The Kindly Ones Read online

  Dr. Thomas quickly gave his assent. While we waited for Berlin to endorse the transfer, I was “temporarily detached” from Sonderkommando 4a to the Einsatzgruppe D. I didn’t even have to return to Kharkov; Strehlke forwarded to me the few things I had left there. I was quartered in Simferopol in a pleasant pre-Revolutionary middle-class house, emptied of its occupants, on Chekhov Street, a few hundred meters from the Gruppenstab. I dove with pleasure into my Caucasian studies, beginning with a series of books, historical works, traveler’s accounts, anthropological treatises, most of them unfortunately dating back to before the Revolution. This is not the place to expand on the peculiarities of that fascinating region: the interested reader should refer to the libraries or, if he likes, to the archives of the Federal Republic, where he might find, with persistence and a little luck, my original reports, signed by Ohlendorf or Seibert, but identifiable thanks to the dictation sign M.A. We knew very little about present conditions in the Soviet Caucasus. A few Western travelers had still been able to go there in the twenties; since then, even the information provided by the Auswärtiges Amt, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was pretty scant. To find facts, you had to dig deep. The Gruppenstab had a few copies of a German scientific journal called Caucasica: most of the articles dealt with linguistics, in an extremely technical way, but you could also glean quite a few things from them; Amt VII, in Berlin, had ordered the complete collection. There was also copious Soviet scientific literature, but it had never been translated and was only partly available; I asked a Dolmetscher who wasn’t a complete idiot to read the works available and provide me with extracts and synopses. In terms of intelligence, we had abundant information about the oil industry, the infrastructure, communications, and manufacturing; on the subject of ethnic or political relationships, on the other hand, our files were almost empty. A certain Sturmbannführer Kurreck, from Amt VI, had joined the Group to start up a Sonderkommando Zeppelin, a project of Schellenberg’s: he was recruiting “anti-Bolshevist activists” from the Stalags and the Oflags, often from ethnic minorities, to send them behind the Russian lines for espionage or sabotage. But the program was just getting started and hadn’t yielded anything yet. Ohlendorf sent me to consult the Abwehr. His relations with the AOK, very tense at the beginning of the campaign, had gotten noticeably better ever since the arrival of von Manstein as the replacement for General von Schobert, killed in September in a plane accident. Yet he still couldn’t manage to get along with the Chief of Staff, Oberst Wöhler, who tended to want to treat the Kommandos as units of the Secret Military Police, and refused to call Ohlendorf by his rank, a serious insult. But working relations with the Ic/AO, Major Eisler, were good, and with the CI officer, Major Riesen, excellent, especially since the Einsatzgruppe began actively participating in the anti-partisan struggle. So I went to see Eisler who directed me to one of his specialists, Leutnant Dr. Voss. Voss, an affable man about my age, wasn’t a genuine officer but rather a university researcher seconded to the Abwehr for the duration of the campaign. He came from the University of Berlin, like me; he was neither an anthropologist nor an ethnologist, but a linguist, a profession that, as I would soon find out, could quickly go beyond the narrow problems of phonetics, morphology, or syntax to generate its own Weltanschauung. Voss received me in a little office where he was reading, his feet on a table covered with piled-up books and scattered sheets of paper. When he saw me knock on his open door, without even saluting me (I was his hierarchical superior and he should at least have stood up), he asked me: “Do you want some tea? I have real tea.” Without waiting for a reply he called out: “Hans! Hans!” Then he grumbled: “Oh, where has he gone?” put down his book, got up, went past me and disappeared into the hallway. He reappeared an instant later: “It’s fine. The water’s heating.” Then he said: “But don’t stay standing there! Come in.” Voss had a delicate, narrow face and animated eyes; with his rebellious blond hair, shaved on the sides, he looked like a teenager just out of high school. But his uniform was well tailored, and he wore it with elegance and assurance. “Hello! What brings you here?” I explained the object of my studies. “So the SD is interested in the Caucasus. Why? Are we planning on invading the Caucasus?” At my crestfallen demeanor, he burst out laughing. “Don’t make such a face! Of course I know. In fact, I’m here only for that. I’m a specialist in Indo-Germanic and Indo-Iranian languages, with a subspecialization in Caucasian languages. So everything of interest to me is over there; here I’m just treading water. I learned Tatar, but it’s not of great interest. Fortunately, I found some good scientific works in the library. As our advance progresses I have to gather a complete scientific collection and send it to Berlin.” He burst out laughing. “If we’d remained at peace with Stalin, we could have just ordered them. It would have been pretty expensive, but certainly less than an invasion.” An orderly brought some hot water and Voss took some tea out of a drawer. “Sugar? I can’t offer you any milk, unfortunately.”—“No, thanks.” He prepared two cups, handed me one, and fell back into his chair, one leg raised against his chest. The pile of books partly masked his face and I shifted. “What should I tell you, then?”—“Everything.”—“Everything! You have some time, then.” I smiled: “Yes. I have time.”—“Excellent. So let’s begin with the languages, since I’m a linguist. You should know that the Arabs, in the tenth century, called the Caucasus the Mountain of Languages. It’s just that. A unique phenomenon. No one really agrees on the exact number, since they’re still arguing about certain dialects, especially in Dagestan, but it’s around fifty. If you reason in terms of groups or families of languages, first you have the Indo-Iranian languages: Armenian, of course, a magnificent language; Ossetian, which particularly interests me, and Tat. Of course I’m not counting Russian. Then there are the Turkic languages, which are distributed around the perimeter of the mountains: Karachai, Balkar, Nogai, and Kumyk Turkish to the north, then Azeri and the Meskhetian dialect in the south. Azeri is the language that most resembles the one they speak in Turkey, but it has kept all the old Persian words that Kemal Atatürk purified out of so-called modern Turkish. All these peoples, of course, are leftovers from the Turco-Mongolian hordes that invaded the region in the thirteenth century, or else the remnants of subsequent migrations. And the Nogai Khans reigned for a very long time over the Crimea. You saw their palace in Bakhchisaray?”—“Unfortunately not. It’s in the frontline zone.”—“That’s true. I have a permit, though. The troglodyte complexes are extraordinary too.” He drank a little tea. “Where were we? Ah, yes. You then have by far the most interesting family, which is the Caucasian, or Ibero-Caucasian, family. I’ll stop you right away: Kartvelian, that is Georgian, has no connection to Basque. That was an idea of Humboldt’s, may his great soul rest in peace, and taken up since then, but wrongly. The term Ibero simply refers to the South Caucasian group. What’s more, we’re not even sure that these languages have any connection to each other. We think so—it’s the basic postulate of Soviet linguists—but it’s impossible to demonstrate genetically. At the very most we can outline subfamilies that form genetically related units. For the South Caucasian, that is, Kartvelian, Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz, it’s almost certain. Likewise for Northwest Caucasian: despite the”—he emitted a sort of strange hissing whistle—“of the Abkhaz dialects that are a little perplexing, it’s mainly a question, together with Abaza, Adyghe, and Kabardo-Cherkess, along with Ubykh, which is almost extinct and can still be found only among a few speakers in Anatolia, of a single language with strong dialectal variants. The same goes for Vainakh, which has several forms, of which the main ones are Chechen and Ingush. On the other hand, in Dagestan, it’s still very confusing. We’ve distinguished a few major groups like Avar and the Andi, the Dido or Tsez, the Lak, and the Lesghian languages, but some researchers think that the Vainakh languages are related to them, and others not; and within the subgroups there are major controversies, for instance on the relationship between Kubachi and Dargva; or else on the genetic a
ffiliation of Khynalug, which some prefer to regard as a language-isolate, along with Archi.” I didn’t understand much of this, but I marveled as I listened to him summarizing his material. And his tea was very good. Finally I asked: “Excuse me, but do you know all these languages?” He burst out laughing: “You’ve got to be joking! Can’t you see how old I am? And also, without fieldwork, you can’t do anything. No, I have an adequate theoretical knowledge of Kartvelian, and I’ve studied elements of the other languages, especially of the Northwest Caucasian family.”—“And you know how many languages altogether?” He laughed again. “Speaking a language isn’t the same thing as knowing how to read and write it; and having a precise knowledge of its phonology or its morphology is another thing entirely. To go back to the Northwest Caucasian or Adyghe languages, I’ve done some work on the consonantic systems—but much less on the vowels—and I have a general idea of the grammar. But I’d be incapable of talking with a native speaker. Now, if you consider that in everyday language you rarely use more than five hundred words and a pretty basic grammar, I can probably assimilate pretty much any language in ten or fifteen days. After that, each language has its own difficulties and problems that you have to work through if you want to master it. You could say, if you like, that language as a scientific subject is quite a different thing, in its approach, from language as a tool of communication. A four-year-old Abkhaz kid will be capable of phenomenally complex articulations that I could never reproduce correctly, but I, on the other hand, can then break down and describe, for instance, a plain or labialized alveolo-palatal series, which will mean absolutely nothing to the boy, who has his whole language in his head but can never analyze it.” He thought for a minute. “For example, I once took a look at the consonantic system of a southern Chadian language, but it was just to compare it to that of Ubykh. Ubykh is a fascinating language. They were an Adyghe tribe, or Circassians, as they say in Europe, who were completely driven out of the Caucasus by the Russians, in 1864. The survivors settled in the Ottoman Empire, but mostly lost their language, which was replaced by Turkish or other Circassian dialects. The first partial description of it was made by a German, Adolf Dirr. He was a great pioneer in the description of Caucasian languages: he studied one a year, during his vacations. Unfortunately, during the Great War, he got stuck in Tiflis; he was finally able to escape, but only after losing most of his notes, including the ones on Ubykh that he had collected in 1913, in Turkey. He published what he had managed to keep in 1927, and it was still admirable. After that, a Frenchman, Dumézil, took it up and published a complete description of the language in 1931. Now, Ubykh has the peculiarity of having between eighty and eighty-three consonants, depending on how you count them. For several years people thought that was the world record. Then it was argued that some languages from southern Chad, like Margi, have more. But no conclusions have been reached yet.”

  I had set down my teacup: “All that is fascinating, Leutnant. But I have to stick to more concrete questions.”—“Oh, sorry, of course! What you’re interested in, basically, is the Soviet nationalities policies. But you’ll see that my digressions weren’t useless: those policies are based precisely on language. In czarist times, everything was much simpler: the conquered natives could do pretty much whatever they wanted, so long as they behaved and paid their taxes. The elite could be educated in Russian and even be Russianized—a number of Russian princely families were of Caucasian origin, especially after the marriage of Ivan the Fourth with a Kabardian princess, Maria Temrukovna. At the end of the last century, Russian researchers began studying these peoples, especially from an ethnological standpoint, and they came out with some remarkable studies, like those of Vsevolod Miller, who was also an excellent linguist. Most of these works are available in Germany and some have even been translated; but there’s also a number of obscure or limited-edition monographs that I hope to locate in the libraries of the autonomous republics. After the Revolution and the civil war, the Bolshevik government, inspired in the beginning by a work of Lenin’s, little by little outlined an absolutely original nationalities policy: Stalin, who at that time was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, played a major role. This policy is an astonishing synthesis of, on one hand, entirely objective scientific studies, like those of the great Caucasologists Yakovlev and Trubetskoy; on the other, of an internationalist communist ideology, incapable at the beginning of taking the fact of ethnicity into account; and, finally, of the reality of ethnic relationships and aspirations in the field. The Soviet solution can be summarized in this way: a people, or a nationality as they say, equals a language plus a territory. It’s in order to obey this principle that they tried to provide the Jews, who had a language—Yiddish—but not a territory, with an autonomous region in the Far East, Birobidjan; but apparently the experiment failed, and the Jews didn’t want to live there. Then, according to the demographic weight of each nationality, the Soviets created a complex scale of levels of administrative sovereignty, with precise rights and limitations for each level. The most important nationalities, such as the Armenians, the Georgians, and the so-called Azeris, just like the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians, are entitled to an SSR, a Soviet Socialist Republic. In Georgia, even university studies can be carried out, all the way through, in Kartvelian, and scientific works of great value are published in that language. The same is true for Armenian. It should be said that those are two very old literary languages, with a very rich tradition, that were written down long before Russian and even Slavonic, first transcribed by Cyril and Methodius. Also, if you’ll allow me a digression, Mesrop, who at the beginning of the fifth century created the Georgian and Armenian alphabets—although those two languages don’t have the slightest connection to each other—must have been a linguist of genius. His Georgian alphabet is entirely phonemic. Which is not something you can say about the Caucasian alphabets created by the Soviet linguists. It is also said that Mesrop invented a script for the Caucasian Albanians; but unfortunately no trace of that remains. To continue, you then have the autonomous republics, such as Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya-Ingushetia, or Daghestan. The Volga Germans had the same status, but as you know they were all deported and their republic was dissolved. And then it continues with the autonomous territories and so on. A key point is the notion of literary language. To have its own republic, a people must necessarily have a literary, that is to say, written, language. Now, aside from Kartvelian, as I’ve just explained, no Caucasian language fulfilled this condition at the time of the Revolution. There were some attempts made in the nineteenth century, but solely for scientific purposes, and there are some Avar inscriptions in Arabic characters that go back to the tenth or eleventh century, but that’s all. This is where the Soviet linguists have carried out a formidable, colossal work: they created alphabets, based on Latin characters first and then on Cyrillic, for eleven Caucasian languages as well as for a large number of Turkic languages, including many Siberian tongues. These alphabets of course are far from perfect from a technical standpoint. Cyrillic is hardly adapted to these languages: modified Latin characters, as they attempted in the 1920s, or even the Arabic alphabet would have suited them much better. They did make a curious exception for Abkhaz, which is written now with a modified Georgian alphabet; but the reasons for this are certainly not technical. This obligatory use of Cyrillic has generated somewhat grotesque contortions, such as the use of diacritic signs and of digraphs, trigraphs, and even, in Kabardian, to represent the voiceless aspirated labialized uvular plosive, of a tetragraph.” He snatched a piece of paper and scribbled some signs on the back, then held it out to show me the inscription КХЪУ. “That’s one letter. It’s as ridiculous as when we write, for Щ”—he scribbled again—“shch, or even worse, like the French, chtch. And then, also, some of the new spelling systems are extremely erratic. In Abkhaz, the marking of aspirates and ejectives is amazingly inconsistent. Mesrop would have been scandalized. Finally, and this is the worst, they insisted that each lan
guage have a different alphabet. Linguistically, that makes for some absurd situations, like Щ which in Kabard represents sh and in Adyghe ch, whereas it’s the same language; in Adyghe, sh is written as Щ, and in Kabardian ch is written as ЩЪ. It’s the same thing for the Turkic languages, where for instance the soft g is noted in a different way in almost every dialect. Of course, they did it on purpose: it was a political decision, not a linguistic one, which obviously aimed at separating the neighboring peoples as much as possible. Now here’s a key for you: related peoples had to stop functioning as a network, horizontally, so that they would all refer vertically in parallel to each other, to the central government, which thus takes the position of the final arbiter of conflicts that it itself continually stirs up. But to return to these alphabets, despite all my criticisms, it’s still an immense achievement, all the more so since it came with an entire educational program. In fifteen, sometimes ten years, entire illiterate peoples were provided, in their own language, with newspapers, books, magazines. Children are learning to read in their native language before they learn Russian. It’s extraordinary.”

  Voss went on; I took notes as fast as I could. But what charmed me the most, more than the details, was his relation to his knowledge. The intellectuals I had known, like Ohlendorf or Höhn, were continually developing their knowledge and their theories; when they spoke, it was either to present their ideas or to drive them forward. Voss’s knowledge, on the other hand, seemed to live inside him almost like an organism, and Voss enjoyed this knowledge as he would a mistress, sensually; he bathed in it, constantly discovered new aspects of it, already present in him but of which he had not yet been aware, and from it he took the pure pleasure of a child who has learned how to open and close a door or fill a pail with sand and empty it; and whoever listened to him shared this pleasure, since his talk was made up of capricious meanderings and perpetual surprises; you could laugh at it, but only with the laughter of pleasure of the father who watches his child open and close a door ten times in succession while laughing. I went back to see Voss many times, and each time he welcomed me with the same relaxed courtesy and the same enthusiasm. We soon struck up that frank, rapid friendship that war and exceptional situations favor. We would stroll through the noisy streets of Simferopol, enjoying the sun, in the midst of a motley crowd of German, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers, of exhausted Hiwis, of tanned and turbaned Tatars, and of Ukrainian peasant women with rosy cheeks. Voss knew all the chaikhonas in the city and conversed familiarly, in various dialects, with the obsequious or jolly natives who served us, apologizing for the bad green tea. He took me one day to Bakhchisaray to visit the superb little palace of the Khans of Crimea, built in the sixteenth century by Italian, Persian, and Ottoman architects and by Russian and Ukrainian slaves; and the Chufut-Kale, the Fort of the Jews, a city of caves first dug into the chalk cliffs in the sixth century and occupied by various peoples, the last of whom, who had given the place its Persian name, were in fact Karaïtes, a dissident Jewish sect that, as I explained to Voss, had been exempted in 1937, based on a decision from the Ministry of the Interior, from the German racial laws, and had consequently, here in Crimea, also been spared by the special measures of the SP. “Apparently, the Karaïtes of Germany presented some czarist documents, including a ukase signed by Catherine the Great, that affirmed that they were not of Jewish origin but had converted to Judaism at a later period. The specialists in the ministry accepted the authenticity of these documents.”—“Yes, I heard talk of that,” Voss said with a little smile. “They were clever.” I would have liked to ask him what he meant by that, but he had already changed the subject. The day was radiant. It wasn’t too hot yet, and the sky was pale and clear; in the distance, from the top of the cliffs, you could see the sea, a somewhat grayer expanse beneath the sky. From the southwest vaguely reached us the monotonous rumble of the artillery pounding Sebastopol, resounding gently along the mountains. Filthy little Tatars in rags were playing among the ruins or guarding their goats; many of them observed us curiously, but bolted when Voss hailed them in their language.