The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

concern in his voice. “I do hope you didn’t get the idea that I wasn’t pleased to see you the other day, because nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, nothing’s given me so much pleasure for a very long time. But we’ve been through a lot lately. And then the exhausting journey from Berlin. Even the sight of my dear friend couldn’t possibly compete with the promise of a night’s peace and quiet in a friendly hotel bed.”

“I never had any such impression,” Frank lyingly reassured him. “I can quite understand how difficult it must have been.”

“How could you even begin to understand?” Achim replied in a tone that came across as a rebuke, but spoke of inconsolable pain. “To start with, you’re not Jewish.”

The way he said it came almost like a slap in the face. And Frank retaliated.

“So you think Jews have a monopoly on suffering?”

“Today, yes. Absolutely.”

Frank was taken aback by the conviction of his friend’s reply, but said nothing.

“I sometimes get the feeling that we’ve come to symbolise the guilty conscience of the entire human race. All man’s basest desires. Everything that humankind is unable to come to terms with. That’s why we have to suffer.”

He turned to the window, looked out onto the street, and appeared to lose himself in his thoughts. It was some time before Frank broke the silence.

“You amaze me, Achim. I’ve never even thought of you as Jewish before. In fact, in the past you were not even averse to cracking the occasional antisemitic joke. And now here you are talking of ‘we’. I had no idea you felt so strongly.”

“Nor did I, until those gangsters in government started spouting their hatred and contempt.”

He fell into a pensive silence. And before he was able to stir himself from his thoughts, Frank went on to relate his experience in the wine tavern a few evenings earlier.

“You know, I was sinking a large quantity of pinot gris the other night. On my own. The place was quite empty. This man comes in and sits down at the table next to mine. Unashamedly queer, probably on the pick-up, and quite obviously Jewish. For me he was the epitome of so many Jews. But you’re so utterly different. In many ways you’re totally unjewish. So why do you feel so strongly?”

Achim smiled. It was a smile that came with a slight wince in his expression. “You see what’s happening to us my friend?”

“Come on, Achim. Don’t start these cryptic comments.”

He was beginning to irritate Frank. He appeared so strangely smug in a way that did not fit with the Achim he knew.

“All right, Frank. Let me give you an example. I’ve been reading a book recently, a pseudophilosophical work by Rudolf Kassner. Maybe you know him?”

Frank shook his head.

“He’s a writer of essays. A thinker. A culture critic if you like. Much revered by poets. He’s published erudite writings on the Romantic poets and painters of England, like William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as fascinating pieces on Indian idealism and the morality of music. The man is embarrassingly well-read, well-informed and articulate – a model of our civilisation. This book I’ve been reading was published a few years ago, just as the mindless masses were sweeping their Führer to power. It’s a very learned book and rambles evasively through the author’s highly abstruse theories on what he calls ‘physiognomics’ – something he’s constructed as a means of classifying the character of people, for example by the shape of the face. At one point, early in his book, he describes what he calls the ‘phallic’ face. Let me just quote what he says.”

Achim went over to the bedside table and picked up a book lying beneath the light.

“It’s incredible. Just listen to this,” he said and started to read: “‘Another variant of the phallic face is that of the money type (commoner amongst Jews than amongst other races), which is not to be confused with the mean type. The money type with his round, spherical, unfinished, overgrown money-face is not at all mean, or is just as wasteful as he is mean and greedy. This is a very modern face which has developed gradually with modern capitalism, the stock exchange, share prices and so on. A face without substance, like coins or bank notes are without substance…’ And so it goes on.”

There was a quiet rage in his voice and a hint of disgust drawn on his lips as he threw the book on the bed.

“This man is educated, a writer and intellectual, a man of culture revered by poets, playwrights and professors. A man with sensitivity and an awe-inspiring mind. And yet he writes trash like this. So corrupted is he by the zeitgeist that he’s become a mouthpiece of official dogma, disseminating lies for which he’s unwittingly helped to contrive a fashionable camouflage with an uncomfortably respectable semblance of truth about it.

“And we, Frank, are no better,” he continued. “We’re just as corrupt in our own way. We’ve absorbed all the lies, drawn our conclusions, and – whether we realise it or not – we’ve all taken sides. It’s inevitable, I suppose.”

“You’re quite wrong, Achim,” Frank said, when he finally found a sufficient pause to intervene. “I’ve definitely not taken sides. And I’m not the only one, I’m sure.”

Achim slowly poured himself another Mirabelle brandy, without looking to see whether his old friend was in need of one.

“Then these are sad bloody days for humanity,” he muttered, “because it’s about time you did. There are moments in life, Götz, when you can’t just sit on the fence, but have to decide. There are things about which you can never be in two minds.”

He tossed the drink down his throat, leaned his head on the back of the chair, and stared into space.

Achim’s words stung and left him smarting all the more by the calculated use of Frank’s given name. A name that Frank so loathed. He knew Achim was