Thrilling Cities
Page 15
Antony Terry drives ten thousand miles a year on the autobahns and, referring to our M1 and our hunger for more super highways, he doubted whether such panaceas would reduce our accident rate. These huge roads, he said, create their own type of accident and, by building them, you only replace one kind of accident with another kind. People get semi-hypnotized and doze off at the wheel.
After a couple more ‘boiler-makers’ we went on to the Ritz, one of the half-dozen first-class restaurants in Berlin, with a menu in eight languages. There, over a wonderful dinner, Terry passed on the gossip of the day – how the famous publishing house of Ullstein had just been bought by Springers, the great post-war publishing phenomenon; of the Reptilienfonds, the reptile or slush fund of the West German ministries for what is comprehensively known as ‘Middle Eastern good relations’ – the providing of suitable feminine entertainment for visiting heads of minor states; of the fact that there was no beatnik movement in Germany because there were now no traditions to revolt against; of the small importance of the Halbstarke, Zazous, or teddy boys in Germany; of the complete standstill in all literary and artistic progress of any kind since Hitler because of the absence of Jews, the former leaven in the heavy German bread, and of the greatly exaggerated hullabaloo recently created, largely by newspapers wanting ‘a story’, about the resurgence of Nazism and anti-Semitism.
And so for a brief tour, which ended at four o’clock in the morning, of Berlin night life.
It is certainly not what it used to be in Berlin, though there is still the emphasis on transvestism – men dressing up as women, and vice versa – which used to be such a feature of pre-war Berlin. Now, at the Eldorado, for instance, and the Eden (where a home-made bomb went off, wounding three guests, ten minutes after we had left) some of the ‘women’ are most bizarre. The one I particularly took to, a middle-aged flower-seller such as you might see sitting beside her basket of roses in Piccadilly Circus, is known as the ‘Blumenfeldwebel’. ‘She’ had been a corporal in a Panzer division and has an astonishing range of Berlin/Cockney repartee. Some time ago, when a famous English film producer was working in Berlin, she attached herself so closely to him that she was finally given a walk-on part in the film, and all she was interested in now was to try and get over to England to get another job from him. Another startlingly beautiful ‘woman’ had been an under-officer in charge of a military clothing store; but the most startling was ‘Ricky Renee’, an American aged twenty-five who was born in Miami, had only a modest success as a male tap-dancer and decided to turn ‘woman’. He has been so sensational in his new role that he even appeared as a woman in a strip-tease act in the Italian film II Mondo di Notte.
The ‘waitresses’ were most ingenious at serving one while somehow keeping their huge hands and feet out of sight and modulating the deep tones of their voices when they took your order, but otherwise they were buttressed, bewigged and made-up as extremely handsome and decorous ‘ladies’.
Two of the other night-clubs were also splendidly Germanic – the famous Resi, a vast hall where nothing happens except that there are dial telephones on the tables so that you can communicate with any girl who takes your fancy round the room, and a ‘cabaret’ which consists, uniquely, of a giant waterworks which shoots dancing jets of coloured water into the air to the accompaniment of the ‘Dance of the Bumblebee’.
The other night-club, even less inspiring, consisted of a smallish area with a sawdust ring in the centre containing two plump and docile horses. In between drinks, one was permitted to mount a horse and trot it a dozen times round the ring – a remarkable way to pass an evening.
Espionage is one of the main industries of Berlin – East and West – and I spent most of one day exploring the fringes – the centre is far too well protected – of the great spy battle of which Berlin has been the battlefield since the end of the war. I concentrated on one great independent operator – a notorious middle-man who sells his ‘informations’ for whatever sum whichever of the Western secret services will pay. I will call him O. He lives in the leafy suburbs in a monstrous Hansel and Gretel villa whose innocence is only belied by the spy-hole in the front door. He is a small, plump, amused man (all such agents have a humorous, ironical attitude towards what they describe as ‘the game’) with the perfect command of languages that comes probably from a Slav origin. He chain-smoked Muratti filter cigarettes with the first gold tips I have seen for years. He was as apparently open-handed and ready to gossip as any civilized man who has plenty of small ‘informations’ which sound secret but are not, and he correctly assumed that I would be tactful and not probe too deeply behind the gossip.
‘You must understand that it is all getting so much more difficult, Mr Fleming. My friends [spy-talk for his Western employers] are more selective and the opposition’s security is now very good. There have been fifteen years to indoctrinate the Eastern Sector in security and now anything which is important, any secret, is cut up into slices – the tactics, location, technique, finance, personnel behind, let us say, a chain of missile bases – and possession of one slice of knowledge in each of those departments of knowledge is confined to a small cell of people – only those who have to be in the know. This makes for confusion and bad liaison on the project, since there is bound to be over-lapping between these realms of knowledge, but it also makes for very tight security. Then if there is a leak, that leak can be traced to one cell of about five people. After that there are the investigations – background, friends, bank account, the usual things, and then there is the execution. So penetration is most difficult and dangerous. And then there is the question of the payment for informations. In the good old days one could offer refuge in the West and money and good living and the “democratic way of life” – freedom and all that. Today it is not so easy, and everyone is surprised that Soviet and East German officials and officers and so on are not bringing over informations in exchange for these things. Such a misunderstanding is foolish. The answer is that in the East people no longer want these things. Life is very much better now in the Soviet bloc. To the intelligent people, the people we would like to come over, the future with Communism looks just as good, if not better, than life in Europe and America. Such people are not attracted to democratic chaos. They think we over here are making a hash of things in the name of Democracy. They greatly prefer the symmetry of Communism and the planned economy – particularly when the plans seem to be successful. And – the sputnik and so on have helped here – they are quite sure they are on the winning side, that Russia is stronger than the West. These people are realistic. Why should they exchange these solid things for the trashy “comforts” of the West where they would have to start all over again, suffer from the homesickness which they have so strongly, and perhaps be traced and shot for treachery into the bargain? No, Mr Fleming, we must admit that the millions of dollars spent on propaganda – the huge transmitters, those ridiculous leaflet balloons and so on – are wasted money and effort at this moment. Successful propaganda only comes from strength. To offer people better shoes and clothes, and jazz, is not enough. And, of course, you must remember that the youth in the East, the German youth, is now almost fully educated in Communism. He is sixteen years old and Communism is all he knows. If his parents tell him otherwise, they are being as old-fashioned as children all over the world consider their parents.’
All this suggested to me that O. would soon be out of a job, but he explained that in espionage Parkinson’s Law operates with particular zest. There were some ten thousand Communist agents now in Western Germany, he said. They were concentrated in many hundred organizations, divided again into cells. Against this army, a huge counter-intelligence army had to be arrayed. Then, with the increased difficulty in penetrating the East, a larger force of specialists had to be employed by the West. Thus, to gain a smaller bulk of Eastern ‘informations’, many more Western spies were required. But on both sides the whole business had become far more professional. There was not the old fre
e-for-all of the happy ten years after the war, when a huge game of grown-up cops and robbers was being played across the frontiers, and kidnappings, murders and ‘traitors’ were the order of the day. Had I, for instance, ever heard the true story of the ‘Great Tunnel’? That had been a lark, all right.
I said I had read some scraps about it in the papers at the time – in 1956 – but the story had been played down, I had supposed, for security reasons.
O. laughed. ‘More probably embarrassment,’ he said. ‘You can’t be insecure about a story the Russians published in all their papers, with pictures of the tunnel and the English equipment. The Russians even took all the Western correspondents out in buses and took them down the damned thing to see for themselves. It was really a marvellous affair. This is how it all happened.
‘Some time in 1955 your intelligence people were looking at the town plan map for Greater Berlin when some bright communications man spotted that the main trunk telephone cables between East Berlin and Leipzig at one point passed underground only about three hundred yards from a bulge in the American sector. Others of your people worked out that these cables would be carrying the traffic between the headquarters of the East German Army at Aldershorst and Zossen, East Germany’s Aldershot, so to speak. There was even more excitement when it was proved that a Russian official teleprinter cable was another of the lines. So your people got together with the Americans and plans were made to tap these cables by digging a tunnel under the fields from a near-by American radar station as far as the Schonefelder Chaussee, under which the cables ran. Obviously it was a terrific technical job, and a very tricky one because all the time Russian patrols were passing along the road, and the security aspect in the American sector was another problem. I believe there was a bad moment when the peasant who owned the field began cutting his corn and the watchers in the American sector saw that the roof of their tunnel had made a ramp right across his field that was even more obvious when he put the land under the plough again. However, he didn’t seem to mind then, although it’s amusing that after the whole thing blew up, so to speak, the peasant sued the Americans and the innocent Russians for ruining the subsoil of his field, and trespass and Heaven knows what all. Anyway, the tunnel was finished and the line tapped and hundreds of batteries of tape-recorders were plugged in to the lines and operated for months all through the twenty-four hours, and hundreds of British and Americans were employed translating all the wonderful stuff they must have got out of the tunnel.
‘Then, of course, the inevitable happened. The stretch of road where the tunnel met the cables was always kept under watch, and one day the watchers saw one of those usual telephone repair gangs arrive in a lorry and start lazily digging up the vital few yards of road. There was nothing to do but evacuate as quickly as possible, and no time to dismantle the rooms full of machinery underground. Two or three of the personnel were left to listen behind the door of a compartment and they heard the amazed comments of the workmen, who had apparently just chosen that particular spot to look for a fault in one of the cables caused by a rain-water leak. Then the game was up, and lorry loads of Russian experts and troops with tommy-guns arrived and blocked off the area and started their investigations. The whole story was given to the press and worked up into a big scandal, involving the Americans, of course, and also the British, because all the technical machinery was marked “Property of the G.P.O.”! All the Americans could do to save their faces was to put up a notice in the tunnel directly under the frontier line saying, “Beware. You are now entering the American Sector.” They even forgot to turn off the electric light in the tunnel!
‘Anyway,’ concluded O., ‘those were the great days. Now, both sides are more “korrekt” – and of course no one wants any untidy scandals in the spy war while Summits are the order of the day. But that doesn’t mean,’ he laughed, ‘that in Greater Berlin today there isn’t one whole division of Allied spies on one side of the frontier and one whole division of Communist spies on the other. It is still a very big and important business.’
O. then handed me a copy of a hush-hush East German intelligence document giving the complete ‘family tree’ of the secret service organization in the Ministry for State Security in East Berlin, from which I note the existence of two interesting departments, Abteilung 4, ‘For military espionage and deception in the NATO forces in West Germany and in NATO headquarters in Paris’, and Abteilung 8, ‘Diversion and sabotage, preparations for “X” Day’, and over this parting gift we said goodbye.
I left Berlin without regret. From this grim capital went forth the orders that in 1917 killed my father and in 1940 my youngest brother. In contra-distinction to Hamburg and to so many other German towns, it is only in Berlin and in the smoking cities of the Ruhr that I think I see, against my will, the sinister side of the German nation. In these two regions I smell the tension and hysteria that breed the things we have suffered from Germany in two great wars and that, twice in my lifetime, have got my country to her knees. In these places I have a recurrent waking nightmare: it is ten, twenty, fifty years later in the Harz Mountains, or in the depths of the Black Forest. The whole of a green and smiling field slides silently back to reveal the dark mouth of a great subterranean redoubt. With a whine of thousands of horsepower, behind a mass of brilliant machinery (brain-children of Krupp, Siemens, Zeiss and all the others) the tip of a gigantic rocket emerges above the surrounding young green trees. England has rejected the ultimatum. First there is a thin trickle of steam from the rocket exhausts and then a great belch of flame, and slowly, very slowly, the rocket climbs off its underground launching pad. And then it is on its way.
Yes, it was obviously time for me to leave Berlin.
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Five-star: For comfort and a bit of the solid, efficient, old-style atmosphere and service one remembers from pre-war, though in modern streamlined form: Kempinski, Kurfürstendamm (West Berlin’s Piccadilly), corner of Fasanenstrasse and the centre of what night life there still is in the Western sectors. Plushier, even more five-star, ultra-modern and with square beds (you can sleep any way round you like) is the Hilton. Its rooms look out over a wonderful all-round view of the grey bomb-battered city. Those sleeping on the lower floors are awakened early by strange birds squawking in the city’s zoo just below.
One-star: For those seeking to recapture the Berlin atmosphere of 1945 amid the ruins I suggest one of the small, reasonably priced one-star hotels just by the former Anhalter Station. This is in the waste-land of rubble that was once Berlin’s business centre and was flattened in the final battle for the city. It is a few yards from the Russian sector – though still firmly in the West and a quarter of a mile from the Potsdamer Platz, the East–West sector border trouble spot. One of these ‘atmosphere’ hotels on the Soviet sector border is the Alemannia. The Volkspolizei here is within shooting distance but doesn’t. One-star but clean. One can eat there too, simple Berlin kitchen. Less exciting: the Astoria Hotel near the Zoo in the British Sector (Fasanenstrasse) is small but efficient.
Restaurants
Five-star: Renowned for Oriental chi-chi of every kind and for its famous customers, the Ritz in the Rankestrasse (centre of town). For good, clean, appetizing, reasonably-priced food of the Berlin type: the Aben, at the Halensee end of the Kurf-Grstendamm, much patronized by the gourmets among the British regiments stationed in Berlin, or the Berliner Kindl, where Berliners of all classes go for a good meal in the evening, with beer. Chinese food, for those who like it, in at least five excellent restaurants of this type, the best undoubtedly the Lingnan, Kurfürstendamm, the Canton, Stuttgarter Platz, and the Hongkong, next to the Maison de France, Kurfürstendamm. For Swabian cooking (richer and more seasoned than Berlin food) in an old-fashioned, restful background with a zitherplayer who specializes in the Third Man theme and Viennese ‘Schrammel’, there is Kottler’s in the Motzstrasse, and Berlin gourmets swear by Schlichte in the Martin Luther Strasse. Despi
te its austere furnishings and rather-too-bright lights, Schlichte undoubtedly has wonderful cuisine.
For ‘British, Americans and French only’ (still respectfully ‘messieurs les alliés’ in four-power Berlin), the Maison de France, a reasonably priced official French restaurant where the food is not over-good but there is dancing and a pleasant enough atmosphere, and a good bar with an excellent barman who knows his stuff. Anything from Amer Picon (‘pour les fievres nevralgeuses des colonisateurs’) to Scotch. Cheapest possible French-owned student-type restaurant with excellent freshly cooked food, though atmosphere ever so slightly Frenchily grubby: the Paris in the Kantstrasse, across the road from the West Berlin opera house and near the university and zoo.
Night-clubs
West Berlin’s night spots are not what they were in the gay, spendthrift post-war years, but they do offer some interesting sidelines such as transvestism. One of the two main night-clubs of this type is the Eldorado, Martin Luther Strasse (U.S. sector), which presents transvestism as a sort of joke, with the floor show taking the mickey out of itself. The Eldorado is definitely one- or two-star in its prices, but fairly respectable; one could almost take the family there and not know the ‘girls’ are not what they seem unless one knew it beforehand. Prices: entrance charge 1s. 8d., Scotch (nip) 5s. 6d., French brandy 4s. 2d., beer 3s. 4d. Turkish coffee (pot) 3s. 4d., wine about £1 a bottle.
Five-star (but not expensive): the Old-Fashioned, admission only after knocking three times and asking for Franz Schubert (the owner, no relation of the other Franz Schubert); dancing, excellent Italian band, quite a lot of pretty girls among the customers. Patronized by whatever society is left in the Four-Power City. The Cherchez la Femme: little boîte in the Fasanenstrasse, semi-nude dancing of a strictly respectable type and occasionally neo-strip-tease act. Charly’s, Wittenbergplatz, plushy; boîte for dancing only, to juke-box (latest Berlin craze); fashionable with Berlin’s moneyed jeunesse dorée at the moment, but not expensive. Badewanne (the Bath Tub), Nurnberger Strasse, jive cellar, good to look at for a few moments, popular with visiting theatrical personalities, cheap and loud but bursting with Berlin vitality. Resi, in the Hasenheide in one of West Berlin’s toughest, most working-class districts; recent statistics show that seventy per cent of its customers are foreigners. Most popular of all Berlin mass entertainments. A vast palais de danse with telephones and pneumatic-tube postal service connecting the hundreds of tables, so that strangers can make dates or pass anonymous compliments. Remde St Pauli, near the zoo, centre of town in British sector; noisy, raucous, slap-and-tickle sort of show, based on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, with ‘underwear displays’ (ladies and gents), and girls, girls, girls (on the stage, no hostesses). Like the Resi, it has reasonable prices.