The Bitter Taste of Victory (2 page)

Almost all the cities in Germany had been badly bombed. By the end of the war a fifth of the country’s buildings were in ruins.
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Most of Germany had been plunged into darkness as one power station after another was bombed out of action; there was no city where gas, water and electricity were functioning at the same time. The streets in the city centres were eerily empty. Those people who remained had burrowed underground into cellars, basements or bomb craters, emerging to scavenge for food or water in the debris. The rows of flattened or hollowed houses were populated chiefly by
Trümmerfrauen
or ‘rubble women’, wiry figures employed by the Allies to clear away the mountains of pulverised buildings by hand.
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Between cities, the smashed Autobahnen were crowded with refugees. Much of the nation was on the move, with no particular destination. In September 1944 there had been 7.5 million foreigners in
Germany and they were all now attempting to return home or to reach one of the Allied DP (Displaced Persons) camps. In addition there were millions of Germans rendered homeless by the bombing and there would soon be nearly 13 million Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania, once their borders were redrawn to include former parts of Germany.
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The roads thronged with families, trailing handcarts with children or elderly relatives perched on top of furniture; with former Wehrmacht soldiers, recognisable, according to one observer, by their filthy grey uniforms hanging from gaunt limbs, their feet bound in bandages and their ‘countenance of defeat’.
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These were the scenes that confronted Ernest Hemingway and his soon-to-be ex-wife Martha Gellhorn when they arrived in the spring of 1945, competing to be among the first to witness the effects of the bombing. Relatively well fed on army rations and well dressed in American army uniforms, they stood out among the tattered Germans who rushed towards them, audaciously claiming them as liberators. They found that maps made no sense. North and south, left and right lost all meaning when there were no crossroads or corners to differentiate one pile of debris from another. Entering Cologne in March 1945, Gellhorn wondered if what she saw was too nightmarish to be real. This seemed not so much a city as ‘one of the great morgues of the world’. But she did not grieve for the devastation because she was too appalled by the spectacle of ‘a whole nation passing the buck’: no one was prepared to admit to being a Nazi. This was a view shared by the photographer Lee Miller, who found the inhabitants of Cologne ‘repugnant in their servility, hypocrisy and amiability’.
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Other Allied reporters were able to be more sympathetic. The British writer George Orwell followed Gellhorn to Cologne later in March and was distressed that a whole city could be reduced to ‘a chaos of jagged walls, overturned trams, shattered statues and enormous towers of rubble out of which iron girders thrust themselves like sticks of rhubarb’. But when the concentration camps were liberated in April 1945, and journalists confronted the piled up corpses and skeletal survivors, it became even harder to pity the defeated Germans. Now
Miller, Gellhorn and others asked themselves where this evil had come from and to what extent all Germans were responsible, or at least complicit in the horror.
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Hemingway, Gellhorn, Miller and Orwell were among the first British and American cultural figures to arrive in Germany. They were sponsored by governments who had made provision for journalists as part of the war effort, wanting them to report on the strength of their forces and the brutality of the enemy. The US government had also sent in actors and singers to entertain the troops, so Hemingway’s old friend Marlene Dietrich arrived in Germany shortly after he did, as a USO (United Services Overseas) entertainer, proud to be serving her new government though shocked to see her homeland in tatters. She was too loyal to the US and too angry with her former compatriots to feel much sympathy. ‘I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her,’ she told a reporter.
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In May 1945, Germany surrendered and Britain, the US, the Soviet Union and France divided the defeated country into four zones, each sending in additional forces of occupation to administer their area. Berlin was also partitioned into four sectors, though it lay in the Soviet zone. At Potsdam in July, the occupiers took responsibility for reconstructing the country economically, politically and, more surprisingly, culturally. As a result, a new cohort of British and American writers and artists arrived in Germany to help rebuild the country their armed forces had just spent five years destroying.

German speakers were needed for this task. Several of the figures who might be termed ‘cultural ambassadors’ were writers who had spent time in Germany before the war. Among them were two British poets, W. H. Auden, sent by the American government to report on civilian responses to bomb damage, and his friend Stephen Spender, posted by the British government to assess the state of German universities. Auden and Spender had been drawn to Germany in the 1920s, attracted by its atmosphere of sexual promiscuity and its artistic avant-garde. Now looking expectantly for the seedy Berlin bars and snug Munich coffee houses where they had once watched cabaret and discussed philosophy, they encountered only wreckage; the playground
of their youth had been razed to the ground. Wandering around the destroyed city of Darmstadt, Auden found himself constantly in tears, reporting that ‘the people . . . are sad beyond belief’.
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The Allies also made use of the exiled Germans now living in Britain and the US. The Austrian film-maker Billy Wilder was sent by the American government to act as a film officer in their zone, returning to Berlin, where he had made his home until 1933 when Hitler had made it too dangerous for him as a Jew. Surrounded by former friends, he might have been expected to feel pity for the humiliated Germans, but he was spending his time watching hour after hour of concentration camp footage and he could not distinguish between the gaunt inhabitants of the bombed city and the perpetrators of the death camps. ‘They burned most of my family in their damned ovens!’ Wilder said. ‘I hope they burn in hell!’
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Sent to be in charge of newspapers in the British zone of Berlin, the exiled German novelist Peter de Mendelssohn had come to see the Germans as a ‘band of thieves and murderers and abject criminals’, but was more troubled than Wilder by the sight of the ruined cities of his youth. He found that not only maps but language itself had become inadequate. ‘We used to have a vocabulary with which to describe bombed cities,’ he said, but now words like ‘damaged, blasted, burnt-out, shattered, broken’ and terms like ‘debris, collapsed wall, bricks, masonry, bent girders, fallen beams’ had become redundant. There was no ‘damage’ because the damaged thing itself had disappeared. Instead one needed ‘new eyes to see, and totally new words to describe’ what he could only evoke metaphorically as a ‘white sea of rubble, faceless and featureless in the bright sunlight, acres and acres of white, bleached bones, the sprawling skeleton of a giant animal’.
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This book tells the story of Germany between 1944 and 1949 through the eyes of twenty writers, film-makers, painters, actors and musicians who arrived in Germany from Britain and the US and struggled to make sense of the postwar world. In addition to those already introduced, other important figures include Thomas Mann and his children Klaus and Erika Mann, all in Germany as Americans; the German-
American playwright Carl Zuckmayer; the British film-maker Humphrey Jennings; novelist Rebecca West; painter Laura Knight; and publisher Victor Gollancz. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (visiting the French zone), Bertolt Brecht (visiting the Soviet zone), the German composer Paul Hindemith, the American novelist John Dos Passos and the British novelist Evelyn Waugh all make brief appearances as well. The focus is on the better-known figures to visit Germany for the obvious reason that their reports had more impact in the US and in Britain. All of them were influential, affecting public opinion about postwar Germany in their home countries, shaping Allied reconstruction policy in Germany or producing important works of art in response to their encounters with the defeated nation.

Individually, these figures often had diverse, personal reasons for volunteering to be in Germany, driven by curiosity or by a desire to help or punish, or by a more simple need to find former friends or family members. Collectively, they were dispatched by governments who placed journalism and, more controversially, the arts, at the centre of their plans for reconstructing Germany.

From 1942, when postwar planning for Germany became more a likelihood than an aspiration, diplomats and economists in Britain and the US had been asking themselves what kind of future there could be for this country once it had been defeated. How was the nation to be both punished and reconstructed and what constituted punishment and reconstruction? How would the Allies impose a settlement on Germany that would ensure the country could never again devastate Europe? How were the architects of the fighting, bombing, and genocide in the concentration camps to be held to account?

In 1945 official estimates for the expected duration of the Allied Occupation varied from ten to fifty years. The most urgent task for the Allies as they began to rule this divided country was to feed their new subjects and to attempt to restore electricity, gas, water and transport to their zones. But from the start, it was clear that this was not only to be a question of rebuilding the houses, streets, and in some cases whole towns that had been destroyed by the Allied bombing, nor of financial help. Postwar Germany had become Britain and America’s dilemma. It
was essential to create a peaceful and stable nation if future wars were to be avoided, and it was for this reason that culture came to play a crucial role in the reconstruction programme.

At Potsdam the Allies authored an agreement to prepare the Germans ‘for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis’. This was to be achieved through denazification, disarmament, demilitarisation, democratisation and re-education. Denazification involved both the straightforward task of removing Nazis from positions of power and the more complex but also more fundamental task of reconfiguring German society to be less militaristic. The arts would be vital in introducing the Germans to alternative philosophies and modes of interaction. For the Americans, democracy was not just the American political system but the American way of life, and that included everything from behaviour on public transport to dance styles, and was demonstrable through art, music, books and especially films.
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Germany was to be reborn; its citizens as well as its cities were to be reconstructed. This was a campaign for the minds of the Germans – a ‘re-education’ in the ideas of peace and civilisation.
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So, suddenly, a generation of British and American writers, film-makers, artists, musicians and actors found themselves the vanguard of the campaign to remake a country. The immediate postwar period was a time when culture mattered, when writers and artists were seen as fundamental in securing a peaceful postwar settlement not just in Germany but in Europe as a whole. When UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – was founded in November 1945 to prevent war, it guided itself by the credo that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. This was accepted by politicians and sponsors in Britain, the US and other founding countries as a manifesto for cultural transformation. Often the cultural figures entering Germany in 1945 were hoping to forge not just a new denazified Germany but a new pacifist Europe.
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