Arie A. Galles

ARIE A. GALLES (born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, USSR, 1944; lives and works in Madison, N. J.)
Wehrmacht's First  Movement, 1st Day of the 9th Month, 1939
1999
Charcoal and white conté on arches
30 x 42"
Courtesy of the artist

wehrmacht's first movement

Photo: Tim Volk

Statement

The section of Beethoven's score for the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, which forms the background in my piece, is almost completely destroyed. The eraser marks leave Schiller's words barely readable. The Wehrmacht's eagle and the double image of Wehrmacht troops breaking the border barrier of Poland on September 1st, 1939, starting World War II, are stark.

The irony of the wings of the Nazi eagle (and the secondary pair of "dragon-fly-like wings," created by the grouping of the soldiers) hovering over the erased score and the words of two great Germans, touched me to the depth of my being. I wonder whether these smiling soldiers, in the obviously posed photograph, made it alive to the end of the horror they so casually let loose upon the world. I wonder whether they were aware of the great import of their actions as they were opening the first wound of what was to be a bloody five-and-a-half-year torture session of my parents' homeland, and the rest of Europe. The Einsatzgruppen, the Gestapo, and the SS, as well as Wehrmacht units and individual soldiers, could only do their work under the umbrella created by the Wehrmacht's conquest.

I do not, nor have I ever seen every Wehrmacht soldier as a murderous thug. During the first months of occupation of Sanok (our town in Poland), my mother was stopped, after curfew, by a Wehrmacht officer. (She says he was a Captain, but I don't know if she knew the rank. She did, however, speak German well, having been educated during the Austro-Hungarian control of Galicia.) He questioned her as to who she was and why she was out, and she told him that she had no food for her and my sister. He asked her where she lived, and after she told  him, he let her go without arresting her. She stayed up all night worrying why she told him she was a Jew and why she gave him the correct address. In the morning he showed up with two soldiers, he brought some food and the soldiers chopped some wood for her to use. He told her that he is a front-line soldier, and he has to go where he is sent, but that there are others who will come and do us harm. I first heard this story from my mom when I was about eight years old when we were still living in Poland.

Nonetheless, I see the Wehrmacht in World War II as a Juggernaut destroying all in its path and, in the process, almost erasing the noble achievements of such Germans as Beethoven and Schiller. The Wehrmacht brought everything in its wake except a "Brotherhood of all Men."