The Bitter Taste of Victory (3 page)

The story told here falls into two distinct periods. The first is the phase between 1944 and 1946, which was a period of urgent
reconstruction and cultural idealism; a time when the Allies planned fundamentally to denazify Germany and tried to use culture as a means to do so. This period culminated in the trial of twenty-two Nazi leaders at Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946 – an epic court case that was observed by writers including Rebecca West, John Dos Passos and Erika Mann. After the trial ended in the autumn of 1946, the Germans were transformed from prisoners to subjects. At the same time, the differences between the Soviet and the western zones of Germany became more marked and the co-operation of the Allies in ruling Berlin broke down. The onset of the Cold War and the change in enemies it entailed left the British and the American authorities keen to co-operate with the Germans in the struggle against the Russians, leaving denazification anachronistic and unnecessary. This impacted directly on artists visiting Germany from Britain or the US because after 1947 they were part of the Allied armoury of the Cold War.

Ultimately this is a story of individuals whose aims did not always or indeed often coincide with those of their governments. Even in 1945, several of the visiting writers and artists found the Allied aims absurd. The British and Americans in Germany were all officially ‘occupying forces’, segregated from the Germans in cafés and shops and forbidden from socialising with them. The booklet British soldiers and civil servants were issued with before leaving for Germany informed them that there could be no good Germans: ‘The Germans are not divided into good and bad Germans . . . There are only good and bad elements in the German character, the latter of which generally predominate.’ But for writers such as Spender and Auden, who had admired Germany and many of its inhabitants before the war, this seemed ridiculous, as did the possibility of transforming the German nation through British and American culture. Had not the Germans had a far superior
Kultur
of their own, which had dominated the artistic landscape of Europe for several centuries? This led to a second question. If German literature, music and film had not prevented the German people from following Hitler (if indeed the concentration camp at Buchenwald had been within walking distance of Goethe’s former house in Weimar, the
symbolic capital of the
Kulturnation
), how was British and American culture going to do it?
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By 1947 the views of most of the protagonists had diverged from those of their governments and those, such as Klaus Mann, who still visited Germany became isolated individuals, bemoaning a moment when the opportunity to forge both a new Germany and a new Europe had been lost. In the end, most of the figures explored here had less effect on Germany than Germany had on them. As a result this is not so much a history of Germany in the years after the war as the story of a group of writers and artists who found that the encounter with ruined Germany necessitated a period of personal reconstruction. Broken by their own helplessness in the face of wreckage on a scale they had never believed possible in 1945, then disappointed by the failure of the Allies to use culture in winning the peace, they cast around hopelessly for possible modes of redemption.
¹⁵

Some of them sought to counteract hatred and bitterness with love, defying the stench of death by committing themselves to living. But as the intense suspended present of war gave way to postwar, this became more difficult. A more durable promise for redemption was offered by art itself. In 1945, both Spender and Klaus Mann committed themselves to a vision of a new united Europe, underpinned by a shared artistic heritage that would allow nationalism to be replaced by a common consciousness of collective humanity. Most of the artists, however, sought a more personal form of reconstruction through artistic creation. They oscillated between seeing Germany as a real place, with bureaucratic, practical problems, and a dream setting, in which every object was symbolic. As they confronted the dilemma of German reconstruction, they created a genre of art that explored questions of guilt, atonement and redemption against a background of apocalyptic ruin.

This is a genre in which we could include works as diverse as Martha Gellhorn’s novel
Point of No Return
, Stephen Spender’s account of his time in Germany,
European Witness
, W. H. Auden’s allegorical poem ‘Memorial for the City’, Billy Wilder’s triumphantly comic film
A Foreign Affair,
Humphrey Jennings’s documentary
A Defeated People,
Laura Knight’s paintings of the Nuremberg trial, Lee Miller’s obliquely surrealist German photographs, Rebecca West’s strangely personal account of her time in Nuremberg ‘Greenhouse with Cyclamens’ and Klaus Mann’s unfinished novel
The Last Day.
¹⁶
All of these works used the concrete landscape of the bombed cities, the concentration camps or the fallen pomp of the Third Reich to explore more metaphysical questions of guilt. Surveying Germany from the perspective of an outsider, these artists saw in Germany’s tragedy the larger tragedy of the human condition.

In the late 1940s the artistic landscape of Germany was dominated by a genre that came to be known as
Trümmerliteratur
(rubble literature) or
Trümmerfilm
(rubble film): art set in the ruins of the bombed cities, imbuing the ‘zero hour’ after the war with physical form and exploring the relationship between architectural and psychological destruction.
¹⁷
Perhaps the genre of works set in Germany by British and American visitors could be called ‘outsider rubble literature’, or even
Fremdentrümmerliteratur.
This is a genre that asked, ultimately, what right the Allies had to judge Germany from outside when they were guilty too. Surely they shared the responsibility for Germany’s crimes because they had allowed them to happen? The Allies had condoned Hitler’s initial aggression and then, during the war, had fought to win rather than to prevent inhumanity, failing to free Jews in the territories they liberated or to exploit their knowledge of what was happening to the Jews to influence world opinion about the Nazis. ‘The victors who seat us on the defendants’ bench must sit next to us. There is room,’ the German writer Erich Kästner observed in his diary on 8 May 1945.
¹⁸

This genre of ‘outsider rubble literature’ includes Thomas Mann’s great postwar novel
Doctor Faustus
, a book written by a man who had not seen the ruins he described, but who had heard about them from his friends and children who visited Germany and now imaginatively recreated them from his study in California in frightening detail. It is a novel that takes on new resonance and becomes more movingly confessional when read alongside
Point of No Return
or
A Foreign Affair
because Mann’s troubled distance from the scenes he describes becomes the central emotion of his book.

All these works are acts of reckoning that at the same time enabled a kind of tolerance in the face of bitter disappointment. Collectively, they demonstrate the slow, ambivalent reconstruction of the human spirit; for their creators, they formed part of a process of attempting to learn to live again. For the participants of this book, the experience first of the bombed cities and the concentration camps, then of the cool Realpolitik of the Allies was too distressing to be forgotten. The Occupation and the
Wirtschaftswunder
, or economic miracle, of 1950s West Germany may have counted as a success story for the Allies but in the midst of the occupation forces’ frantic efforts at reconstruction, a series of individual tragedies played out, set against a background of ruined buildings and scattered bones.

This book is in part an attempt to reconcile or at least to disentangle these two stories. The four years after the war are the bridge between two worlds we know well: the devastation and horror of the Second World War and the powerful and peaceful Western Europe of today, dominated by a prosperous, liberal Germany. In between these is another world that might have been; one that the cast of this book hoped to bring into being, but in the end were defeated from creating, first by German intransigence and then by the all-consuming pragmatism of Cold War politics. This is the story of a group of artists who fought to bring a new order into existence and then, when the fight became hopeless, mourned all that they had lost.

PART I

The Battle for Germany

1944–45

1

‘Setting out for a country that didn’t really exist’

Crossing the Siegfried line: November–December 1944

During the autumn of 1944 Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn raced each other to the front line. For five years of war Gellhorn had taunted her husband for his apparent weakness; while she covered the conflict in Europe as a war correspondent, Hemingway preferred to remain safely in Cuba, attempting to sink German submarines from his fishing boat. As far as he was concerned, he had been heroic enough in the First World War and Spanish Civil War, when his relationship with Gellhorn had begun. At forty-four he wished to remain at home writing his novels with Gellhorn by his side. ‘ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?’ he asked her in a cable. Gellhorn saw it differently. It was Hemingway who had made her a war correspondent; Hemingway who had taken a promising young novelist with honey blonde hair and improbably long legs and exposed her to the sight of civilian slaughter in the Spanish Civil War, browbeating her into writing about it. She had fallen in love with him as a comrade in reckless bravery and was frustrated to find herself married to a complacent coward who had lost interest in the fate of his world.
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When Gellhorn returned from Europe to see her husband in March 1944, Hemingway woke her in the night to ‘bully, snarl, mock’ her for seeking excitement and danger in Europe. ‘My crime was to have been
at war when he had not.’ Eventually, Hemingway decided to take up Gellhorn’s gauntlet. But, unlike in Spain, they were to be competitors rather than collaborators. Hemingway’s previous two wives had accepted that there was only room for one great writer in the house. Gellhorn’s attempts at independence seemed to demonstrate a waning love and he wanted to wound her in return. He therefore used his superior reputation to attach himself to
Collier’s
, Gellhorn’s own magazine. Each publication could only officially employ one war correspondent so this left Gellhorn unauthorised. What was more, Hemingway procured a seat on one of the few aeroplanes flying to London and pretended to his wife that women were barred from the aircraft. Gellhorn made the crossing on a vulnerable and rat-infested cargo ship and was furious when she discovered that she could have been on the plane after all.
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By the time the couple were reunited in London in May, Hemingway had found an alternative, more compliant lover, the journalist Mary Welsh, while Gellhorn was determined to have as little as possible to do with her dishonest, competitive and too frequently drunken husband. They made their separate ways to Europe, with Gellhorn getting far closer to the D-Day landings than Hemingway, despite the official order barring women from the battlefields. Hemingway beat Gellhorn to liberated Paris where he loitered with Mary Welsh at the end of August, departing briefly to Rambouillet where he contravened the regulations for war correspondents by stacking his room with hand grenades, Sten guns, carbines and revolvers and unofficially directing intelligence operations.
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The focus of the European war effort had turned to Germany. Now that Paris and Rome had been liberated, the world was waiting for the conquest of Berlin. The end of the war in Europe had become contingent on Germany’s surrender and this was to be brought about by destroying the country by air and leaving helpless the army on the ground. In the East, the Russians began an enormous offensive called Operation Bagration on 22 June, co-ordinating air, artillery, tanks and infantry in an effort to recapture Belorussia and push west into Poland and Germany. Within five weeks, the Red Army had broken through the German line, expelling Germans from Belorussia; simultaneously
they launched an attack on Poland that brought them within sight of Warsaw by the end of July. On the western front, the war effort was focused on penetrating the German defensive Siegfried Line and crossing the Rhine. For the British at least this was partly an attempt to beat the Russian advance into Germany and stop them setting up a communist regime.
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As Allied generals such as Bernard Montgomery, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Omar Bradley debated how best to manoeuvre their troops into Germany, war correspondents such as Hemingway and Gellhorn tried to attach themselves to army units likely to be sent towards the Rhine. For five years, Germany had seemed unreal and distant; the word ‘Germany’ conjured a place of mythical evil. Now it was about to become real again and everyone involved in the war wanted to be the first to see it. The New York-based Anglo-Irish writer James Stern, describing his motives for visiting Germany, wrote that he ‘thought of the prospect of returning with a mixture of horror and fascination. I felt that it would be like setting out for a country that didn’t really exist.’
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Throughout the autumn of 1944, war correspondents and entertainers convened in Paris between trips to the front and contrived to join the troops entering the growing sliver of Germany occupied by the Allies. Hemingway, Gellhorn, the American photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller and the German-born movie star Marlene Dietrich were among the British and American literati to wander restlessly through Parisian boulevards, drink in the cafés of the Left Bank and visit the liberated French intelligentsia, in a bizarre, shabby imitation of life in 1920s Paris.