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THE ART OF IDENTITY

AND MEMORY TOWARD A CULTURAL HISTORY

OF THE TWO WORLD WARS

IN LITHUANIA

Edited by GIEDRE JANKEVICIUTE and RASUTE ZUKIENE

With a Preface by VEJAS GABRIEL LIULEVICIUS

Boston

2016

LITHUANIAN STUDIES

SERIES EDITOR

DARIUS STALIUNAS (Lithuanian Institute of History)

EDITORIAL BOARD

ZENONAS NORKUS (Vilnius University) SHAUL STAMPFER (Hebrew University) GIEDRIUS SuBACIUS (University of Illinois at Chicago)

ACA� STUDIES P R E S S

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Creating the Future of Lithuania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-61811-507-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-618rr-508-9 (electronic) ©Academic Studies Press, 2016

Cover design by Ivan Grave Book design by Kryon Publishing www.kryonpublishing.com

Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Preface Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

vi

Foreword Giedre Jankeviciute and Rasute Zukiene

viii

CHAPTER 1: The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna Laimonas Briedis

CHAPTER 2: Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists Laima Lauckaite-Surgailiene

CHAPTER 3: The Diaries of Death Agne Narusyte

CHAPTER 4: Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II Giedre Jankeviciute

CHAPTER 5: Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in

25

55

85

Germany in 1945-1950 139 Rasute Zukiene

CHAPTER 6: The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania 175 Rasa Antanaviciute

CHAPTER 7: The Limits of the Blockade Archive 203 Natalija Arlauskaite

CHAPTER 8: Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna 241 Larisa Lempertiene

CHAPTER 9: World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music of the Lithuanian Diaspora and Soviet Lithuania 257 Ruta Staneviciute

Authors 287

List of Illustrations 292

Index 301

Preface

For the past several decades, fascinating scholarship has been produced

on the cultural history of the two world wars. The works of Paul Fussell,

George Mosse, John Keegan, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker,

Jay Winter, and others pointed the way toward a fuller integration of the

ideological, intellectual, cultural, and political elements that were needed

for a more comprehensive understanding of this violent period, from 1914

to 1945.

As it recedes in time from us, the era of the world wars can increas­

ingly appear as a modern Thirty Years' War. And this emerging perspective

can allow us to perceive in new ways, and with greater accuracy, the

commonalities, linkages, evolutions, and passions that drove these conflicts

of an unprecedented scale, and how they were remembered and repre­

sented afterwards. Yet such recent scholarship in cultural history has

focused mostly on Western Europe, without fully including the experi­

ence of East-Central and Eastern Europe in this devastating period.

Indefensible as they are, the compartmentalizations of the bygone Cold

War endure, with postcommunist regions still left out of the enlarged

narrative.

The present volume, however, is a distinctive contribution to help

remedy this problem. Themes that are universal ( exile, loss, trauma,

survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts

at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and

its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern

European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.

This collection presents new research on a rich and varied cast of

characters: German soldiers of the Kaiser strolling the streets of Vilnius

and becoming military personifications of Walter Benjamin's celebrated

jlaneur; German-Jewish artists fascinated by the depth of Lithuanian

Preface

Jewish life revealed before them; a contemporary photographer whose

archival digging unearths vast troves of photographs of doomed civilians

subjected to Soviet repression; freezing artists struggling to keep the will

to create under Nazi occupation, then dealing with loss of homeland in

refugee camps; composers seeking to give musical form to their vision of

war. The studies also reveal paradoxical and telling dynamics: how (in

explicit contrast to the hallowed British memory of the Great War)

memory of World War I was sidelined in Lithuania under a series of very

different governmental systems; how the sorrowful genre of "memorial

books" for Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust was antici­

pated in the interwar genre of German-Jewish artists and writers recalling

their wartime encounter with these places; how the virtual archives

produced by documentary films of tragedies like the siege of Leningrad

open larger questions of representation and historical accuracy. There is

special merit in these texts when they explicitly engage comparisons with

other national experiences: British, Latvian, and French. Most of all, these

studies raise strikingly new questions and themes for further research.

Taken together, this evocative and wide-ranging set of studies is a

forceful demonstration of how much the experience of this region, largely

neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on

the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of

achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on

to meet it.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Lindsay Young Professor of History

Director, Center for the Study of War and Society

University of Tennessee, USA

vii

Foreword

This collection of studies focuses on the interaction between war and art,

or, more specifically, on the present impact of World Wars I and II on visual

art, photography, literature, and music created in the territory of Lithuania.

The various authors examine how war affected art and its creators, and the

public relationship of both during and after hostilities. These scholars hold

the view that the trauma of World War II affected several postwar genera­

tions in Europe, forming their identity. Conflicts emerging in our own days

that threaten to provoke civilizational transformations spur us to reflect

once again on the effects of both world wars of the twentieth century on

Europe's culture and the self-concept of its peoples.

Given their global scale and modern means of devastation, the last

century's two world wars were among humanity's most destructive expe­

riences in history. They provoked radical changes in the lifestyles, beliefs,

and values of nations, social groups, and individuals. Scholars of military,

political, and social history certainly have studied and continue to study

these changes, which have been and continue to be the subject of docu­

mentary and literary works and of films. Art historians, however, have so

far not shown sufficient interest in culture during eras of war. They have

tended either to seek inspiring leaps of patriotism in such art or to assert

that war is detrimental to artistic creation, and thus conclude that works

of art produced in conditions of war do not merit closer enquiry. Research

into artistic culture lets us identify issues that are important for a deeper

understanding of any historical situation and, of particular importance,

analyze the link between personal and social experience-this requires

that we change our mind-set concerning the importance of artistic culture

in historical studies, especially culture produced and lived during war.

On the one hand, scholarship in the area of the humanities changed

during the 1970s: art history embraced the social theory of culture and the

Foreword

tools of inquiry offered by microhistory, and it also underwent a conver­gence with research on visual culture. Application of these new approaches made it clear once more that the interpretation of artifacts is a reliable means of awakening historical imagination and thus also of relating the present to the past. This collective study arose within the field of New Art History and is the fruit of changes in the discipline of art history.

On the other hand, our book testifies to a watershed in research on the history of Central and Eastern European countries. The region has long been marginalized in general historical studies because it has nothing to say in major contexts. World War I's impact on these countries has been linked to the independent statehood they achieved upon the collapse of empires at the end of the war and has been interpreted exclusively in terms of geopolitics. The effects of World War II have been examined as a conse­quence of the postwar division of Europe, which imprisoned the entire region in the Soviet sphere of influence. Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and, all the more, western territories of the Soviet Union, such as Lithuania, were absent from the grand narrative regarding Europe at war. In speaking about World War II, the Baltic countries have appeared as "bloodied lands" -a space of mass killings without clear contours and, above all, a site of the horrific Jewish Catastrophe. Only a small group of specialists knew and used in scholarly works the terms Ober Ost ( the administrative district created in 1915 in the western part of the Russian empire that was occupied by imperial Germany's eastern front army) and Ost land ( the administrative district in 1941-44 of Third Reich-occupied Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, part of Belarus, and part of Poland, with its capital in Riga). At present the situation is changing, and quite forcefully. Scholars of cultural studies and political history have suddenly realized that their research was frozen solid by Cold War discourse.

The cultural heritage of the war years-regarding World Wars I and II-had been dealt with through the prism of communist ideology. Inside the Communist bloc, research in this area was forced throughout the Cold War period to serve the needs of ideology. And artistic culture was treated accordingly, selecting what was suited to the official war narrative and disregarding other artists and their works. As a result, it was impossible to investigate, for example, the feelings or observations of a German artist ix

Foreword

who, along with the army, ended up in Lithuania at the time of World War I. Yet this matter expands our knowledge of early twentieth-century Europe, attesting to the varied imagery born in the minds of the people of that

time. The world stretching out east from Germany was a revelation to the artists who worked in Lithuania in the years of World War I, such as writer Arnold Zweig or expressionist painters Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Magnus Zeller. Authors Paul Fechter, Hans Frentz, and Sammy Gronemann, along with artists Walter Buhe, Alfred Holler, and Hermann Struck, discovered exotic Jewish Vilnius-an island of the medieval East and traditional reli­

gious Jewish culture unexpectedly opened up to the modern West. Taboo under the communist regime were not just an analysis of the wartime clash of ideologies and research into their strategies and vocabulary using examples of visual art but also art for private consumption, works that

held up human dignity in a reality of occupation that trampled on such dignity. Over many decades, the paintings, graphic art, and sculptures of many Lithuanian, Polish, and Jewish artists awaited their hour in dark corners of museums and private collections. These works had soaked up the pain, hopes, and unrest of their authors and contemporaries, along with brief moments of happiness and rare flashes of creative genius amid

the prevailing repressive culture. Studies of migration were forbidden, and this prevented any grasp of the scope of the changes of the era. Yet demo­graphic changes-with massive waves of migration from the East to the West motivated by political transformations (in our case, from Lithuania to Poland, Germany, and France; from Europe to the United States; and

from the Soviet Union to Lithuania)-radically altered the culture of Central and Eastern European countries and that culture's expression in literature, fine arts, photography, cinema, and music.

Another thing that is encouraging local military and political histo­

rians to overcome past ideological viewpoints is the attention by Western scholars to the twentieth-century history of the Baltic countries. Cultural studies so far have advanced in a rather narrow circle. They seek to reveal

the peculiarities of the local culture in two ways: by using comparatist

methods and by going deeper into local vicissitudes. The latter approach so far dominates, since a lack of sources forces specialists in the wartime

x artistic culture of the Baltic countries, including Lithuania, to pay special

Foreword

attention to the gathering and analysis of facts. Cultural heritage always suffers great losses in times of war. Artistic monuments perish, as do sources documenting them. Moreover, the Soviet totalitarian regime for decades denied people the opportunity to share memories that did not fit the official grand narrative, thereby eliminating any chance that a corpus of ego-documents or an oral history might form. Thus the authors of this collective study extensively employ a fact-based approach. In this respect, the book is intriguing and innovative, full of stirring discoveries.

It was the need to question the established approach based on binary oppositions-enemies and friends, victims and executioners, winners and losers-and to delimit the marks that the two world wars left on the history of Lithuania in light of new research material that led a group of scholars specialized in different fields-architecture, visual art, and literature-to join forces. Art historians Giedre Jankeviciute, Laima Lauckaite-Surgailiene, and Rasute Zukiene, literary scholars Laimonas Briedis and Larisa Lempertiene, and history of art and architecture PhD student Rasa Antanaviciute (whose doctoral advisor was Giedre Jankev­iciute) decided in early 2013 to analyze the results of their individual

research through seminars and discussions. They would then summarize the conclusions and, on this basis, start to build a common platform for systematic research into artistic culture in Lithuania and neighboring countries during the two world wars, a platform open also to other scholars interested in this region. The project, called "Culture, Identity, and Memory: Lithuania during the Two World Wars;' is headed by Rasute

Zukiene and financed by the Lithuanian Research Council. Three other scholars, Natalija Arlauskaite, Agne Narusyte, and Ruta Staneviciute, from other fields of research (cinema, photography, and music, respectively) were invited by the editors of this volume to share their insights, which broadened the perspective offered by the core group.

The result of the initiative is the present collective study of the influ­ence of war on the cultural life of Lithuania. Most of its authors speak about German-occupied Lithuania during World Wars I and II, without touching on the topic of the Soviet occupation. They address and analyze several crucial areas: conditions and forms of artistic life during the period of occupation; participants in the art scene and their activities; reflections xi

xii

Foreword

of war in works of art and the significance of artistic work under the

conditions of occupation and exile; and, finally, the impact of memory of

the two world wars on Lithuanian culture.

The studies are presented in English to avoid the language barrier

that has tended to keep Central and Eastern Europe largely out of reach

for the West. We hope that this publication will facilitate communication

among scholars of the various countries in the region and will encourage

new research on the Baltic countries' artistic culture in twentieth-century

periods of conflict.

The first thematic group of the collection consists of studies by

Laimonas Briedis and Laima Lauckaite-Surgailiene devoted to Vilnius/

Wilna/Vilna during the years of World War I, or, more precisely, to the

German perception of the city. In Chapter 1, Briedis explores the relation­

ship between the conquered city and its conqueror-the German soldier

of the Great War. The focus of his narrative is a German literary figure, the

theoretician of expressionism Paul Fechter, who lived in Vilnius/Wilna

during the years of World War I and wrote a book about his walks around

the city. Briedis analyzes Fechter's text in the context of German expres­

sionism, relating its author's approach with the tradition of the French

flaneur, reconstructing the subjective experience of his character and the

feeling of freedom that he personally experienced in the presence of

marching troops, and his ability to wonder in the face of war. In Chapter

2, Lauckaite-Surgailiene analyzes the image of Jewish Vilna in the works

of German artists residing in the city. An air of contradiction and ambiv­

alence prevails, amid intertwined admiration and repulsion, as the

influence of propaganda and ideology combines with authentic artistic

reflection.

The second group of papers, by Agne Narusyte, Giedre Jankeviciute,

and Rasute Zukiene, focuses on World War II and its repercussions on

Lithuanian society and culture. They delve into the processes that took

place in the middle of the twentieth century and analyze how visual art

and photography reflected the experiences and values of civilians who

lived in the occupied country. In Chapter 3, Narusyte looks at an archive

of photographs that contemporary Lithuanian artist K�stutis Grigaliunas

has collected from the files of KGB criminal cases opened during the first

d Foreword

Soviet occupation, in 1940-41, for his on-going project The Diaries of

Death. The presence of studio portraits, snapshots, and documentary

photographs from the interwar period, next to mug shots, interrogation

protocols, and death sentences, raises questions about how photography was used in the process of repression and social transformation and about

the power of such an archive to form the basis for resistance against forces

threatening the same society today. In Chapter 4, Jankeviciute explores

visual art as a source for understanding daily life during World War II,

with reference to the problems regarding visual sources that are raised by

the paradigm of very recent history. Her analysis of several groups of

thematically different images shows the extent to which visual art is

capable of conveying the moods prevailing in society, and how it reflects

historical reality and is able to bring perception of that reality closer to the

present time. In Chapter 5, Zukiene directs attention to the first years of

the postwar period and the creative attempts of former citizens of Lithuania

and other Baltic countries in displaced-persons camps in Germany. Her

research shows how strongly the imagination of artists and writers who

found themselves in an alien environment was influenced by the loss of

home. It reveals how this topic complicated the exiles' relationship with

the new cultural milieu and interfered with their efforts to speak the

Western language of modern art. All three studies deal with subjects

pertinent to art history in the traditional sense. But their insights into and

conclusions about works of art and photography, including their circum­

stances of production and functioning, enter the realm of social history

and blend into the narrative of the history of ideas and mentalities.

The research in this collection has been guided by the idea that the

memory of the two world wars should be shared by all contemporary

Europeans. That is only possible if the narratives about the wars are not

closed up within the boundaries of social or national groups or states and

if they transcend them to reveal concrete events as part of the history of

the entire region or even of Europe as such. In the case of Lithuania, this

task is complicated further by the fact that the war here literally spoke

(and speaks) in many languages, and each ethnic group-Lithuanians,

Poles, Jews, Russians, Belarusians, and Germans-experienced it in its

own way. These peoples continue telling different stories of the wars and xiii

xiv

Foreword

often perceive their traumas as unique and incomparable with the experi­

ences of other nationalities, which were in truth quite similar. Thus far the

diverse inhabitants of this region have neither coordinated their approach

to history nor shared their emotional and/ or psychological attachment to

their historical homeland and place of origin. So despite the common

paradigm of loss and trauma, local narratives of memory rest on different

national, ethnic, and ideological foundations.

This situation shaped by historical reality prompted four researchers,

Rasa Antanaviciute, Natalija Arlauskaite, Lara Lempertiene and Ruta

Staneviciute, to address the problems of memory and representation.

Their texts constitute the third group of the collection and complete the

suggested narrative. In Chapter 6, Antanaviciute takes up the memory of

World War I in Lithuania. Her study looks into the official history (text­

books) and public representations (monuments and commemoration

rituals) produced from the end of the war up to the present time. She

compares the practices of memory after World War I in Lithuania with

those in Latvia. Latvia was chosen as a neighboring country with a similar

experience of World War I-a field of battle with little actual military

action. In Chapter 7, Arlauskaite explores the memory of World War II in

documentary cinema. She bases her arguments on analysis of Ukrainian

filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's prominent documentary Blockade about the

siege of Leningrad. The case of the well-known German siege and its

interpretation in Loznitsa's film provide valuable food for thought

regarding the drama of occupied territories and their residents. This

drama touched upon the post-World War II fate of all of Central and

Eastern Europe, including Lithuania. In Chapter 8, Lempertiene discusses

the memory of Jewish Vilna after the Holocaust, outlining several narra­

tives and tracing the genesis of their constituent elements. She finds those

elements already present at the time of World War I in the image ofJewish

Vilna created by German soldier-artists, an image established in the

interwar years and further developed after World War II en route to its

final shape. In Chapter 9, Staneviciute's subject is World War II memory

in the Lithuanian music of two composers, one a representative of exile

culture (Vytautas Bacevicius), the other of Soviet Lithuanian culture

(Eduardas Balsys).

Foreword

The book's authors and editors have taken a bold step in their attempt

to couple two world wars. This decision may seem questionable, but we

hope the contents of the individual studies will show that the volume has

served its purpose. Our aim has been to contribute to the beginning of a

long-term discourse that could be of interest to researchers from many

countries and from many fields of the humanities. This volume presents a

picture of a Europe that is shaped by what has happened, and now happens,

not only in its center but also at its margins. Without this fragment, the

picture of the whole is incomplete. Thus we hope that our book will prove

relevant not only to art historians but also to other readers who are inter­

ested in twentieth-century Europe and that they see it as a many-layered

field of complex events.

We wish to thank all those who have contributed to the appearance of

this volume through their advice, practical assistance, and moral support.

Giedre Jankeviciiite and Rasute Zukiene, editors

xv