The Bitter Taste of Victory (39 page)

In the US, the phrase ‘Cold War’ now gained popular parlance. That April an American statesman had announced that the world was ‘in the midst of a cold war’, repeating the phrase in speeches throughout the
summer so that by October a
New York Times
columnist stated that the phrase ‘Cold War’ had come to be universally accepted as the best description of the current struggle between Soviet Russia and the United States to shape the postwar world. Europe was explicitly divided and Germany was caught in the middle. And in the short term, this was beneficial to the ‘West Germans’ at least, enabling Gollancz’s aims to be achieved. Politically, the occupiers were now committed to the possibility of the ‘good German’ and the nation was going to be fed.
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Zuckmayer, too, could be satisfied with the situation. Culture in Germany flourished as the division between the eastern and western zones of Germany became more entrenched and the occupiers poured more money into funding cultural activities in their zones. The previous November, Hilde Spiel and her two children had joined Peter de Mendelssohn in Berlin, where he was now editing the newspaper
Die Welt
. Spiel was appointed as the paper’s theatre critic, which meant going to first nights up to five times a week throughout the city. After years as a housewife in suburban Wimbledon, she was enjoying the glamorous life possible among the conquerors, commissioning evening gowns from Berlin dressmakers. And she was impressed by the theatre, which she described as ‘the state religion in Berlin’: ‘In the midst of the most desolate metropolis in the world, among grey and bleached skeletons of houses, theatres of a splendour such as a Londoner might seek in vain at home still rise, and are rising again.’
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But if the Cold War was proving beneficial for culture in Germany, then this was culture primarily as decoration. The arts had proved a useful way for each side to show off to each other. The cultural competition found a locus in the cultural centres springing up in all four zones. The French Mission Culturelle, American and British Information Centres (known respectively as Amerika Häuser and Die Brücke) were founded in 1946, followed by the grander Soviet House of Culture of the Soviet Union complete with a plush, well-heated bar and smoking room in 1947. These provided platforms for library services, music recitals, film screenings, exhibitions and public lectures, often given by
visitors from abroad. The Americans hoped that their centres could be used to correct the popular image of Americans as gum-chewing philistines, with the director of education and cultural relations informing staff that ‘in spite of the great contribution which has been made by America in the cultural field, it is not generally known even to Germany or the rest of the world’ and that their task was to rectify this.
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One way to convert the Germans to American and British culture was to import books. In 1946 Goronwy Rees had been involved in a ‘British Book Selection Committee’ choosing which books to translate and export. They decided to avoid military and naval topics, theological books, philosophy (‘best to give it a rest’) and travel books. Over the next two years they came up with a list of titles by authors including Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy L. Sayers. Many of these books had also been available during the Third Reich but there was also
Post D
, a work of reportage about the destruction wrought by the Blitz in London by John Strachey, then an ARP warden and now the Minister for Food in Germany, and Christopher Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin,
with its accounts of the exotic nightlife and growing National Socialist tendencies of Weimar Germany.
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Meanwhile in December 1946 the Americans supported the German publisher Ernst Rowohlt in instituting a series of novels published in newspaper format with the friendly series title ‘Ro-Ro-Ro’. The first books were by Hemingway, Alain-Fournier and Tucholsky, inclusively bringing together the classical German tradition with contemporary French and American literature.
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Another way to publicise the momentous contributions of Americans in the cultural field was to invite influential artists to come to demonstrate those achievements. It was even better if the emissaries were Germans who could tell their former compatriots about the new cultural vitality they had found in the land of the free. Zuckmayer had advocated visits from Americans hoping that these could enable mutual understanding rather than being used as propaganda exercises. Now the visitors were invited with more didactic aims and few were as forgiving of their former compatriots as Zuckmayer.

At the end of May 1947 the composer Paul Hindemith arrived in Frankfurt from the US, where he had emigrated via Switzerland in 1940 when it became obvious that his music was too avant-garde for Hitler’s Germany. During the war he had heard almost nothing from Germany, where his music was unofficially banned. In 1940 he had applied for American citizenship, learning off by heart the official booklet on the US constitution and way of life. Then just before the war ended news of family and friends began to arrive and Hindemith learnt that his mother was still alive. Almost immediately, he was bombarded with calls for his return, which he answered with similar scepticism to Thomas Mann. He told his publisher that it seemed too soon to achieve anything worthwhile in Germany: ‘whoever is given the power to try and clean out the pigsty will simply be and remain the pigsty-cleaner, and the really constructive work can only be done by his successor’. He was suspicious of the tales of woe and adulation that he was sent on a daily basis, which all seemed ultimately to be over-entitled demands for help. Hindemith decided his best offering to future peace was going to take the form of compositions, and he set about writing ‘A Requiem for Those We Love’, dedicated to the memory of Roosevelt and the dead American servicemen. Meanwhile the Germans continued to pay homage by performing his pieces, though he refused to grant licenses in Germany for the music he had written in the US which he believed would ‘flourish much better in the healthier (if also not ideal) climate over here’.
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In April, Hindemith decided to visit Europe but to avoid giving concerts in Germany. He met Furtwängler in Switzerland, happy to forgive his former friend for his wartime compromises, and then went to Germany to visit his mother. It was difficult to keep a low profile; his presence was discovered and he found himself attending concerts of his work, uncomfortable with being treated as a returning German in a country where he no longer felt he belonged. A year later he was approached by the US Military Government with an invitation to tour the US zone of occupation in Germany and serve as a conductor and lecturer in their ‘reorientation programme’. This was much more acceptable to him and he was happy to oblige, wanting to impress upon
the Germans his reasons for shifting his allegiance to the US and contented to play his part in the cultural arms race taking place in Germany.

Culture was now pouring into Germany and it looked as though soon Marshall Plan money would be as well. It would be some time before daily life in Germany became less desperate, but there were signs that the Germans were no longer enemy aliens. In this climate it no longer made sense to be over-scrupulous in constraining the activities of German artists, so on 25 May 1947 Furtwängler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic at the American-requisitioned Titania-Palast cinema. At the end of a programme comprised entirely of Beethoven, the conductor was applauded for fifteen minutes.
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Reading about the concert in the US, Erika Mann was furious, complaining that even if the concert had been a success (which she doubted given they had only had two rehearsals), there was no need for such excessive adulation. ‘I cannot recall any exhilarating concert in Paris or London where the audience summoned the conductor 16 times.’ The applause seemed to her to be a protest against denazification. ‘The Germans never miss an occasion to emphasise their sacrifice and their survival and they do it in a loud and aggressive manner’. They would not have to protest for much longer. In October 1947 denazification would be handed over to the Germans altogether, with instructions to complete the process by the end of the year.
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Erika Mann was not alone among exiles in the US in looking on in horror as denazification was abandoned. The dream of a new Germany that had sustained them during the war had been trampled. In Germany, the more principled artists and writers asked themselves how they could bring into existence a new German culture untainted by Nazism. In August 1946 Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter had launched
Der Ruf
(‘The Call’), intended as an ‘Independent Journal of the Young Generation’, which became a forum for young writers calling for a ‘
Stunde Null 
’ – or zero hour – and a complete break with the past. They separated themselves from the older generation, partly as a way of
drawing a line between the Nazis being tried at Nuremberg and the young men who had merely fought on the battlefield, and maintaining that the German majority should not be tainted by the crimes of a minority. Andersch and Richter had been removed from the editorship in April 1947 by Americans who thought they were too critical of the Occupation. However they were now busy founding ‘Gruppe 47’, a relatively informal grouping of young writers committed to tearing away the past and reconstituting the present on broadly existentialist principles.
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Others focused on integrating themselves into the wider culture of Europe. The first step to gaining a European presence was the foundation of a new German PEN centre in 1947, under the auspices of International PEN, the influential writers’ organisation dedicated to promoting literature and defending freedom of expression. For years, German writers had been represented at PEN only by German and Austrian centres in exile in London and New York. In June 1942, the English PEN newsletter editorial stated that after the war it would fall upon PEN to reestablish ‘connections with the countries now cut off from free intercourse with the rest of the world’. The writer believed that organisations such as PEN would be responsible for spearheading the creation of a new European literature and, ultimately, for establishing a new European community. In this PEN would be assisted by the Free German League of Culture, which remained ‘a reminder of a German culture that has nothing to do with Nazi Kultur’.
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Unsurprisingly, there were writers involved in both the English PEN centre and the German centre in exile who were sceptical about reopening a branch in Germany after the war. A new Italian centre opened its doors in July 1945 but there was vocal opposition (especially from the Hebrew and Yiddish centres) to allowing the Germans to follow suit. However even in June 1945 at a PEN dinner in London, the English PEN president Desmond MacCarthy gave a speech asking what could remain of the Germany he had once loved, given that Hitler had ‘destroyed the Reich’, and the Germans following him had ‘murdered their mother Germany’. He provided the answer, insisting that German
music, the German landscape and, crucially, the German language, ‘will and must survive’ and that it was PEN’s duty to enable this survival. At the 1946 summer congress, the German group put forward a resolution to start trying to establish a German centre. That December the English PEN newsletter reported favourably on Gollancz’s ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign, reminding their readers of the ‘appalling intellectual starvation’ in the British zone in Germany.
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Now in June 1947 writers from across the world converged in Zurich for the PEN congress that would determine whether to open a new German centre. Among the writers present was Thomas Mann, who had decided to make this the focus for his first postwar trip to Europe. He was not yet ready to visit Germany. In a message published in the German newspapers at the end of May he had explained that he was fully aware of the ‘extraordinarily difficult and sorrowful position’ of Germany today but that they must not expect to recover too quickly after a catastrophe of this kind. He hoped though that ‘after two, three, or five years, the horizon again will be brighter and thanks to the inborn industry and energy, Germany will not need to despair about the future’.
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