17th February 2007
Ethel Mannin was a well known and popular author who published many books from the 1920s through to the 1960s and 1970s. 'German Journey' tells the story of a visit she made, as a war correspondent, to Germany and Austria in the Spring and Summer of 1947.
The book was published in 1948, a little later than most of the other contemporary British accounts of Germany after the war, which I've talked about on this blog. (See earlier postings on Fenner Brockway, 'German Diary', Noel Annan, 'Changing Enemies', William Strang, 'Home and Abroad', Lieutenant-Colonel Byford-Jones, 'Berlin Twilight' and Victor Gollancz, 'In Darkest Germany').
It's interesting to see many of the same themes reappear. Here are some extracts from Ethel Mannin's 'German Journey':
On the devastation caused by the Allied bombing, still visible two years after the end of the war: "It is a shock to see buildings which look as though it were only last week they were bombed. Each side of the road there are hills of rubble, and the hollow houses; not a house or building here and there, but each and every house, continuously. You were prepared for it, you remind yourself, you knew it would be like this; you had read Victor Gollancz's book and Fenner Brockway's, you had seen a film made by the Quakers; it is all as you expected; what you had not expected was the effect on yourself. You discover that you feel sick. Physically sick."
She describes a conversation with her driver in Hamburg: "I exclaimed involuntarily, 'My God, it's frightful!' 'Oh, but there's far worse,' my companion assured me. 'In fact,' he added, 'when people want to see ruins there's a special drive we take them - a kind of show-piece. You just go on and on....'"
On the distinction between the (British) occupiers and (German) occupied, and the tendency of the victorious British (not the defeated Germans) to behave as if they were the 'Herrenvolk' or 'Master Race': "It could be South Africa and the Europeans and 'non-Europeans' as they call the whites and blacks. Or India at the height of the British Raj. What Fenner Brockway calls the 'Poonah' attitude is expressed in a marked tendency not to say please or thank-you to German personnel, whether it is waiters, chambermaids, drivers, or office staff...This Herrenvolk attitude has been commented on by other observers than myself."
A constant theme in the book is how well fed the occupying forces are, in contrast to the local population - for example the luxury of the British Officers' Mess, which war correspondents, such as the author, were allowed to attend.
"I personally should find it depressing to live in an oasis of plenty in that desert of starvation. But admittedly it's all in the point of view. Everything possible has been done to brighten the lives of the allied personnel, with clubs, cabarets, special cinemas; even in the German places they have priority. If a dance-place is packed, for example, and there are no tables available, you simply ask for an 'allied table'. You are one of the garrison, one of the victors, and they, the conquered, cannot refuse you."
On the black market economy: "Domestic servants to Allied personnel will gladly take part of their wages in cigarettes. You tip the porter on the station two cigarettes, and your car-driver three - five if you have kept him for some hours. You leave a couple of cigarettes beside your place in the dining car of a train."
And finally, evidence of the emerging cold war: "As I write, the effectiveness of the Marshall Plan in getting the wheels going again and the food on the table in Germany has yet to be demonstrated; there may well be now a race between East and West to feed Germany - food having taken its place as a political weapon."
And the growing perception among the British that there was little to choose between National Socialism and Soviet Communism. On walking in Vienna, in the Soviet sector of Austria, seeing posters on the walls of happy Soviet workers and Soviet achievements, Ethel Mannin comments: "substitute the hammer and sickle and Soviet star for the swastika and it could as easily be Nazi propaganda."
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