German

Literaturkritik — No. 2, February 2006 — Politics and History

A Victorious Red Army Soldier

Vladimir Gelfand’s “Germany Diary” describes the end of the war in Berlin from the perspective of a Red Army soldier
By H.-Georg Lützenkirchen

The liberation of Germany from Hitler’s fascism in the eastern part of the Reich was inseparably connected with the advance of the Red Army. Collective memory retained images of endless columns of refugees gripped by fear — a fear deliberately intensified by Nazi propaganda, which portrayed the approaching Soviet soldiers as brutal, uncivilised barbarians driven by revenge.

We know much less about the individual Red Army soldier who moved westward against the remnants of Greater German madness. In collective memory the individual face disappears behind the anonymous image of the Soviet soldier. Yet every one of them had a name. One was the twenty-two-year-old officer Vladimir Gelfand.

He was born in Ukraine into a Jewish working-class family shaped by Soviet industrialisation. Education was highly valued in this milieu, and Gelfand displayed literary interests early. In 1942 he volunteered for the front and joined the Red Army. By early 1945 he commanded a mortar platoon, fought in front-line engagements and entered Berlin with the victorious forces. He remained in Germany until his demobilisation in September 1946.

Throughout these years Gelfand kept a diary in which he recorded observations, thoughts and experiences. Together with letters and documents illustrating soldiers’ everyday life, the notes later became part of his estate. They were submitted for publication by his son, who emigrated to Germany in 1995. The diary thus forms a small but significant chapter in the history of German-Russian relations.

The surviving entries begin on 13 January 1945, when the Red Army was still in Poland. On 28 January Gelfand notes: “Germany greeted us inhospitably — with snowdrifts, strong wind and deserted, almost dead villages. The people here, the Germans, fear the wrath of the Russians. They flee and leave all their property behind.” Two days later he is struck by the wealth of abandoned German houses: “The luxury of the furnishings can hardly be described; the wealth and refinement of these things are astonishing. Our Slavs will be amazed!”

Looting becomes an everyday reality, and Gelfand records it openly: “No one forbids us to take from the Germans what they once deprived us of, and to destroy their property. I am completely satisfied.” Yet he condemns senseless destruction. When one of his comrades raises a hand against a bust of Goethe, Gelfand intervenes: “Geniuses cannot be equated with barbarians, and destroying their memory is a great sin for a civilised person.” The episode reveals how Gelfand wanted to see himself: as a “civilised person,” the opposite of the image Germans had been taught to associate with the Red Army.

Not all victors were equally restrained. Women in particular suffered violence. For a long time this subject remained outside public discussion, but it has increasingly attracted historical attention. Gelfand describes an encounter a few days after the capture of Berlin. He offers to help women in the street, and their reaction makes him pause. “Those emerald eyes suddenly looked at me with a stunned, lost expression. I felt I simply had to learn what was tormenting them.” The women tell him in horror what they experienced on the first night after Red Army units entered the town. One of them, desperate, clings to Gelfand: “You may do with me whatever you want … just save me from all those men!”

Gelfand does not seem fully to understand what lies behind such words. Some time later he begins relationships with German women, but repeatedly stresses in the diary that he cannot share their views and moral values. Overall, however, his writings are less about violence and destruction than about a romanticised longing for love. Unlike many comrades, he is more interested in women and books than in drinking and fighting, although he too repeatedly clashes with superiors and fellow soldiers.

“What am I to do?” he writes in one moment of despair. “From whom am I to seek truth and justice? There is no God, and apart from him no one knows what I have had to endure …” At the same time he consciously resists the rigidity of military order. When a strict directive in summer 1945 forbids Soviet soldiers to associate with the German population, he writes angrily: “We are human beings! We cannot sit in a cage! Besides, our service does not end in the barracks, and living in them has already become unbearable … What do I want? Freedom! To live freely, to think, to work, to enjoy life! And now even that has been taken away from me.”

Gelfand repeatedly finds ways to escape barracks routine, but only demobilisation finally releases him from military restrictions. The value of the notes lies precisely in their lack of sensationalism. They are the diary of a young man caught in the maelstrom of war who continues to dream, read, think, fall in love and defend his individuality under conditions in which this is almost impossible. He does not turn himself into an idealised hero. The diary therefore allows us to see a Red Army soldier not as part of a faceless mass, but as a person with doubts, desires and feelings.