William Vollmann - Europe Central

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.

571 “West Berlin was never a part of the Federal Republic and will never belong to it!” —Collective Team,” GDR: 300 Questions, 300 Answers, trans. by Intertext Berlin (Dresden: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1967), p. 109.

571 “We were already planning a step-by-step takeover by West German monopolies”—So claimed by Erich Honecker, From My Life (New York: Pergamon Press, Leaders of the World Biographical Series, 1981), p. 208.

572 “At 0.00 hours the alert was given and the action got underway”—Ibid., p. 211. Citing the menace posed to Dreamland by Berlin-West’s eighty espionage and terror organizations, and, worse yet, by the innumerable currency speculators, not to mention the Anglo-American monopoly capitalists, Honecker demands (p. 209): “Could we afford to look on passively while the open border was exploited to bleed our republic to death by means of an unprecedented economic war?” What to do? Deploy the ghouls of Nightmareland against the capitalists!

573 Adenauer’s words to the East Germans (actually spoken in 1955)—Paul Weymar, Adenauer: His Authorized Biography, trans . Peter De Mendelssohn (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957), p. 488.

574 Epigraph—“More quickly than Moscow itself…”—Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Harvest / A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1978), p. 92 (“Moscow,” orig. written in 1927).

574 Comrade Sorgenicht: “Hilde Benjamin, Communist personality…”—[Rolf Steding, ed.], Academy of Political Science and Jurisprudence of the German Democratic Republic, An Example for Unity of Theory and Practice: On the Occasion of the Eighty-fifth Birthday of Professor Dr. Sc. Dr. Hilde Benjamin (Potsdam: Center for State and Justice Information, Department of Publications and Printing, Current Event Articles of Political Science and Jurisprudence ser., no. 345, 1987), translated into English for me (17¢ per word; I now forget how much it all came to) by Elsmarie Hau and Tracy Bigelow; original, pp. 9-17; Hau-Bigelow, p. 5 (Klaus Sorgenicht, “Hilde Benjamin, A Communist Personality Who Personifies the Unity of Theory and Practice”).

574 “The so-called ‘West German’ press,” “A negroid woman with dark, evil eyes…” —Hilde Benjamin’s Stasi file. Stasi Archive copy, obtained September 2003. Kopie BstU, Archiv der Zentralstelle AR 2 E/mi#1.01 [? illegible] 1156/61, 26.4.02. Her file code seems to have been A/27355/15/10/84, Ref. C. All translations, mistranslations and retranslations by WTV. Page BStU 00051 (Die Welt, 15.8.52, Wolfgang Weinert, “Ob schuldig oder nicht schuldig”); abbreviated; last two words slightly altered for euphony.

574 Most of my physical descriptions of Hilde Benjamin, and some of my descriptions of the former Field-Marshal Paulus, are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive. One description of Benjamin is after a photograph in Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (Hg.), Einsichten: Diktatur und Widerstand in der DDR (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag Leipzig, 2001), p. 70.

575 Some details of the Red Guillotine’s life derive from Hilde Benjamin’s Stasi file. A few other biographical tidbits are taken from Marianne Brentzel, Die Machtfrau: Hilde Benjamin 1902-1989 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1997).

575 Benjamin’s visit to the commandant with four wristwatches—Some Russian officers did behave this way, but this meeting is entirely imagined. Benjamin herself describes it very differently.

576 Benjamin’s associations with Käthe Kollwitz and Roman Karmen are entirely invented.

576 Description of various versions of the Liebknecht memorial image—After the reproductions and text in Prelinger, pp. 51-56.

577 Benjamin to her mother: “I believe I will be able to help the victims of injustice” —Steding (Sorgenicht), trans. Hau-Bigelow, p. 6 (somewhat altered; not said to her mother).

577 Description of Benjamin’s life and career before 1945—In part from her Benjamin Stasi file, pp. BStU 000001-6; p. 786, [?]taaat1.Komitee für Rundfunk, [?]bt. Monitor, 2.1355 (2.135) [handwritten code; some parts illegible], Karl-Wilhelm-Fricke, DLF 21.40 vom 5.2.77, Porträt Hilder Benjamins.

577 Georg Benjamin “was also Superintendent of Schools in Berlin-Wedding, a working-class quarter”—Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit.

577 I have drawn some of my inferences about Benjamin’s role in the Communist legal arena of the 1920s from Hilde Benjamin, “The Struggle of the Working Class for a New Rule of Law and a Democratic Legal System” (1969), in Aus Reden und Aufsätzen (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1982), trans. for WTV by Pastor Andreas Pielhoop.

578 “The legend”: “In that period, Communist Hilde Benjamin was clear that her most important work was the realization of the Party’s decisions.”—Steding (Sorgenicht), p. 7 (somewhat altered).

578 Description of the courtroom for the Horst Wessel trial—After Benjamin’s Stasi file, p. BStU 000229, Spiegel, Mittwoch, 18.3.59, p. 30 (“SOWJETZONE: Recht: Zwischen Recht und Rot”).

578 Testimony of Horst Wessel’s mother, and Benjamin’s response—My invention.

579 Benjamin to defendants: “I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power”—Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit. (somewhat altered; not to anyone in particular; an official third-person restatement of her views).

579 Comrade W. Ulbricht “The Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 4.

579 “The legend:” “She was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz…” —Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit.

579 “The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.” —Ibid., p. 8.

580 “Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848”—Somewhat after Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR 1945-53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 8.

580 Footnote: Ulbricht’s activities in the Spanish Civil War—Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 411.