Inquisition

Dear V.,
I had better start this, so you have something to read when I am six feet under.
This is about life – your life. It’s not about boy groups and parties, defloration and masturbation, first kisses and first tears; it is – among other things – about the horrors that our deep space cruiser called “Mother Earth” inflicts on its creatures. Every day, every second of its existence. Long before we were born it has been doing that, and it will continue to do so.
Being spared is not a sign of great intelligence and strength but sheer luck.
Being aware of this is helpful: It puts things in perspective. It might make you a happy woman who gets on well with men (not a dumb harassment suer). A happy woman like Mary, my wife. She is the best woman a man can find, and I would love you to become like her.
She has a great sense of humor, she is infinitely supportive and loyal (better than any mother), she is sensitive but takes an insult with a smile (that’s self-confidence!), she is instinctively tactful and never insults people, she is generous and altruistic – and she gives with a smile, with pleasure.
Mother Teresa was a greedy little bitch in comparison.
Marys biggest wish is to see her guy happy. This is why she is still here – 46 years later. (And this is why I kicked out your mother after only three years of matrimony.)
Saints are pretty hard to find in this day and age of female “emancipation”. Lots of women are simply no good anymore. Supercilious and selfish. They don’t love men, they don’t know men, they don’t want to know men; all they want is to be supported and spoilt, to be luxury objects, to let the man sweat while they sit back and relax. And to have all the rights in the world, not just equality. Perfect little whores really. And, typically, they are usually the ones who despise prostitutes.
No wonder: They are competition. (And quite often the better choice for a man! If Boris Becker had kept that in mind, he wouldn’t be minus ten millions now. But hey – a 3-second-ejaculation has its price, right.)

Take my stepsister D.: She – like a man – wants her partner to be a lot younger than she is (“I feel younger than I am” – as if that mattered!), she expects me to lift up her wet dog because her dress is too precious (but my shirt she doesn’t think of), she can’t seem to remember anybody’s birthday – but she is full of talk about karma and love and Buddhist ideals. And full of principles. She would report her own son to the police, if he were guilty of a crime, she once said.

This reminds me of the article I wanted to talk about (“Schreiben nach Auschwitz”, NZZ Nr. 151/2001):
A Jewish prisoner who had been made block captain had his own son executed for stealing food ... Just to make a statement, just to say: I know the rules. Just to suck up. Just to be a better Nazi than the Nazis.
And Borowski, who the article is about, evokes other nightmarish reminiscences:
“[Ich sah] Güterwaggons, aus denen erstickte Kleinkinder wie tote Hühner an den Beinen herausgetragen wurden.” About his lover Maria he writes: “Man vergaste sie in einer Krematoriumskammer und machte aus ihrem Körper Seife.”
“World Of Stone” is the title of one of his books, and he escaped this world by committing suicide, in my birth year, aged 28, after surviving the concentration camps. He was unable to live on with these images in his head.

Do you see what I am talking about here?
I am trying to tell you that you shouldn’t get upset if your party doesn’t go too well. If a guy grabs your butt. If a guy is too lecherous for your taste. If it rains. If that phone call you are dying for never comes.

Yesterday a report on Korea was announced on TV. About how they sell dogs on their markets – as food ...
There is more horror in this world than any human mind can possibly conceive and comprehend. One can only deal with little bits and pieces at a time. I wonder sometimes how God can take all this shit – today’s tragedies, the atrocities of the past, the cruelties to come.

Verdun, Auschwitz, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Vietnam – one would imagine that the world ends right there, for everybody. But it didn’t. People write poetry still, they fall in love still, they live and die as if nothing had happened.
Just like the trees and shrubs in my forests. They don’t give a damn about the past, the present or the future.
And they don’t travel. They don’t need to be in motion in order to be happy.

Recently an 80 year old woman fell and died a few hours later in hospital after being mugged in the streets of Z. The assailants were two teens aged 15 to 16, a girl and a boy.
Why do today’s young people do such things? When I grew up, school kids didn’t rob people, and they didn’t shoot teachers or parents. We were scared stiff of bad marks, demanding teachers and domestic rules.
Is this A. S. Neill’s fault? Is this the result of permissiveness? Of lenience and indulgence?
I don’t think so. Young people are and have always been ignorant and headless. (The postulate to give the vote to 16 year olds, in this light, is nothing but an attempt to better manipulate the constituency.) And they are and will always be crazy about “new” things. They love revolutions, mobile phones, computer games, floods, fires, solar eclipses, petting and ... you name it.

Horvath’s “Jugend ohne Gott” wanted to act as “bullets and shrapnels” in the war to come; Hitler’s triumphs (1933, 1938) would never have been possible without the support of youth.
If you had been 16 then, you would most likely have become a BDM member. Just like everybody else in your class.

15/11/2001
When you are taking photographs, hold on to the images in your head too.
Here is what Jechiel Dinur, an Auschwitz survivor, wrote:
“Photographien [...], alle Arten von Photographien. Grosse und kleine. Sie gleiten aus aufgetrennten Taschen. Liegen überall am Boden verstreut. Man tritt mit Füssen darauf. [...] Rifka, die Putzfrau, fegt sie auf den Müll. Niemand scheint hinzuschauen [...] Alle haben sich daran gewöhnt, dass sie am Fussboden liegen; junge Frauen mit ihrem Bräutigam am Hochzeitstag; lächelnde Babies in ihrer Wiege; Knabengesichter mit rührenden klugen Augen. Diese Fotos haben Menschen mitgenommen – als Andenken an ihr Leben.”
NZZ Nr. 266/2001, p. 67

19/4/2002
A doctor touched some of his female patients indecently; a priest dreamt about his choir boys, and the dreams were stronger than he was; a software developer wanted more control than he was due; a politician accepted a fur coat for his wife – how shocking! Bad, bad, bad people! They deserve to lose everything, don’t they. They deserve to be dragged around in the mud by the media. Regardless of their biographies, their merits, their immaculate careers.
Well, I let you think that.

And I give you another glimpse of real horror: the sort of acts which the people we are supposed to form a nation with perpetrated a few decades ago. The people whose current leaders speak of human rights as if they had invented them and readily condemn the way terrorists are being treated by the US military. Its jeunesse dorée goes to discos, drives cars, has unlimited fun – with no bad conscience. “Concentration camp” or “confiscation” are exotic words to them. If their Porsche has a dint, it’s the biggest tragedy they can think of.
Here it is:
“Im März 1944 besetzten Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht Ungarn [...] Nicht ganz zwei Monate später begann die Deportation der ungarischen Juden nach Auschwitz-Birkenau. Unter tatkräftiger Mithilfe von ungarischen Polizei- und Verwaltungsstellen wurden innerhalb von acht Wochen 440’000 Männer, Frauen und Kinder in das Vernichtungslager geschleppt, zum überwiegenden Teil sofort im Giftgas erstickt und zu etwa einem Viertel als Zwangsarbeiter auf grosse Rüstungs- und Rüstungsbauprojekte in Deutschland, Österreich und anderen besetzten Gebieten verteilt.”
NZZ Nr. 88/2002, p. 62

3/6/2002
The above gave you a glimpse of what amok running governments are capable of, especially in “Teutonia”. (Thanks to the European integration the whole of Europe, by the way, is now paying for the damage this country caused, the material damage [all other forms of damage cannot ever be repaired].)
No wonder Kohl was such an ardent apologist of the integration process. Shared burdens are smaller burdens.

The following is about stupidity.
Fanaticism is stupidity, always. Don’t ever forget that! Enlightened people see through ideologies and their narrow scope and are broad-minded, tolerant and liberal.
And this is the text: “Wege der Erniedrigung” by Michail Schischkin. Read the whole thing, and learn. Non scholae, sed vitae discimus.
And do me a fucking favor: Have sex without a bad conscience; don’t commit suicide instead. Because self-hate and contempt for your body do not ennoble you; they make you look like a damn fool.

5/9/2002
Today I read the following: 8’000 sheep from Australia suffocated on a cargo ship to some Arab country. They are sent there alive to be butchered the “right” way.
Now a lot of sharks have fat bellies, and the sheep have no worries anymore. Suffocation seems preferable to Arab abattoirs. If I were a sheep, I’d probably choose the sharks.
They are straightforward killers. Not sadistic ritual murderers.

9/7/2003
Quotation:
“Ich arbeitete auf dem Bahnareal. [...] An einem sommerlich heissen Tag im Jahr 1942 hörte ich verzweifelte Schreie, die durch die Gitter der Viehwagen herausdrangen. Eine Frau bat einen Ukrainer um Wasser für ihr Kind. Er forderte eine Uhr. Sie gab ihm die Uhr und streckte durch das Gitter einen Schuh, welchen der Mann mit Wasser füllte.”
NZZ Nr. 153/2003, p. 75 (Jerzy Czarnecki: “Erinnerungen eines Davongekommenen”)