Europe Central (132 page)

And then, as I smoked a cigarette with a tank crew or chatted with a rifle company about the overall situation, I never failed to encounter that irrepressible urge to press onward, that readiness to put forward the very last ounce of energy, which are the hallmarks of the German soldier.

—Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein (1958)

1

In the sleepwalker’s time, we took back our honor and issued Panzergruppen in all directions. But when I finally got home, the advance guard of the future had already come marching through the Brandenburg Gate, with their greatcoats triple-buttoned right up to their throats, their hands in their pockets and their eyes as expressionless as shell craters! According to my wife, whose memory isn’t bad when she confines herself to verifiable natural events, some of our lindens were in bloom that May, as why wouldn’t they be, and the rest were scorched sticks, so she refers to that time as the “Russian spring,” which proves that she can be witty, unless of course she heard that phrase on the radio. Anyhow, we got thoroughly denazified. Our own son, so I hear, threw away his Hitlerjugend uniform and sat on the fountain’s rim, listening to the United States Army Band day after day. Next the Wall went up, so half of Germany got lost to us, possibly forever, being magically changed into one of the new grey countries of Europe Central, and all our fearfulness of death came back. An old drunk stood up in the beerhall and tried to talk about destiny, but somebody bruised his skull with a two-liter stein, and down he went. When I reached home that night my wife was standing at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the doorjamb, peering at me through the place where the diamond-shaped glass window used to be, and I must have looked sad, because she said to me in a strange soft voice like summer: Never mind those lost years; we still have almost half the century left to make everything right, to which I said: Never mind those eight years I spent in Vorkuta, when they knocked my teeth out and damaged my kidneys, to which she replied: Listen, we all suffered in the war, even me whom you left alone while you were off raping Polish girls and shooting Ukrainians in the ditches; it’s common knowledge what you were up to; besides, you’re a middle-aged man and, and look at all the beer you swill; your kidneys would have given out on you anyway.—Having reconnoitered her disposition (as my old commanding officer would have said; he died of influenza in some coal mine near Tiflis), I fell back, so to speak; I withdrew from the position in hopes of saving something; I retreated into myself. Let her talk about destiny all she wants, I said to myself. At least
I’m
not tainted by illusions!

As it happened, I’d been saving up a little treat for myself; I’d hoarded it beneath the cushions of my armchair. Right before I went to the hospital, Athenäum-Verlag released the memoirs of my hero, Field-Marshal von Manstein. Although I don’t consider myself a bookish person, it seemed befitting to show my support, so to speak, especially since the poor old man had recently gotten out of jail, fourteen years early if memory serves—the only favor I’ll ever thank those “Allies” for. For four years I couldn’t get to it, on account of the shell splinter in my head, but finally the thing stopped moving, so I got some peace, and there he was, right there on the dust jacket in all his grey dignity, wearing his Iron Cross and his oak leaves. The title of the book was
Lost Victories.

I’ve always been of the opinion that had Paulus only been permitted to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops, we could have won the war, and I’ve proved it to quite a few people, even including one of the Russian guards at Vorkuta. Von Manstein really could have saved us all.

Whenever I think about what happened to Germany, or my own miserable life, or the way my fourteen-year-old niece died, burned to death by the Americans in Dresden, I get so emotional that I start grinding my teeth, and then my wife tells all her friends:
He’s in one of his moods again.
She never cared for my brother the former engineer, who’s now imprisoned behind the wall of that so-called “German Democratic Republic,” repairing sewer mains for the Communists and earning almost nothing, my poor brother whom I’ll never see again (although he can still telephone me); he’s another victim of our former High Command’s deeply echeloned illusions.
She
says he didn’t welcome her into the family. As if that were the point! Well, I could go on and on. But von Manstein was going to take me out of my funk. Von Manstein was going to show me how it should have been done! And I knew from the very first page that he would stand up for the German Army, too. You see, another thing that really pisses me off is the way the whole world condemns “German militarism,” as if we hadn’t been fighting simply for enough living-space to survive! What would, say, the French have done if they’d lost the last war, and been forced to pay in blood, soil and money, year after year, while all the neighbors sharpened their knives and got ready to carve off another piece of France? They say we went too far in Poland. Well, the Poles would have annexed Germany all the way to Berlin if they could! Von Manstein makes exactly this point in his book, which I really do recommend. He exposes the aggressive power politics of the Poles. Anybody who reads him will never feel the same way about Poland; this I guarantee. To get right down to it, von Manstein knows what’s what! The victors may try as hard as they like to bury him, but that only makes me admire him all the more. As a great German said,
the strong man is mightiest alone.

Well, I hadn’t gotten very far in his book, really. I was only about halfway through the Polish campaign. But I could already tell that my faith in von Manstein wouldn’t be disappointed, because as soon as the starting gun went off he exploded that lying slander that we meant the Poles any harm; he said—let me find the page—aha, here is how he put it:
When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army, this was, in military parlance, merely the aim that must be the basis of any big offensive operation.
And how about all those so-called “atrocities” we committed in the process? (Anybody who complains that our army behaved, relatively speaking, incorrectly, ought to spend a few years in Vorkuta!) We brought matters to an end as quickly as we could. The capitulation of Poland, again in von Manstein’s words,
in every way upheld the military honor of an enemy defeated after a gallant struggle.
And that’s all any good German needs to say about it.

So then what happened? Then those degenerate “Allies,” who hanged our leaders for aggressive conspiracy, declared war on
us
!—Well, we did our duty. My best friend Karl, who was with von Richthofen’s Eighth Flying Corps and who never in his life told a lie, wrote me in a letter that an eagle flew beside him, just outside the cockpit window, on every sortie against Sedan. I’m not a sentimentalist, but that anecdote does make a person think. Well, Karl got shot down over Stalingrad. He was bringing food and medicine to Sixth Army. Everything wasted! But he wouldn’t have wanted my pity. The point is that we followed the only correct line, and our policies remained as generous as they could have been under the circumstances.—Just as a burst or two of light machine-gun fire will usually clear a road of partisans, so von Manstein utters a line, and all objections get blasted away! For instance,
as a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops,
he writes,
nothing happened to disturb our relations with the civil population during my six months in France.
Von Manstein’s word is gold. If he says a thing is so, case closed. And yet they punish us for “crimes” against France! That’s why sometimes I wake up in the morning all hungover and thinking, what’s the use?

My wife was angry again, this time because I’d clogged up the drain by shaving, so her indictment ran, but I bunkered myself down, because right after that part about military honor,
Lost Victories
became especially interesting. I’ve always had a taste for theoretical issues. In Vorkuta I used to ask the guards how it all would have turned out if Stalin had died instead of Roosevelt; that question cost me those two top front teeth. So you can imagine how excited I felt when von Manstein began to raise theoretical questions, too: What should Poland have done to avoid defeat? To me it’s a real exercise in open-mindedness to step into the enemy’s shoes just for an eyeblink, and then wiggle one’s toes a little, so to speak; it’s good preparation for
next time.
Yes, that’s the correct way to go about it. And von Manstein, needless to say, had the answer in his ammo clip: Poland should have abandoned the western territories to save her armies from encirclement, then waited for the Allies to come. (Of course, they wouldn’t have; they never did. What can you expect from those cowards? Look what Poland is now—a Russian satellite!) I wanted somebody on whom to try this out, but my son, who in the old days would have agreed with everything I said, hadn’t shown his face all day; I suppose he was as close as he could get to the Tiergarten, hoping to cadge cigarettes from American Negroes. Anyhow, what would he have cared? When I got back from Vorkuta, he looked at me as if I were a monster. My wife tried to smooth it over by claiming that he didn’t recognize me. Well, so what;
the strong man is mightiest
and all that. Next came the question I could really throw my soul into: What ought
we
have done to avoid defeat at Russia’s hands? Needless to say, I had this more or less worked out, but only in general terms. So pay good attention, I told myself, because this is Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein speaking! He’d make me
see
the arrows on the maps, the spearheads, the long dotted trails, the ingot-like rectangles of our Army Groups! I was back there now, rushing through all those new states which so came into being on practically every page of
Lost Victories,
with their Reich Commissars pre-assigned by our sleepwalker himself while the Wehrmacht continued forward, its operational area ideally to be (see, I really do understand the theory behind this) not much deeper than the front line itself, in order to avoid interference with our “Special Detachments” in the rear, and about those it’s better not to say anything, because they’re secret; what I’m trying to get across is that in
Lost Victories
Germany was on the march again, and the farther we went the stronger we got, until we were giants in a land of dreams. I’m a realist, but why can’t I visit the past, especially when it’s as sweet to me now as that smell of burned sugar that rose up when our bombers hit the Badayevskiy warehouses in Leningrad? About Leningrad von Manstein says (and I agree with him), that back in ’41 we could have taken the place if we’d just pushed a little harder, but the sleepwalker wouldn’t let us; he demanded Moscow at the same time, which is why he got neither. (In retrospect, he does seem to have been—let’s put it kindly—a bit starry-eyed.) We made another thrust in ’42, but just when we were getting somewhere, Vlasov’s Second Shock Army attacked us, then troops got diverted to the Caucasus; and no sooner had von Manstein straightened out
that
mess when Paulus got into trouble at Stalingrad! So, you see, it was just bad luck that we never got to roll into Leningrad. Burned sugar! I’ll never forget that delicious smell. It was as if all the confectioners in Russia were getting busy, baking us a victory cake as big as a mountain; the frosting was all ready; I’ve always liked caramelized sugar.

Field-Marshal von Manstein closes the first chapter of his memoir:
From now on the weapons would speak.
Soon we would break through the Stalin Line. We would take Leningrad at last. And when we did, von Manstein would be there! He’d raise his Field-Marshal’s baton to say
Germany.
At once there would come undying summer.

2

Some of us in that open cage in Vorkuta, with our caps always on and our footcloths and anything else we could find wrapped around our faces against the cold, so that we resembled Russian babushkas, well, to pass the time we used to talk about politics, almost never about love because that would have been too unbearable; it was almost as if we could already see those sleazy smiles on the faces of the Aryan girls we’d given our all for; now they were doing it with American soldiers just to get a little chocolate; when I got home and saw them flashing their teeth at the men who’d burned Dresden, I almost let them have it, I can tell you! As sad and sullen as most of us were at Vorkuta, the woman-crazy ones were the worst off. You can hum “Lili Marlene” like an idiot; you can fantasize about this lady or that until you’re as black in the face as a hanged partisan, but you’re still here and she’s still
there,
beyond the barbed wire; still, even in the Gulag you can advance a theory or an opinion, and precisely because opinions feel, to get right down to it, less real than they do back home, in the barracks or even on the march, why not make the most of them? Headlamps in the forward trench, I always say! You might as well be speeding in dusty convoys of exultation beyond the steppe-horizons, with that growl of tank treads comforting you all the way across the summer flatness; once you’ve heard that, you’ll never stop wanting more. In that frame of mind you can pleasurably debate a question—for instance: Was the Russian campaign aggressive or not? Von Manstein considers the Soviet troop dispositions to have been
deployment against every contingency,
which implies, at least as I see it, that Operation Barbarossa was arguably defensive. Moreover, he writes how on the very first day of the Russian campaign,
the Soviet command showed its true face
by killing and mutilating a German patrol. To me, that’s conclusive (especially since von Manstein said it), but in any event you can argue something like that, and polish your opinions until they’re as fixed and perfect as diamonds; you might as well, since you’re not going anywhere for years and years, if ever.