Europe Central

SOURCES

These stories are not as rigorously grounded in historical fact as my Seven Dreams books. Rather, the goal here was to write a series of parables about famous, infamous and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision. Most of the characters in this book are real people. I researched the details of their lives as carefully as I could. However, this is a work of fiction. Poetic justice has I hope been rendered, both to them and to their historical situations (which got stripped down into parables, then embellished here and there with supernatural cobwebs). To give one especially glaring example, see my note immediately following this section: “An Imaginary Love Triangle: Shostakovich, Karmen, Konstantinovskaya.” I apologize for any offense which I may have given to the living, and I repeat: This is a work of fiction.

Under such circumstances it would be a sterile exercise in didacticism to list sources of anything other than direct quotations. But I’ve tried to be as accurate in the small details (for instance, “the sound of our footsteps, which I loved, and love still, despite everything”48), and as fair to the historical personages involved as possible. It is probably needless to state that the social systems described here, together with all their institutions and atrocities, derive entirely from the historical record.

The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage. There is no compelling need to consult it; however, it might have furnished some eerie instances of German and Russian synchronicities.

I prepared the list of patronymics for those of you who have trouble keeping track of Russian names and nicknames.

Military terminology need not trouble the reader overmuch here, especially since its seeming specificity was so often illusory during World War II. The number of soldiers in a divison or a regiment, for instance, varied not only according to whether that regiment were German, Soviet, Romanian, Italian, etcetera, but also according to how much it had been bled to death. As the war went on, formations tended to become under official strength. (An instance of non-equivalence: When the German attempt on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, was halted in the winter of 1941, ninety-five Soviet divisions—eight hundred thousand men—stopped seventy-seven and a half German divisions—a million men.) After several attempts at drawing up a nice little chart for you, I finally despaired. The relative equivalence of ranks in the armies concerned was less problematical, but often still not exact. The only matter which does require specific elucidation is this: In Axis (and most Allied) usage, the word front refers to the immediately contested area between two armies. In Soviet usage, however, a front could be an operational grouping, similar to a Nazi army group. During the Great Patriotic War the Soviet Union formed and dissolved fronts according to the requirements of each situation. There were never less than ten, and never any more than fifteen. To minimize confusion I have capitalized the term when using it in a Soviet sense. Thus, the Volkhov Front is “Volkhov Region Red Army Group,” whereas the Volkhov front is the frontline area of the Volkhov area.

Regarding the Ring Cycle, Parzival, Eschenbach’s Tristan and Isolde, the Nibelungenlied and the Norse songs of the Poetic Edda, it should be noted that the names and acts alter in variations of the stories: Hogni is Hagen, and Gunther Gunnar; Brynhild spells her name “Brunnhilde” whenever she finds herself in a Wagner opera. Guthrún may metamorphose into Kriemhild or Grimhild, or vanish entirely. Siegfried wins Brunnhilde for Gunther by riding through a wall of flame, or else he has already done this, awoken her and pledged troth before he ever met Gunther. In either case, the relationship between Siegfried and Gunther is a constant: vainglorious complacency on the one hand, with a hint of illicit intimacy between Siegfried and Brunnhilde, and envious, resentful dependency on the other. I have tried to respect the appropriate consistencies and inconsistencies.

When the plurals of German nouns happen to be identical with the singulars (“Gauleiter,” “Nebelwerfer,” etc.), I thought it best to Anglicize them with an s, especially in such parallelistic constructions as: “Our Nebelwerfers against their Katyushas, what an unresolved problem!”

The moral equation of Stalinism with Hitlerism is nothing new. V. Grossman made that point first and best in his novel Life and Fate. Here it is merely a point of departure. (What is totalitarianism? In 1945, shortly before his own death in an air raid, the horrible Roland Freisler, judge of the Nazi “People’s Court,” says to his condemned adversary what a Stalinist could also say: “Only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: We demand the entire man!”—Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya 1939-1945, ed. & trans. by Beate Ruhm von Oppen [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990; orig. German ed. 1988], p. 409.)

A great number of my visual descriptions, both in straightforward prose and in metaphors, derive from the illustrations in Irina Antonova and Jorn Merkert, comp., Moskva-Berlin Berlin-Moskau 1900-1950 (Moscow: Galart [a supposed coproduction with Prestel-Verlag in Munich and New York; I haven’t seen the latter but if it ever comes out it would be preferable for the reader who can’t sound out Cyrillic]; 1996). This is a spectacular book.

Descriptions of Third Reich uniforms, weapons and other militaria, particularly on the Ostfront, make occasional reference to Nigel Thomas, The German Army 1939-45 (3): Eastern Front 1941-43, illus. Stephen Andrew (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Men-At-Arms ser. no. 326, 1999); Bruce Quarrie, Fallschirmjäger: German Paratrooper 1935-45, illus. Velmir Vuksic (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Warrior ser. no. 38, 2001); Robin Lumsden, A Collector’s Guide to Third Reich Militaria, rev. ed. (Surrey: Ian Allan Publishing, 2000 rev. repr. of orig. 1987 ed.); Werner Haupt, A History of the Panzer Troops 1916-1945, trans. Dr. Edward Force (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1990; original German ed. 1989).

Descriptions of the airplanes of all sides are based on the pretty color foldouts in The Gatefold Book of World War II Warplanes (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, by arr. w/ Brown Packaging Books Ltd., 1995). For details on the sources of technical specifications to Soviet airplanes, see the appropriate note to “Elena’s Rockets.”

My occasional descriptions of the handwriting of German and Russian writers and composers derive from the samples which appear in Marianne Bernhard, comp., Künstler-Autographen: Dichter, Musiker, bildende Künstler in ihren Hand-schriften (Dortmund: Die bibliophilen Taschenbücher, Harenberg Kommunikation, 1980). The exception is the handwriting of Shostakovich, which I have described based on facsimiles reproduced in various biographies, etcetera.

ix Shostakovich epigraph: “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”—Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Limelight Editions repr. of 1979 Harper & Row ed.), p. 156. (Henceforth cited, for the sake of argument, as Shostakovich and Volkov.)

3 Epigraph—Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Brilliant General, ed. and trans. Anthony C. Powell (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1994 repr. of 1958 abridged trans.; original German ed. 1955), p. 22.

3 A German general: Moscow as “the core of the enemy’s whole being.”—Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler: A Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941-5, trans. David Footman (London: Macmillan, 1970 trans. of 1970 German ed.), p. 39.

3 “Italy” (actually, Mussolini): “We cannot change our policy now…”—Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War 1938-1939 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), p. 200.

3 The sleepwalker (Hitler): “This will strike like a bomb!”—Ibid., p. 462.

4 Marshal Tukhachevsky: “Operations in a future war…”—Comrade Stalin: “Modern war will be a war of engines.”—John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany: Volume One (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999 repr. of 1975 ed.), p. 5.

5 The telephone: “It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland.” —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971; orig. German ed. 1925-26), p. 325.

5 The telephone: “That is precisely why the Party affirms…”—J. V. Stalin, On the Opposition (1927-27) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1974).

6 Hitler to Paulus: “One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web…”—See source-notes to “The Last Field-Marshal” (in that story, an amplified version appears).

8 Telephoned order “Under no circumstances will we agree to artillery preparation,” etc. —Gérard Chaliand, ed., The Art of War in World History from Antiquity to the Nuclear Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 954-55 (Guderian on firepower).

A note on Krupskaya’s final years, when I describe her as “writing in support of Stalin’s show trials that many of her own former comrades-in-arms deserved to be shot like mad dogs,” may be in order. According to one eminent historian of the period, she should undoubtedly be credited with having vainly tried to save a few of her colleagues such as the Old Bolshevik Pyatinsky. Apparently I. D. Chigurin was indebted to her for being permitted to die a natural if wretched death. (See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 repr. of 1990 ed.], pp. 238, 437-38). In this account, and several others, Krupskaya receives passing mentions, tinctured by sympathy or pity. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn in his trilogy on the prison system demands to know: “Why didn’t Lenin’s faithful companion, Krupskaya, fight back? Why didn’t she speak out even once with a public exposé, like the old worker in the Rostov Flax Works? Was she really so afraid of losing her old woman’s life?” (The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1973, 1975, 1978; orig. Russian samizdat mss. 1960s], vol. 2, p. 333.)

32 Epigraph—Quoted in Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (New York: Norton, 1968 repr. of 1950 ed.), p. 239.

32 Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor): “I have always found the word ‘Europe’…”—Ibid., p. 246.

36 Epigraph: “A new bride cries until sunrise…”—Russian proverb, quoted to me by a prostitute in Moscow.

Some of my understanding of this artist’s character has been informed by Elizabeth Prelinger (with contributions by Alessandra Comini and Hildegard Bachert), Käthe Kollwitz (Washington: National Gallery of Art / Yale University Press, 1992).

36 Letter from Kollwitz: “My only hope is in world socialism”—Closely after a letter in The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, ed. Hans Kollwitz, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press), p. 184 (21 February 1944).

36 “…she stood before a woman whom she’d made out of stone,… and stroked the granite woman’s cheeks”—Closely after Diary and Letters, p. 122 (entry for August 14, 1932: “I stood before the woman, looked at her—my own face—and I wept and stroked her cheeks”).

37 The tale of Frau Becker and her children—After Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989), p. 49, entry for 30 August 1909, trans. by WTV.

37 “Peter would have joined them”—Tagebücher, p. 379 (9 November 1918, trans. WTV).

37 Kollwitz’s family showing the Imperial flag for the first time ever—Large, p. 127.

37 Rumpelstilzchen—Known to Anglo-American fairytale readers as Rumpelstiltskin.

38 “Peter’s flag hanging from the balcony”—Described in the Tagebücher, p. 170 (10 October 1914, trans. WTV).

38 “Vile, outrageous murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg”—Tagebücher, p. 400 (16 January 1919, trans. WTV).

38 “For Rosa Luxemburg an empty coffin near Liebknecht.”—Tagebücher, p. 403 (entry for 25 January 1919, trans. WTV).

39 Kollwitz in the morgue: “Oh, what a dismal, dismal place this is…”—Large, p. 166, slightly altered.

41 Karl to his wife: “You have strength only for sacrifice and letting go…”—Tagebücher, p. 176 (27 November 1914, trans. WTV).

41 Käthe’s recurring dreams of Peter—Tagebücher, p. 193 (end of July 1915, trans. WTV).

Various details on Peter’s argument with his parents over volunteering, his death, the condition of his grave and Käthe and Karl’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1927 (“Russia intoxicated me”) come from the Tagebücher, p. 400 (16 January 1919, trans. WTV), pp. 745-47 (Appendix: “Die Jahre 1914-1933 zum Umbruch [1943]”. One woman who apparently met Kollwitz claims to have been told by her that “she persuaded him to volunteer for the fighting.” But this same woman says that Peter the grandson died “in the Polish campaign.” This Peter died in 1942, long after the Polish campaign had ended. (Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich [New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999 3rd paperback repr. of 1993 ed.], p. 311 [testimony of Frau Emmi Heinrich].)

42 “IHR SOHN IST GEFALLEN”—“Your son has fallen.”

44 Kollwitz: “Today started work on the sculpture ‘Woman with Dead Child’—Tagebücher, p. 85 (entry for 9 September 1910, trans. WTV). (Original: Heut den Beginn gemacht zu der plastischen Gruppe: Frau mit totem Kind.)

44 Kollwitz on her Russenhilfe image: “It’s good, thank God”—Tagebücher, p. 508 (entry for 12 September 1921, trans. WTV).

45 Kollwitz to her son Hans: “There are other problems that interest me now…”—Christoph Meckel et al, Käthe Kollwitz (Bad Godesberg, West Germany: Inter Nationes, 1967), p. 16 (Ulrich Weisner, “On the Art of Käthe Kollwitz”), somewhat altered.

45 “An elegy of the people.”—Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1976), p. 162.

45 The chord D-D-Sch—Often so represented in studies of Shostakovich and his later music, especially the Eighth String Quartet. Thomas Melle for his part insists to me: “Inappropriate German notation. The correct German notation would be: d, d, es, c, b.”

45 A. Lunacharsky on Kollwitz: “She aims at an immediate effect…”—Otto Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz, trans. Stella Humphries (London: Studio Vista, 1961), p. 58.

46 Description of Kollwitz amidst the jury of the Prussian Academy—After a photograph in Martin Fritsch (herausgegeben & bearbeitet von Annette Seeler), Käthe Kollwitz: zeichnung Grafik Plastik: Bestandskatalog des Käthe-Kollwitz-Museums Berlin (Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 1999), p. 37.

46 Professor Moholy-Nagy to Kollwitz: “It is an elementary biological necessity…”—Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987 repr. of 1927 second German ed.), p. 13. The encounter between these two artists is entirely invented.

46 Professor Moholy-Nagy to Kollwitz: “The traditional painting has become a historical relic…”—Ibid., p. 45.

47 The grocer’s apprentice: “… I would like to stand for something. I would like to be there for something”—After the justification given by Frau Ellen Frey, who defended Hitler decades after the Third Reich; in Owings, p. 181. (Frau Frey said “live for,” not “stand for,” but the latter seemed more appropriate in this context, given that the boy is dying.)

47 Description of Peter’s hand and body in Kollwitz’s recollections—Based on a description in the Diary and Letters (p. 115; entry for August 27, 1927) of her doomed grandson Peter: “the frail little hand laid in ours. The beautiful naked little body.”

48 Footnote: The role of Otto Nagel—Otto Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, n.d., 1962 or after), p. 41. About the exhibition see pp. 53, 56, 63-64.

49 Letter from Kollwitz to her children about learning Russian—Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, p. 183 (7 February 1944).

49 Letter from Kollwitz: “The desire, the unquenchable longing…” Ibid., p. 187 (13 June 1944).

49 Kollwitz diary entry: “And I must do the prints on Death…”—Diary and Letters, p. 114 (13 February 1927).

50 Layout of the Kollwitz exhibition in Moscow—After the Tagebücher, p. 632 (November 1927). Elena Konstantinovskaya’s presence is a fabrication.

51 Grete, Anna and the old proletarian woman—Plucked from the Tagebücher.

51 Description of the young Käthe Kollwitz (compared by me to the young Krupskaya)—Based on a photo in David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Book Group, 2000), p. 70 (“Käthe Kollwitz, circa 1905.” Source: Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte).

51 “They,” on Kollwitz: “Her family was involved in the workers’ movement”—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 12, p. 586 (entry on Käthe Kollwitz).

51 “The doctor came immediately, and his invoice never”—Tagebücher, p. 18 (introduction).

51 Kollwitz: “That’s the typical misfortune…”—Diary and Letters, p. 52 (September 1909).

52 “One young man” to Kollwitz: “The temporal sequence of a movement…” —Closely after Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, on the subject of his reflected color displays; excerpted in Moholy-Nagy, p. 80.

53 The young man (Comrade Alexandrov): “I used to believe that if I lived out my life…” —The Diaries of Nikolay Punin 1904-1953, ed. Sidney Monas and Jennifer Greene Krupala, trans. Jennifer Greene Krupala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 51 (entry for 15 August 1917; somewhat reworked).

53 “He wanted to escort her and her husband to a Shostakovich premiere.”—There is no evidence that Kollwitz did or did not attend a Shostakovich event. Originally I sentenced her to the rather mediocre Second Symphony simply because its premiere date, 1927, coincided with the year of her visit. In fact, it premiered in Leningrad in November, so Kollwitz had probably come and gone before it arrived in Moscow. For that reason the Scherzo in E-flat Major (1923-24) seemed safer.

54 Kollwitz on Schnabel (“clear-consoling-good”) and Beethoven (“the heavens opened”)—Diary and Letters, p. 115.

55 Kollwitz to Lene Bloch: “Marriage is a kind of work” —Tagebücher, pp. 18-19 (introduction).

55 The parade on Red Square—Based in part on the description in her Briefen an den Sohn, pp. 201-02 (Moscow, 6 November 1927).

55 The drawing “Listening,” later “lithographed… as Slushayuoshchie”—Kete Kolvitz (so transliterated in Cyrillic) catalogue, Katalog vystavki proizvedeniy iz muzeev i castnych sobraniy German Demokrat. Republiki (Moscow: Isdatelstvo Akademii Khudozhest SSSR, n.d. [prob. 1963], no page nos.). This is merely my fabulist’s trick. The only reasoning that the name “Listening” got changed to its Russian equivalent was that it so appeared in the catalogue. Of course to Kollwitz herself it remained “Zuhörende,” or in some versions “Zuhörender” (catalogue 14, 1927).

55 “Out of Moscow Käthe Kollwitz brought with her a beautiful page…”—Bemerkung, ascribed to Otto Nagel (op. cit., p. 288; trans. a bit floridly by WTV).

56 Danilo Kiš: “Under my personal supervision a hundred and twenty inmates of the nearby regional prison camp…”—Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Duska Mikic-Mitchell (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001 repr. of 1978 Harcourt ed.; orig. Serbo-Croatian ed. 1976), p. 42. To avoid monotony, I have changed “prisoners in” to “inmates of.”

56 Kollwitz: “When the man and the woman are healthy, a worker’s life is not unbearable” —Tagebücher, p. 49, entry for 30 August 1909, trans, by WTV.

56 “Joy in others and being in harmony with them had always been one of the deepest pleasures in her life.”—After Diary and Letters, p. 116 (entry for March 1928: “Joy in others and being in harmony with them is one of the deepest pleasures in life.”)

56 Kollwitz: “Moscow with its different atmosphere…”—Diary and Letters, p. 115 (New Year’s Eve, 1927).

57 “Frau Kollwitz had taken up etching in order to distribute the maximum number of prints to the working class”—After an assertion in Kearns, p. 141.

58 The meeting between Kollwitz and Karmen I fabricated.

58 Old Reschke in the Cafe Monopol, 1914: “God be thanked that mobilization is happening…”—Tagebücher, p. 149 (August 1914, trans. WTV, slightly altered). He is not elsewhere mentioned in the diaries, so I don’t know whether he was really “old Reschke” (my adjective) or not.

58 Karl: “This noble young generation…” Tagebücher, p. 152 (10 August 1914, trans. WTV).

59 Description of Peter in the last month of his life—After a photograph in the Tagebücher, p. 167 (“Peter Kollwitz, 2. Oktober 1914”).

59 Roman Karmen: “How terrible it must seem to be to be a mother who weeps… film it!”—K. K. Ognev, ed., Roman Karmen (Moscow?: Sovexportfilm, n.d., after 1975), p. 7 (extract from Karmen’s daybook while in Spain, presumably in 1936; trans. by WTV).

60 Description of Peter’s room—After a photograph in the Tagebücher, p. 192.

60 The commentator: “In the diaries one finds…”—Tagebücher, p. 899 (notes; trans. and slightly reworded by WTV).

60 Hitler’s attire in Hamburg, 1928—The Infancy of Nazism: The Memoirs of Ex-Gauleiter Albert Krebs 1923-1933, ed. and trans. William Sheridan Allen (New York: New Viewpoints, a division of Franklin Watts, 1976), p. 155.

60 Käthe to Gorki: “All that I saw in Russia…”—Tagebücher, p. 899 (notes, trans. and slightly reworded by WTV).

60 “We Protect the Soviet Union!”—This image seems to be rare. I have found it only in Nagel, p. 139 (“Wir schützen die Sowjetunion!”).

61 Hitler to his lieutenants: “Speechless obedience”—Krebs, p. 189.

61 “And in an instant the bullet struck him!”—Käthe Kollwitz, Brief an den Sohn 1904 bis 1945, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1992), p. 91 (19 November 1914, trans. WTV).

61 Description of Hans Kollwitz’s bookplate—After Kollwitz, Brief an den Sohn, p. 81 (“Das Exlibris, das Käthe Kollwitz 1908 für ihren sechzehnjährigen Sohn entwarf…”).

62 Description of the Leningrad exhibition—After a photo in Otto Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, n.d., 1962 or after), pp. 66-69. The presence of Konstantinovskaya and Shostakovich has been invented.

62 Footnote: The entry on Kollwitz in Meyers Lexikon—Vol. 6, (pub. 1939), p. 1300. Meyers lists a few works, such as her “Proletariat” (1925). The implication is that she is a has-been.

62 Footnote: “Oh, Lise, being dead must be good…”—Diary and Letters, p. 195 (letter of February 1945).

63 Hitler: “The Germans—this is essential—will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress”—Chaliand, p. 945 (secret conversation of 17-18 September 1941).

64 Epigraph: “At the very point when death becomes visible behind everything…” —Kollwitz, Diary and Letters, p. 123 (entry for August 1932).

64 The Song of Igor’s Campaign: “You reign high upon your throne of gold…”—Song of Igor’s Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Random House / Vintage Books, 1960), p. 55 (“Apostrophe,” ll. 523-28; substantially “retranslated” by WTV, less to improve on VN than to avoid permissions fees).

66 Anecdote of the kolkozniks in Moscow—After James von Geldern and Richard Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 184, anecdote.

66 Capture of sixty Soviet tanks by the Condor Legion—Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965), 401.

66 Akhmatova: “One might say that Leningrad is particularly suited to catastrophes…” —Chukovskaya, p. 40 (entry for 27 September 1939), slightly abridged. “The black water with yellow flecks of light…” actually was said by Akhmatova, not Chukovskaya.

68 Epigraph—Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, ed., Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, trans. Thomas Hoisington and Steven Shabad (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 395-96 (Document 146, author [“two priggish inspectors”] not cited; State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF], f.5207, op. 1, d.1293, 11.7-8).

68 Details on Soviet planes, rocket engines, etc.—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, entry on aviation; Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer, trans. M. M. Samokhvalov and H. C. Creighton (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1975 rev. of 1973 Russian ed.); Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II (New York: Military Press, 1989 repr. of 1946-47 ed.), entries on Soviet air power and Soviet aero engines.

68 Descriptions (here, in “The Palm Tree of Deborah” and in “Untouched”) of Rodchenko’s non-objective sculptures—Based on the photographs in Galerie Gmurzynska, Alexander Rodchenko: Spatial Constructions / Raumkonstruktione (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002). 68 Assessment of F. Zander: “One of the tragedies of this outstanding intellect…” —Golovanov, p. 212.

69 The “forty times forty” churches of Moscow—Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, 3rd ed., trans. Elaine Feinstein (New York: Penguin, 1994 repr. of 1993 ed.), p. 15 (“Verses About Moscow,” 1916, stanza 2); slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

69 The “Carpenter” link of the N. K. Krupskaya Brigade—I have invented these names. A Pioneer brigade of forty-fifty member was subdivided into links of ten members each. Each brigade was named after a revolutionary leader; each link was named after tool or field of production. Pioneers were divided by age into Young Pioneers and Little Octobrists. The Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) kept young people from ages fourteen to twenty-three. Sharpshooting and first aid would indeed have been some of the skills which Elena would have learned there. As mentioned in “Opus 40,” she was expelled from the Komsomol in 1935.

69 Details on the Komsomol and the Pioneers—In part from Samuel Northrup Harper, Civic Training in Soviet Russia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1929).

70 “We noticed two black and blue marks on the neck of Elena Konstantinovskaya…”—Siegelbaum and Sokolov, loc. cit.; verbatim except that Elena’s name has been substituted for that of another girl, and Liza Ivanova has become Vera Ivanova.

71 “Isolde’s secret song was her marvelous beauty…”—Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan; with the Tristan of Thomas, trans. A. T. Hatto (New York: Penguin, 1975 repr. of 1967 rev. ed.; orig. trans. 1960; Strassburg’s poem ca. 1210), p. 148, grossly “retranslated” by WTV.

76 Epigraph: “What child is there…”—Hanna Reitsch, The Sky My Kingdom: Memoirs of the Famous German WWII Test-Pilot, trans. Lawrence Wilson (London: Greenhill Books, 1991 expanded repr. of 1955 English ed., but [p. 219] “I wrote this book after I had been released from one and a half years as a prisoner in the United States,” hence my approximate dating of 1947).

77 Details on German planes, rocket engines, etc. (most of them exaggerated and distorted by me)—Dear and Foot, entry on V-weapons; Reitsch, various minor details on gliders and flight experiences; Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II (New York: Military Press, 1989 repr. of 1946-47 ed.), entries on German air power and German aero engines.

77 The Geco 7.65 cartridges—Since the plot in part turns on this matter, it may be worth a note. According to Paul (op. cit.), “the Poles” massacred at Katyń “were quickly shot behind the head at close range, probably with a German-made pistol—the light 7.65 mm Walther… considered the finest police pistol in the world” (p. 110). “The caliber, Geco 7.65 millimeter, did not fit the Tokarev or Nagan pistols generally carried by the NKVD. It did fit the Walther…” (p. 206). Indeed, the Tokarev and the Nagan (often spelled Nagant) were both 7.62 mm in caliber. The table of small arms in I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; p. 1016) lists no Soviet 7.65 mm. weapon whatsoever. Inexplicably, that is also the case for German weapons (ibid., p. 1014). The only two German pistols listed, the Parabellum P08 and the Walther P38, are both 9 mm. It would seem, then, that the 7.65 caliber used at Katyń was hardly a favorite with either side. However, the table “Characteristics of German World War II Service Pistols” in Edward Clinton Ezell’s famous Small Arms of the World: A Basic Manual of Small Arms, 12th ed. (New York: Stackpole Books, 1983; p. 500) has eight entries, the first two being the P08 and the P38 just mentioned, the third being the 7.63 mm Mauser 1932, and the other five all sporting the 7.65 mm caliber. These are: the Mauser 1910, the Mauser HSc, the Sauer 38, the Walther PP and the Walther PPK. (It was with one of these latter two models which Hitler committed suicide in 1945.) In the equivalent Soviet table (p. 696), four models of pistols and revolvers appear, including the two already mentioned in Dear and Foot. The remaining two (the Makarov and the Stechkin) are both 9 mm and seem to be largely postwar in any event. In short, on the information at hand, it would seem that Paul’s statement is correct: The Poles were murdered with German-made bullets. Large quantities of the Geco 7.65 mm. were sold to the Baltic countries and perhaps even to the USSR during the interwar years. The massacre was certainly committed by the Soviets, not the Germans.

77 Heidegger: “The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth”—Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row / Colophon, 1971), p. 220 (“… Poetically Man Dwells… ,” a lecture given in 1951).

81 Epigraph: “‘Twas in olden times when eagles screamed…”—Lee M. Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda, 2nd rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987 repr. of 1962 ed.), p. 180 (“Helgakvitha Hundingsbana” I, stanza 1, slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

81 “His new armor, which was so red that it made one’s eyes red just to see it”—This description of the Red Knight’s armor is based on Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: A Romance of the Middle Ages, trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New York: Random House / Vintage, 1961; orig. German poem finished ca. 1210), p. 81 (Book III). The Red Knight was Ither of Kukumerlant.

82 Mein Kampf: “And simultaneous with him stands the victory of the reified Idea, which has ever been, and ever shall be, anti-Semitic”—Meyers Lexikon, vol. 5 (1937), p. 711. (I have compressed and added a “stands” to the eye-glazing original: “… und zugleich auch mit ihm den Sieg des Gedankens der schaffenden Arbeit, die selbst ewig antisemitsch war und ewig antisemitsch sein wird.”)

82 The black-and-white plates: Adolf Hitler I and II—Same vol., following p. 1248.

82 Plates on “Garten” and “Germanen”—Ibid.

82 National Socialism entry—Ibid., vol. 8, 1940.

82 Parzival, Galogandres and King Clamidê—Eschenbach, pp. 113-15.

85 Epigraph: “There is nothing in you which fails to send a wave of joy and fierce passion inside me…”—Sofiya Khentova, Udivitelyenui Shostakovich (Saint Petersburg: Variant, 1993), p. 117 (2nd letter of 15 June 1934), slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

85 For early Soviet names for Leningrad landmarks, in this story, in “And I’d Dry My Salty Hair” and in “The Palm Tree of Deborah,” I have made occasional use of A. Radó, comp. [issued by the Society for Cultural Relations of the Soviet Union with Foreign Countries], Guide-Book to the Soviet Union (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1928), pp. 197-364 (entry on Leningrad).

86 Physical appearance of Shostakovich at this time—After the illustration in Detlef Gojowy, Schostakowitsch (Hamburg: Rowohlt, Bildmonographien, 2002 repr. of 1983 ed.), p. 49 (“Porträt Schostakowitschs aus den Jahren 1933 bis 1935”).

87 Shostakovich’s letters to Elena, and various other background details—Based on Khentova, pp. 114-37, 150-59, 168-70, 245-46, trans. for WTV by Sergi Mineyev (16,746 words at 16.777 cents per word, for a total cost of $2,846.82).

88 Composition dates for various movements of Opus 40—Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 80.

88 Relative evenness of two themes from Opus 40—Harold Barlow and Sam Morgenstern, A Dictionary of Musical Themes (London and Tonbridge: Ernest Benn Limited, 1974 repr. of 1949 ed.), p. 438.

90 S. Khentova: “In contrast to Nina Vasilievna…”—Khentova (Mineyev), original, p. 115, Mineyev p. 1.

91 Shostakovich: The First String Quartet is “a particular exercise in the form of a quartet” —Musik und Gesellschaft, vol. 34, no. 9 (September 1981), pp. 549-52 (Ekkehard Ochs, “Das Streichquartett im Schaffen von Dmitri Schostakowitch: Zum 75. Geburtstag des Komponisten am 25. September), p. 549 (trans. by WTV).

91 Shostakovich to T. Glivenko: “I have a very clever wife, oh, yes—very clever…” —Khentova, p. 131, Mineyev p. 12; Shostakovich-ized by WTV.

91 Shostakovich: “When a critic for Worker and Theater or for The Evening Red Gazette”… —Quoted in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000 rev. repr. of 1977 ed.), pp. 480-81 (from Sovetskaya Muzika, no. 3 [1933], p. 121).

92 E. Mravinsky: “This masquerade imparts the spurious impression that Shostakovich is being emotional…”—Khentova (Mineyev), original p. 114, Mineyev p. 1; slightly reworded for contextual clarity by WTV.

92 Shostakovich: “I can’t forgive myself for not kidnapping my golden Elenochka and bringing her to Baku with me” and “As soon as I’m back in my Lyalka’s arms I’ll have the strength to resolve everything”—After Khentova (Mineyev), original p. 116, Mineyev p. 2 (letter from DDS to EEK, 15 June 1934).

93 “The brilliance here is sinister rather than exhibitionistic”—Emanuel Ax, program notes to the CBS “Masterworks” recording of Shostakovich’s Trio (Opus 67) and Piano Sonata (Opus 40); produced by James Mallinson (code MX 44664); p. 3.

94 Distinction between motif, leitmotiv and theme—Based partially on a chat with ethno-musicologist Philip Bohlman in September 2003; after thinking for a moment, Professor Bohlman advised me that “theme” would be the right word to use in connection with Shostakovich.

94 Footnote: Moser’s entries on Shostakovich, Sousa, Serbian music, “Glasunow” et al—H. J. Moser’s Musik Lexikon of 1933 (Berlin-Schöneberg, Max Hesses Verlag, 1935).

95 Ekkehard Ochs on dialectic in Shostakovich—Ochs, p. 551 (trans. by WTV).

95 Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya: “I try to stop loving you…”—Same document, original pp. 119-20; Mineyev p. 4; slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

96 Arrests “by the tens of thousands”—Conquest’s figure, in his chapter on the Kirov affair. Kirov was murdered by Stalin.

96 A. Ferkelman on Shostakovich: “I never succeeded in getting any other pianist to take such fast tempi…”—Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 1995 repr. of 1994 ed.), p. 105 (testimony of Arnold Ferkelman, slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

96 “I don’t believe that I’ll be yours…”—pp. 122-23, Mineyev, p. 6 (25 June 1934), slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

98 Shostakovich on Opus 40: “A certain great breakthrough”—Ochs, p. 549 (trans. WTV).

98 Shostakovich to Konstantinovskaya: “Why did I meet you?…”—Khentova (Mineyev), original, p. 122, Mineyev, p. 6 (1st, short letter of 25 June 1934).

99 Epigraph—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 94.

Many of my visual descriptions of the Condor Legion and its acts are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive in Berlin.

101 Wotan: “For so goes the god from you; so he kisses your godhead away”—Libretto booklet to the Solti version of Wagner’s “Siegfried” (James King, Régine Crespin et al performing; Wiener Staatsopernchor, Wiener Philharmoniker, 1985), p. 130 (Act III, Scene 3; German text trans. by WTV).

101 How Loki gave birth to ogres—Poetic Edda, p. 139 (“Voluspá hin skamma,” stanza 14).

102 Names and descriptions of various German airplane formations—After a diagram in Meyers Lexikon, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut AG., 1938), pp. 193-94: “Fliegen im Verband.”

104 Meyers Lexikon, 1938: “He is no dictator…”—Vol. 5 (1938), p. 1276, trans. and made slightly less ponderous by WTV (end of entry on Adolf Hitler, which then concludes with an encomium from Goebbels).

105 Epigraph—Combined from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, expanded ed., trans. Judith Hemschemeyer, ed. Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997), p. 521 (“At the Edge of the Sea” 1914), and Anna Akhmatova: Selected Poems, trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 31 (same poem, trans. as “By the Seashore”), “retranslated” by WTV as “At the Seashore.”

For many of the details in Akhmatova’s life I’ve relied on Roberta Reeder’s irritatingly reverential Anna Akhmatova, Poet and Prophet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). References to Akhmatova’s heterosexual affairs are in the main based on the truth as I’ve understood it; references to more bizarre sexual practices are the fabrication of my narrator, Comrade Alexandrov.

105 “The equivalent of ten Stalin tanks”—An anachronism; Stalin tanks would not have been available at this juncture. But I wanted to mention Stalin’s name as close to the opening as possible.

106 “One of her postwar odes”: “Where Stalin is, is freedom…”—Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), p. 879 (Appendix, “In Praise of Peace,” 1949), “retranslated” by WTV.

107 Footnote: Punin’s diary—Op. cit., p. 72 (undated entry for 1921, before 28 July).

107 Punin on art casting itself across life “like a shadow”—Ibid, p. 203 (entry for 24 February 1944).

107 Shostakovich: “Basically, I can’t bear having poetry written about my music” —Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 273.

108 N. Berdayev: “The putrefied air of a hothouse”—Quoted in Reeder, p. 25.

111 Gumilyev’s affairs with “Blue Star” (Elena Debouchet) and Tanya Adamovich—Reeder, p. 62.

111 N. Nedobrovo: “Her calmness in confessing pain and weakness”—Ibid., p. 88, slightly abridged.

112 Excerpts from “Poem Without a Hero”—All from Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), pp. 563-64 (I.4.405, 407-11, 415, 418), “retranslated” by WTV.

113 L. K. Chukovskaya: Akhmatova’s fate was “something even greater than her own person” —Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals, vol. 1, 1938-1941 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2002 repr. of 1994 Farrar, Straus & Giroux ed.; orig. Russian ed. 1989), pp. 6-7.

114 Tale of the “Stalin Route”—Von Geldern and Stites, pp. 258-61.

114 Addresses of main places of detention (mentioned here and in “Opus 110”)—Dr. Cronid Lubarsky, ed., USSR News Brief: Human Rights: List of Political Prisoners in the USSR as on 1 May 1982, 4th issue (Brussels: Cahiers du Samizdat, 1982), p. 37.

115 Chukovskaya: “She herself, her words, her deeds…”—Op. cit., p. 6.

116 Akhmatova: “How early autumn came this year.”—Ibid., p. 6. 116 Akhmatova: “It’s extremely good that I’ll be dead soon.”—Ibid., p. 14.

117 Masaryk on Dostoyevsky and on Russian atheism—Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1967; original German ed., 1912), vol. 3, pp. 49, 10.

118 Gumilyev’s nightmares—Diary entry quoted in Reeder, p. 61.

119 Gumilyev: “Your cold, slender hands.”—Ibid., p. 61 (trans. of “Iambic Pentameter,” 1913).

121 Epigraph—Three Märchen of E. T. A. Hoffmann, trans. Charles E. Passage (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 324 (“Master Flea: A Fairytale in Seven Adventures,” composed 1822, published 1908).

121 “The most spectacular scenario ever written”: “Germany can no longer be a passive onlooker! Every political possibility has been exhausted; we’ve decided on a solution by force!”—Watt, pp. 514 (Hitler to Sir Nevile Henderson, 29 August 1939), 534 (Hitler’s Directive No. 1 for the Conduct of the War, 31 August 1939).

123 Epigraph—Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambala Publications [A C. G. Jung Foundation Book], 1995), p. 45.

Some of the technical terms relating to telephones have been extracted (and, I hope, used correctly) from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 25, p. 476 (entry on telephone communication). These words and information have to a lesser extent also been deployed in “Steel in Motion” and in “The Palm Tree of Deborah”’s description of the Leningrad broadcast of the Seventh Symphony.

125 “Lyalka, you filled my heart until it was ready to explode.”—Closely after Khentova, p. 123, Mineyev p. 6 (letter of 25 June 1934).

126 Epigraph—George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (New York: Dover Publications, 1967, repr. of 1923 4th ed.), p. 2.

126 Gunnar, Hogni and Guthrún—So they are named in the “Greenlandish Lay of Atli” in the Elder Edda, from which the Nibelungenlied in part derives. In the latter version of the tale, Gunnar is Gunther, Hogni becomes the balefully noble Hagen, and Guthrún, who never wanted her brothers to come to their destruction, is now Kriemhild, who lures them to it in order to take revenge for their murder of Siegfried.

127 Göring: “The Czechs, a vile race of dwarfs without any culture…”—Quoted in John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 646.

129 Hitler’s interest in the directing at Bayreuth—Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Avon, 1970, trans. of 1969 German ed.), p. 185.

131 “We’re getting old, Kubizek,” &c (conversation at Bayreuth)—After Toland, p. 854 (slightly altered).

131 “Siegfried and Gunnar hadn’t even laid eyes on the princesses they pined for”—So we infer from the Nibelungenlied, in which Gunnar has actually become Gunther, as already noted; I have kept his Norse name to retain consistency with the opening of “The Sleepwalker.”

139 “On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival, I’m gripped by a great sadness…”—From the “secret conversations,” quoted in William Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 102.

139 The golden figures, the far-famed ones…”—Voluspá (The Prophecy of the Seeress”), stanza 60; in The Poetic Edda, p. 12.

140 Epigraph: Shostakovich on musical means and ends—Fay, p. 258.

140 Russian casualties of the Leningrad siege—Contemporary Soviet sources estimated around 1,000,000 victims. Western figures were substantially lower; usually they claimed 6-700,000 killed. However, as late as the end of Shostakovich’s life, the American historian William Craig wrote that “more than a million besieged Russian civilians had starved to death during the nightmarish winter of 1941” alone.—Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad (New York: Reader’s Digest Press / E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973), p. 18. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia [Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entisklopediia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entisklopediia Publishing House, 1973)], ed. and trans. Jean Paradise et al. (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1976), settled on the following statistics: 641,803 people died of hunger and 17,000 of bombings and shellings. The Germans dropped 150,000 artillery shells on Leningrad during the siege, 100,000 incendiary bombs, 5,000 high explosives (vol. 14, p. 383; entry on Leningrad). I decided to use the higher figures for reasons analogous to my use of Gerstein’s inflated figures on the Holocaust in “Clean Hands” (see note, below); this is what people would have believed at the time.

142 A. Glazunov: “Then this is no place for you. Shostakovich is one of the brightest hopes for our art”—Wilson, p. 29 (testimony of Mikhail Gnessin, slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

143 N. L. Komarovskaya: “A small pale youth…”—Ibid., p. 17.

143 Cousin Tania: “His compositions are very good…”—Victor Ilyich Seroff, in collaboration with Nadejda Galli-Shohat, aunt of the composer, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Life and Background of a Soviet Composer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1943), p. 102 (letter from Tania to Nadejda Galli-Shohat).

147 N. Malko: “As compressed as chamber music,” “he certainly knows what he wants,” etc.—Somewhat after Wilson, pp. 48-49. The anecdotes of the shoes and of the mating behavior of insects (the second one slightly altered from what actually took place) have been moved here for the sake of narrative effect. Both events occurred during his later Kharkov recital with Malko.

148 Comrade M. Kaganovich: “The ground must tremble…”—Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, ed., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 45 (Ronald Grigor Suny, “Stalin and His Stalinism: Power and Authority in the Soviet Union, 1930-53).

148 Proletarian Musician: “His work will infallibly reach a dead end.”—Fay, p. 55 (slightly altered).

151 Shostakovich to Sollertinsky: “Overcoming the resistance of an orchestra…” —Closely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 75 (another context).

152 Mitya to Glikman: Joke about Stalin & Co. in the sinking steamship—Von Geldern and Stites, p. 329 (“Anecdotes”).

154 Shostakovich to The New York Times: “Thus we regard Scriabin…”—Seroff, p. 157 (New York Times, December 20, 1931).

154 Rabochii i Teatr: “A last warning to its composer”—Wilson, p. 90. The 1979 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which came out after the composer had won several Stalin Prizes and then safely died, confined itself to the dry statement that this ballet as well as “Dyanmiada” “did not remain in the theatrical repertoire.”

154 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “In the 1930s, Soviet musical culture…”—Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entisklopediia, ed. A. M. Prokhorov, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entisklopediia Publishing House, 1973), ed. and trans. Jean Paradise et al. (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1976), USSR volume, entry on music.

154 A. Akhmatova: “In this place, peerless beauties quarrel…”—Hemschemeyer version, “retranslated” by WTV.

156 Footnote on “Thousands Cheer”—This movie played at the Astor in September 1943. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times described it as a crowd-pleaser.

156 Shostakovich’s sister, Mariyusha, to their aunt: “Our greatest fault is that we worshipped him…”—Seroff, p. 180, slightly abridged.

157 A. Akhmatova: “Without hangman and gallows…”—Ibid., p. 665 (“Why did you poison the water… ,” 1935), “retranslated” by WTV.

157 “Music’s Kandinsky”—A two-page parallel between Shostakovich and Kandinsky is drawn by Gawriil Glikman (München), “Schostakowitsch, wie ich ihn kannte,” in Hilmar Schmalenberg, ed., Schostakowitsch-Gesellschaft e. V. (Hrsg): Schostakowitsch in Deutschland [Schostakowitsch-Studien, Band I] (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, Studia Slavica Musica, Band 13, 1998), pp. 189-90.

159 D. Zhitomirsky: “The despair of the lost soul”—Wilson, p. 95.

161 Shostakovich to the press: “I want to write a Soviet Ring of the Nibelung!”—Seroff, p. 191 (interview with Leonid and Pyotr Tur; exclamation point added).

161 Shostakovich to Nina: “All of her music has as its purpose…”—Seroff, p. 252 (actually, from DDS’s statement “About My Opera”).

162 Nadezhda Welter: “Sometimes one was overcome with a feeling of cold fear…” —Wilson, pp. 98-99.

165 Shostakovich to Nina: “Let’s at least get to the recapitulation…”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 163 (the original context was the symphonies of Glazunov).

166 Shostakovich to Nina: “Lady Macbeth’s crimes are a protest…”—Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, paperback repr. of 1997 ed.), p. 501 (quoting a “program essay” by Shostakovich).

166 Shostakovich to Nina: “Can music attack evil?”—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 234.

166 Shostakovich to Nina: “And Sergei, you see, my music strips him…”—Loosely after Seroff, p. 253 (from DDS’s statement “About My Opera”).

168 Shostakovich to E. Konstantinovskaya: “Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me…”—Wilson, p. 110 (quoted from Sofiya Khentova; slightly altered).

168 Shostakovich to E. Konstantinovskaya: “Prisoners are wretches to be pitied, and you shouldn’t kick somebody when he’s down”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 110.

169 V. Shebalin: “I consider that Shostakovich is the greatest genius…”—Wilson, p. 114 (Alisa Shebalina).

170 Shostakovich to Glikman: “The things you love too much perish”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: “You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear.”

170 Tukhachevsky: “One should practice large-scale repression and employ incentives”—Chaliand, p. 915 (“Counterinsurgency”).

172 Pravda editorial on Shostakovich: “He ignored the demand of Soviet culture…” —Seroff, pp. 206-07.

173 Tukhachevsky: “I always get whatever I ask for.”—Very loosely based on words attributed to him in another context, in Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45 (New York: Quill, 1985, repr. of 1965 ed., with new intro.), p. 33.

176 Tukhachevsky at the time of his arrest and execution: “I would have been better off as a violinist”—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 97.

176 Shostakovich’s interrogation—I have made it far more brutal than it was. One source proposes that it might never have happened: An intensely sensitive man, Shostakovich may have so feared his imminent demise that he lost his ability to discriminate between what happened in fact and what only occurred in his tormented imagination. (This, again, was a common syndrome under the Terror.)—http:/www.siue.edu/~aho/musov/basner/basner.html, 6/20/2002 (“ ‘You Must Remember!’ ” Shostakovich’s alleged interrogation by the NKVD in 1937,” p. 3).

177 The Fifth Symphony as “a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism”—We’re told that this phrase was not Shostakovich’s, but he acquiesced in the happy suggestion.

179 Increase in the productive capacity of Leningrad since 1913—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 14, p. 385. However, the benchmark year was actually 1940, not 1941. I imagine that the accuracy (such as it was) of the statistic is unaffected.

179 “The critics” on Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony: “Nothing more than the recapitulation of a football match”—After Isaak Glikman, Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman 1941-1975, with a Commentary by Isaak Glikman, trans. Anthony Philips (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001; original Russian ed. 1993), p. xxxii.

179 Definition of a family: “A socio-biological community…”—The Soviet Way of Life (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 347 (ch. 8, “The Soviet Family”).

179 S. Volkov: “The feelings of the intellectual…”—Solomon Volkov, Saint Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 423.

180 Description of the Eighth Symphony—Based in part on my hearing of it, and in part on the score itself: Dmitri Schostakowitsch, 8. Symphonie Op. 65, ed. nr. 2221 (Hamburg: Musikverlage Hans Sikorski, Taschenpartitur / Pocket Score; “SovMuz” [“Sowjetische Musik”] ser., n.d., 1991?; orig. comp. 1943).

180 Footnote: Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “The Communist Party and the Soviet government…”—Vol. 4, p. 334, entry on Great Patriotic War.

180 Hitler: “Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord…”—These maps, and the German military symbols referred to in this story and in “Opus 110,” “Breakout” and “The Last Field-Marshal” are derived from the reproductions of orders of battle in Kurt Mehner, ed., Die Geheimen Tagesberichte der Deutsche Wehrmachstführung im zweiten Weltkrieg 1939-45 (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1987).

184 A. Zhdanov: “Either the working-class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves…” —Alexander Werth, Russia at War 1941-45 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), p. 305 (trans. from Pavlov, Leningrad v. blokade).

185 Current Biography: “Early in 1941, Shostakovich completed his Seventh Symphony…”—Vol. 2, no. 5, p. 71 (May 1941, article on Shostakovich).

185 N. Mandelstam: “The whole process of composition…”—Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Modern Library, 1999, repr. of 1970 trans.), p. 71.

186 Footnote: The two-note “Stalin motif”—Described in Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 157.

186 Mravinsky: “Everything has been heard in advance…”—Wilson, p. 140.

187 Shostakovich to New Masses: “The first part of the symphony…”—Seroff, p. 237. I have no knowledge that Glikman wrote this, but he did compose such things for Shostakovich from time to time.

188 Party activists to Shostakovich: “You will be called to the front when you’re required” —After Seroff, p. 236 (cabled dispatch to New Masses, 28 October 1941).

188 Shostakovich to the “Party activists”: “Only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction” —Reeder, p. 255 (Shostakovich’s written application; abridged and Shostakovich-ized by WTV).

188 Shostakovich’s speech of recantation: “There can be no music without ideology, comrades! Music is no longer an end in itself, but a vital weapon in the struggle”—Abridged from Seroff, pp. 160-61 (New York Times interview, to which I have added the word comrades).

189 Shostakovich: “If they hadn’t shot Tukhachevsky…”—Loosely after Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Limelight Editions 2004, repr. of 1979 Harper & Row ed.), p. 103.

190 “I, I, I want to write about our time…”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 154.

192 Shostakovich to himself: “I am a person… with a very weak character…”—After Khentova (Mineyev); original, p. 126, Mineyev, p. 9.

194 Shostakovich to Volkov: “I wrote my Seventh Symphony very quickly…”—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 154.

194 Shostakovich to Glikman: Composition dates for the movements of the Seventh Symphony—Glikman, p. 3 (letter of 30 November 1941). My dates for the completion of the other two movements also follow this source (see p. 6; letter of 4 January 1942).

194 G. V. Yudin: “After a short pause…”—Wilson, p. 37.

194 L. Lebedinsky: “Frightening in its helplessness”—Wilson, p. 346.

195 Reduction of the bread ration on 2 September to a fourth of its previous level—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 14, p. 383 (entry on Leningrad).

197 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I suppose that critics with nothing better to do…” —Glikman, p. xxxiv, somewhat Shostakovich-ized.

197 “For the first time we can cry openly. Not one of us here hasn’t lost somebody…” —After Shostakovich and Glikman, pp. 136, 135.

198 Zhukov’s strategic Muse: “Stalin will be the savior of Europe”—Actually, Zhukov deplored Stalin’s military incompetence.

200 Akhmatova: “In Pushkin’s day one did not expose everything about oneself” —Chukovskaya, p. 15; slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

203 Shostakovich to S. Volkov: “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all” —After Shostakovich and Glikman, p. 180.

204 Shostakovich: “It’s always easier to believe what we want to believe… The mentality of a chicken.”—Ibid., p. 199.

208 Activists to Shostakovich: “… you’re waiting for the Germans”—Punin, p. 207 (entry for 30 July 1944, accusations overheard on returning to Leningrad from evacuation; slightly altered). Shostakovich was actually evacuated as early as 1 October, but because I have wanted to associate him with the beginning of a Leningrad winter, I delayed his departure for two weeks.

208 Shostakovich’s mother: “Of course Mitya…”—Seroff, p. 175 (letter from Sonia Shostakovich to her daughter Zoya, ca. 1929).

208 Various information on troop strengths, casualties, military organization, etc.—John Ellis, World War II: A Statistical Survey (New York: Facts on File, 1983). Sometimes these figures have been simplified by me for narrative purposes. For instance, when I write in reference to the Red Air Force “four regiments to a division, two divisions to a corps,” I omit to state that this was true as of 1943, and that a division might sometimes be three regiments instead of four, a corps anywhere from two to four divisions. Ellis’s data make occasional appearances not only in this story but also in “Breakout” and “The Last Field-Marshal.”

214 Doubling of Leningrad’s bread ration in February 1942—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 14, p. 383 (entry on Leningrad).

215 Olga Berggolts: “This man is stronger than Hitler!”—Harrison E. Salisbury, The Nine Hundred Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 522.

215 The émigré Seroff: “Today the ‘average’ American…”—Op. cit., p. 3.

215 Quotations from the Seventh in the Dictionary of Musical Themes—Barlow and Morgenstern, p. 438.

215 The bourgeois critic Layton: “This naive stroke of pictorialism…”—Robert Simpson, ed., The Symphony (New York: Drake Publishers, Inc., 1972), vol. 2 (“Mahler to the Present Day”), p. 208 (article on Shostakovich).

215 The disdainful intellectuals—Here is one of them, discoursing on the so-called “masterpiece tone”: “Its reduction to absurdity is manifest today through the later symphonies of Shostakovich. Advertised frankly and cynically as owing their particular character to a political directive imposed on their author by state disciplinary action, they have been broadcast throughout the United Nations as models of patriotic expression.” —Virgil Thomas, “Masterpieces,” 25 June 1944, in Sam Morgenstern, ed., Composers on Music: An Anthology of Composers’ Writings from Palestrina to Copland (New York: Greenwood Press, 1956), p. 496.

215 Moses Cordovero: “God does not behave as a human being behaves…”—Daniel C. Matt, comp. and trans., The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 83 (“The Palm Tree of Deborah,” in “The Ten Sefirot”).

216 Glikman: The “decent-sized divan,” &c—Op. cit., p. xli. I have changed “steal” to “shoot.”

216 Shostakovich to Glikman: “You know, Isaak Davidovich…”—Loc. cit., but I have de-Glikmanized this into something much more downcast and hesitant.

217 Wolfgang Dömling: “It is because of this historic aura…”—Liner notes to the Sony Classical recording of the Seventh (New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting, recording in New York City, 22-23 October 1962).

219 Hitler’s order: “Stage 1, make a junction with the Finns…”—General Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters 1939-45, trans. R. H. Barry (Novato, California: Presidio Press repr. of 1964 ed.; original German ed. 1962), p. 254.

219 Leningrad as “that city which Dostoyevsky likens to a consumptive girl blushing into beauty briefly and inexplicably”—Somewhat after Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin Classics, 1989), p. 75 (“White Nights”).

222 Epigraph—Republic of Poland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, German Occupation of Poland: Extract of Note Addressed to the Allied and Neutral Powers (New York: Greystone Press, ca. 1941), p. 80 (Appendix 1, proclamation of October 28, 1939, by Governor-General Frank).

223 Official military history: “The church is untouched”—Der Sieg in Polen, herausgegeben vom Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; with a foreword by Field-Marshal Keitel himself (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, 1940), p. 129. The actual word used is unversehrt.

224 Emblems of Panzer divisions, 1941-42—Werner Haupt, A History of the Panzer Troops 1916-1945, trans. Dr. Edward Force (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1990; original German ed. 1989), p. 178.

225 Depictions of runes—Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs, Which Contains All Manner of Symbols Used from the Earliest Times to the Middle Ages by Primitive Peoples and Early Christians, trans. Dydyan Holland (New York: Dover Publications, 1955, repr. of 1930 ed.), pp. 100-04.

226 Various descriptions of Third Reich architecture in Berlin, and its wartime and postwar fate—Based on Speer, chs. 5, 6 and 10; and on photographs and text in Mark R. McGee, Berlin from 1925 to the Present: A Visual and Historical Documentation (New York: The Overlook Press, 2002, abr. repr. of 2000 German ed.).

226 Göring: “The greatest staircase in the world”—Speer, p. 192.

228 Epigraph—Louis Harris Cohen, The Cultural-Political Traditions and Developments of the Soviet Cinema 1917-1972 (New York: Arno Press, 1974), p. 93 (Karmen on Mikhail Slutsky’s “One Day of War,” 1942).

Some details and dates of Roman Karmen’s life derive from the film retrospective catalogue (dedicated to him) published by the Modern Art Museum in New York, 1973. Others come from Roman Karmen: Retrospektive zur XIV. Internationalen Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche (Leipzig: Staaatliches Filmarchiv der DDR, 1971). I have also made use of the many photographs in the Ognev book, which has been cited already in the Käthe Kollwitz story. No doubt I should have used Roman Karmen v vospominankyakh sovremennikov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1983), but never got around to it. I am sorry to say that I have also failed to consult the undoubtedly informative Roman Karmen by N. Kolesnikova, G. Senchakova and T. Slepneva (Moscow: 1959). Miscellaneous career information on Karmen and L. O. Arnshtam derive from S. I. Yutkevich et al., ed., Kinoslovar v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (A-L) (no place of publication; prob. Moscow: Izdatelstvo “Sovestskaya Entsiklopediya,” 1966), pp. 672-74 and 112-13, respectively.

229 Roman Karmen and Elena Konstanintovskaya seem to have married in Spain sometime 1936 and 1937, since Konstantinovskaya is said to have “brought back a husband from Spain.” When they divorced is unknown to me, but it might well have been as soon as 1938 or 1939, given the long trips which Karmen set out on almost immediately after their return to the USSR. In this book I have imagined that they married in 1936 and divorced in 1943, after Stalingrad and before Kursk.

229 “We were soldiers…”—Slightly altered from Roger Manvell, Films and the Second World War (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1974), p. 128.

229 Great Soviet Encyclopedia references to Roman Karmen—Vol. 11, p. 457 (biographical entry on Karmen himself), vol. 12, p. 368 (entry on filmmaking) and vol. 19, p. 214 (entry on film technology).

229 Yuri Tsivian: “He’s, well, let’s say he’s an official classic…”—Interviewed over the telephone by WTV, 2002.

230 Influence of Käthe Kollwitz on Karmen—Invented, as is his attendance at Otto Nagel’s exhibition of 1924. “The Sacrifice” would have been a plausible influence, since it not only was made shortly before the show (1922), but was also a very powerful image.

232 “Unusual angles, the most incredible positioning of the camera…”—Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered second page.

232 Kara-Kum temperature of one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit (I am skeptical) —Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 9.

233 Vertov: “Link all points in any temporal order.”—Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xxvi (“From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” 1929). (Vertov named himself; his original given name was Denis Arkadievich Kaufman.)

234 K. Simonov: “As we watched the films sent in by Karmen [spelled “Carmen” throughout this document] from far off Spain…”—Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 11 (slightly abridged).

234 Dziga Vertov: “The filmings in Spain represent an indisputable achievement…” —Op. cit., pp. 142-43 (“The Truth About the Heroic Struggle”). These two sentences were widely separated in the original.

234 Drobaschenko: “A man filled with energy and elegance.”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 77 (Sergej Drobaschenko, “Roman Karmen”), trans. WTV.

235 Elena’s doings in Spain—All invented (except for her Order of the Red Star), since I could find out nothing definite about her. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 10, p. 603 (entry on Spanish history), more than two thousand Soviet volunteers, mostly pilots and tank operators, fought in Spain.

235 Footnote: Fates of Mirova, Koltzov, Ehrenburg—Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 308. Mirova disappeared on her return to Moscow in 1937; Koltzov was arrested in 1938 and died in the Gulag in 1942; he was eventually rehabilitated.

235 Same footnote: Date of first Spanish combat of Soviet tanks—Gabriel Jackson, p. 319.

236 The departure of Madrid’s gold reserves—Martin Blinkhorn, ed., Spain in Conflict 1931-1939: Democracy and Its Enemies (London: SAGE Publications, 1986), pp. 228-29. This source gives the figure of 500 metric tons.

236 The liquidation of Andrés Nin—Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931-39), intro. by Les Evans (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp. 267-68 (no. 66: “The Murder of Andrés Nin by Agents of the GPU,” August 8, 1937). Trotsky writes: “He refused to cooperate with the GPU against the interests of the Soviet people. That was his only crime. And for this crime he paid with his life.”

237 “I must always be there, whenever fighting breaks out”—Konstantin Slavin, undated Soviet Exportkino book about Karmen, cover missing; in Budesarchiv, Berlin; p. 5.

Information on orders, medals, titles and honors of the USSR (Elena’s Order of the Red Star, Chuikov’s Order of Lenin, and the Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, which I describe in “Opus 110”)—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 9, p. 241; vol. 15, p. 629; vol. 18, pp. 516, 658. Many details of Karmen’s doings during the war years are based on his Über die zeit und über mich selbst: Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, trans. into German by Henschel Verlag, typescript, Bundesarchiv cat. no. 92 28 / 87, pp. 23-37. Very likely this is the same as his About Myself and the Times, published in 1968 by the Publicity Office of the Soviet Film Industry. I have not located a copy of this document. Thirty-six hundred words of Über die zeit were translated into English for me (17¢ per word; $613.19) by Elsmarie Hau and Tracy Bigelow. A number of my descriptions, attributions, colleagues and witnesses, etcetera, are entirely invented.

238 Karmen: “How precious this footage will be for all of us…”—Somewhat “retranslated” from Ibid., orig. p. 24; Hau-Bigelow, p. 1.

239 Akhmatova: “The Leningraders, my heart’s blood, march out even-ranked…” —Selected Poems, p. 72 (“Courage,” 1942), “retranslated” by WTV.

239 The plot of “Scout Pashkov”—Von Geldern and Stites, pp. 338-39.

240 Aspektverhältnis and zeichen—Thomas Melle to WTV: “‘Zeichen’ to me seems too general for a nonphilosophical grammarbook,” which was precisely my intention.

241 Karmen to Comrade Alexandrov: “Since everything in that court followed a strict consequential logic…”—Slightly abbreviated and “retranslated” from Über die zeit, orig. p. 37; Hau-Bigelow, p. 8.

242 V. I. Chuikov: Berlin “rained rivers of red-hot steel on us.”—Op. cit., p. 176 (“raining” in original).

242 The two extracts from the unhealthy old book in Berlin—The Nibelungenlied, trans. A. T. Hatto (New York: Penguin, 1969, repr. of 1965 ed.; original German ed. ca. 1200), pp. 23, 54 (chs. 3, 5), “retranslated” by WTV.

242 The non-appearance of Karmen in the credits to “Stalingrad”—Very occasionally we do find him listed—once even as codirector of “Stalingrad,” in Dr. Roger Manvell, gen. ed., The International Encyclopedia of Film (New York: Bonanza Books, 1975, repr. of 1972 Rainbird ed.), p. 174.

243 “A fellow traveller,” writing about “Stalingrad”: “Simple and heroic in the finest sense of the word”—Thomas Dickinson and Catherine De la Roche, Soviet Cinema (London: The Falcon Press, Ltd., 1948), p. 67 (De la Roche writing).

243 Karmen’s non-appearance in Wakeman’s compilation—John Wakeman, ed., World Film Directors, vol. 1: 1890-1945 (New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1987), pp. 1122-25.

244 The relationship of Roman Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya—Suppose that they had never married. In that case I imagine the following two episodes: (1a) For her birthday he once gave her a long folding screen comprised of still portraits he’d made of peasant women in Kara-Kum. M. Ia. Slutskii, with whom he codirected several documentaries, assured him that the faces were stunning. Of course it was a very large object, an egotistical thing, really, and he would have resented it if anybody gave him something that size and expected him to hang it on the wall; at four meters long, it would certainly dominate a room. So he showed it to Elena first. She told him that she thought it was beautiful. He asked her if she would like to have it. He assured her that if she didn’t want it, he wouldn’t be insulted; the only reason that he wanted to offer it to her was that he was very proud of it and he wanted to give her something he was proud of. She’d acted happy and overwhelmed; she hung it on the wall of her apartment. And then one day it wasn’t there. He didn’t say anything about it. The next time he visited, it still wasn’t there, and the next time she said casually that she was redoing the wall, and it would go back up eventually. But he knew that it never would. (1b) He truly believed that his images on the screen were beautiful. If they were mediocre, he didn’t know better. He only wanted to make Elena happy. Elena loved art. She always said so. She admired visual art especially, although she also enjoyed music; she had quite a few records, many of which he supposed that Shostakovich had given her, and she rarely failed to listen to Shostakovich’s latest on the radio. Sometimes that made him very jealous, but he never said anything. (2) Then there was the time he’d given her a print of an old Kalmuck woman, an image he was particularly proud of; and a month later he found it on the floor of her car, creased and with a footprint on it. She was running him over to Boris Makaseyev’s in the car, and he was just about to get out when he saw it. He handed it to her and said: Maybe this could be put in a better place. When she came back to pick him up two hours later it was still in the car, but in the back of the car. Makaseyev’s wife saw. She was a very sweet, rather shy woman who was fond of Karmen. She knew that he and Elena were having difficulties.—Why, what a lovely print! she said. May I see it?—Elena handed it to her and said: I feel a little guilty about the fact that it’s damaged, because Roman probably thinks I don’t care about it.—Karmen said nothing, and Makaseyeva took it in her hands and said: It’s beautiful. Elena, don’t ever treat his work that way again or I’ll slap your face.—Sorry, I was only joking, she quickly said when she saw Elena’s expression.

256 Information on the cast, credits, etc., of the movie “Zoya”—Vsesoyuznuii Gospudarstvennui Fond Kinofilmov, Sovyetksie Khudozhestvennuie Filmui: Annomiyobannui Kamaloy, vol. 2: “Zvukovuie filmui (1930-1957)” (Moscow: Gosudartvennose Isdatelstvo “Iskusstvo,” 1961), pp. 331-32. “Zoya” is item 1789. We find it defined as a drama, released by Soyuzdetfilm on 22 September 1944. Arnshtam listed first and third, Shostakovich listed fourth (as the composer, obviously), Karmen not at all. Zoya was G[alina] Vodyanischkaya; Zoya as a child Katya Skvortsova; V. Podgornui was the German officer; R. Plyatt was the German soldier. (There were far more Russians than Germans in the cast.) “Zoya” won a Stalin Prize in 1946. It got praised in Pravda on 22 September 1944, in Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda the following day; and two times more in Komsomolskaya Pravda; in Iskusstvo Kino in 1946, etc. The New York Times for its part concluded that Galina Vodianitskaya “plays the heroine elaborately” but that the movie was “tediously constructed”—too many newsreels intercut with too many flashbacks to Zoya’s sentimentalized childhood (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 [New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1970], p. 2058 [B. C. (Bosley Crowther?)], “Zoya,” April 16, 1945, 18:6).

257 “Film is the most important art form…”—Very loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, Testimony, p. 149.

258 Footnote: The New York Times’s opinion of Karmen’s documentary on the Nuremberg Trials (“Judgment of the Peoples”), The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 3 (of 6): 1939-1948, p. 2184 (Bosley Crowther, “The Nuremberg Trials,” May 26, 1947; 24:2), full sentence substantially abridged by WTV. As for his film on Albania, the Times considered that less effective than I. Kopalin and P. Atasheva’s documentary about the liberation of Czechoslovakia (p. 2128, “At the Stanley,” July 15. 1946, 21:1).

258 Burt Lancaster: Karmen’s “passionate love for life and people…”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 78 (Sergej Drobaschenko, “Roman Karmen”), trans. WTV.

259 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—Vol. 19, p. 214. The New York Times ridicules this movie for its excess of high-speed automobile driving and the stiffness of the alternating male and female narrators (the former is Karmen himself; the latter is E. Dolmatovsky). All the same, the Times enjoys the steel mills of Magnitogorsk, the oil fields of the Caspian and the log raft in the Carpathians. “Far and Wide” seems to be almost all travelogue (The New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968, vol. 5 [1970], p. 3134 [Bosley Crowther, “Great Is My Country,” July 1, 1959; 26:1]).

259 Castro: “In the name of our people we thank you…”—Roman Karmen: Retrospektive, p. 69, trans. WTV.

259 Allende: “My friend Roman Karmen”—Ibid., p. 70, trans. WTV.

259 Moscow Kinoslovar on the character of Karmen’s films—After S. I. Yutkevich et al., p. 674, trans. WTV. I have somewhat reordered and abridged the items on the original eye-glazing list. In spite of my italics, this is not a direct quote at all, but a second-generation paraphrase.

260 Epigraph: “With few, but courageous allies…”—Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 287 (entry for 8 January 1944).

262 Footnote: Vlasov’s wife: “Andrei, can you really live like that?”—Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 39. Vlasov’s wife was actually not the allegorical Moscow figurine of my conception, but a doctor from a tiny village in the province of Nizhni Novgorod. She was indeed arrested and executed after his defection. They had a small son, whose fate I don’t know.

261 Vlasov’s recommendations to Stalin—Not much is known about them, although the two men did have some such conference. Given that Vlasov was in good odor after the Battle of Moscow, I decided to put into his mouth the strategy which actually got followed.

261 Stalin: “Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves”—Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals (New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 304 (Catherine Andreyev, “Vlasov”).

261 Number of Twentieth Army’s tanks during the Battle of Moscow—Erickson, p. 534.

265 “What the enemy called Kesselschlacht, cauldron-slaughter.” Mr. Thomas Melle notes (letter to author, September 2003): “A little semantic confusion crept in here: ‘to slaughter’ means ‘schlachten’ (animals, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc.); ‘Schlacht’ means ‘battle’ or ‘fight’ and the plural of ‘Schlacht’ is “Schlachten’—‘to slaughter’ and ‘battles’ being the same word in German. I think ‘cauldron battle’ would be more appropriate. In a dictionary it says ‘battle of encirclement and annhilation.’” I myself rest my artistic and semantic case.

265 General K. A. Meretskov: “If nothing is done then a catastrophe is inevitable.” —Shukman, p. 305.

266 Guderian: “These men remain essentially unable to break free…”—Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer! The Development of Tank Warfare, trans. Christopher Duffy (Reading, Berkshire, U.K.: Cassell Military Paperbacks; orig. German ed. 1937), p. 24 (“retranslated”).

266 Vlasov’s commissar: “Everything you say may be correct from the military viewpoint…”—Roughly after Sewern Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 252 (memoir of Marshal I. Kh. Bagramian).

271 Vlasov’s capture—Accurately told, except that he was captured with a woman named Maria Voronova, who was the family servant in Nizhni Novgorod and whom Vlasov’s wife actually dispatched to him to take care of him. Since her presence raises several issues not relevant to the parable, I decided to leave her out.

272 Vlasov to General Lindemann and Lindemann’s reply: “Would a German officer in my place have shot himself?”—“Capture’s no disgrace for someone like you, who’s fought with his unit up to the very last instant…”—Loosely after an exchange between Vlasov and the German intelligence officer who captured him, Captain von Schwerdtner, indirectly quoted in Sven Steenberg, Vlasov, trans. Abe Farbstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970 trans. of 1968 German ed.), p. 28.

275 The German policeman-poet: Vinnitsa, where “we saw two worlds, and will permit only one to rule”—Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, “The Good Old Days”: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, trans. Deborah Burnstone (Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky and Konecky, 1991, repr. of 1988 German ed.), p. 123 (my trans.; the English given on the following page differs slightly).

277 Jewish casualties at Babi Yar—Most Western sources estimate that about thirty-three thousand people were murdered. Soviet sources sometimes say seventy thousand. The eyewitness A. Anatoli Kuzentsov gives the figure of one hundred thousand in his “documentary novel” Babi Yar.

277 Boyarsky: “When the Jews saw how easy it was to be executed, they ran to the pits of their own free will.”—Slightly rephrased from the statement of a German customs official who saw the Jews being machine-gunned in Vinnitsa. The eyewitness estimated that “some thousands” were shot “over the total period” (Klee et al, p. 119).

279 Tukhachevsky: “It is necessary to observe the promise of privileged treatment to those who surrender voluntarily with their arms.”—Chaliand, p. 916 (“Counterinsurgency”).

281 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Vlasov spoke openly, and I did also, insofar as my oath of service permitted me”—Op. cit., p. 73 (slightly reworded).

281 Vlasov: “Only if I put human values before nationalist values…”—Ibid., p. 75 (a little altered).

281 Vlasov: “The Soviet regime has brought me no personal disadvantages,” “At Przemysl… my proposals were rejected,” “Two factors must entail… interference from the commissars.”—Ibid., pp. 253-54 (Appendix II: “General Vlasov’s Open Letter: Why I Took Up Arms Against Bolshevism”; somewhat abridged and altered).

283 Strik-Strikfeldt: “It’s an admirable document, but, as drafted, too Russian”—Ibid., p. 76 (slightly altered).

285 Strik-Strikfeldt: “I grant that thousands of Russian prisoners have died…” —Loosely after the argument advanced by General Jodl at his war crimes trial in Nuremberg; see Gilbert, p. 253 (10 April 1946).

285 Khrushchev: “Temporary people”—Kershaw and Lewin, p. 51 (Suny).

285 Second Lieutenant Dirksen: “A democracy of the best”—Very loosely based on the views of an S.S. officer in 1937, as remembered by his interlocutor, Eugen Kogon, in The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Berkley Publishing: Berkley Windhover, 1975 repr. of 1950 ed.), pp. 8-9.

286 Vlasov: “As a soldier, I cannot ask other soldiers to stop doing their duty”—Andreyev, p. 44.

286 The song of Vlasov’s Russian troops at Moscow: “I’m warm in this freezing bunker / thanks to your love’s eternal flame!”—After Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 (New York: 1999 repr. of 1998 Penguin U.K. ed.), p. 290 (from the last stanza of zemlyanka [“The Dugout”], “retranslated”). Slightly anachronistic here, since this song was sung in Stalingrad, probably not the previous year at Moscow.

287 Vlasov’s Smolensk Declaration: “Friends and brothers! BOLSHEVISM IS THE ENEMY OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE”—Andreyev, p. 206 (slightly “retranslated”).

287 Strik-Strikfeldt: “One could come across grey wraiths who subsisted on corpses and tree-bark”—Op. cit., p. 49 (which actually reads: “One could come across ghostlike figures, ashen gray, starving, half naked, living perhaps for days on end on corpses and the bark of trees”).

288 Guderian: “A fortress of unlimited breadth and depth”—Guderian, p. 42 (slightly altered).

288 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Since the Slavic-Asiatic character only understands the absolute…” —B. H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk (New York: Quill, repr. of 1948 ed., 1979), p. 226 (actually not Strik-Strikfeldt at all but the testimony of General Blumentritt; much altered and expanded).

289 German inspection report: “Discipline: Slack…”—Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 256 (Appendix III: “Extracts from Report of Captain Peterson on His Inspection of the Dabendorf Camp, 13 and 14 September 1943”).

289 Vlasov on the new flag: “I’d really like to leave it that way…”—After Steenberg, p. 85.

290 Vlasov to Strik-Strikfeldt: “You can’t even give a suit that fits, and you want to conquer the world!”—“Retranslated” from Steenberg, p. 53.

291 Strik-Strikfeldt’s memoirs: “In German concentration camps there had been bestialities…” and “The world still does not believe that these thugs…”—Strik-Strikfeldt, pp. 242-43.

292 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “It is well known that the structure of emotional life…” —Vol. 15, p. 155 (entry on love).

293 Vlasov at Smolensk: “A foreign coat never fits a Russian.”—Andreyev, pp. 47-48 (slightly altered).

293 Vlasov at Smolensk: “The Germans have begun to acknowledge their mistakes. And, after all, it’s just not realistic to hope to enslave almost two hundred million people…” —Loosely after the paraphrase in Steenberg, p. 71.

293 Death rate of Russian prisoners at Smolensk—Strik-Strikfeldt, pp. 49-50.

294 General Lindemann: “The East and the West are two worlds…”—Liddell Hart, p. 226 (testimony of General Blumentritt).

294 Vlasov’s memoradum to the Reich government: “The mass of the Russian population now look upon this conflict as a German war of conquest”—Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Octagon, 1980), p. 567 (slightly reworded and abridged).

295 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Too much propaganda is merely propaganda”—Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 25.

295 “A colleague’s literary production” (actually an S.S. pamphlet about the Untermensch): “And this underworld of the Untermensch…”—Joachim Remak, ed., The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), p. 37 (S.S. Hauptamt-Schulungsamt, Der Untermensch, 1942; “retranslated” by WTV).

298 Wise Nazi adage: “The javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick for the promotion of health.”—George L. Mosse, comp., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), p. 43 (Frankfurter zeitung, 1937, “The Blond Craze”).

298 Heidi Bielenberg: “The healthy is a heroic commandment.”—Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Ace Books, 1970), p. 392 (“German Wife and Mother,” quoting Hans Johnst).

299 Himmler, speaking about Heydrich: “Cold, rational criticism.”—Fest, p. 137 (“Reinhard Heydrich—The Successor”).

302 Goebbels: “A hundred-percent victory for German propaganda…”—Allen Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Polish Massacre (New York: Scribner’s, 1991), p. 224 (diary entry of 28 April 1943).

305 The man in the lavatory, quoting the Reich Commissioner of the Ukraine: “Some people are disturbed that the population…”—Remak, p. 124 (report of Quartermaster Fähndrich, Kiev, 5 March 1943; somewhat altered).

306 Vlasov at Riga: “A Russian can bear much which would kill a German”—Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 192, slightly changed.

306 The Waffen-S.S. captain: “If one gave Vlasov’s army a flag…”—Dallin, p. 576 (Erich Koch; verbatim).

306 Vlasov: “The problem of developing a tactical breakthrough into an operational breakthrough…”—Partially derived from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 21, p. 21 (entry: breakthrough).

307 Vlasov: “If we can help the Reich resist…”—Loosely after his expressed view as recorded in Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 215.

308 Re: “Mozart’s ever so healthy German melodies,” Thomas Melle remarks: “You know, of course, that Mozart was Austrian.” I do.

308 Moltke’s maxim from 1869: “The stronger our frontal position becomes…” —Count Helmuth von Moltke, Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel J. Hughes, trans. Harry Bell and Daniel J. Hughes (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1993), p. 203 (1869 Instructions for Large Unit Commanders,” X., “Tactical Considerations,” A., “Infantry and Jäger,” slightly “retranslated”).

311 Hitler: “I don’t need this General Vlasov at all in our rear areas,” “No German agency must take seriously the bait contained in the Vlasov program,” and “That’s a phantom of the first order”—Dallin, p. 574 (slightly rearranged).

311 Himmler: “That Russian swine Herr General Wlassow”—Paul Padfield, Himmler, Reichsführer SS (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990), p. 476 (Padfield spells it “Vlassov”).

312 Hitler: “We won’t be able to save anything…”—Abridged from Warlimont, p. 390 (fragment no. 7, discussion with Colonel-General Zeitzler, 27 December 1943).

312 Lines from “Herbsttag”—Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 14 (facing German text, trans. by WTV).

313 Vlasov: “I don’t know them. You see, I have been through Stalin’s school”—Slightly altered from Strik-Strikfeldt, pp. 202-03.

314 Himmler: “We guarantee that at the end of the war you’ll be granted the pension of a Russian lieutenant-general,” “And in the immediate future, you will continue to have schnapps, cigarettes and women,” and “One has to calculate frightfully coolly in these matters”—After Padfield, p. 467.

315 Himmler to Gunter d’Alquen: “Who compels us to keep the promises we make?” —Clark, p. 408.

315 Vlasov’s manifesto: “A fight to the finish of opposing political systems…”—Severely abridged from Daniels, p. 230.

318 Vlasov: “Washington and Franklin were traitors in the eyes of the British crown.” —Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 229.

318 Vlasov: “God give me strength!… And one day you’ll tell everybody at Valhalla that I wasn’t a traitor…”—Ibid., p. 230, considerably altered (the original reads: “God give me strength to hold out to the end. But you, Wilfried Karlovich, you will go with Malyshkin and help him. That I know. And one day you will tell the others that Vlasov and his friends loved their country and were not traitors.”

319 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “In this long and bitter struggle…”—Vol. 4, p. 351 (entry on the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45).

319 Guderian’s opinion of Himmler: “An inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority”—Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon, abr. (New York: Ballantine Books, n.d.), p. 30.

320 General Guderian: “Vlasov wanted to make some statement,” and replies of Hitler and Göring—Warlimont, p. 503 (fragment 24/25, briefing conference on 27 January 1945).

320 War diary of the British Thirty-sixth Infantry Brigade: “In glittering uniforms” —Carol Mather, Aftermath of War: Everyone Must Go Home (London: Brassey’s [U.K.] Ltd., 1992), p. 70 (embellished a little).

321 Vlasov: “Kroeger keeps filling up my glass…”—Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 230.

322 Vlasov to his two quarreling soldiers: “We can’t beat Stalin with open fingers…” —Loosely after Steenberg, p. 155.

323 Heidi’s mother: “The Führer won’t allow the Russians to get us. He’ll gas us instead” —Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 762 (the speaker was an anonymous old woman).

324 Strik-Strikfeldt: “Definition of cowardice: Leaving Berlin to volunteer for the Ostfront!” —After Klemperer, p. 313 (entry for 8 May 1944).

324 Vlasov: “Germany has collapsed sooner than I expected.”—Strik-Strikfeldt, p. 227.

326 Footnote: Vlasov: “I know that, and I’m extremely afraid…”—Andreyev, p. 78 (“retranslated” a little).

326 Same footnote: Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Communist morality is the noblest and most just morality…”—The Soviet Way of Life, p. 316.

327 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: Definition of cosmopolitanism—Vol. 13, p. 190 (entry on same).

328 Epigraph: “That man should have shot himself…”—Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Harper Colophon Books, 1964), pp. 690-91 (Hitler to his staff officers, 1 February 1943).

328 Guderian on Paulus: “He was the finest type…”—Panzer Leader, p. 30.

328 Military orders: “Kriegsgliederung ‘Barbarossa’”—Mehner, vol. 3, end matter. Untranslated phrases: “War plan ‘Barbarossa.’ B-Day.”

329 Information on enemy strength, dispositions, etc., available to Paulus from Fremde Heere Ost—I have built up much of my imaginary picture from details in David Thomas, “Foreign Armies East and German Military Intelligence in Russia 1941-45,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 22, no. 22 (April 1987).

329 “Fourth Army Chief of Staff in the Polish campaign”—The biographies of Paulus are all in wild disagreement on this as on other issues. (For instance, even the careful Erickson calls him “von Paulus,” although Goerlitz makes it clear that our hero was a bookkeeper’s son.) Samuel W. Mitcham, for instance, claims in Hitler’s Field Marshals and Their Battles (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001; p. 226), that he was actually in Tenth Army then, and that Tenth Army was renamed to Sixth Army.

329 Hitler: “The ultimate objective is the cordoning off of Asiatic Russia…”—Directive No. 2 for Barbarossa, as quoted in Walter Goerlitz, Paulus and Stalingrad: A Life of Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus with Notes, Sources and Documents from His Papers, trans. Col. R. H. Stevens (New York: Citadel Press, 1963, trans of 1960 German ed.), p. 96.

329 Kesselring on Paulus: “He made a specially good impression…”—Kesselring: A Soldier’s Record (title page cut away in library binding; published shortly after 1953), p. 52.

330 Paulus’s children—Mitcham (p. 224) gives him three: Olga, Friedrich (killed in action in the Anzio campaign) and Alexander. Craig (p. 408) gives him an unnamed daughter, I assume Olga, Alexander (killed at Anzio) and Ernst, and has Ernst commit suicide in 1970. Beevor (p. 427) does not mention Olga, has Friedrich killed at Anzio, and calls the third child Ernst Alexander. So I’ve settled on Olga, Friedrich and Ernst. Since the circumstances and nature of Ernst’s wound have not been specified, I gave him a serious thigh wound which required his evacuation from Stalingrad. Had he not been evacuated, it seems unlikely to me that he and his father would both have survived the Stalingrad campaign. I further imagine that his wounding occurred before the German position at Stalingrad had reached a very desperate stage, since (a) it would have been less likely that he’d be evacuated then and (b) he might have been more inclined to stick it out like his father. All this is the flimsiest speculation, which is God’s gift to historical fictioneers.

331 Olga’s son Robert—In fact I don’t know whether she had any children.

331 Conversation between Paulus and Coca: “That’s a matter for political decision… a good chance that we’ll achieve victory this year”—Somewhat loosely after Goerlitz, p. 28.

334 The S.D. police-lieutenant to Paulus: “You can ask anything of them, just like horses. They work until they drop and make no demands”—Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 158 (letter from Gendarmerie chief Fritz Jacob, in Kamanets Podolsky, 21 June 1942).

335 Hitler: “Keitel, is this line ready?… All the way to here?”—Warlimont, p. 522 (Appendix A: Staff Conference Fragment No. 8, 12 December 1942; actually Hitler and Zeitzler speaking).

336 Warlimont: Total German losses thus far on the Ostfront, 625,000—Ibid., p. 239 (“War Potential 1942,” figures as of 1 May 1942). The reserve situation was actually worse than Paulus might have known. Warlimont writes (p. 240): “At present there are no further reserves available in Germany.”

337 Hitler: “The fuel situation… liquidate this war”—Kershaw, p. 514 (slightly altered).

337 Hitler and Paulus at von Reichenau’s funeral—This never happened. Hitler sent a proxy to the ceremony.

337 Paulus’s assessment of Russian troops: “Incapable of operational initiative”—Actually, the assessment of them by Fremde Heere Ost, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. See Thomas, “Foreign Armies East,” p. 274.

339 General Halder: “One of the sacrifices which commanders have to make…” —Warlimont, p. 162 (actually, written by Halder in his diary).

343 Fremde Heere Ost: “Special formations: Numbers unknown”—Loosely after the tabulation in Thomas, p. 276.

343 Ditto: “The clumsiness, schematism, avoidance of decision and responsibility has not changed since the Finnish campaign”—Ibid., p. 274. I have added “since the Finnish campaign.”

347 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn): “During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…”—Vol. 5, p. 566, entry on Volgograd.

348 “Field-Marshal von Reichenau’s order of 10.10.41 to proceed with extreme measures against subhumans”—There were a number of variations of the infamous “commissar order,” whose provisions got rescinded at different times and different degrees by different commanders. Regarding commissars, many of the German generals seem to have actually believed, as for instance did von Manstein (p. 179), that since they weren’t exactly soldiers, chaplains or doctors; and since their purpose was to encourage “vicious resistance” in the enemy formations, then they didn’t qualify as privileged non-combatants; this view, however self-serving, may be faintly arguable. Most of the “commissar” order, however, is sickeningly murderous. In the very first of the numbered “Instructions for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia” we read: “Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist Folk. This subversive world-view and its carriers validate Germany’s struggle.” The second instruction warns that “this war must be prosecuted ruthlessly against” (and here in the orders the following categories were underlined) “headmen, fifth columnists, Jews, and others who stand actively or passively against us.”—Mehner. (The German word for “instructions,” Richtlinien, really means “guidelines,” but a more rigid substitution seemed appropriate here. I wanted to literalize it into the cognate Right Line, with its even stronger moral tone, but regretfully decided that this had too Stalinist a sound. The excerpts in this note have been slightly abridged.)

348 Some of the military arrows, vectors, etc. for Kharkov and Stalingrad derive from the maps in Günter Wegmann, ed., “Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht gibt bekannt…”: Der deutsche Wehrmachtsbericht (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1982).

349 Colonel Metz to Paulus: “Let me congratulate you on your Knight’s Cross…” —Slightly abridged from Goerlitz, p. 167. This message bears the date of 5 June 1942 and therefore probably reached Paulus much sooner than I have allowed it to.

351 Field-Marshal von Manstein: “The safety of a tank formation operating in the enemy’s rear…”—Von Manstein, p. 185.

351 Coca to her husband, on Africa: “Keep your fingers out of that pie.”—Ibid., p. 32.

353 The Führer: “There is not going to be a winter campaign!”—Ibid., p. 35.

353 The architecture of Werewolf, Wolf’s Lair, Wolf’s Gorge, and for that matter many of the structural details of Hitler’s trains, cars, military headquarters, etcetera, referred to in this story and in “Clean Hands”—Peter Hoffmann, Hitler’s Personal Security (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979). Hitler was at Wolf’s Lair, with many interruptions, from 24 June 1941 through 20 November 1944. Meanwhile came two spells at Werewolf: 16 July to 1 November 1942 (this is the period of greatest relevance here), and 17 February through 13 March 1943. Paulus’s final visit to Wolf’s Lair, when Paulus goes “whiter than a German tank,” is my fabrication.

354 Hitler: “The Ukrainians, yes, a thin Germanic layer…”—Kershaw, p. 244 (recollection of A. Rosenberg); somewhat altered; the original was about the Poles rather than the Ukrainians.

356 Hitler: “Once we’ve erased Leningrad and Moscow from the map…”—Warlimont, p. 242, quoting Goebbels, March 1942.

356 Major-General Schmidt: “The greatest happiness any of our contemporaries can experience…”—Warlimont; quoting Goebbels’s diary, entry for 21 March 1942.

361 Paulus to Lutz: “The great thing now is to hit the Russian so hard a crack…” —Goerlitz, p. 169.

363 Colonel Heim on Paulus: “A slender, rather over-tall figure…”—Goerlitz, p. 48.

363 “They”: “This defensive mission is contrary to the German soldier’s nature”—After Newton, p. 63 (Otto Schellert, “Winter Fighting of the 253rd Infantry Division in the Rzhev Area 1941-1942”).

364 “A German general who survived the war”: “Practically every Russian attack…” —Major-General F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles: A Story of the Employment of Armour in the Second World War, trans. H. Betzler (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956, repr. of 1955 English ed.), p. 185.

366 Field-Marshal von Manstein: “This policy of covering everything…”—Walimont, quoting Goebbels’s diary entry for 21 March 1942, p. 40.

366 Unnamed officer at Wolf’s Lair: “Any caliber smaller than a hundred and fifty millimeters is ineffective…”—Loosely after Newton, p. 117 (Gustav Höhne, “In Snow and Mud: 31 Days of Attack Under Seydlitz During Early Spring of 1942”).

366 Hitler: “I made it clear to my Brownshirts… rip off his armband”—Loosely after Mein Kampf, p. 504 (“An Attempted Disruption”).

367 “Manstein’s high regard for the march discipline of the S.S. Death’s Head Division” —Op. cit., p. 187.

369 Fremde Heere Ost, Gruppe I, Army Group report on the Red Army’s new Don Front: “Defensive enemy behavior”—Thomas, p. 269. (The source for this erroneous information was actually not the Leitstelle für Nachrichtenaufklärung, however.)

370 Enemy signal of 18.11.42: “Send a messenger to pick up the fur gloves”—Erickson, p. 464.

371 “Übersicht über sowjetrussischen Kräfteeinsatz” and description of the map’s colors —The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, trans. David Irving (New York: Times Mirror, World Publishing, 1972, trans. of 1971 German ed.), frontispiece.

372 Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Encirclement is most often achieved…”—Vol. 18, p. 78 (entry on encirclement).

374 Paulus, on a possible breakout: “More than ten thousand wounded and most of our heavy weapons would have to be written off”—Loosely after the sentiment expressed by General Schmidt in Beevor, p. 268. On this same page Beevor writes that Paulus was “haunted” by comparisons with Napoleon’s retreat, so I supplied the standard figures on that disaster.

376 Field-Marshal von Manstein on Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch: “Not belonging to quite the same class as Baron von Fritsch…”—Manstein, p. 75. About Paulus, Manstein was actually more charitable than this, concluding (p. 303) that “he can hardly have had a sufficiently clear picture of the overall situation.”

376 Radio transmission came from our Führer: “Sixth Army is temporarily surrounded by Russian forces…”—Moderately altered from the version in Beevor, pp. 269-70.

378 Paulus to Coca: “At the moment I’ve got a really difficult problem on my hands…” —Goerlitz, p. 72 (letter of 7 December 1942).

378 Episode of the grand piano in the street, the ammunition-box altar for Christmas, and a few other miscellaneous details—Loosely based on Franz Schneider and Charles Gullans, trans., Last Letters from Stalingrad (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1962).

378 Gehlen’s assessment of von Manstein: “One of the finest soldiers of this century.” —Gehlen, pp. 153-54. This was actually a postwar evaluation of the man.

379 Field-Marshal von Manstein: “The best chance for an independent breakout has already been missed.”—von Manstein, p. 306.

380 Paulus’s letter to von Manstein, as dictated to Colonel Adam: Severely abridged, somewhat “retranslated” and slightly altered from the full version which von Manstein gives as Appendix I (pp. 551-54).

381 Lieutenant-General Jaenecke: “We’ll go through the Russians like a hot knife through butter!”—Slightly altered from Mitcham, p. 235.

383 Paulus: “Your airlift has failed us…”—Loosely after Craig, p. 234.

384 Major-General Schmidt to Major Eismann: “Sixth Army will still be in position at Easter…”—Slightly “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 334.

384 Paulus to Eismann: “At any rate, under current conditions a breakout would be impossible…”—Very loosely after an indirect quotation in von Manstein.

384 The remainder of this conversation with Eismann is fabricated. For evidence that von Manstein was in fact willing to take responsibility for having Paulus disobey Hitler, see his memoir, pp. 341-42.

384 Hitler: “We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up…”—Warlimont, p. 285.

385 Teleprinter conversation between Paulus and von Manstein, 23 December 1942: “Good evening, Paulus… full authority today”—Abbreviated and slightly reworded from the original in Goerlitz, pp. 276-77 (“Documents and signals” section).

386 Schmidt to the teleprinter clerk: “Can aircraft still take off safely from Tatsinskaya?” —Teleprinter conversation from Schmidt to his opposite number General Shulz, the Chief of Staff at Army Group Don, 24 December 1942 (Goerlitz, p. 278).

387 Paulus to von Manstein: “Army can continue to beat off small-scale attacks…” —Abbreviated and slightly “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 351.

387 Paulus to Coca: “Christmas, naturally, was not very happy…”—Goerlitz, p. 80 (letter of 28 December 1942).

388 Note on German national character: “To regard the fulfillment of duty rather than personal responsibility…”—Count Hermann Keyserling, Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928; original German ed. n.d., Das Spektrum Europas), p. 121.

390 Paulus to Zitzewitz: “Everything has occurred exactly as I foretold…”—Goerlitz, p. 43.

390 Heim on Paulus: “The face of a martyr.”—Ibid., p. 48.

391 General Warlimont on Hitler: “Strategically he does not comprehend…”—Warlimont, p. 244.

391 Daily briefing of 4 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: Powerful enemy tank attack…”—Mehner, vol. 6: 1 Dezember 1942—31 Mai 1943, p. 71; my translation and abridgment.

392 Hitler to von Manstein: “The Russians never keep any agreements.”—Craig, p. 368.

393 Paulus to his staff officers: “I expect you as soldiers…”—Slightly altered from F. W. von Mellenthin, German General Staff Officer. (I presume this is the same Major-General who wrote Panzer Battles: German Generals of World War II As I Saw Them [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977], p. 115. Paulus was actually addressing only one man, Colonel Dingler of the Fourteenth Panzer Corps.)

394 Paulus: “History has already passed its verdict on me”—Goerlitz, p. 72.

394 Daily briefing of 16 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: On the W. and S. fronts…”—Mehner, vol. 6, p. 95; my. trans. and abr.

394 16 January 1943 as “the day that we lost the airstrip at Pitomnik”—von Manstein, however, gives this date as the twelfth.

394 Paulus: “Dead men are no longer interested in military history.”—Beevor, p. 370.

394 Hitler: “You must stand fast to the last man and the last bullet.”—After Warlimont, p. 286; Kershaw, p. 549.

395 “Now they’d split us into two mutually isolated sub-fortresses.”—von Manstein (p. 364) writes that there were actually three pockets formed on 24 January, a claim which I have not read anywhere else. Goerlitz asserts that Sixth Army was split into two on 26 January.

395 Paulus to OKW, 24 January 1943: “No basis left on which to carry out mission…” —Abridged and “retranslated” from von Manstein, p. 358.

395 General Heitz’s slogan: “We fight to the last bullet but one”—Beevor, p. 382.

396 “The Jew Babel” on the Jews of Zhitomir—The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 380 (diary entry for June 3, 1920).

396 Von Reichenau on the liquidation of the Jewish children: “I have ascertained in principle…”—Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 153 (abridged and slightly altered).

400 Signal of 29 January 1943: “To the Führer!…”—After Beevor, p. 379, abridged.

400 Daily briefing of 30 January 1943: “6 Armee, Heeresgruppe Don: More Russian attacks…”—Mehner, vol. 6, p. 123; my trans. and abr.

400 Paulus to General Pfieffer: “I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian corporal”—Beevor, p. 381.

400 The German surrender at Stalingrad—The Soviets are said to have captured 2,000 officers and 91,000 thousand men. Very few of those ever came home. In 1958 von Manstein wrote: “Of the 90,000 prisoners who finally fell into Soviet hands, not more than a few thousand can be alive today” (p. 360). The original strength of Sixth Army was about 300,000. Presumably the 200,000-odd men not captured had already been slain in the fighting. Mitcham (p. 239) cites “the commonly accepted figure” of 230,000 Germans killed or captured in the course of the siege, not counting the wounded who were lucky enough to get flown out. Von Manstein (p. 396) estimates that between 200,000 and 220,000 soldiers were in the pocket as of the beginning of the encirclement. “Altogether, the Axis must have lost over half a million men” (Beevor, p. 398). According to Beevor (p. 394), the Russians endured 1.1 million casualties at Stalingrad, 485,751 of which were deaths.

400 Regarding the necessity for Sixth Army’s ordeal at Stalingrad, the words of von Manstein (op. cit., p. 354) deserve to be quoted: “Every extra day Sixth Army could continue to tie down enemy forces surrounding it was vital as far as the fate of the entire Eastern Front was concerned. It is idle to point out today that we still lost the war in the end and that its early termination would have spared us infinite misery. That is merely being wise after the event. In those days it was by no means certain that Germany was bound to lose the war in the military sense. A military stalemate… would have been entirely within the bounds of possibility if the situation on the southern wing of the German armies could in some way have been restored.”

400 German eyewitness: “Sorrow and grief lined his face”—Craig, p. 372.

400 Major-General Schmidt to Paulus: “Remember that you are a Field-Marshal of the German army.”—Beevor, p. 388. These words were actually uttered a few hours later, immediately before Paulus’s interrogation.

401 Unnamed Russian general, to Paulus: “We now have great and priceless experience of defensive fighting here on the banks of the Volga”—Closely after Vasili I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, The End of the Third Reich, trans. Ruth Kisch (Bristol, U.K.: Macgibbon and Kee, 1967; orig. Russian ed. ca 1964), p. 17. In the original, Chuikov was speaking neither to Paulus nor sarcastically.

401 Paulus to his captors: “That would be unworthy of a soldier!” and following conversation —After Beevor, p. 390; with some parts verbatim and some parts invented.

403 Paulus’s experiences in the USSR, 1943-53—Based on the occasional mentions of him in Bodo Scheurig, Free Germany: The National Committee and the League of German Officers, trans. Herbert Arnold (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan Press, 1969; original German ed. 1961).

403 The London Sunday Times correspondent A. Werth: “Paulus looked pale and sick…” —Werth, Russia at War, p. 549.

403 Hitler on Paulus’s surrender: “What hurts me the most personally…” and “So many men have to die…”—Warlimont, p. 306 (fragment no. 47: midday conference [transcript], 1 February 1943).

404 Field-Marshal Keitel: “I always took his side with the Führer…”—Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, Back Bay Books, 1992), p. 310, slightly altered.

404 Rudenko: “Have I rightly concluded from your testimony…” and Paulus’s reply—Ibid., p. 311.

405 The defense attorney: “What about you, Field-Marshal Paulus?” and Paulus’s reply—Loc. cit., somewhat altered.

405 Ribbentrop: “That man is finished…” and Jodl’s reply—Gilbert, p. 148 (12 February 1946).

406 Colonel Heim’s characterization of Paulus: “Well groomed…”—Goerlitz, pp. 47-48.

406 Ernst Paulus’s postwar relations with his father—The silver-framed photograph from Poltava is, of course, my fabrication. For what it is worth, Ernst Paulus inserted the following into Goerlitz’s compilation (p. xiii): “So, in all reverence, I dedicate this book to the memory of Sixth Army.”

407 Hitler’s will: “:… and therefore to choose death of my own free will…” Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Documentation Center, Long Dark Nazi Years: A Record of Documents and Photographs of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution (Haifa, 1999), testament p. 4 (pages of this book not consistently numbered). This document was discovered in a secret compartment of a suitcase in possession of a Frau Irmgard Unterholzer in Tegernsee.

407 Ditto: “May it be one day a part of the code of honor…”—Ibid.; testament p. 6.

407 Hilde Benjamin, nicknamed the Red Guillotine—She makes a few cameo appearances in Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). There is no information available to me that she ever met Paulus in real life.

407 Hitler to Paulus: “One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web…”—Slightly altered from Warlimont, pp. 326-27 (fragment no. 5; discussion with Sonderfuuhrer von Neurath concerning Italy on 20 May 1943).

408 Field-Marshal von Manstein on closeness between officers and men as the “Prussian tradition”—Op. cit., p. 207.

408 Paulus’s prewar service report (1920): “Modest, perhaps too modest…”—Quoted in von Mellenthin, German Generals, p. 104.

408 Hilde Benjamin on Paulus: “An innocuous representative of the former military-professional caste…”—I have fabricated this.

409 Paulus’s Dresden lecture: “At the same time, particular attention was invited to Sixth Army’s inadequate stock of supplies”—Goerlitz, p. 219 (memorandum: “The basic facts of Sixth Army’s operations at Stalingrad [Phase I],” by Paulus).

409 Gehlen: “My department predicted ten days in advance precisely where the blow would fall at Stalingrad!”—After Gehlen, p. 56. In his memoirs, Gehlen is nearly always right. David Thomas paints a different picture.

409 The show trial of the Gehlen Organization—On 11 November, two ringleaders were guillotined in Dresden between 4:18 and 4:22 A.M., for the crime of industrial espionage.

409 “Five hundred and forty-six spies arrested!”—Number supplied by Gehlen, p. 174, who contemptuously adds: ‘A fantastic figure which should itself have sufficed to convince any neutral observer that this was pure propaganda; it reminded me of the RAF and Luftwaffe claims in the Battle of Britain.”

As transliterated in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 13, p. 433), her name is Zoia Anatol’evna (Tania) Kosmodem’ianskaia. In this story I have preferred the looser, less forbidding orthography of World War II Anglo-American accounts. The encyclopedia informs us, in typical fashion omitting any mention of the mundane stables, that “she was captured by the fascists… while fulfilling a combat mission.”

411 Epigraph: “The essential thing about anti-guerrilla warfare…”—Warlimont, p. 289 (Hitler at staff conference, fragment no. 29, evening session, 1 December 1942 in Wolfschanze).

412 Zoya: “You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.”—Karpov, p. 150. The first two of the three photographs of Zoya are reproduced here.

413 Number of Vlasov’s mortars and heavy guns—Erickson, p. 534.

413 Marshal Tukhachevsky: “The next war will be won by tanks and aviation”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 100.

413 The song of the two beardless boys: “Into battle for our nation, into battle for our Stalin”—Alexander Werth, Leningrad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), p. 33. To follow the meter of the original Russian (which appears on the same page), I’ve added an “our” before “Stalin” (the original runs za Stalina) and accordingly rendered za rodinu, “for the nation,” as “for our nation.”

415 Streets named after her—In addition to a number of Kosmodem’ianskaia Streets, there is a monument to her on the Minsk highway.

The tale of Gerstein has haunted me for a number of reasons. “At the beginning of Nazism in Germany,” writes Marie-Louise von Franz, “I was several times asked by Germans in what respect they were abnormal, for though they were unable to accept Nazism, not doing so made them doubt their own normality… misery fell upon people who had done the right thing.”—The Feminine in Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), p. 36. Some of the remarks in “Clean Hands” about the conflicting necessities of parleying with evil and of respecting it by not investigating it are partially indebted to this book; likewise the notion that someone who continues to fight evil and gets victimized is from a psychological perspective complicit. Basically, what von Franz is arguing is that if we repress our own evil side, it will come out somewhere else. My motivation in placing such arguments into the mouths of the other characters is to deepen our sense of what Gerstein’s biographer has called “the ambiguity of good.” All the same, I firmly believe that there was nothing ambiguous about Gerstein’s good, unavailing though it proved to be. He is one of my heroes.

417 Hans Günther: “This is one of the most secret matters, even the most secret…”—Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-45 (New York: Schocken, 1973), p. 311 (“retranslated” a little). However, in his own affidavit, which is presumably more accurate, Gerstein assigns these words not to Günther but to S.S. Brigade Chief Otto Globocnik; see Saul Friedländer, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf [Borzoi], 1969), p. 104. For narrative reasons I have employed Levin’s version.

417 For a full version of Gerstein’s affidavit, see Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst: Dokumentation zur Massen-Vergasung, Heft 9 (Bonn: Printed by Oberfränkische Verlangsaft und Druckerei G.m.b.H, Hof/ Saale, 1955), pp. 7-16 (affidavit of 4 May 1945).

421 Gerstein’s journey to Belzec—In fact, he, Günther and Pfannenstiel traveled together by truck. Since literal faithfulness here would have made it impossible to introduce Berthe’s Doppelgänger, I gave him a train trip.

422 S.S. Brigade Chief Otto Globocnik: “Now, you’re going to have two jobs at Belzec…” —Ibid., p. 311 (altered and expanded).

423 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “The whole procedure is not entirely satisfactory…”—Closely after Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 244 (“‘The camp had clean sanitary facilities’: Professor Wilhem Pfannanstiel, Waffen-S.S. hygienist, on a gassing at Belzec”).

424 Captain Wirth to Gerstein: “There are not ten people alive…”—Friedländer, pp. 108-09.

425 Gerstein to the Swedish attaché: “The people stand together… You can hear them crying, sobbing…”—Abridged from Gerstein’s report of 4 May 1945 (presumably to the Americans); in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 242. In Friedländer this testimony appears in the past tense.

426 Working capacity of Belzec and other extermination camps—According to Gerstein’s 1945 estimate, as reproduced in Friedländer, p. 104. Given the statistics which have since been more or less agreed upon for the number of people murdered in the Holocaust, Gerstein’s count is far too high. For instance, based on his figure for Sobibor, the yearly “output” of that camp would be more than 7,000,000 victims. In fact, one of the murderers estimates that a total of “only” 350,000 Jews died there (Erich Bauer, “the Gasmeister”; in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 232). The commandant of Auschwitz states that “the highest number of gassings in one day was 10,000. That was the most that could be carried out… with modern facilities” (ibid., p. 273). According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, “of the circa 50 million people who died during World War II, around twenty million were victims of the unprecedented policy of extermination of the Third Reich” (p. 11; Franciszek Piper, “The Political and Racist Principles of the Nazi Policy of Extermination and Their Realization at Auschwitz”). In order to better respect and re-create Gerstein’s thought processes, I have let his count stand. About Maidanek Gerstein writes only “seen in preparation,” so for quantification of its “productivity” I have relied on the 1944 account of Alexander Werth (op. cit., pp. 890-94, which includes that grisly detail about the cabbages). Werth seems to have been the first credentialed Western journalist to see the camp.

427 “How many Jews remained above the ground in Europe?”—The protocols of the Wannsee Conference inform the “Herr Undersecretary of State Luther” that 131,800 Jews remained in the Old Reich, 43,700 in the Ostmark, 2,284,000 in the General Government of the former Poland, around 5,000,000 in the USSR; it all added up to the following total: “zusammen: über 11.000.000”—Peter Longerich, Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20. Januar 1942: Planung und Beginn des Genozids an den europäischen Juden (Berlin: Gedenk und Bildungsstätte Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz, Band Nr. 7, series ed. by Norbert Kampe; Edition Hentrich, 1998), facsimile p. 6 (also stamped 171), Besprechungs-protokoll (with cover letter on SD stationery to Undersecretary of State Luther, dated 16 February 1942, date-stamped by Luther’s office 2 March 1942), sec. III.

427 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “When one sees the bodies of these Jews…”—Slightly abridged from Gerstein’s report (Friedländer, p. 113).

428 Conversation of Wirth and Gerstein: “We don’t need any modifications” and “the prussic acid has deteriorated in transit”—Very loosely after Gerstein’s report (Friedländer, p. 112), expanded and embellished. Wirth never offered Gerstein an outright bribe.

429 Wirth to Gerstein: “Two in the head is too much; two will practically tear the head off” —Fairly closely after the war diary of Blutenordenträger Felix Landau, in Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 97 (entry for 12 July 1941; he was shooting Jews).

429 Footnote: “What harms love more than doubt and suspicion?,” etc.—Strassburg, p. 223.

430 “They have already adopted…” and “Supplies for Tunis.”—S. L. Mayer, ed., Signal: Years of Retreat 1943-44: Hitler’s Wartime Picture Magazine (London: Mayer Hamlyn: A Bison Book, 1979). The issues selected by Mayer were all intended for the Channel Islands and therefore appeared in English. The pages of this volume are unnumbered, so they cannot be cited. I have also drawn on some of the illustrations in Signal for “The Last Field-Marshal.” Since the dates of the various issues have not been indicated, there may be minor anachronisms.

430 Ludwig Gerstein’s tale about the “Yid who tried to steal our name,” and subsequent conversation—Based on the following, written by Ludwig in the family album: “During the 1890s, a Jewish doctor, Richard Goldstein of Hamburg, changed his name to Gerstein. A complaint lodged by my brother Karl with the city Senate was unsuccessful, but he was promised that this would not be allowed to happen again. A renewed complaint on my part in 1933 went unanswered” (Friedländer, p. 10), and then Ludwig Gerstein mentions “an expatriate student” at the Technical University in Berlin. The part about a Jew under an assumed name being discovered and deported is my invention. Ludwig Gerstein closes the album with an exhortation to his descendants to safeguard the purity of their Aryan blood. Since people generally speak more crassly than they write, I haven’t hesitated to make him still more fearsomely anti-Semitic than the record proves him to have been.

430 Gerstein on his father: “He used to say that he regretted what was being done” —Closely based on the testimony of the Jewish lawyer R. Coste, in Friedländer, p. 11.

431 Gerstein’s service record “from this period”: “G. is especially suitable…”—Actually, his training report from 5 May 1941, somewhat altered (Friedländer, p. 90).

432 Complaints of the gassing van inspectors: After the statement of August Becker, Ph.D., gas-van inspector (Klee, Dressen and Riess, p. 71). I have not seen any evidence that such people actually went to Gerstein.

433 Recollection of Pastor Otto Wehr: Gerstein: “Every half hour those trainloads of doomed Jews come chasing me…”—Very loose rephrasing of Friedländer, p. 134 (Otto Wehr).

433 Gerstein to Bishop Dibelius: “Help us, help us! These things must become the talk of the world—”—Friedländer, p. 136 (testimony of Otto Dibelius, abridged).

435 Ludwig Gerstein: “Leave bad manners to their own quarrel”—Actually, this is part of the advice given to the knight Parzifal by one of his first teachers, Gurnemanz de Graharz. See von Eschenbach, p. 94.

435 “Word of the Week” street poster: “Who wears this symbol is an enemy of our people” —Hans Bohrmann, comp., Politische Plakate, with essays by Ruth Malhotra and Manfred Hagen (Dortmund, Germany: Harenberg Kommunikation; Die bibliophilien Taschenbücher, no. 435, 1984), p. 374, item no. 278 (trans. by WTV). The note on p. 643 identifies this item as “Parole der Woche 1942 Nr. 27 (1.-7.7.),” in other words, the “Word of the Week” for the first week of July.

436 Baron von Otter to Gerstein: “… a great influence on the relations between Sweden and Germany”—Gerstein believed or wanted to believe that the Baron said this; these are the words of his report to the Allies at the end of the war (Friedländer, p. 124).

439 Edmund: “Long and wide went the forest…”—von Eschenbach, p. 214 (“retranslated” by WTV).

439 Gerstein to Helmut Franz: “The times leave me no choice…”—Friedländer, p. 91 (recast as direct speech).

439 The Hitler Youth actor in Hagen: “We’ll have no Savior who weeps and laments!” and Gerstein’s reply: “We shall not allow our faith to be publicly mocked without protest!” —Friedländer, p. 37, slightly “retranslated.”

440 Gerstein’s final inteview with the Swiss consul Hochstrasser—A fiction, like the first one. According to Balfour (loc. cit.), Gerstein did at some point tell Hochstrasser about the Holocaust, and Hochstrasser passed this information on to his country. I know nothing about his own attitude to Gerstein.

440 Conversation between Gerstein and his wife: “How can you, a man of honor… testify about them”—Considerably altered from Friedländer, p. 131 (Gerstein’s interlocutor was actually the architect Otto Völkers). According to Friedländer, Gerstein might in fact have tried to protect his wife during this period from full knowledge of what he’d seen at Belzec; but from her testimony (p. 132), it seems clear that she was aware that massive numbers of people were being murdered by the Nazis.

442 Ludwig Gerstein: “For whoever desires the Grail must approach that prize with the sword”—Actually, Eschenbach, p. 269, slightly “retranslated.”

442 “His son Christian”—I have not been able to find out the names of Gerstein’s children.

443 Gerstein to his family: “The Allies have devices with which they can pinpoint their targets in the dark…”—Testimony of Nieuwenhuisen, to whom Gerstein was in fact speaking; in Friedländer, p. 163.

446 Captain Wirth, on the capacity of Auschwitz’s crematoria and open pyres: After The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, pp. 169-70 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).

447 “Our fiendish enemy on the Ostfront,” on the German mood after Stalingrad: “Bitter resistance, bordering on unthinking rashness; and timidity shading into morbid cowardice” —Chuikov, p. 15.

448 Bishop Dibelius, who “advocated only the exclusion of the Jews from our economic life”—Information given in Friedländer, pp. 38-39. This is a heartbreaking datum; Gerstein was so far from Germany normalcy, such a crier in the wilderness, that he had to consider somebody like Dibelius his ally!

449 The typist from the motor pool: “What you are under the uniform is nobody’s business” —Actually, this was an old woman whose slightly anti-Nazi son had joined a Nazi group just to get some peace. She is quoted in Karl Billinger, Fatherland (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935; no date given for what must have been the original German publication), p. 243. Billinger was a rather dreary German Communist who was lucky enough to be amnestied after about a year in a camp. I have stolen two or three details from him for my scenes of Gerstein’s 1936 arrest and internment.

451 “The historian-ethicist Michael Balfour”: “One is tempted to dismiss Gerstein as a romancer…”—Michael Balfour, Withstanding Hitler in Germany 1933-45 (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 240-41 (entry on Gerstein).

452 “Whoever gazes into Isolde’s eyes feels both heart and soul refined like gold in the white-hot flame.”—Strassburg, p. 150, slightly “retranslated” by WTV.

452 Colloquy between Gerstein and Berthe—Very loosely based on the dialogue between Svipdag and his dead mother Gróa in the Poetic Edda, pp. 141-43 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanzas 1-16). Gróa is giving her son spells and guidance for travel in the other world to win his bride.

453 Michal Chilczuk, Polish People’s Army: “But what I saw were people I call humans…”—Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, ed., The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945 (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987), p. 38 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

454 “In theory, he was saving a hundred thousand lives”—It is unknown how much prussic acid Gerstein destroyed, and exactly by what manner. Friedländer (p. 181) quotes Gerstein as saying in one of his affidavits that “the actual amount involved was approximately 9 tons 7 cwt, enough to kill 8,000,000 people.” Of course the Germans used metric measures: 18,700 pounds equals 8,500 kilograms. Since 8,500 goes 941.2 times into 8,000,000, we might as well say that 1 kilogram of Zyklon B can kill 1,000 people; hence Gerstein’s desperately theoretical computation that withholding 100 kilograms saved 100,000 people. Like most of Gerstein’s computations, this one would have exaggerated Holocaust numbers. According to Commandant Höss, who ought to have known, “five to seven kilograms of Zyklon B sufficed to murder 1,500 people” (The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 171), so Gerstein was off by a factor of five to seven. Once again, I’ve thought it best to be faithful to his thought processes, and to the information available to him at the time, rather than give hindsight’s corrected statistics.

455 Ludwig Gerstein: “If you want to live a worthy life, Kurt, you must never treat a woman badly. A woman, you know, bears no weapons in her hands”—Substantially “retranslated” and abridged from von Eschenbach, p. 268 (the hermit Trevrizent to Parzifal).

457 Die Ostschweiz headline on the Hungarian Jews: “People are Disappearing” —Mentioned by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 254 (Henryk Swiebocki, “Disclosure and Denunciation of SS Crimes”).

458 Description of Roman Karmen’s body language as he filmed the captured Nazis of Maidanek—After a photo in Ognev.

458 Details on the suppliers on Zyklon B and Gerstein’s own shadowy but probably negligible role in supplying Asuchwitz—Friedländer, pp. 184-88. There is no record of Gerstein’s ever having any such conversation with Höss as the one which I have imagined. Presumably he must have had close calls here or elsewhere.

460 Gerstein to his wife: “What action against Nazism…”—Gerstein testimony of 1945; in Friedländer, p. 160.

461 Signal magazine: “‘I’ll have the second from the right,’” says Hilde…”—Mayer, op. cit. The following sentence, “I don’t care how many bombs they drop…” is my invention. The repaired shop window through which Hilde is bravely peering was damaged by an Allied air raid.

462 Gerstein to Hochstrasser: “If Hitler should lose, he’ll slam the door…”—Loosely after Gerstein to Nieuwenhuisen, to whom Gerstein was in fact speaking; in Friedländer, p. 163.

462 “They” at Oranienburg: “What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental” —Klee et al, p. 163 (letter from S.S.-Obersturmführer Karl Kretchmer, Sonderkommando 4a, 27 September 1942).

463 Details on Ravensbrück concentration camp—Based on Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück: An Eyewitness Account of a Women’s Concentration Camp, trans. by Gerald Satter-white (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975).

464 Gerstein’s father: “Hard times demand hard methods”—Friedländer, p. 203.

466 Dr. Pfannenstiel to Gerstein: “You’re the man who invented the gas chamber”—An allegation (not made specifically by Dr. Pfannenstiel or anyone) quoted by Balfour.

466 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “I noticed nothing special about the corpses…”—Friedländer, p. 118 (Pfannenstiel’s testimony before the Darmstadt Court, 1950, slightly abridged).

466 Gerstein on the pink color of the corpses killed by Zyklon B—Described in The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 168 (Franciszek Piper, “The Mass Extermination of Jews”).

466 Dr. Pfannenstiel: “Can science devise a way to render this process of exterminating human beings devoid of cruelty?”—In his postwar testimony before the Darmstadt Court, Pfannenstiel actually said: “I wanted to know in particular if this process of exterminating human beings was accompanied by any acts of cruelty” (Friedländer, p. 118). I would think that my alteration does perfect justice to his thought processes during the days when he could participate in the Holocaust with impunity.

466 Gerstein and Helmut Franz on Kollwitz’s “Volunteers”—Imagined by me. Helmut Franz’s views on the need to respect evil and leave it alone are based in part on the argument in von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales.

466 The same conversation, on voluntarism and willing Hitler to be good—Somewhat based on Rudolf Hess’s notion of loyalty to Hitler, as quoted in Krebs, pp. 206-07. Hess actually does compare himself to Hagen.

468 “Let gape the gates!”—Poetic Edda, p. 151 (“Svipdagsmál,” stanza 43).

470 “Clever Hans” Günther’s victims: two hundred thousand Jews in Bohemia and Moravia—Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 369 (HQ BAOR, interrogation reports from No. 1 Sub-Centre, 3-10 December 1945).

470 Gerstein to his father: “You are wrong about one thing…”—Levin, p. 310; Friedländer, p. 208 (“retranslated” a little).

470 Gerstein to his wife: “People will hear about me…”—Friedländer, p. 211.

471 “It may be that the mere fact of making such efforts…”—Friedländer, pp. 198-99 (Frankfurt court document, 1955).

471 Göring: “Anybody can make an atrocity film…”—G. M. Gilbert, Ph.D., Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo, 1995, repr. of 1947 ed.), p. 152 (15 February 1946). Göring was of course sentenced to death. It may be worth noting here that his wife told him: “I shall think you died for Germany!” and “then all suffering vanished from his face.” Her verdict: “He was devotion and goodness incarnate.”—Emmy Goering, My Life with Goering (London: Bruce and Watson Ltd., 1972), pp. 157, 159.

472 Epigraph—Vladimir Karpov, ed. [photos; with text by Georgii Drozdov and Evgenii Ryabko, trans. Lydia Kmetyuk], Russia at War: 1941-45 (London: Stanley Paul, 1987), p. 17.

472 Chuikov’s decorations—He also received eight Orders of Lenin and one order of the Red Star. He was not promoted to Field-Marshal until 1955.

472 Assessment of Chuikov’s military prowess—After the brief biography by Richard Woff, in Shukman, pp. 67-74. I forgot to mention that during the Nazi-Soviet Pact he’d participated in the heroic liberation of East Poland from the Poles.

472 Chuikov: “The black humped shapes, like camels on their knees, of dead enemy tanks.”—Op. cit., p. 18.

473 Chuikov: “The spring was with us, but behind the enemy’s lines it was autumn”—Ibid., p. 17.

473 Chuikov: “This long delay in the opening of the second front…”—Ibid., p. 20.

473 The stanza from Marina Tsvetaeva: “You can’t withstand me…”—Tsvetaeva, p. 43 (“Where you are I can reach you” [1923]), “retranslated” and slightly truncated by WTV.

476 “There were tears in the men’s eyes…” —Modern Art Museum catalogue, unnumbered p. 4.

476 Situation of Chuikov in March 1943—After Richard Woff, in Shukman, p. 72; John Erickson (“Malinovsky”), in the same work, p. 120; John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 2 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 45-64; Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 29, p. 195, which also gives information on Chuikov’s various decorations.

477 The trembling of Paulus’s hand when he lit a cigarette—Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, orig. p. 32; Hau-Bigelow, p. 5.

477 Karmen’s simile of the waterfall—After the same document, pp. 32-33, Hau-Bigelow, p. 5.

477 Soviet gratitude for Lend-Lease items—I quote the Great Soviet Encyclopedia’s entry on this program: “The deliveries made under lend-lease spurred US production during the war and promoted the enrichment of the monopolies at the expense of the government.”

478 Karmen on remembering everything—After Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, p. 36, Hau-Bigelow, p. 7 (“Again the ruins of Berlin flash by… And again I try not to forget, as I [tried] two years earlier in Stalingrad, not the smallest, not a single detail of this historic event”).

479 “Dziga Vertov’s seven-reel declaration of love for the women of our Soviet military forces”—Made in 1938, but not widely distributed since by then this filmmaker was getting isolated for his “formalism.” As the saying goes, he died in obscurity. I wish I had found time to add a story about the rat-infested basement where the young Dziga Vertov edited Kino-Pravda, or the strange coincidence by which his “Three Songs of Lenin” was so well received by the Italian Fascists that it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1935.

479 Karmen’s aerial bombing mission—After Erzählungen über mein Schaffen, pp. 24-28, Hau-Bigelow, pp. 2-4.

480 Photographs of Soviet prisons from the outside (mentioned occasionally in “The Second Front” and “Opus 110”)—Lubarsky, pp. 14-19.

481 Käthe Kollwitz: “I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production” —Diary and Letters, p. 23 (autobiography).

483 Comrade Stalin: “Feelings are women’s concern”—Enzo Biagi, Svetlana: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Timothy Wilson (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), p. 25.

483 Karmen’s visit to Stalin’s dacha—Ibid, p. 19. According to this source, he and Simonov were present when Svetlana met her great love, the married filmmaker A. J. Kapler, who got sent away for five years for his pains.

484 “Their only reason for invading France at that late date was to deny us total victory in Germany”—An actual Communist argument. See Andeas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1985), p. 449.

484 Red Army’s rape of German women: “an incendiary shell usually brought them out of their cellars.”—Information from Clark, p. 417.

485 First epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 383.

485 Second epigraph—Billinger, pp. 140-41.

486 Von Manstein: “Grave as the loss of Sixth Army certainly is…”—Von Manstein, pp. 289-90, slightly altered.

486 Statistics on troop and mine dispositions at Kursk—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 14, p. 134 (entry on the Battle of Kursk). This engagement is generally considered to have lasted two weeks. Soviet sources, however, concatenate it with other battles, so that it runs fifty days—all the more monumental.

486 Rüdiger’s admiration for Lisca Malbran in “Young Heart”—An anachronism. This film cleared the censorship in mid-September 1944 and premiered at the end of November. The Battle of Kursk had taken place in the summer of 1943. “Young Heart” disappeared rapidly because in its second month it had earned only 372 Reichsmarks, ten percent less than the authorities required. It was an E-film (“Erste Grundhaltung latente polit. Funktion”), in other words a “serious” drama with appropriate political nudges. H-films were comic with political nudges. There were also nP-films and P-films (non-political and manifestly political). After Stalingrad, E-films were preferred over H-films, “on account of the seriousness and greatness of our times”. Unlike many films, especially P-films, “Young Heart” received no subsidy. Information from Dr. Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistiche Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Drittes Reiches (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1969), summarized for WTV by the delicious Yolande Korb. “Young Heart” must have been dreadful.

487 Various details relative to the weaponry of the two sides at Kursk, especially regarding the numbers and capabilities of Tiger tanks—David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

487 Some of my visual descriptions of German troops in this operation are based on photographs in the Ullstein archive.

488 Dancwart’s favorite proverb: “Keep riding until daybreak”—Nibelungenlied, p. 202 (“We cannot bivouc,” answered bold Dancwart. “You must all keep riding until daybreak.”)

489 The size of the salient: half the size of England—Erickson, The Road to Berlin, p. 64.

489 Ninth Panzer Division’s experiences at Kursk—Based in part on Haupt, 173-74 (battle diary of Ninth Panzer, Panzer-Grenadier Grosssdeutschland, 6 June 1943, Citadel/ Orel).

490 Ninth Panzer Division’s armor strength at Kursk—Glantz and House, p. 349.

490 Twenty-first Panzer Brigade’s armor strength at Kursk—Ibid., p. 284.

490 “Well, from the very beginning we’d known that it was no use; it was up to us as frontline soldiers simply to obey orders and bear the responsibility”—After Hans von Luck, Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck (New York: Random House / Dell, 1989 repr. of undated Praeger ed.), p. 238 (original reads, in another context: “It sounded to us rather too pathetic, but what was the use? We knew that from now on it was up to us, as frontline soldiers, to bear the responsibility and make the decisions”).

490 Emblems of Panzer divisions, 1941-42—Haupt, p, 178. When I write that “we disguised the X of our divisional emblem with a V overhung by a horizontal bar,” I am actually describing the disguise of Fifth Panzer.

490 Number of Tiger tanks assigned to Ninth Army at Kursk—Nik Cornish, Images of Kursk: History’s Greatest Tank Battle, July 1943 (London: Brown Partworks Ltd. / Brassey’s, Inc., 2002), p. 135.

493 Sergeant Gunther: “Slavs drink from the skulls of their enemies”—Loosely based on Tsvetaeva, p. 114 (“Bus,” 1934-35: “Inside me, warmth and birdsong./You could drink both of them from/the two halves of my skull/[Slavs did that with enemies]”).

493 Volker: “There’s nothing we can do…”—Nibelungenlied, p. 215 (“‘The things we have been told of will happen irremediably,’ said bold Volker the Fiddler. ‘Let us ride to court and see what can happen to us fearless men in Hungary.’”)

493 “Beware of being too wise, it’s said”—Very loosely after the Poetic Edda, p. 22 (stanza 54, “Hávamál”).

496 “Maybe they expected me to scratch runes on the back of my hand”—“Operation Citadel” has a number of references to the Poetic Edda, of which this is a representative example. Brynhild (here known as Sigrdrífa) advises Siegfried, who has just awoken her from her magic sleep, to make his way through life with the help of runes. “On thy beer horn scratch it [the ale rune], and the back of thy hand, and the Need rune on thy nails” (p. 235, “The Lay of Sigrdrífa,” stanza 8, interpolated with fn.).

499 “Doom never dies, said the old man”—Poetic Edda, p. 25 (“Hávamál,” stanza 25, very loosely “retranslated” by WTV).

500 Hitler on Russian tank production figures: “The Russians are dead.”—Fest, p. 94.

501 Narrator: “Well, to be sure, they have good reason… what they had will never come back”—After the Nibelungenlied, p. 215 (“She has good reason for her long mourning,” answered Hagen, “but he was killed many years past. She ought to love the King of the Huns now, for Siegfried will never come back—he was buried long ago”).

503 Von Manstein: “A clear focal point of effort at the decisive spot”—Von Manstein, p. 547 (italics in original, excepting the “a”).

504 Significance of the Reds’ thrust against Twenty-third Panzer Corps—Described in Glantz and House, p. 161.

507 “First, get the command tank”—Information from Cornish, p. 186.

507 Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana: “I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, all-knowing, heartless Russia”—Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla John-son McMillan (New York: Avon Books [Discus], 1967), p. 132 (letter 11).

510 Von Manstein: “And so the final German offensive in the East ended in fiasco…” —Op. cit., p. 449, “retranslated” by WTV. The translator notes (p. 549) that the chapter on Operation Citadel, from which I’ve drawn this quotation, is actually an article by von Manstein for the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette, which in this English edition has been substituted for the original text’s much longer chapter on Citadel, “in order to shorten these memoirs to a size suitable for publication in Britain and the U.S.A.”

511 Stalin: “If the Battle of Stalingrad signalled the twilight of the German-Fascist Army…”—Quoted in Cornish, p. 216.

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.”

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

578 Description of the courtroom for the Horst Wessel trial—After Benjamin’s Stasi file, p. BStU 000229, Spiegel, Mittwoch, 18.3.59, p. 30 (“SOWJETZONE: Recht: Zwischen Recht und Rot”).

578 Testimony of Horst Wessel’s mother, and Benjamin’s response—My invention.

579 Benjamin to defendants: “I’ve come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power”—Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit. (somewhat altered; not to anyone in particular; an official third-person restatement of her views).

579 Comrade W. Ulbricht “The Communists must be the ones who know Fascist labor law the best”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 4.

579 “The legend:” “She was asked by the commander of the Berlin city precinct Stieglitz…” —Steding (Sorgenicht), loc. cit.

579 “The radical removal of Nazi and reactionary elements was a main focus of her department.” —Ibid., p. 8.

580 “Since East Germany doesn’t even have trade unions yet, our first task will be to complete the bourgeois revolution of 1848”—Somewhat after Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR 1945-53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 8.

580 Footnote: Ulbricht’s activities in the Spanish Civil War—Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 411.

580 Same footnote: Comrade Leonhard on Ulbricht: “Being entirely innocent of theoretical ideas or personal feelings…”—Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, trans. C. M. Woodhouse (Whitstable, Kent, U.K.: Ink Links, 1979, repr. of orig. 1957 English ed.; orig. German ed. 1950), p. 288.

580 Same footnote: A. A. Grechko on Ulbricht: “The old one isn’t worth much anymore” —Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German Democratic Republic (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2002), p. 5.

580 Benjamin: “Not creation of the new, but restoration of the old”—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000010, p. 4.

581 Ulbricht: “This meeting has nothing to do with dismantling”—Leonhard, p. 343. This source also describes the confrontation with Ulbricht regarding abortion; I have reworded his answer somewhat in the imagined conversation farther on in the text, and entirely invented Benjamin’s role.

581 A few descriptions of East German landscapes, and several concepts relating to “socialist legality,” are indebted to Arthur W. McCardle and A. Bruce Boenau, eds., East Germany: A New Germany Nation Under Socialism? (New York: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 52-79 (Horst Krüger, “Alien Homeland: Sentimental Journey Through the GDR-Province,” 1978); and pp. 156-71 (Institut für Theorie des Staates und des Rechts der Akademie der Wissenschaft der DDR, “The Nature of Socialist Legality,” 1975). Krüger concludes (p. 73): “Actually the worst thing across the border was this good behavior which bores you to death.”

582 Some of the events and statistics I cite from here on are from Gary Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany, 1945-1955 (Oxford: Row-man & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, 2003). I am also indebted to Angela E. Stent, “Soviet Policy Toward the German Democratic Republic,” in Sarah Meiklejohn Terry, ed., Soviet Policy in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press: A Council on Foreign Relations Book, 1984), pp. 34-41, 47ff.

582 Benjamin: “Law must correspond with the progression of civilization”—Steding (Gotthold Bley, “The Creative Work of Hilde Benjamin in the Formation of the GDR’s Legislation and Legal System”); Hau-Bigelow, p. 12 (abr. and reworded).

582 Most of the various East German trials and sentences are from information in Evans’s Rituals of Retribution, as are a few brief quotations from Hilde Benjamin. From this book I have borrowed, then altered and embellished, various legal phrases and pronouncements to suit the purposes of my American gangsterism. It may be of interest to the reader, as it was to me, to learn that the East German legal system was far, far less lethal than both the Nazi and the Soviet variants. Evans concludes (pp. 864-66) that the GDR executed more than two hundred people, mostly in the fifties. Soviet military tribunals in the GDR executed others. Executions for murder were abolished in 1975; capital punishment was ended entirely a few years later. Evans goes on to call Hilde Benjamin “perfectly capable of mass murder” (p. 869).

582 Sentence of six years for selling eggs in West Berlin—Bruce, p. 227.

584 Benjamin: “Thorough cleansing of the entire public sphere”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 4.

584 “Her legend”: “She showed the ability to continually evolve…”—Steding (Sorgenicht); Hau-Bigelow, p. 8 (abridged and reworded; she actually proposed, still more radically, that “a law at the time of its enactment would correspond with the progression of civilization”).

584 The Red Guillotine: “Since man develops his personality primarily in work…” —GDR: 300 Questions… , p. 62.

585 Benjamin: “The important thing is to apply the laws in a new democratic spirit” —Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 6.

585 Seventy-eight thousand charged with political crimes in 1950—Binsichten: Diktatur und Widerstand, loc. cit., p. 71. “There were no longer any classes or sections which can live at the expense of others”—GDR: 300 Questions… , p. 42 (tense altered).

585 “The legend”: “She proved capable of disciplining enemies of the new republic with unrelenting severity”—Steding (Sorgenicht); Hau-Bigelow, p. 9 (abridged and reworded).

586 West German journalist: “Who has ever once experienced this woman…” —Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 00051 (Die Welt, 15.8.52, Wolfgang Weinert, “Ob schuldig oder nicht schuldig”).

587 Information on the 1953 uprising—Peterson, p. 3.

587 “The General Prosecuting Authority, headed by the prosecutor general of the GDR…” —Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 6, p. 315 (entry on the German Democratic Republic).

588 “The legend”: “Her most important trials are known, and need not be mentioned further.” —Steding (Sorgenicht); Hau-Bigelow, p. 9.

588 Stasi evaluation: “Comrade BENJAMIN is from the professional and political standpoint…”—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 00055.

589 Comrade Gotthold Bley: “Socialist law and socialist legislation were tools, motors and levers she used”—Steding (Bley); Hau-Bigelow, p. 12.

589 Comrade Büttner: “She solidified the dialectical interrelation between law and society…”—Steding (Horst Büttner, “Keeping the Revolutionary Achievements and Experiences of Coming Generations Alive”); Hau-Bigelow, p. 18. (The original, which does refer specifically to her work as Justice Minister in those years, runs: “She solidified the inseparable connection and dialectical interrelation between law and society…”)

589 Purpose of GDR justice: “Smash the resistance of expropriated monopolists for all time…”—Somewhat after Hans Werner Schwarze, The GDR Today: Life in the “Other Germany,” trans. John M. Mitchell (London: Oswald Wolff, 1973, trans. of orig. 1970 German ed.), p. 41.

589 Benjamin: “Only here in the German Democratic Republic have we learned the lessons of the past”—Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 5.

590 “On 28.1.54 it came to our attention…”—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 00040.

590 Gallows for Hilde Benjamin—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 0004; newspaper clipping, 3.2.54: “Galgen für Hilde Benjamin.”

590 Rumor that Benjamin had fled toward Israel—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000031 (letter from Breitschneider, Oberkommissar, Leiter der Abteilung VI, to the Stasi, 2.3.54).

590 “There are three kinds of people here…”—Peterson, p. 257.

591 Description of Benjamin and Ulbricht at the military parade—Somewhat after a photo in Benjamin’s Stasi file, p. BStU 000227, Spiegel, Mittwoch, 18.3.59, p. 28 (“SOWJETZONE: Recht: Zwischen Recht und Rot”); the reproduction is poor, and I cannot tell whether the male figure is really Ulbricht.

593 Photographs in Benjamin’s office, including the likeness of “that representative of the international workers’ movement, Felix Dzherzhinsky”—An accurate list, and F. D., founder of the hated Cheka, is truly described in this way; in Steding (Büttner), original p. 55; Hau-Bigelow, p. 17.

593 Description of Red Guillotine in the courtroom—After Benjamin’s Stasi file, p. BStU 000220, Spiegel, Mittwoch, 18.3.59, p. 22 (“SOWJETZONE: Recht: Zwischen Recht und Rot”); some details invented (for instance, in the poor reproduction of the newspaper photo I couldn’t see whom the busts represented; very possibly Stalin’s was gone by this stage; Pieck, Lenin or Marx could have been the subject).

595 Benjamin: “This sentence is a warning for all who waver…”—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000015; p. 10.

597 Programmatic Declaration: “Our laws are the realization of human freedom” —Benjamin (Pielhoop), p. 7.

597 Comrade Bley: “Based on the teachings of Lenin, she envisioned a necessary direction for the workers’ and farmers’ movement in socialist legislation”—Steding (Bley); Hau-Bigelow, p. 12.

597 Honecker: “Only a shambles was left of Adenauer’s ‘policy of strength’”—Op. cit., p. 213.

598 Tale of Benjamin’s forced retirement—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000178, Haupt-abteilung XX/1/I, Berlin, den 19.6.67.

598 Description of the restricted area where Benjamin, Ulbricht and other privileged Party members lived—Carola Stern, Ulbricht: A Political Biography, trans. and adapted by Abe Farbstein (New York: Praeger, 1965; n.d. for orig. German ed.), p. 196.

599 “Seventy-five percent of our judges in the regional and district courts derived from the working class [by 1967]”—GDR: 300 Questions, p. 67.

599 “To be remembered here is her impartiality…”—Steding (Sorgenicht); Hau-Bigelow, p. 9.

599 Statistics on farms and industrial enterprises confiscated in East Germany (actually by 1974)—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, loc. cit., p. 316.

599 The prank calls about the coffin—Benjamin Stasi file, p. BStU 000191, Haupt-abteilung XX/1, Berlin 12.8.71. I have altered this incident substaantially.

In Berlin in 2003, Juliane Reitzig, a pretty woman in her twenties, answered my questions about growing up in the DDR as follows: “School was very military-like. You had to show effort, you know. It wasn’t like, here’s a little book about the bees and you know what. It was very political. In third grade they were already introducing us to the documentaries about the Holocaust. The Americans were our enemies and the Russians were our friends, of course. The Nazis were bad, of course. We the Communists, we were the good people. There wasn’t any talk of Eastern Germans being involved in Nazis. It was always the West Germans who were the bad ones… They were encouraging us to have pen pals. I was excited, but at the same time they were checking to be sure that we were really writing letters. They would organize holidays if we were making an effort. They would organize trips to Russia… There were a lot of people who had more than others, especially those who were in the SED, the Party. Everybody had a job. Everybody had a place to live. But it was a planned economy… My parents, they told me that they had applied to leave for the West, they said, don’t tell anyone, but I told my best friend, and her grandfather was actually working for the Stasi. There were rumors, and later on they found out he was there for sure. I never really went back to where I used to live. I have a dislike for that man, and also for other people who were very directly involved in that politics… Most people wanted the reunification.” Juliane did not immediately recognize the name Hilde Benjamin. About the destruction of Dresden she said, “I really don’t know all the historic details beyond the bombing, but there was a regime in power that needed to be stopped.”

601 Epigraph—“Everywhere that Torah is studied at night…”—Matt, p. 90 (“The Hidden Light,” from zohar 2, 213-14).

602 “My dear lady, thank you for your, your, you know, but I, I, well, I simply took a simple little theme and I did my simple, simple best to develop it!”—Grossly exaggerated from Wilson, p. 325 (testimony of Evgeny Chukovsky: Shostakovich on the First Cello Concerto).

611 Epigraph: “There is something fearful…”—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 402 (“Monsieur du Miroir,” rev. version of 1846).

In various stories, especially this one and “Opus 110,” descriptions of Dresden before its destruction are based on the text and photographs (which are labeled with such helpful indicators as “zerstört, später abgebrochen”) in Fritz Löffler, Das alte Dresden: Geschichte seiner Bauten (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann Verlag, 1999, repr. of 1995 ed.). A few details of Dresden in the 1960s derive from Jean Edward Smith, Germany Beyond the Wall: People, Politics… and Prosperity (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1979, rev. of 1967 ed.). This author visited Dresden in 1967.

612 Photographs of Dresden in the first years after the bombing—Christian Borchert, zeitreise: Dresden 1954-1995 (Dresden?: Verlag der Kunst, 1996). The window display at “Honetta Damenmoden” was actually photographed in 1956, not 1960, the year of Lina’s visit; it probably looked slightly less sparse by then.

613 Photographs of destroyed Dresden, including corpses—Richard Peter, Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an (Halle/Saale: Fliegenkopf Verlag, n.d., ca. 2000).

613 Lesbian venues and typologies in Weimar Berlin—Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2000).

616 The Russians “separated themselves; they had their own place”—In the interview cited earlier (for “The Red Guillotine”), Juliane Reitzig said the following about the Soviet troops: “I think people were afraid of the Russian soldiers, but at the same time you had to like them. They separated themselves; they were in this airbase; they had their own place. Rarely saw them on the street; there were guards in the separate areas.”

616 Information on continuing widespread rape of German women by Russian soldiers in Dresden and other parts of East Germany—Fritz Löwenthal, News from Soviet Germany, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1950). Bruce (p. 47) tells a nasty story of Red Army men with syphilis who, released from a hospital for a night out, raped East German women in Brandenburg. One reason that so many SED members resisted Russian domination was these rapes. The tale of Vice-Landrat Beda also comes from this source.

620 Epigraph: “Was their ill fate sealed when in they looked.”—Poetic Edda, p. 164 (“Volundarkvitha,” stanza 21).

622 Epigraph on the “‘sweet biscuits’ of culture”—The Soviet Way of Life, p. 409 (ch. 9: “The Society of Great Culture”).

622 Shostakovich’s cornucopia of food—G. Glikman (1945), in Schmalenberg, p. 182 (trans. by WTV).

623 Sovetskaya Musika: “It is impossible to forget that Shostakovich’s work…”—Walter Z. Laquer and Geroge Lichtheim, The Soviet Cultural Scene 1956-1957 (New York: Atlantic Books / Frederick A. Praeger, 1958), pp. 13-14, citing Sovetskaya Musika, 1956, no. 3, p. 9.

624 Akhmatova: “As if every flower burst into words”—Akhmatova (Hemschemeyer), p. 276 (“Music,” Zh. 452), “retranslated” by WTV.

624 V. Berlinsky on Shostakovich: “a lump of nerves”—Wilson, p. 244.

624 Eighth Symphony as “repulsive, ultra-individualist”—MacDonald, p. 191. The denouncer was Viktor Belyi, and the setting was, of course, the infamous Union of Soviet Composers’ congress in January 1948.

625 A nineteeth-century French traveler: “The Russians are not ghosts…”—Dumas, p. 55.

626 Zhdanov: “Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent…”—Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia from Lenin to Gorbachev (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, University of Vermont, 1993), pp. 236-37 (Report to the Leningrad Branch of the Soviet Union of Writers and the Leningrad City Committee of the Communist Party, 21 August 1946).

627 Mikhail Nikiforovich: “Begging your pardon, my dear Svetlana Alliluyeva”—Biagi, p. 23. (“Begging your pardon, my dear Svetlana Alliluyeva” was my Shostakovian addition.)

628 Comrade Alexandrov’s assessment: “A young, pretty blond woman with gentle brown eyes and a good figure”—Actually, G. Glikman (1945), in Schmalenberg, p. 182 (trans. by WTV). The Shostakoviches had at this time been married for over a decade.

630 Comrade Luria: “As stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it…”—This and other aspects of the Jewish creed based on the texts and commentaries in Jacob Neusner, Introduction to Rabbinic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

631 Comrade Alexandrov’s note: “Only eight percent of Leningrad’s housing was destroyed” —Figure from Werth, Leningrad, p. 43.

632 Shostakovich to Schwartz: “What I’ve heard is better than anything by Shostakovich!” —Loosely after G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 199 (trans. by WTV).

634 Description of Shostakovich in 1948—After the illustration in Gojowy, p. 81 (“Im Zebtrum des Kulturkampfes 1948…”).

635 The poster of Shostakovich in the copper helmet; Gavriil’s reaction to it and his sculpture —G. Glikman, Ibid., pp. 179-80.

637 Shostakovich: “Certain negative characteristics in my musical style prevented me from reconstructing myself”—New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (Washington, D.C.: Macmillan Publishing Ltd., 1980), vol. 17, p. 265 (entry on Shostakovich, slightly reworded).

637 Description of Galya Shostakovich as a girl—After the illustration in Gojowy, p. 29 (“Dimitri Schostakowitsch mit seiner Tochter Galina”).

638 Akhmatova’s denunciation in Leningradskaya Pravda—Reeder, p. 296.

640 “Comrade Hitler”: “Conscience is a Jewish creation”—The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, p. 145 (Francizek Piper, “Living Conditions as Methods of Extermination,” quotation from H. Rauschning’s Gespräche mit Hitler).

640 Khrennikov on Shostakovich: “Alien to the Soviet people”—MacDonald, p. 192.

640 Footnote: Great Soviet Encyclopedia remarks on the Allied Control Council—Vol. 13, p. 7, entry for same (slightly modified for context).

641 Shostakovich’s doublespeak to the activists: “I appreciate your valuable critical observations… I’m sure those sanctions will, mmm, to speak, inspire me to… future creative work and provide, er, insights… Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak, forward”—Glikman, p. 27 (letter of 8 December 1943, meant sarcastically in original, further Shostakovich-ized by WTV).

645 Shostakovich to Ustvolskaya: “Illusions don’t die all at once—”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 85.

645 Completion date of Ustvolskaya’s Sonata No. 2—February is my interpolation. I know only that it bears the date 1949.

645 Comrade Stalin: “We’ll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich”—Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 148.

647 Marina Tsevtaeva (“in anger and in love”): “I refuse to be”—Op. cit., p. 122 (from “Poems to Czechoslovakia”).

648 Shostakovich: “I do not like too friendly or too antagonistic relationships between people.”—After Khentova (Mineyev); original p. 152, Mineyev, p. 18.

650 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to write about”—Glikman, p. 39 (letter of 2 February 1950; this would actually have been written five months before Shostakovich had gone to East Germany, but it’s a typical Shostakovich-ism. Glikman notes that whenever his friend wrote such things, he generally meant or at least felt the opposite).

651 Devotee of white keys and black keys: “This typical Russian girl, with her two braids…”—Dmitry Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1998), p. 199.

654 S. Skrebov: “I absolutely reject such music…”—Wilson, p. 251 (testimony of Lyubov’ Rudneva, slightly altered).

658 Great Soviet Encyclopedia on God: “An imaginary figure of a powerful supernatural being.” —Vol. 3, entry on God.

660 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Dear Isaak Davidovich…”—Glikman, p. 49 (29 August 1953).

670 Shostakovich to Nikolayeva: “Which of them was luckier?”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 98 (here Shostakovich was actually comparing himself to the executed Tukhachevsky).

670 Shostakovich to Nikolayeva: “Well, to grieve is also a right, but it’s not granted to everyone!”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 136.

670 Shostakovich: “It was really terrible that he didn’t have a secretary. It used to be that Nina always picked up the telephone and said that he was away for two months”—After Gojowy, p. 106 (DDS to Denisov, trans. by WTV).

670 Chekhov: “Isn’t our living in town…” —Anton Chekhov, The Tales of Chekhov, vol. 5: “The Wife” & Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Ecco Press, 1985 repr. of 1918 Macmillan ed.), p. 267 (“The Man in a Case,” 1898), abridged by WTV.

671 The difference between a whistling shell and a sizzling one—Werth, p. 55.

672 The émigré Martynov on “Lady Macbeth”: “A warning of harmful deviation.”—Ivan Martynov, Dmitri Shostakovich: The Man and His Work, trans. T. Guralsky (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), p. 47.

673 Discussion with Comrades Khubov et al about “Lady Macbeth”—Loosely based on the account in Glikman, pp. 261-62.

674 “It’s about, I, I, how the love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things…”—After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 108 (the composer was actually speaking of “Lady Macbeth”).

674 Shostakovich’s song: “Burn, candle, burn bright, in Lenin’s little red asshole” —G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 197 (trans. and slightly altered by WTV).

674 The Eleventh Symphony’s “secret references to the Soviet tanks now crushing the Hungarian uprising”—After Wilson, p. 317 (testimony of Lev Lebedinsky: “What we heard in this music was not the police firing on the crowd in front of the Winter Palace in 1905, but the Soviet tanks roaring in the streets of Budapest”).

674 Maxim: “Papa, what if they hang you for this?”—Loc. cit.

675 “A German”: “The Russians are masters in the construction of shellproof wooden field fortifications.”—Steven H. Newton, comp., German Battle Tactics on the Russian Front 1941-1945 (Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Military/Aviation History, 1994), p. 127 (Gustav Höhne, “In Snow and Mud: 31 Days of Attack Under Seydlitz During Early Spring of 1942”).

675 Shostakovich: “When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been a coward…” —After Wilson, p. 304 (testimony of Edik Denisov). For narrative reasons I have moved this scene from 1957, when it actually occurred, to 1958.

675 Address of the Kino House (Dom Kino)—Dr. Heinrich E. Schulz and Dr. Stephen S. Taylor, Who’s Who in the USSR 1961/62 (Montreal: Intercontinental Book and Publishing Co., Ltd, 1962; printed in Austria; orig. comp. by Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich), p. 320 (entry on Karmen). Let’s hope that the Kino House was in the same place in 1958.

680 Khrushchev and Shostakovich, 1960: Based on a scene described in Wilson, pp. 381-82 (testimony of Sergei Slonimsky).

681 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Life is far from easy. How I long…”—Glikman, p. 90 (letter of 30 April 1960).

681 Glikman’s secret approach to Elena Konstantinovskaya on Shostakovich’s behalf —This is a total fiction.

681 Number of faculty members at the Leningrad Conservatory—Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol 14, p. 396 (entry on Leningrad Conservatory). Since this is a 1972-73 figure, it might be slightly higher than would have been the case a decade earlier.

682 Lebedinsky to Shostakovich: “You don’t have much luck with women, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that you’ve racked up your share of failures” —Somewhat after Wilson, p. 352 (testimony of Lebedinsky).

682 Shostakovich to Irina Supinskaya: “Actually, I’m not against your calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony…”—Closely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 156.

683 Shostakovich to Lebedinsky: “I’d sign anything even if they shoved it at me upside down”—Wilson, p. 183 (actually not said to Lebedinsky but remembered by Y. P. Lyubimov, slightly altered).

683 Khrushchev: “Plainly speaking, why do the United States of America…”—N. H. Mager and Jacques Katel, comp. and ed., Conquest Without War: An Analytical Anthology of the Speeches, Interviews, and Remarks of Nikita Sergevich Khrushchev, with Commentary by Lenin, Stalin and Others (New York: Pocket Books, 1961), p. 99 (at Czechoslovakian embassy, Moscow, quoted in New York Times 10 May 1960).

685 Shostakovich on the beauty and plumpness of Meyerhold’s wife—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78.

686 Marina Tsvetaeva : “I set my lips to the breast of the great round battling earth.”—Tsvetaeva, p. 20 (from “Insomnia,” 1916, stanza 6), “retranslated” by WTV.

687 Dostoyevsky: “Why do even the finest people…?”—Uncle’s Dream etc., p. 109 (“White Nights”).

690 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I’m not going, you see… They’ll have to tie me up” —Slighly altered from Glikman, p. 92 (Glikman’s commentary).

691 German casualties of the Allied bombing of Dresden—Kershaw (p. 761) gives an estimate of “at least 35,000” victims.

692 “Even former S.S. officers were cooperating with us now…”—Gehlen (p. 249) names three who worked for East German intelligence in part “to avenge the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.”

693 Shostakovich: “The distinguishing feature of Jewish music…”—Wilson, p. 235 (testimony of Rafiil Matveivich Khozak).

694 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I wrote an ideologically deficient quartet…”—Slightly altered from Fay, p. 217.

695 “Akhmatova insists… that whoever doesn’t make continual reference to the torture chambers all around us is a criminal”—Loosely after Chukovskaya (p. 5), who was actually writing that she herself would be a criminal if she didn’t make at least some elliptical record of her conversations with the great poet.

696 Manfred Smolka: “There is no doubt that desertion and treachery…”—Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 852. From the context, it is not clear whether Smolka’s words were in fact reported in the press.

697 The Kabbalists: “Every definition of God leads to heresy”—Matt, p. 32 (Abraham Isaac Kook, “Pangs of Cleansing,” in Orot).

697 Shostakovich: “When fate and all that is, you know, meaningless!”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 17.

701 Conventional wisdom on Zoya: “Not long but beautifully did she live!”—Vsesoyuznuii Gospudarstvennui Fond Kinofilmov, p. 331 (entry on the movie “Zoya,” trans. WTV).

703 Leskov on Katerina’s final murder: She “threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft little perch”—Nikolai Leskov, The Enchanted Wanderer: Selected Tales, trans. David Magarshak (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1987, repr. of 1961 Secker & Warburg ed.), p. 50 (“Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk district,” 1865).

704 Shostakovich to F. P. Litvinova: “You know, my dear Flora Pavlovna, I would have displayed more brilliance…”—Fay, p. 268.

706 Description of Nina’s portrait—After the illustration in Gojowy, p. 28 (“Die Ehefrau Dimitri Schostakowitschs, Nina Wassiljewna geb. Warsar”).

707 “Seed corn must not be ground.”—Title of an image by Käthe Kollwitz, 1941-42.

708 The district Party secretary: “This is outrageous! We let Shostakovich join the Party…”—Wilson, p. 359 (Kirill Kondrashin).

708 Tale of Ashkenazi as Shostakovich’s divorce intermediary against Nina—Based on Khentova, p. 130, trans. for WTV by Sergi Mineyev.

708 Date of Roman Karmen’s marriage to Maya Ovchinnikova, his telephone number and his preference for hunting and fast cars—The International Who’s Who, 1977-78 (London: Europa Publications Ltd., 1977), entry on Karmen. The original says “cars,” not “fast cars.” But in Karmen’s “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” there are a huge number of sequences with fast cars in them.

709 Karmen’s private telephone number, ca. 1965—Andrew I. Lebed, Dr. Heinrich E. Schulz and Dr. Stephen S. Taylor, Who’s Who in the USSR 1965-66, 2nd ed. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966; printed in Spain; orig. comp. by Institute for the Study of the USSR, Munich), p. 346 entry on Karmen, whose address was then Polyanka 34. The International Who’s Who gives him a different number in 1977-78, so it seemed no invasion to publish this one.

711 Shostakovich to his wife: “It was blackmail, Irinochka… If you love me, you won’t dig that up…”—Loosely after Fay, p. 218.

712 Shostakovich to his wife: “You see, I’m such an insensitive criminal type…”—Loosely after Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 242 (actually said in reference to the criticisms not of Denisov but of Solzhenitsyn).

712 “A great comrade”: “Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated…” —Hitler, p. 363.

713 The ditty played by Shostakovich: “Merry singing makes the heart glow…”—Von Geldern and Stites, p. 234 (Vasily Lebedev-Kumach and Isaac Dunaevsky, “March of the Happy-Go-Lucky Guys,” 1934), “retranslated” from the following, which rhymes A B C C in the facing Russian text: “Merry singing fills the heart with joy. / It will never let you be sad. / The countryside and villages love singing, / And big cities love singing, too.”

713 Brezhnev: “Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and life-affirming”—Daniels, p. 282 (Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 29 March 1966).

714 The reunion of Shostakovich and Akhmatova (“eighty-eight”)—After Shostakovich and Volkov, pp. 274-75. So far as I know, their meeting was not filmed and Roman Karmen was not present.

717 The bourgeois critic Layton: “At their best, the symphonies…”—Simpson, op. cit., p. 198.

717 Shostakovich to Glikman: “I am a dull, mediocre composer”—Glikman, p. 140 (letter of 3 February 1967, abridged).

718 Shostakovich to Glikman: “Slowly and with great difficulty…”—Glikman, p. 143 (letter of 8 April 1967).

719 Shostakovich to the orchestra: “On the left and right flanks, the battalion regions are echeloned…”—After Glantz and House, p. 277 (Stavka Front Directive No. 12248, 8 May 1943, 0429 hours).

719 Shostakovich to the audience: “Death is terrifying…”—Wilson, p. 417 (Mark Lubot-sky, unpublished memoir).

719 Shostakovich to his wife: “Unfortunately, Lebedinsky has grown, how shall I put it, old and stupid”—Wilson, p. 352, Shostakovich-ized.

719 Von Manstein: “Consequently it was now necessary for the Germans…”—Op. cit., p. 470.

722 “Our unshakable allies in East Germany” on the Fifteenth: “Strangely reserved and introverted” —Otto-Jürgen Burba, “Repetitio und Memento: Struktur und Bedeutung der Ostinatoformen bei Dmitri Schostakowitsch,” in Schweizer Musikpädagogische Blätter (Switzerland), vol. 85, issue 1 (January 1997), pp. 25-30; trans. for WTV by Yolande Korb; “retrans.” here and there by WTV; original p. 28; Korb, unnumbered p. 5.

723 Glikman’s brother’s idea for Shostakovich’s gravesite, and his recapitulation of Irina’s reaction—G. Glikman, in Schmalenberg, p. 178 (trans. by WTV). In this memoir, Glikman says “Petrograd,” not “Leningrad.”

724 Bely: “All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect…” —Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 12 (slightly altered).

724 “… and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate…”—Punin, p. 191 (entry for Leningrad, 13 December 1941): “For a long time there hung an arm up to the elbow, attached by someone to the fence of the garden of one of the destroyed buildings. Dark crowds of people walk past with faces swollen and earthlike.”

725 Nadezhda Mandelstam (footnote): “I can testify that nobody I knew fought…”—Mandelstam, p. 307.

727 Non-appearance of Shostakovich’s name in the Urals poll—The Soviet Way of Life, p. 395 (ch. 9: “The Society of Great Culture”).

728 Epigraph—Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964; orig. German ed. 1962), p. 46 (“Soul of Wood”).

730 Professor Svetlana Boym, who happened to be a fellow at the American Academy during my own brief residence there in 2003, proposes that I’ve misconceived the Russians’ anti-American attitude. In her view they wouldn’t have been anti-Cliburn at all. Instead of Cliburn representing something baleful, she says, he would have simply been isolated and forgotten as his Russian colleagues got drunk and chased women.

730 The juror Oborin: “Good, really very good…”—Paperno, p. 209.

731 New York Times: “A big, percussive attack…”—Issue of 11 April 1958, p. 12, col. 5.

732 Sofiya Gubaidulina: “Dmitri Dmitreyvich, you’re the person our generation depends on…”—Very loosely based on her retrospective testimony in Wilson, pp. 304-05.

733 The premiere of “Far and Wide My Country Stretches”—I am taking a liberty here, not knowing exactly when this film of Roman Karmen’s first appeared. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia tells me only that it was released in 1958, the year that Cliburn won the competition.

736 General von Hartmann: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust…” —Craig, p. 373, slightly reworded.

737 Footnote: Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “Spontaneity, straightforward lyricism, exultant sound and impetuous dynamism.”—Vol. 12, p. 121 (entry on Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr.).

I would have preferred to set this story in 1958, when “Lost Victories” first appeared, rather than in 1962; then the parallelism with “The Pianist from Kilgore” would have been more exact; unfortunately, the Berlin Wall was not erected until 1961. It seemed best to make the events of the story occur a year later, so that the narrator could consider the Wall a settled injustice rather than a brand new outrage.

738 Epigraph—Von Manstein, p. 29.

739 “Had Paulus only been permitted [by Hitler] to break out and link up with von Manstein’s troops…”—Interestingly enough, Paulus seems to have blamed both Hitler and von Manstein. The ambiguously kidnapped Jahn had an opportunity to speak with him in 1954, in the office of Herr Weidauer, the Bürgermeister of Dresden. Jahn describes him (pp. 258-61) as a broken man, talking pitiably about his decorations.

740 “A great German”: “The strong man is mightiest alone.”—The great German was Schiller, but Hitler loved to quote this aphorism.

740 Speaking of great Germans, here is what the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (vol. 15, p. 436, biographical entry) has to say about von Manstein: “an honorary member of a number of revanchist circles.”⁴⁹

740 Von Manstein: “When Hitler called for the swift and ruthless destruction of the Polish Army…”—Von Manstein, p. 190.

740 Von Manstein: The capitulation of Poland “in every way upheld the military honor…”—Ibid., p. 59.

741 Von Manstein: As a result of the impeccable behavior of our troops…”—Ibid., p. 151.

742 Von Manstein: “From now on the weapons would speak.”—Ibid., p. 33.

743 “Lili Marlene”—Mr. Thomas Melle would have me write the German “Lili Marleen,” but I have never seen it this way in any Anglo-American World War II source, so I fear it would look wrong to my readers.

743 Von Manstein on the Soviet troop dispositions—“Deployment against every contingency” —Op. cit., p. 181.

743 Von Manstein: “The Soviet command showed its true face…”—Ibid., p. 180.

After completing this story I discovered the following footnote in Moholy-Nagy (p. 15): “The interplay of various facts has caused our age to shift almost imperceptibly toward colour-lessnessand grey: the grey of the big city, of the black and white newspapers, of the photographic and film services; the colour-eliminating tempo of our life today. Perpetual hurry, fast movement, cause all colours to melt into grey.”

748 Ansel Adams: “…lightly charmed by the passing landscape…”—Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1983), p. 117 (commentary on his photograph of Jacques Henri Lartigue).