William Boyd - The New Confessions

I was as fully recovered as I would ever be by the end of 1945. Eddie was still urging me to have a look at his script on Jesse James. I pleaded ill health for as long as I could, but then a letter arrived that changed everything and set me on a different course of action.

The envelope that contained it was a curious-looking object, almost obliterate with official stamps and chinagraph markings. It had been sent first to my father’s house and had eventually found its way to me. It was from Karl-Heinz and was dated October 1945.

My dear Johnny,

So sorry to have to ask you for this, but would you lend me some money? One hundred dollars is all that I need and I will be in your debt forever and ever. I know it seems like a fortune to ask for, but I’m told that over there in Hollywood, U.S.A., dollar bills grow on trees in your gardens. Pick me one bunch, please, and send it to me at the Dandy Bar, 574 Kurfürstendamm, British Zone, Berlin.

How are things with me? Don’t ask, my old friend, don’t ask.

A warm English handshake from your old prison guard,

Karl-Heinz

Karl-Heinz was alive. This was the best news. How? By what unlikely chance? Suddenly the lethargy of my convalescent’s life fell away. I knew what to do now. I was going back to work for the Chula Vista Herald-Post .

I was full of astonishing optimism during my journey to Berlin. I felt, hard though it may be to credit, that my life was beginning again. Karl-Heinz was alive. Somehow, I knew we would finish The Confessions now, and though I had no idea what form it would take, I was sure it would come about. Too much lying around in hospital beds. Too many hours staring at the Pacific Ocean with nothing to occupy my mind, I hear you say. I had sent Karl-Heinz the money he had asked for; now all I had to do was find him.

However, that elation — that old exhilarating sense of potential — began to seep away as we flew over the city on our approach to Templehof. I had been prepared for an image of destruction, but the vision that confronted me that afternoon in March 1946 was not so much shocking as unreal in a bizarre, sinister way. Berlin was gone, its skyline vanished. When you stand in a city and look casually about you, you see towers, roofs, steeples, gables, chimneys, treetops. Light comes at you through angles and over inclines, sometimes squeezing in through alleyways, sometimes basting the general view in wide boulevards and parks. Berlin was not razed, the shells of buildings still stood, but it had lost all those idiosyncrasies that made it particular — that made it “Berlin.” Only the Funkturm stood tall and untouched above the devastated streets. Everything else was uniformly gray and everything had been battered.

How can I explain it? If you have ever seen a rugby team troop off the pitch at the end of a game played in exceptionally muddy conditions, you can bring to mind an analogue. The tired, tousled, dirty men seem suddenly the same size and thickness, all covered and clotted in mud. The slim, speedy winger is indistinguishable from the balding hooker with the beer belly. Their ordeal, their exhaustion and dishevelment, have homogenized them. And this is what had happened to Berlin. It was one large ruin. The city had fused.

I was billeted in a villa in Zehlendorf — west in the American sector. It was designated by the press bureau of the military government PSR-4, for some reason. There were half a dozen journalists staying there and it was run by a pale silent woman called Frau Hanf. She was tall and rather beautiful in an exhausted, strained sort of way, but she was the very paradigm of formality. I never dared ask her a personal question.

The next day we were taken on a tour of the city. My depression deepened. What overwhelmed me was the mess. It seemed impossible that it could ever be cleaned up. I could not imagine how a new city could ever emerge from this devastation. We drove up the Kurfürstendamm towards the Gedächtniskirche. The houses on either side were scorched shells, uneasy facades, set between vast rubble mounds. To my amazement, however, I saw bright signs and fresh paint, even neon. Shops, cafés, Lokale , were open and making a brave show of plying for trade. The streets were full of people, stooped and intent and walking uncharacteristically slowly for Berliners. Everywhere were gangs of grubby trousered women sorting through bricks. Opposite the church, the Gloria-Palast — where The Confessions: Part I had played for a week — was a tumbled crater of stone and concrete.

We drove on. Another tremendous shock. The Tiergarten had gone! gone completely, not a tree left. In its place were thousands of tatty garden plots. I was overwhelmed by this transformation. I tried to imagine Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, Central Park, as vast vegetable gardens, all the trees cut down for fuel.…

On the Brandenburg Gate were red flags and pictures of Lenin. The stark white of the memorial to the Unknown Russian Soldier seemed almost obscene set against the miserable incinerated black of the buildings all around. The Dome, the Schloss, the Chancellery … the Adlon Hotel, Wilhelmstrasse … everything shattered or demolished. I looked out of the windows at the drear view, the gangs of women and POWs sifting through the debris, my mind a confusing sequence of “before” and “after.” Where was the Bristol, the Eden, the Esplanade? Where were the embassies, the theaters, the department stores? That pile of bricks had been the bar where I would have a drink after my stint as doorman at the Windsor. This space used to be Duric Lodokian’s house. That rubble mountain had been the hotel where Leo Druce had his wedding reception. Monika Alt used to live behind this cauterized facade.… And so on. It’s pointless to rehearse the conflict of emotions, the sweet and sour memories that day provoked. They lessened subsequently and with some speed. You can get used to anything. Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places. But I never got used to what had happened to the river Spree. Perhaps because that first day I had arrived in Berlin in ’24, in the early morning before the city was up and about, I had walked along its banks from the Lehrter Station through a cold misty dawn. Now it was the city’s sewer, clogged and polluted, rimmed with scum and thick with effluent and excreta. Its strong ornamented bridges had all been destroyed and makeshift wooden spans replaced the shattered arches. It seemed almost too solid to flow, but if you could bear to stand long enough (you could hang a hat on the smell off it, as the Berliners used to say) you could see its surface shift and eddy after a fashion, as if it were a prototype river not yet perfected, an early design model now superseded and antiquated.

My diary. A typical day.

Berlin, March 25, 1946. Woke early after a bad night’s sleep. Frau Hanf obligingly provided me with an early breakfast of stewed fruit and porridge before the other journalists were up. I got her to sit and have some coffee with me by offering her a cigarette. I asked her what her husband had done before the war — she said he’d been a washing machine manufacturer. She has no idea where he is now. We talked about how one might set about finding a missing person. You can leave notices around the city, she said. There are even agencies that will track down relatives for a fee. The military government and the control commission are no use at all. She said this without resentment or bitterness .

Driven to the Kommandatura for a briefing on the next Four Powers meeting. Dull stuff. Talked to an American staff captain who said the Russians had not raped excessively. They were more interested in looting, he said. Given that most of the Russian troops were Asiatics he thought that the amount of raping in Berlin had been “about average.” He became very bitter, however, about the question of silk stockings. “More women in Berlin wear silk stockings than in Paris or London,” he insisted. Must see if I can confirm this .