Renaming St. Petersburg

View transcript: Renaming St. Petersburg

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Renaming St. Petersburg / Heiner Müller and News & Stories interview Daniil Granin / Commander of nine tanks before Königsberg 1945 / Russian poet, morally incorruptible / He has been compared to Heinrich Böll - -
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Leningrad 1918 / Now St. Petersburg again
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Advance of the German troops 1941 / The 900 days siege of Leningrad - -
Voice-over
[In Russian]
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Heavy tank “Josef Stalin”
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Daniil Granin
Daniil Granin
[In Russian]
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A poem by A. Pushkin about the beauty of St. Petersburg
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Rosemarie Tietze, translation
Granin (via translator from Russian)
I love Peter’s creation, I love your strictly harmonious appearance … something like that … the powerful river, the granite at its shore, your iron lattice fences with the pattern, the moonless resplendence of your nights. When I’m sitting in my room, reading without a light, and the clarity of the sleeping metropolis, the towers of the churches …
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“I love thee, city of Peter’s making; / I love thy harmonies austere, / And Neva’s sovran waters breaking / Along her banks of granite sheer; / Thy traceried iron gates; / thy sparkling, yet moouless, meditative gloom / And thy transparent twilight darkling; / And when I write within my room / Or lampless, read / then, sunk in slumber, The empty thoroughfares, past number, / Are piled, stand clear upon the night - -” / From the poem: The Bronze Horseman by Aleksandr Pushkin
Alexander Kluge
Pushkin wrote that. Could you briefly describe Leningrad for me?
Granin (via translator)
Leningrad, that is beauty, created by generations of very different architects: Italian, French, English, German, they all made their contributions. It’s a city that is situated in a very harmonious way in the midst of water, on the water. It’s not like Venice, though, which is immersed in water up to its neck, so to speak.
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Daniil Granin
Kluge
So Venice is up to its neck in water. This one is not up to its neck in water. Just up to its knees.
Granin (via translator)
It’s surrounded by water …
Kluge
Up to the belly.
Granin (via translator)
At the water.
Kluge
At the water.
Granin (via translator)
Maybe up to the belt sometimes, but it’s situated near the water.
Kluge
How do you feel about the fact that it’s called Petersburg now?
Heiner Müller
St. Petersburg.
Kluge
That it is called St. Petersburg?
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How do you feel about the fact that Leningrad is called St. Petersburg again?
Granin (via translator)
I was not a big fan of the change. Because one and a half, two generations of people have lived there under that name by now. Because people actually have emancipated themselves from the name Lenin, Leningrad stood for itself. Also, Leningrad is in such a difficult situation now.
Kluge
But why Saint? Peter the Great isn’t a saint after all.
Granin (via translator)
Well, because it’s not named after Peter the Great.
Kluge
But he founded it.
Granin (via translator)
And not in honor of Peter the … but in honor of Saint Peter, his patron saint.
Kluge
But everyone knows that’s a sham.
Granin (via translator)
No, it’s not a sham.
Kluge
But Peter … Peter the Great founded the city, erected it.
Granin (via translator)
But he would never have named it after himself. He named it after Saint Peter.
Heiner Müller
But the West sees the name as a glorification of Peter the Great.
Granin (via translator)
That’s the West’s business.
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Heiner Müller
Kluge
But isn’t it a strange coincidence that the founder of the city is aware of a Saint by the same name, who only plays a minor role in Byzantium?
Granin (via translator)
But why shouldn’t he have named the city in honor of his personal patron saint?
Kluge
Uh-uh.
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Mr. Granin, do you remember the day Leningrad was liberated?
Granin (via translator)
No, I don’t, because I wasn’t on the front lines in Leningrad anymore, I was in armor school.
Kluge
What does a … what kind of tank did you drive?
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Daniil Granin
Granin (via translator)
A heavy thank, an IS.
Kluge
The Joseph Stalin, yes. What does the inside of an IS look like, the inside of a Joseph Stalin? On the left, on the right …
Granin (via translator)
I was on the upper left. First I was the commander of a tank, and then of an entire tank division. In the end, I was … when the war ended, I was commander of a tank division.
Kluge
What does such a commander do?
Granin (via translator)
He gives his orders to the tanks via radio …. I had command over nine tanks. We crossed Estonia … then we were in East Prussia.
Kluge
Did you see Germans there, or did you simply move along the flanks?
Granin (via translator)
Of course we saw them.
Kluge
Yes, yes. But did you see them flee.
Granin (via translator)
Yes. Sometimes they were fleeing, sometimes they withdrew.
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An incident in a Russian forest.
Granin (via translator)
Two groups were walking along a forest path: a Soviet patrol and a German one. They ran into each other at a crossroads. The Soviet group jumped into the ditch on one side, the German group on the other side of the road. A young German soldier made the mistake of jumping into the same ditch as the Soviet group, and everyone started laughing. Both sides, ours as well as the Germans. And after that they just could not bear to shoot at each other. Eventually he ran over to his own people. Our guys went quietly in one direction in the ditch, the others went quietly in the other direction.
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An episode in the days before the siege of Leningrad 1941 / As commander, Granin has to retreat from the town Zarskoje Selo - -
Granin (via translator)
Something similarly weird also happened to me in the course of, at some point during the war. In fact, when we retreated from Zarskoje Selo, the headquarters of our regiment was at the palace, the palace of …
Kluge
Of Zarskoje Selo, the tsar’s palace.
Granin (via translator)
The palace of Tsarina Catherine. Something is always happening in these headquarters, people are coming and going … and as I already said, I was commander of the regiment back then, for two or three days. And suddenly one of the palace guards comes up to me and says: It’s impossible what your soldiers are doing here. They are walking across the parquet floor without felt slippers.
Kluge
Galoshes.
Granin (via translator)
They are ruining the parquet.
Kluge
In the middle of a war.
Granin (via translator)
We were supposed to hand over Pushkin a few hours later, and he says: I’m appalled at what you’re doing here. You as commander should put a stop to this. And he took me to a ballroom with an incredible parquet floor, expensive wood, and I suddenly realized that it was indeed scratched up, there were scratches from military boots, terrible scratches …
Kluge
What did you do?
Granin (via translators)
I told my soldiers not to walk through this ballroom anymore.
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A bitter experience in 1991 - -
Kluge
You were in Berlin, and near the Brandenburg Gate – you give an account of that in a story – and you observed marketeers, a flea market where they sold Soviet medals and Soviet uniforms. Could you tell me about your feelings in that moment?
Granin (via translator)
Well, that was definitely bitter. That almost … more than 40 years later, the victors are selling their uniforms next to the Reichstag. Of course that is a bitter feeling.
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Capture of the Reichstag / Berlin 1945
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The Soviet commander-in-chief visits the “Siegessäule”
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Why is Granin important?
Heiner Müller
Granin was very important for the GDR. Not just in regard to their cultural politics. He was something like a moral authority, I mean, he provided an ethical critique of the system that wouldn’t have been possible in the GDR yet.
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Heiner Müller
Kluge
In a roundabout way, could you …
Müller
Due to a lack of faith. And of course in reaction to current events. So, by using Soviet issues and materials, you could criticize the GDR. The GDR functionaries always displayed a certain arrogance towards the Soviets, that’s why it wasn’t that noticeable. They could always backtrack and say, it’s not like that here. Until the changing point came with Gorbachev, then nothing that was going on in the Soviet Union was possible anymore in the GDR. But Granin was an important figure for that.
Kluge
He has been compared to Böll on the one hand and to Hans Werner Richter on the other.
Müller
His position was very similar to Böll’s, yes. I met him in person only at the second meeting that Hermlin organized, these peace talks that also had a sort of subversive character, from the perspective of the politburo. And there was a reception after the second talk, Granin was there, he also had spoken, very harshly; and the Neues Deutschland had published articles about these meetings with totally distorted summaries of the presentations. They always twisted them into something positive, the critique was always rewritten as positive. And I remember that after the reception we were standing on the stairs in the state council building, and Granin was yelling at Hager because of these articles in the Neues Deutschland. Everyone was outraged, and with allusion to his Moscow connections, he demanded from Hager that everything would be printed the way it had been said. And it got printed. But never delivered to the booksellers. It remained an internal publication.
Kluge
He acted in a rather authoritarian way at times. In Nuremberg, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of May 8, 1945, after they showed a film about the destruction of Cologne, the bombing of Cologne, I heard him say that as Soviet patriots in ‘42, they had been pleased about such an air strike.
Müller
Pleased, yes.
Kluge
A sense of dismay in the room, and then a realization. That here was someone like an enemy, a confident enemy, who was not an enemy right now.
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… Mr. Granin, in 1941 you were 22 years old?
Kluge
You were 22 years old in 1941.
Granin (via translator)
Kluge
He was 21. If you could describe … did you live in Leningrad back then? What was it like for you, when the Germans showed up outside the city?
Granin (via translator)
So, the beginning of the war or the city?
Kluge
At, in the city, when they come …
Granin (via translator)
The very first day of the war, I enlisted immediately. I had worked in the Kirow factory back then, in fact, I was building tanks. I did not get drafted, because we were not allowed to join the army, so to speak. But then I tried again and again … then I finally managed to join the militia. And on July 4 we moved to the front. And that was somewhere near Luga. And we got off the train and right into a bombardment, our division was bombarded … that was a division made up of volunteers, they weren’t trained military. We didn’t have any weapons, we only had bottles with inflammable material.
Kluge
Molotov cocktails.
Granin (via translator)
I didn’t even have a gun. Then we got … everyone got two grenades. That means, we really weren’t armed at first. We pretty much had to defend ourselves with our bare chests, so to speak. We didn’t know how to fight at all, of course. We shot for the very first time. There were a few older people among us, master engineers, who had already fought in the civil war. They knew what war was, but what they knew was the war back then. Anyway … despite the terrible losses we experience, we stopped the Germans. For about two weeks we held them back, I think.
Kluge
And how did you do that?
Granin (via translator)
We shot. Threw ourselves in front of the tanks, threw the Molotov cocktails. They were simply … these, these militia people were very brave people. It was a kind of absolutely desperate courage. We thought we had a powerful army. We thought we were ready for war.
Kluge
We conquer Warsaw, we conquer Berlin.
Granin (via translator)
We thought that no one could fight a war against us in the first place anyway, because … as soon as there was contact with us, everyone would understand that you can’t fight proletarians.
Müller
Why not, because they are proletarians, or because they are so strong?
Granin (via translator)
Because they are proletarians. International solidarity, Workers of the world unite! … It’s impossible.
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Heiner Müller
Müller
And what was his motivation to keep trying to enlist? It took quite a while for him to get accepted, after all.
Granin (via translator)
That was my rebellion against this evil attack. A protest against fascism.
Kluge
One moment. Yesterday you said you were disarmed morally, you couldn’t just hate. Hate takes a long time.
Granin (via translator)
The war fueled the hate. But at first it was just protest, it was rage.
Kluge
Oh, and rage is enough to enlist. That alone doesn’t make you a soldier. And now you are … and how did you get back to Leningrad? Straight through the German frontline?
Granin (via translator)
Yes, through the frontline. We came through the frontline to Leningrad.
Kluge
How did you do that? So … did you see, did you hear the Germans?
Granin (via translator)
That was … the frontline still had weak points. We reached Leningrad, I was promoted to staff of our division, and I was sent to the area of Pushkin and Zarskoje Selo. The front had not quite reached Leningrad.
Kluge
Zarskoje Selo, as we say, right? That’s where the castles are.
Granin (via translator)
That’s where we set up our defense.
Müller
In your account of your first deployment at Leningrad … the regular troops retreat and observe, and everyone scatters across the territory, in the forest and … I keep noticing a misunderstanding about the Soviet Union, and also about Stalinism. We are so used to thinking in a centralist way – but perhaps that’s completely wrong. Even for Stalinism itself. And I have a question, for instance: Malaparte, I don’t know if you are familiar with him, he was a correspondent on the East Front during the first year, he reported on the advance of the German frontline in the Ukraine, the Finnish War, and also Leningrad. And Malaparte asked a question: Why did the siege in Leningrad last that long? Why didn’t the Germans take Leningrad? Which, he thinks, would have been possible, from a military perspective. And Malaparte has this theory – developed very much from an outsider perspective – about the old opposition between Leningrad and Moscow: that Leningrad was always a hostile foreign power for Stalin, and that it was even in Stalin’s interest to see the proletarian militia, or the vigilantes, as he says, destroyed, to consciously sacrifice them. Maybe that’s a weird question for him, but I’m curious to hear what he thinks about it.
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Could it be a misunderstanding to assume that Russia is a centralist country under Stalin’s rule?
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Heiner Müller
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Did Stalin want to sacrifice Leningrad? / Did the Germans not want to take Leningrad?
Granin (via translator)
I think that’s something that … it’s such a monarchic way of thinking, a monarchic view of history, to reduce everything to the figure of Stalin. And it certainly doesn’t apply to the first year of the war. The first year of the war was characterized by the fact that the people fought. The people reached for their weapons, the people saved the country. Why didn’t the Germans invade Leningrad? I have asked myself that question. I told you that I was supposed to be commander for a while after our commander had broken a leg. At first I thought it would just be for an hour or two until the displacement comes. But then it took a few days after all. Our division made an organized retreat from Pushkin and Zarskoje Selo on September 17, 1941. We left Pushkin at 5am. I remember that morning very well. The town was still asleep. And I so wanted to wake up the town people. We did – after all, we were retreating. The people came out to heat the public bathhouse, for example, we saw that during the retreat. The town wasn’t expecting the invasion of the Germans.
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Because he built tanks as an engineer at the Kirow factory, he was assigned temporary commander - -
Müller
How long did the siege last?
Granin (via translator)
900 days.
Kluge
So almost three years.
Granin (via translator)
900 days … until the blockade was eventually blown up.
Kluge
During the third winter.
Granin (via translator)
The entire time the Germans tried to take Leningrad. First they thought the city would just die. Then, when the “route of life” across Ladoga Lake was established, they tried to take it by assault from several points. Didn’t work out.
Kluge
The 11th army was moved up there after they had taken Sevastopol.
Granin (via translator)
The 11th army. Then … the Spanish were there too.
Kluge
The Blue Division.
Granin (via translator)
And it did … it didn’t work. How the Leningrad frontline could even persist is absolutely inexplicable to me today. Because we also were very hungry, after all, we had dystrophy, people got shipped off to military hospitals. Some defected to the Germans, because the Germans kept yelling: Here! Bread! Buns! Really, how the Leningrad front could hold, even though I was on the frontline myself, is absolutely inexplicable even for me. It was very quiet … well, in a relative sense, of course, but it was very quiet.
Müller
In this context, I remember a quote by Mao Tsetung who once said: National Socialism was unbeatable as long as it was in the offense. And what he describes can often be understood as a process: You shift from one gear into another, move to a different, slower speed … and …
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Mao Tsetung: “National Socialism was unbeatable as long as it was in the offense –”
Kluge
Whereas Russia, so to speak, is unbeatable in the defense.
Granin (via translator)
I think, of course you can develop these kinds of explanations now, but back then, when the Germans were approaching Leningrad, we had already noticed that it was possible to fight them. We just didn’t have enough tanks, not enough air force, but the infantry had learnt that it’s possible to handle the German infantry.
Kluge
But if you could go back to what you said yesterday: The moral disarmament. First the moral is ruined, or it appears too late, and then the weapons are defeated. Wasn’t it also a factor that the Germans didn’t associate anything with Leningrad? Who wants to live in Murmansk, who wants to own the swamps behind Leningrad? There were no images associated with that place. The force of the Blitzkrieg relied on the thought: The day after tomorrow I’ll have breakfast in Bordeaux or Paris. And fast as lightning I’ll mail the stockings I bought in Paris back home to my wife. But which way is the lightning supposed to go in direction Vladivostok? There’s no route to Vladivostok via Leningrad. The dominant fantasy during the entire war, even for the strategists, was to move south. Sunny Crimea, that was a goal. Tiflis – warmth, palm trees, camels.
Granin (via translator)
That’s probably true. Because the soldier’s psyche needs short-term goals. The soldier’s life is very short and thus he simply needs short-term goals.
Kluge
High-speed goals. Short-term goals.
Granin (via translator)
But there’s one problem. Actually something very interesting, an ethical condition. When we were outside Leningrad to defend it, we always felt like Leningrad was behind us. If that had been another city, we wouldn’t have kept standing. But Leningrad, with its castles, its architecture, the Hermitage, with Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol. With its beauty, its white nights – that was a presence behind us. If it had been a normal city … or simply an empty spot, place … then we wouldn’t have been able to withstand.
Kluge
Empty spot, sure. But at the same time the people of Rostov defended Rostov, for example, and they had only a totally pathetic museum.
Translator
They did?
Kluge
A pathetic museum, so nothing like white nights, a long bridge. And in Stalingrad there’s barely anything at all. It seems obvious that the locals would be the strongest when it comes to defense. You don’t know if the people of Rostov would have defended Leningrad.
Granin (via translator)
Of course they would have defended Leningrad, there were other people on the frontline, after all, not just people from Leningrad. But Leningrad in general is a city of traditions, of historical merit, a huge historical … and that simply had an effect. When we saw the airplanes fly over us every day, German airplanes bomb the city, and behind us columns of smoke from the fires rose to the sky – that had a terrible effect on us.
Müller
There is a counter-example I remembered just now. The GDR border patrol. At the border in Thuringia, there weren’t any Thuringians, but they were from Mecklenburg. In Mecklenburg, in Mecklenburg at the border were Thuringians, or Saxons. At the Berlin Wall, there were no Berliners. That was basically the death sentence for this country from the outset, that …
Kluge
That is a Prussian tradition – send the Alsatians to East Prussia, the East Prussians westwards. It’s a form of abstract allegiance. And for this … actually, that could have also been a Stalinist method, but they didn’t have time for that.
Granin (via translator)
Probably, yes. Because the respective units always met up on-site, and there was no possibility to transport the troops from one place to another.
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Daniil Granin
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… Mr. Granin, what kind of experience was New Year’s Eve during the war for you?
Kluge
Could you tell me about New Year’s Eve, that means the turn of the year 1942/43?
Granin (via translator)
‘42/43 I don’t remember, but I do remember ‘41/42. That was a very strange New Year’s. Because one of our scouts went out to a German dugout where he was supposed to drop a grenade.
Kluge
When you say grenade, you always mean hand grenade?
Granin (via translator)
Uh-uh. And there was a table that was set marvelously … a set table, and there was canned food, and we were all so hungry. He just could not throw a hand grenade, it just wasn’t possible. This luxury – no. He simply grabbed the table cloth and took everything. He wrapped the entire food in this cloth …
Kluge
Where were the Germans?
Granin (via translator)
… he ran out, and then he threw the hand grenade afterwards. And the scout came back to us with his table cloth.
Kluge
Scout means patrol, or what is a scout?
Granin (via translator)
Well, the scout, the patrol of this particular regiment. They were just trying to find out what kind of firearms the enemy had.
Kluge
And the Germans were absent at the time?
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Rosemarie Tietze, translation
Granin (via translator)
They were somewhere nearby, but there was shooting, and someone … got injured, two of ours got injured. Anyway, he took all the preserves, the wine … and that’s how we celebrated New Year’s Eve!
Kluge
And here he arrives, loaded with spoils, and that’s how you celebrated New Year’s Eve! And 1945, what was New Year’s like that year?
Granin (via translator)
At that time I was already in Leningrad.
Kluge
Fixing the electric power.
Granin (via translator)
Of course that was a wonderful New Year’s. It was such a joy, this New Year’s Eve. You know, this feeling that we freed the whole world and our country, and that a completely new and incredible future was ahead of us, that everything would be different now. It was such a wonderful New Year’s.
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Reopening of the railway service between Leningrad and Moscow after the end of the siege - -
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St. Petersburg
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DOPPELMAGAZIN. DOUBLE ISSUE
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Renaming St. Petersburg / Heiner Müller and News & Stories interview Daniil Granin / Commander of nine tanks before Königsberg 1945 / Russian poet, morally incorruptible / He has been compared to Heinrich Böll - -
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NEWS & STORIES
Voice-over
[Russian]