Authors: Rebecca West
They had grave reason for doubting the power of their defenders to defend them. They thought the French
kaput,
because they themselves had defeated them. The French flag was flying from the Victory column in the middle of the Tiergarten only because Great Britain and the United States had brought in a beaten foe to crow over them; and they were sure that the United States had had most say in that matter, for they suspected that the British were on their way down to join the French in the dusk where great powers outlive their greatness. A chief cause of this suspicion was the shameful parsimony shown by the British government in regulating the expenditure of the British members of the Allied Control Commission and the occupying forces. In Berlin and Western Germany alike, the Germans saw all but the highest British officials far worse clothed and fed than any German who had scrambled out of the abyss after the currency reform, and they knew quite well that the weaker vessels among them were trading on the black market. But there were even more eccentric forms of cheese paring. At a time when there was no blockade and consequently no great strain on the air service, a British general was summoned from Berlin to an investiture at Buckingham Palace to receive a decoration from the King. The Treasury would not allow him to use an RAF plane to make a special flight from Berlin to London and back. He was obliged to travel as an ordinary passenger by BEA; and since there was no return flight on the day of the investiture this meant that he had to miss a very important meeting with the Russians concerning a problem on which he was the British specialist. Every office in Berlin was a whispering gallery, and the news of this skinflint decision was all over the city in a couple of days.
The Berliners had grounds for regarding the French and the British as bankrupts whose discharge lay among the remoter probabilities of the future. They had as good grounds for thinking the Americans a little silly. It is insufficiently appreciated how curious the Germans found the reiterated statement by the American generals that their chief reason for letting the Russians take Berlin and occupy Prague, after Vlassov had taken it, was their own dedication to the pursuit of the Nazi leaders and the German Army, which they believed to be about to carry out an “Operation Redoubt” and retreat into the mountains of South Germany and Austria. An educated and informed Berliner, such as the mayor, Ernst Reuter, must have found this excuse quite terrifying. It is difficult to know how any general could have believed that the German Army could use the road system leading to the mountains except at a pace which would condemn it to destruction from the air, or how it would be able to feed itself if it succeeded in gaining the heights. The educated and informed Berliner would be forced to suspect that that faith in “Operation Redoubt” was a pretext which dispensed American generals and their government from the need to confess that, at a time when victory was still incomplete, they had used their troops not for the military purpose of defeating the Nazis, but for a political purpose—and that the relationship between the United States and the Soviet in 1949 proved this purpose to have been ridiculous.
The Berliners had reason to think the Americans silly because they had given the Russians the prestige of taking Berlin, and reason to think all the Allies very silly for their treatment of the Russians now they were all shut up in Berlin together. In 1949 the protocol of the Westerners laid down that Soviet rudeness was answered by politeness, Soviet delay by unlimited patience, Soviet greed by concession; for there was a theory afloat among the Allies that all Russians were rude, unpunctual, and greedy problem children, whose better nature would be released only if Nanny were kind and firm. Berlin was full of people who had good reason to consider this protocol and that theory quite comically mistaken. For it was a city of Social Democrats, most of whom, and nearly all those above a certain age, knew the history of Continental socialism. They realized that Moscow insulted its Allies, kept them waiting till the small hours for messages that could have been delivered during the working day, and asked for twice as much of everything as it had any right to get, because Moscow was Stalin, and Stalin was Lenin’s pupil, and had seen him gain control of the Russian Socialist party by rudeness, procrastination, and exorbitant demands. Lenin brought into being the Bolshevik party as an irresistible power at the London-Brussels Conference by prolonging it and inspissating it with intrigue and by keeping ice-cold, while his simpler enemies grew hot and confused in rage at the waste of the precious time and the precious party funds, and at the besmirchment of the shining cause by trickery; and again and again he created a nightmare of tedium and ill feeling round his opponents, and let them break out of it only when they conceded him part of his demands, which naturally he made as gross as possible. Stalin sat and watched him, and as Lenin went up in the world went with him. A German like Ernst Reuter, who had gone out of social democracy into communism and come out of it again, must have watched in amazement while Stalin exercised this old conference technique on the Allies, and they succumbed to it as if they had been Menshevik innocents of fifty years before.
It is a technique which can be successful only as long as it be not recognized and imitated by the other side. The deadlock in Berlin would have been ended as soon as it began had the Western Allies politely matched tiresomeness by tiresomeness. When the Soviet representative insisted on delivering a memorandum at the awkward hour of midnight he should have got his answer at two in the morning; when the Soviet representative put up a proposition he obviously knew to be ridiculous, the Americans and the British and the French should have put up propositions which they obviously knew to be more ridiculous; and the Foreign Office and the State Department and the Quai d‘Orsay should have used their resources, which in this respect are not inconsiderable, to produce bores who would have maddened the Russians till they too, like General Howley, rose and said that they were tired and must go home. The only deductions that Stalin and his army could draw from the Allies’ failure were unlikely to restrain them from aggression; they could only put down the Allies as masochists who liked being treated rough and who would enjoy being conquered. Possibly some Berliners guessed that the Allied policy was as it was because there were not half a dozen men in the Allied military governments who knew anything whatsoever about the early history of the Bolshevik party, and their home governments were as uninstructed; but this was hardly a reason to give them confidence in the Allies.
A Jew, one of the ablest who fled from Hitler, one of the first to settle down in Germany after the defeat, gave an explanation of the Berliners’ choice which did not at first hearing ring true. He said, “The Berliners are for the Allies and democracy, because at last they learn from the Russian Sector what totalitarianism is.”
“At last?” we asked sceptically.
“At last,” he reaffirmed. “You see, under the Nazis, strangers did not come by night and take you away unless you were a Jew or an important Social Democrat or an important liberal or a party member who had got in wrong with the high-ups. If you were not a Jew or a conspicuous politician or a party member, and were an unimaginative person as well, you did not realize what this meant, and perhaps persuaded yourself that it did not really happen. And if you were a sufficiently unimportant German, who only knew the people next door and had no Jewish friends, and never joined the party, then you might very well never get any intimation that it did really happen. But now any German in the Russian Sector, whatever his race or politics or degree of distinction, may hear a knock on his door at night and know that he is to be taken away and may never come back. And in the other sectors anybody may be kidnapped. So now the Berliners have learned, all of them, what totalitarianism is.”
It was impossible not to say, coldly, “They ought to have learned that long ago. There was a stinking pile of evidence which should have taught the deaf and the blind.” But the truth lay thereabouts. It manifested itself most clearly if one followed the clue given by the analysis of the Berlin polls: eighty per cent of the electors voted against communism, and of those anti-Communists sixty-five per cent were women. Women are notoriously idiotic in the prime sense of the world, they like to be private persons and are apt to be indifferent to public affairs; and these women had private business of an urgent sort. There was a great deal of man’s work which they had to do because the men who should have done it were not there. The figures of war casualties computed by the German General Staff have never been published, and the figures issued by the Bonn Information Service are arrived at by political rather than by arithmetical calculation. But the truth can be gathered obliquely. In many German cities the majority of the breadwinners were women. In Berlin the proportion was fifty-two per cent. These women went to the polls to record a defiant decision. They looked like rocks, Neumann and Reuter, the men who led the resistance of the city, but they would have been as sand had it not been for these tired women, who were feeling something strongly. It was hard to know what until one had met them face to face, then it was plain. There were twenty women of that kind sitting round the table in the conference room of UGO (Unabhangige Gewerckshafts Organization), a new federation of nineteen trade unions which had had to be started because the old federation was in the Russian Sector and became a Russian instrument. All of them were very tired. They were all employed women with homes, and it is always penal servitude to do a day’s work in a factory and then do another day’s work cleaning and cooking. But these women had much more to bear than that. They had come through a bad winter: as all fuel had come in on the airlift there had been very drastic electricity cuts. Each district had only two hours of electricity in the day and two in the night, at times which varied from week to week. This meant that all women employed in factories near their homes had to go to their work in the two-hour period which fell by day and had to do their cooking and washing in the period which fell by night, though this might be between two and four in the morning. Now power was less strictly rationed, as it was summer and the fuel went further, but they still lived in great discomfort, for few had a pane of glass left in their windows. They were drawing pathetic satisfaction from a recent decision of the British authorities that the old Berlin custom by which a tenant was responsible for the repair of windows was abrogated and that the landlord must shoulder the responsibility. They considered that a great advance, for they still thought it a law of nature that landlords have more money than tenants. But whether the landlord could pay or not, these women certainly could not afford glass, for a square yard of the stuff cost a fifth of their weekly wage. They were tired, and they were poor. Between a quarter and a third of that weekly wage had to go out in rent and rationed food, “and that,” said the two young women who represented the Railway Workers in UGO, “is why we are striking. Think of those of us who work in the Eastern Sector and live in the Western Sector—we have to pay Western prices in rotten Eastern marks.” That quarter or third became the greater part of their wage.
Need the Russians have tried to make their hard lives harder? “They never fight fair,” the women sighed, “they always lie. They spoke of the seventeen strikers who had been arrested and the two who had been kidnapped; they spoke too of the strikebreakers, who were for the most part members of the East German Police Force. These boys had been brought by train from Magdeburg and Thüringen, having been told that there had been a Nazi putsch in Berlin and that they must defend their country against civil war. It is said that many of these boys had deserted, and with the pardonable egotism of martyrs, these women assumed that their motive was sympathy with the strikes, though it was as likely as not that they were sick of the poor food in the Eastern Zone. But not for long did the women speak of the strike, for that was not really one of their troubles, it was an exercise of courage, and courage brings its own intoxication. They were tired, they were poor, they were brave; and, like all the brave, they were cowards. They feared unemployment.
They would sooner have been dead than without work. They spoke of a Third World War with less apprehension. This fear was urgent, because the factories in Berlin were essentially plants where half-worked goods were finished for the market, and these, of course, were bulkier than raw materials, so the airlift could not carry the full load necessary to keep the machines working, and there was no knowing how long the blockade would last, or what it would do. “Look,” they said, “you would think that farming would always be the same. But look …” So laced with countryside is the city of Berlin that there are two thousand farm workers and foresters and market gardeners working within its limits, and of these the market gardeners had been hit in a way that they had never expected. The previous winter, when the blockade was at its tightest, and little space could be spared in the airlift for fresh vegetables, the nurserymen had spent a lot of money on buying seeds and coke on the black market from the Eastern Zone. They had had to buy many seeds, for the quality had been undependable since the war, but now fresh vegetables were coming in by air and from the Eastern Zone, and these were dirt cheap, because of the rotten Eastmark. It was therefore not worth while for the market gardeners to plant out their seedlings. “It is not that we are not well paid,” said the young war widow with professional pride, “but we are working only three days a week, and that is unheard of, we could not have guarded against it.” To be a hard-working woman and have an impish misfortune, an economic poltergeist, twitch the work out of one’s hand, it was not fair.
They were tired, poor, brave, and afraid; and they had also a solemn and delicate grief in common. It is not true, by the way, that eels get used to being skinned. There were two robust old parties representing the building trades, one a specialist in the repairing of roofs in the blasted and burned-out houses, a job rather like rick-covering, and the other was forewoman of a squad that cleared up rubble and sorted out what was usable for rebuilding. They were proud of doing such heavy and such valuable work, but for all that a wistfulness fell on them, and they sighed that till now it had not been done by women, and perhaps it was not suitable for them. No, they decided suddenly, looking abashed, it was not at all suitable.