Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century

Sinclair McKay

Viking, £20

Review by Rosemary Goring

ALL cities are inchoate, none more so than Berlin. Hitler, who fancied himself an architect, wanted to reconstruct it, taking his cue from Ancient Greece and Albert Speer. The Führer’s dream was to demolish much of the German capital’s core and replace it with what Sinclair McKay describes as “avenues of neoclassical monumentalism”.

Late at night, when all about was careering toward chaos, he and Speer would pore over scale models like miniature railway enthusiasts pondering where to place signals. When, eventually, Berlin was blitzed, Hitler was himself reduced to dust, incinerated at his own request by insanely loyal disciples who regarded the moustached rabble-rouser as a messiah.

Nineteen forty-five was Berlin’s annus horribilis when, rather than face the avenging Russians, many of its inhabitants opted for suicide. For those who were opposed to the Nazis, it was a cruel fate. Along with millions of others they were the war’s collateral damage. This, though, should not be allowed to excuse what was a collective crime.

As McKay acknowledges, for so many Berliners who had attended Hitler’s rallies, there had been “jolting moments” when his eyes met theirs and they were love struck. In that respect, Berliners were no different from their fellow Germans, content to go along with what he prescribed as long as it addressed their perceived grievances.

Inevitably, Hitler and the war hangs over McKay’s enthralling, even-handed and emotionally draining “biography” like the blackest of clouds. Its jacket shows a weaponless German soldier sitting with his hands clasped amidst the ruined and still burning Reichstag. It’s not hard to imagine what he is thinking; it is written on his face. It is the face of abject Germany; demoralised, disillusioned, dejected, dumbfounded.

It took five years for the war properly to arrive in Berlin and when it finally did its insulated inhabitants, now cowering in basements, looting stores and awaiting the arrival of the Russians, began to appreciate what had been visited upon them. How many of them felt in any way personally culpable is hard to ascertain. McKay writes, “there were some [my italics] Berliners who were beginning to feel the moral weight of what the regime had done; that ordinary people had contributed to this”.

Yet Berlin was in many respects the one German city that ought to have proved impervious to Nazi charm. Its liberalism was as legendary as its licentiousness and, especially in the 1920s, its hands-off attitude to sex in all its manifestations rivalled that of Paris. There was a proliferation of brothels and policing of underground gay culture was as easy-going as the Met’s attitude to partying in Downing Street.

Indeed, even Hitler appeared relaxed about individuals’ sexual orientation. By way of example, McKay highlights the case of Ernest Röhm – the leader’s “sociopathic lieutenant” – who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality. This, of course, changed as the Nazis widened their net to include homosexuals, many of whom were liquidated, including Röhm, who had outlived his usefulness. By then – the mid 1930s – the Nazis were intent on producing a master race.

Art, as McKay notes, was not immune to such fanaticism. One of the select artists to benefit from Hitler’s imprimatur was Adolf Ziegler whose “output ranged from tastefully arranged nudes to family groupings to portraits of apparently timeless women in the country gathering fruits”. Men were thus encouraged to sow their seeds and women were mere vessels – “the means by which the Aryan bloodline might be promulgated”.

That a civilised, sophisticated people could take such nonsense seriously demonstrates the extent to which it is possible to pollute the minds of an entire nation. We might understand why those who have nothing will seek solace in the embrace of history’s tyrants. Less easy to comprehend is the complicity of the educated middle class who, at the sudden disappearance of Jewish friends and neighbours, professed not to know what was going on. “It was above all the educated German bourgeoisie who had failed,” recalled one Jewish woman who was protected by working-class Berliners.

For many to whom the Nazis were anathema, exile was the only option. Among the most celebrated and courageous was Albert Einstein who, more perceptive than most, realised that what Hitler offered the middle-class was the illusion of stability. Like Thomas Mann, Georg Grosz, Alfred Döblin (author of Berlin Alexanderplatz), Stefan Zweig, Erich Kästner and many others, Einstein left for foreign shores.

But a surprising number, including the conductors Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Fürtwangler, the actress Hildegard Knef and the musicians who formed Charlie and His Orchestra, which took “American hits and gave them Nazi lyrics”, stayed.

One curious omission in McKay’s book is mention of the writer Hans Fallada, who managed somehow to live in a twilight world, cooperating with the regime while also challenging it. His seminal novel, Alone in Berlin, written at a lick in the immediate aftermath of war, is remarkable for the contemporary spotlight it shines on Berliners – good and bad – when snoops were everywhere.

McKay’s book gives much shorter shrift to coverage of post-war Berlin. Its division by the Allies, the advent of the Cold War and the building and falling of the Wall, are of course part of its never-ending story. But I was sorry not to see any mention of Berlin’s usurpation, albeit short-lived, as capital by nondescript Bonn, which was akin to London being superseded by Loughborough.

Likewise, we learn little of its renaissance as one of the great European cultural and political hubs. Berlin’s re-emergence has been long, costly and inspiring. It has resisted the worst that humanity can throw at it. In the later decades of the last century its defining image was one of cranes towering above a sprawling building site to which tourists flocked as they do the Parthenon. As the art critic Karl Scheffler said (in 1910), it is a city fated forever to become and never to be.