Labour won by a landslide, and it radically altered his position. He was commissioned to go to Germany and research its post-war intellectual life, just as he’d wanted. This resulted in a secret report that was only declassified recently. It makes interesting remarks about German war guilt and suggests that more should be done to educate the up-and-coming generation of young Germans.
His photographs show wrecked guns and downed planes and rude refugees sticking out their tongues at him as he floated past sitting in the back of a car with a corporal driving. Signs outside the barracks reminded officers to travel armed. They were warned that Werewolves, ex-members of the Hitler Youth, had been ordered to resist even after the surrender. The officers had to tackle huge refugee problems and there were ominous discussions in the Officers’ Mess as to whether tensions with the Russians would lead to another war.
The car he was given suffered from a neurotic carburettor and sometimes he’d find himself in the countryside with nothing to do but listen to the larks singing in an empty sky. His driver became friendly with a German girl and Stephen was curious as to whether they’d become lovers. (They hadn’t.) The black market thrived in the larger towns – which Dad seems to have enjoyed. He met a dodgy sergeant-major who could fix any deal, and became involved in complex negotiations to exchange a carton of cigarettes for an immense music box. This instrument became a part of my childhood. La forza del destino, with supplementary arpeggios tickled by wee prongs touching nails stuck into a shiny bronze roller.
When Ernst Robert and Stephen were reunited at first all went well. Curtius talked openly about ‘war guilt’. Yes, the Germans were responsible. There may have been excuses – their lack of democratic experience, their deference towards authority – but this did not alter the fact that Germany bore responsibility for the most abominable crimes Europe had ever seen.
It was exactly what Stephen had wanted to hear, but mixed up with his forthright opinions Curtius complained about his present situation. It was humiliating that the German army had been beaten by such amateur soldiers as the Americans, he said. And what were the Allies going to do about Russia? Where was the crusade against Bolshevism that was so obviously necessary? The triumph of Bolshevism would mean that culture in Germany would be utterly destroyed, he said. And could Stephen please get his suit back? It had been sequestered and he couldn’t teach without it. Dutifully, Spender went where he was directed. Without a word, the officer opened a door into a room crammed with people whose condition was far worse than lacking a respectable suit.
Stephen began to feel that behind these views lay a peculiar selfishness, as if Curtius was unable to see the European point of view, only the German one.
My mother was also touring Germany at the time, but they did not travel together. She was giving concerts for ENSA.
Once during her visit, she played two concerts on the same day in wildly different surroundings. The first took place in the concentration camp of Belsen in front of an audience of survivors. Later that same evening she played for a group of senior British officers in a baroque theatre attached to a castle.
At Belsen, she was warned that the ex-inmates could not endure anything profound, so she played short cheerful pieces on an upright piano. Even so, their reaction overwhelmed her, as if these listeners had no control over their emotions. ‘Their applause after each piece was almost vociferous, there was an atmosphere of vehement pleasure, as if the music was a sign to them that they were indeed in the real world.’ At the castle that evening, playing on a superb Steinway to a group of English officers who seemed completely detached from their surroundings, the response to a Schubert impromptu was ‘courteous and much less demonstrative’. Somehow the two performances cancelled each other out. ‘I remember the day’s experience as imposing a profound recognition that only seldom, if ever, can one truly – entirely – enter into the lot of any other human being.’
My parents caught up with each other the next day by accident. The car taking Natasha to Berlin stopped by the side of the road to help a stranded vehicle, and out of it emerged Stephen. They spent a few days together in the devastated city. There’s a dark photo in a family album of my mother wrapped in a coat standing in the middle of Hitler’s Chancellery. An immense chandelier dangles from wires and three Russian soldiers scurry along in the background.
Over the summer, Stephen typed out his diary and began turning it into a book. He showed a draft to Cyril, who wanted to publish the Curtius material immediately. Stephen had promised to show the text to Curtius first, but he allowed himself to be overruled.
In January 1946, Curtius saw his words quoted in Horizon and he was appalled. He had received Stephen as a friend, not as an interviewer. If he’d known that Stephen had intended to publish his thoughts, he would have spoken differently. His remarks about German war guilt, in print, would make him seem disloyal to other Germans.
Stephen apologized several times. Curtius refused to accept his apologies and Stephen began to lose patience. ‘Most people here have taken it to be a defence of your conduct since 1933, though perhaps you would not wish me to do that.’ This was a hint that he thought there’d been something equivocal about the fact that Curtius had refused to leave Germany.
Curtius appealed to T. S. Eliot, who defended the German’s right to have seen the article before it was published. Eliot also thought that Stephen did not understand the position of Curtius within Nazi Germany. ‘You discuss the reasons for his not leaving Germany after 1933 but I don’t think that you attempt to justify his remaining there, you merely go a certain distance towards condoning it.’
My father insisted that Curtius should be held to his words. Remarks about etiquette were irrelevant. He wrote to Eliot that in his Horizon article he’d tried to give an idea of Germans such as Curtius, ‘who have my sympathy, but whom nevertheless I regard as very dangerous unless their views can be dragged into the open and they themselves made responsible for them’. Eliot thought this was simplistic. ‘It is very difficult for the majority of human beings to recognize any sense of collective guilt in which they are personally implicated.’
Stephen knew nothing about the condition of ‘inner exile’ adopted by those Germans who hated the regime but refused for patriotic reasons to leave Germany. They hid in curious places and kept silent. It was a German secret, a syndrome, an ailment. It could not be discussed without raising awkward questions about loyalty.
Stephen took the view that by teaching medieval Latin literature to his students, Curtius had evaded his responsibilities. He underestimated how tightly the Nazis controlled their intellectuals. Curtius belonged to a group of democratic professors who were under constant surveillance. In the mid-Thirties, he’d engaged an SS officer as his assistant, a certain Hermann Grimmrath. This man had protected Curtius until 1940, when he was sent to the Russian front, where he was killed. A colleague at Bonn University was denounced by a pupil and arrested, but by concentrating on Latin, Curtius avoided dealing with anything that belonged, as it were, to the present tense.
Eliot was closer to Curtius than Stephen, and he did his best to calm things down. He wrote to Curtius:
Against what damage he may have done you by it [the Horizon article], I can say nothing, for I am ignorant; but for the element of pure bad taste and stupidity I can plead. He is really a good and affectionate young man – though very callow for his years; but he has sometimes offended me – and, I think, others – by the tone he adopts. He is a Liberal, and therefore tends to intolerance and judging others; and he tends to take an unconsciously superior tone on the basis of very imperfect understanding.
The remark is ironic, but covers genuine irritation. The peculiar thing about the dispute is that, underneath, these three were in agreement that European culture