Yet that Luger has a history and my father got it from one of his projects. From him I inherit it, as you will inherit it from me. My father gripped that pistol and put it in one of the infinite histories that make up History. You'll excuse my Hegelianism. I believe I've told you (and if not, I tell you now) that Heidegger was my Master, but my origins are with Hegel. I return to the Luger. I return, in search of my father, to the last days of the Great War. It is night, and there are no stars, and if there were the shrapnel covers them with its phantasmagoria, its macabre unreality. The Kaiser's lieutenant, exhausted, covered in mud, and in sweat, and in blood, and full of himself, tells my father to give the order to retreat. My father roars: "We are less than fifty kilometers from France". The lieutenant says: "They are orders from the politicians, orders from Berlin". "We make war, not them", he says, always angered, my father. "You are mistaken, Müller", the lieutenant says. "We make war, but they govern."

Who are they?

The social democrats, the Bolsheviks, the cowards and the Jewish traders.

And why do we submit to this gang of traitors?

I don't submit. I'm a soldier, I obey.

The lieutenant likely didn't speak further. So my father told it to me. "If he hadn't said what he'd said right away, I...would have done something else." But the lieutenant leaned back on the wet, dirty mud of the trench and confessed (because it was that: a confession): "I am, also, a defeated soldier, defeated by tiredness, by disgust." "What disgust, what tiredness?" exclaimed my father. "Who beat you, lieutenant?" "Those that lead this war, they defeated me." "You declared yourself won! By God, only fifty kilometers and we'll be in France. If we throw ourselves on them we'll annihilate them. That is war, and tiredness or disgust, not cowardice." "Do you believe I'm a coward?" "I believe that if you don't give the order to continue fighting you don't deserve to be a warrior. War is annihilating the enemy, lieutenant." The lieutenant released a derisive chuckle, also bitter, also offensive: "Don't be citing me Clausewitz. Or save them for another war. This one, with its puny conduct, with the low troop morale, with soldiers that know themselves to be manipulated by traitors, with soldiers that forgot their nation because no one reminds them nor invokes it, because there isn't a chief to embody it...this war is lost. Either we retreat or its the enemy that annihilates us". My father, possessed by an anger he'd recently found in himself, took out his Luger and shot him four times. A slim corporal, pale, not too tall, walked by, just a few meters away or a little more, and with a menacing, sullen voice said: "One doesn't win a war by killing one's own". The retreat was disordered, chaotic. That chaos saved my father from punishment. No one, in no war, kills a superior with impunity.

But that act, those four shots he fired on the lieutenant, that unreflective, or clearly demented, act, that act that granted historicity to the Luger, destroyed my father. He could not, didn't know how to live with it. He died in 1924, in the middle of the Weimar Republic, the republic of defeat, wasted by debts, corroded by blame (he had killed a man, to sum it up, exhausted by the ignominy of the traitors, to a German soldier, to an innocent) and wasted by a cerebral discharge that, mercifully at least, finished him off right away, without adding, to his life, the suffering of dying.

Now it, the Luger, is here, where I told you, on my work desk, "ready to hand". That it once again partakes in history, that once again it occurs in history, that it again embodies the complex trauma of an event, does not depend on it, but on me, from the use I put it to, or not.

For the moment, I continue writing.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:36 AM