Poets and Chess Players #8: In Which Herr Dr. Weiss Conducts A Séance

Polzin had never met an intellectual who could continue thinking critically after being made to feel superior.

This is chapter 8 of Poets and Chess Players, a WWII spy adventure and drama serial. Previously, Viktor and his deputy searched Dr. Haber’s spare flat and found clues pointing to Dr. Otto Weiss and his private hospital in Vienna. This time, Comrade Polzin goes undercover to investigate why his missing informant went to such pains to hide their connection…

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November 28, 1941 - earlier that day¹
Vienna, Greater Germany

Eminent neurologist Dr. Otto Weiss was a small man in his late thirties, very thin, with a pox-pitted face and wide blue eyes that didn't quite seem to fit into their sockets. Just looking at him made Polzin uneasier than he had been all week. Of course, it didn’t help that he had done enough homework to find Weiss’ publication history. The university pieces - Proposed further applications for Hess’ apparatus for electrode stimulation of the central nervous system of intact organisms², for example - were heavy reading at best, but seemed ordinary enough. The more recent work troubled him.

Weiss watched blankly but politely as the receptionist poured two cups of ersatz-coffee and set down a plate of sliced marble cake before silently excusing herself; then, he turned back to Polzin. “So what brings you to my humble premises, Herr Doktor…Graner, yes?”

He inclined his head. “Yes. Dr. Heinrich Graner, from the university hospital in Halle. We met in Berlin several years ago, just briefly. You gave an enlightening talk on the technical limitations of psychoanalysis.”

“Ah, of course!” Weiss nodded, smiling now - whether for politeness, or because he had been successfully prodded to invent the memory, it didn’t matter. “I quite enjoyed that convention. Yes, Dr. Graner, I do recall you.”

“I thought you would. I’m not an easy man to forget,” Polzin said, casually raising his three-fingered hand. “No, please, don’t trouble yourself; I’m used to it. An old war wound - the damned Russians.”

“If you insist. Yes, they are savage creatures! Why, I have a patient myself at the military hospital…”

Polzin allowed the man to ramble about some recent trauma cases while forcing himself to take the meal, offering just enough in the way of interjection to keep the doctor preening. Dr. Weiss evidently thought quite a lot of himself, as well he might. He was young, already well-published and respected, with two practices, a government contract, and a wife whom he presumably never saw; and now here came an old head like Dr. Graner to seek him out and meekly listen to him pontificate, as if he needed a favor. In fact, there would be a favor mentioned - but later, only when Weiss forced him to stop hinting and ask directly, after he’d sufficiently demonstrated how embarrassed he was at needing it. This was all part of the plan. Polzin had never met an intellectual who could continue thinking critically after being made to feel superior.

“But I bore you, surely,” Weiss said, just finishing his cup.

Polzin feigned a pained twitch of his lips. “Not at all, Dr. Weiss. My own research…ah…has been on connected lines, though I’ve devoted far less attention to the biological components of cognition.”

“Really! That’s where everything is happening now.”

“You would suggest I move toward physiology, then?”

“I wouldn’t presume to give you advice,” Weiss said coyly, evidently pleased with this development. “However, all the really interesting psychiatric work I’ve seen lately has at least an element of the physiological, and vice versa. I might remind you, for instance, of that Berlin lecture…”

Polzin had only access to a journal’s review of the lecture, and he mentally scrambled for any concrete detail it had mentioned. “Psychosurgery, you mean? Neurosurgery I understand well enough, but I didn't know that anyone serious had presented evidence of its usefulness for the psyche.”

Weiss shook his head. “It's very solid science by now, Dr. Graner. That was exactly my point: the common neurotic can be treated on the couch with psychic therapy, but the ego has only so much power when the cerebral organ itself is diseased. Thus the development of various shock therapies, the febrile cures, lobotomization…”

“Yes, yes - of course the foundations are sound enough,” he said, tacking as close as he dared to the subject he wanted Weiss to think he’d brought up himself. “I mean - well, may I speak frankly?”

The doctor leaned back, crossed one knee over the other, slowly broadened his smile, and said, “By all means.”

“Aren’t there more important things for our best minds in medicine to be devoted to,” Polzin said, “than chasing situational improvements for the hopeless cases? I entered this profession - I don’t know about you, sir - but I entered it believing we might do some real good for the race. I don’t see how this fad of surgically tinkering with schizophrenics advances that.”

“It doesn’t, of course,” Weiss said smugly. “No, in my opinion, Moniz and his like³ have it all backwards. Perhaps their work is valuable as a data-collection effort at most, but you’re very right: the diseased brain is a waste of psychiatry’s time.”

He forced a frown, his heart beating wildly. “Then forgive me, but how does physiology benefit us?”

Weiss stood up and made a generous motion toward the office door. “It may be faster to show you some of my work, Doctor, if you really want to know.”

The halls of the clinic were cold, and clean, and empty. Dr. Weiss brought his visitor through a locked door and into a narrow room with one distant, narrow window, their first reminder in some time that the original building was medieval. To the right, a pair of barrister bookcases filled with medical texts flanked a white melamine table, half taken up by a Magnetophon reel-to-reel tape machine. To the left, open shelves running the length of the room bore a catalog of specimen jars. Polzin forced himself to take in the scene steadily, as if he were well-used to the sight of unveiled human brains.

His vision dimmed a little around the edges, and he swallowed back another memory of the labyrinthine basement of Moscow Center, and alleged medical facilities that were little more than abattoirs. Fortunately, Weiss was looking away, but Polzin felt a string of insistent thoughts wrap around the base of his skull and begin to tighten: He knows who I am. He must know. He knows what I want from him, and he’s brought me here to kill -

“Tell me, what do you notice about this particular specimen?” Weiss asked, turning around with a jar in his hands. 

Polzin gathered his wits about him and looked down at the gently bobbing lump of gray matter, fearing the worst: a test, one which he must almost certainly fail. Immediately, he realized that it was not. “I assume that you’re referring to the large tumor,” he said, trying not to sigh in relief.

The doctor chuckled as he walked back down the room to return the jar to its place. “A little joke, yes… This subject presented with a very specific disorder of speech; it was so specific, actually, that I was able to predict the tumor’s location by the symptoms alone. You see the basic utility of cerebral physiology: any person with damage to that area would have the same problems, just as reliably as thrombosis produces a swelling of the affected limb. I begin with the obvious and deleterious, but of course this is where most of our colleagues end, as well.” He set down a second preserved brain on the table - partially dissected, the two halves drifting independently of each other - and moved to the controls of the Magnetophon, speaking louder now over the sound of rewinding tape. “This one looks quite normal, doesn’t it?”

“At first glance, yes.”

“And yet I excised it from a man who was not normal at all.” Weiss stopped the tape with a precision clunk and adjusted a dial, then started it again in replay. Several seconds of static rustled through the attached speaker before Weiss’ voice came again, this time from the tape.

“Otto Weiss recording with Subject 82. Twenty-first November, nineteen-forty-one. Sixth recording-”

“Seventh, Doctor. You took the sixth yesterday.”

“I wasn’t even in the building yesterday. What did we talk about?”

(A soft, scratchy laugh.) “You must have been here. I saw you very clearly, you were sitting just where you always do. I told you about a dream I was going to have.”

“I see. Well, did you have it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then, please, tell me again.”

(A pause; static.) “The great unconscious stretched before me, and I saw my path rise and fall along the mountains until it reached the sea. There was a texture to it all, like a varnished oil painting - you know how it is. I wasn’t sure if I was looking at a backdrop or something real. Elena was there.”

Polzin stood transfixed with his shoulders slumped forward, having already realized that it was days at most since the brain before him had been part of a man, forming those words and commanding that voice. He felt like an initiate at a séance, watching wisps of smoke curl from a spirit medium’s mouth. 

(Papers rustling, Weiss again.) “She looked the same as before?”

“No…she looked older, and very sad. She was draped all over with this black sheet like Veronica in a Passionsspiele⁴. Then she put a towel over my head for a moment, and when she pulled it back I could see it was soaked with blood. I hadn’t even realized I was bleeding.

Elena led me down off the path, and I followed her into a cave. There were all sorts of people waiting for us. A few of them I knew, I think, but most of them were soldiers. It was awful, as bad as anything I ever saw back in the War, and I came to realize almost immediately that we were all dead.”

“We - including yourself?”

“Yes.”

“How interesting. Did you know how you had died?”

“Not per se. But Elena told me that it would be soon now, and when I put my hands to my head, I could feel that my skull was opeEEeexXXXXeecKJSsh–

-SCHRIK-clunk.

Weiss had stopped the tape again, and was frowning deeply at some sort of damage to the thin film. “Damn machine. I can’t imagine what the problem is,” he muttered. “This’ll be the third time this month I’ve had to get a technician out. My apologies, Dr. Graner.”

“It’s understandable,” Polzin said, still more shaken than he’d have liked. Though he’d spent the week glued to his sources, cramming to play this part, he’d only understood about half of what Weiss said; but half was enough. And just wait until he gets his hands on you, hissed his thoughts.

Viktor Polzin was a devout materialist, and always had been. He took a moment to ground himself while Weiss untangled the tape: obviously, his own battered brain was no longer as trustworthy as he would like it to be. Further disturbed by such perversions of logic and rational science, it was giving cues of danger that simply couldn’t be relied on. Objective thought was his only refuge. 

“So he predicted his own death?” he said.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, Subject 82 died on the operating table the very next day. Uncanny, isn’t it?” Having shut down the tape machine, Dr. Weiss returned the jar to its place and led Polzin back through the silent halls to his office with its large friendly windows and the self-consciously soft chairs.

“Mishaps aside, I hope you were able to see my point,” Weiss said. “The natural and disease state are not the only conditions available to us. As we Germans are an unusually sensitive folk, it occurred to me some time ago that our people presented an ideal starting place to research such an improved state of being. If I - we - can only identify a physiological root for precognitive potential, think of what it would mean! Everyone wants to know how to reverse the decline of the race; well! Perhaps it’s only an unfortunate pivot as we push onward to new frontiers.”

Polzin was grateful that the nature of Berliners didn’t require his enthusiasm to convey his approval. “Yes, I do see what you mean. It’s a very interesting project, Dr. Weiss. And I can’t think of a more fit place to begin.” Weiss nodded his thanks silently, seeing that his visitor hadn’t finished his thought. “But, even so, psychic predisposition must be very rare. Where on earth do you get your subjects?”

“Ah! You’ve caught me.” Weiss smiled a little. “Yes, I have been forced to become…creative. I admit it may be difficult to present the data cleanly, which is rather irritating. I would rather have identified the precise area to be studied first - I suppose I’ll still have to write up the studies separately. However, needs must. Without a ready source of the predisposed, my only option has been to move ahead with experimentally triggering mystical states in ordinary subjects.”

“Really - that is interesting.” He made the first motions to stand and then remembered, if dimly through his desire to get away, that Dr. Graner wasn’t yet finished here, so he turned it into an anxious twitch. “And you…were able to get a government grant for the work, I suppose?”

“I was; it's really not very difficult. I have some friends who will fund anything if the proposal references their own work. Pre-Christian Germanic shamanism, in my case. They think I'm helping them reconstruct a properly virile religion based on the psychic archetypes my subjects unearth.”

Polzin nodded, as if in thought. “I see - well, it's just - ah, to be honest, I haven’t had any luck myself. And I had heard you were a man with connections.”

“That's flattering. I suppose I am, yes. Who was it that referred you?”

An idea suddenly hit. “Klemens Haber,” he said. “You recall-?”

Weiss chuckled. “Oh, yes…he is also a difficult man to forget.” He uncapped and recapped a pen absently in his hands. “And how is the wayward philosopher? He's been avoiding me for so long, I was afraid he'd gotten himself arrested.”

“It's been some time since I saw him myself,” Polzin said, shrugging. “Arrested, though? Whatever for? He always seemed quite harmless to me.”

“Oh - maybe, but - heh, well, there's no telling with him.” Weiss’ smile tightened uncomfortably for a second. “The ideas that boy gets, really. Intriguing, yes! But he's all ideas, no practicality whatsoever. I always said he should have gone for a real degree. We're old school friends,” he clarified. “We attended the minor seminary⁵ together at Hollabrun.”

“Really,” said Polzin, who wasn't sure he had translated Knabenseminar accurately enough to comment.

“Yes, I actually had expected him to continue. You know how he is - he gives you that look, and you feel like a miserable cur if you don't explain yourself. If he wasn't going to be a psychotherapist, priest would have been second-best.” The doctor shook his head. “Ah, well. That’s a brain…but so wasted on a mongrel.”

“Yes, of course, a shame.” Polzin pushed himself up to his feet, lingering fear finally overcoming his curiosity. “I appreciate your time, Doctor. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“You're welcome,” Weiss said, with a thoughtful, piercing look as he joined him in standing. “If you’re serious about looking for funding, come see me again tomorrow. I think I can arrange a meeting for you.”

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1. Forgive me, the timeline gets slightly wonky here because I made some last-minute changes to the scene organization without accounting for the clock. Obviously this now belongs properly between the two halves of Chapter 7.

2. Walter Hess, brain-mapping vivisectionist. See also: (ScienceDirect)

3. Egas Moniz, inventory of the lobotomy. See also: (ScienceDirect)

4. The seasonal dramatization of Christ’s Passion, already a Very German Thing, is particularly characteristic of the Tyrol and Bavaria.

5. Seminary, but for high-school boys; still common in the early 20th c. as a remnant of the days when aspiring priests arrived with little if any previous schooling.