The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Berlin, November 1946, photographed by Fred Ramage

  Like Vienna, Berlin had been divided into four zones, with the heart of the old city now in the Soviet-occupied sector. The British and Americans made do with the former entertainment and newspaper districts as well as with the leafier and wealthier suburbs such as the Grünewald, where Hilde and Peter now lived. Germany was still a country of rubble and large tranches of Berlin lay in ruins. In her first weeks there, Hilde wandered around the city in disbelief, experiencing again the total destruction she had seen in Frankfurt. In the centre stood the remains of the Chancellery and of the Reichstag, now a vast shell, covered with the scrawls of the Russian soldiers who had first occupied it. Everywhere there were the precarious façades of rows of bombed houses and shops which had still not fallen down or been rebuilt. Even in the central park, the Tiergarten, the trees had been smashed down to jagged stumps and the grass was pock-marked with craters. Dotted around were the remains of statues celebrating Germany’s triumphant past, now lying in distorted attitudes with what Kingsley Martin saw as ‘an astonishingly bizarre effect, strange prehistoric beasts surveying with stony eyes the abomination of desolation around them’.

  The reconstruction of Germany was progressing more slowly than its inhabitants had expected, and there was now a general feeling of despondency amongst the Germans. In an article written for the New Statesman in July 1946, Peter de Mendelssohn described the hopelessness of the ‘hungry, discouraged and disgusted millions’ who had spent the past year toiling away at their ‘mountainous heritage of ruin’. Gradually, the rubble was being cleared, but it would be a long time before enough new buildings could be erected to make the city feel less desolate. And the Allies had failed to solve the catastrophic food situation, which meant that thousands of people were starving. Late 1946 and early 1947 later became known as the ‘hungry winter’ or the ‘winter battle’. Despite tightened rationing in Britain on Germany’s behalf, daily consumption in Berlin was below 1,000 calories. There were mass protests about the food situation throughout the early months of 1947.

  Hilde and Peter lived a colonial life in the leafy suburbs of west Berlin. They had been given a large apartment in a 1930s housing estate and were, according to Hans Flesch-Brunningen, enjoying their ‘satrap days’. Thanks to the black market they had enough food; thanks to the discrepancy between British and German wages they had a household of servants (a cook, a housemaid and a chauffeur). Peter was firm in insisting that they should not use their supply of cigarettes and alcohol to buy black-market consumer goods, but they still lived on a completely different plane from the ordinary Berliners who were starving and begging throughout the city.

  If it was possible for Hilde and Peter to ignore the destitution of the Germans around them and to enjoy themselves, it was largely because of the segregation within districts as well as between zones. Their suburb had been commandeered by the British, so they ended up with more friendly British neighbours than there had been at home in London. Indeed, for Hilde the new gregarious community atmosphere meant that the leafy Berlin suburb was a vast improvement on the equally leafy suburb of Wimbledon, which she had thankfully left behind. From the start, they entertained a wide circle of friends. In January 1947 Hilde reported to her mother that they had hosted a party with forty or fifty guests: ‘Apart from the British, we had a lot of Americans here and two Russian officers, which counts as a triumph.’

  When they were not partying or dining with friends, Hilde and Peter enjoyed the cultural scene that was flourishing amid the ruins. From the moment the war ended, culture had been revived at a faster rate than buildings or food supplies. Although props and scenery had to be carried in wheelbarrows and the theatres were unheated, windowless shells, audiences turned up night after night to makeshift productions of plays, concerts and operas. Visiting Berlin in the spring of 1946, Elizabeth Bowen’s friend Clarissa Churchill commented on the ‘unnaturally elaborate cultural life’ that had been dragged to its feet by the Allies, observing that casts and orchestras had been ‘purged, patched up, and sent onto the stage for the benefit of shivering Germans or stolid Allied soldiery’. By 1947, sustained Anglo-American and Soviet investment in the cultural scene in Berlin had made it impressively professional once again. There were plays and operas at improvised theatres throughout the city and an extensive yearly season at the prestigious Deutsches Theater, which had survived the bombing. During the spring of 1947 Hilde herself was involved in helping to commission a production of her Viennese friend Hans Weigel’s Barabas at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where Brecht’s plays were often performed.

  In a 1948 almanac celebrating the theatre in Berlin, Hilde Spiel praised the obsession with the stage in the ruined capital.

  In the midst of the most desolate metropolis in the world, among grey and bleached skeletons of houses, theatres of a splendour such as a Londoner might seek in vain at home still rise, and are rising again.

  What was the visitor to think? Were these façades intended to simulate a healthy bourgeois life that the Germans could imitate? No. In fact they were reality itself; the only reality that remained.

  The scenery of the theatre has replaced life . . . Here alone there is still eating and drinking, carefree love and needless death, strutting and warbling, cajoling, laughing . . . And the theatre has not been slow to recognise its own power.

  Her enthusiasm for the theatre brought Hilde into troubling contact with the Germans who had compromised with the Nazi regime. In 1945, she had dismissed the ease with which Peter socialised with the Germans, remembering those dark years of ‘martyrdom, hunger, annihilation’ and resisting the easy fraternisation over Caucasian wine. In fact Peter remained less forgiving of his compatriots than did many of his British colleagues. In 1946 he told Hilde that the Allies had decided, if not to forgive and forget, then at least to ignore. ‘Otherwise we can never again live together.’ At the time he was confused by this solution, maintaining his ‘personal disappointment or rather disgust with the Germans, and I mean the so called good, intelligent and intellectual Germans’.

  Meeting an old friend who asked him what he planned to do to aid his former acquaintances, Peter announced that he had no interest in helping the Germans, good or bad. ‘I came here,’ he said coldly, ‘to do my own tiny little share to make sure that this people which has murdered my friends, driven my family into despair, devastated the world I loved, ruined the civilization for which I live and blown my windows and walls in for no reason at all, is from now on going to leave me and my folks in peace once and for all.’ He was particularly irritated when, in August 1945, he heard Germans saying how much they liked the rival newspapers produced by Hilde’s former suitor Hans Habe, on the grounds that they did not contain the usual stories of war guilt, concentration camps and general German atrocities, which they thought were in poor taste. ‘What can one do in the face of such an attitude?’ he asked Hilde at the time. ‘Employ brute force, kick the shit out of the bastards, as the Americans say, bash their goddam krautheads in, or what?’

  Almost two years on, both Hilde and Peter remained just as irritated by the lack of compunction displayed by those Germans who had stayed. As an Austrian and a German, they found it easier than the British dispassionately to condemn the Germans for succumbing to a regime they themselves had resisted. They were less bothered than many of their British acquaintances by the oddness of arriving to reconstruct a country they had spent the last five years bombing; they felt entitled to be self-righteous about supporting the right side in the war and arriving in Germany as British subjects. But Hilde Spiel wrote in her autobiography that in this period she became aware ‘how many shades and gradations of thought and behaviour there had been toward the Nazi regime on the part of the intellectuals who had remained in Germany’. Gradually, both she and Peter became more accepting. Looking around in the street she found that most Berliners looked trustworthy. And at parties she found herself engaging in friendly conversation
s with Nazi actors such as Gustaf Gründgens and Käthe Dorsch (who had once had a good relationship with Göring), conversations which she later looked back on with shame.

  Hilde’s life in Berlin was interrupted by trips abroad. There were returns to both her homes: to Vienna in March, and London in May. ‘London is so beautiful, it breaks my heart to have to leave it again,’ she wrote in her diary after a few days of seeing friends and rediscovering England in the spring. In June Hilde and Peter went to Zurich for the second congress of International PEN since the war, accompanied by their daughter Christine, whom Hilde was aware she had neglected since arriving in Berlin, gratefully relinquishing her to the care of their nanny. At the congress they saw old friends such as Klaus Mann and became acquainted with more of the European intelligentsia. Christine played on a swing where Stephen Spender was flirting with Darina Laracy, wife of the Italian writer Ignazio Silone. In the summer Hilde had another solitary adventure, visiting her old friend Hansi (the model for Lisa in Lisa’s Room) in Rome. There she saw Alberto Moravia for the first time since their pre-war romance, but she was less impressed by his cold charm than she had been ten years earlier. Instead, she was beguiled by the more insistent attentions of a young Italian count whom she referred to in her autobiography as Luciano della P. Encouraged by Hansi, she spent her final night with him.

  Returning to Berlin, Hilde became more involved in the theatrical scene. Previously she had been working as a freelance journalist writing articles about English themes for the German newspapers and magazines. Now, in August, Peter became the editor of a separate Berlin edition of Die Welt and Hilde was appointed as the drama critic. This involved going to first nights in both the western and eastern sectors of Berlin. These were glamorous affairs and Hilde commissioned gowns from Berlin dressmakers, using material sent by her mother, who bought it with her clothing coupons in London.

  The transformation Hilde had longed for during her lonely months as a housewife in Wimbledon was now complete. She was a source of influence and admiration; as theatre critic of one of the city’s major newspapers she could make or break reputations. She boasted to her mother that she had become ‘one of the foremost highbrows and am read everywhere and complimented by all’. Peter had been informed by his cultural editor that Hilde was the most famous woman in Berlin and, she told Mimi, ‘they are even calling me beautiful. They must have a strange idea of beauty here.’

  Certainly, when Kingsley Martin visited in November their roles had shifted. He was no longer the gracious host bestowing a favour on exiled German visitors as he had been in London. He was now grateful to be escorted around Berlin by one of its most influential women, and for her part Hilde was happy to spend five days looking after him and introducing him to people. She was, she later wrote, ‘taken as ever with his charm and vitality and the bold outline of his extraordinary profile’. ‘Let’s be sensible,’ he said with a sigh, when she collected him from his hotel in pouring rain to take him to the airport.

  Martin was in Berlin partly to observe the increasing tension between the Western Allies and the Russians. He spent much of his time in discussion with prominent German politicians and with leading representatives of the occupying forces. By this point, relations between the Eastern and Western occupiers were starting to sour as Cold War divisions became entrenched. Dialogue between the powers had been difficult and hostile from the start. When he was first posted to Berlin Peter wrote to Hilde that there were tensions between the Soviet propaganda ‘with its blunt slogans, its blatant and unashamed platitudes’ and the language of the other Allies. Journalists, he said, were already drawing parallels between the censorship of the Russians and that of the Nazi regime. However, Peter and Hilde did their best to foster consensus. Hilde was particularly proud that Russians had attended that first party they hosted in Berlin in January 1947. ‘They hardly ever accept private invitations, and it made a great impression on everyone that they accepted ours,’ she told her mother. ‘I am fascinated by them, as is Peter, and very pleased that they are not shy with us. They drank quite a lot and must have had a good time, or they would not have stayed the whole evening.’

  Peter’s British employers encouraged him in attempts to bring together the British and the Russians. They did not expect open conversation between the two sides, but felt that if the British and Russians could simply be present in the same places, hostility might be tempered. Personally, Hilde was loyal to her earlier ideals of Russia and the Russians and so was keen to promote understanding between the two camps. She had grown up on Russian novels and plays. Seeing a stage adaptation of Crime and Punishment in London just before moving to Berlin she wrote romantically to Peter that ‘nothing goes to one’s heart so much, nothing moves one more in one’s inner being than the Russians’.

  The British had been encouraged to think favourably about the Russians during the later stages of the war. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Churchill announced to Britain that ‘Russia’s danger is our danger’. In Vienna in February 1946, hearing tales of Soviet atrocities, Hilde thought back to that moment when she heard in England that Hitler had marched into Russia and she knew that the Allies had a chance of winning the war. ‘The Red Army saved my life. How can I condemn it lock, stock and barrel, because it repays evil with evil in enemy country?’ She had abandoned the youthful enthusiasm for Communism she had evinced in the 1920s, but although she had heard about the Moscow show trials she had not heard about the destruction of the kulaks. If fascism was the incarnation of evil, Hilde saw Communism as merely a fallen angel.

  In March 1946 Winston Churchill had announced that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. But Hilde looked back on 1947 as the year before the entrenched nature of the Cold War became apparent. At least at the time, she and her circle still believed that conflict between the two opposing governments and ideologies could be avoided simply through human contact between representatives from each side. Nonetheless, this was becoming harder and harder by November 1947. ‘It is very difficult to keep up one’s hopes of reaching an understanding with the Russians,’ Hilde wrote to her mother in December. ‘Although war is to be avoided at all costs, we can see here that the Russians are really doing everything possible to forfeit the goodwill of their patrons. This is really very sad.’

  It was looking possible that the Western Allies would have to withdraw from Berlin. Hilde and Peter carried on their daily lives, attempting to pretend that nothing had changed. She continued to attend first nights in the eastern sector. But in January 1948 the theatre itself was the setting for an outbreak of East–West tensions, when the French staged a production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1943 play, Les Mouches (The Flies), an existentialist adaptation of the Electra myth. Sartre himself was expected to attend, and in the lead-up to the first night tickets went for extortionate prices on the black market. The Soviet-controlled press ran a hate campaign against the ‘anti-humanism’ of the play, while the French-controlled press proclaimed Sartre a moralist and existentialism a new form of humanist ethics. In the theatre – which, after all, was according to Spiel the only reality that still remained – it was becoming evident that it was going to be hard to avoid open hostility.

  Elsewhere in Europe, it was easier to escape both memories of the Second World War and the reality of post-war international conflict. Arriving in Spain to research a travel book in the summer of 1947, Rose Macaulay found the same light and ease that she had experienced in Portugal during the war. Spain was struggling economically and politically. Franco’s authoritarian fascist government had been ostracised by the Western Allies following a UN resolution condemning the regime. As a result, the country faced severe food shortages and potential political unrest. Writing to her sister Jean, Rose was aware that the Spanish government was nervous about being attacked; there were coastal places where the British could pass through but not stay overnight. She was also disturbed by the outward reminders of fascism, visiting the police station in Barcelona where pris
oners were beaten to extricate confessions. But, touring the Mediterranean coast, she generally remained happily oblivious of the country’s contemporary politics, immersing herself in the more distant past.

  It was during this trip to Spain and Portugal that Rose Macaulay began to find in ruins a form of possible consolation. She had been wandering obsessively through the bomb sites of London since her own flat was bombed in 1941, but so far she had found only confirmation of her own bleak state of mind. Cecil Beaton may have discovered aesthetic beauty in the still smouldering ashes of a frightful wasteland, but Macaulay would write in The Pleasure of Ruins that the debris left by the Second World War was too recent to be consolatory. Now in Spain she was soothed by older ruins and by the sense that cities and buildings were capable of recovering the beauty they had lost. She was learning to aestheticise ruins as Beaton, Greene and Yorke had aestheticised both fire and rubble during the war itself. Reporting on her Spanish trip to her cousin Jean that September, Rose lovingly described the profusion of age-old buildings, ‘unheralded and unordered’, mouldering into faster ruin.

  Of course this has drawbacks as well as charms – but to come on a deserted ruin of an abbey in the mountains, or some wonderful Cartuja [Carthusian monastery] with the grass and trees and weeds thrusting up through the broken arches, untended and luxuriant in hot sunshine . . gives one a breath-taking shock, as of magic, or of a sudden step back into other centuries.

  In Fabled Shore, the published account of her trip, she mentions the ruins of the town of Figueras, which was destroyed by Saracens and then burnt down in several later disasters and attacks. Each time, ‘with its indefatigable powers of recuperation, Figueras built itself and its church up again’. She then gives an account of Malaga, which has been troubled by ‘discontented Moriscos in the sixteenth century, discontented liberals in the nineteenth, angry nationalist rebels in 1937’ but has still made a good recovery. Debris, she says – and she would know – is seldom: