Read Online Europe Central by William Vollmann - Free Book Online
Authors: William Vollmann
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Historical, War & Military, Germany, Soviet Union, Germany - Social Life and Customs, Soviet Union - Social Life and Customs
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hair was now entirely white.
In the early winter hours, when she heard fighting in the street, her grief for Germany got mixed up somehow with those recurring dreams she used to have that Peter was still alive; sometimes he and Hans were on the battlefield together; she tried to help him discover what he should do to avoid being shot again.
4
He had fallen on 22.10.14, in Flanders, ten days after his war began. He was the first of his regiment to die.
Peter was the volunteer. The other son Hans, the one she hardly knew, of course survived. Hans saw through the war to its skeleton of politics. He later became a doctor like Karl. He was always realistic.
5
Karl had refused Peter permission to go, so he had turned to his mother. She never knew exactly how he succeeded in getting her to overcome her fear, but he did, after which the father, as usual, obeyed the mother.
Then came the telegram: IHR SOHN IST GEFALLEN.
Her friend Liebermann gave her this advice: Work.
6
Having been raised by a perfect, untouchable mother, she was fated—indeed, she had been brought into the world—to be the same, all the while exuding a secret lavish maternality. And then, from a jet-black cloud, death’s long grey arms reached to pick her child from amidst a harvest of wide-eyed children. How many women have we all seen wilting away, because they were prevented from fully giving the love which was in them to give? The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which criticizes her favorably, explains that she perceived World War I through the prism of personal tragedy, which imparted a gloomy, sacrificial tone to her creative work. Hence her crazed figures dancing open-mouthed around the guillotine; hence those elongated, muscle-striated arms reaching up at the sky in grief and anger.
Throughout most of the following decade she created posters for the German Communist Party. Meanwhile she continued her mournful, simian self-portraits; she woodblock-printed her hundredth screaming mother bearing her dead child in her arms, other mothers crowding around her in the procession to the grave.
7
The myth that her son’s death was the inspiration for this work is easily exploded. For instance, “Death, Mother and Child” dates from 1910, when Peter still had four years left to live. It formally resembles the previous year’s chalk sketch, entitled “Goodbye”: the child’s face, lovely, stark-white and realistic, clutched by the mother against her own larger, greyer face, which seemed in its grief to be decaying into the black, black smudge beneath it. In 1903, in both her “Pietà” and her “Mother with Dead Child,” the positions had been reversed, the mother clutching the little corpse from above, resting her head on the breast while the child’s head dangled in space, the lips slightly parted in the white face. There had been another “Mother with Dead Child” in that same year, this one almost Blakean in the foregrounding of the leg, foot and toes; the mother was sitting cross-legged with one knee up, bowing her head down against the child, whose form, shrouded into a phallic blur, blended into hers; her ear, wrinkled forehead and one sunken eye were there, but only in that furred, decomposed fashion common to embryos and unfinished art; the Kaiser would not have seen any virtue in this.
In 1911, Peter was growing rapidly but remained underweight; he read his New Testament in Greek and ran to see zeppelins; meanwhile, his mother completed her “Mother in the Bed of a Dead Child,” again the white, white face, this time almost resembling a skull, the crudely cross-hatched sheets, and then the mother’s face, dark-hatched against the black hinterground, with a single candle-flame shining forlornly behind her; her dark heavy fingers reach forward to caress the white cheek; her deep dark eye-sockets seem to contain fibers of muscle, like those of a thoroughly anatomized cadaver. The slow love and grief, upon which Kollwitz has
In the early winter hours, when she heard fighting in the street, her grief for Germany got mixed up somehow with those recurring dreams she used to have that Peter was still alive; sometimes he and Hans were on the battlefield together; she tried to help him discover what he should do to avoid being shot again.
4
He had fallen on 22.10.14, in Flanders, ten days after his war began. He was the first of his regiment to die.
Peter was the volunteer. The other son Hans, the one she hardly knew, of course survived. Hans saw through the war to its skeleton of politics. He later became a doctor like Karl. He was always realistic.
5
Karl had refused Peter permission to go, so he had turned to his mother. She never knew exactly how he succeeded in getting her to overcome her fear, but he did, after which the father, as usual, obeyed the mother.
Then came the telegram: IHR SOHN IST GEFALLEN.
Her friend Liebermann gave her this advice: Work.
6
Having been raised by a perfect, untouchable mother, she was fated—indeed, she had been brought into the world—to be the same, all the while exuding a secret lavish maternality. And then, from a jet-black cloud, death’s long grey arms reached to pick her child from amidst a harvest of wide-eyed children. How many women have we all seen wilting away, because they were prevented from fully giving the love which was in them to give? The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which criticizes her favorably, explains that she perceived World War I through the prism of personal tragedy, which imparted a gloomy, sacrificial tone to her creative work. Hence her crazed figures dancing open-mouthed around the guillotine; hence those elongated, muscle-striated arms reaching up at the sky in grief and anger.
Throughout most of the following decade she created posters for the German Communist Party. Meanwhile she continued her mournful, simian self-portraits; she woodblock-printed her hundredth screaming mother bearing her dead child in her arms, other mothers crowding around her in the procession to the grave.
7
The myth that her son’s death was the inspiration for this work is easily exploded. For instance, “Death, Mother and Child” dates from 1910, when Peter still had four years left to live. It formally resembles the previous year’s chalk sketch, entitled “Goodbye”: the child’s face, lovely, stark-white and realistic, clutched by the mother against her own larger, greyer face, which seemed in its grief to be decaying into the black, black smudge beneath it. In 1903, in both her “Pietà” and her “Mother with Dead Child,” the positions had been reversed, the mother clutching the little corpse from above, resting her head on the breast while the child’s head dangled in space, the lips slightly parted in the white face. There had been another “Mother with Dead Child” in that same year, this one almost Blakean in the foregrounding of the leg, foot and toes; the mother was sitting cross-legged with one knee up, bowing her head down against the child, whose form, shrouded into a phallic blur, blended into hers; her ear, wrinkled forehead and one sunken eye were there, but only in that furred, decomposed fashion common to embryos and unfinished art; the Kaiser would not have seen any virtue in this.
In 1911, Peter was growing rapidly but remained underweight; he read his New Testament in Greek and ran to see zeppelins; meanwhile, his mother completed her “Mother in the Bed of a Dead Child,” again the white, white face, this time almost resembling a skull, the crudely cross-hatched sheets, and then the mother’s face, dark-hatched against the black hinterground, with a single candle-flame shining forlornly behind her; her dark heavy fingers reach forward to caress the white cheek; her deep dark eye-sockets seem to contain fibers of muscle, like those of a thoroughly anatomized cadaver. The slow love and grief, upon which Kollwitz has
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