March 24, 1945
On the cover of the twelfth “Underwater Cabaret” from 1945, you can see the image of a market woman. This motif refers to the poem “Des Führers Mutter” (The Führer’s Mother) on the inside.
The Dutch poem “Voor de eindspurt” (For the Final Sprint) deals with the perceived positive course of the war from Curt Bloch’s perspective. The British troops have advanced so far that one can “smell the breeze of freedom.” Captivity will soon be over, and the work of the poet in the resistance can be completed. “No one is sad,” writes Bloch, “when the O.W.C. must disappear. ”
In the German poem “Nazi-Alternative,” Curt Bloch predicts the downfall of the Germans. Germany is “frayed and torn” like an old pair of pants, the cities are in ruins, the “once ecstatic state” is over, and all hope is lost. Now the Nazis and their bigwigs have only two alternatives left: to kill themselves or wait for the executioner. “He who has the choice has the torment.”
In creating his Dutch text “In Memoriam Rauter †,” Curt Bloch apparently assumed that Hanns Albin Rauter (1895–1949) had died in an assassination attempt. The General Commissioner in the Netherlands got caught in a firefight with six members of the resistance on the evening of March 6, 1945, between Arnhem and Apeldoorn. Rauter’s adjutant and his driver were fatally hit, while Rauter himself, who had played dead, was severely wounded. However, he survived the attack, which Bloch did not know at the time he wrote this satirical obituary for “Heinrich Himmler’s henchman.” (Hanns Albin Rauter was sentenced to death and executed after the war.)
In the German poem “Des Führers Mutter” (The Führer’s Mother), Curt Bloch uses very unpleasant terms to describe the woman who gave birth to Adolf Hitler: “devilish broomstick,” “devilish woman,” “horribly eerie dragon.” In his verses, he suspects that Hitler’s mother must have been a market crier. She embellished her goods with lies at the marketplace in Braunau, thus gaining a large customer base. Little Adolf learned this behavior from her. But eventually, her mother’s methods were exposed, and she went bankrupt. Similarly, people would now turn their backs on Adolf Hitler, no matter how much he screams.
In a newspaper excerpt from February 24, 1945, there is a statement by Joseph Goebbels addressed to the youth, claiming that Germany will be the “carrier of European culture” in the year 2000. This inspires Curt Bloch’s Dutch poem “The Bellamy Imitation.” The Reich Minister of Propaganda would ignore the hopeless situation in Germany and attempt to deceive the public again with the false story of a glorious future. The title of the poem probably refers to a character in Edgar Wallace’s novel “The Green Archer,” which was published in the 1920s and translated into several languages. In it, the businessman Abel Bellamy gets entangled in numerous false statements until he is eventually killed himself.
