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Ties that Bind: “City, City”

When a large city came under direct attack, no inhabitant could remain indifferent. A country’s capital dramatically symbolized national institutions and historical continuity. Many large cities were objects of all-out attack during the Second World War. They often became a focus for defense, a catalyst for the decision to take up arms. It was the city that represented civilian life in its most concentrated form. Personal and national life overlapped in the city; in some literary works the city assumed such importance that it moved into the foreground, becoming a major presence or protagonist in its own right.

Even when an ancient capital fell into enemy hands, it might still remain a symbol of cultural continuity or resistance. This was the case of Prague, one of the first major European capitals to be conquered in 1938. A major theme in Czech literature between 1937 and 1945 was the city of Prague as symbol of independent culture. Vitezlav Nezval, Jaroslav Seifert, Frantisek Halas, K. J. Erben, Vladimir Thiele, and Vladimir Holan all wrote moving poems about Prague during the war years; a Czech literary critic has written that the Czech state was subject to many changes throughout its history—its territories were disputed, religion, culture, and language persecuted, its form of government abolished in 1938—but what remained was Prague.6

But if no effort was made to defend a capital city, its fate could be different. Paris fell in mid-June 1940; the “open cities” provision of French capitulation meant that French cities would not be bombarded but their administration was to be transferred to Germans by “due process” within forty-eight hours.7 The city had no material destruction. But more than any other major city, Paris became a symbol of impotence. In a poem written in 1943 “To Kill,” Paul Eluard described a conquered city:

Tonight there falls

a strange peace over Paris

a peace of blind eyes

of dreams without color

that hurl themselves against the walls

a peace of useless arms

of vanquished faces8

In the same year Marcel Ayme wrote a short story “The Man Who Could Walk through Walls.” The story became well known because it archly satirized a mentality prevalent in France during the war years. Ayme described a man who had a magical ability to walk through buildings, walls, and floors. But one day he forgot to take his “medicine”; he became trapped inside a wall. The story was an allegory about wartime opportunism. Ayme used the city as a symbol of those who adapted to enemy occupation and took advantage of it, advancing their careers but becoming ensnared in collaboration.9

Many Parisians were happy their city escaped the destruction of Warsaw, or of Vippuri (Vyborg) in Finland, the Karelian capital bombarded by the Red Army in 1939–40.10 Paris was not even subjected to attack. But for that same reason, it never became a symbol of resistance.

The fight to save Warsaw in September 1939 was particularly savage. Although it fell there would be two more revolts in the city against the Germans before 1945. Several major Polish writers singled out the destruction of Warsaw in books about the war. The collection of poems Building the Barricades by Anna Swirszczynska evoked Warsaw as a living presence11 Tadeusz Gajcy wrote:

over the furrow of letters you still see

my image: I am walking through the air, and my city

walks behind me.12

In “Song of the Walls”:

How can one not love the shattered walls

of this city, which flows away at night . . .

the Warsaw which is dead, and the living.13

In perhaps the finest book about the insurrection of 1944, Miron Bialoszewski asked himself several times why he was unwilling to leave the dying city.

I don’t know what we expected. After all, I think it was known that those stumps of Krucza or Wilcza were only stumps and nothing else . . . On top of that, there’s the destruction of protective structures. If the building should collapse, if it disappears, then our chances become worse. Or it could shrink even more. And more. Go somewhere else? Where? Houses are dwindling everywhere. And the crowding. People are dying. That’s true. But houses are dying too.14

Bialoszewski’s book was about the city and its people; in the course of his narration the two become interchangeable. He remained in Warsaw until the end, when the Germans ordered all inhabitants to leave. Almost simultaneously the Germans retreated and the Soviet Army advanced into the ruins of Warsaw on January 17, 1945. The city that had housed 1,289,000 inhabitants six years before did not contain a living soul. Ninety-three percent of the dwellings were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Bialoszewski’s book concluded with a simple sentence: “I set eyes on Warsaw again in February 1945.”

Czeslaw Milosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945:

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?

I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot

Write anything, because five hands

Seize my pen and order me to write

The story of their lives and deaths.15

The poem shows how the destruction of a city, its transformation into ruins, could be endless. Together with Dresden and Hiroshima, Warsaw was one of the most completely destroyed cities during the war.

During the war the legend and personification of “London” was created by several British writers. The city became a major presence in a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances. Four poems about the Blitz—“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”; “Deaths and Entrances”; “Dawn Raid”; and “Ceremony after a Fire Raid”—were among the finest in the book, and London became a single collectivity. Thomas wrote of those “wounded on London’s waves,” and of “many married London’s estranging grief.” He claimed he was giving the city a “tongue.”

In a long, stately poem, “Ceremony after a Fire Raid,” Thomas mourned a young girl killed in a bombardment, “Laid in her snow / On the altar of London.” The mode of lamentation was rhetorical, nevertheless the poem is moving, reaching a crescendo in the final third section with an image of the city transformed into a sea of fire:

Into the organ pipes and steeples

Of the luminous cathedrals . . .

Over the urn of sabbaths,

Over the whirling ditch of daybreak

Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire

And the golden pavements laid in requiems,

Into the bread in a wheat field of flames . . .

The masses of the sea

The masses of the infant-bearing sea

Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter forever

Glory glory glory

The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.16

Contemporary novels and poems used bombed landmarks such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and the House of Commons for scenes that expressed strong defensive resolve. The ending of Hillary’s 1943 novel The Last Enemy had an important London setting, as did Eric Knight’s This Above All.

A volume in Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Officers and Gentlemen began with an animated description of London burning:

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon; everywhere the searchlights clustered and hovered, then swept apart; here and there pitchy clouds drifted and billowed; now and then a huge flash momentarily froze the serene fireside glow. Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles. “Pure Turner,” said Guy Crouchback, enthusiastically; he came fresh to these delights.17

Despite the ironical “enthusiasm” the scene is by no means light-hearted. Guy Crouchback had returned from abroad to his native land, and to London when it came under attack. He was in the place where he wanted to be.

Cities played a prominent role in the defense of Russia, but only in the middle years of the war, after June 1941. Moscow, evacuated in 1941, had negligible importance. Konstantin Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg both wrote that defeatism in Moscow reached epidemic proportions.18 Stalin made a decision in 1942 to defend another city, the city on the Volga named after him. A lesson had been learned in Moscow. Stalin personally prohibited the evacuation of civilians from Stalingrad, calculating the troops would defend the city with greater motivation if the civilians remained inside.

Two cities, Stalingrad and Leningrad, were key to a strategy of defense and counterattack. Leningrad had a passive defensive role; it was besieged for nine hundred days, from August 3, 1941 to January 18, 1943. During the period much of the armaments industry was evacuated to the Urals and armies regrouped in the East. In popular consciousness the link between what were called the “hero cities” of Leningrad and Stalingrad was kept alive; the poet Olga Berggolts broadcast on September 20, 1942 that “an umbilical cord” united Leningrad and Stalingrad.19 The siege of Leningrad was lifted only after the successful defense of Stalingrad. In Leningrad, between eight hundred thousand and a million civilians died.

In a deliberate campaign the defense of the two cities was orchestrated by writers and propagandists. Aliger was flown in to the surrounded Leningrad in order to write about the siege. Many writers and journalists continued to live in the city. Their works were quickly published and reached a wide national audience.20 Olga Berggolts wrote in 1942:

In the mud, darkness, hunger, and sorrow,

With death’s shadow dogging our heels,

We were so happy,

So wild with freedom,

That our grandchildren would surely envy us.

The introduction of freedom was new. Freedom and defense turned out to be a powerful combination.

Leningrad was a city of civilians, the military presence negligible. As the siege continued the city was without electricity, fuel, or water, daily rations were below subsistence level. As many died from starvation as from bombing or shelling. Muscular dystrophy crippled thousands. The city was compared to a submerged town in which the manner of walking of its starved citizens was so slow “they seemed to be moving through dense water . . . It was as if I was reading some fantastic novel about the earth’s last days, about life’s extinction . . . cities standing devoid of life and covered in snow.”21 Berggolts saw the city as a necropolis. Personal relations took on a special dimension.22 Dogs, cats, birds, glue, and belts were eaten, Ales Adamovich wrote that people ate whatever they could lay their hands on “everything from the birdseed to the canary itself.” When loaves of rye bread were brought across Lake Ladoga they became objects of reverence, “sacred,” “whiter than snow.”

The defense of Stalingrad was also a holding action while Soviet armies were repositioned to the east and north. As fighting became intense, civilians were driven from contested districts; in Simonov’s novel Days and Nights a commander tells his men they can retreat only when the ground under them is so hot, literally, that they cannot stand it. Victor Nekrasov wrote they were expected to “dig themselves in, surround themselves with wire and mines, and hold on.”

Stalingrad stopped being a city in a meaningful sense. When the hero of Days and Nights, Saburov, returned to his battalion after an eighteen-day absence “The three buildings which Saburov’s battalion had been defending no longer really existed; they were only foundations on which the remains of walls and the lower parts of windows still stood in a few places. They all looked like children’s toys, smashed and broken. To the left and to the right of the buildings ran unbroken lines of ruins. In some places the chimneys were still standing. Now, at night, the rest dissolved into the darkness and looked like an uneven rocky valley. It looked as if the houses had disappeared into the ground and as if burial mounds of brick had been raised over them.”23 The city had been turned into trenches, dugouts, burial mounds, “cairns haphazardly raised over houses which had gone underground.”

It was during this period that General Chuikov was reported to say, “Time is blood.” Some of the finest Russian novels focus on the events of the battle of Stalingrad: Victor Nekrasov’s novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad, Konstantin Simonov’s Days and Nights, Yuri Bondarev’s Hot Snow, Vasili Grossman’s For a Righteous Cause and Life and Fate.

Interpretations of the meaning of the victory at Stalingrad varied greatly. The phrase “the spirit of Stalingrad” became popular, indicating the determined defense of the city. What was this “spirit?” Many episodes in Viktor Nekrasov’s novel, published in 1946, express a palpable sense of revolt against authority.24

Vasily Grossman was explicit on the meaning of this “spirit” in the closing pages of the novel For a Righteous Cause. Communications between a small defensive unit and headquarters were severed, rank suddenly had little importance. The differences between regular, conscript, and penal troops disappeared. The “spirit” of Stalingrad, according to Grossman, was democratic with strong elements of revolt. In the later novel Life and Fate, Grossman made his most forceful statement of all about the nature of the fighting for the city. Everything at Stalingrad had “a new intensity” that impressed all people, old party men as well as ordinary soldiers, “There was something about the relations between people here. There was a true sense of dignity and equality on this clay slope where so much blood had been spilt.” Young people in their teens were caught up in this spirit. “Nearly everyone believed that good would triumph, that honest men, who hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice their lives, would be able to build a good and just life.”25

To dramatize his interpretation of the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman chose a dangerous combat situation at “House 6/1.” This pocket of resistance was surrounded by German troops and cut off from headquarters, as in his earlier novel For a Righteous Cause. The telephone cable leading to the house is repeatedly cut. There is ambiguity about this: how, and by whom, was it cut? The army command is worried about reports that discipline has broken down in the group fighting at House 6/1, that the group’s commander, Grekhov, has refused to write official reports. The members of the tiny detachment are of different ages and backgrounds; they hold meaningful discussions, Grekhov speaks in favor of liberty and sharply criticizes Lenin. An adolescent girl falls in love for the first time. After a long period without communication from headquarters, Krymov, a narrow-minded older Bolshevik, comes to reassert discipline. He is met with mockery and hostility. He makes threats, and lectures the group. Grekhov fires a shot in his direction and orders him away.

Later, before the end of the battle of Stalingrad, the “handful of men” at House 6/1 are overrun and killed. Grossman interprets the scene categorically: “Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end.” Victory sprang from the spirit of equality and liberation that characterized much of the fighting at Stalingrad, but that spirit became the first casualty once victory was secured. Grekhov died, and Krymov lived on.26

The Battle at Stalingrad became known in the West as a remarkable feat of arms and a turning point. In late 1942, a Chinese leader wrote that Stalingrad marked “a turning point in the whole history of mankind”—this was Mao Tse-tung, writing for the Liberation Daily in Yenan.27 But major works about Stalingrad suggest it was a different kind of turning point from what Mao had in mind. In Stalingrad there was a strong element of revolt against authority. It was the defensive battle that inspired morale and determination during a crucial period in the middle of the war. For a brief period the city, reduced to rubble, became the powerful symbol of the freedom of an entire nation.