Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Four years before the World War and two years before the Kaiser ordered the removal of her poster demanding playgrounds in tenement housing (a sad girl stands by a wall, clasping a sick baby; behind them, the sign reads PLAYING FORBIDDEN) we find her writing in her daybook: Today started work on the sculpture “Woman with Dead Child.”

  8

  For years she looked out her window at the same gaunt man who grimaced under his tophat. She never learned his name, but she learned to recognize his footsteps on the cobblestones. For awhile he used to be accompanied by a little blond boy with sunken eyes, but the blond boy died of tuberculosis, and then the man came down with it, too; he was one of Karl’s patients, but he wouldn’t give his name; he felt very ashamed because he couldn’t pay. No doubt that was why he then stopped being Karl’s patient. Perhaps Karl had saved him; he lived on year after year. Käthe, newly a mother, was still at work on her Weavers’ Series when she first came to know him; she was still scratching the dark fine lines of anguish on brown paper, bringing to life the pale children, the weak figures in black, the death. Once, in about 1895 it must have been, the gaunt man removed his tophat to scratch at his hair, and then, right then, when his eyes almost met hers, she caught him, sketching his head for three or four seconds of passionate struggle; yes, she’d possessed him; now he was hers; his agony wasn’t in vain anymore; he became one of her weavers.

  In 1921 she drew a poster for the Russenhilfe; she wanted to do what she could to help the Communists fight that terrible hunger in their country. But she didn’t care to join the Party, because their tactics didn’t suit her. She made two pairs of hands respectfully reaching to support the swaying head of someone Slavic, someone with dark hair whose eyes were closed in extreme weakness. All the sick proletarians Karl treated, whose stories were so sad and who all too often lived and died beyond anyone’s power to help, she remembered them when she made that Russian face.—No, not all of them. That man in the tophat, when he passed beneath her window he conveyed so dramatic an impression that she took up her graphite stick, but there was too much anger and not enough weakness in him. Frau Becker’s son, the dark one who’d died last year, she remembered his drooping eyes when he was dying. She worked him into the Slavic face. She looked it over and said to herself: It’s good, thank God.—Karl agreed, as he always did.

  She sat herself down in Peter’s room and considered doing a series of very straightforward posters about Lenin. But when she and Hans came by some accident to be discussing politics, she said: There are other problems that interest me now, essential human problems like death.

  But your woodcut about Liebknecht—

  A little sternly, she said to him: I’m not the old hating, fighting Käthe Kollwitz.

  In fact, she remained as unchanging as Berlin’s pale green summer weeds and trees along the water, because her anguish was as dependable as the ocherish brownstones.

  9

  In 1922 she rendered death’s skull-moon in the darkness above bowed children who spasm in concert with our century’s millions of enchained volunteers; the title is “Hunger,” and I’ve read that this image, badly reproduced in a secondhand monograph, lay in wait for decades like an antipersonnel mine for the specific purpose of horrifying Shostakovich’s daughter Galina; one day when she, still unmarried and presumably in Leningrad to attend the premiere of her father’s Eleventh Symphony, was browsing the book-kiosks along the Nevsky, the mine exploded: Galina, who was actually trying to find a present for her brother’s name day, opened the volume by accident—well, isn’t that a tautology? Isn’t every accident an accident? I won’t exaggerate; I won’t claim that the young woman screamed; after all, she’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, even if she couldn’t remember all of it; she’d seen real skulls enough! All the same, such was the power of this image that she had a nightmare, and in the morning her famous father, who was himself feeling a bit anxious just then, saw some peculiar wretchedness in her face which he experienced like a punch in his stomach; this sensation, suitably translated into the chord D-D-Sch, later found its way into both his Fifteenth Symphony and the unholy Opus 110.

  Meanwhile, the man in the tophat promenaded sadly under Käthe Kollwitz’s window.

  10

  In 1926, A. Lunacharsky, who was then our People’s Commissar of Culture, paid her this compliment: She aims at an immediate effect, so that at the very first glance one’s heart is wrung. She is a great agitator. That was the year she went to Roggevelde with Karl, to visit Peter’s grave for the first time.

  In 1927, she stood amidst the jury of the Prussian Academy, those shorthaired, dark-suited old men with canes and tophats, with both hands gripping the mat of one of her woodcuts as the man beside her, resting his hat against his large belly, gazed respectfully down at Art. Perhaps they regretted that the Kaiser had not permitted them to give her the gold medal twenty-nine years ago. They reminded her of Hans and Peter when they were little, the two pairs of eyes staring at her above the white collars they hated. Their hall glowed with the light of heavenly privilege. They presented her with a prize.

  After the ceremony, a gentleman from the National Front tried to talk to her about the mystical role of motherhood, and Professor Moholy-Nagy, fresh from the Bauhaus, scolded her that her latest composition, another white-on-black woodcut of a woman and child going into death, was both too static and too dark.

  After all, she said wearily, it’s a representation of death.

  It is an elementary biological necessity, Moholy-Nagy sternly said, for human beings to absorb color, to extract color.

  What do you mean, a biological necessity?

  We live in a colorless age.

  So you’re sad, like me.

  Don’t say that! I reject emotion unconditionally.

  As gently as she could (there were many people in the room), she said to him: We’ve all been injured by the war years. In your case, perhaps you’re afraid to feel, because—

  Professor Moholy-Nagy vindictively interrupted: The traditional painting has become a historical relic and is finished with.

  She smiled at him. Then slowly she turned away to receive more congratulations from elitists and militarists, the ones who had killed Peter, and not just Peter, but all the brave young men in helmets who toiled white-faced through zigzag trenches and marched through hellscapes, falling a dozen at a time, the smokeskinned young men with daggers who crept through tunnels to murder one another, the brave young men who rushed against barbed wire, got impaled, and hung there until the bullet-wind blew through them; or else if they were lucky they became squinting prisoners, marched away between lines of Frenchmen on horseback; then they could look forward to coming home years later, bitter, poor and hateful, ripe for the next war. When she couldn’t bear any more of it, she caught the tram for Weissenbürgerstrasse. She went home to her nervously overworked husband whose patients had so often modeled poverty’s face to her.

  The man in the tophat stood outside. This time she spied him in conversation with that tubercular young grocer’s apprentice who was in ecstasies about Hitler; Karl said that little could be done for him; he’d be in the grave in six months. Käthe had once asked the boy why, what he had against Jews, how he could possibly wish on Germany more hate and war. He replied: Excuse me, Frau Kollwitz, but I would like to stand for something. I would like to be there for something.—Now both of them wore swastika armbands. They looked more cheerful than she had ever seen them.

  They didn’t even notice her at first. Then they did see her. The man in the tophat said: Well, well, it’s Frau Kollwitz again.

  And she realized that all these years he had also been watching her.

  She’d put up with enough at the Prussian Academy. She had nothing to say to him.

  But the man in the tophat had something to say. Taking two steps closer, while the ashen-faced grocer’s apprentice gazed at him with shining eyes, he said: You know the difference between you and us, Frau Kollwitz? We’re optim
ists.

  This shocked her so much that she could scarcely breathe, because it was true.

  The dying apprentice chimed in: We never gave up. Even at the end we still believed in victory.

  She looked them in the face and said: Do you believe in it now?

  Yes, Frau Kollwitz; we at least will keep our faith.

  She rushed upstairs to Karl’s office; the door was closed and a man was groaning. She needed Karl right then, but so be it. The last flight of stairs exhausted her. She unlocked the flat and went straight to Peter’s room.

  That was the night when she dreamed that the man in the tophat had come two steps closer, and two steps closer, until suddenly he turned into a drawing she did once, of a mother catching her dead soldier-boy as he tumbles gruesomely into her arms; it was early next morning, when she awoke in Karl’s arms, sobbing, that she realized that death had now become a friend; and there would be one famous self-portrait (catalogue number 157) where death kindly leads her away. (As the sleepwalker laughed to Colonel Hagen: Don’t you think there’s something Jewish about that?) Ruf des Todes, she entitled it. That hand descending in the fullness of time to touch the artist’s shoulder, whose was it? Not a skeleton’s but also not Peter’s. His hand was eternally frail and little to her now, just as he was no grown man but a beautiful naked little boy. The hand in Ruf des Todes was heavy and old; perhaps it was Karl’s; its touch was domestic; it called her to herself so that she, weary and not at all surprised, could go with its owner to lie down in peace. But even if the hand wasn’t Peter’s, it was Peter’s bed she lay down upon.

  11

  In that same year 1927, the fraternal peoples of the USSR prepared to celebrate the achievements of Soviet power. In spite of Trotsky, the kulaks and the bourgeois monopolists, we’d built socialist democracy! Specifically, the emiseration of the masses under capitalism, which our dear friend K. Kollwitz has depicted so powerfully in her graphic work, was forever vanished, like the prewar prostitutes of the Nevsky. Moreover, we’d carried out this feat of humanism without giving ground to the capitalist anaconda which encircled us. By 1927, we could show the world an unbroken and unbreakable chain of victories. This was the year when an airplane of our R-3 series accomplished the first Moscow-Tokyo-Moscow flight. On the musical front, Shostakovich had not yet been disgraced. Photographically and metallurgically we held our own; on the educational front, we’d nearly liquidated illiteracy.

  Therefore, to mark our Revolution’s tenth birthday, it was decided to invite nine hundred and forty-seven foreign delegates, among whom K. Kollwitz came quickly to mind:11 K. Kollwitz, who empathized so sincerely with the working class—the Kaiser had called her a gutter artist—K. Kollwitz, who had never joined the Party and whose presence in our land would thereby prove the broadmindedness of our goodwill; K. Kollwitz, whose grief-hued tableaux of worker-martyrs, by being set in Germany, showed the superiority of our own system—I myself especially admire her lithograph of a proletarian woman in profile (1903), whose tired old hands clasp one another uncertainly, and whose pale face bows submissively in the darkness; Kollwitz has done the hair in stipples rather than in lines, so that this worker resembles a shaved convict—K. Kollwitz, who offered good odds of dying before she could turn against us; she was sixty years old, tired, worried she was done.—Retrospection proves that we gambled well; in 1944, the second to last year of her life, with the sleepwalker’s war against us obviously lost, we find her writingher children, advising that little Arne be taught Russian: With the two countries bound to be so linked . . . so let him learn the language while there is still time. That same month she wrote: My only hope is in world socialism. (Needless to say, she also wrote: The desire, the unquenchable longing for death remains.—I shall close now, dear children. I thank you with all my heart.) In other words, she remained as reliable as our Polikarpov-Grigorovich I-5 biplane fighter of 1930 (two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour).

  So Dr. Kollwitz and his wife boarded the tramcar which carried them past a boarded up window in a four-storey flat, trees and birds, shadows near the river bridge; then came a flag battalion whose fourteen crimson banners spoke out against the big financiers who headed the Jewish hydra, and she thought she saw that man, that gaunt man who’d stood below her window grimacing under his tophat for all these years, but he wore a brown uniform now and his right arm touched the sky and he was shouting in ecstasy. Sounding its bell, the tram turned the corner, and before they even knew it they’d arrived at the Ostbahn Station. Leaning, hunched figures were begging on the steps; they could have crawled out of one of her etchings. Käthe gave them all the coins she had in her pockets, while Karl, smiling patiently and stroking his iron-grey beard, guarded the luggage.

  They had one valise each. They bought their tickets knowing that we’d reimburse them. Then they went upstairs to the platform. The train came. Their seats were reserved. They stowed their luggage and sat down. And the train began to move. She’d never forget that slow-departing troop train, Peter waving to her from the window. The Kaiser had called merrily to the departing troops: Back home when the leaves fall!

  A young girl with reddish-blonde bangs lowered the train window until she could rest her chin on it; she leaned, gazed, stretched and turned as fluidly as a newt. Karl adjusted the reading lamp for her. Käthe sat writing in her diary: And I must do the prints on Death. Must, must, must! She had always wanted to visit Russia.

  The German boy who’d shared their compartment on the train, his slender legs crossed as he plucked half-consciously at his long raven hair, read Hölderlin, with a flask of water wedged beneath his arm. He suddenly realized that this doctor’s wife was somebody important; but by then it was too late.—Well, well, we think that Hölderlin or Kollwitz is a “choice,” but what is culture but a historically determined form of social organization?

  The farther east they went, the colder it grew. By the time they crossed the border it was actually snowing.—It’s another world, said Karl.—Changing trains, waiting for their documents to be inspected, they arrived at the Byelorussian-Baltic Station three hours late, but a man in raspberry-colored boots was waiting for them on the platform. He led them into one of our black, flat-topped Russian automobiles whose chests sloped doubly down over the wheels, like the clasped mandibles of praying mantises; Karl helped her in, and although the car proceeded very slowly, on account of the ice, before they knew it, they found themselves exactly where they were supposed to be. The luggage got sent on to the hotel.

  Karl had been hoping to stretch his legs; he’d been looking forward to a promenade on the Tverskaia, but was told that there wasn’t time, on account of the delay with the train. He looked sadly across the street into the window of a pastry-shop. Now here stood the curator, shivering and waiting. Here stood the pretty interpreter, who had long dark hair. The man in raspberry-colored boots, who seemed much taken with some private joke, waved goodbye and rode away with the driver. Then Käthe and Karl had to check their overcoats. Käthe was feeling a bit dizzy; she didn’t know quite why; Karl had to help her out of her coat. She had longed so much to be here, and now she hardly even felt curious. And she worried about doing something wrong, of leaving something important in her coat pocket, or somehow offending these Russians although they seemed so jolly—this interpreter, for instance, who must be nervous, for she kept trying so fervently to be welcoming that Käthe couldn’t think. The interpreter’s name might have been Elena; Käthe couldn’t remember anything the way she used to. Karl would certainly remember it, but how could she ask him when the girl stood right here? Never mind. The curator was twittering and beckoning. This husband who used to bring her red roses in bed, who wept when he saw her completed work, and who used to examine Peter in the consulting room, then share with her his every worry about the boy’s fragility, what a fine man he was! He murmured sweetly in her ear: I’m completely proud of you, Käthe.—She took his hand.

  On the walls of the exhibition hall, her grief was alrea
dy in place, framed and captioned: woodcuts in the main gallery, lithographs on the left, important etchings on the right, drawings in the other gallery; this was perhaps not exactly the way she would have done it, but the nervously ecstatic curator, who kept biting her nails, gazed on her so worshipfully that she had to express total satisfaction with the organization, selection and illumination of Käthe Kollwitz’s uncountable roundeyed, upgazing children, pallid figures leaning on their hands, pale and grimy women whose faces were lit by exploitation’s arc lamp. They were all real people whose tragedies were tied as much to life itself as to anything else: Grete, whose insanity had a strong sexual component and who at thirty was married and remained a virgin; Anna, who’d experienced bleeding and pain from constant sexual intercourse and who had considered suicide; that old Proletariarfrau who’d stood grim and angry outside the morgue after those two hundred and forty-four Communists were shot. In the midst of other agony-angled, grief-distorted compositions, her woodcuts loomed largest, with their gaunt pseudo-realism.

  And here was an enlarged photoportrait of her from long ago. In her twenties she had strangely resembled Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who as it happened was only two years younger than she. Both women had the same intense eyes, the same lips clenched as if to hide their fullness. Käthe stared at her youthful self for a long time. For some reason, she knew not why, she dared not look at Karl.