Europe Central (145 page)

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.

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.

THE RED GUILLOTINE

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).