The Bitter Taste of Victory (15 page)

After the documentary was finished three women left, looking ill, but the rest of the audience waited for the cowboy film that had been advertised and were disappointed to learn that the programme was in fact over. Wilder and Taylor seem to have been surprised that anyone should want to see a film about cowboys after being exposed to lampshades made of human skin. But this was the first cinema screening the Germans had attended since the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels shut the cinemas in 1944. They had been overwhelmed already by shots from the concentration camps on posters and noticeboards erected by the Allies. And they were hungry, homeless and worn down by years of war and months of occupation. The previous summer James Stern had suggested that the German guilt was ‘so colossal they simply cannot face it, much less give it expression’. What Wilder saw as callousness may simply have been bemused horror; a helpless sense of guilt that brought with it a desperate desire for escapism.
²³

The scepticism of the audience about some of the footage in the documentary convinced Taylor of the urgent need for a longer and more verifiable film so he continued to try to persuade his superiors that Wilder should make one. Wilder was keen to do this. As far as he was concerned, his role as a film-maker in Germany was to convince the German people of their guilt. He was too angry to be interested in enabling the kind of mutual tolerance demanded by Spender or Auden. But it was not at all clear that he would be granted
permission, though it seemed absurd both to Taylor and Wilder that the Americans had sent one of their most successful film-makers to Germany without forming a clear idea of what he should do there. McClure did not seem especially convinced that Wilder should be film-making at all.

This indecisiveness and inefficiency was typical of both the American and the British bureaucracies. The difficulties were partly the result of a lack of clarity about responsibility at home. In the US, both the Department of State and the War Department felt they had the right to determine matters in Germany. In Britain responsibility for the Occupation had been passed from the War Office to the Foreign Office, and then back again. Both bureaucracies were excessive and the British in particular had far too many employees who were unclear about their exact tasks. The British CCG (Control Commission Germany) had already earned the nicknames ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers’ and ‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’ from an admittedly biased army. Returning from Germany in June, Richard Crossman complained that the British Military Government officials were trying to implement countless detailed regulations without a picture of the overall policy: ‘Not one of the dozens with whom I talked has the vaguest idea what the end result of it all is meant to be. Is Germany to be dismembered? Is there to be a Central German Government? Or is Military Government to take its place? What forces in Germany should replace Nazism and Militarism? Will there be co-ordination between the four occupying Powers and if so, in what form?’
²⁴

Part of the problem, for the divisions responsible for the arts at least, was that the exact policy of the Western Allies on culture remained unclear. There was still a widespread sense that it would be wrong to put time or money into entertaining a country with whom they remained at war. The British Control Commission was restrained by a government anxious not to irritate a war-weary populace by seeming to treat the Germans anything but stringently. On 5 July, Churchill’s Conservative government was replaced by Clement Attlee’s Labour party in a landslide victory won with Attlee’s pledges for a welfare state.
Having promised the British free schools and healthcare and an improved standard of living, it was going to be hard to justify deflecting British food to Germany, let alone supporting the revival of German culture.

In this respect the Soviet zone was far ahead of the British and US zones, liberated culturally by the very different Soviet attitude towards denazification. For the Russian occupiers, denazification was not a question of the mentality of individuals but of the structure of society. They believed that once capitalism had been replaced by communism, the threat of German fascism would be eliminated. Therefore they could be more lenient towards individual Germans than their western counterparts, who were set on a course of individual rehabilitation that necessitated a period of German guilt.

As head of the Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration, Major General Sergei Tulpanov was in charge of both culture and politics in the Soviet zone and was convinced that the two were inextricable. Through culture the Russians could persuade the world that the country of Pushkin and Tolstoy was a civilised one (and that the excesses of the Russian soldiers were mere accidents of war) and could convert the Germans to the communist cause. Tulpanov’s assistant, the art historian Major Alexander Dymschitz, was open-minded and liberal and knew far more about German history and literature than most Anglo-American officials.
²⁵

From the start of the Occupation, the Russians decided that culture in Germany would be very different from culture in the Soviet Union. Recently the German communist politician Anton Ackermann had issued a manifesto suggesting that German culture needed to be organised on broad, anti-fascist democratic principles rather than along the stricter lines of communist culture in Moscow, where he was living in exile. Bourgeois art could be encouraged and satire could be tolerated. Later Tulpanov said that Germany was given its comparative cultural freedom because at this point it was in a state that resembled the
Sturm und Drang
period of the Soviet Union in the 1920s; the Germans were not yet ready for Stalinist culture.
²⁶
The Russians therefore gave the Germans a relatively free hand in resurrecting the film studios and printing presses in their zone and set
about reviving the musical and theatrical scene. It would be a while before the Western Allies caught up.

While Wilder waited to find out exactly what was required of him, Auden was posted to Bad Homburg as well. The bombing survey was almost completed and he was being dispatched home earlier than expected. Predictably his debriefing took several weeks longer than it needed to, but his stay at Bad Homburg was enlivened by the arrival of another expatriate Ussbuster, the composer Nicolas Nabokov. An aristocratic Russian by birth (and the cousin of the writer Vladimir Nabokov), Nabokov had left Russia after the Revolution and had lived a happily cultured expatriate life in 1920s Berlin and Paris before emigrating to the US after Hitler’s rise to power. Now an American citizen, Nabokov combined old-world European charm with new-world ease and means. He was destined to be a success in postwar Germany, although his months as an Ussbuster had been dispiriting.

Nabokov’s first impressions of Bad Homburg were inauspicious. Arriving on a cold summer night at 3 a.m., he surveyed the dining hall and found that it was strewn with debris. There were empty beer cans, gin and whiskey bottles, broken glasses and filthy paper napkins scattered across the floor. Unable to find any coffee or gin, Nabokov spread his sleeping bag on the bar and fell asleep. He woke up to find a face leaning over him saying: ‘Why, for God’s sake! What are
you
doing here in this place?’

Clean-shaven and washed, Auden was ready for his breakfast and was irritated to find that the dining room was still dirty and occupied by sleeping Ussbusters. He was pleased, however, to see his friend. Nabokov and Auden spent the next couple of weeks walking in the pine woods and drinking on the terrace where they talked about Stravinsky, Goethe and Kierkegaard. Both were keen to avoid their Ussbustian colleagues.

‘Most of them are crashing bores, my dear,’ Auden complained to Nabokov on his first day. ‘They have
no
or
wrong
ideas about everything and belong to the world that neither you nor I can possibly like or condone.’ Auden was impatient with the debriefing sessions they
were forced to sit through, which he saw as comprised chiefly of bogus socio-political jargon. ‘All of this is
waste
, my dear. But it better remain that way. It is none of
our
concern.’

Despite his insouciance, Auden remained troubled by the destruction he had witnessed in the German cities, unable to see how devastation on that scale could be condoned: ‘Are we justified in replying to
their
mass murder by
our
mass murder? It seems terrifying to me, don’t you agree?’
²⁷

By the time that Auden’s stay came to a close in August, summer seemed to be over and the compound was enveloped in a continual grey mist. The night before Auden left, he and Nabokov sat in an empty room next to the bar with private supplies of gin and whiskey from their rooms. Auden asked Nabokov if he planned to stay in Germany and Nabokov sought his friend’s advice. Nabokov himself had escaped communist Russia for the US and he was now worried that the Americans underestimated the brutality of conditions in the Soviet Union. He was rightly anxious about the fate of the Russian Displaced Persons imported by the Nazis to Germany who were being sent back to the Soviet Union. Visiting DP camps in Hanover and Hamburg, he had been besieged by outstretched hands reaching out to him with bits of crumpled paper announcing in Cyrillic script that the bearer had a friend in Chicago or New York. He was now wondering about staying in Germany as an anti-Stalinist and offering his services to the PWD.

Auden said he could not answer his friend that late in the evening and suggested they had coffee at 6.30 the next morning before he left. Nabokov arrived in the breakfast room shortly after the appointed time and was reprimanded for being eight minutes late. They sat in silence sipping their institutional coffee while Auden returned grumpily to the crossword puzzle he was engaged in solving. Eventually Auden looked at his watch and complained that he was meant to be leaving in six minutes but could not see the bus.

‘Now about your question, Nicky,’ Auden said impersonally. ‘My answer to it is neither yes or no, or rather neither stay nor go – it is
entirely
your own business. I’m sorry, Nicky, you’ve got to make up your own mind. No one can, or should, make it up for you. It would
be improper and wrong.’ He paused to smile at his friend. ‘But if you do go to Berlin, I may perhaps come and see you there. May I?’
²⁸

The bus arrived; Auden stood up to leave and gave Nabokov one final homily: ‘As for the substance of your question, it is indeed horrid and monstrous! It is barbarous to send people back to hell without even asking them for their consent! But then, what humans do to each other is usually messy . . . and a
sin
against God’s laws. Nicky, whatever you do, keep well . . . and drop me a line.’
²⁹

Auden did not visit Nabokov in Berlin after returning to the US. Neither did he write the book he had wondered about writing about Germany. Since moving across the Atlantic, Auden had lost interest in pontificating as a public intellectual, so he was not going to pen any essays on the state of Germany or Europe. And it took four years before he could find in the German ruins material for poetry.

In 1949 Auden returned imaginatively to the barbed wire and battered buildings, attempting to find a personal mode of redemption. His poem ‘Memorial for the City’ opens from the perspective of ‘the eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera’ with which Auden and his strategic bombing unit had been required to survey the bomb damage in Germany. Now these lying eyes range across the cities of the world, from Homer’s time to the present, settling briefly on a place across the square between burnt-out lawcourts and police headquarters, where barbed wire runs past the cathedral ‘far too damaged to repair’, around the Grand Hotel ‘patched up to hold reporters’, near the ‘huts of some Emergency Committee’, traversing ‘the abolished City’. This is the familiar world of Frankfurt or Darmstadt, evoked in all its specificity. But it is also the world of poetic nightmare because:

             Across our sleep

The barbed wire also runs: It trips us so we fall[. . .]

             It keeps on growing from the witch’s head.

Auden used the wartime bombsites to ask why we build cities when we then annihilate them, bending our creative ingenuity to making instruments of destruction. But he was writing with a detachment enabled by
time and distance; with a detachment that seems to have been necessary for him before he could write about the ruins at all. Therefore he juxtaposed this recent history with the history of Christendom, seeking redemption through the Christian faith that he had embraced ten years earlier:

As we bury our dead