William Vollmann - Europe Central

In the last photographs taken before her widowhood one already finds a dourly absent expression upon her heavyset features, even when everyone else is smiling.

In 1924 our fellow traveler Otto Nagel had opened the first German arts exhibition in the Soviet Union. Käthe Kollwitz was represented. No one came out against her.

Surprisingly, as late as 1939 they’ll allow her a tiny entry in Meyers Lexikon: She was born; she received a German education; she’s been a wife since 1891. Her expressive pages are not free from the class-battle standpoint used for Communist propaganda. That knock on the door, when will it come? When it does, three years after her enforced resignation from the Prussian Academy, the Gestapo command her to disavow certain pro-Russian statements she’s made in an interview with Isvestiya. She submits. Afterward, she’ll make halfhearted plans with Karl to have poison ready. Karl, his practice already banned, will die of old age just as the sleepwalker’s tanks glide into Paris. On 23.10.43, the family flat will be destroyed by American bombers. Käthe will die in Saxony, shortly after the firebombing of Dresden. I quote from one of her very last letters: Oh, Lise, being dead must be good, but I am much too much afraid of dying, of being terribly afraid at the moment of death.

In fact, she is said to have resembled Tsvetaeva, especially around the mouth, although her long, dark hair, which she so often wore in bangs reaching nearly to the eyebrow, also reminded some people of that doomed poet.

Even Käthe Kollwitz herself copied out in her daybook Nietzsche’s letter to his sister rhapsodizing over Wagner’s “Parsifal.”

The so-called “D-S-C-H signature,” which will be discussed later, in my analysis of Opus 110, is by this simple criterion akin to a motif: in other words, it’s not relevant to the people. Accordingly, any references to an “E-E-K signature” must be contemptuously dismissed as anti-Soviet provocation. As we like to say, it’s no accident that even in Moser’s Musik Lexikon, published in the very first year of the Thousand Year Reich, Shostakovich gets passed over. Sousa and Serbian music are present; they’ll soon be considered enemies. Under Russische Musik, Shostakovich’s teacher Glazunov receives a nod on page 721, and below him a Gruppe Glasunow sits reverentially assembled. Glazunov, you see, was a classicist; Shostakovich is a formalist. Even the German Fascists know poison when they see it.

Americans.

In old days, kings gilded the horns of their favorite cows, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that gold bracelet she wore was from Uncle Wolf.

I quote from his diary: If I myself don’t understand anything in art, what then do I understand? The “living” person and that’s all. Keep shooting live people; they get in people’s way, in the proletariat’s way. Keep shooting.

In the interests of justice I’m compelled to remind you of her dismissive cruelty to Nedobrovo’s wife, whom she despised for her ignorance of poetry—at least she found the husband to her taste. In the end she left the husband—she abandoned everybody!

It wasn’t until 1945, on the day after that foreign snake Isaiah Berlin departed, that we screwed a microphone into her ceiling. We made it visible on purpose; that saved us trouble. Next time he came to our country, she wisely refused to meet him.

The title of the American film says it all: “Thousands Cheer.”

As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains: “The Communist Party and the Soviet government foresaw the possibility of an armed struggle with the forces of imperialism, and, in the years of peaceful socialist development, adopted all the necessary measures to strengthen the country’s defensive abilities.”

It is perhaps this part which most influenced Martinov’s characterization of the third movement as a “Toccata of Death.”

One critic has even read into this symphony a two-note “Stalin motif” which first appears in bars four and five.

Simonov, whose testimony is unreliable since he seems to have also been in love with her, remembers seeing her going into the Palace Hotel in Madrid, now converted to an orphanage, and always bringing something for the children. On 24 October 1936, when the first Soviet tanks went into combat in the vicinity of Aranjuez, Elena was there in the midst of a detachment of Komsomol volunteers. Karmen saw her and was captivated. He believed her to be as attracted as he was to the Spanish carelessness for death. I’m informed that her Komsomol training stood her in good stead; the TASS journalist Mirova, who unfortunately disappeared on her return to Moscow in 1937, is said to have been drawn to her and often expressed admiration (although not to Karmen, who instinctively kept his distance from this individual as he did from the equally unlucky Koltzov of Pravda ) . However, what Mirova read in Konstantinovskaya as cool effectiveness, and Koltzov as a secret rage, Ehrenburg of Izvestiya, one of the few journalists to survive the purges, considered to be a calculated determination to get back in the Party’s good graces so that her spell of imprisonment in 1935 would not haunt her anymore. In his private letters, Ehrenburg writes about her with a venom akin to a rejected suitor’s. In any event, Konstantinovskaya fought bravely, winning her Order of the Red Star in the useless Brunete counteroffensive of July 1937.

In a photograph in an East German retrospective catalogue, we see Karmen in Loyalist uniform, but hatless, standing happily amidst his colleagues, shouldering his camera as they shoulder their rifles, with sandbags and a doorway behind them. He is the happiest man in the picture; for him, Spain seems to be a lark. His colleagues in their berets will stay and die, or else at the war’s sad end flee into internment camps in France. But this cruel and ignorant interpretation of a brave man’s smile neglects two facts: First, while he was with them, he ran at least as great a risk as they; secondly, he believed, and rightly, that only by inflaming the world, for instance through the camera-propaganda of R. L. Karmen, could the Spanish cause hope to triumph.

How far should one go with the enemy? Zoya herself will tell you: Not one inch! But G. Vodyanischkaya, who played Zoya, was certainly willing to follow Arnshtam’s script; isn’t one of the qualities we most prize in an actress acquiescence? Several reels of Karmen’s private footage disappeared immediately after his death in 1978, but I have it on good authority that he persuaded two starlets to let him film them kissing; this footage he reviewed over and over late at night at the Studio of Documentary Films, trying to accept Elena for who she was. Long after they’d separated forever, he would experience occasional flashes of rage when he happened to see two women sitting alone at a table in a restaurant, gazing into each other’s eyes.

The New York Times calls it grimly gratifying , but adds: Except for an obvious partiality toward the Soviet prosecutors, the film might have been assembled by any competent craftsman among the Allies.