On the cultural front, too, the Russians sought to repair and rebuild as well as to pillage. Like the Nazis before them, they understood that the arts could serve important psychological and propagandistic functions, especially in a time of stress. Quickly they established a new museum administration to oversee what was left of Berlin’s collections, which they reopened to the public in temporary quarters on May 17. A little later, on May 26, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its first postwar concert in a cinema building that had survived the bombing. Fittingly, the program opened with a piece that had been banned in Berlin since 1933: Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the end of May the Russians licensed Berlin’s first postwar newspaper, Die Tägliche Rundschau, which Berliners dubbed Die Klägliche Rundschau (The Pitiable Review) because it contained only a few lines of genuine news, the rest being articles praising the Soviet system. In July 1945 Johannes R. Becher, a Communist poet who had been living in exile in Moscow, returned to Berlin and founded Der Kulturbund für die demokratische Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany), whose task was to help reestablish Berlin as Central Europe’s foremost center of “progressive” culture.
It was Berlin’s political direction, however, that most preoccupied Moscow in this period. The Soviets wanted to set the course for the first municipal administration that arose amidst the ruins of the vanquished Nazi capital. To achieve this they decided to employ as proxies trusted German Communists who had been living in exile in the USSR. Preparations for the takeover had begun in February 1944 with the creation of a commission of exiles charged with working out the organizational details of a Communist regime. The central figure here was Walter Ulbricht, a pear-shaped and primly goateed Saxon who had served the Communist cause with ruthless efficiency and an unswerving devotion to the party line. After training in the early 1920s at Moscow’s Lenin School, he had become a Communist Reichstag deputy in 1928 and District Secretary of the KPD for Greater Berlin in 1929. Escaping Hitler’s roundup of Communists by fleeing abroad in 1933, he had worked for the party in Paris and Prague, ever careful to keep his distance from the errant Trotskyites. During the Spanish Civil War he had helped Moscow purge the Republican forces of anti-Stalinist elements, which turned out to be good practice for the internal purges he would later conduct as head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED) in East Germany. Ulbricht was often ridiculed for his unimposing exterior, castrato-like voice, and Saxon accent. Yet for all his inadequacies he was clearly a tough survivor, and he was determined to make use of his survivor’s talents when appointed by Stalin to head the little group of German exiles dispatched to Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters outside Berlin on April 30, 1945.
A colorful personal account of the Ulbricht group’s work in Berlin is contained in the memoirs of Wolfgang Leonhard, who at twenty-three was the youngest member of the team. Raised in the USSR and educated at the Comintern School, Leonhard spoke fluent Russian and understood Moscow’s ways better than most of the older exiles. He knew what Berlin meant to the Soviet leaders, and he was honored to be part of their mission to make this former Social Democratic bastion a truly Red—Moscow Red—capital of the future. However, none of his ideological preparation in Russia prepared him for what he saw upon entering Berlin with Ulbricht’s cadres on May 2, 1945. Having always pictured Berlin as the epitome of civilized order, he now felt as if he had stumbled into a scene from Dante’s Inferno:
Our cars made their way slowly through Friedrichsfelde in the direction of Lichtenberg. The scene was like a picture of hell—flaming ruins and starving people shambling about in tattered clothing; dazed German soldiers who seemed to have lost all idea of what was going on; Red Army soldiers singing exultandy, and often drunk; groups of women clearing the streets under the supervision of Red Army soldiers; long queues standing patiently waiting to get a bucketful of water from the pumps; and all of them looking terribly tired, hungry, tense and demoralized.
Walter Ulbricht (right) with a young Erich Honecker (then chief of the Free German Youth), 1951
Undeterred by the desolation around them, Leonhard and the other members of Ulbricht’s group set about finding reliable “antifascists” to serve the Soviet military occupation. Needing local lackeys to pass on their orders, Russian commanders had already appointed some native administrators, but their choices had been hurried and often ill advised. Leonhard discovered that one district commander had simply gone into the street and grabbed a passerby whose face he liked, saying “Come here! You now mayor!” In staffing the native administration, Ulbricht and company did not take the stance that only known Communists need apply. On the contrary, in traditional working-class areas like Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg they chose Social Democrats as borough mayors; and in bourgeois districts like Wilmersdorf, Zehlendorf, and Charlottenburg they found veterans of the centrist and liberal parties for these posts. They could afford to appear so evenhanded because the figures they were appointing had no substantive power; real authority was wielded by the borough mayors’ deputies and by the holders of key offices like chief of police and head of personnel. These men were all trusted Communists who reported directly to their superiors in the Soviet military administration. As Ulbricht defined the strategy: “It’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.”
Berlin’s new municipal government was in place by May 17. The incoming lord mayor and de facto head of the seventeen-man Magistrat (city assembly) was an aged civil engineer named Arthur Werner, who combined unassailable democratic credentials with political timidity and encroaching senility. Werner’s lack of mental acuity was just fine with Ulbricht, who, when cautioned by his colleagues that the new mayor was “not all there in the head from time to time,” replied: “What’s the matter? We’ve got our deputy.” The deputy in question was one Karl Maron, a member of the Ulbricht group who had worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. After the division of Germany he went on to edit the SED’s house newspaper, Neues Deutschland, then became head of the secret police. The chief of police in Berlin’s first postwar administration was Paul Markgraf, a brutal apparatchik whose previous incarnation as a decorated Nazi officer had ended with his capture at Stalingrad and incarceration in a Soviet POW camp, where he quickly made the appropriate political conversion. Personnel matters in the new government were handled by Arthur Pieck, son of the future president of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck. Communists also occupied nine seats in the Magistrat, just enough to ensure control without it being too obvious.
Revealingly, few of the men around Ulbricht were native Berliners. They brought to their mission in the ruined German capital much of the provincialism and distrust of metropolitan life that had attended the Nazi administration of the city. For the Communists, too, the town’s cosmopolitanism, though now much reduced, represented a challenge to ideological conformity and to their prospects for political domination. Talk as they might about making Berlin open to “progress,” what they really had in mind was closing the place off to influences that they could not control.