The Bitter Taste of Victory (59 page)

Over the course of the next year the left-wing student movements radicalised. Artists in all art forms called for direct engagement with German politics past and present, asking urgent questions about their parents’ Nazi past and demanding fundamental changes in German society, keen that the Federal Republic should do all it could to separate itself from that earlier period of dictatorship. The critic and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared that the ‘sickly parliament’ of the Federal Republic was at the ‘end of its legitimacy’ and urged writers and artists to ‘go out on to the streets with the students and the workers,
and express ourselves a bit more clearly . . . Our aim must be: let us create French conditions here in Germany.’
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Breakaway factions began to consider terrorism, interpreting the events of June 1967 as the death knell of West German democracy. They were granted ammunition by the anti-Vietnam demonstrations in October 1967, when protestors condemning ‘opposition to the American war of extermination’ were violently suppressed by police using water cannon and truncheons. The adversary now became the capitalist forces of German and American consumerism as well as the government itself. In April 1968, Gudrun Ensslin and her lover Andreas Baader set off incendiary devices in two department stores. A week later the radical activist Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head by an anti-communist, sparking violent protests by demonstrators who saw the assassination attempt as an act of political bullying by the powerful Springer newspaper publishing empire. The journalist Ulrike Meinhof now leant her support to Ensslin and Baader, helping Baader to escape from prison. Collectively they issued a manifesto in 1970 proclaiming that ‘the Red Army is established’. ‘Did the pigs, who shot first, believe we would allow ourselves to be shot down peacefully as animals to the slaughter?’ The enemy, they claimed, was ‘American imperialism’.
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The Allied Occupation that had brought about America’s influence and power in West Germany was now seen as effecting a reprehensible continuation of the values of the Third Reich. Twenty years after it had started, the Germans were angry to have been used as pawns in the Cold War. In demanding a reassessment of the Nazi era, the younger generation also demanded a reassessment of the Occupation. They saw the four years after the war as ending in a weak settlement in which the Allies, driven by the Cold War, had allowed the Germans to get away with it.

In 1969 the twenty-four-year-old German artist Anselm Kiefer presented a series of photographs under the ironic title
Besetzungen
(‘Occupations’) at a gallery in Karlsruhe. Here, garbed in his father’s military uniform, Kiefer performed the Nazi salute against a background of historical monuments and natural settings in Italy, France and Switzerland as well as while standing on the table of his own Düsseldorf studio. Growing up just after his second world war, Kiefer had been
unnerved to find that his school history lessons barely mentioned the Nazi era. It was only when he found a recording of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and Göring that he began to understand what it was his parents’ generation was attempting to repress. ‘The sound goes right through the skin. Not only through the ears and the head. I was simply shocked. And that’s how it began.’ The
Sieg-Heil
salute had been banned in Germany since 1945 and Kiefer called these photographs a ‘provocation’. He was both condemning the Germans’ forgetfulness of the past and reminding the viewer of Hitler’s appropriation of art. In one of the photographs, Kiefer adopted the pose of the romantic wanderer in Casper David Friedrich’s
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
(
The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
), echoing Thomas Mann in his suggestion that no aspect of Germany’s past was untainted by National Socialism. Kiefer’s acts of Occupation both mimicked the Nazi attempts to occupy Europe and aimed to succeed where the Allied Occupation had failed.
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By rejecting the values of the Occuaption, the younger generation of students and artists created a climate in which the exiled artists of the 1940s could find a voice. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno became prophets of the revolution. Klaus Mann now became a figurehead of the West German rebels, though somewhat ironically his posthumous rise to fame was accelerated by yet another fracas with Gustaf Gründgens. Like his nemesis and former lover, Gründgens himself had committed suicide in 1963, but his death did not prevent his adopted son from taking out a lawsuit to prevent the publication of
Mephisto
when the Munich publishing house Aufbau Verlag Nymphenburg announced plans to publish it in 1964. The case dragged on for seven years until finally the West German Supreme Court ruled in favour of Gründgens’s claim. However even after 1971 the book remained available both in East Germany and in neighbouring countries, so West German radicals were easily able to obtain copies as they set about endowing Klaus Mann with the martyr status his sister had attempted to acquire on his behalf.

The views expressed in the 1940s not only by Klaus and Erika Mann but by Stephen Spender and Rebecca West had now become mainstream. Even the impatient fury of Martha Gellhorn and Lee Miller
seems mild compared to the pronouncements of Gudrun Ensslin or Ulrike Meinhof. For the majority of angry and disillusioned young, most of whom still hoped to reform society by pacifist means, Stephen Spender’s statement in 1947 that ‘the day may come when this fusion of two ideas – liberal democracy and economic freedom – will take place within the minds of certain Germans’ had proved more prescient than many of his less optimistic contemporaries might have expected at the time. Although some German terrorists now believed that economic freedom was dangerous and liberal democracy had failed, the kind of vision described by Spender generally prevailed.
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Looking back, it is easy to see why it took twenty years for this fusion to take place and for fundamental denazification to occur. It was naïve of the Allies to expect a starving, brainwashed nation to change its mentality overnight; naïve of those implementing cultural policy to expect
Moral
to come before
Fressen.
What is more, the cultural policies of the Allies came down simply to the erratic actions of a handful of individuals, all of whom were as busy living and experiencing the end of the war as they were planning a coherent cultural programme. In tracing the day-to-day experiences of these figures on the ground in Germany, it quickly becomes clear that their efforts to convince the Germans of their guilt were inseparable from their own encounters with the ruins and their inhabitants, and therefore from the daily business of writing and loving, dancing and grieving.

Living at speed, racing from the remains of the bombed cities and concentration camps to the luxury of the Allied headquarters, they certainly did not have time to instigate a cultural policy any more than the Germans themselves had time to formulate a clear notion of their own guilt amid the daily business of survival. For these writers, artists and film-makers, being an occupier was not so much a question of implementing policy or of reporting on events as of participating energetically in the life of the country. It now seems surprising how great a capacity for living people like Martha Gellhorn and Rebecca West manifested amid the ruins. Given the setting, it is less surprising that they should have ended up exhausted and discouraged. It is also unsurprising that Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Billy Wilder and Klaus
and Erika Mann, all arriving in Germany with complex personal agendas, should have failed to change anything and should go home demoralised by the situation in the defeated nation.

How much does the disappointment of this group of dreamers and visionaries in the late 1940s ultimately matter, given that Germany came through in the end? The changes effected by the 1960s radicals were far-reaching and were continued by subsequent generations before and after the reunification of Germany. Since 1990 Germany has been remarkably successful in reconceiving itself as a tolerant and peace-loving nation, emerging in the twenty-first century as the reasonable and unassailable dominant force in the European Union, albeit tainted by the growing shadow of Holocaust-denying neo-Nazis. This is a German state that is determined always to confront its past. Dominated by a vast monument to the Holocaust, today’s Berlin is a city in which it is impossible to forget the Jewish dead.

None the less, the disillusionment of Spender and Auden, of Wilder and the Manns does still matter, primarily as a missed opportunity. This was a chance not just to create a denazified Germany but to use Germany to reconfigure Europe along transnational grounds. For Spender, Klaus Mann and others it was an opportunity for a new system of values to assert itself. At that moment when throughout Europe almost all there was to lose had been lost, there was a chance for peace to be seen as a matter of a nation’s collective mental strength as well as its military might. It seems astonishing now that a large number of governments devoted substantial funds to UNESCO in 1946 in the shared belief that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. But if the 1940s had played out differently it need not have been so surprising to us now. Arguably the united Europe that emerged in the 1950s could have been culturally rather than economically driven if it had not been caught up in Cold War enmity that rendered useless the lessons of 1945.
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Both the nature of this missed opportunity and the sense of betrayal it provoked is attested to by these stories of the writers and artists who visited Germany from Britain and the US in the postwar years. If in general they had less impact on Germany than Germany had on them,
then the mood of desperation they took with them remained with them in subsequent decades. Twenty-five years later, Martha Gellhorn told a friend that she had still not recovered from the disillusionment with humanity acquired during her day at Dachau: ‘Dachau, and all I afterwards saw: Belsen etc., changed my life or my personality. Like a water-shed. I have never been the same since. It’s exactly like mixing paint. Black, real true solid black, was then introduced, and I have never again come back to some state of hope or innocence or gaiety which I had before.’

Towards the end of her life, Lee Miller sobbed as she remembered her visit to the death camps, regretting that she had rushed into Dachau unprepared. Both Gellhorn and Miller had arrived in Germany passionate, curious and courageous, determined to play their part in improving the world by recording suffering. Both had left resigned to despair. This was the despair that had killed Klaus Mann and that Erika Mann spent the years after his death abortively attempting to magic into a political movement.
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Fighting desperation through artistic creation, the writers, artists and film-makers who visited Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war had fashioned works of art that can be seen collectively as one of the primary results of the cultural occupation. And in their mood of (sometimes tragi-comic) gloom,
Doctor Faustus
,
The Last Day
,
Point of No Return
,
Memorial for the City
,
Greenhouse with Cyclamens
,
European Witness
,
A Defeated People
, Laura Knight’s painting, Lee Miller’s photographs and to a lesser extent
A Foreign Affair
, caught the mood of the wider artistic world at this moment; a mood that was evocatively described in Cyril Connolly’s editorial for the final issue of
Horizon
magazine in December 1949. Here Connolly warned that the current desperate struggle ‘between man, betrayed by science, bereft of religion, deserted by the pleasant imaginings of humanism’ was set to continue and to dominate the art of the subsequent decade. ‘For it is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.’
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Collectively, these ambivalent, tragic works of art matter because they gave the anguish of a generation concrete form. A group of artists
had found in the German ruins a vocabulary for exploring the struggle of their age; they had encountered horrifyingly potent symbols in the bombed-out houses, the piles of debris, the wandering refugees pushing their carts at the side of ravaged roads, the skeletal figures in the concentration camps. Now, looking back on this time, we can glimpse a Germany that might have been in the books, films and pictures they created. We can see just how much these artists’ failure to bring this world into existence mattered to them in the quality of their despair.

If anyone could emerge triumphantly in the Federal Republic of Germany, then it was Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder. Both possessed the resilience and wit needed to shrug off the self-satisfaction, the cream cakes and American propaganda as defiantly as they had brushed aside the mounds of rubble in 1945. In 1960 Dietrich returned to Germany for a concert tour. She was welcomed by Willy Brandt (then governing mayor of Berlin) but pilloried as a traitor by the German press. In the lead-up to her visit hundreds of letters appeared in the newspapers asking, as one Rhineland ‘Hausfrau’ put it, ‘Aren’t you ashamed to set foot on German soil as a common, filthy traitor?’ and suggesting that she ‘should be lynched as the most odious of war criminals’. Ticket sales were low so Vienna and Essen cancelled her engagements. The five days in Berlin became three and the Titania-Palast gave out free tickets to fill the house. Dietrich told
Newsweek
that her only worry was the threats of rotten tomatoes and eggs, which left ‘such awful gooey streaks in the clothing’. There were still some Germans who were curious to see the woman recently named as the ‘fourth greatest immigrant to America’, but 400 of the 1,800 seats at the Titania-Palast were empty when the show opened in May.
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