The Bitter Taste of Victory (4 page)

The city had gone mad, Lee Miller announced in an article for
Vogue
describing the early weeks after the liberation. Pretty girls lined the streets, screaming and cheering; the air was filled with perfume that the French had been saving for this moment. For Miller, as for Hemingway and Gellhorn, this was a return home. The former lover and collaborator of Man Ray and the muse of the surrealists (she was currently engaged in an affair with the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose), Miller had lived in Montparnasse in the 1930s and she was now
revisiting former haunts. All of these visitors tried to find the city they had once loved beneath the wounds of Nazism while they celebrated this small victory in the midst of an apparently endless war.
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By September 1944, the Western Allies were racing ahead of the Russians in the competition to enter German territory and Hemingway triumphed in his contest with Gellhorn. On 1 September he received a telegram from his current hero, Buck Lanham, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division’s 22nd Regiment. ‘Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein,’ Lanham jeered, ‘we have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.’ The next morning Hemingway began making his way to Landrecies, on the Franco-Belgian border; he was with Lanham when the 22nd Regiment began its assault on the Siegfried Line on 7 September. Two days later Hemingway was camping with the regiment in the forest on the Belgian-German border near Hemmeres, sleeping on a pine-needle floor. It was freezing and wet and he came down with a cold, but he wrote contented, loving letters to Mary Welsh declaring that he was now ‘committed as an armored column in a narrow defile’.
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This was a happiness occasioned both by the reciprocity of his love for Mary Welsh and by the war. Though in Cuba Hemingway had resisted Gellhorn’s call to arms, he was as temperamentally restless as she was. He too was calmed by the intense immediacy of battle and now told his son Patrick that he had never been more satisfied nor more useful. While in the forest he met Bill Walton, a suave
Time
reporter colleague of Welsh’s whom Hemingway had befriended that summer in London and Paris. Like Hemingway, Walton was a journalist determined to prove his own heroism; he had parachuted with the US troops into Normandy on D-Day. Now Hemingway had the satisfaction of saving his friend’s life. Recognising the sound of an incoming German plane, he ordered Walton to jump out of a jeep moments before it was strafed.

Hemingway entered Germany with the first American tanks on 12 September and moved into a farmhouse near Bleialf which he and his army companions nicknamed ‘Schloss Hemingstein’. Here he shared a double bed with Walton and was glad to reprise the heroic role
he had already played in two wars. When a shell landed outside the house, breaking windows and eradicating lights, Hemingway calmly continued eating in the darkness while the officers around him hid under the table.

Two months later Hemingway’s triumphant report of the battle would appear in
Collier’s.
‘A lot of people will tell you how it was to be first into Germany and how it was to break the Siegfried Line and a lot of people will be wrong.’ It was the infantry who had cracked the line, not the air force; the infantry who had made their way through grim, forested country until they reached a hill and ‘all the rolling hills and forests that you saw ahead of you were Germany’. They had passed the pillboxes that some ‘unfortunate’ people believed constituted the Siegfried Line, made it past the concrete fortified strong-points and then, in a freezing gale, penetrated the West Wall that many Germans considered impenetrable. Even at the time, Hemingway wrote, it was a battle that felt more cinematic than real; it would be easy to turn it into a movie: ‘The only thing that will probably be hard to get properly in the picture is the German SS troops, their faces black from the concussion, bleeding from the nose and mouth, kneeling in the road, grabbing their stomachs, hardly able to get out of the way of the tanks.’ Patriotically, he concluded that these scenes made him feel that ‘it really would have been better for Germany not to have started this war in the first place’.
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The Allies’ incursion into Germany continued with a three-week battle for Aachen, which was the first German city to surrender on 21 October. Immediately, Allied war correspondents arrived to witness the destruction wrought by their armies and airforces and to interview the defeated Germans. As participants in the Allied war effort, they were intended to produce reports indicting German brutality but instead they often ended up describing the astonishing devastation of the city. Aachen had been heavily bombed in 1943 and shelled throughout the three weeks of battle. Now 85 per cent of the town was in ruins and only 14,000 of the prewar population of 160,000
remained.
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In parts of the city there was row after row of plaster-decorated façades still presenting a semblance of ordinary architecture while in fact there were no houses behind them; elsewhere there was mile after mile of rubble. Only the cathedral stood tall, towering eerily over a sea of ruins. When the inhabitants remained they were living in basements, frightened both of the Americans and of their German rulers, who hurled abuse at them on the radio, accusing them of cowardice for surrendering. The streets were lined with the skeletal remains of their bombed inhabitants and the whole city seemed to exude the smell of rotting flesh.
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Among the first Allied visitors to Aachen was Erika Mann. Once a bohemian German actor, car racer and cabaret writer, Mann was now an American war correspondent, defiantly proud of her army uniform and Anglo-American accent. She was also the daughter of the German writer Thomas Mann, a US citizen and the most prestigious spokesman for German literature in exile. For several months she had been driving around Europe in a battered Citroën bestowed on her by a friend in the French resistance shortly before he died.

Mann had spent the early years of the war broadcasting for the BBC in London and had seen the destruction created by the London Blitz. As an American war correspondent, she had then come close to the battlefields of France, Belgium and Holland. However, nothing had prepared her for the flattened German cities. Like many returning Germans, Mann found it hard to take in the transformation of her former homeland or to believe that this ‘phantastically ruined’ wasteland had really been a city.
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But she had little sympathy either for the vanished buildings or for their demoralised inhabitants. She was determined not to reveal her own German identity and kept up an American persona to stop herself striking out and hitting the unrepentant Germans she now encountered. Meeting a group of German policemen currently being ‘re-educated’ by the Americans, Mann was shocked by the ‘complete lack of feeling of their collective guilt’ displayed by the men, who asked her naively what plans were being laid in Washington for German reconstruction. How did the Americans intend to strengthen the German economy? As a war correspondent had Mann
come across any interesting stamps? Perhaps she could help fill the gaps in their collections?
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Staggered that the Germans could be so oblivious to her own outrage, Mann asked them questions in return. As Military Government policemen, did they expect to run into trouble among Germans still wanting to display the Nazi flag? Immediately, three or four policemen assured her that the Germans were ready to abandon Nazism. Their failure to do so was explained by a familiar mantra: ‘Terror!’ ‘Dictatorship!’ ‘The Gestapo!’ It seemed to Mann that this was becoming a childish song, intoned everywhere. ‘In one breath as it were, these Germans would tell you that a) Nazism was kept alive in Germany by a mere handful of hated fanatics, while b) every German was watched over by two Nazis.’ She believed that Nazism had finally become objectionable but thought that it had lost popularity not because of its moral depravity but because of its military weakness. ‘Germany’s leading criminals stand accused today not of being criminals but of being failures.’
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Writing to her brother Klaus in the English language she had determinedly made her own, Erika said that it was ‘phantastic’ to be back in the ‘Hunland’ and that she was convinced more than ever of the hopelessness of the Germans. ‘In their hearts, self-deception and dishonesty, arrogance and docility, shrewdness and stupidity are repulsively mingled and combined.’ She was now certain that neither she nor her brother would be able to live again anywhere in Europe, which was in as bad a state morally as it was physically. This was a ‘bitter pill’ to swallow, even though she had already been loyally committed to Uncle Sam.
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Erika Mann had very little patience with anyone who claimed to have been duped by the Nazis. She herself had openly mocked and resisted them even before they came to power, though in the very early days it was Klaus who was the politically orientated Mann sibling, warning the world about the dangers of fascism in 1927. Erika’s own political stance began spontaneously and passionately five years later when she recited a pacifist poem by Victor Hugo at an anti-war meeting. A group of Brownshirts broke up the gathering and threw chairs at her, denouncing her as a ‘Jewish traitress’ and ‘international agitator’. Fired from her acting role after the Nazis threatened to boycott the
theatre unless she was dismissed, she felt called upon to make a stand. She was successful in suing both the theatre and a Nazi newspaper who had described her as a ‘flatfooted peace hyena’ with ‘no human physiognomy’. After examining several photographs of Erika, the judge declared that her face was in fact legally human. Galvanised into politicial activism, Erika opened the Pepper Mill revue in Munich on 1 January 1933, collaborating with her lover the actor Therese Giehse and a troupe of players to perform anti-Nazi satirical cabaret until the Nazis drove them out of Germany two months later.
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Having retained her uncompromising stance throughout twelve years of exile, Erika was certainly not prepared to mellow now. She was exhausted by her year of press camp cots and army rations; aware that her thirty-eight-year-old body was taking the same battering as the car given to her by her dead friend. She missed her parents (at home in the plush comfort of Los Angeles) and her brother Klaus (stationed in Italy reporting for the US army). But she was propelled by hatred of the Germans who had driven her family from their homes and killed many of her friends. The people who confronted her daily exhorting sympathy for the destruction of their cities or demanding additions to their stamp collections were the same Germans who had thrown chairs at her in Munich and burned thousands of the books she loved. She was determined to play whatever part she could in witnessing their humiliation and convincing them of their guilt.

In early October, Ernest Hemingway was forced abruptly to return from Germany to France because he had been court-martialled for joining in the combat at Rambouillet. If he wished to free himself, he now had to forsake his own heroism and pretend that he had not borne arms. His anger was compounded by an encounter in Paris with Martha Gellhorn, who suggested dinner only to spend the evening demanding a divorce. Hemingway was reluctant; he preferred leaving to being left and had not quite lined up his next wife. None the less, he found solace in the arms of Mary Welsh, and the company of his old friend Marlene Dietrich who took to sitting on Hemingway’s bathtub at the Ritz and
singing to him while he shaved. This was the first time Hemingway and Dietrich had met in a war zone and it suited them well. Both were in love with courage and were foolhardily determined to emerge as heroes.

Dietrich had come to Europe from America in April as a USO entertainer. She would later look back on her time with the army as one of the happiest periods in her life. Night after night she shivered stoically in sequined dresses as she sung to US troops of love and home and reminded them of the softer and more romantic world they were fighting to regain. She was in her forties with a grown-up daughter but here once again she could be a youthful sweetheart. According to one colonel, Dietrich seemed to look each soldier straight in the eye and say: ‘You mean something to me. I hope somehow I get through to you that I want to be here with you.’ These were her boys; she was beloved by all and especially by the generals, whom she flattered and adored. She had spent September in the protection of the swashbuckling General ‘Old Blood and Guts’ Patton, enjoying taking on the role of First Lady to a war hero. Early on Patton asked her if she was afraid of performing so close to the fighting. She assured him that she was brave; she had no fear of dying. But as a German by birth who was reviled by the Nazis for taking US citizenship, she was aware that she would have enormous propaganda value as a prisoner of war: ‘They’ll shave off my hair, stone me, and have horses drag me through the streets. If they force me to talk on the radio, General, under no circumstances believe anything I say.’ Patton handed her a revolver and instructed her to use it swiftly if captured.
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