At few days in Dresden
Alistair Home
!always wanted to visit Dresden to see the klithulous treasures which that remarkable lu,aroque monarch, Augustus the Strong, "ad collected there (plus 354 bastards), 111,11ch of which has miraculously survived day of shame of February 1945, Last 11th, accompanying two West Germans, 110 were to provide some useful counter nits, I set off through the Berlin Wall. 0.4ch time one sees that sinister corral, ;Lue Wall still shocks. It is, I am told — with Possible exception of that other monu"'eat to man's beastliness, the line of ,Ireaehes of World War I — about the only Lreation of the twentieth century that could seen from another planet. Certainly it is i'iggressively visible to all incoming aircraft, Itinefields and beaten death-zone snaksni endlessly into the distance. When I first it, East German industry had triumv1,antly capped it with sewer-piping just to Prrevent any would-be escaper, who actually vev,ehed it, from getting his hands over. th typical West Berlin humour, wooden 13-:,.ers had been erected for tourists to stare 11;e" in derision at the Nopos' in their th4chine gun turrets a few yards away across ij Wall, and hundreds of rabbits had tteiantly turned the death strip into a beQ,tership Down. Now the Nopos' have ts:rireplaced by robot guns (a 22-year-old crqPee was shot down shortly before we st4sed over), and even the poor bunnies e1,111,_ to have been dispatched. th 1,11,e true face of Communism, of which we "oat People are but another profile, the iasomehow conditions all entry into the trvi• It makes it at once more ominous and to","tig to visit than any other East Bloc eoililt!Y I know. From observation, it seems for"1,,ciously to be made even more irksome breZest Germans to enter than for lesser -us; despite the fact that the millions of absuturrency DMs they bring in at an thetiNrci rate of exchange must virtually keep ail, f"t)k's rickety economy afloat. First of What()1-11. Pages of bossy instructions dictate You may not import: 'calendars, eiliainacks and diaries, stamps and stamp ctilti,,,iles'; records ('unless works of the tne;at heritage', whatever that may list ,'f); newspapers ('unless on the postal aittled the DDR'); books 'whose content is (NI& against the preservation of peace', filsis-,en's toys 'of a military character'; ist Whose content is hostile to the Social ‘jtate' (b augur y some amazing attempt at Y, this also includes unexposed film). exzrwhile the copious list of banned 4sci revealingly covered most foodstuffs textiles. So ostpolni. uch for the Spirit of Helsinki and and " „Ittik, Subserviently we left our Vogues Ltntry Lifes in a locker in West Berlin airport. At the frontier we waited an hour (apparently, a very good day), submitting to various checks and form-filling, while a disembodied hand (possible female) grabbed our passports through a slot in a wooden box. A perfect Le Carre setting, I was thinking when — as we sat in that grim No-Man's-Land — my travelling companion inquired sweetly and with superlative timing; 'tell me, were you ever a spy?' The question being, strangely, not on the declaration form, I expected the alarms to ring and robot guns to start firing at us through that wooden slot. But, mysteriously we were waved through, and into the Socialist paradise.
We stopped first at Potsdam, and Sans Souci. The railings were rusting away unchecked, the lawns looked as if they hadn't been mown since the death of Frederick the Great, and birch trees were growing out of the roof of the New Palace. For 45 minutes we queued to get in; allegedly because of a shortage of felt Panto ffeln for walking on the parquet, but, more likely, I was to reflect later, because queuing is — apart from skiing — the national sport in a country which offers precious few other distractions, At Potsdam, and everywhere else, there are hordes of khaki-clad Russian troops, photographing each other. We note how they and the East German soldiery in Feldgrau give each other a wide berth, like rival gangs at school. At Wittenberg alone, we were told that, 'protecting' this town the size of Haywards Heath where Luther nailed up his 95 protests, there were 40,000 Soviet 'allies' — or three times the total British troops in Ulster. Unlike Poland, the Russians make no effort to keep a low profile; here, one has the sense of the conqueror still flaunting himself 35 years on.
The next shock comes with the first sight of Dresden. It didn't feel good to be English. Even now the traces of that one night of February 1945, when 35,000 were killed, show up worse than one had ever imagined. How little seems to have been restored in 35 years, and how appallingly shoddy is the new! The fire-blackened towers of Augustus's Schloss still gape open at the top, resembling obsene skulls from a cartoon by George Grosz. Our hotel stands at the top of the pride of 'new' Dresden, the Pragerstrasse. No GLC architect could have done worse. Where the old medieval heart of Dresden once stood, rise acres of uniform square blocks with balconies of corrugated plastic stitched on, such as you see on the poorest outskirts of Paris. Down below on a long parvis with checkered squares, broken up by a few undistinguished fountains, drab figures move aimlessly as if motivated by hidden magnets. We rechristen it Lowry Alice. It is infinitely depressing; an encapsulation of the combined horrors of our century — senseless destruction and soulless reconstruction.
The state of unrestored Dresden takes me back to my memories of Berlin and Cologne when I first went to West Germany in the early Fifties; the same gaunt ruins, the same weed-covered empty spaces. And the people: the same sallow faces stamped with undernourishment and over-stress; the dung-coloured clothes of inferior material. The sparse traffic, too, belongs to that unreconstructed West Germany of a generation ago; the put-putting tatty two-stroke cars, incrementing a pollution problem obviously gigantic by western standards, and equally tinted in sallow shades of grey to ochre.
Down in the Hotel Neva (note the name) a friendly native points out warningly the closed circuit TV cameras; 'but the rooms aren't bugged!' A big plus-mark; everybody is incredibly friendly — embarrassingly so, considering that the DDR is celebrating its 30th birthday by introducing new laws to impose up to 12 years jail on any citizens passing disparaging information to Westerners, even if no secrets are involved.
Stories had a certain consistency. In a long queue at a miserably provisioned supermarket, shoppers complained loud about the worsening economic crisis and soaring prices. They were queuing for a few dispirited tomatoes, and already resignedly anticipated no fresh vegetables this coming winter. Yet, all agreed that 'at least we're the best off materially of the East Bloc countries.' Looking at the shop windows of Lowiy Allee, it was hard to credit. By the absurdly artificial rate of exchange which puts the DDR mark at par with the DM, consumer goods seem to cost roughly the same as in the Federal Republic, though of far inferior quality, while equivalent wages might be perhaps only a quarter as high. What was most missing, then? Why, freedom, of course. One Dresdener defined it in words that Ernie Bevin might have used; `to get in a train and go anywhere you please, not just to Rumania or Bulgaria.' As a young man he had travelled widely (presumably with the Wehrrnacht); but his children could go nowhere, except Rumania and Bulgaria (and the former, now, presumably only by bicycle).
That night I heard on Leipzig radio a nauseatingly treacly voice sing; . . . on a Sunday in Avignon, there is all loneliness gone, . . , so come with me to Avignon.' But how? My Dresdener was additionally unlucky; he could not even receive TV from the West, though 80 per cent of the DDR can. A friendly Wittenberger, born under Nazism and grown up in Marxism, told me with glistening eyes how he had lived for each instalment of the West German version of Upstairs, Downstairs.
How could this seemingly listless populace ever be sparked into winning all those Olympic medals, all those engineering contracts in the Third World? By endless exhortation, I concluded. Everywhere the slogans and propaganda shout at you. One restaurant displayed a kindergartenlike chart giving each waitress good conduct marks; at another a photo of Rosa Kleb beamed out over the inscription `This Month's Best Co-worker.' In the museums they never miss the big-base-drum about the wicked Anglo-Americans blasting Dresden and the culture-loving Russians saving and restoring all those pictures (which, indeed have been superbly restored, as has the partly destroyed Zwinger — one of Europe's baroque marvels). At Meissen a magnificent set of 1740 porcelain bears the 'social' explanation — 'Many had to work hard so that the select few could enjoy pleasure at table.'
As we rattled back over neglected roads to leave the rich and beautiful life, thinking that the TUC should be invited to hold their next annual conference here, my companion remarked glumly 'these aren't Germansthey've partly gone Russian.' And yet, despite the Wall, to the outsider those blood ties still seem awfully strong. One could not help wondering what would happen should any remote reversal in the Heartland ever cause those khaki hordes round Potsdam and Wittesiberg to decamp and go home.
Back in Berlin, our car was waved away at Check-Point Charlie; no West German number plates. On to the Heinrich Heine crossing point; car OK, but no British passports. So I am dumped back to cross Check-Point Charlie on foot, feeling uncomfortably like the Spy-who-was-notcoming-in-out-of-the-Cold. A surly Woo& lieutenant growled at me, 'but where's your car? It's written down in your papers.' That was too much; I lost my temper and bellowed back like a true Prussian. To my amazement the Wall parted and I was out. An hour later my companions picked me up, the petrol tank having been searched for an escaping dwarf. They had also found nowhere to change their worthless remaining East Marks; instead of the 1:1 they had paid, they were forced to accept 1:5 in West Berlin. The Wall had exacted one last toll. His example is clear evidence of the abuse of psychiatric medicine in the Soviet Union — the willingness of psychiatrists to co-operate in diagnosing political dissent as mental illness, to disregard the proper procedures for forcible hospitalisation, to prescribe and administer drugs to someone whose only symptoms of mental illness are dissatisfaction with life under the Soviet system. In fact, there is increasing evidence that such treatment is being administered to anyone who adopts too individual a life style, even where there are no political motives, as well as to political dissidents, members of religious organisations, and workers who protest against bad working conditions. The treatment, as Bloch and Reddaway's book, Russia's Political Hospitals, so graphically describes, includes confinement with seriously ill and violent patients, and treatment with minddistorting drugs, It took a long time for psychiatrists in the West to accept the truth of the reports of this abuse. Even now, they have a tentativeness which detracts from effective protest. Yet the evidence is that such protest can achieve some results. The first sign of a British response was a statement in The Lancet in 1973 which, ironically, was convinced by the hysterical tone of Soviet denials that something was amiss. Much the same kind of reasoning, that such extravagant language must be covering something, led to a resolution condemning the Soviet Union at the World Psychiatric Association meeting in Honolulu in 1977. This led the USSR to break off relations with tbe psychiatric associations of the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Even so, it has taken another two years for the World Psychiatric Association to set up the promised monitoring committee. So far the response has not been enough to cause so much embarrassment to the Soviet regime that the present leaders of the Soviet psychiatric profession, Drs. Morotov, Lunts and Snezhenevsky, are ill any danger of dismissal. They have good political links and a firm grip on the professional organisation, which prevent access to the latest international thinking psychiatry. But Alexander Podrabinek's conviction and sentence demonstrate that the Soviets are not entirely deaf to Western opinion if it is expressed loudly enough. Five years' internal exile, for an offence which he had not committed, is appalling — but it compares favourably with the sentences of Orlov, Scharansky and Ginzburg. The reason for its comparative lightness is undoubtedly the vigorous public defence conducted by two British lawyers with the assistance of a number of medical witnesses, including Dr Gerard Low-Beer, who had himself examined an allegedly mentally ill dissident and found no illness. An International Committee also defended the Podrabinek brothers, and drew on a dozen countries for its members. Such publicity, and the letters from the British Royal College of Psychiatrists and the America"
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