But there is a satisfactory answer to all questions. Cruelty can be explained by saying that war has its own laws. It is not cynicism when this author says that in spite of everything he admired the French Resistance — all resistance movements indeed, except for the German one because that did not have a national foundation.
‘It was only those who couldn’t keep their mouths shut who landed up in concentration camps. Why couldn’t people just hold their tongues and survive these twelve years?’
‘How did you know at the time that it would be twelve years?’
‘It could have been more. Of course. But then what? Why not see this too in a historical perspective, why not judge what has happened as if it had happened a hundred years ago? Strictly speaking reality doesn’t begin to exist until the historian has put it into its context and then it’s too late to experience it, and vex over it, or weep. To be real, reality must be old.’
Right enough, in this room in a villa in the Ruhr reality does not exist. True, in the course of the afternoon, the wife comes into the room crying and tells us about a scene that has just taken place in the bakery. A man with a big stick had forced his way past terror-stricken, waiting women and seized the last loaf without anyone in the queue managing to prevent him. But for the born classicist the intermezzo is hardly painful enough to force the regrettable reality, taking place right now, into his life. We sit in the gathering dark and talk about the baroque, the whole room is full of the baroque: on the table there are thick German theses on the baroque as a building-style. He is in the course of writing a novel set in the baroque era and based on an uncompleted project of von Hofmannsthaclass="underline" that is why he is now reading everything he can about baroque architecture, to be able to construct a true reality for his characters, who will not be thinly disguised contemporaries with bread shortages and hunger obsessions, but proper baroque people of baroque flesh and baroque blood, thinking baroque thoughts and living baroque lives. Baroque — hardly, one would think, an up-to-date way of living in a Ruhr on the verge of hunger-riots. But up to date? In this literary workshop where time does not exist until it is too late?
But where is the root of suffering? He begins talking about the happiness of suffering, about the beauty of suffering. Suffering is not dirty, suffering is not pitiable. No, suffering is great because suffering makes people great. ‘What accounts for the conquests of the old German culture? The fact that the German people had to suffer more than other peoples!’ It is impossible to convince him that suffering is someWe shall no longerthing unworthy. The romantic historian in him acknowledges suffering as the most powerful driving-force behind great human endeavours, and to the born classicist it is the driving-force behind great literature, which does not necessarily need to be literature about suffering.
At the dinner-table his mother, whose aristocratic pallor is a product of equal parts nobility and undernourishment, talks with the same pleasurable joy about the happiness of German suffering. We eat potatoes and kale because at the moment there is nothing else to eat, and the various members of the family urge one another to take a little more although the urging is strictly ironic. In this highly cultivated family hunger is put to use as a stimulant. The meal acquires a special significance because it is the second-last typewriter which is being eaten up. I eat little, at the most one key or two. Then the author returns to the last typewriter and the baroque, which he has never left, and I set out into the Ruhr which is as little baroque as possible. In the garden I meet the two schoolgirls on their way home: Maresi, christened after a story by Lernet-Holenia, and Victoria, named after the defeat of France in 1940, children who are pale chiefly from undernourishment. But as the car drives back through Düsseldorf it is a chubby baroque angel I seem to see displaying his ghostly wings against the darkening ruins.
One month later, in Hannover, in a painter’s studio. We talk about the collapse and about the new German art. I have seen some strangely bland exhibitions. The most interesting perhaps was one by a group of idealistically Communist artists, remarkable not as art but as propaganda. In a beautifully scripted display-programme they announce their devotion to the reorganization of the world into a huge trade union. All the social units we know at present are to be replaced by compounds with the word Werk—. We shall no longer talk about artists but about Werkleute, not about studios but about Werkstätte, not about nations but about Gewerkschaften. And so on. There was also a programmatic ruin — a quite unrealistic stage-set ruin in the background, in front of which were two playing children and flowers. Bad theatre — nothing else. At another exhibition the commonest motif was not ruins but the heads of smashed classical statues lying on the ground with the Mona-Lisa smile of defeat.
‘But when I paint ruins,’ says the painter in Hannover, ‘I do that because I think they are beautiful and not because they are ruins. There are masses of ugly houses which have become things of beauty after the bombing. The museum in Hannover really looks quite passable as a ruin, especially when the sun breaks through the shattered roof.’
Suddenly he grasps my arm. We look out on the shabby street. A black procession of nuns, one of the world’s most proper sights, shows up against one of the most improper: a lewd ruin with clinging pipes and gallows-like rafters.
‘I’ll paint that some day, not because it is a ruin but because the contrast is so verdammt erschütternd.’
Berlin, 3 February 1945, during a raid. That is a date in a chapter from a novel, published in a German magazine and one of the few instances of a young German writer coming to grips with the recently terminated suffering. It describes a tram-conductor’s last afternoon. He arrives home to find the house empty at an unusual time. His daughter is epileptic and anything may have happened. As a huge American raid closes in on Berlin the tram-conductor, Max Eckert, sets off on a terrible odyssey which ends at the underground station where his family in all probability were burnt beyond recognition together with thousands of others. In a fit of rage he attacks a policeman who greets him with ‘Heil Hitler’ and he is shot. It is a grim and chilling extract from a novel in progress, Finale Berlin, which turns out to be a collective novel of suffering, an interpretation of the terrible suffering of the bombed, a suffering which is common property to every German city-dweller and still lives in the senses as bitterness, as hysteria, as repugnance, as lovelessness.
Meanwhile the Swedish plane has climbed still higher over the German plight. We fly above white evening clouds and there are old-fashioned ice-ferns on the windows. But about three thousand metres under us, at a sharp angle now, there is a woman living only in order to write a big novel about another kind of suffering: that of the concentration camp prisoners. She has herself spent several years in a camp for political offenders. In that camp she belonged to the so-called Rilke Group, a small fanatical group of women who during the breaks and in danger of their lives would gather in a corner of the compound and in whispers read the poems of Rilke to one another. But it is not her own suffering she wants to write about, she wants to write about a suffering that was greater: her husband’s. He spent eight years in Dachau and is now an old man twenty years before his time: white-haired, tottering, hoarse. Now she is trying to train him to speak: in the evenings before they go to sleep, through the night when they lie awake, at meal-times; but he does not understand her, he does not understand how she should want to write about what he has suffered. And none of their friends and acquaintances understand either, not him who has just come back from a Russian camp and in sharp contrast to most home-comers has become enthusiastically pro-Russian on account of the fact that he was not shot the moment he was captured. He was taken at Stalingrad and now he never tires of relating how he and his fellow soldiers once festooned the railings of a bridge with naked Russian corpses for the fun of getting a unique snapshot. He will never come to understand that he was allowed to survive. The practical, extrovert Anny, who spent three years in political detention and who has just returned from a three-day 200-kilometre journey for a sack of potatoes, he does not understand either.