Sunday, August 22, 2010

The Victory of the Cross over the Swastika

I was noodling through the Interweb Tubes, looking for an image of a particularly ugly church in Hamburg, for reasons I shall explain in a subsequent post, when I came across this webpage written by a Nazi woman who was returning to Germany from India in 1948. She traveled by rail on the Nord Express and the page describes her journey in a style reminscent of St. Augustine's Confessions, only in hers she worships Adolf Hitler instead of God. The following excerpt makes the analogy even more apt.
The sun had already gone down, and we were running through the suburbs of Hamburg. For the first time, I beheld what I was soon to see every day: the ruins of Germany. Black against the pale green and golden sky -- the afterglow of the late summer sunset -- saw no end of shattered walls; of heaps of wreckage; of blocks of iron and stone out of the midst of which emerged, now and then, the skeleton of what had once been a boiler, or a wagon, or an oil tank; no end of long dark streets in which no life was left. The whole place looked like an immense excavation field.

Tears came to my eyes, not because these were the ruins of a once prosperous town, the lamentable remnants of happy homes and useful human industries, but because they were the ruins of our New Order; all that was materially left of that supercivilization-in-the-making which I so admired. Far in the distance, I noticed the steeple of a church standing, untouched, above the general desolation -- like a symbol of the victory of the Cross over the Swastika. And I hated the sight of it.

2 comments:

ligneus said...

Sort of reminds me of this.

K T Cat said...

ligneus, thanks for the link. I just checked audible, but they don't have that book recorded. I'm going to buy it from Amazon now.