The German-Russian Museum at Karlshorst

Writers describing a place in which some event of importance occurred will often stress the apparent “normality” of that place. This literary device plays on our expectation that great historical events ought to have taken place in cities, halls, mountains, plains and so on, that have a corresponding ambiance of greatness about them. It creates an intriguing disjuncture. It is not a bad way of easing the reader into an article.

A sterling candidate for this ordinary-place-extraordinary-events conceit may be found in a quiet suburb of eastern Berlin known as Karlshorst. Here, only a brief walk from the local railway station, sits the German-Russian Museum.

There is not a great deal to recommend Karlshorst as a tourist attraction in its own right. While it has all of the grit of nearby Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg (four decades of East German urban planning will do that to a place), it lacks the countercultural spark that has made these two districts such international bohemian meccas. Perhaps one day Karlshorst will attract flocks of peripatetic Britons and Australians, but in the meantime Karlshorst really could be anywhere in the German-speaking world. It has a little S-Bahn station (one can get a train to Schönefeld airport from here), a discount supermarket of distinctly spartan layout, and a handful of chain bakery cafés. Eating a pastry and drinking some thick coffee at one of these last, I more or less exhausted most of Karlshorst’s non-commemorative charms.

Walking up a winding suburban street, encouraged by signposts, you come to a large grey box with a pointed roof, clearly built on the cheap at some point in the first half of the twentieth century. A small concrete portico betrays the half-hearted neoclassical ambitions of its architects. This is the German-Russian Museum, truly one of the most moving testaments to the horror of war I have yet encountered.

The flags of Germany, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine flutter outside in the breeze. Floral wreaths in the Russian white-blue-red tricolour sit at the base of a T-34 tank mounted on a plinth; its jaunty pose somehow suggests forward motion. On its turret are painted the words “For the motherland!” Beside the tank, above another Russian flag wreath, written in gold on a granite wall is an exhortation to future generations never to forget the deeds of the heroes of the Red Army in delivering them from the tyranny of fascism.

If you asked the proverbial man or woman on the street to guess where the European theatre of the most destructive war in human history came to an end, it is likely that he or she would correctly guess, “Berlin”. Yet I imagine that few would guess that the ceremony itself took place in so humble a structure as this. It seems odd that a peace of such world-historical import should have been concluded here, in quiet, leafy Karlshorst. This, after all, was History with a capital H, History as Hegel and Marx spoke of it. The occasion seemed to demand a palace, or a great hall of state, at the very least. The mind casts around: the Garrison Church in Potsdam, perhaps, or some old Hohenzollern retreat. Yet on May 8, 1945, in what was previously the mess hall of this rather unremarkable building, Soviet, American, British and French representatives accepted the total and unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The war in Europe was over: tens of millions lay dead, and the continent lay in ruins. But it was over. As the Russian motto at the entrance reads, “Glory to the great victory!”

Before the war, the building in Karlshorst was a Wehrmacht military academy. It seems fitting, in a way, that German militarism should come to breathe its last here. Indeed, I mean this almost literally: the leader of the German delegation, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, would be hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes the following year, and the representative of the German navy, General-Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, took a lethal dose of cyanide just a fortnight after the ceremony.

After the war, the building became the nerve-centre of the Soviet military administration in occupied Germany, with Stalin’s chosen potentates occupying a surprisingly humble office adjoining the main hall. From here, men with red stars on their caps ruled the ruins of the empire that had once given its all to destroy them.

From the hall of surrender the visitor passes up a flight of stairs to the main museum, chronicling the ravaged years leading up to the surrender. The exhibition is unflinching in the fashion typical of Soviet and Russian commemoration of the war, indeed, the only form of commemoration possible for a nation that lost more than 20 million of its people.

Throughout the museum I thought of Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece Come and See. In perhaps the most harrowing film ever put to celluloid, a young Belarusian boy named Flyora is drawn into the hell-world of the German occupation, digging an old rifle from beneath the sandy soil and joining the partisans in the forest. Sure enough, I found a poster for the film hanging in the basement, with young Flyora’s terrified face superimposed on Dürer’s all-too-apt woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. To those seeking a less theological metaphor, I suggest the image invoked by Hegel in his lectures: Geschichte als Schlachtbank—history as the slaughtering-bench.

To the people of the occupied Soviet Union, it must have felt as if the Lamb had opened the fourth seal, and let Death loose upon the world “to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth” (indeed, it was from this sixth chapter of the Book of Revelation that Klimov took the title for his film). Such ends are associated with a great reckoning, a final dispensing of justice from which none will be able to escape.

As Hitler’s armies stormed across European Russia towards Moscow, this dread penetrated even the fortress walls of the Kremlin: the invasion marked perhaps the only time in the man of steel’s public life that he lost his nerve, vacillating between depression and paralysis in the days after the first German divisions began to roll across the border. At one point he threw up his hands after a meeting with his chief lieutenants and lamented that he had “fucked up” the “great inheritance” left to him by Lenin. In one of the shameless ideological reversals that were his trademark, Stalin even seemed to find God, reinstating the Orthodox Church’s previously suppressed Moscow Patriarchate in order to stir Russian hearts.

It is difficult to overstate the horror of the occupation of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it is hard to find words to describe it at all: they seem to do a service to the truth either in their inadequacy or their hyperbole. As Hofmannthal’s Lord Chandos said, the words seem to disintegrate in the mouth (or on the page) like rotting mushrooms. How, then, are these horrors to be conveyed to future generations?

One of the twentieth century’s most frequently quoted lines is the quip, most often attributed to Stalin, that while a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is merely a statistic. Regardless of who said it (the pedant in me demands that I point out that it was in fact Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front), the fundamental insight of the remark is undeniable. It is a depressing reflection both on ourselves and on the past hundred years of our history that we have come to be so desensitised to the scope of man’s inhumanity to man. But this tendency may be fought, I argue, by looking to the photographs at Karlshorst.

These images, the twentieth century’s terrifying answer to the war-albums of Jacques Callot and Francisco Goya, make real the terrifying reality of the occupation for individual men, women and children. In looking at these images, taken at close quarters, we remember that though many may be killed in quick succession at a given moment (a hail of machine-gun fire, a shell, the death chamber at a concentration camp), each death was an individual event, an individual tragedy (what was the original German title of Hans Fallada’s novel? Jeder stirbt für sich allein—Every Man Dies Alone?), with its own unique set of personal, familial and social ramifications.

We see the corpses of women raped and murdered by the Germans in the Crimea. Komsomoltsyi—that is to say, children, members of the Soviet approximation of the boy scouts and girl guides—hanged in Volokolamsk, north-west of Moscow. A peasant woman forced to wade through the shallows of a river in order to search for mines. Before, during and after photos of a mass shooting of suspected partisans at Vyazma. A German soldier’s nauseating boast about his participation in a gang rape somewhere in the seventh circle of Hell that was the occupied Soviet Union: “Man,” he says of his victims, “how they swore!”

But I feel I must move on.

Posters hang suspended in the air. These are images (more images!) in the great Russian patriotic tradition, the tradition still put on display every May at the parades in Red Square. The first and most famous of these posters, produced within days of the German invasion, depicts a middle-aged woman in brilliant scarlet peasant garb, a woman perfectly portrayed to evoke mother or grandmother to millions of military-aged Russian men. She holds the Red Army oath in one hand while the other swings in a hortatory arc towards the sky: “The motherland”—the poster uses a slightly atypical Russian-language formulation of the term that literally includes the word mother—“calls!” Another plays upon these men’s sentiments towards their sisters, wives and lovers, and indeed makes an appeal to these women themselves (let us not forget the 800,000 female soldiers who fought in the Red Army during the war): “Fascism is the greatest enemy of woman!”

Others appeal to these men’s capacities as protectors, as warriors embodying old masculine ideals. A young, shawled woman clutching her young son is threatened with a bloodied, beswastika’d bayonet: “Red Army soldier: save us!” Or: “The Germans eat the bread of our children!” Or: a bearded partisan, righteousness burning in his eyes, materialises from behind a tree to bayonet a fascist soldier. Moving towards 1945, the tone of these posters at once lightens and grows more determined: one of the most heartening of these, produced near the very end of the war, features a Soviet soldier stroking his luxuriant moustache on Unter den Linden, declaring with a fierce grin that he’ll smoke every last fascist out from their lairs.

I was alone in the museum but for the man at the desk and a Russian father and son who followed a room or two behind me as I wandered through the exhibition. I wondered what personal or familial connection tied them to the horrors depicted in the museum’s photographs and testimonies: given that the war claimed some 20 per cent of the Soviet Union’s population, the odds were that that connection, whatever it was, was a visceral and very real one. The two of them caught up with me behind the museum, where the interested visitor may find some assorted Red Army materiel: another tank, artillery pieces, a Katyusha rocket launcher (once famed and feared for its screech, now silent).

How it would have heartened the operators of these machines to know that one day they would sit, peaceful and unused in a sleepy suburb of Berlin, for the quiet contemplation of their descendants!