In a historical sense as well, then, the white nurse is an emblem for the bourgeois woman’s renunciation of her female body. The nurse’s is a dead body, with no desires and no sexuality (no “penis”). She unites in herself the opposing poles of mother and sister, burying all of their dangerous enticements inside: the fiction of a body, which men need in order not to feel threatened. All of that is signaled, in the end, by the nurse’s uniform. “White” signifies untrodden ground; no stream of red has ever been let loose within that uniform, never a stain on its fabric.* The nurse is a blank page and condemned to remain so, if she is to function as a terrain for male fantasies.** One man did in fact write on that page, by allowing himself to fulfill his incestuous desire for his sister. He reports an episode of premarital “sexual intercourse” (his phrase), the only one I could locate in these books that was not followed by the death of the “sister.” The man is Rudolf Höss. Stationed during wartime in Palestine, Höss lies wounded in a military hospital in Jerusalem, the city of miracles:

Even my own mother couldn’t have taken better care of me than that nurse did. Gradually I noticed, however, that it wasn’t only maternal love that moved her to offer me so much tender care and attention.

Until then love for a woman, for the opposite sex, was something unknown to me. Of course, I’d heard a lot about sexual matters from my comrades’ conversations, and soldiers talk about those things in a fairly straightforward way. Yet I myself was still a stranger to such desires, perhaps for lack of opportunity. Besides, the strains of existence in that theater of war were hardly conducive to any sort of affectionate feelings. Because I’d resisted any show of tenderness since I was a young boy, I was confused at first by her tender caresses, her holding me and supporting me longer than was necessary. Confused, that is, until I, too, entered love’s magic circle and began to see the woman with new eyes. At every stage, the affection I felt was exquisitely unfamiliar, as was the sexual union she quickly guided me toward, I myself wouldn’t have had the courage to initiate this first sexual experience which, in all its charm and tenderness, became a touchstone to which I would return throughout my life. I could never discuss such things in a trivial way. Sexual intercourse without the deepest affection had become something unthinkable. This protected me against flirtations and brothels.

The passage comes from a forty-five-year-old death row inmate. What reason would a man like that have for holding anything back? He had watched more people die than he could remember. He had ordered and directed their deaths. He had been shaken, but he had held out to the last: the duty of an SS man. On that level at least, nothing human was alien to him. Now seeing his own death before him, he confesses his earliest love for the first time, in words that could hardly be more helpless or unreal. Nothing in that passage is based on experience. “Exquisitely unfamiliar”— “at every stage”—“all its charm and deepest affection”—“love’s magic circle”—the body itself is never brought into play, neither would he have confessed even to that fictitious love if he thought he were going to stay alive. The dream of his lifetime was having that white nurse/Virgin Mary appear to him in the Jerusalem military hospital. It was a dream dreamed by seventeen-year-old private Rudolf Höss , the man who earlier would have given anything to avoid becoming a priest, or to be allowed to become a soldier. His first sexual experience “became a guiding principle for the rest of my entire life.” Realizing the fantasy acted like a cork, bottling up any further possibilities for real love relationships.