Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  Such opinions were not confined to the Germans. After becoming the first chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain in the summer of 1945, John Maynard Keynes succinctly explained his aims in a radio program by exclaiming: “Death to Hollywood!” This, when the British, like Germans, Dutch, and other Europeans, were flocking to the cinema to watch American movies. When the United Artists Corporation protested, Keynes wrote a letter to the Times, asking UA to forgive him for his “eccentricity.” What he had meant to say was that countries should “develop something . . . characteristic of themselves.” What he had really meant was: “Hollywood for Hollywood.”25

  Keynes was being a little disingenuous. His disdain for “Hollywood” was all too typical of many European intellectuals, even if they couldn’t quite repress their excitement about New World culture, either. In an article published in Horizon in the spring of 1945, Cyril Connolly wondered where the European cultural revival might come from. What the world needed most, he argued, was “a positive and adult humanism.” Could America supply it? On balance, he thought not. For America was “too money-bound and machine-dry.” No, it had to come from his beloved France. Only France would be “capable of a bloodless 1789, of a new proclamation to the world of the old truth that life is meant to be lived and liberty is its natural temperature . . .”

  Paris was to many people the symbolic antidote to “Hollywood.” The Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre philosophizing at the Café de Flore, of literary journals with roots in the Résistance, of young men and women living lives of sexual and political liberation. This hopeful view of France stretched all the way to Japan, which was subjected to an even greater and more concentrated dose of American culture than Germany. The top ten publications in 1946 in Japan included three foreign books in translation: Sartre’s Nausée, André Gide’s Intervues Imaginaires, and Erich Maria Remarque’s Arc de Triomphe.26 And in Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted the fashion among the young for sporting French berets after the war: “Anyone who felt they had something to say wears a black beret.” In Japan, this Francophile fashion adopted by intellectuals lasted at least until the end of the twentieth century.

  Francophilia never had mass appeal, however. Besides, many people in France were as infatuated by America as people in other countries, north, south, east, and west. Even Sartre himself. In November 1944, a dozen French reporters were invited to visit the United States to learn more about the American war effort. Simone de Beauvoir recalled that she “had never seen Sartre so elated” as the day when he was asked to join the party. De Beauvoir described the allure of America in her memoir. She could have been speaking for millions all over the world:

  It meant so many things, America! To begin with, everything inaccessible; its jazz, cinema and literature had nourished our youth, but it had always been a great myth to us as well . . . America was also the country which had sent our deliverance; it was the future on the march; it was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images; the mere thought that they could be seen with one’s own eyes set one’s head whirling. I rejoiced, not only for Sartre’s sake, but also for my own, because I knew that one day I was sure to follow him down this new road.27

  Then there was Boris Vian and his band of zazous, who had rebelled against the frowzy Pétainism of the war years by affecting an Anglo-American style, throwing wild parties, and reading clandestine copies of Hemingway and Faulkner. They were the French counterparts of the German Swingjugend, who, at far greater risk, showed their defiance of the Nazis by dancing to forbidden jazz music in private apartments. After the Spring of ’44, Vian and the zazous dressed in American surplus blue jeans and checked shirts, and played and listened to nothing but jazz, jazz, jazz.

  Disillusion often follows exposure to the real thing. Sartre returned from the U.S., in Beauvoir’s account, “a little stunned by all he had seen.” He had liked the people all right, and was impressed by Roosevelt, but, in Beauvoir’s words, “apart from the economic system, segregation and racism, there were many things in the civilization of the Western Hemisphere that shocked him—the Americans’ conformism, their scale of values, their myths, their optimism, their avoidance of anything tragic . . .”28

  It stands to reason that France was seen by many, especially in France itself, as the obvious cultural counterweight to America. Like the United States, the French Republic was born from a revolution with universalist aspirations; France as an enlightened civilization whose fruits could, and indeed should, grow with profit everywhere. Americans have a similar view of their own republic and its mission in the world. This was certainly true in 1945, when the U.S. was in a somewhat better position to preach, and sometimes impose its values, than France. It was different in the early nineteenth century, when Napoleon spread French universalism with brutal force, especially in the German lands. The German reaction then was the growth of a romantic nationalism, a defensive consciousness of blood and soil whose hideous perversion would lead to the Third Reich.

  Reeducation American-style in 1945 was a gentler enterprise, despite an initial thirst to mete out punishment. Perhaps this was one reason why Germans, not without ambivalence and even resentment, took to the American century more readily than the French. Knowing what they themselves had done to the Slavic countries, let alone to the Jews, most Germans can only have been deeply relieved by the way they were treated by the Americans. Life in the Anglo-American zones was certainly to be preferred to the Soviet zone, or even, certainly in the beginning, to the much smaller French zone in the Rhineland along the French border. The main city under French occupation was the elegant spa town of Baden-Baden, now bereft of guests to take the waters. That France should have a zone at all was far from obvious. The United States had been against it, since France, despite General de Gaulle (whom Roosevelt had always distrusted) and his Free French forces, had hardly played a vital role in defeating Nazi Germany. Still, de Gaulle’s will, as usual, prevailed. The other problem with France was the desire among many of its citizens to wreak vengeance, and to extract as much loot from Germany as they could get away with.

  This was especially true in the first year of occupation, during which the French, more even than the Americans or the British, behaved like conquerors. Troops were sometimes undisciplined. Natural resources, such as coal, were shipped to France. There were French plans, which came to nothing in the end, to annex parts of Germany, specifically the industrial Rhineland and Westphalia and the coal-rich Saarland. These schemes were abandoned because none of the other Allies supported them. There was opposition from some French generals too, who feared that such moves would provoke just the kind of German revanchism that had led to the war that had just ended.

  But the French, as always inspired by their mission civilisatrice, were serious about culture, especially the export of French culture to civilize the Germans. And not just the Germans. Exhibitions of French art, concerts featuring French composers, and French cinema and literature were promoted in other Allied zones as well, to show, in the words of René Thimonnier, head of French cultural affairs, that “in the order of cultural values, France is still a great nation, indeed perhaps the greatest of all.”29

  In terms of denazification, the French did pretty much what the Americans did: purge teachers and others with a Nazi past, ban books from libraries, and check the content in German papers and radio programs produced by reliable German journalists under French control. One of the people combing through contemporary German writing in Baden-Baden was the novelist Alfred Döblin, who had become a French citizen in the 1930s. He was struck by the wooliness of German prose produced immediately after the war, the tendency towards mysticism, the air of intellectual confusion. Germans, he surmised, “hadn’t read or learned very much.” The German soil, at first, “only sprouted grass and weeds.”30

  Like the American officials of the Information Control Division, French officials did not think the Germans were quite ready
in 1945 to be exposed to political ideas. Their view was that the press ought to concentrate instead on the problems of daily life and cultural affairs, on subjects such as “contemporary French ceramics” or “French painting.” The idea was to bring the Germans, who had been deprived of modern artistic developments outside the Third Reich, back into the civilized world. The center of the civilized world was, of course, Europe, and the cultural capital was, of course, Paris.

  There was a political point to this, apart from restoring French amour propre. Even though France was unable to annex the borderlands along the Rhine, something more important would soon happen there. Its rich supplies of coal and steel would be put under the control of a pan-European institution to the benefit of Germany, France, and the other members of the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in Paris in 1951. The French zone was the birthplace of what would later become the European Union. The initiative to share sovereignty had come from France. The man who officially proposed it was the French statesman Robert Schuman, born in Luxembourg of a French father and German mother. The chancellor of West Germany, who agreed to share sovereignty over one of Germany’s wealthiest areas, was the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer.

  To say that Germany was lucky to be divided into Allied zones in 1945 would be cruel to those who had to endure communist dictatorship for four decades. But perhaps these divisions best suited the federal nature of Germany. The Allied occupiers were never able to centralize German education, or flatten regional differences in culture and politics. Whether Germans were really reeducated is doubtful. The greatest Allied achievement may have been to leave western Germany without animosity. Wishing to reeducate a former foe may be patronizing, but it is a more benign and much less dangerous policy than vengeance. Helping the old enemy to its feet may have been more than some Germans deserved, but it was better than squeezing the country dry. This time there would be no “stab in the back” legend, or armed bands of desperadoes wanting to avenge their nation’s defeat. What really shaped Germany’s future, however, had less to do with culture or education, justice, or even common decency, than with political circumstances, the Cold War, the need to build strong democracies in Europe, the opportunism of the German elites, American interests, and the utopian project designed, in the words of Robert Schuman, to “make war [in Europe] impossible” and “encourage world peace.”

  In terms of military and political clout, the French occupation of the Rhineland may not have amounted to much, but it helped to knit one of the bloodiest fissures in Europe together again. A united Europe was not only a Franco-German, but also a Christian Democratic, dream. De Gaulle, with a great degree of skepticism, likened it to “resuming Charlemagne’s enterprise.”31 The social democrats in Germany had opposed it, as had the French communists. De Gaulle was against it, too, because he thought France was not strong enough yet to dominate the union. Perhaps the general was irritated because he wasn’t in power at the time. For in 1945, inspired by Jean Monnet, de Gaulle had actually spoken in favor of integrating the Ruhr and the Saarland into a European federation. (He was a little vague about whether Britain should be part of this.) Whatever the future of the currently troubled Union may bring, this dream of unity did more to bring Germany back into the fold of European nations than all the reeducation programs put together.

  • • •

  ON DECEMBER 15, 1945, the Saturday Evening Post featured an article about the occupation of Japan with an extraordinary headline—extraordinary now, not then. It read: “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap.” Written by William L. Worden. Dateline: Tokyo, By Bomber Mail.

  Above the dateline is a summary of Worden’s article: “While the Nipponese wait to be told what to think, and their slippery countrymen duck the job, the living example of the American soldier is proving effective.”

  Later on in the piece, the reader is informed that “The average Japanese is a simple person not far removed from the savage—as evidenced in the war.”

  But there is some hope, for, “The man who, at the moment, seems to be most effective in democratizing and civilizing the Japanese is the G.I., even as he was so effective in pacifying him.”

  This image of the “Jap” as a savage was widespread during the war. After the A-bombs had killed around two hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman wrote to a friend that “when you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.”32

  What is remarkable about the occupation is how quickly such views disappeared. Which is not to say that the idea of reeducating the Japanese to become peaceful democrats was not viewed in some quarters with the greatest skepticism. Experts on Japanese culture and society in the State Department, collectively known as “the Japan hands,” were quick to point out the top-down collectivist nature of traditional Japanese life. The Japanese, they claimed, would never behave like individuals. They were used to obeying orders from people of superior rank. The emperor was revered as a sacred figure. His subjects, in the words of one Japan hand, were “inert and tradition bound.” The Japanese, according to the British representative in occupied Tokyo, were “as little fitted for self-government in a modern world as any African tribe, though much more dangerous.”33*

  Pitted against the Japan hands, whose theories on the Japanese character were often based on what they heard from their elitist Japanese contacts, were the China hands, frequently people with left-wing sympathies, and New Dealers from the old Roosevelt administration. These were the officials whose opinions prevailed, at least in the first years of the occupation. The pivotal date was August 11, when Joseph Grew, doyen of the Japan hands and former ambassador to Tokyo, was replaced as undersecretary of state by Dean Acheson. Acheson stated in September that “the present social and economic system in Japan which makes for a will to war will be changed so that the will to war will not continue.”34

  General MacArthur, a deeply religious man, whose wartime theories about the “Oriental mind” as childlike and brutal were often remarkably crude, was convinced that he had been destined to reeducate the Japanese. His guides in this mission, he liked to say, were Washington, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ. Ideally, Japanese should be converted to the Christian faith. But in any case—and here MacArthur’s ideas concurred with those of Konrad Adenauer—renewal had to be spiritual as well as political, social, and economic. MacArthur, however, went further than anything conceived by the German Christian Democrat. His occupation of Japan, he said, would result in “a spiritual revolution . . . an unparalleled convulsion in the social history of the world.”35 Herbert Hoover, on a visit to Tokyo, rather oddly called MacArthur “the reincarnation of St. Paul.”36 Yet the American viceroy had no interest in exploring Japanese culture, or learning much about the place. He spent most of his evenings at home watching cowboy movies. His translator, Faubion Bowers, later recalled that during MacArthur’s five years in Japan, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, or president of the largest university.”37

  Unlike Germany, Japan was not divided into Allied zones (the Soviets had wanted to claim the northern island of Hokkaido, but made no fuss when the U.S. said no). The Japanese occupation was an American show, and MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, had almost absolute authority, even though he reigned over an elected Japanese government, which did most of the actual governing. There are several possible reasons why the reeducational zeal in Japan was greater than in Germany. It may be that experiences in Germany set the stage for what followed in Japan. Efforts that were frustrated in Germany by the other Allies, or by German recalcitrance or regional differences, had more chance of success in Japan where the U.S. was almighty. But the main reason might be contained in SCAP’s idea of the Japanese as childlike savages, as simple souls ripe for conversion. They were not Christians, nor was their culture rooted in Western civilization. As far as the Japanese m
ind was concerned, this truly seemed like Year Zero.

  Considering how vicious the fighting in the Pacific War and how brutal the wartime propaganda on both sides had been, the Japanese were surprisingly willing pupils. The way the Japanese paid tribute to MacArthur when he left Japan in 1951, after he had been dismissed by President Truman from his post for insubordination in the Korean War, would have been unthinkable in Germany. A law was enacted to make him an honorary Japanese citizen. Plans were drawn up to build a memorial to the Supreme Commander in Tokyo Bay. And hundreds of thousands of Japanese lined his route to the airport, many of them in tears, shouting their thanks at his limousine. One of the main Japanese newspapers exclaimed in an editorial: “Oh, General MacArthur—General, General, who saved Japan from confusion and starvation.”38

  Here is a letter to SCAP from a Japanese lawyer with strong communist leanings: “For the future of the Japanese people, [the leaders of the Occupation] have brought the peaceful dawn of liberty, equality, and benevolence. They have ably assisted and conscientiously directed the Japanese in the building of a democratic nation . . . to show our gratitude for their accomplishments, we will hold a mass rally to welcome the occupation forces.”39 And this was written in November, just three months after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.