The Bitter Taste of Victory (36 page)

PART IV

Tension and Revival

1946–48

11

‘Their suffering, and often their bravery, make one love them’

Cold War: October 1946–October 1947

In the autumn of 1946 two men arrived in Germany from England and the US convinced that this maimed and tormented world could be redeemed by love. Victor Gollancz’s ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign was flourishing and he was keen to see the plight of the starving Germans for himself. He wanted to use his experiences in Germany to persuade the British politicians and public to treat their former enemy with compassion. The German playwright Carl Zuckmayer had spent the war writing a play about Nazi Germany while sequestered with his family on a New England farm. He now wished to help his former compatriots by acting as a conciliatory emissary between his two nations.

This was the first time Gollancz had travelled without his wife Ruth present to attend to his comfort and assuage his anxiety. Although it was three years since his nervous breakdown, he was still physically fragile. He imposed nineteen-hour days on himself none the less, waking at 5 a.m. to make notes on the previous day. In Ruth’s absence he was sustained by manic energy and by his fervent love for the reviled. On 5 October, shortly after his arrival, he wrote a letter home from Nuremberg describing how even after hearing the nastier details of the horrors revealed in the trial he was suffused with love for the Germans
in general, ‘just because they’re despised and rejected’. It seems that if they had not done so much wrong he would not have sympathised with them so much; somehow all his revulsion during the months when he had imagined himself as an inmate at Dachau had prepared him for this time.
¹

Gollancz went from Nuremberg to Kiel and then Hamburg. After a year of reconstruction, Hamburg was gradually becoming more orderly. In the streets where habitation was still possible, much of the debris had been cleared and there were reusable bricks stacked against walls in neat piles. People had set up makeshift homes in former bunkers, air-raid shelters and basements and numerous tiny shops had sprung up in the surviving corners of buildings, heralded by signs erected in the grassy ruins. But there were corpses still concealed beneath the rubble. Many of the shop signs poking out of the wreckage announced the presence of nonexistent shops, merely marking the graves, of the lost life of the city. The cellars where people lived were cramped and damp and in order to survive most people busied themselves with the hunt for food, hiking for miles in search of potatoes. Visiting the city at the same time as Gollancz, the Swedish novelist Stig Dagerman found that he could still take a train at a normal pace for fifteen minutes through one of Hamburg’s formerly most densely populated areas without seeing a single human being or usable building. For Dagerman this was a landscape ‘drearier than the desert, wilder than a mountain-top and as far-fetched as a nightmare’. The view from the train resembled ‘a vast dumping-ground for shattered gables, free-standing house-walls whose empty window-holes are like wide-open eyes staring down on the train’.
²

Gollancz was better informed than most visitors about the appalling conditions in Germany, but he was still shocked by his encounter with this city. There were currently 100,000 people suffering from hunger oedema. Rations for Germans in the British zone had recently been increased to 1,550 calories per day but frequently the items that were meant to account for this ration (bread, cereal, milk and vegetables) were unavailable, meaning that thousands of people were living on only 400–1,000 calories (and Gollancz was quick to point out that 400 was
half the Bergen-Belsen figure). He visited a bunker without daylight or air where 800 children were being schooled with no food or materials. There was not enough penicillin in the hospitals and cases of tuberculosis had increased tenfold. Mothers leaving hospital with newborns had no cloth to wrap them in and no milk in their emaciated breasts.

The condition of the DPs was especially distressing. ‘It is beyond any possibility to describe their misery,’ Gollancz told his wife, though he was intending to find a way. Visiting a ship where 200 DPs had been living for six months, he found that he could not help crying. He did not have time to do a full survey of the DP camps but he was aware that the sites of all the former concentration camps had been put back to use by the Allies needing to house both DPs and POWs. The majority of the 50,000 Jews who had remained in Germany at the end of the war were still in segregated camps. In a 1945 report to President Truman, Earl G. Harrison (the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School) had complained that the Americans were now treating the Jews much as the Nazis treated them. Many Jewish DPs still had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb – ‘a rather hideous striped pajama effect’ – while others were obliged to wear German SS uniforms.
³

More recently in August 1947 the British MP Norman Hulbert had protested in Parliament about the number of Germans still housed in concentration camps, stating that ‘concentration camps is the only right and proper description there is for these institutions’. There were thousands of German POWs convicted without trial, watched over by guards who were former members of Nazi military units. What was more, many of these people had been children when the war broke out and were too young to have voted in 1933. Surely no theory of collective guilt could extend this far.
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Surveying the German ruins, Dagerman found absurd the tendency of journalists to dismiss desperation on this scale as ‘indescribable’: ‘If one wants to describe them, they can be described quite perfectly.’ Gollancz shared this view. As far as he was concerned, the role of the writer was to document suffering not, as in Mervyn Peake’s formulation, to avoid future war, but to change public opinion at home and effect
practical changes in the present. Immediately, he started writing letters to the newspapers at home complaining about the situation in the British zone. From Düsseldorf on 30 October, he told the editor of
The Times
that the condition of millions was horrifyingly ‘wretched’. He provided a detailed portrait of a starving man in hospital in Hamburg whose swollen scrotum reached a third of the way to the floor and of the ugly skin blemishes branded on children as ‘the stigmata of malnutrition’.
⁵

The newspaper received an onslaught of letters contradicting Gollancz’s statistics and reminding him of the suffering inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews. He replied on 12 November that the most horrible of his experiences had been a visit to the camp at Bergen-Belsen, where he had seen the tattoo marks on the arms of the Jewish survivors.

I am never likely to forget the unspeakable wickedness of which the Nazis were guilty. But when I see the swollen bodies and living skeletons in hospitals here and elsewhere; when I look at the miserable ‘shoes’ of boys and girls in the schools, and find that they have come to their lessons without even a dry piece of bread for breakfast; when I go down into a one-roomed cellar where a mother is struggling, and struggling very bravely, to do her best for a husband and four or five children – then I think, not of Germans, but of men and women.

Gollancz warned, as other visitors had before him, that this was not simply a humanitarian concern; it was also a question of whether the Occupation could survive in the face of German resentment. Hearing that the British government had announced that specially imported extra meat and sugar would be available for British subjects over Christmas, he complained that this would incite anger in homes where people were existing on 400 calories. British prestige was near the nadir, he told readers of the
News Chronicle
; the youth was being poisoned and renazified. ‘We have all but lost the peace – and I fear this is an understatement.’
⁶

Gollancz’s visit coincided with one of the worst winters for almost a hundred years. Unprepared for the cold, he himself developed flu,
though he carried on working regardless. Around him both the occupation forces and the Germans were terrified that Germany had neither the fuel nor the food to cope with sustained conditions of this kind. By November engines on every railway line were put out of service by frost damage; consumption of coal was cut to a fifth of its normal levels. To make matters worse, it was difficult to use the remaining trees as fuel because of the lack of foresters. Forestry had been a favourite pursuit for the Nazis and 92 per cent of the industry had been sacked following denazification proceedings. Cities throughout the country soon lay in frozen darkness and even the occupiers were unable to perform their work, finding that ink froze in inkwells and cups of tea iced over on desks.

Gollancz returned to London in the middle of November 1946 at the same time as Carl Zuckmayer arrived in Germany for the first time in seven years. Later, Zuckmayer would describe exile as ‘the journey of no return’. Anyone who left dreaming that one day he would come home was lost. The wayfarer might return, but the place he found could no longer be the one he had left; he himself was no longer the person he was previously. This was a truth Zuckmayer experienced painfully now, re-entering the country he had once taken for granted. His plane was due to land in Berlin but it was an overcast afternoon and they were enveloped in fog and rain. They touched down instead in Frankfurt where he wandered through the shattered Old Town feeling as though he was in a nightmare from which he could not awake.
⁷

Zuckmayer no longer knew anyone in Frankfurt, which was the first large city he had seen as a child. He did not have a single address to visit and could not be sure whether any of the people he had once known there were still alive. The theatres were destroyed; the debris crunched coldly under his feet; the fog shrouded the ruins with a pale, ghostly light. ‘We wanted it this way, and this is how it ended,’ a passerby remarked. However, there were people in Frankfurt who knew Zuckmayer and wanted to make his return less alienating. Checking into a hotel requisitioned by the US army, he was asked by the emaciated clerk if he was the same Zuckmayer who had written
Der Fröhliche Weinberg
(
The Merry Vineyard
). ‘Oh, what a pleasure you’ve come
home,’ he was told. ‘You know what? You’ll get a white towel in your room. We never give them out nowadays, see, because the soldiers take them. But you’ll get a towel and two pillows.’
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From this moment Zuckmayer was able to see the best in his former compatriots and to remain hopeful about the German capacity for redemption. Like Gollancz he was convinced that the Germans should be treated with kindness, though in Zuckmayer’s case this was because he retained faith in the fundamental goodness of mankind. On his second day in Germany, Zuckmayer rode to Berlin in a military train and was filled with pity for the town and its inhabitants. He rode past the bare Tiergarten and then inspected the ruined houses where inhabitants clustered together around slowly dying stoves. Initially, the house where he had once lived and where his daughter had been born seemed unchanged but as he approached he realised that it was now only a façade: a thin wall whose gashed-out windows opened onto nothingness.

As the winter became more severe, Zuckmayer shared Gollancz’s horror at the privation. There was no hope for old people or children who became ill. He visited the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, a brave man once imprisoned by the Nazis, and found that he was living in a frosty house with no medical care although he was ill with pleurisy and pneumonia. Suhrkamp lay in bed, hollow-eyed and pale, manuscripts piled high on his blankets, attempting to revive his publishing firm while nourished only by hot potato soup.

Zuckmayer was proud to be an American citizen, but he had remained far more identified with the German people than either Thomas Mann or Billy Wilder, perhaps in part because he had never really consorted with American intellectuals. In 1939 he had crossed the ocean with his wife and daughter and attempted, like so many other German cultural figures, to make it in Hollywood. He had hated life in this expensive, drunken ‘anteroom to hell’ where everyone had to pretend they were rich and happy. Instead, he managed to rent a farm in the Vermont countryside where for five years he chopped wood and milked cows, pleased to be a free man. During this time he alienated other refugees by stubbornly believing in a ‘good Germany’.
⁹

Initially Zuckmayer had been too numbed and exhausted to write, but one day he kicked aside a loose stone on his land and heard a gurgling sound resembling ‘a cry, a summons, a spring bubbled up’. Cooling his face with the water, he knew that a knot within him had been released and he would begin another play. Over the next three years he completed
Des Teufels General
(
The Devil’s General
), writing in German about wartime Germany from the safety of a landscape curiously reminiscent of the Vienna woods and the Salzburg mountains. His play is in part an attempt to see the humanity in Germans who had signed up mistakenly to serve the Nazis; it was a humanity in which Zuckmayer persistently believed.
¹⁰