A few minutes later, as Sergei boots up his laptop and starts a movie on YouTube, it really is the end of normality. “This is my favorite movie, Nebyvalshchina, from 1983, I’ve watched it twenty-three times. Once you’ve seen it, you know everything there is to know about mankind.”
Well then, it’s time to give it a good watch. The English title of the movie is Believe It or Not and the action takes place on a small farmstead: pigtailed women with long skirts, wooden huts, wheat fields, nineteenth century. The main characters are an idiot, a soldier, and an inventor. To begin with all the men on the farmstead are away at war. Except for the idiot, who looks a bit like a young Boris Johnson, who seizes the opportunity of lack of competition to get married. What follows is one of the saddest love scenes in the history of movies. A straw floor, both wearing long-sleeved pajamas; they gaze into emptiness, an embarrassed silence, a little peck on the cheek, he yawns, she smiles. Cut.
Enter the inventor. He looks like a barefooted Klaus Kinski in rags. With feverish fervor he empties the feathers from a cushion to attach them to a pair of wooden artificial wings. He attaches them to his arms and amid the jeering of the village youth, he Icaruses into the water from a ledge. Later he experiments with a hot-air balloon in the shape of a cow and a rocket made out of pickled gherkin fibers, powered by gunpowder. Both experiments go disastrously wrong.
The plot really starts to go haywire upon the appearance of the soldier, who looks like Chris Evans. A strange king with a high-pitched voice and a speech defect appears and puts on a gas mask because of the soldiers’ smelly socks whereupon all his courtiers, also wearing gas masks, begin fiercely fighting. A hole to Hell opens up in the floor and Boris, Klaus, and Chris tumble into it and find themselves in a wild orgy with a bunch of hot witches in a kind of banya steam room before the Devil drives them out. There then follows a failed attempt to reach Heaven via a dangling rope, a masked ball in the snow, and more fighting.
In the final scene the inventor, using supernatural powers, eventually manages to fly and the soldier invites people to his magic show. To the left, old men and women creep under the magic table and, after a blow of a hammer on an anvil, reappear to the right, skipping out as young children. It is, of course, just a trick, as the elderly people are later unveiled hidden beneath the tablecloth. The last to pass through is the idiot: on the other side, a naked child skips out, and under the table: nothing. The idiot is transformed; in his new body he runs off toward the horizon. The End.
A farming community populated by ambitious idiots wreaking nothing but chaos between Heaven and Hell and solving conflicts with beatings. Interesting view of mankind. But maybe in a place like Volgograd it’s not so easy to have a high opinion of one’s own species.
NOVEMBER 1942
THE WAY TO the angriest mother in the world is up two hundred steps, one for every day of the Battle of Stalingrad, and past the Hall of Military Glory, which is always guarded by two sentries on wooden podiums. For the ceremony of changing of the guards they march in a goose-step. Before a guard is relieved, sweat is wiped from his face by an officer, who then tucks the cloth he used into the guard’s side pocket. The circular hall displays the names of fallen soldiers and their ranks on mosaic stones hammered into the wall. In the middle of the hall there is a huge hand made of white concrete holding a torch, which has been burning continuously since before the sentries were born.
Outside, the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire comes from invisible speakers. The path leads past neatly trimmed lawns and heroes’ gravestones to the highest point on Mamayev Kurgan, the hill where the imposing statue The Motherland Calls stands: a tower-high avenging spirit with robes streaming out behind her, face contorted with anger, and mouth wide open. What a clamor it would make if a being this size really were to scream! The right arm waves a sword in the air, as long as the fuselage of a Boeing 737; the left arm is stretched out horizontally with an open hand—an order to her own troops to fight, or maybe also a reproachful gesture toward her enemies. The statue represents Russia in the fall of 1942 as German troops were advancing toward Stalingrad, and symbolizes the Red Army’s most important military triumph in the Great Patriotic War.
Including her sword, the concrete lady is 279 feet high. The Statue of Liberty in New York (151 feet) or Christ the Redeemer in Rio (98 feet) would seem like small children next to her; symbolically, of course, such a triumvirate would be nonsensical, as neither liberty nor Jesus enjoyed much favor with Stalin. “That’s pretty much the most impressive statue I’ve ever seen,” says David, who is exploring the city with me. Mamayev Kurgan, simply called “Height 102” on maps of the time, was the scene of some of the toughest fighting in the city and was covered in trenches, minefields, and barbed wire. The blood of more than thirty thousand dead soldiers seeped into the ground here.
We travel to the Stalingrad Museum in a quaint subway that looks like an old-fashioned streetcar. The museum is located directly adjacent to remnants of the brick walls of Grudinin’s Mill—the only building that was left untouched after the war, which has been preserved as a memorial, rather like the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima. In front of it, six children sculpted from light-colored stone are dancing on a fountain around a crocodile. I recognize them from one of the most famous photos of Stalingrad: it shows this sculpture, which had somehow miraculously survived the house-to-house fighting and destruction all around. Thanks to the replica erected here, everyone can snap a similar photo—children circling and jeering at a predator against a backdrop of ruins. All that is missing is the fire in the windows, the smoke, and the dust.
David is more interested in the tanks and artillery a few yards away. “Can you take a picture of me?” Yes, I can. David on an 88-mm flak gun, David on a T-34 tank, David on a 150-mm heavy howitzer 18. He finds it “awesome” and wonders why I’m not interested in posing for similar photos—especially as a German.
I don’t need them. In the attic of my grandpa’s house there are enough memories of Stalingrad, tidily stowed in a small tin box: one crumpled map of the city, scale 1:100,000; a soldier’s German–Russian dictionary; a translation of one of Stalin’s radio broadcasts; one Iron Cross, second class; one Iron Cross, first class; a General Assault Badge in silver; a wounded badge and notification that on November 9, 1942, he was transported from Stalingrad to a military hospital in Luxembourg suffering from infectious yellow fever (Hepatitis epidemica). He never explained how he got his medals. Up until his death in 1981 he never spoke of the war—maybe out of shame, maybe self-protection, maybe because he didn’t want to burden his offspring.
November 9, 1942. At that time everything was pointing to an imminent victory by the Germans, even though they were less well-equipped for the oncoming winter than their enemies. The Germans had already conquered large parts of the city, as shown by an expensive 3-D animation in one of the museum’s exhibition rooms. But fortunes turned ten days later with Operation Uranus: the Germans were surrounded; the Russians gained the upper hand and held on to their advantage until Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus capitulated in January 1943. It’s quite possible that yellow fever saved my grandpa’s life.
The museum displays weapons, uniforms, newspaper cuttings, bravery medals, and endless rows of black-and-white portraits of war heroes. A monotone voice from the audio guide explains the exhibits and relics. Particularly interesting is a “lithographic stone, which was prepared in advance by Hitler’s soldiers,” as the voice informs me. This was the printing plate for pamphlets only in Russian. The title on it reads: “STALINGRAD HAS FALLEN.” Proof of the degree of optimism of the German army, which was used to victory, upon arriving on the Volga. Hitler expected Stalingrad to fall within eight days; nobody in Germany thought that it might take months or that overwintering would be necessary.