Demidoff - oder von der
Unverletzlichkeit des Menschen
Ein getreuer Bericht geschrieben und
gezeichnet im Jahre 1942
by Erich Kuby (pseudonym Alexander Parlach), Paul List Verlag, 1947
Demidoff - or on the
invulnerability of the man
A true report written and sketched in
1942
See below some of the sketches from
this book.
From Mein Krieg about this
book:
(Pg. 225) [During
the long months in Demidoff I
lived
in circumstances which allowed me to write especially great detail. I
also sketched a lont, puting line beside line, with patience. In 1947 I
published with the List Publishing house a modest echo of the book
plans which failed during the war, a small volume of texts and drawings
with the title "Demidoff – or on the Inviolability of the man." The
selection I decided upon then only partially coincides with the
selection which I now consider appropriate for the times.]
This was Kuby's first published book. In 1947, it was
still dangerous to express the views he held, so he used the pseudonym
Alexander Parlach.
During the war, these same views, even when semi-contained, had gotten
him courtmartialed and
eventually sent to military prison for 9 months, of which he served
only half due to the intervention of the prison commander, Captain
Kaletta, who also prevented him from being subsequently sent to a field
punishment unit which would have amounted to a death sentence. Because
of a radio play he wrote in 1954
about the Defense of Fortress Brest (in 1959 incorporated into
the chronicle Nur noch rauchende
Trümmer or "Nothing
but Smoking Ruins"), he was accused in 1955
of diffamation of character of the general in charge of the defense of
Brest, but acquitted in 1959. Kuby had been present in Brest as an
ordinary soldier, and simply
wrote the truth. Much – but not everything – had changed in the 12
years
between the publication of the two books. In 1961 Kuby really dumped on
the Wehrmacht and in great detail, but in the relatively safe form of a
thinly disguised roman à clef, Sieg! Sieg! (published in English
in 1962 as "Sitzkrieg of Private Stefan") about his experiences in the
first campaign (Kriegsreise)
in France.
These books are based on his letters sent mostly to his wife, but also
to
friends, and on some of their responses. In 1975, when he brought out
his monumental chronicle Mein Krieg
(My war – Notes from 2129 Days),
he revisted the first French campaign, Demidoff, and Brest, but in
condensed and somewhat softened form. This was now 30 years later, but
he still felt he had to take some, but just some of the acid out of his
pen. All of his war correspondance would, according to Kuby, fill up
ten thousand pages. This material must belong to his second wife,
Susanna Böhme-Kuby, who is still alive and lives in Italy. How
much dynamite is still there, waiting to be set off?
I have translated here into English the (bookjacket)
preface of Demidoff, and the postscript, and I present also some
of his sketches from the book. I am translating as well some passages
or episodes not present in Mein Krieg.
Preface: (bookjacket)
INSTEAD OF A RESUME, its premature announcement
One ought to beaccustomed to reporting about one's own life. However,
it is one thing to help to feed the burocracy with one's modest
contribution of irrelevant data, for example born on 28 June 1910, but
quite another to provide relevant information about oneself that will
interest normal people such as you dear readers.
If one recounts the life of Alexander the Great in the manner of our
schoolbooks, then the nine-year long school slumber will not be
interrupted for one moment. In fact, I was so fast asleep that I only
woke up after the scholastic train had passed me by. I was
awakened by reproaches, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, left the
mind-numbing institution, and only returned in order to take [and pass]
the final examination. When Gottfried Keller [19th century Swiss author
of a Bildungsroman (Der grüne Heinrich) whom Kuby admired]
casually writes in a letter that his sister again successrully stored
some piles of firewood through the winter, then we forget neither the
wood nor the sister for the rest of our lives, even though she was
without a doubt an insignificant person.
In other words, the life of any person can become relevant for us, if
we get to look at it through a good magnifying glass. If I were to say
that my family originated in Bavaria and Swabia – whereby a grandmother
from Hamburg must also be mentioned – regardless of the unpleasant
consquences for me resulting from the revelation of such a foreign
background to the Bavarian civil registrar – that in itself would
explain very little [a classic sentence written in the style of
Gottfried Keller]. If, however, I were to describe the farm on which I
grew up during the First War [WW1], an hour's walk from the nearest
village, the smell of the warm bogs through which the winding footpath
led to Hugelfing where it joined the dusty highway at a wayside cross
(before which I, inappropriately anough for a protestant, doffed my
green pointed hat), – yes, if I were to describe in detail this long
journey through thirty years, of which not even the smallest part has
escaped my memory, then such self representation would make as much
sense as any careful depiction of a person which can only be brought to
life in indivuals.
I may hardly doubt that it will some day come to a "true report" of
this sort, because I don't believe that I can write anything but
autobiogrphy in the widest sense of the word. Until then we should,
however, participate in the course of events and learn what is in store
for our people, that is, for my generation which had the good fortune
to be so placed in our century that it could have been raised and
formed between the wars and, therefore, wasn't completely unprepared
for the temptations with which the criminal regime drew in its
accomplices. He [Hitler] named these accomplices "Volksgenossen"
(fellow member of the German tribe), something I will never and under
no circumstances be. A.P.
NACHWORT (Postscript, pp.
134-48, in the process of being translated here in its entirety)
pg. 134
I believe I owe the reader a postscript from which he learns how these
notes came to be and what kind of role they play in the author's
military career. This period makes up a sixth and therefore not
unimportant part of his life thus far. It is also perhaps not
unnecessary to explain the reasons which caused me to publish my
letters from Demidoff at this time – although the most important motive
is expressed in the book's subtitle. At the beginning of October 1939,
in a Signal Corps barracks near Potsdam, I was issued an orginally
Czech uniform stiff with dirt and made of Manchester velvet as training
under garments. At the end of May 1945, as I returned home from 9
months of
[American] captivity, I was wandering through a French occupied village
near Karlsruhe, when a woman ran after me and said: "Come with me, I
have an old pair of pants for you. You can't go any further in uniform,
or the French will snatch you up!" I left my uniform with her,
and the war for me was over.
Between these two dates I wrote letters day by day – with the exception
of days spent together – to my wife also to other to many other
people. I kept a diary with short entries, and from 1941 on I kept an
occasionally more detailed record which in spite of my culpable, but
never actually punished recklessness I preferred to not entrust to the
military postal.
From this remaining sediment of the war I have taken a very small part
in order to write "Demidoff." For its publication I have edited out all
strictly personal material, and only occasionally made use of the first
person in order to remind the reader that he is dealing with fragments
of letters. I add to them, under the appropriate date, a few diary
entries. In condideration of the documentary nature of the report I
originally intended put these parts in italics. However, that would
have lent an emphasis and importance which they do not deserve. An
attentive reader who.....(translation in progress)
pg. 135
is used to listening for the rhythm of the sentences will figure out in
any case where the letter ends and the diary begins.
Whoever has read this book knows that I don't pretend to be an
illustrator. When I nevertheless inserted into the text a selection of
my Demidoffer sketches, I did so because they support, despite all of
their insufficiency, the only conscious and intended bias of my war
notes, the bias toward the truth. That's the way it was, and that's the
way I was, thought, felt, acted and didn't act.
The special circumstances in Demidoff laid the foundation for a report
that almost reads like neatly composed fiction. It was a time in which
things didn't go for me either particularly well or badly, a time in
which the war shaped my life – which was certainly not the case for the
entire six years – without claiming the main role in my notes because
of genuine combat experiences. From the point of view of a soldier,
Demidoff was a stroke of luck; it was a break in the war,
accorded me otherwise only in connection with the degrading conditions
in the homeland barracks from which everyone (except for the most
miserable creatures) wished to escape to the less comfortable but freer
circumstances of the front. It is not by chance that I select the
letters from this period at a time when newly fed nationalist
tendencies,
born of desperation, are proliferating.
Our nation, less ready than ever to let itself be guided by
rational considerations, works itself up into a mood in which its most
recent history seems to be shrouded in a golden mist. Even the war of 6
years is already the object of the general tendency to embeillish the
past and blacken the present. Of the soldiers who have recently taken
off their uniforms or changed their colors, not a few would be ready to
put them on again while convincing themselves and others that
"everything wasn't all that bad." Nothing would be less appropriate
than to counter such currents (which render the laying of new
foundations
pg. 136
completely impossible) with horrifying war stories which, even it they
were literally true, could be dismissed with the objection: Well, yes,
that sort of thing did happen, but.....Otherwise we were marching
forward victoriously, barely aware of the enemy, or we lay in Russian,
French, Serbian, or Norwegian Demidoffs, killed time, had enough to
eat, drink, and smoke, and all was well or at least a thousand times
better than the misery we have now – and that which wasn't so good we
didn't
see, or we ignored it. And therefore it is perhaps not too late to take
a good look.
*
During my first year as a soldier, toward the end of the French
campaign, it didn't occur to me that my letters would be read by other
eyes than the ones I saw before me as I wrote. In September 1940 I left
Le Creusot to go on leave. At home, on a hill above Lake Constance
[Bodensee], friends convinced me to make excerpts from the collection
available
to a wider circle of readers.* They knew about the letters because my
wife had occasionally read to them parts of the letters. After I
returned to France I landed in my 50th profession a soldier: The
Signals Unit 3, in which I had been promoted to Private first class,
assigned me to write
its history [Neither this passage nor the relevant
passage in Mein Krieg makes clear whose idea this
was.]
[...]
The commander of the 3rd Signals detachment in Frankfurt/Oder, whose
intellectual thirst I satisfied by supplying him with cheap novels, had
compelling reason to make himself known to his contemporariesbecause of
his two victorious campaigns, in Poland and then France. With a sculptor
*[The following passage indicates that Kuby was planning the war
chronicle at least a half year earlier.]
Mein Krieg (pg. 32) [Vom 27.
Februar bis 12. März 40 bekomme ich
Urlaub,
wir verbringen ihn in der bereits halb ausgeräumten Berliner
Wohnung. In diese Tage fallen verschiedene Begegnungen mit Dr.
Jürgen Eggebrecht, Lektor der Hanseatischen Verlagsanstalt vor dem
Krieg, 1940 jedoch bereits Zensor im OKW als Kriegsverwaltungsrat (pg.
33) mit goldenen Kragenspiegeln. Im Dom-Hotel in
Köln
habe ich in diesen Tagen ein langes Gespräch mit dem Leiter des
Insel-Verlages, Prof. Kippenberg, darüber, ob es eine
Möglichkeit
gebe, die Zeit realistisch darzustellen und die Darstellung dennoch
unter den gegebenen Verhältnissen zu veröffentlichen.]
[translator's note: birth of the manuscript "Kriegsfahrt durch
Frankreich" – before the invasion of France, original title]
pg. 140
Die intensive Beschäftigung mit meinen Briefen, die ohne jede
Tendenz ein Spiegel meiner Tage waren, belehrte mich, daß ich
nicht die Taten des "Führers" anzushauen brauchte, um zu erfahren
wohin es mit uns hinauswollte, sondern nur das Sein der harmlosen
Burschen, mit denen ich die Stube, das Grabenloch und das Essen teilte.
Ich begann zu ahnen, das die Diktatur eine Herrschaftsform ist, in der
die Geschicke eines Landes von der Dummheit und von den Begierden der
Masse bestimmt werden, während in allen Staaten, in denen die
"Demokratie" funktioniert, zwischen Massenwahn und Führungstat
überaus kunstvolle, überaus wirkungsvolle Filter gespannt
sind.
The intensive work with my letters,
which were an unprejudiced mirror of my daily life, taught me that I
didn't have to observe the deeds of the "Führer" in order to learn
what we were heading toward, but rather the harmless fellows with whom
I shared the barracks, the foxholes, and the food. I began to
realize that dictatorship is a form of government in which the destiny
of a nation is determined by the stupidity and the passions of the
masses. On the other hand, in all states in which "democracy"
functions, there are in place extremely artificial but nonetheless
highly effective filters between mass hysteria and acts of leadership.
pg. 142
Wenn ich zuweilen mit Bitterkeit registrierte, wie sich alle in blinder
Verzückung ihr Grab shaufelten, so wurde daraus nicht bleibende
Verbitterung:...
When I occasionally bitterly observed
that they all, in blind ecstasy, dug their own graves, nevertheless my
bitterness didn't remain permanent;....
pg. 145
Dasselbe Volk, das 1933 bei Todestrafe hätte gemäßigt
wählen müssen, um sich auf der Spitze der Welwirtschaftskrise
in einem labilen Gleichgewicht zu halten bis die Krise durchgestanden
war – und damals radikal wählte um endlich seine Todesehnzucht zu
erfüllen und die Höllenfahrt anzutreten – wählt in einer
neuen h-storisichen Stunde, in der nur eine radikale Entscheidung den
Weg zu einer neuen sozialen Ordung frei gemacht hätte,
gemäßigt in dem verzeifelten Bestreben, ein paar
Trümmer aus dem Schiffbruch zu retten; die Rest des Besitzes
und den gerupften, scheußlichen Balg eines [preußischen]
Adlers."
The nation should have voted in 1933,
despite the threat of revolutionary terror, for moderation, in order to
maintain itself in precarious balance at the height of the world wide
economic crisis until the crisis had passed. Instead it voted for
radicals in order to fulfill at last its death wish [emphasis mine]and to begin the descent into hell. Now, in
a new historical epoch, in which only a radical decision can clear the
way to a new social order, has voted moderately in the desperate
attempt to save some flotsam from a shipwreck, the remains of its
property and the disgusting, plucked skin of a [Prussian] eagle.