QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Six

 

I know the bust of Nefertiti is not sentient. At its core it is limestone, the compressed bodies of billions of single celled living creatures that once had some chemical level of awareness. But I have imagination enough to dream of a universe where any life, once having been sparked, survives in some sense. And I can dream of what it must have been like for cold stone to have the sculptor's warm hands cut and file and shape and soften its surface, combining in some small way his imagination, his life, and some small portion of the breath of a Queen of the Nile and thus impart a shadow of life into cold stone.

In Thutmose's universe his stone and plaster image of Neferetiti became one of the five parts that made up the living woman; Ib, (her emotional heart), Sheut (her ever present shadow), Ren (her living name), Ba (her personality) and Ka (what we would call her soul). It is thought her left eye was left unfinished in order to prevent the capture of Nefertiti's Ka by the stone. But could it not be that the stone and plaster image had its own Ka, or heart or shadow? And if so, what must have it been like to have slowly emerged from the darkness of nonexistence, to be born into existence slowly, and to have then been loved and admired for decades, before being abruptly thrown to the floor, abused and defiled, and then abandoned and forgotten -  buried in sands for 3, 000 long dark lonely years.

And then the light returned. Meticulously, the sand was brushed away, and once again warm human flesh touched her surface, lifted her up, and human eyes fell upon her shape and color, and human imaginations beheld her image, as a visitor from eons past. And then, in what must have seemed like a startlingly violent instant, she was traveling, whisked 2,000 miles from the place of her creation, into a new temple, a temple dedicated not to a god, but to the Ka of humanity, to that one part of humanity that no other creature on Earth has ever possessed but humans: our imagination. It seems that the bust of Nefertiti has enjoyed a most eventful Akh, or afterlife. She does indeed, live again.

When they first brought her to the Neuss (New) Museum, on Museum Island in the Spree River in Berlin, Germany, it was a re-dedication. The building had been erected in the 1840's, and was, like the Pharaoh’s new capital, a technological innovation – at the time. Instead of plaster, the New Museum was built with concrete poured over iron supporting rods with a brick exterior. The first floor contained Egyptian and German collections, and plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures (below). 

But the arrival of the Queen inspired changes. The central Greek courtyard was given a glass roof, and converted into space to display Ludwig Borchardt's collections from Akanetan, referred to by its modern Arabic name of Armarna. And it was here (below) that Nefertiti found her new throne. But it  did not prove to be a permanent abode.

In January of 1933 a new Pharaoh came to town.  Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. His new Reich minister, Herman Goring, began looking for a way to quickly and cheaply improve Germany's diplomatic standing in the world. At the time Egypt was nominally ruled by the debauched King Fariouk Fouad, but the real power behind his throne was Britain. And it occurred to Goring that returning the pilfered bust of Nefertiti on the occasion of his coronation, might cause the King to look favorably upon German diplomatic entreaties.  Letters were exchanged with the offer. But when Hitler got wind of the idea he killed it because he was convinced Nefertiti looked to be a member of his mythical “Aryan master race”  And that was, as far as I can tell, the last good thing Hitler did for Germany until he shot himself.

Adolf confidently started the Second World War on September 1^st, 1939, and even though Goring had assured citizens that Berlin would never be bombed, in an abundance of precaution Nefertiti was boxed up and temporarily locked away in the vault of the Prussian Governmental Bank. Then, on the night of 25 August, 1940, 70 obsolete British bombers dropped 21 tons of bombs on Berlin, hitting empty fields and damaging some houses. The worst injuries were some cuts and bruises, and the bombers never came near to hitting the airport, which has their target. 

The biggest causality was Hitler's equilibrium. He ordered the construction of three massive anti-aircraft gun towers in the center of  the city. The largest (above) was built in the Tiergarten park, adjacent to the Berlin Zoo. It was 7 stories tall to allow the guns clear fields of fire. The walls were of reinforced concrete 26 feet thick, the ceilings were 16 feet thick. It was so large it could shelter 5,000 civilians, and many of Germany's most valuable artistic treasures, including Nefertiti, were moved there in the fall of 1941. And there she stayed, hidden again, as safe as if she were still buried in the Egyptian sands, for another four and a half years, until the Soviet armies approached Berlin.

On 6 March, 1945,  Nefertiti made yet another trip, this one of 200 miles southwest to the rolling hills of the Thuringian Forest, where she was left for safe keeping 2,100 feet below ground level in a salt mine under the village of Merkers-Kieselbach. Late in March she was joined by 100 heavy woolen coats, 100 tons of gold bars, 550 bags of German currency (above) and 27 Rembrandt paintings. Two weeks later the entire cache was captured by soldiers of the 3rd American Army under General George S. Patton. Within days the entire treasure was transferred another 100 miles southwest to a bank vault in Frankfurt. There was so much loot that it took 2 convoys of 17 heavy trucks each. Being capitalists, the Americans shipped the gold first.

After Germany surrendered on 5 May, 1945, the Queen of the Nile was moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, on the north bank of the Rhine River. Here they brought her out into the light again to be examined by experts, and the public was even allowed to gaze upon her face. There she remained, transferred into German control, until 1956, when she was moved to the Dahelem museum in the American sector of Berlin. She could not return to Museum Island because the Neuse had been blasted to ruin during the war (above), and besides, the island was in East Berlin, the zone controlled by the Soviets.  When the East Germans demanded she be handed over, the West Germans decided to transfer her to the Egyptian museum in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. And there the Queen stayed for almost forty years - a human life time, but a blink of the single eye to Nefertiti. Then in 1989, the East German government collapsed.  In October of 1990 Germany was officially one nation again, and Berlin one city, and it became a matter of national pride for the Germans to return their Egyptian queen to her German throne.

In 2005 the German government began a 295 million Euro rebuilding of the Neuse, under a plan drawn up by English Architect David Chipperfield. And in 2009 the Queen once again held court in the Neuse Museum in the German capital. Her journey from the banks of the Nile to and from the banks of the Spree and to and from various bank vaults has been described as both “adventurous and beyond comparison”, and earning her the number two spot on Time Magazine's list of “Top ten plundered Artifacts”.  Egypt still wants her back, and Germany still intends upon keeping her.  And while one identity is barely 200 years old and the other goes back 4,500 years, both countries view Nefertiti as a national icon.

If you think about it, its a crazy situation, because she isn't really the queen of the Nile. She is limestone and plaster and paint, an image of a one time queen of a long dead empire that culturally has little in common with either of today's nations. And if, like Pinocchio, she were to arise tomorrow morning, as a real woman, she would be a very confused lady, no matter which city appeared before her eye. So far she has not had the afterlife she envisioned. And it may get stranger yet.

- 30 -   

COLD WAR

 

I don’t believe most Americans have ever heard of Igor Gouzenko (above), but he actually had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Empire than Ronald Reagan. Simply because Igor and his wife wanted what all new parents want, a better life for their children, the best laid evil plans of Joseph Stalin eventually collapsed.

Igor dreamed of becoming an architect, and while studying in Moscow he met and married Svetlana (Anna) Gouseva.  But Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941 (above), put an end to all personal  dreams in Russia.  After basic training in the Red Army, Igor received a year of training as a cipher clerk.

In May of 1943, the 24 year old Lieutenant was reassigned to the Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa, Canada (above), to work coding and decoding messages for “spymaster” Colonel Nicolai Zabotin.

As an officer in the GRU - Soviet Military Intelligence, - Colonel Nicolai Zabotin  (above) was aware of how much he depended on the talents of  the young Igor, which is why Zabotin obtained permission for Igor’s pregnant wife, Svetlana, to join him in Ottawa in October of 1943.  It was a not a boon the Stalinist security structure usually granted.

And to accommodate the wife of his favorite code clerk,  Zabotin even gave them an apartment,  at 511 Somerset Street in Ottawa (above).  The couple were stunned. "In Moscow," Igor would later say, "a place that size would have been shared by four or five families." And it was while living in such relative opulence, in June of 1944,  the loving couple welcomed a bouncing baby boy.

In September of 1944 the NKGB - the infamous Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs (above) -  ordered the happy couple and their 3 month old son to return home to Soviet Russia.  Because he had two more years  left of a standard tour of duty,  Igor believed he was suspected of some violation, or perhaps had made some overlooked mistake in writing home to his parents.  

And even if he could defend himself, he feared that because he knew so much about Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States, he would likely be imprisoned in a Siberian gulag (above) to keep him quiet. 

And if he were lucky enough to be allowed to return to Canada, his son and wife, who was now carrying their second child,  would not be permitted to join him The families of agents overseas were effective hostages, should an agent contemplate making a dash for freedom. 

Lieutenant  Gouzenko  appealed to Colonel Zabotin, who granted him a year’s extension. But as that extension began to run out in August of 1945, Igor decided to run out, too. He began to stuff  what would eventually be 109 top secret cables and documents under his shirt and wear them home. 

Then, shortly after 8:00 pm on  5 September, 1945,  just days after Japan formally surrendered  bringing the Second World War to an end, Igor walked out of the Soviet embassy for the last time.

Unsure of just what to do next,  Igor asked his next door neighbor, an officer in the Canadian Air Force,  for advice. He suggested they should approach the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And that was what Igor immediately did, showing up at the headquarters with his family.  But end of war celebrations were still going on,  and the few people on duty had no idea what to do with their would-be Russian defectors. True, Igor had plenty of documents which indicated some sort of Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and the U.S.. But at the time the Russians were Canadian allies. The RCMP weren't even sure they should be looking at this stuff. They told Igor and his family they should come back tomorrow.

That night, while Igor and his family huddled, terrified, in the dark, on the floor of their apartment, there was an ominous pounding on their front door. They returned to the RCMP first thing the next morning. The officers asked some questions, and wrote down the answers, but then sent them home yet again. 

That night their neighbor allowed the exhausted couple and their infant to sleep in his apartment. They heard more pounding on their door across the hall. It seemed likely that Colonel Zabotin had finally noticed the 109 documents that were missing from Igor’s desk. After another fruitless visit to the bewildered RCMP, Igor spent the day walking about the Canadian capital trying to find someone in some government agency who was interested in a desperate young man who had the code names and covers of an entire Soviet spy ring in their midst. He even applied for Canadian citizenship. Nobody was interested in his story. 

In desperation that evening he walked into the newsroom of the Ottawa Journal (above) and blurted out to the night editor, “Its war. It’s Russia.” The editor suggested he go to the Department of Justice. The Gouzenkos tried, but found the offices of the Canadian Department of Justice were closed.

The calm of the next night was shattered when four burly men burst into Igor’s apartment and ransacked the place. Fortunately Igor and his little family were again sleeping on their neighbor’s furniture. But this time the neighbor called the police. The four men were detained long enough for all to be identified as employees of the Soviet embassy. But while the police officers looked the other way, the Russians escaped. The following day the embassy protested the brief detention of their staffers, and demanded the immediate return of the “criminal” Igor Gouzenko..

When Canadian Prime Minister, 70 year old William Lyon Mckenzie King (above), was told of the Soviet's demands, his first instinct was to hand Gouzenko and his family over.  But before he could act, 

Lieutenant Gourzenko and Svetlana suddenly appeared at the  office of Justice Minister with their  collection of documents. And this time somebody with a knowledge of intelligence actually looked at them. King would later claim, ""It was like a bomb on top of everything else."

On his own initiative, Under Secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson had the desperate Russian and his family swept up and transported to the secret  "Camp X" on Lake Ontario (above), used during the war for the training of underground intelligence and sabotage agents inserted into occupied Europe. By this time, Igor was threatening suicide. And without asking Prime Minister King, Robertson granted the family asylum. 

Prime Minister King asked the British Foreign Intelligence Service, MI-6, to evaluate Igor's information. The service sent two agents from their section 9, Kim Philby (above) and Roger Hollis, to interrogate Igor. What no one knew at the time was that both of these trusted and respected high ranking British intelligent agents were lifelong Communists, Russian moles right in the core of British Intelligence.  

It appeared as if poor Igor was about to be betrayed, branded  a fraud, and handed over to the murderous NKVD. But  just a few days into his interrogation,  the secret arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing of scientists Alan Nunn May (above) broke in the press. 

Until March Alan May had been building the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor (above) just outside of Ottawa, and handing the top secret designs directly over  to  Colonel Zabotin,   May was prominently mentioned in Gouzenko's documents.  

Even more importantly, shortly before all of this, a Soviet code book had been captured in Norway,  which allowed the decoding of hundreds of secret Soviet transmissions. While everything to do with the code book was still top secret, it all confirmed everything Igor had been telling the Canadians. After all of this, to have questioned Gourzenko's information would have merely raised questions about Philby and Hollis.  So the Soviet moles inside MI-6 recommended the Canadians accept Igor as genuine and grant him asylum.

Among the 39 Soviet spies arrested because they were mentioned in Igor's documents was Fred Rose (above), a Communist Party member of the Canadian Parliament from Cartier, Quebec. He was in the perfect position to betray Canada and sway government policy in favor of the Soviet Union.   He was convicted of espionage by the secret Kellock-Tascherau Commission, and served 4 1/2 years in prison.  Stripped of his Canadian citizenship, Rose lived out the rest of his life in Warsaw, Poland, where he died in 1983. 

Colonel Zabotin (above) was returned to the Soviet Union under arrest by the NKVD, where he was convicted as an enemy of the Soviet People for allowing his trusted cipher clerk to escape. He served 4 years in a labor camp.  After that, nothing is known about his life. 

In six years Kim Philby (above, right) would retire with honors from MI6, and in 1961, just before he was unmasked as a traitor, he would defect to the Soviet Union. 

 In the meantime, the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, became George Brown. He and Svetlana, now Anna, were moved to Clarkson, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto.  He wrote two books, and made publicity tours, always hidden inside a cloth hood (above).

The Browns lived middle class lives in Canada, raising 8 children and 16 grandchildren. Igor died in 1982, of complications of diabetes. Anna died in 2001. Their legacy was a victory for average people who just want to live their lives without becoming the playthings of ambitious egos, like Joseph Stalin. 

And that is how the cold war started.

- 30-

QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Six

 

I know the bust of Nefertiti is not sentient. At its core it is limestone, the compressed bodies of billions of single celled living creatures that once had some chemical level of awareness. But I have imagination enough to dream of a universe where any life, once having been sparked, survives in some sense. And I can dream of what it must have been like for cold stone to have the sculptor's warm hands cut and file and shape and soften its surface, combining in some small way his imagination, his life, and some small portion of the breath of a Queen of the Nile and thus impart that shadow of life into cold stone.

In Thutmose's universe his stone and plaster image of Neferetiti became one of the five parts that made up the living woman; Ib, (her emotional heart), Sheut (her ever present shadow), Ren (her living name), Ba (her personality) and Ka (what we would call her soul). It is thought her left eye was left unfinished in order to prevent the capture of Nefertiti's Ka by the stone. But could it not be that the stone and plaster image had its own Ka, or heart or shadow? And if so, what must have it been like to have slowly emerged from the darkness of nonexistence, to be born into existence slowly, and to have then been loved and admired for decades, before being abruptly thrown to the floor, abused and defiled, and then abandoned and forgotten -  buried in sands for 3, 000 long dark lonely years.

And then the light returned. Meticulously, the sand was brushed away, and once again warm human flesh touched her surface, lifted her up, and human eyes fell upon her shape and color, and human imaginations beheld her image, as a visitor from eons past. And then, in what must have seemed like a startlingly violent instant, she was traveling, whisked 2,000 miles from the place of her creation, into a new temple, a temple dedicated not to a god, but to the Ka of humanity, to that one part of humanity that no other creature on Earth has ever possessed but humans: our imagination. It seems that the bust of Nefertiti has enjoyed a most eventful Akh, or afterlife. She does indeed, live again.

When they first brought her to the Neuss (New) Museum, on Museum Island in the Spree River in Berlin, Germany, it was a re-dedication. The building had been erected in the 1840's, and was, like the Pharaoh’s new capital, a technological innovation – at the time. Instead of plaster, the New Museum was built with concrete poured over iron supporting rods with a brick exterior. The first floor contained Egyptian and German collections, and plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures (below). 

But the arrival of the Queen inspired changes. The central Greek courtyard was given a glass roof, and converted into space to display Ludwig Borchardt's collections from Akanetan, referred to by its modern Arabic name of Armarna. And it was here (below) that Nefertiti found her new throne. But it  did not prove to be a permanent abode.

In January of 1933 a new Pharaoh came to town.  Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. His new Reich minister, Herman Goring, began looking for a way to quickly and cheaply improve Germany's diplomatic standing in the world. At the time Egypt was nominally ruled by the debauched King Fariouk Fouad, but the real power behind his throne was Britain. And it occurred to Goring that returning the pilfered bust of Nefertiti on the occasion of his coronation, might cause the King to look favorably upon German diplomatic entreaties.  Letters were exchanged with the offer. But when Hitler got wind of the idea he killed it because he was convinced Nefertiti looked to be a member of his mythical “Aryan master race”  And that was, as far as I can tell, the last good thing Hitler did for Germany until he shot himself.

Adolf confidently started the Second World War on September 1^st, 1939, and even though Goring had assured citizens that Berlin would never be bombed, in an abundance of precaution Nefertiti was boxed up and temporarily locked away in the vault of the Prussian Governmental Bank. Then, on the night of 25 August, 1940, 70 obsolete British bombers dropped 21 tons of bombs on Berlin, hitting empty fields and damaging some houses. The worst injuries were some cuts and bruises, and the bombers never came near to hitting the airport, which has their target. 

The biggest causality was Hitler's equilibrium. He ordered the construction of three massive anti-aircraft gun towers in the center of  the city. The largest (above) was built in the Tiergarten park, adjacent to the Berlin Zoo. It was 7 stories tall to allow the guns clear fields of fire. The walls were of reinforced concrete 26 feet thick, the ceilings were 16 feet thick. It was so large it could shelter 5,000 civilians, and many of Germany's most valuable artistic treasures, including Nefertiti, were moved there in the fall of 1941. And there she stayed, hidden again, as safe as if she were still buried in the Egyptian sands, for another four and a half years, until the Soviet armies approached Berlin.

On 6 March, 1945,  Nefertiti made yet another trip, this one of 200 miles southwest to the rolling hills of the Thuringian Forest, where she was left for safe keeping 2,100 feet below ground level in a salt mine under the village of Merkers-Kieselbach. Late in March she was joined by 100 heavy woolen coats, 100 tons of gold bars, 550 bags of German currency (above) and 27 Rembrandt paintings. Two weeks later the entire cache was captured by soldiers of the 3rd American Army under General George S. Patton. Within days the entire treasure was transferred another 100 miles southwest to a bank vault in Frankfurt. There was so much loot that it took 2 convoys of 17 heavy trucks each. Being capitalists, the Americans shipped the gold first.

After Germany surrendered on 5 May, 1945, the Queen of the Nile was moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, on the north bank of the Rhine River. Here they brought her out into the light again to be examined by experts, and the public was even allowed to gaze upon her face. There she remained, transferred into German control, until 1956, when she was moved to the Dahelem museum in the American sector of Berlin. She could not return to Museum Island because the Neuse had been blasted to ruin during the war (above), and besides, the island was in East Berlin, the zone controlled by the Soviets.  When the East Germans demanded she be handed over, the West Germans decided to transfer her to the Egyptian museum in the Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. And there the Queen stayed for almost forty years - a human life time, but a blink of the single eye to Nefertiti. Then in 1989, the East German government collapsed.  In October of 1990 Germany was officially one nation again, and Berlin one city, and it became a matter of national pride for the Germans to return their Egyptian queen to her German throne.

In 2005 the German government began a 295 million Euro rebuilding of the Neuse, under a plan drawn up by English Architect David Chipperfield. And in 2009 the Queen once again held court in the Neuse Museum in the German capital. Her journey from the banks of the Nile to and from the banks of the Spree and to and from various bank vaults has been described as both “adventurous and beyond comparison”, and earning her the number two spot on Time Magazine's list of “Top ten plundered Artifacts”.  Egypt still wants her back, and Germany still intends upon keeping her.  And while one identity is barely 200 years old and the other goes back 4,500 years, both countries view Nefertiti as a national icon.

If you think about it, its a crazy situation, because she isn't really the queen of the Nile. She is limestone and plaster and paint, an image of a one time queen of a long dead empire that culturally has little in common with either of today's nations. And if, like Pinocchio, she were to arise tomorrow morning, as a real woman, she would be a very confused lady, no matter which city appeared before her eye. So far she has not had the afterlife she envisioned. And it may get stranger yet.

- 30 -