A while since I picked up a meaty history tome as the next read, but I had been looking forward to this one since reading a glowing review in the FT's "books and arts" section. (I probably shouldn't own up to this as work pays for my daily FT, but the Saturday edition is definitely by far the best thumbed of the week. But I digress.) Berlin at War had been surprisingly hard to track down in Nottingham's Waterstones last November, but I had finally found it and it sat on the shelf for a couple of months waiting for Freedom and the filler-manqué One Day to get read.
It was worth the wait: well written, lucid, interesting and the pages flew by. I'm not enough a scholar of the Third Reich (indeed I feel slightly embarrassed about purchasing from the seemingly never-ending supply of books about evil Nazis) to be able to assess this statement, but Moorhouse perceives a gap in the historical literature about the period, viz the experience of regular Berliners in the second world war. The subject is interesting, of course, in the way that the experience of any city which suffered bombardment and invasion is interesting, but it is the status of Berlin as the very heart of the Evil Empire which gives it that extra fascination.
The book opens with an impressive description of the celebrations of the Führer's birthday in 1939, a day of grandiose swastika-bedecked pageantry marking the high point of Hitler's regime. Moorhouse effectively conveys the excitement of that day, the spectacle and the splendour, but at the same time communicates its ordinariness, the way normal people (mostly) set out to enjoy a day off, packed their sandwiches, got the kids organised, took the S-Bahn into town, cheered the parading soldiers, nipped off for a breather in the park, and wended their way home after a grand day out. He also describes those who thought it was all a bit over the top, who found the strutting and prancing just a bit too much for their taste. The underlying point is that Berlin in 1939, for all that it was a geopolitical focal point, was also a place where lots of diverse but ordinary people lived, rather like any other, perhaps even with slightly radical, left-wing tinge. It is that sense of ordinariness, which has both good and sometimes dramatically bad implications, which pervades the entire narrative, however extraordinary the situation in which these people live becomes.
There is not much moralising in the book, except, perhaps somewhat contrarily, when Moorhouse describes the moral implications of Speer's megalomaniac architectural plans for the city, perhaps because there doesn't need to be. What we read - say of the deportation of the city's Jews, or the vast population of forced labourers - we read in the context of our historical knowledge; there is little need to be reminded of the wider events which give these realities their wider context. This is maybe also a useful narrative trick, as it creates a degree of ambiguity around Berliners' reactions to these events. How much did they know, how much did they suspect, how much did they fear? As would surely happen anywhere, some citizens are delighted to see the back of the despised Jews, many more know it is simply as well not to ask too many questions and keep their heads firmly down, while a small number show great moral and physical courage in helping out Jews who decide to go underground - Taucher in the parlance.
Perhaps the most abiding impression is that of stoical compliance, the tendency of ordinary Berliners to respect the orders of the regime, to get in line when they are told to, to maintain order. In many ways this can be understood in a positive sense. The Nazi state, as Moorhouse points out, delivered on many of its commitments to its citizens, at least the orderly Aryan ones. For example, at least until the system collapsed at the end of the war, Berliners were far better protected than their counterparts in, say, London, against the effects of aerial bombing. The massive tonnage of explosive dropped on Berlin caused relatively far fewer casualties than London suffered in the Blitz, thanks to the far superior provision of shelters and bunkers.
Of course, the fact remains that, at a deeper level the regime served even its favoured citizens very ill, by bringing down on them the consequences of its actions of invasion, occupation, barbarism and genocide. The last two chapters of the book deal with the ultimate reckoning, payback visited on people who may or may not have deserved it but who attempted to cope with it much as anyone else probably would. The final scenes are, of course, harrowing, as the barbarity of the Eastern war comes home, to be visited, in particular, on young women, raped and murdered en masse with utter impunity, and even younger boys conscripted by a desperate and cynical regime, given a Panzerfaustand told to sacrifice themselves for the Fatherland.
There is no doubting Moorhouse's credentials as author of his work - he is one of the foremost and most respected historians of the period. One can be sure of the depth and seriousness of his research, albeit research based - as he explains - heavily on testimony of those who were there. However, this does not read as a dense learned tome, but as a fluent, intelligent account of what it was like to live in a city which, for the most part was a relatively protected and privileged part of the Empire before, suddenly, becoming Europe's epicentre of violence and destruction.
Recommendation? As ever with this sort of book, you need to be interested, but if you are this is a highly readable and intelligent book which will relate to you a new dimension of a story you probably already know well. That's a yes, by the way.
Living through the reckoning: Berlin at War
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