Bismarck and Moltke and Roon round it; and he transferred the Sieges Allee to an unfrequented part of the park. It may be argued that the German people showed culpable negligence in not taking this act of extravagance and folly as a warning and rising against Hitler. Even if the Germans did not know about the concentration camps they must have known about this transfer of statuary. Should an American President move the Washington Square Arch to Brooklyn and the Lincoln Memorial to a playground in Georgetown, or a British Prime Minister move the Albert Memorial to a public garden in Hammersmith, and did so for political reasons, even if the mass of the population did not suspect anything, the people who worked round him would, and restrictive action would be taken.
The statues gained by the change. They were set deeper among the trees, they lost their smugness, they looked as if they were part of the setting of a romantic drama. But at the end of the war they had suffered a further change which lifted them out of their poor place as artifacts into Lear’s kingdom of loss. The trees of the Tiergarten had in 1946 been nearly all destroyed. Some were burned in the air raids, others were hit by Russian artillery during the battle for the capital, most of them were cut down by the freezing population during the first winter after the war. Now the great park was nothing but a vast potato patch, with here and there a row of vegetables and a plot of tobacco plants. From this naked land rose the statues in starkly inappropriate prominence. Above them the column of the three victorious wars was surmounted by the French flag, since this was in the French Sector, and the horizon was bounded by riddled cliffs which were once splendid villas and apartment houses. But, as well as this landscape-wide humiliation, they had suffered more private troubles. The charge that the Red Army is illiterate was forever disproved. The pedestals of Moltke and Roon, the bellies of the women who sprawl round the base of the Bismarck memorial, were scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers.
The Empress Victoria had lost her marble veil, her marble hat, her marble head. Decapitated, she stood among the pergolas. The Sieges Allee had suffered a peculiar loss of the same sort. The statues and busts were left intact; they belong to a kind of realistic art greatly admired by the Russians. But each of the marble loges is decorated on each side by a Hohenzollern eagle, and every one of these had been decapitated, very neatly, and evidently by a suitable instrument. Only the naked girl was as she had been, but there were marks of attempts to get her off her horse. She could be seen a long way off over the bare ground.
There is no statuary at all near the Brandenburger Thor, except a memorial to the Russian troops, which is surmounted by a realistic figure bearing a fantastic resemblance to Mussolini. The sentry who guarded it was, like so many of the Russian soldiers in Berlin, a ravishing small boy, with pink cheeks and a nose that turned up to heaven with the gravity of prayer. But one did not see a large number of troops in the streets of the Russian Sector; and, indeed, few troops were visible in any sector. The machinery of the Four Power control of Berlin was masked; but how many officials were labouring at their desks to coordinate what was too complex to be coordinated became manifest when the traveller found himself uncomfortably uncoordinated. This inevitably happened to those who took this route to Nuremberg, for authority in England had allowed travellers to the trial to take with them letters of credit, which, however, new currency regulations that had just come into effect made it extremely difficult to cash, a turn of events which seemed to surprise authority in Germany as much as the travellers. But even when finesse of a hardly defensible kind got the letters of credit cashed in British scrip money, there was the problem of buying
The statues gained by the change. They were set deeper among the trees, they lost their smugness, they looked as if they were part of the setting of a romantic drama. But at the end of the war they had suffered a further change which lifted them out of their poor place as artifacts into Lear’s kingdom of loss. The trees of the Tiergarten had in 1946 been nearly all destroyed. Some were burned in the air raids, others were hit by Russian artillery during the battle for the capital, most of them were cut down by the freezing population during the first winter after the war. Now the great park was nothing but a vast potato patch, with here and there a row of vegetables and a plot of tobacco plants. From this naked land rose the statues in starkly inappropriate prominence. Above them the column of the three victorious wars was surmounted by the French flag, since this was in the French Sector, and the horizon was bounded by riddled cliffs which were once splendid villas and apartment houses. But, as well as this landscape-wide humiliation, they had suffered more private troubles. The charge that the Red Army is illiterate was forever disproved. The pedestals of Moltke and Roon, the bellies of the women who sprawl round the base of the Bismarck memorial, were scrawled with the names and addresses of Russian soldiers.
The Empress Victoria had lost her marble veil, her marble hat, her marble head. Decapitated, she stood among the pergolas. The Sieges Allee had suffered a peculiar loss of the same sort. The statues and busts were left intact; they belong to a kind of realistic art greatly admired by the Russians. But each of the marble loges is decorated on each side by a Hohenzollern eagle, and every one of these had been decapitated, very neatly, and evidently by a suitable instrument. Only the naked girl was as she had been, but there were marks of attempts to get her off her horse. She could be seen a long way off over the bare ground.
There is no statuary at all near the Brandenburger Thor, except a memorial to the Russian troops, which is surmounted by a realistic figure bearing a fantastic resemblance to Mussolini. The sentry who guarded it was, like so many of the Russian soldiers in Berlin, a ravishing small boy, with pink cheeks and a nose that turned up to heaven with the gravity of prayer. But one did not see a large number of troops in the streets of the Russian Sector; and, indeed, few troops were visible in any sector. The machinery of the Four Power control of Berlin was masked; but how many officials were labouring at their desks to coordinate what was too complex to be coordinated became manifest when the traveller found himself uncomfortably uncoordinated. This inevitably happened to those who took this route to Nuremberg, for authority in England had allowed travellers to the trial to take with them letters of credit, which, however, new currency regulations that had just come into effect made it extremely difficult to cash, a turn of events which seemed to surprise authority in Germany as much as the travellers. But even when finesse of a hardly defensible kind got the letters of credit cashed in British scrip money, there was the problem of buying
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