1,402 words
New Delhi
3 May 1973
Dearest comrade,
This is first to thank you from the depth of my heart for your moving present of $25 to me—a “victim of Democracy” indeed, inasmuch as had we won the war, I should not be here struggling to bring out my book in French against overwhelming odds.
I should probably be representing a quite different India from the one I see all around me in the Holy Land of the West as Germany would then be, with our ageing Führer—now 84 years old, looking over his life’s work with the satisfaction of a victor.
But then, I should not be conscious of what He really means, in the light of cosmic truth. Had He won, He would have been—would have had to be—“Kalki” Himself, the last Man against the current of universal decay. And He was not He. He said so Himself in 1928, to the writer Hans Grimm, who refers to that memorable conversation in his book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? published in 1954. (One of the few impartial books by a man who was not on our side—although a “good German.” Too “bourgeois” to be one of us, but just; honest.)
And we should now be at the dawn of the next “Manavantara” (Time-cycle) in all its loveliness.
In the days we had hope—in glorious 1942, when the Germans were pushing towards Stalingrad (while the Swastika flag fluttered above the everlasting snows of Mt. Elbruz, in the Caucasus—over Europe and Asia—and while Germany’s allies, the Japanese, occupied Imphal, on Indian soil)—we considered it possible for the two armies, that of our Führer, and that of the Son of the Sun Goddess, to meet in Delhi. The Germans would come along the immemorial Way of Conquerors: the Khyber Pass. And I remember myself—so well!—sipping Greek coffee (that I had taught our old servant Sindhubala to prepare) with Mr. Mukherji at my side telling me: “And this will be the third wave. First the Aryans who brought the Sanskrit tongue and culture to India, some 6,000 years ago; then your Greeks, with the half-god Alexander, more than thirty-six hundred years later; then now our Führer’s compatriots. You saw the Khyber Pass: I didn’t.” (I saw it in October-November 1936 and described it in the first book I wrote [in French] after my two Doctoral works: L’Etang aux lotus [The Lotus Pond]. It is a wonderful Way—rugged, dazzling, practically empty.) And Mr. Mukherji continued: “You can imagine the march of the third Aryan wave through the Pass and beyond—you know the region.”
And didn’t I imagine it!
The formidable German tanks crushing the white, ochre, and fiery red solitude; the men on foot following. (It is impossible to go through the Pass on motorcycles!!) The warlike songs echoing in the sun-burnt rocks:
We shall go always further
Even if everything falls to pieces
For Germany belongs to us today
And tomorrow the whole world!
(Wir werden weiter marschieren
Wenn alles in Scherben fällt
Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland
Und Morgen die ganze Welt!)
And I imagined our Führer receiving the allegiance of East and West, here, in the Red Fort of Old Delhi—a bus ride from the spot from which I am writing to a brother in faith and companion at arms.
And being (to my misfortune) as every Southern or partly Southern European, in the habit of taking my dreams for realities before they materialize, I went and bought myself a lovely brown silk sari, with silver swastikas all long the border of it. I showed it to my mother-in-law, an orthodox Brahmin lady of old lineage, and to my dismay, she rebuked me: “What! You like that!—whose fabrication should be forbidden in a Hindu state! But don’t you realize that the holy Sign being also on the lower border of your sari will touch your feet at every footstep you take! That is outrageous! It is as though you felt no reverence for the holy Swastika. Don’t wear it!—or it will bring you no luck!” (Feet according to Hindu custom—unless they be those of a God and then themselves sacred—should never touch anything holy.)
I never wore the sari. It was stolen with the suitcase that contained it—and another of pure white linen with a gold, green, and pink border, and a portrait of the Führer, and the best French translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, and nearly all the manuscripts of my then unpublished book Impeachment of Man (written 1945) on 16 August 1946, at the St. Lazare Station in Paris.
I can understand the reaction for your fellow-travelers in the train between Linz (probably) and Braunau. I visited the Birthplace about fifteen times. The House is no longer a school but a series of flats above a bank. You now cannot go inside into the birth room. And I was told they were planning to pull it down—as they entirely wiped out the very foundations of the lovely house on Obersalzberg: after dynamiting the walls. They don’t want us, and the future generations, to have anything standing, dating back to the Great Days. (They dynamited the lovely column gallery at the Zeppelin Wiese [Zeppelin Field] (where the Nuremberg rallies used to take place). May the Gods dynamite their whole stinking “welfare civilization,” and may I, before I die, see the bits of it scattered to the four points of Heaven! The more I live, the more I find it so utterly ugly.
Only Nature—the lovely animals, trees, forests, etc.—and our real brothers in faith are worth keeping on this planet. The rest can go to hell—and is also going (joyfully!!) apparently.
Your $25 were a God-send: they paid a part of my rent for a month. I had to give two months in advance, and the rest for the furniture, and my landlady was going on a holiday. Moreover from 15 May the Alliance Française holds no classes—so the little I used to get from there (about $25 a month) will also be suppressed until the end of August.
Am still waiting for the second proofs of the fourth forma of my French book (being printed in Calcutta). Strikes, electricity cuts, and such disturbances—on top of the fact that the printers do not know French—are responsible for these delays.
When the tenth forma comes out—when the book is half printed—I’ll have to give the printer another fore account of roughly four or five hundred dollars. I have yet no idea how I shall—and whether I shall—be able to do so, not being presently able to save. But I live and wait. The Gods are great.
An odd question: Do you love animals and in particular felines? I am asking you that because I could send you a book of mine of which I have more than one copy here. (I have about 150 in France.) The book, written in 1958–61, printed in London in 1965, is called Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or the true story of a most objectionable Nazi” and . . . half-a-dozen cats. It is the true picture of fifteen years of one aspect of my life. Begins in February 1942 in Calcutta; ends 10 July 1957 in Teheran (on my overland journey back to India at that time). The cats concerned have all really lived. The “most objectionable Nazi”—Heliodora—is myself. On 10 June 1949, Colonel Vickers, governor of the Werl prison where I was, told me (to my delight) that I was “the most objectionable type of Nazi” he “had ever met”—and he was in Germany ever since 1945, and had had some eleven thousand SS men among his prisoners (“war criminals” and such). The book is a true cat story and an ideological profession of faith. (It even had the effect of making a true cat-lover take interest in our faith to the extent of studying it and liking it.) But it would probably bore anyone who had no sympathy for cats.
If you want it—if you have that sympathy—I can send a copy to you.
Should I send your letter to Mr. Mukherji—or is it a copy for me?
My letter must now be ended if I want to catch the mail in time. With thanks once more for all your kind marks of solidarity and comradeship.
With the unchanging greeting of the faithful,
H.H.
Savitri Dêvi Mukherji