Field-Marshal von Manstein closes the first chapter of his memoir: From now on the weapons would speak. Soon we would break through the Stalin Line. We would take Leningrad at last. And when we did, von Manstein would be there! He’d raise his Field-Marshal’s baton to say Germany. At once there would come undying summer.
Some of us in that open cage in Vorkuta, with our caps always on and our footcloths and anything else we could find wrapped around our faces against the cold, so that we resembled Russian babushkas, well, to pass the time we used to talk about politics, almost never about love because that would have been too unbearable; it was almost as if we could already see those sleazy smiles on the faces of the Aryan girls we’d given our all for; now they were doing it with American soldiers just to get a little chocolate; when I got home and saw them flashing their teeth at the men who’d burned Dresden, I almost let them have it, I can tell you! As sad and sullen as most of us were at Vorkuta, the woman-crazy ones were the worst off. You can hum “Lili Marlene” like an idiot; you can fantasize about this lady or that until you’re as black in the face as a hanged partisan, but you’re still here and she’s still there, beyond the barbed wire; still, even in the Gulag you can advance a theory or an opinion, and precisely because opinions feel, to get right down to it, less real than they do back home, in the barracks or even on the march, why not make the most of them? Headlamps in the forward trench, I always say! You might as well be speeding in dusty convoys of exultation beyond the steppe-horizons, with that growl of tank treads comforting you all the way across the summer flatness; once you’ve heard that, you’ll never stop wanting more. In that frame of mind you can pleasurably debate a question—for instance: Was the Russian campaign aggressive or not? Von Manstein considers the Soviet troop dispositions to have been deployment against every contingency, which implies, at least as I see it, that Operation Barbarossa was arguably defensive. Moreover, he writes how on the very first day of the Russian campaign, the Soviet command showed its true face by killing and mutilating a German patrol. To me, that’s conclusive (especially since von Manstein said it), but in any event you can argue something like that, and polish your opinions until they’re as fixed and perfect as diamonds; you might as well, since you’re not going anywhere for years and years, if ever.
Right before the sleepwalker married Eva Braun and blew his brains out, he wrote his political testament, a copy of which my paraplegic friend Fritzi somehow got hold of last year. Good thing Fritzi was already denazified! Now, this document makes several statements which I can’t entirely support; for example, in my opinion the man was too hard on the Jews, not that they don’t need a firm hand. But what did impress me was that he’d made up his mind about everything—everything!—back when he was nothing but a hungry tramp in Vienna; in that testament, he insisted that he hadn’t altered his conclusions about a single matter in the decades since then. Then he looked around him and said (so I imagine): What are we Germans going to be now? A rabble of syphilitic raped girls and legless men!—So he pulled the trigger. That takes guts. Paulus didn’t have the courage to do it at Stalingrad. I would have done it in an eyeblink, if that would have made any difference for Germany. Now, that’s triumph of the will! So I do still respect him in a way, not least for the fact that he knew what he knew, whether it was true or not. (If only if he’d allowed Guderian’s mobile formations to do what Germans do best, instead of adopting that static defense which is more suitable to Slavs!) So why not pass the time deciding what you believed, then arguing for it, being true to it?
Even in those prison days, something in me was getting ready to feel a certain way, like a field-gun zeroing in on the target; I wanted to become something once and for all; strange to say, Vorkuta came back to me as I sat so comfortably at home, reading von Manstein; and they weren’t wasted years anymore; they were leading up to something. I wanted to clarify existence, if only for myself, to draw secret and perfect distinctions until my comprehension was a narrow spearhead. (Here’s a distinction for you, free of charge: Russians opt for a massive artillery barrage before an attack, while we Germans prefer to trust in our own blood.) It was happening line by line; and I still had hundreds of glorious pages before me, like the Russian steppes in summer ’42, stretching on perfectly golden and infinite like all our victories, our lost victories I should say; and as I read I kept notes on the progress of our assault divisions.
Don’t think I haven’t seen it alclass="underline" the national enthusiasm, the pride, the successes thrown away contrary to the will of Nature, the way our bigshots in their long grey coats used to lean backward and smile like sharks when some Polish dignitary or other would scuttle up to shake hands! In those days the sleepwalker could still dream of cracking Leningrad like a nut, making the Neva run backward, riding on the shoulders of the Bronze Horseman; while I for my part had all my teeth; my dreams swept east like silhouettes of German infantry marching up dusty summer roads. (For laughs we used to tune into Radio Leningrad, because all they broadcast was the ticking of a metronome.) Well, summer’s long gone. But I don’t care about that, for I’ve come to recognize something within my soul as titanic as the Big Dora gun which helped us reduce Sevastopol—yes, by now you’ll have guessed; I served under him; I’m a veteran of von Manstein’s Eleventh Army! And I hold the Iron Cross, First Class—no matter that the Americans have decreed that I can’t wear it. So I read on and on, knowing that I did somehow have a thousand more years ahead of me; and the lindens were shimmering outside the window and German workmen were rebuilding everything. We live not far away from the Landwehrkanal, which was our primary defensive line during the battle of Berlin (it’s also where that Jewish bitch Rosa Luxemburg got hers back in 1919). This is where our thirteen-year-old German boys came out in their black school uniforms to die in the struggle against Bolshevism. So much history all around me! And that day I really felt as if I were a part of it, I can tell you, sitting in my armchair finishing Lost Victories. Then I got to the part where von Manstein says that Hitler wasn’t bold enough to stake everything on success; and that thing that I’d been getting ready for so long to feel, I felt it now. And it was this: If only von Manstein had been our Führer… ‣