The new (and old) camps were called ‘Spetzlager’, or ‘special camps’. At Christmas 1946 there were 15,000 prisoners in Buchenwald and around 16,000 in Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen, or Spetzlager no. 7, was closed down in the early 1950s. Later fifty mass graves were discovered there which were thought to have been dug after the war, containing around 12,500 bodies. Most of the dead had perished from hunger or disease; about thirty-five to forty inmates died every day in the winter of 1946-7. Death began with the over-sixties, who perished from dropsy. When they had succumbed it was the turn of the fifty-year-olds. In the winter of 1946 to 1947 even the forty-somethings died in droves. Camp 3, Hohenschönhausen had about 3,000 prisoners, Fürstenwalde 6,000, and Camp 4, Bautzen 18,000. Russian estimates show that, of the 122,671 Germans who passed though the camps, 42,889 died - that is, more than a third. Only 756 were actually shot.54
German figures are roughly double the Russian tally: 240,000. Of these a higher figure of 95,643 perished - over 40 per cent. In these revisions there were 60,000 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, of whom just over half died; a little over 30,000 at Buchenwald, where a little under half did not survive the experience; and 30,000 at Bautzen, where 16,700 died.55 Anyone who was suspected of Nazi sympathies was liable to incarceration; and a good many monarchists and conservatives were thrown in too. The chief sugar manufacturers - twelve in all - were sent to a camp. One survived. Quite a lot of young people who had been in the Hitler Youth or the girls’ equivalent, the BdM, were sent to the camps. For the major landowners and Junkers there was Rügen.56 Added to the perils of life in the Russian concentration camp, Nacht und Nebel abductions had claimed another 5,431 Germans by November 1947, of whom 1,255 were youths.57
For all its dangers the Soviet Zone, like the Democratic Republic that succeeded it, offered a sort of daily life provided the citizen was not too demanding. There were times when the inhabitants of SBZ were better fed than the Germans in the West, but this did not prevent them from complaining, as in this parody of the nationalist anthem ‘Deutschland über alles’:Deutschland, Deutschland, ohne
alles
Ohne Butter, ohne Fett
Und das bischen Marmelade
Frisst uns die Verwaltung weg.
Hände falten, Köpfe sinken,
Immer an die Einheit denken.
Germans, Germans lacking
everything
Lacking butter, lacking fat
The modicum of marmalade
Is mopped up by our brass hats.
Bow your head in humility,
Lie back, think of Unity.
Culture
Two heroic figures emerged in the Russian Zone to promote a brief flowering of the arts after May 1945. They were Johannes R. Becher and the Russian art historian Colonel Alexander Dymshitz. Becher was just behind the front line, ready to implement a policy elaborated in Moscow, but once again it was not necessarily an exclusively Marxist-Leninist approach. As early as 30 April 1945 Ulbricht issued a list of writers who were welcome to publish in the Soviet Zone. They were all exiles from Nazism: Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig and Bertolt Brecht.58
The Russians actively promoted not just socialist theatre, ballet, opera and cinema; they promoted bourgeois arts as well. This was in keeping with Anton Ackermann’s programme penned in Moscow in June, that the Soviet system was wrong for Germany, and that it needed to be reorganised on broad, anti-fascist, democratic principles instead. The programme had to be in place before the Western Allies arrived for the meeting in Potsdam. For the first three years after the war, there were no real cultural divisions in the capital, and the Soviet Zone continued to take the lead in cultural matters.59 Becher returned to Berlin after twelve years and three months of exile on 11 June 1945. Ulbricht had approved his role; he was ‘necessary for the work among the intellectuals’.60
Becher found his house in Zehlendorf intact, if not quite habitable. He went off to live in Dahlem, in the home of the Nazi banker Emil Georg von Strauss. He immediately began to invite old friends over to discuss getting intellectual life going again in the city. This was to become the steering committee for the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). It was meant to function in all four zones. Becher put down his thoughts on Berlin in a letter to his wife Lily, whom he had left behind in Moscow. ‘It is really enough to make you howl . . . and Berlin is Berlin. Despite everything you are not coming back to a strange place. Children sing German, mothers speak German - and the trees on the streets and the green on the balconies - I am overjoyed, my most beloved, and the only galling thing is that you are not beside me!’61 On 3 July the Alliance was launched at a party for 1,500 people in the hall of Broadcasting House in the Masurenallee. Becher spoke: ‘We have enough German tragedies in our history, more than enough, now we want to finally bring an end to German tragedies . . .’ In the next two years he went a long way towards creating that renewal until the Cold War made bourgeois writers unwelcome in the SBZ.
As the Allies prepared to celebrate their meeting in Potsdam, the Russians reopened the Variété Theatre and in a cinema opposite they screened the film Dr Mamlock. Where no specific building existed, the Russians turned over municipal premises to theatre and cinema. A triumphal arch had been set up in Berlin’s Frankfurter Allee, which was later to become one of the showpieces of Stalinist architecture. As part of the festivities Wilhelm Furtwängler gave a concert in which Mendelssohn’s music was played.br All these events received the hearty approval of Bersarin. Few Berliners, however, knew they were happening. There were as yet no newspapers, and communication was by word of mouth.
The Soviet cultural supremo was Colonel Sergey Tulpanov, head of the Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration. He wanted to prove that the Russians were not quite as barbaric as May 1945 had seemed to suggest.62 They tended to look after the German artists and show them respect, while the Western Allies cavilled, treated them like unrepentant Nazis and refused to shake their hands. Tulpanov was a huge, ursine presence, whom George Clare compared to Hermann Göring, many of whose cultural offices Tulpanov had taken over. By April 1946 more than a hundred theatres had opened in the SBZ, performing classics such as Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, Molière’s Tartuffe and works by Offenbach, as well as Russian pieces. Tulpanov was abetted by Dymshitz. It was Dymshitz who was behind Die Möwe, the artists’ and writers’ club that opened in the old Bülow Palace in the Soviet Sector and provided literary and artistic Berliners with a decent meal, comfort and rest. Later they had the premises of the old Berlin Club that Becher turned into an artists’ colony with the parquet from Hitler’s Chancellery. Here authors ate unrationed food and kept out of the cold.63
Dymshitz was a highly cultured man of Jewish origin from St Petersburg. He had grown up in a house with a Steinway and a library. He had spoken German, French and English from childhood and attended the German Reform School, the best in the city before the Great War. He went on to develop a fondness for the avant garde as a student in the 1920s. He had little rapport with the Anglo-Americans, but he had a certain amount of support from the French cultural boffin, Félix Lusset. When the Anglo-Americans outlawed Becher’s Kulturbund in their sectors, Lusset refused to follow suit.64
Like Göring, Tulpanov could tolerate satire provided he found it funny. He revelled in the performances of Günter Neumann, who was reviving Berlin cabaret at Ulenspiegel in Berlin. Like the Schaubühne in Munich, Ulenspiegel was a stage licensed to poke fun at the Allies. Even the Nazis had tolerated some small degree of satire in this form. As George Clare put it, Neumann lashed out at all the Allies, but without a ‘trace of German self-pity’. He poked fun at frat, and the desperation to which German girls were driven by hunger:Johnny took me like a lady
And we traded - nothing shady,
Two pounds of coffee so I’d do it,
Fruit-juice cans so I’d renew it.
Hot we got with burning skins
For a couple of corned-beef tins
But for chocolate - Hershey bar
I went further much than far.
Carl Zuckmayer admired the Russian contribution to the arts at the time. The most prestigious theatre in the Russian Sector was the Admiralspalast, which had survived the bombing unscathed and now played host to the State Opera. Zuckmayer found the singers less impressive than their counterparts in New York, but on the other hand he was very struck by the talents of the young directors and artists who designed the performances.65 Of the Western Allies, only the American theatre chief Benno Frank came anywhere near him. He had been a prominent German Jewish actor and director before 1933. Their British counterpart was Pat Lynch, a Cork-man and one-time prepschool master with a fondness for Wagner. It was only much later that the Westerners learned by their mistakes and began to open cinemas and theatres in their sectors.66
Becher’s office as president of the Cultural Alliance was in Schlüterstrasse 45, just off the Kurfürstendamm in the British Zone. The honorary president was Hauptmann. When Hauptmann died and the Poles could finally dispose of his corpse, Becher, Tulpanov and Pieck travelled to Stralsund on the Baltic coast. Becher pronounced the obsequy over the late writer’s coffin: ‘According to your wishes, may you be laid to earth before sunrise, to become a symbol of German promise! May your decease become the turning point.’67 Schlüterstrasse 45 had an interesting history.bs After the Nazi cultural association, the RKK or Reichskulturkammer, had been bombed out of its premises in the centre of the city, it had moved here. The building still contained all the files relating to artistic activity in the Third Reich, and, in the basement, the painting collection of the Jewish community. Now it became the rallying point for the starving artists of the occupation who came to Becher for shelter and ration cards.68 In Becher’s time the house contained the ‘Spruchkammer’, a sort of Star Chamber where German artists were examined for their reliability by a panel composed of the four powers. It was headed by the British major Kaye Sely - born Karl Seltz in Munich.
Becher’s success was so great at this time that even Thomas Mann condescended to come to him to request a favour for one of his wife’s relatives, Hans von Rohrscheidt, who was being roughly handled by the Soviet authorities. In return Becher wanted Mann to bring his influence to bear in getting CARE packets for his writers. Becher was trying to bring them all home: Döblin had returned (he was in Baden-Baden, working for the French) but Anna Seghers, the Manns, Herzfeld and Feuchtwanger were all hesitating. It was the time of the well-publicised dispute between Thomas Mann and two writers who had stayed in Germany, Walter von Molo and Franz Thiess. Thiess had said it was natural to remain in Germany, and pointed out that it had been harder to remain than to enjoy a comfortable life in exile like Mann. Mann’s son Klaus called Thiess ‘repulsive’: he had come to terms with the Nazis and earned a packet working on film scripts. Becher tried to pour oil on the troubled waters, issuing another invitation: ‘Come home, you are expected.’ On 22 November 1945 he launched an appeal to the émigrés. He did not share Mann’s view that books published during the Third Reich were worthless, and refused to allow his writings to appear in a volume of exile literature. He saw no virtue in exile: it was ‘bitter necessity’, no more. It was an attitude that made him unpopular with those who had emerged from the concentration camps.69
With Becher at the helm, and with the backing of Tulpanov for the time being, the Soviet Zone took a pragmatic approach to denazification in the arts. Zhukov had not believed that Hauptmann had resisted the Nazis, but he had given him his entire protection, keeping both his own soldiers and the Poles off him while he eked out his last days. The Americans were after Furtwängler’s blood. He had been a Prussian state councillor under the Nazis - a wholly honorary position given out to a few cultural and intellectual worthies who toed the line.bt Furtwängler had taken refuge in Switzerland at the end of the war, partly as a result of his fears for his safety. He had been close to some of the men who were executed after the July Plot. As the war drew to a close the Swiss had turned on him and he had fled to Austria in the autumn of 1945. He was summoned back by the Russians in February 1946 to take over his old job at the Berlin Philharmonic. Up to then the reins had been held by Leo Borchard, and by the temperamental thirty-three-year-old Sergiu Celibidache.
‘Celi’ had taken over the Philharmonic just six days after Borchard’s death. He was even more obscure than his predecessor: an unknown Romanian who had arrived in Berlin in the mid-1930s to study composition under Heinz Tiessen. Before he was relieved of his post by the triumphal return of Furtwängler, ‘Celi’ conducted the BPO no fewer than 108 times. The Allies saw him as a ‘political virgin’ and, while disputes raged about all the other conductors who were to some extent tainted by Nazism, there was no argument about him.70
As the Philharmonie had been gutted, ‘Celi’ performed in the Titania Palast in Berlin-Steglitz,bu the Theater des Westens by the Zoo, the Radio Station and other intact buildings in Dahlem, Tegel and Wedding. He also performed in other German cities standing in for Furtwängler, who was the subject of particularly petty attacks by Allied officials - chiefly American. Before Furtwängler could perform in the Western Allied Zones, he had to receive his Persilschein - a clean bill of political health - in Vienna, Wiesbaden and Berlin. Vienna presented him with few problems, but at the American HQ in Wiesbaden they were reluctant to exonerate him. There was a persistent clamour from back home, especially from Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika. He could only proceed to the higher court in Berlin in December 1946. He was finally absolved in April 1947. During that time Celibidache stood in for him, but according to Furtwängler’s widow relations between the two of them were always good.71
Furtwängler returned to Berlin in a Russian aircraft on 10 March 1946, landing at the Adlershof airfield in the Soviet Zone. He was received in all pomp by Becher. The Russians provided him with the Pheasantry, his old grace-and-favour residence in the park at Sans Souci in Potsdam. His faithful housekeeper was waiting for him, and so was his piano. The West objected to his performing, however, and his appearance at the concert in the Radio Station had to be scrapped. That day the orchestra was directed by Celibidache.
Furtwängler had already been cleared by a denazification court in Austria and thought that the pardon would be granted automatically in Berlin. The Americans in the person of General McClure, however, were not prepared to give in so easily and they reminded the other Allies that Furtwängler needed an American licence to perform at the Philharmonie, which was in their sector, and that all Prussian state councillors had been banned from public life under Control Council Directive No. 24. This didn’t much impress the Russians, who offered Furtwängler the directorship of the Lindenoper, which lay in their territory. They even whipped up a press campaign to bring him back, embellishing their Berliner Zeitung on 16 February 1946 with the headline ‘Berlin calls Wilhelm Furtwängler’. The conductor refused to be wooed. Knowing that acceptance meant kissing goodbye to the BPO, he declined the offer.72
Furtwängler had never been a Pg, but there were plenty of conductors who had: Karajan, Knappertsbusch, Krauss and the chief conductor of the Berlin City Opera, the Austrian Leopold Ludwig. Ludwig had denied his Party membership on the Fragebogen and had been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment by the British Military Government. Ludwig was not only a Pg - like Karajan he had joined in Austria where membership was illegal. 73 Knappertsbusch had actually been a protégé of Eva Braun’s, who was attracted to the conductor’s ‘boyish good looks’. Hitler had not held him in high regard, claiming he was ‘no better than a military band-leader’. The Führer did not like Karajan either, because the conductor did not use a score and failed to spot the errors of the singers. He would have pushed Karajan aside had he not been protected by Göring. Such was the Third Reich.74
The Russians ceased any pretence at taking denazification seriously for the arts scene. The civilised
Captain Alexander Gouliga was replaced by an obstreperous Sub-lieutenant Levin who apparently did not even speak German. The Allied culture boffins had their last meeting with Gouliga in the House of Soviet Culture where a splendid feast had been prepared: goblets of Crimean champagne were served by two old German waiters with Hitler moustaches ‘who looked like a couple of ex-Gauleiters recently released from a Russian internment camp’. After the sparkling wine came vodka and beer. Salads were succeeded by smoked fish and caviar, caviar by stuffed eggs, cold meats and sausages - and those were just the zakuski. Bortsch and stroganoff and orange cream rounded off the feast.75
As far as opera was concerned, both the Städtische Oper and the Lindenoper had been outhoused due to bomb damage. Berlin’s City Opera was now in the Theater des Westens, while the Lindenoper was in the Admiralspalast in the Friedrichstrasse. Although the former was in the British Sector, the audiences for both opera houses were principally Russian. Neither was open to mere Germans. The night George Clare went to the Theater des Westens in 1946 there was a handful of British officers and two NCOs (himself and his friend), together with a ‘sprinkling’ of Americans and a ‘pride’ of Frenchmen. The rest of the audience was made up of Russians and their wives. The Soviets allowed officers to import wives and children, which was forbidden for the time being among the Western Allies - hence the need for frat.76
As ever, music had a powerful effect on the Berliners, who had braved the bombs to hear the BPO perform during the war. Margret Boveri remembered her first concert after the war. She heard a choral work of Bruckner’s in a ‘ruinous hall in [Berlin-]Zehlendorf’. It gave rise to floods of tears brought on by years of suppressed and concealed emotions.77 When after two years of trials Furtwängler received his Persilschein on 30 April 1947 and was able to conduct ‘his’ orchestra once again on Whit Sunday (25 May), the audience clapped for fifteen minutes, summoning him back to the rostrum sixteen times. It had been an all-Beethoven programme - the overture to Egmont, and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Erika Mann carped: it was not the old Philharmonic, but the purged version that had survived the Third Reich, and even then it had been under-rehearsed. The conductor replied to her father, modestly pointing out that fifteen minutes’ applause was not unusual for Beethoven in Berlin.78 One Jew who wholeheartedly stood by Furtwängler throughout the crisis was Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin, who performed the Beethoven violin concerto with the conductor on 28 September 1947, was anxious to break the boycott of Furtwängler in America. He demonstratively gave the conductor his hand, and was treated as a traitor in America as a result.79
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