We went to the Soviet
war memorial at Treptow Park expecting Soviet kitsch. It turned out to be a
curiously moving site. The memorial is most noted for a giant statue depicting
a soldier with a sword, holding a baby, or being held by a baby, which
surmounts a smaller stone space, a sort of hypertrophied hut. The soldier faces (at a field’s distance) two
pinkish red marble walls, which are separated by a space. There is a series of
steles depicting various scenes of war and peace that make their way on the
edge of the field between the wall and the giant statue.
None of this seemed in bad taste, or in some
non-synchronicity with the event commemorated – the massive war between the
Soviets and Nazi Germany that ended in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, when the
German army finally surrendered.
In the 90s, it was considered in bad taste to prefer the Soviets
to the Nazis. The moral equivalency argument, which had started on the far
right in Germany, triumphed after the wall fell.
Of course, that is utter bullshit.
I’ve been reading Anthony Beevor’s account of the final push
and the “battle of Berlin” since I’ve been here. Beevor’s account is famous for
finally putting into the scales the massive number of rapes committed by the
Soviet troops. This was a moral advance in historiography: military history has
almost completely avoided the subject of rape, even though rape has been weaponized
in all wars.
However, along with the moral enlightenment comes a certain
puzzling moral blindness. While fully willing to lay the blame for the rapes on
the Soviets, Beevor doesn’t spend much time pondering the terror bombing of the
German cities, and in particular, Berlin. In the moral calculus, the Nazis and
the Soviets get very bad marks, while the allies fall back into that
comfortable category of military history, the advance of a number of divisions.
In fact, though, those Allies were advancing through civilian casualties of at
least 600,000; they were advancing through the deliberate destruction of cities,
and their residences, which were all openly part of the Allied war plan, much
more so than the Soviet quasi-approval of rape.
I myself have no doubt that the right side won in WWII.
Whether it should have been fought at all is a question that goes back to WWI –
the truly unnecessary war. If Vladimir Lenin had been the head of Russia in
1914 rather than Czar Nicholas, or if the governments had listened to the
socialists, led by Jaures, and its radical wing, led by Trotsky and Lenin, WWI
would never have happened – which would have meant that WWII never would have
happened. Instead, the momentum of the 1900s and 1910s, which was with the
Left, was broken, never to be fully recovered again.
Beevor, I should make clear, feels that the campaign of rape
is morally important without feeling, therefore, that the Soviets and the Nazis
were morally equivalent – which I take to be, logically, the idea that it would
not have made a moral difference if the Nazis had won.
Of course, the argument that the radical right made in the
70s in Germany, which you can now see casually sprayed across the New York
Review of Books, as if it were obvious, was the argument of America First in
1939/1940. A group with which, I believe, Trump’s father was involved. But the
same bien-pensant liberals who find Trump shameful have gone along with finding
Trump historically justified. Such is the price of keeping in place a
neo-liberal order that has to justify itself with larger and larger historical
revisions. Otherwise, one has to question how we came to a place where the top
ten percent own more than the bottom seventy percent, and how the top 1 percent
own more than the next nine percent, and so on. Put it on a graph and label it:
world-historical fuckup.
But I digress. The Soviet memorial is a quiet place, much quieter
than the argument I am making above. There is something to be said for the
aesthetic continuity of muscularity between the fascists and the communists. In
the U.S., we confine the bulging muscles to the comic book and to action
movies. But the monumentality, the bowed heads, the sense of human waste and
exhaustion – this is what the memorial, in its entirety, conveys well. I
expected something triumphal. What I found was something elegiac.
One of the more memorable spots in Berlin.
