The Return of Lanny Budd

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Fourth voice: ‘Now I begin to feel what must have taken place when Kasenkina suddenly decided to jump out of the window. At last I understand why they are so agitated in the Kemlin’.

  Third voice: ‘Yes, my friend, now everything becomes as clear as the history of peoples and rulers in general. Limitless power breeds limitless fear of one’s own people, the fear of the jailer. And history knows no cure for this fear. It is easier to deal with fugitive party functionaries and M.V.D. men by trying to make them ridiculous in the eyes of the people; but the little Russian teacher, she spoke to Zenzinov, to Tolstoy’s beloved daughter. She retraced the road and became more dangerous. And there are millions of Kasenkinas, for millions would come to understand just as she did, if they had the opportunity to see, to speak. You see, all this still lives in the Russian people, and as long as it lives there is fear among the men in power and hope for all mankind’.

  III

  Through all these events the airlift was going on, with no sign of ending. Berlin, which had called itself ‘the magnificent city’ and now had its magnificence blasted, was the epicentre of a hurricane, the coldest spot in a cold war or the hottest in a hot war—whichever simile you preferred. Berlin’s freedom, its very existence, depended upon this struggle; and what were the plain people making of it? Lanny wanted to know, and he went to call upon the family of Johann Seidl, in the Moabit district. They were Socialists and would talk to him frankly and would pass him on to others, as many as he wished. They had once saved his life, and he would make return by taking some of those American foods which were otherwise not to be thought of by them.

  The tenement in which they lived had been only partially repaired, and now there was little hope of more work on it because there were no materials; the airlift was bringing only absolute necessities, food and coal and oil, medicines and a little clothing. The Seidls were more crowded than ever, having had to curtain off a part of their kitchen to make a sleeping place for a nephew of Johann, with his wife and child. This young man, Karl, was a refugee from the East sector; he was haggard, undernourished, and obviously honest. Lanny was interested in hearing his story and then asked him questions while the family and some of the neighbours who had been summoned stood around and listened. The curtain had been drawn aside, and several of the people sat on the single bed. Lanny had one of the two chairs which the family possessed; they would have been uncomfortable if he had not sat on it.

  Karl Seidl had been a worker in a tin shop in that dreary industrial part of the ‘magnificent city’. The shop had been half wrecked by artillery shells, and anyhow there was no more tin. For weeks he had hunted a job and had almost perished; then at one of the Russian barracks he was taken on as what was called a ‘fireman’ but really was a handyman and slavey. He cleaned up the filth, he carried the heavy burdens, he did whatever anybody told him to do. In return he got a few marks and was able to buy bread to keep his family alive from day to day.

  Karl had been a Socialist since childhood, and when the Soviets formed what they called the Socialist Unity party, S.E.D., he had thought it was the proper thing for him to join. He explained that the Reds seldom used the word ‘Communist’, at least not in East Germany; he had hardly ever heard it. They were planning socialism, they were building socialism, they were organising socialism. There had been only a few Communists in Berlin; the Social Democrats had been the majority party, and now they were taken into the Unity party—the Socialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. The party bosses told the members what to do, and they did it, just as Karl did at the barracks.

  For a while everything went all right, but then he made the mistake of attracting attention to himself by being too conscientious and diligent. One of the party bosses came to him and told him that part of his duty was to keep watch and make sure there were no traitors in the organisation. He must listen to what his comrades said and report on them. Karl said he had never done anything like that and didn’t know how to do it; but it was carefully explained to him: he would express ‘diversionist’ sentiments, ‘Social-Fascist’ sentiments, see what the others replied, and report if anyone agreed with him.

  This had worried Karl terribly. It meant being a Spitzel, and that was a word of shame. He found every possible excuse to avoid this duty; he became sick and couldn’t work. But the party leader kept after him and began to use threats, saying that he was under suspicion of being a Social Democrat himself, and he would get into serious trouble if he refused to carry out his party duties.

  While he was in this state of terror Karl visited the home of a friend who had a little radio set, and they sat listening to R.I.A.S. turned low. They heard what R.I.A.S. called the ‘Spitzeldienst’. The radio speaker named spies who were known in this factory and that and warned the hearers to avoid these vile persons. ‘More names will be given at this hour every evening. Listen and make note of them and beware’. So there was the last straw on poor Karl’s moral back; he decided that he would never have his name called on that dreadful list; he would make his escape to the Western sector.

  IV

  It was just a matter of walking across the street, but it wasn’t as simple as it sounded. The little family had a few belongings which they knew they could never replace, and if you were carrying a large bundle that opened you to suspicion. Moreover, Karl was already under suspicion, and some spy might be following him. So they waited for a stormy night, and then in rain and darkness they crossed. They did not make the mistake, which some refugees in their helpless ignorance had made, of going to one of the various offices the Reds still had in the West sector—for example, Radio Berlin, which many got confused with R.I.A.S. There were sad stories of people who had gone there and naïvely told their purpose, and had been kept until night and then whisked back and turned over to the S.S.D., the Eastern secret police. The end of it was conviction for treason and sentence to ten or fifteen years in a slave-labour camp. Karl had come to his uncle’s home, and in the morning when his clothes had been dried out he had gone to what was called ‘Refugee Row’ in the Kuno-Fischer-Strasse.

  Here the fugitives were screened. If they could convince the investigators that they had come in peril of life and limb, they were granted the status of ‘political refugees’; they were entitled to shelter and an allowance of sixty marks a month, which would buy just about half the quantity of food it took to keep them alive. If they were not able to convince the investigators they were advised to go back; but of course if they went most of them would pay with their lives, for they were now considered traitors. So they couldn’t be forced to go; they just stayed on, in the condition of stateless persons having no papers and exposed to many dangers. They went about begging for work and beating down wages, so they were not popular in the labour market.

  Lanny gave Karl a little money to keep him and his family alive and promised to plead his case with the authorities. So the art expert paid a visit to that drab and depressing building on Kuno-Fischer-Strasse, once a trade-union hall, bombed and then repaired. Inside were many rooms, and against the wall in each were rows of chairs occupied by sad, depressed-appearing humans, old and young. They sat patiently; for wars are great developers of patience in the poor. There were a dozen teams of three Germans, each doing the interviewing and then consulting with regard to each case. They had to do their best to sort out the worthy from the deadbeats, and also from the well-trained spies whom the Reds were continually sending over.

  Lanny traced down the team which had the Karl Seidl case in its care, and they heard his story and made notes and promised to expedite the decision. Incidentally, they gave him some idea of the problems which had fallen upon their shoulders. The refugees were pouring in, not merely from East Germany but from all the border states; the military barracks on the outskirts of the city were jammed, and new shelters were being built. ‘But how can we get materials now? And what will happen, Herr Budd, if we have to leave Berlin?’

  V

  Many people had asked this q
uestion of Lanny, and he knew that many more would ask it at home; so he went to call upon General Lucius Clay, the military governor who had the problem in his hands. In the days when Lanny had first begun to observe his country’s government and to think about it, the power had rested in a few aggressive men of big business like his father, who had subsidised both political parties and given their orders through a ‘boss’. But in the days of Franklin Roosevelt the power had begun to shift, and the process was continuing under Truman; in spite of all cries of protest, the bureaucrats were taking over the power in the name of the public interest. And here was one of these bureaucrats—the fact that he wore an Army uniform with four stars on each shoulder did not keep him from being a member of that new caste. His entire career had been in the Army, but he had never fought a battle; he had been an engineer and instructor of engineering, he had built great dams and airfields, and had been General Eisenhower’s deputy in charge of supplying the material needed in the greatest military campaign of history. Now he was in charge of a campaign to take nearly fifty million conquered Germans and make them over into a democratic community. The Soviets had taken seventeen million to be made into Reds, and the three free nations were in process of putting the rest under one government with General Clay in charge.

  He came from Georgia and had an accent an American would notice but probably a German wouldn’t. He was moderately tall, slender, with a thin face and prominent nose. He gazed at his visitor intently with dark eyes, which heavy eyebrows made to appear cavernous. He was completely absorbed in his tremendous job and eager to have it reported correctly to the American people. A.M.G. was trying to do something new in history, to teach conquered peoples the idea of governing themselves. Lanny said that everybody asked him if we were going to ‘stick’, and General Clay answered, ‘I will show you what I said on the subject over the telecon’.

  That was shortening of the words ‘telephone conversation’; it was a recently perfected device by which officials in Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington could carry on a conversation among themselves. The words spoken were taken down as if on a teletype; the machine automatically put them into code and transmitted them by wireless; they were received by another machine in each of the other cities and there decoded and typed on wide sheets of paper. Now General Clay pushed one of these sheets toward Lanny. ‘This is what I said to the Department of the Army when the blockade began’.

  And Lanny read, ‘When Berlin falls, Western Europe will be next. If we mean to hold Europe against communism we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war without losing face. If we withdraw, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will, and communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay. This is not heroic pose, because there will be nothing heroic in having to take humiliation without retaliation’.

  ‘That was approved’, said the General, ‘and there has been no change. I’m quite sure there will be none’.

  ‘Would it be proper for me to quote that?’ Lanny asked, and the answer was, ‘It would be helpful’.

  VI

  From that office Lanny went to call upon Ernst Reuter, Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. Lanny had met him in the old days when he had frequented the labour college which Freddi Robin had helped to establish in the city. After the ending of World War I, Reuter had left the Social-Democratic party and become general secretary of the Communist party; but he had quickly come to realise the dishonesty of that organisation and had returned to his first love. That made him a renegade in the eyes of the Reds, and when he was duly elected mayor of Berlin they refused to let him serve. Now, during the blockade, the three Allied sectors were being merged and Reuter was on the point of taking his office.

  Lanny was embraced by a big, shaggy bear of a man, voluble and explosive. Nobody would have any doubt what Ernst Reuter thought or what he intended to do. Yes, the Americans were going to stick, he said, and the Germans were going to stick with them. Of course the Reds could take them at any time, but the Reds knew it would mean a general war, and they didn’t want that, because their own social structure was too shaky. All you had to do was to call their bluff, and they would back down every time. The Oberbürgermeister of West Berlin became poetical and declared, ‘We have gazed into the face of the Red Medusa and we have not been turned to stone!’

  He had only one fault to find with the Allies and with his own countrymen: they did not fight back at the enemy hard enough, they did not spread enough propaganda. Reuter, as elected mayor, was doing all he could, but the Bonn government of Germany was confused and split up among political parties and perhaps afraid that, if war came, the Americans would fall back of the Rhine before they tried to make a stand. ‘But we must have the courage of our convictions’, declared Reuter. ‘We have the truth on our side, and we must speak it boldly and keep speaking it day and night. Everybody in Germany wants a united country and everybody must be made to realise that it is the Reds who have seized a part of Germany and are holding it as a satellite. We can have a united Germany any time the Reds are willing to let us have it on democratic terms. Let the German people decide what kind of united Germany it is to be’.

  Reuter had listened to Herr Fröhlich over the radio but hadn’t known the speaker’s real name. He had never heard the Peace Programme from New Jersey and was enthusiastic when he learned about it; he wanted to send Lanny forth as an evangelist to tell the world that the German people had got their freedom back and were going to keep it this time and not surrender it to any sort of dictator.

  VII

  Lanny Budd went on the air again. R.I.A.S. gave him a spot early in the evening when the workers of East Berlin would be in their homes, crouching by their cheap radio sets and keeping them turned low. He addressed the East Germans especially, though of course those in the West would be listening in too. He spoke as one who had loved Germany from boyhood; the genial and warmhearted and enlightened Germany, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Beethoven and Heine. Those great masters had been world citizens, men of the free world. They could never have worked and taught, they could never have survived, in a police state, a land full of spies and torturers and concentration camps.

  Herr Fröhlich said he had been talking with Germans who had escaped into the Western world and told him their stories. He set forth the differences between democracy and dictatorship, not in abstractions but in the concrete experiences of one man after another, men of all classes—workers, students, college professors, Army officers—who had been through the Russian anti-Fascist schools and could perceive the difference between the ideals the Communists taught and the horrors they practiced. He closed with a plea to the Germans to come back to the Western world—not physically, for their services were needed in the places where they were. They were needed to teach others and help to save the mind of East Germany. He wanted them to come to the Western world in their minds and hearts, in their way of thinking and feeling about the struggle between the two great world forces which had torn Germany into halves.

  A few seconds after he finished he was called to the telephone; it happened in Berlin, just as in Edgemere, New Jersey. A voice said, ‘Guten Tag, Herr Fröhlich. No names, please. That was an excellent talk and a pleasure to hear’.

  The voice sounded familiar, but Lanny couldn’t place it. ‘You must give me a clue’, he said, and promptly the voice replied, ‘Das Untersuchungsgefängnis’, and again, ‘No names, please’.

  That overlong German word, which means investigation jail, brought back to Lanny’s mind in a flash his visit to Frankfurt. ‘Um Himmels Willen’ he exclaimed. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m only a few blocks from you, at a friend’s house’.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘That is something not to be explained over the telephone. Can you have dinner with me?’

  Lanny countered, ‘Can you afford it?’


  ‘Oh yes, I have some of the new Westmarks which I must spend before I go back where I came from’.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking only of the marks; I mean can you afford the risk?’

  ‘Tell me some quiet place where we can sit and talk’, said Einsiedel; and Lanny named a place where he had occasionally gone with Monck.

  VIII

  The pair met, and after they had ordered the meal and the waiter had gone away the ex-flier reported that he had been released immediately after Lanny’s visit to him. ‘I’m deeply grateful to you, Herr Budd’, he said, ‘and I would not fail to thank you personally’.

  ‘But really’, protested Lanny, ‘I didn’t do anything’.

  ‘You mean they didn’t ask you about me?’

  ‘They asked me, of course; but all I could say was I didn’t think you were a spy’.

  ‘Well, they must have had respect for your thinking. So I am in your debt, and I hope that someday I may be able to return the favour’.

  Said Lanny, ‘I hope that you will not find me in an Untersuchungsgefängnis’.

  ‘Be careful’, said the young Graf, ‘it can happen, you know’. So they joked, having no psychic powers and being unable to foresee even a few days into the future.

  Lanny asked, ‘How did you get here?’ And the answer was that he had taken a train to Leipzig and from there to East Berlin. He added, ‘I am still editor of the Tägliche so I’m in a position to do you a favour. I will not allow the paper to mention the talks of Herr Fröhlich. If we did so we would have to denounce him as a lackey of Wall Street and hireling of neo-fascism’.