Neal Ascherson: Dancing on a Volcano

Neal Ascherson

The title of this book misses a trick. ‘Stay alive’ doesn’t quite get the Berlinisch black humour of the original: ‘Bleiben Sie übrig.’ That last word also hints at something left over, an unlikely survival. A scrap left on the edge of a dog’s dish goes much too far, but a blackened somebody crawling out of his ruined house after a thousand-bomber raid – he’s pretty übrig.

The day after finishing this book, I visited Tate Britain. I’m always moved by the damage to its great west wall: the pits, furrows and scars dug out of the masonry by the Luftwaffe bombs across the street. A wall of the Victoria and Albert Museum stays bomb-bitten in the same way. London remembers its Blitz wounds with pride. Berlin is different. The German capital suffered far worse destruction from the air, and thousands more deaths, than London. (Something like thirty thousand Londoners were killed by aerial war; Berlin lost about fifty thousand.) And yet when I lived there, I never came across a symbol honouring Berliners for having endured and survived the years of bombardment. ‘Perhaps liberal German writers shy away from [Berlin’s war experience] to avoid any hint of national self-pity,’ Ian Buruma comments. Nazi propaganda told the citizens to ‘durchhalten, ausharren’ – hold firm, stick it out – and almost to the end, with Russian tanks entering the suburbs, most of them did. In Britain under the Blitz, the government didn’t ask public opinion before proclaiming that ‘London can take it!’ But – with some notable exceptions – Londoners stoically took it. After all, what alternative did either Berliners or Londoners have?

Buruma is well qualified to write about all this. His Dutch father, Leo, was conscripted by the Nazi occupiers to work in a Berlin factory. His mother, whom Leo met and married after the war, was English and Jewish, and about half this book is concerned with the fate of Berlin’s Jews. (They numbered about 160,000 when Hitler came to power. After flight and emigration, some 90,000 remained when war broke out in 1939. About 1500 emerged alive at the war’s end.) It’s striking that Buruma’s sources, mostly memoirs and diaries, are almost all written by women. (Men were often away in the forces or silenced in other state service.) Some of them are well known, like the intrepid British woman Christabel Bielenberg, or the sharp-eyed party animal ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov, a Russian exile who was the darling of young men in the Foreign Ministry. But many are more obscure and their works – the memoirs of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist involved in the clandestine rescue of Jews, or the letters of one of the few men, the Jewish ex-banker Erich Alenfeld – seem not to have been translated. In some ways, Leo Buruma is the most intriguing witness here. Coming from a strict Protestant family in Nijmegen, he felt at first inferior and provincial when confronted by the magnificence of a great European metropolis – still mostly intact when he arrived in May 1943. Working in a vast factory producing brakes and machine guns, Leo acquired Ukrainian girlfriends (the city was crowded with forced or slave labour imported above all from Eastern Europe). But the cultural splendour that awed him was about to perish: ‘The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on Kurfürstendamm, opposite the Romanisches Café, once the favourite haunt of Weimar-period literati; the German Opera House … the 18th-century Bellevue Palace; the Berlin Zoo; Charlottenburg Palace; the grand houses in the Hansa district. By the end of the year, they would all be gone or reduced to burned-out husks.’

His son is touchingly uneasy about the rights and wrongs of his father’s actions. So was Leo himself, in common with other self-questioning Dutch forced workers. Should he have refused conscription and joined the clandestine resistance? In fact, he did fail to report for transfer to Germany. But he was caught in a round-up and told that his parents would be arrested if he did not agree to labour for the Nazi war economy. So he submitted. In Berlin, he lived through the worst air raids and the Russian conquest, aware of the deportation of the city’s Jews, but taking care not to mention it in his self-censored letters home. After the city’s capture in 1945, a miracle – the last-minute appearance of a Russian officer who spoke English – saved him from a firing squad after a pistol was found in the house where he was sheltering. To that officer, Ian Buruma says drily, ‘I owe my existence.’

Christmas came, with ‘Silent Night’ now including some new lines (‘Adolf Hitler is Germany’s star./Showing us greatness and glory afar’). In February 1940, Goebbels temporarily closed places of entertainment and some factories to save fuel for domestic heating. Compared with Britain’s authoritarian democracy, the Nazis showed incredible incompetence in managing the consumer economy. As in London, a massive black market thrived. But British ‘spivs and profiteers’ were outclassed by the greed of some of the Nazi elite. ‘The shopping lists of Wilhelm Frick, the interior minister,’ Buruma writes, ‘revealed that he received 125 kilos of game, 100 kilos of fruit, 25 kilos of sausages, as well as ham and corned beef, and 25 pounds of chocolates.’ (His grocer later killed himself in jail. Frick survived to be hanged by the Allies after the war.)

Germany’s conquest of France and much of Europe in the summer of 1940 lifted Berlin’s mood. There was a season of frantic enthusiasm for the Führer. But at the same time the first serious RAF raids reached Berlin, inflicting a few casualties – tiny in comparison to what was to follow. Although the Luftwaffe had just levelled much of Warsaw and Rotterdam, Goebbels affected outrage: ‘Air gangsters!’ Vengeance on British cities followed. The verb Coventrisieren – to bomb a town to rubble – joined the Nazi vocabulary. Here Buruma makes the first of several reflections on the strategy still associated with Air Marshal Harris: the intensive bombing of civilian targets carried out to break morale and end a war. Harris was wrong: ‘Berliners, like Londoners, or indeed the citizens of Tokyo, Hanoi and many other cities since then, lived through far worse bombings without cracking.’ One could add Gaza. Goebbels thought that the onslaught actually hardened the Berliners’ will to fight on, and as Buruma says, ‘he may have been more correct than Bomber Harris.’ Later, as the bombing began to reduce the centre of the city to ruins, the young Ursula von Kardorff described ‘a general frenzy of pleasure … Not terribly nice, really, this dancing on a volcano, simply because people want to use their homes before they have to move into mass shelters.’

Even under the Nazi dictatorship, there were still fateful moral choices to be made. Agonising compromises awaited those who hated the regime but still carried some public responsibility. Stay Alive is very illuminating about two such groups. One was the cultural world of literature and music, theatre and film. The other was the circle of upper-class officers and civil servants who supported the July Plot against Hitler in 1944.

In culture, red lines were drawn and broken. Many verdicts still blow in the wind. Was Thomas Mann right to treat German writers who didn’t emigrate as collaborators? Veit Harlan, who made the antisemitic film Jud Süss for Goebbels, was clearly beyond the pale. But what about Wilhelm Furtwängler, who disliked the Nazis but in 1942 conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Ninth for Hitler’s birthday – and at the end shook Goebbels’s hand? Or Marlene Dietrich, who refused Goebbels’s bribes to return to Germany in 1937 and only came back to Berlin in 1945 with the American armies (for which Berliners never forgave her)? Or Heinrich George, the heavyweight hero of several Goebbels-sponsored movies including Jud Süss and Kolberg – the colossally expensive death-wish epic of patriotic sacrifice made as the Reich was crumbling into final defeat? In those terrible weeks, as the Nazis grabbed every German man for almost certain death at the front, many enlisted with the movie crews at the Babelsberg studios, which desperately kept their cameras running even when there was no film left in the can.

Buruma is perceptive about the choices faced by high-placed resisters, many of whom had homes and families in Berlin. They saw that Hitlerism was evil – even Satanic – and had to be destroyed. But these were men and women who loved their country. How could they work for the enemy’s victory? Anyway, some of the July plotters shared the patriotic grievances that had helped Hitler to power; they resented the Treaty of Versailles and some of them – Adam von Trott, for instance – thought that German influence over Bohemia and Moravia was historically justified. It’s interesting that Buruma repeatedly contrasts the plotters’ ‘decency’ with the ‘criminal state’: a translation of Verbrecherstaat, which is a German legal term for a state under criminal control whose laws have lost all claim to be obeyed. Was that a helpful concept for the July plotters?

The failure of the plot, when the bomb intended to kill Hitler released most of its force into the table he was sitting at, led not only to the sadistic execution of its main figures but released the full blast of state terror against their families and friends. From country houses or comfortable Berlin suburbs, women were sent to concentration camps and children to orphanages. Buruma (who only briefly mentions other, more left-wing conspiracies) relates that ‘by the end of the year, a total of 5764 people had been executed, and 5684 more were killed in the first four months of 1945. Less than two hundred had been directly implicated.’

The tragedy scarcely affected the fate of Berlin’s Jews, except to rob them of a few individuals prepared to hide them. After being driven into factory labour and ordered to wear the yellow star, most Jews had already been deported by 1944. In a vast round-up designed to culminate on Hitler’s birthday in 1943, nearly ten thousand people had been moved into squalid holding sites. From there, trains took them to their deaths, mostly at Auschwitz. Some of the men, those classified as ‘Mischlings’ – persons of mixed heritage – or in mixed marriages, had been sifted from the ‘full Jews’ and put in a holding centre in the Rosenstrasse. What followed was astonishing, and became a cherished legend. Crowds of women appeared, defying SS armoured cars, and stood demanding the release of their husbands. Time and pride have confused the numbers and motives, tactfully assessed by Buruma. But those held in Rosenstrasse were eventually set free, although we don’t really know for certain how many of them there were or why it was decided to let them go.

Stay Alive is rich with stories of Jews who now became ‘U-Boats’ – diving underground, hiding in temporary refuges, in bombed cellars or ruins. These are stories of miraculous escapes, but also of suffering, deceit and betrayal. Buruma tries to answer the question the world asked after the war: how much did Berliners, or Germans in general, know about what was happening to the Jews? The well-informed secret opposition certainly knew. The lawyer Helmut von Moltke, who died on a Nazi gallows early in 1945, wrote optimistically that nine-tenths of the population were ignorant. But the keen little Hitler-maiden Lilo G. wrote in her diary: ‘Mummy told me recently that most Jews are murdered in large camps, but I cannot believe it. It is good that they have left Germany, but to kill them all at once!’

Berliners were certainly aware that ‘Jew trains’ were leaving for somewhere whence no passengers returned. Buruma writes that ‘the desire to look away, to pretend ignorance, to be wilfully oblivious, must have been the norm, even among highly educated Germans.’ As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: ‘Just forget you saw that!’ But years later in Germany, I learned how often young men on leave had confided hideous things they had seen to their mothers or sisters. In the last year of the war, as Buruma confirms, the fear that gripped Berliners was not just of military defeat but of vengeance.

It arrived by stages. The air raids grew heavier, reaching a peak on 3 February 1945, when more than a thousand American day bombers unloaded more than two thousand tons of high explosives on the city centre. Life retreated to overcrowded shelters, where people exchanged wild rumours. Was there really a ‘WuWa’ (Wunderwaffe or miracle weapon) which would annihilate the enemy and bring Germany last-minute victory? Soviet troops had already crossed into German territory and vigilante police squads were hunting ‘defeatists’ in the streets and hanging them from lampposts. Lilo the Hitler-maiden watched people burning their flags and throwing away their Nazi badges. Soon the Russian guns could be heard.

‘After the February bombings, even the flimsy façade of normal life began to unravel fast,’ Buruma writes. Many left the city, replaced by an inrush of thousands of destitute refugee families fleeing from the advancing Russians. By now, central Germany was reverting to the 17th century, to the awful landscape of the Thirty Years’ War. Think of an immense zone of lawlessness in what was once ‘civilised’ Europe. Grass grew in the streets of burned villages; starving bands of armed men preyed on columns of fugitives. Berlin would be sacked (that ancient word), as Magdeburg was sacked in 1631 when its inhabitants were raped, their possessions pillaged and twenty thousand of them put to the sword. It’s claimed that something like a hundred thousand people perished in those final Berlin weeks, and Buruma’s witnesses recall scenes of such nightmarish horror – thousands trapped in subway tunnels as a canal broke through the roof; tanks rolling over human beings during the battle for the bridge at Spandau – that such a total becomes credible.

‘Rape is something all conquering armies do.’ But, as Buruma adds, ‘the scale of violence against German women was extraordinary. Hospitals estimated that more than one hundred thousand Berlin women were raped, and about ten thousand victims died, often by killing themselves in shame.’ After the war, even Russophobe cold warriors in West Germany found it hard to speak about this. But in that spring of 1945, Berlin’s female survivors, their men often dead or in prisoner of war camps, silently set about clearing the mountainous wreckage of their city. They formed chains, passing buckets of brick and plaster from hand to hand. Trümmerfrauen – rubble women – was Berlin’s name for them. They, at least, are remembered with affection and pride.

Anyone intending to spend time in this obstinate city should read Buruma’s book. Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity. Berliners themselves don’t change much. As Buruma shows, they have never asked to be loved. Christabel Bielenberg, who saw them on their worst as well as occasional best behaviour, wrote of ‘the peculiar ribald stoicism which characterises the true Berliner’. Triumphs of world culture, mighty statesmen preaching new freedoms, high rhetoric and high explosives have been dumped on Berliners. But stoically ribald they remain.

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