Bavaria: How a Swedish journalist experienced Germany in 1946 – Bavaria

Need and misery, that was the German great powers in 1946. “It was a dreary autumn with rain and cold, hunger crises in the Ruhr area and hunger without crises in the rest of the old Third Reich.” This is what the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) wrote about the newspaper Quickdraws then sent to Germany. He was supposed to report there on the conditions in the destroyed country. Dagerman was only 23 years old when he toured the country for weeks, collecting impressions for his texts, which still make a big impression today.

Dagerman’s reports were published in Sweden as an anthology in May 1947. Now that they have been published in a new German translation (Stig Dagerman, Deutscher Herbst, Guggolz Verlag), it becomes even more clear what a valuable contemporary document lies before you. Dagerman not only sheds light on the situation in the big cities and in the country, but also reflects on everything that he has experienced in trains, in political speeches and in court cases. Bavaria also comes into focus, but in a completely different way than one would expect.

The Swedish journalist and writer Stig Dagerman toured war-torn Germany in 1946.

(Photo: Guggolz Verlag)

Bavaria in the autumn of 1946. In retrospect, it is above all the departure that shines through, as it was last expressed at the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Constitution. The first elections, the entry into force of the constitution, the Americans swiftly pepping up the country – that’s the common picture. Dagerman, on the other hand, describes the hopelessness and sadness that had become normal. There is little sense of a spirit of optimism in him. Especially in the cities there was a lack of essentials everywhere.

Central station in Munich, 1946

View of the almost deserted main train station in Munich in 1946.

(Photo: Francé, WB)

Dagerman’s gaze is crystal clear. In a letter in November 1946 he wrote: “I came to Nuremberg from Munich this afternoon, and I will certainly not feel at home in this dark and dreary city that has apparently never seen sunshine. There is probably not much to do here see except for the ruins, which are unusually numerous. And I will concentrate fully on the process for the three days that I am here. “

As the translator Paul Berf notes in the book’s epilogue, sent Quickdraws quite deliberately not a seasoned correspondent to Germany. Such a person would have had to cooperate with the occupying powers, which would have severely restricted his freedom. Dagerman, however, was married to a German and was able to travel the country to visit relatives of his wife, which the newspaper hoped would provide more surprising perspectives. And that hope was fulfilled.

War invalids in Munich, 1946

A common post-war scene: a presumably former soldier with no legs sits on the side of the road in Munich.

(Photo: Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)

Once the reporter visited a freight train that had been standing in the rain in an Essen train station for a week. In the wagons were a few hundred Essenes who had been evacuated to Bavaria after the first Allied bomb carpets had been rolled out over the Ruhr area. Now the people had returned to their hometown, or rather to the train station in their hometown, they were not allowed into the city. “There is a ban on immigration,” writes Dagerman, “it is forbidden to look for work, to eat and to live. The Bavarian authorities know that too, but this knowledge does not prevent them from … expelling the evacuated non-Bavarians who are.” to the rural regions of Bavaria spared from the war. “

“Imagine, compatriots deporting your compatriots.”

In Bavaria, people were forced into leaky freight trains. During the trip there was officially nothing to eat, after all, the hometown bought one plate of watery soup a day. Dagerman’s description of the Ruhr area is no less shocking than today’s reports from the slums of this world. He quotes a young man who said that everyone on the train was aware that it was Hitler and no one else’s fault, but that the authorities in Bavaria could have been less ruthless. The wagon was scrawled with chalk: “We thank Mr. Hoegner (the Bavarian Prime Minister) for the free journey.”

A man said bitterly: “Imagine, compatriots, who expel your compatriots. This is where Germans turn against Germans. That is the most terrible thing about the whole thing.” Dagerman writes that the experience of German ruthlessness towards Germans was a terrible shock for the many young people who were brought up not to a National Socialist but to an idealistic nationalism. He went on to say that the differences between the major popular interest groups were “so profound that they deprived the reactionary forces of some degree of their base of operations from which they could conduct effective neo-nationalist propaganda.”

Bavaria in the post-war period: SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher in 1947 during a speech during a rally of the SPD in Frankfurt.

SPD chairman Kurt Schumacher in 1947 giving a speech at an SPD rally in Frankfurt.

(Photo: Gerhard Baatz / AP)

It is a harrowing picture that the author spreads. The occupants of the train hated the Bavarian farmers and Bavarians in general, while the relatively wealthy Bavaria, for its part, looked slightly contemptuously at the rest of the hysterical Germany. The urban population accused the peasants of smuggling food onto the black market, and the peasants, for their part, claimed that the townspeople were traveling in the countryside and pillaging them. The refugees from the east spoke badly of the Russians and Poles, but were viewed as intruders themselves, which ultimately led to them being at war with the people in the west. The bitter result: “The depressed atmosphere in the West is pervaded by hateful moods. The hopelessness hangs over our heads like a gray cloud of lead and wet cold.”

In the report “Cold Day in Munich”, Dagerman impressively describes the nationalist tinge that he recognized in a speech by the SPD chairman at the time, Kurt Schumacher, on Munich’s Königsplatz. Then he unpacks a hammer: “Bavaria, which sends cold-blooded evacuated Hanoverians, Hamburgers or Essenes back to the completely impossible conditions in their hometowns, is of course a selfish, cold-hearted and brutal country, but that’s only half the story.” Dagermann also credits Bavaria with the fact that “there was a not insignificant passive resistance to National Socialism there”.

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