In Search of Klingsor. Jorge Volpi

       EPIGRAPH

      Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives … if a man cuts a picture carefully into 1,000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also devised the rules of the game—but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to determine. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness—or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how much of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how much appears to be caused by your mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from this limitation. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game. For here you strive against the imaginary boundary between yourself and the Godhead—a boundary that perhaps does not exist.

      —ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER

PREFACE

      On September 5, the day they came for me, I was in my house on Ludwigstraße preparing some equations that Heisenberg had sent to me a few weeks earlier. Ever since July 20, when Hitler announced over the radio that the coup attempt had failed and that his life had been providentially spared, I knew that I didn’t have much time. My anguish grew as I listened to the subsequent news reports: the execution of Stauffenberg and of his close friends, the preparations for the trials in the People’s Court, and the massive wave of arrests that were made in the coup’s aftermath.

      Well aware that I could easily be the next in line, I tried to remain calm. But when I learned that Heini—Heinrich von Lutz, my childhood friend—had been arrested, I knew for sure that my days were numbered. But what could I do? Flee Germany? Hide? Escape? We were right in the middle of the very worst months of the war. It would have been impossible. All I could do was wait, quietly, for the SS or the Gestapo to break into my house. If I was lucky.

      Just as I had imagined, the thugs wasted little time. A few days later, the Gestapo arrived at my house, handcuffed me, and I was taken straight to Plötzensee.

      On July 20, 1944, a select group of officials of the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of the Third Reich, aided by dozens of civilians, had made an attempt on Hitler’s life while the Führer was presiding over a meeting at his headquarters at Rastenburg, about six hundred kilometers east of Berlin. The leader of this group was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a young colonel who had been wounded in the line of duty in North Africa. That day, Stauffenberg placed a pair of bombs in a briefcase, which was then deposited underneath the Führer’s desk. Stauffenberg waited for the bombs to go off, the signal for the coup to begin, the coup that would put an end to the Nazi regime and, possibly, the entire Second World War.

      The tiniest, most infuriating logistical error foiled Stauffenberg’s plan. Either one of the bombs hadn’t been activated or the suitcase had simply been placed too far from where Hitler had been sitting. The Führer escaped with a few scrapes and not a single one of the high commands of the party or the army was seriously wounded. Despite the failure of their first operative, the conspirators fully intended to move ahead with their plan, but by the early hours of the next day the Nazis had regained control of the situation. The main orchestrators of the coup—Ludwig Beck, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, and of course, Stauffenberg—were detained and killed that night in the general headquarters of the army, on the Bendlerstraße in Berlin. Hundreds of others were quickly arrested following the strict orders of the Reichsführer-SS and the new minister of the interior, Heinrich Himmler.

      The news of the plot came as a shock to military insiders and civilians alike, thanks to the startling scope of people implicated: military officers, businessmen, diplomats, members of the army and the naval intelligence forces, professionals and merchants. In the aftermath, Himmler had all the conspirators and their relatives arrested, on the theory that the source of evil travels through bloodlines. By the end of August of 1944, some six hundred people had been arrested—some for aiding and abetting the conspirators, others simply for being related to them.

      Hitler was livid about the coup, and unleashed his vengeance upon all the people who had turned against him during the very worst moments of the war. Scarcely a few weeks had passed since the Allied invasion of Normandy, and already there were people ready and willing to do away with him and place the entire Third Reich in jeopardy. So, just as Stalin—his enemy—had done in Moscow in 1937, Hitler decided to stage a great trial so that all the world could see just how vicious his enemies really were. Before it began, Roland Freisler, the chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, and the executioner who would carry out the punishments were summoned to his headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair.” There, Hitler advised them of the following: “I want them hanged, strung up like butchered cattle!”

      The trials began on August 7, in the great hall of the People’s Court in Berlin. On that day, eight defendants accused of conspiring against Hitler’s life were brought before the court: Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Helmuth Stieff, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Karl Klausing, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Albrecht von Haden. They were not permitted to wear ties or suspenders, and their own lawyers even urged them to declare themselves guilty. Flanked on either side by two enormous Nazi flags, Freisler ignored their protests, one after the other. Their crimes were so patently evil in nature that any and all declarations were inadmissible. Without flinching, Freisler condemned each of the eight defendants to death. He directed his gaze upon them:

      “Now we can return to our life and to the battle before us. The Volk has purged you from its ranks and is pure now. We have nothing more to do with you. We fight. The Wehrmacht cries out: ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight at the side of our Führer, following him for the glory of Germany!”

      By February 3, 1945, the day I was to appear before the People’s Court on Bellevuestraße, Freisler had already delivered scores of death sentences. That day five of us were to stand trial. The first among us to face the judge was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a lawyer and reserve lieutenant who had served as a liaison between various resistance leaders. He had been captured shortly after July 20, and since then had been held at the Dachau and Flössenburg concentration camps. As was his habit, Freisler interrupted him regularly, to ridicule him and the rest of the defendants, calling us pigs and traitors and proclaiming that Germany would emerge victorious—victory in 1945!—if he were able to successfully eliminate scum like us.

      But then something happened, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have thought it some kind of miracle or hallucination. Suddenly, the antiaircraft signal rang out, loud and clear, and a red light went off in the hall. After a second of total silence, we heard a loud roar followed by what seemed like an endless series of explosions that reverberated through the courthouse. Bombings had become a daily fact of life in Berlin during those months, so we tried to remain calm and waited for it to end. We would never have guessed that it was anything other than a typical air raid, but it turned out to be the most intense bombing the