Katharina Volckmer, The Appointment: A Novel (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2020, Kindle file).

Reviewed by E. Michael Jones

Zelda Biller begins her review of Katharina Volckmer’s debut novel The Appointment, by claiming that it tells “a story that no German publishing house dared to publish.”1 The assertion is correct, but not in the way she intended it. Blinded by Volckmer’s deliberately obscene and transgressive narrative, Biller concluded that the issue was sex. If so, that issue resolved itself when a German publishing house decided to publish a German translation of the original English edition as if to prove that “all of the sexually inhibited German editors” who turned down Volckmer’s manuscript were somehow unrepresentative of the German publishing industry. So, it wasn’t about sex after all. Volckmer’s book is, however, most definitely about taboos, and she is clever enough to hide those very real taboos behind sexual taboos which disappeared a long time before she was born. No publishing house, either English or German, would have published this book if their editors understood what Volkmer is really saying about the real but hidden taboos which dominate Germany at this moment in time.
The Appointment begins by describing sex in a way that has become typically German in its deliberately transgressive crudity. The nameless narrator/protagonist is being examined gynecologically by a surgeon who is taking the lay of the land in anticipation of doing a sex change operation. Biller summarizes the situation by telling us that:

In the course of her treatment, she tells him about herself and her neuroses, about everything that enrages her about the world we live in, about what she considers trivial or unjust. Her detailed descriptions of quotidian banalities are always critical and pointed, and frequently funny (yes, really!), sometimes metaphorical, usually poetic, and now and then pathetic. As this young lady reveals more and more of herself to Dr. Seligman, like her great love, like performing fellatio in public toilets, like LEGO concentration camps, ponytail butt plugs, and Jesus machines, two things become more and more apparent. First of all, this German Catholic woman has a complex about her own body, as well as a Hitler complex. And secondly, she’s a hypocrite.2

The mise-en-scène of Volckmer’s novella immediately reminded the reviewer mutatis mutandis of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Instead of a self-hating Jew lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, Volckmer describes an equally narcissistic self-hating German with her legs in the gynecologist’’ stirrups contemplating a sex change operation. Both books deal with the same themes: sex, perversion, guilt, shame, body issues. But even granting their similarities, the two confessional novellas couldn’t be more different because while the hero in Roth’s novel is more Jewish like no other Jew, the heroine in Volckmer’s novella is more German than either she herself or the author seems to understand.
With that cryptic statement, “die Heldin in Volckmers Roman [ist] deutscher, als ihr selbst bewusst zu sein scheint,” Biller opens the bagbut refuses to let the cat out of it. What Biller meant to say and what Volckmer actually did say is that German identity is now bound up with Jewish sexual perversity. The German woman now identifies herself as a Jewish sexual fantasy. Volckmer has transformed herself into a masochistic shiksa straight out of a Philip Roth novel.
By mentioning Roth, however, Biller sends the reader off on a wild goose chase that ultimately distracts him from the true source of Volckmer’s book. As the name of the plastic surgeon indicates, Dr. Seligman, the Jewish surgeon in The Appointment is based on Dr. Seligman the Jewish psychiatrist in Lars von Trier’s porno film Nymphomaniac. Both Volckmer’s novella and von Trier’s film involve a “conversation between Judaism and Christianity,” as Leil Leibovitz put it. Both “Volckmer” and Joe, the eponymous nymphomaniac in von Trier’s film, have sexual issues which can only be resolved by talking to a Jewish psychiatrist because, according to Leibovitz:

The alternative to Christ is Seligman. A perfect embodiment of Jewish eschatology, he believes, like the sages of old, that there aren’t any fundamental differences between our own time and the days of the Messiah to come and that all attempts at redemption must focus not on some desperate thrust heavenward but on a series of small and incremental earthly steps. If you believe this—if you believe that everything you do is an important step toward salvation—interpretation becomes your steeliest sword. If you are your own savior, and if every one of your acts facilitates the saving, you are likely to read a lot into everything. That’s how we got the Talmud, the ultimate book of ordering the world, and that’s how we got a grinning Seligman, alone in his apartment with his books, trying to do the same.3

Lars von Trier is Volckmer’s ideal mentor in this regard because he is a Catholic who thought he was a Jew growing up. It turns out that his mother’s Jewish husband wasn’t his father, something that Lars didn’t learn until later in life. It also turns out that his mother was, as he puts it, “a slut,” who had sex with a musician and composer because she wanted Lars to be a great artist.4 Since God is always an exalted father, Lars has a markedly ambivalent attitude toward the Catholic faith:

I don’t know if I’m all that Catholic really. I’m probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen. Here’s my message: I believe it is very difficult to die like the last Pope did. In the knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of so many people. I know that people say that the Pope has got a good line to God. But I say to the Pope: it’s not the will of God that millions of people around the world die from Aids because of some stupid Pope.5

In May 2011, von Trier compounded his identity crisis when he announced at the Cannes film festival, following the premier of his film Melancholia, “I’m a Nazi,” which turns out to be the mirror image of being a Jew:6

The only thing I can tell you is that I thought I was a Jew for a long time and was very happy being a Jew, then later on came [Danish and Jewish director] Susanne Bier, and suddenly I wasn’t so happy about being a Jew. That was a joke. Sorry. But it turned out that I was not a Jew. If I’d been a Jew, then I would be a second-wave Jew, a kind of a new-wave Jew, but anyway, I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out that I was really a Nazi. Because my family was German... which also gave me some pleasure. So I’m kind of a... What can I say? I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker. But there will come a point, at the end of this... I’m just saying, I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I’m not for the Second World War, and I’m not against Jews... I am of course, very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass. But still, how can I get out of this sentence? No, I just want to say about the art, I’m very much for Speer. Albert Speer, I liked. He was also maybe one of God’s best children. He had some talent that was kind of possible for him to use... okay, I’m a Nazi.7

The dialogue between Joe and Seligman in Nymphomaniac is a sign that Lars von Trier can’t make up his mind whether he’s a Catholic or a Jew. The identity question in The Appointment is more nuanced. The nameless heroine who is Frau Volckmer’s alter ego is a Catholic who lives in a world in which only Jews go to heaven. “Do you believe in hell, Dr. Seligman?” Frau Volckmer wonders. “Or do Jews only go to heaven? I don’t believe in either, but it still scares me sometimes, and whoever came up with the idea of eternal suffering really must have had a sick mind.”8
Jewish hegemony over German culture has neutered the Catholic faith through Jewish psyops like “Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” and as a result Catholicism has been reduced to “The Baby Jesus machine,” which will “give you a blessing” if you “put ten pfennigs into the slot.”9 Dr. Seligman is really the priest of a new religion which replaces Volckmer’s Catholicism. Volckmer’s Catholic ancestors could confess their sins to a priest and receive absolution. But that won’t cut it in a conquered country like Germany, which the Jews now rule with an iron rod. Since sacramental confession obviously hasn’t expiated German guilt, something more radical is necessary. Nothing short of a sex change operation is required because acquiring a “beautiful” Jewish “c--k, circumcised and all,” is “like a baptism,” and Dr. Seligman is “like the priest welcoming me back to my long-lost kingdom.”10

Seligman gives Joe a piece of Rugelach, a traditional Jewish-Ashkenazi baked cake in Nymphomaniac

The arrival of “the Baby Jesus machine” means that sacramental confession has lost its power to expiate guilt. This, of course is not the case. The Church still has the power to forgive sin, but the Germans who have left the Catholic Church in droves over the past four decades do not avail themselves of sacramental confession any more, and the main reason they do not is the sexual corruption which got foisted on them by Jewish psychiatrists like David Mardechai Levy and “Doktor Sommer,” otherwise known as Martin Goldstein, who taught the girls who read the German teen magazine Bravo how to masturbate, as I pointed out in detail in the chapter on Werner Heisenberg and Jewish science in my book Logos Rising. Volckmer’s novella indicates that German girls are still being crippled by pornography, which has always been a Jewish operation.
Catholics do not experience guilt because of sins committed by their great grandparents. In order to subject them to the guilt which now cripples the German people, the Jews had to separate them from their Catholic faith, and the simplest way to do this, as the Jewish psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich explained, was by getting them to engage in sinful sexual behavior.
The Jews in this regard were both arsonist and fireman combined. After corrupting the sexual morals of countless German women, driving them from the Church which could have forgiven their sins, Jewish social engineers, working hand in hand with the Americans who conquered Germany in World War II, transmuted real guilt over sexual sin into a form of control based on the alleged guilt of their great-grandparents, condemning Germans to a state of eternal guilt.
Because Germans have been condemned to a state of eternal guilt, Frau Volckmer lives in a “ghostly country in which there were more dead than living, where we lived in cities that had been built around the remnants of where our cities used to be, and every day felt like walking on something that wasn’t supposed to be there.”11 As Shakespeare made clear in Macbeth, ghosts are a manifestation of suppressed guilt. But ghosts are also a manifestation of unacknowledged crimes…..

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(Endnotes Available by Request)