It is never good to have such thoughts, I know that. That night my recurrent dream had a final intensification. I was approaching that immense city by way of a derelict railroad track; in the distance, the line of chimneys was peacefully smoking; and I felt lost, isolated, an abandoned whelp, and the need for men’s companionship tormented me. I mixed with the crowd and wandered for a long time, irresistibly drawn by the crematoriums vomiting spirals of smoke and clouds of sparks into the sky, like a dog, both attracted and repell’d / By the stench of his own kind / Burning. But I couldn’t reach it, and entered instead one of the vast building-barracks, where I occupied a bunk, shoving away an unknown woman who wanted to join me. I fell asleep promptly. When I woke up, I noticed a little blood on my pillow. I looked closer and saw there was also some on the sheets. I removed them; beneath, they were soaking in blood mixed with sperm, big gobs of sperm too thick to seep through the cloth. I was sleeping in a room in Höss’s house, upstairs, next to the children’s room; and I had no idea how I could bring these soiled sheets to the bathroom, to wash them, without Höss noticing. This problem was causing me a horrible, agonizing discomfort. Then Höss came into my room with another officer. They took off their underpants, sat down cross-legged next to my bed, and began to masturbate vigorously, each crimson glans disappearing and reappearing from the foreskin, until they had sent huge jets of sperm onto my bed and onto the rug. They wanted me to imitate them, but I refused; the ceremony apparently had a precise significance, but I didn’t know what it was.

This brutal, obscene dream marked the end of my first stay in the KL Auschwitz: I had finished my work. I returned to Berlin and from there went to visit some camps in the Altreich, the KLs Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, as well as many of their satellite camps. I won’t expand any further on these visits: all these camps have been amply described in the historical literature, better than I could do; and it’s also quite true that when you’ve seen one camp, you’ve seen them all: all camps look alike, it’s a well-known fact. Nothing of what I saw, despite local variations, perceptibly changed my opinion or my conclusions. I returned to Berlin for good around mid-August, in the period between the recapture of Orel by the Soviets and the final conquest of Sicily by the Anglo-Americans. I wrote my report quickly; I had already gathered my notes together along the way, I just needed to organize the sections and type it all out, a matter of a few days. I was careful with both my prose and the logic of my argumentation: the report was addressed to the Reichsführer, and Brandt had warned me that I would probably have to give a verbal report. When the final version was corrected and typed up, I sent it off and waited.

I had gone back, without much pleasure I have to confess, to my landlady Frau Gutknecht. She went into raptures, and was determined to make me tea; but she didn’t understand how, since I was coming home from the East, where one can find everything to eat, I hadn’t thought to bring back a pair of geese, for the household of course. (Actually, she wasn’t the only one with this in mind: Piontek had returned from his stay in Tarnowitz with a trunkful of food, and had offered to sell me some without coupons.) What’s more, I got the impression that she had taken advantage of my absence to search through my belongings. My indifference to her whining and her childish behavior was beginning, unfortunately, to wear thin. As for Fräulein Praxa, she had changed her hairdo, but not the color of her nails. Thomas was happy to see me again: great changes were under way, he affirmed, it was good I was in Berlin, I had to be prepared.

What a curious sensation, suddenly finding myself, after such a journey, with nothing to do! I had finished the Blanchot a long time ago; I opened the treatise on ritual murder only to shut it again right away, surprised that the Reichsführer could take an interest in such drivel; I had no private affairs to attend to; all my files were in order. With my office window open onto the park of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, sunny but already a little dried out by the August heat, my feet up on my sofa, or else leaning out the window to smoke a cigarette, I reflected; and when immobility began to weigh on me, I went down to take a walk in the garden, strolling through the dusty gravel lanes, greatly tempted by the pockets of shady grass. I thought about what I had seen in Poland, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, my thinking skimmed over the images and came to rest on the words. The words preoccupied me. I had been wondering how much the differences between German and Russian reactions to mass killings (differences that caused us finally to change our method to make the thing somehow easier, while the Russians seemed, even after a quarter century, to remain unmoved by it) had to do with differences of vocabulary. The word Tod, after all, has the stiffness of a clean, already cold, almost abstract corpse, the finality in any case of the after-death, whereas smiert’, the Russian word, is as heavy and greasy as the thing itself. What about French, in that case? That language, for me, remained dependent on the feminization of death by Latin: What a difference finally between la Mort and all the almost warm, tender images it gives rise to, and the terrible Thanatos of the Greeks! The Germans had at least preserved the masculine (smiert’, it should be said in passing, is also feminine). There, in the brightness of summer, I thought about that decision we had made, the extraordinary idea of killing all the Jews, whoever they might be, young or old, good or bad, of destroying Judaism in the person of its bearers, a decision that had received the name, now well known, of Endlösung: the “Final Solution.” But what a beautiful word! It had not always been a synonym for extermination, though: since the beginning, people had called for, when it came to the Jews, an Endlösung, or else a völlige Lösung (a complete solution) or also an allgemeine Lösung (a general solution), and according to the period, this meant exclusion from public life or exclusion from economic life or, finally, emigration. Then, little by little, the signification had slid toward the abyss, but without the signifier changing, and it seemed almost as if this final meaning had always lived in the heart of the word, and that the thing had been attracted, drawn in by it, by its weight, its fabulous gravity, into that black hole of the mind, toward the point of singularity: and then we had passed the event horizon, beyond which there is no return. We still believe in ideas, in concepts, we believe that words designate ideas, but that’s not necessarily true, maybe there aren’t really any ideas, maybe there’s really nothing but words, and the weight peculiar to words. And maybe thus we had let ourselves be led along by a word and its inevitability. Within us, then, there would have been no ideas, no logic, no coherence? There would have been only words, in our oh so peculiar language, only that word, Endlösung, its streaming beauty? For, really, how could one resist the seduction of such a word? It would have been as inconceivable as resisting the word obey, the word serve, the word law. And perhaps that, at bottom, was the reason for our Sprachregelungen, quite transparent finally in terms of camouflage (Tarnjargon), but useful for keeping those who used these words and expressions—Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), abtransportiert (transported onward), entsprechend behandelt (treated appropriately), Wohnsitzverlegung (change of domicile), or Executivmassnahmen (executive measures)—between the sharp points of their abstraction. This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that…,” “the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung, the “steppification” of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses. Man lebt in seiner Sprache, wrote Hanns Johst, one of our best National Socialist poets: “You live in your language.” Voss, I was sure, would not have denied it.