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Rating: Mental flashback: Berlin late April - early May 1945. Monstrous Soviet tanks are about to cross the Oder River, the climax of the invasion. Fiery grenades rain down on the helpless populace, almost unaware of what is destined to happen.
Let's imagine the heart of the Capital, a garden gradually turned into a steaming steppe. A discreet staircase connects the devastated square to an unhealthy bunker, Spartan, dripping with filthy liquids, the humidity unpleasantly soaking the rigid uniforms of officers, commanders, hierarchs. One in particular roams silently, spectrally through these dark chambers, these gloomy bolgias. The countless furrows of wrinkles badly sketch the pale, flabby face of a tired, dazed, estranged, unsteady man, his thin hands incapable of stabilizing themselves, lost in perpetual motion. He seems like a veteran of the Prussian war yet hasn’t even reached his sixties.
This individual reigns sovereign over the immense cellar/hatch of the city: he shouts, bellows, cries out against the People’s betrayal, mixes up the maps outlining the last armies defending the Hauptstadt with Monopoly boards, plays with nonexistent pieces, invades fortified squares and impregnable bastions, madness ravages his restless mind. He hurls curses at the Generals, traitors, betrayers, murderers of the Motherland and Honor, who must pay the disgrace with their blood.
The loyal ones abandon him. They contact the enemy. Surrender is inevitable. The recent border of the Third Reich is just a few meters away from the bunker. Two years ago it stretched from the Loire to the Urals. From Oslo to Cyrenaica. There are those who sacrilegiously confuse directives he himself issued in the past, those who announce their inability to “scorch earth” the Glorious Nation now dismissed, those who desert, those devoted to mad nights in the company of prostitutes and "impure" and "inferior" women. What does it matter! The end is near, better to burn everything immediately. Preferably in the wildest revelry. Do these higher-ranking military men, steeped in alcohol and the oldest form of lust, represent the chosen Race for export? Would they embody the new canonical world?
No use. Inevitable defeat. It's time to end it. Heroic death, forbidden to fall alive into the enemy’s clutches. A custom of the Ancients, not even a major novelty. A poorly recycled and poorly re-updated demonstration of courage.
The primary individual decides to marry the only mortal woman to whom he has wished to bestow a shred of love, a feeling, however, morally repudiated. The other woman is the Nation. Thunderous applause ruins an already ungraceful acoustic.
Bullets and cyanide knock on the bunker door and enter uninvited. They seize the helpless German shepherd. Then they destroy the individual and the new wife. They are set on fire with gasoline from unused luxury Volkswagens. The mortal bodies must by no means become part of the adversaries’ war spoils. Other lives perish: innocent children poisoned in their sleep, parents putting lead into their brains. Similar fates befall other vital, proud members.
Among the smoking ruins, filtering through the people befouled by the lime of destroyed buildings, ignoring the rivulets of blood streaming down their faces, a truck equipped with a loudspeaker announces the surrender. The man who simultaneously reveals these voices falls to the ground, overwhelmed by such shame and embarrassment.
Final scene: a young woman and a boy, a former combatant, reunite outside the burning metropolis with their bicycles. Before them, the countryside, the racket of the last grenades, and an uncertain future to pursue. With them, dozens of emigrants. The fire burns and will burn with more ardor in the years to come. The ruins of nineteenth-century apartments cannot compare to the catastrophe of feelings. Man is dust like the concrete that slides from disintegrated bricks.
The Austrian village of Braunau am Inn will be the first to commiserate because of the mysterious protagonist who roams through this review.
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