The war was over – but the sex carried on
WHEN actress Marlene Dietrich returned to her homel and i n 1945, she was shocked by the hell that was a ruined, defeated Germany.
Having taken American citizenship, she hardened her heart: ‘I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her,’ she told a journalist. But did the survivors ‘deserve’ disease, starvation, rape, an unimaginably squalid existence amid freezing rubble, and lingering death?
Some British and American visitors believed that every single German soul was complicit in Nazi crimes; there could be no such thing as ‘a good German’.
Others, more idealistic, were convinced that the very essence of Germany could be changed — remade through culture, rebuilt by artists and intellectuals, so that the horror would never happen again.
This book tells the complex story of Germany between 1944 and 1949 through the eyes of 20 British, American and German artists and writers, among them Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller and Billy Wilder.
These talented men and women walked through the ruins of Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin and the nightmare of the camps in order to ‘confront the apocalypse’ and ask why it happened.
ALL believed that journalism and the arts could be at the heart of a reconstructed Germany. And Feigel is clearly in sympathy with their noble aims.
Her last book, The Love Charm Of Bombs, revealed the intensity of a wartime existence in which people knew that one night of love might be their last. Now she describes how the heartbreaking aftermath of war brought with it a similar desperate craving for respite in the darkness.
Sexual jealousy doesn’t stop because people are starving all around. So Marlene Dietrich arrived to entertain the troops – and began a passionate affair with handsome, debonair ( a nd married) General James Gavin. But Gavin was already in love with the brilliant American journalist Martha Gellhorn, soon to be ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway.
The love triangle of Dietrich-Gavin-Gellhorn is as fascinating as the affair between one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Rebecca West, and the American judge at the Nuremberg Trials, Francis Biddle.
Summoned by British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross to write a book about the trial, West had left England in a hurry, trusting her secretary to pack her case. As a result, the distinguished novelist found she had only one set of underwear and was forced to listen to evidence of unspeakable war crimes bra-less one day and knicker-less the next, because of washing her smalls in between.
This comic detail does not detract from the genuine, mature love between Rebecca West and Biddle. It was to end in sorrow, as he would not leave his wife.
Such stories may seem trivial, set against the swirl of Displaced Persons (over one million by April 1945) thronging the streets of Germany and the shocking revelations of concentration camp evil.
Martha Gellhorn was to remember her day in Dachau for the rest of her life, saying that she had ‘lost her youth’ there.
W.H. Auden doesn’t cut a very impressive figure in this book. While his friend Stephen Spender pondered how to address the painful reality of hatred against the German people, Auden was queening it as ‘first major poet to fly the Atlantic’ (his own words), hiring a handsome personal chef called Hans, wearing slippers and going to bed each night with a bottle of looted wine.
Meanwhile, on the streets, starving people scavenged for cigarette butts because they could make more money that way‘ than finding a job clearing the ruins’. With the Cold War looming, disillusion would become universal. There were plenty of emotional casualties among the intelligentsia who had briefly thought their ideas could ‘save’ Germany. Dietrich, used to the adulation of the troops and Hollywood moguls, came face to face with war’s sleazy betrayals when she tried to trace her younger sister, Liesel. Dietrich had heard rumours that she was in Belsen (though not a Jew) and arranged to travel to the liberated camp.
Then she discovered Liesel and her husband had, in fact, lived near the camp and worked closely with the Nazis. Dietrich felt physically sick — and from then on denied she had ever had a sister. Feigel begins with a statement that indicates how history can shift, even between a book’s completion and publication. Her introduction praises ‘ the powerful and peaceful Western Europe of today, dominated by a prosperous, liberal Germany’. Yet today’s Europe is in crisis, millions of refugees and economic migrants threaten stability, antiSemitism is rife, the spectre of Russia looms, the far-right is on the rise — and all the time wellmeaning intellectuals and artists still choose to think that everything can be made better by ‘ a shared cultural vision’.
Some lessons are never learned.