Was There a Dialogue with “Good Germans” During WWII?
A while ago, Ukrainian social media were rocked by a controversy after the Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych had held a public discussion with the Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin during the Bjørnson Festival, an annual literary event in Norway. Although Shishkin has been living in Switzerland for more than 25 years, is a Swiss citizen, and is explicitly anti-Putin, many Ukrainians think there should be no dialogue even with “good Russians”. In one of the next posts, I will dive into the reasons of this sentiment, which include irrational, emotional reaction as well as rational critique of some Russian dissidents — Shishkin among them, — but this article is an answer to some overtly false comments which drew parallels with WWII and claimed there was no dialogue even with anti-Hitlerite Germans. It was first published in Ukrainian on Zbruč.
Some commentators of the recent discussion around the rationale for communicating with “good Russians” argued in no uncertain terms that, during World War II, there were not — and could not be — any public dialogues with “good Germans”, “Hemingway never interceded for Remarque”, and even long after the war was over no one engaged with them publicly.
Regardless of one’s stance in the discussion, it’s important to give honest answers to the questions. And commentaries like these already on the surface look not entirely honest — or perhaps their authors aren’t well-informed, — even if we ignore the fact that Germany wasn’t the only aggressor in WWII.
Indeed, as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, the atmosphere of distrust, suspicion, dislike, and at times straightforward animosity towards all “Boches” started spreading around the world. After the war broke out, this atmosphere was even more exacerbated. In a number of countries Germans were viewed as “enemy aliens” and, in particular in France and the UK, were interned in camps regardless of their political views.
Widespread in Britain was the so-called Vansittartism — named after the diplomat Robert Vansittart who insisted that Nazism was a function of “German character” and so all Germans had to bear responsibility. On the other hand, many conservatives, in particular in America, accused those fleeing Hitler’s regime in communist sympathies.i
However, German antifascist intellectuals weren’t living in complete isolation. Even though the war reshaped the dialogue with them geographically and, to a degree, thematically, it never stopped completely. And Vansittartism was counterweighed with anti-Vansittartism.ii
In the heat of the war, Marlene Dietrich, who had only been granted American citizenship in 1939, performed for the allied forces at the front line; German scientists participated in the Manhattan Project; translations of books by Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Erich Maria Remarque were successfully sold in the US; and one of the first postwar Nobel Prizes in Literature (in 1946) was awarded to Hermann Hesse, an ethnic German who at the time had for over 20 years been a citizen of Switzerland — the same country Mikhail Shishkin is a citizen of. By the way, although Hesse condemned the Nazis in private talks, after they had come to power he did not dare to take a public stand against them, and they, in turn, tolerated him for a while and didn’t ban his books.
One also has to realize that among these enemy aliens were German Jews, too. Should we consider them “good Germans” or view them as a separate category? And how about today’s Buryats, Chechens and others? How deep should we dig into a family tree? What if we find Ukrainian roots? And how about the Russians who live in Ukraine?
Many Jews were so integrated in the German society that they considered themselves more Germans than Jews. The Nazis also persecuted those who were half-Jewish, one-quarter Jewish or even less. Among them were Catholics, Protestants, and atheists.
Outside the Third Reich such a racial segregation was less common. The German Jews themselves had no problem with participating in the dialogues mentioned below alongside ethnic Germans. Research works on German antifascist émigrés usually also view them together.iii And we, too, often call intellectuals from that period Germans and only learn about their Jewish descent when we read their biographies — just as we consider Heinrich Heine a German, and not a Jewish poet.
Moreover, back then there existed a broader German-language dialogue where ethnic Germans weren’t shunned not only by German Jews, Austrians or the Swiss, but also by many of those who were born in the German Empire or Austria-Hungary or later lived in Germany or Austria and could speak German, including Czechs, Hungarians, as well as Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Galician, and Romanian Jews.
1933–1939
Before one considers what was happening during the war, one needs to have an idea of the prewar intercultural antifascist dialogue, because certain contacts established then and discourses that had been developing then continued throughout the war.
France was the largest hotbed for such a prewar dialogue. Here André Gide, Romain Rolland, André Malraux, and Louis Aragon, as well as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl from the academia, were most actively making friends with Germans. Malraux’s apartment became a meeting place for French and German intellectuals. Aside from the French, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley were also noted for their contacts with Germans in France. The former was a member of the founding committee of the Bibliothèque libre allemande (Free German Library) created in 1934 in Paris to preserve books that were banned in the Third Reich. The latter kept company with German intellectuals who settled in the town of Sanary-sur-Mer where he lived back then — and where he had written his Brave New World.
In June 1935, Paris hosted the International Congress for the Defense of Culture where French and German writers met with their colleagues from many other countries to discuss the fascist threat. Britain was represented by Huxley and E. M. Forster, and the US by Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos. The USSR delegation, in addition to Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, and Alexey Tolstoy, included representatives of national literatures such as Pavlo Tychyna, Ivan Mykytenko and Petro Panch from Ukraine.iv
Spain during the 1936–1939 civil war became another platform for intercultural antifascist dialogue. German intellectuals came here to fight, as war correspondents, or to participate in cultural events. Some were lucky to make acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway, which, as we will see, would prove useful.
Here — in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid, — in July 1937, the second writers’ antifascist congress was held which was a follow-up to the Parisian one. It was attended by Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Nicolás Guillén, André Malraux, André Chamson, Stephen Spender, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ludwig Renn, and others.
In 1933–1935, in various countries German émigrés were involved in campaigns for releasing the political prisoner Carl von Ossietzky and awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize. In particular, in 1935 the Czechoslovak magazine Tvorba published an open letter to Tomáš Masaryk petitioning him to withdraw his nomination in favor of Ossietzky. In the end, Ossietzky was awarded the prize in 1936 (for 1935), but it didn’t save him from concentration camps.
1939–1945
After the start of WWII, the center of intercultural antifascist dialogue shifted to the United States. And here some “good Germans” benefited from their prewar contacts.
Hemingway had no need to intercede for Remarque, as a commentator suggested, yet he interceded for his comrades from the Spanish Civil War, namely Hans Kahle, Gustav Regler, and (a Jew, if it matters to someone) Alfred Kantorowicz — otherwise they would not have gotten a visa due to their communist views.
The Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis, who had engaged with Germans in France, was also helping them to reach America; even more so his wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson.
While most Germans in exile were in dire straits, popular writers like Brecht, Feuchtwanger, or Thomas Mann could afford buying villas in California that became meeting places for German, American, and other intellectuals.
Brecht hosted Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Charlie Chaplin, and Charles Laughton. The latter two were also frequent guests of the German Jew Feuchtwanger alongside many ethnic Germans.
Thomas Mann actually became a mouthpiece of the German opposition intelligentsia.v In May 1940, together with his son-in-law, Italian writer and journalist Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, he organized a conference in Atlantic City to discuss the democratic world’s response to the fascists’ victories in Europe. The result was a manifesto titled “The City of Man”. The participants included Lewis Mumford, Reinhold Niebuhr, and William Yandell Elliott (an advisor to FDR).vi
During the war, Mann delivered three lectures at the Library of Congress: on his Joseph cycle (1942), “The War and the Future” (1943), and “Germany and the Germans” (1945). The first one was attended by Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and Attorney General Francis Biddle.
In October 1943, Mann and Feuchtwanger were invited to the Writers’ Congress organized by Hollywood screenwriters and directors where they gave talks alongside Edward Dmytryk, Robert Rossen, Dalton Trumbo, Darryl F. Zanuck, and other notable personalities of the time.vii
In June 1945, a dinner for Thomas Mann’s 70th anniversary was held in New York City featuring the Pulitzer Prize winner Robert E. Sherwood and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. Long story short, he was far from being ignored as a representative of the “enemy nation”.
In 1942–1943, a series of events to commemorate the Berlin book burnings of May 1933 were held across the United States. On December 1, 1942, at the opening ceremony of the exhibition of burned and banned books in the New York Public Library, Oskar Maria Graf, a popular author at the time, represented Germany; the historian Ambrogio Donini, Italy; the writer and journalist Karin Michaëlis, Denmark; and the publicist Geneviève Tabouis, France. Among those present were also President of the New York City Council Newbold Morris and the famous literary critique Clifton Fadiman, and the exhibition’s patrons included Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein.viii
In these dialogues, Germans propagated diverse messages. Some agreed with Vansittartist sentiments and the responsibility of all Germans. For instance, the philosopher and educationist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster sided with the Society for the Prevention of World War III that advocated the most radical deconstruction of Germany after the war. Among the society’s American members were the writer Rex Stout as well as the aforementioned Lewis Mumford, Clifton Fadiman, and Darryl F. Zanuck.
And even Thomas Mann’s Voice of America address on May 8, 1945, which was dedicated to concentration camps and collective responsibility and provoked a storm of indignation, in particular among “inner émigrés” — those who stayed in the Third Reich without collaborating with the regime (which wasn’t always possible to reliably verify), — can also be mentioned here, although Mann himself traveled a long way from “Germany is where I am” in 1938 to “there are no two Germanies, good and bad” in 1945.
On the other hand, there were Americans — including Sidney Hook, Dorothy Thompson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Varian Fry — who advocated a softer approach and supported the American Association for a Democratic Germany that had the likes of Paul Tillich and Bertolt Brecht in its ranks.ix
The Soviet Union had its own “good Germans” — mostly communists who had found refuge there. Some regretted it because they weren’t spared of Stalin’s purges, and some were even transferred to the Gestapo in Brest-Litovsk in 1940.
In 1943, a number of German intellectuals became part of the National Committee for a Free Germany. Among them were the writers Willi Bredel, Theodor Plievier, Johannes Robert Becher (the future culture minister and the author of the national anthem of the GDR) as well as the future translators of [the great Ukrainian poet] Taras Shevchenko’s poetry Alfred Kurella and Erich Weinert. The committee was created under the supervision of the Soviet leadership who considered these “good Germans” useful: after the war many of them would take up posts in the GDR.
Then and Now
Having answered the question from the title, it is important to make a number of observations regarding some differences between then and now.
Firstly, while back then those at the front line had at best only a vague idea of the talks with Germans in Los Angeles and New York City, today we can witness everything online and respond instantly, which should be kept in mind if one decides to hold a dialogue with someone.
Secondly, one can hardly observe any truly serious, active, intellectual inner dialogue within the core of today’s Russian opposition that would demonstrate comprehension of reasons running deeper than just the “bad dictator”, or realization of the need for complete deimperialization and demilitarization. What is being said or written somewhere on the margins fails to break through the wall of a few celebrities who, for their part, are rarely capable of anything but general populist statements. They don’t seem to have a Tomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, or Paul Tillich of their own. Therefore there are fair reasons to doubt whether one should talk even to ostensibly useful Shishkin.
Besides, Ukrainians are interested in breaking down some western trends like uncritical vogue for dissidents and love for the Russian culture, and for this ignoring and distancing might be the best tactics.
On the other hand, in a democratic society, it’s impossible to prevent anyone from any dialogues — be it with Shishkin or Mishkin. If one doesn’t hold a dialogue, someone else is doing it behind one’s back — and one is left spitting venom on Facebook or Twitter.
Notes
iPaul-Merritt, Carol. The Reception of the German Writers in Exile by the American Liberal Press 1933–1945: Changes and Trends. // Spalek, John M., & Bell, Robert. F. (eds.). Exile: The Writer’s Experience. — Vol. 99. — University of North Carolina Press, 1982. — pp. 95–118
iiGoldman, Aaron. Germans and Nazis: The Controversy over ‘Vansittartism’ in Britain during the Second World War. // Journal of Contemporary History. — Vol. 14, no. 1. — Sage Publications, 1979. — pp. 155–191
iiiSee Palmier, Jean-Michel. Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America. — Verso, 2017. This book is the primary source of further information in the article if not stated otherwise.
ivСимян, Тигран. Культурно-политический контекст и метанарратив Международного конгресса писателей в защиту культуры (на примере доклада армянского поэта Ваграма Алазана. [Simyan, Tigran. The cultural and political context and metanarrative of the International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture (as illustrated by the address of the Armenian poet Vahram Alazan).] // Պատմաբանասիրական հանդես [Historical-Philological Journal]. — №1. — 2020. — pp. 128–140
vFor more on Thomas Mann’s activity see Boes, Tobias. Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters. — Cornell University Press, 2019
viGordon, Adi, & Greenberg, Udi. The City of Man, European Émigrés, and the Genesis of Postwar Conservative Thought. // Religions. — Vol. 3, Issue 3. — 2012. — pp. 681–698
viiFinding Aid for the Writers’ Congress records, 1943–1945
viiiKantorowicz, Alfred. Politik und Literatur im Exil: Deutschsprachige Schriftsteller im Kampf gegen den Nazionalsozialismus. — Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1978. — S. 293–301
ixLamberti, Marjorie. German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on “What Should Be Done with Germany after Hitler,” 1941–1945. // Central European History. — Vol. 40, no. 2. — 2007. — pp. 279–305
