Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Roger, Wilco, A-OK! Our airlift idylls began.

  27

  Here came the Rosinenbombers, bearing powdered milk, butter and chocolate from our former enemies, the Anglo-American Jewish plutocrats; today it was clear that our differences had been mistaken, and we all should have united against the Slavs back before Stalingrad fell.

  Walls of flourbags, milkbags and sandbags rose in the warehouses! Then we really had to admit that the Amis were good.

  Berliners queued up for their turn at the barrel of American milk. Smiling, skinny old men who remembered quite well how to shout Heil Hitler! wrapped themselves up in all their clothes, sat on rubble and drank bowls of American soup. One-legged black marketeers offering butter by a ruined wall looked up, while around the perimeter of Tempelhof our Amis kept rolling slowly forward, riding atop their open tanks; they were ready to beat off any monsters who might come sneaking towards us from beneath the Iron Curtain.

  Another plane came through Dreamland, keeping our island vigilantly alive! (From the air, Berlin was an immense, intricately ridge-patterned butter-biscuit, whose inviting insets and arcs seemed to be made of hard white sugar; in fact it was all concrete.) More sweets flew to Tempelhof! Children ran to the summit of a hill of broken bricks, waving and waving to the American gods of chocolate.

  More body-shaped bags of powdered foodstuffs descended from the bellies of those C-54s, which landed at Tempelhof every ninety seconds. It was like a dream.

  We saved the black-aproned fishwives of the Markt-Halle; we allowed currency reforms to continue to incubate beneath the Reichsbank’s long square coast. We rescued the Kroll Opera House, where once upon a time the Enabling Act transformed our sleepwalker into absolute dictator. We preserved Tempelhof itself, where Käthe Kollwitz once took her son Peter to see the landing of the Wright Brothers’ “White Flame,” and the sleepwalker declared war on unemployment.

  Do you remember that famous photograph of children perched on rubble and broken steel beams, waving at one of the departing Rosinenbombers? Nowadays we call that disinformation. We pretend that it was for them, like the sparks which caught them on fire when they tried to run away from Dresden. In fact they were keeping Berlin supplied just for me. I was their hero again, because I kept getting executed. I alone possessed the talent to go East. If I’d only been able to neutralize Shostakovich, then Western civilization would be saved. But since I couldn’t, well, you know.

  Oh, yes, I hid from the Stasi and the NKVD in various fabulously ruined apartments, which narrowed into peaks as improbable as Gothic spires. It takes time to prove one’s unkillability. Sometimes I nightcrawled to the sign YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR, and then I did leave it, straight through the Iron Curtain! (Antifascist democratic state power leaked cloudy summer sunshine across the railroad ties. I could feel it, even though just then a rat came out.) I’d shot ELENKA so many times, it was only fair to let them shoot me a few more, too, as the working class demands. And it did, and they did. Sometimes I could hardly stay awake . . .

  One occasion, right before they liquidated me (it never even stung), GLASUNOW stood watching, and he shouted: West Berlin was never a part of the Federal Republic and will never belong to it!

  But we didn’t care what GLASUNOW said! We stuck it out until the Soviets capitulated. They withdrew their blockade in the spring of ’49. We had a party at the office. After that, the “economic miracle” occupied us; we went from one victory to another. All the same, the Iron Curtain was more adamantine than an old soldier-woman’s cheekbones. But we didn’t care about that. As Comrade Honecker foresaw, we were already planning a step by step takeover by West German monopolies. On 5.5.55, the Allied High Commission dissolved itself! West Germany, the true Germany, was now once more a sovereign state!

  28

  What about Shostakovich and Elena? I was now so numb to them that I might as well have been asleep! I’d lost her, so why admit her existence? I’d failed either to kill him or help him, so why face my shame? I’d found myself; they loved me at the office; I was a symbol of the superhuman. I never woke anymore; I mean, I never slept; and once I enjoyed a waking dream of a darkhaired woman, stark naked, who gazed at me with wide brown eyes, unsmilingly proud; her gaze reminded me of a customs inspector’s; I think she might have been Elena Konstantinovskaya, but if not, she was probably Elena Kruglikova. Closing my burning eyes, I heard breathing all around me; in retrospect, I must have been at a movie theater, watching an old print of “Airlift Idylls,” starring Lisca Malbran. She wore a snow-white sailor suit but she was actually a paratrooper; they flew her across the lines so that she could single-handedly save Stalingrad. She was a heroine and I was a hero—a national hero. Every time I received another bullet in the neck, I got another medal, posthumously of course. Oh, I was on the good list now! I rationalized that here in Berlin, the entire world’s railroad tracks begin and end in parallels, so I knew that I could get to him or her somehow, or else, they could get to me. The Iron Curtain had never stopped me. Moreover, on July 1961, Comrade Ulbricht announced at a press conference that no one has any intention of building a wall!

  And so on 13.8.61 Comrade Honecker proudly reported: At 0.00 hours the alert was given and the action got underway.

  29

  Stalinallee, eighty meters wide, had become Karl-Marx-Allee by then. The Wall elaborated itself around the Curtain by the week, until it was even huger than the statue of the Red Army man in Treptow Park. Before the apartments on Bernauer Strasse got sealed off, I still used to see people jump, first out of the first floor windows, then out of the second. Well, they stopped that. Hardly anyone could get across anymore. I remember how the twin stone lions crouched down on their broken Lion Bridge as if they were about to howl at the two stone lions on the other side; I remember the Wall passing in sight of the demolished Potsdam Station; I can’t forget anything; my mind’s as full of armor as the old Ordens Palace. And now that’s gone, just like the Iron Curtain. But in those days, well, you know!

  The Red Guillotine busily condemned people to death. Sometimes, when I wasn’t being executed myself, I used to watch the executions from one of the twin stone pillars which overlook Tempelhof’s circular runway. (I pretty much had my run of Berlin by then.) In Warsaw, a stone head and a stone hand lay separately in the dirt for years. Farther to the East, they still had everything: the straw palliasses in Soviet prisons, the many gold-framed icons on the Empress’s blue walls. But the Iron Curtain was shut; and the Wall, watched by long convoys of Ami jeeps with white stars and glaring headlights, killed ever more of its victims; watchdogs snarled in the death zone to defend inevitable upward development against the Teutonic Knights of NATO’s Operation Grey; President Kennedy called on the free world to be resolute; Adenauer sent his brotherly love to the East Germans who are still forced to dwell, separated from us, in thralldom and lawlessness. We call to them: you are part of us, and we belong to you. Hearing this, our truehearted West German women spontaneously presented him with a bouquet!

  I wouldn’t want you to disbelieve in happy endings, at least not on our side. We’d won the inestimable treaure of democracy: shabby West Berliners lining up to vote, and silver-white summer clouds over everything. The new-planted saplings on Unter den Linden grew taller by the hour. A girl stood on one leg, blew cigarette smoke at me through painted lips, tilted her head and winked. ‣

  THE RED GUILLOTINE

  More quickly than Moscow itself, one gets to know Berlin through Moscow.

  —Walter Benjamin (1927)

  1

  Once upon a time, although there might have been previous times, the first button glowed; then the telephone began to ring, straight from Europe Central. For the Red Guillotine, herself a member of the Zentralkomitee, and therefore aware of developments before the telephone told her, this was another moment to count up her triumphs and rejoice that her ideals grew more massive with the years. Outside, almost in sight of Berlin-West, our Thälmann Pioneers held hand
s in a circle, singing on a cobblestoned space which the Rubblefrauen had cleared of ruins. The Red Guillotine almost sang along. She’d been so happy in the Wandervogel when she was fourteen! The words had changed, but many tunes remained the same.

  The telephone said: Sentence confirmed for Nellis.

  Good, said the Red Guillotine, whom Comrade Sorgenicht has correctly eulogized as Hilde Benjamin, Communist personality, who personifies the unity of theory and practice. The so-called “West German” press describes her as a negroid woman with dark, evil eyes, the female incarnation of Roland Freisler. Defendants know to expect no mercy from this charming individual. Coming from such a source, this can safely be considered a compliment.

  The Great Soviet Encyclopedia neglects her in favor of that famous suicide-aesthete whom a weird chance made her brother-in-law. Nor has she been granted any monument in Comrade Honecker’s From My Life. These silences must not be misunderstood. Does the American Secret Service expose its most effective operatives for the sake of history books? The Red Guillotine remains one of our foremost zero hour activists, and in the era of this legend, most of which takes place between the constitutions of 1949 and 1968, we all saw her name if not her face. (Why not her face? We could never be certain that she wasn’t peering at us from behind the velvet curtains in the tiny windows of a Russian limousine.) I’m informed that she bore a physical resemblance both to Comrade N. K. Krupskaya, and also, as I said, to our fellow traveler K. Kollwitz, reproductions of whose sorrowful woodcuts we often show our Pioneers, in order to indoctrinate them with the appropriate class hatred. Kollwitz represented herself. The Red Guillotine represented all of us. It would be a pardonable error to conflate her with some Rodchenko-like profile of a woman made out of wire.

  2

  The tale is told that on that zero hour day when the victors mobilized our children to carry mirrors, typewriters and other booty out of our flats and to the trainyard where it could wait in the rain to go to Russia, the Red Guillotine strode into the office of the Soviet military commandant—not a place which most Germans visited lightly—and he received her, drunk and wearing four wristwatches.

  What you want, Frau? Frau no pretty; Frau get out!

  I speak Russian, she answered in that language.

  He looked astonished. She stood before him, waiting. Suddenly he peeled off a watch, thrust it at her, and said: Take it.

  Thank you, Herr Commandant.

  All Germans hate Russians. Do you hate Russians?

  No.

  I hate Germans.

  That’s the reality.

  Good. Drink with me.

  And she did.

  All right. Now what do you want?

  Then she confided to him her dream. She longed to apply to Germany the progressive legal science of our Eastern mother, the Soviet Union.

  3

  Go back to 1919, when K. Liebknecht and R. Luxemburg were murdered by rightwing elements. Helene Marie Hildegard Lange, aged seventeen, burst into tears, lost her appetite, and practically stopped speaking to anyone.—But, Hilde, what can one do against such people? demanded her mother. It’s not only dangerous to fight them; it’s useless.

  Frau Lange had much on her side: logic, experience, and, above all, love. But at the very moment when the girl had almost been convinced to “go on with her life,” she saw the memorial woodcut to Liebknecht, made by K. Kollwitz from drawings done at the morgue at the invitation of the family. The martyr’s head, thrown back upon the white nothingnesss of the paper, is runneled with the shadows of his final agony. Light shines on his chin and cheekbones. The bulletholes in his forehead have been pitiably concealed, or honored, by red flowers. The mouth’s final grimace is a downcurving semicircular groove. In the half-dozen sketches Kollwitz made, the face is nothing more than what it objectively was: dull, pale, inanimate. In fact, it may well be less. In the very first drawing the flowers have been omitted. Next comes the charcoal study, which retains detail but now, with the same motive and effect of a woman applying makeup, adds the moody smudginess of the medium to the corpse. Here the artist also introduces a line of mourning workers. Old women need more makeup than young; the dead need more still; so this eager-to-please K. Kollwitz next proceeds to an intaglio etching, darkening Liebknecht’s face to such an extent that the ear, eye-socket, cheekbone, hair and forehead are entirely gloomed over. The subsequent lithograph abstracts the scene into lines; the ink wash study, into brush-strokes; finally she settles on the woodcut, whose chisel-marks appear to dissect away every mourner’s face into underlying muscles and tendons; they’re all pale, sorrowing corpses in the darkness around the dead man’s face, a few more planes, crescents and angles of which have been restored to the light but which remain as in those first sketches a portrait of nothingness, now solidified into something akin to an ebony idol. What about the most prominent part of the image, the bier itself? It’s white nothingness—more exactly, it’s a long white mummy-shroud with a few straight ripples of blackness across its edges. In 1960, immediately following the premier of “Comrade Berlin,” there was a banquet in honor of the filmmaker, a certain R. L. Karmen, who in between nibbles of our excellent German cheese informed the Red Guillotine that this daring device of blankness in the Liebknecht memorial sheet had inspired him to something similar in his documentary on the opening of our first blast furnace at Krasnogorsk: he’d omitted the ceremony itself!—As for the Red Guillotine, what effect might Kollwitz’s graphic starkness have produced on her? (We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it’s not people’s art!) Speaking strictly as an aesthetic critic, not as Comrade Alexandrov, I’d have to reply that what this woodcut teaches us is simplification and abstraction.

  And so Fräulein Lange decided to study law at Heidelberg. Her mother asked why. She replied: I believe I will be able to help the victims of injustice.

  Please think better of this, darling. It’s one thing to go into law, and entirely another to—

  In a steely voice she said: They murdered Liebknecht and his daughter is going into law! That’s why I’m going into law.

  Her mother could do nothing with her.

  The legend informs us that she was one of the best students, and perhaps the best of all. She sometimes dreamed of a golden box which could not be opened. She was searching for the key. Someday she would find it, and then . . .

  She did piecework in a metal shop to earn her tuition. As the legend tells it, she was practically a member of the working class. Late one night, having finished at the lathe, she locked up and walked to her tram stop, arriving just as a beggar like a troll or kobold, whose few sodden hairs clung to his wrinkled skull, snatched away an old woman’s purse. Fräulein Lange looked on silently. Even then she had a reputation for impartiality.

  On 27.2.26 she married Comrade Georg Benjamin, a physician, whom the legend is quick to remind us was also Superintendent of Schools in Berlin-Wedding, a working-class quarter. In 11.27, finally understanding the maxim of Comrade Ulbricht that Social Democracy equals Social Fascism, she joined the only legitimate organization of the proletariat, the Communist Party. Two years later she took on the legal defense of our Red Help organization, to which K. Kollwitz also contributed with her poster-propaganda.

  Bourgeois historians, romantics and deviants prefer to remember Weimar Berlin as a concretion of the Princess Café’s private niches, where Georg’s brother Walter and Walter’s poet friend Heinle used to meet prostitutes. They commemorate the old men with canes and tophats at the Prussian Academy, last survivors of a dying class, who considered themselves entitled to “reward” Kollwitz’s achievements when objectively speaking they were nothing more than hypocritically rarefied imitations of the lesbians at Schwerinstrasse-13, who couldn’t stop dreaming about a certain Lina’s pretty knees! Well, let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.

  From our heroine’s point of view, Berlin was nothing
but one chamber after another of the Imperial Labor Court, where she became one of the fieriest accusers of the bourgeois state, inspired by the memory of Comrade Liebknecht. In those days her love for the future was impatient and angry, like the mother’s who brushes her child’s curls a trifle too hard, ignoring its screams, so that it will be perfect for school. She proved particularly uncompromising when she defended strikers against trumped-up charges of disturbing the peace. In the Fourth Criminal Senate, she battled year after year against the malignant Dr. Niedner. The more dissatisfied she became with the world around her, the more convincingly she dreamed. That is why she spoke out so effectively at Party rallies, always advising us to fight the capitalists without compromise; she taught us the slogan Release the proletarian prisoners! As Comrade Liebknecht had done, she called for the organs of the Prussian-German bourgeois state to be replaced by workers’ and soldiers’ councils, for the generals and aristocrats to face justice in revolutionary tribunals. Her mother had bad dreams now; she dreaded that Hilde might meet Comrade Liebknecht’s fate. Hilde stood ready. The legend informs us that in that period, Communist Hilde Benjamin was clear that her most important work was the realization of the Party’s decisions.

  In 9.30 she defended the worker whom the class-biased legal system of the Republic had seen fit to charge with murdering that Nazi provocateur Horst Wessel. (He had murdered Wessel, but that’s not the point.) The young attorney made a striking picture in the first row of wax-gleaming defendant’s benches in that elegant wood-paneled courtoom, for she was calm, thoughtful and even smiling. The defendant, whose eyes shone with desperation and whose collar was less than clean, whispered another of his anxieties into her ear. Frau Dr. Benjamin’s smile elongated slightly. Unkind observers might have described it as a smile of contempt.—Sit up straight, she said from the side of her mouth. Act like a human being. Look the enemy in the face.