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How To Get All You Want In German

A ghost story, of why one should not want to get all they want in German. Written in English.

By Kelly RidgwayPublished about a year ago Updated about a year ago 6 min read

What is this book and why is it been following me for the past 20 or so years?

How To Get All You Want In German

That's the name of it and it's a very small little booklet, and I have no idea when it was printed. There is no date or author. From what I’ve seen so far.

But I have a feeling it was printed in the 30s or early 40s, during those 12 pivotal years in Germany.

It was printed in Germany. It does say that.

And the fact that this book has been following me for so long was perplexing beyond my comprehension for so many reasons.

At several points in my life, I've lost almost everything, physically, but no matter where I went this book continued to show up in my belongings - the few belongings I had left after countless times that I've lost everything.

What I'm about to tell you is going to sound creepy, and you likely won't believe me, and I understand that completely.

But I now know why… Because I was visited. By a ghost. I was, I swear. And the book is from that ghost, it’s attached itself to me through the book and I’ve no way to detach myself from it or the entity – the ghost that’s behind this all.

It visited me one night. The ghost, or entity I should say. It whispered to me in German.

It murmured things to me that night, late at night. And it was terrifying - the sound alone - the voice.

It wasn’t really a voice. More of a distorted modulation of a voice, almost as if it was trying to sound human but couldn’t, with a heavy Bavarian accent.

Agony, anger, shame, eternal rage. That was the tone, the pitch, the sound of it. The sound of this entity’s voice were all those things.

The sky… I could it see from my window as I lay paralyzed that night, alone with entity that visited me.

The sky was pitch black.

Opaque and there were no stars.

By Loaiza Pérez Heredia on Unsplash

It was as if there were never any in the sky to begin with – when the entity was with me, all I knew of life was altered into this same darkness I saw from my window. Nothing I knew of life remained. All there was left was hopelessness, and savage, relentless guilt.

The entity was showing me his eternity.

And when I did see a flicker of the entity, for a moment, there was blood all over him, it wasn't his.

It wasn't his… it was a child's; it was the mother of that child’s blood too. And he told me he left them, along with others in a pile in a village they’d swept through. Behind the army. In the east.

I asked him I asked him in English,

Who are you? What are you? Why did you do this and why are you telling me this?

Not a soldier, he said. In German.

Not in the traditional sense, he was not a soldier, he was not Wehrmacht.

He was there though; he was there behind them.

What are you? I screamed.

He didn’t answer. But I knew as I looked out at the darkness in the sky what he was after I thought about it for a moment.

Insert groups.

He remained in my presence that night and I could sense things about him. About this entity, about what he was when he was alive.

He was filled with with something, I can't describe it, he was filled with something that was malicious, but I can't describe it I can identify with it.

It was not who he always was, but he was groomed to be. He had the predisposition for it, but it was worse than he imagined … what he ended up being a part of.

He was there and he followed orders, and he also engaged in it willingly.

They were drugged, which helped. The drugs excited him. They overpowered him with excitement and adrenaline. They made everything exciting. Everything terrible was exciting.

They selected guys like him for this stuff. Insert group guys - often criminals already, but none of them had done this amount of brutality on such a large scale before. They were usually just common violent miscreants, thieves, drunkards, miserable beings…

In some cases, they weren’t at all though. They just needed jobs.

They all took part in this, and now for an eternity, exist in the absence of any will to continue to.

That’s what the entity told me.

They have no will or desire to exist. They ruminate for eternity in the misery of the duties they performed. The orders they followed.

Within the stipulations of their work there were promises of lives they always wanted.

They all wanted something. To want is something we all share.

But to get it at the price of humanity itself is not something that could go unnoticed, by humankind as a whole, by any supreme order, or God, that has to exist.

Something of that sort must exist, it has to, please! Tell me such a supreme order exists?

I asked the entity this.

No answer.

To act as they did with no mercy. No mercy shown. And to shame the innocent as they did at their last moments. Humiliating them as they shot them all in unison. Laughing at their last moments, watching them as they were gasping and crying out in agony. Then leaving them there in open ravines. Or holes they made them dig themselves.

In a pile. Stacked up by the men who’d shot them after, in a pile. In the hole they’d made them dig just before. Or ravine they forced them to gather just before.

Enough! I screamed.

I don’t need to know How To Get All You Want In German. I don’t want it. At least not what it was in the 30s and early 40s.

That's what this is about, this book. It’s about the nazis? Isn’t it? You’re a Nazi ghost! Leave me alone! I screamed.

Germans don’t want that either. They haven’t for decades. Many of them didn’t either when it was all going on too…

What makes you think I would?

Then the sun rose and my eyes saw light again. Was it a dream? The entity…last night… Was it a dream?

By Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Some time passed and things in my mind settled down a bit. And I decided indefinitely that the visit from the entity was just a bad nightmare that night. It wasn’t real.

And then months passed. But the booklet still remained in my house and reminded me of that nightmare.

So a month ago, I burnt the booklet. Deep in the woods behind my house. I watched it burn, every little page and made sure it was nothing but ash before I put the fire out and went back up inside my home.

This morning, as I did some cleaning around the house, I found it.

The booklet was on my nightstand, just before I set out to do some dusting nearby. There it was. Untarnished.

How To Get All You Want In German

Horrified, I opened it. The first page had information I’d never seen before – the date it was published. 1939, and it was published the day Germany annexed the Czech Republic, before invading Poland. Before the war.

The author was only listed by their initials, RH.

It’s with me now, the book. I can’t get rid of it.

I can’t do anything with it. Because no one can get rid of it – or what it represents. That part of the past that exists without any way to bury it or burn it or get rid of it. Arguably worst part of history known to mankind. And we can’t change it. Not for eternity. We can’t get all we want at anytime, in any language, anywhere. We can’t even change the bad things in the past. They’re there forever.

And all we can do is hope that what we do want isn’t darkness. Because it will follow us forever, for eternity, if it is.

This entity is following me. The booklet, it’s the form the entity takes, except for that one night.

That’s why I have had this book for so long and why it remains with me. It shows up no matter where I go or where I put it or even if I try to destroy it.

Why, I don’t know.

Am I to go into that absence of light, outside God’s grace.

Is that why this entity is here for me, following me, to take me its eternity of darkness with him?

All I want is to not want that. All I want is to not get all this book wants the reader to get?

How To Get All You Want In German

How to get all that this book represents the hell out of my life?

Someone must know what to do here, this can’t be the only copy of this booklet.

HistoricalHorrorMicrofictionPsychologicalShort Story

About the Creator

Kelly Ridgway

I’m a simple person of few words. I appreciate feedback and criticism for my writing. Thank you for reading!

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