2023-06-08 21:38:28
The British author Sinclair McKay wrote a history of Berlin between 1918 and 1989 in dozens of episodes. Did he create a convincing work?
Soldiers on a Berlin flak towerRBB
The British author and literary critic Sinclair McKay writes at the beginning of his story about the short 20th century between 1918 and 1989, in which the city perished and after many years on a drip, Berlin is a naked city, one that openly displays its wounds is resurrected. He used a sentence by the architect David Chipperfield as the guiding principle for his forays into the history of culture and mentality through Berlin, according to which every city has its own history, “but Berlin has too much of it”. But how do you deal with this “too much”? What do you emphasize, what do you leave out?
One of the peculiarities of many historical, biographical, and institution-historical reviews is that National Socialism shrunk to a short and dark phase, which was followed by a difficult beginning. Although no history can now be told without the acknowledgment that there was no such thing as “zero hour,” all too often the year 1945 appears as a catharsis that makes the sense of having gotten away all the more vividly. City stories always deal with founding stories and crystallization points of beginnings.
The will to perish
Ian Kershaw’s study “The End” (2011) could be used as an effective antidote to such transfiguring needs. With ruthless accuracy he described the last three months of the Nazi regime as a history of violence in which the will to collapse negated almost any prospect of an “after”. From Keith Lowe’s “The Wild Continent” (2014), however, one can learn that 1945 by no means marked the end of the violent events. Escape, expulsion, distrust and betrayal shaped an inhospitable attitude to life from which something like a post-war European order was only gradually able to emerge.
Sinclair McKay rarely refers to such powerful references. Rather, he tries to develop the fate of the city topographically. The so-called flak towers (in Friedrichshain and at Gesundbrunnen) had become important culmination points in the last years of the war, through which air raids were to be repelled. And when this was hardly possible, they offered the residents the illusion of protection, at least temporarily, with their steel-hard housing.
In the more impressive chapters of his book, McKay delves into the underpinnings of a devastated city that increasingly fails to simulate normalcy and resistance. In the Volkssturm, which was only recruited in the fall of 1944, Adolf Hitler’s followers Bormann and Himmler believed they had formed experienced combat units in order to awaken fighting spirit and determination in the civilian population. Suicide attacks on the approaching Soviet tanks were also to be perpetrated by so-called child martyrs. The war of annihilation against the attacked neighbors had long since turned inwards, and McKay can convincingly show how widespread the fear of the alleged cruelty of the enemies was, in which not least the acknowledgment of guilt of suppressed brutality and brutality behind the nationalist ideas of grandeur that had been acted out for years appeared.
Sinclair McKay contrasts the story of the decline, which he gained in part from diary contributions and reports from the platform of the Berlin Contemporary Witnesses Exchange, with that short period of time in which Berlin was a lively and experimental metropolis of openness that attracted the curious and stranded from all over the world offered refuge. After the years of libertinism, as historian Peter Gay put it, the “Republic of Outsiders” was followed by a period of paternalistic revenge.
The Forgotten Continuities
In an effort to give many biographical sources priority over historical accounts, McKay sometimes overstrains the meaningfulness of his finds. He is able to let his dramaturgy come to the fore most convincingly where he refers to monstrous continuities that lead the performances of 1945 as a caesura ad absurdum.
Even before 1933, Berlin was a center of revolutionary scientific research, which the Nazis, due to their delusional anti-Semitism, were unable to grasp. According to McKay, the fact that the decisive breakthroughs in atomic research were partly due to the ideas of the Jew Albert Einstein was simply unacceptable to the Nazis. However, the fatal modernity of contemporary violent politics also means that after 1945 neither the Soviet nor the American side had any moral scruples about further developing and trying out the possibilities of technological achievements.
Sinclair tries to explain the oddity of the division of Germany using the example of the Bavarian doctor Johannes Muschol, who suffered from schizophrenia. He had reached West Berlin via the transit route at the beginning of the 1980s and eventually turned up in an East Berlin nursing home. It was not clear how he got across the border, so the East German authorities handed him back to the West. When he tried to get back to the East via a West Berlin viewing platform, he was finally shot on the so-called death strip. The Stasi immediately began to cover up the case. Muschol’s body was cremated, paid for with money found in his pockets. “Too much history” is often accompanied by “too much order”.
Sinclair McKay: Berlin 1918-1989. The city that shaped a century. Harper Collins, 555 pages, 28 euros
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