The Bitter Taste of Victory (53 page)

Brecht arrived in Berlin in time to see the trees shedding their leaves, as he had longingly imagined them doing from evergreen LA. He was staying at the Hotel Adlon on Unter den Linden and on his first morning he woke at dawn to go for a walk, wandering down Wilhelmstrasse to the Reich Chancellery, where he encountered only a few workers and
Trümmerfrauen
and street after street of ruins. His response to the destroyed city was a political one. ‘To me these ruins are a clear indication of the former presence of financiers,’ he wrote in his diary. He was less upset by the wreckage itself than by the thought of the misery people had endured during the bombing. Brecht was not blind to the suffering inflicted by the Russians, recounting in his diary the terrible tales of rape he heard from the workers, but he laid the blame for the ruins on the shoulders of the capitalist politicians whom he believed had colluded with the Nazis in destroying their world:

Berlin, an etching by Churchill from an idea of Hitler’s.

Berlin, the rubbish dump near Potsdam.

Unlike Mann, Brecht was convinced that the Germans could be divided into fascists and non-fascists. Indeed during the war he had complained to Mann that he had become aware of ‘a real fear among our friends that you, my esteemed Mr Mann, who more than any of us has the ear of America, could increase doubts about the existence of significant democratic forces in Germany’.
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Brecht was not completely committed to Soviet communism. He had never been a member of the Communist Party and had been able
to deny even possessing communist principles during his hearing with the Un-American Activities Committee, who had commended him for his co-operativeness. But his vision of the world was fundamentally Marxist and his vision of theatre was fundamentally utilitarian (though he went against hard-line communists in believing that formal experimentation could be allied to political revolution), so he was able to ally his ideals to the East German regime. It helped that they were treating him as a celebrity and offering him an unusual degree both of power and freedom. Within two weeks of his arrival, Brecht was auditioning young actors for a production of
Mother Courage
in which his wife was to play the title role. The actors on the whole he found disappointing; they seemed unable to adapt to the rhythms of his ‘epic theatre’ and incapable of portraying evil (it seemed as though Hitler had banished evil from the theatre and reserved it for the political sphere). But he decided to stay, and celebrated his decision with a triumphant paean to the East German regime:

And so we’ll first build a new state

Cart off the rubble and shoulder your weight!

Build something new there!

It’s we who must master our own fate;

And seek to stop us if you dare.
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Brecht looked set to thrive in postwar Germany in a way that his slightly younger contemporary, Klaus Mann, could not. As arrogant young men in the 1920s, both had stormed the artistic scene of Weimar Berlin. Both had gone into self-righteous exile in the 1930s, eventually making their way from Europe to America. But despite the privations of exile and despite his dislike of California, Brecht had retained his fluency as an artist where Klaus Mann had been unable to do so. Whatever the corruption displayed by both sides in the Cold War, whatever the subjugation of art to politics that the ideological battles brought about, Brecht maintained his faith in the world and his role in it and he still believed in the power of art. He would play his part in building the new state and it was up to the Russians as well as the Americans to stop him if they dared.

For their part, the Russians had welcomed Brecht so enthusiastically because they were aware of how much they needed him. He was one of the few prominent socialists who seemed humorous enough to attract Berlin audiences. That winter the Berliners voted with their feet and rejected the worthier cultural offerings provided by the Soviets in favour of light-hearted American entertainment. Bob Hope and Irving Berlin were enormously popular when they performed at the Titania-Palast in December. And cinema audiences wishing to learn about Russia eschewed the worthily didactic Soviet-produced
The Russian Question
in favour of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder’s 1939 Hollywood comedy
Ninotchka
, which was released at the end of December.
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Berlin may not be deemed ready for Wilder’s satire about the American Occupation but when it came to this earlier spoof of the Russians the case was different.
Ninotchka
stars Greta Garbo as a dilligent Russian communist who comes to value the superior sensuality of the West after encountering the generous humanism of a Parisian count. It is written with Wilder’s typical irreverence. Asked how things are going in Moscow, Ninotchka replies: ‘Very good.The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’ The film was an instant hit in Berlin, with tickets selling out three days in advance.

The Russians now put all their cultural resources into the staging of
Mother Courage
, which opened at the Deutsches Theater on 11 January 1949 and sparked a major theatrical controversy in the Soviet zone. The play was lauded by some critics for its
Volkstümlichkeit
(closeness to the people) and innovation (Brecht was compared to Moses in the
Tägliche Rundschau
) but condemned by others as decadent formalism in terms that Brecht saw as dangerously similar to the Nazis’ critique of ‘degenerate’ art. His arrival may have been a major coup for the Russians but it was already clear that he was too complex a thinker and too determinedly visionary an artist to propound a straightforward communist message. Where Lasky and his colleagues at
Der Monat
were content to follow the prevailing political tide, Brecht was engaged in staging a play written some years earlier about more perennial themes. And as a German speaking to Germans, and a non-card-carrying socialist, he saw his art as more important than the politics of the Occupation or of
the Cold War more generally. More like Zuckmayer than Lasky, Brecht still believed that art could change the world not just through influencing people’s political opinions but through making them better human beings. But he was less naïve than Zuckmayer because he shared Thomas Mann’s vision of the irredeemable urge towards war and destruction.
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Mother Courage
had been written in an inspired and furious month after Germany’s invasion of Poland, using the setting of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48 to explore the concerns of Brecht’s own age. As far as Brecht was concerned, the war that had destroyed Germany in the seventeenth century was one of the first major wars to be caused by capitalism. It was also a war in which Germany had endangered herself with her own, overweening drive towards power. In Berlin, Brecht’s play offered a timely reminder of the wastefulness of war and the separation between the interests of the ordinary soldiers and the generals who wage war in their name, duping them with ideology. As one sergeant puts it,

War’s a deal. It cuts both ways.

Whoever takes also pays.

Our age brings forth its new idea:

Total war – and total fear.
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Wiry, pragmatic and bent on survival, Mother Courage was a familiar figure in a city still teeming with
Trümmerfrauen.
In this production she trailed a handcart that bore a striking resemblance to the carts dragged around by the homeless refugees in the aftermath of the war, its wheels dragging with exhaustion under the possessions spilling out of its sides and its cloth cover providing little protection after years of wartime winters. Mother Courage’s aim is both to profit from the war by selling the black-market goods she carries in her handcart and to keep her three children alive. In Berlin, where survival at any cost had come to seem the only option, this did not seem unreasonable. But where previous actors had made Brecht’s protagonist sympathetic, Helene Weigel rendered Mother Courage hard and angry, loyally sharing her husband’s vision of his play. Here she furthered the distancing effect of Brecht’s techniques of estrangement (the
Verfremdungseffekt
),
working with the songs and placards to distance the audience just when they were on the verge of sympathising with her.

Mother Courage was a woman who made no attempt to resist either the exploitative war or the exploitative economic system imposed on the people by their rulers; who allowed her son to be killed because, always a businesswoman, she attempted to haggle over his price. Brecht was concerned to show that most people do not learn from war. Though their views on the possibility for democratic renewal in Germany were opposed, Brecht privately shared Thomas Mann’s disappointment with the Germans, whom he saw as taking advantage of the Cold War to ‘romp in the strudel’ created by the rifts between the powers and avoid exercising self-criticism. He now wished to rid them of their complacency and to demonstrate that they, like Mother Courage, still had learning to do.
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He was aware that this was going to be a difficult lesson to convey to audience members determined to believe that their wartime suffering had already improved them. Just before the play was performed the acquitted Nuremberg defendant Hjalmar Schacht had published a pamphlet suggesting that the Germans had learnt both from the ‘sacrifice’ of the Thirty Years’ War and of the Second World War. One day this recent sacrifice would ‘cast its blessings not only on us but, as before, on all other peoples of the world’. But Brecht was prepared to work with recalcitrant pupils. ‘Literature must commit itself, it must join the fight all over Germany, and it must have a revolutionary character and show it,’ he had written in his journal in December. Now he had demonstrated that those like Schacht who attempted to profit from war would perish by its inexorable push towards destruction. Though he had already begun to alienate some of the communist authorities by refusing to propound a simple message, he was able to ally his voice with those of his Marxist leaders in suggesting that a new order was needed to rescue the world from its capitalist chains.
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It was appropriate that
Mother Courage
was performed in the midst of another freezing winter. ‘The world’s dying out,’ Mother Courage’s
cook lover complains as they trundle her decrepit cart through an increasingly desolate landscape, hungry and lice-ridden. In Germany, 2,000 Berliners would die of cold and hunger before the spring. January 1949 was a relatively mild month but in February the temperature dropped. When the millionth ton of cargo was delivered to Berlin on 18 February it arrived in a city facing desperate shortages. Luckily the weather improved in March and with it the number of aircraft that was able to land each day. On 16 April the so-called ‘Easter Parade’ set a new record, delivering 13,000 tons of coal in twenty-four hours.
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In the face of the airlift’s achievements, the Soviet authorities in Moscow and Berlin considered when and how to end the blockade. The inhabitants of Berlin had made it clear that they believed a divided city was preferable to a communist one. That December, Berliners had participated in their first election since 1946. Despite posters from the Soviets urging people not to take part (‘whoever elects the warmongers votes for the return of the nights of bombing’), 86 per cent of those eligible voted and Ernst Reuter’s Social Democrats gained a two-thirds majority (up from 51 per cent in 1946). Reuter, now formally confirmed in office, introduced himself to his staff as the new ‘Lord Mayor of Rubble’. Before the election, Peter de Mendelssohn had published an article in the
New Statesman
describing the vote as a plebiscite rather than an election: ‘a plebiscite for or against communism, Russians and the Soviet totalitarian system, and, therefore, by straight implication, a vote of confidence for the Western powers’. By this reckoning, the voters had placed their confidence in the West.
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The Russians had been given a surprising boost when the United Nations issued a report on the situation at the end of December, stipulating that the eastern Mark should be instated as the sole currency for Berlin. However in January the British and Americans persuaded the UN Security Council to back multiple currencies. Meanwhile the Western Allies strengthened their own position by establishing the Ruhr Authority to control and direct the production and distribution of coal and steel in the crucial Ruhr area (leaving the Russians to struggle with second-rate brown coal), which assuaged French anxiety about the potential abuses of power by the incipient West German state. They
also instructed the new Parliamentary Council in Bonn (established in September and staffed by sixty-four elected representatives from across the political spectrum with the CDU’s Konrad Adenauer as president) to prepare a constitution for West Germany. This was to be known as the ‘Basic Law’ (
Grundgesetz
) rather than the ‘constitution’, implying that this would be a temporary state pending the unification of Germany. In another
New Statesman
article de Mendelssohn suggested that the outlines for the ‘triple-headed monster that will be Germany within six months’ were now emerging. The eastern draft constitution was communist and rigidly centralist, broadly similar to the constitution in Czechoslovakia. The western Basic Law for the incipient Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) was as loosely federal and liberally capitalist as the security-conscious French and free-enterprise Americans could agree to make it.
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