The Bitter Taste of Victory (58 page)

Having exonerated Klaus, whom Erika, her family, Germany and the world at large had failed, Erika went on to make explicit the warning offered by these deaths:

‘Look out!’ these dead ones keep calling to us, ‘Danger! You’re on the wrong road, the road to barbarism and disaster! Our living voices proved too weak to make you turn round; perhaps our deaths will shock you into attention. You knew us! We were famous and successful, most of us, quite wealthy and well-liked in many countries for our talents, our intelligence and our personalities. Since we chose to throw away all that we possessed including our very lives, you cannot but acknowledge that something must be very wrong with this world of ours. Be honest, be brave, do admit the calamity to yourselves and the redeeming change will even then have started to occur.’

Seen through Erika’s eyes, Klaus’s death became a final struggle for a world that might have been; for the world that Klaus and Erika Mann, Stephen Spender, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West and Billy Wilder hoped to bring into being after the war. His warning was a warning to Germany in particular. The Germans needed to listen to his message so that men like Albert and Julian – men like Klaus and his father – could find a home there again. But this was Adenauer’s world now, and Truman’s; culturally, West Germany was the home of Melvin Lasky and Gustaf Gründgens. It remained to be seen whether there was still space for the old-world idealists. And it would be many years before the Germans heeded Klaus’s warning or joined the surviving Manns in mourning the casualties of the swift West German recovery.
⁴⁵

Coda

‘Closing time in the gardens of the West’

On 22 November 1949, Adenauer signed a new treaty with the British, American and French high commissioners in Bonn. West Germany was now permitted to join the Council of Europe as an associate member and was formally eligible to receive Marshall Aid.
¹
Interviewed by Rebecca West’s husband Henry Andrews for the
Observer
, Adenauer expressed his gratitude to Germany’s former occupiers, conscious that this embodied ‘an act of faith on the part of the Allies as well as on the part of Germany’.
²

For Adenauer and his former conquerors, the Occupation had been a success. West Germany was set to go forward as a major player in a new peaceful and united Western Europe, buttressed by American money. This was confirmed five months later when the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed a plan for what would become the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), aimed at enabling new economic co-operation between France and Germany by placing their entire coal and steel production under the control of a federated European body. By July 1951 the Federal Republic was an equal member of the ECSC and Germany was no longer officially an enemy. Now prime minister again in Britain, Winston Churchill expressed his relief that the word ‘peace’ could be finally spoken between ‘two great branches of the human family who were cast asunder by the terrible events of the past’.
³

Culturally, the British and American governments counted the Occupation a success as well. There were more theatres, opera houses and cinemas per square mile in Berlin than in almost any other city in
Europe. There was a literary scene that would strengthen internationally over the next decade. The Allies had revived the arts in Germany and had created publications that were to have lasting impact in the postwar period: the American
Der Monat
(soon funded by the CIA) and
Die Neue Zeitung
, and the British
Der Spiegel
and
Die Welt
, stand out as landmark publications that the Germans quickly came to feel proud of. The Cold War had placed Berlin so firmly on the international cultural map that it seemed the obvious place to host the first meeting of Congress for Cultural Freedom, which brought 4,000 delegates to Germany to form an anti-communist cultural front in 1950. So too, German slang, clothes, dance styles and pop music had been enthusiastically reshaped along American lines and the German writers, film-makers, artists and musicians of the 1950s were noticeably more open to their American, British and French counterparts than those of the 1940s. Occasionally, they were even influenced by some of the cultural emissaries who had arrived from Britain and America in the immediate postwar years. Hemingway was a constant source of inspiration, as was Sartre; Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1951
Tauben im Grass
(
Pigeons on the Grass
) took its title from Gertrude Stein and its style from John Dos Passos.
⁴

Yet although the Allies’ hopes for a peaceful and stable Germany had been achieved, arguably the primary aims at Potsdam had failed. Germany had been decentralised and demilitarised (though in 1956 it would regain its army) but had not been fundamentally denazified, democratised or re-educated. In both East and West Germany, the publishing houses, opera houses and theatres contained many of the same faces as they had before and during the war, as did the civil service. In 1953 Adenauer would appoint the former Nazi-sympathiser Hans Globke as director of the Federal Chancellery of West Germany. In the early 1950s the lack of denazification created a climate in which Germans who had co-operated with Hitler could avoid acknowledging guilt and in which the majority of Germans still saw themselves as victims, as they had in 1945. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Allies had not succeeded in their aim to mobilise culture to transform the belief systems of an entire country. Culture had turned out to be decidedly secondary to Realpolitik.

For many of the writers and artists who had visited Germany from Britain and the US during the four years after the war, the Occupation remained a tragically wasted opportunity. During her visit in the spring of 1949, Rebecca West had worried that the speed of economic recovery had overtaken the country’s spiritual growth. For centuries, Germany’s wealth and power had been pressed into the service of madness and death. She asked whether after their years of occupation the inhabitants of the Federal Republic had a new faith with which to bind German wealth and power to the services of sanity and life, and found that she was not confident that they did, or that anybody in Germany felt the need for such a faith.
⁵

West’s pessimism was echoed by Hannah Arendt, who arrived in Germany that December for the first time in a decade and found a society in the grip of collective denial. If she said that she was a Jew, she was confronted with a deluge of stories about what the Germans had suffered. If she raised the question of the bomb damage, she was asked: ‘Why must mankind always wage wars?’ And these complaints were verified by a survey conducted in West Germany in 1951 that revealed that only 5 per cent of the participating Germans admitted feeling any guilt towards the Jews, while 21 per cent believed that ‘the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich’. A year later nearly two out of five respondents informed pollsters that they thought it was ‘better’ for Germany to have no Jews on its territory. The six million Jewish dead remained ghosts for the next generation to confront.
⁶

As West Germany recovered economically in the 1950s, many of the individuals featured in this book felt alienated from the prosperous country that had emerged from the ashes. Some avoided it altogether, while others found their returns dispiriting. Lee Miller never went back to Germany, though she travelled relatively extensively in the 1950s. Martha Gellhorn steered clear of the country until 1962, when she was called upon to take ‘a short jaunt to hell’ to report on German universities. Like West and Arendt before her, she dismissed the Germans as ‘incurable’. They seemed to be ‘quiescent sheep and tigers’ but only because they were overweight with butter and cream, kept quiet by
plentiful goods and food. ‘Remove those and they will become insane blood-loving sheep and man-eating tigers.’ Gellhorn’s arrival in Berlin brought on a ‘deep depression’, partly the result of looking back on the happiness and the misery from fifteen years earlier.
⁷

Spender and Auden waited less time before returning, both still committed Germanophiles who remained loyal to the German poetry they had found so liberating in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. But arriving separately in 1955, they were disappointed by the self-satisfied reality of West Germany. Auden was located by a former German boyfriend, an ex-sailor, whom he found had become disturbingly fat. ‘He hadn’t just put on weight – he was
grotesque
like someone in a circus,’ he complained. The transformation of the city itself saddened him most of all. ‘Alas the city of my youth has now gone,’ he lamented; ‘the juke box and rock-and-roll have ruined it.’ Visiting West Berlin a few months later, Spender was disappointed by the American-influenced new architecture, which seemed neither to be properly modern nor to show any awareness of the city’s past. He was more impressed by the bombastic Soviet blocks in East Berlin: ‘great tracks’ laid down through the decay and chaos, presenting ‘overwhelming propaganda’ where the buildings in the West offered mere ‘hectic shouting’. His general impression of the West Germans was that they were rebuilding their bombed cities to look exactly as they had before, ‘in much the same spirit perhaps as one goes to a dentist and asks to have one’s artificial teeth made an exact replica of the ones they replace’. They seemed to be ‘indulging in a great orgy of bourgeois amenities’.
⁸

Auden’s official wife, Erika Mann, visited Germany more regularly in the 1950s from Switzerland, where Erika, Thomas and Katia moved in 1952, finally driven out of the US after Thomas Mann was denounced in Congress as ‘one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company’. None of them could feel at home in Germany again, alienated both by the failure of German writers to make terms with the wartime exiles and by the pro-American Cold War fervour of the West Germans. Although Mann remained in print in both Germanies, his books were no longer present in the libraries of the Amerika Häuser. In 1953 Joseph McCarthy had taken it upon himself to ensure that the
Häuser were sufficiently anti-communist and purged the libraries of books by so-called communist sympathisers, including Thomas Mann and John Dos Passos. There were even reports of book-burning at two centres. Mann described Adenauer’s Federal Republic as a ‘cultural desert’ and was stubbornly persistent in holding on to his ideal of a Germany united in spirit by its language and literature. In 1954 Mann became determined that an all-German production of a film of
Buddenbrooks
would demonstrate the victory of culture over politics in the Cold War, but the West Germans refused to co-operate with the East German state-owned studio DEFA. Furious, Mann refused a sizeable offer from West Germany for the rights to do it alone. When Erika Mann managed to arrange for Klaus Mann’s
Mephisto
to be published in East Germany in 1956, she was distressed to find that Gustaf Gründgen’s continued influence meant that it remained unpublishable in West Germany.
⁹

Between Thomas Mann’s death in 1955 and Erika’s death in 1969, Erika remained consumed by thoughts of the lost world of her German childhood, unable to feel at home anywhere now that she had lost her identity as both a German and an American. Living alone with the mother who would outlive her, Erika felt achingly bereft of Thomas and Klaus and the particular set of beliefs and ideals the three of them had shared. She spent the year following her father’s death writing an account of his final months, celebrating the ‘clear spirit’ and ‘youthfully supple’ body of a man whose last year was ‘illumined and warmed’ by visible grace. She no longer mourned her brother this publicly, but in 1959, a decade after Klaus’s death, she wrote a letter recalling how as children she and Klaus had encountered a girl playing alone. ‘Where is your Eissi?’ Erika asked her. ‘One
has
to have an Eissi!’ Now she admitted that she still believed in the need for an Eissi and found it difficult to go on living without him. In their different ways, Thomas, Klaus and Erika Mann had been broken by the Allies’ failure to purge Germany of fascism and to allow Hitler’s victims to forge the country afresh. Germany’s tragedy became their own tragedy because the rubble and the corpses remained unredeemed.
¹⁰

It took a new generation of angry young Germans to succeed where the Allies had failed. The trial of the SS-Obersturmbannführer
(lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 opened up questions about the complicity of the German nation as a whole in the extermination of the Jews, provoking Germans at home and abroad to demand a more public expiation for these crimes. This coincided with a cluster of novels engaging with the Third Reich and specifically with the failure of the older generation to confront their guilt in the immediate postwar period. Heinrich Böll’s 1959
Billard um halb zehn
(
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
) juxtaposed present and past to explore the confrontation between two generations of Germans looking back on Nazism. Between 1959 and 1963 Günter Grass published his
Danzig Trilogy
, which began with
Die Blechtrommel
(
The Tin Drum
), a grotesque reimagining of the Nazi period from the perspective of a misguided dissident dwarf.

On 2 June 1967 the growing anger of left-wing West German students (who found a voice through organisations such as the Socialist League of German Students), gained impetus and focus from the shooting of a student, Benno Ohnesorg, during a confrontation between police and demonstrators at protests against the official visit by the Shah of Persia to West Berlin. In succeeding days an estimated hundred thousand students took to the streets with placards explicitly associating this with the repressive terror of the Third Reich: ‘democracy shot down, dictatorship protected’. They were granted ammunition when the Berlin Senate defied the Basic Law by banning demonstrations in Berlin. The graduate student-cum-political activist Gudrun Ensslin declared tearfully that ‘this is the generation of Auschwitz. At that time they attacked the Jews, now they are trying to destroy us. We must protect ourselves. We must arm ourselves.’
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