Year Zero (6 page)

And there were of course far more women than men in Germany by about a 16 to 10 ratio, and the men who were left were often old, crippled, or despised. As the young German says in Rossellini's brilliant film
Germany Year Zero
, shot in the ruins of Berlin: “We were men before, National Socialists, now we are just Nazis.”

Benoîte Groult in her literary memoir of liberated France could not resist comparing the “beauty of Americans” to “the Frenchmen who all look gnarled, swarthy, and undernourished to me.”
⁴³
The demoralization of German and Japanese men was of course worse. Typical was the attitude of a German waitress interviewed by Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright and screenwriter (
The Blue Angel
) who returned to his native land as a U.S. cultural attaché in 1946. This waitress wouldn't touch German men, she said: “They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.”
⁴⁴

For me, the most memorable account of masculine humiliation is by Nosaka Akiyuki, a novelist who was himself a teenager in 1945, hanging around the black markets of Osaka. His brilliant novella,
American Hijiki
(
Amerika Hijiki
, 1967), concerns masculinity as well as race. The main character is a Japanese of his own age. At school during the war he was told that Western men were taller than Japanese but weaker, especially around the hips, due to their soft habit of sitting on chairs, instead of Japanese tatami floors. They could be physically bested by any tough little Japanese with muscular thighs. The schoolboys were frequently reminded of the squat, bullnecked General Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya,” who accepted the surrender of Singapore from the British general Percival, whose rather absurd-looking spindly legs were not flattered by his khaki shorts.

But then the Japanese teenager sees the real thing up close, the
unforgettable sight of an American soldier, “his arms like logs, his waist like a mortar . . . the manliness of his buttocks encased in shiny uniform pants . . . Ah, no wonder Japan lost the war.”
⁴⁵
Clearly, not all Allied soldiers were so big and brawny, and many Japanese men were far from puny. But the perception, that first impression of a hungry teenage boy, would last as the melancholy memory of a war that had been presented to the Japanese as a racial contest between noble Asian warriors and the arrogant white race. This made the first confrontation after the war between victors and the defeated more shocking in Japan than in Germany.

In Germany, the Western (but not the Soviet) authorities did their best to enforce a nonfraternization policy at first. “Pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory,” announced the American Forces Network. “Soldiers wise don't fraternize,” warned
Stars and Stripes,
the military paper, or “Don't play Samson to her Delilah—she'd like to cut your hair off—at the neck.”
⁴⁶
Lifting the ban, said the
Times
of London, “would probably distress a large number of women at home.”
⁴⁷
But none of this was convincing to men on the spot. The “Mistress Army” was a popular expression for the Western Allies at the time. This referred to the many German mistresses attached to American officers (more than to British officers, for some reason; the British appear to have preferred drinking). This, in turn, led to jealousy in the lower ranks, a feeling expressed in bitter jokes such as, “The policy is just to give the brass the first crack at all the good-looking women.”
⁴⁸

General George Patton, like General MacArthur, saw no merit in the ban. Should well-fed American soldiers really refuse to give candy to hungry kids? Were all Germans truly Nazis? (It should be said that Patton was a great deal more indulgent to Germans, even if they
were
Nazis, than towards the communist allies, or indeed to Jews.) Even the
New York Times
, not always in the vanguard of public opinion, was critical in its reports from the occupied zones. Their local correspondent reported in June that he had “yet to meet a soldier, whether he comes from London, the Mississippi Valley or the Alberta wheatfields, who wants the ban continued.” The same reporter revealed the absurdity of measures taken to tighten the ban. In one village in the U.S. zone, a counterintelligence
detachment was sent out to watch a security guard who was monitoring a military policeman who had been “flirting with a German girl.”
⁴⁹

On June 8, General Eisenhower lifted the ban on fraternizing with children, whereupon the common greeting from GIs or Tommies to a young woman was “Good Day, Child!” In August, Allied soldiers were allowed to speak to adults, and even, as long as they were safely out in the open air, to hold hands with grown women. On October 1, finally, the Allied Control Council, the governing body of the four powers' military occupation, lifted the ban entirely. One of the events that nailed it was the arrival of British and U.S. troops in Berlin, where the Soviets were fraternizing quite freely. This divide became intolerable to Western troops, so in a sense the license to frat with Germans was an early consequence of Big Power rivalry. But lifting the ban came with a condition: marriage with Germans, or putting Germans up in army billets, would still be forbidden. This, too, in time became a dead letter, and tens of thousands of German women left with their new husbands to the promised good life of the United States.

Germany had its version of the
panpan
women, the lowest and most desperate being the
Ruinenmäuschen
, the “mice in the ruins.” But, as was true in all countries under military occupation, the borderlines between romance, desire, and prostitution were not always clear. Even in the Soviet zone of Berlin, where few women, including the very young and very old, had managed to avoid sexual assault, and where raping was still a common occurrence for months after the war, sexual relations with foreign troops were not always a straightforward matter. The best and most harrowing account is
A
Woman in Berlin
, a diary kept by a journalist in her early thirties who finally escaped being serially raped by anonymous soldiers by soliciting the protection of one Russian officer. The gentle Lieutenant Anatole became her regular lover. After all, she wrote, “he's looking more for human, feminine sympathy than for mere sexual satisfaction. And this I'm willing to offer him, even with pleasure . . .”
⁵⁰

In the Western zones, women who accepted material goods from their American boyfriends, as most of them would have, were quickly branded
as prostitutes, a reputation they would not have acquired so easily by taking gifts from German men. Of course, access to goods from the PX was a matter of survival for many. In the winter months, even the warmth of a well-heated nightclub was a welcome refuge from icy rooms, shared with many strangers, in bombed-out buildings. But those Lucky Strikes, chocolates, and silk stockings, along with the swing music and the easygoing GI manners, also represented a culture to women, and many young men, which was all the more desirable for having been forbidden in the oppressive Third Reich. People hungered for the trappings of the New World, however crude, because the Old World had collapsed in such disgrace, not just physically, but culturally, intellectually, spiritually. This was true of liberated countries, like France and Holland. It was even more true of Germany and Japan, where the postwar Americanization of culture, beginning with “fratting,” would go further than anywhere else.

At least one woman saw all this for what it was, a dream, which was bound to disappoint in the end—but not without leaving a few traces. After Benoîte Groult has turned down her American lover Kurt's marriage proposal for the last time, she decides to abandon her game of “hunting for Americans.” Now, she writes, “old Europe is all alone. I feel like Europe, very old and desperate. I have just said goodbye to the whole of America this evening. And to you too, Steve, Don, Tex, Wolf, Ian, who came into my life with such a comforting smile, I'll be closing my door . . . It no longer amuses me to fool around with all of you from the Far West: you came from too far away, and you will go back. You have liberated me. Now it is up to me to remake my own freedom.”

•   •   •

NAGAI KAFU, A JAPANESE NOVELIST
best known for nostalgic fictions of the seamy side of his beloved Tokyo, wrote the following diary entry on October 9, more than two months after the Japanese defeat: “Had an evening meal at the Sanno Hotel. Observed seven or eight young Americans, who looked like officers. They did not seem to lack a certain refinement. After supper, I saw them sitting at the bar, practicing their Japanese on the
young woman serving them. Compared to Japanese soldiers, their behaviour was remarkably humble.”
⁵¹

A month before, Kafu noted in his diary that according to the newspapers American soldiers were shamelessly fooling around with Japanese women. Well, he said, “if true, that is payback for what Japanese soldiers did in occupied China.”
⁵²

Kafu was a highly sophisticated eccentric, a Francophile who cared little for conventional opinion. His reaction was, in fact, rare. The more usual view on American fraternization with Japanese women, even among highly educated writers and intellectuals, was a great deal more censorious. Takami Jun, a relatively liberal writer, younger than Kafu, who felt ashamed that he had ever supported, however ambivalently, the militant nationalism of the wartime regime, recalled in his diary something he had seen at the main Tokyo railway station one October evening. Loud American soldiers were flirting with two female station attendants, trying to get them to sit down with them. The girls were giggling, and seemed anything but unwilling. In Takami's words: “They looked as if being flirted with in this way was unbearably pleasurable. Another station attendant came up. Everything about her suggested that she also wanted to be teased. What an indescribably shameful sight!”
⁵³

This must have been quite typical, both the scene and the reaction to it. But whose shame was Takami really talking about? Was it the flirting he found shameful, or the fact that Japanese girls were flirting with foreigners? Or was it his own shame, as a Japanese male? Disapproval of this type of fraternization was expressed in more violent ways too. Japanese girls hired to work for the U.S. Army in Hokkaido complained that they got beaten up regularly by Japanese men because of their association with foreign troops. Henceforth the army had to escort them home in armed trucks.

Envy no doubt played an important role in male resentment. And there was a great deal of envy to go around: defeated men were envious of the victors, American soldiers of Soviet soldiers (when the U.S. ban was still in force), soldiers of officers, and so on. In
American Hijiki
, Nosaka Akiyuki describes how long this feeling could linger. The teenager in
the story grows up and has a family. His wife makes friends with a middle-aged American couple on holiday in Hawaii. They come to visit Japan, a country that brings back fond memories to Mr. Higgins, who served there in the occupation army. Obliged by his wife to be a good host, the Japanese husband decides to entertain Mr. Higgins by taking him to a live sex show in Tokyo. A virile performer, known as Japan's “Number One,” promises to show the audience what Japanese manhood can do. Alas, that night, Number One's powers fail him, and once again, the Japanese husband, feeling a vicarious shame, thinks back to that GI he first encountered in the ruins of Osaka, those loglike arms, those tough buttocks encased in shiny gabardine.

Mr. Higgins is white. Wartime Japanese propaganda did not talk about blacks, except as another example of American racism to discredit the enemy further. But occupation by multiracial troops introduced something more disturbing than mere sexual rivalry. A letter from a Japanese woman, intercepted by U.S. military censors, mentions the rumor that there were “twenty thousand women in Yokohama who had intimate relations with Allied soldiers. It has also been brought to the attention of the prefectural office that thirteen thousand halfbreeds are to be born in Kansai. It is enough to make one shudder when one hears that there are three thousand Japanese women with Negro children in Yokohama.”
⁵⁴
The real source of anger here is not immoral behavior per se, or even prostitution, but the pollution of racial purity.

Similar sentiments were voiced in Germany, especially towards the end of 1945, after the fraternization ban was lifted, just as many young German men were beginning to be released from POW camps. As was true in Japan, young army veterans were especially sensitive on the “fratting” issue. Here, a pamphlet circulated in Nuremberg, denouncing “Niggerwomen” (
Negerweibern
): “Painted and tarted up in colors, with red-lacquered nails, a hole in their stockings and a wild, fat Chesterfield stuck in their beaks, strutting around with their black cavaliers.”
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Another word for fraternizing German girls was “chocolate women” (
Chokoladeweibern
), referring both to material greed and a shameless penchant for those colored cavaliers.

It is surely no coincidence that so many Japanese and German films about the occupation period show black American soldiers ravishing native women, as though their race made the humiliation of the defeated even worse. A German pamphlet warned: “We'll tell you right now, we'll shave off your hair, the blacklist is ready, waiting for when times will have changed.”
⁵⁶
In fact, some women received this treatment already in 1945. There was a case, in Bayreuth, of a woman who was set on fire. In Würzburg, three men were arrested for organizing a terror group called the “Black Panthers,” who threatened to cut the hair off “all German girls who go walking with colored soldiers.”
⁵⁷
A twenty-year-old former Nazi wrote about the fraternizing women: “Have the German people no honor left? . . . One can lose a war, one can be humiliated, but one need not dirty one's honor oneself!”
⁵⁸