AN AIRPLANE CIRCLES over a smashed city in preparation for landing. On board is an American congressional delegation. Looking down on the devastation, a Texas congressman drawls: “Looks like rats been gnawing at a hunk of old Roquefort cheese.” The chewed-up mess in question is Berlin, the congressman a character in Billy Wilder’s black comedy,
Wilder’s film, a story of sexual license, betrayal, and reversal of fortune, brilliantly captures the mood of postwar Berlin. A city that just a few years before had touted itself as the power center of Europe, even of the world, was now reduced to a pile of rubble, ruled over, for the first time since Napoleon, by foreign powers. Foreign rule, of course, also brought division—bisection along the main fault line in the Cold War. The erstwhile capital of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” thus became the capital of the Cold War and the site of some of the most dangerous confrontations between the new contenders for control of the post-Hitler world.
Out of the Ruins
In the autumn of 1945, Felix Gilbert, whom we last encountered in this book watching the body of Rosa Luxemburg being fished from the Landwehr Canal, returned to Berlin as a member of the American Office of Strategic Services. Hoping to see the apartment building where he had grown up, he drove out to his old neighborhood, only to find it a giant rubble field without a single structure intact. He began climbing over the ruins in an effort to locate some sign of where his house had stood. Suddenly he looked down and saw a pattern of blue and white cobblestones on which he had played hopscotch as a child. Like a macabre version of Proust’s madeleine cookies, these dusty cobblestones called to his mind “a remote past because they had played an important role in my childhood.”
The Berlin that Gilbert had known as a child and young student was indeed a thing of the past, reduced to a charred and stinking wreck by the years of bombing and the final brutal assault by the Soviets. It had now joined the cities and towns that were grim testimonials to the destructive power of modern warfare: Coventry, Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima. When the war ended about 40 percent of the German capital was destroyed and its population reduced almost by half (though it was soon to rise again because of an influx of refugees). All the major bridges were down, the canal system was clogged with wreckage and dead bodies, the
A vivid picture of the devastation can be gleaned from the accounts of survivors as they climbed out of their cellars and bunkers. One day after Berlin’s capitulation the journalist Margret Boveri bicycled across the middle of the city, noting that it offered “a scene of indescribable devastation.” Russian soldiers careened drunkenly down streets filled with shot-up tanks and burned autos; dazed refugees shuffled under their enormous burdens; women carrying water buckets lined up patiently at public taps; and escaped horses ran amok. “Haven’t [the soldiers] stolen your bike from you yet?” fellow survivors asked Boveri in disbelief. After touring the central city with two friends on May 12, 1945, another dazed survivor, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, recorded in her diary:
The final six days of fighting have destroyed more of Berlin than ten heavy air raids. Only occasionally does one spot an intact building. . . .
People with weary faces poke around in the ruins, here and there recovering some battered ‘trophy’ or charred beam. . . .
A white horse is lying dead among the rubble and ruin of the place where Bruno Walter used to perform. Its body bloated, its eyes black and petrified. Like a gruesome still life it lies spread out under the broken arcades, its stiff legs accusingly pointing in the air. Bernburger Strasse is one huge pile of rubble. . . .
