Ideological control was also on the agenda at Berlin’s chief center of higher learning, the formerly illustrious Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität on Unter den Linden, which the Soviets reopened on January 29, 1946, as Berlin University. (In 1948, the institution was renamed Humboldt-Universität, the name it carries today.) Claiming that as a former Prussian royal institution the university belonged to Brandenburg rather than to Berlin, the Russians denied their allied partners access to it. Faculty appointments and curriculum decisions were made by the Deutsche Zentralverwaltung för Volksbildung, a Soviet-controlled agency which mandated courses in Russian and Marxism-Leninism. Efforts by the authorities to use the institution as an instrument of party dogma, however, sparked resistance from many of the students, who were sick of having a state ideology crammed down their throats. Berlin University’s first years were therefore marked by tension between dissident students and the bureaucracy. It would take some time before the school could be turned into a fully reliable incubator of future party hacks.
The Western occupiers of Berlin were for the most part considerably less knowledgeable about German traditions than the Russians. When George Clare asked Pat Lynch, Britain’s officer for theater and music, how he was picked for his job, he replied forthrightly, “Hit or miss!” The American officer in charge of music knew nothing of the great Berlin orchestras and conductors. Yet the Western cultural officers were as determined as the Soviets to use the arts as a way of “reeducating” the Berliners and of spreading their own influence.
As the dominant power among the Western Allies, the Americans took the lead in this endeavor. They responded to the Soviets’ early control of the Berlin media with initiatives of their own. They licensed a new newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel, which was run on American lines. In August 1945 they launched the American Armed Forces Radio Network (AFN), whose official function was to bolster the morale of the American troops, but whose broader effect was to bolster the mood of the Berliners. A year later, in response to the Soviets’ refusal to share access to the Berliner Rundfunk, the U.S. military government set up a new station, RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), which quickly became a crucial voice on the postwar scene. At first its programming was fairly evenhanded and objective, but as the rivalry with the Soviets intensified the station became increasingly ideological, a weapon in the war for the soul of the Berliners.
Another such weapon was the Free University of Berlin, which was founded in the American sector in the borough of Dahlem in 1948 as an alternative to the Communist-controlled Humboldt University on Unter den Linden. (Two years earlier, the British had reopened the Technische Hochschule as the Technische Universität.) It was a group of dissident students from the Berlin University who convinced the Americans to reverse their earlier closing of all higher education institutes in their sector and to sanction the new school. The hope of the Free University’s founders was that it would become a model for higher educational reform throughout Germany, and to that end it allowed unprecedented student participation in university governance, promoted closer relations between students and faculty, and outlawed dueling fraternities, which were seen as a legacy of the authoritarian past. The “Berlin Model” in higher education never caught on elsewhere, however, and eventually it faded at the Free University itself. Despite its name, moreover, the Free University in its early days was anything but free of ideological bullying. It fostered its own political orthodoxy, a strident anti-Communism. (Later, from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the school would become just as doctrinaire in its neoleftist stance.)
The French brought more sophistication and knowledge to the business of cultural tutelage in Berlin than the Anglo-Americans, though they could often be just as high-handed. Watching her countrymen at work in the defeated German capital, Simone de Beauvoir was reminded of the Nazis in Paris during their occupation. “It seemed to me that we were just as loathsome as they had been . . . and when one is on the same side as the occupiers, one’s sense of discomfort is all the greater.” In terms of cultural administration, the French had fewer opportunities to show their superiority because their sector, which consisted of only two boroughs, was relatively devoid of important artistic and intellectual institutions. Reinickendorf and Wedding boasted no theaters, operas, museums, universities, or libraries of note. The French “Mission Culturelle” had to make do with importing French cultural stars such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Hélène Vercors, and Albert Camus. This agency also maintained extensive contacts with German intellectuals across the city, and with the Soviet cultural authorities in the Russian zone. In 1947, when the British and Americans forbade the Soviet-sponsored Kulturbund from operating in their sectors, the French refused to join in the ban. Organizations like the Kulturbund, they insisted, offered excellent opportunities “for developing our influence in Berlin on cultural directives.” Felix Lusset, chief of the Mission Culturelle, even held discussions with his Soviet counterpart with an eye to promoting a “Paris-Berlin-Leningrad cultural axis.”
While each of the four powers planted its cultural seeds in the former Reich capital, hoping to grow a mini version of itself, the Berliners themselves were intent upon returning their city as soon as possible to its pre-Nazi status as a world-class metropolis of the arts. Visiting Berlin in 1946, Stephen Spender was struck by the locals’ hunger for culture and diversion after all the horrors they had just been through. The German capital had reinvented itself often enough in the past, and now it would do so again like a municipal Lazarus rising from the dead. “The strength and the weakness of the Berliners,” Spender observed, “was their feeling that they could begin a completely new kind of life—because they had nothing to begin from.” Using Berlin’s wretched physical conditions as a new frisson, entrepreneurs opened nightclubs and jazz dens in the cellars of bombed-out buildings. Plays were mounted on makeshift stages and operas were performed in torn-up halls. Cabaret made a triumphant comeback and subjected Berlin’s recent horrors to characteristic black humor. The Berlin Philharmonic, now under the direction of the Romanian conductor Sergiu Gelibidache, put on its concerts at the Titania Cinema. On May 25, 1947, Wilhelm Furtwängler, having just survived a humiliating denazification hearing instigated by the Americans, returned to the orchestra’s podium for the first time since the war. For the Berliners, who had seen his trial as an injustice, Furtwängler’s return was a hopeful sign that the city was regaining its cultural clout. “Stay here! Stay here!” they shouted to the maestro after the performance.
Driving through Berlin in February 1946, the critic Friedrich Luft was heartened to see placards announcing innumerable plays and concerts. He was also struck by newspaper ads promoting one cultural event after another. “There are at least half a dozen concerts a day—in all parts of the city,” he wrote. “Two opera houses are giving regular performances. What other city in the world can say as much?” A tourism-promotion campaign of 1947 entitled “Berlin Lebt—Berlin Ruft!” told the world that Berlin was back in business, as high spirited and cosmopolitan as ever, despite the nasty patch it had just been through. “Berlin may have put on a hard face,” said the ad, “but its visage is worldly and lively, and it still displays the constant movement, elan, tempo, noise, and openness beloved of Berliners. The big world is here together, with its newspapers and films, its opinions and ideas, its concerns for peace and understanding cherished by all peoples.” For Peter de Mendelssohn, a Berlin intellectual who had returned to his native city as an American occupation officer, the burst of cultural activity meant that the battered German capital was still a force to be reckoned with when it came to the arts: “Berlin is not dead. In many regards it is more alive than Paris,” he contended.