Long Knives, Long Spoons

A group of diners sits at a circular table with spoons too long to hold and scoop the soup into their own mouths. Everyone struggles and starves eternally. This is hell. Heaven, it is revealed, is structurally exactly the same - soup, circular table and long spoons. There, however, the diners use their own spoons to feed each other soup.

During the Nazi party’s rise, they were protected by a group of right-wing veterans called the Sturmabteilung (SA). This group was headed, strangely enough, by an openly gay man - Ernst Rohm. Hitler was best friends with Rohm, and knowledge of Rohm’s sexuality was so widespread that rumors began to circulate about Hitler’s sexuality as well. History is full of indigestible little surprises, isn’t it?

Once the SA started to make a name for itself with brutality and thuggishness towards the Communists, the Nazis took them in and used them as security for their own events. Under Rohm, the SA grew to a million members and Hitler began to worry about the ambitions of his now very powerful friend. After the Communists were all but defeated within Germany, the SA began to continue their antics but targeted citizens for want of an enemy. The people, the German army and the Nazi party wanted to control them. In what is called the Night of the Long Knives, Nazi militants, police and members of the army turned on the SA leadership and slaughtered them all. Hitler gave his best friend the option of suicide. Rohm didn’t take it and was executed.

There are layers to both stories.

Hell, in the allegory of the long spoons, doesn’t require knives, betrayal or Nazis. It just requires selfish intent, a narrow focus on one’s own inability to get what one wants. To me, the allegory only makes sense if the soup is our sense of humanity. We can only be given humanity by those around us. It is a story of sustenance, what we do when we just want to live and be human.

A long knife, like a long spoon is meant to be pointed at others, not at ourselves, but as the old saying goes: “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” Rohm refused to kill himself, an “honorable” act that would saved his friends from facing their conscience. He wanted the knife to be pointed at him, just as he had pointed at countless others, since he never lived in a place where he would do it to himself. This is where a hell of long knives and a hell of long spoons differ - these people were playing an entirely different game - not of sustenance, but of ambition. There is no end to the types of hells we unlock when we decide to pursue our ambition beyond our survival.