The Bitter Taste of Victory (52 page)

With multiple currencies circulating in Berlin, a money market had come into being at Zoo train station by the Tiergarten. Different currencies were used for different goods. Raisins were paid for in western and sugar in eastern marks; newspapers were purchased with eastern money but the printing was paid for in western money. There were two police forces with two prefects of police issuing warrants for arrest countermanding each other; two gas, light and water systems (though those in the western sectors functioned only between sunset and sunrise) and even two sewage systems.
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Despite the continual hum of planes overhead, the airlift was still bringing in only about 40 per cent of what the western part of the city had been consuming prior to the blockade and there was rarely enough to eat in the West. Food was now rationed to 1,600 calories a day so on average Berliners were eight and a half pounds underweight. In the excitement over the airlift’s success, it was easy for onlookers from outside Germany to forget how desperate conditions here remained, even after the currency reform.

‘Lifted’ into Berlin from London by the RAF in July, Gigi Richter was amazed that three years after the war had finished the sweet sickly smell of ruin could still be so overwhelming. She was shocked by the prevalence of choking dust from the crumbling buildings and by the sight of crippled and maimed figures collecting bricks from the piled up rubble or scraping cigarette stubs off the streets. The ‘abject poverty’ was all the more depressing contrasted with the luxury shops now installed in some of the rebuilt buildings on the Kurfürstendamm. Some of the glass cases outside the shops had now been replaced, surreally showcasing single luxury objects: a piece of sculpture or a black lace brassiere.
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According to Richter, no one in Berlin had any money. In June, everyone had been allocated 60 western Marks; their savings had then been restored at a ratio of one to ten, which did not leave most people with enough money to buy a newspaper or take a tram. Even if Berliners did have money, there were desperate food shortages. Richter did not see any potatoes available to buy in the shops in her entire two months in the city. Her report was slightly exaggerated but certainly
the animals in the zoo were starving, medical supplies were running out and Berliners were starting to complain about the dehydrated potatoes and watery coffee (known as
Blumen Kaffee
because you could see through to the floral pattern at the bottom of the mug). Because the electricity was usually turned on in two segments of two hours each, it became common to eat at midnight or to consume cold food cooked much earlier. The suicide rate in the city rose to about seven a day.
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None the less, 84 per cent of Berliners questioned in an opinion poll believed that the Western Allies could provide adequate food to sustain the city and when the Soviet military administration offered to feed western Berliners who registered in the Soviet sector only 2,050 people signed up.

At the end of August 1948, the four military governors met in Berlin in an attempt to solve the currency problem and end the blockade. But asked whether the meetings were amicable, Clay responded ‘it depends on what you call amicable’. It seemed very unlikely that the talks would reach a swift resolution and it was hard to remain conciliatory when an increasingly hostile atmosphere was developing around them. On 4 September, Sokolovsky announced that the Soviet air force would undertake exercises over Berlin between 6 and 15 September. Claiming this was normal practice for this time of year, he registered his regrets about any disruption of the airlift this would cause. Clay complained to Washington that ‘in the four summers we have been in Berlin we have never heard of these manoeuvres previously’. Two days later the Berlin City Assembly was interrupted mid-meeting at the City Hall in the Soviet sector when 1,500 communist demonstrators arrived to disrupt proceedings. The communists had sponsored a new ‘democratic bloc’ which declared that the City Assembly ‘no longer represents the working people of Berlin’.
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Incensed by these bullying tactics, 300,000 Berliners gathered across the Tiergarten and the Platz der Republik on 9 September demanding an end to the blockade. Lord mayor elect Ernst Reuter rose to speak at the podium placed at the base of the stone steps of the Reichstag, where he told the assembled crowd that this was not a day for generals or
diplomats to negotiate, it was a day for the people of Berlin to raise their voice. ‘We cannot be bartered, we cannot be negotiated, we cannot be sold . . . Whoever would surrender this city, whoever would surrender the people of Berlin, would surrender a world . . . more, he would surrender himself. People of the world, look upon this city! You cannot, you must not, forsake us! There is only one possibility for all of us: to stand jointly together until this fight has been won.’

On their way back to their homes in the Russian sector, thousands of demonstrators came up against the might of the Soviet police, armed to punish this rebellion. When some Germans threw rocks they were met with pistol shots; a fifteen-year-old boy died stepping forward to shield a nurse. That day the meeting between the military governors broke down.
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As Erika Mann had observed in the town meeting debate, for many Germans, these developments were not wholly depressing. Now that the Soviet Union and the US regarded each other as the enemy, Germany could be deemed an ally by both and the Germans could be accorded the victim status they had demanded since the end of the war. The Allies had abandoned their more patronising attempts at re-education and punishment. By August 1948 all alleged war criminals had been tried and it was agreed that all POWs in the western zones would be returned to Germany by the end of the year, although the last survey of camp opinion had revealed that over half the remaining POWs viewed National Socialism as ‘a good idea, poorly carried out’, as indeed did a similar percentage of Germans in the western zones.
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Writers and cultural figures tended to reject Nazism more fervently, but very few still talked in terms of collective guilt. Those who found the current mood of forgetfulness upsetting departed: Karl Jaspers had emigrated to Basel in March 1948. Most writers were understandably relieved that the Germans were now seen by their occupiers as allies and that the acceptable status of German literature had been made explicit with the official founding of the new German PEN club at the PEN congress in Copenhagen that June. Addressing the congress on behalf of the English centre, Peter de Mendelssohn had confirmed that the twenty writers proposed to form the core of the new German centre (including
Johannes Becher, Elisabeth Langgässer, Anna Seghers, Erich Kästner, Thomas Mann’s former opponent Walter von Molo and Hermann Kasack, whose novel de Mendelssohn was now translating into English) were all credibly anti-Nazi and fully acceptable in all four zones of Germany. Becher, addressing the congress in a language he claimed still to find painful to employ when it was so ‘disgraced’ by the Nazis, expressed his pleasure at the opening of the new centre and hoped that one day he could host the PEN congress in Berlin, ‘the capital of a Germany that finally, finally, wants peace, peace and nothing but peace’.
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Three months later, the possibility of Berlin as a capital of a united Germany seemed even less likely, as did the preservation of a single PEN centre for East and West. But the existence of the PEN centre was welcome proof that the Germans were now treated with respect by the Allies and was arguably a necessary first step for the kind of cultural revival in Germany envisaged by Stephen Spender at the end of the war, though he would have wanted the assembled writers to look backwards as well as forwards. Meanwhile the occupiers confirmed their loyalty to the Germans by increasing the flow of planes steadily over the course of the autumn. By October 1948 the airlift was theoretically providing West Berlin with 98 per cent of its food requirements and 74 per cent of its coal requirements, although problems of distribution meant that many Berliners were still starving.
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The aeroplanes brought culture as well as sustenance. The Western Allies were determined to prove that they cared about the mental enrichment of their subjects. At the start of October the first issues of Melvin Lasky’s magazine
Der Monat
(
The Month
) were flown to Berlin from Munich, set to be the flagship publication in the US zone. After his outburst at the Writers’ Conference the previous October, Lasky had been admonished by his superiors for being too headstrong in his attack on the communists. He complained to a friend that Berlin was like a frontier-town in nineteenth-century America and that not enough people saw this. With Indians on the horizon you had to have your rifle handy or you would lose your scalp; ‘here very few people have any guts, and if they do they usually don’t know in which direction to point their rifle’.
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Luckily for Lasky, General Clay at least was well stocked with both guts and rifles. He looked favourably on the proposal Lasky presented that December, accusing the Americans of turning a blind eye to the ‘concerted political war’ being conducted against them in Germany. According to Lasky, the Americans were demonised as inane, jazz-drunk, economically selfish reactionaries. They had not succeeded in combating the propaganda from the communists and now an ‘active’ truth, bold enough to ‘enter the contest’ was needed. The substance of the Cold War was cultural in range so the Americans needed to publish a new journal that would ‘serve both as a constructive fillip to German-European thought’ and act, ‘as a demonstration that behind the official representatives of American democracy lies a great and progressive culture, with a richness of achievements in the arts, in literature, in philosophy, in all the aspects of culture which unite the free traditions of Europe and America.’ Lasky’s new magazine was born, aimed at winning the German intelligentsia away from communism and heavily subsidised by American Marshall Plan Amoney.
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Der Monat
created an immediate impact when the first 60,000 copies appeared in October 1948. Germany had been swamped by new literary magazines since the end of the war. Sitting baffled by the mass of paper piled up before him, the writer Alfred Döblin complained in 1946 that magazines had become ‘a natural phenomenon, they fall down from heaven or they rise from hell’. However this one was different because of the large print-run and the consistent international prestige of its writers. It was as though the collected intelligentsia of the West was being flown into Berlin on the American bombers within the pages of the new magazine.
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The first issue contained articles by Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, V. S. Pritchett, Rebecca West, Richard Crossman, Stephen Spender, Clement Greenberg and others. It mixed anti-Stalinism and esoteric high culture in a manner inspired by the American
Partisan Review
, to which Lasky had long been a contributor. The political message was unambiguous, with the first three articles addressing ‘The Destiny of the West’. According to Bertrand Russell, there were three possible scenarios for the future: life
on earth would become extinct, barbarism would reign, or one power would rule the world, in which case it was better that the US should rule than the Soviet Union. ‘Russian victory would be a great misfortune’ leaving no individuals remaining who can think or feel for themselves.’
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Later in the magazine
The New York Times
journalist Drew Middleton sketched a portrait of ‘Soviet Russia without propaganda’ in which he described a day in the life of Iwan Iwanowitsch, an ordinary worker. Ostensibly a neutral account, the political implications quickly emerge. Iwan lives and works in terrible conditions, sharing an unheated room with his wife and two sons and a kitchen with four other families; his eight-hour working day in the factory becomes a twelve-hour day because of the poor transport facilities. He and his family are also subjected to daily lies and propaganda, so he is convinced that the Soviet Union alone conquered Germany and has never come across the terms human rights, personal freedom or human progress.
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Elsewhere the magazine’s anti-Stalinism was more subtle. James Agee’s review of Eisenstein’s
Ivan the Terrible
complained about the banality and artistic simplicity of Eisenstein’s film, before blaming Stalin for producing this effect (though physically free, Eisenstein was intellectually ‘imprisoned’). And in many of the articles there was no clear political message. Stephen Spender’s account of a visit to Picasso and Clement Greenberg’s review of an exhibition of paintings from Germany, currently installed in New York, were two of many pieces with no obvious political agenda, simply showcasing western culture.
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Der Monat
was immediately popular with Germans both at home and abroad. Klaus Mann, keen to write for the magazine, told Melvin Lasky that the first issue contained ‘a lot of interesting stuff ’. Thomas Mann described it in his diary as ‘readable’ and ‘educated’ albeit ‘omitting many things’. This may have been a moment of victory for the Americans in the cultural battle for Germany, but the Russians had their next attack planned.

On 22 October 1948 Bertolt Brecht arrived at the border of the Soviet zone of Germany, travelling from Switzerland where he had moved the previous November after being investigated by the House Un-American
Activities Committee. As a well-known socialist, Brecht’s future in the US was doomed. He was ambivalent about living in Germany, where he found it hard to believe all that much had changed, even under the watch of the Russians. But Brecht was a pragmatist and the East Germans were offering him the promise of his own theatre and the immediate opportunity to stage both his wartime plays,
Mother Courage and her Children
(
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
) and
Galileo.
He and his wife the actor Helene Weigel had decided to try out life in East Berlin, though they kept their options open by travelling with Swiss papers.
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