The Art of Identity and Memory: Toward a Cultural History of the Two World Wars in Lithuania 9781618115089

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THE ART OF IDENTITY AND MEMORY

TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TWO WORLD WARS IN LITHUANIA

Lithuanian Studies Series Editor Darius Staliunas (Lithuanian Institute of History) Editorial Board Zenonas Norkus (Vilnius University) Shaul Stampfer (Hebrew University) Giedrius Subacius (University of Illinois at Chicago)

THE ART OF IDENTITY AND MEMORY

TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE TWO WORLD WARS IN LITHUANIA Edited by GIEDRĖ JANKEVIČIŪTĖ and RASUTĖ ŽUKIENĖ With a Preface by VEJAS GABRIEL LIULEVICIUS

Boston 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-61811-507-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-508-9 (electronic) ©Academic Studies Press, 2016 Cover design by Ivan Grave Book design by Kryon Publishing www.kryonpublishing.com Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Preface vi Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius Foreword viii Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Rasutė Žukienė CHAPTER 1: The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna Laimonas Briedis

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CHAPTER 2: Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė

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CHAPTER 3: The Diaries of Death Agnė Narušytė

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CHAPTER 4: Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II Giedrė Jankevičiūtė CHAPTER 5: Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945-1950 Rasutė Žukienė

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CHAPTER 6: The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania Rasa Antanavičiūtė

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CHAPTER 7: The Limits of the Blockade Archive Natalija Arlauskaitė

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CHAPTER 8: Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna Larisa Lempertienė

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CHAPTER 9: World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music of the Lithuanian Diaspora and Soviet Lithuania Rūta Stanevičiūtė

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Authors

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List of Illustrations

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Index 301

Preface For the past several decades, fascinating scholarship has been produced on the cultural history of the two world wars. The works of Paul Fussell, George Mosse, John Keegan, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Jay Winter, and others pointed the way toward a fuller integration of the ideological, intellectual, cultural, and political elements that were needed for a more comprehensive understanding of this violent period, from 1914 to 1945. As it recedes in time from us, the era of the world wars can increasingly appear as a modern Thirty Years’ War. And this emerging perspective can allow us to perceive in new ways, and with greater accuracy, the commonalities, linkages, evolutions, and passions that drove these conflicts of an unprecedented scale, and how they were remembered and represented afterwards. Yet such recent scholarship in cultural history has focused mostly on Western Europe, without fully including the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe in this devastating period. Indefensible as they are, the compartmentalizations of the bygone Cold War endure, with postcommunist regions still left out of the enlarged narrative. The present volume, however, is a distinctive contribution to help remedy this problem. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars. This collection presents new research on a rich and varied cast of characters: German soldiers of the Kaiser strolling the streets of Vilnius and becoming military personifications of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated flaneur; German-Jewish artists fascinated by the depth of Lithuanian

Preface

Jewish life revealed before them; a contemporary photographer whose archival digging unearths vast troves of photographs of doomed civilians subjected to Soviet repression; freezing artists struggling to keep the will to create under Nazi occupation, then dealing with loss of homeland in refugee camps; composers seeking to give musical form to their vision of war. The studies also reveal paradoxical and telling dynamics: how (in explicit contrast to the hallowed British memory of the Great War) memory of World War I was sidelined in Lithuania under a series of very different governmental systems; how the sorrowful genre of “memorial books” for Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust was anticipated in the interwar genre of German-Jewish artists and writers recalling their wartime encounter with these places; how the virtual archives produced by documentary films of tragedies like the siege of Leningrad open larger questions of representation and historical accuracy. There is special merit in these texts when they explicitly engage comparisons with other national experiences: British, Latvian, and French. Most of all, these studies raise strikingly new questions and themes for further research. Taken together, this evocative and wide-ranging set of studies is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of this region, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius Lindsay Young Professor of History Director, Center for the Study of War and Society University of Tennessee, USA

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Foreword This collection of studies focuses on the interaction between war and art, or, more specifically, on the present impact of World Wars I and II on visual art, photography, literature, and music created in the territory of Lithuania. The various authors examine how war affected art and its creators, and the public relationship of both during and after hostilities. These scholars hold the view that the trauma of World War II affected several postwar generations in Europe, forming their identity. Conflicts emerging in our own days that threaten to provoke civilizational transformations spur us to reflect once again on the effects of both world wars of the twentieth century on Europe’s culture and the self-concept of its peoples. Given their global scale and modern means of devastation, the last century’s two world wars were among humanity’s most destructive experiences in history. They provoked radical changes in the lifestyles, beliefs, and values of nations, social groups, and individuals. Scholars of military, political, and social history certainly have studied and continue to study these changes, which have been and continue to be the subject of documentary and literary works and of films. Art historians, however, have so far not shown sufficient interest in culture during eras of war. They have tended either to seek inspiring leaps of patriotism in such art or to assert that war is detrimental to artistic creation, and thus conclude that works of art produced in conditions of war do not merit closer enquiry. Research into artistic culture lets us identify issues that are important for a deeper understanding of any historical situation and, of particular importance, analyze the link between personal and social experience—this requires that we change our mind-set concerning the importance of artistic culture in historical studies, especially culture produced and lived during war. On the one hand, scholarship in the area of the humanities changed during the 1970s: art history embraced the social theory of culture and the

Foreword

tools of inquiry offered by microhistory, and it also underwent a convergence with research on visual culture. Application of these new approaches made it clear once more that the interpretation of artifacts is a reliable means of awakening historical imagination and thus also of relating the present to the past. This collective study arose within the field of New Art History and is the fruit of changes in the discipline of art history. On the other hand, our book testifies to a watershed in research on the history of Central and Eastern European countries. The region has long been marginalized in general historical studies because it has nothing to say in major contexts. World War I’s impact on these countries has been linked to the independent statehood they achieved upon the collapse of empires at the end of the war and has been interpreted exclusively in terms of geopolitics. The effects of World War II have been examined as a consequence of the postwar division of Europe, which imprisoned the entire region in the Soviet sphere of influence. Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and, all the more, western territories of the Soviet Union, such as Lithuania, were absent from the grand narrative regarding Europe at war. In speaking about World War II, the Baltic countries have appeared as “bloodied lands”—a space of mass killings without clear contours and, above all, a site of the horrific Jewish Catastrophe. Only a small group of specialists knew and used in scholarly works the terms Ober Ost (the administrative district created in 1915 in the western part of the Russian empire that was occupied by imperial Germany’s eastern front army) and Ostland (the administrative district in 1941–44 of Third Reich–occupied Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, part of Belarus, and part of Poland, with its capital in Riga). At present the situation is changing, and quite forcefully. Scholars of cultural studies and political history have suddenly realized that their research was frozen solid by Cold War discourse. The cultural heritage of the war years—regarding World Wars I and II—had been dealt with through the prism of communist ideology. Inside the Communist bloc, research in this area was forced throughout the Cold War period to serve the needs of ideology. And artistic culture was treated accordingly, selecting what was suited to the official war narrative and disregarding other artists and their works. As a result, it was impossible to investigate, for example, the feelings or observations of a German artist

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who, along with the army, ended up in Lithuania at the time of World War I. Yet this matter expands our knowledge of early twentieth-century Europe, attesting to the varied imagery born in the minds of the people of that time. The world stretching out east from Germany was a revelation to the artists who worked in Lithuania in the years of World War I, such as writer Arnold Zweig or expressionist painters Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Magnus Zeller. Authors Paul Fechter, Hans Frentz, and Sammy Gronemann, along with artists Walter Buhe, Alfred Holler, and Hermann Struck, discovered exotic Jewish Vilnius—an island of the medieval East and traditional religious Jewish culture unexpectedly opened up to the modern West. Taboo under the communist regime were not just an analysis of the wartime clash of ideologies and research into their strategies and vocabulary using examples of visual art but also art for private consumption, works that held up human dignity in a reality of occupation that trampled on such dignity. Over many decades, the paintings, graphic art, and sculptures of many Lithuanian, Polish, and Jewish artists awaited their hour in dark corners of museums and private collections. These works had soaked up the pain, hopes, and unrest of their authors and contemporaries, along with brief moments of happiness and rare flashes of creative genius amid the prevailing repressive culture. Studies of migration were forbidden, and this prevented any grasp of the scope of the changes of the era. Yet demographic changes—with massive waves of migration from the East to the West motivated by political transformations (in our case, from Lithuania to Poland, Germany, and France; from Europe to the United States; and from the Soviet Union to Lithuania)—radically altered the culture of Central and Eastern European countries and that culture’s expression in literature, fine arts, photography, cinema, and music. Another thing that is encouraging local military and political historians to overcome past ideological viewpoints is the attention by Western scholars to the twentieth-century history of the Baltic countries. Cultural studies so far have advanced in a rather narrow circle. They seek to reveal the peculiarities of the local culture in two ways: by using comparatist methods and by going deeper into local vicissitudes. The latter approach so far dominates, since a lack of sources forces specialists in the wartime artistic culture of the Baltic countries, including Lithuania, to pay special

Foreword

attention to the gathering and analysis of facts. Cultural heritage always suffers great losses in times of war. Artistic monuments perish, as do sources documenting them. Moreover, the Soviet totalitarian regime for decades denied people the opportunity to share memories that did not fit the official grand narrative, thereby eliminating any chance that a corpus of ego-documents or an oral history might form. Thus the authors of this collective study extensively employ a fact-based approach. In this respect, the book is intriguing and innovative, full of stirring discoveries. It was the need to question the established approach based on binary oppositions—enemies and friends, victims and executioners, winners and losers—and to delimit the marks that the two world wars left on the history of Lithuania in light of new research material that led a group of scholars specialized in different fields—architecture, visual art, and literature—to join forces. Art historians Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, and Rasutė Žukienė, literary scholars Laimonas Briedis and Larisa Lempertienė, and history of art and architecture PhD student Rasa Antanavičiūtė (whose doctoral advisor was Giedrė Jankevičiūtė) decided in early 2013 to analyze the results of their individual research through seminars and discussions. They would then summarize the conclusions and, on this basis, start to build a common platform for systematic research into artistic culture in Lithuania and neighboring countries during the two world wars, a platform open also to other scholars interested in this region. The project, called “Culture, Identity, and Memory: Lithuania during the Two World Wars,” is headed by Rasutė Žukienė and financed by the Lithuanian Research Council. Three other scholars, Natalija Arlauskaitė, Agnė Narušytė, and Rūta Stanevičiūtė, from other fields of research (cinema, photography, and music, respectively) were invited by the editors of this volume to share their insights, which broadened the perspective offered by the core group. The result of the initiative is the present collective study of the influence of war on the cultural life of Lithuania. Most of its authors speak about German-occupied Lithuania during World Wars I and II, without touching on the topic of the Soviet occupation. They address and analyze several crucial areas: conditions and forms of artistic life during the period of occupation; participants in the art scene and their activities; reflections

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of war in works of art and the significance of artistic work under the conditions of occupation and exile; and, finally, the impact of memory of the two world wars on Lithuanian culture. The studies are presented in English to avoid the language barrier that has tended to keep Central and Eastern Europe largely out of reach for the West. We hope that this publication will facilitate communication among scholars of the various countries in the region and will encourage new research on the Baltic countries’ artistic culture in twentieth-century periods of conflict. The first thematic group of the collection consists of studies by Laimonas Briedis and Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė devoted to Vilnius/ Wilna/Vilna during the years of World War I, or, more precisely, to the German perception of the city. In Chapter 1, Briedis explores the relationship between the conquered city and its conqueror—the German soldier of the Great War. The focus of his narrative is a German literary figure, the theoretician of expressionism Paul Fechter, who lived in Vilnius/Wilna during the years of World War I and wrote a book about his walks around the city. Briedis analyzes Fechter’s text in the context of German expressionism, relating its author’s approach with the tradition of the French flaneur, reconstructing the subjective experience of his character and the feeling of freedom that he personally experienced in the presence of marching troops, and his ability to wonder in the face of war. In Chapter 2, Laučkaitė-Surgailienė analyzes the image of Jewish Vilna in the works of German artists residing in the city. An air of contradiction and ambivalence prevails, amid intertwined admiration and repulsion, as the influence of propaganda and ideology combines with authentic artistic reflection. The second group of papers, by Agnė Narušytė, Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, and Rasutė Žukienė, focuses on World War II and its repercussions on Lithuanian society and culture. They delve into the processes that took place in the middle of the twentieth century and analyze how visual art and photography reflected the experiences and values of civilians who lived in the occupied country. In Chapter 3, Narušytė looks at an archive of photographs that contemporary Lithuanian artist Kęstutis Grigaliūnas has collected from the files of KGB criminal cases opened during the first

Foreword

Soviet occupation, in 1940–41, for his on-going project The Diaries of Death. The presence of studio portraits, snapshots, and documentary photographs from the interwar period, next to mug shots, interrogation protocols, and death sentences, raises questions about how photography was used in the process of repression and social transformation and about the power of such an archive to form the basis for resistance against forces threatening the same society today. In Chapter 4, Jankevičiūtė explores visual art as a source for understanding daily life during World War II, with reference to the problems regarding visual sources that are raised by the paradigm of very recent history. Her analysis of several groups of thematically different images shows the extent to which visual art is capable of conveying the moods prevailing in society, and how it reflects historical reality and is able to bring perception of that reality closer to the present time. In Chapter 5, Žukienė directs attention to the first years of the postwar period and the creative attempts of former citizens of Lithuania and other Baltic countries in displaced-persons camps in Germany. Her research shows how strongly the imagination of artists and writers who found themselves in an alien environment was influenced by the loss of home. It reveals how this topic complicated the exiles’ relationship with the new cultural milieu and interfered with their efforts to speak the Western language of modern art. All three studies deal with subjects pertinent to art history in the traditional sense. But their insights into and conclusions about works of art and photography, including their circumstances of production and functioning, enter the realm of social history and blend into the narrative of the history of ideas and mentalities. The research in this collection has been guided by the idea that the memory of the two world wars should be shared by all contemporary Europeans. That is only possible if the narratives about the wars are not closed up within the boundaries of social or national groups or states and if they transcend them to reveal concrete events as part of the history of the entire region or even of Europe as such. In the case of Lithuania, this task is complicated further by the fact that the war here literally spoke (and speaks) in many languages, and each ethnic group—Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Russians, Belarusians, and Germans—experienced it in its own way. These peoples continue telling different stories of the wars and

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often perceive their traumas as unique and incomparable with the experiences of other nationalities, which were in truth quite similar. Thus far the diverse inhabitants of this region have neither coordinated their approach to history nor shared their emotional and/or psychological attachment to their historical homeland and place of origin. So despite the common paradigm of loss and trauma, local narratives of memory rest on different national, ethnic, and ideological foundations. This situation shaped by historical reality prompted four researchers, Rasa Antanavičiūtė, Natalija Arlauskaitė, Lara Lempertienė and Rūta Stanevičiūtė, to address the problems of memory and representation. Their texts constitute the third group of the collection and complete the suggested narrative. In Chapter 6, Antanavičiūtė takes up the memory of World War I in Lithuania. Her study looks into the official history (textbooks) and public representations (monuments and commemoration rituals) produced from the end of the war up to the present time. She compares the practices of memory after World War I in Lithuania with those in Latvia. Latvia was chosen as a neighboring country with a similar experience of World War I—a field of battle with little actual military action. In Chapter 7, Arlauskaitė explores the memory of World War II in documentary cinema. She bases her arguments on analysis of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s prominent documentary Blockade about the siege of Leningrad. The case of the well-known German siege and its interpretation in Loznitsa’s film provide valuable food for thought regarding the drama of occupied territories and their residents. This drama touched upon the post–World War II fate of all of Central and Eastern Europe, including Lithuania. In Chapter 8, Lempertienė discusses the memory of Jewish Vilna after the Holocaust, outlining several narratives and tracing the genesis of their constituent elements. She finds those elements already present at the time of World War I in the image of Jewish Vilna created by German soldier-artists, an image established in the interwar years and further developed after World War II en route to its final shape. In Chapter 9, Stanevičiūtė’s subject is World War II memory in the Lithuanian music of two composers, one a representative of exile culture (Vytautas Bacevičius), the other of Soviet Lithuanian culture (Eduardas Balsys).

Foreword

The book’s authors and editors have taken a bold step in their attempt to couple two world wars. This decision may seem questionable, but we hope the contents of the individual studies will show that the volume has served its purpose. Our aim has been to contribute to the beginning of a long-term discourse that could be of interest to researchers from many countries and from many fields of the humanities. This volume presents a picture of a Europe that is shaped by what has happened, and now happens, not only in its center but also at its margins. Without this fragment, the picture of the whole is incomplete. Thus we hope that our book will prove relevant not only to art historians but also to other readers who are interested in twentieth-century Europe and that they see it as a many-layered field of complex events. We wish to thank all those who have contributed to the appearance of this volume through their advice, practical assistance, and moral support. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Rasutė Žukienė, editors

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CHAPTER 1

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna LAIMONAS BRIEDIS Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas

Keywords: World War I, German occupation, Vilnius/Wilna, expressionism, soldier-artist, flanerie What greater service can a brave leader perform for raw recruits and inexperienced soldiers than to show them, before the battle, a picture of the town they are to storm or the river, hills and country houses they are to march past the following day? —Michelangelo, as reported by Francisco de Hollanda, 1548

In an essay on the art of walking, Henry David Thoreau describes the difference between an idler and a saunterer. The former roams around the world on pretense of going to the Holy Land, but only the latter sets the goal of reaching its distant shores. The idler is a freeloader, seeking personal advantage by putting on the clothes of a pious traveler, while the saunterer is a wayfarer who gives up his duties and responsibilities for the sake of finding inner freedom. “Sauntering,” explains Thoreau, has two meanings: (1) going à la Sainte Terre, in the way of peregrination, and (2) as done by someone who is sans terre, that is, a person who is “without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no

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particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”1 By joining the two meanings together, Thoreau makes the saunterer a modern-day pilgrim. “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friend, and never see them again,” exalts Thoreau on the virtues of purpose-driven wandering, and “if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”2 Thus, a sense of liberation must guide every walk. For no saunterer agrees to having a leader or a guide to chart out a possible direction for the journey. Still, the secret behind every successful saunter is having an epiphany or finding peace before heading back home. So in the end, the art of walking is not unlike a “meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”3 On a more resolute, militant note, the American poet-naturalist compares every walk he takes to “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the infidels.”4 My present study is about freedom under the conditions of marching orders, about wandering—and the ability to wonder—in the face of war. At the core of my investigation is the relationship between the conquered city, Wilna in Lithuania, and its conqueror, the German soldier of the Great War. More specifically, based on the German travelogue about Wilna entitled Wanderstunden in Wilna, I will look at the “artistic repossession” of the city in the manner of a walker’s gaze. The main character of my story is Paul Monty, a make-believe saunterer who plots Wilna as if it were an expressionist canvas on which the inner realm of the soldier becomes a map of the city, the foreign landscape of the German soul. In the province of walking, Thoreau exalts Nature as the main source of inspiration, and his idler, no doubt, is someone who never dares to abandon the comforts of the city. The flaneur, on the other hand, though he or she shares many of the same characteristics of the saunterer, has no Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic, June 1, 1862, accessed October 1, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 1

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

saintly goals other than walking idly about the city and collecting its refuse. Walter Benjamin famously compared the flaneur of metropolitan, that is, Parisian, pedigree to an artist who comes across as a rag-picker, who moves across the modern urban landscape like a scavenger, collecting, reading, and rewriting the city’s narratives. Boredom drives the flaneur into the streets—and what takes him back to his artistic sanctuary is the fulfillment of his curiosity. The flaneur seeks pleasure, harvesting different elements of the cityscape as if they were commodities, something to possess, to trade in, and then, when and if desired, to gather back again. Hence, the difference between the saunterer (a wanderer among the saints) and a flaneur (a trader in urban spectacles) is one of perception: the first journeys inwards, while the second traverses the exterior territory of the mind. Nonetheless, modern idlers, following the Benjaminian reading of the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, “attempt a kind of partial transcendence—imitating the gods—that temporarily overcomes the shock experience of modernity.”5 In the nineteenth century, the creative powers of flanerie were unleashed by the emergence of the city as a territory meant to be traversed. During the Belle Époque, the experience of novelty became a key definition of urban modernity. This was especially noticeable in Berlin, the rapidly growing and fast-paced capital city of Wilhelmine Germany that was often compared to Chicago or New York. Because it had arrived on the metropolitan stage of Europe relatively late, Berlin exhibited its cosmopolitan features with the energy of an uninhibited trespasser. The sprawling modern city, so the argument ran, was created “by will and imagination” rather than by historical forces, representing “the victory of spirit over conformity and traditions.”6 As a city built to savor modern life, Berlin changed the rules of sauntering, turning itself into the Weltgeist, the “spirit of the world.” For this reason, by the first decade of the twentieth century, it was in (modern) Berlin and not in nineteenth-century Paris “where it becomes clear to us how easy it is for the flaneur to depart from 5 Peter Buse et al., Benjamin’s Arcades: An Unguided Tour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 155. 6 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor, 1989), 75.

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the ideal of the philosopher out for a stroll, and to assume the features of the werewolf at large in the social jungle” of modernity.7 For the German flaneur, then, writes Benjamin about Spazieren (“strolling”) in Berlin, urban space came to be experienced as a future-oriented, almost Mephistophelian scene, with the landscape splitting “into its dialectical poles” of vision: the interior and the exterior of the mind.8 For a Berliner set on a mission to absorb the sights of the city, its streets, squares, parks, and other public spaces acquired the meaning of a “dwelling place of the eternally restless being who is eternally on the move, the being that experiences, learns, knows and imagines as much between the houses as the individual between his four walls.”9 By evoking the angst of the century and the fleeting moment of modernity, the German metropolis turned “the reader, the thinker, the loiterer, [and] the flaneur” into the “types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.”10 Loneliness amid the crowd in the exile of the individual mind became the main feature of the Berlin-type flanerie. On the representational level, this call for solitude in the shape of sauntering was captured by the art critic and newspaper feuilletonist Paul Fechter, our link to the fictional Paul Monty. On the eve of the Great War, Fechter published a treatise on expressionism. Titled Der Expressionismus (Expressionism), the book for the first time used the French term flanerie to identify modern characteristics of the wandering German soul. Fechter applied the idea of expressionism to the artists of the Brücke (“Bridge”) group, while at the same time rejecting its Parisian and cosmopolitan connotations by declaring it to be the spiritual necessity of the German people. Expressionism, especially, in its earlier literary (and French) version, had emerged as a subjective form of representation, distorting reality by reducing it to raw emotions. French symbolist poets such as   7 Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flaneur,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1: 1927– 1930, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 265.   8 Ibid., 263.   9 Ibid., 264. 10 Ibid., 216.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

Baudelaire, and, above all, Rimbaud, talked the language of poetry in order to change life, transmuting urban sites into verses that nonetheless were always directing the artistic gaze to the past. Both poets were also passionate walkers: Baudelaire elevated flanerie to the level of aesthetic gratification, and Rimbaud equated sauntering with social revolt. In pre– World War I Germany, however, the French connection between aesthetics and politics took a turn outward. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founding member of the Brücke group and one of the earliest promoters of the expressionistic style of painting, claimed the Latin creative mind takes its “forms from the object as it exists in nature,” while its German counterpart builds “forms in fantasy, from an inner vision peculiar” to his own mind. Hence, for the German artist, Kirchner concludes, the “forms of visible nature serve him as symbols only . . . [for] he seeks beauty not in appearance but in something beyond.”11 In brief, where the French symbolists dreamed up the world, the German expressionists saw it move forward. The Brücke program, issued when the group formed in 1906, sums up this desire of leaving the past behind and pledging to the idea of progress: “With faith in evolution, in a new generation of creators and appreciators, we call together all youth. And as youths, who embody the future, we want to free our lives and limbs from the long-established older powers. Anyone who renders his creative drive directly and genuinely is one of us.”12 For the artists of the expressionist generation, faith in evolution had all the components of a religious reawakening. The Brücke was a chosen path, or, as Fechter put it, “the liberation of inherent spiritual energies of the soul from the bondage of narrow-minded, crude intellectualism.”13 Hence, freeing lives by letting limbs go loose was not just an assertion of stylistic independence but also a call to abandon the governing principles of social conventions. Expressionism, writes another proponent of the style, must be egocentric, but not in the selfish way of artistic narcissism, because the “things we create should have something of ourselves: not our point of view put into deeper perspective, but crystallized out of 11 John Russell, Meaning of Modern Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 83. 12 Rose-Carol Washton Long, German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 23. 13 Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1914), 29.

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ourselves. The center of the world is in every ‘I.’”14 Fechter placed this “I” in a sort of communion of individual passions, declaring the “essential meaning of art” to be “expressing in a concentrated, direct way—the only possible way—the emotion arising from human existence on earth.”15 Thus, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the French artistic vision, especially in its attempt to capture reality in the impressionistic and symbolic manner, was denounced as being too passive, static, feminine, and individualistic for the more direct and communityoriented German eye. Fechter identifies the sixteenth-century German painter Matthias Grünewald as the spiritual forefather of the expressionist way of connecting an individual soul with the external—shared—meaning of life. In general, expressionists felt their isolation from modern society to be an affirmation of the transcendental force of art, and they seek in Grünewald’s Gothic unorthodoxy the emotional impact “that went far beyond the doubtful truth of reality.”16 Grünewald rejected the body and accepted ecstasy as a means of communication, creating altarpieces, in Fechter’s words, in order to reflect “a special disposition of the soul” that strikes viewers as “a kind of will, or rather a compulsion and need.”17 By reading the German expressionist movement as a modernist flare-up of the medieval point of view, Fechter attacks the entire rationalist tradition of modern philosophy. The Enlightenment, with its natural science, empiricism, logical thinking, individualism, utility, and other forms of intellectual “superstitions,” for centuries worked against the Gothic mind-set. So while expressionism is first and foremost a creative form of personal liberation and self-discovery, it is only through the camaraderie found among the artists practicing expressionist forms of representation that “the ancient need of the German people for metaphysics [will survive] unscathed through even the Kantian critiques” of pure reason, enabling 14 Theodor Däubler, Expressionismus: Der Neue Standpunkt (Dresden-Hellerau: Hellerauer, 1916), 180. 15 Fechter, Der Expressionismus, 21. 16 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 18. 17 Fechter, Der Expressionismus, 21.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

them to counter foreign influences with the “subtle irony” of aesthetic experimentations. In general, the art created in the last several centuries, notes Fechter, has been plagued by formalism and “bloodless aestheticism,” and only in Gothic, and, perhaps, German Baroque, do individual emotions reach the level of communal passion. With this mind, in modern Germany, expressionism becomes “not a matter of intention, but a destiny” of national significance when “the personal drops into the background in favor of the great anonymity of the collective.”18 Fechter’s chauvinism turned the Teutonic past into a wellspring of expressionism, but other German commentators influenced by the Great War pointed out its more universal dimensions. In 1917, for instance, another early advocate of expressionist sensibilities summed up the artistic vision practiced by the Brücke group as at one with the cosmos, creating a “new and expanded consciousness” of the human mind.19 And in the book Expressionismus, published on the heels of Fechter’s earlier treatment of the subject, the German art critic Hermann Bahr asserts it to be no less than a miracle of “the soulless, sunken, buried man” rising up again in a world that suddenly, with the advent of war, went “deadly silent.”20 Despite sensual similarities found among various artists of the expressionist persuasion, Fechter distinguishes two opposing streams of visual intention within the movement. Wassily Kandinsky and Max Pechstein, both painters, personify the difference. Kandinsky, writes the critic, defines the “intensive” form of expressionism, which “finds pure spiritual substance only in the depths” of the artistic mind.21 Fechter calls this inner perspective “the landscape of the soul” without any topographical features present on the surface of the painting, where “chaos of color reigns, where experience is still unformed, shapeless, remote from conceptual reasoning and from entering any net of casual projections.” On this plateau of imagination, the “distance between emotions and expressions”—the soul and 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, “Art and the New Gnosis,” in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 93. 20 Herman Bahr, Expressionismus (Munich: Delphin, 1916), 122. 21 Fechter, Der Expressionismus, 26.

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the limb—is shortened to a minimum, leaving no space to wander.22 In contrast, Pechstein is a proponent of “extensive” expressionism, who not only “maintains the relation to the world, but intensifies it to the highest possible degree,” extending “himself to the whole of existence.” Both artists make contact with transcendence: Pechstein “grasps life wherever it streams out as a pure emotion unhindered between heaven and earth,” taking, so to speak, the longest possible path to self-discovery, whereas Kandinsky is more direct, getting straight into “the realms where immediate experience still roams free of [any] traces of materiality,” putting them together as they come across in their raw state.23 Fechter finds Pechstein’s introspective approach more attuned to his own brooding Gothic nature, visualizing the creative process of the expressionist (and Teutonic) mind, to paraphrase Thoreau’s insight into the art of walking, as following “the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.”24 A meeting between Fechter and Pechstein took place in 1913 and came under the sign of Mars, for “they encountered each stark naked in a hall of a Dresden brewery waiting for their army medical examination, and had struck up a lively conversation.”25The same year, individual members of the Brücke group went their separate ways, with Pechstein leaving for the South Seas. At the start of war, Pechstein was detained as an enemy noncombatant by the Japanese in the former German colony on the island of Palau. He was able to return the next year to Europe via the United States, and he was immediately drafted into the German army. The painter spent the next two years on the western front in Flanders, in the infamous trenches of the Somme, standing for the colors of the Vaterland (“fatherland”) against the Union Jack. Fechter too was called into military service, first serving in the Germany army stationed in the occupied part of France, and later in Serbia. By the end of 1915, with the help of his prewar professional connections, he was able to secure a more comfortable 22 23 24 25

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27–28. Thoreau, “Walking.” Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika, Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism (Berlin: Walther de Gruyter, 2012), 166.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

position as a Landsturmmann (imperial reserve soldier) in a regiment meant to provide replacements for first-line units. Seeing little of the frontline battles, he was sent at the beginning of 1916 to Lithuania to lead a small Intelligenz battalion of the German army press office. Quartered in Wilna, the historical capital of Lithuania and one of the administrative centers of the German-controlled Ober Ost territory, he became a contributing editor for Wilnaer Zeitung, the city’s leading (German-language) newspaper. The paper was the mouthpiece of the Tenth Army of the German forces, stationed on the eastern front, where it initially took an offensive position against the Russian army. Wilna, however, was less a frontline city than a rear location of significant strategic value between the German homeland and the actual war zone. Fechter felt right at home in this middle ground of the war land, living there in a sort of “bohemian exile” for more than two years, until he left the city for Berlin in the spring of 1918. While stationed in Wilna, he completed a play, a novel, and a thesis on the tragedy of architecture. He was also able to train his hand in a creative form of wartime storytelling that he described as Zeitungsphantasie, a gazette-type fantasy that blurred the line between reality and fiction in line with the dictates of military censorship.26 The stories published in Wilnaer Zeitung were meant to raise the morale of German soldiers, but the “prevailing opinion in the trenches” on both sides of the front line, to quote the French historian Marc Bloch, who served as a wartime reporter, “was that anything might be true, except what was printed.” By limiting access to information, the warring governments reduced the frontline soldier to “the mental state of olden times before journals, before news sheets, before books.”27 In these circumstances of censorship and media blackout, the authentic (and creative) experience of war was often compared to a journey across “no-man’sland,” the perennial feature of the fixed frontline landscape separating the known (home) territory from the unknown (foreign) land. On this journey into the narrative fog of war, soldiers became itinerant “peddlers, jugglers, pilgrims, beggars,” collectors of rumors and relics, “little fellows 26 Paul Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit: Menschen und Begegnungen (Gütersloh: S. Berlesmann, 1949), 54–55. 27 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 89.

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wandering through the communication trenches.”28 Fechter was fully aware of his role in myth-making, calling himself an actor in the tragicomic game of wartime news gathering.29 Still, if the expressionist movement encapsulated the notion of a Flucht nach vorne (“a flight forward”), then the guns of August put the concept of Pflicht (“duty”)on the larger map of Europe. United by the Franco-Prussian War into an empire just four decades previously, Germans on the eve of the Great War saw themselves as the Herzvolk Europas, the people at the heart of Europe. German war rhetoric put Kultur at the center of the armed conflict, substantiating it with qualities of spiritual advancement for European civilization. The German nation, it was said, had entered the fighting in the creative zeitgeist that called “for authenticity, for truth, for self-fulfillment, for those values, that is, which the avant-garde had evoked prior to the war and against those features— materialisms, banality, hypocrisy, tyranny—which it had attacked.”30 In addition, German soldiers were sent to the front in order to change the status quo in Europe, while their counterparts—French, British, and Russian—were fighting to preserve the order of the nineteenth-century continental balance of power. Put together, German geopolitics and Gothic culture created a sense of liberation that promised a fresh start for Europe. A few months into the war, Hermann Hesse, for instance, experienced a moment of elation at the prospect of being sent to the front: “To be torn out of a dull capitalist peace was good for many Germans and it seems to me that a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life.”31 Nonetheless, as the conflict progressed into its second and third year, seeing casualties mount into the millions, the immediacy of war “began to be enveloped in a fog of existential questioning,” with “the integrity of the ‘real’ world, the visible and ordered world” gradually being eroded.32 At this point of disintegration, and with no opportunity of 28 Ibid., 91. 29 Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit, 56. 30 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 92. 31 Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 94. 32 Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 211.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

escaping camp life, the combating soldier became “not just the harbinger but the very agent of the modern aesthetic, the progenitor of destruction but also the embodiment of the future.”33 Alone in the world yet placed in the company of other fellow travelers, the soldier assumed the role of a frontier personality. With no place to call home, he became a drifter “who had journeyed, on order, to the limits of existence, and there on the periphery he ‘lived’ in a unique way, on the edge of no-man’s-land, on the margin of normal categories.”34 Born in 1880, Fechter belonged to the generation of creative minds who came into the war out of a long period of peace. At the age of thirty-­ four, he was too young to avoid military conscription altogether, yet too mature (and sufficiently well educated) to be sent to the front as a foot soldier. He was put in charge of a small literary division of the province that had been placed under military command to serve as a bridge between home and war: east of Prussia and west of the front line separating the German army from its Russian foe. (One of his younger brothers was more adventurous, joining the navy and becoming the captain of the first German submarine. He retired with the rank of admiral at the beginning of World War II. Another brother was killed at the front in World War I.) In tsarist times, this territory, occupied by the German army in 1915, comprised a big chunk of the so-called Northwestern Region of the Russian Empire; the Germans rechristened the occupied region with the title of Ober Ost, short for the “Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East.” Fechter was familiar with the landscape of the East; he was born and grew up in the Hanseatic town of Elbing, situated on the Vistula estuary. Founded in the Middle Ages as a military fortress during the early stages of the Teutonic crusade into Prussia, Elbing was a city built at the confluence of German and Polish cultures. Indeed, even though most of its population was German-speaking, the city only became part of Prussia in 1772. In keeping with local mercantile traditions, Fechter’s father was a wealthy lumber merchant with close commercial

33 Ibid., 213. 34 Ibid., 211.

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connections to Russian-ruled Poland and Lithuania.35 The family’s surname, however, has a knightly ring to it, since it comes from the Middle High German word meaning a “fencer” and/or “dualist.” Most likely, it also originated in the southwestern part of Germany, the region that in the Middle Ages drew the largest number of crusading knights. In his teenage years, Fechter remembers being an arduous walker, crisscrossing the delta terrain of his West Prussian landscape while admiring the historic and architectural results of the German order. In his own words, roving through the countryside of the Heimat (“home”) opened up for him the magic of the East, with its long horizon of the “wide, green flat Dutch landscape of pastures” that created a paradise for migrating birds.36 The mystique of German colonization in the East is key to Fechter’s understanding of the Gothic features in expressionist art, for he read them primarily as an expression of the Teutonic soul of the land. At university, Fechter studied architecture, mathematics, and physics, graduating from Nürnberg University with a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1906. Fechter’s thesis was on the fundamentals of the Realdialektik; hence his heavy reliance on cerebral metaphysics in describing the works of the existentialist artists. Having a degree in philosophy, he took up the position of feuilleton editor at the newspaper in Dresden. Several years later, he moved to Berlin where he started to write for the well-known liberal newspapers Vossische Zeitung and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. While living in Berlin, Fechter carved himself a niche as an art and theater critic, ingraining himself into the bohemian scene of the German capital. The military transfer to Wilna did little to restrain his artistic aspirations. Indeed, according to his post–World War II recollections, time spent in the city was a continuation of the Berlin Wanderjahre (“wandering years”). A salon-type intellectual meeting point was quickly set up on the premises of the Wilnaer Zeitung in the middle of the old town of Wilna. Fechter calls it the Intellectuellen-Zentrale, the intellectual nerve-center of 35 Alfred Kröhnke, “Paul Fechter: Werk und Persönlichkeit,” in Paul Fechter: Arbeitshilfe des Bundes der Vertriebenen Nr. 34/80 (Bonn: Hrsg.: Bund der Vertriebenen—Vereinigte Landsmannschaften und Landesverbände, 1980), 1. 36 Paul Fechter, Deutscher Osten: Bilder aus West- und Ostpreussen (Gütersloh: S. Berlesmann, 1954), 29.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

the Wilna front, where German soldiers, predominantly officers of an artistic bent (and not necessary expressionist), could come for a cultural respite while passing through the city.37 Initially, it was strictly a male milieu, but without the messiness of the canteen or the command system of the barracks. The artistic court in Wilna was, no doubt, held by Fechter himself, but not without the tacit approval of his direct superior, the infantry lieutenant Ernst Wallenberg, editor in chief of the newspaper. When Wallenberg left the city on his frequent tours of the front line or went to Berlin to make a report, Fechter assumed his responsibilities of supervising the day-to-day operations of the paper. Wilnaer Zeitung had more than sixty staff members, and was by far the largest newspaper in German-occupied Lithuania.38 The only lady allowed to enter this tiny fiefdom of culture was a local, Polish-speaking cleaning woman. Soon enough though, two other women appeared in Fechter’s Wilna life, both German nurses stationed at the nearby military hospital.39 One of them, Cornelia Gurlitt very likely became his mistress. Gurlitt was the daughter of the prominent art historian and rector at Dresden Technical University, the academic seat of the Brücke group. She was also a painter and a passionate follower of Kandinsky. At the age of twenty-four, she volunteered to serve as a nurse on the eastern front, spending a good part of the war in Wilna, attending sick and wounded German soldiers during the day and drawing and painting impetuously at night. Gurlitt committed suicide in 1919, but in his post–World War II memoirs, Fechter, without revealing the true nature of their relationship, described her as one of the most genuine artists of the expressionist generation.40 Another important person in Fechter’s life that made Wilna a pleasure was Montague Jacobs. Born in Stettin in 1875 into the family of an English-born Jewish commercial trader, Jacobs mingled in the same artistic circles as Fechter before the war, working as a theater critic at various Berlin newspapers and journals, including the liberal-minded 37 Paul Fechter, Menschen und Zeiten: Begegnungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1951), 148. 38 Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit, 62. 39 Ibid., 279–80. 40 Ibid., 286.

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Vossische Zeitung. A German through and through by education and critical outlook on the world, Jacobs, a British subject, was nonetheless immediately interred at the beginning of the war. He proved his loyalty to the German cause by renouncing his citizenship rights to his father’s homeland and volunteering to fight his (former) compatriots at the front. As a junior officer in the German army, he spent 1915 on the western front, only to be sent the following year to the East. Around Easter of 1916 he arrived in Wilna with the rank of lieutenant in the service of the Ober Ost military administration. Too old to serve in the frontline trenches of the war (Jacobs was forty-one at the time), the theatrologist-cum-serviceman, in the words of Fechter, joined the Intellektuellen-Zentrale, the small gathering of the Berlin-related “artistic” crowd of German Wilna.41 The Wilna group, to borrow the nomenclature of Germany’s prewar expressionist milieu, never had a fixed number of members. In part, this was because the war allowed no permanence. But it was also overshadowed in terms of numbers by another group of German artists and writers in Lithuania, such as Hermann Struck, Richard Dehmel, Karl Schmidt-­ Rottluff, Magnus Zeller, Arnold Zweig, and Herbert Eulenberg, all posted in Kowno, the administrative center of the entire Ober Ost region. Still, there was regular intellectual intercourse between the two cities, and many artists-cum-soldiers from Kowno came to pay their respects to Fechter in Wilna. Some artists of the Wilna-Kowno circle were also expressionists, if not in terms of their creative output then certainly in terms of their position vis-à-vis modern German culture.42 All had a cosmopolitan outlook on the world, even if many of them had volunteered for service in the Germany army during the patriotic upswing in the early months of the war. Some came from Jewish families, and almost all knew and read several foreign languages. Reading English literature in the original (Shakespeare in particular) was very much in vogue, as much as following events of the contemporary art scene in Paris. Fechter assumed the role of the creative commander of the group, calling himself (in English!) the “man connected with the press.”43 41 Ibid., 58–59. 42 Fechter, Menschen und Zeiten, 148–49. 43 Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit, 56.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

Wilna was taken by the Tenth Army of the German forces in September 1915, but the inaugural issue of Wilnaer Zeitung came out only on January 20 of the following year, a month or two after the eastern front—in the wake of the successful German offense—settled into trench warfare alongside the Riga-Dünaburg-Baranovichi-Pinsk line. General Erich von Ludendorff, who assumed control over the Ober Ost administration, marched into the occupied territory as if he were a conquistador of the New World. For, in his own words, “owing to the dearth of German works of reference on the subject, we knew very little about the country or the people, and found ourselves in a strange world.”44 Writer Alfred Brust, however, turned this lack of spatial knowledge into a picturesque pastiche by noting that near Wilna “the dogmatic division between West and East” proves to be “meaningless, for everything—religions, languages, peoples, histories, and architectural styles—intertwines here” in the most ornate and unpredictable pattern.45 Still, from a strictly administrative point of view, as was noted by statisticians of the German occupation forces, “objectively determining conditions of nationality” in the vicinity of Wilna “comes up against the greatest difficulties.”46 Thus, conclusively, “the city view was in many respects alien and disharmonious. Over half a thousand years the most different influences from Occident and Orient had brought forth a queer cultural mixture which matched the presently still existing mess of nationalities.”47 Despite the confusion, once counted, Wilna’s 140,000 wartime residents were found to fall into several linguistic categories, with Poles comprising half of the city’s population, while Jewish (speaking Yiddish) made up about 44 percent, with Lithuanians, Russians, and Belarusians coming close to 2 percent each.48 There were no more than a thousand Germans (less than 1 percent of the total) counted among the civilian population 44 Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories, vols. 1–2 (London: Hutchinson, 1919), 243. 45 Dietmar Albrecht, Wege nach Sarmatien—Zehn Kapitel Preußenland: Orte, Texte, Zeichen (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 1974), 174. 46 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. 47 Ibid., 43. 48 Wiktor Sukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War I: From Foreign Domination to National Independence, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 161.

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of Wilna. A vast majority of the Germans in the city, numbering several thousands, were military personnel. Statistics thus firmly established Wilna as a linguistically and culturally Polish-Jewish town, even if from the topographical point of view, in the minds of the German military, the city exhibited typical characteristics of a provincial Russian town: it was poorly planned, parochial, and open to the wilderness of the surrounding forestclad landscape. Among the soldiers, however, Wilna quickly gained a reputation as a city blessed with scores of temples and whorehouses, a modern-day Babylon placed at the edge of no-man’s-land.49 Given the ambiguous location of the city within the map of the war, the main goal of the German-language and military-oriented newspaper of Wilna, according to the press office of the Ober Ost, was “the diffusion and strengthening of German prestige” in the region by establishing a line of communication between the army and locals.50 In the end, the stated purpose of the newspaper, which soon became the official daily of the city, was to serve unconditionally the needs of Mars, but not without fully surrendering the rights of Venus. The front page of the first issue of Wilnaer Zeitung summed up it all by heralding the capitulation of Montenegro on the Balkan front while at the same time inviting prospective readers to explore the historical dimensions of German Wilna (“Das deutsche Wilna”). The invitation was no less than a call to sacred duty, for the newspaper heralded its mission to be “a pioneer of German peace work” in the Ober Ost by deepening local understanding and respect “for German spirit and German manner, for German discipline and order. Above all, however, [the newspaper] wants the trust of the population. Deeply rooting itself in the ground of the land, it will share with it joy and suffering—it will become at once a representative of the German Fatherland in the East and a representative of the East in the German Fatherland.”51 The challenging mission of the paper, to follow the voice of homeland in the midst of the war, was turned under the direction of Fechter to the more pleasurable act of discovering the unknown city with the eye of a German stroller. In March 1916, Wilnaer Zeitung initiated a series of feuilleton-style 49 Albrecht, Wege nach Sarmatien—Zehn Kapitel Preußenland, 173. 50 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 116. 51 Ibid.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

essays—vignettes of urban life—under the heading of “Wanderstunden in Wilna,” or “Hours Spent Wandering in Wilna.” Written in the form of mini-travelogues and/or impressionist sketches, the articles advised the visiting German soldier to free his limbs from military drills and experience the place as if it were a human body to be explored. The history of the city, according to the inaugural travelogue of a series entitled “The Face of Wilna,” can be learned not just from reading books but also by looking at the imprint of the place. Just as a human face reveals the secrets of an individual’s life, so the layout of the city can express the mysteries of its character. The soul of the city can be traced on the ground where every historical trauma and shock becomes visible in the shape of a topographical wrinkle. Wilna’s plan, the guide continues, tells the story of an old person who has seen it all but was never allowed to take control of his own destiny. The story of Wilna, however, can gain meaning by becoming a part of the saunterer’s life. For the map of the city, the narrator insists, requires an incision, an opening of its veins, the cutting of several broad avenues through its wrinkly old body. Baron Haussmann, the guide continues, the master maker of modern Paris, could turn Wilna into a promised land for the flaneur. Until then though, the soldier must follow his imagination and plunge into the streets of the city without clear recourse for directions.52 Within a year, the articles, adding up to forty individual pieces, were collected into a book and published under the same title by the printing house of the Tenth Army. The articles on the pages of Wilnaer Zeitung came out unsigned, but the book was published under the name of Paul Monty. Paul Monty, of course, was a stage character, or rather a doppelgänger of both Paul (Fechter) and Monty, short for Montague (Jacobs). The nom de guerre had a distinct British ring to it, embellishing the narrative authority of the German-speaking guide with the qualities of a dandy. The name was thespian, if not comical, with an added nod to the artistic sensibilities of the storyteller. (One can imagine Monty and Paul shoulder to shoulder strolling the streets of London, observing familiar scenes with the eye of a nonchalant stranger.) Indeed, Fechter remembers often 52 Paul Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna (Wilna: Verlag der Wilnaer Zeitung, 1918), 9–12.

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wandering with Jacobs through different neighborhoods of Wilna dressed in civilian clothes, trying to observe the soul of the city from the point of view of its native inhabitants.53 Few if any readers of the guidebook were likely to catch the drift, for the name was neutral enough to give the impression of a real—cosmopolitan, no doubt, but also very likely German—person. Still, read as one character, Paul Monty was neither a soldier nor a connoisseur, but a creature of war trained in the art of walking. A bon vivant put in army boots. Wallenberg’s brief introduction to the guidebook highlights this uneasy cohabitation between the military and civilian stripes of wandering. The book was written with the intention of being a roadmap for the German servicemen visiting Wilna, claims Wallenberg, but it was also meant to be a city guide for local residents who shared the soldier’s desire for urban adventure. The book serves as the alternative to dry “serious textbooks,” inviting every stroller to become a virtuoso in mastering the place. Hence the guide dwells little on matters of war. Its main goal is to enliven dead facts found on the ground without reducing the impression of the city to the static, dull landscape of an academic painting. Even in a time of war, Wallenberg implies, Wilna deserved to be looked at with a fresh pair of eyes, offering itself to be narrated as a necessary part of the ordinary (peaceful) pleasures of life.54 The Great War unleashed the power of imagination unlike any other previous conflict. This was primarily because of the dual nature of modern warfare, fought from two different angles of military operations: the air and the trenches. For the first time in human history, war seen from a flying aircraft could be narrated as a vast panorama of moving targets, a peaceful landscape thrust into military conflict. The official British observer on the eastern front, Bernard Pares, for instance, described his first air ride like reading a novel, for suddenly the unknown land beyond the fatal line was clearly outlined as all that land that was well known to me. Till now I had seen here a field and a line of ramparts, there a river with 53 Fechter, An der Wende der Zeit, 61–62. 54 Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna, 1.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

trees, and there again a hill. It is true that sometimes I had had good field-glass views of a given landscape with signs of life, but now to the naked eye both sides were for the first time parts of one common world, the dividing line ran thin and almost undividing, and all was alive. Indeed, this lent insight with all the hallmarks of a God’s-eye view of the war, with the “tremendous and human struggle of all Europe [becoming] a simple problem of science; one had mounted to the skies and reached what Napoleon, with his heartlessness and his seeing mind, had called ‘the celestial side of the art of war.’”55 Still, concludes English poet Siegfried Sassoon on the other side of Europe, when “all is said and done . . . the war was mainly a matter of holes and ditches.”56 Overall, World War I was a trench war, with a narrow strip of no-man’s-land separating the two opposing sides of the conflict. Most soldiers lived and died in trenches, having little opportunity to see and explore the surrounding landscape in anything more than a zigzagging line of war movements. Thus, to be in the trenches, writes Paul Fussell, “was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost. One saw two things only: the walls of an unlocalized, undifferentiated earth and the sky above.” The labyrinth of the trenches was a death trap in everything but name, filled with water, rats, and the sickly smell of rotting flesh. On the eastern front, in particular, the landscape of the front line, carved out of the moraine, was often described as having the hue of “eternal autumn”—the graying nature morte of the earthly browns. And it “was the sight of the sky, almost alone, that had the power to persuade a man that he was not already lost in common grave.”57 Both perspectives (and experiences) reduce the soldier to an insignificant feature of war lost amid the debris of a perforated landscape, robbing him, so to speak, of his right to enjoy the spoils of war. Monty, in one of the 55 Bernhard Pares, Day by Day with the Russian Army, 1914–1915 (London: Constable & Company, 1915), 166–67. 56 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (New York: Faber and Faber, 1937), 228. 57 Fussel, Great War and Modern Memory, 51.

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Wilna travelogues, reverses this mode of topographical “dehumanization” by proposing the conquest of the city not by the force of arms but by taking a casual stroll. In the realm of modern warfare, Monty admits, the honor of conquering foreign countries goes to the rulers of the land and military commanders. But if the traveler has the soul of an artist—and wandering is one of the freest forms of the seven arts, the guidebook asserts—he can master the city with the ease of a breeze. Stepping forward in the free spirit of wandering, the artist-soldier should follow the flow of the street, crisscrossing the city as if it were a province that belonged to none. Still in the theme of nature, Monty compares the soldier to an autumn leaf, removed from the branch of the army so he can fully enjoy the liberties offered by the city. This form of war maneuvering, Monty concludes, can only end in triumph: having been released from the burden of martial discipline the soldier should have no fear of losing the battle.58 Other Wilna guidebooks with the soldiery as target audience start with an itinerary directing visitors from the front line straight to the delousing station.59 Monty, however, insists on teaching the soldier expressionist principles in the art of walking. Every story “begins on ground level, with footsteps,” writes Michel de Certeau in his study of everyday life.60 Linked together, the intertwined pathways of individual walks give shape to the living space making up a city. Half a century earlier, writing about the emergence of the “spaceminded” culture of the expressionist milieu, Fechter pointed out that each place is “conditioned by the mysterious forces of its soil, in which each individual grows and to which his parcel of space belongs.”61 As if anticipating this change in spatial matters, Monty traces the soldier’s walk in Wilna. When the soldier returns from the war to the city, writes Monty, he needs to accept the civilian way of life. But if the same soldier comes back directly from the front line, where he had led a primitive life of the wilderness, a rapid adjustment 58 Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna, 76. 59 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 43. 60 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 97. 61 Paul Fechter, “The Failure of American Architecture,” Living Age 337 (1929): 274.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

to urban soil is next to impossible. At the front, the soldier’s feet get used to swampy and muddy terrain, but in the city, he faces a solid street pavement. In these circumstances, an ordinary act such as walking can lead to a learning experience of an extraordinary nature and the soldier needs to master anew the unhurried pace of street movements. In brief, he has to become a flaneur; however, when fate brings the same frontline creature to Wilna, continues Monty, “he is forced to learn something completely different.” He has to become a choreographer of city life, for Wilna’s streets are worse than footpaths between the trenches, with sidewalks made up of narrow planks, placed alongside the gutter, that quiver with every move. When a group of pedestrians crowds a winding Wilna street, a spontaneous group dance of leaps, twists, and bounces ensues.62 A walk in Wilna, then, is not unlike a Saint Vitus’s dance, a manic act of a medieval character in which the limbs take possession of the human soul. Stopping short of calling the Wilna style of walking the most memorable act of an expressionist dance, Monty laments the inevitable loss of this form of street art. Soon enough, the guidebook concedes, paved sidewalks will replace planked boardwalks, reducing the art of walking to a mere impressionist act of flanerie. The flaneur, argues Benjamin, is an artist of the modern city who collects visual material in order to become a chronicler and philosopher of its life.63 Still, half of the walk, as Thoreau concludes in his consideration of sauntering, is but retracing our steps.64 Thoreau’s dictum is captured by Monty in one of the most personalized (if not autobiographical) entries of the guidebook, titled “Over the Roofs,” where the narrator of the walk charts out a panoramic view of the city. “I cannot disclose the itinerary of his journey,” declares the storyteller of the Wilna wander-time, for its very short pathway belongs solely to me. He only has to stand from my table and move from his writing when all of 62 Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna, 82–84. 63 Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51. 64 Thoreau, “Walking.”

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Wilna opens up in from of me. The window simultaneously frames and reflects this expanse of Russian proportions, allowing his penetrating eye to draw in with pleasure the roofs of the city. At the sight of the city set at a distance of intimate proportions, an unusual sensation captures the soldier. After months deep in the forest, the city lights and shadows conjure memories of home, and as if in delirium, the soldier sees himself walking in the streets of his native town. The war in Wilna has created something never experienced before, something that highlights the loss by measuring it against the gain, something that dwells in the land of no borders, in between Heimat and Fremde, home and a strange land.65 This is a moment of the expressionist disembodiment described by Daübler as the memory of life: “There is a saying: When somebody is hanged, his whole life will flash before him in the last moment. That can only be Expressionism!”66 Echoing the expressionist formula of the inner imagination, Monty takes a last step toward the city. In the darkness of a warm summer night, the guide to Wilna writes, “when the glow of the Sabbath candles reaches us from the uncovered windows with its gentle murmur of the city’s language, our emotions, led astray by the secrets of the city, calm down. Yet it would be much better if our feelings had never been touched by this sight of the city light, so we could leave all these whispers and rustles, and go back into the darkness of night unscathed.”67

65 Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna, 79–81. 66 Daübler, Expressionismus, 180. 67 Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna, 82.

The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albrecht, Dietmar. Wege nach Sarmatien—Zehn Kapitel Preußenland: Orte, Texte, Zeichen. Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 1974. Bahr, Herman. Expressionismus. Munich: Delphin, 1916. Benjamin, Walter. “The Return of the Flaneur.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Buse, Peter, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken, and Bertrand Taithe. Benjamin’s Arcades: An Unguided Tour. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Däubler, Theodor. Expressionismus: Der Neue Standpunkt. Dresden-Hellerau: Hellerauer, 1916. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Anchor, 1989. Fechter, Paul. Der Expressionismus. Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1914. ———. “The Failure of American Architecture.” Living Age 337 (1929): 274–77. ———. An der Wende der Zeit: Menschen und Begegnungen. Gütersloh: S. Berlesmann, 1949. ———. Menschen und Zeiten: Begegnungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1951. ———. Deutscher Osten: Bilder aus West- und Ostpreussen. Gütersloh: S. Berlesmann, 1954. Freedman, Ralph. Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Fulda, Bernhard, and Aya Soika. Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism. Berlin: Walther de Gruyter, 2012. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich. “Art and the New Gnosis.” In German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long. New York: Macmillan, 1993.Originally published in Das Kunstblatt (1917). Kröhnke, Alfred. “Paul Fechter: Werk und Persönlichkeit.” In Paul Fechter: Arbeitshilfe des Bundes der Vertriebenen Nr. 34/80, 1–6. Bonn: Hrsg.: Bund der Vertriebenen—Vereinigte Landsmannschaften und Landesverbände, 1980. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ludendorff, Erich. My War Memories. Vols. 1–2. London: Hutchinson, 1919. Monty, Paul. Wanderstunden in Wilna. Wilna: Verlag der Wilnaer Zeitung, 1918. Pares, Bernard. Day by Day with the Russian Army, 1914–1915. London: Constable & Company, 1915. Russell, John. The Meaning of Modern Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. New York: Faber and Faber, 1937. Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Sukiennicki, Wiktor. East Central Europe during World War I: From Foreign Domination to National Independence. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” The Atlantic, June 1, 1862. Accessed October 1, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/ 06/walking/304674/. Washton Long, Rose-Carol. German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

CHAPTER 2

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists LAIMA LAUČKAITĖ-SURGAILIENĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas Keywords:  World War I, German art, Vilnius, Jews, identity

When Germans occupied Vilnius1 in September 1915, they were stunned by the large variety of ethnic communities: Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Russian, and others,2 of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Judaic religious traditions. Among them, the Jews stood out. The German policy toward Jews in the Ober Ost during World War I has been analyzed,3 as have the encounter of German Jews with Eastern European Jews and the

1

The name of the city has different historical forms: Jews call it “Vilna,” Poles—“Wilno,” Lithuanians—“Vilnius,” Germans—“Wilna,” and Russians—“Вильна.” In this chapter the current official name “Vilnius” is used. 2 Michał Brensztejn, Spisy ludności m. Wilna za okupacji niemieckiej od d. 1 listopada 1915 r. (Warsaw: Warszawska drukarnia wydawnictwa, 1919), 5, 21, 24. According to the 1915 census, Poles made up 50.15 percent, Jews 43.5 percent, Lithuanians 2.6 percent, Russians 1.46 percent, and Belarusians 1.36 percent of the population of Vilnius. 3 Jürgen Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik in Lithuania during the First World War,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 43, no. 1 (1998), 155–74. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119–20. Christopher Alan Barthel, “Contesting the Russian Borderlands: The German Military Administration of Occupied Lithuania, 1915–1918” (PhD diss., Brown University Press, 2011), 55–68.

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problem of the identity of German Jews.4 Changes in Jewish cultural life in Eastern Europe during World War I have also been examined.5 But the visual discourse and the image of Jews in German art in the years of World War I have yet to be addressed. They are the focus of the present study. Germans had a special term—Ostjuden—to refer to Eastern European Jews, because their life differed considerably from that of Western European Jews. Compared with other ethnic groups in Vilnius, the Jewish community was the largest, constituting more than a third of the city’s population. Jews practiced crafts and commerce, provided services, and ran tearooms, inns, and restaurants, which were frequented by German soldiers. Importantly, Jews were the only local inhabitants whose language the occupiers could understand—the Yiddish language was sometimes considered a peculiar dialect of German. Jews often assisted the Germans as interpreters and mediators in their communication with other locals. How did the Jews of Vilnius regard Germans during World War I? They had experienced the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Empire and, accused of collaboration with the Germans at the beginning of the war, faced deportation to the depths of Russia and persecution, with pogroms held throughout the Jewish settlement of the Pale.6 In Vilnius and its suburbs, retreating Russian Cossacks treated Jews with extreme cruelty.7 In this context, Jews were favorably predisposed to the arrival of the Germans, and 4 Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). Abba Strazas, “Tätigkeit des Dezernats für jüdische Angelegenheiten in der Deutschen Militärverwaltung Ober Ost,” in Die baltischen Provinzen Ruβlands zwischen den Revolutionen von 1905 und 1917 (The Russian Baltic Provinces between the 1905/1917 Revolutions), eds. Andrew Ezergailis and Gert von Pistohlkors, vol. 4 of Quellen und Studien zur baltischen Geschichte (Cologne: Böhlau, 1982), 315–29. 5 Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, eds. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 89–126. 6 Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 145–50. 7 Anatolii Chayesh, “On the Front Line in Lithuania, 1915,” in Narratives of Jewish EyeWitnesses in the Collection of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society (Part II), trans. Gordon McDaniel, last modified July 24, 2009, http://www.litvaksig.org/litvaksig-online-journal/on-the-front-line-in-lithuania-1915?task=article.

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

some of them greeted Kaiser’s army with flowers and salutes as it marched ceremoniously into Vilnius at the end of September 1915.8 Still, it did not take them long to see that the Germans disregarded their religious traditions, forced them to carry on trade on the Sabbath, requisitioned products and property, and so on. So their attitude to the occupiers began to change. German intellectuals and artists who served as soldiers often took interest in Jewish Vilna, and a large number of their works has survived. It should be noted right away that Vilnius’s Jewish community at the time was divided ideologically, socially, financially, and politically. It had complicated relations with the other local communities, including not very consistent, mainly pragmatic Jewish-Lithuanian political ties of the early twentieth century.9 One part of the Jewish community comprised well-off, well-educated, modern, secularized Jews living in new areas of the city. The Germans, however, were only interested in the traditional religious Jewish community, which was based in the Old Town. During World War I, Germans became the first to refer to the city’s Jewish quarters as the “Vilnius ghetto,”10 after the pattern of Western European cities, even though Jews in Vilnius were not confined to a closed territory. Who were the German artists that explored Jewish themes, and what were the aims and audience of their works? These were artists working for the propaganda newspapers published in Vilnius with their illustrated supplements. They arrived from Germany to take up residence as soldiers. Examples include Walter Buhe, who worked for the newspaper Wilnaer Zeitung and its supplement Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung; Gerd Paul and Bruno Steigueber, contributors to Scheinwerfer, a supplement of the Zeitung der 10. Armee; and other artists who passed through the city. It must be noted that all visual and textual publications were strictly censored during the war. Propaganda and censorship sought to conceal the real wartime situation, to hide the truth of the horrors and losses.   8 Czesław Jankowski, Z dnia na dzien: Warszawa 1914—Wilno 1915 (Wilno: Wydawnictwo Kazimierza Rutskiego, 1923), 241.   9 Vladas Sirutavičius and Darius Staliūnas, eds., A Pragmatic Alliance: Jewish-Lithuanian Political Cooperation at the Beginning of the 20th Century (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 10 “Das Ghetto in Wilna,” Wilnaer Zeitung, April 9, 1917.

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One requirement for the censorship of visual art was to avoid “exaggerated depictions of the terrors of war.”11 Thus journals of are full of pictures of victorious marches, portraits of commanders, and peaceful scenes of the conquered lands and their inhabitants. Publications strove to present the city of Vilnius and its inhabitants—Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, and Belarusians—to the soldiers stationed in the Ober Ost and to the broader civilian audience in Germany. To what extent was German attention to Jews, their traditions, and heritage in the years of World War I exceptional? Germans took great interest in all the local peoples, their ethnographic and cultural heritage. According to researchers of wartime German culture, “a striking feature of occupational policies in the East was the occupier’s obsession with ethnographic, statistical and other forms of local study of the conquered populations.”12 In fact, the German press did dedicate much space to Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles; so, the presence of texts and images reflecting the life and traditions of Vilnius Jews were not an exception, but the image of the Jews was quite specific. What was the attitude of German artists and intellectuals to the Jews of Vilnius? On the one hand, these soldiers lived among propaganda, supported by the military leadership, which spread anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices, characterizing Jews as dishonest, disloyal, clannish, and immoral.13 On the other hand, quite a number of German intellectuals kept up ties with colleagues of Jewish origin in Germany, and they sympathized with local Jews living in the Ober Ost. One young artist, Walter Buhe,14 after printmaking studies at the School of the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, worked in Vilnius during the Great War as a press artist for Wilnaer Zeitung. In Germany he had 11 Zensurbuch für die deutsche Presse (Berlin: Hrsg. von der Oberzensurstelle des Kriegspresseamts im März, 1917). 12 Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., introduction to European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 13 Barthel, Contesting the Russian Borderlands, 66–67. 14 Walter Buhe (1882–1958) was a printmaker, painter, and teacher. He studied under Emil Orlik at the School of the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts and lectured there from 1912 to 1915. During World War I he served on the front lines, lived in Lithuania, and visited Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bohemia. From 1920 to 1945 he was a professor of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts (Hochschule für Grafik und

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

mixed with Jews and showed interest in their traditional culture; in 1916 in Leipzig, Rahel bin Gorion dedicated to Buhe a copy of her husband’s, Micha Josef bin Gorion’s, book Der Born Judas: Legenden, Märchen und Erzählungen—a collection of traditional Jewish folklore.15 Another German artist, Cornelia Gurlitt,16 worked as a nurse at a military hospital in the Antakalnis suburb of Vilnius during World War I. While there, she maintained contacts with German intellectuals, such as Wilnaer Zeitung art critic and journalist Paul Fechter and the writer and journalist Herbert Eulenberg of the editorial staff of Kownoer Zeitung in Kaunas, and she also belonged to a group of intellectuals that included some Germans of Jewish origin. In a letter to her brother Wilibald dated May 7, 1917, Gurlitt mentions visits by Eulenberg to Vilnius: The writer Herbert Eulenberg has visited me for a couple of hours every day for the last three days, enjoying my quiet room, the bubbling samovar, flowers and the homey warmth. We talked. I was happy to receive him. Today he is returning to his nest. Most probably now people will visit me more often, mainly Jews, as I’m very much interested in their religion, acquaintance with which has suddenly underscored the beauty of the Old Testament for me.17 Buchkunst) and was awarded the gold medal for the cycle of woodcuts The People of Rosendorf at the Paris World Fair in 1937. 15 The book by Micha Josef bin Gorion (Micha Josef Berdyczewski), Der Born Judas: Legenden, Märchen und Erzählungen (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1916), with a dedication to Walter Buhe’s family was offered for sale at the time of writing by Sächsisches Auktionshaus & Antiquariat Johannes Wend KG. See list and catalog at http://www. kunstantiquariat-hamburg.de/mediasearch.jsp;jsessionid=ED5215EEDCA9F1B669EA6C8BF83AFEC7?job=SEARCH&dbsftautor=Berdyczewski%2C+Micha+Josef+Bin+Gorion. The author is grateful to Dr. Hubert Portz for this remark. 16 Cornelia Gurlitt (1890–1919) was a graphic designer and painter. The daughter of the famous German art historian Cornelius Gurlitt, she studied under Hans Nadler in Dresden and in Paris. She exhibited her expressionistic paintings in Dresden and Chiemnitz before World War I. During the war she became a nurse and worked in the war hospital in Antakalnis (Vilnius) and showed her works at the exhibition of German art in Vilnius in 1917. In 1918 she returned to Dresden. Suffering from postwar depression, she committed suicide in 1919 in Berlin. 17 Hubert Portz, Zimmer frei für Cornelia Gurlitt, Lotte Wahle und Conrad Felixmüller (Ausstellungskatalog) (Hochstadt: KnechtVerlag, 2014), 14.

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Gurlitt’s impressions are very similar to those of “a great many German intellectuals dressed in military uniforms who encountered the Ostjuden and their lifestyle for the first time. This encounter left a very strong impression on nearly all of them. Among the first writers who began to write about it was Herbert Eulenberg, whose book Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland, illustrated by Hermann Struck, contained quite many pictures of Ostjuden.”18 This is how the German writer of Jewish origin Sammy Gronemann, who worked in Kaunas, summarized Germans’ encounter with local Jews in his memoirs of the war years. Thus, Jewish Vilnius made a strong impression on the Germans, and their artistic works serve as a testimony to the fact. I herein aim to reconstruct the Jewish–German discourse from texts and images. Several sources will be used in the analysis: images created by the German artists Walter Buhe, Alfred Holler, Gerd Paul, Bruno Steigueber, Julius CohnTurner, Felix Krause, and Hermann Struck; and texts written by Zeitung der 10. Armee regular contributors Otto Klosinski19 and Otto Jahnke,20 and by critic Paul Fechter of Wilnaer Zeitung, whose article on Jewish Vilnius21 was included in the book of essays Wanderstunden in Wilna.22 Having arrived in Vilnius, German artists would first visit the Old Town. Jews lived in the very heart of the Old Town, on age-old streets with names like Glasstrasse (now Stiklių Street), Fleischmarktstrasse (now Mėsinių Street) and Judenstrasse (now Žydų Street). These streets fascinated the artists with their mediaeval architecture and street-spanning arches, and they became the subject of many paintings by them. Particularly popular was Fleischmarktstrasse Street with its two arches, an icon of the Jewish Old Town. Walter Buhe and Alfred Holler represented it in paintings characterized by brightly colored 18 Sammy Gronemann, Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich: Erinnerungen an die Ostjüdische etappe, 1916–18, illustrated with drawings by Magnus Zeller (Berlin: Jüdischer, 1924), 49. 19 Otto Klosinski, “Die Entschleierte: Wilnaer Stimmungen,” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 5 (1917) (no pagination). 20 Otto Jahnke, “Das Wilnaer Judenviertel,” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 32 (1916) (no pagination). 21 Fechter, “Im Judenviertel von Wilna,” Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916) (no pagination). 22 Paul Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna (Wilna: Verlag der Wilnaer Zeitung, 1918), 59–62.

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 1.  Alfred Holler, Jewish Quarter (Fleischmarktstrasse), 1917, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

redbrick walls (Fig. 1). Buhe’s art nouveau painting is cheerful and optimistic, while Holler’s work is gloomier, full of grey tones, though both chose the cold and harsh winter period as the setting for their works. In general, this dreary season is predominant in the Germans’ depictions of Vilnius. Wandering the Old Town, the artists were delighted by its chaotic cobweb of streets connected by a maze of passageways and courtyards. One of them was the young Alfred Holler,23 who was officially appointed as a war artist during World War I. Although his title implies the depiction of battle scenes, working on the eastern front he only painted intimate, subjective views of this city. Inspired by Holler’s work in Vilnius, fellow artist Fred Hendriok wrote: 23 Alfred Holler (1888–1954) was a painter and printmaker. From 1906 to 1908 he studied at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy, in 1908 he attended the Académie Julian in Paris, and from 1908 to 1913 he studied at the Karlsruhe Arts Academy. From 1914 to 1916 he served in the German army in the Ober Ost. After World War I he lived in Eupen, Belgium. In 1918 Holler was a member of the Aachen group of artists, and in 1954 he was awarded with the Order of Leopold II (Belgium).

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It is the Jewish quarters that have attracted his brush. He has become fascinated with dark courtyards and passageways, crooked streets and a medley of people, and he knows how to convey all that. He never ceases to find hidden picturesque corners and always knows how to render the newly discovered beauty. It is both a creaking staircase and a dilapidated courtyard in the grip of snow, as well as the unexpectedly revealed majestic architecture whose power and grandeur is twice emphasized by the contrast with shabby structures in the foreground.24 In Vilnius, Holler created a series of city views using a special technique—he depicted objects in watercolor on toned paper, which he subsequently drew over with pencil and painted with gouache. The works were published in 1917 in a separate folder of color plates titled Wilna.25 Most of the images in the folder are dedicated to Jewish Vilnius, its intimate nooks and corners painted in the stylistics of art nouveau. Holler particularly liked to paint dark and narrow courtyards at twilight—despite their gloominess, the images are picturesque and boast a subtle range of colors (Fig. 2). Holler was a wanderer captivated by the spirit of the old city. Other Germans, however, found these settings repulsive. One can see the difference among the texts and images dedicated to Jewish Vilnius. Writers tended more than the artists to emphasize its unsavory and ugly side. Otto Jahnke, for instance, wrote: This Jewish quarter is an extraordinary place of nurturing their heritage and poverty. There reigns the law and uniformity of ugliness, which has been so conspicuous in every step already on the main streets of Vilnius. Here we find the lowest class of people who have consciously chosen this form of life, living densely in a crammed and narrow space. I am entering Glasstrasse. The pavements are uneven and bumpy. Sewage ditches are high and badly integrated with the street pavement. Sewage from Judenstrasse flows to Glasstrasse, but 24 Fred Hendriok, “Ein deutscher Kriegsmaler in Litauen,” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 5 (1917) (no pagination). 25 Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 2.  Alfred Holler,

Courtyard in the Jewish Quarter, 1917, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

occasionally the flow halts and becomes stagnant. An old hunchbacked Jew with a staff and a black coat trips on a board thrown over the high edges of a cobbled sewage ditch. From narrow courtyards packed with boxes and chests sewage flows into ditches. A courtyard can only be reached on a board thrown over a ditch. Pavements are so narrow that two people cannot pass each other without pushing each other into the ditch.26 Dirty streets, stinking gutters, and narrow pavements on which passers-­ ­by and vendors jostle with each other—this uncivilized infrastructure of the Vilnius ghetto was mentioned in all German articles about Vilnius. Artist Bruno Steigueber captured it in his painting In the Jewish Quarter in Vilnius—even on a sunny day scarfed women are wading through impassable mud on the street (Fig. 3). 26 Jahnke, “Das Wilnaer Judenviertel” (no pagination).

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Figure 3. Bruno Steigueber, In the Jewish Quarter in Vilnius, 1918, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 117 (1918).

The German artist of Jewish origin Julius Cohn-Turner, who drew the same location, chose another vantage point, from above, looking at the narrow street crammed with people through a first-floor window: Here I am again in the heart of the Old Town. I seem to understand why Vilnius is called the Jerusalem of the East. It appears to

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

be the home of all things discarded or redundant. I wonder who could still be interested in buying these old lamps, rickety furniture, dirty glasses and worn-out clothes, as I hopelessly try to make sense of using all these things. With every step sewage spurts high from under the wooden boards that have replaced the pavement and flows down gurgling. At the entrance door something vague and formless is being offered. A young man is crying out his wares and right away offers something edible to taste. [. . .] Next to him stand a great many beggars of various ages with all possible kinds of afflictions, with­out any distinctions of age, gender and faith.27 In the poverty-ridden streets, commerce was in full swing, shops operated on the ground floor of the houses, and vendors traded their goods on the street, as represented in Holler’s drawing Jewish Quarter, depicting a street with old worn-out clothes hung out for sale on the walls (Fig. 4). Motley shop signs covered the walls of houses in a chaotic mixture of forms, colors, and fonts. Attempting to get rid of this jumble, the city’s German authorities imposed prohibitions and demanded the removal of shop signs. However, the efforts were not successful. Germans were ­surprised, especially, by the inscriptions on the shop signs: “Hebrew and erased Cyrillic letters can be seen everywhere, and hastily scribbled shop signs display the killed words of our native language, Figure 4.  Alfred Holler, Jewish ‘Zudatten zur Schneidai’ [“supplies for taiQuarter, 1917, in Alfred Holler, lors”] and the like, written in grayish red Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: or blue colors.”28 These inscriptions in fact Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, were in Yiddish, which was similar to 1917). 27 Klosinski, “Die Entschleierte: Wilnaer Stimmungen” (no pagination). 28 Ibid.

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German; but the Germans considered them a mockery of their language with mistakes in every word—a complete cultural misunderstanding. Buhe even created a comic composition from various Yiddish inscriptions on the signs of craftsmen and shops (Fig. 5). The structure of the Jewish quarters was irregular and distorted. Houses had twisted, tumbling, or ominously slanted forms, which some German intellectuals found fascinating, and some repulsive: It is home to laundresses, tailors, shoemakers . . . Densely packed workshops of various crafts and trades, poor and slovenly people living together in crammed conditions emit the smells, which are particularly characteristic of Jewish quarters [. . .]. In the evenings, streets are teeming with life. Everything is being bought and sold. Fruit can be bought directly on the street. Vendors are standing in the doorways on the street. People flock in a shapeless crowd on Judenstrasse [. . .]. Ugly old women handle or sell fruit with their dirty hands.29 Sketchy pencil drawings made by Paul Schneider during his stay in Vilnius during World War I convey the chaotic movement of shapeless Figures of passing women covered in huge scarves on Judenstrasse.30 Buhe made many drawings depicting street trade—woman and disabled people selling rags and old books at a flea market (Fig. 6). Gerd Paul drew a vivid conversation of glaziers (Fig. 7), and he portrayed old women with sacks in his drawing At the Jewish Street (Fig. 8). All these artists’ works depict Jews in a repulsive way—vendors and craftsmen, women and men appear old, worn-out, sickly, and ghastly. The Germans saw another, religious, space as a contrast to the street scenes: A highly unfavourable view of the streets vanishes as soon as a curious visitor goes to see Eastern European Jews in their most 29 Jahnke, “Das Wilnaer Judenviertel” (no pagination). 30 Paul Schneider, Drawings, 1917, Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto, accessed March 2, 2015, http://www.vilnaghetto.com/galler y2/v/vilna/VILNA+BEFORE+WWII/ WILNA+PAUL+SCHNEIDER+1917++-+12.jpg.html.

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Figure 5.  Walter Buhe, Notes of the Streets of Vilnius, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 26 (1916).

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Figure 6.  Walter Buhe, Book Sale on the Street, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 23 (1916).

Figure 7.  Gerd Paul, Glaziers of Vilnius, 1918, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 112 (1918).

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 8.  Gerd Paul, On the Jewish Street, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 37 (1918).

sacred place—their sanctuary. This world opens up just a couple of steps off the throng of German Street [. . .]. Hebrew inscriptions on the walls and shops accompany you all along the street curve up to the Old Synagogue. Built in 1576 and humbly lowered into the ground, the synagogue looks hidden.31 31 Fechter, “Im Judenviertel von Wilna” (no pagination).

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It was impossible to get the full view of the Great Synagogue from the outside, as it was crammed among other buildings and could be reached only by an intricate maze of passageways. Buhe painted the side gate to the courtyard of the Great Synagogue in winter: the synagogue overgrown with annexes rises on the left, heaps of snow cover their roofs, and people are wading heavily through snowdrifts at the gate (Fig. 9).

Figure 9.  Walter Buhe, Courtyard of the Old Synagogue in Winter, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 11 (1916).

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 10.  Walter Buhe, Service in the Old Synagogue, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916).

Inside the synagogue it is crammed with people; particularly during Shabbat hours on Saturday mornings there are a great many believers dressed in white prayer shawls who are praying in singing tones, guided by the loud voice of the person leading the service. Only men are around; women are only allowed to stand in the gallery by the Law. Four massive pillars in the centre of the synagogue surround the cupola-crowned bimah—a place from which the prayers are read.32 German intellectuals often attended the services in the Great Synagogue and were particularly impressed by the singing. Buhe drew the majestic interior of the Great Synagogue with a crowd of worshippers and men clad in prayer shawls (Fig. 10). Germans visited not only the Great Synagogue but also the prayer houses in the vicinity: “These houses are open for believers, young and old, who spend all day long there, absorbed in the Talmud studies, poring over 32 Ibid.

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Figure 11.  Walter Buhe, At a Warm Stove, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916).

the Holy Books or clustered around the table for disputes. The stove, which warms poor believers in winter, gives a Slavic aspect to this unique view of a cult site.”33 In capturing the views of Jewish prayer houses, Buhe emphasizes deep religiosity and draws attention to the fact that the prayer house provided a spiritual and a physical shelter to the poor, who would come to warm themselves up in winter and flock around the stove (Fig. 11). Along with the Old Town quarters and prayer houses, the old Jewish cemetery in Snipischki (now Šnipiškės) was among the main places of attraction for Germans in Vilnius: Those who wish to get to know the traditions of the Vilnius Jews have to cross the river by boat to reach a burial site, which served the community . . . until 1831. . . . The place looks abandoned and neglected, but there is a kind of melancholy hovering above the 33 Ibid.

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Figure 12.  Alfred Holler, Old Jewish Cemetery, 1916, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

white tombstones, above the places of eternal rest of famous sages and ordinary believers. . . . Actual little houses with wooden roofs [rise] above the graves.34 These exotic monuments are represented in drawings by Holler (Fig. 12) and Felix Krause (Fig. 13), who documented them and conveyed their poetic mood of sadness. Hermann Struck captured a famous spot of the old Jewish cemetery, the mausoleum of the famous rabbi known as the Gaon of Vilna, which he emphatically placed against the background of the symbol of Vilnius, Gediminas Castle Tower, rising above the other bank of the river (Fig. 14). Artists depicted Jewish religious customs in public spaces. Buhe, in particular, captured many unique views in his sketches drawn from nature 34 Ibid.

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Figure 13. Felix Krause, Jewish Cemetery in Snipischki, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 3 (1916).

with India ink in a single line, which were published in the Wilnaer Zeitung. He drew Jews reciting their traditional prayer at the adorned tree of Ger Zedek in Snipischki cemetery (Fig. 15). Legend has it that Ger Zedek—Count Valentin Potocki—converted to Judaism in the middle of the eighteenth century and was burned by Catholics; a large tree grew in

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 14.  Hermann Struck, Gaon’s Grave at the Old Jewish Cemetery, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

the place where his ashes were spread and became a site of worship for Jews. In another vivid scene captured by Buhe, Jews grind grain for matzos in the courtyards of the Old Town, and housewives buy this flour for their Pesach treats (Fig. 16). During Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, Jews would leave their homes and live in a sukkot—a makeshift booth. One of Buhe’s drawings shows sukkots covered with fir branches on the balconies of the houses on Glasstrasse, providing an unexpectedly transformed view of the city (Fig. 17). During the Sukkot holiday in Vilnius one could see Jews carrying symbolic plants from Israel—a palm twig, a myrtle, bird cherry, citrus fruit—as depicted in another of his drawings (Fig. 18). Such images captured by Buhe are fascinating and rather unique documentation of these traditional customs in the city, illustrating the contribution German artists made by depicting the religious practices of the Vilnius Jews. Fechter extolled the religiosity of the Jewish community and its loyalty to the traditions of their forefathers: The Jerusalem of Lithuania—this honourable title was granted to Vilnius by the religious Eastern European Jews. For long

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Figure 15.  Walter Buhe, At Ger

Figure 16.  Walter Buhe, Pesach in

Figure 17.  Walter Buhe, Sukkot

Figure 18.  Walter Buhe, Jewish

Zedek’s Grave, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, September 16, 1917.

Holiday on the Balconies, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, July 10, 1917.

Vilnius: Matzo Grinders in the Jewish Quarter, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, April 13, 1917.

Holiday: Sukkot, 1916, in Wilnaer Zeitung, October 22, 1916.

centuries the nation of Israelites has constituted a large part of the population of our city. Prominent sages made the Vilnius school of the Talmud known all around the world. Being part of the city’s Jewish community has obliged its members to keep loyalty to their inherited place. Oppression, poverty and pain may have led to bodily deterioration, but could not uproot the

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

tenacious and unyielding trunk. While walking around the streets today we can make sure how important the Jewish element was in the picture of the city in earlier times. The old ghetto has lost its confines, but today the streets where the forefathers lived have become home to their grandchildren.35 Like many German intellectuals, Fechter saw Jews as an oppressed, impoverished, and downtrodden community, which nevertheless retained its strength and loyalty to the faith of their forebears. Works by German artists of Jewish descent stand out in the context of German art on Jewish topics. Quite a large number of Jewish soldiers served in the Kaiser’s army in the Ober Ost, artists among them. They belonged to the German Jewish community, which was modern, assimilated, and Westernized. In Vilnius, though, they encountered a religious community whose life was ruled by traditions. This proved a real discovery for German Jews, a discovery of their ancestors, their roots, and their past. At the same time, they were shocked by the poverty and suffering of their brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. One of these was the famous printmaker Hermann Struck,36 a German officer of Jewish origin who served in various locations on the front line in the years of World War I and worked in Kaunas and Vilnius as an artist, interpreter, and advisor for Jewish affairs. While traveling in the territory of the Ober Ost, he made many drawings. He created lithographs for Herbert Eulenberg’s book Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland.37 Published in Berlin in 1916, it contained illustrations of the country’s landscapes, cityscapes, and residents of various nationalities. The 35 Ibid. 36 Hermann Struck (Chaim Aaron ben David, 1876–1944) was a painter and printmaker. He studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts, won fame as a master of engravings and lithographs in Berlin in the early twentieth century, wrote the book Kunst des Radierens (Berlin, 1908), and taught printmaking techniques to many famous Berlin artists, including Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Marc Chagall, and others. He created portraits of Theodor Herzl, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. During World War I he served as an interpreter on the eastern front, living in Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, and Belarus. An adherent of Zionism, from 1923 he lived in Haifa, taught at the Bezalel Arts and Crafts School, and was one of the founders of the Tel Aviv Art Museum. 37 Hermann Struck and Herbert Eulenberg, Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

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book also included many images of Jews. One drawing is a portrait of an old Jew with a long white beard, his face akin to the types represented by Rembrandt (Fig. 19); another is of a young woman (Fig. 20). The portrait was accompanied by a text, with a question addressed to Rembrandt and answered in the following way: “Why are you so fond of painting old Jews, Master?” Rembrandt was once asked. Because the sorrow of life is reflected in their features with double force. Because of all people, they have a much more grievous experience of everything that we breathe, suffer and ponder upon, as their being has been bitter since birth. As their sorrow-ridden features speak about the feeling of being a stranger on this earth, it is reflected in their faces impressively and with astounding clarity. As on the small surface of a face, which can be covered with the palms of your hands, you can read the tragedy of the entire nation. The furrowed brow, the look of the eyes and the wrinkles at the lips reflect the most painful disappointments, which we collect in the stubble-fields of our dreams as we grow old; they reflect the disappointments in mankind, expressed so clearly as if it were a monument built to the meanness of the world. However, despite all human despair, sometimes you come upon a better hope for the hereafter, when these heartsick lips, which start and end the day with holy psalms, whisper several obscure adages from the Talmud, as if they found a key to Paradise again.38 Being a fervent Zionist, Struck admired local Jews as the keepers of Jewish identity and religious traditions, and he sympathized with their sufferings and misery in the Ober Ost. As an artist, he admired and portrayed them as Rembrandt’s personages. These psychological portraits are full of dignity, a sense of human worth, and empathy. The Jews are idealized as representatives of an eternal nation who have kept their faith and traditions in difficult conditions. Portraits of this kind were created by other

38 Ibid., no page.

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Figure 19. Hermann Struck, Head of an Old Jew, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

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Figure 20. Hermann Struck, Rachel, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists

Figure 21. Julius Cohn-Turner, Talmud Reader, 1916, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 32 (1916).

artists, such as Julius Cohn-Turner,39 a German artist of Jewish origin, who drew a reader of the Talmud, a strong and powerful man, perusing an old folio in a Jewish prayer house in Vilnius with great respect (Fig. 21). The image of Vilnius Jews constructed by German artists during World War I was contradictory and ambivalent, a picture in which beauty and ugliness, admiration and repulsion intertwine. Various factors contributed to the emergence of such an image. One was the underlying ideology of colonialism that the Germans were putting into practice in the Ober Ost during World War I. This ideology placed one’s own identity in opposition to that of others, looking down on indigenous cultures and seeing the Jewish culture and lifestyle as backward, archaic, uncivilized. On the other hand, there was the curious insight of the wanderer: artists admired the Jewish 39 Julius Cohn Turner (1881–1948) was a painter and graphic designer. He was a student of Woldemar Friedrich at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. During World War I he served in Ober Ost, and during World War II he immigrated to Belgium. Given his Jewish origin, he was particularly affected by the cruelty of World War II, which is also reflected in his works.

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quarters as a medieval town with impressive religious services and exotic everyday practices. They were captivated by the city’s picturesque nooks and crannies, and by the Great Synagogue, though the poverty and slovenliness of the ghetto areas repelled them. They often represented Jews as old, decrepit, ragged, and ugly. Certainly, each artist had an individual, subjective view. But the predominant images of Jews, especially in German texts, represented them as repulsive, uncivilized, and unappealing. Still, some German artists, particularly those of Jewish origin, worked within the framework of another discourse. Inspired by the loyalty of their Eastern brothers to their roots, they sympathized with them and represented their character types, places of residence, scenes of religious rites, and traditional customs with fascination. It is important to note that after World War I the artists who experienced the war years in the Ober Ost continued to develop this discourse in Berlin. They did so together with Jewish artists of Eastern European origin who lived in Germany, such as Lasar Segall, Abraham Palukst, Moi Ver, and others. In the interwar period, this discourse had a great impact on the Jewish art of Vilnius and local artists’ understanding of the city’s Jewish identity. Thus the German view of Jewish Vilnius in the years of World War I influenced further creative pursuits.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Barthel, Christopher Alan. “Contesting the Russian Borderlands: The German Military Administration of Occupied Lithuania, 1915–1918.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2011. Brensztejn, Michał. Spisy ludności m. Wilna za okupacji niemieckiej od d. 1 listopada 1915 r. Warsaw: Warszawska drukarnia wydawnictwa, 1919. Chayesh, Anatolii, comp. “On the Front Line in Lithuania, 1915.” In Narratives of Jewish Eye-Witnesses in the Collection of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society (Part II). Translated by Gordon McDaniel. Last modified July 24, 2009. http://www.litvaksig.org/litvaksig-online-journal/on-the-front-line-in-lithuania-­ 1915?task=article.

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“Das Ghetto in Wilna.” Wilnaer Zeitung, April 9, 1917. Fechter, Paul. “Im Judenviertel von Wilna.” Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916) (no pagination). Gronemann, Sammy. Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich: Erinnerungen an die Ostjüdische etappe, 1916–18. Illustrated with drawings by Magnus Zeller. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1924. Hendriok, Fred [F. H.]. “Ein deutscher Kriegsmaler in Litauen.” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 5 (1917) (no pagination). Holler, Alfred. Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder. Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917. Jahnke, Otto. “Das Wilnaer Judenviertel.” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 32 (1916) (no pagination). Jankowski, Czesław. Z dnia na dzien: Warszawa 1914—Wilno 1915. Wilno: Wydawnictwo Kazimierza Rutskiego, 1923. Klosinski, Otto. “Die Entschleierte: Wilnaer Stimmungen.” Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 5 (1917) (no pagination). Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lohr, Eric. Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Matthäus, Jürgen. “German Judenpolitik in Lithuania during the First World War.” In Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 43, no. 1 (1998), 155–74. Monty, Paul. Wanderstunden in Wilna. Wilna: Verlag der Wilnaer Zeitung, 1918. Portz, Hubert. Zimmer frei für Cornelia Gurlitt, Lotte Wahle und Conrad Felixmüller. Ausstellungskatalog. Hochstadt: KnechtVerlag, 2014. Roshwald, Aviel. “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during the Great War.” In European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, edited by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, 89–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Roshwald, Aviel, and Richard Stites, eds. Introduction to European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Schneider, Paul. Drawings, 1917. Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto. Accessed March 2, 2015. http://www.vilnaghetto.com/gallery2/v/vilna/VILNA+ BEFORE+WWII/WILNA+PAUL+SCHNEIDER+1917++-+ 12.jpg.html. Sirutavičius, Vladas, and Darius Staliūnas, eds. A Pragmatic Alliance: Jewish-Lithuanian Political Cooperation at the Beginning of the 20th Century. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011. Strazas, Abba. “Tätigkeit des Dezernats für jüdische Angelegenheiten in der Deutschen Militärverwaltung Ober Ost.” In Die baltischen Provinzen Ruβlands zwischen den Revolutionen von 1905 und 1917 (The Russian Baltic Provinces between the 1905/1917 Revolutions), edited by Andrew Ezergailis and Gert von Pistohlkors. Vol. 4 of Quellen und Studien zur baltischen Geschichte (315–29). Cologne: Böhlau, 1982. Struck, Hermann, and Herbert Eulenberg. Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland. Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916. Zensurbuch für die deutsche Presse. Berlin: Hrsg. von der Oberzensurstelle des Kriegspresseamts im März, 1917.

CHAPTER 3

The Diaries of Death AGNĖ NARUŠYTĖ Vilnius Art Academy

Keywords:  Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, Diaries of Death, NKVD, Lithuanian Special Archives, photography, visual culture studies, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, John Berger “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was,’” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940. “It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Only if we could “retain that image of the past,” could we give hope to the dead because the “enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”1 In 2008, the Lithuanian artist Kęstutis Grigaliūnas started his project Diaries of Death hoping to recover the memory of such a moment captured in photographs, which he found in the files of the Lithuanian Special Archives. The files contained documentation of criminal cases against people who were persecuted during the first Soviet occupation in 1940–41. Benjamin’s words resonate also because he was writing them while he himself was facing danger, just before he left France, where the government was surrendering Jewish refugees to the Nazis. In September of that year, detained by the Spanish border police together with a group of others, he took a deadly dose of morphine. The citizens of the former Republic of Lithuania were living in the shadow of 1

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), 255. Benjamin quotes the maxim of the German historian Leopold von Ranke.

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a similar danger, waiting for Soviet NKVD agents to raid their homes, arrest them, and search their possessions.2 Their personal photographs were confiscated, among other things. For more than seventy years those photographs lay hidden in criminal files. Since the beginning of his Diaries of Death project, Grigaliūnas has revealed them in a series of publications and exhibitions. The first book of the project contains portraits, short biographies, and fingerprints of 944 people who were tortured, deported to concentration camps, and/or executed during the first Soviet annexation of Lithuania.3 The second book holds 8,725 portraits of 5,513 people arrested in 1939–43.4 The third book presents installations the artist created in 2011 and photographs of repressed families of Lithuanian officers.5 And the fourth book, The Archive of Images/Notebook No. 1, presents 1,964 photographs found in the NKVD files that document the fate of people arrested in 1940–41.6 All of them are here, no matter the person or object represented and the purpose for which they were used. Most of them were not taken in moments of danger. Some photos could be dated as far back as the last decades of the nineteenth century, but the majority were personal photos from the interwar period showing everyday life in the independent state: single and group portraits made by studio photographers, records of important moments, such as weddings, christenings, first Holy Communions, or funerals, along with snapshots taken during parties, family outings, trips, sports games, and so on. There were also many photographs of public events, such as military parades, oaths, signings, and public speeches, 2 Народный комиссариат внутренних дел (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del): Russian for “The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.” NKVD was the Soviet intelligence agency organizing secret operations and persecuting opposition and also preparing ground for mass deportations. In 1954, it was transformed into the KGB. 3 Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, Mirties dienoraščiai/Diaries of Death (Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2010). 4 Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, Mes—iš pirmo vežimo/The First Trainload: Deportees of 1941 (Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2012). 5 Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, Aš nežinojau, Mylimasai, kad bučiuoju tave paskutinį kartą/I did not know, my Beloved, that I was kissing you for the last time (Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2012). 6 The volume also contains the longer version of this text: Agnė Narušytė, “Kad priešas liautųsi laimėjęs,” in Vaizdų archyvas/Sąsiuvinis Nr. 1, eds. Kęstutis Grigaliūnas and Agnė Narušytė (Vilnius: Vaizdų archyvas, 2014), 13–37.

The Diaries of Death

captured by famous photojournalists of the time, but most of them were taken by unknown photographers without any stamps or inscriptions. They have survived as the only images of those people’s lives, which probably were flashing through their minds as they sat in prison cells, answered interrogators’ questions, endured torture, and waited for death or deportation. Now gathered together at last, these photographs have been fused into a seamless image of the generation, like a flash of common memory. What does this memory tell us? What should be done with it? What else can we learn from those images? Is it possible to create something more powerful than these books, from which thousands of repressed people stare at us?

THE FILES’ MEMORY The files that record the beginning of repressions start earlier than the official annexation of Lithuania, on August 3, 1940. According to Arvydas Anušauskas, a major authority in the history of intelligence agencies in Lithuania, immediately after the Soviet army occupied the territory on June 15, 1940, the majority of staff of the Lithuanian State Security Department (SSD) was replaced by local communists, who had returned from political asylum in the Soviet Union or had been released from prisons in Lithuania. Yet their activities were controlled from Moscow: on August 1, 1940, sixty-one NKVD specialists were sent directly from the central office.7 On August 26, 1940, the SSD was liquidated so that the newly formed department of NKVD could start its operations, which followed tried and tested schemes of suppressing opposition and organizing terror.8 Before mass deportations on June 14, 1941,9 no fewer than 6,606 people—mostly intelligence officers and agents, military officers, police officers, politicians, and journalists—were arrested.10 They were   7 Arvydas Anušauskas, Lietuvos žvalgyba 1918–1940 (Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2014), 313–14; Arvydas Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje. Slaptosios veiklos bruožai (Vilnius: Asociacija “Atvažiavo meška,” 2008), 23.   8 Anušauskas, Lietuvos žvalgyba 1918–1940, 313–14; Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 25.   9 On June 14–18, 1941, 7,350 people were deported to labor camps, and 12,330 to exile in northern regions of Siberia. Almost half of deportees were younger than 16 years old, 556 of them babies under 1 year old. Most men were separated from their families and deported to labor camps. 10 Of those arrested, 25.2% were Polish, 5.1% Jewish, 4% Russians, 65.7% Lithuanians. Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 25.

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interrogated by using various means of pressure, such as dehumanizing prison conditions and torture, nicknamed “physical impact”: beating, breaking bones, cutting off various parts of the body, holding immersed in cold water, or keeping in darkness for days.11 Documents in the criminal files were written in Russian, even when the Lithuanian forms of the SSD were used initially, because half of staff did not speak Lithuanian.12 When the accusatory material was compiled, the case files were sent to Moscow, where Special Councils judged the accused by hundreds. Many officers, security servants, and policemen who were arrested in June–July were immediately deported to prisons in Russia13 without any charge, and their files were started there, two months after arrest, sometimes even after their death.14 Documents that could not be used for operative purposes were eventually destroyed, and only those that could help further identification and prosecution of anti-Soviet elements were sent back to the NKVD department in Lithuania after the war.15 11 NKVD left no records of torture, except for the bodies found in mass graves after they fled from Nazis and evacuated their archives and their prisoners at the end of June 1941. For example, in Petrašiūnai cemetery, bodies of 41 prisoners killed in March–June 1941 were found. Their feet and arms were tied together, apart from being shot, they showed signs of beating and stabbing, and many noses, tongues, fingers, and sexual organs were cut off, skulls, legs, and arms broken. See Arvydas Anušauskas, “Sovietinis genocidas ir jo padariniai,” in Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos centras (Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania). See the website at http://www.genocid.lt/centras/en/; accessed November 2, 2015, http://www.genocid.lt/GRTD/Tremtis/arvydas1.htm. 12 In May 1941, the 138 members of commanding staff of NKVD (heads of departments and subdivisions, their assistants, operative agents, interrogators, and inspectors) were of the following nationalities: 72 Russians (52.2%), 43 Lithuanians (31.2%), and 23 Jews (16.6%). Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 25. 13 From July 10 to 17, 1940, 507 highest officers of Lithuanian intelligence services were arrested and then deported to Moscow on July 23, 1940. Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 23. 14 Anušauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 24. For example, Petras Kirlys, a military intelligence officer of the Lithuanian SSD, was arrested on July 18, 1940, and on July 26, 1940, his last photograph was taken in Moscow Lefortovo prison, but the case file was started only after two months, on September 17, 1940, misleadingly informing of his arrest in the NKVD prisoner admission point. Captain of Head Office Liudas Urniežius was imprisoned in Norilsk, died on January 25, 1942, but was condemned by the Special Council to ten years imprisonment only on May 15, 1943. Anušauskas, Lietuvos žvalgyba 1918–1940, 312–15. 15 Inga Petravičiūtė, “Sovietinio saugumo struktūra ir funkcijos Lietuvoje (1941–1954),” in Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania website; accessed November 2, 2015, http://www.genocid.lt/Leidyba/1/Inga1.htm. See also Arvydas Anušauskas, Pirmoji sovietinė okupacija: Teroras ir nusikaltimai žmoniškumui (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006).

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Criminal files, fake or not, follow an established sequence: the arrest order, the search protocol, receipts for confiscated possessions, the prisoner’s questionnaire with fingerprints, an envelope with two police photographs—one facial front view and one side view, protocols of interrogations, the charge, the verdict, extracts from the population registry, decisions to rehabilitate or not. Personal data and charges of anti-Soviet activities are repeated everywhere. Guilt is always deemed proven, though conclusions state that “there is no direct evidence.” Circumstantial evidence is enough. It is recorded in interrogation protocols, which do not mention how the information and confessions were elicited. The “evidence” sounds horrific, most of it is hearsay and gossip: The accused boasted to someone about hearing on the radio that life in Lithuania under the Nazis was better than life in Russia. Former Lithuanian military officers, now managers of a weapons factory, during a dinner party to “celebrate” Red Army Day, criticized Soviet nationalization, inadequate salaries for workers, and the imposition of the Russian spirit on Lithuanian art. A maid, who had been fired, confirmed that her ex-employer’s guests were very unhappy with the Soviet government. And a factory was not meeting the five-year plan: obvious sabotage.16 Such “facts” were enough for the prosecutor to conclude that the accused was an agitator fighting against Soviet authorities, belonged to the underground of counterrevolutionary terrorists, and thus had to be tried by the Special Council of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union.17 Such a conclusion was invariably followed by the 16 Interrogation protocol of Jurgis Norkus, May 5, 1942, file No. 3283, Lithuanian Special Archives (Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas; hereafter abbr. LYA), K-1, P-8858, p. 39. The file was started June 17, 1941, closed January 28, 1967. It included cases of Jurgis Norkus (deported to the Reshoty labor camp in Krasnoyarsk region on June 17, 1941, released in 1946, deported to Krasnoyarsk region in 1951, released in 1956, did not return); Domininkas Digrys (deported to the Reshoty labor camp in Krasnoyarsk region on June 17, 1941, released in 1946); Vytautas Dumbrava (arrested June 17, 1941, died on October 24, 1943, in the Reshoty labor camp, Krasnoyarsk region); Jonas Sakalauskas (deported to the Reshoty labor camp on June 17, 1941, Krasnoyarsk region, released in 1956). 17 Most people were charged according to the article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Union, which imposed responsibility for “the fight against the worker’s class and revolutionary movement.”

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recommendation “полагал бы: расстрел”18—“I would suggest: execution by shooting.” The Special Council did not always assign the most severe punishment. Luckily. Because during the thaw of the 1960s, such files were reviewed and conclusions were different: no criminal content, no proof, thus rehabilitate and close the file. A person for whom such a file was opened found himself in a trial process with no way out. Like Franz Kafka’s Josef K., wherever he goes, he always finds himself in the judicial palace; whomever he meets, everyone talks about his process; he is guilty, though nobody knows of what.19 They will find the evidence. Every word pronounced or written by the arrested person at any moment of his life may be seized on, distorted, and interpreted as necessary. No matter what he thinks or says to evade the accusations, to justify himself, to appear better and more respectable, more honest and loyal to the Soviet order, he will still be just a criminal. You are guilty whatever you think about yourself or others, whatever reasons you may provide. It is no use, for example, to argue that the machines in your factory broke down from an excessive workload because you had to meet unrealistic plans without qualified workers or spare parts.20 Photographs also become evidence of guilt—your own guilt, the guilt of others. The life recorded in them no longer matters. However you have lived, when you find yourself in the Process you are guilty. The shutter depressed by the prison photographer clicks twice on your face as a seal of your guilt. Everybody is processed in the same manner: a front facial view and a profile, according to the practice established in the nineteenth century. The photographs are like prison cells. Now Grigaliūnas has compiled them in books. Other photographs were left out, those from life in freedom. But the context of the file puts that freedom in quotation marks. Nobody is free when there is an interested observer. The very act of taking a photo presumes the observer. Prosecution merely reveals this fact, because every innocent-looking snapshot has a function in this 18 “polagal bi: rasstrel.” 19 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. John Williams (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2008). 20 File of Jurgis Norkus, No. 3283, LYA, K-1, P-8858, interrogation protocol, May 11, 1942, p. 43.

The Diaries of Death

Figure 1. Photograph from the file of Juozas Bagdonis, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 12889/3, p. 119). Caption beneath the image (in the Russian language): “In the center of the photo you see Bagdonis Gediminas with his young wife, their parents on either side (the one on the far right is Bagdonis J. V., whom you have been looking for).”

process. For example, after the war, the KGB needs to find a man who was arrested in 1941 and released on an oversight. Documents flow from offices all over the Soviet Union: “He is not registered in this district.” Then a photographer helps. Beneath a photograph is a caption in Russian (always in Russian): “In the center of the photo you see Bagdonis Gediminas with his young wife, their parents on either side (the one on the far right is Bagdonis J. V., whom you have been looking for)” (fig. 1). It is shown to his former neighbors and acquaintances. Some recognize him, some do not.21 There is nothing special in the photograph, just six people lined up for a portrait. It is one of many typical images that nobody would give a second thought. The recorded moment would not seem to be meaningful to anyone but the people 21 File of Juozas Bagdonis, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 12889/3, p. 119.

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present here and their loved ones. Like the Kodachrome print dated November 1961, which is pasted on the next page. The same handwriting informs us in Russian: “The funeral of Bagdonis. Vytautas stands at his head and Gediminas at his feet—both are his sons.”22 The man they had been looking for was found in the United States of America, already dead: the file was closed. But the photographs stay in the file. They seem to warn us: every life, even the dullest, is full of evidence; each of its moments can be extracted by the camera and used as a proof of guilt. Thus, you are always in the Process, but you do not always know it. When you realize this, it is usually too late, the image is already captured. No unintended gesture can be deleted from it, and nothing can be denied. Because photography forgets nothing. The cover of the file bears the words “Хранить вечно”23—“Retain forever.” In fact, the files are still kept, even if the keepers have changed. The first keepers sought to preserve guilt. Yet when the system collapsed, the inscription turned against them: it will be always possible to read the names of those who carried out the arrests, searched homes, interrogated, denounced, betrayed, or otherwise served the regime. The red inscription in Lithuanian, “reabilituoti”—“rehabilitate,” rejects the accusations dryly without going deeper into the absurd illusion of legality that the regime was trying to create by giving out receipts for confiscated possessions and requiring a signature to confirm that the accused had read the verdict. The photographs also served the illusion, but now their status is uncertain. The moments of life recorded in them are no longer important, the names of people have been forgotten, and almost everyone is dead. The photographs do not prove anything—from them you cannot learn about either the process or the prosecutors. They do not tell us anything about the machine of war, the Soviet system, or the prison; they do not rehabilitate anything. Perhaps this is why many of them were destroyed and others lay in the darkness of the archives until our artist discovered them. Grigaliūnas’s work with the photographs found in the files has been recognized: in 2011 he was awarded the National Prize for Culture and 22 Ibid., 120. 23 “Khranit vechno.”

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Art. It may seem that he has already achieved his purpose in creating a reminder of some devalued concepts and the destinies of people. To be sure, the abundance of police photographs shows the extent of the Soviet system’s crimes. But memory tends to fade; new events overshadow the past. People passing by the KGB building on Gedimino Prospect in Vilnius, with the names of former prisoners carved into its wall,24 no longer see their deaths. The inscriptions are discreet, blending in with the texture of the stone. The gashes of memory are simply skimmed over: one looks at this wall only while passing by, because the street itself induces movement and a certain approach to the monument; it is seen every day, part of the mundane that one barely notices because of its familiarity. It is easy to bury knowledge under the soil of indifference in order to continue living undisturbed and to complain about day-to-day problems with nostalgia for the safety that the Soviet system provided. But then Grigaliūnas’s purpose will never be fully achieved.

WHAT CAN PHOTOGRAPHY DO? Theorists who discussed this question at first focused on photographs depicting cruelty—the two world wars left many. There were hopes that the publication of such photographs would open society’s eyes, awaken collective consciousness, and ensure that this violent history would not be repeated. But the power of photographs to cure humanity from war proved disappointingly weak. As far back as 1972, art critic John Berger commented on the impact of such photography: As we look at them, the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation. Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action. We try to emerge from the moment of the photograph back into our lives. As we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption of our lives appears to be a hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen.25 24 This monument was designed by the artist Gitenis Umbrasas. 25 John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 42.

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A photograph that cuts a horrible spectacle out of the flow of time only gives us permission to forget: the reason for looking at such images disappears along with justice, which people who are suffering now would like to hope for in the future when they are remembered.26 In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag agreed in essence with Berger: “And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.”27 She recalled noteworthy examples of antiwar propaganda: the film I Accuse (J’accuse, 1919) by Abel Gance, where the dead rise from their graves, and German pacifist Ernst Friedrich’s book War against War! (Krieg dem Kriege!, 1924), showing photographs of cruelly maimed bodies from the archives of war and medicine. The failure of those endeavors to prevent war led Sontag to a paradoxical conclusion: instead of awakening compassion and protecting us from new wars, such images accustom us to their consumption and thus even encourage violence.28 When photographs testifying to the cruelty of the Soviet regime were brought to light, they only motivated violence, which was directed against the Jews during the Nazi occupation. For example, in August–September 1941, the newspaper Išlaisvintas Panevėžietis published photographs by Jonas Žitkus (Žitkevičius), who recorded the victims of Red terror, showing nineteen people tortured and executed by retreating NKVD troops in Panevėžys on June 25, 1941.29 In the issue of August 10, next to the photograph of the body of a young surgeon, Antanas Gudonis, and his widow, who had been left with a six-month-old baby, an article was published, entitled “Bolsheviks,” which argued that “no Lithuanian of pure blood, pure mentality was a hundred per cent bolshevik” and only Russians and Jews were.30 Such juxtaposition might have encouraged Lithuanians’ involvement in the extermination of Jews. Again, in the 1980s amid the movement for independence, photographs of NKVD victims who were tortured to death shocked society and fueled national sentiment, but the memory soon faded. And I doubt if repetition 26 Ibid., 58–59. 27 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 8. 28 Ibid., 12, 55, 63. 29 Išlaisvintas panevėžietis, no. 6–9 (1941). 30 V. Traknys, “Bolševikai,” Išlaisvintas panevėžietis, no. 9, 1941, 1.

The Diaries of Death

would change anything. Unlike in Soviet times, mass culture at present is overflowing with images of violent death. People consume death as entertainment and see compassion as something inappropriate for mere images on a screen. Debates about the postwar partisan resistance movement lose ground with the admission that “both sides were horrible,” as though the most important thing is to avoid conflict and mask the trauma. In this context, how could photography awaken conscience to prevent violence and destruction? Berger and Sontag arrived at the same conclusion: to make photographs work, a narrative is needed that prolongs the time of looking. With a narrative, instead of shocking, the photographs help the viewer to understand and think. The two authors offer slightly different approaches to creating such a narrative. Sontag saw a suitable example in the work of Jeff Wall, where the mysteriousness of images hovering between reality and fiction makes the viewer linger and slowly realize that, in fact, he or she “can’t understand, can’t imagine” the experience of war.31 Berger thought it better not to make the viewer shiver with horror, but to try to preserve the memory of the photographic context, to restore the “discontinuous moment” to the period of history, relating the past with the pre­sent: “We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires some­­thing of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is.”32 It seems that Grigaliūnas follows both approaches. There is no violence in the photographs he has published so far: the mug shots of people arrested and later killed or deported by the NKVD show no signs of death. They are merely squeezed into the very format of photography. Death and violence are only implied, left for the imagination, which “can’t understand, can’t imagine.” And the time of looking is prolonged by the sheer number of collected portraits: shot after shot, they slowly descend on one’s consciousness as an avalanche of truth. Yet in Archive of Images/Notebook No. 1, Grigaliūnas has chosen a different strategy. Anonymous are the people in the standard photographs of those who have been arrested, though every one of them gazes into our eyes. In this respect, Diaries of Death recalls analogous cases of genocide 31 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 98. 32 Berger, About Looking, 65.

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photography. For example, six thousand people condemned to death in a prison in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, intelligentsia and revolutionaries, were photographed before execution. Later some of the images were collected in a book, The Killing Fields. They are, writes Sontag, “forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera; the experience is sickening.”33 But, she claims, they are just masses; we only remember their uniform horror.34 The prison photographs collected from the Lithuanian Special Archives also only show the crowd of the repressed gazing unvaryingly into the unknown. We look at them only once. By publishing photos of the repressed that were taken before their arrest, Grigaliūnas revives the individuality of the prisoners through the memory of their context. He connects what was to what is with the help of a double view.

THE PROSECUTOR’S GAZE This array of photographs makes present the gaze of the prosecutor, because they were selected and presented to him. This is why the presence of some photographs in the case files is surprising. What could be proven by a photo of naked men bathing in the sea? (fig. 2) Especially when one considers that there is nothing useful here: it is impossible to distinguish faces or figures, for the photo is shot from a distance and blurred. It seems like the NKVD interrogator took them in order to gaze at naked bodies undisturbed, something rare in both Lithuanian and Soviet culture. Or maybe—a more sinister thought arises—he took pleasure in the fact that he had managed to terminate their lives, that such enviable mundane happiness was no longer possible. These are just my guesses. Those who confiscated the photographs to identify people had no interest in their aesthetical, historical, or social meaning. To recognize somebody one does not even need the full photograph: they are often crudely torn or cut off in a quasi-ritualistic act of violence against the photographs. It symbolizes what was done to the people portrayed: they were similarly removed from their loved ones and their homes. The prosecutor’s gaze leaves physical traces. 33 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 49. 34 Ibid.

The Diaries of Death

Figure 2.  Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 18614/3).

The fact of recognition also left traces: crosses are placed above people’s heads and names, which are written in Russian (fig. 3). The inscriptions interrupt the time of the photograph. The prosecutor’s gaze controls my perception: every mark leads to the file. It denies contemplation, stops the Barthesian studium of investigating the material qualities of the past, and imagining the story behind the photographed moment prevents dreaming.35 That would be naively sentimental. Even sacrilegious. It would rob the dead of hope and let the enemy continue winning. And the prick of the Barthesian punctum is also specific here: a viewer transported to childhood memories by some detail in these photographs can only become ashamed of such an egoistic pleasure at the expense of the other’s suffering. The punctum of the photographs found in the NKVD files focuses on one single question: What happened to all these people? It is really not even a question, but knowledge—almost knowledge. Almost knowledge, because unlike the prison portraits, these photos are not only of political prisoners or criminals. A file is usually opened for 35 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 2010).

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Figure 3. Photograph by Mejeris Smečechauskas, 1936, gelatine silver print. From the file of Vincas Mikuckas. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. P13033 Li).

one person. It contains photographs related only to him or her. There is no indication that all the photographed people were arrested: there are many children, women sitting on the grass, platoons of riflemen lined up, and so on. Even the paranoiac gaze of the NKVD agent would not turn them all into criminals. Yet the happy life captured in the photographs must have been touched. The facts of history do not allow us to think otherwise: everyone becomes vulnerable when the gaze of the representative of a penal institution writing in Russian reaches them through a photograph. This is the punctum in reverse: not a detail in the photograph pricking the viewer’s soul, but the viewer-prosecutor pricking the photograph’s detail. I experience this punctum when I look at the portraits of Tomas Jurgis and Zofija Daugirdas from Marijampolė (fig. 4). The first one was taken around 1939 in a studio, with the folds of a curtain visible in the background. They are dressed up. The serene lawyer wears a suit and a tie; the teacher, smiling only with her large warm eyes, sports a dark evening dress with frilly shoulders and a band under her neck; two small boys in sailors’ costumes— Algimantas and Rimvydas—stand between them. Four other photographs show only the mother and children. Their clothes are mundane: sloppy

The Diaries of Death

Figure 4. Family portrait of Tomas Jurgis and Zofija Daugirdas together with their sons, Rimvydas and Algimantas, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li).

dotted trousers on the boys, thick coats and fur hats, the mother’s checkered blouse. The props of the studio are only rags, a scruffy chair, and a flag with a pentagram (fig. 5). Two photographs have been “embellished” by integrating the image into a crudely cut shape of the eternal flame or an artist’s palette. This studio is in another part of the world: the Verkh Obsk Soviet Farm in the Altai region. On the back of the photographs we read (in Russian): “дорогому мужу и папе/жена и дети,” “дарагой папка /Твой Римас и АЛЬГИС”36 (“to our dear husband and daddy/your wife and children,” “dear daddy/Your Rimas and ALGIS”). Zofija sent the photographs together with letters written in Russian (so the NKVD agents could understand) to her husband in the Reshyoty labor camp: “What has happened to you? It is already three months since I got a letter from you. The last letter was 8 August. We are all well, but what’s the point if you are not here.”37 At that exact moment Tomas Jurgis Daugirdas was awaiting execution in the camp. His crime consisted of having led the investigation of communists’ 36 “dorogomu muzhu i pape/zhena i deti,” “daragoi papka/Tvoi Rimas i Algis.” 37 Letter dated November 20, 1942, file of Tomas Jurgis Daugirdas, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li, p. 19/20.

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Figure 5. Zofija Daugirdienė with her sons, Algimantas and Rimvydas, Altai region, gelatine silver print. Inscription on the back (in the Russian language): “to our dear husband and daddy/your wife and children.” Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li).

cases, which was part of his job as a court investigator in the Republic of Lithuania. Two photographs were made in the camp: a profile and a straight-on headshot (fig. 6). In them it is hard to recognize his darkened face. Two inscriptions in his medical card read: “порок сердца,” “истощение”38 (“heart defect,” “exhaustion”).39 Looking again at the family studio portrait made in Lithuania, I try to imagine the prosecutor’s mind. He hardly needs to identify anyone: all the persons are known. He sees the boys’ smooth skin, the woman’s painted lips, her meticulously twisted locks. He looks into their eyes—the warmly smiling eyes of Zofija, the surprised eyes of Rimvydas, the serious eyes of Algimantas, the peacefully dreamy eyes of Tomas Jurgis—and hates their happiness. He dreams of cutting one of them off, moving and reclothing the others. As if making a photo montage. 38 “porok serdtsa,” “istoshchenie.” 39 File of Tomas Jurgis Daugirdas, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li, p. 19/11.

The Diaries of Death

Figure 6. Mug shot of Tomas Jurgis Daugirdas taken in Reshyoty labor camp, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li).

For his photo montage, as for restructuring society, the prosecutor chose private photographs: not reporting done for newspapers, not art created for exhibitions, but documents from the family album. According to Berger, a private photograph is “a memento from a life being lived”; therefore, it is “surrounded by the meaning from which it was severed.” Meanwhile, events represented in a public photograph “have nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event,” it only adds to the memory of somebody unknown, a stranger, and the stranger is not the photographer, but the one using the photograph. The latter, Berger claims, takes on the role of a judging and vengeful god.40 The private photographs of Lithuanian citizens were taken out of their context of “life being lived” to make them “public” and accessible to the judging and avenging user. He did not know the lives of those people; their ritual, ethical, and existential meanings were alien to him. The user gave his own meaning to the photographs, turning them into evidence, testimonials, denunciations, and tools of punishment. 40 Berger, About Looking, 56–57.

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Here, for example, are four photographs found in the file of Aleksas Rekašius. Their sequence was established by the prosecutor, who wrote numbers in blue ink.41 Photo No. 1: In a field behind a village church, nine men have gathered and lined up for a photograph: eight stand in a puddle with their hands in their pockets, some are smoking, some are serious and others are laughing. Four of them wear typical berets. The other four wear net hats. Above three of them the names have been written in blue ink: Мур. Рекаш. Янкаускас42 (fig. 7a). Photo No. 2: The men have been digging stripped to the shorts, but have stopped for the photo, too exhausted to smile. Four of them lift shovels filled with soil. There is a shovel stuck into the dirt, perhaps the photographer’s. A name is written above the man in the center: Мурауск.43 The church cannot be seen in the background, but there are football goals: a blue arrow draws attention to them (fig. 7b). Photo No. 3: The same men pose for a photo again: four of them are sitting up and four are reclining. This time they are without shovels or headwear, though one of them wears a net hat, the one who has remained unnamed. Soft light reveals their muscles, as if molded from the same dirt they have been digging. There are no inscriptions here (fig. 7c). Photo No. 4: With their clothes on, perhaps after having finished their work, the same men rest before a wiry fence and two willows: two are sitting; six are reclining. A village with a church is visible in the distance (fig. 7d). The object of their digging here, along with the meanings of the blue inscriptions and arrows, becomes clear from Rekašius’s file. There is a gap between the action recorded in private photographs and the meaning given to them by the alien gaze of the user-prosecutor. Aleksandras Rekašius was a soldier of the Soviet army who had been working in the Gorky machine factory.44 Red Army soldiers arrested him on May 18, 1942, and charged him with anti-Soviet activism. When his room in the barracks of the Sixteenth Division was 41 File of Aleksas Rekašius, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 46753/3 bb, p. 49. 42 Mur. Rekash. Yankauskas. 43 Murausk. 44 It is not known whether he joined the Sixteenth Lithuanian Division of the Soviet army voluntarily or was taken forcefully, as was often the case.

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Figures 7a–d.  Four photographs from the file of Aleksas Rekašius, gelatine silver prints. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 46753/3 bb).

searched, fifty-seven postcards and photographs were retrieved (only the four described above were found in the file).45 He was questioned on the same day. The first question was about the four photographs: In photograph No. 1 found in your possession,46 where you stand second from the left, there is a badge of the fascist organization Young Lithuania on the lapel of your jacket. In photographs No. 2 and No. 3,47 you are also wearing the black shorts with a white stripe of Young Lithuania’s fascist sports organization, JSO. In photograph No. 2, it is visible that you are working on the sports ground. All your activities prove completely that you belong to the fascist organization. Tell us in detail about your activities in that organization. 45 File of Aleksas Rekašius, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 46753/3 bb: Ruling for Arrest, May 17, 1942, p. 1; Search Protocol, May 18, 1942, p. 5. 46 Ibid., p. 49/16. 47 Ibid., pp. 49/17, 49/18.

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The prisoner explained that he had pinned the badge and sewn the stripe on for aesthetic reasons, urged by Murauskas and Jankauskas, who had been “Young Lithuanians”; he did not belong to the organization, and they were simply draining the marsh that day.48 The four photographs, however, were deemed incontrovertible evidence, as was the diary taken during the search, in which he described what he saw in Russia while traveling on a train that was transporting people to Siberia.49 He was the manager of the grocery shop on coach No. 612288: “I saw the streets full of drunk people: shabby people roll about, sitting, asking for spare change. Old men with beards and small children wait in horrible queues for vodka and beer. It is simply awful to look, many beggars.”50 This and other observations about Soviet citizens were underlined by the prosecutor. Rekašius was condemned to five years in a labor camp. His young wife, Antanina, who had been traveling with him, sent her photograph and a letter to her husband: “When you see my picture I kiss you pressing to my lips . . .”51 But that photograph is missing from the file. In the hands of the user-prosecutor, the photograph accuses in reverse because it immortalizes an everyday action (men working, who took their shirts off because it was hot), and it indifferently records details that had nothing to do with the intended purpose of the photograph, such as the striped shorts. But the user did something here. Having taken the private photographs from their album and closed them up in files for “permanent retention,” he annihilated the memory of the lived life and, together with it, the meaning. The terminated, broken lives became empty stains in the histories of those families. Many photographs also disappeared from the files. Now, Grigaliūnas is saving what remains, transferring private photographs into a new public domain, offering them to new users—people like me, and anybody else who reads his books or visits the exhibitions. Berger’s warning still 48 Ibid., Interrogation Protocol, May 18, 1942, p. 7. 49 Ibid., Diary, p. 49; Certificate of the Tauragė Agricultural Cooperative “Freedom,” June 16, 1941, p. 50/4. 50 Diary of Aleksas Rekašius in file No. 32, LYA, archive file No. 46753/3 bb, p. 49/6. 51 Ibid., Letter of Antanina Rekašienė, p. 50/23.

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stands: the primary meaning of these photographs is alien to us. How, then, can I avoid becoming yet another vengeful judge?

MY GAZE These photographs are now lying on my desk (and yours, dear reader). My gaze coincides uncannily with the executioner’s gaze: we are both looking for something as we search through somebody else’s photos. In order to separate myself from him, to prevent myself from just closing those people up in the narrative of victims, I first carefully look into the photographs without opening the files: I want to know what the images themselves can tell me. They come alive; time starts flowing (figs. 8a–c). And it flows in a special way in photographs. In a static image, Damien Sutton writes, “memory and imagination begin to reflect or refract each other in a manner that creates a disorienting self-consciousness.”52 Then we “can glimpse the enormity of past and future that the photograph suspends,” as if exploring the “crystal image of time.”53 Memory and imagination tear the image in opposite directions, but there is no narrative. It has to be created from fragments in order to reduce that enormity. It is not so simple, because I know nothing about most of the recorded events and people: the life in interwar Lithuania that gave meaning to them already disappeared long ago; there is nobody left to remember those moments—the user-prosecutor took care of that (fig. 9). But their totality, collected in one volume by Grigaliūnas, forms a new community, becomes alive. It depicts the state of happiness before the tragedy, like in films about catastrophes (fig. 10). This is an unfinished coda hanging over the turning point between a free Lithuanian society and a Soviet society shackled by fear (as signified by the police photographs). Between the Lithuanian language and the Russian language (the inscriptions signify this). Between a richly colorful life and a grey uniformity. Representatives of various professions huddle in group portraits, most often teachers, doctors, and military officers. There are 52 Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 36. 53 Ibid., 38, 63. Sutton applies Gilles Deleuze’s concept of cinema as a time-image to photography; see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 81.

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Figures 8a–c.  Three photographs from the file of Jonas Rainys, gelatine silver prints. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. P18498).

many people in uniform: the Riflemen’s Brigade and the Air-Defense Brigade, marching, saluting the colors, riding astride, shooting at targets, admiring their modest-looking Audra (“Tempest”) and Žaibas (“Lightning”) tanks, resting, or simply having dropped by the studio to be photographed for memory: alone, or with their wives and children. The first steps of NKVD in Lithuania in 1940 were to eliminate members of non-communist organizations, the military, policemen, prison officers, land owners, factory owners, civil servants, officers, immigrants from Poland, German repatriates, and family members of all those people. The first three categories—noncommunist organizations, the military, and the

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Figure 9.  Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 18614/3).

police—had uniforms, so the abundance of photographs of uniformed people in the files is not surprising. However, everybody else is here also: a fat industrialist at his factory next to a truck with the logo “Br. Smidt,” teachers with their pupils, Jewish boys lifting their heads from books at school and smiling at the photographer, elderly Jews with hats walking in the street, bearded rabbis, Jewish ladies with expressive eyes, people celebrating something in their apartments, campers, builders, passengers on trains, mowers, woodworkers planing off boards, protesters at demonstrations, woodcutters, detectives investigating murders and bureaucrats filling papers, committees sitting in meetings, concerts and performances, simple passers-by in the street, doctors with their patients, patients with their relatives, musicians with their instruments, athletes—even bathing naked men—women in nice flowery dresses tidily coiffed, seamen, shoppers chatting in the shop, day-trippers at Gediminas Castle, people at the dairy, at the tobacco factory, or at the pharmacy. They had themselves photographed with their favorite things and animals: with bicycles, cigarettes, guns, skis, cars, suitcases,

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Figure 10.  Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 34445/3).

skates, hats, motorbikes, boats, dogs, cats, and horses. There are very many of them; the photos are often blurred; it is difficult to discern who is who. I realize: this is a dead world. They no longer exist. This entire culture. Yet all the things I have listed here are just social and cultural facts. They generalize a society of anonymous people. They do not make the photographs speak. What can you say about a person you don’t know, when you have only seen a pile of photographs taken from him or her? Nothing. It is impossible to say anything for sure; so these photographs are useless for history. But the awareness of the prosecutor’s gaze changes our perspective. It makes us look closely into the faces. To seek suspicious details. To fill the gaps between the photographs by using our imagination, reconstructing people’s lives step by step up to the moment they were noticed by the NKVD. The recognized faces become like holes in the fabric of time: we can string history through them. And I suddenly find myself working with the photographs in a similar way to the NKVD agent; I carry out the same procedures. Only our purposes are different: he sorts the photographs in the file

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in order to accuse and destroy; I do it to recreate life. For example, a young man’s face, his curly hair and somewhat arrogant look, attracts my gaze in forty-one photographs. They record, as usual, happy moments: scouts on their day trips, men queuing at the canteen, a parade of swimsuits on the beach, or Figure 11.  Hirša Chaitin (backboys rowing a boat (fig. 11). The man ground left) with other boys is short, so when in the background, rowing a boat, gelatine silver print. he stretches his neck in order to be Image courtesy of Lithuanian seen in the picture. He is particularly Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. happy in front of his football team, 58, F. 45445/3). proudly wearing the Star of David on his chest (fig. 12). Those photographs belong to the file of Hirša Chaitin, who was born in 1920 in the Kirov region, Russia, but his family moved to Šiauliai, Lithuania, when he was still a child. When Hirša grew up, he became a communist, was imprisoned for that by Lithuanian authorities, and then released by the Soviets in 1940 (fig. 13). He next served as a secretary of the primary party organization in the “Audėjas” factory and joined the Red Army, the Sixteenth Lithuanian Division, when the war started.54 But he was wounded in August 1943 and something happened. He deserted the army and was arrested as the enemy of the Russian nation.55 He shouted that he hated Russians for their abuse of Lithuanians and that he was treated not as a soldier, but as a prisoner. He also said that Jewish people were abused in the army, and he declared: “I don’t want to obey anyone here, who is Stalin to me, I am not the subject of Stalin, I am subject only to the President of Lithuania.”56 For this defiance, Chaitin was condemned to ten years imprisonment57 and deported to the Syktyvkar labor camp in the 54 Interrogation protocol of Hirša Chaitin, October 13, 1943, in file of Hirša Chaitin, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. 45445/3, p. 19. 55 Ibid., Ruling for arrest, October 2, 1943, p. 1. 56 Ibid., p. 2, and Interrogation Protocol, October 13, 1943, p. 20. 57 Ibid., Verdict, January 3, 1944, p. 47.

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Figure 12. Hirša Chaitin (in the middle) with his football team, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. 45445/3).

Komi Republic. The forty-one photographs taken during the raid on his barracks shows none of that.58 Photo memories of innocent summers were taken to be used as evidence, but witnesses’ statements were enough in this case. Yet I imagine how the executioner, a true believer in the Soviet doctrine, should have been irritated by such a photograph: a young man, presumably not Hirša, clad in an elegant suit, stands leaning against a shiny car, an unimaginable luxury to a citizen of the Soviet state. His face is reflected in the car window in profile: this photograph is a simulacrum of future repressions that will squeeze all the diverse people in prewar photographs into the uniform format of the mug shot (fig. 14). Thus I recognize the crime of my own gaze. I enlarge the photographs and investigate them on the monitor. I scroll the faces. Separated from the others, they start talking, asking questions, knowing the future, addressing 58 Ibid., Search Protocol, October 16, 1943, p. 7.

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Figure 13. Political prisoners of Šiauliai enforced labor prison, June 18, 1940, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. 45445/3).

me. Their hands betray hidden feelings. One can observe them, which is what the NKVD agent did. And so through those photographs I investigate him, and I investigate myself. They draw me in. I yield to their power and intrude into the past, into the lives of people unknown to me. I would not care about them if not for those files, the suffering and death, and that gaze; if not for the knowledge that they became vulnerable through the photographs. There are no images of death here; there are no dead bodies. And still I catch myself: my gaze on the faces of others ignores their pain, uses it to get material for creating stories, for feeding the imagination. My gaze is not innocent. This monument built of photographs directs one’s gaze against itself. I see myself in the mirror of history and acknowledge the tendency to consume violence, even if for the sake of compassion.

THE STUCK SEED OF TIME It is clear now why Griga­liūnas continues his work. He keeps going to the archives, scanning photographs, making notes of biographies. Memory revived through photography plays a trick on us. Photography, like “the nourishing fruit of the historically understood [,] contains

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time as a precious but tasteless seed,” wrote Benjamin.59 He thought that it was possible to “blast” an epoch, a life, a work of art out of the total whole of homogeneous history by using the vibrating ten­ sions in photographs. The photographs collected from NKVD criminal files are fragments of an epochal explosion. Because they were being photographed before that blast, people did not yet know which way Europe’s history would turn. They did not anticipate such a future for themselves: everyone had his or her individual version of the future. They were all smilFigure 14. Photograph of unidenti- ing because they were capturing fied man from the file of Hirša Chaitin, dear moments. This defeats our gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of resistance to the impact of the Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, F. K-1, images in order to wound us Ap. 58, F. 45445/3). later with the knowledge of the future; then the images become unbearable. The signs of a happy life increase the distance from the state-­ sanctioned violence and death. They block out the separation, torture, beatings, being kept in a sweatbox with water up to your knees for seven days, obscurity, execution, childhood in an orphanage, starvation in labor camps, burial of little ones, cold, and bullying. The different texture of old photographs hides the truth that we are also living now in just the same way, not anticipating such a future for ourselves. It would be like a slap in the face. A contradiction. Absurdity. 59 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263.

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Nonsense. Like them, people now have not yet experienced the cruelty of invaders, the horror of war. Like us, they “can’t understand, can’t imagine.” As they were being photographed by prison photographers, they could already understand and imagine. Their appearance is testimony to that; cruelty and violence were already their present. Thus, in the first three books of the Diaries of Death, those people were radically not us. The procedures of prison photography argue visually that we should not identify with the people in the portraits: this does not concern us; this is the past; genocide is already history; it will not repeat itself, and it is surely impossible that the same should happen to us. And the photographs of freedom state the opposite. Yes, they actualize memory, but the time stuck in them slowly takes on the taste of the future: the present captured here is not much different from our own. The time that was—and will be.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anušauskas, Arvydas. “Sovietinis genocidas ir jo padariniai.” Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos centras (Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania). Accessed November 2, 2015. http:// www.genocid.lt/GRTD/Tremtis/arvydas1.htm. ———. KGB Lietuvoje. Slaptosios veiklos bruožai. Vilnius: Asociacija “Atvažiavo meška,” 2008. ———. Lietuvos žvalgyba 1918–1940. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2014. ———. Pirmoji sovietinė okupacija: Teroras ir nusikaltimai žmoniškumui. Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn; edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Fontana, 1973. Berger, John. About Looking. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Grigaliūnas, Kęstutis. Aš nežinojau, Mylimasai, kad bučiuoju tave paskutinį kartą / I did not know, my Beloved, that I was kissing you for the last time. Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2012.

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———. Mes—iš pirmo vežimo/The First Trainload: Deportees of 1941. Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2012. ———. Mirties dienoraščiai/Diaries of Death. Vilnius: Vilniaus grafikos meno centras, 2010. Išlaisvintas panevėžietis, no. 6–9, 1941. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Translated by John Williams. Ware: Wordsworth, 2008. Narušytė, Agnė. “Kad priešas liautųsi laimėjęs.” In Vaizdų archyvas/ Sąsiuvinis Nr. 1, edited by Kęstutis Grigaliūnas and Agnė Narušytė, 13–37. Vilnius: Vaizdų archyvas, 2014. Petravičiūtė, Inga. “Sovietinio saugumo struktūra ir funkcijos Lietuvoje (1941–1954).” Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos centras (Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania). Accessed November 2, 2015. http://www.genocid.lt/Leidyba/1/Inga1.htm. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2004. Sutton, Damian. Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Traknys, V. “Bolševikai.” Išlaisvintas panevėžietis, no. 9, 1941, 1. Lithuanian Special Archives (Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas, abbr. LYA) Files: Bagdonis, Juozas, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 12889/3. Chaitin, Hirša, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. 45445/3. Daugirdas, Tomas Jurgis, LYA, F. K-1, Ap. 58, F. P13799 Li. Mikuckas, Vincas, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. P13033 Li. Norkus, Jurgis, F. K-1, F. P-8858. Rainys, Jonas, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. P18498. Rekašius, Aleksas, F. K-1, Ap. 59, F. 46753/3 bb.

CHAPTER 4

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II GIEDRĖ JANKEVIČIŪTĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas Keywords: art, everyday life, history, image, Lithuania, memory, Nazi occupation, Ostland, portrait, representation, still life, trauma, visual evidence, World War II World War II, the memories and imaginations of which vary greatly in Western historiography, in Lithuania still pertains to the realm of traumatized memory. There is more than one reason for this situation, which calls for much deeper research and attention than this introductory study can offer. As a brief generalization, Lithuania, together with its neighbor countries, can be said to be stuck in a stage of transition: although the narrative that was forced upon the population as unquestionable truth during the forty-five years of Soviet rule has been discarded, it still retains an influence. Lithuanians are still counting the victims while trying to find the culprits and assess their guilt. An effort that could only be started after independence was renewed. It must be done, as this important part of the country’s history has long been kept in silence, and the silence has complicated ties with the past and with the present. Such an approach, however, would seem to confine historical imagination to a cage, leaving it unable to experience World War II in its multifaceted reality of people living in

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the face of death, suffering, grief, famine, cold, and desperate survival efforts, yet still trying to live their normal lives. After all, despite the incessant mortal danger and anxiety, people got married and loved, bore and reared children, fell ill and recovered, studied and worked, and, of course, also dreamed of a better life. Their daily routines of domestic concerns were brightened by encounters with relatives and friends, and once in a while they had moments of the happiness and peace that they sought by immersing themselves in art—first in cinema, theater, music, and literature, but also in painting, sculpture, and the like. The experience of such things helped, if only for a moment, to forget the surrounding horror and uncertainty. Knowledge of a people’s daily life makes it easier to comprehend any episode from the past. It is particularly important for understanding all that happened in the mid-twentieth century and that still affects us today. Yet the personal experience of war and of life in an occupied country, in this case Lithuania, is still the part of the past about which we know the least. Without such knowledge, a past time remains a time belonging to others. It has no clear place in the consciousness of someone today and does not speak to us, even if its importance is rationally grasped. Desire to overcome this divide is evident—that is what is sparking growing interest in the memoirs, diaries, and letters of survivors. The deposit of mid-twentieth-century Lithuanian history ego-documents became accessible only in the 1990s, with the end of Soviet totalitarianism. Interest in the visual documents of that time is also correspondingly growing. Alongside the images of terror, which long were the only illustration of the Nazi occupation in Lithuania, hitherto unpublished photographs of military actions are spreading.1 The scant photos capturing everyday life of that time are also being made public.2 1

See, for example, illustrations from Lithuanian and Russian archives and from the U.S. Archives and Records Administration in the book about the battles for Vilnius in the summer of 1944: Gintautas Šironas, ed., Liepsnojantis Vilnius. Liudininkų prisiminimai [Vilnius in Flames: Testimonies of Eye-Witnesses]. Vilnius: Briedis, 2014. 2 One of the first publications containing visual materials that document everyday life in 1939–44 is the catalogue of the personal collection of the historian of architecture Algimantas Miškinis: Algimantas Miškinis, ed. Lietuvos istorija atvirukuose ir fotografijose. Nuo seniausių laikų iki XX a. vidurio [The History of Lithuania in Postcards

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The increased interest in everyday life and personal war memory has made it obvious that the successive occupations starting in 1940, by the Soviets, the Nazis, and again the Soviets, not only deformed the historical memory of the people of Lithuania but also destroyed entire layers of visual and material evidence of the past (here we speak about Lithuania, though exactly the same can be said of Latvia and Estonia—the other two Baltic countries with analogous fates). Scores of diaries, letters, and memoirs, along with personal photographs and family albums, were lost in the war and the postwar turmoil, when nobody cared much for their survival. Much of this material was destroyed by the owners themselves, since the occupiers—Soviets and Nazis—could easily transform the simplest letter or family photo into evidence for prosecution.3 Certainly, not everything perished, but the remaining written personal testimonies and visual documents regarding everyday life in the war period do not constitute a systematically coherent group of sources. The scarcity of sources documenting daily life in Nazi-occupied Lithuania was one of the reasons that led me to examine World War II–era Lithuanian works of art as sources of that epoch’s history or, more precisely, evidence of its everyday life.4 In explaining the choice of such a perspective one could add that “images allow us to ‘imagine’ the past more vividly,” as British historian Peter Burke has said.5 It’s true that works of art can give a clearer and more colorful shape to the images evoked by texts and Photographs: From Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century]. Vilnius: National Museum of Lithuania, 2009. 3 Cf. Chapter 3 of this volume, “The Diaries of Death,” by Agnė Narušytė. 4 The concept of everyday life in this chapter corresponds to its common understanding as a familiar and concretely perceived reality of life organized around the “here” of personal physical space and the “now” of the personal present. It refers to the ways in which an individual or a group of people typically feels, thinks, and acts in their daily practices. It is important to note that everyday life for the most part happens by itself, without immediate reflection on one’s actions, decisions, and assessments. That is why knowledge of everyday life helps us reconstruct the routine and its constituent actions, which are necessary for the sense of human survival and safety. It enables us to recreate emotional responses, moods, and reflections—the changing and ephemeral mental reality that is lacking in the official discourse. While exploring everyday life, we get to know what is significant for specific individuals as social subjects. 5 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 13.

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and photographs. They can offer us a closer look at the faces and moods of the people who lived during a certain period. This conviction underlies some of the assumptions and conclusions of my study here. My goal is to unveil the traits and occurrences of everyday life in the period of Nazi occupation that were captured by the works of local artists in Lithuania in 1941–44. I will discuss how they convey that reality and raise the question of whether—and if so, in what way—this complements our knowledge of everyday life in German-occupied Lithuania. I also seek to make a contribution to Lithuanian art history, in which the middle part of the twentieth century is still insufficiently illumined. Clearly, an authentic work of art should be assessed first of all as a means of self-expression of the artist, the fruit of his or her imagination, but it also unavoidably records signs of the environmental influence and transmits a view of its own time. Thus, suitably queried, it can serve to shed light on that epoch. Works of art reflect the material conditions and circumstances of the time when they were created,6 give documental information, and also— this is even more interesting and important—reveal the psychological states and moods of the artists and their contemporaries. In this way they inform us about the atmosphere and situations that are difficult to verbalize. Thus works of art are not merely “traces of the past,” to quote Burke, but they also help to verify and supplement information from other sources—photographs, films, press illustrations, and texts—regarding the reality of the time. “The diversity and complexity of what was seen, and made to be seen, demands our attention,” British historian Ludmilla Jordanova has written, asserting the merits of visual and material evidence in historical practice. 6 A closer look, for instance, at the materials used by painters in the war period can add more color to the history of artists’ daily life. Rich layers of colorful paint sometimes conceal a support of poor-quality plywood, cardboard, or the waxed cloth commonly used to cover a kitchen table. And paintings made on sack canvas, which was used to wrap parcels, not only reveal the poverty-induced thrift made compulsory by the war, but they also serve as documentary proof that villages supported cities with daily necessities, above all, foodstuffs. Addresses on the paintings’ reverse sides reveal this: the artist’s parents or other relatives with farms in the countryside were the senders, and the city-dwelling authors of the paintings were the receivers.

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However, she also stresses that a historian must assess a variety of functional contexts for an object that was meant to be viewed, and must always keep at least three basic questions in mind when constructing an interpretation: How did the author view his or her creation? How did contemporaries see the work? How do we see it?7 I regard the statement as important, and therefore it has been taken into account for the purpose of my analysis here. *** Unlike in neighboring Poland, where Nazi occupation brought public artistic life to a brutal halt, such activity in Lithuania did not cease, though its circumstances were completely different than before the war. The German authorities allowed the continued activity of the Lithuanian Artists Union, with chapters in Kaunas and Vilnius (an earlier organization of the same name was reregistered, taking the occasion to review the list of members, crossing off Jews and Poles). The Lithuanian Artists Union was overseen by an organ of the puppet Lithuanian government. It received subsidies and so could offer some financial support for its members in that difficult moment. It organized several survey and solo exhibitions, also publishing their catalogues. Two of the country’s higher-education art schools—the Vilnius Art Academy and the Kaunas Institute of Applied Arts—continued in operation until mid- 1943, when the local Nazi authorities decided to close them along with all of Lithuania’s institutions of higher education. The country’s largest art museums—Vytautas the Great Museum of Culture in Kaunas and the Vilnius Municipal Art Museum—operated right up to the end of the war and even expanded their collections with exhibits from showings of artwork by local and shipped-in German artists, some of which they received as gifts and some of which they managed to purchase.8 Galleries that traded in works of art functioned throughout the period of occupation in Kaunas and Vilnius. They ensured that there was a market for art and created the conditions for artists to work not only 7 Ludmilla Jordanova, Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 8 Daina Kamarauskienė, ed., Istorijos štrichai Nacionalinis M. K. Čiurlionio dailės muziejus 1921–2011 [Traces of History: National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum, 1921–2011] (Kaunas: M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2011), 94–102.

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for official clients, who had to meet censorship requirements, but also for the tastes and needs of private clients, in other words, more freely. On the other hand, it was only Lithuanian artists who were able to officially make a living as professional artists, sell their works, and take part in public artistic life. The community of Vilnius-based Polish visual artists9 were relegated to second-class status. These Poles lost their membership in the Lithuanian Artists Union and, consequently, the ability to acquire materials and tools for their work. They were also forbidden from teaching at higher schools of art and displaying their works at exhibitions. Still, the majority of these artists continued their activity, working for private clients and the Catholic Church.10 This study examines works of art that were created in Lithuania during the years of World War II but not necessarily made public at that time. The research presented here has sought to encompass works that express contemporaries’ authentic thoughts, experiences, and moods, along with changes of lifestyle or environment that were provoked by the war. With the aim of reconstructing as thoroughly as possible the everyday life that is captured in the artworks, my discussion focuses not only on what the artists depicted and how, but it also attempts to discern what aspects of wartime daily life they tried to hide or ignore, or, in other words, what the artists did not represent and why. Alongside paintings and sculptures by Lithuanian artists that are well established in the Lithuanian art history discourse, examples of art by   9 Vilnius, Lithuania’s historical capital, from 1919 until 1939 was part of Poland; the city was rejoined to Lithuania under an agreement with the Soviet Union dated October 10, 1939. The Soviet Union had captured this territory along with other parts of eastern Poland when, as an ally of Nazi Germany, it attacked Poland on September 17, 1939. 10 Cf. Dalia Vasiliūnienė, “Sienų tapyba Perlojos bažnyčioje” [“The Wall Paintings in the Perloja Church”], Menotyra 36, no. 4 (2004): 41–49. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, “Bažnytinė dailė nacių okupuotoje Lietuvoje” [“Church Art in Nazi Occupied Lithuania”], in Kunigas [Priest], ed. Paulius Subačius (Vilnius: LKMA, 2011), 193–232. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Lentvario bažnyčia ir jos dekoras. Kościół w Landwarowie i jego wystrój [The Lentvaris Church and Its Décor] (Vilnius: Bažnytinio meno muziejus, 2012). During the Nazi occupation, the Catholic Church in general played an important role with regard to art. Commissions of new church art and restoration works provided artists with significant material and moral support. And Church initiatives that led to works of architecture and art that appealed to patriotic feelings attracted broad public attention.

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Lithuanians and Poles, until now not included in that discourse, are discussed. And I also examine the work of Jewish artists, taking the view that Lithuania’s wartime art also comprises what was created in captivity—in the ghetto, jails, and concentration camps. I interpret these works first of all as activity provoked by the reality of the Holocaust, with the goal of documenting the privations, sufferings, humiliation, and death experienced by ghetto prisoners. At the same time, they are additionally viewed as a broader response to totalitarian terror, as resistance to a system that deprives people of their humanity, something manifest in the very act of creation they involve.11 The work of Lithuanian artists who fled to the depths of the Soviet Union to escape from the Germans or were exiled by Soviet authorities to Stalin’s Gulag in the first half of 1941 is also considered part of the total production of the World War II Lithuania’s art. Little is said about it here, though a few specimens are mentioned as analogous in discussing artworks born in Lithuania.12

LIFE UNDER THE SWASTIKA: COLOR Many volumes have been written about life in the shadow of the swastika, but the unexpected appearance of this symbol always makes one tense up and mull its significance: What does it mean? That is exactly how the Vilnius public reacted to the showing in 2008 of color photographs by the wellknown Lithuanian hydrologist and photographer Steponas Kolupaila (1892–1964), which, alongside scenes of Lithuanian nature and neutral urban images of the late 1930s and early 1940s, present images of Nazioccupied Vilnius. The professor, who lived in Kaunas, came to Vilnius on April 20, 1942. It was a sunny Monday in early spring. To mark Hitler’s 11 The author hopes in the future to do further research on the wartime art of Lithuania’s Jews, applying the theoretical approach proposed by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman. Cf. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 12 Visual material was gathered by researching a variety of collections—from the Lithuanian Art Museum and the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (Lithuania’s largest national art collections) to Polish art museums that preserve works of arts by artists from Vilnius, and museums in Israel that have examples of artworks by prisoners of the Lithuanian ghettos along with comparative materials to support their interpretation. Works of art created in Lithuania were also sought in private collections and in the archives of artists’ families.

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Figure 1.  Steponas Kolupaila, Domininkonai Street in Vilnius, on April 20, 1942. Photograph courtesy of Valentinas Gylys, Kaunas, Lithuania.

birthday, the city donned the flags of the Reich and the Republic of Lithuania, though public display of the latter on Lithuanian national holidays was forbidden (figs. 1). Most likely personal affairs brought Kolupaila to Vilnius on that precise day, not a wish to portray symbols of enslavement,13 but the avid photographer did not forget to bring his camera. The city was bathed in sunlight, which allowed him to experiment with color film (the technique of color photography of that time required strong light, so photos could only be taken on a sunny day). No doubt he quickly realized that the Führer’s birthday decorations would lend his photographs added documentary and emotional value, so he diligently turned his camera on the pairing of the two states’ flags—a clear indicator of Lithuania’s status. Until the exhibition of 2008, those shots were known only to members of Kolupaila’s family and a few photography enthusiasts. At the end of World War II, Kolupaila ended up in Germany as a political emigrant, and from there moved to the United States, so the memory of him and his 13 The trip must have been planned in advance. Even if Kolupaila had the visa required for multiple trips between Kaunas and Vilnius, he would have needed to get train tickets ahead of time. The likelihood that he used another form of transport is quite small, since a fuel shortage left buses and private automobiles out of use in the years of occupation.

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works was erased in Soviet Lithuania. After the restoration of independence, he was remembered first as an expert in hydrology, and only later as a camera enthusiast and pioneer of color photography in Lithuania. The organizers of the Kolupaila exhibition, in showing photographs of occupied Vilnius, seem not to have expected such a strong reaction. But visitors were shocked by the Third Reich flag’s striking redness and the black of the Hakenkreuz (swastika) amid the war-wearied streets of Vilnius that everyone knew so well. Having come for a calm and pleasant encounter with a new page in the history of Lithuanian photography, they unexpectedly came face-to-face with what for many was a new and unseen page in the history of Lithuania. It turned out that the contemporary viewer is not prepared to confront the full-color reality of occupied Lithuania, which eliminates the safe distance that is usually enjoyed.14 An analogous case occurred in Paris in the same year of 2008. The Historical Library of the City of Paris held an exhibition, entitled Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation, of color photographs of occupied Paris by André Zucca (1897–1973), who was a photo correspondent for Signal, a Nazi magazine for Western Europe (fig. 2). Zucca had enough Agfacolor film to capture images of the war and also private views of Paris while walking around in leisure time with his Leica camera. The exhibition was put on by the Paris municipality together with the Gallimard publishing house. The aim was to present the photographer’s legacy, which was given to the library in 1986 and which Gallimard intended to publish. The organizers thought that this unique material—a large collection of color prints of occupied Paris—could be presented to the public without any special commentaries. But that was a mistake.15 Opponents of the exhibit were 14 The contrast of bright sunlight and colors with scenes of murdered Jews’ bodies, the sites of massacres in Babi Yar, and a German soldier rummaging through the belongings of people who had been killed is particularly striking in the photographs taken by German war photographer Johannes Hähle in Kiev at the beginning of October 1941. Several of his photographs (29 shots have survived), which are kept at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung) appeared in the Russian version of Esquire magazine in May 2007 (106–8), in a conscious attempt to shock the reader—and it did. 15 Cf. Jean Baronnet, Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca, preface by Jean Paul Azéma (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), and Philippe Dagen, “De photographies de propaganda nazie provoquent un malaise,” Le Monde, April 12, 2008.

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Figure 2. André Zucca, Rue de Rivoli in Paris under the Hakenkreuzes, 1942. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. © André Zucca/BHVP/ Roger-Viollet.

indignant at the color images of occupied Paris on a sunny day, which they saw as too cheerful and said could not be shown without an explanation of who made them and why. There were proposals to close the exhibition as an insult to the memory of the occupation. But another solution was found—a historian of World War II, Jean-Pierre Azéma, was asked to provide commentaries for the images. The photographs thus acquired the distance and context needed to weaken the upbeat impression of the colorful images. And the exhibition remained open for several months more. The effect provoked by Kolupaila’s and Zucca’s photographs shows that the memory of World War II is still very painful, and not just in the former Soviet Union. In countries that were occupied by the Germans during the war the reality of those years remains grayish green—the color of the soldiers’ uniforms and of dirt. Also black, like the swastika, nighttime and death. And red, like blood and fire. And these are precisely the colors in which that reality was portrayed by artists who worked during the war. Some would argue that the colors were dictated by the universal spread of neotraditionalism and historicism, where a yellowish or brownish “museum palette” is typical, but that appears not to be the only reason. The color of dirt dominates in wartime art, where there is a great deal of twilight, darkness, fog, and rain. Wartime painting breaks out in colors

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

only when, yielding to propagandistic fervor, it seeks to inspire viewers with energy and optimism, or when it suggests they escape to another time and place, breaking free of the reality of war in order to regain a bit of spiritual strength and vitality. Color returns in painted scenes on historical or fantasy themes, in some landscapes, and in still lifes. Color is just one indicator of the state of the wartime creators and viewers of art. What else was important to the gaze of that time, or rather, what can it unlock for us?

LIFE UNDER THE SWASTIKA: MOOD One of the most popular wartime art genres was the portrait, and it appeared in Lithuania too. There is a marked difference between portraits painted at someone’s request16 and images of loved ones. In portraits created for a client, signs of the times are avoided in order to put distance between the person portrayed and the viewer, at the same time showing that the artist tries not to draw too close to his or her subject. An emotional relationship with oneself, the environment, and the people around one opens up in those images that were created without thinking about a possible buyer, and often even with no intention of publicly showing the work. Most of these portraits were painted to be natural. Such a relationship may have been dictated in part by official guidelines for artistic creation (neotraditionalism promoted by the Nazis), but more than that, a gaze that ever so carefully clutches reality suggests the artist’s fear of losing the person portrayed and desire to preserve their features, at least in an image. In fact, I would like to begin with the portrait of an unknown person whose image could represent a resident of any Nazi-occupied Central or Eastern European city. It is the Portrait of a Man (or Man of Vilnius), by the young woman painter Bronė Mingilaitė (1919–83) (1943; fig. 3). It is a student-like composition where the limited proficiency of a beginner artist can still be seen. Still, it is captivating for its look and mood of 16 People of varied social status would order portraits from artists: businessmen, priests, and doctors—in other words, everyone who wanted to support artists and had enough money to do so. There were also some official commissions. At the request of the Academy of Science, for example, Lithuanian classicist artists painted images from Lithuanian literary classics for a portrait gallery at the Academy’s headquarters in Vilnius.

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Figure 3.  Bronė Mingilaitė-

Uogintienė, Man from Vilnius, 1943, oil on canvas, 64 × 57 cm. Mingilaitė-Uogintienė family collection, Vilnius. Image courtesy of Gintarė Uogintaitė, Vilnius, Lithuania.

penetrating melancholy and indifferent despair. Today there is no one left to tell us who this pallid man of deep-set eyes was, bent over a beer bottle and mug. He sits in a café in a hat and heavy coat, as though he had just dropped by for a spell from outside and did not dare, or did not allow himself, to relax. On the one hand, the composition seems unremarkable, something seen in the works of many countries’ artists. On the other, applying Michael Baxandall’s “period eye” concept, it takes on the power of a true testimony to an era. The artist herself, according to her daughter, highly cherished this painting and would never agree to sell it. Most mood portraits present people who were well known to their authors—members of the artists’ families or close friends; self-portraits are also relatively common. Almost all of these works are small-scale portraits of people who are modestly dressed, diffident, immersed in their thoughts, looking away from the viewer, and, usually, sad. These people, even teenagers and children, seem tired and apathetic. They are shown in an enclosed space. These are claustrophobic works that seem at the same time to say that only at home, in a familiar place, is at least some illusion of security possible. For beyond the walls of one’s home begins the hostile and dangerous world. A young woman with a hairdo typical of the war period sits with her needlework, focused on darning a thin blue-colored stocking, in the pastel Wife’s Portrait (1944; fig. 4) by Antanas Gudaitis (1904–89)—one

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 4. Antanas

Gudaitis, Wife’s Portrait, 1944, pastel on paper, 43.5 × 32.4 cm. Gudaitis family collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

of the most prominent innovators in Lithuanian art of the 1930s. The young woman does not look at the viewer or seek to draw attention to herself. She is concentrating intensely, immersed in herself and her work. It could be a warm and cozy domestic scene, but a sense of discomfort prevents such a reading of the work: the orange cloth that stands out in the background seems to be a curtain used to provisionally partition a corner of the room, and her handiwork—the stocking being mended—speaks of hardship. In this picture, only the colors—the bright orange of the drapery, specks of acid-yellow light on the woman’s clothing—make one think of expressionism, which Gudaitis admired, followed, passionately advocated, and promoted. It is as though the author merely sought to capture a small fragment of life at home, a moment of relative tranquility, without thinking about the viewer and the perception of his painting. Having their personal space reduced to a room or a studio also made artists look closer at the people with whom they spent every day

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and examine their surroundings: the interior, its furniture, other objects, and the views from the windows. In spring and summer, professors of the Vilnius Art Academy would paint the Old Town scenes that they could see from their first-floor studios (painting on the street was forbidden by the Nazi authorities); and in autumn and winter, confined indoors, they would ask colleagues to model for them. This situation inspired very good Figure 5. Petras Aleksandravičius, examples of psychological portraiThe Painter Viktoras Vizgirda, 1943, ture. Consider two sculpture porplaster, 60 × 23 × 30 cm. Lithuanian traits by Petras Aleksandravičius Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by (1906–97), those of painter Vikto­ Arūnas Baltėnas. ras Vizgirda (1904–93) and print­ maker Jonas Kuzminskis (1906–85), both professors at the Vilnius Art Academy (fig. 5). Today these sculpture portraits are considered some of Alek­ sandravičius’s best works, and they belong to the classics of Lithuanian portraiture. Often shown in exhibitions, they are now on display in the permanent exhibition of the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius and are among the best examples of the artistic heritage of the twentieth century. Researchers into Aleksandravičius’s work, however, have not asked why both of his models, who bear no outward resemblance to each other, are so similar in their mood: both seem completely lost in their thoughts, distanced from everything that is happening around them, appearing to look without really seeing anything. Clearly, the artist in this way conveyed the mood of the models or his own inner state along with the general climate in the city. Here is how the poet Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (1919–2015) described the mental state of Vilnius residents at the end of the war in his diary: “As

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

the ‘orchestra’ of the military action draws dangerously close, Vilnius is gripped by a strangely unreal mood. People seem to have lost their ties with their surroundings, and have become silent and reticent. They pass each other in the streets without saying a word, as if concentrating on distant worries, as if not seeing anything beyond themselves.”17 The poet’s remarks about looking without seeing and lowered eyes, implying disengagement and unwillingness to interact, is applicable to the overwhelming majority of portraits made during the war years. The family members, colleagues, and friends that artists portrayed are the very same residents of Vilnius that Nyka-Niliūnas described, who glided down streets like shadows, not wanting to be noticed or make contact with other people. The main characteristics in poets’ notes confirm that the portraits convey the unvarying state of most people—apathy, despair, withdrawal into oneself. Such a state was further reinforced by the ever-present companions of war and occupation—cold, hunger, insecurity about the future, and fear of death and loss.18 The wartime portrayal images immersed in the same mood lost their individuality; their common psychological state made them belong to the same type of representation. The disposition of the subjects of these portraits expresses both their own feelings and those of the artists, feelings that did not favor creativity and, as can be seen from the examples presented, scorned originality and pushed artists toward documentality.

DOCUMENTALITY: IMAGING STRATEGY OR CRISIS OF CREATIVITY In reviewing portraits painted during the war, one gets an impression that many artists created out of an impulsive reaction to their surroundings, yielding to the instinct to maintain the professional skills they would need again when life got back to normal. Passive registering of one’s immediate 17 Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, Dienoraščio fragmentai 1938–1975 [Fragments from a Diary 1938–1975] (Vilnius, 2002), 76. 18 Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, “Intimism in Lithuanian Art during the Second World War,” in Art and Artistic Life during the Two World Wars, eds. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė, vol. 5 of Dailės istorijos studijos [Art History Studies] (Vilnius: LKTI, 2012), 262–63.

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surroundings—people, things, and interiors—without particular artistic reflection, became an important feature of the creative practice of the time. In such artworks, the image approaches reality, since the creator only minimally participates in the transformation of reality. Of course, it is often impossible to determine when such an imaging strategy was chosen consciously and when its use was involuntary, flowing from the artist’s lack of strength to transform reality. Despair, fear, hunger, and cold all weakened creative energy, and the general setting in no way stressed a need to be inventive. On the other hand, we see that even in the extreme conditions of the ghetto and prison, where confronting reality demanded vast physical and emotional energy, creativity nonetheless was not extinguished. Life in conditions that deprived people of their humanity kindled resistance, one form of which became artistic creation, generally manifest in efforts to capture one’s immediate reality and leave testimony for those who lived in freedom of the unthinkable daily life of the ghetto or prison. Speaking of art made in ghetto conditions, most images of this type were produced by ghetto inmates who were artists on commission from the ghetto administration.19 Not many images of this type have survived. Drawings and aquarelles depicting the ghettos of Vilnius (Vilna/Wilno) and Kaunas (Kovno) are scattered throughout the world: a few are kept at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum in Vilnius, some are at the Ghetto Fighter’s House Museum (the Lohamei Haghetaot Kibbutz in Western Galilee, Israel), some are held by a variety of institutions in the United States, and the biggest collection is owned by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Drawings and, in rare cases, watercolors had to perform the function of film and photography in documenting events and circumstances, since 19 Cases of spontaneous creativity were rare. They occurred either in somewhat more liberally managed prison camps, in ghettos like Theresienstadt, where there was a rather intensive cultural life, or among children. An example from Vilnius is Samuel Bak (b. 1933), who survived the Jewish Catastrophe and became an artist. His art career began in the Vilnius ghetto, under the protection of the poets Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, and the painter Roza Sutzkever. In March 1943, they invited the talented boy to take part in an art exhibition in the ghetto, suggesting that he draw on blank pages of the Pinkas, a book with the official record of the Jewish community, since paper was extremely hard to get. The Pinkas with Bak’s drawings survived and today is preserved at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. For more, see Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

ghetto residents and labor or concentration camp prisoners were not able to take photographs. A resident of the Vilnius ghetto, librarian Herman Kruk, writes in a diary entry dated July 5, 1942: We are not allowed to photograph. Therefore, on my initiative and under my protection, a council of young artists led by the painter Sher20 was convened. It was decided that every one of them should start drawing pictures of the ghetto. The result: one works on a series “Holes,” the second draws the fences of the ghetto, a third makes pictures of internal life in the ghetto. The group is already working, and the work is progressing, creating interesting drawings, primarily historical documentation.21 Of course, sometimes the prohibitions against photography were evaded. Some photographic images of the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos were made secretly. For example, George Kadish (in Lithuanian, Hiršas Kadušinas), an inmate of the Vilijampolė (Kaunas) ghetto, constructed cameras that could take photographs through the buttonhole of his coat or over a windowsill.22 Applying representation theory, Kadish’s photographs, just like the drawings and aquarelles of his contemporary Jacob Lifschitz (Jokūbas Lifšicas, 1903–44) (figs. 6–7), an artist from Kaunas who was also interred in the Vilijampolė ghetto, can be associated with two strategies of documentary portrayal: expository mode, which addresses the viewer directly, and observational mode, which stresses the nonintervention of the image-maker.23 20 Jakub Szer, in Lithuanian Jokūbas Šeras, (1890–1944), was a painter and graphic artist active in Vilnius and Belorussia in the interwar period; during the Nazi occupation he was imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto, took part in cultural events of the ghetto, and was killed at the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. 21 Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from Wilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 321. 22 Cf. Eli Pfefferkorn and Kay Leslie Ackman, Days of Remembrance, 1987: Family Life in the Kovno Ghetto: An Exhibition of Photographs by George Kadish (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987). 23 Cf. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34 and 38.

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Figure 6. Jacob

Lifschitz, The Market, 1942, drawing on paper. Tory Collection (Kovno Ghetto), Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. © Yad Vashem.

Thus the ghetto artist’s work acquires the status of a significant historical source because of what is portrayed and how. Examining Lifschitz’s drawings, especially the figure compositions and portraits, someone could disagree, arguing that his documentary work reveals a duality of character as both artifice and as evidence, and that is true. But the artistry of Lifschitz’s creations reinforces their impact, since the artist’s main objective was to capture reality, and he achieved that quite well. But most of the art of Lithuania’s ghettos involves pictorial representations of reality that, intentionally or not, are characterized by nonintervention of the imagemaker. The examples of two women artists can be mentioned here: Esther Lurie (1913–98), who lived in the Kaunas ghetto, and Rosa Sutzkever (1904–43) from the Vilnius ghetto.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 7.  Jacob Lifschitz, Kriščiukaičio Str., Slobodka, 1942, watercolor.

Tory Collection (Kovno Ghetto), Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. © Yad Vashem.

Sutzkever’s sepia portrait of the dying musician and teacher Jakov Gersztein (October 27, 1942; fig. 8) was found after the war in one of the ghetto hideouts, or “malinas” (fig. 9). Unfortunately, the drawing’s author did not manage to hide or escape—she perished in the hell of the camps; it is not even known exactly where, probably at the Treblinka concentration camp. The fate of the portrait of Gersztein, like that of Sutzkever’s other images of Vilnius ghetto residents (a collection of them is preserved at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum), represents the fulfillment of the hopes of the artists who rendered the ghetto’s leadership, its residents, and their everyday life. The collection she left still awaits broader research,24 24 Regarding the diffusion of art by Lithuanian Jews, international attention has of course first of all focused on works at Holocaust museums. An example is the catalogue of the Yad Vashem Art Museum’s exhibition Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity (curator

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Figure 8.  Rosa Sutzkever,

Portrait of the Musician and Teacher Jakov Gersztein (Dying Man), October 27, 1942, sepia on paper, 34 × 41.2 cm. Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. © Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum.

Figure 9. Rosa Sutzkever, Portrait of the Dying Jakov Gersztein (recovered

from a Vilnius Ghetto hideout/“malina” after the Nazi occupation) among the other remains of Jewish cultural heritage. Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. © Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

but it is carrying out the function of documentary testimony, like the works of many of her colleagues who shared the same fate. They are recognized as a powerful histori­ cal source on the Holocaust, along­ side documents, memoires, and photo­graphs. The value of documentary testimony, which awakens emotional Figure 10.  Eugenija Macytėmemory, should encourage incluMikšienė-Jurkūnienė, Aliukas: sion also of the art of Stalin’s Gulag Portrait of Dead Son, December in the sphere of the memory of the 27, 1941, Belojarsk Sovchoz Farm No. 5, Krajushinskij District, Altai Krai, war. The significance of the topic is pencil on paper. Image courtesy of rather well demonstrated by Lithu­ Vytautas Jurkūnas, Vilnius, Lithuania. anian artist Eugenija Macytė-Mikš­ ienė-­Jurkūnienė’s late 1941 pencil portraits of her dead son, Alius (Aleksandras Mikšys), (fig. 10) and drawings of his grave and the wooden barracks where she lived with him, which are preserved in the archive of her younger son, Vytautas Jurkūnas, in Vilnius.

SEEN WITH A SEARCHING EYE Wartime portraits, along with pictorial evidence of the known ghetto and Gulag history from written, oral, and visual sources, make it possible to interpret the strategy of documentary portrayal as especially helpful for an eye that is searching for signs of wartime reality in works of art. But that seems not always to be so. For instance, what could we say about the war reality when viewing the winter landscape by Leonardas Kazokas (1905–81), with cowering pedestrians hurrying down the main street of Kaunas (fig. 11)? Or the painting by Vytautas Kairiūkštis (1890–1961) of a brightly colored still life with a pitcher, a wine glass, and two eggs on a plate (fig. 13)? Eliad Moren-Rosenberg), which presents works by Kaunas ghetto artists Jacob Lifschitz, Esther Lurie, and Josef Schlesinger from Yad Vashem’s Pnina and Avraham Tory collection. Cf. Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity (Exhibition catalogue) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Art Museum, 2012), 80–87, 127–30, 150–53, 174–75.

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Figure 11.  Leonardas Kazokas, Kaunas in Winter—Laisvės Avenue, 1942,

oil on canvas, 66 × 79 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

Figure 12.  Cinema Romuva, on Laisvės Avenue in Kaunas transformed during the Nazi occupation into a Soldatenkino for Vermacht soldiers and army officials, c. 1941. Private collection, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

In both cases, the artists view reality with a reporter’s eye and, engaging little with the scene, simply render what they see. As regards Kazokas, one even gets the sense that he painted based on a photograph or sketches made while he was sitting in a warm room looking through a window. Yet even so, the clichéd image of Laisvės Alėja (Liberty Avenue) in Kaunas can turn into a historical source that awakens our imagination if beside it we place a photograph (fig. 12) that confirms how the fashionable Romuva cinema, which just barely did not fit in Kazokas’s landscape, was restricted to Germans during the years of World War II. Kairiūkštis’s quaint still life would be just an elegant example of the genre—promoting values that in normal times are taken for granted and showing that the artist, known for his constructivist past, took a turn toward tradition and open esteem for the work of Pierre Bonnard—were it not for knowledge of the food shortages that plagued city dwellers during the war. The ordinary image acquires special meaning when we learn from the testimony of contemporaries that for many in Kaunas in 1942–43, a boiled egg was a holiday meal and that family members and their guests would share a single egg at Easter. The arrangement of a still life by an artist is of course something thought out in advance, a deliberately programmed fragment of the image. But it is hard to believe that Kairiūkštis would have had merely social intentions in mind. His work takes on new meanings when we start to look for them, making use of additional sources to help interpretation. Again, not much is needed—a single visual reference to a wartime food ration card (fig. 14) is enough for the (un)intended meanings of the picture to stand out and become a part of the meaning of the work. The interior composition Armchair (1943; fig. 15) by the young artist Algirdas Petrulis (1915–2010) would be an image of rather hedonistic daily life if not for the “burzhuika” iron stove, a habitual attendant of hard times. (The word burzhuika derives from the use of these stoves by the “bourgeois,” or буржуй in colloquial Russian, amid cold and famine in the years of the Bolshevik coup.) The artist depicted his office at the Vilnius Art Museum, where he worked as a custodian during the war. At first sight, the composition seems quite cheerful: a moderately baroque-shaped armchair in the center is upholstered with colorful tapestry; paintings are lined up next to the armchair on the floor; and there’s a woven basket with flowers or fruit—a joy­ful, almost

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Figure 13.  Vytautas Kairiūkštis, Still-life, 1942, oil on cardboard and canvas,

32 × 37 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

Figure 14.  Ration card with coupons for bread, surrogate coffee, and soap, 1941. Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius. © Lithuanian National Museum.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

festive summer scene. Noticing the metal stove in the corner, however, changes one’s mood. The painting seems to remind us that the cheerful atmosphere of those days was nothing but a nice impression; one tainted by a rather different reality—symbolized by the stove, a mark of poverty and anxiety. Given the tremendous shortage of fuel in the war years, even the rich owners of comfortable houses with many niceties used these stoves, which could be heated with a small amount of low-quality firewood. So this type of stove was Figure 15.  Algirdas Petrulis, never seen as a friendly household Armchair, 1943, oil on cardboard, object or cozy amenity; it remained 62 × 41.5 cm. Lithuanian Art always an intruder, a companion of Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas. the chaos and poverty that intruded on a comfortable life. Painter Antanas Žmuidzinavičius also installed this kind of stove in his studio in the war years (fig. 16). It still stands today in the artist’s studio at his Kaunas home, which is now a museum. The stove serves as a reminder that the life of the home and its owner was erratic, having seen both abundance and poverty. Metal stoves are signs of the war that feature in the memories not only of those who lived in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation but also of those who spent that time in Soviet Russia or at refugee camps in Germany, France, and Italy. Such a stove is an important attribute, for instance, of a room in drawings (fig. 17) by Stepas Žukas (1904–46), who documented the life of leftwing Lithuanian artists and writers at a settlement called Otdych in the vicinity of Moscow. Burzhuikas were everywhere a part of wartime daily life—in apartments in occupied cities and housing at the Soviet rear, in ghettos,

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Figure 16. Antanas Žmuidzinavičius’s studio at the artist’s house (now a museum), Kaunas, Lithuania. Photographed by Arūnas Baltėnas in April 2009.

prisons, hospitals, and internment camps (fig. 18). They gave off heat, serving as a physical nucleus of life in temporary shelters or homes that took on the traits of a temporary shelter. For an eye that is actively probing for signs of the time, at first glance neutral traditional-genre artworks— landscapes, still lifes, and kindred interior scenes—open up their documentary side, revealing sought-after traces of the war reality. Figure 17.  Stepas Žukas, Corner

of the Room—Otdych Village near Moscow, 1944, charcoal on paper, 27.5 × 22 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph courtesy of Lithuanian Art Museum.

THROUGH THE PRISM OF IRONY

The ability to defy humiliation through humor and irony is a rare gift, which during the war years, for many psychologically scarred artists and their publics, became an effective form of psychotherapy.25 War 25 An examples of such a work in Lithuania is the novel by Stutthof prisoner Balys Sruoga (1896–1947) entitled Forest of the Gods (1945; first published in 1957; published in English in 1996).

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 18. Osias

Hofstätter-Yeshayahu, Barracks Interior: Aigle Internment Camp, September 1942, charcoal on paper. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel. © Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

brings humiliation in many ways and forms. For example, Brian Foss, who analyzed works of art created on commission by Britain’s wartime War Artist Advisory Committee, writes of the problems caused by changes in the roles of the sexes, which he refers to as “Masculinity in Crisis.”26 The people of occupied countries were humiliated not only by violence but also by the poverty that attacked from every side. When such a problem becomes universal, one would almost expect it to be easier to laugh at, but laughing at domestic privations and the hardships they provoke raises the danger of banality. Cartoonists feared this the least, though it is of the nature of the genre of caricature to overly condense reality, making it hard to consider it a visual source that would help one to identify with experiences of the past. Another hindrance is the abundance of details that were relevant to contemporaries but that complicate the understanding of a caricature when the historical context has changed. Example of an open and ironic look at a humiliating reality are the drawings by German artist Karl Schwesig (1898–1955) from the SaintCyprien internment camp (fig. 19). This graphic art, which balances on

26 Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain 1939–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 146–53.

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Figure 19.  Karl Schwesig, In the Latrine: Saint-Cyprien Camp, 1940, pencil

on paper, 23.8 × 25 cm. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel. © Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

the border of caricature but does not cross it, offers a shocking confrontation with what the artist lived through and pondered. A classic ironic look at the hardships of war in Lithuania is the self-­ portrait Running Out of Firewood (1942; fig. 20) by the young artist Vytautas Kasiulis (1918–95), who started his professional career during the war years. The picture provokes a smile. The artist laughs at himself, not hiding the fact that he sees himself as a victim of the difficulties of wartime daily life, thereby trying to minimize those difficulties, at least to some extent. At the same time, the painting shows how heavily one of the most urgent problems of wartime life—the permanent shortage of fuel— affected people’s lives.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 20.  Vytautas Kasiulis, Running out of Firewood (Self-portrait), c. 1943, oil on canvas, 82 × 71 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

To better interpret Kasiulis’s portrait, do we need documentary evidence regarding the aspect of reality represented in the painting? The lack of fuel is something everybody knows goes together with war. Kasiulis’s self-portrait will not help us understand how this problem specifically manifested itself in Lithuania during World War II. It can only encourage us to open the press of that time and read the calls to work duty digging peat in summer and cutting wood in winter. That may help us to see the propaganda posters on the topic of peat excavation with new eyes. In 1942, a series of posters regarding the shortage of the fuel, designed and printed in Riga and meant for the Ostland, began to be distributed in Lithuania (fig. 21). Posters, newspaper announcements, and caricatures certainly would add information on the topical issues of the war years. But this information would not boost the suggestiveness of Kasiulis’s self-portrait, if only for the fact that the painting captures and expresses its author’s authentic experience, while the works of propaganda art reflect the occupier’s attempts to create a desired reality. The posters assert what was important and necessary for the authorities, proclaiming their will. Meanwhile, Kasiulis’s self-portrait speaks about the physical and mental discomfort caused by the lack of fuel and about a young man’s attempt to fight this discomfort, both physically (with a scarf wrapped around his head and tied on the top) and

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Figure 21. Poster Peat Is Our Coal (in Lithuanian), 1942, 99.5 × 69.5 cm. National Archive of Published Documents at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of the Vilnius Graphic Art Center.

psychologically (through self-irony, an attempt to warm himself up by laughter). It is the psychological state and its reflection, which the work of art captures, that today helps us empathize with the feeling of cold amid the uncertainty of war and occupation. On the other hand, it is not just the ironic views but also the works of propaganda that point out the most delicate problems of war-era everyday life. Here, what is most informative, though, is not artwork, but the German documentary chronicles and the feature films, dubbed in the

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian languages, which were made at a film studio in Riga, the Ostland capital, under German orders. How many there were is not yet clear, since research on this is still in progress. Copies of two films are preserved in Lithuania’s Central State Archives: Your Hands (1943), urging Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians to join the Reich Labor Service, and Swinish Misfortune (1942), dedicated to the battle against speculation in food products.

THE NARRATIVE’S AWKWARD PART Among wartime art buyers, the most popular items were portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. The reasons for the popularity of portraits are obvious, but landscapes evoke patriotism and nostalgia for the prewar peace and stability. Occasionally, artists consciously gave landscapes an ideological dimension. For example, the classic national painter Antanas Žmuidzinavičius (1876–1966), for a client who knew nothing about Lithuanian matters, copied an image of a lake that was dull but greatly excited his audience because it contained the Lithuanian heraldic symbol of Vytis, a knight on a white horse, which was banned by the Nazis, a reminder of the victory of Lithuanians against Germans in medieval battles against the Teutonic Order.27 Vytautas Kairiūkštis painted variations of the same flower vase. The Lithuanian Art Museum’s collection has five similar still lifes of flowers by this artist, dated from 1942 to 1943 (fig. 22), with other examples of such works held in private collections (fig. 23). This composition comprises a white jug with garden or wild flowers (the artist would vary them, as he would also vary the tablecloth beneath the jug; the only things that did not vary were the jug itself, and the artist’s gaze, his way of seeing the subject of his painting). It attracted buyers who longed for a simple life with modest summer joys. Hedonism? Usually it is only a desire or longing. Since for some, comforts were only accessible in dreams (or by enjoying an image that 27 Cf. notebook-list of works by Antanas Žmuidzinavičius painted by him from 1900 in the archive of the artist’s home museum in Kaunas. The list has no any inventory number; it is kept among other artist’s belongings in the museum, which itself is the department of the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum.

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Figure 22.  Vytautas Kairiūkštis,

Flowers, 1942, oil on canvas, 51 × 46 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph courtesy of Lithuanian Art Museum.

Figure 23.  Vytautas Kairiūkštis,

Flowers, 1943, oil on canvas, 59 × 52.2 cm. Ellex law firm collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Ellex.

exuded comfort and security at an exhibition or gallery), but others had full access to comforts thanks to a privileged position, the reason for which was not necessarily collaboration with the occupying government. Some participants of the art world did not even realize they were living a much easier life than other fellow citizens or understand what made their countrymen so unusually happy. Symptomatic here is the case of one photograph, which story blends war, art, cultural links between countries, social ties, coincidence, love, luck, and superficiality. What could be said about a photograph from a family album, banal at first sight, of a woman sitting on a couch covered with a bedspread (fig. 24)? The woman is neither very beautiful nor very young. She knows she is being photographed and poses for the shot, sitting lightly on the edge of the couch and pretending to examine a print that she holds firmly with both hands. The rather large sheet of paper has been rolled up for a long time and thus resists being straightened. The woman is trying to hide the effort of her struggle with the unruly paper. Our look wanders from the print to her elegantly crossed legs in silk stockings and to the room’s interior, with framed prints on the walls and architectural decorations in the wall niche containing the

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 24.  Gražina Matulaitytė-Rannit, at home in Kaunas on K. Donelaičio Street, c. 1943. Courtesy of the Lozoraitis family, Rome, Italy.

couch—an Arabic-style lattice supported by slender columns. A wide-necked vase with a lush bouquet stands on a small coffee table by the wall near the niche. It is summer, and the home obviously belongs to well-off people who love art and flowers and live a comfortable and well-provisioned life. The name of the woman in the photograph is Gražina Matulaitytė (1899-1922); it helps us identify the home and its tenants. She is a prima donna of Kaunas opera and operetta, a lyrical soprano who started her music studies in violin class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, honed her skills as a soloist at the Leipzig Conservatory, and gave concerts in Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Stockholm, Oslo, and Prague. The works of art that surround her are engravings by the Estonian printmaker Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954). Some of them, like the composition Berber Girl with a Camel and the female nude hung above the couch and clearly visible, were exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Vytautas Magnus Culture Museum in Kaunas in 1943. The curator and compiler of the exhibit was a friend of Wiiralt named Aleksis Rannit (1914–85). Rannit was a poet, journalist, and critic of Estonian descent. He was a well-versed enthusiast of the founder of Lithuanian national art, symbolist Mikalojus Konstantinas

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Čiurlionis (1875–1911). In 1940, Rannit married Gražina Matulaitytė and settled in Kaunas. When his wife’s brother, Jurgis Matulaitis, moved to Vilnius, the newlywed couple took over his rented flat on Kristijonas Donelaitis Street in the well-known Iljinai house with a circular window designed by architect Arnas Funkas in 1933. This idyllic photo was taken in the no less famous moresque-style living room in the apartment the Rannits rented. The idyllic peace, however, somehow dissipates when we realize that the photograph must have been taken after Wiiralt’s exhibition, thus in 1943 or 1944. Matulaitytė is holding an unframed work by Wiiralt, most probably a gift to her husband in return for curating the exhibition and writing the introduction for its catalogue. The photograph is disturbing not because it was made during the war, but because it does not correspond to our image of the war. It does not contain any hints of poverty, cold, famine, uncertainty, or danger. There is no feeling of apathy, fear, or resolution to struggle, only a cultivated harmony of life, contentment, and peace. This visual source is supplemented by Gražina Matulaitytė-Rannit’s wartime letters to her sister, Vincenta Matulaitytė-Lozoraitienė (1896– 1985), in Rome. Vincenta lived there from 1940, together with her husband, Stasys Lozoraitis (1898–1983), the ambassador of independent Lithuania, and their two sons. The two sisters’ correspondence was briefly interrupted in the second half of 1940 and early 1941 by the Soviet occupation. But when the Germans came, the sisters resumed writing to each other and kept it up throughout the war. Gražina kept her sister updated about her own life and the condition of their mother, Stefanija Mackevičiūtė-Matulaitienė (1860–1944), who was under Gražina’s care, and about the life of their relatives and acquaintances. For example, on December 11, 1942, Gražina wrote to Vincenta from Berlin: My dear Vincunė, you’re going to be surprised when you read that I’m in Berlin. So, my dear. Both of us, “unternehmungslustige Damen,” had this idea. We asked our good acquaintances for help, received everything that was needed for such a trip, and

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

decided to see Berlin. The second lady is my good friend Zosė Kudokienė28 who also sings in the operetta. We were joined by two other colleagues and the choreographer Bandzevičius.29 So, there are five of us. The trip was very comfortable. We were taken to the border by a car. Afterwards, we were the only three people in the train compartment (the other two went separately). To our great surprise, having left Lithuania under a thick layer of snow, we were greeted by spring weather in Berlin and looked like polar bears in our fur coats and high-top boots. Berlin, my old good Berlin, the same and, certainly, different. Everything looks the same as in those times. It’s nice and clean. But, of course, traffic is different. I miss blooming flowers, which used to be so plentiful here, carts with fruit and, of course, shopping, which we always did, but now it can’t even be imagined. We only bought cosmetics, creams and powders. We, theatre people, need it. [. . .] We scattered to different theatres yesterday (here tickets are sold out two weeks in advance, like in Kaunas), but we received tickets through the ministry, so some of us went to Scala, and Zosė and I saw the operetta “Wiener Blut.” We must see all the operettas that are on, so that we could tell something to our colleagues back at home.30 The letter is sincere and clearly shows that its author did not appreciate enough how privileged she was because of her status as the operetta prima donna. She was not surprised at all that she had little difficulty obtaining permission to leave Kaunas for Berlin, that she could go by car to the Reich border (even though motor fuel was limited even for the military), that she was able to continue the trip in a separate train compartment, get tickets to the best performances, and buy cosmetics at time when a good part of the city’s residents lacked even the daily 28 Sofija Vasiliauskaitė-Kudokienė (b. 1915), an opera and operetta soloist from Kaunas. 29 Eugenijus Bandzevičius (real name Kolosov, 1907–86), a ballet dancer and choreographer at the Kaunas Opera and Ballet Theater. 30 Gražina Matulaitytė-Rannit’s letter from Berlin of December 11, 1942, to her sister Vincenta Matulaitytė-Lozoraitienė in Rome, personal effects of the Lozoraitis family.

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necessities—shoes, socks, soap, and food. She considered the war a mere temporary inconvenience, an external force that had disrupted her habitual pleasant lifestyle. Gražina Matulaitytė-Rannit could masterfully distance herself from everything that she preferred not to see. For example, writing to her sister while on tour in Vilnius in January 1943, she first of all expressed her happiness at the success of their brother, Jurgis Matulaitis, who had settled in Vilnius and was the manager of the newly established Vilnius Variety Theater. The beginning of her letter contrasts sharply with the memories of the visual artists we have examined so far. Staying at the St. George Hotel in Vilnius, which was the city’s most luxurious hotel at the time, she wrote: I’ve already visited everybody in Vilnius. My first visit was to Jurgis. He has a cosy apartment, a maid and, thank God, does not lack anything. He invited my friend and me for lunch. It was superb. Entrées, a great soup, the main course, perfect coffee with sweets and cakes, etc. How lucky that he has the energy to fight the reality, and I pray to God that all may continue like this.31 Then she adds, as if incidentally: As always, Vilnius is a beautiful city. I have a liking for such ancient cities. But the poverty of people here is so depressing that I can’t live here. Our life in Kaunas is also difficult, but somehow not hopeless; on the contrary, you feel that it’s the war, which will be over, and there is no concentration of the feeling that these people have already been pushed out of life. On January 19, 1943, she continues: “I’m still writing from Vilnius. It’s very cold here, up to 20–25 degrees, and so much snow! Sometimes the city looks like a fairy tale, all white, and the trees, wires and fences all covered with hoarfrost. It’s good that I have a warm room. I hardly 31 Letter from Vilnius of January 13, 1943, personal effects of the Lozoraitis family.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

go out; true, I must save energy because I sing every day, but I’m frightened to go out.”32 Gražina successfully shields herself from the war and the unfamiliar reality, staying in a warm and cozy room among books and works of art, surrounded by the admiration of her fans and her loving husband. She feels that she deserves all of this because she is totally dedicated to art. A letter from Gražina to her sister on June 30, 1943, in which she tells about her success at the first night of the operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow), by Franz Lehár, in the Kaunas City Theater, again testifies to a life adorned with trappings of luxury: “Now that I’ve had enough sleep after all these first nights (everybody was enchanted, got mountains of flowers, books, a box of various liqueurs from Gen[eral] Velykis,33 who has a liqueur factory and with whom we are great chums), I’ll start writing back to everyone, but to you first, because I know how much you worry about me.”34 The contrast between our earlier artists’ memories and the content of Gražina Matulaitytė’s letters relates to what the French social historians Gilles Ragache and Jean-Robert Ragache write about daily life in wartime France: In 1943, the corn harvest was good, and so the daily ration of bread was raised by 25 grams. Good news! Everything else, unfortunately, did not look optimistic. In 1943, Parisians had to get by on 200 grams of fat and 300 grams of meat a month. People fell ill, tuberculosis spread, and infant mortality grew [. . .] But the most luxurious restaurants in Paris, Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, were still open. There one could get foie gras, chocolate mousse and all kinds of roasts.35

32 Letter from Vilnius of January 19, 1943, personal effects of the Lozoraitis family. 33 Transferred to the reserves, General Mykolas Velykis (1884–1955) owned the Stumbras distillery in Kaunas and was also a famous art lover and patron. 34 Letter from Kaunas of June 30, 1943, personal effects of the Lozoraitis family. 35 Gilles Ragache and Jean-Robert Ragache, La vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l’occupation 1940–1944 (Paris: Hachette, 1988), 137.

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It is very difficult for someone to acknowledge this contrast. We can speak about moods of escapism, attempts to flee from the reality of war, and the luxury enjoyed by the occupiers. But the fact that one person was indulging in luxury and able to routinely obtain the accoutrements of comfort and beauty, while at the same time others barely had the minimum to survive, does not seem to fit into the war narrative. And such cases are confusing.

WHAT WAS LEFT UNSAID What is missing as we examine images of everyday life in World War II– era Lithuanian art? Above all, images of the war itself, of the occupation and its consequences. We are not speaking about the works of left-wing Lithuanian artists, like the previously mentioned Stepas Žukas or Vytautas Jurkūnas (1910–93), who found themselves in the depths of the Soviet Union and depicted Nazi atrocities under the direction of Soviet propagandists. Works created in Lithuania under Nazi rule, which allegorically express the theme of occupation, also still lack a clear place in the war narrative. In works by Lithuanian artists, war and occupation are conveyed through motifs of traditional village art, like images of wooden sculptures of saints. The most popular ones were the Pietà and Rūpintojėlis (Man of Sorrows) images, which were understood as personifications of Lithuania amid its sufferings (fig. 25). They were permitted by the authorities, because the German censors interpreted the images of the suffering Blessed Virgin Mary and Christ as universal symbols of the losses war brings, without realizing their nationalistic dimension of meaning. Works that were openly anti-Nazi or condemned their killings were few and were meant for private use, and only now are they entering the public realm. The reason why they were kept in silence for so long is that the authors of these works were left out of the grand narrative of Lithuanian art history and did not figure prominently otherwise. Some, like the Poles Jerzy Hoppen (1891–1969) and Stanisław Rolicz (1913–97), left Lithuania for Poland in the late 1940s. Their art was thus attributed by Lithuanian art historians to the Polish heritage, even though both artists lived in Vilnius

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 25.  Catalogue of Lithuanian Art Exhibition held in Vilnius from March 19 to April 19, 1944, organized by the Lithuanian Artist Union. Catalogue in Lithuanian and German, printed in Kaunas.

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Figure 26. Stanisław

Rolicz, I’m Building a New Europe, 1942, woodcut, 18.7 × 11.5 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

during the Nazi occupation and created their antimilitary and anti-Nazi etchings there (figs. 26–28). In Poland they became marginalized after the war as the representatives of outdated art, so their works from the war period remained almost unknown and were not displayed in any exhibitions or even reproduced. For a similar reason—a nationalistic approach to artistic heritage—a composition with a child playing on the road by the body of his dead mother against a background of smoldering ruins, which Mykolas Paškevičius (Nicolay Paskevich, 1907–2003) created in 1942 (fig. 29), has not found a place in the wartime narrative. The Riga-born Paškevičius, who studied in Leningrad and started his artistic career in Minsk, Belarus, was associated with Belarussian art;

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 27.  Stanisław Rolicz, The Rape of Europa Yesterday, 1943, wood-

cut, 19.6 × 23.5 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

in Lithuania his works are absent from national art museums and held only in private collections, despite the fact that the artist lived in New York after the war and was well known to the Lithuanian-American community. Nevertheless, his picture is a very interesting piece of wartime art. It shows that Paškevičius was well acquainted with the principles of socialist realism, as he had learned them while living and working in Soviet Belarus before the war. Polina Barskova’s observation on the propaganda poster of similar iconography—one representing a little child sitting in the street by the body of his dead mother, by besieged Leningrad artist Nikolai Selivanov—helps to find the right key to interpret the canvas by Paškevičius. According to Barskova, the image of the bombing victim and

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Figure 28.  Stanisław Rolicz, The Rape of Europa Today, 1943, woodcut, 19.4 × 23.4 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

her child in Selivanov’s poster is perceived as a hybrid body: half-woman, half-historical landmark; thus individual bodies acquire an allegorical meaning.36 Even though the same can be said about the image created by Paškevičius, the main point is that this anti-Nazi picture features the official propaganda language of the Soviets, which raises questions about the purpose of the painting and its possible audience. Early works by the Lithuanian printmaker Žibuntas Mikšys (1923– 2013)—a set of linocuts on the theme of war atrocities, made public only in 2013—pose a similar riddle. One of them (fig. 30) depicts 36 Polina Barskova, “The Corpse, the Corpulent, and the Other: A Study in the Tropology of Siege Body Representation,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2009): 372.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 29.  Mykolas Paškevičius, In the Ruins of War, 1942, oil on canvas,

66 × 88 cm. Ellex law firm collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Ellex.

corpses heaped up in a pit, and an executioner-gravedigger sitting on the edge of the pit drinking vodka from a bottle. Does it portray a scene of Bolshevik terror or Nazi genocide? According to art historian Erika Grigoravičienė, who has analyzed Mikšys’s work and was the first to publish this linocut,37 the artist himself never specified. He never mentioned having seen such a scene with his own eyes. Born in 1923, Mikšys was seventeen at the outbreak of war, barely out of adolescence. His knowledge of the world mainly came from books, newspapers, and artworks. German expressionism particularly impressed him. In the manner of George Grosz, an artist he greatly admired, Mikšys represented the crucified Christ with a gas mask, and a skeleton with a Wehrmacht helmet mowing down bodies with a scythe. 37 Erika Grigoravičienė, ed., Žibuntas Mikšys (Vilnius: LDS leidykla, 2013), 19.

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Figure 30.  Žibuntas Mikšys, Pit, 1944, linocut, 16.6 × 11.5 cm. Mikšys family

collection, Paris. Image courtesy of Erika Grigoravičienė with the kind permission of Miriam Mekas-Mikšienė.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 31. Poster Vinnitsa: This Is What the Jewish Are Fighting For!

(in Lithuanian), German propaganda office code P-134/WinnitzaWandzeitung, 1943, 59.5 × 84.5 cm. National Archive of Published Documents at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Vilnius Graphic Art Center.

The composition Pit was probably inspired by his impressions of expressionist art and the images of Bolshevik terror that abounded in the wartime Lithuanian press (fig. 31). Quite possibly, the impulse to address this topic came from a shocking exhibition of Red terror that opened in Kaunas in 1942. The young artist definitely also was affected by rumors about the mass killing of Jews, but it is not easy to attribute his works to the Holocaust memoirs. To portray the Jewish genocide during the war years would of course have meant to risk one’s freedom and possibly one’s life. The subject of repressions of civilians in art was encouraged only when the offenders were Bolsheviks. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia suffered greatly from Bolshevik terror on the eve of the Nazi occupation. All three countries were annexed and occupied by the Soviets in the summer of 1940, and the Germans invaded

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Figure 32.  Stasys Ušinskas, Twilight (The Shooting), c. 1943, oil on canvas,

180 × 179.5 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

them in the summer of 1941. Many works of art commemorating these tragic events were created in the war years. Some authors opted for symbolic expression, depicting nude figures of martyrs being tortured and killed. A number of large-scale works were created, not all of which were finished or made public during the war. After the war some were presented as images of Nazi terror. Most probably this is what happened with the large-scale composition Twilight (or The Shooting) (1944) (fig. 32), by the famous artist Stasys Ušinskas (1905–74), which represents an oblique line of nude figures suspended in space. This artist likely failed to satisfy wartime clients because he

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 33.  Kārlis Eglītis, Murder, drawing from the War series, 1944, India ink on paper, 9.5 × 14.5 cm. Latvian Art Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

stayed too close to his favored art deco stylistics and mostly avoided the neoclassicist expression promoted by the Nazis. The work surfaced only in the 1960s, at the time of Khrushchev’s liberalization. Soviet art critics interpreted it as an image of the Nazi atrocities. This interpretation was also based on the widely known fact that the Nazis would demand Jews take off their clothes before killing them. The painting was associated with photographs of the murdering of Jews: naked people at the edge of a pit or ditch who are on the verge of falling after being shot. But photos of this kind only began to spread after the war. And nobody tried to explain how the artist could have dared to immortalize those horrific scenes, and on such a large canvas, perfectly aware that he would be shot if the Nazis discovered the artwork. In any case, the legend stuck to the painting and helped establish the symbolism of its title, Twilight/The Shooting. Nobody took notice of the fact that nude figures, or, to be more exact, people dressed in a kind of body suit, as in Twilight/The Shooting, were common in Ušinskas’s compositions. So here he probably was depicting Soviet victims.

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Figure 34.  Kārlis Eglītis, On the Way to Massacre Place, drawing from the Dreams series, 1944, India ink on paper, 9.5 × 14.5 cm. Latvian Art Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

A similar relationship with wartime art is characteristic of other countries of the former Ostland. Only persistent efforts to find signs of wartime reality in art led the Latvians to rediscover artist Kārlis Eglītis’s India ink drawings of Nazi atrocities in a Latvian village (figs. 33–34). The set of drawings, held at the Latvian Art Museum, drew little interest and were considered naïve art of secondary importance until art historian Jānis Kalnačs began to collect material for his book on Latvian art during the years of the Nazi occupation.38 They become valuable in the wartime context as images that convey, through the eyes of a contemporary, things that threatened everyone and took place every day in the occupied country: robberies, rapes, and killings. It was of course very dangerous to represent German soldiers in this way, a circumstance that gives the drawings added meaning. So once 38 Jānis Kalnačs, Tēlotājas mākslas dzīve nacistiskās Vācijas okupētajā Latvijā 1941–1945 [Visual Arts in Latvia under German Nazi Occupation] (Riga: Neputns, 2005), 195.

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Figure 35. Aleksandra Belcova, Mother in the Ghetto, from the Riga Ghetto series, 1941–42, pencil and watercolor on paper, 25.9 × 17.4 cm. Romans Suta and Alexandra Belcova Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

more the question arises: Do the drawings really portray Germans, and not Soviets? After all, already in 1944 the Russians returned to Latvia, dealing no better with the local residents than the Germans had—raping, robbing, and killing. In any case, Eglītis’s work is a rare instance of an artist portraying the brutal side of everyday life during the war, from which many strove to escape (at least psychologically), to distance themselves, and to protect themselves by pretending that did not exist. The only eyewitness accounts of the war atrocities and the Holocaust that we find in Ostland art belong to the Latvian painter of Russian descent Alexandra Belcova (1892–1981). She left quite a large series of pencil drawings and aquarelles with variations on the scene of a Jewish mother in a shabby ghetto room and a narrative representation of the Nazis’ inhuman behavior toward Jews (figs. 35–36). The

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Figure 36. Aleksandra Belcova, Massacre, from the Riga Ghetto series,

1941–42, pencil on paper, 14 × 20.6 cm. Romans Suta and Alexandra Belcova Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

situation appeared in Belcova’s work after her visit to a ghetto to meet her singing teacher. It is not known what the artist saw or what she learned from her friend, but the drawings convey her experience of horror. In remembrance of her friend and other victims, she made many drawings of a woman with two children shut inside a dark room. The woman wears a striped blue shawl reminiscent of the Jewish ritual tallit. The end of the cycle is a self-portrait by Belcova with a striped shawl, in which the artist depicted herself with eyes shut, as if showing that she refused to look at a world in which such atrocities and inhuman behavior were possible. The young Latvian art historian Natalia Jevsejeva was the first to publish and discuss these works by Belcova in her doctoral thesis and then in an album on Belcova in the series Classics of Latvian Art.39 39 Natālija Jevsejeva, “Aleksandras Beļcovas (1892–1981) daiļrade” [“Artistic Works by Aleksandra Belcova (1892–1981)”] (PhD diss., Latvian Art Academy, 2012), 163–70;

Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II

Belcova’s work is an authentic witness to the Jewish Catastrophe. It is certain that her drawings were created only for private use. The artist could be sincere and feel herself free to express her feelings, but one gets the impression that an aspiration to documentality, or perhaps a lack of knowledge of how to convey such horrors, fettered this skilled artist’s hand. Some of Belcova’s drawings look like the work of a child or an amateur. It is hard to believe that this is the same author who created superb art deco–style compositions during 1920s and 1930s. The case of Belcova could be explained by a paradigm suggested by Polina Barskova, who noticed that during the siege of Leningrad the necessity of representation was very strong, but extremely problematic, since nobody knew how to portray pain, which is so intense that all sense of emotion is blocked and creative power taken away.40 The artists tried to alienate the shocking reality and in his way to anesthetize their pain, depicting the events that made them suffer and, in Belcova’s case, feel guilt. This brief foray into twentieth-century Lithuanian art history in search of pictorial evidence of the occupation presents an evident conclusion: the broader interpretation of art themes and motifs requires more research into the history of everyday life. Topics that have been avoided in the art raise questions about the general historical memory of the occupation and the war, or better put, about its deformation and the causes of these deformations. It is obvious also that research on the reflections of daily life in wartime images gives additional perspective to the historical and theoretical issues of visibility and the politics of knowledge. This can be made into an intriguing theme of fostering the memory of war.

Natālija Jevsejeva, Aleksandra Beļcova (Riga: Neputns, 2014), 100–103. 40 Polina Barskova, “‘Avtoportret pered smertju’: Vosproizvedenie blokadnoi lichnosti posredstvom gibridnogo dnevnika,” [“‘Self-portrait while Facing Death’: Reconstruction of the Besieged Personality through a Hybrid Diary”], in Chelovek i lichnost v istorii Rossii, konec XIX-XX vek. [People and Personalities in the Russian History during the End of the 19th and the 20th Century] (St. Petersburg, 2012), 546.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Baronnet, Jean. Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca. Preface by Jean Paul Azéma. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. Barskova, Polina. “The Corpse, the Corpulent, and the Other: A Study in the Tropology of Siege Body Representation.” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2009): 361–87. ———. “‘Avtoportret pered smertju’: Vosproizvedenie blokadnoi lichnosti posredstvom gibridnogo dnevnika” [“‘Self-portrait while Facing Death’: Reconstruction of the Besieged Personality through a Hybrid Diary”]. In Chelovek i lichnost v istorii Rossii, konec XIX–XX vek. [People and Personalities in the Russian History during the End of the 19th and the 20th Century]. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istorija, 2012, 545– 56. http://histrf.ru/uploads/media/default/0001/09/9fde71a6adc6a3efc4273d23643814932fed9176.pdf. Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Dagen, Philippe. “De photographies de propaganda nazie provoquent un malaise.” Le Monde, April 12, 2008. Foss, Brian. War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain 1939–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Grigoravičienė, Erika, ed. Žibuntas Mikšys. Vilnius: LDS leidykla, 2013. Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė. “Bažnytinė dailė nacių okupuotoje Lietuvoje.” [“Church Art in Nazi Occupied Lithuania”]. In Kunigas [Priest], edited by Paulius Subačius, 193–232. Vilnius: LKMA, 2011. ———. “Intimism in Lithuanian Art during the Second World War.” In Art and Artistic Life during the Two World Wars, edited by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė, 246–72. Vol 5 of Dailės istorijos studijos [Art History Studies]. Vilnius: LKTI, 2012. ———, ed. Lentvario bažnyčia ir jos dekoras. Kościół w Landwarowie i jego wystrój. [The Lentvaris Church and Its Décor]. Vilnius: Bažnytinio meno muziejus, 2012.

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Jevsejeva, Natālija. “Aleksandras Beļcovas (1892–1981) daiļrade” [“Artistic Works by Aleksandra Belcova (1892–1981)”]. PhD diss., Latvian Art Academy, 2012. ———. Aleksandra Beļcova. Riga: Neputns, 2014. Jordanova, Ludmilla. The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2012. Kalnačs, Jānis. Tēlotājas mākslas dzīve nacistiskās Vācijas okupētajā Latvijā 1941–1945 [Visual Arts in Latvia under German Nazi Occupation]. Riga: Neputns, 2005. Kamarauskienė, Daina, ed. Istorijos štrichai. Nacionalinis M. K. Čiurlionio dailės muziejus 1921–2011 [Traces of History: M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 1921–2011]. Kaunas: M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2011. Kruk, Herman. The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from Wilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Last Portrait: Painting for Posterity. Exhibition catalogue. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Art Museum, 2012. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas. Dienoraščio fragmentai 1938–1975 [Fragments from a Diary 1938–1975]. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002. Pfefferkorn, Eli, and Kay Leslie Ackman, eds. Days of Remembrance, 1987: Family Life in the Kovno Ghetto: An Exhibition of Photographs by George Kadish. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987. Pollock, Griselda, and Max Silverman, eds. Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Ragache, Gilles, and Jean-Robert Ragache. La vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l’occupation 1940–1944. Paris: Hachette, 1988.

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Suchocka, Izabella. “Spokój i harmonia. Twórczość Ludomira Sleńdzińskiego na przykładzie dzieł z kolekcji Galerii im. Sleńdzińskich” [“Peace and Harmony: The Artistic Heritage of Ludomir Sleńdziński after the example of his works from the collection of the Sleńdziński Family Gallery”]. In Galeria im. Sleńdzińskich w Białymstoku: Aleksander, Wincenty, Ludomir i Julitta Sleńdzińscy [Sleńdziński Family Gallery in Bialystok: Aleksander, Wincenty, Ludomir and Julitta Sleńdziński]. Białystok: Galeria im. Sleńdzińskich w Białymstoku, 2004. Vasiliūnienė, Dalia. “Sienų tapyba Perlojos bažnyčioje” [“The Wall Paintings in the Perloja Church”]. Menotyra 36, no. 4 (2004): 41–49.

CHAPTER 5

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950 RASA ŽUKIENĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas Keywords: World War II, Refugees, displaced persons (DPs), DP camps in Germany, Lithuanian art, Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts, art exhibitions, representation The consequences of World War II were particularly painful for the countries on the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. By the end of World War II, a mass flight of the inhabitants from this corner of Eastern Europe to the West began. A great number of Latvians and Estonians reached the Scandinavian countries, and a large number of Lithuanian intellectuals—artists, musicians, and actors— found themselves in the territory of Germany and Austria, were settled in refugee camps, and became displaced persons (DP). Approximately 300,000 former citizens of the Baltic republics lost their homelands because of the Soviet occupation and the war. According to the data of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 57,495 Lithuanians, 94,730 Latvians, and 30,978 Estonians lived in the British, American, and French occupation zones in West Germany in 1946. In the French zone there were 2,397

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Lithuanians.1 During the war, two thirds of the cultural workers and scholars fled from Lithuania.2 A great cultural potential of Lithuanian intellectuals—teachers, lecturers, physicians, lawyers, and writers—found themselves in DP camps. Of the 139 artists living in Germany in 1946–49, 80 were engaged in creative work.3 Historians analyzing this period write about an environment hostile to the refugees: poverty, crammed barracks, the isolation of the camps, and outbursts of national discord.4 There has not been much scholarly historical or art historical research into the daily life of displaced persons, let alone their cultural activity in postwar Germany. The existing research is characterized by a local perspective focused on the culture of a single country5 or even a single branch of art,6 and it is mostly limited to the presentation of art works and the assessment of their artistic level and their relation with the dominant art trends, as if art had had the possibility of natural development in the abnormal conditions of the war and postwar period. In the present study on Lithuanian artists in postwar Germany (1945–50), I address the question of how art and artists contributed to political solutions that were useful to their nation, its survival, and its establishment in the Western countries, through their works, public positions, and general activity. 1 Algirdas Eidintas, Lietuvių Kolumbai (Vilnius: Mintis, 1993), 94. 2 Vincas Bartusevičius, Lietuviai DP stovyklose Vokietijoje 1945–1951 (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2012), 199. 3 Ibid., 205. 4 Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Gerhard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 5 Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Dalia Kuizinienė, and Daiva Dapkutė, The Cultural Activities of Lithuanian Émigrés (Vilnius: Inter Se, 2002); Dalia Kuizinienė, Lietuvių literatūrinis gyvenimas Vakarų Europoje 1945–1950 metais (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003); Bronius Vaškelis, Žvilgsnis iš atokiau (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2004); Jūratė Vyliūtė, Lietuvių muzikai Vokietijoje 1944–1949 (Vilnius: Scena, 2005); Jūratė Vyliūtė, Čikagos lietuvių opera: istorijos metmenys (Vilnius: Scena, 1999); Linas Saldukas, “Lietuvių DP (perkeltųjų asmenų) kultūrinis gyvenimas 1945–1950 metais” (PhD diss., Vytautas Magnus University, 2000); Virginija Paulauskienė, Išėję sugrįžti: lietuvių išeivių kultūrinis literatūrinis gyvenimas Austrijoje ir Vokietijos DP stovyklose 1944– 1950 m. (Kaunas: Maironio lietuvių literatūros muziejus, 2002). 6 Andreas Linsemann, “Musik als politischer Factor: Konzepte, Intentionen und Praxis. Französischer Umerziehungs und Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949/50” (PhD diss., Mainz, 2010).

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Residents from the Baltic countries teamed up for joint activity in Allied DP camps in Germany. They were united by similar experiences of prewar life, and they were even more closely brought together by the trauma of the occupations and the war. The Allies and politicians considered Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians a single national group—Balts—though, in fact, Estonians are not a Baltic tribe. The so-called Balts were often settled in common camps. They established common public organizations (for example, “Baltic Signals Headquarters”) and held joint art exhibitions. Archival documents reflect the wish of the displaced peoples of the Baltic countries to “represent their nations and introduce the history, culture and customs of their countries and the achievements of their cultural life to the military leaders of the Allies.”7 Until the middle of 1945, all war refugees were engaged in physical labor, and it was not until the proclamation of victory that the minimum conditions for creative work appeared.8 Displaced persons regarded their cultural activity in Germany as an active factor of social life, which could open new perspectives in the future. Representation of their own culture in a foreign land became a moral mission and a means of salvation. In other words, representation of their national culture later played a positive role in political arrangements when the Balts, having experienced two occupations,9 had to prove their right to stay in the free Western world. All displaced persons (Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians, and also Poles and Ukrainians) showed strong connections with their ethnic identity in their cultural representations, and they all undertook cultural activity as a certain mission. The feeling of being a victim was often mixed with the feeling of guilt.10 People discussed how the guilt of fleeing from Lithuania should be redeemed, even though this “guilt” was induced by the occupiers.11   7 Letter of the head of the Baltic Signals Headquarters, Petras Dabrišius to the Education Board of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community (Lietuvių tremtinių bendruomenė—LTB), November 8, 1947. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago, file Eichst.-Rebd.—2. Protocols of the Cultural Council of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community, 264.   8 A. Samanis, “Susiorganizavo dailininkai ir architektai,” Mūsų kelias, November 12, 1948.   9 In 1940, the Soviets occupied the Republic of Lithuania. In June 1941, the German army occupied Lithuania, which was already considered part of the Soviet Union. 10 Juozas Girnius, “Kas pateisina Tėvynės palikimo kaltę,” Tėviškės garsas, August 7, 1947. 11 Vincas Bartusevičius, Lietuviai DP stovyklose, 200.

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Such deliberations crystallized into the idea of a “struggle for the freedom of Lithuania.” The opinion that “the road to freedom was based on cultural values” gained ground among the intellectuals.12 The majority of artists were convinced that they “brought fame to the sacred name of Lithuania as representatives of a rich and ancient culture,”13 and in this way they were fighting for the nation’s freedom. Understood in this way, culture became a field of political representation of the lost Lithuania (which no longer existed on the political map).14 All group exhibitions of folk and professional art fulfilled the direct function of representation. Sometimes they were accompanied by exalted ideological statements, which neither the representatives of other nations nor the Allied authorities found appealing. The Allies had to deal with this either by controlling it or using it to their own political purposes.15 According to Mark Wyman, a researcher of the history of displaced persons, the Allies interfered with cultural activity because they sought to send everyone out from Germany as soon as possible.16 Moreover, what the refugees from Eastern and Central Europe considered as the basis of their existence, the Allies saw as growing nationalism at a time when the world had just suffered from its excess.17 Already in 1948, however, the Allies changed their opinion, because their political approach to immigration changed. Having decided to begin a massive immigration of the Balts, U.S. authorities in 1949 invited the future immigrants to present their culture and exhibitions to American society. The aim was to get to know the new immigrants better and foster a more amicable attitude among Americans. Lithuanian artists held an exhibition of this kind in New York City at the end of 1949. It was called Lithuania Comes to Broadway. 12 Information bulletin of the Hanau camp, June 26, 1948, 164. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago, file of the Hanau 494, 164. 13 “Lietuvos tautinis menas kovoje dėl Lietuvos nepriklausomybės,” Mintis, December 23, 1948. 14 It was often asserted that “representation and adequate propaganda have a huge importance for the residents of the Baltic countries in exile.” See Letter of the head of the Baltic Signals Headquarters, Petras Dabrišius, to the Education Board of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community, date November 8, 1947. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Centre, file Eichst.-Rebd.—2. Protocols of the Cultural Council of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community, 264. 15 Ibid. 16 Wyman, DPs, 157. 17 Ibid.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

The second factor that encouraged displaced persons to get involved in cultural activity was their urge to resist the oppressive reality and continue to create under any circumstances. While living in Germany in difficult conditions, having no rights and feeling unwanted, Lithuanians intensively developed their cultural activity. Keeping the DP occupied in camps was a serious social problem. Settled in old barracks, people were most often unable to find anything to occupy their time and had no jobs. They would often idle away the dreary and monotonous days. The artist Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas (1907–97), who came up with the idea of founding an art school, wrote in his memoirs: “I saw a great deal of nihilism and passivity—the people’s active nature had to be awakened. [. . .] This art school was a good chance to start from oneself and embark on some activity.”18 Schools of general education were rapidly established,19 art exhibitions and concerts were held, operas were produced, and books were published. The Baltic University was founded in Pinneberg (near Hamburg), and several art studios for amateurs were established, as was the academic Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany (École des Arts et Métiers de Fribourg). Amateur art studios were founded by professional artists—Antanas Tamošaitis (Glasenbach camp, 1945), Česlovas Janušas, Julius KaufmannasKaupas, and Vladas Vijeikis (Würzburg, 1945), Vlada Stančikaitė-Abraitienė (Gross-Hesepe camp, 1946), and others. Participants were not differentiated by age: children attended the studios together with adults, who had not had time to finish their art studies in Lithuania. Archival documents testify to poor work conditions and meager possibilities for improving them. In a letter to the Gross-Hesepe district committee, Stančikaitė-Abraitienė wrote that the conditions for work in the barracks were very bad and detrimental to people’s health, students simply did not fit in the room.20 The committee’s 18 Tomas Sakalauskas, Kelionė: dailininko Vytauto K. Jonyno gyvenimas (Vilnius: Vaga, 1991), 104. 19 Fourteen Lithuanian progymnasiums and 20 gymnasiums with about 3,000 pupils operated in Germany in 1944–46. 20 Letter of Vlada Stančikaitė-Abraitienė to the Gross-Hesepe district committee. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago, file of the Gross Hesepe camp, unnumbered.

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Figure 1.  Courtyard of the Wedel refugee camp with the coats of arms of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Great Britain formed from pebbles. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

response was positive but limited: it assigned two additional rooms in another barracks, a shower room and a room of a former shop.21 But these rooms were still absolutely unfit for educational purposes, for drawing and painting classes in particular. Despite the difficult conditions, artists sought to contribute to the improvement and decoration of their meager environment. The courtyards of many camps were adorned with national coats of arms and the rooms with national ornaments or images of Lithuania. Photographs of the Wedel camp by an unknown photographer have survived in the archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago (fig. 1). We can see the coats of arms of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Great Britain, arranged from pebbles on the ground. They testify both to the cultural memory of the displaced persons and to their situation-based friendliness toward the British, who were in charge of the camp.

21 Ibid.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 2. Interior of the refugee camp with a view of a public square

in Kaunas on the wall. Photograph by Kazys Daugėla. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

In another photograph made by the Lithuanian photographer Kazys Daugėla in 1946, we can see temporary living quarters for DPs in a former barracks (fig. 2). A view of the central square of Kaunas is drawn in charcoal on the wall. This view was an expression of longing and loss and served as reminder of the Kaunas square. Being hung on the wall in the camp’s “room,” it also expressed the feeling of social community based on common experience, or, in other words, a “social framework” maintaining the collective memory.22 It is as if an unknown artist tried to restore and reconstruct the lost Lithuania from memory by redrawing a view of its capital on the wall of the former German barracks that had become a temporary home. Typical images of the lost Lithuania—panoramas of Vilnius and Kaunas, church 22 Vasilijus Safronovas, “Kultūrinė atmintis ar atminimo kultūra? Kultūrinės atminties teorijos taikymo moderniųjų laikų tyrimams problemos,” in Nuo Basanavičiaus, Vytauto Didžiojo iki Molotovo ir Ribbentropo: atminties ir atminimo kultūrų transformacijos XX-XXI amžiuje, comp. Alvydas Nikžentaitis (Vilnius, 2011), 39–64.

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towers, wayside crosses, and the symbol of statehood: the Columns of Gediminas—were constantly featured in the illustrations of books and magazines, and in paintings and prints by professional artists. The iconography of the images allows us to discern the values that were accepted by the consciousness of a refugee, a DP, and to see what a person who feels unsafe tries to attach himself or herself to. In some art works created by Lithuanians in Germany after World War II (later they will be discussed in greater detail), one strongly senses nostalgia for the homeland, sadness, and confusion. Emphasis on ethnic culture (folk song and dance ensembles, the national costume as representational clothing, folk textile, embroidery, the crafting of crosses and their erection in fields, the depiction of Lithuanian folk saints in prints) appealed to the feelings of those who had lost their homeland and alleviated the difficult fate of being refugees. However, already at that time there were some critical voices that doubted the value of fostering this type of culture.23 Writer Bronys Raila called it “parochial snobbery” and brought to public attention not only the issues of cultural representation but also those of adaptation, disappearance, or integration in an alien environment. Philosopher Algirdas Julius Greimas (who later founded a school of semiotics in Paris) wrote that in Europe the positive contribution of the Lithuanian nation to the general heritage of civilization should be more distinctly demonstrated.24 Exhibitions held in Germany, Italy, and France, and published books of high typographic quality testified to artists’ well-considered, active, and public commitment.25 But the most eloquent example was the founding of the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts.26 This 23 Algirdas Julius Greimas, “Lietuvių įnašas į kultūrą,” Mintis, January 14, 1948, 2. 24 Ibid. 25 Telesforas Valius: 10 gravures sur bois/Texte du Professeur Albert Bechtold (Lustenau: 1945); 40 Woodcuts: Paulius Augius-Augustinavičius, Viktoras Petravičius, Vaclovas Rataiskis-Ratas, Telesforas Valius/Text by Paulius Jurkus (Augsburg: Žiburiai, 1946); Salomėja Bačinskaitė, Žalčio pasaka/Iliustracijos P. Augiaus (Memingenas, 1947); Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers/Holzschnitte von V. K. Jonynas (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 1948); Adolfas Vaičaitis, Sieben Original-Litographien (1948); Viktoras Petravičius, 37 linoraižiniai/Įžanga P. Jurkaus (Miunchenas: Architektas T. J. Vizgirda, 1949); Mérimée, Le manuscript du professeur Wittembach Lokys: la dernière nouvelle de Prosper Mérimée avec dix-sept bois originaux de V. K. Jonynas (Bade: Art et Science, 1949); Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Le Siège de Mayence/Illustré par V. K. Jonynas (Mayence: Art et Science, 1951). 26 In 1946–49, two official names were used—“École des Arts et Métiers de Fribourg pour Etudiants Etrangers” in French, and “Ausländische Schule für schöne und

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 3. Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts in 1946. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

art school founded by Lithuanians for the refugees reflects the typical experience of many artists and cultural figures who find themselves as DPs. The Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts27 (fig. 3) operated in the French occupation zone of postwar Germany from 1946 to 1950. People of approximately ten nationalities studied there. The majority of students were Lithuanians, but there were also some representatives of other Central and Eastern European nations: Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovakians, and Ukrainians.28 In 1946, the rolls of the school listed 45 students; in 1949 there were already 135 students.29 The school was oriented to applied art and the production of readymade objects. That was the only way to convince the French authorities that an art school was necessary: young people had to study fine crafts and acquire skills that would be indispensable upon return to their devastated homeland. As we know, they did not return home; they did, however, receive basic academic training for their further studies in the world’s universities. angewandte Künste in Freiburg” (Foreigners’ School for Fine and Applied Arts in Freiburg) in German. According to the archival sources, Lithuanians most often called the school “Taikomosios dailės institutas” or “Freiburgo meno mokykla.” 27 The school’s main building in Freiburg was located at 1 Wonnhaldestrasse. Five other locations of the school’s premises are known from the archival sources. 28 Victoria Matranga, Refugee Artists in Germany 1945–1950 (Chicago, 1984), 6. 29 A. Jogaudas, École des Art et Métiers, “Pasikalbėjimai su Taikomosios dailės mokyklos direktoriumi prof. V. Jonynu,” Tėviškės garsas, no. 97, November 6, 1947.

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Figure 4. Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Stained glass windows of the Sisters of Notre Dame Chapel, Wilton, 1961–62.

The school was founded by Jonynas, and he had distinguished himself in Lithuania before the war as an excellent printmaker of the realist trend and an illustrator of classical works. After arriving in the United States in 1950, he became an outstanding stained glass artist and creator of interiors of sacred buildings. His notable works are stained glasses for the Wilton Chapel (Wilton, Connecticut) (fig. 4) and Transfiguration Church (Maspeth, Queens, New York), and the design of and bas reliefs for the Lithuanian chapel in the grotto of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Jonynas failed in his first attempt to bring the idea of a school to life— to found an art school in the American occupation zone. His proposal was rejected on the grounds that no such project was planned and so there was no budget for it. Some researchers, such as Wyman, assert that the officials and politicians who were in power did not approve of the cultural activity of DPs in general, being impatient to send move them out from Germany as soon as possible and thus solve the problem of DPs.30 30 Wyman, DPs, 157.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

The Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts was eventually founded in the French zone. This was an outcome of Jonynas’s personal connections. Quite unexpectedly, he renewed his acquaintance with a former professor from Kaunas University, Raymond Schmittlein. Before the war Schmittlein taught French at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, and he had written some French-language textbooks in Lithuania. In the postwar period, he worked as director of the Education Department of the French occupation zone in Germany. Thanks to Schmittlein’s efforts, the French administration began to appreciate Jonynas’s organizational abilities, which had already been acknowledged in France before the war: Jonynas was decorated with the French Order of the Legion of Honor for organizing the Lithuanian section at the Paris World Exposition in 1937. Thus, having built considerable trust, Jonynas moved from the American zone to the French zone, and founded the art school in Freiburg im Breisgau in the Schwartzwald.31 The majority of teachers of the former Kaunas Art School worked in this school. While compiling the school’s curriculum, Jonynas referred to the Kaunas Art School’s plan of studies.32 Although the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts was oriented to applied art, the basics of academic drawing and painting were not forgotten (fig. 5) Considerable attention was paid to fostering traditions of Lithuanian folk art. Authentic ornaments characteristic of folk textile and the forms and décor of pottery used in villages were predominant in students’ works (fig. 6). The direct continuity of artistic traditions seemed necessary and meaningful as a spiritual link with the abandoned homeland.33 The school regularly held exhibitions. Students and their teachers sought to fit in with Germany’s artistic scene, though it should be admitted they did not succeed in making contacts with German artists. Several 31 UNRRA decision of February 11, 1946, on the establishment of the School of Applied Arts in Freiburg and the appointment of Jonynas as headmaster. See École des Arts et Metiérs (Fribourg-Brisgau: Edition de l’École des Arts et Metiérs de Fribourg, 1948), 7. 32 Kaunas Institute of Applied Art is a direct successor of the traditions and teaching system of the Kaunas Art School. In the years of World War II, Jonynas was the head of the institute. 33 Ingrida Korsakaitė, “Lietuvių grafikos mokyklos tąsa egzilyje,” Kultūros barai, no. 1 (1996): 70.

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Figure 5.  A painting lesson at the Freiburg Art School—teacher Victoras Vizgirda and student Julia Kiefer-Šapkus, 1948. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

exhibitions introducing the study program were held in the school itself (fig. 7). The artists devoted much attention to exhibiting their works in German museums. The recollections of contemporaries show their huge resolution to represent their work in a new country. In his Figure 6.  NCeramic works by students memoirs, journalist Algirdas of the Freiburg Art School, 1947. Gustaitis talks about the efforts of Archive of the Lithuanian Research the famous Lithuanian artist and and Studies Center, Chicago. former Kaunas Art School professor Adomas Galdikas (1893–1969) to join the art scene in Germany: 26 May 1947. Today, the artist Adomas Galdikas was brought by an UNRA truck to Hanau, and from here will go to Freiburg in Br[eisgau]. He waited in the Duisburg camp for three weeks with an UNRA wire in his hands, guaranteeing him a transfer to Freiburg. [. . .] Having arrived in Duisburg with his wife, he was pushed

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 7.  Exhibition of works of the Freiburg Art School, 1949. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

around by the Poles, but Lithuanian students helped him a lot and saved him from famine. There were three weeks in his life when he could not perform any artistic work. Now he has a jacket that hardly holds together and a pair of non-matching trousers. Tomorrow morning a truck will take him to Freiburg. He is taking along some of his works, part of which he would like to show in an exhibition of Baltic art in Baden-Baden, opening on June 1st. Later, there are plans to transfer the exhibition to Paris, and probably somewhere else.34 As we can see, oppressed by poverty, unable even to move freely in the territory of Germany (for each trip official permits of the Allied authorities had to be obtained), the artists made active efforts to try to represent their country and join the artistic scene of Western Europe.

34 Algirdas Gustaitis, Karas braukia kruviną ašarą (Chicago: Devenių kultūrinio fondo leidinys, 1990), 704.

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Several solo or small group exhibitions were held in museums and galleries of Germany, France (Paris), and Italy (Rome). Artists Galdikas, Jonynas, and Vytautas Kasiulis (1918–95) were active organizers of exhibitions. Their catalogues, containing an essay on the artists by the art critic and poet of Estonian descent Aleksis Rannit (1914–85), were published (figs. 8–9). Jonynas and Galdikas, former lecturers of the Kaunas Art School, held four joint exhibitions in Freiburg, Konstanz, Kitzingen, and BadenBaden (fig. 10).35 Their first joint exhibition took place in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg in 1946. Jonynas exhibited woodcarvings and drawings, which he had brought along from Lithuania, and Galdikas showed watercolors and drawings. A catalogue with a short text by French critic Maurice Jardot was published. Everything was well thought out and adapted for an international audience. The two friends knew what they were doing. This can be clearly seen from a letter by Rannit’s wife to her relatives, in which she uses the term “propaganda” when describing the exhibition by Jonynas: “All the newsprint propaganda is led by Aleksis [Rannit], who will hold his first public lecture in German about the works of Jonynas and Galdikas on September 20th; now the posters are hanging in the entire city.”36 A surviving exhibition poster reads: “Aleksis Rannit from the UNRRA Institute of Fine Arts [the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts] will hold a lecture in German on the works by Galdikas and Jonynas at the exhibition of Lithuanian artists at the Augustiner Museum.”37 The first sentence of the lecture given by Rannit made a great impression on the audience: “In the great empire of art, a small nation can also be great.”38 Later this statement was often quoted in the press. Rannit was 35 Ausstellung des litauischen Graphikers V. K. Jonynas (Freiburg: Augustiner-Museum, G.M.Z.F.O. Direction de l’éducation publique beaux-arts, 1946); Ausstellung der litauischen Künstler Professor A. Galdikas, Professor V. K. Jonynas (Catalogue), Kitzingen/ Main: H. O. Holzner, 1948); Galdikas, Jonynas, Bakis: Ausstellung der litauischen Künstler (Baden-Baden: G.M.Z.F.O. Direction de l’éducation publique beaux-arts, 1948). 36 Letter of G. Matulaitytė-Rannit to V. Matulaitytė-Lozoraitienė, Freiburg, November 16, 1946, Kazys Lozoraitis’s private archive, Rome. 37 “Aleksis Rannit vom Institut des Beaux-Arts d’UNRRA spricht in deutscher Sprache über das Schaffen von A. Galdikas und V. K. Jonynas zur Ausstellung der litauischen Künstler im Augustiner Museum” (Exhibition poster), G. Jonynas Troncone’s private archive, Wilton, Connecticut. 38 “Im grossen Reich der Kunst kann oft auch ein kleines Volk gross sein.”

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 8.  Tre incistori Baltici: Jonynas Vytautas Kazys, Petravičius Viktoras, Wiiralt Eduard: mostra allestita dalla Calcografia Nazionale nel giugno del 1949 (Exhibition catalogue) (Urbino: Instituto d’Arte per il libro, 1949). (On the reverse is found Jonynas’s illustration for Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai.)

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Figure 9. Aleksis Rannit, Vytautas Kasiulis: Un peintre lithuanien (BadenBaden: Edition Woldemar Klein, 1947).

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 10. Catalogue for Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas and Adomas Galdikas exhibition (Kitzingen/Main: H. O. Holzner, 1948).

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able to convince people that these works were highly professional, even though they were created far from European art centers—in Lithuania. In 1949, Jonynas held a solo exhibition at the Ariel Gallery in Paris (fig. 11).39 Enthusiastic reviews by art critics (Jean Bouret, Henri Martinie) appeared in French newspapers.40 The head of the Louvre drawing department Maurice Sérullaz and writer Jean Mosellan described Jonynas as “one of the great printmakers of our time,” whose work is “a powerful and touching song in honour of his Lithuanian homeland.” The critics pointed out the dominating factors in the artist’s work: “potency, clarity, elegance, and strength.”41 Despite the abundant praise, however, Jonynas failed to connect with the Paris art scene. Galdikas, who lived in Paris for several years and held a solo exhibition there, was forced to emigrate to the United States. Rannit, who organized an exhibition by two Lithuanian artists and Estonian artist Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954) in Rome, also had to emigrate.42 Press reviews about the exhibitions were very favorable. The German press wrote that “this art is by no means provincial, as it may sometimes seem, and can be placed among the ranks of great European art,” and that “it connects the East and the West.”43 Sometimes the reviews in the German and French press were so laudatory that one could begin to doubt their genuineness and organic relation with the art scene. In fact, the Allied authorities always kept a watchful eye on these exhibitions, which would often become an excuse for friendly meetings of DP artists and representatives of the controlling authorities, resulting in good mutual relations. The control of the authorities over the artists was not particularly strict. Lithuanians sought to maintain good relations and win their favor. 39 V. K. Jonynas, Galerie Ariel, June 24 to July 9, 1949. Fifteen years after the first exhibition in the Zak gallery, the illustrations for the books The Sorrows of Young Werther, Lokis, and The Siege of Mainz created in Germany, and new drawings for “Hamlet” and the poem “Miguel Maňara,” by Oscar Milosz, were presented to the public. 40 Arts, Opera, Le Monde, Le Parisien Liberte, France Illustration. 41 See Antanas Švirmickas, “Spaudos atsiliepimai apie dailininką V. K. Jonyną,” Vienybė, May 16, 1954. 42 Tre incisori baltici: Jonynas Vytautas Kazys, Petravičius Viktoras, Wiiralt Eduard: mostra allestita dalla Calcografia Nazionale nel giugno del 1949. 43 Giessler Rupert, “Litauische Kunst,” Badische Zeitung, November 22, 1946.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 11. Poster for Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas exhibition at Galerie Ariel in Paris in 1949. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius.

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Figure 12.  Representatives of the French occupation authorities visit the

Art School of Arts and Crafts, 1948. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

The surviving photographic material vividly demonstrates that officers were frequent guests at the exhibitions of the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts (fig. 12). Students would create officers’ portraits (fig. 13), and officers’ wives would receive those works as gifts at exhibition openings. Jonynas, the school’s headmaster, also drew several portraits of French officers (fig. 14). The public reaction was quite curious, and the artist wrote in his memoirs: “When I made a portrait (woodcut) of the general of the highest rank of the entire zone, Koenig, who posed for me in his headquarters, others who wished to have their portraits made suddenly became too modest and contented themselves with bookplates.”44 According to the artist, portraits of officers and their wives (and the sharing of a glass of cognac) were a means to put some spark into relations with the French.45 Good relations between Jonynas and the Allied authorities are testified to by works such as his illustrations for Schmittlein’s study on the novella Lokis, by Prosper Mérimée (fig. 15). It was Schmittlein, 44 V. K. Jonynas’s manuscript, c. 1980. Unnumbered pages. Private archive. 45 Ibid.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 13. General Pierre Pene by his portrait at an exhibition of the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago.

Figure 14. Vytautas

Kazimieras Jonynas, portrait of General Pierre Koenig, woodcut, 42.7 x 30.3 cm. LDM G 15348.

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Figure 15. Vytautas Kazimieras

Jonynas, cover of Raymond Schmittlein’s study on the novella Lokis, by Prosper Mérimée (Bade: Art et Science, 1949).

seeking to publish his study at that time, who asked him to illustrate the work.46 Mérimée’s novella is set in Lithuania in the nineteenth century. Jonynas’s illustrations combine Lithuanian folklore elements with abstract or expressively realistic forms. The cover aptly reveals the ethnic character of Lithuania as a land of forests. Another work by Jonynas, illustrations for The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, stirred great interest in Germany (figs. 16–17). A German critic wrote that in these illustrations the world of rococo, which had somewhat faded away among contemporaries, was both sharply and subtly revealed, with its features expressed in a more rational

and modern way.47 Lithuanian artists in exile unswervingly continued the traditions of Lithuanian art formed in the prewar period, which were close to modernist and neoclassical Western European art. Above all, printmakers skillfully employed the stylistics resembling the graphic art of prewar German expressionism. The war trauma, looming danger, and their homeless condition further strengthened the predilection of printmakers for expressive deformation of form. Sad or tragic images and emotions prevail in their works, quite a number of which speak about pain, deaths, losses, funerals, and danger (figs. 18–21). Even classical iconographic motifs, such as St. Sebastian (fig. 22) or a mother with child, would become metaphors of painful and destructive existence in exile. Threat and vulnerability in general became the basic topics of the artistic discourse in exile. For example, artist Viktoras Petravičius, who 46 Schmittlein’s study on Lokis was published in Baden-Baden in 1949. 47 Hermann Hilde, “Dailinininko V. K. Jonyno kūryba tremty,” Tremtis, 70 (1951).

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 16. Vytautas Kazimieras Figure Jonynas, Charlotte, illustration for The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1947, woodcut, 29.6 x 20.9 cm.

17. Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Dance, illustration for The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1947, woodcut, 29.6 x 20.9 cm.

was deeply affected by oppressive experiences in the postwar period, after the war in Germany depicted funerary processions and groups of war refugees (figs. 23–24) rather than the merry wedding ceremonies and festive processions he had been engraving in Lithuania. His works during the postwar period are full of extreme expression. Almost all graphic artists represented Lithuanian landscape, especially, in their prints—plains, the sea, church towers, pillars with chapels, and crosses. Printmakers remained faithful to the customary (prewar) iconography. At that time they were not seeking new views or motifs in that they found in the Germany. Tormented by homesickness, they more often engraved or painted cheerful landscapes of Lithuania from memory. Saints of Lithuanian folk sculptures and sacred signs of landscape were their most important images, expressing the Lithuanian spirit, but, unfortunately, these scenes were recognized and understood only by the former residents of the Baltic countries.

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Figure 18. Romas Viesulas, Composition with a Man and a Bell, 1949, pop., linocut, 29.9 x 21 cm. Antanas Mončys House-Museum, Palanga.

However, painters, unlike graphic artists, did create landscapes of Germany. As Otto Dix put it, landscape painting during the war was a kind of “inner emigration.”48 Lithuanian landscapes painted in 48 Stephanie Baron and Sabine Eckmann, comps, Exil: Flucht und Emigration europäischer Künstler 1933–1945 (Munich-New York: Prestel, 1998), 14.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 19. Telesforas Valius, Women, 1948, woodcut, 23.4 x 17.8 cm. LDM G 24416.

Figure 20.  Telesforas Valius, Cry, 1948, linocut, 43.1 x 43.1 cm. LDM G 23736.

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Figure 21.  Telesforas Valius,

Figure 22.  Telesforas Valius, St.

Figure

Figure

Mother, 1946, woodcut, 15.2 x 15.2 cm. LDM G 244807.

23. Viktoras Petravičius, Refugees, 1948, linocut, 47.8 x 37.8 cm. LDM G 16372.

Sebastian, 1946, woodcut, 15 x 14.8 cm, 24,5 x 20 cm. NČDM Mg-15417.

24. Viktoras Petravičius, Freedom Struggle of My Country, 1946, linocut, 57.5 x 35 cm. LDM G 16383.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 25.  Adomas Galdikas, Autumn, 1946–47, oil on canvas, 43 x 61.3 cm. LDM T 7457.

Germany of Germany remained as emotional and expressive as they were in the prewar period in Lithuania. This was particularly characteristic of works by Adolfas Valeška and Adomas Galdikas, who conveyed the moods aroused by nature in a very expressive way. Their works are tempestuous, marked by a special intensity of lines (figs. 25–27). Freiburg was the most frequent subject for painters. It was probably Jonynas alone who drew Freiburg and its environs while out in nature—his position as headmaster of the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts gave him greater freedom of movement (fig. 28). He successfully used these drawings to create postage stamps for the French zone. Interestingly, it was this DP, who temporarily lived in the French zone from 1946 to 1949, who created the majority of the postage stamps representing the French-occupied lands. The French authorities commissioned Jonynas to create postage stamps of the lands of Saar (1947), Baden (1947), Rheinland-Pfalz (1947–48), and Württemberg-­­Hohenzollern

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Figure 26.  Adolfas Valeška, Freiburg Landscape, 1950, oil on canvas, 80.2 x 60 cm. NČDM Mt 5737.

(1947–48) without any competition. The stamps circulated in the French zone for two years.49 Jonynas made thirty-five designs for stamps. The stamps created by the artist can be described as informative artistic compositions drawn in a soft picturesque style (figs. 29–31). That was a novelty, because postage stamps made using the 49 In 1949, postage stamps created by other artists—E. Bargatzky, P. Hund, H. Thorweger, Meyer and Pixa, J. Dorner, and Professor Dietrich—were issued.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 27.  Adolfas Valeška, Spring in Freiburg, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.8 x 49.5 cm. NČDM Mt 5736.

Figure 28. Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Freiburg Cathedral, drawing, pencil, 23.5 x 19.8 cm. LDM.

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Figure 29.  Vytautas Kazimieras

Jonynas, Baden (Freiburg Cathedral), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947. Private collection, Lithuania.

Figure 30.  Vytautas Kazimieras

Jonynas, Rheinland-Pfalz (Ludwig van Beethoven), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947–48. Private collection, Lithuania.

metal engraving technique were widespread in Germany at that time. Germans were surprised that an artist from a foreign country could feel the spirit of German culture so well. Even several years after Jonynas left Germany, his postage stamp designs were highly acclaimed. A magazine dedicated to the history of the post, Die SammlerLupe, wrote that “it was a highly promising beginning after a downfall, but unfortunately, only the beginning. It is not known where Jonynas is now, but the consistent line of creating postage stamps

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

Figure 31.  Vytautas Kazimieras

Jonynas, Saar (Marshal Michel Nay), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947. Private collection, Lithuania.

Figure 32.  Lithuania Comes to Broadway, exhibition flyer, 1950, print, 10 x 19 cm. Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, Chicago.

has already been lost after him.”50 At that time Jonynas already lived in the United States and was famous as a creator of church art. 50 Seep Schüller, “Hoffnungsvoller Beginn—Vytautas Kazys Jonynas,” Die Sammler-Lupe, 17 (1954): 280.

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In 1948, the United States opened the gates for the immigration of DPs. Having remained rather indifferent to the cultural movement of the refugees for several years, the occupation authorities in 1948 managed to use it to their own ends. At the time, U.S. politicians were apparently concerned with finding a way to introduce the new arrivals so they would be more favorably received by the U.S. population. Exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and other larger cities were planned.51 Lithuanians interpreted the offer to hold an exhibition as an opportunity to thank the Lithuanian Americans for their support. The refugees living in Germany wanted to show the population of the United States and their compatriots that they not only “claimed the benefits” but also could create valuable art.52 A jury was formed, and the works were awarded prizes.53 Before being transferred to the United States, the exhibition was shown in the Hanau camp. It included works by professional artists and artisan artifacts made in small workshops.54 The sections in the American exhibition on “Visual Art,” “Folk Art” and “Handicrafts” were already customary to the refugees. As the commissioner of the exhibition Liudas Vilimas (1912–66) wrote, “these works will clearly show how laborious are the hands of those who remain in overcrowded barracks, waiting either for a return to the homeland, or a 51 Letter of the BALF charge of affairs, Petras Minkūnas, to the chairman of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community, Povilas Gaučys, New York, February 11, 1949. Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago, file: Various letters of the Committee for the Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in the USA, 74. 52 Letter of the chairman of the central committee of the Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community (LTB), Povilas Gaučys, from Hanau, to P. Daužvardis, Lithuanian consul in Chicago, November 2, 1948. Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago. file: Various letters of the Committee for the Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in the USA, 97. 53 Jonas Grigolaitis. “Paroda, kurią matysime Amerikoje,” Vienybė, August 6, 1948. The jury and the awarded works were presented. Members of the jury were chairman A. Tamošaitis, A. Valeška, A. Marčiulionis, P. Augius, LTB representative P. Gaučys, and the chairman of the Journalists Union A. Merkelis. The 1949 list contained 404 exhibits (247 works by 32 artists, and artifacts of applied art by 36 artists). See Gaučys’s letter to the American Lithuanian Council of September 13, 1948. Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago. Various letters of the Committee for the Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in the USA, 126. 54 Handicraft shops in Freiburg, Hanover, Ingolstadt, and Schweinfurt, and the leatherwear workshop of Kempten. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago. Various letters of the Committee for the Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in the USA, 98.

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

possibility to start working in free countries.”55 This kind of discourse is quite common in the perception of exhibitions in the DP period. Above all, I would like to draw attention to the section of the exhibition titled “National Martyrology.” It was meant to “depict the sufferings of our nation in Bolshevik and Soviet times in a decorative form.” According to the plan, it was to be a separate room containing a flag, the Vytis symbol, and stained glasses depicting the sufferings of the nation, with statistics about the deportations and victims of the occupation and the war. A bas-relief was to be created from Lithuanian soil on a podium, and an urn for the victims was to be built. Lithuanian and U.S. flags were to surround the display in a semicircle.56 The plan was distinguished by clear political, ideological, and victim discourse. It was also obvious that the Lithuanians themselves perceived art exhibitions as a tool for supporting national ideology. Still, in the context of this exhibition it would have seemed somewhat strange. Ultimately the plan was abandoned. The exhibition, titled Lithuania Comes to Broadway. Lithuanian Art in Exile, was held in the Hall of Science in New York until early 1950.57 A color flyer was printed without the national attributes, which were customary in Germany. It bore the slogan “Lithuania Comes to Broadway” and called the exhibition itself a festival (fig. 32). It remains unknown to me who managed to change the profile of this event and create an image of a more or less proper art exhibition. All Lithuanian artists of some renown—Paulius Augius (1909–60), Viktoras Petravičius (1906–89), Telesforas Valius (1914–77), Jonynas, Viktoras Vizgirda (1904–93), Julius Kaufmannas-Kaupas (1920–64), Česlovas Janušas (1907–93), and others—took part. Within a couple of years they 55 Letter of Liudas Vilimas to the head of the Lithuanian Information Center in America Jurgelis, Dettelbach, March 23, 1948. Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago. Various letters of the Committee for the Exhibition of Lithuanian Art in the USA, 219. 56 Ibid. 57 Alfonsas Baronas, “Menas Lietuvos vardo populiarinime,” Draugas, December 23, 1949. According to Baronas, the exhibition was held in the Hall of Science (Broadway at 44th Street) in New York from October 20 to November 20, 1949, and received 30,000 visitors. This exhibition was moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, and it was displayed in Waterbury Silas Bronson Library from April 20 to May 6, 1950. Later, the exhibition was moved to Chicago and exhibited in the rooms of the Chicago Historical Society from August 14 to October 1, 1950.

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came to Broadway themselves. On the American continent, emigrants found a different political and cultural climate. In occupied Germany their exhibitions were a symbol of the artists’ strength and abilities. But in the second exile their accumulated symbolic capital did not mean a thing, and they had to start from scratch. Like millions of other war refugees, the artists from the Baltic countries who found themselves in DP camps in Germany after World War II experienced the trauma of war. The works by Lithuanian artists reflect this in the rather gloomy subjects and landscapes of their idealized homeland. In real life, though, the artists made great efforts to withstand the oppressing reality. They used their creative talents to represent their nation in their works and to struggle for the prospects of a better future. With their art and cultural activity they represented their nation and country, and managed to achieve their goal: Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were not forcefully repatriated to their Soviet-occupied countries. It should be noted that the condition of a refugee has always been, and still is, very uncomfortable, and it is very difficult to become a resident of a strange land and integrate oneself into a new environment. Jonynas can be considered an artist who successfully adapted himself to the condition of a DP and to new and rather unfavorable circumstances. Forced departure from Lithuania provoked in him a burst of creative energy, vigor, and ingenuity. In establishing the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts, Jonynas laid the foundation for a younger generation of artists who continued art studies in the United States, Great Britain, and South America in the 1950s and 1960s. The example Jonynas and others who emigrated farther west, however, is an exception rather than the rule. The scope and success of other Lithuanian artists’ activity did not match that of Jonynas. We must remember that the work of the majority of Lithuanian artists during the German period testifies to the trauma of war and the subsequent inability to adapt to a new artistic environment. Having settled in the United States or Canada, they found employment performing manual labor, sometimes working in the fields of education or culture, and their art

Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950

activity was limited to Lithuanian diaspora’s community centers. Because many of them failed to adjust (or just barely) to American museums and galleries, they couldn’t integrate as artists into the new international art medium. Their work did not become aligned with the work of postwar European and American artists. It also remained little understood in a new context and, unlike the works of Western European artists who went through exile, it did not contain direct reflections of the exile experience.

ABBREVIATIONS IN NOTES AND CAPTIONS LDM: Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius LTB: Centre of Lithuanian Refugee Community NČDM: Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Kaunas

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aleksandravičius, Egidijus, Dalia Kuizinienė, and Daiva Dapkutė. The Cultural Activities of Lithuanian Émigrés. Vilnius: Inter Se, 2002. Baron, Stephanie, and Sabine Eckmann, comps. Exil: Flucht und Emigration europäischer Künstler 1933–1945. Munich-New York: Prestel, 1998. Bartusevičius, Vincas. Lietuviai DP stovyklose Vokietijoje 1945–1951. Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2012. Cohen, Gerhard Daniel. In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Eidintas, Algirdas. Lietuvių Kolumbai. Vilnius: Mintis, 1993. Gustaitis, Algirdas. Karas braukia kruviną ašarą. Chicago: Devenių kultūrinio fondo leidinys, 1990. Kuizinienė, Dalia. Lietuvių literatūrinis gyvenimas Vakarų Europoje 1945– 1950 metais. Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2013. Lamberga, Dace, comp. Latvian Art in Exile. Riga: Latvian National Museum of Art, 2013. Linsemann, Andreas. “Musik als politischer Factor: Konzepte, Intentionen und Praxis. Französischer Umerziehungs und Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949/50.” PhD diss., Mainz, 2010.

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Matranga, Victoria. Refugee Artists in Germany 1945–1950: Lithuanian Artists at the Freiburg École des Arts et Métiers. Chicago, 1984. Nikžentaitis, Alvydas, comp. Nuo Basanavičiaus, Vytauto Didžiojo iki Molotovo ir Ribbentropo: atminties ir atminimo kultūrų transformacijos XX–XXI amžiuje. Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2011. Reenan, Antanas van. Lithuanian Diaspora: Königsberg to Chicago. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992. Sakalauskas, Tomas. Kelionė: dailininko Vytauto K. Jonyno gyvenimas. Vilnius: Vaga, 1991 Wyman, Mark. DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 6

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania RASA ANTANAVIČIŪTĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas

Keywords:  World War I, Lithuania, commemoration, history textbooks, grand narrative My main interest lies in the history of public spaces as targets of diverse political authorities and in their function as identity builders and memory constructors. While collecting material on the commemoration phenomenon in general, I was struck by the difference in the amount of attention paid to World War I in the West and in the East.1 In the United Kingdom or France—winning Allied powers—the history of the Great War constitutes an important part of the national grand narrative, or national rhetoric. There are very few towns and villages in the United Kingdom, France, and also Germany, which do not have a public memorial to commemorate those who were killed in World War I. In fact, the Great War started the museofication and universal commemoration of warfare in Europe—it was the first conflict that caused a great number of civilian casualties and 1

It is important to note that, in Lithuania, different terms were used to identify World War I at different times: during the interwar period it was commonly called the “Great War” (referring to its scope rather than its magnificence); after World War II, in Soviet times, it was referred to rather as the “First World War” (in order to deemphasize its magnificence and not identify with the victors) or the “Imperial War”; in post-Soviet textbooks, the terms “Great War” and “First World War” are used as synonyms.

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that implicated all of society. The status of the war in United Kingdom and France has not changed since 1918. In the United Kingdom, two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. on November 11 have marked the end of the war every year since 1918. It was always a part of the grand narrative, and thus there are plenty of researchers, museums, and associations that preserve the legacy and memory of the war. The situation differs dramatically in the East. The nation-states that emerged, or reemerged, in the aftermath of the World War I and after the dissolution of Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires (e.g., Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania) tend to more or less neglect the memory of the war, as does Russia.2 Lithuania shares many characteristics in this respect, but it represents a radical example of almost complete oblivion of the Great War in public memory and commemoration. In Lithuania, the Great War is commonly perceived as a longer period of military conflicts that lasted from 1914 to 1920. This period distinctly splits into two stages: (1) the “international war,” which hit Lithuania in August 1914 when fighting between the German and Russian armies in East Prussia commenced, and which came to an end in March 1918, when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed and the German army retreated; (2) the “national war” or defensive fight of the newly formed Lithuanian national army against Bolsheviks, Bermontians,3 and Poles in 1919–1920, commonly called the Lithuanian Wars of Independence.

2 For example, Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny, Nasza wojna, vol. 1, Imperia 1912–1916 (Warszawa, 2014); Gregor Joseph Kranjc, “The Neglected War: The Memory of World War I in Slovenia,” in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 22, no. 2, London (2009) 208–35; Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Первая мировая война: историографические мифы и историческая память, под ред. О. В. Петровской (Москва, 2014) (The First World War: Historiographical Myths and Historical Memory, ed. O. V. Petrovskaya. Moscow, 2014). 3 The Bermontians, or West Russian Volunteer Army, were an army in the Baltic provinces of the former Russian Empire during the Russian civil war of 1918–20. An army of about 50,000 men (mostly Freikorps, Baltic Germans, and some Russian POWs captured by Germany in World War I and then released on the promise that they would help fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war) was led by General Rüdiger von der Goltz and General Pavel Bermont-Avalov.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Diplomatic battles for the restoration of Lithuanian statehood were waged in parallel with military developments. They started at the end of 1917, toward the end of the “international war,” reached their highpoint in the signing of the Act of Independence on February 16, 1918, and continued until 1922 when the Lithuanian Republic was acknowledged as an independent state by the main international political powers. Commemorations of the two stages of the war differ greatly in intensity. The “international war” barely exists in the history and memory of Lithuania. As the centennial of the war is being solemnly commemorated in the West, Lithuanians are putting their efforts into celebrating other occasions: the 300th anniversary of Lithuanian literary pioneer Kristijonas Donelaitis in 2014, and the 250th anniversary of the Lithuanian and Polish composer, diplomat, and politician Michał Kleofas Ogiński (Mykolas Kleopas Oginskis) in 2015. Even if researchers and warfare enthusiasts sporadically initiate events, no public occasions are foreseen by the Lithuanian authorities to mark the centennial of World War I, no efforts to make it more visible on this extraordinary occasion can be noted. Even in oral or family histories, references to the war usually remain at the level of laconic clichés, mostly connected with the requisition of foodstuffs and the recruitment of fellow villagers. Meanwhile, the “national war” (together with related diplomatic struggles) is abundantly recalled in memorials, history textbooks, and documentaries, and there are also well-developed remembrance rituals. The Wars of Independence constitute an important part of the grand narrative of the present Lithuanian Republic. The authorities are already preparing for the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the Act of Independence, in 2018. One the one hand, we see a striking difference between attention to the Great War in the West and in Lithuania. On the other hand, there is a great disproportion in public awareness of the “national” and “international” stages of the Great War. With these inconsistencies in mind, I would like to compare how the two stages of World War I have been commemorated and remembered in Lithuania since the end of the war, and then to address the question of why the Great War of 1914–18 does not exist in the Lithuanian memory. By doing so, I am focusing on the state’s attempts to create (or to erase) the image of the war, and so I do not explore the reception or interpretation of this image by the population of Lithuania.

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I base my approach to memory and representation on three main ideas: (1) Jean-François Lyotard’s grand narrative, a narrative about narratives of historical meaning and one that offers a societal legitimization through the anticipated completion of a master idea;4 (2) the invention of history as the modern civic religion expected to provide stability and legitimacy to the dominating power structures that, in turn, shape the historical narrative, as described by Eric Hobsbawm;5 and (3) the nationstate (or modern state), which, according to Ernest Gellner, is based on the common identity of its citizens.6 Thus the state-conducted mechanism of memory-building looks like this: a state invents a historical grand narrative that helps to nurture a common (e.g., national or Soviet) identity among its citizens and provides stability to the dominating power structure. Thus, the memory and identity of citizens is structured and focused on narratives, which allow them to feel comfortable in the existing present, prove the legitimacy of the ruling power, and foster pride in being part of a particular political structure. In some countries, the Great War was included in their grand narrative and played an important role there. In others, like Lithuania, it was not and did not. Before trying to answer why, I will look briefly into the history of World War I in Lithuania and into the portrayal of the war after its end.

RESOURCES AND APPROACH While gathering information about the portrayal of World War I in Lithuania, I examined the popular tools of memory construction: history textbooks for high schools, monuments and commemoration rituals, and art works on the Great War. Research by Lithuanian historians was deliberately put aside because it involves a specialized academic discourse. Rather, I seek to review information that reaches a general audience, that is, to look at the state policy on the memory of the Great War and nonacademic public initiatives. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 5 Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983). 6 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997).

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I also offer a very short comparison of World War I memory practices in Lithuania and those in Latvia. Latvia was chosen as a country with a similar World War I experience—a battlefield with limited participation in the military actions.7

WAR IN LITHUANIA AND LITHUANIA IN THE WAR The war in Lithuania started on August 17, 1914, when the Russian army commenced its offensive into East Prussia (fig. 1). Even before that, the Russian army had assembled near the German borders, local inhabitants were mobilized, and requisition of horses and food products started. Military actions with fierce fighting traveled up and down Lithuanian territory, devastating cities and villages, until October 1915, when the eastern front settled down in northeastern Lithuania (fig. 2). The front stayed there until 1918, when the German army marched forward into the territory of what was then already Soviet Russia. The signing of the BrestLitovsk treaty in March 1918 settled the German-Russian borders near the 1915–18 eastern front line and thus ended the “international war” in Lithuania. German troops left Lithuanian territory at the end of 1918. The German occupation, which lasted almost four years, fell very hard on civilians: compelled contributions, requisitions of harvests, forced labor, and destruction of homes soon resulted in misery and starvation. Historians maintain that about five hundred Lithuanian military officers served in the Imperial Russian Army on different fronts of the Great War.8 About 65,000 local men were conscripted and fought on the eastern front under the leadership of Russian officers. Almost half of them were killed.9 It is estimated that about 300,000 residents left Lithuanian territory for Russia in 1914–15 (the total population of the region was about two 7 My inquiry into World War I memory practices in Latvia was greatly facilitated by my colleague from the Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art, Kristiana Abele. 8 “Lithuanians had to fight on different fronts. Even one against the other, because there were Lithuanians on both fighting sides. On the Entente side Lithuanians were fighting on the Russian front against Germans and Austrians, and on the Caucasus front against Turks. More so, there were some Lithuanians among the Russian troops taken to France and to the Thessaloniki front. American Lithuanians also fought on the Western Front. Lithuanians from Prussia had to fight on various fronts on the German side” (Justas Paleckis, “Didysis 1914–1918 m. karas” [Kaunas: Skaitytojas, 1939], 46. 9 Ibid. The numbers vary from source to source, but the general picture remains the same.

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Figure 1.  The Eastern Front in 1914, map in Frank M. McMurry, Geography

of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), accessed April 8, 2015, http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~worldwarone/WWI/ TheGeographyOfTheGreatWar/.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Figure 2.  The Eastern Front in 1915, map in Frank M. McMurry, Geography

of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), accessed April 8, 2015, http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~worldwarone/WWI/ TheGeographyOfTheGreatWar/.

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million). Some of them made their own choice to flee, in order to avoid the German occupation. Others, like political radicals and local Jews, were forced to go as potential collaborators with the enemy. War refugees settled in Russian cities and formed strong Lithuanian communities in exile.10 Here the “international” stage of the war ends and the “national” one starts. On February 16, 1918, the Council of Lithuania declared the reestablishment of independence from all previous legal bonds with other states. On November 11, 1918, Germany officially lost control over Lithuania and the first national government was formed. Legislation creating the Lithuanian army was passed on November 23, 1918. At the end of summer 1919, the Lithuanian army numbered about 8,000 men. These were German and Lithuanian volunteers and conscripted locals. In the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, or “national war,” in 1919–1920, the Lithuanian army lost 1,444 soldiers and about 800 went missing.11 Soon after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was renounced by Germany (November 5, 1918) and Soviet Russia (November 13, 1918), Bolsheviks attacked Lithuanian territory. Largely unopposed, they took one town after another, including Vilnius, and by the end of January 1919 controlled about two-thirds of the Lithuanian territory. Fierce fighting with the Soviets lasted from February to October 1919, when Soviet troops were forced out of the Lithuanian territory. In June 1919, Bermontians crossed the Lithuanian-Latvian border and by October had taken considerable territories in western Lithuania. In October and November 1919, Lithuanian forces regained the lost territories. By the end of 1919, the Bermontians had been completely driven out of Lithuania. In the course of the Polish-Soviet War, in April 1919, the Poles captured Vilnius. Poland justified its actions not only as part of a military campaign against the Soviets (informal alliance of the Lithuanians with the Soviet 10 For more on Lithuanian war refugees in Russia, see Tomas Balkelis, Making of Modern Lithuania (London: Routledge, 2009), 104–20. 11 Alfonsas Eidintas et al., eds., Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). According to other sources, there were from 1,401 to 1,700 deaths.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

forces played an important role here) but also as the right of self-determination of local Poles, who formed a significant minority in eastern Lithuania and a majority of the population in Vilnius. The Lithuanian government in Kaunas saw the Polish presence in Vilnius as an occupation and tried to regain the lost territories by diplomatic and military actions. In addition to the Vilnius Region, the nearby Suwałki Region was also disputed—fighting for this territory between the Lithuanian and the Polish armies took place in August–October 1920. Under pressure from the League of Nations, Poland in October 1920 signed the Suwałki Agreement, which indicated that Vilnius would be left on the Lithuanian side. But Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski immediately violated the agreement. After a staged coup, he captured Vilnius and continued to advance into Lithuania. Because of international pressure, combat ceased at the end of November 1920, but Vilnius and the Vilnius Region remained within the newly established Republic of Central Lithuania (Litwa Środkowa) led by Żeligowski. The republic was incorporated into Poland in 1922.

MEMORY AND REPRESENTATION IN LITHUANIA The history of the memory of the Great War in Lithuania encompasses three periods: that between the two world wars, the time of the Soviet Union, and the period after the reestablishment of an independent state in 1990. My inquiry will follow these time frames: interwar independence, Soviet occupation, and post-Soviet independence.

The First Lithuanian Republic Construction of the national identity and confirmation of the legitimacy of the newly established nation-state were major tasks in the First Lithuanian Republic. The Wars of Independence were chosen as a convincing narrative. As early as 1921, the Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland (fig. 3) was erected in the temporary capital, Kaunas. Boulders for the monument were brought from the battle fields of independence. From its very inauguration, every day at 7 a.m. and at sunset veterans who were injured in the Wars of Independence raised and lowered the state and the national flags beside the monument, in honor of the soldiers who had died. Throughout the

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Figure 3.  Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland, by Juozas Zikaras

and Vladimiras Dubeneckis, Kaunas, 1921, Vytauto Didžiojo Karo Muziejus.

interbellum, the monument was continually added to and developed into an “altar of the nation,” commonly called the War Museum Garden: seven crosses and ordnance from the Wars of Independence were installed nearby; an honorary alley lined with sculpture portraits of ten Lithuanian national heroes was created (four were heroes of the Wars of Independence); in 1928 the Freedom Monument was erected on the opposite side of the alley; and in 1934 a tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame was placed in front of the Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland. As Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, a researcher of the interactions between art and state in the First Lithuanian Republic, puts it: “In spite of its modest appearance and small scale, in its function and social status the Kaunas Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland equaled the most prominent European war memorials and was honored as much as the Arc de Triomphe on Place de l’Étoile in Paris or the National Monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome.”12 The first public state museum in Lithuania—the War Museum—was opened in 1921 on the same square as the Monument to the Fallen for their 12 Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Dailė ir valstybė: Dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 [Art and the State: Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic 1918–1940] (Kaunas, 2003), 122.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Figure 4. The War Museum (part of the War Museum Garden is visible in the foreground), Kaunas, accessed April 8, 2015, http://iq.lt/ gyvenimo-gurmanams/laikinosios-sostines-fenomenas?psl=1.

Fatherland, thus forming a new central site of memory and honor in the capital city. However, the museum aimed at “creating an eternal memorial to the specific deeds through which Lithuania reached independence”13 and not to the war in general. A new majestic building was constructed for the museum in 1930–34 and the name was embellished as it became the Vytautas the Great War Museum (fig. 4).14 One of the two highpoints in the museum’s exposition was the Crypt of Those Who Perished for the Freedom of Lithuania (the other was the Vytautas the Great Chapel). The museum was an important arena for, and an important actor in, commemoration of the Wars of Independence: it commissioned paintings depicting battles that took place in 1919–2015 and sculptural portraits of the military heroes, also initiating rituals and the erection of monuments. 13 See http://www.muziejai.lt/Kaunas/karo_muziejus.htm (accessed October 17, 2014). 14 Architects: Vladimiras Dubeneckis, Karolis Reisonas, and Kazys Kriščiukaitis; the building also hosted the Museum of Culture. 15 For example: Otto Jener—“Kavalerijos ataka,” “Artilerijos mūšis ties Širvintais 1920 m. lapkritį,” “Mūšis ties Radviliškiu 1919 m. rugsėjo 22 d.,” “Karininko Antano Juozapavičiaus mirtis”; N. Trost-(?) Javorskienė—“Žvalgų ataka”; Antanas Kairys—“Panevėžio

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The museum presented the “international” Great War only indirectly. It had a section devoted to Lithuanian military units that started to organize themselves within the Imperial Russian Army in the summer of 1917; and since the Lithuanian army was largely equipped with arms used in 1914–18, the museum’s weapons collection also featured World War I arms. There were no other references to the military conflict that preceded the Wars of Independence. In 1924 a debate started on how Lithuanian military cemeteries should look. The French campaign to build monuments in each and every village in France and the Brothers’ Cemetery (Brāļu Kapi) in Riga (1924–36) were put forward as examples. The minister of defense in 1927 approved a concrete soldier’s cross as the standard military tombstone,16 and numerous Lithuanian military cemeteries began to take shape. In 1930 a monument called “Žuvome dėl Tėvynės” (“We Perished for the Fatherland”), by sculptor Stasys Stanišauskas, was erected in the Old Kaunas Cemetery (fig. 5). Military cemeteries in Kaunas and elsewhere were upgraded and standardized. In 1929, the state erected a memorial to Povilas Lukšys (1886–1919)— the first soldier who died for Lithuanian independence—on the spot of his death near the village of Taučiūnai in Kėdainiai Region (fig. 6).17 Designed by the architect Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, it was a modern pyramid-shaped structure featuring many national and universal symbols: three terraces embodied the tricolor, while the pyramid denoted both the triangular emblem of the Volunteer Forces and eternity. Its opening was made into a national holiday,18 and throughout the First Republic it remained one of the most important memorials to the Wars of Independence. Lithuanian military cemeteries often were established beside the so-called German military cemeteries. The latter were created during World War I by the Rear Inspection of the German army. There were more bataliono žvalgai Ilūkštos bažnyčios bokšte,” and a great number of portraits of soldiers and officers. (Jankevičiūtė, Dailė ir valstybė, 123–24.) 16 Created by sculptor Antanas Aleksandravičius and painter Adomas Varnas. 17 It was discovered later that Aleksandras Vainauskas was the first who died on the Lithuanian-Soviet battle field in 1919. He was awarded a medal of Founding Volunteers in 1935, and his tomb was duly decorated in 1938. 18 Filmed material is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6kpORRnY4 (accessed January 7, 2015).

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Figure 5. “We Perished for the Fatherland,” monument, by Stasys Stanišauskas, Old Kaunas Cemetery, 1930, accessed April 8, 2015, http:// iq.lt/gyvenimo-gurmanams/laikinosios-sostines-fenomenas?psl=1.

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Figure 6.  Memorial to Povilas Lukšys (1886–1919), by Vytautas Lansbergis-

Žemkalnis, Taučiūnai, Kėdainiai Region, 1929, accessed April 8, 2015, http:// kedainiai.lt/popup2.php?ru=bS9tX2FydGljbGUvZmlsZXMvdl9hcnRpY2xlX3ByaW50LnBocA==&tmpl_name=m_article_print_view&article_id=1783.

than 250 such cemeteries scattered all over Lithuania, some with elaborate memorials. The German Honorary Military Cemetery in Alytus, for example, established in 1915, had an entrance gate with the inscription “Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden” (“I had a comrade”) and special landscaping. German cemeteries in Šiauliai, Raseiniai, and elsewhere were arranged around central stone monuments. Usually such places embraced soldiers from both the German and Russian armies (distinguishable by different tombstones), but the cemeteries were called German because of their founders and managers. Although some of the graves had Lithuanian names, they did not attract the attention of Lithuanian authorities or citizens. German cemeteries were commonly regarded as the resting places of alien, German and Russian, soldiers and were never treated as part of the national Lithuanian past. In 1919–22, the Lithuanian and German governments negotiated over who would take care of these cemeteries after the last German military unit left Lithuania.19 Some were entrusted to the care of local authorities or schools, some were on private land and the 19 Vida Girininkienė, Jie nenorėjo mirti [They Did Not Want to Die], accessed January 7, 2015, http://lzinios.lt/lzinios/Istorija/jie-nenorejo-mirti/190153.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

owners could determine their fate. Larger and more important cemeteries were maintained by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) founded in Germany in 1919. More than two hundred new monuments of different scale were erected in Lithuania between the world wars. The most popular topics celebrated were independence itself and heroes of the glorious Lithuanian past, such as Grand Duke Vytautas. About a fourth of the monuments commemorated those who lost their lives for Lithuanian independence. There were crosses, obelisks, stelas, sculptures, and sculptural busts of stone and concrete. The work of both professionals and amateurs, they were placed in major cities and villages, on crossroads and hills, in cemeteries and former battlefields. Very often they were initiated and funded by the people, and in most cases their symbolic meaning, explained in inscriptions, was more important than their artistic value. The same was valid for art commissioned by the War Museum—the subjects painted were of a greater importance than the artistic quality of the artwork. Among the two hundred new monuments, I managed to find just one that had a formal reference to World War I. It was a monument to a Lithuanian soldier of the Russian army named Domininkas, who was killed in a bayonet fight and buried near Masiai village in Šiauliai Region. The monument was erected by the local youth organization.20 The fact that the monument is an exception to the rule, and that it is of minor importance, demonstrates the striking ignorance of the interwar Lithuanian authorities and population towards the recent history of the “international” war. All the efforts of the newly established state, it seems, were put into commemorating its own birth—the diplomatic and military fights for independence. It is very eloquent that there are at least two monuments “To the victims of the First World War” in the small area that is now part of Lithuania but belonged to East Prussia until 1945.21 Both have lists of men from the local parish who were killed

20 Marija Skirmantienė and Jonas Varnauskas, Nukentėję paminklai [Harmed Monuments] (Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1994), 167. 21 The monuments are in Rusnė and in Vilkyškiai (Šilutė Region) (Skirmantienė and Varnauskas, Nukentėję paminklai, 169, 171).

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Figure 7. “To the Victims of the First World War,” monument, Vilkyšiai,

Tauragė Region, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.panoramio.com/ photo/49495231.

during the war and both represent a totally different tradition of commemoration (fig. 7). Interwar historians anchored tradition so as to tell the history of Lithuania separately from the history of the rest of the world. Thus the two existed almost in parallel realities. Lithuanian history textbooks paid very little attention to the Great War. A textbook from 1931, for instance, condensed the course of the war into one section of a chapter titled “Lithuania Is Free Again.”22 The first complete history of Lithuania, by Adolfas Šapoka, which became the civic bible in Lithuanian homes, was published in 1936.23 Here World War I also falls within a subchapter, titled “The Period of the Great War and the Reconstruction of the State,” in the chapter “The Life of Independent Lithuania.” Presentation of the war is limited to a list of offences against local residents and the future Lithuanian state by the 22 Pranas Penkauskas, Lietuvos istorija [History of Lithuania] (Kaunas, 1931), 106. 23 For more on Adolfas Šapoka’s Lithuanian history, see Valdas Selenis, “Adolfas Šapoka ir nepriklausomos Lietuvos istorijos mokslo programa ‘Raskim lietuvius Lietuvos istorijoje’” [Adolfas Šapoka and the History Programme of Independent Lithuania ‘Let’s Find Lithuanians in Lithuanian History’”], Istorija. Mokslo darbai, 71 (2008): 13–21.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Russian and German armies. This approach was repeated in many if not all subsequent textbooks and books on Lithuanian history. Several texts specifically on the Great War were published at the end of the 1930s. However, they dealt either with the course of the war in general (and paid no attention to Lithuania) or with the damages caused by German occupation, with a tendency to stress the suffering of the nation.24 There were no references to direct involvement by Lithuanian residents in actions at the fronts, except for a couple of sentences about neighbors fighting on opposite sides and about peaceful residents reporting on their fellow civilians to Russians and Germans.25 Interwar history texts for general audiences drew a specific picture of Lithuania in the Great War, according to which most Lithuanian residents did not identify with either fighting side as it was a Russian and German conflict, while conscious Lithuanian intellectuals used the turmoil of the war to nurture the idea of a more or less independent Lithuanian state. Thus the war was regarded as an “opportunity” to rebuild the country’s statehood. As a proverb says, “Where two are fighting, the third wins.” But the fight of the two usually was excluded from the story, which celebrated only the victory of the third. Memories of the Great War were totally eclipsed by memories of the Wars of Independence, despite the fact that the “international war” inflicted fifteen times more casualties on Lithuanian residents than the national armed conflict.

The Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic Soviet historiography rewrote the narrative of the past. In the official rhetoric, World War I was deemed imperialistic and the Wars of Independence became a treacherous defense of capitalistic interests by the Lithuanian bourgeoisie. 24 For example: Marija Urbšienė, Vokiečių okupacijos ūkis Lietuvoje [German Occupation Economy in Lithuania] (Kaunas, 1939); Marija Urbšienė, Lietuvos mokykla Didžiojo karo metu [Lithuanian School at the Times of the Great War] (publisher and publication year unknown); J. Šilietis (Jaroslavas Rimkus), ed., Vokiečių okupacija Lietuvoje 1915–1919 m. paveikslėliuose ir trumpuose jų apraštymuose [German Occupation in Lithuania 1915–1919 in Pictures and Short Descriptions] (first edition Kaunas, 1922; second bilingual Lithuanian and English edition Šiauliai, 1999). 25 For example, Šilietis, Vokiečių okupacija Lietuvoje 1915–1919.

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Soviets distanced themselves from World War I. It was a war of “greedy capitalists who sought to divide the world anew” and gain more colonies. Emphasis was placed on the intention of the ruling class, especially in the Russian Empire, to suppress the swelling workers’ movement by calling on all to protect the homeland from external enemies.26 World War I was substituted with parallel memories: the Bolshevik movement, the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the civil war of 1917–22, and, subsequently, victory in World War II, which blotted out the failure in World War I. Lithuanian diplomatic and military battles for independence were treated accordingly. It was always stressed that the “local bourgeoisie disregarded the interests of the Lithuanian nation and supported the Russian Emperor and the German Kaiser.”27 All living and nonliving evidence that contradicted this story had to be eliminated: people were imprisoned and killed, deported or silenced, and monuments were destroyed. By 1960, almost all the commemoration sites built in the interbellum were demolished. The War Museum Garden’s memorial and freedom monument were destroyed in 1950 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. Some monuments in the Garden were replaced with busts and statues of leaders of the Lithuanian Communist Party. The Vytautas the Great War Museum had been transformed into the History Museum already in 1940. Lithuanian military cemeteries were destroyed or turned into parks with no reference to their former function. In Kaunas, for example, Ramybė (“Tranquility”) Park replaced the Old Kaunas Cemetery in 1959. Povilas Lukšys’s gravesite in Taučiūnai was turned into agricultural land in 1962. German military cemeteries suffered the same fate or were simply abandoned. Textbooks on modern world history for schools in the entire Soviet Union were written by Moscow historians and translated into Lithuanian for local use. Textbooks on the history of the Lithuanian 26 See, for example, I. S. Galkinas, V. Chvostovas, and Zastenkeris, Naujųjų amžių istorija, 1870–1918 [History of Modern Times, 1870–1918], vol. 3 (Vilnius, 1962), 600–29. 27 Juozas Jurginis and Z. Pilkauskas, Lietuvos TSR istorija [History of the Lithuanian SSR] (Kaunas, 1967), 70–71.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Soviet Socialist Republic were written by Lithuanian historians following guidelines set by historians from the Soviet capital. It was only in 1957 that the final version of the history of Soviet Lithuania was produced.28 The chapters devoted to World War I mainly detail the work of the local Bolshevik movement: to establish the Communist Party of Lithuania and form a temporary revolutionary government in 1918, to merge the Lithuanian and Belarusian Soviet republics in 1919, and so on. That is, it endorses former enemies in the local Communist Party for their attempts to establish Soviet rule and bring the Red Army marching into Lithuania in 1918–19. One of the textbooks gives four pages to the chapter “Lithuania during the First World War” and eleven to the chapters “Establishment of Soviet Rule in Lithuania” and “Merger of the Lithuanian and Belarusian Soviet Republics and their Fight against Common Enemies.”29 Thus, isolation of Lithuania’s history from that of the world persisted. The anniversary of the October Revolution was the most important state holiday in the Soviet Union (followed in importance by the celebration of victory in World War II). Thus, the revolution and subsequent Bolshevik victories in the Russian civil war were immortalized by artists, writers, and film makers. The “international” war remained invisible. Even the “Great” part of the Great War was attributed to World War II, which in Soviet historiography was called the Great Patriotic War. All Soviet films covering the period of the World War I turn that war into a prelude to the revolution and the civil war. One novel actually filled the gap and shaped the image of the Great War in Soviet times—the dark comedy on the adventures of The Good Soldier Švejk (fig. 8), by Jaroslav Hašek, a Czech writer and former soldier of the Austro-Hungarian army. In its three volumes, written between 1918 and 1923, Hašek exposed the pointlessness and futility of military conflict in general and of Austrian military discipline in particular. The main character finds himself serving in a conflict he does not understand, for a country to which he has no loyalty. 28 Juozas Jurginis, Lietuvos TSR istorija [History of the Lithuanian SSR] (Kaunas, 1957). 29 Ibid.

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Figure 8.  The Good

Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hašek, with illustrations by Josef Lada (Vilnius: 1956).

The novel satirized Habsburg authority and corruption and hypocrisy in the Catholic Church. All this fit very well with the main Soviet narrative of World War I. Hašek himself had a “red” biography: he joined the Red Army in 1918, mainly working as a recruiter and propaganda writer. By 1990, sixty thousand copies of the novel’s Lithuanian translation had been published in five printings.30 30 All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque, reached even greater popularity (25,000 copies were published in 1960 and 90,000 copies in 1989). This novel was also utilized by Soviet propaganda: it contributed to the official pacifist rhetoric, helping shift attention from the eastern to the western front and demonstrate the moral fall of the West. A Farewell to Arms (1929), by Ernest Hemingway, was also popular in Soviet times, with three Lithuanian editions. The war, however, mostly served in the novel as background for a love story and as a symbolic representation of armed conflict in general.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

The Second Lithuanian Republic Although contemporary Lithuanian historians and cultural researchers are deconstructing the national grand narrative bit by bit,31 the popular and official story of Lithuania in 1914–20 has not come closer to World War I. This can be seen in the history textbooks, in the absence of the “international” Great War in commemoration rituals, and in the exaltation of the Wars of Independence alongside the heroic and tragic period of Lithuanian history from 1940 to 1952, which brought the loss of independence, partisan warfare, and mass deportations. The contemporary grand narrative was conceived as a restoration of the interwar narrative, thus justifying the legitimacy of the newly reborn state. History books from the First Lithuanian Republic and those published in exile during the Cold War (which shared the interbellum approach) were taken as its basis. Diplomatic and military struggles for independence clearly overshadow the “international” Great War, which is still covered briefly in chapters on “The Construction of the Lithuanian State.” The vast majority of interwar monuments to those who died for Lithuanian independence have been restored, along with other destroyed monuments. The Freedom statue in Kaunas was rebuilt in 1989, and the War Museum Garden memorial came back to life in 1990 (even the remains of the Unknown Soldier were reburied). Meanwhile, the War Museum regained its title of Vytautas the Great, and the Crypt of Those Perished for the Freedom of Lithuania was reopened in 1998. The anniversary of the signing of the Act of Independence on February 16, 1918, is one of the two most important state holidays (the other being the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State on March 11, 1990). Former military cemeteries were located and marked, and they are honored on Lithuanian 31 For example, Darius Staliūnas, Savas ar svetimas paveldas? 1863–1864 m. sukilimas kaip lietuvių atminties vieta (Vilnius, 2008); Tomas Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania (London and New York, 2009); Darius Baronas and Dangiras Mačiulis, Pilėnai ir Margiris: istorija ir legenda (Vilnius, 2010); Šarūnas Liekis, 1939: The Year That Changed Everything in Lithuania’s History (Amsterdam and New York, 2010); D. Mačiulis, R. Petrauskas, D. Staliūnas, ed., Kas laimėjo Žalgirio mūšį? Istorinio paveldo dalybos Vidurio ir Rytų Europoje (Vilnius, 2012).

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Armed Forces Day (November 23). The tomb of the first soldier who died for Lithuanian independence was restored in 1993. Nonetheless, apart from the enthusiastic restoration of destroyed monuments and cemeteries, neither the “international” nor the “national” phases of the Great War have received much “new” attention: very few commemoration sites or rituals have been created in the past quarter century. Either so many monuments were built during the First Lithuanian Republic that the Second had no need to create new ones, or the restoration itself was more about self-esteem and revenge against the aggressors than about the commemorated events themselves. This latter thought often arises when assessing the meager artistic quality of restored monuments (like the 1939 Monument to the Lithuanian Soldier in Nemunaitis, which was rebuilt in 1990; fig. 9). It should also be said that World War II and its aftermath garner more attention in the contemporary Lithuanian grand narrative than the Wars of Independence, not to mention the preceding “international war.”

Figure 9.  “To the Lithuanian Soldier,” monument, by Vincas Grybas, Nemu­ naitis, Alytus Region, 1939/1990, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.arsa.lt/ index.php?469955709.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Although this can be easily explained (since in Soviet times there was no possibility to commemorate the deportations or partisan warfare), it is a fact that since 1990, World War I has not gained in public visibility. A tendency to separate Lithuanian history from the history of Europe has been inherited from both interwar and Soviet historiography. The two histories are told in different textbooks with limited reference to one another. Only in 2008 was a textbook for the last year of high school published in which the course of World War I and attempts to build an independent Lithuanian state are told in one commensurate narrative.32 Lithuanian translations of works by Western scholars—such as From Sarajevo to Potsdam, by A. J. P. Taylor,33 or Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century34—have not helped to link the “national” and “international” narratives, though they do offer a more objective story of the Great War. Recent academic examinations of the creation of the Lithuanian state include research and the publication of biographies and diaries of Lithuanian intellectuals of 1918 in which fragments of the “international” war start to peep out.35 Wartime postcards are being published and displayed.36 Groups of enthusiasts research and promote World War I weaponry and fortifications, many examples of which survived in Lithuanian territory.37 However, these are either small private initiatives or accidental findings within projects on something else, like the history of photography, heritage preservation, or the exhibition of a private collection.38 32 Stasys Lukšys and Mindaugas Tamošaitis, eds., Istorijos vadovėlis, I dalis [History Textbook, Part I] (Vilnius, 2008). 33 Published in 1966, translated into Lithuanian in 1995. 34 Published in 1994, translated in 2000. 35 For example, Petras Klimas, Iš mano atsiminimų [From My Memories] (Vilnius, 1990); Marija Urbšienė-Mašiotaitė, Prisiminimai [Memories] (Vilnius, 1996); Šilietis, Vokiečių okupacija Lietuvoje; Pranas Bieliauskas, Vilniaus dienoraštis 1915–1919 [Vilnius Diary 1915–1919] (Trakai, 2009). 36 For example, Kaunas atvirukuose Pirmojo pasaulinio karo metais [Kaunas in Postcards during the First World War] (Kaunas, 2011). 37 For example, Arvydas Pociūnas, Kauno tvirtovės gynyba 1915 metais [Kaunas Fortress Defense in 1915] (Vilnius, 2008). 38 To see how much attention national TV has paid to World War I, I reviewed all history shows produced since 1990 and found just one half-hour-long report on World War I

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TURNING TO LATVIA Latvian history has also been rewritten twice since the end of World War I— first by the Soviets, then by Latvians themselves. In 1918–20, Latvia underwent its own war of independence, which now dominates the memory of World War I. But one crucial fact has made the interpretation of the Great War in Latvia different from that in Lithuania: Latvians managed to organize national military units within the Russian army—the so-called Latvian Riflemen—as early as 1915, whereas Lithuanians did so only after the October Revolution. A total of about 40,000 troops were drafted into the Latvian Riflemen Division to defend the Baltic territories against the Germans. Initially the division was formed by volunteers and, from 1916, by conscription among the Latvian population. The departure of the first Latvian volunteers from Riga for the training camp sparked national enthusiasm. From 1915 to 1917, the Latvian Riflemen successfully fought as part of the Imperial Russian Army. In 1917, most of the Latvian regiments transferred their loyalty to the Bolsheviks. Known as the Red Latvian Riflemen, they actively participated in the Russian civil war. They also helped in the attempt to establish Soviet rule in Latvia in 1919. A smaller number of Latvian Riflemen, mostly officers, sided against the Bolsheviks. Different parts of the Latvian Riflemen’s story suited different historical narratives. Both in the interwar period and after 1990, the Latvian Riflemen were included in the story of the formation of Latvian national consciousness. Brothers’ Cemetery in Riga is a majestic national monument to Latvian soldiers who were killed between 1915 and 1920 in World War I and the Latvian war of independence. Built in 1924–36, it is a physical tribute to both the “international” and the “national” war, and it survived the Soviet occupation. Two famous interbellum literary texts commemorated the Riflemen—the novel Blizzard of Souls (Dvēseļu putenis, 1933–34), by Aleksandrs Grīns, and Aleksandrs Čaks’s epic poem Touched by Eternity (Mūžības skartie, 1937–39). Both were banned in Soviet Latvia and events in Lithuania: Laiko ženklai. I-ojo pasaulinio karo pradžia, jo pasekmės Lietuvoje, mūšiai dėl Kauno tvirtovės [Signs of the Time: The Beginning of the First World War, Its Consequences in Lithuania, Fights for Kaunas Fortress], ed. Liudvika Pociūnienė and Petras Savickis, broadcast October 18, 2001)

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

republished in thousands of copies in 1988–89. About seventy oil paintings by Jāzeps Grosvalds, who was a member of the Riflemen himself, also immortalized and kept alive the memory of Latvian soldiers in the Great War. During the Soviet era, the Red Latvian Riflemen were celebrated as part of the Bolshevik movement. In 1971, a monument (fig. 10) and a museum dedicated to the Red Riflemen were built in the center of Riga. In 1982, Juris Podnieks’s powerful documentary film The Constellation of Riflemen (Strēlnieku zvaigznājs) by was shown all over the Soviet Union. No matter how ambiguous the story of the Latvian Riflemen was, it managed to keep World War I alive in both the national and Soviet Latvian consciousness. The contemporary Latvian grand narrative regards the Riflemen as brave and adventurous romantic national heroes who contributed to the vitality of the Latvian national spirit.39

BACK TO LITHUANIA The British and the French could be proud of their posture and achievements during the Great War. Latvians could be proud of the courageous Latvian men who were given as an example to the soldiers of the Russian army. These stories contributed to the heroic narratives of the respective nations, gaining attention and generating various forms of commemoration. Lithuanians did not have such stories. Our stories were sporadic and personal, most probably not very engaging, and sometimes perhaps even uncomfortable. They could not form the basis of an unblemished history led by political and cultural heroes, and thus these stories were neglected. Obviously, according to the logic of heroic grand narratives, the weight of victims varies: 2,244 casualties in the Wars of Independence mean more than the 30,000 Lithuanians who died on the fronts of World War I. Volunteers are more important than recruits, probably because they themselves chose to die but recruits were forced to die for an imposed authority. From a personal perspective, the tragedy of 39 Agita Misāne and Aija Priedīte, “National Mythology in the History of Ideas in Latvia,” in Myths and Nationhood, eds. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 163–66.

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Figure 10.  Latvian Red

Riflemen, monument, by Valdis Albergs, Riga, 1971, accessed April 8, 2015, http://sites-of-memory.de/ main/rigastrelnieki.html.

those forced to die for something they did not believe in is deeper than the tragedy of those fighting for their own ideals. The contemporary Lithuanian policy of commemoration, however, is indifferent to personal perspectives, and our grand narrative is still too small to accommodate fragile moments of history. It uses the old strategy of highlighting the heroic and forgetting the embarrassing. Why there is no memory of World War I in Lithuania? It does not fit into the heroic national grand narrative. Since 1996, when an official agreement between German and Lithuanian authorities was signed, the so-called German cemeteries in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda, and elsewhere have been restored and maintained by the historic German War Graves Commission (fig. 11). The embassy of the Russian Federation in Lithuania has financed the erection of new monuments to soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army40 in villages and small towns in the regions 40 This is an echo of the new trend in Russian historiography to treat World War I as a tragic collapse of the Russian Empire; in the present political situation this initiative may easily produce more negative than positive connotations.

The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania

Figure 11. German military cemetery as renovated in 2010–11, Klaipėda, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.mytrips.lt/Marsrutai/Pajurio-dviraciutrasa-Klaipeda-Palanga/278.

of Kaunas,41 Šakiai,42 Varėna,43 and Marijampolė.44 External interventions attract media attention and make local politicians take part in wreath-laying ceremonies. There are signs that Lithuania’s grand narrative may open up, because now it faces a new challenge: it has to fit in (at least to some extent) with the grand narrative of the West. The initiatives of the German War Graves Commission and the Russian embassy and the centennial of the Great War call for some reaction at the state level. Recent sporadic inquiries into the story of the Great War and revision of the history of the Wars of Independence may prove useful for the image of the modern state and so some further research may be encouraged. One can only hope that this overdue encouragement will stimulate a real change and not just a mere facelift.

41 Ramučiai village, 2011, http://www.muziejai.lt/Tarnybos/Reng_info.asp?txtKodas= 7607 (accessed January 7, 2015). 42 Kudirkos naumiestis, 2013, inscription: “To the Memory of the Fallen Soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army,” accessed January 7, 2015, http://www.drg.lt/rajone/9250atidengtas-paminklas-­­pirmojo-pasaulinio-karo-aukoms-atminti. 43 Šarkiškė village, 2013, accessed January 7, 2015, http://www.varena.lt/lt/naujienos-aktualijos/naujienos/sarkiskese-pagerbtos-pirm-aasg.html. 44 Vaitiškių village, 2014, inscription: “To the Unknown Lithuanian Soldier of the Russian Imperial Army. 1914,” accessed January 7, 2015, http://www.delfi.lt/pilietis/naujienos/ rusijos-imperijos-kariams-paminklas-lietuvoje.d?id=63260108#ixzz3NhxxKr8y.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Balkelis, Tomas. The Making of Modern Lithuania. London: Routledge, 2009. Eidintas, Alfonsas, Vytautas Zalys, Alfred Erich Senn, and Edvardas Tuskenis, eds. Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). Gellner, Ernest. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Girininkienė, Vida. Jie nenorėjo mirti [They Did Not Want to Die]. Accessed January 7, 2015. http://lzinios.lt/lzinios/Istorija/jie-nenorejo-mirti/190153. Lukšys, Stasys, and Mindaugas Tamošaitis, eds. Istorijos vadovėlis, I dalis [History Textbook, Part I]. Vilnius, 2008. (twelfth-grade textbook) Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė. Dailė ir valstybė: Dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 [Art and the State: Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic 1918–1940]. Kaunas, 2003. Jurginis, Juozas. Lietuvos TSR istorija [History of the Lithuanian SSR]. Kaunas, 1957. (textbook for secondary schools). Jurginis, Juozas, and Z. Pilkauskas. Lietuvos TSR istorija [History of the Lithuanian SSR]. Kaunas, 1967. (textbook for grades 7–9). Hobsbawm, Eric. “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Cambridge, 1983. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester, 1984. Misāne, Agita, and Aija Priedīte. “National Mythology in the History of Ideas in Latvia: A View from Religious Studies.” In Myths and Nationhood, edited by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin, 163– 66. London, 1997. Paleckis, Justas. “Didysis 1914–1918 m. karas.” Kaunas: Skaitytojas, 1939. Penkauskas, Pranas. Lietuvos istorija [History of Lithuania]. Kaunas, 1931. (textbook for the fourth grade of primary school and the first grade of secondary school). Skirmantienė, Marija, and Jonas Varnauskas. Nukentėję paminklai [Harmed Monuments]. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidykla, 1994.

CHAPTER 7

The Limits of the Blockade Archive NATALIJA ARLAUSKAITĖ Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University

Keywords: cultural memory, documentary, cinema, World War II, Sergei Loznitsa, visual archive What do we expect from documentary films? The simplest answer would be the truth. It seems that what has been recorded by a camera without any acting, in the midst of events, is a direct impression of reality—pure and undisputable. That is why photographs and filmed footage, above all those related to the painful personal or collective— historical—past, are so highly valued: we expect from them direct testimony. In speaking about the content of testimony, Giorgio Agamben discusses two Latin words signifying a “witness”: testis and superstes. The first word refers to the third party in a dispute between two others—it is the one who records without getting involved. The second word signifies one “who has lived through something, who has experienced the event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.”1 Photographic reportages and documentary films, chronicles in particular, seem to occupy both positions: they record as if 1

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 17–18. For a full version of this article, see: Natalija Arlauskaitė, “Dokumentas ir/ar prisijaukintas valdžios žvilgsnis: Blokados‘ archyvas,” Politologija 69–1 (2013): 88–132.

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from outside but “fully experience the event”—an extreme form of this would be a case when a cameraperson or a journalist has been killed but the camera continues recording. This double character of documentary films creates tension: What does it mean to “experience fully” while being apart? What is the place of this third party, to what extent is it neutral or loaded with power relations? Who invests and controls this power? Such tension can be seen very distinctly in the case of filming extreme experiences—torture, massacres, death by famine or exhaustion. What does it mean to witness the limits of humanity or, in the words of Primo Levi, “the grey zone” that connects the perpetrators and the victims? Or those who are still alive and those who die in front of one’s eyes? Who are we when viewing a document of such testimony, and what effort of understanding does that require from us? These questions have received certain answers, and they have given rise to polemics and radical disagreement, above all in the research on the Holocaust in visual documents/testimonies. The present study is devoted to another case of long-term mass destruction and its representation—the siege of Leningrad (1941–44). To be more precise, it deals with how certain— documentary—forms of memory are constructed and given meaning in the contemporary context, and what the recognition of these forms of memory says about the collective identity of those who recognize it and about the configuration of historical memory. It also gives us an opportunity to explore, albeit preliminarily, the extent to which the models and the vocabulary of perception, well-developed in the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust, can be applied in speaking about the siege of Leningrad. Certainly, this does not imply equivalence between the two events. My primary material here is the film Blockade, by Sergey Loznitsa (2006), which was acclaimed by festival audiences, the academic community, critics and television viewers, and above all for the fact that, in the opinion of many, for the first time it offered a glimpse of daily life during the siege. The film consists exclusively of edited footage taken during the siege, with a specially created synchronized soundtrack. It can be considered a rare case when different interpretive communities (Stanley Fish), from experts to the general audience, come to a virtual consensus about the valuable and perceivable version of historical knowledge/memory that is valid for them.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

Thus, the question raised herein can be formulated differently: What kind of (war) archive is needed to produce marketable (historical) knowledge, and what does this (re)structuring of the archive mean? This question is particularly urgent in the context of the siege of Leningrad because the amount of research into the siege has grown over the past decade, which in turn is related to changes in the archive of the siege. Not only did the topic cease to be taboo and an intense search for interpretive grids begin, but also the formerly closed or restricted holdings of state archives became open and memoir texts began to be published. All this is starting to shatter the predominant rigid myth of the siege—“a heroic city that paid the price of hundreds of thousands of lives to survive in the name of common victory”—which was relatively little represented in Soviet and post-Soviet feature films, because they basically did not show private daily life.2 It was a rare documentary film that overcame this myth by presenting small glimpses of the daily life of people living under the siege of Leningrad against the background of military actions. Does this mean that the old patterns of historical memory are no longer valid? Can they deal with the routine of nonheroic decay, about which the poet Oleg Yuriev wrote on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the siege of Leningrad: Of particular import is the perception of time under the siege [. . .]: time repeats itself over and over in routine activities and yet it comes to an end every second. It is infinite and finite at once, it continues but does not progress. It is the time of repetitive singularity. All the efforts to reproduce the reality of the siege in ordinary literary or lyrical narrative time failed precisely at this paradoxical quality of blockade time.3 2 Жила-была девочка [There Was a Little Girl], 1944, dir. Viktor Eisymont; Ленинградская симфония [The Leningrad Symphony], 1957, dir. Zakhar Agranenko; Балтийское небо [The Baltic Sky], 1960, dir. Vladimir Vengerov; Дневные звезды [Day Stars], 1968, dir. Igor Talankin; Зимнее утро [A Winter Morning], 1966, dir. Nikolay Lebedev; Мы смерти смотрели в лицо [We Looked Death in the Face], 1980, dir. Naum Birman; Соло [Solo], dir. Konstantin Lopushansky; Порох [Gunpowder], dir. Viktor Aristov; Ленинград [Leningrad], 2007, dir. Aleksandr Buravsky. 3 Oleg Yuriev, “In the Vortex of the Congealed Time,” Sign and Sight, September 12, 2011, accessed on August 13, 2013, http://www.signandsight.com/features/2164.html. For

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The same challenge awaits cinematographic narrativization: characterized by a movement from beginning to end while overcoming the obstacles, it is unable to cope with the repetitive singularity mentioned by Yuriev or a mode of experience written about by the historian and sociologist of literature Lydia Ginzburg in her notes on the siege: “Nothing was related and nothing was summing up.”4 Thus, what tools of (historical) narrative are available for documentary films or chronicles, and what consequences do they have? The general frame of discussion is the problematics of historical memory and its construction in cinema. My study itself consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the concept of the (war) archive, the representation/vision of experiences that question humanity, and the challenges of this representation. The second part is devoted to detailed analysis of the film Blockade. It reveals what archive system the features of its narrative create and what position of power they reflect. Specific aspects of the film narrative, above all, the relationship between image and sound, which always is ideologically sensitive, become important in this analysis.

THE ORDER OF THE ARCHIVE AND THE EFFORT OF MEMORY Almost immediately after the end of World War II, a question arose of how to deal with the huge and diverse war archive, which was often put together in unbelievable circumstances and is still being discovered. These are documents from military operations, letters and reports from the military and civil bureaucracy of all participating sides, factory plans, evidence of partisan activity, documentation and memoirs of life and death in the Jewish ghettos, letters from the front and from home, memoirs of prisoners of concentration and extermination camps, verbatim records of postwar court sessions, traces of the still ongoing hunt for war criminals in hiding, a great many personal and official photographs, a chronicle of the war years, objects and buildings, and memory politics and its transformation. more on the perception of time during the siege, see Полина Барскова, “Настоящее о настоящем: о восприятии времени в блокадном Ленинграде.” 4 Лидия Гинзбург, “Рассказ о жалости и жестокости,” 50.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

The questions “What should we do with this archive?” “How should it be arranged?” “Under what conditions does the archive speak to us?” “Who are we, as we look for our relation to this archive?” are not simple and have not been answered yet. One reason is that the archive’s nature of secrecy, silence, and (self-)censorship is constantly changing. Another is that the experience of mass killings—the Holocaust, the siege, tortures, and extermination camps—does not have a ready-made language; and forms of speaking and omission, of visibility, and the mode of (non) display are always related with ideological, ethical, and aesthetic attitudes and with individual, collective, institutional, or state-level choices—and with the judgment of whether a horrible experience testing the very limits of humanity can be seen, perceived, and imagined in any way at all. This debate, which has been going on for several decades, is called the “problem of representability and imaginability.” At its center is the experience of extermination camps and the questions of what testimony is, how it can take place, and how it can be perceived. The extreme positions in this argument can be described differently. One example is the fundamental disagreement between Claude Lanzmann and Steven Spielberg, or, more precisely, between Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). The first is a documentary, mainly shown on secondary TV channels in various countries and at film festivals.5 The second is a conventional feature film, one of the largest box-office hits of 1993–94 and a winner of seven Oscars. Both films talk about extermination camps: the first takes the approach that it is impossible to show destruction and terror, that the extermination of six million European Jews is absolute and any attempt to stage destruction and death is a gesture opposite to memory—it erases and destroys the experience that is impossible to imagine and cannot be repeated or multiplied by any means. Therefore, archival footage is not used in the film, which mainly consists of stories told by survivors in front of the camera. The second film, on the contrary, creates a coherent fictional narrative about death and escape from death in Auschwitz, including the 5 On the twists of the film’s distribution in France, Italy, and Germany, see Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2008), 175–84.

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controversial “shower” (gas chamber) scene and a post scriptum in which we see the descendants of the survivors. The “shower” scene is a kind of remark from an imaginary dialogue with Lanzmann: in reply to the question previously raised by Jean-Luc Godard—What would happen if documentary footage of people in a gas chamber were found? Lanzmann said that even if it did exist, he not only would not see or use it, but he would also destroy it. In protest against Spielberg’s film and strategy, Lanzmann rebuked Hollywood for trivializing the Holocaust.6 The polemic on unimaginable (non)representability can be formulated in a different way: How is a document of disappearance possible, and who builds the corpus of these documents (an archive)? When and by what principles? When and under what conditions can such disparate films as, for example, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1956), by Alain Resnais, or Phil Solomon’s Psalm III: Night of the Meek (2002) in memory of Anne Frank, be added to or separated from the archive of the Holocaust? Is it the same archive? The film by Resnais combines on-set footage of the filming with chronicles accumulated and held in the archives of various countries, fragmented and enlarged photographs, and an off-screen narrative. By commenting on the barracks of the camps looming in the fields, the film poses a direct question: “Is there any hope to really capture the reality” of those who suffered there? While constantly shifting between a 1940s chronicle of concentration and extermination camps, and footage from early 1950s, the film indirectly represents and articulates the insurmountable gap between memory and experience, an unattainable reality, however passionately we may wish to relate to it and give it a voice.7 This insurmountable gap is consistently marked by color—the chronicle and

On the key discussions of Lanzmann’s film, see Stuart Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Audronė Žukauskaitė, “Politinis įvykis kaip nereprezentuojama meno dimensija,” Religija ir kultūra 11 (2012): 16–29. 7 Lanzmann repeatedly criticized Resnais for incorporating the footage filmed by Nazis and for the narrative, in which the victims and the survivors are all alike and the Holocaust is not discussed. The same criticism could be directed to the film Ordinary Fascism (1965, dir. Michail Romm, 138 min.), where, as in Night and Fog, the word “Jew” is mentioned only once. 6

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

the photographs are black and white, the footage filmed by Resnais is in color. Psalm III: Night of the Meek, meanwhile, is an experimental film fantasizing the experience of Anne Frank, who was fond of cinema, and a dream based on this experience, which she may have had on the night of November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht.8 This memory is constructed out of fragments from Fritz Lang’s M (1931), James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), and Carlo Boese and Paul Wegener’s Golem (Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920). The conception is clear enough—all of them represent man-made creatures (the Frankenstein monster and the Golem), or a maniac (M), who kill trusting children. Thus metaphorical Nazis are turned into radical Others, nonhumans. At the same time, the film follows a remotely Benjaminian idea about the media of mechanical reproduction that both produce a reality for the audience and anaesthetize the audience/citizens to political contents. To Solomon, the characters and the fragments of their stories become a filmed document of cultural imagination that is subject to the erosion of memory and film: images are twitching and incomplete; the film deforms in front of our eyes under the effect of acid and other chemicals; silver on the film melts, turning into unrecognizable particles. Although Resnais does not work with fictional images, he does perform manipulations with the film—he enlarges and fragments the image, and introduces different durations for showing photographs; moreover, during the first screening, the cap of the French gendarme Pithiviers in a Jewish concentration camp was retouched. In this way, a compromise with military authorities was sought.9 How do Solomon’s and Resnais’s manipulations of image differ, and do they differ in principle? Are the manipulations in this case related to the changing or different memory of a traumatic historical event?

8

For Phil Solomon’s commentaries on the film, see http://vimeo.com/8813664 (accessed on November 20, 2012). 9 Emma Wilson, “Material Remains: Night and Fog,” October 112 (2005): 89–110.” For more on the film, see Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog” (New York: Breghahn, 2011).

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This question is even more urgent in the case of so-called documentary animation, as in the film Silence (1998, directed by Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas). Documentary animation is usually produced by mixed animation techniques combined with the voice of the author of the memoirs/autobiography reading the text, recorded directly during the narration or previously. Visually the film combines photographs, chronicle, and different kinds of hand-drawn animation. Silence is a ten-minute story told by Tana Ross: at the age of two she is taken together with her grandmother to the Terezin concentration camp, survives it, in 1945 (at the age of five) leaves for Sweden where her uncle lives, and fifty years later tries to understand what happened to her.10 “To understand” and “to remember” in this case means not only to conquer silence, which was required both by the life in the camp and the relatives who encouraged her to forget what had happened, but also to find a form of memory, the very means of speaking. A basic feature of documentary animation is problematization of the autobiographical (mainly traumatic autobiographical) discourse and of viewers’ relation with that discourse, as it tends to the barely institutionalized singular forms of visual and oral narrative, requiring the establishment of both the rules of the narrative and a dynamic distance from that narrative, along with the mode of involvement, each time anew. That is why the form of the document or testimony also changes every time. In The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Michel Foucault speaks about what we consider/call “history” and on what conditions and how historical knowledge works. In this context the meaning of the archive becomes important. According to Foucault, the archive is not texts, objects, and images arranged in a certain order, nor is it their apparently neutral and basically endless assortment. It is the rules according to which they are selected and privileged as compared with other objects and texts, and 10 For more on the film, see Orly Yadin, “But Is It Documentary?” in Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representation in Film and Television since 1933, eds. T. Haggith and J. Newman (London: Wallflower, 2005), 168–72. For more on documentary animation and establishing the subject of memory, see Natalija Arlauskaitė, “Feministinė animacija: Marjut Rimminen filmas ‘Apsaugoti,’ 1987,” Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 62 (2011): 213–26.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

acquire a certain meaning. It is the relation between what is said or shown and what is omitted or cannot be said or shown. Alongside all this, it is the conditions for changing these rules and the way statements are produced.11 It seems that an ideal film document should be free of acting and unintentional—just like the twenty-six-second fragment of the murder of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, filmed by Abraham Zapruder. This short, low-quality film became a certain standard of documentality and later provoked quite a number of conscious attempts to copy it: “The discrepancy between the quality and magnitude of content and the accidental nature of Zapruder’s film make it particularly compelling.”12 However, its further fate revealed a certain tension between the camera work and the final text, related to the fact that a document always belongs to a larger network of testimonies and interpretations. Zapruder’s film was processed, slowed down, enlarged, fragmented even more, and turned into photographs by various means, with the aim of making it a more trustworthy document for solving the riddle of the president’s murder. It was imitated, enacted, and parodied, and thus migrated among different interpretive orders, entering into archives produced in different ways, and each time giving witness to an event at least slightly differently.13 If we return to the experience of World War II and its representation, the problem of a document of destruction and obliteration—and the problem of testimony, speaking in Foucault’s terms—is a question about different alternative archives whose structure is defined by equally different understandings of the relation between image and reality through which power manifests itself. Lanzmann’s reply is quite clear—his film 11 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, particularly the chapter “The Historical A Priori and the Archive.” For authors analyzing the practices of knowledge, documentation, and document accumulation, and their reflection in art in large part refer to Foucault’s ideas of the archive, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64; Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Unrelated to Foucault’s reflections on the archive is Jacques Derrida (1998). 12 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 13. 13 For more on Zapruder’s film, see Bruzzi, New Documentary, 13–21.

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(along with his choice not to use a chronicle of the war years and other visual evidence, with the exception of people telling their stories today) is a total and final document. It essentially disqualifies any other attempt to accumulate, show, and articulate the memory of decay and destruction, as this other form would be, in one way or another, a document produced by camps and Nazis. And this, according to Lanzmann, does not testify to anything, but it only conceals the horror of destruction by giving it a tangible shape. An opposite understanding of testimony is offered in Primo Levi’s texts, which have become a point of reference for those working with various forms of memory and the visual material of the war years—chronicle and photography. This author advances the thought that it is impossible to testify to disappearance—the speaker is always a survivor who has inevitably survived at someone else’s expense. Because the victims have no possibility to testify, the survivors must do it, particularly on behalf of those whom he calls Muselmänner: We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless; but they are the “Muselmänner,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.14 In other words, the question of experience, representability of historical memory, and possibility to imagine/represent is a question about how one should look at the face of the Gorgon in order to survive. How can one tell about this face so that one’s story does not trivialize or simplify the encounter with a sense of impossibility and remain unique? What is the shield that turns into an image of the face of the Gorgon— the form and the means of the story, a document of the unimaginable encounter? 14 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, Vintage Books, 1989), 83–84.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

According to Levi, the Muselmänner are those who have seen the face of the Gorgon and thus have become complete witnesses whose voice will not be heard by anyone. Lanzmann and his followers view skeptically, to say the least, any document of horror (a look at the Gorgon), as “any image protects us from horror by being an image.”15 What does it mean to look into the face of the Gorgon? How can this face, and an encounter with this face, be imagined and represented? While referring to the study by Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux,16 Agamben writes about the tension between the face of the Gorgon, which is understood as a nonface, nonspectacle, the seeing of which cannot be avoided, and a multitude of its images. They are subject to several rules: if in the iconography of classical vases a human face is always represented in profile, the Gorgon is always depicted en face; she does not have the third dimension and is represented “not as a real face but as an absolute image, as something that can only be seen and presented”; she exists only as something that cannot be seen; her frontality is a rhetorical figure of apostrophe, “a call that cannot be avoided”: But the “he who has seen the Gorgon” cannot be a simple designation for the Muselmann. If to see the Gorgon means to see the impossibility of seeing, then the Gorgon does not name something that exists or that happens in the camp, something that the Muselmann, and not the survivor, would have seen. Rather, the Gorgon designates the impossibility of seeing that belongs to the camp inhabitant, the one who has “touched bottom” in the camp and has become a non-human. The Muselmann has neither seen nor known anything, if not the impossibility of knowing and seeing. [. . .] That at the “bottom” of the human being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing—this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from 15 Gérard Wajcman, quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 164. 16 Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

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which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony. The Gorgon and he who has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze; they are a single impossibility of seeing.17 This gap between an image and the possibility of seeing is repeated in Agamben’s book in other forms of rupture, tension, and an attempt to conquer the lacuna of time, experience, and meaning. It is also the point of reference: “The survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors’ testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it.”18 Later the structure of witnessing is described: “The paradox here is that if the only one bearing witness to the human is the one whose humanity has been wholly destroyed, this means that the identity between human and inhuman is never perfect and that it is not truly possible to destroy the human, that something always remains. The witness is this remnant.”19 As is the understanding of the language of witnessing: it is impossible to bear witness using the conventional forms of language; a language must be set free from its customary order—like the language of Paul Celan or the three-year-old boy, Hurbinek, from Levi’s story. Having grown up in a camp, the boy knew and repeated a single word with variations—massklo or matisklo; the meaning of this word remained unknown after Hurbinek died shortly following the liberation of Auschwitz: No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation; perhaps it was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name; perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant “to eat,” or “bread”; or perhaps “meat” in Bohemian, as one of us who knew that language maintained . . . Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm—even his—bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not 17 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 54. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Ibid., 133–34 .

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through my words.20 Agamben describes the structure of the language of witnessing, which contains a trace or hint of what is unsaid in principle, but what must be talked about: “It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the ‘lacuna’ that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness—that which does not have language.”21 This dis-ability of language is most radically expressed in the case of the Muselmänner: “The Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded.”22 Thus, a form of testimony (a narrative about seeing the Gorgon)—the strictness and definitiveness of ready-made discourses that can be overcome by various means, an event of language that does not yield to being archived23—is inserted in the existing apparatus of speech and its control. In his book Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (2003), Didi-Huberman analyses the photographs made by the members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz in 1944 and exhibited for the first time at the exhibition The Memory of Camps (Mémoire des camps: Photographie de concentration et d’extermination Nazis, 1933–1999) in Paris in 2001, and he polemicizes with Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux. Didi-Huberman asserts that four secretly made photographs constitute particularly important and unique testimony “directly from hell,” referring to the circumstances and goals of their appearance, the risk of photographing, and the story of smuggling them outside the camp, and also their sequence, subject, angle, and other formal features. In these four photographs we can see other members of the Sonderkommando standing

20 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Summit, 1986), 192, quoted by Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 38. 21 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 39. 22 Ibid., 48. 23 See ibid., 143–59, for Foucault’s somewhat modified understanding of the archive.

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near corpses being thrown into a pit,24 naked women being led to the gas chamber, and an indistinct view of trees. The polemic is directed against the iconoclasm of the above-mentioned and other authors and their Lanzmannian prohibition to show/ look at the visual documents of killing and obliteration (concentration and extermination camps), as this look privileges a certain experience and thus betrays the unseen horror of everyone. Besides, as was already mentioned, the majority of the photographs or film chronicles produced in extermination camps were made from the standpoint of perpetrators rather than victims, and thus looking at them inevitably identifies us—the viewers—with the perpetrators, and we become inscribed in their view. The four photographs from Auschwitz discussed by Didi-Huberman are special exactly because of their viewpoint—it belongs to a person condemned to die. At the end of his book Didi-Huberman recalls the study Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, by Siegfried Kracauer (1960), in which a parable about the Gorgon appears. Repeating the standard version of the myth that states “the film screen is Athena’s polished shield,” Kracauer says that this, however, is not all: In experiencing [. . .] the litter of tortured human bodies in the films made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination. And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo. Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster?25 Didi-Huberman considers it important that, according to Kracauer, the ethics of a (film) image is based on our decision to relaunch a moving image and our courage “to incorporate it into our knowledge.” Incorporation 24 Resnais makes use of this photograph in Night and Fog. The special circumstances of its appearance are not indicated in any way. 25 Siegfried Kracauer, The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 306, quoted by Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 177.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

here, as in the case of Agamben, has its order and sequence, which is con­­ stantly modified in the discussion of the four photographs from Auschwitz. Didi-Huberman repeats and shows by various means that an image is never separate and isolated. It is involved in the relation with collateral images and other sources or forms of knowledge—testimonies, documents, images, buildings, and their remains. Following Eisenstein, Didi-Huberman calls this relation “montage”—a means of juxtaposing different elements whose meaning is born of their mutual relation. And this relation is not equal to the simple sum of its constituent meanings and requires an intense effort on the part of the perceiver. In other words, editing is a result of the efforts to overcome the gap between an image and an image, between a photographic image and a map of the camp, between an image and a list of the members of the Sonderkommando, between this list and the memories of the survivors. Montage and the necessity of editing (and representation and saying), the constant change of montage order and its effects, becomes a procedure for knowing, an ethical position, and a tool of the politics of seeing. However, if we think about documentary films, it would seem that editing contradicts the idea of a perfect chronicle: an unedited film with an inscribed enunciation position, noncontradictory time (the time of viewing is directly identified with the time of filming, as if the time difference—sometimes up to several decades—were suspended). In our eyes, the chronicle has an increased credit of authenticity, as, consciously or not, in our imagining that a “chronicler [. . .] recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones,”26 and that is why she seems unbiased. According to this mythology of chronicle, the chronicler records reality as though having switched off her will, by identifying herself with the device that records everything at random. This ideal mode of witnessing through a moving image leads us to the early “sequence” films, in which the filming would start at a certain point and last until the end of the film roll (rather than the story). It offers an anachronistic understanding of the film and its viewing practice. Any “processing” of the 26 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 2007), 326.

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film/filmed fragment after the filming introduces a new plane of time, which basically eliminates the mode of chronicle/witnessing. The chronicle tends to resist the plot and narrativity, if these are formed by manipulating the footage. André Gaudreault suggests distinguishing monstration and narration in the structure of a film narrative—monstration (Latin monstrare—“to show”) is the primary level of narrativity coinciding with filming, and narration comes from editing—it is the secondary order of time. Introducing the level (or mode) of monstration allows us to talk about two qualitatively different instances of narration: the monstrator is identified with the view of the filming camera, and the narrator with the authority of arranging/controlling the filmed footage. Their basic difference manifests itself with regard to time. The time of the monstrator is always the present, his position is always synchronic with the image, and he does not have a time distance from the observed/filmed event. The narrator creates various time distances with the filmed event and controls time gaps, deviations, and differences, and any act of editing “catapults” him from the present time.27 This distinction, sensitive to the modes of temporality, allows us to perceive the desired perfect chronicle as a continuous monstration to which the scissors of narration (editing) and the distance that they create do not apply. The distinction between monstration and narration complicates the simple description of compilation films proposed by Laura Mulvey while discussing a film similar to Loznitsa’s Blockade, namely, Mother Dao, the Turtlelike, by the Dutch director Vincent Monnikendam (Moeder Dao, de schilpadgelijkende, 1995). This film is composed of footage filmed by Dutch colonists in the East Indies, present-day Indonesia. The footage was divided into smaller sequences, a quasi-synchronic soundtrack was created, and sometimes the images were accompanied by a voice singing or reading a poetic text. The aim of the film, as stated by Mulvey, is to dissect the imperial (colonialist) film narrative and the distribution of the power of gaze between the colonists and the indigenous population, and to redistribute it so that the relation of power might become visible and 27 André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), esp. 62–80.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

yield to reflection. Mulvey asserts that it is this redistribution that allows us to speak about the fact that “all film compilations have a double temporal structure”28—the time of the original footage and its current rearrangement, which allows us to speak about this second editing as the work of a (historical) trauma, according to Freud. It is difficult to agree with this statement unconditionally, as— remember Gaudreault—any film narrative already has this two-layer temporal dynamics if it is not developed on a continuous plane. Most probably it is not only, and not so much, this double temporality, but also the relation of the primary footage to quite a different whole than the present one that is basic to film compilations, which in fact always deal with certain forms of memory, be it a family or a state. This whole is textual and receptive: the former original text and its entirety seem either confusing or unknown (as happens in the case of actual found-footage films: it is simply not clear from what context this footage comes), and the framework of its perception and the mode of interpretation is either lost and unknown or is strictly incompatible with present values and perception skills. Finally, the motive force of film compilations is creating an alternative archive (from the aesthetic, axiological, and ideological viewpoint, depending on the chosen vocabulary). In Loznitsa’s Blockade, which will soon become the focus of our attention, footage filmed during the war is presented without considerable interference in its visual plane. One can only guess how much the available segments of the footage were abridged, but they were obviously left longer than in earlier films where they have been used. Editing plays the 28 Laura Mulvey, “Compilation Film as ‘Deferred Action’: Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao, the Turtlelike,” in Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema, ed. A. Sabbadini (Routledge, 2007), 109. See also Julia Noordegraaf, “Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan,” in Technologies of Memory in the Arts, eds. L. Plate and A. Smelik, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 172–87. Noordegraaf analyzes the same film by Monnikendam and the installations by Fiona Tan (both artists focus on the colonial period in the history of the Netherlands), and develops a similar idea about film compilations as an instrument of memory. Noordegraaf draws attention to the fact that the space of screening/viewing itself—a cinema hall, television, or a gallery—offers different technologies of memory, and calls the difference between these technologies “time editing” and “space editing.”

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role of visual manipulation by connecting the segments into continuous sequences. However, the main work with “reality” is performed by specially created and dubbed-in sound. The film includes an episode showing a detail of a street after a bombing. Suddenly the scream “Mummy, mummy!” cuts through the street noise at the exact moment when the camera suddenly changes its angle. In the distant background of the changed view, we get a brief glimpse of a running child. The raw material of the film does not have a soundtrack, and the scream is added to justify the shift of the camera and introduce a micro plot—a child is not “running,” but “looking for something.” And a goal and the illusion of attaining it emerge. Moreover, this kind of processing by placing emphasis on a detail of an image (a screaming child) through a dubbed-in articulated voice is analogous to Spielberg’s decision in Schindler’s List: there, a single bright spot—a girl’s red coat—appears on the monochromatic background of the streets of the demolished Warsaw ghetto, which reorders the viewer’s focus and turns a background detail into the center of attention. The running child is not a direct reference to Spielberg’s film, though there is a common logic in the sequence of “child on the street”–“war ruins”–“creation of affect by technical means,” and the dubbed-in voice relocates the viewing, redistributes the focus, and for a short while creates an affective center of identification. As we can see, there are different kinds of editing, and no single documentary image conveying an extreme experience (dying, decay, destruction) is included in the structure of new knowledge, but the wish to protect memory and perform the work of memory often operates in the mode of documentary film/film chronicle. The questions of how one should watch a film chronicle and build the vision and perception of a (horrible) story, how one should include this past in one’s knowledge, what it means to testify on behalf of those who have seen the face of the Gorgon, and on what conditions a (moving) image of a chronicle can have an intense effect rather than be exploited and commodified, have more than one answer and involve a polemic, as we have seen in the case of the films by Resnais and Lanzmann. However, sometimes culture that is intensely focused on its past suddenly sees the long-sought-after truth

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

in a film about the painful past composed from documentary footage. Then the question changes: What is the consensus on history, however temporary it might be, and what does it mean?

STRATEGIES OF ARCHIVING THE SIEGE IN BLOCKADE Blockade (2006), by Sergey Loznitsa, occupies a remarkable place in contemporary Russian cinema on World War II.29 It is a film on which documentary-film festival juries,30 film critics, film and/or siege researchers, historians, and the ordinary audience (both Russian and international, expert and nonspecialized) have come to almost total agreement.31 This consensus is illustrated by the words “the truth of the war/siege on the screen,” which needs, like an encounter with the Gorgon, a language that did not exist before. Possible disapproval of the film was mentioned publicly only in passing: in a session of the Film Committee that financed the film’s production, and—in a letter to the (ultra)nationalist newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Newspaper)—this disapproval follows the logic of “we did not see the film, but we are worried.” On the other hand, as will be shown, Blockade relies heavily on a retro-scenario, predominant in popular feature films. Referring to Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Elsaesser describes a retro-scenario typical of German films dealing with the Nazi past: He detected in the general retro fashion a distinct “retro-scenario”: the peoples of Western Europe, locked into political stasis, nostalgically imagine through the cinema a time where their country’s history still meant individual villains and victims, 29 For more, see Natalija Arlauskaitė, “Negotiations about History and the Identity Workshop: World War II in Contemporary Russian Cinema” (in press). 30 For an incomplete list, see http://www.loznitsa.com/ru/films.html?num=8&page=1 (accessed December 3, 2012). 31 Regarding the expert community, see Barskova, “Sergei Loznitsa, The Siege (Blokada, 2006)”; Youngblood; Bidlack, “Blockade by Sergei Loznitsa”; Paehler; Ковалов; Стишова; and Бейкер. Regarding spectators, see Prikryl; _vlush; commentaries in Ковалов; reference to the letter by “an observant viewer” (as undersigned) in Literaturnaya gazeta in the 2006 Стишова article.

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causes that mattered, and decisions of life and death. One attraction of such a history was the excuse for still telling stories with a beginning, middle and an end, which would give the illusion of a personal or national destiny: a need fascism had tried to gratify on a collective scale. The return to history in the cinema was therefore for Baudrillard not a move towards coming to terms with the past, but the fetishization of another trauma altogether, located in the present.32 A retro-scenario meticulously recreates the past but puts work with that past on hold, as it is based on the classical film narrative solving all conflicts in a continuous space and time, in a world where all events have clear causes and consequences, and the perceiver of that world (the subject of the view and historical memory) connects the elements of that world into a noncontradictory whole that is free of competing perceivers. It is for that reason that the traditional dominant film narrative is the basic form of archiving historical memory, which produces clear and widely used images of history, and that is why it is not suitable for reflecting on historical traumas and “processing” them. Blockade adapts a retro-scenario, which should not allow questioning the predominant order of the archive. But, paradoxically, it is such questioning—“finally, the truth has been revealed”—that is considered a key merit of the film. Blockade runs fifty minutes and is composed of archival footage already used in other films. It was filmed by thirty-eight cameramen, listed in the film credits, who worked during the siege of Leningrad. The footage is chronologically arranged from July 1941 to the salute marking the end of the siege on January 27, 1944, followed by an episode of the public hanging of sentenced German soldiers on January 5, 1946. It is grouped into small successive sequences: captive German soldiers being led through the streets of Leningrad at the beginning of the war, extinguishing a fire, collecting water on the streets (because the water supply system had frozen), burying the dead, and so on. These sequences are 32 Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 374.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

edited to create the effect of an ordinary narrative film, where montage transitions conventionally define the continuity of space and are basically invisible. The episodes are separated by black screens, which sometimes have an inner motivation and are connected by synchronized sound continuing through the black screens. The original footage is silent, and the soundtrack was created specially for the film. Articulated speech is absent: people’s voices are heard not as words but as the intonation or length of a phrase. What does “the truth of the war/siege,” on which a consensus has been reached, mean in this case? How is it achieved? This question is particularly interesting if we recall that the director himself by no means grants the authority of truthfulness and truth to documentary films: “The word ‘truthfulness’—what does it tell us? And what do we have in mind when we talk, for example, about fictional events?”33 Any statement about reality (and that is what any film represents) should take into account the speaker or viewer and his/her system of choices: “without an observer an event has no meaning.”34 In his texts and interviews about the possibilities of documentality in cinema, Loznitsa follows a quite consistent formalist (or, in another tradition, constructivist) approach: reality and film, objective representation and a certain image projection on the screen, are totally different things. What is taking place on the screen is a result of a series of decisions, and their logic is important. Thus, in Loznitsa’s words: A question arises: what is a document? If I can change the meaning of a frame or a plane, for example, by changing the lens, focus, colour, angle and duration, what is the value of this kind of document and its actual meaning? The meaning most probably does not totally come from footage. Apparently the meaning is how I handle it. If you show a man working on a machine tool

33 Сергей Лозница, “Конец ‘документального’ кино,” Искусство кино 6 (2005). 34 Лозница, Конец. Also see Сергей Лозница, “О манифесте ‘Реальное кино’: O призраках,” Искусство кино 10 (2006).

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for five seconds—it is work enthusiasm. If it is five minutes, the meaning changes: it is the torture of monotonous work.35 This means that any filmed fragment is an expression of position, relation, and, ultimately, ideology—which is supported by music and off-screen text or voice and which Loznitsa, who has a very meticulous approach to sound, avoids in his films. For example, he asserts that the episodes from a standard official chronicle used in his film Revue (Представление, 2008) “are cleared of their propaganda intonation, as the music and the text have been eliminated,” and on another occasion he comments that soundtracks can limit the right of the viewers to make independent conclusions up to the point of depriving them of this right completely.36 A film compilation becomes a space of building rather than presenting a (certain) reality, in which sound—above all, music and voice—is delegated the role of moderator in reaching a decision about this reality. Those who have written about Blockade have judged its “truthfulness” by qualifying certain aspects of the making of the film in opposing ways: the majority of reviewers assert that the film is fragmentary and does not have a master narrative;37 but there are some who see “a linear narrative.”38 The majority are convinced that the footage used in the film is entirely authentic, but some think certain episodes were staged.39 Some critics contrast Blockade with the first documentary about the siege, The Battle for Leningrad (1942), mentioning some footage that had not been shown before Blockade. In The Battle for Leningrad, however, we also see airships (which, according to Barskova, were represented “on the blockade scene” for the first time), political caricatures and offers to barter things hung on 35 Елена Стишова, “Какой ‘Портрет,’ какой ‘Пейзаж’! Лексикон Сергея Лозницы.” Искусство кино 6 (2005). 36 Мария Бейкер, “Игра в неигровое. Беседу ведет Мария Бейкер,” Искусство кино 4 (2008). 37 E.g., Barskova; Youngblood; and Kovalov, Oleg, “Без пояснений,” Сеанс, September 8, 2007, accessed on November 26, 2012, http://seance.ru/blog/blokada. 38 Jana Prikryl, “Scenes from the Siege,” The Reeler, March 14, 2007; Nancy Ries, “Russia in Transition: The Films of Sergei Loznitsa (Factory; Portrait; The Settlement; The Train Station),” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (2008): 444. 39 E.g., Kovalov.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

fences (which, in Kovalov’s opinion, could not have been filmed for propaganda purposes in a film chronicle), and corpses on the streets (which Bidlack mentions as being shown for the first time in Blockade). Some critics assert that the film is a precisely constructed view of the blockade;40 others think spectators are left face-to-face with pure images, because the film presents “an unprocessed segment of our history” and deconstructs the myth of a hero city.41 Some see it as a narrative about the tragedy of the city’s residents,42 and some also about the beauty of the city.43 These contradictions do not so much testify to a lack of attention, but rather show a merit of the film in being able to respond to very different needs and expectations, all with the final aim of seeing the truth. The basic question is how that happens, what grid of meanings appealing to different expectations does the film create, particularly bearing in mind that earlier attempts to present documentary truth in film have been disqualified as defective on account of extensive propaganda. For a long time, the memory of the siege of Leningrad was basically represented by two symbols: the daily ration of bread in the winter of 1941–42 (125 grams) and “the diary of deaths” that Tanya Savicheva wrote in her elder sister’s address book. When a family member died, she would make a laconic entry at an appropriate letter of the alphabet The first six entries indicate who died and when, while the last three read: “The Savichevs died,” “Everybody died,” and “Only Tanya is left.”44 The minimalism of the diary entries allowed it to be included in the official archive of the siege: being emotionally very powerful, it did not contradict the official myth that kept the count of the dead, but it blocked any view of their daily life. Other texts and testimonies did exist, but they were most often censored. For example, A Book of the Blockade, by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich (1977–81), consisting of memories and commentaries of the survivors of the siege, despite giving an impression of revealing the daily 40 41 42 43 44

E.g., Youngblood. E.g., Стишова, _vlush, Bidlack. E.g., Paehler. E.g., Youngblood. Tanya Savicheva survived the siege and was evacuated, but she soon died at a children’s home of an infectious disease.

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life during the siege, was heavily (self-)censored.45 It was taboo to talk about the city’s bureaucracy and system of privileges, the black market and its scale, prostitution and cannibalism, and, certainly, to compare the cost of human lives with the achieved military objectives and doubt the necessity of such enormous human sacrifices or the efficacy of the actions of the authorities.46 In general, the daily experience itself, the rhythm and the rituals of daily life, the models of behavior and the changes of personality, the sensations and tests of humanity, and the means of perceiving and giving meaning to this daily life in the face of the ongoing catastrophe, obviously did not fit into the interpretive frame of “tragedy for the sake of victory.” Therefore, the recently increased publishing of uncensored blockade diaries and memoirs, the introduction of new documents into academic circulation, and new questions about an individual in a prolonged catastrophe, all encourage us to reflect on the meta-language and movements of analysis, interpretive grids, and vocabulary.47 Film creators find themselves in the same situation—they either repeat the available models of perception (chronicle, documents) or consciously or unconsciously create their own models. Just like in feature films, these interpretive schemes can be revealed through the forms of coherence: the order of memory (testimony) correlates with a certain principle of coherence. It raises the following questions: Who is the subject of the memory (a testimony and a look)? 45 Regarding the 2009 film Читаем блокадную книгу [Reading the Book of the Siege], by Alexander Sokurov, in which diverse people from adolescent cadets to professional actors read excerpts from the book by Granin and Adamovich, see Polina Barskova, “Chitaem blokadnuiu knigu, [“Aleksandr Sokurov: We Read the Book of the Blockade”],” KinoKultura 28 (2010). 46 See Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Никита Ломагин, Неизвестная блокада. В двух книгах (St. Petersburg: Нева-ОЛМА, 2002), Сергей Яров, Блокадная этика: представления о морали в 1941–1942 гг. (St. Petersburg: Нестор-История, 2011). There were academic taboos in the research on concentration/extermination camps. It was only in 2009 that the first book on brothels in extermination camps, by Robert Sommer, appeared. 47 See works by Polina Barskova and Irina Sandomirsaia.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

Who is the seer and who “handles” this seeing? Or, in the case of Blockade, which has been praised for the showing of daily life: What does it mean to see daily life? How and on whose behalf is this seeing arranged? It is basically an old question of cinema and ideology in the Althusserian and Foucauldian sense: How does the cinema broadcast, repeat, modify, and reflect a certain ideology, form of knowledge, and conditions of its delivery? In this tradition, cinema is not a story told in a film, the people and objects represented, or the phrases said; it is the “how” of cinema—how a narrative is organized, how the seeing is arranged, how sequences and planes (e.g., sound and image) are connected, how perception and identification with the event should/can take place, and what forms of unauthorized perception are possible. The best answers to these “hows” have been presented by analysis of the predominant system of narrative feature films, also called the classical Hollywood (or realistic) film narrative. It remains still today the basic cinematographic means to create historical and traumatic narratives. A realistic film narrative builds an illusion of direct observation whose condition is imperceptible camera work. Editing, in this case, is totally different than the kind that interested Eisenstein and Didi-Huberman. It must be as invisible as possible, and must soften the gap between image and sound and conceal the production of the film rather than create a new situation of knowledge. This continuity correlates with impeccable sound and synchronized voice—the sources of knowledge related to the different senses remain unified and subjected to the dominant image. When a historical trauma and catastrophe is dressed in the robe of a realistic film narrative, it submits to what Elsaesser calls “guilt management”48—it is an arrangement of a narrative about victims and executioners that results in the “soothing” or “appeasement” of trauma, guilt, pain, and memory (which, incidentally, takes place not only in the predominant types of films). Elsaesser calls this post-conflict narrative the “cinema of parapraxis,” which temporarily and veiledly connects guilt with what cannot be reconciled and connected, perpetrators and victims. For example, in his film In a Year of Thirteen Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1978), Rainer 48 Elsaesser, European Cinema.

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Werner Fassbinder represents and develops the theme of guilt, but the cause of that guilt (the destruction of Jews) is not shown—absence as presence, presence as parapraxis. In a Year of Thirteen Moons is not an example of an orthodox narrative film, but it does play with the notion and then create figures of distancing itself from this kind of film. It also creates gaps in the narrative that point to the problematic character of a noncontradictory classical film narrative and the basic inability of any representation to convey unsymbolized experience (in this case, destruction and obliteration). This inability is marked by the voice that is occasionally detached from the image and by temporal inconsistencies of image and voice. Blockade, on the contrary, combines the footage filmed by different people at different times in such a way as to create the illusion of a consistent, noncontradictory narrative. However, the specific coherence of the narrative is based not only on the narrative structure but also on four distinct dominant forms (codes) of coherence: The code of “natural” seasonal coherence. The film presents the imaginary years of the siege: late summer of 1941 is followed by autumn and winter, becoming at one time harsh, at another as mellow as spring, and ending with winter fireworks at the end of the blockade.49 A post scriptum is added—the public hanging of German soldiers in January 1946. The siege that lasted almost three years is compressed into a single almost regular cycle of nature, only its last part being somewhat farther removed in time, but it rhymes almost perfectly with the leading of German soldiers through the streets of Leningrad, as shown at the beginning of the film: one spectacle of the tamed enemy is followed by a second, but this time the “taming” is final. The code of nature, with its seasons of the year, is in charge of the “spontaneous” mythologizing coherence and clarity of the narrative that transcends history, coincidence, and choice. While discussing the naturalizing function of myth in general, Barthes writes: Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it, history evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: it prepares all 49 The change of the seasons as a metaphor in organizing the film is noted in Vladimir Padunov, “Re-Viewing a Lost Civilization: Sergei Loznitsa’s Revue,” The Russian Review 68, no 4 (2009): 685.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from. [. . .] This miraculous evaporation of history is another form of a concept common to most bourgeois myths: the irresponsibility of man.50 In Blockade, the code of nature performs the function of the direct naturalization of history: nature does not foresee the subject, perception, and memory. The code of technological urbanistic coherence. What we see in the film is the public space of the city. That is why the daily life of the siege is the daily life of the city’s infrastructure: streets, bridges, cars, a train, a bread pavilion and queues, defensive fortifications, and citizens with tote bags and sledges on their daily and final itineraries. One of the film’s reviewers wrote that it could be called “a story of a tram” that at times freezes up and at times gets to move again.51 However, there is another claimant to the status of the main character of the film—the cables for the trams and electricity, which iconographically unite the city even when it is empty. The constantly visible urban space, presented as disrupted at some places or moments (there is a frame with broken cables), is basically coherent because of the communication lines extended from frame to frame. The code of a touristic view. The film starts with the iconic spire of the Admiralty. It not only serves as a metonymic image of Leningrad-St. Petersburg, but it also directly defines the place of action: almost the entire film is composed of sequences filmed in the very center of the city. The film also visits virtually all the main sightseeing points essential for a tourist: the Winter Palace and the Palace Bridge, the cathedrals of Our Lady of Kazan and Isaac, Nevsky Prospect, Anichkov Bridge, and the famous sculptures of the taming of horses being dismantled, and so forth. In this way, Blockade offers a customary touristic list of places of interest at an unusual time. 50 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday, 1972), 125. 51 Barskova, “Sergei Loznitsa, The Siege (Blokada, 2006).”

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The defense of monuments and museums in Leningrad under siege was indeed one of the state’s priorities.52 But in Blockade their images were subject to a different logic, namely, in showing some buildings and monuments detached from any human action while forming a sequence of recognizable postcard images, they turned the surrounding views into a museum. In his famous essay “The Blue Guide,” on the logic of views and texts in tourist guides, Roland Barthes wrote that tourist guides offer the bourgeois consumer a kind of “economics of an impression”: collections of places of “interest” that devalue the gaps between them (movement, duration-related experience).53 In Blockade, recognizable locations become props for a curious touristic view, a grid into which the remaining museum of the siege is installed, and through which its exhibits are perceived. The conventions of narrative cinema, above all, synchronous sound. This fourth code relates to the first three codes. It is synchronized sound that makes the editing seams in Blockade almost invisible. For example, incessant street noise blends two different buildings into one; people enter a building from one street and exit from another as if it were the same building. The changing but continuous sound converts the black screens between the sequences from an element of film syntax into part of the represented world—the night—and thus fills a crack in the represented reality. In the previously mentioned sequence with a running child, the sound/voice creates a mini plot and turns an incident into an event. Sound glues the images together into a whole, arranges separate fragments into a whole by conferring on them the meaning of a whole. It builds the world from moments that seemed “not related and did not sum up” to those who have experienced them, and converts them into a

52 Steven Maddox, “These Monuments Must Be Protected! The Stalinist Turn to the Past and Historic Preservation during the Blockade of Leningrad.” The Russian Review 70, no. 4 (2011): 608–26. A small episode in The Battle for Leningrad (1942) is devoted to the defense of the Hermitage. 53 Barthes, Mythologies, 74–77.

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narrative whose pathos, unlike that of individual images, according to Susan Sontag, “does not wear out.”54 Sound belongs both to the world of the screen and to us, the viewers. The distance that exists between the screen and ourselves is absent between the sound and ourselves; thus, synchronized sound performs an important movement of (self-)identification: it inserts, it sutures us into the space of the film narrative, and we identify ourselves with the visible world.55 The greater this degree of synchronicity of image and sound, of the voice and the body, the fewer possibilities remain for alternative perceptions and interpreting subjects, and the seeing and hearing subject itself is established as solid and noncontradictory, with all the ensuing ideological implications. The approach to any film with a realistic narrative or a retro-scenario is based on this mechanism. The case of Blockade is interesting in that the suture is deceptive—it does not allow us to hear what people’s voices say, even though we can recognize that there is speech. The founder of the study of the acoustic dimension of cinema, Michel Chion, suggested the term “emanation speech” (parole-émanation) to describe speech whose words cannot be distinguished: the voice and phrases come from a visible or invisible source, but their content is less significant than the acoustic image, and that is why it is drowned or suppressed.56 In other words, the emanation voice, which is seldom used in cinema, acts beyond and even 54 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 83. 55 For more, see, Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds. E. Weiss and J. Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 54–62; Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. R. Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 335–48; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “Fundamental Aesthetic of Sound in the Cinema,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds. E. Weiss and J. Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 181–99; Kaja Silverman, Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 1984); Stephen Heath, “On Suture,” in Questions of Cinema, ed. S. Heath (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 76–112. 56 The other two are theatrical speech (parole-théâtre) and textual speech (parole-texte). Theatrical speech is based on the importance of a clearly understood dialogue, and textual speech on an explanatory, controlling narrative (often embodied by a

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against words, concealing them, confusing them, destroying any possibility of their perception. Blockade involves its viewers in a (specially created) coherent and almost continuous world of the siege, but with certain reservations. The subject of look (and memory) is established as the one who sees and hears the world that is articulated for him/her, without coming into contact with other articulating subjects. This system of coherence creates the archive of the memory of the siege as almost excessively coherent. Certainly, it differs from a feature film: it does not have a unifying character (though sometimes substitute characters appear) or a predefined goal for the sake of which obstacles are overcome (the goal is intuited based on general knowledge—the lifting of the siege). However, the seasonal, technological, touristic, and acoustic rules of coherence (in general, those pertaining to a realistic film narrative) present the traumatic historical memory as exceptionally coherent, communicable (almost without losses), and conveyable. A loss is marked as the impossibility of getting involved in verbal communication among people. This probably explains both the general consensus about the film and the diverse assessments of its features.57 The film refers to the memory archive known for more than sixty years and controlled by the state, but restructures it. In the new order of the archive, the “war” becomes not only the army movements and battles but also the experiences of civilians, which are not subordinated to military purposes. The footage of Blockade is a product of different views placed in a recognizable framework of perception—the logic of a narrative film, which belongs to a retro-scenario with certain reservations. The narrative film logic is excessively coherent and creates an illusion of complete comprehension. But because of the strategy of sound and voice, the subject of perception and memory is established as problematic—sutured into a coherent narrative but unable to use words, intensely experiencing the surrounding “archived” world but unable to articulate it independently. voice-over), similar to captions in silent films. See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 169–84. 57 It should not be taken as aesthetic criticism of the film, which is virtuosic.

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

Blockade offers a version of traumatic memory in which the subject of trauma and memory does not participate. Working through the memory is identified with natural and technological coherence, which is duplicated by the conventions of a realistic film narrative. In this way the perceivers (subjects of ideology) are constructed as passive, satisfying themselves with the familiar (traditional) models of coherence, which dismiss them from memory work. It seems that the effect of “approaching the truth” and its intensity results from the unusual duration of separate fragments, even though they had been shown before. Certain segments that were formerly inserted into a justifying context—that of the enemy’s atrocities, or heroic deeds by the military forces—are realized as subjectively long, excessively long. This is so particularly for the images of pulling dead bodies on sleighs, burying them in common pits, seeing corpses on the streets: the “firsttime” effect is a result of changed temporality—“for the first time so long.” However macabre it may sound, in this case the “truth” manifests itself exactly in the same way as the “monotony of work” in the example given by Loznitsa. The discursive production of truth does not abolish the archive of the historical truth but shows the mechanism of its formation, which we ourselves (the perceivers and users, the experts of this archive) can find subjectively moving and convincing. A promise of any fragment of a chronicle is being together with the image in its time and place. However, this being is never neutral. The issue is related in part to the polemic between Didi-Huberman and his critic Gerard Wajcman about the four photographs from Auschwitz: How do these photographs made by prisoners (members of the Sonderkommando) differ from those made from the viewpoint of the Nazis? Didi-Huberman mentions the exceptionality of the enunciation position of the photographs, to use the semiotic vocabulary: courage, witnessing despite everything (pending death, danger, possible failure of the entire operation, oblivion), witnessing what was not meant to be witnessed. In this case, the enunciation position is emphatically anti-institutional, as the entire machine of extermination camps rested on the rule of not leaving any documents.

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While proving the exceptionality of the enunciation position demonstrated by the four photographs in addition to what they directly record, Didi-Huberman uses archaeological arguments (a plan of the Auschwitz extermination camp, testimonies of survivors, results of excavations in the territory of the camp) and aesthetic logic (the sequence and angle of the photographs, the relation of light and dark spots, and the subsequent history of enlarging and clipping the photographs and other kinds of image manipulation). He concludes—repeating many times—that the enunciation position of the Auschwitz photographs is exceptional and in a certain respect impossible given the entire institutional machinery of the Third Reich—that it cannot be repeated, that its image structure cannot be imitated, replicated, or learned (as happens in the case of portraits, touristic images, interior, and other genres of the fine arts), that it cannot be learned at an art academy, sold by postcard vendors, or imitated by amateur photographers for their own pleasure. A contrary thing happens in Blockade: a (newly restructured) chronicle presents an image of almost exclusively institutionalized knowledge—a technological (the city’s infrastructure), touristic, and seasonal view, and an (almost) normative film narrative. It is difficult to say what strategies of perception are offered by the primary footage filmed by thirty-eight cameramen and how much of that footage was cut out; it is only known that the general filmed archive of the siege constitutes six hours. At the very least, its considerable length speaks on behalf of institutionalized knowledge (a large group of cameramen remained to film the footage for a future film and film chronicles). The means of selecting, editing, and sound-making chosen by Loznitsa support this knowledge rather than creating distance from it.58

58 Therefore, in referring to the logic expounded here, Polina Barskova’s question—“On what level can the users of the archive of the siege recreate the experience of the ignorance of the siege?”—is essential, but one cannot agree with one of the answers to this question stating that Loznitsa’s film refuses to create “the meaning of history” and “does not claim any knowledge of the role of the episode in general history.” See her article on the politics of ignorance: Полина Барскова, “ Август, которого не было, и механизм календарной травмы: размышления о блокадных хронологиях,” Новое литературное обозрение 116 (2012).

The Limits of the Blockade Archive

The only articulated words in the film, the closing captions, are directly transferred from the chronicle: “On 5 January 1946, the death sentence was executed.” If we recall that the entire visual plane was institutionally produced, the sound was dubbed in, and articulated voice is absent, then presenting a visual equivalent of the latter in the closing captions is particularly important: it serves as a signature of the authority of the film and the archive owner. The subject of historical memory who put a signature at the time of rearranging the archive in 2006 becomes inseparable from the one who produced the signature in 1946. Many spectators found the last episode of the gallows shocking. But by including it along with the closing captions, Loznitsa clearly showed the limits of the chronicle-type archive of the siege and its restructuring for the sake of the “whole truth.”

CONCLUSIONS The logistics of perception, as Paul Virilio would say, is subject to the logic and needs of modern institutions. At the very beginning of his book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, he quotes Maurice MerleauPonty: “The problem of knowing who is the subject of the state and war will be of exactly the same kind as the problem of knowing who is the subject of perception.”59 In the case of the four photographs from Auschwitz, which have provoked new discussion about the representability of the Holocaust, the subject of perception is an impossible subject, according to Agamben, one whose enunciation position is an excess, a radical violation of the order denying the power of institutionalized coherence. The perception of this testimony (memory work) requires manifold editing and an effort to counterpoise representation with experience and duration. In Blockade, the subject of perception is, in fact, the (state) archive controlling the modes of perception and the position of the subject of ideology, and the place of spectators is the focal point of recognition and registration of conventional institutionalized coherence and a projection of the controlling state.

59 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Verso, 1989), 2.

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Loznitsa’s Blockade shows that the cost of consensus about the historical “truth” (and most probably not only in Russia) is involvement in the retro-scenario, but with reservations, and that the conventions of archiving can hardly be radically changed while working with testimonies produced on behalf of an institution (in this case, the cameramen are testes rather than superstites) and arranged by using the predominant form of conferring meaning. Finally, Blockade shows the limits of adapting the archive of the war’s memory, which was formed in the Soviet period and is still helping to foster the positive identity of Russia for a contemporary context: it remains within the limits of the victory myth, in which the enemies were punished and the victory salute was given.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone, 1999. Arlauskaitė, Natalija. “Feministinė animacija: Marjut Rimminen filmas ‘Apsaugoti,’ 1987.” Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis 62 (2011): 213–26. Barskova, Polina. “Chitaem blokadnuiu knigu” [“Aleksandr Sokurov: We Read the Book of the Blockade”]. KinoKultura 28 (2010). Accessed June 13, 2012. http://www.kinokultura.com/2010/28r-blockadebook.shtml. ___. “The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941–1944.” Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (2010). ___. Sergei Loznitsa, The Siege (Blokada, 2006).” Review of Blokada, by Sergei Loznitsa. KinoKultura 24 (2009). Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/24r-blokada.shtml. ___. “The Corpse, the Corpulent, and the Other: A Study in the Tropology of Siege Body Representation.” Ab Imperio 1 (2009): 361–87. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Noonday, 1972. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, 253–64. New York: Schocken, 2007. Bidlack, Richard. “Blockade by Sergei Loznitsa.” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (2007): 729. Bidlack, Richard, and Nikita Lomagin. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

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Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. “Fundamental Aesthetic of Sound in the Cinema.” In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by E. Weiss and J. Belton, 181–99. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, edited by R. Rosen, 335–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. ___. “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing.” In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by E. Weiss and J. Belton, 54–62. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Absence as Presence, Presence as Parapraxis.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 1 (2008): 106–20. ___. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1982. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. Du masque au visage. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Gaudreault, André. From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Heath, Stephen. “On Suture.” In Questions of Cinema, edited by S. Heath, 76–112. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Knaapp, Ewout van der. Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of “Night and Fog.” London: Wallflower, 2006. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Lichtner, Giacomo. Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2008.

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Liebman, Stuart, ed. Claude Lanzmann‘s “Shoah.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maddox, Steven. “These Monuments Must Be Protected! The Stalinist Turn to the Past and Historic Preservation during the Blockade of Leningrad.” The Russian Review 70, no. 4 (2011): 608–26. Merewether, Charles, ed. The Archive. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. “Compilation Film as ‘Deferred Action’: Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao, the Turtlelike.” In Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema, edited by A. Sabbadini, 109–18. Routledge, 2007. Noordegraaf, Julia. “Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan.” In Technologies of Memory in the Arts, edited by L. Plate and A. Smelik, 172–87. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Padunov, Vladimir. “Re-Viewing a Lost Civilization: Sergei Loznitsa’s Revue.” The Russian Review 68, no 4 (2009): 684–87. Paehler, Katrin. “Blockade by Sergei Loznitsa.” Journal of Military History 71, no. 2 (2007), 609–10. Pollock, Griselda, and Max Silverman, eds. Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog.” New York: Breghahn, 2011. Prikryl, Jana. “Scenes from the Siege.” The Reeler, March 14, 2007. Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://www.thereeler.com/features/scenes_ from_the_siege.php. Ries, Nancy. “Russia in Transition: The Films of Sergei Loznitsa (Factory; Portrait; The Settlement; The Train Station).” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (2008): 444–45. Sandomirskaia, Irina. “A Politeia in Besiegement: Lidia Ginzburg on the Siege of Leningrad as a Political Paradigm.” Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 306–26. Sekula, Allan, “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. Silverman, Kaja. Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. ___. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford University Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.

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Spieker, Sven. The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. _vlush. “Блокада.” Синематека, April 3, 2006. Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://www.cinematheque.ru/showthread.php?p=118819. Wilson, Emma. “Material Remains: Night and Fog.” October 112 (2005): 89–110. Yadin, Orly. “But Is It Documentary?” In Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representation in Film and Television since 1933, edited by T. Haggith and J. Newman, 168–72. London: Wallflower, 2005. Youngblood, Denise J. “A Chronicle of Our Time: Sergei Loznitsa’s The Blockade (2006).” The Russian Review 66, no. 4 (2007): 693–98. Yuriev, Oleg. “In the Vortex of the Congealed Time.” Sign and Sight, September 12, 2011. Accessed on August 13, 2013. http://www.signandsight.com/features/2164.html. Žukauskaitė, Audronė. “Politinis įvykis kaip nereprezentuojama meno dimensija.” Religija ir kultūra. Mokslo darbai 11 (2012): 16–29. Барскова, Полина. “Август, которого не было, и механизм календарной травмы: размышления о блокадных хронологиях.” Новое литературное обозрение 116 (2012). Accessed on December 19, 2012. http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2012/116/b10-pr.html. ___ “Настоящее о настоящем: о восприятии времени в блокадном Ленинграде.” Неприкосновенный запас, no. 2(76) (2011). Accessed on August 13, 2012. http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2011/2/ba20.html. ___. “Черный свет: проблема темноты в блокадном Ленинграде.” Неприкосновенный запас, no. 2(70) (2010). Accessed on November 24, 2012 http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2010/2/ba13.html. ___. “Визит в город: актуальное искусство и блокадный архив.” OpenSpace.ru, September 21, 2010. Accessed on August 13, 2012. http://os.colta.ru/literature/events/details/17912/?view_comments =all&attempt=1. Бейкер, Мария. “Игра в неигровое. Беседу ведет Мария Бейкер.” Искусство кино 4 (2008). Accessed on September 9, 2012. http:// kinoart.ru/archive/2008/04/n4-article15. ___. “‘Блокада’ в Роттердаме.” BBC Russian, February 6, 2006. Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/entertainment/newsid_4684000/4684348.stm.

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Гинзбург, Лидия. Проходящие характеры. Проза военных лет. Записки блокадного человека. Сост., подготовка текста, примечания и статьи Эмили ван Бискирк и Андрея Зорина. Moscow: Новое издательство, 2001. Ковалов, Олег [Kovalov, Oleg]. “Без пояснений.” Сеанс, September 8, 2007. Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://seance.ru/blog/blokada. Липовецкий, Марк. “В гнезде ‘кукушки.’ ‘Кукушка,’ режиссер Александр Рогожкин, ‘Возвращение’ режиссер Андрей Звягинцев.” Искусство кино 4 (2006). Accessed on December 9, 2012. http://kinoart.ru/ archive/2006/04/n4-article16. Лозница, Сергей. “О манифесте ‘Реальное кино’: O призраках.” Искусство кино 10 (2006). Accessed on November 26, 2012. http:// kinoart.ru/archive/2006/10/n10-article15. ___. “Конец ‘документального’ кино.” Искусство кино 6 (2005). Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://kinoart.ru/archive/2005/06/ n6-article9. Ломагин, Никита. Неизвестная блокада. В двух книгах. St. Petersburg: Нева-ОЛМА, 2002. Сандомирская, Ирина. Блокада в слове: очерки критической теории и биополитики языка. Moscow: Новое литературное обозрение, 2013. Стишова, Елена. “Какой ‘Портрет,’ какой ‘Пейзаж’! Лексикон Сергея Лозницы.” Искусство кино 6 (2005). Accessed on November 27, 2012. http://kinoart.ru/archive/2005/06/n6-article8. ___. “Возвращение опыта.” Искусство кино 5 (2006). Accessed on November 26, 2012. http://kinoart.ru/archive/2006/05/n5-article6. Яров, Сергей. Блокадная этика: представления о морали в 1941–1942 гг. St. Petersburg: Нестор-История, 2011.

CHAPTER 8

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna LARA LEMPERTIENĖ Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas

Keywords: Vilna Jewish community, World War I, Holocaust, Hermann Struck, Arnold Zweig, Zalman Shneur, memorial books In one of her articles on Vilnius, the cultural anthropologist Anna Lipphardt writes: I lived in that townscape in the early 1990s, in the center of the Lithuanian capital, and was surrounded by an authentic environment, filled as it was with Baroque and Renaissance architecture. At the same time, I lived in an imagined place, the site of the past Jewish habitat which had been known to the world as Vilne, its Yiddish name. Not only the Holocaust separated these two dimensions from each other, but also the almost complete denial of the city’s Jewish past and presence in the public space in the

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50 years after World War II. [. . .] Jewish Vilnius is both present and it is not present1 at the same time.2 The dichotomy described by Lipphardt, formed by the historical traumas of the inhabitants of Vilna and by their reception reflected in a series of textual and visual documents, is the starting point for my study here. I work with a broad group of texts, heterogeneous in terms of the time and place of creation, genre, and language, which were written during the decades following World War II. These texts show the virtual destruction of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Quite a number of these texts are dedicated to Vilna. In the years following World War I in Lithuania there was a large variety of books and articles written with the aim of documenting the material and moral damage that the war inflicted on the Jewish community and culture, and of recording how life had changed in the poverty-stricken and destroyed city, but post–World War II texts, however, focused on the spiritual loss. The authors of these latter texts perceived the disappearance of the city’s Jewish image as a tragedy of cosmic proportions, and thus there appeared, alongside historiographical, documentary, and memoir narratives, or as a leitmotif in these works, a clear tendency to mythologize the pre–World War II city as an ideal chronotope, a simultaneous “golden age” and “paradise lost.” In fact, the majority of these texts are given to nostalgia and melancholic generalizations, and to pitting the material against the spiritual, the latter being strongly emphasized. Possibly the earliest, and certainly a classic example, is the lecture delivered by Abraham Joshua Heschel at New York YIVO in 1945, which was published in Yiddish in 1946 and gained particular popularity after the appearance of its English translation in book form, The Earth Is the Lord’s, in 1950. The famous publicist Irving Kristol, Heschel’s contemporary, wrote about the book: “It is an elegy, sometimes a rhapsody, over what the author believes to have been ‘the golden period of Jewish history.’”3 In Heschel’s text, the traditional Jewish 1 Italics in the original. 2 Anna Lipphardt, “Post-Holocaust Reconstruction of Vilne, ‘the most Yiddish city in the world,’” Ab Imperio 4 (2004): 170. 3 Irving Kristol, “Elegy for a Lost World,” Commentary, May 5, 1950, accessed December 6, 2015, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-earth-is-the-lords-by-abrahamjoshua-heschel/.

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world, destroyed by the war, loses almost all of its material and historical aspects and remains only in the spiritual realm, unchanged through the centuries: “The little Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were like sacred texts opened before the eyes of God so close were their houses of Worship to Mount Sinai. [. . .] Even plain men were like artists who knew how to fill weekdays’ hours with mystic beauty. They did not write songs, they themselves were songs. [. . .] They often lacked outward brilliance, but they were full of hidden light.”4 The virtual Jewish map of Eastern Europe formed by the main types of post-traumatic Jewish literary texts consists of centers of piety and intellectualism—it presents a life with no room for bourgeois mundaneness. David Roskies refers to this conscious or subconscious constructing and structuring of the fabric of the past in literature as “creative betrayal.”5 The initial paradigm of this type of narrative, however, was formed after World War I rather than after World War II, in a particularly significant group of verbal and visual texts: memoirs, testimonies, and artistic compositions of Western European Jews following their first encounter with Eastern European Jewry. Quite paradoxically, this paradigm was adopted and applied to Vilna by Jewish intellectuals and writers of interwar Vilna and Lithuania. Jewish soldiers and officers of the German army who witnessed the life of the traditional Jewish community in Lithuania and Poland, which differed greatly from the dispersed and individualized life of Western European Jews, were amazed by its “authenticity.” The more impressionable among them identified themselves with this community as their “spiritual ancestors,” a cultural experience reflected in numerous memoirs, travel diaries, and works of fiction, which then built a new image of the Eastern European Jewish community for the Western European Jewish reader.6 One of the most influential texts in this group was an essay-­album, published in 1919 and reissued already in 1920 as a result of its immense 4 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001), 92–93. 5 David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 308. 6 Stephen Ashheim’s Brothers and Strangers: East European Jews in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1823 (Madison, 1983) remains the most influential and comprehensive work on this topic.

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popularity, characteristically titled The Face of East European Jewry (Das Ostjüdische Antlitz), with text by Arnold Zweig and illustrated with fifty-five engravings by the printmaker Hermann Struck, who was already famous before the war. Both authors were officers of the Ober Ost,7 stationed at the German army headquarters in Kovno. In 1923, Struck collaborated with the poet Zalman Shneur in a new project, this time directly related to Vilna—a book with his engravings illustrating Shneur’s Hebrew poem “Vilna” (fig. 1).8 Notably, both Struck and Shneur had spent very little time in Vilna, but the encounter with the city left a deep impression on each of them. Both the text of the poem and the engravings, however, show that the book was not necessarily a reflection of their feelings and thoughts as much as an artistic and ideological construct, formed as a result of a similar inspiration from the “exotic” Jewish life in the city, along with a certain acquaintance with the community’s history and nostalgia for a place which by that time remained in the past for both of them. In this extremely ideologically charged Vilna, even the well-documented grit and poverty of the Jewish quarter and the unhealthy appearance of its inhabitants are represented not by actual images but by mythologems, one of which is spiritualized poverty: “Even your water-carriers draw from the source of Torah.”9 By correlating poverty and piety, a poetic description evolves into a parable. Shneur writes about Jewish children, and not just any children, but schoolchildren hurrying to school and, therefore, additionally enveloped in an aureole of spirituality: “In that dreadful squalor their tender blue-veined skin resembles the captive princes of Judea.”10 These lines are accompanied by an appropriate engraving by Struck: a poorly dressed Jewish boy with large soulful eyes. The engraving is not, as one might think, an original illustration created especially for Shneur’s poem; in fact,   7 Short for Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten—the headquarters of the German army in Kaunas during the World War I that was in command of eastern front.   8 First published in the almanac Shelter (Miklat) in New York in 1920.   9 Zalman Shneur and Hermann Struck, Vilna (Berlin: Hasefer, 1923), 6. 10 Ibid., 14.

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

Figure 1. An engraving to Zalman Shneur’s poem “Vilna,” by Hermann Struck. Berlin, 1923.

it had been used by Struck and Zweig for the cover of the second edition of The Face of East European Jewry. It shows that almost literal illustrations for Shneur’s poem could be found among independently created artworks (the boy’s image was not the only example). However, one could romanticize the situation of Vilna and Lithuania’s Jewish community during World War I and extol its idealistic spirituality only if one were not part of it. Shneur’s and Struck’s ideal compatibility as co-authors was not accidental—both were in the position of excited

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outside observers. The actual position of the Jewish community during World War I was far from romantic11—a fact reflected in the name of a massive compilation, On the Ruins of Wars and Turmoils (Af di hurves fun di milkhomes un mehumes),12 published in Vilna in 1931. The compilation was initiated by the Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims (YEKOPO) and edited by Moshe Shalit. It contained statistical data and analysis on Lithuania as a whole, recording and summarizing the spiritual and material losses brought about by the war and the German occupation, and it presented the work of the Committee itself. The majority of the authors were Jewish writers and public figures of Vilna. In the years following World War I, many of them joined the ranks of other authors who prepared and published a series of compilations and almanacs somewhat less defined in terms of their function. These include Jewish Vilna in Word and Image (Yidishe vilne in vort un bild, ed. Moritz Grossman, 1925), The Vilna Almanac (Vilner almanakh, ed. Aaron-Isaac Grodzensky, 1939), and several other “Vilna anthologies,” similar in content and structure (figs. 2–3). They contained poetry, prose, and memoir texts about Vilna by Jewish authors, materials on educational, religious, public, and cultural organizations, and photographic illustrations and reproduced artworks of Vilna’s Jewish quarters. The small monograph Vilnius in the New Jewish Poetry (Vilnius naujojoj žydų poezijoj), by Haim Nachman Shapiro, published in Lithuanian by the Union for the Liberation of Vilnius (Kaunas, 1935), is related to the ethos of the aforementioned Vilna books. Ideologically, all these texts are based on the percept, of distinct origin but well-adapted and developed, of Jewish Vilna as a center of spirituality supported by every layer of the Jewish population, each in its own characteristic way. Not surprisingly, Shapiro’s book contains high praise, completely devoid of critical analysis, of Shneur’s poem as an adequate reflection of Vilna’s spirit. 11 For the sake of justice, I must note that as the Ober Ost liaison officer for the Jewish community, Struck did his best to relieve the Jewish population’s predicament; he actively corresponded with the community’s leaders, who reported to him regularly. In this study, however, I would like to emphasize his artistic interpretation of the encounter with the Jewry of Lithuania and Vilna. 12 Unless stated otherwise, the titles of Jewish publications in this article refer to Yiddish texts.

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

Figure 2.  The title page of the anthology Jewish Vilna in Word and Image. Vilnius, 1925.

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Figure 3.  A fragment of the cover of The Vilna Almanac. Vilnius, 1939.

It was in the 1920s and the 1930s that the expression “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” which had existed almost since the eighteenth century without ever being a significant rhetorical figure, became the dominant epithet to describe Jewish Vilna. Thus, in the small booklet Vilne published in 1922 on the political situation of Vilna, all three authors—N. Shtif, Kh. Landau, and Y. Rozenbaum—use this description to emphasize the significance of

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

the city, and there are numerous other examples.13 A specific exalted narrative of Vilna, defined by a tendency to anthologize and eventually memorialize the real and existing expressions of Jewish communal and cultural life, formed in the interwar period. The narrative seems related to the sense of fragility of these forms of existence, brought on by the war, and the consequent emphasis on memory recorded in words. This tendency was so strong that it even manifested itself in foreign publications. The compilations A Vilna Man (Der Vilner), published in New York in 1929 (fig. 4), and Vilne, published in 1935 (both edited by Yefim Yeshurin), match the Vilna-edited books in terms of tone and a significant part of the authors. This type of narrative became so popular that it persisted without major change for decades. A particular refraction of it can be found in memorial books—a section of Jewish literature that also emerged after World War I and developed fully after the Holocaust, starting in 1943.14 Memorial books dedicated to perished communities of Central or Eastern European towns were published by the initiative and efforts of surviving community members, most often not professional authors or publishers.15 In their article on memorial books, Jonathan Boyarin and Jack Kugelmass call them a “community of mourners.”16 In these books, the text is accompanied by maps and photographs of the town and its life. Thus, each volume narrates the prewar history of the 13 The first illustrated guidebook of Jewish Vilnius—A Thousand Years of Vilna (Toyznt yor vilne), by Zalmen Shik—was published in 1939. One of its introductory chapters is titled “Vilna—the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania.’” 14 Several volumes of this type were published after the civil war in Ukraine; although different in narrative technique, The Destruction of Galicia (Khurbn galitsie), by S. An-ski, published in 1920, could also be considered an example of a memorial book. 15 There are several Jewish terms with the common meaning of “memory books”: yizker-bikher is Yiddish, sifre-zikorn is Yiddish based on a Hebrew loanword, and sifre-zikaron is Hebrew. 16 Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, “Yizker Bikher and the Problem of Historical Veracity: An Anthropological Approach,” The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, edited by Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (New York: University Press of New England, 1989), 522. See also David Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 100–104.

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Figure 4.  Tsemakh Shabad’s article “Vilna Then and Now,” from A Vilna Man. New York, 1929.

town and the community, though in essence they are symbolic memorials rather than history books. About one thousand such books had been published by the end of the 1980s. Boyarin and Kugelmass emphasize the specific genre of these texts: they are not firsthand sources and do not

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

record the life of the communities (only recreating it at a later time), but these books are not academic literature either because their authors never aim for an objective and neutral narration or try to mask their emotional connection to the material.17 I would add that memorial books are not a type of collective memoir, even though they often contain memoir material: the authors are mainly concerned not with reporting their own prewar experience but rather with the precise mental recreation of a locus that has ceased to exist, or was destroyed as a Jewish place, in order to preserve it forever in time as a book. The language of memorial books is Hebrew or Yiddish, sometimes both in the same volume. It seems that Hebrew is used in books describing Yiddish-speaking communities not only because some of the books were published in Israel, or because the initiators of a particular volume may have belonged to a Zionist movement before the war, but also in order to endow the book with the status of a sacred writ (sifre-kodesh). The Hebrew root kdsh, “sanctity,” is used in two traditional idioms that are significant for this discourse: “sacred community” (kehila kedosha) and “saint-like death,” that is “martyrdom” (kidush hashem). In this way, sacred communities become saint-like martyrs, and books about the communities and their annihilation become sacred books or sacral history. As for Yiddish, it is used not only as the natural language of the depicted community but also as a linguistic memorial to that community. Such use changes the status of the language itself, transforming it from a tool for transmitting information into an object of memorialization. Yiddish, in truth destroyed together with the overwhelming majority of its native speakers, and no longer the main European Jewish language because of the Holocaust, is forever immortalized in memorial books, which therefore assume the additional function of a monument to the language. Notably, the extensive list of memorial books for the Lithuanian and Polish communities does not include a volume on Vilna, despite the fact that a Vilna fraternity has existed in New York since 1953 under the name of The Vilna Way (Nusakh vilne), and a counterpart called The Union of 17 Cf. Kristol on Heschel’s book: “The Earth is the Lord’s is frankly an essay in ‘sacred history.’ It makes no claim to be objective, complete, or disinterested—it claims simply to be true” (Kristol, “Elegy for a Lost World”).

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Jews from Vilna and Its Environs (Igud yotse vilna ve-hasviva be-yisrael) was established in Israel in the late 1950s.18 This is not too surprising: researchers have noted the quarrels, and almost strife, that accompanied the compilation and editing of certain memorial books for small-town communities. How much more complex, then, it would have been to reach a consensus to reflect the colossal phenomenon that Vilna was for its former inhabitants and for the entire Eastern European Jewry. However, other texts dedicated to Vilna are numerous, and the intention of their authors, fully detectable in their approach and tone, matches that of the authors of memorial books: to preserve the image of the city in memory while simultaneously emphasizing that memory is indeed the only realm in which it exists. The American writer and historian Israel Cohen, who had visited Vilna several times before World War II and admitted that he felt “so fascinating a spell that I immediately began to interest myself in its Jewish aspect,”19 wrote in the prologue to his book on the history of Jewish Vilna in 1943: This book was first planned in the halcyon days of peace, but the writing of it, owing to the more pressing tasks, was not begun until after the outbreak of war. [. . .] In consequence of the tragic march of events, some phases of life and institutions described in the present tense most probably now belong to the memories of the past. Although, in comparison with many other Jewish communities of Europe, that of Vilna appeared upon the scene rather late, it has exercise a potent and determining influence upon the religious and cultural development of the Jews throughout Eastern Europe—an influence that has even been borne to numberless centers throughout the world by its numerous offspring . . . It has, in truth, been a bastion of Judaism and Jewish life.20 18 Interestingly, the organization’s website opens with the beginning of Shneur’s poem, Vilna: http://www.vilna.co.il/. 19 Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), xxxvii. 20 Ibid., xl–xli.

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

The change of “the present time” to “the past,” noted by Cohen, set the tone for texts about Vilna by the authors who were the witnesses and contemporaries to the process. As the members of the postwar Fraternity of Vilna Jews in Poland (Farband fun vilner yidn in poyln) wrote in their bulletin The Call of Vilna (Vilner opklang) of 1948: “Our Yerushalayim deLita [Jerusalem of Lithuania] is no longer there . . . Yes, Vilnius still exists, the geographical name is still there and will probably exist forever, but our Vilne is no longer there. Our Vilne is now homeless [na vanad] [. . .] Today, we can encounter a true Vilne face only abroad.”21 These words were repeated almost verbatim in 1989 by Lucy Dawidowicz, an American historian, who studied in the YIVO postgraduate program (aspirantur) in Vilna in 1938, in the introduction to her memoir, From that Place and Time: “Vilna no longer exists. On its site stands a place identified on the map as Vilnius, capital of Lithuania . . . Like Troy, the Vilna I knew [. . .] now lies buried beneath the debris of history, beneath layers of death and destruction. [. . .] A visitor to today’s Vilnius can no longer find a trace of what had once been the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”22 In such texts as The Call of Vilna and Dawidowicz’s introduction, the idiom “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” which, as already noted, took root in the interwar period, shifts in meaning from a superlative used by contemporaries to raise the status of their own community to a marker of a semi-mythological, fabled, and irrevocably lost chronotope. (Dawidowicz’s mention of Troy is not accidental: the association with Troy places Vilna in the realm of truly epic mourning). This epic approach is reflected in the three-volume album Jerusalem of Lithuania in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Russian that Vilna native Leyzer Ran published in New York in 1974 (fig. 5). A photographic chronicle in form, in its essence the album became not only 21 Quoted from: Anna Lipphardt, “Forgotten Memory: The Jews of Vilne in the Diaspora,” Osteuropa (special issue): Impulses for Europe: Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry (2008): 191. 22 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), xiii.

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Figure 5.  Leyzer Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania, cover of vol. 3 (New York, 1974).

an excellent document of Vilna but also a monument to the city, incorporating the ideology of interwar compilations and memorial books. Much like the authors of the memorial books, Ran himself was not a professional historian but had collected a vast archive of materials on Vilna and accomplished what amounted to the work of an entire local fraternity. The inclusion of additional languages implied new target

Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna

audiences and the awareness of the constantly diminishing number of readers in the Jewish languages; the fact that Yiddish and Hebrew had been kept showed that the symbolic reference points behind the publication remained unchanged. These reference points also influenced the postwar artistic narratives of Vilna. One such example is the novelist Avrom Karpinovich, who wrote in Yiddish and whose entire body of literary and public work was dedicated to Vilna. The names of his collections—Vilna, My Vilna (Vilne, mayn vilne, 1993) and There Was Indeed a Vilna Once (Geven, geven amol vilne, 1997)—hail back to Heschel’s elegiac tone, and his stories of Vilna’s Jewish criminal world and hoi polloi idealize his characters to the point where they become figures of folklore with lofty morals and the kind of spirituality that is reminiscent of Shneur’s pious paupers. I would like to return to David Roskies, a descendant of a Vilna Jewish family and a member of the Nusakh vilne fraternity, and his apt definition of the dynamics of postwar fictional literature created by Jewish authors of Eastern European descent: “East European Jewish writers and artists, whether they lived through the Holocaust or not, tempered their personal desire to innovate with the collective need to commemorate.”23 And, further, “Because of the Holocaust, every teller of local traditions became a teller of exotic places. For what could be more exotic than slum-dwelling Jews of prewar Warsaw or Vilna [. . .] all of them speaking a poetically charged Yiddish?”24 It could be added that this “exotic location” is actually time—the mythologized past inhabited by beloved ghosts, or a “place-and-time,” to use a slight modification of Dawidowicz’s title. The models of post-traumatic Jewish, particularly Vilna-based, narratives that I have presented became the foundation for a much broader modern multilingual literature that is still being created and that broadcasts the memory of a city by using set forms that follow the paradigm of a famed, idyllically beautiful, and forever lost chronotope. 23 Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 310. 24 Ibid., 312.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohen, Israel. Vilna. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Earth Is the Lord’s. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2001. Kristol, Irving. “Elegy for a Lost World.” Commentary, May 5, 1950. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/ article/the-earth-is-the-lords-by-abraham-joshua-heschel/. Kugelmass, Jack, and Jonathan Boyarin. “Yizker Bikher and the Problem of Historical Veracity: An Anthropological Approach.” In The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars, edited by Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk, 519–536. New York: University Press of New England, 1989. Lipphardt, Anna. “Post-Holocaust Reconstruction of Vilne, ‘the most Yiddish city in the world.’” Ab Imperio 4 (2004): 167–93. ___. “Forgotten Memory: The Jews of Vilne in the Diaspora.” Osteuropa (special issue): Impulses for Europe: Tradition and Modernity in East European Jewry (2008): 187–98. Roskies, David G. A Bridge of Longing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Shneur, Zalman, and Hermann Struck. Vilna. Berlin: Hasefer, 1923.

CHAPTER 9

World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music of the Lithuanian Diaspora and Soviet Lithuania RŪTA STANEVIČIŪTĖ Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius Keywords: Lithuanian war music, Vytautas Bacevičius, Eduardas Balsys, musical topics, intertextuality, war narrative, music and politics, reception. Wars and conflicts of the twentieth century left their mark on musical culture in many different ways. The most apparent repercussions may be found in numerous musical works dedicated to the themes of war, which depict in sound not only the atrocities of World War I, and especially of World War II, but also a geographically varied history of minor local conflicts, insurgencies, and civil wars (plus nonviolent rebellions and revolutions).1 Besides this conspicuous layer of war-­related music from the last century, there is also a larger array of nonthematic musical compositions that emerged and was perceived as an expression of threatening premonitions, traumatic memories, escapism, and other personal and cultural experiences of death-bearing events. Glenn Gould, for example, 1

Compositions as diverse as Karel Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 (1968), Frederic Rzewski’s Attica (1972), and George Crumb’s Black Angels (1970) may serve as just a few well-known examples.

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characterized the Seventh Piano Sonata by Sergei Prokofiev in the following words: “With its schizophrenic oscillation of mood and its nervous instability of tonality, it is certainly a war piece.”2 Moreover, the list of musical pieces inspired by the images of war would not be com­plete without mentioning the revival of military music in the twentieth century—­a century torn by stern political confrontation and brutal wars. This entailed a return to and transformation of war-related musical imagery that had been developed in the musical practices of the past. Research on war-related themes in music and works associated with this field of cultural imagination inevitably involves the discussion of how war is depicted in music and issues of broader musical semantics. However, when such investigation is directed specifically towards the body of work written in the twentieth century, its perspective is often narrowed to focusing on one composer or country. But even if the analysis is applied to this narrow field of individual work or specific culture, one should not rely on references implied in the work’s title and the composer’s declared intentions. Such a descriptive approach is insufficient to detect relations between different varieties of war and military music in contemporary culture. The network of intertextual relationships, composed of centuries-­old musical gestures (topics or topoi) and rhetorical figures, allows one to expand the field of traditions that may have influenced the thought of a particular composer in question and, at the same time, to discover prevalent cultural codes that would help relate different stylistic idioms in modern music. This entails the possibility of discovering a hypothetical war narrative in music and examining its semantic specificity. Without going into further detail, it is enough to mention that the choice of this mode of research was motivated by the aim of avoiding “naïve semiotics.”3 In view of the above-mentioned interpretational perspective, I have selected two compositions for analysis as vivid examples of war narrative in Lithuanian music: Sinfonia de la Guerra (Symphony no. 2) composed in 1940 in Buenos Aires by Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–70), a foremost Lithuanian modernist and member of the 2 Tim Page, ed., Glenn Gould Reader (New York: Knopf, 1984), 166. 3 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 469.

World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music

Paris School during the interwar period; and the oratorio Nelieskite mėlyno gaublio (Do Not Touch the Blue Globe) composed in 1969 in Soviet Lithuania by Eduardas Balsys (1919–84), a representative of postwar modernism. The two compositions, which emerged under very different sociopolitical circumstances, differ not merely in the changes of the conception of musical modernism and its practice, but also by their position with respect to the history of World War II and its later reception (that is, as regards the works’ time of composing and the cultural experience and memories of the war). Both the problems of modern music evolution and, more specifically, of national modernism, and the context of the cultural reflections on war are fields of broad coverage. Therefore, in my analysis of the chosen aspects of the compositions in question, the greatest attention will be focused on two theoretical and interpretive approaches: 1. In order to expose the imagery of war in musical works, the military topic and transformations of other musical topics (topoi) resulting from interaction with various twentieth-­ century musical idioms were chosen as a starting point for stylistic analysis.4 2. By examining the compositions by Bacevičius and Balsys as examples of modern war music, my research focused on interaction of the composers’ work and its reception, with ruptures in the narratives of war and cultural memory.

4 The theory of topics (topoi) has been extended and applied to analysis of contemporary music by relying on authoritative resources, such as Raymond Monelle (2000, 2006), Vladimir Karbusicky (1986), Robert S. Hatten (2004), Esti Sheinberg (2000), Nicholas McKay (2012), and others. The term topos/topoi, or “topic(s),” was first introduced and explicated in literary theory, where it came to refer to an established theme, a constant motif, rhetorical figure, or formula. Leonard Ratner was the first to apply the term in musicology, where it was used for the classic style analysis (1980) to define characteristic figures, semantic-stylistic units in a musical discourse. Music semioticians who further developed the theory of musical topoi have noted that among the most characteristic features of musical topoi are invariability of the formal structure (the signifier) and fluidity of cultural connotations (the signified).

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SINFONIA DE LA GUERRA: INTERPRETATION OF THE OUTBREAK OF WAR FROM AN ÉMIGRÉ PERSPECTIVE In 1939, having earned international acclaim as a virtuoso pianist and composer in Europe, Bacevičius went on a concert tour in Argentina, and while there he was caught unawares by political change and momentous events in Europe and Lithuania (i.e., the Soviet occupation of Lithuania and the outbreak of World War II with Germany’s invasion of Poland). After more than a year’s stay in South America, in September 1940 he moved to the United States and lived there as a refugee almost until the end of his life in 1970 (he was granted citizenship in 1967). The composer wrote his Symphony no. 2 in Buenos Aires in January–March 1940, at which time, it should be noted, Lithuania had not yet been occupied by the Soviet Union or involved in World War II. Bacevičius, an offspring of a mixed Lithuanian-Polish family, dedicated the composition to his sister, Polish composer Bacewicz, and to Poland torn by dramatic events of war. The three-movement Sinfonia de la Guerra is a striking, albeit rare, example of programmatic symphonism in the music of Bacevičius, whose inspirations for musical representation were thoroughly explicated in the synopsis of the composition: • F  irst Movement (Allegro): the outbreak of war, when Germany invades Poland; air raids, rain of bombs, occupation. • S econd Movement (Andante funèbre): the aftermath of the invasion. The movement opens with endless funereal corteges and processions. People are grief-stricken and desperate. Mothers and fathers search through the rubble of their ruined houses in the vain hope of finding the bodies of their loved ones. Crying children cannot find their parents. The middle section of the movement is the peak of lamentations and grief, pouring out from thousands of hearts, the cry of pain and suffering heard from millions of people. • Th  ird Movement (Allegro molto): a scene on the western front; the Germans fight against the Belgians, the Dutch, the French, and the British. The might of the Maginot Line. The movement ends with the German battles in France.5 5 Vytautas Bacevičius, program note for Symphony no. 2, autograph (copy), Archive of Émigré Culture and Art at Klaipėda University.

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It should be taken into account that the program notes bear references to actual events of both World War I and World War II.6 The notes must have been written somewhat later, in 1943, most likely when Bacevičius made attempts to give performances of his symphony in the United States.7 In that same year, conductor Leopold Stokowski took interest in the symphony, having selected it out of numerous compositions sent to him and intending to include it in the concert program. However, for a number of subjective and objective reasons, such as the composer being short of money to have the parts rewritten and the conductor busy with a number of things (including his wedding), the symphony never entered the repertoire of American orchestral concerts (fig. 1).8 The several-year gap between the completion of the symphony and the publicizing of its official program partly accounts for the difference in the stylistic and genre characteristics of the composition from the cultural evocations that its author presented in the program notes. It is useful to remember that in 1942 Bacevičius began composing his Third Symphony, dedicated once again to the theme of war. It was finished in 1944 and dedicated to the American Nations. The pompous Symphony no. 3 perfectly fits in the list of declarative compositions of the heroic style; however, his earlier Second Symphony can hardly be identified as being in the same musical style.

6 Immediately after the outbreak of World War II, the composer invoked historical events of the past to kindle his musical imagination. He recalled certain episodes of World War I, which seemed to promise changes for the better. The illusory strength and effectiveness of the Maginot Line deluded not only Bacevičius but also the Western allies: despite all the fortifications, the allied forces were outflanked and beaten by the Germans in the Netherlands and France in 1941; cf. Davies, Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory [Lithuanian title: Kariaujanti Europa: 1939–1945] (Vilnius: Vaga, 2006), 112–15. 7 Such inference may be drawn from Bacevičius’s letters to Juozas Žilevičius written during the war. Bacevičius mentions in passing that the addressee’s daughter, Marytė, had translated program notes for Symphonies no. 2 and no. 3 in 1944. Cf. Bacevičius’s letter to Marytė Žilevičiūtė, dated April 9, 1944, in Juozas Žilevičius-Juozas Kreivėnas Musicology Archives (a copy of this letter is preserved in the Archive of Émigré Culture and Art at Klaipėda University). 8 Danutė Palionytė, “Vytauto Bacevičiaus simfoninės muzikos vizija” [“Vision of Symphonic Music in Vytautas Bacevičius’s Work”], in Vytautas Bacevičius: Gyvenimo partitūra, vol. 1, edited by Ona Narbutienė (Vilnius: Petro ofsetas, 2005), 320.

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Figure 1. 

Vytautas Bacevičius in Chicago (1941). Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art.

In his diptych of war symphonies, Bacevičius presents an original reflection on the changing reception of the scope and threats of World War II and the ensuing transformations in war-related musical imagery, which had also characterized much of the war music written in other countries. Instantaneous responses to the first events of war and the hopes for the prospective restoration of historical justice were soon replaced by more monumental musical images, which gave meaningful expression to the enormous burden of fear and pain greater than any human being can bear and the sense of existential loss and overwhelming tragedy. But even considering only those early wartime compositions written in spontaneous response to the atrocities of war, Bacevičius’s

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Second Symphony still stands out as highly original and devoid of many of the stereotypes characteristic of the time.9 The overall concept of Sinfonia de la Guerra is akin to the classical “from-darkness-tolight” program revived before the war by Béla Bartók in his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), which subsequently served as a prototype for many compositions dedicated to the theme of war. Various scholars attribute Bacevičius’s Symphony No. 2 to the second, traditionalist phase in his work,10 but the stylistic and semantic codes encountered therein were clearly formed under the influence of the early twentieth-century mechanistic music and idioms of new barbarism (ritualism) and pastoral idyll, which parallels the music of his much-revered authorities in modernism—Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Bartók, Claude Debussy, and some of their precursors (in the first place, Wagner and Mahler).11 The network of intertextual rela  9 It is worth mentioning the revival of traditionalist and neofolkloric tendencies in the early wartime works. Such tendencies are present at their best in Nikolai Myaskovsky’s Symphonic Ballad (Symphony no. 22) (it is known as one of the first symphonic responses to the Great Patriotic War [World War II] in Russian music) and in Symphony no. 23, both composed in 1941. An entirely different—escapist—tendency emerged with the works cast in a pastoral or religious mold and those written in the neoclassical and neobaroque vein, which notably include Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1938–40), Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments (1940), among many others. 10 Interpretations of Vytautas Bacevičius’s work were strongly affected by his own commentaries and appraisals. In his late period, when he returned to the innovations of the avant-garde and developed an individual vision and concept of “cosmic music,” Bacevičius became very critical of his middle creative period (between 1940 and 1956), describing it as a time of “compromise.” In part it was also because of his reputation as an uncompromising innovator that his works composed in the 1940s and 1950s came to be described by various researchers as representative of his “period of compromise, a shift back towards neoclassicism and neoromanticism” (Ona Narbutienė, “Iš Vytauto Bacevičiaus kūrybos pasaulio” [“From Vytautas Bacevičius’s Creative World”], in Vytautas Bacevičius: Gyvenimo partitūra, vol. 1, edited by Ona Narbutienė [Vilnius: Petro ofsetas, 2005], 310), the relapse to more traditional idiom, a classicist phase (Małgorzata Janicka-Słysz, Vytautas Bacevičius i jego idee muzyki kosmicznej [Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2001], 26) or a period of new traditionalism (Palionytė, “Vytauto Bacevičiaus simfoninės muzikos vizija,” 337). 11 Looking back at the parallels between Bacevičius’s symphonic music and works by other twentieth-century composers, Palionytė described Bacevičius’s relation to his predecessors as “inherited tradition”; see Palionytė, “Vytauto Bacevičiaus simfoninės muzikos vizija,” 343.

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tions shows the affinity of this symphony with the broad range of styles distinct from the Second Viennese School and, especially, with the Paris School. Like in many other twentieth-century scores dedicated to the theme of war, the musical fabric of Sinfonia de la Guerra is replete with various subspecies of the military theme. Among the most widely used here are renditions of marches in diverse genres and imitations of army signals and alarums. The expressive possibilities of this topos are most abundantly represented in the first movement: in addition to rhythmic patterns characteristic of the march and fanfare figurations (which imitate the sound signals used in the army as a symbol for calling to battle), brisk tempo and specific orchestration with accentuated woodwinds and melodic percussion instruments point to the tradition of nineteenth-century operatic and concert marches. Fanfare figurations are amply used in the first and third movements of the symphony, where they serve to evoke scenes of battle, while the second movement presents a funeral march, depicting the traumatic consequences of war. The military topos is nonetheless only one of a number of musical means employed to evoke semantic content characteristic of the music of the past and reinterpret them in a new key as applied to the imagery of war. In Sinfonia de la Guerra, the following topoi also have an important structural and semantic function: the pastoral, the hunt, rhetorical figures of the Cross and the Crucifixion, and pianto (wailing),12 and also dissonant intervals and specific musical gestures, such as tritone (diabolus in musica) and figurations of the Tristan chord (post-Wagnerian motifs of “desire,” “longing,” “awakening,” etc.). What is especially noteworthy is that all of the topoi employed in the Second Symphony seem to have absorbed the characteristic stylistic features of diverse musical epochs (fig. 2). Some of these topoi featured in the Second Symphony may also be encountered in Bacevičius’s earlier works, but diabolus in musica, or tritone, should be considered one of his favorite musical symbols and means of structuring his pitch vocabulary. According to Danutė Palionytė, 12 According to Karbusicky, the descending semitone, as a characteristic pianto figure, is an expression of pain and sorrow, a representation of the sigh (“Ah!”) and its musical embodiment (figuration); see Vladimir Karbusicky, Grundriss der musikalischen Semantik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), 65–67.

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a

b

Figure 2. Selected examples of musical topoi and gestures in Vytautas

Bacevičius’s Sinfonia de la Guerra: a. Military: Funeral march (second movement, mm. 48–53) b. Military: Imitation of trumpet signals and fanfares (first movement, mm. 20–24) c. Pastoral: Melodic figuration of idyll and lamentation (first movement, mm. 31–36) d. Hunting: Rhythmic figures of galloping (third movement, mm. 1–6) e. Cross and Crucifixion: Rhetorical figure (first movement, mm. 195–97).

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c

d

e Figure 2. Continued.

tritone mostly occurs in the zones of emotional activity, gets frequently inserted into sections of energetic movement, is often heard in the final measures. . . . In Poème Electrique, this symbol accompanies each appearance of the refrain (main theme) and braces cluster-like “stripe” patterns in the woodwind parts; it also predominates in the outer movements of the dramatic Second Symphony; occurs occasionally like a warning sign in the otherwise buoyant Third, Fourth and Fifth Symphonies; flashes every now and then in the stormy outbursts of Symphonie Cosmique.13 Another feature characteristic of Bacevičius’s work is the simultaneous combination and counterposing of different topoi. Let us look into some typical examples. In the second movement of the Second Symphony, the image of the funeral march is intertwined with the melodic gestures typical of the pastoral topos, harmonic modulations growing out from the Tristan 13 Palionytė, “Vytauto Bacevičiaus simfoninės muzikos vizija,” 346.

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chord and applied to instrumental parts, such as oboe, flute, and harp, typical of that group of musical representation. In terms of topoi distribution, the third movement is rather unexpected, as it combines the means characteristic of a military topos with the representation of horse-riding in music, typical of the hunt topos. Raymond Monelle derived the stylization of galloping heard there from the medieval symbol of a noble horse associated with the noble and heroic warrior.14 The interaction of the indicated topoi manifested itself in constantly shifting quadruple and triple meters (four and three beats per measure) and the juxtaposition of marching and galloping rhythmical figures typical of the military topos and hunt topos. It has to be noted that the said mix of different topoi was a composing procedure rather typical of the early twentieth century, which witnessed a revisionist yet vital relationship between the first modernism and tradition.

BACEVIČIUS’S WAR MUSIC IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERNIST AESTHETIC IDEAS Researchers examining Bacevičius’s musical output often point to a typical contrast between traditional, sometimes even conventional and formal organization, and complex multilayered musical textures in which all parameters are subject to functional instability and variability. His original concept of atonal music, to which he remained faithful throughout his career, is reflected in a deliberately created illusion that all musical patterns and progressions are relatively autonomous and defy the logic of coherent sequences and relations. Such ostensible absence of logical relations affects the interaction between featured topoi and rhetorical gestures and twentieth-century stylistic idioms. On the one hand, topoi and rhetorical figures function as semantic imprints (to use Irène Deliège’s term), which facilitate the listener’s orientation and associative linking of apparently unrelated musical patterns. But on the other hand, transformative development of discrete musical parameters, so characteristic of Bacevičius’s musical idiom, has a profound effect on the semantic field of gestures 14 Raymond Monelle, Sense of Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 51–53 and 62–63.

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adopted from tradition. Topoi and rhetorical figures are continually deformed because of combinatorial processes based on segmentation and variation. Monelle, who analyzed the dissemination of traditional topoi in twentieth-century music, claimed that topoi are employed here in their euphoric and dysphoric states.15 As applied to the interpretation of Bacevičius’s symphony, attention should be paid to an ironic use of the military and other topoi. This creates a musical dysphoria—a disparaging musical depiction of the German army’s maneuver warfare and German militarism as such. The elements of such dysphoric syntax may be found in specific harmonies (“wrong note” imitations) and discordant instrumentation (combining “incongruous” groups of instruments), while the mechanical repetition of the figures of the military topos creates a slightly comic effect, resembling musical representation of fictional and mythological characters in nineteenth-century music (fig. 3). Echoes of the dysphoric gallop transformations in Wagner’s music should also be mentioned, as their acceleration and concentration produce an ironic effect. Emphatic repetition as a means to achieve ironic effect has also been employed by the French composers Bacevičius admired, by a number of émigré composers in Paris who formed the Paris School, and by Stravinsky. Music’s ability to recontextualize themes is best revealed in the first movement of the Second Symphony, where various topoi—as diverse as military and pastoral topoi, invariants of the Tristan chord, figures of a cross and diabolus in musica, idioms of mechanical music—are combined in separate episodes. Thus the musical fabric, with an overabundance of semantic references and structural complexity, approximates the aesthetic category of the sublime. This category is closely related to the practices of the musical avant-garde and modernism as an expression of disharmonious human existence and experience that exceeds human perceptive powers. Theodor W. Adorno associated the revival of this category with the fall of formal beauty as an aesthetic idea in modern art.16 Max Paddison, building his theory upon the ideas of Adorno, saw the complexity of 15 Ibid., 62–63. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 1997), 197.

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Figure 3.  Vytautas Bacevičius, Sinfonia de la Guerra. Military topos: Ironic march (first movement, mm. 215–20). Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Center.

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twentieth-century music originating in a transition from the natural sublime to the constructed sublime as an expression of overwhelming experience.17 An attempt to reach experiences beyond human existence was a constant thread running through Bacevičius’s work, from his earliest expressionist pieces to the late visions of cosmic music. However, the fact that war-themed Sinfonia de la Guerra employs topoi adopted from centuries-old musical tradition gives rise to new arguments for the discussion of the sublime and its role in Bacevičius’s music, taking into account its incredibly dense network of stylistic references and intertextual links. Such interpretation would allow an expansion of the notion of the sublime, which came to be identified with the “density” of polyphonic texture characteristic of early atonalism and dodecaphony, and with the technological complexity that characterizes some practices of the second avant-garde in research of twentieth-century music.18 On the other hand, researchers of modernism rightly consider the paradoxical juxtaposition and contraposition of opposites to be the attributes of irony, a typical tendency of modernist movements outside the Second Viennese School that served to oppose the centripetal (conservative) processuality of late romanticism and the dogma of organicism as applied to the analysis of musical works. For example, Vladimir Jankélévitch sees irony as a tool of critical reaction against modernity, referring to the works by Maurice Ravel and Stravinsky as paragon examples.19 Various musicologists have noted the abundance of categories related to irony—such as satire, comedy, grotesque, humor, absurd—in the pieces produced during interwar modernism.20 A parody of militarism 17 Max Paddison, “Nature and the Sublime,” in Order and Disorder. Music-Theoretical Strategies in 20th-Century Music (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 109, 125. 18 This approach, which essentially pursues Adorno’s ideas in the field of philosophy of new music, is still predominant among contemporary music scholars. Cf. Walter Frisch, “The Refractory Masterpiece: Toward an Interpretation of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, op. 9,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–99. 19 Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’ironie, ou la bonne conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1950), 282. 20 Cf. Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000); Stephen Zank, Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel (Rochester, NY: University

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as a reaction against various afflicting experiences of World War I found its way into Bacevičius’s Second Symphony. Irony here is used as a means to withstand the trauma of the new global conflict, as a strategy of distancing, characteristic of the first wave of modernism, which serves to neutralize the strategies of self-identification that are usually engaged in order to represent common perceptions of war and relate to the emotional categories of pathos, compassion, and the like.

DO NOT TOUCH THE BLUE GLOBE: SOVIET METAMORPHOSES OF WAR AND PEACE In Soviet Lithuania, the first outstanding compositions dedicated to the theme of war were written as late as the 1960s. During war, resignation predominated in the relationship between art and reality, which applied not only to music but also to, say, works of visual art produced at the time.21 The postwar cultural environment was dominated by the official discourse about war, strongly influenced by the cultural confrontations and political tensions of the Cold War. In postwar years, Soviet ideology imposed on composers the theme of peace, which, alongside the themes of the ideologically codified glorification of the new Soviet reality and the friendship of nations, prevailed in Lithuanian music until 1960. The theme of war came back during the Soviet thaw: it was specifically in the late 1950s and in the 1960s that it received various interpretations in the art produced in Lithuania. In comparison with other arts, Lithuanian Soviet music dedicated to the themes of war is a phenomenon appearing somewhat later than cinema and visual art (fig. 4). Among the most outstanding works produced during the period in question (1960s) was the unnamed diptych by Eduardas Balsys, consisting of the Dramatinės freskos (Dramatic Frescoes) for violin, Rochester Press, 2009); Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nicholas McKay, “Dysphoric States: Stravinsky’s Topics—Huntsmen, Soldiers and Shepherds,” in Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations. In Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle, edited by Esti Sheinberg (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 249–62. 21 Cf. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, “Intymizmas antrojo pasaulinio karo metų Lietuvos dailėje” [“Intimism in Lithuanian Visual Art during World War II”], Naujasis Židinys-Aidai 4 (2011): 225–31.

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Figure 4.  Eduardas Balsys (1959). Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art.

piano, and orchestra (1965), and the oratorio Nelieskite mėlyno gaublio (Do Not Touch the Blue Globe) for three soloists, boys’ choir, two pianos, double bass, and percussion (1969).22 In the time of the Khrushchev thaw, Balsys composed music for many films about war, which helped him develop a rich array of expressive means for the depiction of war.23 In the context of the political thaw and ideological liberalization, these films represented war in a nonheroic manner, as it would be witnessed by an ordinary participant. Such an angle of interpretation has also served as the basis of the plot for the oratorio Do Not Touch the Blue Globe. Both its literary sources and the circumstances surrounding its creation point to a changed reception of war, contrary to that reflected in Sinfonia de la Guerra by Bacevičius. Unlike this symphony, the oratorio was initiated by performers who also commissioned a 22 Some other works written during the same period, such as Vytautas Jurgutis’s vocal cycle Kareivio laiškai (Soldier’s Letters) for bass, piano, and percussion (1964), and Julius Juzeliūnas’s Passacaglia-Poem for symphony orchestra (1962), also deserve a special mention. 23 The short list of such films would certainly include Tiltas [Bridge] (1956), Gyvieji didvyriai [Living Heroes] (1960), and Žingsniai naktį [Footsteps in the Night] (1962).

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Holocaust survivor, poet Violeta Palčinskaitė, to write a text for it.24 The composition was based on a specific event (the alleged bombing of a pioneer camp in Palanga, a Lithuanian seaside town, at the very beginning of the war), but the plot did not represent an authentic historical situation. The dramaturgical structure of the oratorio is based on the sequence of seasons, a rather traditional technique for the genre; in contrast to Bacevičius’s symphony, the narrative of Balsys’s composition is not based on a chronological sequence of historical events. The symphony by Bacevičius could be characterized as evoking the images of war, while the oratorio by Balsys is an example of traumatic memories of historical events based on the model of remembering. This shift from representation of reality (war) toward memory of past events reflects a broader trend of change in the war-themed music of the twentieth century determined by the logic of symbolization of traumatic experience. According to Slavoj Žižek, a new event is experienced first as trauma and an invasion of nonsymbolic Reality; only by repeating itself does it find its place in the symbolic order.25 From the viewpoint of musical style, the oratorio by Balsys gives a vivid representation of the second wave of modernism in Lithuanian music. In the context of postwar musical novelties, the composition is also to be regarded as a typical instance of “compromising” aesthetic. It has components of the dodecaphonic and aleatoric techniques that had just started to appear in Lithuanian music of the time, where they were incorporated into the moderately modern and ideologically acceptable style of the neofolkloric direction. It should be noted that in the 1960s, Balsys wrote a series of compositions in a similar style, trying to reconcile Schönberg and Shostakovich, composers who represented the most palpable ideological and musical antagonism in the years of the Cold War. This ideological antithesis was most conspicuously manifested in the style of the Dramatic Frescoes. However, the stylistic range in Balsys’s oratorio, and in some other works he composed in the 1960s, was not limited to this ideological antithesis and its associations. Besides mainstream modernism (which fed on 24 Ona Narbutienė, Eduardas Balsys (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1999), 111. 25 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 61.

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the impulses coming from the Second Viennese School) and the more moderate idiom of Shostakovich (which was then beginning to win official recognition), there was a wide range of other tributary influences in the first and second wave of modernism and avant-gardism. Among these, symphonic jazz should be mentioned, primarily as an important stylistic and semantic feature that hinged on the composer’s favored strategy to paraphrase the secondary folklore (urban pop music) and incorporate it into the vocabulary of academic music. When asked about the composers who influenced his artistic mind-set, Balsys never specifically mentioned either the representatives of the Second Viennese School or Shostakovich. He would acknowledge, in the late 1960s, Prokofiev, Bartók, and Benjamin Britten, and Beethoven, who had been the object of his unfading fascination;26 in later years the list was extended to include Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and the especially revered Witold Lutosławski.27 Even though in the 1970s critics labeled the mixture of different styles in Balsys’s music as “normative Soviet modernism,”28 the reception of postwar moderate modernism in contemporary musicology has currently changed and has stimulated more in-depth research into this phenomenon. Arnold Whittall, for example, thinks that the canon of modern music between 1945 and 1975 was strongly influenced by composers of a more moderate mind-set, especially by those who succeeded in combining innovation and recognizability, individuality and accessibility.29 The music of many composers representing the second wave of modernism is marked by an abundance of stylistic and cultural references, which often become the subject of ongoing debates about the possible contexts of their interpretation. With reference to the cultural connotations of the Cold War, Richard Taruskin described this tendency as “an amalgam of generic and specific signifying 26 Ona Narbutienė, Eduardas Balsys (Vilnius: Vaga, 1971), 7. 27 Narbutienė, Eduardas Balsys (1999), 57. 28 Juozas Antanavičius, “Apie lietuvių muzikos stilių įvairovę” [“On Stylistic Diversity in Lithuanian Music”], in Muzika 6, ed. Jūratė Burokaitė (Vilnius: Vaga, 1986), 8. 29 Arnold Whittall, “Individualism and Accessibility: The Moderate Mainstream, 1945– 75,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 368–69.

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devices: always allusive, but always elusive as well—code without key. . . . [T]hey can be read in many . . . context as well.”30 Similarly, the musical material of Balsys’s oratorio is not “neutral” but conforms to certain strategies that shape the expressive content. With respect to both the literary plot and musical development, an important role is played here by the principle of inversion. The idyllic representation of the world of childhood forms the nucleus of the work’s poetic level. The tragic denouement is revealed gradually, by interspersing the dialogues of the children and the teacher with comments from a dead child, the choir of the dead children, the Mother, and the mask of the Dead City, all coming as if from a distance of time. Despite the extremely colorful stylistic palette, the musical texture may be seen as a kind of inverted musical pastoral. The traditional topoi are not so openly exposed here as in the Second Symphony by Bacevičius. Their development is characterized by a continuous process of recomposition, using the same patterns in both euphoric and dysphoric states. As an example, I shall use the part of the Little One, one of the principal characters of the oratorio. The part of a playing child heard in the first movement is derived from the intonation of the traditional Christmas bells by stylizing the world of children’s games and toys (fig. 5).31 In the development of the composition, the same melodic figuration is transformed into a funeral march accompanied by the toll of funeral bells. For the contrastive juxtaposition of the topoi and their conversion, an especially characteristic instrumental ensemble—two pianos, a double bass, and twenty-two percussion instruments—was used, somewhat reminiscent of a stylized jazz ensemble. The oratorio presents a succession of variations based on contrasting cultural images of the pastoral—from the idyll of the lost world (musical imitations of Christmas music and children’s games) to the tragedy of loss (rendered by using material of folkloric origin structurally akin to laments typical of the pastoral topos). By characterizing Balsys as a follower of the classical conflict-based dramaturgy, Algirdas Ambrazas sensibly discerned in his music two prevalent strategies of recomposition relative to the associative musical 30 As cited in ibid., 383. 31 Narbutienė finds that the song of the Little One has melodic and modal features akin to the traditional Lithuanian sutartinės hymns (Narbutienė, Eduardas Balsys [1999], 200).

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Figure 5.  Eduardas Balsys, Do Not Touch the Blue Globe. Pastoral topos: Living Kid’s Song (prologue, p. 11–12) (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1972).

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material—namely, integration and antithesis, which made his method of composing look similar to the modern collage technique.32 Another characteristic feature of Balsys’s musical modernism was resemantization of the musical material. I refer here to the concept of resemantization as a typical trend of the second modernism discussed by Peter Bürger, author of the popular theory of the avant-garde.33 A highly seminal insight proposed by this theorist of the avant-garde and modernism allows us to readjust the established beliefs about the neutral use of compositional techniques in Lithuanian music during the second phase of modernism. In their own research, Lithuanian musicologists focused more on the analysis of uses of folklore in Balsys’s work, leaving aside a more thorough exploration of the semantic contexts that occur at the intersections of recomposed traditional music and modern music idioms. As applied to the oratorio by Balsys, resemantization reveals to what extent ideological norms and restrictions affected his musical imagination. For example, the use of the twelve-tone technique for the depiction of menace, tragedy, and traumatic memories should be considered a typical instance of normative Soviet modernism. Musicologist Ona Narbutiene, the author of the first monograph dedicated to Balsys, based her account of the period’s music on an assumption that “the dodecaphonic system is suitable for the expression [. . .] of the dark sides of life.”34 A closer look at the early phase of postwar modernism, when twelvetone and serial techniques were introduced and adopted in Lithuanian music (from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s), reveals that the ideological treatment of these compositional devices was gradually going out of date. Ekaterina Vlasova suggests that the ideological shift in the official treatment of dodecaphonic music as a token of hostile ideology in Soviet music occurred after the plenum of the Union of Composers of the Soviet Union held in 1966 and dedicated to the theme of dodecaphony.35 The 32 Algirdas Ambrazas, “Eduardo Balsio muzikos tautinis savitumas” [“The National Originality of Eduardas Balsys’ Music”], in Narbutienė, Eduardas Balsys (1999), 202–3. 33 Peter Bürger, “The Decline of the Modern Age,” Telos 62 (1984/5): 117–30. 34 Ona Narbutienė, “Lietuvių kompozitorių meninio mąstymo naujovės” [“Novelties in the Artistic Thinking of Lithuanian Composers”], Pergalė 7 (1966): 131. 35 Ekaterina Vlasova, “The Struggle of the Artistic and the Propagandistic Trends in the Soviet Music of the 1960s: The Plenum of the Union of Soviet Composers of the USSR

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resemantization of dodecaphony in the work of Balsys occurred somewhat later, during his late dodecaphonic period in the 1980s. Nevertheless, even in his oratorio Do Not Touch the Blue Globe of 1969 the negative semantics of dodecaphony create an ambiguous impression resulting from the folkloric associations of the series’ pitch structure.36 Similar strategies of ascribing semantic content to dodecaphony and subsequent resemantization have been employed by composers who turned to this technique rather late in their careers. Threni: id est Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae (1957–58) by Stravinsky may be mentioned as probably the best-known example. According to Anne C. Shreffler, the serial texture of this composition is persistently “deranged” by repetitions of modal structures made of seconds and minor thirds that sound highly suggestive of the Russian folklore.37 Like in Stravinsky’s threnody, the resourceful use of timbre in Balsys’s oratorio lends an additional semantic charge to the music and is applied to produce various semantic inversions. A culturally codified arrangement of soloists, choral groups, instruments, and their ensembles “deranges” the technological order of serialism and the asemantic nature of this idiom, which has become a token of creative freedom in Western countries in the same manner as the aforementioned juxtapositions and contrapositions of intonational vocabulary characteristic of the series and that of Lithuanian folklore (fig. 6). The application of dodecaphony and other modern idioms in Balsys’s oratorio and his later works, and the interaction of these modern idioms with the recomposed borrowed material and traditional topoi, reveal certain ambiguities in semantization processes pertaining to the manifestations of second-wave modernism, which occurred against the backdrop of the ideological tensions of the Cold War period.

in 1966, Devoted to Dodecaphony,” in Sociocultural Crossings and Borders: Musical Microhistories, edited by Rūta Stanevičiūtė and Rima Povilionienė (Vilnius: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, ISCM, 2015), 229. 36 Cf. Ambrazas, “Eduardo Balsio muzikos tautinis savitumas,” 201. 37 Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 235. Remarkably, it was the first thoroughly serial composition by Stravinsky.

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Figure 6. Eduardas Balsys, Do Not Touch the Blue Globe. Semantic

juxtaposition of dodecaphony and folklore (“Winter,” p. 86–87) (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1972).

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Figure 6.  Continued.

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DISSEMINATION OF WAR COMPOSITIONS BY BACEVIČIUS AND BALSYS DURING THE COLD WAR AND AFTER 1990: TRANSFORMATIONS IN RECEPTION After having examined our two selected war compositions written at different times by two Lithuanian composers, we may conclude that the impact of political discourse on the way war was depicted in Lithuanian music has gradually become more powerful. Tensions caused by political processes and sociocultural ruptures also determined the variable success that each of the two works had in terms of performances and later cultural reception, or, in other words, what Walter Benjamin described as Nachleben der Werke—“the afterlife of works of art.” On the other hand, within the compass of critical musicology it is impossible to downplay the relevance of reception to recomposition of the work’s semantic field. The paradigmatic shift in contemporary musicology from means to meaning38 is indicated by the increasing tendency to relate the formation of meaning with “the social contexts within which music is produced, reproduced, interpreted, evaluated, contemplated, consumed.”39 In this respect, the reception of Balsys’s work is especially symptomatic. For almost a decade after its premiere, the oratorio enjoyed great popularity as one of the prime exponents of Lithuanian music. It had numerous performances not only in the Soviet Union but also in the different blocs of divided Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The oratorio was especially popular in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where in the same decade of the 1960s composers were also trying to reconcile communist 38 Christopher Williams, “Of Canons and Context: Toward a Historiography of Twentieth-Century Music,” Repercussions 2, no. 1 (1993): 31–74. 39 Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, “Introduction: Trajectories of Twentieth-Century Music,” in Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. Richard Taruskin has likewise claimed that though a relatively recent trend in musicology, the history of reception is no less important than the history of creation (or production, to use the author’s word); in his opinion, it is a necessary component of research if one aims to depict historical processes objectively and honestly; see Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Early Twentieth Century, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xiv.

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ideology and the doctrine of serialism.40 Contrary to the situation in the Soviet Union, in the official discourse of the GDR during the 1960s there was a widespread belief that serialism was very suitable as a technique to express socialist content and the confrontations of the Cold War. Works by East German composers Hans Eisler and Paul Dessau may be taken as the most striking representatives of this inclination.41 On the other hand, the reception of the oratorio in Western countries before the end of the Cold War testified to the impact of left-wing ideology on interpretations of the composition.42 In those contexts, the oratorio actually joined the flow of compositions on peace propaganda, representing the motif of the threat of nuclear war typical of the Cold War period rather than a narrative related to the memory of World War II. Because of such ideological connotations, Balsys’s oratorio has virtually disappeared from active concert life since the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite its undeniable artistic value. Known sources present no conclusive evidence for whether Bacevi­ čius did in fact attempt to use his contacts with Soviet institutions in the United States in order to get his Second Symphony performed. Recent research by some historians has demonstrated that the propaganda and huge financial injections coming from the Soviet Union enabled an incessant and ample supply of Soviet war-themed music to the American musical establishments, where it started to overshadow and outnumber similar works by American composers.43 40 Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84. 41 In the 1960s, Eisler’s Lenin (Requiem), composed in 1937, was still among the most popular works in the GDR. This trend is also represented by Dessau’s cantata Appell der Arbeiterklasse (1962), depicting the threat of atomic war, and Orchestermusik no. 3 (“Lenin”) (1972), where the aesthetic of socialist realism is aligned with serial and aleatoric techniques. 42 Pro-Soviet reception of modern music from the Soviet Union was especially noticeable in France, where interpretational contexts of new music were strongly influenced by the ideological confrontation of the French intellectual mainstream with the official discourse of the United States and its cultural initiatives in postwar Europe. For more on this see, for example, Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also cf. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism.” 43 Cf., for example, Ekaterina Vlasova, 1948 год в советской музыке [The Year 1948 in Soviet Music] (Moscow: Классика-XXI, 2010), 203–10.

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Paradoxically, his short flirt with the left-wing milieu of Lithuanian immigrants in Argentina and representatives of the Soviet Union in New York had a tragic impact on the creative career of Bacevičius and the reception of his music—he was ignored by the Lithuanian diaspora in the United States and became a victim of McCarthyism. The majority of his compositions for symphony orchestra written as an émigré were not performed during his lifetime. At the same time, in Soviet Lithuania his music was rejected as ideologically unacceptable owing to the composer’s modernist status. And even when his Symphony No. 2 was finally first performed in Lithuania, in the year 2000, it was not well received. Nevertheless, the reception of both Bacevičius’s symphonies with their moderate modernism, and of Balsys’s oratorio in a “compromised” style after 1990, has been significantly affected by the reassess­­ ment of twentieth-century music in Lithuania. In the context of the inspirations of the second avant-garde with a postmodernist turn, the musical style of these compositions was regarded as retrograde. Their recent reception has also been affected by the changes in the war narrative in Lithuanian culture since the restoration of independence. The distance of time has not weakened but rather reinforced the traumatic war narrative, and the cultural memory has placed it in a broader context of the historical development of the last century. Both the ideologically falsified narrative of Balsys’s oratorio and the bravura treatment of war events in Bacevičius’s symphony bestowed a status of cultural dissonance on the compositions. My analysis of selected Lithuanian war compositions has hoped to show that the processes in question have been influenced by a broader range of intramusical and extramusical factors.44 44 Envisaging further research into the reception of the war music of Bacevičius and Balsys, it is possible to add another perspective to the contextualization of their works by analyzing the interaction between war imagery and changing musical styles. Research conducted until now has led to the conclusion that the resemantization of musical topoi that have been embedded in tradition is more characteristic of first-wave modernism (of which Bacevičius’s Sinfonia de la Guerra was chosen as representative), testifying to a closer relationship with the tradition of its predecessors that it is generally admitted. The depiction of war in Balsys’s oratorio Do Not Touch the Blue Globe is indicative of a more radical break with tradition, which characterized not only practices of the avant-garde but also manifestations of the more moderate second-wave modernism. Such a distinction fits with the shift in the

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Continuum, 1997. Amblard, Jacques. “Possible French Influences in the Works of Bacevičius.” In Vytautas Bacevičius in Context, edited by Rūta Stanevičiūtė and Veronika Janatjeva, 70–77. Vilnius: Lithuanian Composers Union, 2009. Ambrazas, Algirdas. “Eduardo Balsio muzikos tautinis savitumas” [“The National Originality of Eduardas Balsys’ Music”]. In Eduardas Balsys, edited by Ona Narbutienė, 184–203. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1999. Bürger, Peter. “The Decline of the Modern Age.” Telos 62 (1984/5): 117–30. Carroll, Mark. Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cook, Nicholas, and Anthony Pople, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Davies, Norman. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory [Kariaujanti Europa: 1939–1945]. Vilnius: Vaga, 2006. Deliège, Irène. “Mechanisms of Cue Extractions in Memory for Musical Time.” Contemporary Music Review 9, no. 1/2 (1993): 191–205. Frisch, Walter. “The Refractory Masterpiece: Toward an Interpretation of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, op. 9.” In Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, edited by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, 87–99. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Hatten, Robert S. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Musical Meaning and Interpretation). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Janicka-Słysz, Małgorzata. Vytautas Bacevičius i jego idee muzyki kosmicznej. Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie, 2001. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’ironie, ou la bonne conscience. Paris: Alcan, 1950. Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė. “Intymizmas antrojo pasaulinio karo metų Lietuvos dailėje” [“Intimism in Lithuanian Visual Art during World War II”]. Naujasis Židinys-Aidai 4 (2011): 225–31. depiction of war in musical works that is discussed in this chapter, which has been provoked and influenced by cultural and sociopolitical processes.

World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music

Johnson, Julian. Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Karbusicky, Vladimir. Grundriss der musikalischen Semantik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986. Keller, Hans. “Shostakovich’s Twelfth Quartet.” Tempo 94 (1970): 6–15. McKay, Nicholas. “Dysphoric States: Stravinsky’s Topics—Huntsmen, Soldiers and Shepherds.” In Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations. In Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle, edited by Esti Sheinberg, 249–62. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Monelle, Raymond. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ___. Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Narbutienė, Ona. “Iš Vytauto Bacevičiaus kūrybos pasaulio” [“From Vytautas Bacevičius’s Creative World”]. In Vytautas Bacevičius. Gyvenimo partitūra, vol. 1, edited by Ona Narbutienė, 305–11. Vilnius: Petro ofsetas, 2005. ___. Eduardas Balsys. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1999. ___. Eduardas Balsys. Vilnius: Vaga, 1971. ___. “Lietuvių kompozitorių meninio mąstymo naujovės” [“Novelties in the Artistic Thinking of Lithuanian Composers”]. Pergalė 7 (1966): 124–38. Paddison, Max. “Nature and the Sublime: The Politics of Order and Disorder in Twentieth-Century Music.” In Order and Disorder: Music-Theoretical Strategies in 20th-Century Music, 107–35. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004. Page, Tim, ed. The Glenn Gould Reader. New York: Knopf, 1984. Palionytė, Danutė. “Vytauto Bacevičiaus simfoninės muzikos vizija” [“Vision of Symphonic Music in Vytautas Bacevičius’s Work”]. In Vytautas Bacevičius: Gyvenimo partitūra, vol. 1, edited by Ona Narbutienė, 312–53. Vilnius: Petro ofsetas, 2005. Sheinberg, Esti. Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000.

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Shreffler, Anne C. “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” In Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, edited by Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb, 217–45. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Silverberg, Laura. “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Moder­ nism in the German Democratic Republic.” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84. Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ___. Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Vlasova, Ekaterina. “The Struggle of the Artistic and the Propagandistic Trends in the Soviet Music of the 1960s: The Plenum of the Union of Soviet Composers of the USSR in 1966, Devoted to Dodecaphony.” In Sociocultural Crossings and Borders: Musical Microhistories, edited Rūta Stanevičiūtė and Rima Povilionienė, 213–230. Vilnius: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, ISCM, 2015. ___. 1948 год в советской музыке [The Year 1948 in Soviet Music]. Moscow: Классика-XXI, 2010. Whittall, Arnold. “Individualism and Accessibility: The Moderate Mainstream, 1945–75.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, 368–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Williams, Christopher. “Of Canons and Context: Toward a Historiography of Twentieth-Century Music.” Repercussions 2, no. 1 (1993): 31–74. Zank, Stephen. Irony and Sound: The Music of Maurice Ravel. Rochester, NY: University Rochester Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2008.

Authors

Rasa Antanavičiūtė is a researcher of art history at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her main interests lie in the history of public spaces and their function as identity builders, memory constructors, and targets of political powers. Her PhD thesis titled “The Symbolical Places of Vilnius in the First Half of the 20th Century” (academic supervisor Giedrė Jankevičiūtė). She has published articles on the public spaces of Vilnius in the interbellum, urban development of Vilnius during World War II, and construction of the Soviet city in Vilnius from 1944 to 1952. She also edited the study Vilnius Monuments: A Story of Change (2012, with Eglė Mikalajūnė) and curated the exhibition Monuments That Are Not: A Walk in Vilnius (with Eglė Mikalajūnė and Živilė Etevičiūtė) at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2011). Natalija Arlauskaitė is a scholar of literature, cinema, and visual culture, and an associate professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University. Her current field of interest is visual theory, the forms of historical imagination, and the reflection of long-term destruction and decay in cinema and art. She is the author of the books Hermetinio teksto analizė: Velimiro Chlebnikovo tekstų semantinės erdvės struktūra (The Analysis of a Hermetic Text: The Structure of the Semantic Space in Velimir Khlebnikov’s Texts, 2005), Trumpas feministinės kino teorijos žinynas (Key Concepts of the Feminist Film Theory, 2010), and Savi ir svetimi olimpai: ekranizacijos tarp pasakojimo teorijos ir kultūros kritikos (Native and Foreign Canons: Film Adaptations Between Narrative Theory and Cultural Studies, 2014). She is currently working on a new book with the preliminary title A Weathervane and Bullets: The Memory

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and Image Archive of World War II. She is the editor of the series Cinema Patterns, on film theory (Mintis). Laimonas Briedis studied geography, history, and literature at Vilnius University, UCLA, and University of British Columbia (Canada). Currently, he is a senior research fellow at A. J. Greimas Center for Semiotics and Literary Theory at Vilnius University, working on the project of creating a literary atlas of Vilnius. He is also the senior researcher in Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, studying Vilnius image in texts written during World Wars I and II. Briedis is an author of several articles and the acclaimed book Vilnius City of Strangers (Central European University Press, 2010). He lives part time in Vancouver and is currently writing a book on the poetic geography of Vilnius. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė is a senior researcher at the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and teaches at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her current field of interest lies in artistic culture of occupied countries. She explores this topic by focusing on the situation of Lithuania in the middle of the twentieth century. The results of her research are published in the form of academic papers. She also curates exhibitions and participates in conferences. She wrote the monographs Valstybė ir dailė: dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 (Art and State: Art and Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic, 1918–1940, 2003) and The Graphic Arts in Lithuania 1918–1940 (2008), and edited the catalogues Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art in 1940–1941 (2011) and The Realities of Occupation: Posters in Lithuania during World War I and World War II (2014, with Laima Laučkaitė). She organized the international conference “Art and Artistic Life during Two World Wars” (Vilnius, 2011, with Laima Laučkaitė) and edited a collection of articles with the same title prepared on the basis of the presentations read at the conference (2012, with Laima Laučkaitė). Currently she is writing a monograph on Lithuanian art and artistic culture from 1939 to 1944 and compiling a book on the art historian Mikalojus Vorobjovas (Nikolai Worobiow, 1903–54), who was active in Lithuania in the mid-­ twentieth century. Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė is a senior researcher and head of the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Culture

Authors

Research Institute. Her field of academic interest is the art of the early twentieth century. She is the author of the books Art in Vilnius 1900–1915 (2002, in Lithuanian; 2008, in English), Ekspresionizmo raitelė Mariana Veriovkina (Expressionist Rider Marianne Werefkin, 2007), Rafael Chwoles: The Search for Jerusalem (2012) and others. Since 2011, she has been conducting research on the art of World War I in Vilnius. She was one of the editors of Art and Artistic Life during the Two World Wars: Art History Studies, Vol. 5 (2012, with Giedrė Jankevičiūtė), and she has published several articles on the German art of World War I in Vilnius. Together with Giedrė Jankevičiūtė she curated the exhibition The Realities of Occupation: Posters in Lithuania during World War I and World War II in Vilnius in 2014 and edited its catalogue. Lara Lempertienė is a researcher working on various projects and is a senior bibliographer for Jewish books at the National Library of Lithuania. Her main field of interest is the cultural history of the European Jewry. She is particularly interested in Jewish classical texts and their integration in Jewish education in various settings, the Jewish enlightenment (Haskala) and its ramifications for Jewish mentality and culture, the history of Jewish books and the Jewish press, the aspects of intellectuality and day-to-day life of the Lithuanian Jewry, and the forms and contents of memorization of European Jewish culture. She is the author of several dozens of articles and a co-author and editor of several books and periodical editions. Agnė Narušytė is an art and photography critic and curator. She has been teaching at the Vilnius Academy of Arts since 1998, and from 2009 to 2014 she was the head of the Art History and Theory Department at the Academy. She has published the monographs Nuobodulio estetika (The Aesthetics of Boredom: Lithuanian Photography 1980–1990, 2010) and Lietuvos fotografija: 1990–2010 (Lithuanian Photography: 1990–2010, 2011). In 2010–11, she led a two-year research project financed by the Research Council of Lithuania, The History of Lithuanian Photography: Sociopolitical, Aesthetic and Communicational Aspects. The project has resulted in the joint volume with Margarita Matulytė, Camera Obscura: Lietuvos fotografijos istorija, 1839–1945 (Camera Obscura: The History of Lithuanian Photography, 1839–1945, to be published in 2015). It appeared that

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photography during the two world wars was a blind spot in this history. At the same time, the contemporary artist Kęstutis Grigaliūnas was researching the KGB files and using their visual evidence in his ongoing exhibition and book project The Diaries of Death. He invited Narušytė to co-author the fourth volume, and she wrote the text analyzing the ethical issues surrounding the use of confiscated photographs in criminal investigation, their role in preserving memory, and the implication of a researcher’s detached gaze in the crimes of the past. Rūta Stanevičiūtė is full professor at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. She has published numerous articles on modernism and nationalism in twentieth-century Lithuanian music, philosophical and cultural issues in the analysis of contemporary music, and the studies of music reception in academic journals and collections of articles. She is the author of the book on the International Society for Contemporary Music and the spread of musical modernism in Lithuania in 1920s and 1930s Modernumo lygtys. Tarptautinė šiuolaikinės muzikos draugija ir muzikinio modernizmo sklaida Lietuvoje (Figures of Modernity: The International Society for Contemporary Music and the Spread of Musical Modernism in Lithuania, 2015). She also edited and co-edited several collections of articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical culture and history of music reception; she has prepared a college textbook Muzika kaip kultūros tekstas (Music as a Cultural Text, 2007) and a collection of articles on the Lithuanian composer Vytautas Bacevičius (in English, 2009). She has recently co-edited a collection of musicological articles, Sociocultural Crossings and Borders: Musical Microhistories (2015), in collaboration with the study group “Music and Cultural Studies” of the International Musicological Society. Rasa Žukienė has been teaching at the Department of Art History and Criticism of Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) since 1991. Her research interests include the works of the Lithuanian symbolist artist and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), twentieth-­ century modernist art of Lithuania, and the art by Lithuanian émigrés in Europe and North America. She has published several academic monographs, among them Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis tarp simbolizmo ir modernizmo (Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis between Symbolism and

Authors

Modernism, 2004) and Akistatos: Dailininkas Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas pasaulio meno keliuose (Encounters: Artist Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas on the Roads of World Art, 2007). In her studies of the heritage of V. K. Jonynas over the last several years, Žukienė has been exploring the work of displaced persons—Lithuanian émigré artists—in postwar Germany (1945–50) and the transformations of their work after they moved to other continents.

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CHAPTER 2 FIGURE 1.

Alfred Holler, Jewish Quarter (Fleischmarktstrasse), 1917, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

FIGURE 2.

Alfred Holler, Courtyard in the Jewish Quarter, 1917, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

FIGURE 3.

Bruno Steigueber, In the Jewish Quarter in Vilnius, 1918, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 117 (1918).

FIGURE 4.

Alfred Holler, Jewish Quarter, 1917, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

FIGURE 5.

Walter Buhe, Notes of the Streets of Vilnius, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 26 (1916).

FIGURE 6.

Walter Buhe, Book Sale on the Street, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 23 (1916).

FIGURE 7.

Gerd Paul, Glaziers of Vilnius, 1918, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 112 (1918).

FIGURE 8.

Gerd Paul, On the Jewish Street, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 37 (1918).

FIGURE 9.

Walter Buhe, Courtyard of the Old Synagogue in Winter, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 11 (1916).

FIGURE 10.

Walter Buhe, Service in the Old Synagogue, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916).

FIGURE 11.

Walter Buhe, At a Warm Stove, 1916, in Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, no. 9 (1916).

FIGURE 12.

Alfred Holler, Old Jewish Cemetery, 1916, in Alfred Holler, Wilna: 12 farbige Bilder (Wilna: Zeitung der 10. Armee Verlag, 1917).

FIGURE 13.

Felix Krause, Jewish Cemetery in Snipischki, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 3 (1916).

List of Illustrations

FIGURE 14.

Hermann Struck, Gaon’s Grave at the Old Jewish Cemetery, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

FIGURE 15.

Walter Buhe, At Ger Zedek’s Grave, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, September 16, 1917.

FIGURE 17.

Walter Buhe, Sukkot Holiday on the Balconies, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, July 10, 1917.

FIGURE 16.

Walter Buhe, Pesach in Vilnius: Matzo Grinders in the Jewish Quarter, 1917, in Wilnaer Zeitung, April 13, 1917.

FIGURE 18.

Walter Buhe, Jewish Holiday: Sukkot, 1916, in Wilnaer Zeitung, October 22, 1916.

FIGURE 19.

Hermann Struck, Head of an Old Jew, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

FIGURE 20.

Hermann Struck, Rachel, 1916, in Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Stilke, 1916).

FIGURE 21.

Julius Cohn-Turner, Talmud Reader, 1916, in Scheinwerfer. Bildbeilage zur Zeitung der 10. Armee, no. 32 (1916).

CHAPTER 3 FIGURE 1.

Photograph from the file of Juozas Bagdonis, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. 12889/3, l. 119). Caption beneath the image (in the Russian language): “In the center of the photo you see Bagdonis Gediminas with his young wife, their parents on either side (the one on the far right is Bagdonis J. V., whom you have been looking for).”

FIGURE 2.

Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. 18614/3).

FIGURE 3.

Photograph by Mejeris Smečechauskas, 1936, gelatine silver print. From the file of Vincas Mikuckas. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. P13033-Li).

FIGURE 4.

Family portrait of Tomas and Zofija Daugirdas together with their sons, Rimvydas and Algimantas, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. P13799).

FIGURE 5.

Zofija Daugirdienė with her sons, Algimantas and Rimvydas, Altai region, gelatine silver print. Inscription on the back (in the Russian language): “to our dear husband and daddy/your wife and children.” Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. P13799).

FIGURE 6.

Mug shot of Tomas Daugirdas taken in Reshyoty labor camp, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. P13799).

FIGURES 7A–D.

Four photographs from the file of Aleksas Rekašius, gelatine silver prints. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. 46753/3).

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FIGURES 8A–C.

Three photographs from the file of Jonas Rainys, gelatine silver prints. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. P18498).

FIGURE 9.

Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. 18614/3).

FIGURE 10.

Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 59, b. 34445/3).

FIGURE 11.

Hirša Chaitin (background left) with other boys rowing a boat, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. 45445/3).

FIGURE 12.

Hirša Chaitin (in the middle) with his football team, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. 45445/3).

FIGURE 13.

Political prisoners of Šiauliai enforced labor prison, June 18, 1940, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. 45445/3).

FIGURE 14.

Photograph of unidentified man from the file of Hirša Chaitin, gelatine silver print. Image courtesy of Lithuanian Special Archives (LYA, f. K-1, ap. 58, b. 45445/3).

CHAPTER 4 FIGURE 1.

Steponas Kolupaila, Domininkonai Street in Vilnius, on April 20, 1942. Photograph courtesy of Valentinas Gylys, Kaunas, Lithuania.

FIGURE 2.

André Zucca, Rue de Rivoli in Paris under the Hakenkreuzes, 1942. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. © André Zucca/BHVP/Roger-Viollet.

FIGURE 3.

Bronė Mingilaitė-Uogintienė, Man from Vilnius, 1943, oil on canvas, 64 × 57 cm. Mingilaitė-Uogintienė family collection, Vilnius. Image courtesy of Gintarė Uogintaitė, Vilnius, Lithuania.

FIGURE 4.

Antanas Gudaitis, Wife’s Portrait, 1944, pastel on paper, 43.5 × 32.4 cm. Gudaitis family collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 5.

Petras Aleksandravičius, The Painter Viktoras Vizgirda, 1943, plaster, 60 × 23 × 30 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 6.

Jacob Lifschitz, The Market, 1942, drawing on paper. Tory Collection (Kovno Ghetto), Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. © Yad Vashem.

FIGURE 7.

Jacob Lifschitz, Kriščiukaičio Str., Slobodka, 1942, watercolor. Tory Collection (Kovno Ghetto), Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel. © Yad Vashem.

FIGURE 8.

Rosa Sutzkever, Portrait of the Musician and Teacher Jakov Gersztein (Dying Man), September 27, 1942, sepia on paper, 34 × 41.2 cm. Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. © Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum.

FIGURE 9.

Rosa Sutzkever, Portrait of the Dying Jakov Gersztein (recovered from a Vilnius Ghetto hideout/“malina” after the Nazi occupation). Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. © Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum.

List of Illustrations

FIGURE 10.

Eugenija Macytė-Mikšienė-Jurkūnienė, Aliukas: Portrait of Dead Son, December 27, 1941, Belojarsk Sovchoz Farm No. 5, Krajushinskij District, Altai Krai, pencil on paper. Image courtesy of Vytautas Jurkūnas, Vilnius, Lithuania.

FIGURE 11.

Leonardas Kazokas, Kaunas in Winter—Laisvės Avenue, 1942, oil on canvas, 66 × 79 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 12.

Cinema Romuva, on Laisvės Avenue in Kaunas transformed during the Nazi occupation into a Soldatenkino for Vermach soldiers and army officials, c. 1941. Private collection, Vilnius, Lithuania.

FIGURE 13.

Vytautas Kairiūkštis, Still-life, 1942, oil on cardboard and canvas, 32 × 37 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 14.

Ration card with coupons for bread, surrogate coffee, and soap, 1941. Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius. © Lithuanian National Museum.

FIGURE 15.

Algirdas Petrulis, Armchair, 1943, oil on cardboard, 62 × 41.5 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 16.

Antanas Žmuidzinavičius’s studio at the artist’s house (now a museum), Kaunas, Lithuania. Photographed by Arūnas Baltėnas in April 2009.

FIGURE 17.

Stepas Žukas, Corner of the Room—Otdych Village near Moscow, 1944, charcoal on paper, 27.5 × 22 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph courtesy of Lithuanian Art Museum.

FIGURE 18.

Osias Hofstätter-Yeshayahu, Barracks Interior: Aigle Internment Camp, September 1942, charcoal on paper. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel. © Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

FIGURE 19.

Karl Schwesig, In the Latrine: Saint-Cyprien Camp, 1940, pencil on paper, 23.8 × 25 cm. Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, Israel. © Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

FIGURE 20.

Vytautas Kasiulis, Running out of Firewood (Self-portrait), c. 1943, oil on canvas, 82 × 71 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 21.

Poster Peat Is Our Coal (in Lithuanian), 1942, 99.5 × 69.5 cm. National Archive of Published Documents at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of the Vilnius Graphic Art Center.

FIGURE 22.

Vytautas Kairiūkštis, Flowers, 1942, oil on canvas, 51 × 46 cm. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius. Photograph courtesy of Lithuanian Art Museum.

FIGURE 23.

Vytautas Kairiūkštis, Flowers, 1943, oil on canvas, 59 × 52.2 cm. Ellex law firm collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Ellex.

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FIGURE 24.

Gražina Matulaitytė-Rannit, at home in Kaunas on K. Donelaičio Street, c. 1943. Courtesy of the Lozoraitis family, Rome, Italy.

FIGURE 25.

Catalogue of Lithuanian Art Exhibition held in Vilnius from March 19 to April 19, 1944, organized by the Lithuanian Artist Union. Catalogue in Lithuanian and German, printed in Kaunas.

FIGURE 26.

Stanisław Rolicz, I’m Building a New Europe, 1942, woodcut, 18.7 × 11.5 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

FIGURE 27.

Stanisław Rolicz, The Rape of Europa Yesterday, 1943, woodcut, 19.6 × 23.5 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

FIGURE 28.

Stanisław Rolicz, The Rape of Europa Today, 1943, woodcut, 19.4 × 23.4 cm. Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Toruń, Poland. Image courtesy of Nicolaus Copernicus University Library.

FIGURE 29.

Mykolas Paškevičius, In the Ruins of War, 1942, oil on canvas, 66 × 88 cm. Ellex law firm collection, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Ellex.

FIGURE 30.

Žibuntas Mikšys, Pit, 1944, linocut, 16.6 × 11.5 cm. Mikšys family collection, Paris. Image courtesy of Erika Grigoravičienė with the kind permission of Miriam Mekas-Mikšienė.

FIGURE 31.

Poster Vinnitsa: This Is What the Jewish Are Fighting For! (in Lithuanian), German propaganda office code P-134/Winnitza-Wandzeitung, 1943, 59.5 × 84.5 cm. National Archive of Published Documents at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, Vilnius, Lithuania. Image courtesy of Vilnius Graphic Art Center.

FIGURE 32.

Stasys Ušinskas, Twilight (The Shooting), c. 1943, oil on canvas, 180 × 179.5 cm. M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania. Photograph by Arūnas Baltėnas.

FIGURE 33.

Kārlis Eglītis, Murder, drawing from the War series, 1944, India ink on paper, 9.5 × 14.5 cm. Latvian Art Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

FIGURE 34.

Kārlis Eglītis, On the Way to Massacre Place, drawing from the Dreams series, 1944, India ink on paper, 9.5 × 14.5 cm. Latvian Art Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

FIGURE 35.

Aleksandra Belcova, Mother in the Ghetto, from the Riga Ghetto series, 1941–42, pencil and watercolor on paper, 25.9 × 17.4 cm. Romans Suta and Alexandra Belcova Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

FIGURE 36.

Aleksandra Belcova, Massacre, from the Riga Ghetto series, 1941–42, pencil on paper, 14 × 20.6 cm. Romans Suta and Alexandra Belcova Museum, Riga. Image courtesy of Latvian Art Museum.

List of Illustrations

CHAPTER 5 FIGURE 1.

Courtyard of the Wedel refugee camp with the coats of arms of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Great Britain formed from pebbles. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 2.

Interior of the refugee camp with a view of a public square in Kaunas on the wall. Photograph by Kazys Daugėla. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 3.

Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts in 1946. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 4.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Stained glass windows of the Sisters of Notre Dame Chapel, Wilton, 1961–62.

FIGURE 5.

A painting lesson at the Freiburg Art School—teacher Victoras Vizgirda and student Julia Kiefer-Šapkus, 1948. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 6.

NCeramic works by students of the Freiburg Art School, 1947. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 7.

Exhibition of works of the Freiburg Art School, 1949. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 8.

Tre incistori Baltici: Jonynas Vytautas Kazys, Petravičius Viktoras, Wiiralt Eduard: mostra allestita dalla Calcografia Nazionale nel giugno del 1949 (Exhibition catalogue) (Urbino: Instituto d’Arte per il libro, 1949). (On the reverse is found Jonynas’s illustration for Kristijonas Donelaitis’s Metai.)

FIGURE 9.

Aleksis Rannit, Vytautas Kasiulis: Un peintre lithuanien (Baden-Baden: Edition Woldemar Klein, 1947).

FIGURE 10.

Catalogue for Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas and Adomas Galdikas exhibition (Kitzingen/Main: H. O. Holzner, 1948).

FIGURE 11.

Poster for Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas exhibition at Galerie Ariel in Paris in 1949. Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius.

FIGURE 12.

Representatives of the French occupation authorities visit the Art School of Arts and Crafts, 1948. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago.

FIGURE 13.

General Pierre Pene by his portrait at an exhibition of the Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts. Photographer unknown. Archive of the Lithuanian Research and Studies Center in Chicago.

297

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List of Illustrations

FIGURE 14.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, portrait of General Pierre Koenig, woodcut, 42.7 x 30.3 cm. LDM G 15348.

FIGURE 15.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, cover of Raymond Schmittlein’s study on the novella Lokis, by Prosper Mérimée (Bade: Art et Science, 1949).

FIGURE 16.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Charlotte, illustration for The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1947, woodcut, 29.6 x 20.9 cm.

FIGURE 17.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Dance, illustration for The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1947, woodcut, 29.6 x 20.9 cm.

FIGURE 18.

Romas Viesulas, Composition with a Man and a Bell, 1949, pop., linocut, 29.9 x 21 cm. Antanas Mončys House-Museum, Palanga.

FIGURE 19.

Telesforas Valius, Women, 1948, woodcut, 23.4 x 17.8 cm. LDM G 24416.

FIGURE 20.

Telesforas Valius, Cry, 1948, pop., linocut, 43.1 x 43.1 cm. LDM G 23736.

FIGURE 21.

Telesforas Valius, Mother, 1946, woodcut, 15.2 x 15.2 cm. LDM G 244807.

FIGURE 23.

Viktoras Petravičius, Refugees, 1948, linocut, 47.8 x 37.8 cm. LDM G 16372.

FIGURE 22.

Telesforas Valius, St. Sebastian, 1946, woodcut, 15 x 14.8 cm, 24,5 x 20 cm. NČDM Mg-15417.

FIGURE 24.

Viktoras Petravičius, Freedom Struggle of My Country, 1946, linocut, 57.5 x 35 cm. LDM G 16383.

FIGURE 25.

Adomas Galdikas, Autumn, 1946–47, oil on canvas, 43 x 61.3 cm. LDM T 7457.

FIGURE 26.

Adolfas Valeška, Freiburg Landscape, 1950, oil on canvas, 80.2 x 60 cm. NČDM Mt 5737.

FIGURE 27.

Adolfas Valeška, Spring in Freiburg, 1949, oil on canvas, 72.8 x 49.5 cm. NČDM Mt 5736.

FIGURE 28.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Freiburg Cathedral, drawing, pencil, 23.5 x 19.8 cm. LDM.

FIGURE 29.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Baden (Freiburg Cathedral), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947. Private collection, Lithuania.

FIGURE 30.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Rheinland-Pfalz (Ludwig van Beethoven), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947–48. Private collection, Lithuania.

FIGURE 31.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Saar (Marshal Michel Nay), postage stamp of the French occupation zone, 1947. Private collection, Lithuania.

FIGURE 32.

Lithuania Comes to Broadway, exhibition flyer, 1950, print, 10 x 19 cm. Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, Chicago.

List of Illustrations

CHAPTER 6 FIGURE 1.

The Eastern Front in 1914, map in Frank M. McMurry, Geography of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), accessed April 8, 2015, http://freepages.military.rootsweb. ancestry.com/~worldwarone/WWI/TheGeographyOfTheGreatWar/.

FIGURE 2.

The Eastern Front in 1915, map in Frank M. McMurry, Geography of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), accessed April 8, 2015, http://freepages.military.rootsweb. ancestry.com/~worldwarone/WWI/TheGeographyOfTheGreatWar/.

FIGURE 3.

Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland, by Juozas Zikaras and Vladimiras Dubeneckis, Kaunas, 1921. Vytauto Didžiojo Karo Muziejus.

FIGURE 4.

The War Museum (part of the War Museum Garden is visible in the foreground), Kaunas, accessed April 8, 2015, http://iq.lt/gyvenimo-gurmanams/ laikinosios- sostines-fenomenas?psl=1.

FIGURE 5.

“We Perished for the Fatherland,” monument, by Stasys Stanišauskas, Old Kaunas Cemetery, 1930, accessed April 8, 2015, http://iq.lt/gyvenimo-gurmanams/ laikinosios-sostines-fenomenas?psl=1.

FIGURE 6.

Memorial to Povilas Lukšys (1886–1919), by Vytautas Lansbergis-Žemkalnis, Taučiūnai, Kėdainiai Region, 1929, accessed April 8, 2015, http://kedainiai.lt/popup2. php?ru=bS9tX2FydGljbGUvZmlsZXMvdl9hcnRpY2xlX3ByaW50LnBocA==&tmpl_ name=m_article_print_view&article_id=1783.

FIGURE 7.

“To the Victims of the First World War,” monument, Vilkyšiai, Tauragė Region, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.panoramio.com/photo/49495231.

FIGURE 8.

The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hašek, with illustrations by Josef Lada (Vilnius: 1956).

FIGURE 9.

“To the Lithuanian Soldier,” monument, by Vincas Grybas, Nemunaitis, Alytus Region, 1939/1990, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.arsa.lt/index.php?469955709.

FIGURE 10.

Latvian Red Riflemen, monument, by Valdis Albergs, Riga, 1971, accessed April 8, 2015, http://sites-of-memory.de/main/rigastrelnieki.html.

FIGURE 11.

German military cemetery as renovated in 2010–11, Klaipėda, accessed April 8, 2015, http://www.mytrips.lt/Marsrutai/Pajurio-dviraciu-trasa-Klaipeda-Palanga/278.

CHAPTER 8 FIGURE 1.

An engraving to Zalman Shneur’s poem “Vilna,” by Hermann Struck. Berlin, 1923.

FIGURE 2.

The title page of the anthology Jewish Vilna in Word and Image. Vilnius, 1925.

FIGURE 3.

A fragment of the cover of The Vilna Almanac. Vilnius, 1939.

299

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List of Illustrations

FIGURE 4.

Tsemakh Shabad’s article “Vilna Then and Now,” from A Vilna Man. New York, 1929.

FIGURE 5.

Leyzer Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania, cover of vol. 3 (New York, 1974).

CHAPTER 9 FIGURE 1.

Vytautas Bacevičius in Chicago (1941). Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art.

FIGURE 2.

Selected examples of musical topoi and gestures in Vytautas Bacevičius’s Sinfonia de la Guerra. b. Military: Imitation of trumpet signals and fanfares (first movement, mm. 20–24) c. Military: Funeral march (second movement, mm. 48–53) d. Pastoral: Melodic figuration of idyll and lamentation (first movement, mm. 31–36) e.Hunting: Rhythmic figures of galloping (third movement, mm. 1–6) Cross and Crucifixion: Rhetorical figure (first movement, mm. 195–97)

FIGURE 3.

Vytautas Bacevičius, Sinfonia de la Guerra. Military topos: Ironic march (first movement, mm. 215–20). Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Center.

FIGURE 4.

Eduardas Balsys (1959). Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art.

FIGURE 5.

Eduardas Balsys, Do Not Touch the Blue Globe. Pastoral topos: Living Kid’s Song (prologue, p. 11–12) (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1972).

FIGURE 6.

Eduardas Balsys, Do Not Touch the Blue Globe. Semantic juxtaposition of dodecaphony and folklore (“Winter,” p. 86–87) (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1972).

Index

A

Act of Independence (1918), 177 Adorno, Theodor W., 268 Agamben, Giorgio, 203, 213, 215 Aleksandravičius, Petras, 98 Ambrazas, Algirdas, 275 anti-Semitism, 26, 28 anti-Soviet activities, 59 Anušauskas, Arvydas, 57 Augius, Paulius, 171 Azéma, Jean-Pierre, 94

B

Bacevičius, Vytautas, 258, 260, 262, 264, 266, 269, 272–273, 275, 282, 283 Bagdonis, Gediminas, 61 Bagdonis Juozas, 61 Bagdonis, J. V., 61 Bahr, Hermann, 7 Balsys, Eduardas, 259, 271, 272, 273–274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 282, 283 Baltic University, 143 Balts, 141, 142 Barskova, Polina, 125 The Battle for Leningrad (1942), 224 Baudelaire, Charles, 5 Baudrillard, Jean, 221 Baxandall, Michael, 96 Belarussian art, 124 Belcova, Aleksandra, 133–135 Massacre, 134 Mother in the Ghetto, 133 Belle Époque, 3

Benjamin, Walter, 3, 281 Berger, John, 63, 65 Berlin, 3, 9 Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung, 27 Bloch, Marc, 9 Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa), 204, 219–235 articulated words in, 235 code of nature, 229–230 image of almost exclusively institutionalized knowledge, 234 narrative structure, 228–229 retro-scenario, 221–222 system of coherence and memory of the siege in, 232 traumatic memory in, 233 truthfulness of, 224 Boese, Carlo, 209 Bolshevik movement, 192, 199 Bonnard, Pierre, 107 Boyarin, Jonathan, 249 Brücke group, 5 Brust, Alfred, 15 Buhe, Walter, 27–28, 30 art nouveau painting, 31 Book Sale on the Street, 38 Courtyard of the Old Synagogue in Winter, 40 depiction of street trade, 36 At Ger Zedek’s Grave, 46 Jewish Holiday: Sukkot, 46 Jewish religious customs in public spaces, 43–45 Notes of the Streets of Vilnius, 37

302

Index Pesach in Vilnius: Matzo Grinders in the Jewish Quarter, 46 Service in the Old Synagogue, 41 Sukkot Holiday on the Balconies, 46 of sukkots, 45 views of Jewish prayer houses, 40–42 At a Warm Stove, 42 Bürger, Peter, 277 Burke, Peter, 87 Čaks, Aleksandrs, 198 Celan, Paul, 214 Chaitin, Hirša, 79–80 Chicago, 3 cinematographic narrativization, challenges with, 206 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas, 118 Cohen, Israel, 252 Cohn-Turner, Julius, 30 city views, 34–35 Talmud Reader, 51 Council of Lithuania, 182

École des Arts et Métiers de Fribourg (Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts), 143 Eglītis, Kārlis, 131–132 Murder, 131 ego-documents, 86 Elbing, 11 Elsaesser, Thomas, 221, 227 Enlightenment, 6 Eulenberg, Herbert, 14, 29–30 Skizzen aus Litauen, Weissrussland und Kurland, 47 everyday life, 87–88 expressionism, 4–6 expressionist disembodiment, 22 Fechter’s idea of, 4–6 German expressionist movement, 6 Grünewald’s idea of, 6 “intensive” form of, 7 notion of a Flucht nach vorne (“a flight forward”), 10 “space-minded” culture of the expressionist, 20

D

F

C

Däubler, Theodor, 22. Daugirdas, Tomas, 69, 71 Daugirdienė, Zofija, 68-70 Daugėla, Kazys, 145 Dawidowicz, Lucy, 253 de Certeau, Michel, 20 Dehmel, Richard, 14 Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 215–217, 233–234 Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, 215 displaced persons (DP), 139–143, 165, 172 cultural activity, 148 immigration to United States, 170 living quarters, 145 Dix, Otto, 162 documentary films, 203–204, 217. see also films on war Donelaitis, Kristijonas, 177

E

Eastern European Jews, 25, 242–243, 252. see also German view of Jewish Vilnius

The Face of East European Jewry, 244–245 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 227–228 Fechter, Paul, 4–6, 14, 29 as an art and theater critic, 12 brief history, 11–12 chauvinism, 7 education, 12 on fundamentals of the Realdialektik, 12 important persons in his life, 13–14 on Pechstein’s introspective approach, 8 on religiosity of the Jewish community, 45–47 spatial aspects, 20 understanding of the Gothic features in expressionist art, 12 visual representation, 7 and Wilna-Kowno circle, 14 Wilna life, 13–14 films on war Blockade (Sergey Loznitsa), 204, 219–235 cinematographic narrativization, challenges with, 206

Index distinction between monstration and narration, 218 Frankenstein, 209 Golem, 209 M, 209 Night and Fog, 208–209 Psalm III: Night of the Meek, 208–209 Schindler’s List, 207 Shoah, 207 Silence (Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas), 210 Zapruder’s, 211 flaneur, 2–3 Baudelaire’s view of flanerie, 5 Benjamin’s views, 21 Berlin-type flanerie, 4 German, 4 Fleischmarktstrasse (now Mėsinių Street), 30 Foss, Brian, 111 “Masculinity in Crisis,” 111 Foucault, Michel, 210 The Archeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault), 210 Fraternity of Vilna Jews in Poland, 253 freedom under the conditions of marching orders, 2 Freiburg School of Arts and Crafts (École des Arts et Métiers de Fribourg), 143, 146–149, 172 control of the authorities over the artists, 156–158 exhibitions, 149–151, 149–152, 156 painting lesson at, 150 French Order of the Legion of Honor, 149 Friedrich, Ernst, 64 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, 213 Funkas, Arnas, 118 Fussell, Paul, 19

G

Galdikas, Adomas, 150, 152, 155–156 Autumn, 165 Gallimard publishing house, 93 Gance, Abel, 64 Gaudreault, André, 218–219 Gellner, Ernest, 178 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 281

German flaneur, 4 German Honorary Military Cemetery, 188, 201 German Jews, 25–26 German metropolis, 4 German view of Jewish Vilnius during World War I, 26–52, 36–38 city views, 34–35 depiction of street trade, 36 Jewish religious customs in public spaces, 43–45 main places of attraction for Germans, 42–43 space as a contrast to the street scenes, 36–41 views of Jewish prayer houses, 40–42 German War Graves Commission, 200–201 Gersztein, Jakov, 103–104 Ginzburg, Lydia, 206 Glasstrasse (now Stiklių Street), 30 Godard, Jean-Luc, 208 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 160 Gorion, Micha Josef bin, 29 Gorion, Rahel bin, 29 Gould, Glenn, 257 Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, 192–193 Great Synagogue, 40–41, 52 Greimas, Algirdas Julius, 146 Grigaliūnas, Kęstutis, 55–56, 62–63, 65–66, 74–75, 81 Diaries of Death, 56, 65-66 NKVD criminal files, 58–60, 82 photographs as evidence of guilt, 60–62 (see also photography) records of torture, 57–58 Grigoravičienė, Erika, 127 Grīns, Aleksandrs, 198 Blizzard of Souls, 198 Gronemann, Sammy, 30 Gross-Hesepe district committee, 143 Grosvalds, Jāzeps, 199 Grosz, George, 127 Grünewald, Matthias, 6 Grybas, Vincas, 196 Gudaitis, Antanas, 97 Wife’s Portrait, 97 Gurlitt, Cornelia, 13, 29

303

304

Index

H

Hašek, Jaroslav, 193 Haussmann, Baron, 17 Hendriok, Fred, 31 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 242–243 Hesse, Hermann, 10 Historical Library of the City of Paris, 93 Hobsbawm, Eric, 178 The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 197 Holler, Alfred, 30 city views, 32 Courtyard in the Jewish Quarter, 33, 35–36 depiction of battle scenes, 31 Old Jewish Cemetery, 43 Hoppen, Jerzy, 122

I

I Accuse (J’accuse, 1919), 64 Intellectuellen-Zentrale, 12, 14 Išlaisvintas Panevėžietis, 64

J

Jacobs, Montague, 13–14 Jahnke, Otto, 32 Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė, 184 Janušas, Česlovas, 143, 171 Jevsejeva, Natalia, 134 Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims (YEKOPO), 246 Jews of Vilnius, 26–30 texts and images dedicated to, 32–52 Jonynas, Vytautas Kazimieras, 143, 149, 152, 155, 157, 171, 172 Baden (Freiburg Cathedral), postage stamp, 168 cover of Raymond Schmittlein’s study on the novella Lokis, 160 Freiburg Cathedral, 167 illustrations for The Sorrows of Young Werther, 160–161 portrait of General Pierre Koenig, 159 postage stamps, 165–166, 168–169 Rheinland-Pfalz (Ludwig van Beethoven), postage stamp, 168 Saar (Marshal Michel Nay), postage stamp, 169 stained glass work, 148

Tre incistori Baltici, 153 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 88 Judenstrasse (now Žydų Street), 30 Jurkūnas, Vytautas, 122

K

Kadish, George, 101 Kairiūkštis, Vytautas, 105, 107, 115 Flowers, 116 Still-life, 108 Kafka, Franz, 60 Kalnačs, Jānis, 132 Kandinsky, Wassily, 7 Karpinovich, Avrom, 255 Kasiulis, Vytautas, 113, 152 Running out of Firewood” (Self-­ Portrait), 113–114 Kaufmannas-Kaupas, Julius, 143, 171 Kaunas Art School, 149, 152 Kaunas City Theater, 121 Kaunas Institute of Applied Arts, 89 Kazokas, Leonardas, 105, 107 Kaunas in Winter, 106 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 5 Kolupaila, Steponas, 91–93 Kownoer Zeitung, 29 Kracauer, Siegfried, 216 Krause, Felix, 30 Jewish Cemetery in Snipischki, 44 Kristol, Irving, 242 Kruk, Herman, 101 Kugelmass, Jack, 249 Kuzminskis, Jonas, 98

L

Landau, Kh., 248 Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, Vytautas, 186 Landsturmmann (imperial reserve soldier), 9 Lang, Fritz, 209 M, 209 Lanzmann, Claude, 207–208, 211–212 Shoah, 207 Latvia, 129, 132, 139 Latvian Art Museum, 131–134, 132 Latvian history, 198 Latvian Riflemen, 198–200 Lehár, Franz, 121 Levi, Primo, 204

Index Muselmänner, 212–213, 215 Lifschitz, Jacob, 101–102 Kriščiukaičio Str., Slobodka, 103 Lipphardt, Anna, 241–242 Lithuania, 2, 9, 12, 13, 79, 85–86, 139–142 Nazi occupation in, 86 Lithuanian Americans, exhibitions of, 142, 170–173 Lithuanian Art Exhibition, catalogue of, 123 Lithuanian art history, 88 Lithuanian artists in postwar Germany (1945-50), 140–142 Lithuanian Artists Union, 89, 90 Lithuanian Art Museum, 115 Lithuanian Republic, 177 Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 144 Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, 191 The Good Soldier Švejk, 193–194 in textbooks, 192–193 Lithuanian Special Archives, 55, 67, 76, 77, 78, 79–81 Lithuanian Wars of Independence, 176, 182 Lithuania’s Central State Archives, 115 Lithuania’s wartime art, 89–91 documentary testimony, 103–104 feature films, 115 Führer’s birthday decorations, 92 ghetto conditions, 100–102 hardships of war in Lithuania, 111–113 imaging strategy, 99–105 Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation, 93 life in the shadow of the swastika, 91–99 metal stove, 109 mood portraits, 95–99 narrative’s awkward part, 115–122 portrayal of art commemorating tragic events, 122–136 portrayal of Jewish genocide during the war, 129–136 posters, newspaper announcements, and caricatures, 113, 114, 129 ration card with coupons for bread, surrogate coffee, and soap, 108 strategy of documentary portrayal, 105–110 through humor and irony, 110–115 loneliness, 4

Loznitsa, Sergey, 204, 219–235 Lozoraitis, Stasys, 118 Ludendorff, Erich von, 15 Lurie, Esther, 102 Lyotard, Jean-François, 178

M

Mackevičiūtė-Matulaitienė, Stefanija, 118 Macytė-Mikšienė-Jurkūnienė, Eugenija, 105 Portrait of Dead Son, 105 Matulaitis, Jurgis, 118, 120 Matulaitytė-Rannit, Gražina, 117–121 McCarthyism, 283 memorial books, 243–249 language of, 251 on Vilna, 251–253 Mérimée, Prosper, 158, 160 Mikuckas Vincas, 68 Mikšys, Žibuntas, 126 Pit, 127–128. Mingilaitė, Bronė, 95 Mingilaitė-Uogintienė, Bronė, 96 Portrait of a Man (or Man of Vilnius), 96. Monelle, Raymond, 268 Monnikendam, Vincent, 218 monstration, 218 Monty, Paul, 2, 4, 17–20 Mosellan, Jean, 156 Mulvey, Laura, 218–219

N

naïve semiotics, 258 Narbutienė, Ona, 277 National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, 98 national war, 177 New York, 3 NKVD, 56, 57, 64, 76–77, 78, 81 Nusakh vilne fraternity, 255 Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas, 98–99

O

Ober Ost, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 25, 28, 47, 52 Ogiński, Michał Kleofas, 177 Ostjuden, 26 Ostland, 131 Otdych, 109

305

306

Index

P

Pagnoux, Elisabeth, 215 Palau island, 8 Palčinskaitė, Violeta, 273 Palukst, Abraham, 52 Pares, Bernard, 18 Parisian, 3 parochial snobbery, 146 Paškevičius, Mykolas, 124 In the Ruins of War, 127 Paul, Gerd, 27, 30 Glaziers of Vilnius, 38 On the Jewish Street, 39 Pechstein, Max, 7, 8–9 perfect chronicle, idea of, 217 personal war memory, 87 Peter the Hermit, 2 Petravičius, Viktoras, 160, 171 Freedom Struggle of My Country, 164 Refugees, 164 Petrulis, Algirdas, 107 Pflicht (“duty”), 10 photography crime of own gaze, 75–81 depicting cruelty, photographs, 63–66 gaze of the prosecutor, photographs of, 66–75 prison photographers, 83 punctum of the photographs, 67–68 Wedel camp, 144 Podnieks, Juris, 199 Poland, 12 Polish-Soviet War, 1919, 182–183 post-traumatic Jewish literary texts, 243–249 Jewish Vilna in Word and Image, 246–247 There Was Indeed a Vilna Once, 255 Vilna, My Vilna, 255 The Vilna Almanac, 246, 248 Vilna anthologies, 246 A Vilna Man (Der Vilner), 249 Vilne, 249 Vilnius in the New Jewish Poetry (Haim Nachman Shapiro), 246 post-World War II recollections, 12 Prokofiev, Sergei, 258

R

Ragache, Gilles, 121 Ragache, Jean-Robert, 121 Raila, Bronys, 146 Rainys, Jonas, 76 Ran, Leyzer, 253–254 Rannit, Aleksis, 118, 152, 154 Ravel, Maurice, 270, 274 Rekašius, Aleksas, 72–74 Resnais, Alain, 208 Night and Fog, 208–209 Rimbaud, 5 Rolicz, Stanisław, 122, 125–126 Roskies, David, 243, 255 Rozenbaum, Y., 248

S

Šapoka, Adolfas, 190 Sassoon, Siegfried, 19 sauntering, 1–2 in Berlin, 3–4 nature as the main source of inspiration, 2 sense of liberation, 2 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 14 Schmittlein, Raymond, 149 Schneider, Paul, 36 Schwesig, Karl, 112 Second Viennese School, 274 Segall, Lasar, 52 Selivanov, Nikolai, 125 Sérullaz, Maurice, 156 Shabad, Tsemakh, 250 Shneur, Zalman, 244–245 Shreffler, Anne C., 278 Shtif, N., 248 Silence (Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas), 210 Smečechauskas, Mejeris, 68 Solomon, Phil, 208 Psalm III: Night of the Meek, 208–209 Sonderkommando, 215 Sontag, Susan, 64, 65, 66 Regarding the Pain of Others (Susan Sontag), 64 Spazieren (“strolling”) in Berlin, 4 Spielberg, Steven, 207–208 Schindler’s List, 207 St. George Hotel, 120

Index St. Petersburg Conservatory, 117 Stančikaitė-Abraitienė, Vlada, 143 Stanišauskas, Stasys, 186 Steigueber, Bruno, 27, 30 In the Jewish Quarter in Vilnius, 33–34 Stokowski, Leopold, 261 Strauss, Richard, 274 Stravinsky, 270, 278 Struck, Hermann, 14, 30, 47, 48, 244–245 Gaon’s Grave at the Old Jewish Cemetery, 43, 45 Head of an Old Jew, 49 Rachel, 50 Sutton, Damien, 75 Sutzkever, Rosa, 102 images of Vilnius ghetto residents, 103 Portrait of the Musician and Teacher Jakov Gersztein (Dying Man), 104 sepia portrait of the dying musician and teacher, 103–104 Swinish Misfortune, 115 Syktyvkar labor camp, 79

Ver, Moi, 52 Viesulas, Romas, 162 Vijeikis, Vladas, 143 Vilimas, Liudas, 170 Vilnius Art Academy, 89, 98 Vilnius Municipal Art Museum, 89 Vilnius Variety Theater, 120 Vilnius/Wilna, 2, 9 artistic court in, 13 ethnic communities, 25–26 as a linguistically and culturally Polish-Jewish town, 16 queer cultural mixture, 15 walk in, 16–21 wartime residents, 15 Wilna-Kowno circle, 14 Vizgirda, Viktoras, 98, 171 Vlasova, Ekaterina, 277 Vossische Zeitung, 12 Vytautas Magnus Culture Museum, 117 Vytautas the Great Museum of Culture in Kaunas, 89

T

W

Tamošaitis, Antanas, 143 Taruskin, Richard, 274 Taylor, A. J. P. From Sarajevo to Potsdam, 197 Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 216 Thoreau, Henry David, 1, 2 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 176, 179

U

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 139, 152 Ušinskas, Stasys, 130 Twilight/The Shooting, 130–131

V

Valeška, Adolfas, 165 Freiburg Landscape, 166 Spring in Freiburg, 167 Valius, Telesforas, 171 Cry, 163 Mother, 164 St. Sebastian, 164 Women, 163 Vaterland (“fatherland”), 8

Wajcman, Gérard, 215, 233 Wall, Jeff, 65 Wallenberg, 18 Wanderstunden in Wilna, 2 War against War! (Ernst Friedrich), 64 war archive, 206–221 war-related themes in music and works, 258 Bacevičius’s musical output, 267–271 Émigré perspective, 267–260 impact of political discourse, 281–283 in Soviet Lithuania, 271–280 theoretical and interpretive approaches, 259 wartime German culture, 26–28 Wedel camp, 144 Wegener, Paul, 209 Golem, 209 West Prussian landscape, 12 Whale, James, 209 Frankenstein, 209 Wiiralt, Eduard, 117, 156 Berber Girl with a Camel, 117 Wilhelmine Germany, 3

307

308

Index Wilnaer Zeitung, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28 Wilna group, 14 World War I, 5, 18–19, 175–176, 242, 257 Eastern Front in 1914 and 1915, 180–181 World War II, 11, 85, 257 memoirs, 12–13 World War I in Lithuania, portrayal of Brothers’ Cemetery in Riga, 198 First Lithuanian Republic, 183–191 Freedom Monument, 184 Kaunas Monument to the Fallen, 184 in Lithuanian history textbooks, 190–193 Lithuanian military cemeteries, 186 Lithuanian policy of commemoration, 200–201 Memorial to Povilas Lukšys, 186, 188 monuments erected in Lithuania, 189 Monument to the Fallen for their Fatherland, 183–184 Monument to the Lithuanian Soldier in Nemunaitis, 196 resources and approach, 178–179 sculpture portraits of ten Lithuanian national heroes, 184 Second Lithuanian Republic, 195–197 seven crosses and ordnance from the Wars of Independence, 184

tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 184 “To the victims of the First World War,” 189–190 “Žuvome dėl Tėvynės” (“We Perished for the Fatherland”), 186–187 war in Lithuania and Lithuania in the war, 179–183 War Museum, 184–186, 189, 192 War Museum Garden, 184 Wyman, Mark, 142

Y

Yuriev, Oleg, 205

Z

Zapruder, Abraham, 211 Zeller, Magnus, 14 Zucca, André, 93 Rue de Rivoli in Paris under the Hakenkreuzes, 94 Zweig, Arnold, 14, 244

Ž

Žižek, Slavoj, 273 Žitkus (Žitkevičius), Jonas, 64 Žmuidzinavičius, Antanas, 115 ,109 studio, 110 Žukas, Stepas, 122, 109 Corner of the Room, 110