Edouard Roditi
LETTER FROM GERMANY
After four full years of Allied Occupation, the new Germany
that has arisen from the ashes of the Third Reich has little that is
novel to offer to the rest of the world, whether East or West: it is
perhaps even more masochistic than the Weimar Republic in its sense
of urgency and of imminent doom, more confused or more doctrinaire
in its beliefs than any other Germany of the past, more curiously anti–
quarian and traditionalist than any other European nation. Germans
have now tried, for four years, to understand or assimilate the vague
or contradictory doctrines and tastes that the "Reorientation" elements
of the four Occupation Powers have tried to "sell" or to impose. In
Berlin and in Western Germany, the public has thus been variously ex–
posed to the ideas and plays of Sartre, Anouilh, Cocteau, Noel Coward
and Thornton Wilder, to
Gone with the Wind
and to the full gamut of
Hollywood hallucinations, to BBC programs and to
The Reader's
Digest
in German, to Voice of America re-broadcasts and to the kind
of Redskin American literature that we ourselves have now learned to
expect the
Saturday R eview of Literature
to praise, to Rex Warner's
novels and to the productions of
J.
Arthur Rank's ambivalent imperialism
that, to conquer a market, whether domestic or foreign, is ready to
pander to any prejudice, anti-American, antisemitic or anti-socialist. In
Eastern Germany, the population has been offered less confusing but
more monotonous fare: just as the Soviet-dominated Socialist Unity
Party tolerates the existence of bourgeois minority parties that are never
allowed to oppose the Moscow Party-line, so does Soviet cultural policy
allow only a few harmless cultural manifestations of a non-Communist
nature to give the public the iIIusion of still enjoying some intellectual
or cultural freedom.
The consequences of the East-West split in occupation policies are
beginning to
be
distressingly problematic. The establishment of an
East-German People's Democracy and the swing to the Right revealed
by results of the recent elections to the new West-German Parliament
have now split the nation more wide apart than did the political strife
of the years that preceded Hitler's seizure of power, along the same gen–
eral lines and according to approximately the same proportions, but
