‘Discussions of the evening. Carter on the partition of Germany: “Partition her? Why, we’re going to rent her out! This country is going to be one vast To-Let sign! Or maybe, after all the bombings are over, she’ll be a deep enough crater simply to allow the sea to rush in. Then we’ll all take occupation furloughs and go fishing.’ This is from the recently-published diary of Melvin Jonah Lasky, a young American GI on his way to serve in Germany after its defeat in WW2. Lasky, who died 20 years ago today, would remain in Europe, and become a well known anti-communist liberal, particularly noted for editing the influential Encounter magazine.
Lasky strongly opposed the Communist USSR, and helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded magazines and conferences opposed to Communism. He also became an advisor to General Lucius D. Clay, the American governor in post-war Berlin. In 1958, he joined Encounter, an Anglo-American intellectual journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left, and published the works of such writers as Lionel Trilling and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the 1960s, it was revealed that the magazine was partly funded by the CIA, and, though the scandal hurt Lasky’s reputation, he continued to run Encounter until its final issue in 1990.
Lasky was married twice, to Brigitte Lasky (née Newiger) with whom he had two children, and to German novelist Helga Hegewisch Lasky. He was the author of several books, including Utopia and Revolution (1975), On the Barricades, and Off (1989), and The Language of Journalism (2000). He was awarded the distinguished service medal from Berlin in 1995, and, two years later, was named ‘one of the most important Berliners’ by a commission of German historians. He died on 19 May 2004. Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Guardian, and Encyclopedia.com.
Lasky kept a diary for a single year - 1945 - while serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender. He began the diary on 22 January 1945 in Fort Totten, New York, while waiting to be shipped to Europe with the US Army, and concluded it in Frankfurt, Germany, in December. However, the diary was largely forgotten about until it surfaced after Lasky’s death: his assistant Marc Svetov, sorting through papers, found it contained in three neatly stacked ring binders. In time, the diary was duly edited by Charlotte A. Lerg, and published by Berghahn Books in 2022 as The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky: Into Germany at the End of World War II. Some pages can be sampled at Googlebooks.
According to Berghahn: ‘Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. [The book] reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.’
‘Written on the verge of the most politically active phase of his life,’ Berg and Maren Roth say in their introduction, ‘Lasky’s 1945 diary illustrates formative moments and reveals personal insights into the mindset of a young man who was convinced of his own intellectual potential, but not quite sure yet how best to put it to use. The diary gives a first glimpse of the political and cultural views he would go on to assert. They emerge from his prewar youth and education, his social milieu, and his political conditioning, mostly in New York City, complemented by the experiences he gathered while serving with the US Army.’
Here are several extracts.
22 January 1945, Fort Totten, New York
‘What do I know? What have I learned? So many volumes, so much carefully contrived experience (even rash exposure to events and “life”), and here I remain, desperately unable to live with myself, incapable of ordering my memories and responses, and shaping my ambitions. I spent the day nervously in the reading room of the library here, I must have fingered with a hopeless and frantic hunger a hundred volumes. But there was nothing for me, not a page I could read, not a sentence I really wanted. There was a Walter Pater miscellany, and I glanced at some phrases on Pascal - “the spectacle of the religious history of the human soul.”. . . No, that is what I do not understand! I looked at McGiffert’s study on Christian theology, but “Love” and “God” were empty, without meaning. Oh, if I could only comprehend them, take all the great words seriously, patiently, how deeply convenient it would be! - there would be an end to weakness, faltering heart and mind. “Spirituality,” and all the supporting strength of classic historic traditions, could be my sanctuary. I could be strong again . . . I turned to a volume on history - “the critical consciousness of civilization about its own past.” Yes, yes! But what does all my once precise and finicky awareness of Sumer and Akkad and the Gracchi and Innocent and Peter Waldo and Cromwell mean for me now? Paltry, vague, irrelevant memories. . . I picked up Gide’s Travels, Cohen’s Logic, some things of Maugham, a novel by Wolfe, Melville’s Billy Budd, a tale by Edna Ferber. . . I must be mad, or ill. Why am I torturing myself? I am lost and despairing. Is there nowhere a page for me - a paragraph, a word, to teach me to live with myself, with my boredom, with my alienation, with my mediocrity? For the first time in my life, I think, I am alone and bereft. My old formulas are gone and useless. I do now know how to be happy.’
13 February 1945, Lunéville
‘If the confusion and incompetence of the history-recorders reflects the actual situation of the history-makers then the chaos of the battlefield is reaching new depths. I can’t seem to be able to find anybody who knows what he is doing. Policies are unclarified, procedures are botched, and the method and theory of the historical section absurd. The Colonel took a morning recently to restate functions and objectives. After an hour or so, Mooney asked permission to make a comment. “Sir, that’s all very well and good, but - ” and he hesitated only a moment, “but frankly - I don’t know whether to shit or go blind!”
Which just about sums it up. As someone remarked today, the historian-in-chief is “an insurance salesman. . . And the only trouble is, we’re not selling insurance!” A few minutes later the Colonel came through. He tossed a few hasty glances at the oddly occupied office. “I think some of you people ought to find out the unit of measure around here,” he said. “It’s hours, not days! Every goddammed thing takes days, days!” And he left. Some time later: “How many pages have you done today?” The number was apparently negligible and inadequate, and he stormed. “Let’s get the output up! For Christ’s sake, if research takes up seventy-five percent of your time, cut research out! Just write, and then everything will be speeding along!” Mooney, Eggers, and Gottlieb (the current “bird-dog” staff) all tell me they were introduced to their units with - “I don’t know anything about this son-of-a-bitch. I don’t know who he is, what he can do. But I’m leaving him here, and see that he’s kept busy. I don’t want him laying around, fucking off!” The poor fate of a combat historian! There they were out in the cold of winter, sleeping with the men in holes and dugouts, worried about the Rundstedt offensive. And then a call would come through. It was the Colonel. “Eggers? Is that you? Come on in! I’ve been searching all over for you. Come on in. . . I want to send you out again.” Notes are accumulating. Nobody has time to prepare any manuscripts. A bird-dog’s life indeed!
“Have you read much of eighteenth-century literature?” Dyer asked this afternoon, turning aside from his records and maps. “Then you know Gibbon, of course. You know the more I go on with all this, the more I find myself writing like Gibbon. I read my own prose, and there it all is, the Ciceronian periods, the great Latin eloquence. Why, this page here - the Sixth Corps assault on Montélimar - why, mutatis mutandis, it might be a brilliant purple passage on the vices of some Roman emperor. . .” He shook his own head in acquiescence and went back to his records and maps.’
14 February 1945, Lunéville
‘A fine sunny afternoon. On the ground the pools of mud have dried into damp soft earth. In the street little pink-cheeked French children are playing, clomping along the cobblestones in their wooden shoes, singing and shouting un, deux, trois, quatre. . . Above, the air is busy with the ceaseless drone of planes. The sun has shown itself, and the land and the people look fair again, and somewhere not far away bombs are tearing apart an enemy.’
20 April 1945
‘Friday. Some fragmentary details of the push across the Rhine from Ludwigshafen seemed to me especially interesting, and at least a momentary flight from the routine fantasies of military gossip and political prejudice. Mannheim was in ruins, and the roads to Heidelberg from the river area and south from Karlsruhe were frantic refugee escape-lines. The city of Heidelberg itself was almost bulging. Peace-time population of eighty-six thousand; and now it held more than one hundred ten thousand. Heidelberg had become the sanctuary of the Rhine. (There were only about two thousand displaced persons, mostly French.) The people, according to all early observers, appeared to be well-fed, and the town was in all respects normal. The shops and the banks were open, the university was intact (guarded now to protect against looters), and except for the railroad yards the whole city with its historic buildings was undamaged. The Neckar was quiet, and some communications had been established, for little rowboats were coming over and back from shore to shore. Several hundred bodies were still lying around, soldiers and civilians killed in the streetfighting of several days before. The burgomaster, and this was a point I had missed in my own rather hasty “reconnaissance,” had been in office since 1929. He was a Nazi party member. His explanation was, of course, that it had been required of him in order to continue in office. And the Army accepted him as such. In the by now terribly familiar pattern the basic intention was to remove him, but he would be of service temporarily, for he was “not sufficiently prominent in the Nazi hierarchy to warrant his immediate displacement!” To be sure, he had refused to submit lists of prominent Nazis and locations of Nazi property. But he could help keep “order” and “administration” for the time being. On these hollow and lazy phrases all purpose is lost. The removal of the Nazis, summarily, unconditionally, could have become the consistent symbol of the end of the old order. In each town, village, county, everything but the memory of Party power could have been eradicated. Instead, spurious reasons of military and official expediency dictate compromises, blurring and distorting the clean break which would have proved constructive and vivifying. Once again victors and victims alike are prisoners of the machinery of evil. And our real deep helplessness suggests itself at least to me in every detail of the conquest and the occupation. Each report is a conspicuous unwitting exercise in the tragic ironies and paradoxes of the War. “All churches were required, under the Nazi regime, to submit copies of sermons to be delivered. Pastors and priests are continuing this practice.” “The local prison was almost destroyed. However, one cell block, containing about eighty cells, has been cleaned up. It is considerably damaged and without windowglass, but it will serve to accommodate about 150 persons.” “Concentration-camp situation reports were made out and the individual inmates’ questionnaires were left to be filled out by the inmates. The camp was being administered by three of the inmates who had imprisoned the German guards and taken over the management when the camp fell into Allied hands. The three were an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Belgian. The prison was running so smoothly that it was determined not to make any changes. . .’’ The Imitation of Art by Life is no idle intellectual fancy, but is literal and terrifying: the whole war begins to unfold as an ingenious adaptation of Franz Kafka!
Discussions of the evening. Carter on the partition of Germany: “Partition her? Why, we’re going to rent her out! This country is going to be one vast To-Let sign! Or maybe, after all the bombings are over, she’ll be a deep enough crater simply to allow the sea to rush in. Then we’ll all take occupation furloughs and go fishing. Every now and then something’ll bite and up we come with a Heidelberger, nice and fat and Aryan, or a Frankfurter. . . Looks as if we’re in for one good deal after another! Imagine! Nothing to do but fish and swim in Mare Nostrum. . .” And Mooney, once again, on Bates Fabrics, bedroom furnishings, and problems of advertising and merchandising ladies-ready-to-wear.’
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