German Autumn

Poor Man's Cake

Poor Man's Cake Deep within a neglected park on the outskirts of Hamburg there lives an ageing liberal lawyer together with a writer of picaresque novels. The park is in an area of Hamburg where the streets have no other lighting than the headlamps of English vehicles as they prowl past. In the darkness you bump against invisible arms or hear invisible words in passing and with a shiver you remind yourself of the advice given by experienced correspondents - not to venture out on the dark streets of Hamburg without the company of a revolver. The park is a wilder place than it seems in daylight, but at last you reach a safe flight of steps, you ring the bell and are admitted to a large better-class hallway with an umbrella-stand and a Silesian maid. In the lounge the ornamental timepiece , the metres of gold-edged morocco-bound volumes in the bookshelves, the dense carpet, the chandelier, the leather armchairs - none of this gives one hint of the bombing and the desperate housing shortage. And what about the lawyer and the writer? The most cherished slogan of current middle-class election propaganda is the claim that the defeat has abolished classes in Germany. The labour parties are 35 reproved for using a mere fiction as a cudgel in their fight against bourgeois resistance. In fact it was no coincidence that during the election in the autumn of 1946 the battle-cries of class warfare echoed with particular bitterness. The thesis of a classless Germany involved a cynical exaggeration. After the collapse, class frontiers have been sharpened rather than blurred. The bourgeois ideologists confuse poverty and classlessness when they assert that by and large all Germans are financially in the same desperate straits. In one way it is true that most Germans are poor and that many who used to be well-heeled are now down-at-heel, but in Germany there is a difference between the least poor and the most poor which is greater than the difference between those who own much and those who own nothing in a more or less normally endowed society. While the most poor live in the cellars of ruins, in bunkers or in one-time prison cells, and the middling poor crowd together in the abandoned tenements one family to a room, the least poor live in their old villas (like the liberal lawyer and the writer) or in the town's most spacious apartments, where not even the middling poor can afford to live. The lawyer is of course right when he says that the English bombs crossed the frontiers of class, even if, as was natural, the less densely populated residential areas came off more lightly than the packed tenements. But in defence of the class struggle one ought to add that the bank accounts were not bombed. Admittedly, bank accounts are blocked in such a way that it is impossible to draw more than 120 marks per month, a modest sum when you think that that is precisely the price of half a kilo of butter on the black market. Here 36 too for the sake of justice one ought to add that the average wage can amount to 120 marks per month, and that money hoarded at home for safety quite simply escapes the eye of authority. And this leads to the most absurd, incredible and unfair consequences. A common judgement in the denazification trials is that the accused, if he has been active as a Nazi, is deprived of his apartment, which is then allocated to someone who has suffered political oppression. The gesture is fine, but alas often meaningless, because economically anyone who has suffered political persecution finds himself somewhere between the middling poor and the most poor and simply cannot pay the rent for a large ex-Nazi apartment, which is now taken over instead by people with money, and that means people who earned money under the aegis of Nazism. The liberal lawyer and his friend the writer of picaresque novels have never been Nazis. Before 1933 the lawyer belonged to the old Liberal Party and the writer is one of the very few best-selling authors who during the Hitler years preferred to live off their money rather than write. As we drink tea without sugar and eat a cake which beneath its layer of carefully counterfeited cream turns...