Grim Grin
From SARAH GA1NHAM BERLIN
GRAHAM GREENE has a reputation in Germany, almost comparable to Schweitzer or the pre-nuclear Russell, as a serious artist and moralist whose work has concerned itself in the main with one theme, that of conscience and responsibility. He ,was privately in Germany recently, in Hamburg and West Berlin as the guest of Die Zeit, the Hamburg intellectual weekly. The privacy was underlined by three long articles recounting his encounters with news- paper reporters.
He capped the visit with another article of his own printed in the same issue as the last of the descriptive series and somewhat contradicting it. This was an account of his own impression of two and a half days travelling East Germany, speaking no word of German and accompanied by chosen guides, old Communists of whom one had spent the war in the British Army. There has been much hostile comment on Mr. Greene's visit, some of it from loud patriots in West Germany careful not to put their own persons within revolver-shot of the Berlin Wall. Mr. Greene is entitled to think and write what he likes of Berlin and others are entitled to think and say what they like about his opinions, but it is legitimate comment that throughout his account of the far side of the Berlin Wall Mr. Green used a double standard of values Mr. Greene, necessarily quoted in retransla- tion from the German, maintains a carefully neutral tone, but the objectivity is spurious and leaves behind an impression of cold-heartedness and a determination to find something other to say than the usual cold war cliches that ends by being almost meaningless platitude. He begins by comparing with 'relief' the visible, tangible barrier of the wall across the city with those private barriers of belief, political. moral or religious, that we all carry inside us. The nostalgia he sometimes feels for himself before his conversion to Catholicism forty years ago is likened to the feelings of those groups on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate who try to see across the barrier and espy someone they have not seen or touched since 1961, someone 'they know' (a phrase of careful neutralism, mean- ing an acquaintance). He points out that tragedies of division, not otherwise mentioned, existed before the wall was .built .through the seductions of the West that drew away people living in the East. Unconvinced, hurray, by the obvious propaganda speech of the young officer who meets him over the barrier, or by the printed list offered of American agents in Berlin, he finds however an exaggerated tendency to attribute heroic motives to all those who flee over, under or through the wall. Certainly, he says, they have courage; but in reality many are moved by love of a girl or by family affec- tions. Many are brought into temptation by a standard of living that promises portable radios and blue jeans.
This passage is a gem of muddled thinking and feeling. In fact, there is little talk of heroism about the escapers that I ever heard in West Berlin. But since when has there been some- thing inferior, ignoble, about human beings caring for each other? And what is wrong with wanting to wear the clothes other you people can get with their wages, instead of having to spend every pfennig on the needs of living? Mr. Greene regrets that as long as there is a difference in living standards, there will be motives for escaping 'that are not exaell■ the noblest.' Here is sentimental utopianism \ith a vengeance.
In the East Mr. Greene found something all-of-a-piece, unequivocal, while the world of Bonn is complex and full of the Spiegel abir, the cunning of the old Chancellor, the Docnitt . lecture with its aftermath of suicide; of th,. past of General Speidel and the 'latest Nazi in the' Bonn government.' What he does not mention is that everybody talks and reads of these things openly in the complicated Western Germany; that the Spiegel affair ended with the defeat of Strauss, that the Chancellor is about to retire, that discovered Nazi criminals are tried, however late and haltingly. He says no word about the youngsters doing life (it really means life) sentences in East German gaols for trying to help people escape, or about • the hardships of the collectivised peasants and the wave of their thousand suicides. That „Lola is simple and coherent all right: that is v.II",. people want to leave it.
In a personal sense it is unpleasing, as Mr. Greene says, to compare livings standards. 1311t.. it is a perfectly respectable argument politicallY•. the more so since Marxism bases its claim urr rule not only on ethical superiority but on superior economic efficiency. It' is dishonest 1.1 compare the few good shops in East Germany` with GUM in Moscow. Russia is still the most backward country of Europe. and the true comparison for East Berlin is with the Mhcr. half of the same city.
The crosses and wreaths in the Rernauce strasse are not to be compared with the 'memorials On alpine roads to those (mountain' eers or road builders) who fell to their death 'Ilhe people who died there were not killed acts of God or nature. They died jumping out of windows to escape, probably for quite silly reasons, that simple, coherent world for which the Wall is a protection. Some were shot bY policeMen to stop them jumping. Does it Ilt) occur to Mr. Greene that an arrangement °I affairs that has such results cannot be called government with the consent of the governed' and that it is wrong to try to be neutral about such sordid tragedies?
Mr. Greene saw Dresden and refers to the attacks on that city as a greater war-crime than the atom bomb on Hiroshima. The attacks "e Dresden were undertaken, as was clearly pressed with proud loyalty to our Red Arin allies at the time, if not now, at the instance ,, the Russians. They killed more people than 111 first atom bomb, they were a terrible an` pointless disaster. But worse----or better-- than Hiroshima? What do the words mean in 111'1 context? They mean nothing. Neither is it 3 valid comment on Budapest to say that the British did the 'same thing' in Dublin aboo fifty years ago. Since when has one crime beer' the justification for another? Perhaps Graham Greene should stick to enter tainmenis. He is very good at them.
Previous page
