The Bitter Taste of Victory (51 page)

Asked about morale in Germany, Erika accused the Germans of hoping for conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. ‘The Germans today are just as war-minded as they used to be.’ She refused to accept the American view of the Russians as war-mongering. They were hysterical and ill-mannered but she could understand it if they were ‘frightened and nervous and frantic’. The Soviet Union had left Poland ‘completely
alone’ as far as its internal affairs were concerned and would leave the Germans alone as well.
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Thomas Mann observed in his diary that Erika’s comments were ‘very courageous and well-put, but too anti-German on her part’. But she had been speaking on her brother’s behalf more than on her father’s. Erika had been disloyal to Klaus emotionally but she still shared his views. She now made it clear that she was prepared to make herself unpopular for the sake of truth. She would sacrifice her hard-won identity as an American in criticising her adopted country just as she and Klaus had sacrificed their identity as Germans in the 1930s. Erika’s assessment of the crisis was reasonably accurate (except in relation to internal affairs) but neither the Americans nor the Germans wanted to hear it. She was immediately branded as a communist both by the press in Germany and, as yet silently, by the FBI. In Munich a front-page editorial in
Echo der Woche
denounced her as ‘nothing other than a Stalinist agent’. Klaus stood happily by her, rushing off letter after letter in her defence and sending them to newspapers and acquaintances in Germany. On the eve of Klaus’s departure, Erika had made one public gesture of loyalty to her brother, showing that, at least when it came to the situation in Germany, their views still coincided. It remained to be seen whether this could be enough to save him from further despair.
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With the situation in Germany becoming more unstable by the day, it is not surprising that
A Foreign Affair
was deemed inappropriate for German audiences. Billy Wilder’s film previewed in the US in July 1948 and immediately garnered enthusiastic reviews. Praising it as ‘Hollywood’s most thoroughly enjoyable picture of the year’, the
New York Post
reviewer said that although some might feel the black market was no joking matter and fraternisation better ignored, the film had ‘approximated reality more closely than would a grimmer view’. It seemed evident that Wilder was an insider and that his German background enabled greater authenticity. The
Herald Tribune
compared the film to aspirin: ‘it may not cure the world’s diseases, but it surely can make the headache feel better’.
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The Americans were not prepared to provide aspirin to Germany, though; the disease there was growing too serious. On 20 July a new Information Policy edict stipulated that films distributed and made in occupied Germany should try hard to portray the US and its occupation in a positive light: ‘We should . . . admit frankly that we are now in the business of propaganda . . . When everybody else is criticising this country and emphasising its shortcomings, it has become our task to seek out the points which make the American system appear good, sound and the best of all possible systems.’

Wilder’s references to American imperialism and his depiction of the sex-crazed Nazi-chasing American soldiers may have satisfied the censors but no one could claim it made the American system seem the best of all possible systems. His film portrayed the American occupation forces in Berlin as comically ineffectual and self-seeking so it is not surprising that the message from the military authorities was negative. They dismissed
A Foreign Affair
as a ‘crude, superficial’ film, insensible to the world situation. ‘Berlin’s trials and tribulations are not the stuff of cheap comedy, and rubble makes lousy custard pies.’
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Wilder was furious. This was a film that he had made for Berlin audiences and shot in their city. ‘I was in the army and I was in Berlin,’ he complained. The film may be a work of fiction but that made it all the more important to make it authentic. ‘Every occupying, victorious army rapes, plunders, steals. That is a rule that goes way back to the Persians’. But he, like the Manns, was coming to realise that there was no longer a place for him in postwar Germany. He had made the film in a world of ruins; it was released into a world bracing itself for war. What had been acceptable at a time when corpses still lined the streets was not appropriate in this age of cultural diplomacy. Film was now officially propaganda: the Americans had decreed it; the Russians had accepted it for years. Anyone unwilling to join in the regime was lost and most of the artists in Germany seemed content to accept the new programme. According to the London journalist Gigi Richter, visiting Berlin that summer, there did not appear to be a single painter, sculptor, film-maker or writer in the city who wished to leave, despite escalating Cold War tensions.
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Luckily, Wilder’s success in the US saved him from minding about the fate of his film too much. He stopped thinking about Germany, just as he thought as little as possible about the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, too busy film-making to care deeply about politics. As always, he was protected by his sense of humour. And one German at least was delighted with
A Foreign Affair
. After the film’s release Marlene Dietrich wrote to thank Wilder for his belief, insistence, guidance and friendship: ‘Working for you gave me the chance of knowing you and loving you – because of which I am richer and full of gratitude.’ She had been lauded by the
New Yorker
as a ‘delectable dish’, and so was finding it easier to be contented with the film’s ambiguous morality.
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Denied Wilder’s affectionate satire, the Berliners were instead granted an onslaught of less ambiguous cultural offerings over the course of the summer. Zuckmayer’s
The Devil’s General
remained exceptionally popular throughout Germany (it would be performed 2,069 times in the 1948/49 season alone) and now premiered in Berlin. Hilde Spiel went to the opening night, where she encountered the Russian officials for the first time in a few weeks. Previously, she had prided herself on being able to entertain these men at her home, despite the prevailing segregation between occupiers. Now she was dispirited by the change in tone. Tulpanov ignored her, while Dymschitz merely bowed coldly. ‘Between us and the Russians it is all over,’ she wrote sadly in her diary. She had become a friend of Melvin Lasky’s but she was not a ‘cold warrior’ and was aware that there was no longer any real role for her in the new city being forged by government decree. Soon the Allies would probably not even be able to cross paths at first nights any more. Howley had recently issued an edict trying to ban social contact between Americans and Russians (‘none of my men are going to play footsie wootsie with the Russians under such conditions as their intolerable blockade’). In a letter to her mother, Spiel wrote that she was sorry the Russians were behaving so badly as she had liked them as individuals. ‘We held different views, but our contact with them was enormously interesting. We really live in idiotic times, and the twentieth century constantly jangles one’s nerves.’
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However, Spiel did not begrudge the success of the major Russian cultural offering that season. On 13 August, Moscow’s Alexandrov Ensemble gave a performance of Russian music, with a Red Army choir accompanied by a corps de ballet of Red Army dancers, an orchestra and a handful of Russia’s greatest solo singers. Tickets for the concert were almost impossible to acquire but Spiel listened to the broadcast on the radio, enchanted by the Russian song ‘Kalinka’ performed by the tenor Victor Nikitin. Five days later, the orchestra performed outside at the Gendarmenmarkt and Spiel and de Mendelssohn rushed to hear it. They were in the middle of the packed square, where 30,000 Berliners from East and West had come to listen to the small, dark tenor sing his strange, magical song. Later Spiel recalled how, ‘surrounded by ruins, we gave ourselves up totally to the unbearably beautiful melody of “Kalinka” and other Russian songs, and felt irritated, even angry, when now and again a British or American aircraft, bringing essential provisions into the city, drowned out the music as it circled above one of the three airports before landing. A whole city had lost its head and surrendered to the Slavic melancholy of its Slavic oppressors.’
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A few days later the British provided their contribution to the battle for cultural prestige playing out in the capital. This took the form of an Elizabethan Festival Week. Britain’s answer to Nikitin was the eccentric aesthete, Cambridge don and amateur actor/director George (Dadie) Rylands, who came to Berlin with his Cambridge Marlowe Society to stage Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
and Webster’s
The White Devil.
There was also a concert by the Cambridge Madrigal Society of music by Purcell. Always enthusiastic about all things English, Spiel was happily seduced by these performances. She found, perhaps somewhat dutifully, that Kalinka, the fascinating Russian girl, could not compete with these ‘quietly wistful or passionate reminders of the Elizabethan age’ and faded instead into ‘the dusk of a weary, outdated nostalgia’.
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But these cultural offerings were not enough to reconcile Spiel to a city at war. Her marriage had become tense. Frightened by the heavy aircraft passing overhead with a roar that reminded her of the Blitz, she had begun to struggle for breath at night and suffered from palpitations. It seemed perfectly possible that soon those planes would drop bombs
instead of food. In the early weeks of the airlift she and de Mendelssohn had found refuge in playing Ludo every night with the British poet and novelist Rex Warner, who was currently stationed in Berlin working for the educational branch of the Control Commission, and his wife. But Warner was unhappy in Germany and desperate to return to London where he had a lover waiting for him. ‘Life here, with the present political tensions, gets worse and worse,’ he wrote at the end of June, worried that the Americans would do something foolish. After the Warners departed in July, Spiel was left wanting to return to England as well, even though she had found her life in Wimbledon impossibly tedious before moving to the continent. She and her children left Berlin at the end of August. It was a stormy night and they were all violently sick as they flew once more through the low air corridor to Frankfurt.
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By August 1948, 18,048 flights carrying a total of 118,634 tons of goods had been flown into Berlin by air. Fifty-four per cent were operated by the Americans, and forty-six per cent by the British. US and British aircraft now landed at meticulous three-minute intervals at Tempelhof, Gatow and Tegel throughout the day, returning to their home airbases if they failed to touch down in time. Crews had been trained in new techniques to land quickly and vertically after a series of planes crashed while stacking up waiting to land on 13 August (now known as ‘Black Friday’). In the previous two months airlift planes had covered more than 10 million miles. Newsprint for western-licensed newspapers was also arriving at last, averting the danger that the western media would be silenced, and miraculously more coal was currently being flown in than was presently consumed.

Any attempts at joint rule had been abandoned. In a heavy storm on 15 August, Soviet officers had removed the rain-soaked flag from the Allied Kommandatura and packed up the remaining Russian files, leaving behind merely a collection of portraits of Lenin and Stalin on the walls. There were now Soviet representatives only on the secretariat of the otherwise defunct Control Council, the much-tested Berlin Air Safety Centre and the Spandau Military Prison.
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