On Sundays outside the Zoo Station in Berlin a ragged and blind old man sits playing shrill psalm-tunes on a little portable organ. He sits bare-headed in the cold and listens sorrowfully down in the direction of his shabby cap on the pavement, but the German coins make a faint dull clink and only rarely do they fall in the caps of the blind. It would of course be a little better for him if he did not play the organ and above all if he did not play psalms. On weekday afternoons when the people of Berlin draw past with their small creaking hand-carts after yet another day of hunting for potatoes or firewood in the less harrowed suburbs the blind man has exchanged his harmonium for a barrel-organ, and the coins drop more frequently, but on Sunday he insists with quite uneconomic idealism on using his squeaky harmonium. On Sundays he cannot accept his hurdy-gurdy. He still has a little bit further to sink.
But in the stations it is possible to meet people who have passed most of the stages. The big German railway stations, once the scene for mannequin shows and adventures, contain between their scarred walls and beneath their cracked roofs a high percentage of the sum of hopelessness. In rainy weather the stranger is always surprised to see and hear the rain pattering down through the waiting-room roof and forming lakes on the floor between the benches. It seems like a tiny revolution in this disciplined chaos. At night the stranger will start as he stumbles against refugees in the concrete tunnels, refugees from the east or from the south, lying stretched out on the naked floor along the naked walls and either sleeping heavily or sitting crouched among their poor bundles and waiting all too wide awake for a train that will take them to a new station, just as hopeless as this one.
The underground stations in the big cities have come through in better shape. They are rundown but unscathed. Berlin’s Untergrundbahnstationen smell of wetness and poverty, but the trains run promptly as in peacetime. One does not turn to stare at the foreign soldiers walking the platforms with well-dressed but badly painted German girls who are already speaking perfectly whiny American or quick conciliatory English. Many of these girls stand leaning against the sides of the train-doors trying to catch as many eyes as possible with their provocative glances and telling their English soldier that the people here have no sense; others prop up their drunk American friend and make eyes that say: ‘What can a poor girl do?’ The smoke from their Allied cigarettes blends inside the compartments with the smoke of the German cigarettes, which tastes sour and stifling, and gives the underground trains their persistent smell of dirt and destitution. But when the underground trains come up into the sharp light of day these girls too have faces with the shadows of hunger. And it happens — rarely, no doubt, but it does happen — that someone says: ‘That’s what the future of Germany looks like! A drunk pimply American and a whore of a German girl!’
It happens rarely because sheer necessity wears down the habit of moralizing on behalf of others. It is not true to claim, as a well-fed army chaplain from California said over his steak on the Northern Express, that Germany is a country quite without morality. It is just that in this country of privation morality has acquired quite a new dimension, whose very existence unaccustomed eyes simply do not notice. This new morality postulates that there are conditions in which it is not immoral to steal since in these circumstances theft means not depriving someone of his property but a more just distribution of available goods; likewise black-marketing and prostitution are not immoral when they have become the only means of survival. This does not of course mean that everyone steals, that everyone deals on the black-market or goes in for prostitution, but it does mean that even among certain youthful church groups people consider that for the sake of endurance it is from a moral point of view more reprehensible to starve or let your family starve than to do something which in a normal sense is forbidden. The necessary crime is regarded with more tolerance in Germany than anywhere else; that is one aspect of what the Allied chaplain calls lack of morality. Sinking is more readily forgiven than going under.
One afternoon as darkness is falling and when there is a power cut in Berlin I met a little Polish school-teacher in the twilight of a station where the trains to Potsdam rattle past. She has a boy of seven who is taking a childish interest in the remains of a two-year-old train crash out at the edge of the sidings. Passenger coaches with crushed skulls lie tumbled and broken along the side of the rails, a burnt out bogie-car has hurtled into the rusty skeleton of a disintegrated sleeping-car, two goods wagons stand defiantly at cross-purposes, and dead limbs of undercarriages stick up out of the fragments.
By the side of the track all the way into Berlin there are old rusty train wrecks. At each station the platforms are black with people. Crowds with rucksacks, bundles of brushwood, cabbage-heads in tattered paper, and little carts, all rush in through the doors and all the time between two stations there is someone or other wailing in pain. Two women screech unceasingly over a trifle. Trampled dogs whimper but on a bench sit two silent Russian officers surrounded by a little wall of frightened respect.
In short sentences constantly broken off by the crush at new stations or by curses from people whose rucksacks are too big I slowly find out what it feels like to live in great loneliness in Berlin. The Polish teacher lost her husband in Auschwitz and then she lost two children on the road from the Polish border to Berlin in the big panic in 1945, and the seven-year-old boy is all she has left. Yet she has a calm face when the lights come on, and when I ask her what she busies herself with she whispers with a laugh in my ear: ‘Geschäft!’ At one time she read Hamsum and Strindberg in a little Polish village, but ‘jetzt ist alles vorbei’.
What, though, does she mean by ‘Geschaft?’ We talk for a little about longing, since everyone who is forced to remain in Germany longs to be where they are not, unless they are too old to be able to long, or unless they have the desperate courage to believe they have a mission. The Polish teacher longs for Sweden or Norway. She has a picture at home that helps her with her longing. It shows a Norwegian fjord — or the Danube at Siebenbrügen. Would I come home and say which, to save her from longing in the wrong direction?
From the underground station we have many dark streets to negotiate. There has just been an election and the big posters are still hanging on the walls of the ruins. The Social Democrats: ‘Where there is fear there is no freedom; without freedom there is no democracy.’ The Communists: ‘Youth belongs to us.’ The Christian Democrats: ‘Christianity, Socialism, Democracy.’ The CDU is a chameleon who won in Hamburg thanks to crude anti-Marxist propaganda and tried to win in Berlin through an equally diligent use of the word ‘socialism’.
‘But what does ”Geschäft” in fact mean?’
If whispered it means the black market, if said out loud it means business in general. She has a two-room flat by itself at the top of a tenement whose roof has been blasted off. People are already standing waiting on the stairs. Someone who wants to get rid of a clock. Someone else who has suddenly realized that he needs an oriental carpet. An old lady, fine as china, who would rather have something to eat instead of her old solid silver service. The door-bell rings all evening and the big room is full of people eagerly muttering about porcelain, clocks, furs, carpets and incredible sums of money. I sit in a small inner room and try to chat with the silent boy who is seven but whose eyes are at least ten years older. The picture shows a completely anonymous landscape. I drink tea with rare white sugar. In a pause the teacher comes in and says she doesn’t like all this.