by Ian Kluge
Like all great writers, Edgar Allan Poe wrought better than he knew and, in my case, never more so than in "The Tell Tale Heart’, for, while I did not kill the old man on account of his yellow eye, I did kill him because of his fat, porcine lips. More precisely, I killed him because of the obscene smacking sounds made by those lips as he lay in his bed in Ward 20 (Forensics) at the Hohesmunster Asylum, a charitable hostel for the incurably mad run by an order of Catholic nuns. I was feeding him lunch one humid afternoon at the start of a south German August. Those blubbery lips, so full, so plump, so pink, blossomed on the yellow-gray soil of his bristly head like an obscene flesh-eating flower eager to engorge itself on whatever came into reach. They reminded me of nothing so much as the mouth of a lamp-ray, a vicious, lascivious rose of petaled pink lips and tiny, invisible teeth, always ready to clamp itself onto a victim and slowly suck out the bodily juices and blood. It was the utterly shameless, lusty and lecherous sounds of those smacking lips, of that obscene hunger so eager - after all the things it had eaten! - that suddenly loosed from within me an uncontrollable gush, a flood-tide, an island and city smashing tsunami of nausea and disgust. And so I killed the old man, there, in his bed - and none to this day the wiser.
Had he been born in a different time, this man, Julius Fittkau, could have changed history. How interesting it would have been seeing how long Kant and Voltaire and Jefferson, for example, could have maintained, in Fittkau’s smug presence, their views on the natural dignity of man. I often amused myself imagining the eloquent and refined Voltaire standing in Fittkau’s presence just after this bloated whale launched one of his long, fat, juicy farts that fairly bubbled with sulfur and watched how the man inhaled it as though a rare fragrance, convinced in his heart that this odor, was none but the finest perfume and that others were privileged to partake of its richness. In the face of his burpings, almost, but not quite, vomit, though with the same sickly sweet-sour smell; in the face of his rantings, delivered almost sexually, his voice, rising and falling with ever-increasing vocal vigor and volume as though he had mounted your head and was pumping his perverse semantic semen into your ear; and in the face of his unabashed sexual cannibalism, these three philosophes, would, at the very least, have hesitated to make their naively confident pronouncements about the mankind’s inherent nobility. I spent the better part of one evening in almost hysterical laughter imagining Hamlet delivering his world famous speech extolling humanity’s angelical reasoning and natural grace while watching Fittkau at supper, spoon stucking from his ham-fist; chewing, mouth open; noisily sucking and slurping desert, or listening to Fittkau’s loud, unembarrassed groans as he masturbated again in the Ward 20 bathroom.
The Marquis de Sade would, probably, have understood Fittkau better than Kant or Jefferson. But here, too, I hesitate, because, truth to tell, the good Marquis’ pleasures were wholly masturbatory, mere onanistic fantasies imaginatively indulged, whereas Fittkau’s depravities were quite real. He did not, after all, call himself proudly, "der Judenfresser, the Jew-eater" for nothing. And not just eating them either: "Ich habe sie erst gefickt! I fucked them first. In the asshole of course. That’s the Jewish way. Especially the boys, so they’d finally know what a real Aryan penis feels like instead of that shrivelled thing they all have and then the women and girls! You should have heard them squeal! They were jealous, of course, to finally know what their Aryan sisters were getting ..." Looking at his six-four frame and his three hundred pounds, I could well imagine other reasons why women, men, and especially young girls and boys squealed as Fittkau, hung like a horse - watching him in the shower was one of my orderly duties - rammed his long, thick steel-pipe penis into their bodies.
Had Fittkau possessed as much talent for writing as ranting, and had he lived in the right time, his fame would have easily eclipsed the essentially harmless and rather good-natured Marquis whose fantasies did no more than leave himself and a few of his male and female disciples with tired hands and sore groins. His books were written with ink, but Fittkau’s, had he produced them, would have been written in blood. And not only blood, but other bodily fluids as well, and in words spelled out in the entrails he was known to have cut from his victims. After seeing self-indulgence driven to such sub-animal - dare I say ‘metaphysical’? - depths, I cannot help viewing the Marquis and his mush-headed heirs (Michel Foucault, for example) as a bunch of pale, milkless wanna-be’s lacking the courage to really get into the dirt and live down to their principles.
Vile though he was, I must confess I found Fittkau fascinating in a way that only demented genius are, for the truth is, in fairness albeit reluctantly, I must allow him a certain psychotic genius, if in no other way than the courage to reach the extremes. Indeed, I can well imagine a death-metal band named, "Fittkau" - and half-expect it once world knows his story. In more perverse moods, I imagine him as a sort of cult-god to the self-esteem movement, a symbol of unrestrained self-satisfaction and smugness.
Sister Martina, one of the younger nuns on Ward 20 (Forensics), told me one day that even before becoming a Nazi in ‘26, he already had achieved notoriety, as a star member of one of Leipzig’s various clowning clubs. He specialized, so she said, in racial satire, against Jews, Negroes and Gypsies. As she spoke, I had no trouble imagining Fittkau’s impersonations and parodies, using his own full lips, blatantly rouged and enlarged to exaggerate and, thereby, degrade every facial expression of happiness, grief, or love into a sub-human grimace. He had a horribly funny skit, so the sister heard from her parents who were from Leipzig, in which he did Shylock, from Shakespeare’s "Merchant of Venice", as "Scheiss-loch", ‘Shit-hole’ in old Jew York.
Already then, so the sister informed me, he was known as a shameless and unrestrained bon vivant, reveling in excesses of food, alcohol and some very un-Aryan forms of sexual pleasure. He could only have joined the SS with the help of important influence, because in those early days, the SS demanded high standards of health he could hardly have met, as well as conventional sexual conduct. Perhaps it was to prove himself worthy of such great honor that Fittkau volunteered for concentration camp duty right after Hitler seized power.
No doubt, at Dachau he did more than his share to terrorize the communists, social democrats, trade unionists, brown shirts and conservatives who were the Fueher’s first victims. Later, he joined Hitler’s euthanasia program in which tens of thousands of mental patients were gassed with exhaust in hermetically sealed excursion busses. What he did with some of the patients before, or after, he drove them on board is anyone’s guess. They would soon be dead, and in any case, after the Night of the Long Knives when Hitler unleashed the SS on his own supporters, few were willing launch complaints against anyone wearing the skull and cross-bones.
From concentration camp duty and gassing mental patients to an active role in the Holocaust was a small step. With the invasion of Russia, Fittkau enrolled in an Einsatzgruppe , one of the mobile killing squads that followed the victorious Wehrmacht into the Soviet Motherland, where, more often than not with the willing and eager help of the locals, they rounded up and massacred tens of thousands of Jews, gypsies and communists.
I had a hard time imagining him in these groups. If nothing else, this was work for dedicated professionals: long hours of brutal work, a lot of movement from village to village, no time for rest and plenty of danger from partisans. Furthermore, they had to keep their mouths shut about what they were doing and I just couldn’t imagine Fittkau’s over-sized lips being still. If ever a man’s physiognomy revealed his character, that man was Fittkau whose lips never stopped; those bloated red petals were always eating, sucking up stuff from the world, or talking, inseminating it with his rabid ideas. Even when no one was listening, Fittkau blabbered and every so often, erupted like a volcano. "Hey! Jetzt hort mal! Now listen!" and then he started what always became a memorable performance. He had, after all, not been an actor for nothing.
Flinging his arms around wildly as though in some kind of seizure, hands clawing the air, his voice rising and falling in pulses like the crashes of a storm-driven waves, he roared, he shouted, he whined and moaned, groaned, simpered, cajoled and begged, whispered and then without warning, exploded: screamed, screeched, wept, beating his head with his fists, splashing spittle in every direction as he called on Hitler and God to save his beloved Fatherland, to save him from the Jewish and Negro and gypsy plague over-running the world. Then he raved about the need to transform and purify blood by eating the impure blood and using one’s body, above all, his body, as an alchemical retort to sublimate degenerate this matter into something wholesome and pure and light for the good of mankind. "Even the Jew is happy inside my miraculous body!" he screamed - and then laughed, " No one has done as much as I have for Jewish happiness - and for gypsy happiness too!"
He was referring to his career as an Einsatzkommando. At its beginning, he did his job with a certain amount of distinction; he never failed to volunteer for any mass slaughter, he had no attack of nerves, nor did he indulge in needless and inefficient brutality. However, as months dragged into a year, Fittkau became the subject of rumours that he was, to speak in the mildest terms, unbalanced, that now and again, but still too often for his comrades’ liking and comfort, he engaged in strange rituals with bodies of some of their victims.
One must understand that SS Einsatzkommandos regarded themselves as elite soldiers, men who voluntarily did the Third Reich’s dirtiest, filthiest work, fought hard, killed the Fatherland’s foes as efficiently and remorselessly as they could, drank copiously and allowed themselves occasional rape to relieve the stress of combat and whole-sale slaughter, but otherwise saw themselves as normal and healthy citizens performing dreadful necessities. Most were husbands and fathers. Tough, often simple men, they had little patience with things they viewed as abnormal, sick or deranged, so , quite predictably, Fittkau was moved to another unit when the rumors became too strong for his comrades to stomach. Loyalty to their own forbade them to kill him: he had, after all, gotten this way in the line of doing his duty shoulder to shoulder with them and, therefore, deserved some special consideration. Nevertheless, they didn’t want him around. Machine-gunning enemies of the Reich was one thing, but eating their testicles or livers or breasts or hearts as part of some sort of strange blood-ritual was quite something else.
By fall 1944, with the Red Army approaching the Reich, Fittkau, by then a much-transferred Einsatzkommando, an Iron Cross veteran of front-line fighting, and finally a guard at various death-camps in Poland, found himself attached to an SS unit marching inmates from Auschwitz westward. By then he had already abandoned the normal - if I may call it that - world of warfare and become lost in a world of his own where his chief interest was practicing "koerperliche Alkemie", ‘bodily alchemy’ by which he meant nothing less than transforming - or, to use the technical word - sublimating the flesh of sub-humans into the sacred Aryan blood that ran through his veins.
The details are better left to imagination, so I shall give only the barest outline. He followed, in his own way it goes without saying, the old alchemical procedure of pyrification, the application of fire to make the base matter ready for mortification, that is, the reduction of the base matter into its parts. Then came sublimation, transforming the low to the high through the spiritually purified retort of his sacred Aryan body. The goal was alchemical marriage of higher and lower which made its participants perfect. The fire, of course, was the emotional heat aroused by his brutal sex torture, the mortification was merely dismemberment and the sublimation the eating of bodily parts.
When Fittkau started this sort of thing on the march from Auschwitz, the SS, already faced with a lost war, not to mention trials, imprisonment and possible execution, quickly decided to kill their aberrant comrade. But not quickly enough. Psychopaths are notoriously intelligent, and Fittkau, seeing the kind of looks he was getting, simply disappeared into the night and headed west on his own. By war’s end, he had landed in Essen where someone identified him to the British who, after prompt arrest and interrogation, concluded that he was deranged beyond even the slightest credibility. If the army psychiatrist disbelieved his stories, why would a court accept them and sentence Fittkau to hang? It was simply easier to transfer him one more time, to the Hohesmunster Asylum for the incurably insane.
Here, twenty years later, I killed him.
It happened like this. His seemingly hale and hearty appearances notwithstanding, despite his bluster and bluff, Fittkau was not a well man. He was seriously over-weight, smoked heavily, gave several completely exhausting oratorical performances every week and, given the limited space on the highly restricted Ward 20, did no exercise whatever. This manner of living, combined with the physical damage suffered in war had taken its toll. He had, so said Sister Martina, a heart condition, high blood pressure and a rather curious eating anomaly: he was easily given to choking on food, which, being the creature he was, he liked to wolf down as rapidly as he could. I made a note of this information because Sister Martina assigned me to feed him when he was ill. ‘You’re a big man, she said with a smile, "I think you can handle this greedy lout better than I."
When I returned to Ward 20 after one of my weekends off, Fittkau was seriously ill, his fat head on his shoulders - he had no real neck - like a pasty gray-white, swollen wart; his fingers, fatty like five Weiss Wurst, white sausages. When I gave him his bed bath, he actually shivered with cold so I knew his heart wasn’t really doing its job.
Some people improve with illness; aware of their weakness and vulnerability, they become a little more gentle, more mild, more understanding and empathetic, a little more humble. Not Fittkau. He still loved to smell his own farts - and he farted prodigiously I might add; he masturbated in bed with groans of unashamed pleasure; he burped almost as long as he farted - and more thunderously too - and he called for more food, smacking those fat obscene lips. Hearing that smacking sound, I remember thinking, "One day I’m going to pound those lips into hamburger."
Fittkau that day whined and mewled even more than usual as I fed him his thick broth through a tea-pot like contraption designed to prevent spills when feeding sick people in bed. Smacking those horrible lips like a huge three hundred pound baby, he whimpered "Mehr, mehr, more, more" as though he - he who stayed fat in the war by eating his victims - were starving like some waif in a Third World slum. The curtained cubicle where I fed him stank from his farts, for he farted even while eating and commented on the various delicacies of their smell, and suddenly, hearing him mewl for more, suddenly, without warning, I knew there wasn’t enough room in this world for me and this fat, obscene worm whimpering into my face for more of his chunky thick broth.
I remember thinking, "All right, here’s more, damn you!" and, totally overwhelmed by a tidal wave of disgust for this greedy worm, started to pour the whole tea-pot into his eagerly sucking mouth, his fat, lewd lips clinging to the spout as if it were life itself, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously up and down, his fat cheeks now hollowed to increase the suction and his breath hissing short and fast out of his wide, hairy nostrils. I poured with a murderous fury, until his whole mouth was full as he ever wanted it, fuller, in fact, than he was able to swallow, and then, his eyes suddenly widened with panic, he tried to push the tea-pot away, but, using my weight-lifter’s strength, I rammed the spout further between his yellow teeth and into his mouth and poured, the hot broth as fast as I could, thinking, "Drink you son of a bitch, you wanted it all so fast, now take it!" Desperately, unsuccessfully, he tried wrenching his head away, for I quickly grabbed it and held it tight in my hand with the spout still rammed into his mouth and me pouring last few slops. I knew that he couldn’t breath properly any more, but I didn’t care. Only when he started heaving, wracking his blubbery body in a desperate struggle to breathe did I let go, but by then it was simply too late: Fittkau was choking to death, silently, not a whisper of air escaped from his mouth. He suddenly started to wave his arms as if trying to tell me something, and I stood there, watching him gasp, staring straight into his terrified wide open eyes as though I understood nothing. His face got explosively red, his arms and legs twitching, and then, without warning, Fittkau collapsed. He just flopped back into the bedding. And still I just watched him, impassively thinking, "His heart just gave out." Then, after looking at him for a few moments, without any feeling at all, neither fear or joy, with nothing inside except a strange coolness, I left the cubicle and went to the nurses’ station. "Sister Martina," I said "I think something’s wrong with Fittkau."
She was in no hurry and when she got to his bed, she glanced only once at the motionless figure flopped in the blankets, rather cooly lifted an eyelid, then said quite matter-of-factly, "He’s dead. He choked," and then, looking straight into my eyes, "That sometimes happens, you know." After crossing herself, she knelt at his bed and began to pray but for whom I have never known.
I watched her, thinking only, "He’s dead. And I killed him." I had none of the feelings - fear, regret, guilt, sorrow - against which I was inwardly bracing myself as if some kind of psychological hurricane. What I felt can best be described as like having a loose tooth: an odd, sensation, but nothing painful, and, because of its strangeness, irresistible to the tongue’s urge to explore and play with, to waggle this way and that in order to test the extent and intensity of possible feelings. However, there were no feelings at all when I explored the dull fact that Fittkau was dead by my hand. Indeed, this amazed me more than anything else.
After that things happened quickly. Sister Martina told me to straighten the body, and tie a scarf round his chin so it wouldn’t hang open. "Cover him with a sheet and don’t open the curtain. We don’t want to disturb the others." When Senior Sister Edda arrived, she said briskly, "We will take him out after nine when they’re all in bed." "Does that actually fool them?" I asked, and she answered, " Of course not, but there’s always a lot less excitement if they don’t see the body..." Then she asked, "What happened?" I told her, "He choked on the broth, I couldn’t get him to breathe and then he just suddenly stopped." "Heart-attack" she said simply, "with him, not so unexpected. His greed killed him. I’ll tell the doctor."
She left and I did as instructed. When somebody said, "How’s Fittkau?" I simply said, "Peaceful for once ..." and moved on to another topic. Later that evening, after the doctor had finished with Fittkau and written "Immediate cause of death: heart-attack; proximate cause of death: choking " onto the death-certificate, I wheeled his body down to the morgue where one of the young attendants mentioned that Fittkau had no known relatives. "Armer Kerl, poor bugger. Who was he? " he said, and I answered, "Menschen-fresser, a cannibal, from Ward 20" and smiled to myself as he almost jumped away from the corpse. Fittkau would have been pleased.
That night I slept, not soundly, but sleep I did nevertheless, with Sister Martina’s words occasionally surfacing into half-conscious awareness: "His greed killed him." There was no way to prove it was more than an accident for such things after all, happened wherever old and sick people were cared for. Consequently, I felt no apprehension about my story. Only Fittkau knew how I literally rammed the soup-pot into his mouth and poured the hot broth and simply watched as he choked. But Fittkau, for once, wasn’t talking. His lips for the first time, were sealed.
Well over thirty years have passed since that day in August when I killed Julius Fittkau and I find it more than a little ironic that now my job as a teacher requires teaching Poe’s "Tell-Tale Heart." Most of my students enjoy this story in which the narrator’s madness prevents one from ever knowing with any degree of certainty what - or even if anything really - ever took place in the old man’s apartment. Naturally they are all convinced that nothing remotely like this could ever occur in the "real’ world as they call it. And I, for my part, do not challenge them in their charming conviction, but rather smile to myself and looking at them say only, "Perhaps."