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213 chapter 10 “lieber Pomm als ‘Frau komm!’” In addition to being a diplomatic struggle between East and West, the Berlin blockade was a political competition conducted in the streets of a proud but ruined city. Berlin’s residents were not spectators at a contest among foreign occupiers; they were participants. As Brian Robertson noted at the time, and as others have emphasized since, the West’s ability to stay in Berlin “depends in the final issue upon the morale of the population.”1 Myth and legend overlay our image of the blockade, making it difficult to see the city’s residents accurately. When we hear the word Berliners, we imagine an undifferentiated mass, solidly pro-Western, stoically enduring unprecedented hardship. The most familiar names are Ernst Reuter, Franz Neumann, Otto Suhr, and Ferdinand Friedensburg. Louise Schroeder would be a better choice, because the average Berliner was a woman.2 Economic and class differences mattered. Political opinions and intensity of commitment varied. The demands of daily life left little time for politics. And as one author suggested, “There was very little love for any foreigners in Berlin,” which was certainly true at the blockade’s beginning.3 Defeat and its aftermath had given Berliners little reason to be enthusiastic about anything. Wartime destruction and postwar dismantling had stripped the city of much of its industry, depriving thousands of their livelihood. Having requisitioned the best housing, the occupiers lived comfortably amid the city’s rubble. Violence and intimidation were not restricted to Red Army soldiers and the eastern sector, especially in the early years of the occupation. Anger and resentment over German women’s sexual relations with occupation soldiers were widespread.4 We tend to see conditions during the blockade as static, but in reality, they (and Berliners’ perceptions of them) fluctuated. Circumstances were easier at first—that is, when the blockade was not tightly enforced, gardens could supplement supplies, 214  Berlin on the Brink and people expected the crisis would soon end. Berliners tried to maintain a semblance of ordinary life, which was easier when unemployment remained near preblockade levels. Life became harsher as winter approached, darkness lengthened, unemployment rose, and the end of the crisis receded into the distant future. Anticipation made the autumn a more anxious time than winter itself, which proved unusually mild. What Were coNditioNs like, and how did Berliners cope? Life during the blockade was hard, as it had been for years. By May 1945, after months of bombing and weeks of street fighting, Berlin was a “cemetery of ruins.” By one account, it had absorbed more bombs and shells than any other city on the planet and contained one-sixth of all the rubble in Germany. Estimates were that clearing the debris at a rate of 500 railway cars a day would take sixteen years—once trains began to move. So many landmarks had vanished that an American who had lived in prewar Berlin had trouble finding his way. Some thought the city must be rebuilt elsewhere, if it were rebuilt at all.5 Shattered buildings swayed ominously. Only a quarter of prewar dwellings were habitable. Debris choked bomb- and shell-cratered streets; rubble and sewage clogged rivers and canals; muck filled the subway. Natural gas flared from mains; smoke, dust, and the smell of the unburied dead filled the air. Survivors looked more dead than alive, and many of them would die—4,000 a day in August, twenty-six times the prewar rate.6 What the war left untouched fell prey to the victors. Western officials estimated that the Soviets removed 53 percent of Berlin’s prewar industrial capacity, more than double the 23 percent destroyed during the war. Some 80 percent of Berlin’s surviving machine-tool production, 70 percent of raw materials, 60 percent of light industry, and much of its electrical generating capacity went east.7 To support a population of about 3.2 million, the city possessed about a million habitable housing units in 1945.8 Habitable was loosely defined. Several families might share a room, especially in working-class areas. Workers lived in vast tenement blocks that Berliners nicknamed Mietskasernen (“rent barracks”). Built in the late nineteenth century, these five-story structures were subdivided into oneand two-room apartments. Small interior courtyards admitted vague hints of light and air to rooms that did not face the street. Built side-by-side and back-to-back, these tenements stretched for kilometer after dreary kilometer, encircling the inner city...

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