Europe Central by William Vollmann Page A

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.
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    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)
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    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.
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    Call me a Kirov made of bronze, burly in my worker’s jacket, broad, smiling and hatted. Elderly