Europe Central by William Vollmann

be thanked for the result! Of course it made the eagles scream, but the cheering crowds drowned them out. She came running to witness this, still wearing the pale smock she wore in her atelier; the idea of human brotherhood drew her here. A Republic in Germany! She was so happy now. And then, enraged with herself for having felt happy, she remembered the first victory of Peter’s war, 11.8.14 it was, when we regained Alsace-Lorraine for the Reich: even the Social Democrats had been hypnotized by 11.8.14; we rained roses on our soldiers as they marched through the Brandenburg Gate, and even the family of Dr. Karl Kollwitz hung the Imperial flag from the balcony; they’d never done that in their lives, and never would again. Who celebrated 11.8.14 now? Alsace-Lorraine had long since gone French again, and our soldiers who’d won it were hungry now or maimed or else they were a closepacked line of corpses in a groove of dirt. A moment ago she’d felt happy about Scheidemann’s republic, and for what? Across the street, a crazy little man with a moustache was shaking his fist in a rage, stamping like Rumpelstilzchen, while at her side a crowd of workers kept singing the Internationale.
    The fact remained that last year, when news came of the Russian Revolution, she’d wept for joy. She wasn’t ashamed of her tears and never would be.
    And now a Republic! Surely there was something fine about that . . .
    She ran home to tell Karl that we had a Republic. He lifted her up in the air in his joy. Then the electricity went out.
    The railroad workers struck again; troops guarded the bridges, every soldier with his hand grenade. Here with a hollow clap of horse-hooves came the police; a line of Green Minnas waited to take the prisoners away. And the Spartacists got beaten down; it was the old story; people were singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.
    They’d sung that when Peter and Hans marched off with their regiments. She remembered Peter’s flag hanging from the balcony, hymns coming from the tower, and then Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. How young they’d all been then! And before that, when he was little, Peter used to shout hurrah! at the zeppelins.
    She asked Hans if he remembered, and he nodded silently. He lived separately on the fourth floor.
    She heard shooting in the streets. Karl was in the city; she didn’t know where Hans was.
    The day she voted for the first time in her life should have been joyous; but the day before that, she found herself writing in her diary: Vile, outrageous murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Everything changed in her Republic forever, just as it already had within her heart once she received the news about Peter. Living over Karl’s office all those years and sometimes hearing the groans of his patients through the floor, she found that the suffering of others pressed upon her ever more tightly; as an artist, as a leftist, as a German and a human being, above all, as Peter’s mother, she couldn’t avoid feeling even had she wanted to. And so she didn’t simply imagine the last moments of the two martyrs; she experienced them. (Karl had likewise wept when he heard.) Nine days later, Liebknecht was buried, along with thirty-eight others. For Rosa Luxemburg an empty coffin near Liebknecht. They’d thrown Rosa in the Landwehrkanal.
    The tale of Easter’s empty tomb used to haunt her. If we could only leave death behind! Oh, all those dreams she used to have! She wrote them in her diary; she told them to Karl and to her sister Lise. She tried not to torture Hans with them; that wouldn’t have been fair. The occupied grave was worse, far worse; on the other hand, how many times in her life had she found the stone rolled aside, the skeleton bereft of his prey? The best one could hope for was Scheidemann’s republic. Under those conditions, wasn’t a hollow monument worst of all? Rosa Luxemburg’s coffin wasn’t void because she’d been resurrected, but because she’d