The Bitter Taste of Victory (47 page)

And she had lost not only her identity as a brilliant young woman but her identity as an American. In Germany at the end of the war she had enjoyed parading her yankee accent and mannerisms. Here in California she seemed impossibly German, although she had lost touch with the Germany in which she had spent her rebellious, talented youth. It seemed unlikely she would acquire fame of her own again; she
was destined to be known simply as her father’s daughter. She was an almost unknown exiled German spinster about to undergo a painful operation in which she would lose her womb.

Ensconced in this world of mutual care, the Manns in San Remo Drive were uneasily aware of the critical situation in Germany. Thomas Mann now experienced the world on three planes. There was his own, domestic corporeal world; there was Germany, where he remained as involved in the intellectual life as ever; and there was America, where he watched unhappily as the Soviet Union became the enemy and Germany and liberalism seemed destined to become casualties of a new war.

News from Germany reached him daily in the form of reviews and letters about
Faustus.
He cared about the responses to
Faustus
more than he had ever cared about his reviews before. In December, Erika had told Lotte Walter that her father was ‘as excited and curious as a naughty child before Christmas’. And Christmas fulfilled its promise. ‘The files are swelling,’ Mann boasted in his diary at the end of January 1948; ‘no day seems to pass without a positive response to the book’, he announced three days later. The Germans were now asking vociferously for their own edition. These letters and articles were primarily literary so he learned about the political affairs in Germany chiefly from the American newspapers and radio. The unashamed anti-communist bias made the news all the more distressing, leaving him fearful that the ignorant intransigence of both sides would lead the world into a third world war.
¹⁷

Mann had been becoming gradually more ambivalent about the US since Roosevelt’s death in 1945. ‘It will no longer be the America we came to,’ he wrote presciently in his diary in April 1945. The victory of the Republicans in the November 1946 mid-term election left him ‘sick and tired’ and in his view the Truman Doctrine speech in March 1947 was ‘catastrophic’, showing that the Americans were completely failing to understand communism or to see that Russia did not want war. Interviewed in May 1947 he said that in Roosevelt’s absence it was now left to Britain to pioneer ‘the unification of socialism and freedom
which the world badly needs right now’; America had failed to set an example. Later that year the German composer Hanns Eisler (a collaborator of Brecht’s who was now very successful in Hollywood) was tried by the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee, which described him as being ‘the Karl Marx of Music’ and a Soviet agent. Mann was horrified. ‘Feel unnerved by the vanishing sense of justness in this country, the reign of fascist power.’ But still he wrote to friends optimistically that this was merely a period of ‘moral relaxation’. Surely the Americans were too uneasy about their unpopularity in the rest of the world to continue this course of action. With their ‘idiotic and unlawful’ attack on Hollywood the committee might have dug its own grave.
¹⁸

In fact the anti-communist rhetoric in the US flared in the early months of 1948, stoked by Soviet aggression in Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the start of January, the US and Britain put forward a proposal for a new economic government in the Bizone. There would be a two-house legislature and a nine-man supreme court. The Russians responded with a truculent editorial in the
Tägliche Rundschau
announcing that the western powers had divided Germany and in effect nullified four-power rule; there was no room in Berlin for people who took that attitude. The British and American military governors in Germany immediately both announced that they had no plans to withdraw from Berlin.

On 12 January the Russians courted further anger by seizing five Americans, including General Lucius Clay’s special advisor on cultural matters, and holding them in custody for three hours – supposedly for taking photographs while peering into the window of an art shop, although none of them possessed a camera. In London the deputy prime minister Herbert Morrison called on Soviet Russia to discard its ‘provocative policies’ which were impeding economic recovery and ‘running the risk of war’. More defiantly, George P. Hays, the American deputy military governor, said that the Americans would not be forced out. ‘The Russians like to think that Berlin is a Soviet Zone City. It is not.’ Speculating about what the Western Allies would do if the Russians were to cut off all transport to Berlin, he said that ‘in extreme
emergency we could even fly in enough supplies for ourselves’ though it would then be the responsibility of the Russians to feed the Germans in the western sectors. ‘Americans and English refuse to leave Berlin,’ Mann reported; ‘Reds succumb in war of nervs [
sic
]. That is they reject the idea of war.’
¹⁹

In London, Parliament reopened after a recess on 20 January 1948 and the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin gave a speech shortly afterwards announcing that the time was ripe for a consolidation of Western Europe and that if the present division continued it would be by the act and will of the Soviets. He commended America as a ‘young, vigorous, democratic people’ moved by goodwill and generosity. Unsurprisingly, the American newspapers responded favourably to Bevin’s speech, but Mann found it excessive. ‘Again I see Russia being ousted from Germany and a German Europe,’ he complained.
²⁰

The next couple of months were dominated by a crisis in Palestine, where the Jews and the Arabs were arming against each other in the absence of clear directions from the US, Britain or the United Nations. The British mandate in Palestine was due to end in May and it was very unclear whether the country could or should be partitioned. On 9 February, Mann wrote in his diary that ‘15,000 well-armed Arabs are threatening the Jews in Palestine who seem to be facing annihilation once more under the eyes of the wretched UN. Democracy! Only in Socialism does it seem to take on a morally sound existence.’ The Palestinian crisis was then overshadowed by the news from Czechoslovakia, where the Communist Party, backed by the Soviet Union, forced President Edvard Beneš to accept the resignations of all non-communist members and seized control of the government. Two weeks after the coup the only remaining non-communist senior minister, Jan Masaryk, was found dead dressed only in his pyjamas in the courtyard below his apartment in the foreign ministry, where he had jumped or been pushed. ‘Of course this affair is exploited here,’ Mann grumbled, while distressed by the news himself.
²¹

The Russians were also making inroads into Germany, though here they were only keeping pace with the US and British plans for Bizonia. On 10 March, the Economic Council for the Soviet zone was
formalised and a week later a ‘People’s Council’ was formed at the ‘People’s Congress’, bringing into existence an independent Soviet-sponsored government in Germany. At the same time, another meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London was coming to an end. Ministers from Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the US had met in London at the end of February to make plans for the new ‘West Germany’. Reading reports from the conference, Mann noted in his diary on 7 March a British, American and French agreement to turn western Germany into a federal area of the Marshall Plan. Despite ambivalence from the French (who feared the potential economic power of a centralised West Germany), they had decided to authorise West German authorities to form a provisional government.

For Mann this meant that ‘the old gentlemen and Hitler’s sponsors will be reinstated as rulers of American money’. He was disappointed by the American commitment to forming a West German satellite state, partly because it would make war more likely and partly because denazification would be conclusively abandoned. For the Russians it meant American imperialism being imposed on Germany and was an invidious violation of the Potsdam Protocol (though the Russians themselves had been violating it consistently for years). This was confirmed on 17 March when the Treaty of Brussels was signed in Belgium and Truman made an incendiary speech to Congress on the same day. The treaty, also known as the Brussels Defence Pact, was the immediate result of the London Conference and formed the first step towards a Western European Union. It bound its signatories (Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) to come to each other’s defence and – crucially for France – committed Britain and France to keeping troops in Germany for the next fifty years.
²²

Addressing Congress, Truman praised the Treaty of Brussels as ‘a notable step in the direction of unity in Europe for the protection and preservation of its civilisation’. His speech came almost exactly a year after he had outlined the Truman Doctrine and it consolidated his earlier position. He claimed that there was an ‘increasing threat’ to democratic governments throughout the world and that the US was
committed to protecting the freedom of these nations. The Soviet Union did not want Europe to help itself. There were times in world history when ‘it is far wiser to act than to hesitate’ and this was one of them. Truman urged Congress to introduce military conscription and establish general military training in the US and to enable the rapid passage of the Marshall Plan.
²³

The Soviet reaction to these developments was swift and unexpected, though the focus on Berlin was no surprise. On 20 March 1948 the Allied Control Council convened for a meeting at the request of the Russians. Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, the new Soviet military governor in Germany, began by asking the western leaders to inform the Control Council about the results of the London meetings. They refused to provide this information on the grounds that the conference had been taking recommendations rather than making decisions. Sokolovsky was prepared for this. Tall, handsome, apparently imperturbable with forty medals arrayed across his broad chest, he enjoyed these battles of wills with the Western Allies – although beneath his bluff good humour he was an anxious insomniac, tormented by a leg wound from the Russian Civil War and exhausted by his hour-long nightly phone briefings from Moscow. He complained that as the members declined to divulge details of the London Conference he was compelled to make a statement. Rapidly and unintelligibly, he read out a typewritten statement announcing that the Control Council no longer existed ‘as an organ of government’, and then rose to his feet, declared that he could see ‘no sense in continuing today’s meeting’ and walked out of the room.
²⁴

Two days later the Russians cancelled meetings of seven subsidiary bodies of the Allied Control Authority on the grounds that the Soviet members were either ill or busy. The next day the western commanders refused to allow their subordinates to meet with the Russians, although the governments in London and Washington were anxious to stress that the real body of power in Berlin was the Kommandatura which was still functioning. ‘We are here by Allied agreement and we intend to stay,’ Clay proclaimed in Berlin.
²⁵

At this stage the Soviets moved to restrict flights in Berlin, requiring prior Soviet clearance for each plane. Thomas Mann was becoming
frustrated with the ‘nonsense headlines’ in the American newspapers. The
New York Times
protested that ‘from the very beginning of the occupation the Soviet officials have made co-operation almost impossible’. On 1 April, Moscow radio broadcast an article in
Pravda
claiming that the Control Council ‘has in fact already ceased to exist’ and that ‘the dismemberment of Germany has become an accomplished fact’. That same day, Soviet officers in Berlin announced that all trains and cars entering the city would be required to produce official authorisation. Any western nationals travelling into the capital would now have to submit their luggage for inspection and show identity documents at control points. Standing his ground, Clay sent a convoy of American troops from one end of the US sector to the other, shifting anti-tank gun and field equipment, and proposed to his government that they should be given permission to shoot if Soviet troops attempted to board his trains.
²⁶

The crisis was exacerbated on 5 April, when a Russian fighter plane dived into a British passenger plane (a scheduled flight from London via Hamburg) on the outskirts of Berlin, killing fourteen British passengers. Over the days that followed, the British and the Russians passed the blame up and down until eventually the British backed down and did not press for an enquiry.