MY NAME IS OZYMANDIAS
By D. W. BROGAN IN 1910, so the story runs, Theodore Roosevelt visited Berlin and gave an audience to the Kaiser. William II asked his visitor why it was that so many American tourists went to Paris and London, so few to Berlin. There were the great museums, the opera, the theatre, very vivacious night-life, yet the Americans stayed away. "Visit Berlin! They'd as soon visit Chicago or Glasgow." The story perhaps explains why I had never seen Berlin in its days of splendour and why I flew into it with a double curiosity ; to see it as it was, to guess what it had been.
And the first thing that I noted from the plane was what history text-books had insisted on enough—the poverty of the soil, of Brandenburg. Not very impressive woodlands, lakes and rivers diversified the patterns of the sandy soil. This was a poor land indeed, and a very different countryside from the smiling landscape of Swabia, which the younger line of the Hohenzollcms had aban- doned for the dreary frontier province. If the Prussians were tough, if the Berliners were dour, the soil and the climate accounted for a lot. The vegetable gardens round the houses of the British officials in Griinewald were poor things, and it was unusual luck, as well as industry, that made Berlin, in the past two generations, one of the largest cities in the world and one of the fastest growing. It grew a good deal faster than Chicago. Then the luck turned, and air-raids and street-fighting wrecked the vast, sprawling capital of the Third Reich.
Or did they ? One had been told so often of the terrible character of the bomb-damage of Berlin that it was natural to expect nothing but ruins and open spaces where buildings had been. So my first surprise was to find so much of Berlin standing. Nearly all of it is damaged, more or less, but most of it is there. Indeed, I saw no bombed-out area as completely swept of buildings as is the centre of Rotterdam. Houses burned out alternate with houses only partially damaged, and even those that look completely gutted have often one room or two inhabited. And a badly bombed street looks the same in London and in Berlin ; the difference is that there are far more of them in Berlin. What is more impressive and more de- pressing than the bombed buildings is the fantastically neat piles of stone and brick that represent the great tidying-up effort that followed the war. You drive through walls of this pedantically assembled rubble from which optimists expect to rebuild a new city. It is a macabre and impressive sight.
The people were the next curiosity. They had endured the bom- bardment, the siege and, before that, the temptations of the brief moment when the Third Reich seemed to rule Europe and be on the way to ruling the world. They had endured, too, the past year of blockade, the feeling of being an exposed bastion of the West and the feeling that the West might have to let them down. But in the fine summer weather they did not look any more tired or any more shabby than Londoners. Of course, the weather counted for a lot. I never saw so many males of all ages in shorts. There were plenty of healthy, half-naked children and plenty of young women with vast billowing hair-dos and very light clothing.
Of course, as one went East, the clothes were less impressive, the people more drab, but that is true of the East End of all great cities ; only this East End is also on the other side of the iron curtain. Then came another surprise. For I drove through a considerable part of the Russian zone and never saw a Russian. There were no sentries at the great Red Army Memorial, which is subsiding. The bulky figure of the Russian soldier with his rifle and the old-fashioned
bayonet that even in 1914 marked off the Russian infantryman from other soldiers—that and the glittering white House of Soviet Culture were the only striking evidences of Russian pride and power. There were minor signs ; there was the red flag on the Brandenburger Tor ; there were Russian street-signs ; there were slogans calling on the Berliners to work for peace, unity, freedom, but that was all. This city cut in two, this main battlefield of the cold war, gave no outward sign of its extraordinary situation. Of course, one heard plenty of stories of the Russian zone, of students who go back on holiday and are never heard of again, of arbitrary arrests, of semi-savagery, but, as far as I know, I saw no Russians at all.
Most of the great public monuments of Berlin were, or are, in the Russian zone. The most famous of all, Hitler's Chancellery, is now mere rubble, but most of the rest arc standing burned-out. There is the gutted palace from whose balcony William II announced that the sword was being forced into his hand in August, 5914- There, in fair condition, is Bismarck's Chancellery, like a minor Paris town house. There is the palace of the Crown Prince ; there what had been the palace of that Francophile soldier-prince, Henry, which, at the then darkest hour of Prussian history, became the new University of Berlin. The Friedrich Wilhelm University (now the Humboldt University) is in the Russian zone, having exchanged one totalitarian control for another. There where Fichte preached to the prostrate German nation, where Hegel and Treitschke taught, the university that Du Bois-Reymond called "the avant-garde of the Hohenzollerns," a new Marxist doctrine is being imposed. The old university is badly bombed, and one might say that its sins have found it out, but no university professor can see quite unmoved the statues of Mornmsen and Helinholz or fail to be touched by the founding, this year, of the new "Free University of Berlin," as a reply to the Russification of the old.
Dr. Reuter, the Burgomaster, Friedcrick Mcincckc, the Rector, and their colleagues are doing, again, what was done after Jena, turning to the university to save the people, turning, of course, in a spirit very different from that which animated the Friedrich Wilhelm University. The Free University lacks nearly everything ; the books of the Staatsbibliothek are mostly in Western German depositories, and serious publication in Berlin is only now getting under way. The students of the English seminar have to work with- out many basic texts. (The Shakespeare in the professor's bookcase in his study was that edited for family use by Dr. Bowdler.) But here, and in the great technical school at Charlottenburg in the British zone, a gallant attempt to provide the new Germany with a new educated class is being made. We must wish it well and not hope for too much, too soon. Students, I found, hesitate to ask questions, and are still cut off from the Western world—and know it.
Previous page
