William Vollmann - Europe Central

In fact, within a few years of Shostakovich’s death, the New York critics were deriding Cliburn for “superficiality.” His repertoire dwindled. In his tour of 1994 he played nothing but Rachmaninoff’s Third, and that first Tchaikovsky concerto which had brought him his freakish fame. (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, however, which since the dissolution of the USSR can now never be superseded by a new edition, continues to praise his spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.). I am told that he opens every performance with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The finer detail of our Ortho-Mx projections is the result not only of a higher organized nervous sensibility and improved moral accutance, but, above all, of absolute technological superiority. The millions of colors and tonal zones which we Americans now enjoy look better than ever, thanks to the cooperation of private industry. Digital smoothing is now underway. Before the next war breaks out, we hope to entirely eliminate every intra-atomic space.

Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, trans. Lily Emmet (New York: Harper and Row, 1971 trans. of original 1967 French ed.), p. 71. The forgotten soldier was Alsatian, and he served with the Wehrmacht. He missed the sound of steel boots on cobblestones, a detail which I have pilfered for “Clean Hands.”

My own assessment of the man has much to do with the following remark in “Lost Victories” (p. 533): “I can only say that it was not granted to me—as one who had for several years past been engrossed in arduous duties at the front—to perceive Hitler’s real nature, or the moral deterioration of the régime, to the extent to which we can obviously do today. Rumors of the kind that circulated at home hardly penetrated to the front, perhaps least of all to ourselves.” I can accept this to an extent, but, as the Nuremberg Trial verdicts insisted, blindness at some point becomes culpability. Moreover, what does “moral deterioration” mean? Did he think the Third Reich to be moral at its inception? Did the mass murder of the Brownshirts and the opening of concentration camps at the very beginning not trouble him?