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Summary
Summary
When Germany surrendered in May 1945 it was a nation reduced to rubble. Immediately, America, Britain, Soviet Russia, and France set about rebuilding in their zones of occupation. Most urgent were physical needs--food, water, and sanitation--but from the start the Allies were also anxious to indoctrinate the German people in the ideas of peace and civilization.
Denazification and reeducation would be key to future peace, and the arts were crucial guides to alternative, less militaristic ways of life. In an extraordinary extension of diplomacy, over the next four years, many writers, artists, actors, and filmmakers were dispatched by Britain and America to help rebuild the country their governments had spent years bombing. Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell, Lee Miller, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Billy Wilder, and others undertook the challenge of reconfiguring German society. In the end, many of them became disillusioned by the contrast between the destruction they were witnessing and the cool politics of reconstruction.
While they may have had less effect on Germany than Germany had on them, the experiences of these celebrated figures, never before told, offer an entirely fresh view of post-war Europe. The Bitter Taste of Victory is a brilliant and important addition to the literature of World War II.
Author Notes
Dr. Lara Feigel is a Senior Lecturer in English at King's College London, where her research centers on the 1930s and World War II. In addition to the critically acclaimed The Love-charm of Bombs , she has authored Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945 and co-edited Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside and the New Selected Journals of Stephen Spender . She has written for the Guardian , Prospect and History Today . Lara lives in West Hampstead, London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this colorful narrative, Feigel (The Love-charm of Bombs), a senior lecturer in English at King's College, London, uses the lives of 20 American, British, and German cultural figures as a lens through which to examine post-WWII Germany, from the Nazis' surrender to the early fall of 1949. Some of Feigel's subjects are well known, such as novelist Thomas Mann, filmmaker Billy Wilder, and poet W.H. Auden; others, considerably less so, including photographer Lee Miller, journalist Martha Gellhorn, and novelist Rebecca West. Feigel is at her best in describing the immediate year after Germany's defeat, when rubble was "spread for mile after mile, scattered with corpses," and the occupiers treated civilians harshly. Vivid chapters address the Nuremberg Trials and the Berlin Airlift, and Feigel shows how the politics and sensibility of the early Cold War period led to a measure of growing Western sympathy for Germans and the abandonment of an in-depth denazification of German culture and society. Unfortunately, in her last three chapters, she focuses too heavily on Mann and his oldest children, Erika and Klaus; she also writes too little on life in the Soviet sector. Despite these flaws, this is a well-constructed, fascinating, and anecdote-rich work about the early Cold War and the influence of postwar Germany on Western culture. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* British professor Feigel, author of The Love-Charm of Bombs (2013), about the romances that bloomed during the Blitz among various British writers, deals here in inimitable fashion with immediate post-WWII Germany, which was left, in 1945, in near-total ruin. Her story boasts a large cast of accomplished cultural figures Thomas Mann and his grown children, poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, Austrian-born film director Billy Wilder, writer Rebecca West, actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, and others. U.S. Army General James Gavin's simultaneous affairs with Dietrich and correspondent Martha Gellhorn (former wife of Ernest Hemingway) is not the ordinary stuff of academic histories (but, then again, neither is Feigel's general emphasis on her subjects' sexuality). In part, it is a story of personal reconstruction, particularly of the Mann family members, but in another sense it is a story of failure, of missed opportunity. Were Germans Nazis or victims? Many individuals had to come to terms with the evil they saw and with themselves, and Feigel does a masterful job in sorting it out. This is uniquely nuanced history.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist
Choice Review
Writers tend to pen far less about how wars end than they write about wars' beginnings. Feigel, (English, King's College, London), author of Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945 (2010) and The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), has crafted an exceedingly engaging, readable account of how novelists, poets, actors, and filmmakers from England and the US entered Europe in the last years of WW II and how they used their talents to describe what they saw. She discusses the wartime and postwar activities of luminaries such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden; German exiles Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Hindemith, and Thomas, Klaus, and Erika Mann; and John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Martha Gellhorn. Feigel proceeds chronologically, beginning in 1944 and ending with Germany's division in 1949. What is unique in her account is the interweaving of the public and personal--descriptions of military advances together with the amorous entanglements of her protagonists, such as Wilder and Hemingway, while they observed and recorded the wartime devastation in Central Europe. Clearly, her heroes are Dietrich and Wilder, who, despite the horrors of the war, had an essentially optimistic Weltanschauung, embodied by Wilder's comedic and sardonic filmmaking. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries. --Marion Deshmukh, George Mason University
Kirkus Review
An elucidating cultural study explores the ways artists forged a sense of redemptionboth personal and societalfrom the devastation of post-World War II Germany. European and American writers, journalists, filmmakers, and painters were drawn to postwar Germany to witness the horrendous carnage as well as the Allied attempts at rehabilitation. In her rigorously researched study, a natural extension of her previous look at the Blitz through the eyes of selected London authors, The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), British scholar and journalist Feigel (English/King's Coll. London) picks through the rubble of Germany through the points of view of a variety of writers. These include Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Martha Gellhorn, and two of the children of Thomas Mann, Erika and Klaus, returned from exile. Should the Germans be excoriated and forced to confess their guiltas the Allied Occupation established in the "JCS 1067" document that formed the official postwar policy in Germany and which the Manns insisted uponor should the suffering of the people be addressed through humanitarian efforts, as proposed by British author Stephen Spender and others who hoped to enlist German culture in the country's resurrection? Were the British, Americans, Russians, and French who divvied up Berlin to be considered liberators or enemy occupiers? Moreover, along with the divergent opinions on how to deal with the defeated Germans, there was the personal anguish experienced by correspondents like Gellhorn, who plumbed her grief over visiting Dachau in her war novel Point of No Return (1948). Feigel looks at the incredible speed with which the Berlin theater regained its footing and examines the rise of what would become known as Trmmerliteratur ("rubble literature"), as writers scrambled to find what Peter de Mendelssohn called "a vocabulary with which to describe bombed cities." Exiled German speakerse.g., Hollywood director Billy Wilder and actress Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mannwere most relentless in their damnation of the Germans. A deep, significant exploration of artistic atonement in postwar Germany. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As many journalists, filmmakers, writers, photographers, actors, and artists made their way to fallen Germany at the end of World War II, they found the country to be both a muse and a puzzle. While some transplants rejected the notion that Germans were ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, others felt conflicted. Some experienced revulsion as they considered the compliancy of average Germans in the face of Nazi barbarity. And most demonstrated sympathy for those Germans who scavenged for food, whose children died of starvation, and who endured rape and degradation in the final days of the war. Fogel (English, King's Coll. London) connects the film, art, and music of the era by recording the conflicting emotions of guilt and blame by the occupiers and the efforts of individuals concerned with guaranteeing lasting peace in Europe. VERDICT Essential for those interested in postwar Germany; the impact World War II had on the arts; and the role that individuals such as filmmaker Billy Wilder, writer Martha Gellhorn, and actress Marlene Dietrich had in rebuilding Germany.-Beth Dalton, Littleton, CO © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| Maps | p. xiii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Part I The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 | |
| 1 'Setting out for a country that didn't really exist': Crossing the Siegfried line: November-December 1944 | p. 13 |
| 2 'Nazi Germany is doomed': Advance into Germany: January-April 1945 | p. 28 |
| 3 'We were blind and unbelieving and slow': Victory: April-May 1945 | p. 43 |
| Part II Ruin and Reconstruction, May-December 1945 | |
| 4 'Complete Chaos Guaranteed': Occupation: May-August 1945 | p. 71 |
| 5 'Berlin is boiling in sweltering summer heat': Berlin: July-October 1945 | p. 99 |
| 6 'A pain that hurts too much': German Winter: September-December 1945 | p. 120 |
| Part III Judgement and Hunger, 1945-46 | |
| 7 'You'll hang them anyhow': Nuremberg: November 1945-March 1946 | p. 143 |
| 8 'Let Germany Live!': Fighting the Peace: March-May 1946 | p. 168 |
| 9 'Let this trial never finish': Boredom: May-August 1946 | p. 187 |
| 10 'The law tries to keep up with life': Judgement: September-October 1946 | p. 198 |
| Part IV Tension and Revival, 1946-48 | |
| 11 'Their suffering, and often their bravery, make one love them': Cold War: October 1946-October 1947 | p. 221 |
| 12 'I've been the Devil's General on earth too long': Artistic enlightenment: November 1946-January 1948 | p. 251 |
| 13 In Hell too there are these luxuriant gardens': Germany in California: January-June 1948 | p. 275 |
| Part V Divided Germany, 1948-49 | |
| 14 'If this is a war who is our enemy?': The Berlin Airlift: June 1948-May 1949 | p. 305 |
| 15 'Perhaps our deaths will shock you into attention': Division: May-October 1949 | p. 335 |
| Coda: 'Closing time in the gardens of the West' | p. 357 |
| Notes | p. 371 |
| Bibliography | p. 409 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 421 |
| Index | p. 425 |