Refugee Conversations
He knew that he was still alive.
More he could not say.
(Wodehouse)
1. On passports / on the parity of beer and cigars / on orderliness
The fury of war had reduced half of Europe to a wasteland, but she was still a young and pretty fury and was wondering how she might make a little detour over to America, when it came to pass that, about this time, two men were sitting opposite each other in a railway cafe in Helsingfors, and, throwing occasional cautious glances over their shoulders, they began to talk ⊠about politics. The one was big and fat and had white hands; the other was a little thickset man with the hands of a metalworker. The fat one held up his beer glass and peered through it.
The Fat Man
This beer isnât proper beer, although that is perhaps compensated for by the fact that these cigars are not real cigars either â but your passport, that has to be a passport. Otherwise they wonât let you in.
The Stocky Man
The passport is the noblest part of a human being. Nor does it come into the world in such a simple way as a human being. A human being can come about anywhere, in the most irresponsible manner and with no proper reason at all, but not a passport. Thatâs why a passport will always be honoured, if itâs a good one, whereas a person can be as good as you like, and still no one takes any notice.
The Fat Man
So one might say: the human being is just the mechanical holder for the passport. He gets his passport stuffed into his breast pocket rather as a share certificate is stuffed in a safe. The safe itself is of no value, itâs just a container for valuables.
The Stocky Man
And yet, one might contend that a human being is, in a certain sense, necessary for the passport. The passport is the main thing, all due respect, but without the attendant person it couldnât really be, or at least it wouldnât be complete. Itâs like with a surgeon â he needs a patient, otherwise he canât operate, and to that extent he is not an autonomous being, just half a thing, notwithstanding all his qualifications; in a modern nation state itâs the same again: the main thing is the great leader, the FĂŒhrer, the Duce, or whatever, but even they have to have people to lead. They may well be great, but someone has to bear the damage of it, otherwise itâll all come to nothing.
The Fat Man
Those two names youâve just mentioned, they remind me of this beer and these cigars. Iâd like to think of them as leading brands, the best there is to be had here, and I see it as a fortunate state of affairs that the beer isnât proper beer and the cigar isnât a proper cigar, because if they didnât happen to be on an equal footing, this cafĂ© would be almost impossible to run. The coffee probably isnât proper coffee either.
The Stocky Man
What do you mean, a fortunate state of affairs?
The Fat Man
I mean it restores the balance. They have nothing to fear from comparison with each other and, shoulder to shoulder, they can take on the world: neither of them will ever find a better friend, and when they meet, their encounters are always harmonious. It would be different if, for example, the coffee was proper coffee and only the beer wasnât proper beer â then people might well complain that the beer was inferior, and what then? But Iâm distracting you from your subject â you were talking about passports.
The Stocky Man
Itâs not such a pleasant subject that I mind being distracted from it. I just find it strange that theyâre so keen on counting and registering people, especially at a time like this. Itâs as if theyâre afraid of mislaying somebody. Theyâre not usually so solicitous. But they want to be absolutely sure that you are this particular person and not that one: as if it made any difference who they allow to starve to death.
The tall, fat man stood up, bowed and said: My name is Ziffel, physicist. The stocky man seemed to be wondering whether he should stand up too, but then took courage and stayed where he was. He muttered: You can call me Kalle, thatâs fine.
The fat man sat back down and took a sulky drag on his cigar, the one he had already complained about several times, before he spoke again.
Ziffel
Concern for human beings has increased a great deal in recent years, particularly in the new states. Itâs not like it was before; nowadays, the state cares. The great men who have come to the fore in various parts of Europe take a keen interest in people; they canât get enough of them. They need lots of them. At first none of us could fathom why the FĂŒhrer was gathering up so many people from around the borders of Germany and transporting them into the middle. Since the war started itâs all become clear. He gets through them so quickly, he needs a plentiful supply. But the reason everyone has to have passports is mainly to do with keeping order. Order is essential at times like this. Suppose you and I were allowed to wander around without any proof of who we were: nobody would be able to find us when it was our turn to be deported, and order would go out of the window. You were talking about a surgeon earlier. Surgery only works because the surgeon knows whereabouts in the body the appendix, for example, is to be found. If the appendix could move about at will, without the surgeonâs knowledge â into the head, say, or into the knee â heâd have a hard time removing it. Any advocate of order will tell you the same.
Kalle
The most orderly person I ever met was a man called Schiefinger, in Dachau concentration camp â an SS man. They used to say he wouldnât allow his mistress to wiggle her bottom on any day but a Saturday, or at any time of day but the evening â not even unintentionally. In the pub, she wasnât allowed to put the lemonade bottle down on the table if the bottom of the bottle was wet. When he beat us with his leather whip, he did it in such a conscientious manner that the weals on our skin formed a pattern you could have measured with a protractor. His sense of order was so deeply ingrained that he would have preferred not to beat us at all than beat us untidily.
Ziffel
Thatâs a very important point. Nobody sets as much store by order as prisons and the military. Theyâre renowned for it, always have been. Itâs like the French general who told Emperor Napoleon, at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, that the army was ready down to the last gaiter button: that really would have been a great boon, if it had been true. It all comes down to the last button. You need all the buttons. The last button is what wins you the war. The last drop of blood is important too, but not as important as the last button. Itâs order that wins wars. And you canât impose order on blood the way you can on buttons. The top brass are never so well informed about whether the last drop of blood has been spilled as they are about the buttons.
Kalle
âLastâ is one of their favourite words. Out on the moors, the SS man always told us to go at it with our last ounce of strength. I often wondered why we werenât allowed to use the first ounce. But it had to be the last, otherwise it wouldnât have been any fun for him. And they want to win the war with the last ounce of strength too; they positively insist upon it.
Ziffel
They want to show itâs a serious matter.
Kalle
Deadly serious. If seriousness isnât deadly, it doesnât count.
Ziffel
That brings us back to the buttons. Nowhere else is order so highly prized as it is in the military, not even in business â despite the fact that you can make profits in business by keeping things in meticulous order, whereas war only ever leads to losses. Youâd think it would be much more important to look after the pennies in business than to look after the buttons in war.
Kalle
Itâs not about the buttons per se: thereâs nothing as wasteful as a war, everyone knows that. They donât stint on material when it comes to fighting a war. Have you ever heard of a military administration conserving resources? Orderliness is not the same as a sense of economy.
Ziffel
Of course not. Itâs about wasting resources in a systematic way. Everything thatâs thrown away or spoiled or destroyed has to be written down and numbered: thatâs order. But the main reason for instilling order is a pedagogical one. There are certain tasks people canât perform at all if they donât perform them in an orderly way. And thatâs pointless ones. Get a prisoner to dig a trench and then fill it in again and then dig it out again, and let him do it as sloppily as he likes, and heâll go mad, or rebel â which is the same thing. But if he is instructed to hold the spade in such-and-such a place and not a centimetre lower down, and if thereâs a line drawn on the ground to show him where to dig so that the trench will be perfectly straight, and if he is told that once heâs filled in the trench the ground must be as smooth as if there had never been a hole there at all, then the work gets done and everything runs like clockwork, as they say. On the other hand, humanity is almost impossible to come by these days without corruption, which is also a kind of disorderliness. Youâll find humanity wherever thereâs an official whoâs on the take. With a little bribery you can sometimes even get justice. I gave an official a tip to let me jump the queue at the passport office in Austria; I saw in his face that he was compassionate and open to bribery. Fascist regimes clamp down on corruption precisely because they are inhumane.
Kalle
Somebody once said muck is just stuff in the wrong place. We donât call it muck when itâs in a flowerpot. In principle I think orderliness is a good thing. But I once saw a Charlie Chaplin film where he was packing a suitcase â or rather, chucking his stuff into a suitcase â and once heâd shut the lid he decided it was too messy because there were too many bits of cloth poking out. So he took a pair of scissors and just cut off the sleeves and trouser legs and everything else that was hanging loose. It astonished me. I can see you donât think much of orderliness either.
Ziffel
Iâm just conscious of the enormous advantages of sloppiness. Sloppiness has saved thousands of lives. Often, in war, a man need only deviate very slightly from the course of action heâs been ordered to take and heâll escape with his life.
Kalle
Thatâs true. My uncle was in the Argonne Forest. They were sitting in a trench, and the order came through on the telephone for them to go back immediately. But they didnât follow the order to the letter â they wanted to finish off the fried potatoes they were eating first â and they ended up being taken prisoner and so they were saved.
Ziffel
Or take a pilot, for instance. Heâs tired, and he reads the flight instruments slightly wrong. He drops his bombs next to a large tenement building instead of on top of it. Fifty peopleâs lives are saved. What I mean is that people are not ready for a virtue like orderliness. Their thinking is not sufficiently developed. Their undertakings are idiotic, and only a sloppy and disorderly execution of their plans can save them from even greater harm.
I had a lab assistant, Herr Zeisig, who kept everything in order â it was very hard for him. He was constantly tidying up. Youâd have some apparatus all set out ready for an experiment and get called away to answer the telephone, and by the time you got back heâd have tidied everything up again. And every morning the tables were spotless â meaning that the bits of paper with all your notes on had disappeared forever into the bin. But he did work hard, so you couldnât really say anything. Of course, you did end up saying something, but by doing so you just put yourself in the wrong. Every time something disappeared â or rather, was tidied up â heâd look at you with his pale eyes, in which there was not even the faintest glimmer of intelligence, and youâd find yourself feeling sorry for him. I c...