In Search of Klingsor

IN SEARCH OF KLINGSOR

Jorge Volpi

Translated by Kristina Cordero

DEDICATION

FOR ADRIAN, ELOY, GERARDO, NACHO, AND

PEDRO ANGEL, MY FELLOW CONSPIRATORS

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

BOOK ONE

Laws of Narrative Motion

LAW I: All narratives are written by a narrator

LAW II: All narrators offer one, singular truth

LAW III: All narrators possess a motive for narrating

Crimes of War

Hypotheses: From Quantum Physics to Espionage

HYPOTHESIS I: On Bacon’s Childhood and Early Years

HYPOTHESIS II: On Von Neumann and the War

HYPOTHESIS III: On Einstein and Love

HYPOTHESIS IV: On Gödel’s Theory and Marriage

HYPOTHESIS V: On Bacons Departure for Germany

Brief Autobiographical Disquisitions: From Set Theory to Totalitarianism

DISQUISITION I: Infancy and the End of an Era

DISQUISITION II: Youth and Irrationality

DISQUISITION III: The Arithmetics of Infinity

DISQUISITION IV: Liberty and Lust

DISQUISITION V: The Search for the Absolute

The Uranium Circle

Parallel Universes

The Quest for the Holy Grail

BOOK TWO

Laws of Criminal Motion

LAW I: All crimes are committed by a criminal

LAW II: Every crime is the portrait of a criminal

LAW III: Every criminal possesses a motive

Max Planck, or a Lesson in Faith

Reasons for Discouragement

Johannes Stark, or a Lesson in Infamy

The Game of War

Werner Heisenberg, or a Lesson in Sadness

The Dangers of Observation

Erwin Schrodinger, or a Lesson in Desire

The Laws of Attraction

The Liar’s Paradox

The Dimensions of Affection

Niels Bohr, or a Lesson in Will

Chain Reaction

The Uncertainty Principle

Hidden Variables

Kundry’s Curse

BOOK THREE

Laws of Traitorous Motion

LAW I: All men are weak

LAW II: All men are liars

LAW III: All men are traitors

Dialogue 1: On Those Forgotten by History

The Conspiracy

Dialogue II: On the Rules Governing Chance

The Bomb

Dialogue III: On the Secrets of Destiny

The Realm of the Occult

Dialogue IV: On the Death of Truth

The Betrayal

Dialogue V: On the Privileges of Insanity

Klingsor’s Revenge

End Note

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives … if a man cuts a picture carefully into 1,000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also devised the rules of the game—but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to determine. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness—or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how much of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how much appears to be caused by your mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from this limitation. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game. For here you strive against the imaginary boundary between yourself and the Godhead—a boundary that perhaps does not exist.

—ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER

PREFACE

On September 5, the day they came for me, I was in my house on Ludwigstraße preparing some equations that Heisenberg had sent to me a few weeks earlier. Ever since July 20, when Hitler announced over the radio that the coup attempt had failed and that his life had been providentially spared, I knew that I didn’t have much time. My anguish grew as I listened to the subsequent news reports: the execution of Stauffenberg and of his close friends, the preparations for the trials in the People’s Court, and the massive wave of arrests that were made in the coup’s aftermath.

Well aware that I could easily be the next in line, I tried to remain calm. But when I learned that Heini—Heinrich von Lutz, my childhood friend—had been arrested, I knew for sure that my days were numbered. But what could I do? Flee Germany? Hide? Escape? We were right in the middle of the very worst months of the war. It would have been impossible. All I could do was wait, quietly, for the SS or the Gestapo to break into my house. If I was lucky.

Just as I had imagined, the thugs wasted little time. A few days later, the Gestapo arrived at my house, handcuffed me, and I was taken straight to Plötzensee.

On July 20, 1944, a select group of officials of the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of the Third Reich, aided by dozens of civilians, had made an attempt on Hitler’s life while the Führer was presiding over a meeting at his headquarters at Rastenburg, about six hundred kilometers east of Berlin. The leader of this group was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a young colonel who had been wounded in the line of duty in North Africa. That day, Stauffenberg placed a pair of bombs in a briefcase, which was then deposited underneath the Führer’s desk. Stauffenberg waited for the bombs to go off, the signal for the coup to begin, the coup that would put an end to the Nazi regime and, possibly, the entire Second World War.

The tiniest, most infuriating logistical error foiled Stauffenberg’s plan. Either one of the bombs hadn’t been activated or the suitcase had simply been placed too far from where Hitler had been sitting. The Führer escaped with a few scrapes and not a single one of the high commands of the party or the army was seriously wounded. Despite the failure of their first operative, the conspirators fully intended to move ahead with their plan, but by the early hours of the next day the Nazis had regained control of the situation. The main orchestrators of the coup—Ludwig Beck, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, and of course, Stauffenberg—were detained and killed that night in the general headquarters of the army, on the Bendlerstraße in Berlin. Hundreds of others were quickly arrested following the strict orders of the Reichsführer-SS and the new minister of the interior, Heinrich Himmler.

The news of the plot came as a shock to military insiders and civilians alike, thanks to the startling scope of people implicated: military officers, businessmen, diplomats, members of the army and the naval intelligence forces, professionals and merchants. In the aftermath, Himmler had all the conspirators and their relatives arrested, on the theory that the source of evil travels through bloodlines. By the end of August of 1944, some six hundred people had been arrested—some for aiding and abetting the conspirators, others simply for being related to them.

Hitler was livid about the coup, and unleashed his vengeance upon all the people who had turned against him during the very worst moments of the war. Scarcely a few weeks had passed since the Allied invasion of Normandy, and already there were people ready and willing to do away with him and place the entire Third Reich in jeopardy. So, just as Stalin—his enemy—had done in Moscow in 1937, Hitler decided to stage a great trial so that all the world could see just how vicious his enemies really were. Before it began, Roland Freisler, the chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, and the executioner who would carry out the punishments were summoned to his headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair.” There, Hitler advised them of the following: “I want them hanged, strung up like butchered cattle!”

The trials began on August 7, in the great hall of the People’s Court in Berlin. On that day, eight defendants accused of conspiring against Hitler’s life were brought before the court: Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Helmuth Stieff, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Karl Klausing, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Albrecht von Haden. They were not permitted to wear ties or suspenders, and their own lawyers even urged them to declare themselves guilty. Flanked on either side by two enormous Nazi flags, Freisler ignored their protests, one after the other. Their crimes were so patently evil in nature that any and all declarations were inadmissible. Without flinching, Freisler condemned each of the eight defendants to death. He directed his gaze upon them:

“Now we can return to our life and to the battle before us. The Volk has purged you from its ranks and is pure now. We have nothing more to do with you. We fight. The Wehrmacht cries out: ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight at the side of our Führer, following him for the glory of Germany!”

By February 3, 1945, the day I was to appear before the People’s Court on Bellevuestraße, Freisler had already delivered scores of death sentences. That day five of us were to stand trial. The first among us to face the judge was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a lawyer and reserve lieutenant who had served as a liaison between various resistance leaders. He had been captured shortly after July 20, and since then had been held at the Dachau and Flössenburg concentration camps. As was his habit, Freisler interrupted him regularly, to ridicule him and the rest of the defendants, calling us pigs and traitors and proclaiming that Germany would emerge victorious—victory in 1945!—if he were able to successfully eliminate scum like us.

But then something happened, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have thought it some kind of miracle or hallucination. Suddenly, the antiaircraft signal rang out, loud and clear, and a red light went off in the hall. After a second of total silence, we heard a loud roar followed by what seemed like an endless series of explosions that reverberated through the courthouse. Bombings had become a daily fact of life in Berlin during those months, so we tried to remain calm and waited for it to end. We would never have guessed that it was anything other than a typical air raid, but it turned out to be the most intense bombing the Allies had launched since the start of the war. Before we even realized what was happening, a powerful crash blasted through the roof of the People’s Court. Plaster fell from the walls like giant blocks of talcum powder, and a torrent of smoke and soot swept through the courtroom as if it had suddenly begun to snow. The plaster fell from the walls in chunks, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage. Either we would wait for the proceedings to continue or the judge would call a recess until the next day. When the smoke cleared a bit, we saw that a heavy chunk of stone had fallen onto the judge’s bench, and next to it lay the head of Judge Roland Freisler, split in half, with a river of blood spilling down his face and staining the death sentence Schlabrendorff had just received. Other than Freisler, no one was injured.

The court security guards ran to the street in search of a doctor and after a few minutes returned with a little man in a white jacket who had sought shelter from the bombs in the courthouse vestibule. As soon as he approached the body, the doctor announced that nothing could be done: Freisler had died instantly. The rest of us remained exactly where we were, dumbfounded, as the security guards glared at us with hatred in their eyes, not knowing what to do next. That was when we heard the doctor’s firm voice: “I won’t do it. I refuse. I’m sorry. Arrest me if you want, but I won’t sign that death certificate. Call someone else.” Later on we found out that the doctor, a man by the name of Rolf Schleicher, was the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, who had worked in the Institute for Aerial Legislation before being condemned to death by Freisler a few weeks earlier.

Following Freisler’s death, the trial was postponed again and again as the Allied bombings continued to destroy the city. In March 1945, I was transferred from one prison to another until an American regiment finally liberated us shortly before the Nazis surrendered in May. Unlike most of my friends and fellow conspirators, I survived.

On the afternoon of July 20, 1944, a stroke of luck saved Hitler’s life. If Stauffenberg’s second bomb had gone off on that afternoon, or if that briefcase had been placed just a bit closer to Hitler, or if there had been a chain reaction, or if Stauffenberg had made absolutely certain to plant himself closer to Hitler … On the morning of February 3, 1945, a similar kind of luck saved my own life. If I had been tried on some other day, or if that bomb hadn’t dropped precisely when it did, or if that piece of rock had fallen a few centimeters to the left or to the right, or if Freisler had dodged the blow or run for cover somewhere … I still don’t know how logical—or sane—it is to establish a connection between these two events, but I do. Why do I insist, so many years after the fact, to connect these two unrelated incidents? Why do I continue to present them as one, as if they were two manifestations of one single act of will? Why do I refuse to admit that there is nothing hidden behind them, that they are no different from any other human misfortunes? Why do I cling so obstinately to these ideas of destiny, fate, and luck?

Perhaps because other unforeseeable circumstances, no less terrible than these, have forced me to write these words. Perhaps I string together these seemingly unrelated events—Hitler’s salvation and my own—because this is the first time that humanity has been such a close witness to such catastrophic destruction. And our era, unlike other historical moments, has been largely determined by such twists of fate, those little signs that remind us of the ungovernable, chaotic nature of the realm in which we live. I propose, then, to tell the story of the century. My century. My version of how fate has ruled the world, and of how we men of science try in vain to domesticate its fury. But this is also the story of several lives—the one that I have endured for over eighty years and, more important, those of people that, once again by uncontrollable acts of fate, became intertwined with my own.

Sometimes I like to think that I am the thread that connects all these stories—that my existence and memory and these very words are nothing more than the vertices of the one all-encompassing, inevitable theory that brought our lives together. Perhaps my goal seems overly ambitious, or even insane. It doesn’t matter. When your everyday existence becomes marked by death, when all hope is lost and all you see is the long road to your own extinction, this is the only thing that can justify your remaining days on Earth.

PROFESSOR GUSTAV LINKS

MATHEMATICIAN, UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

NOVEMBER 10, 1989

BOOK ONE

LAWS OF NARRATIVE MOTION

LAW I: All narratives are written by a narrator

At first glance, this statement may appear not only paradoxical but decidedly stupid, yet it is more profound than it may seem. For years, we have been led to believe that when we read a novel or a story written in the first person—and I say this simply to illustrate a point, since this book is not a work of fiction—nobody is there to guide us through the plot and its various riddles. The plot, instead, presents itself in an almost magical manner, as if it were life itself. Through this process, we sense that a book is a parallel world which we make the active decision to enter. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one thing I cannot abide it is the cowardice of those authors who attempt to hide behind their words, as if nothing of their true selves filters into their phrases and verbs. They numb us with their overdoses of supposed literary objectivity. Obviously I am not the first person to identify this deceitful game, but I do want to make clear that I fully disagree with this scandalous method that certain authors employ in an effort to cover the tracks of their crimes.

COROLLARY I

For the reasons mentioned above, I should clarify that I, Gustav Links—a man of flesh and blood just like you—am the author of these words. But who am I, really? You can easily see this simply by glancing at the front cover of this book. But what else do you know? Forget about me for a moment and look at the cover once again. For one thing, this volume was finished—not written but finished—in 1989. And what else do you know, aside from the little that I have already told you: that I participated in the failed plot to overthrow Hitler on July 20, 1944, that I was arrested and tried, and that a twist of fatum finally intervened and saved my life?

Nevertheless, I hope you don’t think I would be so presumptuous as to subject you to the story of my life. This has never been my intention, and as many others before me have said, I simply hope to serve as a guide who will walk you through this story: I will be a Serenus, an old, deaf Virgil who promises, from this moment on, to accompany and guide the reader. As the result of an act of luck, of the inevitable, of history, of chance, of God—call it what you like—I was forced to participate in the events I am about to describe. But I can assure you that my only goal is to gain your trust. Because of this, there is no way I could possibly trick you into thinking that I don’t exist and that I haven’t participated in the transcendental events I am about to describe.

LAW II: All narrators offer one, singular truth

I wonder if you have ever heard of a man named Erwin Schrödinger. Aside from being the celebrated physicist who discovered wave mechanics, he was also an inspired soul and one of the protagonists of this drama, a kind of Don Juan in the body of a wizened, old professor (of course, only now do I allow myself to describe him with such familiarity; when I first met him I never would have dared). He used to wear the most endearing pair of little round eyeglasses, and was forever surrounded by beautiful women … but that is beside the point. I only mention these details as an afterthought, out of chronological order, and only because I must. Although the notion of subjective truth certainly occurred to the Sophists in ancient Greece and to Henry James in the nineteenth century, it was our good friend Erwin who established the scientific foundations of such a theory, and his theory is one I find particularly satisfying. I won’t go into detail, but I will point out one of its more unexpected consequences: I am what I see. What is this statement trying to communicate? A platitude: that truth is relative. Every observer, whether contemplating an electron or an entire universe in motion, unwittingly completes what Schrödinger called a “wave packet” released by all objects under observation. When subject and object make contact, what emerges is a jumbled mixture of the two, which then leads us to the none-too-surprising conclusion that, in practice, each mind is a world unto itself.

COROLLARY II

The ramifications of the previous statement must seem as transparent as a drop of morning dew; in fact, it’s the oldest excuse in the book. The truth, it claims, is my truth, and that is that. The quantum wave functions that I complete with my act of observation are unique and immutable—and this is supported by a litany of theories I don’t particularly wish to elaborate on right now (the uncertainty principle, the theory of complementarity, the exclusion principle, among others). In essence, they state that no one has the authority to declare his truth as superior to that of someone else. I am telling you this, I repeat, as a way of laying my cards out on the table. If this comes across as unbearable, deceitful, or even manipulative, please know that it is not my intention but rather the consequence of a physical law I cannot help but obey. As such, I feel no need to apologize for this.

LAW III: All narrators possess a motive for narrating

The problem with axioms is that they always seem so tediously obvious that many people think they could easily be mathematicians themselves. It’s inevitable. But to recapitulate: If we agree with Laws I and II, that all texts must have an author, and that said author possesses a single, exclusive truth, then the next declaration will seem even more tedious. It states that if things do not appear from nowhere, it is because someone has specifically intended for it to be that way. I realize that this axiom does not apply to the world itself—at least, it seems highly unlikely that we will soon understand why someone chose to create the world as we know it—but I am not responsible for the uncertainties that exist outside these pages. We must banish the terrible theological temptation by which literary critics and scientists declare ordinary texts to be modern-day version of the Bible. No author is God, or anything like God—believe me—and no single page comes close to being even the worst imitation of the Tablets of the Law or the Gospel. And obviously, men of flesh and blood have little in common with the men we read of in books. Our metaphorical tendencies can sometimes get us into very big trouble. Here, then, is the real mystery of all mysteries: Unlike what occurs in the natural universe, books are always written with a motive, and these motives can often be quite petty indeed.

COROLLARY III

Don’t assume, however, that it will be so easy to discern my motives. Scientific research, the kind that I performed for years—the kind that you will soon undertake—is much more complicated than baking a cake from an old family recipe. I only wish it were that simple! So don’t get unduly excited: I have no intention of revealing my reasons in one fell swoop. I may be aware of them myself, but even I don’t know if I have fully made sense of them. With a bit of patience, perhaps you will be the ones to disentangle them. Remember what Schrödinger said: For a true act of recognition to occur, an interaction must take place between observer and observed, and now I find myself in the latter (and somewhat less comfortable) category. I hope that you enjoy studying these incidents and hypothesizing upon their possible causes—a task that I have realized so many times in the past, though under very different conditions. In the world of science, this is the key to success. I could make your work easier by saying that I shall present my version of the facts and my conclusions to the world, that I will tell my own, personal truth. But at this stage of my life—I am over eighty—I am still not fully convinced by my own reasons. If you had asked me forty or even twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have wasted a second in subscribing to the above-mentioned theories. No, now it is different: I see how my old, sinister friend lies in wait for me. I see how every breath requires a superhuman effort, and I see how the most trivial of human activities for you—eating, bathing, defecating—have become nothing less than minor miracles for me. And so I don’t quite know if my beliefs have remained the same, either. If you are willing to accept the challenge—how pompous; let’s call it a game instead—you can be the one to decide whether I am right or wrong.