The Bitter Taste of Victory (49 page)

But as the spring progressed the Manns came together in reading the newspapers and listening to the radio, looking on helplessly as the crisis in Berlin deepened. Often they were joined by Bruno and Lotte Walter, or by Heinrich Mann; sometimes by Adorno or other writers. Anxiously, this coterie of privileged German exiles waited to see if Germany was going to become embroiled in yet more conflict; this would be its third war in their lifetimes and for once it did not seem entirely Germany’s fault.

At the end of May, the US had played its part in escalating the tension. Clay’s forces in Germany banned the importation of Russian-authorised papers, books and magazines into the US zone in order, as the
New York Times
reported, to ‘cut the flow of communist propaganda’. Shortly afterwards they restricted routes for Russian personnel travelling to Soviet military missions in Frankfurt, forcing them to use routes through the British zone. Talks between the foreign ministers in London had resumed in order to finalise arrangements for the Bizone, but the fraught situation in Germany was somewhat overshadowed by the crisis in Palestine. Meanwhile the Soviet government in Germany circulated a petition for German unity that the Russians claimed over eight million people signed.
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Unsurprisingly, there were no writers from the Eastern zone at the second German Writers’ Conference, which took place in Frankfurt in
the third week of May. The German authors present denounced totalitarianism and censorship but they all seemed to accept the separate existence of East and West Germany. This was very different from the conference the previous year when literature seemed to have the potential to influence politics; now writers were merely reacting to the political events taking place around them. ‘Am glad not to have been there,’ Thomas Mann wrote in his diary, reading reports.
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Mann felt duty-bound to warn the world of the costs of this division. On his seventy-third birthday on 6 June he delivered a speech at a peace conference in LA calling for mutual understanding and compromise. As always, Erika had helped him translate it into English and now took the questions from the floor. Afterwards, the family celebrated Thomas’s birthday with champagne and chicken soup. But he was powerless to institute peace either outside or inside the home. On 15 June, Erika had to undergo yet another operation because the scar of her hysterectomy had become infected. Thomas was distressed by Katia’s reports of the ‘ordeals’ their daughter endured at the hands of her doctors.
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That day the three western military governors met three German state presidents in Frankfurt to authorise the German leaders to call a constitutional assembly to write a constitution for the new German state. The Russians halted 140 coal cars at a new inspection point because of alleged ‘defects’ and decreed that all Germans travelling from Berlin to the western zones should buy railroad tickets at Friedrichstrasse station in the Russian sector. The following day the Soviet representatives walked out of a meeting of the Berlin Kommandatura, at this point the only functioning four-power body in the city. ‘Our insistence on remaining there is so full of contradictions,’ Thomas Mann wrote in his diary after reading about this. ‘It is absolutely necessary but only for reasons of prestige.’ With that ‘we’ he still aligned himself with the Americans but he was increasingly sceptical about their policies. The following evening he recorded a long talk about ‘American despotism’ with Erika.
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On 18 June 1948 the Western Allies announced a currency reform that would be implemented two days later. The brainchild of Ludwig
Erhard, the current director of the Economic Council for the Bizone (and an enthusiast of an American-style free market who had put himself at risk by challenging German economic policy during the war), the new Deutsche mark or D mark would be the equivalent of 10 Reichsmarks. Initially, Erhard had wanted a four-power joint currency reform but the Russians had blocked proposals that notes would be printed jointly and the Western Allies did not trust them not to print extra money recklessly as they had done since the war ended. Immediately the Russians retaliated with new travel restrictions, preventing western traffic from entering Berlin from the East on the grounds that they did not want an influx of valueless Reichsmarks to enter Berlin from the western zones. The US and Britain countered the blockade with transport aircraft for personnel. Saddened by what now seemed a hopeless situation, Thomas Mann observed the ‘confusion in Germany caused by the currency measures’. His eczema was still increasing in severity and he was being kept awake in the night by his inflamed ears. Meanwhile Klaus injected himself with morphine and atropin, which affected his eyesight, leaving him unable to read or write.
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The D mark was introduced as planned on 20 June 1948. As yet it was valid in the entire western zone except Berlin. The Russians banned the playing of jazz on Soviet-controlled Berlin radio for two days, confining the programmes to serious music to mark the ‘Black Friday’ of currency reform. On 24 June they introduced their own new mark, which was immediately legal tender throughout Berlin. The western commandants now released the D marks they had been storing in the capital. Immediately, the Russians put a stop to all railroad traffic, depriving the western part of the city of food and fuel, and cut off gas and electricity to West Berlin. In London, Churchill warned that the present situation in Berlin was ‘as grave as those we now know were at stake at Munich ten years ago’, stating that there could be no safety ‘in yielding to dictators – whether communist or Nazi’. That day Clay landed at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport from Heidelberg and informed the assembled newsmen that the Russians might be trying to exert pressure ‘but they can’t drive us out of Berlin by anything short of war’. He told Ernst Reuter, the lord mayor elect of Berlin, ‘I may be
the craziest man in the world but I’m going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.’
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Reuter was generally too commonsensical a man for craziness but as an ex-communist and a former favourite of Lenin’s he also hated the Russians, who had prevented him taking office since he was elected in the 1946 elections. He promised that the Berliners would do their best to support Clay. On 26 June, Clay asked Colonel Frank Howley (James Gavin’s replacement as governor of the US sector of Berlin) which supplies should be flown in first and was told that flour was the most crucial provision. The next day Clay ordered 200 tons to be transported to Tempelhof airport on American bombers. On 28 June, Howley watched as the first food planes wobbled into Tempelhof and thought they were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. ‘As the planes touched down, and bags of flour began to spill out of their bellies, I realised that this was the beginning of something wonderful – a way to crack the blockade.’ The Berlin airlift had begun.
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PART V

Divided Germany

1948–49

14

‘If this is a war who is our enemy?’

The Berlin Airlift: June 1948–May 1949

Hilde Spiel was in Vienna when the currency battles started in Berlin. Summoned back by her husband Peter de Mendelssohn, she travelled by train to Frankfurt where she found that all flights to the capital were full. She was surprised that the crisis had escalated so quickly. Seduced by the alternative reality of the theatrical world, she had not noticed that the shared occupation of their city was collapsing. To her the disputes between the Americans and the Russians were just another drama, no more real though often more comic than the scenes playing out on stage.

Spiel eventually managed to procure a seat on a military aircraft on 26 June 1948. All the passengers were instructed to wear parachutes, which was awkward as she had no trousers to change into. An American woman soldier lent her a pair of bright red pyjama bottoms which she wore clownishly with a khaki army jacket. On board, passengers were too busy bracing themselves for interference by Soviet bomber planes to notice Spiel’s attire. American flights were now forced into the low ‘Frankfurt air corridor’ (one of three low, narrow high-turbulence airways that the Russians had assigned to the Western Allies for passing over their territory), which meant that the plane was violently shaken and Spiel was sick.

In Berlin she found a city on the edge of war, its inhabitants busy stockpiling food and supplies. Two days after Spiel’s arrival, the first
planes carrying food arrived in the city. With the electricity supply from the East cut off, the western occupiers now rationed electricity to just two hours a day, plunging Berlin into a wartime darkness that Spiel remembered only too well from the Blitz in London. Unable to turn on the radio, people listened urgently for the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) vans which transmitted the news on the streets.

The Berliners remained resiliently committed to culture despite their anxiety. On the first evening of the blackout the American-born violinist Yehudi Menuhin played at the Titania-Palast with Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. This was the first concert given by a Jewish soloist in Germany since the war and it could not have been more timely. Outside the concert hall, US planes were arriving with food to fill hungry bodies; inside, an American violinist provided music to calm fraught minds. At that moment, the Western Allies seemed fully capable of winning the peace.

‘If this is a siege, where is the front?’ Spiel asked in a report written for the
New Statesman
. ‘If this is a war, who is our enemy?’ It seemed impossible that the enemy should be the Russians, who continued to greet her politely at the theatre. But all around her, the conflict continued. ‘We must, if we are frank with ourselves . . . face the risk of war,’ the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan had announced to the House of Commons on 30 June. ‘We are in Berlin as a result of agreements between the Governments on the areas of occupation in Germany and we intend to stay,’ George Marshall insisted in Washington. The US had now cancelled deliveries of meat and medicine into East Germany, which meant that the Russians faced shortages of their own.
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People in Berlin quickly became used to the drone of planes overhead, supplied both by the British and American airforces. Hundreds of British pilots who had recently been demobbed were now told to go back into action indefinitely. Luckily these mercy missions to a starving city were generally seen as aiding a good cause. The American bomber planes became known as
Rosinenbomber
(raisin bombers) because some of the pilots sent packets of raisins and sweets down to the children in parachutes.

A week into the airlift, morale in the western sectors was challenged when Furtwängler cancelled an appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic in Potsdam because he was too frightened to travel to East Germany. Although the Americans agreed to lay on transport and protection, the conductor had grown accustomed to putting his own needs before his nation’s and was not prepared to encounter any danger. The following day the first death in the blockade occurred when an American Dakota crashed, killing the pilot. The odd virtual war playing out in Berlin had claimed its first death. For Colonel Howley and General Clay, the increased stakes brought the familiar excitement of war, testing their valour and competence alongside the pilots,’ leaving both men determined to make the airlift (or ‘Operation Vittles’ as it now became known) work. But for those on the ground the darkness and food shortages were increasingly problematic and the escalating danger quickly became more enervating than exciting.
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Six thousand miles away, the Germans in California found developments difficult to comprehend. ‘The conflict in Berlin deteriorates and increases,’ Mann observed. ‘Continual deliveries of food by western planes into the isolated zone.’ It seemed to him that with American prestige at stake, it was not going to be possible to withdraw. He busied himself instead with personal hopes and worries, delighted when the seven-year-old Frido appeared on 6 July – ‘slim and more handsome than ever before with his strong second teeth’ – and jumped straight onto his lap. Frido, his brother Toni and their parents had arrived from San Fransicso where Michael Mann was a violinist in the San Franscisco Symphony Orchestra. With all these visitors, the Manns’ house was too full for Erika and Klaus. Erika went to stay with Bruno Walter in Beverly Hills, pleased to have an excuse to spend time with her lover although his interest in her seemed to be waning. Klaus rented a flat of his own, a short walk from the sea, where Harold moved in with him for a life of domestic togetherness, quarrels and betrayals.
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