The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,47

Clearly he thought she might grab it back. And perhaps Margaret would have, too. But now it was too late. The man turned his back.

Margaret gripped the book and put it in her backpack furtively, hoping no one had seen her. And just as quickly as the money was gone, her stomach churned. She was trembling, but she could not bring herself to ask for the money back. It was already done.

She walked a few steps. She did not want her own life to signify. But she did want meaning—that sweet sensation of sphericity. The meaning of something else. The meaning of Magda Goebbels’s life—the meaning of the lost world.

She would make good on her connection to the hawk-woman. Even if Magda Goebbels had not seen the irony linking her husband’s crimes and her children’s deaths, even if she had never recognized her guilt, Margaret would begin to know Magda Goebbels’s side of it: the primrose labyrinth leading her to justify a social movement of murder, maybe how the philosophy of the madman in his own words makes it all smooth and fine. Margaret thought this would be the single richest trick of her amnesiac’s brain. She would allow meaning—but only the meaning of a Nazi.

Riding home on Linienstrasse, she passed a quiet entrance to an industrial courtyard. As she sped past the dark entryway on her bicycle, she caught sight of a sun-filled courtyard beyond a tunneling entryway. All she saw was instantly gone: the glinting windows, exposed pipes, the ivy and the smoky sunlight. The flashing pace of the view into the courtyard felt like nostalgia. To think of nostalgia, even without nostalgia itself, was painful and searing.

She bicycled home. She sped down Friedrichstrasse. She flew through Potsdamer Platz. Slowly, she began to smile. She had Adolf Hitler’s book in her backpack. When she got home she would draw the curtains, shutting out even the hawk-woman, in order to read, and it would take the time out of time: not freeing her from her burden of guilt, not releasing her, no, even weighing her down all the further, but at least now with her cloudy burden no longer unpaired—no longer without an understanding of its kinship, as a small-time evil, with historical evil, which is large, large enough to rest on. For the great arduousness of guilt is its loneliness.

In the next days, Margaret finished the portrait in oils of Magda Goebbels. It was a beautiful piece, and when it dried, she put it on the pillow next to her own. They slept, the flesh woman and the painted woman, one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open.

She read Mein Kampf according to plan. At every turn, she looked for places where Hitler’s sensibility overlapped with her own. On page 65, Hitler asks:

Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?

And although Margaret knew that Hitler’s idea of “self-preservation” was built on a persecution complex, she was elated. In the year 1925, he acknowledged, even if later rejecting, the possibility that his right to act on that persecution complex was perhaps only subjectively reasonable. It seemed akin to her own constant inner quizzing. And it suggested to fervid Margaret that there might be something flaccid and forgiving—not in Hitler’s life, but in his character.

Finally, she came to exactly what she had been looking for. She found it in a passage of no particular significance: Hitler’s description of himself as a soldier, on a transport train during the First World War.

I saw the Rhine for the first time thus: as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old Watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my chest became too narrow for my heart.

At this, Margaret’s own chest narrowed. Perhaps there was nothing in the quotation that justified it, but for one moment, Margaret saw Hitler as young and soft and grasping and sentimental. And she did the arithmetic and figured that Hitler must have been twenty-five when he was on that train. This year, Margaret was also twenty-five.

So she saw herself there. And although to be like him was the opposite of goodness, and even