October 9, 1943
Introduction to the content
In his Response to the War Navy, Curt Bloch describes how the occupiers are attempting to recruit Dutch workers for the German naval forces. Germany poses as a maritime teacher – Bloch considers this behavior to be arrogant. No effort should be made, because the Netherlands will soon be navigating the seas for itself and its own freedom.
In the poem Reckoning, Curt Bloch lists various deadly “cases of misfortune and fortune” that befell German and Dutch National Socialists. These are noted with pleasure. However, not out of a sense of revenge, but out of a desire for justice. The deaths of these individuals will not be the only ones, Bloch predicts: “The final reckoning for the rest is still pending.”
In the poem Astronomical Possibilities (a German poem with a Dutch title), Adolf Hitler attempts to escape the well-deserved punishment by the angry people. He believes he might still find a safe haven as a refugee among the stars in the sky. However, in the Milky Way as well as at Venus, Mars, Neptune, Aquarius, he encounters rejection. Curt Bloch advises Hitler to go to Saturn – for he ate his own children…
“Cleared according to plan” – this phrase, as Curt Bloch has observed, recently appeared more frequently in the Wehrmacht’s reports. The Germans used to rob, plunder, “clear out” the conquered countries. Now they were evacuating their positions before the advancing Allies. And one day, the unwanted occupiers would be completely cleared out of the way.
In the poem The Leaning Tower, the Pisa landmark looks down upon the SS guards and speaks to them. The death they brought to the world would now befall them. They had followed Adolf Hitler with enthusiasm and, like the famous tower, kept sinking deeper. Disaster would be palpably approaching.
