The Bitter Taste of Victory (41 page)

12

‘I’ve been the Devil’s General on earth too long’

Artistic enlightenment: November 1947–January 1948

The ‘charred remains’ of the German Writers’ Conference were not easy to clear away. Over the next few months anatomising the crisis of German culture became a popular activity. Melvin Lasky followed his speech at the conference with a gloomy ‘Berlin Letter’ in
Partisan Review
, bemoaning that life in the capital since the end of the war had been merely ‘a formal gesture of historic survival’. There was trade, traffic and city life but there was neither state nor culture; there was an intelligentsia but no intellectual life; there was a thriving theatre scene but the most popular playwrights were dead. The writer in Germany was not a free man because books remained censored by conquerors in all zones. The ‘semi-totalitarian dimness’ had given Russian and German Stalinism the ‘half-light it needs to have its own way’.
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Lasky’s was a maverick and incendiary voice but he was supported by several writers in Germany who saw the Occupation as stifling genuine artistic talent. Not long after the war ended Elisabeth Langgässer had grumbled that Berlin was ‘a vacuum filled with newspapers, magazines, and literary gatherings, a sheer collection of nonsense’. During her twelve years of ‘inner emigration’ she had found more time to produce real work than she did now. ‘Both culturally and materially, Berlin is one big mound of rubble. A dance of ghosts from 1928.’ Earlier in 1947
Jaspers had complained to Arendt that Germany was becoming a battleground for the US and the Soviet Union, ‘a garbage heap where all those people are tossed whom nobody wants anywhere else’.
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By bringing together all the contenders for literary greatness in postwar Germany, the Writers’ Conference had unwittingly laid bare the impoverishment of contemporary German culture. It was now more than two years since the war had ended but there was still no major work of German literature reflecting on the Third Reich. Writers did not seem capable of lighting the way to self-knowledge and redempton for the German people.

This situation would change rapidly in the months following the conference with the Swiss publication of Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
in October 1947 and the opening of Carl Zuckmayer’s
The Devil’s General
in Frankfurt in November.
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Written in the US by German writers who had only imagined the war-torn Germany they described, these works portrayed a country that was paying the price for selling its soul to the Devil. Zuckmayer’s and Mann’s explorations of guilt and responsibility chimed with Jean-Paul Sartre’s wartime play
Les Mouches
(
The Flies
), which immediately became the theatrical sensation of the year when it opened in Berlin in January 1948. Addressing questions of repentance and freedom in occupied France in ways that now appeared pertinent to occupied Germany,
The Flies
seemed to offer a way forward for the diseased nation depicted by Zuckmayer and Mann. What was more, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir themselves accompanied his play, bringing existentialism triumphantly into a Germany much in need of a new philosophy.

In November 1947, Carl Zuckmayer returned to Germany for the Frankfurt premiere of
The Devil’s General.
The play had been staged in Zurich the previous winter (Zuckmayer had managed to dash across the border to watch the first night) but had initially been banned by the American authorities in Germany who were worried that it would have a reactionary political effect, fostering a legend about the German officer class. This time Zuckmayer did not wear the uniform of Germany’s conquerors. He had resigned his commission and came
garbed as a civilian, accompanied by his wife. He was now convinced that although he had a home in the US, he belonged fundamentally to the nation whose language and culture he still shared.
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During Zuckmayer’s visit the previous year, journalists had asked him if he remained a German. ‘When becoming an American citizen,’ he replied, ‘one has to take an oath.’ As a grown man taking an oath, he was aware that this was a decision for life. ‘I am an American and will remain an American citizen.’ In fact the situation was less straightforward. Hearing German voices, walking through the ruins of the cities he had grown up in, he had known that he was a German, even if Germany could not currently be his home. Now it seemed more possible to belong there again.
⁵

Zuckmayer attended the final rehearsals of the play in the former Frankfurt stock exchange, refurbished as a temporary theatre. Another freezing winter had begun and the actors were cold and hungry. Zuckmayer smuggled food from the US army canteens to keep up their strength, happy to be in a theatre again. During the opening performance he spent as much time observing the audience as watching the action on stage. He noticed that the officers from the occupation forces were looking on sceptically, doubtful that the Germans wanted to be confronted with their own shame. But they were proved wrong by the ensuing surge of enthusiasm. According to Zuckmayer, the audience could not believe that the play had been written by someone who had lived abroad throughout the war. There were former German soldiers sitting side by side with victims from concentration camps, all apparently astounded to see their own lives played out before them. ‘The play corresponded to the reality as they had known it, down to the smallest detail,’ he observed somewhat immodestly.
⁶

The Devil’s General
is set in Germany in the final months of 1941. Its hero, Harras, is a general in the Luftwaffe, a brilliant pilot who believes that he can remain a good man while participating in the war, separating himself from the Nazis with occasional acts of defiance and ironic humour: ‘I’ve never dipped into the party treasury, never stolen anything from a Jew nor built myself villas from the proceeds.’ Occasionally he helps Jews, to appease his conscience, but he remains committed,
almost addictively, to the war: ‘The meaning of my life was always flying. I started out in 1914. And now I can’t stop anymore. It’s like liquor.’ Harras’s honesty is contrasted with the delusions of the Nazis around him. Eilers, a brilliant colonel and pilot serving under Harras’s command, believes fervently in the Nazi ideals. Indeed, it seems to be Nazism that bonds him to his wife in a passionate
folie à deux
. ‘Don’t question, darling. Believe,’ she tells her husband when he wonders if all this killing is necessary. The Minister for Culture informs Harras humourlessly that his province is ‘total mobilisation of the German soul’.
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Harras’s ironic detachment is enough to distance him from these false ideals but it also comes dangerously close to separating him from life itself, until he falls in love with a young woman called Diddo who is convinced that happiness remains possible. ‘I want to be happy!’ Diddo tells her lover, ‘Quite madly happy.’ ‘We need a whole world of joy,’ he promises her in return, now determined to live. Harras’s love for Diddo restores his own youthful humanism. He assures Lieutenant Hartmann, a young man who has started to doubt Nazism and to question the value of life itself, that life is more beautiful than it looks: ‘The world is wonderful. We human beings try like hell to louse it all up but we are no match for it – for the original concept.’
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It is too late for Harras to commit to the beauty of the world. Aircraft are being sabotaged and he is unable to track down the culprit; suspected of knowing more than he admits, he is taken away for two weeks of questioning by the Gestapo. Eilers dies in one of the damaged planes and Harras feels responsible for his death.

Throughout, Harras has tried to believe in the possibility of a ‘good’ Germany. At one stage he toasts ‘the true, the immortal Germany’ in which the wine they are drinking was made. But he is convinced now that Germany is doomed. ‘It’s laid too many rotten eggs for us – the house of mad Siegfried, the insane delusions of grandeur.’ One of the Jews he has attempted to save kills himself and Harras comes to see that there is guilt in inaction. ‘We’re guilty for what’s happening to thousands of people we don’t know and can never help . . . Permitting viciousness is worse than doing it.’
⁹

Eventually Harras discovers that the planes are being sabotaged by the chief engineer Oderbruch, a former friend who is now resisting the Nazis and working for Germany’s defeat. ‘We need the defeat – we must help it with our own hands,’ Oderbruch tells him. ‘Only then can we rise up again, cleansed.’ Oderbruch urges Harras to join the resistance in Switzerland. But Harras believes that his day has passed. ‘I’ve been the Devil’s General on earth too long. I’m going to fly an advance mission for him in hell too – in preparation for his imminent arrival.’ He abandons the girl he loves, convinced that he is too tarnished for happiness, and takes off suicidally in a sabotaged plane. Before he dies he tells Hartmann to have faith in a new kind of goodness. Harras himself may not know God but he has looked the Devil in the eye. ‘That’s how I know that there must be a God. He hid his face from me. You will meet him . . . go ahead and believe confidently in divine justice! It will not betray you.’
¹⁰

Zuckmayer may have had his own play partly in mind when he advised the American authorities to make a documentary film showing the Germans how men and women from their own midst ‘fought and eventually died for the path of liberation’. This was effectively the story of
The Devil’s General
and reviewers and audiences responded overwhelmingly positively to a play that suggested that even under Nazism individuals retained the ability to save their own souls. On the third night, Zuckmayer attended a discussion with young Germans. He was surprised how candidly audience members confessed to misdeeds performed under Nazism. ‘The hearts of these young people seemed to be wide open.’ Hundreds of letters now arrived opening with ‘I am your Lieutenant Hartmann’ and Zuckmayer decided to devote his life to talking to confused young Germans.
¹¹

Zuckmayer remained convinced that the German youths he spoke to were fundamentally redeemable and that the popularity of his play was proof of this. He believed that he was succeeding where the concentration camp documentaries had failed in teaching his compatriots a moral lesson through his art and discouraging fascism by revealing the possibility of another, individualistic and heroic, way. Others thought that this was naïve. The German film director Douglas Sirk, now in
Germany as an American, was sure that when audiences applauded the play they were really applauding the Nazis, pleased to see their uniforms spruced up once more: ‘When I saw the play, after the last curtain the crowd surged forward in the theatre and chaired the hero off the stage in his Nazi uniform and out into the streets. And in the streets people joined in the procession when they saw this triumphant Nazi uniform on the shoulders of the audience.’ Either way,
The Devil’s General
proved immensely popular with the Germans whose culpability it explored. It would be performed almost continuously in cities throughout Germany for the next two years.
¹²

In appointing himself the Devil’s General on earth, Harras is a peculiarly German figure. Since Martin Luther drove away the persistent fiend who taunted him while he attempted to translate his Bible, the Devil had been a familiar feature of German life, taking root in the popular imagination through Goethe’s
Faust.
Before the war, Goethe’s story had provided the vehicle for Gustaf Gründgen’s career-defining performance as Mephisto, which was immortalised in Klaus Mann’s novel. The Germans often prided themselves on their imaginative reach, their striving for knowledge and their fascination with death – all qualities that might lead someone to make a pact with the Devil. Now it seemed not just to Zuckmayer but to Thomas Mann that the nation had made a pact with the Devil and that its chances for salvation were doubtful.
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