Laima Laučkaitė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2016.7.4
During World War I, a German writer of Jewish background, Arnold Zweig, worked as a censor in the Press Department of the German Army Headquarters in Kaunas and was a co-author of the newspaper Kownoer Zeitung. In 1917, he visited Vilnius and later wrote the text The Necklace of Vilnius, which was published in the Menorah magazine in Berlin in 1924. Based on this case, the article analyses the relationship between an image and text: the construction of the verbal narrative of Zweig on visual Vilnius, the influence of the narration by cultural and linguistic traditions and the ideology of the Great War. The author discussed four architectural monuments in Vilnius: The Church of St Anne, the Bernardine Church, the Great Synagogue and the Gate of Dawn with the miraculous painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, naming each as a pearl of a certain colour. Zweig described the influence of the shape of buildings on the viewer through visual associations with the redness of blood, the natural timber, the viridity of the wall and the golden shining of the painting. Finally, the writer interpreted the architecture of churches in Vilnius through religious imagery and links to the faith, which, according to Zweig, helped the residents of this multi-confessional city to survive the dreadfulness of war and never lose hope. Thus, architecture for Zweig was a pretext to speak about common human things, faith and local and global spiritual values. However, the motive of the necklace as a piece of women’s jewellery related to Vilnius also has another connotation. The German texts on Vilnius from the period of World War I often treat this city as a woman, a being of ‘the weaker sex’ and present its history as a narrative with political, ideological, gender or even sexist interpretation: ‘the bridegrooms from the East (Russia) and the West (Germany) have fought for the rich queen Wilna, and the Eastern groom abused her for a long time, but finally the groom came from the West and delivered her.’ Similar rhetoric, typical of the German literature about Vilnius during World War I, could also be noticed in the text by Arnold Zweig dedicated to his memories of Vilnius and its architectural monuments.
Keywords: World War I, Kownoer Zeitung, Berlin, architecture, German lit