Nocturnes: The New Temporary Hire Used To Paint Houses

Ja!, Karl-Heinz, this kind of assignment

demands total incompetence, some who

was born to lose, born to disrupt, born to fail:

and the man I have selected is the best

possible candidate. He cannot keep his mouth

shut, and he has the most grandiose

fantasies. But he is more suspicious than

anyone I have ever known. Everyone he meet,

or has met, or expects to meet is---in his
perspective---an enemy, a subversive, ready

to take advantage of him. In some perverse
way, he enjoys this; hatred, after all, is a

form of attention, and the hatred expects from

others is merely a reflection of his own

self-hatred. Yes, I know he was deocorated

in the war, but the acts bravery with which he

is credited were attempts to immolate himself,

to prove to himself, by his own actions against

himself, that the hatred he felt from others,

and the hatred he stirred up in others, was so

terrible that someone deserved to die; ultimately,

himself. All his efforts are a singleminded attempt

to build himself a personal pyre on which to be
consumed, and to bring the whole world into

that consumption with him, so great is his

self-hatred of the world, and of the witness

it bears against him. He enjoys the music of

Wagner far too much. I wonder if he knows

that Frau Wagner's mother was a French whore,

whose grandparents were bank-housing Jews.

No matter. Our man spreads chaos wherever he goes---

chaos around reflecting the chaos within him---

and he will certainly achieve the ends for which

our choosing processes have selected him.

He will clash with that loudmouth locksmith, Drexler,

and this den of agitators will implode as a result

of that conflict; before a single march, before

they can endorse a singler candidate. We need

to plant in among them at once, not a moment to lose.

He will fit right in; yes, he was a painter---

houses, not masterpieces. No, you have never

heard of him; I doubt anyone has, even the

officers who pinned the Iron Cross have probably

forgotten him. He struts a lot, but makes no

lasting impression. Even his hatreds are not

original. Bring in him to the office; we will

tell him together that he his hired. His name

is Hitler, something or other Hitler.

Starward

Author's Notes/Comments:

I apologize if anyone take offense to the speaker's remarks about Cosima Wagner's mother, Countess Marie D'Agoult, whose affair with the composer Franz Liszt produced three children whom the Countess essentially abandoned. Countess D'Agoult was the granddaughter of a member of the Flavigny family of bankers.

Some historians, whose work I read too long ago to remember for a correct citation, suggested that Hitler was inserted into the very small National Socialist Workers' Party, as either the seventh or eighth member, as a police spy and may have been tasked with sowing discort and disruption within the party.