The Bitter Taste of Victory (17 page)

Gradually, Spender became exhausted by the scale of ignorance on both sides. Even the German-educated elite seemed unwilling to admit their culpability, while many of the British officers he spoke to seemed ignorant of Nazism and its evils. Several officers told him that they sympathised with the Nazis because they were fellows who stood up for their country, whereas the refugees were rats who had let their country down.

Already it was clear that the process of denazification was absurdly unfair. Millions of Germans had been presented with
Fragebogen
(questionnaires) asking 133 questions over the course of twelve pages, described by the visiting Swedish novelist Stig Dagerman as ‘a kind of ideological equivalent of tax returns’. These were designed to ascertain the interviewees’ relation to Nazism and militarism but asked along the way whether the bombing had affected their health and about their sewage, electricity and drainage.
⁴¹
Many Germans were rightly outraged to be presented with these forms. The names of the interviewees were drawn at random and there was an element of absurdity in the selection. There were questionnaires assigned to some Germans who had been imprisoned in concentration camps and to some former high-ranking Nazis including Hermann Göring’s wife Emmy Sonnemann, who filled in the form in Straubing prison while her husband awaited trial. And to many Allied officials the results of the
Fragebogen
seemed almost irrelevant. Americans granting newspaper licenses ignored the forms and elected instead to get potential applicants drunk, believing that inebriated conversation was more revealing than sober box-ticking.
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Attempting to make sense of the tragic-comic chaos surrounding him, Spender became overcome by a sensation of nausea that was as physical as mental. This began with a feeling of violent homesickness. He lay on his bed reading French books which consoled him because they had been written in a world where plans, thoughts and relationships could grow. In Germany, Spender felt that it was impossible to create a free atmosphere in which good could take root and develop. The Germans had deprived themselves and the rest of Europe of freedom and in the process had turned Germany into a ruined prison where the Allies served as unwilling jailers.

Retreating back to Paris in August, Spender analysed his nausea and decided that the people of Europe were faced with a choice. They were now familiar with a kind of destruction that they had never previously contemplated. It was quite possible to imagine any town in Europe pulverised into a desert of rubble. The idea of destruction had become oddly fascinating and people had to decide collectively whether to embrace or resist it. For Spender, it was essential that a new pattern of world society designed to secure peace should come into being. It
would be modelled according to the necessities of future world-unity and not according to existing interests. The ruins of Germany testified to the need for a united Europe: ‘behind London, Paris, Prague, Athens, are those shadows, those ghosts, the destroyed towns of Germany which are also the part of the soul of Europe which has collapsed visibly into chaos and disintegration. Their ruin is not just their ruin, it is also pestilence, the epidemic of despair spreading over and already deep-rooted within Europe, the black foreshadowing of the gulf which already exists in us – the gulf which we can still refuse.’
⁴³

Thwarted by both the British and the Germans, Spender was no longer so optimistic that it was possible to reconcile the spirit of JCS 1067 with the spirit of Thomas Mann. Like Auden and Wilder, he was giving up on the possibility of having any impact on Germany. Instead, he sought a higher ideal in a vision of European unity. This was in part inspired by the prewar ideals of Curtius, though he had lost some faith in the man himself.
⁴⁴
From now on Spender would be less concerned with reviving culture in Germany than in attempting to bring about a shared cultural vision for Europe.

5

‘Berlin is boiling in sweltering summer heat’

Berlin: July–October 1945

On 2 July 1945 Berlin was officially opened to the Western Allies. Since the city had fallen to the Russians in May, very few British or American soldiers had been allowed in. An American reconnaissance party of 500 men had been turned away on 17 June on the grounds that the Western Allies had still not retreated to the demarcation lines agreed at Yalta. The handful of western journalists who managed to reach Berlin reported on the strangeness of seeing the German capital strewn with Russian signs and Slavic faces; even the clocks were aligned to Moscow time. They were also struck by the unusually vertical quality of the ruins. In parts of the city centre there was street after street of ghostly façades, defying gravity in their refusal to topple.

Now advance units of occupation forces arrived to set up communication facilities and prepare for the troops. Billets were in short supply so they camped in the Grunewald, the forest to the south-west of Berlin. The next day a train of sixty jeeps brought the first British, US and French troops and foreign correspondents into the city that for six years of war and two months of occupation they had been waiting to claim as their own. On 12 July four-power rule officially began in Berlin. Each commandant was to take a fifteen-day turn ruling the city and the Western Allies were now responsible for importing food across the Soviet zone to feed people in their sectors of Berlin.

Partly because the city had been closed for so long, the entry to Berlin now took on the excitement that crossing the Siegfried Line into Germany held during the latter stages of the war. Amid the persistent cosiness of their headquarters in German spa towns, or amid the crumbling opulence of The Ritz in Paris, British and American soldiers, officials and journalists waited impatiently to be sent into the former capital of the Reich. And they were not disappointed by what they found. Corpses still lined the streets, the ruins stank, but one by one the nightclubs and bars reopened; even in tatters Berlin retained the excitement and edge of its hedonistic past. For its conquerors, Berlin became the site of a summer-long cocktail party taking place against the backdrop of an overheated morgue.

Erika Mann was on one of the jeeps entering Berlin on 3 July. She had returned to Germany in June, going straight to Munich where she registered a claim on the family house. Unlike Klaus, Erika remained determinedly unsentimental while visiting the lost city of her childhood, staying clear of the remains of Poschinger Strasse. This was more difficult in Berlin, which she described in an article as ‘one of the most unreal places imaginable’. Here was ruin on an even greater scale than she had seen in Aachen or Munich. The city centre seemed ‘a kind of lunar landscape – a sea of devastation, shoreless and infinite’. And the resourcefulness of the inhabitants made the landscape all the more unreal. Well-dressed men with dispatch cases climbed piles of debris looking for goods to sell on the black market; German girls on bicycles smiled and flirted with Amerian GIs; in a large tenement building she found someone playing a Prussian marching tune on a miraculously intact piano. Erika was angered once again by the lack of obvious guilt. Moving swiftly and talking loudly, these people seemed to have no idea that they had deprived her of her home.
¹

Erika Mann’s arrival was closely followed by the appearance of the German novelist Peter de Mendelssohn, who was now a British citizen garbed in army uniform and assigned to be in charge of newspapers for the Western Allies. Initially, he was employed by the Americans; his task was to investigate the journalists remaining in Berlin and license a newspaper in their zone. On 15 July de Mendelssohn wrote to his wife,
the Austrian novelist Hilde Spiel (who was waiting at home with their children in Wimbledon), describing his first impressions of the city where he had once lived: ‘Berlin is boiling in sweltering summer heat, and the stench and odour that rises from the canals and river arms of the inner city, still packed with thousands of rotting human bodies, make one really sick . . . In a few days this town is going to be a cesspool. Again, as with most other things in Berlin, one can only say: there has never been anything like this anywhere before.’
²

De Mendelssohn and Spiel had spent the war in London saving pennies and dodging bombs. Successful writers in Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s, they had found themselves starting again in a new language and a new country, struggling to forge a new reputation in exile. Initially, de Mendelssohn had been reluctant to return to Germany, unwilling to undertake the task of going to reform that ‘band of thieves and murderers and abject criminals’ who remained. But now he was revelling in the unfamiliar luxury and power. Both de Mendelssohn and Erika Mann were stationed with other British and American officials in the south-west suburb of Zehlendorf, which was relatively untouched by the bombing. Here the air was clean and birch trees swayed gently in the summer breeze. There were French windows open onto the terrace and drinks on the coffee table and it was hard to believe that they were only minutes away from some of the worst destruction the world had ever known.
³

De Mendelssohn was making the most of the culture that had started reviving within days of the fall of Berlin. In the 1920s, Berlin had been one of the creative capitals of Europe; a city where new intellectual and artistic ideas could flourish and new art forms like the cabaret and the cinema could take flight. This was the home of German Expressionism (created in part by immigrants from Russia who brought Soviet art and theatre to the city) and of the International Modern Style. It was natural that Billy Wilder had gravitated to Berlin from Austria; that Klaus and Erika Mann had made their way there from Munich, seeking the city that Klaus referred to as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah in a Prussian tempo’; that W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender had moved there from London, allured by
the city’s atmosphere of artistic innovation and sexual freedom. If there was going to be a postwar German cultural revival to combat the years of Nazi repression then it seemed inevitable that it would take place in Berlin.
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On 12 May the ban on film and theatre that Goebbels had imposed on Germany had been lifted and a few days later the German bass baritone Michael Bohnen had found himself in front of the remains of what had once been the Theater des Westens in Charlottenberg. The outer walls were still standing but there was no sign of a roof; the stage was burned out and the orchestra reduced to a mass of rubble; corpses littered the balconies. Bohnen wandered up and down in front of the ruins, shaking his head. A couple of hours later he realised that he was no longer alone. There were two former stagehands and a chorus girl beside him. Then three musicians appeared, announcing that they had heard a rumour that the theatre was going to be reopened.

At this stage there was no press or mail in the city but none the less singers, painters, stage hands, prompters and ballet masters quickly learned that the theatre was opening again. They found their way to the shell of the theatre and began sweeping away debris with their hands, burying corpses and building a makeshift roof. Once the renovations were underway, Bohnen sat in the corner auditioning singers and musicians and examining sketches by scene painters. He began to hire people, though he had no money to pay them and the denazification orders meant that he had to turn away seventy-five good singers and musicians who had been members of the NSDAP. Seats were brought in from other destroyed theatres; a curtain was patched together from scraps of old material. On 15 June, only a month after the repairs had begun, the theatre reopened with the new name of the Städtische Oper (Municipal Opera House). From the start every performance sold out, attended both by Germans and Russians. Here at least there were none of the anxieties about fraternisation that beset the British when they reopened the circus in Hamburg.

This was the first of many theatres to reopen in Berlin in the early months after the war. Every day the Soviet-licensed newspaper, the
Berliner Zeitung
, listed performances and auditions occurring
throughout the city. To put so much energy into reviving theatres when people were dying of starvation all around them seemed somewhat mad, or at least it would have done anywhere else. But it made sense here, if only because this was the spirit of old Berlin. For the performers and theatre enthusiasts starving in the ruins, the theatre offered a means of keeping going in a city it would be easy otherwise to give up as dead.

On 13 July, Peter de Mendelssohn saw Schiller’s
Der Parasit
(
The Parasite
) in what he thought an excellent production at the Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This was the opening night and it was a special performance with all seats reserved for the ‘victims of fascism’.
⁵
He told his wife that the theatre stood in a completely bomb-shattered neighbourhood just off the Friedrichstrasse but was itself remarkably unharmed: ‘To the left and right there is just ruins. The theatre has not a scratch, inside there isn’t a spot on the deep red velvet and plush of the seats, not a spot on the white and gilded ceiling, not a glass bead of the lovely old chandeliers has fallen or broken. It was a memorable evening.’
⁶

Unfortunately,
Der Parasit
was withdrawn after two weeks. The play ended with the words ‘Justice! You only see that on the stage!’ Hearing this, the disillusioned Berliners tended to applaud over-enthusiastically, disgruntled at the injustice of the Occupation. The outraged authorities closed down the play. But for every production that closed there were another five waiting in the wings to take its place as the strange cultural frenzy continued.
⁷