Preferred Citation: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p125/


 
Chapter Four— Kulturbund

Chapter Four—
Kulturbund

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, No. 14–16 Cäcilienallee (today Pacelli-Allee) in Dahlem had been a gathering place for leaders of German high finance and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Emil Georg von Stauss, director of the Deutsche Bank, was one of the first to overcome an initial reservation toward the party. His home came to serve as a leisurely gentlemen's club where political and financial leaders got to know each other and learned to appreciate their shared interests. The Stauss villa was not the place, as is often rumored, where German financiers saved the NSDAP from bankruptcy, although the social atmosphere offered by its master did create the necessary conditions for this.[1] After World War II, the Stauss villa became the residence of the American commandant of Berlin for the next forty years. And according to the plans of the Foreign Office, the Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic is to have his residence here in the coming years. The villa, built in Landhausstil in 1914 by the architects Wilhelm Cremer and Richard Wolkenstein, is among the most beautiful in a residential district replete with upscale homes.

Two families from the circle of émigrés returning from Moscow lived here temporarily in June and July of 1945: the couples Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, and Johannes R. and Lilly Becher. Erpenbeck, a member of the Ulbricht Group, was the first to arrive, in late April. Becher followed six weeks later, on June 10. With him came Heinz Willmann, a colleague from Moscow and the editor of the magazine Inter-


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nationale Literatur/Deutsche Hefte, published by Becher. The Red Army lodged Becher and Willmann (Lilly Becher joined them a few weeks later) in a confiscated house in the district of Karlshorst, in direct proximity to Russian headquarters, for the first days after their arrival in Berlin. The move to a bourgeois residential district in the west and accommodation on Cäcilienallee came about at Becher's request, though it was already clear that once the Americans assumed control of this district a few weeks later the situation would fundamentally change. But location was precisely what mattered: Becher and Willmann's plans could be better carried out from Dahlem than from Karlshorst. Dahlem and the adjoining districts of Friedenau, Steglitz, Wilmersdorf, and Schmargendorf were preferred by financiers as well as artists and intellectuals. Few people who held a position of even minor importance in Berlin's cultural life lived in the districts now belonging to the Russian sector, with the exception, at most, of Treptow. Actors, singers, editors, and writers who worked in the old cultural center of Berlin-Mitte lived in Dahlem in a villa, a single family home, a large apartment, or—at the bottom of the economic ladder—one of the small flats in the so-called artists' block at Barnayplatz, a guild-union establishment of the 1920s.

At Cäcilienallee, Becher and Willmann undertook a range of activities in many ways comparable to those at Schlüterstrasse. They assumed contact with comrades living in the area who had hibernated through the Nazi period there or recently returned from camps and prisons. Among them was the thirty-three-year-old publisher Klaus Gysi, who had survived in semi-legality and was now working in the provisionally established district office of Zehlendorf. He was very likely the source of the tip that the Stauss villa was available. Other contacts and comrades included the artist Herbert Sandberg, returned from prison; Robert Havemann, a physicist at the neighboring Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute; Enno Kind, a journalist formerly active in the Münzenberg group and a future theater critic for Neues Deutschland; and Wolfgang Harich, who lived around the corner on Miquelallee. Contact was also made with members of the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden who, in private life, were now neighbors in Dahlem. Paul Wegener, Ernst Legal, and Herbert Ihering soon numbered among the more or less regular visitors to Cäcilienallee. Politicians from the bourgeois camp also turned up: the former DDP and future CDU man Ferdinand Friedensburg, Gustav Dahrendorf of the SPD, and the unaffiliated mayor of Zehlendorf, Wittgenstein. Figures from academic circles like the philosopher Eduard Spranger, the art historian Edwin Redslob, the Slavicist Max Vasmer, and the musicologist


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Hans Bennedik appeared there. The pastors Niemöller and Dilschneider from the German Confessional Church frequented Cäcilienallee, as did the successful novelist of the 1920s Bernhard Kellermann, the radio man Franz Wallner-Basté, and others.

After many individual meetings and discussions, a kind of plenary session took place in the drawing room of the Stauss villa on June 26, 1945. The participants resolved to do what Paul Wegener and his supporters in the Kammer already had in mind: establish a cultural, moral, and intellectual organization for (as the phrase later became) "overcoming the past." Becher and Willmann were empowered in the name of those assembled to apply for a license for this organization from the Russian commandant. Further steps followed quickly. The very next day, on June 27, the application was filed. One week later, on July 3, the official inaugural meeting took place in the great hall of the broadcasting center on Masurenallee. Given the generally chaotic conditions at the time, the tempo was astonishing, almost suspicious. For on July 4, as expected, the Americans and English entered Berlin and moved into their sectors. Was the Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutsch-lands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Revival of Germany), as the new association was called, supposed to be a fait accompli before this new order was established? Both the swiftness of the inaugural proceedings and the date on the Russian license suggest as much. It was issued on June 25—that is, one day before the assembly at Cäcilienallee voted to establish the Kulturbund and entrusted Becher with obtaining the Russians' approval. It is unlikely that an official document of this sort contained a printing error. Had the Russians sanctioned the Kulturbund before its own founding fathers knew they would create it[2] Had the whole thing already been settled in Moscow, and the figures necessary for implementation in Berlin simply sought out afterward?

Of course there was a history to Becher's undertaking. For years the intelligentsia exiled in Moscow, like the circles of exiles in the West and the Allies' postwar planning divisions, had pondered how the intellectual and cultural infrastructure of National Socialism was to be done away with after its defeat. When victory seemed close at hand, these considerations and plans became more and more realistic. In September 1944, Moscow was the scene of a cultural conference to set the course. It involved the party leadership and prominent representatives of the party intelligentsia—Becher, Friedrich Wolf, Erich Weinert, Willi Bredel, Gustav von Wangenheim, Hans Rodenberg, Fritz Erpenbeck, Theodor Plivier, Maxim Vallentin. Becher held a talk titled "The Reeducation of


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the German People," summarizing what in the preceding years had been established as the party line. In Becher's words, the situation required a "national liberation and reconstruction of the greatest kind in the ideological and moral sphere.... It is a matter of liberating the German people from all the reactionary filth of its history, which emerged in its most extreme form with Hitler, and of giving to the German people all the positive forces from its history and the history of other peoples that can sustain it and prevent it from slipping back into imperialist adventures."[3] Becher listed the groups within the intelligentsia to be won over and reeducated for this undertaking:

1. Educators, from village schoolteachers to university professors;

2. Pastors and the clergy;

3. Literature in a broad sense (including film, the press, radio, theater).

The technical and organizational details of how this plan was to be set in motion were not discussed. But it was clear that the "party as an intellectual power of order" stood behind—or rather, above—all activities of this kind.

There were no further discussions or initiatives regarding the intelligentsia and reeducation until May 1945. On June 6, the very day when the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden was established in Berlin, Wilhelm Pieck in Moscow drew up his plan for the (as it was now already termed) Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung. Its program was in no way more concretely formulated than it had been the previous fall by Becher. ("Active production in the area of literature, science, and art toward the intellectual and moral destruction of Nazism, participation in the intellectual rebirth of the German people toward democracy and progress, encouragement of free scientific research and of all cultural life, popularization of the classical inheritance of German intellectual life.)[4] However, the observations that Winzer, Erpenbeck, and others had meanwhile made from within Berlin's intellectual circles were clearly reflected in the list of names of the organization's possible members attached to the report. From the environs of Schlüterstrasse, Eduard von Winterstein, Michael Bohnen, Klemens Herzberg, Heinz Rühmann, and Viktor de Kowa were earmarked as possible members. But they represented, if one considers the entire list, a minority. Church and union representatives, officials in the Magistrat, and former KPD and SPD delegates to the Reichstag (including Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck) formed the majority. This list, compared with the participants at the inaugural meeting in the Stauss villa and the board of directors of the


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Kulturbund eventually formed in August, shows a clear retreat of political figures in favor of intellectual and cultural ones. Ulbricht, Pieck, and Winzer (whose name was also on Pieck's list) no longer appeared in the circle Becher had gathered about him. Compared with the scientists, artists, literary figures, actors, and so forth, representatives of political parties now formed only a small minority. They also no longer participated as party representatives, but as cultural dignitaries who only incidentally had party affiliations. A politician was a member of the Kulturbund just as any doctor, engineer, or office worker with an interest in cultural affairs might be. Presenting itself to the Berlin public on July 3 in the broadcasting center, the Kulturbund emphasized its nonpartisanship as well as its (nonpartisan) political, enlightenmentlike activism. There was no logical contradiction between nonpartisanship and cultural and political activism in the conception of the Kulturbund. The seven program points Becher presented at the inaugural meeting[5] were completely in line with the directives planned in the Soviet-occupied zone for all areas of state, economic, social, and cultural life concerning the "antifascist democratic reconstruction" and "antifascist democratic unified front." To overstate the case a bit, one might say that the KPD, officially revived on June 11, 1945, had itself become nonpartisan, renouncing almost all of its revolutionary social demands of the period prior to 1933. There was no more talk of a dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary, citizens' rights and freedoms were openly praised and private property guaranteed; private enterprise was not only tolerated but even encouraged. Freedom of the press and freedom of the arts and sciences were deemed necessary and worth preserving, and finally expressly secured. There was no talk of transposing the Soviet social model to Germany.

It harked back to the Popular Front period ten years earlier. The KPD had once before presented itself to potential noncommunist allies first and foremost as an antifascist party, and not as a revolutionary and communist organization. Even the persons in question were the same. Johannes R. Becher had been involved in organizing the first big popular-front meeting of intellectuals, the Congress for the Defense of Culture, in Paris in 1935. He continued and broadened his party experience both in the subsequent activities of the International Organization for the Defense of Culture and in his work with Internationale Literatur/Deutsche Hefte, for which he was able to win the collaboration of everyone of standing and reputation, from Romain Rolland to the Mann brothers. At the time, there was no reason to conceal one's


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party membership—the Moscow show trials were still to come—but the party demanded extreme reservation and the strictest discretion in the conspiratorial assumption of being able to exercise more influence this way. This game of hide-and-seek, laughed at by outsiders as both obvious and naive, was taken very seriously by Becher. When his comrade Gustav Regler was carried away by communist sentiments during the Paris congress in front of the plenum and began singing the Internationale, Becher reproached him sharply and stipulated for further popular-front work: "It must be avoided at all cost that the Congress, along with the organization formed there, could be denounced as communist."[6] Exactly ten years later, at the founding of the Kulturbund, a similar mishap befell Becher. The party line and Walter Ulbricht's demand for a democratic appearance despite tight KPD control should have resulted in a Kulturbund structured like Berlin's municipal government: a bourgeois representative as its formal head, and communists in all key positions. Becher and the party planned to make the internationally known author Bernhard Kellermann the president and figurehead of the organization and Becher its true head and motor. The bourgeois majority upset these plans by selecting Becher himself at the inaugural meeting—most likely in the not misguided assumption that he, the apparent initiator of this undertaking, had earned the position. "It was a defeat, not a victory," Anton Ackermann declared, as had Becher ten years earlier in Paris.[7] Becher, however, could not be held responsible for his election, whereas Ackermann had been guilty for the same failure in the eyes of the Russians because he "had slept through the past three months."[8]

Although in the eyes of the party the Kulturbund was marked by this birth defect, the circles it strove to win over seemed not to notice it at all, regarding their choice as absolutely correct and appropriate. (It is, of course, theoretically possible that Becher's election might have been a conscious torpedoing of the communists' strategy, which any halfway intelligent observer of the scene in the summer of 1945 must have seen through; but given the fairly unrefined political sense of the participants, this is not likely.) Criticism of Becher within the party was unfounded: the election was forced on him by his bourgeois followers against his will (he resisted, almost comically, accepting it at the last moment); moreover, it soon became clear that he filled the position superbly and successfully, even by the party's standards.

If there was one member of the KPD whom the bourgeois members of the Kulturbund considered not a stranger but one of their own,


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it was Johannes R. Becher. He played the role of the "integrating and seducing figure" (Gerd Dietrich)[9] so perfectly that one might wonder who was really seducing whom. As the party's liaison to the bourgeois intelligentsia, Becher was as successful in the postwar years as Willi Mfinzenberg had been in the 1920s and 1930s. Both functioned as a contact for intellectuals, with the difference, given the times, that Münzenberg "played the salon proletarian successfully" (Bruno Frei)[10] whereas Becher portrayed with equal aplomb the bourgeois son (which he in fact was) who, in the eyes of his bourgeois contacts, only incidentally belonged to the KPD. If Münzenberg's trademark had been his firm worker's handshake with which he was able to pull in sensitive leftist intellectuals of the Weimar and emigration periods (Bruno Frei), it was to some extent Becher's bourgeois respectability and sensitivity, the delicacy of his handshake, that made him irresistible to the educated middle class after 1945. His involvement with the KPD seemed not a threat but an encouragement, assuring them that one of their own would work alongside and make his influence known to the new rulers. In this respect, Becher fulfilled an integrative function similar to the Popular Commissioner for Culture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Anatoli Lunatscharski.

Becher not only played this role but seemed to merge with it entirely. His whole life and artistic development had consisted in changing from one role to the next, living out each to the fullest—from sensitive symbolist to aggressive expressionist, from expressionist to pro letarian-revolutionary agitation poet, finally from agitator to national classicist. This last oscillation had taken place during his exile in the Soviet Union, both in reaction to the political defeat of 1933 and the loss of Heimat, and as a witness to the Stalinist rediscovery of patriotism during the Great War. In 1948 young Alfred Andersch asked him how he would explain his transformation from left revolutionary to Heimat -bound national poet. In response Becher pointed to the realization "that we were already living in exile in Germany before we went into outward emigration. Leftist literature was 'avant-garde' and isolated from national problems, and we left the shaping of fundamental historical problems to 'rightist' literature, which presented them in its reactionary way.... I discovered Germany in emigration ... discovered the German countryside, the German people, and the great German poetry that I had before dismissed with a wave of the hand."[11]

Becher's biographical trajectory from rebellion against his father, suicide attempt, drug dependency, and identification with the party as a


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substitute father revealed the same pattern again and again: rebellion followed by submission, with regular suicide attempts as the hinge between the two. Becher was not only a "divided poet"—as the title of a collection of texts issued after the opening of the archives in 1989 referred to him[12] —but a divided man and political masochist, who after attempts at breaking free always submitted again to an "almost voluptuous discipline."[13] He was unsteady in his personal relationships as well. His letters reveal the odd habit of addressing the same friends, alternately and arbitrarily, in the formal Sie and the informal Du . His humor was just as volatile. Heinz Willmann mentioned Becher's lack of self-irony and his constant readiness to unleash torrents of irony at the expense of others.[14] Hans Mayer speaks of his readiness to laugh, which was, however, often "the expression of a brutal Bavarian humor." "There were also traits of an evil person in him," Mayer continues, "an evil one, not a bad one. He could cause suffering, just to enjoy it."[15] Others saw another side, like Theodor Plivier, on whose behalf Becher supposedly came up against Ulbricht and Pieck in Moscow. But even here an internal split was unmistakable. "He dried many tears, and he did it alone and secretly, as though ashamed of his compassion and the monstrous crimes of a regime he could not free himself from."[16] Becher could be the "nasty Geheimrat " and the "Becher we have to drain to the dregs.[17][*] He also could be—as the young student Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who visited him in 1946, found—a man who "having no more than the first impression of someone would make the first step to overcome distance, not with suspicious caution, not skeptical about what sort of person it might be."[18]

The three years in Berlin after his return from Moscow became for Becher a unique period in his life, without oscillation, without inner conflict, without anything more than the absolutely necessary measure of vicious humor. It seemed the fulfillment of a wish that his mistress from his Moscow years, José Boss, once expressed to him-"that only the poet in you remains and everything else was slowly done away with—all the 'Jobs.'"[19] Of course, Becher did not enter the Kulturbund as a poet but as an organizer, initiator, and mediator. In contrast to his previous and subsequent political activities he dedicated himself to this undertaking with the seriousness, energy, purposiveness, and evenhandedness of a person whose interest was provoked not merely by the desire to escape from something else. As long as his interests and the

[*] This is a pun on Becher's name, which means "cup."


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party line were in harmony, Becher's peak lasted. When the dreamland of the interregnum period between the war's end and the Cold War was over, his personal dream period would also end.

The very visible communist leadership of the Kulturbund (beyond Becher and Willmann, this included Alexander Abusch and Klaus Gysi) was, as we have already seen, not nearly as disadvantageous as the party had feared. The majority of Berlin's theater heads, museum directors, professors, actors, writers, and artists who had participated in some form in the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden now became members of the Kulturbund. There was even a spatial motivation for this once the Kulturbund took up quarters in the building on Schlüterstrasse.[20] The two institutions could be clearly distinguished in terms of program and organization: from the very beginning the Kulturbund understood itself as a suprazonal and ultimately national organization, whereas the Kammer, despite high-flying schemes, always remained a Berlin concern. Unofficially, however, the Kulturbund became an informational exchange as the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden had been by bringing together in its board the most important figures of Berlin's universities, theaters, orchestras, museums, radio stations, publishers, and newspapers. After the dissolution of the Kammer in the spring of 1946, the Kulturbund absorbed these functions entirely.

The Kulturbund, however, did not consist only of a board of directors. Unlike the Kammer, it was conceived of as a organization for the masses, an objective achieved within the first months. At the end of 1945, there were four thousand members in Berlin, and the number reached nine thousand six months later. Socially, the educated classes were dominant: 27 percent were writers and artists, 11 percent scientists, 9 percent teachers, 14 percent engineers, 24 percent civil employees and officials, 14 percent individuals of independent means. Workers formed the smallest group with 7 Percent.[21]

The chord the Kulturbund struck in the middle class despite its communist leadership rested on the specific disposition of this class after the collapse. Joining culture to politics, or better yet, replacing politics with culture, could not have been a more welcome offer. As a cultural organization, the Kulturbund corresponded exactly to the needs of a social class that traditionally mistrusted politics and wanted nothing more to do with it after the most recent events. At the same time, as a political and moral institution, it promised to promote a catharsis of the moral discontent undoubtedly present in the bourgeoisie in the wake of Na-


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zism. Compared to the occupying powers' reeducation plans, carried out with the greatest naïveté and force by the Americans, the Kulturbund possessed the great attraction of a "house cleaning" (as it was called at the time) carried out without external interference. Membership meant allegiance to a moral, nonpartisan party. Culture, invoked like a magic word, would overcome the burden of the past and promised moral redemption. In this sense the Kulturbund was not merely a communist undertaking to win over and integrate bourgeois "useful idiots" into the communist-controlled Popular Front—as it has gone down in Western journalism and history—but mutually benefited both parties. Communists secured the prestige of the educated bourgeoisie for their popular-front politics, and the bourgeoisie received its desired moral exoneration. In the simplest terms, morally tainted culture was exchanged for morality lacking cultural prestige. Adherents of the bourgeois political class, people like Ferdinand von Friedensburg, Gustav Dahrendorf, and Ernst Lemmer, valued the Kulturbund as a substitute political forum at a time when real political life in Germany was not possible. Lemmer compared his task with that of the German National Association in the nineteenth century.[22] For Friedensburg, a former Prussian government official and alongside Becher probably the most active founding member until 1948, the Kulturbund represented "our own German position between the occupying powers.[23]

The Kulturbund guaranteed its success by satisfying tangible material requirements in addition to moral and political needs. For bourgeois intellectuals who did not want to be seen as too close to the new rulers in the SMAD and the KPD/SED, it was a welcome trading place to accept material advantages without being politically compromised—without any taint of collaboration at all. The perks offered included the Club of Artists on Jägerstrasse, location of the former upper-class Club of Berlin. Here, moving across the parquet floor of Speer's New Chancellery—which in the course of the building's restoration was disassembled there and laid afresh here—members could enjoy the central heating lacking at home and unrationed meals, read foreign newspapers not available elsewhere, and learn about cultural life abroad through lectures, discussions, and film presentations. Through its close connections to émigré circles and good contacts to all of the Allied cultural posts, the Kulturbund was undoubtedly the most international cultural institution in Berlin in the first year after the capitulation. Other amenities offered to members of the Kulturbund included summer vacations at the Baltic Sea resort of Ahrenshoop (confiscated by the SMAD


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specifically for the Kulturbund). All of these goods, foodstuffs, and luxuries, as well as the greatest part of its budget, were bestowed upon the Kulturbund by virtue of an SMAD ordinance.[24] Johannes R. Bech-er's correspondence bears witness to how seriously the leadership of the Kulturbund regarded the coordination of moral and material needs and how much had been learned from the Russians in securing the sympathy of the hungry bourgeois intelligentsia through special rations ("pajoks," the legendary food packages). Shipments of foodstuffs from émigré comrades in America had the same persuasive force as plans for founding new magazines. If friends offered help in the form of food packages and inquired of Becher which of their colleagues or comrades was most needy and deserving, Becher suggested a name, indicating, as in a letter to F. C. Weiskopf in New York in May 1947: "It would be very good if you see to it that a note is included with each package indicating that the name was recommended by us, that is, by the Kulturbund."[25] But even relations between the Kulturbund and émigrés, whatever the personal connections and political sympathies, were marked by a principle of exchange. Both sides tried to capitalize on what the other needed. Hence letters from America that reached Becher often contained not only offers for care packages but also inquiries as to what professional opportunities and positions awaited the potential reimmigrant. A representative number of such letters in the archives of Becher's correspondence reveals a repeated schematic structure:

First paragraph: praise of Becher's writing.

Second paragraph: request for a copy of Becher's latest work.

Third paragraph: request for support upon return to Germany.

The third paragraph of a letter from Hanns Eisler, for example, of November 24, 1946, reads: "I would be very pleased if I could be of use, even a destroyed Berlin is still Berlin for me. Above all, I am thinking of the chairmanship of a music department."[26] Alfred Kantorowicz, who on February 3, 1946, likewise declared interest in an academic post, received the following reply from a beleaguered Becher: "This still seems to present certain difficulties.[27]

The repatriation and reintegration of émigrés into German cultural life, which curiously was given no mention at all in the programmatic principles at the Kulturbund's founding, became a central focus and probably stands as its most important contribution to German postwar culture. In this respect, it did internationally what the Kammer der


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Kunstschaffenden had done on the local Berlin level; that is, it acted not as an employer but as a source of communication and mediation. People seeking to fill available positions were almost all members of the Kulturbund and could be contacted through Becher: Otto Winzer in the Magistrat; Gustav von Wangenheim and later Wolfgang Langhoff at the Deutsches Theater; Ernst Legal at the Staatsoper; Klaus Gysi at the Aufbau-Verlag; Paul Wandel, Erich Weinert, and Herbert Volkmann in the Soviet zone central administration's department of Popular Education. For many if not most of the émigrés returning to Berlin between 1946 and 1948, the Kulturbund served as an information and travel agent and employment and housing office in one. Compared with the system of privileges that later developed and the luxury offered to the great old men of bourgeois culture like Arnold Zweig and Heinrich Mann, the support of the party intelligentsia at the time proved modest. In distinction to the leading political cadres, who from the very beginning were taken into the SMAD's distribution system and received lodgings and provisions, even prominent intellectuals like Becher, Alexander Abusch, Friedrich Wolf, Erich Weinert, and Willi Bredel cherished every care package. Nor could the subsequent assignment of accommodations, after the first returnees were generously provided for by the Red Army (as in the Stauss villa), have been called privileged treatment. First-class intellectuals and functionaries like Abusch, Willmann, and Erich Wendt lived for months as subtenants.[28] On the other hand Heinrich Mann, the "Hindenburg of German exile" (Ludwig Marcuse),[29] whose return the Kulturbund had attempted to arrange beginning in 1946, was offered "a modern house with central heating, nice bath, and five rooms of pleasant proportion with garage, terrace, and winter garden, already pleasantly warmed and furnished. It was—this will amuse you—built ... for an SS officer." The description is contained in a letter from Arnold Zweig to Heinrich Mann.[30] Zweig himself had shortly before been allocated a similarly appointed house, as had Hanns Eisler, who lived on the property bordering Mann's house. Mann's death prevented his return; it was one of the Kulturbund's few unsuccessful reimmigration attempts.

As importantly as the émigrés figured, they were not the principal group targeted by the Kulturbund. The call for a "democratic revival" really had another aim. The artists, intellectuals, and scientists who had not emigrated from the Third Reich fell into three groups: Nazi sympathizers; apolitical Germans who remained professionally active after


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1933 without compromising themselves, and who occasionally even voiced camouflaged criticism; and those who ceased all artistic and literary work, or at least forwent publication, and turned to other occupations. Originally only those who expressed their refusal with total silence claimed the term "inward emigration" for themselves. From the personal point of view of Becher and other émigrés in the Kulturbund, the fact that Germans who had blithely continued to publish within the Third Reich also suddenly emerged as 'inward émigrés' after the collapse must have seemed sheer hypocrisy and opportunism. At the same time, the idea of reunifying German culture depended upon exactly this kind of comprehensive notion of inward emigration—a kind of general amnesty permitting all those who had not actively sympathized with the Nazis to return to the cultural community. There was another not entirely remote motivation for reimmigrants from Moscow to redefine emigration this way. If all those who had remained in Germany and not compromised themselves were now integrated under the label of inward émigrés, perhaps all who had gone into exile—into Stalin's Russia or Roosevelt's America—could (might, must) be seen and judged part of one undivided outward emigration.

In order to rejoin the branchings of German culture after 1933, the Kulturbund needed a figurehead whom everyone entering the organization could acknowledge and identify with. With the loss of Becher after his election to the presidency, someone else had to be sought. Becher's first concern after the founding of the Kulturbund was to find a patron, an honorary president to decorate the organization and give it respectability and an integrating force.

His first choice was Thomas Mann.[31] But before he could take steps toward winning him over, the matter was already decided. A controversy provoked by Walter von Molo and Frank Thiess spoiled the chances for Thomas Mann's return to Germany, if he had ever truly entertained such thoughts. Mann's polite refusal of Molo's request to return to Germany had drawn a caustic commentary from Frank Thiess. It was his open letter to Mann that contained the phrase that émigré's had followed the German drama "from their comfortable box seats" abroad. Becher must have swallowed his anger and bitterness over seeing his own plans for the great writer thwarted so clumsily when he wrote privately to Thiess. A grinding of teeth over the wasted chance is still somewhat audible in his lengthy letter of January 26, 1946: "Your first open letter to Thomas Mann [was] inappropriate in terms of tim-


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ing, content, and tone. It would have been advisable if you had beforehand been in touch with Germans more familiar with the attitude abroad toward Germany, and who could have presented you plainly with the attitude toward emigration and in particular Thomas Mann's emigration within it." But then the tone changes. Becher moves from the accusatory you to the cooperative we , leaving no doubt that he considered Thiess a comrade in matters of German culture despite his lack of diplomacy and his brutality in the case of Thomas Mann: "We could have been spared this refusal, equally regrettable for us and Thomas Mann, if we had in timely fashion considered and thought through together if, how, and when we wanted to approach Thomas Mann [emphasis added]." Becher assured Thiess it was his "sole effort to serve the cause that you and I are equally bound to: the revival of our people. Long before the return to Germany it was clear to me that in the interest of this cause, an end must be brought to the distinction between 'inward emigrant' and 'outward emigrant.'"[32]

After Thomas Mann, Becher's attention turned to another great writer of the older generation. Given his objectives, the choice was not an obvious one. Nothing about Gerhart Hauptmann seemed to embody the present circumstances, and not only because of his eighty-three years. Almost everything about him was unreal, especially the long stretch between his productive youth and his spent old age. This had drawn comment from Becher, then of another mind, on the occasion of Hauptmann's seventieth birthday in 1932: "A man remains, seventy years old, who is no longer of interest. May he rest in the peace he has made with the ruling powers."[33] His existence during the Third Reich was also unreal, keeping silent, but not forgoing official honor. Hauptmann was a living anachronism, a dead man waiting for release from life. His only connection to the present of 1945 was his surreal surroundings in Silesia, which was now undergoing the expulsion of the German population and seizure by the Poles. Provisionally supported by the Red Army in the summer and fall of 1945, he continued on as lord of the manor of Wiesenstein House—a strange and unreal state given the tragedy playing out just beyond the boundaries of his property's extensive grounds.

Becher's attention was brought to this situation in the summer of 1945 by Gerhart Pohl, a former literary friend and now Hauptmann's neighbor. In October he undertook what has gone down in postwar literary history as the "expedition" to Hauptmann. In two motor vehicles,


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and accompanied by a journalist from the Täliche Rundschau and two SMAD officers (the task of one of whom was to photograph the events), Becher made his way to Silesia. Soon after his arrival he realized that the aim of bringing back Hauptmann in person was impossible. The old man shuffled between bed, sofa, and armchair and had no thoughts of leaving his familiar surroundings. He wished only to die in peace. Even his spirits seemed cut down after having witnessed the doom of Dresden in February 1945. "My head is as fuzzy as if I were wearing a dozen woolen caps. I fade out of consciousness so often that I think, now is the end—and I would thank God for it" (notebook of Margarethe Hauptmann).[34] For the meeting with Becher and his entourage, Hauptmann was moved from his bed by his attendant and seated in an armchair. In a bathrobe, sunken in, he let pass before him what, to follow the reports of it, must have been a strange scene of pitiful pathos, wooden staging, and businesslike brevity.

Becher: "Today millions of people are looking to you, Gerhart Hauptmann! They await a word, a word of encouragement! We all need your strength to raise up and strengthen Germany. We must rebuild under difficult conditions. It is our firm belief that we will succeed from the best sources of humanism. But this will take your word, Gerhart Hauptmann, and this is what we ask of you!"

Hauptmann: "I am at your disposal. You do indeed charge me with an enormous task, though I am already—on the brink ... I am a German, and it is absolutely clear that I will remain so. What we are discussing here is a matter that concerns Germany."[35]

The expedition did result in securing Gerhart Hauptmann's name for the Kulturbund—that is, the title of honorary president. That Hauptmann himself, or the part of him still living, could not be brought back to Berlin[36] was of no great weight by comparison and in fact proved an advantage, as did his actual death the following year. Only the name on his work remained, and now this could be more easily made to identify with the progressive early period. But the question remains how Becher lighted upon precisely the man who for so many years was practically the symbol of numbed artistic potency, an image of sterility and opportunism. The expedition met with disbelief and rejection from Becher's ideological friends. "Sympathy for efforts to win widespread participation in the rebuilding of cultural life," said F. C. Weiskopf, "must have its limits. In the case of Hauptmann, these limits have been crossed, in an undignified way and, as it may prove, to no effect. As far as the


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'world public' itself is concerned, when it looks on Hauptmann (if at all), it looks with contempt and repulsion at this man who has outlived himself, a dancing puppet always making himself available to everyone."[37]

Becher, who thirteen years earlier had used similar words, did not need such hints. People like Weiskopf who judged the German scene from the distance of America, he could reply, were unfamiliar with the real situation; the situation dictated that Gerhart Hauptmann was unfortunately the right figure to reintegrate German culture. His appointment as honorary president may be viewed as an olive branch to the bourgeois members of the Kulturbund who had also acted opportunistically during the Third Reich. Becher's deployment of Hauptmann as a representative figure served as more than a trick popular-front strategy. Hauptmann was presented as a model of catharsis with whom many other fellow travelers should be able to identify. "The great intellectual power Gerhart Hauptmann represents has all too often been declared apolitical and neutral, and stripped of its own power," Becher wrote in the Tägliche Rundschau after his return from Silesia,[38] remarking: "The path to humanity, which the best part of his work called out for ... [was] barely visible in much of what the writer failed to do against the spirit of barbarism ... and in the darkness of the confusing and tumultuous times, he came close to the abyss and wanted to lose himself in fruitless resignation and isolation." The unspoken but clearly implicit conclusion of this statement: the Kulturbund offered the catharsis that would save German culture from such dangers.

To see in Becher's strategy only a Machiavellian calculation to pull discredited artists and intellectuals into his own sphere of influence would be mistaken. His twelve years of exile in Moscow must have made him only all too familiar with the reaction of intellectuals who closed their eyes and ears to the terror around them. Becher could not approach Hauptmann as an innocent man approaches a guilty one, as he might have done in 1932; they were, even if he could not admit it to himself, accomplices and partners in suffering. In writings published after Becher's death there is a note of deeper sympathy, tolerance, and complicity akin to Brecht's "An die Nachgeborenen" ("To Those Born After"): "Let us not be unjust to Gerhart Hauptmann's work, or led astray and embittered because Gerhart Hauptmann has adopted an attitude in the past years that—precisely because of our agreement with and interest in his work—we object to.... No, we do not want


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to make his mistake our own and muddy our clear view of Gerhart Hauptmann. We bend in reverence even before a confused and often broken will, if it began as purely and passionately as his did."[39] In 1945–46 Becher could not have guessed that a few years later literary and intellectual contemporaries would judge him as he had judged and condemned Hauptmann in the past—in Johannes Bobrowski's merciless words, as "the greatest dead writer of his time, whom nobody listens to and reads, though he lives and writes on."[40] The experiences of Becher's exile, his feelings of transgression and cowardice, had followed him to Berlin and Silesia. In his later years, he would reflect on that period in autobiographical notes and poems. "Burned Child," a poem written down hastily like a diary entry, signals even in its title that it deals with his personal experiences.

A backbone brokenonce 
Can hardly be persuaded
To stand upright again,
For the memory
Of the broken backbone
Is frightening.
Remaining so even
When the break has long since healed
And the reasons for it
No longer exist.[41]

Hauptmann was the most prominent member of the fellow-traveling silent majority of inward émigrés whom Becher set out to woo. As a rule, émigrés won over by the Kulturbund belonged to the enlightened political left wing of German culture before 1933; but the Kulturbund worked with at least the same energy for members of the conservative-apolitical right wing who had remained in the Third Reich, well-known figures like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernst Wiechert, Ricarda Huch, Hans Carossa, and Reinhold Schneider. Though not in the spectacular style of pursuit Hauptmann had elicited, Becher went to Bavaria and personally sought out Wiechert, probably the most prominent representative of the inward emigration in 1945, to gain his collaboration on a magazine project. Called Die Tradition, the publication was designed to bring together authors of the inward emigration and serve as a conservative counterpart to the leftist liberal monthly magazine Aufbau published by the Kulturbund.[42] Although the encroaching East-West polarization


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brought an end to these efforts before they could take root, the very beginnings in 1945–46 were enough to sound the alarm in his own camp. Weiskopf's cautionary voice was joined by others, who moved beyond criticism to strident protest. The outrage was greatest among Becher's former supporters in the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers), most of whom had mostly spent the Nazi period in Germany, in concentration camps or prisons, and who now condemned the new roles given to Hauptmann, Wiechert, Carossa, and Fallada. "The gentlemen have already assumed their positions," Hans Lorbeer wrote to Becher: "They will set the tone, pick the text. I would not be surprised if Herr Pohl, Herr Barthel, Herr Binding, and Herr von der Vring found similar ones. Herr Fallada is already there. Herr Heinrich Mann, who once knew to speak such generous words to the 'democratic' rubber truncheon police back in lovely Prussia, and Herr Hauptmann, and whatever their names are. One day, when the politician has been put aside [Lorbeer was at this time the mayor of Wittenberg] to pick up the poet's pen again, there will be no mercy. "[43] This was not only an expression of political and moral indignation, but a fear of being left empty-handed in future cultural life. Kurt Huhn, a writer and member of the BPRS in the 1920s, remarked: "The noose is tighter than in my time in the camp. Yes! Silence in the cultural office. Silence in the party newspaper. Excluded, ousted, superfluous, you get there and stare into cold faces, what the hell kind of world is this?"[44]

Like Becher an émigré in Russia, Erich Weinert had returned to Berlin three-quarters of a year later and belonged to the party intellectuals who were pointedly not members of the Kulturbund. In his opinion, Becher was too lenient with Hauptmann, Fallada, and the others. "We don't wish to be pharisees, but we won't let the boundaries be effaced that separate us from the people with whom we no longer share any common ground. They should be thankful if nothing more happens to them than being granted the right to rehabilitation."[45] Adam Scharrer, another writer from Mecklenburg, was, as his friend Willi Bredel let Becher know after Scharrer's fatal heart attack, "extraordinarily bitter over the Kulturbund's policies in Berlin," because it slighted "proven antifascists" in favor of "bourgeois nitwits" and threw the former "on the scrap pile.[46] At an SED party conference on current questions of cultural policy in January 1947, a member of the Kulturbund complained "that we in the Kulturbund are now required to procure a farm, a seaside villa, or whatever, for a well-known intellectual, a former member of the NSDAP, just so he doesn't go over to the English


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zone ... or make sure to provide every possible economic advantage for people in whose literary production we have not the slightest interest, just so their books aren't published in other zones."[47]

However, it was not only Becher's communist confederates from the old times who complained about the Kulturbund. Its original target group, the bourgeois intellectuals, also launched a critique, different from the protest coming from the left but touching on what had limited the Kulturbund's appeal from the very beginning. Walther Karsch, co-publisher of the American-licensed newspaper Tagesspiegel since the fall of 1945, was initially cautious about the organization but not averse to it. Only later did he become an outspoken opponent, seeing too many ideologically irreconcilable forces at work for Becher's goal of a "great union" of German culture to be achieved with such speed. "It cannot be done if opposing fronts are effaced for the sake of an external unity," Karsch warned. "On the contrary: only by working out these fronts, proceeding sharply and ruthlessly with oneself and others, can an external unity become an internal and genuine one.[48] Karsch never joined the Kulturbund. Even a completely different type, a conservative liberal of the older generation like Ferdinand Friedensburg, formerly a high Prussian official and cofounder of the Berlin CDU in 1945, who became one of the four vice presidents of the Kulturbund and its most active bourgeois member, announced similar discontent at a meeting of the board in early 1946: "There is a lack of ... intellectual confrontation and struggle.[49] Jürgen Fehling, who was nearly elected to the board in late 1946, made only a single appearance there. He opened with the observation that the "the greatest danger of this meeting seems to me to be that you're all so deadly serious. You speak as if you were all union secretaries," and ended with an address to Becher:

I think the methods in Russia, first quelling the revolution in art for twenty years so that there is peace after this horrible bloodbath and then creating a so-called unstormy youth, are absolutely wrong. Herr Becher, this is your great task as I see it. I believe that you, as a German writer, should acquaint those Russian gentlemen with the conception that Germans are completely unrevolutionary and never do well in intellectual revolutions. Only a genius can do that, and the genius never notices how revolutionary he is. To those who go on believing that a Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, or Kropotkin was as dangerous and revolutionary as Goethe when he wrote something as harmless as Elective Affinities or even something infamously dangerous like the "Walpurgisnacht" or the second part of Faust, let it be said that in comparison everything in politics is a harmless horse trade between parties.[50]


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Sarcastic analyses and tongue-lashings like these were rare in the Kulturbund, on the board as well as the committees and discussion sessions. The organization typically provided a forum for serious discussions between representatives of different ideological and political views, like the debate between Anton Ackermann and Ferdinand Friedensburg about Germany's status within the political aims of the victorious powers on February 21, 1947. This took place in an uncompromising and controversial yet civilized and tolerant way, if perhaps somewhat insipidly for Jürgen Fehling's taste.[51] Even a topic like Ernst Jünger could be thoroughly debated in 1946 by members of the Literature Committee, including Karl Korn and Ilse Langer, free of the taboos typical of the time.

Regarding the culture of music, the Kulturbund distinguished itself by setting up a concert and lecture series titled "Contemporary Music" (organized by Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt) that provided exposure to new musical production. And the personal dealings between communist and bourgeois intellectuals apparently acquired the relaxed atmosphere of a gentlemen's club. Becher the communist, and the educated bourgeois Friedensburg (who as a young man in World War I made an adventurous escape from a British prison camp on Gibraltar), were on excellent terms personally. They saw each other privately as well, not restricting their interaction to the official sphere of the Kulturbund.[52] Their mutual attempt to use the Kulturbund for their own ideological and political goals—that is, as a means of influencing adherents of the "opposing" camp—was apparently conducive to their relationship and led to a mutual respect, evidenced in Heinz Willmann's expression of professional admiration for Friedensburg: "Friedensburg knew how to use music to personally bind a circle of influential people to himself—outside of the Kulturbund. His intention was to assemble a circle around him (and to influence it) that was set apart from the Kulturbund and everything involving it."[53] Their personal dealings also seem to have been marked by a certain degree of (self-) irony. Willmann's remark to Friedensburg—"You would even consider joining the KPD if you could save German capitalism by doing so"[54] —was, as both were aware, no less true for the communist Willmann, who, in order to serve his party, had become the director of a cultural association composed mostly of the educated bourgeoisie. It was also one of the oddities of their interaction that communists in the Kulturbund, maintaining bourgeois form, addressed each other formally, whereas several communist and


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bourgeois members—who, like Friedensburg and Heinrich Deiters, had been students together—used informal address.[55]

The Kulturbund could produce open and controversial discussions, put on experimental and avant-garde cultural events, and foster personal relations among its members of a sharp-tongued but cordial tone; but all of this was only one side of the "culture" of the Kulturbund, and indeed the one that hardly appeared publicly. Its projected and generally perceived political physiognomy looked different. The Kulturbund was an organization that represented traditional culture—that is, non-avant-garde bourgeois culture before 1933—where representatives of the tradition set the scene and tone, and where the dissonances that had defined pre-1933 culture were smoothed out in the interest of cultivating the greatest possible harmony. As long as the trauma of the Third Reich and its collapse fed the intelligentsia's need for harmony and their disinclination toward renewed politicization, the Kulturbund's gentle contemplative course for the most part suited precisely the wants and needs of the intelligentsia.

And the first year did pass in peace and harmony. Even the political conflict stirred up by the forced merger of the KPD and SPD, leading to the first polarization of communists and anticommunists, did not impact the Kulturbund. There were few SPD members in its ranks, and the public considered the controversy over the merger solely a party affair at the time. The atmosphere changed only after the Magistrat elections in October 1946—that is, after the independent SPD triumphed over the SED. The administration of Greater Berlin set up by the Ul-bricht Group in May 1945 was dissolved. Communists who had occupied decisive positions up till then were replaced by social democrats. In the department of Popular Education, the SPD's Siegfried Nestriepke assumed the post held by Winzer. The SED did everything in its power to keep the Social Democrats out. "You cannot desert your work," Winzer declared on October 22 in a meeting with colleagues. "No one leaves his post voluntarily. We must find a way, using all our means, to remain in the apparatus.... We must now undertake all measures to prevent our people from being thrown out."[56] Becher adopted a more courteous stance. Before a selected circle of Russian journalists, he remarked self-critically about the election defeat: "The SED is known everywhere as the party of Quislings, as the party of the Soviet occupying power. It is not right for the Täghche Rundschau to cover up the SED's blunders. It prevents the SED from practicing self-criticism, and it creates the impression that the SED and the occupying power are one and


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the same. The occupying power must not orient itself to one party. That would be too risky. The occupying power must not identify itself with the defeats and blunders of a party. It will lose all possibility of maneuvering if it supports only the SED. We have to work together with the Social Democrats, there is no other way."[57] But the Social Democrats, who had toiled in vain during the one and a half years of the communist power monopoly, now came out more vigorously and "revanchist" against their former tormentors than was politically necessary. Friedensburg, a disinterested observer of this confrontation, thought the SPD was following "to some degree in the steps of their predecessors with their 48% majority ... and is succumbing to certain totalizing cravings."[58]

The Kulturbund registered the new climate in the form of the SPD's sudden interest in its activities, members, and organization. Since Gustav Dahrendorf, one of the founding members, had moved to Hamburg, not a single distinguished representative of the SPD had joined the Kulturbund. So the organization was now criticized for lacking a legitimate democratic basis; that is, its failure to hold elections had resulted in the SED's excessive (and the SPD's lack of) influence on the organization. A change in power comparable to the shake-up of the municipal government was called for. Friedensburg and Becher, of one mind in this matter, replied that the board had never been conceived of as democratically representative, but was oriented to models like the Council of Immortals of the Académie Française. At the same time, they had to admit that the board, "with a few laudable exceptions, has not shown such a great spirit of reform that we might perhaps imagine that our work is so splendid it could not be done better some other way."[59] Demands for democratic legitimation could not be ignored, and elections were scheduled. They took place as part of the First Federal Congress on May 20–21, 1947. Social Democratic hopes for a political landslide like the margin in the Magistrat elections were disappointed. The board expanded to thirty members, none of whom were members of the SPD. As before, communist and bourgeois members dominated, for the simple reason that there were almost no organized SPD adherents in the Kulturbund's membership. This was not the result of a systematic policy of scaring off and excluding SPD members; the underlying reason for the lack of Social Democrats was likely that the SPD was not a party of intellectuals. After its betrayal of the 1918 revolution, the SPD had become a party of functionaries. Since 1919, rebellious bourgeois intellectuals rejecting their own class and seeking a new political home


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had turned to the KPD, which through no effort of its own—and despite the animosity toward intellectuals soon rampant there—became the party of the intellectuals. A curious alignment of antipathies and sympathies among party functionaries and intellectuals developed across party lines. Despite all political enmity, an SPD functionary like Nestriepke, who had only scorn for the (in his view) fictitious nonpartisanship of the Kulturbund ("I do not value very highly people who are only nonpartisan. I prefer an avowed party man"),[60] was closer to an uninspired KPD functionary like Ulbricht than to Becher, an intellectual of his own party. And Becher connected better with the bourgeois Friedensburg than with the apparatchiks of his own party. The real front, not adhering to party allegiances, established itself between those seeking to subordinate politics to culture and those seeking to subordinate culture to politics.

After the board election, the SPD still made sporadic attempts to gain control of the Kulturbund on the district level. The most resolute attempt was undertaken in Wilmersdorf, the unit with the largest membership and greatest number of prominent figures and activities. After the election, several prominent Social Democrats joined the group and briskly took action against the district. This culminated in July 1947 with a vote of no confidence against the chairman, Hans Schomburgk, a famous explorer. An independent figure like Friedensburg, Schomburgk professed no party affiliation and belonged to the Kulturbund's bourgeois majority of dignitaries. There were fierce disputes between SPD and SED adherents at the meeting, in the course of which the writer and SED member Alexander von Stenbock-Fermor struck an SPD representative when the latter remarked: "In a discussion of human dignity and freedom, an SED speaker has no say."[61] The Wilmersdorf fist-fight represents only one of numerous dissonances in the course of 1947 jolting the Kulturbund out of its peaceful meditation. As the political polarization spread across the city, assurances from its communist organizers that they were acting not as party communists but as critical humanists allied to the Kulturbund's goals met with skepticism. Walther Karsch, a critical observer of the Kulturbund since fall 1945, now considered it nothing more than a front for the SED for the purpose of winning over, manipulating, and infiltrating noncommunist circles. Forces were at work, he wrote in a lengthy article a few days after the Kultur-bund's congress and board elections, that sought to "make up for the defeat in the political realm [the elections] by securing and (if must be) conquering all those positions from which it would be possible to align


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intellectual currents with their own, or at least—in the truest sense of the word—not let them be crossed."[62]

Karsch and the Social Democratic critics of the Kulturbund were not wrong. Internal communications reveal what was behind the much-vaunted nonpartisanship. A memo from Willmann on relations with the SED reads:

We find it only natural that the Kulturbund should collaborate particularly closely with the SED; this party is after all the bearer of progressive, liberal ideas. Within the specific spheres of both organizations' work, all issues will be discussed and carried out jointly, and in most district groups, the director or secretary is active as a functionary in the SED. Messrs. Otto Winzer and Anton Ackermann provide a connection between the board and the SED central committee and ensure a common tact in approaching political aims.... We will maintain all connections to the other parties as well, since we have set ourselves the task of gathering all democratic forces. Of course internal ties there are rare, with the exception of a few district groups whose leadership includes members of the CDU and LDP.[63]

Karsch himself, as copublisher of a newspaper that labeled itself independent and nonpartisan but was an American licensed and controlled mouthpiece, launched his attacks from the precarious position of his own partisanship and dependence. This hypocritical casting of stones came increasingly to characterize each of the confrontations that occurred as the political polarization increased.

Of course in 1945 the KPD had its specific intent in establishing the Kulturbund. But intentions are one thing, and existing conditions and subsequent developments are another. From the beginning, the Kulturbund developed a unique dynamic, which in many respects was "nonpartisan" and evaded the control of the KPD/SED. For a time it became a generally accepted authority in the broad field of "moral" culture, as the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden had been in more specific cultural matters. And just as the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden gradually lost its footing and justification when other cultural institutions were founded, political developments after 1946 began to undercut the Kulturbund's political and moral premises and legitimation. It could no longer claim to unify moral and political culture in the face of a clear segregation of communist and anticommunist moral politics and moral culture. The Berlin intelligentsia considered these developments from their own point of view. During the communist monopoly of political power in Berlin in 1945–46, many had seen in the Kulturbund the greatest chance for a relative degree of independence and nonpartisanship. Now that the SPD


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election victory had broken that monopoly and crystallized as an alternative to communism, they shifted their hopes in this direction, especially once this alternative soon found the same generous support from the Americans as the KPD/SED had previously from the Russians.

The Kulturbund's bourgeois members began withdrawing in the first months after the Magistrat elections. Soon afterward two of them—the art historian and copublisher of the Tagesspiegel (and later the first rector of the Free University) Edwin Redslob, and the Humboldt University professor of Slavic studies Max Vasmer—created the Society for the Friends of the Natural Sciences and Humanities in Berlin-Wannsee, that is, in the American sector. This new organization was given little publicity and elicited little public interest. There was no mention of the Kulturbund as a possible motivation, or of the society as an alternative to it. The separation was the silent expression of a difference of opinions, as faint and imperceptible as Redslob and Vasmer's participation in the Kulturbund had been until then. Friedensburg, whose social position and outlook would have predestined him to membership in the new organization, remained in the Kulturbund. He remarked at a board meeting that "he was initially a little concerned, but in his opinion such concern was unnecessary. In refusing every political objective that organization marks itself as completely different from ours. We are engaged in a political struggle, they are a social club."[64] But Friedensburg was not as unconcerned as he appeared. A few days earlier he cautioned against ignoring the ever louder critique of the Kulturbund's irksome involvement with the SED. ("We will have to make a great effort and use a great deal of caution and selflessness to overcome this criticism, by recognizing the tensions in their mutual justification and reconciling them.")[65]

Western occupation authorities, in the first year of the Kulturbund's existence, did not object to its activities; in fact, its program of democratic revival corresponded exactly to ideas (especially the Americans' plans) for reeducating the German people. Even in 1947, the Kulturbund's lectures and events organized or assisted by the Americans, English, and French still outweighed Russian involvement.[66] The only thing arousing distrust at this time, particularly in the eyes of the Americans, was the excessive leniency the Kulturbund practiced in dealing with politically and morally tainted figures like Gerhart Hauptmann and Wilhelm Furtwängler. The organization's communist leadership, as long as


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the KPD/SED was part of the political mainstream, was even less objectionable given that a number of American intellectuals serving as cultural officers were liberal-minded men of the New Deal who considered communists the most courageous and active of antifascists. This stance, too, began to change in the course of 1946. The New Deal generation of cultural officers was demobilized and sent back to America. New officers, selected according to different political criteria and marked by the Cold War atmosphere already advancing back home, took their places. Despite this gradual change in climate, the Kulturbund was still regarded with cautious reservation. Its bourgeois-communist mélange proved a ticklish problem; in antagonizing the communists, the Americans risked losing the leading bourgeois figures they hoped to ultimately win over to their side. A man like Friedensburg, an internal American memo stated, was "very precious ... because the presence of this strong personality within the Kulturbund is very expedient to confirm the impression that the Kulturbund is a politically neutral organization."[67] This was nothing other than a paraphrase of the difficulty any American anti-Kulturbund policy faced. The British officer in charge also assumed that the Kulturbund was "a communist dominated organization" but did not advocate ignoring, isolating, or disbanding it, rather of turning the tables and using it as a means for the West to exert its influence: "It might well provide one of those points where we can meet communism in Germany and make some real effort towards infiltrating into German communism what we consider democratic ideas. I always feel that to do this rather than blankly oppose communism is the right British answer to the German communist move and I am quite convinced from experience that there is a large body of German communists who only belong to the SED because it is the most left-wing party, and would in fact, with a little education, be very much closer to the ideals of British democracy than to Marxism."[68] Friedensburg had similar ideas, but his hopes of influence from within the Kulturbund were ultimately as ineffective as those of the Western powers. ("Until now I fancied opposing the possible influence of our communist colleagues, insofar as communist ideology appears at all, of at least having a chance at the same effectiveness on the other side.... Of course the fear of communist influence on other segments of the population is very widespread in Germany. But it corresponds to a bourgeois inferiority complex, of which I am completely free.")[69]

Before 1947 came to a close, the Kulturbund had to cease its activities in the British and American sectors and vacate Schlüterstrasse. What


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SED propaganda and later East German historiography termed the Verbot (ban) on the Kulturbund was the result of a complicated process desired and staged not only by the two Western powers.[70] The ban was a lesson taught by the Americans and English, but also by the Russians. Of course their political motives for this varied, but their actions were synchronized in a manner akin to an image coined by Alfred Kantorowicz at the time: the smooth coordination of a pair of parted scissor blades about to snap together and tear to pieces whatever is between them.

The ban followed Allied command order BK/o (47)16 to the letter. Issued in January 1947, it stated that political organizations in each of the four sectors of Greater Berlin had to be individually approved. The purpose, of course, was for the four powers to keep all political activity in their respective spheres under their control. Excluded from the regulation were political parties and unions licensed by the Russians before the Western Allies had arrived. How the order impacted the Kulturbund, which was neither a party nor a union, was soon the subject of divergent interpretations. The Americans considered it a political organization and argued that a license should be applied for in the American sector. The Russians declared it a cultural organization, insisting that according to Allied Order no. 1 (regarding the assumption of the Russian decrees issued in May and June 1945 by the Western Allies), the license of June 25, 1945, was still valid for the whole of Berlin. The Kulturbund itself was ready to file the petition demanded by the Americans, but had already applied for a quadripartite license the year before, in May 1946. At the time, without indicating their reasons, the Americans and British had refused their formal permission, but declared themselves willing to silently tolerate the Kulturbund in their sectors.[71]

In 1947, the Kulturbund found itself in a dilemma. If it filed for a license as the Western powers demanded, it offended the Russians, who had made it clear that this issue was a matter of prestige for them. Not filing a petition meant that after November 1, 1947, the deadline set by the Americans, the Kulturbund would no longer be considered legal in the American and British sectors. In Becher's words, it was "an international conflict in which we Germans have no chance of intervening."[72] Nevertheless, efforts to intervene were undertaken, most vigorously by Friedensburg. In talks with the Americans and Russians (Howley and Tulpanov) he sounded out their intentions. Certain that no one was concerned with the Kulturbund's well-being or even survival, Friedensburg tried to win time by turning the decision back on the Allies through what


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a British cultural officer termed "an ingenious tactical move."[73] In a letter written two days before the American ultimatum expired, Friedensburg declared the Kulturbund's neutrality in this matter: since the Allies represent diverging views with respect to its legal status, the board [of the Kulturbund] does not see itself in a position to reach a final decision in this matter and must leave it to the Allied command. To this end, the Berlin board asks the Allied command to reach a unified decision very soon, so that the Kulturbund can continue its activities in the Berlin area as it has until now."[74]

The letter was written on October 30 and passed on to headquarters along the usual official channels—that is, through the office of the SPD mayor, Luise Schröder. Two weeks passed before it arrived. The deadline of November I had expired, and the ban on activities in the American sector came into effect at midnight. The British authorities followed suit on November 12. (In the French sector the Kulturbund remained legal.) It is possible that the American-British ban resulted from the delayed delivery of Friedensburg's letter, perhaps deliberately caused by an SPD functionary in the Magistrat unsympathetic to the Kulturbund. But the letter could not have secured more than a temporary postponement anyway. The Americans' resolve at this time to end the problem of the Kulturbund in their sector was evident from their inquiries in a few district groups, where they assumed that noncommunist majorities were to be found or could be created. The director of the Neukölln group, a member of the SPD, was asked "why he did not himself register the Kulturbund and file for a license. It could do no damage at all if a decentralization were to take place here. The petition would probably have been approved immediately."[75]

For completely different reasons, the Western ban on the Kulturbund was not unwelcome to the Russians. In the heightening Cold War atmosphere, the Western powers' ban on the Kulturbund must, in terms of propaganda, have seemed more valuable to them than the organization itself was. Friedensburg noted from a conversation with Tulpanov that the latter had said, "The current situation is perhaps not at all so damaging. The Kulturbund developed with complete success, and with this incident the world public will wake up to the undemocratic behavior of the Western powers."[76] From the very beginning, despite all material and moral support, the Russians had had reservations about what they considered the Kulturbund's elitist structure. In September 1946, the head of the SMAD cultural division, Alexander Dymschitz, stated to a control commission of the party's central committee arrived


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from Moscow: "The Kulturbund is not an organization concerned with mass political work. We have many differences of opinion with Becher" making it necessary "to radically improve the work of the Kulturbund, which has not become a mass organization, nor clearly defined its position as an SED organization."[77] Tulpanov, Dymschitz's boss, was even clearer with respect to Becher:

We have now arrived at the firm conviction that Becher must be replaced. It is impossible to bear him any longer. For some time I have opposed this and we have had serious misgivings, but now ... with the political struggle intensifying, the Kulturbund cannot simply be transformed into a mishmash of the entire intelligentsia.... In all of his intellectual views Becher is not a Marxist, but is directly oriented toward England and America, toward Western European democracy. He is embarrassed to say that he is a member of the SED Central Committee. He conceals it in every imaginable way. He does not even allow us to call him comrade but insists on "Herr Becher," and he fears any strong confrontation within the Kulturbund.... He approaches party work with disgust.... He is accommodating, never on the offensive; still, he is more familiar with the psyche of the German intellectual than we are.[78]

But the Russians' criticism of Becher was not unanimous. Two months after Dymschitzs and Tulpanov's accusations, a thorough evaluation of Becher's performance was made by Vladimir Semjonov, the head of the political division of the SMAD, a representative of the Foreign Ministry in the Soviet Zone and adherent of a different party faction in Moscow than Tulpanov. Semionov found Becher to be "under a certain influence of bourgeois-thinking intellectuals," but also found that "subjectively Becher is on our side and openly pursues, from his standpoint, the best methods for our work in Germany. Removing Becher from the Kulturbund is not advisable at this time."[79] Divergent judgments of Becher and the Kulturbund, like the divergent political lines of Soviet policy on Germany, had their source in the competing groups in the Moscow party and its mesh of interests, aptly termed "cryptopolitics" (Borck). Plans and intrigues launched in the Politburo and the Central Committee in Moscow were faithfully reflected in the SMAD, its personnel, its attitudes, and its practices.[80]

If the Russians' actually intended to provoke the American-British ban on the Kulturbund and make propagandistic use of it, they could boast short-term success. The ban reunited the various groups and figures within the Kulturbund that had already begun to drift apart. A large protest meeting was held. Friedensburg, Ernst Lemmer, Günther Birkenfeld, and Gert H. Theunissen, who had all frequently expressed


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their discontent with the organization's political tendency before, now put aside reproaches and showed solidarity with their organization and its communist leading trio. But this unity did not last long, and it ended in bitter disappointment—even in the leadership—over the Russians' behavior. Both bourgeois and communist members had expected something else from the protective power supposedly so sympathetic to their cause. Herbert Sandberg, the communist artist and caricaturist, thought "the Soviet command must be persuaded that filing a petition is technically correct, especially since Colonel Howley will presumably grant his approval."[81] The bourgeois art historian Adolf Behne remarked: "We have found so much understanding from the Russians that we can hope they will also do us the service of ending American intrigues and for our sake not oppose the petition simply in order to oust the Americans." Friedensburg added: "This behavior [the Russians' negative attitude] cannot be reconciled to our friendly relations up to now if it is their purpose to help the Kulturbund build on the foundations they have given us."

After this episode, the Kulturbund faced the unpleasant reality of no longer being recognized and supported as an important cultural institution but used as a pawn on the chessboard of the East-West conflict. The solidarity against the ban was the final, short-lived unity the Kulturbund mustered before dissolving the following year. It suffered the same division that gripped the city in 1947 and was completed in 1948 with the currency reform, the blockade, and the split of the Magistrat. Its bourgeois members, insofar as they did not decide in favor of the Eastern side, kept silently apart from its activities and retreated into private and professional life. Many left Berlin and headed for western Germany. Some of those who stayed and wanted to continue their political activities settled in the Eastern "camp," as it was thereafter called, others in the Western camp. These were migrations in a literal geographic sense. The period when artists and intellectuals traditionally lived in the Western districts of Berlin and worked in Berlin-Mitte was over. Members of the Eastern camp living in Wilmersdorf or Dahlem now moved to Pankow, Niederschönhausen, or Treptow. As a rule, those who switched over to the Western camp kept their residences. Half a year after the Kulturbund was banned and moved from Schlüterstrasse to Jägerstrasse in the Russian sector, a "Free Kulturbund" was established in the American sector. Its founders included the former board members Birkenfeld, Redslob, and Theunissen, and a former opponent of the Kulturbund, Walther Karsch. Unlike the original Kulturbund three


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years earlier, the new organization (soon renamed the League for Intellectual Freedom) could not pull in big names from Berlin's artistic and intellectual life. The list of its founding members reads like a who's who of the mediocrity that would dominate the next twenty years of provincial West Berlin culture: Fritz Äckerle, Werner Hadank, Karla Höcker, Hanns Korngiebel, Siegfried Nestriepke, Josef Rufer, Karl Ludwig Skutsch, Joachim Tibertius, Friedrich Weigelt. Birkenfeld, for whom such company was probably too shabby from the very start, had to wait two years before a more resplendent intellectual forum for anti-communism turned up. In 1950, he became the head of the Berlin office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international association (supported in later years by the American CIA) that set about organizing the anticommunist intelligentsia with the methods it had gleaned from the Kulturbund and the communist congresses of the 1930s.

And as for the old Kulturbund? It went the way of all organizations that had been founded with such hope in 1945 and ended up gleich-geschaltete shadows of themselves with the Stalinization of the GDR. The fates of some people caught up in this process suggest that it was not carried out as smoothly and easily as it was regarded by the West during the Cold War and is sometimes presented still today.

Among the noncommunists, Ferdinand Friedensburg fought most persistently to defend the original conception of nonpartisanship against political polarization. He wanted nothing to do with the Free Kulturbund. He repeatedly sought dialogue with the Americans to revoke the ban of November 1947, not knowing, or deliberately ignoring, the fact that the contra-Kulturbund was "an American baby,"[82] as an English officer put it. At the same time, he adopted a stance within the Kulturbund against its increasing political orientation toward the East. Official statements made by Willmann and Gysi in the name of the Kulturbund were, in Friedensburg's opinion, excessively marked "by the vocabulary of political confrontation." He accorded the growing number of resignations from the board "a certain justification" and asked "whether the Kulturbund had not been unsteadied by the departure of the aforementioned men and women."[83] Such critical and self-critical tones were perhaps typical of the board in the past, but six weeks after this statement Friedensburg discovered that the one-sidedness was more advanced than he had assumed. On September 14, 1948, the Kulturbund expelled him for "anti-Soviet statements" supposedly made in a public speech. Surprised by this move, Friedensburg declared indig-


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nantly to Becher that the expulsion took place "in violation of the basic rules of any sailing club."[84] As a member of the board elected by the delegate assembly of the Federal Congress, Friedensburg could not be simply shut out. In fact, the initiative for his expulsion seems to have come not from the board but from the chapter of Greater Berlin, which had meanwhile become dominated by communists. The board was presented with a fait accompli; the Kulturbund's Greater Berlin chapter had made its decision without consulting the press at all. It is known that at least one member of the board (Krummacher) protested[85] —not publicly, but behind the scenes, ineffectually and finally cowardly, as would become the rule from now on. Friedensburg, the last of the noncommunist founding members of the Kulturbund, had to recognize that the period of relative openness and gentlemen's club rules was over.[*]

Recent studies offer two views of how the Kulturbund's communist initiators judged its course. The first, assuming that the Kulturbund was an unambiguously communist camouflage organization, grants Becher and his circle a certain disappointment because their plans—to win over "useful idiots "—failed. But this was supposedly only a tactical failure, after which the communists could proceed with the agenda they had always had in mind: the socialist-Stalinist Gleichschaltung of the GDR. David Pike has recently represented this argument in detail. He does give Becher credit for not being an enthusiastic advocate of Stalinism, of perhaps returning to Germany in 1945 with the goal of creating something other than what he and his comrades had witnessed in Russia in the 1930s. However, such hopes, if they existed at all, were from the very start as illusory as the underlying premise "that a new Germany could be built upon the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, be inextricably linked to the Soviet Union, bow down to Stalin, and never engage in patterns of repression even remotely comparable with their experience in Soviet exile."[86] Accordingly, Pike judges the Kulturbund a

[*] One could imagine an anthology of "farewell letters"—the written pages with which the men who had until then worked jointly, and who from then on found themselves on opposite sides of the front, took leave of each other in 1948. Becher was the recipient and author of such letters many times over. For example, Kulturbund member Rudolf Pechel, publisher of Deutsche Rundschau, wrote on July 26, 1948: "I now consider it hopeless that in present-day Berlin intellectuals can still find a common ground that preserves some final bind.... I will tell you openly that it is painful and disappointing to find the community that existed during the Hitler years destroyed. But I can change nothing, and now I can only step down.... Let me hope that despite everything at least we both can maintain a feeling of human connection." Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Estate of R. Pechel II, Vol. 1.


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contradiction in itself: "The very notion of a genuine non-partisan organization sponsored and overseen by a Marxist-Leninist party ... was patently absurd."[87]

The contrary view, most recently argued by Gerd Dietrich,[88] sees in the Kulturbund a genuine attempt, not merely a tactical party move, by communists to create a forum for a "dialogue of dissidents."[89] Though thwarted by the Cold War and the politics of the SED and SMAD, it was a serious attempt whose failure represented a genuine defeat for its founders, especially Becher.

Both views have their logic, and once again the truth falls unimaginatively somewhere in between. Becher surely did not hope to make Germany a Soviet satellite state, as Pike thinks, but rather, being the cross between nationalist-patriot and communist that he was, had ideas of German-Russian relations that approached Friedensburg's "Rapallo" mentality, or the version of the "German path to socialism" his comrade Ackermann proposed in 1946. German communists who had witnessed the Stalin terror of the 1930s had every reason after their return to Germany to secretly infuse the party's official popular-front directives with a different meaning and purpose. The Popular Front, as Ulbricht and his circle understood it (and as it actually operated), was meant to encourage submission to Stalinism. The cultural popular front attempted by Becher and his circle, initiated and organized by party intellectuals who sought out the help of bourgeois partners, was more of a popular front against Stalinism, trying to overturn the patterns of the 1930s and keep their own apparatus in check and Moscow at a safe distance.[90] On the other hand, party intellectuals like Becher were themselves too deep in the party, too mixed up in its apparatus and psychology, to be consciously and consistently capable of such a policy. They could manage only momentary emotional longings for insurrection. Becher, who had alternated between rebellion and self-discipline, accepted the responsibility of the Kulturbund in 1945 to serve his party, but also to satisfy certain tendencies toward independence from this power base. While the balance between his striving for independence and his party superego lasted—for the two to three years of the open political situation in Berlin—it functioned brilliantly. They were productive, energetic, and happy years for Becher, as exhilarating as his Expressionist youth and his conversion to communism after World War I. He had the pleasure of playing two different roles, without either audience being fully aware of the duplicity. To the party, he was a somewhat mysterious liaison to the bourgeois camp. In the bourgeois camp,


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he was surrounded by the aura of a man who belonged to the new power elite. Becher would have been the last person to end this dreamlike state, because he would have been the first to lose by it. The end came from behind his back, from above, against his will—and after a predictable self-subjugation to the party. He did not lift a finger as Friedensburg's case was decided. As always in such situations (like earlier in Moscow, and later in the Harich and Janka cases), he simply absented himself for reasons presumably related to his experience in Moscow in the 1930s: "fear and cowardice" (Pike).[91]

But rebellion followed this acquiescence as well, or resulted from it, according to his familiar cycle. A few weeks after the American ban on the Kulturbund (for which, in Becher's opinion, the Russians were also guilty because of their obstinate attitude) he stated: "The character of nonpartisanship in the Kulturbund was not always carried out as we understood it."[92] Nor was his own party innocent. Becher felt it had abandoned, if not betrayed, him, its interference and bungling destroying the carefully created nonpartisan ranks. This of course could not be said openly, for fear of suggesting that Becher was more interested in "his" Kulturbund than in party politics. An emotional outburst a few weeks later showed that he had only temporarily suppressed his anger. His vehemence, out of all proportion with the actual occasion (the supposed discrimination against the Kulturbund when the German Popular Congress was formed), points to his reserves of anger. Becher's letter to the party leadership was a settling of accounts in the broadest terms: "The recent behavior toward the Kulturbund seems to me no accidental oversight. Many similar instances could be mentioned that in my opinion reveal a considerable underestimation, on the side of the leading comrades of intellectual work, viz. an undue arrogance of leading comrades toward comrades working in the cultural sphere."[93] Even party intellectuals more hard-boiled than Becher suffered from their treatment at the hands of the party. Unlike Becher, his collaborator Alexander Abusch had emigrated to the West and returned to later become one of the most smoothly functioning wheels in the Stalinized cultural bureaucracy of the GDR. He noted down the following remarks for a report he was to deliver in early 1948 before the Ideological Commission of the SED:

The comrades in charge of the Kulturbund have long had the feeling that we do not receive sufficient feedback on our work from the party because the general political significance of our work is underestimated.... This work is considered unpolitical or the musings of a few intellectuals in the party....


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Some strains of the anti-intellectualism in the German workers' movement are clearly still at work here, contrary to all Latin countries, CSR, Yugoslavia, etc. The party shies away from esteeming and promoting leading intellectuals in accordance with their specific value.... The Kulturbund is responsible for helping to foster the atmosphere and openness necessary to create intellectual resources for the party. But given the tendencies indicated above, the party does not have the ideological attractiveness it needs for these classes. It does not have the ideological offensive power right now to approach issues like the Freedom of Personality, the Concept of Freedom as a historical concept, existentialist philosophy, etc., as a general German discussion, as a large-scale, visible, and offensive confrontation in the Western zones, in Berlin, and last but not least (make no mistake) in the Eastern zone as well [emphasis in original].[94]

The intellectuals' scolding directed at their party seems not to have fallen on deaf ears. On February 11, 1948, a resolution from the party leadership labeled "Intellectuals and Party" pointed to "very serious deficiencies, mistakes, and neglect in the work of the party itself," and with respect to the Kulturbund promised "to safeguard under all circumstances the nonpartisanship of the organization and resist all attempts to make the Kulturbund into a mere appendage of the party organization."[95] But none of this came to pass. On the contrary, as Friedensburg's expulsion showed, the Gleichschaltung only increased in tempo. It is perhaps a balancing irony that communist intellectuals reproached by the West for treating their bourgeois colleagues in the Kulturbund as "useful idiots" were treated in a similar manner by their own party and, having served their purpose, were ultimately pushed aside in the same way.


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Chapter Four— Kulturbund
 

Preferred Citation: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6n39p125/