BENEATH THIS BLACK ROOF, ON A well-clipped block in a small midwestern town on the Wabash River, a professor opens his eyes in the dark, confused at first by an outline under the sheets, this limp figure beside him in bed. From some primordial haze slowly comes recognition, then language: bed, sheets, wife … Andrea. He kisses her and rises. He is fifty-eight years old, and he wakes every morning at this ungodly hour, in his finely appointed brick house with exploding beds of lilies, phlox, and begonias. After three heart attacks, he goes now to cardiac rehab. Wearing shiny blue Adidas sweats, he drives off in the family’s Nissan. Once at the medical center, he walks briskly on the treadmill, works the cross-trainer machine, and then does some light lifting. It’s a standing joke that if he’s not there at 6:00 A.M. sharp, the staff should just put on ties and go straight to the funeral home. After his workout, as he drives to his house, the town glows in a flood of new light; the river bubbles in its brown banks as the flies rise; the lawns are almost too bright, green with beauty and rancor.
He feels better for this visit, more alive, another day on earth ensured, another chance to breathe in the smell of cut grass before a spasm of summer lightning. He takes Lopressor, Altace, and aspirin to thin his thick blood. Even now fragments accumulate, arteries begin to clog, his cardiac muscle weakens, slows, speeds again to make up time. There is so little time.
He wears his silvered hair neatly parted. A creature of habit, he’s worn the same style of round tortoiseshell-frame glasses for thirty years. He drinks a cup of chai every afternoon of his wellplotted life at a café near his office at Purdue University, where he teaches medical illustration. He is a humble, somewhat conservative man, a Roman Catholic whose joy in the simplest things can be overwhelming, inexplicable. After his third heart attack, when they jammed tubes into him and he was pretty sure it was over, he became insistent. “Just tell me I’m going to mow the lawn again!” he said to his doctor. “Tell me I’m going to mow the lawn!”
These were nearly his last words.
If this man can be oversensitive and a bit obsessive, if he has an exact recall of the big and small injustices that have been done unto him—he keeps old hurtful letters on file—he knows he must unburden himself now, make peace with those in his life: wife, children, friends, colleagues. And with the vanished ghosts that roam the rooms of his memory: mother, father, brother.
And what of Pernkopf? What of Batke?
He can’t fathom where to begin with the Book, now forever out of print, effectively banned. When considering it, he often conjures the language of some illicit affair: rapture, consumption, shame. And if he was betrayed by that lover, does it lessen all those days he spent in love? Ah, the Book, the nearly unbearable perfection of its paintings, and then, weltering behind it, armies clashing across the face of Europe, six million spectral Jews. Under pressure, history splits in two: the winners and the losers, the righteous and the evil.
It’s not like this man to act impulsively, to yield control, to risk missing cardiac rehab, to wander seven thousand miles from his dear doctor, but he does. He packs a bag with some old journals, drives from West Lafayette to Indianapolis, and gets on a plane. He travels eight hours in coach, through spasms of lightning, wearing his Adidas jumpsuit, hair neatly parted. Fragments accumulate; arteries begin to clog. He drinks some wine; he pores through his journals, these copiously recorded memories of a sabbatical he took twenty-three years ago, when he went on a pilgrimage to find the Book’s greatest artist, when he still worshipped—yes, really, that’s the word—the Book’s achievement. He naps, wakes, reads his decades-old handwriting again. If he were to die on this plane, in a hotel lobby in Vienna, in the echoing halls of the Institute searching for some truth, will he have been cleansed? After all, he didn’t do the killing or throw the bodies from the window. He didn’t spew the hate that incited a hemicycle of fanatics.
No, his sin, if that indeed is what it is, was more quotidian: He found beauty in something dangerous. There are days when he can’t remember how it began, and nights when he can’t sleep, remembering.
A cloudy afternoon, Vienna, 1957. A man sits and smokes, a body laid before him. A creature of habit, he wears a white lab coat and a white polyester turtleneck, no matter what the weather. He is small, with a crooked nose and skewed chin that give him the appearance of a beat-up bantamweight. He has a lot of nervous energy, except when he sits like this. When he sits like this, he seems almost dead, a snake in the heat of day. Before him lies a nameless cadaver that was brought up from the basement of the Institute, from the formaldehyde pools of torsos and limbs, then perfectly prepared like this: an incision, a saw to the breastbone, the rib cage drawn open, the heart removed. He stares at this open body, looks down at the floor, stares some more.
In his right hand, he holds a Habico Kolinsky, one with long sable hairs, his brush of choice. On the rag paper before him, he has sketched some rough lines, has plotted his colors. And now, after this prolonged stillness, he bursts from his chair. He paints across the entire canvas, maniacally, almost chaotically. He lays in washes of color, gradually building the glazes. His hand darts back and forth. He goes at the bronchus and then the thoracic duct. With his tongue, he licks the brush and lifts off pigment to show phantasmic light on this internal landscape. He flicks turquoise here and there to make the fascia appear real. What he does is highly intricate, but at this speed it’s like running on a tightrope. He is in deep space, underwater, gravityless. He works in a fever, shaking and levitating. Weeks pass, and still he stands before this painting, this body.
What is his desire? To be a rich man, to paint what he chooses, to hang in museums, to make love to beautiful women, but he is on the wrong side of history. And yet he isn’t a demagogue or a war criminal. He is merely a trained fine artist who must paint dead bodies for the money—and that’s what he will do, for nearly five decades of his life: brains, veins, viscera, vaginas. Perhaps his sin is quotidian, too: In 1933 he says yes to a job because he’s hungry, and so sells his soul, joining Pernkopf’s army of artists, which soon becomes part of Hitler’s army. Now a silver light pours thickly through the tall glass windows. He lifts pigment, then swabs his brush over the Aquarellfarben cake. He expertly paints in the ascending aorta and pulmonary trunk, giving them ocher and purple colors. He creates this astral penumbra of arteries and air pipes, galaxies within the body. For one moment, he does it so well he vanquishes memory. It has always been just him and the canvas. And as certain as he will be forgotten, with each painting he believes he won’t. He is the righteous one, the butcher’s son made king.
They don’t know how to treat him, this unusual specimen, this volcanic event. He shakes and levitates in his temporary palsy. It is the summer between seventh and eighth grades, 1957. Far away, in another world, an unknown man named Franz Batke paints in Vienna while this unknown boy, David Williams, has some sort of infection. His body has burst out with huge open sores on his face, back, and chest. The shots put him into a high fever that brings on convulsions. He is a supernova; he could be cursed.
Outside, the Michigan sun burns, it rains lugubriously, and then there is bright light on the panes again. The floor shines with menace. There is no explanation for this suffering. No treatment that the doctors can find. Inside him a cell has split in two. He is a boy who, by some internal chemical flood of testosterone and disease, is fast becoming something else, a different animal.
In the fall, he is released from his hospital cell. He lifts weights and runs the sand dunes by the lake to build his body back. He dreams of being the middleweight champion of the world, the kid from Muskegon, Michigan, hitting someone so hard that he separates the guy from his body. If only he could convert his rage to power and skill, it might happen. After school he takes a football and runs through the cornstalks in the backyard, pretending each stalk is a tackler. It is twilight now, and the boy has been running through these cornstalks for hours, for days. His shirt is streaked with blood from where he’s been stabbed by the stalks, the scabs broken open, releasing pustulants from the body. When he heals, his skin will be runneled and pocked. He will always live a word away from that good-looking upperclassman, the one in the locker room who, before everyone, called him Frankenstein. It will take him decades to understand these scars and what has happened to him. What has happened to him?
Years later, after crossing an ocean in search of something he can’t put a name to, he finds himself in a room with the old man, who smokes so many cigarettes it seems he is on fire. They talk about the thing they both love most: art. Sitting in that studio in Innsbruck, David Williams, the would-be middleweight champion of the world from Muskegon, Michigan, who speaks in faltering German, feels immediately at home with this Austrian, Franz Batke, who speaks no English and who, unbeknownst to him, is a former Nazi. How has this happened? Because they speak only of art. Williams will write in his journal, “I am truly beginning to see this man as a genius.” After all, among the scarred carapaces of lost civilizations, among the ugly ruins and tormented dreams of history’s fanatics, some beauty must rise, mustn’t it?
Mustn’t it?
The cell has split in two. There is no diagnosis, no explanation. Clouds cover the city, hyena-shaped, turning on themselves. The tanks are rolling, and the people come out of their houses, clutching bouquets to pledge allegiance to their invaders, without fully understanding. They throw flowers and sing. They are thin already, engraved by rib cages and dark rings beneath their eyes. It is not easy to understand. Their euphoria is blinding.
On this morning, Eduard Pernkopf rises at 4 A.M. He is a short, portly man with gray-blue eyes, dour and phlegmatic, though not entirely humorless. He wears round glasses and diligently reads his well-thumbed Schopenhauer. He has a scar on his left cheek from a duel he once fought. It is hard to imagine this particular fellow in a duel. And it is equally hard to imagine what moves inside him—ambition, zealotry, some canted idealism? Or is it just sickness? He has thyroid problems and crippling headaches. A blood clot is moving slowly toward his brain. When his first wife dies of tuberculosis at twenty-seven, he pens a symphony dedicated to her titled The Pleasure and Pain of Man. He marries her sister. He smokes exactly fifteen cigarettes a day. He comes to care about only two things: the Book and the Party.
The Book begins as a lab manual while Pernkopf is teaching at the Anatomy Institute in Vienna. He needs a dissection guide to help students better identify the organs and vessels of the body, but he finds other anatomy texts outdated or unsatisfactory, and he is a perfectionist. He soon has what seems like an impractical dream: to map the entire human body. And this dream is what leads to his life’s work: an epic eponymous four-volume, seven-book anatomical atlas, an unrelenting performance spanning thirty years of eighteen-hour workdays. Here our mortality is delivered in Technicolor, in eight hundred paintings that illuminate the gooey, viscous innards of our own machine, organized by regions: the Chest and Pectoral Limb; the Abdomen, Pelvis and Pelvic Limb; the Neck; and the Topographical and Stratigraphical Anatomy of the Head.
The group he recruits to paint comprises fine artists, some of whom have trained for years and are known as akademische Maler. At this time—the early 1930s—there is no work in Vienna. People scrounge for crumbs. Beggars line the streets. On Fridays shopkeepers leave small plates of pennies out for the poor. A rich person is someone who owns a bicycle, and the artists take their jobs willingly, thankfully. Perhaps in another place and time, they’d be famous for their watercolors of Viennese parks or Austrian landscapes. But here they draw the cold interiors of the human body.
Pernkopf oversees these men and women: four, seven, nine, then eleven artists in all. Perhaps he is dimly aware that this moment may never repeat itself. Never again will social conditions warrant that so many talented fine artists gather together to detail the body, and never again will the art of medical illustration veer so close to that of fine art itself. The book will coincide with the discovery and refinement of four-color separation: All anatomical works before it will seem to be from Kansas, while Pernkopf’s Anatomy will seem to hail from Oz.
For his part, Pernkopf directs the dissections and preparations of the cadavers for painting. These preparations can be exacting, hour upon hour spent pinning back skin on a forearm, scraping fascia from a bone, sawing skulls open to reveal a fine minutiae of arteries, the skein of veins beneath the dura. But he learns quickly: The better the preparation—the more fresh and vivid the viscera—the better the painting.
He is driven by ideas of accuracy and clarity. He stresses again and again: The paintings must look like living tissue, even more alive than living tissue, if such a thing is possible. He strikes a deal with a publisher named Urban & Schwarzenberg, which after seeing the early work is convinced that Pernkopf’s book may one day be mentioned in the same breath as da Vinci’s sketches of the body, Vesalius’s Fabrica, or Sobotta’s Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen.
Meanwhile, the cell has split. The Jewish diaspora of the late nineteenth century—one bringing thousands from southern Poland and western Ukraine to Vienna—has also now projected Jews into the highest reaches of society, causing deep-seated rancor. Anti-Semitism becomes commonplace. Even at the Institute, competing anatomical schools rise under one roof to segregate the Jews from their Austrian detractors, a student army of National Socialists. Passing in the halls, students come to blows.
For Pernkopf this violence is as it should be. From the moment he enrolls as a student at the University of Vienna, in 1907, at eighteen, he joins a nationalistic German fraternity, which becomes the foundation for his later fervency as a National Socialist, including his belief that Jews have corrupted German culture. Shortly after joining the Nazi Party in 1933—which is against the law in Austria at the time—he joins the Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, the underground uniformed army of Nazis. And then he waits.
Months, then years, pass. Life worsens. The institute is only a microcosm of Vienna itself, of Austria as a whole, of this entrenched hatred pushing up through the dirt of society. On March 12, 1938, Hitler enters the country uncontested, in an open limousine. He speaks from the balcony of the town hall in Linz to crazed flower-throwing crowds and claims his beloved birthplace, Austria, as his own—a blank-check Nazi annexation known as the Anschluss. In Vienna, where Hitler once made watercolors of Gothic buildings, flags bearing swastikas are unfurled. Some feel a rush of hope; others, like Sigmund Freud, who lives only four blocks from the Institute, pack to leave.
And so, on this morning, Pernkopf readies himself for the most important speech of his life. It is 4 A.M., the time he usually reserves for writing the words that accompany the paintings in his atlas. He scribbles in shorthand, striving to find the right intonations and arpeggios, giving words to some echo he hears in his head. Later his wife will type the loose pages, and then he will stand in the hemicycle at the Institute before a room packed with medical school staff, pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler, in his storm trooper’s uniform, a swastika on his left elbow. He will call for “racial hygiene” and the “eliminating of the unfit and defective.” He will call for the “discouragement of breeding by individuals who do not belong together properly, whose races clash.” He will call for sterilization and “the control of marriage.” And finally he will praise Hitler for being a man who has found “a new way of looking at the world,” as someone “in whom the legend of history has blossomed.”
The speech becomes an overt declaration of war within the university. Jewish students will soon be thrown from the third floor of the Anatomy Institute to a courtyard below, and 153 Jewish faculty members will be purged—some will eventually be sent to concentration camps; others will flee. In this milieu of bloodlust, the bodies of those tried and guillotined after the Anschluss—more than a thousand in all, mostly political opponents, patriots, Communists, and petty criminals, among them eight Jews—will be stacked like cordwood behind the Institute, to be used as preparations for Pernkopf’s sacred atlas. From the legend of these human limbs, his temple rises.
As a child, the boy obsessively draws. He draws humans and animals. He does crude landscapes in watercolor. When he holds a brush in his hand, when he puts that brush to paper, he becomes invisible. He cannot be seen. He has no history, no scars.
He becomes the first in the Williams family to graduate from high school, then goes to community college. In his freshman biology class, he sketches a frog, the insides of a frog, with amazing accuracy and clarity. When his instructor sees it, she tells him about universities where one can learn to draw the insides of frogs—and other animals, including humans.
David the artist may be an enigma to his factory-working parents, but his younger brother, Greg, is an aberration. While David is short, stocky, and a loner, Greg is tall, angular, and outgoing. As David has his art and science, Greg toys with the idea of becoming a priest.
If the brothers dwell in alternative realities, they unconsciously remain each other’s lodestars, each other’s partial reason for hope. For they have the same goal: to escape the blue-collar drudgery of gray Muskegon and a house that has slowly gone from Norman Rockwell portrait to Ingmar Bergman film, mother listing into alcoholism and mental illness, father burdened by some deeply hidden guilt from his own unspoken past. Each son is searching for some kind of euphoria to obliterate the pain of growing up in this house. At the age of twenty, David abruptly moves to Hamburg to live with a woman he has met when she was visiting the States and who loves him, his scarred self, something he once thought impossible. Greg finds theater and opera, then men and drugs.
Years pass. Greg moves to Detroit, New York City. David splits with the woman in Hamburg, returns home, is accepted into the University of Cincinnati’s medical-illustration program, meets his wife, a schoolteacher, after being set up in a Muskegon bar. Shortly after they marry, he encounters the Book for the first time.
He remembers the exact particle reality of that moment. At the university, he lives in an almost obsessive world in which people spend a hundred hours drawing a horse hock or the tendons of a human arm, in thrall to brush on paper. One of his professors has purchased Pernkopf’s Anatomy, a mythic work Williams has heard defined as pure genius, and he goes to the professor’s office to see it.
The books are enormous, with blank green cloth covers. Inside could be almost anything—Monet’s water lilies, pornography, the detailed mechanics of a car—but when he opens them, when the bindings crack and the dry-cleaned scent of new pages and ink wafts up to his nostrils, there appear before him hundreds of thick, glossy sheets, these wild colors, these vibrant human bodies!
It’s an electric moment, a pinnacle, of which a life may contain not more than a handful. But it is more than just the bright frisson of discovery, the wordless awe before some greater fluency. If this is a book with emanations, with a life of its own, then perhaps what startles him most is the glint of self-recognition that he finds in its pages: While he sees the timeless past in the trenches and deep spaces of the body, he also, oddly—and he can’t yet put words to this—sees his own future.
What he doesn’t know yet, flipping through these pages, is that twelve years from now, as an associate professor, he will take a sabbatical and go in search of the Book, that he will find its last living artist, Franz Batke, who will take him under his wing, impart his lost techniques. He doesn’t yet know that he will return again to Batke just before the old man dies—and learn what he’d rather not know about him. That he will write an academic paper about the Book for an obscure journal of medical illustration, in which he’ll praise Pernkopf’s Anatomy as “the standard by which all other illustrated anatomic works are measured.” It will briefly help his academic career and bring him a measure of fame. But with it comes a backlash. He will lose friends, question himself, and be judged guilty of Pernkopf’s crimes by mere association; he will refuse to talk about the Book, curse the day he first saw it.
If this is indeed a book with emanations, as he will come to believe, perhaps even his heart attacks can be blamed on it—Pernkopf, in white lab coat, reaching from the grave for one last cadaver.
The book is blindingly beautiful, an exaltation, a paean, and a eulogy all at once. Page after page, the human body unfolds itself, and with each page the invisible becomes visible, some deeper secret reveals itself. What is it?
Here is an eardrum, whole, detached from the vestibule-cochlear organ and floating in space. It appears as a strange wafered planet. Here is a seemingly glass liver through which appears a glass stomach and then glass kidneys, all in a glass body, an utterly transparent figure, aglow. Here is a skull wrapped in red arterial yarn, and here a cranium packaged in the bright colors of the holiday season. There are eyes that look out, irises in bottomless depth, a disembodied gaze that is the gaze of poetry itself. There is an unpeeled penis, a pulsating liver the color of a blood orange, a brigade of soulful brains, levitating.
And then there are the drawings of dead people—cadavers, faces half intact, half dissected, skin drawn back in folds from the thoracic cavity, heads half shelled, showing brain. Consider Erich Lepier’s watercolor of the neck. In nearly black-and-white-photographic detail, the dead man seems to be sleeping; the intact skin of his neck is supple, his lips are parted, his eyes half closed. His head is shaved, and he has a mustache. Even the fine hairs of his nose are visible. Inside him a superficial layer of the neck’s fascia comes in two strange shades of color: a bluish pearlescent and a translucent olive green. The acoustic meatus, pathway to the inner ear, is visible, as is the mastoid process. Every changing texture is felt, every wrinkle recorded. Half of this dead man is in exact decay and half of him seems alive. The painting is its own kind of pornography, half violation and half wonder.
Or consider Batke’s watercolor of the thoracic cavity after the removal of the heart. It’s like gazing on a psychedelic tree of life: arteries, veins, bronchus, extending like complex branches inside their bizarre terrarium. Batke employs all the colors of the rainbow, these interwoven lines of yellow, blue, orange, purple, but invented and mixed by him, all these appear as new colors. The bronchus, which rises in the background, is striped and Seuss-like in white and umber. Although the painting’s concern is the minute sorting and scoring of these air and blood tunnels, it still captures an undulating energy, fireworks, the finely rendered thrum of the body. The painting nearly takes wing from the page.
Page by page, Pernkopf’s Anatomy is stunning, bombastic, surreal, the bone-and-muscle evidence, the animal reality of who we are beneath the skin. And yet, as incomprehensible and terrifying as these landscapes can be, as deep as our denial that life is first and finally a biological process, hinging even now on an unknown blood clot orbiting toward the brain, on a weak heart, on the give of a vein wall, the Book brings its own reassurance. Lepier’s detached eyes, like spectacular submersibles, Batke’s precisely wrought otherworldly vaginas, Schrott’s abstract, almost miraculous muscles/ducts/lymph nodes, Karl Endtresser’s bizarre spinal configurations—all of these slavishly striving for the thing itself while being regarded, through Pernkopf’s eyes and those of the artists, as beautiful, nearly spiritual objects.
So what can be said about this Book? That its intentions are good? That it is a masterpiece? That each painting contains its own genius? And what if a number of these paintings have been signed with swastikas, what then? Is it possible that only Nazis and their myriad obsessions with the body could have yielded such a surprising text?
And what of the dead stacked like cordwood at the Institute, their body parts pulled down by pitchfork? Do the secrets revealed in the Book count less than the secrets kept by it? Does its beauty diminish with these facts or the political beliefs of its general and foot soldiers? In a righteous world, perhaps it should, but does it?
Shortly after the Anschluss, after thousands of Austrians have been conscripted for the front lines of a war against the world, after more and more Austrians have died of starvation, the euphoria fades, the master race begins to devour itself. And yet Eduard Pernkopf ascends, his name a Hakenkreuz and a haunted house.
He is first and foremost a scientist, believing, mimicking the racial politics of the Third Reich. Well received by the powers in Berlin, he is first named dean of the medical school, then Rektor Magnificus, or president, of the University of Vienna. Shortly after the Anschluss—March 12, 1938—he issues a letter to all university staff: “To clarify whether you are of Aryan or non-Aryan descent, you are asked to bring your parents’ and grandparents’ birth certificates to the dean’s office.… Married individuals must also bring the documents of their wives.”
Under his presidency, medical experiments are conducted on the unfit and retarded; children are euthanized. Somewhere in his building is the severed head of the Austrian general, the patriot Wilhelm Zehner, who in the first days of the Anschluss either committed suicide in political protest against the Nazis or was murdered by the Gestapo. Among the more than a thousand guillotined bodies Pernkopf claims for himself from the district court, he searches for the best, the youngest, the finest specimens of muscle and skin. He opens the bodies like walnuts, discards what won’t serve him. Those he decides to keep go to the formaldehyde pools in the Institute’s basement, floating there until needed for use.
So who is Pernkopf? If he’s taciturn with his painters, it is because he maintains the utmost professionalism. A dreamer, an intellect, a lover of music, he is in the workshop early in the morning and late at night: He is simply an overwhelming presence. The Book becomes both his great unfinished symphony and, slowly, his madness. Whether or not he encourages them, some of his artists now sign their work to show their Nazi allegiance: Lepier follows his name with a swastika, Endtresser fashions the double S of his name as an SS lightning bolt, and Batke seems to do the same with the number 44 when he dates his paintings from 1944.
But even before the American bombs fall on the Institute—mistaking it for a factory, leveling half the building—even before the lot of these men are left scattered on the wrong side of history, half anesthetized by the past and half consumed by it, there is this one last moment in which they believe they are the righteous ones. These paintings of the human body belong to the highest expression of their Nazi idealism, but they exceed even that classification. If they save human lives—which they do every time a surgeon uses them to heal the body—each one is an act of salvation.
There was no note, but nonetheless he knows. He knows from a conversation they had the last time his brother, Greg, came from New York City to West Lafayette, when they sat on the front stoop drinking beers. They talked about everything, and Greg mentioned how he believed hedonism was the highest possible expression of self and that to die in an act of euphoria was the only way to really live. In context it was not alarming, nor really surprising. In retrospect it explained everything.
When he learned of his brother’s suicide, David Williams drove four hours to Muskegon, straight to his parents’ house. His mother was sitting in the living room shaking her head, and his father refused to believe it was Greg, since there hadn’t been a positive identification. Someone had to go to New York to identify the body. “You work with dead bodies all the time,” his father said, cruelly. “You can do this.”
The next morning, the elder son flew to LaGuardia, then took a bus and walked to the morgue at Bellevue to see the younger son. The waiting room was crowded with people there to identify family members who had been shot, knifed, beaten, or killed by gang members. A very large black man in a uniform, an officer of some sort, brought him into a room with a curtained window. He asked twice if David Williams was ready, and the second time Williams feebly answered “Yes.”
When the curtain parted, there was his brother, still tall and angular, lying on a metal dissecting table, in severe rigor mortis, with the back of his head resting on a wooden block, exactly like a cadaver in a gross-anatomy lab. But this was his brother—and there was no longer anything beautiful about him, only a pallid mask where his face had been, a lifeless slab in place of his animated body.
If his brother’s death left no mark on the greater world, the rest of those dark days in 1978 are part of David Williams’s personal history: how he fell into the arms of the large black man who carried him from the room; how he refused to sign a piece of paper that said his brother was found with needle marks on his arm; how he went to the YMCA to pick up his brother’s belongings; and how, when he arrived back in Muskegon, his parents were in denial about their son’s sexuality and about his suicide, an act that meant he could not be buried, according to Catholic rite, with the other generations of Williamses at St. Mary’s Cemetery.
And it’s part of history, too, that his brother, the person whose life most closely tracked his own, ended in the cold, unconsecrated ground of Muskegon, among the graves of factory workers, back in this place they both tried so hard to escape.
Not long after, on sabbatical, David Williams goes to see Franz Batke. He is nervous; he doesn’t know what to expect. He leaves his family behind in Munich and drives to Innsbruck. He thinks it is no coincidence that shortly after falling in love with his wife, he first saw the Book, and now, shortly after his brother’s death, he arrives in Innsbruck to visit the dying old man who is the last living vestige of the Book itself. But what is it that draws him here? He is looking for answers, yes, or perhaps merely reasons to live. And even if Batke’s paintings hadn’t changed his life—as they have—it is not so strange that a young man suffering loss might seek counsel from an old man who knows a great deal about loss.
What he finds is that Batke is a hermit living in a cell in self-imposed exile. Batke has come to Innsbruck from Vienna, leaving behind his wife, because Vienna represents the past to him, haunting him even now, defeating him, and after more than fifty years with his wife, he is not sure whether or not he still loves her. And he has come here because he has been offered work by Werner Platzer, the man who after the war and Pernkopf’s death brought the last books of the atlas to fruition. Platzer, who is hard-driving with frantic dashes of intellect and craziness, has promised his friend Batke pay and living quarters in return for paintings to fill a new book on vaginal surgery.
So Batke lives in two rooms at Innsbruck’s Institute of Anatomy, where Platzer is the new director. The old man never leaves, never goes out to take the air. Students bring him his food and sundries. Usually, he drinks ice water all day while he works. At night he has trouble sleeping, due to a bad cough, ominous and deep, which worries even him. Against his doctor’s orders, he continues to smoke cigarettes. If he is smoking himself to death, the cigarettes may also be what keeps him alive for two more years because they give him something, besides painting, to do.
At first he is mistrustful of David Williams, thinking the American scholar has been sent to spy by the publisher or by someone else looking to profit from him. But slowly Batke realizes that the professor is here for seemingly no reason other than to watch him paint—and to be taught. It dawns on him that, even if he has been remembered by only this one American, he has still achieved a certain kind of immortality. Though they can barely communicate, they become closer and closer. They don’t discuss politics, only art. And at the end of each day, Williams records another entry in his journal.
“Herr Batke fixes lunch—scrambled eggs and small pieces of pork and wurst. I continue to work on the vein—he says to paint the middle valve first and then add the dark and light dich-weiβ. He wants me to stop using such small choppy strokes.”
And “even in German, I understand him: ‘Loosen up. It’s no big deal.’ I feel it finally beginning to happen.… I actually enjoy it physically—the way the paint floats around. I really think this way of painting can suit me. He also demonstrates a vein. He can still do it at 77 years old. He works for two and a half hours on a very small section.”
Under Batke’s eye, the body becomes beautiful again for David Williams. After the shock of seeing his brother as a cadaver, he perhaps retrieves some small part of Greg with each new painting. And yet, for all of the gemütlichkeit, for all the warmth David Williams feels toward the master, Batke himself seems broken. He has been stranded on the wrong side of history, and now he never leaves his cell.
Night after night, they sit up talking. Batke shows so many little kindnesses, serves food, cakes, wine. One day when David Williams’s family comes to visit, he has presents for the children, charms the American’s wife.
So how does one quantify the joy he feels when Batke speaks to him as a friend and mentor—as a father, really—when Batke tells him that he, David Williams, might be the only artist with the ability to paint like the old man himself, someone to carry on the mythic tradition handed down by Pernkopf? Or how does one share what it meant that last day in Innsbruck, to see Batke come downstairs and step outside for the first time in years, to stand in a downpour of sunlight, just to say goodbye?
Isn’t there something to be said for these moments? Aren’t they a part of this man and this Book’s history, too?
The tanks are rolling, and the people come out of their houses, clutching bouquets to pledge allegiance to their liberators. They throw flowers and sing. After landing at Omaha Beach, the Allied army sweeps across France, liberating Paris, and breaches the Siegfried line near Aachen. Hitler flees to his underground bunker and commits suicide with his mistress, Eva Braun. The Third Reich implodes.
When American troops arrive in Vienna, they arrest Eduard Pernkopf and Franz Batke. Both are removed to prison camps, where they are placed in what is called a de-Nazification program, one in which prisoners are subjected to hard labor and a history lesson in the truth: movies showing the reality of the concentration camps, among other horrors of the war. Pernkopf, who is fifty-seven now, who has lived with visions of grandeur, is lost and broken. Still, he has visitors sneak in his work, at which he continues to toil during his three-year stay.
Meanwhile, at the university, the members of the old regime have been imprisoned or removed, and the school issues a letter to those still-living former Jewish faculty members now scattered about the world, inviting them back. Of hundreds, only one returns, a man named Hans Hoff, whose wartime travels have taken him from New York City to Baghdad. Well regarded before the Anschluss, he is put in charge of the Neurological Institute. When released from prison, Pernkopf is barred from teaching at his own beloved Anatomy Institute but somehow finagles two light-filled rooms under Hoff’s roof to finish his Book. The atlas is all he has left—and all that keeps him alive.
In these tattered postwar times, with jobs scarce again, he is able to regather his former artists and then add two more. He works his eighteen-hour days, remaining wholly unsympathetic to those who can’t keep up. Among his painters, disillusionment and internecine squabbles are now endemic. Batke and Lepier represent opposite extremes, the improvisational versus the mathematical, and both work to fill the Book with their own work in order to bring more glory to it.
In 1952, Pernkopf publishes Der Hals (The Neck), but time is short. A blood clot in his brain causes a stroke, and he dies on April 17, 1955, before the completion of his last two books. Werner Platzer, who is regarded by many as Pernkopf’s scientific son, finishes those.
Despite Pernkopf’s long fall from grace, his burial turns out the entire faculty. He is celebrated by fellow professors as a perfectionist, a stirring teacher, and the impresario of what many increasingly regard as the world’s greatest anatomy book. Some of those present are former Nazis and some are not, but all who have lived through the war now seem to bear their own burdens, secrets, and sins, and clearly they regard Pernkopf as one of their own. So they commend him to heaven.
The Jew, Hans Hoff, is there, too, in a black suit. But what passes through his mind, what he says to himself as Pernkopf is lowered into the grave, is lost now in the ash of all unspoken things. Perhaps to stand there in the first place, on Viennese soil again, he has already begun the difficulty of forgiving, or forgetting. Perhaps he marks the moment indelibly, unapologetically. Creator, destroyer—let him lie beneath the burnt grass and dying blossoms of his own history now.
One day, during the height of the debate over Pernkopf’s Anatomy, a close acquaintance, a kind Jewish woman, approaches David Williams and says sharply, “Why would you want to be remembered for your association with this book, of all books?” He has no answer. Another time, in England, while giving a lecture at Cambridge on the atlas, he is confused when a Jewish woman breaks down in tears and is helped from the room, pained by how this man, this American, has found beauty in the ugliest of books. What sickness moves inside of him?
And there’s more. He receives a letter from a distinguished academic, challenging his paper for its whitewash of history. “Have you not been struck by the fact, Mr. Williams, when visiting cemeteries in small Austrian towns, how many innocent young men lost their lives on the eastern or western front, but these originators of the Nazi mentality survived?” he writes. “As convenient as it seems to be, one cannot separate a man’s professional work from his spiritual being.”
Meanwhile, an oral surgeon at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, Howard Israel, has referred to Pernkopf’s Anatomy before every new surgery of his career. When he finds out about its past, he feels deeply betrayed. He researches the Book with another Jewish doctor, William Seidelman, asserting in a medical journal that cadavers from concentration camps may have been used in the making of the atlas. Their evidence: the appearance of roughly shaved heads and circumcised penises. When Williams is asked about this by a reporter from The Jerusalem Report, he disputes the fact, saying that when he asked Batke if death camp cadavers were used in the Book, the old man became enraged and denied it vehemently. Even famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal examined the records, and his conclusions seem to bolster Williams’s side. The two doctors, however, take a dimmer view of Williams as one of the Book’s greatest defenders.
Williams is not alone in his view of the Book. Following the publication of his paper, the two most prestigious American medical journals review Pernkopf’s Anatomy and declare it in “a class of its own” and “a classic among atlases,” with illustrations that “are truly works of art.” Nonetheless, Williams increasingly feels isolated, doubtful. How could beauty have made him half blind? Is he, as it appears to some, a Nazi apologist? On public radio, he is asked how it feels to be the one benefiting from a Nazi text, and he fumbles for an answer.
He loses friends; he loses sleep; his heart begins to hurt. He meets several times with the local rabbi, who tells him that his sin may be one of perspective. He must imagine the unimaginable when it comes to the Holocaust, must feel the grief of that woman at Cambridge, assuming she may be like so many who lost mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and spouses, in the ovens and dark chambers of places like Dachau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. How hard could it be to see that for some the Book is not a metaphor for beauty or salvation or transfiguration, that it’s not the highest expression of what saves David Williams from Muskegon, Michigan, or erases his scars, or, in some complicated way, brings Greg back? No, for that woman at Cambridge, the Book is nothing but a dirty crime scene, violated bodies that might include her brethren. The artists are no better than vultures over their carrion. What affliction or hubris has kept that from him?
Three heart attacks and several angioplasties later, he is a different man, one who still lies awake at night thinking about the Book, but thinking about it from the point of view of that woman who broke down at Cambridge. He doesn’t speak about Pernkopf’s Anatomy for years, though he follows developments from afar. Under pressure, the University of Vienna launches and concludes an investigation into Pernkopf’s Anatomy, claiming in November 1998 that circumstantial evidence suggests Jewish cadavers were probably not used in the making of the atlas. Reviewing the hundreds of pages of findings, Williams is left unconvinced, believes the university administration has obscured the results to protect its reputation.
From some primordial haze slowly comes recognition. It is the spring of 2002, and in West Lafayette he now prepares to return to Vienna, to Munich. He packs his bags, and when he is briefly overcome with doubt, his wife says, “You are Pernkopf’s Anatomy. A big part of that Book is who you are.” So he travels eight hours in coach, through spasms of lightning. But this time he arrives aggrieved, angry, skeptical, confused, searching for truth—more, perhaps, as a Jew would. He has come to avenge the naïveté of his younger self and to make his final goodbyes to the paintings, for he is sure he will never see them again in this lifetime, nor perhaps ever have the desire.
In bright sun, beneath a heavy roof, the Institute occupies half a city block along the trolley routes and shops of Ringstrasse. The first time he came to Vienna, the weather was bad—rain, thick clouds rolling over themselves—and somehow the city seemed cold, less receiving, left him empty and alone. This time he feels more resolute. Somewhere, he hopes, in the locked rooms and forgotten closets, among the thousand cadavers used by a new generation of anatomy students, is a clearer answer to the past.
He meets with professor after professor. He is unfailingly polite, phrases sensitive declarations of fact as questions in his midwestern lilt. A few he meets are defensive; most, quite the opposite. A gentle old man, a former president of the university who knew Pernkopf, serves him tea and cakes. Later, he finds out that the old man was an SS officer. Many records, including those of the identities of a number of cadavers, were destroyed by the American bombs that brought down half the Institute. Others were tampered with by those looking to obscure their crimes. Exactness is elusive. Rather than thinking there’s a cover-up here, David Williams begins to feel pity for these people, relentlessly driven back to an increasingly untraceable past.
One professor leads him through the Institute on a tour: They stand on the spot where guillotined bodies once were piled in ten-foot-high drifts and taken down by pitchfork for Eduard Pernkopf’s use. They stand in the hemicycle, where Pernkopf headily praised Hitler and called on his colleagues to lead a new age of medical experimentation, a period that would come to include the sterilization of the mentally disabled and the euthanasia of nearly eight hundred “defective” children. They go to the basement, a dark, dank, spooky place, to look upon the formaldehyde pools that once held Pernkopf’s cadavers. An attendant opens the lid on one of the pools, activates a hydraulic lift, and suddenly several bodies, bloated and pale, each one donated for use in the school today, appear from the depths on metal trays.
Somehow, on his last visit he had failed to mark all these spots, or perhaps unconsciously didn’t entirely want to or feel he needed to. Now he does, shaking his head, grimacing.
Finally, he dines with a young historian, Daniela Angetter, the woman charged with investigating much of the University of Vienna’s Nazi legacy. Her world is one of chilling medical experiments and severed heads, and she wears her work with a gaunt hauntedness and weary eyes. Allergic to protein and lactose, she eats potato chips at dinner while her husband, a plumber, eats blood sausage. “This has been horrible for me, to see dead bodies,” she says. “I’m a historian, and to think that people were executed because they were starving and stole a pig and ate it. Would I have been strong enough to stand up? If you didn’t conform to the Party, you were executed. I’ve stayed awake many nights thinking about these things.”
Sitting there, moved by this young woman, believing her, David Williams comes to realize this: All these people are run down by ghosts, too. He is not alone in his confusion. After illustrious postwar careers, former SS officers serve afternoon tea; a new generation born thirty years after the war pores over the past, making amends for its grandparents. Even now, on a sunny spring day in 2002, on the eve of the anniversary marking fifty-seven years since the fall of Nazi Germany, students carry urns bearing the last discovered remains of victims at the university during Pernkopf’s reign; the government calls for calm in the streets of Austria’s capital, deploying fifteen hundred police officers to ensure that neo-Nazi demonstrators don’t rampage in the Heldenplatz, the square where Hitler addressed hundreds of thousands of euphoric Austrians in 1938.
Here is an entire country living the events of the war over and over and over again. Later, in Munich, Williams spends an afternoon with his friend Michael Urban, the erudite sixty-three-year-old grandson of Eduard Urban, the man who first struck a deal in 1933 with Pernkopf to publish his atlas. Having inherited his grandfather’s company, Urban sold it to a company that decided to cease publication of the Book. He believes it to be a troubled masterpiece, one that should continue in print with a foreword detailing the most harrowing events of its creation. Now, while the German quietly listens, the American attempts to put into words something that has troubled him, continues to trouble him on this trip: He wonders whether, by being friends with Franz Batke, by seeing the magnificence in Pernkopf’s Anatomy, he is doomed. And yet he feels that to reject both fully is a sin of its own, a betrayal.
“David, there’s nothing wrong with you,” says Urban. “We are moving on two planes: the principal, everyday plane and then one made up of these overwhelming feelings and emotions. When we try to talk about this, we move into a wordless dimension.” Here he pauses, runs a tapered finger over his furrowed brow, smiles weakly. “My father was at one of these mass rallies, the Goebbels speech at the Sports Palace in 1943, and he said his arm was up in a Nazi salute before he knew what he was doing. It was hysteria. It’s inconceivable what people did to one another during the war. But you must remember: People endure.”
The next day, he goes to see the original paintings. He is wary, excited, and nervous. Urban has arranged for the paintings to be delivered to the downtown offices of the publishing house. And he has also arranged for Werner Platzer, the man who finished the atlas after Pernkopf’s death, to come to Munich to lead Williams through nineteen oversized black binders stuffed with eight hundred original pieces of art.
Platzer operates three cups of coffee ahead of the world. He doesn’t eat; he doesn’t pee. He just sits with the paintings, providing long discourses on each. And Williams sits with him, a student again, savoring every moment, but this time questioning, too. He asks Platzer why he thinks the Book is out of print, and Platzer shakes his head, incensed. “It’s too good,” he says. “The Book is too good.” When Williams points to a painting that many feel is that of a Jewish cadaver with a shaved head, Platzer explodes. “What does a Jew look like?” he says. “Tell me. It is absurd. I wish you Americans ate what we ate then: nothing. Three days a week, I might not eat. I looked like this man here. Absolute nonsense.”
Williams sits before him, unblinking, and presses his concerns. He believes the swastikas and SS symbols have been removed from some of the originals, as they were removed from subsequent printings of the Book, so a laborious hour is spent trying to locate the paintings in question. In the end, he discovers the symbols have been erased, and he seems troubled, angry.
And yet, when he comes upon a Batke painting of the inner ear, he holds it up and stares for a long time. “It’s just so alive,” he says softly, passing a hand lightly over it. When he sees another, of the chest, he says, “I’d give anything to have that hanging on my wall.” The two men look at the Lepiers and Dietzes, Endtressers and Schrotts. They marvel at the near psychedelic colors and intricate brushwork. With each painting—with each proliferation of arteries, with each gravityless organ—the body becomes that exalted place again.
The viewing takes seven hours, and in the end he feels it all over and over: joy, curiosity, shame, awe. In person, in full color, the paintings still mesmerize. They still emanate.
But this time in their presence, he is not exactly euphoric. If he feels a deep sense of fulfillment in seeing these paintings one last time, he also feels a strange sadness. When it is over, when the sun dips below a building and a streetlight blinks on in the window, he is almost trembling. He pulls out a handkerchief, removes his glasses, and wipes his face. His hair is slightly disheveled. He exhales, looks once at the oversized binders against the wall, presses his lips tightly together, and then turns his back and leaves the room.
The old man sits and smokes, a bottle of beer set before him. He has a crooked nose and a skewed chin. Night pours through the windows of his cell. Sitting across from him is the American, fellow exile and good friend now, who has remembered him, who has made a pilgrimage to record a way of painting that will be forever lost with his death. It is 1980, and they have spent months together, eating, drinking, laughing. There is so little time. Though they don’t speak fluently to each other, they have formed a bond through painting. And now they are drunk, and their conversation veers from art to the war.
The old man suddenly rises and disappears for a moment, then returns with a small cardboard box that makes a jingling sound. It is dust covered and full of medals, including an Iron Cross he won for valor on the Russian front, where he was shot in the groin. He passes the medal to the American, who feels its weight in his hand, turns it in the light, admires it. The old man, who trusts the young man now, who is being a little vain and showy, sad and funny, mentions that he is still proud to have worn his Brownshirt uniform. He says the Americans blew it, joining the war on the wrong side, and accuses the Jews of forcing the Americans to enter the war against the Germans rather than with them. He chides his guest for this. He describes his imprisonment and his days being de-Nazified. And David Williams, the American professor, listens, nods, and later writes in his journal, “The evening seems like a dream to me … perhaps it’s the beer. This man who I have admired for so long—I should say his work—there is no doubt in my mind that as a painter he is a genius!!—this man reveals himself as a common Nazi, a Jew hater, a Brown Shirt.… Is it possible that all makers of great works of art are ultimately exposed as thus?”
And ever after, he will wonder: Who is this old man, this last living vestige of the Book? And what secret has he found after his life as a vulture at the side of carrion? It appears there is no secret. The Nazis have lost, and he is dying on the wrong side of history. The mouth is made for food, the penis for the vagina, the heart made to beat. Until it simply ceases. Death is no salvation. The only thing left is to paint.
On the wall above David Williams’s desk at home today in Indiana hangs a painting by Franz Batke, near an old portrait of Eduard Pernkopf. Sometimes, at the end of the day, after mowing the lawn, he spends a minute gazing at them. But if asked why the pictures are there, David Williams shakes his head; he can’t say why. But he doesn’t take them down.