The Dart of Wokeness

Extracts from the Congo Diary of Doctor Rudolf Schicklgruber

Translated from the German by Petrus Tornarius (July 2023)

Lesender Alter, Hugo Kauffmann, 1879

July 27, 1921. Now that I am settled in and have begun my vaccinations, I have decided to start keeping a little diary as I always promised Mutti I would.

July 28, 1921. All quiet in Guenonville. The little people are wonderful! Even though they have never heard of the American “flu” and do not understand the purpose of the vaccinations, they submit to them cheerfully. But then I suppose they are used to the pricks of jungly thorns.

August 1, 1921. In my free time I play on my bandonion, the one that Onkel (I simply refuse to call him Vati!) gave me. Jesu, beleibet meine Freude and so on. I am also reading The Psychiatric Study of Jesus by Albert Schweitzer. What a good man! What good people there are in the world!

August 3, 1921. I have been having dreams about Adolf again. Did Mutti really love him more than me? After all, he was her firstborn, so it’s possible. I’ll never know, of course. But there was that time he dangled me by my heels from the fourth-story window of our apartment in Braunau and was threatening to let go. “Rudolf, stop annoying Adolf!” Mutti shouted. I wonder what she meant! All I did, after all, was not want to give him my marble collection.

August 14, 1921. I admit that I find it hard to get used to the pygmies’ modus—the little women with their uncovered breasts! I always have to look away. Luckily, they are so small, they seem like children.

August 19, 1921. I wonder how Adolf’s Künstlerleben is working out for him? Was he really cut out to be an artist? Sometimes I think hanging out with that artsy bohemian crowd—Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer, Buber, and always, always that crazy Rosenzweig—led him astray. They were “modern,” so he wanted be modern as well (never mind Mutti, of course). They wanted to be artists so he wanted to be one too! I have come up with a phrase to describe this— “peer pressure.”

August 20, 1921. The Belgian officials came today for inspection—three palefaces with big noses in pith helmets (they like to imitate the British) with big notebooks. We passed the “test,” it seems—if I understood their French. My medical mission will be permitted to continue. Gott sei Dank! It would be terrible to have to stop the vaccinations now!

August 22, 1921. The fact is I might easily have strayed onto that artistic path like Adolf myself. I remember gazing at Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer when I was a boy and thinking I wanted to be a painter too. Indeed, it might have happened if Dr. Freud had not taken me on as a patient. There was no room in his schedule, but he fitted me in between the Wolf Man and lunch. Probably he was taking time out from his lunch hour, the good man. I sometimes used to see the Wolf Man—Sergei was his name—in the waiting room when he emerged from the inner sanctum. “Few people realize it, but the Herr Professor is a fine piece of ass! Me too!” he once told me with a twinkle in his eye.* I always wondered what he meant. But perhaps I misheard. He was a Russian, after all.

August 30, 1921. In the Große War, Adolf took good care of me. When the other men in our unit wanted to string me up by my big toes, he intervened and saw to it that they only strung me up by my thumbs. That wasn’t so good! Sometimes even now I have trouble doing the vaccinations. But the big toes would surely have been worse!

September 3, 1921. Again with the Belgians. Now they say we did not pass. New regulations have arrived from Brussels, it seems. So the mission must close. The little people are distraught! And as for me, what future awaits me now? I cannot return to the Fatherland because of Vati (I mean Onkel).

September 4, 1921. I know why this happened. One of the little people out hunting accidentally shot a dart that pierced a sleeping Belgian’s derrière. The man was not seriously injured but the Belgians are all so angry and they blame me! M. Machin and Captain Chose are shouting about it even now, standing right outside my tent, exclaiming: “Quelle horreur ! Quelle horreur!” They exaggerate, of course, but it is indeed rather horrible to be awoken in such a fashion!

September 6, 1921. I have come to a decision. The only thing to do is forge ahead, deeper into the jungle. To do good to one’s fellow creatures is surely the only consideration! But to whom? The little people speak of a tribe of friendly apes beyond the volcano called bonobos that have never yet been vaccinated! It is to them I must go. I am sure of it. It is also what Adolf would doubtless recommend if he were here.

Good, good Adolf!

*The Wolf Man “confessed the following transferences: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head.” Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, letter dated February 13, 1910, quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 287. “Freud … called me ‘a piece of psychoanalysis.’”—Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, quoted in Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf Man and Freud (London, 1972), 150.–Ed.

Source: Original holographic diary in the Moïse Tshombe Library of the Institut supérieure d’études tshombistes, Tshombeville, République autocratique du Katanga.

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Petrus Tornarius is the latinized name of the South African American poet Peter Dreyer—a form often used by some of his medieval German ancestors. He employs this pseudonym to sign poems he thinks “worth publishing, but perhaps a bit infra dig.” Dreyer is the author, among other books, of A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch), The Future of Treason (New York: Ballantine), and Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny (New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Secker & Warburg).

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