Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)
Page 1
Heinz Rein
* * *
BERLIN FINALE
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Contents
Pre-finale
Berlin, April 1945
Part I: UNEASE BEFORE THE STORM Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Part II: UNTIL FIVE MINUTES PAST TWELVE Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
The End
The New Beginning?
About the Authors
Heinz Rein was an influential German novelist writing before and after the Second World War. He became a major figure in the ‘rubble literature’ period, and his famous novel Berlin Finale, published in 1947, was one of the first bestsellers in the tumultuous German rebuilding period. He abandoned East Germany for the West in the 1950s.
Shaun Whiteside is a distinguished translator of both German and French literature. His translations for Penguin include Sigmund Freud’s On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, Norman Ohler’s Blitzed, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Sybille Steinbacher’s Auschwitz and several novels by Georges Simenon, including Maigret’s Doubts and The Saint-Fiacre Affair.
For Erich Weinert
‘The bullet in the middle of the chest, the brow split wide That’s how you lifted us high in the air on a bloody board! High in the air amidst wild cries, so that our tortured gesture Might be an eternal curse to him who ordered us to kill!’
Ferdinand Freiligrath, The Dead to the Living
Pre-finale
‘Eris shakes her serpents
All Gods flee
And thunder clouds hang
Heavily on Ilium’
Schiller, Cassandra
Berlin, April 1945
Lisbon, San Francisco and Tokyo were destroyed by earthquakes in a matter of minutes; it took several days for the fires of Rome, Chicago and London to be extinguished. The fires and earthquakes that raged upon the spot on the earth’s surface marked by the geographical intersection of 52 degrees 30 minutes northern latitude and 13 degrees 24 minutes eastern longitude lasted almost two years. They began on the clear, dark night of 23 August 1943 and ended in the rainy grey of 2 May 1945.
It was at this spot, thirty-two metres above sea level, that the city of Berlin lay nestled in an Ice Age dune until that night when destruction began its baleful course. It had risen from a fishing village to a fortress town, to the seat of the margraves and prince-electors of Brandenburg, to the residence of the kings of Prussia and the capital of the imperial and republican German Reich. It had come into being with the advance of colonizing German tribes into the settlement zones of the Wends and Slavs, and had lain for centuries far from the tribal territories of German culture. It had become a bulwark in the German colonial nation, an outlier of the old German West and an outpost of the new German East, and was late in entering the Reich and still later in becoming the centre of German history. It consists of a multiplicity of small, middle-sized and large towns, of villages, settlements, farms and barbicans that lay scattered between the Havel and the lake-land to the east of the Marches, and merged together towards the old fortress towns of Berlin and Kölln. The scourge of history worked very sparingly here, there were few traces of its rise and its transformations, but they refined an ambiguous appearance with certain noble features that were firmly engraved upon the city’s core. There are innumerable traces of the city’s downfall, which began as soon as it was elevated to the capital of the Greater German Reich. Devastating conflagrations, storms of steel and carpet-bombing have transformed the city’s lively face into the grimace of a death’s head.
On 23 August 1943 the city was dealt its first wound when 1,200 British Air Force planes launched their first great strike. The southern suburbs of Lankwitz, Südende and Lichterfelde were rendered into a smoke-blackened island of death in the middle of the sea of life. But this time it was not sea engulfing the island, it was the island ousting the sea, because soon it was no longer alone. Everywhere, in Moabit and Friedrichstadt, around Ostkreuz and in Charlottenburg, at Moritzplatz and around the Lustgarten, islands of death appeared, their shores advancing further and further and amalgamating, until at last the whole city became a land of death with a few patches of water that still contained a trace of life. Each attack broke a piece from the structure of the city, destroyed property and lowered living conditions.
Whole districts were turned to barren rubble. Large factory sites, flanked by unused chimneys, became a wilderness of shattered hangars and rusting machinery, pipes, metal bars, wires and joists. Many streets were still lined with the façades of buildings that looked like living houses but were now nothing but cynical backdrops. Mutilation has left other districts so disfigured as to be unrecognizable, filling them with wheezing, struggling life. The stumps of their mutilated buildings rise naked and ugly among the heaps of rubble, they loom like islands from the sea of destruction, torn and shredded, the spars of roofs which have been blown away like ribs stripped of skin, the windows as blind as eyes with permanently lowered lids, occasionally blinking glassily, the walls bare, having shed their plaster, looking like ageing women whose faces have been ruthlessly wiped of foundation and rouge.
In other parts of the city the destruction is less complete, but in those rows of houses the war’s claws have torn great gaps, often revealing a surprising view of the inner courtyards of buildings. Having escaped the airstrikes, they are visible from the streets for the first time, and so can no longer hide their ugly countenances behind the shoddy flamboyance of their external façades; in a sense, the hurricane of explosions has raised the curtain on them. These streets hold all degrees and varieties of destruction, from total annihilation to shelters cobbled together from cardboard and cellulose. There are houses whose roofs have burned away, and others consumed by flames up to the first floor, and some that have been emptied by the blasts, their window frames, shutters and doors ripped from their bodies, the dry skeletons of the roof beams protruding like bones from corpses. There are flats that hang like swallows’ nests above the exploded façades because the bombs fell at an angle, and basements that have survived the pressure of the collapsing houses. Only smoking stove-pipes among the piles of rubble suggest that people are vegetating in there as if in a fox’s den. The anatomy of the houses presents itself unadorned, the stairs and the partition walls, the lift shafts and chimneys are like bones, the gas and water pipes like arteries, the radiators and bathtubs like entrails. The remains of life are wasting away amidst the jungle of ruins, and nature alone begins to clothe the naked destruction, covering the piles of debris with greenery.
The wide network of the public transport system, woven from the many
tram and bus lines, the overground and the underground, the Stadtbahn and the Ringbahn, the local and suburban trains, has been torn to pieces, provisionally repaired with the most makeshift of patches. The timetables change from one day to the next because the destruction of platforms, overhead wires, tunnels, viaducts, bridges and stations has led to restricted services, cancellations and diversions.
The typical features of the city, those classically bourgeois buildings clustered around the island on the Spree and the swiftly flowing axis of Unter den Linden, which once lent it its characteristic features, created by the masterly hands of Schinkel, Schlüter and Eosander, Rauch, Knobelsdorff and Langhans, have been erased even before Speer’s drawing-board architecture could supplant it. Its landmarks now are high-rise bunkers, accumulators of anxiety, inhalers of flight, olive-drab lumps of concrete with anti-aircraft guns which, heavy as gigantic mammoths, stamp down the grass of the Friedrichshain, the Humboldthain and the Zoological Garden, no conciliatory feature mitigating the brutal functionality of their architecture. To these are added the many bunkers, both below and above ground, in the squares and by the stations of the city centre, in the estates and leafy colonies of the periphery, and their most primitive variety, the slit trenches, carved into parks, patches of forest and the embankments of the suburban railways.
At the beginning of the war the city had 4,330,000 inhabitants, but in April 1945 there are only 2,850,000. The men have been conscripted to military service, they have been recruited to the Todt Organisation, to the Volkssturm territorial army, they have been sent elsewhere with their factories. The women have fled to areas supposedly safe from air attacks, the old and the sick have been evacuated, the young called up for work duty, the schoolchildren lodged in rural evacuation camps, and the Jews removed. The decline in population is in fact far greater than that, because among the 2,850,000 inhabitants of the city 700,000 are foreign forced labourers from conquered and subject countries, Ukrainians, Polish, Romanians, Greeks, Yugoslavians, Czechs, Italians, French, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Danish, Hungarians and those Jews and inmates saved from the death camps in the east because they were fit for work. They are crammed in barracks on the desolate stretches between the city and the suburbs, in sites cleared of bomb damage, usually along the railway lines, hastily thrown up and surrounded by barbed wire fences. They bear a striking similarity to the emergency settlements that stand grey and bleak between patches of woodland and allotments, except that here (as everywhere else) the barbed wire is replaced by the invisible network of a system of surveillance and control, calculated down to the tiniest detail.
The ministries have left Berlin, they have been ‘transferred’, or moved to ‘temporary quarters’, the offices on Wilhelmstrasse are being dismantled, freight trains are being loaded night and day with files, cabinets and boxes, but also with furniture, household effects and suitcases. Senior ministry and Party officials have fled, leaving only the so-called ‘intelligence centres’, but there are plans for them too, and the extensive ‘Thusnelda transport operation’ is already in progress, with the special trains ‘Adler’ and ‘Dohle’ in Lichterfelde West and Michendorf, and numerous private cars.
Beneath the roar of the air-raid sirens, the muses fall silent. In the brief intervals between power cuts and air-raid warnings, all that emerges from microphones and cinema soundtracks are the voices of the illegitimate sisters of those muses, although the heroic bass of Mars is drowned out by a hysterical descant of compulsory frivolity; the little troop that consists of Comrades, Kolberg, Hallgarten Reconnaissance Unit, Johanna the Black Hunter and The Great King stand lonely among the interminable armies of Young Hearts, A Happy House, My Colleague Will Be Right With You, The Ideal Husband, All Around Love, The Woman of My Dreams, It Started So Well, Long Live Love, The Honeymoon Hotel, The Greatest Love, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes, Women Make Better Diplomats, A Man for My Wife, Fritze Bollmann Wanted to Go Fishing, Love Letters, Easy Blood, Nights of Madness, Don’t Talk to Me About Love. The flagging thrust of Fridericus Rex and the Horst Wessel Song mix with the Königswalzer, the music of the weekly newscasts, the tormented laughter and the wailing sounds of the sirens mingle into a horrible cacophony.
In this city of ruins, whose body is burnt and broken, whose entrails are shredded and torn, people live pressed closely together, they lead a life more terrible and difficult than the lives of soldiers, devoted entirely to battle and danger. Beneath the constant threat – and it is no less of a threat – from explosions and fire, asphyxiation and entombment, the people of this city still lead a kind of private life, and carry the pitiful ballast of civilization around with them. They need to look after themselves and their families, they need to work and at every second they expect that they will have to interrupt whatever activities they happen to be engaged in, whether it be sleeping or making love, drilling or calculating, cooking or shaving, and devote themselves to a fate that gives them no chance of escape. They lead a nomadic, troglodytic life, they allow the seed of a neurosis that may well be incurable to grow within their children, and surrender them to illiteracy. They watch the substance of youth being consumed in labour camps and anti-aircraft batteries, and the sense of a meaningful, orderly life dying away while their children are raised as warlike nomads. They have already moved so far from their origins, they have allowed their humanity to wither and atrophy to such an extent that at last they are merely machines which react willingly to the gentlest pressure of a finger or a phrase. It is the phlegmatic quality of people who have become fatalistic, who have rid themselves entirely of their own will and stubbornly continue along the path on which they have embarked, impassively accepting orders and special assignments, and praising as heroism their inner and outer indifference, and as perseverance their readiness to suffer; they ceased long ago to be the ‘reckless race’ described by Goethe. Beneath the ashes of their numbed souls there still smoulders the hope of divine providence announced by the mouth of the Antichrist, that famous covenant with God to which Hitler and Goebbels, Fritzsche and Dittmar are now so keen to refer. They know that fate, as unstoppable as a flood from the Volga and the Atlantic Ocean, will not halt at the gates of their city, but no spark of revolutionary zeal comes alive within them, no unleashed rage bursts the chains of duty, no cry of despair stirs the pangs of conscience. The disasters that the British and American Air Forces are delivering so masterfully in the airspace above the city absorb all capacity for thought, they send their victims off in search of refuge, food and clothing, ration coupons, food cards and bomb-damage certificates. They leave those who have been spared busy with repairs, safeguarding their belongings and struggling to reach their workplaces. The forms of civilized life are shattered, apartments have turned into dark caves since the protecting shell surrounding the sensitive cortices of the city, the telephone and electric cables, the gas and water pipes and the sewerage system, is torn and frayed. The people of the city have returned to the pump, the stove and the tallow candle.
There is something frantic about their movements, about their language, any unusual sound that springs suddenly from the flowing monotony makes them flinch and listen excitedly. They have only one single topic of conversation: the situation in the air, whether the Reich is free of enemies, whether any bomber units have flown in, where they are headed, whether they are flying away again. Everyone who leaves his apartment says goodbye to his family like someone undertaking a long and difficult journey into the uncertainty of an unknown and dangerous country, everyone carries with him a suitcase, a rucksack, a full briefcase or a shoulder-bag, since the alarms often take them by surprise and force them to seek refuge somewhere far from home.
But it is not only the danger of war from the air that weighs down on the people, another menace has added to the weight of that burden: the front lines. Since the crossings of the Rhine in Remagen and Oppenheim, the Western Allies have reached the Elbe in a surprise incursion across western and central Germany, the Soviet armies have advanced as
far as the Oder from the bridgeheads of Puławy, Warka and Baranów, through Poland and eastern Germany, but even though the western front is constantly shifting, Berlin has turned its face to the east, where the Soviet armies wait menacingly beyond the Oder.
It is the unease before the storm that lies over the city, an unease caused by the uncanny peace that spreads behind this last barrier in the east of the city, it is a restless peace, in which the railway trains and columns of motor cars from the Russian hinterland, from Chelyabinsk, from Sverdlovsk, from Gorky, from Magnitogorsk, from the collective farms of the Urals and Kuznetsk, advance towards the Oder. There is no one in the city who doesn’t know that each day the lull before the big storm is being used to put new gunners in the firing position, to drive new tanks into place, new aeroplanes are preparing to launch, new divisions are reaching their combat zones. Those far-off worlds, the Soviet Union and the United States, have come frighteningly close, the distance between the Stars and Stripes and the Red Flag has shortened to the distance between Frankfurt an der Oder and Magdeburg, and in the middle lies the besieged city which – once protected by the waters of the Volga and the English Channel – seemed an unattainable hinterland, the stump that is Berlin. The enemy armies are still beyond the big rivers that form the final obstacle, but they are already bringing in their fleets of planes and severing their last thin threads of life. They are preparing for the final onslaught, which could break out at any moment, across the Oder and the Elbe, rolling towards the city with the force of an avalanche.
The city’s stump has been turned into a makeshift fortress which is preparing to defend itself. Anti-tank ditches have been carved deep into the areas on the outskirts, communication trenches run diagonally across fields and allotments, one-man trenches have been dug into railway embankments, hillocks and patches of woodland, gun emplacements and anti-tank barriers block all access routes, immobilized tanks are buried at crossroads, flak artillery has been adapted to fire at ground-level targets, factories have downed tools, electricity, coal and fuel are now unavailable; the clerical and manual workers stay busy on the city’s edge, digging yet more trenches and lining up barricade after barricade. In the streets, in the restaurants and cinemas, in shelters and railway waiting rooms, patrols of the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Todt Organisation, the Gestapo and the police go in search of those unwilling to work and deserters: once again the Party has mobilized all means within its power to force each individual to do his part.