The Bitter Taste of Victory (13 page)

Riess questioned the US directive for cultural austerity by suggesting that re-education could only be achieved by rehabilitating cultural channels and convincing the Germans that newspapers, literature and theatre were not merely vehicles for propaganda as they had been in Nazi times. The Allied governments needed to send intellectuals with an understanding of the Germans to do this and needed to allow them to talk to the natives. In fact, Riess’s government, if not Spender’s, somewhat inadvertently already had the matter in hand. But rather than being sent in as cultural experts, many of the first intellectuals to be posted to Germany by the US government were part of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, which sent over a thousand military and civilian experts (known as ‘Ussbusters’) to examine the impact of bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan.

Early in 1945, W. H. Auden had offered his services to the US government in helping to rehabilitate Germany. He, like Spender, had loved Germany before the Nazis came to power. Indeed, it was Auden who had introduced Spender to Germany. As an Oxford undergraduate, Auden had appointed himself leader of a coterie of brilliant, homosexual young writers. Spender – tall, shambling, red-faced, innocent – was assigned the role of disciple, lolloping behind the more self-assured poet. It was natural that after failing to take his degree at Oxford Spender should follow Auden to Germany, joining his friend in learning about psychoanalysis and sexology and making the most of Berlin’s atmosphere of promiscuity, falling in love with mercenary, pretty German boys.

Since then Spender had partially freed himself from Auden’s influence. He had at least publicly abandoned pretty boys for respectable young women, marrying the writer Inez Pearn and then the pianist Natasha Litvin. After Auden’s departure to America, Spender had consolidated his independent position on the London literary scene, co-publishing Cyril Connolly’s influential wartime journal
Horizon.
It was typical, though, that Auden should once again make it to Germany
before Spender, although he set about trying to get there some months later. His Ussbuster papers came through remarkably quickly and he left the US at the end of April, pausing in London to show off his American uniform and American accent: ‘my dear, I’m the first major poet to fly the Atlantic,’ he announced to Spender.
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Auden flew into Frankfurt just before the war ended. As the plane landed, passengers could see into the rows of burned-out houses, peering through the shells at the smashed shards of furniture.
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He proceeded amid the ruins with his usual sense of entitlement. He commandeered the personal services of a young blond chef called Hans and adapted his uniform, removing the helmet liner and donning carpet slippers instead of shoes. Having unearthed a supply of Rhine wine, he took at least one full bottle to bed with him each night. Auden’s unit began in Darmstadt, in the Rhine-Main area, and by 29 May they were touring Bavaria, interviewing civilians along the way. Typically, Auden designated himself as the team’s leader and dubbed himself ‘Research Chief’. In Kempten he met Lincoln Kirstein, the American ballet impresario, who was a friend from New York and was now in Germany with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, attempting to find and protect great works of art. Kirstein was impressed when he looked inside Auden’s jeep and found that he had acquired a cooking pot, mattress, box of books, standard lamp, phonograph with records, crate of wine and plaque of Wagner’s profile.

Unlike Spender, Auden does not seem to have had a definite vision of what he wanted to do in Germany. Although he was wondering about writing a book of his experiences, he did not see himself as a poet talking to poets or as being responsible for the redemption of the German soul. Like his brother-in-law Klaus Mann, Auden was appalled by the self-serving pomposity of the more prosperous Germans. However, Auden was more troubled than Mann, Gellhorn or Miller by the devastation of the German cities. His chief sympathy was with the survivors of concentration camps whom he found whispered like gnomes; he cabled home for money to help a woman who had been in Dachau. But this did not preclude pity for so-called Aryan Germans. Over the course of the war Auden had gradually committed to
pacifism. His decision to move to America was in part a decision to stay away from politics because his left-wing political activism of the 1930s had given way to religion. Although he helped his German exiled friends to produce material aimed at persuading the US to enter the war, he was never convinced that fighting back was the answer. ‘Of course it matters whether the Chinese win or the Japanese,’ he wrote in his notebook, pondering the Sino-Japanese war in the summer of 1939, ‘but even if the Chinese lose, or the oppressed are suppressed, it does not mean the end of progress, only that its rate of development is slower . . . if war could have been avoided it would be better still.’
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Auden had been depressed about the bombing of the German cities when he read about it during the war. He was all the more distressed to see the effects of the bombing now. In Darmstadt he was billeted in a house belonging to a Nazi couple who had left their children with their grandparents. Here he found himself responsible for telling the couple that their parents had killed themselves and taken it upon themselves to kill their children as well. According to the Ussbuster reports, Darmstadt itself had been 92 per cent destroyed in a fifty-one minute bombing raid in September 1944. Auden’s friend and colleague James Stern described this pink city, built of the local red sandstone, as now looking like a high sea: ‘a tempestuous ocean of pink rubble with jagged, perforated walls sticking up between the great waves’. The locals talked about the September raid as ‘The Nightmare’; a moment they could never forget but could also never describe.
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As analysts for the ‘Morale Division’, Auden and James Stern’s task was to interview the civilian population about their experiences of bombing and its aftermath. Stern shared Auden’s view that the Germans should be treated with compassion. He could understand their fear of their occupiers. One of his interviewees told him that he had expected that the Americans would send all the Germans back to the US as slaves after the war. ‘We heard that we wouldn’t be allowed out on the streets, that we women would be raped by Negroes, that we’d be separated from our husbands and our children deported,’ another informed him. This fear had only been confirmed by some aspects of the Occupation: the non-fraternisation rule had made it impossible for the
occupiers to demonstrate their reasonableness. So he could see that they were frightened as well as sycophantic when they expressed gratitude to their occupiers and denied any residual allegiance to the Nazis.
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And he could see, too, that the Germans’ apparent lack of guilt was also a manifestation of bemusement. Watching a group looking at the vast posters where shots of dead children and babies lying on their backs on the ground were captioned with the question ‘Who is guilty?’, Stern tried to imagine what they were thinking as they turned away with ‘dumb, expressionless faces’. He decided that they were still stunned by bombardment, fear and defeat; still ignorant after years of lies and propaganda; that the feeling of guilt was ‘so colossal they simply cannot face it, much less give it expression’. And as a result he was able to sympathise with them and began to feel a degree of guilt for his own role in exacerbating their grief with his probing questions. ‘What do you say, you damned Gallup-poller you,’ Stern asked himself, when across the table there was simply a ‘forlorn life with nothing to live for, and not the courage to take it because as long as the heart goes on beating life is dear’?
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Both Stern and Auden were careful to differentiate between different groups of Germans. They were better able to perceive the complex range of German reactions to defeat than Gellhorn and Miller, or even Erika and Klaus Mann. They could see that it might be reasonable to expect the intellectuals to have resisted Hitler in the early 1930s but that this had been more difficult for the working-class Germans who had emerged out of a decade of poverty, hyper-inflation and hunger resulting from the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Thomas Mann may have been right that there were German characteristics that made them unusually susceptible to Hitler (Stern found a large number of his interviewees displayed a mixture of self-pity and sentimentality that he had learned to identify with cruelty), but there was also no doubt that there were living conditions that made Hitler’s rise to power far more possible than it would have been at other times.
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Though Erika Mann felt justified in retrospectively expecting more resistance to Hitler from her compatriots in the early 1930s, there was a
limit to what could be expected in the 1940s. Not everyone could go into exile, which became anyway less and less practical a possibility. And once the war had started, even so small an act of resistance as hiding a Jewish friend was ridden with danger. By 1944 it was common to see Germans as well as captured enemy troops hanging from lamp posts in streets: the possibility of effectively resisting Hitler had become untenable. And yet some people did continue to resist, despite the dangers. In an attempt to convince the Allied authorities that not all Germans were undeserving Nazis, Auden and Stern obtained statements from students involved in a large anti-Nazi uprising in Munich in January 1943 and also from the German philosophical economist Alfred Weber and liberal politician Emil Henk who had played a part in the events leading up to the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944.
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Auden wrote to Stern’s German wife Tania that although their work was interesting, he had spent much of his time in tears. ‘The people . . . are sad beyond belief.’ He told another friend that he found the word ‘morale’ in the title of the ‘Morale Division’ embarrassing: ‘It is illiterate and absurd. How can one learn anything about morals, when one’s actions are beyond any kind of morality?
Morale
with an “e” at the end is psycho-sociological nonsense. What they want to say, but don’t say, is how many people we killed and how many buildings we destroyed by that wicked bombing.’ In an unpublished interview for
Time
magazine Auden described scornfully how they had asked people if they minded being bombed. ‘We went into a city which lay in ruins and asked if it had been hit. We got no answers that we didn’t expect.’
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On 5 June 1945 the four military governors of Germany – Eisenhower, Montgomery, Georgy Zhukov and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny – signed the ‘Declaration of Defeat and Assumption of Sovereignty’ in Berlin. Now that the Germans had officially ceded their sovereignty, the zones drawn up at Yalta came into play. The British zone in the north-west of Germany included the largely empty farmlands of Schleswig-Holstein, the industrial and farming areas of Lower Saxony and the industrial area of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was the most bomb-damaged of
the four zones, with 22 per cent of its dwelling houses destroyed and 35 per cent damaged. The US zone encompassed 41,000 square miles of south-east and central Germany including all of Bavaria. The main cities (Munich, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Mannheim and Karlsruhe) were all badly bombed but the countryside was relatively undamaged. The Russian zone covered the north-east of Germany, with Berlin in its centre, while the French would be given a small corner in the south-west, carved out of the original British and US portions, at the end of July.
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The unconditional surrender was unprecedented; that day Germany ceded powers that were not allowed for in international law, handing over sovereignty to the Allies in what constituted a kind of annexation. Germany was now effectively a colony jointly ruled by Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union. The British in particular were used to colonial rule and from the start the London officials planning the Occupation saw it in distinctly colonial terms. The Control Commission for Germany (CCG) informed its staff that Germany was to be re-educated through democracy and that British democracy was ‘the most robust in the world: It is on British soil that it flourishes best, but we do export it, and, tended carefully, it grows and flourishes in diverse lands.’
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The colonial aspect of the Occupation seemed especially evident in the non-fraternisation rule, which was becoming increasingly comical. On 7 June,
Stars and Stripes
reported that there were now prophylactic stations established in the US zone, although it was not regarded as any relaxation of the non-fraternisation rules. The official medical spokesman issued a somewhat confusing message: ‘The Army strongly advises continence, knowing that some soldiers will by law of averages engage in promiscuous relations with women. Inside Germany the Army orders non-fraternisation. But that law of averages is still at work: Hence, pro stations.’ And the absurdity of the non-fraternisation rules became even more apparent when the famous Hamburg Circus reopened on 12 June. The circus was being revived for the benefit of the British army and Germans were barred from the shows. The entertainers were generally Displaced Persons from Russia, Czechoslovakia and
Poland. Although the organisers were keen to employ some of the former German circus stars, the current regulations forbade British soldiers from applauding Germans. After some discussion German animals were, however, deemed acceptable; performing horses, brown bears and lions which had been hungry for years were now being properly fed.
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