Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday October 11, 2010
|
BERLIN AT WARBERLIN AT WAR
Roger Moorhouse
Basic
ISBN 978-0-465-00533-8
432 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
War came to Europe in September 1939, but six months later its effects were almost wholly invisible in Berlin, the capital of Germany and headquarters of the Nazi leadership. "Berlin in the spring of 1940," Roger Moorhouse writes, "was remarkable primarily for its continued orderliness, cleanness and normality." The German army had rolled over Poland, Norway and Denmark, and the conquest of France was only weeks away. Confidence among the city's citizens ran high, yet underneath were "anxiety and confusion" as well as "seriousness and skepticism," in part because few ordinary Germans really wanted to go back to war only two decades after the end of the last one, in part because memories of that earlier conflict were so strong:
"With every step the German armies took that summer, they were reawakening memories of the First World War. The mention of Verdun or Arras, or any number of towns so bloodily fought over a generation before, sent shivers down German spines and provoked the fear of a similar catastrophe."
That fear was to prove justified in August 1940, when the Royal Air Force began night bombing over Berlin; "although the early raids tended to be rather inconsequential, they nonetheless reminded citizens that they were still at war and gave them a grim warning of things to come." To be sure, "Greater Germany was a reality: it bestrode the continent, its economy was the strongest and its political model was the most dynamic." Yet, "for all the optimism, a profound sense of unease seemed to persist," and it became ever more clear that "the 'lull' of 1940-41 was merely the pause between two battles rather than the end of the war."
There was no doubt of this in June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It was "the largest military operation in European history: 3.5 million men, supported by nearly 4,000 tanks and over 2,500 aircraft, were advancing along a 2,000-kilometre front, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea," and before long it proved to be one of the most disastrous, "the theatre in which the lion's share of Germany's five million military deaths would occur." As Moorhouse says, "Every household and every family in Berlin would have known somebody who was there." Barbarossa brought the war home to Berlin, and it was only the beginning.
Moorhouse, a British writer for BBC History magazine as well as the author of "Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death" (2006), tells the story of Berlin's war thoroughly and fairly. He focuses as much as possible on ordinary citizens rather than Nazi kingpins and apparatchiks, and he leaves little doubt that this was a war few Berliners had wanted and from which all of them suffered. Probably the groundbreaking book on the subject is Antony Beevor's powerful "The Fall of Berlin: 1945" (2002), but Moorhouse covers a far longer period of time and in that sense is more ambitious, though the few paragraphs he devotes to atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers on German women at the war's end pale in comparison with Beevor's passionate and painfully detailed account.
Still, there is more than enough pain in "Berlin at War" to satisfy all except the most masochistic readers. It tells the story of a civilized and cultured city gradually sinking into the depths of degradation, almost completely helpless before the onslaught of the Allied ground troops and bombers as well as the incompetence and greed of the Nazi leadership. From the beginning of the war, residents had to cope with rationing, meted out in a system that "was infernally complex and inevitably unpopular." Because of it, "Berliners had to queue for almost everything, meaning early mornings, late nights, and long hours standing in line, waiting -- often in vain -- for whatever was at the end of the queue." Of course the predictable soon occurred: "Any political system that seeks to control the supply and pricing of goods will develop a black market, and wartime Germany was no exception. ... It has been estimated that the black market in Nazi Germany accounted for at least 10 per cent of average household consumption."
Rationing and profiteering, however unpleasant, are privations people can live with. Bombing is something else, and in September 1940 the bombing began in earnest. For a week the RAF pounded the city: "Not only had British aircraft demonstrated their ability to reach the city, but they had shown themselves able to bomb almost at will and take the lives of Berlin's civilians. The myth of the capital's inviolability -- which had been shared by all sections of the city's society -- had been irrevocably shattered." Yes, the city had ample air-raid shelters and "three enormous flak towers," making it "the best defended and best-protected city of the war," but that was hardly enough. Then in March 1943 the RAF delivered "the largest tonnage of high explosives that had yet been dropped in the air war -- a payload of over 900 tons that was twice the amount the Luftwaffe had dropped on London in their largest raids of the Blitz in 1941." One Berliner wrote in her diary:
"The city and all the western and southern suburbs are on fire. The air is smoky, sulphur-yellow. Terrified people are stumbling through the streets with bundles, bags, household goods, tripping over fragments and ruins."
Terrible as that was, the war in the European theater was still more than two years from its conclusion. Between then and the German surrender in April 1945, the city at times was an inferno in which "fear was the defining emotion." Moorhouse continues: "One did not simply 'get used to it'; rather, as many eyewitnesses suggest, it grew with each raid, layered with the gruesome experiences of loved ones or friends, the visions of destroyed buildings, and the memory of lines of corpses laid out for identification. Josepha von Koskull recalled the many horror stories that did the rounds, 'about being buried alive, about charred bodies that were shrunk to the size of small children, and that could be buried in a margarine tub. Often it was said that the impact of a heavy air mine...would burst one's lungs bringing death.'" When at last the Red Army entered and the bombing stopped, people venturing out from what remained of their residences were stunned:
"The scene that greeted them on those first excursions was one of unimaginable destruction. Few areas of the capital were untouched by the ravages of war. Entire districts had been rendered uninhabitable; buildings standing like so many broken teeth, with empty, gaping window frames opening into blackened voids where once had been apartments, homes and businesses. The streets in between were pitted with craters and covered by vast fields of rubble, through which makeshift footpaths snaked. Over it all, a pall of smoke and dust hung in the air, covering everything, choking the survivors and twisting and eddying in the cool spring breeze."
Amazingly, the city began coming back to life, with "the famed Trummerfrauen, or 'rubble women' ... clearing the ruins, patiently passing buckets of debris down a line, stacking everything that could be reused and disposing of the remainder," though "for all their efforts, it was a process that would take many years to complete." Those years saw the division between East and West Berlin, the Berlin Airlift, the depredations of the East German secret police, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, and at last the city's, and the country's, reunification. Now Berlin has regained its standing as one of the world's great cities. That it started at ground zero is made all too clear by this excellent book.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
SHOWTIME: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater
Larry Stempel
Norton
ISBN 978-0-393-92906-5
826 pages
$39.95
Reviewed by Lloyd Rose
"Showtime" opens with a quotation from Stephen Sondheim:
It's the fragment, not the day. ...
Not the building, but the beam,
Not the garden, but the stone,
Only cups of tea
And history. ...
Another big book on the American musical? Absolutely. O'Neill may seethe, Miller lecture, Williams poeticize, and Mamet swear -- but let's face it, America's great contribution to world theater has been the musical. The show that must go on is never a tragedy, the business there's no business like doesn't churn out operas, and the star never breaks her ankle so that the understudy can go on and score a triumph in "A Doll's House." The musical rules Broadway and is exported around the globe. It's the stuff everyone's showbiz dreams are made of: The great English Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn fled the Bard for ... well, for "Cats." These things don't always work out. Still, every fan understands Nunn's passion and ambition.
Larry Stempel is a scholar rather than a fan, but without the cliched scholarly dryness. He spent roughly 30 years researching and writing "Showtime," but his attitude towards his subject remains fresh. He seems delighted with everything he finds; you can almost hear him murmuring, "I didn't know that" as he unearths some new discovery.
And "unearths" is the word: Researching this book was a near-archaeological task. The early musicals were looked on as perishable commercial commodities. "As part of the business of show business, the material seems to have been regarded as having little intrinsic value once a show had exhausted its money-making potential. At that point it became disposable stuff." There might still exist sheet music of a few songs (with simplified orchestration), a manuscript here, a typescript there, some costume or set sketches -- but that's it. Considering this paucity, and the fact that he starts his history in the early 18th century, it's a wonder the book didn't take Stempel 40 years.
The first theater in America was built in Williamsburg, Va., in 1716, but the actors were amateurs. Professional acting companies -- all British imports -- began to tour the country around the 1750s, performing not only all-spoken plays but various, loosely defined "English operas," in which songs were added to satirical or sentimental scripts. ("The Beggar's Opera" is the best-known of these.) There is "no clear historical divide" between what we understand today as the musical and that earlier, "musically ubiquitous world of theater" now lost to us. Prior to the Civil War, Stempel writes, "One might. ... make a convincing case that the normal condition of theater in America at the time was a musical one." (Stephen Foster's then-popular "Old Folks At Home," for example, was incorporated into the first productions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a song for Tom.)
Stempel's painstaking genius is to separate out the threads that were woven into the modern musical theater. These are subtle and numerous -- from the 18th-century French, German and English influences of European-trained professional musicians (there were no music schools yet in America) to the crude realities of the ethnic theater of immigrant Irish and Italians. (These old ethnic styles can still occasionally be glimpsed. Dan Ackroyd and Steve Martin's wild-and-crazy Czechs on "Saturday Night Live" are exactly the sort of thing that broke up immigrant audiences over a century ago. And "The Godfather Part II" contains a charming restaging of a sentimental Italian-American play, complete with song, written by the director Francis Coppola's grandfather.)
The African-American influence was, obviously, enormous. The insulting minstrel shows stole black music because there wasn't anything as interesting to poach from the white musical tradition. The all-black musical appeared at the end of the 19th century.
Bumping up against the gentilities of opera and operetta were vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, the spectacle and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. Not to mention the "leg drama," an 1867 example of which sent no less than Mark Twain into a blissful daze ("the scenery and the legs!"). All gloriously unrefined. "The spirit, style, and energy that were to make the Broadway musical distinctive," Stempel writes, "were shaped largely in the crucible of American subcultures."
And so the show goes on, up through the more self-conscious crafters of musicals -- Berlin; Kern, Wodehouse and Bolton; the Gershwins; Cole Porter; Rodgers and Hart -- until the 1940s, when Oscar Hammerstein II more or less single-handedly invents the modern musical, in which the book is practically a play in itself, capable of dealing with serious themes. This had happened before, of course, with "Showboat" and others, but it was Hammerstein who deliberately elevated the non-musical parts of the musical. (Up until then, the book had generally been regarded as, in P.G. Wodehouse's words, "the stuff that keeps the numbers apart.") After appearances by Lerner and Loewe, Harnick and Bock, "Yip" Harburg, George Abbott, Harold Prince, Leonard Bernstein, Kander and Ebb, Bob Fosse, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Walt Disney Company and many, many, many others, the curtain number, appropriately enough, is a section called "Sondheim's Children."
Even as he presents these stars, Stempel is creating a context for them -- their set, lighting and sound design, so to speak. He discusses what the word "score" meant to different composers. He tracks the history of theater producing. He illustrates in detail the differences between the song forms of Tin Pan Alley and musical comedy. He reviews the history of Broadway choreography. He examines the art of orchestration. He offers financial analysis, sociological perspective and aesthetic insight. He provides a series of fine biographical sketches. And he quotes and quotes and quotes -- everyone from Cohan to Sondheim, in effect hosting a discussion on the history of the musical by its greatest practitioners.
Musical theater is a subject that can inspire extremes of opinion and fixation, and a very personal sort of love. Stempel spent so many years researching and writing this book that a reader might reasonably anticipate a trip with one of those obsessives who produce a lot of thin air, along with the occasional brilliant flash of insight. Well, this is a brilliant book, all right, but there's nothing narrow or eccentric about it. "Showtime" is large in spirit as well as scope, and as precise, humble and wise as that Sondheim lyric with which it begins.
Lloyd Rose is a former head drama critic for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 NEW IN PAPERBACK. Parents, leave those kids alone
THREE BOOKS ABOUT THE TEA PARTY
PROMISE ME: How a Sister's Love Launched the Global Movement to End Breast Cancer
ON SECOND THOUGHT: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits
BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK: A Memoir |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
