Berlin полностью

For the Nazis, the most important cultural weapon was film, and never more so than during the war, when movies could be used to promote ideals of endurance and togetherness in the face of adversity. Images of Berlin as a bastion of patriotic unity were prominent in a film called Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940), which recalled the heady days of the 1936 Olympics. The message it sent was that, by holding together, the Germans could win this new contest just as they had triumphed in 1936. Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love, 1942) told the story of a Berlin diva (played by the beautiful Sarah Leander), who through a love affair with a German officer learns the value of keeping up morale, which she demonstrates by singing songs like “I Know That Sometimes a Miracle Will Happen.” The Wehrmacht objected to this film because the officer sleeps with the singer, but Göring pointed out that any officer who missed a chance to sleep with Sarah Leander was not fit to serve. Another inspirational film, vastly more expensive to make, was Veit Harlan’s Kolberg, a reenactment of the heroic Germans’ defense of that town against Napoleon’s French invaders in 1806/7. To produce this epic, shooting for which commenced in 1943, Goebbels persuaded the Wehrmacht to provide 187,000 soldiers as extras and 6,000 horses. The budget was eight and a half million marks. The film took so long to make—actual fighting got in the way of the staged fighting—that when it finally premiered, in 1945, Berlin lay in ruins.

Even more quixotic was the film Das Leben Geht Weiter (Life Goes On), set in a beleaguered Berlin, where in reality the life that went on was mostly underground. While meant to celebrate Berliner pluck, the movie, like Kolberg, was an example of hugely misplaced effort. Because most of the buildings on location had been destroyed, UFA built full-scale imitations of them at great expense at its Babelsberg studios. Air raids knocked out electricity and phone lines during the shooting. Eventually production was shifted further west, to Luneberg, but the film was not completed when the British arrived, and none of the footage survives.

In August 1944 Goebbels ordered the closing of Berlin’s theaters, this time for good. Even before this time, however, most Berliners were too harried by the escalating air raids to consider an evening at the theater; simple survival provided drama enough. Andreas-Friedrich recorded a night under the bombs on June 21, 1944:

There is a toppling and crashing, quaking, bursting, trembling. To us it seems as if the floor bounded a yard up in the air. There’s a hit. Another. And another. We wish we could crawl into the earth. Biting smoke stings our eyes. Did our neighbors get hit? We have no idea. All we know is that we are poor, naked, and desperately in need of help. . . . [Finally] All clear! Where the next house stood is now a heap of ruins. A woman runs screaming past us. She is wrapped in a horse blanket; terror distorts her face. She is pressing three empty clothes hangers to her breast. Gradually the street comes to life; more and more people appear out of the smoke, the ruins, the ghastly destruction. They say forty-eight bombs hit our block. The dead can’t be counted yet; they’re under rubble and stone, crushed, annihilated, beyond the reach of help.

Albert Speer, on the other hand, found an element of beauty in the raids. Observing an attack from the roof of one of his flak towers, he had to remind himself

of the cruel reality in order not to be completely entranced by the scene: the illumination of the parachute flares, which the Berliners called ‘Christmas trees,’ followed by flashes of explosions which were caught by the clouds of smoke, the innumerable probing searchlights, the excitement when a plane was caught and tried to escape the cone of light, the brief flaming torch when it was hit. No doubt about it, the apocalypse provided a magnificent spectacle.

Looking on the bright side, Speer noted that the Allied bombers were accomplishing much of the demolition work that would be necessary for the realization of Germania, the envisaged Nazi capital of the future.

Speer’s boss, Adolf Hitler, witnessed neither the “magnificence” nor the horrors of the Battle of Berlin, for he was away from the city for most of this period. In any event, he had no wish to see the effects of the bombing on German cities; this was too depressing. By late 1943, according to Speer, he was even losing interest in the architectural reconstruction of Berlin. He now preferred to dream about rebuilding his old hometown of Linz, where he expected to retire and be buried. Echoing Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler said that he did not want to be interred in Berlin. “Even after a victorious war,” wrote Speer, “[Hitler] did not want to be buried beside his field marshals in the Soldiers Hall in Berlin.”