Death in Rome

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Book: Read Death in Rome for Free Online
Authors: Wolfgang Koeppen
Eva, we'll get our Gottlieb back, just you see,' and she shuddered and bit her lip because he had said Gottlieb, he'd never dared to do that before, and it was treason to call the standard-bearer, SS-general and one of the highest figures in the godless Party Gottlieb, because Judejahn hated the name, priestly slime left on him by the schoolmaster his father, and he didn't want to love God. Family and friends called him Götz, while officially and in public he was G. Judejahn, Götz was an abbreviation of Gottlieb dating from his wild Freikorps days, but Friedrich Wilhelm, the pedant and owner of the leather-bound edition of Goethe, had found Götz unworthy, though it was pithy and Germanic, but it also summoned up the famous lines in his mind, {*} and it was a borrowed, occupied name, one should just carry whatever name one was baptized with, and so, daring and flush with confidence, he again said Gottlieb, although he too found the name ridiculous and unmanly. Black-clad she walked. Walked clad in black from the window overlooking the courtyard to the mirror over the wash-basin, stalked like a caged beast in a cell. She had kept her mourning all through the years, except in the detention, camp, because she'd been arrested in her travelling-clothes, but once she was released, she borrowed a black dress from her sister, because her own clothes had disappeared, her wardrobes looted, and the houses Judejahn had owned had been taken away from her. And when her husband got in touch, to the perplexity of the family she did not put aside her mourning, because she hadn't been mourning her husband, the hero missing in action, and the fact that he was alive only added to the reason for mourning, he would ask after their son, she had been unable to safeguard him, and maybe Judejahn himself had gone to Canossa and was living like a prince; she didn't mind him sleeping with other women, he had always done that and told her about it, that was part of a warrior's life, and when he made babies, then they were warrior babies and good stock, recruits for the storm troopers and the Führer, but it disturbed her that he had hidden away in the Levant. She guessed that he too had perpetrated treason, blood-treason and racial betrayal in the soft enemy climate, in rose-scented harem darkness, in garlic-reeking caves with Negresses and Jewesses, who had been waiting for revenge, and were panting for German sperm. Eva would have liked to raise an army to fetch these children, Judejahn's bastards, home: to put them to the test, and have them live as Germans or die as half-castes. The kitchen boy in the yard was whistling again, it was another nigger song, brash and cheeky and scornful, and the laughter in the lobby rolled up the stairs and along the corridor to her, plump, complacent, and sometimes cackling.
    Oberbürgermeister Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath was sitting with Anna his wife and Dietrich his younger son in the lounge of the German hotel, and already they had made contact with visiting compatriots, with Germans of similar background and outlook, fortunate survivors but with short memories like themselves. VW-owners, drivers of Mercedes, redeemed by German efficiency and now once more valued bringers of foreign currency, they were conversing and drinking sweet vermouth, and on the table were street maps and guidebooks, because they were planning expeditions to Tivoli and to Frascati, but also to the rebuilt monastery of Monte Cassino; they meant to visit the battlefields, which held no terrors for these people, and one of their number would look and find and shout, 'This was our battery position, we were spitting down from here, here is where we were dug in, here is where we held the line. ' And then he would show what a fine fellow he was, hats off, because he admired himself as an upright warrior, a sporting killer, so to say, he would talk about Tommy Atkins and GI Joe, and maybe even about Anders and his Polish army, but only maybe

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