniently ignoring his own Faustian pact.164 It might comfort you to consider the Third Reich an anomaly, but it was the norm. Look back across history. From the Incas to the Romans: from the Crusaders to the Inquisition: every page is steeped in blood. Peter the Great even put his own son to torture. There was no benevolent God on hand with a substitute ram. Or look a little closer to home: to the American soldiers in Vietnam who so exercised our seventies friends. You remember the My Lai massacre?165 Murder innocent civilians if you must, but why scalp them? Why cut out their tongues and disembowel them? Why carve the company name into their chests? I simply ask the questions. I pass no judgement. The truth is that we’re all little boys pulling the wings off butterflies. But, when we grow up, butterflies aren’t big enough … butterflies don’t scream loudly enough to assure us that we’re alive. What better way can we find to say ‘Yes, I’m a man and I’m making my mark’ than by causing pain? That is the truth. And I give it to people packaged in a video cassette.
M.A. So you make your films as a safety-valve in order that peoples’ darkest fantasies be enacted on screen and not in real life?
T.B. I make my films to make money. I’m a businessman not a therapist nor the Secretary General of the UN. Besides, I don’t suppose that even I could ever fathom peoples’ darkest fantasies.
M.A. I’ve always subscribed to the Socratic view that no one can choose to be wicked. People only do evil when they’re deluded into believing that they’re doing good.166 Pure evil is found nowhere but in literature. We didn’t hear Stalin or Pol Pot or even Hitler echoing Milton’s Satan in a call for evil to be their good, or vowing that to do ill would be their sole delight. The SS guards behaved as they did because they’d been brainwashed into thinking that they were supermen and their victims vermin. That’s why I set so much store by the search for motives. If any precept has sustained me through life, it’s Madame de Staël’s Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.
T.B. Don’t you think that they should have resisted the propaganda and realised that what they were doing was wrong?
M.A. Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not excusing them.
T.B. Oh, I’m sorry. My French must be rusty. I thought that that was what pardonner meant.
M.A. I’m trying, first, to make a distinction between the criminal and the crime and, second, to point out that evil isn’t inevitable. Whereas you, unless I’m much mistaken, believe that people are evil and there’s nothing that we can do about it.
T.B. We can adapt to it. If you live on an earthquake fault-line, you adjust to it – you dig deeper foundations or whatever. We must make similar adjustments to the fault-lines in human nature. I’m a professional adjuster.
M.A. Do you mean in your life or in your work?
T.B. Both. To be frank, I’m surprised at Socrates. If that was the best he could come up with, he didn’t take the hemlock a moment too soon. Judging evil by intent, you end up with a position in which Goebbels is more culpable than Hitler because Hitler was at least sincere in his beliefs whereas Goebbels was a cynic who believed only in the packaging. His wife’s stepfather was Jewish. He admired the films of Jewish directors. His main aim was self-promotion, having discovered an arena in which his hitherto unrecognised talents could thrive.
M.A. I wouldn’t care to choose between Hitler and Goebbels.
T.B. In which case, what about the youth who knowingly and callously robs an old lady of her life-savings? On the scale of intent, he would be more culpable than either of them.
M.A. Then perhaps we should define evil as inhumanity: a refusal to recognise other peoples’ essential rights. Whether or not we base our morality on a transcendental being will always be open to dispute. But we must be able to agree on a moral code based on our common humanity. Its arbiter will be our conscience – that conscience which, whatever Hitler may have thought, is as intrinsic a part of human nature as language or imagination.
T.B. You’re saying that evil is inhumanity. I’m saying that it is our common humanity. Hitler was no different from you or me or Wolfram Meier or Dietrich Bonhoeffer,167 except in degree. It was his humanity that drove him on. That is what you must recognise if you wish to understand Felicity – or, indeed, anyone else. I see, after all, that I must tell you about Auschwitz. And don’t be alarmed. For me, it is not a nightmare or a trauma; it is simply the past. I suffered, but I am not ennobled by it. I am not running an art gallery or writing poems or working for an organisation that promotes world peace. I am not my sister, Vera, another survivor, who cares about nothing but rescuing battery chickens. ‘It’s inhumane,’ she says, ‘to keep animals under such conditions.’ And she doesn’t appreciate the lack of logic, let alone the historical insult, in her words. I’m not ennobled by suffering but I am strengthened by it, because I know what life is. Hitler wanted to breed a master-race that would be able to withstand anything, and the irony – the deadly irony – is that we did. And why was I one of the chosen ones? Believe me, it wasn’t because I was an especially good person or because God thought, ‘I have a mission for Thomas that he should set up the most successful pornography business that Germany has ever seen.’ No. It was because I was strong: because I reduced myself to an instinct. And, if you want to know which is the most fundamental human instinct, just ask any former Auschwitz inmate. We saw it even in the contortions of the dead: in the father climbing on to the back of his son, or the mother pushing aside her daughter in order to reach to the top of the gas chamber and suck out the last gasp of air. The answer, in case you hadn’t guessed, is to survive.
M.A. But surely that’s only half the picture? I’ve read about the many acts of altruism that took place in the camps.
T.B. The only altruism came from those who needed concepts of good and evil to sustain them more than bread. Do you know the biblical tale of Jacob and Esau?
T.B. Esau’s selling his birthright for a mess of pottage was my favourite bedtime story, preferably narrated in my father’s oaky tones. In Auschwitz, we sold our birthright – decency, fraternity, humanity – for a cup of broth, a swill of foetid water that created the illusion of warmth in our bellies. And that wasn’t all. Do you know which were the hardest blows to endure in the camp? They weren’t the body blows – the kicks from the kapos or the beatings from the guards – but the blows to our self-esteem. We were the stinking, lice-ridden dregs of creation, tying pieces of string around our trouser legs so that the shit wouldn’t ooze into our boots. You may wonder what was gained by treating us that way. I’ve read books – scholarly books – that said that, if we appeared to be subhuman, it made it easier for the Nazis to mistreat us. But, no, it was to make it easier for us to mistreat one another. So that, when the guards told half of us to lie on the ground and the other half to urinate in their mouths, we didn’t hesitate. And the worst of it is that we began to believe that Hitler was right. How could we be human beings when it was only by behaving subhumanly that we managed to survive?
But I’m running ahead of myself. I was fourteen when I was arrested and sent to Auschwitz but, to my great good fortune, I looked older. The worst injustice, to my mind, was that I’d never set much store by being Jewish. It was an accident of birth like the colour of my hair or the other physical features that have become clichés. As a child – years before I’d heard the name of Hitler – I hated the fact that we allowed ourselves to become victims: that we were taught never to draw attention to ourselves. We were Jews as wallpaper long before they turned us into Jews as lampshades and other household items … I’m sorry. I see that I’ve offended you. You mustn’t forget that Jewish humour is almost as legendary as our business sense.
He laughs.
On arrival in the camp, we were marched straight on to the parade-ground. The commandant asked for the names of any barbers. My father was a barber. And, to my shame, I despised the profession as much as I despised the man. But, in a spirit of malice, I raised my hand. And I was chosen. Whereas my father kept his pressed against his side. And he was gassed.
M.A. Wasn’t that an example of altruism? He kept his hand down in order to give you a better chance.
T.B. This wasn’t a vacancy for a stylist in a fashionable salon! Have you any idea how many people they were preparing to murder every day? They needed a large team. No, the truth is that we’d had a blazing row on the morning of our arrest (it wasn’t all laying Tefillin168 and lighting the Friday night candles). That I should have stolen his trade after they had stolen everything else was the final insult. There again, it may have been the wind. Even at the best of times, he was half-deaf. Shall I carry on?
M.A. Please.
T.B. I was placed in the category of ‘economically useful Jews’ and I vowed to remain there for the rest of my life. I cut the hair of the men, women and, yes, children, who were destined for the gas chambers. Everything happened so fast. You ask how the Nazis could have done it morally. At the time, all I could think of was how they could do it practically. Hundreds of people were killed in a matter of minutes. It should have taken longer. If nothing else, they deserved that. But I couldn’t talk about it to any of my comrades because, providing I kept my concerns to myself, there was still the possibility that it was only me who was losing my mind.
I watched them as they undressed. First the men: the rabbis and teachers and doctors whom I’d been taught to look up to all my life. Without their clothes, they were nothing. Just dry bones squeezed into sacks of old parchment. I knew then that there was nothing sacred about the body. And that was the first lesson that I learnt.
Next came the women. And, as they stripped, I felt a stirring in my loins. Some of them were ancient and some scarcely in their teens, but my body didn’t discriminate. Suddenly I felt alive. I was no longer weak; I was hard. And that was the second.
We didn’t simply cut the women’s hair, we shaved them: under the arms and on the pubis. It was the first time I’d realised that women had body hair. The guards dropped by to enjoy the spectacle. While we set to work, they poked the women with sticks as though they were prodding cattle. That’s why I was never able to join in the general expression of outrage at sixties fashions. I knew the value of hair.
Once, they brought in a group of girls from my neighbourhood. Abandoning modesty as well as clothes, they ran up and clung to me, naked. They were so relieved to find me alive. My survival offered hope for theirs. And do you want to know the truth? I scorned them. How could they be so stupid as to suppose that they were simply taking a shower? Or so naive as to believe that they would be put to work? There were feeble old women and helpless young children among them. One woman had had her wooden leg unscrewed. What earthly use would she be? But no, even in extremis, people cling to their illusions –
M.A. Such as?
T.B. That God is good. That their enemies will be merciful.
M.A. Did you give them any warning of their fate?
T.B. What for? Most were half-dead already. Why poison their last few moments? Some of my colleagues did try, at the risk of their own lives. They claimed that people had a right to know. Perhaps they thought that it would restore their dignity and turn an abattoir into a scaffold. The truth is that, like all so-called morality, it eased their own consciences, relieving their guilt at remaining alive. For that was the cruellest irony: we knew that our presence in the Special Detail depended on regular transports. The moment they stopped, we too would be liquidated. Darwin lives! And so do I. For eighteen months, I survived in Hell. From what I recall, Jesus Christ stayed a mere three days. And in that time I learnt that, if the first human instinct was survival, the second was sex. Women stopped menstruating; nursing mothers lost their milk; but the seminal fluid still flowed. Two men who were forced to share a bunk chose to share their bodies, clinging together in a frenzy of desperation, desire and shame. Years later I read that, when they introduced a brothel into one of the camps – I don’t remember which; it certainly wasn’t Auschwitz169 – first in line weren’t the relatively well-fed kapos and foremen but the Muselmanner, the living skeletons who looked as if the unaccustomed spurt of energy would destroy them. The sexual impulse prevailed.
Meanwhile, we were all actors in a vast pornographic fantasy, one that was played out not on a screen but on a flag. Rape was comparatively rare, even though it wasn’t considered Rassenschande – I don’t know the exact translation: race defilement comes close. But then, if you’d been a healthy young Nazi, would you have chosen to have sex with a putrid, hairless, half-starved woman with bones instead of bumps? Some did, of course, risking the wrath of their superiors and feeding their own disgust. But they were few. Most preferred to excite themselves by regular visits to the shower-room. Occasionally, bored guards would force a group of women to strip and parade through the camp, lashing them so hard that the blood ran down their legs in a parody of their monthly cycle.
M.A. Then how can you bear to propagate such images now?
T.B. Because they’re the truth. I can’t endorse conventional platitudes of love and romance as though I’d spent the War in Switzerland. I can’t endow the sexual act with a spiritual meaning that it is quite unable to sustain. My films show men and women as they truly are. Why don’t you address your complaints to producers in Hollywood? There, everything is titillation. The penis must at all times remain hidden – as though the nakedness of an erection would expose the sham of everything else. My films are real. My actors aren’t faking.
M.A. I don’t want to offend you, but in what way real? They occupy a world of total predictability where sex takes place in locker-rooms with the same nod to verisimilitude that saw Thirties musicals set backstage. It’s a world where every nurse and secretary, every pizza boy and plumber, is instantly available and utterly insatiable. And people take that image away from the screen and into their everyday lives.
T.B. People have always led inauthentic lives but, in the past, they did so like Madame Bovary in the context of romantic novels. Now it’s in the context of hard-core films. Which is progress of a sort.
M.A. So, if I understand you right, you’re saying that it was in Auschwitz that you discovered your vocation?
T.B. (With a laugh) What I thought I was saying was that it was in Auschwitz that I learnt not to need one. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. After the War, I planned to make my way to Palestine.
M.A. Then there was at least one ideal that didn’t die.
T.B. I prefer the word illusion. Either way, the British put an end to it when they refused me entry. So I came back to this derelict town and rebuilt my life. I didn’t have a pfennig to my name, so I turned to the most plentiful of natural resources. Fortunately, it was in high demand. We were an occupied country full of men living a long way from home. So what did they want? Girls. Especially girls who did the things that girls at home never do. Girls without boundaries. And I cornered the market. Very soon I was ready to branch out, first into clubs and then into films. My fellow entrepreneurs were happy to let me blaze a trail. As an Auschwitz survivor, I had greater licence. I can sense your disapproval …
M.A. No, not at all.
T.B. But, whatever you may think, ours is a reputable business. We’re not SS guards in the ghetto forcing old men at gunpoint to rape and sodomise young girls while our comrades capture it on film. We maintain regular hours and clean conditions. Angel was the first company in Europe to insist on the use of condoms. We lost sales, but it was the only way to safeguard the actresses – some of the girls from the East are so desperate, they’ll do anything for a few hundred marks.
M.A. You see. We’re not so different. You also believe in protecting people from themselves.
T.B. No, merely from the effects of their poverty. Besides, it was sound economics. Not only did we gain prestige but we forced all our rivals to follow suit.
M.A. May I ask you about the actress who died?
T.B. What about her?
M.A. That must have dented your confidence, if nothing else.
T.B. We were cleared of all responsibility. At the post-mortem, they discovered that she’d had an undiagnosed heart condition. She could have died at any time. Now, to return to more agreeable matters, did you have a chance to look at our merchandise? Is there anything you’d care to take home as a souvenir?
M.A. Thank you. That’s very kind, but no.
T.B. We cater to every taste. If we’d been in business in the Thirties, Hitler would never have had to keep his sexuality a shameful secret with Geli. He could have subscribed to our caviar line.
M.A. In which case, if you believe Meier, there would never have been a Holocaust at all.
T.B. Maybe … there again, maybe not. If we’re lucky, the antidote to history will be pornography. Did you know that there’s a thriving underground market in concentration camp films in Israel?
M.A. No, I can’t say that I did.
T.B. Does it shock you?
M.A. Less than it would have done an hour ago.
T.B. Then your visit hasn’t been entirely wasted.
M.A. Is there anything that you wouldn’t put on film?
There is a prolonged silence. Bücher appears to be struggling with himself.
T.B. Branding. It takes me back further than I want to go.
M.A. I’m sorry. How crass of me to remind you.
T.B. No. Spare me your expressions of concern. Even now, you retain the hope that, in spite of everything I’ve said, I shall conform to type. You want me to wear the number on my arm like a war wound. You want me to burnish it like a medal. But it’s you that gives me the number. Your pity keeps me in the camp. Of course it will always be a part of me, like a bullet-hole in a building that has never been repaired. But I’ve put it behind me. Except with Ilse. Ilse likes my number. She teases it with her fingers and her tongue. She identifies the pain. It excites her. And, together, we can invest it with any meaning that we choose. We take it out of the history books and make it our own. Now I’m at your disposal. Is there anything else you wish to ask?
161 Dieter’s parody of Woody Allen’s celebrated axiom – ‘Don’t knock masturbation; it’s sex with someone you love’ – struck no chord with Bücher, who took it purely as a medical fact.
162 Helmut Käutner’s 1942 film in which Kessel played the title role.
163 Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954), conductor, and Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), film director, who colluded, to differing degrees, with the Nazi regime.
164 In a speech to the college of cardinals on 2 June 1945, Pope Pius XII spoke of ‘the satanic apparition of National Socialism’. For an analysis of the Pontiff’s own record, including his 1933 Concordat with Hitler, see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, Viking 1999.
165 On 16 March 1968, Charlie Company, a unit of the US Eleventh Light Infantry Brigade, entered the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later, more than five hundred unarmed civilians – women, children and old men – were dead.
166 ‘No man does wrong knowing he’s doing wrong but does so only out of ignorance or delusion,’ Plato, Protagoras.
167 Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45), Lutheran pastor, theologian and opponent of Hitler, who was hanged in Flossenburg camp.
168 Small black leather boxes containing Old Testament passages, strapped to the forehead and left arm and worn by Orthodox Jewish men during morning prayers.
169 In 1943, a brothel was set up in Flossenburg on Himmler’s instructions. One of his aims was that homosexuals should be cured of their disposition by regular visits. The prostitutes were Jews and gypsies from the women’s camp at Ravensbruck. They were told that they would be released from imprisonment at the end of six months but, after servicing an average of 2000 clients during the period, they were sent to Auschwitz and replaced by another contingent of ‘volunteers’. See Heinz Heger, The Men With The Pink Triangle, Gay Men’s Press 1980.