Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  WOMAN WITH DEAD CHILD

  A new bride cries until sunrise; a sister cries until she gets a golden ring; a mother cries until the end of her life.

  —Russian Proverb

  1

  Berlin 1914, crowds shouting and waving their hats when mobilization was announced, that was her epoch, the epoch of eagles. She’d once met Rodin. That fact alone proves how old she already was in this terrible new Europe.

  At the Kaiser’s word they’d overruled themselves, declining to award her the gold medal after all; she was a woman, you see, and with leftist views besides. She stood there whitehaired but still young-looking in her pale smock, her white-sleeved wrists crossed against the darkness, proud and angry in defeat. Karl raged for her, then brought flowers. And now the Kaiser had fled and would never come back. Her familiar, hated, hero-worshiping Germany had died with its heroes, after which the eagles stopped screaming, pretending once again to be stone. What would become of us now? Her only hope was world socialism.

  Russian children played with the fallen head of Alexander II’s statue; German children longed for a savior. As for her, she kept making her quick, crude placard drawings of sick men, despairing mothers, children huddled in terror as the skeleton prepared to strike. In a sense, the Weavers’ Series had been her life’s work. In another sense, her life’s work was the iteration and reiteration of a single image, which achieved its final expression where she stood before a woman whom she’d made out of stone, gazing at the woman’s face—her own face—as she wept and stroked the granite woman’s cheeks. That wasn’t yet. Just now she couldn’t stop thinking about Karl’s patient, Frau Becker, who kept losing her children; five out of eleven were already in the ground. Frau Becker used to talk about it as if it had nothing to do with her: The big ones died off, and the little ones were always coming back.—In her honor, Käthe made another etching of a mother with a dead child. Strange to think that she’d once felt at loose ends . . .

  Look! Red flags on Unter den Linden! Soldiers were shouting; who knew what they might do? Karl had begged her to stay home, but she couldn’t have borne to miss this. She was at the Brandenburg Gate when they threw their cockades into the dust. Peter would have joined them in that, she was sure.

  Then from the window of the Reich Chancellery Herr Scheidemann proclaimed a Republic. Never mind that all he wanted was to forestall Liebknecht from spreading Lenin’s revolution; God be thanked for the result! Of course it made the eagles scream, but the cheering crowds drowned them out. She came running to witness this, still wearing the pale smock she wore in her atelier; the idea of human brotherhood drew her here. A Republic in Germany! She was so happy now. And then, enraged with herself for having felt happy, she remembered the first victory of Peter’s war, 11.8.14 it was, when we regained Alsace-Lorraine for the Reich: even the Social Democrats had been hypnotized by 11.8.14; we rained roses on our soldiers as they marched through the Brandenburg Gate, and even the family of Dr. Karl Kollwitz hung the Imperial flag from the balcony; they’d never done that in their lives, and never would again. Who celebrated 11.8.14 now? Alsace-Lorraine had long since gone French again, and our soldiers who’d won it were hungry now or maimed or else they were a closepacked line of corpses in a groove of dirt. A moment ago she’d felt happy about Scheidemann’s republic, and for what? Across the street, a crazy little man with a moustache was shaking his fist in a rage, stamping like Rumpelstilzchen, while at her side a crowd of workers kept singing the Internationale.

  The fact remained that last year, when news came of the Russian Revolution, she’d wept for joy. She wasn’t ashamed of her tears and never would be.

  And now a Republic! Surely there was something fine about that . . .

  She ran home to tell Karl that we had a Republic. He lifted her up in the air in his joy. Then the electricity went out.

  The railroad workers struck again; troops guarded the bridges, every soldier with his hand grenade. Here with a hollow clap of horse-hooves came the police; a line of Green Minnas waited to take the prisoners away. And the Spartacists got beaten down; it was the old story; people were singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.

  They’d sung that when Peter and Hans marched off with their regiments. She remembered Peter’s flag hanging from the balcony, hymns coming from the tower, and then Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. How young they’d all been then! And before that, when he was little, Peter used to shout hurrah! at the zeppelins.

  She asked Hans if he remembered, and he nodded silently. He lived separately on the fourth floor.

  She heard shooting in the streets. Karl was in the city; she didn’t know where Hans was.

  The day she voted for the first time in her life should have been joyous; but the day before that, she found herself writing in her diary: Vile, outrageous murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Everything changed in her Republic forever, just as it already had within her heart once she received the news about Peter. Living over Karl’s office all those years and sometimes hearing the groans of his patients through the floor, she found that the suffering of others pressed upon her ever more tightly; as an artist, as a leftist, as a German and a human being, above all, as Peter’s mother, she couldn’t avoid feeling even had she wanted to. And so she didn’t simply imagine the last moments of the two martyrs; she experienced them. (Karl had likewise wept when he heard.) Nine days later, Liebknecht was buried, along with thirty-eight others. For Rosa Luxemburg an empty coffin near Liebknecht. They’d thrown Rosa in the Landwehrkanal.

  The tale of Easter’s empty tomb used to haunt her. If we could only leave death behind! Oh, all those dreams she used to have! She wrote them in her diary; she told them to Karl and to her sister Lise. She tried not to torture Hans with them; that wouldn’t have been fair. The occupied grave was worse, far worse; on the other hand, how many times in her life had she found the stone rolled aside, the skeleton bereft of his prey? The best one could hope for was Scheidemann’s republic. Under those conditions, wasn’t a hollow monument worst of all? Rosa Luxemburg’s coffin wasn’t void because she’d been resurrected, but because she’d disappeared. That was what assassins did nowadays, when they . . .

  She carved the mourners light on dark over Liebknecht’s snow-white bier, her chisel-strokes in each woodblocked face resembling muscles beneath flayed flesh. The Communists told her that she had no right, because she wasn’t one of them. But the family had asked her to come. They’d laid red roses on his forehead, to hide the bullet holes. Outside, the rightists were singing Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.

  Liebknecht wasn’t the last. It got almost unbearable, but of course it couldn’t compare with the World War. To get right down to it, what could she do but work, and sometimes catnap in Peter’s room when Karl wasn’t there to be hurt? What he’d always wanted of her was intimacy increasing without limit. She knew now that she’d never desire that, not ever. There wasn’t space.

  Berlin’s trains kept shooting over the steel bridges; Berlin’s boats kept boring underneath them. Our exhausted front-line veterans kept gathering; now they called themselves Old Fighters although most were only in their twenties. Rightists and leftists, they killed each other in their rage.

  She visited the morgue and counted up to two hundred and forty-four murdered corpses, naked behind glass, with their clothes rolled up on their bellies. She heard the people who loved those dead ones weeping. She said to herself: Oh, what a dismal, dismal place this is . . .—Then she went home to Weissenbürgerstrasse, to etch in tears and paint in blood what she had seen. Of course in the World War it had been worse; she must never forget that.

  Another of Frau Becker’s children had died. Karl said that nothing could have been done, given the conditions in which that family had to live. He got emotional, actually. Even the living ones didn’t seem to grow very much. She remembered the way that Peter had suddenly grown so large at age fourteen . . .

  She could hear Frau Becker sobbing in Karl’s office. Karl must be gi
ving her a sedative. Then that grocer’s apprentice came back, although by now it was practically the middle of the night; she could hear him coughing; and the atmosphere of Karl’s office, humid with tears and sputum, began to seep up around her. She’d do another woodcut of Frau Becker, but not now, because she didn’t have the strength. Sometimes she felt numb, and then her work wasn’t any good; she longed to feel. But when feeling came back, it often overcame her, and then she could do nothing but weep or stare at the floor. She went into Peter’s room and closed the door. Here she felt at peace.

  Many years ago, she and Karl had been quarreling, and so she had slept alone. Then Peter, who had been very little, had a nightmare and came scurrying into bed with her. As soon she pressed him against herself, all the desolation she’d been feeling went away. Of course it was not quite like that anymore. Oh, she felt tired, so tired! She wasn’t yet so old that she had any right to be tired. She said to herself: Work.

  She worked without reference to the fiery proto-Cubism of those years, the representational, classical past as dead as the Second Reich itself, dead, dead!—as dead as the Tsarist officers who’d now sunk beneath their own weedy mucky parade grounds so that the Party of Lenin and Stalin could march across their moldering faces. Since 1912 she had kept a room on Siegmund-shof for her plastic arts. That was where she would create the mourning woman out of stone. Mostly she carved, etched, and painted in that flat on Weissenbürgerstrasse. Those were the years when the figures in other people’s paintings began to go ever flatter, more garish, more distorted, the colors hurtful to her although she liked some of the galloping calligraphic riders in Kandinsky. Grosz’s desperately angry caricatures, the X-ray bitterness of Otto Dix, not to mention abstract constructivism; she didn’t swim with that tide. Käthe Kollwitz kept painting poor people, starving people (white figures in dark fields, dark chalk on brown Ingres paper), raped women, mothers with dying children, mothers with dead children. In the end she depicted mainly herself, her stricken, simian face thinking and grieving. She too was a mother with a dead child.

  2

  The child had died quickly. He’d been the very first of his regiment to die. He’d died innocently, like our German hero Siegfried, who in Latin chronicles, Norse epics, German poems and songs dies over and over again, invincible from the front, stabbed in the back. (Goethe was her favorite writer, very possibly because he was not happy.) He’d never seen his death coming because it was sent to him by machine; how could he have fought it?

  (People forget that Hagen, the man who murdered Siegfried, was also a German. He had his reasons. This war was Siegfried’s war. The next war would be Hagen’s.)

  After the first anguish, the stretch of loneliness which she, too strong or weak for suicide, had yet to cross remained as immense as the entry on the war in our 1935 Grosser Brockhaus: forty-seven pages, ten charts, twelve full-color maps, inset photoportraits of our German heroes.

  3

  As I’ve said, she lived on Weissenbürgerstrasse with Karl in a neighborhood whose red-roofed, multistoreyed pillars enclosed humid courtyards for the working poor. She lived there for fifty-two years, accomplishing such works as the lithograph “Fallen” (1921), which depicts a mother clapping her hands to her face in utter grief, her children gathered around her, bewildered, anxious, distressed, reaching up toward her for the reassurance which just then she cannot give. The little girl at her back, who seems to be clutching a doll, stares up at her with the same black-dots-on-white-domino face as so many of the dead children.—Then came widows, more bereaved mothers; it might have been a theme. That was inside. Outside, the police kept taking strikers away in Green Minnas. The workers kept striking. It was in their honor that on a sheet of copper she drypointed the wrinkles, threads and shadows of prisoners’ trousers as they crowded together behind the wire. She printed it, and it wept forever and ever in shiny trembling tears of ink. The birds in the Tiergarten, the green summer light in the Tiergarten, she didn’t have those. She had blackness.

  Sometimes she bought her hope from the small newspaper kiosks which stationed themselves between flower stands; she wanted to keep up with developments in Russia. Why not still hope?

  But the Kapp Putsch, when Berlin went utterly dark, and then the street battles between strikers and swastika’d Freikorpsmen, the shooting and the shouting, it went on and on. After the World War you’d think that people could have learned something. Naturally, how could they? She’d been four years old when Germans raised their swords to victory in the Mirror-Hall of Versailles; that was what Germans still wanted. Sometimes she felt so tired; there was neither beginning nor end. Karl had turned Social Democrat; after the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht he’d said that it was time to be realistic, especially in Scheidemann’s republic. Käthe hadn’t argued. She felt herself more Communist than Social Democrat, and made lithographs for the Communists, because they were more active and lively. Anyhow, Karl had always been a “realistic” sort of person. A few weeks after they’d received the telegram about Peter, Hans’s regiment got sent into a zone of typhus. Karl proposed to write the Ministry of War to advise against this on medical grounds. When Käthe, pleased but surprised that he would even attempt so vain an errand, asked what on earth he was thinking of, he told her, almost spitefully, she later thought: You have strength only for sacrifice and letting go of things, not for keeping track of trifles.—Although his face was bonier and he had less hair, he had scarcely aged much. Of course Käthe’s hair was now entirely white.

  In the early winter hours, when she heard fighting in the street, her grief for Germany got mixed up somehow with those recurring dreams she used to have that Peter was still alive; sometimes he and Hans were on the battlefield together; she tried to help him discover what he should do to avoid being shot again.

  4

  He had fallen on 22.10.14, in Flanders, ten days after his war began. He was the first of his regiment to die.

  Peter was the volunteer. The other son Hans, the one she hardly knew, of course survived. Hans saw through the war to its skeleton of politics. He later became a doctor like Karl. He was always realistic.

  5

  Karl had refused Peter permission to go, so he had turned to his mother. She never knew exactly how he succeeded in getting her to overcome her fear, but he did, after which the father, as usual, obeyed the mother.

  Then came the telegram: IHR SOHN IST GEFALLEN.

  Her friend Liebermann gave her this advice: Work.

  6

  Having been raised by a perfect, untouchable mother, she was fated—indeed, she had been brought into the world—to be the same, all the while exuding a secret lavish maternality. And then, from a jet-black cloud, death’s long grey arms reached to pick her child from amidst a harvest of wide-eyed children. How many women have we all seen wilting away, because they were prevented from fully giving the love which was in them to give? The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which criticizes her favorably, explains that she perceived World War I through the prism of personal tragedy, which imparted a gloomy, sacrificial tone to her creative work. Hence her crazed figures dancing open-mouthed around the guillotine; hence those elongated, muscle-striated arms reaching up at the sky in grief and anger.

  Throughout most of the following decade she created posters for the German Communist Party. Meanwhile she continued her mournful, simian self-portraits; she woodblock-printed her hundredth screaming mother bearing her dead child in her arms, other mothers crowding around her in the procession to the grave.

  7

  The myth that her son’s death was the inspiration for this work is easily exploded. For instance, “Death, Mother and Child” dates from 1910, when Peter still had four years left to live. It formally resembles the previous year’s chalk sketch, entitled “Goodbye”: the child’s face, lovely, stark-white and realistic, clutched by the mother against her own larger, greyer face, which seemed in its grief to be decaying into the black, black smudge beneath it. In 1903, in both h
er “Pietà” and her “Mother with Dead Child,” the positions had been reversed, the mother clutching the little corpse from above, resting her head on the breast while the child’s head dangled in space, the lips slightly parted in the white face. There had been another “Mother with Dead Child” in that same year, this one almost Blakean in the foregrounding of the leg, foot and toes; the mother was sitting cross-legged with one knee up, bowing her head down against the child, whose form, shrouded into a phallic blur, blended into hers; her ear, wrinkled forehead and one sunken eye were there, but only in that furred, decomposed fashion common to embryos and unfinished art; the Kaiser would not have seen any virtue in this.

  In 1911, Peter was growing rapidly but remained underweight; he read his New Testament in Greek and ran to see zeppelins; meanwhile, his mother completed her “Mother in the Bed of a Dead Child,” again the white, white face, this time almost resembling a skull, the crudely cross-hatched sheets, and then the mother’s face, dark-hatched against the black hinterground, with a single candle-flame shining forlornly behind her; her dark heavy fingers reach forward to caress the white cheek; her deep dark eye-sockets seem to contain fibers of muscle, like those of a thoroughly anatomized cadaver. The slow love and grief, upon which Kollwitz has superimposed the living body’s almost reptilian grossness, combine into something quite simply horrifying. Soon enough she etched another version of “Mother and Dead Child,” this time entitled “Tod und Frau um das Kind ringend” (1911), the child’s mouth blackly gaping in a face gone slightly darker, the mother’s correspondingly lighter so that the two black slits of her clenched mouth and eye leap out at us; here too is death, a white skeleton whose round eye-socket gazes at the pair with something between curiosity and glee; shreds of flesh, perhaps hiding ribs, join it to the two forms which it has now begun to sever. We’ll ignore such variations as “Death and Woman,” in which the little child fights with all its feeble strength to save Mother from being raped away by death; I suppose you get the picture.