When the new wave of “repressions” began in 1928, the peasants, who worshiped her, sent her many letters begging her to save their families from dekulakization, exile and imprisonment. It was impossible even to answer them all. She said to herself: My personal reading of these words is irrelevant. The Revolution must be saved.—The rapture was gone. She no longer hoped to write in the Book of Life, or even to be Lenin’s copy-editor; all that remained to her was to read aloud whatever might be set before her. In 1936 we find her writing in support of Stalin’s show trials that many of her own former comrades-in-arms deserved to be shot like mad dogs (a stilted commonplace of the time). By then she’d become a sad, round-faced babushka, a good Kommunistka who stared slowly at the world. Sometimes it was whispered to her that Fanya Kaplan was still alive. She credulously gobbled such rumors, which were presented to her like offerings.
Superior in her destiny to the murdered murderess, she escaped even the show trials. The rumor that Stalin poisoned her need not be credited. She died of arterial sclerosis in 1939, and this seems to me a strangely appropriate disease for one whose vitality and spontaneity had been gradually clogged. Stalin was prominent among those who carried her funeral urn to its waiting niche in the Kremlin wall. ‣
MOBILIZATION
I have often observed in myself that my will has decided even before my thinking is over.
In the Kaiser’s time, iron crosses hung from the Brandenburg Gate, and there were processions of white horses and of Prussian officers whose immense brass buttons gleamed fiercely. (The Russians didn’t mind at first; the Tsar and the Kaiser were cousins.) After our spectacular adventures in France, we had begun to overcome the human fearfulness of death, and even (on certain very hot nights) to speak to each other of destiny. A man leaped up in the beerhall and cried out that this would be the year when our century finally began, fourteen years late; never mind those fourteen lost years because we had a thousand more ahead of us! And nobody laughed. Pretty soon we were all in the streets. The July breath of linden trees, the sheen of rivers, the Kaiser’s promises and the perfumed humidity rising up from between women’s breasts now dissolved one another into a supersaturated solution whose molecules swarmed apart, perched in the lindens, opened their wings, then, unable to remain alone beyond the saturation limit, rejoined the Kaiser’s newly crystalline slogans.
A generation before, the Iron Chancellor had observed: I’ve always found the word Europe on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name. And so the Kaiser, inaugurating a century of perfect honesty, divorced the word Europe. He said Germany. At once, Berlin’s department stores became as airy and multi-windowed as hothouses. The clockfaces which crowned them opened gilded hands to embrace a futurity of undying summer.
The Kaiser shouted: Germany! On the outer walls of the Zeughaus, stone helmets which had obediently overshadowed stone collars for nearly two centuries came alive. Within each helmet-darkness, drops of excited moisture strove to become eagles.
The winged figures on the bridges of Berlin are now mostly flown, for certain things went wrong in Europe, which was supposed to become Germany; indeed, the wrongnesses ripened into bombs, so our angels had to flee or go smash. But even now (I’m writing in the year 2002), Berlin remains the city of eagles; and in 1914, when everything began to happen, we were, if I may say so, graced to perfection by those kingly war-birds, who inspired us as much as they guarded us, sometimes disguising themselves as winged deities on columns—I’m thinking of the gilded Victory who still flexes her wings atop the Siegessäule’s triumphal phallus—sometimes protecting our dead, as does, for instance, the black eagle in gold upon the ancient pall of Anna Elisabeth Louise, the Margrave’s daughter.
In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine, then, how much life our faith could impart to stone effigies of eagles back in the Kaiser’s day, when belief really meant something! The Brandenburg Gate had not yet been time-scorched to the color of earth. None of the people in the old photographs were dead—not one! Berlin’s pale green willow trees bent over the water, craving to marry their own reflections and thereby complete eternity’s circle; several succeeded. On the bridges and columns, eagles shrieked. New atoms of humidity flew up to become eagles.
Here came our Kaiser, jaunty and true; he was sterner than a Bismarck statue in a crypt; his soul was a sarcophagus of gilded lizard-dragons and gaping faces eternally melded to black bronze. He came in uniform, with his Iron Cross and dark sash, emerging from a crypt-gate between pillars crowned by a pair of eagle-angels. He’d been communing with the white grave-effigy of Kaiser Friedrich III, the gilded bier of Friedrich I. He’d rested his ear against the marble and heard a voice groan: Germany.
Do you want to know more? Beneath that bier, the marble was cunningly tunneled through. That’s where it got secret; farther down, it got top secret. That was where the stone always sweated and the tunnels stopped forking; there was only one choice. The deep passage ended in a niche into whose wall a medallion had been set forever (which is to say, until 1945). Whose likeness did it carry? Whose could it have been, but his, the one who won the Pope’s kiss of peace even when all Europe stood against us, the one who sent our first iron tentacles into the Slavic East, the one who launched the Third Crusade? Oh, yes, it was Barbarossa’s round, cruelly birdlike face beneath that squat crown; he was bulging-eyed; he clutched floral spearheads; he glared at us all from within his heavy round money-disk. And so the Kaiser came down to him. He knelt and placed his ear against the face of Barbarossa, as we do with telephones. And Barbarossa sighed in a voice neither gravelly nor liquid: Germany.
The Kaiser rose up. Germany was on his lips now. Germany would come out.
Awaiting his words, we beerhall men got our hats ready to throw up in the air. We’d brought our martial-looking mothers, wives and children, all of whom were blank-eyed, tranquil and strong, the children protected by their mothers’ hands, the mothers guarded by the gilded profile of Friedrich I, which was in turn upheld by gruesome, menacing eagles.
Our Kaiser began to speak. Clenching his hand in the white glove, he said that like the bravely honest people that we were, we must honor our promise to the Austrians and punish the Serbs; that this meant war against England and France; that because Russia refused to disinterest herself in the Serbian question, the only correct thing was to declare war on Russia also.
Then the Kaiser shouted: Germany! and before we could even wave our hats, all the Medusa-faces which had glared somnolently on stone shields since the creation of Berlin, which was the creation of the world, woke up. They wanted war games and adventures. Soon our white-clad girls would be waving goodbye to troop trains.
On the Schlossbrücke, a winged goddess held a dying naked warrior above an eagle who was about to eat a snake. Their flesh was stone, but now the snake writhed, the warrior groaned, the goddess laughed, and the eagle shrieked! In the Berliner Dom, an immense white eagle, blocky and menacing, with a fan-tail, had masqueraded as an angel for centuries. Now it too began to scream, flapping its wings until all the picture postcards blew out of the little kiosk outside. The church’s stained-glass windows glowed yellow. Then the silver gunbarrels of the organ began to fire; gold and silver music-notes rained up into the air; and right beside me a pale little man, probably a tramp, with disheveled hair and a dark trapezoidal moustache, began to caper, smiling at the world with a sleepwalker’s eyes. He was the one who’d leaped up in the beerhall that time. He gripped my hand and cried: I saw them! I saw them come to life! It happened when the Kaiser said Germany…