A Dark Book in August

This month’s online Book Review: Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse (Bodley Head) 432 pages

August in the northern hemisphere  always  has always struck me as having something of a tail-end feel about it, not least in the publishing industry. Long-past are the pre-Christmas heavy-hitters with ‘star’ authors or their ‘star’ topics hogging the front-desks. Gone too is the excitement of the new titles out in spring and early summer. Many readers have taken the few good hits, in paperback, off to the beach for the last glimpse of sun before autumn comes and with it the haggling over new contracts in the run-up to the Frankfurt fair.

So Random House’s The  Bodley Head should be commended for taking a punt on Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse , publishing a long book, by a middle-ranking historian, on a subject difficult to digest, still less enjoy.

Berlin at War is published thirty years on from the publication of the first edition of Richard Grunberger’s brilliant ‘A Social History of the Third Reich’. While appealing to a new generation of readers, it is a tough act to follow.

Certainly  Moorhouse’s introduction is unsettling.  He stakes his claim to originality somewhat controversially by differentiating himself from those (unnamed) historians that “tend to concentrate their attentions on the persecution and destruction of the Jews”. He continues, condescending and contentious, declaring that while the concentration of these other historians “is of course, right and proper”, it has also led to a “profound imbalance in our understanding of German society as a whole.”

Moorhouse tells us that we have hitherto actually learnt very little about how a majority of ordinary non-Jewish Germans lived, “the compromises demanded and the principles, that in some cases, had to be abandoned” At the same time the author would like us to see him as a standard bearer for what he calls the ‘democratisation of history’ whereby accounts have shifted away from ‘the great and the good’ to the ‘view from below’.

At this point Grunberger should be turning in his grave. I forced myself to read on and found myself  soon absorbed by this  account of wartime Berlin that for the most part is profoundly human  in its examination of how Hitler’s Nazism and the Allied counter-offensive impacted on one of Germany’s most traditionally liberal and cosmopolitan cities at all levels of society.

Only on page 113 of his book does Moorhouse offer the reader his first extended reference to the tragic fate of Berlin’s Jews. Prior to that the author’s detailed research of the archives and interviews mainly with non-Jewish Germans shows a people generally prone to Goebbels meticulously orchestrated propaganda , enjoying a fairly benevolent system of  rationing and protected by very advanced air-defence systems, under the shadow of the Gestapo and its informers.

A blot on the chillingly regimented landscape which Moorhouse writes about at some length comes in the form of a member of the Nazi party and former storm trooper turned serial killer in the black-out which has been imposed in anticipation of the Allied bombings raids. The killer is suspected of being a Jew but nonetheless turns out to be one of those ‘ordinary Germans’, Berlin’s equivalent of the Yorkshire ripper, only in wartime.

Moorhouse clearly thinks this is a story worth detailing over several pages. The suggestion is that somehow the murderer in question may have personified the darker side of humanity, the kind that can take place in any society, whether under Nazi rule or an elected democratic government. It is a questionable premise.

 In other parts of the book Moorhouse gives a vivid description on how the repressive, intimating, seemingly all pervasive nature of the regime divides the majority of ordinary Berliners between the complicit and the cowed, leading many of them to turn a blind-eye to the horrors being carried out on a massive scale against their fellow human beings or simply to deny their existence.

In describing the last days of the war in Berlin   Moorhouse cannot avoid covering ground already impressively written about by others, not least Antony Beevor who nonetheless generously praises the book on the back cover. Such puffs are like gold dust to publishers and authors, not least in August. At the same time  the lack of any mention of the Catholic Church, and the  strained  relationship  of its bishops and lay followers  with the regime is a striking omission in a  book that aspires to unravel some of the  moral dilemmas facing  law-abiding citizens  living in fear.

Thankfully however Moorhouse does not in the end show himself to be a David Irving clone, in denial of the holocaust. The descriptions of Berlin’s Jewish women standing up in defence of their men folk and of others who chose to go underground are among the most deeply moving of the book. Less than a month after the last fatal ‘transport’, a former Jewish hospital in Berlin was overrun by the Red Army. The 800 Berlin Jews that remained, alongside the 1,400 or so fugitives who had not been betrayed were, in Moorhouse’s words, “the last representatives of a community annihilated.”

For the most part, Berlin at War is a well written and challenging book, the product of diligent and original research, dexterously handled. It left me feeling haunted and troubled.