Today’s show is the concluding half of “Berliner Milljöh” (“Berliner Milieu”), a show KPFA originally broadcast on October 21, 1969. The show is a word/sound montage dealing with the Weimar Republic, the poetry of Bertolt Brecht, and the prose of Christopher Isherwood, passages from whose Berlin Stories (1945)—set in Berlin from 1930 to 1933—are read by the author. “Berliner Milljöh” is described as “an audio collage in the style of the times drawn from contemporary documents to recreate the spirit of an age.” It was produced by William Malloch and compiled by Dr. Richard Raack. My thanks to the Pacifica Radio Archive for making this program available to me. I heard the show in 1969, and it remained powerfully in my memory. It seemed particularly relevant in these days of Donald Trump and his policies.
Here is Christopher Isherwood, from Berlin Stories:
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
*
Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of an intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all round you, to-night, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean—sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tram-lines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
Berlin is a city with two centers—the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter den Linden, carefully arranged. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city—a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch; nothing has been forgotten. And they are all so pompous, so very correct—all except the cathedral, which betrays, in its architecture, a flash of that hysteria which flickers always behind every grave, grey Prussian façade. Extinguished by its absurd dome, it is, at first sight, so startlingly funny that one searches for a name suitably preposterous—the Church of the Immaculate Consumption.
But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood….
Jack adds,
“Berliner Milljöh” deals with the chaos and confusion that led to the rise of Adolph Hitler. Adolph Hitler was a specific leader who existed at a specific time but we may perhaps take him as exemplary of an aspect of any situation of governance—the moment when the leader sees his purpose not as service but as the acquisition and exercise of power. “Darkness is good,” said Steve Bannon. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” The late historian Tony Judt reflected upon “the central place of genocide” in Nazism: “Far from being just another exercise in mass violence, the plot to eliminate whole peoples and categories of people represented the ultimate in the control and dismantling of the human person and was not extraneous to the meaning of the regime but the very basis of it.” The control and dismantling of the human person is the ultimate manifestation of—as Steve Bannon says—“power.” “You’re fired” means that you have ceased to be a person and that I have caused that condition: I have complete power over you. When the goal of government becomes power of the governor rather than service to the governed, government has reached the point of what Hannah Arendt called “the origins of totalitarianism.” American Milljöh.