4th November 2009
As the name of this blog “How it really was” suggests, I start from the assumption that the aim of the historian is not to judge the past, but to discover and reveal what really happened, following the German historian Leopold von Ranke, who famously said:
“Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessen: so hoher Ämter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen”
which I translate as:
The role, commonly attributed to History, is to judge the Past, to instruct the Present, for the benefit of the Future: such a high (noble) role is not claimed for this essay: it aims simply to show how it really was
I am therefore very suspicious of any theoretical approach to history, especially those which attempt to judge the past, (who are we to criticise what other people may or may not have done, in circumstances and times we can barely understand), preferring to stay firmly grounded on what we know, drawing on the evidence of what people said, wrote, or were reported to have done. It seems to me that all too often the historian’s interpretation tells us more about their own personal views and the commonly held prejudices of their time, than anything new about what actually happened.
But this empirical approach to history means I very quickly come across the issue of whether the people and events I describe and find interesting are typical of what other people thought and did at the time, or whether they are just unrepresentative, isolated instances.
The problem we face as historians is how to make sense of the mass of facts and circumstances we discover and how to communicate this to our listeners or readers.
One way of addressing this issue is through some form of statistical analysis. It seems to me, though, that the problem with this approach is that we have to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator and generalise to the point where too much data is lost. The most influential and interesting people and events were often those that were exceptional in some way.
Some time ago, another research student at the Institute for Historical Research (at the University of London) introduced me to Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and this seemed attractive, as a way of generalising from specific examples without losing their individuality. I had already classified the various people I intend to study for my thesis, on the British in occupied Germany after the war, as “senior army officers”, “diplomats and administrators”, “educators”, “young men” and “returning exiles.” Perhaps I should construct an “Ideal Type” for each of these groups?
I had never read anything by Max Weber before and was very sceptical as to what he could offer a historian. After all, he is best known as one of the founders of modern sociology (a theoretical discipline I have done my best to avoid, as it seemed too full of complex jargon, abstruse logic, and highly questionable assumptions).
But after reading what Max Weber himself wrote about the “Ideal Type”, (rather than what other people have written about it), it seemed to make a lot of sense.
So here is my understanding of Max Weber’s concept of the “Ideal Type” and how it could be used by historians.
1) It is not possible to describe historical events without using concepts of some sort. If historians are not explicit about the concepts they use, the result is that they either do this implicitly, using some kind of logical or verbal construction, (and so possibly mislead their readers), or else they stay lost in a world of undefined “feelings”.
2) To be useful as an aid to historical description, concepts must have certain characteristics and be used in particular ways.
3) Weber called a concept which meets these criteria an “Ideal Type”:
4) Different historians will construct different "Ideal Types" as our understanding of historical events changes over time.
5) To be useful, concepts used as "Ideal Types" should be precise and specific, not vague or general. It doesn’t matter if this means some historical events do not always fit with the "Ideal Type" as the historian has defined it, because our understanding of what happened works by highlighting differences between the concepts we hold in our minds and historical reality, as well as similarities.
In summary, Max Weber seems to be saying that history is a dialogue between the present and the past (very similar in many ways to the English historian EH Carr in his book What is History). The present is represented by the concepts – the “Ideal Types” - created by historians and held in the minds of listeners and readers. The past is represented by the historical evidence, as discovered and revealed in the historians’ sources.
References:
Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntis” in Johannes Winckelmann (ed) Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1988)
21st October 2009
Last week I wrote about Amy Buller, her book 'Darkness over Germany' and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as an alternative college or university.
The first principal of Cumberland Lodge was Sir Walter Moberly, previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, Chairman of the University Grants Committee and the author of a book published in 1949, 'The Crisis in the University'.
His views, which he said were not only his own but representative of a group of similarly minded people, are interesting as an example of British conservative Christian thinkers, who believed that the world was in crisis, due to a lack of religious faith and respect for tradition, especially among young people. This had been especially apparent in Nazi Germany (so they believed), but the same problems affected not just Germany, but the whole Western world, including Great Britain.
Although the focus was different, there are clear similarities between his thinking and Amy Buller’s book 'Darkness over Germany'. As Walter James wrote in his history of Amy Buller and the foundation of Cumberland Lodge, although her book was about Germany, it reflected the sense that:
“Nazism was the outward manifestation of a sickness with which the entire West had been infected. This view was widely shared among Christian thinkers in the 1930s.”
Although this was a minority point of view at the time and not shared by most people in Britain, it does appear to have influenced a number of British senior officers and administrators in occupied Germany after the war and helps to explain the curious mixture of sympathy and arrogance that is apparent in some of their words and actions (See for example previous posts on this blog on Field-Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone). On the one hand a grave concern that, had circumstances been different, what happened in Nazi Germany could equally have happened in Britain and on the other hand, a view that because these threats to civilisation had been (so they believed) successfully resisted in Britain, it was now the responsibility of British people to convert the heathen and help people in other nations, especially the Germans, share the unquestioned strengths and benefits of British moral, religious, political and cultural traditions.
Here are some extracts from Walter Moberly's book ‘The Crisis in the University':
“The crisis in the university reflects the crisis in the world and its pervading sense of insecurity.”
“The veneer of civilisation had proved to be amazingly thin. Beneath it has been revealed, not only the ape and the tiger, but what is far worse – perverted and satanic man.”
In Moberley’s view, the real trouble lay “in the powerless of the individual in the face of mass society”. The impact of Western civilisation on Africa had been disintegrating, but now so-called civilised communities were suffering from the same problems:
“Apart from any conscious intention or propaganda, [Western civilisation] destroys the foundation of belief, custom and sentiment on which primitive life is built. Unless it also brings some new world picture and way of life to replace that which is in ruins, it leaves behind it devastation. But nemesis has followed. To-day the ‘civilized’ communities are suffering from a similar devastation. Over a large part of Europe and Asia binding convictions are lacking and there is confusion, bewilderment and discord. The whole complex of traditional belief, habit and sentiment, on which convictions are founded, has collapsed. All over the world indeed the cake of custom is broken, the old gods are dethroned and none have taken their places. Mentally and spiritually, most persons to-day are ‘dis-placed persons’.”
Despite relative economic decline after the war, Britain could still provide leadership for the rest of the world. In material resources, Great Britain was “no longer quite in the front rank” but “a full share of leadership in the realm of ideas is still open to us…. We have learned in modern times to criticize ourselves … We may still be shocked by the barbaric gospels of others; but is not all that is positive in our way of life and moral codes simply a relic of an old hierarchical order in which we have ourselves ceased effectively to believe? For ceremonial occasions, no doubt, we still have a Church as we still have a King, but neither has much to do the realities of power.”
“Much of the world is looking to this country for moral leadership with an expectancy which we have disappointed, but have not yet forfeited. It does not seem fantastic to suggest that the fate of civilization in the next period may hang on the question whether this country can rise to its moral opportunity.”
If this was his diagnosis of the global problem, the universities had, in his view, failed to show the moral and cultural leadership they should, resulting in apathetic students with no clear convictions or sense of purpose. “The universities are not now discharging their former cultural task.” This was apparent in both Britain and Germany:
“This process has been going on for a long time. But, in the last few years, it has been accentuated by the moral collapse of the German universities under the Nazi regime. Of no universities had the intellectual prestige been higher; during the last century they had been a model to the world. Yet when the stress came, with certain honourable exceptions among individuals, they showed little resistance, less indeed than the Churches. They failed to repel doctrines morally monstrous and intellectually despicable…. No doubt certain weaknesses in the German make-up contributed to this collapse, but to ascribe it solely to a double dose of original sin in the German people is unconvincing. It seems to have been due in large measure to the fact that the German universities had no independent standards of value of which they felt themselves the guardians and which they held with sufficient conviction and tenacity to stand up against the torrent. But, British teachers cannot help asking themselves, ‘Is this not also our own case? If we were subjected to a like pressure, are we confident that our own standards of value are too coherent and assured to be obliterated? Are we sure that we too should not succumb?’ They do not find it easy to answer with the ringing confidence they would wish.”
“The cultural failure of the universities is seen in the students. In recent years large numbers of these have been apathetic and have had neither wide interests nor compelling convictions”
“Whatever the cause, the university to-day lives and moves and has its being in a moral and cultural fog.”
In the final chapter at the end of the book ‘Taking Stock’, he summarised his argument that the solution to the “age of crisis” was not to abandon established traditions, but to reinvigorate and reinforce them:
His conclusion and perhaps surprisingly enlightened solution (for a conservative thinker) to these problems was:
Free discussion: “All inhibition of discussion of the burning issues of the day must be removed, for any attitude towards them is preferable to apathy and drift.… Communication and debate must be unconstrained.”
But there were limits to neutrality and some basic values had to be reaffirmed, such as “a passion for truth” “a delicate precision in analysis” “a willingness to learn from all quarters” and “freedom of utterance”.
References:
Sir Walter Moberly, The Crisis in the University ( London: SCM Press Ltd, 1949)
Walter James, A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, (Privately printed, 1979)
14th October 2009
For some time I’ve been puzzled by what you might call the 'spiritual dimension' to British activities in occupied Germany after the war, typified by Field-Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone, saying that what they were really trying to do was to “save the soul of Germany”. It’s as if they thought they were missionaries trying to convert the heathen, rather than soldiers administering a defeated enemy country.
Back in December 2008, I wrote on this blog, about how I gained an insight into this way of thinking after reading a book published in 1943, Darkness over Germany, by Amy Buller.
Amy Buller was a remarkable woman. Her greatest achievement was founding Cumberland Lodge in 1947, as a type of alternative university or college, where students and others could meet to attend courses and conferences. I’ve now discovered more about her after reading 'A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge', by Walter James, who was the Principal of Cumberland Lodge from 1974-82.
She was born in 1891, and died in 1974. She was brought up as a Baptist in South Africa, but appeared to experience something of a religious conversion when she returned to England in 1911 to study at Birkbeck College and became a devout Anglo-Catholic. After the end of the First World War she worked for the Student Christian Movement and developed close links with both senior academics and Anglican bishops, including William Temple, later Archbishop of York and Canterbury.
Between the wars she made several visits to Germany and these formed the basis of her book 'Darkness over Germany'. Walter James described her views at the time as follows:
“What she wanted people to understand, as far as one can judge, was that Nazism, though false, was a new and powerful religion, demanding the whole man as every religion did and as German Protestantism had ceased to do.”
And he quoted from the prologue to Darkness over Germany, where she wrote that:
“I record these stories to emphasize the need for youth and those who plan the training of youth to consider carefully the full significance of the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”
According to James, writing the book was the watershed in her life and this was when she started to think of founding a college. She resigned from her job as warden of a residential women’s college in Liverpool and moved back to London. By chance, Queen Elizabeth read the book on the recommendation of the Bishop of Lichfield and she was summoned to meet the queen in March 1944. She told her of her ambition to establish a college and the queen said she would do what she could to help.
After many difficulties raising the necessary funds and finding a suitable location for the college, the King and Queen offered her the use of Cumberland Lodge in 1947. Sir Walter Moberly was appointed as the first principal in 1949, and an impressive array of people came to speak at events there, including Lord Lindsay, Karl Popper, A J Ayer, Michael Oakeshott, R H S Crossman, Ernst Gombrich and T S Eliot. Amy Buller became the honorary warden until 1964, when she retired, first to Oxford and then later to London, where she died in 1974.
References:
Walter James, A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine’s, Cumberland Lodge, (Privately printed, 1979)
30th September 2009
Some months ago I wrote about a reference I found in an official intelligence report, written by a British officer in Berlin soon after the end of the Second World War, that another war was likely and this time German soldiers and airmen would fight on the side of the British and Americans against the Russians:
“The war between the Russians and the democracies is approaching and indeed has already begun, and Germany will of course be invited to participate. An International Air Brigade is to be formed for use in the war against Japan. Volunteers are invited and will be trained in England. Several offers have been received.”
(See: More on Goronwy Rees and his six day tour of Germany in July 1945)
I was surprised by this, and since then I’ve looked out for other references to people believing that war between Britain, America and Russia was likely, well before relations between the four victorious Allies broke down, the start of Berlin airlift in 1948 and the division of Germany.
While researching a different subject – the way ‘communism’ or ‘Bolshevism’ was described as a ‘disease’, rather than as a set of ideas or a political doctrine, by people in Britain between the wars and after and by Winston Churchill in particular – I came across a reference to Operation Unthinkable. Apparently documents released by The National Archives in 1998 showed that in May 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe, Churchill instructed his staff to prepare top secret plans for a surprise Anglo-American attack on the Soviet Union, with the assistance of 10 German divisions, under the codename “Operation Unthinkable: Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation.” The aim of the plan was to get “a square deal for Poland” with free and fair elections based on secret ballots and the participation of democratic leaders from all parties, not just the communists, in the government of the country. For planning purposes, the attack was scheduled to be launched on 1st July 1945.
The military planners soon discovered that the idea was hazardous, to say the least, as the Soviet Union had four times as many soldiers and twice as many tanks in Western Europe, as the British and Americans combined, and recommended it was not taken any further. Churchill gave way and modified the terms of reference to defence rather than attack: covering the “hypothetical” case that US troops would go home, and the island of Britain needed to be defended against an attack from Russia.
But the question remains whether “Operation Unthinkable” was just an isolated example of military planning for all contingencies, and how close Britain, the US and the Soviet Union really were to war in 1945. Here are four pieces of evidence I’ve come across in my research which could have some bearing on this:
Firstly, the curious incident of the missing telegram. In 1954 Churchill said, in a speech in his constituency at Woodford in Essex that, even before the war was over, he had “telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” This caused a furore in the British press, and rather spoilt the celebrations for Churchill’s 80th birthday, as a number of Labour MPs, including Barbara Castle, refused to sign a Birthday Book in his honour because he had been willing to “use Nazi soldiers against our war allies.”
Montgomery, when asked about this, at first said he had received the telegram, but then could not find it in his papers. Churchill withdrew the remark saying he must have confused one telegram with another and the matter died down.
However, as David Reynolds and other historians have found, in Montgomery’s papers at the Imperial War Museum archives there is a handwritten note, dated June 1959, entitled “The Truth about the Telegram”, in which Montgomery confirms he received a verbal, but not written, order from Churchill to ‘stack’ German weapons, in case they might be needed to fight the Russians.
“On 14th May 1945 I flew to London from Germany to see the Prime Minister to tell him that the problems of government in Germany were so terrific that he must at once appoint a C-in-C and Military Governor…. The announcement was made on 22nd May.
At our meeting in Downing Street the P.M. got very steamed up about the Russians and about the zones of occupation – which would entail a large scale withdrawal on our part. He ordered that I was not to destroy the weapons of the 2 million Germans who had surrendered on Luneburg Heath on the 4th May. All must be kept, we might have to fight the Russians with German help.”
A month later no further instructions had been received, so according to Montgomery:
“On 14 June I got fed up with guarding the weapons. We had signed the surrender in Berlin on 5th June and agreed to set up the Control Commission for 4-Power Government of Germany. So I sent the attached telegram to the War Office on 14 June 1945. Things were pretty hectic in Whitehall in those days, the Coalition government was coming to an end; a general election was announced; it was impossible to get a decision, a firm one, on anything. I got no answer.
I waited for one week. I then gave orders for all the personal weapons and equipment to be destroyed!!
Then in November 1954, Winston Churchill in a speech at Woodford referred, unwisely to the order he had given. He said he had sent me a telegram. It could not be found. There was no telegram.”
Secondly, despite official denials by British officials that there were differences between them and their Soviet allies, rumours abounded that things were not as they seemed. For example in his book ‘Berlin Twilight’ (published in 1947) Lt-Colonel Byford-Jones described the lack of cooperation between the Russians and other victorious allies immediately after the end of the war, writing that:
“If a man builds a high wall round his house, locks his gates, refuses to admit his neighbours, he should not be surprised if the building becomes the centre of morbid curiosity….This illustrates the situation in which the Russian zone of Germany found itself in the eight months after the war’s end….Officers of the Allied forces, with whom Russia had been co-operating in the world’s greatest war, were suddenly treated as would be saboteurs or spies, and were refused admittance into the Russian zone, the frontiers of which, adjoining those of the American and British, were closely guarded day and night….Journalists and broadcasters belonging to Allied and neutral countries were forbidden to enter.
It was not surprising in these circumstances that a new Crusade seemed imminent, that officers talked of little else at one time in their British and American messes over strong Schnaps and Steinhaiger [beer] than ‘the coming conflict’. There was something too ‘cloak and dagger’ about these conversations. One did not mention the words Soviets or Russia or even the Red terror; one spoke of ‘they’ and ‘it’ in appropriately lowered tones, and everyone had the key to the code.”
Thirdly, a key element of Nazi propaganda in the closing months of the war was the attempt to persuade the Western allies that they should join with them in forming a “Bulwark against Bolshevism.” For example in a speech on 2nd May 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide, but before the end of the war on May 8th, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, foreign secretary in the interim German government headed by Admiral Dönitz, said:
“But the more German territory in the east, which ought to form a basis for food supplies for the starving people in the west, falls into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the most speedily and terribly will famine sweep over Europe. Nurtured by this distress, Bolshevism flourishes. A Bolshevised Europe constitutes the first phase on the path towards a world revolution which the Soviets have been persistently pursuing for over twenty-five years.”
Incidentally, this speech, by Schwerin von Krosigk contains one of the first references I have found to the existence of an “iron curtain” separating East and West: “In the east, the iron curtain is advancing even further, behind which the work of annihilation proceeds hidden from the eyes of the world.” This was well before Churchill used the phrase at his speech at Fulton Missouri, on March 5th 1946, to say: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Please note I am not claiming that Churchill or other British politicians or soldiers were influenced by Nazi propaganda – if anything this made them take extra care to emphasise the unity of the Allies – but it is still interesting that plans were made to attack Russia, Britain’s wartime ally, despite the enemy they had both defeated saying this was exactly what they should do. (In war you don’t normally do what your enemy says you should!)
Fourthly, how much did Stalin and other Soviet Union leaders know about “Operation Unthinkable? It seems they were, justifiably, very suspicious of British intentions at the end of the war and for several months afterwards. At the Four Power Control Council in Berlin, the Russians claimed, on several occasions, that the British were not meeting their obligations under the Potsdam Agreement to disband the German army. At the meeting on 20th November 1945, Marshal Zhukov, the Russian representative, tabled a formal notice objecting to the “presence of organised units of the former German Army in the British Zone of Occupation.”
Montgomery was incensed by this, writing in a telegram to Arthur Street, the Permanent Secretary of the British “Control Office for Germany and Austria” in London that:
“… it is a mystery to me why it should be thought that we do not want to carry out the POTSDAM agreement in disbanding the German armed forces. We have fought them in two bloody wars and our very existence as a nation has been threatened by them. That we should retain any affection for them or should desire their continued existence is a matter beyond my comprehension.”
Perhaps Montgomery was sincere when he wrote this, or perhaps he was being disingenuous. I don’t know. In any case, by now, in the autumn of 1945, the situation seems to have become very messy. Of the roughly two million German soldiers who had surrendered into British custody at the end of the war, over half a million had been released to work on the land or in the coal mines (under operations codenamed “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle”). Others had been sent to the US zone, but around 700,000 were still detained. Whatever British intentions were immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, there were now other reasons for not fully disbanding the German army, as Montgomery explained in the “Notes on the Occupation of Germany” held with his papers at the Imperial War Museum:
“There were two main reasons for the presence of the 700,000 ex-Wehrmacht personnel in concentration areas awaiting disbandment … first, we had nowhere to put them if they were disbanded and we could not guard them if they were dispersed in prison camps over our area; second, His Majesty’s Government required 225,000 Germans as reparations labour for the United Kingdom.”
As Montgomery explained in a statement at the subsequent Control Council on 20th November, German soldiers who surrendered at the end of the war were not formally designated as prisoners of war because if they were so described “we should have to accord them certain privileges in conformity with the Geneva Convention. We should be debarred from using them for certain tasks. We should have to feed them on a relatively high scale of rations.”
In addition, the British army in Germany were using some German soldiers, still under the command of their own officers, as so-called ‘Dienstgruppen’ (or service units) to carry out general labouring tasks. As Noel Annan explained in his book ‘Changing Enemies’
“The labour for these schemes was provided by keeping the German army in being and renaming them DienstGruppen, although these had shortly to be dissolved following Russian complaints…”
Somewhat reluctantly, in response to Russian pressure, the remaining captured German soldiers were released, in a process given the intriguing name of “Operation Clobber”, which, according to an army conference held on 4th December was due to start on 10th December 1945 and finish on 20th January 1946 – so you could say this blog post traces British ideas on what to do with the two million German soldiers who surrendered and were interned at the end of the war: from Operation “Unthinkable”, via “Barleycorn” and “Coalscuttle” to “Clobber.”
References
Some of the original “Operation Unthinkable” documents have been digitised and can be viewed on the web:
On Churchill’s use of medical imagery to describe the “disease of Bolshevism”:
Antoine Capet, ‘“The Creeds of the Devil’ Churchill between the Two Totalitarianisms, 1917 – 1945”, Finest Hour Online, 31 August 2009
On Churchill writing his memoirs and his interpretation of the history of the War, including references to “Operation Unthinkable” see the chapter on "The Unnecessary Cold War” pp 464-486 in:
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004)
Montgomery’s handwritten note on the “Truth about the Telegram” is held at the Imperial War Museum archives:
BLM 162: “The Woodford Speech of Nov 1954 and the famous Telegram”
For a description of rumours circulating in the feverish atmosphere of post-war Berlin:
W. Byford-Jones, Berlin Twilight (London: Hutchinson, 1947)
The speech by Count Schwerin von Krosigk is reprinted in Ulrike Jordan (ed), Conditions of Surrender, Britons and Germans witness the end of the war (London & New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997)
The references to Soviet objections to “organised units of the German army in the British Zone”, the Dienstgruppen and the disbandment of the German army are from:
Montgomery’s Notes on the Occupation of Germany, Part 3 (Imperial War Museum, BLM 87) and M.E. Pelly and H.J.Yasamee (eds) assisted by G.Bennett, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 1, Volume 5, Germany and Western Europe 11 August – 31 December 1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1990)
23rd September 2009
As I tried to explain in a post back in January 2008, the approach I am using for my research into the British in occupied Germany after the Second World War is to follow the people.
I hadn’t realised then that the relationship between history and biography is quite controversial. For many years historians have been reacting against the idea that history is the lives of great men (and the occasional great woman). They have been looking at economic trends, social structures and institutional frameworks as a way of explaining what happened in the past, rather than seeing the course of events determined by the actions and desires of individual men and women.
One of the first people to adopt this approach, of course, was Karl Marx, who believed that the future course of history was determined by the dialectical struggle between the capitalist and working classes, with the inevitable result the victory of communism. But you do not have to share a Marxist view of economics, or be a socialist historian, to focus on long term trends, or try to describe and analyse the economic, social and cultural factors which influence and determine the way people behave.
I would never claim (as the historian Herbert Butterfield did in 1955) that “It is men [and women] who make history” but I do think it is impossible to understand, describe and explain what happened in the past, without referring to how this affected individual men and woman and how people responded to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
All too often I have read works by other historians who, so it seems to me, have generalised to the point of being misleading. For example, in my own field of research, Germany under Allied occupation after the Second World War, it is all too easy to say the “British” did this, the “Americans” did that, and the “French” and “Russians” and “Germans” did something else. I know from my own research that British people in Germany formed a very mixed and diverse group, with widely different backgrounds, attitudes and beliefs, and I expect the same was true of people of other nationalities. I also suspect that, although British people generally behaved differently from, for example, German people, in some ways, due to different social and cultural backgrounds, in other ways some groups of British people had more in common with people of other nationalities, than with their own compatriots.
For example, it seems to me that senior British army officers such as Montgomery, Robertson and Bishop, with a deeply conservative and traditionalist outlook on life and strong personal religious beliefs, had more in common with German Christian Democrat politicians such as Konrad Adenauer and Karl Arnold, than any of them had with Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democrats, or with John Hynd, self-taught railwayman, trade unionist and British minister with responsibility for Germany, let alone a US GI, a 21 year old British tank commander with no adult experience other than war, or a half-Jewish, German-speaking exile returning to the country in which he had been born.
I have recently read an excellent book, in which a number of historians and biographers discuss the relationship between history and biography: Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography. The following comments are based on my reading and understanding of the introduction by Simone Lässig:
In the 1970s, many social historians attempted to create a theory-driven historical (social) science and biography was seen as “an antiquated and unreflective approach to history.” This trend was especially noticeable in Germany among the so-called “Bielefeld school” of historians, although in Britain and the US, biography remained an established academic and popular form.
Both forms of writing about the past have their weaknesses. If history is only concerned with structures, long term processes, and mass phenomena “a science of human societies will entirely lose sight of the human beings themselves.” On the other hand, the weaknesses of biography include a lack of theory or methodology and an artificial coherence in the description of a life story, which often in reality develops as much from luck and chance as deliberate intention. Every individual person’s life is to some extent fragmented and inconsistent. People take on different roles during their lives with contradictions, upheavals and turning points.
Recently, distinguished historians have returned to writing biographies and in the book, some described their approach. For example, Ian Kershaw explained why he decided to write his biography of Hitler. Although, as a social historian, he was initially sceptical, he came to biography as a way of looking at the nature of Hitler’s power, not through giving direct orders, but through establishing a framework of broad policy objectives within which others could act.
In addition to discussing how historians can bring new approaches to biography, Simone Lässig outlined five trends by which a biographical approach is opening up new possibilities for modern historical scholarship:
1) As a way of moving from the abstract towards the concrete, from system and structure to the unique and individual, and of describing “how people master life’s unforeseen challenges.”
2) At the same time it offers a method of describing how individuals “bear the characteristics of a larger [social] group”. It can also help explain change: “It is rarely possible to explain change in history if the individual is marginalized or even ignored” (For example Luther and the Reformation or Hitler and Nazi Germany)
3) Biographies provide exactitude and detail “not only to discover what is typical, but also to grasp these ways of life in all their breadth and variability.”
4) Because biography deals with people, rather than attempting to discover objective universal facts or rules, a biographical approach “sensitizes the reader” to the fundamental openness of history, its subjective character and to the relativity and limited nature of historical knowledge.
5) An individual example can stimulate more general insights and so reveal or highlight social, economic, cultural or political interconnections and networks.
In summary, this shows that a biographical approach to writing history can reveal aspects which may remain hidden or misunderstood in other approaches which rely too heavily on generalisation, or on an analysis of social, political, cultural or economic structures and institutions, and neglect the individual people.
References:
Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds), Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008)
14th September 2009
It’s intriguing how memories of the First World War and its aftermath influenced British people in occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War.
At the end of the First World War, French, British, Belgian and US troops occupied the Rhineland. This was agreed as part of the Armistice signed on November 11th 1918. The details, including zones of occupation, were worked out by the French Marshal Foch and the British were allocated the city of Cologne and surrounding area. British troops first crossed the frontier into Germany on 2nd December 1918.
The occupation was originally intended to last for 15 years, with the number of Allied troops reduced in stages after 5 and 10 years, subject to certain conditions being met. The British left Cologne in January 1926, but some troops stayed on in Wiesbaden until 30th June 1930.
Looking back to memories of the First World War and its aftermath helps to explain some of the ambivalence in British policy and attitudes towards the German people after the Second World War. On the one hand a concern not to be deceived again by a duplicitous people, who, so the story went, had courted sympathy from well-meaning Allied soldiers, claiming they were victims of an unjust peace settlement, while at the same time planning their revenge and preparing for war. But on the other hand, a concern that the Allies had also made some mistakes, and the economic depression, hunger and unemployment which followed the First World War should not be repeated, for fear that an even worse disaster may occur in the not so distant future.
As examples of the view that this time, in 1945, they had to “stay the course” and “do the job properly”, here are some extracts from three articles in early editions of the British Zone Review, the official journal of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany:
“Experiences of Rhineland Occupation: 1919-1925
You will not, I think, be surprised at my conclusions – that the occupation, intended as a measure for preventing their making war, was used by the Germans as a means of dividing the Allies and of getting their propaganda into the very heart of each of the Allied countries. Moreover we failed to see that Germany was only shamming dead economically and financially and was exploiting the situation to arouse a wholly unjustified sympathy and causing us serious trade difficulties, for which we would blame the peace settlement and our Allies.”
(British Zone review, October 13th 1945)
“Lessons of History
We set out to see whether there was a lesson to be learnt from history. It now stares us in the face. To cut down our occupying forces below an effective minimum or to let considerations of retrenchment weaken our control organisation would be to fly in the face of experience.”
(British Zone Review, November 24th 1945)
“Why Weimar failed
Behind the welter of political strife, the confusion of unversed and inept politicians, the militarists and industrialists waited and planned to avenge themselves of their defeat.”
(British Zone Review, December 22nd 1945)
On the other hand, if we look at contemporary accounts of the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, written in the 1920s rather than in 1945, we find that the troops generally got on well with the local population, and in many cases returned home “definitely pro-German.” Violet Markham, who spent two years in Germany with her husband, who was chief demobilization officer for the British Army of the Rhine, wrote in her book 'A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine' published in 1921, that “Life in Cologne is very pleasant for the occupying army” and “surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are.” On first crossing the border into Germany, she remarked that “It is almost with a shock you realise that German civilians are not equipped with hoofs and horns or other attributes of a Satanic character” and she soon came to see people as individuals, rather than as the stereotypes promoted by governments in wartime:
“It is easy to hate the abstraction called Germany, but for individual Germans one feels either like, dislike or indifference the same as for other people.”
Although she had no doubts as to the “noble ideal” for which the British had fought the war, and was irritated at Germany’s “refusal to say she is sorry”, she was also critical of Allied post-war policy; especially the continuation of the economic blockade; and the Treaty of Versailles, which she said had “scrapped the fundamental ideals for which we fought the war.”
In her view, the democratic government which emerged in Germany in 1918 had an impossible task as it was “confronted by hunger, defeat, despair, and the miseries which resulted from the blockade” and the Allies were partly to blame for the rise of the extreme parties and the decline in the vote for the Social Democrats in the elections of 1920:
“The party standing for ordered democratic development had been knocked out. The British public should try to realise it has been killed by the Allied policy.”
She was not optimistic for the future. In a prediction, which may have seemed extravagant at the time, but which turned out to be unpleasantly close to the truth, she wrote that:
“The post-war chaos appears so complete that men turn from it in despair. Moral disillusion and weariness have their counterparts in recklessness and wild extravagance. There is a sense of an approaching Twilight of the Gods; of a collapse of the foundations of society.”
Perhaps surprisingly, it seems that official British policy after the Second World War, at least as implemented by those on the ground in Germany, was influenced as much by this second strand of thought, of the need to avoid hunger, despair and unemployment, as by concerns that German militarists would re-arm and seek their revenge. This can be traced in the papers of General Sir Brian Robertson, arguably the most influential British soldier and administrator in Germany after the end of the war. His father, General, later Field-Marshal, Sir William Robertson had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the First World War and for a time, in 1919, Military Governor of the British occupied part of the Rhineland.
In a speech in November 1939, when he was President of the Natal Chamber of Industries in South Africa, well before he had any idea of his future role in post-war Germany, Brian Robertson looked forward to the end of the war, saying:
“This war, so far at least, is very unlike the last. It is equally certain that the peace treaties, which have yet to be made, will be quite unlike those which ended the last war. Those treaties were failures because they were based upon fear and vindictiveness. The next treaties, if they are to give lasting peace, must be founded upon confidence and generosity, and they must strike at the root causes of international unrest. Chief among these causes is that economic nationalism which has grown up like a rank week to stifle the national flow of trade between nations.”
Many years later in 1965, in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Brian Robertson referred to his experience as a member of the British delegation at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1932-3 and how this had made him: “a first hand witness of the failure to deal properly with Germany after World War 1.” He continued by saying:
“My father had been Military Governor for a period then. He often talked to me about the mistakes and problems of those years. ‘The idea that you can hold down a country like Germany with her face in the dust indefinitely is a foolish one’ he used to say.”
If it was not possible to 'hold Germany down' for ever, there had to be an alternative policy to one that was purely negative, based on disarmament, demilitarisation and economic controls. In an article in the British Zone Review in October 1945, Robertson tried to explain his own personal philosophy, which suggested he had learnt a different 'lesson from history' from the other articles I quoted earlier in this posting. The analogy Robertson used was that of education: the German people had to be treated as one would treat a child. Firstly it was necessary to be stern, as the child had “inherited some very bad qualities from its parents”. But secondly it was necessary to be just, as:
“Lack of justice towards the Germans will bring us no profit but will evoke a spirit of embitterment and martyrdom which is as certain to lead to a desire for revenge as it did during the years which followed the First World War. Starvation and disease are not suitable punitive measures.”
In a talk he gave in December 1945 at a conference of British Army Corps Commanders, who at the time also acted as regional governors, responsible for all aspects of Military Government in their areas, Robertson gave his view of the attitudes of the four Allies in Germany, claiming that it was only the British who had a constructive policy. The French were concerned above all with their own security and the Russians with the payment of reparations. The Americans went from one extreme to the other and “their main contribution to Quadripartite government is to produce a series of unpractical laws which have very little bearing on the main problems.” The British were, in his view: “the only power that really cares what happens to Germany. We flatter ourselves that we can regenerate her. Probably we feel instinctively that our interests will not best be served by turning Germany into a helpless desert.”
References:
David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918-1930: the Reluctant Occupiers (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1991)
David Williamson, A Most Diplomatic General: The life of General Lord Robertson of Oakridge (London, Washington: Brasseys, 1996)
Violet Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921)
6th June 2009
Sometimes the asides and diversions in a book can be as, if not more, revealing than the main story. In this third and final post on Stephen Spender’s book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World, I want to write about the unacknowledged hero, or villain, of the piece, his Humber car.
One of the ironies of the book, is that despite his grand and noble conclusion that only a “conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light” could save the world from “a threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one ... rising up from the ashes of fascism", he himself appeared powerless and unable to do anything.
The original reason for his visit to Germany was to inspect and re-open libraries in the Ruhr and Rhineland, including vetting and removing Nazi books. But he came to think that this was a pointless task:
“…my conversation with Dr Reuter, [the librarian at Düsseldorf] made me realize that there was little point in our policy. Anyone who wished to obtain Nazi books in Germany could easily do so, and to withdraw the Nazi books seemed only a piece of window-dressing which would give us a reputation for treating literature in the same way as the Nazis themselves had done.”
For example, a librarian at Aachen told him there was no difficulty at all carrying out his orders; they had previously done much the same for the Nazis:
“We understand exactly what you want, and there is no difficulty whatever about carrying out your instructions. You see, throughout the Nazi regime, we kept all the books by Jewish and socialist writers in a special cellar, under lock and key, as having only historical and scientific interest. All we have to do now is to take out these books and put them on our open shelves, while at the same time we lock up all the Nazi books, because now they only have historical and scientific interest.”
And in any case, many local German librarians had already done what was necessary on their own initiative:
“In practice, I found that the libraries of the Ruhr and the Rhineland were capable of opening themselves without my intervention … In every case, the Germans had automatically set about purging their libraries on the day of their towns being occupied by the Allies, if not before that.”
Throughout this time, Spender was often unable to travel round the British Zone and do his job, because his (British) Humber car had broken down, often for days, despite attempts to fix it:
“During these days of my car being broken down, I was often left with little to do but observe conditions and listen to rumours.”
“The car remained in a very bad state. However, one day we managed to get it to Aachen and almost all the way back before we got stuck a few miles outside Bonn, from where we had to be towed.”
I don’t think he intended the book to be read this way, but it seems to me that the car had become a symbol of the British occupation; of how despite the best of intentions, they were not able to achieve anything constructive, and were in fact no different from, and no better than, the people whose country they were occupying:
“On 20th September the Humber had a slight attack of recovery. I made an attempt to get it to Düsseldorf. After going very fast for four miles, it stopped in a rain-storm on the autobahn between Bonn and Cologne. My driver decided that the pump was wrong and he got out to repair it. After he had taken it to pieces and put it back, no petrol came through the pipe leading to it from the tank at the back of the car. He undid the cap of the petrol tank and blew down the hole. There was some pressure of air in the tank and petrol squirted back at him into his eyes, mouth and nose. He was practically blinded for five or ten minutes. Three little German boys who were present at this scene were in ecstasies of hysterical joy. They rolled over on the ground roaring with laughter, and, for the next hour, while we waited dismally in the car, they imitated to each other the expression on his face when he fell back into the road. This was one of those moments when our occupation suddenly appeared like all occupations: one could imagine similar scenes in which little French boys were squirming on the ground with laughter at solemn German officers whose Mercedes had broken down, during their Occupation.”
Spender could be extraordinarily insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around him, as well as very perceptive. For example, he described meeting, by chance, a former inmate of a concentration camp, and arranged to see him later at his hotel. Because he was classified as a German civilian, Spender was not permitted to share his tea with him:
“The next day he arrived at four-thirty while I was having a large tea in the lounge. I could not offer him, a German civilian, tea, so I sent him up to my room while I finished off my excellent repast with far more butter and ham than one gets in England. I was aware of the contrast between my own standard of living and that of this concentration camp inmate; but although this worried me, on the whole it had the effect of making me eat perhaps a slightly larger tea than I would have done otherwise, because this worry was a form of anxiety and anxiety tends to make me greedy.”
I don’t think there was any irony in this account, or even self-criticism.
During his second visit, in September and October 1945, Spender met the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings, who was in Germany making his film ‘A Defeated People’ (see previous posts on this blog).
In the book Spender refers to Jennings as ‘Boyman’, presumably from his tendency to say “Oh boy, oh boy”.
“Boyman talks an Anglo-American-Continental Film World slang in which he mixes up phrases such as ‘Oh boy, oh boy,’ with cockney such as ‘Bob’s-your-uncle.’”
Jennings’ self confidence irritated him. At the end of an evening in the British officers’ mess, Spender wrote that:
“[Boyman] talked a great deal more and said that the damned fool of a British public ‘had no realization of these conditions.’ His attitude that everyone except his Film Unit is a bloody fool, annoys me. Besides which, why should the British public be sensitive to conditions in Germany? I often wonder whether sensibility is such a virtue as I myself am inclined to suppose it to be, since my own experience is that being sensitive, aware and imaginative does not prevent one from being selfish. In fact, it makes one ego-centric. All the same, Boyman is a live wire, and part of my irritation with him is undoubtedly due to jealousy and competitiveness. After the evening with Boyman I went to bed doubly depressed: by the squalid destruction of Düsseldorf and by the assertive cocksureness of Boyman.”
One of the ironies of history is that while Spender’s reputation has declined over time, that of Jennings has grown, and he is now considered by many to be Britain’s greatest wartime documentary film maker. For example, Angus Calder in his classic work, ‘The Myth of the Blitz’, referred to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.”
But what struck me most were not the differences, but the similarities in outlook between Spender’s book, European Witness, and Jennings’ film A Defeated People. Words and images in the book reappear in the film. For example these words from European Witness could be describing a shot in the film: “The girders of the Rhine bridges plunged diagonally into the black waters of the Rhine frothing into swirling white around them”; as could descriptions and portraits of a demoralised and apathetic people; ‘Zero Hour’ represented by the clock whose hands have stopped working; and an overriding concern, in the words of the commentary of the film, that “our powers of destruction today are terrible”. But also apparent both from reading the book and watching the film, were the high and noble ideals of many of those responsible for the British occupation; their belief in the urgent need to do whatever was necessary to prevent another war; combined and contrasted on occasions, with a sense of hopelessness in the face of extreme adversity; and running in parallel with all of this, a grudging sympathy with the current condition of the former enemy.
Despite overwhelming odds, and personal limitations, both the book and the film tried to convey to the British people back home, the sense that things could not be left as they were; in the words of the film, the German people could not be “left to stew in their own juice”; and despite everything that had happened in the past, what was needed now was a constructive effort, on both sides, to repair the physical, moral and, for some people, the spiritual damage caused by the war. In Spender’s words: “a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”
1st June 2009
In my last post, I wrote about Stephen Spender’s book 'European Witness', and his reactions to the destruction he found in the cities of Germany after the war; of how this made him all too aware of the fragility of European civilisation, and his fear that the ruins of Cologne and Berlin could all too easily be followed by the ruins of London, Paris or Brussels.
The conclusion he drew from this was, that if things were to get better instead of worse, a conscious effort was required:
“… today we are confronted with the choice between making a heaven or a hell of the world in which we live, and the whole of civilization will be bound by whichever fate we choose.”
The Nazis had shown, in his view, that it was possible for individuals to have a dramatic effect on the future of the world, for the worse. Previous outlooks on life, prevalent before the war, were no longer sustainable. Both Marxist historical determinism and liberal laissez-faire attitudes had assumed that the actions of individuals were insignificant compared to the greater impersonal forces of history. But if the end result of trusting to a benign and inevitable social progress was the rise of fascism and the destruction of civilisation, as he knew it, what was the alternative?
“We realize today that what goes on in men’s minds may have a terrifying effect on their environment. The nihilistic nightmares of Fascism have proved that, and the weapons which destroyed fascism have proved it to a degree which makes even Fascism seem a childish dream.”
“One might compare the countries of the world to-day to clocks. Each country registers a different time, but outside their time there is one time for the whole world, registered to one clock, with a time-bomb attached to it.”
“The countries of the world are isolated in their separate experience. Yet the pressure of awareness is so great that the world to-day has a kind of transparency. We look through our own experiences to those of other countries. They might be us and we might be them. What has happened to us might happen to them. Through the streets of London and Paris we see the streets of Hamburg and Warsaw. Yet, it is easier in Paris to imagine the whole city being destroyed, than in Berlin to imagine Berlin being rebuilt.”
Liberal ideas of individual freedom, of each individual striving for his own personal self-interest, resulting in social progress and greater happiness for all, were no longer acceptable as a guide to personal conduct. The only answer to the nightmare of present destruction and the threat of worse to come was a conscious and deliberate effort, by all those who recognised the danger, to do whatever they could to avoid it.
“If we are truthful with ourselves, we have to admit, surely, that political freedom has been tolerable and welcome to us, because we did not think that it confronted us with the direct responsibility of a choice between good and evil. We were free because we believed in ‘laissez-faire’, in the old-fashioned conception of evolution, in the sense of having confidence that an interplay of free forces and conflicting interests would inevitably product the best results. And no one was responsible for these results, no one was responsible for progress. If one was a reformer or even a radical revolutionary, one was still only a force within a total of conflicting forces which were producing the general movement of social advancement, so that in a sense it was true that the people who were opposed to reform, the conservatives, were contributing as much to the general progress (in that they themselves represented one of the forces of society) as the progressives.”
The Nazi and fascist leaders showed that individuals could make a difference, even if it was for evil, rather than for good:
“They made social and political activity significant moral, or rather immoral, activity, and they renounced the irresponsible amoral automatism of the progressive industrial era. As human beings, they were at the centre of their own social actions and in a universe which, if it does not include the idea of heaven, at least includes the idea of hell, they damned and destroyed themselves and a great part of the world with them.”
I’ve written before on this blog (in my post on Amy Buller’s book ‘Darkness over Germany’) about how some British commentators described the war and its aftermath in religious and spiritual terms. Perhaps surprisingly, even an enlightened, liberal and rational commentator such as Stephen Spender ended his book by writing in religious and spiritual terms about the importance of morality, and of the “realization that society has got to choose not just to be free but to be good.”
“Thus can I explain to myself why it is that these terrible men preoccupied (I can witness only for myself) not only my waking thoughts but also my dreams, during many years. And in my dreams, I did not simply hate them and put them from me. I argued with them, I wrestled with their spirits, and the scene in which I knew them was one in which my own blood and tears flowed. The cities and soil of Germany where they were sacrificed were not just places of material destruction. They were alters on which a solemn sacrifice had been performed according to a ritual in which inevitably all the nations took part. The whole world had seemed to be darkened with their darkness, and when they left the world, the threat of a still greater darkness, a total and everlasting one, rose up from their ashes. And at the same time, there could not be the least doubt that the only answer to this past and this present is a conscious, deliberate and wholly responsible determination to make our society walk in the paths of light.”
9th May 2009
Stephen Spender was one of a group of highly influential left-wing writers and artists who came to prominence in Britain in the 1930s, including W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood. After the war he was a notable public intellectual, editor of the magazine Encounter, and received numerous honours and awards, including Poet Laureate of the United States in 1965, and a knighthood in Britain in 1983.
In more recent years his reputation as a poet has declined. See for example this review, in the electronic magazine Slate, of a recent biography of Spender:
“Fairly or unfairly, Spender's reputation as a toady has steadily consolidated, while his reputation as a poet has steadily declined.”
I am no expert on Spender and can’t comment on whether this view of his poetry and personality is justified or not, but I’ve recently read his book European Witness, an account of two visits he made to Germany immediately after the Second World War, in July and August, and September and October 1945.
In some ways, European Witness tells a similar story to other British and American accounts of Germany after the war, such as Patrick Gordon-Walker’s The Lid Lifts, and Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’, but Spender seemed to have had a knack of making explicit, what other observers alluded to but rarely, if ever, said directly.
I’ve written on this blog before, about the shock many British observers felt at the scale of destruction in Germany - far worse than anything at home. It wasn’t just the physical destruction of the cities they found shocking, but the apparent collapse and demoralization of the people. Humphrey Jennings expressed this in stark terms in a letter he wrote to his wife Cicely, when filming in Germany in September 1945:
“… the problem of the German character and nation … seeing, watching, working with the Germans en masse – terrified, rabbit-eyed, over-willing, too friendly, without an inch of what we call character among a thousand … a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul – no oneness of personality to hold the parts together and shine out of the eyes. The eyes indeed are the worst the most telltale part – no shine, often no focus – the mouth drawn down with overwork and over-determination …”
Jennings was unusual in expressing this so directly and visually. Spender, writing in European Witness, a book for publication, was more literary, but some of the language he used - parasites sucking at a dead corpse - was just as vivid:
“Now it requires a real effort of the imagination to think back to that Cologne which I knew well ten years ago. Everything has gone. In this the destruction of Germany is quite different from even the worst that has happened in England (though not different from Poland and from parts of Russia). In England there are holes, gaps and wounds, but the surrounding life of the people themselves has filled them up, creating a scar which will heal. In towns such as Cologne and those of the Ruhr, something quite different has happened. The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the surrounding life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city which is not only battered but also dismembered and cut off from the rest of Germany and from Europe. The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcase, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the Cathedral - the commerce of destruction instead of production.
The people who live there seem quite dissociated from Cologne. They resemble rather a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and who are camping there, living in the cellars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization.
The great city looks like a corpse and stinks like one also, with all the garbage which has not been cleared away, all the bodies still buried under heaps of stones and iron.”
It’s easy now, looking back with hindsight, to think that reconstruction and economic recovery – the economic miracle - followed almost inevitably from the ruins of war. For contemporary British observers in 1945, it was very far from obvious. Their expectation was the opposite - that what had been destroyed was lost for ever and could never be rebuilt. According to Spender this sense of hopelessness, and despair at the future, affected the occupiers, as well as the occupied:
“The effect of these corpse-towns is a grave discouragement which influences everyone living and working in Germany, the occupying forces as much as the German. The destruction is serious in more senses than one. It is a climax of deliberate effort, an achievement of our civilization, the most striking result of co-operation between nations in the twentieth century. It is the shape created by our century as the Gothic cathedral is the shape created by the Middle Ages…. The city is dead and the inhabitants only haunt the cellars and basements. Without the city they are rats in the cellars, or bats wheeling around the towers of the cathedral…. The destruction of the city itself, with all its past as well as its present, is like a reproach to the people who go on living there.”
It made him feel sick, as he described in a chapter in the book, entitled Nausea:
“A few days later, I experienced a sensation which is as difficult to describe as a strong taste or a disagreeable smell or a violent action, because, although it was a mental condition, its effects were so physical. It is worth endeavouring to describe however, because although I may have felt this rather more acutely than others, I believe that the condition is a mental one which is partly the result of the occupation, and from which many people in the occupying Armies suffer. Other people would probably explain the horror – the longing to get away at all costs – which affects the majority of the members of the Forces occupying Germany as a result of the ruined surroundings, the lack of entertainment and the generally depressing atmosphere. But I think that subtler and deeper than this is a sense of hopelessness which is bred of the relationship of Occupiers and Occupied.
The first symptoms of the illness were violent homesickness accompanied by a sensation of panic that I would never get out of Germany…. Such sensations are acuter than most physical pain and, although they do not last, whilst they go on it is of little use telling oneself, what is most certainly true, that one will be better to-morrow, because they have the force of a vision…”
In some ways therefore, although the war had ended and Nazi Germany had been defeated, things were no better than they had been before. The ambitions of modern nation states, the destructive power of war, and the possible consequences of this in the future for everyone, for the victors as well as for the defeated, were starkly obvious in the ruins of the German cities and a demoralised and hopeless people. The Cologne and Berlin of today could all too easily be the London, Paris or Brussels of tomorrow. According to Spender, there was no German problem now, only the problem of the disunity of the Allies.
“Germany, instead of being a place where the ‘German problem’ is being solved has become a scene where the disunity of the Allies is projected and one more demonstration of the fact that modern states were incapable, during what is called peace, of sacrificing national sovereignty in order to avert foreseen disasters.”
The foreboding he had felt in 1931, before the rise of the Nazis, had not been dispelled by victory in war, as the potential for further and even worse destruction was all too obvious and the ruins of Germany could become the ruins of the whole of Europe. Just as there had been, in his words, “enormous power for good or for evil” in Weimar Germany, the future in 1945 was not inevitable, but required a conscious choice. In summary, as he wrote at the end of the chapter, his “sense of nausea on certain days in Bonn”, was due to:
“… a real potentiality in my environment, as vivid as the potentialities of Nazism in 1931. This was the potentiality of the ruin of Germany to become the ruins of the whole of Europe: of the people of Brussels and Paris, London and New York, to become the herds wandering in their thousands across a continent, reduced to eating scraps and grass. It was the sense as I walked along the streets of Bonn with a wind blowing putrescent dust of ruins as stinging as pepper into my nostrils, that the whole of our civilization was protected by such eggshell walls which could be blown down in a day. It was a sense of two futures within modern humanity, like the two worlds within Faust’s breast, one a future of confidence between people in a world of such happiness as can reasonably be organized within the conditions of human existence, the other a world given over to destruction and hatred. Both these potentialities were real: but the constructive one required resolution, unity, will, acceptance of guilt, and a conscious choice to determine our future, the destructive one was to be got by going on as we have done now ever since 1918.”
References:
Stephen Spender
European Witness
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946)
For other views of Stephen Spender see:
John Xiros Cooper
“The Crow on the Crematorium Chimney”: Germany, Summer, 1945
https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/341/317 (PDF)
David Aberbach
'Stephen Spender's Jewish roots'
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5800826.ece
Stephen Metcalf
Stephen Spender, Toady: Was there any substance to his politics and art?
http://www.slate.com/id/2113164/