BOOKS
Without a city wall once more
Richard Lamb
FAUST'S METROPOLIS by Alexandra Richie HarperCollins, £29.99, pp.1107 This engrossing book is published at an opportune moment, with Berlin about to become the capital of recently reunified Germany. Today Germany, with her 80 million population, is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the European Union. Yet the horrors of the Nazis are still close, and fears are being voiced that an uncontrollable German desire for domination will rear its ugly head. Little comfort on this score can be found from this book.
Bismarck made Berlin the capital of Imperial Germany in 1871, and although he was ousted by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the city prospered greatly until 1914. Then Berlin was virulently nationalist and hailed the declaration of war on Russia and France with jubilation, but was so shocked at Britain entering the conflict that many Britons there found their lives in danger. In spite of hunger and other hardships during the first world war, Berliners could not believe Germany could ever be defeated, and in September 1917 were deluded by the hollow paper gains of territory in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. For them the humiliating armistice and the abdication of the Kaiser hardly seemed to be true, but they were soon up against the harsh reality of civil war with the fighting between Spartacus troops and the Freikorps. The book has interesting material on Lenin's involvement with Spartacus.
The vindictive Treaty of Versailles was resented by every German, and provided fertile ground for Hitler. However, with the failure of the beer hall Putsch and the march on red Berlin in 1923, the Nazi vote became derisory; galloping inflation triggered off by France's senseless occupation of the Ruhr disappeared with the Rentenmark in 1923, and post-war Germany thrived while Stresemann improved her relations with the other Western powers. Richie brings to life the flowering of artistic and cultural life in Berlin in the late 1920's. Those were the great days of the Berlin theatre with Reinhardt and Brecht. All this was lost under the Nazis and hundreds of leading 20th-century writers, poets, film makers, theatre directors and painters were forced into exile while entertainment became propaganda.
The spectacular increase in the Nazi election vote in 1932 could have been checked if France and Britain had been more accommodating to the Weimar Republic over rearmament and reparations, but Neville Chamberlain and John Simon, who later were leading Nazi appeasers, took a harsh line against Chancellors Bruning and von Papen, not realising they were to be the last democratic German Chancellors.
Once Hitler was in power, German re- armament was blatant, but Alexandra Richie makes a serious error by writing that conscription and the existence of a powerful air force in direct contravention of Versailles and Locarno was announced in March 1937. Hitler actually made the announcement in March 1935, a little over two years after he became Chancellor, when his forces were still puny compared with the French.
Mussolini, at the time violently anti-Hitler, immediately organised with France and Britain the Stresa Conference when for the last time the victorious powers of the first world war were in full agreement. They asked the League of Nations to take sanctions against Germany for the breach of treaties and warned Hitler not to try and annex Austria. For a moment it looked as if German rearmament would be halted but alas, unity was short-lived. In October Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, bringing down economic sanctions on Italy, not Germany.
Thus when in March 1936 Hitler again contravened Versailles by remilitarising the Rhineland, Mussolini was at loggerheads with France and Britain, and refused to oppose Germany. The Baldwin Government was supine and France, without outside help, threw away the last opportunity to stop Hitler dead in his tracks by using French military superiority to throw the German troops out of the Rhineland.
Richie is non-committal over the controversy as to whether the General's plot would have toppled Hitler in September 1938 if Chamberlain had not flown to Munich to accede to the dictator's demands. However, she dismisses the gallant plotters of 1944 as 'ambiguous figures' and does not believe that if the Stauffenberg bomb had killed Hitler the Resistance would ever have had the support of the people. One cannot be dogmatic over what would have occurred if Hitler had been killed, but my conclusion is that the plot might well have succeeded with General von Kluge, in charge of the Normandy front, surrendering to Field Marshal Montgomery. If only Churchill or Roosevelt had encouraged the plotters they would have had a far better chance. She quotes a post-war poll showing one-third of West Germans 'opposing' the 1944 attack on Hitler's life. Still, to most Germans today the plotters are 'heroes'.
Richie blames Roosevelt for allowing Stalin to capture Berlin instead of the Allies; she thinks that the American President completely misjudged Stalin, being `extraordinarily not to mention criminally stupid' in seeing 'friendship' in Stalin which was never there. At that stage the United States was so much the senior partner that Churchill could do nothing about it.
For Berlin this was a disaster. Much is already known but this book gives oral accounts showing the full honors of rape, pillage and murder, and the slaughter caused by quite unnecessary continuous shelling of Berlin streets and squares by Russian field guns during the final hours. According to Richie, Berlin would have surrendered to the Americans or British without a fight, but the Germans, knowing that the Russians were bent on revenge for Nazi atrocities in Russia, fought until the bitter end.
Having lived in both West and East Berlin, Richie is in full command of her crisis-ridden post-war history. East Berliners suffered even more than is generally realised and her tale of hordes of Stasi spies prying into their private life is horrific. Both in 1948 and in 1961 Berlin seemed doomed to be a battlefield again but each time the war clouds rolled away.
After all this tragedy it is pleasant to read of the jubilation when the Wall came down in 1989, and the mixed feelings when the Allies left in 1994. Surprisingly, in the vote on unification more East Berliners voted `against' than in the rest of East Germany. Berliners had most to gain from unification but communism was still simmering. This book is authoritative and a good read; not all is new, but most of the wealth of detail is.
Richard Lamb's Mussolini and the British is published by John Murray, £25.00.
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