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.
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.
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:
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 alclass="underline" 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.
12
Surprisingly, as late as 1939 they’ll allow her a tiny entry in