The Temptation of Despair

Tales of the 1940s

Werner Sollors

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780674052437
• eBook ISBN: 9780674416321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources—diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film—Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.

These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making "After Dachau" a new epoch in Western history.

The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people—sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience—as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

Notes

Introduction

1. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Reuben Hatch’s book Bible-Servitude Re-Examined: With Special Reference to Pro-Slavery Interpretations and Infidel Objections (Cincinnati: Applegate, 1862), 243, as the first instance of the word nation-building, where it is associated with the rise of human selfishness resulting in the creation of chattel slavery; the next occurrence is in a journal article from 1913 referring to “the moving forces of the constructive nation-building of the American people.” Yet a Google Ngram curve for the word shows a steep increase of its employment only in the years from 1958 to 1972 and from 1985 to 2000.

2. Franz Oppenhoff, the mayor of Aachen installed by the Americans in October 1944, was assassinated on March 21, 1945, in what was believed to be a Werwolf action, but research in East German archives led Volker Koop to the conclusion that the assassination was an SS operation. See his book Himmlers letztes Aufgebot: Die NS-Organisation “Werwolf” (Köln: Böhlau, 2008), 122–36. Similarly, the spectacularly brutal assassination of sixteen people collaborating with the Americans in Bavaria, the so-called “Penzberger Mordnacht” of April 28, 1945, may have actually been planned by the SS. Members of the occupying forces appear not to have been targeted.

3. This is a marked contrast to the situation in Japan.

4. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

5. Franz Neumann, “Military Government and the Revival of Democracy in Germany,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs 2 (1948): 4.

6. See Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945 (2003; repr. München: btb-Verlag, 2005), discussed in Chapter One.

7. I am citing these examples more or less randomly to stand for such a vast array of shorthand capital letters used in the 1940s that several scholarly books about the period include long lists of acronyms. However, in case the reader wonders, HJ stands for Hitlerjugend; BdM for Bund deutscher Mädchen, the Nazi youth organizations for boys and girls; and GYA was the German Youth Association of the U.S. Army, which engaged youngsters in sports activities after the war. OKW was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Supreme German Army Command, SHAEF the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, and USAREUR the United States Army Europe.

8. Richard L. Merritt, Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 260.

9. The document is included in Hajo Holborn, American Military Government: Its Organziation and Policies (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1947), 157–72. The quoted passages are on 159 (4.b and 4.c). Part II of the directive instructed the commander-in-chief of U.S. Forces of Occupation: “Except as may be necessary to carry out these objectives, you will take no steps (a) looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy” (164). See also http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3-450426.pdf, accessed March 1, 2013. One of the odd ironies of the JCS-1067 was that this first real blueprint for the American occupation was classified and remained secret because it contained a large list of people who were to be arrested; it was made public on October 17, 1945. By then parts of the JCS-1067 had been incorporated into the Potsdam Agreement. General Lucius D. Clay was critical of the JCS-1067 and found that it “contemplated a Carthaginian peace which dominated our operations in Germany during the early months of the occupation,” but was fortunately so general in nature that “the degree of its application was left to the judgment of the military governor.” Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 19.

10. Nicholas Watson, “Despair,” in Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 342–57, an authoritative and exhaustive treatment of the theological and historical background of the notion in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

11. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3. Quoting Cassian’s long warning against the dangers of the “midday demon,” Agamben comments that the patristic description seems “to have furnished the model for modern literature in the grips of its own mal de siècle” (14n4).

12. Ars moriendi, Desperatio: Versuchung durch Verzweiflung, Cod. Pal. germ. 34, fol. 118v, XV c. Heidelberg / Universitätsbibliothek. Friedrich Joseph Adam Bartsch, Die Kupferstichsammlung der K. K. Hofbibliothek in Wien: In einer Auswahl ihrer merkwürdigsten Bilder (Wien: Braumüller, 1854). Images of “Temptation by Despair” and “Triumph over Despair” are at ARTstor 8075.1475/651.

13. The lure of suicide also had a longstanding history. Thus a seventeenth-century melancholy woman confessed to experiencing the “very great temptations” of destroying herself after giving birth to a child, so much so that she often took a knife in her hand to do it and feared being alone—until after the loss of another child she was freed of her thoughts of desperation by God’s great mercy, and she was able to pray and found solace in scriptures. E.C., “The Temptation of Despair,” in Patricia M. Crawford and Laura Gowing, eds., Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 2000), 276. Source: Vavasor Powell, Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Believers, 2nd ed. (1652), 25–27.

14. Robert Brasillach, a French fascist writer who was executed as an intellectual collaborator in 1945, published an in-depth essay on Bernanos in 1944 under the title, “Georges Bernanos ou la tentation du désespoir,” in Les quatre jeudis: images d’avant guerre (1944; repr. Paris: Les sept couleurs, 1951): 257–74. Georges Bernanos, Die Sonne Satans, trans. Friedrich Burschell and Jakob Hegner (Hamburg: rororo 16, 1950). In an essay on Gertrud von le Fort’s postwar writing, Joël Pottier invokes Bernanos’s phrase to characterize le Fort’s lyrical diary of the years 1933 to 1945. In Frank-Lothar Kroll, ed., Flucht und Vertreibung in der Literatur nach 1945 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1997), 147.

15. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Irina Renz, eds., “Vormittags die ersten Amerikaner”: Stimmen und Bilder vom Kriegsende 1945 (Stuttgart: Kleist-Cotta, 2005), 93.

16. Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1998), 248–49.

17. A Google Ngram even shows a sharp increase of uses of the word Selbstmord (suicide) from 1941 to 1948. Percy Knauth’s essay on “The German People” in Life, May 7, 1945, 69–76, begins with the story of the suicide on March 25 of Helmut Lotz and his family in Frankfurt.

18. The many photographs of this scene that are now also readily available at various internet sites seem to have helped to make these suicides rallying events for the extreme right. Lisso appears to have followed the example of Mayor Alfred Freyberg who also killed his wife and daughter and himself as the Americans were arriving in Leipzig. In Bourke-White’s section “Death Seemed the Only Escape,” she mentions that she was urged by Bill Walten of Life magazine to run to Leipzig’s city hall: “The whole inside of it is like Madam T[u]ssaud’s wax-works.” She follows this with a half-page description of the scene, including the bottle of Pyrimal with which the Lissos had killed themselves. See “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly”: A Report on the Collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand Years” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), 49–50. Some of Bourke-White’s photographs appeared in the photo-essay “Suicides: Nazis Go Down to Defeat in a Wave of ‘Selbstmord,’ ” Life, May 14, 1945, 32–33. See also Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 292–93. Bourke-White took another photograph from a very high position. Whereas Bourke-White featured Lisso’s party membership card under his elbow, Lee Miller shot the scene after placing a highly visible portrait of Hitler against the doorpost. Someone also must have moved Lisso’s body into a more upright position on the extremely dusty table, so that his elbow now rests next to a pack of cigarettes and matches and not on the party card. Miller “photographed the mother and the daughter as if asleep, then moved close to the daughter, who seems to swoon luxuriously across the leather sofa.” Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New Yor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Introduction
• One. March 29, 1945: Between the No Longer and the Not Yet
• Two. May 7, 1945: Malevolent Rectangles of Spectral Horror
• Three. June 23, 1945: After Dachau
• Four. October 4, 1945: Dilemmas of Denazification
• Five. January 8, 1946: Are You Occupied Territory?
• Six. April 24, 1946: The Race Problem in the House on Lilac Road
• Seven. August 20, 1948 / May 6, 1977: Heil, Johnny
• Coda
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index