In bad French he immediately asked questions about my sources. I evaded them, talking about other matters and mentioning my exploits with Garibaldi’s men. He was pleasantly surprised, he said, as he was writing a novel about events in Italy in 1860. It was almost finished, its title would be Biarritz, and it would comprise several volumes. Not all the events were set in Italy—it moved about from Siberia to Warsaw to Biarritz (of course) and so on. He spoke of it with enthusiasm and a certain smugness, claiming that he was about to complete the Sistine Chapel of historical fiction. I didn’t understand the link between the various events he was describing, but the story seemed to revolve around the continual threat from three evil powers that were surreptitiously taking over the world—the Freemasons, the Catholics (in particular the Jesuits) and the Jews, who were also infiltrating the first two in order to undermine the purity of the Protestant Teutonic race.
The novel began with the Italian conspiracies of Mazzini’s Freemasons, then moved to Warsaw, where the Freemasons were conspiring against Russia, along with the nihilists—a breed as damned as the Slavs had ever managed to produce, although both (nihilists and Slavs) were mostly Jewish…and it is important to note that their system of recruitment resembled that of the Bavarian Illuminati and the Alta Vendita of the Carbonari, where every member recruited another nine, none of whom must know each other. Then the story returned to Italy, following the advance from Piedmont southward to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in a mayhem of violence, treachery, rape of noblewomen, dramatic exploits, gallant swashbuckling Irish monarchists, secret messages hidden under the tails of horses, a vile Carbonaro prince, Caracciolo, who molests a young (Irish monarchist) girl, the discovery of magic rings in green-oxidized gold with intertwined snakes and red coral at the center, a kidnap attempt on the son of Napoleon III, the drama of Castelfidardo where the battlefield is strewn with the blood of German troops loyal to the pope, and condemnation of the welsche Feigheit — Goedsche said it in German, perhaps so as not to offend me, but I had studied a little German and understood he was referring to that cowardly behavior typical of the Latin races. At that point events became more and more confused, and we still hadn’t reached the end of the first volume.
As he spoke, Goedsche’s vaguely porcine eyes gradually lit up, and he spluttered and laughed with self-satisfaction at witticisms he judged to be excellent. He seemed to be hoping for some firsthand gossip about Cialdini, Lamarmora and other Piedmont generals, and of course Garibaldi and his men. But since people like him were used to paying for their information, I didn’t think it appropriate to give him any Italian tidbits for free. And anyway, it was better to keep quiet about what I knew.
This man, I thought, was on the wrong track. You can never create danger that has a thousand different faces—danger has to have one face alone, otherwise people become distracted. If you want to expose the Jews, then talk about the Jews, not the Irish, the Neapolitan monarchy, Piedmontese generals, Polish patriots and Russian nihilists. Too many irons in the fire. How can anyone be so chaotic? And all the more surprising when, apart from his novel, Goedsche seemed completely fixated on the Jews—so much the better for me, since I had come for the very purpose of offering him a special document about the Jews.
He was, he said, not writing his novel for money or in hopes of earthly glory but to liberate the German race from the Jewish snare.
We must return to the words of Luther, when he said that the Jews are evil, poisonous and devilish to the core and had been our plague and pestilence for centuries, and still were in his time. They were, to use his words, «perfidious, venomous, bitter serpents, assassins and children of the devil, who sting and harm in secret, as they cannot do it openly.» To deal with them, the only possible remedy was a scharfe Barmherzigkeit, which he was unable to translate but, as I understood it, meant a «rough mercy,» by which Luther meant no mercy at all.
«Their synagogues had to be burned down, and whatever did not burn had to be buried so not a single stone remained in sight; they had to be driven from their homes into cattle sheds like Gypsies; all their Talmudic texts, which taught only lies, curses and blasphemies, had to be removed; they were to be prevented from practicing usury; all their gold, money and jewelry was to be taken from them, and their young men given axes and spades and their women flax and spindles. That is because,» said Goedsche, sneering contemptuously, «arbeit macht frei, work sets you free. The final solution, for Luther, would have been to drive them out of Germany like rabid dogs.
«No one listened to Luther,» continued Goedsche, «at least not until now. And despite the fact that, since ancient times, non-European peoples have been considered as base—look at the Negro, who even today is rightly considered an animal—no sure criteria have yet been defined for recognizing superior races. Today we know that the more developed level of humanity has white skin, and that the most evolved model of the white race is German. The presence of Jews poses a constant threat of racial crossbreeding. Look at a Greek statue: such pure lines, such elegant build, and it is no surprise that beauty was identified with virtue, and to be beautiful was to be brave, as we see with our great heroes of Teutonic mythology. Now imagine Apollo with Semitic features, with brown skin, dark eyes, hooked nose, bent body.
This is how Homer described Thersites, the very personification of baseness. The Christian legend, still strongly influenced by the Jews (it was, after all, begun by Paul, an Asiatic Jew whom today we’d call a Turk), has convinced us that all races are descended from Adam. No—in separating from the original beast, men have followed different paths. We have to return to that point where our paths separated, and therefore to the true national origins of our people, rather than the ravings of those French lumières, with their cosmopolitanism and their égalité and universal brotherhood! This is the spirit of our modern times. What in Europe is now called nationalism is a cry for the purity of the original race. Except that this term—and aim—is valid only for the German race. It is absurd to imagine that in Italy the return to bygone beauty could be represented by your bowlegged Garibaldi, your short-legged king and that dwarf Cavour. The Romans, after all, were a Semitic race.»
«The Romans?»
«You haven’t read Virgil? They came from a Trojan, and therefore from an Asiatic, and this Semitic migration destroyed the spirit of the ancient Italic people. Look what happened to the Celts: after being Romanized, they became French, and therefore they too are Latin. Only the Germans have managed to remain pure and uncontaminated and to break the power of Rome. The superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the Jew (and inevitably also of the Latin) is seen in the excellence of the various arts. Neither Italy nor France has given birth to a Bach, a Mozart, a Beethoven or a Wagner.»
Goedsche didn’t exactly look like the type of Aryan hero he was praising. Indeed, to tell the truth (though why do we always have to worry about the truth?), he had the appearance of a gluttonous, lecherous Jew. In the end, however, I had to accept what he said, seeing that he was working for the service that had to pay me the remaining twenty-five thousand francs.
But I couldn’t resist a small gibe. I asked if he thought he was a good example of the superior, Apollonian race. He glowered at me and said that belonging to a race is not just a physical matter but above all a spiritual one. A Jew is still a Jew even if, by accident of nature, he is born with blond hair and blue eyes, in the same way as there are children born with six fingers and women capable of doing multiplication. And an Aryan is an Aryan if he lives the spirit of his people, even if he has black hair.
My question had tempered his enthusiasm. He calmed down, mopped the sweat from his brow with a large red-checked handkerchief and asked to see the document for which our meeting had been arranged. I handed it to him, and after all he’d been saying, I thought it would have sent him into raptures. If his government wanted to be rid of the Jews in accordance with Luther’s charge, my story about the Prague cemetery seemed an ideal way of alerting the whole of Prussia to the nature of the Jewish conspiracy. Instead I watched him, between one mouthful of beer and another, frown several times and screw up his eyes until he looked almost like a Mongol. Finally he said: «I’m really not sure this information is of any interest. It says what we have always known about Jewish conspiracies. It’s certainly well said, and if it has been invented, then it’s
