Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  I’ve always been of the opinion that had Paulus only been permitted to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops, we could have won the war, and I’ve proved it to quite a few people, even including one of the Russian guards at Vorkuta. Von Manstein really could have saved us all.

  Whenever I think about what happened to Germany, or my own miserable life, or the way my fourteen-year-old niece died, burned to death by the Americans in Dresden, I get so emotional that I start grinding my teeth, and then my wife tells all her friends: He’s in one of his moods again. She never cared for my brother the former engineer, who’s now imprisoned behind the wall of that so-called “German Democratic Republic,” repairing sewer mains for the Communists and earning almost nothing, my poor brother whom I’ll never see again (although he can still telephone me); he’s another victim of our former High Command’s deeply echeloned illusions. She says he didn’t welcome her into the family. As if that were the point! Well, I could go on and on. But von Manstein was going to take me out of my funk. Von Manstein was going to show me how it should have been done! And I knew from the very first page that he would stand up for the German Army, too. You see, another thing that really pisses me off is the way the whole world condemns “German militarism,” as if we hadn’t been fighting simply for enough living-space to survive! What would, say, the French have done if they’d lost the last war, and been forced to pay in blood, soil and money, year after year, while all the neighbors sharpened their knives and got ready to carve off another piece of France? They say we went too far in Poland. Well, the Poles would have annexed Germany all the way to Berlin if they could! Von Manstein makes exactly this point in his book, which I really do recommend. He exposes the aggressive power politics of the Poles. Anybody who reads him will never feel the same way about Poland; this I guarantee. To get right down to it, von Manstein knows what’s what! The victors may try as hard as they like to bury him, but that only makes me admire him all the more. As a great German said, the strong man is mightiest alone.

  Well, I hadn’t gotten very far in his book, really. I was only about halfway through the Polish campaign. But I could already tell that my faith in von Manstein wouldn’t be disappointed, because as soon as the starting gun went off he exploded that lying slander that we meant the Poles any harm; he said—let me find the page—aha, here is how he put it: When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army, this was, in military parlance, merely the aim that must be the basis of any big offensive operation. And how about all those so-called “atrocities” we committed in the process? (Anybody who complains that our army behaved, relatively speaking, incorrectly, ought to spend a few years in Vorkuta!) We brought matters to an end as quickly as we could. The capitulation of Poland, again in von Manstein’s words, in every way upheld the military honor of an enemy defeated after a gallant struggle. And that’s all any good German needs to say about it.

  So then what happened? Then those degenerate “Allies,” who hanged our leaders for aggressive conspiracy, declared war on us!—Well, we did our duty. My best friend Karl, who was with von Richthofen’s Eighth Flying Corps and who never in his life told a lie, wrote me in a letter that an eagle flew beside him, just outside the cockpit window, on every sortie against Sedan. I’m not a sentimentalist, but that anecdote does make a person think. Well, Karl got shot down over Stalingrad. He was bringing food and medicine to Sixth Army. Everything wasted! But he wouldn’t have wanted my pity. The point is that we followed the only correct line, and our policies remained as generous as they could have been under the circumstances.—Just as a burst or two of light machine-gun fire will usually clear a road of partisans, so von Manstein utters a line, and all objections get blasted away! For instance, as a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops, he writes, nothing happened to disturb our relations with the civil population during my six months in France. Von Manstein’s word is gold. If he says a thing is so, case closed. And yet they punish us for “crimes” against France! That’s why sometimes I wake up in the morning all hungover and thinking, what’s the use?

  My wife was angry again, this time because I’d clogged up the drain by shaving, so her indictment ran, but I bunkered myself down, because right after that part about military honor, Lost Victories became especially interesting. I’ve always had a taste for theoretical issues. In Vorkuta I used to ask the guards how it all would have turned out if Stalin had died instead of Roosevelt; that question cost me those two top front teeth. So you can imagine how excited I felt when von Manstein began to raise theoretical questions, too: What should Poland have done to avoid defeat? To me it’s a real exercise in open-mindedness to step into the enemy’s shoes just for an eyeblink, and then wiggle one’s toes a little, so to speak; it’s good preparation for next time. Yes, that’s the correct way to go about it. And von Manstein, needless to say, had the answer in his ammo clip: Poland should have abandoned the western territories to save her armies from encirclement, then waited for the Allies to come. (Of course, they wouldn’t have; they never did. What can you expect from those cowards? Look what Poland is now—a Russian satellite!) I wanted somebody on whom to try this out, but my son, who in the old days would have agreed with everything I said, hadn’t shown his face all day; I suppose he was as close as he could get to the Tiergarten, hoping to cadge cigarettes from American Negroes. Anyhow, what would he have cared? When I got back from Vorkuta, he looked at me as if I were a monster. My wife tried to smooth it over by claiming that he didn’t recognize me. Well, so what; the strong man is mightiest and all that. Next came the question I could really throw my soul into: What ought we have done to avoid defeat at Russia’s hands? Needless to say, I had this more or less worked out, but only in general terms. So pay good attention, I told myself, because this is Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein speaking! He’d make me see the arrows on the maps, the spearheads, the long dotted trails, the ingot-like rectangles of our Army Groups! I was back there now, rushing through all those new states which so came into being on practically every page of Lost Victories, with their Reich Commissars pre-assigned by our sleepwalker himself while the Wehrmacht continued forward, its operational area ideally to be (see, I really do understand the theory behind this) not much deeper than the front line itself, in order to avoid interference with our “Special Detachments” in the rear, and about those it’s better not to say anything, because they’re secret; what I’m trying to get across is that in Lost Victories Germany was on the march again, and the farther we went the stronger we got, until we were giants in a land of dreams. I’m a realist, but why can’t I visit the past, especially when it’s as sweet to me now as that smell of burned sugar that rose up when our bombers hit the Badayevskiy warehouses in Leningrad? About Leningrad von Manstein says (and I agree with him), that back in ’41 we could have taken the place if we’d just pushed a little harder, but the sleepwalker wouldn’t let us; he demanded Moscow at the same time, which is why he got neither. (In retrospect, he does seem to have been—let’s put it kindly—a bit starry-eyed.) We made another thrust in ’42, but just when we were getting somewhere, Vlasov’s Second Shock Army attacked us, then troops got diverted to the Caucasus; and no sooner had von Manstein straightened out that mess when Paulus got into trouble at Stalingrad! So, you see, it was just bad luck that we never got to roll into Leningrad. Burned sugar! I’ll never forget that delicious smell. It was as if all the confectioners in Russia were getting busy, baking us a victory cake as big as a mountain; the frosting was all ready; I’ve always liked caramelized sugar.

  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.

  2

  Some of us in that open cage in Vorkuta, with our caps always on and our footcloths and anythin
g 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.

  3

  Don’t think I haven’t seen it all: 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 . . . ‣

  THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD

  1

  Were this a movie, and in particular the sort of movie which makes people happy in wartime, it would have been set in the famous “white nights” of Leningrad, when Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Moreover, summer happens to be a season expressly reserved for Aryans, so this Russian story finds itself compelled to take place in winter, when the nights of Leningrad, like most days, are black, black, black! How about a compromise? We’ll tell our tale in grey.

  Once upon a time, when it was the twentieth century and my parents were still young, color had yet to enter the world. Light and darkness, black and white, sufficed my poor grandparents; by the time my parents were born, grey had been invented by I. G. Farbenindustrie. At first it didn’t seem good for anything except smudgy London fogs, but by the time the Blitz began it could express the smoke of burning cities quite nicely. Three days before the Führer broke off his monumental tank battle in Kursk, the U.S. War Department, having been apprised by a Zeiss defector that Hitler’s home movies were now being filmed in color, launched the top-secret Taos Project, in the course of which an ingenious boy scientist named Ansel Adams employed a hedgehog formation of photon-guns to fracture the firmament’s tonal scale into exactly ten zones, from the primeval black of Zone 0 to the perfect blank of Zone X. Contrast, cloud-cliff relationships, pearly-grey pine trees decked out with recesses of utter black, luminance and detail, mid-range gunmetal rivers banded by wakes of paler grey, these distinctions permitted our universe a greater number of adjustments than the earlier Gutenberg model had enjoyed; but it was not until Operation Polaroid that most citizens got to see colors for the very first time: primary colors in Phase One (we smile now, when we remember that until 1979, high summer foliage could only be yellow or blue); and then, once our American landscape had been suitably conditioned by the Adams Ray, the secondaries, the tertiaries, and finally the various infrared flavors which we enjoy so much in erotic situations. As I said, the Germans had stolen a march on us here, just as the Russians would in outer space; I cannot forbear to quote from the declassified OSS “appreciation” prepared by a certai
n Frank Voss, our on-the-spot U.S. operative whose real mission is to sniff around for secret weapons here in the ruins of the Führerbunker; this colorblind fellow who is now experiencing color for the very first time (indeed, the only time, since his final reel included capture, torture and liquidation in North Korea) writes that from the heap of steel cannisters in the well of rubble at the far end of a dank hall now guarded by no less than three Kalmuck machine-gunners (they were quite friendly, he reports, and also gave me the location of a Werewolf detachment which had created several nuisances in our sector) there comes a shining more pale than any Zone VII grey, which nonetheless partakes of Zone II’s dramatic inevitability; Frank Voss, who at one time was a divinity student, speculates that to the sentries, whose sophistication in his opinion leaves much to be desired (their ideology, he sadly writes, compels them to see in black and white), this indescribable light may be as sacred as the star on the pale forehead of their revolutionary cruiser Aurora.—Yes, indescribable!—Defeated, Frank Voss withdraws to safer grey metaphors; reports of the atomic glow over Hiroshima now seem similarly off the mark. Nonetheless, in this episode he wins our hearts almost as much as does that flickering silver eminence, Bing Crosby; indeed, had it not been for the Cold War, our tense young American would probably have received the Order of Kutuzov for bravery, because, without fear or hesitation, he outdoes the daring of his Kalmuck allies: namely, he unscrews the top of the biggest movie cannister! And instantly, for a radius of perhaps twenty feet, the corridor gets colorized not by “red,” “blue” or “yellow,” for which he would have lacked the words anyway, but by their muted opposites, because the Germans’ first experiments with color involved negative film. After following Frank Voss’s strangely moving attempts to describe these hues on the basis of their estimated wavelengths, we reach this (partially corrupted) transcript of an attempt to contact HQ: Deeply regret unable to evaluate the phenomenon. Doing all possible. Please confirm immediately on emergency link whether destruction of these objects is advised before Soviet experts arrive. Voss then tries more desperately than ever to describe the magenta blush imparted to the ceiling by several thousand almost identical eight-millimeter frames of Eva Braun’s lips, but here the report has been CENSORED: APPROX. 300 WORDS DELETED. Well, isn’t it better that way? Mystical testimony achieves its maximum propaganda value when it shades off into inchoateness or even darkness. Besides, the Germans never intended for color to be enjoyed by anyone except the elite, and the rest of Europe remained awfully grey in those days, her best Zone 0 being blackout paper, which in museums subject to the penetration of the Adams Ray appears to be a weak greenish-black at best, while her most reliable Zone X can be no paler than a Nazi officer’s corpse staring up at the sky. This is the reason why Ansel Adams himself, that true American, never visited Europe until 1974, by which time he’d been projected into his eighth decade of life; he’d calculated that lighting conditions over there would be practically impossible, that high values would be blocked, for beyond Omaha Beach the entire continent remained divided into only two crudely differentiated zones (in which Adams explicitly counted the pearl-grey midnights of Leningrad); but he had to go just the same. In Paris his elongated shadow already lacked even a blue component; and when he got to Arles, on a conveyance whose engineers had advanced far beyond the futuristic blockiness of any armored train, he found himself lightly charmed by the swift-passing landscape (leaden-black earth; silver-grey grass-hairs; the Académie Française was now fiercely debating the introduction of certain sepias and russets) but bored by its rural sameness and the evidence of tired antiquity and modern industrial landscapes. In a word, I confess to acute home-sickness.