Europe Central (150 page)

Authors: William Vollmann

Tags: #Germany - Social Life and Customs, #Soviet Union - Social Life and Customs, #General, #Literary, #Germany, #Historical, #War & Military, #Fiction, #Soviet Union

BOOK: Europe Central

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In a photograph in an East German retrospective catalogue, we see Karmen in Loyalist uniform, but hatless, standing happily amidst his colleagues, shouldering his camera as they shoulder their rifles, with sandbags and a doorway behind them. He is the happiest man in the picture; for him, Spain seems to be a lark. His colleagues in their berets will stay and die, or else at the war’s sad end flee into internment camps in France. But this cruel and ignorant interpretation of a brave man’s smile neglects two facts: First, while he was with them, he ran at least as great a risk as they; secondly, he believed, and rightly, that only by inflaming the world, for instance through the camera-propaganda of R. L. Karmen, could the Spanish cause hope to triumph.

How far should one go with the enemy? Zoya herself will tell you: Not one inch! But G. Vodyanischkaya, who played Zoya, was certainly willing to follow Arnshtam’s script; isn’t one of the qualities we most prize in an actress acquiescence? Several reels of Karmen’s private footage disappeared immediately after his death in 1978, but I have it on good authority that he persuaded two starlets to let him film them kissing; this footage he reviewed over and over late at night at the Studio of Documentary Films, trying to accept Elena for who she was. Long after they’d separated forever, he would experience occasional flashes of rage when he happened to see two women sitting alone at a table in a restaurant, gazing into each other’s eyes.

The New York Times
calls it
grimly gratifying
, but adds:
Except for an obvious partiality toward the Soviet prosecutors, the film might have been assembled by any competent craftsman among the Allies.

The Russian title,
Grenada, Grenada, Grenada Moya,
sounds even more like a love song.

In our Soviet Union, of course, one may only be apolitical in the most enthusiastic and even militant fashion. It’s said that on one occasion Vlasov, having just denounced the brutal, hypocritical murderousness of a certain article in
Pravda,
was interrupted by the visit of a Party apparatchik. Quickly he began to praise the selfsame article. When the guest had gone away at last, Vlasov’s wife, standing numbly in the kitchen doorway, said to him, “Andrei, can you really live like that?”

Here we might as well insert another allegory. The metal of the day was steel. Hitler and Mussolini had their Pact of Steel, “Stalin” is a quite literally steely pseudonym; all hearts riflemen smiled at Vlasov, smoking their mahorka cigarettes. Then they went and died for him. The arc-welder’s glare whenever a tank was hit became their own eternal flame. Nonetheless, our attack faltered and froze. were supposed to be hardened and armored. But it remains a sad fact that in our Soviet smelting plants we most often find steel being alloyed against corrosion by means of neither that utopian substance platinum nor even the perfectly adequate nickel; rather, manganese gets pressed into this role, because it’s abundant and cheap in the USSR. So it is also with our weapons and even our fighters . . .

Accounts of his fate vary. The reader is invited to select one element from each of the following pairs: a bullet or a noose; the Germans or the Russians.

Here we might note that in several accounts, Vlasov is said to have fallen into German hands in the company of a certain Maria Voronova, whose husband was being reeducated at the expense of the state, in a certain unknown location in Siberia. To make ends meet, she cooked for the Vlasov family. At Vlasov’s wife’s behest, Maria Voronova supposedly made her way to the Volkhov pocket. In a photograph commemorating their capture, the pair sit in a military vehicle whose machine-guns face the sky. Vlasov’s taut, exhausted face can be seen only in near-profile. His glasses have slipped halfway down his nose. In his hand he clutches a tapering object which might well be a German cartridge, Geco 7.65 millimeter. Maria Voronova, if indeed this pallid, kerchiefed young woman is she, has managed to retain some of her attractiveness. She sits at his side, almost smiling.

The Soviet claim, that he was found on the floor of a Studebaker truck, wrapped up in a roll of carpet “like a coward,” has not yet been verified.

According to certain émigré sources, whose provenance naturally excludes them from credibility, the accused was warned that he might be tortured to death if he didn’t cooperate. —“I know that, and I’m extremely afraid,” he is alleged to have replied. “But it would be even worse to have to vilify myself . . .”—The even more mendacious accusation that Vlasov and his cohorts were hanged with piano wire, a hook being inserted at the base of each skull, can be refuted with the simplest extract from the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Communist morality is the noblest and most just morality, for it expresses the interests and ideals of the whole of working mankind.”

He kept this promise as perfectly as all the others. On 1.2.43, which is to say the day after Field-Marshal Paulus’s surrender, Generals von Weichs, von Kleist and Busch all attained to the selfsame dignity. On 1.3.44, “Hitler’s fireman,” the brave General Model, got elevated in recognition of his defensive excellence, which bought us time to gas the Hungarian Jews. The truly final Field-Marshal was Schoerner (5.4.45), a man whose commendably hysterical brutality made him long to do to the defeatists of the German General Staff what he’d already done to Russian civilians; it seems more than befitting that he received his baton from the hands of our Führer himself.

As we read in Gottfried’s
Tristan
:
What harms love more than doubt and suspicion? . . . Yet it is far more remiss in a man to reduce doubt and surmise to certainty; since when he has gained his object and knows that his doubts are justified, the fact which he was at pains to track down becomes a grief surpassing all others.

Why couldn’t the human factor have been eliminated entirely? World War III, which I expect Germany to win, will be fought with robots. Then we can all hide in deep bunkers; we’ll be invulnerable. On the first afternoon of Operation Citadel, our Goliath radio-controlled explosion machines broke through at Maloarkhangelsk, but One Hundred-and-Twenty-ninth Soviet Armored Brigade defeated further penetrations. Does that fact invalidate our Goliaths? Not at all. It’s merely that we didn’t have enough of them.

Here once again let’s quote Count Hermann Keyserling’s
Das Spektrum Europas,
which never goes out of date:
Germany is the conscience of mankind . . . the mirror of the world.

Comrade Ulbricht had already proven helpful to us during the Spanish Civil War, when he’d prepared Trotskyite volunteers for liquidation. He declined to smile for R. L. Karmen’s cine-camera. From her own experience, Elena Konstantinovskaya knew exactly what he was and avoided him in terror. Comrade Leonhard remembers him as follows:
Being entirely innocent of theoretical ideas or personal feelings, to the best of my knowledge he never failed to carry out the directives transmitted to him by the Soviet authorities with ruthlessness and skill.
This was exactly the sort of person we wanted to run East Germany. Somewhat to our surprise, he survived the death of Stalin by pointing out that if he himself were purged, the criminals of 17.6.53 might be emboldened; and, after all, nothing must accrue to the advantage of these subversive elements. In 1969, A. A. Grechko, Marshal of the Soviet Union, who’d commanded the Soviet Union’s fraternal armed forces in Germany from 1953 through 1957, was overheard to say:
The old one isn’t worth much anymore.
And indeed, in 1971 Ulbricht was ousted by our new man, Comrade Honecker.

As the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
explains, “the Western Powers . . . increasingly sabotaged the work of the Allied Control Council, and in March, 1948, wrecked it completely.”

The last three notes of this, stressed, sudden and sinister, recall in equal measure the triple knuckle-taps through which Russians in public places warn one another of the appearance of a known police agent, and the three short blasts of the all-clear which in an ominous reversal of their customary meaning admonish good Germans to prepare themselves for a possible air raid.

In fact the word which predominates in “Lady Macbeth” even more than the languorously salivary
tselúy,
kiss me, is—
boredom.

Here we must footnote the dark elegance of “Babi Yar”’s poet, Yevtushenko, who often posed for photographs with his hand on his heart, while Shostakovich smiled beside him anxiously.

“I can testify that nobody I knew fought,” writes Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All they did was lie low. That was the most that people with a conscience could do—and even that required real courage.”

In fact, within a few years of Shostakovich’s death, the New York critics were deriding Cliburn for “superficiality.” His repertoire dwindled. In his tour of 1994 he played nothing but Rachmaninoff’s Third, and that first Tchaikovsky concerto which had brought him his freakish fame. (The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
however, which since the dissolution of the USSR can now never be superseded by a new edition, continues to praise his
spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.).
I am told that he opens every performance with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The finer detail of our Ortho-Mx projections is the result not only of a higher organized nervous sensibility and improved moral accutance, but, above all, of absolute technological superiority. The millions of colors and tonal zones which we Americans now enjoy look better than ever, thanks to the cooperation of private industry. Digital smoothing is now underway. Before the next war breaks out, we hope to entirely eliminate every intra-atomic space.

Guy Sajer,
The Forgotten Soldier,
trans. Lily Emmet (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 trans. of original 1967 French ed.), p. 71. The forgotten soldier was Alsatian, and he served with the Wehrmacht. He missed the sound of steel boots on cobblestones, a detail which I have pilfered for “Clean Hands.”

My own assessment of the man has much to do with the following remark in “Lost Victories” (p. 533): “I can only say that it was not granted to me—as one who had for several years past been engrossed in arduous duties at the front—to perceive Hitler’s real nature, or the moral deterioration of the régime, to the extent to which we can obviously do today. Rumors of the kind that circulated at home hardly penetrated to the front, perhaps least of all to ourselves.” I can accept this to an extent, but, as the Nuremberg Trial verdicts insisted, blindness at some point becomes culpability. Moreover, what does “moral deterioration” mean? Did he think the Third Reich to be moral at its inception? Did the mass murder of the Brownshirts and the opening of concentration camps at the very beginning not trouble him?

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Praise

VIEW FROM A RUINED ROMANIAN FORT