In Berlin I met your mother, in between the shrapnel, among the wounded and the dead. I ask myself - now, in the precise moment that I write this - what I was doing in Berlin. I don't believe I recall it well. I don't remember the exact date either. You will have to trust my conceptual precision more than my fidelity to the calendar. I never knew how to measure time with the calendar. I never knew that I had to see time as a number line which had the arrogance to order something so tumultuous, chaotic like temporality and, at times, historicity. I know the Weimar Republic was collapsing. That Hitler, uncontainable, was nearing power. That Germans called for him; that they feared the Nazis less than the communists. That they feared the Jews, who, neatly educated, neatly scared, identified in turn with the communists and with the owners of finance, the possessors of the money missing from hungry Germans. I know all that. I know, perhaps, that they were the final months of 1932. But I am not sure. What I know is what I told you: the total collapse of the Weimar Republic. That was my calendar. I also know that, in that crossroads, In a Berlin ringing with gunshots, with bombs, and with cries of anger and pain and death, I met Maria Elizabeth Wessenberg, your mother. Surprise yourself: she was out in the street, she had blood on her face, she shouted "killer Nazis" and fought, with fervor, for the side of the Bolsheviks.

When she fell on some paving stones that hurt her knees, when an SA kicked her sides, her throat, and raised his truncheon to smash her head, I jumped into that chaos like a warrior among warriors; a warrior without a cause, without party, without passion. My passion was another: to save that woman. I judged her, hardly having seen her, someone insane, or a being ready to hand over her life for nothing, for street thunder, for an avatar of the times, for a mere political contingency. I could not see anything else in those combats between Nazis and communists that deafened Berlin. To me, that wasn't history. It was a ruckus and majestic revelry due to its thunder, its blood, the shouts, the wounded and the dead. But, could one make out in the middle of that street shrillness anything substantial? Those I judged incomprehensible, at this point in the events, were the communists. Can't they read or, even, arduously make out the signals of the age? Germany was already in the hands of National Socialism. Why continue opposing an unstoppable force, for arrogance towards history? Only they could do something like that. Only those that religiously read the teleological prophecies of the Communist Manifesto. That brief text, perfect fruit of techno capitalism while pretending to overcome it, it told its militants that history had a necessity, a sense and that they were its incarnation. Only that could explain so much absurd passion, so many lives given over to a prophecy cross dressed with science, so much blood spilt for a dazzling and seductive dialectic, as dazzling and seductive as the heads of the men that had brought it forth: the Hegel of the Science of Logic, the Marx of Capital. He says it in one of the more brilliant passages of Mein Kampf. Communism does not grow because the proletariat read the obscure and impenetrable works of their ideological god. It grows with the explosive oratory of its leaders. From here sprung the need -- for the Germany destined to contain the red tide -- to subjugate them. Destroy them. If the oratory was worth more than the books, if the oratory fired hatred, and the hatred led to the decision to kill, the victory, for this reason, was the Führer's: there wasn't in Germany another orator like him. This too, the communists did not see.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:50 AM