A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
West-marks or West cigarettes as bribes to avoid waiting and get the best treatment at a very low price.
Along the west side of the zigzag border, glittering movie theaters lured East Berlin kids to Hollywood cowboy or gangster films with special low ticket prices to overcome the currency disadvantage. Superman-type comic books were sold to them at cut-rate prices. East Berlin adults crossed over to see Hollywood and West German films, good and not so good; one hit was Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Highbrow crossovers went to West Berlin theaters to see dramas then popular in the Western world. I soon realized that most East Berliners did cross over, whether commuting to a West Berlin job then spending a Saturday night dancing or at a show, or purchasing items, modern, fashionable, or simply in short supply in the GDR. East Berlin, despite constant improvement and a better assortment of goods than elsewhere in the GDR, could never keep pace with the enticing offerings of a Marshall Plan—subsidized, booming capitalist economy just a few streets away.
As I mentioned, this migration was not entirely one-sided. Excluded from ID requirements in East Berlin besides hairdressers and physical therapists were books, records, and theater tickets, already extremely inexpensive. Even opera tickets cost only 15 East-marks. Thanks to the exchange rate, this meant that West Berliners, for the best seats in the East, paid little more than they would for a serving of coffee and cake, making it harder for us East Berliners to get good seats, or sometimes any at all. But it was well worth the effort, as I will soon describe.
Berlin, already split before the Wall, had its amusing features. At one corner in downtown East Berlin you could look north and read the GDR version of the evening news in rotating electric letters at Friedrichstrasse Station. If you turned your head 90 degrees westward you could read a very contrary CIA version rotating from a tall RIAS radio tower in West Berlin.
A few subway lines moved from one West Berlin borough to another, crossing through a part of East Berlin and stopping at stations there. So for some stretches passengers were mixed. I enjoyed seeing one passenger reading about evil drugs and joblessness in the West while another, sitting peacefully next to him, read about the hunger and oppression in the Soviet Zone he was passing through.
I watched West Berlin loudspeaker trucks drive right up to the unguarded borderline, loudly blaring anti-GDR messages. As soon as possible, a sound truck arrived on the Eastern side and, almost bumper to bumper, blasted loud music to drown it out until it drove off to the next location.
As for me, fearful of somehow being recognized or simply asked to identify myself, if only as witness to some accident, I never risked putting one toe across a border marked only by the famous signposts “You are now leaving the American (or British or French) Sector.” I was also a bit nervous since the street where, after a year, we got a new little apartment that was separated from the U.S. sector only by unlighted gardens. I was doubly glad when, after a lucky swap, we got a centrally heated apartment in the very safe Stalin Allee, which, happily, five months after we moved there, was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee.
6—Berlin’s Cultural Scene
Renate and I were not greatly tempted by the goodies across the dividing line (and we did get a few goodies from my parents). The stage and the opera, which we had greatly enjoyed in Bautzen and Leipzig, meant more to us. Despite fantastically low prices, the quality in East Berlin was superb.
The first play after the war, in September 1945 in East Berlin, had been Gottfried Lessing’s 1779 classic Nathan the Wise, a call for tolerance between religions, a vigorous rejection of anti-Semitism and fully taboo in the Nazi years. Those first audiences, huddled in the unheated auditorium of the famous Deutsches Theater, often physically hungry, were also hungry for cultural fresh air. Its producer, Gustav von Wangenheim, a communist theater man, had fled from the Nazis to the USSR and during the war called on German soldiers at the front to lay down their arms. Then he taught German POWs at the “anti-fascist schools.” The Nazis had sentenced him to death in absentia. His response was Nathan the Wise, four months after their defeat. His second production was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, its Berlin premiere and first introduction to recent American drama.
Similar sentiments motivated many people of stage, screen, and the arts who came out of hiding, literally or figuratively, or returned from exile in a dozen countries. Von Wangenheim was followed by Wolfgang Langhoff, arrested by the Nazis the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933, tortured and sent to toil as one of the “peat bog soldiers,” prisoners made famous by their song, which, after his release and flight to Switzerland, he had edited and publicized. His first great success was Goethe’s Faust and even more an adaptation of Aristophanes’ ancient comedy Peace by the brilliant writer Peter Hacks, newly arrived from West Germany. At the premiere the ovation lasted three-quarters of an hour, the stage “iron curtain” had to be raised fifteen times!
The manager of the wrecked and rebuilt Volksbühne (People’s Stage) was Fritz Wisten, also a leftist, and Jewish, arrested and mistreated by the Nazis but saved from deportation and death because his actress wife was Aryan. They were even able to conceal and rescue a few colleagues from the Jewish Cultural Association that he had once headed. At the Volksbühne, we enjoyed jolly but still hard-hitting plays by old Molière from seventeenth-century France.
Most of all I loved the Brecht theater. The great Bertolt Brecht arrived in Berlin in 1948 with his wife, Helene Weigel, forced to flee his exile home in California by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Neither Switzerland nor Austria offered him a chance to produce his plays, but then East Berlin gave his new Berliner Ensemble the same beautiful, baroque theater where his Three-Penny Opera had triumphed in 1928. The first production was his play Mother Courage, about a woman who sells goods to soldiers during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and, despite one tragic loss after another, never comprehends that war is never good for “little people” like her. The role, wonderfully played by his wife, was an early source of controversy. Mother Courage was far from the “socialist hero” type often sought in those years. It was really hard to identify with her. Brecht did not want audiences to “identify,” however, but to reflect and draw their own conclusions; most in the audience had also been forced to learn that war brought nothing but misery and ruins. Mother Courage’s run-down little wagon circling at center stage became a legend.
Co-starring with Weigel, and even more legendary, was the actor and singer Ernst Busch. The Spanish Civil War songs he recorded during the fascist bombing of Barcelona in 1938, based on the international song book he compiled, are still loved in many countries. After Spain’s defeat, he was turned over to the Gestapo and narrowly escaped death when the penitentiary was bombed. Now, defying partial facial laming, he triumphed again and again, once again with the song “Mackie Messer” (“Mack the Knife”) from The Three-Penny Opera and above all in the title role in The Life of Galileo. Every production in the Brecht theater was noteworthy, unique—and a treat.
And then there was opera, far more popular here than in the United States. The State Opera House on Unter den Linden boulevard, built for King Frederick II (Frederick the Great), whose classical lines made it my favorite building, was managed by Max Burkhardt, who had spent six years behind bars, partly in solitary confinement, and also survived only because his wife, thanks to false documents, was an Aryan. I recall Shostakovich’s The Nose, not only its music and absurdly funny plot, but because our balcony seats were five meters from the loge where Party head Walter Ulbricht was also enjoying the premiere. Also, in Tosca, otherwise done beautifully, I recall how the heroic tenor Cavaradossi’s can of paint defied stage directions by falling from its scaffold position and rolling slowly downward, with all eyes on it except those of the oblivious hero, till it fell into the orchestra. Best of all was the jolly Barber of Seville, a production so appealing with its ironic charm that it is still being offered.
Good as the State Opera House was, the rival Komische Oper (Comic Opera), headed by the great Austrian Walter Felsenstein, was even better. It featured no world-famous singers, just very good ones who could also act. Felsenstein and his team rehearsed even the smallest roles for months till they attained, for us, perfection. Every performance was a true delight, from the eerie cellar and riotous court in Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue or Bluebeard to the overwhelming gale and heart-rending ending in