Authors: H. G. Adler
“Go to Ruhenthal and pick up the three hundred prisoners that the guards will hand over to you there! Make sure to count exactly how many there are; you’re responsible for anyone who escapes! If anyone tries to escape, don’t call after them, just shoot! Your weapons should be clean and at the ready! You’ll march through Leitenberg toward the Scharnhorst barracks, where you’ll report, then onward to the firing range at Dobrunke!”
The corporal listens to the order and takes along a private and ten soldiers, who pick you up. Now they drive you onward, young, strong lads who don’t know you and will not know you because they don’t speak to you since that is forbidden. They see you, but they don’t look at you, their
shyness immense, their appearance fragile and empty, childlike embarrassed sadness hiding within their faces. They walk confidently and place their leather-clad feet firmly on the ground, one step after another. They are not part of the chain, but their stride is as human as your own, just a bit less tired. They stride powerfully, leading you on in your own powerlessness. Only rarely do they make eye contact or with a few spare words cross the divide that separates you and your guards. If they did decide to disobey the strict regulations, they nonetheless could learn little about you, because there are too many of you, there wouldn’t be enough time, nor would there be any trust between you. On top of that, there’s too much to do as you march, work, and march again, the day soon over.
At midday, when there’s an hour’s rest from work, the guards change shifts. These soldiers also have their orders to take you back to Ruhenthal early in the evening and hand you over to the guards after carefully counting you. Orders alone artificially hold you together and in a few hours divide you again, it all taking a short while. Only a set of gestures and understood signs unites you, there being no way to relate to one another on a deeper level; everything that transpires happens in an inhuman network that consumes all of us. Yet we plod along as well, our participation not in earnest; no one can think he truly knows anyone whom he’s glad to meet but hardly knows. No, no one is for real; that is the fate of those who journey, those forced to take a ticket. So get going, for you still have to reach the prescribed destination, no matter how tired you are. Quietly the will prods you on in order that suffering doesn’t erupt in all of its destructiveness, denying each questionable existence.
“What a pain you are when you rant and complain! Cheer up!”
“How can I cheer up? Nothing will allow it. What has happened to me may seem right to you, but it’s unbearable to me.”
“You can bear it. Try counting the steps. Maybe the soldier over there is doing the same. He looks like he’s just looking on absentmindedly.”
“But why doesn’t he absent himself altogether? He could desert. He has a weapon. He could do it a lot easier than you or I. He doesn’t have to do what he was told. Open rebellion wouldn’t sit well at all with him, for he lives under irrefutable laws, but he could desert! That’s for certain!”
“Yes, sure. But if he bails out, there will be another one to replace him.
And if that one leaves, then there will be another after him. And so on for eternity, and because of that it never stops.”
“Isn’t that always the case? There are always more. The guilt just shifts from one to the other, it doesn’t go away. No one is himself. Each is the other one’s ape. If someone has a problem with that, then he’s replaced. That’s the way it more or less is and will always be.”
“Don’t you want to see any meaning in it at all?”
“Do I want to …? You’re a fool! The desire is there but it’s like an untouchable flower, one that is always visible and yet which always remains out of reach.”
“I misspoke. I don’t mean if you
want
to make sense of it all, no, I mean whether you can see
any
sense to it.”
“Why do you mislead me with questions about secondary matters when I am forced to live life firsthand? It’s what’s happening to us firsthand that matters! And what’s happening firsthand is not necessarily for the best. Rather, it’s enough that it is. Any meaning it has, and there indeed is one, has been so eradicated that at best you can only collect your thoughts. Yet given the state of necessity in which you live, you don’t want to see what you’re a part of.”
“Isn’t that then the meaning of it?”
“If that’s the case, then you are reducing meaning to something inessential. That then would place it outside of the operation that controls us, and also therefore outside of our own essence.”
“Yet our essence is not this operation. These are only the outward conditions that we are forced to suffer.”
“There’s no such thing as outward suffering felt by each of us as well as by me. We are a community held together by suffering, and that is essential.”
“But there is suffering that you don’t experience. A stranger’s suffering is not your suffering.”
“Any suffering is my suffering. You know, if something is treated as inessential it is still my concern; it doesn’t matter whether I wish to recognize it or not. Suffering exists in and of itself, whether I feel it or not. I can always feel it, always it is right next to me, even when for a moment I don’t feel it and don’t have to bear its entire weight myself. But I at least have to see it, hear it, feel it, even smell it, for it continues to spread its thick mist.”
“But how about meaning? Doesn’t it exist as such, yet in a much more ungraspable, much higher sense? I’d even go so far as to say, as a much higher form of meaning?”
“You play with the word
meaning
by placing it in uncertain terms in one instance and certain terms in the other.”
“You’re picking at my words and ignoring their meaning!”
“I don’t want to joke around and pluck bare your heart’s innermost desire, since you are also speaking of my desire. Meaning is what we desire.”
“And desires truly exist!”
“But as desires. Don’t you see the difference? Suffering exists. It’s there, and it’s not desired. No one desires suffering, or at least not his own suffering, that is, if he isn’t so disturbed as to take joy in his own suffering. But many, if not all, desire meaning. Desires are intentions that can sometimes be attained, but often they are unattainable. Meaning at its most basic level is an unattainable desire.”
“Since it floats before me, it also materializes somewhere inside me; thus it exists within me.”
“That’s right. I have nothing to add to that.”
And so what remained silent was what could further be said about meaning, for it cannot bear up under constant focus if it is to cohere to what we believe and think. Sometimes the moment calls each of us up out of the depths in which we linger or think we linger. Such moments can simply pass, but it can also happen in such a way that what follows them grants no reality to suffering. Then usually that’s it, everything that once seemed to break all bounds becomes the everyday.
Lucky is he who doesn’t have to wait for this because he already knows the sentence that’s been handed down against him. Though he awaits his execution, it’s certainly not a surprise. The surprise attack meant to disorient him is known well beforehand and is a dependable and trusted companion. The other passengers are only there for a while and frequently disappear before they are even missed. Only a small, albeit sudden surprise can upset the inertia of one’s feelings, which themselves always want to cling to normalcy, since within that exists a protection against overwhelming suffering. It’s true, whoever needs to protect himself ends up feeling doubly disturbed at any change, for normalcy is invoked as a means to scare away loneliness. Yet because normalcy doesn’t find the truth to be
sweet, truth always wins out, thus normalcy can never be certain that it will continue to exist. One may always like to think of it as reliable, but it is clear to all that though it may be nurtured for long periods of time, in the end it always abandons human beings without fail.
The truth is merciless, and it is always victorious, always to people’s surprise, for nothing is as deeply mocked as the final victory of truth, even when its story involves countless insults, though never a final defeat. The truth is most terrible for those who never risk it, something that upsets them more than mockery or disdain. Truth allows no escape and readies itself for the pursuit that presses through its every pore until it conquers the resistant heart. Thus truth is merciless to him who tries to lock it out of his heart and is forced to accept it nonetheless. But it is never cruel, and only lies try to cast it as so by binding it up with something awful in order to battle the truth and delay and prevent its victory until the very end. This victory occurs when normalcy breaks out again, even if it’s the last part of normalcy, namely life itself, even though it may know its own end, yet can never fully believe it.
The moment will strike you when nothing else stands between you and the truth. Then all false images fall away. Yet this is going too far; it is not up to life to show the truth in its final form, for its own execution does in life as well.
Whatever then could possibly survive or remain would be the truth itself.
That’s probably so, but let’s keep our wits about us so that we can indeed exist and serve the truth perpetually. That way we certainly cannot escape ourselves, but we do not need to run away from ourselves, but rather must get hold of ourselves and say to everyone that we are the ones who rest while we journey and who journey while we rest. As long as we are ourselves, everything that is not us will pass, and in the same way everything is in the midst of a journey, everything passes which is not us, the ones whom all that is strange just passes by.
Yet, full of fear, we court the strange and seize hold of it in order to own something for the first time, because it is difficult to believe in yourself when you are not master of something that stands for yourself, thus confirming that you exist through what is yours, though in the end it’s still only a part of yourself. This touches upon the fact that you yourself are so
little, it being difficult to even know if you exist at all when you in fact possess nothing. All power, all fame, and all greatness love to be displayed through symbols of power or at the very least wealth. The history of mankind is a history of power and wealth, its fairy tales and proverbs have been shaped by it as well. The face of the Earth, as long as man has prevailed upon it and transformed it, is nothing more than a scarred field created and abandoned by such madness.
Leitenberg is a wound, a superficial ulcer that owes its creation and existence to the greed of men. Each one says: “This is mine! A house, a yard, a dog! This I call mine! Mine! Mine! These I grant my will and a name, which I think is a good thing. I chose them myself. A house, a yard, a dog! I need my possessions!” And so Leitenberg was founded and grew. This and every other town struggled for dubious rights through grim means and used coldhearted power to dupe those who didn’t know anything, didn’t want to know anything, and who were continually done in by human intentions. And so it came to pass, the deadly battle raging back and forth, an undeclared and thus maddening war.
In the name of justice, injustice is installed, defying the condemnations that want to destroy the visible signs of greed. Yet the monuments have long since superceded human power with their own power, and so they remain as someone passes by who is being taken away and has been dispossessed and sent into exile to survive there as long as he can until the day of his final dissolution, when he is nothing more than a dead animal, the horrible image of which he remains for only a few hours more, and which he had become even before the truth was completely revealed to him.
Those who live on create special memorials to the dead, whom they call the departed, wishing still to possess them or to appear to possess them, though they also turn them into rubbish or refuse, which is easier to abandon when necessary. And so gardens are set up, fenced in and tended with care, where in locked crates the former owners pass on through the observation of certain customs and morals. In the gardens narrow holes are dug and filled, around which gather the living with heavy hearts, shedding tears as they stick the crates into the ground, tossing their murdered flowers after them and shoveling them over with earth until the holes close up. But the ceremony doesn’t satisfy their pride, and so they create a mound above each hole that is planted with flowers and decorated in
order to satisfy their belief that the former owner will not disappear from the memories of the new owners.
The mounds in this garden are lavishly decorated, and each is named. That’s something special, as workers drag in special blocks of granite that require great effort as well as expense. With chains the blocks are lifted and placed above those who can do nothing against the fact that the stones are set directly above their skulls. But there’s comfort in this strange custom, for now the dissolute once again possess something that, at least in the imaginations of the living, cannot be taken away. The dead are condemned to silence, but the stones must have pity on them and, amid all the ornamentation, proclaim the wonder of their names for all to see.
Whoever has a name enjoys his simple existence and has not left the society of whatever world in which the slightest hint of a name still brings him joy. “All ye rejoice, for we have a name!” Holy choirs sound beneath the ringing of bells that swing to and fro and that do not shatter. For that would mean existence is endangered, there being nothing to denote it with gusto. The dead are not erased, rather their names are instead proclaimed far and wide. Their legacy outlasts their contempt, their misery, and all sadness. For existence has erected a monument to itself that towers above them.
Existence is all that remains, an almost incomprehensible collection of the detritus left over. The one who lives, who cannot live there, feels like a helpless stranger. He is someone who is led past and then through. He still has eyes and can see, he’s not dead, even if he can do no more than express what he observes, thus becoming a ghost imprisoned and dressed as a living figure. The dead man made of stone is not absent for long and needs no outward shell, since he has one and is one. The ghost newly transformed is added to many other ghosts of his own kind, all of which appear in similar manifestations, possessions being one of them, even though there may be few left, or few that are allowed or granted by higher powers, versus the power of the wrongful owners who have ensured their own control over existence and make no distinction as to whether what they have seized are things that belong to the dead and are what remains of them, or indeed if they belong to the living who want to own them for themselves and make their claim to them. However, the living cannot do so, since after the creation of the laws that caused them to cease to exist,
they are not what they really are, having instead become goods that have been taken, which, since they are not things and therefore do not exist, can no longer be proprietors that one can either count or recognize as people, but rather are ghosts clad in different forms whom the unbelievers retaliate against whenever they make themselves visible, harming them in ways that any of us can suffer but that one should never be forced to bear.