Thus, the fronts seem clear. Clearer, at any rate, than in WWI. But not completely clear. For instance, Uncle Helmuth’s comments since March 1938 revealed that not all of them emigrated when the brown brothers of the Reich marched into Vienna, not all of them fled like bats from a cave when a light is carried in. He had always called them “shady elements,” alluding to their “obscure machinations.” Now, evidently, a certain portion of them who were not so allergic to light had remained, and they occupied his imagination more keenly and more intensely than ever. They were now personally closer to him, so to speak, were more of his ilk, and in donning brown uniforms had changed their identities but not their power and arbitrariness, not the infinitely freer existential form that towered over his own and made it appear subordinate. But because they were of his stamp, for the moment he looked up at them kindly, yes reverently. He knew them individually, knew their names (Reich Field Marshal Hermann Göring, Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Labor Leader Ley). But in general they were still (albeit now in a positive sense) they. At first he spoke their names in a different tone, of course (as Cousin Wolfgang did about the “New Human Being,” the “People”). With stars in his eyes and the booming of unconditional trust in his breast, he would say, “You don’t have to worry about a thing; they’ll take care of it properly!” But this gradually changed again. The intonation became flatter, more sober. Soon the individuals melted back into the old collective term; the names gave way to the anonymous expression his powerlessness used for those in possession of power: they.

The more the days plunged, light and blue, into the great icy vacuum from which an ever-greater past promised to emerge from an abstract present—very much the right basis, then, for a great future—the more taciturn Uncle Helmuth became. I saw very little of him then; I had already moved out of the apartment and was chicly installed in a garçonnière (paid for by Stella) in the center, so I saw Uncle Helmuth only when I visited Aunt Selma or Cousin Wolfgang, who refused to meet me anywhere but in the “joint parental home” (“If you want to see me, then the place that was your home for twelve years ought to be good enough, right?”). But by early 1939, one could catch the irked overtones whenever Uncle Helmuth mentioned them. (“They seem to be forgetting that we people of the Ostmark are Germans too, after all.”) And then the hour of vast collective bloodshed began palpably to advance on him too. It must have been around this time that I last saw him, but I can imagine that by September 1939 everything was back to normal: “They’ve put us in a fine mess!”

25

For Uncle Helmuth and his iron men, I am now in the enemy camp, even though I too am standing as an iron man to fight side by side with millions like me against some kind of “them.” This is paradoxical, but I enjoy every moment of it.