Iron Curtain (60 page)

From the beginning, the Berlin festival was conceived on a grand scale. As one concerned Western analyst noted, the festival was intended to fill sixteen Berlin theaters, with a total capacity for 20,000; 103 cinemas, serving 40,000; the brand-new Walter Ulbricht Stadium, which would seat 60,000; and the brand-new swimming stadium, which had room for 8,000. Open-air events would be held in forty squares and parks.
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To accommodate the expected crowds at the mass demonstrations, the Berlin authorities cleared a huge pile of rubble in the center of the city. They also renovated some of the monuments on Unter den Linden and prepared the Berlin Museum to receive a major exhibition from the
People’s Republic of China. Hotels, youth hostels, and private homes were equipped with 120,000 mattresses to accommodate the visitors from abroad. East Germans—at least 80,000 of them—were housed in tents.
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The Stasi prepared well in advance too. In May, the policemen began careful monitoring of the “atmosphere” around the festival planning. They collected informers’ reports and scanned the letters of 800 students and 100 teachers at
Leipzig University, 500 students and 40 teachers at
Rostock University, and 800 students and 100 teachers at Jena University to get a sense of what was being said about the event.
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In June, the Stasi unveiled Operation Sunrise, the police action designed to monitor and control all of the West German participants. The Sunrise team—headed by the minister of state security himself,
Erich Mielke—was to take all West German delegates directly from the border to reception camps where they would be registered, and from there to collection camps where they would stay. At the collection camps, Stasi functionaries—posing as drivers, catering staff, and organizers—were immediately to begin recruiting potential secret agents and to be on guard against spies.
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Other informers were also assigned to find out “which members of the bourgeois political parties are meeting who” and to observe “whether priests try to prevent people from participating or whether
they oppose the World Festival in their sermons.”
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Statistics were to be kept in the run-up to the events and weekly reports were to be written, partly encrypted. Each of the West German states was to be given a code name (Schleswig-Holstein was Mercury, Lower Saxony was Jupiter, North Rhine-Westphalia was Mars, and so on).
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In addition, the ministry would send extra contingents of armed policemen who were instructed, curiously, to bring their own toothbrushes, razors, and musical instruments.
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All of this meticulous advance preparation in some sense paid off. The Third World Youth Festival was indeed a marvel of mass choreography and crowd planning. There were opening and closing ceremonies, a Day of Solidarity with Young Girls (“because they are active defenders of peace”), and a “demonstration of German Youth against the remilitarization of Germany.”
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Pablo Neruda came, as did his friend Bertolt Brecht. A newsreel created to promote the festival shows participants releasing doves. Special homage was paid to the
North Korean delegation, as the newsreel announcer explained that “the youth of the world wants to show you courageous people that we are standing on your side.” During another ceremony, flowers were also laid on the graves of Soviet soldiers in Berlin (“Youth from around the world gave thanks to the Soviet Union”). At the opening ceremony there were flags, marchers, and choreographed displays on a scale not seen in Germany since the war.
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For those already enthusiastic about the communist regimes, the Berlin youth festival was a glorious, even an ecstatic experience. One
Free German Youth functionary recalled the opening parade with enthusiasm decades later: “That was an amazing experience, the people who walked down Unter den Linden, Friedrichstraße, who came from all parts of the city, from everywhere, it was an amazing experience.”
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Jacek Trznadel, a young Polish writer, received ration cards for a new suit so that he could attend the festival along with other members of the “young literary generation.” He encountered a Berlin that was “poor and gray, still filled with rubble, but bedecked for the celebration with red banners.” Afterward he remembered very little except a “portrait of Stalin in the sky—and a young German girl with whom I exchanged addresses … there were such euphoric sentiments.”
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Hans Modrow recalled being moved to tears by the closing ceremony, which involved hundreds of people from all over the world. Modrow was also part of an enthusiastic group of Free German Youth who decided to internationalize the festival even more: they locked arms, marched to the border, and picked
a fight with the West Berlin police. Much later, Modrow reckoned that this seminal experience had reinforced his sense of righteousness, as well as his faith in the new regime.
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But for anyone who felt at all skeptical, either about East Germany or about communism, the festival also had an ominous side. So soon after the end of the war, some found it was strange to see young Germans marching in uniform, performing perfectly coordinated gymnastics, and shouting in unison. One Polish youth activist, Józef Tejchma, remembered the opening ceremony had left him with both admiration and something like fear: “It made an enormous impression on me, of a vast machine, an explosion of energy … all of that order, that Germanness … I had the feeling that these young people had enormous power, that they were functioning according to a particular scenario.” Although he was “impressed that you could organize something like that,” he also felt uneasy.
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Werner Stötzer, later a well-known East German sculptor, had even more mixed feelings. Along with Modrow, Stötzer was part of the Free German Youth group that marched to the border, an event he recalled rather differently from how Modrow did. It all began in a good-humored manner, Stötzer wrote in his memoirs—but then the mood changed:

As the Polish communists had learned during their first referendum, more propaganda was not necessarily more convincing. And more chanting young people, more banners, more parades, and more coordinated gymnastic displays were not necessarily more reassuring, to the Germans or to anyone else.

IN ONE CORNER, a bureaucrat in a suit, briefcase under his arm, strides forward with confidence; from the opposite corner, a young family—father, mother, and baby—smile and wave a flag, on their way to a parade. In between, engineers huddle over their designs. Workers lay down railroad ties. From their tractor, peasant farmers hail a blond peasant girl with a sheaf of wheat in her arms. Young people dressed in the blue uniform of the Free German Youth and the blue ties of the German Young Pioneers march and clap their hands in the air, to the accompaniment of accordions and a guitar.

Factories, apartment blocks, and a stadium rise up in the background
behind the figures. And at the very center, a young worker grasps the hand of a white-haired party boss. A man in a flat cap and high leather boots—the familiar uniform of the policeman—smiles enthusiastically at them both, as if giving his blessing. The colors are bright, the surface is shiny. All of the figures have symmetrical, idealized faces and a somewhat weightless quality, as if they belonged in a children’s cartoon.

But they are not in a cartoon. All of these figures feature in an eighteen-meter mural, grandiosely titled
Aufbau der Republik
(
Construction of the Republic
). The mural was designed by
Max Lingner, a German communist painter, executed on Meissen porcelain tiles—hence the shiny surface—and then mounted on the side of what had been Göring’s Air Ministry in Berlin, one of the few monuments of Nazi architecture to survive the war. Soviet forces had used the building briefly, but from 1949 until 1991 it was known as the
House of Ministries of the German Democratic Republic, and it contained the GDR’s most important government offices.
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Aufbau
is of course a work composed in the spirit of
Socrealismus
,
socialist realism, at its most zealous moment. If parades, festivals, work competitions, and summer camps were meant to occupy the daily life and the leisure time of
Homo sovieticus
, the images of socialist realism were meant to occupy his imagination and his dreams. Painting, sculpture, music, literature, design, architecture, theater, and film in Eastern Europe would all eventually be shaped by the theories of socialist realism, one way or another. So would the lives of painters, sculptors, writers, actors, directors, musicians, architects, and designers—as well as the experiences of ordinary people who came to live in socialist realist buildings, read socialist realist fiction, and watch socialist realist films.

Aufbau
is a typical work of High Stalinist socialist realism. But it was not a typical work for its painter. Lingner had been born in Germany but emigrated to
France after Hitler came to power in 1933. While in Paris, he was influenced by the bright colors and abstract designs of his French postimpressionist colleagues, and he began painting in that vein. He also achieved a certain renown for his sharp, dark, satirical illustrations in the French communist press. Although this graphic work was highly politicized, it was not mawkish or bland, and it never looked like a children’s cartoon.
Aufbau
was, for him, a new departure. For that reason the story of Lingner’s mural—how it came to be painted, why it looks the way it does—is also the story of how
socialist realism came to dominate, for a brief period, the fine arts everywhere in Eastern Europe.

Lingner was not the only East German painter whose prewar work had been dissonant, eclectic, satirical, or abstract. Before 1933, German painters such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Franz Marc, and George Grosz had been among the most energetic and innovative in Europe. German art schools and movements—expressionism, the Bauhaus—had influenced artists and architects around the world, from Edvard Munch and Vassilii Kandinskii to Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson. Many of these artists and movements had links to the political left, and after the war several of the most famous names in German culture—
Otto Dix, for example, and in 1948
Bertolt Brecht—returned deliberately to
East Berlin, hoping to build a socialist Germany.

An unusually talented group of Soviet
cultural bureaucrats awaited them. To the immense surprise of those Germans who had been horrified by their first, often brutal contacts with Soviet troops, a handful of their new occupiers spoke fluent German, read German literature, and admired German culture. One or two even knew more about German art than most natives. Two of the most important—
Alexander Dymschitz, head of the cultural division of the Soviet Military Administration, and
Grigorii Weispapier, the first editor of
Tägliche Rundschau
, the Red Army’s newspaper in Berlin—had once been classmates at the Art History Institute in Leningrad. Others had training in philosophy. Several were Jewish. They arrived with a mandate to make the eastern half of the city more culturally dynamic than the West, to oversee the “bourgeois revolution” in culture, and to prepare the way for the communist cultural revolution that would follow. In contrast to most of their countrymen, who treated the natives with disdain and brutality, they cultivated contacts with German artists and literati, attended performances, and visited exhibitions.

In the very early days the East German cultural scene was just as chaotic as everything else. In the immediate wake of war, a series of random people “reoccupied” the Reichskulturkammer, the Chamber of Culture, where files on all of the artists, performers, and writers in Germany were still extant. The first to arrive was
Elizabeth Dilthey, a former Nazi. She produced bogus Russian credentials, declared herself in charge of the new Kulturkammer, moved into the building, and immediately gathered around her cultural luminaries such as
Martin Gericke, a hairdresser and theatrical makeup artist.
When the
American army arrived in July, Gericke, now describing himself as a “philosopher,” became their informant. Next,
Klemens Herzberg—who had only marginally better credentials—ousted Dilthey and had himself proclaimed Plenipotentiary of the City Commandant of Berlin for Cultural Affairs, a title he kept for ten days, during which time he threw some excellent parties. Finally the Soviet administration replaced him with an elderly and politically neutral actor,
Paul Wegener.
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For a short time, the Kulturkammer was a critical institution for artists and intellectuals in Berlin, who used the building as a club, dining room, and meeting place. More importantly, it was also the center for the distribution of ration cards, a central concern for every Berliner. Even in the first weeks following the war’s end the Red Army granted those with artistic credentials the coveted “first” ration, a larger piece of bread, and more meat and vegetables. Asked why, Dymschitz declared that “it is possible that there is a Gorki among you. Should his immortal books remain unwritten, only because he goes hungry?”
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So powerful did this tool of cultural influence become, however, that the Soviet authorities decided to wield it with more force. The Kulturkammer had been a spontaneous creation, after all, and within a few months they had taken away its more important function—the distribution of privileges—and given it to an institution of their own creation, the Cultural Union, or Kulturbund.