Berlin Diary (16 page)

B
ERLIN
,
August
20

I have a job. I am to go to work for the Columbia Broadcasting System. That is,
if…
. And what an
if
it is! It is this way: It is crazy. I have the
job
if
my
voice
is all right. That’s the catch. Whoever heard of an adult with no pretentions to being a singer or any other kind of artist being dependent for a good, interesting job on his
voice
? And mine is terrible. I’m positive of it. But that’s my situation tonight.

It has been quite an evening. I met Edward R. Murrow, European manager of CBS, in the lobby of the Adlon at seven o’clock. As I walked up to him I was a little taken aback by his handsome face. Just what you would expect from radio, I thought. He had asked me for dinner, I considered, to pump me for dope for a radio talk he must make from Berlin. We walked into the bar and there was something in his talk that began disarming me. Something in his eyes that was not Hollywood. We sat down. We ordered two Martinis. The cocktails came. I wondered why he had asked me. We had friends in common, Ferdy Kuhn, Raymond Gram Swing…. We discussed them. Apparently he was not here to do a broadcast, then.

“You must come sailing with me tomorrow or Sunday,” I said.

“Swell. I’d like to.”

The waiter gathered up the empty cocktail glasses and laid two menus before us.

“Just a minute before we order,” Murrow broke in.

“I’ve got something on my mind.”

That’s the way it was. He said he had something on his mind. He said he was looking for an experienced foreign correspondent to open a CBS office on the Continent. He could not cover all of Europe from London. I began to feel better, though I said nothing.

“Are you interested?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said, trying to down my feelings.

“How much have you been making?”

I told him.

“Good. We’ll pay you the same.”

“Fine,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” he said, and reached for the
Speisekarte
. We ordered dinner. We talked of America, Europe, the music at Salzburg he had just heard. We had coffee. We had brandy. It was getting late.

“Oh, there’s one little thing I forgot to mention,” he said. “The voice…”

“The what?”

“Your voice.”

“Bad,” I said, “as you can see.”

“Perhaps not. But, you see, in broadcasting it’s a factor. And our directors and numerous vice-presidents will want to hear your voice first. We’ll arrange a broadcast. You give a talk, say, on the coming party rally. I’m sure it’ll work out all right.”

B
ERLIN
,
September
5

Did my trial broadcast this Sabbath day. Just before it began I was very nervous, thinking of what was at stake and that all depended upon what a silly little microphone and an amplifier and the ether between Berlin and New York did to my voice. Kept thinking also of all those CBS vice-presidents sniffing at what they heard. Everything went wrong at first. Claire Trask, fifteen minutes before the start, discovered she had left the script of her introduction at a café where we’d met. She dashed madly out of the studio, returning only a few minutes before we were to begin. At the last minute the microphone which apparently had been set for a man at least eight feet tall wouldn’t come down. “It is stuck,
mein Herr
,” said the German engineer. He advised me to point my head towards the ceiling. I tried it, but it so constricted my vocal cords
that only a squeak came out when I started to talk.

“One minute to go,” shouted the engineer.

“I can’t go on with that mike,” I protested.

I espied some packing-cases in the corner just behind the microphone. I had an idea.

“Boost me up on those, will you?”

“
Wie, bitte?
What you say?”

“Give me a lift.” And in a second I was atop the boxes, my legs dangling nicely, my mouth just opposite the level of the microphone. We all laughed—

“Quiet,” the engineer shouted, giving us the red light. I had no time to get nervous again.

And now I must wait for the verdict. In the meantime leaving for Nuremberg tonight to do the Party Congress for the U.P. Webb Miller and Fred Oechsner were rather insistent that I help them out. It’s better, at that, to have some distraction in the next few days while I wait. Wrote Tess we probably won’t starve.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
11

A week now and no word from Murrow. My voice apparently was pretty lousy. Birchall of the New York
Times
talks of giving me a job, but won’t pay much. Returning to Berlin day after tomorrow.

N
UREMBERG
,
September
13

Murrow called and said I’m hired. Start October 1. Wired Tess. Celebrated a little tonight, I fear, on the very potent local Franconian wine. Prentiss Gilbert, our counsellor of Embassy, has been here, the first American diplomat to attend a Nazi Party Congress. Ambassador Dodd, who is in America, strongly disapproves, though Prentiss, a swell guy,
says he was forced into it by Henderson, the pro-Nazi British Ambassador, and Poncet, who used to be “pro” but is probably so no longer. The congress duller this year and many are asking if Hitler is slowing up. I hope so. Constance Peckham, a nice young lady from
Time
magazine has been here. She thinks we “veterans” are much too blasé about this party show, which appears to have given her a tremendous kick. Much good talk and drink with her, Jimmy Holburn, and George Kidd this night. Appropriate, I suppose, that I should begin and end my newspaper sojourn in Germany at this madhouse which is the party rally. Three years. They’ve gone quickly. Germany has gone places. What will radio be like?

B
ERLIN
,
September
27

Tess back, feeling fine, and we’re packing. We are to make our headquarters in Vienna, a neutral and central spot for me to work from. Most of our old friends have left—the Gunthers, the Whit Burnetts—but it is always that way in this game. Go to London next week, then Paris, Geneva, and Rome to meet the radio people, renew contacts with the newspaper offices, and, in Rome, to find out if the Pope is really dying, as reported. We are glad to be leaving Berlin.

To sum up these three years: Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears. Often we have tried to segregate ourselves from it all. We have found three refuges: Ourselves and our books; the “foreign colony,” small, limited, somewhat narrow, but
normal
, and containing
our friends—the Barneses, the Robsons, the Ebbuttses, the Dodds, the Deuels, the Oechsners, Gordon Young, Doug Miller, Sigrid Schultz, Leverich, Jake Beam, and others; thirdly, the lakes and woods around Berlin, where you could romp and play and sail and swim, forgetting so much. The theatre has remained good when it has stuck to the classics or pre-Nazi plays, and the opera and the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, despite the purging of the Jews and the year’s disciplining of Fuertwängler (who has now made his peace with Satan), have given us the best music we’ve ever heard outside of New York and Vienna. Personally too there was the excitement of working here, the “Saturday surprises,” the deeper story of this great land in evil ferment.

Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it
is
, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted. But Spengler included Germany in the decline of the West, and indeed the Nazi reversion to the ancient, primitive, Germanic myths is a sign of her retrogression, as is her burning of books and suppression of liberty and learning.

But Germany is stronger than her enemies realize. True, it is a poor country in raw materials and agriculture; but it is making up for this poverty in aggressiveness of spirit, ruthless state planning, concentrated
direction of effort, and the building up of a mighty military machine with which it can back up its aggressive spirit. True, too, that this past winter we have seen long lines of sullen people before the food shops, that there is a shortage of meat and butter and fruit and fats, that whipped cream is
verboten
, that men’s suits and women’s dresses are increasingly being made out of wood pulp, gasoline out of coal, rubber out of coal and lime; that there is no gold coverage for the Reichsmark or for anything else, not even for vital imports. Weaknesses, most of them, certainly, and in our dispatches we have advertised them.

It has been more difficult to point out the sources of strength; to tell of the feverish efforts to make Germany self-sufficient under the Four-Year Plan, which is no joke at all, but a deadly serious war plan; to explain that the majority of Germans, despite their dislike of much in Nazism, are behind Hitler and believe in him. It is not easy to put in words the
dynamics
of this movement, the hidden springs that are driving the Germans on, the ruthlessness of the long-term ideas of Hitler or even the complicated and revolutionary way in which the land is being mobilized for Total War (though Ludendorff has written the primer for Total War).

Much of what is going on and will go on could be learned by the outside world from
Mein Kampf
, the Bible and Koran together of the Third Reich. But—amazingly—there is no decent translation of it in English or French, and Hitler will not allow one to be made, which is understandable, for it would shock many in the West. How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination! They laughed. But Hitler frankly admits it. He says in
Mein Kampf
: “A state which in an age of racial pollution devotes itself to cultivation of its best racial elements must some
day become master of the earth…. We all sense that in a far future mankind may face problems which can be surmounted only by a supreme Master Race supported by the means and resources of the entire globe.”