Denazification and culture in post-war Germany

I became interested in what happened to culture in post-war Germany because it seemed a way to think about how culture responds to or fails to respond to political upheaval and social disaster. In May 1945, when Germany surrendered, Britain, America, the Soviet Union and France divided the country into four zones, and each sent in a force of occupation to administer their area. The occupiers all took responsibility for reconstructing the country economically and politically, which we all know. What’s less well known is that they also took responsibility for cultural reconstruction. Each occupier sent in writers, filmmakers and artists to help rebuild the cultural sectors in the country that their armed forces had just spent five years destroying.

In my book The Bitter Taste of Victory, I look at 20 cultural figures who found themselves in Germany in British or American army uniform. Among them was Stephen Spender, who was sent back to be in charge of denazifying libraries and universities, and W.H. Auden, his great friend, who was charged with reporting on morale in the bombed cities. Both Spender and Auden had spent time in Germany in the 1920s and regarded German culture as far superior to British culture. As German speakers, they both hoped they could provide a useful service connecting the German cultural figures who’d resisted the Nazis with the occupiers, to get German culture going again rather than just importing culture from abroad. Some of the figures sent into Germany were Germans and Austrians who’d emigrated during the war and went back in the guise of conquerors, which often provoked resentment amongst their former compatriots. Among them were the writers Klaus and Erika Mann, children of Thomas Mann.

Spender was certainly successful in denazifying the libraries and the universities, and he did bring sort of large libraries from Britain. There was a book list of appropriate writing, which was broadly seen to be democratic. I argue in my book that Germany had a greater effect on these people than they had on Germany. I don’t think in the end that Spender and Auden managed to revive the more interesting elements of German intellectual life. At the same time, Spender did write what was, for me, his masterpiece, a book called European Witness, where he describes the ruins of Europe and attempts to decode what they mean.

Although Billy Wilder failed to get the German film studios back into action, the comedy he set in the Berlin ruins, The Foreign Affair, is, I think, one of his two or three best films. It’s given its lustre by the performance of Marlene Dietrich, who, at first, said no when Wilder asked her to come along and play a woman who’d had affairs with senior Nazis. He somehow managed to persuade her to do so, and she did it, giving this astonishing performance. The conceit of the film is that she has had affairs with senior Nazis, but now she pragmatically decides to go for an American GI.

Wilder really brings out the ambivalence of the situation. At this point, he’s not straightforwardly condemning the people who’ve gone along with the Nazis and are now going along with the occupiers. There’s a really great speech where the GI accuses Marlene Dietrich of exploiting him and she says that she’s lost everything. She’s lost her possessions, her beliefs and her country. She’s endured night after night of sitting in air raid shelters and then the arrival of the Red Army, and she can’t see how he can come here in American uniform and tell her that she’s been wrong to try and keep going.

We can see it is a missed opportunity in lots of different ways. Spender and Auden were right to hope that the best elements of German culture could be rescued and rechannelled, rather than just flooding Germany with American culture. This proved tricky immediately after the war. I think their hopes for a reflective, self-critical culture were interrupted swiftly by the Cold War, which I see as beginning on the ground in Berlin in 1947. Suddenly, at that point, it all became about showing off and competing with the Russians: when the Russians brought a huge choir to Berlin and staged spectacles of music, theatre and film, the British and Americans had to do the same.

Often, in the process, they abandoned denazification. At the same time, many of the writers and artists whom Spender and Auden were championing were now dismissed as communists and couldn’t perform. You get a sense that the real heroes of this period were of people like Furtwängler, who should probably have been more strongly denazified. As things moved on, I think even larger opportunities were missed for culture to matter at all in the post-war period. Part of what I like about this moment is that it felt like a moment when culture was at the heart of politics and cultural figures had the power to direct the world for the better. For example, when UNESCO was founded in November 1945 to prevent war, it guided itself with the credo that: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it’s in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

This was broadly accepted at the time in a way that is hard to conceive of today. At the same time, many of the artists who were sidelined had been fighting for a vision of a united Europe and believed that a shared cultural heritage and a shared desire for peace could transcend national loyalties. At this moment, when it’s quite hard to articulate a European identity that people can believe in, I look back on the post-war moment and think that if culture had remained central to the European project, we might have done a better job at constructing our identity as Europeans.

I think the whole story speaks to a situation now where no one’s quite sure about what the value of culture is. We’re presented with two paradigms in this post-war period. There’s the American optimism about what culture is and what it can do; if you just bring in some books and films, you can transform a nation. However, there’s also the pessimism induced by knowing that, despite its great culture, Germany succumbed to Nazism. Perhaps in the face of those, it’s inevitable that no one in the end could find a way forward, but I’m not sure where it leaves us. Should we continue to fund culture because it will rescue us from decay, or should we trust our iconoclastic artists to make their way through the wastelands, whatever history throws at them?

I think the Cold War project in which both America and Russia were investing heavily in culture very much emerged out of this period. A magazine like Encounter, which for a while had Stephen Spender as an editor, really came out of this moment in which they decided that they could influence the hearts and minds of nations through writing. Encounter emerged from a magazine called Demonat, which began in Germany in 1947. It was very much the American thinking that they needed to provide the Germans with a high cultural offering, with brilliant writers writing brilliant things, but with an American message.

I think the attempt to turn Germany into a peaceful and democratic culture through culture was in the end a failure, partly because Germany had a perfectly good culture of its own. Yet, the bombed cities and collapse in morale transformed the work of a handful of writers, filmmakers and artists who encountered them.