The Bitter Taste of Victory (12 page)

In
The Other Germany
, Klaus and Erika Mann explained to their American readers that the Germans loved to stress the difference between their concept of
Kultur
and the more superficial western
concept of
Zivilisation
. Though they did not discuss it here, both the tardiness of their father’s own confrontation with the Nazis and his more problematic nationalist leanings were a product of this divide. In his
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
, published a year into the First World War, Thomas Mann had patriotically pledged his allegiance to the German war effort on the grounds that the war represented a conflict between German
Kultur
and the
Zivilisation
of the rest of Europe. He wanted Europe to be reorganised around German
Kultur
, which he saw as representing the spirit of ‘progress, revolution, modernity, youth and originality’. In 1919 he regretfully saw the British and US victory as completing the ‘civilising, rationalising, pragmatising of the West which is the fate of every aging culture’.
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In Mann’s case these were not purely nationalist sentiments. He hoped that German
Kultur
could be used to bring about a more unified Europe. But it is easy to see how this argument could be used for nationalist ends by others. It is also easy to see how the German elevation of
Kultur
created a society in which artists were able to distance themselves from politics and therefore to avoid speaking out against the regime. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this was partly because Germany was fundamentally a
Kulturnation
rather than a political state: a collection of separate political entities that shared a common language and culture. But even after the unification of Germany in 1871, Germany needed its artists to provide its national identity and those artists often distanced themselves from politics, partly because writers who dared to question the censors ended up jailed or exiled.
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This changed during the Weimar Republic, when the new atmosphere of political freedom brought on a new left-wing political engagement among German artists, especially in Berlin where it coincided with a moment of sexual and artistic experimentation. By the time that Hitler came to power,
Kultur
and
Zivilisation
were inextricably entwined, though it took a great number of German intellectuals some years to realise this.

When Mann pleaded for the supremacy of German culture in the First World War, he was pleading for culture and politics to remain separate. By the time that he spoke out against the Nazis in 1936, he was
aware that this had proved impossible. Even during the Weimar Republic, Mann had come to see the necessity that German artists needed to do all they could to support democracy in Germany.
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Under National Socialism, the German notion of culture as high art had become untenable when Hitler appropriated art for his mass rallies.
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Hitler and Goebbels’s
Kunstpolitik
made art serve politics and politics serve art. When Hitler attended Wagner’s
Parsifal
before going into battle, he was suggesting that war was a continuation of art by other means. If it had taken Mann some years to admit this publicly, it took many of his contemporaries a lot longer. Over the next four years the personal dilemma faced by both Thomas and Klaus Mann was going to be whether they could separate their fates from those of their wicked countrymen; whether redemption for Germany was possible and what role they as writers could play in bringing it about; whether remodelling themselves as Americans was enough to escape guilt and despair.

Mann’s new government shared his view that there was only one Germany, although governmental officials tended to be more prosaic in the qualities they ascribed to it. The twenty-first of May 1945 saw the publication of the ‘Directive to the Commander in Chief of the US Occupation Forces’ (known as JCS 1067), which was to form the basis for policy in the US zone. This document condemned the ‘fanatical’ and ‘ruthless’ German megalomania, stating in terms reminiscent of Mann’s that the Germans could not ‘escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves’. As a result, Germany was not being occupied for the purpose of liberation but as ‘a defeated enemy nation’. The troops were forbidden to fraternise with Germans and were to concentrate on denazifying and demilitarising Germany. Political activities of all kinds were banned and all existing schools were to be closed. Freedom of speech, press and religious worship was permitted, though any newspapers had to be licensed by the Allies.
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It was clear in the instructions issued to both British and US Control Commission employees that they were being sent in as enemy occupiers rather than liberators. A March 1945 broadcast to American soldiers on
the Armed Forces Radio Service informed them that after ‘a good clean fight’ you could shake hands with the opponent but that this had not been a good clean fight. They should not be misled into thinking ‘Oh, well, the Germans are human’ because the murderer and the cannibal were human too, but it did not make them humane. A month later an American training film entitled
Your Job in Germany
instructed recruits that although they would come across some ‘mighty pretty scenery’, they were in ‘enemy country’: ‘You are not being sent into Germany as educators. You are soldiers on guard . . . Every German is a potential source of trouble . . . The German people are not our friends . . . They’re not sorry they caused the war, just sorry they lost it.’

The British arriving in Germany were issued with the booklet on ‘The German Character’ that took Thomas Mann’s line in challenging the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans: ‘There are only good and bad elements in the German character, the latter of which generally predominate.’ The Germans exalted death rather than life and were maudlin, suicidal and sadistic. The booklet ended with a list of dos and don’ts: do give orders, be firm, keep the Germans in their place and display cold, correct aloofness; don’t try to be kind (‘it will be regarded as a weakness’), show any aversion to another war (the British must be prepared to go to war again, if Germany fails to learn her lesson) or even show hatred (‘the Germans will be flattered’).
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The enemy status of the Germans was formalised by the non-fraternisation rule enforced by both the British and US governments. Since first entering Germany, Allied troops had been forbidden from socialising with the Germans. When the Americans arrived in Frankfurt they were even prevented from speaking to the 106 remaining Jews. This policy was widely criticised both by the Germans and by Allied observers and seemed to contradict the desire to re-educate the Germans out of their allegedly maudlin, suicidal and sadistic tendencies. An unsigned article in the British
New Statesman
in April 1945 complained that it was impossible to re-educate a people without first establishing common ground. ‘Defeat and occupation give them their physical lesson. Now the spiritual lesson must follow.’ In May the Psychological Warfare Division representative at SHAEF, Richard Crossman, complained that
the non-fraternisation orders prevented the British from organising anything. The Germans were disappointed that the Allies seemed to have no interest in exposing them to the influence of the outside world for which many of them had hungered for years.
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There was no mention of culture in JCS 1067 and this accorded with the non-fraternisation orders. On 3 May,
The New York Times
had reported a directive from Washington for Germany to be re-educated with a ‘very austere programme’, wholly lacking in entertainment for at least six months after its resistance ended. ‘We are not going to try to make life pleasant for the Germans,’ the Director of European Operations for the Office of War Information had announced. Although several departments had talked about using cinema as a means of re-education, film, theatre and literature were deliberately omitted from JCS 1067 and it was left up to individual departments to work out a cultural policy.
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As far as occupation directive JCS 1067 was concerned, the reconstruction of Germany was a practical, albeit partly intellectual, act. Could the Germans learn to give up arms and stop terrorising the world? As far as Thomas Mann was concerned, it was a more metaphysical one, involving the purging of the German soul. Could the Germans learn to give up the dangerous pleasures of the sublime? For many of the Anglo-American intellectuals who were determined to get to Germany in the summer of 1945, the answer to the German dilemma lay in managing to make the spirit of Mann compatible with the spirit of JCS 1067. Mann might be right that the good and the bad German elements were inextricable from each other but in practical terms it was crucial to separate the Nazis from their victims. This was going to involve a lot of form-filling and red tape.

PART II

Ruin and Reconstruction

May–December 1945

4

‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’

Occupation: May–August 1945

Where Gellhorn, Hemingway, Miller and Dietrich had spent the autumn of 1944 determined to get to Germany chiefly as spectators, wanting to be at the fulcrum of the war and to see the land from which the Nazi evil was emanating, writers and film-makers including Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Jennings and Goronwy Rees went to Germany in the summer of 1945 aiming to help rehabilitate the country in one way or another. Summoned before the Joint Selection Board of the Control Commission in London the previous winter, Spender had suggested that as a British poet who had spent time in Germany in the 1930s he might be useful in helping locate and direct any new literary and cultural movement that would emerge at the end of the war. ‘Do you think that after the Nazis there can really be such a development?’ the incredulous interviewer asked. Spender was sure that there could be and that enabling it was as crucial as the rest of the Allied reconstruction programme. Initially, Spender was rejected by the board, but he spent the spring of 1945 trying to persuade them to send him to Germany, convinced that it would take people like him with an understanding of the German language and culture to make a difference in transforming the troubled German psyche described by Thomas Mann.
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In June, Spender’s friend John Lehmann would publish an editorial in his magazine
Daylight
, stating that if Britain had a ‘political mission
of reconciliation and restoration’ in ruined Europe, she also had ‘a cultural mission no less important’. In his view, Europe was to be saved by ‘an
evolutionary
humanism’, developed from centuries of civilising culture, and Britain could be ‘the guide and inspiration of such a humanism’. This was a view that Spender broadly shared, but in his opinion the evolutionary humanism was also already present in German culture. He saw the task of the British poet in Germany as being to remind both the British and the Germans of their shared cultural roots. It was with this in mind that he had written articles about Hölderlin and Goethe during the war, defying the lines of antagonism Orwell had described in his
Tribune
column by suggesting that the British were capable of contemplating the literary greatness of the nation they were fighting. Unlike Mann, Spender still believed in the possibility of the ‘good’ German and he now wished to make contact with the German writers he respected, to remind them of their shared humanist heritage and encourage them to write again. He would then persuade the Allied authorities to publish their books, thus encouraging a new spirit of tolerance and individualism among the Germans.
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Spender’s vision of the transformative power of art and of the artist as cultural ambassador was idealistic. But his broader belief that British and American intellectuals should go into Germany and talk to people was widely shared. On 20 May the German theatre critic Curt Riess published an article in
The New York Times
that acted as a call to arms for American intellectuals with an interest in Germany. Like his friend Klaus Mann, Riess had emigrated to the US in the 1930s and had spent the war as a war correspondent in the American army. On VE Day he was in Berchtesgaden, the site of Hitler’s southern headquarters, and he then went on to explore Munich with Klaus Mann. Riess was as frustrated by the German hypocrisy as Gellhorn, Miller and the Manns were, describing ironically in his article how after three weeks in Germany he had come to feel ‘the highest respect for Hitler, who evidently ran this country for thirteen years against the furious opposition, or at least the silent disapproval, of all its seventy-odd million inhabitants’. He was irritated with the arrogance of German businessmen who told him that the world had to do something for Germany,
implying that a world without Germany would not be worth living in. In his view, the Americans were faced with a long-drawn-out battle for re-education.
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