Authors: Giles MacDonogh
The most famous man of Berlin theatre, Gustaf Gründgens, was another state councillor, and was suffering from the same blanket ban as Furtwängler. Once again, the Russians took no notice, and restored him to power as
Intendant
at the German Theatre. Gründgens might have been deemed to have suffered enough already. He had been arrested as
Generalintendant
of the Prussian State Theatres, because - it was said - his Russian captors had believed his rank to have been a military one, and spent nine months in Russian camps. Colleagues had finally persuaded Bersarin that Gründgens was no soldier, but the difficulty then was to find him: the Russians kept no reliable records of the people interned in their camps and gulags. Once freed, he became a Russian baby and benefited from their aegis, to the degree that they denazified him themselves on 27 April 1946, and declared his character without a stain. Gründgens returned to work, despite all attempts on the part of the Western Allies to prevent him. His first role was in Carl Sternheim’s satire
Der Snob
. It was a great occasion; ‘an event, the most important by far in early post-war Berlin’s social and cultural life’. Despite the poverty that raged all around, ticket-touts were able to charge up to RM1,000 for a seat.
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Becher wanted to make the Soviet Zone a refuge for all writers. Authors were given category-I ration cards. He rescued Rudolf Ditzen, tried to wean him off the alcohol that was killing him and provided him with a theme for a novel so that he might start work again. Ditzen’s young wife was addicted to morphine, which was provided by another writer, the poet and physician Gottfried Benn, who like Ditzen-Fallada, had made no attempt to emigrate after 1933.
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The Ditzens were found a place to live in the Soviet enclave of Pankow and were even brought toys and a goose at Christmas - all of which failed to prevent a drunken Ditzen from having a go at the Muscovite Party chairman Pieck at a drinks party that month.
The rehabilitation of writers like Ditzen in the Soviet Zone led to a set-to with the Anglo-Americans and JCS 1067. Ditzen-Fallada was anything but squeaky clean, and had earned a handsome crust under the Nazis. The British denazifiers sniffed and the Western press cavilled. In Munich the writer Hans Habe called one of his novels a work of fascist literature. This led to difficulties in obtaining a licence across the Elbe and in resuming contact with his publishers abroad.
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The Russians also cast a surprisingly benign eye over publishing in their zone at first. For more than forty years the Aufbau Verlag shone a beacon of light - sometimes bright, sometimes dim - from the former premises of the bank Delbrück, Schickler & Co. in the Französischestrasse.
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The house was created on 16 August 1945, under Becher’s protecting hand. Becher had been planning new publications even in his exile. Less doctrinaire than most of his colleagues, he believed that the Germans had to admit collective guilt, but was less literal in his interpretation of the Soviet canon. He ensured that the press received the necessary licence from the Soviet authorities. The running of the press was taken over by another Muscovite and long-term Communist Party member, Erich Wendt, in 1947.
Becher was elected to the central committee of the SED in April 1946, but some people in the Berlin Kremlin did not believe he was a Marxist-Leninist at all. He certainly did not turn up to all the meetings. The ‘Tulip’ had abandoned him. As Tulpanov put it tactfully after Becher’s death, in Berlin ‘Nothing remained of the modesty of the war years. He was at home, completely at home, and he quite naturally expressed the view that he knew better than we did how to order the German house.’
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Becher was still protected by Vladimir Semionov and Dymshitz. Dymshitz told Tulpanov that the Cultural Alliance was not meant to be an ideological organisation. Tulpanov stayed his hand for the time being, but Alexander Abusch was placed beside the poet in the organisation as the head of the ‘ideological division’, to keep an eye on him. The SBZ made sure that the press could dip into Russian reserves of paper and board for the book covers. Once again it was Dymshitz who restrained the censor, Captain Filippov. In 1945-6, only one book fell foul of the Russian authorities, and that was Günther Weisenborn’s
Berliner Requiem
. Here not even Becher’s intercession could persuade the Soviets to allow publication of a work that centred on the misery of the Berliners in the first post-war days.
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The Aufbau Verlag’s earliest publications were Becher’s
Manifest des Kulturbundes zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands
and the first number of the cultural and political periodical
Aufbau
. Neither was calculated to run counter to the ideals of the Russian Zone or to excite the censor Captain Filippov. A year later the Kulturbund published its own weekly in
Sonntags
, with a print-run of 200,000. The Aufbau, however, was not just a printing press for radical texts: before the year was out it had published eleven books, including works by Georg Lukács, Max Hermann-Neisse, Theodor Pliever - whose documentary novel
Stalingrad
achieved sales of 177,000, not including those sold under licence to West German houses - and Heinrich Heine, all of them authors who had the distinction of being banned by the Nazis. Heine was the only dead author, and the most eminent of them all.
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Becher came to the conclusion that Aufbau should not be the publisher of exile-literature, so in 1946 he changed the policy to include writers who had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi years, but who were not tarred with the brush of Nazism. They included Ernst Wiechert, Hans Fallada, Gerhart Hauptmann and Ernst Niekisch. As Germany polarised at the onset of the Cold War, some of the non-communist writers were pushed out of the list, while others chose to remove themselves.
Censorship was formally introduced by the Russian authorities in January 1947, but that year the Aufbau was still printing works by non-communist authors such as Egon Erwin Kisch and Lion Feuchtwanger, as well as Victor Klemperer’s study in the Nazi abuse of language,
LTI
. The Aufbau only became wholly ideological in its policy once the Western Allies put through currency reform. Among other things, the move meant a serious loss of income for the East German publishing house. After 1948 the size of the editions diminished considerably. Many of the Aufbau authors also belonged to the Cultural Alliance. Other members included Anna Seghers, Ricarda Huch and the painters Otto Nagel and Karl Hofer.
One of Becher’s projects was to create a new artists’ colony at the seaside resort of Ahrenshoop as the Cultural Alliance’s Summer Academy on the Baltic. The Nazis who had been living there were flushed out and a children’s home was created so that writers would be unencumbered with parental duties. Becher wanted to build up a new, anti-fascist intellectual elite.
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The desire to ‘make Germans out of Germans’ by reintroducing them to their art and literature - some of which had been banned under the Nazis - sadly gave way to more blatant Soviet propaganda after 1947 and Becher was unable to contain the ideological tide. Performances of Schiller and Mozart were replaced by Pushkin and Gogol, Chekhov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. That might have been tolerable in its way, but soon that too was pushed aside in favour of modern plays which stressed the value of Soviet culture and the evilness of its Western equivalent. Plays had to show the Soviet Union in a positive light. Even Becher came under suspicion for a while until he saved his skin by writing a few poetic encomiums to ‘the great Stalin’. The drama put on after 1947 was every bit as tedious as the American plays performed in the US Zone.
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On 21-22 May 1946 the Cultural Alliance held a congress with Tulpanov present. Becher sailed close to the wind again. In a speech he questioned Soviet policy: ‘demontage and reparations make most people doubt whether they will still be able to lead a tolerable life’. He called for more responsibility to be given to Germans to govern their own lives. The speech did not go down well.
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He pushed on regardless. The first German writers’ congress was held in the Hebbel Theatre (in the American Zone) at the beginning of October. As many as 250 writers came, including Ricarda Huch, but some of the fleurons still evaded his grasp: there was no sign of the Manns, Brecht or Feuchtwanger. Becher called for unity - there was no peace without it. A split Germany was not a Germany at peace. He revealed his hand as an idealist for a united Germany. The congress was the first and last of its kind.
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Two years later the Cultural Alliance held a congress which brought together artists and writers from East and West to denounce McCarthyist America.
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The Western Allies had already disowned Becher, and they kicked him out of the Schlüterstrasse at the end of the year.
The crack was coming and many of the writers who had found a
Gemütlichkeit
in the Soviet Zone were leaving: Pliever went to Munich, Ricarda Huch to Frankfurt-am-Main. Becher was unfairly accused of being behind the abduction of the journalist Dieter Friede. He was having to defend the system more and more. When Eugen Kogon (who had been in Buchenwald) compared the Russian camps to the Nazi ones, Becher told him the comparison was absurd. The Western Allies refused him a pass to travel in their zones. At the end of the year Pieck was describing Becher as a ‘political ignoramus’. Becher offered to resign in December. His letter was signed pathetically ‘Mit sozialistischem Gruss!’ (With socialist greetings!),
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an unfortunate reminder of the Nazi formula. He had been broken; he was one of the first great casualties of the Cold War.
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Life in the American Zone
They send us chicken feed and expect us to say thank you.
Johannes Semler. Quoted in Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard, ein Politikerleben, Munich and Landsberg am Lech 1996, 51
T
he American Military Government in Frankfurt-am-Main was housed ‘in the conquerors’ part of the city’ in one of the sand-coloured sky-scrapers beyond the main railway station which made up the HQ of IG Farben and which appeared as an oasis in the middle of the rubble. You needed a special pass to approach it and, if you were lucky enough to discover a way in, you found it filled with what the American novelist John Dos Passos refers to as ‘chicken colonels’
bw
or pen-pushers.
Dos Passos had lunch there in November 1945. A German maid called them to the table. He ate venison steak and drank first-rate burgundy
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- a very different bill of fare to that endured by the helots who milled about outside, fetching twigs in prams to heat their stoves. They called the place ‘GI Farben Haus’ and gave it a wide berth. Visitors might catch an occasional glimpse of the god of war himself, General Eisenhower, accompanied by his Irish mistress Kay Summersby. With some exaggeration excused by the passing of time she wrote that the IG Farben building was ‘a small city in itself. It was very elegant - lots of marble and fountains and indoor flower gardens, great curving staircases and very luxurious offices, several tennis courts could have fitted into Ike’s office.
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Bouquets of fresh spring flowers were placed in our offices every day.’
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The Russian Gregory Klimov had reason to visit the American HQ, where he wanted to talk to Clay. He was struck by the slovenly attitude of the black troopers, who had their cheeks wadded with gum. ‘The privates stretched themselves out with their feet on the desk while the generals tore around like messenger boys.’ Eventually he met a ‘long-nosed little soldier’ who turned out to be Clay - ‘He wasn’t a general, he was an atom-bomb.’
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James Stern was struck by the cute Americanness of it all, particularly the mess, where the officers pecked at coleslaw and drank iced water. Homesick Americans could also assuage their spleen with ice-cream. Stern’s friends in Frankfurt were unimpressed by the authority that watched over them, filling them with the breath of democracy. ‘Das Pharisäer Ghetto’, they called it, ‘The Ghetto of the Pharisees’.
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Before he left Frankfurt Dos Passos had a chance to look round and sit in on a local American Military Government meeting. ‘Frankfurt resembles a city not so much as a pile of bones and smashed skull resembles a prize Hereford steer.’ Yet people seemed to be rushing about the streets, doing some sort of business: ‘They behave horribly like ants when you have kicked over an anthill.’ At the meeting he heard the reports. Frankfurt was receiving 2,000 new residents a week; flats were being revamped for them; there had been five black-marketeers arrested and fish was arriving from Bremen . . .
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America’s great battlefield generals in the Second World War had been Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. Patton captured the imagination not only of the Americans, but also of the Germans, making him a sort of American Rommel. He could hardly be restrained from going on to take Prague before the arrival of the Red Army, using the Czech Uprising as an excuse. He claimed, improbably, that the Russians would stop it - ‘These patriots need our help!’ - when the Soviets had very largely conjured it up. What he meant was that he wanted to take Prague for the West. He was no friend of the Russians. When a Russian came to him with a pettifogging complaint he shouted, ‘Get this son-of-a-bitch out of here!’ Zhukov was dismissed as a ‘comic-opera covered with medals’ and Patton was exceptionally proud to report that he had drunk a Russian general under the table. In this respect his views were similar to those of Mark Clark, or even Lucius Clay. ‘On to the Oder!’ he intoned.
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