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By Root 1548 0

first weeks after liberation’ could talk of hard times. Not because the Russians necessarily took it out on the Germans, although the rank-and-file of the Red Army unquestionably had reasons for doing so and did so. (‘They showed no fear whatsoever and their vision of the future was the rape and pillage of Berlin.’5) As one of our students, returned from captivity, who has since become one of the most eminent German historians,6 explained to me: ‘They did not treat us worse than themselves. It was simply that they were physically so much tougher than we were. They could stand the cold better. That scared us, when we were at the front, and we suffered from it as prisoners. They would dump us on a central-Asian plain in winter and say: build a camp. Start digging.’

It was not surprising that hatred and fear of Russia penetrated the atmosphere in Germany, among both the natives and the vast numbers of refugees – particularly numerous in our part of Lower Saxony – who made Russia responsible for their mass flight or mass expulsion. In 1947 it was a curious, sometimes schizophrenic, combination of feelings: repulsion, superiority, but also respect for the victor, and the contrast between the image of uncontrolled social disintegration in the West and the vague feeling that the discipline ‘over there’ (in the Soviet zone) got people to do a day’s work, controlled the black market, etc. The Marshall Plan and the 1948 currency reform were about to change all this, but in the summer of 1947 a sense of total impotence and blankness about the future still dominated public opinion in the British zone. There could be no German reconstruction without a third world war, one heard in Hamburg. I felt this helplessness myself. ‘Frankly, the more I’m here the more depressed I get,’ I wrote. ‘Hope? I can’t see any.’ This was a spectacularly wrong assessment of West German prospects, but Germany did not look encouraging in 1947.

But what did it make a western communist feel like about the Soviet Union, whose shadow so patently darkened the German scene? No illusions could survive the immediate postwar contact with the Soviet occupation, direct or indirect, just as the hopes of postwar international amity, which were not confined to communists, had a hard time surviving the postwar frictions between the western and eastern military and officials on the ground. The young Austrian refugees from the London wartime emigration who followed their Party’s instruction to return to rebuild their country amid the smell of hungry people in wintry trams and in high-ceilinged, commandeered offices had expected physical hardships, but few had anticipated the actual pervasive anti-Russian mood. For those who lived under, or even had direct contact with, the realities of Soviet-occupied central Europe, being communist was no longer as simple as before the war. We did not lose our faith and our confidence in the eventual superiority of socialism to capitalism, nor our belief in the world-changing potential of Communist Party discipline, but our, or at least my, hopes were now edged with that sense of inevitable tragedy of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’.7 Paradoxically, what made it easier or, for many, possible to maintain the old faith was, more than anything else, the crusading global anti-communism of the West in the Cold War.

II

But let me return to the time of the Berlin airlift. As the wartime alliance broke up, so did the fading hope of postwar co-operation between the two superpowers. In 1947 the communist ministers in western governments began to be edged out of their offices, and so were the non-communist ministers in the countries under communist rule. For purely European purposes a new Communist International (the so-called Communist Information Bureau or Cominform) was set up, to publish a journal which, even by the exacting standards of the Soviet era, must have been the all-time champion of unreadability. 8 The eastern regimes, deliberately not set up as communist, but as pluriparty ‘new’ or ‘peoples’ democracies’ with mixed economies,