The Bitter Taste of Victory (19 page)

While he waited for Gellhorn, Gavin was pleased to entertain Billy Wilder, who arrived in the city in early August, instructed to investigate the film studios in the US zone and to begin reviving the German film industry. Wilder was billeted with the 82nd Airborne Division and he set about getting to know the soldiers and exploring the town. For Wilder, this was a homecoming in a way that his arrival in Germany had not been. Twenty years ago he had fallen in love with Berlin, discovering a way of life exactly suited to his own frantically speedy personality. Now he found that ‘it looked like the end of the world’.
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He asked his driver to take him to the cemetery where his father lay buried, in the Soviet sector. The Jewish burial ground had become a battlefield in the final days of the war and it was now scattered with blasted headstones, burnt trees and tank tracks. They were met by an emaciated rabbi and a one-legged gravedigger who informed Wilder that it would be difficult to locate his father’s grave. Wilder’s helpless rage for the plight of the Jews was exacerbated when he heard the
terrible story of the rabbi, who had survived the war in Berlin by remaining in hiding for years. When the Soviet soldiers appeared in April, he and his wife had rushed out to greet them, delighted to be liberated at last, but the rabbi was forced to watch as the conquerors raped and killed his wife.

Wilder felt sorry for his city but he had no sympathy for its Aryan inhabitants. When a German shouted ‘
arschloch
’ at him and his driver while they were speeding down the Kurfürstendamm, he stopped and reprimanded him, telling him to wait while he summoned the authorities. He was delighted to find that his assailant was still standing there hours later when he drove past again.
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Between forays to the haunts of his youth and drinking sessions with Gavin’s troops, Wilder visited the film studios as instructed. He reported that UFA’s Babelsberg studios in the US sector were in good condition but absurdly, the Tempelhof studios were cut in half by the demarcation line between the US and Soviet sectors: ‘The gentlemen who thought out this demarcation line certainly qualify for a new vaudeville act: sawing a live studio in half.’ The word ‘live’ was inappropriate because the heart and the lungs had been removed; the Russians had taken all the usable equipment back to the Soviet Union. However, Wilder was no longer a dedicated employee of the PWD. What he now wanted to do most of all was to make a film for Paramount, his own production company, set in the Berlin ruins.
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‘I found the town mad, depraved, starving, fascinating as a background for a movie,’ he wrote in a report to his superiors on 16 August. He was impressed by the speed with which the Americans were opening up the cinemas and exhibiting their documentaries and by the newsreels that carried with them a lesson, a reminder and a warning. ‘A good job has been done, no doubt.’ But once the novelty wore off it would be increasingly difficult to deliver the lesson. The Germans would not come week after week to act the guilty pupil. They would be happy to watch glamorous Hollywood films, of course, but these could play very little part in their re-education: ‘Now
if
there was an entertainment film with Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman or Gary Cooper, in Technicolor if you wish, and with a love story – only with a very
special love story, cleverly devised to help us sell a few ideological items – such a film would provide us with a superior piece of propaganda: they would stand in long lines to buy it and once they bought it, it would stick. Unfortunately, no such film exists yet. It must be made. I want to make it.’
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The film he was proposing was the simple story of an American GI and a German Frau, whose husband had been killed in action. At the start the German woman would have nothing to live for; by the end she would have recovered a little hope. Cannily, Wilder quoted Eisenhower to support this message: ‘let us give them a little hope to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world.’ The GI was not going to be a flag-waving hero: ‘I want him not to be too sure of what the hell this was all about.’ The film would touch on fraternisation, on homesickness and on the black market. In the end the boy would not get the girl; he would go back home with his division while the girl left behind would see the light. Wilder had spent time in Berlin, had talked to Gavin and his troops, and had fraternised with Germans from bombed-out university professors to ‘three cigarette-chippies’ in the nightclubs. He had almost sold his wristwatch at the black market under the Reichstag and he had secured the copyright to songs by Friedrich Holländer, the composer of the songs in
The Blue Angel
. He was ready to go home and write the script.
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It seems astonishing that within two months Wilder had come so far from sitting watching reel after reel of concentration camp footage, recoiling helplessly from the scenes he was witnessing. If PWD had been more appreciative of him, he might still have been making the atrocity film. But he was foremost a film-maker and he remained a Berliner. He was not going to stay and fight his way stickily through red tape. He was going to go home and make a comedy set in that ‘mad, depraved, starving, fascinating’ town. What was more, he already knew who he wanted to play the Frau. He was going to attempt to persuade Marlene Dietrich to take on the role of a Nazi whore.

Although Wilder’s time in Berlin had not been especially successful for the PWD, employees of the newly rebranded Information Control
Division (ICD) continued their attempts to revive the film industry without him.
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In the three months since the end of the war, the US occupation authorities had abandoned their plans for a ‘very austere program’ of reconstruction, increasingly aware that they needed to compete with the Russians for popularity and influence. Both the British and the Americans were now committed to using culture as part of their re-education initiative, though there was still no clear policy on how this was to be done and limited dialogue between ICD and its British equivalent (the British Information Services Control Branch) and the departments responsible for education or denazification.
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The first cinemas to reopen in Berlin had been in the Soviet sector but there were now twenty functioning cinemas in the US sector as well. The Germans were also starting to attend plays and concerts in all the sectors. The Americans had considerable work to do if they were going to catch up with the Soviet cultural programme in Germany. In Berlin in particular the Russians had made the most of their head start to race ahead in commandeering the city’s cultural institutions. Within days after the end of the war they had taken over the Nazi Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) in Charlottenberg and instituted a committee to verify the status and politics of Berlin’s artists and intellectuals using the Nazi files still housed in the building. Leading writers, poets and actors were classified for Class II rations, placing their dietary needs in the same category as
Trümmerfrauen,
only just below those of ‘heavy labourers and workers in hazardous trades’. Presided over by the actor-director Paul Wegener, the building was renamed the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden (Cultural Workers Chamber) and endowed with departments related to music, literature, theatre and cinema. On 3 July the Russians had appointed the German communist writer Johannes Becher to run a new ‘Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands’ (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany). Becher had recently returned to Berlin in June after twelve years of exile in the Soviet Union. A successful writer in Germany before Hitler came to power, he was delighted to have a chance to help direct the postwar cultural scene.
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Ostensibly, both the Kammer and the Kulturbund were vehicles for cross-zonal co-operation. The Kulturbund was not officially a communist initiative and had the potential to create a consensus between liberal and communist intellectuals, especially given that the Russians were prepared for the artistic scene in their zone of Germany to be freer and more controversial than that in the Soviet Union. In this respect, Becher was an ideal choice to run the Kulturbund, which he wanted to be an organisation for the intelligentsia in all four sectors, enabling them to provide a model for the renewal of the German people on a new and progressive basis. The Kulturbund was now housed alongside the Kammer in its building on Schlüterstrasse, with its home in the British sector giving it the potential to cross boundaries in this way.

As a reasonably liberal socialist and a German writer who went against Thomas Mann in celebrating a ‘good’ German tradition embodied in the Enlightenment humanism of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing, Becher endowed bourgeois German artists who had compromised with Nazism with the moral respectability of communist affiliation at the same time as he granted the communists artistic integrity by affiliating the party with Germany’s greatest artists and intellectuals.
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He had widespread support among the intelligentsia in all zones, especially when he established a club in Berlin for cultural figures called Die Möwe (‘The Seagull’), which provided literary Berliners with unrationed food and warmth and then founded the Aufbau Verlag in August, publishing books that had been banned during the war years or written in exile. He quickly became the cultural gatekeeper for émigrés to approach when hoping to return to Germany from the US, Britain or the Soviet Union.

But Becher’s popularity among the German intelligentsia was treated ambivalently by the Russians. His commitment to reviving Germany through the ‘true German cultural values’ represented by Enlightenment humanism and given form by the writings of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing went against communist orthodoxy. Tulpanov worried that Becher was catering to what the intelligentsia wanted rather than leading them and was therefore reluctant to give him free reign. And the
British and Americans, too, were becoming suspicious of Becher and of both the Kammer and the Kulturbund, which they saw as too similar to the Nazi cultural organisations and too allied to Soviet ideals of culture. It seemed anomalous that these Soviet-sponsored bodies were operating in the western sectors of the city.
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There were signs that the existing East-West co-operation in the cultural sphere was going to be difficult to maintain. Because the Russians had been so hasty in reviving culture across the city and because theatres and other cultural venues were unfairly distributed between the sectors, all four of the Allies were now organising and supporting cultural ventures in each other’s territory, which created the need for complicated negotiations. At the same time they were ultimately responsible for all that occurred within their own sectors. This would have been difficult enough if they had all been disposed towards compromise but in fact the political agendas in Washington and Moscow tied the hands of even the most conciliatory cultural officials.

At the start of August the Russians closed a production of the American playwright Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
at the Deutches Theater after only two days. The play had been put on by a collective of former members of the Deutsches Theater, who had been naïve in thinking that an American play was going to be acceptable in the Soviet sector. A few days later the theatre critic Paul Rilla explained in the
Berliner Zeitung
that the play had demonstrated excessive formal experimentation and concern with ‘private emotions’: ‘why not instead a new, robust dramatic form and up-to-date content?’ Nicolas Nabokov, now appointed to Berlin to be in charge of music for the Americans, struggled with the intransigence of both the US and Soviet governments. Going to see
Madame Butterfly
in the Soviet sector with an American general, he found himself required to explain the plot of the opera. When he learnt that it involved an American officer impregnating a Japanese girl and then returning home to marry someone else, the general was furious. ‘You knew that
they
were going to permit the Krauts to put on American uniforms and go through that . . . insulting . . . that slanderous rigmarole! And you didn’t
do
anything about it! You didn’t protest?’
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Nabokov was discovering that the problems of quadripartite government were magnified in Berlin: ‘Berlin was only
more
corrupt,
more
decadent,
more
degenerate than the rest of Germany, and its ostentatious morbidity was more apparent because it was the seat of the most emasculated government in the world: ineffectual, cumbersome and absurd.’ He was frustrated because he was caught between the practical impossibility of housing and feeding orchestras (did trombonists really need more calories than string players?) and the political impossibility of mediating between East and West. His role in Germany was to ‘establish good psychological and cultural weapons with which to destroy Nazism and promote a genuine desire for a democratic Germany’. One of his tasks was to track down the Soviet administrators in charge of the press, radio, film, theatre and music in their sector and to persuade them to establish a Quadripartite Directorate of Information Control so that there could be clear cultural policy across the sectors. He had expected establishing a directorate of this kind to be difficult but he had not expected it to be so hard just to find the Russians concerned. For two months he ate caviar with charming and taciturn Soviet officials who were unable or unwilling to tell him about any of their colleagues’ job titles or responsibilities. It was all the more difficult because the Russians kept trying to convince him that he was one of them – ‘we need composers in Russia,’ Tulpanov urged him – because he was a Russian by birth, even though he was there specifically as an anti-communist.
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