Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
90 practices of remembrance
occupied by the German army after the expulsion of Russian in-
vaders in eastern Prussia following the rout at Tannenberg in August
1914. There were reversals—and the Brusilov o√ensive of 1916 threat-
ened to move the front west. But most of the time, the front stayed in
the east.
A Russian wartime joke caught the essentials of the military
balance—or rather imbalance—of power on the Eastern Front. In
this apocryphal story, a cease-fire has enabled two patriotic soldiers,
one Russian, one German, to exchange views as to who was wiser,
nobler, and braver, the Kaiser or the Tsar. The German soldier
proudly salutes his Kaiser, who, each time there is an o√ensive on the
Eastern Front, puts on his uniform, and rushes from Berlin directly
to the front to salute the army. The Russian soldier is prouder still.
‘‘Our Tsar is even wiser. Every time there is an o√ensive, he sits in his
palace and lets the front come to him.’’
∞≤
After the last major and disastrous Russian o√ensive of the war,
in July 1917, it was not only the front which moved east, but the bulk
of the Russian army, who, as Trotsky put it, voted with their feet
against the war. And then, after the second Russian Revolution of
1917, the new regime under the Bolsheviks sued for peace.
Russians soon discovered that German terms were very harsh,
amounting to the creation of a vast satellite empire, either directly or
indirectly controlled by Germany. The intention was that the Rus-
sian and Ukrainian ‘‘breadbasket’’ would produce a cornucopia of
goods to compensate the hard-pressed German home front for the
material sacrifices they had made during the war. In response, Trot-
sky tried to stall and to negotiate a space of ‘‘no war—no peace,’’ and
thereby to bypass these harsh German demands. After the break-
down of talks at Brest-Litovsk, the German army simply moved
farther east, into the heartland of Russia, and the old Pale of Settle-
ment. By March 1918, when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed,
ending the war in Russia, the German army was in occupation of
Photography and Remembrance 91
much of European Russia. And even after the war in the east had
formally ended, in March 1918, and two million soldiers moved west
to support the vast o√ensive aimed at breaking the Allies on the
Western Front, there were still one million German and Austrian
soldiers stationed in the territory of what had formerly been the
Russian Empire. Bardach was one of them.
The army’s role in that occupation was complex. Some of it was
purely administrative; some of it was repressive. There is a wealth of
documentation about this aspect of the war in the Bibliothek für
Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart. Among the documents in that collection
is a fly sheet in five languages—German, Yiddish, Polish, White Rus-
sian, and Russian—announcing the penalties the local populace
faced if they did not license their dogs. Much more important edicts
faced the same linguistic maze. The German army was responsible
for order and sanitation, both extremely di≈cult to maintain in
wartime. The control of a displaced civilian population was a vir-
tually impossible task. The numbers were overwhelming. One esti-
mate has it that one in five residents of European Russia was a
refugee by 1916.
∞≥
It is this ambulant population, as well as those
desperately trying to stick to their villages, their families, their live-
lihood, that German soldiers like Bernhard Bardach encountered
during the war.
Many of the photographs taken by this extraordinary doctor
show some of the face of this vast corner of the conflict. There are
photographs of hospital work alongside some images of prostitutes,
who were screened by the army medical corps to limit the spread of
venereal disease and prevent it from crippling the whole of the Ger-
man army (fig. 4). There are images of typhus wards, and the con-
stant e√ort of washing and cleaning to prevent the outbreak of
epidemic disease and to repair its ravages. There are also scenes of
the army at rest, or hunting game with hounds, or putting on a
concert for the local population. There is a field cinema to bring to
92 practices of remembrance
Fig. 4. Prostitutes shielding their faces. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute,
New York)
the east the latest in the doings of the film industry, beleaguered as it
was by the shortage of Western films. And there are a number of
photographs of Bardach the artist, drawing and painting in his spare
time some of the rural scenes which had managed to withstand the
ravages of war (fig. 5).
Other photographs are more somber. He captured images of
villages on fire, villages destroyed, spies strung up (figs. 6–8). He
recorded sights of carnage, with bodies strewn haphazardly across
the landscape. And time and again, the photographs return to the
tension between a modern war in a very unmodern environment.
Flame throwers operate in a vast hinterland untouched by the
sources of such new weaponry (fig. 9). Airplanes appear, and then,
to make a point, the more familiar mode of transport—horses—tow
them to their hangars (fig. 10). The army too was loathe to shed
some of the vestiges of older forms of combat. Uhlans, Bardach’s
camera shows us, strode across the Eastern Front months, even
Photography and Remembrance 93
Fig. 5. Bardach the artist at work. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck In-
stitute, New York)
94 practices of remembrance
Fig. 6. Village burning on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck
Institute, New York)
Fig. 7. Village destroyed on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck
Institute, New York)
Photography and Remembrance 95
Fig. 8. Spy strung up on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the
Leo Baeck Institute, New York)
years, after they were blown o√ the landscape of the battles in the
west. A vanishing world indeed.
The scale and complexity of the Eastern Front defies any attempt
to capture it in the gaze of a single man. But some features of the
old, fixed in photographic images by Bardach, had a specifically Jew-
ish character. He photographed the Great synagogue in Brest, along-
side the old cemetery, filled with tombstones at odd angles covering
96 practices of remembrance
Fig. 9. Flame throwers on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck
Institute, New York)
Fig. 10. Airplane hauled by horses on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the Leo
Baeck Institute, New York)
Photography and Remembrance 97
Fig. 11. Old man with a sack, at an unspecified location in Volhynia, c. 1916.
(Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York)
generations of Jewish families in a patchwork blanket of stone. These
photographs are poignant in part because they show the features of
the old Jewish world in the east of Europe in the first phase of its
fragmentation. Bardach was very sensitive to the contours of this
world and to the faces of the people who inhabited it. He captured
the face of a Jewish pedlar, his back bent by his bag of wares, and the
shape of a family—probably refugees—pausing for prayer in a field
(figs. 11, 12). He saw the rhythms of daily life in the shtetl, the towns
where the bulk of the Jewish population lived, and captured them on
film (fig. 13).
Pogroms and hardship had impelled much of this vast popula-
tion of Jews out of Poland and Tsarist Russia before the 1914–18 war.
But the Jews Bardach encountered had also known another series of
calamities during the Great War itself. When Russian armies fled
east, after the defeats of 1914 and 1915, Jewish villages were torched
and looted, and their inhabitants raped and killed. It is no irony to
98 practices of remembrance
Fig. 12. A Jewish family, probably refugees, pausing for prayer in a field. (Cour-
tesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York)
Fig. 13. Daily life in the shtetl, c. 1916. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New
York)
Photography and Remembrance 99
say that advancing German army units were seen as liberators of
some Jewish communities, reduced by fire and slaughter to a miser-
able state.
∞∂
And yet we must not be too sanguine about the nature of the
Germany army’s encounter with both the Jewish and non-Jewish
population occupied during hostilities. Occupation is never a clean
operation. Injustices occur; su√ering is inevitable. There is some
evidence that Jews were treated more harshly than the rest of the
occupied population. There was forced labor, ironically bringing the
Östjuden to Germany against their will.
∞∑
And the indigenous popu-
lation did su√er from a host of diseases, and were reduced to appall-
ing levels of poverty. Bardach’s Jewish consciousness, evident in his
proud choice of Jewish subjects, was, of course, exceptional. It is not
too di≈cult to imagine what many other German and Austrian
soldiers made of this primitive, otherworldly population of poor
Jews. It is likely that in some elements of the German and Austrian
armies, the encounter with Yiddish-speaking, inward-looking, im-
poverished Jews was a moment in which curiosity led to contempt,
which in turn led to racial hatred. Anti-Semitism grew in Germany
and Austria because of the war. It grew too out of the encounter
between German soldiers and Östjuden during the long years of
occupation in the east.
It is thus apparent why this particular occupation was a terrible
portent. The vast territories in the east, encountered for the first
time by millions of ordinary Germans and Austrians, were indeed a
field of conquest between 1914 and 1918. There and only there the
Germans won the war. In contrast, no matter what the architects of
the Dolchstosslegende said, the war in the west was lost on the bat-
tlefield. Not so in the east. Nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s saw
that if German power were ever to expand again, the record of
warfare in the east suggests clearly where that role would be worked
out. It would be in Ostland, in the vast hinterland of Poland and