Rolf Hochhuth: Johann Georg Elser
Liquidate inconspicuously, during the next air raid:
Gestapo letter to Dachau before war’s end.
In the concentration camp crematorium, Elser
—Born 1903 in Hermaringen—
Is presumably strangled, perhaps shot:
The witnesses, now drawing civil-servant pensions,
Say nothing, seeing as they are his murderers…
Eleven months before Hitler’s world war
Elser goes—to steal explosives—
To work as a laborer in a quarry:
A German is as consequent as Hitler.
Tortured a year later, interrogation-broken
—he thinks God has rejected his deed—
An unbowed Elser gives only one motive:
Peace—or Hitler! The Wilhelm Tell of totalitarianism times,
All alone in his nation, who almost collectively
Denounce him, because they love the Führer like beer
And bosoms—even when, in fact especially then,
After Hitler throws fifty times more people
than lived in pre-war Munich into graves,
Onto heaps of ash, three hundred thousand fed to the fish.
Four weeks before the Wehrmacht breaks out,
Elser breaks the first bricks out of the pillar
That supports the hall (where the Führer spurs on
His fellow bandits every year) for his powder chamber.
Kneels thirty-five nights before the pillar
—a bruised knee will be his downfall.
The flashlight shaded; rubble, bricks
Carried in a case down to the Isar.
Three days before the explosion
Clockwork and detonator calibrated:
The police don’t believe him capable
Until he reconstructs the mechanism behind bars.
As often—forty times—as he creeps to his crime scene,
He goes to churches, that soothes him…
A Swabian, after seven years at village school
He was the best apprentice carpenter in his year.
Plays music in associations, four different instruments,
Popular with women, unmarried father. Before he
Sets out, he has to sell his double bass:
Needs four hundred marks. Gets the night watchman’s
dog in the “Bürgerbräu” accustomed to him:
Brings meat to the kennel every day
From his lunch plate in the restaurant.
Has only ten marks left on his way to Switzerland.
His sister gives him thirty.
He spends it on a trip to Munich
To check his clocks… In Constance,
Imprisoned already, he hears on the radio as Adolf Hitler
Leaves the hall too soon – eleven minutes!
Seven Nazis dead, one waitress too. Sixty
Injured. Even six decades later
No encyclopedia names Elser! Only Munich at last
And his home village have Elser Streets:
his nation does love freedom
– But not those who sacrifice themselves for it.
First published in Rolf Hochhuth:
Die Berliner Antigone. Prosa und Verse.
Reinbek bei Hamburg 1971.
Quoted here by kind permission of the author.
This version taken from: Rolf Hochhuth:
Anekdoten und Balladen.
Edited by Gert Ueding,
Stuttgart 2001, pp. 13 ff.