Читаем Berlin полностью

Driving through Berlin in February 1946, the critic Friedrich Luft was heartened to see placards announcing innumerable plays and concerts. He was also struck by newspaper ads promoting one cultural event after another. “There are at least half a dozen concerts a day—in all parts of the city,” he wrote. “Two opera houses are giving regular performances. What other city in the world can say as much?” A tourism-promotion campaign of 1947 entitled “Berlin Lebt—Berlin Ruft!” told the world that Berlin was back in business, as high spirited and cosmopolitan as ever, despite the nasty patch it had just been through. “Berlin may have put on a hard face,” said the ad, “but its visage is worldly and lively, and it still displays the constant movement, elan, tempo, noise, and openness beloved of Berliners. The big world is here together, with its newspapers and films, its opinions and ideas, its concerns for peace and understanding cherished by all peoples.” For Peter de Mendelssohn, a Berlin intellectual who had returned to his native city as an American occupation officer, the burst of cultural activity meant that the battered German capital was still a force to be reckoned with when it came to the arts: “Berlin is not dead. In many regards it is more alive than Paris,” he contended.

More alive, perhaps, but there was reason to question the quality of Berlin’s culture in this period. Many of the artists and intellectuals who returned from exile were struck by a lack of originality, innovation, and genuine creative power in the art of the time. The dramatist Fritz Kortner, who like Brecht had spent the war years in the United States, was so appalled by the theatrical productions he saw at the Kurfürstendamm-Theater in 1947 that he wanted to flee back to America. Brecht himself complained loudly of “the miserable artistic condition in the theater of the former Reichshauptstadt.” Peter Suhrkamp, the publisher, wrote his friend Hermann Hesse in Switzerland about the lamentable “noise” being made by the legions of cultural mice climbing out of their holes and scurrying about the city. Despairing of the local music scene, Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote: “What’s going on here now is all passing, insignificant, meaningless. A reign of mediocrity in its truest sense, but which certainly cannot and will not last.” The novelist Elisabeth Langgässer found the 1947 Berlin Writers’ Conference to be like “a great show of fireworks, and the following morning the parched brown grass was strewn with the charred remains.”

It is hardly surprising that Berlin’s culture in the immediate postwar period lacked freshness and originality. For the past twelve years the city had been cut off from most of the rest of the world. Berliners understandably wanted to catch up with what had been happening elsewhere during their enforced isolation. Hence the city was inundated by a tide of cultural borrowing, some of it of high quality, but much of it the worst that the wider world had to offer. Another major impulse was to take up culturally where one had left off in 1933, to revive the “Golden Twenties.” Alluding to that fabled era, Berliners liked to call the period immediately after World War II the “golden hunger years.” To a large degree, the Berlin culture of this time was indeed a throwback to the Weimar culture of the 1920s and early 1930s. But what had once been avant-garde was not so avant any more, and what might have been “golden” in the 1920s now looked merely yellowed.

If Berlin Falls, Germany Will Be Next

In line with their strategy of indirect rule in eastern Germany and Berlin, the Soviets had licensed four political parties in summer 1945: the KPD (Communist Party), the SPD (Social Democrats), the CDU (Christian Democrats), and the LDP (Liberal Democrats). All were essentially “front” organizations, but the KPD, as the party closest to the Soviet military administration, was expected to dominate the political scene. By late 1945 it was clear that this was not happening, especially in Berlin. Precisely because they were perceived as stooges for the Russians, the Communists made little headway in conquering the hearts and minds of the Berliners. The Soviets decided therefore to change tactics and to orchestrate a merger between the KPD and the popular SPD, thereby giving the native Communists a blind behind which to smuggle themselves into a position of control. Stalin once said that imposing communism on the Germans was like trying to fit “a saddle on a cow,” but a more appropriate image for the Russian tactic at this juncture was that of the Trojan horse.