The Bitter Taste of Victory (54 page)

At the end of January a statement from Stalin intimating that he did not want war and would consider gradual disarmament was leaked to the press. He informed Truman that he would raise the blockade if the western powers postponed their planned meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers and lifted their own trade and transport restrictions simultaneously. Crucially this time there was no mention of currency. Distrustful of Stalin, the new US secretary of state Dean Acheson waited for a more definite proposal. In the meantime the Western Allies showed their strength by signing the North Atlantic Treaty (establishing NATO) assuring mutual defence against Soviet attack on 4 April. Truman, newly re-elected against all expectation in November, described the North Atlantic Treaty as a ‘neighbourly act’: ‘We are like a group of householders, living in the same locality, who decide to express their community of interests by entering into a formal association for their mutual self-protection.’ It did not make war inevitable because men with ‘courage and vision’ could still determine their own destiny. ‘They can choose slavery or freedom – war or peace.’ Later in the month the military governors approved the final draft of the Basic Law, which enabled the formation of a West German state with limited sovereignty but the prospect of becoming an equal partner in the emerging Western European democratic community.
Crucially, it took the lead from the Nuremberg trials in establishing a catalogue of civil rights, obliging the government to protect these for the first time in German history. The French were now sympathetic to the prospect of a strong centralised government in Germany, having joined Bizonia to form Trizonia the previous spring.
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The US and Russian ambassadors-at-large, Philip Jessup and Jacob Malik, were currently engaged in talks aimed at bringing the blockade and airlift to a close as quickly as possible. They finally came to an agreement at the start of May. On 9 May 1949, almost exactly the fourth anniversary of Germany’s surrender, the West German Parliamentary Council finalised the Basic Law. Konrad Adenauer gave a speech describing himself as ‘deeply moved’ that after sixteen years Germans were finally able to arrange political and governmental matters in ‘at least one part of Germany’ according to democratic principles. The next day the Russians published orders to lift travel restrictions on 12 May. Worryingly, there were still some petty limitations – goods trains were limited to sixteen a day and passenger trains to six – but on 11 May the electric current was turned on from the Soviet zone and Berlin was bathed in light for the first time in almost a year.

Just after midnight the British-American checkpoint opened on the Autobahn and cars and lorries began to drive towards the city. Curt Riess, still stationed in Berlin, described this as oddly comparable to a grand opening night at the theatre. Crowds including actors, beauty queens, writers and scientists flocked to the checkpoint, many of them in evening dress. Everyone cheered General Clay. Over the next few days food prices dropped swiftly and newspaper circulation soared among Berliners keen to read about the fairy tale taking place in their own city.

However, the jubilation was short-lived. Rumours started spreading about Berlin trucks not arriving in the West and on 20 May the Berlin railroad workers went on strike, encouraged to do so by Colonel Howley, angry because 15,000 workers were paid in eastern Marks but lived in West Berlin where they could buy very little for their money. The Russians instituted a state of emergency, imposing a ‘little’ blockade on Berlin. Only four trucks an hour could now pass into the West
so the airlift continued, albeit on a reduced scale, as the Russians drew out negotiations to end the strike. The war had been averted but Berlin was poised on the brink of siege once again, its subjects unable to return to peacetime complacency.

This was the situation that confronted Rebecca West, who now arrived in Berlin, accompanying her husband Henry Andrews who was reporting on Germany for the foreign office. They flew into Berlin from Hamburg on a plane packed tight with green vegetables and officials, and landed at Gatow with the sharp descent that had now become habitual for locals but was a shock for West. It seemed to her as though the plane was a ball, thrown up into the clouds by a giant child. ‘The ground rushed up and stopped just in time, while ears popped and silted up with deafness.’
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West had not had a happy two years since leaving Germany. Henry was becoming more incendiary, unreliable and humiliatingly unfaithful. He was pursuing a flirtation here in Germany, chasing a young woman who edited the Hamburg edition of
Die Welt
. West made no mention of Francis Biddle during this trip. She had recently told a friend that she had lived a completely celibate life for the past eighteen years, writing out the affair with Biddle altogether. But memories of those previous enchanted days in Germany must have collided with her present impressions, adding to her irritation. Her report on the country was not favourable.

She found that Berlin – usually the ‘loosest, least confined of any capital’ – had become a prison. ‘Everybody in Berlin was a prisoner. None was free, not even those who claimed to be warders.’ The Berliners were imprisoned because they were conquered, the Allies because they were conquerors and could not leave without an admission of defeat. She was as dismissive as ever of the Germans, whom she was convinced all remained Nazis, angry with Hitler merely for not being efficient enough in Nazifying the country.
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As a long-standing and fervent anti-communist, West was dismissive, too, of the Russians, and pleased that the British and Americans seemed victorious in the Cold War in Berlin. With ‘tired feet and leaking shoes, the watering of mouths over missed meals,’ the women of
Berlin had ‘learned with their whole being that justice gives a better climate than hate’. They had developed an allegiance to the ‘democratic faith’, changed more by the occupation of their city than they had been by the Nuremberg trials. In his report Henry Andrews wrote that the Western Allies should be grateful to the Russians for all they had done in alienating the Germans from the Soviet Union and turning them towards the West. Thanks to the Russians and their policies, Germany had been divided in two and young Germans wanted to side with their western conquerors. ‘In Russia they find no kinship. Our manner of life, our belief in the rule of law, our habit of respect for each other and arriving at a working compromise is what we have to offer. That is the pull of the West.’ The US and Britain seemed to be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Berliners.
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The new West German state was on its way to being established and, ballasted by American money, it promised to be both prosperous and popular. But West was right to be less optimistic than her husband, depressed by a city whose prison bars and jailers seemed in danger of extending their reach to confine the whole postwar world. This was a war and it claimed its casualties like any other. Seventy people had been killed by the airlift, while thousands of others had endured months of anxious worry and hunger. Outside Germany, onlookers including Stephen Spender and Thomas, Klaus and Erika Mann were more disillusioned than Henry Andrews as they watched their hopes for a new united Europe perish. The war might be cold but it was war none the less and it had not yet claimed its last victim.

15

‘Perhaps our deaths will shock you into attention’

Division: May–October 1949

When the West German Basic Law was passed on 10 May, Thomas Mann was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. He, Katia and Erika were on their way to London to begin a four-month European tour. Just before leaving the US, Mann had decided that his journey would include Germany. He was going to accept the prestigious Goethe prize in Frankfurt at the end of August and to confront the ruins of his former home in Munich. Erika hated the idea of her father returning to Germany and he found it distressing to disappoint her but after months of vacillation he had made his decision. As 1949 was the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth, Mann was already planning to lecture in London, Zurich and Stockholm on ‘Goethe and Democracy’, so it seemed wrong to talk about this most German of figures without visiting Goethe’s home. Mann was conscious of his declining health and advancing years and of his injured reputation in Germany. It was time to follow his book back into his satanically cursed homeland.

Just before leaving the US, Mann had given a version of his Goethe lecture in Washington. Here he drew attention not only to Goethe’s cosmopolitan European spirit (his belief in a ‘world literature’) but his enthusiasm for America, where at one stage he had wondered about emigrating. According to Mann, Goethe’s vision of America was of a
world of ‘naturalness, of simplicity and untroubled youthful vigour’ far away from the ‘age-burdened complexity’ and nihilism of Europe. And this was Mann’s America too: freedom-loving, outward-looking, democratic. It was an America in which both he and his children had increasingly little faith. The hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee continued, cleaving American society in half in what Mann saw as ‘a campaign against the memory of Roosevelt’.
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In March the dividing lines had been formalised at a conference in New York. The ‘Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace’ brought thousands of left-wing Americans (the composer Leonard Bernstein and the playwrights Lilian Hellman and Arthur Miller among them) together with Russian counterparts including the composer Dmitri Shostakovich to discuss art and politics at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Cold warrior Sidney Hook booked the hotel’s bridal suite and filled it with anti-communists including Nicolas Nabokov and the poet Robert Lowell, who organised a demonstration denouncing the conference as a Soviet front aimed at disseminating communist propaganda to the Americans. Arthur Miller later described how he had to step between two praying nuns as he entered the doors of the hotel. For Miller the conference was partly an effort to enable communication between East and West. However, it quickly became appparent that this had ceased to be possible, because there were no longer any political choices to be made: ‘the chessboard allow[ed] no space for a move’.
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Mann sent a telegram of solidarity to the Astoria conference and was chastised by Francis Biddle for lending his support to a meeting ‘used chiefly as a sounding board for communist propaganda’. He defended himself on the grounds that his doubts about the wisdom of America’s current foreign policy were shared by ‘a great number of mentally high-ranking and distinguished Americans’. A war between the US and the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe and it was time for intellectual leaders from East and West to debate the dangers of the present political situation on ‘a purely cultural and spiritual basis’. Mann could not see that there was anything problematic about applauding speeches by the Russian delegation. ‘What is wrong with treating the guests from
that great, strange country with friendliness and encouragement in an effort to show them that in America today there are still a great number of people of good will?’
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It was 1933 again and this time Mann was prepared to make a stand. He was aware of how much he had to lose in his relationship with Erika, whom he was now determined not to disappoint; and he was aware, too, that it was possible, even now, to uproot and resettle, though it would mean losing the home he loved. At the press conference after his Goethe lecture he claimed that as a writer, he could not be expected to dislike Russia. He could not renounce the great Russian novels that had helped shape his own; he could hate neither Russian writers nor Russian culture. And he went further, defending Russia politically as well as culturally, claiming that the Russians were ‘fundamentally disinclined towards war’, sincerely wishing for peace.
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For an exile who risked losing his prized American citizenship by expressing enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, these were brave sentiments to express publicly. Yet Mann was conscious that he could never go far enough for his daughter. She would have liked a complete repudiation of US foreign policy, a rejection of the German Goethe prize and a refusal to return to Germany until the Germans had ceased to allow themselves to be pawns in the Cold War. He could not quite do this. For one thing, the majority of his readers were in Germany and America. The German edition of
Doctor Faustus
had already gone into its second printing and the American edition had been respectfully reviewed (though some reviewers admitted to occasional boredom) and sold 23,000 copies within days of publication. As someone who lived in order to write, Mann required readers. So too, he was not yet ready to lose his influence in the US altogether, still hoping that he could help mitigate the situation. And although he had accepted that the new humble Germany he had hoped would emerge after the war had failed to materialise, he now needed to see what had become of the country for himself; to mourn the ruins he had recreated in
Doctor Faustus.
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As always, Erika Mann was more defiantly willing to risk everything for her principles. For her this remained the only way possible to live. She was also less disposed to equivocate than her father, able to
formulate definite opinions immediately where he had to feel his way towards them. The Americans seemed to Erika to be on their way to moral and political ruin, while the Germans were beyond redemption. In a lecture tour the previous winter, she had informed Americans that contrary to propaganda, Germany had not changed at all. Re-education had been abandoned; Nazis had been courted, favoured and employed. ‘Post Hitlerian Germany isn’t any less arrogant, any less nationalistic, any more democratic and any more trustworthy than was the Kaiser’s and the Führer’s Reich.’ But although she disapproved of his decision to return to his untrustworthy homeland, Erika was still prepared to accompany her father on his European travels, partly because he was now the only centring force in her life. The previous November, Bruno Walter had ended their relationship on the grounds that he wanted it to return to its ‘natural, that is, fatherly basis’ (in fact he wanted to embark on a new affair with the singer Delia Reinhardt). In Walter’s absence she became all the more attached to Thomas.
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