More alive, perhaps, but there was reason to question the quality of Berlin’s culture in this period. Many of the artists and intellectuals who returned from exile were struck by a lack of originality, innovation, and genuine creative power in the art of the time. The dramatist Fritz Kortner, who like Brecht had spent the war years in the United States, was so appalled by the theatrical productions he saw at the Kurfürstendamm-Theater in 1947 that he wanted to flee back to America. Brecht himself complained loudly of “the miserable artistic condition in the theater of the former Reichshauptstadt.” Peter Suhrkamp, the publisher, wrote his friend Hermann Hesse in Switzerland about the lamentable “noise” being made by the legions of cultural mice climbing out of their holes and scurrying about the city. Despairing of the local music scene, Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote: “What’s going on here now is all passing, insignificant, meaningless. A reign of mediocrity in its truest sense, but which certainly cannot and will not last.” The novelist Elisabeth Langgässer found the 1947 Berlin Writers’ Conference to be like “a great show of fireworks, and the following morning the parched brown grass was strewn with the charred remains.”
It is hardly surprising that Berlin’s culture in the immediate postwar period lacked freshness and originality. For the past twelve years the city had been cut off from most of the rest of the world. Berliners understandably wanted to catch up with what had been happening elsewhere during their enforced isolation. Hence the city was inundated by a tide of cultural borrowing, some of it of high quality, but much of it the worst that the wider world had to offer. Another major impulse was to take up culturally where one had left off in 1933, to revive the “Golden Twenties.” Alluding to that fabled era, Berliners liked to call the period immediately after World War II the “golden hunger years.” To a large degree, the Berlin culture of this time was indeed a throwback to the Weimar culture of the 1920s and early 1930s. But what had once been avant-garde was not so avant any more, and what might have been “golden” in the 1920s now looked merely yellowed.
If Berlin Falls, Germany Will Be Next
In line with their strategy of indirect rule in eastern Germany and Berlin, the Soviets had licensed four political parties in summer 1945: the KPD (Communist Party), the SPD (Social Democrats), the CDU (Christian Democrats), and the LDP (Liberal Democrats). All were essentially “front” organizations, but the KPD, as the party closest to the Soviet military administration, was expected to dominate the political scene. By late 1945 it was clear that this was not happening, especially in Berlin. Precisely because they were perceived as stooges for the Russians, the Communists made little headway in conquering the hearts and minds of the Berliners. The Soviets decided therefore to change tactics and to orchestrate a merger between the KPD and the popular SPD, thereby giving the native Communists a blind behind which to smuggle themselves into a position of control. Stalin once said that imposing communism on the Germans was like trying to fit “a saddle on a cow,” but a more appropriate image for the Russian tactic at this juncture was that of the Trojan horse.
The plan might have worked had the SPD in the eastern zone accepted its assigned role, but the majority of the party refused to do so. Over the objections of the Soviet-chosen SPD leadership, rank-and-file Socialists insisted on putting the merger question to a secret vote, which resulted in a landslide victory for the opponents of fusion. Calling the referendum “irrelevant,” on April 21, 1946, the leaders of the KPD and eastern SPD went ahead and merged their two parties into the SED (Socialist Unity Party). The bond was sealed by a handshake between the Communist chief Wilhelm Pieck and the Socialist leader Otto Grotewohl. Recognizing this gesture as the headlock it really was, antimerger Socialists refused to join the “unity” group and recast the rump SPD as a rival to the SED. The old division of the German left that had grown out of the First World War and helped to weaken the Weimar Republic was now back in place, courtesy of Soviet bullying. Soon it would segue into the division of Germany and Berlin, with the two leftist parties on opposite sides of the fence.
The SED’s ineffectiveness as a political force in the former Reich capital became evident in the first municipal elections of the postwar era, on October 20, 1946. Despite extensive interference by the Soviets, including prohibitions on SPD meetings and publications in the eastern sector, the SED proved no match for its Socialist rival, winning only 19.8 percent of the vote compared to the Socialists’ 48.9 percent. The SED did badly even in the Soviet zone and in the working-class districts of the western sectors, where the KPD had once been strong. “The women of Berlin have decided against the Russian lovers,” said an SED member sarcastically.
Ernst Reuter
As a result of the elections, the new municipal government that began meeting a month later was dominated by the SPD. The city assembly appointed the Socialist Otto Suhr as its chairman, while another Socialist, Otto Ostrowski, became postwar Berlin’s first Lord Mayor. However, because Ostrowski seemed too easily intimidated by the Russians, the Magistrat replaced him with yet another Socialist, Ernst Reuter. This was a provocative choice, for Reuter was an ex-Gommunist who had broken with the party in the early 1920s in protest against its domination by the Soviet Union. Switching to the SPD, he had served in Berlin’s city assembly and fought many a political duel with the local Communists. He had returned to Berlin from wartime exile in Turkey with a loathing for all forms of dictatorship, including those that masqueraded as democratic.
Rightly seeing Reuter’s appointment as a demonstration of municipal independence, the Soviets used their veto in the Kommandatura to squelch his selection. Louise Schröder stepped in as acting mayor and did a brilliant job at running the city in this difficult moment. Reuter, meanwhile, continued to oppose Communist policies from his position in the Magistrat. Most Berliners considered him their rightful mayor, and he often spoke out on behalf of the city. He would not, however, officially became mayor until 1949, and then only of West Berlin.
Frustrated by their inability to control Berlin through their German marionettes, the Soviets sought to impose their will through repression and terror. In their own sector they heightened censorship and began arresting non-Communists, even members of the front organizations that they themselves had created. Some of the victims ended up in recently liberated Nazi concentration camps like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which slipped almost seamlessly from one dictatorship into another. Hoping to evade the Soviet net, anti-Communist East Berliners began moving to the western sectors, but this was no guarantee of safety, for Russian secret policemen thought nothing of kidnapping people in broad daylight off streets in the West. George Clare reported:
[The Soviets] began to ‘take out’ political and human-rights activists who opposed them. It was all over in seconds. A car screeched to a sudden halt, hefty men jumped out, grabbed their victim, bundled him into their vehicle, and before those who witnessed it could comprehend what had happened, they were racing off in the direction of the Soviet sector. There, of course, such dramatics were unnecessary—people just disappeared.