Narratives of Identity and Nationhood in Occupied Germany Special Issue

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Citation for published version (APA): Feigel, L., & Oliver, E. (2018). Narratives of Identity and Nationhood in Occupied Germany. (German Life and Letters; Vol. 71, No. 2). Wiley.

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April in Occupied

2 Gone with the Wind

cation Questionnaire as Cultural No. LXXI

A SPECIAL NUMBER Volume Volume ISSN 0016–8777 (print) ISSN 1468–0483 (online) 1468–0483 ISSN (print) 0016–8777 ISSN IN OCCUPIED GERMANY: IN OCCUPIED GERMANY: edited by Lara Feigel and Emily Oliver NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD NARRATIVES

by Christopher Knowles (King’s College London) and Julia Vossen (King’s College (King’s London) and Julia Vossen College by Christopher Knowles (King’s by Daniel Jonah Wolpert (University of Cambridge) (University of Cambridge) by Daniel Jonah Wolpert

Germany by Emily Oliver (University of Warwick) Germany by Emily Oliver (University of Warwick) Study of Cultural Interactions in Post-war Four Illustrated News Magazines: A Comparative Germany London) Contents in Occupied Germany by Lara Feigel Introduction: Narratives of Identity and Nationhood (University of Warwick) College London) and Emily Oliver (King’s ‘Everybody gets fragebogened sooner or later’: The Denaziﬁ Sollors (Harvard University) by Werner Text Culture in the National Cinema of Occupied The Author and his Corpse: German Classical Germany University) by Jennifer Fay (Vanderbilt Democratic Film and the Aesthetics of Choice Reading Women if they capture you’: ‘Heaven help the Yankees German Life and Letters New Series

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS NEW SERIES VOLUME LXXI N o. 2 April 2018 1

d d n i . r e v o c _ 2 _ 1 7 View this journal online at wileyonlinelibrary.com _ L A L G 0 0 0000GLAL_71_2_cover.indd 1 Publisher: German Life and Letters is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ISSN 0016-8777 (Print) OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd was acquired by John ISSN 1468-0483 (Online) Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s programme has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Wiley’s Corporate Citizenship initiative seeks to address the environmental, social, economic, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley Blackwell. and ethical challenges faced in our business and which are important to our diverse stake- Journal Customer Services: For ordering information, claims and any enquiry concerning your journal holder groups. Since launching the initiative, we have focused on sharing our content with subscription please go to www.wileycustomerhelp.com/ask or contact your nearest office: those in need, enhancing community philanthropy, reducing our carbon impact, creating glob- Europe, Middle East and Africa: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +44 (0) 1865 778315 al guidelines and best practices for paper use, establishing a vendor code of ethics, and engag- Americas: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +1 781 388 8598 or 1 800 835 6770 (Toll free in the USA & ing our colleagues and other stakeholders in our efforts. Follow our progress at www. Canada) Asia Pacific: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +65 6511 8000 wiley.com/go/citizenship Japan: For Japanese speaking support, Email: [email protected]. For production queries please contact the Production Editor at [email protected] Visit our Online Customer Get-Help available in 6 languages at www.wileycustomerhelp.com For submission instructions, subscription and all other information visit: wileyonlinelibrary.com/ Information for subscribers: German Life and Letters is published four times a year in January, April, July journal/glal and October. Institutional subscription prices for 2018 (print and online) are: €905 (Europe), £715 (UK), US$1,225 (The Americas), US$1,628 (Rest of World). Editorial Board: Professor Rebecca Braun, Prices are exclusive of tax. Asia-Pacific GST, Canadian GST and European VAT will be applied at the appro- Department of Languages and Cultures, priate rates. For more information on current tax rates, please go to www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/tax-vat. Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN The price includes online access to current content and all online back files to January 1st 2014, where Professor Stephen Brockmann, available. For other pricing options, including access information and terms and conditions, please visit www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/access. Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Delivery Terms and Legal Title: Where the subscription price includes print issues and delivery is to the recipient's address, delivery terms are Delivered at Place (DAP); the recipient is responsible for pay- Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA ing any import duty or taxes. Title to all issues transfers FOB our shipping point, freight prepaid. We [email protected] will endeavour to fulfil claims for missing or damaged copies within six months of publication, Dr. Steffan Davies, Department of German, within our reasonable discretion and subject to availability. University of Bristol, Back issues: Single issues from current and recent volumes are available at the current single issue price 17 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TE from [email protected]. Earlier issues may be obtained from Periodicals Service Company, 351 Professor Margaret Littler, School of Arts, Languages and Fairview Avenue - Ste 300, Hudson, NY 12534, USA. Tel: +1 518 537 4700, Fax: +1 518 537 5899, Email: Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, [email protected] Manchester M13 9PL Production Editor: Noelito Catacutan Valdivia (email: [email protected]) Professor R. C. Speirs, Department of Modern Languages, Advertising: Lisa Evans ([email protected]) University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham On-line: View this journal online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/glal. B15 2TT Copyright and Copying: Journal compilation © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved. No part Professor Janet Stewart, School of Modern Languages and of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the copyright holder. Authorization to photocopy items for inter- Cultures, Durham University, Elvet Riverside, New Elvet, nal and personal use is granted by the copyright holder for libraries and other users registered with Durham DH1 3JT their local Reproduction Rights Organisation (RRO), e.g. Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com), provided the appropriate fee is paid Editorial Assistant: Dr. Anna Carrdus, German Life and Letters, directly to the RRO. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying such as copying for PO Box 65641, London N1P 1RW general distribution for advertising or promotional purposes, for republication, for creating new collec- [email protected] tive works or for resale. Permissions for such reuse can be obtained using the RightsLink “Request Permissions” link on Wiley Online Library. Special requests should be addressed to: permissions@wiley. Contributions may be written in English or German, and should be submitted as e-mail com. attachments to Dr. Carrdus or – in the case of North Amer ican submissions – to Disclaimer: The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences Professor Brockmann. All submissions are refereed by the Editorial Board. Authors will arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not be notified as soon as possible (normally within three months) of the Editors’ decision. necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised. Contributors must follow the German Life and Letters style sheet when preparing Periodical ID Statement: GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, (ISSN 0016-8777) is published four times a year, their submissions. For a copy of the style sheet please visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley. in January, April, July and October. US Mailing agent: Mercury Media Processing, LLC, 1850 Elizabeth Avenue, Suite #C, Rahway, NJ 07065 USA. Periodical postage paid at Rahway, NJ. Postmaster: Send all com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-0483/homepage/GLL_Style_Sheet.pdf address changes to GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, John Wiley & Sons Inc., C/O The Sheridan Press, PO Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331. Contributors will receive free of charge one paper copy of the number in which their Abstracting and Indexing Services article appears and one PDF offprint of the article. The Journal is indexed by America: History and Life; Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Bibliographic Index; British Humanities Index; Current Contents;. Historical Abstracts; IBR - Internationale German Life and Letters accepts articles for Open Access publication. Please visit http:// Bibliographie der Rezensionen geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur; IBZ - Internationale olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-406241.html for further information about Bibliographie der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur; MLA International OnlineOpen. Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures; Periodicals Contents Index; Personal Alert; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature; Religion Index One: Periodicals; Wiley is a founding member of the UN-backed HINARI, AGORA, and OARE initia- Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works; Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies; Canadian tives. They are now collectively known as Research4Life, making online scientific Review of Comparative Literature. content available free or at nominal cost to researchers in developing countries. Please Printed in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd visit Wiley’s Content Access – Corporate Citizenship site: http://www.wiley.com/ WileyCDA/Section/id-390082.html

0000GLAL_71_2_cover.indd00GLAL_71_2_cover.indd 2 005/03/185/03/18 3:583:58 PMPM Publisher: German Life and Letters is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ISSN 0016-8777 (Print) OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd was acquired by John ISSN 1468-0483 (Online) Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s programme has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Wiley’s Corporate Citizenship initiative seeks to address the environmental, social, economic, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley Blackwell. and ethical challenges faced in our business and which are important to our diverse stake- Journal Customer Services: For ordering information, claims and any enquiry concerning your journal holder groups. Since launching the initiative, we have focused on sharing our content with subscription please go to www.wileycustomerhelp.com/ask or contact your nearest office: those in need, enhancing community philanthropy, reducing our carbon impact, creating glob- Europe, Middle East and Africa: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +44 (0) 1865 778315 al guidelines and best practices for paper use, establishing a vendor code of ethics, and engag- Americas: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +1 781 388 8598 or 1 800 835 6770 (Toll free in the USA & ing our colleagues and other stakeholders in our efforts. Follow our progress at www. Canada) Asia Pacific: Email: [email protected]; Tel: +65 6511 8000 wiley.com/go/citizenship Japan: For Japanese speaking support, Email: [email protected]. For production queries please contact the Production Editor at [email protected] Visit our Online Customer Get-Help available in 6 languages at www.wileycustomerhelp.com For submission instructions, subscription and all other information visit: wileyonlinelibrary.com/ Information for subscribers: German Life and Letters is published four times a year in January, April, July journal/glal and October. Institutional subscription prices for 2018 (print and online) are: €905 (Europe), £715 (UK), US$1,225 (The Americas), US$1,628 (Rest of World). Editorial Board: Professor Rebecca Braun, Prices are exclusive of tax. Asia-Pacific GST, Canadian GST and European VAT will be applied at the appro- Department of Languages and Cultures, priate rates. For more information on current tax rates, please go to www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/tax-vat. Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN The price includes online access to current content and all online back files to January 1st 2014, where Professor Stephen Brockmann, available. For other pricing options, including access information and terms and conditions, please visit www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/access. Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Delivery Terms and Legal Title: Where the subscription price includes print issues and delivery is to the recipient's address, delivery terms are Delivered at Place (DAP); the recipient is responsible for pay- Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA ing any import duty or taxes. Title to all issues transfers FOB our shipping point, freight prepaid. We [email protected] will endeavour to fulfil claims for missing or damaged copies within six months of publication, Dr. Steffan Davies, Department of German, within our reasonable discretion and subject to availability. University of Bristol, Back issues: Single issues from current and recent volumes are available at the current single issue price 17 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TE from [email protected]. Earlier issues may be obtained from Periodicals Service Company, 351 Professor Margaret Littler, School of Arts, Languages and Fairview Avenue - Ste 300, Hudson, NY 12534, USA. Tel: +1 518 537 4700, Fax: +1 518 537 5899, Email: Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, [email protected] Manchester M13 9PL Production Editor: Noelito Catacutan Valdivia (email: [email protected]) Professor R. C. Speirs, Department of Modern Languages, Advertising: Lisa Evans ([email protected]) University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham On-line: View this journal online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/glal. B15 2TT Copyright and Copying: Journal compilation © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved. No part Professor Janet Stewart, School of Modern Languages and of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the copyright holder. Authorization to photocopy items for inter- Cultures, Durham University, Elvet Riverside, New Elvet, nal and personal use is granted by the copyright holder for libraries and other users registered with Durham DH1 3JT their local Reproduction Rights Organisation (RRO), e.g. Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com), provided the appropriate fee is paid Editorial Assistant: Dr. Anna Carrdus, German Life and Letters, directly to the RRO. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying such as copying for PO Box 65641, London N1P 1RW general distribution for advertising or promotional purposes, for republication, for creating new collec- [email protected] tive works or for resale. Permissions for such reuse can be obtained using the RightsLink “Request Permissions” link on Wiley Online Library. Special requests should be addressed to: permissions@wiley. Contributions may be written in English or German, and should be submitted as e-mail com. attachments to Dr. Carrdus or – in the case of North Amer ican submissions – to Disclaimer: The Publisher and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences Professor Brockmann. All submissions are refereed by the Editorial Board. Authors will arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not be notified as soon as possible (normally within three months) of the Editors’ decision. necessarily reflect those of the Publisher and Editors, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher and Editors of the products advertised. Contributors must follow the German Life and Letters style sheet when preparing Periodical ID Statement: GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, (ISSN 0016-8777) is published four times a year, their submissions. For a copy of the style sheet please visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley. in January, April, July and October. US Mailing agent: Mercury Media Processing, LLC, 1850 Elizabeth Avenue, Suite #C, Rahway, NJ 07065 USA. Periodical postage paid at Rahway, NJ. Postmaster: Send all com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-0483/homepage/GLL_Style_Sheet.pdf address changes to GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, John Wiley & Sons Inc., C/O The Sheridan Press, PO Box 465, Hanover, PA 17331. Contributors will receive free of charge one paper copy of the number in which their Abstracting and Indexing Services article appears and one PDF offprint of the article. The Journal is indexed by America: History and Life; Arts & Humanities Citation Index; Bibliographic Index; British Humanities Index; Current Contents;. Historical Abstracts; IBR - Internationale German Life and Letters accepts articles for Open Access publication. Please visit http:// Bibliographie der Rezensionen geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur; IBZ - Internationale olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-406241.html for further information about Bibliographie der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur; MLA International OnlineOpen. Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures; Periodicals Contents Index; Personal Alert; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature; Religion Index One: Periodicals; Wiley is a founding member of the UN-backed HINARI, AGORA, and OARE initia- Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works; Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies; Canadian tives. They are now collectively known as Research4Life, making online scientific Review of Comparative Literature. content available free or at nominal cost to researchers in developing countries. Please Printed in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd visit Wiley’s Content Access – Corporate Citizenship site: http://www.wiley.com/ WileyCDA/Section/id-390082.html

0000GLAL_71_2_cover.indd00GLAL_71_2_cover.indd 2 005/03/185/03/18 3:583:58 PMPM German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD IN OCCUPIED GERMANY

LARA FEIGEL (King’s College London)

EMILY OLIVER (University of Warwick)

‘Frieden, das ist nur Schlamperei, erst der Krieg schafft Ordnung.’1 These words from Brecht’s Mutter Courage may not have sounded as ironic to its first Berlin audiences in January 1949 as they do now. After four years of Allied occupation, with the Soviets and Western Allies increasingly at odds and West Berlin completely cut off from its surroundings and supported by airlift, peacetime may have seemed more of a mess than the war had. Since the beginning of the Allied occupation, those lucky enough to survive the war had faced hunger, homelessness, clothing and fuel shortages, and the coldest winter in living memory. The chaos following unconditional surrender in 1945 opened up a space for competing narratives – about Germany’s future, about its recent and more distant past, about political systems and ideologies, and not least, about the role of art and culture in re-shaping Germany. This issue of German Life and Letters examines some of the narratives circulating during the years immediately following the unconditional surrender of 1945. It focuses particularly on cultural life in the American and British zones of occupied Germany, covering film (Fay, Wolpert), literature (Oliver, Sollors), and journalism (Knowles and Vossen). Arising from a conference hosted by the European Research Council-funded research project ‘Beyond Enemy Lines’ at King’s College London in 2015, the contributions here should be read in conjunction with two other volumes. The first is a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies, also arising from the conference, which specifically tackles the question of culture’s transformative power during the occupation period.2 The second is Lara Feigel’s book, The Bitter Taste of Victory, which maps the cultural landscape of the western zones of Germany in this period by tracing the experiences of twenty British and American figures who were involved either in witnessing German cultural life or in making an effort to change German culture.3

1 Bertolt Brecht, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder: Eine Chronik aus dem Dreißigjahrigen¨ Krieg,ed.H.F. Brookes and C. E. Frankel,¨ London 1960, p. 21. 2 Comparative Critical Studies, Special Issue: ‘The Transformative Power of Culture in Occupied Germany’, 13/2 (2016), ed. Lara Feigel and Elaine Morley. 3 Lara Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory. In the Ruins of the Reich, London 2016.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 132 LARA FEIGEL, EMILY OLIVER These included the British writers Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and Rebecca West, the American writer Martha Gellhorn, and returning exiles Klaus and Erika Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, and Billy Wilder. In contrast to those volumes, which were focused on cultural transformation or exchange led by the western occupiers, the essays here are more concerned with the narratives of Germany and German life circulating in occupied Germany. Collectively, the contributors are interested in exploring the relationship between narratives constructed by the British or American occupiers and the responses to these narratives by their German recipients, who often mediated or subverted the narratives they were offered and in doing so sometimes found a way to own them for themselves. Thus, in Werner Sollors’ account, the absurdities of the Allied ‘Fragebogen’ became the subject of satirical narratives by German writers, while in Emily Oliver’s account, that archetypal narrative of the American South, Gone with the Wind, became a tale well suited to German women in need of stories to help them survive the struggles of daily life in occupied Germany. Daniel Wolpert’s article contrasts two German filmmakers working within the confines of the eastern and western zones of occupation, who both turned back to cultural landmarks of Germany’s past to create a new narrative of identity for Germany’s present. In the process they were taking on the narrative of anti-fascist democracy being inculcated by both sets of occupiers and trying to find a way to reclaim this as specifically German. For Jennifer Fay, the narrative of democracy offered by the occupiers proved more fraught for the German filmmakers. She shows them subverting the very narratives they were offered. Turning to journalism, Christopher Knowles and Julia Vossen show that the Allies attempted to create a new vision of democratic journalism through the introduction of a new publication, Der Spiegel, modelled on publications in Britain and America. This, more than any of the other case studies examined here, was a success story. In the hands of their German writers, the British and American models took on a new, Germanic form, which does seem to have proved satisfactory for German writers and readers. This special number builds on existing work on culture in post-war Germany, not just by our team but by a wider network of scholars. Although the culture of the occupation remains less explored than other periods of German cultural history, there are excellent studies of literature and film in Germany in this period by Stephen Brockmann and Werner Sollors, of culture in the western zones in the immediate post-war period by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and of film (including the relationship between film policy and film production) by Jennifer Fay.4 A comprehensive survey of the US

4 Stephen Brockmann, German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour, Columbia, SC 2004; Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, Cambridge, MA 2014; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, tr. Kelly Barry, Berkeley, CA 1998; Jennifer Fay, Theaters

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 133 occupation of Germany was provided by Detlef Junker, Phillip Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris in 2004, with articles covering politics, security, economics, society, and culture.5 For the British Zone, Gabriele Clemens’s work still provides an invaluable overview of culture at the level of policy and planning.6 Our contribution is specifically to nuance and explore some of the narratives of German identity and nationhood in the post-war period that recur both at the time and in subsequent scholarship. The best-known narrative of the immediate post-war period is without doubt the notion of a ‘Stunde Null’, or zero hour, in German culture. Following the Third Reich’s unconditional surrender, the perennial ‘German question’ was once again wide open, and it was by no means clear what geographical or socio-political form a future Germany might assume. However, this did not automatically bring about radical discontinuity in German culture. Several critics have shown that the idea of a ‘Stunde Null’ in German politics and culture in 1945 was just that: an idea. Examining German post-war literature, Stephen Brockmann writes that ‘the “zero hour” is more a literary historical myth than a reality’, since ‘the year 1945 was characterized at least as much by literary continuity as by a tabula rasa’.7 Although the Allies’ aim in denazifying the country was at least initially to achieve a radical break with the past (see Sollors’ essay on the ‘Fragebogen’), German attitudes and tastes did not change overnight. As a disillusioned Hannah Arendt remarked after visiting the country in 1950, ‘while Germany has changed beyond recognition – physically and psychologically – people talk and behave superficially as though absolutely nothing had happened since 1932’.8 Several contributions to this volume examine the troubling continuities in the things Germans enjoyed reading, watching, or contemplating in the immediate post-war period, and in the things they continued to reject. For instance, Emily Oliver’s contribution examines the continued enormous popularity of the pre-war bestseller of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany, Minneapolis 2008. See also Hansjorg¨ Gehring, Amerikanische Literaturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1953: Ein Aspekt des Re-Education Programms, Stuttgart 1976; Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, Chapel Hill 1995; Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, London 2008. On fine art, see John-Paul Stonard, Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945–55, London 2007. 5 Detlef Junker, Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris (eds), The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990, A Handbook, vol. 1: 1945–1968, Cambridge 2004. 6 Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949: Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater, Stuttgart 1997. See also regional studies, including Ulrich M. Bausch, Die Kulturpolitik der US- amerikanischen Information Control Division in Wurttemberg-Baden¨ von 1945 bis 1949, Stuttgart 1992; Rudiger¨ Bolz, Rundfunk und Literatur unter amerikanischer Kontrolle: Das Programmangebot von Radio Munchen¨ 1945–1949, Wiesbaden 1991. 7 Stephen Brockmann, ‘German Literature, Year Zero: Writers and Politics, 1945–1953’, in Stunde Null: The End and the Beginning Fifty Years Ago, ed. Geoffrey J. Giles, Washington, DC 1997, pp. 59–74 (pp. 72–3). 8 Hannah Arendt, ʻThe Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germanyʼ, Commentary, 10 October 1950, 342–53 (344).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 134 LARA FEIGEL, EMILY OLIVER Gone with the Wind among German readers. Such continuities in cultural consumption suggest that it took more than a military defeat to change German patterns of thought and behaviour during the occupation. In the realm of cultural policy, the primary narrative of post-war Germany encouraged by the western occupiers was the narrative of democracy, of choice, and of the possibility both for cultural products to be inherently democratic and for artists to create a genre of specifically democratic art. Having won the war, the Western Allies’ primary mission was to introduce democracy to Germany after twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. General Robert McClure’s criteria for film selection in occupied Germany can serve as a neat summary of the occupation’s cultural aims as ‘the fixing of German war guilt, demonstrating the values of democratic living, and indicating that the United States is a strong democratic society striving for the realization of full freedom’.9 The British had similarly defined goals, mixing national interest with political idealism in an attempt to promote ‘British methods [...] British products and [...] British political and moral values’.10 Although the ultimate goal of cultural policy – a peaceful and democratic Germany – was clear, the question of how this was to be achieved was decidedly less so. All Allied forces issued policy directives, but those tasked with implementing these policies on the ground were often left to figure out the concrete details on a case-by-case basis. Allied Information Control officials frequently found themselves in the position of censoring cultural and journalistic outputs, and thus paradoxically attempting to promote democracy through undemocratic means. A key question at the heart of this matter was: what makes art or culture ‘democratic’? Was it simply a question of selecting the appropriate content to present to the Germans? Did it matter how this content was presented? Or was it rather a question of the socio-political context framing cultural products which would ultimately determine their reception and interpretation? The essays in this volume all tackle different aspects of ‘democratic’ context (Sollors), content (Wolpert, Oliver), and form (Fay, Knowles and Vossen). Could the new, democratic Germany be forged by eliminating those seen as undemocratic? This was the hope behind the Americans’ enormous bureaucratic effort to determine who was and was not to play a significant role in Germany’s future by means of the ‘Fragebogen’. The volume begins with Werner Sollors’ essay examining responses to the Allies’ optimistic narrative of denazification through questionnaire. The assumption behind the ‘Fragebogen’ was that democratic culture could be achieved in

9 ‘History: Information Control Division, Office of Military Government for Germany (US) (OMGUS), 8 May 1945–30 June 1946’, p. 55, memo, Box 454, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 10 British Information Services to Germany, Foreign Office, September 1945, PRO/FO 898/401, National Archives, Kew.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 135 Germany by removing from a position of influence anyone previously involved with Nazi organisations (and also, perhaps more dubiously, that Germans would tell the truth about their past on this questionnaire). Through many different examples of writers and artists who were surveyed, Sollors probes the logic of determining an individual’s level of involvement with the Nazi regime through membership of Party organisations rather than through their specific actions prior to 1945. Originally developed by the exiled German Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann as a first step towards revolutionary change in Germany, the ‘Fragebogen’ soon turned into a bureaucratic nightmare for Americans and Germans alike. Arendt criticised American efforts at denazification, saying that ‘[f]rom the beginning, the whole system, based upon length of party membership, ranks and offices held, date of first entrance, etc., was very complicated, and involved almost everyone’.11 Sollors examines the difficulties encountered by American cultural officers navigating a bureaucratic maze of their own making. The questionnaire’s ludicrousness was not lost on contemporaries. Sollors shows its satirical deployment in fiction by German writers such as Erich Kastner¨ and Ernst von Salomon, as well as by the American writers Gordon Gaskill and John Dos Passos. Given that the ‘Fragebogen’ was the most widely distributed text in occupied Germany, Sollors considers it a German ‘Erinnerungsort’, suggesting that much work remains to be done to locate questionnaires submitted by culturally significant individuals and evaluate these in relation to their published and private writings. The articles that follow consider the premise that a cultural product is ‘democratic’ if its subject matter deals with democratic ideas, such as freedom, choice, the rule of law, active political participation by all citizens, and universal human rights. Even though in 1945 Germany had just emerged from twelve years of ‘Gleichschaltung’ and indoctrination, these essential democratic values were not altogether new to the nation, since they could all be found in German cultural achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Germany may have been poor in democracy, but it was rich in ‘Kultur’. While democracy (however ambivalently defined) was something relatively new and controversial to Germans, ‘Kultur’ constituted an important pillar of German national identity, and was held in high esteem by Germans and Allied Information Control officers alike. Thus, Daniel Wolpert’s article explores the way that German filmmakers on both sides of the cold-war divide invoked classical German culture as a source of legitimacy for democratic ideals. By analysing Georg Klaren’s 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Buchner’s¨ Woyzeck and Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1949 film of Goethe’s Werther for the Western Trizone, the essay compares interpretations of the relationship between German culture and politics immediately after the war, examining how film directors hoped to overcome the previous opposition of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ in German

11 Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Ruleʼ (note 7), 346.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 136 LARA FEIGEL, EMILY OLIVER history. In their attempts to reconnect with and reclaim an apparently untarnished national past, both directors employ the classical authors themselves (Goethe and Buchner)¨ as mediators within their films and as a kind of moral compass for the viewer. This is all the more remarkable, given that Klaren and Stroux were working on opposite sides of the emerging East-West divide, in which both new German states would claim to be the only rightful heir to Germany’s cultural heritage. By employing the same device (i.e. the author’s presence on screen), both directors used Germany’s remote past to interpret its recent descent into Nazism as the downfall of an essentially ‘good’, cultured nation through militarism and the distortion of ideals. However, the differences in approach are also telling. It seems significant that the author chosen in the East is the radical Buchner,¨ perhaps reflecting an attempt to expand the notion of what a classical author is, raising Buchner¨ to the level of Goethe. Within the films, the authors serve different functions. Klaren’s Wozzeck deploys the trope to stress obstacles such as a rigid class structure which must be overcome to pave the way for a socialist future, while Stroux’s film can be seen as supporting the return to conservatism in the West, emphasising Goethe’s genius and bourgeois humanism. Is there such a thing as democratic form? Could the way of telling a story or communicating with a viewer or reader pave the way for a more democratic Germany? These questions are tackled by Jennifer Fay’s essay. Fay considers choice as the bedrock of democracy by contrasting the treatment of this issue in one German and one American film from the occupation period. Departing from the habitual sleight of hand which equated democracy with American culture, Fay carefully distinguishes between form and content in order to ask whether there is such a thing as ‘democratic style’ in cinema. She argues that the most successful US film to be released in the Trizone, The Best Years of Our Lives (US 1946; Germany 1948), not only tells a triumphant story of good US soldiers returning home after doing their duty, but also promotes an aesthetics of choice for the viewer through the way in which shots are framed. Through a tension between foreground and background action, for example, the viewer is empowered to choose an object of focus. Fay’s other example, Helmut Kautner’s¨ unsuccessful musical satire Der Apfel ist ab (1948), dramatises the problem of choice itself as a kind of hell in which Germany found itself during the occupation. The protagonist’s refusal to choose between a bewildering and paralysing array of options can be seen as a starting point for audience emancipation: perhaps the refusal to choose is itself a democratic act. Thus this German filmmaker at once subverted the American notion of the new democratic Germany and owned it, in a new and complex form. The Germans, left to choose for themselves, proved receptive to the culture of their new democratic occupiers. But the narrative they chose was not one that had been selected for them. Indeed, in its depiction of

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY AND NATIONHOOD IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 137 a society oiled by slavery and rigid in its hierarchies, Gone with the Wind is in many ways an awkward representative of western democratic life. Yet this was one of the American cultural products that enjoyed the most popularity in wartime and post-war Germany. In her essay, Emily Oliver argues that Margaret Mitchell’s tale of a woman’s struggles through chaos and hunger offered opportunities for identification to German women in a multitude of ways, but also potentially encouraged them to view themselves and their country as victims of an unjust occupation, since the novel is written from the perspective of the losing side, and idealises the antebellum regime. The story’s inherent racism proved too embarrassing for the American occupiers to allow David O. Selznick’s hugely successful film adaptation to be released in West Germany until 1953 – thus somewhat undermining the fiction of the US as a democratic, tolerant, and pluralistic society in the late 1940s. It is in cases such as these that a distinction between democratic and popular becomes important, since Gone with the Wind was without doubt popular in post-war Germany, but a closer look at some of the reasons for its popularity suggests that this was at best a problematic medium for promoting democracy in a formerly fascist society. The final essay examines one of the great occupation-era success stories in the field of journalism: the German news magazine Der Spiegel.First published as Diese Woche in the British Zone in late 1946, the magazine was premised on the British officer John Chaloner’s idea of presenting news to Germans in a different fashion. By importing the popular format of news magazines such as the American Time and the British News Review and encouraging a young German editorial staff to imitate their styles, Chaloner and his colleagues created a new and highly successful news medium for the German market. British and American efforts to reform the press in their zones focused on promoting the separation of news and opinion as a uniquely Anglo-American feature, claiming that this distinction had never been present in German news media.12 While Christopher Knowles and Julia Vossen show that this premise was somewhat questionable, they also argue that Der Spiegel did not in fact adhere to this strict separation. On the contrary, Vossen’s stylistic analysis demonstrates that the German language proved very well suited to imitating ‘Time-style’ prose, which obscures its sources of information, and subtly blurs the boundaries between report and commentary. This example of cultural transfer was in fact so successful that Der Spiegel came to be regarded as one of the cornerstones of West German democracy in the second half of the twentieth century. As many of the articles in this issue demonstrate, the legacy of the Allied occupation is still relevant today. In order to avoid reading the history of the Western occupation zones with the aid of hindsight as an inevitable progression towards an economically stable, democratic German

12 Paper on ‘Information Control in the British Zone of Germany’, Foreign Office, FO 945/848, National Archives, Kew.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 138 LARA FEIGEL, EMILY OLIVER state, it is worth paying attention to the various competing narratives about Germany’s future and its past circulating in the immediate post-war period, when it was by no means inevitable that Germany would become the democratic cornerstone of Europe that it is seen as today, and by no means inevitable either that Europe as a whole would become either democratic or stable. By unpacking what narratives were constructed, and who constructed, modified, and sometimes undermined and reconstructed them, the articles in this issue open up crucial questions about when and how the new Germany was forged. At a moment when the future of the European Union is in doubt, it seems important to go back to that moment of difficult transition from war and fascism to peace and democracy and to remember how complex a moment it was, for both the Germans and their occupiers.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

‘EVERYBODY GETS FRAGEBOGENED SOONER OR LATER’: THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT* WERNER SOLLORS (Harvard University)

ABSTRACT Disseminated in millions of copies to post-war Germans, the Allied denazification questionnaire, in its best-known version, asked 131 questions not only about membership of the NSDAP, SS, SA, and fifty other affiliated associations, but also about individuals’ pre-Nazi voting record, implicated relatives, and such data as weight, height, and foreign-language expertise. Erich Kastner¨ and Ina Seidel filled in such a questionnaire in 1945. While its massive circulation made it a site of German cultural memory, it also became a bureaucratic nightmare for those who had to evaluate the piles of these forms in the Allied armies and the German ‘Spruchkammern’. The ʻFragebogenʼ provoked writers on both sides of the Atlantic to represent it in fiction and non-fiction. Just Scheu composed a song about it, and Wolfgang Borchert, Margret Boveri, Stig Dagerman, David Davidson, Alan Marcus, John Dos Passos, Zelda Popkin, and Ernst von Salomon commented on it in prose, often critically, calling it a merciless catechism of 131 questions or an ideological equivalent of tax returns. Though often perceived as an embodiment of American culture, it had emerged with the help of Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse, German Marxist intellectuals in exile, who hoped that denazification would bring about revolutionary change in Germany.

In Millionen von Exemplaren von alliierten Besatzungsbehorden¨ unter die deutsche Nachkriegsbevolkerung¨ verteilt, stellte der Entnazifizierungs-Fragebogen in seiner bekanntesten Fassung 131 Fragen, und zwar nicht nur uber¨ Mitgliedschaft in der NSDAP, SS, SA und funfzig¨ anderen angeschlossenen Verbanden,¨ sondern auch uber¨ das Wahlverhalten 1932 und 1933, Verwandte mit Nazi-Karrieren und ganz allgemeine Informationen wie Gewicht, Große¨ und Fremdsprachenkenntnisse. Erich Kastner¨ und Ina Seidel fullten¨ einen solchen Fragebogen 1945 aus. Seine massenhafte Verbreitung machte den Fragebogen zu einem deutschen Erinnerungsort, aber er wurde auch zu einem burokratischen¨ Albtraum fur¨ diejenigen, die in alliierten Armeen und deutschen Spruchkammern Berge von Formularen auszuwerten hatten. Schriftsteller und Kunstler¨ auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks, darunter Wolfgang Borchert, Margret Boveri, Stig Dagerman, David Davidson, Alan Marcus, John Dos Passos, Zelda Popkin und Ernst von Salomon, fuhlten¨ sich provoziert, den Fragebogen in Belletristik

∗I wish to thank Lara Feigel for the kind invitation to participate in the 2015 conference at King’s College London, Helena Metslang for organising everything, and the participants who made truly helpful suggestions for the expansion of a talk into a paper. Heidrun Fink at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Stefan Seidl at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen,¨ Hannah Hefermehl-Fischer at the Staatsarchiv Munchen,¨ Elgin Helmstaedt at the Akademie der Kunste¨ Berlin, and Julia Emmy Rains at the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Dusseldorf¨ gave generous answers to my questions, and the Harvard University Libraries provided access to unpublished dissertations and shortened the research time significantly by the ‘scan & deliver’ method of procuring sources.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 140 WERNER SOLLORS und Sachbuchern¨ darzustellen, oft kritisch. Just Scheu komponierte ein Lied uber¨ ihn. Der Fragebogen wurde als gnadenloser Katechismus von 131 Fragen oder als ideologisches Gegenstuck¨ zu Steuererklarungen¨ bezeichnet. Oft als Verkorperung¨ amerikanischer Kultur wahrgenommen, entstand der Fragebogen aber mit Hilfe von Franz Neumann und Herbert Marcuse, deutschen marxistischen Intellektuellen im Exil, die hofften, die Entnazifizierung wurde¨ in Deutschland zu revolutionarem¨ Wandel fuhren.¨

One of the most widely disseminated printed texts in Germany during the immediate post-war years was a bilingually produced document, the ‘Fragebogen’, or questionnaire, that needed to be filled in by millions of employment seekers and other residents. Questionnaires were distributed to thirteen million persons in the American Zone alone, as Military Governor Lucius D. Clay mentions with pride in his 1950 memoir, Decision in Germany, adding that ‘perhaps never before in world history has such a mass undertaking to purge society been undertaken’.1 Others called this bureaucratic process ‘revolution by decree’ or an ‘artificial revolution, from above, on a prostrate society in a state of temporary disintegration’.2 It was also the result of ‘a perfectionist’s plan’ that ran into predictable and unpredictable problems and obstacles along the way.3 While its wide scope, uneven implementation, and emphasis on party membership rather than on individual criminal acts made the questionnaire a largely failed experiment, its unreliability turned it into a large-scale invitation to create and circulate myths. For the Allies, it was the myth that a questionnaire could actually eliminate Nazism; for those who filled in the ‘Fragebogen’ with exonerating testimonials nicknamed ‘Persil-Scheine’ after the popular detergent, it was the myth of their own anti-Nazi past or mindset; for artists, the questionnaire was a text that could inspire creative work, including fiction. This article will present the questions the ‘Fragebogen’ asked against the background of Allied denazification efforts, examine two examples of completed questionnaires, review several texts that were inspired by the ‘Fragebogen’, and conclude with a brief report on its origins.

DENAZIFICATION

The questionnaire was part of the Allied denazification campaign in the second half of the 1940s. The word ‘denazification’ itself was a new coinage

1 Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany, Garden City, NY 1950, p. 259. 2 See Lutz Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern: Sauberung¨ und Rehabilitierung unter amerikanischer Besatzung, Frankfurt a. M. 1972, p. 13; Constantine FitzGibbon, Denazification, London 1969, p. 163. 3 [Alexander] Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945–1950, Stroud 2007, p. 25, quoting FitzGibbon. Biddiscombe also quotes Tom Bower, who described the questionnaire as ‘a bureaucratic solution to a political problem’, and Kurt Tauber, who called it ‘a revolution by administrative ordinance and official forms in triplicate’.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 141 of the mid-1940s. The Maryland political scientist Elmer Plischke claimed to have invented it, in analogy to ‘demilitarization’.4 Planning for the occupation was conducted in the German Country Unit (GCU) within the US War Department and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), and in 1944 the GCU began to think about what it started calling the ‘denazification problem’.5 As Plischke explained in a 1947 article, he had proposed the word denazification because it served as an excellent overall single term to contain nine different policies intended to terminate Nazi rule forever: 1) liquidating the Nazi Party, together with its affiliated and subsidiary organisations; 2) eradicating Nazism from German legislation; 3) changing names of parks, streets, and public ways; 4) seizing property of the Nazi Party and of individual Nazis; 5) prohibiting Nazi privileges, benefits, and pensions; 6) arresting and detaining Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters, and other persons dangerous to the Allied occupation or its objectives; 7) removing and excluding from public office and from positions of responsibility and importance in quasi-public and private enterprise members of the Nazi Party who had been more than nominal participants in its activities, active supporters of Nazism, and other persons hostile to Allied purposes; 8) preventing Nazi propaganda; and 9) prohibiting the public playing or singing of Nazi anthems, and the public display of Nazi flags and other Party insignia and paraphernalia.6 Much of this denazification agenda had clear goals. It was easy to determine what it meant to arrest leaders, and Nazi insignia and street signs could be quickly removed and property confiscated. But removing and excluding from public office and from ‘positions of responsibility’ and importance in quasi-public and private enterprise ‘more than nominal’ members of the Nazi Party was a daunting and complex task, since by 1945 about eight million Germans had become members of the party, whether by conviction, opportunism, or force of circumstance. On what basis could such a determination be made? The questionnaire was believed to provide this basis. THE QUESTIONS

There were several different versions of the ‘Fragebogen’, the first of them in English-German bilingual format, and the later ones in German

4 The Oxford English Dictionary directs us to a book review of a novel from April 1944 about a recalcitrant Nazi, and the text of that Saturday Review of Literature piece carries the title ‘En Route to De-Nazification’ and ends with the assessment that the novel ‘is likely to satisfy [the reader’s] hope for a de-Nazification of Germany’s killers’; see Robert Pick, ‘En Route to De-Nazification’ (a review of Franz Hoellering’s novel Furlough), Saturday Review of Literature, 19 August 1944, 10. Apparently neither that book review nor a 1944 British use of the verb ‘denazify’ affected the new political terminology. 5 William E. Griffith, ‘The Denazification in the United States Zone of Germany’, Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1950, p. 6. 6 Elmer Plischke, ‘Denazifying the Reich’, The Review of Politics, 9 (1947), 153–72 (155–6). My wording follows Plischke’s, but condenses it.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 142 WERNER SOLLORS only. The first ‘Fragebogen’ issued by the American Military Government, ‘MG/PS/G/9’, contained many unnumbered questions that were organised in groups. It was four pages long.7 The revised and expanded later version, ‘Fragebogen MG/PS/G/9a’ (or ‘9a’ for short), six pages long, was the one that became the symbol of all questionnaires: while many questions were identical to those on the earlier form, the new version from May 1945 numbered them from 1 to 131.8 A German-only version from 1948 expanded the catalogue to 145 questions.9 The two-page ʻMeldebogenʼ, issued on the basis of the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism that was passed on March 5 1946 and transferred the task of denazification to German hearings in so-called ‘Spruchkammern’, or juries, contained only fourteen numbered questions, with sub-questions.10 All these questionnaires have an opening set of questions about personal data and identity, profession, residence, military service, employment history, and so forth, followed by a central section asking about membership of the NSDAP and all affiliated Nazi organisations (questions 41–95 on the 9a questionnaire, or 55 of 131 questions). As one would expect, the long questionnaires went into far more detail. For example, MG/PS/G/9a began with the prompt, ‘List position for which you are under consideration’. It also asked for the party membership number and added to the question about religious affiliation a request to state whether the subject had ever left a denomination.11 It inquired about weight and height, marital status, titles of nobility held, education starting with primary school, income and assets, membership of political parties the Nazis had forbidden, part-time service in organisations, benefits incurred from National Socialist rule, publications and speeches, travel abroad, work in territories occupied by Germany, and knowledge of foreign languages.12 9a also asked Germans to reveal for which party they had voted in November 1932 and in March 1933 as well as to indicate any incriminating political facts not only about themselves but also about their relatives.13

7 A blank form is available at http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/images/30014796-r1.jpg (accessed 30 November 2015). 8 A sample can be found at http://www.moosburg.org/info/stalag/bilder/frage.gif (accessed 30 November 2015). 9 An example is available at https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2IBHJKLV7WBDKVIY 576FSSQQYJ5PKTQZ (accessed 30 November 2015). 10 Samples of the ‘Fragebogen’ can be found at http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/dhm.php?seite= 5&fld 0=ZD019173 (accessed 30 November 2015). 11 Adding the question about the party membership number may have been intended to facilitate verification. 12 There is a disparity between the German and the English version of the questionnaire, which asks about ‘secondary and higher education’, whereas the German reads ‘Grundschul- und hohere¨ Bildung’. 13 Question 27 asked whether the subject sent his children to Napola, Adolf-Hitler-, or NS Fuhrer¨ schools, and questions 101 and 102 (on the 9a form) read: ‘101. Haben Sie irgendwelche Verwandte, die jemals Amt, Rang oder einflußreiche Stellungen in irgendeiner der von Nr. 41 bis 95 angefuhrten¨

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 143 Completion of the ‘Fragebogen’ was mandatory in order to be cleared for employment, and giving false answers was criminalised. Though briefer, the German ‘Meldebogen’ added a request for self-classification into one of five categories: I. Major Offenders/Hauptschuldige; II. Offenders/ Belastete (Aktivisten, Militaristen, Nutznießer); III. Lesser Offenders/ Minderbelastete (Bewahrungsgruppe);¨ IV. Followers/Mitlaufer;¨ V. Persons exonerated/Entlastete.

SOME ANSWERS

As a set of texts that enjoyed mass distribution and that needed not only to be read carefully by millions but also to be responded to, the ‘Fragebogen’ would seem to be an ideal work to examine through the lens of reader-response theory, for it literally needed to be ‘completed’ by its readers.14 The responses were made under oath of honesty, even if that meant self-incrimination. And responses were not limited to filling in the questionnaires themselves, as the process of doing so also stimulated other responses in new texts and cultural productions, activities sufficient to consider the ‘Fragebogen’ a cultural text that served as an ‘Erinnerungsort’ for post-war Germany.15 John Dos Passos was perceptive when he gave his reportage on post-war Germany the title ‘Land of the Fragebogen’.16 The following examples are intended to suggest that it might be an interesting project for a scholar of literature and culture to locate and evaluate a great number of submitted questionnaires against the background of other responses to the ‘Fragebogen’, both published and private. The ironist Erich Kastner,¨ best known as an author of children’s books and film scripts, was in the Austrian town of Mayrhofen when the war ended. He was required to fill in the original questionnaire 9 in Tyrol and then the expanded 9a in Munich, when he was applying to become feuilleton editor of the American-edited German-language paper, Die Neue Zeitung. He seems to have answered all questions, including the one about relatives. He weighed only 115 pounds, was not a member of any Nazi organisation, and had voted for the Social Democrats in 1932 and 1933. Kastner¨ responded fully to question 115:

Organisationen haben? 102. Falls ja, geben Sie deren Namen und Anschriften an, der Grad Ihrer Verwandtschaft sowie eine Beschreibung der Stellung und Organisation.’ 14 That the reader must ‘complete’ the text is an often repeated maxim of reader-response criticism, for example, in Rachel Lee Rubin, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, New York 2012, p. 274, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response criticism (accessed 30 November 2015). 15 See Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Memoire´ , vol. I, Paris 1987, and Deutsche Erinnerungsorte,vols I–III, ed. Etienne Franc¸ois and Hagen Schulze, Munich 2005. 16 John Dos Passos, ‘Land of the Fragebogen’, in Tour of Duty, Part Three: In the Year of Our Defeat (1946), reprinted Westport, CT 1974.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 144 WERNER SOLLORS

Wurden Sie jemals aus rassischen oder religiosen¨ Grunden¨ oder weil Sie aktiv oder passiv den Nationalisten [sic!] Widerstand leisteten, in Haft genommen oder in Ihrer Bewegungs- oder Niederlassungsfreiheit oder sonstwie in Ihrer gewerblichen oder beruflichen Freiheit beschrankt?¨ He had been twice arrested briefly by the Gestapo and could not publish any books in Germany between 1933 and 1945. He reported his international trips, commented that the records relating to his income had been burned but that he had paid taxes in Charlottenburg Ost, and he admitted that even though he had been blacklisted by the Nazis he had received the exceptional permission to write the scripts for the films Munchhausen¨ (1943) and Der kleine Grenzverkehr (1943), but not under his own name – becoming ‘Berthold Burger’,¨ though the films ultimately appeared anonymously, as he states in his answers to questions 3 (‘Andere von Ihnen benutzte Namen’) and 116. Apart perhaps from his allusion to Allied bombings, one finds little indication of Kastner’s¨ characteristic irony.17 This changes when one looks at Kastner’s¨ diaries. In a part of his diary that was not included for publication in his book Notabene 45, he describes speaking with an American officer whom he names ‘Typograph’: Vorhin war ich in der Renatastraße, bei einem amerikanischen Gestapoherrn in Uniform, der griechischer Amerikaner ist und Typograph heißt. [...] Im ubrigen¨ nahm er meine Personalien fur¨ eine Kartothek auf und uberreichte¨ mir einen 6-seitenlangen Fragebogen, den ich ausfullen¨ soll. Denn obwohl er mir Glauben schenke, konne¨ er naturlich¨ nicht wissen, ob ich unter irgendwelchen Pseudonymen fur¨ die Nazis gearbeitet hatte.¨ Derartiges Mißtrauen scheint leider gerechtfertigt, da den amerikanischen Behorden¨ am laufenden Band unwahre Angaben gemacht zu werden scheinen. Die ausgefullten¨ Fragebogen werden ubrigens¨ nach Paris geschickt. Wer dort fahig¨ sein soll, die Richtigkeit der Angaben zu beurteilen, ist mir schleierhaft.18 Calling an American officer ‘Gestapoherr’ probably reveals some of Kastner’s¨ true feelings about the questionnaire – and may have seemed to him heretical enough for him to choose not to make these passages widely accessible as late as 1961, when he revised his 1945 diary for publication.19 Since Kastner¨ wondered how the accuracy of ‘Fragebogen’ answers would be checked, it deserves mention that questionnaires could be spot checked against sets of Nazi, SS, and SA membership files that had fallen into Allied hands and became the core holdings of the Berlin Document Center, although more systematic checks became possible only in 1946. Germans who were caught cheating could be punished very publicly so that such publicity would prompt others to answer their questionnaires correctly. The

17 Fragebogen Erich Kastner,¨ Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 18 Typed transcript of the diary, June 1945, pp. 80–1, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 19 Notabene 45: Ein Tagebuch, Berlin 1961.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 145 movie actor Harry Piel, for example, who had claimed in his ‘Fragebogen’ from the British authorities never to have joined the SS, was sentenced in November 1945 to six months’ imprisonment and a 5,000 Mark fine.20 It is open to question whether such cases led to more honesty or whether Hannah Arendt was right in her assessment that ʻEuropeans do not always believe in telling the absolute truth when an official body asks embarrassing questions.ʼ21 Another questionnaire I managed to obtain is that of the far more implicated Ina Seidel who had signed the writers’ loyalty oath to the Fuhrer¨ in 1933 and written so many congratulations to Hitler that, alluding to her bestselling novel Das Wunschkind, Werner Bergengruen called her Das Gluckwunschkind.¨ 22 In December 1945 she filled in the questionnaire and even answered question 101, mentioning that her son- in-law, Ernst Schulte Strathaus, had been ‘Reichsamtsleiter’ on Rudolf Heß’s staff, but was expelled from the party in 1941 and imprisoned by the Gestapo for two years. She reported that she was a member of the ‘Reichsschrifttumskammer’ from 1933–1945. She stated that she had voted for the conservative-nationalist Deutsche Volkspartei in 1932 and 1933 and weighed 112 pounds. She answered question 115: ‘Zwei meiner Bucher,¨ ‘Lennacker’ (1938) und ‘Unser Freund Peregrin’ (1941) durften nach anfanglichem¨ starken Erfolg nicht wieder aufgelegt warden. Dies kann bezeugt werden durch meinen Verlag, Deutsche Verlagsan[stalt].’23 In the question about income and assets, she documented the decline of her royalties after 1942, when two of her most popular books could no longer be reprinted. It might be interesting to examine a great number of questionnaires completed by writers and intellectuals in the context of their works, diaries and correspondence.

THE ‘FRAGEBOGEN’ AS LITERATURE

In literature published in the 1940s and 1950s the ‘Fragebogen’ functions as a narrative symbol and a plot device. American texts often incorporate

20 ‘German Film Actor Sentenced: Gave False Information’, Manchester Guardian, 27 November 1945, 5. It might be a worthwhile task to review trial records in Allied courts for cases of other respondents who were caught lying. Still, Bavaria was notorious for ignoring the questionnaires, which became obvious when it turned out that ‘24 out of 39 Fragebogen [were] missing in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 46 out of 51 missing in the Ministry of the Interior, and 21 out of 31 missing in the Regional Economic Office; and six officials already ordered to be removed who were still at their desks’; see Earl F. Ziemke, The US Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944–1946, Washington, DC 1975, p. 385. 21 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, Commentary, 10 (October 1950), 342–53 (347). 22 Werner Bergengruen, ‘Die Aufzeichnungen’, in Werner Bergengruen: Schriftstellerexistenz in der Diktatur. Aufzeichnungen und Reflexionen zu Politik, Geschichte und Kultur 1940–1963, ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll, N. Luise Hackelsberger, and Sylvia Taschka, Munich 2005, pp. 27–246 (p. 135). 23 Fragebogen Ina Seidel, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 146 WERNER SOLLORS the German words ‘Fragebogen’ and sometimes also ‘Spruchkammer’ when representing the annoying bureaucratic work the questionnaires demanded, at first from the Allied armies and then from German juries. An entry in the comical ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Military Governor’ in Bavaria in 1947 opens with a reference to the questionnaire: ‘No matter how long I live, I’ll never get the word Fragebogen out of my head. Everything in Germany revolves around it.’ He does not like the word ‘Spruchkammer’, which he hears in his ‘sleep and still can’t pronounce just right’: he defines it as a ‘purging court’.24 American literary representations typically question the wisdom of the whole questionnaire procedure. A representative scene appears in David Davidson’s The Steeper Cliff (1947), a novel informed by Davidson’s time as a press officer in Munich. The US Army wants to install a new mayor of the fictional Bavarian town of Galensburg, and one candidate is the publisher Steeber. It is apparent to Cooper (through whom we are reading this third- person novel) that Steeber is a good choice, since he was suspended for a couple of months by Goebbels in 1934 and had his business closed down altogether in 1941, yet Captain Jones ‘pushed a packet of printed forms across his desk. “Fragebogen”, he said. “Have Steeber fill out ten copies.”’25 ‘Cooper glanced once more at the long three-paneled forms, the merciless catechisms of 131 questions’ – and the narrator reviews many of them, before making his comment in the novel’s characteristic, hard-boiled style of narration:

This was the age of many documents and no privacy, the age when a bomb sheared away the walls while you sat in the bathroom. Yet there was much that never got on any Fragebogen. There were no blank spaces for fears, no dotted lines for the detailing of agonies and inner misfortunes. There was no conqueror yet who could compel the answers to the important questions – precisely and conscientiously.26

Similarly, in Alan Marcus’s 1948 novel Straw to Make Brick,basedonthe author’s experience in the occupation army, a Lieutenant Casey laments that the only school superintendent the army has been able to approve ‘must be eighty if he’s a day’ and that teachers are hard to find: ‘We’ve had hundreds of Fragebogen [sic!] submitted last week, but you know, most of these guys are not usable, and those that are, well, I don’t know. I expect half of them are lying on their Fragebogen’. Hence Casey wonders ‘whether we’re screwing up with the Fragebogen’.27 In a long scene in Zelda Popkin’s Small Victory (1947), the professorial protagonist Barlow, working at a desk

24 ‘Leaves from the Diary of a Military Governor, as edited by Gordon Gaskill’, American Magazine, January 1947, 32–3 and 108–11 (111, 109). 25 David Davidson, The Steeper Cliff, New York 1947, p. 21. 26 Ibid., p. 22. 27 Alan Marcus, Straw to Make Brick, Boston, MA 1948, pp. 134–5; see also the interview with a German priest, pp. 152–3.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 147 in occupied Frankfurt am Main with a ‘pile of Fragebogen’, ends up being frightened at his own self-righteousness after an academic who had been married to a Jewish woman tries to explain the constraints that made him join the Party, though it turned out that he was unable thereby to save his daughter. Barlow is physically affected by the meeting that leaves him in a ‘trap of confusion’.28 From the point of view of often harrowing actual life experiences, the dry questionnaire seemed ridiculously inadequate. It is represented as an instrument that would only make self-righteous bureaucrats happy, like a thin-faced sergeant whom John Dos Passos encountered in Bad Wiessee on 6 November 1945 and later caricatured. That sergeant proudly proclaims a 92% denazification rate and when asked how it is done, he replies:

It’s the fragebogen. You don’t know about the fragebogen. The fragebogen’s the greatest thing in Germany... If they get past this, they can hold any job they want. If they don’t, they can’t have any position where they employ labor or exercise a skilled trade or profession. They can’t do nothing but pick-and- shovel work... And if they lie on their fragebogen, we have ʼem up in court and they don’t get off easy. Every man or woman who has any position of authority has got to make out a fragebogen. If it turns out they are big Nazis, it’s mandatory arrest. If they are small Nazis, they report to the labor gang. Everybody gets fragebogened sooner or later. Then we know whatʼswhat.29 Dos Passos’s report, ‘Land of the Fragebogen’, thus not only made the questionnaire title-worthy but also transformed it into a verb. The admiring bureaucrat’s triumphant exclamation, ‘Everybody gets fragebogened sooner or later’, might well summarise American literary responses of the period. Dos Passos describes the ‘Fragebogen’ as ‘a long questionnaire of the type developed by United States immigration inspectors’ and Davidson, as we saw, called it a ‘merciless catechism of 131 questions’. Other writers followed suit with analogies. The Swedish novelist Stig Dagerman, for example, in his excellent report, German Autumn, refers to it as a ‘kind of ideological equivalent of tax returns’; Dagerman also writes that the ‘Spruchkammer’ ‘performance can seem like an example of applied existentialism’, and mentions that the ‘Spruchkammer’ was commonly referred to as ‘Bruchkammer’ or ‘Sprichkammer’.30 Among German writers, Wolfgang Borchert, as Erwin Warkentin has shown, commented critically on the ‘Fragebogen’ when he complained that as long as he had to fill in sixteen-page questionnaires in order to get published in a magazine, talking about democracy and individual freedom

28 Zelda Popkin, Small Victory, Philadelphia and New York 1947, pp. 75–82. 29 John Dos Passos, ‘Land of the Fragebogen’ (note 16), p. 254. The ‘Fragebogen’ also appears in Hans Habe’s novel Off Limits (1955). 30 Stig Dagerman, German Autumn, tr. Robin Fulton Macpherson (1988), reprinted with an introduction by Mark Kurlansky, Minneapolis, MN 2011, pp. 66, 74, 75.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 148 WERNER SOLLORS was meaningless.31 Sabine Kalff quoted Theodor Heuss’s complaint about the ‘eternal questionnaire’ and reported Margret Boveri’s critique that it was impossible to ‘determine the exact degree of affinity with National Socialism via questionnaires, since they could not estimate the reasons for certain behaviour’.32 The entertainer Just Scheu, known for such early post-war shows as Doppelt oder nichts and the Funklotterie, wrote and sang a humorous ‘Fragebogen’-Lied about a victim of Nazi persecution paranoia who has nightmares about his party membership when he sees the numbers 1 to 131:

Ich bin fragebogenkrank, ich bin fragebogenkrank Kennen Sie das furchterliche¨ Leiden? In meinem Fragebogen stimmt zwar ziemlich alles – Gott sei Dank! Und das will schon heutzutage was bedeuten. Aber trotzdem werde ich den einen Tick nicht los, Was mach ich bloß? Was mach ich bloß? Ich seh nur Zahlen: Eins bis hunderteinunddreißig, Hab ich auch alles richtig ausgefullt¨ – was weiß ich? Ich traume¨ jede Nacht, ich war¨ in etwas drin gewesen Dann schreck ich zitternd und mit Schweiß bedeckt empor. Ich traume¨ jede Nacht, ich war¨ doch in was reingetreten, Daß grade ich kein Nazi sein soll, kommt mir komisch vor. Vielleicht hat man mich mal heimlich in was reingeschoben, Es war¨ ja denkbar, bei dem Schwindel und dem Druck von oben. Ich habe den Arzt gefragt. Er sagt, dass er nicht helfen kann, Ich hatt¨ den NSDAP-Verfolgungswahn.33

31 ‘So lange die Zigarettenstummel fremder Militarm¨ achte¨ auf der Straße liegen (damit will ich nichts gegen die Zigaretten gesagt haben) und so lange ich 16-seitige Fragebogen ausfullen¨ muß, um in einer Zeitschrift gedruckt zu werden, so lange ist es sinnlos, uber¨ Demokratie und personliche¨ Freiheit zu diskutieren.’ Quoted in Erwin Warkentin, ‘War by Other Means: British Information Control and Wolfgang Borchert’s Draußen vor der Tur¨ ’, unpublished ms. of conference paper given at King’s College London, 2015, p. 1, referring to Peter Ruhmkorf,¨ Wolfgang Borchert in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1962, p. 162. 32 Sabine Kalff, ‘Know Your Foe: Boveri’s American Primer as a Reaction to the American Policy of Denazification and Re-education’, unpublished ms. of conference paper given at King’s College London, 2015, quoting Dieter Franck, Jahre unseres Lebens 1945–1949, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1980, p. 108, and Boveri’s 1946 Amerikafibel. 33 Just Scheu, ‘Der Fragebogen’, in Kleinkunststucke¨ ,vol.IV,Wir sind so frei: Kabarett in Restdeutschland 1945–1970,ed.VolkerKuhn,¨ Weinheim and Berlin 1993, pp. 61–2. The phrasing ‘in was reingetreten’ punningly draws a parallel between joining the Nazi party and stepping into dog excrement. For a recording of the first stanza, see https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=hApZ XnWIQw (accessed 30 November 2015). Locating Scheu’s own denazification questionnaire might add more complexity to this song by an entertainer who had been active as actor and author during the Nazi period; see Ernst Klee, Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945, Frankfurt a. M. 2007, p. 520.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 149 In the second stanza the nightmares return after the singer has completed the twelfth sheet of the questionnaire, and he now imagines his wife telling him to leave her bed and democratic house. If only he had entered the party in 1933, he concludes sarcastically, he would now be exonerated. (That the real Nazis got away was a common complaint about denazification in Germany.) By far the most extensive and the most popular response to the questionnaire in the period was Ernst von Salomon’s odd and vivid memoir, called Der Fragebogen, which was published in an edition of 10,000 on 20 March 1951, with a British licence and on French paper, and sold another 200,000 copies by the end of 1952, despite worried reviews.34 Salomon thoroughly disliked what he perceived as American self-righteousness:

Die Amerikaner wollten zwar die Wahrheit wissen, aber nicht, um sie zu erfahren, sondern um zu richten, nach den Gesetzen einer von ihnen als allgemeingultig¨ angesehenen Moral, in deren Namen sie sich aufgemacht hatten, die deutschen Verbrechen zu bestrafen und das merkwurdig¨ irregeleitete Volk durch eine ‘Reeducation’ wieder auf den richtigen Weg zu bringen.35

He thinks of the questionnaire as an ‘examination of conscience’ (‘Gewissenserforschung’), a police wanted notice with characteristics of the subject (‘Steckbrief’), or a certificate of ancestry (‘Ahnenpaß’) such as had been required by the Nazis. His central aesthetic ruse is that he uses the 131 questions of the ‘Fragebogen’ to structure his 800-page memoir – taking ample opportunities to question and talk back to the questionnaire, so as to accuse the questioners and drive home the absurdity of the ‘Fragebogen’. He complains about being coerced to fill in the ‘Fragebogen’, about its stupidity, and he even mocks the typographical errors that the version of 9a he was working with apparently contained. Salomon incorporates all 131 questions, sometimes giving brief and at other times very, very long responses. Perhaps the most memorable short answer is the one he gives to questions 101 and 102, the questions asking for implicated relatives: ‘Antwort wird verweigert.’ He explains:

34 Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1951. On the reception of the novel see Markus Josef Klein’s adulatory biography, Ernst von Salomon: Eine politische Biographie mit einer vollstandigen¨ Bibliographie, Limburg a. d. Lahn 1994, pp. 270–71. Klein quotes Salomon’s account of the publishing history, p. 270: ‘Die Englander¨ waren einverstanden mit dem Abdruck, nur hatten sie kein Papier, und die Amerikaner lehnten ab. Blieben also die Franzosen. [. . . ] Rowohlt ubernahm¨ namlich¨ damals Sartre neu und bekam (mit Augenzwinkern des franzosischen¨ Hohen Kommissars) so viel Papier fur¨ Sartre, daß der Fragebogen mit abgedruckt werden konnte.’ Klein also cites private approval in letters from Salomon’s friends. Alfred Polgar offered a strong critique in ‘Eine gespenstische Erscheinung’, Der Monat, 3 (September 1951), 654–6. 35 Quoted in Klein, Ernst von Salomon (note 34), p. 266.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 150 WERNER SOLLORS

IchkannmichnurmitMuhe¨ des Vergnugens¨ enthalten, diese beiden Fragen zu beantworten. Ich hatte¨ da viele merkwurdige¨ Dinge zu berichten. Aber ich tue es nicht. Ich halte diese beiden Fragen fur¨ perfide. Ich bin mir bewußt, daß diese Auslassung ein Vergehen gegen die Verordnungen der Militarregierung¨ darstellt, und mich der Anklage und Bestrafung aussetzt. Ich hoffe, daß sich die Militarregierung¨ ihrerseits des Vergnugens¨ nicht enthalten kann, den einzigen Menschen in der ganzen Welt, der ihren Fragebogen wirklich ernst nimmt, unter Anklage zu stellen und zu bestrafen.36

Salomon, a Weimar-period, right-wing Freikorps fighter and conspirator who was directly involved in the assassination of Walther Rathenau, never joined the Nazi party. His life partner at the end of the war was the Jewish woman Ille Gotthelf. He stylises himself as a mixture of bohemian bonvivant, political adventurer, and Prussian nationalist – and as victim of the Americans: he uses the word ‘Opfer’ when in the American internment camp on the Natternberg near Deggendorf, where he was imprisoned from 1945 to 1946 along with about 4,000 other internees. The last 150 pages of his book constitute the longest single response to the questionnaire, triggered by just one, the last, unnumbered rubric on ‘Fragebogen 9a’, ‘Remarks/Bemerkungen’. Salomon describes the American camp regime in the starkest manner with brutal, unprovoked beatings and the strong suggestion that Ille was gang-raped during her interrogation by at least six American soldiers: ‘Was geschah mit Ille da drin?’, he asks, and then repeats that loaded question. She finally comes out, and he describes what he sees: ‘Ich starrte sie an, sie lachelte¨ mir schnell von der Seite zu, sie hatte keinen Gurtel¨ an, das Kleid war schief zugeknopft,¨ ihre Strumpfe¨ hingen herunter.’37 Nor is it surprising that in Salomon’s version the Americans are the true anti-Semites. He relates the account of a fellow inmate, the actor Wolf Ackva, who claimed that during a camp visit by the New York lawyer, Krebs, none of the American officers spoke with him. When Krebs left, Robertson said: ‘Ich kann Hitler nicht leiden, aber er hat etwas Gutes getan: er hat die Juden totgeschlagen!’ Ackva shouts back: ‘Hoi, hoi! Weil die Deutschen die Juden totgeschlagen haben, deswegen sind wir hier!’ ‘“Falsch!” sagte Robertson, ‘ihr seid hier, weil ihr nicht alle Juden totgeschlagen habt!’”38 Although Goronwy Rees prefaced the English translation with warnings about Salomon’s display of ‘Schadenfreude’ and his nerve to ‘dissociate

36 Salomon, Der Fragebogen (note 34), p. 467. 37 Ibid., pp. 678–9. 38 Salomon, Der Fragebogen, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, p. 588 (of paperback reprint). This passage is discussed as part of Salomon’s anti-Americanism in Gabriela Wettberg, Das Amerika-Bild und seine negativen Konstanten in der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur, Heidelberg 1987, p. 42, and in the context of re-education in Helmuth Mosberg, Reeducation: Umerziehung und Lizenzpresse im Nachkriegsdeutschland, Munich 1991, p. 57.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 151 himself from all responsibility for the triumph, and the crimes, of National Socialism’, the translator Constantine FitzGibbon omitted this passage.39 Was it perhaps too much to put this comment into the mouth of an Allied officer, a comment that criticises Germans for not having completed the genocide and at the same time implies that Jews (illustrated also by the presence of the ‘New York lawyer Krebs’) were the ones responsible for the Germans’ imprisonment. Kastner¨ called his interrogating officer a ‘Gestapoherr’, but Salomon fleshes out what that term might mean when articulated by an anti-American polemicist on the German far right. As Alfred Polgar put it in his review, ‘Uber¨ Salomons Darstellung der Vorgange¨ in amerikanischen Lagern schwebt unausgesprochen das Motto “ganz wie bei uns, bei den Nazis”’.40 When he is shown atrocity photographs Salomon calmly questions whether the number of victims makes any difference. (Still, neither he nor Ille can sleep the night after first seeing the photographs.)41 Yet Salomon is extremely sympathetic toward those who are classified as ‘war criminals’ (a term he uses in English and puts in quotation marks). For example, there is, at the very end of the book, a rather positive portrait of Hanns Ludin, who became German emissary to Slovakia in 1941 and, as such, signed deportation orders sending many Jews to Auschwitz. Ludin refuses Salomon’s offer to help him escape and goes to his certain death, having told Salomon that he always followed his conscience, which was not always easy.42 Salomon’s novel ends with Ludin’s gruesome execution in Czechoslovakia as a war criminal, a strangulation that lasted twenty minutes. Ludin’s, and the book’s, last words are ‘Es lebe Deutschland!’ The book’s coda offers the ironic certification of ‘E. R.’, the friend and publisher of Salomon, Ernst Rowohlt.43 Since Ernst von Salomon structured his memoir following the questionnaire it might be interesting to compare his novel with the questionnaire he actually filled in. My attempt to locate a copy of Salomon’s 131-question ‘Fragebogen’, however, failed. No copy of it seems to be in existence among his papers at Marbach, but the Staatsarchiv Munchen¨ found for me the shortest of questionnaires: it is only one page long. It turns out that Ernst von Salomon never had to fill in the long

39 The Answers of Ernst von Salomon to the 131 Questions in the Allied Military Government ‘Fragebogen’, preface by Goronwy Rees, tr. Constantine FitzGibbon, London 1954, pp. vii–xii. Had the dialogue between Ackva and Robertson been translated, it would have appeared on p. 478. 40 Polgar, ‘Eine gespenstische Erscheinung’ (note 34), 655. 41 Salomon tells a joke that apparently was common around the end of the war: ‘What is worse, losing the war or getting rid of the Nazis?’ The answer is that really the worst would be to lose the war and still have the Nazis. The joke implies that Salomon favoured a post-Nazi future. 42 An excerpt from 2 or 3 Things I Know about Him, a 2005 documentary that Ludin’s son Malte made about him, is available at https://www.journeyman.tv/film/3023/2-or-3-things-I-know-about-him (accessed 30 January 2018). 43 Salomon, Der Fragebogen (note 38), pp. 806 and 807–8.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 152 WERNER SOLLORS denazification questionnaire that his autobiographical novel pretended to ‘complete’. The format of the book that became a bestseller because it spoke to so many Germans who did have to fill in the ‘Fragebogen’ was the publisher’s idea: ‘Rowohlt sagte mir, daß ich, wenn ich irgend etwas publizieren wolle, den großen Fragebogen ausfullen¨ musse.Ergabmirso¨ ein Ding und ich machte mich daran, die Fragen einzeln zu beantworten.’44 It may be the ultimate irony that Salomon’s Der Fragebogen is now routinely cited by historians as the most easily accessible source for the 131 questions of the denazification questionnaire, when the book was actually a blatant attempt to mock the Americans and to demolish their ‘Fragebogen’ while pretending to answer it, thus propounding the misconception that the author had actually filled in the 131-question MG/PS/G/9a. In her Amerikafibel fur¨ erwachsene Deutsche (1946), on the other hand, Margret Boveri set up a somewhat milder contrast between the Americans with their mechanical ‘Fragebogen’ and the Germans, whose human sensibility could not easily be understood that way:

Die Amerikaner haben die Deutschen nach den Gesichtspunkten, die sie interessieren, aufgeteilt in Einheiten, die ausnahmslos durch eindeutige Antworten zu bestimmen sind – Parteimitglied oder nicht, Auslandsreisen oder nicht, Erwerb judischen¨ Besitzes oder nicht – und damit glauben sie den deutschen Menschen zu erfassen, soweit sie ihn fur¨ ihre Regierungstatigkeit¨ erfassen wollen. Fur¨ unser Gefuhl¨ bleibt immer – auch in den behandelten Kategorien – ein ungeklartermenschlicherRest.¨ 45 As Sabine Kalff has shown, Boveri explained questionnaires as ‘a normal part of American life’ rather than as a tool specifically devised ‘to wear out the Germans’ patience’.46 Boveri reproduces a Hollerith punch card and connects data collection, multiple choice tests, IQ questionnaires, and public opinion polls to the format of the ‘Fragebogen’. While this sounds like a plausible explanation, the questionnaire actually had somewhat more complex origins and was not directly an outgrowth of a specifically American faith in quantitative assessment. Historians, starting with William E. Griffith’s dissertation, submitted in 1950 but never published in book form, have delineated the intellectual

44 Letter to Alfred Kantorowicz, August 11, 1948, cited in Klein, Ernst von Salomon (note 34), p. 266. Klein mentions that Salomon was exempted from the Law of Liberation from National Socialism by a decree at the ‘Spruchkammer Traunstein’ of 13 May 1947. 45 Margret Boveri, ‘Hollerith-Maschinen oder: Der Weg zum Fragebogen’, in Amerikafibel fur¨ erwachsene Deutsche, Berlin 1946, pp. 41–61 (p. 45). 46 Ibid., p. 46: ‘Denn daruber¨ sind sich die wenigsten Deutschen klar, daß der Fragebogen nicht als Tortur fur¨ die besiegte Nation eigens erfunden wurde, sondern daß jeder Amerikaner sich selbst tausendmal einem Fragebogen unterwirft, daß er uber¨ sich selbst nach den gultigen¨ Fragebogenregeln die Summe zieht wie uber¨ uns die Angehorigen¨ der Control Councils und des CIC. Der Fragebogen entscheidet in Amerika nicht nur uber¨ Schulung, Berufswahl und Fortkommen; er ist gleichzeitig in der Form des “Quiz” ein nationaler Sport auf geistigem Gebiet, der am Radio, in der Presse, in großen Versammlungshallen ebenso eifrig verfolgt wird wie Football und Baseball auf den Spielfeldern.’ See Sabine Kalff, ‘Know Your Foe’ (note 32), 12.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE DENAZIFICATION QUESTIONNAIRE AS CULTURAL TEXT 153 and bureaucratic background against which the idea of a thorough weeding-out not just of the political, bureaucratic, and economic elites but also of the vast masses of party members emerged. Apparently, it was Frankfurt School thinking, represented in 1944–5 in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) by Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse, that laid some of the intellectual foundations for the official plans for the occupation. The idea was that Nazism had created a widespread form of false consciousness. In order to create a more progressive post-war Germany, all representatives implicated in the Nazi order had to be removed. Hence Neumann and Marcuse prepared black lists for removal, white lists for their replacements, as well as in-between grey lists.47 The division of the population into categories proved compatible with a proposal in the Central Europeanists’ planning unit for a detailed questionnaire. For meanwhile the German Country Unit (GCU) had learned from the experience in Italy that there was a need for ‘(1) a policy for purging Fascists, (2) criteria for evaluating information concerning Fascists (i.e. “Removal categories”), and (3) a procedure for applying these criteria by the use of a detailed questionnaire (Scheda personale)’.48 The GCU developed a first proposal that provided for ‘the immediate removal and exclusion of the more heavily incriminated officials and the retention of all others – subject to later screening by Military Government’.49 It included a draft questionnaire (‘Fragebogen’) based upon the Italian Scheda personale.50 The ‘proper task of Allied military government was not only to eliminate the Nazis as a state party, but to prevent similar groups from re-entering the fray once the German political life had been restored’.51 Perry Biddiscombe has pointed out the irony that ‘Germans themselves, albeit exiles, [...] introduced the idea and methods of denazification’ that would later become the embodiment of American occupation policies. More than that, they were German Marxists (Marcuse would become a 1960s hero), Marxists who believed that denazification would be a step toward revolutionary change in Germany. Sceptics in the Army and the SHAEF G-5 unit, of course, did not share that belief, but they had no alternative plan for eliminating the Nazis – and so the ‘Fragebogen’ became the massively applied instrument that created many bureaucratic headaches for the Allies and seemed to be the sinister embodiment of ‘America’ to many of those who had to complete it.52 The Americanness of the ‘Fragebogen’ may thus be just another myth surrounding a text that has given rise to more than its fair share of post-war myths.

47 Biddiscombe, Denazification (note 3), pp. 21–4. 48 Griffith, ‘The Denazification in the United States Zone of Germany’ (note 5), p. 6. 49 Ibid., p. 7. 50 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 51 Biddiscombe, Denazification (note 3), p. 25. 52 Ibid., pp. 21–4.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

THE AUTHOR AND HIS CORPSE: GERMAN CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE NATIONAL CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY

DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT (University of Cambridge)

ABSTRACT The status of German high culture and that of German national identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way, setting the German national project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke, among others, described as a ‘Kulturnation’. With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946, Meinecke sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, thereby challenging the Allied occupiers’ disparagement of Germany as barbarous and foolish. By examining two films, Georg Klaren’s 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Buchner’s¨ Woyzeck and Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1949 filming of Goethe’s Werther, produced in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic, this article casts new light on this dilemma of cultural self-definition through the popular medium of cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. The article examines the choices of Buchner¨ and Goethe as authors for the screen and looks at the role they fulfil in a project to recuperate German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.

Der Zustand der deutschen Hochkultur und der deutschen nationalen Identitat¨ sind seit jeher in einer besonderen Weise miteinander verbunden, was Friedrich Meinecke, unter anderen, als Besonderheit des deutschen nationalen Projekts gegenuber¨ Europa mit dem Begriff der ‘Kulturnationʼ fasste. Mit dem Erscheinen seines Werks Die deutsche Katastrophe im Jahre 1946 griff Meinecke diesen Gedanken erneut auf und betrachtete Deutschland gemaß¨ einer fruheren¨ Konzeption des Kulturellen als Mittel fur¨ eine besiegte und beschamte¨ Nation, moralische Bedeutung wiederzuerlangen, anstatt von der alliierten Besatzung bloß als barbarisch und dumm bezeichnet zu werden. Anhand der Analyse zweier Filme – Georg Klarens Adaption von Georg Buchners¨ Woyzeck aus dem Jahr 1947, die in der Sowjetzone entstand, sowie Goethes Werther aus dem Jahr 1949 von Karl- Heinz Stroux, der in der sogenannten Tri-Zone kurz vor der Grundung¨ der Bundesrepublik gedreht wurde – wirft dieser Aufsatz neues Licht auf das Dilemma der ʻKulturnationʼ innerhalb des Massenmediums Film. In beiden Filmen kommt der Autor selbst als diegetischer Vermittler der Adaption des eigenen Werks zu Wort. Der Aufsatz untersucht die Wahl von Buchner¨ und Goethe als Autoren fur¨ die Leinwand und nimmt in den Blick, welche Rolle sie innerhalb eines Projekts der Erholung der deutschen Kultur und des deutschen Nationalgefuhls¨ unter alliierter Besatzung erfullen.¨

This article will examine the ideological uses of cultural figures in German film under Allied occupation and compare the way in which these figures

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 155 were used to assert ideological differences in a battle for guardianship of German cultural value waged by the two emerging states after 1949. In the context of post-war intellectual debates, prominent thinkers such as the conservative Friedrich Meinecke and the socialist Alexander Abusch proposed solutions to the problem of recovering a morally viable German identity from the debased Nazi past. For both thinkers, the recovery of a unique meaning and place for the products of German culture was central to this task. To this end, representatives of German high culture were to be rehabilitated from the narratives of the Third Reich so that they might serve as a conduit for the recuperation of a debased national identity.1 The reflection of these concerns in popular cinema is testament to just how powerfully the need for a response to Hitler’s defeat necessitated a re-casting of cultural identity so that there could be positive cohesion and value to being German after Hitler. The ostensibly different answers given by each film under discussion here to the question posed by Germany’s moral abjection post-war had a common origin in their shared understanding of how value and legitimacy were conferred, namely by an appeal to authorial authority. Where the use of authorship within both productions functioned as a seal of authenticity, just what that ‘authenticity’ meant and to whom it was addressed was played out in the very different treatments of the films themselves. While a set of idealised values embodied in German high culture had initially been seen as a means by which to restore a unified and cohesive German national identity after Hitler, two oppositional narratives about Germanyʼs cultural heritage soon emerged, each claiming to be the rightful heir of cultural value to the exclusion of the other. This conflict over the ‘true’ cultural narrative was hotly contested in early post-war film, with productions from the Soviet Zone and the Western Allied zones vying for moral dominance in narratives saturated with high cultural references in dramas such as Kurt Maetzig’s 1947 DEFA production Ehe im Schatten,the most widely viewed domestic film made after 1945 before the founding of the two states, which was released across all zones; and Hans Mueller’s ...und finden dereinst wir uns wieder, titled from a quotation from Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea and made in the British Zone in the same year, to name but two examples.2 Films offering pedagogical and recuperative narratives with interspersed references to German culture as moral touchstones were common in the early post-war period, offering a sense of moral, if not national continuity with a pre-Nazi past. These productions were further influenced by, and reflected, the political uncertainties of Allied and Soviet relations.

1 See, especially, Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe. Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, Wiesbaden 1947; also Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg einer Nation: ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis¨ deutscher Geschichte, Berlin (East) 1946; and Alexander Abusch, Schillers Menschenbild und der sozialistische Humanismus, Berlin (East) 1960. 2 Kurt Maetzig, Ehe im Schatten , DEFA 1947.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 156 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT The film industry during the Third Reich had unprecedented commercial success and enjoyed a golden era of popularity. This success was due in no small part to the expert manner in which filmmakers manipulated German cultural history for the screen to so convincingly fit the ideological ends of Goebbels’ ‘Reichsfilmkammer’. A proliferation of Nazi screen productions of biographical epics and historical period dramas based on works from the period of Weimar classicism were common fare in the cinema of the Reich. This wove the National Socialist ‘Kulturkampf’ into historical narratives on screen where the struggle for a German nation was undertaken by German genius. Productions such as Herbert Maisch’s films Friedrich Schiller – Der Triumph eines Genies (1940), and Andreas Schluter¨ (1942), for example, effectively presented selected cultural works and icons as prophetic markers leading to the triumph of the German cultural will, where subjects would include all and any cultural figures that could, however tenuously, be described as ‘German’: Hans Steinhoff’s Ewiger Rembrandt andG.W.Pabst’sParacelsus, for example, both served to provide narratives for a greater Germany.3 Such coalescence between the political and high culture in the cinema in films of the Nazi era was to pose a pressing problem of moral and cultural legitimacy for German filmmakers after the Third Reich, as they strove to return moral and cultural legitimacy to an industry so manipulated by the Nazis. German film makers in the years immediately after 1945 would find it difficult to escape from the shadow of these films in their attempts at cultural renewal, and opted instead to infuse dramas with high cultural motifs as a means of presenting, initially at least, a moral rather than a political message in dramas about the Nazi past and the post-war present. In the case of German cultural figures in film, there was a mutual shift in emphasis that required culture and politics to be separated, at least ostensibly, into distinct spheres. The very first films in 1946 did not deal with aspects of German genius or parables of nationhood, but rather concerned themselves with the tribulations of living among the ruins, earning the productions of the era the often pejorative label of ‘Trummerfilme’.¨ 4 The question of national identity was replaced with presentations of conscience framed as personal ʻinner emigration’ under the auspices of a ‘universalising’ set of humanitarian moral values, which would inform the authorial voice of the protagonists of the two films under discussion in this paper. This divergence in the use of classical German culture in the Eastern and Western sectors can be illustrated by looking at the only two films made

3 Hans Steinhoff, Ewiger Rembrandt, Tobis 1942; see also Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Paracelsus,UFI 1943; and Horst Claus, Filmen fur¨ Hitler: die Karriere des NS-Starregisseurs Hans Steinhoff, Vienna 2012, pp. 432–45. 4 Unknown author, ‘Stimmen aus Parkett und Rang: Man mag keine Ruinen’, Der Spiegel, 4 (January 1947), 22.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 157 under Allied occupation that explicitly take up major works of German literature as their main subject: Karl-Heinz Stroux’s adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, which was released in 1949, and Georg Klaren’s Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Buchner’s¨ Woyzeck, retitled Wozzeck for the screen, in 1947.5 What is notable about both films is the manner in which they offer explicit rejoinders to the Nazi-era adaptations and biographical films. In order to break with Nazi cinema’s blemished representations of cultural figures, both authors are presented as explicitly corrective agents in the filmic adaptations of their work, offering an ‘authentic’ reading not just of their work but also, most crucially, of the political significance their work is to have for post-war Germany – all without a single shot of rubble entering the frame.

THE MAP AND THE BOOK: KARL-HEINZ STROUX’S BEGEGNUNG MIT WERTHER

Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1.6 million DM production, finally released as Begegnung mit Werther, was the second most expensive feature film shot during the Allied occupation after Helmut Kautner’s¨ Der Apfel ist ab of 1948, bankrupting the Nova-Film company in the process.6 However, it received a broadly positive press, and audiences reported that they found the film moving and pertinent.7 The opening scene depicts an encounter between Goethe and Napoleon. This encounter represented a familiar historical frame for audiences used to Napoleon, and was a familiar incarnation of the ‘Erbfeind’, given that there had been no fewer than thirteen films made under Hitler that represented narratives of a national struggle during the Napoleonic period. However, in common with much of the art produced by so-called former ‘inner emigrants’ in this period, the film is far less concerned with ideology or national struggle through the allegory of the Prussian State than with the individual struggle to champion values of shared humanity. Indeed, this position was characteristic of the majority of film production outside the DEFA studios during Allied occupation, in what Peter Pleyer was famously to describe as a defining feature of the period in cinema, namely presenting protagonists who displayed the ʻOhnmacht des Individuumsʼ in relation to the Nazi past.8 The film opens with Goethe’s visit to the French Emperor in Erfurt in 1808. The contemporary political subtext of the film is made explicit from the outset by Stroux’s use of opening inter-titles. These titles are highlighted as commentary by the closing of theatrical curtains – closing off

5 Karl-Heinz Stroux, Begegnung mit Werther, Nova-Film 1949; Georg C. Klaren, Wozzeck, DEFA 1947. 6 For further discussion of Der Apfel ist ab, see Jennifer Fay’s contribution to this volume. 7 Unknown author, ‘Pappmond uber¨ Leid und Liebe’, Der Spiegel, 11 August 1949, 33/49, 29–30. 8 Peter Pleyer, Deutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1948,Munster¨ 1965, p. 159; see also the discussion in Adolf Heinzlmeier, Nachkriegsfilm und Nazifilm: Anmerkungen zu einem deutschen Thema, Frankfurt a. M. 1988, pp. 1–22.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 158 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT a virtual space between the film proper and historical information about the actual meeting of Goethe and Napoleon in 1808. This double preface works as a narrative aside to indicate clearly that the film’s historical context serves as an authentic basis for the drama. The emphasis on the setting and the auspicious meeting places the action in an allegorical space reflecting the political impasse of 1948 between the Soviet and Western powers. A filmic arena is created where German cultural values might offer a riposte to the cold political calculations of the occupiers. After a note dedicating the film to the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth, there are two inter-titles, the first of which reads: Im Herbst 1808 versammelte Napoleon die Fursten¨ Europas in Erfurt, um sich mit ihnen uber¨ die Neuordnung des Erdteils zu beraten und mit dem Kaiser Alexander von Russland zu einem Frieden zu kommen. This is followed by the second inter-title, which reads, in a more elaborate, cursive typeface: Bei dieser Gelegenheit empfing er: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s full name is enlarged, filling the centre of the screen, to give top billing to the Weimar poet, and to mark out the film as a statement of his central position in the film; the curtains close and the film commences. The two men take seats facing each other across a large desk. Napoleon professes his fondness for Goethe’s work, most especially his tragic story of doomed love, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, which Napoleon has read whilst fighting in Africa. The only problem is that he does not like the ending. Goethe is as nonplussed by the critique as he is by the flattery. Nonetheless, Napoleon asks Goethe if he will dedicate the work to him to mark his historic meeting with the Tsar of Russia and the other crowned heads of Europe. Goethe declines. Napoleon, believing this would have been an honour for Goethe, is taken aback. Goethe explains that he would not dedicate any of his works to anyone, no matter who they might be. The reason, he explains, is that he might one day live to regret it, a statement of his desire to stand above politics. In the ensuing conversation Goethe disagrees with Napoleon about where the fate of man lies. For Napoleon it lies in politics, for Goethe it is in the human heart. Audience members used to the conventions of the biographical films made in the Third Reich would have recognised the figure of Goethe as little changed from former National Socialist tropes: a wily German genius who could shrewdly and wisely resist the charm and pressure from an uncultured interloper.9 However, Napoleon’s pointed reference to his meeting with the Russian Tsar and the statement in the opening inter-titles

9 As seen in films such as Pabst, Paracelsus (note 3); and Herbert Maisch, Andreas Schluter¨ , UFA 1942.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 159 mark this out as more than a retelling of a German literary classic: it offers the audience a reply to the Western occupier from the point of view of German culture, personified by Goethe in a historical allegory reflecting the Western Allied negotiations with the Soviet Union over the fate of Europe at the close of 1948. The production places Goethe’s literal reading of Werther to Napoleon at the core of a framing drama which aims to reveal superior and universal German values to a conqueror whose understanding is limited to more earthly calculations about territory and military might (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The opening dialogue: Napoleon doesn’t like the ending of Werther.10

Goethe listens to the sweeping statements made by his host and quietly expresses his skepticism by telling Napoleon that there will be no ‘happy endʼ to this work. With his anti-political credentials firmly nailed to the mast, Goethe seeks to correct the Emperor’s view of Werther and, with it, his understanding of humanity. He picks up Napoleon’s copy of the book and starts to read aloud, the shot then fading to the adaptation that makes up the main part of the film. The dramatisation of Goethe’s Werther that follows is a broadly faithful rendition of the work, concluding with Werther’s suicide. We hear Werther commit the act but do not see the deed. The witnessing of Werther’s death is shot in a static close-up of the dresser desk at which he is seated. He snuffs out the candle on the nightstand with his fingers and picks up the flintlock

10 All images used in this article are frame grabs from Begegnung mit Werther (note 5) and Wozzeck (note 5).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 160 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT pistol next to it. This death scene and what follows to end the reading diverge from the novel. Werther declares his love for Lotte one last time and wishes her a good life, upon which the viewer hears a gunshot and the shot moves to the curtain blowing in through a window off-screen, signaling that a soul has departed this earth. The final sequence of the film – Werther’s funeral – is fluid, a tracking crane shot which follows the funeral entourage from above, as if from the point of view of the departed Werther watching his own burial. After the soil has been deposited on his coffin, the camera glides up in a widening overhead shot that implies both the ascent of a human soul to heaven and the departure of the frame of the story. This transition to a rising shot that implies the point of view of the spirit of Werther is a key transition, passing the spirit of Werther between narrative levels and back to the framing discourse between Napoleon and Goethe. Now, however, there are no words spoken between the two men. Goethe, having finished giving authorial life to his work and brought the spirit of Werther into the room, closes the book in silence. He rises and places it on top of the map opposite a stunned Napoleon (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The closing silence: ‘Kultur’ trumps ‘Zivilisation’.

In this return to the framing narrative, Goethe’s silent act visually trumps the map with the book, implicitly trumping ‘Zivilisation’ with ‘Kultur’. Goethe walks out of the room in total silence. Only once he has gone, does Napoleon rise from his deep state of introspection. Looking down from his window, watching Goethe, now clad in his cape and hat, enter his carriage, the Emperor is moved to remark to the officers who have now joined him: ‘Das ist ein Mensch!’ With these words the film ends.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 161 The implicit message of this adaptation of Werther and the overt message of the framing discourse of the film, that art is a greater and nobler force than politics, points to a distinction between art and politics based on the assertion of the eternal truth of art, as opposed to the transitory truths of politics. In this case it is Goethe’s reading of Werther that changes Napoleon’s mind. The message of Stroux’s film, cast within the frame of the meeting of two great Europeans, is that for the work of art to have ultimate moral value, for it to be able to assert truth in a transformative way, it must be transmitted by an authentic voice, in this case that of the author, to guarantee its authenticity and ensure the direct understanding of its ‘true’ meaning. Notwithstanding the variations in the filmic adaptation of the story of Werther, and the fictionalised encounter that frames it, Stroux’s production attempts to convey a solemn and grand sense of authenticity via appeals to authorship by placing Goethe within the film. In so doing Stroux offers a reading of a great work of German culture which is underwritten by a positing of unassailable authorship and, with it, a moral surety insofar as it has unchanging value and therefore relevance to the political turmoil of the Cold War that is just beginning.

THE AUTOPSY OF HISTORY: GEORG KLAREN’S WOZZECK

Georg Klaren’s 1947 costume drama Wozzeck, the first film adaptation of a German literary classic after the war, frames Buchner’s¨ play as a critique of militarism. Its realisation in a DEFA film produced in the Soviet Zone of Occupation explicitly seeks to provide an account of how Nazism drove good men to acts of evil. The film was the subject of a great publicity drive. While Klaren decided not to emphasise the proto-modernist aspects of Buchner’s¨ work, ostensibly for fear of inviting interpretations which would undermine the film’s purpose,11 it was lauded in the Soviet Zone press as a great step forward and a radical new departure for the German cinema as well as being a true inheritor of cinematic expressionism in the Weimar Republic – a claim that Dr. Klaren hoped would mirror its message as a bridge between a revolutionary tradition and a socialist future.12 Wozzeck was very different from other, contemporaneous DEFA fare. It neither adopted the direct and didactic approach of using workers instead of trained actors, as did Milo Harbich’s 1946 effort at a ‘socialist neo-realist’ agricultural liberation film, Freies Land, nor did it assume the hectoring tone of Wolfgang Schleif’s 1947 anti-capitalist mining drama, Grube Morgenrot.13

11 Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Postwar Traumas in Klaren’s Wozzeck (1947)’, in German Film & Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler, New York 1986, pp. 132–45. 12 ‘Der Soldat Wutzig als Filmheld’, unknown author, Berliner Zeitung, 18 May 1947; the article included an interview with Klaren. 13 See also praise for this style of ‘workers film’ at the time: Alfred Zettel, ‘“Freies Land” – der Film der Bodenreform’, Tagliche¨ Rundschau, 2 October 1946; Milo Harbich, Freies Land DEFA 1946; Wolfgang Schleif, Grube Morgenrot, DEFA 1947.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 162 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT Neither did it ape the UFA style of Kurt Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten, released the same year. The adaptation, with its heavily stylised setting in the early nineteenth century and within a strongly allegorical – yet clearly German – past, melded fantastical costume design, visual collage and expressionistic tropes in a style rich in high angles and menacing shadows to create a distinctly theatrical effect. As a result, it bore many of the hallmarks of modernist drama in its departure from the familiar cinematic treatments of literary works that came before 1945. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, given in May 1947 to coincide with the premiere, Paul Hahne, the film’s producer, spoke about the choice of costume and sets and the choice of Walter Schulze-Mittendorff as his costume designer for the film:

In dem Kostumbildner¨ Walter Schulze-Mittendorff, der schon Fritz Langs ʻMetropolisʼ ausstattete, stand uns ein hervorragender Fachmann zur Seite. Er hat es geschickt vermieden, die Kostume¨ streng historisch nachzubilden, sondern sie mehr typisiert, [...] Die Uniformen z.B. erhielten die Attribute des modernen Militarismus, wie Knobelbecher, Kratzchen,¨ geschwungene SS- Reithosen.14 One of the most ambitious aspects of the film, however, lay in the radical changes made to the play itself. Klaren not only completed the drama with Woyzeck’s execution, but cast Buchner¨ himself as a student of the deranged doctor who feeds the hapless soldier a diet of peas as part of a sadistic and meaningless experiment. In this role, the character of Buchner¨ bears witness to the performance of his own work and finally intercedes. Performing a political autopsy on the dead Woyzeck, he explains to his fellow medical students, and by extension to the cinema audience, the meaning behind the death of his protagonist. The political autopsy lays bare the mindless militarism and inhumanity that led to murder and the injustice of Woyzeck’s sad life. Buchner,¨ the medical student, ending his commentary with a direct address to the camera, underscores the allegorical burden of the story for the cinema audiences of 1947. As with Stroux’s production later in 1949, Klaren asserts an authorial voice, this time as a warning from history about the perils of militarism and the inhumanity and insanity it ushers in. However, the literary work and its author, in contrast to Stroux’s production of Werther, are cast as overtly political entities. This is unsurprising, given the choice of Buchner¨ and an appeal to the radical cultural heritage he represents. The moral and the political are not set apart as separate entities, rather the political urgency of Buchner’s¨ work is underscored by his very presence within the film adaptation. Politics in Wozzeck is not distinguished from the moral tragedy that befalls Woyzeck. For Klaren, the political messages of the play are not just the tragic fate of a human protagonist, but also the tragedies of historical failure. For his film to have any meaning, an adaptation beyond

14 Unknown author, ʻSoldat Wutzig als Filmheldʼ (note 12).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 163 the literal was a condition for the possibility of its relevance to the post- war present. Buchner’s¨ inclusion in the film serves to re-frame the drama as historical material instead of fiction, transforming it into a type of class- fable. The effect is to make the screen production a parable for the present, offering a means for Klaren to address the audience directly through the character of Buchner.¨ The film’s final scene leaves no doubt as to this political imperative (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Buchner,¨ third from the right, performing an ideological autopsy on the executed Woyzeck.

In this scene, the playwright-cum-medical student Buchner¨ discusses the fate of the deceased Woyzeck, who was driven to commit acts of murder and then condemned by the very system that created him. The cruel doctor dismisses these accusations and, in a commentary on the fatalist attitudes of the present day, claims the whole sorry episode to be a simple result of Woyzeck’s natural tendencies. Klaren’s film, though undoubtedly an allegory for the catastrophe of the Nazi era, makes it clear who is really to blame for the murder that led to Woyzeck’s execution. The militaristic values instilled in Woyzeck are too much for him and, having effectively been poisoned by the inhumane doctor both physically and spiritually, Buchner’s¨ protagonist finds himself in a delusional and paranoid state. Reduced to a state of insanity and rage, no longer in control of his life or his faculties, Woyzeck commits murder. In a further departure from the original text, Klaren introduces a flashback sequence of Woyzeck’s arrest and trial, culminating in his journey to the gallows. Bound, standing in a cart, on the way to his execution, the

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 164 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT doomed Wozyeck passes his own house. His smiling, unknowing son, soon to be orphaned, stands out in front and watches his father go by. Woyzeck turns to the innocent figure of his son as he recedes from view and quietly says ʻMach’s besser, Bubʼ – a final call to the fatherless youth of Germany. As Anke Pinkert’s persuasive reading of this scene highlights, this represents the last words of fallen German fathers, spoken from beyond the grave to their sons who would never know them.15 Klaren’s adaptation highlights the disastrous class politics at work in this form of oppression perpetrated by those of higher rank: the doctor, who poisons Woyzeck’s body, and the superior officer, who poisons his mind and humiliates him, combine to drive the unfortunate man to murder his gullible, unfaithful wife. The moral codes of duty, rank, and militarism, as well as the objectifying projects of ‘military science’ are revealed to be immoral features of a deadly, self-serving cause, one that drives men to acts of barbarism. This way of accounting for Nazi barbarism is given further weight by the ghostly and hallucinatory apparition of graves overlaid on the face of Woyzeck in a premonition of genocidal war (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Woyzeck foresees the future cycles of war and suffering.

Films such as Und wieder ʼ48!, Die Buntkarierten,andRotation,16 all made in the two years after Klaren’s film appeared, took up the political imperative

15 Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany, Bloomington, IN 2008, p. 122. This observation also chimes with the later narratives exculpating working-class Germans of any responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich as ‘erstes Opfer des Faschismus’. 16 Gustav von Wangenheim, Und wieder ʼ48!, DEFA 1948; Kurt Maetzig, Die Buntkarierten, DEFA 1949; and Wolfgang Staudte, Rotation, DEFA 1949.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 165 that had been voiced in Wozzeck to promote the need for ideological action to prevent a cyclical return to the catastrophe of fascism. The deaths of both Buchner’s¨ and Goethe’s protagonists in the films from the period of the Allied and Soviet occupation offer metaphors for the death of the German nation. The role of the protagonists and their tragic deaths are telling, not only by the manner in which they appear on screen, but by how they position the film dramas as narratives in the respective political context of the occupying powers. Klaren’s film was not well received by the Bi-Zone press at its opening in December 1947 in the Western sectors of Berlin.17 A mark had been overstepped for the Western Zone commentators, who saw in the film a ‘DEFA-Buchner’¨ 18 and were quick to point to what they saw as a crass, ideologically inspired re-scripting of the play. Conversely, Stroux’s film was not shown in the Soviet Zone as the political landscape had shifted radically, and by the time of its release Berlin was blockaded. However, Begegnung mit Werther opened in Frankfurt to great acclaim, prompting the film critic of Die Zeit to laud the cultural and moral regenerative powers inspired by the production:

Immer wieder wird den Deutschen vorgeworfen, daß sie an den geistigen Kampfen¨ der westlichen Volker¨ um die Freiheit des einzelnen im 18. Jahrhundert außer mit den kuhl-distanzierenden¨ Bemuhungen¨ einiger großer Philosophen nicht teilgenommen hatten.¨ Vor dem unmittelbaren Anruf der Goetheschen Sprache aber wird deutlich, daß Deutschland der Befreiung des europaischen¨ Menschen zwar nicht durch politische Formeln und Postulate gedient hat, wohl aber hat es diesem Menschen durch Goethe die unendliche Landschaft seines Herzens geschenkt und ihn seines Gefuhls¨ machtig¨ gemacht.19 The beginning of a de facto division of Germany into distinct economic spheres after the unilateral currency reforms by the Americans in 1948 meant that its division into ideological – and therefore also cultural – spheres was irreversible. The very process of division had a profound effect on the uses and interpretation of German cultural legitimacy for the founding of the two German states.

AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHENTICITY

The highly political form of ‘German genius’ on screen during the Nazi era returned, not as biographical accounts and adaptations foretelling an even

17 See, for example, Walter Busse, ‘Im Kafig¨ der Ohnmacht: Der Wozzeck-Film der DEFA’, Der Kurier, 19 December 1947. 18 E. Montije, ‘Woyzeck im Film. Urauffuhrung¨ im Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion’, Der Tagesspiegel, 19 December 1947. 19 Hans Holscher,¨ ‘Das Herz ist das Schicksal!’, Die Zeit, 10 March 1949: http://www.zeit.de/1949/ 10/das-herz-ist-das-schicksal (accessed 12 August 2013).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 166 DANIEL JONAH WOLPERT greater genius in the form of a ‘Fuhrer’,¨ but rather as something altogether more seductive. The cultural touchstone of ‘genius’ ascribed to the screen versions of Buchner¨ and Goethe in the films of the late forties was one that had an alchemical effect: it could turn moral virtue into political ideology and back again. This allowed the concept of ‘genius’ to be put to political ends in film by means of a moral judgement on the politics of the other German state. In this way cinema could confer the legitimacy of German ‘Kultur’ on debased ‘Politik’ once more. This was reflected in films in the form of a re-emergent, church-led social conservatism in the West and as representations of a German socialist tradition in historical accounts of class struggle in the East. In the context of the increasing divisions in the geopolitical sphere, two increasingly distinct cinemas belonging to two German states, however inchoate, had begun to emerge in late 1947 and into 1948. While it is true that these ideological divisions were present from the outset and could already be found in the more ideologically explicit DEFA productions of 1946 and early 1947, such as Milo Harbich’s Freies Land (1946), Wolfgang Schleif’s Grube Morgenrot (1947) and, to a lesser degree, in Staudte’s Die Morder¨ sind unter uns (1946).20 However, key DEFA films, such as Lamprecht’s Irgendwo in Berlin (1946)21 and Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten (1947) represented their political engagements in the broader terms of anti-militarism and anti-Nazism. The shift to explicitly and predominantly socialist narratives in GDR cinema by the 1950s was tailored to an audience which was encouraged to view the West as the failed half of the tragic German story, doomed to repeat a cycle of economic injustice and ruin, ending in an inevitable return to fascism. The quest for a ‘moral re-armament’ that was so pressing in the early post-war years had been made all the more difficult by the loss of untainted national traditions with which to address the spectre of the Nazi past. To this end, the question of a national identity, insofar as it had any legitimacy in cinema, was to be carried forward in references to cultural traditions that could lay claim to a type of value that would carry greater moral weight than the Nazi past. The concept of German genius, which had driven the National Socialist narratives on screen, had to be reclaimed and placed beyond its previous incarnations under the auspices of the ‘Reichsfilmkammer’. By appropriating the authors as characters within films of their works, both Stroux and Klaren effected a move to reconnect the values embodied by the genius of the author on the screen with a case for the moral legitimacy of a ‘good Germany’. The placement of the author within or around his work, as seen in the two films under discussion here, also offered a form of breach of narrative level where the author appears in an appeal to the audience for a corrected or ‘true’ reading

20 Wolfgang Staudte, Die Morder¨ sind unter uns, DEFA 1946. 21 Gerhard Lamprecht, Irgendwo in Berlin, DEFA 1946.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY 167 of the adaptation he is himself an agent in, either as part of a framing narrative as in Stroux’s work or directly, as taking a part of his own work in Klaren’s film. This paradoxical move of interceding in or guiding a ‘true’ reading by means of authorial interruption would have been a move unthinkable in the grand narrative sweeps or hagiographical distortions of German cultural works and figures during the Third Reich. The preceding analysis is limited to just two films, and makes no greater claims than those observed above. Nevertheless it is still interesting that the mode of address to a German public eager for a sense of moral respectability after the international exposure of atrocity and the humiliations of defeat should take the form of authorial interventions by fictionalised depictions of Goethe and Buchner.¨ These interventions were plainly designed to vouchsafe not only the legitimacy of the adaptation but also to open up the question of political engagement once more on the screen. In other words, the return of German cultural figures, in their first two appearances in the German cinema after 1945, embodied not an outright rejection of the representations of German cultural superiority under Hitler, but rather a differently refracted vision. The appeal to authority was still deployed, but now as a means to make sense of the powerlessness felt under the occupation. Goethe’s conservative position in Stroux’s production – as a reader addressing himself both to the audience and to the occupier – placed the audience in a position of alliance, not only with Werther as the tragic hero but more specifically with Goethe, the paragon of German genius as the storyteller. Goethe’s rejoinder in his famous meeting with Napoleon, then, claims to speak to all mankind, and it speaks, allegedly, from a German heart. It is little wonder that emotions ran high at the cinema as Stroux’s poetic rendition chimed in with the mood of an audience tired of being shamed.22 The humanist message of the film that ‘Sire, unser Herz ist das Schicksal!’ directly addressed those who wished to assert their cultural ‘Germanness’ outside of any culpability or agency during the Third Reich, and to declare their suffering to be the result of suicidal folly.23 Klaren’s Buchner¨ appears not as an author but as a recognisably authorial figure who offers his verdict on the insanity of militarism at an autopsy which he never personally scripted. Yet this scene is the site of the true authorial intervention within the adaptation. This has the effect that the truths in Wozzeck lie in the spirit and not in the letter of the text by which the unfinished play is played out. Indeed, the open-endedness afforded Klaren by the unfinished nature of the original work was a key factor in his choice of material:

22 See Holscher¨ (note 19). 23 This position is perhaps most clearly presented in Meinecke (note 1), pp. 52–65.

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Fragmente wie ʻWoyzeckʼ oder Novellen eignen sich viel besser fur¨ die Verfilmung als Theaterstucke¨ oder Romane. Fragmente deshalb, weil sie der optischen Phantasie jeden Spielraum lassen, weil ihre Zuspitzung auf eine einzige Pointe der Wesensform des Films ganz besonders entspricht.24 The unfinished nature of Buchner’s¨ work provided Klaren with the opportunity to make the film into a continuation of the original, locating the work’s authenticity less in its form as a work of universal wisdom, as was attempted in Stroux’s film, where a ‘correct reading’ is presented by Goethe, but rather as a bridge to a greater German continuity by adding the legitimacy afforded by the presence of Buchner’s¨ authorship to the allegorical purchase of his play for the cinema audience of 1947. In this guise, Klaren’s proto-socialist Buchner¨ is able to appear as a contemporary figure without loss of legitimacy as a supposed character in his ‘own’ work. His inclusion, both visually and narratively, completes the fragment, adding new dynamism to the work. Both films offer fleeting glimpses, perhaps, of the state of cinema and the representation of German culture under occupation. As they stand, they are snapshots of both transition and continuity in cinema, reflecting a myriad of influences and are a small part of the cinema output of the time. However, they do share a powerful sense of the value ascribed to German high culture in post-war cinema. Both films took concepts of cultural authority and authorial authenticity as a means to present different examples of the diverse German cultural canon and make them relevant to a public weary of the misery, powerlessness, and shame of being German. For all their failings, Stroux and Klaren did this by taking a familiar idea of German ‘cultural genius’ and refiguring it on the post-war screen as an attempt to turn it to recuperative ends.

24 Interview with Klaren in ‘Soldat Wutzig als Filmheldʼ (note 12).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE JENNIFER FAY (Vanderbilt University)

ABSTRACT Both the Germans and their American occupiers understood that films were supposed to support a democratic culture and worldview during the occupation following the Second World War. This essay explores how democratic culture comes to be defined at mid-century through choice, and how two films that played in the Western Zones, Der Apfel ist ab (1948) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), take up choice as a formal aesthetic closely tied to a fraught democratic experience. Best Years, praised by German critics as a realistic portrait of American life, also adopts what the film critic Andre´ Bazin calls a democratic and liberal film style of deep focus compositions and shots of long duration that allow the spectator to choose what to look at in the frame. Yet, as even Bazin notes, this choice is slyly coercive. Der Apfel was a critical failure and thematises indecision within the narrative. In contrast to Best Years, it turns the optics of choice into vertiginous confusion in which there are no good choices. This essay argues that the democratic refusal in Der Apfel ist ab is an apt critique of ‘democracy as choice’, and that the film opens up new horizons of political invention.

Die Deutschen und ihre amerikanischen Besatzer wussten gleichermaßen, dass Filme wahrend¨ der Besatzungszeit eine demokratische Kultur und Weltanschauung hervorbringen und unterstutzen¨ sollten. Dieser Artikel erortert,¨ wie die demokratische Kultur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts als Wahl definiert wurde, und wie zwei in den Westzonen gespielte Filme, Der Apfel ist ab (1948) und The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), mit dem Topos der Wahl umgehen, das als formale Asthetik¨ eng mit einer schwierigen demokratischen Erfahrung verbunden ist. Best Years, von deutschen Kritikern als realistisches Portrait amerikanischen Lebens gelobt, ist außerdem ein Beispiel des vom Kritiker Andre´ Bazin sogenannten demokratischen und liberalen Filmstils mit Kompositionen aus tiefem Fokus und Aufnahmen von langer Dauer, die es dem Zuschauer selbst uberlassen,¨ worauf er sein Augenmerk richtet. Jedoch, wie sogar Bazin notierte, ist diese Wahl auf listige Weise zwingend. Der Apfel war ein kritischer Misserfolg und thematisiert die Unentschlossenheit innerhalb der Handlung. Im Gegensatz zu Best Years verwandelt dieser Film die Optik der Wahl in schwindelerregende Verwirrung, in der es letztendlich keine gute Wahl gibt. Dieser Artikel behauptet, dass die demokratische Verweigerung in Der Apfel eine treffende Kritik der Vorstellung von ʻDemokratie als Wahlʼ darstellt, und dass der Film neue Horizonte politischer Schopfungskraft¨ eroffnet.¨

This essay is about the aesthetic registers of democratic experience in Occupied Germany, and it focuses on two films, one American, one German, both of which played in the Western Zones at approximately the same time. They would seem to have very little to do with democracy, the beautiful, or, in fact, with each other. Indeed, the pairing of these films

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Figure 1. Adam (Bobby Todd) wanders in the rubble of his destroyed postwar city. Der Apfel ist ab (dir. Helmut Kautner,¨ 1948).1 will no doubt strike the reader as a rather random choice. But it is exactly the proposition of choice, thematised and formalised in these films as the bedrock of democratic experience that interests me, especially under the circumstances of military occupation. The first film is The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s sober melodrama from 1946 that revolves around three Second World War veterans who, deeply affected by their combat experience, struggle to readjust to a country seemingly unchanged by war. The second is Der Apfel ist ab (1948), Helmut Kautner’s¨ musical satire of a civilian driven to suicidal despair because he cannot choose between two women. It is clear from the opening sequence that Adam (played by Bobby Todd) is coping with a trite but unsolvable domestic problem in a city utterly destroyed by war (Figure 1). His already absurd melodrama reaches a satiric pitch when Adam falls asleep in the lobby of a psychiatric retreat. His unconscious transports him from the post-war rubblescape to the scene of the biblical creation – from ‘Stunde Null’ to Genesis One, but with a twist. Heaven is fashioned after an occupied territory, complete with ‘Himmelspolizei’, barbed wire barricades, a politically divided cosmos, and an Earth under

1 All images used in this article are frame grabs from Der Apfel ist ab,dir.HelmutKautner,¨ Bavaria Film, 1948; and TheBestYearsofOurLives, dir. William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1946.

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Figure 2. Adam stops the Himmelspolizei. Der Apfel ist ab. reconstruction in Heaven’s workshop (Figure 2). Pulled between Heaven and Hell, Adam’s inability to choose between two women on Earth becomes a refusal to choose, tout court. These films could not be more different tonally, generically, or historically. Best Years was celebrated for its emotional and stylistic realism, winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, plus an honorary award for Harold Russell, a non-professional actor who lost both hands serving in the war, for his portrayal of Homer Parish, a sailor with a similar story. In the year of its release, Best Years was the highest grossing feature in US history, second only to Gone with the Wind.2 According to the New York Times, it was also the most successful Hollywood film in occupied Germany’s Western Trizone, and thus a sign of a ‘democratic film industry in Germany’.3 According to Samuel Goldwyn, the film’s producer, the War Department requested specifically that he make this film available for German re-education. In an article defending Hollywood’s free access to foreign markets, in fact, Goldwyn explains why Best Years is so appropriate for this pedagogical mission:

2 Kevin Fallon, ‘Fifteen Highest Grossing Oscar Winners’, The Atlantic, 13 January 2011: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/01/15-highest-grossing-best-picture-oscar- winners/69456/#slide5 (accessed 23 November 2015). 3 Arthur Mayer, ‘Revival of Democratic Film Industry Lags’, The New York Times, 24 April 1949 (X5).

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Here is a picture which was not made as propaganda or with any ulterior motive, but only to tell the story of the problems facing a great many Americans back from the war. Yet, because it was told in honest American terms without any attempt to gloss over deficiencies, it won recognition as an inspiring presentation of American democracy at work.4

Der Apfel, by contrast completely eschews realism, opting instead for a surrealist, absurdist cabaret design. A critical and commercial flop, Der Apfel was condemned by the Church before its release for its blasphemous parody of the Creation story, and was criticised after its opening for its unserious response to the question of German war guilt and responsibility, and for its ambiguous frivolity. Indeed, the Church deemed it completely inappropriate for German re-education.5 I argue that both films may be read as aesthetic responses to and even sensual experiences of mid-century liberal democracy, especially as the films thematise an optics of choice over and against real democratic invention and political self-determination. Given the conditions of military occupation and the mandated policy of democratic re-education, these films may be understood as narratives of democracy insofar as they are entertainment films selected for the audience in the occupied zone, putatively for the sake of their political rehabilitation. As fictions projecting images of liberal America and a fickle post-war Germany, Best Years and Der Apfel were part of a larger platform of propaganda, burdened with the task of representing some kind of democratic narrative of the present moment as a script for Germany’s political future. As fables, however, these are also pedagogical films that teach us the limits of such propaganda. Read in tandem, they criticise, knowingly or not, the ‘democracy-as-choice’ programme for its failures to instantiate a new political or aesthetic order. In what follows I situate these two films within the context of the occupation culture and American presumptions about democratic art. I will argue that Der Apfel ist ab, considered by critics at the time of its release as well as by present-day film scholars to be a decidedly undemocratic film, may actually be a better political object than Best Years,toutedasthe exemplary movie of democratic culture and cinematic style. To make this argument, however, it is necessary to explain how elusive and counter- intuitive definitions of democratic culture were in 1945. It is only against this background, in which a democratic style may be defined independently of democratic content, that a film like Der Apfel may emerge as a good object.

4 Samuel Goldwyn, ‘World Challenge to Hollywood’, The New York Times, 31 August 1947 (SM8). 5 ‘Die kirchlichen Behorden¨ zu Helmut Kautners¨ “Der Apfel ist ab”’, Der neue Film (Munich), 30/27 (1948). Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt a. M., press clippings for Der Apfel ist ab.

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THE POLITICS OF CHOICE

What continues to fascinate about the culture of occupied Germany is that it occasioned a formal policy of re-education that recognised the interconnectedness of culture with politics and economics, such that the arts were understood to be not merely epiphenomena of political systems, but constitutive of an entire world view. The so-called ‘brains trust’ of American wartime and occupation planners was composed of politically diverse American and German emigr´ e´ experts, from a range of disciplines, who studied tactics of total war and outlined a programme for ‘total occupation’ that would remould German society.6 Within this context, democracy was the goal of the occupation (the only positive term among the so-called ‘4 Ds’, the other three being de-militarisation, de-Nazification, and de-industrialisation), but it was rarely referred to as anything other than ‘a way of life’, usually an American way of life – encompassing an everyday ethics, a political system of representation, and a general commitment to individual freedom and happiness. Democracy was inclusive of these facets, but irreducible to either culture or politics. Democratic art and aesthetic experience were thus both instrumental to a larger system of political culture, and gave rise to a host of narratives of democracy. The democracy of this moment was mired in a number of paradoxes, perhaps endemic to democracy itself, not the least of which was the imposition of a democratic system by foreign military rule. The Americans wanted Germans to participate in open elections that would express the public will, but only when that will had been predictably re-oriented towards an outcome that would maintain liberal freedom. This could be achieved by limiting political pluralism: eliminating from the menu of choices fascist, communist, or anti-American parties. This is what Werner Sollors has recently explored in the context of Weimar and post-war Germany as the oxymoronic concept of ‘militant democracy’. Taken from Karl Loewenstein’s political theory, the term describes a ‘democracy strong enough to ban parties whose sole aim was to bring about an end to democracy’.7 As Chantal Mouffe explains it, the democratic paradox consolidates around a specifically liberal tradition. Liberalism abides ‘by the rule of law, the defense of human rights and the respect of individual liberty’. Democracy – rule by the people – presumes ‘equality [and] identity between governing and governed, and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between these two distinct traditions

6 For a superb discussion of the culture of research and intellectual exchange in the Central European Section of the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, see the introduction by Raffaele Laudani in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani, Princeton 2013, pp. 1–26. 7 Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s, Cambridge, MA 2014, p. 170.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 174 JENNIFER FAY but only a contingent historical articulation.’8 The occupation was one such articulation, emphasising and straining to convince Germans of the inseparability of these two concepts, with free market capitalism as the necessary intervening term. ‘Market democracy’ tells us that in a free market people choose the products they want, and thus what is profitable is also popular, and what is popular is also democratic.9 Given the mandate to re-educate the Germans democratically using film, it is worth considering how film and culture generally were defined in relation to this fraught political term.10 I want to focus on three interlocking suppositions. The first, rather specious tautology was proffered by the captains of the American film industry. A democratic film, they argued, was one produced in a democratic state in which films circulate in a competitive market unfettered by government censorship, trade barriers, or undue taxation. A successful film made and released under these conditions was democratic because audiences had chosen, of their free will, to support this film over others. Trade barriers to Hollywood films amounted to a form of censorship, and thus propaganda, because they limited the selection of films and audiences’ access to American culture – America’s democratic way of life. Indeed, the only reason foreign governments erected trade barriers in the first place, Hollywood executives argued, was because their citizens preferred Hollywood films to their own national cinema.11 On the one hand, a democratic film had nothing whatsoever to do with narrative content and everything to do with expanded consumer choice. On the other, it mattered a great deal that American films represented the American and presumably ‘democratic’ way of life. Presuming symmetry between producers and consumers, this notion of a democratic film claims that the capitalist industry gives the people what they want and that films reflect popular tastes. But it also argues that choosing in the marketplace is itself a democratic activity. As Victoria de Grazia argues, this is the Marshall Plan-era ideology of a ‘market empire’ revolving around the ‘sovereign consumer’. It was not only that choosing was the corollary of buying, but that making choices in the marketplace prepared citizens to make rational selections in politics.12 Importantly, however, the market empire ‘existed not to equalize or liberate, but to allocate and preserve existing freedoms’

8 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London 2000, p. 3. 9 Wendy Brown, ‘We are All Democrats Now’, in Democracy in What State?, ed. Giorgio Agamben, New York 2009, pp. 44–57 (p. 48). 10 This is a topic I take up at length in Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany, Minneapolis 2008. Here I build on this research to analyse democratic aesthetics and film form in the context of occupation. I thus rehearse some of the argument of my book in the pages that follow. 11 House of Representatives, Postwar Economic Policy and Planning Hearings before the Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning, 79th Cong. Part 9, Dec. 20, 1946, Washington, D.C. 1947, pp. 2,521–5. 12 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA 2005, p. 343.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 175 in the face of authoritarianism and command economies.13 Arguments about democratic cinema were thus the justification and the alibi for open markets after the war. The second, anthropological view, advanced by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict, all of whom advised in the planning for the occupation, sought to understand a connection between democratic society and its cultural artifacts, both to help morale on the American home- front during the war and to bring democracy to the Axis populations after defeat. Typically, democratic culture could best be understood in relation to fascism as its opposite or cure. In 1943 Bateson published an anthropological analysis of Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) to answer the question: ‘What sort of people were the Nazis?’ For Bateson, a fictional film made collaboratively and to satisfy mass tastes would yield to the trained observer secret insights into Nazi culture and its psychological dynamics. Bateson implicitly embraced the idea that the popular film reflected the national unconscious:

A painting, a poem or a dream may give an exceedingly false picture of the real world, but insofar as the painter or the poet is an artist, and insofar as he has complete control of his medium, the artistic product must of necessity tell us about the man himself. In the same way, this film, insofar as it is an integrated work of art [...] must tell us about the psychology of its makers, and tell us perhaps more than they intended to tell. [...] In the analysis, film has been treated not merely as an individual’s dream or work of art, but also (because it was created by a group and with an eye to the popular appeal) as amyth.14 I quote Bateson at length to demonstrate a methodology born out of the exigencies of warfare and re-education. Cinema is more than merely an entertainment or propagandistic medium. It is an ethnographic object through which one might discover an entire worldview and political mythology. As Fred Turner has recently remarked, Bateson’s lectures defused the propagandistic force of Nazi media: ‘film’ writes Turner, ‘became the ground of culture itself, a landscape open to observation. The viewer in turn became not a victim of the enemy’s hysteria, but its analyst.’15 Following from this study of Nazi cinema was the reasonable presumption that American democratic culture produced films in accordance with a democratic personality, which was defined by The Committee for National Morale as ‘psychologically whole and able to make rational, independent choices. It acts spontaneously, it changes in response to life circumstances,

13 Ibid., p. 103. 14 Gregory Bateson, ‘An Analysis of the Nazi Film Hitlerjunge Quex’, in The Study of Culture at a Distance, ed. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux,´ Chicago 1953, p. 302. Bateson’s article was originally published in 1943 and revised and republished in 1945. 15 Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multi-media & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, Chicago 2013, p. 73.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 176 JENNIFER FAY and it recognizes and accepts cultural and racial differences.’16 The goal of any democratic cultural policy, wrote Mead, is to foster ‘human beings who will choose and think the choice all important and be strong, healthy and wise in choosing’.17 In 1941 Mead and Bateson planned an exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art on the theme of ‘democracy’ that would be interactive, exploratory, and that would, according to their proposal, ‘restore to the individual his belief that he can make choices, he is not just a helpless musical instrument on which the propagandist plays whatever tune he wishes’.18 Such an exhibit, which was never mounted, would manifest a democratic experience – what Turner calls ‘the democratic surround’ – through active selection of things to look at and read, and by instilling in the visitor the sense that she is a free subject. Interestingly, their notes say nothing about democratic content per se, only the form of experience. It was left to film theorists (at the periphery of official policy) to articulate the specificity of cinema in the context of the 1940s democratic imperative. This is the third view. Siegfried Kracauer, a German emigr´ e´ writing in the US, and Andre´ Bazin, writing in Paris after war, were tremendously invested in the relationship between film and politics, form and feeling, fictional characters and national dispositions at mid-century, when film, the medium complicit during the war in the worst catastrophe in human history, could promote global humanism and world understanding. In his famous 1947 study of German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer not only made a persuasive case for national cinema as such, but also attuned his readers to the secret inner life that cinema supposedly projects: ‘What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions [...] which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness’.19 This programme of study, which had its origins in his Weimar-era commentaries, was written in the hope that cinema could emancipate its audience, or least help the theorist understand why emancipation might be stalled or foreclosed. Thus, film style and form reflected, but also produced, psychological dispositions and political imaginaries. Even the film theatre itself, he argued in the Weimar era, had revolutionary potential. In contrast to Nazi and communist visual culture, one could start to describe a democratic alternative associated with a style of realism, ambiguity, and, above all, spectatorial choice, which could refer to the selection of a film from the list of titles playing, or choosing what in a film merits attention. I return to these theorists later in the essay. For now, I want only to highlight that what all of these definitions of mid-century democratic culture share is the idea

16 This is Turner’s summary of the Committee of National Morale in ibid., p. 60. 17 Margaret Mead, ‘The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values’, in Science, Philosophy, and Religion: A Symposium, New York 1942, p. 68. 18 Quoted in Turner (note 15), p. 75. Capitalisation as in the original. 19 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton 1947, p. 6.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 177 of choice and selection. In other words, democratic form is the democratic content. It operates through the dynamic of selection. This notion of democratic art anticipates some of Jacques Ranciere’s` writings that have spearheaded a rapprochement between politics and aesthetics and helps us to push beyond the categories of propaganda and ideology. As he defines it, aesthetics refers to ways of doing and making, and forms of visibility and invisibility. Aesthetics describes precisely the kinds of sense perceptions that ‘induce novel forms of political subjectivity’ and communal practice, what he calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’.20 Insofar as politics involves the experience and distribution of space, time, and vision, it is, at its core, aesthetic. And insofar as the aesthetic gives form and structure to experience, it is political. Yet Ranciere` cautions against any notion either of art’s autonomy or its complete submission to politics, and argues for a historically situated understanding of how these twinned endeavours of sensory organisation inform each other. As he writes, ‘The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation [...] what they have in common [formally, historically] with them.’21 And this is the method of my essay: to consider what The Best Years of Our Lives and Der Apfel ist ab have in common with the project of post-war democratic experience in the context of the occupation and mid-century geopolitics.

AMERICAN FILM, AMERICAN DEMOCRACY?: THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

Almost universally, German reviewers praised Best Years as the most important, insightful Hollywood film to have reached them in the post-war period. It allowed audiences to glimpse both an American everyday way of life (‘Alltag’) and the country’s handling of the ‘Heimkehrer’ problem, reminding viewers that even their occupiers were struggling with ‘die gleichen Schwierigkeiten und Sorgen’ of post-war re-adjustment as were Germans, though with important material differences.22 Calling the film a ‘tragisches Tribut’ to all that was sacrificed for war, one critic urged that everyone should see this film that sums up the private experience of an entire generation, as well as the shape of American political life:

Der Film ist ein amerikanischer Film. Er sagt als solcher mehr uber¨ Amerika und die Chance Demokratie, als hundert Leitartikel und Parteiredner in drei Nachkriegsjahren in Deutschland uber¨ Demokratie haben sagen konnen.¨ [...] In jedem schauspielerischen und regielichen Detail dieses Films finden

20 Jacques Ranciere,` The Politics of Aesthetics, London 2004, pp. 12–13. 21 Ibid., p. 19. 22 ‘Die besten Jahre unseres Lebens’, DerneueFilm, 2/12 (21 July 1948), 5. Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt a. M., press clipping, Die besten Jahre unseres Lebens (cited hereafter as ‘DIF, BY’).

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Figure 3. Homer (Harold Russell), Fred (Dana Andrews) and Al (Fredric March) in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946).

wir den seiner Nationalitat¨ enthobenen Menschen wieder, der die besten Jahre seines Lebens dem Kriege hat opfern mussen.¨ 23 Focusing on three soldiers from different parts of the military and different social classes in the US, the film explores the distance between men changed and damaged by war and a country and social order that have remained largely intact (Figure 3). The soldiers get their first glimpse of home when they make their way from the stateside army base back to Boon City in a B-17 bomber, the very craft that devastated the towns and homes of Germany just months before. Viewing Boon City through the window of the bomb-aimer station as it flies in for a landing, we see the familiar signs of civilian life (a golf course, the high school football field), a view that conveys America’s ʻescape from destructionʼ during the war, as Edward Dimendberg writes (Figure 4).24 This sequence recalls Wyler’s famous documentary for the Office of War Information, Memphis Belle: Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), when the filmmaker accompanied the 324th Bomber Squadron on its twenty-fifth and final mission over Wilhelmshaven. In this documentary it is not Boon City but Nazi territory

23 ‘Die besten Jahre unseres Lebens’, 1948 (no author, exact date, or publication provided), DIF, BY. 24 Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, MA 2004, p. 45.

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Figure 4. Returning soldiers gaze from the bomb-aimer station at the American heartland unchanged by war. The Best Years of our Lives. that is similarly framed first by the plane’s window and then by the camera as a target. This sequence from Best Years presents the American landscape as precisely that which has been spared the ravages of aerial bombing. Once grounded, Best Years settles on three interwoven stories of the soldiers’ re-adjustment to and re-acquaintance with post-war American culture – at once as strange and familiar to the soldiers as it was to German audiences. Wyler was especially attentive to the details and gestures of American life, eschewing Hollywood glamour and artificiality in favour of realism, and even re-enactment. For example, the intimate reunion between Al and his family was scripted and staged after Wyler’s own homecoming after the war, down to the last details of furniture, rugs, clothing, exchanged glances, and hugs (Figure 5). And Harold Russell performs any number of virtuoso tasks with the hooks that replaced his lost hands, mingling his real-life achievement of physical rehabilitation with its fictional re-enactment. Not a few German critics remarked that, however universal the story of a returning solider may be, this film reminds them that, above all, Americans had homes to return to, and that ‘return’ was spatially, temporally, maybe even temperamentally possible only for the victors. ‘Der Film ist ohne Zweifel ein Spitzenfilm amerikanischer Filmarbeit’, writes the critic for Berlin am Mittag :

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 180 JENNIFER FAY

Figure 5. Fred greets his family in a set modeled on Wyler’s own homecoming. The Best Years of our Lives.

Vielleicht ist der amerikanische Soldat heimgekehrt. Wir sind noch nicht heimgekehrt, da wir noch keine Heimstatt haben, ruhelos zwischen Tag und Traum arbeitend und wandernd, sind wir auf dem Wege zu jenem Europa, das aus Vision Wirklichkeit werden soll: Soldaten und Heimkehrer in der Wandlung zu Menschen und Kampfern¨ der friedlichen Zeiten.25

The Berliner Zeitung also noted the stark differences between these two continents:

In Europas verwusteten¨ Fluren bescheint die Sonne nicht so sehr Sieger als einfach Uberlebende,¨ und es beschleicht uns weniger Neid als fast ein wenig Stolz dabei, daß unser Verzeichnis der wirklich lebenswichtigen Dinge so klein geworden ist. Der Weg zuruck¨ ist am kurzesten¨ dort, wo es gar kein Zuruck¨ mehr gibt.26

Yet another reviewer remarks that the film’s investigation of life up-close and through the ‘optimistische Gestaltung’ of the three main characters’ fates is a reminder:

25 ‘Die besten Jahre unseres Lebens’, Berlin am Mittag (22 July 1947), DIF, BY. 26 W. Lg, ‘Wenn Manner¨ heimkehren’, Berliner Zeitung (18 July 1947), DIF, BY.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 181

Es ist wohl ein Unterschied, in welche Umgebung ein Heimkehrer zuruckkehrt:¨ In das Land des Verlierers oder das des Siegers! Letztlich aber ist da fur¨ beide ein gemeinsamer Nenner: Mit Anstand auf die unwiederbringlich besten Jahre des Lebens neu aufzubauen. Der Film bringt uns Amerika naher,¨ besser, als es manche Bucher¨ vermogen.¨ 27 Best Years supposedly tells us more about democracy and America than any speech, book, or propaganda in the last three years. Yet the concrete democratic life-world is an ocean away, while the future of Europe remains a mere vision for those existing between day and dream. In this review, democracy is little more than a synonym for American culture. This is not a film about men who must make political decisions – or any decisions, really. The tragedy of the story is that their ‘future’ is to find a way back into their past lives, a way back that is foreclosed to a German audience. What exactly makes this a democratic film, then?

ANDRE´ BAZIN AND WYLER’S DEMOCRATIC STYLE

Writing in France in 1948, just four years after the Nazi occupation, Andre´ Bazin was also fixated on this most celebrated American film. In his famous essay on Wyler, first published in Revue de Cinema´ , Bazin, like a few of the reviewers above, praises Wyler for taking up a critical problem in the post- war order, namely the re-integration of soldiers returning from the world’s most brutal war. Wyler, he argues, has translated his own experience of world conflict into an ‘ethic of realism’. This results in sets that are built to the measure of actual living spaces; costuming and make-up that come out of everyday life; and the use of a medium (or normal) lens to document how the war changed everything and nothing in the typical American town. Most impressively, however, Wyler’s story about post-war liberal culture is told in a democratic style. In contrast to directors who imprint their signature vision onto material and who impose an unambiguous meaning onto every shot, Wyler wants only for his spectator to ‘see everything’ and ‘make choices of his own will’. Sharp, deep-focus, long takes are ‘reassuring to the viewer’, because they give ‘the opportunity to observe and to make a selection’ within the frame, and time enough ‘to form an opinion’. Thus, declares Bazin, ‘this film aims at being liberal and democratic, like the conscience of both the American viewers and of the characters’.28 Bazin may be the first film theorist to propose a democratic film style, but one, as I will discuss, that is fraught with seemingly undemocratic tension. And it is this tension that is most interesting to me in view of the re-education programme in which the film participated.

27 Gunther¨ Milbradt, ‘Die bestern Jahre unseres Lebens’ (1948; newspaper title not given), DIF, BY. 28 Andre´ Bazin, ‘William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing’, in Bazin at Work, ed. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, tr. Bert Cardullo, London 1997, p. 9.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 182 JENNIFER FAY

Figure 6. Homer and Butch (Hoagy Carmichael) play ‘Chopsticks’ in the foreground while Fred makes a phone call in the background. Al, in medium shot, tries to attend to both of these actions. The Best Years of our Lives.

The key example comes in a scene set in Butch’s bar. Fred, the former bomb-aimer played by Dana Andrews, has concluded a tense meeting with Al (played by Fredric March), who has demanded that Fred break off his illicit romance with Al’s daughter, Peggy. Noticing the phone booth at the bar’s entrance, Fred immediately makes the call at the very back of the shot. Al stands in the mid-ground where, it so happens, he meets another friend, Homer (Harold Russell), the disabled veteran who has learned to play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano with his hooks (Figure 6). Eager to show off his hard-earned talents, Homer performs for Al. Thus we, the spectators, see in the space of one shot two simultaneous actions played out in deep space staging and deep focus cinematography. Homer commands our attention and Al’s in the foreground, as he plays a duet with none other than Hoagy Carmichael, while Fred makes his phone call in the background. Dramatically speaking, observes Bazin, the ‘real action’ of the scene is the phone call, which is both inaudible and far away; the piano recital, what Bazin calls ‘the diverting action’, is large and loud in the foreground, and ‘conversely proportional to its dramatic significance’. It is not that Homer’s performance is immaterial, however. Bazin notes that the spectator is invested in both the fictional and actual veteran’s recovery

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 183

Figure 7. Al looks over his shoulder at the phone booth while Fred makes the call. The Best Years of our Lives. and fascinated by his virtuosity. Or, as Bazin writes: you don’t get ‘to see someone play piano with hooks everyday’.29 As a result of this meiotic – or understated, even dramatically inverted – mise en scene` , we perform our own mental editing, based on the paradigm of classical continuity, as our eyes focus on the action in the foreground (a close-up), dart to Al’s face in the mid-ground (a medium shot), and then attend to the dramatic action in the background (a long shot), all without the need for classical editing by the director. Bazin writes:

Wyler killed two birds with one stone: first, the diversion of the piano allows him to extend as long as possible a shot that would otherwise have seemed endless and consequently monotonous; second, and more important, this parasitic pole of attraction organizes the image dramatically and spatially. The real action at the phone booth is juxtaposed against the action at the piano, which directs the attention of the viewer almost against his will to itself, where it is supposed to be, for as long as it is supposed to be there. Thus the viewer is induced actively to participate in the drama planned by the director.30

Of course, Bazin notes that Wyler does cut into the scene twice to eliminate Homer from the frame (Figure 7), just to be sure that we register the

29 Ibid., p. 15. 30 Ibid.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 184 JENNIFER FAY importance of the phone call we can barely see, but not hear. The choice of where to look, significantly, does not find its complement in a choice of where to listen. Wyler’s gamble is that by staging such compelling, but less dramatically important, action in the foreground, we are even more active in attending to the small and silent background. The point, however, is that this ‘democratic style’ revolves around the ‘coexistence of two actions of unequal significance’ in the same shot. ‘Thus the viewer is induced actively to participate in the drama planned by the director’ through her ambient gaze.31 There are a few counter-intuitive, what I could consider to be almost anti-democratic, features of this ‘democratic style’ in Bazin’s account. Democracy arises neither out of the equality of actions nor out of the equality of presentation, but in the opportunity to choose. Moreover, whereas earlier in the essay Bazin describes a spectator who mentally edits of her own free will, or potential freedom, in this scene, her will is forced against itself as she must choose between a visually less compelling drama in the background and a dramatically less significant spectacle in the foreground. In fact, this scene is emblematic of how the democratic style emerges out of the film’s humanitarian sentimentality: the narrative drama is punctuated, we might say distracted, by an overwrought, even aggressively sentimental performance: a handless war hero plays piano with his hooks. One result is that the moment at which the film calls on us to exercise our freedom is precisely when the director exerts maximal control. Finally, as Bazin observes, Wyler’s spectator is not only ‘free’ to edit mentally; the choice itself is staged as a matter of distraction, a distraction necessary, in Bazin’s reading, to manage the boredom or ‘monotony’ of real time and duration (in this case, the time for Fred to make the phone call). The choice to look is not only a matter of democratic selection, it is also, paradoxically, a distraction in the form of entertainment that is necessary for contemplation. This reading suggests that entertainment may itself be a form of democratic distraction from the democratic freedom of choice. While Bazin’s reading of spectatorial choice may seem forced, he is perfectly aware of these paradoxes. The genius of the film is that it manages these tensions while granting the spectator some power over the images’ significance. The viewer ‘is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives’.32 One wonders if this Hollywood film is staging in theory, if not also in fact, the sly coerciveness of democratic experience. Even Wyler remarks on the overall effect of the film’s style: ‘what [the film] has to say is gotten across in such an entertaining manner that people coming out of the theatre will think they are saying it, not the writer or the

31 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 32 Andre´ Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, in What is Cinema? Vol. I, ed. and tr. Hugh Grey, Berkeley, CA 1971, p. 36.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 185 director or the producer.’33 This kind of participation – from the choice to look leading to the will to speak – leads the spectator almost subconsciously to adopt the director’s perspective as his or her own. This may be a more exacting explanation of an American democratic style as subterfuge.

DER APFEL IST AB AND DEMOCRATIC REFUSAL

The question of attentional distraction as a tool of democratic choice brings me to the second film, Der Apfel ist ab. Contentious, unpopular, and commercially unsuccessful, thematising indecision and, upon its release, prompting perplexity among audiences, this was by no definition a democratic film. The controversy, about which both Robert Shandley and Heide Fehrenbach have written, concerned the Church’s objection to the film’s satiric treatment of the Creation story and humanity’s fall from grace.34 But perhaps just as politically problematic was the film’s putative trivialisation of the contemporary moment. Whereas Best Years resolves the universal problem of post-war re-adjustment through an intimate family melodrama (the final scene of resolution, as tradition demands, is a wedding), Der Apfel turns bourgeois melodrama (an industrialist who cannot choose between his wife and his mistress) into a world-historical crisis of biblical proportions. This film may even intimate that the bourgeois family is the world-historical crisis and unfortunate fate of humankind. Unable to choose between two women on Earth, Adam is also unable to choose between Eva and Lilith in Paradise, or between Heaven and Hell, or between paradisiacal boredom and infernal distraction. Indeed, in this film, Hell is having to choose. Luzifer (Arno Assmann) easily lures Adam and Eva (Bettina Moissi) into his nightclub after their interminable languishing in Paradise where they await the Earth’s construction. He then offers them a vast menu of entertainments. The couple sits in a theatrical surround where their demonic host invites them to select the evening’s entertainment. Crammed onto a series of separate stages, we see excerpts from a can-can dance, a boxing match, a Wagner opera, a military march, a chamber of horrors, and a jazz nightclub (Figure 8). Each tableau explodes (often via superimposition) into the frame as the camera tracks forward to discover some unsettling detail in the mise en scene` .Kautner¨ then cuts back to the dumbfounded couple (Figure 9). Luzifer says: ‘Sie brauchen nur zu wahlen.’¨ ‘Wahlen’,¨ of course, means both to choose and to vote, and thus the problem of selection is also a question of politics. Initially,

33 Thomas M. Pryor, ‘William Wyler and His Screen Philosophy’, The New York Times, 17 November 1946, 77. 34 Robert R. Shandley’s discussion of the controversy and the film’s commercial and critical failure in Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Philadelphia 2001, pp. 167–74; Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler, Chapel Hill 1995, pp. 84–9.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 186 JENNIFER FAY

Figure 8. The can-can, one of the entertainments on offer in Hell’s nightclub. Der Apfel ist ab.

Figure 9. Adam and Eva (Bettina Moissi) are overwhelmed by the entertainment surrounding them in Hell. Der Apfel ist ab.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 187

Figure 10. Prismatic confusion in Hell’s nightclub. Der Apfel ist ab. we, like Adam, have neither the time to choose, nor the competing actions within the shot to select from. However, in Hell’s democracy the supposedly sovereign subjects must decide. Unable to select one act, Adam and Eva are subject to them all simultaneously, and their sensory overload becomes manifest in the visual and aural style. Variety theatre is no longer presented sequentially or in depth, but in an over-crowded space and cacophonous sound design. As Adam and Eva sit on a rotating platform, the chaotic array flits by, turning democratic choice into centrifugal nausea which then gives way to prismatic superimpositions and complete abstraction (Figures 10 and 11). Entertainment becomes two-dimensional design, while ‘music’ becomes something approaching noise. In this way a narrative moment of indecision is conveyed through a style of anarchic confusion, and we are no more able to make selections within the shot (editing mentally) than Adam is able to orient himself within this hall of distractions. Adam and Eva, covering their eyes and taking to their heels, find refuge in the sensory calm of boring Paradise, where there are no decisions to make and where diversion, such as it exists, is in the form of a white piano courtesy of an American C.A.R.E. package (Figure 12). The piano, in both films, is the director’s chosen instrument of democratic distraction! I take this to be a democratic style of a different order. In contrast to Bazin’s idealised film spectator who selects between two unequal actions

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 188 JENNIFER FAY

Figure 11. Confusion gives way to abstraction in Hell’s nightclub. Der Apfel ist ab.

Figure 12. Adam and Eva enjoy a new piano in Paradise courtesy of a C.A.R.E. package. Der Apfel ist ab.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 189 staged within the same frame, Kautner¨ depicts a scene of spectatorship explicitly in the film’s diegesis. Adam and Eva must choose from among many separate but equally problematic and unsatisfying entertainments. And, as we have seen, Der Apfel was itself considered an inappropriate entertainment choice for post-war German audiences. While the sequence suggests that each of these entertainment forms has a political valence (the sexual politics of the French can-can, the racial dynamics of boxing, the musical ‘impurities’ of American jazz, and the fascist contamination of Die Walkure¨ – all of them caricatures of cultural politics), there is not one on offer that captivates both Adam and Eva. Within the frame itself we also find a pronounced contrast with Best Years. Whereas Wyler provides compositional depth and legibility in order to focus our attention and encourage us to gaze ‘freely’ according to his, the director’s, will, Kautner,¨ explicitly thematising choice, risks our alienation by providing no viable options. Indeed, so fragmentary is the mise en scene` and so chaotic is the nightclub experience that both absorption and contemplation are out of the question. Adam’s democratic failure, of course, is not that he chooses unwisely, but that he makes no choice at all. Even selecting Wagner would bring order to this diabolical evening. Adam is politically and socially disobedient in his indecision, and the film style may actually have a lot to say about the dream work of democracy. Towards the end of his fantasy, when Adam still finds himself torn between two women, a bi-lateral summit between Heaven and Hell is called in order to rescue humankind from a non-reproductive future. Adam stubbornly declares that he wants both women or none. The law, however, will not permit polygamy. The talks at a standstill, God (in the form of a papier-machˆ e´ hand) intervenes by creating an unlikely compromise: both women in one. Upon awakening back in the lobby (this entire adventure to a Heavenly occupation thereby confirmed to be an unconscious projection), Adam encounters this very dream woman. They exchange hopeful smiles and ride off in a tram back to town. This film probes both through its narrative and style the limits and usefulness of democratic refusal that emerges out of boredom and distraction. By refusing the choices of entertainment or of women, Adam manages to dream up a new future. Kautner’s¨ own description of his authorial intent taps into the democratic zeitgeist of the occupation. He explained in an interview that the film is about the trouble that comes when a man cannot choose between two things. ‘You can take it politically, but you can also take it purely as human nature in reference to all things that we come across today in these uncertain times.’35 The editorial staff at Munich’s Echo der Woche, however,

35 ‘Wohin rollt der Apfel?: Ein Gesprach¨ mit Helmut Kautner’,¨ DieneueFilmwoche,45(5December 1948), 517. Press clippings for Der Apfel ist ab,HelmutKautner¨ Archiv, folder 44, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Kunste,¨ Berlin (cited hereafter as ‘AdK, Apfel’).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 190 JENNIFER FAY had a different take. The film did not explore the aesthetics of choice, but led, instead, to spectatorial confusion. The ending produced at least three different opinions and three different interpretations. Was the woman at the tram-stop a distillation of both Eva and Lilith? Or was the point that each viewer could see in her what he or she wanted? Or was the woman a new Eve, fashioned in Heaven and sent down to accompany Adam on Earth? This ambiguity was completely unsatisfactory and suggested that Kautner¨ had not made up his own mind on the matter.36 Kautner¨ failed either because he could not decide, or precisely because he offered viewers too many interpretive options. Responding to this editorial, the painter Oswald Malura praised Der Apfel:

Es ist ein Film, bei dem man denken muss, und der deshalb moglicherweise¨ im breiten Publikum nicht den erwunschten¨ Anklang finden wird. Die meisten Menschen sind heute denkfaul, und jeder Film, der ihren Geist herausfordert, begibt sich auf unsicheren Boden. Zeitubel!¨ Doch zuruck¨ zum Apfel. – Traumwelt und Wirklichkeit mit den trivialsten Dingen des Lebens gemischt – Geist und Fulle¨ der Vorstellung, trotz Pappe und Gips, das ist ‘Der Apfel ist ab’. Moge¨ dieser Film uns allen ein guter Vorbote sein, dass auch wir eines Tages nach einem schweren Traum die Verwirklichung unseres sehnlichsten Wunsches in einer neuen Lebenssynthese vorfinden: ein Leben in Gluck,¨ Wohlstand und Frieden auf lange Sicht.37

This film, then, may require too active a spectator, one who must think too hard for too long to understand Kautner’s¨ challenge. Malura also tells us that Adam’s refusal may actually lead to a future in which the binary oppositions in life dissolve into a happy synthesis. Choosing between two unequal options, in other words, does not lead to a new future or to happiness. Instead, having to elect one given option over the other confirms the status quo of limited choice. Der Apfel, then, may be a more radically democratic film, despite its unpopularity and presumed inappropriateness for democratic re-education. Read together with an American film celebrated for its liberal, democratic humanism, Der Apfel helps us to see the limitations of Hollywood’s political style.

DEMOCRATIC FABLES

At a moment when Germany was caught between two superpowers and on the eve of its own sovereignty, Der Apfel proffers the notion of democratic refusal as a starting point for emancipation – even if only as a means to liberate Adam from his fickle romantic bondage. The scenario in this film abides by Thomas Docherty’s more recent observation that democracy is

36 ‘An die Schriftleitung des Echo der Woche’, Echo der Woche (8 January 1949), AdK, Apfel. 37 Oswald Malura, ‘An die Redaktion. Kritik zum Film: ‘Der Apfel ist ab’, Echo der Woche,AdK,Apfel.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEMOCRATIC FILM AND THE AESTHETICS OF CHOICE 191 not a matter of making choices in the marketplace, or polling booths, or anywhere else, because choice finally limits freedom. Democracy – ‘episodic and rare’ – arises out of an aesthetic event of self-invention.38 The arts, he argues, have the potential to prompt a shared encounter with ‘forms of novelty that will allow us to move “beyond” ourselves, beyond who and where we are, beyond where we’re from’. Aesthetic democracy requires our ‘imagining the impossible, and then establishing or actualizing the impossible, the unforeseeable’ that can lead to a thinking-beyond the ready- made, boring options of marketplace politics.39 While Der Apfel would seem to negate democratic experience according to its mid-century definition, it may, however meekly, point to a democratic future. Reading Kautner’s¨ film alongside Best Years and Bazin’s theory of democratic style, we can pinpoint techniques and scenarios of an ambivalent aesthetic of choice. There is Der Apfel ist ab, in which refusal to choose leads to an unforeseen and happy future. Then there is The Best Years of Our Lives, in which we discover the limits of democratic agency and the seduction of choice over genuine self-determination. I will not in closing declare that they or I have identified a set of trans-historical democratic styles, or that empirical audience members were necessarily attuned to this relationship between style and political action. This is a textual reading bolstered by the archive. There is always the danger that aesthetic forms do not translate into political experience, or, worse, that they systematically foreclose such experience. Forms of ‘democracy’ without individual agency are the basis of an undemocratic and often militaristic society, where people feel they are represented (say in the cinema on screen or through the process of voting), but where the material conditions and inequality of the status quo remain the same. This was Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis: ‘Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relation which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights.’40 As Benjamin sees it, this mode of representation without rights is the aestheticisation of political life, which culminates in war. The answer – the antidote – comes from the communist politicisation of art, specifically to be found in the proletarian montage cinema of Eisenstein. In the aftermath of war, however, the political terrain had changed: fascism was forbidden and Soviet communism was off the table in 1948 for citizens in the Western Zones. What remained, then, was to work through some kind of democratic style, knowing that no aesthetic alone could secure a political present or future.

38 Thomas Docherty, Aesthetic Democracy, Stanford, CA 2006, pp. xiii–xiv. 39 Ibid., p. 151. 40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (second version), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael J. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA 2008, p. 41.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 192 JENNIFER FAY Thus, it might be more appropriate to say that Bazin, Wyler, and Kautner¨ provide democratic film fables that speak to the ambivalences of (and thus have something in common with) the post-war politics of their moment. I take the term ‘film fable’ from Jacques Ranciere’s` book of the same name. In his theory, cinema is born out of a dialectical relationship between the intelligent director who moulds material according to his artistic purposes and the passive machine that always records what is in excess of narrative signification. As a result, films are open both to narrative comprehension and to de-figurative readings that delight in cinema’s power to capture the insignificant, overlooked, and even banal minutiae – ‘the meaningless truth of life’.41 These are the details that the eye unaided tends not to perceive, or that narrative eschews for the sake of dramatic coherence. Most films strike a balance between these two extremes: the ‘pure creative activity’ of the filmmaker and ‘the pure passivity’ of the machine that records ‘the very surface of things, independently of every desire to signify or create’.42 The visual and narrative registers of film, argues Ranciere,` are always in tension with, if not undercutting, each other. And thus, by virtue of its technology, film is a ‘thwarted fable’ of its own narrative ambitions. Conversely, its narrative ambitions betray film’s capacity to elevate mechanical recording above the cause and effect muthos of Aristotelian drama. The significance of this opposition is that film, in the hands of the right maker, demands interpretation and, as Tom Conley remarks, ‘interpretation gains access to the arena in which politics and aesthetics are set in play in multifarious ways’.43 Best Years and Der Apfel represent particularly rich and historically situated democratic film fables, especially as they play the optics or narrative of choice against each other. In the process, they create two democratic styles that work productively against themselves and each other: free choice is undercut by subtle coercion, distraction is a means of directing attention, entertainment courts boredom, choice leads to withdrawal, and refusal leads to open futures. Calling these ‘democratic styles’, I posit that these films provide a fitting description of the affective registers of America’s market empire in post-war Germany and the paradoxical features of democratic praxis. Yet, film theory tells us that there is always the possibility that the spectator will engage with the film otherwise. Or, in momentarily looking away the movie-goer may recognise what this aesthetic of democracy has in common with its praxis and will labour to change, if not the style of film, then the democratic order of things.

41 Jacques Ranciere,` Film Fables, tr. Emiliano Battista, Oxford 2010, p. 17. 42 Ibid., p. 8. 43 Tom Conley, ‘Film Fables’, Screening the Past (online journal) (20 November 2006): http://t l w e b . latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/20/film-fables.html (accessed 23 Nov. 2015).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

‘HEAVEN HELP THE YANKEES IF THEY CAPTURE YOU’: WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY EMILY OLIVER (University of Warwick)

ABSTRACT First published in German in 1937, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind was one of the most popular books in Germany throughout the Second World War and well into the occupation period. This article investigates why Mitchell’s tale of the American Civil War and the South’s humiliating defeat and subsequent occupation by hostile powers captured the popular imagination in occupied Germany. Drawing on the portrayal of women in the post-war German press, the article illuminates how Scarlett O’Hara’s transgression of traditional gender roles offered female readers potential for identification with the central character. Through reading Gone with the Wind in relation to debates about women’s behaviour, relationships, and bodies during the occupation period, it argues that the novel participated in the victim discourse arising within Germany immediately after the Second World War.

Nach seiner deutschen Publikation im Jahre 1937 avancierte Margaret Mitchells Roman Vom Winde verweht rasch zu einem der beliebtesten Bucher¨ in Deutschland und bußte¨ auch wahrend¨ der Besatzungszeit nichts an Popularitat¨ ein. Dieser Artikel erortert,¨ warum Mitchells Erzahlung¨ uber¨ den amerikanischen Burgerkrieg¨ und die demutigende¨ Niederlage und Besatzung der Sudstaaten¨ die Phantasie der besetzten Deutschen anregte. Durch Vergleiche mit der Darstellung von Frauen in der deutschen Nachkriegspresse erlautert¨ der Artikel, inwiefern Scarlett O’Haras Verstoß gegen traditionelle Geschlechterrollen weiblichen Lesern Identifikationspotential mit der Zentralfigur bot. Indem Bezuge¨ zwischen Vom Winde verweht und Nachkriegsdebatten uber¨ Frauenverhalten hergestellt werden, wird argumentiert, dass der Roman einen Teil des Opfer-Diskurses bildete, der bereits wahrend¨ der Besatzungszeit in Deutschland entstand.

In 1945, with the Red Army advancing on Germany, thirty-five-year-old Erna Eschenburg and her sister Frieda decided it was time to flee back to their native Berlin from the Sudetenland, where Erna had been posted for work. Having been bombed out twice, they had few possessions left, but they piled what little they had onto a handcart along with Frieda’s two-year-old son, Hans. Erna recalls: Da hinein hatten wir auch unsere letzten guten Bucher¨ gestopft, weil wir daran so hingen, ‘Vom Winde verweht’ und so. Diese Bucher¨ haben wir unterwegs eingetauscht in Maggisuppen. Und mit diesen paar Maggisuppen und geklauten Kartoffeln haben wir uns durchgeschlagen bis nach Berlin. Außerdem hatten wir nur noch das, was wir am Leib hatten, leichtes Gepack.¨ 1

1 Erna Eschenburg, quoted in Sibylle Meyer and Eva Schulze, Wie wir das alles geschafft haben: Alleinstehende Frauen berichten uber¨ ihr Leben nach 1945, Munich 1984, pp. 74–5.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 194 EMILY OLIVER The image of two women and a child fleeing an oncoming army will be familiar to readers of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The fact that two German women at the end of the Second World War considered this American novel one of their most prized possessions might encourage us to look more closely at the kind of imaginative fiction women engaged with at this time, and the aspects of their lives which gave it particular relevance. When Margaret Mitchell died in 1949, the Berlin journalist Hellmut Jaesrich called her ‘die erfolgreichste Schriftstellerin Amerikas, der Welt, ja vielleicht aller Zeiten’. Although critical of the style of Gone with the Wind, Jaesrich’s article in the Tagesspiegel praised Mitchell’s talent for creating sympathetic yet ambivalent characters. In his view, Scarlett O’Hara exemplified this nuanced characterisation, since she was ‘keine flache Schablone [...] ungut und doch sympathisch, egoistisch und doch von schneller, tatkraftiger¨ Hilfsbereitschaft, strahlend schon¨ und erfolgshungrig und doch immer wieder vom Leben genarrt und enttauscht’.¨ Jaesrich claimed that millions of female readers had secretly identified with Scarlett O’Hara. He also pointed out a further reason for the novel’s enormous and continued popularity:

Das Urweibliche, zart, doch wider Erwarten elastisch, ja fast stahlhart, in einer Welt voller Schrecken, voll Krieg, Wirren und Unsicherheit – vielleicht hat dieses Leitmotiv des Buches den Hauptanteil an seinem Erfolg, als sei in der riesigen Schar seiner Leser schon die Ahnung vorhanden gewesen, daß sich etwas wie der grimmige, aber doch noch ein wenig biedermeierliche Krieg zwischen Nord- und Sudstaaten¨ bald in noch grausigeren Formen zutragen sollte.2 For Jaesrich, looking back from the perspective of 1949, it seemed as though fiction had become reality since the novel’s publication in 1936. The other striking aspect of his article is its emphasis on resilience, determination, and adaptability as specifically female responses to the horrors of war and the hardships of post-war life. Gone with the Wind was an extremely popular reading choice in Germany during and after the Second World War. First published in the United States in 1936, the novel was rapidly translated into German by Martin Beheim- Schwarzbach and appeared in Germany in September 1937.3 Within two days, Vom Winde verweht had already sold 12,000 copies, and by 1941 it had gone through sixteen print runs with a total of almost 280,000 copies.4 As John Haag points out in his study of the novel’s fate under the Third Reich, actual numbers of readers were probably even higher, since the large, expensive tome (selling at 12.50 RM) would have been circulated among family and friends, and ‘virtually every German lending library stocked one

2 Hellmut Jaesrich, ‘Margaret Mitchell gestorben’, Der Tagesspiegel, 17 August 1949, 5. 3 Margaret Mitchell, Vom Winde verweht, tr. Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach, Hamburg 1937. 4 See Anne-Marie Wallrath-Janssen, Der Verlag H. Goverts im Dritten Reich, Munich 2007, p. 447.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 195 or several copies’. Although no further reprints were authorised after the US entered the war in 1941, the book was never removed from private households, and Haag estimates that it ‘may well have been read by as many as a million Germans by 1945’.5 The novel’s pre-war publication meant that surviving copies would have been available in all four zones of occupied Germany. The popularity of Gone with the Wind among Germans continued unabated during the immediate post-war years. The first new edition to appear in 1946 sold out completely within a very short space of time, and throughout the occupation period the novel remained the most sought- after work of fiction in public lending libraries.6 In July 1949, a report on Berlin libraries noted: ‘“Vom Winde verweht” liegt noch immer an der Spitze der Publikumswunsche’.¨ The author bemoaned the fact that books were still scarce in post-war Germany and could not keep pace with popular demand. She also reported that the library’s main user group had not changed over the past ten or even twenty years: ‘Die Frauen sind in der Uberzahl’.¨ 7 Although not strictly a ‘zero hour’ text, the availability of Gone with the Wind during and after the war, as well as its subject matter, made it a book female readers could (re-)turn to at a time when its fictional content increasingly mirrored their post-war reality. This article investigates the reasons for the popularity of Gone with the Wind in post-war Germany by examining the conditions of its re-publication under Anglo-American cultural policy on the one hand, and highlighting key points of appeal to female readers in occupied Germany on the other. It draws parallels between the portrayal of women’s ‘survival work’ after the American Civil War in Gone with the Wind and press portrayals of the social, political, and economic issues affecting German women’s lives in the wake of the Second World War. By highlighting the ways in which the fictional scenarios of Gone with the Wind mirrored everyday life for women in occupied Germany, I argue that identification with Scarlett O’Hara offered female readers potential justifications for their behaviour at a time when women’s choices, relationships, and bodies were subject to intense public scrutiny, and both Allied and German law-makers proved unresponsive to their demands. Through its foregrounding of female suffering, the novel participates in the victim discourse which arose in the first decade after the Second World War, enabling German women to claim that they had been victims of the war instead of interrogating their own

5 John Haag, ‘Gone with the Wind in Nazi Germany’, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 73 (1989), 278– 304 (279). 6 See Wallrath-Janssen, Der Verlag H. Goverts (note 4), p. 447. See also Eva Siewert, ‘Wie der Roman Vom Winde verweht entstand’, Telegraf, 4 October 1946, 5; unknown author, ‘Mit den Augen einer Frau...’, Telegraf, 2 August 1949, 5. 7 Charlotte Fang, ‘Hier Wunschzettel, dort Zufallstreffer: Wer liest was in der Volksbucherei?¨ Berlinerinnen sind lesehungrig’, Sie: Die Wochenzeitung fur¨ Frauenrecht und Menschenrecht,3July 1949, 6.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 196 EMILY OLIVER collusion with, or tacit acceptance of, the Nazi regime.8 Although both Allied cultural policy and women’s everyday lives in occupied Germany have received considerable scholarly attention, there has so far been little effort to combine these two fields. By focusing on popular middle-brow literature with a predominantly female readership, this article examines the links between cultural consumption and socio-political context during the occupation period. It is important to note that the equally popular film of Gone with the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, was not released in West Germany until 1953 – fourteen years after its US premiere in 1939. Since the focus of this special number of German Life and Letters is the Allied occupation from 1945 to 1949, the article concentrates exclusively on the book as the only version available to German audiences in this period. I examine the specific set of circumstances which motivated women’s choice of Gone with the Wind as reading material, and what the reading experience may have offered them in return. What parallels are there between Scarlett O’Hara’s story and women’s lives in post-war Germany? To what extent does Gone with the Wind affirm or challenge prevalent gender roles at this point in time? What made this particular fiction the most popular reading choice among German women for over a decade, and what might explain its continued popularity from wartime to post-war era?

A HEAD START: GONE WITH THE WIND AND THE POST-WAR BOOK TRADE

Although it was an American novel, the first post-war edition of Gone with the Wind was published in the British Zone. Following Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, the US and Britain had put in place broadly similar policies for controlling the German publishing industry. In the British Zone this was controlled by the Information Services Control Branch, while in the American Zone this task fell to the Information Control Division (ICD). Both were in charge of rationing and allocating paper, and both operated a licensing system, checking an applicant’s political background before granting a licence to run a publishing house. British policy makers emphasised the need for highbrow literature over light entertainment, since their policies aimed to reform German society by targeting its cultural and political elites.9 Meanwhile, the American military government was concerned with promoting ‘translations of American books which convey, factually and without propaganda, American life and

8 For an overview of the debate on German victim discourses, see Helmut Schmitz, ‘Introduction: The Return of Wartime Suffering in Contemporary German Memory Culture, Literature and Film’, in A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present,ed.H.S., Amsterdam 2007, pp. 1–30. 9 See Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949: Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 68–9.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 197 democratic ideals’.10 Based on these criteria, Gone with the Wind was clearly not an ideal candidate for achieving American or British book policy goals in Germany. Instead of promoting democracy, the novel idealises the Old South with its rich white plantation owners and exploitation of slave labour. Far from portraying the US as a democratic nation, it shows a country divided by civil war which practises racial segregation. In terms of intrinsic literary merit, Gone with the Wind is not exactly highbrow literature, but a skilfully narrated page-turner. Although Gone with the Wind did not meet most of the Allied selection criteria, its publisher did. The ideal applicant for a publishing licence was ‘one who possessed training and experience in publishing, sufficient financial resources or backing to assure his success, and who had actively resisted the Nazis’.11 Henry Goverts, head of the Goverts publishing house which had published Vom Winde verweht in 1937, proved to be this ideal candidate. The son of a Hamburg merchant family, Goverts had liberal and democratic sympathies, counted Carl Zuckmayer among his university friends, and had worked with both the theatre director Max Reinhardt and the sociologist Alfred Weber in the Weimar Republic. His business partner, Eugen Claassen, had been part of the liberal milieu of the Frankfurter Zeitung during this time.12 Although founded in 1934, barely a year after Hitler came to power, the Goverts publishing house had avoided publishing National-Socialist literature in the Third Reich focusing instead on novels, poetry, young authors, and translations of Italian and American literature. In March 1945, Goverts had been forced to flee to Liechtenstein after the Nazis discovered his connection to the dissident Kreisau Circle. This unblemished political record and the fact that the Goverts publishing house had survived the Third Reich without being closed down or subsumed into a larger business gave Goverts and Claassen a head start over other post-war publishers. The licensing process implemented by the Allies turned out to be time-consuming, requiring several different levels of approval: from July to the end of September 1945 only eight publishers were licensed in the US Zone.13 Meanwhile, the British did not even have the requisite forms available until September 1945.14 Whereas other would-be publishers got caught up in lengthy bureaucratic battles with the authorities, on 31 October 1945 Goverts and Claassen were among

10 OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States), ‘Functional Report Information Control’, no. 42, 20 December 1948, p. 14, Institut fur¨ Zeitgeschichte (Munich), Microfilm MA 560. 11 Edward C. Breitenkamp, The US Information Control Division and its Effect on German Publishing and Writers 1945–1949, University Station, ND 1953, p. 40. 12 See Wallrath-Janssen, Der Verlag H. Goverts (note 4), p. 5. 13 John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II, Ithaca 2010, p. 231. 14 See Breitenkamp, The US Information Control Division (note 11), p. 40.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 198 EMILY OLIVER the first to receive a publishing licence from the British occupiers for their Hamburg business.15 A further advantage was that Gone with the Wind had already been translated and published before the war, meaning that Goverts neither had to wait nor pay for translation rights. This, again, gave it an important head start over other publishers, since the procedures imposed by the Allies in this area also proved lengthy and inefficient. Normally, in the case of American literature, the Civil Affairs Division in Washington would obtain translation rights for a particular book from the US copyright holder, before the German-based Information Control Division would offer a German publisher these translation rights.16 This system made German publishers unattractive to the American market, since the army could only offer a modest flat rate of $250 for German-language rights, prompting many companies and authors to sell to Swiss publishers instead.17 A watershed moment for the German book market occurred in 1948 with the currency reform in the Western zones, turning it overnight from a seller’s into a buyer’s market. It marked an important change in the target market for books, since these no longer had to appeal to the Information Control Officer in charge, but rather to the German public.18 The transition from Allied licensing monopoly to free market had some interesting consequences: ‘demand increased for light fiction, travel, and other entertaining books’, whereas interest in political and religious literature declined.19 As the US Military Governor noted in a 1948 report, ‘Illustrative of this was the complete sale of the initial edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind’.20 This was probably due to another factor working in favour of Gone with the Wind: demographics. Occupied Germany was populated mainly by women and children. Over three million German soldiers had been killed in the war, and seven million were still in POW camps, meaning that in 1945 the German population consisted of around seven million more women than men.21 Pejoratively known as the ‘Frauenuberschuss’,¨ the shortage of men in occupied Germany created all kinds of problems and possibilities, temporarily changing women’s roles in the economy and the family, and leading to frequent discussions of these effects in the post-war press.

15 See Wallrath-Janssen, Der Verlag H. Goverts (note 4), p. 6. 16 Hansjorg¨ Gehring, Amerikanische Literaturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1953: Ein Aspekt des Re- Education-Programms, Stuttgart 1976, p. 37. 17 Hench, BooksasWeapons(note 13), p. 250. 18 See Gehring, Amerikanische Literaturpolitik (note 16), pp. 29–30. 19 Hench, BooksasWeapons(note 13), p. 255. 20 OMGUS, ‘Monthly Report of the Military Governor’, no. 41, November 1948, p. 38, IfZ (Munich), Microfilm MA 560. 21 See Maria Hohn,¨ ‘Stunde Null der Frauen? Renegotiating Women’s Place in Postwar West Germany’, in Stunde Null: The End and the Beginning Fifty Years Ago, ed. Geoffrey J. Giles, Washington, DC 1997, pp. 75–87 (76).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 199 Many of the German women forced to take men’s place in society in 1945 were deeply traumatised by their experiences during the German defeat. Many will have shared Scarlett’s experiences in some form or another: seeing their homes attacked or raided by a foreign army, suffering homelessness and evacuation, or being forced to flee (especially from the former eastern territories of the Reich). In the Soviet Zone in particular, the occupation was initially also accompanied by mass rapes and looting.22 Once fighting had ceased, the most widespread problems in all zones of post-war Germany were hunger, poverty, homelessness, and disease. Those women lucky enough to survive the war now faced an even greater challenge: surviving everyday life in occupied Germany.

‘AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I AM NEVER GOING TO BE HUNGRY AGAIN’: HUNGER AND LOOSE MORALS

The first and most pressing issue confronting the population of occupied Germany was food: women had to feed themselves, their children, and often relatives or in-laws sharing their cramped living space. The German defeat was followed by drastic food shortages, particularly in large cities like Berlin, where refugees from the East poured in on a daily basis. In May 1945, the daily ration for Berlin housewives consisted of 312g of bread, 400g of potatoes, 30g of grain, 20g of meat, and 7g of fat.23 This ration card was nicknamed the ‘Hungerkarte’ or ‘Himmelfahrtskarte’, since it was impossible to survive on it without supplementing the rations in some way.24 Ten months into the occupation, the Allies still struggled to feed the population of their respective zones, and rations kept decreasing further: for the British Zone they lay somewhere between 1,050 and 1,591 calories; in the American Zone they were slightly more stable at 1,270 calories; and inhabitants of the French Zone were allotted a meagre 950 calories.25 As the British campaigner Victor Gollancz pointed out in 1946, these figures were well below the 2,650 calories deemed necessary for daily subsistence by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).26 Even

22 See Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, Cambridge, MA 1995, pp. 69–140. For further discussion of rape in the context of the occupation, see Atina Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers’, October, 72 (1995), 42–63. 23 See Elizabeth Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s “Crisis Years” and West German National Identity’, The American Historical Review, 101 (1996), 354–95 (374). 24 See Hohn,¨ ‘Stunde Null’ (note 21), p. 85; Leonie Treber, Mythos Trummerfrauen:¨ Von der Trummerbeseitigung¨ in der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit und der Entstehung eines deutschen Erinnerungsortes, Essen 2014, p. 217. 25 See Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift, London 2007, p. 363. 26 See Victor Gollancz, Leaving Them to their Fate: The Ethics of Starvation, London 1946, p. 5; and Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London 1947, p. 29.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 200 EMILY OLIVER the few items listed on a ration card could only be obtained by long hours of queuing outside shops, with supplies frequently running out before one reached the front of the queue. Many women resorted in desperation to the black market or ‘Hamsterfahrten’ – laborious (and illegal) journeys out to the countryside on overcrowded public transport to barter their last belongings in exchange for food. Hunger dominates the central part of Gone with the Wind. It acts as a turning point for the protagonist, drawing a sharp caesura between her carefree girlhood and her future role as provider: hunger becomes the catalyst for Scarlett’s subsequent actions. One of the novel’s most famous passages occurs when Scarlett is lying in the dirt behind the ruins of the neighbouring plantation, and is literally sick from hunger. However, she refuses to be defeated by this misery:

As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill – as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.27 From this moment, Scarlett’s behaviour and all her decisions are motivated by a compulsive striving for food, money, safety, and stability. Having vowed never to go hungry again and to provide for her ‘folks’ at any cost, Scarlett is as good as her word. She does, in fact, go on both to steal and to kill. When a lone Yankee soldier arrives at Tara intent on stealing their remaining belongings and food, Scarlett shoots him in the face, searches his pockets for money, and buries his body behind the house. Occupied Germany saw a similar erosion of moral values driven by necessity. Shortages of food, fuel, and clothing were compounded by the coldest winter of the twentieth century in 1946–7, resulting in 60,000 deaths from hypothermia and malnourishment.28 Stealing, bribing, forging documents, or trading on the black market became features of women’s daily survival work. Evidence of these changing moral codes can be seen in a questionnaire produced for readers of the Berlin women’s magazine Sie in January 1948 under the title ‘Sind Sie moralisch noch intakt?’ Women were encouraged to assess their own moral standards by asking themselves questions such as:

– Sie fanden eine Lebensmittelkarte. Der Inhaber war nicht vermerkt. Wurden¨ Sie die Karte an das Amt zuruckgeben?¨ –Wurden¨ Sie bei einer mehr als funfst¨ undigen¨ Eisenbahnfahrt im Sommer einer siebzigjahrigen¨ Frau, die auf dem Trittbrett reist, Ihren Platz im Coupe´ abtreten?

27 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, London 1971, p. 419. All further page numbers in brackets refer to this edition. 28 See MacDonogh, After the Reich (note 25), p. 374.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 201 –Wurden¨ Sie das gleiche bei 5 Grad Frost tun? – Halten Sie die Beteiligung der eigenen Kinder an einem Diebstahl fur¨ besonders verwerflich? – Sie haben eine billige, wenn auch ‘schwarze’ Einkaufsquelle entdeckt. Nennen Sie diese Ihren Bekannten? – Haben Sie niemals bei der Ausstellung eines Dokumentes, einer Reisebescheinigung, der Lebensmittelkarte, eines Zeugnisses und so fort sich einer noch so geringen Unwahrheit schuldig gemacht?29

Interestingly, the magazine provided no key to the results of the questionnaire, refusing to judge its readers’ morals, and tacitly acknowledging that the behaviours cited were necessary to get by. The scenarios depicted provide insights into the concrete situations faced by those trying to survive in the ‘cigarette economy’ of post-war Germany, where the Reichsmark was of little value and only labour or commodities had meaningful purchasing power. One commodity which could be traded for food or clothing in this economy was a woman’s body. Although the war had seriously depleted the German male population, there were large numbers of young foreign soldiers on German soil. Since Allied soldiers had better rations and access to such luxuries as nylons and cigarettes, several German women resorted to prostitution or entered into relationships with members of the occupying forces in return for food, shelter, or protection.30 Although Scarlett never actually resorts to prostitution, and reserves nothing but contempt for Atlanta’s ‘bad woman’, Belle Watling, she does not shy away from offering up her body in return for material gain. When she is in danger of losing Tara due to new taxation laws, and having heard that Rhett Butler has made a fortune on the black market, Scarlett makes herself a dress from her mother’s curtains and offers herself to Rhett in return for his money. Initially, her plan is to persuade Rhett to marry her as a long-term solution to her financial woes:

Her mind ticked on steadily. Coldly and logically an idea grew in her brain. [...] ‘I’ll marry him,’ she thought coolly. ‘And then I’ll never have to bother about money again.’ (p. 526)

However, remembering Rhett’s aversion to marriage, she is prepared to compromise on this: ‘if he would not marry her but still wanted her,

29 Unknown author, ‘Ein Fragebogen: Sind Sie moralisch noch intakt? Ein vollig¨ inoffizieller Fragebogen, den Sie nur sich selbst beantworten sollen’, Sie, 4 January 1948, 5. 30 See Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany, Berkeley, CA 1993, pp. 23–5; Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman’ (note 23), 380; Michaela Freund, ‘Women, Venereal Disease, and the Control of Female Sexuality in Post-War Hamburg’, in Sex, Sin and the Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall, London 2001, pp. 205–19 (207).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 202 EMILY OLIVER there was a way to get the money. After all, he had once asked her to be his mistress’ (p. 527). Having formulated this plan, Scarlett nevertheless wrestles with her conscience, since her behaviour constitutes a radical departure from everything she has previously believed in:

she fought a quick decisive battle with the three most binding ties of her soul – the memory of Ellen, the teachings of her religion and her love for Ashley. [...] But all these things went down before the merciless coldness of her mind and the goad of desperation. (p. 528) Scarlett is ruthlessly calculating and rational in her choice of partner. Despite her former attraction to Rhett, the decision to become his mistress at this point is motivated solely by economic factors. When her plan fails, Scarlett barely hesitates to marry the middle-aged Frank Kennedy instead, who is all but engaged to her sister Suellen. In doing so, she knows she is very probably depriving her sister of her only hope of marriage, since men of marriageable age are in short supply following the war.

‘THERE’S NO FUN BEING MARRIED’: MARRIAGE AND FAMILIES IN OCCUPIED GERMANY

Despite the shortage of eligible German men, divorce rates soared during the occupation years. Around 88,000 marriages were dissolved in 1948 alone, representing an 80 per cent increase since 1946.31 Although divorce rates began to decline again in the 1950s, the ‘divorce epidemic’ of the initial post-war years sparked a public debate on the perceived crisis of the family. Gone with the Wind portrays a number of very different marriage models, whilst clearly highlighting Scarlett’s dubious reasons for entering into these unions. One reason for many divorces in post-war Germany was the high number of hasty wartime marriages, which had not allowed partners to get to know each other for any length of time before the husband’s deployment. One journalist characterised these war marriages as nothing more than ‘legalisierte Urlaubsverhaltnisse’.¨ 32 Gone with the Wind begins with just such a marriage: to spite Ashley, who has rejected her, Scarlett enters into a rash and loveless marriage with the feckless Charles Hamilton. Charles dies within days of the outbreak of war, leaving Scarlett to face the boredom and isolation of widowhood, and to raise an unwanted child:

She was soon released from the bonds she had assumed with so much haste and so little thought, but she was never again to know the careless freedom of her unmarried days. Widowhood had crowded closely on the heels of marriage but, to her dismay, motherhood soon followed. (p. 128)

31 See Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman’ (note 23), 380. 32 Unknown author, ‘Andere Zonen – gleiche Probleme’, Sie, 15 December 1946, 2.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 203 With remarkable candour the novel shows Scarlett’s lack of attachment to her husband and child. Far from romanticising the dead war hero and the mother’s subsequent bond with his child, Mitchell stresses Scarlett’s resentment at having to mourn a man she never loved, and to raise a child she never wanted. In this sense, Gone with the Wind may have offered comfort and relief to German women struggling with feelings of resentment towards their husbands and children. However, it was not just hasty wartime marriages which were in peril after the German defeat. Even more stable couples found that long separations and the formative experiences of danger had so changed them that reunion was impossible. Cramped living arrangements, poverty, and the extreme difficulties of daily post-war life also combined to make married life intolerable for some. Writing for the Nordwestdeutsche Hefte in the British Zone, the columnist Walther von Hollander noted that Germany’s defeat had damaged German men’s pride and credibility, with the result that women were no longer willing to believe in male leadership. Like many commentators at the time, von Hollander attributed the marriage crisis to women’s increased emancipation during and after the war:

Die Frauen haben sich wahrend¨ des Krieges in einem mannlich¨ todbedrohten und mannlich¨ beruferfullten¨ Leben großartig bewahrt.¨ Sie haben [...] oft im Sexuellen ein Leben gefuhrt,¨ das sich bisher der Mann, mit Recht oder Unrecht, vorbehalten hatte.33 The journalist Annemar Hinrichs joined Hollander in the opinion that the war and its consequences had contributed to women changing faster than before. She concluded that some women ‘sind in den Harteproben¨ des Lebens der letzten Jahre so ausgepragt¨ selbstandig¨ geworden, daß es den Mannern¨ zumindest schwierig erscheint, sich neben der selbstsicheren Partnerin zu behaupten’.34 Instead of embracing independence and self- sufficiency in a woman as useful qualities, a predominantly conservative press believed these traits threatened the stability of traditional marriage. Although Scarlett’s second marriage in Gone with the Wind does not end in divorce, it portrays exactly the kind of gender role transgression feared by post-war German commentators. Having married middle-aged Frank Kennedy for his money, Scarlett does not trust her husband to manage his business, since he is too lenient in extending credit to his customers. Upon discovering that she has a better head for arithmetic than Frank, Scarlett wonders whether she might also be better at conducting business:

A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared

33 Walther von Hollander, ‘Wie uberwinden¨ wir die Ehekrise?’, Nordwestdeutsche Hefte (April 1946), 26–7. 34 Annemar Hinrichs, ‘Gibt es wirklich zu viele Frauen?’, Sie, 1 May 1949, 11.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 204 EMILY OLIVER

in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright. Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind. Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words. She sat quite still, [...] thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. (p. 604)

Scarlett’s emancipation astonishes even her, but having performed traditionally ‘masculine’ labour in the aftermath of the war gives her the confidence to stray further beyond traditional gender roles:

With the idea that she was as capable as a man came a sudden rush of pride and a violent longing to prove it, to make money for herself as men made money. Money which would be her own, which she would neither have to ask for nor account for to any man. (p. 605)

When Scarlett proceeds to buy and manage a saw-mill by herself, Frank finds her behaviour and public disregard for social conventions deeply embarrassing. Scarlett’s independent actions increasingly isolate her from respectable Atlanta society, and although she is conscious of the difference between herself and others, she finds herself unable to revert to being the person she was before the tremendous social upheaval caused by war and defeat. In addition to Scarlett’s first two disastrous marriages, a large part of the novel is taken up with portraying a different kind of family unit: the female- headed household. While the men are away, Scarlett assumes her new role as head of the household at Tara, driving her family and the remaining loyal slaves ever harder to contribute their share in working on the plantation and procuring food: ‘She would hold Tara, if she had to break the back of every person on it’ (p. 426). Scarlett repeatedly emphasises her own fierce independence and resents the constant presence of her sister-in-law Melanie, who is physically weak and dependent on her for protection. It is only at the end of the novel, when Melanie dies following a miscarriage, that Scarlett realises just how much she has relied on another woman’s strength and support since the war:

as Scarlett looked sadly back, she realized that Melanie had always been there beside her [...] unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind, passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire, hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin. [...] Suddenly she was standing at Tara again with the world about her ears, desolate with the knowledge that she could not face life without the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender-hearted. (pp. 987–8)

Far from being supremely independent, Scarlett now recognises that she has in fact depended on Melanie through all the major crises of her adult life. For a long time during and after the war, Scarlett and Melanie jointly

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 205 headed an almost entirely female household, with Scarlett acting as the material provider, and Melanie providing much-needed emotional support. This model of a family centred on the mother was much discussed in post-war Germany as an alternative to the patriarchal nuclear family. With so many men lost or estranged from their wives by war, the female- headed household remained a widespread phenomenon well into the 1950s. Elizabeth Heineman’s research shows that, ‘[i]n 1950, one of every three West German households was headed by a woman, and [...] nearly twenty percent of urban children lived in female-headed households in 1953–54’.35 In the late 1940s, this situation caused grammar school teacher Dorothea Klaje to spark a debate in the press by proposing radical social and legal reform to bring legislation of the future Federal Republic in line with the changed reality of German families. In contrast to the traditional definition of family, with the father as breadwinner and the mother as child-minder, Klaje put forward the concept of the ‘Mutterfamilie’, redefining family as ‘eine Gemeinschaft von Erwachsenen und Unerwachsenen zum Zwecke der Erziehung der Unerwachsenen’. According to this definition, it was ‘gleichgultig,¨ ob der Vater des Kindes lebt oder tot ist, ob er in einer Ehegemeinschaft mit der Mutter zusammengeschlossen ist oder nicht’, since the family’s centre was the mother. In her proposal to the Parliamentary Council, which was at that time drafting the new West German constitution, Klaje argued that matriarchal families should be supported by the state through taxes on single men and childless women:

Die Mutter ist Familienvorstand und bleibt es auch, wenn sie sich spater¨ verheiratet. Sie bestimmt den Wohnsitz der Familie, ihr gehort¨ die Wohnung bzw. das Haus. Bei der Heirat behalt¨ die Frau ihren Madchennamen¨ bei [...]. Alle Kinder, auch die in der Ehe geborenen, tragen den Namen der Mutter.36 Under these circumstances, in order to balance the demands of work, child care, and household chores, two or more women might opt to live and raise children together – which in many German families was already the case. Ultimately, Klaje’s proposal was not taken into consideration by the Parliamentary Council, but discussion of her ideas continued in several publications, particularly women’s magazines. A number of female commentators dismissed Klaje’s claims as too radical, but joined her in

35 Elizabeth Heineman, ‘Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic’, Central European History, 29 (1996), 19–60 (19–20). 36 Dorothea Klaje, ‘Auch ein Vorschlag: die Mutterfamilie’, Sie, 27 February 1949, 5. For further discussion of reactions to the ‘Mutterfamilie’ proposal in several post-war women’s magazines, see Angela Seeler, ‘Ehe, Familie und andere Lebensformen in den Nachkriegsjahren im Spiegel der Frauenzeitschriften’, in Frauen in der Geschichte V: ‘Das Schicksal Deutschlands liegt in der Hand seiner Frauen’ – Frauen in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte, ed. Anna-Elisabeth Freier and Annette Kuhn, Dusseldorf¨ 1984, pp. 102–13.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 206 EMILY OLIVER demanding reforms of marriage and divorce law, as well as an improved standing for illegitimate children.37 While most participants in the debate considered the suggestion of two women heading a family as laughable or impractical, an article in the Tagesspiegel advocated the legal sanctioning of families composed of two or more women with children:

Vielleicht sollte man die Frauen, die sich ernsthaft zu einer solchen Gemeinschaft zusammenschließen wollen, als Familie anerkennen und ihnen bestimmte Vorrechte einraumen.¨ Man konnte¨ ihnen bevorzugt eine Wohnung verschaffen [...]. Die Behorden¨ konnten¨ ihnen Steuerer- leichterungen gewahren¨ und ihnen die gleichen Versicherungsrechte geben wie anderen Familien, und schließlich sollte vielleicht jene [...], die die Aufgaben der Hausfrau ubernimmt,¨ nach einer gewissen Zahl von Jahren ebenso eine Rente [...] bekommen wie eine Ehefrau.38

Although both public opinion and the post-war press seemed at least balanced in their discussion and at best supportive of reforms of family structure and women’s rights, this had little discernible effect on actual policy decisions in the early Federal Republic. When discussing Klaje’s proposals, Robert Moeller calls it ‘remarkable’ that ‘by the early fifties not even muted variations on these themes resounded in women’s magazines, sociological literature, or the halls of parliament’.39 Far from redefining social order, Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) promoted a conservative image of the family and narrowly defined gender roles within it, apparently closing down the short-lived debate on women’s rights.

‘WHY HAD GOD INVENTED CHILDREN?’: MOTHERHOOD AND REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS IN OCCUPIED GERMANY

One potential consequence of both marriage and fraternisation was, of course, motherhood. Debates raged in the German post-war press over the mother’s position in the family, over illegitimacy, adoption, and abortion. In 1946 the rate of illegitimacy in Germany was more than twice that of 1939.40 Whether legitimate or not, at a time when women were struggling to feed and clothe their existing families, pregnancy could amount to disaster. Although expectant mothers received increased rations from the fifth month of pregnancy onwards, this did little to ease their material

37 See Agnes von Zahn-Harnack [Weimar-era women’s rights activist and co-founder of the ‘Berliner Frauenbund 1945’], Nora von Kapp [Chairwoman of the ‘Antifaschistische Frauenliga Bayerns’], and Lucia Finger, ‘Nochmals: die Mutterfamilie’, Sie, 20 March 1949, 8. 38 Bvm, ‘Familie – ohne Mann’, Der Tagesspiegel, 24 April 1948, 3. 39 Moeller, Protecting Motherhood (note 30), p. 78. 40 See Heineman, ‘Complete Families’ (note 35), 21.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 207 woes. There were hardly any baby clothes or nappies available.41 Statistics compiled by local health insurance providers (‘Ortskrankenkassen’) show the effects of women’s constant hard labour inside and outside the home: in 1947, 12 per cent of mothers were found to be suffering from exhaustion, and 14 per cent from insomnia and stress due to overwork. Within two years, these figures had increased to 59 per cent and 43 per cent respectively.42 In the light of these difficulties, Victor Gollancz claimed that German women no longer wished to have children: ‘Instead of desiring a child many women are now succumbing to a deep despondency, thus the diagnosis of a new pregnancy often arouses fits of despair’.43 Consequently, abortion rates in occupied Germany increased dramatically. Whereas during the war there had been one abortion for every twenty live births, in 1945 the figure was estimated at one for every 3.3 live births.44 However, poverty was not the only reason for this peak in abortions. Following the mass rapes by the Red Army during the conquest of Berlin, medical abortions were permitted for Berlin women who testified that they had been raped by a member of the occupying forces (usually Russian soldiers, but there were also isolated reports of rape by American and French soldiers).45 Berlin health records show that between 8 November 1945 and 1 February 1946 over 250 pregnancies were approved for termination – some as late as the seventh or eighth month.46 This practice amounted to a de facto suspension of paragraph 218 of the German ‘Strafgesetzbuch’, which forbade abortion in most cases. Although the Allies tolerated the practice, they did not go so far as to remove this paragraph from German law.47 The instances of rape decreased significantly after the initial weeks of the occupation, but due to widespread poverty, the legal status of abortion remained a hotly contested topic in the German press. In Berlin, both the British-licensed Telegraf and the US- licensed Tagesspiegel devoted full-page spreads to the issue, printing opinion

41 See Katharina Luthardt, ‘Wollen Frauen heute Kinder? – Beobachtungen in einer Berliner Klinik’, Telegraf, 29 March 1947, 5. 42 See Maria Hohn,¨ ‘Frau im Haus und Girl im Spiegel: Discourse on Women in the Interregnum Period of 1945–1949 and the Question of German Identity’, Central European History, 26 (1993), 57– 90 (65). 43 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany (note 26), p. 43. 44 See Heineman, ‘Complete Families’ (note 35), 21. 45 An estimated 500,000 women in Berlin were raped at the end of the war, many during the height of the violence from 24 April to 5 May 1945. However, estimates vary considerably (from 20,000 to almost a million women), and since many women were raped more than once, the actual incidence of rapes was much higher. See Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence’ (note 22), 46; Erich Kuby, Die Russen in Berlin 1945, Bern 1965, pp. 312–13. 46 See Grossmann, ‘A Question of Silence’ (note 22), 55–6. 47 Unknown author, ‘Fur¨ und Wider des Paragraphen 218’, Telegraf, 25 October 1946, 8.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 208 EMILY OLIVER pieces by doctors, biologists, legal experts, and social workers, and also featuring vox pop interviews and letters to the editor.48 Although still opposed to fully legalising abortion, by March 1947 the Control Commission had put forward proposals for minor reforms as part of the new German penal code. These permitted medical abortions if the mother’s life was in danger or the pregnancy had resulted from rape.49 However, despite these suggestions, paragraph 218 was eventually adopted without changes in the new penal code for the West German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic in the East. It was not until the 1970s that feminist campaigners succeeded in forcing through significant changes to this law.50 Gone with the Wind may have provided some reassurance to women opposed to pregnancy in post-war Germany, since Scarlett’s attitude towards motherhood is anything but conventional. Instead of regarding the role of mother as a woman’s true fulfilment, Scarlett abhors it. She is disgusted by the physical process of pregnancy and childbirth, lamenting that it ruins her figure. Shortly after her first husband dies in the army, Scarlett is horrified to learn that she is pregnant:

Scarlett had wept with despair at the knowledge that she was pregnant and wished that she were dead. [...] She felt little affection for the child, hide the fact though she might. She had not wanted him and she resented his coming and, now that he was here, it did not seem possible that he was hers, a part of her. (p. 133) Although over the course of the novel Scarlett gives birth to three children by three different men, they are hardly given much of an interior life within the narrative, being presented chiefly through Scarlett’s eyes as an inconvenience and an imposition on her life. Indeed, Scarlett’s and Melanie’s perilous flight from Atlanta to Tara is considerably hampered by the presence of Scarlett’s son Wade:

Why had God invented children, she thought savagely as she turned her ankle cruelly on the dark road – useless, crying nuisances they were, always demanding care, always in the way. In her exhaustion, there was no room for compassion for the frightened child [...] – only a weariness that she had borne him [...]. (p. 394) Following her second child’s birth, Scarlett vows not to have any more children, since this would hinder her from running her lumber business,

48 See ‘Diskussion um den Paragraphen 218’, Telegraf, 21 December 1946, 5; ‘Der umstrittene Paragraph: Diskussion um die Frage der Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung’, Der Tagesspiegel, 9 March 1947, 2. 49 See Dr Franz Neukamp, ‘Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung und Adoption’, Der Tagesspiegel,9 March 1947, 2. 50 SeeDagmarHerzog,Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Princeton, NJ 2005, p. 205.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 209 thereby limiting her independence. When she does fall pregnant again after her marriage to Rhett, Scarlett briefly considers an illegal abortion. However, Rhett warns her of the dangers of this procedure and forbids her to risk her life in such a manner. Once their daughter Bonnie Blue is born, Rhett’s great care, pride, and interest in the child contrast sharply with Scarlett’s failure to nurture her children.

‘I’LL THINK ABOUT THAT TOMORROW’: VICTIMHOOD AND COMPLICITY IN POST-WAR WOMEN’S NARRATIVES

It is difficult to write about German women’s suffering after the Second World War without questioning the legitimacy of such an undertaking. After all, Nazi Germany had just inflicted the worst suffering known to humanity on most of its neighbours and large parts of its own population. Given the atrocities perpetrated prior to 1945, it may seem petty to point out hunger, poverty, and other hardships endured by Germans during and after defeat. Can we really consider the former perpetrators as victims after the Second World War? Since the 1980s, increased research on German feminist history has identified women’s previously ignored contributions to economic, political, and social life after the war.51 However, the emphasis on German women’s suffering, particularly striking in several oral history collections, threatens to displace memories of the suffering endured by victims of the Holocaust and those subjected to German invasion and occupation before 1945. The question whether to consider German women as victims in the aftermath of the Second World War depends on ‘the degree of continuity or rupture with the era before 1933 and after 1945’, and the German self-perceptions this enables.52 In her seminal essay ‘The Hour of the Woman’, Elizabeth Heineman argues that female post-war experience played a crucial role in shaping West German collective memory of the occupation years. According to Heineman, certain aspects of stereotypically female experience were universalised to form some of the Federal Republic’s founding myths. Thus, female victimhood at the hands of the occupying forces became ‘generalized into stories of German victimhood’; the ‘Trummerfrau’¨ became the symbol of West Germany’s remarkable recovery and heroic reconstruction efforts after defeat; and stories of female sexual promiscuity were seen to indicate a general moral decay during the occupation period

51 See Meyer and Schulze (eds), Wie wir das alles geschafft haben (note 1); Beate Hoecker and Renate Meyer-Braun (eds), Bremerinnen bewaltigen¨ die Nachkriegszeit, Bremen 1988; Margarete Dorr¨ (ed.), ‘Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat...’: Frauenerfahrungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg und in den Jahren danach, Frankfurt a. M. 1998. 52 Atina Grossmann, ‘Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism’, Gender & History,3 (1991), 350–8 (350–1).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 210 EMILY OLIVER rather than the Nazi period.53 Appropriating female experience enabled Germans to memorialise the hardships of the post-war years without enquiring too deeply into the events which had led to this situation. These findings are consistent with Robert Moeller’s research, which shows a victim discourse already emerging among Germans during the occupation period. Far from turning German suffering into a taboo subject, in the first decade after the Second World War Germans ‘devoted considerable energy to assessing their losses and incorporating their victim status into public memory and politics’, so that by the 1950s, ‘rhetorics of victimisation were central parts of the civic culture of the early Federal Republic’.54 According to Moeller, focusing exclusively on their own suffering was a way for Germans to ignore the events which had led to this situation.55 Contemporary press reports support Moeller’s contention that during the occupation period Germans did not want to be confronted with their recent past. Several newspapers remarked on Germans’ unwillingness to engage with the ‘Zeitstuck’¨ or ‘Zeitroman’, the topical contemporary play or novel. As a journalist for the monthly theatre journal Die Buhnenkritik¨ put it in 1947,

das aktuelle Zeitstuck¨ braucht uns keine Spiegel mehr vorzuhalten oder Fragen zu stellen, die haben wir selbst genug auf dem Herzen und in welcher Situation wir leben, wissen wir leider zu deutlich.56

In the same year, a survey conducted among Berlin women summarised answers to the question ‘Welche besonderen Liebhabereien haben Sie?’ thus:

Fast alle antworteten: lesen, lesen! Geben Sie uns Bucher,¨ nicht nur Broschuren.¨ Richtige große Romane, Biographien. Viele wollen die Zeit vergessen. [...] ‘Unsere Probleme sind so nackt und nuchtern’,¨ urteilte eine Befragte fur¨ viele. ‘Wir wollen keinen Zeitroman, aber auch keine romantische Verlogenheit, wir wollen Romane, in denen große Seelen leben, die noch intakt sind, die uns ein Leben zeigen, das noch wirklich Leben genannt werden kann.’57

This frame of mind goes some way towards explaining the enormous popularity of Gone with the Wind among German women during and after

53 See Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman’ (note 23), 355. 54 Robert G. Moeller, ‘The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimisation in East and West Germany’, in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven, Houndmills 2006, pp. 26–42 (27 and 33). 55 Moeller, Protecting Motherhood (note 30), p. 14. 56 R. L., ‘Kurz und kritisch’, Die Buhnenkritik¨ , 1/3 (May 1947), 26. 57 Unknown author, ‘Wie leben sie?’, Sie, 5 January 1947, 3.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 211 the Second World War: the novel occupies the middle ground between realism and escapism. While Gone with the Wind contains vivid descriptions of post-war suffering and survival work, its nineteenth-century American setting is at several removes from German women’s immediate experience between 1945 and 1949. Moreover, it is surprisingly easy to read the book without confronting the issues of race and slavery. Narrated largely from the point of view of a white, upper-class protagonist, the novel seems curiously untroubled by the causes of the American Civil War and more concerned with the difficulties in race relations after the abolition of slavery. Mitchell mourns the ‘Old South’, its values, and its society, presenting the efforts of the emerging Ku Klux Klan as chivalrous and gentlemanly behaviour, necessary to right the wrongs done to Southerners (particularly to Southern women). African- American characters such as Mammy, Prissy, Pork, and Uncle Peter are presented as loyal but somewhat stupid, and a pervasive, unreflective use of racist vocabulary (‘darkies’, ‘free issue niggers’ etc.) indicates that Scarlett does not consider events from the perspective of someone racially and socially disadvantaged by the antebellum regime. In the rare instances where issues such as relations between slaves and their owners are debated, it is to demonstrate that the Yankee occupiers are far more racist than their Southern counterparts, who supposedly have a better understanding of how to treat African Americans. When a Yankee woman rejects Scarlett’s advice to employ a freed slave as a nurse, saying that she would not ‘trust [her] babies to a black nigger’ (p. 656), and subsequently insults Uncle Peter, Scarlett’s reaction is indignant, even violent:

the knowledge that they had hurt the faithful old darky with their stupid remarks fired her like a match in gunpowder. [...] They deserved killing, these insolent, ignorant, arrogant conquerors. (p. 657) However, even Scarlett’s protective reaction betrays her inability to consider former slaves as humans with equal rights. While claiming superior knowledge and a kinder, more liberal attitude over the Yankees, she simultaneously others and infantilises all African Americans:

They did not know that negroes had to be handled gently, as though they were children, directed, praised, petted, scolded. They didn’t understand negroes or the relations between the negroes and their former masters. Yet they had fought a war to free them. And having freed them, they didn’t want to have anything to do with them, except to use them to terrorize Southerners. They didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t understand them, and yet their constant cry was that Southerners didn’t know how to get along with them. (p. 658) Scarlett continues to regard herself as benevolent towards the African- American characters in her life, while maintaining that they should not be

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 212 EMILY OLIVER free or have the right to vote. Failing to acknowledge her complicity in and benefit from a social system which treated certain minorities as less than human, Scarlett is outraged at the Yankees’ ignorance of ‘how it really was’. MGM’s 1939 film of Gone with the Wind faithfully portrays the race relations as they appear in the novel, similarly characterising the black figures as unintelligent and infantile, and their white masters as necessarily harsh with them. This proved to be the key reason why the film was deemed unsuitable for screening in occupied Germany by the US Information Control Division. Given the novel’s established popularity in Germany, and the fact that Gone with the Wind was the highest-grossing picture of all time, the film would have offered considerable entertainment value to Germans whilst simultaneously demonstrating American technical superiority. However, in a 1947 Hollywood Quarterly article, Robert Joseph, a former Film Officer for Berlin and Deputy Film Officer for Germany, pointed out the difficulty of finding film content suitable both for reforming German minds and presenting the US in a favourable light:

Objectivity is a quality which is not characteristic of the Germans. Gone with the Wind [...] might have been selected to show (1) the excellence of American color film, (2) the epic sweep of the story, and (3) the intelligent acting and direction. Yet, the Negro incidents in the picture were found objectionable.58 Although neither book nor film reflects on its inherent racism, a decade after the novel’s original publication US authorities were clearly aware of the negative light it shed on their country. With a considerable number of black GIs stationed in Germany, and aware of the hypocrisy of preaching racial equality to Germans whilst implementing segregation at home and within its own troops, the US found itself unable to export one of its prime cultural products, which would almost certainly have been guaranteed German box office success. The fact that the novel was not banned, but in fact re-released in post- war Germany demonstrates the inconsistencies in Allied cultural policy during the occupation. While the Allies were attempting to implement a programme of re-education and reform, in this case there was an unofficial process of counter-cultural exchange going on, by which German women continued to cherish a racist American narrative which spoke to some of their most pressing concerns. With its consistent emphasis on female suffering and resilience, Gone with the Wind arguably offers scope for identification to women in any context of trauma – irrespective of geographical location, though not irrespective of race or class. However, it seems particularly pertinent to the German post- war case in being narrated from the point of view of the losing side whilst avoiding any confrontation with the losers’ tacit collusion with the former

58 Robert Joseph, ‘Our Film Program in Germany: How Far Was It a Success?’, Hollywood Quarterly,2 (1947), 122–30 (126).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd WOMEN READING GONE WITH THE WIND IN OCCUPIED GERMANY 213 regime. Scarlett resolutely refuses to look back, thereby absolving herself of all responsibility:

‘I don’t know why we fought and I don’t care,’ said Scarlett. ‘And I’m not interested. I never was interested. War is a man’s business, not a woman’s. All I’m interested in now is a good cotton crop.’ (p. 480) It does not make much difference to Scarlett under what regime she exists, so long as she is able to earn money, have nice things, retain ownership of Tara, and provide for her family. The riches-to-rags-to-riches narrative of economic success and security in Gone with the Wind echoes the German post-war founding myths identified by Moeller, in which ‘East and West German victims alike established their identities as survivors, and survivors became the shapers of their own destinies, able to return Germany to the proper path’.59 The rhetoric of victimisation thus became a prerequisite for Germans’ subsequent emphasis on their triumph over post-war hardships: ‘On both sides of the Cold War divide success was measured in reconstructed cities, economic recovery, the provision of adequate housing, and a sense of security’.60 Surveying more recent examples of German memory culture, Helmut Schmitz agrees with this assessment, stating that ‘German wartime suffering is re-inscribed into a narrative of the economic miracle and the successful overcoming of hardship while being politicised and instrumentalised into a foundational myth of the young Federal Republic’.61 This fiction neatly eluded any consideration of what had caused post-war hardship in the first place. As the economic and social issues raised in this article show, women in occupied Germany certainly had good reasons for adopting Scarlett’s self-perception as a victim of the war. However, several scholars of the occupation period have stressed the need to move beyond a perpetrator/victim dichotomy when discussing women’s changing roles in the final years of the war and the early post-war years.62 While Moeller sees part of the problem in historical accounts ‘that end some stories too early and start others too late’,63 Heineman calls for an acknowledgement of ‘a more complicated relationship between vulnerability and privilege’ in German women’s histories. In her view, a crucial point ‘to such historical writing is the recognition of women’s agency, which permits us to see both

59 Moeller, ‘The Politics of the Past’ (note 54), p. 35. 60 Ibid. 61 Schmitz, ‘Introduction: The Return of Wartime Suffering’ (note 8), p. 11. 62 See Atina Grossman, ‘Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945–1949’, Archiv fur¨ Sozialgeschichte, 38 (1998), 215–39; Elizabeth Heineman, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past’, Central European History, 38 (2005), 41– 74; Robert G. Moeller, ‘Germans as Victims?: Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies’, History & Memory, 17 (2005), 147–94. 63 Moeller, ‘Germans as Victims?’ (note 62), 176.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 214 EMILY OLIVER troubling and admirable choices, even by subjects with a limited range of motion’.64 The enthusiastic reception of Gone with the Wind in occupied Germany indicates that perhaps Margaret Mitchell’s fictional narrative accomplished what historical scholarship is still struggling to achieve: a nuanced account of women’s wartime and post-war lives, in which the protagonist makes both troubling and admirable choices, and is by turns privileged, humiliated, vulnerable, resilient, and above all, identifiably human.

64 Heineman, ‘Gender, Sexuality’ (note 62), 62.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd German Life and Letters 71:2 April 2018 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

FOUR ILLUSTRATED NEWS MAGAZINES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY

CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES (King’s College London)

JULIA VOSSEN (King’s College London)

ABSTRACT Newspapers and magazines are cultural products and can therefore be considered as works of fiction as well as fact. This article discusses the creation of the news magazine Der Spiegel as an example of cultural transfer, providing an insight into the diverse origins of Der Spiegel, the influence of the magazine on post-war German journalism, and the adoption of British and American models by much of the German press. The origins, format, content, and writing style of four magazines published in the US, Britain, and Germany are analysed and compared: the US magazine Time, the British weekly magazine News Review, Diese Woche, the immediate precursor to Der Spiegel,andHeute, an illustrated feature magazine published in the US Zone of Germany. All four magazines used colourful language and stylistic devices to interpret the news as well as report it and sometimes peddled a fiction of objectivity that was in fact highly opinionated. Diese Woche was no different in this respect from Time and News Review. The idea that British and American news reporting was accurate and truthful and never mixed fact and opinion, whereas it was only the German press that mixed information with tendentious comment, was one of many myths circulated in post-war Germany.

Zeitungen und Zeitschriften sind kulturelle Produkte, die oft Fakten mit Fiktion vereinen. Dieser Aufsatz behandelt die Entstehung des Nachrichtenmagazins Der Spiegel als Beispiel fur¨ kulturellen Transfer und bietet dabei Einblicke in seine vielfaltigen¨ Ursprunge.¨ Beleuchtet werden außerdem der Einfluss, den die Zeitschrift Der Spiegel auf den Journalismus im Nachkriegsdeutschland hatte, sowie die Ubernahme¨ britischer und amerikanischer Modelle durch einen großen Teil der deutschen Presse. In diesem Aufsatz werden die Ursprunge,¨ das Format, der Inhalt und der Schreibstil von vier Zeitschriften analysiert und verglichen, die in den USA, Großbritannien und Deutschland veroffentlicht¨ wurden: die amerikanische Zeitschrift Time, die britische Wochenzeitschrift News Review, Diese Woche, der unmittelbare Vorganger¨ des Spiegels,undHeute, eine illustrierte Reportagezeitschrift, die in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone in Deutschland veroffentlicht¨ wurde. Alle vier Zeitschriften bedienten sich einer bilderreichen, durch Meinungen gefarbten¨ Sprache, um die Nachrichten gleichzeitig zu berichten und zu interpretieren. Manchmal verbreiteten sie die Fiktion einer Objektivitat,¨ die in Wahrheit nicht immer realisiert wurde. In dieser Hinsicht unterschied sich Diese Woche nicht von Time und News Review. Die Vorstellung, dass die britische und amerikanische Berichterstattung immer genau und wahrheitsgetreu sei und nie Fakten und Meinungen vermische, wahrend¨ nur in der deutschen Presse

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 216 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN

Informationen mit tendenziosen¨ Kommentaren vermischt wurden,¨ war eine von vielen Mythen, die im Nachkriegsdeutschland kolportiert wurden.

Eine Zeitschrift, die flott ist, die in wenigen Worten viel aussagen kann, die berichtet statt zu kommentieren, die wollten wir machen.1 Newspapers and magazines are cultural products that are often works of fiction as well as fact. Although they may claim to be objective, they select and interpret the news as well as report it. In her case study of the Neue Zeitung, intended by the US occupation authorities to be an ‘American newspaper for the German population’, Jessica Gienow-Hecht argues that cultural transfer is best examined as a process in which the meaning of cultural products changes as they are introduced into a new environment.2 This article discusses the process of cultural transfer through another example in a similar field: the creation of the news magazine Der Spiegel in the British Zone of occupied Germany. Der Spiegel was modelled on the now defunct British magazine News Review, which in turn was modelled on the US magazine Time. This article is a case study, and does not claim that the conclusions are generally valid in all cases. For example, it complements, rather than conflicts with Gienow-Hecht’s findings with regard to Die Neue Zeitung, suggesting that alternative mechanisms for cultural transfer should also be considered as they appeared to work in the case of Der Spiegel. We wish to draw attention to the complexity of cultural interactions in post-war Germany under Allied occupation, and deconstruct the very diverse origins of Der Spiegel, a magazine that later became a cultural institution in post-war Germany. In an influential series of articles published in 1999 in the journal Diplomatic History, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Rebecca Boehling, Uta Poiger, Petra Goedde and Rob Kroes discussed the issue of US cultural influence in post-war Germany. They argue that earlier paradigms of ‘modernisation’, ‘Americanisation’, or ‘cultural imperialism’ need to be replaced by alternative models of cultural transmission that recognise the important role played by intermediaries, such as German-Jewish refugees who spent the war in exile in the United States and returned to the US Zone of occupied Germany in 1945.3 In the case of Der Spiegel, the ‘agents of

1 Harry Bohrer, ‘Es wird großen Spaß machen’, Spiegel Almanach, December 1948. 2 Jessica Gienow-Hecht, ‘Art is Democracy and Democracy is Art: Culture, Propaganda and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944–1947’, Diplomatic History, 23/1 (Winter 1999), 21–43; Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945–1955,Baton Rouge 1999. 3 Rebecca Boehling, ‘The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe: The Case of the United States’s Occupation of Germany’, Diplomatic History, 23/1 (Winter 1999), 57–69; Uta G. Poiger, ‘Beyond “Modernization” and “Colonization”’, Diplomatic History, 23/1 (Winter 1999), 45– 57; Gienow-Hecht, ‘Art is Democracy and Democracy is Art’ (note 2); Petra Goedde, ‘From Villains

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 217 transmission’ were a twenty-one-year-old British army officer, two German- speaking Jewish exiles who had spent the war in Britain, and a team of young German writers who had little previous experience of journalism. Yet the magazine they created was to prove more popular, commercially successful, and politically influential than any other similar publication in Western Europe, let alone in Germany, and still exists today.4 Rather than examining a single case, as Gienow-Hecht does with Die Neue Zeitung, we adopt a transnational, cross-cultural, comparative approach that to our knowledge has not been attempted before, examining the origins, format, content, and writing style of Diese Woche, the immediate precursor of Der Spiegel, published in November and December 1946 as an ‘overt’ publication under the direct management and control of a local British Military Government unit in Hanover, together with copies of two other weekly news magazines, Time, published in the United States, and News Review, published in Britain. We also compare and contrast Diese Woche with Heute, an illustrated feature magazine published in the US Zone of Germany by the same US Military Government unit responsible for Die Neue Zeitung. The article discusses four potential mechanisms for the transfer of cultural values. The first part, by Christopher Knowles, focuses on the historical context and the individuals who acted as cultural intermediaries, the format of the magazines and the content of the articles; the second part, by Julia Vossen, on the style of writing. By comparing four magazines published in different countries we aim to provide an insight into the diverse origins of Der Spiegel, the influence of the magazine on post-war German journalism, and the adoption of British and American models by much of the German press in the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on Diese Woche, published by the British Military Government, rather than its immediate successor, Der Spiegel, essentially the same magazine but now licensed to its German editor, Rudolf Augstein, highlights the role of a small group of British soldiers and administrators in creating a magazine that would later, in the words of Augstein’s biographer, evolve into ‘einem Blatt des Widerspruchs und des Infragestellens, ohne die der demokratische Diskurs nicht zu denken ist’.5 The circulation of Der Spiegel rose from 50,000 copies per week in early 1947 to 110,000 in 1951 and 811,000 in 1966, far higher than other political weekly magazines in Germany.6 By the end of the 1950s, the distinctive style of Der Spiegel was adopted as a model by much of the German press.7 In 1962, in what has to Victims, Fraternization and the Feminization of Germany, 1945–1947’, Diplomatic History,23/1 (Winter 1999), 3–20; Rob Kroes, ‘World Wars and Watersheds: The Problem of Continuity in the Process of Americanization’, Diplomatic History, 23/1 (Winter 1999), 71–7. 4 Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienoffentlichkeit¨ 1945–1973,Gottingen¨ 2006, pp. 219–27. 5 Peter Merseburger, Rudolf Augstein, Munich 2007, p. 7. 6 Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise (note 4), p. 90. 7 Ibid., pp. 219–25.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 218 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN become known as the ‘Spiegel Affair’, the German government tried to close the publication after it revealed details of a NATO manoeuvre. The attempt failed after widespread protests. The ‘affair’ led to the resignation of the Defence Minister, Franz Josef Strauss, and has been regarded as one of the first major tests of post-war German democracy.8 Although the outline of the story of the creation of Der Spiegel is well known, this is not as a result of academic scholarship on the subject, which has been sadly lacking.9 The story has been told, in different ways, in the fortieth, fiftieth, sixtieth and, more recently, the seventieth anniversary issues of the magazine, and also in three books by two Spiegel journalists: Hans Dieter Jaene, Der Spiegel: Ein deutsches Nachrichten-Magazin (1968), and Leo Brawand, Der Spiegel Story (1987) and Der Spiegel – ein Besatzungskind: Wie die Pressefreiheit nach Deutschland kam (2007). Though broadly correct, these accounts are by insiders, telling the story in their own way and for their own purposes. Copies of Diese Woche, the precursor to Der Spiegel, are not easily obtainable.10 Furthermore, although there have been several studies of the emergence of German journalism in the 1940s, they focus on the US Zone and say very little, if anything, about developments in the British Zone.11 Gienow-Hecht argues that the German-speaking former exiles who created, wrote, and edited DieNeueZeitungwere able to infiltrate American values into the format of a traditional high-brow German newspaper. In her words they ‘draped democratic notions in traditional German clothing’.12 ThecaseofDiese Woche and Der Spiegel is different because, unlike Hans Habe, the founder and first editor of DieNeueZeitung, John Chaloner, the English officer who created Der Spiegel, did not write or edit any articles. Chaloner deliberately set out to create a new format that had never appeared in Germany before. The model he used, the British magazine News Review, had itself been modelled on Time,butDer Spiegel was not simply a German version of Time. Any transfer of cultural values was achieved not through overtly promoting a democratic message in the content, but

8 Martin Doerry and Hauke Janssen (eds), Die Spiegel-Affare:¨ Ein Skandal und seine Folgen, Munich 2013; Ulrich Herbert, ‘Liberalisierung als Lernprozeß. Die Bundesrepublik in der deutschen Geschichte – eine Skizze’, in Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, ed. Ulrich Herbert, Gottingen¨ 2002, p. 29; Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, New York 2007, pp. 172-3. 9 The only significant work in English is Alan Bance, ‘Der Spiegel No. 1 as complete text: between Tutelage and Freedom’, in The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany, ed. Alan Bance, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 139–52. 10 The copies of Diese Woche used for this article were obtained directly from the private business archive of Der Spiegel in Hamburg. 11 Notably Christina von Hodenberg’s excellent Konsens und Krise (note 4). However, she worked on US and not on British archives, and claims (incorrectly) that the US, ‘in bezug auf die Medien [der] am starksten¨ engagierte Westalliierte waren’. The British devoted at least as much attention to printed media as the US. It was not entirely by chance that Hamburg, in the British Zone, became a major press and publishing centre for the future Bundesrepublik. 12 Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible (note 2), pp. 6 and 77.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 219 through importing a new British and American magazine format and writing style that conveyed a diversity of news and opinion in a lively and attractive manner, using colourful language, and sometimes put forward a notion of objectivity that was in fact highly opinionated. In the long term, the medium was more important than the message.

THE US AND BRITISH ORIGINS OF DER SPIEGEL

It is often claimed that Der Spiegel was created as a German version of Time. This is true in part, but the process was mediated over an extended period of time, from the creation of Time in 1923, via the British magazine News Review, founded as a British imitation of Time in 1936, to Diese Woche, created as a British Military Government publication in 1946 before it was re-named Der Spiegel in January 1947. The historical process of creating the magazines, the individuals involved, their personal connections, and their roles as cultural intermediaries were important factors in the process of cultural transfer. This section examines the historical origins of the four magazines under consideration, Time, News Review, Heute,andDiese Woche, the diverse backgrounds of the individuals involved, and the interplay of cultural interactions that eventually led to the creation of Der Spiegel. Time, the world’s first weekly news magazine, was founded in Baltimore in 1923 by two friends from school and university, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, who believed that many of their compatriots were poorly informed and knew little about the world, but wished to know more. The magazine provided a condensed version of the week’s news, written in a terse, crisp style that was later imitated and parodied in many other publications. By 1927 the magazine achieved profitability, selling 175,000 copies a week.13 After Hadden died in 1929, Luce acted as business manager and editor- in-chief. In 1930 he created the business journal Fortune and in 1936 the pictorial magazine Life. Other magazines followed, and when Luce retired in 1964 his publishing empire included book publishing, radio and television stations, while his magazines sold over ten million copies a week worldwide.14 In February 1936, thirteen years after the first issue of Time had appeared in the United States, two British magazines, News Review and Cavalcade, were launched within two weeks of each other, imitating Time and competing for the title of ‘Britain’s first weekly news magazine’.15 Over the next few years both changed owners and neither was ever as successful as Time in the US or as Der Spiegel was later in Germany. Cavalcade claimed a circulation

13 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/596077/Time (accessed 18 May 2015). 14 http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0403.html (accessed 18 May 2015). 15 ‘British Newsmagazines’, Time, 24 February 1936, 48–9.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 220 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN of 50,000 copies in 1937, and circulation figures for News Review were probably similar, well below those of Time in the US, even allowing for the larger population in the US of around 130 million in 1937, compared to 47 million in the UK.16 The lack of success of weekly news magazines in Britain can be explained, at least in part, by the structure of the industry and the high penetration of national newspapers, which limited the scope for a weekly news digest.17 Both News Review and Cavalcade merged with other magazines and closed as independent publications in 1950.18 Other types of magazine sold well in Britain. Before the war, the most popular magazines, Picture Post, John Bull, and the Radio Times, sold over a million copies, which was comparable to similar publications in the US.19 In 1950, when wartime paper rationing ended, the Radio Times sold over 8 million copies; this was the largest audited magazine circulation in the world.20 Heute was an illustrated feature magazine modelled on Life, rather than a topical news magazine modelled on Time. It was published by the same US Military Government unit that was responsible for Die Neue Zeitung and printed on the same presses, but there seems to have been little connection between the editorial teams.21 The first issue of Heute appeared on 1 December 1945, six weeks after DieNeueZeitung, and copies were subsequently published on the 1st and 15th of every month. The magazine provided comment and lavishly illustrated features, rather than news, and was widely distributed in the US Zone of Austria as well as in Germany, with a total circulation of around 400,000 copies in February 1947.22 In October 1946 a new German-speaking editor and deputy editor were appointed. Despite, or perhaps because of, their German-sounding names, Heinz Norden and Heinz Berggruen were listed on the magazine’s imprint as ‘US civilians’, though neither had been born in the United States and both returned to Europe as soldiers with the US army.23 Norden was born in London in 1905 to secular Jewish parents who had immigrated to Britain from Germany.24 He returned to Germany in 1918, but emigrated again

16 Ibid. 17 Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers: Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918–1978, Oxford 2009, pp. 20–21; http://www.magforum.com/news˙magazines.htm#now (accessed 18 May 2015). 18 http://www.magforum.com/news˙magazines.htm (accessed 18 May 2015). 19 For example, the circulation of Life was around 1,000,000 in 1938. 20 Bingham, Family Newspapers (note 17), p. 31; http://www.magforum.com/time1.htm (accessed 18 May 2015). 21 Imprint, Heute, 1 Nov 1946, stated that the magazine carried no advertisements and was published by the same publisher as Die Neue Zeitung (twice weekly), Die Neue Auslese (monthly), and Die Amerikanische Rundschau (every two months). 22 Birgit Bodeker,¨ Amerikanische Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache 1945–1952, Frankfurt a. M. 1993, p. 94; Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, tr. Diana M. Wolf, Chapel Hill and London 1994 (original German edition published 1991), p. 96. 23 Imprint, Heute, 1 Nov 1946. 24 http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam˙122/bioghist.html (accessed 18 May 2015).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 221 to New York in 1924 and joined the US army in 1941. Norden’s deputy, Heinz Berggruen, was born in Berlin in 1914 and worked as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung before fleeing from Germany to the United States in 1936.25 Diese Woche, the first German weekly news magazine, was created by John Chaloner, a twenty-one-year-old British army major and press officer in Hanover. He started working on Diese Woche in the Spring of 1946 when, with help from two German secretaries, he made up a dummy from articles and pictures lifted or translated from British and German newspapers and magazines.26 After receiving permission to go ahead from the British Information Services Control division headquarters, he asked two of his staff-sergeants, Harry Bohrer and Henry Ormond, both German-speaking Jewish exiles now working for the British army, to act as editor and business manager respectively, and recruited a team of young German journalists to work on the paper.27 Chaloner ordered British and US publications to be sent from England, including several copies of News Review, which he told his team of inexperienced editors and journalists to use as a model for their work.28 Other publications requested included Time, Newsweek, Russia Today, Tribune, Life, The Spectator, Punch, the New Statesman and Nation,anda book of cartoons with work by well-known British cartoonists such as Zec, Giles, Vicki, and Low.29 After two dummy runs of 500 copies each, on 25 October and 1 November, the first issue of Diese Woche was published on 16 November 1946, with a print run of 15,000 copies.30 Diese Woche was an instant success, but soon attracted the attention of Chaloner’s superiors for including articles which were critical of the British authorities and their Allies.31 Chaloner was called in by the authorities

25 Heinz Berggruen, Highways and Byways, Northamptonshire 1998; Vivien Stein, Heinz Berggruen: Leben und Legende, Zurich 2011. 26 Leo Brawand, Der Spiegel – ein Besatzungskind: Wie die Pressefreiheit nach Deutschland kam, Hamburg 2007, p. 65. 27 Leo Brawand, The Spiegel Story, Oxford 1989, p. ix (first published in German as Der Spiegel-Story, 1987); Brawand, Der Spiegel – ein Besatzungskind (note 26), pp. 66 and 98. 28 Rudolf Augstein, ‘Nach Gottingen¨ konnte¨ ich immer noch’, Der Spiegel, 29 December 1986; Rudolf Augstein, ‘So wurden wir angefangen: Rudolf Augstein uber¨ die Grundung¨ des SPIEGEL 1946’, Der Spiegel, 11 November 2002. 29 Der Spiegel archives, file 1381, letter from Chaloner to COGA, London, 9 October 1946. 30 Der Spiegel archives, file 1381, letter from Deputy Press Chief, 30 Information Control Unit, dated 23 October 1946, asking for permission to increase the number of complimentary copies to 500; fortnightly report initialled ‘O’ (Ormond) to Press Chief, 30 Information Control Unit (Chaloner), 1 November 1946. 31 ‘Instant success...’, see Der Spiegel archives, file 1381, where a report initialled ‘O’ (Ormond) to Press Chief, dated 9 December 1946, stated that a total of 44,900 copies had been ordered by book shops and other wholesale firms, well in excess of the circulation of 15,500. On 14 December 1946, Ormond reported that the number of orders had increased to 56,800. On 25 January 1947, after the licence had been issued to Augstein and the magazine re-named Der Spiegel, Ormond successfully asked for the circulation to be increased to 50,000. See also The National Archives, FO 1056/37:

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 222 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN to answer accusations that, in publishing the articles, he was providing ammunition to former Nazis, and had ‘collaborated with the enemy’ by giving excessive freedom to the German journalists.32 He was officially reprimanded by his chief of division for exceeding his responsibilities in going to press without authorisation and told to have ‘nothing whatever to do with the paper from this moment’.33 Another officer, Major Nick Huijsman, who was in charge of licensing publications in the British Zone, was told to take personal responsibility for Diese Woche, ensure it was run on ‘the most cautious lines’, and ‘discover a group of licensees to take over the paper’.34 Although Chaloner had no further direct involvement with the paper, Bohrer and Ormond remained in post. Three further issues of Diese Woche appeared at weekly intervals and a Christmas double issue on 21 December, still including articles that were critical of the British and their Allies.35 Around the end of the year a decision was taken that the magazine be transferred to German ownership. The British authorities appeared to believe that while criticism might be tolerated in a German paper, it was not acceptable in a publication that bore the express imprint of the British Military Government.36 A preliminary licence was issued to the twenty- three-year-old Rudolf Augstein, who was told that the name of the magazine had to be changed, and the first issue of Der Spiegel was published on 4 January 1947.37 Chaloner left Germany in early 1947, but Bohrer and Ormond continued to work with their German proteg´ es´ for at least a further six months, until a full licence was issued to Augstein and two of his German colleagues in July 1947.38

Lists of licensed newspapers and periodicals in the British Zone, 9 January 1947 and 9 February 1947. The circulation figure for Der Spiegel is given as 15,000 in the 9 January list and as 50,000 in the 9 February list. Articles critical of the Allied occupation authorities include ‘Hunger an der Ruhr: Chaos uber¨ Deutschland’, Diese Woche, no. 1, 16 November 1946, reporting criticism in British newspapers of food shortages in the British Zone; ‘... und wohin mit den Polen: Eine Frage, die England erregt’, ibid., reporting opposition from British Trade Unions to allowing Polish soldiers who had fought with the Allies and their families to stay in Britain; ‘Streit nach dem Essen’, ibid.,on Winston Churchill suing the writer Louis Adamic for making libellous statements in his book, Dinner in the White House. 32 Brawand, Der Spiegel – ein Besatzungskind (note 26), pp. 156–8. 33 The National Archives, FO 1056/16, folio 195, letter from Sprigge to Bayer, 29 November 1946; and folio 195A, letter from Sprigge to Gibson, 29 November 1946. 34 Ibid. 35 For example, ‘Die Fahne hoch’, Diese Woche, no. 2, 30 November 1946, reported the mayor of Hamburg, Max Brauer, an opponent of the Nazis who had spent the war in exile in the US, criticising British occupation policy in Hamburg in a speech at the opening of the city parliament. The title story in Diese Woche, no. 3, 7 December 1946, criticised the Allies, especially the French and Russians, for not allowing German POWs to return home. 36 Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), p. 47. 37 Ibid; DSA 1381, report initialled ‘O’ (Ormond) to ‘Press Chief’, 31 December 1946. 38 After 12 July 1947 the imprint at the back of the magazine changed from stating that it was published with ‘preliminary authorisation’ – ‘Herausgegeben von Rudolf Augstein, (mit vorlaufiger¨

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 223

FORMAT

The distinctive news magazine format, first created by Time in 1923 and copied by News Review in 1936, was transferred to Diese Woche and Der Spiegel with only minor changes. The most distinctive features were the front cover, the inside page layout, and the content structure, all of which were designed to attract the readers’ attention and emphasise the human interest aspect of the selected news stories. All the front covers of Time and all but one of the covers of News Review produced in November and December 1946 comprised a striking close-up portrait of the head and face of one individual, set within a red or deep orange border, on all four sides ofthepageonTime, and at the top and bottom only on News Review. Front cover pictures on Diese Woche were similar: one close-up portrait, three full or half length, and the fifth a group of women, framed by deep orange bars at the top and bottom of the page, following News Review rather than the more subtle framing of the picture on Time. The page size was the same on all three magazines, with inside pages divided into three columns, with section headings and article titles. Illustrations were included on nearly every page, comprising photographs, mainly of people, graphics and diagrams, and the occasional cartoon. The cover price was relatively cheap and affordable: one Reichsmark for Diese Woche, sixpence for News Review, and 15 cents for Time in the US, or one shilling for the European edition in the British Isles.39 The contents in all three magazines were divided into three roughly equal parts. The first comprised a single, large section of national news stories, followed by a second large section of foreign news. The third part comprised a medley of the arts, science, business, and entertainment that varied slightly from week to week, with short sections on personalities, business, religion, books, education, medicine, cinema, music, theatre, the press or sport. Readers’ letters to the editor were on the first page in Time and the last page in News Review and Diese Woche. All three magazines carried advertisements. Articles were not signed, and there were no editorials. Heute was different, and a comparison highlights how similar the other three magazines were, in contrast to Heute. The page format was larger, approximately ten by fourteen inches, compared to eight by eleven inches for the others, with a significantly higher proportion of photographs and illustrations, ideal for full or double page features. The magazine was thirty- two pages long, plus front and back covers, and appeared twice a month, rather than weekly. The price was remarkably cheap for a lavishly produced, highly illustrated magazine; at 50 Pfennig it was half that of Diese Woche. The front covers were printed in black and white, with a deep red title banner

PR/ISC Genehmigung 600/PR vom 1. Januar 1947)’ – to the more formal ‘Veroffentlicht¨ unter Zulassung Nr. 123 der Militar-Regierung’.¨ 39 Die Neue Zeitung, published twice weekly, cost 20 Pfennig per copy.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 224 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN at the top. Front cover pictures were occasionally of important people, such as the US Secretary of State James Byrnes, following a similar style to the news magazines, but more usually of ordinary people, or photographs of places, such as a Christmas tree in New York in the December 1946 issue. The inside page layout varied according to the content: three or four columns with multiple illustrations, or occasionally large and striking full page illustrations. There were no advertisements. Some regular features were included in every issue, such as readers’ letters, a short story or extract from a book, a quiz and crossword, and on the inside back cover a single, large, full page, iconic photograph of a scene from the United States: Mount Rushmore, giant sequoia trees in Yosemite, or skating in New York’s Central Park. Features on life in America were prominent in all copies of Heute. The 15 December Christmas issue, for example, included articles on ‘Christmas in America’, the Metropolitan Opera House, and a three- page piece on high school girls (‘Bobby-Soxers’), headlined ‘Backfische aus Amerika’.

CONTENT

Although the format, visual appearance, and structure of the three weekly news magazines – Diese Woche, Time,andNews Review – were similar, the stories they covered were different, reflecting the interests of their readers in the US, Britain, and Germany. If they did cover the same event, they reported it differently.40 In some cases their interpretation changed as the story developed over time. With the exception of Heute, which was clearly presenting its readers with a favourable view of life in the United States, it is difficult, from reading the content of the magazines, to discover evidence of any explicit transfer of news, ideas or cultural values from the US or Britain to Germany. Stories were not generally taken directly from one magazine and reprinted in another. There was relatively little overlap between stories covered in each of the magazines. Where the same story was covered in more than one magazine, the same magazine might provide conflicting or inconsistent views. Cultural transfer worked in more than one direction, with Time and News Review occasionally citing German sources. Diese Woche often cited British newspapers as its sources, but selected and interpreted the stories to reflect the interests of its German readers. A story on German scientists recruited to work in Russia, for example, was given a different slant by each magazine. The event which triggered

40 Except for a few minor stories in Diese Woche sourced directly from Time or News Review,suchas an article in the 7 December issue of Diese Woche, questioning whether it was appropriate to clean Old Master paintings, which was based directly on an earlier piece in the 14 November issue of News Review. Both magazines printed the same ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of the painting by Peter Paul Rubens, ‘Chapeau de Paille’; see ‘Dirty old masters face a clean-up’, News Review, 14 November 1946; ‘Alte Meister, Frische Farben’, Diese Woche, 7 December 1946, 16.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 225 the story took place on 22 October 1946, when several thousand German scientists and technicians in the Soviet Zone were rounded up early in the morning and sent with their families to work in Russia.41 Die Neue Zeitung reported the story in a brief factual article on 25 October, ‘Nach Russland verpflichtet’.42 On 28 October a short piece in Time made no mention of any action by the Soviet Union. It reported that since the end of the war all four of the victorious Allies had been competing with each other to recruit German scientists and uncover technical secrets, but the ‘struggle was nearing its end – for each victor nation had corralled about all the German brains it could get hold of’.43 News Review covered the story under the heading ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ in its 31 October issue, but with a different slant. The article presented the image of a named German individual, abducted against his will following a Soviet intrusion into the British sector of Berlin, while his family looked on helplessly.44 A week later a brief article provided a more favourable view of a similar, though much smaller action by the British. It reported that ten of ‘Hitler’s top- rank rocket scientists were voluntarily leaving Germany’ to work in Britain. A government minister was quoted as saying it was part of a ‘pre-arranged plan’, and that the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union had the right to ‘requisition all scientists in their respective zones [and] use their brains as they see fit’.45 Diese Woche covered the story at length in an article titled ʻAbtransport nach Osten’ on the first two pages of the pre-production dummy issue dated 1 November, reporting that large numbers of engineers and technicians had been woken at home in the middle of the night and told they had to be ready to leave in three hours.46 Diese Woche criticised the Soviet actions, and also highlighted inconsistencies and divisions among the Allies. The article quoted the British commander in Berlin claiming that the Soviet action was a violation of human rights, reported the Soviet commander in Berlin saying that the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had previously criticised deportations of specialist workers by the Americans, and commented that Germans should not judge the administrative actions of the Allies.47 Diese Woche returned to the topic in

41 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, Cambridge, MA and London 1995, p. 220. The operation is now generally known by its Soviet name ‘Osoaviakhim’, but this name was not used in the articles in Time, News Review,orDiese Woche discussed here. 42 ‘Nach Russland verplichtet: Aufforderung an deutsche Ingenieure und ihre Familien’, Die Neue Zeitung, 25 October 1946. 43 ‘German brains’, Time, 28 October 1946, 17. 44 ‘Workers’ Grabtime’, News Review, 31 October 1946, 5–6. 45 ‘V-Experts to Britain’, News Review, 7 November 1945, 1. 46 ‘Abtransport nach Osten’, Diese Woche, pre-production issue, 1 November 1946. 47 The same theme was continued in ‘Auch ein Ostfluchtling:¨ er wollte nicht nach Russland’, Diese Woche, no. 1, 16 November 1946, 4, a personal story of one man who had escaped from a train full of engineers and technicians on its way to Russia.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 226 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN the Christmas issue on 21 December, describing British attempts to obtain German patents and trade secrets and to promote their use by British industry.48 On 4 November Time covered the issue again in a short article, ‘Red Recessional’, but with a different interpretation from a week earlier, closer to that of News Review and Diese Woche, criticising the Soviet action. One of four brief pieces on Germany reported that at 2 am on 23 October, ‘all over the Soviet Zone, doorbells began buzzing’ and ‘before dawn, trainloads of skilled German workers were rolling eastward’.49 There was no reference to the story in Heute. The 1 November issue reported the results of the recent elections in Berlin, held on 21 October, but this was the only topical news story covered. The main feature, ‘Ein Dach uber¨ dem Kopf’ (‘A roof over one’s head’), spread over nine pages, provided descriptions of seventeen ways of building new houses, from reclaiming old bricks from rubble, to pre-fabricated, factory-built houses made of steel and concrete. Other features in the same issue were on a small-town library in America, seven young German children in a Berlin school writing their wishes for the future, the city of New Orleans, American football, and two short stories by the American author William Saroyan. All four magazines selected content they considered most relevant and of interest to their audiences in the US, Britain, or Germany respectively. Although they might favour a particular point of view, they generally reflected the national preconceptions and prejudices of their readers, but encouraged them to make up their own minds, rather than telling them what to think.

STYLE

Leo Brawand reports that in the first staff meeting for Diese Woche the journalists were shown copies of News Review, as well as Time, which were to function as role models for the new German news magazine. Some of the articles were translated into German for them, and they were instructed on how to write in the Anglo-American style.50 Whether articles from the first editions of Diese Woche therefore display the same stylistic characteristics as articles from Time and News Review, simply copying their model, is a question to be explored here. Brawand also reports that the journalists of Diese Woche were shown editions of ‘successful critical journals of the Weimar Republic’, such as Die Fackel and Die Weltbuhne¨ .51 These journals were ‘recommended by Bohrer as intellectual criteria’, and Augstein called them ‘a good German model worth combining with the Anglo-American

48 ‘Geistiger Export Deutschlands’, Diese Woche, 21 December 1946. 49 ‘Red Recessional’, Time, 4 November 1946, 18. 50 See Brawand, Der Spiegel – ein Besatzungskind (note 26), p. 102. 51 Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), p. 22.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 227 news magazine style’.52 Was this combination of models really put into practice and did it, among other possible influences, lead to articles in Diese Woche having a unique style of their own, clearly distinct from their Anglo- American forerunners? Since Time, News Review,andDiese Woche all covered the news story described above about German scientists being recruited to work in the USSR, three of the articles – ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ in News Review,‘RedRecessional’inTime, and ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ in Diese Woche – provide an opportunity for stylistic comparison across the different publications.53 The following stylistic analysis is not a linguistic one. Rather, it is a rhetorical-stylistic analysis. Whereas a linguistic-based comparison of texts written in two different languages is highly complex and methodologically problematic, rhetoric provides a more feasible framework for a stylistic comparison across different languages. There are various different ways in which to conceptualise the relation between rhetoric and stylistics. Hans-Werner Eroms, for example, explains that traditional stylistics was a ‘Teildisziplin der Rhetorik’, while Bernd Spillner describes stylistics as ‘Nachfolgerin der traditionellen Rhetorik’.54 Craig Hamilton sums up the various concepts and understandings present in the critical debate: ‘Some may see stylistics as part of rhetoric; others may see it as rhetoric; and still others may see the two as co-existing.’55 It is Hamilton’s concept of rhetorical stylistics, set out in his paper on ‘Stylistics as rhetoric’, that informs the following analysis: ‘rhetorical stylistics involves looking at rhetoric and style’.56 Rhetoric can be defined as ‘die Lehre vom optimalen Einsatz sprachlicher Mittel’.57 It is traditionally understood as a normative framework, although this is not what my own analysis is about.58 It is not about good or bad use of language but about analysing how journalists choose to use language to reach their goals most efficiently and effectually. This idea already incorporates a basic definition of style which hinges on the existence of choice. Style is ‘gebunden an die Existenz unterschiedlicher Ausdrucksmoglichkeiten’.¨ 59 Only if speakers or writers have a choice between different ways of expressing a fact or an idea in language is it possible to speak of the existence of style. This very basic

52 Ibid. 53 The story was not covered by Heute. 54 Hans-Werner Eroms, Stil und Stilistik. Eine Einfuhrung¨ , Berlin 2008, p. 13, and Bernd Spillner, ‘Verfahren stilistischer Textanalyse’, in Rhetorik und Stilistik: Ein internationales Handbuch historischer und systematischer Forschung, ed. Ulla Fix, Andreas Gardt, and Joachim Knape, Berlin 2009, pp. 1739– 82 (p. 1744). 55 Craig Hamilton, ‘Stylistics as rhetoric’, in The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, ed. Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, Cambridge 2014, pp. 63–76 (p. 76). 56 Ibid. 57 Eroms, Stil und Stilistik (note 54), p. 15. 58 See ibid., p. 13. 59 Spillner, ‘Verfahren stilistischer Textanalyse’ (note 54), p. 1744.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 228 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN concept of style is also employed by Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short: ‘every analysis of style [...] is an attempt to find the artistic principles underlying a writer’s choice of language’.60 It is in accord with this concept of style that not only are certain forms of speech or text thought to have a style, but, as Spillner writes, ‘es besteht heute Konsens daruber,¨ dass “Stil” eine Qualitat¨ aller Texte ist’.61 Eroms characterises newspaper articles as ‘in besonderem Maße geeignet, die Wirkungsweise stilistischer Strategien zu erkennen’.62 While literary texts unfold their stylistic potential ‘in Interdependenz mit der Aussage’, in texts in the media stylistic characteristics ‘stehen [...] im Dienst der Aussage’.63 This seems to suggest a natural affinity between texts in the media and rhetoric, in that rhetoric, considering its roots in speeches held in court, also subordinates style to content and utilises it to get the intended message across.64 The following analysis does not claim to be complete, but concentrates on some of the most striking stylistic characteristics of the texts under consideration. The three articles to be analysed differ in length and can be found at different positions in their respective publications from three different countries.65 However, they all report the same event and are published in very similar, actually related, news magazines over the course of only five days. Furthermore, the German and the Anglo-American news magazines also target a very similar readership. In the Spiegel Almanach, Harry Bohrer writes about Diese Woche as ‘eine aktuelle Wochenzeitung quer durch alle Volksschichten’.66 The ‘Spiegel Statute’ from 1949, which defines the working principles of the successor to Diese Woche, describes the target readership of the German news magazine as ‘a large circle of lay people with normal interests’.67 Having analysed the style of articles published in Time, Uwe Magnus reaches a very similar conclusion about the American news magazine’s targeted readership: ‘Die Artikel [...] sprechen somit einen weiten Leserkreis in der einfachen, allen verstandlichen¨ Sprechweise des taglichen¨ Umgangs an’.68 The title and the lead are two elements of the articles’ structure which are characteristic of their genre. The first point of comparison is to be found in the titles of the articles. ‘Red Recessional’ and ‘Workers’

60 Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, Harlow 2007, p. 60. 61 Spillner, ‘Verfahren stilistischer Textanalyse’ (note 54), p. 1744. 62 Eroms, Stil und Stilistik (note 54), p. 227. 63 Ibid. 64 See Spillner, ‘Verfahren stilistischer Textanalyse’ (note 54), p. 1752. 65 Total number of sentences: ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ – eleven, ‘Red Recessional’ – thirty-two, ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ – sixty-three. 66 Harry Bohrer, ʻEs wird großen Spaß machenʼ (note 1). 67 Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), p. 61. 68 Uwe Magnus, Time und Newsweek: Darstellung und Analyse, Hanover 1967, p. 84.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 229 Grabtime’ are rhetorically similar insofar as they reveal only the most minimal information about the topic or content of the articles. Their main function is to generate interest and to gain attention, not to inform succinctly.69 What heightens the appeal of the titles in Time and News Review is their playful and inventive style. They both make use of traditional rhetorical-stylistic devices, which Eroms describes as ‘normierte, gesetzmaßig¨ erlaubte “Verstoße”¨ gegen das Erwartete’.70 ‘Red Recessional’ uses alliteration to stand out, while ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ both alludes ironically to a popular radio programme of the time (‘Workers’ Playtime’) and contains a neologism, which makes the title catchier. In rhetorical terms, ‘Abtransport nach Osten’, presumably written by Augstein, pretends to a more informative character than the other two titles and eschews obvious stylistic devices, which might be thought to weaken its potential to generate readers’ interest. However, the mere combination of ‘Abtransport’ and ‘Osten’ could not fail to reverberate strongly with contemporary German readers because of the shocking connotations of the Eastern Front, the deportations of Jews and others, and the ordeal of the forced march out of the former Eastern territories endured by so many Germans at the end of the war. Rhetoric, in other words, was deployed in various registers, some more blatant than others. A feature common to all three articles is the fact that they are not neutral, but already reveal a bias in the interpretation of events. The word ‘recessional’ constitutes the core of the interpretation in the article in Time and is therefore also directly repeated in the lead. The word ‘grab’ from the neologism in the title from News Review has negative connotations. The word ‘Abtransport’ in the title of the article in Diese Woche is normally used either to describe the removal of material and goods, or to describe the involuntary movements of people. Had the writer of the article intended a more neutral or positive title, he could have used a word like ‘Abreise’ instead. By using ‘Abtransport’ in the title he implicitly gives an interpretation of events, suggesting that the humans involved are being treated like goods or animals (like the Jews and others transported to death camps in cattle wagons). This renunciation of objectivity, or of the appearance of objectivity, is not an exception in articles in Time and Der Spiegel. Referring to the prospectus of Time, which states that complete neutrality is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, Magnus concludes that objectivity is clearly not a principle of the magazine.71 According to Brawand, the ‘Spiegel Statute’ of 1949 names as one basic precept of the German news magazine: ‘Der Spiegel must show where the weight of the argument lies.’72

69 Magnus points out that it is not even unusual for titles of Time articles to be incomprehensible to the reader until he has read the whole article. See Magnus Time und Newsweek (note 68), p. 91. 70 Eroms, Stil und Stilistik (note 54), p. 177. 71 See Magnus, Time und Newsweek (note 68), p. 120. 72 Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), p. 61.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 230 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN The second point of comparison is the lead of the articles, which Brawand describes as ‘the main stylistic legacy left to us by the British’, and which, according to him, the journalists of Diese Woche practised day and night.73 The lead of ‘Red Recessional’ is the most informative and the most ‘classical’ one. It reports the events, puts them into context, and interprets them. The leads of ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ and ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ are written in a quite different style, which seems to comply more with the requirements that Brawand describes as essential for a good lead: ‘something that really caught the reader’s attention “like a lasso” and made him go on reading’.74 In the case of the article in Diese Woche the journalist tries to achieve a ‘lasso effect’ by writing in a literary, almost poetical style. The lead does not give any information about the article’s content, it only hints at ‘eine neue Begebenheit’ and in this way tries to build up interest and suspense, dramatising the events. In the case of the article in News Review the journalist uses a different technique to catch the reader’s interest. He puts the story of one named individual at the centre of his lead, thereby emphasising the aspect of human interest in his story. He reports the events only from the perspective of this person, giving no further information or context. The emphasis on stories of human interest is also noticeable in the other two articles, although they do not express it in their leads. It is a basic precept of Time and later Der Spiegel to write stories with a focus on human interest. Henry R. Luce’s definition of journalism is: ‘Journalism means, for us, an unlimited interest in the whole of human life.’75 One of the basic statutes of Der Spiegel is: ‘Nothing interests people as much as people.’76 All in all, the leads in News Review and Diese Woche seem more similar to each other than either of them do to the lead in Time. While the first two seem to be more focused on the effect and apply more of a ‘lasso-function’, the latter seems to be more focused on information and interpretation. Rhetorical categories that play a central role in the following analysis are ‘the artistic proofs of ethos, logos,andpathos first described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric’.77 Hamilton explains that ‘in simple terms, ethos refers to character and pathos to emotions, while logos refers to evidence, forms and arguments’.78 While logos is a category of reason, being enhanced by examples or relations of cause and effect, ethos and pathos are categories which describe the emotional aspect of the use and effect of language.79 Ethos is connected to the side of the talker or

73 Ibid., p. 62, and see also p. 20. 74 Ibid., p. 20. 75 Magnus, Time und Newsweek (note 68), p. 72. 76 Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), p. 61. 77 Hamilton, ‘Stylistics as rhetoric’ (note 55), p. 74. 78 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 79 See ibid., p. 75; see also Dietmar Till, ‘Rhetorik des Affekts (pathos)’, in Rhetorik und Stilistik (note 54), pp. 646–69 (p. 647).

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 231 communicator, encompassing the ‘Image des Redners’, while pathos refers to the side of the listener or addressee.’80 Whereas ‘bei “logischen” Texten idealiter die Argumente selbst (die sprichwortlichen¨ “nackten Tatsachen”) uberzeugend¨ wirken’, pathos works very similarly to ethos and ‘versetzt die emotionale Pradisposition¨ des Zuhorers¨ in einen Zustand, der dessen Urteilsfahigkeit¨ im Sinne des Redners lenkt’.81 One example of a way to enhance pathos has already been described above: the emphasis on stories of human interest. In terms of the rhetorical category of ethos, it is important to note that all the analysed articles share the characteristic of authorial anonymity. When the concept of Diese Woche was developed, Bohrer stressed the point that articles in the new news magazine would not be signed.82 Furthermore, the articles neither carry any references to sources, nor do they indicate the time and place of their origin. According to Brawand, Bohrer saw anonymity as a provision to prevent any member of staff from winning personal fame.83 In a rhetorical context, anonymity could be interpreted as a deliberate rejection of ethos, the emotional influencing of the reader by the image of the writer. But the anonymity of articles in the different news magazines can also be seen in a more critical light. Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to it in connection with his second thesis about Der Spiegel in his famous essay ‘Die Sprache des Spiegel’84 in 1957, which claimed that Der Spiegel was not a news magazine at all, because it did not present news, which clearly names its sources, but stories:

Jede Nachricht hat eine Quelle, die sich angeben laßt;¨ Zeit, Ort und Urheber sind von ihr nicht ablosbar.¨ Diese Angaben gehoren¨ deshalb zum unentbehrlichen Minimum jeder, auch der kleinsten Zeitungsmeldung. Im Spiegel fehlen sie, weil sie mit dem Prinzip der Story nicht vereinbar sind: Story und Nachricht schließen einander aus.85 According to many critics of Der Spiegel, the journalistic form of the story is used to conceal a high degree of opinion under the cloak of the term news.86 Magnus analyses the apparent advantages of anonymity in Time and states that this principle seemingly supports the magazine’s claim to omniscience and completeness, and in this way also increases its impact on readers.87 Because articles in Time are not signed by individual journalists, every article

80 Till, ‘Rhetorik des Affekts (pathos)’ (note 79), p. 647. 81 Ibid., pp. 653 and 650. 82 See Brawand, The Spiegel Story (note 27), pp. 22–3. 83 See ibid., p. 23. 84 See Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ʻDie Sprache des Spiegelʼ,inEinzelheiten I: Bewußtseins-Industrie, Frankfurt a. M. 2010, pp. 74–105. 85 Ibid., p. 85. 86 See Dieter Just, Der Spiegel: Arbeitsweise, Inhalt, Wirkung, Hanover 1967, p. 117. 87 See Magnus, Time und Newsweek (note 68), p. 74.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 232 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN speaks with the weight and authority of Time’s entire editorial department, of whose integrity the reader can be assured. Magnus compares this to speaking ‘ex cathedra’.88 Enzensberger voiced similar concerns about the anonymity of style and language in Der Spiegel:

Hingegen ist die Spiegel-Sprache anonym, das Produkt eines Kollektivs. Sie maskiert den, der sie schreibt, ebenso wie das, was beschrieben wird. Es handelt sich um eine Sprache von schlechter Universalitat:¨ sie haltsichf¨ ur¨ kompetent in jedem Falle.89 Although Bohrer may have interpreted anonymity as a fundamentally democratic principle, which prevents certain people from elevating themselves above others, it is also appropriate to consider doubts about the democratic character of the anonymous articles, as they might be used to blur the distinction between facts and opinion and to create the appearance of omniscience, which has the potential to silence critics. The stylistic and rhetorical character of the main body of the articles is the next topic for analysis. One stylistic characteristic of ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ from Diese Woche is its poetical style.90 This is supported by stylistic devices such as metaphors (‘Der Scheinwerfer der Weltoffentlichkeit’,¨ ‘ein wahres Fackelfeuer’), but also by literary and emotional embellishments which have no further informative value but enhance pathos by ‘mov[ing] readers and increas[ing] their emotional involvement with the text’.91 An example of this is the sentence: ‘Zu Tranen¨ und Wehklagen blieb keine Zeit.’ Another notable stylistic characteristic is the use of colloquial language or even slang. In ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ we find two examples of colloquial language: ‘in den Schornstein schreiben’ and ‘aus den Betten geholt’. The use of simple and colloquial language enables Diese Woche to reach a wider and more diverse readership. Furthermore, ‘shifts in register [...] also enhance ethos’, as the writer becomes ‘more intimate and more closely identified with readers’.92 A similar effect might be connected to the phrase: ‘Rotarmisten fungierten als Mobelleute’.¨ This sentence paints an absurd, almost comical picture of the Russian soldiers. Besides probably appealing to a wider audience through humour, it is another example of steering the reader’s opinion, similar to that which occurs in the sub-titles of the articles. ‘Abtransport nach Ostenʼ contains two extremely shortened sentences: ‘Marschrichtung: Osten. Reiseziel: unbekannt.’ These sentences dramatise the situation, stress the lack of information of the workers going to Russia, and may also imitate the command language of the

88 See ibid., pp. 73–4. 89 Enzensberger, ʻDie Sprache des Spiegelʼ (note 84), pp. 80–81. 90 Just describes the style of Diese Woche as ‘pseudo-literarisch[...]’, Der Spiegel: Arbeitsweise, Inhalt, Wirkung (note 86), p. 145. 91 Hamilton, ‘Stylistics as rhetoric’ (note 55), p. 75. 92 Ibid.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 233 Russian soldiers picking up the German workers. In addition, the word ‘Marschrichtung’ also suggests that people were being forced eastwards on foot, which, of course, was not the case, but which further influences the reader’s interpretation of events. In the article from Diese Woche there are many direct quotations, the majority of which are directly built into sentences (e.g. ‘mit Ausnahme des SPD-Fuhrers¨ Franz Neumann, der eine “unloyale Haltung gegenuber¨ der Sowjetunion” einnehme’; ‘bei dem es “nicht ohne Harten”¨ abgegangen seiʼ). The frequent use of such quotations strengthens the reader’s impression of the accuracy and completeness of the article, thereby enhancing logos.93 It also again stresses the aspects of human interest in the story.94 The last noticeable stylistic characteristic of ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ is the frequent use of hyphenated compound nouns (‘SPD-Zeitung’, ‘Anti- Sowjet-Kampagne’, ‘Anti-Sowjet-Propaganda’, ‘Goebbels-Propaganda’, ‘russisch-kontrollierten’, ‘anti-westlichen’, ‘Uran-Zerspalter’). Just analyses the possible functions of these compound nouns: on the one hand they may fulfil an informative function, as they shorten the sentences, thus making them clearer and easier to understand. On the other hand, the compounds may also give less precise information than a longer sentence and, according to Just, they may be used to covertly include an opinion in the news, as the average reader might be less sceptical towards a compound noun than towards a longer sentence.95 An example of an interpretation included in an effective compound noun is ‘Goebbels-Propaganda’. Without having to explain the alleged commonality with Goebbels’s type and use of propaganda, the negative connection is instantly established by the reader. It has to be stressed, though, that ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ at this point indirectly quotes the Soviet news agency. Those sentences of ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ which are not quotations appear to be much less loaded with opinion. The much shorter ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ shares some characteristics with ‘Abtransport nach Osten’. Like the German article, it begins in a poetical style: ‘Early one dark morning’. However, there are no metaphors or other signs of poetical language in the rest of the article. What is characteristic of ‘Workers’ Grabtime’, though, is that the narrative, at the beginning, is a chronological one, which is stressed by repeated references to the time: ‘By four a.m.’, ‘At ten’. This gives the text the appearance of completeness and accuracy. The article from News Review contains one slang expression (‘shanghaied’), another characteristic which it shares with ‘Abtransport nach Osten’. It also contains one direct quotation and one German word, which is translated in brackets: ‘arbeitspflicht (labour duty)’. This use of a word from a foreign language, which, according to Just, later becomes

93 See Magnus, Time und Newsweek (note 68), p. 79. 94 See ibid., p. 72. 95 See Just, Der Spiegel: Arbeitsweise, Inhalt, Wirkung (note 86), p. 152.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 234 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN characteristic for Der Spiegel, again stresses the ostensible accuracy of the article’s content.96 On the one hand, both the chronological accuracy and the use of a literal quotation in German enhance logos, while on the other they also enhance ethos, as they convey the image of a well-informed and educated author. The final stylistic characteristic of ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ which separates it from ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ is its deliberate use of adjectives, adverbs, and powerful verbs to make the article livelier and give it more colour (‘dark’, ‘insistent’, ‘tearful’, ‘in disgust’, ‘violent’, ‘pressed’). Words like this are very effective in displaying and eliciting emotions and can therefore be used to influence and steer the reader’s opinion and interpretation of the reported news, which is a clear instance of pathos. For example, the words ‘in disgust’ and ‘violent’ are used without explanation. Not one of the people who supposedly ‘quit in disgust’ is quoted and not one act of violence is actually described. The reader has to believe these judgements conveyed via adjectives and adverbs, and is not able to verify them. It is interesting to note that ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ also mentions the four people who, according to ‘Workers’ Grabtime’, ‘quit in disgust’, but the German article, published one day after the article in the British magazine, mentions that one man denied having resigned, and also gives additional information about the other three men. Thus, whereas ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ simply offers an interpretation of events through a single adverb, ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ provides background information and also mentions the direct reaction of one of the men concerned. An example of a verb that expresses a strong degree of interpretation in ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ can be found in the last sentence of the article: ‘after 7000 Germans had been pressed into Soviet service’. By choosing this specific verb, the article positions itself clearly and dismisses the Russians’ explanations that the workers were legally conscripted to work. ‘Red Recessional’ shares some characteristic elements with the other two articles, but makes use of even more stylistic devices, which give the overall article a more playful appearance. As discussed in relation to the lead, the language of ‘Red Recessional’ is not as poetical as that of the other two articles, although it also contains one metaphor (‘did not come into court with surgically clean hands’). But like ‘Workers’ Grabtime’, ‘Red Recessional’ also uses temporal markers to stress the chronological narrative of the events (‘at 2 a.m. on Oct. 23’, ‘before dawn’, ‘in June’). A characteristic which ‘Red Recessional’ shares especially with ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ is the frequent use of direct quotations, which are sometimes built directly into the article’s sentences and sometimes not (e.g. ‘Sokolovsky had personally assured them that “in principle removals have been completed”’; ‘so pack at once and “count on being en route three to four weeks”’). Another shared stylistic characteristic with ‘Abtransport

96 See ibid., p. 148.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 235 nach Osten’ is the use of compound nouns (‘Russian-backed SED’, ‘one- industry Jena’). These compound nouns are used, to different degrees, to covertly combine facts and opinion, but also to add extraneous information and provide more human interest, as for example in the case of the ‘one- armed Berlin Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher’. Additionally, ‘Red Recessional’ contains a drastically shortened sentence, which is very similar to the two sentences found in ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ (‘The order: you must work in Russia’). Here, again, the very short sentence before the colon might imitate the command language used by the Russian soldiers. The very short sentence, ‘their phone rang’, is similarly used to dramatise events and build up suspense. A characteristic which ‘Red Recessional’ shares with ‘Workers’ Grabtime’ but not with ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ is the use of strong, colourful adjectives, adverbs, and verbs which have interpretational functions and channel the reader’s opinion. Examples of the frequent and targeted use of adjectives and adverbs are: ‘crashing’, ‘rude’, ‘dutifully’, ‘violent’, ‘excited’, ‘pouring’, ‘angrily’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘nightmarish’. Examples of verbs with similar characteristics and functions are: ‘grabbing’, ‘rot’, ‘haunt’. The language used in ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ seems more neutral and factual, but also less colourful and more monotonous, because the article from Diese Woche makes less use of these kinds of strong words than the Time and News Review articles. It is very interesting to note, however, that Just describes in his study of Der Spiegel a similar use of adjectives, adverbs, and verbs to those found in ‘Red Recessional’ and ‘Workers’ Grabtime’.97 This suggests a later convergence of style between Diese Woche,laterDer Spiegel,andTime and News Review. There are some stylistic devices, such as alliteration and assonance, which are unique to ‘Red Recessional’. In addition to the title, the text contains further examples of alliteration, for instance, ‘men and machinery’ and ‘doorbells began buzzing’; and of assonance, for example, ‘stresses and shortages’. That the language used in the Time article is more playful and inventive than the language of the other two articles is also stressed by the fact that it contains a rhyme: ‘troops on their stoops’. In the penultimate paragraph of the article there are even more new stylistic devices. First, there is repetition of a word to stress a contrast (‘the average German’ versus ‘the average citizen of devastated Ukraine and Byelorussia’). Secondly, there is a threefold repetition which builds up a climax of drama and accumulates significance (‘is better fed, better dressed, and better housed’). In summary, the rhetorical-stylistic comparison reveals enough evidence to speak of a clearly recognisable influence of the Anglo-American news magazine style on Diese Woche. This is not to say that the style of ‘Abtransport nach Osten’ is a mere stylistic copy of the other articles. But the key

97 See ibid., p. 150.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 236 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN differences, the most significant of which is the lack of strong and colourful adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, is also not enough to suggest that the German news magazine, at this point, had a unique style of its own. It did not consciously and clearly separate itself from central aspects of its forerunner’s style or some of its most basic precepts, like the anonymity of articles, the focus on stories of human interest, and the attitude towards objectivity. The authors of all three articles employ the three rhetorical categories of ethos, pathos,andlogos, thereby providing information and targeting the readersʼ intellect, but also trying to influence and control the readersʼemotions.

CONCLUSION

The origins of Diese Woche and Der Spiegel can be traced to the US, via Time; to Britain, via John Chaloner and News Review; to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, via Harry Bohrer and Henry Ormond; and to Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, through Rudolf Augstein and his team of young editors and journalists. The story of Diese Woche and Der Spiegel is one of multiple origins, interconnections, and cultural interactions. This article has examined four factors that may have contributed to the process of cultural transfer: the historical process of creating the magazines, the individuals involved and their role as cultural intermediaries; the format of the magazines; the content of the magazines; and the writing styles. We concluded that the historical context and the individuals involved, their personal connections and roles were important factors, as were the format and writing style, but, perhaps surprisingly, the content appears to have been less significant. There is little evidence of any direct borrowing of subject matter, ideas for articles, or specific ideas and messages consistently promoted in both Der Spiegel and Time in the US, in News Review in Britain, or in Heute in the US Zone of Germany. Gienow-Hecht argues that Die Neue Zeitung transferred American ideas to its German readers in the form and style of a traditional German newspaper. With Der Spiegel the opposite was the case. The format and style, but not the content or any overt messages, were taken from US and British models. Die Neue Zeitung ceased publication in January 1955 after the US government stopped offering financial support.98 Heute had already closed, and the British News Review ceased publication as an independent magazine in 1950.99 Der Spiegel, on the other hand, like Time, has continued to this day. The magazine emerged in the 1950s as a highly successful, established and influential part of the German media, selling over one million copies at its peak in the 1970s, far more than any equivalent

98 Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible (note 2), p. 167. 99 The British Library catalogue gives the last issue as 25 May 1950 and states that News Review was subsequently incorporated with Illustrated.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd NEWS MAGAZINES AND CULTURAL INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR GERMANY 237 publication in Britain. The self-portrayal of Der Spiegel as being independent and critical of authority allowed it to adopt a writing style that appealed to its readers, using colourful language, mixing facts and opinion, and including interpretations in the space between the lines. Although its style was often criticised, it was also admired, widely imitated, and adopted by other German publications.100 Later critics such as Enzensberger perceived ‘Die Sprache des Spiegel’ as dangerous to German culture and democracy, but Der Spiegel was no different from similar publications in the US and Britain in its use of language to present a particular point of view. The idea, common among British and US information control officials in Germany, that British and American news reporting was accurate and truthful and never mixed fact and opinion, whereas only the German press ‘mixed information and tendentious commentʼ, was one of many fictions peddled in post-war Germany by Germans, by the British, and by the Americans.101 As has been shown in this article, all three weekly news magazines, Time in the US, News Review in Britain, and Diese Woche/Der Spiegel in Germany, blurred facts and opinion. They were all very clear about their aim of being independent, but at the same time they all used various stylistic devices to interpret the news as well as report it, and make it appear interesting to their readers. Der Spiegel was no different in this respect from Time and News Review. Although Diese Woche and Der Spiegel did not embody any explicit set of US or British cultural or political values, Rudolf Augstein and the early Spiegel writers and editors clearly adopted more general ideas about a free and independent press from Chaloner, Bohrer, and Ormond, and from the British and American magazines they were told to use as models for their work: independence from government, a willingness to criticise authority and champion the rights of the individual, an open society where information is not concealed from the general public, the need for a good citizen to be properly informed in order to exercise his or her democratic rights, and the presentation of diverse, sometimes conflicting ideas. When asked many years later, in a filmed interview with Der Spiegel in 2006, why and how he had decided to create the magazine, Chaloner said that, above all, he wanted to establish a paper that was independent of the government:

It was to strongly develop the independence of the German press, so that there could be no question of it following the Hitler pattern, that it was somehow a government-owned organisation or publication.102

100 Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise (note 4), pp. 219–25. 101 FO 945/848, paper on ‘Information Control in the British Zone of Germany’: ‘Only by reforming the German press and banishing from it the dangerous mix-up of information and tendentious comment which has passed as news-writing in German newspapers for the last sixty years, can we hope to educate in the German public a taste for the truthful, objective reporting which will make it difficult to impose on them once more the kind of propaganda with which the German militaristic regime were able to lead their people into five wars of aggression within eighty years.’ 102 Der Spiegel archives, interview with John Chaloner, 2 November 2006.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 238 CHRISTOPHER KNOWLES, JULIA VOSSEN In Chaloner’s view, the greatest danger to culture and democracy came not from a magazine’s writing style or whether articles were signed or anonymous, but from a weak press unable to resist and oppose oppressive governments. If this meant that his magazine, Diese Woche, published articles that were critical of the British and Allied authorities, or that Der Spiegel attacked the Adenauer government in 1962, then so be it: ‘that seemed to me the natural role of a so-called free press.’103

103 Ibid.

C 2018 The Author German Life and Letters C 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd