The Bitter Taste of Victory (18 page)

De Mendelssohn found that it was easy to succumb to the creative energy igniting the city and wondered if he was wrong to do so. He was appreciative of the Germans’ attempts at cultural renewal but like Spender he was sceptical about the intellectuals’ assumption that they remained unscathed by Nazism and could therefore continue as normal. Meeting a group of Berlin intelligentsia at a party, he was astonished by the way they all asked naturally after German exiled writers such as Carl Zuckmayer and Thomas Mann, assuming that the continuity of life which had somehow been preserved for them had also been preserved by these writers in exile. Was it vanity, he wondered, or
illusion, or incomprehension of what these years had meant to the rest of the world? But he could see that there was little point disapproving of the Germans for their ignorance. As the party wore on he began to feel that the Russians, Americans and Germans shared an instinctive belief that it may be better just to leave things as they were: ‘not go any further into the whole argument of guilt, innocence and responsibility, knowledge and ignorance at any rate on this level of educated civilised people . . . there might be an advantage in having a tacit agreement to leave this whole complex alone, not to wake the sleeping lion’.
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They had succumbed to the charms of the Berliners and of their strange ruined city. The Allies may have defeated the Germans in war but the Germans looked set to challenge the Allies in peace.

The US sector of Berlin was initially administered by Floyd Lavinius Parks’s 1st Airborne Army, but on 5 August 1945, James Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division was assigned to replace them. Gavin arrived on 25 July, after an enjoyable few days of leave with Gellhorn in the US, and spent his time reconnoitering the city. Returning to Europe, he had found it ‘wonderful to be back into things again’, reporting proudly to Gellhorn that he was ‘boiling along at top speed’. But it was more fun when she was there to speed along with and on 1 August he begged her to join him: ‘Darling everything I do and everywhere I go I think of how it will look when you are here and how it will look to you.’ He was anxious about her fidelity; neither of them was especially monogamous by nature but he was determined that their relationship should not be on a ‘ships-that-pass-in-the-ETO[European Theater of Operations]-basis’.
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Four days later the 82nd took over the US sector and Gavin assumed his seat on the Allied Kommandatura. The tasks facing him were enormous. Of the 245,000 buildings in the city, 28,000 had been destroyed and 20,000 were so badly damaged that they could not be rebuilt. It was the only city in Germany where you could walk for two miles without finding a single habitable house. There were Berliners living with five or six people to one room in basements. The Russians had arrived
with typhus and venereal disease, which meant that 10 per cent of the 110,000 women raped in Berlin had been infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea that they were now trying to treat without antibiotics. Erika Mann may have convinced herself that the swift-moving and loud-talking Berliners were unfairly prosperous but throughout June there were a hundred Berliners a day dying of typhus and paratyphus carried by human lice. In a sermon in Dahlem in July the anti-Nazi theologian Otto Dibelius had complained that the mortality figures in Berlin were rising rapidly. Before the war, 200 people a day had died in the city; during the war this had risen to 250; now it was around 1,000, even though the population had shrunk. The Russians had made efforts to feed the Berliners, delivering 188,000 tons of food in three months, but there were still chronic shortages. Children were dying for lack of milk so it was disastrous when the Russians rounded up the remaining ninety cows in a farm in Dahlem and sent them back to the Soviet Union at the end of June.
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‘Well the town is ours, what is left of it,’ Gavin told Gellhorn. He had been drinking Armagnac with her friend the photographer Robert Capa, rationing his mentions of her name for the sake of discretion. He was now preparing to work with the Russians, unimpressed by their extensive looting of the US sector: ‘Even the telephones were ripped out and shipped back to Russia, but a funny thing, they shipped all of the telephone directories back with them. Like children. I believe they really figured the directories would work in Russia. Probably spend most of their time dialing the chancellery and asking for Adolph Hitler.’

The Russians were not alone in extracting reparations from Germany, but they were certainly less discriminating in their looting. They felt entitled to be callous at the end of a war that had resulted in the deaths of between 23 and 26 million Soviet citizens. This was one person in eight of the population and dwarfed the 405,399 American dead. Unlike the Americans, the Russians had experienced the brutal invasion of their homeland, fleeing from the invading Germans in the summer of 1941; they were now determined to exact revenge.
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One of the first acts Gavin performed in his new role was to set up a telephone conversation between Marlene Dietrich and her mother,
Josephine von Losch. Dietrich had received no news of her mother during the war and had worried that she was being persecuted on account of her daughter’s defection from Germany or hit by the Allied bombs. Generals Patton and Bradley had both sent in emissaries to locate Josephine early in July and discovered that she had in fact survived. Now Gavin arranged for a phone conversation, recorded for posterity. Speaking in English because of the censors, Marlene assured her mother that both she and Liesel were well:

‘Mami, you suffered for my sake. Forgive me.’

‘Yes, my love.’

‘Mami, take care of yourself.’

‘Yes. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Mami.’

‘Goodbye, my heart. Goodbye.’

Gavin then set about arranging a travel permit for Dietrich to come to Berlin and visited Josephine himself. ‘PLEASANT VISIT WITH YOUR MOTHER SHE IS FINE THE 82ND IS LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU SOON GENERAL GAVIN,’ he reported by telegram.
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Gavin was expected to fine-tune his policies in Berlin on the basis of the results of another two-week conference between the Allies, which had been made public on 3 August. This time the British, Russians and Americans (now represented by Harry Truman, who had taken over as President following Roosevelt’s death in April) had met at Potsdam, to the south-west of Berlin, to discuss once again how to take measures to ensure that ‘Germany never again will threaten her neighbours or the peace of the world’. The resulting document insisted that it was not the intention of the Allies to destroy or enslave the German people: ‘It is the intention of the Allies that the German people be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis. If their own efforts are steadily directed to this end, it will be possible for them in due course to take their place among the free and peaceful peoples of the world.’

The chief purposes of the Occupation were described as disarmament, demilitarisation, denazification (which also involved convincing the Germans that ‘they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves’ and bringing the war criminals to judgement), democratisation (preparing the way for renewed democracy in Germany) and re-education. No specific mention was made of culture but the agreement opened the way for denazification, democratisation and re-education to be pursued partially through cultural means. The victors also agreed to establish a ‘Council of Foreign Ministers’ from Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, France and China who would meet periodically to negotiate the terms of peace treaties with the Axis powers.
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The Allied-licensed newspapers in Germany responded respectfully to the results of the Potsdam Conference. ‘The German people are granted the possibility of reconstructing their lives on a democratic and peaceful basis,’ the
Berliner Zeitung
proclaimed. But the Germans were generally too preoccupied with questions of day-to-day survival to be interested in these cogitations. When Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 play
The Threepenny Opera
(
Die Dreigroschenoper
) opened at the Hebbel Theater in the American sector a week later, the audience applauded riotously at Brecht’s famous words ‘first comes food, then morality’ (‘
Erst kommt das Fressen
,
dann kommt die Moral 
’), hoping that their occupiers could learn this lesson. The Berliners were more concerned with actions than words and were reassured to see that their city was gradually being reconstructed. By 14 August mail had resumed and there were over 300 Berlin postmen back at work; 10,000 telephones were now in service again. Gradually, the trams began to run, with eighty-three trams traversing a distance of twenty-two miles.
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On 6 and 9 August 1945 the world’s first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was immediately apparent that the world would never be the same again. This was the moment when the US lost its sheen as a guarantor of freedom both for many of the German exiles who had proudly taken American citizenship and for
many of its native citizens. Klaus Mann complained that his adopted country was not going to ‘stop fooling around with devastating gadgets before they’ll have blown up our whole little universe . . . Not that I think it would be a major loss if our earth went to pieces!’ It was in response to the atomic bomb that George Orwell coined the phrase ‘cold war’ in a
Tribune
article entitled ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’, where he stated that the world was heading ‘not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity’. Presciently, Orwell suggested that the atomic bomb would paralyse the world by making its strongest nations ‘at once
unconquerable
and in a permanent state of “cold war”’ with their neighbours.
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Possessing the atomic bomb gave the Americans new confidence in their position in Germany. Now the Germans knew that the US had this new weapon at its disposal, surely they would not be so foolish as to risk another war? And if Germany was no longer capable of waging war, perhaps it was less necessary laboriously to change every aspect of German life. Perhaps they could just be left to their own devices and pathologies. On 7 August, Eisenhower and Montgomery had issued statements to the Germans assuring them that they were there to help rebuild their life on a democratic basis. Montgomery promised that soon they would have the freedom to determine their own mode of living, subject only to the provisions of military security. Drew Middleton reported in
The New York Times
that the political rehabilitation of Germany was expected to progress at a faster rate than previously planned. The US would start reducing the army in its zone and attempt to restore a central German government.

On 15 August, Europe celebrated Victory in Japan (VJ) Day and James Gavin took stock of the end of the war. He admitted to Martha Gellhorn that although he abhorred the brutality of war he would miss ‘the excitement of it, the companionship with fine men that it has given me and the deep appreciation of simple things’. Back in the US, he had the tedium of a failing marriage and life in an army base to return to. He was unlikely to seduce a woman like Gellhorn again. Brought up in an orphanage and then adopted by coal miners, his own origins were humble; his first jobs had been in a newsagents and a barbers’ shop. He
was aware that if they had met in the US he would not have been in Gellhorn’s league and that returning home he would be defined by class instead of rank once more.
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But although the war was over, Gavin’s tasks were more difficult than ever. With his troops gradually diminishing, he attempted to embark on the impossible task of reconstructing Berlin. He told Gellhorn that he had never worked so hard with so little sense of accomplishment. ‘I feel like a small boy trying to hold the dam but the dam has about a hundred holes in it.’ He was aware that the situation would become more difficult as winter set in. There was no coal allocated to the Berlin civilians so he was sure that people would starve and freeze. The railroads and bridges had still not been repaired, which made it very difficult to transport food to Berlin through the Russian zone. ‘When a train leaves the US zone and enters Russia on the way to the US sector of Berlin it may as well have gone off Cape Cod into the Atlantic.’ Sometimes trains took five hours and sometimes five days. Against this background, he felt Gellhorn’s absence more than ever. She was due to arrive in London in September and he was determined to find a way to bring her to Berlin as a correspondent.
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