As a child in Germany I knew next to nothing about America. It was for me a continent of pure fantasy, populated by cowboys and Red Indians, perhaps with a few gangsters thrown in, though what these unshaven figures were up to was far from clear to me.
One of the salient facts of life in Nazi Germany was that you simply could not leave the place. To travel abroad was a privilege not available to ordinary people. In this respect, the Germany of the late Thirties was like the Soviet Union: a self-contained, claustrophobic space, which offered to my elders only one way of escape: invading and plundering their European neighbours.
I remember wondering whether America was real. It sounded like a figment, like something out of a children’s book. Every now and then our vacuous newspapers tried to convince their readers that the United States was run by plutocrats. These were pictured with big cigars in their mouths and wearing top hats. It was not easy to believe that such people really existed. They looked like the equally implausible Jews whose caricatures appeared on the bulletin board of my elementary school. Nobody had ever seen anybody remotely resembling them in real life.
When Hitler declared war on the United States, I was probably too busy passing a Latin translation test to take notice. Because of the war, my family had moved to a village in Bavaria. To go to school was a nuisance. Every day at five in the morning we had to take the train to a town which boasted a gymnasium. In late 1944, the railroad tracks were bombed and all travel was suspended. This meant that we had to walk about seven miles to school and back, a daily trip which before long became very tiresome.
On this road I had my first direct contact with America, an experience which settled any doubt about its existence. On a bright autumn day, a fighter plane suddenly roared down on us. We were three fifteen-year-old kids and had very good reflexes, so we immediately took cover in the ditch at the side of the road. I remember clearly the little clouds of dust rising in front of me where the bullets hit the ground, and only a fraction of a second afterwards the hammering of a machine-gun. It was a near miss. When the plane had passed us, we looked up and saw it glitter in the sky. I think it was a Mustang. We could even distinguish the star on its wings and the pilot in his cockpit. In any case, the plane made a U-turn and came back to us, but since we did not offer a good target, it swept by without another volley. When it was gone, we leaped up and danced on the road. Strangely enough, it was an altogether exhilarating experience.
Half a year later, I was called upon to defend Germany. I was handed a greenish uniform made of scratchy cellulose, a gun and a bazooka. The Allies had long since crossed the Rhine. Together with a group of thirty other kids I was stationed at a trunk road about twenty miles from our village. We were supposed to save the Reich, which consisted of a vast heap of rubble, by shooting at the approaching American tanks. Under the circumstances I did not see much point in pretending to be a hero. I prepared myself carefully, taking along a good map and a hoard of civilian clothes which I tucked away at a few strategically chosen locations. It was a risky business, since there were a lot of people who had a mind to shoot you: on the one hand the advancing Allied armies, and on the other hand our own officers, who were eager to execute deserters.
The choice of the right moment was therefore decisive. As soon as I heard the first Sherman tank rumbling in the distance, I ducked and took to my heels. In a nearby forest I found my little cache, shed my uniform and became a civilian again.
I walked the whole night, and when I arrived at my village early in the morning, I saw them coming: an endless procession of armoured vehicles, artillery, trucks and jeeps. The men looked like visitors from outer space. They were well-fed, their khaki trousers were clean and neat, and their attitude was supremely insouciant. With a casual nod to the gaping peasants, they jumped from their cars and proceeded to light a bonfire in the village square. Some of them were black giants, and they were chewing a substance unknown in our part of the world tasting of peppermint. As soon as they had settled down round the fire, they began, to my utter astonishment, to read what looked to me like children’s books. Overcome by curiosity, I began to talk to them in my rudimentary schoolboy’s English. They laughed and handed me my first comic book.
It turned out that I was the only person in the village who had some slight command of the language, and within a week or so I was established as their more or less official interpreter. Only very much later did I realize that they had acted against their regulations. On the very first day of occupation, they ignored military discipline and began to fraternize with the enemy.
I had a wonderful time. As long as I could remember, there had always been someone to boss me around, shouting orders: teachers, janitors, party bosses and sergeants. Overnight, all these authorities had vanished. It was a huge relief. Of course, there was something called the Military Government, but this was an abstraction, an invisible entity far away in cities beyond our reach. All civilian road and rail traffic had ceased long ago. German newspapers did not exist. I was lucky, since I could glean fascinating bits of information from the pages of the army news-sheet, a daily called the Stars and Stripes. It was clear that there existed an immense outside world unknown to me, and its name was America.
In due course I made two other discoveries. One day, Captain McCann, our local commander, handed me a parcel the size and shape of a brick. It was wrapped in greaseproof paper, which gave no clue as to what it might contain. When I opened it, I found a tightly packed plethora of intriguing objects: first of all, a small can, to the bottom of which was attached an ingenious opener. Inside, I discovered an unfamiliar sort of pressed meat called Spam. Next came an aluminium foil with a brown bitter powder in it which went by the equally mysterious name, Nescafé. There were also individually packed cubes of sugar, a bag of powdered milk, a supply of aspirin, a tin of sweet pineapple, matches, paper handkerchiefs, toilet paper, and, most intriguing of all, a condom and a tube of antibiotic ointment for the prevention and cure of venereal disease.
All these things were organized and put together in the most thoughtful manner. The whole contraption was called a C-Ration. It contained everything a soldier far away from home might need, not excluding what in my eyes seemed to be the most extravagant luxuries. It was clear to me that a nation capable of such foresight was invincible.
My next surprise was even more overwhelming. Captain McCann had set up his headquarters in a large farmhouse at the end of the village. I used to hang around his office, and one day I noticed in a corner a huge box full of books. Somebody on the other side of the Atlantic had thought of the intellectual needs of the GI and supplied the American Expeditionary Forces with a cornucopia of world literature, absolutely free of charge. Help yourself, said Captain McCann.
Starved of reading matter, I could hardly restrain myself. I came home loaded with paperbacks. My hoard was a wild mixture of thrillers and classics, pulp fiction and philosophy. I wallowed in Somerset Maugham and Hemingway, Louis Bromfield and Thoreau. I remember a fat grey volume put together by an earnest American academic called Louis Untermeyer. His anthology of modern American poetry opened vistas to my fertile mind. Someone in Washington must have decided that the troops were eager to read William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, though Ezra Pound, I believe, was off-limits for the Army. I am not sure that many GIs shared these enthusiasms, but the whole operation was a sign of generosity and yet another proof of American superiority.
At the bottom of the heap I even found a few books by German authors: Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque, a best-seller long since forgotten, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and The Trial, written by someone I had never heard of, Franz Kafka. They all made for heady reading, even in English. After the long cultural blackout of Nazi Germany, world literature, shipped by the ton from the United States and handed out for free, was an unforgettable source of illumination in the bleak and depressing climate of post-war Germany.
After a few years, my country returned to an uneasy sort of normality. Reams of worthless old banknotes were traded in for a new currency printed in the US. Empty shop windows filled up, almost overnight, as if by miracle, with shoes, sausages, screwdrivers and apples. In a frenzy of reconstruction roofs were mended, streets cleared of rubble, railway tracks repaired. At the same time, and with the same amazing speed, millions of Nazis disappeared from sight. Most of them had instantly turned into demure democrats, blithely pursuing their careers in government, business, education, law and medicine. Nobody wanted to hear about what were politely called ‘Germany’s darkest years’.
Within a very short time, the western part of the country had become an American protectorate. True, there were also British and French troops around, but everybody knew that the true winner of the war was the United States. To consider America a ‘young nation’ is a well-worn European cliché. In the event, the alleged adolescent became the guardian of a decrepit and worn-out Germany. The US took on the difficult job of re-socializing our part of the world. This was not, of course, an act of sheer benevolence. Germany’s future was determined by the beginning of the Cold War. Never was a defeated nation offered more generous terms, and never were such terms less deserved.
Despite the Allies’ feeble efforts at deNazification, there was something murky about our recovery. Many Germans harboured silent resentment about what they saw as a disaster rather than a liberation. Amnesia was a common affliction, and the old authoritarian frame of mind was still very much in evidence.
Many people of my generation hankered for America, a place where such hang-ups did not seem to exist. In our imagination, it was a paradise of jazz, of civil liberties and easygoing morals.
As a student at one of our antique universities, I one day found in my mailbox a letter from Washington inviting me to undertake a six-week tour of the United States. How I came to be a candidate for the Fulbright exchange programme I cannot say, but it certainly felt like a passport to utopia. I was given a plane ticket and a small allowance. The itinerary was up to me, but the Washington office offered to put me in touch with any institution I wished to visit.
Since I could not afford a car, I decided to buy a Greyhound pass valid for travel throughout the US. I walked the clapboard settlements of the Mississippi delta, talked to plasma physicists and movie producers and spent a lot of time at forlorn bus depots and in motels resembling flophouses. The lack of money provided me with certain insights into the American class system. The Greyhound bus served a clientele of sailors without ships, demobilized GIs, prostitutes and a variety of other losers.
I found everybody from government officials to the last tramp incredibly easy to talk to, forthcoming and helpful. The only hitch was when I boarded a bus in Alabama and took a seat at the back. I was politely told by an old black lady that I had to sit in front. Later on at the bus stop I ended up on a bench with a sign that said FOR WHITES ONLY.
The vast country I had set out to discover seemed exotic beyond my wildest dreams. Very often I felt lost, like a person in a Hopper painting. The natives seemed gregarious enough, more so than most Europeans, and yet I was struck by a pervasive aura of loneliness.
Another baffling aspect was the weird discrepancy between image and reality. At the time, Europe was still an underdeveloped region in terms of advertising and public relations. In America, the promises made by ads and neon signs seemed to be wide of the mark. The most wretched fast-food joint on the wrong side of the tracks would proudly proclaim that only here could you relish ‘Arthur’s world-famous meatballs’. Similarly fantastic claims were made on behalf of shaving creams, motels, nightspots and even entire states. Nobody appeared to be bothered by the unbridgeable gap between promise and reality. It took me a lot of time and effort to learn the grammar of representation which prevailed in this outlandish civilization.
And when I finally came to Hollywood, another shock awaited me. I was given free tickets to a live television show. For a German student in 1953, this was a sensational attraction. I had never seen a stand-up comedian in action, and I daresay that most of his punchlines were lost on me. But what really filled me with apprehension were two signs which every now and then flashed their message to the audience, asking us to laugh or to applaud. Both of these instructions were dutifully followed. Even now, when this arrangement has become commonplace all over the civilized world, it remains a riddle of obedience which I have never been able to solve.
And thus, when I returned home, envied by my fellow students, I had to confess that my first American venture had been a glorious failure – that I could admire this far-flung land of promise, worry about it, dream about it, but that to understand it was beyond me.
Image © ercwttmn
