CHAPTER SEVEN: AN EPILOGUE AND SOME HYPOTHESES
In 1952, after Cecil was black-balled by the U.S. Army, he looked for a job in Europe, but in vain. So he accepted a position in Ethiopia as the English-language announcer for Radio Addis Ababa. As Edith had no intention of moving to Africa, she and her sons moved to Cannes on the French Riviera. After a year in Ethiopia, Cecil returned to Europe, determined to land a job in Europe.

By 1953, the paroxysm of anti-Communist hysteria had passed––or perhaps the U.S. Air Force was less paranoid than the U.S. Army and the State Department––for he was offered a job as education advisor at Bitburg Air Base in western Germany. From then until he retired in 1969, he served as education advisor at several American air bases in Germany and, from 1963 to 1966, in France. He and Edith planned to retire to Innsbruck in Austria, where the climate was warmer than in Germany and the local language was German. In 1969, Edith died of a heart attack after a botched operation in the local hospital, and Cecil returned to Kaiserslautern in Germany, where he had friends. Though he stayed there until 1986, after 1952 he no longer dealt professionally with Germans, nor did he have any further insight into German society or politics. And there ends my narrative reflecting their views of German society in 1928 and again from 1945 to 1952. Along the way, these narratives contain a few surprises that have prompted me to seek explanations.


The Food Situation
The first surprise is Cecil's reaction to the food situation in Germany in the immediate postwar years. In his travels throughout Germany in 1945, he wrote:

- There is more misery within forty miles of Franklin, N.C. than in this whole section of Germany from here to Hersfeld and back to Heidelberg!

- There are no peoples north of the Pyrenees and the Alps whose diet and general conditions compare with 60 percent of the state of Arkansas. If your heart bleeds for the suffering Europeans, it does so because someone is yelling very loudly. . . . here the middle class plays tennis and the workers take walks.

- Pretty agricultural villages, old, quaint, lovely, people very busy raking hay, plowing, picking beans, tending sheep. The horses were fat and huge, the cattle fat, the oxen looked like pictures in a book. The peasants were real peasants, the women worked like men, dressed soberly, looked healthy and busy.

- The country between Karlsruhe and Constance is everlastingly lovely, the people are fat and healthy, the villages untouched, . . the land filled with fruit and livestock.

- All across Bavaria there are so many livestock and such hard-working farmers. . . . Lucky peasants, and busy. With all their manure piles.

- I went on a trip to Switzerland and saw some beautiful country. The section known as Swabia is untouched except in the larger cities, and the people in the country are fat, healthy, busy, and comfortable.

And in 1946, he wrote:

- There is no starvation in the American Zone or in Berlin. People do not even have the long hungry look of many of our southern mountaineers, the miners in West Virginia when they don't mine for four years, for instance. There is no misery in Germany yet which is comparable to the misery of the crackers and clay-eaters of Georgia, the zarks of Ozark country or the dark men of Mississippi.

- The food situation is much better than you think. The people would not work with such normal energy if they did not have something that sticks to the ribs.They get food in the black market and with this food they supplement the figures you read about. . . . this much is sure: the Ruhr and the Saar are both far far away from the rich agricultural regions and many people there are actually living on 950 calories a day, which is a slow-starvation diet. . . . But if you go across Baden, Wuertemberg, Bavaria, and up through the Hersfelt section of Hesse, you will find the farmers feeding cream to cats, you will find them producing livestock to butcher on the sly, you will find them refusing money and insisting on gold, cloth, tobacco, chocolate, and carrying on the daily grind of peasant life with lots of bedding sticking out the windows, geese up and down the road, fat horses and oxen.

Cecil's observations are worth taking seriously, for he was the son of a poor farmer and had grown up in a small farm town in Kansas, and later spent several summers in the mountains of North Carolina, so he knew a great deal about farming. How then can we explain his observations in the light of the well documented reports of hunger and misery in Berlin and other cities and in the rest of Germany? Here are two possible explanations What caused the disparities between the food-rich agricultural regions of western Germany––Hesse, Württemberg-Baden, and Bavaria––and the food-deficient cities was the breakdown of transportation. Railroad tracks had been damaged, bridges had collapsed, locomotives and rolling stock worn out or broken; as for those that could be repaired, there was little coal. Likewise, for the few serviceable trucks that remained, there was no fuel. Hence it was difficult and costly to transport food from the farms to the cities. Furthermore, farmers had traditionally sold their crops and purchased goods manufactured in cities: clothes, shoes, tools, appliances, machines, chemicals, etc. But so many urban factories and workshops had been bombed and, for those that had survived the bombing, there was little fuel or electricity and few raw materials. Until June 1948, the Reichsmark was increasingly worthless, and neither farmers nor city people had much interest in selling what they had. Instead of trade, there was theft, as hungry city people foraged in the countryside and gangs pillaged what they could (On this point, which neither Cecil nor Edith mention, see Bessel, pp. 343-50).

This lasted until June 1948, when the new currency, improved transportation, and policies of the Western Allies revived commerce and alleviated the food crisis.


Stereotypes
The other surprise is Edith's attitude toward the people of Berlin. As she wrote in 1947:

- I find myself liking the Germans less and less as the days go by. Here are some of the reasons: people from whom you would least expect it beg and steal shamelessly. They are lackadaisical in their work.

- The Germans I have come in contact with complain bitterly (and of course they are right) of all they have suffered esp. from the Russians when they first came in. But they haven't the slightest notion of what they, the Germans, did to other nations when they invaded them.

- They are very obsequious to the Americans, of course, and very mean toward each other. I have seen numerous examples of it.

- The dishonesty, the laziness, these changes in the character of the people seem to me more of a tragedy than the ravaged cities.

- But if I can't help but pity them on the one hand, I have even less sympathy for them than I had when I first arrived here. So many of them are so obsequious to us and so cruel to their own; and such beggars and such thieves. They have to be constantly monitored, and there are so many burglaries.

- The amount of begging here is terrific. They are quite shameless about it. Mothers send their children out to beg "en mass."

- The Germans will never listen nor believe that there is hunger and want elsewhere. Only they are worthy of pity!

- They are a caterwauling people. They complain and whine and beg all the time. . . . They are far from working as hard as they should to clean up their ruins (they seem to take a perverse pleasure in preserving them to make people feel sorry for them). The behavior that Edith observed in Berlin in 1947 contrasts with what most people think of Germans. The difference reflects not the "national character" of the German people (whatever that is) but the circumstances of their place and time, namely their response to the defeat and the anarchy and desperation that followed (See Bessel, chapter 11).


A Few Last Thoughts
The excerpts from the letters and memoirs I have quoted in this essay lead me to deeper questions: How much can participant-observers be trusted? Are their writings the Truth? There are three reasons to question what they wrote. One is because they came to Germany with their own personalities and biases: Cecil as a Midwestern American farm-boy turned adventurer turned government official, Edith as a French woman, linguist, and sophisticated world traveler. Another is the unusual position they found themselves in during the years 1945 to 1953 as conquerors in a defeated nation, but civilians. And the third is that they were writing to people whom they want to impress or reassure or, in the case of Cecil's memoirs, for his descendants.

Finally, there is selection bias. While I have looked through their papers and picked those that had information that suited my purpose––to relate their impressions of the society and people they observed during those years––I cannot be sure that I got them all. Some letters and pages may have been lost, and others I may have missed. And the missing pieces may have been important.

But how is that different from the writings of all historians? It differs in one important way. Historians have a tool that participant-observers lack, namely hindsight. Today, we look back on the period described in this essay––1945 to 1953––as the start of the Cold War; but people living at the time, especially after the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon in 1949, were afraid that a third world war, deadlier even than the second, was about to erupt. Similarly, many people, including The New York Times reporter Cyrus Sulzberger, believed that another global pandemic like the influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 was imminent. And very few contemporaries expected West Germany to recover and prosper, and rearm, as quickly as it did.

The lesson to be learned is that historians (of whom I am one) may be as far from knowing the Truth as contemporaries, albeit in a different direction.