The Bitter Taste of Victory (20 page)

East
-
West co-operation was even more difficult when it came to governing the city more generally. At the start of September, Gavin took his turn as the head of the entire Kommandatura, which he reported to Gellhorn made him responsible for ‘887,000 very hungry but rather docile Krauts’. Their food consumption was 600 tons daily, which was a ‘hell of a lot of potatoes’ and involved vast numbers of trains. The fuel situation was looking disastrous for the coming winter. He found that the Kommandatura was proving increasingly unworkable as a means of solving these problems.
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The Kommandatura was built on an inherent contradiction. Because each representative of the four occupying powers had the power of
veto and the French and Russians in particular were determined to use it, there was no real necessity to work together. In the case of nonagreement their own national policies would prevail. But however ineffectual it was, by its very existence the Kommandatura embroiled the Allies in hours of pointless discussion. Gavin wasted a whole morning debating the relative merits of dry and fresh milk with the British, French and Russians.
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Battling with the intransigent Russians and the hungry Germans, Gavin wondered how to restore order in a city that often seemed unruleable. Like Wilder he was caught up in the crazy energy of the ruined town but it was rather less fun if you were meant to be in charge of it. None the less he was sure that all of his difficulties would diffuse if only his lover would appear. ‘Darling, all of this doesn’t mean a damn thing if I know that you are going to be here,’ he told his ‘darling Marty’. ‘So please, hurry.’
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Gellhorn was too slow. On 19 September, Marlene Dietrich arrived in Berlin using travel orders arranged by Gavin. She had been wanting to see her general again for months. After they last met she had told her daughter Maria that they had not slept together because her feelings for him were more a ‘fan-type crush’ than sexual passion and, perhaps more decisively, because he had not asked her. This time Gavin succumbed more easily. ‘I have decided that there will never be any more between us than there is constancy in our hearts and if it is not there there is nothing,’ he had written to Gellhorn in July. But he had not seen her for almost three months and the image of the absent woman was swiftly displaced by the presence of one of the world’s most seductive movie stars. Here was Marlene Dietrich in army uniform, low-voiced, funny and adoring. The two quickly began an affair.
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Dietrich herself was losing patience with Jean Gabin, her film-star lover with whom she was living in Paris. He was jealous and temperamental and they were quarrelling. She was grateful to escape to Berlin, the city where she had been born and where she had begun her career, singing cabaret in nightclubs and seducing cinema audiences as the matter-of-fact showgirl in
The Blue Angel.

Dietrich was distressed both by the scale of the destruction and by the continual noise created by the American authorities, who were using dynamite to level the ruins. Her former house in Schöneberg had been reduced to a façade, with a balcony still hanging precariously from the wall. When it was first bombed her mother had spent her days searching the rubble for her possessions and had found a bronze mask of Marlene’s face still intact. But Dietrich was happy to hear the Berlin dialect again and pleased still to be popular among the locals. ‘The Berliners love me,’ she told her ex-husband Rudi proudly, ‘bring me everything from photos to their ration of herring.’ She had been to the theatre and met up with old friends and had even wondered about reviving her pre-war lesbian singing act.
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Within days of arriving, Dietrich began performing two shows a day for the army, as popular with the troops as she had always been. When she first had a day off between shows, she sped to Czechoslovakia to look for Rudi’s parents. After a nightmarish journey she was told that they had left the Displaced Persons camp they had been assigned to. She returned to Berlin dispirited but found that they had walked all the way to her mother’s house from Czechoslovakia. They were shaking with fright because they had been told they were not entitled to ration cards and would have to go to another camp. This was Gavin’s rule – a harsh but apparently necessary measure to prevent Berlin overcrowding and starving in the winter – but by the next day Gavin had found heavy-labour ration cards for Rudi’s parents so that they would be able to stay.

On 2 October, Dietrich flew back to Paris. Later that day Martha Gellhorn arrived in Berlin. Between the departure and the arrival of his two lovers, Gavin wrote a letter to Dietrich celebrating their ten days together. ‘I love you and think you should be on a pedestal. I want you there, that is part of loving you.’ He missed her already, complaining that there was now a void in his existence that no one and nothing could fill. ‘Until I am in your arms again I will be completely at a loss.’ He now had nothing to look forward to at noon, in the evening, at night, any time.
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In fact Gavin had the arms of another beautiful woman to look forward to. When Gellhorn appeared later that day she was allocated
a room close to his, in the staff quarters of the 82
^nd
Airborne Division, on the grounds that she was writing about the unit’s exploits for the
Saturday Evening Post.
The couple resumed where they had left off in June, with Gavin showing Gellhorn around Berlin, and reminding her that bodies were ‘something terrific’. The next day he took her with him to supervise the digging of corpses out of the flooded subway. ‘I’ve given up deads since Dachau,’ she wrote in her diary; ‘the desolation – women working in the rubble. The women with dyed yellow hair and that grey thick German skin . . . Hospital – 30 hunger cases out of 960 patients. Germany should be a colony – will never be a democracy. Forecast Russo-American war . . . Danced 9 hours.’
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This was the life that Gellhorn led best. She may have been upset by the corpses and the starving patients, she may have been furious with the undemocratic and sycophantic Germans, but she was able to dance for nine hours with her lover in the continued suspended present of war. They lived intensely together for an ecstatic week, fired with the feverish energy of the city. ‘What shall I do when this easy comradely life goes to pieces?’ Gellhorn asked in her diary on 10 October. ‘Am really unsuited for anything else.’ She departed to London the following day and Gavin wrote to Dietrich in Paris, explaining his silence on the grounds that he had been waiting for a visitor who could deliver a letter personally rather than trusting the postal system. He was listening happily to the records she had given him of her singing. He now regretted that they had seen so little of each other before Berlin; he had waited too long to find her. ‘You are a wonderful person Marlene, beautiful, lovely, most unselfish.’
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Gavin was courting Dietrich in the language of her own songs. ‘I am made for love from head to toe,’ Marlene sang to her Jimmie from the army gramophone with the same Berlin accent that he heard every day on the street. When she sang this song in
The Blue Angel
, she was seducing a stuffy professor who quickly proved unable to resist her charms. Gavin did not see why he should withstand them either.

At one point in the Berlin film Billy Wilder had gone home to write, the James Gavin-inspired soldier-hero explains (in the third person)
why he is too busy cavorting with his German temptress to slow down and wave the American flag:

During the war he couldn’t go fast enough for you. Get on that beachhead, get through those tank traps, and
step on it, step on it. Faster –
a hundred miles an hour, twenty-four hours a day, through burning towns and down smashed
Autobahnen.
Then one day the war is over. And you expect him to jam on those brakes and stop like that? Well, everybody can’t stop like that. Sometimes you skid quite a piece. Sometimes you go into a spin and smash into a wall or a tree and bash your fenders.

James Gavin himself was finding it hard to slow down. Burdened by the responsibility for keeping a whole city alive and depressed by the prospect of returning home, he was determined to take what excitement the war still had to offer, able only to continue ‘boiling along at top speed’. It was possible that he was going too fast; that even he could not sustain simultaneous affairs with two women with quick wits, famous legs and luxuriant blonde hair who had become the darlings of the American army. But he was certainly not going to jam on the brakes and stop.

6

‘A pain that hurts too much’

German Winter: September–December 1945

After leaving Berlin, Martha Gellhorn wrote to James Gavin telling him that she did not think they had a future together. ‘Dearest Love, dearest Jimmy and darling,’ she began, ‘I have thought of nothing but you all these days.’ She mistrusted herself and she feared the evolution of their love. He would fall more in love with her; she would fall more in love with him; she would create an alluring story about him in her mind, turning him into several people he was not. She would rely on her story, while he would simply rely on her, or on the version of her that existed in his mind. Love was a conjuring trick – ‘done with the most beautiful mirrors in the world’ – but it was convincing enough that soon they would strive for permanence. Marriage would come next, destroying the illusion as it had with Hemingway, and Gellhorn was sure that she could not marry Gavin: ‘I simply could not be a good army wife. I’d be dreadfully bad at it, I know: it is sickening to realise that two people alone are not a world nor even a life; we live in a fixed specific world (I, on the other hand, am only happy if living in every available world and obeying the rules of none), and we live with countless people.’

She was too old and spoiled to make polite conversation with other army wives and he would grow impatient with her before long. It was important to realise this now, while they were happy together; while she
loved him so much that the days seemed ‘fuzzy dreams’ and she was living suspended in time, waiting to see him again. She was depressed by the prospect of a future without him and she worried that she was doomed to live alone because she seemed to belong nowhere. ‘My feet are cold every night without you, and presently I suppose I will be cold throughout.’
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Gavin’s own feet were cooling rapidly under his American army blankets. Autumn set in early in 1945 and by September it was clear that the winter would be as bad as the pessimists had feared. Already on 23 August, Peter de Mendelssohn had observed to his wife that autumn was beginning and Berlin had ceased to smell; he was anxious that the winter was going to be unendurable and that the Germans were not doing enough to prepare for it. The health and food situation in the ruined German cities was deteriorating quickly. Water was polluted because of breaks in pipes and 80 per cent of sewage in the British zone was not reaching the sewage works. The tuberculosis rate for Germany as a whole was now triple the rate that had prevailed before Germany’s defeat. All but one of the forty-four hospitals in the British sector were badly damaged and on 15 October
The New York Times
reported a frightening shortage of medicine throughout Berlin.
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The next day there was a ration cut in the US zone, taking the daily calorie count (for those fortunate enough to acquire their full rations) to a debilitating 1,345. In the British zone the daily rate was even lower. During the summer the British had been importing 70,000 tons of wheat and 50,000 tons of potatoes a month from Britain; this was unsustainable and it was becoming almost impossible to feed the Ruhr area, which had previously imported its food from eastern Germany. The 1945 harvest was extremely poor, with rye now 44 per cent and potatoes 45 per cent below the 1943 produce. As a result of the official shortages, people relied more and more on the black market where prices inflated rapidly as demand escalated. There was more food to be gained scouring the ruins for cigarette ends than finding a job clearing those ruins. ‘How can I afford to look for work? I have a family to feed,’ went a line in a popular joke. That winter 60,000 Berliners died, with 167 committing suicide. For those fighting to keep the population alive it seemed increasingly absurd to think in terms of guilt.
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As the days darkened, there were shortages of electricity throughout Germany. In Berlin there was only a current for a few hours a day and people never knew exactly when it would come on. Candles were only available on the black market; light bulbs were a rarity. In theory, each Berlin family was allocated a tree for firewood but it was hard to police this and by the end of 1945 the whole Tiergarten (the large park running through the centre of the city) had been hacked down to stumps. Onlookers were struck by the absurdity of the pompous statues of dead German heroes standing nakedly in a wilderness of mud.
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Berlin, which had seemed so alluringly vibrant that summer, now felt unrelentingly depressing for the British and American occupiers, even though they were living in relative luxury compared to the natives they were there to help. Peter de Mendelssohn was determined to winter in London and return the following spring. Curt Riess now found that he could not stay in Berlin longer than a week at a time without becoming depressed. He escaped to the more hopeful atmosphere of Paris or Switzerland every ten days. Visiting the city in November, as part of a larger trip to report on the Nuremberg trials, the American novelist John Dos Passos observed that Berlin was bleaker than the other beaten-up towns: ‘There, that point in a ruined people’s misery had been reached where the victims were degraded beneath the reach of human sympathy.’ He was disheartened to find that the Berliners were too miserable to incite his sympathy. It seemed that sympathy depended on a process of empathetic identification that ceased to function when the gulf between the onlooker and the victim was too great. Dos Passos wondered if this had also been the case for the Germans who had complacently watched the suffering of their Jewish neighbours.
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