After the Reich (52 page)

Sometimes the French showed themselves more pragmatic than the Americans. Where the latter had sequestered IG Farben and banished the directors, the French allowed BASF in Ludwigshafen to remain as it was. On the other hand they made no bones about pocketing a chlorine business in Rheinfelden, a viscose business in Rottweil, the Preussag mines or the chemicals group Rhodia in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and awarding them to French concerns. In Friedrichshafen they shipped out everything useful in the Zeppelin works and did much the same at Dornier and Maybach.
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Clay voiced his frustration at the French ‘living off the land’ in Baden-Württemberg, but it was to some extent an expression of a more old-fashioned attitude to war and conquest, where naked self-interest played a large part.
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The French too managed to pick up a few scientists, whom they wanted for their missile programme. There had been a research institute outhoused at Biberach in their zone. The Germans were lured over to work for them by the promise of excellent conditions. They could live in Germany and work in France. There was Kehl opposite Strasbourg, and Neuf Brisach on the other side of the Rhine to Alt Breisach. One of the scientists, Helmut von Zborowski, invented the coleoptor, a pioneering VTOL aircraft.
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Reading Elena Skrjabina’s account of life near Koblenz in the French Zone, you would believe all was sweetness and light. The French had not been present at Yalta, and had made no promises to return Russian nationals. A Soviet commission for repatriating Russian citizens had been set up in a nearby castle, but Elena was spared the consequences of Operation Keelhaul, which probably saved her life. She had spoken French from childhood, and this evidently made her sympathetic to the officers of the garrison. They arrived at the beginning of July 1945 and a few days later she was helping their cook procure veal for the 14 July celebrations. The Russians quite naturally fared better than the Germans, who were being rounded up for heavy labour in France, but not all Germans by any means suffered in this way, and returning soldiers were allowed to go back to their homes.
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When Karl-Heinz Bohrer went to school in the Black Forest, he came face to face with life in the French Zone. At the outset the French were the most hated of the four occupying powers. They threw their weight around, requiring Germans to walk in the roads in the university city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Karl-Heinz had heard reports of atrocities carried out by Moroccan troops. The locals laughed at the operatic uniforms. The French wanted to have their revenge for the German occupation, and the Germans resented the political imposition of French ‘victory’. That changed with time. For Karl-Heinz the next few years were marked by an awakening, political and erotic. He read Eugen Kogon’s book
Der SS-Staat
which was pretty well the first in German to examine the machinery of Hitler’s terror. He discovered French culture, first of all in the little cinema in the tiny village of Bickendorf near his school; he saw
La Belle et la bête
,
Les Enfants du paradis
,
La Mort de Danton
and
Sous les toits de Paris
. Among his neighbours, France - Paris in particular - became chic. The antipathy to all things French disappeared. Boys wore Basque berets and hung French posters in their dormitories. They longed to be accepted by the French.
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That was a long time in coming. Paul Falkenburger, a Frenchman who taught at Freiburg University, recalls that it was not until 1947 that there was any meeting between young Germans and French, and that that first occasion took place in Titisee in the Black Forest.
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Berets became a potent symbol for post-war German youth. Ruth Friedrich saw them cropping up like mushrooms in Berlin: ‘Anyone who felt they had something to say wears a black beret. There have never been so many berets in the city. They are the Phrygian bonnets of the first post-war weeks in Berlin.’
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The French acquired the Saar at the four-power conference in Paris in April 1946. They were once again the keenest to return to the
Kleinstaaterei
- the system of small, impotent states that had been Germany before 1806 - and to this end were reluctant to join Bizonia. French attitudes to Germany changed radically after the end of the war. At first they wanted merely to milk the country, but soon they saw the point of wooing the defeated Germans. President de Gaulle did this as early as October 1945 when he visited the ZOF and spoke of the need to return to ordinary life, to reconstruct the economy. The Germans and the French had to work together ‘because we are Europeans and Westerners’.
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Of course the reason for this was de Gaulle’s spat with Moscow. The Soviet leaders had gone cold on him, and he could no longer rely on the Russians to get his own way.

De Gaulle was still insisting on a veto for the central agencies at the Control Council. Koenig was happy to take on the role of opposing any attempt to reunite Germany, which removed any chance of a centralised railway system and trades union movement. Koenig came up against Clay, who was anxious to re-establish sovereignty so that American troops could go home. Here the French became the unconscious allies of the British, who feared just that - an American departure. Clay was tempted to proceed without France, which was deliberately segmenting Germany.

At the New Year of 1946 de Gaulle insisted that Germany be re-created as a confederation, not a Reich. As the barometer dropped the French were as pitiless as ever in their demands for coal. Production in the Ruhr had fallen to 12 per cent of the 1943 level. In June 1945 the British commander Montgomery had insisted that the coal be kept in Germany ‘to prevent . . . unrest and disorder’.
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At the Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in Moscow in December French demands for coal went up again. They required annual shipments of twenty million tons from 1947. Once again they dished the idea of central agencies by rejecting the suggestion that there should be a central body looking after finance. Koenig was prepared to accept a German commission of experts, providing that it did not operate west of the Rhine (which the French hoped would fall to them). Clay could scarcely conceal his annoyance at the Control Council.
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It was suspected that he intentionally disrupted shipments of wheat to the ZOF.
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Later he quite openly proposed stopping deliveries. Clay was slow to decide that the real danger to peace came from Moscow, not Paris.

The central-agencies argument was eventually won by the French when, as the Cold War broke out, the British for one saw the possibility of centralised, Berlin-based bodies falling into the hands of the Soviets. The French remained at odds with the policy of the Anglo-Americans, however. Their view was that the German economy should serve their needs, while the Russians wanted to hold it down; as far as London and Washington were concerned, Germany should have been allowed to enjoy reasonable levels of industrial activity. To this end Clay halted the dismantling of industrial sites in his zone in May 1946.
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France had a chance to show off in July and September 1946. First came the Paris CFM and later, also in Paris, the much vaunted Peace Conference that was no such thing. The mood among the victorious Allies had changed once again after Churchill’s Fulton speech that March. The former prime minister’s sabre-rattling was not popular at first: his American audience thought he was showing himself an imperialist. It was now the turn of Soviet foreign minister Molotov to try to seduce the Germans. In July he issued a critique of the Western Allies, interpreting the French
idée chérie
of detaching the Ruhr as ‘agrarianisation’ in the spirit of the loopy Morgenthau Plan. Such measures would only breed a spirit of revenge. The Allies needed to render Germany a peaceful, democratic state.
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In 1946 the outstanding French figure of his time, the apostle of Franco-German reconciliation Robert Schuman, entered the lists.
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Schuman seemed almost fated to play his role. He had been born in Luxembourg in 1886, and went to school there before attending four German universities. He became a lawyer in Metz, in German Lorraine, on the eve of the First World War. After the war he represented a Lorraine constituency in Paris, now that the province had returned to France. In 1946 he was made minister of finance under Bidault and, shortly after that, foreign minister. For nine months from November 1947, he was president of the Council, or prime minister. His tenure corresponded to the early period of the Berlin blockade.
^ch

At first Schuman’s line echoed that of de Gaulle. He coveted the Ruhr and opposed German unity, stressing the need for a federal German state. Germany in a segmented state was less dangerous. Yet he was clear that Germany needed to be brought back as an equal partner to play its role in the concert of nations. Provided it could accept its ‘harmless’, federal structure, Schuman was prepared to see it released from the doghouse. He also knew that individual European nations had little chance in competition with the great power blocs: the United States, the Soviet empire in eastern Europe and the British Empire. They needed to federate themselves in order to succeed. The first step towards the European Union would be taken with the formation of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg in 1949. It was at the then German Strasbourg University that Schuman had presented his doctoral dissertation.
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The Anglo-Americans were proceeding towards Bizonia: the merging of their territories which the British believed would cut costs. The pro-Soviet ministers in the French cabinet kept France out of the arrangement. The Paris Peace Conference was held at the Palais du Luxembourg, but although it was billed as an assembly on the scale of the Versailles conference that had followed the First World War, in reality it was empowered only to deal with peripheral issues, settling border questions in Italy and eastern Europe.

In September 1946 it was James Byrnes’s turn to wag his finger at the Russians in Stuttgart. Germany, according to the US secretary of state, was an economic unit, and the aim was economic revival and democratic self-government. American troops would stay in Germany until Germany was secure. Byrnes’s peroration was followed up by Bevin’s in the House of Commons, which alluded to the presence of PCF (Communist Party) ministers in the French government. The Ruhr was not up for grabs, and Britain and America were ready for Bizonia. The American economic adviser General William Draper proposed that the French enter Trizonia as a means of goading Russia, but the French continued to hold aloof, even imposing a customs wall around their zone in the Saar in December 1946, much to Clay’s exasperation.
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The French had lowered their demands for German coal. They now pegged their needs at half a million tons a month for 1947, rising to a million thereafter. It was feared that the German economy might catch up with France’s. Shipments, however, were fixed by output at the mines: at a daily production of 280,000 tons, 21 per cent could be exported. This would rise to 25 per cent only when production passed 370,000 tons.
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French demands continued to irk Clay. On 6 February 1949 he wrote, ‘Sometimes I wonder who conquered Germany, who pays the bill, and why?’ He had a successful meeting with Schuman the following month, however, and expressed an interest in his project for a Western European Union.
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Culture

De Gaulle’s persistent noises about the Rhineland made most Germans think he wanted to annex it to France. He insisted, however, that French policy was only about security, and that the Rhineland was to be a buffer-zone. Where French intentions were generally treated with suspicion, their cultural policy was a startling success. This was very largely due to Raymond Schmittlein, who was director of culture in Baden-Baden. Schmittlein had been born in Roubaix in the north of France, but his mother was Alsatian and he had cousins on the far side of the Rhine. He was
agrégé
in German, and had studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he met his wife. He had taught at the University of Kaunas and had headed the French Institute in Riga. He was a Gaullist. His solution to denazification was to lure the people away from dodgy ideology through culture.
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The famous Weimar novelist Alfred Döblin reappeared in Germany in French uniform and became a literary censor in Baden-Baden. By his own testimony, towering piles of books were placed before him, written either during the war or just after. Suppression had not done wonders for German letters, he thought. With no pun intended (Günter Grass’s first successful novel,
The Tin Drum
, was not published until 1959), he wrote, ‘At first the only thing that grew on the ground was grass and weeds.’
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He founded a literary journal, and formed part of the delegation that inaugurated the new University of Mainz. The journey to the inauguration ceremony was an adventure in itself. As they approached the cathedral city they saw the wrecks of factories ‘as if brought down by an earthquake’ and then the city centre: ‘But where was Mainz? All that one could see were ruins, faceless people, twisted beams, empty façades: that was Mainz.’
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In the old barracks that was now the university Döblin watched civilians and military figures leafing through the translated transcripts of the speeches that morning. There were British and American uniforms scattered along the rows. An orchestra struck up the overture from
The Magic Flute
. Men came in wearing black gowns and mortar boards. Döblin was reminded of a high-school graduation in the United States. The president of the region gave a speech in which he described the new university as the key to the material and cultural revival of the region.
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