Foreign News: Report from Munich

Four years ago the U.S. Seventh Army rolled triumphantly into Munich. Last week, from the city that was Naziism’s birthplace and shrine, TIME Correspondent Emmet Hughes cabled:

Bavaria’s countryside, its soft-rolling hills and gabled farmhouses blanketed by late snow, looked as snug and changeless as ever. Only at a few points along main roads did little, neatly painted buildings strike an odd note: U.S. snack bars, complete with hamburger, jukebox and all the refined necessities of American life. They reminded you that this is, in a sense, America’s Bavaria.

The country’s soft air of calm was deceptive. Like every Bavarian city and village, Munich went mad last week. While wind and snow whistled through the scarred streets and hollow buildings, along the avenues and through bright windows could be seen gaudy devils and silvery angels, Spanish ladies with black mantillas, Egyptian pharaohs in gold brocade, Hawaiian dancers in tights, bra and lei. Jazz bands blared in every cabaret and public dancehall.

These last two days before Lent were the crashing, climactic orgy of Munich’s Fasching—the first full-dress, no-holds-barred carnival after a decade of war and ruin. In the whole Fasching time (which the bold began the second week in January), Munich has writhed and staggered through some 2,500 public and 25,000 private parties; the city has pocketed some 150,000 marks in entertainment taxes. This year, Munich citizens had decided that nothing mattered more than a successful Fasching: families pawned beds, shoes and watches to buy costumes; impoverished baronesses slashed their last evening dresses and their husbands’ tattered tuxedoes to make fetching disguises.

St. Michael & the Zoot-Suits. Ash Wednesday Eve I drove through the most devastated streets of Munich, through rubble lanes barely wide enough for a car to pass, to a factory standing in darkness. We climbed a rickety outside stairs to a second-floor door that opened into a garish six-room apartment, slyly constructed by the factory owner in violation of housing laws. Our monocled host greeted us with tipsy cheeriness as his guests oohed and aahed over his gay shirt pasted with cutouts of Esquire girls. Inside the rooms were assembled, in monstrous taste, old tapestries, carved Italian statues of the 15th Century, paintings of madonnas, and some fourscore of Bavaria’s wealthiest and most titled citizenry. Heading the guest list was one of the Kaiser’s grandsons, a little ill at ease and easily the soberest guest in the place, and his pretty, dark-eyed sister, a refugee from the German Eastern territories. As the host eyed the dignitaries with evident satisfaction, a friend explained to me succinctly: “He has the food, they have the titles.” Around a statue of the Archangel Michael, grass skirts and American zoot-suits, favored by Munich’s youthful social elite, whirled till dawn. Morning found most of Munich broke and badly hung over.

There is an important reason why Bavaria can afford such lunatic luxury. Its economy can take it. Bavaria is Western Germany’s fat breadbasket, and its agrarian economy has always been nicely sprinkled with small industry. Extremes of rich & poor have been less severe here than in Germany’s industrial heart. War damage has been less grievous—bombs could not do to Bavarian farms what they did to Ruhr factories.

“This Bavaria of ours is really a circus,” explained Josef Mueller, pulling back his thick, rubbery lips in a wide grin. “Jo” should know. Bavaria’s canniest politician, he heads the Christian Social Union, its top party machine, an unwieldy, feud-ridden alliance of anti-Marxists which controls 104 of the provincial Landtag’s 180 seats. Jo of course was speaking not of Fasching but of Bavaria’s political life.

Out of the East. Selfish and insular Bavaria speaks most clownishly through the separatist Bayernpartei. Its leader, squat, jowly Josef Baumgartner, sums up his creed: “Every German state should be given veto power like that in the U.N.” One C.S.U. leader has remarked: “A separatist’s happiest dream is somebody to be named Bavarian ambassador in Bern, but the truth is none of them has brains enough to be a vice consul in Venezuela.”

More sobersided was Jo Mueller’s warning over the separatist dream of a South German state under the auspices of Paris: “Slice off southern Germany,” he said, “and you surrender the north to the Soviets in the long run. You can’t build a Paris-Munich-Vienna line without opening the way for a Moscow-Berlin-Ruhr line.”

What may blow Bavaria’s political circus to kingdom come is a social revolution, of which the first rumblings can already be heard. Bavaria’s prewar population of some 7,000,000 has now hit the 9,000,000 mark. The new millions, reversing the Teutonic movement that for decades pressed eastwards, come from the once-great pockets of German population in East Europe. Impoverished, rootless, and angry with the world, they present smug, insular Bavaria with a screaming problem of psychological and physical adjustment. They need jobs, housing, security.

Already through the scores of refugee camps dotting Bavaria’s country there drifts a bitter wind of social hatred and malice. Families herded into camps snarl with venom against the cozy villages near by. “If only the Russians would come for a few weeks,” said one old refugee from East Prussia. “It would warm my heart to see the Bavarians thrown out of their homes.”

Out of Detroit. To this Bavaria, America has brought not only snack bars and jukeboxes but also a man who is easily the most interesting ruler the country has known since mad King Ludwig II. He is Murray D. van Wagoner, onetime Michigan state commissioner of roads, onetime governor of Michigan, today governor of Bavaria. A portly, ruddy-faced man with a kind of gruff charm, Van Wagoner engages in no such lunacies as Ludwig, who built bizarre stone castles all over Bavaria, and ended his life by jumping into a lake. Van Wagoner’s castles are all built in the air.

“We’re making real progress with these people,” he assured me. “You know it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. This is no quickie—it may take 10 or 20 years, maybe more. But we’re getting there.”

Where are we getting? “The way I like to put it,” Van Wagoner put it, “is we’ve got this automobile called democracy—see?—a car called democracy. We’ve put it here for these people to drive, and we’ve taught them how to drive, see? But their being able to drive doesn’t mean there won’t be accidents, does it?”

One of the governor’s difficulties is that he cannot help conducting himself as if he were governing Michigan. He had this to say about denazification: “There’s a lot of talk about whether Nazis who’ve been in camps should be able to run for office. I don’t know—but prison records aren’t always bad politically. I knew in the Polish section in Detroit, if you’ve been to jail a couple of times, it helps a lot if you’re running for office! And, for that matter, look at Curley.” The governor laughed heartily.

The burbling of the American governor is one of the thoughts behind the savage crack that one honest, deeply anti-Fascist Munich businessman made to me: “Despite all the reeducation, sometimes it seems that Military Government is determined to convince Germans again that they really are a superior race.”

Out of Emptiness. German nationalism is growing in Bavaria, and growing fast. What has been called “democratization” is proceeding slowly. Every German political leader with whom I have talked here —Socialist or Christian Democrat or Separatist—acknowledges these two facts at once. The future, not of Bavaria alone but all Germany, and perhaps all Europe, depends heavily on whether the U.S. reacts to these facts with only a shudder, or with intelligence and understanding.

The fire-eating, conscienceless nationalist speaks shrilly from the past. Standing a stone’s throw from the infamous Dachau, where a refugee camp now huddles, I listened to the booming voice of Franz Jilka: “Give us another war!” Jilka is one of three million Sudeten Germans driven from Czechoslovakia after the last war. He is an old Social Democrat, 64, grizzled, tough and thirsting for revenge. “Would I fight!” he exclaimed. “Give me the chance! All three million of us are waiting for the war—that is the only way we can get back our land. Give us the arms—and we will drive the Russians from Berlin before they can even lace their boots!” Loud though it rings, the voice of Jilka is not yet speaking for Germany, nor even for that nationalism which is resurgent. That could happen if the agony of today’s intellectual confusion lasts many years more.

The nationalist problem is far more subtle than Jilka’s hysteria, far less a conspiracy of individuals than of circumstances. It is not being nourished by would-be world conquerors or old Wehrmacht leaders meeting in secret underground. It is being nourished by the Soviet-zone concentration camps, which are no more decent than those of the Nazis, by the Soviet blockade of Berlin, by the division of Germany, by the inescapably antidemocratic machinery of military occupation, by the bitter polemics between East & West, by divisions among the Western powers that keep them from forming a coherent policy of their own. It is born of the whole series of tragedies which have whittled down the moral stature of those who conquered Germany.

All the same bitter circumstances that threaten to transform decent patriotism into indecent nationalism are conspiring also to choke democracy’s growth. The saddest and plainest diagnosis I have heard came from a brainy, sober man of 42 who has fought Fascism all his life—Waldemar von Knoeringen, head of Bavaria’s Socialist Party:

“I think we still have a chance—not more. To understand this, you must understand the mind of young Germans today. They are not apathetic; they are extremely inquisitive, but they are unconvinced. Democracy is nothing more than a theory and a word to them. Very interesting, they say—now, what has it done for-Germany? Where is it? When the Western powers cannot even agree among themselves, which one is being democratic? You argue this out—but it takes time.

“Now that they have the atom bomb, a lot of Americans talk boldly about what they will do to the Russians. But the Americans didn’t approve when Germany fought the same battle. This, too, you can answer, but it takes more time.

“The young war veteran, broken by his experience, confused in heart and mind, will interrupt your talk about how democracy must be defended at all costs. He will ask: ‘That is very nice talk, but tell me about tomorrow. Am I to take a gun and fight for capitalist America?’ If you have time, you can go on and explain what capitalist America is.

“You see, we need bricks as well as ideas. We need to be able to point to something that everyone can see and say: ‘Look! Democracy built this.’ We still have nothing to point to.”