Cold Peace

“You can’t just annul an election!” Jakob Liebherr protested indignantly. As an elected official, even if only a city councilman from the borough of Kreuzberg in the American Sector of Berlin, he felt strongly about elections. “You can’t ignore the will of the people and then pretend to represent them!”

“The elections were manipulated,” his son answered dismissively. 

The two men, one in his mid-fifties and the other half as old, faced each other across the kitchen table of an apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The elder Liebherr was going bald, and his fringe of hair was mostly grey. His son, in contrast, had thick, dark, wavy hair over a strong, handsome face. Only those who had known the elder Liebherr in his youth would have recognised the resemblance. Two years in a concentration camp had sucked the good looks out of Jakob’s face, leaving it gouged with lines that made the bones unpleasantly prominent. 

Yet while those years had aged him, they had not broken him. His voice was strong and decisive. “Manipulated?” He challenged. “Indeed — by your friends the Soviets! Your friends knocked on doors and warned that anyone who voted against the merger of the KPD and SPD might disappear in Siberia for the rest of their lives. Your friends told women that they might not get milk for their children if they voted the ‘wrong’ way! Yet even then they feared the voice of the people. So, policemen obeying Soviet Military Government orders dispersed the people standing in line to vote, and Red Army soldiers barged into polling places to steal the ballot boxes. So, yes, very definitely there was massive voter intimidation and suppression — in the Soviet Sector. If the KPD needs Red Army soldiers to force people to vote for it, they — and you — are in trouble.”

“The German people cannot be trusted to vote in their best interests. They elected Hitler, remember!” Karl shot back, changing his argument altogether and glancing towards his mother for support.

Trude Liebherr was in her fifties and wore her grey hair combed severely into a bun at the back of her head. Sitting between her son and her husband, she had so far followed the argument intently but without comment. In answer to her son’s look, however, she spoke sharply. “That’s not true, Karl, and you know it. Hitler never received a majority of the vote in a free and fair election.” 

Karl exploded, throwing up his hands in a dramatic gesture of frustration. “That’s not the point! Hitler was controlled by capital. He was a puppet of the bankers and monopoly industrialists. We represent the People!”

“How can you represent “the people” if only 10% of the population votes for you?” His father brought the conversation back to the elections.

“Because we are on the side of progress!”

“How does destroying our industrial capacity further progress?” The elder Liebherr wanted to know.

“The Soviets suffered immeasurably in the war. They have the right to reparations!” 

“Agreed! Even the Americans agree. The Western Allies invented the idea of reparations after the last war, remember? No one is questioning the right of the Soviet Union to reparations, but there must be limits — a clear point at which they stop. Furthermore, Germany has to have a way to pay them.” Slowing down to add emphasis to his words, Jakob Liebherr declared. “For the last two years, the Soviets have been systematically vandalizing or dismantling our factories, power plants, laboratories and workshops. In doing so, they have destroyed our ability to manufacture industrial products and thereby our ability to earn the currency with which to pay them the reparations they want.”

“Don’t be a capitalist stooge!” Karl shot back. “You are saying that reparations should be paid from profits. Profits are theft. The Soviets are securing reparations by taking from the capitalists the means of production and so enabling the Soviet Union to become a great industrial nation.”

“That might have been true if the factories they dismantled here were being rebuilt and operated in the Soviet Union — which they are not. Furthermore, even if they did re-assemble the factories, the price would be the impoverishment of Germany, making it perpetually dependent on hand-outs from the West.” Jakob dropped his voice. “That, Karl, might be in the interests of the Soviet Union, but it is not in the interests of Germany or the German people.” 

“Defending the Socialist Motherland is in the interests of all working people,” Karl countered, more flustered by his father’s calm than his earlier anger. 

“That’s what they taught you in the Lubjanka, Karl. It is not your own brain or heart speaking.” Liebherr pinned his son to his chair with his eyes.

After several long seconds, Karl broke free. He jumped to his feet. “How do you know what is in my heart and brain?” 

His father gazed at him unwaveringly.

Karl spun about, grabbed his coat and without bothering to put it on plunged out the door, slamming it behind him. From the kitchen, his parents listened in silence to his feet pounding down the stairs at a run. At the bottom, there was a short pause and then the front door also slammed shut. 

“I’m not sure it was fair to remind him of the Lubjanka, Jakob,” Trude remarked softly.

“Not fair?” Her husband asked astonished. “He has to face up to the fact that he’s the one being manipulated. That he has become a puppet. What do you think he would have said to me if I’d returned from Oranienburg concentration camp spouting Nazi slogans and propaganda?”

“He was 13 when you were arrested,” Frau Liebherr reminded her husband, “and barely 16 when you were released. He’s only 27 now. When you were his age —”

“I know. I know,” her husband admitted with a deep sigh. “I was an Independent Socialist. But there is a difference.” Jakob looked sharply at his wife. “When I was a leftist radical, the Bolshevik Revolution was only a year old. Lenin and Trotsky were still alive. Our illusions had not yet been shattered. No one could foresee the horrors that would follow — Stalin’s merciless machine, the ruthless eradication of independent thinking within the Party, not to mention the kangaroo trials, the assassination of Trotsky, the forced collectivization, the gulags, the NKVD, the Pact with Hitler……” After a moment of reflection, he spoke again, “I don’t understand how Karl, with all the evidence he has in front of his nose, can close his eyes to the true nature of the Soviet regime. He’s not stupid and we raised him to think for himself.”

“As best we could, but he was conscripted at 18 and became a Soviet prisoner at the age of 20. He spent almost five years in the Soviet Union.”

Her husband sighed and then admitted in a small voice, “I’m frightened, Trude.”

Trude sank into the chair her son had vacated. She reached across the table and took her husband’s hands in hers. Through two world wars, a revolution, and incarceration in a concentration camp, she had never heard her husband admit he was afraid. Gently she probed, “What frightens you, Jakob?”

“The whole situation. I always thought that if we could just get rid of the Nazis, we could rebuild, start anew. I thought we could draft a new social democratic constitution and write new laws…. But look at us! Two and a half years after the end of the war, the country is not only still occupied, it is sinking deeper and deeper into poverty. The currency is worthless. The black-market flourishes, enriching only the dishonest. Honest people have nothing left to sell — except their bodies. And while the Soviets rob us of everything — our food, our industrial capacity, our children, our hope — the Western allies send diplomatic notes of protest! They still view us — rather than the Soviets — as their enemies. I had such hopes when they first arrived. I thought they would protect us from the Red Army and the NKVD. I thought they would support our aspirations for democracy. Instead, they let the Russians lead them around by the nose.” 

Trude nodded sadly. She had no words of comfort. She felt as discouraged as her husband.

“Ernst Reuter was elected mayor last June.” Her husband reminded her, “The Soviet Military Administration vetoed his right to take office in July and it is now December, yet nothing — absolutely nothing — has been undertaken to enable him to govern. Instead, the Soviet-appointed police commissioners grow bolder and Soviet-appointed officials usurp the power of the elected government with impunity.”

“The Allied Foreign Ministers are meeting in London,” Trude reminded him, grasping at straws. “The American Secretary of State, General George Marshall, is not as naïve as his predecessors. Maybe things will start to change.”

Jakob didn’t believe that but he knew Trude was trying to cheer him up. Besides, there wasn’t any other straw to cling to, so he forced a smile and muttered, “Let’s hope so.”