Three years later Bertolt Brecht returned to Berlin with similar objectives. Anxious to demonstrate his commitment to socialism, Brecht settled in the Soviet sector, where he was placed in charge of the Stadttheater, given a spacious house, and allowed to import a new bevy of mistresses and hangers-on. Soon he would have his own theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble, and his own theater, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Yet despite all the state-subsidized perks, the like of which no German artist had enjoyed since Wagner, Brecht was often frustrated in East Berlin, which struck him as provincial and small-minded, and he was careful to keep his bank accounts in Switzerland and his citizenship in Austria.
Film was pressed into the Soviets’ “cultural renewal” campaign when, with their backing, the old UFA studios in Babelsberg were turned into DEFA, which became the East Germans’ main film factory. DEFA’s first film,
One might have thought that this was a message that the Soviets would not want to push too strongly, and in fact it was not long before they began to take a harder line in cultural politics, stressing less the value of German traditions than the superiority of Russian and Communist models. Berlin artists whose works did not conform to the ideals of socialist realism were increasingly shut out of the picture, while ideologically correct hacks were rewarded with commissions and prizes. Even Johannes R. Becher, the veteran Communist, was harassed by the Soviet secret police until he produced some poems praising Stalin. (Becher ultimately praised the Soviets so effusively that Berliners called him “Johannes Erbrecher” [vomiter]—a pun on his middle initial and last name.)
Ideological control was also on the agenda at Berlin’s chief center of higher learning, the formerly illustrious Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität on Unter den Linden, which the Soviets reopened on January 29, 1946, as Berlin University. (In 1948, the institution was renamed Humboldt-Universität, the name it carries today.) Claiming that as a former Prussian royal institution the university belonged to Brandenburg rather than to Berlin, the Russians denied their allied partners access to it. Faculty appointments and curriculum decisions were made by the Deutsche Zentralverwaltung för Volksbildung, a Soviet-controlled agency which mandated courses in Russian and Marxism-Leninism. Efforts by the authorities to use the institution as an instrument of party dogma, however, sparked resistance from many of the students, who were sick of having a state ideology crammed down their throats. Berlin University’s first years were therefore marked by tension between dissident students and the bureaucracy. It would take some time before the school could be turned into a fully reliable incubator of future party hacks.
The Western occupiers of Berlin were for the most part considerably less knowledgeable about German traditions than the Russians. When George Clare asked Pat Lynch, Britain’s officer for theater and music, how he was picked for his job, he replied forthrightly, “Hit or miss!” The American officer in charge of music knew nothing of the great Berlin orchestras and conductors. Yet the Western cultural officers were as determined as the Soviets to use the arts as a way of “reeducating” the Berliners and of spreading their own influence.
As the dominant power among the Western Allies, the Americans took the lead in this endeavor. They responded to the Soviets’ early control of the Berlin media with initiatives of their own. They licensed a new newspaper,
