The Bitter Taste of Victory (37 page)

At the end of the war Zuckmayer had felt nostalgic for his homeland and anxious to see his father, who was eighty-two and dangerously ill. He was grateful to the Americans for granting him citizenship and sheltering him for so long, and he hoped that by visiting Germany as an American he could bring about a reconciliation of the two nations to which he belonged. Like Stephen Spender in 1945, Zuckmayer hoped to explain the Germans and the Americans to each other. He thought that as a writer he was particularly well placed to do this, believing that it was possible to teach humanist values through art and indeed hoping that the Germans might come to understand themselves better through his own wartime play. After applying to join the Control Council, he was charged with the task of surveying the US zone and reporting on the conditions and requirements of reconstruction, with a focus on theatre and film. He hoped that this could be a role in which he could ‘bridge the abysses, soften opposites and appease minds’.
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In this respect, Zuckmayer was one of several Germans in the pay of the American authorities who wanted to re-educate the Germans through their own
Kultur
. This was the mission of the editors of the American-sponsored newspaper
Die Neue Zeitung
, edited by the Hungarian-born German novelist Hans Habe, an old rival of Peter de Mendelssohn’s, with the German poet and children’s writer Erich Kästner as its cultural editor. Both Habe and Kästner took Spender’s view that the Germans could learn to be democratic partly through coming to appreciate their own great art, going against the view of the Allied
authorities in 1945 that German culture was partly responsible for the rise of Nazism.

For many American officials, Habe and Kästner’s emphasis on German culture was problematic in a publication produced by the American authorities and intended to foster respect for the American way of life. One bureaucrat had complained to General McClure in April 1946 that
Die Neue Zeitung,
‘through its emphasis on interpreting and projecting German life and culture, with America receiving driblets of attention, has involuntarily played the Goebbels propaganda tune: “Americans are money-hungry barbarians with no cultural life of their own”.’ But given the American emphasis on freedom of speech, having appointed the paper’s editors, there was very little they could do about this, and the success of the paper made them reluctant to make radical changes in personnel. Kästner himself, who was responsible for the German-centric content of the cultural pages, was adamant that he was furthering the cause of the American occupiers by teaching the Germans to be more broad-minded and therefore democratic in their appreciation of their own culture. That January he had attended an exhibition of abstract art in Augsburg where he had heard students shouting ‘what filth’ at the paintings, with some even suggesting that ‘these artists should be done away with’ or taken to a concentration camp. He complained that although art was free again, these children of the 1930s continued to spit ‘as they have learnt it, on everything that they do not understand’. It was the duty of his newspaper to teach artistic tolerance, as a first step in re-educating the German public.
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This was Zuckmayer’s view as well, and like so many visitors before him, he was impressed to find culture flourishing in the ruins of Berlin. He watched Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth
at the Hebbel Theater and understood why it had become the most popular play in postwar Germany. Wilder’s play depicts twentieth-century New Jersey confronted by a wall of ice that threatens it with extinction and brings with it the unsettling presence of ancient figures including Homer and Moses. Zuckmayer had enjoyed it in New York, seeing it performed for society aesthetes, but he found it gained charge when the spectators as well as the characters had survived the ice age by the skin of their teeth.
This audience could still feel ‘the shudder of menace’ Wilder hoped to conjure; the German title
Wir sind noch einmal davon gekommen
(‘We have come through yet again’) seemed especially pertinent to the bombed cities.
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Zuckmayer was less impressed by the state of the film industry, although he was hopeful about the prospects of the former German film producer Erich Pommer, whom the Americans had sent out that summer to be in charge of film in their zone. Once the boss of Billy Wilder, Pommer had been a great film mogul in Weimar Germany and now he was celebrated by Berlin’s writers and film-makers as a returning Messiah. ‘When Pommer comes, it’s time to roll up your shirtsleeves,’ announced Erich Kästner. Pommer was determined that postwar German cinema would be defined by a ‘rich tradition of poverty and ingenuity’ offering ‘the undistorted image of people in our time’; he was also determined to allow Germans to make films in the US zone as quickly as possible.
¹⁴

All this was especially urgent given that the Russians continued to stride ahead with film production in their zone. That October the Soviet-sponsored feature film
Die Mörder sind unter uns
(
The Murderers are Among Us
) had been released to great acclaim. Directed by Wolfgang Staudte, this was a realistic film exploring the existential shame of a doctor who is unable to escape his war experiences, set in the wreckage of the bombed cities and brave in its suggestion that war crimes remain crimes in times of peace. The Berlin edition of the
Neues Deutschland
commended it for confronting the uncomfortable truths of postwar Germany: ‘who could deny that the towering ruins are our own daily vision?’ It was embarrassing for the Western Allies that the Russians were so far ahead in reinstating German cinema, especially as Staudte had first applied for a license in the US zone but was told that no films would be made in Germany except by the Americans for the next five years. The British, too, were further ahead than the Americans in their film-making although the first British film
Tell the Truth
(
Sag die Wahrheit
) that premiered in December 1946 seemed a problematically conservative portrayal of drawing-room life in prewar Germany, doubly dubious because it had been in production during
the war and was revived by the British authorities using some of the same cast and crew.
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Zuckmayer himself wondered about making a documentary about the Nuremberg trials but as the winter progressed the trials seemed unimportant. No one had time to turn Göring into the martyr that Rebecca West and Erika Mann had feared; they were too busy fighting for survival. Both Zuckmayer and Gollancz found denazification increasingly farcical. It seemed mad that ordinary Germans had spent months filling in absurd forms when senior Nazis could be acquitted. Zuckmayer thought that denazification was all the more pointless given that almost nothing was done on behalf of the former victims of concentration camps. Instead this should be the hour of acceptance, the time when people ceased to measure and weigh the tears shed on both sides. He found that the ragged Germans attending the theatres had acquired an unexpected magnificence, their eyes burning with receptivity, ‘ready for any challenge to their emotions and minds’.
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His hopes were confirmed when he attended a production of his own 1931 play
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
(
The Captain of Köpenick
), a satire on Prussian militarism, in Heidelberg. Just after the First World War, Zuckmayer had studied in this sleepy baroque city in south Germany. Now he was surprised to find that it was almost unchanged; it was one of the few German cities that had not been bombed at all. On his first evening there, Zuckmayer visited a pub where twenty-eight years earlier he had attended liberal meetings. He found the same overheated stove, the same coats and hats thrown over chairs and even the same inn-keeper garbed in his habitual green woolly waistcoat. Only the beer was thinner, though served in the tankards of his student days.
¹⁷

The next night Zuckmayer went to the theatre to watch his play.
The Captain of Köpenick
had been written during the time of Hitler’s rise to power and was intended to warn the Germans about excessive respect for military rank. This had proved a pertinent message and Zuckmayer expected the packed theatre to respond enthusiastically. However after the first and second scenes he heard whistling from the gallery and balcony, indicating disapproval. By the fifth scene the
whistling had stopped and Zuckmayer kept an eye on one of the whistlers, a young blond man who spent the rest of the play sitting with crossed arms and a gloomy face. At the end he asked the man why he had whistled after the early scenes but not later. ‘Why do you care?’ the man asked. Zuckmayer told him that he was the playwright and was now an American who wanted to know what the younger generation thought about militarism.
¹⁸

The man brought his friends to talk to Zuckmayer and it turned out they had all been officers in the German army. They had initially disliked the play for its open condemnation of German culture but had then found themselves taking it more seriously. Zuckmayer talked to the men all night, telling them about his experiences in the US and discussing competing ideas of nationhood and history. By dawn all were agreed that Germany had to find a new ideal in line with the tradition of European humanism: ‘not a battle against the world, not an attempt to conquer the world, but a desire to understand other people and become a creative part of the world as a whole’.
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This was the first of many discussions that Zuckmayer had with groups of young people during his trip. He arranged to speak to school and university students, convinced that open dialogue between the Americans and the Germans could create the conditions for democracy. He was sure that the discussions were fruitful and that the people he spoke to were not going to become Nazis again. They were waiting instead for something better to come. Contact with these young Germans brought Zuckmayer two kinds of happiness: one was to be able to help, the other not to have to hate. On a small scale, Zuckmayer was achieving just the kind of re-education the Allies had hoped for when they formulated their policies two years earlier. If we take him at his own word, he was succeeding in using culture to turn the Germans from fascism to humanism, from blind uniformity to individualism. Like Gollancz, he wanted to transform the Germans into allies, but from his (well-fed) perspective, physical nourishment was inseparable from mental nourishment and his role as a writer was partly to provide this. Zuckmayer was one of the few people in
Germany who still believed that art could be used to convert a starving nation to democracy.
²⁰

Outside Germany the debates about the conditions of the Occupation continued and on 25 November the British Cabinet capitulated on the question of food parcels. This was a victory for Gollancz’s ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign, especially as he had encouraged all 100,000 of his supporters to write to the prime minister the previous week. There was no parcel post for Germany from Britain so thousands of packages poured into the SEN offices in London waiting to be hand delivered. The parcels could do relatively little to alleviate the German plight but they did impact on morale; many Germans were amazed that their cause had been championed by a Jew.

In January, Gollancz published a book-length account of his experiences in Germany entitled
In Darkest Germany
, which had been written at astounding speed, even for him. Extensively illustrated with photographs revealing emaciated stomachs, hollow faces and misshapen shoes, the book was an angry indictment both of the British government at home and of the occupation forces in Germany and their failure to mitigate starvation and disease. He broadcast his own allegiance to the ‘poor and dear’ people in emotive terms: ‘their suffering, and often their bravery, make one love them’.
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In his introduction, Gollancz defended himself from the charge that he was now betraying the Jews by fighting for the Germans. He claimed that he was motivated by ‘plain, straight’ Jewish commonsense, undeflected by sentimentality. Three propositions seemed self-evident: firstly, nothing could save the world but ‘a general act of repentance’ instead of an insistence on the wickedness of others; secondly, good treatment not bad treatment made men good; thirdly, ‘unless you treat a man well when he has treated you ill you just get nowhere’. He claimed, too, that if every German was responsible for what happened at Belsen then ‘we, as members of a democratic country and not of a fascist one with no free Press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively for refusing to tolerate
anything that might be considered even remotely comparable with Belsen’.
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