The Bitter Taste of Victory (30 page)

The dismantling was no longer typical, however. Following the Paris meeting in the spring, there was a broad consensus among the British and Americans that they should come together to protect Germany economically from Soviet influence. In July, James Byrnes offered to merge the US zone with any other zone for economic purposes. His offer was promptly accepted by Britain, though it remained to be seen quite how this would work. Earlier in the month, bread rationing had been introduced in Britain. Gollancz and his supporters were delighted, but much of the British populace was left furiously wondering quite what they had gained from fighting the war, with the
Daily Mail
reporting that bread rationing was ‘the most hated measure ever to have been presented to the people of this country’. British politicians were aware that they could only unite with the Americans if the richer nation was prepared to pay a substantial majority of the costs.
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While Gollancz campaigned to make the British public more sympathetic towards Germany, Erika and Klaus Mann urged their readers to remain hard-hearted in judging the Germans. Erika had returned to the Nuremberg trial in March, now diagnosed with pleurisy. She retained her exasperation with the Germans in general and was especially incensed about the indulgence being shown to German cultural figures who had consorted with the Nazis but were now deemed useful enough to be swiftly denazified.

In the middle of February the Russians had summoned the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler back to Germany to take over his old position
at the Berlin Philharmonic. ‘Berlin calls Wilhelm Furtwängler’, ran the headline in the Soviet-controlled
Berliner Zeitung.
‘All of us who want to build the new democratic Germany in the spirit of humanity need the high symbol of artistic perfection . . . that is why we, why Germany, needs the artist Wilhelm Furtwängler.’ German exiles in the US including Thomas Mann immediately protested about this move and were supported by the American occupation authorities.
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During the Third Reich, Furtwängler had spoken out on behalf of Jewish musicians such as Bruno Walter, who were forced out of Nazi Germany, and had refused to join the Nazi Party or give the Nazi salute. However he had carried the title of Prussian State Councillor in the Third Reich (primarily an honorary title) and conducted on Hitler’s behalf throughout his time in power, most notably giving a concert to the Nazi Youth in 1938, conducting Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
(
The Master-Singers of Nuremberg
) on the evening before the 1938 Nazi rally, and giving a concert in Prague in March 1944 to mark the fifth anniversary of the occupation of Poland. In order to conduct at the Philharmonic, which lay in the the US sector, Furtwängler had to receive a denazification license (
Persilschein
) in Vienna, Wiesbaden and Berlin. The Americans in Wiesbaden were reluctant to exonerate him and it was clear that it would be some time before the case would be resolved. None the less, he arrived in Berlin in a Russian aircraft on 10 March and was received with great ceremony by Becher, who was prepared to believe that here at least was a German whose soul was alive and conducted him to his old apartment in the pheasantry of the Sans-Souci Palace at Potsdam.

Erika Mann was outraged about Furtwängler and she was angry too about the acceptance offered to the ‘inner emigrants’ who had been calling for her father’s return. In her letter to Lotte Walter in January she complained about the adulation accorded to ‘a new poet, an uncle named Bergengruen’, who had gone so far as to compare Germany to Christ. As a Catholic, the poet and novelist Werner Bergengruen was one of many writers to frame Germany’s current situation in an apocalyptic, Christian framework in which specific guilt was subsumed by a more general sense of man’s original sin.
Later that year Erika Mann would write an article dismissing the term ‘inner emigration’ as a ‘free pass’. Authors did not have to prove that they had spoken out against the Nazis but could claim the status of the spiritual emigrant.
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At the start of May, Erika was summoned home to California to help look after her father, who was being operated on for lung cancer. Her days of gallivanting around Europe were over; from now on she would remain at home as Thomas Mann’s loyal assistant, leaving Klaus to struggle alone in the battle to regain a foothold in Germany. Exhausted and disillusioned, Erika was not reluctant to leave. She warned her parents that they should expect ‘a pensive, white-haired lady who shows the strain of defeat in victory’. For Erika as for many of Germany’s conquerors, the taste of victory was becoming ever more bitter both because of the intransigence of the Germans and because her faith in the Americans was weakening. A couple of months earlier she had warned her father not to travel to Europe because Germany would ‘swallow’ him up and it was a ‘horrid’ place even to visit. ‘It is sad, poor, demoralised, corrupt and depressing’; if he appeared he would be used ‘by the Russians against the Yanks and the French against the Tommies’, and would return home damaged and angry.
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Arriving in Los Angeles, Erika wrote a series of articles castigating the Germans and their conquerors and claiming inaccurately that the stories about a starving Germany were mere propaganda. ‘Whereas the rest of Europe, including England, has gone hungry for the past six years, the Germans begin only now to feel the pinch of severe food shortages.’ This was patently untrue: the calorie counts alone testified to the desperate situation in Germany. But Erika seems genuinely to have believed that the Germans were less hungry than they claimed to be, convinced that their self-pity and denial made them unworthy of sympathy on any count. She made it clear in her articles that she no longer had much hope for German re-education; the Germans seemed to be waiting only for a war between the Americans and the Russians. And she was one of many commentators to see a third world war as becoming worryingly likely, partly because of the aggressive self-righteousness of the Americans.
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In Italy, Klaus Mann was perturbed that his family was regrouping in California without him. No one had pleaded with him to return to watch over his father’s sickbed. Indeed, he learnt about the successful outcome of his father’s operation from a telegram from his father’s publisher and a note in
Time
reporting that the great man was ‘resting comfortably’. ‘I don’t know what ails or ailed him in particular and how much he himself knows by now,’ Klaus complained to his mother, unsure how to write to the patient. ‘Tell him my “affections and congratulations”.’
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Klaus was concerned about his dwindling role both in the family and in postwar Europe. In his autobiography, published in 1942, he had hoped explicitly that there would be a world after the war ‘for people like us to live in, to work for’. He was sure that a world brought into being by the victorious Allies would ‘accept and need’ the services of men such as him – ‘versed in various idioms and traditions, experienced go-betweens . . . fore-runners and agents of the super-national civilisation to be constructed’. Here he was imagining his position in Germany in terms similar to those of Stephen Spender, hoping that as an American citizen well-acquainted with German culture he would be ideally placed to help first with denazification and re-education and then with establishing a new outward-looking and European cultural scene in Germany. These hopes had now been quelled, more dramatically in Klaus Mann’s case than in Spender’s because he had more invested both in Germany and his role there. And artistically he had very little in prospect. His collaboration with Rossellini had ended and he had been attempting successively to start film, book and magazine projects, which had come to nothing.
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He fuelled his resentful disappointment into articles about Gustaf Gründgens, who returned to the stage in May as the leading character in Carl Sternheim’s
The Snob
at the Deutsches Theater. Since his relationship with the Manns ended two decades earlier, Gründgens had been the theatrical darling of both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Gründgens’s successful performance as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s
Faust
in 1932 had led Göring to appoint the actor as the intendant (artistic director) of the State Theater, partly so that
Gründgens could direct Göring’s then-lover Emmy Sonnemann in her emerging acting career. At the end of the war, Gründgens was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities but his nine months in prison was a relatively privileged time when he was given permission to direct a makeshift prison theatre. The Russians had realised that his skills could be put to better use on the public stage and transported him directly from prison to the Deutsches Theater where he was to play his new role.

The Snob
opened on 3 May to sell-out audiences and rave reviews. There was five minutes of applause before Gründgens could even speak his opening lines; at the end of the play the stage filled with flowers. The critic Walter Karsch attributed the applause both to the success of the performance and to the audience’s gratitude to Gründgens for creating an island of artistic calm outside the political turbulance of the Third Reich. Klaus Mann managed to acquire a ticket on the black market and saw the play in June. In a satirical article entitled ‘Art and Politics’, Mann complained that if Gründgens could now be given a standing ovation on the Berlin stage, the Germans should welcome Emmy Sonnemann back as well. Indeed, ‘perhaps someone gassed in Auschwitz left behind some stage piece in which the esteemed woman could make her second debut. The good woman surely knew nothing about Auschwitz – and besides, what does art have to do with politics?’
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This essay was not simply a personal swipe at a former lover. It was also a considered critique of the German separation of culture from politics. ‘“Political song – nasty song!”’ it begins; ‘an old German saying – an old German error . . . as if art could exist outside social context – independent and inactive, floating in a vacuum!’ Even if art could remain aesthetically pure, the artist could not help being part of his time: a human and a citizen bound to the same laws as his less artistically gifted contemporaries. He could therefore not be allowed to go unpunished for collaborating with political gangsters. ‘Have geniuses a jester’s license?’

Klaus Mann went on to distinguish between different kinds of artists, saying that writers who had compromised with Nazism should be most punished, given that ‘moral culture’ comprised one of their professional
duties. Musicians presented a more complex case because their music remained relatively apolitical. During the war Bruno Walter had conducted Strauss in New York, saying that although he would never again shake hands with the composer he did not wish to deprive the American public of his music. Mann suggested grudgingly that Strauss’s music might be performed but the composer should not be invited to the premiere. He was more scathing about Furtwängler, insisting that as state councillor he had been highly implicated in Nazi politics. ‘You cannot be in charge of the most effective cultural propaganda for an imperialist regime without being aware of the character of your position.’ He ended by admitting reluctantly that not every writer, actor or musician was able to emigrate – ‘and the concentration camp was understandably not to everyone’s taste’ – while maintaining that a culture rebuilt by Nazi sympathisers had better remain buried.
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In his ‘Germany and the Germans’ speech the previous summer, Thomas Mann had grappled with the question of whether German artists should be criticised for attempting to rise above the political realities of their age. Klaus now answered this easily. But he was disingenuous in not accepting any notion of ‘inner emigration’ and in not giving weight to a German intellectual tradition that had created an artistic culture of ‘inwardness’ that made the notion of inner emigration far more possible than it would have been in Britain or the US: the legacy both of the later period of German Romanticism and of a nineteenth-century repressive political regime that sent many of its politically engaged artists into jail or exile. During these postwar years Klaus never publicly questioned his father’s stance, but as his son well knew Thomas had asked for the renewal of his German passport in April 1934, disapproving of Nazism but believing it was possible to live quietly amid a dictatorship.

In his wartime autobiography Klaus had admitted to the youthful folly of apoliticism. For many years he, like most of his artistic contemporaries, had found politics ‘void and depressing’, refusing to bother with them. He had changed his mind, quickly and vehemently, but could he blame his former friends for failing to do so? It seems that he could and did. He went on to write an article called ‘Berlin’s Darling’
which was at once an explosion of years of hatred and a belated love letter to Gründgens. Here he takes a mock light-hearted tone in describing how smitten the ‘jolly Reichsmarschall’ was with the ‘delightfully demoniac’ actor; how the ‘fat protector’ appointed his new protégé as the ‘indefatigable, ingenious
maitre de plaisir
of Greater Germany’. But the portrayal of Gründgens in his youth is almost lyrical. Mann describes the ‘handsome, clever, glamorous, sophisticated’ young actor he once loved and the ‘nonchalant, iridescent charm’ that he once found so seductive. After outlining Gründgens’s various outrageously successful incarnations, Mann analyses Gründgens’s reaction to the ovation that greeted him every night: ‘Was he moved or embarrassed? If so, he did not show it; he just stood there and smiled – as attractive as ever, with white tie, pink complexion, blond toupee and all: the indestructible darling of pre-Nazi, Nazi and post-Nazi Berlin.’
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