After the Reich (63 page)

Written in Jünger’s mystical style,
Der Friede
is a work of great foresight which makes a plea for an honest, workable peace. It is at once clear why the Allies disliked it: it calls their actions - and their peace - into question even before they had formulated the terms. For Jünger the blood of dead soldiers was the seed that would bring forth corn after the peace; and that corn was for all to share, conqueror and conquered. It must be a peace in which all sides win. Hatred was poor-quality corn. ‘The good corn that has here been so finely ground should never be squandered; it must provide us with bread for a long time.’
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Jünger spared neither side. He talked of the exterminations carried out by the Germans, ‘where men were killed like vermin’ or ‘hunted down like wolves’. ‘Dark rumours spoke of horrible agapes where thugs and torturers . . . waded in the blood of their victims.’ For the foreseeable future these ‘death pits’ would remain in the minds of man - ‘they are the real monuments to this war like those at Douaumont and Langemarck’.
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‘No one can rid himself of guilt.’
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Jünger cast himself as the ‘decent’ soldier, the respecter of his enemy, for ‘no one can be a hero to his enemy who does not credit him.’
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Finally, Jünger warned against a merely technical, non-creative peace. Such a settlement would mean that ‘tyranny would grow and fear with it, the darkness would spread yet further and in a short while new fronts would open, occasioning new conflicts’.
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Jünger had his fans, although they were not often to be found among the forces of occupation. He was also under attack from the exiles. He was the most important German writer to have stayed put, but he wrote no praise of the Nazis, and when the Nazis offered him a seat in their emasculated Reichstag he told them he would rather write a good poem than represent 60,000 dolts. His book
On the Marble Cliffs
was seen as a brave attack on the dictatorship, and gave solace to many opponents of the regime. Klaus Mann nonetheless lashed out at him in
Auf der Suche nach einem Weg
, calling him a ‘card sharp who tries to mislead people into believing barbarity was a new way of thinking’.
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Like everyone else in public life, artists and writers had to fill in the 133-question
Fragebogen
or questionnaire to determine their degree of collaboration with the regime. Ernst von Salomon sent up the high-minded and clumsy Allied approach in his highly successful book
Der Fragebogen
(
The Answers
) of 1951. Salomon was naturally an object of suspicion to the Allies because he had played a role in the assassination of the Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. Salomon had been nineteen at the time, a proudly Prussian, right-wing thug who had been at a cadet school when the Great War ended and regretted having been denied the chance to join the scrap and serve his king and Kaiser like countless other Prussian noblemen before him. He was in and out of prison throughout the 1920s, but his first book,
Die Geachteten
(
The Outlaws
) of 1930, brought him into the literary limelight. He became a successful author and screenwriter and one of the darlings of the publisher Ernst Rohwohlt.

Salomon was a Prussian royalist, not a Nazi, but the tone of his books appealed to the country’s rulers after 1933. He nonetheless dismissed out of hand their attempts to woo him. When American interrogaters asked him why he had not pursued what would have been a highly successful career in the Party, he replied candidly that he had earned three times as much as a screenwriter as he would have done as a Gauleiter.
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Die Fragebogen
was a huge success, selling a quarter of a million copies in the fledgling Bundesrepublik. Having been so severely chastised and humiliated by the Allies, many Germans revelled in its pugnacious treatment of what Salomon saw as American hypocrisy. Liberals, both in Germany and abroad, were not so sure. The Oxford academic Goronwy Rees, who provided an introduction to the English edition, warned readers against the smoothness of the author’s tongue, but concurred with Salomon’s outraged contention that ‘to be convicted of National Socialism was necessarily to be convicted of guilt’.
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What annoyed others more was the absence of apology for the deeds of the Nazis, or indeed for some of the spicier moments of the author’s youth (even though he had paid his debt), and his desire to turn the SA leader and Nazi ambassador to Slovakia, Hanns Ludin, into a decent man and a martyr to his principles. Despite his diplomatic rank Ludin was hanged, or rather strangled, by the Czechs in January 1948. It took him twenty minutes to die.
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But, if some of the arts were to see a flowering, others were dogged by denazification. This particularly affected music and the persons of Germany’s two greatest non-émigré composers, Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner. Both had been members of the Nazi Reich Kulturkammer and were eligible for internment under JCS 1067. The seventy-six-year-old Pfitzner was put in the camp at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, smack opposite the gates to Strauss’s villa, in 1945 and was banned from writing. The ban was lifted the following year, but he had to go before the Spruchkammer or denazification tribunal in 1947. He died in the same year as Strauss: 1949.

Strauss managed to avoid internment. He had never been a Nazi, and on 1 May 1945 described the Third Reich as ‘12 years of the rule of bestiality, ignorance and illiteracy, which brought about the destruction of 2,000 years of German civilisation’. Then Thomas Mann’s son Klaus turned up and tricked him into saying the sort of things that would make Americans believe he was an unrepentant Nazi. But not all Americans shunned him, and famously the oboist and GI John de Lancie commissioned one of his great late works, the Oboe Concerto of 1945. Denazification dangled over Strauss’s head too, but he managed to make it to Switzerland. In 1947 he gave a tour in Britain, although his music was still banned in Germany. He was finally cleared in June 1948. He had meanwhile become an Austrian citizen.
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The visual arts were also hampered by the perceived need to avoid everything that had been practised under the Nazis: representation was out. Those members of the older generation who struggled on did it with far less conviction, as was plain to see in the poor late works of Dix and Grosz. One exception, perhaps, were the ‘unpainted’ works of the right-wing artist Nolde, who had gone into ‘inner exile’ after his paintings had been declared degenerate by the Nazis. The Nazi artists, the sculptor Breker for example, had no appreciable audience now. The coming men were of the Beuys and Baselitz type, the latter literally standing tradition on its head.

The Press

The new papers after the war in Berlin were propaganda sheets put out by the Russian army such as the
Nachrichten für die deutsche Bevölkerung
. The first proper paper was the
Tägliche Rundschau
, which appeared on 15 May 1945, edited by SBZ. It was eagerly scoured in hope that it would give a clue to what the Russians would do next. The next to appear was the
Berliner Zeitung
a week later. Initially this was also the work of the Soviets, but they handed it over to the town hall, and it was edited by Rudolf Hernnstadt, a Jewish journalist who had enjoyed a good reputation before the war. The first paper for Berlin was the communist
Deutsche Volkszeitung
, edited by a Muscovite. This was followed by the socialist
Das Volk
.

Experience and language made German and Austrian
Remigranten
invaluable when it came to controlling and editing the new press. Bernhard Menne became the first editor of the
Welt am Sonntag
, while Erich Brost was his opposite number on the
Kölnischen Kurier
. The Viennese E. H. Pollitzer - or Pollitt - was editor of the
Lübecker Post
. At first he worked under the historian A. G. Dickens before he was allowed to run his own show. Other returned Germans became prominent journalists. Leo Felix, who had gone under the name Felix Field during the war, worked for a number of papers. Peter de (or von) Mendelssohn was the British equivalent of a Muscovite: he had emigrated to Britain and served in the British army and helped the British establish the credentials of German journalists after the war.
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He was editor of Ullstein’s ambitious
Neue Zeit
. In the end this came to nothing, and the first paper free from Allied propaganda was the
Tagesspiegel
.

For a while the Americans founded their ‘newspaper metropolis’ on the little town of Bad Nauheim. This was the base for two new papers, the
Frankfurter Presse
and the
Frankfurter Rundschau
. The first issue of the
Allgemeine Zeitung
- which was to become the famous
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(
FAZ
) - came out on 7 August 1945, after the break-up of the Potsdam Conference. The editor had instructions from the Americans not to print any stories about Allied discord. Later Peter de Mendelssohn ran that too, before returning to London. The
Frankfurter Presse
got off to a good start, with the letter from Walter von Molo to Thomas Mann and a piece by Alfred Kerr. The Liberal Democrats had their voice in
Der Morgen
. By September, newspapers were popping up like mushrooms. There were 150 of them founded between 1945 and 1948.
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The Americans had a considerable success with the
Neue Zeitung
and the glossy
Heute
in Munich. Erich Kästner edited the
Neue Zeitung
, which was controlled by Major Hans Wallenberg, a former Ullstein editor who had emigrated in 1937. Wallenberg was a convinced anti-communist who left the
Neue Zeitung
to work for Springer in Hamburg. The paper was a breath of fresh air in its time, as its aficionados admired the quality of the writing and ignored its propaganda content. In 1947 it was selling 800,000 copies, and Wallenberg believed he could easily dispose of one and a half million. Zuckmayer thought that the Americans could be really proud of what they had achieved through the
Neue Zeitung
.
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Another prominent ‘remigrant’ was Hans (Janos) Habe, the son of the Viennese press baron Imre Bekessy.
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Habe ran parts of the press for the Americans and had to deal with the odd dissenting voice the Americans wanted to ban. One of these was
Der Ruf
, which branded the occupation ‘anachronistic, colonialistic and inhumane’. Habe turned to Thomas Mann for support: ‘These young people hate their fathers; but they hate the enemies of their fathers even more.’
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The Americans were also successful in creating radio stations with a distinct propaganda role. One of these was Radio Liberty, launched on 12 August 1946. Another was RIAS (Radio in American Sector), which came into its own during the Berlin blockade, broadcasting from vans. Clay believed that RIAS did essential propaganda work, and that the Americans should grant it funds to continue.
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In the summer of 1947, Tisa von der Schulenburg found work as a journalist in Hamburg. She paid a call on Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach, who worked in the office of
Die Welt
in the city. He had been a chess partner in London of Tisa’s first husband, Fritz Hess. The editor, Julius Hollos, was also present at the meeting. She told them she wanted to work as an illustrator on the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. ‘Why not come to us?’ they said. She was engaged at RM300 a month, as a writer and illustrator.
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She focused her attention on the Ruhr, where she sketched the miners in the same way as she had drawn the pits in County Durham in the 1930s. Everyone was suspicious of her. The British thought she was a communist agitator, the miners a British spy. When she tried to cover the 1948 London Olympics for
Die Welt
the British refused to grant her papers. In despair she took the veil.
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Where the former owners had been Jewish, newspapers were relatively free from Allied interference. This was the case of Ullstein in Berlin, owners of the
Berliner Zeitung
, the
Berliner Morgenpost
and the
Berliner Abendpost
. Some of the Ullsteins had fled to America and others to London, where they had created an Ullstein Ltd. The head of the family, Hermann Ullstein, had died in the autumn of 1944. The only Ullstein remaining in Germany was Heinz, who remained alive because of his Aryan wife. Like most Jews married to Christians, he performed hard labour for the Todt Organisation, but fled at the right moment and survived the massacre of many of the others. He surfaced just in time to save the machinery of the press, which the Russians had dismantled but not yet shipped.

Axel Springer was a creation of the British Zone. The successful German weekly
Der Spiegel
began life as
Diese Woche
, the child of the twenty-one-year-old Major Chaloner of the Hanover Information Council. When its editorial got out of hand, it was offered to the Germans and Springer. Springer was given his first licence by Major William Barnetson, later chairman of Reuters. Despite the opposition of some British administrators, Springer rapidly advanced to become Germany’s first post-war press baron.
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