Vladimir Gelfand. Diary 1941-1946/Flamman "Dagbok kastar tvivel över våldtäktsmyten". Stefan Lindgren: Vladimir Gelfand, "Tysk dagbok 1945-46: en sovjetisk officers anteckningar"

Swedish

Diary Casts Doubt on the Rape Myth

Flamman, 11 January 2007 / Ryska Posten, 14 January 2007 - CULTURE
Germany Diary 1945-46 - Vladimir Gelfand. Ersatz, 2006. Translated by Lars Wiklund.
Diary Casts Doubt on the Rape Myth

Vladimir Gelfand's Germany Diary 1945-46 is remarkable in many respects. It is an unusual eyewitness account of the Red Army's liberation of Poland and eastern Germany. Since keeping a diary was forbidden in the Red Army, probably for security reasons, readers already have reason to be grateful to the Ukrainian lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand for persistently breaking that rule.

Gelfand was only twenty-one during the bitter fighting at the Oder, where he apparently showed considerable courage. He entered Berlin determined to experience something new, meet people, learn German and, not least, enjoy the company of women. He was tired of a war that had been his everyday life for three years and deeply weary of overbearing and loud-mouthed officers who constantly found fault with him.

Gelfand seems to have been something of a scapegoat. His daydreaming and incessant writing amused or irritated others; the fact that he was handsome, intelligent and successful with women naturally provoked envy. In several places he suggests that officers in the Red Army also looked down on him because of his Jewish background.

"How many hardships, how much humiliation and insolence I have had to endure because my name is Gelfand, because I was born into a Jewish family and because I myself am a Jew," he wrote confidentially to his father.

For Gelfand, however, such phenomena were sad remnants of the old society. He believed that national antagonisms and the mistrust they produced would eventually disappear, though only over decades. As long as people could still be lynched because of race, he wrote, one had to be prepared to confront brutal deception honestly and with dignity, and to fight it to the end in the name of humanity and life.

Gelfand often loses himself in trivialities, but a certain literary talent cannot be denied. Keeping such an intensive diary under wartime conditions was an achievement in itself. He writes with defenseless honesty about losing his sexual innocence, discovering that he is not impotent, and becoming a man through a year of intense work, encounters and relationships.

More tiresome are his endless complaints about injustices and humiliations inflicted by other Soviet servicemen. Although he remained a convinced supporter of the Soviet system and a Party member, his outlook was narrow; he was probably a rather self-absorbed and vain young man.

His loudly beating heart repeatedly met disappointment, both among Soviet women attached to the troops - some of whom unfairly acquired the reputation of "regimental mattresses" - and among the German women he met in the city. He often found German women vulgar, while girls who took hold not only of his body but also of his heart soon proved unfaithful or uninterested.

"What is especially striking about Gelfand's encounters with women is that there was clearly no violence involved," literary scholar Elke Scherstjanoi writes in the afterword.

Strictly speaking, Gelfand neither participated in nor witnessed a single rape. The reviewer finds this noteworthy in view of Antony Beevor's estimate in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 of roughly 1.4 million rapes in occupied Germany. Gelfand describes no systematic mass rapes or mass looting. Instead he often portrays young people seeking companionship, warmth, love and erotic experience amid the dizziness of the postwar period.

Gelfand does record a rumor that a German women's battalion in Berlinchen, now in Poland, had been subjected to mass rape. According to Scherstjanoi, however, no such battalion existed. In another episode a woman who says she had been raped by twenty Russians offers herself to Gelfand. The reviewer asks provocatively why she would then voluntarily sleep with a twenty-first Russian.

For Gelfand it was not difficult to find sexual partners in postwar Berlin; the difficulty was finding genuine feeling and love. After he contracted gonorrhea in June 1946 his disappointment and homesickness increased.

For writers convinced that the Soviet advance into Germany was one continuous chain of crimes, Gelfand's evidence does not fit the familiar pattern. One possible objection is that he may have kept silent about rapes committed by himself or others. Scherstjanoi suggests that his silence also reflects the fact that the victors did not attach great importance to rape at the time and did not see it as a central political issue; otherwise, she argues, a politically engaged person such as Gelfand would probably have discussed it.

The reviewer counters that official Soviet institutions did not remain entirely silent. Shortly before the assault on Berlin the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda criticized Ehrenburg's indiscriminate hatred of Germans, while Soviet commanders issued warnings against excesses. Marshal Zhukov, the article notes, warned his men to remember why their homeland had sent them to Germany.

Lev Kopelev later described in East Prussia how a divisional commander, Colonel Smirnov, personally shot a lieutenant who had taken part in a gang rape. According to military reports, 4,148 Soviet officers were convicted of various crimes in January-March 1945, and such offenses reportedly became less frequent after Germany's capitulation.

Why, then, should Gelfand have remained silent? He himself was in conflict with many officers whom he regarded as morally corrupt, mockingly calling some of them "telephone heroes" who had accumulated medals away from the fighting. Drunkenness and black-market speculation appear to have been widespread. Gelfand himself also stole and sold things on the black market, though often the booty consisted of broken watches.

As Kjell Albin Abrahamson observed in another review, Gelfand and other Soviet soldiers often resemble comic antiheroes more than heroic stereotypes. Yet those antiheroes were not automatically rapists. During the desperate German resistance in spring 1945, many soldiers were simply occupied with staying alive; Soviet losses in the operations from the Vistula to the Oder were enormous even before the final advance into Germany.

Scherstjanoi argues that even when Gelfand did not harm Germans, he could still despise them and show a "cold reserve" toward their daily suffering. Gelfand was certainly not free of hatred. Influenced in part by Ilya Ehrenburg's rhetoric, he could write that burning Germany was a satisfying sight and carve the words "I spit on defeated Berlin" at the Reichstag - a sentence Soviet censorship would never have allowed to appear in print.

Yet, paradoxically, Gelfand also showed deep respect for German culture, language and people. When another officer smashed German statues, Gelfand saved a bust of Goethe and wrote that Russians had to remain civilized even when dealing with German barbarians. When ordered to help remove books from the German Academy of Sciences for a military library, he first reacted negatively, then calmed down when he discovered that many of the books were Russian volumes the Germans had taken from the Soviet Union.

For nearly a year he supervised the dismantling of German factories that were to be shipped to the Soviet Union. The reviewer distinguishes this from ordinary looting because it formed part of the reparations imposed by the victorious powers.

However incomplete Gelfand's diary may be, the article concludes, it can serve as a counterweight to historical revisionists who recast the defeat of Hitlerism simply as a barbaric assault by Stalin's hordes on Western civilization.

After the war Gelfand lived for many years as a teacher in the Soviet Union and left behind large quantities of notes that his son later organized. The volume published in Sweden by Ersatz in Lars Wiklund's translation represents only a small part of Gelfand's wartime writings. The German and Swedish publishers considered the years 1941-44 less suitable for their editions, but the larger body of material remained available in Russian.

Stefan Lindgren