My annual lecture tour entitled ‘The Making of Modern Germany’ ended in Potsdam just the other day. My own preparation took into account, apart from revisiting usual sources, catching up with the multi-Oscar winner Oppenheimer. The film gets its momentum and suspense not only from the scientific discovery, the moral dilemma, but also from the frantic drive to present President Truman with the political and military ‘bombshell’ to put on the negotiations table at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Truman almost casually told Stalin privately of his possession of “a new weapon of unusual destructive force”.
Atomic bombs ended WWII in Asia
Some days later, successive Atomic Bombs were launched on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a real life test of their ‘unusual destructive force’. Japan unconditionally surrendered. My own father, lying wounded in a military hospital in Burma, heard the news and was relieved the war was over.
The USA advantage was short-lived. The spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the ‘Manhattan Project’, and makes a fringe appearance in Oppenheimer, had been passing information to the Soviets, which had given them the possibility to develop their own A-Bomb. Oppenheimer’s apprehensions, so brilliantly portrayed by Cillian Murphy, came true.
The Cold War started soon after
The Cold War, the nuclear weapons race and the age of spies, fear of spies and the eventual glamorization of spies, was launched at the charming mock-Tudor mansion of the Cecilienhof Palace, the venue for the Potsdam Conference between the allied powers, USA, Soviet Union and Britain. The foundation for the post war settlement had been laid at the Yalta Conference (February 1945 ) between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. By the time of the final settlement at Potsdam (July/August 1945), the main actors had changed as had the intentions and priorities of the western powers. Stalin has what he wanted, a cordain sanitaire of satellite states between the Soviet Union and the West.
A new leader for Great Britain
Churchill had arrived in Yalta with, in his own words, the aim of preserving the British Empire. The Potsdam conference coincided with the British General Election and Churchill, sensing the political wind change, took his shadow PM Attlee with him. The British election, much to the surprise of the world, resulted in the defeat of Churchill’s Conservative Patty and its replacement by Attlee’s Labour Party. The British electorate was sophisticated enough to distinguish between Churchill, the inspirational war leader, and his regressive party, which rightly took the blame for the economic and social depression of the interwar years. The new British PM Attlee’s priorities were post war reconstruction and a fairer Britain, not the British Empire. He proved the point dramatically when the Labour government agreed to Indian Independence (1947), something Churchill had bitterly opposed.
Roosevelt has always disliked the British and other European empires, believing that the USA’s own expansion would be based on a more benevolent and generous view of international politics; a view thoroughly disproven from Cuba, to Vietnam. Truman, and his successors, went one step further seeking and eventually succeeding in displacing Britain and France in the Middle East and Asia.
Walking in and around the Cecilienhof
The Cecilienhof Palace’s mock-Tudor mansion house and English gardens formed part of the deep ties between the British and German royal and imperial families. It was commissioned by the last Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was the son of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, also Victoria.
As I wandered round Cecilienhof, I was struck by the similarities President Trump shares with the last Kaiser. Both erratic, vain, resentful, and vengeful, who vastly overrated their own abilities.
The gardens of Cecilienhof now lead the visitor across a lawn to the banks of the Havel river. But from the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) until its dramatic opening in 1989, the view and access were blocked by the hideous symbol of a divided Germany and a divided Europe.
Now visitors can return to the river harbour in Potsdam and sail under the Glienicke Bridge (above). During the Cold War the bridge was inaccessible, and only used for an occasional exchange of spies.
The Cold War was portrayed in many films
The Cold War era, both during and after, has proven fertile grounds for fiction and films and Berlin the favourite and obvious setting. John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold captured my imagination and drew me to study in West Berlin in the ‘60s and I actually saw the filming of Len Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin near my flat.
But it was Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, which brought the Glienicke Bridge to be the popular tourist attraction it has become. The bridge is now busy, a commuter link leading to and from West Berlin. Once the symbol of Prussian militarism, Potsdam is now virtually a leafy and desirable suburb of Berlin. Besides the impressive riverside new- build, there are privatised, and now gentrified, former utility housing tower blocks from days of ‘Socialist Germany’.
As they say ‘Berlin is never static, it never becomes, it is always becoming’.
To read the original article, please find it here.
.jpg){kind=link}
_(2731361224).jpg){kind=link}