Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  In other words, the People’s Colleges were an institution unknown to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and nothing like them existed in the Soviet Union. And so they were destroyed, along with so many other groups that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had never mentioned. In the end, the fate of the Polish Scouts, the Hungarian People’s Colleges, the German Christian Democratic youth, and a vast range of other institutions—mainstream and idiosyncratic, political and apolitical, from shooting clubs and fencing teams to folk-dance troupes and Catholic charities—was the same. The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passions, talents, and free time.

  Chapter 8

  RADIO

  One winter day, I stupidly wrote in the text of the script, “There is a cold atmospheric front approaching us from Russia.” The broadcaster read it aloud … in the morning they phoned me: “Go and see the director.” I went to see the director, and was ushered in right away. “Zalewski,” he told me, “I thought you were more intelligent. From now on, remember that only warm, good things come from the East.” It didn’t seem funny at the time …

  —Andrzej Zalewski, former Polish radio employee1

  “HIER SPRICHT BERLIN.” “Here speaks Berlin.”

  With those words, Berlin radios came back to life. It was May 13, 1945. They had been silent for nearly two weeks, since Admiral Doenitz had announced the death of Adolf Hitler on May 1. Now the German capitulation was complete and the Soviet military administration had taken over the Reichsrundfunk radio building in Masurenallee, in the western half of the city. The building, which had been specially designed for radio broadcasting and had one of the most modern recording studios in Europe, had been saved from destruction by its location outside the center and, more importantly, by the Red Army’s deliberate protection. Even as the rest of Berlin lay in ruins, most of what had been Grossdeutscher Rundfunk’s equipment was still intact, and many of the radio station’s staff were still alive.2 In that sense, the radio station was almost unique among Berlin institutions.

  That first broadcast was only an hour long. It began with the Soviet, American, British, and French national anthems, followed by an address from Marshal Stalin. Listeners then heard the terms of the unconditional surrender read aloud, along with statements from Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin again. News from around the world came next—including information on Himmler’s arrest and plans for war crimes trials—interspersed with Soviet military music. The final part of the broadcast reported on the victory celebrations in Moscow:

  … Millions of Muscovites held their breath and rushed out toward the loudspeakers. When the first melodious bars of the radio station began, more and more came to Red Square, to the Kremlin, and waited for the big news in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. When they finally heard that Hitler’s Germany had unconditionally surrendered, the celebration began … A happy, melodious voice shouted, “Three cheers for the Great Stalin!” This shouting extended across the whole square …3

  Radio was important to Muscovites, listening in their dark apartments. The Red Army assumed, correctly, that it would be important to Germans listening in their dark apartments too. From the moment of their arrival, the Soviet occupiers invested heavily in programming and equipment for the new radio station, and in the days that followed the first broadcast, the new Berlin radio station expanded its repertoire with startling speed. On May 18, the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper played Beethoven (representing German music) and Tchaikovskii (representing Russia) in one of its large recording studios. Two days later, Deutschland Rundfunk again broadcast Beethoven and Tchaikovskii, as well as Strauss and Borodin.4 On May 23, the radio broadcast its first children’s program.5 Listeners could hear periodic news bulletins as well.

  All of this activity was supervised by a group of Soviet officers who administered the new station and functioned as its first censors as well. They controlled in turn a group of Germans, including at least three members of the Ulbricht Group: Hans Mahle, a longtime communist who would later found East German television; Matthäus Klein, a Wehrmacht officer who had been “converted” in the Soviet reeducation camps for German soldiers; and, in a junior capacity, Wolfgang Leonhard, then aged twenty-four. They were soon joined by the twenty-two-year-old Markus Wolf, Leonhard’s Comintern school colleague and East Germany’s future spy master.

  Like the secret policemen of Eastern Europe, the “new” German radio station already had a history before 1945. Though the Russians had not expected to have such an excellent facility immediately available, they had certainly thought to train some of the new radio broadcasters in advance. Both Klein and Mahle had been working for some years in tandem with political propaganda officers of the Red Army, from whose ranks many of the first Soviet cultural officers in Germany would later be drawn. As early as 1941 German-speaking Soviet officers and German communists jointly compiled leaflets that they dropped from airplanes over German lines. In November of that year, they also began to publish several newspapers aimed directly at German POWs.

  After the battle of Stalingrad, in July 1943, the German communists in Moscow founded the National Committee for a Free Germany. They were joined by several POWs who had converted to the Soviet cause. Together, the two groups published a newspaper—edited by Rudolf Herrnstadt, later a prominent East German editor—which they delivered to German territories conquered by the Red Army, as well as to POW camps. They also began active radio broadcasting. At different times different German-language stations transmitted news out of Moscow as well as constant invitations to German troops to lay down their arms and overthrow Hitler. Mahle worked on a number of these stations, including some that pretended to be Nazi stations in order to broadcast disinformation.6 Wolf became an announcer and commentator, a job which brought him into close contact with Walter Ulbricht. His wife, Emmi—the woman who had once forced Leonhard into a humiliating public confession—walked up and down battlefields with a megaphone, shouting at German soldiers to lay down their arms.7

  Though the National Committee was a Soviet front organization, its leaders were very careful not to appear “too communist,” particularly in 1943 and the first half of 1944 when they still hoped a putsch would overthrow Hitler. As noted, its members adopted the black, white, and red flag of imperial Germany instead of the colors of the Weimar Republic or the USSR. A separate “League of German Officers” was also created to work alongside the committee in order to encourage the participation of former Wehrmacht officers who might be squeamish about working directly with German communists.8

  Something of this calculating spirit also infected the new Berlin radio station in the spring of 1945. Klein and Mahle had met many of the POWs, and they knew most Germans would be allergic to anything that seemed too radical or too Soviet. Superficially, they maintained much that was familiar about German radio, including its somewhat ponderous style and its heavy diet of serious culture and classical music. They retained the Nazi-era production staff and even many of the broadcasters, eliminating only those associated with the fiercest Nazi propaganda. As Wolf wrote to his parents in June, “there are six of our men and one officer, and 600 of ‘them’ … sifting out the chaff is possible only to a small degree, since many, really most, are needed.”9 Still, there was never any question about the station’s fundamental political orientation. Nor did any of its leaders doubt that their political views would eventually triumph. Mahle understood that his job was to provide a “mirror” for the masses in an interim period, while they were developing a “democratic self-understanding.” During this process, there would be “divergent voices” and open debates, and of course the media must express them “by publicly carrying out this dispute, the consciousness of the masses will be formed and their democratic self-consciousness will be strengthened.”10

  Not all media, in this early period, followed such clear guidelines, and newspapers in particular provided many different viewpoints. In September 1945 Der Tagesspiegel, an economically lib
eral newspaper, began publishing in Berlin under American auspices, but it remained freely available throughout the city until 1948, as did the conservative Die Welt, which began publication in the British zone of West Germany in 1946. Even within the Soviet zone, all of the legal political parties—the social democrats, Christian democrats, and liberal democrats—were at first allowed to publish their own newspapers on condition that they accept a certain amount of Soviet material.11 These newspapers and others would provide real competition for the most important Soviet-sponsored newspapers, the Tägliche Rundschau, the voice of the Red Army in Berlin, and the Berliner Zeitung, jointly run by Herrnstadt and a Soviet colonel.12 Later the independent papers would run into trouble. Neue Zeit, the Christian Democratic paper, would be punished for political incorrectness by a reduction in its circulation (the authorities controlled all of the paper). Das Volk, the social democrats’ paper, would be merged with the communist party’s newspaper, Deutsche Volkszeitung, and transformed into Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the East German communist party from 1946 until its demise—and also edited, initially, by Herrnstadt.

  But the radio was always different. Even if its biases were subtle and its attitude toward “divergent views” more indulgent than would be the case later on, East German radio was a pro-communist and pro-Soviet monopoly from the very beginning. In later years, Mahle would recall that “the Central Committee’s understanding was that radio must play a direct, operative and organizational role in the transformation of life in Germany,” and in 1945 and 1946 radio was certainly the most accessible form of media.13 Workers, peasants, and people of all kinds listened to it, particularly in a period of paper shortages and distribution glitches, and the communists intended to use it to their advantage.

  Initially they succeeded. In Berlin, the radio immediately had a special status as the only seemingly “German” authority in the city—anyway the only public voice that clearly spoke in German—and indeed in the country as a whole. So high did the radio rank in the public’s esteem that Germans wrote thousands of letters to the station in its first years of existence, asking about everything from Russian foreign policy to the price of potatoes. Some wanted more classical music, others asked for less. There were compliments—one writer liked a program on Hölderlein, another a program on fairy tales—but complaints as well. Indeed, these missives—which often began with the salutation “Dear Radio”—could be brutally frank. Dozens demanded to know when their sons, husbands, and brothers would be returning home from prison camps in the USSR. After a program on that very subject, dozens more complained that the radio had presented an overly rosy portrait of those prisoners, most of whom “come back from Russia miserable and sick.”14

  Following Soviet practice, the station kept close track of all of these letters, counting how many were devoted to particular subjects (232 concerned food shortages in July 1947, for example) and carefully measuring whether the numbers of “negative” letters was rising or falling.15 At least in its first two years of existence, it tried hard to answer its listeners’ most urgent concerns and to convince them that the communist-led future would be better.

  Perhaps the best-known attempt to soft-sell communism to the listening masses was Markus Wolf’s signature program, You Ask, We Answer. For several months, starting in 1945, Wolf provided on-air answers to letters sent in by German listeners. Although the questions he received covered a huge range of subjects, and although they often required factual answers (“What is to become of the Berlin Zoo?”), he almost always supplied an ideological twist as well, just as he had learned to do in the Comintern school in Ufa. During the June 7 broadcast, for example, he responded enthusiastically to a listener who wrote in to say how impressed he was by the energy and spirit of the Red Army, particularly as “we’ve always been taught that in Russia, those who achieve are not valued.” Wolf declared that “all of those who believe the fairy tale about leveling down in the USSR have fallen victim to Goebbels’s propaganda,” and praised the Soviet system, which welcomed the “creativity of the worker.”

  Another listener wanted to know what, other than rationed food, would soon be available to eat in Germany. Wolf first reminded her that “we are not going hungry”—the Germans should on that point feel themselves lucky—then noted that “difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army,” and finally assured her that the “nutrition department of the city council is doing its utmost to import vegetables, salad, and so on, to Berlin.” He even used the question about the zoo to remind listeners of how much things had deteriorated during Hitler’s final days, before promising them that better days were coming: the zoo still had 92 animals, including “an elephant, 18 monkeys, 2 hyenas, 2 young lions, a rhino, 4 exotic bulls, and 7 raccoons.”16

  Wolf’s answers rarely praised communism outright, and he didn’t use Marxist language. But almost all of them praised the Red Army or the Soviet system, both of which were favorably compared to their German counterparts. And all of them explicitly contained the promise that life, which had become unbearable under the Nazis and during the final days of the war, would now quickly improve.

  Other programs took a similar tack. Late in 1945, one broadcaster visited Saxony to investigate the status of “youth” in that region and found many heartening developments. Several former Hitler Youth members told him they were “delighted not to have to salute their leaders.” All professed to be thankful that the war had ended. Schools had not yet reopened and there were many hardships, but the reporter predicted “a free and beautiful future for our youth.” The word “communism” was not mentioned.17 Yet another reporter visited Sachsenhausen and produced a genuinely harrowing account of the final days at the camp. Though the Red Army was thanked profusely at the end, there was nothing especially ideological about that broadcast either.18

  But as time went on, the station’s tone changed. Following the Berlin municipal elections of 1946—which provided the first great blow to the East German communist party—the propaganda became more strident, the announcers’ communist affiliations more obvious. This change was immediately picked up by listeners and reflected in the letters. “Dear Radio,” wrote a listener in 1947, “you have slowly started to become boring. Your evening programs are starting to repeat themselves.” Another complained about the stridency of the language: “One would think one had tuned in to Radio Moscow.”

  In part, the new tone was inspired by the Soviet officers who worked alongside the radio staff. Until 1949 they went on reading (and censoring) preprepared texts before they were broadcast, and they remained deeply involved in the finances of the radio, which in the early days they heavily subsidized. In 1945 and 1946 the radio consulted Soviet officials about hiring decisions, spending decisions, and the coordination of news policy with newspapers.19 There was no secret about any of this involvement: on ceremonial occasions, Mahle paid official obeisance to his Soviet colleagues. It was, he said at a reception they hosted for the radio, “an honor to thank them, especially Marshal Zhukov.” He also reminded his hosts that the radio was “the largest cultural institution in the Soviet zone” and urged them to stay as closely involved as possible: the radio “needs frequent meetings with its friends and powerful sponsors.”20

  But the communist party’s unpopularity among Germans in general, and Berliners in particular, would eventually give Mahle and his German colleagues reasons to worry. By 1946, the radio station would find itself in direct competition with Radio in the American Sector (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, or RIAS), which had livelier news programs and, more importantly, better music. As the station sensed itself losing out in the competition with Western radio, and as East German communists began to recognize that living conditions were improving more rapidly in the Western zones of Germany, the radio’s managers began an internal argument that would last for many years: How to win over the masses?

  Some worried that the station was too elitist, that it was losing its connection to the par
ty, and that it had too little understanding of what “the masses” really wanted to hear. “We demand of the masses that they listen to us,” one radio party member declared during an internal discussion, “but do we listen to them?” The radio should be a “megaphone for the people,” he declared. Many agreed that there should be more “ordinary” voices on the radio and far fewer party speeches. They also knew that the letter writers thought they were boring—and they feared it was true. In a 1948 discussion of how to promote the party’s first “Two-Year Plan,” some broadcasters argued that a simple broadcast of Ulbricht’s speech on the matter wasn’t enough: “In order for listeners not to get bored, the radio must find ways to tell readers about the plan in a lively way.” The best reporters were to be commissioned, and they were to go out and interview people about how the plan would be put into practice. In a later discussion of theatrical performances, radio commissioners agreed that “writers must be able to create lively and genuine scenes from material that is often very dry,” and must learn to combine artistic technique with ideology because “it’s the special task of radio to train more and more such writers.”21

  Others did not agree. As the communist party’s unpopularity deepened, some at the radio, in the party, and in particular in the Soviet headquarters at Karlshorst began to put forth another view. Russian cultural officers observed that the combination of ideology and culture didn’t always work: during one organized “culture week,” they pointed out, people came to hear the music but ignored the lectures.22 They grew suspicious that attempts to lighten ideology would simply water it down. Others felt those long broadcasts of long speeches, however boring, had to stay in the radio’s repertoire. Otherwise how could the people get to know their leaders? Their conclusion: there should be more ideology, not less—on the radio and everywhere else.