SLSL (and GR) related book review: guess who else went down the sewer

[pynchonoid]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n23/asch01_.html
Hitler's Teeth by Neal Ascherson 
review of
_Berlin: The Downfall, 1945_ by Antony Beevor 

"[...]Near its close, the book summarises the bizarre
fate of Hitler's corpse. There was never any mystery
about its discovery, although it suited Stalin to
pretend that there was and he kept even Marshal Zhukov
in the dark. A Smersh counter-intelligence team
smuggled the remains out of the Chancellery garden and
had a positive identification from a dentist's
assistant within 48 hours. Yelena Rzhevskaya, a young
intelligence officer with a sense of humour, was given
charge of Hitler's upper and lower jaws in a cheap
jewellery box lined with red satin. Told she would be
shot if she lost it, she was still clutching the box
in one hand as she poured booze for the Smersh victory
party a few nights later. The jaws stayed with Smersh,
while the NKVD got the cranium. Both relics have now
turned up in the old Soviet archives. Headless Hitler
was hidden under a Soviet parade ground at Magdeburg,
until he was secretly dug up, cremated and flushed
down the sewers in 1970. [...]"


Lots of gory detail about the rape of German women by
occupying Russian soldiers, too -- another
absence/presence hovering in Pynchon's Zone, and a
shadow that P may first begin to illuminate in "The
Small Rain" where the occupying soliders make free
with the local women, a picture he elaborates in quite
a bit more detail in V.  


" [...] But Beevor accepts that 'altogether at least
two million German women' were raped, 'a substantial
minority' suffering multiple or gang rape. [...] he
dismisses the idea that Soviet hate propaganda and the
vengeful war-verse of Ilya Ehrenburg had much to do
with it. The hate was there already, and Beevor sees
it expressed in the horrible atrocities committed in
the first East Prussian villages reached by Soviet
troops when they crossed the German frontier. There,
gang-rape was accompanied by mutilation and murder;
the naked, crucified women found by German
counter-attack forces were filmed by the Nazis and
stiffened the will to fight on. As the war progressed,
however, Beevor identifies a second phase: the sadism
grew rarer, and soldiers simply helped themselves to
German women with a casual minimum of force, as if
they were looting a bottle of cognac or grabbing a
civilian's bicycle. Now the rapist (Frau, komm!) might
unpredictably offer his victim an endearment, or a
piece of sausage. A third phase, in occupied places
where all supply had broken down, replaced the need
for guns and violence with the need of starving women
to bargain their bodies for food. In a fourth,
according to Beevor, women were able to keep their
families alive and secure themselves against further
rape by setting up 'occupation wife' arrangements with
individual soldiers or officers. [...] 

The second unforgettable source is an 'anonymous
diarist', a young German woman who recorded all her
thoughts as well as her experiences. Bombardment,
rape, defeat and hunger all fell on her, but something
inside her stayed cool and amused. Even before Berlin
fell, she noted how women's feelings about men were
changing. 'We are sorry for them, they seem so
pathetic and lacking in strength . . . The
male-dominant Nazi world glorifying the strong man is
tottering, and with it the myth "man".' Soon the
Russians were in her street, taking turns to help
themselves in her kitchen and rape her in the bedroom.
But she and the women around her managed to fortify
themselves with grim humour; they noticed, for
instance, that the soldiers liked fat women best and
therefore grabbed the well-fed Nazi wives first. She
wound up as the possession of a cultivated Russian
major: a bargain of sex for groceries. And, as she had
foreseen, it was the returning German men who fell
apart, blubbering about 'whores' when they discovered
what the women now took almost for granted. [...] "


-Doug






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