Recogne
Traduttore, traditore, so the Italians claim. To translate is to betray. The translator is a traitor. Traitor, that’s the exact word many staunch Nazi-supporters mentioned in the same breath as the name Marlene Dietrich, the German diva who opposed the Nazi regime.
Yet both the immigrant translator and the performer of ‘Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’ were no traitors to the original. The pen of Max Colpet, the vocal cords of Marlene Dietrich and their own experience of a tumultuous time morphed a folky American anti-war song into a timeless lament about the loss of a generation devoured by war. Sag mir wo die Männer sind? Sag mir wo die Soldaten sind?
Today I’m in Bastogne to see where the soldiers had gone, to the war. Fresh snow beckons me to see the Battle of Bulge as it was fought. A cold hell covered in an angelic white blanket. Only the fog that denied the Allies their air support is absent, replaced by a clear sky and a bright winter sun.
That sun turns the whole scene unimaginable. Before me lies a bucolic fairytale winterscape rather than a grim battlefield; more Disney-on-ice than fear of flying schrapnel.
In the dry cold sunlight, the foxholes overlooking Foy resemble a set from Band of Brothers at best. I realize I am not looking for traces of a battle, but for recognition of a TV show.
Sometimes our (re)creations of something come between us and the real thing, like a picture of a deceased loved one that replaces the vivid memory. Sometimes it would be better not to have that picture that eats away at how you remember them. Trying to capture memories sometimes works like Medusa’s gaze, conservation through petrification.
My brain understands the battle positions, the tactics, even the hardships of the cold in a foxhole, but my heart rejoices at the sight of my dog skipping through the woods without a care in the world.
Just a couple of kilometers down the road from Foy and Bastogne is a German cemetery. Here I find the terminus, the end station of Dietrich’s song: die Gräber. The graves where her generation — and that of Max Colpet — lies. The snow cover tells me I was the first to visit in some days. There are no other footsteps. Only crows have left the evidence of their macabre dance imprinted in the snow.
One of the very first graves as I enter the cemetery reads: Heinrich Becker. 28/09/27–26/12/44. Heinrich was seventeen years and three months old when he died trying to fulfill a delusional dictator’s dreams of regaining grip on reality. The number momentarily shocks me, but I know there were many young boys enlisted at the end of the war. I keep staring at the year. 27. 1927. It means something to me, but what?
It’s the year my grandfather was born. February 1927. Heinrich and Jacques could have been friends, pen pals maybe (although my grandfather definitely wouldn’t have been up for such a frivolous hobby). If Heinrich haled from the Ruhrgebiet, a mere 200 kilometers separated their fate. One enlisted, another one going to see the battlefield near the river Lys, where soldiers were temporarily buried with the tips of their boots sticking out. One drafted after the war as part of the occupation force; one dead, a body cold and rotting in the Ardennes. One having a wife, children, a divorce, grandchildren, life with all its pain and some happiness; another one the big emptiness. Two fates, separated not by time, but by a line on a map.
I continue and start to wonder. There were also older soldiers amongst the many graves. I know that many of the troops participating in the Ardennes Offensive were SS. Are there also SS buried here? In Malmedy, Peiper’s SS division executed 84 American POWs. Maybe one of the graves belonged to an executioner? Maybe some of the dead committed atrocities at the East Front?
The thought of war crimes is strangely cathartic. I know I can’t distinguish between the good and the evil beneath my feet. There are just bodies, skeletons of young people who died before their time. The price of war is listed here on stone crosses with three names on each side.
The cemetery of the losing side is different than that of the winning side. Here there are no brave heroes who fought to liberate the world. There are no flowers on this cemetery. Whereas Allied cemeteries remember the dead with a solemn, but optimistic pride, there is just silence and sadness in Recogne.
Ideology has no place in the tomb of the losing soldier. Here there is just pure, tangible loss. Here there is no Band of Brothers. Here there are only Heinrich, Emil, Horst, Siegfried and thousand of others. Men I don’t know, but I can imagine their lives. Here they are, Marlene, covered under a blanket of pure white snow in a warm winter sun.
