Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

continued in West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s and a great deal of original research was carried out. West Germany became unique in its attempts to confront its history and to atone for its crimes, and it won respect in the international community.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, debates over how to approach this history became increasingly politicized and were bound up with questions about German national identity. Very generally, those on the left tended to argue that the Holocaust was unique, that it could never be put into a historical context, while more conservative historians argued that the crimes of other nations were also terrible and that Germans must stop thinking that they were uniquely evil so that they could begin to build a normal nation. The debate intensified in the 1980s in response to the Tendenzwende, a shift to the right represented by Helmut Kohl’s electoral success. Kohl provoked controversy through his ill-judged 1985 visit with President Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery, where Waffen-SS men were buried. This in turn fuelled the Historikerstreit – the historians’ debate – which focused on how Germans should approach the Nazi past. This debate was sparked off by an article published in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung by Ernst Nolte in June 1986 in which he argued that the mass murder of the Jews should be put into a broader historical context and that the Final Solution had perhaps been an ‘asiatic deed’ modelled on Bolshevik crimes to which the Nazis had added only the technology of gassing.⁸¹ The article was hastily rebutted by Jürgen Habermas in Die Zeit, and the exchange set off a flurry of argument and counter-argument about whether Nazi crimes were unique or whether they were comparable to other national atrocities, in particular the Stalinist Terror. The debate produced little new research and quickly degenerated into bitter personal attacks between rival groups, prompting Gordon Craig to dub it ‘the war of the historians’.⁸² The arguments were tempered somewhat by Richard von Weizsäcker’s moving and courageous speech as Federal President on the fortieth anniversary of the German surrender in 1945. Weizsäcker renounced the notion of ‘collective guilt’ but acknowledged the ‘historical consequences’ of the Third Reich and maintained that Germans could not ‘come to terms with the past’ because that implied ignoring the moral burdens of history. Indeed, he argued, only by facing and accepting the past could Germans look forward to any credible future.⁸³

      When I worked in both East and West Berlin in the 1980s – in particular during the 750th Anniversary celebrations in 1987 – I was always struck by the extraordinary contrast between West Berlin, with its vast range of debate and discussion, and the GDR, where nobody was permitted to deviate from the official line. The contrast alone was a powerful argument in favour of the West German system, and of the attempt to be open about the past. Nevertheless, although discussion about Nazi crimes had become widespread amongst historians and journalists and writers and film makers, there were many ordinary people who resented it. The members of the ‘Active Museum’ who created the first exhibition at the former Gestapo headquarters did so in the face of unpleasant protests from members of the general public; those who put up signs marking infamous landmarks such as the site of Freisler’s People’s Court had to repair them when they were repeatedly knocked down; members of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst who displayed and discussed Nazi art at the Inszenierung der Macht exhibition carried on in spite of the death threats they received for ‘stirring up the past’.⁸⁴

      The controversies about how to come to terms with this history after reunification remain unresolved, but although interest was still strong amongst the educated elite it had become clear by the 1990s that many ordinary people were tired of seeing their nation in terms of this terrible history and wished to look to the future. Some claimed that too much attention was being paid to the Holocaust, and that it was time to draw a line under the past. Young West Germans born after the war may have felt remorse at what their forefathers had done but many now echoed Helmut Kohl’s claim that the ‘grace of late birth’ absolved them of guilt. The desire to draw a line was reflected in a Der Spiegel survey of January 1992 commemorating the Wannsee Conference. Two-thirds of Germans stated that they wanted less discussion about the persecution of the Jews. Far more worrying, however, was the result which showed that 32 per cent of those polled believed that the Jews were themselves partly to blame for being ‘hated and persecuted’.⁸⁵

      There is another reworking of the Faust legend which takes place in the city of Berlin. This one was written in 1936 by Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, who committed suicide in Cannes in 1949. It is entitled Mephisto – Roman einer Karriere, and was made into the extraordinary film Mephisto by István Szabó in 1981.⁸⁶ A true story, it recounts the career of Mann’s brother-in-law, the actor Gustav Gründgens, who went to Berlin in 1928 and remained until 1945, becoming the head of the Deutsches Theater and then the Staatliches Schauspielhaus under the Nazis. During those years he became one of the best-known actors in Germany. He was most famous for his production of Goethe’s Faust, and for his own performances in the role of Mephistopheles.

      Klaus Mann’s story is also a metaphor for Berlin, and for all the people who sold their souls for the fame and fortune, security and success afforded by the new regime. Mann mocks the poet Gottfried Benn – ‘Pelz’ – and André Germain – ‘Pierre Larue’ – who remained in Berlin to further their careers, but he reserves his venom for the main character, Gustav Gründgens – ‘Hendrik Höfgen’. Like Gründgens, Höfgen is initially a supporter of left-wing experimental productions but his attempt to found a workers’ theatre founders and he gradually finds an audience amongst the new Nazi elite. Slowly, steadily, they court him, and his blinding ego coupled with his burning hunger for success at any price make him useful to them. It is they who arrange for ever more productions and new directorships, rewarding him with even greater honours and power. But each time he is asked to do something in return. Höfgen is expected to rid the theatre of ‘undesirable elements’, or to abandon his black mistress, or to divorce his wife now living in exile, or to make propaganda speeches extolling the virtues of the ‘new German Kultur’. One evening, shortly after Höfgen has asked ‘the general’ if one of his friends might be spared, he is taken to the great Olympic stadium. The general barks an order. Höfgen is pushed on to the field and the general watches as glaring white spotlights are turned on him. Höfgen tries to hide but the intense lights follow him; he races to the centre of the vast arena but he cannot escape; he turns and tries to shield his eyes, but the piercing glare is too bright. Finally, in despair, he looks up and whispers: ‘What do they want from me? I am only an actor.’

      Klaus Mann’s Mephisto is the story of the seductive power of evil. His Faust does not sign a dramatic pact with the Devil but relinquishes his soul slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly. Like so many Berliners caught in the Nazi net Höfgen is not an inherently evil man – he is talented, hard working, even loyal up to a point. But he wants to be better off, he longs for power and security and influence. Many of those who worked for the Nazis were, like Höfgen, ordinary people who were just ‘doing their job’, just signing the paper or stamping the file, part of a long, efficient but often anonymous chain of command in which those German traits – order and discipline and efficiency – so often seen as virtues became its worst vices. Nazism was made up not only of the Himmlers and Heydrichs, the SS camp guards and the Einsatzgruppen commanders; it also functioned because of those minute acts of betrayal, those imperceptible moments of cowardice – looking the other way when someone was being beaten, refusing to enter a shop daubed with the Star of David. The warning of Mephisto is that a person makes his moral choice much earlier than he thinks – it is already too late when a single person has been hounded out of his office for being of the ‘wrong race’; it is already too late if someone is kicked to death in a cellar because he holds political views which do not conform with those of ‘the people’; it is already too late if a child is removed from the classroom for being Jewish, or if someone is turned in and perhaps executed for listening to an ‘enemy’ broadcast. Berliners continued down this road between 1933 and 1945, carrying on doggedly until the city lay in ruins around them and millions of innocent people had been murdered.

      Berlin is itself a testimony to the insidious nature of evil; a warning of the power of Mephisto. And the evil was everywhere in Berlin between 1933 and 1945. How many people realize that in 1943 there were over fifty key Gestapo and SS offices in the city centre, not to mention the hundreds of other government