“This too is merely cant. The protestations of a completely honest man who must deal with charges that are not quite groundless yet unjustly harsh, and who must now make a manly upright effort to kiss a few asses rhetorically, to creep into any available hole inside or outside the court, and to do so quickly, making the best possible impression before a general closing of sphincters.

“There’s a hollow feeling in the pit of everyone’s stomach, even, apparently, the defendant’s. He lowers the sheets of paper and shakes his head indignantly. No, he says resolutely, he won’t go on. They have forced him to read his text in order to hinder him from communicating something of extreme importance. He is visibly agitated and gets to his feet after all, but so shakily that the papers and the blanket slide from his lap. Göring, who sits next to him, tries to pull him back on the bench by the tail of his jacket. But Hess shoves Göring’s hand aside and hisses to him that he has to let him do his duty. He stands there, large. Stands there and moves the periscopes of his eyes about as though seeking something.

•

“He seeks it far, far beyond the table with the Last Supper figures of the eight judges facing him on the long wall, far behind the now empty witness stand on the short wall to his left and the glass lock-up booth next to it; behind it, the simultaneous translators are waiting for his next words in order to instantly recolor them into French and English and Russian and let them whir up like a bright flock of birds.

“As a rule, one scarcely hears it, this bright flock of words. It whirs up and scatters, slipping into the rusty and encrusted headphones made of former Wehrmacht supplies and hanging from every seat in the courtroom, albeit seldom used. And even though the words trickle out as dwarves from the uselessly dangling earphones, it is so still in this room that you can hear every one of them. The periscopes of the defendant Rudolf Hess sweep through the space.

“They scan an imaginary horizon. He turns them to the right, they sweep across the stunned heads of the attorneys, who are looking at him, and across the tables of the prosecutors and their astonished miens to his right, across the barrier separating the public, from which hundreds of pairs of eyes are staring at him—but what they seek lies far beyond, outside this room, far outside this building, guarded like a military camp, and beyond Nuremberg, shamefully bombed and flattened, and beyond Germany, covered with silent lunar craters, and beyond Europe, smashed and shattered, and perhaps even beyond this planet, which the mange of mankind has so dreadfully attacked and violated. And while they search, his saurian head speaks, and his sullen and exhausted little voice says that the important information which he has to communicate and which they have been trying to hinder him from communicating concerns matters that the initiated have long been aware of, but that have not been made sufficiently accessible to the general public. During the great show trials in Russia, the press pointed out the incomprehensible self-accusations of the defendants and expressed the suspicion that these self-accusations could have been obtained only with the aid of drugs. Nevertheless, it still has not gotten around urbi et orbi that certain pharmaceutical preparations, in the form of injections or tablets, are able to transform the most solid character into a toy with no will of its own, a malleable tool for any intention whatsoever.