Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Of course I was also practical. As Heidegger writes: The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. You’re too young to understand the spiritual nature of flight because rockets and planes are everywhere now; flying’s debased. When I was a boy, we’d all run out into the streets to watch our fire-red biplanes pass over us! Just take it from me: You’ll never understand.

  I don’t mind telling you that we cheered when that rocket-plane took off on its maiden voyage, rising up a ladder of speeding flames! Where did it go? That’s top secret, but we all saw it, everyone who mattered saw it as it sped over villages decked with flags and flowers; I’m reliably informed that it made a soft landing in the sand dunes of East Prussia. You’re probably sneering, but that was an achievement in those days, especially given the political limitations imposed by our adversaries; East Prussia might as well have been the moon, and yet we got there! I’ll never stop believing that this was a triumph for the human race.

  Before 1934 was half over, we had BMW jet propulsion power units in production. (By the sleepwalker’s orders we couldn’t say anything about those, of course; you’re the first person I’ve ever told.) I was there, and in uniform! By 1937 the Junkers company was also experimenting with jet propulsion; and I’ll never forget the maiden voyage of a certain immense steel bullet with shark-fins and German designs—swastika on the rudder, black cross on wings and fuselage—my heart glowed even more than the first time I heard the sirens of a Stukageschwader 77! When a rocket or anything at all rocketlike soars into the sky, there’s a beautiful inevitability to the experience. Gravity has been defeated, overruled, just like that! And how easy it’s turned out to be! With that rocket go all of us, rising toward our dreams, steel in motion, doing what we’ve been told all our lives we can’t do! And there it went, faster and faster, growing upward, steel fruit of a tree of flame, the flame clinging to earth for a long time, then rising behind the rocket, uprooting itself to go somewhere new, the steel bullet diminishing into a metal speck, then into nothingness; all we could see now was the flame; and then the flame entered a cloud and was gone. Even though the security situation didn’t permit us to talk about it, Germany saw it! We saw it in Swabia and we glimpsed it from the Ostmark; we tilted up our heads as we stood in crowds on Hermann Göringstrasse and we saw our dreams arise. Meanwhile, Professor Focke invented the world’s first helicopter.

  2

  In those days I dreamed of nothing but flight. Whenever I was with a woman, her arms around me reminded me of the inverted gull wings of the Ju-87. By the time that the BMW-003 project had begun in 1939, I’d seen it all. Have you seen it all? You most definitely haven’t unless you’ve seen the test flight or better still the combat flight of a Me-163B rocket-plane, which deserves its name because it’s powered by a genuine Walter rocket. (Walter was a friend of mine.) As with so many other things in life, you have at best five or six minutes in the air in this machine, due to the ferocious rate of fuel consumption; moreover, you need to jettison the undercarriage, which never makes for happy landings; but whether you come back or not, you can dictate your sensations and emotions to the world by laryngophone!

  We had T-Stoff and C-Stoff for fuel in those days; I knew it all. Unfortunately I never got to fly a rocket myself, but I stood so close to the action that it seemed to me I could have done it in my sleep: Press the black button so that the hydrazine hydrate and alcohol begin to marry the hydrogen peroxide, then press the red button, and experience the shriek of flame! In a twinkling you’ve risen past the Ack-Ack Tower; you’ll land on a secret runway in Dreamland, then continue on by armored car . . . Stay cool and brave—you’ll win an Iron Cross!

  3

  Rocket-flame is sacred, like a flower placed in the hands of a wounded German soldier. Rockets are sacred because their mission is to approach the ideal. And with each new generation, right up to the V-weapons and beyond, they become more themselves. Their slimness grows more elegant, their tapering payloads more aerodynamic. But now that the war’s over and they’re perfect, nobody cares. Isn’t that sad? That’s the reason why I prefer to dwell on maiden voyages. Our rockets were mere prototypes then; our test pilots took risks; nobody knew what might happen. When I go back in time to 1936, before the sleepwalker called Göring on the black telephone, I see squatter, cruder rockets traversing our German skies. That was when we reoccupied the Rhineland. In 1935 the rockets were even wider, almost rectangular. They burned alcohol mixed with liquid oxygen. In 1934, when we purged Röhm and those scum, our flying machines were essentially square in cross-section, and their double wings resembled metallized pages of sheet music. In 1933, when the sleepwalker took power, I happened to be a philosophy student in Freiburg. It was night. We stood in a circle outside the library, waiting. The command came. I was ready; I did my part. Liftoff! And so it rose and flew, gloriously propelled by human force; with indescribable joy I watched it spinning sharp-cornered like some strange new propeller device designed to cut the wires of enemy barrage balloons. I estimated its mass and velocity; I predicted its trajectory; I foresaw the duration of the flight down to the last second; I already knew the combustion temperatures involved. Just before it reached maximum altitude, it vanished for the merest eyeblink in the smoke that rose up all around us; next it entered the zone of pitiless light, first as a silhouette, then, once its descent had begun, it opened, revolving about its spinal axis with the print on its pages stark enough for me to read it, had I wanted to, all the way across the pyre—it was some Jew book, something about pacifism, I believe—and Professor Heidegger, now unanimously elected Rector since his Anglo-Bolshevik predecessor had resigned, was speaking to us, or shouting, I should say, his voice deep, exultant, and more certain than it had ever sounded in any lecture I’d ever heard; he was telling us all that this marked a new night for German culture; that the old must burn for the sake of the new. Beside me stood my classmate Edelgard, who would later be killed with both her children in a British bombing raid; and I got excited by the firelit rapture on her face; she was hurling books by the handful, and her hair was more beautiful than fire; so I grabbed the collected works of the Jew Freud and threw them right up into the sky; they reached their apogee just as the first book I’d launched swirled finally down to commit itself to the flames of German summer. ‣

  WHEN PARZIVAL KILLED THE RED KNIGHT

  ’Twas in olden times when eagles screamed . . .

  —First Helgi-Song (12th century)

  1

  When Parzival killed the Red Knight simply because he longed to wear his armor, the King felt sad and the court damsels wept; all the same, one couldn’t blame Parzival any more than one can the kitten who proudly slays his first robin redbreast. Action is what it is: scarlet feathers, red blood, grey guts and a stench. Cruel? Yes. Useless? Not at all. That’s how they learn.

  When a certain sleepwalker liquidated the Brownshirts, don’t think he didn’t have his reasons! All the same, his heartbeats rushed away like machine-gun bullets, thanks to the novelty. He was just beginning; he was still kittenish.

  The telephone rang.

  We have Röhm in custody, it said.

  Tell me.

  Yes, my Führer. We caught him in bed. With a man. They kissed each other goodbye.

  The kitten didn’t need to think; Parzival saw the red armor and knew in his bones what would make him happy, but the sleepwalker hesitated. Röhm had been his friend. Röhm had helped him—

  Well, no damsels were going to weep this time. He mounted the red horse; he slammed on his new armor, which was so red that it made one’s eyes red just to see it.

  2

  He derived himself as perfectly from legend as Parzival ever did. To prove it, let’s open his storybook.

  If we page through volume five of Meyers Lexikon we come in time to Hakenkreuz, illustrated with an ancient white pictograph in Sweden, a bronze shield (Nabel) with four curly arms each ending in a three-knobbed pommel; then a chandelie
r (Gewandspange) in swastika form, each arm spiraling inward to its candle-socket; then an old pot from Hannover with swastikas marching around its sides; a skeletonized bronze disk from Baden, with a swastika in the center, followed by a longish entry which ends with this quotation from Mein Kampf: And simultaneous with him stands the victory of the reified Idea, which has ever been, and ever shall be, anti-Semitic.

  Now for the full page galleries of black-and-white plates: ADOLF HITLER I and ADOLF HITLER II:—look! His father, his mother, his birthplace! Here he is with his comrades in the World War (there will never be another war); it’s a snapshot of soldiers in their uniforms and caps, all sprawled carelessly in front of trees; in the center of the front row, one man has his hands in his pockets, but he’s too relaxed; after all, romantic heroes must begin in star-crossed obscurity. So maybe Parzival’s the one on the far left, he seems lonelier, as befits that night-born man, foredoomed to sink a hoard of German fighters deep down below the sun; he already wears the moustache. On the next page, in ADOLF HITLER II, we see him going over city plans with Albert Speer; Berlin’s roads will now crack apart the whites and greens of our mapped German landscape! ADOLF HITLER II also depicts him receiving flowers from German girls in traditional dress; in ADOLF HITLER II he’s embracing a fellow Old Fighter, his head low and sideways against the man’s chest as he grips his shoulders.

  Do you want to know how modest he is? Although he’s already killed the Red Knight and his whole race screams for encores, although he’s Führer und Reichskanzler, although he’s Gründer und Führer der nat.-soz. Bewegung, he insists that the curtain fall after ADOLF HITLER I and ADOLF HITLER II. In comparison, GARTEN I doesn’t end with GARTEN II (a victory garden, so I recall); oh, no, GARTEN III joins the attack, which successfully terminates with GARTEN IV. And that’s nothing! GERMANEN I reaches all the way through GERMANEN VIII—a stretch nearly as vast as Operation Barbarossa itself!

  In volume eight, in the National Socialism entry, there he is again, full page and in color, glaring.

  3

  When Parzival killed the Red Knight, it happened to be 1934, a good year for Käthe Kollwitz’s “Death” series. I especially admire Leaf 1, Frau vertraut sich dem Tod an: A woman who resembles the artist is holding her child in against her skirts, stretching out her hand to entreat bony Death. But Death follows orders.

  In Leaf 4, Tod packt eine Frau, one of her most powerful compositions, the skeleton seems to be embracing a woman from behind, biting her in the back of the neck while she turns toward him screaming and the little child reaches up, trying to fight him off. Nor should we forget Tod hält Mädchen im Schoss (catalogue number 153): The child’s lip draws back as if in a sob as she sits in the lap of maternal Death whose face is black like a veiled Muslim woman’s; her face lies against Death’s dark head. Oh, and Tod greift in Kinderschar, ha, ha! The bony angel with black wings like a paratrooper and wasted flesh around its skeleton comes swooping down to grab wide-eyed, uncomprehending children, just as Skorzeny will seize Mussolini in 1943. By then, we’ll all have become characters in Parzival’s fairytale.14 We could have won the World War! Don’t you remember how our three-oh-fives blasted right through the French battery at Verdun? Unfortunately, the Jews got to us. That won’t happen again. On every canted, bird-inscribed Iron Cross we wear, the white bird will clutch the white bones of a swastika. We’ll become as hard and fundamental as skeletons. And Parzival’s most fundamental of all; his skeleton’s invulnerable, ceaselessly growing; his heart-pistons pound behind a bridge’s steel ribs.

  But this is still 1934, when a woman embraces Death and gazes on his dark face as lovers do, drawing his head close to hers. The title: Tod wird als Freund erkannt, death perceived as a friend.

  4

  When Parzival killed the Red Knight, he did it for white-armed Lina and for Freya and Elena, not to mention white-armed Lisca Malbran.

  In olden times, wars were waged by heroes who admired one another but found themselves forced by fate or blood revenge to do each other harm. In our time, we fought for hateful ogres against other ogres equally hateful. From a practical point of view, can’t it be argued that nothing has changed?

  Parzival killed the Red Knight for us. In our name, bloodstained tank treads will soon grind down the corn. Tod wird als Freund erkannt.

  Don’t shun the shock! Grind out more gold for him! He knows how to make it red.

  5

  What else was happening when Parzival killed the Red Knight? On the far side of Myrkvith Forest, where ogresses ride wolves and use snakes for reins, past Sun Fell and Snow Fell, in Sowjet-Russland, another Red Knight (I mean Kirov) fell to Russia’s Parzival, who attended the funeral, called for vengeance, and launched his Great Terror.

  It was a year after Erich von Manstein had been promoted to Colonel and a year before Friedrich Paulus would be promoted to Colonel. Captive black-smiths were forging us red-gold rings. German schoolboys began a new course of study: Knighthood. It was the year that Shostakovich’s future wife Irina was born. Our composer, two years married to Nina Varzar, was sleeping in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms when Irina came into the world. It was for Elena that he composed the romantic Opus 40. Meanwhile, Elena’s future husband, good, loyal Roman Karmen, made the film “Kirov.”

  Parzival killed the Red Knight and became King, all of us now hoping for good harvest years.

  6

  When Parzival killed Galogandres, the standard-bearer of King Clamidê, the attackers called the battle off. The long dark pipelike barrels of their antitank rifles couldn’t frighten him: Parzival had saved Queen Condwiramurs! On the next day, it’s true, he had to best King Clamidê in single combat, but, even though at the time it seemed difficult—so difficult, in fact, that the blood gushed from Parzival’s eyes—it ended correctly, with the sleepwalker’s arm rigidly parallel to the ground as he stood at the reviewing stand, Berlin, noon exactly, 7.6.39, and the returned Condor Legion striding past with their guns straight up. ‣

  OPUS 40

  There is nothing in you which fails to send a wave of joy and fierce passion inside me when I think of you. Lyalya, I love you so, I love you so, as nobody ever loved before. My love, my gold, my dearest, I love you so; I lay down my love before you.

  —Shostakovich to E. E. Konstantinovskaya (1934)

  1

  Each of Shostakovich’s symphonies I consider to be a multiply broken bridge, an archipelago of steel trailing off into the river. Opus 40, however, is a house with four rooms. In front, it’s true, there’s an ornate golden staircase ascending out of a snowy plain, then ending unconsummated in air. But Shostakovich always liked his jokes—oh, me!

  In those years he still resembled a boy. Sweetly gazing at the world through his round dark-framed spectacles, he captivated Elena Konstantinovskaya. That sliver of starched white shirt within his dark suit, she couldn’t wait to stroke it with her talented hands. He peered shyly down through half-closed eyes. Then he built Opus 40 for her and him to dwell in, and she led him inside.

  They were going to have an apartment with a dark passageway, then steps and halfsteps. They’d live there, deep below the piano keys in Moscow. Nina could stay in Leningrad.

  2

  It was 1934, the year of Y. Bilioch’s immortal elegy “Kirov,” with camerawork by R. L. Karmen. But Kirov wasn’t yet dead on the white night between May and June when Elena first held Shostakovich’s hand. The music festival had ended, and the pale boy, who was newly married, crossed his soft white wrists, gazing rapturously at her through his glasses. Elena, you’re the one for me, he said. Time for private English lessons! Before he’d even kissed her, his bass- and treble-glands had begun composing Opus 40, which prefigures his most beautiful fugues.

  3

  Her electric clitoris and the phrase electric clitoris were the first two aspects of her to be translated musically—a claim which the translator would have rejected, since right up until his Seventh Symphony he proudly disdained program mu
sic; but sometimes the critic’s exegesis is wiser than the composer’s, for the same reason that in recordings of Opus 40, Emanuel Ax plays the piano part better than Shostakovich; no one who has read the entire case file can deny that Elena Konstantinovskaya’s clitoris was electric and that its sweet vibrations sing forever in the cello melody which opens the first movement. The phrase or alias which derives from her clitoris gets expressed in the happy, comic, rocking-horse sexuality of the piano in the second movement, when our young Shostakovich looks self-deprecatingly down between his own shoulders (if you’ve ever drunk absinthe, you’ll understand what it’s like to be weighed down by the drug almost to paralysis, and at the same time to exist within an invisible ball of consciousness which hovers precisely halfway between your body and the ceiling); from an eminence which sparkles with dust-motes in the bedroom of that dacha in Luga, the second movement (allegro) gazes irreverently down upon its pale and awkwardly ecstatic father, whom I’d rather call a child; groaning for joy, the child is riding his hobbyhorse, Elena. His shoulderblades rise and fall as elaborately as the mechanical arms of a player piano; he’s copulating in a frenzy! This brief theme expresses a typical lover’s sentiment: Look how ridiculous I am compared to you! Joined to you, I make us both ridiculous! All the same, let’s, let’s, so to speak, do it, my darling little Elenochka, because you’re the one for me.