After the Reich (62 page)

France’s political commitment to its zone in the Tyrol-Vorarlberg quickly slackened. At the outset the governor, M. Voizard, had a staff of 1,600. A year later less than half that number remained. By the end of the decade it had sunk to ninety-three. In 1945 there were thirty-four offices in the Tyrol alone, in 1948 just eleven. Before the French went home, they performed their own demontage, removing 3,000 machine tools and 2,700 tons of different metals to compensate for the 35,000 machines taken by the Germans from France: a greater prize was the testing equipment for jet engines in Kramsach and the wind tunnel at Oetztal, which the French reassembled at Modane. Some French machinery had ended up in Kapfenberg in the British Zone. The British helped dismantle it and pack it up for shipment back to Alsace.
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11

Life in All Four Zones

Germany today is divided into four zones and within each there are
two worlds: an army of occupation and a conquered people.
The former are not just there to supervise and control, they must
also exert an influence; they are meant to stop up the spirit of aggression
and nationalism and eliminate it before leading the way to
democratic self government; civilisation should heal the smashed and
shaken land.
The first question that comes to mind is what do these two worlds
know of one another? How do they perceive one another? What is
the real relationship?
Naturally no one expects an army of occupation to become an
object of love and adoration, and on the other side, a conquered
people, whose leaders without question launched the war, cannot
expect to be treated at once with sympathy and trust.
But the task of reorientation, even successful administration,
requires an atmosphere of trust and respect on both sides.

Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 71

Children

A
s a Viennese Jew returning to central Europe in British uniform, George Clare steeled himself against feeling pity for the conquered. At the railway town of Hamm in Westphalia, his mettle was put to the test by a swarm of infants who appeared under the train windows: ‘Eh Tommy . . . Please Tommy vat you got? Chockie, sandvich, sveets?’ Clare observed the ‘manna from Britain’ that was tossed out to the urchins: hard-boiled eggs, sweets, sandwiches, chocolate bars, oranges, apples, even tins of pilchards. The children fought with one another to get at the loot while the soldiers enjoyed the spectacle, like ‘throwing nuts to monkeys at the zoo’. Clare went back into the compartment and fetched his haversack rations. He jumped down from the train. The four children closest to the door ran away. ‘Hier bleiben!’ shouted Clare - Stay here! They turned back, curious to hear a Tommy speak German. He shared out his rations among the four of them. He wondered whether any German had done this in the Warsaw Ghetto and yet he felt that what he was doing was right: ‘I could not hate all Germans, as the Nazis had condemned and hated all Jews. No, I neither hated Germans nor - with the exception of the children - did I pity them.’
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Many German children had become feral. They had lost one or both parents, or had simply been estranged from them. In the big towns they lived in holes in the ground like the rest, begging or scavenging for food. At least one British high court judge began his life in this way, until he was rescued by a British soldier who took him back to Britain with him and sent him to school. James Stern remembered the vision of these curious guttersnipes, clothed in rags - ‘or rather, from head to foot they were perfectly camouflaged in filth, so that until they moved you could not tell they were there’. At the approach of an adult, especially a foreign soldier, they scattered like so many rabbits, disappearing into holes. When they re-emerged they sniffed and stared around them. ‘And then you’d see that they carried stones or sticks or bars of iron, and their teeth were black and broken, or that they had no teeth, that one had a single arm, another a crutch, and that the only clean spots on their bodies were the whites of their eyes.’ When he looked into their eyes, however, they were no longer rabbits to Stern - they were famished, diseased leopard-cubs ‘whose one enemy was man’.
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Some of these children had homes, but they nonetheless went out and hunted in packs, stealing what they could from the conquerors. When Stern’s major was alerted to some theft from their well-stocked larder, he decided that some children were to blame. The supposed criminals were hunted down to a dung heap where they had their camp and threatened at pistol point. The youngest of the boys was around five. The only evidence they found was a bottle containing some pink petrol: American petrol was dyed pink. That was enough to convict them. The major ordered a search of their parents’ lodgings. The flats were searched and at least one of the boys received a clip round the ear from his father, but no contraband was found, and the case against the boys was dismissed.
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Nor was it only working-class children who took to crime in this way. Zuckmayer met a certain Frau Doris von M., a former actress married to an elderly Prussian nobleman who kept a boarding house for American visitors to Berlin. ‘My son steals!’ she told the dramatist. ‘And we don’t know what we should do about it.’ Her son and his private-school-educated friends stole to trade, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for sport: ‘The only true Commandment is the eleventh - thou shalt not get caught.’ Jürgen was the boy’s name. One day he returned with a pound of sugar that he had bought with cigarettes pinched from a teacher’s pocket. He also had some chocolate, taken from an American nurse. He proudly delivered these preciosa to his parents, believing that he had done something useful and that he was contributing to the family budget. He had two pilfered cigarettes for his father and was disappointed when he received no thanks. Jürgen had no religion: ‘The Lord looks after the “Amis”, because they can afford him. The Ivans don’t need any, because they worship vodka. The Germans are too poor for either.’

Jürgen’s parents were strict about his thieving, but it was not always so. Others welcomed a wheelbarrow filled with stolen coal or a pound of bacon.
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For many more indigent Germans they could hardly have done without a little help from their children, particularly teenage boys. Heinrich Böll’s short story ‘Lohengrins Tod’ (Lohengrin’s Death) of 1950 is about a boy who is shot at by Luxembourgeois soldiers while stealing coal from a train, falls and suffers appalling injuries. In the hospital they ask if his parents should be informed, only to find out that his mother is dead, and the head of the household is his elder brother. Stealing coal was hardly seen to be a sin: after all, Dr Frings
^cu
had actually absolved the coal-stealers from his pulpit.
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Children were a considerable problem for the Allied authorities. There were over fifteen million of them in Germany. Of those born after 1930, some 1,250,000 had lost a parent in the war, and 250,000 had lost both. Up to a third had no more contact with their fathers as they were in POW camps, while a further million and a half were refugees from the east, with a little under half that number living in makeshift camps. In the case of a boy arrested for petty larceny in Munich in 1946, it transpired that his mother had been killed in an air-raid in Essen in 1943, that his father was missing in Russia, that he had been billeted with an aunt in Dortmund but had been evacuated to East Prussia. He had moved to Danzig to be trained to operate an anti-aircraft battery where he had been captured by the Red Army. The Russians had released him. He had gone to Berlin, but had been unable to locate the relative he was looking for. He had finally gone to Bavaria in search of food. Many female children resorted to prostitution to survive. Boys, too, performed a service for Allied soldiers. In Frankfurt their most prominent client was the infamous American major ‘Tante Anna’ (Aunt Anna).
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American schoolmasters thought the appropriate policy was to organise the children in sporting clubs and teach them democracy at the same time. It was believed that baseball and football might instil a sense of fair play in small Germans. The sporting life was lost on many of them, but jazz and dancing tended to succeed where baseball failed: the jitterbug and boogie-woogie were popular with German youth, as were Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Attempts to extend musical re-education to Samuel Barber and Aaron Copeland proved less successful. The Germans had a musical tradition of their own. A camp was established at Compiègne near Paris to train German teachers.
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The Americans made the mistake of trying to herd German children together in these imitation summer camps. Hitler’s
Volksgemeinschaft
had emphasised the community in preference to the individual, and right-thinking German youth wanted nothing of the American idea. They loathed all notions of being ‘herded together once again’.

One visionary was Yella Lepman, a Jewish writer born in Stuttgart who returned to Germany in 1945 in an American uniform. From 1946 she built up an international children’s library in Munich which she ran until 1957. In December 1945 she went before incredulous American generals to demand cases of books for German children. She stood her ground and eventually received their blessing to import some. In her memoir she describes the sight of young children as she first encountered them playing in the bomb craters before the ruined station. Many were without shoes, and ran around in their socks or barefoot. It was hard to tell the difference between little boys and girls; ‘here and there they made an attempt to beg; a ten-year-old with one leg, the other certainly lost during a night of bombing, hops like a lame bird around the American canteen, clapping his hands imploringly. Occasionally a white or black soldier takes pity and throws the child something: a half chewed piece of chocolate out of his pack, a stale sandwich, a few cigarettes to barter: that produces a wild commotion, sometimes a fight, a punch-up.’
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CARE packets were the salvation of suffering Germans like Charlotte von der Schulenburg. After the currency reform of 1948 which scrapped the inflationary Reichsmark she exchanged the coffee in the parcels for Deutsche Marks. She also received second-hand clothes from English and American families who had heard of her plight. There was always a party when the parcels came and the maid Klara was proud to take the children into the village dolled up in their not quite new finery. The collars were dazzlingly white, their hairbands freshly ironed.

Another charity organisation for the families of the Plotters was founded by a Swiss doctor, Albert von Erlach. The money was spent on taking the children of the conspirators and giving them a holiday with a Swiss family. Two of Charlotte’s children were dressed up in their best tracksuits and clogs and taken to a Red Cross train in Hanover where they were consigned to the care of English nurses. The train took off with little Schulenburgs, Schwerins and Kleists. They came back three months later. One of the Schulenburg daughters had put on seven and a half kilos. She was smartly dressed in grey flannel and wonderful shoes. The other had plump cheeks and a splendid little coat. They called out to their mother, ‘We have brought you silk stockings and Nescafé!’ The following year two of her other children went and gorged themselves on oranges and chocolate and other delicacies that Germans could only dream of. It broke her heart to lose her children for such a long time, but she had to admit the benefits.
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Arts

German literature was set for a flowering after 1945, once the pressure of Nazism had been lifted, and Goebbels’s nose pulled out of the pot. Thomas Mann had adopted a typically high and mighty attitude to any literary stir-rings that took place between 1933 and 1945: ‘A stench of blood and shame attaches to them; they should all be pulped.’ Had such pulping come about, it would have been as effective a form of censorship as the Nazis ever used.
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Mann’s comments were occasioned by an invitation to return to Germany penned by the author Walter von Molo in the summer of 1945.

Please come soon . . . look at the grief-furrowed faces, look at the unutterable sadness in the eyes of the many who did not take part in the glorification of the shadowy side of our natures, who could not leave their homes, because we are talking here of many millions of people for whom there was no other place on earth other than their own land which was gradually transforming itself into a huge concentration camp, in which there would be only different grades of prisoners and warders.

Mann’s rigid stance did not make him popular in Germany, and Hans Habe, who had returned to Germany in American uniform and set about castigating his former countrymen, was dismissed as a ‘Morgenthau-boy’.
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Ernst Jünger’s tract
Der Friede
(The Peace) was one of the most important pieces of samizdat literature written during the war, and it continued its illicit circulation after the peace. It was written in 1941 and revised in 1943, when Jünger was protected by the Army Command, chiefly in Paris. The following year Jünger suffered a personal tragedy when his son Ernst was killed near Carrara in Italy. It was Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg who brought a copy of the text back to Germany and circulated it among the opposition. More copies were made in March 1945, and these were distributed in south Germany. The Allies, however, refused to grant a licence to print the book. In 1948 it was published in Paris, Amsterdam and New York and in 1949 in Zurich and Vienna.
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On 30 August 1945, Jünger had a visit at Kirchhorst: ‘In the afternoon Axel von dem Bussche-Streithorst came, a young and severely handicapped major. He brought with him a copy of my treatise on the peace. I have the impression that this is the best known of my writings . . . although no press has printed it, no bookseller has sold it, and no newspaper has published a review. The whole fame of the book rests on a few copies that I gave away.’
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