HUMANITY HYENAS
the executed courier for the opposition and actual landowner where the Wolfslair had been built, and I, were shlepping buckets of water from the well because there was no electrcity to run the pump to the outlets by the lawns while “incoming”, which I of course did not know by that wonderful diminuting disendangering moniker, was hurtling through the air from the North West on that idyllic end of April day as we heard splashing and realized that the soldiers were tossing their rifles, machine guns and Panzerfaeste (literally “tank fists” ), 
&
THE CURDLING, THE RUIRINATION,
THE RUIN
OF THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS
VIDE:
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2014/10/humanity-hyenas-ruirination-of-human.html
http://handke-yugo.blogspot.com/2014/09/yvind-bergs-attack-on-handke.html
================================
IT IS CHRISTMAS 1949/50
As compared to Summer 1960
(see the Alaska, the final chapter of my SCREEN MEMORIES which SOLSIICE has accepted) CHRISTMAS 1949 is the one time that I do recall flying in a DC-3
http://tinyurl.com/lns6svh
converted into a military transport with facing seating along the aisle of its fuselage. “Air bridge” time or shortly afterward, I am a U.S. Military Dependent courtesy of my mother marrying a U.S. officer, a Captain Richard Weber, OSS/CIC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade
http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-airlift
Meanwhile (that is now, in Fall 2014) I have figured out why I can't remember the second time I flew in a DC-3, in the Summer of 1960, that is on my way from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Galena fighter interceptor base
to fight a nearby forest fire: after landing in Galena around midnight I did not sleep for another 24 hours. By the time I finally fall asleep on comfortable Alaskan moss (that will be my bed for the next six weeks) I will have been awake for at least thirty six hours, probably closer to forty-eight. If you don't sleep your brain will not inscribe recollections. We started to fight fire around midnight, but I have no memory of it, either, of how we fire fighters got from Galena airfield to the fire line - by truck (?), did we walk those several miles (?), not by helicopter - I have the most vivid of recollections of my first helicopter ride (in a little three man Bell) the next morning, all I recall is the inception of the recollection of firefighting with a P-38 screaming overhead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-38_Lightning
I took it on good faith that it was a P-38, how was I to tell what kind of plane it was in the midnight dusk of the night of the midnight sun that tossed fire retardant on me and my adjacent fire fighter, someone I quicky christened “the Florids shrimp” - a diminutive kid from Florida with a shrimp's visage who had never before handled an axe! Much less anthing as odd as a Pulaski double-bit!
- I had no experience of overhead fighter planes since May 1945 when fighter interceptors flew low over the Heerstrasse outside Bremen, strafing!, the kind of memory that will instill a fright for life! If you don't sleep, the dream work is in no position to lay down memory traces!
That very eventful Christmas 1949-1950 (first films - THE NIGHT AT THE OPERA, THE RED SHOES, THE THIRD MAN, THE ROAD TO MOROCCO - first romantic kiss, with the daughter of
Albrecht Tietze who was the physician who together with his assistant Dr. Charlotte Pommer had saved my father’s life after the Gestapo had delivered him to the Berlin Police Hospital after he had tried to commit suicide so as not to divulge the names of fellow conspirator so that they could have him in presentable shape for Freisler’s People’s Court) includes my first contact with what falls into a category that then 13 year old me, however, already appreciated keenly: Menschlichkeit/ Unmenschlichkeit.
Both parents had been in the resistance to Hitler and had survived their respective Gestapo prisons
http://www.lukasverlag.com/programm/titel/317-gestapo-im-op.html
during the siege of Berlin but I appreciated especially - since the day, in 1947, that I read of my beloved grandfather Werner von Alvensleben
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Alvensleben
having been tortured in Buchenwald - that event: I flinched, an event that was decisive in making me want to flee what I regarded by then as “the land of murderers” (I shudder every time I bethink the fact that for a time I was within one degree of separation from Hitler, whom Opa made fun of at lunch instead of poisoning - my grandmother at least had the instinct to say that “She did not wish to have that gentleman for lunch again!” - what a way to put it!). Not that far from our house outside Bremen there had been a small camp, in the Teufels Moor – the Devil's Moor – and as children we were too spooked to ice skate near its edge. That account of my grandfather's torture, published in a broadsheet, was written by a woman Buchenwald survivor, Opa's torture was mentioned incidentally, which lent the account greater credibility and made it that much more shocking for being incidental. - He was said not to have been the same person afterward. All that the family ever told me about that was that Opa refused to take his shirt off in front of his wife and daughters. The message of hidden, humiliating scars was clear enough. Why I appreciated what torture meant at that time is a question that still puzzles me, but only slightly, in that I allow that for all the answers that I do have there yet exists the possibility that I may still be missing something - a statement in which you may detect the epistomelogically no longer over-confident analysand! – I imagine empathy suffices, if torture is performed on the most significant figure in your young life. (See Screen Memory 1 & commmentary which seeks to account why I fastened so immediately onto a figure I had scarcely seen by age four, and would not again for another five)
At times I felt that it was psychological torture to have been a prisoner of my governess Ms. No from age nine months to about age seven. However, I think extreme empathy with physical pain suffices. Show me a scar of yours and I will flinch. The other day I came across the photo of a bone-saw that was used in 19th century amputations - I nearly convulsed in pain! I had an eardrum pierced at age seven without anesthetic, so I have a distinct measure of extreme, if brief, pain. Nothing upsets me as much as accounts of torture! A firing squad! No big deal! A hanging? A brief empathetic flinch of the muscles in my neck. Ditto for the Fallbeil! For that kind of beheading. But torture? I couldn't even have Bush tortured! Not even to get the smirk off his mug! Cheney I might give serious consideration to. But I know even there I would desist if it came right down to it, though I'd enjoy to see that dreadful person sweat a bit: it's not that I am entirely free of sadism!
It is said that empathy depends on a parallel, on mirroring neurons; so be it, the speed with which signals travel in nerves to the brain and back.
That Christmas 1949-50 I was visiting my mother and her second husband who I think by then had been promoted to Captain of the CIC. I had first met then Lieutenant Richard (Dick) Weber in May 1945 when he drove up to our house in the rural outskirts of Bremen in a captured German Fiat in Wehrmacht camouflage to inform the inhabitants that his Colonel Fink – the contingen was not just C.I.C. but also O.S.S. which meant that they spoke German - had requisitioned my father's Maybach (which Cadillac of German cars, however, belonged to the company, Unilever, that owned the firm, Nordsee Deutsche Hochsee Fischerei, that my father managed). Dick was so charmed by this bevy of ladies having tea on the terrace that sunny May or early June day in 1945 that he stayed all afternoon. We boys, who had been herumlungern (lounging around) his vehicle were pissed that he had no candy for us! - I actually tossed a tennis ball at the silly Fiat's rear end – one of our few precious tennis balls that we boys used for a game called koepfen, i.e. you tossed the ball into the air and then headed it, or tried to head it between designated goal posts ten feet apart and ten feet away from each other that your opponent guarded as though he were a soccer goalie!) - Within weeks of its appearance in our lives the U.S. Army had created a cargo cult in the occupied zone, Bremen became a U.S. enclave, Bremerhaven its port, and by Fall of that year I was well on my way to a rapid political education and becoming an American.
Toward the very end of the war, suddenly one fine morning, I saw a company or what was left of a company or maybe batallion of German soldiers that had marched all the way from the failed defense of the bridge in Arnheim encamped in the fir woods all the way down the slopes all around our pond who were to be employed in a last ditch defense of Bremen. Cousin Nona, eldest daughter of Heinie von Lehndorf,
the executed courier for the opposition and actual landowner where the Wolfslair had been built, and I, were shlepping buckets of water from the well because there was no electrcity to run the pump to the outlets by the lawns while “incoming”, which I of course did not know by that wonderful diminuting disendangering moniker, was hurtling through the air from the North West on that idyllic end of April day as we heard splashing and realized that the soldiers were tossing their rifles, machine guns and Panzerfaeste (literally “tank fists” ),
into the pond - their officers still in finely piped dress uniforms, having tea on the terrace, did nothing to intercede. Yet if these soldiers had provided me and my cousin Detlev von Arnim, fleet as a greyound and tough as the most elastic of Krupp steel, “tank fists” or rifles to become werevolves for us as we, from the embankment in our oak maquis, espied our first Americans, driving in jeeps and personnel carriers, windshields down machine guns mounted on the hoods, on the sunken Napoleonic Armu Leuchtenburger Chausee I expect that the little nationalists that we were then would not have hesitated. But in nearly no time I took Joe Louis's side in our school boys declension of the superiority of national sporting ability. My cousins took Schmeling's. The Brits we all agreed had the best soccer teams! Whence all this amazing authority for hotly argued issues is all I can say! None of us, but Dedo, not yet teenagers had seen a single real soccer match or had even seen the or a film of a boxing event. It appeared we lived in world of certified myths, and of apparently essential male certainty.
I have no idea whether my mother was tortured or mistreated when the Gestapo, the Secret Police, entrapped and then arrested her towards the end of the war
http://www.lukasverlag.com/programm/titel/317-gestapo-im-op.html and she never discussed her imprisonment, nor that she appears to have been connected in some fashion to the resistance group Rote Kapelle. And by the time I had the opportunity to research these events she herself had died, prematurely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Orchestra_(espionage)
http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article108894297/Wie-die-Gestapo-die-Rote-Kapelle-zerschlug.html
However, during that adventurous time she befriended a certain Rainer Hildenbrandt https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Hildebrandt
who had survived a Nazi concentration camp and who became hugely upset when the Soviets and the new East German SED government started to use the same camps, several, four to be precise, which my mother's father had survived, which motivated Rainer to start his famous Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit
I don't have a photo that I can find of Hildebrandt the way he looked as still the young man that he was in 1950, but I came to think of him as resembling the Paul Henreid of Casablanca, the young idealistic Czech freedom fighter.
Rainer being infused with the same kind of idealism that Heinreid portraits in the film merges the two faces in my recollection, whom I last saw in the early 80s in New York, and I at least see it in his face even in old age:
My mother and her new husband had a place in Charlottendorf, in the American of the four sectors into which winners had divided the city, in the Westend, the above ground S-Bahn stop is still Krumme Lanke (twisted or crooked) small lake. It was a pleasant area for rambles in the Grunewald. The apartment was in what in the U.K. is called a “semi-detached house”, something that is not at all detached but constitutes one half of a building that is separate from the other half, the outsides in Germany were invariably yellow stucco, and can have four separate apartments and two separate gardens. My mother and Dick – Fir Place had been sold the previous year & it was the first Christmas elsewhere since 1943, but the apartment had some of my mother's favorite furniture.: a blonde tea table pops into the fore of the memory bank! (It derived from the well lighted veranda section at Fir Place where my mother liked to have tea with her women friends). Dick is sitting there and my mother and her friend Rainer arrives, at once I realize that Rainer is in love with my mother, just from the way he calls her “Lexi.” I am told nothing about how they know each other except for the briefest of reference to the war years. I imagine Dick was well informed about Rainer's war activities and his then endeavors.
I got along awfully well with Dick, who was more of a much older brother than a father surrogate. My actual father may have been courageous in the resistance, as a father he was in every respect a Priam. He chased and denigrated me as of my earliest years, my only moment of expressed pride in him came when I asked him, he and my mother had returned to Bremen in Fall 1945, when he said yes to my question whether he had been in a Gestapo prison, I was looking up at him as he started to ascend the long staircase at Fir Place. By age 9 it had become a mark of honor to have been in that kind of prison. I had undergone an extremely rapid political education since the end of the war that spring.
Dick let me steal his jeep, and then I allowed him to catch me, he allowed me to think I could leap out of the jeep as we traveled along the shoulder of the Autobahn at a moderate rate, and if - this was my conjecture – I started to pump my legs as though running I could segue from riding in a car to running, say, at anywhere from 25 to 40 miles an hour – instead of tumbling head over heels into the embankment! I had had a taste of the apparently “real coffeee (echter Kaffee) that elicited near orgasmic expressions among the women when it became available and I knew or learned quickly while observing the drinking habits of the OSS contingent that a cup of coffee was the potion of choice in sobering you up when you got drunk. Thus I claimed to be able to down a shot of whiskey to no ill effect - Dick said go ahead not realizing my ulterior motive, which succeeded by playing drunk to obtain the forbidden cup of “real coffee.” Playful times.
By Christmas 1949 I was in my 2nd year at boarding school in Ploen, I had been, from 1945-until 1948, the pet of the Bremen OSS, and as someone who has just turned 13, I was well on the way to Americanizing myself, as you might be too if your family has been subjected to such infamy and pain,
although my crew-cut was more of a Hindenburg variety than the real American deal, and my friends, laughing, called kidded me “Ami” for my attempt to get the hated German out of my system. There was not just the fear of and disgust with being German, but the attraction that everything American exerted.
First of all, by Fall 1945 I really appreciated them as liberators, the influence that my governess exerted on me waned to practically nil, an occasional foray to check on cousin Nona and me who were fascinated by each other's genitalia is really all I can recall. The OSS /CIC contingent were fun, they played with us boys, they “horsed around,” as it is put in American, we lacked men in our lives, Colonel Fink was an impressive colonel, a Mohwinkel I realized later had modeled himself on Clark Gable. In Fall 1945, with the return of the parents and the grandfather (already in early Summer), Fir Place was designated “Off Limits” with signs to that effect posted all around – except to the partying contingent. Nona and I observed them from our outpost at the top of the long staircase. Once everyone had gone to bed we treated ourselves to the left overs, the sweet Bols liquors! However, inhaling a first cigarette from a long butt made for a frightening experience that made you run and run to get your breath back! Americans had a hugely impressive surfeit of material goods, they smashed their trucks on our slippery roads against the huge old trees, and then eventually hauled the wrecks away! I guess we could have inferred as much from the endless armadas that had bombed us for years on end. The magazines had ads with airflow cars and girls with airflow bodies, and if you went to the Post Exchanges, as I did occasionally in Bremen and that Christmas in Berlinm, these girls materialized in their tight sweaters pretty legs and rouged and lipsticked faces – signifiers which signified if all you had seen were the utterly chaste braided blonde North German girls that age that they were “available” if only you could get your masturbating hands on them. However, chiefly it was two items on the American menu that sealed the deal: American Forces Radio Bremen and its jazz and blue program which as of Spring 1945 sunk the deepest roots for the kind of American I have become as a few years back I realize to my surprise that I really was an American upon hearing Sam Cooke sing Aint that Good News, it might as easily have been Otis Redding singing By the Dock of the Bay, or Mississip John Hurt Loving Spoonful Hurt, or Charlie Parker or Horace Silver, or Coltrane or Miles Davis. It would have to be that the Warrant Officer who ran AFNB was the only one who couldn't handle roughhousing with us boys and hit out violently when we pinned him, once and then of course never again. What of course you don’t realize as a kid and probably could not imagine if your had been told, was that these American men were permanent children themselves and only got along with children in the many countries that the U.S. Army would be stationed in during your life time. If we received a glimmer of the U.S. Army’s Catch 22 dimension I suppose the only retrospective hint would be materialistic wastefulness.
The second major attractiong that sealed the deal was The Declaration of Independence...
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html
Just what the doctored ordered for an abandoned child who had then been kept prisoner during the Third Reich with his very own prison-keep, Ms. No. The mention of “unalienable Rights” led to no querying of these two loaded words - alien, inalienable and rights and whence they might derive, but to a deep sense of satisfaction! That was the country meant for me! Moreover it had American Indians!
During tea it becomes evident that Dick and Rainer get along,
Dick must have been primed to expect Rainer to approach him for assistance for his KAMPFGRUPPE and it is offered.
If you now take another look @
but also here
https://www.antifainfoblatt.de/artikel/die-braunen-wurzeln-der-antikommunistischen-%C2%BBkampfgruppe-gegen-unmenschlichkeit%C2%AB
and at the link for
it becomes clear that the KAMPFGRUPPE, financed by the OSS which was turning into the CIA, quickly turned into an organization that committed sabotage and other acts of violence and that Rainer within a few years withdrew from an organization over which he quickly lost control.
You might call this the first, the initial curdling of the spirit of human rights that had flowed out of the opposition to the Hitler regime and the opposition to Franco during the Spanish civil war.
This entirely accidental witness to what turned out to be the funding of a group whose purpose became perverted, this potentially highly vocal human rights hyena was of course kept exquisitely informed of what transpired!
Actually, I am scratching me head until I have blood under my fingernail to discover the next time “human rights”, either in an immediate or general sense became important to me.
First thing that occurrs is a physical fight I lost at Ploen with the son of a German general by the name of Hering, or something very close to it. I lost it because I practically had a heart attack I was so violently upset at this classmate defense of the Hitler regime. My good buddies, and that was the one time in my life I really had a bunch of good buddies, were surpised at my collapse. Thus I became afraid of the violence in me!
Nothing regarding human rights comes to mind during my two disastrously disappointing years in Sour Orange except for the decrepit house in our backwoods in a junkyard all its own with an interracial couple living in it - my first glimpse of what would become knowledge of a deeper darkness in the United States.
There was my letting myself be cast as Lucifer in the Junior high play Danny Dither and thinking it was no skin of my nose being stuffed into a brown SS uniform - after all, I was violently anti-Nazi & ipso facto a “good German”, which proves to me that not only did I at least used to have the making of a “human rights” hyena but also of what is currently called a “gut Mensch” (Handke calls them “sinless postmoderns”). Fortunately Lucifer was a speaking part and kid in town congratulated me, they thought I’d been really good, but they had had a hard time understanding me. It was time to do something about my accent.
The one actual unequivocal Nazi I encountered during my nearly ten years in the Third Reich was the SS teacher who in either first or second grade at the Schoenebeck Volkschule who gave either sleepy or preternaturally contrarian me a violent slap in the face for greeting the Fuehrer’s photo with the wrong arm at the day’s opening in school, at Pledge of Allegiance time.
How to deal with the fact that both parens had brothers in the SS and that one of their marriage photos had both these men in uniform on either side of them? Well, make sure you have a good cover if you endanger yourself in that manner.
The Danny Dither event I felt, in retrospect, had great comic possibilities, but I don’t avail myself of them in the Sour Orange chapter of SCREEN MEMORIES.
Things become dicier once I enter Sour Orange Antacid,
Oakwood Friends School outside Poughkeepsie, in 1952. Not only did quite a few kids there derive from parents who were the vitims of McCarthyism, my first experience of American hysteria, and Peter Seeger showed up to sing for us when he and his Weavers were suffering too, but in 1954 we witnessed the Army-McCarthy on our school T.V. set, schoolmate Hoffman the photographer happened to have been in Guatemala as a sixteen year old and brought back photos and tales that induced the first doubts in the altogether goodness of ye olde Uncle Sam! I was voted in the Yearbook, of which I was the photo editor, as the most predisopoed to be critical and at the drop of a hat, thus I am not too surprised at myself, as aren’t some surviving classmates, that I then took to critical theory as a duck to acid!
Oakwood Friends School outside Poughkeepsie, in 1952. Not only did quite a few kids there derive from parents who were the vitims of McCarthyism, my first experience of American hysteria, and Peter Seeger showed up to sing for us when he and his Weavers were suffering too, but in 1954 we witnessed the Army-McCarthy on our school T.V. set, schoolmate Hoffman the photographer happened to have been in Guatemala as a sixteen year old and brought back photos and tales that induced the first doubts in the altogether goodness of ye olde Uncle Sam! I was voted in the Yearbook, of which I was the photo editor, as the most predisopoed to be critical and at the drop of a hat, thus I am not too surprised at myself, as aren’t some surviving classmates, that I then took to critical theory as a duck to acid!
Haverford was marked by the inchoate angers that led to the 60s explosion and manifested itself there, e.g., in the “Destruction of Lower Marion” at the end of Freshmen year.
During my junior year abroad, intellectually, two of the at most half dozen important encounters were with the work of Brecht and Georgy Lukasc during my semester in Berlin. I resisted the offer to be debriefed once a month in exchange for $ 100 of what I happened to see during my nightly visits to the theater and opera in East Berlin. $ 100 was DM 400 at that time, and DM 400 translated in East Mark 1600, and I bought my 50 volume set I think it was of the collected works of Marx & Engels for I think East Mark 100. This was my second Berlin Marx, the first had been Groucho & Fils in The Night at the Opera. East Berlin might be interesting culturally, but its FDJ seemed reminiscent of the HDJ. If the CIA man at the family friend U.S. Consul’s office had offered me, say, $ 1000 or $ 500, I have considered a number of times whether I might have allowed myself to be debriefed, it would have obviated the need for my scholarship and summer jobs. But whatever I might happen to overhear certainly was not worth that kind of money. Chiefly, what with my mother’s life as a counter spy for an example, I was afraid of becoming entangled. To be “in the resistance” was one thing, to become an agent in an obscure conflict was quite another.
It was not really until the Vietnam war that I became any kind of “humanity hyena,” and during that time (much as I would have liked to have been in the Sierra Maestra during the Cuban Revolution, and sabotage the Bay of Pigs that I had seen coming while I was in Alaska!), and Vietnam’s aftermath that whatever action I took was in the form of writing and publishing. Most proudly, really, of Wilfred Burchett’s Mostquitos & Elephants. Now there was someone as a model, an original human righs hyena from “down under” during the Spanish Civil war who had turned communist but who’d been in the tunnels with the Vietcong. And with a sturdy Bulgarian peasant wife no less.
One of my most interesting nights transpired in the mid-60s in Munich while I was doing research on the German resistance at the Institute fuer Zeitgeschichte and I saw the announcement for a rally of the neo-Nazi NPD in Hitler’s old Buergerbraeu cellar and I went and I saw all those old brutal thicknecked now aging warriors but wasn’t seized with horror into my marrow bones until I heard their reaction to a former SS-General praising Moishe Dayan - yet t’was shortly after the 67 Israeli Egyptian war - “look what Moishe learned from us.” The basso profundo bearish grunting laughter was not just bone chilling, not that I have ever sensed that that my bones ever chilled and that such a proverbial saying can even materialize, but provided a sense of the existence of infinite knowing sadism that persisted deep the heart of the world, and that would forever prove Kafka right.
If it were not for being a Handke specialist and having become interested in how the disintegration of Yugoslavia played out in Handke’s personal and literary history I would not have given thought to what I have written here so far, nor become so profoundly disenchanted with the propagandization, instrumentalization and perversion of human rights as I am now, and as I will now detail with the “Handke affair” as an example.
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