The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 1632865513
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Germany surrendered in May 1945 it was a nation reduced to rubble. Immediately, America, Britain, Soviet Russia, and France set about rebuilding in their zones of occupation. Most urgent were physical needs--food, water, and sanitation--but from the start the Allies were also anxious to indoctrinate the German people in the ideas of peace and civilization.
Denazification and reeducation would be key to future peace, and the arts were crucial guides to alternative, less militaristic ways of life. In an extraordinary extension of diplomacy, over the next four years, many writers, artists, actors, and filmmakers were dispatched by Britain and America to help rebuild the country their governments had spent years bombing. Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell, Lee Miller, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Billy Wilder, and others undertook the challenge of reconfiguring German society. In the end, many of them became disillusioned by the contrast between the destruction they were witnessing and the cool politics of reconstruction.
While they may have had less effect on Germany than Germany had on them, the experiences of these celebrated figures, never before told, offer an entirely fresh view of post-war Europe. The Bitter Taste of Victory is a brilliant and important addition to the literature of World War II.
imbues us with limitless freedom, which most people routinely evade, acting without thinking. It is at moments of ‘anguish’ that we become aware of the possibility of individual freedom. This anguish assails us as a feeling of vertigo, resembling the feeling of a person who stands on a cliff and realises that nothing prevents him jumping off. At these moments, we have the chance to reclaim our freedom and live authentically. This entails a joyful ‘self-recovery of being’. What was so exciting
Nov 1945. 14‘The most’, ‘little people’, ‘accounts to’: Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, 21 Nov 1945. 15‘The Nazi defendants’: Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 307. ‘no Cicero’: Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 301. ‘I doubt if there’, ‘We Americans’; ‘reasonable, practical’; ‘when the prosecutor’: Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, pp. 306, 441, 304. 16‘I’m possessed’: PdeM to Hilde Spiel, 26 Nov 1945, PdeM Archive. 17‘why can’t we’, ‘I don’t believe’: The New York Times, 23 Nov 1945, cited in Ann
several of Wilder’s drafts of the screenplay, Sollors argues that the changes in the script parallel the change in American attitudes towards Germany from a punitive posture to a collaborative one (p. 253). 7For an account of the enmity between Brecht and Mann, see Hans Mayer, ‘Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht: Anatomy of an Antagonism’, New German Critique, vol 6, pp. 101–15. English conversation: TM, diary, 30 May 1948, in Tagebücher. 8‘In hell too’: BB, ‘On Thinking about Hell’, in BB, Poems
haunted by the sight of the two women bent anxiously over the dying baby’s cot, watching intently as if they knew that any moment might be his last. And he found that ‘it seemed futile and ironical beyond all measure that for me five years of war should end with that scene in the garden where the two bomb-crazy women and their baby presented so perfect an image of what victory really means’.7 That dying baby was one of thousands of Berliners who were unlikely to survive the winter. In the
would then be put to death’. The death of her own affair gains a curious grandeur from its temporal synchronicity with the deaths of the defendants. But this is a rhetoric of fate and she does not let Biddle off this easily. These temporary loves, she writes, were often noble, but there were some who would not let them be so: ‘There were men who said, “You are a good kid, but of course it is my wife I really love,” when these terms were too perfunctory, considering his plight and the help he had