Page 19 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

I refuse: I refuse on moral grounds. Because I have learned by experience that if you let yourself be bound by an oath, you’ll have to take the consequences someday.”29
Eichmann, like the former suitors, confronts the dreadful consequences of abiding by oaths. To fulfill the Oath of Tyndareus, Menelaus and Agamemnon gather a large fleet at Aulis, sacrifice Iphigenia, sail to Troy, and embark, disrupting the lives of many households. Following a failed embassy, a broken truce, they are willing to go to whatever extremes, be they bellicose or holocaust. Nazi party officials, too, for Beautiful Lady Margareta’s sake must obey Hitler’s will to persecute, deport, exterminate Jews and undesirables, and war for her sake. Thus, lured by her eternal feminine ideological gaze, Nazi Germany earns its fatal label: Death is a Master from Deutschland.30 The Jews and Europeans must endure terror and death, just as Trojans endured theirs, for their sublime feminine sakes. Not only must Nazi party officials obey their oaths, just as Helen’s former suitors had to obey their oaths, but once the Trojans blatantly refuse to return Helen in Book 7, they must war. Indeed, “the terms of death,” say the
29 Jochen von Lang and Claus Sibyll. Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police. Trans. Ralph Manheim. USA: New York, 1983. 198-9. Quoted in Jonathan Glover’s Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 336.
30 Celan, Paul. “Death Fugue.” Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. New York: W.W.W. Norton, 2001. 31.
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