The Bitter Taste of Victory (60 page)

As always, Dietrich succeeded in charming her audiences into amazed approval. She sang new arrangements of a series of German songs and revived songs such as ‘Falling in Love Again’ that had made her famous. She moved the audience with the uncertainty of Holländer’s ‘
Ich weiss nicht, zu wem ich gehöre
’ (I don’t know to whom I belong’) and ended triumphantly with ‘
Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin
’ (‘I
still have a suitcase in Berlin’). At the end of the first performance, hundreds of audience members including Willy Brandt leapt to their feet cheering. Dietrich gave encores for the first time in her concert career and was rewarded by eighteen curtain calls. By the end of the tour, in Munich, even standing room was sold out. Dietrich was now fifty-eight and the physical demands of her schedule exhausted her. She fell over in Düsseldorf and broke her shoulder, but managed to carry on by performing with her upper arm tied to her body with the belt of her raincoat, the courageous warrior she had always been. One curmudgeon did hit her with an egg but the German reviews were swooning paeans of praise. ‘She is a legend,’ the Düsseldorf
Handelsblatt
proclaimed, ‘fascinating as a woman of the world, of the intelligence, of the spirit.’
²⁰

The following year Billy Wilder followed Dietrich back to Berlin to make
One, Two, Three.
Like Dietrich, Wilder was now a world-famous star, riding on the success of
Some Like It Hot.
His new movie portrayed an American Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin named MacNamara (played by James Cagney) who is in the process of trying to sell Coke to some Russian commissars in East Berlin. He is sent his American boss’s precocious seventeen-year-old daughter, Scarlett, as an unruly houseguest and fears his career is in jeopardy when she secretly escapes to marry Otto, a dishevelled young German communist who plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union.

MacNamara’s efforts first to annul the marriage and then, when he discovers Scarlett is pregnant, to turn Otto into an aristrocrat, involve chaotic car chases from one side of Berlin to the other, and Wilder was determined to shoot in both halves of the city he now nicknamed ‘Splitsville’. However the Russians refused permission to film the scenes set on their side of the border. Undaunted, Wilder informed them that the East German border guards were visible in his footage of characters driving towards the Brandenberg Gate. Would they want western audiences to think that East Germany was a police state? Eventually the Russians consented and Wilder was the last westerner to film in East Berlin. But political events intervened halfway through, plummeting Wilder into the vortex of history once again when, during the night of 12 August
1961, the East German army closed the border between East and West Berlin. The next morning Wilder was outraged to discover that the beginnings of the edifice that would become the Berlin Wall had been resurrected in the middle of his set. He now had to hurriedly rewrite his script and to reconstruct the Brandenberg Gate and the Unter den Linden in the Bavarian studios where they finished filming.
²¹

Once again, Wilder used comedy to avoid either the isolation of despair or the cowardice of conforming to his new government’s current agenda. Like the radical young generation of Germans who would emerge at the end of the decade, Wilder did not forgive the Germans their Nazi past or allow denazification to have been a success. MacNamara’s heel-clicking assistant Schlemmer always insists that he knew nothing of Hitler during the war but then when his old SS commander reappears in the guise of an apparently respectable West German journalist, he
heil
s him automatically. There is a suggestion that all Germans are merely serving their new Russian and American masters with the same blind obedience that had led to the murder of Wilder’s mother and grandmother. But once again, his was the long view: he was able to laugh off the bureaucratic absurdity of communism, the megalomanic blindness of American imperialism, and the fascist conformity of the Germans by satirising them all in equal measure.

In the end Wilder was defiantly on the side of life. He had no wish to join Klaus Mann’s ‘League of the Desperate Ones’, or to walk over the cliff face that Gellhorn had confronted at Dachau. He may have done all he could to distance himself from the Germans but he shared the Berliners’ ability to crawl out of the ruins and carry on. Near the end of the film Otto suggests that the entire human race should be liquidated, distressed that the communists have turned out to be as corrupt as the capitalists. MacNamara’s reply is benign: ‘Look at it this way, kid. Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and Stripe toothpaste can’t be all bad.’ There was optimism in Wilder’s humour, as there had been in 1945, during that bizarre zero hour after the war when he had learnt to laugh in order to survive in a ruined and desolate world.

Notes

Abbreviations used in the Notes and Bibliography

Introduction

1  
Over 3.6 million German homes were destroyed: see Giles MacDonogh,
After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift
(John Murray, 2007), p. 1.

2  
Although they quickly became a ubiquitous symbol, the
Trümmerfrauen
were chiefly a Berlin (and Soviet zone) phenomenon. The Western Allies were reluctant to employ women for this task. See Leonie Treber,
Mythos Trümmerfrauen: Von der Trümmerbeseitigung in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit und der Entstehung eines deutschen Erinnerungsortes
(Klartext, 2014), pp. 234–39.

3  
These figures are from Tony Judt,
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(Vintage, 2010), pp. 14, 17, 26. See also Malcolm J. Proudfoot,
European Refugees, 1939–1952: A Study in Forced Population Movement
(Northwestern University Press, 1956), pp. 80, 158
–
59.

4  
The Wehrmacht is the army (literally the ‘defence force’).‘countenance of defeat’: James Stern,
The Hidden Damage
(Chelsea Press, 1990), p. 109.

5  
‘one of the great’, ‘a whole nation’: MG, ‘We Were Never Nazis’,
Collier’s
, 26 May 1945. ‘repugnant in their’: LM, ‘Germany, the War That is Won’,
Vogue
, Jun 1945, in Antony Penrose (ed.),
Lee Miller’s War: Photographer and Correspondent with the Allies in Europe, 1944–1945
(Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 166.

6  
‘a chaos of’: GO, ‘Creating Order out of Cologne Chaos: Water Supplied from Carts’,
Observer
, 25 Mar 1945.

7  
‘I guess Germany’:
Los Angeles Examiner
, 3 Feb 1945, cited in Steven Bach,
Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend
(University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 299.

8  
‘the people’: WHA to Tania Stern, 20 May 1945, WHA Archive.

9  
‘They burned’: BW as recalled by John Woodcock in J. M. Woodcock, ‘The Name Dropper’,
American Cinemeditor
39:4, Winter 1989/1990, p. 15.

10  
‘band of thieves’: PdeM to HS, Jun 1944, PdeM Archive.‘We used to have a vocabulary’: PdeM, ‘Through the Dead Cities’,
New Statesman
, 14 Jul 1945.

11  
‘for the eventual’: For the complete document, see ‘The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale Law School)’:
Avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade17.asp
. See also William Shirer’s discussion of the Potsdam communiqué: William L. Shirer,
End of a Berlin Diary
(Hamish Hamilton, 1947), pp. 95–8.

12  
‘Re-education’ was the term used in both the British and US zones to characterise what Rebecca Boehling defines as all the plans ‘intended to reverse the isolation the Nazis imposed on German cultural life and political consciousness and any authoritarian social and political hold over traditions from pre-1933 German history’. According to Boehling, re-education was to be achieved through ‘indoctrination, licensing, and censorship of the means of mass communication as well as numerous measures to democratize the German education system and reorient various areas of German cultural life’. (Rebecca Boehling, ‘The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe: The Case of the United States’s Occupation of Germany’,
Diplomatic History
, 22:1 (1999), pp. 57–69). See also Michael Balfour, ‘Re-education in Germany after 1945: Some Further Considerations’,
German History
, 5:1 (1987), pp. 25–34 for reflections on re-education from a British perspective.

13  
‘since wars begin’: UNESCO Constitution, signed 16 Nov 1945. For the full document, see UNESCO.ORG: portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15244& URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

14  
‘The Germans are not’: Brigadier W. E. van Cutsem, ‘The German Character’, 9 March 1945, NA FO 371/46864, cited in Patricia Meehan,
A Strange Enemy People
(Peter Owen Publishers, 2001), p. 55.

15  
For an excellent analysis of despair in, and in response to, Germany during this period see Werner Sollors,
The Temptation of Despair
(Harvard University Press, 2014). Focusing on a series of works of art produced in response to ruined Germany, Sollors portrays a country where both occupiers and occupied were caught in ‘a strong undercurrent of melancholy and despair’ (p. 3) and warns us against the danger of using hindsight to coopt late 1940s Germany into the hopeful story of the West German economic miracle. Similarly, William L. Hitchcock questions whether this can be seen as a period of ‘liberation’ in his book
Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945
(Faber & Faber, 2009).

16  
Other works that could be added to this list include Hans Habe’s
Walk in Darkness
(1948) and
Off Limits
(1955), Zelda Popkin’s
Small Victory
(1947) and William Gardner Smith’s
Last of the Conquerors
(1948), but these are beyond the scope of this book.