Intellectual and Cultural Life in Blockaded Berlin
The shops and cafes were empty. Unemployment was rampant. Lighting and heat were rationed, and yet ... Sporting events still took place, there were live concerts, the theaters and opera continued to offer performances, the cabarets flourished and so did the nightclubs. Indeed, despite the hardships encountered in daily life, blockaded Berlin remained an intellectual and cultural centre and even gave rise to a new university!
Yet arguably nothing was more important than the news. Not only did a variety of newspapers continue to circulate, but the popular "Radio in the American Sector" radio station (below) became an iconic symbol of West Berlin's spirit as a "free voice of the free world." It was vitally important to keeping people not only informed but entertained -- and laughing.
But the founding of a new University had little impact on the daily lives of most of West Berlin’s inhabitants. For them, after food, heat and light, nothing was more important in this period than news. Berlin had a long tradition of competing newspapers going back more than a century. After the censorship of the Nazi era, the press had flourished in Occupied Berlin – fostered by the fragmentation of the city into competing political systems. The various political parties eagerly sought to influence the population for their own cause. All three Western Allies had a strong commitment to freedom of the press and had quickly recognised the potentially insidious effects of the Soviet-controlled press, which received massive financial and bureaucratic support from the Soviet Military Administration. In consequence, although the West was reluctant to support one paper or another, the Western Powers were generous with imports of newsprint and licenses for a variety of papers.
At the start of the Blockade, the Western Allies had been dismayed to discover that the usual reels of newsprint could not fit through the doors of their transport aircraft. Rather than let the newspapers close, however, paper factories were commissioned to produce a particularly light-weight paper that could be transported by air in a different format – and this cargo was given a high priority. In consequence, five daily newspapers were kept alive in Berlin – put to press each evening literally by candlelight - throughout the Blockade. Not one of West Berlin’s newspapers missed a single edition after the initial few weeks of the Blockade - and sales were high. Furthermore, papers were also imported from West Germany and so Berliners always had a range of opinion and view-points from the Social Democratic Vorwärts and Sozialdemokrat to the more conservative Kurier, Tagesspiegel, Telegraf and Abend.
The importance of newspapers at the time can be measured by the fact that Soviets viewed these Western papers as a threat to their control over the Eastern Sector and Zone. The description of events was so at variance with their own version of events that it was obvious to readers that one – if not both – sides were lying. By August 24, 1948 the situation was considered so serious that the Soviet Military Administration felt compelled to forbid the sale of newspapers published anywhere outside the Soviet-controlled areas. The East Berlin post-office workers forthwith voted “spontaneously and unanimously” to discontinue deliveries of papers from the West because of “anti-Soviet agitation.”
The West Berlin news stands responded with a boycott of the Soviet-controlled publications. In retaliation, the transport police, i.e. those police responsible for order on Berlin’s commuter trains (S-Bahn) - all of whom were employees of the Soviet-Controlled Berlin Transport Authority - started confiscating Western print media sold in the newsstands located in the S-Bahn stations. They ripped the advertisements for the “anti-Soviet” press off the walls and they forcibly expropriated any Western papers in the possession of passengers as well. Right up until German Re-Unification in 1990, there were many Berliners who, remembering these events, boycotted the S-Bahn, preferring other means of transportation to control by – and payments to – the East. Strangely, the Soviets never seemed to grasp the simple fact that their actions to make Western newspapers inaccessible only made them more desirable.
Yet perhaps even more important than print media at this time in history was radio. To counter the near constant out-pouring of Soviet propaganda on the airwaves of the Berliner Rundfunk, a new radio station had been established in February 1946 in the American Sector. Named exactly that, Radio in the American Sector or RIAS, the station grew rapidly in popularity until by July, 1948 it had an estimated market share of 33%.
After the start of the Blockade, however, RIAS suddenly became “the” most popular radio station in and around Berlin. RIAS broadcast 24 hours a day, and since much of the city was without electricity much of the day, they sent out trucks with loud-speakers to read the news out on the streets. A fleet of twelve vehicles manned by newscasters started cruising the city's streets. Reporters of RIAS remember vividly going out into the pouring rain wondering if it was worth the trouble only to find crowds of Berliners already standing at every corner, soaking wet but patient in their hunger for news.
RIAS, powered by a 100,000 watt transmitter, could reach not only the Soviet Zone around Berlin but into Poland and Czechoslovakia as well. There were those living under Soviet occupation that went to great efforts to ensure reception of those broadcasts, and in return the Soviets felt compelled to try to jam them. (A favourite Berlin cabaret wrote an entire song inspired by the Soviet jamming sounds. Each verse is ended by a chorus of jamming noises and the next verse shifts to a different key to intimate the shift of frequencies.) The Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk employed three times the number of people that RIAS could afford, but it had only one tenth the number of listeners.
RIAS was a success primarily because “the free voice of the free world” offered listeners news in a format that did not insult their intelligence. The Soviet-controlled media’s refusal to admit there was a Blockade and its efforts to portray the Airlift as “a second bomber offensive” discredited it almost beyond repair. So did claims broadcast by Soviet radio that Berlin was the site of violent protests against the Western Allies, who had shot into the crowd killing “hundreds” who lay unburied on the streets. That might convince the citizens of Moscow and Leningrad that they were on the side of History and Truth; it did not play well even on Alexanderplatz, seat of the Eastern Police, let alone on Wittenburgplatz in the West.
RIAS furthermore brought news in a timely fashion – as it was breaking – not after it had been reported to the Politburo, a response had been meticulously formulated by the Soviet authorities and then translated, distributed and released to the Eastern news media hours or days after the event. Last but not least, RIAS news was popular because it dared to – and got away with – critique of the Western Powers in its commentary. Clay’s policy of not exercising his right to censorship was one of his wisest and most successful occupation policies.
Yet it would be wrong to think that RIAS was popular because of its news programs alone. It also broadcast a variety of entertainment programs, including radio-drama and jazz – then still considered a little racy and daring. (It had been forbidden under the Nazis and was alien to the Soviets.) RIAS offered Berliners cultural features and theatre reviews, sports and local news as well.
That there was so much to report upon may surprise many. Certainly visitors to Berlin seemed to miss much of what was going on. The Malcolm Club’s “Dizzy” Bell found Berlin a barren place. She complained:
The
city was grimly depressing, for people were living in holes all over the place
and there were only a few spots open…There was nothing much you could do in
Berlin, except sail on the lovely lakes. You couldn’t window-shop, for example,
because there was nothing in the windows except cardboard hams and other such
unappetizing articles. There was nothing in the cafes either.[i]
But Mrs. Bell contradicts herself somewhat by telling about visiting night-clubs – a rather adventurous undertaking because one had to ‘avoid the police’ who closed down night-clubs operating when lighting was switched off, which – of course – was most of the time. “The party…would take candles, dodge the patrols, and put the candles on their tables so that they could see something of what was going on.”[ii]
And, in fact, there was a great deal of other, more traditional entertainment offered in Berlin during the Blockade as well. There were live performances of everything from serious drama and opera to cabaret and musicals – although performances were often scheduled at unusual times in order to ensure electricity. In some ways the cultural offerings were greater than they had been for decades because world-famous performers from the Marlowe Players of Cambridge to the American comedian Bob Hope made their way to Berlin in order to demonstrate solidarity with the Berliners and the Airlift. But Berlin’s own artists were also active, producing contemporary plays like Carl Zuckmayer’s “The Devil’s General” and classics like the “Troubadour”, the “Fledermaus” and “Figaro.” As long as the weather was warm, the Berlin Philharmonic and the RIAS Symphony Orchestra preformed in open-air theatres. There was rarely a theatre, opera or concert performance that was not sold out in advance.
During the Blockade sporting events also continued to take place – from football matches to tennis tournaments and even horse-racing. Maybe these events did not attract the leading athletes of the world, but they still offered the Berliners relaxation and diversion from the grim realities of life in the blockaded city. In the many sport clubs, the Berliners also actively took part in sport.
A Berliner argues:
It would be completely wrong to imagine that the Berliners [during the Blockade] were depressed and disinterested, or sat helplessly upon the piles of rubble gazing up at the aircraft flying overhead. Not at all! It wasn’t like that at all! That would have been completely incompatible with Berlin mentality.[iii]
Nothing characterizes Berlin’s mentality and spirit better than a political cabaret, conceived as a single broadcast in December 1948, that so perfectly fit the mood of the times that it instantly became a sensational success. Instead of a single broadcast, it was turned into a series, a monthly programme, and would ultimately have 130 episodes. It was broadcast for over 15 years, from 1948 until 1964. It was the “Club of the Island Dwellers.” (Club der Insulbewohner)
In the opening broadcast, the “Islanders” have rather unexpectedly just discovered that they are living on an island in the middle of a “red sea.” They declare that, in consequence, “the roar of the four-engine aircraft is music to our ears. Who can speak of noise?” However, the programme was not really about the Airlift. Like good cabaret anywhere with skits, dialogues and chansons it poked fun at society, politicians and above all the audience itself. The West Germans, referred to by the Berliners as “Wessis” and considered a distinctly different animal from the Berliners themselves, were often the butt of jokes – and the earnestness of Eastern news media and Party “functionaries” offered a wealth of material as well.
One skit, for example, described the visit by an admiring reporter to a factory in the East. The factory is a completely unique and innovative industrial complex because it works in three shifts around the clock to “construct culture.” As the foreman from the poetry division explains: It had become evident in the post-war years that “many so-called artists were unable to resist the temptations of the monopoly-capitalist political dividers” of Germany. To prevent such an “important consumer of culture” as the citizens of the “from the monopoly-capitalist-free” Soviet Zone from being deprived of culture, the “politically responsible cultural-renewing civil servants” had decided to establish this factory.
Another skit recorded the “secret” meeting of the East Zone “Carnival” club which had been called together to receive their “confidential guidelines” on how to behave during the “spontaneous celebrations.” First of all it is explained that Carnival was not – as the liars in the West suggested – a Christian tradition but had been invented by the “Brothers” in the East - just like the fast that preceded it also came from the Brothers. Jokes, the members are instructed, are supposed to be directed at all figures of authority – except all those in the East, of course. Then a variety of songs are selected for singing during carnival – and one eliminated because it is “too obvious” that “one is always happy at a People’s Own Factory.” The final song, which the participants find “just lovely,” is sung by a young lady who proudly tells how her “Darling is with the Peoples’ Police….” And she only, only, only hopes that he won’t go over to the other side…. In another skit, one of the West Berlin gossips complains that there is less of everything – except People’s Police, who are now defecting by the sixes and sevens.
But the essence of the Islander’s viewpoint is captured in their theme song, which some claim became the unofficial “anthem” of West Berlin. This song was adapted from month to month to take into account current events, but it always started and ended with the same lines: The Islander doesn’t get rattled, the Islander doesn’t like fuss….The islander hopes absolutely, that his island will become mainland again.[iv]
[i] Doris Bell, quoted in Robert Rodrigo, Cassel and Co, 1960, 79-80.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Klaus Scherff, Luftbruecke Berlin, Paul Pietsch Verlag, 1998, 151.
[iv] Gunther Neuman, Der Insular, Dec. 1948.
NOTE: The content of this blog post is based on Helena P. Schrader. The Blockade Breakers. Pen & Sword, 2008.
The Berlin Airlift is the subject of Bridge to Tomorrow, a trilogy of novels starting with Cold Peace.
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