The Bitter Taste of Victory (40 page)

When that time came, Mann would perhaps return; in the meantime, he went to London and then Zurich, accompanied by the now ever-faithful Erika. In Zurich, Mann made a gesture of allegiance to his broken homeland. He gave a lecture on Nietzsche and defended the German writers present at the congress (Johannes Becher, Erich Kästner and Ernst Wiechert), urging that the German PEN centre should reopen. Mann’s pleas were effective. The assembled members voted in favour of the Germans, opposed only by the Hebrew and Yiddish centres. The English PEN editorial described the decision as ‘a triumph for the spirit of internationalism’.
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At the PEN congress, there were also hopes that Germany would soon form part of a wider European cultural scene enabled by UNESCO, established in 1946 to construct the defences of peace through education, science and culture with the liberal biologist Julian Huxley as its director (though Francis Biddle was briefly considered for the role) and Stephen Spender as a literary councillor. Since the war began,
politicians from across the world had been demanding a federated Europe as a guarantor of peace. In 1942 Churchill expressed his hopes to the leader of the House of Commons that after the war ‘the European family may act unitedly as one, under a Council of Europe’. Just before the end of the war, Democratic Socialists recently liberated from the concentration camp at Buchenwald issued the ‘Buchenwald manifesto’, demanding that Germany should be reconstructed on a socialist basis and should co-operate with other socialist-governed states to form ‘a European community’ that would ‘guarantee order and prosperity’ for the postwar world.
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As yet, this could only take cultural rather than political form. In November 1945, at a United Nations conference in London planned to establish what would become UNESCO, Clement Attlee had argued that in order to know our neighbours we must understand their culture, through their books, newspapers, radio and films. Ellen Wilkinson, the British minister of education, had suggested that it was writers and artists, more than any other profession, who could reach across the barriers of frontiers. Representing the US (who deemed the new organisation important enough to contribute 44 per cent of its budget), Archibald MacLeish stated that the time had come to choose between living together and not living at all and that UNESCO had the power to foster ‘the common understanding of the peoples of the world’.
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These sentiments were echoed by Stephen Spender in September 1946 when he attended the first of a series of annual meetings called the
Rencontres internationales de Genève
, aimed at establishing a common ‘European spirit’. Since leaving Germany, Spender had worked determinedly in pursuit of a humanitarian, non-nationalistic European ideal. Now, speaking alongside European intellectuals including Karl Jaspers and Georg Lukács, he made a plea for the rebirth of Europe through culture. It had become clear that ‘success, prosperity, victory, power, aggression and even the spirit of invention’ were powerless to save civilisation. Instead what was needed were ‘civilising values’ which could be accessed through the artistic achievements of the past by artists in the present. Appointing himself as judge of a kind of intercontinental art competition, he announced that Europe possessed an unusually
intense concentration of great art and was therefore able to lead the world in this respect, if its citizens could realise ‘those values present in their architecture, their paintings, their literature and their men and women of genius’ through their ‘life, thought and deeds’ and illuminate the path from destruction to creative construction. He advocated a full consciousness of the horrors of the present, which would entail reintegrating Germany into intellectual life and inviting the Germans to describe ‘what they have suffered and what these difficult years have taught them’ from a position of trust and equality.
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Returning home from Geneva, Spender felt ambivalent about the conference he had just attended. He voiced these doubts in an article entitled ‘The Intellectuals and the Future of Europe’, published the following January. Here he complained that it was impossible to discuss European culture without entering the field of European politics and that as soon as they had begun to discuss the politics the delegates had found themselves disagreeing fundamentally. In particular there had been an impasse between Jaspers, with his vision of a Europe united by classical antiquity and the Bible, forged by people driven not by their loyalty to the state but by their individual conscience, and Lukács, with his communist commitment to progress, who had condemned Jaspers as ‘a broken man’ over-reliant on ‘social-realism’.
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For Spender, the division between Jaspers and Lukács was indicative of ‘the struggle within the European soul’ and it was a struggle that he located in Germany, ‘the true meeting-place of East and West’. It was not a coincidence that both Jaspers and Lukács saw themselves as German (at one point Lukács, though the representative of Hungary, had talked about ‘us Germans’). And Spender was hopeful that the struggle, if recognised as German, could provide both Germany and Europe with a mode of redemption. Right now the Germans were too occupied with practical questions of survival to pay much attention to spiritual questions. But Spender suggested presciently that ‘the day may come when this fusion of two ideas – liberal democracy and economic freedom – will take place within the minds of certain Germans’.
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In the meantime any meeting of the European intellectuals was going to be marked by a rift between communist sympathisers and
violent anti-communists; the notion of ‘the West’ was becoming meaningless because it existed only in opposition to the East. Yet Spender believed that the intellectuals should continue to meet and to talk because only then could they achieve what he thought should be termed ‘re-education’: ‘a complete Re-education in our conceptions of the relations of nations to each other in the world, of our relations as individuals to society and of our freedom as individuals’. He wished that they could meet not in Geneva but in Germany, where they would be confronted with the problems of their world. There they could be re-educated into a new vision of both selfhood and nationhood that would create the preconditions for genuine European co-operation. In the meantime there was a danger that such gatherings were merely creating a class of spoiled travelling writers going from conference to conference to air familiar ideas.
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Whatever his doubts about the efficacy of official European co-operation, Spender attended the June 1947 Zurich PEN congress as the representative for UNESCO, using this as a forum to make his hopes for incorporating the new German PEN centre into the wider European community explicit. Here he argued not just that German culture could be integrated into a wider European culture but that in the cultural sphere, Cold War politics could be transcended. While governments differed on questions of politics, they could co-operate in the area of economics, education and culture. In UNESCO and PEN there could be an interchange of ideas between East and West that would allow the whole world to be re-educated.
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Mann and Spender, pledging their support to PEN and UNESCO in June 1947, still hoped that literature could transcend political divisions. It should be possible for German writers to join PEN and fight for internationalism; it should be possible for UNESCO to protect culture from national agendas. But Spender’s time in office was to be short-lived. He stepped down from UNESCO the following year when Julian Huxley was discouraged from applying for re-election, now seen as problematically left-wing by the Americans. And the writers in the
German PEN centre were unable (and in Becher’s case unwilling) to distance themselves from Cold War politics.

During his visit to Germany, Zuckmayer had been hopeful that in artistic spheres at least, co-operation between the Americans and the Russians was still possible. He visited the Möwe, where the Russian cultural officers arranged a cultural reception in his honour, inviting governmental representatives and German theatrical people from all the sectors. But Zuckmayer’s own idealism made him somewhat gullible in this respect; in fact the Russian newspapers now referred to the Americans as ‘imperialists’ and ‘aggressors’. The following summer, political tensions became increasingly manifest in the cultural sphere. There was more overt anti-communist censorship in operation in the US zone. In August 1947 Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
was banned after a letter of complaint to the US War Department decried the play as communist anti-business propaganda. ‘Who is responsible for choosing communist Miller’s play?’ asked the writer. ‘Some innocent in the Army? Or some Communist?’
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The East-West co-operation that Zuckmayer had dreamt of was a casualty of the larger political process that had enabled the Germans to be treated as friends. Though the Cold War had proved useful in beginning the revival of both Germany and its culture, it would not prove beneficial for indigenous German culture, which from now on would be riven between East and West. On 4 October 1947 writers from across Germany came together for a writers’ conference where it became apparent that cultural freedom was a casualty of the new political situation. The five-day German Writers’ Conference took place in the Hebbel Theater in the US sector, organised by the cross-zonal Protective League of German Authors and the Kulturbund and including writers from all four zones. Opulent hospitality was provided by the Russians, who hosted a banquet for all the participants at the congress. Hilde Spiel later recalled the surreal and disturbing effect of the enormous table, groaning under the weight of bowls of caviar and seafood salad, in a city whose inhabitants were still visibly starving.
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The conference aimed to overcome the tensions between inner and outer emigrants and to debate the question of politicised literature.
Accordingly, speakers from across the political spectrum began by arguing relatively open-mindedly about whether or not literature should be politicised, with the novelist Stephan Hermlin complaining that the Germans who defended aesthetic impartiality were ‘beginning to bar the way back to reality’.
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However, the conference took place amid escalating international hostility. A month earlier, in response to the US plans for Marshall Aid, Stalin’s ideologist Andrei Zhdanov had declared that the Second World War co-operation between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had come to an end. The Soviet Union convened a conference of Eastern European countries (Cominform) in Belgrade to close ranks in the face of the American threat. The US authorities in Germany chose this moment to launch ‘Operation Talkback’, a new information programme aimed at using the mass media to counteract anti-American Soviet propaganda.
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These tensions intruded on the Writers’ Conference when on the fourth day the Russian playwright Wsewolod Witalyevich Wishnevsky (visiting from the Soviet Union) changed the terms of the debate by attacking the US, claiming that the world was now divided into two camps, one represented by ‘barbarism, by an ideology of hatred of humanity’, the other by ‘millions of simple human beings who live for peace, who fight for peace’ and urging German writers to find their place in the ranks of these simple democrats.
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Immediately, a short, young, bearded American assailed Wishnevsky with a thirty-five-minute tirade in perfect German. This was Melvin Lasky, an American Jewish anti-Stalinist who had been working as a journalist in the US before he became a combat historian in the army and was demobbed in Berlin, where he occasionally served as a conduit for Arendt’s food parcels to Jaspers. Now Lasky furiously insisted that the task of writers was to fight for cultural freedom. They had to condemn tyranny everywhere, not just in Nazi Germany, and right now that meant fighting against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.
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The conference could not recover from this conflagration. Alarmed, Johannes Becher insisted that a division of Germany along
Soviet-American lines would be a disaster that would threaten the peace of the world. It was absurd for German literature to be circumscribed by zonal boundaries. But it was too late. According to the Catholic conservative novelist Elisabeth Langgässer, ‘the whole meeting went up like a show of fireworks, and the following morning the parched brown grass was strewn with the charred remains’. Shortly afterwards, the Kulturbund was banned in the British and US sectors and had to vacate its premises on Schlüterstrasse. Its days as a cross-party organisation were over. A year after Gollancz and Zuckmayer had arrived in Germany hoping lovingly to feed the stomachs and minds of the German people, it had become evident that all sustenance would come sponsored by one side or other of the ideological divide. Writers could continue to dream of a united Germany and a transnational Europe but they were weak in the face of a political battle between superpowers that soon would turn Berlin into a war zone once again.
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