Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

I write only the truth . . .

. . . how extraordinary while clearing the family attic, only last week, to find a copy of Goethe’s Faust, published in Leipzig (1920 Insel Verlag), and clearly a souvenir from my father’s duties in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) when, during WW2, his rôle was concerned with the military intelligence to be gleaned from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section. 

Am I to believe that it was my father’s own copy, when between its ultra-thin pages I found the 1944 newspaper clipping of the poem you see in my photograph, snipped from the NSDAP’s Völkischer Beobachter?  I don’t think so. 

But I do believe my father retained the cutting as an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi who, by the precious fragment’s preservation within the covers of Goethe's magnum opus, had – even as the thousand year Reich trembled before the Allies – disclosed evidently his continuing blind allegiance to the romantic völkischen Nationalismus ideology of those demagogues pledged to Führer, Volk und Vaterland.

Oh come on! I hear you protest. Is it possible after seven decades to deduce so much from such meagre clues? I’ll answer in a moment but, first, the poem (according to my own perception of it at the moment it fell into my hands): 

                                       Between life and death

                                       Narrow our path whose hedges
                                       Wreathe destiny and sorrow.
                                       Narrow the highstrung bridges  
                                       That stretch from life to death now.
                                       While other lips were silent,
                                       Eyes spoke with our truer sight,
                                       Our wishes surge ascendent,
                                       Higher, freer in the light.

                                       We stride on hour by hour
                                       Seeking the half-seen footpath,
                                       Yet, from the fields’ young verdure
                                       Sprouts the new sown aftermath.
                                       Destiny? My own? And yours?
                                       Our fate is running like sand.
                                       Life and death a single course
                                       Aloft in the divine hand.

Zwischen Leben und Tod
by Franz Lüdtke

                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod

                                       Schmal unser Weg. Wir pflücken
                                       Kränze aus Glück und Not.
                                       Schmal die wiegenden Brücken
                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod.
                                       Unsere Lippen schweigen,
                                       Nur unser Auge spricht. 
                                       Unsere Wünsche steigen
                                       Höher, freier ins Licht.

                                       Stunde um Stunde schreiten
                                       Wir den helldunklen Pfad –
                                       Aber aus Ackerbreiten
                                       Sprießt die ewige Saat!
                                       Schicksal? Meines? Und deines?
                                       Schicksal verrinnt wie Sand.
                                       Leben und Tod sind eines
                                       In der göttlichen Hand . . . 

A proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. 

In the divine hand . . .  In der göttlichen Hand . . .  well, the author of this poem, Franz Lüdtke, by these words evokes in my view the statement, some seven years earlier, pronounced by the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, in 1937: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Consider, then, the nature of Franz Lüdtke as an NSDAP propagandist, a passionate proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany that would see the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum realised by territorial expansion eastwards, absorbing Poland and encompassing the eastern borderlands that ran from the Baltic states to Transylvania and the Black Sea.

Consider Lüdtke’s Eastward-visionariness – his Ostvisionen – his conviction, as chief of the Foreign Policy Department of the Nazi party, that Ostlande could be recovered from Slavic thraldom for Großdeutschland by the Reich’s triumphant Eastern colonisation.

The significance of the marginal notations in Faust on page 201 by our unknown Nazi Goethephile should then become clear . . . for it is between pages 200 and 201 that Lüdtke’s valedictory poem was pressed by his devotee.

I want to build a thousand bridges.

For, as I removed the cutting of Zwischen Leben und Tod, I read beneath it Goethe’s text, the words of Mephistopheles addressed to Faust, singled out by a jagged pencilled bracket:

                                       Ich wollt indes wohl tausend Brücken bauen.
                                       Nicht Kunst und Wissenschaft allein . . .

                                       I want to build a thousand bridges.
                                       Not by art and science alone . . .

Is there not a mystical connexion intended here by the unknown German reader? Does not the reader of both Lüdtke and Goethe – precariously keeping the faith on January 14 1944, the very day the Wehrmacht are routed and their retreat from Leningrad begins – still believe that the Reich of a Thousand Bridges can yet endure, even though the path to victory crosses a measureless abyss in a treacherous murk – helldunklen – half-lit by enemy tracer fire. 

Notwithstanding this initial interpretation, I yet believe the mood of the poem is suggestive of an almost heretical admission by Lüdtke of leaderlessness insofar as destiny's path is half-seen.

An insinuendo . . . the lisping English reviled.

Further pencilled scribblings identified in Faust yield more of the unknown disciple’s steadfast völkisch-nationalistisch rationale; a rationale moreover coloured by the cultural refinement of Anglophobia and state instituted antisemitism. 

Page 166, for instance, has a marginal checkmark beside a text that leads to the mocking Goethean aphorism . . .

                                       So bringt der West den Schwarm . . .

                                      Und . . . [Sie] lispeln englisch,  wenn sie lügen.

. . . a double meaning that could suggest unholy fiends are set to bring a swarm of evil forces from the West and that they lisp like English when they lie.

Hence one speculates to propose that these characteristic marginal checkmarks against the ‘Swarm of Lisping English’ are pencilled there to draw attention to further significances for the German reader of 1944 . . . namely, the afflicted tongue of Moses, an archetypal speech defect that would doubtless resonate as a redoubled insinuendo . . . the lisp slander . . .  the sly variant of the gross blood libel that impugns Die Juden who allegedly rule England (see Juden beherrschen England, Nordland-Berlin, 1939, below), a revival a millenias-old shibboleth over which Nazified anti-semites could gloat.

A volume from my father’s collection of antisemitic propaganda brought back
from WW2 service overseas and, judging from the over-stamping on the
cover, this 1939 copy of Juden beherrschen England (‘Jews rule England’) was
an exhibit from a mission by T-Force, an operational arm of Twelfth Army
Group, possibly seized by them as evidence in indictments against war
criminals during the Nuremberg Trials at which my father was an
interpreter for interrogations.

Verso . . . the newspaper cutting.

I cannot refrain from adding a footnote

I write only the truth . . .

On the reverse of the Lüdtke poem cutting is a sneering dispatch from Ankara, dated the previous day, referring to the November 1943 Cairo Conference at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Tschiangkaischek determined the Allied position against Japan and the future of postwar Asia. The propagandist’s despatch begins: ‘The Germans must have tremendous power if the Allied military authorities, out of concern for the safety of Roosevelt and Churchill, found it necessary to make their meeting place a veritable fortress.’ 

There is a perverse irony, perhaps, in that usage of ‘Fortress’ when you consider that following defeat in the Desert war, in the very month of the Cairo Conference (November 1943), the Desert Fox, Field Marshall Rommel, his life shortly to end on the orders of Hitler, was appointed commander of Fortress Europe .

See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/scene-glimpsed-by-nietzsche-from-his.html

See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html

•

For a tragedy of a native German’s alienation in the face of the NSDAP’s inexorable rise to power incited by antisemitism see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library
http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

A Great Poet’s Disarming Admission: W.D. Snodgrass and the de Witts

I’ve deeply admired the distinguished American poet, W.D. Snodgrass, ever since the day Oxford University Press published After Experience* in the States; I attended the launch of this volume in New York in 1968. 
      In particular, the superb title poem, “After Experience Taught Me . . .”, resonated with me because at once I recognised the quotation from the little Guide to Spinoza bequeathed to me by my father. It is Spinoza’s* Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that provides Snodgrass with the poem’s schematic thesis (‘After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile ... etc.’ ) against which he counterpoints antithetical couplets of martial brutishness devised to reduce the enlightened lens-grinder to a dehumanised husk.  
      My father, an eye-witness at the Nuremberg Trials, served in SHAEF under U.S. General Eisenhower from late 1943 until the end of WW2.  I believe Father would have had a profound understanding of Snodgrass’s After Experience since listening at first hand to harrowing evidence of Nazi atrocities had been his daily lot. 
      (See: Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’
      http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html  )
      But it was not until I learned much later the truth of the baptismal names masked by the initials W.D. – they actually stood for William De Witt and, therefore, he appeared to be of Dutch extraction – that it occurred to me to summon the courage to write to the poet. 
      Was it too fanciful, I asked myself, to view Snodgrass’s cathartic work eviscerating the agents of the Holocaust (The Führer Bunker Cycle of Poems) as an act of reparation on behalf of his ancestors, the patrician de Witt brothers, murdered and disembowelled in 1672 in the Hague, in whose suburb, Voorburg, Spinoza resided. 

     

      As I eventually wrote in my letter to W.D. Snodgrass: ‘I’m told that Spinoza, a Sephardic Jew, had developed an intimate friendship with Jan de Witt and his brother so the controversial philosopher had to be forcibly restrained from going into the streets to publicly denounce the murder. The two de Witts had been mistakenly identified as traitors by a Dutch mob that lynched them and mutilated their bodies, believing the brothers had been responsible for the defeat of the Dutch troops by the French in 1672.’ 
      (It is said that Spinoza was moved to attend the scene of the crime with a notice inscribed Ultimi Barbarorum – Basest of Barbarians – until dissuaded by van der Spyk, the painter.)
      Ten generations or so later, I asked the poet, did latterday De Witt owe Spinoza a debt of honour? 
       Some weeks later an airmail from Erieville NY arrived, which went some way to solve the riddle. W.D. Snodgrass wrote:

Thanks for your very kind letter . . . Your question about Spinoza, the de Witt brothers and my poems about the Third Reich is fascinating – downright ingenious – but I’m afraid my answer will have to be disappointing. I was always curious about where my middle name came from (that is, previous to my father, who was Bruce DeWitt Snodgrass). My family was always very vague about this, saying that we were mostly Scots, with a little Irish thrown in, but they thought we’d had an ancestor who was “German or something.” I was surprised, then, to find, on a trip to Belgium, and again on a later visit to Holland, that the name appeared frequently, often on store windows in the spelling “deWitte.” This amused and further puzzled me because, when I attended a high school reunion, I’d been surprised to find that everyone addressed me as “DEwitt,” a name which seemed to imply the removal of someone’s intelligence. (I still believe that when I was actually in School, friends called me “De,” the same nickname my father went by, and I still do.)
This puzzle was solved for me by Philip Hoy, the literary critic and publisher who came here from London to interview me about 10 years ago. When I asked where he’d got his Dutch name (there were several Hoys in my home town), he said it was just where I’d got mine — many Dutch Covenanters had fled to Scotland or England before emigrating on with their fellow-believers to the U.S. As a matter of fact, there was a Covenanter college (Geneva) only a block from my home in Beaver Falls, PA, but they are Reformed Presbyterians while my family were all United Presbyterians and considerably less stringent and hide-bound.
I once had known of the de Witt brothers and their relation with Spinoza, but had forgotten about it. Thanks for reminding me – it gives me a sense of closer relation with Spinoza than I can probably claim with justice. I hope this will give you the information you need.
With best wishes,
W. D. Snodgrass

His signature and handwriting had a crispness and flow that reflected the agility of a questing mind. (The letter was dated April 10 2004, some five years before his death, aged 82.)

Ultimi Barbarorum 

It is my belief that Ultimi Barbarorum would make a fitting epigraph to this meditation on “After Experience Taught Me . . .” or even, perhaps, this stanza (from the The Führer Bunker Cycle, in the mouth of Joseph Goebbels):

                     Pray, children, pray.   
                              Our Father who art in Nihil
                              We thank Thee for this day of trial
                              And for the loss that teaches self-denial. 
                              Amen.

The mutilated bodies of the Brothers de Witte by
Jan de Baen

Postscript.

To pursue the resonances of W.D. Snodgrass’s name to a point of supererogation, I should add, for the benefit of non-British readers of this text, that WD indicates ‘War Department’ in common notation in the UK, and can often warn civilians of sites of unexploded bombs. 

* For another literary title derived from Spinoza’s works, see Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (The Ethics – Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, Part IV:  Of Human Bondage).

 

For After Experience, see: 
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171513

For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

 

See also The Humbert in the Park, for further amateur literary sleuthing: 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-humbert-in-park-more-palimpsestic.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html