The Two Berlins & Hamburg

...This was not merely my imagination, I was sure...

...In fact, the whole scene looked like an artificial copy of some contemporary Soviet Russian life which lay somewhere between 1884 and 1984...

...For example, "auseinandertanzen" (literally "dancing apart") was always being stopped in East Berlin, and throughout the Soviet Zone there was now the ludicrous "sixty-forty" rule: it was laid down that the playing of any band must consist of at least 40 per cent of " cool " Communist jazz and not more than 60 per cent of " h o t " Western music...

...The social outlook in Germany has become much more flexible, and this certainly helped to achieve the Wirtschaftswunder...

...My melancholy grew...

...But these conversations only went on up to the currency reform of 1948—and then they stopped...

...by having colored bearers carry his equipment while he himself scrambled up unburdened...

...Why does Khrushchev not play golf...

...But this very success has had another side...

...And thirdly—the historical irony: Among the hostile Western influences which Lenin and his successors tried to ban, they had surely never counted on the mocking anarchic folk music which had been invented by the oppressed Negroes of New Orleans and had already swept through the chinks in their curtain...

...Yet the actors tried hard and in Ellen Tiedtke had a splendid little actress and singer...

...It was no good my telling myself that it did not matter, that the women could be, and were, indifferent to sales, because the Communist State had simply decreed that there should be a kiosk on each platform and that was that...

...I observed that one of these stated: "We support the Candidates of the National Front," and that, its lettering was garlanded with bust bodices and bosomy chemises entitled "Garnitur Charmeuse...

...If I were Khrushchev, I reflected, I would see to it that the vodka at the Caf...

...the playing of the small orchestra seemed perfunctory: even the waiters did not look quite right...

...The decor was a dullish beige...

...On each almost deserted platform, a woman sat in a glass newspaper kiosk...

...but as soon as the wit was directed against the Communist Tulers, both the actors and audience suddenly sprang to life and became gay and human and ordinary...

...Budapest in the Stalinallee, I asked a bystander who was waiting anxiously for the cab to help me change a note...

...Around me were the same informally dressed and confident young people (incidentally, hardly drinking) with the same dedicated look on the faces of the dancers and intent, scholarly expression on the faces of those who stood and listened to the rhythm...

...It seemed an ideal book over which to fall asleep...

...I noted that he had a harrassed expression and carried a heavy briefcase...

...But then the atmosphere in the Caf...

...Red brick under rainy sky, suburban semi-detached villas, some flaking terrace houses with occasional basements, smoke-darkened railway bridges across shopping streets, glimpses of docks, the lights of the Reeperbahn like a dream of what the Charing Cross Road would like to be...

...and entertainment district near the EastWest border, there was a little more public life...

...The tone of the novel was consistently authoritarian...

...From Altona, seen across the Elbe, the panorama of Hamburg's docks and shipyards sprawling in the mist was a Turner landscape...

...There'll be no East and there'll be no West, Nor border nor breed nor birth, When East is East and West is East And the Reds take over the earth...

...The Quartier du Jazz, which was a favorite haunt for students interested in very superior jazz, lay only a few minutes' walk from the no-man's land between Berlin West and East, but as I looked at the band and the densely crowded floor I felt the geographic location did not matter— I might equally have been at the Caveau de la Huchette in Paris or Humphrey Lyttleton's Oxford Street club...

...But danger threatened from Venus, so that a space-ship, commanded by Russian and Chinese scientists, had to set out...

...There was even one single daring joke: " FIRST VOICE : Eisenhower' plays golf...

...The hero and spaceship pilot was called Hannibal Smith...

...Back in the Stalinallee, impressive street illuminations were now ablaze, but, after a. moment of puzzling I saw what was wrong: there were far too few pedestrians and cars to be seen at this early evening hour...

...It's I who ought to thank you...

...against the block warden, who answered complaints against the lack of lighting on the stairs by making speeches about a brighter future ahead and then himself tumbled down the unlit steps...

...DEEP VOICE WITH HEAVY RUSSIAN ACCENT : Soviet lawns have no holes...

...For at that decisive moment the economic wheels began to turn again, faster and faster, and gradually everybody one knew had a new job and became better off and busier —and stopped talking...

...He cut my apologies short...

...Immediately after the war...

...From the past of 1884 came the bourgeois dullness of the place, while the sense of being under observation, the strained expressions on the faces of ,the people at the tables, mirrored the mood of 1984...

...Indeed, it was hard to believe that to defend this way of life, students should be sentenced to years of hard labor, as had just happened at Jena...

...Not merely in such externals as cars, glossy magazines, new teen-age life and weekend informality...

...By contrast with the lavish equipment of the Communist theaters, the auditorium and the scenery were rather shabby...

...The West German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, is today as good as complete...

...As I watched the unconcerned youngsters at the Quartier du Jazz on the edge of the Communist world, several thoughts occurred to me...

...In the end I could bear it no longer and bought something, a Communist space-fiction novel which I read when safely back in bed in West Berlin...

...For, quite apart from the Russians in the East Zone and rearmament and all that, one consequence of our American-style economic miracle is that by now we also have a full-blown Americanstyle middlebrow culture...

...The young man from East Berlin had a knowledge of Western bands and recordings which seemed to me astonishing...

...To get a taxi at this spot and at this hour...

...Communist East Berlin, I found, defeats the attempt of getting the feel of a new town by strolling at random...

...In this atmosphere, which I could not really grasp, I found my thoughts straying...

...At the Strausberger Platz at the end of the Stalinallee, standing among tall apartment blocks with almost all their windows lit, I saw that, apart from a few figures in the distance, I was the only pedestrian in the square —I felt as if I were in the midst of an eerie Hollywood set...

...But the sense of strangeness could not be shaken off...

...The action was laid in the year 2003, when "the last capitalist state had been eliminated on earth" and humanity lived in untroubled peace...

...It seems to be in the nature of life that the historical problems of one generation are never solved by another—they are wryly bypassed...

...As an old friend told me: "One has to admit that the Americans contributed many positive values to German life—-sum them up under the misused old word 'democracy' which yet stands for something...

...First, that whereas it was so difficult to get any other ideas across to young Russians, the international idiom of jazz had penetrated the Iron Curtain with utter ease...

...The title was The Dead Planet...

...HAMBURG: After the oppressive Prussian regularity of the streets of Berlin, Hamburg met me with a comforting sense of the familiar...

...Richard Armour...

...There can be few more desolate places than subway stations in the Communist sector of Berlin around ten at night...

...Budapest, one of two such establishments designed to provide restaurant life for the upper hierarchy of Communist East Berlin, was not one to encourage such questioning...

...The songs and jokes of the first half of the program were directed against the West: against Dulles, Adenauer, Wall Street, the Western H-bomb...

...What unexpected luck...

...The badly printed East Berlin newspapers on display carried identical headlines: the rest of the stock consisted of a few books and children's comics of repellent design...

...It was all good-natured, and seemed familiar—indeed, rather like reading the first half of the Neiv Statesman...

...After the interval came a sudden change: now the shafts were directed against local Communist bureaucrats, e.g...

...of the Communist citizens at these tables, half a dozen might, within a year, have escaped to the West and another half a dozen be in political trouble...

...In Die Distel, the East Berlin cabaret—'the only one of its kind and maintained as a safety valve for self-criticism—I was lucky to get one of the last seats...

...On arrival they found Venus a dead planet: the imperialist-minded beings who earlier on had threatened Earth had in the interval fortunately blown each other to hits with nuclear weapons...

...The sense of strangeness grew as within a couple of hundred yards round the back of the apartment blocks, I came upon bombed ruins...

...Youth club bands would get through the quota of "Eastern" music on off evenings so that on a big Saturday or Sunday night they could play the " hot " Western jazz which really thrilled them...

...Yet don't condemn us too easily...

...To report truthfully, as long as the performance sounded like the first half of the New Statesman, the atmosphere in the cabaret was on the glum side...

...Budapest simply did not look quite real...

...Nor, for instance, did I find out who the young woman was who sat by herself in the Caf...

...And while one can readily get Germans to shake their heads over the elusive spiritual and cultural emptiness of the new society, they have as a rule few ideas to offer...

...If material goods are the criterion, there has probably never been a machine as efficient in providing them as West Germany's free enterprise capitalism of the decade 1948-58...

...Budapest, wearing a red sack dress, with shoulder-length fair hair and a long cigarette holder, looking out of keeping with the surroundings...

...Budapest was at least remotely of the quality of that served to guests in Moscow...

...As you know well enough" He disappeared into the dusk, but what I was supposed to know well enough I never discovered...

...The problem how to go in for soul-searching in the midst of such a middlebrow culture where such questions just aren't asked, is one to which I haven't an answer...

...But what will happen to West Berlin If we give up and go, Is something it would surely seem That any child should know...

...They had come across for the evening because the music was better and because their own authorities had put up all kinds of obnoxious rules...

...It was time to descend into the subway...

...for before I could summon the initiative to introduce myself as a visiting journalist and ask questions, she got up and left...

...At the first glance, the Caf...

...No one ever bought anything...

...They were essentially non-political and regarded their Communist authorities rather as a particularly stupid "establishment...

...WEST BERLIN : The girl with the blonde pony-tail at the microphone at the crowded Quartier du Jazz in West Berlin was Leonore Brueckner, a young actress from Leipzig, in the Soviet Zone, who had come across some time ago and was now singing a blues song with what seemed to my inexpert ear the authentic intonation of the deep South...

...But this tallied with reports one read from behind the Iron Curtain, of the fierce vogue for highbrow jazz in Poland, where it was permitted, and of the way students December 22, 1958 1» in Soviet Russia took tape recordings of Western jazz broadcasts and of the fantastic trade in these "black tapes" which had developed...

...Its pride, the Stalinallee, pompously broad, with clumsy ninestory blocks of flats, oddly Russian in style and all oppressively identical, did not conform to a period I knew...

...Looking at the endless forest of cranes, sheds and smoking funnels it was as hard as among the twinkling lights on the Alster to remember that Hamburg had not so long ago been the scene of the biggest air raids before Hiroshima...

...Having mistaken my direction, I had to change several times and wait for connections...

...To anyone who remembers earlier days, German life of today has a striking American coloration...

...On reflection, I decided that this was not meant to be a subtle joke...

...A group of young people who had come over from the East sector and were ready to talk freely fitted into the pattern...

...After all...

...The picture of the Quartier du Jazz drove home the lesson that in this specialist world there wrere only two nations, the young and the old, the young who responded immediately to this music and the old who did not...

...BALLAD OF BERLIN Oh, East Berlin is East Berlin And West Berlin is West, And how the twain first met, I doubt That Kipling could have guessed...

...He was the grandson of an American Negro Communist who had fled to the Soviet Union in 1948 and for sport he climbed Everest, but not in the manner of the imperialist British, i.e...

...There are plenty of ways of getting round this," a cheerful young informant told me...

...the patrons looked like middle-class Germans, but unnaturally subdued...

...The result of this silence is our unbewaeltigte Vergangenheit, the past we haven't yet coped with, the Nazi horror in our history which by now is almost never talked about, not even among old Socialists and anti-Nazis...

...And straight out of 1984 came the fact that every single shop-window had to display a large political slogan...

...As against the foil of Hannibal Smith's impulsiveness (the American s t r a i n ! ), the Russian heads of the expedition were invariably wise and calm, and proved right on every occasion...

...Or again, if there had to be an appallingly bad statue of Stalin in the center of the Allee, surely this ought to be cleaned and washed more often...

...From a distance, the shops run by the Communist State Trading Organization had looked colorful, but on a closer look their windows, too, had an already unfamiliar look that of wartime austerity, of few goods and indifferent display...

...In the small Communist caf...

...There was a whiff of salt in the air, a sense of the North Sea and the British shores on the other side...

...You've seen yourself how three quarters of our books and films and plays are translations from the English...

...Secondly, were the Communist rulers right—as I rather thought they were—in regarding "hot" jazz as an idiom that was in essence revolutionary, destructive of their elderly dogma and censorship...

...It's not only that many people dislike facing the past —of course they do—but that we, that is, all of us in Germany, are simply travelling in a different direction...

...I remember, we used to have endless conversations about the roots of Nazism and the ways to a spiritual regeneration of Germany...

...He laughed ironically...