The Bitter Taste of Victory (57 page)

In the lead-up to Mann’s visit to Weimar there were complaints in the West German newspapers because Mann had failed to protest against East Germany’s refusal to allow the ‘Society to Combat Inhumanity’ to visit Buchenwald, the camp next to Weimar which the communists continued to use to imprison enemies of the state. Asked about this by journalists, Mann defended his decision neither to denounce nor to visit Buchenwald. His presence in Weimar was intended to symbolise the basic unity of Germany and it would not be helpful to make demands on the East German authorities which they would be unable to fulfill.

On the way to East Germany, Mann stopped in Bayreuth, where he found that the last people to sign the guest book in the Bayerischer Hof hotel had been Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. He left sixteen blank pages between their names and his for the sixteen years of his exile. Exchanging his trilby for a more suitably socialist cloth cap, he then drove on to Weimar, accompanied across the border into the eastern zone by Johannes Becher. On 1 August the historian and former Buchenwald inmate Eugen Kogon published an open letter in the
Schwäbische Landeszeitung
condemning Mann’s presence in East Germany and claiming there could be ‘no neutrality in the face of inhumanity’. The 12,000 political prisoners in Buchenwald had no choice about the zone that they inhabited. This was ‘the terrible truth, and the terrible reality in all the occupied zones where we have to live’. They were not able to dwell either in a ‘unified Germany’ or in the ‘free German language’.
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That day Mann was given breakfast by Tulpanov, whom he found knowledgeable and urbane. They talked about Russian and German literature and Tulpanov spoke favourably about the developments in East Germany, saying that soon little interference on the part of the occupation authorities would be needed. Mann did not enquire further. If he was there as a cultural ambassador then his role was simply to foster friendliness between East and West. Privately, he no longer believed that he had the power to change anything in Germany with his pronouncements, although he still hoped that through his novels he could have an effect.

In the evening he was awarded the Goethe Prize at Weimar’s National Theatre, where 2,000 people crammed into the auditorium to hear him repeat the speech he had made in the West. Mann made no reference to the political situation of East Germany in his address and did not make his political allegiance as an American explicit, although he wore the tiny emblem of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in his buttonhole. He later claimed that he spoke as an American when he declared that in every social revolution the cherished achievements of mankind – freedom, law and the dignity of the individual – must be preserved as a sacred trust and passed on to future generations and that
he hoped that ‘out of the present crisis a new feeling of human solidarity, a new humanism will be found’.
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In Frankfurt, Mann had donated the prize money to a trust helping German writers. Here in Weimar he gave the money to a fund for rebuilding the Herder church, explaining that the government provided well for intellectual workers in the eastern zone, coddling those who were not persecuted. In East Germany, more than in the West, Mann was fêted as a celebrity, which he believed reflected a greater respect for the power of letters on this side of the iron curtain. There were crowds on the streets and schoolchildren showered him with flowers and garlands, waving banners in his honour.
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Mann returned to Frankfurt via Bad Nauheim and then travelled by train to Amsterdam. His trip was almost over. He had survived without haemorrhaging on lecture platforms or breaking down with sadness. He had seen the ruins that had so distressed Klaus, Erika and Golo four years earlier and spoken to the people whom he like Erika saw as stained with the blood of his son as well as of the millions murdered in concentration and extermination camps. Nothing he had seen had lessened his sadness, partly because of his sustained loyalty to Erika and Klaus, whose disillusionment the sights of Germany seemed repeatedly to corroborate. But he had faced something that they could not face, acknowledging his own troubled kinship with contemporary Germany at a time when Erika was unable to do so. Now he was too exhausted to read as he sat in silence, waiting for Katia to pack for their return to California. Finally on 6 August they boarded the
New Amsterdam
steamship bound for New York, where their cabin was large and practical and he could read on a bench on deck. Docking briefly in Le Havre, Mann wrote an account of his trip in his diary, thinking back ‘to the many adventures and the strange and varied journey interrupted by grief and terror in that vast room in Stockholm’. He had now received a letter from Erika who sounded stronger, though she had been suffering from swelling in her feet and legs. Soon they would be reunited amid the palm trees and flowers of California, heavier-hearted than when they had left.
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In the period after Thomas Mann left Germany, rapid progress was made in establishing both new states. On 14 August the first election
was held in the incipient Federal Republic of Germany. The two main competitors were Konrad Adenauer’s conservative Christian Democratic Union and Kurt Schumacher’s left-wing Social Democratic Party, which had dominated the Weimar Republic. Schumacher was campaigning for an economically socialist country while Adenauer was more sycophantically prepared to follow the lead of the occupying powers. In the end, the margins were tight. The SPD gained 29.2 per cent of the vote and the CDU 31 per cent. Some powerful figures within the CDU wanted a coalition with the SPD but Adenauer instead agreed to a coalition with the other smaller parties who had won the remaining third of the votes. In September, Adenauer himself was elected chancellor with a narrow majority and Theodor Heuss was appointed to the largely ceremonial office of president.

On 20 September, Adenauer made his first speech at the Bundestag in Bonn, where the West German parliament was to be seated, announcing the formation of the new government. The next day the high commissioners (formerly the military governors) met Adenauer for an official ceremony terminating the Military Government and replacing it with a civilian one. For the first time since the war, German officials were greeted with an official military salute by the US, British and French military police. The French high commissioner, André François-Poncet, informed Adenauer that: ‘Western Germany – we regret that we cannot say all of Germany – today possesses the means which should allow her to take the direction of her own destiny into her own hands.’
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At the start of October a new state was established in East Germany. On the seventh the People’s Congress proclaimed the founding of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), lauding it as ‘a powerful bulwark in the struggle for the accomplishment of the National Front of Democratic Germany’. Initially the Volksrat served as a provisional Volkskammer (People’s Chamber) and Grotewohl was charged with forming a government. The next day the Soviet military administration approved the list of senior officials constituting the provisional government and Pieck and Grotewohl were then elected as the first president and prime minister of the GDR. In his inaugural speech Pieck stated
that the German people were required to ‘smash’ the Western Powers’ plans and should not rest ‘until the unity of Germany is restored and all territories recovered’.
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Thomas Mann was at first relatively optimistic about the new West German government. ‘Could turn out well,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 September. But Erika was convinced that West Germany would quickly regain its excessive power and browbeat the rest of Europe into submission again. And Thomas too worried that Germany was renazifying and that West Germany would soon be fascist. ‘I seem to have timed my visit “at the very last minute”’ he told a friend. He expressed this anxiety in an article about his German trip published in the
New York Times
in early October. Here he described his ‘moral impressions of Germany’, where the majority of people seemed to live by the slogan ‘Everything was better under Hitler!’ and to lack any real faith in democracy. He claimed that the current ‘hapless constellation’ of Cold War tension favoured the evil elements in Germany while harming the good and then went on to defend aspects of East Germany.
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Explaining why he had decided to donate his East German prize money to the reconstruction of the church and not to the maintenance of writers, Mann stated that Russian communism was ‘keenly aware of the power of the intellect’ and that even the regimenting of intellectuals was ‘a proof of esteem’. He wrote with respect of the goodwill and idealism of many of the East German officials. One in particular in Weimar had impressed him with his hard-working integrity and his pride that East German reconstruction was achieved without foreign aid. Mann saw this as ‘a hint of the honour of the old Continent’ – a wistful challenge thrown out of ‘a Europe that could not be bought, that would no longer be the kept woman of the man with the big money-bags’. In his receptiveness to East Germany, Mann defined himself as ‘a non-communist rather than an anti-communist’. He refused to take part in the ‘rampant hysteria’ of communist persecution but was committed to peace in a world whose future had ‘long since become unimaginable without communist traits’.
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Not surprisingly, the article was received critically. ‘The fact that we are engaged in a cold war of ideas is of no importance to Thomas Mann,’ complained one reader; ‘He does not even say that he is opposed to the totalitarian state,’ said another. Mann found his waning popularity in the US distressing. Arriving back at San Remo Drive after his trip to Europe, he had described the ‘joy of home, joy of being safe and in the hold, away from the world that might go on screaming’, in his diary. In Germany, he had made explicit his allegiance as an American, urging the Germans not to underestimate the cultural life in America and lauding contemporary American literature. But as Erika struggled with the American authorities (who were making it difficult for her to obtain citizenship) he was wondering more frequently about moving to Switzerland, and he was doing his best to be as principled as Erika wanted him to be in speaking out publicly against his new homeland.
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Relations between Thomas and Erika remained strained. She was pleased with her father’s
New York Times
article but she was still devastated about Klaus’s death and angry with anyone who was not writing about her dead brother. She was continuing to devote much of her own energy to turning Klaus’s death into a meaningful event. While Thomas was writing his
New York Times
article, Erika was translating and attempting to republish her brother’s article about ‘The Ordeal of the European Intellectuals’. In October she gave a lecture intertwining her brother’s essay with words of her own, speaking in the dual voice they had once shared.
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Klaus’s essay elaborated on the themes of
The Last Day
, depicting the hopelessness of honest intellectuals in the postwar world. The English version published in
Tomorrow
just after his death describes ‘thinking men and women’ across Eastern and Western Europe as ‘a baffled, insecure group’, for whom the slogans reverberating in the air from Russia and America have a hollow ring. Many of them are looking for comfort in the ancient documents of Hinduism, the Bible, the writings of Lenin, or the existentialist philosophy of Sartre. Some have turned to communism and some to anti-communism but none can believe in progress. As civilisation tumbles ‘under the assault of streamlined barbarism’ they
find it impossible to describe or rationalise the nightmarish world of Auschwitz. The masters of the world stammer, able to subscribe only to T. S. Eliot’s ‘I can connect/ Nothing with nothing’.
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The longer unpublished version of the essay, which Erika now translated into German, contains a hint of the ‘Suicide Club’ that Julian wished to establish in Klaus’s novel. Klaus ends with the pronouncements of an imaginary disenfranchised student, complaining about the mess that has been made of the world he is to inherit. In the face of the desperate conditions around him, he suggests that a new rebellion of the hopeless is needed. ‘Hundreds, even thousands of intellectuals should do what Virginia Woolf, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig, Jan Masaryk have done,’ he says, advocating a wave of suicides which will ‘shake the people out of their stupor’, making them grasp ‘the fatal severity of the plague that man has brought about himself with his ignorance and egomania’.
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In the notes for
The Last Day
, Julian wonders about writing ‘a novel advocating suicide as the only decent and logical solution . . . the Werther of our time’ before deciding that ‘books don’t have such power any more’ and besides, he is too tired. Klaus was too self-conscious to see his death wish as straightforwardly political. Reading his diaries, it is hard to see his death as resulting from anything but loneliness, exhaustion and the frustration of failure. However in her talk that October, Erika paid tribute to the men and women who had committed suicide, lauding it as a brave political act. Having outlined the arguments of Klaus’s essay, she described the recent wave of suicides. Her roll call of dead intellectuals echoed Klaus’s list of Woolf, Toller, Zweig and Masaryk, but in a lecture dedicated to the memory of her brother, Klaus’s name implicitly headed the list. She stated that these people did not die for personal reasons: ‘not because they had failed in their own private or public lives’. Instead ‘they died because we had failed them, because we didn’t seem to have much use for them any longer’. They quit because the earth – ‘this particular star’ – had become uninhabitable. They were not ‘irresponsible cowards’. Instead their departure constituted a deliberate demonstration: ‘the most unforgettable warning any one person would be able to sound’.
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