In another story, ‘Mein Onkel Fred’ (My Uncle Fred), Böll’s eponymous hero comes back from the war, possessing nothing but a tin can containing a few cigarette butts. He demands bread, sleep and tobacco; then he lies down on the sofa and, complaining it is too small for him, remains there, scarcely stirring, for months.
The fourteen-year-old narrator is the family breadwinner. His father has been killed in the war, and his mother has a small pension. The boy’s job was to take unwanted possessions to the black market, swapping a Dresden cup for some semolina, three volumes of Gustav Freytag for two ounces of coffee or a pillow for some bread. Freytag’s brand of German nationalism must have seemed highly dispensable just after the war. At other times he stole coal. His mother wept at the thought of this, but did nothing to stop him.
Meanwhile Uncle Fred snoozed on the sofa. One day his sister - the boy’s mother - suggested gently that he might enquire whether there was a position going in his old firm, where he had kept the books. The boy was sent to find out. He discovered a pile of rubble about twenty feet high. Uncle Fred was clearly elated when the news was brought to him. He asked the boy to break open a crate containing his few effects. In it was his savings book, containing 1,200 marks and a few other objects of trifling worth and his diploma from the Chamber of Commerce. The boy was told to collect the cash and sell the rest. He managed to dispose of all but the diploma, as Uncle Fred’s name had been inscribed with India ink. This provided enough food for weeks, a considerable relief as the schools had opened their doors again and the narrator was compelled to finish his studies.
Uncle Fred rose Lazarus-like from the sofa, shaved and called for clean underwear. He borrowed the boy’s bicycle and set off for the city. He returned smelling strongly of wine and armed with a dozen buckets. He had decided to revive the flower trade in the town. He set up beside the tram stop and with a shout of ‘Flowers, fresh flowers - no coupons required!’ he began his new life. Within three weeks he had three dozen buckets and two branches, and a month later he was paying taxes. It was impossible for the boy to keep up with his uncle’s progress: there were ever more buckets and branches, and soon he had colonised the entire town. The boy retired from his branch of the family business and concentrated on school. A few years later his uncle was a man of substance in a red car, and the boy was designated his heir - only he had to go to business school first.
In the spring of 1947 Alfred Döblin paid the first of two visits to the German capital. It was here he had achieved fame for Berlin-Alexanderplatz, the most famous novel of the Weimar Republic, and also the best-known fictionalised account of Berlin life. By his own account, Döblin entered though the back door. Like Renée Bédarida he landed in Frohnau in the French Sector. It was a soft introduction, but he had few illusions: ‘Reality exceeds fantasy.’ He went into the centre, arriving at the same Stettin Station that had received him and his family when they came from the Pomeranian port in 1888. He was immediately struck by the vision of an elegant restaurant with chandeliers and brightly painted shutters. Outside the signs were in Cyrillic. It was for Russians.1
He went west, arriving in an incongruously elegant flat in the Kurfürstendamm, in the British Sector. There was a publisher there (possibly Suhrkamp). ‘I asked what do the people get up to here? I was told that many sold their possessions, if they still had any, and lived off the proceeds. One piece after another disappeared in this way. Many dealt on the black market, very many.’2
The terrible weather was over - it was a sunny day, and they went out to the Café Wien. There was no coffee to be had, and the ‘cup’ turned out to be no more than coloured mineral water. Döblin looked for the cinema that had given the première of the film of his novel Berlin-Alexanderplatz. It was no more. The fashionable literary café of the Weimar days, the Romanischen, was open - to the skies. The sheer enormity of the destruction at last dawned on Döblin. Here was the city he had so ably chronicled in his novels, and almost all of it was gone: the Wintergarten with its variety shows, the Viktoria Café. There were no buildings either side of the Brandenburg Gate. He watched with astonishment as a Russian soldier walked past the Kranzler Eck with his lover on his arm. A paper seller gave him what for: ‘As things are going in Europe and the world, anything is possible, and who knows if, after ten or twenty years, a Russian soldier and his wife will be walking along the wrecked boulevards of some western city.’3
Döblin continued his voyage of discovery. On the Schlossbrücke (called the ‘Dolls’ Bridge’ because of the statues of Prussian worthies) he had recollections of the various Kaisers. There was little more than the river. On Alexanderplatz he looked at the great department store Tietz: ‘It looks like a man who has had his neck broken by a blow, and whose skull has been pushed down into his ribcage.’ Döblin was bitter. He had converted to Catholicism, but he could not quite bring himself to bestow mercy on his former tormentors: “What am I actually doing here . . . They allowed themselves to be defiled . . . I feel like a man who has been betrayed.’4 In the Königstrasse he noticed women pushing prams past the wreck of another Jewish department store, Wertheim - they were filled with wood. His goal was the Frankfurter Allee, where he had lived and practised: a popular quarter that provided him with models for his books. ‘The sight was shocking. A terrible martial violence must have descended to knock these houses flat . . . Every now and then a façade reported for duty. There the house must have stood . . . It is no longer what I knew and where I lived.’5
Döblin returned to give a lecture the following year. Berlin made him uneasy: ‘This was the principal theatre of the horror. This is where the crime took wings. The nation allowed itself to be deafened by singing youth and applauding bystanders.’ He was hard on Berlin, a city that was no more enthusiastic about Hitler than many others. ‘The judgment of history speaks in a terrible voice.’ But Döblin’s message is one of hope: ‘A man finds it easier than a city to change. A man may transform himself where a city crumbles away.’6
Currency Reform
The currency had been chaotic since the end of the war. The Soviets had simply printed money when they needed it, and this had caused rampant inflation.7 Nobody trusted cash. Farmers and shopkeepers were placed in a difficult position. The former avoided the market. The latter ruled over empty shops in the basements of ruined buildings. Germany’s post-war planners therefore conceived of a system that would inject confidence into the currency and wind up the black market and the cigarette economy. They wanted to create a marketplace where shopkeepers and manufacturers were kept permanently short of working capital to create a powerful incentive for rapid turnover and all cash received would promptly be spent on new goods. The scheme was an instant success. The Germans were often literally ‘drunk’ with the opportunities it gave them, and the black market disappeared overnight.8
The first proposals for monetary reform were made in the autumn of 1946. The Reichsmark was pegged at ten to a dollar. Barter markets were created in order to undermine the illegal black markets where most Germans did their shopping. In January 1947 Clay believed the new money to replace the Reichsmark should be centrally printed in Berlin, but there were doubts about the Russians. As it was, the cigarette economy had its own ways of regulating itself. The price of a twenty-cent packet of cigarettes was RM120, which remained the same for six months even in Berlin. French cigarettes were a third of that sum. A month’s shopping amounted to only RM50. A dollar was worth 600 marks, so six marks bought you a cigarette. In the Rhineland Elena Skrjabina was able to buy a lorry with a suitcase filled with cigarettes.9 With rumours that the old money was shortly to go, there was frenzied buying to get rid of potentially worthless currency. In May 1948 the price of a pound of strawberries had gone down to RM25 and cherries were now at 12. The pubs were filled with Berliners drinking away their reserves. Elena Skrjabina’s Bendorf shop was doing a roaring trade.10
The problem was that the new money did not come, and the prices began to rise again. On 16 June a
pound of coffee cost 2,400 marks. Two days later the word was out that the new currency was to be called the ‘Deutsche Mark’. On 25 June 1948 currency reform was introduced in the Western zones. The old money would be exchanged at a rate of one-tenth of the new, though for a while the two currencies ran side by side. The SBZ had been excluded from monetary reform because the Russians could not have been trusted to print the right amounts.11 By June 1948 Ludwig Erhard had made arrangements to print 500 tons of banknotes in the US and have them airlifted to Frankfurt. Virtually all rationing and price controls were abolished. Clay told him that his advisers had said that the move was a terrible mistake. Erhard replied: ‘Herr General, pay no attention to them. My own advisers tell me the same thing.’12
The Soviet answer was immediate. That same day the Russian commander Sokolovsky required the SBZ to introduce ‘immediate and necessary measures to protect the interests of the German population and the economy of the Soviet Zone’.13 The Russians acted that night: passenger trains were halted, and at the beginning of July they cut the city off completely from the West.et
In the meantime shops in the Western zones filled with goods; black markets disappeared; people ceased to ‘hamster’; and production increased. The atmosphere changed too. Every man, woman and child received DM60 in two instalments, and they all set out on shopping sprees. Ruth Friedrich’s friend Frank reported from Munich that the shops were crammed with food and that no one spoke of calories any more, because they all had enough to eat.14 Clay wrote to his guru Byrnes to complain about the British and the French, who had dragged their feet over the currency reform. Clay could report the immediate benefits: ‘Overnight hoarded goods appeared on the shelves as the stores had to sell to meet pay-rolls . . . even fruits and vegetables from the farm once more went on sale in the market place.’ In one month productivity had risen by 10 per cent.
In Hehlen the Schulenburgs were now the proud possessers of DM280, but Charlotte still didn’t know where the next tranche of money would come from. There was a knock at the door and her faithful cook and maid Klara came in wearing a white apron. Charlotte handed her DM40, and Klara said, ‘I want to tell her ladyship something, I don’t want any more money.’ When Charlotte replied that she had none to give her for the time being, the maid said, ‘I am doing this for his lordship’s sake.’ She meant: you don’t have to thank me.15
Crisis in Berlin
Döblin’s second visit marked the moment of change in Berlin. From June 1947 the city had a new mayor in Ernst Reuter, a former communist and intimate of Lenin’s who had gone over to the socialists in the 1920s and had emigrated to Turkey on the arrival of the Nazis. He had returned to Germany in November 1946 and taken a British train from Hanover to Berlin at the end of the month. On 5 December he was elected to the council. It was a bad moment to start, just before the killer winter. The council worked just half the day, as the offices could not be heated.16 The Russians vetoed his election as mayor, because, they said, Turkey was a fascist country. Louise Schroeder had to take his place meanwhile. Stalin was looking to find a way of preventing the Western Allies from creating their own Germany. It was the policy that Bob Murphy called ‘irritate and tire’ - wear down the West.17 Come what may, the Russians would force the Western Allies out. Molotov made it sound like ‘them or us’: ‘If we are to lose in Germany we would have lost the war.’18 Everything short of military force was to be used. The Russians were constantly probing and pushing, spreading rumours that the Western Allies were about to pack their bags. They invaded the railway offices in the US Zone, but the Americans resisted and they backed off. They made applications to the Americans for any of their citizens hiding in their sector.19
Currency reform was the pretext, but it wasn’t really about that. The Soviets saw the chance of making the Western Allies abandon Berlin, thereby losing their attraction to the Germans, or forcing them to drop the London programme for a separate state, or obliging them to return to the grand alliance as embodied in the CFM mechanism.20 There was fear in some quarters that the Russians would succeed.21 Clay for one was looking for a showdown:I doubt very much if this action would imperil the quadripartite machinery. If it should, we still force the Russians to slam the door and even if they did slam the door, we should still continue in Berlin. However, we cannot continue successfully unless we establish a governmental machinery for western Germany. The resentment of the Germans against colonial administration is increasing daily and those democratic Germans who hate communism and would prefer to establish the types and kind of government which we desire will soon lose their positions of leadership with their own people.
He told the under-secretary of the army, William Draper, that ‘two and a half years without government is much too long’. On 5 November 1947 he said that a provisional government would be established no later than 31 January 1948.22
The others were not so sure. General Robertson was for appeasement. The French even considered allowing the Russians the stake in the Ruhr they coveted so much.23 Clay was right that the Russians were not actually looking for a fight. They wanted to humiliate the West by offering to provision all the Berliners. That way they would win their love. The Berliners certainly did march on their stomachs, and their stomachs were empty. The Russians were going to keep the air corridors open and avoid military confrontations. They made no preparations for a military emergency. Nor was the Western bluff that convincing: the bombers the Americans sent to Britain were not configured for atom bombs.24
From 23 February 1948 the London Conference was debating just this question. The Russians had jumped off the CFM carousel at the end of the previous year. They were not invited to London. In their absence and in the imposing setting of India House the foreign ministers of Britain, Belgium, France, Holland, Luxembourg and the United States were giving form to the state of West Germany. On 17 March the Brussels Pact was signed as the first step towards NATO. The terms were leaked to the Soviets by Donald Maclean on the same day the Prague coup took place. Most of the Western ministers were convinced that the time had come to split Germany in two, but the French held aloof for the time being. They thought the Russians would prevent it. They only reluctantly agreed to the idea of West Germany because of Prague and because Sokolovsky walked out of the Control Council on the 20th. Couve de Murville, the French foreign minister, began to panic and decided there would be a fresh war within three years.25
Howley had been made American commandant at the Kommandatura on 1 December 1947. He was looking forward to a scrap too. He called his British counterpart, General Herbert, ‘shockingly defeatist’. When the Russians cut off the city in June, Herbert predicted that that would drive the Westerners out by October.26 He might have been conscious of just how weak the West was. In a reply to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge dated 5 March 1948, Clay detailed the strength of the American forces in Berlin - there were fewer than 2,000 soldiers. ‘It is obviously our desire to retain as small as garrison as possible.’ The Americans also had some German police auxiliaries, as the Russian-backed Markgraf Police (run by Paul Markgraf ) were not meant to function in the American Zone.27
On 18 March there was cause for a little celebration in Berlin. It was the centenary of the March Revolution of 1848 which had brought a brief triumph to the cause of the German middle classes, before they joined the more reactionary nobility and rallied behind Bismarck and the Empire. A crowd of 30,000 gathered at the ruined Reichstag. There were speeches from Franz Neumann of the SPD, Jakob Kaiser of the CDU and the mayor-elect, Ernst Reuter. Reuter alluded to the events in Prague. ‘Who will be next?’ he asked. Berlin would be next. ‘If the world knows this we will not be abandoned by the world.’28
The situation was worsening with each month. There were no barriers between the sectors, and those fleeing the Russians could try to disappear in the west of the city in the hope of finding a way out to the West. On 25 March the journalist Dieter Friede disappeared in a Nacht und Nebel kidnapping. The Soviet authorities later
justified their actions by claiming that he was a spy. The ‘Mini Blockade’ was next. It began on 31 March and lasted until 2 April. The SBZ’s policy was improvised.29 This time it was provoked by an Anglo-American refusal to allow the Russians to board their military trains.30 One of these crossed the Soviet Zone daily. There were also several freight trains every week, thirty-two daily ‘paths’ - or crossings - to supply the garrison and the Germans and a daily passenger aircraft. It was a warning shot, a trial run. Three days later, on 2 April, the Allied Kommandatura was dissolved. More disappearances followed. Some 200,000 people were reported to have been forcibly taken to the USSR since the end of the war. The Berliners felt particularly vulnerable once again. The Russian-backed SED launched a propaganda campaign in the Western sectors.31
The Soviets had shown their hand in the communist takeover in Prague in February and Jan Masaryk’s suspicious death the following month. They were now openly demonstrating what was in store for their bloc. Truman understood that Berlin needed to be held for propaganda purposes; it was also necessary to stop the flow of communism west. ‘If we failed to maintain our position there, communism would gain great strength among the Germans.’32 Like Clay he gave the Germans no credit for being able to make up their own minds.
Prague brought the French down to earth. It was timely that Robert Schuman was president of the council, and possessed the sort of wise head France needed at the time. In March Koenig met Clay and Robertson in Berlin for talks on the German constitution and the French merging with Bizonia to form Trizonia. Koenig became predictably uppity at the idea of a ‘Reichstag’. On 6 April Couve de Murville flew to Germany to see Clay. He was concerned that Berlin might fall to the Russians. They also discussed currency reform. When the Russians did move to cut Berlin off from the west, the French foreign minister Bidault stressed that for the sake of Allied prestige there could be no backing down. Schuman, who had begun his political career in Germany, insisted that Berlin was a symbol that could not be abandoned. It was not thought politic that any French soldiers should die for Berlin, however, and the French air force was kept out of the operation, the excuse being that it was too weak - which was probably true.33
After the Reich Page 70
