Goering at Elsinore
It’s 1938. The new fighters
test well, steel plants
are in hand, Austria in hand,
Prague on notice, and the Reichsmarschall
in a white uniform lounges
on the deck of the *Carin II*.
(The aide who threads the canals
reports to Himmler, but learns nothing this trip.)
Loudspeakers blare pop songs –
“Blame It On Napoleon!” –
to the smiling waving people on the banks,
and Goering under his awning grins and waves.
Then he orders the aide to sail
up the coast to Helsingřr.
Whimsically, he doesn’t radio
the Danes till almost within sight
of the castle. But this visit was planned,
and that evening the actor, Gründgens, is not surprised
to see his patron in the audience.
The curtain rises. Hamlet is alone.
There’s no ghost. Claudius looks Jewish.
The scene of him praying turns one’s stomach
with its hypocrisy and insolence!
He has corrupted Gertrude’s blood.
Polonius is an old-style reactionary.
Ophelia is febrile, flighty,
racially mixed. The prince is strong, direct,
Aryan. His flaw is to think
that any of these people *means something.
They twist him. He should have seized power
when his father died, followed his healthy instinct.
The blond giant Fortinbras succeeds to the crown.
In the dressing-room later, Goering
will again applaud
his protégé Gustav Gründgens,
Intendant of the Prussian State Theater,
not a Party member,
homosexual twice hidden in marriage
(as Goering, who is something else, knows);
he will call him the Hamlet of our age.
And tomorrow the King of Denmark
will pin, as a sort of bribe,
another medal on the uniform.
But now the big man
enjoys, in the undifferentiating
manner morphine entails, the fights
and speeches, the great talent
he owns like a painting, the reports on the Stuka,
obsequious looks, and the high whitewashed vaults
of this castle, Hamlet’s castle, where
the original story, whatever it was, happened.
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