The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,67

only got worse. She was not insane, she told herself, but the frequent bouts of madness were beginning to add up.

When she found the Meissner biography of Magda Goebbels, the one with quotes from Ello Quandt which had made Magda Goebbels appear so sympathetic, Margaret read only three pages before she broke the spine of the book in a rage. She pushed it off the table and onto the floor. She stood up, almost unable to see.

For she had seen enough. The book was a slavering hagiography, Meissner was a sycophant. She had been led by a golden hoop in her nose straight over a precipice. Again and again, there were descriptions of Magda, a woman “of breeding and distinction,” “pretty, angelic-looking even, with her pale, gold, silken hair, milk-white complexion and sparkling blue eyes, graceful, dainty and slim,” worst of all, as de facto justification for her involvement with Nazis: “mistress of the feminine virtue of adjusting to different mentalities.”

Margaret remembered what she had read about Magda’s several affairs, the ones she had had to distract herself from Goebbels’s womanizing: many were with men who worked in the Propaganda Ministry with Goebbels himself, and wouldn’t it not be the most unlikely thing, if the man who decided to write a biography of the dead woman were one of her former lovers?

The most obvious lie in the book was this: Magda Goebbels, who in other biographies was said to have been born to a ladies’ maid out of wedlock, was here described as having been “the offspring of a happy marriage.”

Margaret was betrayed. The quotations in which she had put so much hope, which had rendered Magda cognizant and remorseful and mercilessly executive in her attempts to avenge herself against herself, not simpering, not silly—these were being discredited and crumbling into piles of fakery before her eyes. So Magda had been nothing but a fanatic, nothing but a deranged patriot when she killed her children, and all ideas that she had been a lone Nazi tribunal, turning the principles of inheritance of evil inward on the family of evil itself, were nothing but fantasies. Margaret had been singled out, chosen for tailing by a rapacious falcon, a lunatic, a fanatic, a spy.

The moment fell over her; the burst of a honey bubble. The collapsing that began at Sachsenhausen accelerated in a rush.

It was the plainly cheap and inauthentic quality of the available paths into Magda Goebbels’s mind. The situation could not be a matter of chance. The way Margaret saw it now, the smoke-and-mirrors, mirage-like quality of access to such minds must be intrinsic to the very stuff of such minds. A cephalopod builds its multichambered shell according to the nacreous laws of its species, and so too, this flickering figure of Magda Goebbels, without hardly meaning to, vanished inside layers of narrative artifice—whether by the euphuistic friends she kept, the rhetoric-heavy letters she wrote, the genre-distorted portraits she commissioned, the bombastic films and men she adored—all emanations from her personality which built rightness and naturalism, in layer upon layer, for things that were beyond right or nature. Margaret had thought she would read Mein Kampf and enter into communion with Magda Goebbels, but now she saw that without having even planned it for herself, Magda Goebbels would remain an icon on the outside, unreal on the inside, forever and ever.

The characteristic of storytelling that had first become manifest when Margaret was at the doctor’s—that the meaning generated through it was not only one great falsifier but the great falsifying agent at the disposal of the human mind—Margaret saw as the lurking bogey. Stories themselves were the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she came into contact with meaning, and meaning was the hell that threatened to swallow her up whenever she heard any story.

Margaret trembled. She left the university in haste.

FIFTEEN • Tales of the Overripe

Erich the Hausmeister was having strange days.

He read the diary of the American further. He rubbed his chin, inclined his head, and found that the girl had become obsessed with her older German lover, had even begun to spy on him. She was obsessed in particular with her lover’s connection to her parents—the dead father and the estranged mother. It seemed that she had been collecting—nay, stealing—bits of Amadeus’s personal papers, and as Erich became more interested, he read these as well.

Margaret had written:

August 15, 2000

Dearest diary,

I looked through Amadeus’s file cabinets this afternoon after he went to teach his class; I