The names alone sound like something out of a
strange detective story, “Drath and Muth,” as if the legendary French Inspector
Clouseau (Peter Sellers) were pronouncing “death and the moth,” which wouldn’t
be far from the truth, given the essay I recently read about the death of
German journalist Viola Drath through the hands of her younger husband,
Albrecht Muth.
Drath, a Washington, D.C. journalist of long renown, 44 years older than
her young lover, was found dead in her Georgetown, Q Street house, on August 12
of 2011, her reportedly violent husband, it appears, the perpetuator.
Yet, Drath established herself as a significant figure in the D.C. world,
befriending author Norman Mailer, who stayed in her house as he researched his
fiction, Harlot’s Ghost. Working for the government, her husband
commented, “When I speak German to Henry Kissinger, he talks like a little
boy.”
She and her husband, indeed, often entertained
the German-speaking community in the capitol city, dinners which included
significant guests almost every weekend.
Upon the Colonel’s death in 1986, Drath, lonely and distraught, began
meeting with Muth quite often, and quickly became enamored with the young
German-speaking “Muti,” who matched her Teutonic memories, and with whom she
argued, in German, deeply into the night.
Behaving, as Foer’s essay relates, more like an intern than a companion,
Muth slowly insinuated himself into Drath’s life, reading the daily newspapers
and reporting back, and, most importantly, assuming the domestic
responsibilities including cooking and cleaning, for which Drath had no
facility. After the later abandonment of
Muth, Drath revealed to a friend that she did not even know how to cook
breakfast.
As a couple, however, Drath and Muth achieved even greater recognition
in the Washington, D.C. community than she had ever achieved with the Colonel.
In regular dinner parties, attended by figures such as Pierre Salinger, Antonin
Scalia, Dick Cheney, and numerous others, with Muth serving up dinner from
their infamous yellow-tinged kitchen, D. C. insiders slowly grew to admire and
respect Drath's new husband, who began to claim outrageously exaggerated
relationships with Iraqi government officials; gradually, as his lies spun
literally out of control, proclaiming a kind of double-spy involvement with the
Iraqi community, using his connections to reveal internal secrets to various
governmental agencies, while simultaneously involving international figures
from George Soros (who once quipped to the French Ambassador, that Muth was the
“the type of man who would have closed the oven door behind him at Auschwitz,”
a statement Muth saw as a testament to his worth) to Arun Ghandhi, the grandson
of Mahtama.
There is something almost touching about Foer’s New York Times essay's description of Muti's madness, as he reveals
Muth’s strategies, wherein he contacted only the highest figures with whom he
had access, ignoring the underlings, which only made the upper echelons, who
believed that he had necessarily been vetted by their lower assistants, more vulnerable—and
ignorant. Only a few bothered to check into his actual credentials, which
eventually revealed that he was a complete fraud. Muth had it down perfectly;
as he himself described it: “You meet someone of import, check him out,
determine [if] he can be of use, you make him yours. At some point you must
decide whether to run him as a useful idiot, he not catching on as to who you
are and what you do.”
By
that time his connections with Drath had already established him within the
political community and the fact that Muth was also gay (one of his gay lovers
actually lived in Drath’s house), and, increasingly, a violent drunk, took ages
apparently to reach the political consciousness. Muth, despite temporary
escapes to Miami (during which he proclaimed he was in Iraq, working behind lines),
contrived to be seen as a major government informant. Muth was even thanked for
his fabulated e-mail reports out of Iraq (written on Drath's Georgetown
apartment computer) by higher-ups at the State Department such as the seasoned
Thomas Pickering. Only in 2011, the year of the murder of his wife, had Muth
begun to be perceived by many in the higher levels of government as another
fraud and even a mad man, in the manner of the great Washington, D.C. con-artists
such as Edward von Koberg III, Craig Spence, and Steven Martindale.
Indeed, from the first statement of Foer’s fascinating essay, “Dinners
were served in the basement. Ambassadors, generals with many stars, senior
White House officials and closely read columnists—all would walk past the
yellowing kitchen, which looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the Ford
administration, and down the dimly lighted dining room,” I suddenly became
sickened with a kind of strange sense of déjà vu. I had been there! “Howard,"
I shouted out, "do you remember Viola Drath?” After a slow pause of aging
memory, Howard responded, “Yes, she was a German journalist.” “Didn’t we attend
a party at her house?” Howard wasn’t sure of the event. “Read the article,” I
demanded! Suddenly everything came rushing back into my memory. I immediately
recalled the dinner party we had attended, Howard invited, obviously, because
we was a central curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Suddenly
the whole evening, a rather dreadful one, came into focus. I recall—and Howard
eventually confirmed this—a great many significant figures crowding into the
open living room of the large Georgetown house for cocktails. One man was
draped with numerous metals—on his way to another party after. We descended
that small staircase beside the yellowing kitchen down to the dining area, me
following Viola, who said: “You’re Swiss! The Swiss always make such good
cooks!” Her comments entirely flummoxed me—was I suddenly in her mind a mad, gay
chef? (our acquaintances in that city often said such strange things that I
sometimes felt that I was living on another planet). I remember the crowded
dinner, but little of what occurred during our dinner. I recall only my
complete discomfort in having to endure the affair, typical of many a
Washington, D.C evening for me in those tortured days. As we left the house, I
whispered to Howard, “I feel like we’ve just descended into the heart of a Nazi
enclave.”
“Drath and Muth,” of course! In those days of the early 1980s, however,
I am confident the Colonel still stalked the halls, caring for his wife and
daughters. I believe I never encountered the “moth,” drawn to death's flame.
But death was already in the air.
Los
Angeles, July 18, 2012
