“The Front Was Everywhere Now, All the Time.”
(Post #19; Menuet, pp. 763-841)
Max is sent to Hungary with the mission to procure Jewish prison laborers for the Germans’ production of weapons. Himmler tells him that they need “a great many men” because the Anglo-Americans are innovating, having started daytime bombing raids that are resulting in massive losses for the German air force’s attempts to defend against them. “More than ever, the Jews owe us their labor force. Is that clear?” Strong-arming Hungary to handover its Jews was viewed as an exciting new opportunity to regain the initiative in the struggling war effort.
But for Max, things do not go as planned. There is resistance within the SS ranks as to how valuable Jewish labor is to the war effort. Eichmann articulates this view:
“Do you truly believe that between victory and defeat, the balance depends on the work of a few thousand Jews? And if that were the case, would you want Germany’s victory to be due to Jews?
“We’re not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. We’re waging war to purify Germany, to create a Germany in which you’d want to live.
“And we have a lot of enemies…Eliminating the Jews but leaving the Poles makes no sense…There are still far too many criminals, asocials, vagabonds, Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals…We have to take care of all of them, category by category.”
It’s not surprising then, that once on the ground in Hungary, Max’s work is thwarted at every turn. Max writes,
“…in short, it was a mess, genuine havoc, due to which in the end most of the deported Jews died, right away I mean, gassed even before they could be put to work.
“Why this obstinacy to empty Hungary of its Jews, given the conditions of the war…”
Max is sickened and exhausted by these failed efforts. To make matters worse, he is confronted by the two German investigators looking into his mother’s and stepfather’s murders, who show up unannounced at his hotel room in Budapest. They tell him that Moreau’s will left everything to the twins and that they find this very strange.
Max returns to Berlin and finds the city in ruins. The news from both the Western and Eastern fronts is very bad for the Germans. He starts to hallucinate and falls into a severe fever. Because he refuses the doctor’s and Thomas’s attempts to have him hospitalized, Helene arrives to act as his nurse. He is brutally cruel to her and takes pleasure in shocking her with rants about the Final Solution and the many hundreds of thousands of murders that have been taking place in the name of National Socialism.
After several days of extreme illness, Max garners sufficient strength to do some quiet reading at home. He takes up the science fiction novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs that he retrieved from Moreau’s attic. This Wikipedia entry about Burroughs’s socio-political views is quite shocking:
“Burroughs strongly supported eugenics and scientific racism. His views held that English nobles made up a particular heritable elite among Anglo-Saxons. Tarzan was meant to reflect this, with him being born to English nobles and then adopted by talking apes (the Mangani). They express eugenicist views themselves, but Tarzan is permitted to live despite being deemed "unfit" in comparison and grows up to surpass not only them but black Africans, whom Burroughs clearly presents as inherently inferior. In one Tarzan story, he finds an ancient civilization where eugenics has been practiced for over 2,000 years, with the result that it is free of all crime. Criminal behavior is held to be entirely hereditary, with the solution having been to kill not only criminals but also their families. Lost on Venus, a later novel, presents a similar utopia where forced sterilization is practiced and the "unfit" are killed. Burroughs explicitly supported such ideas in his unpublished nonfiction essay “I See A New Race.” Additionally, his Pirate Blood, which is not speculative fiction and remained unpublished after his death, portrayed the characters as victims of their hereditary criminal traits (one a descendant of the corsair Jean Lafitte, another from the Jukes family).[45] These views have been compared with Nazi eugenics – though noting that they were popular and common at the time and that Burroughs expressed great contempt for Nazism and fascism[41][46] – with his Lost on Venus being released the same year the Nazis took power (in 1933).”
Max parrots some of Burroughs’s ideas in letter to Himmler. Later after Max has recovered, Dr. Mandelbrod’s partner, Leland, cautions Max. “The Reichfürer forwarded your recent memorandum to us: instead of wasting your time with childish pranks, you should think about Germany’s salvation.”
The Germans are losing the war, badly; Max is losing his grip on reality, increasingly isolated and reckless. An unraveling on parallel tracks. It can’t end well.