Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ experimental productions but his attempt to found a workers’ theatre founders and he gradually finds an audience amongst the new Nazi elite. Slowly, steadily, they court him, and his blinding ego coupled with his burning hunger for success at any price make him useful to them. It is they who arrange for ever more productions and new directorships, rewarding him with even greater honours and power. But each time he is asked to do something in return. Höfgen is expected to rid the theatre of ‘undesirable elements’, or to abandon his black mistress, or to divorce his wife now living in exile, or to make propaganda speeches extolling the virtues of the ‘new German Kultur’. One evening, shortly after Höfgen has asked ‘the general’ if one of his friends might be spared, he is taken to the great Olympic stadium. The general barks an order. Höfgen is pushed on to the field and the general watches as glaring white spotlights are turned on him. Höfgen tries to hide but the intense lights follow him; he races to the centre of the vast arena but he cannot escape; he turns and tries to shield his eyes, but the piercing glare is too bright. Finally, in despair, he looks up and whispers: ‘What do they want from me? I am only an actor.’

      Klaus Mann’s Mephisto is the story of the seductive power of evil. His Faust does not sign a dramatic pact with the Devil but relinquishes his soul slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly. Like so many Berliners caught in the Nazi net Höfgen is not an inherently evil man – he is talented, hard working, even loyal up to a point. But he wants to be better off, he longs for power and security and influence. Many of those who worked for the Nazis were, like Höfgen, ordinary people who were just ‘doing their job’, just signing the paper or stamping the file, part of a long, efficient but often anonymous chain of command in which those German traits – order and discipline and efficiency – so often seen as virtues became its worst vices. Nazism was made up not only of the Himmlers and Heydrichs, the SS camp guards and the Einsatzgruppen commanders; it also functioned because of those minute acts of betrayal, those imperceptible moments of cowardice – looking the other way when someone was being beaten, refusing to enter a shop daubed with the Star of David. The warning of Mephisto is that a person makes his moral choice much earlier than he thinks – it is already too late when a single person has been hounded out of his office for being of the ‘wrong race’; it is already too late if someone is kicked to death in a cellar because he holds political views which do not conform with those of ‘the people’; it is already too late if a child is removed from the classroom for being Jewish, or if someone is turned in and perhaps executed for listening to an ‘enemy’ broadcast. Berliners continued down this road between 1933 and 1945, carrying on doggedly until the city lay in ruins around them and millions of innocent people had been murdered.

      Berlin is itself a testimony to the insidious nature of evil; a warning of the power of Mephisto. And the evil was everywhere in Berlin between 1933 and 1945. How many people realize that in 1943 there were over fifty key Gestapo and SS offices in the city centre, not to mention the hundreds of other government and related offices? How many have walked past number 98/99 Wilmersdorfer Strasse and realized that it was at one time the central SS Personnel Office; or past Unter den Eichen 126–135, which was the site of the SS Economic and Administration Office; or past the Hedemannstrasse 24, which was the SS Race and Settlement Office, or the Knesebeckstrasse 43, which housed the Office of the SS-Reichdoctors? How many people have passed Meinekestrasse 10, once the SS Gruppe IVB, responsible for the political control of churches, sects and Jews, or the Kurfürstenstrasse 115/116, once the site of Referat IVB4 – better known as Adolf Eichmann’s division of Judenangelegenheiten (Jewish Affairs)? How many have walked over the former Schlossstrasse 1, now at the centre of the palace debate, knowing that they are on the site of the central SS training school? How many shoppers have strolled down the bustling Kurfürstendamm past numbers 140–143 and realized that it once housed a warren of offices dealing with everything from ‘saboteurs’ in the occupied territories to the protection of German Volkstum?⁸⁷

      Attempts to commemorate this aspect of Berlin history have often reflected contemporary politics. West Berlin’s first monument to the Second World War was created in 1952 at the former Plötzensee Prison. It was here that 2,500 people, mainly German nationals (including many resistance fighters involved in the 1944 plot), were hanged or guillotined, and the site was dedicated to all victims of Fascism.⁸⁸ A short time later a memorial was erected at the Bendlerblock, where Stauffenberg was shot after the failed 1944 assassination attempt. It was dedicated to the German resistance.⁸⁹ These monuments were important, but the choice of location and the choice of ‘victim’ echoed the post-war West German tendency to concentrate on the fate of the ‘good’ Germans – the 1944 plotters – to the exclusion of others. This choice of ‘victim’ was mirrored in East Berlin in the re-dedication of Schinkel’s Neue Wache with an eternal flame in memory of the ‘victims of Fascism’, which in East German iconography meant their largely fictitious ‘Communist resistance fighters’. It did not mention victims in Poland, Russia, the Netherlands or Greece; nor did it mention the gypsies or the Jews.

      The Neue Wache has already served as the Kaiser’s guardhouse, as a war memorial for the Weimar Republic, as a memorial for the Nazis and as a shrine for East Germans guarded until 1989 by goose-stepping soldiers. In 1993 it was renamed the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’ and the long inscription now commemorates resistance fighters, homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, soldiers who fell on the front, people killed in the bombing raids – indeed all those who were victims of war and terror. It reflects Helmut Kohl’s view that there is a ‘community of victims’, all of whom should be remembered together.

      It is right for Germans to have a place to mourn all those who died tragically during the Second World War; however, the idea of a ‘community of victims’ glosses over one very important aspect of the Nazi past: it implies that a young man who was forced into the army against his will and then died on the front can be compared to a young man killed in Auschwitz, or that a Berlinerin who met her death in a bombing raid can be compared to a young Russian woman burned to death in a barn in 1942. There is a difference between those who were victims of the ‘horrors of war’ and those who were specifically targeted, hunted down and murdered by the Nazis themselves – not only victims of war, but victims of the Germans as well.

      The central memorial to ‘all victims of Fascism’, which includes those killed by the Nazis, implies that Berliners had as little responsibility for their own suffering in the war as, say, those who eked out an existence in the camps; that Berliners were victims too. But Berlin was not Auschwitz or Maidanek or Stutthof or Kulmhof, nor was it Leningrad or Minsk or Amsterdam or Warsaw. Innocent people were hunted down by the Nazis in Berlin, to be sure, but they were in the minority in this city of 4 million people. Berlin was the centre of the Third Reich; here the worst crimes ever committed by Germans were discussed, ordered, codified, registered, approved. For every Berlin resistance fighter, for every Berlin Jew deported to Auschwitz, there were dozens of members of the Gestapo or the SS; dozens who worked in the laboratories or the railway offices or the bureaucracy or the corrupt courts, oiling the wheels and allowing the brittle edifice to function right until the bitter end. In Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare says that ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’ – a history, hidden since 1945, which can best be addressed in Berlin.

      The most successful attempt to do this so far is the Topographie des Terrors, which started as a temporary exhibition on the site of Gestapo headquarters in 1987 and which is to become a permanent installation in Berlin. The site has a chilling history. It became the headquarters of the Geheime Staatspolizei – the Gestapo – in 1933. In 1934 Heinrich Himmler moved the SS headquarters to the Hotel Prinz Albrecht next door and shortly afterwards the building behind was leased to the SS Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headed by Reinhard Heydrich. In 1939 the Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD were united in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Reich Main Security Office), headed by Heydrich and officially headquartered at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8.⁹⁰ This accumulation of power made it the centre of the terror both in Germany and abroad. The site was damaged during the war and blown up in 1949; it was due to have a road built over it until 1981, when the architectural СКАЧАТЬ