Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  The tall, pallid puppet seated itself before him on a concrete shard. It plucked a dandelion. Then it drew a tall bottle of schnapps from its rucksack. Resheathing the bottle without sharing it, it rose, and remarked with wooden formality: Germany has collapsed sooner than I expected.

  But, my dear fellow, the Führer has promised that our “Wonder Weapons” will soon be ready . . .

  Forgive me, Wilfried Karlovich, but I . . . Anyhow, there’s no use in having it out with you. I don’t blame anyone. What is it that Heidi always says? The strongest survives.

  (He remembered the way home: the barbed wire, the sentry, then the horseshoe barricades and truncated pyramids of sandbags on Smolensk Street, followed by the door which couldn’t quite close, the pitch-dark, icy stairs, the inner door, and beyond that a desperation clotted into darkness which in turn had frozen into grief and sickness where his other wife, his integrity, lay waiting.)

  On 27.4.45, his comrade Zherebkhov urged him to flee to Spain by air, to work for the liberation movement in securer surroundings. Vlasov replied that he wished to share his soldiers’ fate.

  After that, we find him in the midst of the Prague Uprising, issuing his commands on a scarcely audible field telephone. On 8.5.45, as skeletonized buildings became lyres for flames to play upon, the Czech National Council sent an urgent appeal to Vlasov’s troops, begging them to turn against the Fascists, but when he tried to negotiate asylum after the war, the Czechs replied that they could guarantee nothing. That very same day, accepting the entreaties of his soldiers, he turned his attention to the Anglo-American zone. (She was whispering: And then come home to me, Andrei . . . ) On 11.5.45 he demanded to be judged by the International Tribunal, not by any Soviet court. The following day the Red Army broke into his sector. Hanging his cartridge belt from a wrecked girder, Vlasov summoned the spurious protection of an American convoy en route to Bavaria. His hopes resembled corpses frozen with outstretched hands upon a plain of dirty melting snow.

  38

  And so one more time Vlasov found himself compelled to disband his encircled army and advise his men to break out in small groups. Some were lucky enough to reach the Americans and surrender to them. Vlasov, of course, was not.34 His stations of the cross remained thoroughly in keeping with the times: first the bridge with a British sentry on one side, a Soviet guard on the other, then the crossroads at the edge of the forest where light tanks and searchlights trained their malice on the “Fascist chaff”; next the barbed-wire compound, followed by the first interrogation in the lamplit tent (NKVD men crowding in to regard him as if he were a crocodile); the first beating; the chain of prisons, each link eastward of the last; the inspections, tortures, questions; the stifling windowless compartments of Black Marias which lurched down war-cratered roads; the murmur of Moscow traffic; finally, the Lubyanka cells. The very first thing they’d taken away was his memory-token (Geco, 7.65 millimeter). Punching him in the teeth, they upraised that German shell in triumph—literal proof that he was a murdering Hitlerite! Vlasov wiped his bloody mouth. All he wanted now was to get through the formalities.

  A photograph of the Soviet military court in Moscow shows him to have become paler than ever after his year of “interrogation,” but unlike several of the other defendants whose nude heads bow abjectly, Vlasov stands defiant, his bony jaw clenched, his heavy spectacles (which will be removed on the day when all twelve men get hanged, heads nodding thoughtfully as they sway before the brick wall) occluding our understanding of his eyepits.35 Rubbing his bleached blank forehead, he was actually wondering whether some amalgam of planning and determination could save his colleagues. He thought not. Anyhow, he got distracted just then by the hostile testimony of his former commanding officer, K. A. Meretskov, who’d abandoned him (as he now believed) at Volkhov, and who’d never been able to give him any better talisman than that meaningless phrase local superiority.

  Meretskov looked rather well these days. In his evidence proffered to the court, he referred more than once to “the Fascist hireling Vlasov.” With a shadow of his old energy, the accused man smiled upon him, his glasses gleaming like a skull’s eye-sockets.

  The prosecutor demanded to know which of his fellow ghosts and shadows had first recruited him into the anti-Soviet conspiracy. Vlasov cleared his throat. He licked the stump of a newly broken tooth. Remembering how Comrade Stalin had once said to him: Speak the truth, like a Communist!, he accepted full responsibility for his actions.

  We might say that his mistake was cosmopolitanism, which the Great Soviet Encyclopedia defines as the bourgeois-reactionary ideology of so-called “world citizenship.” Cosmopolitanism pretends to be all-embracing. Really it’s but a front for the aggressively transnational surges of capital. Humanistic pacifism and utopianism are other masks of the same phenomenon—which of course differs utterly from proletarian internationalism.

  On 2 August 1946, Izvestiya announced that pursuant to Article 11 of our criminal code, the death sentence of the traitor A. A. Vlasov had been carried out. ‣

  THE LAST FIELD-MARSHAL

  That man should have shot himself . . . What hurts me most, personally, is that I promoted him to Field-Marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last Field-Marshal I shall appoint in this war.

  —Adolf Hitler (1943)

  1

  First Beethoven on the gramophone and then the battle array for Sixth Army; first a kiss on Coca’s snowy cheek and then a conference with von Reichenau, first Poland and then France; first Russia, then everything. In the postwar encomium of his colleague Guderian, he was the finest type of brilliantly clever, conscientious, hard-working, original, and talented General Staff officer, and it is impossible to doubt his pure-minded and lofty patriotism. The war with Russia was to last for six weeks. First summer, and then winter. The telephone rang again. First Operation Magic Fire, then Cases Otto, Green, White and Yellow, the black smoke of historical justice funneling up from shelled villages, German faces laughing through the diamond-window of a Polish castle; first Operation Sea Lion, which got tabled as a result of enemy superiority; then Operation Marita, completed and fulfilled by Operation Mercury, and finally the sheet of darkness spanned by a thick white X . He lit another cigarette. In the upper left quadrant of that blackness, midway between its corner and the absolute center of the X , there shone a white rectangle inscribed with these words in the old Fraktur lettering which sheltered like an aristocratic ghost in secret documents of the Officer Corps: Kriegsgliederung ”Barbarossa” and then in the blackness’s lower right a smaller rectangle housed the word B-Tag. The blackness also said Geheime Kommandosache, military secret, and the lower right quadrant of it was stamped: Top secret! For officers only!

  On 22.6.41, the first ten thousand shells of Operation Barbarossa fulfilled themselves in explosions as golden as the victory angel in Berlin who outstretches her hand high over Moltke’s statue. And now the groups, armies, divisions and battalions at the grey-shaded border of Hitler’s white map began the next lightning-war, whiteness seized, footprinted with ensigns, pennants, flags, circles and semicircles, the sleepwalker’s wide-rooted, tapering arrows pointing east . . .

  Lieutenant-General Friedrich Paulus was fifty-one years old. He had been a military man for the last thirty-one. In short, he was a member of the “Old Fighters.” Like our Führer, he’d served bravely in the previous world war, winning the Iron Cross, both first and second classes. He admired the way the Führer had recovered all the territories stripped away from us at the end of that conflict. Moreover, he was one of those handsome generals whom everybody needs; his moustache was as stylish as a German bayonet. Slightly attainted by cosmopolitanism (Coca was Romanian), Paulus nonetheless received increasingly important commands, since nobody could deny his loyal thoroughness: Chief of Staff of Panzer troops, then Fourth Army Chief of Staff in the Polish campaign (his progress on the white map curiously resembling one of those crude black spearpoints which our professors have une
arthed from medieval Poland), Sixth Army Chief of Staff during the conquest of France . . . This same Sixth Army would soon be on the march to Stalingrad. As First Quartermaster of the General Staff, under circumstances of extreme secrecy, he’d drafted the war-plan for Barbarossa. The railroad stop was Bahnhof Görlitz. Then came the nested checkpoints, and two-men escorted him into Wolf’s Lair with the isolated sub-perimeters of barbed wire within its saliented parallelogram. Here grew many trees between bunkers whose roofs had been camouflaged with artificial moss, and here wormed the shell-game tunnels in which we hid Wolf’s special train; in Wolf’s Lair everything was safe. Paulus accomplished much of his best work here. The ultimate objective, instructed our Führer, and everyone held his breath, is the cordoning off of Asiatic Russia along the general line Volga-Archangel. Requirements: Glycerine for cordite, coal gas for explosives, bauxite for aircraft parts . . . As slowly and perfectly as a silkworm spins, Paulus constructed our networks, schedules and dispositions. In the words of General Kesselring: He made a specially good impression on me by his levelheadedness and his sober estimate of the coming trial of strength. Coca was sad, of course. She’d never entirely overcome her leftist sympathies. Moreover, like most of her countrymen she held an exaggerated regard for Russian troops. Desiring to spare her any useless anxieties, her husband had encouraged her to believe that all movements east would cease at the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line; but even that had pained her; she’d considered Case White unjustified. At any rate, we’d neutralized the Polish threat; Case White was now closed. Our subsequent duty was to suspend operations, possibly for the next decade, during which time the French and the British weren’t supposed to declare war. Indeed, this was what he himself had been told by the High Command. Once we were faced with a full-scale European conflict, which necessarily unfolded into another world war, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line lost its validity. (The Führer had explained in confidence that Operation Barbarossa must be launched no later than the spring of 1941.) And Coca found out.

  Frequently he brought his work home in his briefcase, the alternative being to never come home at all, and on one occasion, his daughter Olga’s son, who at Coca’s wish was staying with them for three weeks while his parents wrapped up some business in Paris, had done the mischief; something about the boy reminded him of his son Ernst, who was actually twenty-three now and a soldier in Sixth Army; the boy’s twin brother Friedrich was also serving Germany, but in another unit. What exactly was it which brought Ernst to mind? He would have been stating the matter unkindly had he said that they were both weak, and it might not even have been weakness as much as that certain kind of grief which treasures up its own secrets. In fact, in our army it often happens that the most woebegone soldiers are the bravest, perhaps because death would release them from themselves. Hopefully the war would be over by the time Olga’s boy would be called up; he was very intelligent but delicate. Distressed about some misunderstanding or other with his comrades in the Hitler Youth (after all, this was a different branch), the child rushed into his study, which he had express instructions not to do, but since he was actually choking back tears, Paulus couldn’t find the heart to be strict with him. He remembered his own school days all too well. There on the beechwood table, unfortunately, lay four recent aerial reconnaissance photographs of Red Army concentrations, which he’d laid end to end, the comfortingly heavy, marvelously sharp Schneider loupe positioned on top of Minsk just then, with the lanyard trailing halfway across Belorussia; and although to civilian eyes any aerial view resembles any other, particularly when the topography is flat, and although the Soviet divisions had been identified only by Roman numbers, each photograph was most unfortunately emblazoned with the stamp of the Abteilung Fremde Luftwaffe Ost.—Ost! gasped the precocious boy. Grandfather, what’s there to worry about in the East?—With a gently reproving smile, Paulus told him to be silent.—You know that these topics are forbidden, Robert, and you also know the reason why they are forbidden. Isn’t that so? Now, what’s the reason?—Because—because we have enemies everywhere, Grandfather. That’s . . .—Exactly. Now what’s this I hear about Heinz and Pauli pulling a button off your uniform? You’re far too grown up to cry . . .—He’d assumed that Robert, who was ordinarily quite good about such things, would tell no one, not even his grandmother, whom he adored, and, come to think of it, it might not have been Robert’s fault at all that Coca discovered the secret, for on several occasions before and since he’d had large-scale maps of western Russia with him. As a rule, however, Coca didn’t enter his study uninvited. Moreover, when he didn’t actually need them, whatever secret papers he had to bring home were locked in his briefcase, and his briefcase was in the safe. Coca said nothing until Olga had come to take Robert away. Breathless and fidgety as always, Olga presented them with a case of Veuve Clicquot, his favorite, to reward them for taking care of Robert. He thought that excessive, but thanked her as graciously as he could. Peeping into his face, she said that an old French lady had given her a very good price; no doubt it had been to her advantage that she’d learned perfect French from her mother.—No doubt indeed, said her father, smiling.—She picked at her eyebrows and remarked that it was surprising how at home one felt in Paris nowadays; everything was becoming Germanized. Papa was a hero there to a lot of people, thanks to the part he’d played. Coca nodded mirthlessly; she wanted Olga to depart so that the quarrrel could begin; he understood that perfectly well, but Olga fortunately didn’t. Some shops had closed, of course, said Olga, and they’d melted down Victor Hugo’s statue for bullet-casings. Didn’t Mama think that was a pity? and Mama said that it was. It had been hot, a different sort of heat from Berlin’s, somehow, and Baroness Hoyningen-Huene, who unlike Mama was really starting to look her age, had complained about how difficult it was to open the windows at the chalet; by the way, had she made the correct decision in forbearing to buy Papa a replica of the double-headed Frankish battle-axe? Olga’s visits were ordinarily fun, not least because she’d always managed to keep herself just a little bit spoiled. And her father needed nothing more than to be amused right now, God knows; the left side of his mouth had already begun to smile as she dashed on: Count Zubov had encountered her on the Rue de Rivoli, quite by chance; he’d shown himself to be very impressed with her new dress, very impressed! Paulus could well imagine the poor Count, who was one of the most meekly polite noblemen ever raised, feeling himself obliged to praise Olga’s dress, which had been very expensive, ad infinitum, or until she was satisfied, whichever took longer.

  I suppose he insisted on inspecting every button, didn’t he?—

  Oh, Papa! cried darling Olga, with a little pout.

  It does look very nice on you, without a doubt.

  But Robert looked miserably at Coca, and Coca seemed to be holding back tears. He tried to convince himself that it was only because the boy would momentarily be going away. When they’d eaten up all of Coca’s little cakes, he rose to carry out Robert’s suitcase, although Olga protested that he was getting too famous and important to do that. The Baron, whose family name was von Kutzschenbach, and with whom Coca felt more at ease than he, had certainly bought Olga a splendid car, a Mercedes of the latest make. (Where was he this time? Olga hadn’t said.) The swastika pennant gazed out newly black-on-crimson from its nickel-plated holder. He stood admiring the car a little awkwardly until she and the boy came out. He wondered how well her husband was able to control her. It was not, strictly speaking, his place to worry about her anymore, but of course a father can never absolve himself of his responsibility. First he embraced her, then shook Robert’s hand; Coca kissed them both, and they drove away, rounding the corner rather too quickly in his opinion, although Olga was an excellent driver. After that, of course . . . One of the things he’d learned about his wife was that when she was unhappy or angry about something, she couldn’t help but express it; trying to persuade her into an exchange of views before she’d purged her feelings would have only made everything worse. It had alw
ays been very important for him to get on with Coca, not only because he hated personal confrontations; the real truth was that he sincerely loved his wife; and what hurt her made him miserable. Thus logic and affection together induced him to answer instead of merely scolding her, and he steadily said: That’s a matter for political decision, Coca. Anyhow, there are sufficient military grounds . . .

  But what will become of us all?

  What do you mean?

  Who’s going to live to see the end of this?

  Oh, he said, there’s quite a good chance that we’ll achieve victory this year.

  He personally considered the Middle Eastern theater to be far more important to the ultimate outcome. Only there could the British be defeated.

  Pulling on fresh white gloves, he bent over the desk and studied the snowy sheet of symbols: Lage 4.6.41.abds mit Feindbild, situation map with enemy dispositions. The summer maples, oaks and lindens rode Berlin like witches.

  2

  On 5.8.42, Lieutenant-General Paulus, now in command of Sixth Army, approached Stalingrad in obedience to the directives of Operation Blue, or Blau as I should say, for blue is merely any blue, but the German blau signifies to me a greyish blue like the Caspian Sea on an overcast day. The primary goal of Operation Blau was to seize Russia’s oil fields in the Caucasus. Stalingrad, the sleepwalker’s afterthought, could hardly yet be seen on the eastward horizon. The tanks droned on. August burned down upon the brown steppes.