“For this is the torment that everyone here feels, even a rubberneck sticking his nose into the Nuremberg Trial: the ineluctability of a state that cannot be changed. The static, immobile presence of horror (so oppressively depicted in the best present-day writing from Kafka to Beckett—isn’t it?). The omnipresence of hopelessness. The anonymity and ubiquity of evil. The continuous existence of murderousness in the condition humaine. The impossibility of eliminating that existence. . .

•

“The habituation to horror has paralyzed every person in the Nuremberg court. Its omnipresence has allowed no movement. One murder is dreadful and reprehensible. The murder of ten people is an abomination. The murder of one hundred people goes to the limits of the imagination. The murder of several million people is an abstraction, to be grasped only with statistics. Crime becomes a matter of quanta. The murderer cannot be placed in any conceivable relationship to his deed. One cannot imagine a just punishment for him. He is no longer a murderer by means of a direct deed. He is an executive particle of an overall executive action. He no longer acts. He performs his part in organic events. The causality of guilt and atonement is canceled. Indeed, all causality is thereby canceled. Time stands still . . . I don’t know who said that limbo must be worse than hell. So it doesn’t matter what the event may bring, it will bring temporary salvation. Even if it spelled an end to any further attempts at distinguishing good and evil, it would still be the final fulfillment of an increasingly vital wish.

“And this great moment seems to have come. The room fills up with people. No one hears them or sees them coming. They jam in. The room fills up like a pond with an underground source. Where one person was standing there are now three. Three heads stick together to hear the translations out of earpieces of antediluvian headphones from shot-up tanks or crashed airplanes or sunken U-boats, tangible testaments to the reality of the horrible. What will he say now, the defendant Rudolf Hess, the deputy of that “Üch” of March 1938 in Vienna? Will he reveal that the accused of Nuremberg are drugged? Or that they were drugged in the days of the Third Reich? Or the judges? The prosecutors? People wait in utter suspense.

“The defendant Rudolf Hess once again raises his small, white worm of a forefinger. This time for the oath. He pronounces the formula. He swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God.

“And even though the black-robed torso of LORD JUSTICE Lawrence at the judges’ table opposite him clears its throat, reminding him paternally that the defendant need not say the oath again, since all his statements here in the courtroom are under oath anyway, the defendant declares that he nevertheless wants to tell the truth this time and nothing but the truth.