Category Archives: Everyday life

Losing a piece of old Berlin

14 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in berlin, Everyday life, postwar

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I was so sad to hear that Clärchens Ballhaus, my favorite place in all of Berlin, has closed down. Every time I was there, it felt like I stepped back in time to the ballrooms of the 1920s and 1930s. Apparently there’s a new owner and it will be open again after renovations, but *not* renovating was kind of Clärchens’ charm. It looked and felt like the real thing, a nightclub from about 100 years ago. It had the peeling plaster and bullet holes in the mirrors to prove it. It offered tango and cha-cha nights. The waiters wore waistcoats. The last time I was in Berlin, I spent several hours in Clärchens’ various rooms stuffing myself with food and drinks and taking pictures. I’m glad, since Clärchens may never look like this again.

I wasn’t sure what happened  to Clärchens after World War II until I got my hands on the official history, Berlin tanzt in Clärchens Ballhaus by Marion Kiesow. From 1942, the Ballhaus closed down under the Nazis (dancing was forbidden), and was used by German army staff officers needing somewhere to pour over their maps. Once Germany surrendered they left a lot of paper behind that Clärchens – open again! – turned to its blank white side and used as “tablecloth.”

Soon the Red Army appeared, using Clärchens courtyard for their horses. But on Saturday, July 14, 1945, the Ballhaus finally opened again for the business of dancing and having fun. The building was in bad shape from the bombardments and fighting, but people climbed through the rubble for a chance to dance and drink a thin kind of punch. The man shortage meant every man could dance the night with constantly changing partners.

Though Clärchens was in the new Soviet Sector of occupied Berlin, people from all over the city could go there in the early years after the war. Those were hard years for most, and some people sought their escape in “Bonbons” – drugs in sweets wrappers that were sometimes openly sold table to table.

By the way, there really was a Clärchen – Clara Bühler, the wife of the original owner of the dance hall at Auguststr. 24. After World War I, she ran the place herself, and for the rest of the century, it was known as Clärchens.

I hope it reopens one day, and with its old charm and authenticity.

 

My Child Lebensborn

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Children, Culture, Everyday life, general, postwar, Uncategorized

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Discover how hatred of our enemies continues to create victims, even after the victory.

That’s how the Norwegian developers described the theme of their app game My Child Lebensborn. Right after World War II, you adopt a child, Klaus or Karin, and must survive in a small Norwegian town. I couldn’t resist taking a look, and downloaded the app on my tablet.

Two hours later, I was still playing, and on the edge of tears.

The artwork and gameplay are simple and wonderful, and the music a perfect soundtrack to the bittersweet story that unfolds. You’re a single parent raising your adoptive child; I chose the girl Karin, because I have a daughter the same age. It’s a hard life. I had to work hard to feed her, and Karin often went hungry, or was alone at home. The basic tasks of feeding and clothing and washing Karin would’ve been overwhelming on their own, but worse things happened.

Karin turned 7 and wanted to know who her parents were. And why was she so bullied at school? Why was she called a “Nazi-kid?” Why did the others call her a German as if it was the worst thing one could be? I had to help Karin struggle with these questions, and watched how she suffered under them.

That’s the lesson of this game, the power of adult prejudices to destroy an innocent, delivered in a powerful, interactive way. As Karin’s adoptive parent, I had to set out to find the answers to her questions about who she was. There are some heartbreaking scenes and situations, and you don’t have to be a parent to be moved by them.

When the game was done, I wanted it to keep going, as painful as some of it was. I didn’t want to let go of Karin.

The game pointed me to the existence of the research group Children Born of War, which studies the effects of war on children, particularly children of foreign soldiers and local mothers. This is a crucial and heart-rending postwar issue, and not just in Germany, as I saw and lived in My Child Lebensborn.

Gladow, boy gangster of postwar Berlin

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Crime, Everyday life, Personalities, postwar

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His name was Werner Gladow, and his hero was Al Capone.

He reflected just about the worst of postwar Germany. As became clear later when he was on trial for murder, he was only interested in getting rich, and it didn’t matter how he did it — or who he had to hurt. It could be argued any sense of morality had been kicked out of him by the war and Germany’s defeat; he was 14 when the Russians took Berlin. But it was just as likely he was a sociopath to begin with. His short and violent criminal career ended with him being one of the first people to be executed in the new East Germany.

Born in 1931, he bounced from one school to another (11 by the age of 15), and landed after the war in the criminal elements around Alexanderplatz and Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where he did what many teenagers did — tried to make a quick profit in the black market. During one of his first attempts at swindling customers, he landed in prison for a few months, where he recruited some of the first members of what would become the Gladow Gang. Between 1947 and 1949 he committed 375 robberies in banks, markets, shops and jewelry stores.

He was a smart kid and knew how to use the political situation in the divided Berlin to his advantage. His gang would commit robberies in West Berlin, then flee back into East Berlin (it was easy to go back and forth in the years before the Berlin Wall was built). The western police had no authority in the east, and couldn’t pursue them. The eastern police wouldn’t pick up the chase since the crime had been committed in the west. The next time, Gladow committed his robbery in the east and fled to the west. After awhile he got cocky, leaving visiting cards at the scene of robberies and playing up to the press.

He also got more violent. His gang acquired firearms any way they could, including mugging police. They killed the driver of a chic car and stole it, only to get it stuck in the sand near Müggelsee. They tortured a businessman and his wife for the key to their safe.

Betrayed by one of his gang, the police caught him in a gun battle worthy of a Chicago gangster. (Here’s a 1950 Spiegel report on Gladow’s arrest). He was lightly wounded on the chin, and at the sight of his own blood, he fainted. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and assorted other crimes. When he was hanged, he was only 19.

 

 

Wives and the postwar husband problem

02 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by in Everyday life, postwar, Women

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Berlin, Tanz im Freien

ADN-ZB/ dpd Berlin 1947 Tanz im Freien. 573-47

I’ve written before about how changed German women were after the war. But what happened to the relationships between wives and their husbands?

Annegrete Baum’s Frauenalltag und Empanzipation talks about the hard realities German husbands faced when they came home after 1945. On paper, nothing had changed. Marriage was still regulated by laws drawn up in 1900. A husband controlled his wife’s money and whether she could work outside the home. He dictated her roll with their children. He had the right to decide where the family would live, what furniture and appliances the home might have, and when meals would be served.

The war changed all that. The problem was, many men, exhausted and demoralized from the war, couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that anything had changed. After all he’d sacrificed, he could be lord of his house again, couldn’t he? But a husband who tried to reestablish his dominant role sometimes got this reaction from his wife, as one woman wrote in 1948:

He orders us around and isn’t happy with anything. Didn’t he have enough of orders in the war? He thinks he has the right to demand a cozy home. I think he doesn’t have the right to demand a thing. (1)

The result — many couples walked away from their marriages. In Catholic (!) Bavaria, for instance, the divorce rate rose from 4.7% in 1938 to 16.5% in 1949.

With letters from women, the screenwriter and moderator Walther von Hollander tried to understand why rates of divorce shot up in Germany after the war. The core reason was how well women took on responsibilities that used to be reserved for men. That translated into control over their money and, as an extension, a new sexual freedom. And these changes were happening on a home front where the women fought to survive the bombardments and invasion. Women saw themselves as soldiers as much as their men. Husbands had no right to claim special privileges when they got home.

Hollander also had to admit part of the problem was simple. The men had lost the war.

But as a wise female physician observed, they returned not infrequently with the look of winners. “Women,” the physician said, “entrusted their lives to the men, and even trustingly followed them into the war, which they rejected internally. The women knew a long time ago that the war was lost. But the men assured them that they would still win it. Now, after the defeat, they cannot demand that we continue to entrust ourselves to their leadership.

What about couples who stayed together? A 1948 episode of the radio show “Guten Morgen, liebe Hausfrau” offered advice for a good postwar marriage.

Men live on illusions! To let him have them — that’s the secret of a cleverly conducted marriage. Why take away his illusion that he’s the lord of the house?(2)

 

 

(1) My translation from Baum p.95.

(2) My translation from Baum p.96

Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-P0506-505 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Postwar Christmas

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Everyday life

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446px-Christkindlesmarkt_nuernbergAnyone who’s ever been to a Christmas market knows how important the holiday season is in Germany. After World War 2, the Germans celebrated the first peaceful Christmases any way they could. They lived in a world of shortages and destruction, but they — and the Allies in Germany — did what they could to spread a little cheer in hard times.

It wasn’t easy. Winter 1945 was known as a turnip winter. There wasn’t much food to go around, and the traditional Christmas feast was out of the question for most people. A year later, things were even worse. In December 1946, temperatures dropped to minus 20C in parts of Germany. People died of cold and hunger, though far fewer than expected considering the living conditions.

Despite the challenges, there were Christmas concerts and parties. The Allies sponsored events for children and donated food and sweets. Shops lucky enough to have window glass dressed them with tinsel and bulbs and wished their customers a Merry Christmas.

Ruth Andreas Friedrich, a Berlin journalist, wrote in her diary on December 21, 1946:

“What do you think of a Christmas tree?” Frank asked me this morning.

“A lot,” I said, “but unfortunately, there aren’t any. Unless you have a certificate that proves you have lots of children or were a Victim of Fascism.”

Frank laughed. “Or if you have a saw.”

Germans who did cut down trees in surrounding forests — illegally. The Allies controlled who harvested trees, where and when.

Christmas was (and is) a season of hope. The Germans in the postwar era needed this reminder that humanity had a future in peace, not in the violence of the inhuman war their country had started and lost.

Photo: Nuremberg Christmas Market, by Roland Berger via http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Wikimedia Commons