Leaving Berlin: A Novel

by Joseph Kanon

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  For Martha, Gregg, and Tess

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AS MOST READERS WILL know, postwar Germany was divided by the Allies (the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union) into four zones of military occupation. The capital, Berlin, was similarly divided into four occupied sectors. Located deep inside the Soviet zone, Berlin became an inevitable bone of contention as wartime cooperation deteriorated into the open hostility of the Cold War. Finally, in June 1948, the Soviets decided to force the other Allied powers out of Berlin by cutting off all land access to the Western sectors, a blockade to which the West responded with the Berlin Airlift (July 1948–May 1949), often considered the first battle of the Cold War. At its height the airlift provided Berlin with eight thousand tons of supplies a day.

  The events of Leaving Berlin take place in January 1949 while the blockade was still a daily presence and occupied Germany had not yet formally split into two states. It was a time, like our own, fond of acronyms. A few key ones that are used here: SED (the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which incorporated the old Communist Party and effectively replaced it), OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), SMA or SMAD (the Soviet Military Administration, governing its zone from the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst), BOB (the CIA’s Berlin Operations Base), DEFA (the largest German film studio, successor to Weimar’s Ufa, located in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin and hence in the Soviet zone). Earlier, the SA (Sturmabteilung) was the Nazi storm trooper unit.

  Readers with even a glancing acquaintance with the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) will be familiar with the notorious Stasi (Ministry for State Security) and its armies of IMs (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—unofficial collaborators), but the Stasi was not founded until February 1950, and the term IM was used only after 1968. The first German secret police in the Soviet sector was the Interior Administration’s Intelligence Information Department (K-5), who worked with the city police. On December 28, 1948, a new independent secret police division was established, the Main Directorate for the Defense of the Economy and the Democratic Order. K-5 continued to exist, both organizations under the direct control of Erich Mielke, who later ran the Stasi (1957–1989). Informants were then called, as here, GIs (Geheime Informatoren—secret informers).

  Although I have tried to be accurate about details of time and place, one deliberate chronological liberty has been taken: the SED party purge, and its attendant show trials, actually began a year later, in the summer of 1950. Finally, the real people in these pages—Bertolt Brecht, Alexander Dymshits, Anna Seghers, Helene Weigel, et al.— appear only as I imagine them to have been.

  1

  LÜTZOWPLATZ

  THEY WERE STILL A few miles out when he heard the planes, a low steady droning, coming closer, the way the bombers must have sounded. Now loaded with food and sacks of coal. After Köpenick he could make out their lights in the sky, dropping toward the dark city, one plane after another, every thirty seconds they said, if that were possible, unloading then taking off again, the lights now a line of vanishing dots, like tracer bullets.

  “How does anyone sleep?”

  “You don’t hear them after a while,” Martin said. “You get used to it.”

  Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night, waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds—how near?—the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of its bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.

  “So many planes,” Alex said, almost to himself. “How long can they keep it going?” Die Luftbrücke, Berlin’s lifeline now, with little parachutes of candy for the children, for the photographers.

  “Not much longer,” Martin said, certain. “Think of the expense. And for what? They’re trying to make two cities. Two mayors, two police. But there’s only one city. Berlin is still where it is, in the Soviet zone. They can’t move it. They should leave now. Let things get back to normal.”

  “Well, normal,” Alex said. The planes were getting louder, almost overhead, Tempelhof only one district west. “And will the Russians leave too?”

  “I think so, yes,” Martin said, something he’d considered. “They stay for each other. The Americans don’t leave because the Russians—” He stopped. “But of course they’ll have to. It’s not reasonable,” he said, a French use of the word. “Why would the Russians stay? If Germany were neutral. Not a threat anymore.”

  “Neutral but Socialist?”

  “How else now? After the Fascists. It’s what everyone wants, I think, don’t you?” He caught himself. “Forgive me. Of course you do. You’ve come back for this, a Socialist Germany. To make the future with us. It was the dream of your book. I’ve told you, I think, I’m a great admirer—”

  “Yes, thank you,” Alex said, weary.

  Martin had joined him when he changed cars at the Czech border, straw-colored hair slicked back, face scrubbed and eager, the bright-eyed conviction of a Hitler Youth. He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of the war. With the leg and the slick hair he even looked a little like Goebbels, without the hollow cheeks, the predator eyes. Now he was brimming with high spirits, his initial formal reticence soon a flood of talk. How much Der letzte Zaun had meant to him. How pleasing it was that Alex had decided to make his home in the East, “voting with your feet.” How difficult the first years had been, the cold, the starvation rations, and how much better it was now, you could see it every day. Brecht had come—had Alex known him in America? Thomas Mann? Martin was a great admirer of Brecht too. Perhaps he could dramatize Alex’s Der letzte Zaun, an important antifascist work, something that might appeal to him.

  “He’d have to talk to Jack Warner first,” Alex said, smiling to himself. “He controls the rights.”

  “There was a film? I didn’t realize. Of course we never saw American films.”

  “No, there was going to be, but he never made it.”

  The Last Fence, a Book-of-the-Month-Club Selection, the lucky break that supported his exile. Warners bought it for Cagney, then Raft, then George Brent, then the war came and they wanted battle pictures, not prison-camp escapes, so the project was shelved, another might-have-been on a shelf full of them. But the sale paid for the house in Santa Monica, not far from Brecht’s, in fact.

  “But you were able to read it?” Alex said. “There were copies in Germany?” Really asking, who are you? A representative from the Kulturbund, yes, the artists’ association, but what else? Everyone here had a history now, had to be accounted for.

  “In Switzerland you could get the Querido edition.” The émigré press in Amsterdam, which explained the book, but not Martin. “Of course, there were still many copies of Der Untergang in Germany, even after it was banned.”

  Downfall, the book that had made his reputation, presumably the reason Germany wanted him back—Brecht and Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig had all come home and now Alex Meier, Germany’s exiles returning. To the East, even culture part of the new war. He thought of Brecht ignored in California, Seghers invisible in Mexico City, now celebrated again, pictures in the paper, speeches of welcome by Party officials.

  There had been a lunch for him earlier at the first town over the border. They had left Prague at dawn
to be in time for it, the streets still dark, slick with rain, the way they always seemed to be in Kafka. Then miles of stubby fields, farmhouses needing paint, ducks splashing in mud. At the border town—what was it called?—Martin had been there with welcoming flowers, the mayor and town council turned out in Sunday suits, worn and boxy, a formal lunch at the Rathaus. Photographs were taken for Neues Deutschland, Alex shaking hands with the mayor, the prodigal son come home. He was asked to say a few words. Sing for his supper. What he was here for, why they offered the resident visa in the first place, to make the future with us.

  He had expected somehow to find all of Germany in ruins, the country you saw in Life, digging out, but the landscape after lunch was really a continuation of the morning’s drive, shabby farms and poor roads, their shoulders chewed up by years of tanks and heavy trucks. Not the Germany he’d known, the big house in Lützowplatz. Still, Germany. He felt his stomach tighten, the same familiar apprehension, waiting for the knock on the door. Now lunch with the mayor, the bad old days something in the past.

  They avoided Dresden. “It would break your heart,” Martin had said. “The swine. They bombed everything. For no reason.” But what reason could there have been? Or for Warsaw, Rotterdam, any of them, maybe Martin too young to remember the cheering in the streets then. Alex said nothing, looking out at the gray winter fields. Where was everybody? But it was late in the year for farmwork and anyway the men were gone.

  Martin insisted on sitting with him in the back, an implied higher status than the driver, which meant they talked all the way to Berlin.

  “Excuse me, you don’t mind? It’s such an opportunity for me. I’ve always wondered. The family in Downfall? These were actual people you knew? It’s like Buddenbrooks?”

  “Actual people? No,” Alex said.

  Were they still alive? Irene and Elsbeth and Erich, old Fritz, the people of his life, swallowed up in the war, maybe just names now on a refugee list, untraceable, their only existence in Alex’s pages, something Fritz would have hated.

  “It’s not us, these people,” he’d yelled at Alex. “My father never gambled, not like that.”

  “It’s not you,” Alex had said calmly.

  “Everybody says it’s us. They say it at the club. You should hear Stolberg. ‘Only a Jew would write such things.’ ”

  “Well, a Jew did,” Alex said.

  “Half a Jew,” Fritz snapped, then more quietly, “Anyway, your father’s a good man. Stolberg’s just like the rest of them.” He looked up. “So it’s not us?”

  “It’s any Junker family. You know how writers use things—a look, a mannerism, you use everything you know.”

  “Oh, and so now we’re Junkers. And I suppose we lost the war too. Pickelhauben.”

  “Read the book,” Alex had said, knowing Fritz never would.

  “What does it mean, anyway? Downfall. What happens to them? The father gambles? So what?”

  “They lose their money,” Alex said.

  Old Fritz turned, embarrassed now. “Well, that’s easy enough to do. In the inflation everybody lost something.”

  Alex waited, the air settling around them. “It’s not you,” he said again.

  And Fritz believed him.

  “But the camp in The Last Fence,” Martin was saying. “That’s Sachsenhausen, yes? They said at the office you’d been in Sachsenhausen.”

  “Oranienburg, in the first camp there. They built Sachsenhausen later. They put us in an old brewery. Right in the center of town. People could see through the windows. So everyone knew.”

  “But it was as you describe? You were tortured?” Martin said, unable to resist.

  “No. Everyone was beaten. But the worst things—I was lucky.” Hands tied behind their backs then hung from poles until the shoulder joints separated, torn from the sockets, screams they couldn’t help, pain so terrible they finally passed out. “I wasn’t there long enough. Somebody got me out. You could still do that then. ’33. If you knew the right people.” The one thing old Fritz had left, connections.

  “But in the book—”

  “It’s meant to be any camp.”

  “It’s nice, though, don’t you agree, to know what the author has in his mind, what he sees?”

  “Well, Sachsenhausen then,” Alex said, tired of it. “The layout was described to me, so I knew what it was like. Then you invent.”

  “ ’33,” Martin said, backing off. “When they rounded up the Communists. You were in the Party even then?”

  “No, not then,” Alex said. “I just got caught in the net. If you were sympathetic. If you had Communist friends. They scooped up all the fish and you were caught. You didn’t need to have a card.”

  “And now the Americans are doing it, putting Communists in jail. They said that’s why you left.” A question. “They’re trying to destroy the Party. Just like the Nazis.” The only way it made sense to the Kulturbund.

  “They’re not sending people to Sachsenhausen,” Alex said evenly. “It’s not illegal to be a Communist.”

  “But I thought—”

  “They want you to tell them who the others are. Give them names. And if you don’t—then that’s illegal. So they catch you that way.”

  “And then to jail,” Martin said, following the logic.

  “Sometimes,” Alex said vaguely.

  Or deportation, the Dutch passport of convenience that had once saved his life now something to use against him. “Might I remind you, you are a guest in this country?” The congressman with the thick athlete’s neck, who probably thought exile a greater threat than prison. And let Alex slip away.

  “So you came home to Germany,” Martin said, making a story.

  “Yes, home,” Alex said, looking out the window again.

  “So, that’s good,” Martin said, the story’s end.

  There were city buildings now, the jagged graveyard streets of the newsreels, Friedrichshain probably, given the direction they were coming from. He tried to picture the map in his head—Grosse Frankfurter Strasse?—looking for some familiar landmark, but all he could see were faceless bombed-out buildings heaped with rubble. He thought of the women handing down pails of debris, hammering mortar off reusable bricks—and four years later the rubble was still here, mountains of it. How much had there been? Standing walls were pockmarked by shelling, marooned in empty spaces where buildings had collapsed, leaving gaps for the wind to rush through. The streets, at least, had been cleared but were still lined on either side with piles of bricks and smashed porcelain and twisted metal. Even the smell of bombing, the burned wood and the sour lime of broken cement, was still in the air. But maybe, like the airlift planes, you didn’t notice after a while.

  “You still have family in Germany?” Martin was asking.

  “No. No one,” Alex said. “They waited too long.” He turned to Martin, as if it needed to be explained. “My father had the Iron Cross. He thought it would protect him.”

  But did he? Or was it simply a cover for a fatalism so knowing and desperate that it couldn’t be admitted? It was almost as if he had exhausted himself getting Alex out. How much had it cost? Enough to wipe out Fritz’s debts? More?

  “You owe him your gratitude,” was all his father would say.

  “You should come too,” Alex had said.

  His father shook his head. “There’s no need. Not for me. I’m not the one they send to prison for having such friends. The Engel boy, he was always trouble. Who does he think he is, Liebknecht? Times like these, you stay quiet.” He took Alex’s shoulder. “You’ll be back. This is Germany, you know, not some Slavic— So it passes and you’ll come back. Nothing is forever. Not the Nazis. Now don’t worry your mother.”

  But it turned out the Nazis were forever, long enough anyway to turn his parents into ash, seeping into the soil somewhere in Poland.

  “There’s Alexanderplatz up ahead,” Martin said.

  The welcome lunch and bad roads had made the trip longer than they’d
expected, and it was late now, their car lights stronger than the occasional streetlamp shining a pale cone on the rubble. On the side streets there were no lights at all. Alex leaned forward, peering, oddly excited now that they were really here. Berlin. He could make out the scaffolding of a building site and then, beyond a cleared, formless space, the dark hulk of the palace, singed with soot, the dome just a steel frame, but still standing, the last Hohenzollern. Across from it the cathedral was a blackened shell. Alex had expected the city center, the inevitable showcase, to be visibly recovering, but it was the same as Friedrichshain, more rubble, endless, the old Schinkel buildings gutted and sagging. Unter den Linden was dark, the lindens themselves scorched clumps. There was scarcely any traffic, just a few military cars driving slowly, as if they were patrolling the empty street. At Friedrichstrasse, no one was waiting to cross. A sign in Cyrillic pointed to the station. The city was as quiet as a village on some remote steppe. Berlin.

  All the way in Martin had talked about the Adlon, where Alex was to stay until a flat could be arranged. It was for Martin a place of mythic glamour, of Weimar first nights, Lubitsch in a fur collar coat. “Brecht and Weigel are there too, you know.” Which seemed to confirm not only the hotel’s status, but Alex’s own. But now that they were almost there, with no lights visible up ahead, no awning or doormen whistling down taxis, he began to apologize.

  “Of course it’s only the annex. You know the main building was burned. But very comfortable I’m told. And the dining room is almost like before.” He checked his watch. “It’s late, but I’m sure for you they would—”

  “No, that’s all right. I just want to go to bed. It’s been—”

  “Of course,” Martin said, but with such heavy disappointment that Alex realized he’d been hoping to join him for dinner, a meal off the ration book. Instead, he handed Alex an envelope. “Here are all the papers you’ll need. Identity card. Kulturbund membership—the food is excellent there, by the way. You understand, for members only.”