Europe Central by William Vollmann Page B

people, starving people (white figures in dark fields, dark chalk on brown Ingres paper), raped women, mothers with dying children, mothers with dead children. In the end she depicted mainly herself, her stricken, simian face thinking and grieving. She too was a mother with a dead child.
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    The child had died quickly. He’d been the very first of his regiment to die. He’d died innocently, like our German hero Siegfried, who in Latin chronicles, Norse epics, German poems and songs dies over and over again, invincible from the front, stabbed in the back. (Goethe was her favorite writer, very possibly because he was not happy.) He’d never seen his death coming because it was sent to him by machine; how could he have fought it?
    (People forget that Hagen, the man who murdered Siegfried, was also a German. He had his reasons. This war was Siegfried’s war. The next war would be Hagen’s.)
    After the first anguish, the stretch of loneliness which she, too strong or weak for suicide, had yet to cross remained as immense as the entry on the war in our 1935 Grosser Brockhaus : forty-seven pages, ten charts, twelve full-color maps, inset photoportraits of our German heroes.
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    As I’ve said, she lived on Weissenbürgerstrasse with Karl in a neighborhood whose red-roofed, multistoreyed pillars enclosed humid courtyards for the working poor. She lived there for fifty-two years, accomplishing such works as the lithograph “Fallen” (1921), which depicts a mother clapping her hands to her face in utter grief, her children gathered around her, bewildered, anxious, distressed, reaching up toward her for the reassurance which just then she cannot give. The little girl at her back, who seems to be clutching a doll, stares up at her with the same black-dots-on-white-domino face as so many of the dead children.—Then came widows, more bereaved mothers; it might have been a theme. That was inside. Outside, the police kept taking strikers away in Green Minnas. The workers kept striking. It was in their honor that on a sheet of copper she drypointed the wrinkles, threads and shadows of prisoners’ trousers as they crowded together behind the wire. She printed it, and it wept forever and ever in shiny trembling tears of ink. The birds in the Tiergarten, the green summer light in the Tiergarten, she didn’t have those. She had blackness.
    Sometimes she bought her hope from the small newspaper kiosks which stationed themselves between flower stands; she wanted to keep up with developments in Russia. Why not still hope?
    But the Kapp Putsch, when Berlin went utterly dark, and then the street battles between strikers and swastika’d Freikorpsmen, the shooting and the shouting, it went on and on. After the World War you’d think that people could have learned something. Naturally, how could they? She’d been four years old when Germans raised their swords to victory in the Mirror-Hall of Versailles; that was what Germans still wanted. Sometimes she felt so tired; there was neither beginning nor end. Karl had turned Social Democrat; after the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht he’d said that it was time to be realistic, especially in Scheidemann’s republic. Käthe hadn’t argued. She felt herself more Communist than Social Democrat, and made lithographs for the Communists, because they were more active and lively. Anyhow, Karl had always been a “realistic” sort of person. A few weeks after they’d received the telegram about Peter, Hans’s regiment got sent into a zone of typhus. Karl proposed to write the Ministry of War to advise against this on medical grounds. When Käthe, pleased but surprised that he would even attempt so vain an errand, asked what on earth he was thinking of, he told her, almost spitefully, she later thought: You have strength only for sacrifice and letting go of things, not for keeping track of trifles.—Although his face was bonier and he had less hair, he had scarcely aged much. Of course Käthe’s