Night of the Aurochs Read online

  Also by Dalton Trumbo

  JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1939)

  ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE:

  THE LETTERS OF DALTON TRUMBO, 1942-1962

  (ED. HELEN MANFULL)

  (1970)

  Copyright © Cleo Trumbo, 1979

  All rights reserved

  First published in 1979 by The Viking Press

  625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Penguin Books Canada Limited

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Trumbo, Dalton, 1905-1976

  Night of the aurochs.

  1. National socialism—Fiction. I. Title

  PZ3.T7714Ni [PS3539.R928] 813'.5'2 79-12786

  ISBN 0-670-51412-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in CRT Electra

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The University of North Carolina Press: From The Works of Stefan George, rendered into English by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz. University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, No. 78. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974, p. 375.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY CLEO TRUMBO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT KIRSCH

  PART I: THE TEN CHAPTERS

  I announce myself, confess my grief and affirm my identity with God

  I pay homage to those who gave me life and commemorate their deaths

  I meet Death in the woods and swoon to his enchantment, his cruelty, his love

  I inhale the summer perfume of Inge’s loins and am driven by it to murder

  “It was the just and vengeful sorrow of Frija for the murder of Balder, her son, that drowned Valhalla’s golden towers in the blood of dying gods and filled the world with darkness”

  Not all her tears can save Inge from becoming my toy, my bride, my slave

  For love of Gunther Blobel I am cast like Lucifer from Paradise

  I visit Forchheim en route to Nuremberg and the shadow of Inge darkens my beer

  With the Wandervoegel in the last golden summer of my youth

  “For their vine is the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are clusters of Gall; their clusters are bitter”

  PART II: TRUMBO’S SYNOPSIS

  Grieben and the Rise of the Third Reich

  Grieben’s Diary

  Grieben at Auschwitz

  PART III: THE GRIEBEN LETTERS

  PART IV: DRAFTS AND NOTES

  FOREWORD

  In 1938, almost immediately after Trumbo and I were married, he started writing Johnny Got His Gun. I didn’t know anything about writers. We had bought a small place up in the mountains. He worked all night. I watched flashes of Johnny appear at breakfast. I learned—if not about writers—about Trumbo. In order to write Johnny, he had to become Johnny.

  Twenty years later, when he began to talk about writing Grieben, I remember saying to him, “I’m going to leave you if you’re going to become this man.”

  Trumbo spent the early years of our marriage revealing the ultimate pain of the victim. He would spend the last years of our marriage exploring the ultimate evil of the oppressor. He was unable to finish this last novel. It remains unfinished for everyone but me—perhaps because I know what was in his heart.

  He recognized the reality of evil in everyone and he was especially aware of the evil in himself. He could never accept the wholesale extermination of the Jews which took place during World War II. Neither could he ignore his human connection with it even though he was not a Jew. What he did, in fact, was to choose to take on what was not his by birth. It was his by history. It was his by a quality of conscience that would not permit him to disown it.

  It was easier to become Johnny. To become Grieben meant to confront the darkest corners of his own soul.

  In Johnny Got His Gun it was not his purpose to revel in pain. His purpose was to tell a story that might challenge the concept of the glories of war. The story said: This happens. The story said: This happens because of us. In Grieben, it was not his purpose to revel in tales of horror. His purpose was to tell a story that might challenge the concept of evil as an external force. The story says: This happens. The story says: This happens because of us.

  Had he been able to continue the novel, he meant to transcend the inhumanity of Grieben. He meant to transcend the limits of his own personality and, perhaps, even the tragedy of the era into which he was born. If he could define evil, maybe those who came after him could transform it.

  He meant to bring hope.

  CLEO TRUMBO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, thanks to Cleo Trumbo, who in the chaos and clutter of her move from the house she and Dalton Trumbo shared for so many years took the time to help locate materials, was unfailingly supportive and helpful, the truly great lady she is. Michael Wilson died before I could speak with him but his interviews with Bruce Cook, Trumbo’s biographer, helped a great deal. Indeed, Cook’s Dalton Trumbo published by Scribner in 1977 was most helpful in providing background on the writer. So too was Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962, edited by Helen Manfull, published by M. Evans and Company. Angus Cameron endured a long pursuit of the missing letter Trumbo had written proposing Night of the Aurochs. Ring Lardner, Jr., and Al Leavitt sent me in the right direction. My research associate, Linda Rolens, was, as always, crisp and insightful. Mrs. Ruth Longworth, retired State Librarian of Montana, solved some problems for me in the construction of this book. Victoria Stein added to this book through her editorial skills. Finally, Dalton Trumbo himself, whom I did not ever meet but whom I feel I know after tracing his work and life. Several times I felt he led me to the important places in his meticulous archive.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Robert Kirsch

  The thing I am after here, the devil I am trying to catch, is that dark yearning for power that lurks in all of us, the perversion of love that is the inevitable consequence of power, the exquisite pleasures of perversion when power becomes absolute, and the dread realization that in a time when science has become the servant of politics-as-theology, it can happen again.

  DALTON TRUMBO,

  afternote to Night of the Aurochs

  More than once Dalton Trumbo compared the writing of his troubling and troublesome novel, Night of the Aurochs, to wrestling with the devil. He knew the story would not be an easy one to write when he began it in 1960 though its premise was daring and sensational: to tell the life of an unrepentant, unregenerate Nazi, Ludwig Richard Johann Grieben, through Grieben’s own words. In the end, Grieben both fascinated and repelled him, “a hero of a Satanic rather than a godly morality,” yet, Trumbo went on, “by definition a hero.” In a letter to Michael Wilson, he reveals his suspicions of “the idea of morality as a fact or cause.” He adds, in a tone which is almost always present when he refers to the book: “Anyhow, so it goes, and so do I blunder toward the heart of this goddamned book I never should have started.”

  Trumbo did not complete the book by his death on September 10, 1976, though he had worked on it on and off for sixteen years. “No matter what I am working on, not a week passes that I don’t get something written on Aurochs or Grieben, or whatever the hell it will end up being called,” he wrote Wilson. To his agent Shirley Burke, in a letter written in 1976, he revealed another aspect of the work: “This is my first uninterrupted prose work in years and I am enjoying it immensely. I will, of course, enjoy it much more if it turns out to be any good.”

  The two views are not necessarily contradictory. Trumbo was divided about the book, aware almost from the beginning that it was the most disturbing and
challenging work he had ever attempted. This in itself did not bother the author of Johnny Got His Gun. More upsetting was that the longer he wrote from the point of view of Grieben the more his idea of Grieben changed. The German who had started out as a representative Nazi became over the years a character Trumbo could not easily dismiss in stereotyped terms. He found it necessary to remind himself and the reader often of the horrors committed in the Nazi persecution of the Jews and in the death camps. He wanted to get to the human center of such acts.

  Trumbo, the professional writer, the prolific writer, made a decision: tell the story in the first person. He had to shift that approach somewhat as you will see in these pages but he could not escape the empathy and role reversal this method demanded. Inside Grieben, he found what he also knew as a writer: that no person can be the villain of his own life. “Characters change as they are written and take on lives of their own,” he writes in his afternote.

  Grieben both fascinated and repelled Trumbo. A writer must energize his characters with his own experiences and emotions. It is no accident that he has given Grieben the very same operation and heart condition which he experienced, the illness which would ultimately take both his life and Grieben’s. There is more than a hint that experiences in Trumbo’s early life, his witness of the vindictive treatment of German-Americans in World War I, his radical hopes for a more just and equitable system in America, gave him a certain understanding of Grieben’s idealistic youth.

  Trumbo himself was a child of war and depression. Born in Colorado in 1905 (he thought for a time to give Grieben the same year of birth, decided to make him a veteran of World War I and moved his birth back), Trumbo came from an old American family, grandson of a frontier sheriff, son of a veteran of the Spanish-American war. Although his father had worked hard, he had little to show for his efforts and was discharged from his job as a shoe clerk because his health failed. The family moved to Southern California and Trumbo watched his father die as his family struggled for a living.

  Witty, acerbic, unpredictable, Trumbo became a multi-media writer, producing four novels between 1935 and 1941, the best known of which was Johnny Got His Gun, and nearly forty screenplays including Kitty Foyle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Exodus, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, The Fixer, and Papillon. He tried playwriting, pamphleteering, and took his responsibilities as a principled citizen seriously. The contrast with Grieben is important. Trumbo was a radical of the Western Populist tradition, fought social and economic injustice, sought to help average people to fight those who sought to use, abuse, or dictate to them.

  Trumbo was far from the true believer Grieben epitomized. He joined the Communist Party in the early forties, seeking the social justice it appeared to offer. But dogma and discipline went against his nature and though he became a central figure in the Hollywood Ten, the group of screenwriters imprisoned for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he did not consider that this was an act of heroism. He thought it nothing less than the minimum of principled action against repression and thought control.

  His view was not a softening or blurring of the experience. He had paid his dues along with hundreds of blacklisted writers, actors and actresses, producers, and others in Hollywood’s crafts. Trumbo was blacklisted for thirteen years, from 1947 to 1960, but managed to earn a living and to win an Oscar under the pseudonym Robert Rich for the screenplay of The Brave One. He was the first of the prominent blacklisted Hollywood people to win an open credit, for the film Exodus, and that was a turning point of the exclusionary policy. Trumbo wanted no credit for doing what he felt was his obligation as a man devoted to freedom and justice.

  In Night of the Aurochs, Trumbo is not concerned with forgiveness or rationalization of the horrors committed by the Nazis. What he is after in this powerful and unremitting story is the notion that history, society, and ideas can victimize us and what we do to resist the victimization is the measure of our worth. The notion of hubris in ancient Greek tragedy is reversed. Grieben’s total commitment to Nazism and German destiny is his acceptance of becoming the creature of that doctrine, which permits him to see every act as justified by the ends. His cleverness and certainty, his arrogance and affected superiority, his consistency are all evidence of his self-delusion. By making himself the total instrument of Nazi policy, Grieben believes that he has elevated himself from “a mild-looking man of no importance who shows in face and body the ravages of struggle” to a man who has lived “colossally,” who has found power. What he has lost is his humanity.

  Grieben’s average qualities, his sense of being the mean, median, and mode of Germany, his roots implanted in aristocracy and peasantry, in contrasting regions of the country, in Protestant and Catholic religions, in the poetry, philosophy, and intellectual pursuits of German culture, in the mean and mischievous and cruel aspects of it, were intended to allow Trumbo to examine a whole range of questions about the unimaginable crimes committed by the Nazis. Trumbo wants to remind us that human beings committed those horrors, not supermen, not subhumans.

  Cleo Trumbo, who knew her husband’s intent, writes in her eloquent foreword: “To become Grieben meant to confront the darkest corners of his soul.” She goes on to say, “he meant to transcend the inhumanity of Grieben.” If necessary, Trumbo was prepared to transcend “the limits of his own personality.”

  Bruce Cook, Trumbo’s biographer, who had read more than one hundred pages of Night of the Aurochs, concluded the fragment was “more than an impressive act of literary impersonation; it is in some private sense a kind of spiritual autobiography of Trumbo, a mighty effort to understand not just a Nazi, but part of himself as well, and thus to master his own demon.”

  Certainly, Night of the Aurochs even in its imperfect state, even with its contradictions and shock, is the most important novel Trumbo ever attempted and will remain, I believe, a brave attempt to confront in fiction the human center of tyranny and unspeakable cruelty. Johnny Got His Gun, perhaps the most effective anti-war novel ever written in America, is a much simpler book. Trumbo’s masterly techniques of ridicule and irony, his sarcasm and satire, although present in Aurochs, were not sufficient to encompass the horror of the holocaust. He needed to surpass his own strengths as a writer and in many respects he did.

  To develop empathy with Grieben was part of this challenge. The German stood in opposition to most of what Trumbo believed in and fought for. In his life and work, Trumbo resisted victimization and dehumanization. Aurochs was a further expression of that impulse, the last bequest of his art and skill.

  In any case, Trumbo’s words speak best for himself. He completed enough of Night of the Aurochs (his original title, though later he toyed with the idea of calling it Grieben) to make the short novel, which is the main text of this book. The work consists of ten chapters, which relate the present circumstances of Grieben and the years of his early life in some detail, some bridging notes, a “diary” Grieben kept during his service with the SS extermination groups in Russia and later as commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and finally, a long section which begins as a synopsis but quickly becomes a third-person narrative relating Grieben’s experiences. Here we find the most shocking part of the story, his relationship with Liesel, the half-Jewish woman whom Grieben “loved,” whom he had arrested and sent to the concentration camp he runs, and over whom he exercised that complete power which Trumbo began to think is at the heart of the authoritarian impulse. Finally, Night of the Aurochs is about the eroticism of power and the power of eroticism.

  The whole range of the novel is in these pages, though there are sections particularly in the years between World War I and World War II which are indicated but not developed. The text is Trumbo’s. The story is coherent, as shocking and compelling as anything Trumbo has written. The section called The Grieben Letters provides three remarkably revealing letters by Trumbo on the book, the first written by him to Angus C
ameron in 1961, outlining the original notion of the work in detail, the second, written sometime in 1974, a long and completely candid analysis of the work written in response to a letter by Michael Wilson (who had read part of the manuscript and whose letter is also printed in the section), and finally, a letter Trumbo wrote to his agent Shirley Burke, shortly before his death. There is also a section of variant readings, notes, and fragments, which fill out the shape of Trumbo’s intent and the changing nature of his attitude toward the work.

  These materials form not only the novel of an important American writer addressing what is surely the most traumatic and significant single event of this century, the holocaust, but an astonishing and illuminating record of what went on behind the narrative, in the mind and development of author and character.

  So convincing and valid is Trumbo’s writing that we need to be reminded that he did not finish this novel, that the letters and the notes are integral to understanding the nature of the author’s struggle. Also, we must remember that had he lived to complete the book, many of the most shocking and disturbing views might have been changed. Much of what is written here is thinking out loud and should be seen as tentative. In view of the courage and outspokenness which marked Trumbo’s life and art, he would not have flinched from publication. Aurochs is bound to be controversial, as much of Trumbo’s expression has been. Some will find this work blasphemous, distasteful, pornographic (Trumbo himself questioned some of the material in these terms), but it is the serious work of a serious writer, and it raises issues which deserve to be discussed. As a revelation of the writing process, the work has an additional claim on our attention.