Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [70]
And so, the daughters and sons of Rombaden who came from that union of Berwin and Helga became the purest on earth.
Sean O’Sullivan closed the book. For so many years he had probed and prodded for answers ...and now ...strangely ... on the eve of his departure from Germany some of these answers were coming to him.
Was not the Legend of Rombaden in fact the story of the German people?
He began to thumb through the thin book for clues, passages to clarify a hundred hazy thoughts. And then, nagging unanswered questions began to be answered with a strange clarity.
When he had been in college and was chosen for military government, there had been endless arguments and discussions about the German mind. Scholars and practical men argued logic and theory, and then, at a certain point in every discussion, all logic about the German people dissipated into confusion. The German always ended in a cloud of mystery ...the eternal enigma.
But here, in Hinterseer’s pages, the German showed himself. Here was Siegfried! Here in the Legend of Rombaden was that longing to be the super race! Here was that strange elation at the moment of death so prevalent in the German culture! Here was the hero’s reward for death in battle!
In the legend they looked upon themselves as the “chosen” people of God. But, what kind of a god? This was not the God of Jesus Christ! The god that they longed to identify themselves with was a pagan god! Wolfram was a god who lived in the forest and was more animal than human!
Did not the Germans, indeed, identify themselves more with the pagan than with monotheism, the Western concept of one God? Sean pondered. Once he had written what was termed a brilliant paper, on the “Origins of Anti-Semitism in the German Mind.” By chance, General Hansen, in his search to find German experts, read the paper. It was this paper by an obscure political-science instructor at the University of California which brought Sean O’Sullivan into military government before the age of thirty.
Sean now tried to link his paper to the Legend of Rombaden. He had written:
No people in all of the Western world live closer to their mythology than the German people. Siegfried and other legendary figures, particularly warriors, are deep within the soul of the German people.
The German people have identified themselves indelibly with the forest, with nature, and with animals. This powerful lure of the forest has given vent to the mysticism that always follows “forest people” and a relationship to animals peculiar to them.
Take, for example, the German hunting rituals. After an animal has been slain, the German hunter cuts the throat with a special knife. The “Forest Master” dips a stick into the animal’s blood and anoints the hunter’s forehead. The stick is a pure phallic symbol and the purpose of the ceremony is to endow the hunter with the potency and power of the animal he has just slain ...just as Siegfried bathed in the blood of the dragon he had killed.
The Jews gave to the Western world a formal conception of one God. The Jews handed down from Sinai the basic “laws” or rules of Western morality, the Ten Commandments.
The German hates both the one-God concept and the stringency of the “laws” in his subconscious mind. On the surface and to the world at large he is both a Christian and a product of Western culture.
However, he is a split personality. Another part of him, a vital part of his soul, remains in the forest. The German is, therefore, civilized in much the same way as a domesticated animal, for part of the German is always animal.
Despite his trappings, part of the German is pure pagan. In order for the German to become