Free Europe Central by William Vollmann Page A

nine hundred and forty-seven foreign delegates, among whom K. Kollwitz came quickly to mind: 11 K. Kollwitz, who empathized so sincerely with the working class—the Kaiser had called her a gutter artist—K. Kollwitz, who had never joined the Party and whose presence in our land would thereby prove the broadmindedness of our goodwill; K. Kollwitz, whose grief-hued tableaux of worker-martyrs, by being set in Germany, showed the superiority of our own system—I myself especially admire her lithograph of a proletarian woman in profile (1903), whose tired old hands clasp one another uncertainly, and whose pale face bows submissively in the darkness; Kollwitz has done the hair in stipples rather than in lines, so that this worker resembles a shaved convict—K. Kollwitz, who offered good odds of dying before she could turn against us; she was sixty years old, tired, worried she was done.—Retrospection proves that we gambled well; in 1944, the second to last year of her life, with the sleepwalker’s war against us obviously lost, we find her writingher children, advising that little Arne be taught Russian: With the two countries bound to be so linked . . . so let him learn the language while there is still time. That same month she wrote: My only hope is in world socialism. (Needless to say, she also wrote: The desire, the unquenchable longing for death remains.—I shall close now, dear children. I thank you with all my heart.) In other words, she remained as reliable as our Polikarpov-Grigorovich I-5 biplane fighter of 1930 (two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour).
    So Dr. Kollwitz and his wife boarded the tramcar which carried them past a boarded up window in a four-storey flat, trees and birds, shadows near the river bridge; then came a flag battalion whose fourteen crimson banners spoke out against the big financiers who headed the Jewish hydra, and she thought she saw that man, that gaunt man who’d stood below her window grimacing under his tophat for all these years, but he wore a brown uniform now and his right arm touched the sky and he was shouting in ecstasy. Sounding its bell, the tram turned the corner, and before they even knew it they’d arrived at the Ostbahn Station. Leaning, hunched figures were begging on the steps; they could have crawled out of one of her etchings. Käthe gave them all the coins she had in her pockets, while Karl, smiling patiently and stroking his iron-grey beard, guarded the luggage.
    They had one valise each. They bought their tickets knowing that we’d reimburse them. Then they went upstairs to the platform. The train came. Their seats were reserved. They stowed their luggage and sat down. And the train began to move. She’d never forget that slow-departing troop train, Peter waving to her from the window. The Kaiser had called merrily to the departing troops: Back home when the leaves fall!
    A young girl with reddish-blonde bangs lowered the train window until she could rest her chin on it; she leaned, gazed, stretched and turned as fluidly as a newt. Karl adjusted the reading lamp for her. Käthe sat writing in her diary: And I must do the prints on Death. Must, must, must! She had always wanted to visit Russia.
    The German boy who’d shared their compartment on the train, his slender legs crossed as he plucked half-consciously at his long raven hair, read Hölderlin, with a flask of water wedged beneath his arm. He suddenly realized that this doctor’s wife was somebody important; but by then it was too late.—Well, well, we think that Hölderlin or Kollwitz is a “choice,” but what is culture but a historically determined form of social organization?
    The farther east they went, the colder it grew. By the time they crossed the border it was actually snowing.—It’s another world, said Karl.—Changing trains, waiting for their documents to be inspected, they arrived at the Byelorussian-Baltic Station three hours late, but a man in raspberry-colored boots was waiting