Another Zundel Letter excerpt out of Mannheim / 22 Oct '05,
written to a young friend living in Texas:
The criterion for getting the "Close Combat
Decoration" in the old Wehrmacht was that you had to be in such close
contact with the other combatant that you could see the whites of the
enemy's eyes. That means, as you know, fighting close-in with bayonets,
tree branches, rocks, anything one could get one's hands on. German
veterans have told me hair-raising tales about the Eastern Front. Ernst
and Ingrid, and their loyal friends, are out there in the forefront,
seeing the whites in the eyes of the enemies of freedom, in prisons,
courtrooms, in three countries and on two continents. Since the struggle
has transferred from the battlefield to the courtrooms, this is where real
history is now being shaped.
On 17, October, 2005, we won a small but significant legal
victory in the Oberlander Gericht, which is the level of court one step
away from the Supreme Court, known here in Germany as the Constitutional
Court - an odd name and situation, as this temporary Allied construct in
effect operates not under a Constitution at all, but rather under what's
called a "basic law." Israel is the only other country in the
world to operate under this unusual system - odd coincidence, eh?
The issue we brought before the court dealt with my mail
restrictions, specifically correspondence between Ingrid and myself.
Letters were being withheld - ridiculous! We won the case on
constitutional grounds; the judgment reads that communication between a
husband and wife are of a specially protected essence or class. Husbands
and wives must be able to discuss their respective views about their own
particular situation and how that may relate to the court case before
them.
So - we won an important victory for married couples!
Imagine this: I, the man who was forced to return in chains from exile
after 47 years, is now being forced to fight like a bastard to give these
Germans the important, actually sacred, right for a man and his wife to
communicate freely!
I told them: "Bis hierher und nicht weiter!"
Ingrid is fond of saying, "we drew our line in the sand."
Undoubtedly, one day someone will translate these court documents. I don't
have the time - I have to prepare for my other court appearance and have
approximately 20,000 - 25,000 pages of documents to sift through for that!
Most of it is déjŕ vu - they are the same documents dredged up by the
prosecution for my prior court cases in Canada. Imagine that! I am accused
of the same issues, as evidenced by the same documents the Canadian
Supreme Court used to exonerate me on constitutional grounds thirteen to
twenty years ago! One of the documents [against me] cites a publication
written in England thirty-one years ago!
Can it get any more grotesque? I don't think there are any
parallels in history. Ernst is once again setting precedent. Galileo had
it easy by comparison.
I now want to switch topics to get a little mental relief
from the torture of these documents of shame, as I call them. I told you
in a previous letter that I had bought a small radio with a CD player. Now
my cell reverberates to the sounds of Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, Beethoven,
Bach - and, yes, Wagner too! Oi Vey! Ausgerechnet Ernst - how could you?!
I believe - and you could help me with this - that we
humans respond to music with our DNA, our inherited genes - what we call
in German Erbmasse, the things our forefathers deposited within the blood
pulsating in our veins. That's where their racial memory is stored. That's
why we Europeans and Euro-Americans resonate with our folk's collective
memory. That's why country music in the United States and Canada is almost
entirely the product of the European American. It is the same on this side
of the ocean. At this very moment, Saturday morning, as I await the call
to get my one hour of fresh air in the prison yard, I am listening to
Schlagermusik sent by a kind of working class pop station, which also
plays American hits as far back as Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, and Pat
Boone.
Now that I have been taken out of circulation for the last
three years and am safely locked away for 22 hours and forty-five minutes
a day, I have time to listen to music and do some serious thinking. One of
my recent interests has become music and a genetic connection. I talked
about this issue with some Eastern Europeans, Gypsies, Jews - I
encountered a Romanian thief here who confessed to me the other day that
he comes from a long line of Jews - an eerie thing really as he plays
guitar in our Bible hour, so we had something in common anyway. I also
befriended a German/Russian-mix fellow who also played a few songs in
church and sang for us. Interesting these people's attitudes toward music
and the feeling music evokes in them! Then I questioned at length a
Congolese who played "his music" and his own arrangements in, of
all places, German churches and cathedrals! He brought me his media
clippings. You should have seen the costumes and instruments they used -
it was out of a black and white Tarzan movie, something I would have
watched with my kids in the 1960s. Those goofy, wide-eyed German
Christians, soaking in the multicultural milieu, looked totally bewildered
in his photos!
One German here shares a cell with another Congolese who
is highly intelligent, a former engineer. His German cell mate tells me
this Congolese grows visibly distressed when the German watches classical
concerts on his television. It has apparently even led to differences and
arguments. It's that profound.
You see, we Europeans resonate via our DNA to a different
cadence, rhythms, instrumentation, etc. One can see once again the wisdom
in the statement, "we march to a different drummer."
When I listen to the electronic popularity tests conducted
on the aforementioned German radio station, I listen to the voices of
mostly women, but a few middle-aged men too. They almost exclusively
request romantic, wholesome, non-raucous melodies, what I like to refer to
as "voluptuous songs" about love, tenderness, kindness, loyalty,
fidelity, rather than what modern music has to offer. One woman, a Greek,
has had over 250 gold records to her credit over a forty years singing
career. There are Italians and Spaniards, too, all singing in accented
German - the same genre of music, nice, melodic. DNA is the key to success
in the music field, as it is in painting, architecture, fashion - only the
aberrant strangers in our midst create the cultural discomfort and
dissonance we feel.
I believe we may be beating them back now. German pop is
becoming increasingly popular in Germany. One boy recently sold over a
half million records singing about tenderness and love in his silken
voice. A music critic from one magazine wrote that he [the boy] had
"soul in Blut," using the English word for soul, rather than the
German Seele - as it might have alerted the ever present censorious
cultural commissars that the German folk might be on the rise again, so to
speak.
