I don’t know whether I read or heard this tale, dreamed it, or simply or made it up myself:
In the mid 1930‘s some German Communist and Jewish intellectual workers began their exile in Copenhagen, including Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Gersom Scholem.
Comrade Brecht and Benjamin were good mates, and Benjamin had known and admired Scholem for many years.
One hot Summer day Brecht called on Benjamin, who was living in a tiny room on the second floor of a cheap commercial hotel. A soon as Brecht was through the door of Benjamin’s dingy room he spotted a large book, opened face down on the bedside table. It was a German translation of The Karamazov Brothers, evidently Benjamin’s current reading material.
Brecht was dismayed and disappointed. Ever solicitous of his friend’s far from robust health he had warned Benjamin a number of times of the dangers to the psyche of reading Dostoevsky. Karamazov in particular he’d warned against, as the novel was populated by giant havoc-wreaking monsters of the imagination, and should only be approached after careful preparation, including the kind of rigorous physical exercise expected of boxers before a major bout.
Brecht took up the book, slammed it shut with a loud report, and tossed it through the open window. Benjamin blinked repeatedly in dumbstruck surprise and alarm, but did not protest.
Just as this was happening Gersom Scholem was on the street below, turning into the entrance of Benjamin’s hotel, on his way to call on him. The book, weighing as much as a leg of lamb, caught Scholem square on the side of his head, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism keeled over, and the hard pavement rose up to greet him.
More of this fable, or perhaps dream, I can’t relate.
.....
I reread Dostoevsky’s masterpiece a few weeks ago, and came out of the experience, I presume, relatively unscathed.
Recently I was reading some parts of Joseph Goebbels unpublished dairies and came across an entry relating to Goebbels’ own 1934-5 reading of The Karamazov Brothers. He notes that reading it contributed to his own near ‘nervous collapse’ of that year. Dr Goebbels could imagine himself to be a sensitive soul, having read widely and acquired some culture from his early years as a Catholic scholar.
Another interesting diary entry deals with the events that came to be called ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, when an incipient 1939 revolt by some members of the two million strong Sturmabteilung, headed by the powerful Ernst Röhm, threatened the integrity of the movement.
Although admiring, even venerating Hitler for some charismatic personal qualities, barely conceivable to posterity, but evidently very tangible to many contemporaries who met him, Goebbels nevertheless often wrote diary entries describing Hitler as indecisive and vacillating, a petit bourgeois dilettante and social climber, more concerned with acquiring expensive cars, hobnobbing with the likes of Fritz Thyssen, and enjoying the company of fluttering film starlets, than improving the lot of German workers, and the largely unemployed and poverty stricken members of the SA - who had done the necessary cosh and fist work of making the Nazi revolution. Goebbels liked to describe himself as a Socialist.
It was considerations like this that had stirred up the SA revolt. The building of the ridiculously ostentatious new party HQ, the Brown House in Munich, the sight of ranking Party leaders cruising around in top of the range Mercedes donated by sympathetic capitalists, even the preposterous uniforms adopted by Göring, must have goaded the hungry and sometimes bootless SA men as they stood on street corners collecting for Winterhilfe.
Goebbels’ dairy notes Hitler’s indecision and vacillation during the SA crisis. Despite being a sadistic dwarf, a pederast and cocaine fiend, Röhm was one of Hitler’s earliest Party comrades, whom he considered a friend.
Eventually action became unavoidable, and Goebbels took a phone call from Hitler in the middle of the night - the SA ringleaders were to be immediately rounded up and arrested. In classic Mafia style Hitler and Goebbels got tooled up, piled into a sleek new Mercedes, and followed by the rest of their death squad, sped off into the night to hunt down their prey.
They found Röhm in a plush hotel room, in bed with an Aryan boy. Don Hitler himself confronted Röhm with a pistol and accused him of treachery. That night sixty or so SA leaders were arrested, and over the next few days shot.
Ever the sentimental schmuck, Hitler could not bring himself to have his pal Röhm whacked. Twice Röhm was left alone in a room with a loaded pistol, but could not be persuaded to do the right thing. In the end he died by means of assisted suicide.
Goebbels describes in his diary the anguish suffered by himself and Hitler over these terrible but necessary events - the regime’s first mass killing. ‘After all’, he concludes, ‘we were not cut out to be murderers.’
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