Theater of Cruelty

by Ian Buruma

  Perhaps he went over the top in this hallucinatory epilogue, but if so, he went bravely, gloriously over the top, with all guns blazing. Some of Fassbinder’s visual inventions are brilliant elaborations on Döblin’s own imagination. The religious imagery, for example, already heavily present in the novel, which is, after all, a kind of passion play, is filtered through Fassbinder’s peculiar perspective in the last part of the movie: Biberkopf nailed to a cross, watched by the women he has killed or abandoned; Reinhold wearing a crown of thorns; and one especially striking scene of Frau Bast as the Virgin Mary cradling a puppet of Biberkopf with a Nazi armband. A hint, perhaps, that Biberkopf, once he recovered his sanity, would become a perfectly normal little man, and thus, in Fassbinder’s words, “no doubt become a Nazi.”

  Döblin could not have known quite what would be in store for Germany just a few years after he published his novel. But the specter of Hitlerism is already hovering over the work. Biberkopf and his gang show a total contempt for politics, especially the politics of the Social Democrats, who were hanging on to the last threads of the Weimar Republic. The political meetings, described in the novel, of anarchists and Communists are pregnant with latent violence. Fassbinder did know what happened, of course, and hints at the future by having brown-shirted storm troopers march through the last scenes of Biberkopf’s delirium. We also hear the sounds of the “Horst Wessel Song” clashing with the Socialist “Internationale.” It is fitting that he should end his movie on this note. The novel, in Fassbinder’s words,

  offered a precise characterization of the twenties; for anyone who knows what came of all that, it’s fairly easy to recognize the reasons that made the average German capable of embracing his National Socialism.

  Fassbinder ends his essay, written in 1980, with the hope that more people will read Döblin’s great book—“For the sake of the readers. And for the sake of life.” I share that hope. Those who are not blessed with the good fortune to be able to read the novel in German can still enjoy Fassbinder’s great film. But it is high time for the book to find a new translator brilliant and inventive enough to do justice to the text in English. Of course it is untranslatable, but that is no reason not to try.5

  1 Eugene Jolas, who translated the novel in 1931, was an interesting man, an American who knew James Joyce and was active in modernist circles in Paris. But his translation is inadequate. He chose to use American slang: “Now I getcha, wait a minute, m’boy.…” And so on.

  2 Fassbinder’s essay, written in 1980, is included in Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz (Schirmer/Mosel, 2007), the catalog of a show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, along with an essay by Susan Sontag, “Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1983).

  3 Quoted in the 1965 paperback edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag).

  4 Interview with Hans Günther Pflaum, reprinted in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, edited by Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 47.

  5 Michael Hofmann is translating the book for New York Review Classics.

  5

  THE DESTRUCTION OF GERMANY

  FROM THE COCKPIT of an RAF Lancaster bomber, the approach to a major German city at night in 1943 must have been a bit like entering a brightly lit room stark naked—a moment of total vulnerability. Trapped in the blinding web of searchlights, tossed about by flak explosions, terrified of fighter planes attacking from above, freezing in temperatures well below zero, exhausted through lack of sleep and constant tension, limbs aching from having to sit in the same cramped position for many hours, ears tormented by the screaming engines of a plane fighting for its life, the pilot knew he might be blown to bits at any time. And that is indeed what happened to the more than 55,000 airmen in Bomber Command who lost their lives somewhere over Germany.

  If they were lucky enough to make it through the flak, the bomber crew would have seen something of the inferno they helped to set off. Billows of smoke and flame would reach heights of six thousand meters. Essen, an industrial city in the Ruhr, was described by one bomber pilot as a huge cooking pot on the boil, glowing, even at a distance of more than two hundred kilometers, like a red sunset. Another pilot recalls: “This is what Hell must be like as we Christians imagine it. In that night I became a pacifist.”1

  Now imagine what it must have been like to be stuck in a dark cellar in Hamburg or Bremen, gasping on carbon monoxide and other gases. Gradually the fires outside turn the cellar into an oven, so those who have not already been asphyxiated have to face the firestorms raging with the force of typhoons outside. Firestorms suck the oxygen out of the air, so you cannot breathe or, if you can, the heat will scorch your lungs, or you might die in melting asphalt or drown in a cooking river. By the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, up to 600,000 people had burned, or choked, or boiled to death in these man-made storms.

  Then consider the aftermath, when concentration camp inmates were forced to dig out the charred remains of people in the air raid shelters, whose floors were slippery with finger-size maggots. One of the rare German writers to describe such scenes, Hans Erich Nossack, wrote:

  Rats and flies ruled the city. The rats, bold and fat, frolicked in the streets, but even more disgusting were the flies, huge and iridescent green, flies such as had never been seen before. They swarmed in great clusters on the roads, settled in heaps to copulate on ruined walls, and basked, weary and satiated, on the splinters of windowpanes. When they could no longer fly they crawled after us through the tiniest of cracks, and their buzzing and whirring was the first thing we heard on waking.2

  Same events, different perspectives.

  Were all these victims—the bomber pilot blown up in the sky, the civilian baked to death in a cellar, and the prisoner who had to gather corpses with his bare hands—equal in their suffering? Does death flatten all distinctions? In fact, the story gets more complicated. Wolf Biermann, the singer and poet, was six when the bombs rained on Hammerbrook, a Hamburg working-class district where he lived with his mother, Emma. To escape the flames Emma dragged her boy into the Elbkanal and swam to safety with him clinging to her back. He remembers three men burning “like Heil-Hitler torches,” and seeing a factory roof “fly through the sky like a comet.” But Biermann also knows that in that same year his father was murdered in Auschwitz. As he puts it in his song “The Ballad of Jan Gat”: “I was born in Germany under the yellow star [of David], so we accepted the English bombs as gifts from Heaven.”

  Later in 1943, in an attempt to “Hamburgerize” Berlin, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, also known as “Bomber” or “Butcher” Harris, decided to unleash the full might of Bomber Command on the capital. My father, a Dutch university student who had refused to sign a loyalty oath to the German occupation authorities, had been deported from Holland and forced to work in a factory in east Berlin. The first wave of RAF bombers arrived over his head on a cold November night. A shallow ditch is all the foreign workers had to protect them. Some were killed during that first raid, when the factory received a direct hit. Nonetheless, the next morning my father and his friends were disappointed that the RAF did not follow up immediately with another huge raid to exploit the general disorder.

  As it happens, it took almost two years of daily destruction—the British by night, the Americans by day, and the Soviets firing off their large guns called Stalin Organs—to flatten much of Berlin. “Hamburgerization” (the phrase was Harris’s) was a failure, for this largely nineteenth-century city of sturdy brick buildings and wide boulevards would not burn as easily as older cities with narrow medieval quarters whose wood-beamed houses caught fire instantly. And so the bombing went on and on, leaving my father and millions of others in a state of permanent exhaustion and exposure to the cold and the rats.

  Thomas Mann, exiled in Southern California, declared that the Germans were reaping what they had sowed. This, by and large, has been the preva
lent attitude in the Allied countries, both during and after World War II. After all, it was the Germans who started the destruction of Europe. German bombers had demolished much of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry before the RAF unleashed “strategic bombing” on German civilians. Strategic bombing was also known as “area bombing,” aiming to destroy whole cities rather than specific targets, or “morale bombing,” aiming to break the morale of the civilian population. Already in 1940, three years before Hamburg, Hitler was fantasizing about reducing London to ashes. He told Albert Speer:

  Göring will start fires all over London, fires everywhere, with countless incendiary bombs of an entirely new type.… We can destroy London completely. What will their firemen be able to do once it’s really burning?3

  That the Germans had it coming to them is still good enough reason for English soccer fans to taunt German supporters in football stadiums by stretching their arms en masse in imitation of the bombers that laid waste to their country. And until recently most Germans showed no sign of protest. In his now famous lecture in Zurich, later published in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald took German writers to task for ignoring the destruction of Germany as a subject. This literary silence echoed a more general silence. “The quasi-natural reflex,” Sebald writes, “engendered by feelings of shame and a wish to defy the victors, was to keep quiet and look the other way.” He mentions how in 1946 Stig Dagerman, a Swedish reporter, passed by train through mile after mile of rubble and wilderness that was once a dense part of Hamburg. The train was packed, like all trains in Germany, “but no one looked out of the windows, and he was identified as a foreigner himself because he looked out.” “Later,” says Sebald,

  our vague feelings of shared guilt prevented anyone, including the writers whose task it was to keep the nation’s collective memory alive, from being permitted to remind us of such humiliating images as the incident in the Altmarkt in Dresden, where 6,865 corpses were burned on pyres in February 1945 by an SS detachment which had gained its experience at Treblinka.

  This unarticulated sense of guilt may have played a part, even though the guilty German conscience about the Holocaust only emerged slowly and partially about twenty years after the war. The reason German liberals, scholars as well as artists, have shied away from German victimhood is also political. The bombing of Dresden, for example, has long been a favorite topic of German revanchists and guilt-deniers on the extreme right. A common rhetorical trick in far-right websites and such publications as the National-Zeitung is to turn the language used about Nazi crimes against the Allies. Thus, there is talk of the Allied “Bombenholocaust,” and the annihilation of German civilians, “just because they were Germans.” The figure “six million” is bandied about, as though that were the number of German civilians killed by Allied bombs. “There was also a Holocaust against the Germans,” concludes the National-Zeitung. “Yet in contrast to the denial of Nazi crimes, the denial of this Holocaust against the Germans is not threatened with punishment.” This is not the kind of thing most Germans would wish to be associated with.

  And if Dresden, which even Winston Churchill (rather hypocritically) condemned in hindsight, was easily harnessed to a malign cause, this was all the more true of such horrors as the ethnic cleansing of Germans in Silesia and Sudetenland at the end of the war. And so the very idea of Germans as victims acquired, as Sebald puts it, “an aura of the forbidden,” but not so much, as he argues, because of guilty “voyeurism” as because of the rancid stink of nasty politics. Extremes, of course, provoke other extremes. To counter neo-Nazi demonstrations against the “Allied Holocaust,” the “Anti-fascist Action” group in Berlin gathered in front of the British embassy for a “Thank You England” party, while chanting: “New York, London, or Paris—all love Bomber Harris!”4

  Perhaps the author and former student leader Peter Schneider was right to contest Sebald’s claim by stating that it “was too much to expect [of the postwar generation] that they should break the stubborn silence of the Nazi generation at the same time as they considered the fate of German civilians and refugees.”5 But Sebald was surely right to think that paying such attention was long overdue. It was time to take the subject of German suffering out of the hands of the National-Zeitung and its bitter sympathizers.

  The silence was broken with a bang with the publication of The Fire, by Jörg Friedrich.6 This exhaustive and harrowing account, city by city, month by month, of Germany’s destruction became a best seller in Germany and provoked an endless round of TV discussions, polemics in magazines and newspapers, radio debates, and books, taking one position or another. It was as if Germans, having been mute for so long, needed to talk and talk and talk.

  Friedrich is anything but a revanchist or a Holocaust denier. Quite the opposite: he is a bearded member of Peter Schneider’s 1968 generation who spent much of his journalistic career exposing crimes of the Third Reich and detecting signs of neo-Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany. Perhaps he felt that his work on the Nazis was done, and it was now time to look at the other side. In any case, his study of Allied “morale bombing” is every bit as passionate and filled with righteous indignation as his earlier contributions to such works as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. As a kind of visual companion to The Fire, Friedrich has also published Brandstätten (Sites of Fire), a book of photographs of ruined cities, burned corpses, and other images of what it was like to be at the receiving end of area bombing.7

  Friedrich has been accused by some British commentators, who may or may not have actually read The Fire, of calling Churchill a war criminal and excusing German war crimes by indicting the Allies. In fact, he neither calls Churchill a war criminal nor excuses German crimes. He mentions, albeit in passing, the fact that the Germans were the first to firebomb great cities, namely Warsaw and Rotterdam. He also observes that Göring’s Luftwaffe killed 30,000 British civilians in 1941. And he makes sure the reader knows that “Germany’s ruin was the result of Hitler.” Of course, this leaves the responsibility of other Germans out of the picture. But that is not the subject at hand.

  Friedrich does, however, draw a sharp distinction between bombing cities as a tactic to assist military operations on the ground and bombing as a strategic doctrine to win the war through terror and wholesale destruction. The Germans, he claims, always stuck to the former, while the Allies opted for the latter. Whether this distinction is quite as clear as he claims is open to doubt. The Luftwaffe surely aimed at working-class areas of London during the Blitz as a strategy of terror and not just as a battlefield tactic. But the Allies took this doctrine to its limit, culminating in the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

  Bombing civilians was not in itself a new phenomenon. Friedrich mentions the German Zeppelin raids on Britain in 1915. Five years later Churchill, as air and war minister, decided to put down an uprising in Mesopotamia with bombs. In 1928 Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, who had taken part in those raids against Arabs and Kurds, proposed that the best way to destroy the enemy in future wars was not to attack his military forces directly but to destroy the factories; the water, fuel, and electricity supplies; and the transportation lines that kept those military forces going. This is what the RAF tried to do in the first half of 1941. But its Wellington bombers had little chance of hitting factories or shipyards. It was hard to spot any target except by day or on bright moonlit nights, and even then it was almost impossible to drop bombs with precision. The price of trying was also very costly. More than half the bomber crews lost their lives. Only one bomb in five landed within a five-mile radius of the target. Indiscriminate bombing of city areas was an easier option.

  Already in 1940, when Germany appeared to be invincible, Churchill believed that there was only one sure path to winning the war and that was “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”8 One reason men of Churchill’s generation thought of such desperate measures, apart from their despe
rate situation, was the traumatic legacy of World War I. The idea of another war of attrition with armies butchering one another for years was intolerable. Better to get it over with fast.

  However, the RAF had the wherewithal to attempt this only three years later, by which time the strategy had been fully developed out of a sense of impotence and failure. The main thinker behind it was Air Marshal Charles Portal, who had already had experience of bombing unruly tribesmen in Aden, where he was posted in 1934. Harris, his successor as head of Bomber Command, and another veteran of the bombing in Mesopotamia, was the man who carried it out. What had changed since the idea was first introduced by Trenchard was that war had expanded to all industries, including the workforce itself. Civilians, so it was hoped, would turn against their leaders if they were bombed out of their homes and had no means of survival. Hit them hard enough and their morale would crack. Londoners had already demonstrated that the opposite was true by their show of defiance under German bombing, but Portal dismissed this by claiming that the Germans, unlike the plucky Cockneys, were prone to panic and hysteria.

  In fact, of course, the Germans did not turn against their leaders at all. Instead, as my father observed in Berlin, they pulled together pretty much as the Londoners did. It is impossible to know for sure, but there is little evidence that morale bombing, at least in Germany, made the war any shorter. Lord Zuckerman, himself a proponent during the war of hitting transportation lines and thus a fierce critic of strategic bombing, has argued that the war might even have ended sooner if his tactic had been adopted.9 If so, this was certainly not obvious in 1943, when Albert Speer told Hitler that six more bombings on the scale of Hamburg would bring Germany to its knees.