Berlin 1961 (28 page)

Now that Kennedy had been so weakened, Khrushchev was more inclined to risk drawing him into the ring.

Although the Soviet leader’s luck had changed far faster than he could have imagined, he knew he had to move faster still. The situation on the ground in Berlin remained stubbornly unchanged. A whole new generation was congregating in Berlin, eager to soak up the sights and atmosphere of the only city in the world where they could watch the world’s two feuding systems compete openly and without mediation.

Khrushchev wanted to take no chances about where it would all lead.

Jörn Donner Discovers the City

What drew young Finnish writer Jörn Donner to Berlin was his conviction that the place was more of an idea than it was a city. For that reason, it served his postgraduate lust for adventure and inspiration far better than any of the available alternatives.

Paris’s Left Bank had Sartre and his disciples, Rome’s Via Veneto offered its Dolce Vita, and nothing could rival London’s Soho when it came to Donner’s search for the combined attractions of learning and debauchery. Yet only Berlin could provide Donner such a unique window on the divided world in which he lived.

Donner considered the difference between East and West Berliners to be purely circumstantial, and thus they served as the perfect laboratory mice for the world’s most important social experiment. They had been the same Berliners shaped by the same history until 1945, when an abrupt application of different systems left one side with the decadent vices of prosperity and the other with the virtues of a straitjacket. Berliners had always been pinched geographically between Europe and Russia, but the Cold War had transformed that map into a psychological and geopolitical drama.

Twenty years later, Donner would produce Ingmar Bergman’s film
Fanny and Alexander,
and it would win four Academy Awards. But, for the moment, he fashioned himself as a modern-day Christopher Isherwood, and, having just completed his studies at the University of Stockholm, he wanted to launch his artistic career by chronicling Berlin as the living history of his times.

Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin
had tracked the improvised street battles between communists and Nazis during the 1930s that were the prelude to World War II and the Holocaust. Donner regarded the story he would tell of no less historic significance, though the role of Berliners themselves would be more as passive bystanders to the high politics that surrounded them.

Germans disparagingly employ the term
Berliner Schnauze,
or “Berlin snout,” to describe Berliners’ irreverent boisterousness, and none of that had been lost during their postwar occupation. Author Stephen Spender described Berliners’ apparent Cold War courage this way: “If Berliners show a peculiar fearlessness which excites the almost unbelieving wonderment of the world, that is because they have reached that place on the far side of fear, where, being utterly at the mercy of the conflict of the great powers, they feel there is no use being afraid, and therefore they have nothing to be afraid of.”

In the cold damp of the West Berlin subway, Donner studied the unpleasant, incurious Berlin faces that were at the center of his drama. Though the fate of humanity might be decided in their city, Donner found Berliners curiously apathetic, as if the reality were too much for them to absorb.

In a search for the right metaphor to describe the divided city, Donner would later apologize to his readers that he could not resist “the sleepwalker’s almost automatic mania” to describe Berlin’s division through the contrasting nature of its two most prominent avenues—West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm and East Berlin’s Stalinallee.

Like West Berlin, the Ku’damm (as locals called it) had emerged from the chaos of the postwar years full of restless energy, neon lights, aspirational fashion, and new cafés and bars competing for expanding wallets. Like East Berlin, the Stalinallee concealed the underlying fragility of its society with its centrally planned neoclassical grandeur, which dictated everything from each apartment’s size to the width of its hallways and height of its windows. State security directives determined precisely how many informants would be planted among what number of residents.

Though the heart of the Ku’damm was but four kilometers long, that stretch contained seventeen of the country’s most expensive jewelers, ten car dealers, and the city’s most exclusive restaurants. War widows begged on corners where they knew the city’s finest citizens would pass. One such spot was directly before Eduard Winter’s Volkswagen showroom, where Berlin’s richest man was known to sell thirty cars a day when not running his Coca-Cola distributorship.

Isherwood, whose book gave rise to the movie
Cabaret,
spoke of prewar Ku’damm as a “cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops…a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town.” The Cold War atmosphere remained much the same, though postwar reconstruction had introduced the sharper concrete and glass architectural edges of the 1950s.

The Ku’damm’s seedier side had also survived the war. In one tawdry bar, called The Old-Fashioned, Donner observed a Düsseldorf businessman licking the ear of a blond bar girl until she wearily drew back and his lips fell into her armpit. Berlin was a place where Germans came to pursue their pleasures in anonymity and without curfew, from its transvestite bars to more conventional amusements. What happened in Berlin stayed in Berlin.

Across town in communist East Berlin, Donner found the Ku’damm’s alter ego. In 1949, in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, Ulbricht renamed the city’s grand Frankfurter Strasse for the dictator, and it would keep his name through November 1961, even though he was dead and had been renounced by Khrushchev.
^*
During World War II’s final days, Soviet soldiers had hung Nazis from trees that lined the street, often fastening to their corpses identifying papers with the inscription:
HERE HANGS SO-AND-SO, BECAUSE HE REFUSED TO DEFEND WIFE AND CHILD.

Ulbricht had rebuilt the street as Stalinallee to be a showcase for the power and capabilities of communism, “the first socialist road of Germany,” whose purpose was to provide “palaces for the working class.” So construction crews from 1952 to 1960 produced a long row of eight-story apartment houses of Stalinist monumental architecture. Wartime rubble was transformed into high-ceilinged flats with balconies, elevators, ceramic tiling, marble staircases, and—a luxury at the time—baths in every apartment. To provide a sufficiently wide and long promenade for military marches, builders made Stalinallee a tree-studded, six-lane, ninety-meter-wide, two-kilometer-long highway. Stalinallee would provide the backdrop for the annual May Day parade, but it also was where the 1953 workers’ uprising gained its momentum.

Only a short distance from Stalinallee, Donner described the quiet desperation of East Berliners who had passed through the ravages of World War II, only to again land on the wrong side of history. The Raabe-Diele was one of the oldest pubs in Berlin and sat on Sperlingsgasse, a narrow lane still blocked in the middle by wartime ruins that had not yet been cleared. It had but three tables, a counter, benches along the walls, and simple, tattered chairs.

Its sole proprietor was Frau Friedrich Konarske, who at age eighty-two had worked the same counter for fifty-seven years. She would not discuss her own sad life but happily gossiped with Donner about her clientele, all men save for a loud, forty-something woman who drank straight shots while recounting her stomach operations.

“Ten drunk men are better than one half-sober female,” complained Konarske.

Two middle-aged men strummed their guitars at a table by the window and sang sentimental songs. As they prepared to go home, a man with a hunchback shouted a last request in a squeaky voice. “Play ‘Lili Marlene.’ That’s what I want to hear. And then I’ll buy you a round.”

The best-dressed man in the bar—and who, because of that, the others took to be a Communist Party member or state security officer—shouted his objection on the grounds that the song had been one of Hitler’s favorites.

The hunchback protested angrily, “What’s that? ‘Lili Marlene’ was played during the war in order to give voice—yes, to give voice—to the longing of the soldiers for peace. It has nothing to do with Nazism.” And it was true: the song had been written during World War I by soldier Hans Leip while he marched to the Russian front from Berlin. The hunchback protested that even Americans and Englishmen loved the song.

“It’s a universal melody!” shouted an inebriated young man who looked like he had been a boxer, with his large, flat nose, cauliflower ears, and finger-tips yellowed by nicotine. One after another of Frau Konarske’s clientele sounded agreement in an uprising against the supposed communist, but the singers still hesitated, as momentary acts of defiance could result in long jail sentences.

Made courageous by drink, the boxer type threatened the well-dressed man: “If you don’t want to listen, you can leave.” He then began to sing the first verse alone, after which the two musicians joined in, followed by one additional voice after the other, until the entire pub joined in song around the still-silent man in the dark suit who sipped his beer.

Frau Konarske offered drinks on the house. She then took Donner aside and showed him the small, framed text behind her on the wall, dating from World War II. It read:
WE SHALL GO TO OUR DEATH JUST AS NAKED AS WE CAME INTO THE WORLD.

She asked the stranger, “Do you think that anyone will take over my place after I am gone? All my relatives and friends are in West Germany. Do you think they want to come over to East Berlin and work in a little hole from ten in the morning until two at night?”

She answered her own question: “No.”

9

PERILOUS DIPLOMACY

The American government and the president are concerned that the Soviet leadership underestimates the capabilities of the U.S. government and those of the president himself.

Robert Kennedy to Soviet military intelligence agent Georgi Bolshakov, May 9, 1961

Berlin is a festering sore which has to be eliminated.

Premier Khrushchev to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr., at the Ice Capades in Moscow, on the goal of the Vienna Summit, May 26, 1961

WASHINGTON, D.C.
TUESDAY, MAY
9, 1961

W
earing a white shirt, a loosened tie, and a jacket held casually over one shoulder, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy bounded down the steps of the side entrance to the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue and extended his hand to Soviet spy Georgi Bolshakov.

“Hi, Georgi, long time no see,” the attorney general said, as if reacquainting himself with a long-lost friend, though he had met him only briefly once, some seven years earlier. Beside Kennedy stood Ed Guthman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who had become his press officer and sounding board. Guthman had arranged the unprecedented meeting through the man who had delivered Bolshakov by taxi and stood beside him, New York
Daily News
correspondent Frank Holeman.

“So shall we take a walk?” Kennedy asked Bolshakov. The attorney general’s casual manner was disarming, considering the unconventional, unprecedented contact he was about to initiate. He nodded to Guthman and Holeman to stay behind as he and the Russian spy walked onto the Washington Mall in the spring evening mist, making small talk about the magazine that Bolshakov had been editing that day.

At Kennedy’s suggestion, the two men sat on a secluded patch of lawn, the air scented with freshly mowed grass. The U.S. Capitol stood in the background to one side, and the Washington Monument to the other, with the Smithsonian Castle’s front gate directly behind them. Lovers on early evening walks and small groups of tourists looked to the rain clouds above, which threatened a storm.

Bolshakov described his closeness to Khrushchev, and he offered himself up as a more useful and direct contact to the Soviet leader than Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, Mikhail Menshikov, whom Bobby and his brother had come to consider a clown.

Bobby told Bolshakov that his brother was eager to meet with Khrushchev, and that he hoped to improve communication in the run-up to their first meeting so that the two sides could get the agenda right. The attorney general said he already knew about Bolshakov’s links to some of Khrushchev’s top people and was confident he could play that role, if he was willing. “It would be great if they receive information firsthand, from you,” Bobby said. “And they, I believe, would have a chance to report it to Khrushchev.”

After a roll of thunder, Kennedy joked, “If a bolt of lightning kills me, the papers will report a Russian spy killed the president’s brother. It could trigger a war. Let’s get away from here.” They first walked briskly and then accelerated to a run to escape the downpour, regrouping in the attorney general’s office after riding up in his private elevator. They removed their wet shirts and continued their conversation while wearing undershirts and sitting in a tiny room with two armchairs, a refrigerator, and a small library.

Thus began one of the most unique and—even years thereafter—only partially understood relationships of the Cold War. From that day forward, the attorney general and Bolshakov would communicate frequently—during some periods as often as two or three times monthly. It was an exchange that went almost entirely unreported and undocumented, an omission Robert Kennedy would later regret. He never took notes at the meetings, and reported on them directly and only orally to his brother. Thus the Bolshakov–Kennedy exchanges can be reconstructed only imperfectly through a dissatisfying Robert Kennedy oral history, Soviet records, Bolshakov’s partial recollections, and the memories of several others who were involved at one point or another.