A Train of Powder (21 page)

But usually literacy oiled the wheels. In office after office in the administrative centres one found Frenchmen who could give to any question on their subject an answer which had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and who used words as precisely as mathematicians use numbers and symbols. It would be idle to pretend that the other zones afforded such treats. A strange historical nostalgia makes American parents like their young to talk as simply as if they were Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and unsuccessful efforts in this direction make many American adults talk with a poverty of vocabulary and a sustained attack on the graces of syntax which would have disgusted Mark Twain himself. For this reason educated Germans often underestimated the quality of American officials; just as they (and British and American correspondents) also put down British officials as “stuffed shirts” who were in fact intelligent and sensitive and well informed, but who had been subjected to English public school and university education, which acts like a vacuum cleaner on the English language, drawing the richness out of it as if it were dirt. But the French were always masters of speech; they could give every German with a mind worth enlisting on their side the assurance that they too inhabited the world of thought.

Yet about all these Frenchmen, who were handling the task of occupation so well, there was a disquieting languor. A political officer would deliver a wise and learned disquisition on German public opinion far too slowly. He would speak as if he had all the time in the world and was not happy about it, as if he had been forced to retire before his time, and was being fobbed off with something less than real work. The same weariness could be detected in many of his most able colleagues, and it came from a common cause. They did not in fact believe that the occupation was worth while. They did not think it was doing anything to the German people. We all know that there are some events which become experience and others which do not: some events which give us information about the universe and ourselves, and some which tell us nothing. When Britain and America were obliged to occupy Germany they very creditably renounced all idea of revenging themselves on their defeated enemy and planned an occupation which would be a great and enlightening experience for the German people. This ambition was likely to be disappointed. No man is able to foretell when or where he himself or a man of his own kind will encounter an event which is also an experience, and he is much less likely to be a sound prophet if he tries to arrange a rendezvous with enlightenment for a man belonging to another people, shaped by a different history. But the moralist cannot bear to admit this, and the British and Americans are fundamentally moralists. The French, however, are fundamentally intellectuals, and nothing held them back from foretelling the failure and recognizing it when it occurred.

This was not cynicism, though it was often taken for that. Rather was it gravity. The truth was that Western Germany was a frightening place. British and Americans were not injecting the Germans with their philosophy, if they could be said to have one in common, and the Germans showed no signs of holding a faith of their own. The one-legged man who grew enormous cyclamens in the greenhouse at Nuremberg was becoming a nightmare figure. The greenhouse seemed likely to cover the whole of the country before long, changing its form for the production of things other than flowers: textiles, chemicals, motorcars, ships, steel. But the man’s face had not changed. He had care for nothing but growing more and more cyclamens, better and better cyclamens. He was as indifferent to all but his own industry as if it were a stupefying drug, and his fellows knew the same obsession. But inevitably their industry would create a situation in which they would have to interest themselves in much else, for their productivity would engender wealth, which would engender power, to which they would have to give direction and a form. But above that greenhouse rose the Schloss built by the last generation which had attained wealth and power, and its lobster-claw turrets, its hobgoblin gables, had been the signs of surrender to fantasy too elemental and wild, which had let loose the forces of madness and death. There was no news of a faith that would bind German wealth and power to the service of sanity and life. There was indeed little evidence that anybody in Western Germany felt any need for such a faith.

It was no hardship to leave Western Germany for Berlin.

4

The blockade of Berlin still held. So the plane, packed tight with green vegetables and officials, went straight up into the air, as if it were a ball a giant child were throwing at the clouds. There was so much traffic on the Berlin run that a plane which was seven minutes late at its journey’s end had lost its place in the queue at Gatow Airport and had to go back to its starting point and try its luck the next day. So the pilots dared not waste a second on those gentle spiral ascents which coddle the passenger off the ground in an ordinary commercial flight, and there was no nonsense about the descent either. The ground rushed up and stopped just in time, while ears popped and silted up with deafness. The passengers were whisked off the ground, for each plane had just fifty minutes at the Berlin airport to unload and fuel. This athletic miracle was performed not only by the slim and the straight and the young and the male. A great many women worked on the loading, and among them were some of the lusty old girls who three years before had been clearing up the rubble. Their eyes glittered among their wrinkles as they cawed together like crows and hurled the trolleys along. They had never missed a good fight in their neighbourhood yet, and this was the best of all.

It was odd to find oneself in prison in this loosest, least confined of capitals. Lakes and waterways run through it, and there is much wet and sandy ground on which it is not safe to build, so there are heaths and pine woods and birch woods and good alluvial fields well within the city limits. But now it was a prison, the largest prison ever known, with walls that rose to the sky and were as thick as the whole encircling Soviet Zone. Everybody in Berlin was a prisoner. None was free, not even those who claimed to be warders. The Berliners were prisoners because they were conquered. The Allies were prisoners because they were conquerors. The Americans could not leave lest the Soviet Union take their withdrawal as an admission that they were willing to surrender the whole world to it and stay at home in peace; and a Third World War might well have followed such a misunderstanding. The British could not leave Berlin lest the United States and the Soviet Union take their withdrawal as an admission that they were a bankrupt people destitute of power: a misunderstanding which also might have hastened the outbreak of a Third World War. The French could not leave Berlin lest the world draw its conclusions from the state of serfdom into which they had fallen in 1940 and think them destitute of power.

The Russians also were prisoners; theirs was the deepest degree of captivity. They could not leave Berlin without abandoning what was then the sole Russian idea: that they could occupy any country into which they could send the Red Army to cooperate with the local Communist party, no matter how greatly the population loathed them, and that by imposing a police state they could then induce in such countries an appearance of satisfaction which would make it difficult for the Western democracies to gain moral support if it tried to drive them out. The Russians had therefore to stay in Berlin and pretend that they found it easy to administer their Sector, at the same time doing their best to drive out the Allies. For the inhabitants of their Sector obstinately voted against communism in their free elections, and this evidence of discontent could be suppressed if the Allies abandoned the quadripartite control of the city, and there need be no more free elections.

In the summer of 1949 they were working at the task of ousting the Allies with all that peculiar bitchery which was Stalin’s stamp and seal. A year before the Russians had refused to cooperate with the British and the Americans and the French in the currency reform, though this was obviously necessary, since the official currency was still Hitler’s Reichsmark, which for long before the defeat had been the parthenogenetic child of printing presses unmated with any gold reserve. They picked a series of petty quarrels over the new Deutschmark and proceeded to use the power which the Potsdam Conference had given them when it embedded Berlin in the heart of the Soviet Zone. In June 1948 they had closed all land communications between Western Germany and Berlin. Their hope was that this would inflict such privations on the Sectors controlled by the Western Allies, which relied for their important export trade on Western Germany, that the Berliners would not want them to stay. This threat was met by that great act of genius, the airlift, which supplied the city’s essential needs at a cost of a hundred thousand pounds a day, and by a ban on the export of all goods from Western Germany to the Soviet Zone in East Germany. In May 1949 this ban had reduced Eastern Germany to the verge of economic collapse, and the Russians, with a great fanfare on the radio and in the news-reels, let the trains and the automobiles and the canal barges go through their Zone to Berlin.

But as soon as the Russians got the goods they needed and were saved from administrative disaster they began to cheat. It happened that a large number of railway workers in the Soviet Zone went on strike, an event which genuinely amazed the Red Army and the commissars, since strikes are not permitted in the Soviet Union. But they turned it to their own purpose and refused to settle it, for so long as it went on no goods could be carried to or from Berlin, and the Soviet authorities could plead that they were not imposing a blockade, it was the German Railway Workers’ Union that was responsible for the hold-up. This ruse was peculiarly Stalinist. It explained why Lenin, and the party as a whole, had never thought much of Stalin in the early days, for it was incomplete. It left the automobiles and the canal boats unaccounted for, and they had to be turned back by Soviet guards who demanded documents of which nobody had previously heard, and this revealed to the simplest minds that there was a disingenuous element at work.

So, in the summer of 1949, the little blockade was on. In the sky over Berlin the airlift hummed perpetually, though on the ground it was very easy to find parts of the city which seemed remote from strife, and even from life. The bogus classical villas round the lakes of Dahlem were now truly classical, and as graceful and elegiac as the willows which drooped silver over the waters. In the past their pompous colonnades had shut out light much needed in a northern climate, and they had been dumpy with darkness. Now these colonnades were doubly irradiated, by the light that shone on them from without, and the light that poured down into their rooms through the shattered roofs. The gardens were now more tame and more wild: the lawns and parterres were covered with neat rows of vegetables, the un-pruned rambler roses hung in great curtains, billowing in the wind, from porches and balconies. Bullet-pocked shutters made easy a burglar’s entrance to a house that was intact. Built into a colossal mantelpiece, a huge marble female head, crowned with faintly green laurels on its faintly gilded hair, looked over the dusty parquet floors of the empty salon and was reflected in the cracked and sallowed mirrors, set in nouveau art frames representing twined water lilies. It seemed a good house to explore, but the handle of the door had been taken off and put on again at an odd angle. To open that door might be very unhealthy, and, indeed, if an intact house in this district lacked inhabitants it usually meant that it had been mined by German troops in their last stand against the Russians and had not yet been cleaned. That door handle had been noticed so nearly at the last moment that it seemed good to go outside and sit on a bench in the garden and breathe the air with a proper appreciation.

On the other side of the lake was a great white mansion, flying the Union Jack; and on its lawn, between two taller visitors, walked a trim man with a white moustache. This was Sir Cecil Weir, the president of the Economic Sub-Commission of the Allied Control Commission for Western Germany, a Glasgow manufacturer who had been one of the chief planners of British industry during the war and had reorganized French industry after the liberation. He was the perfect bourgeois whom Marx had denounced in the Communist Manifesto one hundred and one years before, with double inconsistency, since he was a determinist, and the bourgeois was a natural product of the capitalism which he had certified as an inevitable and temporarily beneficial historic phase: the perfect
boorjoo,
whom the Russians were still denouncing with the same inconsistency. But me imperturbe, Sir Cecil might have said with Whitman, for within himself he was adventurous and serene. He and Harry Collins, who had brought the coal out of the ground in the Ruhr, belonged to the same type of thinkers who dealt with concrete things in an abstract way. Harry Collins believed in bringing coal out of the ground, no matter whether the ground was British or American or French or German, because coal is a good thing for human beings to have about the place. Sir Cecil believed in trade as the foundation of civilization. Wherever raw materials flowed into a factory and manufactured goods flowed out and the product was satisfactory and the accounting honest, houses and schools and hospitals were built, and men became cleaner and wiser and kinder. Hence he was as profoundly shocked by the blockade of Berlin as he would have been at a blockade of Glasgow.

This impersonal effort was often to be recognized among Allied officials. It had its bearing on the moral issue raised by the people, mostly English, who arrived in Germany with the avowed intention of loving the Germans and claimed to be inspired by Christ’s injunction that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves. But they had surely mistaken a difficult injunction for an easy one. Christ did not tell us to love our neighbours as we love our lovers or our kin, which is not a hard task for people with a certain vacancy of nature; every woman tried for murder receives a number of proposals from total strangers. He did tell us to love our neighbours as ourselves, and that is a cool and intellectual love. Few of us take joy in ourselves. Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn. But we fight for our rights, we will not let anybody take our breath away from us, and we resist all attempts to prevent us from using our wills. It is our duty to fight as eagerly for the rights of others, to admit the unique and sacred character of their souls and their wills, and here in Germany that duty was often faithfully observed. No parachutist dropped on the Ruhr could have guessed that Harry Collins was not wrestling for his own people; and Sir Cecil Weir might have been managing factories that belonged not only to his own nation but to his own firm. It is true that even in those days some objected because the ultimate result of such services to Germany must be her reappearance as Great Britain’s most formidable competitor in world markets; but that is a dilemma which the cited injunction disregards.