The Bitter Taste of Victory (43 page)

However he was aware that in writing this most German of novels he was estranging himself further from his countrymen. As the war ends, Zeitblom’s heart falters with pity when he thinks of the fate that awaits his ‘foolish’ Nazi sons who ‘believed, exulted, sacrificed, and struggled’ with the nation’s masses. But he is conscious that neither his pity nor their anguish will bring them any closer. ‘And they will also lay that to my account – as if things might have been different had I dreamt their
vile dreams with them.’ Mann had estranged himself from the vile dreams of his former friends and if he had turned out to be in the right then it only made him more of an outsider.
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In January 1948, declining an invitation to speak in Frankfurt, Mann voiced his hopes that the novel would temper the misunderstandings that had developed in Germany surrounding his relationship with the country. ‘I hope it will show that I am not exactly a deserter of Germany’s destiny.’ Certainly this was the case for some reviewers. In
Die Wandlung,
Victor Sell praised this as the quintessential postwar German novel: ‘Even though he now lives in California, Mann is still in touch with the German experience . . .
Doctor Faustus
tackles the problem, which the wider masses of Germans took up only after total defeat: the question of how it was possible that a people with a highly developed culture could let evil have its way.’ But others were more sceptical. Walter Boehlich complained in
Merkur
that ‘there is a Germany that Thomas Mann loved, and there is a Thomas Mann whom we loved and still love. But this is not the author of
Doctor Faustus
.’
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The problem was largely that Mann had damned Germany to a hopeless future. Leverkühn’s final masterpiece ends with a half-hearted note of promise. This is a ‘hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair’ which ‘abides as a light in the night’. But it was not a note of optimism that many people saw reflected in Mann’s novel. Over a year since the Nuremberg trials had finished, just when the conquerors had begun to drop the notion of collective guilt and the humiliating process of denazification, Germany’s greatest living writer had sent in his verdict in the form of a book that arrived like a bitter-tasting food parcel to remind the Germans they were culpable. Towards the end of the novel Mann describes the ‘transatlantic general’ who has instructed the inhabitants of Weimar to file past the crematoria at their local concentration camp, declaring (‘should one say, unjustly?’ Zeitblom asks in rhetorical parentheses) that the citizens who went about their business in seeming honesty, ‘though at times the wind blew the stench of burned human flesh up their noses’, should share in the guilt of these horrors. ‘Whatever lived as German stands now as an abomination and the epitome of evil,’ Zeitblom observes sadly, wondering what it will be
like to belong to a nation whose history bears ‘this gruesome fiasco’ within it and that has driven itself mad.
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Mann may have implicated himself in the fate of his countrymen, but he left them no means of escape from misery. Zuckmayer had offered more hope, in suggesting that those who resisted Nazism could be saved by divine justice and that repentance remained possible. The truly deluded in Zuckmayer’s play are granted a kind of goodness; Harras’s sin is to know that Nazism is evil but to go along with it all the same. Zuckmayer was certainly idealistic enough to believe that the young in particular were capable of change. But Zuckmayer’s play did not offer a clear path forward for postwar Germans, any more than Mann’s novel. It was left to Jean-Paul Sartre to offer a mode of escape from guilt through the existentialist doctrine of freedom.

Existentialism came to postwar Germany in the guise of Sartre’s play
The Flies
and in the small, bespectacled figure of Sartre himself, accompanied by ‘La grande Sartreuse’, Simone de Beauvoir.
The Flies
was performed in Düsseldorf in November 1947 with Gustaf Gründgens in the title role and then in a more talked-about performance at the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin in January 1948, this time with Sartre and Beauvoir in attendance.

Sartre and Beauvoir entered Germany on 28 January, taking the train from France. The train’s French dining car felt like a small colony, segregated from the Germans in other carriages. Beauvoir worried that they were now as hateful as the Germans had been in wartime France. The next morning they sped past forests of pine trees into Berlin and were confronted immediately by ruin. ‘Huge stone doorways without doors opened onto kitchen gardens, balconies dangled crookedly across the façades of buildings that were nothing but façades,’ Beauvoir later wrote. A surrealist umbrella and a sewing machine on top of an operating table would not seem out of place. Reality had become insanity. It was all the more unpleasant because Berlin was in the midst of another terrible winter, with temperatures of minus eighteen degrees most days. ‘Ruins and rubbishes, rubbishes and ruins, nothing more,’ Beauvoir
wrote in her idiosyncratic English to Nelson Algren, her American lover.
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They were there as guests of Félix Lusset, who headed Berlin’s Mission Culturelle. French officials were increasingly keen to demonstrate the importance of French culture both to the Germans and the other allies and Lusset had invited Sartre and Beauvoir in order to do this. Initially, the French had governed their zone with even more cultural austerity than the Americans or British, believing they owed no pleasure to a nation that had occupied France tyrannically twice in thirty years. ‘Not one French painting or sculpture will be in the hands and possession of this guilty and criminal people,’ the writer Louis Aragon announced at the end of the war. However, like the Americans, the French rapidly followed the lead of the Russians in wanting to showcase French culture and demonstrate the superiority of French civilisation. French authorities now endorsed a policy of
rayonnement
, or cultural radiance. And both the Institut Français and Félix Lusset’s Mission Culturelle had been founded in 1946 with precisely this aim, operating independently from the military administration to provide theatre, cinema, concerts, exhibitions and evening classes.
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When it came to showcasing French culture, the Pope and High Priestess of Existentialism were good guests to have. Since the end of the Second World War, Sartre and Beauvoir had acquired a kind of fame rarely conferred on philosophers, both in France and in the US. Sartre had visited the White House and written articles for American
Vogue.
In 1945 the popular French weekly
Samedi Soir
had accused him of spreading ‘a new fashion through the living rooms of both [Parisian] banks, a fashion centred around a rather nebulous philosophical abstraction, a doctrine of German origin that goes by the barbaric name of “existentialism”. Nobody knows exactly what it means, but everybody speaks of it over tea.’

As yet the Germans knew of Sartre’s wartime and postwar ideas only by reputation; his central texts,
Being and Nothingness
(1943),
Existentialism is a Humanism
(1946) and
What is Literature?
(1947) had not yet been translated into German. But his reputation was enough for his ideas to inspire intense excitement and revulsion, especially as they
emanated from an atmosphere of overflowing ashtrays and bohemian sexual promiscuity. Although Sartre and Beauvoir were frequently treated as husband and wife, they were in fact unmarried, committed to a pact ‘to maintain through all deviations from the main path “a certain fidelity”’, which allowed them to have other lovers. Both made full use of this and made no attempt to hide their sexual emancipation either in their life or in their writing, which added to their dangerous allure.
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In Germany, Sartre’s ideas had particular appeal for those anxious to classify 1945 as a ‘zero hour’. In
Being and Nothingness
he had advanced the central thesis that ‘existence precedes essence’, arguing that humans are unique because who they are at any particular moment is the result not of a fixed character, or ‘essence’, but of the choices they have made and the future possibilities they are pursuing. This imbues us with limitless freedom, which most people routinely evade, acting without thinking. It is at moments of ‘anguish’ that we become aware of the possibility of individual freedom. This anguish assails us as a feeling of vertigo, resembling the feeling of a person who stands on a cliff and realises that nothing prevents him jumping off. At these moments, we have the chance to reclaim our freedom and live authentically. This entails a joyful ‘self-recovery of being’. What was so exciting about this was that it allowed people to begin again at every moment. For the Germans who had spent the years since the war acquiescing to their occupiers’ accounts of their overweening and aggressive essence, it offered the possibility that by seizing their freedom they could recreate themselves and start afresh.
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These ideas were not in themselves new and were not in themselves French. Somewhat problematically, much of Sartre’s argument had developed out of prewar German philosophical thinking. He had spent several months in Berlin in 1933 (too busy reading philosophy to notice the worrying political developments) and was indebted to the ideas of Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. In 1940 he looked back on Heidegger’s influence as ‘providential’, because it had taught him notions of ‘authenticity and historicity’ at the moment when war was about to make these indispensable for the conscientious individual, if
not for his government. But where Heidegger was now tainted with his involvement with National Socialism, Sartre brought the credibility of a
résistant,
though his own activities in the French resistance had been more limited than was generally believed. He also combined his more abstract ontological ideas with an enticing political commitment to
‘littérature engagée
’. Lecturing in the US in 1945 Sartre had announced: ‘in the underground press, every line that was written put the life of the writer and the printer in danger . . . The written word has regained its power.’ His essay
What is Literature?
insisted on the need for literature to commit to progressive (left-wing) political goals.
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During the preparations for Sartre’s visit, liberal German writers such as those involved in Gruppe 47 had waited with eager anticipation for the proponent of a set of ideas that had the potential to provide Germany with a way forward, while the communist press vilified both Sartre and his philosophy as dangerously individualistic. On 9 January the philosopher Wolfgang Harich had published a detailed commentary on Sartre in the
Tägliche Rundschau
, castigating him as an ‘example of bourgeois decadence’. The following day, the writer Ernst Niekisch (chair of the history of imperialism at Humboldt University) had published an article with the incendiary title ‘Existentialism: a neo-fascist postwar fashion’.
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Sartre’s relationship with communism was more complex than these articles might suggest. Since 1939 he had been a staunch socialist who believed strongly in the need for oppressed minorities to rise up against their capitalist oppressors. But he was committed to a notion of individual freedom that was incompatible with Marxist economic determinism or collective action of any kind. As far as Sartre was concerned, there should be more space for the non-communist left. He was a member of a group called the ‘Revolutionary People’s Assembly’ that was searching for a ‘third’ option between capitalism and communism. This was more possible in France than it would be in the US or indeed Britain. There was still a strong French left (only partly allied with Soviet Russia) and even in Germany, French officials were still trying to mediate between East and West, culturally if not economically. The French did not ban the Kulturbund at the same time as the
other Western Allies and Lusset was unusually keen to co-operate with the Russians, at one stage discussing a possible Berlin-Paris-Leningrad cultural axis with Alexander Dymschitz.
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For Lusset, Sartre and Beauvoir’s visit was therefore a chance to enable cultural conversation across all four zones. There was one official party after another, including a lunch in the Soviet Club and a drinks party hosted by the Americans. Both Sartre and Beauvoir would rather have been wandering in the ruins of Berlin. ‘I am seeing lots of bad people, really stupid, conceited, ugly, nasty ones: generals, ambassadors and wives,’ Beauvoir complained to Algren. They briefly persuaded their chauffeur to divert their car to the Berlin suburbs on the way to a French party, but even after arriving an hour late Beauvoir found the occasion horribly tedious. Elisabeth Langgässer handed Beauvoir an orchid and told her that she looked like an orchid herself. ‘They are amazed that an existentialist woman is not too ugly,’ Beauvoir informed Algren scathingly.
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