Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Teaching the blessings of democracy was not necessarily easier. In an article for Yank magazine, entitled “Re-education of Germany,” there is a wonderful interview with a ten-year-old German schoolboy in Aachen named Ernst. Asked whether he knew that the German armies had all been defeated, he replied: “The Americans had many guns and many Jews.” Next question: “Has anyone told you anything about democracy?” Answer: “The teachers are telling about it.” So was he interested in what he heard about democracy? Answer: “It does not sound like so much fun as singing.”10

  Aachen, Charlemagne’s old capital in the heart of Europe, was where the reeducation of Germany began, not for sentimental historical reasons, but because it was the first town under Allied occupation. Few schools were left standing after the bombings. Out of a prewar population of 160,000 only 14,000 remained. Eighty-five percent of the town lay in ruins. The beautiful early medieval cathedral, where Charlemagne is buried, somehow survived the damage. But now, in the words of Yank: “The war of bombs . . . has given way to a new war of ideas. The effort to de-hoodlumize young Germans is an experiment that all the world will watch.”

  A Major John P. Bradford, representing the U.S. military government, told the German city officials who had not been purged that they had a great opportunity: “You are to be allowed to teach the German youth, to re-educate it, to turn it away from the baseness of Nazism.”11

  The first problem was the lack of suitable teachers; conscripted men were either dead or still stuck on various battlefronts, as POWs, or they had been dismissed as Nazis. The poet Stephen Spender asked a group of schoolchildren in Hamburg what they were learning at school. Latin and biology, they said. Nothing else? No, they replied, “You see, the History, Geography, English and Mathematics teachers have all been purged.”12

  The next problem was textbooks. Much had been destroyed in the bombings. What was left were usually highly unsuitable: books in praise of the Führer and his master race, or the biological need to rid Germany of the Jews. Even pre-Nazi textbooks contained stories honoring the German martial spirit, or the heroic deeds of such figures as Frederick the Great. But, since there was not much else, these would have to do. Plates were made in London of one of these Weimar-era books, shipped back to Germany, and printed at an old newspaper plant in Aachen.

  The director of schools in Aachen, Dr. Karl Beckers, was confident that the smaller children could be convinced fairly easily that their future lay with “all the people everywhere and not with that of a ‘greater Germany.’” With the older children, however, Dr. Becker thought it might be necessary to be “very firm.” But, he stated, even “in dealing out punishment in the classroom, we shall try to use democracy. Sometimes when a boy or girl causes trouble in the classroom, we will let the class decide how best to punish the culprit.” Dr. Becker was “opposed to whipping,” he said, “except in the most extreme cases.”13

  Dr. Becker was a Catholic conservative. Concerned to “replace the trappings of Nazis with something concrete and good,” he saw a revival of Christian spiritual values as the answer. Many Germans believed this, which explains the dominance in future West German elections of the Christian Democratic Union. The future leader of the Christian Democrats, and the first postwar chancellor, was another Catholic Rhinelander, Konrad Adenauer. Stephen Spender went to see him at the town hall of Cologne, where Adenauer was mayor before Hitler came to power, and again in 1945.

  Through the windows of Adenauer’s office Spender gazed at what little was left of the streets of Cologne. There were still walls standing, but these were “a thin mask in front of the damp, hollow, stinking emptiness of gutted interiors.” But Adenauer, in his interview, stressed a different kind of ruined landscape. “You can’t have failed to notice,” he told Spender, “that the Nazis have laid German culture just as flat as the ruins of the Rhineland and the Ruhr. Fifteen years of Nazi rule have left Germany a spiritual desert.”14 What was needed, then, as much as food and fuel, were more schools, books, films, music, theater: “The imagination must be provided for.”15

  Hunger for culture was certainly real, but the motives could be quite odd. One reason many Germans had stopped reading books was that Nazi literature was, on the whole, deadly boring. Now some people spoke about the need for high culture as though it were a kind of penance. Spender met a lady in Bonn, “the most unctuous type of respectable pious hausfrau,” who was outraged by the frivolous taste for popular entertainments. There should be no place for cabarets, let alone jazz music, in the moral ruins of the Third Reich, she thought. German culture should be serious, for that was the “least one would expect, after all that the Germans have done.” Germans should “be compelled” to have only “good” culture: “Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe. Nothing else should be allowed.”16 It is doubtful that Adenauer would have been quite so severe.

  The hunger for culture was illustrated better, perhaps, by the first postwar revival in Berlin of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, a play that had been banned under the Nazis, of course. People walked for hours to get to the Hebbel Theater in the American zone, one of the few theaters that survived the war more or less unscathed. The performance started at four o’clock in the afternoon so that people could walk home safely before criminals stalked the streets at night. The premiere was on August 15 (the day after the Japanese surrender, but that was surely a coincidence). Rehearsals had taken place under very difficult circumstances: rain had come pouring through the roof, the actors were hungry, the costumes were stolen, the props destroyed.

  Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the former resistance fighter, was in the audience. “I feel choked with emotion,” she wrote in her diary. Songs “of our illegal days,” which had provided so much “solace and comfort during many desperate hours,” could now be heard in freedom. But even in these heart-warming moments, her sensitivity to the false note, the hint of bad faith, did not desert her. There was “a storm of applause” at Brecht’s famous words: “First give us something to eat, then we can talk about morals . . .” She was instantly roused “out of my self-absorption.” The burst of self-pity was offensive to her. “Must we begin our first attempt at free expression by criticizing others?”17

  • • •

  IT WOULD HAVE MADE more sense, in a way, if Brecht’s highly political opera, so full of left-wing moralism, had been revived in the Soviet zone rather than in the U.S.-occupied Kreuzberg area of Berlin. After 1949, it was indeed in the “democratic” (communist) German state that Brecht would build his own theater, even though he prudently held on to his newly acquired Austrian passport. The Soviet Union, too, made a strenuous effort to reeducate the Germans. The Soviets actually took culture more seriously than the Anglo-American allies. A British occupation official complained in a dispatch that the “free and personal culture” promoted in the West couldn’t compete with the “politicized culture” of the Soviets. In the Soviet sector, he said, “Theatrical, book-publishing, art, and musical activities are conducted with a hustle which conveys the impression that something new and lively is going on.”18

  Something was indeed going on. The “democratic” elements of the German intelligentsia were actively courted by the Soviet authorities with special clubs, extra food rations, and general assistance with artistic endeavors. “Democratic” culture was often marked by a mixture of German nationalism and communist ideology. One of the prime German cultural movers was Johannes Becher, the Marxist poet and chairman of the Soviet-initiated Kulturbund, or, to give it the full name, Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany. Rather like the British educator Robert Birley, Becher saw the “German spirit” as the proper foundation for renewal, as long as this spirit was “progressive.” He wasn’t thinking of Goethe so much as of the communist martyrs who died in Nazi prisons. “Antifascist art” was the “real” German art.

  In fact, this formula proved to be too flexible for the Soviet military commissars, who had a narrower and more provi
ncial concept of progressive culture. They were happy to promote Russian classics in the German theater, such as works by Chekhov or Gogol, as well as modern Soviet plays and even some progressive German playwrights, such as Friedrich Wolf, father of Markus Wolf, the future East German spy chief, as long as they were produced in the Soviet fashion. To this end, they liked to tell German writers and theater producers precisely what to include, what to delete, and how to stage the plays.

  The popular appeal of musical, cinematic, and theatrical performances in the Soviet zone was probably not enhanced by the official insistence that they be accompanied by pamphlets and long introductions on stage by political figures explaining the correct political line. Communist authorities did not stint on advertising such films as Lenin in October, or Lenin in 1918, but the audience, even though starved of entertainment, remained largely unconvinced. Even members of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) could not muster much enthusiasm for much official Soviet culture. Johannes Becher, whose communist credentials were impeccable, was never really trusted by the Soviets. As well as being German, he was perhaps too “cosmopolitan.” And there was a dangerous whiff of Trotskyism in his past. In November 1945, a Soviet cultural official in Potsdam accused the Kulturbund of tolerating “bourgeois tendencies in art and literature; futurism, impressionism, etc.”19

  There was another aspect to life and culture in the Eastern zone, which was to remain a feature until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989: the hectoring, hyperbolic tone of official Nazi rhetoric was carried over seamlessly into the communist style—as well as goose-stepping, mass calisthenics, and a penchant for military marches, often accompanied by slogans roared by vast crowds punching their fists in the air, extolling friendship and peace. Besides attending the postwar premiere of The Threepenny Opera, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich was also at the inauguration of the Kulturbund. Her boredom with the endless speeches soon turned to disgust. She noted in her diary on July 3:

  Hardly anyone of the eight notables, who are talking here about coming to terms with the past and renewing our cultural life, seems to notice how little they’ve so far managed to renovate their own way of talking. It is still about the greatest, the ultimate, the largest, and most magnificent . . . ‘With firm steps we’re marching into the battle for pacifism,’ a politician proclaimed the other day, probably not realizing how paradoxical his well-meant zeal sounded being phrased that way. Learning to cut out the exaggeration might not be so easy.20

  • • •

  EVEN THOUGH AMERICAN CULTURE WAS, on the whole, more entertaining than the culture promoted by Soviet authorities, you would not necessarily get that impression from the earliest magazines put out in the Western zones. Rather than leaving this task to the Germans themselves, U.S. occupation officials began by publishing their own magazines for German readers. The first issue of a monthly journal, entitled The American Observer, aimed at German intellectuals, contained articles on humanism and faith, the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, and a piece entitled “Rebirth of the Tennessee Valley.” A magazine called Heute (Today) featured stories on the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, “Men in the Hell of Concentration Camps,” and “Community Work in the Tennessee Valley Authority.”21

  Reception of these journals among the German readers was, in the words of one American observer, “spotty.”22

  The Soviets, on the other hand, allowed dependably “democratic” Germans to produce their own magazines from the start, an altogether more fruitful strategy. The first one, Aufbau, published articles by Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, and Ernest Renan, as well as pieces about German war guilt. It sold out almost instantly.

  Since Germans had been deprived of Hollywood movies for more than a decade, the thirty-two feature films specially selected to promote the American way of life were popular, regardless of the intended message. The selectors made sure to avoid the darker sides of American society, so no gangster pictures. Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) were also considered too negative. But the Germans got to see pretty much the same slightly dated Hollywood films as many other western Europeans at the time: Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1942), Deanna Durbin in One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), the biopic Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and the 1944 musical Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby as a golf-loving priest.

  Some choices backfired, however, and had to be withdrawn. Action in the North Atlantic (1943), a war picture starring Humphrey Bogart as a merchant seaman being attacked by German U-boats, caused violent scenes in a cinema in Bremen. Having to watch documentary films about Nazi atrocities was one thing; to be subjected to entertainments featuring helpless Americans being machine-gunned at sea by vicious German U-boat crews was intolerable. Outraged veterans of the German navy tried to force other people the leave the cinema with them.

  The main problem with American, and to a lesser extent British, reeducation was a perhaps irresolvable and certainly unresolved dilemma; the aim was to teach Germans, and later the Japanese, the virtues of freedom, equality, and democracy. Yet the lessons in freedom of speech came from military authorities, whose power was almost absolute, whose propaganda was often an extension of psychological warfare, and who used censorship whenever it suited their purposes. To be sure, culture and education were nowhere near as oppressive as under the Nazis or the Japanese wartime regime, and it was certainly a bit rich for Hitler’s ex-soldiers such as Günter Grass to mock the Americans for their racism, but the Allies were vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. Praise of democracy could sound a little hollow coming from occupiers who refused even to show Gone With the Wind, or countenance any views, or indeed factual information, that put their own policies in a negative light.

  On August 31, the occupation of Germany was given a new, official status. Although still divided into different zones, the country was to be officially governed by the Allied Control Council, consisting of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. Once more Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s ear for the false note was acute. She wrote in her diary:

  Now at least we know who governs us. Why is there so much talk in the papers about democracy? Democracy means the people rule. We are ruled by the Control Council. We should beware of abusing that beautiful word [democracy].23

  Bookstores and libraries all over the American zone were combed through by American Book Control teams. Not all the books they removed were written by Nazis. Popular travel accounts describing Americans or non-German Europeans as uncouth or degenerate were banned too, as were such authors as Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West), and the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who was indeed a fierce Prussian nationalist but died in 1896, long before Hitler was ever heard of. Spengler, though initially sympathetic to the Nazis, had fallen out with them before his death in 1936. He had the peculiar distinction of having some of his books banned by the Nazis as well as the Americans.

  Banning Nazi propaganda, in books, films, or other entertainments, was the least of it. Officers from the Information Control Division also engaged in censorship of the news. The American journalist Julian Bach spent much of 1945 observing such officers in various places in Germany. He described their attitudes with a sharp sense of the absurd. Germans, they surmised, had been systematically starved of free thinking during the Nazi years. Just as starving people in liberated concentration camps cannot be fed with too much food, because of their shrunken stomachs, shrunken minds cannot take too rich a diet of information either. In Bach’s words: “According to the American ‘mental surgeons’ in charge of healing the German mind, the Germans’ hunger for news and fresh ideas must be satisfied only gradually.”24 That most of these surgeons had very little idea of German history, culture, or society cannot have been helpful in assessing the required doses.

  At first, the only newspapers available to Germans were written and edited by occupation officers. Even so, a little bit went a long way. Copies of these newssheets sold on the b
lack market for twenty times their original price. When the first issue of a paper in Cologne appeared in the street, there was such a mob scene that a nervous American colonel in the vicinity felt the need to reach for his gun. In contrast to the Nazi press, even these occupation papers must have smelled of freedom. And access to American and British books and periodicals in the so-called America Houses and British Centers, opened in cities all over the Anglo-American zones, was a blessing to many people, and remained so for a long time.

  The Western Allies couldn’t have it all ways, however. By preaching the virtues of democracy and free speech, and encouraging the rebuilding of German political parties, they provoked criticism that ham-handed military censors had tried so hard to avoid, specifically, criticism of the military occupation and its policies. American policies favoring free enterprise over a planned, socialist economy annoyed social democrats. In the British zone, run by representatives of Attlee’s socialist government, it was often the reverse; German conservatives protested against the “Bolshevik” economy planned by the occupiers. Criticism from Christian Democrats sometimes had more sinister overtones. In the state of Hessen, in the American zone, a speaker at a youth rally warned that denazification would lead to the “Bolshevizing” of Germany. “Emigrants in Allied uniforms” (Jews, in other words) were blamed for this unfortunate tendency.

  • • •

  IF AMERICA WAS THE MODEL to follow, and its culture, from Bing Crosby musicals to Lucky Strikes, from swing music to chewing gum, the dominant postwar influence, this was viewed by many Germans with a degree of ambivalence. It went against the widely held view among Christian conservatives that religion and classical German Kultur were the only routes to spiritual renewal and redemption. Suspicion of American culture had a conservative pedigree that went back much further than Hitler’s rise. Its popular appeal had long made American culture seem like a threat to traditional values, defined and promoted by the intellectuals. This disturbed some left-wing intellectuals too. Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher who had spent the war years in exile in the U.S., was scathing about jazz music and other popular American art forms, albeit from a Marxist perspective. To him, jazz was part of what he called the “culture industry,” a capitalist ploy to exploit the masses by dazzling them with commercial entertainments.