The Bitter Taste of Victory (44 page)

When they did manage to escape from Lusset and his cultural programme, both Beauvoir and Sartre explored Berlin with customary energy. Beauvoir in particular wanted to see the corners of the city that other visitors would find irrelevant and she was distressed by the scenes that confronted her. ‘You feel worst if you are on the occupating side,’ she told Algren. The luxurious meals lost their flavour when she knew that people around her were starving. ‘You cannot fancy how sad and deserted these places are, how sad and forlorn all the people look here.’ The faces in the streets were grey with hunger; cripples and amputees carried bits of wood on their backs or in carts.
⁴⁰

Surrounded by poverty, Beauvoir was furious because she had to wear an evening dress to watch a performance of
The Flies
. She found the idea of it humiliating; it made her feel that she belonged ‘to the woman gang and to the bourgeoisie’. As she had not brought a gown with her, she had to borrow one from a ‘big ugly woman’. It seemed to her that given that the German women themselves had no evening dresses, the conquerors wore them primarily to show off what it meant not to be
German. ‘It seems very bad to be French here; very bad to be American too, very bad to be Russian, and it does not seem better to be German.’
⁴¹

Because of its location in the US sector, the Hebbel Theater generally put on American plays. It was now the most important theatre in Berlin and the right place for the French to stage a performance they wanted to cause a sensation. Arriving, Beauvoir and Sartre were staggered by the queues of people trying to buy tickets. They heard that there were Germans prepared to give 500 to 1,000 marks for one seat (when the average German was living on 300 marks a month) and that some theatregoers had paid with two geese. The popularity of the play was partly the result of controversy. During the run of the Gründgens production in Düsselorf, Dymschitz had published an article warning the Berliners against staging a play that rehashed reactionary individualism garbed in the rags of modernism.
⁴²
The Russians had threatened to boycott the production, but in fact from the start it had been attended by dignitaries from all four sectors and had proved popular with both critics and audiences.

Sartre’s modern adaptation of the Greek Electra myth had been transformed by its celebrated director Jürgen Fehling from sparse allegory to expressionist nightmare, with the set attempting literal depictions of hell. The stage was dominated by a black sun; the houses of Argos were blocks of concrete and Jupiter’s statue a phallic totem. And the exaggerated set was reflected by hysterical acting. Both Sartre and Beauvoir hated the production. ‘Nobody can do such ugly things as Germans when they choose to,’ Beauvoir complained to Algren; ‘the actors were always screaming, sweating, and lying on their backs and rolling from the top to the bottom of some staircase: just an asylum of crazy people.’ But they were alone in their disappointment. The majority of Berlin critics hailed the genius of the production, while deploring the obscurity and boredom of Sartre’s text. Friedrich Luft condemned the play as ‘a demonstration of pessimism, based on bloody stench, pus, excrement, rubbish and the worst kind of disgust’ but thought that Sartre’s ‘arid and obscure’ play ‘bloomed in Fehling’s hands of genius’. Hilde Spiel lauded Fehling’s ‘major coup’ although
she found existentialism ‘neither true nor useful’. Most of the spectators were impressed both by the production and by the play itself, which seemed to the Germans to offer a path out of collective guilt.
⁴³

When it was written and first performed in France in 1943,
The Flies
served as Sartre’s call to arms against the Vichy regime with its rhetoric of guilty apology for the fall of France. Sartre wanted France to take back her liberty and wanted resistance fighters to realise that they could kill without remorse. The play opens with the return of Orestes to Argos, a ‘nightmare city’, where his sister Electra lives as a downtrodden drudge with her mother Queen Clytemnestra and her stepfather King Aegistheus. Fifteen years earlier Clytemnestra and Aegistheus murdered Electra and Orestes’s father, Agamemmnon, the previous king. Since then the people of Argos have been engaged in a luxuriant and self-destructive process of repentance, all pointlessly taking the blame for Aegistheus’s deed on the grounds that they did nothing to prevent it, indeed that they experienced a vicarious thrill. ‘It’s measured by the bushel, is repentance,’ Zeus tells Orestes, who is surprised that these ‘creeping, half-human creatures beating their breasts in darkened rooms’ can be his kinsmen. The gods have sent down flies as a symbol for the people’s remorse. Thousands of oversized bluebottles swarm around the city, drawn by the stench of carrion.
⁴⁴

Orestes feels both pity and envy for the people of Argos. He envies them because they have somewhere definite to trudge. He is free but freedom brings a lack of belonging. ‘That is not
my
palace, nor
my
door.’ Meeting Electra, he falls instantly in love, delighted to have found a sister and a lover in one. Electra is scornful about the ‘national pastime’ of Argos: ‘the game of public confession’. Orestes has arrived in the midst of the annual day when the dead supposedly roam around the city, berating the living who have wronged them. This is the time when the citizens plead for mercy: ‘forgive us for living while you are dead’. Orestes decides to kill Aegistheus and Clytemnestra to free both his sister and the people of Argos. Zeus is powerless to stop him because Orestes (like a good existentialist) knows that he is free, which makes him invincible. Killing his mother and her accomplice, Orestes alienates
his sister but liberates himself. Electra now takes on her mother’s remorse. ‘All you have to offer me is misery and squalor,’ she complains to her brother; ‘I bitterly repent.’ Orestes learns to take responsibility for his own freedom. ‘I am free, Electra. Freedom has crashed down on me like a thunderbolt . . . Today I have one path only, and heaven knows where it leads. But it is
my
path.’ He is now able to strip his people of their illusions and shelter them from the flies.
⁴⁵

It is easy to see why Sartre’s play was popular in Germany. The flies in Germany were multiplying by the day and the Germans were much in need of an Orestes to drive them away. In Germany ‘the game of public confession’ was an even more popular national sport than it had been in occupied France. And now the Germans were desperate to throw off the shackles of guilt that had been attached to them by the Occupation, tightened by the Nuremberg trials and made still more uncomfortable by the appearance of Mann’s
Doctor Faustus.

‘Please forgive us,’ the children of Argos ask, ‘we didn’t want to be born, we’re ashamed of growing up . . . We never laugh or sing, we glide about like ghosts.’ This is no more absurd than the role inflicted on German children by the rhetoric of collective guilt. At some point the Germans had to be allowed to move beyond remorse and
The Flies
seemed to offer a way to do so. ‘Germany is free, insofar as one can call a devastated nation deprived of its sovereignty free,’ Zeitblom states cynically towards the end of
Doctor Faustus.
According to Sartre, the nation may not be free, but its subjects can be. ‘I am free,’ announces Orestes; ‘beyond anguish, beyond remorse.’
⁴⁶

The message of
The Flies
was more sophisticated than many audience members or critics realised. On 1 February 1948 Sartre participated in a round-table discussion at the theatre with literati from all four zones. Sartre was welcomed as a philosopher, playwright and ‘
camarade de la Résistance’
, and asked to explain his views on repentance and guilt. Alfons Steinberger, a communist academic and the representative of the Soviet zone, suggested that
The Flies
was popular in Germany because ‘it administers a gigantic pardon, a summary general absolution’, and asked Sartre if he was aware he was preventing the Germans from recognising their responsibilities.
⁴⁷

Sartre explained that he had originally written the play to give courage to the French in the face of the Nazis and Pétainists who wanted to convince them that the Popular Front had lost them the war and resistance was impossible. Steinberger suggested that while the Nazis in France may have urged repentance, the Nazis in Germany had suppressed the consciences of the nation and it was the responsibility of Germany’s new rulers to restore morality to its citizens. Sartre insisted that the German people needed to look forwards rather than backwards. The Nazi crimes were now over. ‘To wallow in the past, to suffer the torment of it night and day, is a pointless, completely negative thing.’ None the less, in freeing themselves of their past and embracing the future the Germans needed to take responsibility for their actions. Repentance was a passive, complacent state. ‘Responsibility on the other hand can lead me to something else, to something positive, in other words to an essential rehabilitation, to action for a fertile, positive future.’ The Germans needed to be given unlimited freedom and unlimited responsibility. ‘You do not give a child his freedom if you put him in his chair and then tell him “you are free but for the love of God if you get down from your chair to get something then you will get a smack”.’
⁴⁸

This made sense in the context of Sartre’s larger philosophical theories, but to his interlocuters it was at once too complex and too simple a message. It was too complex to tell the Germans that they were now free to do what they liked but that they must take responsibility for their freedom. The difference between repentance and responsibility was a subtle one that spectators would not necessarily understand from Sartre’s play and few of them had access to his essays to elucidate it. At the same time it was too simple to suggest that the past could be forgotten. One of the other speakers pointed out that one man’s freedom creates another man’s captivity. ‘It is liberty that chloroforms and murders its patients. Your liberty is made of nitrogen.’
⁴⁹

According to Sartre, a truly free society would be one in which no one was free at the expense of others. But he provided no explanation for how this was to be achieved. ‘There has never yet been a society of free men,’ he admitted, ‘it is purely a matter of finding our route to a
free society.’ This was a dilemma that he had been grappling with, seriously and urgently, for several years, convinced that ‘my freedom implies mutual recognition of others’ freedom’ and that the authentic individual must honour the freedom of others. In his 1946 essay
Anti-Semite and Jew
he had investigated it precisely in relation to the problems besetting Germany, suggesting that given that the anti-Semite existed, like all men, as ‘a free agent within a situation’, it was ‘the perspective of choice’ that needed to change. Rather than removing the individual’s freedom, the philosopher (or politician?) needed to ‘bring it about that freedom decides on other bases and in terms of other structures’. Here Sartre sounded more like Germany’s occupiers, either Russian or American, than he sounded at the round table. But for whatever reason, he did not elaborate on these concepts now and he had chosen not to engage with the political situation of the country he was visiting. As a result, his ideas seemed impossibly idealistic in a society desperately in need of pragmatic restructuring.
⁵⁰

Beauvoir perturbed Félix Lusset by avoiding the pontifications of the round table to continue her exploration of the city. She looked for a café where she could sit, eat and write to Algren and found one where all that was available was a bowl of broth. Over the next couple of days she and Sartre wandered around together. Because they had no ration coupons they could eat almost nothing and they could find only muddy coffee to drink. ‘We felt in our stomachs what is Germany to the Germans,’ Beavoir reported. They tried to locate the house off Kurfürstendamm where Sartre had lived in 1933 and found that it was horribly damaged. She was distressed that there were no shops selling useful cheap goods, there were only luxurious clothing and antique shops because the Germans had sold all their expensive clothes, jewellery and china to buy food. ‘I never saw so much frail china and precious glasses and old books as in this miserable city.’
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Their most stimulating contact with German people was with a group of a dozen students, who told them about their daily hardship. The girls in particular moved Beauvoir with their poor stockings and shoes, limp hair and eloquent eyes. Perhaps they reminded her of the shabby genteel poverty of her own youth, when friends’ mothers and
servants were frequently attempting to bathe and reclothe the dishevelled young philosopher.