476 “There were tears in the men’s eyes . . .” —Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 4.
476 Situation of Chuikov in March 1943—After Richard Woff, in Shukman, p. 72; John Erickson (“Malinovsky”), in the same work, p. 120; John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 2 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 45-64; Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 29, p. 195, which also gives information on Chuikov’s various decorations.
477 The trembling of Paulus’s hand when he lit a cigarette—Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, orig. p. 32; Hau-Bigelow, p. 5.
477 Karmen’s simile of the waterfall—After the same document, pp. 32-33, Hau-Bigelow, p. 5.
477 Soviet gratitude for Lend-Lease items—I quote the Great Soviet Encyclopedia’s entry on this program: “The deliveries made under lend-lease spurred US production during the war and promoted the enrichment of the monopolies at the expense of the government.”
478 Karmen on remembering everything—After Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, p. 36, Hau-Bigelow, p. 7 (“Again the ruins of Berlin flash by . . . And again I try not to forget, as I [tried] two years earlier in Stalingrad, not the smallest, not a single detail of this historic event”).
479 “Dziga Vertov’s seven-reel declaration of love for the women of our Soviet military forces”—Made in 1938, but not widely distributed since by then this filmmaker was getting isolated for his “formalism.” As the saying goes, he died in obscurity. I wish I had found time to add a story about the rat-infested basement where the young Dziga Vertov edited Kino-Pravda, or the strange coincidence by which his “Three Songs of Lenin” was so well received by the Italian Fascists that it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1935.
479 Karmen’s aerial bombing mission—After Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, pp. 24-28, Hau-Bigelow, pp. 2-4.
480 Photographs of Soviet prisons from the outside (mentioned occasionally in “The Second Front” and “Opus 110”)—Lubarsky, pp. 14-19.
481 Käthe Kollwitz: “I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production” —Diary and Letters, p. 23 (autobiography).
483 Comrade Stalin: “Feelings are women’s concern”—Enzo Biagi, Svetlana: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Timothy Wilson (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), p. 25.
483 Karmen’s visit to Stalin’s dacha—Ibid, p. 19. According to this source, he and Simonov were present when Svetlana met her great love, the married filmmaker A. J. Kapler, who got sent away for five years for his pains.
484 “Their only reason for invading France at that late date was to deny us total victory in Germany”—An actual Communist argument. See Andeas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1985), p. 449.
484 Red Army’s rape of German women: “an incendiary shell usually brought them out of their cellars.”—Information from Clark, p. 417.
OPERATION CITADEL
485 First epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 383.
485 Second epigraph—Billinger, pp. 140-41.
486 Von Manstein: “Grave as the loss of Sixth Army certainly is . . .”—Von Manstein, pp. 289-90, slightly altered.
486 Statistics on troop and mine dispositions at Kursk—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 14, p. 134 (entry on the Battle of Kursk). This engagement is generally considered to have lasted two weeks. Soviet sources, however, concatenate it with other battles, so that it runs fifty days—all the more monumental.
486 Rüdiger’s admiration for Lisca Malbran in “Young Heart”—An anachronism. This film cleared the censorship in mid-September 1944 and premiered at the end of November. The Battle of Kursk had taken place in the summer of 1943. “Young Heart” disappeared rapidly because in its second month it had earned only 372 Reichsmarks, ten percent less than the authorities required. It was an E-film (“Erste Grundhaltung latente polit. Funktion”), in other words a “serious” drama with appropriate political nudges. H-films were comic with political nudges. There were also nP-films and P-films (non-political and manifestly political). After Stalingrad, E-films were preferred over H-films, “on account of the seriousness and greatness of our times”. Unlike many films, especially P-films, “Young Heart” received no subsidy. Information from Dr. Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistiche Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Drittes Reiches (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1969), summarized for WTV by the delicious Yolande Korb. “Young Heart” must have been dreadful.
487 Various details relative to the weaponry of the two sides at Kursk, especially regarding the numbers and capabilities of Tiger tanks—David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
487 Some of my visual descriptions of German troops in this operation are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive.
488 Dancwart’s favorite proverb: “Keep riding until daybreak”—Nibelungenlied, p. 202 (“We cannot bivouc,” answered bold Dancwart. “You must all keep riding until daybreak.”)
489 The size of the salient: half the size of England—Erickson, The Road to Berlin, p. 64.
489 Ninth Panzer Division’s experiences at Kursk—Based in part on Haupt, 173-74 (battle diary of Ninth Panzer, Panzer-Grenadier Grosssdeutschland, 6 June 1943, Citadel/ Orel).
490 Ninth Panzer Division’s armor strength at Kursk—Glantz and House, p. 349.
490 Twenty-first Panzer Brigade’s armor strength at Kursk—Ibid., p. 284.
490 “Well, from the very beginning we’d known that it was no use; it was up to us as frontline soldiers simply to obey orders and bear the responsibility”—After Hans von Luck, Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck (New York: Random House / Dell, 1989 repr. of undated Praeger ed.), p. 238 (original reads, in another context: “It sounded to us rather too pathetic, but what was the use? We knew that from now on it was up to us, as frontline soldiers, to bear the responsibility and make the decisions”).
490 Emblems of Panzer divisions, 1941-42—Haupt, p, 178. When I write that “we disguised the X of our divisional emblem with a V overhung by a horizontal bar,” I am actually describing the disguise of Fifth Panzer.
490 Number of Tiger tanks assigned to Ninth Army at Kursk—Nik Cornish, Images of Kursk: History’s Greatest Tank Battle, July 1943 (London: Brown Partworks Ltd. / Brassey’s, Inc., 2002), p. 135.
493 Sergeant Gunther: “Slavs drink from the skulls of their enemies”—Loosely based on Tsvetaeva, p. 114 (“Bus,” 1934-35: “Inside me, warmth and birdsong./You could drink both of them from/the two halves of my skull/[Slavs did that with enemies]”).
493 Volker: “There’s nothing we can do . . .”—Nibelungenlied, p. 215 (“‘The things we have been told of will happen irremediably,’ said bold Volker the Fiddler. ‘Let us ride to court and see what can happen to us fearless men in Hungary.’”)
493 “Beware of being too wise, it’s said”—Very loosely after the Poetic Edda, p. 22 (stanza 54, “Hávamál”).
496 “Maybe they expected me to scratch runes on the back of my hand”—“Operation Citadel” has a number of references to the Poetic Edda, of which this is a representative example. Brynhild (here known as Sigrdrífa) advises Siegfried, who has just awoken her from her magic sleep, to make his way through life with the help of runes. “On thy beer horn scratch it [the ale rune], and the back of thy hand, and the Need rune on thy nails” (p. 235, “The Lay of Sigrdrífa,” stanza 8, interpolated with fn.).
499 “Doom never dies, said the old man”—Poetic Edda, p. 25 (“Hávamál,” stanza 25, very loosely “retranslated” by WTV).
500 Hitler on Russian tank production figures: “The Russians are dead.”—Fest, p. 94.
501 Narrator: “Well, to be sure, they have good reason . . . what they had will never come back”—After the Nibelungenlied, p. 215 (“She has good reason for her long mourning,” answered Hagen, “but he was killed many years past. S
he ought to love the King of the Huns now, for Siegfried will never come back—he was buried long ago”).
503 Von Manstein: “A clear focal point of effort at the decisive spot”—Von Manstein, p. 547 (italics in original, excepting the “a”).
504 Significance of the Reds’ thrust against Twenty-third Panzer Corps—Described in Glantz and House, p. 161.
507 “First, get the command tank”—Information from Cornish, p. 186.
507 Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana: “I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, all-knowing, heartless Russia”—Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla John-son McMillan (New York: Avon Books [Discus], 1967), p. 132 (letter 11).
510 Von Manstein: “And so the final German offensive in the East ended in fiasco . . .” —Op. cit., p. 449, “retranslated” by WTV. The translator notes (p. 549) that the chapter on Operation Citadel, from which I’ve drawn this quotation, is actually an article by von Manstein for the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette, which in this English edition has been substituted for the original text’s much longer chapter on Citadel, “in order to shorten these memoirs to a size suitable for publication in Britain and the U.S.A.”
511 Stalin: “If the Battle of Stalingrad signalled the twilight of the German-Fascist Army . . .”—Quoted in Cornish, p. 216.
THE TELEPHONE RINGS
512 Epigraph—Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Principles of Orchestration, with Musical Examples Drawn from His Own Work, in Two Volumes Bound as One, ed. Maximilian Sternberg [Shostakovich’s teacher], trans. Edward Agate (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1964 repr. of 1922 Edition Russe de Musique ed.; R-K’s draft unfinished in 1891), p. 141 (“Voices related in fifths and fourths”). In these stories I have preferred the orthography “Rimsky-Korsakoff.”
512 “Everyone should do his own work from all the way to the end”—After Wilson, p. 288 (testimony of Evgeny Chukovsky: Shostakovich to his son Maxim). The original reads “from beginning to end.”
ECSTASY
517 Epigraph—Anna Akhmatova, My Half-Century: Selected Prose, trans. Ronald Meyer (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997 repr. of 1992 Ardis Press ed.), p. 135 (second letter, Komarovo, August 26, 1861).
521, 523, 524 The three boldfaced letters in the book—I am sorry that these seem obscure to some readers. They are E, E and a, and they mark the book’s beginning, midpoint and ending thus: “Elena E. Konstantinovskaya.” (Her name is sometimes more correctly transliterated “Yelena,” as in Fay’s biography of Shostakovich, but out of deference to people who may be unfamiliar with the letter ye, I have remained loyal to the more traditional transliteration.)
OPERATION HAGEN
525 Epigraph—“I gave her my oath that I’d not wrong her anymore . . .”—Nibelungenlied, p. 148 (ch. 19, “How the Nibelung Treasure Was Brought to Worms”), “retranslated” by WTV.
526 Details about reupholstering the chairs at Kranzler’s with Swiss packing twine and the “Negress” at the Golden Horseshoe—Samuel Hynes et al, Reporting World War II: Part One: American Journalism 1938-1944 (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 213, 219 (Howard K. Smith, “Valhalla in Transition: Berlin After the Invasion of Russia: Autumn 1941”).
527 Günther: “Complain not to me, but to Hagen; he’s the cursed boar who slew this hero!”—Libretto booklet to the Solti version of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” (Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen et al performing; Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker, 1985), p. 206 (Act III, Scene 3, my trans. and alteration of the German libretto, which would literally read: “Complain not to me; complain to Hagen; he is the accursed boar who gored this hero!”).
528 General Nikitchenko: “The record is filled with his own admissions of complicity. There is nothing to be said in mitigation”—Uncovered Editions, ed. (“the series has been created directly from the archive of The Stationery Office in London”), The Judgment of Nuremberg, 1946 (Guildford, Surrey: TSO Publishing; printed by Biddles Ltd., Crown copyright, 1999 abr. repr. of 1946 ed.), pp. 183, 185 (Justice Jackson, judgment of Göring).
528 “The President”: “Defendant Hagen, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted . . .”—Ibid., p. 297 (pro forma sentence for each capitally convicted war criminal).
INTO THE MOUNTAIN
529 Epigraph—Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Harvest, 1975 repr. of 1942 ed.; original Russian ed. ca 1942; date not given), p. 183 (“Form and Content: Practice,” ca. 1942).
529 Affair of the Remagen bridge—Speer, p. 562.
529 Plan to flood the Ruhr mines—Ibid., p. 564 (the actual procedure was described by Hörner, assistant to the Gauleiter, and might not have come specifically from Hitler although it conformed to Hitler’s general order).
529 Destruction planned for Düsseldorf and Baden—Ibid., pp. 566-67. Again, there is no evidence that Hitler was involved on this minute level.
530 Conversation between Hitler and Speer—Condensed from Ibid., pp. 570-73, with alterations and additions.
530 Hitler to “the officer”: “The nature of this struggle permits no consideration for the populace to be taken”—Ibid., p. 577 (this was actually a general order to the commanders-in-chief).
530 Göring and the fate of the Philharmonic—Recounted in Ibid., p. 585.
530 Hitler: “Then the Luftwaffe is superfluous. The entire Luftwaffe command should be hanged at once!”—Slightly altered and abridged from Kershaw, p. 801.
530 Hitler to General Koller: “Any commander who holds back his troops will forfeit his life in five hours.”—Bullock, p. 783, citing Koller.
DENAZIFICATION
532 Epigraph—Vladimir Ognev and Dorian Rottenberg, comp., Fifty Soviet Poets (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, repr. of 1969 ed.), p. 178 (Yevgeni Yevtushenko, “Snivelling Fascism,” my trans. of Russian text. The translation given on p. 179 softens the original).
534 Akhmatova: “I smile no more. A freezing wind numbs my lips”—Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), p. 175 (“I no longer smile . . .”, 1915, from White Flock), “retranslated” by WTV.
535 The German POW: “Wälse! Wälse! Where’s your sword,” etc.—Libretto booklet to the Solti version of Wagner’s “Siegfried” (James King, Régine Crespin et al. performing; Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker, 1985), p. 44 (Act I, Scene 3; German text trans. and slightly altered by WTV; it would more literally run: “the strong sword I’ll swing in the storm”).
535 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, entry on Germany: “A state in Europe”—Vol. 6, p. 340.
AIRLIFT IDYLLS
536 Epigraph—Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks and Other Stories, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (New York: Penguin, 1960), p. 159 (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” 1886).
537 Various descriptions of Third Reich architecture in Berlin and its wartime and postwar fate—Based on photographs and text in McGee.
538 Description of Hitler’s model of postwar Berlin—Large, p. 301 (“Model of Hitler’s planned north-south axis, including the Arch of Triumph, and the domed Hall of the People.” Source: Landesbildungsstelle.). Various other descriptions of idealized and projected Nazi streetscapes are based on five of Albert Speer’s models and drawings reproduced in Antonova and Merkert, pp. 424-25.
539 Footnote: “Germany is the conscience of mankind . . .”—Keyserling, p. 136.
539 Elena Dmitrievna Kruglikova was the soprano who sang the first part of Lyusha in Dzerzhinskii’s opera Virgin Soil Upturned (1937).
539 Some of my codenames are fictional; some are derived from Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books / A member of the Perseus Books Group, 1999), pp. 437-59 (ch. 26, “The Federal Republic of Germany”). The sad story of LOLA comes here; of course the dates make it one more anachronism.
542 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Love for an idea . . .”—Vol. 15, p. 153 (entry on love
).
543 The pale, pale man who wore dark glasses: “You’ve absorbed the Russian mentality. . . There’s something of the Russian soul in you, that emotional, sentimental, immeasurable something . . .”—Closely after Gehlen, p. 127 (Gehlen is speaking about a bilingual colleague-rival).
546 “The poetess Akhmatova”: “Call this working! . . .”—Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), p. 414 (“The Poet,” summer 1959), “retranslated” by WTV.
547 GRAENER: “The German people need romanticism once more”—Somewhat after a remark by the composer Paul Graener; quoted in Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 26.
548 L. Moholy-Nagy: “Penetration of the body with light . . .”—Op. cit., p. 69.
550 “Atonal fallacies”—A phrase in frequent use by Nazi musicians.
559 Shostakovich: “I feel it’s the worst cynicism to, to, to besmirch yourself with ugly behavior . . .”—Volkov, p. 243, somewhat altered (originally said in reference to A. Sakharov).
560 The Fifth Symphony as “series of components, gestures or events . . .”—Taruskin, p. 520.
564 Luftwaffe blueprints buried in a coffin—After Otto Jahn, Twice Through the Lines: The Autobiography of Otto Jahn, trans. Richard Barry (London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1972, trans. of original 1969 German ed.), p. 223.
565 Some details of the narrator’s cloak-and-dagger negotiations with the East German and Russian authorities are pillaged from Jahn, p. 238ff. Jahn was kidnapped (according to his own account; others accuse him of defecting) in July 1954.
565 The kidnapping of Walter Linse took place in 1952, not before the airlift.
569 Kurt Strübund’s maneuver—John Dornberg, The Other Germany (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968).
571 Frequency of C-54s landings at Tempelhof: every ninety seconds (in spring 1949) —Large, p. 408.
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