Iron Curtain (34 page)

The idealists might eventually have fought back, and there were numerous struggles for power throughout the larger Nékosz organization. But in 1949 the regime would run out of patience. The colleges were abruptly and decisively nationalized, on the grounds that they needed to become more “professional.” They were absorbed into the rest of the state university system, the buildings were adopted by other institutions, the special reading lists and theater trips were abandoned, and the idealistic self-governing mechanisms, which had largely ceased to function in any case, were dissolved. The decision was justified by reference to Marxist theory. As Rákosi put it, “I learned all about socialism from the famous old books. I learned about mass organizations, youth associations, women’s organizations, trade unions … There is not a single word about People’s Colleges in those books, and I don’t think they are necessary.”
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In other words, the People’s Colleges were an institution unknown to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and nothing like them existed in the Soviet Union. And so they were destroyed, along with so many other groups that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had never mentioned. In the end, the fate of the Polish Scouts, the Hungarian People’s Colleges, the German Christian Democratic youth, and a vast range of other institutions—mainstream and idiosyncratic, political and apolitical, from shooting clubs and fencing teams to folk-dance troupes and Catholic charities—was the same. The nascent totalitarian states could not tolerate any competition whatsoever for their citizens’ passions, talents, and free time.

“
HIER SPRICHT BERLIN.
” “Here speaks Berlin.”

With those words, Berlin radios came back to life. It was May 13, 1945. They had been silent for nearly two weeks, since Admiral
Doenitz had announced the
death of Adolf Hitler on May 1. Now the German capitulation was complete and the Soviet military administration had taken over the Reichsrundfunk radio building in Masurenallee, in the western half of the city. The building, which had been specially designed for radio broadcasting and had one of the most modern recording studios in Europe, had been saved from
destruction by its location outside the center and, more importantly, by the Red Army’s deliberate protection. Even as the rest of Berlin lay in ruins, most of what had been Grossdeutscher Rundfunk’s equipment was still intact, and many of the radio station’s staff were still alive.
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In that sense, the radio station was almost unique among Berlin institutions.

That first broadcast was only an hour long. It began with the Soviet, American, British, and French national anthems, followed by an address from Marshal Stalin. Listeners then heard the terms of the unconditional surrender read aloud, along with statements from Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin again. News from around the world came next—including information on Himmler’s arrest and plans for war crimes trials—interspersed with Soviet military music. The final part of the broadcast reported on the victory celebrations in Moscow:

Radio was important to Muscovites, listening in their dark apartments. The Red Army assumed, correctly, that it would be important to Germans listening in their dark apartments too. From the moment of their arrival, the Soviet occupiers invested heavily in programming and equipment for the new radio station, and in the days that followed the first broadcast, the new Berlin radio station expanded its repertoire with startling speed. On May 18, the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper played Beethoven (representing German music) and Tchaikovskii (representing Russia) in one of its large recording studios. Two days later, Deutschland Rundfunk again broadcast Beethoven and Tchaikovskii, as well as Strauss and Borodin.
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On May 23, the radio broadcast its first children’s program.
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Listeners could hear periodic news bulletins as well.

All of this activity was supervised by a group of Soviet officers who administered the new station and functioned as its first censors as well. They controlled in turn a group of Germans, including at least three members of the Ulbricht Group:
Hans Mahle, a longtime communist who would later found East German television; Matthäus Klein, a Wehrmacht officer who had been “converted” in the Soviet reeducation camps for German soldiers; and, in a junior capacity,
Wolfgang Leonhard, then aged twenty-four. They
were soon joined by the twenty-two-year-old
Markus Wolf, Leonhard’s Comintern school colleague and East Germany’s future spy master.

Like the secret policemen of Eastern Europe, the “new” German radio station already had a history before 1945. Though the Russians had not expected to have such an excellent facility immediately available, they had certainly thought to train some of the new radio broadcasters in advance. Both Klein and Mahle had been working for some years in tandem with political propaganda officers of the Red Army, from whose ranks many of the first Soviet cultural officers in Germany would later be drawn. As early as 1941 German-speaking Soviet officers and German communists jointly compiled leaflets that they dropped from airplanes over German lines. In November of that year, they also began to publish several newspapers aimed directly at German POWs.

After the
battle of Stalingrad, in July 1943, the German communists in
Moscow founded the
National Committee for a Free Germany. They were joined by several POWs who had converted to the Soviet cause. Together, the two groups published a newspaper—edited by
Rudolf Herrnstadt, later a prominent East German editor—which they delivered to German territories conquered by the Red Army, as well as to POW camps. They also began active radio broadcasting. At different times different German-language stations transmitted news out of Moscow as well as constant invitations to German troops to lay down their arms and overthrow Hitler. Mahle worked on a number of these stations, including some that pretended to be Nazi stations in order to broadcast disinformation.
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Wolf became an announcer and commentator, a job which brought him into close contact with Walter Ulbricht. His wife, Emmi—the woman who had once forced Leonhard into a humiliating public confession—walked up and down battlefields with a megaphone, shouting at German soldiers to lay down their arms.
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Though the National Committee was a Soviet front organization, its leaders were very careful not to appear “too communist,” particularly in 1943 and the first half of 1944 when they still hoped a putsch would overthrow Hitler. As noted, its members adopted the black, white, and red flag of imperial Germany instead of the colors of the Weimar Republic or the USSR. A separate “League of German Officers” was also created to work alongside the committee in order to encourage the participation of former Wehrmacht officers who might be squeamish about working directly with German communists.
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Something of this calculating spirit also infected the new Berlin radio station in the spring of 1945. Klein and Mahle had met many of the POWs, and they knew most Germans would be allergic to anything that seemed too radical or too Soviet. Superficially, they maintained much that was familiar about German radio, including its somewhat ponderous style and its heavy diet of serious culture and classical music. They retained the Nazi-era production staff and even many of the broadcasters, eliminating only those associated with the fiercest Nazi propaganda. As Wolf wrote to his parents in June, “there are six of our men and one officer, and 600 of ‘them’ … sifting out the chaff is possible only to a small degree, since many, really most, are needed.”
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Still, there was never any question about the station’s fundamental political orientation. Nor did any of its leaders doubt that their political views would eventually triumph. Mahle understood that his job was to provide a “mirror” for the masses in an interim period, while they were developing a “democratic self-understanding.” During this process, there would be “divergent voices” and open debates, and of course the media must express them “by publicly carrying out this dispute, the consciousness of the masses will be formed and their democratic self-consciousness will be strengthened.”
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Not all media, in this early period, followed such clear guidelines, and newspapers in particular provided many different viewpoints. In September 1945
Der Tagesspiegel
, an economically liberal newspaper, began publishing in Berlin under American auspices, but it remained freely available throughout the city until 1948, as did the conservative
Die Welt
, which began publication in the British zone of West Germany in 1946. Even within the Soviet zone, all of the legal political parties—the social democrats, Christian democrats, and liberal democrats—were at first allowed to publish their own newspapers on condition that they accept a certain amount of Soviet material.
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These newspapers and others would provide real competition for the most important Soviet-sponsored newspapers, the
Tägliche Rundschau
, the voice of the Red Army in Berlin, and the
Berliner Zeitung
, jointly run by Herrnstadt and a Soviet colonel.
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Later the independent papers would run into trouble.
Neue Zeit
, the Christian Democratic paper, would be punished for political incorrectness by a reduction in its circulation (the authorities controlled all of the paper).
Das Volk
, the social democrats’ paper, would be merged with the communist party’s newspaper,
Deutsche Volkszeitung
, and transformed into
Neues Deutschland
, the official organ of the East German communist party from 1946 until its demise—and also edited, initially, by Herrnstadt.

But the radio was always different. Even if its biases were subtle and its attitude toward “divergent views” more indulgent than would be the case later on,
East German radio was a pro-communist and pro-Soviet monopoly from the very beginning. In later years, Mahle would recall that “the Central Committee’s understanding was that radio must play a direct, operative and organizational role in the transformation of life in Germany,” and in 1945 and 1946 radio was certainly the most accessible form of media.
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Workers, peasants, and people of all kinds listened to it, particularly in a period of paper shortages and distribution glitches, and the communists intended to use it to their advantage.

Initially they succeeded. In Berlin, the radio immediately had a special status as the only seemingly “German” authority in the city—anyway the only public voice that clearly spoke in German—and indeed in the country as a whole. So high did the radio rank in the public’s esteem that Germans wrote thousands of letters to the station in its first years of existence, asking about everything from Russian foreign policy to the price of potatoes. Some wanted more classical music, others asked for less. There were compliments—one writer liked a program on Hölderlein, another a program on fairy tales—but complaints as well. Indeed, these missives—which often began with the salutation “Dear Radio”—could be brutally frank. Dozens demanded to know when their sons, husbands, and brothers would be returning home from prison camps in the USSR. After a program on that very subject, dozens more complained that the radio had presented an overly rosy portrait of those prisoners, most of whom “come back from Russia miserable and sick.”
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Following Soviet practice, the station kept close track of all of these letters, counting how many were devoted to particular subjects (232 concerned food shortages in July 1947, for example) and carefully measuring whether the numbers of “negative” letters was rising or falling.
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At least in its first two years of existence, it tried hard to answer its listeners’ most urgent concerns and to convince them that the communist-led future would be better.

Perhaps the best-known attempt to soft-sell communism to the listening masses was
Markus Wolf’s signature program,
You Ask, We Answer.
For several months, starting in 1945, Wolf provided on-air answers to letters sent in by German listeners. Although the questions he received covered a huge range of subjects, and although they often required factual answers (“What is to become of the Berlin Zoo?”), he almost always supplied an ideological
twist as well, just as he had learned to do in the
Comintern school in Ufa. During the June 7 broadcast, for example, he responded enthusiastically to a listener who wrote in to say how impressed he was by the energy and spirit of the Red Army, particularly as “we’ve always been taught that in
Russia, those who achieve are not valued.” Wolf declared that “all of those who believe the fairy tale about leveling down in the USSR have fallen victim to Goebbels’s propaganda,” and praised the Soviet system, which welcomed the “creativity of the worker.”

Another listener wanted to know what, other than rationed food, would soon be available to eat in Germany. Wolf first reminded her that “we are not going hungry”—the Germans should on that point feel themselves lucky—then noted that “difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army,” and finally assured her that the “nutrition department of the city council is doing its utmost to import vegetables, salad, and so on, to Berlin.” He even used the question about the zoo to remind listeners of how much things had deteriorated during Hitler’s final days, before promising them that better days were coming: the zoo still had 92 animals, including “an elephant, 18 monkeys, 2 hyenas, 2 young lions, a rhino, 4 exotic bulls, and 7 raccoons.”
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