Read Online Europe Central by William Vollmann - Free Book Online Page B

death’s skull-moon in the darkness above bowed children who spasm in concert with our century’s millions of enchained volunteers; the title is “Hunger,” and I’ve read that this image, badly reproduced in a secondhand monograph, lay in wait for decades like an antipersonnel mine for the specific purpose of horrifying Shostakovich’s daughter Galina; one day when she, still unmarried and presumably in Leningrad to attend the premiere of her father’s Eleventh Symphony, was browsing the book-kiosks along the Nevsky, the mine exploded: Galina, who was actually trying to find a present for her brother’s name day, opened the volume by accident—well, isn’t that a tautology? Isn’t every accident an accident? I won’t exaggerate; I won’t claim that the young woman screamed; after all, she’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, even if she couldn’t remember all of it; she’d seen real skulls enough! All the same, such was the power of this image that she had a nightmare, and in the morning her famous father, who was himself feeling a bit anxious just then, saw some peculiar wretchedness in her face which he experienced like a punch in his stomach; this sensation, suitably translated into the chord D-D-Sch, later found its way into both his Fifteenth Symphony and the unholy Opus 110.
    Meanwhile, the man in the tophat promenaded sadly under Käthe Kollwitz’s window.
    10
    In 1926, A. Lunacharsky, who was then our People’s Commissar of Culture, paid her this compliment: She aims at an immediate effect, so that at the very first glance one’s heart is wrung. She is a great agitator. That was the year she went to Roggevelde with Karl, to visit Peter’s grave for the first time.
    In 1927, she stood amidst the jury of the Prussian Academy, those shorthaired, dark-suited old men with canes and tophats, with both hands gripping the mat of one of her woodcuts as the man beside her, resting his hat against his large belly, gazed respectfully down at Art. Perhaps they regretted that the Kaiser had not permitted them to give her the gold medal twenty-nine years ago. They reminded her of Hans and Peter when they were little, the two pairs of eyes staring at her above the white collars they hated. Their hall glowed with the light of heavenly privilege. They presented her with a prize.
    After the ceremony, a gentleman from the National Front tried to talk to her about the mystical role of motherhood, and Professor Moholy-Nagy, fresh from the Bauhaus, scolded her that her latest composition, another white-on-black woodcut of a woman and child going into death, was both too static and too dark.
    After all, she said wearily, it’s a representation of death.
    It is an elementary biological necessity, Moholy-Nagy sternly said, for human beings to absorb color, to extract color.
    What do you mean, a biological necessity?
    We live in a colorless age.
    So you’re sad, like me.
    Don’t say that! I reject emotion unconditionally.
    As gently as she could (there were many people in the room), she said to him: We’ve all been injured by the war years. In your case, perhaps you’re afraid to feel, because—
    Professor Moholy-Nagy vindictively interrupted: The traditional painting has become a historical relic and is finished with.
    She smiled at him. Then slowly she turned away to receive more congratulations from elitists and militarists, the ones who had killed Peter, and not just Peter, but all the brave young men in helmets who toiled white-faced through zigzag trenches and marched through hellscapes, falling a dozen at a time, the smokeskinned young men with daggers who crept through tunnels to murder one another, the brave young men who rushed against barbed wire, got impaled, and hung there until the bullet-wind blew through them; or else if they were lucky they became squinting prisoners, marched away between lines of Frenchmen on horseback; then they could look forward to coming home years later, bitter, poor and