On the ruins after the war, they began to dance

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2024-04-10 13:00Posted on the official account of Beijing Ideal Country LIVE

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Titanic

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The movie

Beautiful life

In the final shot, the little boy ends up in a tank and finds his mother among the victims released from the concentration camp, the war is over, and their lives go on. At the end of the movie Schindler's List, after the Allied officers bring the news of liberation, a large number of displaced people form a huge procession and move forward together, and the war is over, but they do not know where to go.

In works about war, the story often ends with the war, and the story that follows is rarely mentioned.

Homes have been destroyed, lives have collapsed and broken out of order, loved ones are gone, and everything that was once difficult to restore is waiting to be rebuilt. Are they grief, depressed, guilty, hopeful, and free? Maybe they have all of them, and they don't stop there.

Berlin in 1945, after the defeat in World War II, the Germans began to rebuild their lives. The city is littered with rubble and ruins, and in these ruins you can see two kinds of people: those who bend down to carry the rubble out bucket after bucket, and those who look for a place to dance among the ruins. Unlike what everyone always imagined, life after the war was one of weathered faces and serious and desperate expressions. After the defeat of Germany, there was an unexpected wave of dance fever throughout the country. Everyone was dancing, carnivals were being held everywhere, as if a collapsed life did not exist, and as if a moment of freedom was the only thing they could hold in their hands.

There is not enough food and beer, lift up whey to replace. The city was ruined, the tavern doors were all rubble, rearranged, weaving through the ruins, dancing in the basements. In The Age of Wolves: Germany and Germans in the Aftermath of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, Harald Jena looks at post-war German society and Germans, and documents the dance fever that pervaded Germany after the war. In the book, Harald Jena analyzes the reasons for the emergence of this dance craze, delves into the spiritual world of post-war Germany, and shows us how ordinary people rebuilt their lives and regained their humanity in the shadow of the Third Reich.

Find the dance floor in the ruins

Nowadays, people tend to imagine the post-war period as an extremely serious era. The scene at that time, especially the depiction of that era, is more depicted by weathered faces and desperate expressions. This is not surprising given the predicament and unease that prevailed at the time. Yet, incredibly, even over the years, there has been a lot of laughter, dancing, celebrating, flirting and love. Because light-hearted scenes are out of place for the serious subject that people are trying to represent, the closer they are to the contemporary, the less cheerful they are in film and literature.

And for all the same inopportune feeling that plagued people back then, they partyed to their heart's content, even more freely than in the affluent years when people were increasingly staying at home.

When the fear of the overnight bombing and the initial post-occupation unease passed, the joy of surviving became an unstoppable force. The scarcity of life in the ruins did not damage this overwhelming energy at all. On the contrary, the feeling of finally escaping disaster and the unforeseeable, completely unplanned future has led to a sharp rise in the intensity of life.

A lot of people just live in the moment. If the moment is good, take it to the extreme. The overflowing joy of life begins to explode, often causing people to indulge in pleasure madly. Because the threat to life is still everywhere, people want to enjoy life to the extreme. A real dance fever erupted from there, and everyone danced as hard as they could, and piercing screaming laughter could be heard everywhere, which of course made many people unbearable.

A Munich recalled: "I went to the dance every night for months, even though there was neither food nor drink. There is only one sour drink called whey. I enjoyed it every night with all those who love to dance, and even if we ate and drank later, we rarely had such a joy again.

"Area of Interest"

Berlin and Munich were the same. For example, Brigitte Eicke, an 18-year-old Berlin female secretary, was a life-loving girl who loved books, always loved the cinema, and loved dancing, and she didn't let the fall of the imperial capital take away her passion. Seventeen days after Germany's surrender, she went to a movie theater for the first time, which had reopened only two days earlier.

In the evening, she wrote in her diary: "I picked up Kitty at 3 o'clock and we went to the Babylon Cinema with Annemarie Reimer, Rita Uckert and Edith Sturmowski. It was really nice and we all had a great time. It's just that the movie is terrible. Captain Grant's Children (

Die Kinder des Kapitän Grand), a Russian film, only in Russian, the gist of which we don't quite understand. "As far as dancing goes, Brigitte will need to be patient for several weeks. A member of the German Girls' Union (BDM), who became a member of the Nazi Party under the call for "the people to sacrifice their children for the leader's birthday", she first had to do punitive work in clearing the rubble.

But when the Soviet occupiers declared all the young people misguided and granted amnesty, she became a new member of the Anti-Fascist Youth Committee, and from then on her dance steps began to dance from one dance floor to another.

"Area of Interest"

Over the next few weeks, Brigitte Ike and her friends traverse the ruined city, rushing from one newly opened dance hall to another. Up to this point, the tavern had been confined to the ground floor, and the rubble at the entrance had been swept away and simply arranged, but this did not prevent people from dancing briskly in the basement.

They then went to places called "Central Palace", "Casino", "International Café", "Standard Café" and "Cabin Café". In the summer of 1945, the 18-year-old visited a total of 13 different, in today's terms, clubs – a number that is quite impressive even in today's party city of Berlin. And there are many more clubs for this curious young woman to explore: just to name a few examples on the side streets of Kudam Street, such as the Piccadilly Bar, Robin Hood's Restaurant, Roxey's Restaurant, the Imperial Club, the Blue Cave Restaurant, and the Monte Carlo Coffee Bar.

It's a world where everyone can dance

For many desperate people, celebratory parties are a thing of the past. Mothers who lost their children on the run and went out of their way to find them, patients who struggled between life and death in their adult years without proper medical help, and those who were so traumatized that they completely lost the courage to live. In short, it was those people, just after the war, and every laughing face seemed to them to be a grimace of irony.

And a few of them. They sat in the ballroom for a while, without intervening, and when there were too many people, they left the lively scene with a blank face. But you would be wrong to think of these people as a better category without any consideration, and to see those who are dancing as hard-hearted people who have turned a blind eye to the injustice and suffering of the past.

The guilt that the Germans carried was rarely a reason to find entertainment out of place, and it was more to discourage them from their own misfortunes, such as the longing for their captured husbands or the mourning of their dead relatives.

"Life is Beautiful"

It's a world where everyone can dance. Maria von Eynern, a young university student, explains the explosion of enthusiasm for life that surprised even her own after the collapse of her original world: "There are many reasons for this—

The first is the real personal freedom that is generously and even extravagantly granted to us by the ruined surroundings, which has a mesmerizing aspect. Everyone was incredibly sociable. In the end, everyone is responsible for themselves at the end of the day—for every happiness, and for every misstep in the jungle of confusion, because every wrong step causes us to stumble and fall. ”

The shock of the collapse was followed by a deep sense of self-responsibility and personal freedom. The former confusion is abruptly transformed into initiative, and the female college student understands it as follows: "We", as if she were speaking for an entire generation, "create an atmosphere around herself, always in a posture of readiness to face and deal with the strange phenomena of life." Freedom beckons to us in all areas. For example, there is no longer a norm of dress, "because no one else has such a norm of dress, and all proletarians and intellectuals have freedom in the true sense of the word."

Wolfgang Borchert wrote in 1947: "Our songs of joy and our music are dancing in the abyss/throat yawning at us...... Our hearts and brains have the same rhythm of hot and cold: excited, crazy and hurried, unrestrained. This picture shows a scene from a popular club in Munich in 1951. Source: "Wolf Era"

This emerging zest for life is not just the privilege of those who are well educated. The "incredible social fever" that Maria von Aineen was surprised to discover in herself pervaded the society of the time. While some hedgehog huddle in their fortress of bitterness, others are invested in new associations, friendships, and love. The result of expulsion, inward movement and evacuation is not only mutual hostility, but also attraction and curiosity to each other.

In the midst of hardship and suffering, the fragmentation of the family also means liberation from the suffocating web of relationships. The boundaries between the poor and the rich have also become clear, and the experience of losing everything overnight, and the pervasive death that can still be felt, trivializes the previously decisive class differences. This is also the meaning of what Maria von Aineen wrote about in her record as "the freedom of all proletarians and intellectuals."

How to understand the post-war

Today one must imagine the vulgar carnival of the post-war years in a mental space, characterized by a frenzy of high-profile and cheap flooding that now seems incomprehensible. The people of those days compared themselves to the spirit of the times into more and more high-standard idioms, which also sought to put the suffering of Germany above the suffering of their victims. In Ernst Wiechert's "Speech to the German Youth of 1945" (

Rede an die deutsche Jugend (1945): "We stand in front of an abandoned house and see the eternal stars twinkling over the ruins of the earth. There has never been a nation on earth so lonely as we are, and no nation has ever been so stigmatized as we are. And we pressed our foreheads against the broken wall, our lips whispering to the old human question: 'What are we going to do?'"

According to the cultural historian Michael Bachtin, the laughter of the carnival, which arose as early as the Renaissance, was directed at "changes in the world order." It is a national laughter that tries to play down the history of the world that makes it helpless, so it is a laugh of fear and a laugh of remorse: "This paradoxical carnival laughter, which connects death and rebirth, denial and recognition, ridicule and triumph, is itself a universal, utopian, world-facing laughter." ”

Dancing in Bavarian clubs: In the jazz clubs of the U.S. military, German and American musicians became buddies. The most important thing is the rhythm of the swing. Source: "Wolf Era"

The party in the post-war period was not on a sinking ship, but on a dance on what had already been a sunken ship. The strange thing is that everyone is still alive. Every now and then, a strange kind of silliness will appear in people. The first real German pop song after the war was Evelyn Künnecke's "Three Little Stories" (

"Drei Geschichten") - a meaningless song of pure entertainment: it tells the story of a knight who sits high on a rock and fishes but never catches any fish. "Why, why?" said Evelyn Cunek, with a warm blankness, "[See] the fishing rope can't reach the water. "Formally a complaint, in matters stupid: a peculiar humor emerges.

This unbelievable German exhilaration, which reminded the historian Friedrich Prinz of the traditional feast that follows the funeral of a loved one. "When Mars, the god of war, has swept the battlefield," and although misery and hardship prevailed for a while, Prinz wrote, "but there was still a great deal of interest in the hearts of the people." At large country peasant funerals, the excitement usually spreads as soon as the coffin is buried in the ground. Immediately after the funeral, the people who returned from the cemetery threw themselves into the feast in the hotel: hesitating at first, then spreading pleasure more and more vigorously, a sense of joy that they "still enjoy the good habits of life". ”

However, compared to the creatures killed by the war before, where could people have devoured so much? If this kind of post-funeral feast were to measure the scale of sorrow and joy, people might not be able to get out of a hysterical feast of hysterical drinking at all. But, as Margarete und Alexander Mitscherlich pointed out in their large study entitled "Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern" (Unable to mourn), it is precisely because the majority of Germans have restrained their grief that such celebrations, while in an often surprising indulgence, are still borderline in an atmosphere that is not completely irrational. The funeral feast is a universal phenomenon in anthropology. It is one of the few customs that occurs in a similar way in almost all cultures, although in different forms and depths. Such a sad and joyful gathering is a ritual of grief and oppressive grief, and for many it is an indispensable collective coping with death, in which conflicting and parallel emotions are ritualized.

The Carnival Society began to dare to speak out again: in 1949 John Bull could be seen on the float of the Carnival Society "The Cultists of Lyskig" how John Bull used a planer to dispose of Michel's bare butt in Germany, alluding to the Allied demolition of German industrial facilities. Source: "Wolf Era"

In this dance in the ruins, death is incognito but everywhere. People have fun in an environment where the impermanence of life is everywhere. In some places, the war has dissipated so slowly that one can actually smell the corpses. Max Leon Flemming, a businessman and art collector, had such an experience in his villa in the Berliner Tiergartenviertel in one of Berlin's most devastated districts. Everything around him had been blown up, worn away by dying protests, and the neighborhood's villas, once almost absurd by their vulgar decorations, were now lying in the rubble of the floors.

Fleming, a man who was once very wealthy, made a living by gradually selling his rich collection after the world economic crisis of 1929, "by selling paintings on the walls", as one museum director put it. He was an admired member of the Berlin art scene, and immediately after the war, he and Gerd Rosen founded the leading post-war modern art gallery in Berlin.

On September 7, 1946, Max Leon Fleming invited a large number of friends and family to the "Ball on the Ruins". Each invitee received a hand-drawn watercolor invitation card on which he wrote on a typewriter the words "Dance until the gray Sunday morning" against a sketch of the ruins. Where: "4 Margareton Street, 4th and 5th floors, dancing in a Bavarian club in Pompeii: at the jazz club of the American army, German and American musicians became buddies." The most important thing is the rhythm of the swing. In the middle of the green hell of the ruins of Berlin", on the upper floor of the zoo, the only "house best suited for this pious use". Dress casually, "women wear less, men wear more". He asked people to bring their own alcoholic beverages if possible, as well as to hand in ration tickets for potatoes and bread, or to bring potatoes "directly". After Fleming informed the group that "the tomatoes were grown in the ruins", he added on the postcard: "There is also a 'special post-war request': each person should bring a wine glass and fork." "Once the guests have figured their way through the rubble, the party is sure to be an intoxicating night of celebration.