Obsessions of Berlin
--------------------------------------------------------------------

People :
----------------------------------

Author : Paul Mattick

Text :
----------------------------------


From Partisan Review, Vol.15 No.10, October 1948, pp.1108-1124.
Copied with thanks from the Council Communist Archive at web.archive.org/web/20090221055640/www.kurasje.org.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

As against the terror of the bombs, the actual conquest
of Berlin was of lesser significance to its inhabitants. Nevertheless,
the artillery tore new holes into the ruins, shot away parts of the
surviving buildings, killed many people running for food and water. The
spray of machine guns is visible almost on every house, every floor,
every apartment door. The tanks ground down the streets and sidewalks.
The battle was fought section by section, street by street, house by
house. It is said that sixty thousand Russians died in the struggle for
Berlin. The estimate may be incorrect, but it reveals the ferocity of
the struggle. There are no guesses on the German losses. They lost
everything – particularly, however, their illusions about the
Russians.

The Russians are Berlin’s second great obsession. The rape of
the city is burned deep into the minds of its inhabitants because it is
associated with their greatest disappointment. Long before the fall of
the city, refugees from the East told horrible stories about the
Russians’ behavior. So did the radio. But wishful thinking
discounted these stories as exaggerations and propaganda. At any rate,
it could not get worse than it was. The same hope that welcomed Hitler
in exchange for the depression welcomed now the Russians in exchange for
the bombings.

Berliners who had once belonged to the Communist Party, or
sympathized with it, looked upon the Russian conquerors as their
liberators. Their disappointment was consequently greater than that
experienced by the great mass of apolitical people and passive Nazis.
Even the less exposed Nazis hoped for a quick fall of the city in order
to escape a fight that no longer made sense. The more realistic among
them killed their families and themselves.

And there were those who had welcomed the Allied bombers in the hope
that the misery in their wake would lead to revolt. But the
terror-machine of the Nazis proved to be stronger than the despair of
the people. The atomization of the masses was sufficiently advanced to
allow the organized terroristic minority to control all situations. But
with the Russians at the gates of Berlin, defeatism became more
widespread. With the Russians within the city, revolt became possible.
But the Russians were not interested; they did not look for help but for
loot.

The loot had been promised to the Russian troops – mostly made
up of Mongolians – as the price for taking the city. The women
were among the spoils. Despite the disaffection within the German ranks,
the fight for Berlin took longer than was expected, the Russian losses
were greater than contemplated. The barbarism of the Russian troops is
now excused by the ferocity of the Nazi defense that enraged the Russian
soldiers. Their rage, it is explained, could not be controlled; it took
some time before the Commissars were able to bring order into the chaos
and deprive the individual soldier of his right to rape, steal, and
kill, in favor of the systematic expropriation executed by the army in
the name of the state.

The Nazi stalwarts had the choice of dying fighting or committing
suicide. They found it easier to get killed. They hated the Russians and
they had no love for the Germans. Whoever was not with them in this last
battle was their enemy. Unwilling adolescents and feeble old men were
forced into the Volkssturm. Those who could not handle a gun,
or manipulate a hand-grenade, were kept busy building barricades.
Refusal to work or to fight led to immediate execution. Everywhere the
defeatists were hanging on the lantern posts. Attempts to cut them down
were again punished by death.

The luck of battle shifted from day to day, sometimes from hour to
hour. The unwilling soldiers of the Volkssturm threw their guns
away as soon as the Russians entered their street, only to pick them up
again when they were driven back. They would be killed either way: by
the Russians if found with a weapon in their hands, by the Nazis if
found without their guns. But in the final stages of the battle more and
more Germans joined the Russians in the hunting down and killing of the
Nazis. They tore down the barricades they had erected to slow the
Russian advance. They helped take care of snipers. They recognized the
Nazis who had shed their uniforms, and destroyed them. They improvised
red flags, reorganized the Communist Party, occupied the apartments of
Nazi party-members, plundered and killed on their own account.

However, the Russians refused to distinguish between Nazis and
anti-Nazis; all Germans were fascists and capitalists. They even
outlawed their own German Communist Party, only to allow its legal
reorganization at a much later date – with the arrival of Wilhelm
Pick and his Moscow-picked retinue – so as to have an additional
weapon of control. It would not do in May 1945 to offer a Russian
soldier a brotherly embrace. He needed just to see the
“luxury” of a radio, watch, or couch to be convinced that he
was not dealing with a Tovarisch but with a capitalist. At any
rate, as he was out to loot, he was not interested in probing the
personal history and social position of his victim.

The rape of Berlin was not the aftermath of the struggle but part of
it. The fight was less a military affair than a gigantic raid of a
million-fold army of bandits. Even the appearance of the Russian
soldiers ceased to be military; they discarded filthy and torn parts of
their uniforms for German civilian clothes. They wore two and three
suits under the military blouses and pants. Hardly able to walk, they
advanced from street to street, tommy-gun in one hand and a suitcase of
loot in the other. The bayonet broke open closets and drawers; what was
removable was taken, only to be lost again to the Commissars who
organized the eastward track of the previously westward Nazi caravans of
plunder.

In great demand, of course, were things that could be carried on the
body, such as watches and jewelry of all descriptions. As the victory
must be celebrated, schnapps and vodka were also in great demand. Every
bottle of vinegar was opened and tasted before the Russians accepted
their possessors’ protestation that they contained no alcohol. And
with the schnapps the fighting and thievery gained in elan. Those who
could not deliver quickly enough were shot down; women, not willing to
give in at once, were thrown out of the windows with their throats slit.
Fires were set to the houses that yielded too little, their occupants
fleeing the basements into the deadly cross-fires of the streets.

During the battle, the interval between life and death is the
occasion for love. Stopped for days at a particular spot, there was time
for enjoyment before the sniper’s bullet found its mark. Women and
girls dragged from their basements were lined up on the sidewalks. They
tried to make themselves appear old and ugly by smearing their faces
with soot and by dirtying the shabby rags they wore in the cellars. But
a soldier’s hand would wipe away the filth and discover good looks
behind the mask of fear. Children would follow their mothers and
sisters, only to see them ordered to bend over and lift their skirts to
make ready for love in daylight and collectivity, to be loved by drunken
soldiers still able, however, to keep an eye on the rooftops so as not
to be killed in the act of copulation. Long afterwards, the smaller of
the children would play the newly-learned “game of
raping.”

The end of the battle is the start of the clean-up period. Groups of
Russians began looking for strayed German soldiers; systematically,
house by house, block by block. Nights, they returned to be rewarded for
their day’s troubles. The dead women, sprawling on the streets
with their throats cut from ear to ear, served as a terrible reminder
not to refuse the victors. The soldiers took what they found, regardless
of age. Years without furloughs, years of war and nothing but war, had
given them a great and indiscriminate appetite. Lucky the woman who
aroused the fancy of an officer who would take charge of her and thus
protect her from the mob. For others there was just the command
“stay down .... comrade comes.” It was like in an army
brothel; only the experience was missing, and the husband looked on, and
the children were not spared. And there was always the fear of death. If
the lights suddenly went out, the Russian might start shooting. If the
lights suddenly went on, he might also shoot, always suspicious of being
trapped, of being tricked, of being surprised by a god-damned German
swine.

Of course there are also other stories; stories of the kind Russian
soldier who stopped in his fight just to help an old lady cross the
street. Stories of the crying Russian soldier killing an old couple to
end their useless and hopeless misery. Of the baby-lover, forcing a can
of milk down the throat of a terrified child. Of those that took from
one German to give to another. Of the Commissar killing the rapist on
the spot, and the officer belaboring the plunderer with his saber. No
doubt, these stories are as true as the cruel ones. But the
unpredictability of the Russians’ behavior merely increased the
fear. Life and death depended on their caprices; it gave the terror a
particularly bitter flavor. And when all is said, there remains the fact
that within two months Berlin was thoroughly plundered. What was not
securely hidden had been taken, most of the women had been mishandled,
and the majority of the population had been reduced to paupers.

II

Apparently it was true that the soldiers had lost their
discipline. Long after the battle searching parties continued to look in
the basements and ruins. They looked no longer for Nazis but for
Russians. And they have been looking for deserters ever since; most of
the Razzias that take place in Berlin have as their first
objective the hunt for former Russian soldiers. Troops were shifted, the
Mongolians retreated to the hinterland; new soldiers arrived. Too late
for the great show they were now forced to buy their women with bread
and their bicycles with worthless vouchers and German Marks they had
picked up in banks and post-offices.

But the troops were still living with the Germans. What kind of
people were these Russians? Had they been so totally demoralized by
years of campaigning, that they forgot all the so-called civilized ways
of behavior? Or did they come from Russian regions so backward that any
comparison with Western standards was at once unfair and impossible?
With surprise and contempt the Berliners watched the attempts of Russian
soldiers to drill a hole in the wall in the hope that it would spout
water just as the faucet did over the kitchen sink. They were amazed by
the readiness of the Russian soldier to exchange an expensive
wrist-watch for any old alarm clock just because it was so much bigger.
They were disgusted to see their living-room changed into a butcher-shop
as the Russians dragged animals up the stairs to be killed on the
carpet. They did not understand their persistence of using the bathtub
for a toilet and the toilet for washing their faces. They could not help
laughing over the disappointment of the Russian who washed his potatoes
in the toilet-bowl only to see them disappear as he pulled the lever.
They saw with regret the wrecked automobiles and bicycles littering the
streets, demonstrating the Russians’ great love and little
aptitude for things mechanical. They learned to know the Russian’s
great fear of his superiors: to make a misbehaving soldier run, it was
only necessary to shout “Commissar” at the top of
one’s lungs. They witnessed Russian soldiers marched off to
prison, heavy ropes around their bodies, the point of the bayonet
between their shoulder blades, like in an old war-picture of a hundred
years back. They experienced day by day the wide gulf that still
separates the East from the West, as yet unbridgeable by any ideology,
crossable only by armed forces, and haphazardly kept together by the
permanence of terror.

Order was reestablished in Berlin. Russian soldiers had been buried
where they had fallen, on the sidewalks, in the center of the streets.
Their graves had been lovingly cared for. Little white fences had been
placed around them. Flowers, and often the picture of the deceased, were
planted on the heap of earth covering them. Their remains were now dug
out to restore the streets to their original function, and were placed
into mass-graves at more appropriate places. Barriers were placed on
every important street corner. Smart Russian women in uniform, white
gloves, their bosom pushed up to the neck, regulated traffic by lifting
or lowering toll-bars for vehicles and individuals alike. Like other
regulations modeled on the Russian village, these traffic disturbances
disappeared with the entry of the Allied troops.

With order restored, pillage was now directed from headquarters. The
factories lost their machinery, the warehouses all they contained. Even
the tracks of the city railway were removed, but had to be brought back
at a later date. The street-cars were moved to Russia. The Germans
repaired previously discarded ones; but they, too, were taken. Only the
oldest, most dilapidated ones were left to Berlin.

With the entering of the Allied troops about half of Berlin was freed
of the Russians. The expropriations were legalized, the removals were
now being called reparations. The Russian troops moved into barracks and
bunkers formerly housing German troops. Their uniforms seemed cleaner
and they began to let their hair grow. But the more well-mannered they
became, the less could be seen of them. Their isolation is not complete,
of course; they can still be observed guarding the factories and offices
that work for them. They have their parades and patrols and also their
time off. They still plant their machine-guns on railway stations to
check the papers of all who pass. But there is no longer that one-sided
“fraternization” of the first months of the occupation.

III

Russia has lost in Germany, most certainly in Berlin,
notwithstanding all the apparent “good will” the people show
toward the Socialist Unity Party, Russia’s German instrument. It
is not propaganda, nor a stubborn refusal to be disillusioned, which
explains some of the Berliners’ “enthusiasm” for
Russia’s German policy. Behind the “enthusiasm” hides
fear, which is kept alive by an invisible terror that may at any day
come into the open.

On May Day 1948 there were nearly three-quarters of a million people
in the Lustgarten demonstration called by the Russian-sponsored
Socialist Unity Party. Apparently more than the number of those who
attended the Socialist demonstration at the Reichstag building. Only two
Russians in mufti, and one in uniform, shared the tribune with Pieck and
his staff. Few Russians were seen along the route. The slogans were all
related to imagined German needs, and against the Marshall Plan. Hour by
hour the demonstrators passed the reviewing stand. Their shoutings,
however, had no spontaneity, but were directed by groups of claques near
the loudspeaker-system. The Communist-controlled Berlin police formed
part of the demonstration and received the loudest applause. Over and
over again the loudspeakers burst forth with “Long live the German
people’s police.” The Moscow-trained former Nazi officer,
Markgraf, at that time Berlin’s sole police president, smiled down
to the masses, coquettishly waving a red carnation or clicking his heels
in an earnest salute. Berlin’s love for the police and the love of
the police for the Berliners seemed boundless and all-embracing.

The shabby clothes, torn shoes, and hungry faces of the demonstrators
made them appear like an army of desperate beggars, out to invade the
reservoirs of the rich. But they yelled for the police, for the
often-felt rubber truncheons, for the deadly order of the party-state.
Did the bottle of schnapps they received this morning go to their heads?
Of course not, for it was sold at once to the black market. The schnapps
was not a present but cost more than a weekly wage; by selling it they
realized a profit big enough to buy four loaves of bread. Maybe the
sight of the large brown sausages sold at various booths near the
marching-route made them love the world and all it contained? But taking
the sausage meant to part with precious ration-coupons and to face a
meatless month. No, the enthusiasm for the police, for the Communist
Party, for Russia, was not the result of bribery; it was given
absolutely free, it came from the heart, a heart obsessed by fear.

The manipulated demonstrations of the “people’s
will” are organized through a malignant net of organizations. It
is not up to the individual to decide whether or not to go. With others
he is assembled at the place of work or at his living-quarters. His
trade-union functionary, factory-representative, party-comrade, or
house-warden, will know if he missed the call, if he stayed away
deliberately; and he may be reprimanded or reported. Reported to whom?
That’s just it. Under the Nazis it was clear, but now one
doesn’t really know. However, if the Russians should become the
absolute rulers, it may be expected that a bad record or a deficiency of
enthusiasm will reach the files of a new Gestapo. It is better to play
safe, to act and talk as is expected, or not to talk, just nod, and
follow the functionary.

Communist Party trustees, backed by the Red Army, control factories
still working, supervise all available jobs whatever their nature,
control the cooperatives and the municipal offices. Although rations are
small they must be bought. To live, one must work, even if most work is
of the make-believe kind. Some jobs qualify for ration-card Two, others
for ration-card Three, the most important jobs, as evaluated by the
Russian occupiers, for ration-card One. To get a ration-card a work-card
is needed. To keep the work-card, one must not oppose the policy and
ideology of the Socialist Unity Party.

In opposition to the planned installation of a Western German
government the Party called for a German referendum on the question of
national unity. That no one is against unity is clear, though there may
be some who do not care to show concern. That this is not a German
question at all is also clear. What will happen in Germany and Berlin
depends on the conflicts or agreements, between the great competing
powers. Nevertheless, the propaganda offices are busy on both sides and
the referendum is part of the Russian program. And then it
starts:– The house-warden knocks on the door: “Have you
added your name to the list for the referendum?” He comes back
next day with the same question, and the day thereafter. The question is
asked at street corners, at the grocer’s, in the factories and
offices, everywhere, by a great number of unpaid functionaries in search
of ration-card One, until everybody feels sure that he is watched, that
his indifference will not remain unnoticed. The list of names demanding
the referendum may be kept, checked, and gone over again, as soon as the
Allied powers have left, on the day of reckoning when the unreliables
are purged. Anyhow, it is not difficult to sign a name, and thus they
sign – just in case.

Of course nobody is fooled by these expressions of the people’s
will. The Party is not gauging its ideological success but the amount of
fear it has been able to inspire. By means of the referendum,
demonstrations, elections, declarations of all sorts, it measures the
degree of its power over the people. It knows that ideological control
is of small importance in an age which has devaluated all ideologies,
where ideologies are merely labels for the controlling powers of one or
another set of politicians who base their rule not on ideas but on an
effective organization of terror.

Life in the Russian sector begins to resemble life under Nazi rule,
including the arrests and disappearances of oppositionists in nightly
raids. Although as yet without uniform and with restricted authority, a
red “SS” is in formation. Discipline and the leader
principle are stressed, the party hierarchy and its system of privileges
has returned. With the division of the people into ration-card
categories an inexpensive army of functionaries and storm-troopers has
been created. Being in possession of a number One ration-card means to
keep on living; outside this category there is only slow starvation. The
struggle for existence is a fight for the proper ration-card, for the
privilege of being used as policeman, propagandist, informer, or
executioner by the masters of the party-machine.

Russian expansion is based not on consent but on force. It is a
military and police affair exclusively, notwithstanding all the
doctrinaire concern with ideological issues, for these, too, perform
police functions, leading, as they do, to the early discovery of
deviations and nascent opposition. It is not the change in the economic
structure the Russians may introduce in Germany that causes concern, but
the political-social structure of their party-state. For the Berliners
the “Iron Curtain” hides no secrets. They have traveled
across it, their relatives are living there, visiting them from time to
time, either legally or illegally. Uncensored letters reach Berlin. They
know that the conditions in city and country do not differ from the
miserable conditions in the Western Zones, that Berlin merely reflects
the whole of the territory that was once Germany. Furthermore, some of
them have been with the Nazi armies in Russia, some returned as
prisoners of war, looking like the inmates of Belsen and Buchenwald in
their last stages of development. Local experiences are not their only
criteria. But because of these experiences all that is Russian takes on
a particularly sinister character.

The immediate situation, however, calls for duplicity. As long as
there is a chance to pledge allegiance to the West, the chance is taken
in the illusory hope that this may influence the decision of the Western
powers to stay in Berlin. Simultaneously, the Russians are supported
wherever necessary, in order not to arouse their wrath, in case the city
should be theirs completely. As there are no escapes for the masses,
their attitudes change with their masters. Democratic Berlin will be
even more “democratic” as soon as the basis for its current
democracy – four power competition – is removed. Meanwhile,
people can do no more than bewail their reluctance to follow suit at the
first great exodus to the Western zones, at the earliest rumors of a
possible Berlin crisis. Now they are trapped, to be sold out if so
convenient, or to be used in a kind of test-case for the larger issues
at stake. Those who do not live by politics will prefer to do as they
are told, no matter who does the telling. The Western-oriented
politicians will, at best, become refugees. In their majority they will
probably crowd still more the already crowded Russian concentration
camps. In any case, German preferences do not count; the present flood
of brave slogans about the Berliners’ valiant refusal to bow to
the new dictatorship is only silly, facing, as Berlin does, an army
judged able, in case of war, of overrunning the whole of Germany within
a few days.

IV

The political issues that seemingly agitate the Berliners
only indicate their own impotence. Their interest in politics is waning.
They would, no doubt, support any power, and any cause, in exchange for
bread and security. They would even try to forget their early
experiences with the Russians. But no bread and no security is
forthcoming. It is the obvious poverty of the Russians, their strange
primitiveness, their crude terroristic methods, their inability to give,
and their need to take where hardly anything is left to take, that makes
the Germans prefer the West. Even if nothing is to be expected from
either side, still there is a greater familiarity with the Western
world. There is also the strong suspicion that the Bolshevik colossus
rests upon feet of clay and that, notwithstanding possible initial
successes, it would not last in a prolonged war. It is not so much
hunger for revenge, as the desire to escape the camp of the defeated,
which motivates the German sympathies – such as they are –
for the West.

However, no real turn to the West is possible. Victors behave as
such; even where no great gains can be realized the victorious gestures
will be maintained. These gestures alone confront the Berliners, removed
as they are from the bargain-counter of international diplomacy, where
special claims historically and otherwise, are framed in terms of coal
and iron. France’s anxiety over a possible German revival is not
shared by her occupation troops, who recognize its baselessness merely
by looking around. No fear-determined brutality accompanies their rule.
Only the French officer behaves as arrogantly in Berlin as did the Nazi
officer in Paris. And in the French desire to demonstrate their
superiority the Germans may recognize their own behavior of better days.
It is not a wise girl who refuses a French soldier a dance in the
Amusement Park; she may very well get her face slapped. One must be
careful in the use of one’s language when facing the French
interrogator, since a real or imagined lack of respect may lead to
painful consequences. In general, however, the French behave toward the
Germans in Berlin as they would if they met them in Paris. In their
persistent enmity they are like all the other Western people who endured
the Nazi occupation. Apparently, they are not as yet finished with the
war and their previously suffered humiliation still looks for
compensation.

Only the British soldiers attempt to make themselves inconspicuous,
provided they are sober, and so long as they are on their own. But they
are forced to do a lot of marching and shouting. Their officers stick to
themselves in Germany as once in India. Barbed wire around their
compounds, toll-gates, and many guards secure their isolation. They
bring their wives and children to Berlin and live their
English-way-of-life as if they were at home. The privates turn to German
girls, which brings them into contact with the population. They are no
longer feared but envied for their better food and happier outlook.

The presence of the French and British is largely ignored, however,
as it is clear that only two great powers determine Berlin’s
status. America means many things to the Berliners. It means relatives
and friendly organizations that send food and clothing. It means coffee
and cigarettes on the black market. It means work and sales. It means a
hamburger with a GI in the Titania Palast, and well-filled
garbage cans for the scavengers. For some it provides the unfounded hope
for social solidarity and for a turn away from the present trend of
totalitarianism and war. For others it means effective opposition to the
East and the certainty of war. For most, however, America is only the
other side of the coin which, however thrown and however it will fall,
spells doom for Europe in general and for Berlin in particular.

Although deeply involved in Germany and Berlin, the occupation army
knows how to keep its distance from the defeated. The isolation of the
Americans is perhaps even more complete than that of the British. They
live their American way-of-life in heavily guarded compounds, comprising
large territories in pleasant natural settings. They have their own
churches, schools, and kindergartens; their own movies, concerts,
lectures, restaurants and stores. No German foot is to set there, except
on missions of service. As distinct from the British, no program of
austerity interferes with the Americans’ pleasures. All less
desirable activities are performed by Germans; Polish guards watch over
them, their unbombed quarters are inaccessible to all but those with
proper papers. Security has been developed both into a great art and a
great science. To judge by the weapons displayed and by the red tape
employed, the life of each American seems to be in constant danger. Even
the Fräuleins need a “social pass” attesting
to their physical health, which was in former times required only of
prostitutes. From another view however, all this isolation seems not at
all queer, for it corresponds to the division of rich and poor that sets
up barriers everywhere. The Americans in Berlin may be looked upon as a
kind of new bourgeoisie, more sharply divided from the slum-dwellers
than the bourgeoisie of old.

Of course, business closes the gap; the coffee from the States must
be sold, valuables which escaped the Russians must be bought, and the
requirements of the elevated social position demand a great amount of
German labor. But work is fantastically cheap. Prior to the currency
reform the weekly pay for any category of work did not exceed the German
Mark equivalent of ten American cigarettes, that is four cents, as the
PX sells the carton for eighty cents.

Nevertheless, the USA feeds part of Berlin. The Americans never tire
of pointing to their deliveries and to the fact that they themselves
manage without German-produced foods. Like the nation as a whole, so her
citizens separately feel like philanthropists, the more to be admired
since it is the former enemy they benefit. The hungry beggars have no
choice but to be grateful, and their excessive submissiveness supports
the conqueror’s illusion of generosity. But there is no Jove for
the Americans. The block-busters are not forgotten. The Americans are
preferred because of the crumbs that fall from their tables and because
they are businesslike people. They buy where others steal, they sell
where others give. And even if the end-result – absolute
impoverishment and complete exploitation – should be the same, the
process to this end, in terms of personal experiences, seems not as
terrible as the lawless past.

American generosity brings a bitter smile to the lips of the
Berliner. He knows quite well what his rations are, and he knows the
black market prices. His bitterness on this point, however, does not
differ from his feelings toward his own countrymen, the farmer for
instance, or toward the Displaced Persons and the Western businessmen
who are engaged in black market activities. He cannot find any
satisfaction in the thought that the black market must find its end as
soon as Germany is emptied of all the valuables that still command a
price on the world-market, for he needs the black market and is by
necessity a part of it. The temporary black market depression in the
wake of the currency-reform did not help the Berliners much, as the
“cold war” prevented them from profiting by the
farmers’ and store-keepers’ new confidence in the freshly
printed money.

The smile released by the propaganda for Democracy, however has no
bitterness at all. It can even turn into a hearty laugh if the question
of the reeducation of the Germans is raised. It is understood, to be
sure, that an army is exempt from democracy, otherwise it could not be
an army, and that an occupation army in particular cannot serve a lesson
in democracy. It is rather the propaganda in newspaper, newsreel, and
radio, that is found so amusing. Every word uttered in favor of
democracy is at once contradicted by the facts of life. It is not the
Nazi education of the past, having lost its dubious meaning long before
the occupation, which explains the Berliners’ obvious reluctance
to take the dealers in democracy seriously; it is the close resemblance
of their present life to that under the Nazi dictatorship. Of course
they are supposed to pay for their sins of the past before being allowed
to enjoy the fullness of the democratic life. The propaganda merely
contains the promise of rewards for present-day good behavior, just as
the flesh-pots of the Nazis had to be earned first by countless
sacrifices and terrible suffering. But for too long the Berliners have
lived on promises, and no longer do they trust in words. They are not
cynical and disillusioned, as the observers say; they are merely sick of
phrases totally unrelated to their actual situation. They do not see a
choice between democracy and dictatorship but merely hope for the lowest
possible degree of the terroristic rule of which they have had so
much.

It is found increasingly difficult to oppose the Nazi observation
that power alone determines who is to rule and live, and who is to be
ruled and destroyed. The anti-Nazi cannot help feeling that
authoritarianism has survived the Nazi rule and that the difference
between oppressor and liberator is rather small. Hate and disgust grows,
and dissipates into despair. It cannot lead to a revival of nationalism,
as the material base for the latter has been bombed away. To get out of
the country, rather than to revive it, is the dream of its ambitious
people. They are no longer able, however, to feel embarrassment over the
long Nazi dictatorship, and they no longer brood over the atrocities
committed. They have grown cold to all but their own misery; and to tell
them, as is often done, that they “only got what they were asking
for,” causes no anger but only tired gestures of resignation.
Whatever they were and whatever they have done, just now they only
desire to live and to be left alone.

V

The desire to be left alone has nothing to do with the
current issues of self-government, national unity, Western federation,
constitutions, or the color of flags. It simply means to be left out of
all activities concerned with such matters. It is the desire to escape
the manipulations of politicians, profiteers, professional ideologists,
and also the pressure of the enchanted minority defending traditional
values. It is a vague longing for a new start, unaffected by the past,
and an activity with no other issues than those of making bread and of
eating it undisturbed. The desire is illusory but it indicates the
prevailing state of mind. To be left alone implies also the wish to
escape the war now in the making. The anti-war attitude is not based on
theories but on direct experience in the bombed cities and on the
battlefields of the world. They have learned to place life above all
those considerations which are evoked in the justification of war. They
are at any rate much too busy trying to keep alive, to be concerned with
the larger problems of world politics. They do not really care about the
changes of uniforms so long as they are able to use the night for
sleep.

Sleep is important, undisturbed sleep of even greater importance, as
the Berliners found out in the restless nights during the war. To go to
bed with the careless assurance that they will rise again in the morning
– this ordinary experience became the greatest desire of the
bombed sleep walkers. To sleep without the constant fear of death meant
more than victory or defeat. Sleep is not just the mind and body at
rest, it shortens the days, it helps against the cold, it is a
substitute for food, preserves energy, and is the hiding place of
misery.

Food is another of the Berliners’ great obsessions, and sleep
overcomes it only partly and temporarily. The individual awake is the
personification of hunger. His mind is occupied with food and the
question how to get it. All other thoughts are secondary and rather
meaningless as long as the primary need remains unsatisfied. The
rationed food is no problem. It is so little, and is sold at stable
prices, so that anyone who works can pay for it. The only question it
arouses is whether to eat it all at once or to distribute it over the
larger part of the week. The answer depends on the individual’s
connections on the black market and on his ability to pay its
prices.

The search for food goes on relentlessly, in and outside of Berlin.
For food anything expendable will be exchanged. For a few pounds of
potatoes great hardships are endured; hours of standing in line for a
railway ticket; the brutal rush for a front place at the gate; the
struggle for a place inside the train or even for hanging on its sides;
the dodging of the police, and the long marches from farm to farm.
Whoever cannot leave the city is busy visiting the grocery stores and
black market centers so as not to be late for the last delivery of bread
or butter. They are always on the run for food, always asking for
information about food, always excited about food, always thinking in
terms of food, and all the while hungry to the bones.

There are many types of hunger, and the Berliners have experienced
them all. There is the hunger for specific commodities that disappear in
times of war. There is the desire for a balanced and pleasant diet,
instead of stuffing the belly with whatever is on hand. There were the
rations during the Hitler regime, which were seldom sufficient, and
became hunger rations toward the end of the war. And then came the
absolute hunger with the collapse of the distribution system during the
siege of Berlin. To survive this period meant to eat whatever was found
on the streets, in the ruins, and during frantic searches in abandoned
stores. Wounded horses were ripped apart as soon as they had fallen.
Most of the people turned butchers; like ant-heaps they hovered over the
carcasses. They hunted for dogs and cats, picking from the asphalt what
was red and bloody, even the innards of men blown to bits by artillery
fire. Only to live through this ordeal, to be alive when the war was
over, to enjoy once more a normal life, and to eat as much as one
liked.

But the hunger remained; it was now organized and categorized. Former
class divisions lost their meaning before the food-commissions, only to
have their illegal comeback on the black market. The law made new
classifications in terms of ration-cards with different numbers of
calories, dividing the population into groups that were to live and
function, Others that were to die off slowly, and still others destined
to die quickly. The counting in calories may be good for the
statistician and it may make easy the sociologist’s comparative
studies in living standards, but to the hungry it is merely the
strangely expressed verdict determining their punishments down to the
death-sentence. But the judges are not fair, the sentences are not
clear. What does it mean, for instance, to speak of the calories of ten
pounds of potatoes if half of them are inedible, or of the
calory-content of one pound of sugar if half of it consists of an
undefinable dust? What does the rationed meat mean, if week after week
no meat at all reaches the market, or if it turns up in the form of
ground intestines mixed with flour, or is substituted by a herring
nobody knows how to fry for lack of fat?

Not even the highest ration covers human needs; it must be
supplemented with black market food and self-raised garden products. All
other categories are only names for various starvation levels. They not
only create new classes but also split the families into feuding units.
The permanence of hunger makes sharing impossible. All sociality
disappears; everyone holds on to his own, or tries to hold on. Some eat
their rations fast, others slowly; envy and hate develop merely by
watching people eat. Some men ruin their health quickly so that their
children may eat, others starve their wives and children to retain their
own strength. Suspicion rules, extras are kept secret, food is eaten in
hiding, dragged into a corner to be devoured in animal-fashion. People
are nervous, ill-willed, ready to quarrel on the slightest pretext and
more than often inclined to kill. Inequality within the setting of
general want is the crudest form of inequality, the most corrupting, the
ugliest, and the most vicious method of control.

If there were a sign that the hunger might end it would lose half of
its terror. But the many years of repeated disappointments extinguished
all hope. Even if the situation should change suddenly, the people would
not believe in its permanence. They would merely eat themselves sick,
would hoard what they could not get down, accumulate enormous quantities
of food; it would take a long time before food would cease to be an
obsession. Abundance, however, occurs only in their dreams; the
recalling of the far-off past seems like a fairy-tale of well being.
Lucky are the children born into this misery. They do not know about
other than the meager rations, the substitutes, the skimmed milk if any,
and the black dry bread. They do not know about candies, chocolates and
fruits, and often refuse these strange things if they are offered to
them. The world of hunger, cold, and want is the only world they know
about. With their toes blue in the sharp wind, they run about laughingly
like other children. With their bare feet in wooden soles they play
their games undisturbed. Their carefree attitude misleads the well-fed
visitors to consider the claims of misery to be grossly exaggerated. The
doctors know differently, of course; they measure, weigh, and keep
records and offer proof that these children are not like other children,
for they weigh less, grow to lesser heights, and die sooner when
sick.

The older children are realists in the world of hunger. Their early
life belonged to Adolf Hitler; no other ideas but those of the Nazis
entered their minds. No one contradicted their childish empty talk.
Theirs was the future – supposedly. And then all this collapsed.
What was good became bad, what was once laudable was now cursed; if no
one dared to oppose their childish arrogance, now no one seemed to care
for them at all. They were either a burden, or a source for additional
food, which they gathered by becoming small-time operators on the black
market. Some no longer had parents; others who had, no longer cared for
them. They needed help which no one could provide; so they tried to help
themselves and sometimes they succeeded.

Disregarding the ever-present propaganda for the prevention of
diseases, girls look for soldiers. They have been raped, why
shouldn’t they sell? What is all this talk about morals anyway? Of
course, syphilis is not worth a pack of cigarettes. But neither is it
good to be healthy and hungry. All is a gamble anyway, the good often
die quicker than the bad. There is no love and no romance, it is all
business on the barter level. There is little prostitution in the old
sense of the word although there are still prostitutes around the
Alexanderplatz. If enough buyers were at hand, prostitution
would be general. Sex is a way of getting food as good as any other, and
often the only way. The escapades of wife and daughter in search of food
are disregarded; love completely disarmed, faces hunger.

The adolescents are frightfully realistic about the new relationship
of hunger and love, of existence and sociality. No values other than
material ones arouse their interest. They are practitioners of the empty
life. The immediate personal gain in terms of things – edible,
usable – is their only concern. Narrow-minded, without scruples,
they turn their cold egotistical eyes upon the world of rubble in search
for plunder left by the plunderers of yesterday. And since so little is
left their selfishness is miserly; not even toward themselves do they
know generosity. They calculate, count, ration, hoard, to secure their
mere existence in spite of everything and everybody.

Hunger shows; it drives the smiles from the faces and tightens the
skin on the bones. The flesh turns yellowish-brown and eyes sink into
their sockets. There is an irritated tired look in the eyes, and sadness
and anger around the mouth. The backs are bent and the steps are unsure
as if in hesitation before the grave. When hunger comes, it appears
publicly only in its early stages and in some cases not at all.
Permanent hunger makes one indifferent, even to the self. The hungry
hide like wounded animals in their caves. Starvation is not a
street-sight; it doesn’t offer itself to curious visitors. The
people on the streets, and particularly on the still comfortable
streets, frequented by the even more comfortable visitors, are still
struggling against starvation with all the weapons at their command. If
they are hungry, they rush about not to get hungrier. They still care
about their appearance, dress up brush, wash and mend not to add moral
humiliation to the physical dilemma. The starving rush no longer. They
do not clutter the streets; they have no shoes to walk in and no reason
to be seen. They stay at home, in their rooms, live in their beds, or in
the wards of hospitals, apathetically awaiting either a miracle or
death. Their peaceful withering away is the triumph of the rationing
system. It is always a minority that succumbs first, to make room for
another minority, recruited from the large mass of people lighting for
their place in the majority. But in the end the various minorities
represent a previous majority. This prospect, however, only intensifies
the struggle for life and gives the hunger-obsession first place in the
minds of the obsessed.

Note on the Text

Shortly after the end of the Second World War Paul
Mattick renewed contacts and correspondence with his previous comrades
from the German/Dutch or Council Communist current of the 30s.

One of these was Reinhold Klingenberg, whom Mattick had
know personally from his youth and who – still living in Berlin
– could tell many details from the actual scene of the German
capital captured and managed by the victorious Great Powers.

In 1948 Mattick himself managed to go to Europe and
visit Berlin. There he met his old contacts and was able also to
participate in some of the gatherings of the Group of International
Socialists, GIS, around Alfred Weiland. From this trip he collected very
detailed information about the situation in Berlin – information
that was afterwards expressed and communicated in this article on the
Obsessions of Berlin.


     From : Marxists.org

Events :
----------------------------------

     Obsessions of Berlin -- Added : March 02, 2021

     Obsessions of Berlin -- Updated : January 08, 2022

About This Textfile :
----------------------------------

     Text file generated from : 
http://revoltlib.com/