We have reached a district whose luck it was to come through the destruction with its cellars intact. The buildings have collapsed but the cellar roofs have held and now they give shelter to hundreds of bombed families. Through the small windows we see the small rooms with bare cement walls, a stove, a bed, a table, and at best a chair. Children play with stones on the floor, a pot stands on the stove. In the ruin above, white children’s clothes flutter on a washing-line stretched between a twisted water-pipe and a fallen iron girder. The smoke from the stoves finds its way out through the cracks in disintegrating walls. Empty prams wait outside the cellar windows.
A dentist and a few grocers have set up shop at the bottom of a ruin. Wherever a scrap of earth is available red cabbages are cultivated.
‘The Germans are a capable people at any rate,’ my guide says and falls silent.
At any rate. It sounds as if she is sorry.
Farther down the street an English lorry stands, its engine idling. Some English soldiers have got out and are clowning for the benefit of a group of small children.
‘The English are nice to children at any rate.’
It sounds as if she is sorry about that too.
But when I try to tell her that I am sorry about the loss of her home she is one of the very few who say: ‘It began in Coventry.’
The line sounds almost too classic to be genuine but in her case it is genuine. She knows all about what has happened in the war and yet, or perhaps because of that, her case is so tragic.
For there is in Germany a large group of honest anti-fascists who are more disappointed, homeless and defeated than the Nazi fellow-travellers can ever be: disappointed because the liberation did not turn out to be as radical as they had thought it would be; homeless because they did not want to associate themselves either with the overall German dissatisfaction, among whose ingredients they thought they could detect far too much hidden Nazism, or with the politics of the Allies, whose compliance in the face of the former Nazis they regard with dismay; and, finally, defeated because they doubt whether as Germans they can hold shares in the final victory of the Allies while at the same time they are equally unconvinced that as anti-Nazis they can be partners in the German defeat. They have condemned themselves to complete passivity because activity means co-operation with the dubious elements which in the course of twelve years of oppression they have learned to hate.
These people are Germany’s most beautiful ruins, but for the present as uninhabitable as the collapsed masses of ruined dwellings between Hasselbrook and Landwehr, which smell acrid and bitter from quenched fires in the wet autumn twilight.
Bombed Cemetery
On a bridge in Hamburg there is a man standing selling a little gadget: fastened to an ordinary knife, it is meant to give a more economical method of peeling potatoes. He puts on such a show when he demonstrates how using this new invention the potato-peel can be as thin as anyone could want, that all of us, who have been standing at the railing watching how heavy black barges loaded with rubble are poled up the canal, turn away and gather round him. No one is likely to satisfy his hunger by joking about it, even in Hamburg, but to be able to laugh at it provides an entertaining form of forgetfulness which the people of this hungry land are seldom willing to forgo.
The man on the bridge holds up his solitary little demonstration-potato in the autumn sun and announces that it’s a devil of a job peeling potatoes as big as those allowed by the rations … A fishmonger near by shows the same kind of humour when he puts up a huge, indignant notice in his empty shop-window: ‘Imagine raising the fish rations now when we’re so short of wrapping-paper.’ He gets the laughers on his side, if not the buyers, yet.
But at one end of the bridge there is a tram-stop. A little old woman with a big sack of potatoes has just mounted the platform when the tram sets off. The sack tips over, the string loosens, the old lady screams as the tram rolls by us and the potatoes begin to drum on the roadway. A violent stir is felt among those crowded about the street-seller and when the tram has passed he is standing almost alone by the railing while his audience scuffle over the potatoes among hooting English army cars and Volkswagens in war-paint. Schoolchildren fill their satchels, workers stuff their pockets full, housewifes open their handbags for Germany’s most sought-after fruit, and two minutes later, laughing and eager to buy, they have surrounded the seller of the device intended to procure Germany’s thinnest potato-peel — after one of those abrupt switches from fury to friendliness which make the people of Hamburg so exciting and so risky to mix with.
But why does Fräulein S. not laugh? As I leave the bridge with her I ask her right out why she did not laugh, but instead of answering she says bitterly: ‘That’s Germany today — risk your life for a potato.’
But in fact not laughing at the need on the streets of Hamburg is only what could be expected of Fräulein S. Since the collapse of Germany she has been working in a labour office in Hamburg but before that she had a fishmonger’s shop that was burnt up in the celluloid bombing in 1943. Now she spends two hours each day inspecting a district of ruins, checking that those capable of work are at work, and seeing to it that those who cannot look after themselves are cared for. The person who introduced me to Fräulein S. confided in me that she is one of the many Germans who are Nazis without knowing it and who would be mortally offended if anyone dared to suggest that her views were similar to those of the Nazis. Fräulein S. is said to be very bitter but at the same time grateful for a job that gives her the chance of keeping her bitterness on the boil. She is undoubtedly an energetic and go-ahead person, but she is also a confirmation of the idea held by many, though of course not all, anti-Nazis: that dubious opinions are the price of energy in today’s Germany.
It is tempting to talk politics with someone who does not realize that one knows something about them, especially if that someone is German and is supposed to have Nazi sympathies without being aware of the fact. Which party does such a person vote for? (Local elections have just been held in Hamburg.)
Fräulein S. answers without a moment’s hesitation. For her there was only one party, ‘the Social Democrats of course’, but on further questioning —’why exactly them?’ — she can give no more rational explanation than the majority of SDP voters. In fact like most Germans of her way of thinking Fräulein S. chose her party by process of elimination: the Christian Democrats are eliminated because one is not religious, the Communists will not do because one is afraid of the Russians, the Liberals are too few to play a significant role, the Conservatives are too unknown, so that leaves the SDP if one is going to vote — and one does vote, despite the fact that one says it cannot matter who wins an election in a country that is still occupied.
We come out into a wide ruined square where a tall solitary lift-shaft has been forgotten by the bombs. A few workers are pulling a little cart loaded with stone and scrap and when they come to the street a woman with a red flag steps out quite pointlessly and stops the traffic which is not there.
‘You see, Mr D.,’ says the frost-bitten woman who is with me and she takes my arm, ‘we Germans think it is high time the Allies stopped punishing us. Whatever people can say about us Germans and what our soldiers have done in other countries, we have not deserved the punishment we are now getting.’