The First Rising
By IAN FRASER REVENGE is sweet but it is also a short-lived passion and its exercise, like drinking sugared wine, is usually fol- lowed by revulsion. From 1942 to 1945 we—that is, Britain and her allies—practised total revenge on Berlin, and now, in so far as we remember Berlin's existence at all, we remember it with sympathy, often with admiration and always with a feeling of guilt. It is in fact impossible to wander among the ruins of Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse in 1956 without wondering if the RAF's nightly journeys were really necessary. The dismantling, demilitarisation and `pasturalisa- don' which took place during 1945 and 1946 appear now as frankly criminal. The Western world is having to pay the bill for its excesses by supporting a quarter of a million unem- ployed, and finds itself in the rather foolish position of having to recognise in Berlin one of its staunchest bastions in the Cold War. It was Berlin that first proved, in June, 1953, that an unarmed revolt against Soviet imperialism was both possible and worth while.
The Big Three went for Berlin during the war with all the weapons they had. After they had flayed, scourged and scari- fied it with bombs, incendiaries and shells they turned it over to the Russian fellaheen, who raped every female human body and removed every removable piece of property. Behind them, at a safe distance, came the chairborne brigades of the NKVD with a mission to rape the German soul. Britain and America were too preoccupied with domestic issues to protest even at what was happening in Poland in the summer of 1945, so how could they be expected to raise a voice against the Russians' activities in Eastern Germany'?
Theodor Plievier's Berlin* is a contemporary historical novel which enables the outsider to relive the defeat and humiliation of the German capital and the twilight existence which Berlin and the Soviet Zone endured for the next eight years. The book ends in the summer of 1953 with a gleam of light from the Stalinallee, whence marched the first workers in an undreamed- of, almost unbelieved, strike against the Proletarian Power.
In a score of character sketches and half a hundred incidents Plievier reproduces the effect of Nazi collapse and Communist brain-washing on a random selection of Germans—a staff officer, a Luftwaffe colonel, a propaganda expert, a non-politi- cal professor, a factory director, a pre-war Communist, a multiple deserter and lots of women. Though only a minority expected anything good from the Russians, all expected a radical change and it was difficult to sec in April, 1945. how a change could be to something worse. When all visible property lies in ruins ins and money has lost nearly all its value Commun- ism, even to the bourgeoisie, becomes much less alarming. When women sell their bodies to American Negroes for a carton of cigarettes, their menfolk will not be fastidious about changing party cards for a better ration book. Add to all this the Brave-New-World illusion which afflicted Europe in the 'summer of 1945 and it is not difficult to see why so many Germans viewed the Russian Military Administration at first with benevolent expectation.
One did not have to be a Communist to condone the raping and looting; one did not have to be schooled in dialectical materialism to justify the gutting of Siemens and AEG fac- tories or the deportation of millions of prisoners of war to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Russians and Germans have
• BERLIN. By Theodor Plievier. Translated by Louis Hagen and Vivian Milroy. (Hammond and Hammond, 18s.)
always done this sort of thing to each other. Hardship was excused during the first few years as a necessary concomitant of defeat. But by 1950 the material benefits of not having been blessed with Communism became apparent to a growing num- ber of East Germans and the arguments in its defence began to wear thin. Western Germany was forging ahead and though the cake was not so evenly distributed as in the East, it was a so very much bigger cake that even the worst off were beginning to prefer it. It was about this time that the first defections were reported from Eastern Germany. Jaded officials and politicians who had collaborated with the Russians for a variety of motives, some ideal, some material, broke down under the strain. Some continued in office, arguing no doubt as did Main and Laval that their people's lot would have been even worse without their intercession. Some of these kept open a channel of escape to the West, some deliberately barred it. All these types are masterfully represented in Herr Plievier's book.
The mistake the Russians made in Germany was that they forgot that people can remember. It seems also to have been their mistake in Poland and Hungary. All these countries— Czechoslovakia too—enjoyed a very much higher standard of living in the 1920s and 1930s than they do now, and the varying forms of political repression to which they were subjected were nothing compared to the rule of the NKVD and its local business associates now. Russia, on the other hand, is probably better off than ever before. Yet for a long time the people in the satellite countries acquiesced in the Soviet way of life. They did so partly because they believed in it and partly because they thought they could not change it, anyway. Time and Tito have destroyed their belief; Berlin proved that there was very much something they could do to change it.
Plievier is one of those Germans who was a Communist in his youth, spent most of the war years in Russia and broke with the Russians at the end of the war. His Russian officers are subtly drawn. Major-General Yegorov, a high emissary of the Kremlin, surveys the ruins of Soviet policy in Germany on the riotous morning of June 17, 1953, and reflects : 'The "German Democratic Republic" no longer exists, the govern- ment has fallen to the ground like a withered leaf. Specimens! —let them out of the bottle and they will disappear like smoke.' Three years have passed since then. Perhaps Khrushchev has read this excellent book in the meantime.
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