Word: messkirch
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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Blood for Blood. Though Messkirch is kind to the French and Russian war prisoners who work on his estate, he frankly considers them inferiors who rely on "temperament" instead of "temperance." He is contemptuous of the local party hack, who spouts Nazi clichés, but he has also a sneaking admiration for him: "In his round eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, I saw the extinct race of ancient Rome, which had marched intrepidly over the whole expanse of the ancient world and conquered it." He admits his isolation from the mainstream of European life: "The most...
...Messkirch is thus easy prey for the Nazis. Indifferent for most of the war, he suddenly gets word that his only son, Otto, has been killed in ambush in France. In his anguish, he turns for guidance to the only philosophy he knows-the Nibelungen lore. "Only blood could atone for the blood of my son," he concludes from his primitive reading, and this judgment is confirmed by the Nazis: "The principle of revenge permeated every aspect of our collective struggle in the Third Reich. Vengeance was the reason why our flying bombs thundered over the enemy's territory...
...revenge, Messkirch decides to murder a French prisoner. He chooses Mollendruz, a young man of intelligence and character, as a worthy countersacrifice for his son. No sooner has he committed the murder than he learns that his daughter is carrying Mollendruz' child. True to his newfound Nazi standards, Messkirch disowns his daughter, who kills herself. He becomes a local hero, because "the father had yielded to the German in me." Ultimately, he sardonically observes, the Nazis "would have raised me to a legendary figure; my deed would have graced the pages of school primers; it would have been celebrated...
...Messkirch expects to savor his revenge when Mollendruz' father comes to see his son's grave. But his revenge goes sour. He learns that Otto was not killed by the enemy but by the Nazis, for plotting against the regime. Utterly broken, Messkirch can only stammer a few words of bogus comfort to the Frenchman, his enemy. "I had forgotten the skepticism of which I was so proud," he concludes. "I had abandoned myself to darkness, and darkness ruled over...
Caricature, Not Character. For all his crimes, Messkirch is a sympathetic character. Not so the chief character of The Birthday King, by British Novelist Gabriel Fielding. Ruprecht Weidmann is the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family that has a slight admixture of Jewish blood and is trying desperately to get into Hitler's good graces. A cold opportunist, Ruprecht commits his anti-Nazi brother to a concentration camp, drowns a companion, betrays a business associate who is plotting against Hitler, sends off a dozen of his factory workers to serve as medical guinea pigs. Ruprecht is a kind...