Authors: Giles MacDonogh
Wieland Wagner hoped to enlist Toscanini to come to the aid of the theatre and of his grandfather’s legacy. The Italian conductor had been volubly anti-fascist and was in good odour in the United States. The Opera House was an ‘unprotected shrine’.
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As for the Wagner home, Wahnfried, the ruined house provided a backdrop for American dances and summer parties. There were reports that GIs had been seen dancing the jitterbug on Wagner’s grave.
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With time it became clear that the Wagner legacy could be saved, providing it was purged of its flirtation with Nazism. Oskar Meyer, the new mayor of Bayreuth, ensured that some serious, non-Wagnerian operas were performed under the sacred roof, even if he wanted to send Winifred Wagner to a labour camp for five years. The three children who had remained behind in Germany were all tainted by Nazism to a greater or lesser degree. There remained only the émigré Friedelind.
If the Americans were not as active as the Russians in promoting culture, their zone was not a complete backwater. Prince Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein remembered seeing
As You Like It
performed by the Shakespeare Company - the forerunner to the Royal Shakespeare Company - in Wiesbaden. Later he saw Carl Zuckmayer’s play,
Des Teufels General
, based on the life of the Luftwaffe general Udet who committed suicide in 1941. Sayn-Wittgenstein became so enraged at the scene when the general is confronted by an SS officer that he leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Hauen Sie doch dem Schwein eine in die Fresse!’ (Go on, give the pig a punch in the gob!). His neighbour sought to calm him down in the local dialect: ‘Ei beruige Se sich. Es ist nur auf der Biehne’ (Come on, calm down. It’s only a play).
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Part of Zuckmayer’s job was to report on the state of theatre in the American Zone. He was impressed by what he encountered in Berlin: ‘with what seriousness, passion and enthusiasm theatre is performed in this undernourished and freezing city, how much theatre is fought for, attended and loved, spoken about and criticised - the whole gamut of artistic events and projects theatrical and operatic - and, thank God, free cabaret as well, [cultural life in Berlin] reveals a spiritual, intellectual and physical vitality that could not be stamped out by robbing the people of liberty for twelve years nor by the consequences of a collapse without parallel, nor by dividing [Germany] into four zones.’ Not only did Berliners appear to live and breathe theatre, they were prepared to forgo much of their paltry livelihood to attend. In the west you could see people with money to spare, but in the north-east, 20 per cent of the population attended performances, although the entrance ticket cost them as much as they would pay for a small amount of pork dripping or a few grams of butter on the black market.
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Looking into theatre meant liaising with the actor-director Benno Frank, who headed the music, theatre and cinema section of the ICD or Information Control Division. His assistant was the Eric Clarke who in civilian life had been the administrator at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. One, fairly unsuccessful policy was to make German troupes act translations of American plays that were seen to have propaganda value, but which offered no criticism of American life. Some of these were of undoubted interest, such as those by Thornton Wilder, others were less so - Elmer Rice’s
The Adding Machine
, John C. Holm and George Abbott’s
Three Men on a Horse
, Paul Osborn’s
On Borrowed Time
, Samuel Behrman’s
Biography
, William Saroyan’s
The Time of your Life
, Clarence Day’s
Life with Father
and Lillian Hellman’s
Watch on the Rhine
. The latter caused grumbling in Vienna when it was put on by Ernst Lothar with his wife, Adrienne Gessner, playing a leading role. It was a play about the opposition to Hitler, but the audience felt the author was uncertain of her ground.
The heavy-handedness of Allied theatre policy led to a conference in Stuttgart at the end of February 1947, when it was decided to allow German theatre more freedom to perform plays it chose and to direct them the way it wanted. There had been a successful interaction between the French and the Americans in Stuttgart, which is not far from the ancient university town of Tübingen in the French Zone. Newell Jenkins, the far-sighted American theatre officer for Baden-Württemberg, had encouraged these exchanges. Jenkins and William Dubensky were also successful in ‘liberating’ the theatres in Stuttgart and Wiesbaden that had been requisitioned by the American army. They were turned over to their original use. There had also been a successful exchange between the Americans and the Russians in Berlin, but that was once again due to Dymshitz. In the American Sector it was the Hebbel Theatre that led the way, while the Russians encouraged performances in the Volksbühne in their own sector.
The usual physical problem beset theatres in the American Zone: 60 per cent of them had been destroyed in the bombing. Added to the lack of premises was a paucity of actors and directors, many of them having either voted with their feet in 1933 or perished in the camps. Theatre was nonetheless best represented in the American Zone. The Western Allies controlled 70 per cent of the theatres, and in Bizonia the Americans led the British by six to four. A little bit of invention was necessary. In Munich the theatre had been destroyed, and performances took place in the Fountain Court of the badly damaged royal residence. One thriving part of the Munich theatre was the Schaubühne cabaret which was directed by Erich Kästner, the author of the Berlin novel
Florian
. The Americans made him editor of their
Neue Zeitung
.
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Zuckmayer also filed a report on the film industry in the American Zone. It appeared that Germany had become a dumping ground for Hollywood, and not enough was being done to help revive the native German film industry that had come under Goebbels’s control during the Nazi years and had naturally been used chiefly for propaganda. The German people lapped up the films they had been deprived of during the Third Reich - that is, all except the bigwigs, who had continued to watch them in their specially constructed home cinemas.
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German films were subjected to censorship, sometimes as a result of over-sensitivity on the part of the American authorities. An example of this was a film on the life of Louis Pasteur. It showed a group of Russian refugees being injected with a rabies vaccine. The Americans thought it would remind people of the experiments carried out in the camps and cut the scene. Such films that were made under the American aegis were often as tainted with propaganda as those of Dr Goebbels. They familiarised German audiences with the problems Jews faced in reaching Palestine, or the living conditions of DPs. Zuckmayer felt they should sponsor a film on the German opposition.
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Zuckmayer was present at a performance of his most popular play
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
in Heidelberg, and was surprised to find a small number of young men wolf-whistling. After the play was over he challenged one of them to explain his behaviour. The play had been particularly despised by the Nazis because it had poked fun at the Prussian respect for army uniforms. Zuckmayer discovered that the whistlers were mostly ex-officers and students, and in no way standard louts. They had gone to voice their disapproval of plays that devalued German ‘culture’.
Zuckmayer’s role was also to promote American culture and democracy, and he invited the hecklers to come to see him, and discuss whatever it was that annoyed them so much about his play. In Bavaria he was engaged to speak to some of the older children in a Gymnasium about the benefits of democracy. He was wary, however, of presenting his talk as such, for fear that the children would see him as a mere spouter of American propaganda. The children were by no means taken in by the American profession of disinterested benevolence. They wanted to know why half the seminars at Munich University had been closed. They also revealed that some of the children had been threatened that they would get their comeuppance and suffer ostacism and physical violence once the occupation was wound up.
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The author had to duck the ‘Gretchen Question’
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on his many appearances on the podium. Germans were well aware of the position taken by Thomas Mann, and of the intransigently anti-German pose struck by Mann’s daughter Erika.
Zuckmayer proved a remorseless critic of American policy until he was brought down by a heart attack in December 1948. He had always been adamant that he would not go to Germany to boss Germans around while posing as an American officer. He wanted to bring the Germans books, especially those (like his own) that had been banned since 1933. He was convinced that love was a stronger emotion than hate, and that the Germans needed encouragement, not the lash. He intended to make a film about the Nuremberg trials, but in this he was thwarted and pipped at the post by Stuart Schulberg, who headed the film division of the ICD in Berlin. He had disapproved of the way the trials had been run, and felt that the real trials took place in the hearts of Germans.
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There was at least as much enthusiasm for books as theatre, and the dramatist contended that if the publishers were merely given enough paper they could instantly sell everything they brought out. The Americans sensed this and created libraries in the form of twenty-six Amerika Häuser and 137 reading rooms. In Berlin-Zehlendorf, Zuckmayer discovered the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, who had run the illustrious house of Fischer before the war, and was to create Suhrkamp in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1950, one of the most influential publishing houses of post-war Germany. Suhrkamp had been allowed to move from Potsdam in the Russian Zone and set up in comparative comfort, although the frigid winter of 1946-7 hit him as hard as everyone else, especially after his pipes froze. Suhrkamp had had anything but an easy war. An opponent of Hitler, he had been tangential to the so-called Solf Circle around Hanna Solf, the widow of the last imperial foreign minister Wilhem Solf, and had been denounced by the same Swiss Dr Reckzeh whose testimony resulted in them all being thrown into Ravensbrück concentration camp and the execution of two of the set, the Red Cross nurse Elisabeth von Thadden and the diplomat Otto Kiep. He had been badly treated in the camp and sustained serious injuries to his back, as well as a near mortal inflammation of the lungs and the skin covering his ribs.
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The American Zone also silently (or almost) played host to Group 47, the first post-war school of German literature. The group was the brain-child of Hans Werner Richter, whose attempts to create a magazine
Der Skorpion
were snuffed out by the American censors. The aim was to turn their backs on everything the Nazis might have taught them: existentialism was fashionable, and the name of Sartre a leitmotiv in their discussions. Magical realism reared its head in the writings of Wolfdietrich Schnurre. One of those early movers and shakers was Nicolas Sombart, the son of the famous sociologist Werner Sombart. Every six months the members met to read their works in progress in various bucolic spots around the zone. Very soon the group began to attract some of the bigger names in post-war German literature: Alfred Andersch, Martin Walser, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.
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It is probably not surprising that one particular man in an American uniform was very interested in discovering illustrious fragments of German culture, and that was W. H. Auden. One night James Stern returned to hear Beethoven being performed in the
gute Stube
of the house he shared with the British poet in Nuremberg. It was a Herr Ledenfels, once the most famous performer in the city. Auden had picked him up somewhere on his rounds.
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8
Life in the British Zone
No German is
persona grata
with Mil. Gov.
A British officer. Quoted in Charles Williams, Adenauer, London 2000, 296
British Military Government
T
he British ‘element’ in the occupation of Germany was required to administer 23,000,000 souls. It was formally governed by a junior minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who was responsible for both German and Austrian affairs as head of the Control Office for Germany and Austria, or COGA. Originally this fell under the Civil Affairs Division of the Ministry of War, as the Foreign Office disowned it. Later, when Lord Pakenham was minister, he was given a room at the Foreign Office, which brought him closer to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, physically at least. The first minister was John Hynd, a former railway clerk and trade unionist, who had only been an MP since 1944. It seems his choice was suggested by the fact he had taught himself German. For obvious reasons his department was called ‘Hyndquarters’.
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He was shunted on to pensions and replaced by Lord Pakenham, a quondam Oxford don who was to achieve household fame as the Earl of Longford, campaigning against pornography and in favour of prisoners. The left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz thought Hynd a good fellow: ‘There is no humaner man in British public life,’ but it is clear that he also thought his humanity of no avail when those above him refused to change British policy.
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He had less time for Frank Pakenham, who made a speech in the Lords that was ‘a model of feebleness and futility’.
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The real problem was not the quality of the men the government put in to look after Germany, but the amount of power accorded to them to put things right.