The Bitter Taste of Victory (45 page)

These students were similar to those Zuckmayer had spent the past two months getting to know, though at the end of January he had collapsed with a heart attack. Sartre placed as much hope in the confused young as Zuckmayer did. Later he wrote that the people he admired most in Germany refused to repent, saying instead: ‘We were against the Nazis, we fought in the war because it was necessary that our country should win and we refuse to feel remorse.’ In Sartre’s view Germany had not made a pact with the Devil. Indeed the Devil himself was as deluded an invention as the oversized flies swarming round Argos.
⁵²

Sartre’s visit had provided one of the last moments of dialogue between East and West. It was crucial in introducing existentialism to Germany. Members of Gruppe 47 found Sartre’s concept of responsible freedom inspirational and over the next three years most of Sartre’s books would be translated into German. Sartre like Zuckmayer had offered the young people he met a more hopeful future than that found in the demonic nightmare world of Thomas Mann. This was not a Germany that was tragically damned by its own arrogance but a Germany comprised of independent individuals who need only take responsibility for their own freedom.
⁵³

Having diagnosed the plight of postwar Germany, Sartre, Zuckmayer and Mann were not there to help the Germans make sense of their texts. By the middle of February, Sartre had gone home, Mann was reading reviews of his novel from California and Zuckmayer was recuperating from his heart attack in a leafy sanatorium, exhausted by his attempts to reconnect with his compatriots. The plays and the novel remained, much analysed and talked about. But they could provide little hope to a nation still caught in the grip of yet another perilously cold and hungry winter. ‘
Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral
,’ Brecht had informed the Germans 1928. Ultimately, the same would hold true for the Occupation.
⁵⁴

13

‘In Hell too there are these luxuriant gardens’

Germany in California: January–June 1948

For those who found
Doctor Faustus
and
The Devil’s General
too sanctimonious, there was another commentary on Germany in the making. Like
Faustus
it was being created amid the sunny palm trees and bougainvillea of California. Billy Wilder’s German comedy was now in production and Marlene Dietrich and her fellow stars spent the early months of 1948 filming in Hollywood. While her friends in Berlin froze in the frost and snow, Dietrich glided stylishly around a set of Berlin ruins newly created in an air-conditioned Paramount studio. This was one of the hottest Californian Januaries on record.

The development of the film now titled
A Foreign Affair
had been slower than Wilder had expected when he left Berlin in 1945. He had returned from Germany to witness his comedy
The Lost Weekend
becoming a sudden success, winning three Oscars including best screenplay and picture. With this behind him, it should have been easy to begin preparations for the new film but he was told by the occupation forces that Berlin was not yet ready for a film crew. Wilder now had enough experience of occupation bureaucracy to know that this could be a slow process, so he shelved the project and made
The Emperor Waltz
, a technicolour costume comedy set in turn-of-the-century Vienna featuring Bing Crosby yodelling in lederhosen. Wilder’s roots were in Vienna as much as in Berlin but this was an odd, escapist film
and it left him wanting to return to underground nightclubs and rat-infested rubble. By May 1947 Wilder and his partner Charlie Brackett had submitted their first full treatment for
A Foreign Affair
. That August, Wilder went back to Berlin to shoot the location footage, transporting all of his own film stock as there was none in Germany. He had not yet completed the script but he knew the ruined scenery he wanted to capture in that depraved and fascinating city.

Returning to Berlin for the second time, Wilder was even more dismissive of the Germans than on his previous visit. He was now here as an American movie director. After viewing aerial shots of block after block of Berlin levelled to the ground, the American assistant director remarked that he could not help feeling sorry for the Germans. ‘To hell with those bastards!’ Wilder shouted, jumping to his feet. ‘They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!’
¹

On the way back to the US, Wilder stopped off in Paris to persuade Marlene Dietrich to take on the role of Erika, the unrepentant Nazi singer. Since leaving Berlin, Dietrich had become involved in another film being shot in Germany. In 1946, Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City
had opened in Paris and Dietrich had become an instant convert to neo-realism. When she heard that Rossellini was planning to follow it up with a film set in the rubble of Berlin, she offered her services. She was now working as an unpaid translator for the film’s writer Max Colpet, breaking her fingernails as she taught herself to type on his portable typewriter.

Granted permission by the French occupiers, Rossellini had been shooting location footage in Berlin in parallel with Wilder in August. Indeed, Rossellini marked the ruins he filmed with chalk, wanting Wilder to use different scenery. Now Rossellini had taken his cast home to Italy where they were all so delighted by the availability of Italian food that they quickly put on weight, delaying filming while they dieted back to their original size. Dietrich was no longer required, which left her in need of a new project. She was reluctant to take on the role of a Nazi, even if it meant a return to the Berlin nightclubs of
The Blue Angel
and a chance to work with Wilder. However, Wilder was persuasive and had a generous salary to offer as well as an onslaught of
flattering charm. In the US, Dietrich’s daughter Maria was about to have a baby and Dietrich wanted her grandchild to be pampered in movie-star luxury. What was more, Wilder had already commissioned songs from their old friend Friedrich Holländer and, more ominously, he also had other actors in mind to ask if she refused. She agreed to take the part.
²

Arriving in the US in December, Dietrich moved in with Wilder at his house on North Beverly Drive in the middle of star-spangled Beverly Hills. Wilder and his wife Judith had divorced soon after his return from Germany in 1945 and he was now living alone in their former marital home, waiting to decide which of his mistresses to marry. For her part Dietrich had drifted out of touch with James Gavin and was between lovers, settling into the role of war veteran (she had been awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 1945) and soon-to-be grandmother. With Wilder she was somewhere between mother, lover and wife. She fussed about his health and made him laugh on and off set with jokes and stories about her sexual exploits in 1920s Berlin.

The easy bond between Wilder and Dietrich was a source of irritation for Dietrich’s co-star Jean Arthur, who played Phoebe Frost, a goody-goody American Congresswoman who arrives in Berlin to investigate the morale of the American soldiers and check they are not cavorting with German Fräuleins. In the film the James Gavin-inspired hero, Johnny, seduces Phoebe in an effort to distract her from trailing Dietrich’s Erika, who turns out to have been the lover of a Gestapo chief and to have giggled at the opera with Hitler before the German defeat ushered in a new group of powerful men and she conveniently fell for Johnny. On screen, Erika is brilliantly catty to Phoebe, deriding her schoolgirl hairstyle and her ‘face like a scrubbed kitchen floor’. Jean Arthur was as dowdy off set as Phoebe Frost was on set and Dietrich enjoyed exploiting her jealousy. At one stage Arthur appeared on Wilder’s doorstep where she accused him of burning her close-up at Dietrich’s request. ‘What a picture,’ Wilder complained, ‘one dame who’s afraid to look in a mirror, and one who can’t stop.’
³

Wilder was happy with the film that was coming into being. Unlike Mann’s sombre analysis of Germany in
Doctor Faustus
,
A Foreign Affair
is a brilliantly comic shrug of the shoulders at the impossible predicament of postwar Germany.
⁴
The film demonstrates Wilder’s ambivalence towards both the Germans and the Americans but the indictments are prevented from being damning by the film’s constant stylishness and humour, which makes even his most flawed characters sympathetic. Wilder had still not forgiven the Germans, whom he portrayed as opportunistic and unrepentant Nazis. But he could not see the American occupiers as much better. At the start of the film, one of the visiting Congressmen objects controversially to the blatant propaganda being put forward by the Occupation: ‘If you give a hungry man a loaf of bread, that’s democracy. If you leave the wrapper on, it’s imperialism.’ In the summer of 1947, when the film was set, this was just what the Americans, as much as the Russians, were doing. And Wilder’s GIs are no less corrupt than the Germans they are there to re-educate. They sell their morals and their possessions for sex with German women for whom they often have very little respect.
⁵

Johnny is attracted to Erika because she has been a Nazi, not in spite of it; their chemistry lends Nazism an erotic charge. ‘How about a kiss now, you beast of Belsen,’ he says to her in the original draft of the script, after he has brought her a tatty mattress as a present and she has spat a mouthful of toothpaste half-playfully in his face. By the time the film had been completed, this had been replaced with the milder ‘you gorgeous booby trap’, but there was still no mistaking the strange allure of her Nazi past. ‘For fifteen years we haven’t slept in Germany,’ Erika grumbles, refusing to be grateful. ‘No mattress will help you sleep. What you Germans need is a good conscience,’ Johnny replies, taking on the line of his government. ‘I have a good conscience, I have a new Führer now, you.
Heil
Johnny,’ Erika says, raising her arm in a Nazi salute. ‘You
heil
me once more and I’ll knock your teeth in,’ he warns, obviously aroused by her depravity. ‘You’d bruise your lips,’ she replies, and Johnny places his hands around her neck as he tells her that he ought to choke her a little and break her in two. ‘Build a fire under you, you blonde witch.’

As Wilder and Dietrich both knew, war makes monsters of men. Johnny is to be forgiven his flirtation with Nazism. It is to his
saccharine Congresswoman paramour that he explains that he has raced at a hundred miles an hour through burning towns for five years and is unable to jam on the brakes and stop. And luckily Phoebe Frost proves more forgiving of Johnny than Gellhorn was of Gavin when he excused himself on similar grounds. But despite Phoebe’s redemptive powers, Erika remains the film’s pulsating star. ‘That’s the kind of pastry makes you drool on your bib,’ one GI says of her, and it is a view Wilder encourages. Dietrich is lovingly followed by the camera as she wends her way lazily around the Lorelei nightclub, casually drawing on the cigarettes of her male onlookers. What is more, Dietrich was allowed to wear the same dresses that she had worn as a USO singer, identifying herself to Americans as one of them. The film may end with Johnny going obediently home to the US with his efficient Iowan Congresswoman but there is no doubt that he will be considerably less interesting away from Erika. And her scenes took Wilder and his audiences back to his own cinematic past.

Höllander’s songs, performed by Erika in the Lorelei nightclub, bring the spirit of 1920s Berlin to occupied postwar Germany, further complicating the viewer’s relationship with the Germans. ‘Want to buy some illusions?’ Dietrich asks a room full of people used to trading on the black market, who have long since given up their ideals:

Slightly used, just like new,

Such romantic illusions

And they’re all about you.

I’d sell them all for a penny,

They make pretty souvenirs.

Take my lovely illusions,

Some for laughs, some for tears.

These songs imbue the ruins of Berlin with the tragedy, nonchalance and sultry eroticism of its Weimar roots, especially as Dietrich sings ‘Falling in Love again’, the English version of the Holländer song (‘
Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt
’) that had become her theme tune in
The Blue Angel
. What is more, Höllander himself plays the piano
at the Lorelei; at one stage Dietrich removes a cigarette from Johnny’s mouth to place it in his. It is as though he has been sitting at the piano in a seedy Berlin basement since the time of
The Blue Angel
, when he played an almost identical part. Like Mann in
Doctor Faustus
, Wilder was nostalgic for the lost Germany of his own youth: for a German culture that both saw as containing the seeds of Nazism but that neither could revoke because they remained aware that it had shaped them.

If Wilder allied himself with the Germans through his nostalgia for Weimar culture, he also provided the Americans with the most vivid depiction most of them would have seen of the wreckage of Berlin. How could they not feel sorry for the Germans after seeing aerial footage of street after street of hollowed out façades? Wry asides like ‘that pile of stone over there was the Adlon hotel just after the 8th air force checked in for the weekend’ serve to remind us of the casualness with which these buildings were destroyed. Johnny asks Phoebe if she really wants the Americans ‘to stand there on the blackened rubble of what used to be a corner of what used to be a street with an open sample case of assorted freedoms waving the flag and giving out the bill of rights’. How could he not accept Erika’s defence of her own will to survive? She has been bombed out a dozen times; everything has caved in and been pulled out from under her – ‘my country, my possessions, my beliefs’; she has spent months in air-raid shelters crammed in with hundreds of other people; she has endured the arrival of the Red Army. Surely it is not the place of the Americans to come in now and tell her that she has been wrong to keep going. The rubble she inhabits makes this point more eloquently than either she or Johnny can.