The Fateful One

— J. Chr. de Vries

Foreword

Every history has its own history, which in turn has its own history, a seemingly endless recursive process of the history of the history of the history, stretching back to the Big Bang. At least, if we may assume without question that this bang set time in motion alongside space. Without time and space, no history; at least, so it seems.


My history partly encompasses the history of my parents, the majority directly, but the part before my birth only through stories, which are inherently incomplete. The history of my grandparents is even more incomplete; I only knew three of them. The history of my great-grandparents I know only a very small part of, through a few stories. Of my great-great-grandparents, I know nothing. As for my children and grandchildren, I will know their history up until my death.


All histories overlap in a cascading manner, directly or indirectly. Their direction is back in time. We survey, like Klee’s Angelus Novus, as Walter Benjamin so aptly portrayed in his final text Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Geschichtsphilosofische Thesen), the chain of histories with our backs to the future. ‘Do not look back!’ — for looking back is dangerous, as Lot’s wife found out during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and as Orpheus did when he left Hades with his Eurydice. But we do nothing else, only in our dreams and visions are we capable of turning our gaze to the future, driven forward by the storm of destruction. “That which we call progress, is this storm.” Or does ‘looking back’ perhaps refer to the future?

— JCdV, Bonnemort, December 9, 2023

The Fatefule One

Nearly a month after finding the message about the tragic death of Taunis Haas in my mailbox at the entrance of my property, it was a dreary day in mid-March 2022, I found another message: there was a ‘colis’ waiting for me at La Poste in Le Bugue. The package would remain there for two weeks. I decided to pick it up right away; I wasn’t expecting a package and was curious about its contents. It seemed to be too large for my mailbox, otherwise it would have been placed there. I drove there in the afternoon, and to my great surprise, it turned out to be a rather large package, originating from Taunis Haas. I recognized his meticulous handwriting on the address label.
 The package contained a collection of notes, manuscripts, folders, and a few letters. After briefly flipping through various texts, I understood that at least some of it must have originated from his website, which had been shut down over ten years ago. I had expected a letter from Haas, explaining some things to me, but the only message addressed to me turned out to be a yellow Post-it note with my name on it and a reference to the title of Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ song cycle: An Herrn De Vries, meinen Leiermann. The note was stuck to a manuscript that lay on top of the stack of texts, titled: ‘The Fateful Ones’.
 The author of the manuscript was Otto Godenlied, a writer I had never heard of. This was not particularly strange in itself, considering the manuscript had never been published. I would only later discover the reason behind this. Haas had underlined the following paragraph:

• Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville is an interesting case in light of my earlier discussions about secrecy and taboo. He found himself at a juncture in history where secrets and taboos intersected, indeed, where they deeply penetrated and destroyed each other in the most fundamental and penetrating manner. Fouquier-Tinville was the public prosecutor during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution; according to his own accounts, he sent nearly two and a half thousand ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to the guillotine. The National Archives of France hold thousands of so-called ‘last letters’ from those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror; these letters were addressed to family members and friends, but the vast majority of them ended up on Fouquier-Tinville’s desk. The letters contain a wide array of personal confessions, final wishes, financial advice, and paternal or maternal guidance to family, children, and spouses. For example, those of the brilliant chemist Lavoisier and also of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat. Among Fouquier-Tinville’s papers was an official report that eloquently listed Lavoisier’s merits and praised his significance for ‘the fatherland’. It was to no avail. In one of his last letters, Lavoisier writes:
  • Les événements dans lesquels je me trouve enveloppé vont probablement m’inviter les inconvénients de la vieillesse. Je mourrai tout entier, c’est encore un avantage que je dois compter au nombre de ceux dont j’ai joui…
• [The translation provided by Taunis Haas is as follows: The events in which I find myself enveloped will probably spare me the inconveniences of old age. I will die in full health, which is yet another advantage I can count among the many I have enjoyed.]
• Marie Charlotte de Corday d’Armont writes in a letter to her father following her murder of Marat (she stabbed him to death in a bathtub):
  • Un tel attentat ne permet nulle défense. C’est pour la forme. (…) N’oubliez pas ce vers de Corneille: «Le crime fait la honte et non pas l’échafaud.»
• [Such a crime requires no defense. It’s merely a formality. (…) Do not forget this rule of Corneille: ‘The crime causes shame, not the scaffold.’ — Translation by Haas.]
• There are more accounts with words that testify to similar noble spirits; spirits that do not indulge in confessing secrets and petty last attempts to save their own skin. Like the Girondin Vergniaud, who is said to have remarked the following about Charlotte Corday: “She kills us, but she also teaches us how to die.” Vergniaud himself was executed on the guillotine in 1793, along with twenty-one other Girondins, after being personally accused of treason by Robespierre; they sang the Marseillaise together until the last man, namely Vergniaud himself, met his end on the scaffold. Taboos were rapidly broken down, engulfed in a frenzy of betrayal, violence, bloodlust, and fanaticism, a spine-chilling repositioning of values and norms. In the final moments of those condemned to death, we see, alongside the testimonies of the noble spirits, the revelations of those who believed they could trade their secrets and principles for their naked lives. Times of reappraisal, uprisings, and bloodshed bring out not only the best, but certainly also the worst in humanity. And now Fouquier-Tinville himself, the chief prosecutor, the man on whose desk all these secrets were gathered. He too ultimately fell victim to the revolutionary orgy. After Robespierre had succumbed to his own revolution, Fouquier-Tinville tried to save himself by distancing himself from Robespierre’s ideas and even helping in his arrest. It was to no avail; on July 7, 1795, Fouquier-Tinville’s life also ended on the scaffold. “I will die because I have served my country with too much zeal…” [avec trop de zèle].
 Interesting side note: Fouquier-Tinville earned an annual salary of exactly six hundred sixty–six livres [pounds] as public prosecutor.*)
• *) Olivier Blanc, La dernière lettre — Paris, 1984
  
• One can hardly deny that here we are dealing with some form of fate. But what does this mean? Fate from the perspective of some deity? From the perspective of — heaven forbid — Revolution? Justice? Truth? Power? … Oh yes, definitely the latter. Although, what does that power amount to if it results in fate? It seems to be a flawed power then. Power can fail, so can a revolution, but justice and truth are infallible. Justice and truth can be violated, denied, trampled upon. But this is always by a power, never by justice or truth themselves. In that sense, power is always the father of fate. Wait! I understand the mistake I made now: power does not necessarily strive for justice or truth; at least, not inherently. Power is amoral — not immoral! Power is thus the origin of fate, justice and truth never are. The revolution, which can certainly serve justice and truth, is ultimately an articulation of power, whether that power fails or not. Then remains the deity. Often, gods are considered an articulation of justice or power, but that is a misconception. Ultimately, gods are nothing more or less than a metaphor for power. If gods decree fate, it is because of their power. And failing gods in that case are merely powers defeated by another power. The strongest prevails. That’s how power works.
• So what is fate then other than being a victim of an ill-disposed power? There is nothing spectacular about it, nothing tragic, nothing heroic — it is pedestrian, cheap, and banal. Or foolish, that could also be the case, that it is not just bad luck, but incompetence; lack of talent. But then the fated one is still a victim of some deity, since this deity apparently burdened the fated one with too little talent. The drawback of this explanation is that power then operates outside of us, we have no sight of it, no matter how much we practice to excel in it, or try to please the gods or otherwise force their favor. In that case, there is no free will, everything is preordained.

• The Hôtel des Invalides is inhabited by the fated ones, it is immensely vast. Nevertheless, some of the fated ones are lonely; namely, when they are aware of their condition. In most cases, this is not the case, most of the fated ones are foolish, meaning stupid, but unaware of it. Blessed are the foolish, cursed are those who must deal with them.

Except for the pencil-drawn vertical lines along the above paragraph of the manuscript, Haas had not added any further comments.
 While examining the remaining papers from the package, apart from a peculiar text titled ‘Labyrint’, I came across a folder with a label that read “Stasi Archive”. Some texts in the folder mentioned the name Otto Godenlied, including the title of his text ‘The Fateful Ones’. There was also a reference to a text with biographical information. Godenlied turned out to be of Dutch descent. He had fled to East Germany in October 1977, after being involved in the kidnapping of the German employers’ chairman Hanns Martin Schleyer under the leadership of Angelika Speitel from the Red Army Faction [RAF]. In September 1977, Schleyer was briefly held captive in Scheveningen by Speitel and her fellow kidnappers. Godenlied, who was living in The Hague at the time, was said to have rented a car from the Tromp garage there to transport Schleyer to Brussels. However, the police were on the kidnappers’ trail, and the arrest failed, resulting in a shootout where a police officer was seriously injured. Speitel and Godenlied managed to escape, and Godenlied fled to East Berlin. There, he sought political asylum, which was granted in early 1978, after which he got a position in the infamous Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen in Berlin as the archives administrator. This ultimately led to a dark, viewless life, quite literally, as his office had no windows.
 In the Stasi archive, I also found a letter from Godenlied addressed to his mother. The letter was apparently never sent; it had no stamp or postmark. I suspect that the content of the letter was the reason for its censorship. 
 The letter was written in blue ink, in Dutch. I will only quote three relevant fragments from it for my text.

— Berlin, Hohenschönhausen, 1988

Dear Mama,

Finally, after all these years, I have found the courage to write to you. Whether this letter actually reaches you, I cannot say for certain, as the letter will surely be censored by the Stasi. Perhaps parts will be blacked out, or the letter may not be sent at all. I can only hope that it reaches you. But even if, unfortunately, it does not, I have no regrets about writing it; it would, on the contrary, articulate the perfect metaphor of my utterly meaningless and fateful life. Justice in the end.
[…]
I have not a moment’s regret for leaving behind the Netherlands, that land of coziness, Brussels sprouts, and geraniums. But unlike the fox, I have lost both my fur and my cunning. And above all, my ideals. What a disillusionment, this so-called Marxist country, where by far the majority of inhabitants are fated ones, and where the free provisions of gas, light, water, but also healthcare and education, seem to emphasize that fate. Why put a price tag on something that is irrelevant, and in fact nonexistent?
[…]
I work in a bare little office, lonely behind a steel desk tucked away among enormous rows of dreary filing cabinets, where the only light comes from flickering bright blue-white neon lights, as there are no windows. Nobody knows me, I have no friends, let alone a relationship. Everything I thought to unleash in the Netherlands has turned out to be utterly meaningless. What do I leave behind, other than a great vacuum? Although, ‘great’? That emptiness is at most an inconsequential, minuscule insignificance. What meaning have I ultimately contributed to history?

From an addendum added to his biography, it appeared that Godenlied had ended his life a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had hung himself in his office on an archive cabinet. Apparently, the answer to the last question I quoted from his letter above was: ‘nothing’. Not even tragically, as we could read in his manuscript. This also means that his self-chosen death is meaningless. It is not an expression of discontent, criticism, fear, or helplessness, it is nothing at all. At least, reasoned from his personal perspective. Yet we are indeed witnesses to a history, however small, through those Stasi archives. We will never know if Godenlied was aware of this; there is no hint of it in the letter to his mother. Perhaps, but this is of course a form of interpretation [hineininterpretieren], the absence of that hint confirms that he even considered that Stasi archive as meaningless, and therefore mentioning it was also meaningless.

The similarity with this issue and that of Haas is clear, I think that is not a very daring assumption. Both ended their lives, Godenlied with an explicit reference to the ‘fateful’, and Haas with an implicit one, through the reference to Godenlied. Yet there is also a difference because the circumstances in which Haas came to his ultimate decision can certainly be called tragic, due to the dramatic love story that preceded it. If that was fateful, then that fate was of a different order.

For Godenlied, his entire life was a failure, his self-chosen death was born out of ultimate, unbearable loneliness. For Haas, this was different, his life did indeed have meaning for him, only the events that took place at the end of it, the death of his two lovers, and the impossibility of those loves, made the rest of his life meaningless. It was precisely his ultimate act that gave meaning to his life. His act was an answer to the fate that befell him, and answering impossible questions is, even in its failure, a meaningful act. The question now is whether Haas was aware of the difference between his interpretation of fate and that of Godenlied. I believe I can answer that question affirmatively, because of the dual reference to Schubert’s Leiermann, first in the letter he sent to me, and then through the package; the call to continue singing the songs in death — Willst zu meiner Liedern deine Leier dreh’n? — for our songs are ultimately the songs of the gods.

Epilogue

What is the meaning of a history that is written but ultimately never read? I have extensively described the history of Taunis Haas’s self-chosen death, yet nonetheless decided to leave it unread.*) Would it have been better to destroy that written text? That seems like a legitimate question. However, a history cannot be undone, especially since I was a part of it. But if a history is not read, is it truly written? Does a text only become a written text through its reading? An unread text is a text in potential. An unread history is a potential history.

— Bonnemort, December 9, 2023

*) See: The Common Ground