Excerpt: Hitler's Dream

Note: taIWWan will be sharing excerpts from David Barry Temple's sci-fi novel, A Western Metempsychosis, about time travelers who go back in history to rescue the human race from fascists, imperialists, and capitalists. 

In this scene, the time travelers work on Hitler's ideology with subliminal persuasion after his incarceration for the Beer Hall Putsch. With the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg and Samuel Wallenstein within, Hitler and Hess alter Mein Kampf.

At night, his conscience worked on him, relaxing him to doze off. In one dream, he was on a train within minutes of a Finland Station though he had never been to Finland. He was the main attraction when the train arrived with every eye upon him. He went out to stand on the caboose platform to wave. The station itself was gray and pink stucco held up by slim columns that branched where they met the roof. His last thought before awakening was that the station did not suit him well.

“This could be you,” he heard a female voice within him say, as he stood and shuttered peeing in the pot provided. He could quickly seize control of events, too, a wakeful voice said. “You could become a mench,” a third voice whispered as he returned to sit on the cot and contemplate his dream. Then, the penny dropped: he realized what he had dreamed: He was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, steaming into St. Petersburg after an eight day trip from Zurich to start the socialist revolution.                              

“Rudolph, I had the strangest dream a few nights ago,” said Adolph during his confidant’s next visit to prison. “I know how to convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualism, the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from Weimar liberalism.”

“The community of the volk, Herr Hitler?” asked Rudolph detecting a shift in Adolf’s philosophy.

“They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control without owning, guided by a single party, but could the economy be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.”

“Yes, I see your point. There cannot be socialism without a civil war.”

“Did I say that?” questioned Adolph.

“It sounded like that was what you meant,” retorted Rudolph looking askew.

“We cannot find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution; that is what the dream told me.”

“Your dream, Herr Hitler?”

“I understand Lenin now,” Adolph went on, pacing the cell, hands clasped behind his back. “Marx and Lenin had the right goal, but had chosen the wrong route.”

“Instead of destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, they must use it and let it destroy itself as the workers bore from within, fire their bosses, and share the profits.”

“That is a marvelous idea, Herr Hitler.” Rudolph wrote down every word Adolph said on a pad. It would become Mein Kampf the way Rosa Luxemburg would have had it.

“Why the Jews aren’t Germany’s enemy at all! Their social awareness will help all volk realize our ideals. Bourgeois Jewish businessmen and women aside-“

“Let’s not forget the rising of the women!” interrupted Rudolph. 

“Of course not! All volk, men and women, will be appreciated by the rising proletariat so long as they are not blood-suckers,” said Adolf struck with the realization of what he was saying, yet dubious of it coming from his own mouth.

“But aren’t the Jews scum, Herr Hess?”

“Indeed not, Herr Hitler; they are part of the German fabric!” confirmed Rudolph himself perplexed by the contradiction Hitler expounded.

“Yes, I see,” replied Adolph, stopping in his tracks, looking as if he had bitten his tongue.

 In their heads, the dopamine was gushing through their brains like beer in a rathskeller, but like drunks in a midnight choir, when they awoke the next morning, they wondered what they had been thinking the night before.

      It was easier for the time traveler to sway Adolph in his prison confinement, isolated as he was from his followers, but Rudolph brought dissonance in with him. It was one step back for every two steps forward when they conversed and Mein Kampf was regularly edited from what Adolf thought he meant and what he really said. As Rudolph drew him back to fascist anti-Semitic ideals, the progressive influences in their consciousnesses usually prevailed.

Excerpt: Decadence in Weimar Germany

Note: taIWWan will be sharing excerpts from David Barry Temple's sci-fi novel, A Western Metempsychosis, about time travelers who go back in history to rescue the human race from fascists, imperialists, and capitalists. 

In this scene, the time travelers have just been re-joined by Earl in the body of a German Lieutenant. His mission is to transmigrate into Hitler and re-write history. Imagine if the communists won the revolution in Germany instead of the capitalists capitulating to fascism, just as Clinton's Democrats did to Sanders which resulted in Trump?  

After visiting the café regularly for almost three years, in October, 1921, their prayers were answered. For almost three years, they waited for a sign from Earl. As they sat at the table where they had first met Rosa, their coffee time was disturbed by a familiar language in a queer accent:

     “Adolph and I are to meet in one month’s time.” They looked up to see the Lieutenant, speaking English with an annoying New York accent though the syntax and lexicon was purely continental. The patrons around them looked over. “It is unsafe to talk here. Let’s scram!”

     His three friends from Page, Arizona couldn’t stop laughing. Earl’s accent still rang true though Wolfgang’s metempsychosis dust into Samuel, Samuel who time-traveled with the three cohorts, and sustained the spirit of Earl Stubbs and Rosa Luxemburg in the body of the Lieutenant. Earl’s dominant presence was leading the way to influencing a better man from the one who ordered death to the activists of German communism.

     Bertha, Martha, and Wolfgang covered their mouths to stifle themselves but drew attention as they stood to exit the café. Gail's Bertha, couldn’t contain the joy of seeing Earl again, though it was in another lifeline, place, and time. Just then, Leon's Wolfgang six-foot frame leaped on to the back of his brother, now the Lieutenant, disregarding Samuel and Rosa’s subliminal disdain; they could tolerate the brotherly love, but the Lieutenant, whose body was in its sixties, couldn’t handle the weight and promptly stumbled into a puddle on the cobblestone street.

     “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said as Bertha and Martha each extended a hand to help him up. “You don’t do that to a senior citizen!”

     “Come; let us go to Volkspark Friedrichshain; I know just the place we can chat,” said Martha who kept on top of tourism trends.

     Wolfgang led them down the street to his new AGA 6/16 PS Typ A Phaeton.

     “Pretty spiffy, eh?” chided Earl through Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung. “You always had a fetish for convertibles.”

     “1418 cc four-cylinder engine driving the rear wheels through a three speed manual transmission, a maximum of 20 PS; 15 kW; 20 hp.”

     “Not exactly your’66 Ford Mustang; 200 hp, 150 kW, "C-code" 289 cubic inch 4.7 Liter engine,” Bertha commented.

    “It will do; 23 skidoo!” Wolfgang shouted above the roar of the engine. “Let’s go!” They loaded into the car and drove to the park, stopping off on the way to pick up some French wine, cheese, and bread.

    “You’ve done well for yourself, dear brother,” called the Lieutenant from the front passenger seat, the ladies seated behind. “What may I ask is your line of work?”

     “I’m a pharmacist!” yelled Wolfgang, his driving scarf flapping in the wind.

     “I am not surprised!” said the Lieutenant shaking his head with a smile.

     “Need a run of cocaine? Berlin is ‘Powder City’ you know.” 

     “Oh just keep your eyes on the friggin’ road and stop flapping your mouth,” scolded Bertha from the rear.

     “Guess what Bertha does besides back-seat driving.”

     “She’s a librarian?”

     “That’s right, and a book shop clerk on weekends.”

     They all had a jolly time as the car lurched from left to right on the uneven pavement, especially with so many cobblestones removed for use as projectiles in riots. Occasional troupes of brown-shirted men patrolled the sidewalks. They watched in silence.

“Martha is a travel agent for a shipping company and has her own business on the side,” called Wolfgang.

 In ‘21, with inflation running high, it was a good thing the time-travelers had handsome jobs. The ruling class was booking cruises on fancy luxury liners and trains around Europe, to Africa and the Middle East, and to America with zeppelins and aircraft on the horizon; business was good. “No more immigrants in the ships’ hold; all Tiffany and mahogany these days.”

“She will be able to book us on a cruiser back to New York when this mission is over.”

The decadence of Berlin was all around them; prostitutes on many street corners downtown, gambling houses, opium dens, speakeasies, burlesque shows and open homosexuality. The three time travelers would have nothing to do with it. Wolfgang had seen it all before by the 1990’s, Bertha and Martha by the 1970’s.

“Did you know,” said Wolfgang, “that in the ‘90’s, there are still Christians who blame all this post-war degradation on the Jews?”

 “Some anti-Semites say the decay of moral values, in all areas of life, coincided with the height of Jewish power in Germany,” added Bertha.

“Is that so? I guess all the customers were Jewish, too,” laughed Wolfgang. “Most of my opium and cocaine clients at the pharmacy aren’t Jewish.”

 “And the customers at the beer halls in Munich aren’t either; they won’t even let a Jew in there to have a beer,” added Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung.

“Even if half of the films were produced by Jewish writers, actors, directors, producers, etcetera, someone paid them to perform. They are just trying to earn a living giving the German people what they want,” Wolfgang pointed out.

“Well, I think those burlesque shows are hilarious,” said Martha. “When does Josephine Baker come on the scene?”

“Oh that’s in the late twenties. We will be finished with our mission here before that, I hope,” informed Bertha.

“I guess stuck-up hypocrites need someone to blame for dragging them into the modern world,” said Wolfgang.

The car was stopped in traffic by an ally where they could see a brown shirt receiving fellatio. “My Friends in Freikorps talk of German chastity and self-discipline while getting public blowjobs from poor Polish street urchins,” added the Lieutenant.

 By ’23, one U.S. dollar could buy 4.2 billion marks. Six wheelbarrows of banknotes could barely buy a loaf of bread. “A blowjob in Berlin costs thirty cents,” so the Lieutenant informed them.

“Now how would you know that, Herr von Pflugk-Harttung?” asked Martha raising an eyebrow. She wasn’t sure whose libido was talking; the Lieutenant’s, Earl’s, Samuel’s, or even, heaven forbid, Rosa’s. The Lieutenant blushed as the car’s occupants roared with laughter. 

Lesson: Don't Waste Your Time Responding to Fascists

The “Luka” lesson for the conversation enrichment class in Fengyuan, Taiwan, went so well yesterday. It started with a choral reported speech warm-up, my last statement being: “I have a problem. What did I say?” ("You said you had a problem.") "I don't know your names. What did I say?" ("You said you didn't know our names") which led into having the class tell me their names and addresses handing out business cards for them to write it on (they all had English names) and mini-clips for them to attach to their shirt pockets of jacket zipper tags. 

We then re-connected to “Luka” for the question, “Where do you live?” One boy said he lived on the second floor; the class laughed. I said there were a million second floors in Taichung; which one did he live on? I then introduced how to write and say one’s address in English using the American standard of house number first followed by street name, street section (if any) and lane or alley number. I helped the students transcribe their Mandarin names into pin-yin or other Romanization. I told the class that next week, they would have to stand and introduce themselves including full name and address.

We zoned in on "Luka’s" problem; she was a victim of child abuse. I wrote the five types of relationship abuse on the board and demonstrated examples using verbal and body language clues. Next week, I will reinforce the lesson with a “Do Now” asking for examples for each abuse. I used the suicide of a 27 year old Taiwanese author who was in the news recently as an example; some of the students knew who I was referring to. She was a victim of sexual abuse from her bushiban teacher when she was 13 years old. 

I topped off the discussion introducing child labor, saying these abuses were suffered by many under-aged workers by their bosses. It was May Day yesterday and, although the topic of child labor is in the more advanced Bread & Roses Curriculum I wrote, I made the connection now; no child under 16 should be allowed to work; over 16, while in school,  only up to 20 hours a week. I know that the students knew of some under-aged friend who worked; the class was hushed.

      Now isn’t it better writing what I just did instead of writing a Facebook message responding to Sal P’s anti-socialist diatribe, explaining why he’s wrong defending Trump and criticizing Venezuela’s revolution? I blocked him on Facebook. Especially on May Day, do I have to explain to the de-evolutionary how he wouldn’t have had a job teaching at FDR high school in New York City if it weren’t for what he called my socialist worker-solidarity ideals: I'm “living in the past; not from modern prospective,” he said.  

     The teachers' union protected him from charges of incompetence; charges he probably deserved. He should kiss the feet of every union member who fought for his rights and gave him the opportunity to waste immigrant students’ time in the ESL classroom for twenty-five years. Maybe the union was wrong for protecting a self-centered reactionary bigot like him. There is nothing he can be taught, and I have better things to do. Wherever there are workers fighting for social justice and their rights to a living wage, Sal won’t be there and wouldn't help; that’s why he, and other fascist freedom riders, has to be blocked.

Happy May Day! Solidarity Forever!