The Bitter Taste of Victory (61 page)

17  
For a discussion of the concept of the ‘zero hour’ see Stephen Brockmann’s introduction to his
German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour
(Boydell & Brewer, 2004).

18  
‘The victors who’: Erich Kästner, Diary (rewritten for publication), 8 May 1945, cited in Sollors,
The Temptation of Despair
, p. 32.

1:
Crossing the Siegfried line

1  
‘ARE YOU A’: EH to MG, Feb/Mar 1944, cited in Carl Rollyson,
Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn
(Aurum, 2000), p. 150.

2  
Bernice Kert,
The Hemingway Women
(W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), p. 391.

3  
See report by David Bruce in Jeffrey Meyers,
Hemingway: A Biography
(Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 406–07; also Antony Beevor,
Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble
(Penguin, 2015), p. 49.

4  
The Americans were more contented to let the Russians take Berlin; Roosevelt and Eisenhower were taken in by Stalin and his promises. See Antony Beevor,
Berlin: The Downfall, 1945
(Viking, 2002), pp. 194–95.

5  
Stern,
The Hidden Damage
, p. 4.

6  
LM, ‘Paris, Its Joy. . . Its Spirit. . . Its Privations’,
Vogue,
Oct 1944, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

7  
‘Go hang yourself’: cited in Carlos Baker,
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
(Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), p. 420.

‘committed as an’: EH to Mary Welsh, 13 Sep 1944, EH Archive.

8  
EH, ‘War in the Siegfried Line: A grim story of how our infantry broke onto German soil’,
Collier’s
, 18 Nov 1944.

9  
Statistics from Ian Buruma,
Year Zero: A History of 1945
(Penguin, 2013), p. 281.

10  
Details of the ruined city based on LM, ‘Germany – The War That is Won’,
Vogue
, June 1945, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
. Miller visited Aachan in March, but the damage was still much the same as it had been in October.

11  
‘phantastically ruined’: EM, ‘Occupation – Trial or Error’, Oct 1948, EM Archive.

12  
On her American persona: EM to KM, 8 May 1945, EM Archive.

‘complete lack of’: EM, ‘Our Newest Problem: Germany’,
Liberty,
3 Feb 1945, EM Archive.

13  
EM, ‘Our Newest Problem: Germany’.

14  
EM to KM, 15 Jan 1945, EM Archive.

15  
KM’s warnings: Andrea Weiss,
In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 73.

‘Jewish traitress’: cited in Weiss,
In the Shadow
, p. 79.

‘flat-footed peace hyena’: cited in KM,
The Turning Point: The Autobiography of Klaus Mann
(Serpent’s Tail, 1987), p. 241.

16  
A happy period for MD: see MD,
Marlene
, trans. Salvator Attansio (Avon Books, 1990), pp. 197–228.

‘You mean something’: Barney Oldfield, cited in David Riva (ed.),
A Woman at War: Marlene Dietrich Remembered
(Painted Turtle, 2006), p. 68.

‘They’ll shave off’: Dietrich,
Marlene
, p. 200.

17  
‘You’re brave’, ‘A whole philosophy’: MG to Stanley Pennell, 8 or 9 May 1931, in
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
, ed. Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus, 2006).

On her feelings following Spain, MG wrote to Bill and Annie Davis in Jun 1942: ‘Spain was a place where you could hope, and Spain was also like a vaccination which could save the rest of mankind from the same fearful suffering. But no one important cared. So the hope was killed . . . after Spain, I at least felt such bitterness at how the world was run that I wanted no part of it in any way . . . But if you have no part in the world, no matter how diseased the world is, you are dead’ (
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
).

18  
‘I can resign’, ‘Good is my’: MG to Hortense Flexner, 22 Sep 1941, in
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
. On her compulsion to run away, see MG to Stanley Pennell, 19 May 1931: ‘There is too much space in the world. I am bewildered by it, and mad with it. And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand’ (
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
).

‘a life with’, ‘and let them’: MG to Hortense Flexner, 22 Sep 1941, in
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
.

19  
‘badly dressed’: MG to EH, 28 Jun 1943, MG Archive.

‘I am so free’: MG to Allen Grover, 2 Nov 1944, MG Archive.

20  
MG, ‘Cracking the Gothic Line’,
Collier’s
, 28 Oct 1944.

21  
‘Home is something’: MG to Edna Gellhorn, 14 Nov 1944, MG Archive.

‘It is impossible’: MG, ‘By Radio From Paris’,
Collier’s
, 4 Nov 1944.

‘make an angry’: MG to Eleanor Roosevelt, 5 Feb 1939, MG Archive.

22  
‘like a package’: cited in Caroline Moorehead,
Martha Gellhorn: A Life
(Vintage, 2004), p. 278.

‘what I had guessed’: cited in Moorehead,
Martha Gellhorn
, p. 280.

‘wham bam’: MG to Betsy Drake, 13 Sep 1983, MG Archive. For years Gellhorn had been embarrassed about her own lack of receptivity in bed. In 1934 at the end of a long relationship with a married man, Bertrand Jouvenel, she apologised for failing to satisfy her lover. Because she had scandalised the world by engaging in a public affair with a married man, people assumed that she was driven by sexual fervour: ‘it must be thought, she is a woman of great passion – with the needs of the body clamouring’, she wrote to Campbell Beckett, 29 Apr 1934 (
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
). In fact she was unable to return his desire and had disappointed him with her lack of orgasms.

23  
MG, ‘Rough and Tumble’,
Collier’s
, 2 Dec 1944.

24  
MG, ‘Death of a Dutch Town’,
Collier’s
, 23 Dec 1944.

25  
‘much smitten’, ‘a reddish blonde’: Chester B. Hansen, diary, 28 Dec 1944, (Chester B. Hansen Collection, United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, courtesy of Antony Beevor).

‘her elegant hair’: Bill Walton to Bernice Kert, April 1980, cited in Kert,
The Hemingway Women,
p. 415.

‘You can’t hunt’: cited in Rollyson,
Beautiful Exile
, p. 162.

26  
‘I wasn’t meant’: MG to Bertrand de Jouvenel, undated 1932, in
The Letters of Martha Gellhorn
.

‘We want some’: EH to Patrick Hemingway, 19 November 1944, in EH,
Selected Letters
,
1917
–
1961
, ed. by Carlos Baker (Granada, 1981).

2:
 Advance into Germany

1  
Statistics from Richard Bessel,
Germany 1945: from War to Peace
(Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 11 (450,000), and Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 165 (250,000).

2  
‘He seemed distant’: MD to Rudi Sieber, in Maria Riva,
Marlene Dietrich
(Bloomsbury, 1992), p. 556. See also MD,
Marlene
, p. 213.

3  
‘Yes, yes, but The Blue Angel’: see MD,
Marlene
, p. 218, and Riva,
Marlene Dietrich
, p. 556.

4  
De Gaulle had been demanding a separate zone of occupation for France since October 1944, wanting control of the Rhineland in particular. According to Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, if the French did not play a major role in the war after the liberation, ‘the Germans will not look on them as conquerors’. Churchill and Roosevelt were prepared to grant France a zone but Stalin was not; as a result the French zone was carved out of the British and US zones that had been previously agreed (MacDonogh,
After the Reich
, pp. 10–11).

5  
‘only when Nazism’: Report of the Crimea (Yalta) Conference, 4–11 Feb 1945, in
Documents on Germany under Occupation, 1945
–
1954
, ed. Beata Ruhm von Oppen, (Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 4–6.

6  
‘I dislike making’: cited in Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 170.

7  
‘good German’, ‘the better a German’, ‘race of hooligans’, ‘a breed which’: Robert Vansittart,
Black Record: Germans Past and Present
(Hamish Hamilton, 1941), pp. 12, 16.

‘in the most deadly manner’: Churchill to the House of Commons, 21 Sep 1943, cited in Bessel,
Germany 1945
, p. 285.

For hatred of Hitler and Nazism amongst the Allies, see Richard Overy,
Why The Allies Won
(Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 286–9.

8  
‘That unfortunately’: cited in Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 171.

9  
‘If we concentrate’, ‘I confess that’: Victor Gollancz,
Shall our Children Live or Die: A Reply to Lord Vansittart on the German Problem
(Victor Gollancz, 1942), pp. 23, 49.

10  
‘Propaganda and Publicity to Germany’ (a joint PWE and BBC paper on German Re-Occupation), Jan 1944, NA PRO FO 898/370.

11  
‘grotesque and naked’: Lieut. Col. H. V. Dicks, ‘Germany after the War: a resumé with commentary’, February 1945, NA FD 1/6046, cited in Jessica Reinisch,
Public Health in Germany
(thesis, 2005), p. 68.

12  
See, Richard M. Brickner,
Is Germany Incurable?
, (J.B. Lippincott, 1943).‘democratic character structure’, ‘freedom’s own children’: Margaret Mead,
And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America
(William Morrow, 1942), pp. 261, 26.

13  
For a helpful definition of ‘culture’ and explanation of its etymological roots, see Raymond Williams,
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(Fontana, 1976). Describing culture as one of the ‘two or three most complicated words in the English language,’ Williams suggested that there were currently three main active categories of usage: i) as a noun referring to a ‘general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’, ii) as a noun referring to ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group’, iii) as a noun referring to ‘the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity – this is now the most widespread use – culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film. A ministry of culture refers to these activities – with the addition sometimes of philosophy, scholarship, history’. For Williams the overlap between usages reflects ‘a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both the works and practices of art and intelligence’. In Williams’s explanation the German ‘
Kultur’
shared the multiple means of ‘culture’ (while the French ‘
culture
’ and Italian
‘cultura
’ were more likely to refer just to art and learning or to a general process of human development, rather than to culture as a way of life). In fact the German ‘
Kultur’
was more exclusively artistic than its British or American equivalent. For a fuller discussion of this difference see Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, ‘Art is Democracy and Democracy is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the
Neue Zeitung
in Germany, 1944–1947’,
Diplomatic History
23:1 (1999), pp. 21–43.