Taking full advantage of their enormous buying power, the occupiers became major profiteers of the black market. It was alleged that the wife of General Clay bought up huge quantities of artwork, which she sent back to America in her husband’s personal airplane. President Truman’s adviser, General Harry Vaughn, bragged that on a trip to Berlin he peddled his spare clothes for “a couple thousand bucks.” Berliners resented this exploitation of their vulnerability, but they flocked to the markets themselves, for, as Speier noted, “it enables them to get something additional, for example a package of dried milk in exchange for a valuable glass of crystal.”
Recognizing that the black markets were fostering a criminal environment of racketeering and speculation, the occupation authorities threatened to shut them down, but nothing much came of the threats. Moreover, for all the sleazy practices that this economy undoubtedly encouraged, it also provided good training for the budding capitalists of the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s.
If Berlin’s thriving black market pointed up a certain impotence or benign neglect on the part of the occupiers, the same can be said of their policy regarding the political crimes of the recent past. In principle, an interallied program of denazification was supposed to eliminate all vestiges of Nazism in German life and bring surviving offenders to justice. Of course, this policy applied to Berlin along with the rest of the vanquished Reich. But in the capital, as elsewhere, many of the leading Nazi criminals had either died or managed to disappear. Some Nazi functionaries had actually vanished with Allied help, since they had valuable information or talents that they could trade for their freedom. Such was the case, for example, with General Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed the Wehrmacht’s intelligence operations against the Red Army during the war. He was flown out of Germany by the OSS, then returned in 1950 to West Germany to run a new American-backed spy agency aimed at the USSR and East Germany.
The Soviets, for their part, had dismissed all Nazi party members from public jobs shortly after taking over the city. Yet within weeks many of these individuals, having changed their political livery from brown to red, were back in positions of trust. The Soviets also revived the Nazi-era network of neighborhood spies, the “block wardens,” often employing the same men who had done this job for the Nazis.
The British and Americans tackled denazification in a characteristic Anglo-Saxon way: they sent out Fragebogen (questionnaires) asking people to categorize their relationship to the defunct Hitler regime. Respondents were required to state whether they had been members of the Nazi Party or had held positions requiring loyalty to the system. Needless to say, this inspired much creative reworking of curriculum vitae. Berliners with problematical pasts who could not sufficiently cover their tracks, or who were too stupid even to try, had to go through denazification hearings. If they emerged clean from these proceedings they received all-clear certificates that the natives dubbed “Persilscheine,” after a popular soap. (For a stiff price, one could obtain a fake Persilschein on the black market.)
Armed with their denazification documents, Berliners descended on the Allied employment offices looking for work. George Clare, who vetted job applications in the British sector, recalled an endless procession of antifascists who claimed to have always admired Churchill and hated Hitler. In light of this procession of virtue, he could not help wondering how it had happened that the Nazis had managed to become the largest party in the Reichstag. Nonetheless, in their haste to hire reasonably competent natives, he and his colleagues generally did not scrutinize the applicants too closely.
The Golden Hunger Years
The wartime Allies’ mission to denazify Berlin extended to culture. The plan was not just to purge the local arts scene of politically problematical influences but to impose a whole new culture based on “humanistic” and “democratic” values. But the victors differed when it came to defining exactly what these ideals meant and how the cultural makeover should be achieved.
As we have seen, during their brief tenure as sole occupiers of Berlin the Soviets revived certain segments of the local culture, and they continued to be active in this domain after the Western powers arrived in the city. Aware of the importance that culture held for Berliners, the Russians brought in knowledgeable experts to run their cultural affairs division and allowed them considerable leeway to create programs that would be attractive to the natives. In overall charge of Soviet cultural policy was Colonel Sergei Tulpanov, a bear of a man who resembled Hermann Göring both in his girth and in his ability to mask his political agenda with backslapping bonhomie. His chief assistant was Alexander Dymschitz, a product of the educated bourgeoisie who thoroughly knew his way around German culture. He, like many in the Russian cultural bureaucracy, was of Jewish origin. In setting policy in Berlin the Soviets were not hindered by any pretense of nonfraternization. With their support the above-mentioned Kulturbund sponsored a Writers Congress attended by former “inner emigrants” and political exiles from both East and West. The House of the Culture of the Soviet Union on Unter den Linden organized exhibitions of Russian painting and lectures by noted Soviet authors. The Soviets reopened the renowned Deutsches Theater, which had survived the bombing relatively unscathed, and placed at its head the former avant-garde director Fritz Wangenheim, who promised to enlist the theater “in the broad democratic front of the German renewal.”
Three years later Bertolt Brecht returned to Berlin with similar objectives. Anxious to demonstrate his commitment to socialism, Brecht settled in the Soviet sector, where he was placed in charge of the Stadttheater, given a spacious house, and allowed to import a new bevy of mistresses and hangers-on. Soon he would have his own theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble, and his own theater, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Yet despite all the state-subsidized perks, the like of which no German artist had enjoyed since Wagner, Brecht was often frustrated in East Berlin, which struck him as provincial and small-minded, and he was careful to keep his bank accounts in Switzerland and his citizenship in Austria.
Film was pressed into the Soviets’ “cultural renewal” campaign when, with their backing, the old UFA studios in Babelsberg were turned into DEFA, which became the East Germans’ main film factory. DEFA’s first film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946), directed by Wolfgang Staudte, tells the story of a former Wehrmacht doctor who, having failed in the war to prevent his captain from murdering innocent Polish civilians, tracks the man down in postwar Berlin and brings him to justice. Staudte had tried to interest the Americans in this project but was told that the Germans “should not even think of making any films for the next twenty years.” In subsequent years a stream of antifascist films flowed out of Babelsberg, most of them stressing the importance of ordinary citizens taking a stand against tyranny.
One might have thought that this was a message that the Soviets would not want to push too strongly, and in fact it was not long before they began to take a harder line in cultural politics, stressing less the value of German traditions than the superiority of Russian and Communist models. Berlin artists whose works did not conform to the ideals of socialist realism were increasingly shut out of the picture, while ideologically correct hacks were rewarded with commissions and prizes. Even Johannes R. Becher, the veteran Communist, was harassed by the Soviet secret police until he produced some poems praising Stalin. (Becher ultimately praised the Soviets so effusively that Berliners called him “Johannes Erbrecher” [vomiter]—a pun on his middle initial and last name.)