How can I explain it? If you have ever seen a rugby team troop off the pitch at the end of a game played in exceptionally muddy conditions, you can bring to mind an analogue. The tired, tousled, dirty men seem suddenly the same size and thickness, all covered and clotted in mud. The slim, speedy winger is indistinguishable from the balding hooker with the beer belly. Their ordeal, their exhaustion and dishevelment, have homogenized them. And this is what had happened to Berlin. It was one large ruin. The city had fused.
I was billeted in a villa in Zehlendorf — west in the American sector. It was designated by the press bureau of the military government PSR-4, for some reason. There were half a dozen journalists staying there and it was run by a pale silent woman called Frau Hanf. She was tall and rather beautiful in an exhausted, strained sort of way, but she was the very paradigm of formality. I never dared ask her a personal question.
The next day we were taken on a tour of the city. My depression deepened. What overwhelmed me was the mess. It seemed impossible that it could ever be cleaned up. I could not imagine how a new city could ever emerge from this devastation. We drove up the Kurfürstendamm towards the Gedächtniskirche. The houses on either side were scorched shells, uneasy facades, set between vast rubble mounds. To my amazement, however, I saw bright signs and fresh paint, even neon. Shops, cafés, Lokale, were open and making a brave show of plying for trade. The streets were full of people, stooped and intent and walking uncharacteristically slowly for Berliners. Everywhere were gangs of grubby trousered women sorting through bricks. Opposite the church, the Gloria-Palast — where The Confessions: Part I had played for a week — was a tumbled crater of stone and concrete.
We drove on. Another tremendous shock. The Tiergarten had gone! gone completely, not a tree left. In its place were thousands of tatty garden plots. I was overwhelmed by this transformation. I tried to imagine Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, Central Park, as vast vegetable gardens, all the trees cut down for fuel.…
On the Brandenburg Gate were red flags and pictures of Lenin. The stark white of the memorial to the Unknown Russian Soldier seemed almost obscene set against the miserable incinerated black of the buildings all around. The Dome, the Schloss, the Chancellery … the Adlon Hotel, Wilhelmstrasse … everything shattered or demolished. I looked out of the windows at the drear view, the gangs of women and POWs sifting through the debris, my mind a confusing sequence of “before” and “after.” Where was the Bristol, the Eden, the Esplanade? Where were the embassies, the theaters, the department stores? That pile of bricks had been the bar where I would have a drink after my stint as doorman at the Windsor. This space used to be Duric Lodokian’s house. That rubble mountain had been the hotel where Leo Druce had his wedding reception. Monika Alt used to live behind this cauterized facade.… And so on. It’s pointless to rehearse the conflict of emotions, the sweet and sour memories that day provoked. They lessened subsequently and with some speed. You can get used to anything. Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places. But I never got used to what had happened to the river Spree. Perhaps because that first day I had arrived in Berlin in ’24, in the early morning before the city was up and about, I had walked along its banks from the Lehrter Station through a cold misty dawn. Now it was the city’s sewer, clogged and polluted, rimmed with scum and thick with effluent and excreta. Its strong ornamented bridges had all been destroyed and makeshift wooden spans replaced the shattered arches. It seemed almost too solid to flow, but if you could bear to stand long enough (you could hang a hat on the smell off it, as the Berliners used to say) you could see its surface shift and eddy after a fashion, as if it were a prototype river not yet perfected, an early design model now superseded and antiquated.
My diary. A typical day.
Berlin, March 25, 1946. Woke early after a bad night’s sleep. Frau Hanf obligingly provided me with an early breakfast of stewed fruit and porridge before the other journalists were up. I got her to sit and have some coffee with me by offering her a cigarette. I asked her what her husband had done before the war — she said he’d been a washing machine manufacturer. She has no idea where he is now. We talked about how one might set about finding a missing person. You can leave notices around the city, she said. There are even agencies that will track down relatives for a fee. The military government and the control commission are no use at all. She said this without resentment or bitterness.
Driven to the Kommandatura for a briefing on the next Four Powers meeting. Dull stuff. Talked to an American staff captain who said the Russians had not raped excessively. They were more interested in looting, he said. Given that most of the Russian troops were Asiatics he thought that the amount of raping in Berlin had been “about average.” He became very bitter, however, about the question of silk stockings. “More women in Berlin wear silk stockings than in Paris or London,” he insisted. Must see if I can confirm this.
Lunch at the WarCorrMess in the Hotel Am Zoo. Windsor soup, brisket of beef, dressed cabbage. Floated the silk stockings theory. Several people agreed. Wrote a small article for the Herald-Post on the matter. Late in afternoon took some photographs in a burned-out-tank park — v. dramatic
Saw Die Spur des Falken again. Bogart is excellent. Cinema freezing. Looked in at Dandy Bar. No sign of Henni. Home.
The Dandy Bar was in a small street just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was in the ground floor and basement of a ruined apartment block. In the vestibule there was a reception desk and a cloakroom. Stairs led to the basement, where there was a bar and tables and chairs set around a small stage and dance floor. The place had pretensions. Some of the walls were paneled, the wood salvaged from grander buildings, and there was a lot of red plush about. The tables had white cloths and the waiters wore uniforms. It was patronized almost exclusively by American soldiers — who had more-easygoing fraternization laws — and girls.
I went there the evening after my tour round the city. The bar was open but empty. A three-piece band of emaciated men in loose Hawaiian shirts played “Don’t Fence Me In” rather well. I showed the barman a photograph of Karl-Heinz. Yes, he said, he used to come here when it was the “old” Dandy Bar, before the management upgraded it. In the old days it was for homosexuals, “men and women,” he added liberally. Karl-Heinz hadn’t been seen since. “How long ago was that?” I asked. “Four, five months,” he said. And no, no letter for him had been delivered or collected. I left a message just in case and took to dropping in there most nights. It seemed the only thing I could do. A bottle of wine cost ten pounds and I once ate a meat dish there that someone later told me was spaniel.
During those first weeks in Berlin I did my job reasonably dutifully and associated with other journalists. I found myself very quickly caught up in the apathy and aimlessness that seemed to brew in the air above the ruined city. In a curious way it was a bit like Los Angeles, only here the constant climate was destitution and deprivation. Those of us exempt from these afflictions were still contaminated by the prevailing mood, like an airborne virus. The tone employed in conversation was one of bitchery and complaint. We sat in our basement nightclubs, drinking and eating our fill, moaning about our work and living conditions. Outside, the rest of the city went to hell.