The Bitter Taste of Victory (23 page)

Spender’s competitiveness with Jennings was unnecessarily puerile. Jennings too had been moved by the suffering he had witnessed though he had chosen not to show this to Spender. If there was a contest for powers of sympathy, the choice between the two men would be close. But for Spender the larger question remained one of postwar humanity’s relationship with destruction, where Jennings’s concerns were narrower and more immediate. After all, Spender himself had been seduced by Weimar Germany; he had found in the German poets a vision that seemed more cosmic and more profound than anything he could find in England. As a result he, like Thomas Mann, was prepared to see the German dilemma as one that involved the individual and his country wrestling with the Devil in their souls rather than one involving the British supplying the Germans with telephone wires and traffic signs.

Spender’s dual vision of Germany as both a political and a spiritual dilemma is evident in
European Witness
, which emerged out of Spender’s ‘Rhineland Journal’, published shortly after his trips in
Horizon
. Here Spender’s practical concern as a journalist was to argue for the need for a united Europe and urgently to explain the dangerousness and seriousness of destruction on this scale. But the passage where he described the destruction as ‘serious in more senses than one’ demonstrated the poet’s vision as well as the public intellectual’s; attempting
to decode the metonyms of the Chancellery or the Reichstag, he was a poet in search of an image. Like Auden, Spender the poet had been rendered silent by the German ruins, though he had found in the London bombsites rich material for poetry during the war. But
European Witness
is none the less as much the work of a poet as a journalist; a poet too frightened by the dead cities to turn them into poems – frightened by the way that the landscapes around him can metamorphose into nightmares.
²⁷

At the end of
European Witness
, Spender describes the way that the Nazis preoccupied not only his waking thoughts but his dreams for many years. ‘And in my dreams, I did not simply hate them and put them from me. I argued with them, I wrestled with their spirits, and the scene in which I knew them was one in which my own blood and tears flowed. The cities and soil of Germany where they were sacrificed were not just places of material destruction. They were altars on which a solemn sacrifice had been performed according to a ritual in which inevitably all the nations took part. The whole world had seemed to be darkened with their darkness, and when they left the world, the threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one, rose up from their ashes.’ For Spender, despite his hope for a new Europe, the darkness remained. It was latent in the faces of the apathetic DPs wandering through Germany and of the embittered Germans who still regretted merely losing the war. It was latent, too, in the nations that had reduced Germany to rubble. The nightmare waited to engulf the Germans and their occupiers alike.
²⁸

That autumn, the differences between Jennings and Spender were being echoed in the press in a debate between German writers who had remained in Germany and the exiled Thomas Mann. In August, the ageing author Walter von Molo had published an open letter to Mann in various American-licensed newspapers in Germany and in newspapers in the US and England, begging Mann to come back and help reconstruct his homeland and insisting that writers like von Molo himself had stayed simply because they had nowhere else to go. Von Molo
characterised wartime Germany as a ‘huge concentration camp’, suggesting that all Germans were victims and that exile was a privilege. He assured Mann that the
Kulturnation
remained distinct from the
Staatsnation
, representing the real Germany: ‘In its innermost core, your people, which has now been starving and suffering for a third of a century, has nothing in common with the misdeeds and crimes, the shameful horrors and lies, the fearsome aberrations of the diseased, who, for this very reason trumpeted so much about their health and perception.’

Mann was unsurprisingly furious. Von Molo claimed to admire Mann but it seemed as though he had failed to read the texts of Mann’s postwar broadcasts and speeches before writing to him. This was exactly the kind of easy shedding of blame that Mann deplored. If Mann as an exile was prepared to accept some responsibility for the Nazi crimes then how could von Molo believe that the people who had compromised with Hitler were blameless?
²⁹

Mann wrote a reply to von Molo headed ‘Why I am not returning to Germany’, which he sent to the New York magazine
Aufbau
(
Reconstruction
) and to newspapers in Germany. He began by saying that he should be glad that Germany wanted him to return, but that he could not imagine that an old man with his heart weakened by exile could do much to help the prostrated German citizens. It was impossible to wipe out twelve years of exile; to forget the years of wandering from country to country, worrying about passports, while his ears rang with tales of shameful barbarism in his lost, estranged homeland.

Mann reminded von Molo, as Spender had reminded Curtius, that if all the intellectuals had risen up collectively against the regime then the course of events might have been different. As it was, the Germans had not freed themselves. Mann was proud to be a US citizen with English-speaking grandchildren growing up around him in America. He repeated his previous arguments: that there could be no good German and that Mann himself felt identified with ‘a Germany that finally succumbed to its temptation and made a pact with the Devil’. Now, as someone tainted with German evil, he was afraid of German ruins: ‘the ruins of stone and the human ruins’. But he did believe in Germany’s future and hoped that she would find a new way of life in tune with the innermost
tendencies and needs of the nation. Behind Germany’s isolation had always been her need for love. ‘Let Germany renounce her vainglory, hatred and egoism, let her find again her love, and she will be loved.’ Meanwhile, he dreamt of feeling the soil of the old continent under his feet and one day, ‘if God wills’, he would see it again.
³⁰

Before Mann’s reply was published, von Molo’s letter was followed by a statement from the novelist Frank Thiess who endorsed von Molo’s views and said that ‘inner emigration’ was more honest and patriotic than physical emigration. In a piece of disturbingly fascist rhetoric, Thiess claimed that German writers needed ‘German space, German earth, and the echo of the German people’ and then went on to explain his own failure to emigrate as a desire for spiritual growth. During the Third Reich he had assured himself that,

if I were to succeed in surviving . . . this horrible epoch, I would have won so much for my spiritual and human development that I would emerge richer in knowledge and experience than if I had observed the German tragedy from the balcony and orchestra seats of foreign countries. It makes a difference whether I experience the burning of my home myself or watch it in the weekly newsreel, whether I am hungry myself or simply read about starvation in newspapers . . . I believe it was more difficult to keep one’s personality here than to send messages to the German people from over there . . . We do not expect any reward for not having deserted Germany.

Thiess’s statement was not endorsed by many other writers. Becher informed him furiously that his letter was ‘inappropriate in its timing, its content, and its tone’. But Mann, in his orchestra seat in California, felt helpless in the face of ignorance and blindness on this scale. He complained in his journal on 18 September that Thiess’s declaration was ‘distorted and provocative’ and that the Germans were manifestly ‘
une race maudite
’ (an accursed race).
³¹

Mann was saddened to find himself divided from the ‘inner emigrants’. He had not always seen ‘inner emigration’ as cowardly or problematic, as Klaus and Erika did. Indeed, he had been one of the
first people to use the term, privately, when he described himself as an ‘inner emigrant’ in his diary in 1933. Ten years later he had used the term publicly in a speech in Washington where he declared that his own suffering as an exile was comparable to the alienation faced by those anti-Nazi Germans who had remained in Germany: ‘Believe me, for many there Germany has become just as foreign as it is for us; an “inner emigration” with numbers in the millions there is waiting for the end, just as we are waiting.’

For Mann, although there could not be a ‘good’ Germany, distinct from the bad Germany, there could be a
Kulturnation
; Goethe’s Germany could survive political strife. And the
Kulturnation
could be kept alive both by inner and outer emigrants. This chimed with the point that both von Molo and Thiess were making now. But like Spender, Mann thought that the ‘inner emigrants’ should be less self-righteous in proclaiming their own suffering and more sympathetic to the suffering of exiles. For Thiess to be the loyal defender of the
Kulturnation
and Mann the disloyal deserter was absurd.
³²

Mann’s answer to von Molo was published in Germany on 10 October 1945. The Germans remained unconvinced by his arguments and many of the responses to his article echoed Thiess. On 23 October, Edwin Redslob wrote an article in the Berlin
Tagesspiegel
(a newspaper set up in the US sector by Peter de Mendelssohn) comparing German suffering during and after the war to the suffering of Christ on the cross. In December the novelist Otto Flake claimed in the
Badener Tageblatt
that Germany had in fact performed a heroic and altruistic task, demonstrating the dangers of nihilism to the rest of the world.
³³

Mann’s rejoinder to these remarks was surprisingly mild. He gave a broadcast insisting that he could help Germany best from California. There he could write articles convincing the many fascists remaining in Germany to renounce their megalomania and persuading the Americans not to let the German children starve. This did little to ameliorate the situation. ‘We can achieve reconciliation with the entire world, but not with Thomas Mann,’ the Hamburg journalist Herbert Lestiboudois announced in January. Mann-hating had now become a strangely enjoyable pursuit. Mann’s son Golo was currently living in Germany, running
a radio station for the Americans called ‘Radio Frankfurt’, and he reported home to America that the Germans were ‘profoundly happy’ about his father’s correspondence with von Molo: ‘To have a pretended reason for bitterness, for disappointment, a chance to attack, to lament over fallen moral grandeur – Oh what fun they got out of that!’
³⁴

Spender, Jennings, Mann and von Molo were all looking, in their very different fashions, for a way to redeem Germany and therefore to redeem the world. This was the mission of their governments as well and as far as they were concerned, one way to do this was to put the Nazis on trial. Those figures who had haunted Spender’s dreams throughout the war, sacrificing his own blood and tears, needed to be judged and hanged as public expiation for the nation’s sin. That September, the British put the commanders of Bergen-Belsen on trial in the sleepy little town of Lüneberg, forty miles north-east of Belsen. According to Jennings, this was the only town in Germany to lack a filthy smell and be almost untouched by the bombing. For the next two months, German journalists reported dutifully on the horrors revealed in the dock, grateful to have a focus for blame and to see the guilt as individual rather than collective. Watching the trial in October, Alan Ross wrote a poem where he described the defendants as already in the process of dying. ‘The faces no longer/ Display emotion, but a sense of failure.’ The case had meaning but no valid spirit; ‘The world’s crime is absolved in unimportant/ Deaths.’
³⁵

Meanwhile the occupying powers prepared for a much bigger trial. In November the leading Nazis would be placed in the dock at Nuremberg. Excitedly, the German papers listed the senior Nazis about to be judged and found wanting. Prominent space was given to lists of the defendants, each accompanied by a photograph. There is a disturbing element of nostalgia in these accounts of those same men whose images had dominated the German newspapers only six months earlier. If Germany had made a pact with the Devil then she had gained a period of carefree freedom in exchange. It now seemed to both Mann and Spender that the Germans failed to understand that those years of freedom had come to an end. The Devil simply demanded a few more victims be sacrificed along the way.

PART III

Judgement and Hunger

1945–46

7

‘You’ll hang them anyhow’