Tag: Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Ehrenburg: history, memory, cinema (2/2)

This week, the second part of my exploration of the life and work of Ilya Ehrenburg. Though my excuse for writing this is Ehrenburg’s connections with the films and filmmakers of the 1920s-30s, I am also interested in the memoirs as a work of reflection on this period. As I recorded in my last piece, they offer an amazing glimpse of the interwar world – and of what that world meant in retrospect.

Part 2: Later years

As a kind of coda to the Paris of the 1920s, I want to start by mentioning Moi Parizh (My Paris), a book that Ehrenburg published in 1933. It is a photo album-cum-essay, a visual and literary walk through Paris, the city that Ehrenburg loved so much. But this visual and textual exploration is far from touristic. Ehrenburg is interested not in the facades of great buildings, or even in the great and the good who inhabit them. He is interested in those who sleep rough, in those who survive in the poorest neighbourhoods, in those who live lives that go otherwise unrecorded in history. Ehrenburg knew poverty firsthand, and his snapshot (sometimes covert) images of Paris reveal not just the subjects of his camera but the knack of the observer who knows where to look. These images are often uncomfortably intimate in their portrayal of homelessness and destitution. But they are not exploitative, and there is a kind of tenderness in the way Ehrenburg seeks out the corners of the city to find life – young and old, active and inactive, abled and disabled – going about its business, or doing nothing at all. My Paris is as beautiful as Dmitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1926), one of my favourite films, where the street scenes attain a poetry founded in reality. Whereas Kirsanoff tells his story purely through images (with no intertitles), Ehrenburg offers a parallel text commentary on his photographs. Here is a representative passage on the Seine:

It all begins on the steps, where the unfortunate ones sleep. They sleep on stone as on a bed of feathers. They also sleep on the riverbank. They’re particularly keen on wandering under the bridges. It’s cool there in the summer and there’s shelter from the rain. Shadows mill in the gloom. Some like the Pont d’Auteil, others – Pont Alexandre III. Neither eyes nor rags can be clearly distinguished. Life is defined by sounds: a loud dog-like yawn, curses, groans, grunts and the sinister hoarseness that suggests the nearing of the end. The bridges of Paris – old bridges and new bridges, with the thundering metro, with moustachioed Zouaves – join the two banks: the Bourse and the Académie, the markets and the Sorbonne. They have different names. Trains clatter over some, dreamers stroll on others. From below they are all alike; they are shelter and quiet. Beneath them live those who no longer have the strength to cross from one bank to another. […]

The stairways to the Seine are not just a certain number of steps: they are light-headedness and fate. Down leads poverty, and down leads love. Anyone who has loved in Paris knows the damp fog that rises over the Seine, the sorrowful cries of a little steamer and the quivering of the shadows. Lovers kiss, pressing each other against the handrails or sliding down; they, too, wander beneath the arches of the bridges. No one is surprised – love, everyone knows, is homeless.

The Seine also has other admirers. These don’t try out the steps. They pause on the bridge, then plummet like stones. Who’s to say why they preferred the cold of the water to gas or the rope? Some are hurled down by hunger, others by grievances, others by love. […] As for the Seine, it’s not to blame for anything: a river like any other. It’s a gate as well. A gate left open. People sometimes leave through it. Then hooks crawl along the sandy bed. The dreamers, meanwhile, keep strolling up and down the embankments. (My Paris, 7-8)

Reading My Paris, you can understand why Pabst’s production of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney did not satisfy Ehrenburg. The contemporary reality from which he wanted art to emerge is more potent in his text and images than in Pabst’s drama. It is not just that Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney did not contain the reality of Ehrenburg’s fiction, it is that the film did not contain his experience of contemporary life. The author does not record if he knew or saw Ménilmontant (perhaps it was among the films he brought to Russia in 1926, cited last week), but one senses that aspects of it would surely have appealed.

In Ehrenburg’s memoirs, the streets of Paris take on a more personal meaning in retrospect. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, the act of recalling scenes from these spaces is clearly as moving for Ehrenburg as it might be for us to see his images of My Paris another half-century later. “When I come to Paris now I feel inexpressibly sad – the city is the same, it is I who have changed; it is painful for me to walk along the familiar streets: they are the streets of my youth” (I, 66). The retrospect of the memoirs – and the way this perspective inflects its record of the past – noticeably sharpens later volumes. Like other great works of recollection, this book is as much about the act of memory as memory itself. As I have written on this blog many times, the distance between ourselves and the past is one of the major reasons that the world of silent cinema is so potent. One senses from the silent images of My Paris a world that is both incredibly tangible and irrevocably absent.

This sense of distance opens out in the later volumes of Ehrenburg’s memoirs. After 1930, the idealism that motivates so much of the art and artists he recalls is whelmed in political realities. This shift can be felt in his references to cinema. Increasingly, politics redefines – and prescribes – the boundaries of art. Ehrenburg talks about meeting Lewis Milestone, another Russian Jewish exile, who regales him with anecdotes about filming All Quiet on the Western Front (1930): “[Milestone] told me that during the shooting the producer Carl Laemmle came to him and said: ‘I want the film to have a happy ending’. ‘All right,’ Milestone replied, ‘I’ll give it a happy ending: Germany shall win the war’” (III, 127). This rather pointed comic story is followed by a grimmer conclusion. Ehrenburg recounts being present for the exhibition of All Quiet in Berlin in 1931, when Nazi agitators release a hundred mice into the cinema in protest at the film’s anti-militarism (III, 201). Political pressure within Hollywood likewise forestalls Milestone from adapting one of Ehrenburg’s novels in 1933 (IV, 9-10). The times are changing.

Ehrenburg travels through Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. By the time he returns to Moscow in 1935, his homeland is in the grip of an increasingly paranoid and controlling Stalin. Creative freedom in the arts is being squeezed. Ehrenburg has a fleeting encounter with filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, who has just been summoned by Stalin. This ominous summons is now the norm. Stalin’s “suggestions” to artists are euphemistic instructions, to be obeyed on pain of disfavour, arrest, or death. Under these conditions, expression and innovation are stifled. As Ehrenburg puts it: “If a writer or an artist does not see more than the numerical ‘mass’, does not try to tell people something new, as yet unknown to them, then he is hardly any use to anyone” (IV, 98).

The Spanish Civil War begins. Ehrenburg leaves Russia for Spain. Art is a solace, a comfort, sometimes a distraction. Besieged in Madrid, he watches Chaplin films (IV, 145). But the knowledge of the future haunts Ehrenburg’s pages. He knows their cause is doomed, just as he knows the fate of his friends and comrades. These are volunteers from Russia and the east, men like him who have led extraordinary lives in pursuit of their beliefs. “Of all these men, I was the only one to survive. [One] was killed by an enemy shell. As for the others, they were destroyed for no reason at all by their own people” (IV, 176). It’s a devastating line, the fulfilment of the threats already being made to artists like Dovzhenko.

When Ehrenburg returns once more to Moscow in December 1937, the “great purge” is underway. His daughter tells him about countless arrests, disappearances, executions. Conversations between them must be conducted in whispers for fear of reprisal. Ehrenburg’s homeland is now an alien, threatening place. “I was totally bewildered; I felt lost, no, that is not the word – crushed” (IV, 190). It is with a strange sense of relief that he returns to war-torn Spain. But the Republican cause is near its end. In January 1939, Ehrenburg is one of the thousands of refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. During the retreat, his party must abandon or destroy their baggage. Ehrenburg finds himself forced to burn his own books (IV, 231). It is an image with chilling resonance.

He returns to Paris, where he remains when the Second World War begins. During this period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Ehrenburg finds himself a neutral, if anxious witness. He is in Paris when the Germans enter. He recalls more voluntary destruction of equipment, of documents. So much polluted smoke enters the sky that the rain turns black. “This, too, had to be lived through”, he observes (IV, 260-1) – and the brevity of his words make the depth of his recollected emotion stronger. Ehrenburg leaves the city he loves above all others. His nation not yet at war, he finds himself travelling back to Russia via Berlin. A Jewish Communist, Ehrenburg negotiates his way through Hitler’s capital city feeling “like a live fox in a fur shop” (IV, 266-7).

The fifth volume of his memoirs, called simply “The War”, is also the shortest. This is despite Ehrenburg being in a state of ceaseless activity, travelling among the Russian forces and writing accounts of all aspects of the war in the east. As I wrote in the preamble to my previous post, Ehrenburg also collected eyewitness accounts of atrocities committed by the Germans and their allies. In his memoirs, one senses the exhaustion of these years, and that much of what he saw or heard was beyond description. Often, he records details in passing that resonate more than a longer description could. He recalls once holding in his hand a bar of soap made from the rendered flesh of murdered Jews (V, 30). It’s an image, an idea, so grotesque that Ehrenburg need not say more. He admits later: “I find that to explain all I have seen and lived through is beyond my powers” (VI, 107). If Ehrenburg is sometimes reticent to speak of himself directly, or at great length, he offers a glimpse into his mindset of these war years. Again, he describes himself as a kind of romantic who is forced to reorient himself by the world around him:

By nature as well as upbringing I was a man of the nineteenth century, more given to discussion than to arms. Hatred did not come to me easily. Hatred is not a particularly creditable emotion and is nothing to be proud of. But we were living in an epoch when ordinary young men, often with agreeable faces, with sentimental feelings and photographs of the girls they loved, had, in the belief that they were the elect, begun to destroy the non-elect, and only genuine and profound hatred could put an end to the triumph of Fascism. I repeat, this was not easy. I often felt pity, and perhaps I hate Fascism most bitterly because it taught me to hate not only the vile inhuman idea but also its adherents. (IV, 267)

I have read only fragments of Ehrenburg’s wartime journalism, and his memoirs are reluctant to quote much of his own work save occasional poems. This wartime material, written to appeal and inspire the Red Army in its fight, has a quasi-infamous reputation for its propagandistic rhetoric and invocations of violence. On this, I simply haven’t read enough to comment – and it’s rather beyond the scope of this piece to do so. All I can say is that the memoirs offer a painful and moving retrospective of the man he was. One senses that the older Ehrenburg resents not what his younger self did or wrote but why he had to act as he did and write what he did. As in the passage cited above, hatred did not come naturally to him – but come to him it did.

Having written about this enforced hatred of the war years, Ehrenburg’s post-war work – as witness, as journalist, as cultural ambassador, as promoter of peace – is even more striking for its empathy. His encounters of those who survived the war and its genocides are among the most affecting in the memoirs. In one extraordinary passage, Ehrenburg meets a Russian girl from Kursk who loved a German soldier during the war. Knowing Ehrenburg’s propagandistic vilification of German manhood, the girl tries to explain how she could fall in love with the “enemy”. To do so, she tells him that her feelings were like those of Jeanne Ney. Ehrenburg in turn reaches for film to try to explain his own feelings. Unable to pity this girl in the immediate context of the war, years later he recalls seeing Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Seeing the heroine’s affair with a German solider, and her subsequent mistreatment by her vengeful community, Ehrenburg finally comes to understand the life of the woman from Kursk (V, 98). Even as an artist, one might understand the world better only through the art of another.

Again and again, Ehrenburg returns to the idea of art as a universal requirement for human communication. Having been absent from much of his daughter’s life, it is only decades later when he reads her novel that he understands her childhood (IV, 59). As ever, this desperately moving personal admission is swiftly passed over in favour of encounters with others outside his family. In one such, Ehrenburg is approached after the war by a young woman who had survived the siege of Leningrad. She gives him her diary to read, and Ehrenburg is astonished at how often the woman wrote about what she was reading:

When the girl came to fetch her diary, I asked her: “How did you manage to read at night? After all, there was no light”. “Of course there wasn’t. You see, at night I remembered the books I’d read before the war. This helped me to fight against death”. I know few words that have affected me more deeply; many a time I have quoted them abroad when trying to explain what enabled us to hold out. Those words bear witness not only to the power of art, they are also a pointer to the character of our society. (VI, 13)

Ehrenburg continues to travel, viewing the material destruction of the places he knew – and the first efforts of reconstruction. Revisiting Kiev, he sees the house where he was born in rubble. Then he visits the ruins of the enemy. In Nuremburg, he attends the trial of Nazi war criminals. In one of the most extraordinary passages in the memoirs, Ehrenburg is sitting in the gallery when suddenly he sees Hermann Goering looking up at him. He realizes that Goering recognizes him as the infamous Jewish Bolshevik that Goebbels attacked personally in the Nazi press. Suddenly all the other men in the dock are looking at him. Cinema makes an uncanny appearance in this scene, too. The Nazis in the dock are shown footage from the concentration camps. Ehrenburg watches their faces, and records seeing Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, weeping (VI, 34-5).

But there is little catharsis. As Ehrenburg writes, the events of the war years were not a singular instance of barbarity but a symptom of broader attitudes that did not die out in 1945: “The attempt has been made to present fascism as a stranger who accidentally intruded on decent civilized countries; but fascism had generous uncles, loving aunts, who to this day enjoy good health” (III, 207). After 1945, he continues travelling, writing, organizing. He visits the USA for the first time. Here, he observes the segregation of black Americans. At one function, Ehrenburg grows thirsty and invites an architect to whom he is talking to a bar to get a drink of water. The architect makes excuses and leaves. Someone explains that the architect would not be allowed into the bar, which is for whites only. “I found myself lacerated by someone else’s humiliation”, Ehrenburg writes. “I no longer wanted to drink nor, to be quite candid, did I want to live” (VI, 63-7). On another occasion, a woman tells him how a white man demanded that she – a “half-caste” woman – be thrown off a whites-only bus. The conductor placated the angry white by pretending that the woman had dark hair because she was “a Jewess”. The woman relaying this story to Ehrenburg explains how terrifying she found the experience. “It was then for the first time that I felt ashamed of being a Jew”, writes Ehrenburg; “I wished I were a black Jew” (VI, 69).

Proselytizing for peace as he travels across the new and old worlds, Ehrenburg returns to Russia to find another wave of purges underway. Among countless others, figures from the Jewish resistance to Nazi occupation now find themselves on Stalin’s blacklist. Ehrenburg’s friends sleep with a revolver on their bedside table in case there is knock at the door in the night. The gun is not for the intruders, but for themselves (VI, 277). Everyone, including Ehrenburg, called Stalin “The Boss”. This term was not used from familiarity but from fear. “In the same way Jews in the past never pronounced the name of God”, Ehrenburg writes. “They could not really have loved Jehovah: he was not only omnipotent but pitiless and unjust” (VI, 302). Ehrenburg was glad to have lived long enough “to know the cruel truth” about Stalin and that “millions of innocent people had perished” on his orders (V, 45-6).

But this did not lessen his faith in socialism, nor his desire to name and confront social injustices. And I must conclude this (already rather long) piece on a more positive note. Put simply, Men, Years – Life is an astonishingly rich and rewarding account of the first half of the twentieth century. But more than the events or people it covers, I was moved by Ehrenburg’s generosity of spirit – and moved by his optimism, in spite of the events he experienced, for new ways of human co-operation. As his post-war reflections (in particular) acknowledge, it is through experiencing other cultures that we understand one another and realize our commonality. For this reason, the imposition of borders and boundaries is both counterfactual and counterproductive:

Culture cannot be divided into zones, like cutting a cake into slices. To speak of western European culture as separate from the Russian, or of Russian culture as separate from the western European is, to put it plainly, a sign of ignorance. […] Only dwarfs use stilts, and the people who shout about their national superiority are those who are not quite sure of themselves. (VI, 109)

As with culture, so with wider relations between peoples. “Solidarity with the persecuted is the first principle of humanitarianism”, he writes (VI, 127). Here, too, cinema becomes part of Ehrenburg’s hope for younger generations. He cites his love for Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948) and meets many of the new Italian directors who would define the coming decades (VI, 175-7). New ways of seeing, and new ways of exploring human experience, offer new avenues for mutual comprehension.

For all the horror and misery Ehrenburg witnessed across his life, his memoirs conclude with a message of hope for the future. It is also, one senses, a hope that he feels is necessary to maintain, regardless of circumstances. As he himself admits, there is a strain of romanticism in Ehrenburg that I find deeply sympathetic. He has faith in art and in the people who strive to produce it, to engage with it, to learn from it. It is faith not only in the value of art as aesthetic creativity, but as a way for societies to understand the spiritual needs of human beings. “I believe that without beauty to satisfy the spirit no social changes, no scientific discoveries will give mankind true happiness. The argument that in art both form and content are dictated by society, however true, seems to me too formal” (VI, 338). Having lived through dictatorships, censorships, genocides, Ehrenburg recognizes that art represents a kind of freedom that is beyond classification – or control. The very act of writing his memoirs is itself, surely, a mode of release, of escape. It is also an act of hope. “Who knows, perhaps something remains of every one of us? Perhaps that is what art is”, he writes (IV, 151). Art might only be a “something” of ourselves, but through it we can reach out to one another – across culture, and across time. By the end of the sixth and final volume, this is exactly how I felt about Ehrenburg – a voice, and a person, reaching out to me.

Paul Cuff

References

Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years – Life, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp, 6 vols (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961-66).

Ilya Ehrenburg, My Paris, trans. Oliver Ready (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005).

Ilya Ehrenburg: history, memory, cinema (1/2)

This week, I talk about Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), a writer whose work I discovered through silent cinema. I’m a huge fan of G.W. Pabst’s Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927) and was curious to read the novel on which it was based. After a long search, I tracked down an English edition of The Love of Jeanne Ney from 1929. Given the price tag of my copy, I was worried I would regret my purchase of this utterly obscure novel. But within a few pages, I was totally won over by the style and tone of the author. By turns humorous and brutal, charming and satirical, cruel and romantic, the novel is a superb read. Ehrenburg’s voice so appealed to me that I looked up what else he had written. It became apparent that the man was prolific, publishing numerous novels, reams of poetry, volumes of travel journalism, war reports, speeches, reviews – all in different languages: Russian, French, German, Yiddish… Of this ungraspably extensive bibliography, I found that none of his non-journalistic work was in print in English. Some of his wartime work remains available, in particular his report on the Holocaust in eastern Europe: The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, a collection of eyewitness accounts compiled with Vassily Grossman.

This situation was very different in the 1960s, in the post-Stalin cultural “thaw” (a term Ehrenburg popularized), when the author’s work was widely discussed in the anglophone world. It was in this period that he wrote his memoirs. Finding decent copies of all six volumes of this work was difficult, but I love a challenge. From bookshops across the globe, I amassed them all and read them across the course of last summer. Quite simply, Men, Years – Life (1961-66) is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever read. It is almost unbelievable what this man experienced: from imperial to post-Stalinist Russia, from trenches in Spain to the skyscrapers of New York, from the cafes of Paris to the battlefields of the east, from writing poetry in garrets to making speeches at peace rallies, Ehrenburg experienced almost every conceivable facet of the early twentieth century. That he did not perish in the revolutions, civil wars, world wars, genocides, and multiple purges that he experienced is miraculous. “I have survived”, he writes in his opening pages, “not because I was stronger or more far-seeing but because there are times when the fate of a man is not like a game of chess played according to rule but like a lottery” (I, 7). As the title of his memoirs indicates, Men, Years – Life is a personal record of his era through the people he encountered. Amid his generosity to innumerable writers, artists, and fighters he met, the major events of Ehrenburg’s personal life sometimes slip in through devastatingly brief asides. (Thus, in passing, do we learn that his first wife leaves him for another man, with whom she raises their daughter Irma (I, 186).) If nothing else, it is an amazing record of the first half of the twentieth century, a time when “history unceremoniously broke into our lives by day and by night” (III, 89).

This week’s post, and my subsequent post, is a selected tour through some of Ehrenburg’s life and his relationship with cinema: cinema as culture, cinema as literary adaptation, cinema as a way of seeing the world.

Part 1: Early years

Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, a subject of the Russian Empire, to a Lithuanian-Jewish family. His first memories are of an era that would bring an unceasing flood of cultural shocks and revelations. “The twentieth century was under way”, he writes: “I remember one of our visitors telling us that soon a ‘bioscope’ would be opened and that they would show living photographs” (I, 30). For the adolescent Ehrenburg, the new century means other forms of revolution, too. He becomes involved in political activity associated with Bolshevism. Aged seventeen, he is arrested and exiled.

He arrives in Paris in December 1908, knowing barely any French – just an outré vocabulary drawn from the plays of Racine. With his unerring knack of finding extraordinary people wherever he went, he soon meets a raft of other local or exiled figures – from Lenin (“his head made me think not of anatomy but of architecture” (I, 69)) to Blaise Cendrars (“he was the yeast of his generation” (I, 170)), not to mention fellow avant-gardists Picasso, Modigliani, Rivera, and others. The writers and artists among them would meet at the Café de la Rotonde, a restaurant in Montparnasse where “we would gather […] in the evenings to drink, read poetry, make prophecies or simply to shout” (I, 171). Living in what amounted to almost debilitating poverty, Ehrenburg became a poet “because I had to” and a journalist “because I lost my temper” (I, 178). When he could afford it, he went out. In 1911 he attended the (in)famous premiere of Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, D’Annunzio’s stage collaboration with Debussy. He records being “infuriated by its mixture of decadent aestheticism and a kind of scent shop voluptuousness” (II, 128). (He didn’t realize it, but Abel Gance was there on stage, playing one of the extras.) Later, in the company of the painter Diego Rivera, Ehrenburg encountered a new kind of artist for the age:

Once at a small cinema Rivera and I saw a film actor I had never seen before. He smashed crockery and daubed elegant ladies with paint. We guffawed like everyone else, but when we had left the cinema I said to Diego that I felt afraid: the funny little man in the bowler hat exposed the whole absurdity of life. Diego replied: “Yes, he’s a tragedian.” We told Picasso to be sure to see the film with Chariot: that was the name the French gave Charlie Chaplin, as yet entirely unknown. (I, 199)

Then came the Great War, “a grandiose machine for the planned extermination of human beings” (I, 184). Ehrenburg volunteers to fight Germany but is rejected by the army doctor as unfit (“One cannot with impunity prefer poetry to beef for a period of three or four years” (I, 161)). So he becomes a witness, watching the old order disintegrate – and the violent forces this process unleashes. Europe’s civilization is merely a set of clothing now shed, its philosophy abandoned for bloodlust. For Ehrenburg, it is a swift and uncomfortable revelation. “I realised that I had not only been born in the nineteenth century: in 1916 I lived, thought and felt like a man from the distant past. I also realized that a new century was on its way and that it meant business” (I, 185). Europe was stepping “into the dark ante-room of a new age” (II, 101). And from the west, American culture floods in. When the US enters the war in 1917, the newspapers gush over the prospect not merely of American soldiers but American culture: “They extolled everything – President Wilson and Lilian Gish, American tinned food and the dollar” (I, 219).

After the war, Ehrenburg returns to the east. This part of his memoirs is among the most personal, since there was not enough political or cultural stability to sustain his creative life. Having always considered Kiev as his “home town”, in 1919-20 Ehrenburg realized how contingent the idea of “home” might be. “[The] Romans […] used to say Ubi bene, ibi patria: where it is good, there is your motherland. In reality, your motherland is even where it is very, very bad” (II, 75). Russia and much of eastern Europe was in turmoil. Kiev was at the centre of a civil war and changed hands several times. “Sometimes I felt as if I were watching a film and could not understand who was chasing whom”, Ehrenburg writes: “the pictures flashed by so quickly that it was impossible to see them properly, let alone think about them” (II, 80). Cinema here becomes a metaphor both for vision and for bewilderment – a kind of impediment to vision. Like silent films that were projected at faster-than-life velocities, lived history did not behave according to clock time.

The chapters that follow read like the flickering images Ehrenburg describes, passages of events so bewildering and terrifying that it is staggering that the narrator survived to narrate. Only when, for six months, the Red Army occupies Kiev is there a window of stability – at least for Ehrenburg. But even this interval is surreal, since he is charged with supervising “mofective children” (i.e. “morally defective” children). It was a form of re-education for the socialist utopia that beckoned. “The discrepancy between our discussions and reality was staggering”, Ehrenburg observes (II, 83-90). Utopia is postponed. The Reds are swept away. The Cossacks arrive. There is a pogrom. A disorganized medley of murder, mutilation, rape. As a Jew, Ehrenburg moves from hiding place to hiding place. Captured, he narrowly avoids being “baptized” (i.e. thrown into the ice-covered sea of Azov) (II, 95). He is among a flood of refugee in the Crimea, where he is starved and abused for being both a Jew and a Red. Then typhus strikes. His wife is a victim. She survives, but in what state?

After Lyuba’s temperature had gone down, a complication arose: she was convinced that she had died and that we were for some reason forcing a life after death upon her. With the greatest difficulty I got food for her and cooked it, my mouth watering, while she repeated: “Why should I eat? I’m dead, aren’t I?” One can easily imagine the effect this had on me; yet I had to go to the playground and play ring-a-ring-o’-roses with the children. (II, 101)

There follows a series of interventions random, comic, and horrifying. Ehrenburg escapes from the Crimea on a salt barge that he realizes is slowly sinking. He finds refuge in Georgia, then goes to Moscow. Having been nearly murdered by the Whites (for being a Red), Ehrenburg is now arrested by the Reds (for being a White). He is imprisoned, than released. Vsevolod Meyerhold invites him to head the organization of children’s theatre in Russia. But in 1921 Ehrenburg leaves Russia. He goes via Riga, Danzig, Copenhagen, and London to Paris – only for the French authorities to expel him to Brussels for being a suspected Bolshevik agent (II, 186-8). He travels to Berlin and witnesses the febrile uncertainty of the Weimar Republic: “The Germans were living as though they were at a railway station, no one knowing what would happen the next day. […] Everything was colossal: prices, abuse, despair” (III, 14). In a beerhall in Alexanderplatz, Ehrenburg hears the name of Adolf Hitler for the first time. Visiting Italy soon afterwards, he sees uniformed fascists.

These surreal shifts of fortune make even the most bizarre filmic narrative of the 1920s seem realistic. Ehrenburg records that the White general who instigated the pogrom in Kiev later became a circus performer, in which role he encountered him in Paris in 1925 (II, 92-3). This reads like a detail from a film by Stroheim or Sternberg, or a scene from a Joseph Roth novel. The people and events that swirl around Ehrenburg here are those whose shadows are caught in the films of the period. I’m thinking of the newsreels, those glimpses of real people and places, but also of the fictions whose strangeness is hardly less compelling. One is tempted to describe this section of the memoirs as a record of modernity at its most frenzied and fragmented, but Ehrenburg defies such labels – either as a (contemporary) protagonist or as a (retrospective) narrator. He describes himself as a “rank-and-file representative of pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia” (II, 150) who understood the turmoil of 1920-21 in apparently old-fashioned terms:

We ridiculed romanticism but in reality we were romantics. We complained that events were developing too swiftly, that we could not meditate, concentrate, realize what was going on; but no sooner had history put on the brakes than we fell into despondency – we could not adapt ourselves to the new rhythm. I wrote satirical novels, had the reputation of being a pessimist, but privately nursed the hope that, before ten years had passed, the whole face of Europe would have changed. In my thoughts I had already buried the old world, yet suddenly it had sprung to life again, had even put on weight and was grinning. (III, 58)

This conflict between imagined and lived worlds, between ideals and realities, defines much of Ehrenburg’s experience of the post-1918 years. He finds himself in a world of film, radio, automation, mechanization: “I felt that the rhythm of life and its pitch were changing” (III, 93). In Paris, the artists of the 1920s “wanted to turn the world upside down, but the world stood firmly on its feet as ever” (III, 91). He meets a new generation of filmmakers: René Clair, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, Jean Epstein. In the cinema, he sees The Pilgrim (1923) and The Gold Rush (1925) (III, 92-3). Cultures mix and mingle. In a Paris bar, Ehrenburg overhears someone asking their friend: “Is it true that Potemkin is a better actor than Mosjoukhine?” It turns out that the man “had heard something or other about the success of Eisenstein’s film and thought Potemkin was the name of an actor” (III, 96). Similarly, finding himself in a disreputable beerhouse in Moscow in the summer of 1926, Ehrenburg overhears an argument. It ends with a girl shouting to another youth (who is covered in blood): “You needn’t try so hard. Harry Piel – he’s the one I like!” (III, 108). Later, in the UK at a PEN Club meeting, Ehrenburg is mistakenly introduced to his audience as Pabst, “the outstanding Austrian film director who had made that excellent film, The Love of Jeanne Ney” (I, 117).

These eclectic encounters should remind us that film was very different before it became “film history”. Ehrenburg meets it out of context, in translation, in argument, in slang, in misattribution, and in simple error. The modern reader may feel out of kilter, recognizing names, dates, and titles only with difficulty. But it is also curious (and curiously touching) evidence of how cinema muddled along within popular culture. The neatness of filmographies or encyclopaedias of this period do not do justice to the pell-mell realities of lived history. For the inhabitants of the past, silent cinema was a moving feast – part of a complex, multicultural diet.

Ehrenburg also does more than witness cinema. In 1927, he revisits Penmarch (in Brittany) with the artist László Moholy-Nagy to make film about Breton fishermen – but the project remains unrealized (III, 122). The always on-the-move Ehrenburg is also a go-between for other filmmakers. In 1926 (the same summer, presumably, that he overhears the drunken argument about Harry Piel) he is asked to export extracts from French films “given to me by Abel Gance, René Clair, Feyder, Epstein, Renoir, Kirsanoff.” He shows them in Moscow, where many Soviet filmmakers see the experiments of the French avant-garde for the first time. So “enthusiastic about the cinema” is he that Ehrenburg writes a pamphlet: Realization of the Fantastic. But he also states that “in point of fact, I did not like German films of the Caligari type and the people I really admired were Chaplin, Griffith, Eisenstein, René Clair” (III, 124). Ehrenburg befriends Eisenstein and later hears him speak on film and art at the Sorbonne in Paris (III, 136). But it is Clair’s Paris qui dort (1925) that he says characterizes his experience of Paris in the 1920s (III, 131).

I close this week’s piece with the work that inspired it: Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, based on Ehrenburg’s eponymous novel of 1924. One can sense in its pages the wild emotional extremes of the post-war years, as well as the streak of romanticism that the author admitted filled his mindset. He calls it “my sentimental novel”: “a tribute to the romanticism of the revolutionary years, to Dickens, to enthusiasm for the plots of novels, and to my (this time non-literary) desire to write not only about a Trust concerned with the destruction of Europe, but also about love” (III, 57). Ehrenburg’s brush with a suspicious, reactionary French bureaucracy in 1921 surely colours his novel. The authorities in Paris (and just about every authority figure in the novel) are depicted as cruel, rapacious, sadistic. These characteristics might seem exaggerated, but given what Ehrenburg had gone through they are hardly surprising – or (one feels) inaccurate. The novel is startingly brutal but also incredibly tender. It is a story where love can (and must) survive violation and death.

The German film adaptation of 1927 retains the essentials but makes notable changes. The ending is markedly different. In the novel, Jeanne is repeatedly raped by Chalybjew – a sacrifice that does not save Andrej from being executed. In the film, Jeanne fends off Chalybjew, who is captured – thus allowing the release of Andrej from prison. The novel ends with Jeanne carrying on Andrej’s revolutionary activities, her memory of their love sustaining her life and work. The film ends with Jeanne imagining Andrej’s release (and, presumably, their future together).

Pabst’s production could never depict, let alone imply, some of the events in the novel – but its changes to the story became the subject of controversy about the conservative/nationalist politics at Ufa. Indeed, the film’s greatest political attack came from Ehrenburg himself in 1927. Through the German communist Wieland Herzfelde, he had been brought into contact with Pabst and invited to watch the filming. He accompanied the production to Berlin and Paris, where he encountered exiled White Russian soldiers among the extras, observed Pabst bullying tears from the star Édith Jéhanne, and marvelled at the crew’s futile efforts to film bedbugs in close-up. When shown the finished film, Ehrenburg couldn’t contain his mirth: “it all looked different, in details and in essentials”; “one moment I laughed angrily, at another abused everybody” (III, 128). He wrote a newspaper article claiming that his novel had been butchered. When Ufa failed to respond, Ehrenburg’s comments were expanded into a seven-page pamphlet that attacked the company for being reactionary and the film for being a betrayal of real life.

In retrospect, Ehrenburg writes with much more tolerance of Pabst’s film. Indeed, in his memoirs he spends more time talking about the in-between moments of the production than the film itself. On set, his favourite actor was Fritz Rasp, who plays the villain Chalybjew:

Rain set in, the shooting was constantly put off, and Rasp strolled with me about Paris, whirled in roundabouts at fairs, danced himself to a standstill with gay shop-girls, daydreamed on the quays of the Seine. We quickly became friends. He played villains but his heart was tender, even sentimental; I called him “Jeanne”.

We met again in later years, in Berlin, in Paris. When Hitler came to power in Germany things grew difficult for Rasp. He told me that during the war years he had lived in an eastern suburb of Berlin. SS men had entrenched themselves there and were shooting at Soviet soldiers from the windows. I have already said that Rasp looked like a classical murderer. What saved him was my books with inscriptions and photographs where we figured together. The Soviet major shook him by the hand and brought sweets for his children. (III, 127)

I love Rasp on screen, and I love this anecdote. It’s rare to hear any details about such relatively minor figures of the silent era – character actors who never play the lead, but whose faces one always encounters and delights in recognizing. Here, then, is Fritz Rasp, cavorting about Paris in 1927 with a Bolshevik, being sentimental and silly. Ehrenburg’s account of Rasp in 1945 also makes a nice counterpoint to the famous story (also set in 1945) about Emil Jannings waving his Oscar at American soldiers to convince them he was on their side.

But already the spectre of the 1930s is upon us! This means the coming of sound, and it means upheavals of a more urgent nature. Though this blog is (after all) devoted to the era of silent cinema, Ehrenburg’s life and memoirs are too fascinating to leave off at this point. And his engagement with art and artists, including film and filmmakers, continued sporadically through the rest of his life. I am interested not only in the events of the interwar years, but also how these events were seen in retrospect. This will be the subject of my next post.

Paul Cuff

References

Ilya Ehrenburg, The Love of Jeanne Ney, trans. Helen Chrouschoff Matheson (London: Peter Davies, 1929).

Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years – Life, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp, 6 vols (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961-66).