The Bitter Taste of Victory (16 page)

We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear,

That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity

Neither ourselves nor our city;

Whoever the searchlights catch, whatever the loudspeakers blare,

We are not to despair.
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Shortly before Auden left Bad Homburg for London, Spender arrived at the British headquarters in Bad Oeynhausen. He was two months behind his friend but he had made it at last and he was determined to be as useful as possible, although he was sad to leave behind his new son Matthew who had been born in March. His mission was to investigate the intellectual climate of German universities in the Rhineland. This was a task that suited him well, enabling him to meet some of the Germans he had known before the war, though his superiors made it clear that he had been sent as a German-speaking intellectual rather than a poet. His remit was education rather than literature.

In the report of his trip later published as
European Witness
, Spender described Bad Oeynhausen as ‘a large sprawling nineteenth-century health resort, full of ugly villas’. The architects had surrounded each villa with a skirt and bodice of billowing trees, so that today they flaunted their last-century modesty like middle-aged over-dressed women. The villas were absurdly accoutred with ornate towers and domes. This smugly comfortable spa town had now been filled with army signs and with British soldiers hurrying around in heavy boots. Their mess tins and red tape struck an anti-romantic note against a background that should be filled with shepherds.
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Spender was briefed on his tasks by a former Oxford don who was now an army brigadier. His chief assignment was to interview German
intellectuals. This meant that he was exempt from the non-fraternisation rules, which had anyway been relaxed once again so that the Allies could now fraternise with Germans in public places. He was anxious to start immediately but was forced to wait in Bad Oeynhausen while transport could be found for him. While there he bumped into Goronwy Rees, a London writer and celebrated cad with whom Spender had once collaborated in translating Büchner’s play
Danton
’
s Tod
(
Danton’s Death
). Rees found Bad Oeynhausen even more sinister than Spender did. He thought that the smug and stuffy atmosphere suggested that the oppressive mood of Bismarck’s Germany remained unscathed. And he felt that the unreality of the spa town was harmful for the occupiers. ‘It was rather as if the Germans, having conquered Britain, had decided to govern it from Llandrindod Wells.’ But as the senior intelligence officer for William Strang, the political adviser to the commander-in-chief, Rees was now based at a separate headquarters in Lübeck, where he took Spender for the night.
³²

Rees told Spender about the destruction he had seen in the Ruhr, where broken arches and girders projected crazily into the sky, and the dead cities failed to provide food, water, shelter or heating – able to support the life only of rats. Over the next few days Spender made his way slowly to Cologne, driving past bombsites and destroyed bridges in a car that repeatedly broke down along the way. Arriving in Cologne on 11 July, Spender saw the jagged rubbish confronted earlier in the spring by Miller and Orwell and realised for the first time what total destruction meant. His initial impression was that there was not a single house left standing. The walls were merely insubstantial masks in front of the hollow and putrid emptiness of gutted interiors.
³³

Ten years earlier Spender had been to Cologne when it was the hub of the Rhineland, with a large shopping centre and streets full of bustling restaurants, theatres and cinemas. It took a great effort of the imagination to juxtapose the Cologne he remembered with the putrescent corpse-city of today; he could not believe that the thousands of people trudging through the blackened streets were the same crowds that had been window shopping or hailing taxis a few years earlier. It was only the cathedral that reminded the onlooker that this had been a
great city. Spender was sure that the devastation was too great ever to be healed. Where in London the surrounding life of the people filled up the gaps and wounds left by the bombing, here the inhabitants became parasites sucking at a dead carcass as they dug among the rubbish for food.

In the published account of his visit to Cologne, Spender described the destruction and reflected that it was serious in several senses:

It is a climax of deliberate effort, an achievement of our civilisation, the most striking result of co-operation between nations in the twentieth century. It is the shape created by our century as the Gothic cathedral is the shape created by the Middle Ages. Everything has stopped here, that fusion of the past within the present, integrated into architecture . . . that long, gigantic life of a city has been killed . . . The destruction of the city itself, with all its past as well as its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there. The sermons in the stones of Germany preach nihilism.

All the visitors to defeated Germany had to confront the apparent meaninglessness of absolute ruin. Gellhorn and Miller had taken refuge in anger; Auden had been silenced by despair. Here Spender performed the dexterous feat of locating meaning specifically in meaninglessness. This nonsensical rubble was fitting as the architectural achievement of his times.
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Having observed the wreckage, Spender’s next task was to interview the inhabitants and to see if any kind of redemption could be found from the nihilism that surrounded them. As well as seeking out intellectuals, he interviewed people he met along the way. Early on he talked to six DPs whom he found sitting on a bench gazing dully out over the Rhine. At first he thought they were German POWs returning home. They were angry to be mistaken for ‘German swine’ and announced that they were Poles, who had lost all their relatives when the Germans burned their towns, hanging people on trees. They were dismissive of the sensitivity with which the British were now treating the Germans: ‘you calculate the rations they should have, as though they were being
cared for in a hospital’. Spender felt frightened by their apathy and frightened, too, that there seemed to be a menacing quality in their despair. The fires which had burned the cities of Europe were still smouldering in the minds of men.
³⁵

The first German Spender actively sought out was his former teacher and mentor, the literary critic Ernst Robert Curtius. When Klaus Mann had interviewed Curtius a couple of weeks earlier, he had found him ominously ‘unchanged’ and arrogantly contemptuous of the ‘barbaric Americans’ occupying Germany. Spender was more disposed to be sympathetic toward the older man, having spent much of the war worrying about his safety; indeed it was partly with Curtius in mind that Spender had first thought of coming to Germany. In his 1939 ‘September Journal’, Spender had recalled his first talk with Curtius at a Bierhalle in Baden. Here Spender had behaved with the same good-natured clumsiness with Curtius as he had with Auden, talking constantly and indiscreetly about his life in Hamburg. Curtius laughed, apparently at as well as with the younger man, leading Spender to reflect that ‘because he saw so far beyond me and at the same time loved me, I owe more to him than to any other person’. The pair walked in the Black Forest, swam, discussed literature and drank beer in the evenings.
³⁶

The friendship was erotically charged. They read carnal poems in a Greek anthology together and Curtius asked Spender for pornographic details of his encounters with boys in Hamburg. But it was primarily an intellectual exchange. When Spender had left Oxford without a degree, he was frustrated that his tutors seemed to have little to teach him. Now at last he had met someone who seemed never to lose sight of the direct connection between literature and living, making Spender feel that he could grasp hold of the literature they read and use it to live better. Through Curtius, Spender made contact with the Germany of Goethe, Hölderlin and Schiller; a country he described in Nietzschean terms as ‘an Apollonian Germany, a Germany of the sun, not the Germany of Hitler who rouses himself from a torpid dullness into a frenzy of words and actions’. He also learnt from Curtius an understanding of a connected and continuous tradition of European
literature that stretched from the Greeks and Romans through to the Middle Ages and on to the present and made it impossible to separate one nation culturally from another.
³⁷

It was partly with Curtius in mind that Spender had written his articles about Hölderlin and Goethe during the war. Now both Spender and Curtius were married (Curtius to a former student) and both had endured five years of brutal war. Spender was relieved to find that although half of Bonn was destroyed, Curtius’s ground-floor flat was in an almost untouched part of the city. Curtius was moved to see Spender and took him into his library, a bare empty room with no carpets and few books, where his wife Ilse supplied a meal of cabbage and potatoes.

Curtius was one of the few German intellectuals Spender respected who had stayed in Germany throughout Hitler’s regime. Spender now tried to work out what this meant. Since 1933 he had wondered why his mentor did not leave Germany and had decided that it was because Curtius felt too rooted in the Germany of Goethe to imagine life elsewhere. Initially Curtius’s flat had provided a hub for people to come to upbraid the Nazi regime, usually from a Catholic point of view. The Nazis made his life difficult and Spender assumed that he had eventually compromised in one way or another to avoid being imprisoned. He was disappointed to find that Curtius shared the general tendency to dismiss the Germans collectively without including himself in their shame. Curtius was not a Thomas Mann, seeing in his own German Romantic past the seeds of Nazism. Instead, he told Spender blithely that there was almost no intellectual life left in the whole of Germany and that it would have been impossible for German intellectuals to put up a collective resistance against Hitler: ‘You seemed to expect us to stand up or go out into the street and say that we opposed the war and the Party. But what effect could that have had except our own destruction? It certainly would not have stopped the war. It was not we in Germany but you, the democracies, the English, the French and the Americans, who could have stopped the war at the time of the Occupation of the Rhineland. What were we to think when you let Hitler march in?’
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There was considerable truth in this. Certainly, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Allied outrage at the concentration camps, given that when Britain and then the US did wage war against Germany it was in response to German imperialist aggression rather than to the Nazis’ blatant disregard of human rights. Even now many of the Allied leaders placed more emphasis on the Prussian militarism of the Germans than on their persecution of the Jews, and were not doing as much as they could have done for Hitler’s Jewish victims.
³⁹
And Curtius was correct that even when it came to imperialist aggression, the Allies had allowed a generous degree of leeway. He was probably also right that, for most intellectuals, active resistance would have resulted in clear consciences but dead bodies. However, Spender was not so much disappointed that intellectuals such as Curtius had failed to resist as disturbed that they did not seem more conflicted now. He was saddened, too, by the indiscriminate criticism of the Occupation made by the Curtiuses and other intellectuals.

People in Bonn complained that the Americans had been too slow in liberating the Rhineland and especially Bonn, dismissing the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge as a few shots made by frightened SS men. ‘We can understand that American civilisation is unwarlike and that the Americans do not want to practise military virtues,’ one professor said patronisingly, ‘but you have no idea how difficult it is being conquered by a people who can’t fight. Everything happens so slowly.’
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