Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  They were German too, one generation closer than he, and celebrated the fact in their tastes—must have, because they could hardly have invented them on their own: heavy, flavorless food, limited ambitions, disapproval of the maverick, funeral-going, trust in people with broad faces, and belief in the special virtue of a dreary breed known as the German mother. “German” as a lifelong malady that was without hope but never serious; as the thin edge above want and far below plenty; as crepe-hanging; as self-pity—yet from these compounding a strange morality that regarded itself as superior to all variant modes. He had been encouraged since infancy to think of himself as an average man, but in a harshly restricted community where some were less average than others; if wealthy, had immorally taken too much from the world; if very poor, were immorally lazy; if taking pleasure in the material, ostentatious; if ascetic, holier-than-thou. But never “German” as the lofty vision, the old and exquisite manners of prince and peasant, battlements and armor, clear water splashing down from high, blue rocks, wine named for the milk of the Virgin, maleness, the noble marriage of feeling and thought.

  But they sent him to college, on an insurance policy which his father, being an agent, had sold to himself, and the premiums for which, lean year in and out, had claimed all their unencumbered money, and Reinhart had first opted for Liberal Arts instead of Business Administration and now left even that. As he departed for camp he carried, along with his toilet articles and change of socks in a miniature suitcase, an acute suspicion that he would come to nothing, and... a marvelous sense of relief.

  At the induction center an interviewer saw the B in zoology on the record and put him down for a medic, asking him first, though, for as a volunteer you had some faint choice. And he agreed, suddenly finding his bloodthirsty fancy had paled; a superior and sensitive person deplored violence; it didn’t, as every retroactive commentator on past wars insisted, “settle anything.” He personally had made himself so strong with the weights that no one bothered him, and if they did, he generally gave way in the conviction that not only were they probably right but that also anger and hostility were degrading. Under the Geneva Rules medical troops were all but neutral, and in recognition of this were not intentionally shot at and if captured were obliged to go on treating wounded, theirs or the enemy’s, it made no difference; they were above the taking of sides.

  The Germans honored this convention—that was admitted by the most rabid. For after he had been in the service a few months, Reinhart began to seek reasons why the Germans, while wrong—they warred against the U.S., for one thing, and it was probably true that Czechoslovakia and Norway and Holland, little harmless Holland!, had inoffensively not deserved invasion; true as well that, even discounting for cheap newsmen and their “copy,” there had been regrettable brutalities by the extremist, Nazi units, although in view of the Belgian babies of World War I you should go cautiously here; they were surely wrong to torture Jews, who he had discovered in college were, at least in their American branch, a pretty good bunch of fellows given certain peculiarities, and who apparently had not during the German inflation of the twenties enriched themselves while gentiles starved, as alleged by Hitler & Co., although one must be careful here, too, in simple justice, for anyone who had ever traded in a Hebrew haberdashery knew the Jew as far from a naïve man—he had come under an obligation to find reasons why the Germans, though mistaken, though bullies, though bad, if you will, were yet not bad, were not to be allowed that case which the greatest writers assure us even Satan has.

  The Army, oddly enough, was filled with superior people, the universities being then in the process of emptying to that purpose. Every barracks had its circle of cultivation, and while its membership was still outnumbered by the gross herd playing cards, shooting dice, and shouting incessantly fuck this, fuck that, it in the strength of unity read newspaper editorials, went on pass to hear the nearest city’s philharmonic, and discussed international political events. At every post where Reinhart served, this circle in fact had been semi-officialized, meeting at least once a week with the authority and encouragement of an intellectual officer. Since he was channeled in that direction by cultural imperatives and nobody else seemed interested in him, Reinhart willy-nilly frequented this society, attending a few concerts, where he felt unpleasantly conspicuous as the middle-aged civilian audience beamed benevolently on the display of high-minded soldiery, and sitting in on some discussions, quaking with terror that he might be called upon to add his half-cent. If that sum were indeed low enough to symbolize the content of his head as he sat surrounded by his frighteningly articulate comrades.

  The prevailing sentiment was, as one intense, red-haired, hollow-cheeked PFC (they were all privates and PFCs) put it, “just left of center, like FDR.” Reinhart literally did not know what this meant, except that while in grammar and high schools, when he took his father’s cue in politics, he had detested Roosevelt, had at campaign times worn little buttons against him, one for Landon pinned to a sunflower head of yellow felt, another reading simply: “We don’t want Eleanor either.” And still, even after he lost all interest in that sort of thing, carried a vague distaste for the man which was renewed at every picture of the teeth, the cape, the cigarette holder, the dog, the wife melting in good will, the sons drooping in false modesty, the desk ornaments, and Sarah Delano R., the grim progenitor of all these. Yet it was not subsequently hard to swallow that he had been an improvement on old Hoover, starched-collar, pickle-faced, the personified No. And whatever left-of-center now meant—he had always supposed it a kind of radical creed presided over by kindly-looking cranks like Norman Thomas who were understood to be not serious and a more extreme variety represented by Earl Browder with his mustache and dark shirt and faintly alien air, which might be sinister if it ever got its most improbable chance—what it meant now could only be something respectable, if somewhat strangely motivated, for these young men professed a constant concern for victims of one social outrage or another, in which company they themselves could not be counted, so that it was not a demonstration of self-interest.

  Reinhart was impressed, even cowed, by their easy yet earnest assurance and disturbed by the shrinking of his hitherto supposed wide horizon. How he had wasted his faculties to date! Even if his sympathies had been all along on the right side: these people too were opposed—and from a far more intelligent point of vantage—to the double-breasted, cigar-smoking deities of business, the devotional poems in Sunday supplements, Mother’s Day, Congressmen, and the suburban imagination. In college he had been too apathetic to find this out, confined in the circle of self as he was then. Beneath the surface pall there was meat in the political and economic disciplines; as approached by these acute young men, they were adventurous and splendid and, he soon saw, were far fitter areas for the mature moral effort than the gross physical projects he had earlier honored.

  For example, one’s build. These men, by his earlier standards, were usually physical wrecks, if small, skinny, if large, flabby, shoulders slumped, belly, if they had one, bulging, the whole man hung with garments as a point of merit shabby as the Army would allow. And no pride of carriage even in the shower, where if he met one of them Reinhart was thrown into confusion: embarrassed by his undulating biceps as he soaped the scalp, yet unwilling to loose the arm’s tension if there was also present one of the common sort of soldier who didn’t applaud intellect.

  It was stupid, perhaps mean, to be a good soldier in any manner, although he had been right to get appointed to the medics on motives of nonviolence. All these people had been drafted, so that they had no choice, but they would have chosen the medical department. Some even had friends immensely admired who would not serve in anything but conscientious-objector enclosures; some others confessed that while that was going too far for them, it was a thing most noble for a man to hold fast at any sacrifice to what he believed right and true, against the mob, by which they certainly did not mean the people, who were always r. and t, but rather the
crowd who ran things. Reinhart would earlier have supposed the latter meant Roosevelt and his entourage, with everything but Maine and Vermont, four terms without hindrance, no end in sight, but he soon found this a misapprehension, the situation being precisely the reverse, with all such good folk victims. Indeed, the persons to be admired were invariably victims, and the degree of their victimization was the degree of one’s approval. The unfortunates even included some staggeringly rich men, who however were “liberal” and therefore smeared, earning the herohood into which poor men were enlisted at birth.

  Reinhart had never used his head for much but dreams, he knew, and this new employment of the brain was exciting as well as good, for neither did it ignore the heart as it surveyed the vast panorama of the evil that men had made in the world and recommended sensible alleviations. The underfed coolies of Asia alongside the oversated warlords; the black and twisted miner deep in the earth’s entrails, considered with the flabby oyster of a mineowner in his house on the hill; the poor little have-not, next to the arrogant, pudgy have. These contrasts were inexcusable in a world where education should be within everyone’s reach, where it was now technically feasible for every man to be served by the machine rather than vice versa; they were wicked and what was worse, silly, most of the wrong people not wishing to be bad so much as not understanding what was good.

  You take the Germans, for example, or really to test these intelligent new ethics, take Hitler. You at least had to grant that, terrible as they were, he had stuck to his ideals. If that awful energy could have been diverted into virtuous channels, if he could have stopped after solving the problem of unemployment and building the wonderful net of highways!—No, you most assuredly did not take either the Germans or Hitler; and if you did, there were strong grounds for popping you in the booby hatch. At least, so said without words the faces of the others to whom Reinhart, breaking his long silence, introduced this application of the theory they had so generously trained him to use. The trouble was that they had forgetfully omitted one clause from the grand code: no Germans need apply.

  Reinhart was quick to know the justice in this, too, for, awakening from his long sleep, he had begun to see the terrible landscape of actuality. It was false to think that the Nazis were an accidental, noxious but temporary weed upon a permanently rich German ground of the essence, which might one day be cleared. No, go as far back as you would, the wars of 1914-18 and ’70 against freedom-loving, culture-cradle France, the rise of brutal Prussia, way back to the war lasting thirty years and further to the razing of the magnificent Roman civilization by the tribes which Tacitus had earlier observed as being without mercy. Martin Luther overthrew the wickedness of popery; Frederick the Great sponsored the culture of the Age of Reason; Goethe was spokesman for the liberties of the heart and mind; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, revolted by their time’s cruel and shallow materialism, drafted prescriptions for the free personality—even these were but masks for more Germanic creeds, or the same old one, of tyranny, militarism, suicide, irresponsibility, and madness.

  When in the last months of the war American troops went choking through the fell streets of Buchenwald and other camps, passed the vast trenches of slack human skins, the bones inside all loose from their connections, and oven-grates of gray human ash, took in their nostrils that bouquet of burned man which for recognition it is unnecessary ever to have smelled before, and for sleep impossible to forget after—when the pictures and accounts were published, for Reinhart as usual was not there—the most malevolent indictment by the anti-Germans had not been enough, the righteous people who wished to reduce the land to a pastoral community were too mild, perhaps not even another Flood would suffice. For the outrage had been done to him, Reinhart, who had trusted in his origins.

  There is no native American but the redskin; we others are something else at a slight remove, which cannot be changed; our names and looks and surely some complexion of the corpuscles themselves are to some old line peculiar, else we should blow away without identity. So he believed—his only belief, along with an idea of the possibility of simple decency—and thus, with his deep relation to what the superior, bright young men in the discussion groups were pledged to destroy, he disqualified himself from their company and took up instead—well, what was fun, booze and snatch and other pursuits generally pointless and amoral, and was forever delighting such people as Marsala with his adaptability.

  His one secret was that he liked the Army, where the petty decisions were provided and the major ones ignored, and where you could live as if you had been born the day you put on the uniform.

  CHAPTER 4

  JUST AS IT HAD ARRIVED in England after the great mass of troops assembled there for the Continental assault was gone, so did the 1209th cross the Channel and proceed eastward against the stream of real soldiers returning. At the outset, the assignment to Germany was seen as punishment cruel and perverse. For a year they had run an enormous Nissen-hut hospital in Devonshire, tending casualties flown straight there from the fields of battle, wounds yet hot and reeking. They were veterans of the European Theater and should have been let to cross the water and swagger before the slobs on Stateside duty, to mix undelineated with the repatriated combat regiments, back in the frame where the greater category enveloped the smaller, overseas versus home.

  Instead, the score was to stay grievously unjust: for more than a year the 1209th had had to stand holding its portable urinals while patients lay smug with honorable wounds, relating the grand experiences denied to people of the rear areas. Charging the Siegfried Line; streetcars filled with explosives rolled down the hill into Aachen; the bridge at Remagen, with its sign: “You are crossing the Rhine by courtesy of the —th Infantry Division”; the bombs falling on the ball-bearing works at Peenemünde, courtesy of the Eighth Air Force; the Ardennes, where even company clerks and cooks took up their virgin rifles and joined the defense and even a general proved a hero, courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division; and at the very end, “Germany” itself made commonplace by courtesy of the Third Army, who got to Pilsen in Czechoslovakia and burst into the famous brewery to fill their helmets with beer. By courtesy of the 1209th General Hospital, Colonel Roy Fester commanding, one passed his water, told his stories, took a pain pill, and went to sleep.

  Just at the point, though, where the responsible latrine intelligence had disqualified the hysterics who insisted the 1209th would any day be shipped to the Pacific, and established beyond a peradventure that it would settle in the Helmstedt field where the unit was then resting as an alleged transient, and stay there forever—just at this point where the wailing was loudest, there being nothing else to do except peer through the single set of field glasses at the nurses’ tents across the meadow, came a courier of unquestioned authority with the word.

  Berlin, it was to be Berlin, so long as something had to be accepted, a horse of a different hue from mere Germany; considerably better, in fact, since the combat forces had never got there. It would be at the courtesy of only the Russians, and the Russians themselves, with the Germans downed, were now a kind of enemy and face to face with their allies kept weapons at port arms. Already they had sealed the Helmstedt checkpoint, and when, after a week of negotiations, the colonel was permitted to pass with jeep, driver, and one aide, he made only fifteen miles before another Soviet unit arrested and held him twenty-four hours incommunicado.

  All this, not to mention Berlin of the Nazi mythos: old Hitler screaming crazy garbage; creepy little Goebbels, dark and seamed, scraping along on his twisted foot; fat, beribboned Goering, more swollen joke than menace; swastikaed bruisers maltreating gentle little Jews; the Brandenburg Gate and Unter der Linden Trees; and acres of the famous blonde pussy, whom twelve years of Nazism had made subservient to the man in uniform: one heard that an SS trooper could bend down any girl on the street and let fly. And, once in the city, little work conjoined with a peculiar honor: the crap-house spokesmen who in England had been privy to a document from higher head
quarters listing the 1209th as the biggest and best hospital in the Communications Zone, saw another now which said, approximately: the 1209th, selected because it was the biggest and best in the Communications Zone, would be the only general hospital in Berlin District.

  Berlin was not the worst place to end a war; better, surely, than the gooks in the islands or France where pigs lived in the same houses as people.

  As Reinhart had promised the girl, he could have been found in the frame building across the street from the hospital almost any morning if the visitor came late, and any afternoon, provided the visitor came early; he put in a good four hours of daily attendance, give or take an hour either way, and had much impressed his superior, Lieutenant Harry Pound, by his drive. Pound was not properly a medical-administrative officer at all, but an infantryman, had in fact waded in on Omaha Beach on D-Day, H-Hour plus two, and shortly thereafter led a patrol into a hedge row filled with Krauts and their armament, collecting Mauser slugs and souvenirs of grenades in all four limbs and, later, the Silver Star. Under treatment by the 1209th he had healed into limited service and was transferred from bed to staff. Their job, Pound and Reinhart, was “Special Services,” recreation, diversion, amusement both for patients and medics, things that had meaning in the long, pastoral days in England but which now were needless, except insofar as they satisfied the rules of organization. However, there was in the works a plan for Sunday guided tours of the Nazi ruins; Pound ostensibly was always out somewhere arranging for permission to enter with a force of sightseers into the Soviet Sector but had not yet got even an admission that he existed—if indeed he was really trying, for he had a girl friend in the nurses’ contingent and was often seen with her when officially he was understood to be elsewhere—and besides, individuals could go across the border on their own hook without hindrance by the Russians, without the shepherding of Pound, which was to say he and Reinhart had no motive for an undue haste in consummating their project, especially since their desks were littered with schedules and itineraries and manifests and notes to show the colonel if he snooped.