Page 469 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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happened; Rabichev, however, wants them also to agree on his appropriate manors of
having intercourse: By describing an all too much exaggerated situation of hellish mass-
raping and contrasting it with his own presumable consensual, even romantic acts of
having intercourse, to which he was forced by group pressure, he makes sure that his
way of having sexual intercourse with a German woman was different. It were (only) the
others who forced the women deliberately, violently and against their will.
Thus both memoirists point to the dilemma of Red Army veterans: to talk about (and
to agree on) atrocities that have shocked them and simultaneously to distance them-
selves personally from that.

* * * *

History consists of stories - this post-modern approach has already proven its appro-
priateness. The prevailing analysis makes clear that also Ego-Documents on wartime-
rape are arranged within narratives. It is them who reflect the given historic distinct
social frames of speaking about it and the authors’ ambitions to present oneself in an
appropriate light. Thus they stick to collective, but also internalized expectations. As
the comparisons between prompt diary notes and memories of German and Russian
contemporaries have shown these frames, and therefor the assumed appropriate light, do
change within time: The personal experience of German women of having been raped
gained more and more emphasis during the decades, while the Russian testimonies re-
flect its authors‘ wish to acknowledge and to distance oneself simultaneously from the
atrocities.
Nevertheless, it is the memories of the former Polish forced worker Janina M., their
contant changings with every time she re-tells the episode of (not) being raped by Soviet
Soldiers, which ensure us that narratives are fabricating within the process of telling
them. A circumstance that is too easily omitted as in most cases only one account of
one’s historic experience is available and thus makes up the only possible version of
how it has been. Or better – how it should have been.
Unfortunately – when taking these fabrication processes into account – we historians
stumble across another problem: across the questions of what to believe; of how to man-
age the tightrope walk between acknowledging the contemporaries right to their own
stories (especially in cases of rape) and remaining critical towards our sources. Luckily,
in the analysis carried out within this paper, this question is not of crucial importance
as nobody doubts or denies in general what has happened. As historians it is not our
task to ask what Red Army soldiers like Ivan Jakushin, Vladimir Stezhenskiy or Leonid
Rabichev did personally. We should rather take into account that the modes of speak-
ing about a historical phenomenon are as important as the phenomenon itself. They are
an internal part of it because nothing exists without our interpretation, nothing can be
rememered without frames and narratives.