Free Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen Page B

to me with his laws of harmony and his schoolmasterly strictness, celebrated chef d'orchestre that he is, an exact reader of a score, a gardener with pruning shears, while I'm all weeds and wilderness. And Kürenberg said, as though he read Siegfried's mind: 'I believe in our collaboration. There are contradictions in me and in you that don't contradict each other.' And the life into which they had been pitched was contradictory, and they contradicted their kind.
    Judejahn had felt himself under observation, and had withdrawn. He retreated, with his angular skull between his hunched shoulders—retreat or tactical withdrawal, the way a patrol between the lines in no man's land retreats or withdraws when they feel they've been spotted; no shots are fired, no flares light the night sky, fate hangs in the balance, but they withdraw, creep back through barbed wire and vegetation, back to their own position, and conclude for the moment that the enemy position is impregnable. And the murderer too, the hunted criminal, presses back into the shadows, the jungle, the city, when he senses the bloodhounds are near by, when he knows he's in the policeman's field of vision. Likewise the sinner flees the eye of the Lord. But what of the godless man who doesn't know himself to be a sinner, where does he turn? Straight past God, and into the desert! Judejahn didn't know who was watching him. He saw no spies. There was only a priest in the lobby—Rome was crawling with religious brethren—standing strangely transfixed and staring like Judejahn through the glazed double door at the animated company sitting at the table, drinking and talking. It was a German Stammtisch , a table established in the German way but transported provisionally to a southern latitude; and, objectively speaking, there was only the wood and glass of the double door to separate Judejahn and his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, but he had remained seated: whether he was holding forth here or in front of the town council at home, he had remained seated, whereas Judejahn had strode boldly on, boldly and blindly on with the watchword that God is dead. He had gone further than the burghers in the hall, but it was they who had made it possible for him to go so far. They had underwritten his wanderings with their lives. They had invoked blood, they had summoned him, exhorted him, the world will be won by the sword, they had made speeches, there was no death to compare with death in battle, they had given him his first uniform, and had cowered before the new uniform he had made for himself, they had praised his every action, they had held him up as an example to their children, they had summoned the 'Reich' into being, and endured death and injury and the smoke from burning bodies all for the sake of Germany. But they themselves had remained seated at their table in the old German beer hall, German slogans on their garrulous tongues, Nietzsche clichés in their brains, and even the Führer's words and the Rosenberg myth had only been exhilarating clichés for them, while for Judejahn they had been a call to arms: he had set out, little Gottlieb wanted to change the world, well well, so he was a revolutionary, and yet he detested revolutionaries and had them flogged and hanged. He was stupid, a dim little Gottlieb, worshipping punishment, little Gottlieb afraid of a beating and desiring to beat, powerless little Gottlieb, who had gone on a pilgrimage to power, and when he had reached it and had seen it face to face, what had he seen? Death. Power was Death. Death was the true Almighty. Judejahn had accepted it, he wasn't frightened, even little Gottlieb had guessed that there was only this one power, the power of death, and only one exercise of power, which was killing. There is no resurrection. Judejahn had served Death. He had fed plentiful Death. That set him apart from the burghers, the Italian holiday-makers, the battlefield tourists; they had nothing, they had