Like most people, I never asked to become a murderer. If I could have, as I’ve already said, I would have gone into literature. Written, if I’d had the talent, or else perhaps taught, at least lived in the midst of beautiful, calm things, the noblest creations of the human spirit. Who, of his own free will, aside from a madman, would choose murder? And also I would have liked to play the piano. Once at a concert an elderly lady leaned toward me: “You are a pianist, aren’t you?”—“Unfortunately not, madam,” I had to answer with regret. Even today, the thought that I don’t play the piano and never will play it suffocates me, sometimes even more than the horrors, the dark river of my past carrying me through the years. I literally can’t get over it. When I was a boy, my mother bought me a piano. It was for my ninth birthday, I think. Or my eighth. In any case before we left to live in France with that Moreau man. I had been begging her for months and months. I dreamed of being a pianist, a great concert pianist: cathedrals at my fingertips, airy as foam. But we had no money. My father had been gone for some time, his bank accounts (as I learned much later) were frozen, my mother had to fend for herself. But somehow she found the money, I don’t know how, she must have saved up, or borrowed; maybe she even whored a bit, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. She probably had ambitions for me and wanted to cultivate my talent. So on my birthday the piano was delivered, a fine upright. Even secondhand, it must have been expensive. At first I was dazzled. I took lessons; but my lack of progress quickly bored me, and I soon dropped them. Practicing scales was not what I had in mind, I was like all children. My mother never dared reproach me for my irresponsibility or my laziness; but I can see that the idea of all that wasted money must have gnawed at her. The piano stayed there, gathering dust; my sister was no more interested in it than I was; I no longer thought about it, and barely noticed when my mother finally resold it, most likely at a loss. I have never really liked my mother, I have even hated her, but this incident makes me sad for her. It’s also somewhat her own fault. If she had insisted, if she had known how to be stern when she had to be, I might have learned to play the piano, and that would have been a great joy to me, a safe haven. To play just for myself, at home, that would have been a delight. Of course, I often listen to music, and I take a keen pleasure in it, but it’s not the same thing, it’s a substitute. Just like my male lovers: the fact of the matter, I’m not ashamed to say, is that I probably would rather have been a woman. Not necessarily a woman living and functioning in this world as a wife or a mother; no, a woman naked, on her back, her legs spread wide open, crushed beneath the weight of a man, clinging to him and pierced by him, drowning in him as she becomes the limitless sea in which he himself is drowned, pleasure that’s endless, and beginningless too. But things did not turn out that way. Instead I ended up a jurist, a State security official, an SS officer, and then a director of a lace factory. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.

What I’ve just written is true, but it is also true that I have loved a woman. Only one, but more than anything in the world. Yet she was precisely the one I was not allowed to have. It is quite conceivable that by dreaming of myself as a woman, by dreaming of myself in a woman’s body, I was still seeking her, I wanted to draw closer to her, I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be her. This is entirely plausible, even if it changes nothing. I have never loved a single one of the boys I slept with, I just used them and their bodies, that’s all. Whereas with her, her love would have fulfilled my life. Don’t laugh at me: that love is probably the only good thing I’ve ever done. All this, you’re probably thinking, must seem a little strange coming from an officer of the Schutzstaffel. But why couldn’t an SS-Obersturmbannführer have an inner life, desires, passions, just like any other man? There have been hundreds of thousands of us whom you still judge as criminals: among them, as among all human beings, there were ordinary men, of course, but also extraordinary men, artists, men of culture, neurotics, homosexuals, men in love with their mothers, who knows what else, and why not? None of them was more typical of anything than any other man in any other profession. There are businessmen who enjoy fine wine and cigars, businessmen obsessed with the bottom line, and also businessmen who hide obscene tattoos under their three-piece suits and go to work with a rubber plug up their anuses: all this seems obvious to us, so why wouldn’t it be the same for the SS or the Wehrmacht? Our military doctors would find women’s underwear when they cut open the uniforms of the wounded more frequently than you’d think. To state that I was not typical means nothing. I lived, I had a past, a difficult and burdensome past, but that happens, and I managed it in my own way. And then came the war, I served, and I found myself at the heart of terrible things, atrocities. I hadn’t changed, I was still the same man, my problems had not been resolved, even though the war created new problems for me, even though those horrors transformed me. There are men for whom war, or even murder, is a solution, but I am not one of them; for me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers. And one thing leads to another: I started out within the bounds of my service and then, under the pressure of events, I finally overstepped those bounds; but everything is connected, closely, intimately connected: to argue that if there had been no war I would still have resorted to such extremities would be impossible. It might have happened, but maybe not, maybe I’d have found another solution. You can never know. Eckhart has written, An angel in Hell flies in his own little cloud of Paradise. I always took that to imply that a devil in Paradise flies also in his own little cloud of Hell. But I don’t think I’m a devil. There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don’t know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that’s what’s terrible. You can never say: I shall never kill, that’s impossible; the most you can say is: I hope I shall never kill. I too hoped so, I too wanted to live a good and useful life, to be a man among men, equal to others, I too wanted to add my brick to our common house. But my hopes were dashed, and my sincerity was betrayed and placed at the services of an ultimately evil and corrupt work, and I crossed over to the dark shores, and all this evil entered my own life, and none of all this can be made whole, ever. These words are of no use either, they disappear like water in the sand, this wet sand that fills my mouth. I live, I do what can be done, it’s the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!