Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  He didn’t seem at all bitter. There was something in him of Peter’s, of that mobilized idealism we all had in Germany during that first week (although old Reschke in the Café Monopol had probably got it right when he said to her: God be thanked that mobilization is happening; the suspense wouldn’t have been bearable anymore . . . )—when Peter joined the colors she’d thought him still a child; he was eighteen and a half; but his enthusiasm moved her almost to tears; as for Karl, he’d said: This noble young generation, we must work so that we can measure up to them.—That was at the beginning, of course, when even she had believed the Kaiser, and Peter still lived.

  How old were you when your father died?

  Fourteen, he replied with his quick smile. That was when the Poles took Kiev—

  He clicked the shutter; the magnesium powder flashed.

  Thank you, Frau Kollwitz. I’ll send you a copy. Well, this camera gave me my start, but I’m now becoming bored with still photography. I don’t think it represents the dynamism of our new age. Have you seen the Rodchenko exhibit?

  Yes, I have, she said politely. Comrade Alexandrov had arranged to take her. She had hated it.

  Well, those strange angles, those distortions, I love that! And he’s useful, too; he does billboards which catch people’s interest and educate them. Only I want to go farther! I want to animate everything! At the same time, it’s important to remain true to life, as you’ve always been. I won’t make escapist films; I’ll make documentaries.

  He now reminded her so much of Peter that she could hardly bear it; specifically, he reminded her of Peter in the last month of his life, smiling in his dark uniform with its column of big shiny buttons; he wore his new cap as often as he could and he kept gazing off into what he thought was the future.

  That sounds very admirable, said Käthe, smiling at him. And now I must board my train.

  May I please ask you for one bit of advice? said the young man.

  It’s time to go, said Karl.

  I’ll gladly help you, Roman Lazarevich. But only if you don’t cause me to miss my train!

  Where was Karl now? Oh, God be thanked, he’d gotten all the luggage on board . . .

  This young Roman Lazarevich flashed her one of his quick smiles and said to her: How terrible it must seem to be a mother who weeps over her dead child, and a man to see it and film it! At least that’s how I imagine it. I haven’t made any films yet, but I know that it’s going to be my task to seek out misery and hopefully to reveal its causes and solutions. So in a sense I want to become the next Käthe Kollwitz. I want to devote my life to women and dead children. But it seems wrong to use them for any purpose, even for the universal good.

  Karl, whose smallish eyes seemed ever in retreat behind his glasses, was back now and had slipped his arm around her. He murmured: You’re not obliged to answer that if you don’t wish it, Käthe.

  What should she have said? Should she have confessed that without ever asking she’d caught that gaunt man who grimaced under his tophat and imprisoned him forever in her Weavers’ Series? That was true, but how much more often she’d hunted down her own ancient, exhausted face!

  All at once she thought she was going to cry again. She would have hated that more than anything.

  She said: Roman Lazarevich, with me it’s very simple. The woman with the dead child is me, myself. And the child is also myself.

  14

  And so they came back through the arch-shaped door at number twenty-five Weissenbürgerstrasse. Peter’s room remained the same as it had been thirteen years ago, with his white bed made up just so, his framed silhouette on the wall, the glass panes closed on his cabinet of boyish curiosities; flowers in the vase, clothes on the hooks.

  A commentator notes that in the diaries one finds almost nothing about this journey, and even her son in Berlin, to whom she so often reported in such detail on all her trips, seems to have received only one letter from her. All the same, she must have been contented with her experience, because the following year, while the sleepwalker, wearing a business suit and a fancy hat, was giving another speech in Hamburg, striding back and forth in a frenzy, with a short riding-whip in his hand, Käthe finished chiseling out a woodcut of Elisabeth pregnant with Johannes and Maria pregnant with Jesus, took off her apron, sat down at the wide wooden table in the living room, then wrote Gorki: All that I saw in Russia I saw in the light of the Soviet star. Coming from a German, her next sentence now seems ironic, to say the least: And I have a longing to go again, deep into the land, to the Volga. Fourteen years later her grandson, who was also named Peter, would die there, drowned in an eddy of bullets and bombs near the great whirlpool called Stalingrad.

  She didn’t gaze out the window so much nowadays, so I can’t report whether or not she saw the man in the tophat parading up and down the cobblestones of Weissenbürgerstrasse with his fellow Brownshirts; perhaps, he’d died by then; the grocer’s apprentice was long in the grave. She was much too busy to take in the late summer light, let alone the mist on the Wannsee; she was too encumbered with honors. By the time the Great Depression stabbed her Republic in the back, they had promoted her to department head of the Prussian Academy of Arts. When Shostakovich’s Second Symphony premiered, she was making another dark woodcut, the mother’s face blurred like a shrouded mummy’s, the little one apparently dead; she called it “Sleeping with Child.”

  In 1931 her huge lithograph “We Protect the Soviet Union!” showed bitterly stern proletarian men locking arms with one determined proletarian woman; they were all in a line, walling away evil; coincidentally, they remind me of the rows of figures in Roman Karmen’s documentaries. Her creative work, which is devoted to the German proletariat and its liberation struggle, is one of the high points of European revolutionary realistic art.

  In the following year, while S. Korolev’s RP-1 rocket plane first flew through the Soviet sky and the sleepwalker summoned his lieutenants to headquarters at the Kaiserhof Hotel, demanding speechless obedience, she arrived at the cemetery where Peter was buried. It was July. She spent two days grieving alone, shrugging off Karl’s touch. (When after years of hesitation she finally decided to marry, her mother had promised her that she would never be without his love.) The cemetery looked more pleasant to her each time she saw it. The first time she had come, it had been walled in with barbed wire. A Belgian soldier helped her get in and led her to Peter’s grave. She had been grateful for his silence and his lack of surprise. Oh, but everything had seemed so dreary then! Now she was quite accustomed to it.

  Hans came on the twenty-fifth.—And in an instant the bullet struck him! she kept explaining over and over, while Hans stared at her, slowly shaking his head. Keim and the others put him in the trench, she said, because they thought he was only wounded when he was actually dead in that moment . . .

  That dull or guarded look, she could never be quite sure which, had came into Hans’s eyes during the war years; perhaps it was only when he was with her; it would have been natural for him to believe that she loved Peter best, simply because she’d never stop mourning him. For his sixteenth birthday she’d made Hans a bookplate of a blond and naked angel, whose genitals were neither overstated nor hidden in the American manner; and the angel stood on the edge of a white island, with his wings and fists raised as he gazed down into a grey sea, the whole scene illuminated by the riches of futurity, which, as it proved, Hans would be able to spend and his brother would not. Hadn’t she sensed that? She knew both their bodies so well; first Hans used to model for her, then Peter. And Karl used to worry about Peter’s lungs, his lack of weight. Well, poor Hans was going grey now.

  The figures were installed on the twenty-eighth, not at the grave itself, which would have been too small, but across from the cemetery’s entrance: the kneeling father, his arms folded rigidly inward as he stares straight ahead, or pretends to; really he’s gazing down into the earth, which is nowhere; his face is frozen; he bites back his grief.—Such is our life, she said
to Karl.—The mother for her part bows frankly forward and down; she seems about to pitch into the grave at any moment. Indeed, in the course of its placement this female figure began tipping forward in the mucky ground; the workmen had to correct the pedestal and then lower the mother back onto her vigil-stone a second time.—I’m not sure that the World Congress of Friends of the Soviet Union would have been interested in such details.

  All the same, that was the year of her second and more extensive Soviet exhibition, the one in Leningrad. Framed prints, one or two high, depending on size, wound round the walls of a rococco salon whose carved ceiling-flowers and molding-flowers the Revolution had not yet removed. Slender Otto Nagel put on his striped suit and went there for the opening; many Leningraders attended; in the photograph, eleventh from the left, I see a young girl with dark, dark hair; I think her name is Elena Konstantinovskaya. Two rows behind her, and not looking in her direction at all, because they hadn’t noticed each other yet, I definitely see D. D. Shostakovich; his new wife Nina is away at work.—But Käthe stayed home, which is to say at Peter’s grave, with yellow wooden crosses all around her.

  Then everything in Germany became black, white and red—the colors of the Third Reich.12 She thought of something that Professor Moholy-Nagy used to say: I don’t care to participate in this sort of optical event.

  15

  In the end, her art got supplanted in both zones. A grief-stricken mother holding her dead child is all very well, but perhaps a trifle too universal—or, as Comrade Stalin would say, incorrect. For how could our ends be served by implying that everybody, even the enemy herself, grieves over dead children?

  Better by far that famous poster of the Red Army woman with one hand on her hip, another on her bemedaled breast, standing sentry-straight before a bullet-pocked German wall, her red-starred cap at an angle to show off her hair (short, yet feminine) as she smiles into the sideways future! Thus runs the Russian view. On the other side we merely need to quote our Führer’s dictum that the Germans—this is essential—will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. ‣

  YOU HAVE SHUT THE DANUBE’S GATES

  At the very point when death becomes visible behind everything, it disrupts the imaginative process. The menace is more stimulating when you are not confronting it from close up.

  —Käthe Kollwitz (1932)

  1

  In our Soviet literature of today (nationalist in form, socialist in content), there is scant room for epics and suchlike old trash. However, the twelfth-century Song of Igor’s Campaign does contain a passage which I find relevant to my context. Addressing eight-minded Yaroslav of Galich, whom I myself couldn’t care less about, the anonymous bard sings:

  You reign high upon your throne of gold;

  you have locked closed Hungary’s mountains,

  bolting them with your iron troops;

  you have barred the King’s way;

  you have shut the Danube’s gates.

  It’s true; he had shut the Danube’s gates, and you know who I mean; you understand what the Danube stands for.

  The king he’d barred the way against was presently gazing down a long tree-lined gunbarrel whose steel was comprised of angled cobblestones; the rifle’s mouth gleamed gold; and through that gunbarrel roofed with trees came the Condor Legion straight ahead, bearing arms and standards as they marched like bullets through the gunbarrel’s mouth. It was their victory parade. —I wasn’t there. I was guarding the Danube’s gates.

  I did have observers in place by the swastika-buntinged Brandenburg Gate when the Condor Legion came marching through; that night the black telephone rang, and when I lifted the receiver, my Red Orchestra began to play me a song, not Shostakovich but Hindemith: closing my eyes, translating program music into pictures, I got to see it all: First came that trio of scowling young warriors in canted berets and shiny calf-length boots. The center man bore the standard, which was topped by an eagle and swastika. All three of them were decorated. At a discreet distance behind them strode the columns with their upraised rifles. Prestissimo, now! The Condor Legion came goose-stepping forward with bayonet-fixed rifles pointing straight up, passing a line of drummers in uniforms and steel helmets.

  2

  Call me a Kirov made of bronze, burly in my worker’s jacket, broad, smiling and hatted. Elderly women are susceptible to me. My duties are as tedious as Leningrad’s dogs, snow, horses. I wander amidst the booksellers on Nevsky Prospect, making sure that all’s well with our Danube’s gates. Yezhov rings me up on the big black telephone: Send me more little ballerinas! That’s not my job, but I’ll do it. My job’s everything long and low.

  Have you been to the neutral countries? Not I. To me there are no neutral countries. That’s why listening to foreign broadcasts in Leningrad will soon be a capital offense.

  I turned in my report on Operation Magic Fire and went home. Yezhov’s ballerinas were already whispering to me about Operation Barbarossa, but Case White hadn’t even been opened yet; we still had infinite time. The future doesn’t exist until it happens.

  I live alone, and that’s by choice. My one desire is to aggravate the contradictions of capitalist culture.—Are you stupid enough to believe that?—What I really like to do is listen to the Red Orchestra. And whenever they tell me to, I’ll drive over to listen in at Akhmatova’s. I’ll bet that Lidiya Chukovskaya’s over there again tonight. No one’s ever caught them doing it, but I know they’re both lesbians. If it were up to me, they’d both be shot.

  The humble secretary on his throne of gold had shut the Danube’s gates. I know what I know, so I didn’t argue. The Red Orchestra said that the King would sign a treaty with us first, so he didn’t have to fight a two-front war. Well, that would be logical.

  The King could never get through. We were safe. You-know-who would reign forever on his throne of gold.

  3

  Pyotr Alexeev, with whom I sometimes do wet work, told me a funny one yesterday. It seems that a herd of kolkhozniks with fresh manure on their shoes get to Moscow; you know; they’re shock workers; they’ve won the prize! Think of them as Rodchenko’s robotlike abstract paper cutouts painted with dark oil and mounted on circular wooden bases. The guide explains that they are now in the world capital of progress, abundance, freedom, you name it. Eventually one of the farmers comes up timidly and says: Comrade Leader, yesterday I walked all over the city and didn’t see any of those things! The guide has just the right answer. He replies: You should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers!

  That’s what I tell myself. He’s shut the Danube’s gates, so all’s well. It doesn’t feel that way to me, but I should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers. Unfortunately, my job is to walk around.

  Tukhachevsky informs Comrade Stalin that the next war will be fought with tanks. Very good—let’s experiment with tanks in Spain. Straightaway sixty of our tanks get captured by the Condor Legion, mostly with the assistance of Moors to whom the Fascists paid five hundred pesetas each. To this provocation, Comrade Stalin has an answer: Shoot Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky should have spent more time reading the newspapers. Then he would have known that tanks will never be any threat. And the Condor Legion goosesteps forward.

  I lift the big black telephone. All the better to listen in, my dears! Chukovskaya is saying, in that peculiarly arch tone she adopts whenever she’s trying to impress Akhmatova: The streets are so wet and gloomy now . . .

  I’m thinking: Lidiya Korneeva, you don’t know the half of it!

  Akhmatova says: One might say that Leningrad is particularly suited to catastrophes . . .

  I’m thinking to myself: What horseshit! It offends me that such a person ever got published.

  Akhmatova’s running on: That cold river, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, terrifying moon . . .

  Chukovskaya whispers: The black water with yellow flecks of light . . .

  Under the black water’s
where you deserve to be. That’s what I thought. Of course, nobody gives a shit about my opinions.

  4

  The Danube’s gates are safely frozen, just as the sleepwalker’s frozen with his left hand on his belt and his right arm up and out, the fingers slightly open, while facing him, Generalmajor Freiherr von Richthofen mirrors him, and the Condor Legion is frozen in its multiple goosestep, one leg up in the air, its hydra-faces grimacing; this is a sailor’s dance. ‣

  ELENA’S ROCKETS

  The children invented a game for themselves that involved hurling a stocking, which has been tightly packed with dust, through the air like a rocket, and as it falls it creates an entire cloud of dust. The youngsters play this game a lot, although it has been forbidden by the management.

  —Anonymous, Memorandum to Deputy Chairman of Moscow City Children’s Commission, re: Children’s Commune, Barybino (1936)

  1

  Even then there was something about Elena Konstantinovskaya which rendered her an object of obsessive desire. In the fantasies of Shostakovich, whom she was not to meet for several years yet, she occasionally resembled a certain Rodchenko angel whose long dress was a tipi-like construction of electric-blue slats; atop this triangle, which is to say right at her infinitesimally narrow waist, she outstretched pure white skeleton-arms which resembled picket fences; these blessed the world with their triangular golden hands. (For the sake of completeness I want to tell you that this particular angel also possessed a crimson scapula, not to mention a triangular crimson head whose only feature was a single strawlike white protrusion.) Elena might not have looked much like that to anyone but Shostakovich, and even to him only on certain days, when the music she inspired achieved its extreme limit of formalism. As has been written about the rocket scientist F. Zander, one of the tragedies of this outstanding intellect was that his engineering solutions, however mature, did not correspond to the technical possibilities of his time.