Underground Berlin

Home , Edwin Black, Triumphal Arch (woodcut)

chapter 15 Underground Berlin

Illustration 15.1 Untitled, Umbo (c. 1935) Berlinische Galerie © Bildrecht, Wien, 2015

Auch du, vielstädtiges Berlin/ Unter und über dem Asphalt geschäftig Berthold Brecht, “Über Deutschland”

If Americans’ first literary visions of Berlin were of Fay’s “ample squares; level streets; long lines of sculptured facades, temples, palaces, churches, statues, columns, porticoes, and bridges, in a stately order” (37), a century later Isherwood added a further touch to this architecture so “carefully arranged” in “grand international styles,” Berlin’s “self-conscious civic centre” asserting its “dignity as a capital city – a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch,” nothing forgotten, all seeming “so very correct”—until one learns to recognize the “flash of that hysteria which flickers always behind every grave, gray Prussian façade” (1954: 370). If Isherwood was “a camera with its shutter open,” recording Berlin of those days (1), Alan Balfour has described how period photos of Berlin, from today’s perspective, seem to reveal a “reality below the surface of things,” hinting at “often unacknowledged forces below the surface of experience, which may erupt when least expected” (46). Clearly, as Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe suggested, by the 1930s, something ominous flickered below the city’s orderly surfaces with a brighter hysteria than that of the night life Isherwood made famous. As Wilhelm Gauger writes, from the Second World War’s begin- ning until shortly afterward, Berlin is depicted in Anglophone literature as a place contrasting a beautiful surface with the hollow demonism of Nazism

232 chapter 15 below.1 Howard K. Smith’s memoir of these years in Berlin repeatedly used the metaphor of Germany as a beautiful apple, full of worms, though ironically its “beautiful surface” was partly sustained by American corporate investments, as Jonas Scherner has begun to explore and as texts like Edwin Black’s ibm and the Holocaust (2001) and Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust (2009) have worked to popularize.2 Late postwar fiction continued to be fascinated by themes of a darker reality beneath the city’s surface. In Walter Abish’s How German is It (1980), mass graves are discovered under a spanking new German city. In Irving Wallace’s thriller The Seventh Secret (1986), a bunker beneath a gleaming new West Berlin shelters Nazis scheming to resurface like an ominous Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor who, legend has it, is sleeping beneath a mountain, waiting to awaken and restore Germany’s empire.3 American fiction like Wallace’s, Schneider’s The Last Twenty Minutes of Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler and Young’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler often worked to mythologize Hitler’s Berlin bunker, linking his death to that of gods, much as William T. Vollmann’s chapter/ story titled “Into the Mountain” recounts how “in the old Norse legends great men go into the mountain when they die, and their voices may sometimes be heard where there are hollows in the earth; but the sleepwalker’s [Hitler’s] intention was that there would be no mountain after him, no voices in the ground, no ground, and certainly nobody above ground to listen” (529). In Michael Young’s wartime saga, protagonists invading Hitler’s Chancellery find a trap door revealing stairs descending into darkness in which “angry, gut- tural raving” echoes from a fabulous underground hall where Hitler sits, alive and well beneath the ravaged city, drinking champagne (117). Similar themes recur in contemporary fiction. In Hattemer-Higgins’s The History of History (2011), an underground bunker houses the ghostly incarnation of Magda Goebbels, enthroned on a great dais of tinned vegetables and sardines in blaz- ing candlelight, smoking cigarettes from a golden etui.4 In Chloe Aridjis’s Book

1 “[Berlin] wird zu Beginn des Krieges und kurz danach gezeigt, wobei der Kontrast zwischen der schönen Oberfläche und der hohlen Dämonie des Naziturns sowie den Zernstörungen an anderen Orten herausgearbeitet wird. Berlin hat etwas Unwirkliches an sich” (89). 2 See also Charles Higham’s Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money- Plot 1933–1949 and Eleanor Jones and Florian Ritzmann’s “The Coca-Cola Company under the Nazis.” 3 “Barbarossa” was also the code name for Germany’s 1941 invasion of Russia, the largest mili- tary offensive in history, with 4.5 million troops. 4 The American protagonist escapes this ghost of Hitler’s bunker through the crypt of St. Matthias at Winterfeldtplatz, but the hidden plot of the novel is that she herself has bur- ied her own neglected child in a courtyard, linking her to the infanticidal Goebbels.