Forgotten Land (18 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
The competition to design the new monument was won by two architects from Berlin, the brothers Walter and Johannes Krüger. The Krügers had already built a war memorial at Leer in East Friesland – a defensive circle of brick and stone enclosing a tall cross. The commemoration of Tannenberg was to be a much bigger affair, on a site of some forty acres; for it, the Krügers again used the concept of defence, designing a vast octagonal circle of red brick – the material of the castles and churches of the Teutonic Knights – whose enclosure could be a theatre or a stadium with room for thousands. Eight four-sided towers sixty feet high stood at intervals in the wall, again like fortresses, with small, slit-like windows. The design resembled another imperial German monument, at Castel del Monte in Apulia, also with eight towers, erected in 1240 to mark Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s southward expansion. The Krügers mentioned their debt to Stonehenge and the massive block-like look must have seemed elemental and prehistoric; other historical links were to the ziggurats of ancient Persia and to the pyramids of the Aztecs. Beneath the brick, much of the interior was concrete, shaped within the towers like giant artillery shells. Other contemporary touches were some fluorescent tube lighting and mosaics of soldiers
that resemble the work of the Italian futurists. Later, under National Socialism, came the introduction of totalitarian symbols, typically communist or fascist, like the stone soldiers outside the entrance to Hindenburg’s tomb where a slab of granite carved with the Field Marshal’s name was put above the portal.
that resemble the work of the Italian futurists. Later, under National Socialism, came the introduction of totalitarian symbols, typically communist or fascist, like the stone soldiers outside the entrance to Hindenburg’s tomb where a slab of granite carved with the Field Marshal’s name was put above the portal.
The building had a powerful sense of weight, of solid rootedness in the land, and was raised slightly so that visitors walked up to it, as if to a sacred site. The bricks must have resembled dark flames in the sun and yet have been almost black when the sky was overcast, as if they were alternately on fire or in a storm. Inside the towers, recesses held either regimental memorials or shrines to the unknown dead. Short passages led through rounded pre-gothic arches to soaring chambers. One chamber contained a semi-circle of busts of the Tannenberg commanders; others had staircases abutting from the walls with regimental standards hung along the edge; another was decorated with scenes from an imaginary soldier’s life – from leaving home to death in battle. The Tannenberg Memorial was a mixture of imagery – of war and religion, of the Teutonic Knights, of an undoubted victory, evoking not tranquillity but a sense of brooding threat. The stone eagles inside looked angry and alert; long slits or patterned small windows rationed the light; models of swords decorated a part of one outside wall. Much more than the commemoration of individual deaths, it was the German equivalent of the Lutyens monument at Thiepval to the missing of the Somme but at the same time political and bombastic: an unquiet place rather than one of peace and regret.
People were invited into the memorial, as if to intensify its power; two of the towers were at first used as youth hostels and another was filled with evocations of the distinctive East Prussian landscape and history. Originally the plan was for the centre of the courtyard to stay uncluttered to allow sizable gatherings. Eventually, however, a tall cross was put in its centre, a larger version of the simple cross the Krügers had built at Leer, and paid for by the local builder Gustav Leipski, whose firm built much of
the memorial. The Krügers had thought of imitating a design by Reginald Blomfield for the British cemeteries, of a stone cross embedded with a bronze sword. But the swords on the towers stood alone, unmixed with crosses. The architectural drawings included a rising sun, as if to indicate a new national consciousness. The monument had a clear message – of defensive purpose and past victory, reflecting Hindenburg’s claim that Germany had fought against aggression and his challenge to the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles, even to the acceptance of defeat.
the memorial. The Krügers had thought of imitating a design by Reginald Blomfield for the British cemeteries, of a stone cross embedded with a bronze sword. But the swords on the towers stood alone, unmixed with crosses. The architectural drawings included a rising sun, as if to indicate a new national consciousness. The monument had a clear message – of defensive purpose and past victory, reflecting Hindenburg’s claim that Germany had fought against aggression and his challenge to the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles, even to the acceptance of defeat.
Red-brick defiance: the Tannenberg Memorial.
By September 1927, the building was ready to be dedicated, although not quite complete, and Hindenburg, by now President of Germany, came on a symbolic journey. Avoiding the Polish territory of the Corridor – which he would have had to cross if he had come overland all the way – he travelled on a warship from Swinemünde to Königsberg and then by car through the
East Prussian landscape to Hohenstein, to the battlefield that had made his name: Tannenberg.
East Prussian landscape to Hohenstein, to the battlefield that had made his name: Tannenberg.
In Ypres, Reginald Blomfield’s New Menin Gate also stands for victory. It shades into individual tragedy in the lists of the dead, grouped into their regiments, but seems to wait for a victorious army to march through its high arch. To escape this, you walk up onto Vauban’s seventeenth-century ramparts – built when the French were campaigning in this part of Flanders – past a metal tablet engraved with some verses by Edmund Blunden, his poem ‘Can You Remember?’ written some sixteen years after the end of the Great War when comrades and the landscape could still loom shockingly through the fog of time:
Those mists are spiritual
And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
Of which I am sure;
And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
Of which I am sure;
Of which, at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.
Blunden wants to hold on to memory’s sharpest definition. War had been, he felt, in some ways ennobling (‘when will such kindness come again?’), yet so horrific and wasteful that he had been prepared to trust Hitler, a fellow veteran, who (Blunden thought) must be determined that it shouldn’t happen again.
The path leads up to the top of the city wall, where some leafless trees are no shelter from increasing rain and a track-suited
jogger splashes past. Now the town centre is on your right, with its precise reconstruction of towers, spires and gables; to the left the ground drops away towards the moat, a busy main road and newish buildings – Ypres’ modern life. Vauban’s fortifications now protect the old – and here, clear through fading drizzle, is a British cemetery: quite small with a tall cross above rows of smaller crosses on short grass as smooth as a cricket pitch. It’s overwhelming: an outpouring of collective memory, outside reason: first the pompous gate, then Blunden – the Kentish boy who hadn’t wanted to go – who brings back individual experience before you reach the buried dead.
jogger splashes past. Now the town centre is on your right, with its precise reconstruction of towers, spires and gables; to the left the ground drops away towards the moat, a busy main road and newish buildings – Ypres’ modern life. Vauban’s fortifications now protect the old – and here, clear through fading drizzle, is a British cemetery: quite small with a tall cross above rows of smaller crosses on short grass as smooth as a cricket pitch. It’s overwhelming: an outpouring of collective memory, outside reason: first the pompous gate, then Blunden – the Kentish boy who hadn’t wanted to go – who brings back individual experience before you reach the buried dead.
At Ypres, it’s still the victors’ story. You have to search for the field at Esen, where the Roggeveld cemetery was, where Karl and Käthe Kollwitz came in 1927 and 1932. The place is now enclosed by a wire fence beside a road near a shed and some silage covered in black sheeting, kept down with tyres. A pylon looms beyond gates that are tied up with blue binder twine – a rare flash of colour. The field looks derelict, as if the graves have only just been removed; scattered stones might be broken bits of headstone, the small rise in the centre perhaps a burial mound of some neolithic chief. Some fruit trees nearby, possible pre-1914 planting, suggest an orchard – against the flat Flemish landscape of grass, plough and coppices where troops could have hidden. A hill, a mountain for this part of Europe, rises in the distance.
This place was emptied of bodies after 1945 and the dead moved to Vladslo, a few miles away from Esen, where they lie under rows of stones, groups of crosses, darkening oaks and, on the edge, even darker rhododendrons. Vladslo is also quiet, and in flat country. The statues
The Grieving Parents
are near Peter’s grave – where he shares his stone with nineteen others, their dates of death ranging from September 1914 to September 1915. For him, the inscription reads, ‘Peter Kollwitz Musketier. 23:10:1914.’
The Grieving Parents
are near Peter’s grave – where he shares his stone with nineteen others, their dates of death ranging from September 1914 to September 1915. For him, the inscription reads, ‘Peter Kollwitz Musketier. 23:10:1914.’
Käthe Kollwitz is now a part of her country’s good past. The place where she lived for years with Karl, where Hans and Peter grew up, has been named after her – Kollwitzplatz, a pleasant nineteenth-century square in Berlin’s Prenzlauerberg. It has survived the bombs, the hideous post-war development and its years in the communist east to become a place of bohemian prosperity. The Italian coffee shops and Asian and European restaurants are full; the brewery that Peter’s room looked out on is now an arts centre; sensibly dishevelled mothers wheel babies around in buggies and a weekly market is impeccably organic and ‘fair-trade’. If someone is described as being ‘sehr Kollwitzplatz’ it means liberal, worried about the planet, pleasantly earnest, decent and (because of rising property prices) quite rich.
In the garden in the square’s centre, near a children’s play area and a grove of trees, is a black statue of the artist, the cast of a self-portrait. Käthe Kollwitz sits in a typically prehensile pose, bulky and hunched, resembling a nun in a shapeless habit, one hand holding what looks like a sculptor’s tool. Someone, in a gesture of freedom, has written on the statue, leaving a blue scrawl across her breast that says ‘Kranke Kollwitz’, sick Kollwitz.
It’s true that Peter’s death left her wounded for ever. There
were
distractions from mourning as Berlin became a centre of post-war turmoil and, rooted in Prenzlauerberg, with her husband’s medical practice and their surviving son Hans, she became caught up in the febrile atmosphere. Her poster designs of the 1920s for campaigns against war and hunger show an intensifying of emotion: hypnotized youth streaming to the front led by
the figure of Death in
The Volunteers
; the
Sacrifice
of a woman offering up her infant son; another woodcut of
The Parents
, this time clasped together in shared sorrow. For the religious imagery she went often, as before, to old masters like Holbein – his body of Christ in the grave – or to Michelangelo’s Pietà. Her work still reflected a puritan sense that art should never be obscure. She used woodcut and (more and more) lithography, which made her work cheap to buy.
were
distractions from mourning as Berlin became a centre of post-war turmoil and, rooted in Prenzlauerberg, with her husband’s medical practice and their surviving son Hans, she became caught up in the febrile atmosphere. Her poster designs of the 1920s for campaigns against war and hunger show an intensifying of emotion: hypnotized youth streaming to the front led by
the figure of Death in
The Volunteers
; the
Sacrifice
of a woman offering up her infant son; another woodcut of
The Parents
, this time clasped together in shared sorrow. For the religious imagery she went often, as before, to old masters like Holbein – his body of Christ in the grave – or to Michelangelo’s Pietà. Her work still reflected a puritan sense that art should never be obscure. She used woodcut and (more and more) lithography, which made her work cheap to buy.
She was growing old. In her youth, she thought, she might have been a revolutionary, but now she wanted change by evolution, without hatred. Her series
War
of 1922 – 23 reflects the suffering of mothers and children rather than battle, reminiscent of Goya’s scenes depicting what Spain had endured against Napoleon. The memorial woodcut of the corpse of the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht (murdered by the right-wing militia, the Freikorps) and the mourners reflects Holbein’s
Christ in the Sepulchre
. It was Liebknecht and his family and the mourners that she sympathized with rather than the revolution. For Käthe Kollwitz, the suffering individual was more important than abstract ideals – and she herself was in anguish. In April 1921 she wrote of depression, of a sense of uselessness as an artist and of difficulty in loving Karl and her family, although that same year she found a new reason to love – Hans’s newborn boy, her grandson, also called Peter.
War
of 1922 – 23 reflects the suffering of mothers and children rather than battle, reminiscent of Goya’s scenes depicting what Spain had endured against Napoleon. The memorial woodcut of the corpse of the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht (murdered by the right-wing militia, the Freikorps) and the mourners reflects Holbein’s
Christ in the Sepulchre
. It was Liebknecht and his family and the mourners that she sympathized with rather than the revolution. For Käthe Kollwitz, the suffering individual was more important than abstract ideals – and she herself was in anguish. In April 1921 she wrote of depression, of a sense of uselessness as an artist and of difficulty in loving Karl and her family, although that same year she found a new reason to love – Hans’s newborn boy, her grandson, also called Peter.
Not until January 1924 did Käthe Kollwitz return to what had once obsessed and comforted her – a memorial to her dead child. This was prompted – at least partly – by the fact that Peter, after the allocation of land for the dead, had reached his resting place, at Roggeveld cemetery. Her ideas had changed; she thought now of two reliefs on either side of the door to the cemetery with the inscription ‘Here lies the most beautiful German youth’ or ‘Here lies flowering youth’ – or two gigantic free-standing figures, like monoliths from the Egyptian temple at Abu Simbel. By October she was thinking of the free-standing mother and father, both kneeling, the mother looking out across the graves, her arms open
as if to embrace all her ‘sons’, the father with his hands clasped in his lap. A year later this had changed again, the mother kneeling but with hands crossed in a ‘loving position’ under her face, still looking at the graves, apparently happy in her love.
as if to embrace all her ‘sons’, the father with his hands clasped in his lap. A year later this had changed again, the mother kneeling but with hands crossed in a ‘loving position’ under her face, still looking at the graves, apparently happy in her love.
The work was interrupted in the summer of 1925 when her mother died. Käthe Kollwitz went with the ashes from Berlin to Königsberg, where they were buried in her father’s grave. About thirty people gathered in the churchyard – mostly relations and representatives of the Free Church. A hymn was sung – ‘Our Dead Live On’ – and Konrad, Käthe’s brother, spoke of what they had loved and learned not only from their mother but from her family, the Rupps, and from the Free Church. Käthe followed, saying that she had asked her mother if she believed another life was waiting after death and the old lady had answered, ‘It is enough.’ This was true, the daughter felt, when a life had been lived to the end, like that of her mother. They gave her, Käthe said, with feelings of honour, back to the earth. The words express pleasure in remembering the fulfilment that Peter had never known.
The memorial would embody grief and guilt and anger. By March 1926, the composition was still of two kneeling mourners. She felt uncertain about the position of the heads and hands, although she was sure that the piece should represent not only the sadness of their own son’s death but the loss of those buried alongside him. In June the Kollwitzes visited Peter’s remains in Flanders for the first time. She described the scene to her son Hans – the rows of graves, the low wooden crosses with the names of the dead on metal plaques, the cemetery among farmland, the silence broken by the larks. The only ornaments were a short pillar on a plinth without an inscription and a regimental memorial, also shaped like a pillar. His parents cut three small roses from a wild plant and put them beside Peter’s cross.
The land’s shape and an awkward entrance made it impossible to put the figures by the cemetery’s gate; a better place might be near the boundary hedge. Back in Berlin she thought about
this, still not certain, and had the idea of a stone on the ground in front of them, inscribed with ‘Here lies the most beautiful German youth’, perhaps beside the names of Peter and his dead comrades on another plinth. She changed the mother figure again, making the head bow lower, folding the arms over the breast in the shape of the cross bar of a Christian cross. Many attempts at women’s clothes disgusted her before she settled on an all-encompassing cloak, shapelessly self-denying. It reminded her of a letter she had written soon after Peter’s death to a friend to thank for the present of a shawl, saying that her son would no longer need it because he had been killed. The image seemed right; in March 1928, she wrote of the cloak of pain, of love and yearning that seemed to cover her when she worked, of the sense of a living Peter that made her cry. She had chosen Belgian granite for the statues. The German government would give her enough money to finish them.
this, still not certain, and had the idea of a stone on the ground in front of them, inscribed with ‘Here lies the most beautiful German youth’, perhaps beside the names of Peter and his dead comrades on another plinth. She changed the mother figure again, making the head bow lower, folding the arms over the breast in the shape of the cross bar of a Christian cross. Many attempts at women’s clothes disgusted her before she settled on an all-encompassing cloak, shapelessly self-denying. It reminded her of a letter she had written soon after Peter’s death to a friend to thank for the present of a shawl, saying that her son would no longer need it because he had been killed. The image seemed right; in March 1928, she wrote of the cloak of pain, of love and yearning that seemed to cover her when she worked, of the sense of a living Peter that made her cry. She had chosen Belgian granite for the statues. The German government would give her enough money to finish them.
In 1927 there was another interruption. Käthe Kollwitz’s fame as an artist of protest interested those in the Soviet Union who wished to have contacts in the west – and the Russians invited her to Moscow for an exhibition of her work. Photographs capture the apparently impassive artist, flanked by admirers, some dressed in the dark suits of Soviet officialdom. She grew tired, thought of Peter, felt admiration for what seemed to be the achievements of the revolution but also a detachment from all this because of the work waiting for her back in Berlin. By April 1928, the face of the mother-figure had become her own face: a stark portrait of an old, lined woman and just impersonal enough to represent universal mourning. The father, less obviously Karl, clean-shaven instead of bearded, gave her trouble. Early attempts seemed ‘soulless’, although technically adept; by October 1929, still dissatisfied, she had begun again. In the finished group, the father is not looking down, like the mother, but has his head pointing ahead, eyes open, his look glazed, painful but disconnected. His arms are crossed, his hands clutching them, as if to shrink the upper body or hold onto it, fearful of loss. To lose memory,
Käthe Kollwitz felt, would be another betrayal, like that of letting Peter go to his death in August 1914.
Käthe Kollwitz felt, would be another betrayal, like that of letting Peter go to his death in August 1914.
There was great interest when the statues went on show at the Berlin National Gallery in June 1932 and casts were simultaneously displayed in the old Crown Prince’s palace. During the Weimar years Käthe Kollwitz’s fame had grown. She became a professor at the Prussian Academy of Art and, although cautious about active political involvement, signed a public appeal in 1932, asking that the communists and Social Democrats should unite against fascist extremism in the forthcoming elections. Other signatories included Albert Einstein and the novelists Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig.
Later that summer, the pieces made the journey to Belgium, travelling by train through Cologne and Ostend, and were placed at Roggeveld. The work was overseen by the Kollwitzes and there’s a photograph of them in the cemetery, with the workmen and an architect from the German War Graves Commission on what must have been a cool day. Karl and Käthe wear raincoats, and she is in a hat, leaning against the plinth of the statue of the father. Karl has a solemn, puzzled look, stiff but calm; Käthe seems resigned, one hand drooping from the plinth where her arm rests, the other arm at her side. Karl’s hands are clasped in front of him, not so tightly as in the statue.
She found the cemetery changed since 1927. The ground had been levelled and planted up, covered with large wooden crosses, shielded by a higher wall. Perhaps it seemed a more orderly and official place, as if time was gradually smoothing away pain; it was to stop this that she had made the statues. Roses were in flower, some on Peter’s grave, and she had to admit that the mown lawns were beautiful. The Belgian workmen and the locals – former enemies of the Germans (Peter was killed by a Belgian) – were friendly, as in 1927. When the statues went up, she thought the father’s gaze from the strong, angular, almost square head was not wide enough; it should perhaps have taken in all the graves. The memorial still seems angry, not consoling – different
to any idea of worthwhile sacrifice, endless rest or the Glorious Dead: more a personal expression of pain and of the difficulty in sharing it. The separation of the mother and father, the distance between them, is a reminder, subconscious perhaps, of how Karl Kollwitz had tried to dissuade Peter from enlisting, while Käthe had persuaded him to let their son go.
to any idea of worthwhile sacrifice, endless rest or the Glorious Dead: more a personal expression of pain and of the difficulty in sharing it. The separation of the mother and father, the distance between them, is a reminder, subconscious perhaps, of how Karl Kollwitz had tried to dissuade Peter from enlisting, while Käthe had persuaded him to let their son go.
The most beautiful time was the last afternoon, when they were alone with the statues – when she stood in front of the woman, saw her own face, stroked the stone and cried. All seemed to be living, what she had wanted for so long. Karl, standing behind her, acknowledging that the piece was her suffering, perhaps also that she had been right to show them apart in their mourning, whispered, ‘Yes, yes’ – and they both, as Peter’s parents, felt now, in spite of the separated images, what only they could feel.
On their last day at Roggeveld, the Kollwitzes saw the first visitor – a young man on a bicycle who slowed down on seeing the statues from the road and came into the cemetery to look. She hoped it might become easier for people to get to the place. Buses took tours to the British, American and Belgian cemeteries but not yet to the German. The country around was full of the dead; although moved, her heart seemed to grow heavier at the sight of all the crosses on the graves and the symbols of remembrance. By the Yser Canal was the Flemish tower that had on four sides the inscription in four languages – an echo of one of her post-war lithographs – in English, French, German and Flemish – ‘Never Again War’. Käthe Kollwitz preferred the dark, unrelenting, gothic atmosphere of the German cemeteries to the open, bright feel and planted blooms of the British ones. ‘The war was not a pleasant affair,’ she thought. ‘It isn’t seemly to prettify with flowers the mass deaths of all these young men. A war cemetery ought to be sombre.’
Back in Berlin, in August 1932, she thought of the Christian imagery of her childhood, of those Königsberg days inspired by Grandfather Rupp, of Bach’s music to the text ‘O great love – love
without measure, that leads to you from this martyr’s way’. The statues were without texts from the Bible or scenes from Christ’s martyrdom, yet the crosses in Flanders – British, French, German, Belgian – seemed appropriate as a symbol of suffering, made more human by the absence of a representation of Christ. She was glad that someone had noticed the faintly humorous look on the mother’s face.
without measure, that leads to you from this martyr’s way’. The statues were without texts from the Bible or scenes from Christ’s martyrdom, yet the crosses in Flanders – British, French, German, Belgian – seemed appropriate as a symbol of suffering, made more human by the absence of a representation of Christ. She was glad that someone had noticed the faintly humorous look on the mother’s face.
Unlike the French, the Belgians had offered the Germans land for their dead after 1918, as if to echo the often-quoted words of Albert Schweitzer that the soldiers’ graves are the greatest preachers of peace. The brutalities of the Second World War and the Nazis tainted this reconciliation and when, in 1948, the leases at Roggeveld and elsewhere came to an end, the Belgian landowners wanted to reclaim some of the hundred and twenty sites. The Belgian and German governments agreed that the bodies were to be moved into four larger cemeteries and Roggeveld was among those that were given up. Peter Kollwitz went not too far, to his present resting place at Vladslo, where, in 1954, the statues were moved and the new cemetery landscaped. Käthe Kollwitz had wished for a sombre place, without prettiness or serenity. In autumn or winter, when the fallen oak leaves – the tree of Thor, god of war – drift over the gravestones like shifting memory, Vladslo feels desolate, with the two statues large enough above the grave of the artist’s son to spread their grief over all of this place’s dead.
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