by Geert Mak
Question: ‘Can you honestly say that you have never used a man?’ Answer: ‘I have, I've done that, more than once. But I didn't do it to be nasty. I married an American because I knew that then I would be allowed to stay in America, but I also liked him a lot. But does the fact that you have a car, money and an apartment in New York mean that you've sold yourself? Sure, girls from the former Soviet Union go out with rich men, but in the end they marry for love and not for money?’
Question: ‘What didn't you like about Europe?’
Answer: ‘Whenever I go to Paris, I always end up in a bad mood. Because the people there don't wash themselves, they stink, even their so-called aristocrats stink. In America, even the workers wash themselves, they're clean. In Europe, everyone walks around with their nose in the air.’
At the pavement cafés along Kurfürstendamm, people are sitting out in the spring sun. For the first time since 1945, Germany is at war. Kosovo has tried to secede from the Yugoslav Federation, the Serb Army has rolled into the province and is crushing the rebellion with an iron fist. Albanian families are being killed or driven from their villages, hundreds of thousands of people are refugees, Europe fears a new round of genocide.
And now, since yesterday, NATO is intervening. The Germans see it as a ‘humanitarian war’. On the evening news I watch aircraft decorated with the Germany military cross rolling out onto the runway, ready to bomb Belgrade and Serb targets in Kosovo. The Bild-Zeitung is selling copies faster than the news-stands can stock them. The front page is framed with the colours of the German flag. ‘Our boys, at last!’
Back at my boarding house, the Jewish proprietress is sitting in front of the TV, her face white as a sheet. ‘They're actually going to start the bombings,’ she says shakily. ‘They really are. It's madness, complete madness.’ She's afraid, and keeps bursting into tears.
Chapter SIXTEEN
Berlin
IN THE 1920S, BERLIN CONSISTED OF THREE STREETS. FOR BERLINERS, Unter den Linden was the walking street, the boulevard where foreigners and provincials strolled back and forth to view all the cardboard grandeur of the German Empire. Leipziger Strasse was the shopping street, home to the department stores belonging to Wertheim, Israel, Tietz and Jandorf. Friedrichstrasse was the quaffing street, with bars, beer joints, grand cafés and houses of pleasure back to back. And Wilhelmstrasse was the seat of government, but that was a different story.
In those days one arrived in Berlin by train. Everyone came by train: the Russians arrived at Schlesischer Bahnhof (now Ostbahnhof), the French, English, Belgians and Dutch at Potsdamer Bahnhof. All these station districts with their eating-places, brothels and cheap hotels were like magnets around which the city revolved. ‘Asia begins at Schlesischer Bahnhof,’ the citizens of Berlin said, pointing to the tracks that ran all the way to Vladivostok and reminding each other of the price of a train ticket to Tokyo: 650 imperial marks. One could as well have said: ‘Europe begins at Potsdamer Bahnhof’, and point to the tracks running all the way to Hook of Holland. Here lay Europe's natural crossroads. Everything and everyone passed through this city.
In those days, Berlin was a city of soldiers returned home from the front. A picture taken in December 1918 shows troops marching through the Brandenburg gate: their frowning, unshaved faces lined with hunger and cold, silent crowds along the road, the soldiers step briskly to shake off the humiliation. Their comrades were broken, invalids, wreckage, they themselves had become accomplished killers. They were baffled by the defeat that had been suddenly imposed upon them. Until summer 1918, after all, Germany had won one victory after the next. Had a single enemy soldier ever set foot on German territory? And what about the capitulation, right after a new ‘left wing’ government had come to power, after Wilhelm's fall? ‘The victorious front has been killed by a knife in the back,’ the army's former commanders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, had said – and ah, that had to be it.
Berlin was also a city of the exiled and uprooted. After 1918, more than nine million Europeans had been cast adrift. Two million Poles, an equal number of Russians, a million Germans and 250,000 Hungarians were wandering the roads between Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London and Amsterdam.
Berlin was the natural centre to which they were drawn. The signs outside the cafés and restaurants around Nollendorfplatz were written in Cyrillic letters. When bus drivers stopped at Bülowstrasse, they shouted: ‘Russia!’ In 1918 there were 50,000 Russians in Berlin, by 1924 there were 300,000. The city had six Russian-language dailies and twenty Russian bookshops. There were at least a dozen Russian galleries and cabarets and countless cafés, all full of failed revolutionaries, would-be Bolsheviks, drunken artists, down-at-heel nobility and armchair generals.
In his reports from Berlin, the quintessential journalist Joseph Roth described these exiles’ fate. The Hungarian boy Geza, for example, who had accidentally fought on the wrong side during the revolution and now dreamed of becoming a cabin boy on a cruise ship to America. Or Mr Schwartzbach from Galicia, who poured his lonely heart into building a miniature model of Solomon's temple, complete with countless details dreamed up by Schwartzbach himself. After nine years his magnum opus was finished, and disappeared into the back room of a Jewish restaurant on Hirtenstrasse, where no one ever looked at it again. But there were also others, like General Biskupsky, the Beast of Odessa, who hoped to create a ‘Russian-German alliance’ with his German colleague Ludendorff, towards the day on which both gentlemen would someday return to power. Or Fyodor Vinberg, a former czarist officer and one of the first advocates of a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’. Vinberg walked around all day touting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake text put together by the czar's secret police to provide ‘definitive’ proof of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Thousands of such confused and embittered expatriates were wandering in Berlin, running into each other everywhere: anarchists, monarchists, businessmen, everyday citizens, Poles, Hungarians, Russians. They arrived wearing their best clothes, but decline was not long in coming. The jewels were hocked, the hotel tenancy terminated, the elegant clothing became threadbare, Kurfürstendamm was given the nickname ‘Nöpsky Prospekt’, and the panic grew.
And in that same ragbag of a town, a miracle took place: Berlin became, for Europe, the city of the modern day. Perhaps it had to do with the way Wilhelm's Berlin had suddenly deflated like a balloon in 1918, leaving an enormous vacuum behind and the accompanying demand for new content, radically different forms and ideas. A cursory glance at the names of those who fled the city in the 1930s shows us something of the talent that had gathered in Berlin: Albert Einstein, Arnold Schönberg, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Heinrich Mann and his two children Klaus and Erika, Arthur Koestler, Marlene Dietrich, Hermann Ullstein.
In the eyes of many, Berlin was a man-eating monster of machines, factories, anonymous housing blocks and speeding trains and cars. It served as the model for Metropolis, the masterpiece by Viennese-born cineaste Fritz Lang. But at the same time it was the world in which Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill created their Threepenny Opera. It was there that Yehudi Menuhin gave his first concert, at the age of thirteen. Looking back on it, he found the Berlin of those days above all a neurotic place. Not an authentic society, ‘but a new society based on new money, and on extravagance, brashness, show. Everything became possible. Everything became Experience with a capital “E” – and a capital “X”.’
The epicentre of this movement of modernity was Café des Westens. This was where the literary magazines were passed around, hot off the presses. This is where the captains of the avant-garde granted audience to their followers, the expressionists associated with Der Sturm, with artists like Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinksy, the young Marc Chagall and countless Futurists, constructivists and Dadaists. One of the café's focal points was the Dadaist painter George Grosz, famous for his unflattering prints of whores, beggars, paraplegic war invalids on rollers and fat-necked real-estate speculato
rs, street scenes often not at all far removed from reality.
When the owner of Café des Westens boosted his prices in 1920, they all moved to the Romanisches Café, a huge, ugly space across from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. In Paris the tone was set by the esprit du salon, but the Romanisches Café had the atmosphere of a popular uprising. Everyone shouted, everyone wanted to be right. Beside the revolving doors sat the old, bearded expressionist painters. Up on the balcony people played chess. There was a sculptors’ table, a philosophers’ table, a newspaper table, a sociologists’ table. Pulling up a chair at a table to which one did not belong gave immediate cause for uproar. George Grosz would come storming in, dressed as an American cowboy, complete with boots and spurs. The Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman made ‘calligrams’ there (‘Gertrude. GERTRUDE. GERTRUDE. Slut.’), and spoke of city life that had run amok into ‘randiness, opium, madness and anarchy’. ‘Berlin,’ he wrote, ‘hung from the sky on a silken thread, a ponderous, colossal behemoth dangling above a roiling inferno.’
Meanwhile, Joseph Roth was touring a different Germany. At the railway station in Chemnitz he saw a conductor eating bonbons out of a box someone had left behind on the train. The conductor was a serious man with hairy fists. Now he was eating this ‘candy for naughty girls’ as though it were a sausage sandwich. ‘Six months earlier this conductor would never have eaten bonbons. Now he is overpowered by hunger.’
In Berlin he sees two prep-school boys marching down a busy street singing:
Down, down with the Republic of Jews,
Fucking Republic of Jews,
Fucking Republic of Jews!
The adults stepped aside to let the boys pass. ‘And no one boxed their ears.’
He sees the growth of the German ‘periodical forest’, its seedbed on Potsdamer Platz.‘The saplings are called the Völkischer Ratgeber, the Kampfbund, the Deutscher Ring, the Deutsches Tagblatt, and all are marked with the inevitable swastikas cut deeply these days into every bark.’
Joseph Roth also wrote a striking piece about meeting an old worker who had just been freed after fifty-one years in prison. He had skipped half a century: the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. In line with his own sense of propriety, this nineteenth-century man went out onto the busy streets in search of work. He had barely noticed the First World War, he had never ridden in the U-Bahn, never seen a car – let alone a plane – and suddenly all of modern Berlin came crashing down on him. He had not been gone for half a century, no, it seemed more like three.
And now here I am, three quarters of a century further, and I feel almost as lost as that old prisoner who recognised nothing of his old home town. In 1999 one can search long and fruitlessly for the Berlin of the 1920s, for all the old cafés, restaurants, shops, department stores, boarding houses and attic apartments, for the wild city of Brecht, Lotte Lenya, Erich Kästner, Roth and all the others.
Where the Romanisches Café once stood there is now a complex of offices and middle-class residences built in the 1950s. All that is left of old Nollendorfplatz is the pump for watering horses, dating from the days of the kaiser. Along the long stretch of Bülowstrasse behind it, no more than ten pre-war houses are still standing. The busy working-class neighbour-hoods have vanished, replaced now with a great deal of greenery, they have become quiet, park-like districts. The façade of Tietz's department store is still standing, as is the lower level of the Jannowitzbrücke S-Bahn station, although the sound of the train whistles, the steam and the promise of the steel tracks is gone now. Only the old Hackescher Markt station is intact, a red-brick construction with wrought-iron archways and stonework ornaments that have survived this century as though by a miracle.
Where, then, is all the rest? Quite simple: today most of that Berlin lies in the Grunewald woods. It is covered by trees and bushes, a pile of rubble more than a hundred metres high, the Teufelsberg. Here and there a few chunks of cement stick out of the ground, a piece of marble, a rusted pipe. In the distance the new city sparkles in the afternoon sun. One hears a bird singing, a little boy's voice, the barking of a dog, the snapping of a twig. In that silence, the old Berlin lies buried.
The Russian embassy is a hundred-metre-long chunk of Stalin along Unter den Linden, built in the early 1950s. It is a boot heel, designed to push Berlin as far into the ground as possible. Power, grandiosity and indomitability, that is the message shouted to the street by the hard granite, the overbearing façade and the staunch pillars. The building stands on the site of the old embassy, the elegant Courland Palace, famous for the most extravagant rococo hall in Berlin. That exquisite, light-green marble now lies beneath the rubble at Grunewald as well.
These days the embassy swimming pool is open to the public. The good people of Berlin swim laps there while the poolside statue of Lenin stares off into the distance over their heads. Russia is now in dire need of added revenue. When the first Soviet ambassador, Adolf Ioffe, arrived here in April 1918, he had with him a red flag and twelve million marks in starting capital for propaganda work. Berlin, in Lenin's view, would ultimately become the capital of the worldwide revolution. The German's subsidy for his revolution was now being turned against Germany itself. The embassy personnel hung up a huge banner right after Ioffe arrived: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Books, newspapers and pamphlets followed by the carload. Along with them there arrived new personnel, solicited and unsolicited: revolutionaries, adventurers, profiteers from the old Russia, bureaucrats from the new. Much of the antique furniture, many tapestries, chandeliers and paintings evaporated onto the black market. The use of weapons in the building became a serious problem: almost everyone carried a pistol, to ‘defend the revolution’.
Despite this chaos, the Soviet embassy was one of the most important diplomatic posts for a defeated Germany. Berlin viewed with extreme interest everything that happened in and around the new revolutionary state. Here, perhaps, lay the future for German trade and industry as well. At the same time – and this double role was one the Soviet mission always retained – the embassy was a permanent jamming station for the German powers-that-be, producing a constant flow of agitprop both open and covert. In this, one man played a vitally important role: Lenin's former travelling companion, Karl Radek. He had come into the city in December 1918, disguised as a wounded German soldier, along with a group of returning prisoners of war. By then he had become a key figure in the Socialist International, and could ‘stammer away’ – as he himself put it – in ten languages. Yet at the same time he remained a caricature of himself, full of jokes and silly ideas, always bearded and bespectacled,‘his pockets bulging with newspapers and magazines’.
Radek immediately established contact with the radical wing of the German revolutionaries, the group around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. He held court almost every day in the Ukrainian restaurant Allaverdi, where the Soviets had their own table and where Radek bantered with the former country gentlemen and landowners who waited on tables. All paths crossed in that restaurant, those of the old regime, the nobility, the middle class, the monarchist officers, the local revolutionaries and the new Soviet leaders. Radek adhered to the pure Bolshevik line, including the use of terror against ‘classes condemned to death by history’. Rosa Luxemburg was having none of that. Others joined in the debate. All the schisms that had arisen among the revolutionaries of Petrograd were reiterated in Berlin. In this way there arose German Trotskyites, Bucharinists and Zinovyevites, and more than that. The stylistic motifs of the Soviet Union were imitated as well: the constructivist fonts on the posters, the russe-bolchevique fashion, everything that happened in Russia was repeated on a smaller scale in Berlin. Except for the revolution itself. That went on in its own, German way.
Every country and every political movement prefers to write a history that makes it feel comfortable, a portrait in soft pastels, a story that does no violence to the self-image. The losers are usually unable to paint any portrait whatsoever. They
simply fade away, and their story is eradicated along with them.
Only a hair's breadth separated Germany from becoming a kind of Soviet republic. In November of 1918, mutinies began among the sailors in the ports of northern Germany and the revolt quickly spread to other parts of the country. From that moment, a wave of uprisings, demonstrations and riots swept the country from north to south, from east to west and back again. In Berlin, a full-scale war in the streets was carried on in spring 1919. For three months, Munich was governed by a Soviet-style republic. It was only in 1920 that relative calm returned to the country.
The German legend concerning those painful years remained in place until 1945. After then, no one felt like thinking about that popular rebellion. It was the story with which Hindenburg and Ludendorff poisoned public opinion after 1918. Both men, as mentioned earlier, announced that it was this social-democratic revolution that had brought defeat to Germany and twisted the knife in the back of the victorious front. That was the charge levelled against Chancellor Friedrich Ebert and his SPD party.
Thanks to letters, affidavits and sections of diaries discovered since, we now know what really happened. On that crucial day of 29 September, 1918, the day on which both army and kaiser suddenly accepted defeat, it was not the ‘whining’ social democrat Ebert who organised the capitulation, but courageous General Ludendorff himself.
When Ludendorff realised that defeat was inevitable, he manipulated matters in a way that would protect the army and the imperial elite. He advised Kaiser Wilhelm to ‘give the government a broader foundation’ by granting the social democrats ministerial responsibility. A government with such a broad popular base would then have to establish a truce, and responsibility for the capitulation could be foisted off on others. In this way the army's ‘honour’ could be preserved, a matter of utmost importance to its Prussian officers. ‘They [the social democrats] will have to bring about the peace that must now absolutely be established,’ Ludendorff told his staff. ‘Those who have mixed this concoction will now have to drink it themselves.’ It was a barefaced lie – he himself, the highest army commander, was the one who bore primary responsibility for ‘this concoction’ – but for the disgraced officers and humiliated nationalists the legend was too attractive not to believe.
