Lot 221 D

"Grey. If you look at photos from post-war Germany, this colour seems to attack you: grey coats, grey dust, grey rubble, grey acres, grey houses, yes, even the people somehow seemed to be grey. Terrible. But Germany in rubble was not like this at all. I had lived long enough in the USA after the war to know the mood of a replete, victorious nation that starts to have a presentiment that its best times are over. In Germany, it was quite the reverse. Here, an atmosphere of reconstruction prevailed, of “Hurray, we are still alive!”, and the euphoric certainty, that now the worst was over. People built houses out of ruins and new factories on fallow land, they partied and danced in the provisional arrangements, American GIs enjoyed themselves with German girls, and a tender upswing started from Neukölln to St. Pauli. Simultaneously, the country split up more and more clearly into two parts. And like a sombre remembrance that the war had raged till only yesterday, the last German prisoners of war returned from the East in 1955. An army of padded jackets, wooden suitcases, and worn-out shoes assembled in Friedland, for some there were relatives waiting, for many not. The faces into which I looked on that day were really of a deep grey" (cited from Robert Lebeck, in: Tete Böttger (ed.), Robert Lebeck. Vis-à-vis, Göttingen 1999, S. 25).