Looting, then and now
The chatterers who argued two weeks ago that the war was turning into a quagmire have found a new cause for feigned despair: looting. No weapons of mass destruction found, they cry, and now anarchy in the streets. This "freedom" is a thoroughly bad business, goes their subtext. Support your local dictator, they infer, or the dispossessed will one day liberate your lawnmower.
Time for a bit of perspective, then, and it's provided nicely in this weekend's S?sche Zeitung by Karl Stankiewitz in an article titled Die Pl?r von M? (The looters of Munich).
Back in 1945, Stankiewitz was a hungry 16-year-old in Munich. On 1 May, when Allied bombs had stopped falling and the SS were retreating feyadeen fashion, the great looting began in what Hitler liked to call the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" (the capital of the movement). The undernourished Stankiewitz found his way into a spirits factory where, confronted with a mountain of sugar, he filled himself a bucket of the sweet stuff. He then emancipated ten bottles of "Arrak", a spirit whose name, interestingly, is derived from the Arabic for "juice" or "sweat". According to Alex Lichine's New Encyclopaedia of Wines and Spirits, it's "a coarse drink made for tough palates". In other words, ideal for celebrating freedom from dictatorship.
Next stop for the young looter Stankiewitz was the historic and, for the Nazis, holy B?r䵫eller, from where Hitler had ordered the famous 1923 march to the Feldherrnhalle:
"The huge, dark vaults of the brewery were full of treasures. Wine, not beer, flowed in streams from barrels and covered the floor to half a metre deep. Two corpses swam in the red flood. Did they drink themselves to death or did they drown in the looting panic? I got out of the inferno quickly. Somewhere, I grasped a whole cheese and rolled it along by the Isar."
This is what the end of war is like. Chaotic. The freed people fill their stomachs and pockets. The shocking thing is not that it is happening — it's that so many of today's overpaid, too well-fed commentators lack the humanity to feel the forces that drive repressed and brutalised people to take back a fraction of what was taken from them.
Stankiewitz makes a very important point when he writes that the Munich looters were of all ages and nationalities and came from all levels of Munich society. The lawyer's widow and the major general's family were involved. It wasn't just the proletariat, he says. 1945 Munich; 2003 Saddam City.
Diarist of the day: Gyles Brandreth, 12 April 1994"I invited John Gielgud to lunch to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. There were just four of us: Sir John, Michele [Brandreth], me and Glenda [Jackson] (Glenda was Michele's idea -- and inspired. She looks so sour, but she was sweet and gossipy and exactly right for the occasion.) He arrived in central lobby at one, on the dot, twinkling and cherubic, and amazingly upright and steady.
'It's a great honour that you should join us, Sir John,' I said
'Oh, I'm delighted to have been asked. All, my real friends are dead, you know.'
The stories just poured out of him. 'Marlene [Dietrich] invited me to hear her new record. We were in New York. We all went and gathered round the gramophone, and when we were settled the record was put on. It was simply an audience applauding her! We sat through the entire first side and then we listened to the other side: more of the same!' "
