Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  Wilderness lay down in the front turret in his RAF flying jacket feeling fraudulent, wondering who had lain here in the war aiming his machine guns at German fighters. Wondering to no particular point about the war that he had gratefully missed. He nodded off, the North Sea had little to captivate. He woke up somewhere over the Frisian Islands, a pleasing chain arcing out across the northern end of the Zuyder Zee.

  About ten minutes out of Hamburg the pilot sent for him.

  “Take the flight engineer’s seat. I’ll give you the Hamburg tour. You’ll get a better handle on the place if you see it from above. Dunno what you’ve heard about the raids we made on Hamburg, but exaggeration is close to impossible.”

  “I’m a cockney,” Wilderness said. “I was in the East End right through the Blitz. I’ve seen enough ruins to last a lifetime.”

  “Not like this you haven’t.”

  And he hadn’t.

  Miller put the Lancaster into a slow curve and took the city at less than a thousand feet.

  London, the East in particular, was dotted with ruined houses. Occasionally a whole terrace might have vanished. One side of the street reduced to rubble, the other still standing, albeit with every window blown in.

  Hamburg looked as though it had been hollowed out with a spoon, like sinking a spoon into ice cream and just scooping out the middle till the sides were scraped clean. Every house was wrecked, every street was wrecked. The flesh had been seared off. All that remained were the bones, the teetering, improbably slender facades of houses and blocks of flats, gutted from attic to cellar, looking as though the first stiff breeze would fold them in like a tower built from playing cards. Nobody lived here. Surely nobody could live here?

  “Did you do this?” Wilderness asked, wondering if Miller might take offence.

  “No, no I didn’t. But if you’re ever in what’s left of Cologne . . . well . . . I did three runs over Cologne. And I think the only thing that can be said for Cologne now is that it got off marginally lighter than Hamburg.”

  The arc Miller had steered took the plane across what appeared to be endless acres of brand new Nissen huts—an instant town, drawn to a line and a grid. It looked grim and heartless—a town, a real town, a town that had “growed,” however ugly, could not look as forbidding as this. They’d sprung up like mushrooms, like the prefabricated houses back home. Bulldoze the ruins of London and build a home in a day.

  They were approaching the edge of Fuhlsbüttel, the base taken over by the RAF. They all but skimmed the roofs of what looked to Wilderness to be a shantytown that fringed the airfield—a mishmash of makeshift shacks and tents. Just when he was thinking there could be nothing worse than a sea of Nissen huts.

  “Nobody could live here you said a minute or two back?” said Miller.

  Wilderness thought he had only thought this and was surprised to find he had uttered it out loud.

  “Quite right, old son. This is where they live. I reckon about a million Hamburgers fled what we did to them, and this is what’s come back. Not many, but it seems like an awful lot sometimes.”

  “Why here? Why right next to a British base?”

  “Because this is where the easy pickings are. Hamburg is rotten, like an overripe fruit. Ready to burst. I shan’t be half glad to see the back of it. Civvy Street here I come.”

  Wilderness didn’t understand the image, or the idea, but asked Miller what he had done in Civvy Street.

  “I was a trader.”

  “Stocks and shares?”

  “Yep. Not going back to that.”

  “I was a trader too. Off a barrow in the Whitechapel Road.”

  Miller hooted with laughter at this.

  “Hang on to your seat son, we’re going down.”

  §67

  An RAF corporal met him by the guardhouse at the Fuhlsbüttel perimeter. He drove a staff car, a commandeered French Citroën given a cursory lick of RAF blue paint, doubtless executed with half a working brain by some poor sod on jankers, and seemed none too pleased to see Wilderness. He stood to attention, scanned him fruitlessly for any sign of rank, and none being visible beneath the sheepskin jacket, looked appalled when Wilderness held up his corner of blue serge with the propeller on it.

  The corporal scowled. Shoulders slackened, elbows and knees abandoned symmetry, the spit and polish on his shoes faded into history. All pretence of deference vanished in an instant. He thrust a small brown envelope at Wilderness.

  Wilderness was getting used to this.

  You’re billeted at the Atlantic Hotel. Meet me. Breakfast 8 a.m. tomorrow. Sleep well. ABJ.

  He might travel to the ends of the earth, to Samarkand or Boggley Wollah only to find Burne-Jones had departed minutes before and left him a small brown envelope and instructions to guide the course of the rest of his life, in Richard Burton’s words—“Pay, pack, and follow.”

  Wilderness made the by now stock response.

  “So the colonel’s not here then?”

  “The fuck should I know. All I know is I got dragged off a winning hand at Tuesday night poker and ordered back to the base double quick to pick up a VIP. And what do I find. I find you. An erk. So that’s what I am now . . . a chauffeur for erks without so much a bit of scrambled egg to their caps. You ain’t even got a cap. What’s so fuckin’ special about you you get a staff car all the fuckin’ way in to fuckin’ ’Amburg?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Wilderness replied. “But I’ll carry my own bag if you like, Corporal.”

  “Fuck you, kid. Get in the car and keep yer gob shut.”

  They got to the Atlantic Hotel in the last of daylight. A blanket of grey falling upon the ash and rubble, not a hint of colour, the temperature plummeting towards freezing.

  The gift of an RAF sheepskin flying jacket notwithstanding, Wilderness wondered if he might regret the decision to make room in his kit bag for his Welsh Guards outfit by ditching his winter woollies. The only words the corporal spoke to Wilderness as they crossed the Hamburg suburbs were, “Three kings, I had. Three kings and a fortnight’s pay riding on ’em.”

  §68

  That the Atlantic Hotel had survived at all was a miracle. It towered over the Alster Lake, with all the hallmarks of a prime target. Its luminous white facade now dulled to a dirty grey, but all that needed was paint. It was battered, pockmarked but far from decrepit.

  Another churlish corporal checked his papers at the door.

  “This is supposed to be officers only.”

  Wilderness said nothing to this. Let the twat think he was Bomber Harris in disguise if he felt like it. Whatever string Burne-Jones had pulled to get him in here mattered more than the two stripes on this bugger’s arm. He took back his papers, hoisted his kit bag with a silent “fuck you.”

  It was as grand as the Ritz—and the night of his cocktail in the Ritz with Merle had been the last, the only time he’d ever set foot in a hotel like this.

  He was on the top floor, almost under the eaves, but the bed was as wide as the Thames and the bathroom not much smaller than Wembley Stadium. He slept the sleep of the just with ne’er a dream nor waking thought of corporals.

  At breakfast he was shown with chilling disdain to the table at which Burne-Jones was already seated.

  “Glad you could make it.”

  One of Burne-Jones’s pointless pleasantries. The pretence he occasionally indulged in that rank was of no import. Of no import in a room full of brass. Wilderness sat down quickly, feeling that heads would start to turn soon if he didn’t.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Am I the only erk billeted in this place?”

  “Quite possibly. The others are all out at Fuhlsbüttel. But I need you here.”

  “Where you can keep an eye on me?”

  Burne-Jones ignored this.

  “Bacon, eggs, and coffee OK? Or are you still a cockney sweet tea man?”

  “You and your little digs, eh? No, I’m a reborn sophisticate. Coffee will be fine. Black, no sugar.”


  Burne-Jones smiled, tucked into his breakfast, and between mouthfuls muttered, “How quickly they grow up.”

  §69

  Out in the street it was, as everyone had predicted to him, bollock freezing. He zipped up his flying jacket, and the look on Burne-Jones’s face told him he had thought better of asking if it was nicked.

  “Let’s take a walk. I need to show you Hamburg.”

  “I got the aerial tour last night.”

  “I need you to see it at ground level. In fact I need you to see Germans.”

  They stepped around a child collecting fag ends in a tin mug.

  The kid looked up, a bright smile on hollow cheeks, a dead light in his blue eyes.

  “He’s your first,” Burne-Jones said. “They call them Kippensammler. Literally fag collector.”

  “Choc, Tommy? Fags, Tommy?”

  Wilderness had half a Mars bar in the pocket of his blouse. He’d eaten the rest on the flight. He held it out to the kid and the kid snatched it out of his hand and ran.

  Wilderness stared after him.

  “You weren’t expecting gratitude, surely?” said Burne-Jones.

  “No,” said Wilderness. “I wasn’t. I was thinking there goes the master race. Blond hair, blue eyes, begging for half a bloody Mars bar.”

  “Jolly good. You’re getting the idea nicely. This will all be about Germans, and that’s an awfully good place to start.”

  He led off into the ruined centre of Hamburg, across St. Georg in the direction of Borgfelde and Hammerbrook—districts that had been razed by the firestorm of 1943.

  “The child, you see, collects fag ends. These he sells to some lucky bugger in possession of a rolling machine who can reassemble the bits our chaps throw away into the semblance of a whole, if not wholesome, fag. A good fag retails at seven or eight marks, but even a roll-up using bog paper will fetch three or four. It’s the new currency. Money doesn’t count in Germany any more.”

  “Like my stamp collection.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “I used to collect stamps when I was a nipper. I had all those pre-Hitler stamps from the Weimar days—had a whole page of perforated 200 Millionen Mark stamps. Wasn’t worth the sheet of bog paper you say these blokes roll their fags in.”

  Burne-Jones wasn’t paying much attention to their surroundings, concentrating on his argument, but it was clear from everything he’d said that he expected Wilderness to, that he expected him to combine what he heard from Burne-Jones with what he saw in the streets. Of course, it wasn’t London, as Miller had said, so much worse. But in common, it seemed to Wilderness, was the extraordinary survival power of church spires. In streets that were but dust and rubble, every so often a church spire would loom up in desolate isolation. Just like St. George’s-in-the-East back in Stepney or St. Anne’s at the bottom end of Wardour Street.

  “Let’s go back a little further. 1919.”

  “The revolution?”

  “Quite, because you won’t understand the Germans if you don’t understand that. They don’t call it the revolution, of course—it wasn’t after all—they call it the “stab-in-the-back”—Hitler’s early speeches are littered with the phrase. It’s what that begat that mattered. The Nazis weren’t the only group to spring up, to cohere in the wake of 1919—if anything they were rather slow off the mark—but there were dozens of other groups, right and left. Spartacists, Steel Helmets, Reichsbanner . . . Freikorps. If you were young and angry in the 1920s you could join a movement. Some of them petered out before the republic fell, some joined the Nazis and so on. I’d say there was a time between the wars when, if you joined, you almost joined a state within a state. The paramilitaries made the Oddfellows or the Freemasons look like a Thursday evening Ping-Pong club in Scunthorpe. If you wanted they provided everything . . . more like life insurance than politics . . . if you wanted you could be married and buried by the movement you joined. It was . . . total. You could live in it.”

  “And?”

  “And you have to ask yourself what it was in the German character that all this appealed to. Good-natured and malicious, Goethe called them. Or was it Nietzsche? No matter . . . it was something in the German soul, in the dungeons and corridors of the German soul. It wasn’t just Nazism. It could have been any faction. The Nazis just came out on top.”

  “I’m not sure I believe in national character. It’s like saying all Irish are piss-artists or all Frenchmen are terrific in bed but we aren’t.”

  “Good point. But everything in its temporal context. Think what these people had been through at the end of the last war. Military defeat. The collapse of the state—something we’ve never experienced. And add to it what they’ve gone through since 1933. A fragile democracy snuffed out in a palace coup. Then twelve years of the Thousand-Year Reich. It’s tempting to be too intellectual about this. To say that there is deracination of the mind if you like. But these people are made by their culture and twice made by the collapse of their culture.”

  “What are you trying to tell me? That Germans aren’t like us?”

  “Yes. Exactly that. Not all Germans and not all Germans forever, but the Germans of now. The post-1945 German isn’t like you or me, and I don’t want you to think he is. That would be a great mistake. Germany and the Germans . . . right now . . . they’re a moral vacuum. And you’re going to be working with them. Millions of them.”

  “What?”

  Wilderness stopped in his tracks. It suited Burne-Jones that they should stop. Another of his illustrations. A chain gang of women—women of all ages from teenage girls to grandmothers—wrapped in rags against the cold, they were passing bricks from person to person. The first one picked a brick out of the rubble, the last, seven or eight pairs of hands later, stacked it on a pallet.

  “Trümmerfrauen,” Burne-Jones said too simply. “Rubble women. They’ve been picking over the bones of Germany’s cities practically since the day the Führer put a bullet through his brain. They get extra rations, and bit by bit we get the streets cleared. And one day Hamburg will get rebuilt. Wasn’t much to look at in the first place, so who knows . . . perhaps they’ll build a better Hamburg. Meanwhile you get an object lesson in the German character.”

  “Obedience?”

  “Determination.”

  Wilderness wondered if Burne-Jones had chosen the turnaround point at which they headed back in the centre or whether it was due to time and chance.

  They had ground to a halt—Burne-Jones had stopped talking, they had both stopped walking—in front of a blitzed terrace. It would not, with a slight shift of style, have looked out of place in London, in Stepney or in Deptford. The whole terrace was roofless and windowless, but as they reached the middle, any assumption that these houses were deserted was swept away. A door creaked open, miraculously still attached to its hinges, and a housewife swept dust and dirt out into the street. And when she had done that she reached behind her for a bucket, got to her knees and began to scrub the step. He’d seen this a thousand times in childhood. Houses that were damp, with flaking plaster and cracked windows, with buddleias sprouting from fractures in the brickwork, with leaking gutters, with . . . with scrubbed, whitened thresholds, the face presented to the world that boldly declared “this is not a slum, this is my home.”

  §70

  They’d crossed the Lombard Bridge between the two Alster Lakes, into Neustadt. Burne-Jones had talked all the way. His potted history of life and death amidst the ruins. Wilderness had listened. In between the spacious paragraphs of Burne-Jones’s narrative he was listening out for the sound of the city. London did not sound like Cambridge, Cambridge did not sound like London, although removed from both he could not have articulated the difference. Hamburg sounded like neither. Hamburg rattled. No, not precise enough. Hamburg clinked. Clinked to the sound or brick hitting brick, stone falling on stone, as the Trümmerfrauen sifted the city. It was the ever-present sound, softer than bells, louder than trickling water. In a couple of hours Wildern
ess had come to regard it as a musical abstraction. Burne-Jones seemed not to hear it at all, but then Burne-Jones seemed not to see the writing on the walls.

  After seeing it half a dozen times, Wilderness pointedly stopped by one painted inscription.

  Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

  There’d been dozens, perhaps hundreds, adorning every wall they’d passed. A public noticeboard for the missing and the dead. The Times personal column for the homeless and desperate. There’d been plenty appealing to Nell—whoever she was.

  “You are paying attention, aren’t you Joe?”

  “Of course. I can repeat your last sentence if you wish. But don’t you wonder who Nell is?”

  Burne-Jones stared at the message. Double-Dutch not German as far as he was concerned.

  “Now you come to mention it, no. I don’t. Now . . . what was I saying?”

  “You were telling me about Germany being in denial. Not a phrase I’d heard before. But while we’re here. Eighty-eight.”

  “What?”

  “The number 88. I see that more often than I see ‘Where’s Nell’ or ‘Find me Hilde.’”

  “Oh. That’s old. They were painting that on the walls about nine months ago. Once they realised that liberation didn’t mean instant transformation into a land of milk and honey and that they might just have to clean up the mess themselves, they started wishing they had Adolf back. Eight is H, the eighth letter of the alphabet. Ergo . . . HH is Heil Hitler. But as I said, they’ve passed that. They now want to pretend he never existed. If you were to believe every German who claimed to have been part of the July 20 conspiracy, then you’d marvel the Reich made it to the twenty-first—the conspirators seem to have had more regiments than Joe Stalin, more divisions than the Pope.”

  They’d reached the Dammtor Bahnhof as big as any in London and suffering from the same glass and iron Paxton pretensions to being a cathedral. The war, the British, had somehow left it intact. Like the Atlantic, frayed and ragged, but intact.