German Autumn

German Autumn

German Autumn In the autumn of 1946 the leaves were falling in Germany for the third time since Churchill's famous speech about the falling of leaves. It was a gloomy season with rain, cold - and hunger, especially inthe Ruhr and generally throughout the rest of the old Third Reich. All autumn, trains arrived in the Western Zones with refugees from the Eastern Zone. Ragged, starving and unwelcome, they crowded in dark, stinking station-bunkers or in the giant windowless bunkers that look like rectangular gasometers, looming like huge monuments to defeat in Germany's collapsed cities. The silence and passive submission of these apparently insignificant people gave a sense of dark bitterness to that German autumn. They became significant just because they came and never stopped coming and because they came in such numbers. They became significant perhaps not in spite of their silence but because of it, for nothing can be expressed with such a charge of menace as that which is not expressed. Their presence was both hateful and welcome - hateful because they arrived bringing with them nothing but their hunger and their thirst, welcome because it fed suspicions which one 5 would willingly entertain, distrust which one would willingly cultivate, and despair by which one would willingly be possessed. And can anyone who actually experienced that German autumn saythat this distrust was not justified or that this despair was unmotivated? It can well be said that these never-thinning streams of refugees that flowed across the German lowlands from the lower Rhine and the lower Elbe as far as the windy highlands around Munich were one of the most important factors in the internal affairs of this country without internal affairs. Another factor of domestic policy, and of about the same significance, was the rain that lay two feet deep in the populated cellars of the Ruhr district. Someone wakens, if she has slept at all, freezing in a bed without blankets, and wades over the ankles in cold water to the stove and tries to coax some fire out of some sour branches from a bombed tree. Somewhere in the water behind, tuberculous children are hoarsely coughing. If she does succeed in getting a few flames going in the stove - a stove which at the risk of her life she has heaved out of a crumbling ruin which its owner has lain buried several yards beneath for the past two years - the smoke billows into the cellar and those who are already coughing cough even more. On the stove there is a pan of water (there is no lack of water) and she stoops and gropes in the water on the floor and plucks up some potatoes that have been lying invisible beneath the surface. The woman standing ankle-deep in cold water puts these potatoes in the pan and waits for them until, in due course, they are edible, although they were already frozen when she managed to get hold of them. 6 Doctors who talk to foreign interviewers about the eating habits of these families say that what they boil up in their pans is indescribable. It is not indescribable at all, any more than their whole manner of existing is indescribable. The anonymous meat which in one way or another they come across, or the dirty vegetables which they find God knows where, are profoundly unsavoury, but the unsavoury is not indescribable - only unsavoury. We can in the same way meet the objection that the sufferings which the children in these cellar-pools must undergo are indescribable. If one wants to describe them, they can be described quite perfectly - in the following way, for instance: the woman standing in the water by the stove leaves the cooking to its fate, crosses to the bed where the three coughing children lie and orders them to get off to school at once. Smoke, cold and hunger fill the cellar, and the children, who have slept fully clothed, step into the water, which laps almost over the tops of their tattered shoes, and make their way through the dark passage-way where people are sleeping, up the dark stairs where people are sleeping, and out into the chilly, wet German autumn. School does not begin for two hours yet, and the teachers tell foreign visitors about the cruelty of the parents who drive their children out on to the street. But one could...