Writing 'As You Like It'

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward’s newest contribution to Rick On Theater is a speculation; Kirk’s going to guess at how William Shakespeare, undoubtedly the greatest playwright in the English language and, arguably, in the theater world, came up with the text of As You Like It (which Kirk happens to be directing right now).  This speculation is intended to be an attempt to illuminate how some writers compose their works (regular ROTters will know that Kirk’s also a playwright himself). 

[First, let me cop to something: Kirk’s very description of the structure of AYLI demonstrates why it’s just not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.  Though Kirk’s always liked it—which suggests he knows it pretty well—I’ve never been fond of it (or Shakespeare’s other “pastoral” play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  That said, I think this is a terrific examination of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy—or, at least, one possible account of it.  In any case, Kirk makes a good argument for the writing process he presents.

[Kirk’s written for ROT on the subject of Shakespeare several times before.  “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” posted on 4 June 2010, and “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010, are accounts of productions Kirk staged in 1969 and 1972, respectively; and “Frank Kermode On Shakespeare’s Language,” 26 January 2016, and “Asimov’s Shakespeare,” 6 April 2016 ,are pieces based on his readings of a couple of reference works he found particularly useful: Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (2000) and Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov (1970).  “Evaluating A Director,” 1 March 2017, concerns Shakespeare in the sense that it’s an account of the auditioning process through which Kirk went to get the gig directing the production of As You Like It on which he’s currently engaged.  Perhaps another pertinent post for this article is Kirk’s “How To Write A Play,” 18 February 2016 , which is self-explanatory, I imagine.  ~Rick]

William Shakespeare has left few clues about his life, to the extent that some people claim he did not write the plays attributed to him, but was the “beard” or front man for another writer. I’m not one of the people who think so, but it’s true that we’re missing a great deal of basic information we’d love to have about him.

For example, we don’t have his actual date of birth; the traditional date (April 23, 1564) is based partly on romantic speculation (he died on another April 23, in 1616), and partly on a deduction from the date of his baptism (April 26, 1564).

We don’t know for sure where he went to school, assuming he did (which certainly seems likely). We have only guesses about what his marriage to Anne Hathaway (1555 or 1556-1623) was like. We don’t know anything at all about what he did between 1585 and 1592, a gap that has been filled by a number of conceivably fanciful tales.

We know very little of his career in the theater in London, although we know he had one, and we don’t know how thoroughly he retired from theater, if at all, or what he did at home once he went there, or how he died. We have a few samples of handwriting, a will, a grave, some remarks by others – that’s about it.

Oh, and we have his plays – there’s some argument, of course, about how many he wrote and/or co-wrote – and the Sonnets, plus two long poems. It’s difficult for any writer who’s not the merest hack to disguise his entire self within that much creative output. A modern day parallel might be the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who reveals a great deal of his emotional life in his songs. On the other hand, Dylan is so secretive about his private life that he might as well be, well, Shakespeare.

Dylan’s songs, of course, are lyric, meaning that more often than not they express the thought or feeling of a “speaker,” whether that “speaker” is actually Dylan or someone else, either real or imagined. It is easy to imagine, at least, that we are hearing Dylan’s real feelings in his songs.

Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are dramatic, meaning that the thoughts and feelings within them are assigned to characters, and those characters may or may not reflect Shakespeare’s own personality.

Figuring out what Shakespeare was “really” like is an exercise carried out in literally hundreds, if not thousands of books. Those numbers demonstrate how uncertain the venture is. Still, the effort is practically irresistible, as I’ve discovered recently while directing a production of As You Like It (AYLI), a comedy by Shakespeare written, perhaps, in 1599, and first published in the First Folio of 1623.

I can’t say that I’ve discovered any truths about Shakespeare’s “real” (or “everyday”?) self, but I do believe there are some interesting observations to be made about Shakespeare’s writing process, if we are willing to grant three assumptions. I freely admit that there’s no way to verify any of these assumptions. I’m making them for the sake of discussion.

The first assumption is that the text of the play as found in the First Folio is the text as Shakespeare wrote it, or at least very close. The question of what corrections, emendations, and plain old mistakes have crept into the printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays is a major one, especially when multiple versions of a play exist, as is the case with Hamlet. However, that doesn’t apply to AYLI, which makes its first appearance in the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays.

The second assumption is that the plot of AYLI is what Shakespeare wanted it to be, and not simply a repetition of his source material. I believe this is a reasonable assumption. Wikipedia’s summary of Shakespeare’s sources makes it clear that he did not simply borrow an entire plot for AYLI, using it whole:

The direct and immediate source of As You Like It is Thomas Lodge‘s Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, written 1586-7 and first published in 1590. Lodge’s story is based upon “The Tale of Gamelyn,” wrongly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer and sometimes printed among his Canterbury Tales. Although it was first printed in 1721, ”Gamelyin” must have existed in manuscript form in Shakespeare’s time. It is doubtful that Shakespeare had read it, but Lodge must have built his pastoral romance on the foundation of “Gamelyin,” giving it a pastoral setting and the artificial sentimental vein, much in fashion at the time. The tale provided the intertwined plots, and suggested all the characters except Touchstone and Jaques.

Some have suggested two other minor debts. The first is Michael Drayton‘s Poly-Olbion, a poetic description of England, but there is no evidence that the poem was written before As You Like It. The second suggested source is The Historie of Orlando Furioso by Robert Greene, acted about 1592. 

I have not read Rosalynde, but I have read enough summaries of it to see that Shakespeare did significant work on the plot. All in all I believe we can make the assumption that the plot of AYLI is the result of his own decision, not because of his source.

The third assumption I want to make is that Shakespeare wrote the play more or less from start to finish, with few if any corrections and revisions, and that when he was finished with it, he turned it in. Obviously I can’t prove this, but there is no doubt that around the time the play was written, Shakespeare was a busy man.

Figuring out when Shakespeare wrote particular plays is another knotty scholastic problem, but it appears that within a year or so before and after the composition of AYLI, he also wrote Henry IV Part 2, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. That is heavy lifting for any writer.

Additionally, there’s the title of the play, As You Like It. Bernard Shaw cited it frequently, suggesting that Shakespeare meant it to say, “You wanted it, so here it is.” I feel that Shaw pushes that point too far. However, there’s no question it’s suggestive.

If we accept my three assumptions, which I feel are reasonable if by no means certain, and then look at the play, we see – possibly – an interesting picture of a writer in the process of working.

The setting of the play is France. However, absolutely nothing is made of this except for some character names. The play “feels” consistently English, right down to the name of the Forest of Arden (perhaps originally the Forest of Ardennes?). Even before the play begins, then, we have an element of the story that’s not even acknowledged, much less used in the play.

The first scene of the play sets up a conflict between brothers – Orlando, the younger, and Oliver, the older and very unsympathetic – that quickly devolves into a physical fight.  When Orlando leaves, Oliver enlists the aid of a wrestler to kill Orlando in a forthcoming wrestling match.

We then see Rosalind and her close friend Celia. They are presented fully and sympathetically and that treatment continues throughout the play, whenever they appear, with sprightly and clever dialogue, some of the most entertaining that Shakespeare ever wrote.

Their conversation is interrupted by a character, a courtier, named Le Beau. As best as I can tell, Le Beau is intended when we first see him to be a supercilious sort, a fop, something like Osric in Hamlet.

Duke Frederick, a usurper, then appears, and at first it’s hard to see anything wrong with him – he is anxious that the younger wrestler (Orlando, as it happens) not get hurt, which is commendable. After the match, which Orlando wins, Frederick starts to congratulate him, but realizes that Orlando is the son of one of his enemies, and he then snubs him.

Before the wrestling match, Orlando has seen, and fallen in love with, Rosalind. He now asks Le Beau who she is, and Le Beau answers him not only straightforwardly, but sympathetically. Le Beau in fact criticizes Duke Frederick, and warns Orlando that he is probably in danger.

My impression of this encounter is that, having set Le Beau up to be one sort of person, Shakespeare now finds he needs him to be someone else – instead of a vacuous insect, to be a man of real character. So Shakespeare, not bothering to go back and revise our first look at Le Beau, essentially turns him into a new person.

Duke Frederick now banishes Rosalind from the court, and Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia decides to go with her – Rosalind’s father, the overthrown Duke, is now living in the forest, like Robin Hood. At this point the plot is not only realistic but potentially threatening – the forest presumably is a dangerous place, Duke Frederick is a wild cannon, and Orlando also clearly may be in trouble.

We then see the banished Duke in the forest. However, what follows is not danger but comedy, as we hear about the funny things one of the Duke’s people, Jaques, has said about a deer he saw in the woods. The play appears to be lightening up. We can certainly feel that it will be a comedy.

But the next two scenes work the other way – Duke Frederick sends troops to find and capture Rosalind and Celia, and Adam, Orlando’s servant, warns Orlando that he had better escape from the Duke’s castle while he can.

The relation of these events to the previous comic scene are not faults in the play, of course – Shakespeare is fully entitled to juxtapose different kinds of scenes next to each other, and he does, throughout his whole career in fact, to brilliant effect.

Nevertheless, the first time we saw Adam, he seemed to be a conventional old servant. Oddly, now, when he warns Orlando of danger, he turns into a comic character, a sort of Foster Brooks (for those who remember him), verbose and somewhat muddled:

The enemy of all your graces lives:

Your brother – no, no brother; yet the son –

Yet not the son, I will not call him son

Of him I was about to call your father…

Again we see Shakespeare adding traits to a character as he needs them. In this case, I would say, he wants to keep the tone of the play from becoming too serious, so he uses Adam for that purpose. Adam talks a great deal (there are some indications that Shakespeare played the role!).

Shakespeare now takes us back into the forest, where Rosalind and Celia meet a shepherd and decide to buy a property from a character the shepherd describes:

My master is of a churlish disposition,

And little recks to find the way to heaven

By doing deeds of hospitality.

This churlish character, who sounds potentially interesting, will be referred to once more in the play, but will never appear. It is fairly unusual for a character in a play to be introduced and then dropped in this fashion. My feeling is that perhaps there was an intention to bring him on stage – but that that didn’t work out, perhaps because it wasn’t necessary.

The next scene is a song. It has no plot function at all – I wrote in my script, “Why is this here?” This is not the last song Shakespeare will introduce in this play without much reason for it to exist. (Some have called AYLI “Shakespeare’s musical,” presumably like a musical of pre-Oklahoma! vintage.)

Orlando now bursts into the banished Duke’s camp, demanding food for the starving Adam and himself. The Duke is friendly and convinces Orlando to bring Adam to him, so he can be fed. After Orlando leaves, the Duke remarks to Jaques that “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy,” to which Jaques replies with the famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech. (The scene ends with another song, incidentally.)

Clearly, then, Shakespeare is doing some fine writing in this play. But I hope the description of the story so far has made it clear that the work to this point is uneven. Shakespeare appears to be meeting the needs of the moment without a great deal of concentration on the plot (cf. that first, oddly inserted song) or consistency of character. One gets the feeling – at least I do – of a writer forging ahead in the task of creating a play, not tossing it off, but also not sweating the details.

The next scene finds Duke Frederick, who has now become thoroughly brutal, terrorizing Orlando’s brother to the point where the following brilliant dialogue would fit just as well in one of the history plays:

DUKE FREDERICK:

Your lands and all things that you dost call yours

Worth seizure do we seize into our hands,

Till you canst quit you by your brother’s mouth

Of what we think against you.

OLIVER:

O that your highness knew my heart in this!

I never loved my brother in my life.

DUKE FREDERICK:

More villain you.

The preparation has at this point been made for something like the following: Duke Frederick will assemble an army, invade the forest, and attempt to capture Rosalind and Celia. The banished Duke, with Orlando as his second in command, will oppose Frederick, and after appropriate ups and downs, will defeat him.

This, I feel, is a reasonable expectation in view of the story so far. Frederick will lose; but the struggle will be fierce. We have already seen a good bit of violence in the play – brother fighting brother, the wrestling match, death threats, a Duke increasingly savage. Watch out!

What now? Well, Rosalind is in the forest, dressed as a man called Ganymede, and Orlando is in the forest, in love with the Rosalind he thinks he left behind, so Shakespeare brings them together again.

As is well known, in Shakespeare’s time women did not perform on stage; female roles were played by men. So Rosalind’s male appearance is easy to establish, and we don’t need to fret that Orlando certainly ought to recognize her. (It appears that they had both lived in the same castle!)

I don’t consider this one of the marks of inconsistent or unconsidered plot development in this play. Shakespeare often uses this same device, for example in Twelfth Night, and it is basically a “convention,” an established way of doing things, in his plays. However, there will be another example of non-recognition later that is more extreme.

While Rosalind and Orlando are working out their relationship – Rosalind offers to “cure” Orlando of his love by pretending to be, well, Rosalind, and Orlando accepts – Shakespeare introduces not one but two other pairs of lovers.

Their existence in the play is not unreasonable – I’d say that the major theme of the play is the nature of love. But the characters are given a great deal of stage time, and not much happens in that time except that they talk.

As a director, I can state that the best way to stage these scenes is to have very fine performers playing them. Otherwise they are likely to strike the audience as “dead time.”

One reluctantly feels that Shakespeare, with not a lot of plot in hand and not a lot of energy for complications, felt at this point that he had to write something. The dialogue in these scenes isn’t “bad.” It’s not priceless either, and the plot points are easy to grasp – the audience, one suspects, “gets the message” long before the scenes are finished.

I should add that along the way there is also a substantial amount of comic dialogue (in prose), most of it in scenes featuring Touchstone the clown. Shakespeare appears to have had a fine actor (Will Kempe) available to play this kind of role, and no doubt it was easy to create lines for Kempe like the following:

Of a certain knight that swore by his honour they were good pancakes and swore by his honour the mustard was naught: now I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good, and yet was not the knight forsworn.

This kind of thing may have been hilarious in context and as performed by Will Kempe. It is difficult for us today not to stare at it with a cold eye, and in fact I cut that particular speech from our production, along with some other “comic” dialogue, because I was unable to think of any way to make it intelligible. (It brings to mind the parody “Shakespearian” comic speech in the British comedy revue of the 1960’s, Beyond the Fringe: “I’m from Lancaster, and that’s to say for good shoe leather!”)

I have neglected to keep mentioning the songs in the play, but I should point out one (“What shall he have that kill’d the deer?”) that occurs because Shakespeare, clearly bored by the requirements of plot by this time, needs to separate two scenes between Rosalind and Celia. In order to indicate that time passes, people come out, sing a song, and leave. This is not, in anybody’s book, brilliant play construction.

Finally, late in Act IV, Shakespeare begins to feel the need to bring his story to a conclusion. You will recall my speculation above that Duke Frederick will come into the forest with an army. This is not exactly what happens.

Instead, Oliver, Orlando’s vile brother, appears with a story of having rescued Orlando from a lion, and while telling the story, falls in love with Celia. He is a thoroughly redeemed – in fact, completely transformed – character.

Orlando, frustrated that his brother has found his true love while he can’t find his, tells “Rosalind” (Rosalind) that he can’t pretend any more, whereupon Rosalind promises to straighten everything out.

After another unmotivated song, the main characters of the play gather to see what Rosalind can do. The Duke and Orlando have a mystifying conversation in which we learn that the Duke has failed to recognize his own daughter:

I do remember in this shepherd boy

Some lively touches of my daughter’s favour.

This is carrying Shakespearian disguise pretty far; but never mind, because there are more wonders ahead.

Suddenly more music – honestly, it almost is a musical – plays, and Hymen, the goddess of marriage, appears and sings a song, introducing Rosalind as, well, Rosalind.

I have been asked in rehearsal what in the world Hymen is doing there – there are no other mythological characters in the play – and all I can guess is that perhaps that she wandered in from a Masque (a courtly form of entertainment often featuring mythological characters).

Then – in a stupendous feat of dramaturgy – a new, previously unseen character appears. He is Jaques de Bois, Orlando’s middle brother, and if you have been paying attention you will note that he shares a first name with another character in the play – the Jaques of the “Seven Ages of Man” speech, a character invented by Shakespeare, not in the source material.

In other words, at this point Shakespeare brings in a new character and doesn’t even bother to think up a new name for him.

Jaques de Bois, in a nod to my notion of where the plot might have gone, reports (we don’t see this happen) that Duke Frederick did indeed lead an army into the forest, but that he met “an old religious man,” perhaps a monk, and was converted! He will now be a monk himself, and he is giving the banished Duke back his dukedom. Ta da!

It’s certainly a happy ending. Frankly, though, I get even greater pleasure from the glimpse that I am convinced the play provides, of a writer too busy to rewrite, who makes decisions as he goes along without worrying too much about them, and who nevertheless produces a lovely, if definitely curious, play.

One reads that some critics consider AYLI a masterpiece, while others consider it deeply flawed. Surely the answer is not an “either/or” matter. Who says it has to be perfect? It  is lovely. And fun. And a little odd.

I am delighted that AYLI is a play with its strengths and curiosities both on display for us – not, for example, a powerful machine of a drama like Othello, where every detail packs a punch.

Sometimes the majesty of Shakespeare’s achievement feels like it’s too much for us to take in. On the other hand, here is a holiday of a play, written, without a lot of stress, to delight us, and also perhaps to get us to scratch our heads once or twice.  In it, I am convinced, we get to see the author at work.

Not every play has to be a masterpiece in order to be a treasure. As You Like It is definitely the way I like it.

[Among the things in William Shakespeare’s bio about which we don’t know the truth is his religious affiliation.  (Much is made of this in Will, the fictionalized bio series about the Bard on TNT.)  Some biographers posit that he was a Catholic—perhaps a secret Catholic—while others assert he was a true Anglican.  I believe there’s little or no evidence to support either contention.  (Will is far from a great show, but, like the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, it’s a good example of how we fill in the gaps in what we know about the playwright with imagined—and often far-fetched—history.)

[Guessing how Shakespeare wrote As You Like It with so little evidence—based solely on reasoning—reminds me of two acts of imagination.  One’s an old cartoon, maybe from the New Yorker, maybe Playboy.  A man dressed in skins is lolling on a beach, noodling with some stones.  In the last panel, he gets up and walks away and we see what he’s left behind is Stonehenge: he was a giant and all the theories we’ve made through the centuries to explain how Stonehenge was built the way it was are just wrong!

[The other thing is Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia in which Lord Byron scholars, doing research in an old English country house where the poet is supposed to have stayed, are putting together their interpretation of evidence about Byron and a hermit who lived on the grounds 150 years earlier.  Their logical conclusions turn out to have been all wrong—as we learn because the play takes place alternately in the present and in the 1800’s

[Like most Stoppard plays, Arcadia  plays with language and perception (many of his plays, starting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, are about how we know what we know—or think we know) and has a puzzle at its center.  A little like Artist Descending a Staircase (1972/1989), Arcadia also plays with time—in the sense of how a story is told.  Artist is told backwards and Arcadia is told in two time periods alternately (like James Michener’s 1965 novel, The Source).  So while characters in the present are piecing together clues about an event in the past, we see that past event unfolding in intervening scenes.  

[The  present-day characters draw a logical conclusion about the unrecorded historical happening, but the characters of the past didn’t actually behave out of reason; sometimes they just did things on a whim—like that giant playing with rocks on a beach in the cartoon.  No logic in the world could predict a giant playing “pick-up-rocks”!  Just like no one can reason out why Shakespeare, who my undergrad director and theater teacher used to say was just a hack—and sometimes he simply had to churn out product, wrote a scene or inserted a song into a play just because he felt like it at the moment or didn’t take the time to come up with a better idea.]

'The Big Lift'

I recently posted an eight-part series called “Berlin Memoir” recounting my recollections of my 2½ years as an intelligence officer in West Berlin from July 1971 to February 1974.  (The memoir was posted on 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017.)  The memoir originated as a series of long e-mails I sent my friend Kirk Woodward back in 2005, and the impetus for those were an old movie I watched on cable TV that precipitated a Proustian experience for me.  That flick was The Big Lift (1950, directed and written for Twentieth Century Fox by George Seaton) starring Montgomery Clift (1920-66) and Paul Douglas (1907-59) as a couple of U.S. airmen assigned to Operation Vittles, also known as the Berlin Airlift (26 June 1948-30 September 1949). 

The airing of The Big Lift that I watched 12 years ago was on AMC on the evening of Thursday, 31 July 2005; the stream of e-mails started within days of that.  On Saturday evening, 19 August 2017, WNET, the PBS outlet on New York City’s channel 13, ran the same film on its Reel 13 and I taped it to watch again later.  When I did, I was prompted to write about the movie, not as any kind of film review—the movie’s been around far too long already for me to do that now—but from the perspective of that Proustian time trip back 30 years I made a dozen years ago.  The Big Lift isn’t a terribly remarkable movie as far as cinema goes—Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times of 27 April 1950 that the film “merits favor without too high acclaim”—but it had some startling, small moments of reflected reality.  Not Realism—reality. 

The movie was made on location in Berlin (using both local German actors for the German roles and actual military personnel for all the army and air force characters except Clift and Douglas) starting in May 1949, just after the end of the Soviet blockade.  (The airlift was, in fact, still going on—to build up a supply surplus and guard against a Soviet resumption of the blockade.)  Berlin was still digging out from the wartime rubble, which is visible all around the filming locations, and Berliners were suffering under infrastructure deficiencies, exacerbated by the Soviet blockade.  They still had the freedom of the city, however, despite the four-party occupation that divided it into four sectors; the Berlin Wall, which separated the Soviet Sector that became East Berlin from the U.S., British, and French Sectors that became West Berlin, wasn’t built until August 1961, over 11 years after the movie was released. 

When I was in Berlin in the early ’70s, West Berlin, two-thirds of the city, had 2.5 million inhabitants; East Berlin, one-third of the former German capital, was home to 1.25 million people; in the film a character speaks of 2.5 million people in the city, though statistics I’ve seen put the population at 3.3 million in 1950.  (Today the population is 3.7 million in the city  proper and 6 million in metro Berlin.)  At the time the airlift launched, the country as a whole was also still separated into occupation zones.  The Federal Republic of Germany, formed from the British, French, and U.S. Zones of Occupation and colloquially known as West Germany, wasn’t proclaimed until 23 May 1949; the German Democratic Republic, the former Soviet Zone of Occupation usually called East Germany, was proclaimed on 7 October.   

At the start of The Big Lift, there’s a voice-over that explains how the Soviets started the Berlin Blockade (which ran from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949).  The western presence in a foothold 110 miles inside the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany so rankled the Soviets that they launched an attempt to force the Allies out of Berlin by starving the city.  Richard Peña, the host of Reel 13 and a film professor at Columbia University, explained that first, the Soviets turned off the electricity and then the VO describes how they sealed all the crossing points between West and East Germany and East Germany and West Berlin, halted the trains at the border of the Soviet Zone and actually removed lengths of track, blocked river and canal routes into the city, and closed the Autobahns connecting Berlin to the western zones to Allied traffic.  With all access to land and water routes into and out of Berlin denied to them, the Western Allies determined to airlift supplies of fuel, food, and medicines to the city, using Rhein-Main Air Base, part of the main international airport in Frankfurt-am-Main in the U.S. Zone of Occupied Germany, as the base of operations in the west and Tempelhof Air Base, the military airfield of Berlin’s central airport, located in the occupied city’s U.S. Sector, as the principal off-loading depot in the east. 

(British, French, and Australian forces participated in the airlift alongside the U.S. Air Force; as we see in the flick, even the U.S. Navy, which had no forces in Berlin, detached sailors to help unload cargo at Tempelhof.  The British effort was called Operation Plainfare and the Aussies’ was codenamed Operation Pelican.  The French, having committed the bulk of their post-war aircraft to their war in Indochina, 1946-54—the precursor to the U.S. conflict in Vietnam—couldn’t supply any planes, but they expanded the airport in their sector of Berlin, Tegel, to accommodate cargo flights from Frankfurt.  Tempelhof Airport, built in 1927, was West Berlin’s main airport until it was closed in 2008; it ceased to be a U.S. Air Force Base in 1994.  Its place was taken by Tegel Airport, which had served mostly French military flights during the Cold War.  During the era of the divided city, the British and Soviet forces had airports in their sectors as well, Gatow and Schönefeld, respectively; Gatow, also a landing site for airlift flights, was mostly used for British military aircraft and Schönefeld, now Berlin’s secondary international airport, was the central airfield for the Soviet Sector/East Berlin.)

The Berlin Airlift, flying over 200,000 flights in 12 months, carrying almost 9,000 pounds of cargo a day, defeated the Soviet action and they never tried it again—but, still miffed at the existence of the democratic outpost decades later, they did keep up the same tactics on a sporadic and short-term basis.  Every few months, they’d stop the supply trains from West Germany and keep them on a siding for hours, maybe a day.  On another occasion, they’d stop all the traffic on the Autobahn—official Allied traffic was restricted to one designated route through the German Democratic Republic between Berlin and Helmstedt on the border—and back cars and trucks up at one or another of their internal checkpoints. (Checkpoint Able, or Alpha as I was called after 1956, was located at Helmstedt-Marienborn on the border between the British Zone of Occupation in the west and the Soviet Zone in the east; Checkpoint Baker, later Bravo, was the crossing point from the Soviet Zone into the American Sector of occupied Berlin at Dreilinden-Drewitz in the city’s southwest region; Checkpoint Charlie was located at Friedrichstrasse, the access point from the three western occupation sectors of Berlin into the Soviet Sector.  After 1961, Checkpoint Charlie was the only military gateway between West and East Berlin.)

With a scene of some GI’s watching a Movietone newsreel report of the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the start of the airlift, The Big Lift begins in July 1948, a little over two weeks after the airlift began.  The newsreel is interrupted by an announcement ordering the off-duty airmen of the 19th Troop Carrier Squadron at Hickam Field in Honolulu to report to their squadron.  At a briefing, the men are told they’re being sent on temporary assignment to Westover Field in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, for “operational training,” but some men in the squadron, among them Master Sergeant Hank Kowalski (Douglas), a ground-controlled approach (GCA) operator, guess that they’re really on their way to Germany to  help run the Soviet blockade they just heard about on the newsreel.  As one  “ground-gripper” sergeant tells them: “I just put 15 hundred pounds of coffee aboard there, and I haven’t heard of any coffee shortage in Massachusetts lately.”  Those feelings turn out to be right and the men of the crews of the C-54 Skymasters of the 19th, including Technical Sergeant Danny MacCullough (Clift), flight engineer of a troop transport nicknamed The White Hibiscus, take off for a flight halfway around the globe to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany.

(A GCA operator is a special air-traffic controller who uses advanced—for the time—technology and instrumentation to help planes in hazardous circumstances, such as bad weather or mechanical problems, land safely.  The United States Air Force had only become a separate service in 1947; during the war, it was known as the U.S. Army Air Force and in 1949, the ranks were still the same as the army’s.  A tech sergeant, Clift’s character’s rank, was the equivalent of today’s sergeant first class: three chevrons on top and two rockers below; a master sergeant, Douglas’s character’s rank, is the same now as it was then: three chevrons with three rockers.  The air force still uses both ranks today, but the insignia for NCO’s have changed.

(Frankfurt Airport is one of the largest and busiest in Europe.  When I lived in West Germany from 1962 to 1967, I flew into and out of Frankfurt many times.  I also landed at Rhein-Main, the military part of the Frankfurt airport, in July 1971 when I reported for duty in Berlin because I had to change planes there; I also had to change out of my uniform, required attire for the military transport flight from McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, into a civilian suit for my arrival in Berlin, where I was instructed not to appear in uniform.  When I lived in West Germany, Frankfurt was also the army base where my mother went for some of her periodic shopping trips at the PX and commissary; until he was transferred to the embassy in Bonn, my father was officially assigned to the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt-am-Main and that’s where his boss worked.  Frankfurt’s also where I took my PSAT’s and SAT’s in 1964 and where I registered for the draft in 1965.)

Showing on a world map the route from Honolulu, halfway across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, across the continental U.S. to Chicopee Falls, then across the Atlantic and half of Europe to Frankfurt, Germany—a long flight in a propeller plane that had to make refueling stops en route—Danny and Hank’s C-54, all the seats removed to make room for cargo, heads for Rhein-Main Air Base.  When they arrive, other planes from Alaska and Puerto Rico are also coming in to land.  When the squadron sets down in Frankfurt, Danny and his crew are immediately ordered to fly a load of coal into Berlin’s Tempelhof Air Base.  Danny’s friend Hank hitches a ride with them to his new post at Tempelhof.  A POW of the Germans during World War II who’d been mistreated by a guard who hated both Americans and Poles—and he was both—Hank holds a grudge against the German people and goes out of his way to be rude and overbearing to them.  (In 1948, the war, which ended only a little over three years earlier, was still such a recent memory that on the entry gate to Hickam Field was still the notation: “TOKYO: 4394 mi. / FLYING  TIME: 26 hrs. 27 mins.”)  Danny, who wants to see some of Berlin, is disappointed at being restricted to the air base so the plane can be unloaded quickly and return to Frankfurt.  Their time on the ground at Tempelhof is 20 minutes!

Hank hates being sent to Berlin for personal reasons, and we see in the film that the city is still a disaster area anyway.  (When my parents visited Berlin in June 1963 for Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, they reported that the city seemed artificial, that life was sort of staged and forced, like a Potemkin city.)   In my day, however, West Berlin was a vibrant and active city, with a full social and cultural life; it was a plum assignment.  Berlin Brigade and its attached units had the best of everything in USAREUR (U.S. Army, Europe) and USAFE (U.S. Air Force, Europe)—PX/BX (and we also had access to the British NAAFI and the French Économat), service clubs, army hospital, recreation facilities, housing, everything—and, at least with respect to military intelligence, the best of the best were sent there.  Generals from The Zone, as we called West Germany (a hold-over from the days of the occupation zones of Germany), came to Berlin to play—especially golf—or get treatment at the Berlin Army Hospital; GI’s stationed in The Zone were brought in by the bus- or train-load for “Berlin Orientation Tours” (about which I comment in “Berlin Stories – Three SNAFU’s,” 18 August 2012, and “Berlin Memoir, Part 1,” 16 December 2016). 

On that first flight into Berlin, the pilot of Danny’s plane (Lt. Gerald Arons) gives a detailed description of flying into Tempelhof Air Base: “All you have to do is to stay in this 20-mile corridor, hold exactly 170 miles an hour, maintain exactly 6,000 feet, fly instruments continuously, keeping a three-minute interval, making radar checks on the second, maintain . . . .”  (He’s interrupted by Tempelhof tower on the radio warning him of two Soviet fighters about to buzz their C-54.)  The Soviets controlled the airspace over their occupation zone of Germany and restricted Allied flights to a very narrow corridor.  Plus, Tempelhof is actually in downtown Berlin: planes come in to land over city buildings.  As Danny quips on that first flight, they “certainly put this field in a nice place, didn’t they?” and Hank winces as he looks out the window to see buildings looming up beneath them, shutting his eyes tight until he hears the landing gear hit the runway.  As the plane comes in over rooftops, Lieutenant Arons jokes, “It’s just like landing in the Rose Bowl!” 

Once they’re safely on the ground, Hank remarks that because pilots have to drop “200 feet in a quarter of a mile,” a steep descent, “I guess you could use GCA over all those apartment houses.”  Indeed, there are several shots of this, both from the air as the flyers make their approaches and from the city as planes land or take off practically outside apartment windows.  We see the second flight of Danny’s plane shown in the film come in right over the rooves of apartment buildings until the aircraft actually disappears from sight beneath the roof line, the airport and its landing strips still in front of it.  Whenever I flew into Berlin, I had the same response that Hank had. (It reminded me a little of the airport in Geneva, where I graduated from high school. That airport is in a little trough surrounded by mountains—including Mont Blanc, at 15,774 feet, Western Europe’s highest peak—and the planes have to fly in high to get over the mountains and then drop suddenly to land before they hit the mountains on the other side.  If I watched out the window during our approaches, my heart ended up in my throat!) 

The same flight restrictions were in force for flights to and from Berlin in the ’70s as in the ’40s and ’50s; only specially certified pilots were allowed to fly in and out of Berlin.  One of these was the newly-appointed CO of Tempelhof, Col. Gail Halvorsen (b. 1920).  In 1948-49, then-Lieutenant Halvorsen became a hero to the children of Berlin (by the 1970s, the adults running the city): he was known as the Candy Bomber because he dropped Hershey bars from his plane whenever he flew over the city on his landing approach.  (He would wiggle his plane’s wings to signal the children below that it was their Candy Bomber.  This provided another nickname for the flier: Uncle Wiggly Wings.)  Halvorsen inspired others, both military and civilian, to lend a hand in this effort, which acquired the name Operation Little Vittles.  I knew Colonel Halvorsen when I was stationed in West Berlin—his daughter was a member of our theater group, which met at the air base—and once when I took an air force hop from Ramstein, then USAFE headquarters, into Tempelhof, the former Candy Bomber piloted the plane.  My little brush with actual history.  (I relate this incident in “Berlin Memoir, Part 7,” 29 March 2017.)

Months after their first flight, the crew of “Big Easy 37” (the craft’s radio call sign) rename their plane Der Schwarze Hibiscus (“The Black Hibiscus”) because of the coal dust that’s accumulated from hauling the fuel.  They become surprise celebrities in Berlin when they are the 100,000th flight of Operation Vittles to land in the city.  At an airfield ceremony, complete with “the honor guard of the Office of Military Government” (which we called the U.S. Command, Berlin, or USCOB, by the ’70s),  by “representatives of the people of Berlin,” as ABC radio correspondent Lyford Moore (who appears as himself), the commentator of the proceedings, put it, three crew members are singled out to receive token gifts: Capt. William A. Stewart, the pilot, Lt. Alfred L. Freiburger, co-pilot; and Danny.  Amusingly, the gifts the Berliners hand out are German-style briefcases like the ones every man, from street and construction workers (who used it to carry their zweite Frühstück—‘second breakfast’—and their lunch) to business executives, carried in West Germany when I was a teenager there.  The co-pilot, Lieutenant Freiburger, was addressed in behalf of the children of Berlin by 10-year-old Helmut Braucher (who’d been coached for his speech by a GI from the deep South so that little Helmut, with his pronounced German accent, uses southernisms like “y’all”—very droll).  It struck me that Freiburger was a stand-in for, or at least a reference to, Lieutenant Halvorsen’s Candy Bomber—whose exploits, I suspect, would have been known to audiences in 1950.

At the tarmac ceremony, Frederica Burkhardt (Cornell Borchers) is introduced to thank Danny in behalf of the women of Berlin and he’s immediately taken with the pretty German war widow.  Then Richard O’Malley, an AP correspondent covering the ceremony (also himself), recruits Danny for a public relations stunt.  O’Malley wants Danny to follow a load of flour airlifted from Rhein-Main to a bakery in Berlin, and see it turned into a loaf of bread, which will end up in the hands of a Berlin child.  When the correspondent tells Danny he can get him a 24-hour pass in Berlin for a couple of hours work, the airman jumps at the offer as a way of getting to see Frederica again. 

Danny gets TDY (temporary duty) orders to travel to Berlin with O’Malley and a few days later, the AP reporter has met Danny in Frankfurt and is accompanying him in the cockpit on the C-54’s flight to Tempelhof.  Fog has descended on the city, obscuring the approach to the air field and O’Malley listens in as the crew responds to Hank’s GCA guidance from Tempelhof’s tower as he talks the plane in through the “building area” until the pilot can see the runway and resumes a “visual landing.”  (“That I gotta see,” says O’Malley, as he shifts over to see out the cockpit window.)  In the next scene, Hank gives Danny and O’Malley a lesson in the equipment and procedures of GCA in his control station in the tower.)

After doing his PR gig for O’Malley, Danny calls the phone number Frederica gave him for her neighbor who has a telephone and finds that she’s at work.  Danny locates her at her work—shoveling rubble from bombed-out buildings off the streets of Berlin into what look like mine trolleys on tracks.  In the movie, there are several scenes of Frederica and other Berliners scooping up war wreckage into various carts and wheelbarrows.  The destruction, still in evidence both in the early ’60s when I lived in West Germany and in the early ’70s when I was in Berlin, had to be cleared by hand because the deprivations of Germany after the war, especially in Berlin, made gasoline-powered machinery unavailable.  In addition, the post-war unemployment was so great until the Wirtschaftswunder—the Economic Miracle—of the 1960s, that hiring out-of-work Berliners to clear the rubble served a benefit. (In a couple of scenes, the bomb-damaged Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche is visible in the background.  While most of the bomb debris was long removed by the time I arrived in Berlin—when my parents were in Berlin in ’63, they told me that there was still war rubble visible around the city—the iconic Memorial Church’s silhouette was unchanged, as it is even today, the bell tower having been kept in its distressed condition as a reminder of the war and its consequences.)

What the movie doesn’t tell is that most of that debris was taken to a site in the borough of Wilmersdorf near the Grunewald, Berlin’s forested “Central Park.”  (Some of the reclaimed bricks were reused.)  The rubble was piled into an artificial mountain named Teufelsberg (“Devil Mountain”), the highest spot in the city at about 395 feet.   On top of that mountain, the Army Security Agency, the military counterpart of the NSA, built an elaborate spy site for communications surveillance (“signal intelligence,” known as SIGINT) called Field Station Berlin, the most secret place in the city.  Usually just called Teufelsberg—the facility was known to insiders simply as “The Hill”—the listening facility was located in the British Sector even though it was a U.S. site.  (The Brits had a small section on the site, but essentially we just shared whatever poop we got with them and the French.)  Bristling with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos, FSB looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek (or Raumschiff Enterprise, as it was entitled on German TV—what a hoot to see Spock speaking dubbed German!).  There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the complex to zap all the “grunie pigs,” the wild boar that roamed the Grunewald, into roast pork! 

Everyone knew FSB was there—you could see the bulbous towers and antennas, looking like some futuristic city, from many parts of Berlin—but very few who didn’t work there knew what went on.  (One of my classmates from the Russian language program was assigned to the companion listening station in Helmstedt and despite my clearances as an intel officer—I had clearances for which you’d need clearances just to know what the initials stood for—he couldn’t tell me what he did, aside from the obvious: listening in on Russian, East German, and Warsaw Pact communications.  The transcripts I got from Potsdam, which I mention in passing later, came from FSB.  As a counterintelligence Special Agent, I was involved in “human intelligence,” or HUMINT—that’s spies and counterspies, “sources,” and “subjects”—and “electronic intelligence,” or ELINT, more familiar as bugs, taps, and electronic eavesdropping.)  Teufelsberg was used as a debris dump site through the 1950s and was finally landscaped in 1972; construction of FSB was begun in 1963 (a mobile listening station was installed on Teufelsberg in 1961), so it didn’t exist when The Big Lift was filmed.  Even if it did, the filmmakers probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mention that that’s where all the rubble was heading.  Now, of course, Teufelsberg’s all over the ’Net—looking like a sci-fi ghost town!

After Frederica gets off work, she takes Danny on a tour of the city  and he sees a worker putting posters up on a Litfass column, a cylinder-shaped sidewalk structure used for advertisements in cities like Berlin and Paris (where they’re called Morris columns).  When the man sifts through some street trash to fish out cigarette butts, the soft-hearted flight engineer gives him some fresh cigarettes but in the exchange, the worker’s buddy on a ladder above them spills a bucket of poster paste all over Danny’s uniform.  This forces Danny and Frederica to rush back to her apartment where he can change clothes so the young widow can take his uniform to a cleaner; he has to borrow civilian working clothes from Herr Stieber (O. E. Hasse), Frederica’s neighbor, until the uniform is cleaned.  Being out of uniform was a serious offense in the occupied Berlin of the postwar decade.  Danny asserts later, only half joking: “If I’m seen out of uniform, I’ve had it.  They give me ten days, goodbye stripes; worse than that, they’ll take away my PX card.”  In my era, wearing civvies off duty was perfectly fine—although GI’s couldn’t ride the buses and subways for free unless they were in uniform.  

(The cigarette-butt bit reminded me of one of the constants of intel work at Berlin Station: “walk-ins”—people who came in off the street to the HQ compound and said they had something to report.  As you might imagine, 99% of walk-ins were nonsense.  Many, even a majority I’d say, were nuts.  As a result, we often got kooks calling or walking in with all manner of strange reports to make.  One such swore that the KGB was leaving poisoned cigarette butts on the streets so that GI’s would pick them up, smoke them, and get sick.  To prove this, he had brought little bottles of his own blood, which he carried around with him in a tote bag.  Riiight.  I used to see GI’s picking up discarded cigarette butts all the time.  I mean, who could afford 25¢ a pack at the PX?)

While he’s waiting in Frederica’s apartment for her to retrieve his uniform, Danny gets to know Stieber, the neighbor with the telephone.  They introduce themselves to one another and chit-chat briefly, then Stieber takes a seat by the window and takes out a pad and makes notes as planes land at the airport.  (I told you, the planes flew right by the windows!)  Danny asks the man what he’s doing.  “I’m a Russian spy,” he answers matter-of-factly.  Clift is taken aback slightly, as you might expect.  Danny asks if Stieber’s not afraid that the GI might report him.  “Americans know I do this,” Stieber states.  He explains that because the Russians don’t believe the official announcements of the airlift’s progress—since the Russians lie, they assume everyone else does, too—they insist on getting their own statistics.  (This is why Stieber has a phone when so few others can get one—so he can report regularly to his Soviet handler.)  Since the official reports are accurate—the U.S. wants everyone to know what they’re doing; it’s good propaganda—he tells Clift that he leaves out one or two flights, just so the Russians feel they’re getting “real” figures.  Later in the movie, Stieber’s steps out of the living room briefly just as a plane comes in to land.  He sticks his head around the corner, then smiles at Danny and says, “That one was only American propaganda!” 

Stieber tells Danny that the Russians are spying on the Americans with 15,000 German agents in Berlin, and the Americans are spying on the Russians, only with just 10,000 German spies.  (In my Berlin days, there were about 10,000 GI’s and official U.S. civilians posted in the city.  Of those, perhaps 2,000 were engaged in some kind of intelligence work.)  Both sides know that the other side is spying, and that each side also knows that the other side knows.  “Things  must get a little gemischt [mixed up],” observes Danny.  “Oh, ja, a little sehr gemischt [very mixed up],” laughs Herr Stieber.  “But there’s also maybe 500 Russians who are spying for both sides.”  It’s very good for the unemployment problem, he quips.   It’s all very absurd—but not inaccurate. 

When I was in Berlin in the ’70s, not only were the Russians (and the East Germans, of course) spying on us and we on them, but, of course, the French and British were also spying on the Russians and vice versa.  But we were also spying on one another.  And there were spies in Berlin from Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet Bloc countries, all spying on everyone else—including each other.  There were even countries with no obvious need to be in Berlin operating there—Chinese spies, for example.  Berlin was espionage-central in that era—the counterpart of, say, Lisbon in WWII.  With the possible exception of Saigon, Berlin in that period may have had more spies per capita than any other place on Earth.  It certainly had spies from more countries and agencies than anywhere else.  As the label for one exhibit at Washington’s International Spy Museum (see my report “Spook Museum,” 25 March 2010) had it: “BERLIN – City of Spies”! (I’m sure there’s a comedy of errors in this somewhere!) 

The first day I arrived in the city and reported to Berlin Station’s offices, which were in the headquarters compound on Clayallee, named for Gen. Lucius Clay (1897-1978), “father” of the Berlin airlift (who appears in the newsreel at the beginning of the movie), I noticed two black Russian sedans parked, one by each exit from the compound.  (Volgas and Moscvitches were easy to spot: even in the 1970s, they looked like cars from the 1950s!)  I asked about them, and my sponsor told me that they were almost always there, just watching, taking notes and probably photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, they knew my name, rank, and assignment.  (We weren’t clandestine, but low profile.  We wore civilian clothes on duty and were all addressed as “Mr.” or “Miss” outside the office.  When we had to wear fatigues—for the firing range, say, or during an alert—we wore no branch or rank insignia, only the “U.S.” device.  Our addresses and phone numbers were unlisted, and our private cars were all registered in Munich—the 66th Military Intelligence Group headquarters—not Berlin.)  By the same token, I got info copies of the transcripts of the wiretaps from Potsdam, the Soviet military HQ in East Germany.  The Cold War was mighty crowded in Berlin!  Sehr gemischt, indeed.

When it comes time to retrieve Danny’s uniform, Frederica discovers that the cleaner has been called into the Soviet Sector on a family emergency and the shop is closed.  Frederica suggests that if Danny, an American, goes and asks him, the cleaning shop-owner will more likely give him a key than if she went alone—so he goes off in the clothes he borrowed from Herr Stieber.  On the way to the Soviet Sector, they arrive at an U-Bahn (for Untergrundbahn, the German word for ‘underground railway’ or ‘subway’) station, marked with a large letter U.  These signs were ubiquitous in Berlin, designating one of two underground systems in the city; the other was the S-Bahn (for Stadtschnellbahn, ‘city rapid transit,’ a commuter rail line similar to New York/New Jersey’s PATH trains).  Both systems predated World War II so both went into all the occupied sectors—even after the Wall went up.  The difference was that, according to the occupation agreement, the U-Bahn was controlled by the Western allies (and later, the West Berlin authorities) and the S-Bahn by the Soviets (and then the East Berlin government).  And because the S-Bahn was considered East German territory, even in West Berlin, I wasn’t allowed even in the stations, let alone the trains, because of my security status.  (I could use the U-Bahn, even though it went to East Berlin—as long as I stayed on our side of the Wall.)

As they’re about to go into the U-Bahn, Danny realizes that he forgot his cigarettes.  Frederica says he can get some in the station, but Danny says all he has is “scrip.”  During the occupation, so that U.S. cash wouldn’t circulate on the black market, GI’s were issued scrip, a kind of substitute currency that was only good on military bases and in PX’s and service clubs; Germans weren’t supposed to possess scrip (though a black market in it quickly arose), so Danny couldn’t buy anything on the German economy or exchange his scrip for German money.  (One of the reasons the Soviets started the blockade was because the western sectors of Berlin had announced that they would begin accepting the newly-adopted West German Deutsche Mark, loosening the Soviet’s grip on the city.)  Danny can’t even exchange some scrip for Frederica’s marks because she’s not supposed to have any and can’t spend or exchange it legally.  (She offers to buy his cigs for him and he’ll pay her back later.)  

Scrip was no longer in use by the U.S. military in Germany either in the ’60s or the ’70s—though ration books were for items like tobacco, liquor, and gasoline, among some other commodities, to prevent GI’s from buying them in bulk, tax free and subsidized, at the PX or commissary and then reselling them to unauthorized people—such as German civilians.  I worked on a surveillance of a guy suspected of doing just that—as well as selling classified information, a kind of all-purpose sleeze—but the op fell apart and as I was just a hired hand, I don’t know what happened after that; see my post “Berlin Stories – Three SNAFU’s.”

In the U-Bahn station, they find a vendor who sells loose cigarettes (among other, probably black market goods).  You could still buy loosies in much of Europe when I was in school there—a pack was relatively pricey even in the ’60s.  (Of course, I mostly bought my smokes at the PX where a pack of American cigs went for a quarter with a ration booklet; the average price at home was 30¢.  Thanks to the U.S. taxpayer and duty-free agreements, my cancer sticks were subsidized!  When I was in high school in Geneva and ran out of my PX butts, I had to pony up the local price.  Since French cigarettes like Gauloises and Gitanes were strong, unfiltered, and stinky, I had to pay for English cigs or American, the most expensive ones but the ones I smoked—around SFr3.25 at the time for a pack of twenty, about 70-75¢.  That’s worth almost $6 today.)

Despite the potential penalty for Danny’s being caught out of uniform, he and Frederica meet Hank and his “Schatzi,” the intelligent but naïve Gerda (Bruni Löbel), at a night club, where Hank treats Gerda as an inferior.  (“Schatzi” was GI-German slang for something like ‘sweetie’ or ‘tootsie’; it’s derived from the German word Schatz, or ‘treasure,’ which is a common German term for ‘sweetheart,’ as in mein Schatz, ‘my treasure,’ ‘my darling.’)  He’s also rude to Frederica, pumping her about her late husband whom she’s told Danny died in Russia, and her father.  Hank accuses her husband of having been in the SS, but she insists that he was just a draftee, like so many U.S. soldiers.  Hank shoots back, “Some day I’d like to meet just one German who enlisted.”  Her father, Frederica continued, had resisted the Nazis: as a university professor, he protested the burning of books until they burned his books.  When my family lived in West Germany in the early ’60s, we were amused that every German who’d have been of military age during the war insisted that he fought on the Russian front.  Not one former Wehrmacht soldier we encountered had served on the western front.  With so many Germans fighting in the east . . . who was it that was shooting at Brits and Americans like my dad, we wondered. 

Before Hank and Gerda arrive at the restaurant, Danny and Frederica talk about their day in Berlin, riding the U-Bahn and the streetcar (which no longer existed by the time I arrived there).  Danny’s been learning German and he asks Frederica about the difference between addressing people as Sie (the formal form of ‘you’) and saying du (the informal ‘you,’ comparable to the archaic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in English).  Frederica explains the distinction and Danny wonders how long it takes for two people to duzen one another—to get to call each other du instead of Sie.  Frederica tells him that “usually this would take a long time.” 

 “When you only got 24 hours and you’ve used up eight of them already . . .,”  Danny replies.

“For such emergencies we have the Duzis.  We link arms and drink . . . and then we . . . .”  Danny kisses her.

This is a bit of a thorny issue in Germany—I assume still today.  (The French and most other European cultures, except the British, have the same distinction.)  Who duzens whom and who must siezen is sticky for foreigners.  When I first went to live in Germany, I was still a teenager, so the situation was a little clearer: I could automatically duzen my peers, even when we were just introduced, and I had to siezen their parents and any other adults I met.  My parents had it rougher since over time, they became friendly with some of the Germans they met through my dad’s job or other circumstances.  Since Dad was a diplomat, that put him at a formal distance from most men and women he met, so it was basically safer socially just to keep to Sie for the most part.  Of course, as foreigners. we were given a lot of latitude by our German hosts, who were just delighted that we even tried to speak German, even if we made mistakes.  No one ever invited me to duzen him or her, even though I called Germany home until after I was 20.  (I never participated in a Duzis or drank a Bruderschaft—another ceremony for transitioning from Sie to du—or witnessed either one.)  By the way, connected to the distinction of Sie and du is also the practice of calling people by their first names or, even more familiar, nicknames, which aren’t used as casually as they are in English, especially for us Americans.  The post-war situation in The Big Lift abbreviated the time it would take for two people to get to that level of familiarity, further shortened by the facts that Danny and Hank are Americans—we jump right to first names and nicknames as soon as we meet—and have so little time to get acquainted to new people like Frederica and Gerda.

In the restaurant, Hank happens to spot the former camp guard who tormented and beat him as a POW, and attacks him and nearly kills him.  Danny’s able to stop Hank only by knocking him down and passing military police mistake him for a German attacking Hank.  Still in civvies (in which he can’t be caught), Danny’s chased into the Soviet Sector accompanied by Frederica.  She explains that “Germans go back and forth all day long,” crossing between the sectors—remember, there’s no Wall yet.  Not in my day, of course.  Besides the Wall, the East Germans prohibited West Berliners from entering East Berlin from 1961 to 1973 (though they often got around this by holding ID documents that showed that they came from a city in the Federal Republic, a pretty common gambit).  In addition, U.S. personnel with high clearances like me were forbidden by our government from traveling into East Berlin and East Germany—though, incongruously, not other Eastern Bloc countries.  As a result, I lived in West Berlin for 2½ years and never visited East Berlin (where most of the historic sights were).  (I wrote about this in “The Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009.)

Danny and Frederica narrowly escape back into the American Sector, where Hank is waiting for them at Frederica’s apartment.  A group of neighbors gathers late in the evening, drinking, noshing, playing music, and singing—a kind of impromptu party.  Another woman who lives in the building is just arriving from work and stops in to say hello.  When she arrives, she makes the rounds of all the partiers, stopping at each one, shaking his or her hand, and saying, “Guten Abend.”  When she reaches the last person, she says she’s tired and off home to turn in and immediately reverses her route, shaking all the same hands in reverse order, saying. “Gute Nacht,” as she works her way back out the door.  That’s so German—the formal, hand-shaking greeting of each and every person present, even though you don’t plan to stay, and then doing the exact same thing to say good night.  Even Hank remarks in a later scene on how often the Germans shake hands; in the scene after Danny’s been to the bakery and given the loaf of bread to a little girl, everyone shakes hands to say auf Wiedersehen, even Hank—except that he mumbles dismissively, “Yeah, yeah,” as he shakes each person’s hand.  In Germany, at least back then—they may have caught the American casualness disease since my day—you can’t just stick your head in the door, wave, and say to everyone at once, “Hi.  And good night,” and then leave.  It couldn’t have been realer if it had been a documentary!

By now, Danny’s fallen in love with Frederica, despite learning from Hank that she lied about the backgrounds of her dead husband, who’d indeed been a member of the SS—and almost certainly not a draftee—and her father, who “never saw a university,” and had cooperated with the Nazis because “he had a little dough, and wanted to keep it . . . .  Walked out on her mother in ’39 because she was Polish,” Hank reported.  “Nice guy,” snaps Hank.  He explains to Danny that a friend of his in “the Document Center” checked Frederica out and found a record of her from the war years.  (As I revealed in “Berlin Memoir, Part 4,” posted on 9 February 2017, we actually had to conduct records checks on people with whom we got friendly outside the unit.) 

The Berlin Document Center was, in fact, the records repository for the Third Reich’s official files, and it was in the American Sector so we kept it as a resource.  It was one of the agencies we always checked when we did background investigations of a German native who was old enough to have lived in the Third Reich.  Mind you, the BDC held all the Reich’s official records, so a file might reveal only that someone was an old-age pensioner, had been a dues-paying member of the musicians guild, or had held a job as a school teacher in Frankfurt.  Only occasionally did a file check of the BDC reveal a criminal record or service in the SS or something nefarious. 

Danny confronts Frederica with the BDC file, and she acknowledges the facts.  Her explanation for the lies is that, like others in post-war Germany, she’s learned to make herself seem brave and pitiful to evoke sympathy from their occupiers.  “When you live in a sewer, you soon discover that the sewer rats are best equipped to survive,” she explains.  After contemplating the significance of Frederica’s lies about her husband and father, and seeing that she’s capable of deception, Danny realizes that he still loves her.  When he reads in the Air Force Times that GI’s like his crew who’ve served in Operation Vittles for six months are due to rotate back to the States soon, he applies to marry Frederica.  

The Air Force Times, like its companion weeklies the Army Times, Navy Times, and Marine Corps Times, publishes official information from the services and the Department of Defense, or National Military Establishment as it was known in 1948.  The Stars and Stripes, a quasi-independent daily newspaper published the by U.S. armed forces abroad, headlines from which are also seen in the The Big Lift, covers the news stories of the day as well as events in the military community, but doesn’t publish official notices and announcements.  So, for instance, the headline “Rotation to Start for Lift Personnel Who Have Served Six Months” ran in the military Times, while the story slugged “Record Fog Shrouds Europe; Sea and Air Travel at Standstill; Air Lift Manages to Deliver Only 70 Tons in 24 Hour Period” was published in Stars and Stripes.  When the list for promotions to captain, in which my name appeared, was released by the Pentagon in November 1973, it was published in the Army Times but not Stars and Stripes—which, however, had run a long story in July about the newly-founded Tempelhof American Theatre that I helped start. 

When Danny’s squadron commander uses the telephone to try to expedite Danny’s marriage application, the connection is so bad that the two officers have to spell out their names to each other using the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, used in the U.S. military from 1941 to 1956 (when a uniform NATO alphabet was adopted).  The JAN, commonly called “Able Baker” after the words for the letters A and B,  was developed so that soldiers and airmen using radio-telephone communications could spell out important information (or any time when initials or letters were spoken) with letters represented by words that can’t easily be confused for letters that sound similar (like B and D,  for example).  When I had to serve as Duty Agent, I had to stay in the station all night to answer the phones (sort of like the Charge of Quarters in a line unit—except spooky).  One phone was, of course, the red alert phone which rang once a night to check the communications system, and the DA had to answer it with a prescribed phrase: the name of the unit and the DA’s initials in phonetic alphabet.  So, when I was DA, I’d have to say, “66th MI.  Romeo-Echo-Kilo.” (That would have been “Roger-Easy-King” in 1948.)

Danny rushes back to Berlin to get Frederica and marry her before he has to report for transfer back to the States.  Fog has enveloped the whole continent so badly that pilots have been instructed that if their planes and crews are in danger, they should turn the aircraft around and return to Rhein-Main.  Indeed, Danny’s plane is enshrouded in fog en route to Berlin and Captain Stewart is about to order it to turn around and go back to Frankfurt when it suffers another hazard: one of the engines catches fire and the crew can’t extinguish the flames.  Before we see Danny’s plane land safely at Tempelhof under Hank’s GCA guidance, there’s a shot of an earlier plane that crashed and is in flames by the side of the runway.  Once on the ground, Danny runs off to find Frederica, rounding up Hank and Gerda as witnesses and telling them to meet him and Frederica at the Bürgermeister’s office.

Herr Stieber suspects Frederica of duplicity when he delivers a letter to her from St. Louis; he intercepts the reply she’s written to her German lover living there, revealing that she intends to divorce Danny as soon as she can without being sent back to Germany after he brings her to the States, and see her lover behind his back until that happens.  In the meantime, Hank, while trying to teach Gerda the meaning of democracy, comes to see that he’s been hypocritical in his own behavior toward Germans.  He’s also now deeply ashamed of the beating he gave the former POW guard, explaining that he had spent seven years waiting for “satisfaction,” but now he doesn’t feel satisfied; he feels “dirty.”  He begins treating Gerda as an equal and with affection as they meet Frederica at the Berlin city hall to be witnesses at her wedding to Danny.  When Danny arrives, he tells Frederica it’ll be a long time, if ever, before she gets to America and turns on his heel and leaves.  Herr Stieber has given Danny the letter she wrote.  Gerda says she prefers to stay in Germany and do what she can to help rebuild her country, and Hank reveals to Danny that he’s not going home but has switched his temporary assignment in Berlin to permanent duty.  Danny’s flight out departs, amidst rumors that the Russians will soon end the blockade (which they did on 12 May 1949).

What most often caught me while watching The Big Lift were the little bits of actual German culture and custom that were incorporated in the movie.  Some of the little things in the flick that hit me were specifically about life in post-war Germany and occupied Berlin.  As odd as it may seem from a chronological perspective, life in Germany was not very different in the early ’60s when I was there as a teen than it was right after the war.  Less rubble, more prosperity (just beginning), but otherwise, it was still “post-war.”  (Of course, it was also the Federal Republic by then—no longer Allied occupied territory.)  Even in the ’70s, when I was there ten years further on, Berlin was still occupied and, except for new uniforms (and still less rubble), plus the addition of the Wall, things were much the same in many ways as they were depicted in The Big Lift, right after the war ended.  It was a time warp, in both instances.