The Bitter Taste of Victory by Lara Feigel

Author:Lara Feigel
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Culture was now pouring into Germany and it looked as though soon Marshall Plan money would be as well. It would be some time before daily life in Germany became less desperate, but there were signs that the Germans were no longer enemy aliens. In this climate it no longer made sense to be over-scrupulous in constraining the activities of German artists, so on 25 May 1947 Furtwängler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic at the American-requisitioned Titania-Palast cinema. At the end of a programme comprised entirely of Beethoven, the conductor was applauded for fifteen minutes.42

Reading about the concert in the US, Erika Mann was furious, complaining that even if the concert had been a success (which she doubted given they had only had two rehearsals), there was no need for such excessive adulation. ‘I cannot recall any exhilarating concert in Paris or London where the audience summoned the conductor 16 times.’ The applause seemed to her to be a protest against denazification. ‘The Germans never miss an occasion to emphasise their sacrifice and their survival and they do it in a loud and aggressive manner’. They would not have to protest for much longer. In October 1947 denazification would be handed over to the Germans altogether, with instructions to complete the process by the end of the year.43

Erika Mann was not alone among exiles in the US in looking on in horror as denazification was abandoned. The dream of a new Germany that had sustained them during the war had been trampled. In Germany, the more principled artists and writers asked themselves how they could bring into existence a new German culture untainted by Nazism. In August 1946 Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter had launched Der Ruf (‘The Call’), intended as an ‘Independent Journal of the Young Generation’, which became a forum for young writers calling for a ‘Stunde Null ’ – or zero hour – and a complete break with the past. They separated themselves from the older generation, partly as a way of drawing a line between the Nazis being tried at Nuremberg and the young men who had merely fought on the battlefield, and maintaining that the German majority should not be tainted by the crimes of a minority. Andersch and Richter had been removed from the editorship in April 1947 by Americans who thought they were too critical of the Occupation. However they were now busy founding ‘Gruppe 47’, a relatively informal grouping of young writers committed to tearing away the past and reconstituting the present on broadly existentialist principles.44

Others focused on integrating themselves into the wider culture of Europe. The first step to gaining a European presence was the foundation of a new German PEN centre in 1947, under the auspices of International PEN, the influential writers’ organisation dedicated to promoting literature and defending freedom of expression. For years, German writers had been represented at PEN only by German and Austrian centres in exile in London and New York. In June 1942, the English PEN

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.