The Bitter Taste of Victory by Lara Feigel Page A

reconstruct the country their governments had destroyed. Alongside Spender, there were other British figures I had written about previously: W. H. Auden, Humphrey Jennings, Rebecca West. Perhaps even more interesting were the Americans: Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Lee Miller. And then there were the Germans andAustrians, sent to Germany in the uniform of the conquerors: Klaus and Erika Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, Billy Wilder.
    Fascinated by these unexpected stories of Anglo-German collisions, I found that I could not stay away from the war in Europe forever. I found that the world of literary London and the world of my family were not as easily separable as I had made them. I had already come to love Berlin, where I had discovered a life of cycling, swimming and cafés that was conducive to writing. Now I became more concerned with peeling back its layers of history and seeing what remained of the Nazi era, curiously overlaid with the legacy of the Occupation that had ended up dividing the city in two.
    I’ve now spent more time in Germany than anyone else on either side of my family. I also know more about the war in Europe than I initially wanted to know. Whether 1945 was a moment of hope or a moment of despair is explored in the pages that follow. What is certain is that it was a time that put any neat cataloguing of nationality in doubt. Indeed, for people like Stephen Spender this disruption of straightforward boundaries between nations was a positive effect of a war that had the potential to reconfigure Europe as a transnational entity united by its common culture. Perhaps one day another journalist will ask me if the book reflects my own wartime heritage and no doubt I will be surprised by my answer. Perhaps that will be the moment when I make sense of my English accent and preoccupations, my eastern European and Dutch ancestry and my German name.





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