английский
Норман Наймарк
Журнал холодной войны исследований - Том 12, номер 1, 2010, стр. 191-193
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Winter 2010, Vol. 12, No. 1, Pages 191-193
Posted Online 17 March
2010.
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Norman
M. Naimark, Stanford University
ISSN 1520-3972
E-ISSN 1531-3298 |
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Wladimir
Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946:
Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten,
trans. by Anja Lutter and Harmut Schröder, ed. by Elke Scherstjanoi © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The MIT Press Seite 191-193 |
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Wladimir Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946: Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten, trans. by Anja Lutter and Harmut Schröder, ed. by Elke Scherstjanoi. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005. 357 pp. Reviewed by Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University The publication of the extensive, unexpurgated diary of a Red Army soldier who experienced both the end of the war on the Eastern Front and the Soviet occupation of Germany might well be considered an important development in the historiography of wartime and postwar Europe. Vladimir Gelfand’s son brought his father’s diary and papers to Germany when emigrating there in 1995. We have very few uncut and uncensored diaries of Soviet soldiers from this period. Moreover, as a relatively unsophisticated and forthright writer, Gelfand does not seem to engage in much selfcensorship. Nonetheless, the Gelfand diary unfortunately falls far short of expectations, despite the expert editing, annotation, and afterword by Elke Scherstjanoi, one of Germany’s leading specialists on the Soviet occupation forces, and despite the excellent production of the book, which includes numerous evocative photographs of Gelfand in Germany. The interposing of Gelfand’s letters home to his mother, father, other relatives, and friends is effective as a way to deepen one’s understanding of the young lieutenant’s views and experiences. The real problem with the book is Gelfand, who, as Scherstjanoi points out, “is interested above all in himself ” (p. 333). Not only is Gelfand completely self-absorbed, he is not a terribly interesting or perceptive 22-year-old. Like many aspiring members of the Soviet intelligentsia of his generation, he harbors exaggerated literary pretensions and ambitions. But he also has few skills other than his general literacy and familiarity with Soviet literature from the 1930s. His references to Russian literature of the nineteenth century or to the German classics are єeeting and superЄcial. He does write regularly and at length as a way, he believes, to develop his talent. He records in his diaries some scenarios for future stories, none of which are especially intriguing. He is proud of his poetry, particularly the following poem, which he inscribed on the Reichstag (it also appears in a letter to his mother and a diary entry of 24 August 1945). “On the balcony of a Berlin apartment house; I stand with the comrades; And look at and spit on Germany; I spit on Berlin, the conquered” (pp. 113, 126). In the first part of the diary, from January 1945 to the immediate aftermath of victory in May, Gelfand spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about his comrades-in-arms. He describes their behavior as gross, simpleminded, larcenous, and thoroughly besotted (while at the same time professing his everlasting Soviet patriotism), and it is apparent that he gets along with very few of them. In fact, wherever he goes, he seems to arouse the animosity of his immediate superiors and those around him. He is a party member, a “Stalinist,” and an aspiring political propagandist. But no one wants to hear about his political interventions. He is alternatively incensed and whiny about the fact that he is repeatedly passed over for military medals. He sees himself as cultivated and sensitive and his comrades as invariably brutish, conspiratorial, and envious. Only much later in his diary does he suggest that perhaps he was passed over for medals because of his Jewish background. In fact, he says almost nothing about his Jewishness or about the Holocaust. This is particularly notable because he does mention in a petition to his superiors for home leave that he lost many family members to Nazi mass murder. Gelfand’s ruminations on women and sex in occupied Germany dominate his thoughts and feelings. He thinks of himself as devastatingly attractive to women. He does not blame them for єirting with him on the streets, sleeping with him when he offers them the opportunity, and falling in love with him, as they do routinely. Although he says he prefers Russian women, he goes from German girlfriend to German girlfriend, naively disappointed that “true love” is elusive and that none of his paramours live up to his elevated thoughts about the ideal woman. He shows almost no recognition that hunger and the need for protection drive many of these German girls and women to his bed. Not surprisingly, he comes down with a case of venereal disease and has to endure the painful cure of turpentine injections. Typically, the only woman Gelfand seems genuinely to admire—the daughter of a Russian family deported to Germany by the Nazis—rebuffs his attempts to get close to her. Russian women, he concludes, do not appreciate a sensitive and gentle temperament like his own. Gelfand says almost nothing about the ubiquitous problem of rape in occupied Germany. He is completely uninterested in German politics or the problems of fourpower Berlin. At the same time, he often denigrates German standards of culture and manners, making fun of the Germans’ fetishes about food and their stinginess, all understandable in the postwar circumstances of shortages and acute hunger. Before Gelfand was demobilized at the end of September 1946, he worked in various parts of the Soviet reparations and trophy administration in Germany, removing industrial material and libraries, transporting timber and spare parts. His observations of his tasks provide some insights into the chaos of the demontage operations and the desultory manner in which they were often carried out. The way he is able to move around the Soviet zone, more or less at will, and his constantly changing assignments in one or another town and city, reveal a much more free-єoating life than is often assumed of Soviet soldiers in the occupation. He is incessantly buying, selling, and trading, looking in one town for Єlm, in another for a camera, and in a third for tailored clothes. The frequency with which he sends packages and letters home reєect a єow of information and material from Germany to the Soviet Union that may well have had a larger impact on postwar Soviet existence than historians have understood. Despite Gelfand’s repetitive stories of exploitative womanizing in Germany, they do suggest that sexual relations between occupation soldiers in the Soviet zone may have resembled those in theWestern zones more than scholars originally thought. One gets a picture of loose morals and easy sex in the Soviet zone that Єts the picture of postwar Germany as a whole and that, like Germany as a whole was based on the deprivation and insecurity endured by countless women and girls. Although useful lessons can be gained from reading Gelfand’s diary, many of the censored diaries and memoirs published in article and book form during the Soviet period were more insightful and engaging than this account. In fact, the publishers and editor would have done their readers a favor by cutting Gelfand’s often repetitious diary. Three hundred pages of Vladimir Gelfand as young soldier is more than any reader can take, even a reader who is deeply interested in immediate postwar Germany. |
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E-ISSN: 1531-3298
ISSN: 1520-3972
