The Bitter Taste of Victory (64 page)

15  
‘The Army strongly’: Peter Lisagor and Pat Mitchell, ‘Still a Ban on Fraternizing, but Prophylaxis is Available’,
Stars and Stripes
, 7 Jun 1945.

16  
For the Hamburg raid see Overy,
The Bombing War
, pp. 334, 336. For the quotations from Sybil Thorndike’s letters to her husband, Lewis, see Jonathan Croall,
Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life
, (Haus, 2008), pp. 345–46.

17  
For Thorndike’s letters to Lewis see Croall,
Sybil Thorndike
, pp. 348–49.

18  
Mervyn Peake, ‘The Consumptive, Belsen 1945’, in
The Glassblowers: A Collection of Poems
(Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950).

19  
‘the reasons which’: Mervyn Peake to Maeve Peake, cited in Tom Pocock,
The Dawn Came Up
(Collins, 1983), p. 128.

‘He was quieter’: interview with Maeve Peake, cited in Pocock,
The Dawn Came Up,
p. 146.

20  
‘the way of living’: Brigadier-General Robert McClure to Colonel Kehm and Colonel William Paley, 19 Feb 1945, NARA RG 331, cited in Kay Gladstone, ‘Separate Intentions: The Allied Screenings of Concentration Camp Documentaries in Defeated Germany in 1945–46 in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds.),
Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933,
pp. 50–64, p. 51.

‘By reminding’: Bernstein, cited in Gladstone, ‘Separate Intentions’, p. 54.

21  
‘There was an’: BW, “Billy, How Did You Do It?”: Billy Wilder in Conversation with Volker Schlöndorff,
Arena
series, BBC TV, 1988, cited in Ed Sikov,
On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder
(Hyperion, 1998), p. 237.

22  
‘When the title’: Report by BW and Davidson Taylor following a screening of
KZ
in 400 person theatre in Erlangen on 25 Jun 1945, cited in Gladstone, ‘Separate Intentions’, p. 60.

23  
‘so colossal’: Stern,
The Hidden Damage
, p. 129.

24  
On the reputation of the BCCG see Meehan,
A Strange Enemy People
, p. 53.

‘Not one of the’: Richard Crossman, ‘A Voice from Berlin’,
New Statesman and Nation
, 9 Jun 1945.

25  
See George Clare,
Berlin Days
(Papermac, 1994), pp. 61–6, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945
–
1948
, trans. by Kelly Barry (University of California Press, 1998), p. 34.

26  
See Schivelbusch,
In a Cold Crater
, p. 35. Schivelbush also endorses Werner Hahn’s view that Stalinist culture under Zhdanov was in fact less dogmatic than it seemed. According to Hahn, ‘cultural politics under Stalinism were not actually cultural politics, but a politics that availed itself of culture as a strategic means, being otherwise completely disinterested in its contents and forms. Culture was attacked and took the blow’ (Werner G. Hahn,
Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946–
1953, Cornell University Press, 1982). See also David Pike,
The Politics of Culture in Soviet-occupied Germany 1945–1949
(Stanford University Press, 1992).

27  
These remarks by WHA quoted in Nicolas Nabokov,
Bagazh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan
(Atheneum, 1975), pp. 220–21.

28  
‘Now about’: cited in Nabokov,
Bagazh
, p. 225.

29  
‘As for’: cited in Nabokov,
Bagazh
, p. 225.

30  
WHA, ‘Memorial for the City’, in
Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
, ed. by Edward Mendelson (Faber, 1976).

31  
‘a large sprawling’: SS,
European Witness: Impressions of Germany in 1945
(Hamish Hamilton, 1946), p. 9.

32  
‘It was rather’: Goronwy Rees,
A Bundle of Sensations: Sketches in Autobiography
(Chatto & Windus, 1960), p. 174.

33  
Rees tells Spender what he has seen: Rees,
A Bundle of Sensations
, pp. 183–84. Spender reports this conversation in
European Witness
, p. 15.

34  
‘It is a climax’: SS,
European Witness
, pp. 23–24.

35  
‘German swine’, ‘You calculate the rations’: SS,
European Witness
, pp. 33, 35.

36  
‘unchanged’: KM to Katia Mann, 1 Jul 1945, KM Archive.

‘because he saw’: SS, ‘September Journal’,
Horizon
, Oct 1939.

37  
‘an Apollonian Germany’: SS, ‘September Journal’.

38  
You seemed to’: Curtius, quoted in SS, ‘Rhineland Journal’,
Horizon
, Dec 1945.

39  
For the Allies’ treatment of the Jews in Germany, see Grossman,
Jews, Germans and Allies
.

40  
‘We can understand’: SS, ‘Rhineland Journal’,
Horizon
, Dec 1945.

41  
Officers tell him they sympathised with Nazis: SS,
European Witness
, p. 73.

‘a kind of ideological’: Dagerman,
German Autumn
, p. 66.

42  
For the questionnaires, see MacDonogh,
After the Reich
, p. 345. On the intoxicating of applicants, see Harold D. Hurwitz,
Die Stunde Null der deutschen Presse: Die amerikanische Pressepolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949
(Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1972), p. 38. Once drunk, applicants were also required to write essays.

43  
SS,
European Witness
, p. 97.

44  
In October 1928, in ‘Die geistige Internationale’ (‘The International Spirit’), Curtius reflected on the ten years since the end of the First World War and stated hopefully that ‘a consciousness of a European community spirit is blossoming, which comes from the experience of joint hardship’ (E. R. Curtius, ‘Die geistige Internationale’,
Die Böttcherstrasse
, October 1928).

5:
 Berlin, July–October 1945

1  
‘one of the’, ‘a kind of lunar’: EM, ‘Das befreite Berlin’, Jul/Aug 1945, in
Blitze überm Ozean: Aufsätze, Reden, Reportagen,
ed. by Irmela von der Lühe (Rowohlt Tb Verlag, 2001).

2  
PdeM to HS, 15 Jul 1945, PdeM Archive.

3  
‘band of thieves’: PdeM to HS, Jun 1944, PdeM Archive.

4  
‘Sodom and Gomorrah’: KM,
The Turning Point
, p. 86.

5  
Special performance of
Der Parasit
: ‘Berliner Bühnen’,
Berliner Zeitung
, 14 Jul 1945.

6  
‘To the left and right’: PdeM to HS, 15 Jul 1945, PdeM Archive.

7  
‘Justice!’, play closes: Rees,
A Bundle of Sensations
, p. 192.

8  
‘not go any further’: PdeM to HS, Jul 1945, PdeM Archive

9  
‘wonderful to be back’, ‘boiling along’: James Gavin to MG, 5 Jul 1945, MG Archive.

‘Darling everything I do’: Gavin to MG, 1 Aug 1945, MG Archive; ‘ships-that-pass’: Gavin to MG, 10 Jul 1945, MG Archive.

10  
On the extent of the material destruction, see Curt Riess,
The Berlin Story
(Frederick Muller, 1953), p. 38. For conditions in the city generally, see MacDonogh,
After the Reich
: disease (p. 98); deaths from typhus (p. 113); death rate in city (p.118); removal of cows (p.111).

For estimates of the number of women raped in Germany, see Grossmann,
Jews, Germans and Allies
, p. 49.

11  
‘Well the town’, ‘even the telephones’: Gavin to MG, 8 Aug 1945, MG Archive. On Soviet deaths, see Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 131.

12  
‘Mami, you suffered’: telephone conversation between MD and her mother, in Riva,
A Woman at War
, p. 85.‘PLEASANT VISIT’: Gavin to MD, 30 Aug 1945, MD Archive.

13  
Report on the Potsdam Conference, Jul–Aug 1945:
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=2976
.

14  
‘The German people’: ‘Die Ergebnisse der Berliner Konferenz’,
Berliner Zeitung
, 4 Aug 1945.

Day-to-day survival: see Riess,
The Berlin Story
, pp. 36–37.

For Brecht applause, see Ruth Andreas-Friedrich,
Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945
–
1948
, trans. by Anna Boerresen (Paragon House, 1990), p. 82.

For reconstruction, see Ian Buruma,
Year Zero: A History of 1945
(Penguin, 2013), p. 283.

15  
‘stop fooling around’: KM to Hermann Kesten, 11 Aug 1945, in KM,
Briefe und Antworten
.

‘at once
unconquerable’
, ‘not for general’: GO, ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’,
Tribune
, 19 Oct 1945.

16  
‘the excitement of it’: Gavin to MG, 15 Aug 1945, MG Archive.

17  
‘I feel like a small boy’: Gavin to MG, 30 Aug 1945, MG Archive.

‘When a train’: Gavin to MG, 23 Aug 1945, MG Archive.

18  
‘it looked like the end’: BW speaking to cameraman in plane over Berlin, cited in Sikov,
On Sunset Boulevard
, p. 244.

19  
Sikov,
On Sunset Boulevard
, p. 246.

20  
‘The gentlemen who’: Memorandum written by BW, cited in Sikov,
On Sunset Boulevard
, p. 246.

21  
‘I found the town mad’, ‘A good job’, ‘Now
if
there’: BW, Memorandum for the United States Information Control Division on the subject of ‘Propaganda through Entertainment’, 16 Aug 1945, in Ralph Willett,
The Americanization of Germany, 1945
–
1949
(Routledge, 1988), pp. 42, 40.