Naamloos verhaal

11

On the morning I strode into the office put at my disposal, I was reminded again of the long path down which I yet had to travel. I entered a room which was perhaps five by seven metres, with a ceiling two metres fifty high at most. I thought wistfully of my Reich Chancellery. Now that place had rooms; the very instant one entered one felt dwarfed, one trembled before such power, such high culture. Not on account of the splendour – the ostentation had always left me cold – but whenever I received someone in the Reich Chancellery, I noticed at once that he felt the superiority of the German Reich, felt it physically. Speer got everything so right. Just take the Great Reception Hall – each chandelier alone must have weighed a tonne; had any one of them come down they would have crushed a man below, turning him to a pulp, a mash of bones and blood and squashed flesh, with maybe some hair sticking out the side. I was almost afraid to stand beneath them myself. I never gave any hint of this, of course; why, I strolled beneath those chandeliers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was just a matter of getting used to them.

But that is exactly how things must be.

For how could one spend millions and millions on a Reich Chancellery, only for someone to come in and say to himself, "Oh, I thought it would be bigger than this"? The point is, this man must not think at all, he must feel it viscerally, instinctively. He is nothing; the German Volk is everything! A master race! The edifice must emit an aura, like a pope, but a pope, of course, who smites the slightest contradiction with fire and sword, like the Lord God himself. The mighty double doors open, out steps the Führer of the German Reich, and foreign visitors must feel like Odysseus before the Cyclops, but this Cyclops has two eyes, over which no man will be able to pull the wool!

And there were no boulders at the Chancellery.

There were escalators. I almost felt as if I were in Kaufhof in Cologne, to which I had paid a visit immediately after its Aryanisation. You have to hand it to him, that Tietz; the Jews certainly know how to build department stores. But here is an important distinction: in Kaufhof the customer should think he is king, whereas when he came to the Reich Chancellery, the customer knew that he had to bow – in spirit at least – to something far greater. I was never in favour of having every Tom, Fritz or Heinrich crawling about, especially not on that floor.

The floor of the office at my disposal was made of a dark-grey compound. It was no carpet I recognised, but a type of covering fabricated from a tatty felted substance – but not at all the sort of material from which one would choose to tailor a German soldier's winter uniform. I had seen its like many times in this new world; it was so ubiquitous that I did not need to feel humiliated by its presence in my office. It was plainly a feature of these impoverished times. I vowed that in the future the German worker and his family would have different floor coverings from these.

And different walls.

The walls here were paper thin, no doubt due to a want of raw materials. I had a writing desk, which was manifestly second-hand, and was obliged to share the room with another desk, which must be for the typist I had been promised. I sighed deeply and gazed out of the window. It gave onto a motor park with dustbins in an array of colours, the reason for this being that waste was carefully separated, no doubt another consequence of the raw materials shortage. I shuddered to contemplate from which bin's contents the wretched floor covering had been made. Then I chuckled to myself at Destiny's bitter irony. If only the Volk had made a greater effort at the right time, there would be no need to collect refuse in this manner, given the wealth of raw materials in the East. All kinds of waste could have been happily tipped into just two dustbins, or even a single one. I shook my head in disbelief.

Rats scurried around in the yard below, alternating with groups of smokers. Rats, smokers, rats, smokers, and so it went on. I scrutinised once more my modest, nay pathetic writing desk and the cheap, whitish wall behind it. It would not look any better no matter what one hung up there, even a bronze imperial eagle. One would have to content oneself that the wall did not come crashing down with the weight. Once upon a time I enjoyed four hundred square metres of office; now the Führer of the Greater German Reich sat in a shoebox. What had become of the world?