The German Genius

of, say Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Hannah Arendt, or Herbert Marcuse, they seemed overall happier in Britain than their counterparts did in the United States. Fewer went back to Germany, and they integrated themselves into British life more smoothly and completely, eventually occupying the higher echelons of the traditional “establishment”—the BBC, Oxford, and Cambridge, and major cultural institutions such as Covent Garden and the British Museum. Was this because Britain, being a European country, was easier for them to understand? Was it because they had the opportunity to fight in some fashion, or were closer to the fighting, which helped them adjust? There is no American book like Helen Fry’s The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens , about Germans who fought for Britain, though undoubtedly many Germans in America did a lot for the war effort. Was the experience of internment in some way cleansing, too, in the sense that, although it was unpleasant while it lasted, it was a communal experience, people could see that—from a British point of view—it wasn’t entirely unreasonable and, important psychologically, that when it ended it was over? Many émigrés in Britain were there by 1940 and shared the darkest days with their hosts—did the experience of “coming through” affect their subsequent adjustment and loyalties?
    We can never be sure. What is certain is that the émigrés were much more influential than most Britons recognize.

“Divided Heaven”: From Heidegger to Habermas to Ratzinger
     
    A fter the guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945, Germany was a wasteland, with millions of homeless and displaced people. George Orwell was in Cologne in March 1945 and wrote that to walk through the ruined city “is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.” 1 Walter Gropius returned to Berlin on a visit in August 1947 and found the city little more than “a corpse” he recommended that the Americans build a new capital at Frankfurt am Main. 2 Others felt the rubble should be left as rubble, a “monument to the obsoleteness of the Third Reich.” New housing was needed on an unprecedented scale—according to one account, some 6.5 million units had been destroyed. 3 As Wolfgang Schivelbusch says, it was not just housing that was needed but a new vision. Did the country’s architects and planners re-create and restore what had been destroyed, or did they start afresh?
    They did both. In some areas—Munich, Freiburg, and Münster—they reconstructed what had been lost. In others—Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt am Main—they started anew. Everywhere, however, they made use—ironically enough—of Albert Speer’s plans drawn up for the “Working Staff for the Reconstruction Planning of Bombed Cities.” 4 Besides houses, theaters, concert halls, universities, and sports stadia all rose from the rubble, some more pleasing to the eye than others, such as the Expressionist Town Hall at Bensberg (Gottfried Böhm, 1962–67), or the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin itself (Hans Scharoun, 1956–63). 5 The most remarkable building was Mies van der Rohe’s glass and steel Neue Nationalgalerie, with austere lines where the paintings were displayed underground. 6
    Amid this rubble and reconstruction, Berlin’s intellectual life enjoyed a short, sharp revival immediately after the end of the war as exiles returned, people who had been hiding underground dared to show their faces, and the Allies encouraged cultural life as something that was easier to rebuild than the fabric of bricks and stone. Brecht’s pithy aphorism for what went on was “Berlin: an etching of Churchill’s according to an idea of Hitler’s.” 7
    The Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Revival of Germany), shortened inevitably to the Kulturbund, was licensed by the Russians and soon had a membership of 9,000, showing—if nothing else—the appetite for culture in the ruined city. At first the Kulturbund thought that Thomas Mann might become its figurehead, but he had been attacked in an open letter accusing him, in effect, of watching the war from a “comfortable” distance, and he therefore spurned all overtures. Instead, Gerhart Hauptmann, then aged seventy and living in Silesia, was approached, and he agreed to be honorary president. The Kulturbund mounted a series of concerts and lectures on