Berlin ballads
Tim Garton Ash
The Berlin Bunker James P. O'Donnell (Dent E6.95) The Siege of Berlin Mark Amold-Forster (Collins £6.50) James O'Donnell is an American journalist and an old Berlin hand. His book about the last days of Hitler and his court in the bunker beneath the old Reich Chancellery in the heart of Berlin will be read by many people who read no other books on the subject. It is already, the publishers inform us, a bestseller in Germany and France. That is why it is worth paying it some attention.
Mr O'Donnell has the great advantage of having been in Berlin from the first days of July 1945, when the British and Americans moved in to occupy their sectors of the city. Vivid is his description of what he saw there on the Wilhelmstrasse Berlin's Whitehall 'One Russian was helping. . . youngsters cut steaks from a dead horse. I saw the corpse of an ocelot that must have escaped from the nearby zoo in the last horrendous bombings, a poor terrified beast no doubt yearning for the peace and quiet of its native tropical rain-forest on the Amazon.' No doubt. That little flourish of retrospective empathy we can allow.
The trouble is that Mr O'Donnell does not confine his empathy to ocelots. We find here, what we have already deplored in Mr Curtis Cate's work on the Berlin Wall (which in its turn draws heavily on the oral testimony of. . . James P. O'Donnell), both flatulence of style and inordinate historical presumption. Describing Speer's meeting with Hitler on the Fuehrer's birthday: 'Hitler had been touched by [Speer's] maudlin request for the autographed picture . . . Hitler was sincere. But he was also as always, the inveterate actor.' How does the author know that Hitler was sincere? Presumably he divines this with the same rod that divined the ocelot's last wishes. But you may never do with historical persons what you may occasionally do with ocelots. Above all not with Hitler. O'Donnell's judgment is qualified (contradicted?) after the semi-colon, perhaps in an attempt to emulate the memorable ambiguities, the qualified and subtle percipience, of Hugh Trevor-Roper's Last Days of Hitler.
For Mr O'Donnell sails, self-confessedly, in Trevor-Roper's keelwater. In style, he follows him as an electric organ might follow a Bechstein. In content, although he does add some interesting details. I cannot see that he makes one new point of historical importance. His standards of proof are not rigorous. His primary sources are interviews with the survivors, but too many of his direct quotations, printed in extenso, are of the 'This man said that another man said . . . ' variety. Several passages (`Group Sex' in the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer brewery) cater simply to the reader's retrospective voyeurism. This voyeurism is not necessarily to be deplored. Prurient inquisitiveness, vulgar curiosity, may be the initial impulse behind real historical enquiry. If The Berlin Bunker leads a few readers to, for a start, TrevorRoper's book, it will have done some service.
This would be particularly desirable to correct the presentation of Albert Speer. In any account which confines itself to the last days of the Third Reich Speer must emerge with credit. His refusal to carry out Hitler's last 'scorched earth' commands, the Fuehrer's revenge on the German people who had proved themselves 'unworthy' of a better fate, was not merely rational but courageous. It is a different matter to extrapolate this doubtful dissent, this lastminute opposition, back into Speer's heyday as armaments minister. O'Donnell comes near to making out of the architect of the Nazi war effort a conscience-ridden architect of resistance. No doubt this is quite unintentional. But the impression necessarily arises from the construction and style of the book. It results from the author's apparent lack of enthusiasm for explaining what led his characters to be sitting in the bunker in the first place. It results finally from a generally indifferent sense of history.
The contrast with Mark Arnold-Forster's book on postwar Berlin is striking. A detail is revealing. Both authors mention the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Potsdam, Mr O'Donnell describes as 'the Berlin suburb' which is not even strictly accurate. 'Potsdam', remarks Arnold-Forster, 'was the country seat of the Prussian kings and is to Berlin what Windsor is to London.' Exactly. The foreground of his work is sketched with the same lightness and precision as the background details. His centrepiece is the Berlin airlift.
It is ironical that some of the same pilots who in the winter of 1944-45 were beating the living daylights out of the surviving Berliners and incidentally reducing them to a state of apathetic resignation before the Nazi tyranny came back in the winter of 1948-49 bringing them food, fuel, newsprint and courage. The latter enterprise was as fruitful as the former was fruitless. Arnold-Forster is very good on the sheer technical audacity of the airlift. Inevitably the 40 pages in which he traces the story of the city through the 30 years since the lifting of the Soviet siege are slightly anticlimactic, and breathless.
I suspect that the author who was blockaded in Berlin in 1948, tends slightly to idealise the current morale and solidarity of the West Berliners. Where O'Donnell extrapolates backwards from 1945, he extrapolates forwards from 1948: 'The West Berliners remain a real community. They-Turks included -are a closer band of brothers and sisters than they would be if they were free to travel to the rustic delights of Potsdam and the mark of Brandenburg'. I wonder if my Turkish neighbours in the borough of Kreuzberg 'Little Istanbul' as the Berliners call it would be quite so euphoric. And many young people born here are voting with their feet.
Alas Mr Arnold-Forster's very first sentence is no longer accurate: 'West Berlin is a pleasant city of rather more than two million inhabitants who live the lives of reluctant lighthouse-keepers'. In fact the population fell below two million three years ago. It is true that those who remain are still lighthouse-keepers-Prospective visitors to the lighthouse should read this book.
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