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Ripheus23

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Ripheus23 last won the day on November 21 2018

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  • Birthday 07/15/1986

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  1. Officer Arendt and the Transcendental Purifier*

    *I believe Derrida's "transcendental signifier" phrase is later than 1930s Germany in origins, so inasmuch as this title is a play on that, it is so at a stretch.

    _______________________________

    Scene outlines:

    Edith Arendt is a Jewish police officer in Nazi Germany assigned to a case involving a serial killer the locals in Berlin (the city scene of the crimes) have nicknamed "the Transcendental Purifier."

    ["Don't call him that again. That's just a name some stupid students got to using because they took classes in which their teachers told them about stories like that in the American press."]

    She reviews the case with morbid colleagues before being summoned to investigate a new crime scene in which the murder weapon is harder to find than in previous incidents. Prior to this, all had been killed by metal crosses or menorahs used to bludgeon or stab the person to death. All have been people identified as "upstanding" Aryan-minded citizens so the initial theory is that it's a Jew killing Nazis. However, one of the victims was a Jew herself, so the off-color colleagues make a joke question out of it: "Maybe he didn't think she was Jewish." "Of course he knew she was Jewish! He hit her in the head with one of their storming candleholders!" Now, the victim is a Muslim, though. One of the colleagues says something like, "Aren't Muslims just sand Jews?" To which the other replies, "No, they're not," and they mock-argue, as a set-up to ask Edith whether she knows if Muslims and Jews are the same. But she's focused on the bookshelf.

    She finds a section where there are three copies of the Quran. Two are simple but the third is larger and heavier and more ornate. She checks it and it's covered in blood.

    Later, she comes up with a theory that the killer is following a regular foot-route and the department tests her theory, which gets them down the road from where the actual next killing takes place. And that is in a super-rare Eastern Orthodox church in a Russian area of Berlin, where the victim has been killed by a cross, a menorah, and a Quran.

    So, the killer is escalating. Frustrated, Edith thinks of her two possible overarching rivers of evidence: the unsub's motive, and his signature. For some reason he's using religious icons as murder weapons. Unsure, she goes to the nearest university, where she hears students talking about "the Transcendental Purifier." She talks to them about it, and they say they didn't coin the phrase to refer to a Jew purifying Germany, but a fanatical German purifying his own ranks, so to speak. She realizes the killer is targeting people who he deems to be insufficiently German or Aryan, and the next morning she rushes into her superior's office to explain what she's found out after a sleepless night of archival examination. She says she's identified the culprit as probably Immanuel Mendelssohn, an early inmate in the Nazi concentration camp system, sent there for unusual political deviance, a for-the-time excessive zeal for Nazi ethnic ideology, and contributing in a peculiarly ghastly way to the purge of the SA. The superior gets an odd glint in his eyes, as if he recognizes who Edith is talking about even before she says the name. Anyway, they track him down and arrest him, and ready him for trial.

    At one point the interrogators ask him why he did what he did. They mention his name, which can be traced back to targeted ancestry but at a far enough hereditary remove not to compromise him at all. Anyway, Immanuel says he wanted to do it for a while and figured that with the way things have been going in Germany, he figured he could get away with it. He argues for a "Roman conspiracy," not by Catholics but literal bloodlines-Romans, and says that this is just as dangerous as (or even moreso) the "Jewish conspiracy." He complains about Judaism and Christianity and Islam as all different species of the same general virus of almsgiving that weakens German mettle.

    "Now that's an interesting idea that I'd never considered before," the interrogator laughs. "Never mind that Rome doesn't exist anymore.

    "Or I'll concede the point. Rome is a perfect example of what we mean by the decay of a people. Cultivated from the survivors of the holocaust of Troy... and brought to ruin by mongrels---Germans hadn't evolved much, back then, among others... and martyrs. Mongrels and martyrs! But, we've improved.

    "Enough of my dialectical catechism, however."

    Edith cringes and worries a lot as she routinely runs into colleagues and superiors and other higher-ups in other subsystems of the regime, who laugh at odd intervals and give her coy smiles here and there. Eventually, the serial killer is sent to another concentration camp. Edith is startled by her superior and another government agent on a similar level, who accost her for getting an upstanding Aryan citizen in trouble, basically. They say that she's proven that even a supposedly actually good Jew, is really a traitor in waiting. But this is (on the surface) just very morbid mockery. After a few rounds of this, they laugh and cajole her, telling her that they have an assignment for her, in Poland.

    In the camp, the Transcendental Purifier is one day interviewed by some of those creepily-laughing Nazis. They tell him about a health measure the government intends to put into effect after the impending war. They say they've come to share his point of view in various ways. In their heads, of course, they think, We can't seriously punish him for doing exactly what we're going to be doing in a few years. They say that given his history and, technically, his name, they can't give him a job in the public police, or the SS so much, or the secret police, or the military. They judge him unfit for those kinds of duties. So they smile at him and say, "But we do need you to drive some trains for us."

    [In movie-form: then the camera shows a portfolio with a map, on the table in front of the killer. As it zooms in, the audience sees that it is a map of a train route to Auschwitz. Unsettling loud music starts to chime in before the final zoom-in and cut-out to the credits.]

    1. Ripheus23

      Ripheus23

      Or pilot/captain the trains, IDK the lingo.

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