The Bitter Taste of Victory (22 page)

Departing from Germany, Gellhorn placed her faith in literature rather than love. She began to write an autobiographical novel responding to her experiences in Germany, attempting a slow and painful process of personal reconstruction. She was one of several of the writers and artists in Germany that winter who sought artistic redemption in the face of suffering that seemed to become more hopeless by the day. In December, an article in the
British Zone Review
proclaimed that efforts were to be made ‘to effect a radical and lasting change of heart in the hard-working, efficient, inflammable, ruthless and war-loving German people’, asserting that the spiritual regeneration of the German people would be ‘the greatest and most durable guarantee of the peace of Europe that we could hope to attain’. There was no doubting the truth
at least of the second part of the statement, but most of the cultural emissaries sent from Britain and the US were beginning to doubt whether they could play an active part in it or more fundamentally whether culture could be used to alter the mentality of a nation. Instead their role seemed to be to attempt to describe the indescribable, not necessarily, as Mervyn Peake had initially hoped, in order to lessen human antagonism by illustrating the images of war, but simply to find some kind of order in the chaos and confusion that surrounded them.
¹⁷

When Peter de Mendelssohn had complained that summer that they no longer had ‘a vocabulary with which to describe bombed cities’, he was in part challenging writers to find a new way to write about total destruction. This was a task that several German writers had already begun; de Mendelssohn himself would soon translate into English the ‘inner emigrant’ writer Hermann Kasack’s
The City beyond the River
(
Die Stadt hinter dem Strom
), one of the first examples of
Trümmerliteratur
, or rubble literature. Now many of the British and American writers and film-makers in Germany began to undertake this task as well, creating works of ‘outsider rubble literature’ and film in which the German ruins are seen partially or wholly from the position of the occupiers and therefore inflected with questions of guilt and blame. If there were positive effects of sending in artists to Germany amid the conquerors then they took the form of these books and films, rather than of any obvious immediate developments in German culture or changes in the German psyche.
¹⁸

Three British artists were engaged in the task of literary or cinematic creation in the winter of 1945. Stephen Spender had returned to Germany for two months in September, this time inspecting the German libraries that had been closed down in May, and wrote the book that would be published as
European Witness
describing both his trips. The writer Alan Ross was stationed on the Wilhelmshaven naval base that autumn (having joined the Royal Navy in 1941) and wrote his first volume of poems,
The Derelict Day
, as a response to his experiences in Germany. The film-maker Humphrey Jennings had been sent to Germany for two months in September 1945, making a film called
A Defeated People
for
the Ministry of Information, aiming to convince the British of the need for the Allied Occupation and of its successes so far.

As they attempted to create art out of the wreckage of a starving and freezing nation, Spender, Ross and Jennings were all searching for symbols of ruin and redemption. For Goronwy Rees, the dying baby in his house in the Grunewald had come to represent a devastated country where very little hope was possible and the notion of ‘victory’ was absurdly misplaced. That winter, Spender, Ross and Jennings tested one symbol after another, wanting to capture the simultaneous misery of the Germans and their occupiers and of the DPs who still wandered down the
Autobahnen
in rags or lived in constrained poverty in the DP camps.

Ross’s German poems depict landscapes that briefly offer the consolation of symbolising a nation’s hope and despair but then end up simply as debris in all its tedium. ‘German gun site’ opens with a July sun that ‘conveys a meaning into death’. But what that meaning is remains unclear. The poem is essentially a list of bleak images drawn from the gunsite: broken trains, shells ‘discarded like cigarettes’, damaged bridges, photos of naked girls pinned on the mud walls. Similarly in ‘Occupation’ the poet finds that ‘the flat unchanging/ Scene becomes a snare’ for the onlooker who seeks to imbue it with meaning. The poet’s own failure to find significance in the images becomes symptomatic of the occupiers’ failure to find meaning in the country they are governing. More bleakly, ‘Occupation troops’ describes men who have become so used to the familiar aspect of death that they ‘no longer notice/ the decaying air’ in which they live. Only sometimes at night, walking blindly with girls under cold stars, they are touched with compassion and feel a ‘common sense of futility’.
¹⁹

Visiting Berlin towards the end of his German trip, walking through the ruins of the city he had once loved, Stephen Spender found in the remains of the Reichstag and the Chancellery mysteries to be solved, metonyms in need of decoding. The Chancellery in particular seemed ‘still full of clues, and almost of footmarks’. There were rooms full of papers; there were the chairs remaining in Hitler’s main reception room with the stuffing ripped out of them; there was Hitler’s desk with its massive marble top in the garden where it had been flung;
there were the books on architecture above Hitler’s bed. Spender wondered if it was these books that would yield the most meaning. The Führer had spent the last months of his life resuming his architectural studies. Perhaps the clue to Nazism lay in Hitler’s failure to pass the examination to study architecture in Vienna. ‘The architect who failed to build had turned the foundations of every city in Germany to sand.’
²⁰

People as well as objects were potential symbols; especially people who no longer seemed human. That summer Spender had visited a DP camp and observed that collectively the DPs looked like human animals who had been crammed into a foreign zoo. Now Ross watched the DPs swarming through the streets of Hamburg, picking among the rubbish for scraps and pushing their hand carts and prams through the wreckage and found, like Dos Passos in Berlin, that there was a level of suffering that was dehumanising in its extremity. In Ross’s poem ‘Displaced Persons’, the scavenging homeless search like animals for food. Outcasts in a postwar no-man’s land, they are the ‘inhabitants of a dead terrain’: ‘
We are, most of all, a nuisance to ourselves.
’
²¹

Ross’s vision of Germany was unredeemed. Given these poems, it is unsurprising that he was relieved when he was sent home to London at the end of the year. But if his was one of the bleakest and most hopeless accounts of postwar Germany by a British writer, this was partly the result of his medium. Poetry does not require the poet to be practical. As a fellow poet, Spender also thought in imagistic terms and could be similarly despairing. But he was in Germany to be useful and his book was partly a work of journalism that was more hopeful when more pragmatic. Writing his book on his return to London, he found that he was able to find cause for optimism among the German ruins. ‘If we can find ten good Germans, we can save the spiritual life of Germany,’ he advised. If the Allies could locate ten Germans respected both by their compatriots and the outside world then these model citizens could lead Germany into Europe. It was in this spirit that Spender turned the rubble into a figure of collective destruction that he saw as making an eloquent plea for a comparably effortful collective act of creation that would take the form of forging a European community.
²²

Humphrey Jennings too was determinedly optimistic. His role in Germany was a propagandist one. He was there to make a film convincing the British that the sacrifices they made on behalf of the Occupation were worthwhile. In this respect Jennings had been an obvious person to choose for the task. Working for the Crown Film Unit in wartime London, he had made films reminding the British what they were fighting for – the windy beaches, vulnerably clad in barbed wire, the lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery – using avant-garde montages of sounds and images. He was loyally British and temperamentally sanguine. Despite this, his hopefulness faltered during his early weeks in Germany, when it seemed to him that almost every characteristic that the British strived to cultivate had been lost by the Germans: ‘exiled, thrown into gas chambers, frightened, until you have a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul’.

This vision of the Germans is present in Jennings’s film, where we are told that the British will stay in Germany until they are shown definite signs that the next generation will grow up sane and Christian again. However, partly because he was making a propaganda film, partly because of his own idealism, Jennings was searching for a symbol of redemption. He found it in the figure of the German child.
²³

All the visitors to Germany that winter struggled with the question of German children. If they were too young to have perpetrated the evils of the camps, were they innocent enough to provide Germany with hope? Or had they already been sufficiently indoctrinated for re-education to be necessary? Were these years of humiliated defeat going to leave them thirsting for revenge as Hitler had after the First World War? There were few people who thought, like Gellhorn at her most pessimistic, that excessive effort should not be made to feed the German children given that they were tainted by the general German disease. Most people tended to respond more ambivalently. In a poem entitled ‘Hamburg: Day and Night’, Ross described the bare-footed children walking along Hamburg’s Steindamm, dawdling and displaying ‘like tickets, their dirty and disfigured limbs’. This image is too depressing to be hopeful but is also too pitiful to be condemnatory.
²⁴

Like Gellhorn, Jennings was initially sceptical about the innocence of the German children. In Aachen early in his visit he saw a mass of white-Sunday-frocked school children standing tightly together in military fashion and singing ‘Lili Marlene’ at the tops of their voices as they rushed through the empty streets. These children were too regimented to initiate a new way of life; they had inherited the orderliness of their elders. However, as Jennings spent more time in Germany he saw more cheerful and individualistic youths playing in the street and became hopeful that German children were not as different from British children as he had feared. His film ends with an image of German children dancing joyfully in a circle. This is doubly promising because it echoes a sequence in Jennings’s wartime film
Listen to Britain
where the circling children are a symbol of the sustaining nature of British lightheartedness in a time of war. In
A Defeated People
the dancing children become a sign of the playfulness latent in Germany; it is the duty of the British army to stay and cultivate this potential amid the debris. For Jennings art had provided a mode of redemption both for himself and for Germany. Identifying the figure of the German child had enabled him to become less despairing about the postwar world. It had also allowed him to believe in the transformative potential of his own art; to believe in himself as a cultural emissary. This film was going to enable the British to make the Germans less ‘hard-working, efficient, inflammable, ruthless and war-loving’, as instructed in the
British Zone Review
.
²⁵

Bumping into Jennings in Düsseldorf in September, Stephen Spender was irritated by Jennings’s optimism. He saw him as over-confident in his ebullience and was maddened by ‘his Adam’s apple, his flapping ears, his pin-head face, and his bumptious expression, which looks odd in a man who now has white hair’. As far as Spender was concerned, the last thing the British needed was a film documenting the activities of the Military Government in Germany. Meeting Jennings again in Hamburg, Spender was dismissive of the film-maker’s assertion that the military was doing a tremendous job. According to Jennings, accounts of the looting, raping and shooting perpetrated by the Russians in Berlin were ‘grossly exaggerated’ and reconstruction was working
wonderfully: telephones were working; traffic was flowing in an orderly manner. ‘I cannot carry on this kind of argument,’ Spender reflected in
European Witness
, where Jennings is half-heartedly disguised with the patronising name ‘Boyman’. ‘Perhaps I exaggerate, but the homelessness of thousands of people, the ruins, the refugees, the distress, the hunger, haunt me, and since I have no statistical picture in my mind I do not even know whether I exaggerate.’

On the authority of the Oberbürgermeister in Berlin, Jennings said that he did not think thousands would starve to death in Berlin that winter. He admitted that a few thousand might indeed die in the DP camps but did not seem to think this was a relevant factor. ‘If he were a German,’ Spender complained sardonically, ‘for the same statistical reasons, presumably he would not think Belsen a relevant factor.’
²⁶