Before the Wall: Berlin Days, 1946-1948

A poignant memoir of the author's years as a British intelligence officer in postwar Berlin, working in the Allied denazification program. Born Georg Klaar, Clare an Austrian, Jewish refugee emigrated to England after the Anschluss (recalled movingly in his Last Waltz in Vienna ) and served in the British Army for the next decade. The author describes his conflicting emotions toward the stricken, self-pitying citizens of bombed-out Berlin when, after WW II, he returns to the city he had last visited eight years earlier. His job now was to serve as a minor functionary with the British occupation forces, licensing German members of the performing arts after they had been cleared by German denazification panels--part of an Allied attempt to help rebuild a cultural bridge between Germany and its victors. Set against a background of growing East-West tensions, he shares incisive portraits of the people he interviewed--the prominent and the not-so prominent--such as the widow of an anti-Nazi general executed by Hitler who wanted no special treatment, and a teenage SS member who insisted on being arrested for war crimes--and the many others who claimed to have been anti-Nazi until Clare confronted them with their Nazi Party files. Most striking are Clare's surprisingly generous feelings toward the citizens of the regime that killed his parents.