Europe Central (11 page)

He was very sincere and very quick. She ended up liking him. He asked if she would be willing to pose right there on the station platform with her latest masterpiece, “Listening,” which had been drawn from life in our own Soviet Union, but she explained that it was already packed away. He smiled understandingly.

She asked him what he aimed to do with his life, and he said that he wanted to document the progress of the Communist Revolution here and throughout the world. He was considering attending the State School of Photography if he could find somebody to help him. He wanted to go into films.

Käthe nodded, leaning against Karl’s shoulder. All she wanted to do was take her seat on the train and rest. If she never answered another question again, except from her grandchildren, that would be so perfect! At the same time, she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to the young man. If she could only keep Karl from realizing how tired she was! Trying to rescue her, he would surely hurt the young man’s feelings.

Excuse me, my dear, she said to him, but could you kindly repeat your name? We elderly people find ourselves becoming a bit stupid, unfortunately.

Of course, Frau Kollwitz! My name is Karmen, Roman Lazarevich. Perhaps someday I’ll make a name for myself.

And where did you say you come from?

Odessa. This camera is actually my late father’s. It’s all he was able to leave me. The White Guards tortured him because he’d published a few articles in the Communist press. Later they released him, but he never recovered. He died quite young.

You poor, poor child, said Käthe, shaking her head. She hoped that her husband hadn’t heard. Karl, who’d lost his own father and mother early, was easily upset by such cases.

It’s a common story, unfortunately. Your expression is perfect; could you hold still for just a moment?

And the handsome young Karmen in his corduroy cap, smoothfaced, sighted through the camera, whose bellows were part way extended and locked in position by the steel X across the top; she saw that the metal lens board of the front standard was armored, and so was everything else.

(Shall I describe that perfect expression of hers? She conveyed an impression most of all of sad steadiness; not only did she no longer need any model but herself, but she’d turned into one of her own sculptures. Her eyes were not unlike Shostakovich’s in that grief seemed almost ready to explode out of them, like corpses flying into the air when a stray shell hits a mass grave.)

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.