On March 21, Heroes’ Memorial Day, the Führer gave a speech. It was his first public appearance since the defeat at Stalingrad, and like everyone else, I awaited his words with impatience and anxiety: What was he going to say, how would he seem? The wave of shock from the catastrophe was still vividly felt; the most varied rumors were running rampant. I wanted to be present at this speech. I had seen the Führer in person only once, a dozen years before (I had since then heard him often on the radio and seen him in newsreels); that had been during my first trip back to Germany, in the summer of 1930, before the Seizure of Power. I had extorted that trip from my mother and Moreau, in exchange for my consent to continue the course of study they demanded. Once I had passed my baccalauréat (without honors, which meant I had to take a preparatory class to pass the ELSP entrance exam), they let me go. It was a wonderful trip, from which I came back dazzled, bewitched. I had gone accompanied by two high-school friends, Pierre and Fabrice; and we, who didn’t even know what the Wandervögel were, followed their traces as if instinctively, heading for the forests, walking during the day, talking at night around little campfires, sleeping on hard earth and pine needles. Then we went south to visit the cities of the Rhine and ended up in Munich, where I spent many hours in the Pinakotek or wandering through the streets. Germany, that summer, was growing turbulent again: the aftereffect of the previous year’s American stock market crash was making itself harshly felt; elections in the Reichstag, planned for September, would decide the future of the nation. All the political parties were agitating, using speeches, parades, sometimes violence and brawls. In Munich, one party clearly set itself apart from the others: the NSDAP, which I heard about then for the first time. I had already seen Italian Fascists on the news, and these National Socialists seemed to draw inspiration from their style; but their message was specifically German, and their leader, a frontline soldier who was a veteran of the Great War, spoke of a German renewal, of German glory, of a rich, vibrant German future. This, I said to myself as I watched them march by, was what my father had fought for during four long years, until he was finally betrayed, he and all his comrades, and lost his land, his house, our house. This was also everything that Moreau, that good French patriot and radical, who drank to the health of Clemenceau, Foch, and Pétain every year on their birthdays, detested. The leader of the NSDAP was going to give a speech in a Braukeller: I left my French friends in our little hotel. I found myself at the back, behind the crowd, and could scarcely hear the speakers; as for the Führer, I just remember his gestures, made frenetic by emotion, and the way his hair kept falling over his forehead. But he was saying, as I knew with absolute certainty, the things that my father would have said, if he had been present; if he had still been there, he would certainly have been on the platform, one of the men close to that man, one of his foremost companions; he might even, if such had been his fate, who knows, have been there in his place. What’s more, the Führer looked like him, when he stood still. I returned from that trip now for the first time with the idea that something was possible besides the narrow and stifling path outlined for me by my mother and her husband, and that my future was there, with this unfortunate people, my father’s people, my people too.

Since then, many things had changed. The Führer still had all the confidence of the Volk, but the certainty of final victory was beginning to ebb away among the masses. The people blamed the High Command, the Prussian aristocrats, Göring and his Luftwaffe; but I knew too that within the Wehrmacht some were blaming the interference of the Führer. Within the SS, it was being whispered that he had had a nervous breakdown after Stalingrad, that he wasn’t talking to anyone anymore; that at the beginning of the month, when Rommel had tried to convince him to evacuate North Africa, he had listened to him without comprehension. As for the public rumors, in the trains, the tramways, the lines, they were becoming downright ludicrous: according to the SD reports that Thomas received, people were saying that the Wehrmacht had put the Führer under house arrest in Berchtesgaden, that he had lost his reason and was kept under guard, drugged, in an SS hospital, that the Führer we saw was just a double. The speech was going to be given in the Zeughaus, the former arsenal at the end of Unter den Linden, right next to the Spree Canal. As a Stalingrad veteran, wounded and decorated, I didn’t have any trouble getting an invitation; I suggested to Thomas that he come with me, but he replied, laughing: “I’m not on leave, I have work to do.” So I went alone. They had taken considerable security precautions; the invitation said that service weapons would be forbidden. The possibility of a British raid frightened some: in January, the English had reveled at launching a Mosquito attack on the anniversary of the Seizure of Power, producing many victims; yet now the chairs had been set up in the Zeughaus courtyard, under the large glass cupola. I found myself seated in the center, between an Oberstleutnant covered with decorations and a civilian wearing the Gold Badge of the Party on his lapel. After the introductory speeches, the Führer made his appearance. I opened my eyes wide: on his head and shoulders, over his simple feldgrau uniform, I seemed to see a large blue-and-white striped rabbi’s shawl. The Führer had started speaking right away in his rapid, monotone voice. I examined the glass roof: Could it be a play of the light? I could clearly see his cap; but underneath it, I thought I made out long side curls, unrolling along his temples down over his lapel, and on his forehead, the tefillin, the little leather box containing verses of the Torah. When he raised his arm, I thought I could make out other leather straps bound around his wrist; and under his jacket, weren’t those the white fringes of what the Jews call the little tallith showing through? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized my neighbors: they were listening to the speech with solemn attention, the civil servant was studiously nodding his head. Didn’t they notice anything? Was I the only one to see this unprecedented spectacle? I looked at the dignitaries’ stand: behind the Führer, I recognized Göring, Goebbels, Ley, the Reichsführer, Kaltenbrunner, other well-known leaders, high-ranking Wehrmacht officers; they were all contemplating the Führer’s back or the audience, impassive. Maybe, I said to myself, panic-stricken, it’s the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone sees how it really is, but hides it, counting on his neighbor to do the same. No, I reasoned, I must be hallucinating, with a wound like mine, that’s entirely possible. Yet I felt perfectly sound of mind. I was far from the platform, though, and the Führer was lit from the side; maybe it was simply an optical illusion? But I still saw it. Maybe my “pineal eye” was playing a trick on me? But there was nothing dreamlike about it. It was also possible that I had gone mad. The speech was short, and I found myself standing in the midst of the crowd trying to head for the exit, unable to make any headway in my thoughts. The Führer would now go to the galleries in the Zeughaus to visit an exhibition of war trophies captured from the Bolsheviks, before going on to inspect an honor guard, and place a wreath at the Neue Wache; I could have followed him, since this was included in my invitation, but I was too rattled and disoriented; I extricated myself from the crowd as quickly as possible and headed back up the avenue toward the S-Bahn station. I crossed the avenue and went to sit in a café, under the arcades of the Kaiser Gallerie, where I ordered a schnapps, drained it in one swallow, then ordered another. I had to think, but the meaning of my thinking escaped me, I was having trouble breathing, I undid my collar and drank some more. There was one way to discover the truth of the matter: in the evening, at the movies, the newsreels would show excerpts from his speech; that would set me straight. I ordered a paper with a list of showings: at seven o’clock, not far away, they were showing Uncle Krüger. I ordered a sandwich and then went for a walk in the Tiergarten. It was still cold, and not many people were strolling under the bare trees. Different interpretations were whirling around in my head, I was impatient for the film to start, even if the prospect of seeing nothing there wasn’t any more reassuring than the opposite. At six o’clock, I headed for the movie theater and took my place in the line to buy my ticket. In front of me, a group of people were discussing the speech, which they must have heard on the radio; I listened to them eagerly. “He blamed the Jews for everything again,” said a skinny man wearing a hat. “What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any more Jews in Germany, so how can it be their fault?”—“But no, Dummkopf,” replied a rather vulgar woman with bleached hair stacked in an elaborate permanent, “it’s the international Jews.”—“Yes,” the man retorted, “but if these international Jews are so powerful, why couldn’t they save their Jewish brothers here?”—“They’re punishing us by bombing us,” another grayish, stringy woman said. “Did you see what they did in Münster, the other day? It’s just to make us suffer. As if we weren’t suffering enough already with all our men at the front.”—“What I found scandalous,” said a ruddy, paunchy man dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, “is that he didn’t even mention Stalingrad. It’s shameful.”—“Oh, don’t talk to me about Stalingrad,” said the fake blonde. “My poor sister had her son Hans over there, in the Seventy-sixth Division. She’s almost mad with grief, she doesn’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”—“On the radio,” said the grayish woman, “they said they were all dead. They fought to the last bullet, they said.”—“And you believe everything they say on the radio, you poor thing?” the man with the hat said. “My cousin, who is an Oberst, says there were a lot of prisoners. Thousands. Maybe even a hundred thousand.”—“So Hansi might be a prisoner?” asked the blonde.—“It’s possible.”—“Why don’t they write, then?” asked the fat bourgeois. “Our prisoners in England or America write; it even comes through the Red Cross.”—“That’s true,” said the mouse-faced woman.—“And how could they write when they’re all officially dead? They write, but our people don’t pass on the letters.”—“Excuse me,” another person interrupted, “but that is true. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, she got a letter from the front, it was just signed: A German patriot, which said that her husband, who is a Leutnant in the Panzers, is still alive. The Russians dropped leaflets on our lines, near Smolensk, with lists of names and addresses, printed in tiny letters, and messages to the families. Soldiers collect them and they write anonymous letters, or send the leaflet as is.” A man with a military haircut joined the conversation: “Anyway, even if there are prisoners, they won’t survive for long. The Bolsheviks will send them to Siberia and make them dig canals until they die. Not one of them will come back. And after what we did to them, that will be only fair.”—“What do you mean, after what we did to them?” the fat man asked sharply. The fake blonde had noticed me and was staring at my uniform. The man with the hat spoke before the soldier did: “The Führer said we have lost five hundred and forty-two thousand men since the beginning of the war. Do you believe that? I think he’s just lying.” The blonde elbowed him and glanced in my direction. The man followed her gaze, reddened and stammered: “Or, well, maybe they don’t give him all the figures…” The others were also looking at me and fell silent. I tried to look neutral and absent. Then the fat man tried to restart the conversation on another subject, but the line had begun to move toward the ticket counter. I bought a ticket and found my seat. Soon the lights went out and they played the news, which opened with the Führer’s speech. The film was grainy, it jumped and went blurry at times, they must have rushed to develop it and print the copies. I still seemed to see the large striped shawl over the Führer’s head and shoulders; I couldn’t make out anything else, aside from his moustache; impossible to be sure of anything. My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver; I scarcely noticed the main film, a flimsy Anglophobic thing, I was still thinking about what I had seen, it didn’t make any sense. That it was real seemed impossible to me, but I couldn’t believe that I was hallucinating. What had that bullet done to my head? Had it irremediably blurred the world for me, or had it truly opened a third eye, the one that sees through the opacity of things? Outside, when I exited, it was night, time for dinner, but I didn’t want to eat. I went back to my hotel and locked myself up in my room. For three days I didn’t go out again.