Boris Eltz—Ilse Grese

Boris Eltz and Ilse Grese’s relationship is presented through a sharp contradiction: their intimacy is shaped by violence, resentment, and sexual humiliation, yet Boris also defends Ilse against accusations of brutality and remains physically close to her. The novel does not supply a complete history of their relationship. Instead, it lets a remembered quarrel, a public confrontation, and two later images of the pair expose its unstable mixture of desire, complicity, and distress.

Intimacy and the Quarrel

Boris describes a past quarrel with Ilse as having taken place in bed. He calls it sordid and says its consequence is that Esther Kubis is being persecuted not only by Ilse but by Hedwig, Ilse’s “little bumgirl.” The account connects private conflict to the treatment of another woman: Esther’s persecution is not presented as separate from the antagonism between Boris and Ilse, even though Boris does not explain precisely how the quarrel led to it.

Asked what happened, Boris admits that he had seen Ilse use a lash earlier that day and thinks the sight affected his mood. He describes the outcome as a fiasco. The physical violence he witnessed thus enters their sexual encounter indirectly, as the occasion for his failure and for the bitter remark he says he made to Ilse: “Yes, Ilse, that’s the best way to torture a man in bed. You don’t need your knout. Just give him a fiasco.” The joke makes the lash and sexual humiliation part of the same language. It is at once an explanation, an accusation, and a way of turning his own embarrassment into a taunt.

Boris initially distinguishes Hedwig from Ilse, saying that he does not think Hedwig herself poses much danger and insisting that the persecution is “all Ilse.” His account also complicates that distinction: he says that Ilse and Hedwig make a pet of Esther, and that Esther regards this treatment as the worst part. The intimacy between Boris and Ilse therefore sits beside a relationship of domination in which Ilse’s treatment of Esther is central to Boris’s explanation of the conflict.

Public Defense and Accusation

At the theatre in Fürstengrube, Boris approaches Ilse in the front row and addresses her by the camp nickname “The Beautiful Beast.” He disputes the title only in part: the adjective, he says, is accurate, but he rejects the noun. Ilse asks which half he means, and Boris answers that she is “basically humane.” His defense is deliberately strained. The exchange places a declaration of her humanity beside a nickname that joins beauty to brutality, and Boris’s attempt to separate the two makes his divided judgment visible.

He then tells Ilse that an investigator from Berlin reported that she had set dogs on a Greek girl in the woods because the girl had wandered away and fallen asleep in a hollow. Boris says that he laughed at the investigator and defended her: “Not Ilse, I said. Not my Ilse.” The words turn his defense into a claim of personal attachment. He does not answer the allegation by disputing its details; instead, he insists that the Ilse he knows could not have done it. The possessive “my” expresses intimacy, but it also marks the distance between his loyalty to her and the violence being alleged.

The setting makes the exchange public rather than private. Other officers and camp personnel are gathering for a performance, and Boris confronts Ilse in the auditorium before the show begins. He moves from teasing her about her nickname to invoking a specific accusation of cruelty, then ends with a formal good evening. The sequence lets his intimacy and his unease occupy the same encounter: he challenges her, defends her, and continues to address her as someone with whom he has a personal bond.

Physical Closeness and Visible Distress

In a later room, Boris sits at a table with a carafe of gin, looking utterly beaten. Ilse strokes his forearm and ducks her head to smile up at him. The gesture is tender in its physical closeness, but the description does not resolve the distress suggested by Boris’s posture or establish what has left him so defeated. Their attachment appears as an action between them, not as an explanation of what either feels.

A subsequent scene gives the pairing a more uneasy image. In a crowded foyer, Ilse paws at Boris while he sits to one side, clearly drunk, with his face in his hands. The earlier stroking of his forearm becomes, in this later glimpse, intrusive contact against a tableau of intoxication and withdrawal. The account does not say that the earlier quarrel caused this condition, nor does it explain the change between the scenes. It does, however, resist presenting their physical closeness as simple reassurance: Ilse reaches toward him while Boris remains visibly overwhelmed.

The Relationship’s Contradiction

Across these scenes, Boris’s relationship with Ilse is defined less by a settled declaration than by incompatible acts. He remembers their sexual quarrel in language of torture and failure, and he attributes Esther’s persecution to Ilse; in public, he rejects the idea that Ilse is a beast and calls her “my Ilse” while recounting an allegation that she set dogs on a prisoner. Later, touch links them again, first in a gesture of apparent comfort and then beside Boris’s drunken collapse.

The narrative does not offer a reconciliation or a clear ending for the relationship in these glimpses. Its emphasis falls instead on the gap between Boris’s knowledge of Ilse’s cruelty and his impulse to defend her, and between the intimacy of their contact and the distress with which he is shown. That gap makes the relationship consequential beyond the couple: Boris’s account of their quarrel leads directly to the question of Esther’s treatment, while his public loyalty exposes how personal attachment can persist alongside evidence of violence.