Authors: Rebecca West
But if one stopped in the right street one could refresh oneself at a large tea shop, which was full of people, mostly women, and all Germans. Allied personnel were forbidden to enter a restaurant or a hotel or any place where they might eat German food and invite the accusation that the Allies were pillaging the German economy, though the Allies were actually living on a scale well below full nutrition. In this tea shop each of the fortunate Germans was drinking a cup of chocolate or coffee topped with a swirl of whipped cream, and was bending piously, as in performance of a rite, over a plate on which there were at least three cakes; say, a slice of chocolate layer cake and another of strawberry torte, both smothered in whipped cream, and a confection of meringue and chopped hazelnuts.
Germans questioned on this point often alleged that these debauchees would have no later meal that day. But in the evening several Hamburg restaurants, such as the Rathskeller, were filled with Germans who managed to consume and pay for such a light repast as a plate of hors d’œuvres, where smoked eel and rose-pink ham and slivers of Matjes herring lay in a circle of mayonnaise eggs, followed by a fish soup glistening with cream, a duck golden with the juices of its basting, and an ice-cream bombe masked with hot meringue.
Many Europeans have been shocked, some into lasting anti-Americanism, by the amount American soldiers and tourists drink. Almost all non-Germans who visited Germany after the currency reform were as shocked by the amount the more prosperous Germans ate, and by the sympathy they received at a very high level. German politicians meeting Dorothy Thompson, who had been as good a friend of anti-Nazi Germans as she was an enemy of the Nazis, and deserved well of them for opposing the Morgenthau Plan, did not find words to thank her, but at once attempted to enlist her support in a quarrel they were waging with the Allied Control Commission on the subject of pigs. To put it briefly: the Germans wanted to feed pigs on the grain sent them under the Marshall Plan, so that they might eat pork, while the Allied Control Commission desired them to consume the grain as grain, for the nutritional experts asserted that there was a considerable waste of food value in converting it into meat. It was plain that, in raising this matter rather than others with Miss Thompson, the politicians felt they were putting first things first.
It was indeed impossible not to feel shocked at the spectacle of people refusing to make the sacrifice which we were offering up in England by curbing our appetites that all might share alike. But this was largely nonsense. Let us leave on one side the painful consideration that at this date Germans of moderate means ate better than their English equivalents, simply because the English had not the art of making good cheap sausage. To begin with, the situation seemed more gross than it was, because the bad is more easily perceived than the good. A fresh lobster does not give such pleasure to the consumer as a stale one will give him pain. A beautiful woman living in chastity gives fewer indications of her state than a beautiful woman kept by a rich lover. Even so, the women in Hamburg who ate creamy cakes could be seen doing so by anybody who troubled to visit a certain confectioner’s shop. But only old ties of friendship brought us together with a woman bearing a famous name in the city annals. An English official explained to us that we would find her very tired, because the homeless were still billeted on the lucky whose houses were intact, and while the conscienceless found ways of getting rid of them, this woman had accepted her responsibilities to the full. She let the authorities put a family in each of her rooms, and herself went up to a cold attic, where her family portraits hung slanting on the gabled walls. But she was not only tired, her eyes were red with weeping. “But of course I remember visiting your mother-in-law in London. It was all so pleasant. She played Brahms so beautifully. No? Then perhaps it was a sister. No? Well a friend perhaps, and there was a beautiful Chinese shawl on the piano. And another day she took me to Ranelagh. It was all so very pleasant.” But later she had to tell us the preoccupation. “I can tell you as you are strangers. A woman was billeted on me a short time ago, and it seems that she is really a bad woman. She pretends to me that she goes to bed and she shuts her door so that I hear it and says good night, and then she gets out of the window and goes down to the bomb sites, and dreadful things happen, you can imagine. And really, to have people getting out of the window, in the house where you were born. But she does it that way so that I should not complain and get her turned out, and I suppose I should, for were are young people in the house, and it is not right for them to be with her. But, oh dear, oh dear, a bad woman needs a roof over her head as much as anybody else, I do not like to do this.”
She smiled brilliantly when we spoke of the cream cakes and said that good could come out of evil and great good had come out of these cream cakes. When the pastrycooks started making them again the news did not escape the attention of a body of women who had formed an organization called “Woman” as a result of listening to Dorothy Thompson’s broadcasts from the United States during the war. They had formed a secret society which offered resistance to the Nazis by good works, by doing kindnesses to Jews and other persecuted people; and they were still working together now. “We thought it absurd that people should be eating cream cakes and torte when there was no ration of milk for the little children, so, just think, we marched on the Town Hall and demanded that this should be done. And they did it. They just had not thought, you know.”
There were many such Germans who were sharing all they had in as handsome a spirit as ever was shown in England. But the truth was often just as the stranger saw it: there were many Germans who were brutally selfish and fought their way over their weaker brethren to the trough. Nevertheless, as one travelled through Germany in 1949, it emerged that many Germans fell into neither category. They believed that no good would come of deliberately sharing things, that even the person who was handed the unearned share would not benefit. They believed in free enterprise. They thought that if people did what they liked, ate what they liked, made what they liked, and sold what they liked, the laws of supply and demand would function so healthily that in the end every citizen would have a substantial slice of cake and there would be no reason for anybody to share anything with anybody else.
It was strange that they struck foreign visitors as inert, and that so many British and Americans abused their governments for having no policy in Germany; for the entire German people was formulating a policy with every breath, and that policy was to develop their industry in accordance with their laissez-faire economic theories and to refuse to be impressed by the welfare state and planned economy which was actually established in Great Britain and which existed in fantasy in the minds of American intellectuals. The degree to which they were not impressed was quite remarkable. The Germans had always been willing to be impressed by the British before; but at this moment, when they had most reason to respect them, they refused to make any sign of intellectual obeisance. But it would have been a historical impossibility that they should accept the idea of the welfare state and a planned economy. To begin with, the Nazi regime had claimed to be a welfare state and had certainly imposed a planned economy; and all that had worked out very badly. Also, the Allied Control Commission was itself imposing a planned economy on Germany, not without incident. “I do not know if this is very interesting reading for a lady,” said a British official kindly, handing over the desk the Monthly Report of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element) for April 1949. The lady found it interesting enough. She opened it at page 84 and read in the Finance Report of the Bipartite Section the paragraph:
One of the anomalies in the income tax law, as amended by Military Government Law 64, was that the aggregate amount of income and property taxes might—in the case of very wealthy taxpayers—exceed 100 per cent of their incomes. By making Property Tax a deduction in computing income tax assessments, Economic Council Ordinance 95 removes this anomaly.
This is a use of the word “anomaly” without precedent, except in the mad scene in
Hamlet,
where, of course, Ophelia says, “Anomaly, that’s for the Treasury,” just before she remarks that the owl was a very wealthy taxpayer’s daughter. This was no anomaly but an offence of the kind the modern state is forced by its own complexity to commit times without number against its unfortunate children. None of us who are the victims of such mistakes ever learn to like them when they are committed by our own kind. Try to think how much less we should like them if they were committed against us by our conquerors.
The Germans found it particularly irritating when the Allies not only tried to impose a planned economy on them, but tried to march them even farther left than they had gone themselves. In Düsseldorf two young men, one an American liberal journalist, the other an English University Fabian, were interviewing a German politician. “And what about land reform?” they asked with heavy suspicion, which was directed not against the Germans but against the Allies. “That’s not getting on very fast, is it?” The German politician was something of an attitudinizer; he had been giving a Stadttheater performance of a patriot saving his country in its hour of need, but he cocked his eyebrows at them with a surprising shrewdness. It happens that at Yalta the Russians sold us a pup named Land Reform, by which we bound ourselves to break up the large landed estates in the British Zone, with the ostensible object of destroying the excessive political power of the landowners. We experienced considerable difficulty in carrying this out, because there were few large landed estates in the British Zone; and inspirational force was lacking because research showed the landowners in this region had exercised little political power. At this point the wise thing was to go home with one’s hands in one’s pockets, whistling, but Mr. Bevin and his familiars in the Foreign Office decided that no German farm, outside certain special categories, should be over two hundred and fifty acres. As this is not a very large acreage, considering the poor soil found in many parts of Western Germany, and as it raised some tedious problems of resettlement, the officials of the Allied Control Commission were obeying these instructions with a certain leisureliness which suited Germans of all parties. “And you gentlemen,” said the German, “what steps are you taking to pass a law in your countries imposing a limit on the acreage of farms?”
Like words were spoken in an office on the Ruhr. “Oh, indeed? You gentlemen approved of the extent to which the workers have to be represented on factory management committees and would like the proportion to be increased still further? Well, I am not against that myself. But had you not better first make such a system compulsory in your own countries and see how it works?” On such occasions it became apparent that if an occupation were to be enjoyable the natives of the occupied territory should wear nose rings and not be able to read. The Germans spent far too much time with their unringed noses in British and American left-wing publications. They were too well aware that there was a British left-wing element with an eye on cooperation between the British Labour government and a German Social Democratic government, which would enable the British Labour government to go to the electorate with the claim that they had scotched German industrial competition by inducing the German government to impose trade-union restrictions of the British type. All over the British Zone, Germans suspected that though the British Control Commission officials might be decent fellows their compatriots at home were humbugs and halfwits; and in the Ruhr they were quite sure of it, because of the continuance of the dismantling policy. This, in 1949, was the sheerest tomfoolery. In 1945 and 1946 it had been reasonable, for that was not a time for reason. Then it was right for the Allies to go into Germany and say to the Germans, “You chose to live by the sword, and now we shall see to it that you forge no more swords,” and to overturn their smithies and force them to make good the damage they had inflicted on the industries of other lands. But by 1949 all feasible restitution in kind had been effected and the penal aspect of dismantling had been annulled. Let us consider the case of a great factory, a noble factory, a true work of art, its black diagram of ingenuity visible for miles in the spacious industrial area of the Ruhr, known to many Germans from their youth up, and to many of them a promise of employment. The Ruhr population had worked well under technicians like Harry Collins of Doncaster and had come to think of themselves and the Allies as joint conspirators in productiveness. If they suddenly found gangs of their fellow countrymen at work under Allied command tearing down this factory, they did not say, “Ah, we are now expiating our sin in waging that war—you remember, that one which ended four years ago.” They simply felt that the occupation authorities, whom they had done their best to please and had come to like, had suddenly turned nasty and were destroying German property and putting them in danger of unemployment; and they could not imagine what motive could inspire this action except trade rivalry.
By 1949 the sole purpose of dismantling recognized by both sides was the reduction of Germany’s war potential; and on that basis there was carried on a long and degrading argument in which nothing was said that could be believed by any sensible person. The German industrialists overdid their protestations that the works scheduled for demolition were unimportant as war potential; they were synthetic petrol plants, with fatty by-products, and that told its own story. They also exaggerated the beneficence of the part they played in the German peacetime economy, which obviously did not stand or fall by its synthetic petrol plants any more than the British or French peacetime economies stood or fell by theirs. The British opponents of dismantling were still more offensive than the Germans, for they based their case on the thesis that the Germans were a sinless people who can be trusted with any amount of war potential, that the Germans were essentially and unalterably pacifist.