Just Me Page 16
That night in the hotel, a pianist and saxophonist were playing smooth jazz in the bar. I downed several Ernest Hemingway cocktails and, as the other customers left, I was joined by the waiter. I was drunk and tactless enough to confide my misgivings. He was a wonderfully frank young man. He told me his parents and grandparents denied knowing what went on before and during the war, but like me he found it unlikely when it was so obvious. This drove a wedge between him and his family, because his generation were taught to face up to the war crimes. He went on to point out that the whole area around the hotel was completely destroyed by the Allies. His grandmother was raped repeatedly by the invading Russians. He explained that since the Wall came down Berlin was struggling with two different ideologies: people brought up under Communism and people brought up under the capitalist system were battling to accommodate one another. His total honesty should have cheered me up, but he reminded me of two other distressing aspects of Berlin – the occupation and the Wall.
I had to get out of this tragic place, the backdrop to continual horror. Far from, as I had hoped, having my prejudices dispelled , I was on the point of leaving with them intact and even confirmed. Then a friend of a friend contacted the hotel, saying there were a couple of women she wanted me to meet.
One, Irina, lived in East Berlin and was the daughter of a leading Communist; the other, Ilona, was a West Berlin film-maker intent on exposing Nazi war criminals. A fascinating mixed bag that was too good to miss.
I met Irina at Hackescher Markt. I told her she would know me by my blue hat, but I instinctively recognised her. The red-haired woman striding towards me stood out in the crowd. Not her neat, yet inexpensive, clothes, but her bright-eyed energy gave her an eye-catching allure. She was soon laughing a gutsy laugh at my tales of confusion, and, arm in arm, we went off to look around her world.
Where I had seen roadworks Irina saw rebirth. She was hopeful that the new construction would bring life back to the eastern sector but it was the restoration of the old buildings that most excited her. She expressed herself upset by the total condemnation of everything about the eastern way of life. It was not all Stasi nastiness. Even though she admitted that an organisation that boasted 90,000 full-time and 175,000 unofficial people spying on friends and neighbours created fear. Now, the secret files are revealing details of past betrayals, and causing much pain. But it was not like that to begin with.
She was dismissive of the current fashion for Ostologie that sentimentalises the food and cars of the old GDR, trivialising their lives under Communism. When she took me to some of the craft workshops and party and union meeting places, she reminded me that it was the Communists and Social Democrats that presented the biggest opposition to the National Socialists during their rise to power. Their feuds with one another made them a less powerful opposition than they could have been.
To begin with I was wary of her positivity, as she had a vested interest. Her father was Rudolf Herrnstadt, a leading Communist activist and journalist, editor of the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. She was born in Russia of a Russian woman. Her father was actively involved in the creation of the GDR.
Irina took me to Karl-Marx-Allee, East Berlin's main boulevard, to show me an example of Communist town planning. Massive monumental blocks with two large towers incorporating flats, a hotel, shops and a cinema line a road that is eighty-nine metres across. At first glance I could see it was impressive, but I found it bleak and inhuman. For my taste, the road was too wide and the buildings too uniform. Dictator's architecture, meant to impress. Then with Irina's help I looked closer. She showed me where her father's newspaper office had been and described how he had been closely involved with the creation of Stalinallee as it was then called. Built by the workers themselves, with their involvement in the designs, it was an experiment in pleasant living space for them. No expense was spared in making it attractive. It reminded me of the attitude the Victorian English took towards the nobility of work, as in my grandfather's sewage works. The fountains and trees in the street, the parks behind for sports and the rooftop communal space were all designed to bring people together. The shops on the ground floor provided all their needs. One whole section was dedicated to children, with a toy and clothes shop, and day nursery, with small furniture especially for little ones. Never mind stories of them all being forced to be potty-trained by one year old, this was a charming place and a godsend for the mothers.
The buildings' exteriors are made of elegant stone and Meissen ceramic with, when you look closely, exquisite detail. It wasn't all show either. The interiors followed the Bauhaus principle of practical elegance. We visited some friends of Irina in one of the flats who have lived there since they first went up and they said it was, and still is, a happy place to live. Would that some of our sink estates had been built with such loving concern for their inhabitants. I rued my habit of making quick superficial judgements; on closer examination this was a lovely place. Fortunately, others are changing their opinions too and it looks as though this majestic area will be preserved from the mania of razing East Berlin to the ground.
The unity that this estate fostered worked against the state. It was here, encouraged by Irina's father, that a strike led to the uprising of 1953, which had to be quelled by Russian tanks, after which the iron hand of Russia gradually destroyed the early idealistic socialist vision. Irina's father was thrown out in the process, as were all the original visionaries. Nevertheless, the uprising started a change of attitude, later felt in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that eventually led to the fall of the Communist satellite empire.
The grotesque Berlin Wall, built to keep the citizens of the GDR from leaving, was the uprising's more direct result. In one museum there is a film of the events shot simultaneously from either side as the Wall was thrown up in one day in 1961. In the west, incredulous citizens are standing on stepladders with binoculars, waving tearfully to their slowly disappearing compatriots. In the east, armed soldiers are keeping people at bay. One young woman ignores a soldier's request to leave. He returns a moment later looking more threatening, and she eventually walks away, head held high, but why was it that none of them fought harder against this monstrous assault on their freedom? Not even, apart from that girl, just shout their disapproval? Were they too intimidated and exhausted from years of dictatorship of one sort or another to do anything? When the time was right, of course, they did. The sheer weight of crowds and feeling dismantled the Wall stone by stone on that glorious day in 1989.
The highlight of my tour of the eastern sector was a visit to Sophiensaele. This was the first headquarters of the German Communist party, and obviously a frequent haunt of the youthful Irina. At the top of some dark stairs is a magic ancient ballroom. Faded and peeling walls, tattered drapes, one expects phantom dancers to whirl around the floor. In fact, there was a live girl in a black leotard and tights, rehearsing a Pina Bausch-type dance. Silent and intense, she was oblivious to our presence. Rosa Luxemburg, murdered and thrown into the river for her left-wing views, had lectured here, but this girl was probably putting the enchanting room to a more suitable use. It is now an important performance space especially for modern dance. Much more fun.
Downstairs is a rumbustious family café. Tables round a dance floor, someone playing a piano, children leaping about, people gossiping and laughing. Irina was greeted warmly by everyone. The atmosphere was unlike anything I experienced in the more sophisticated West Berlin. It had a feeling of a past era; indeed, the clothes were reminiscent of the fifties and the people were obviously not wealthy. Nevertheless, it had a joyful atmosphere.
The Palast der Republik was another venue where Irina had a good time as a girl. It was the seat of government of the GDR, but as well as its political purpose it had a bowling alley, shops, a disco and bars. It was a fun palace and a meeting place. Now, after removing the asbestos, no one quite knows what to do with the remaining empty shell. It has fallen foul of the desire to eliminate all trace of the GDR, whic
h Irina finds hurtful. So it remains a gaping ruin – in contrast to the Reichstag, the government centre of West Berlin, which has been gloriously restored with a spectacular dome by Sir Norman Foster, the British architect.
I so enjoyed my time with this vivacious woman, Irina. I love it when people make me rethink perceived opinions. Life in the GDR was not all bad. Its brand of Communision, like many ideologies, started out for the good of the people and then went horribly wrong, but it was not the fault of visionaries like her father. On the platform of the metro station we said our goodbyes and hugged one another. She stayed and waved as the train disappeared, a poignant figure. She lives alone with her memories, hurt and bewildered by the way it has all turned out, but full of hope for the future. She had shifted my obsession with the Nazis into consideration of what happened in Germany after they were defeated. What horrors had we, the Allies – Russian, British, American and French – inflicted that made that man with the digger hate me so much?
The occupiers could have behaved better. Rape, the usual weapon of war, was widespread. A black market thrived, in which, when all else was spent, one's body was the only currency and the occupying troops took full advantage of that. The contrast with their comparative comfort must have been hard to bear for the starving civilians.
The Russians feature large in the story of Berlin. They were the first of the Allies to enter the city at the end of the war. The fighting was bitter for twelve hours and many civilians died, often killed by their own soldiers. I was chilled to discover that Anhalt station, which I used several times, was deliberately flooded by the Germans to stop the Russians' progress underground. Hundreds of people sheltering there were drowned and more were killed by a shell that flattened their dead bodies to a wall. In twelve hours, there was an orgy of destruction. Even 200 animals in the zoo were wantonly killed.
The British took part in one shocking operation involving the Russians. It was decided that all people of Russian descent should go back to the USSR. Stalin regarded them as traitors, particularly his soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Allies, including his own son Yakof. He did not want them. Despite this the Allies sent back, often by force, two million people, many of whom were immediately killed or sent to die in gulags or committed suicide rather than return to a crueller death in Russia. Irina told me one tale of British soldiers forcing a troop of Cossacks over a bridge into a wood in the Soviet zone, where the sound of gunshots told of their fate. The Cossacks showed amazing courage, singing their beautiful litany and protecting their womenfolk as they went. Some of the British soldiers wept, and to their everlasting credit threatened mutiny until the process was eventually stopped. But the whole deportation was a shameful episode.
The carnage wrought on the Germans by the war was annihilating. In Hamburg alone, a firestorm ignited by our bombing caused more damage than in all the British cities put together. When Victor Gollancz went there he wrote to his wife, 'you know I went to Belsen on Tuesday? So I don't for a single second forget the other side of the picture. But these Germans are in an agony of suffering.' In Hanover, not far from the dreaded Bramsche, home of my path-laying friends, only 1 per cent of buildings were undamaged. This city of Berlin that I was wandering around, admiring its renaissance, was 70 per cent destroyed and the area around my plush hotel 95 per cent.
I took respite from searching archives and visiting museums in a concert in the glamorous Philharmonic Concert Hall. I watched Simon Rattle prancing around producing music for smart Berliners. After this, uplifted by the music, I strolled to Potsdamer Platz with its spectacular Sony and DaimlerChrysler buildings. In 1945 a German officer described it thus: 'The whole expanse of Potsdamer Platz is a waste of ruins. Masses of damaged vehicles, half smashed trailers of the ambulances with the wounded still in them. Dead people are everywhere, many of them appallingly cut up by tanks and trucks.' Later, people died here trying to cross the Wall, which went through the middle. Yet here was I, a tourist, enjoying the sights and sounds.
The worst statistic to contemplate is 53,000 orphaned children who struggled to exist in the wreckage of Berlin. I was struck with the thought that were I to pose my accusatory question to some old people, 'What did you do during the War?' their reply might well be: 'I was six and I starved and froze all by myself in the ruins that you created.' Or maybe the very old might have been one of the Trümmerfrauen who, dressed in their absent husbands' trousers and coats, struggled to clear the mountains of debris by hand.
There, on the actual site of such suffering, came a complete change in my thinking. All thoughts of 'serve them right, they started it' were blown away. All I could feel was pity and shame. And impotence at the insanity of war.
Next I met Ilona. Another redhead – a recurring theme in my German encounters – and a whirlwind of activity. A woman with a mission – and a dreadful driver. In her quest to show me the beauties of West Berlin, particularly Charlottenburg, where she lived, she ignored traffic lights, stopped dead if she saw something of interest, and took both hands off the wheel to gesticulate or emphasise a point. As a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, it is a wonder that I opened my eyes long enough to see anything. The most astonishing thing about our hair-raising tour was that never did any other drivers, forced to skid to a stop to avoid her erratic course, honk the horn or scream abuse. In London she would have been, in my opinion fairly justifiably, a victim of road rage. In Berlin, they took it in their stride. One hands-off-the-wheel moment was the site of a Jewish shop guarded by armed police. The passion it provoked led me to suggest we stop for a coffee and talk.
Ilona Ziok is a highly esteemed filmmaker on the Continent. Her father was an aristocrat who was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. The subject of a lot of her work is Nazi war crimes. She mentioned several times that she takes risks with her films as there are people around, often in powerful positions, that are hiding guilty pasts and wish to silence her. Her next subject is a Jewish politician said to have committed suicide, but whom she suspects and wants to prove was murdered. She is having great difficulty raising funding.
Her film Kurt Gerrons Karussell, which I watched to help me with background colour for the musical I was soon to rehearse, was the study of a Jewish comedy actor and director who was sent to a concentration camp where he organised concert parties to entertain the prisoners. Some of the songs they wrote for the shows are gutting in their attempt to laugh at their situation. Satirical ditties about waiting for death. Eventually, Gerron was prevailed upon to direct a propaganda movie, showing how wonderfully the Jews were being treated in these holiday camps. He shows children frolicking and eating sandwiches when they were in fact starving. Nearly all these jolly Jews and Roma were shortly to be gassed. Ilona deals compassionately with the man's dilemma, even leaving open the possibility that he was a director who couldn't resist the opportunity to exercise his craft and make his work as good as possible. If the project was an attempt to save his life, he failed, for after the film was completed, he too was murdered.
Ilona lives in the very area where Christopher Isherwood stayed when he wrote his story of Sally Bowles, the English girl out of her depth in the decadent Berlin of the 1930s. The Nollendorfplatz, where my character Fraulein Schneider had her boarding house, is still a gay area, as it was when Isher-wood, Spender and Auden got up to all sorts of larks there. I wandered around to get the flavour of the atmosphere. Ilona is not happy that, at night, when the club clientele's louche behaviour spills into the streets, there is trouble from neo-Nazi thugs. The rise of such gangs is exactly what her life's work is dedicated to avoiding. Never again should it be possible for someone to rise to power and say as Goebbels did in 1926: 'This city is a melting pot of everything that is evil – prostitution, drinking houses, cinemas, Marxists, Jews, strippers, Negroes dancing and all the offshoots of modern art.'
That would be funny, if it were not that a man with that sort of all-embracing hatred, who in England would be dismissed as a crackpot who wr
ites to Radio Four from Tunbridge Wells, ended up actually carrying out the extermination of millions. As well as his wife after she, in her turn, had poisoned their six children.
I am glad that Goebbels and other perverted acolytes of the Führer ended up sharing a stinking bunker with the madman and his dead dog. It is a suitably squalid end. To hell with 'there is that of God in everyone'. I hope they were in an agony of terror and despair. I can feel no scrap of compassion for any of them. I am glad that they are completely erased from the earth, Hitler's burnt bones buried deep in an unknown place in Russia. Only one story of their deaths touches me. A vase of dead spring flowers was found in the room where Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves. At the end that little vacuous creature tried to pretty up her tomb.
As Ilona pointed out, many of the criminals got away, some with the help of the Vatican. I admired her determination not to let the wounds heal over and be forgotten. I agree with her. She felt a responsibility to her father and I feel the burden of being one of a dying generation that lived through one of the worst events in history. As Ryszard Kapuscinski says,
We must act responsibly. To the degree to which we are able, we should oppose everything that could give rise to war, to crime, to catastrophe. Because we who lived through the war know how it begins, where it comes from. We know that it does not begin only with bombs and rockets, but with fanaticism and pride, stupidity and contempt, ignorance and hatred. It feeds on all that grows on that and from that. That is why, just as some of us fight the pollution of the air, we should fight the polluting of human affairs by ignorance and hatred.
Mind you, easier said than done.
There is evidence in the archives of many attempts before the war to alert the governments of London, Washington and Moscow to the dangers of National Socialism, but they were ignored. Inside Germany those men who attempted to assassinate Hitler were brave not least because, as military high-ups and honourable Germans, it must have been so difficult to disobey what was after all the government of the country, however contemptible. Most Germans didn't. Even when, it seems to me, it would have been impossible not to protest. If I had seen my Jewish schoolteacher being forced to scrub the pavement with a toothbrush, I like to think that, no matter what, I would have lifted him from his knees and taken him away. And I am sure others would have followed suit. Similarly, if persecution on the scale of Kristallnacht had happened in London surely there would have been a counter-offensive, as indeed there was in the East End when Mosley's fascists tried to march there? Hugh Carlton Greene, who was in Berlin in 1938, described how 'racial hatred and hysteria seems to have taken hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle class mothers held up their babes to see the fun.'