by Tony Judt
The American response was to set up ‘America Houses’, with libraries and newspaper-reading rooms, and host lectures, meetings and English-language classes. By 1955 there were sixty-nine such America Houses in Europe. In some places their impact was quite considerable: in Austria, where the Marshall Plan years saw 134 million copies of English-language books distributed nationwide, a significant percentage of the population of Vienna and Salzburg (the former under Four Power administration, the latter in the US Zone of Occupation) visited their local America House to borrow books and read the papers. The study of English replaced French and the classical languages as the first choice of Austrian high-school students.
Like American-supported radio networks (Radio Free Europe was inaugurated in Munich one month after the outbreak of the Korean War), the America House programs were sometimes undermined by the crude propaganda imperatives emanating from Washington. At the peak of the McCarthy years the directors of America Houses spent much of their time removing books from their shelves. Among dozens of authors whose works were deemed inappropriate were not only the obvious suspects—John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett and Upton Sinclair—but also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine and Henry Thoreau. In Austria, at least, it seemed to many observers that in the ‘Battle of Books’ the US was sometimes its own most effective foe.
Fortunately for the West, American popular culture had an appeal that American political ineptitude could do little to tarnish. Communists were at a severe disadvantage in that their official disapproval of decadent American jazz and American cinema closely echoed the views of Josef Goebbels. While east European Communist states were banning jazz as decadent and alien, Radio Free Europe was broadcasting into eastern Europe three hours of popular music every weekday afternoon, interspersed with news on the hour for ten minutes. Cinema, the other universal medium of the time, could be regulated in states under Communist control; but throughout western Europe the appeal of American films was universal. Here, Soviet propaganda had nothing with which to compete and even Western progressives, often drawn to American music and cinema, were out of sympathy with the Party line.
The cultural competition of the early Cold War years was asymmetrical. Among European cultural elites there was still a widespread sentiment that they shared, across ideological divides and even bridging the Iron Curtain, a common culture to which America posed a threat. The French in particular took this line, echoing the early post-war efforts of their diplomats to trace an international policy independent of American control. Symptomatically, the head of the French Cultural Mission in occupied Berlin, Félix Lusset, got on much better with his Soviet counterpart (Alexander Dymschitz) than he did with the British or American representatives in the city and dreamed, like his masters in Paris, of a restored cultural axis reaching from Paris to Berlin and on to Leningrad.
The US spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to win over European sympathies, but many of the resulting publications and products were heavy-handed and counter-productive, merely confirming the European intelligentsia’s innate suspicions. In Germany, America’s excessive attention to Communist crimes was seen by many as a deliberate ploy to forget or relativise the crimes of the Nazis. In Italy the lurid anti-Communist campaigns of the Vatican undercut the anti-Stalinist arguments of Silone, Vittorini and others. Only in art and literature, where the absurdities of Stalinist cultural policy impinged directly upon the territory of painters and poets, did Western intellectuals consistently distance themselves from Moscow—and even here their opposition was muted for fear of offering hostages to American ‘propaganda’.72
On the other hand, in the struggle for the sympathies of the large mass of the Western European population, the Soviets were rapidly losing ground. Everywhere except Italy the Communist vote fell steadily from the late 1940s, and—if opinion polls are to be believed—even those who did vote Communist often saw their vote either as a symbolic protest or else as an expression of class or communal solidarity. Well before the cataclysms of 1956, when the sympathies of most European intellectuals would swing sharply away from the Soviet bloc, the Atlantic orientation of most other Western Europeans had been decided.
CODA
The End of Old Europe
‘Life changed surprisingly little after the war’.
David Lodge
‘I spent my early years in factory towns and their adjacent suburbs, amid bricks and soot and smokestacks and cobbled streets. We took streetcars for short trips and trains for long ones. We bought food fresh for every meal, not because we were gourmets but because we lacked a refrigerator (less perishable substances were kept in the root cellar). My mother got up every morning in the chill and made a fire in the parlor stove. Running water came in only one temperature: frigid. We communicated by mail and got our news chiefly from newspapers (we were sufficiently modern, though, in that we owned a radio roughly the size of a filing cabinet). My early classrooms featured pot-bellied stoves and double desks with inkwells, into which we dipped our nibs. We boys wore short pants until the ceremony of communion solennelle, at age twelve. And so on. But this wasn’t any undiscovered pocket of the Carpathians, it was postwar western Europe, where “postwar” was a season that stretched for nearly twenty years.’73
This description of industrial Wallonia in the 1950s, by the Belgian author Luc Sante, could as well be applied to most of western Europe in these years. The present author, who grew up after the war in the inner-London district of Putney, recalls frequent visits to a murky sweetshop run by a wizened old woman who advised him reproachfully that she had ‘been selling gobstoppers to little boys like you since the Queen’s Golden Jubilee’—i.e. since 1887: she meant Victoria of course—the Queen.74 In the same street the local grocery store—Sainsbury’s—had sawdust on the floor and was staffed by beefy men in striped shirts and sprightly young women in starched aprons and caps. It looked exactly like the sepia photos on the wall taken when the store was first opened in the 1870s.
In many of its essential features, daily life in the first decade after World War Two would have been thoroughly familiar to men and women of fifty years earlier. In these years coal still met nine-tenths of Britain’s fuel requirements, 82 percent of the needs of Belgium and the other countries of the new European Coal and Steel Community. Thanks in part to the omnipresence of coal-fires London—a city of trams and docks—was still periodically shrouded in the damp fog so familiar from images of the industrial city of late-Victorian times. British films from those years have a distinctly Edwardian feel—either in their social setting (e.g. The Winslow Boy of 1948) or else in their period tone. In The Man in a White Suit (1951) contemporary Manchester is depicted as nineteenth-century in all its essentials (hand carts, housing, social relations); bosses and union leaders concur in treating entrepreneurial amateurism as a moral virtue, whatever the price in productive efficiency. Three million British men and women went to licensed dance halls every week, and there were seventy working-men’s clubs just in the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield in the early fifties (though both sorts of social activity were losing their appeal to the young).
The same sense of suspended time hung over much of continental Europe too. Rural life in Belgium could have been depicted by Millet: the hay gathered with wooden rakes, the straw beaten with flails, fruits and vegetables handpicked and transported on horse-drawn carts. Like French provincial towns, where men in berets really did collect a baguette on their way home from the corner Café de la Paix (typically named in 1919), or Spain, sealed in aspic by Franco’s authoritarian rule, Belgium and Britain hung in a sort of delayed Edwardian limbo. Post-war Europe was still warmed by the fading embers of the nineteenth-century economic revolution that had almost run its course, leaving behind sedimentary evidence of cultural habits and social relations increasingly at odds with the new age of airplanes and atomic weapons. If anything, the war had set things in reverse. The modernizing fervor of the 1920s and even the 1
930s had drained away, leaving behind an older order of life. In Italy, as in much of rural Europe, children still entered the job market upon completing (or more likely not completing) their primary education; in 1951 only one Italian child in nine attended school past the age of thirteen.
Religion, especially the Catholic religion, basked in a brief Indian summer of restored authority. In Spain the Catholic hierarchy had both the means and the political backing to re-launch the Counter-Reformation: in a 1953 concordat, Franco granted the Church not merely exemption from taxation and all state interference, but also a right to request censorship of any writing or speech to which it objected. In return the ecclesiastical hierarchy maintained and enforced the conservative conflation of religion with national identity. Indeed, the Church was now so thoroughly integrated into narratives of national identity and duty that the leading primary school history textbook, Yo soy español [‘I Am Spanish’](first published in 1943) taught Spanish history as a single, seamless story: beginning in the Garden of Eden and ending with the Generalissimo. 75
To this was added a new cult of the dead—the ‘martyrs’ of the victorious side in the recent Civil War. At the thousands of memorial sites dedicated to victims of anti-clerical Republicanism, the Spanish Church organized countless ceremonies and memorials. A judicious mix of religion, civic authority and victory commemoration reinforced the spiritual and mnemonic monopoly of the clerical hierarchy. Because Franco needed Catholicism even more than the Church needed him—how else maintain Spain’s tenuous post-war links to the international community and the ‘West’?—he gave it, in effect, unrestricted scope to re-create in modern Spain the ‘Crusading’ spirit of the ancien régime.
Elsewhere in Western Europe the Catholic Church had to reckon with competing and hostile claims on popular allegiance; but even in Holland the Catholic hierarchy felt confident enough to excommunicate electors who voted for its Labour opponents in the first post-war elections. As late as 1956, two years before the death of Pius XII marked the end of the old order, seven out of ten Italians regularly attended Sunday Mass. As in Flanders, the Church in Italy did especially well among Monarchists, women and the elderly—a clear majority of the population as a whole. Article 7 of the Italian Constitution approved in March 1947 judiciously confirmed the terms of Mussolini’s 1929 Concordat with the Church: the Catholic hierarchy retained its influence in education and its oversight power in everything pertaining to marriage and morals. At Togliatti’s insistence even the Communist Party voted reluctantly for the law, though this did not stop the Vatican excommunicating Italians who voted for the PCI the following year.
In France, the Catholic hierarchy and its political supporters felt sufficiently confident to press for special educational privileges in a ‘guerre scolaire’ that briefly echoed the church-state struggles of the 1880s. The main battleground was the old issue of state funding for Catholic schools; a traditional demand but well chosen. While the energy that had fuelled nineteenth-century anti-clericalism, in France as in Italy or Germany, had mostly dissolved, or else was channeled into updated ideological conflicts, the cost and quality of their children’s education was one of the few issues that could be counted on to mobilize even the most intermittent churchgoers.
Of Europe’s traditional religions, only the Catholics were increasing the number of their active constituents in the forties and fifties. This was partly because only the Catholic Church had political parties directly associated with it (and in some cases beholden to it for support)—in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France and Austria; and partly because Catholicism was traditionally implanted in just those regions of Europe which were the slowest to change in these years. But above all the Catholic Church could offer its members something that was very much missing at the time: a sense of continuity, of security and reassurance in a world that had altered violently in the past decade and was about to be transformed even more dramatically in the years to come. It was the Catholic Church’s association with the old order, indeed its firm stand against modernity and change, which gave it a special appeal in these transitional years.
The various Protestant churches of north-west Europe had no such allure. In Germany a significant segment of the non-Catholic population was now under Communist rule; the standing of the German Evangelical churches was in any case somewhat diminished by their compromise with Hitler, as the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt by the Protestant leaders in 1945 half-conceded. But the main problem, in West Germany as elsewhere, was that Protestant churches did not offer an alternative to the modern world but rather a way to live in harmony with it.
The spiritual authority of the Protestant pastor or the Anglican vicar was by convention offered not as a competitor to the state, but rather as its junior partner—which is one reason why the Protestant churches of central Europe were unable to withstand the pressure of the Communist state in these years. But at a time when the West European state was embarking on a much enhanced role as the spiritual and material guardian of its citizens, the distinction between church and state as arbiters of public manners and morals became rather blurred. The late forties and early fifties thus appear as a transitional age, in which conventions of social deference and claims of rank and authority still held sway, but where the modern state was beginning to displace church and even class as the arbiter of collective behavior.
The character of the age is nicely encapsulated in an instruction booklet (BBC Variety Programmes. Policy Guide for Writers and Producers, 1948) prepared by the BBC for internal use in 1948. The sense of moral responsibility that the public broadcasting corporation chose to place upon itself is quite explicit: ‘The influence that [the BBC] can exert upon its listeners is immense and the responsibility for a high standard of taste correspondingly high.’ Jokes about religion were forbidden, as was the description of old-fashioned musical taste as ‘B.C.’—‘Before Crosby’.76 There were to be no references to ‘lavatories’ and no jokes about ‘effeminacy in men’. Writers were forbidden to use jokes that had become popular in the relaxed ambiance of the war, or make suggestive double-entendre allusions to ladies’ underwear as in ‘winter draws on’. Sexual allusions of any kind were banned—there was to be no talk of ‘rabbits’, or suchlike ‘animal habits’.77
Furthermore: Members of Parliament were not to appear on radio programs that might be ‘undignified or unsuitable’ for public figures, nor were there to be any jokes or references that might encourage ‘Strikes or industrial disputes. The Black Market, Spivs and drones.’ These terms—‘spivs’ and ‘drones’ for louche types and minor criminals, the ‘black market’ as an all-purpose term for traders and customers circumventing rationing and other restrictions—show how much Britain at least lived for some years in the shadow of the war. Well into the 1950s the BBC could reprimand one producer, Peter Eton of the popular radio comedy The Goon Show, for allowing ‘Major Dennis Bloodnok’ (played by Peter Sellers) to be awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for ‘emptying dustbins in the heat of battle’ (and for permitting an actor to ‘imitate the Queen’s voice trying to shoo away pigeons at Trafalgar Square’).
Such strictures, and their accompanying note of high-collared, Edwardian-era reformism, were perhaps distinctive to Britain. But their tone would have been familiar all across the continent. In school, in church, on state-run radio, in the confident, patronizing style of the broadsheet and even the tabloid press, and in the speech and dress of public figures, Europeans were still very much subject to the habits and regulations of an earlier time. We have already noted how many of the political leaders of the age were men of another time—Britain’s Clement Attlee would not have been out of place in a Victorian mission to the industrial slums, and it was altogether fitting that the prime minister who oversaw Britain’s transition to a modern welfare state should have begun his public career performing good works in the East End of pre-World War One London.
Against this image of an older Europe—moving at the p
ace of earlier days, at once changed by the war and restrained by pre-war routines and habits—we must set the unmistakably modern form of its primary source of entertainment. This was the golden age of the cinema. In Britain, cinema attendance peaked quite soon after the end of the war, with 1,700 million seats sold in the country’s five thousand cinemas in 1946. In that year one person in three went every week to the local cinema. Even in 1950, when attendance had already started to decline, the average English man or woman went to the cinema twenty-eight times a year, a figure that was nearly 40 percent higher than in the last year before the war.
Whereas the British cinema audience was to slip steadily through the fifties, in continental Europe it continued to grow. One thousand new picture houses opened in France during the first half of the 1950s, about the same number in West Germany; in Italy three thousand new cinemas appeared, bringing the national total to some 10,000 by 1956. The previous year cinema attendance in Italy peaked at around 800 million seats sold (half the UK figure for about the same size population). French audiences, which were at their largest at the end of the 1940s, were nowhere near as large as those of Britain or even Italy78. Nor were those of West Germany, although in the Federal Republic cinema attendance did not peak until 1959. But by any other measure audiences were large indeed; as they were even in Spain, where cinema attendance per head of the adult population in 1947 was among the highest in Europe.
Part of the reason for this post-war enthusiasm for films was the pent-up wartime demand, especially for American films—stoked by the ban on most US films imposed by the Nazis, by Mussolini (after 1938) and by the Pétain regime in France, and more generally by wartime shortages. In 1946, 87 percent of box-office receipts in Italy were for foreign (mostly American) films; of about 5,000 films shown in Madrid between 1939 and the end of the 1950s, 4,200 were foreign (again, mostly American). In 1947 the French film industry produced 40 films, in contrast with 340 that were imported from the United States. And American films were not just available in overwhelming numbers, they were also popular: the most commercially successful films in post-war Berlin were Chaplin’s Gold Rush and The Maltese Falcon (made in 1941 but not available in Europe until the end of the war).