The Bitter Taste of Victory (38 page)

In Darkest Germany
was widely praised both in Britain and Germany, with the German newspapers publishing a series of adulatory articles about their British saviour.
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Meanwhile in Germany it was time for Zuckmayer to attempt to sum up his experiences in a final report. He was less able to generalise than Gollancz; for him there was no one lesson to be drawn from the ruins. Instead he decided to tell the story of the people he had met ‘and how I saw them living and dying in the midst of our civilised world in the winter of 1946/47’.
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The word ‘living’ is crucial here. Zuckmayer was prepared to see the German inhabitants as alive in a way that Gollancz was not. They were visiting the theatre and cinema, they were establishing publishing houses, they were arguing energetically in frozen pubs. ‘With what seriousness, passion and enthusiasm theatre is performed in this undernourished and freezing city,’ he wrote; ‘how much theatre is fought for, attended and loved, spoken about and criticised.’ He wanted the American officials reading his report to believe that the Germans were capable of renewal and should be granted the autonomy to bring it about on their own terms. Cultural life in Berlin revealed ‘a spiritual, intellectual and physical vitality that could not be stamped out by robbing the people of liberty for twelve years, nor by the consequences of a collapse without parallel, nor by dividing Germany into four zones’.
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At the same time, Zuckmayer delineated the appalling conditions in harrowing detail. The winter was getting worse by the day. In January the Russians had stopped delivering coal from the eastern zone to Berlin, exacerbating shortages. Karl Jaspers reported to Hannah Arendt that the rivers were frozen, the locomotives broken down and industries closing. ‘The way things are going now, half of the population will perish, and the rest can then eke out a minimal existence on the land.’ Jaspers had been impressed by Gollancz but found that one man’s generosity was quickly forgotten in view of what was actually being done in the British zone. That month the British government had agreed to divert 200,000 tons of extra food from Britain to Germany
but it was too little too late. Suicides had increased rapidly, with 186 people killing themselves in January alone.
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Zuckmayer described the sparkle of frost on the walls inside the rooms of German homes. In almost all the houses inhabited by Germans, the water pipes had now frozen or burst. The population was dirty, dark and embittered, their clothing soaked with slowly drying snow. Like Gollancz, Zuckmayer was worried that the occupiers were dooming their own regime in Germany by treating the Germans too harshly. In his report he described Germany as divided into two worlds: ‘an occupying army and a defeated people’. The liberal anti-Nazi old guard in particular was disappointed. They had expected the allies to arrive with a carefully drafted plan to win the peace and now thought the opportunity was missed. Zuckmayer hoped that it was not missed altogether but urged the American authorities to address themselves urgently to winning over the hearts and heads of the population.
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For Zuckmayer the potential solution was cultural. Gollancz and Zuckmayer were agreed that democracy could not be taught by undemocratic methods. ‘We are behaving as if you could make men democrats by penalising them for their opinions,’ Gollancz had complained in his book; ‘we are trying to impose a formalistic democracy by totalitarian methods’ when in fact ‘you can create democracy only by creating the conditions for democracy.’ In Zuckmayer’s view these conditions could be created socially and culturally. The Germans and Americans needed to learn about each other’s homes and ways of life; this could be enabled partly by theatre, film and exhibitions as well as by youth groups of the kind he himself had initiated. He thought that the Germans needed to be taught to follow the ideal of heroism some Germans had set during the war and proposed that he himself should direct a documentary or feature film showing them how men and women from their own midst ‘fought and eventually died for the path of liberation’.
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This film would never be made but Zuckmayer did have some immediate influence in Germany. In February 1947 the theatres and directors of the three western zones met for a conference in Stuttgart and decided to cease censorship of plays and to grant independence for theatres, film and music to the Germans. He believed that he was partly
responsible for this and that the decision would ensure ‘the freedom and independence of creative and artistic professions in Germany even after the occupation ended’. He had also made a more local but none the less instrumental impact on the groups of youths he had spoken with and he now urged the US government to focus their efforts on the young. He believed that the kinds of conversations he had held with German youth groups could be replicated throughout the country.

As far as Zuckmayer was concerned, the entire German youth was capable of redemption. Indeed, there was better material in ‘some deluded, but unflinching Hitlerjugend boy’ than in the sycophantic opportunists. And like Stephen Spender the previous year, Zuckmayer insisted that the salvation of the youth was crucial for the salvation not just of Germany but of Europe and therefore of the world as a whole:

The consequences we inflict on the Germans today, we will inflict on ourselves. The cultural reconstruction of Germany and its reorientation is not a question of “Charity” but of reason and self-preservation. This is what we call the concept of a “civilised world”. . . this is the decisive point where this world is either saved or destroyed. The sight of these destroyed cities and the haggard faces speaks a deadly language. They are asking who is next.
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Gollancz and Zuckmayer’s pleas proved effective, chiefly because they coincided with the development of incipient Cold War tension. For the occupiers, Nuremberg had opened the way for forgiveness. Now that some Nazis at least had been publicly punished, the Germans could be elevated from inmates to citizens. As a Third World War became more frighteningly possible and as the fault lines between the US and the Soviet Union deepened, Germany moved from enemy to ally and feeding the Germans became an urgent concern.

Zuckmayer left Germany in March 1947, just as the weather finally began to improve. Jaspers informed Arendt happily that spring had arrived: ‘We don’t have to sit around in blankets any more.’ But the milder weather became the setting for escalating American-Soviet
tensions. The previous October, the conflict between the Americans and the Russians had become explicit when the first postwar elections had been held in Berlin, with both sets of occupiers distributing gifts of shoes, whisky and bicycle tyres to the voters in the preceding weeks. The Russians were convinced that the communist SED party (the result of a forced merger in the eastern zone between the communist KPD and the traditional workers’ Social Democrat SPD parties in April 1946) would be victorious, but in fact they trailed behind both the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-wing Social Democrat Parties (SPD) (which remained an independent party in the western zones). It seemed that the Berliners recognised the SED to be a sycophantic Soviet-led party and wanted to avoid a Soviet takeover.

The Berlin election imbued the American delegation with added confidence when on 10 March the Council of Foreign Ministers met in Moscow to debate the future of Germany. The US was now represented by a new secretary of state, George Marshall, who although non-partisan himself was acting on behalf of a Congress dominated by a vocal, anti-communist Republican majority following a mid-term election in November. He was determined not to allow the Russians to create a centralised Germany paying reparations to the Soviet Union and instead announced the intention of the British and Americans to form a ‘Bizone’ and waive all reparations. These proposals were unpopular both with the Russians and with the French and it was hard for the Russians not to see Marshall’s proposal as anti-communist, especially as it coincided with an incendiary speech from Truman to Congress in Washington on 12 March. In February, Britain had implored the US to take over the burden of providing financial and military support to Turkey and Greece, who were both in the throes of communist insurgency. Now Truman asked Congress for financial aid in rhetoric intended to appeal to the Republicans in Congress who were sceptical about their Democrat president. He argued that there was more than the security of these two countries at stake; the world now faced a choice ‘between alternative ways of life’. One way was based on the will of the majority, the other on the will of a minority imposed on the majority through terror and oppression. ‘I believe that it must be the
policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjection by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’
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Arguably, this was the moment at which the Cold War became unavoidable, although within Germany tensions had been escalating for some time. George Marshall informed the Americans in a radio broadcast that compromise had proved impossible because the Soviet Union had insisted upon proposals designed to establish in Germany ‘a centralised government, adapted to the seizure of absolute control of a country which would be doomed economically . . . and would be mortgaged to turn over a large part of its production as reparations, principally to the Soviet Union’. In Marshall’s view, the recovery of Europe was unduly threatened by the attempt to reach a shared solution. ‘The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate. So I believe that action cannot await compromise through exhaustion.’ Although he still claimed to seek agreement with Stalin, he was also clearing the way for the Americans and British to take matters in Germany into their own hands. Plans were put in motion for a new Economic Council for the Bizone which would meet for the first time in June.
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If ‘Bizonia’ was going to be a success, the British and Americans needed to be popular in Germany. This meant supporting the country economically and using culture to win over the German people. It was time to drop any notion of collective guilt and punishment, and start selling democracy, though it was unclear exactly what democracy was. That spring Lord Pakenham was appointed as the minister responsible to Germany in Britain. He visited the country far more frequently than his predecessor John Hynd and did his best to instill self-respect in his teutonic subjects. At a school in Düsseldorf he told the assembled children never to believe that the whole world was against them: ‘You’re absolutely right to be proud of being German’. On 18 May the British military governor Brian Robertson issued a new instruction to the Control Commission stating that staff should behave to the Germans ‘as the people of one Christian and civilised race towards another whose interests in many ways converge with our own and for whom we have no longer any ill-will’. His staff nicknamed this the ‘be-kind-to-the-Germans’ order.
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Meanwhile the Americans were drafting a new directive to replace the punitive JCS 1067. Launched in July 1947, JCS 1779 advocated the creation of a ‘stable and productive Germany’, stating that ‘the re-education of the German people is an integral part of policies intended to help develop a democratic form of government’, making culture central to the new Bizone agenda. These are directives that both Gollancz and Zuckmayer would have supported. The Cold War pragmatists and the humanist idealists had come to the same conclusion. The Second World War was over and it was time to treat the Germans with kindness and respect.
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The new cultural policy was to be ballasted by economics. On 5 June 1947 Marshall gave an address at Harvard University announcing a new plan to deal with the crisis in Europe. Europe’s requirements for foreign food and other products that the US could provide were greater than her present ability to pay. ‘She must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.’ Marshall offered to provide this assistance, insisting that he was not motivated by ‘political passion and prejudice’ but by a benign sense of history and responsibility.
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In theory, Marshall Aid (officially known as the European Recovery Programme) was available to the Soviet Union. A Russian delegate attended the meeting held in Paris in July to determine the nature and use of these funds. But it was immediately clear that the plan was partly intended to create an anti-Soviet front and the Russian delegate withdrew, leaving the British and French foreign ministers to arrange to implement the plan in the sixteen European nations who wished to participate. The French were sceptical about a proposal that could create a revived and newly threatening Germany but were unable to turn down the offer of much-needed funds. By July, Congress had granted $5.3 billion to Europe, with more funds planned annually, and it was evident that the majority of costs in the new Bizone in Germany would be funded by the US.
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