Putting Germany together again

The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities of Germany after 1945 (though no politicians were directly involved). The chief needs of the shattered population at the time were, of course, practical: food, water, sanitation and the reconstruction of buildings. But a vital supplementary effort was made to address what was left of German culture and history after the crimes and falsifications of the Nazis. The idea was that the arts should revive an alternative, peaceful and civilised way of life in the ruins of the country. It is surprising that no mention is made of the reform of German education by Robert Birley, later a progressive headmaster of Eton, even though technically it falls outside Feigel’s scope. In the long run it must have had a more important effect than the random activities described here.

Nothing can have been easy. Stephen Spender, one of the intellectuals sent on this crusade, found that ‘even the German-educated elite seemed unwilling to admit their culpability’, while many of the British officers in the Army of Occupation told him that they sympathised with the Nazis because ‘they were fellows who stood up for their country, whereas the refugees were rats who had let their country down’.

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Besides Spender, we exported what were thought to be the foremost writers (or anyway journalists) of the time, with the left unsurprisingly to the fore: George Orwell, who was easily the most impressive participant; Martha Gellhorn (who played a more glorious role before and after the end of the war than her husband Ernest Hemingway); W.H. Auden; John Dos Passos; the photographer Lee Miller, who had herself photographed symbolically in Hitler’s bath and the German-American film director Billy Wilder; with the cherry on the cake provided by Marlene Dietrich, who had wisely taken American citizenship in 1939.