Category: Humphrey Jennings

Mass Observation at the Movies

8th February 2008

I’ve recently read ‘Mass Observation at the Movies’ by Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).

Mass Observation is the organisation founded in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet and journalist Charles Madge and the documentary film maker, Humphrey Jennings, to create a kind of written documentary of their own times, and to study their own civilisation in much the same way as anthropologists studied other civilisations, for example the Pacific islanders of the New Hebrides, from where Tom Harrisson had recently returned.

Mass Observation archives are held at the University of Sussex and form a wealth of material for historians to draw on. Some of the material has been published and I’ve been particularly impressed by ‘Nella Last’s War: the Second World War Diaries of a Housewife‘ and three books edited by Simon Garfield, comprising extracts from diaries written for Mass Observation during and immediately after the war. I wrote about the first of these, (in the order in which they were published), ‘Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain‘, in one of my first postings on this blog, two years ago.

I’ve also written extensively on this blog about one of the three founders of Mass Observation, the documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings, and his film about Germany after the war, ‘A Defeated People.’

Jennings was involved with Mass Observation for only a short time, during the two years between founding Mass Observation in January 1937 and the start of the war in 1939. During this time he worked on two projects, a book about events on the day King George VI was crowned and ‘Spare Time‘, a documentary film about what people did when they were not at work, in three industrial areas of Britain – South Wales, Tyneside and Lancashire.

During the war, Mass Observation undertook a few projects to study the reactions of cinema audiences. Firstly a report on Ministry of Information short films, dated 24 July 1941, analysing data from answers to the question: which were the best films and which the worst? "The most frequently praised film" by far, was Humphrey Jennings’ ‘London can take it’ with 12 favourable mentions.

Secondly, Mass Observation issued a directive in November 1943, asking their panel of observers the question: "What films have you liked best during the past year? Please list six films in order of liking and give your reasons for liking them." In this case, the archives include not just a summary and analysis of the data, but the responses themselves. Most of them refer to feature films, but some people mention documentaries among their favourite films.

This is the first time I’ve found anything written about Jennings’ films by members of the general public who watched his films soon after they were made.

Most of the references are to two of his films made that year: Fires were Started and The Silent Village. I found it interesting that all the observers quoted said they liked the sincerity they saw in the films, their portrayal of ordinary men and women, their restraint, and lack of melodrama.

Here are some extracts:

A 26 year old wireless operator in the Royal Corps of Signals in Kent:
"Fires were Started. The best wartime documentary yet: never have ordinary people been more convincingly done … and the film is nevertheless ‘poetic’ in its treatment."

University lecturer, aged 55, Aberystwyth:
"The Silent Village – I believe that was the title. Welsh Lidice. This was good. Quiet, impressive, real. No melodrama."

Electrical engineer, aged 33, London
"Fires have been started. Having lived through the London blitz we naturally enjoyed this film. We were impressed with the way things were done and with the lack of heroics."

Radio Operator (unemployed) aged 31, Newport
"The Silent Village, a short film showing how Cwmgiedd, near Swansea, might have been treated by the Nazis if it had been Lidice in Czechoslovakia. Played with complete sincerity and conviction by the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd, without any professionals."

ATS sergeant (female) aged 22, London:
"The Silent Village – Natural, very moving and restrained"

Typist, aged 20, Reading
"Fires were Caused. (I think I’ve got the name wrong). It was a short, ‘official’ film, but very sincere, moving and human. About the work of the AFS [auxiliary fire service]. Photography was good and the actors were perfect."

Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings

3rd November 2007

A few weeks ago I saw a programme of four films by Humphrey Jennings (Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings, 11th – 13th September 2007, BFI South Bank). This was part of a documentary season run by the British Film Institute (BFI) commemorating five British documentary film-makers, all of whom were born in the same year, 1907 – Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, Edgar Anstey and Marion Grierson.

I’ve written several posts in this blog about Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People and the view it portrayed of Germany after the war. Seven of Jennings’ films were shown as part of the documentary season at the BFI, (four in ‘Finest Hour’ and three in other programmes), but not A Defeated People, and none of the programme notes made any reference to it, probably because it does not fit easily with the themes highlighted in the season – technology, nationhood and industry, the everyday heroism of ordinary men and women during Britain in wartime, technical and industrial progress, people at work and Britain as a ‘Land of Promise’.

This made me think about using film as historical evidence. On the one hand films can provide a very immediate and accessible view of place and time. Angus Calder in his classic work ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ makes extensive reference to Humphrey Jennings and his films in his last three chapters on ‘Deep England’ (on the emotive power of the English landscape), ‘Telling it to America’ and ‘Filming the Blitz.’ He refers to most of Jennings’ films in the book, but, like the BFI documentary season, completely ignores A Defeated People. Presumably this is because the film does not fit easily with his theme of ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ and how British people like to remember their role in the war and afterwards.

In my MA dissertation (on ‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British Occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control) I argued that, if Jennings’ films are considered an accurate representation of Britain in wartime, A Defeated People should also be considered an accurate representation of post-war Germany, especially when viewed critically and compared with the treatment of similar themes in other sources.

On the other hand, different people respond to films in different ways. As I said in my dissertation "when we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experiences and beliefs and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time."

I was therefore interested to read (in the BFI programme notes) about differences in interpreting another of Humphrey Jennings’ films ‘Spare Time’. This short, 15 minute film aimed to show  what ordinary working people did in their spare time in different parts of England: coal miners in Wales, steel workers in the North-East, and cotton workers in Lancashire. The ‘Kazoo Band’ sequence in the film, where a group of young people, dressed in uniform, practiced playing their kazoos, marching up and down an empty football pitch, has been controversial ever since the film was first released in 1939. Basil Wright, Jennings’ fellow documentary film maker, wrote in 1951:

"The Kazoo band, the wind blowing chilly through the imitation silk uniforms, the Britannia tableau tottering on its undernourished pall bearers, and the drum majorette aping, like a grey ghost, the antics of a transatlantic and different civilisation – all this is brilliantly presented. But it is presented in terms of a cold disgust; there is no sense of the human enthusiasms which must somewhere exist behind such a drab and pathetic spectacle. Humphrey was, perhaps rightly, attacked violently for this sequence when Spare Time first appeared, but the fact remains that, as a piece of movie, it is both brilliant and unforgettable." (Quoted in the BFI programme notes for ‘Finest Hour’ Films by Humphrey Jennings)

Others have different views. As the BFI programme notes said:

"All this results in a film that different viewers have quite differently interpreted. Some find it patronising: Jennings’ fellow ‘movement’ film-maker Basil Wright attacked it as ‘sneering’. Others consider it less patronising than other documentaries of the period whose concern for social improvement has sometimes dated horribly."

After watching around 20 films in the documentary season at the BFI, including programmes of films by other directors, I was in no doubt that I agreed with those who found ‘Spare Time’ less patronising than many other documentaries, a few of which had indeed dated horribly. Though all those featured were great documentary film directors, what distinguished all of Humphrey Jennings’ films (including ‘Spare Time’, his wartime films, and A Defeated People) was an overriding concern for people as individuals, sympathy and human understanding, and his ability to portray people on their own terms, without putting words into their mouth, or obviously acting out a script.

If a viewer sees a sequence in his films, such as the Kazoo Band, as ‘patronising’ or ‘sneering’, perhaps this reflects more of the attitudes of the viewer, than those of Jennings himself?

‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone Review’.

Next Thursday 12th July, I will be giving a paper at the Centre for Contemporary British History (CCBH) annual summer conference, on Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century.

Here is a copy of my paper. Next week I hope to write about any comments and questions
from those attending the conference.

‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British occupation, as portrayed in
Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone
Review’

At the end of the First World War crowds in the streets in London were calling for the government to ‘Hang the Kaiser’. In more recent times Anglo-German relations are often trivialised as being about football hooliganism, towels on the beach and Fawlty Towers. At the end of the Second World War things were very different, and more serious, as British soldiers and administrators in occupied Germany struggled to cope, as best they could, with the challenge of winning the peace after winning the war; of occupying a country they had just defeated in battle; and of governing a country where the physical infrastructure had been destroyed and the existing political, social and moral frameworks had collapsed.

The British knew only too well that, although the military conflict was over, their job had only just begun. On 4th May 1945, after receiving the unconditional surrender of German forces in North West Germany, Holland and Denmark on Lüneburg Heath, Field Marshall Montgomery issued a personal message to the troops under his command, in which he said: ‘We have won the German war. Let us now win the peace.’ This message was repeated many times in the months which followed.

As there was no German government in existence any more, the British now ruled an area half the size of their own country with direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million people. With the self-confidence engendered by victory, many people expected that the occupation would last 25 years or more. Contemporary sources frequently refer to the scale and importance of  the task: “…an enterprise of great magnitude and difficulty for which there is indeed no precedent in human history” as J B Hynd, the minister responsible for Germany, said in his speech at the opening of the London exhibition ‘Germany under Control’, in June 1946. 

In this paper I intend to show how the attitudes of many British soldiers and administrators in Germany changed in the first year of the occupation, in the transition from war to peace, with particular reference to Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’. I’ll also refer to two other sources, the exhibition ‘Germany under Control,’ and the British Zone Review, the official fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission for Germany and Military Government.

These were all official sources, and were all sponsored by either the Ministry of Information, or the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany, or both. They therefore show, not only a personal view of the film’s director, the exhibition organisers, or the Review’s contributors, but an official British view of Germany after the war, in the first few months of Occupation.

Firstly, I would like to set the scene by describing some contrasting British attitudes to Germany and the German people at the end of the war. Attitudes in Britain are well documented by Mass Observation surveys, Gallup opinion polls and general press comment, and show that opinion hardened during the course of the war, moving from general agreement with Chamberlain’s much quoted speech on 1st September 1939 that: “We have no quarrel with the German people except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government,” to outright hostility and a belief in the collective guilt of an entire nation. This change started as early as the Norwegian campaign in 1940, when the BBC was instructed to abandon making any distinction between Nazis and Germans, grew stronger throughout the war as people reacted to the bombing of civilians and reports of atrocities; and culminated with the newsreel films of the concentration camps shown very widely in Britain in April and May 1945. To quote historian Nicholas Pronay, writing about how a defeated Germany was presented in British newsreels: “Any lingering doubts about the thesis of the collective guilt of a whole nation were … crushed at the end of April by the footage from the concentration camps.” From now on, according to Pronay, even when German people after the war were shown as suffering and in distress, this was always presented in the context of a collectively guilty people getting their just deserts.

Similar attitudes were shown in a US training film, ‘Your Job in Germany’, originally made in 1944 by the noted director, Frank Capra, and first released in April 1945. The film was designed to be shown to troops immediately following footage from the concentration camps. The message of the film to the US soldier entering German territory for the first time was to be suspicious: “You’ll see some mighty pretty scenery. Don’t let it fool you. You are in enemy country. Be alert, suspicious of everyone. Take no chances. You are up against more than tourist scenery. You are up against German history. It isn’t good.” Somewhere in this Germany there were still SS guards, Gestapo guards, thousands of storm troopers, two million Nazi officials, and most dangerous of all, German youth. To pictures of apparently friendly, smiling people, the commentator says: “You are not being sent into Germany as educators … Every German is a potential source of trouble. Therefore there must be no fraternisation with any of the German people. Fraternisation means making friends. The German people are not our friends. You will not associate with German men, women or children. They’re not sorry they caused the war, just sorry they lost it.”

In contrast with these public and official attitudes in Britain and also in the US, as British soldiers and administrators in Germany came face to face with individual German people, and saw the scale of the destruction in the cities, far worse than anything they had experienced at home, they grappled with two contrasting emotions – should they leave the Germans to ‘stew in their own juice’ even if that meant that possibly millions would die of starvation, or should they feel pity for the suffering of the former enemy, and do what they could to alleviate it.

This was no academic discussion. Before he left London, General Templer, director of Civil Affairs for the British 21st Army Group, was told by PJ Grigg, Secretary of State for War, that: “You must resign yourself to the fact that two million are going to die of hunger in Europe this spring. You and the Army must do all you can to mitigate it, but you won’t be able to cure it.”

Field Marshal Montgomery, the British commander-in-chief was equally aware of his responsibilities. He tells in his memoirs how, following the unconditional surrender on 4th May 1945: “I had suddenly become responsible for the government and well-being of about twenty million Germans. Tremendous problems would be required to be handled and if they were not solved before the winter began, many Germans would die of starvation, exposure and disease.”

In the event, in the British Zone, despite widespread hunger and appalling living conditions, relatively few people did die of starvation and disease as, almost overnight, the British army and Military Government, transferred their attentions from destruction to re-construction, with equal energy and determination. In the former German Eastern territories, of course, it was a different story. The number of people who died as a result of the expulsion of around 12 million ethnic Germans from the East is a highly contentious topic, but was certainly substantial. Estimates vary from around 500,000 to nearly 3 million.

In the words of Noel Annan, political adviser to the British Military government, “Templer’s energy transformed the British zone.” The British Official History of the war tells the same story, of how Templer, “more than any other man saved the zone from famine and anarchy through the desperate winter of 1945-6.” Equally remarkable, the author of the official history concludes his work with a personal impression
. Although many of the regular officers he spoke to at first disliked a posting to Civil Affairs, many from Templer downwards: “made it very clear to the writer that by the time their connection with military government was to be severed, they had come to feel it was the most rewarding work they had ever undertaken.” One officer even said it was “the only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.”

‘A Defeated People’

I’d now like to return to the film, ‘A Defeated People’ and examine in more detail what it can tell us about the complex and varied, often confused and contradictory nature of British policy and attitudes to Germany in the first year of the occupation; bearing in mind that this was an official film, designed to show people at home what life was really like in Germany.

The film was made shortly after the end of the war, in the Autumn and Winter of 1945, by the Crown Film Unit, part of the Ministry of Information. The film’s director, Humphrey Jennings was probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. Angus Calder, for example, in ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ refers to him as “Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films.” His wartime films include well known classics such as London can Take It, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, the last of which has been described by the film historian Jeffrey Richards as “one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz. Those heroic figures silhouetted against the blazing inferno sweeping the dockside warehouse etched themselves into history, embodying the epic of the ordinary men and women who calmly and courageously took up the defence of their city.” 

His films were remarkably popular, at a time when film was still a mass medium, and the British documentary film movement was at its peak. In 1946, at the height of its popularity, a third of the population visited the cinema at least once a week. In addition to cinema showings, the Ministry of Information arranged so called non-theatrical film shows in factories, village halls and clubs, reaching an audience of twenty million people over a two and a half year period. In the heightened emotional atmosphere of wartime, these non-theatrical audiences sometimes wept, or broke out into spontaneous applause, when they saw Jennings’ films. Helen Forman, who was second in charge of the non-theatrical distribution section of the Films division of the Ministry of Information, wrote that: “One of the … films … which was liked and applauded was Humphrey Jennings’ magical Listen to Britain. All sorts of audiences felt it to be a distillation and also a magnification of their own experience of the home front.”

It is therefore intriguing to ask what did this Englishmen, who created the mythic image of the London Blitz, and whose audiences felt his films were a distillation and magnification of their own experiences, make of Germany after the war.

The picture his film ‘A Defeated People’ shows of Germany after the war is grim. It shows not only the physical destruction at the end of the war, but its effect on the people, who were shown as stunned, dazed, as if they didn’t know what had hit them. In the words of the commentary: “Place and time meant nothing, because the people; the links between the people, were smashed too. They were just left wandering, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other.”

Nicholas Pronay, the historian of British newsreels, has argued that the left-wing idealist documentary film makers in general, and  Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People,’ in particular, presented the same image of Germany after the war, that of a guilty people getting its just deserts, as the right wing commercial newsreels and this reflected a basic consensus in Britain about Germany. 

The thesis of my paper today is that Pronay may have been right about the newsreels but was wrong about Humphrey Jennings and his film ‘A Defeated People.’ While the script of the film tells one story, the images show a different and more complex picture. On the one hand, the voice-over commentary, accompanied by pictures of destroyed cities, factories and bridges, has no hesitation in blaming the Germans for “the war they started.” But the images also show German people as individuals, not as a collectively guilty nation; men and women looking for lost relatives, children playing in the rubble on the bomb sites, people living underground in cellars because that’s all that remains of their houses, old women sawing up logs to take home for fuel because they have no coal.

Not only, I would argue, has Pronay misunderstood the film, but he has also underplayed several important and contrasting aspects of the British view of Germany and the German people after the war, which are clearly evident in the film: firstly, awe at the scale of destruction they saw all around them, secondly, the energy and determination with which the British Military Government tackled the process of reconstruction; thirdly, their perceived need to explain to people back home that that they were doing this out of self-interest, not altruism, to prevent disease and prevent a resurgence of fascism which could lead to another war; fourthly, the unquestioned belief of the British in their own superiority and moral self-righteousness; and fifthly, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film, sympathy with the undoubted suffering of the former enemy, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future.

What evidence is there to support this case? Of course we can watch the film, but as with all visual materials, we have to do this critically and question its value as historical evidence, because, especially when referring to images rather than the script, we are dealing with a work of art and different people will respond to it in different ways. When we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experience and beliefs, and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time it was made.

Fortunately there is other evidence available. Firstly when the film was first shown in London in March 1946, it was extensively reviewed by the Press, which helps us understand how it was perceived when it was first released. Secondly, while filming in Germany in September and October 1945,  Jennings wrote a number of  letters to his wife and these provide an indication of his state of mind, his reactions to what he saw in Germany and the ideas he intended to convey in the film. And thirdly, we can compare how certain themes were treated in the film, with the presentation of similar themes and images in other historical sources, such as the exhibition ‘Germany under Control’ and the ‘British Zone Review’.

What the film reviews said in 1946

The film was first shown to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London on March 17th 1946, after a private press showing earlier in the week. It was reviewed in all the major papers, including The Times, Manchester Guardian, Glasgow Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Express, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Daily Worker, Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Times, Sunday Express and Reynolds News.

The publicity material for the film stated that, as the “first official film record of life in Berlin and Hamburg under the British Control Commission,” it would answer the question everyone was asking: “What is it like inside Germany today?” It would show the scale of the destruction, but also how a curl of smoke emerging from the rubble showed someone, still living in the cellar of a destroyed building, was trying to make a home out o
f chaos. The role of the British Control Commission was stressed in bringing order out of ruin and despair. And in the final sentence, there was a glimmer of hope for the future as, “In the wintry sunlight the children are beginning to laugh and dance again, the horrors of war behind them.”

The reviews in all the papers, regardless of their political persuasion, were universally favourable and followed much the same line as the publicity material. It had been a week in which there was a shortage of good new feature films and the News Chronicle said: “it is left to documentaries again to bring weight and dignity to the week’s screen.” According to the Daily Worker: “the most important film of the week is A DEFEATED PEOPLE” and Reynolds News agreed that this was a “documentary film you must see.”

Some reviewers, such as the Daily Telegraph saw in the film a clear expression of sympathy: “A DEFEATED PEOPLE, made by Humphrey Jennings for the Crown Film Unit, gives a picture of life in the British Zone of Germany all the more impressive for its restraint. The tone is agreeably free from gloating, and it would need a much more vindictive race than ours to see without sympathy women cooking amid the ruins and crowds studying huge boards covered with the names of missing persons.” In summary, the reviewers recognised that the situation in Germany was grim, that conditions were bad and people were suffering. The British, as the occupying power,  had an obligation to do something about this, but there was no single answer and no easy solutions. As Joan Lester said in her review in Reynolds News, the film dealt with “the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat. Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity.”

Humphrey Jennings’ letters to his wife while filming in Germany

Humphrey Jennings’ own reactions to the situation in Germany are revealed in the letters he wrote to his wife in September and October 1945. These show that he was initially confused and uncertain what to make of it. In his first letter, written on September 1st, he says:

“Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead.”

A week later he was still none the wiser:

“I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen, Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …”

Jennings’ mixed, complex and uncertain reactions, were perhaps best expressed in a letter he wrote on 10th September. I would like to quote from this at some length, because it illustrates both his eye for visual detail and his attempts to make sense of what he saw. Many of the sights he describes in this letter, appear as images in the film:

“At lunchtime today we were photographing a [German] family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral. The cathedral now with all the damage round immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below … and then returning to Duesseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meet sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets  … In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and firehose in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live.

“Once no doubt Germany was a beautiful country and still remembers it on summer evenings in the country. For the people themselves they are willing enough or servile enough or friendly enough according to your philosophy of History and the German problem. They certainly don’t behave guilty or beaten. They have their old fatalism to fall back on: ‘Kaput’ says the housewife finding the street water pipe not working … and then looks down the streets and says ‘Kaputt … alles ist kaput.’ Everything … how right – but absolutely no suggestion that it might be their fault – her fault. ‘Why’ asks another woman fetching water ‘why do not you help us?’ ‘You’ being us. At the same time nothing is clearer straight away than that we cannot – must not leave them to stew in their own juice … well anyway it’s a hell of a tangle.”

This is not the uncompromising view, claimed by Pronay, as the consensus in Britain, of a guilty people getting its just deserts. There is no doubt in Jennings’ mind that the Germans were to blame for the war, but he also clearly is looking beyond this to the plight of people as individuals, to the obligations of the British as occupiers, and even to a Germany that once was a beautiful country, and might become so again.

The British Zone Review.

It is interesting to compare how these themes, revealed in the film, were handled in the British Zone Review, the official fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission. Not surprisingly, the same themes which emerge in the film appeared in numerous articles in the early issues of the publication:

As one example, I’d like to quote from an article in the first issue, dated 29th September 1945, which described what the British had already achieved in the small town of Buxtehude, near Hamburg. Using the familiar image of life in Germany as a broken clock, the article tells the story of “what Military Government has done and is doing to restore to the British Zone the essential things of life which were swept away in the collapse of Nazi Germany….”

The article continues:

“When the British 213 Military Detachment took over the Nazi-run town on May 10, Buxtehude was like a clock with its spring unwound. There was no gas, and there was no electricity. The water was impure. The town’s small industries were at a standstill. The flour mills were idle. Road transport had stopped, and no trains ran. Today the Nazi bosses are gone, and the town has a Burgomeister, a social democrat, who was three times imprisoned by them. The public services have been restored. Trains are running, and there is a daily bus for those who have passes to say that their journeys are really necessary… How have these things happened?

‘It has just been part of the drill for dealing with such problems’, a British Army officer … told me. ‘The German people have been obedient and cooperative. We have told them what they must do and they have got on with the job.’”

A long running series on “The Price of War” catalogued the devastation in most of the major cities in the British Zone, followed by the work being done to put things right again. In article after article similar themes appear – awed descriptions of the scale and extent of the damage, usually caused by RAF bombing, followed by descriptions of the work being done by the British to repair it.

Other articles in the Review explained why reconstruction was in their own self interest. Chief of these was the fear of disease and unrest. “Epidemics need no passports” as Montgomery had said in his introductory message in the first issue; the economic and social collapse of Germany would be “as disastrous for Western Europe as a whole as it would be for Germany”.

The British in Germany clearly felt their work of reconstruction was not fully appreciated. The lead article in issue number 6, titled ‘For Those at Home’ spoke in almost biblical terms of the need to ensure that all those at home understood the enormity of the task: “The truth is that mere words and pictures cannot convey to those at home the enormity of the disaster that Germany has reaped. It must be seen and felt. …. Many of us returning from leave have remarked with some bitterness ‘They don’t seem to realise the problems we are up against.’

We must preach the gospel of information by every means …” the article continued “What sort of picture do they have in England of Germany, British Zone? London, at the height of the blitz, was well-nigh a land of plenty compared with life today in Dortmund, Munster, Hannover, Hamburg or Cologne … The mind reels when it attempts to assess the proportions of the problem…”    

But if the need for reconstruction was obvious, if unappreciated by those at home,  the same article went on to say that: “These pitifully inadequate pen-pictures which have many omissions, are not drawn in any attempt to win sympathy for the German … Sympathy for the Germans does not exist for us; our job is to see facts and evaluate them. Having helped to win the war we must strive to win the peace.”

Was it acceptable to feel sorry for the enemy or not? An extensive debate on the issue, under the headline, ‘Feeling sorry for the Germans’, was conducted in the letters pages of the Review, over five issues, from 13th October to 8th December 1945, with correspondents expressing a wide range of views.  I’d like to conclude my talk by quoting from the letter which started the debate from ‘Lucia Lawson, Subaltern, A.T.S.’

“In writing this I am probably bringing a storm of criticism down on my head, but I do not think that I am alone in my views. And I would be interested to know.

Some time ago I went to Berlin, prepared to experience the greatest satisfaction of my life, by seeing the town in ruins and the people with no place to live. I came away feeing sorry for some of the Germans …

You will say that those sweet little children with curly fair hair and blue eyes are all potential killers, but with their spindly legs and lips just turning blue from lack of food it is hardly in human nature to hate them. The old man and woman who I saw digging for tree roots in the ruins of the Tiergarten for food, surely deserve a little pity, or do they? The young girl dressed in a thin summer frock who I found sleeping under the shelter of a pile of rubble in the Kaiser Wilhelm church, is she to be hated too? Hundreds are now dying from starvation and disease. In a couple of months the number may easily be doubled.

Well, it is open to discussion, but think before you write, or get someone who has been to Berlin to tell you what conditions are like. Maybe I am too sensitive and soft hearted, but I still say I am sorry for some of them.”

Conclusion

To sum up, British policy and planning for Germany after the war is often described in terms of four D-words, denazification, decentralisation, demilitarisation and democratisation. To these are sometimes added another four D-words: destruction, disarmament, dismantling and dismemberment. But if this typifies the largely negative official policy of the British, the US, the Soviet Union and later France towards Germany, at the diplomatic level, as discussed and agreed at the numerous three and four power summits held during the war and afterwards at Potsdam, it is incomplete, even misleading, as a description of the policy, attitudes and activities of the British Military Government and personnel directly responsible for the occupation. These were often very different, and were determined, not by the official Four Power policy as agreed at Potsdam, but by their direct experience on the ground.

This paper has aimed to show that the film ‘A Defeated People’ and the ‘British Zone Review’ reveal other aspects of British policy and actions in Germany during the transition from war to peace, which are neglected or underplayed by those historians focussing on the high politics of the period. Firstly the uncertain and complex reaction of the British to the destruction they saw all around them; secondly the surprising energy and determination with which the British in Germany tackled the process of reconstruction; and thirdly despite the many voices both in Britain and Germany, expressing the view that the former enemy were a collectively guilty people receiving their just deserts, there was another strand of opinion, which showed sympathy with the undoubted suffering of  people as individuals, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future. In summary, reconstruction not destruction and reconciliation not revenge.

Questions and Answers

14th January 2007

Last week I posted the text of a talk I gave at on: "The British Occupation of Germany, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People‘", at the annual German Historical Institute postgraduate conference in London. I said I would post some of the questions I was asked at the end of the talk and my answers, so here they are:

Q:  Did the film or Humphrey Jennings refer to the Cold War? (And by implication did anti-Russian sentiments account for a relatively pro-German attitude in the film, compared with other materials produced 6 months earlier in May 1945?)

A:  No. The film looks at the British zone only. There is no reference to Russia, the US, or France, or to life in their zones. Jennings was politically on the left and, as far as I knew, sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In his British wartime film ‘A Diary for Timothy’ made at the end of the war, there is shot of a British school choir singing away in a school hall, with a huge banner behind them with a picture of a hammer and sickle and which reads: "Greetings to the Red Army and the Glorious Fighting Forces of the United Nations."

Q:  Were there any British training films made to show to the military, similar to the US film directed by Frank Capra, ‘Your Job in Germany’ which is much less sympathetic to the defeated enemy than ‘A Defeated People’?

A:  Not to my knowledge. As far as I know, ‘Your Job in Germany’ was shown to many British as well as US troops, at the time they crossed the frontier into Germany, as they were then under joint command. The difference between the two films indicates how much attitudes changed in the 6 months after the end of the war. (I wrote about this in my earlier posting on the film ‘Your Job in Germany‘)

Q:  Did the film refer to any resistance by the Germans to the Allies?

A:  No, rather the reverse. There was no sign of any resistance to the Allies. What shocked Jennings was how the German people appeared stunned and dazed, apathetic and listless at the end of the war. (He wrote about this in his letters to his wife from Germany – see my earlier posting).

Q:  Was there any connection between Humphrey Jennings and Victor Gollancz and the ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign?

A:  Not to my knowledge. After he had completed ‘A Defeated People’ Jennings moved on to other subjects which had nothing to do with Germany. He died in a climbing accident in Greece in 1950.

Q:  Do the themes which appear in the film also appear in the ‘Germany under Control’ exhibition which opened in London in June 1946.

A:  I don’t know.  This something I still need to work on.

Q:  How do you analyse a film to use it as a historical source?

A:  A good question and I didn’t have a good answer. My reply was that my use of the film was illustrative, and to be historically valid it would be substantiated by other sources. (In fact, I think films can act as good historical sources, but they do need to be placed within a good analytical or theoretical framework. I don’t this have at present and probably don’t need it for the MA dissertation. It is something I will need to think more about, when I’ve finished the course).

Q:  I claimed in my talk that studying the British Occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as how they perceived Germany and Germans. What does the film tell us about British society at the time?

A:  The effort which went into the process of reconstruction in Germany, in contrast with more negative actions often given more prominence in historical accounts of the period; how attitudes changed in the transition from war to peace, in the six months after the end of the war; the British view of themselves as morally superior and self-righteous, (which was interpreted by some Germans at the time more negatively as arrogance and hypocrisy); how people came to terms with living with the former enemy. I’m sure there is more I could have said on this…

Overall it was an excellent conference, but I don’t intend to say anything about the other very interesting talks given at the conference and the discussions which followed. It’s not appropriate for me to do this in this blog, which is about my own research, and there is no way I could do them justice.

Germany under British occupation – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People.’

6th January 2007

Next Saturday 13th January, I will be giving a brief talk on my research at a conference for postgraduate students at the German Historical Institute in London.

The talk summarises the work I have been doing in the past year or so, much of which I’ve been writing about in this blog.

So as this is my first posting of the New Year, here is a copy of the talk. Next week I hope to write about any comments and questions from those attending the conference.

The British Occupation of Germany – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’

My area of interest is the British Occupation of Germany after the second world war. In particular, to what extent did the British and Americans succeed in ‘winning the peace’ as well as the war? And how did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

I am currently in the second year of a part-time MA in Contemporary British History and for my dissertation, I am researching how British policy and actions in Germany were presented by the government, to people back home, in the eighteen month period between June 1945 and December 1946. In particular I am looking at how the British Occupation of Germany was portrayed in two specific contemporary sources: Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’ which was filmed in Germany in September and October 1945 and first shown to the public in Britain in March 1946, and an exhibition which opened in London in June 1946, called ‘Germany under Control.’

I have chosen these two sources because they were both sponsored by the British Ministry of Information and both received the full support of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany. They therefore show, not only a personal view of the film’s director, or the exhibition organisers, but an official British view of Germany after the war, in the first few months of Occupation.

When I started looking at the subject, I thought the British Occupation of Germany was a neglected area, and in some ways it is, especially in Britain. But it soon became apparent that a great deal of historical work has been done on this period, especially in the 1980s, most notably, the project sponsored by the German Historical Institute, completed in 1993, to catalogue and create an inventory of the British Control Commission files held at the National Archives in Kew.

In the past ten years, since 1995, less work appears to have been published, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find several other postgraduate students are now working on various aspects of the subject, some of whom are here at this conference, so perhaps it is now due for a revival and maybe also a re-assessment. 

As a student of Contemporary British History, it seems to me that a significant gap in our knowledge lies, not in understanding the period of occupation in terms of international diplomacy, or as part of the history of Germany, but in what it can tell us about British history, society, politics and culture.

For five years, and with reserved powers in some areas for longer, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country and had direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million people.

With very few exceptions, such as the recent article by Matthew Frank in Twentieth Century British History on ‘The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, ‘Save Europe Now’ and the German Refugee Crisis’, this episode in British history is largely ignored in surveys of Britain, except in so far as it contributed to increased global tensions and the cold war, or was an economic burden on the British treasury.

My dissertation aims to show that the British occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as about how they perceived Germany and the Germans.

Progress to date

Up to now, most of my time has been spent researching the film ‘A Defeated People’ and the film’s director, Humphrey Jennings.

Humphrey Jennings was probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. Angus Calder, for example, in "The Myth of the Blitz" refers to him as "Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films." His wartime films include well known classics such as London can Take It, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, the last of which has been described by the film historian Jeffrey Richards as "one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz."

His films were remarkably popular, at a time when film was still a mass media, and the British documentary film movement was at its peak. In addition to cinema showings, the Ministry of Information arranged so called non-theatrical film shows in factories, village halls and clubs, reaching an audience of twenty million people over a two and a half year period. In the heightened emotional atmosphere of wartime, these non-theatrical audiences sometimes wept, or broke out into spontaneous applause, when they saw Jennings’ films. For example, Roger Manvell, who worked for the Ministry of Information as a regional film officer, and later became a well-known film critic and writer, organised over 25,000 showings during the war and included a film by Humphrey Jennings in nearly all of them. He has told how "I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences …(especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’ direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain … going back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel."

It is therefore intriguing to ask what did this Englishmen, who some historians say created the mythic image of the London Blitz, and whose audiences sometimes cried when they saw his films, make of Germany after the war.

The film ‘A Defeated People’ was intended to show an accurate and realistic picture of Germany at the time. As far as we know there was no formal brief, no rules as to what could and could not be filmed and no official censorship. Humphrey Jennings wrote the script as he went along and was expected to tell it like it was, which was the way he worked on all his films, both during and after the war.

The picture it shows of Germany after the war is grim. Many British observers were openly shocked at the scale of destruction they saw when they crossed the frontier into Germany, especially in the cities and above all, in Berlin. This was far worse than anything they had seen at home, even in Coventry, Bristol or London during the blitz. As British soldiers were told in the 64 page pocketbook given to them before they crossed the frontier into Germany, (recently republished by the National Archives), more tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one German city, Duisburg, in just two days on 14th and 15th October 1944, than were dropped on London in the eleven months from September 1940 to July 1941.

The film shows not only the physical destruction, of the cities, the railways and factories, but its effect on the people, who were shown as stunned, dazed, as if they didn’t know what had hit them. In the words of the commentary: "Place and time meant nothing, because the people; the links between the people, were smashed too. They were just left wandering, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other."

Most historians and other commentators have largely ignored Humphrey Jennings’ post war films, preferring to discuss his films about Britain during the war, rather than the one about Germany after the war. One well-known British historian however, Nicholas Pronay, refers to the film in the context of writing about how a defeated Germany was presented in British newsreels at the end of the war. The initial attitude of the newsreels was, to quote Pronay, "The Germans were a guilty people with an inborn compulsion to war." This reflected long held views in Britain, going back to stereotypes presented during the first world war. Then, as Pronay says: "Any lingering doubts about the thesis of the collective guilt of a whole nation were … crushed at the end of April by the footage from the concentration camps" which was shown very widely, both in Britain and in Germany. This meant that whenever German people were shown in the newsreels as suffering and in distress, this was always presented in the collective context of Germany as a guilty nation, receiving its just deserts.

Pronay goes on to argue that the left-wing idealist documentary film makers, and  Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People,’ in particular, presented the same hard-line image of Germany after the war as the right wing commercial newsreels, and this reflected a basic consensus in Britain about Germany.

In my dissertation I argue that Pronay may have been right about the newsreels, but was wrong about ‘A Defeated People’. Far from presenting the same picture as the newsreels, the film shows that attitudes in Britain to the former enemy were varied and complex and changed with the transition from war to peace, as the British occupying forces found they had to deal with people as individuals, rather than collectively as the enemy. While the script tells one story, the images show a different and more complex picture. On the one hand, the film shows a grim picture of destruction, with a voice-over commentary that has no hesitation in blaming the Germans for "the war they started." But the images also show German people as individuals, not as a collectively guilty nation; men and women looking for lost relatives, children playing in the rubble on the bomb sites, people living underground in cellars because that’s all that remains of their houses, old women sawing up logs to take home for fuel because they have no coal.

Not only, I would argue, has Pronay misunderstood the film, but he has also underplayed several important and contrasting aspects of the British view of Germany and the German people in the first year after the war, which are clearly evident in the film. Firstly the energy and determination with which the British Military Government tackled the process of reconstruction, their desire to get on with the job and get the place working again. Secondly, their perceived need to explain to people back home that that they were doing this out of self-interest, not altruism, to prevent disease and prevent a resurgence of fascism which could lead to another war. Thirdly, the unquestioned belief of the British in their own superiority and moral self-righteousness. And fourthly, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film, sympathy with the undoubted suffering of the former enemy, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future.

What evidence is there to support this case? Of course we can watch the film. I am one of those who believes that sources speak for themselves, without requiring too much interpretation by the historian, which sometimes serves to confuse as much as it illuminates. But we have to question the film’s value as historical evidence, because, especially when referring to images rather than the script, we are dealing with a work of art and different people will respond to it in different ways. When we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experience and beliefs, and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time it was made.

Fortunately there is other evidence available. Firstly when the film was first shown in London in March 1946, it was extensively reviewed by the Press, which helps us understand how it was perceived when it was first released. Secondly, while filming in Germany in September and October 1945,  Jennings wrote a number of  letters to his wife and these provide an indication of his state of mind, his reactions to what he saw in Germany and the ideas he intended to convey in the film. And thirdly, we can compare how certain themes were treated in the film, with the presentation of similar themes and images in other historical sources.

What the film reviews said in 1946

The film was first shown to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London on March 17th 1946, after a private press showing earlier in the week. The publicity material stated that, as the "first official film record of life in Berlin and Hamburg under the British Control Commission," it would answer the question everyone was asking: "What is it like inside Germany today?" It would show the scale of the destruction, but also how a curl of smoke emerging from the rubble showed someone, still living in the cellar of a destroyed building, trying to make a home out of chaos. The role of the British Control Commission was stressed in bringing order out of ruin and despair. And in the final sentence, there was a glimmer of hope for the future as, "In the wintry sunlight the children are beginning to laugh and dance again, the horrors of war behind them."

The film was reviewed in all the major British papers, and all, regardless of their political persuasion, followed much the same line as the publicity material. In summary, the reviewers recognised that the situation in Germany was grim, that conditions were bad and people were suffering. The British, as the occupying power, had an obligation to do something about this, but there was no single answer and no easy solutions. As Joan Lester said in her review in Reynolds News, the film dealt with "the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat. Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity."

Humphrey Jennings’ letters to his wife while filming in Germany

Humphrey Jennings’ own reactions to the situation in Germany are revealed in the letters he wrote to his wife in September and October 1945. These show that he was initially confused and uncertain what to make of it. In his first letter, written on September 1st 1945, he says:

"Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead." A week later he was still none the wiser: "I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen, Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …"

In general, the letters are very far from the uncompromising view, claimed by Pronay, as a consensus in Britain at the end of the war, of a guilty people getting its just deserts. There is no doubt in Jennings’ mind that the Germans were to blame for the war, but he is also clearly looking beyond this to the plight of people as individuals, to the obligations of the British as occupiers, and even to a Germany that once was a beautiful country, and might become so again.

The theme of the broken clock

I have found it interesting to compare how themes were handled in the film, with the treatment of similar themes in articles, features and letters in other official sources: in particular the British Zone Review, which was a fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission.

To take one example: the theme of the broken clock. Near the start of the film, the commentator says, to a picture of broken clock on a ruined railway station: "And at the finish, life in Germany just ran down like a clock."

The same theme appears in the first issue of the British Zone Review, published on 29th September 1945, the same time as Jennings was filming in Germany, in a feature on page four with the headline "Winding up the Clock" about what the British were doing in Buxtehude, a small town near Hamburg.

The image, of course, is similar to that of ‘Stunde Null’ – Year Zero. Life had stopped, like a broken clock, and the job the British believed they had to do was to wind it up and get things going again. Many German people have written about their memories of the time, but very few British. So to conclude my talk I would like to quote this official British view of ‘Stunde Null’ in a small town in Germany. Like the film, it reveals the same strange mixture of sympathy and self-interest, of reconstruction and self-righteousness:

"This is the story of Buxtehude. It is not a sensational story because Buxtehude is one of those quiet little country towns where – even in Germany – sensations seldom happen. But it is the story of what Military Government has done and is doing to restore to the British Zone the essential things of life which were swept away in the collapse of Nazi Germany…. When the British 213 Military Detachment took over the Nazi-run town on May 10, Buxtehude was like a clock with its spring unwound. There was no gas, and there was no electricity. The water was impure. The town’s small industries were at a standstill. The flour mills were idle. Road transport had stopped, and no trains ran. Today the Nazi bosses are gone, and the town has a Burgomeister, a social democrat, who was three times imprisoned by them. The public services have been restored. Trains are running, and there is a daily bus for those who have passes to say that their journeys are really necessary… How have these things happened?

‘It has just been part of the drill for dealing with such problems’, a British Army officer of the Military Government Detachment told me. ‘The German people have been obedient and cooperative. We have told them what they must do and they have got on with the job.’"

Finally, and as a way of summarising the aims of the dissertation, I would like to quote Peter Wende, the former director of the German Historical Institute here in London, who said in the introduction to a symposium held in May 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the Unconditional Surrender of German armed forces in Europe: "May 1945 marked the transition from decades of conflict to an era of peace and cooperation. Focusing on this decisive historical event from different angles may provide a starting point for discussion of its wider implications."

Christopher Knowles
January 2007

Another view of Humphrey Jennnings’ film ‘A Defeated People’

11th November 2006

Last week I read Kevin Jackson’s biography of Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004). His view of the film ‘A Defeated People’ is quite different from mine. Jackson speaks of a "prevailing grimness of the piece," whereas I saw a very different picture; a humane film that showed people as individuals, that showed pity for their suffering and hope for the future (see my earlier postings).

Jackson refers to a meeting between Jennings and the poet Stephen Spender: "They argued about the Germans, Jennings taking the harsher and more vengeful line on German culpability." He then goes on to say that: "The more [Jennings] saw of the defeated enemy, the less respect he felt…It is at times shocking to see how his new-found scorn for the Germans curdled into disgust."

He also quotes from a letter Jennings wrote to his wife Cicely towards the end of his stay in Germany and refers to the language as a "vocabulary of ethnic hate…There is nothing else in Jennings’ writings even remotely like this; and the film that resulted from his trip through the ruins was a good deal more balanced in tone."

Here is the passage from the letter:

"Have I think been getting nearer the problem of the German character and nation – and a grey dust-swept character it is: seeing, watching, working with the Germans en masse – terrified, rabbit-eyed, over-willing, too friendly, without an inch of what we call character among a thousand. Purely biological problem – almost every attribute that we strive to make grow, cultivate, has been bred or burnt out of them, exiled, thrown into gas-chambers, frightened, until you have a nation of near zombies with all the parts of human beings but really no soul – no oneness of personality to hold the parts together and shine out of the eyes, The eyes indeed are the worst the most telltale part – no shine, often no focus – the mouth drawn down with overwork and over-determination – to do what? Terrified of the Russians – cringing to us. Certainly there is a difference between the SS or the Nazi party in the sense that these are the dupes of those. Yes they can laugh and cry and do almost every thing that so called normal humans can and do – yet there is something missing – helpless now, untrustful of any thing most of all themselves – precisely not ‘The Triumph of the Will.’"

It seems to me that Jackson, writing with the benefit of hindsight, does not fully appreciate just how common it was in Britain at the time to speak about individual people in terms of their supposedly collective ‘national character’ and how much prejudice there was against all foreigners; Germans and others. Official and public attitudes in Britain towards race and ethnicity have changed dramatically in the past 60 years.

Jennings’ letters to his wife Cicely, published in Kevin Jackson’s earlier book ‘The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader’ give a more balanced picture. They show how confused he was, unable to make up his mind on what he saw in Germany. As he said in his first letter written on 1st September 1945: "Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought…" And in his second letter a week later: "I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany… for the moment the contradictions are too great."

Towards the end of his stay, his letters do change in tone and show signs of the prejudice, arrogance and self-righteousness that is so evident in British policy and actions in Germany after the war. (See my earlier posting on ‘Humphrey Jennings’ letters home from Germany’).

But what is most remarkable about the film ‘A Defeated People’ is not what it shows us about conventional British views and attitudes at the time: such as self-righteousness and arrogance and distrust of German people after the war. The film does contain these elements, but it also shows understanding and pity for the suffering of others, whoever they are, and hope and concern for the future.

In the same way that Jennings’ earlier film ‘A Diary for Timothy’, made in Britain at the end of the war, instead of dwelling on victory, looks to the future and what will happen when the war is over, ‘A Defeated People’ also looks to the future and not to the past. It shows people as individuals, not collectively as the enemy. It shows people suffering. The commentary shows no hesitation in blaming them for "the war they started" but this does not mean the British can leave them, in Jennings’ words, to "stew in their own juice." The film doesn’t provide the answers, but it does show people surviving in terrible circumstances, and the "Life Force" stirring again.

In summary, ‘A Defeated People’ is not, as Kevin Jackson sees it, a grim piece about destruction and the aftermath of war. It’s about people surviving despite the destruction and chaos all around them, about hope for the future and Winning the Peace.

‘Your Job in Germany’ a training film for US troops in 1945

4th November 2006

Two weeks ago I went to the Imperial War Museum to view five films from their archive.

I wrote about four of the films in my earlier post on Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary films.

The fifth film was quite different. It was a 14 minute US film, directed by Frank Capra, originally produced in 1944, rewritten after the Battle of the Bulge, and released in April 1945.

It was shown to all US troops entering German territory for the first time, during the closing stages of the war. I believe it was also shown to many British and other allied troops on the Western front.

It is interesting to contrast this film with Humphrey Jennings’ ‘A Defeated People,’ to show just how much attitudes changed in the six months between April 1945 and September and October the same year, when Jennings was filming in Germany.

‘Your Job in Germany’ conveys an uncompromisingly hard line attitude. The title screen at the start of the film says:

"You have just seen some of the atrocities committed by the Germans. The motion picture you are about to see is a training film prepared by the War Department for the US Army of occupation in Germany, so that they will be fully instructed and advised concerning their all-important mission."

There was no attempt to show German people as individuals. Instead the German nation, as a whole, was portrayed as collectively responsible and guilty for causing wars in 1870, 1914 and again in 1939.

The job of the American soldier was to stay aloof, be suspicious, and stay alert.

That a film such as this should be shown to US and allied troops at the end of the war is not surprising. What is surprising is the transformation that occurred in the first six months of the occupation, after the British and Americans had personal experience of conditions in Germany, and had met German men, women and children face to face.

The contrast with "Your Job in Germany" makes Humphrey Jennings’ film "A Defeated People" appear all the more remarkable.

Here are some extracts from the commentary to "Your Job in Germany."

"The problem now is future peace. That is your job in Germany"

"You’ll see some mighty pretty scenery. Don’t let it fool you. You are in enemy country. Be alert, suspicious of everyone. Take no chances. You are up against more than tourist scenery. You are up against Germany history. It isn’t good."

In a sequence referring to events after World War One, when the British and Americans occupied part of Germany for a time, and then withdrew their troops:

(Ironically) "Nice country Germany, tender people the Germans." (Ironically again) "When it comes to culture, they lead the whole world… We poured in our sympathy, we pulled out our armies…millions of people had let down their guard…"

And then referring to the situation, now, after World War Two:

"We almost lost this battle. It took everything we had … It took every once of our courage and guts. It can happen again. That is why you occupy Germany. To make that next war impossible."

"The German lust for conquest is not dead. It’s merely gone under cover."

"Somewhere in this Germany are the SS guards…the Gestapo guards. Out of uniform you won’t know them. But they’ll know you."

"Somewhere in this Germany are storm troopers, by the thousands, out of sight, part of the mob, but still watching you, hating you."

"Somewhere in this Germany there are 2 million ex Nazi officials. Out of power, but still in there, think, thinking about next time."

"Every business, every profession was part of Hitler’s system … Practically every German was part of the Nazi network."

"Guard particularly against this group. These are the most dangerous. German youth.
Trained to win by cheating. Trained to pick on the weak."

"Practically everything you believe in, they have been trained to hate and destroy. They believe they were born to be masters. That we are inferior, designed to be their slaves. They may deny it now, but they believe it."

"You are not being sent into Germany as educators. Every German is a potential source of trouble. Therefore there must be no fraternisation with any of the German people."

"Fraternisation means making friends. The German people are not our friends. You will not associate with German men, women or children."

"Don’t clasp that hand, it’s not the kind of hand you can clasp in friendship."

In practice there was no resistance to the British and US forces, and soldiers very soon did make friends with the people.

Field Marshal Montgomery, the British Commander in Chief, told in his memoirs how the non-fraternisation orders were soon relaxed:

"Such an order would simply not be obeyed. We must be sensible about it. Furthermore, if we were ever to re-educate the German population it would be a good thing to mix freely with them and teach them our standards of freedom and individual responsibility."

Already on 12th June 1945 the orders were relaxed, as Montgomery said: "to the extent that soldiers might speak to, and play with, children. They were of course, doing it anyway."

In July the rules were further relaxed, permitting conversations in the street, but not allowing soldiers to enter German homes. Then in September the ban was lifted completely. Montgomery said in his memoirs:

"We were then left with only two rules – no members of the armed forces were to be billeted with Germans, not were they allowed to marry them."

"It was a great relief to get this matter settled. I had never liked the orders which we had to issue; but it was Allied policy."

Humphrey Jennings’ letters home from Germany

Extracts from four letters Humphrey Jennings wrote to his wife while filming ‘A Defeated People’ have been published in Kevin Jackson’s book ‘The Humphrey Jennings Film Reader‘ (Carcanet, 1993).

I have already quoted one long extract from the letters in my first posting on Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’.

The letters show that Jennings was initially confused and uncertain what to make of post-war Germany. In his first letter, written on September 1st 1945, he says:

"Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead … There is of course too much to photograph – ugly and beautiful – life and death – one can only choose bits and hope they are the right ones. I have never had to record a people or a country before. Of course really it’s impossible – specially as so many things really don’t seem to make sense: one can only go on looking at them until they do."

A week later he was still none the wiser:

"I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …"

One specific example can perhaps give a more detailed illustration of the contradictions he may have been thinking of. Later in the same letter he says:

"Then again there is here the Dusseldorf Symphony Orchestra run by the Oberburgomeister which shows that not only Beethoven survives Fascism and War and Famine and all (which we knew) but also the capacity and the wish to play Beethoven … or perhaps the two are unconnected since the playing was encouraged by the Nazis or what? difficult points … at any rate we are encouraging it and at the same time quite rightly arresting the ex-Nazi orchestral players however good as players."

This echoes scenes in his earlier British wartime documentary films, (described in my posting last week), where British people are shown playing music by German composers.

In ‘The Heart of Britain’, to pictures of the Halle Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, the commentator says: "But in Manchester today they still respect the genius of Germany; the genius of Germany that was." To the sounds of the music, the film moves on from showing the orchestra playing, to scenes of bomb damage and ruined buildings in Coventry. The message is ambiguous: either, there are two Germanys, the good and the bad, or alternatively, how could people who created such beautiful music create such destruction?

In ‘A Diary for Timothy’ the same theme reoccurs but with a different emphasis. In a sequence of Myra Hess playing Beethoven’s Appassionata piano sonata, at one of her National Gallery lunchtime concerts, the commentator says (speaking to baby Timothy): "Did you like the music that lady was playing. Some of us think it’s the greatest music in the world. Yet it’s German music. And we’re fighting the Germans. That’s something you’ll have to think about later on."

Although the film ‘A Defeated People’ makes no reference to the concentration camps, the issue was clearly in his mind. On 1st September he wrote:

"I have working with me besides our boys, an Army Film Unit Lieutenant who was at Belsen and did most of the films shot there: exceptionally nice chap."

And a week later:

"We have by the way with us one Lt Martin Wilson – Army Film Unit and ex-documentary film maker who was the first photographer in Belsen concentration camp and took most of the famous film pictures there and who has been all through the last German campaign and a great deal of the desert and Italian fighting. He is our ‘conducting officer’ and is really terrific. For this job the ideal assistant director."

So not only was Humphrey Jennings, the director of the film ‘A Defeated People’, the man who more than anyone else was responsible for creating the heroic images of Britain in wartime and the mythic image of the London Blitz, but its assistant director, who assisted with filming in Germany, was the first British photographer in Belsen.

This makes is all the more remarkable that the image portrayed in the film ‘A Defeated People’ is (as I wrote in an earlier posting) one that shows ordinary German people as individuals, that shows pity for their suffering and hope for the future.

But these letters also show that Jennings was not immune from the arrogance and self-righteousness that is so evident in British policy and actions in Germany after the war – despite a genuine desire by many, perhaps most, of the Military Government and occupation officials to do all they could to help rebuild a shattered country.

Jennings writes happily about how good the food is – for the British – and how listless and apathetic the Germans appear, (a condition due in large part to the near starvation diet they were living on at the time).

On 30th September, writing from Hamburg, he refers to the waiters in the hotel he was staying at:

"the German waiters – ‘the dwarfs’ as we call them – scurrying like Black Beetles – listening apparently for the crack of the whip – pathetic and beastly…"

In his final letter towards the end of his stay he comes back to the same theme – clearly it was common practice among the British occupying forces to refer to the German waiters who served the officers in the mess as ‘dwarfs’, in Dusseldorf as well as in Hamburg:

"We are back in the mess (Park Hotel) where we were on our first visit to the Ruhr a month ago – extraordinarily comfortable – with excellent drinks and food and hot water and countless little German waiters (‘Dusseldwarfs’) longing to be ordered about – I must say after two or three hours on straight roads towards Aachen in an open Jeep one needs all of them. Military Government has quite rightly taken over the best of everything and keeps up – particularly I think here – a very polished turnout and manner – simultaneously strong and ‘correct’ – the only trouble seems to be that the Germans are really incapable of doing anything for themselves – so long as someone is there to give them orders well and good. Only our job is to make them capable of behaving sensibly without instructions from us – at least otherwise we shall be here indefinitely…"

Fortunately the film itself has no pictures of German waiters in the British officers’ mess portrayed as ‘dwarfs’ (with all the associated racial overtones more reminiscent of the Nazis than the British), but conveys a much more humane image of ‘A Defeated People’.

If your college of library subscribes to Screenonline you can see the film for yourself, and make up your own mind.

Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentaries

21 October 2006

Last Wednesday I went to the Imperial War Museum to view five films from their archive.

The first four were short wartime documentaries directed by Humphrey Jennings: ‘London Can Take It,’ ‘Heart of Britain,’ ‘Listen to Britain’ and ‘A Diary for Timothy.’

‘London Can Take It’ was made in 1940, during the blitz. It was intended for release in the US, to persuade Americans that the British could take everything that was thrown at them and deserved US support.

‘The Heart of Britain’ made a year later, showed what were considered to be quintessentially English scenes, including cathedrals, countryside, textile workers in Lancashire and bombed buildings in Coventry. The commentary includes some memorable phrases such as:

"… and the simplest, most difficult task of all – just staying put"

"… people who sing like that in times like these cannot be beaten" (to scenes of the Huddersfield chorus singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah).

"… and the Nazis will learn, once and for all, that no-one with impunity troubles the heart of Britain."

‘Listen to Britain,’ made in 1942, consists of a dense sequence of sights and sounds, with no commentary at all, apart from a 2-3 minute spoken introduction, added to the film later, against the wishes of the directors. 

The absence of any commentary in this film may have been influenced by research undertaken by Mass Observation.

Tom Harrisson, one of the three founders of Mass Observation, (together with Humphrey Jennings and Tom Madge) has described work done in the war on the effect Ministry of Information films, such as these, had on morale. (‘Films and the Home Front – the evaluation of their effectiveness by Mass Observation’, in  Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918-1945, Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring, eds. Macmillan Press Ltd. 1982.)

"So already before the war and partly because of Humphrey Jennings, who to my mind was one of the real – I do not think it is too strong a word to use – intellectual geniuses of our time, we started a lot of film observation, working out techniques for observing people’s responses and behaviour in cinemas."

Harrisson describes how film viewers were uncomfortable with overt propaganda and switched off when they detected it in films. People were more interested in the pictures, and disliked too much commentary.

The fourth Jennings film I saw on Wednesday, was ‘A Diary for Timothy‘ released in 1945. It was made in the closing months of the war, when, despite setbacks at Arnhem and the Ardennes, victory was certain and mines and barbed wire were being cleared from the beaches, as everyone knew the threat of invasion was over.

This film looks to the future, following the early life of a baby, Timothy Jenkins, born in September 1944, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war. It asks the question: What will happen when the war is over – will it be followed by unemployment and economic depression, as after the First World War, or will the world become a different place, for an injured miner, a farmer, an engine driver, and a shot-down and wounded fighter pilot, as well as for baby Timothy?

I found all four films deeply moving, even sixty years on, after they were made.

With my own interest in how the British approached the occupation of Germany after the war, using Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’ as evidence of this, (see earlier postings), I was especially struck by three sequences in his earlier wartime films:

Firstly in ‘The Heart of Britain’ the commentator says, to scenes of the Halle Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Fifth symphony: "But in Manchester today they still respect the genius of Germany; the genius of Germany that was." To the sounds of the music, the film moves on from pictures of the orchestra playing to scenes of bomb damage and ruined buildings in Coventry. The message is ambiguous: either, there are two Germanys, the good and the bad, or alternatively, how could people who created such beautiful music create such destruction?

Secondly, in ‘A Diary for Timothy’ the same theme is repeated. In a sequence of Myra Hess playing Beethoven’s Appassionata piano sonata, at one of her National Gallery lunchtime concerts, the commentator says (speaking to baby Timothy): "Did you like the music that lady was playing. Some of us think it’s the greatest music in the world. Yet it’s German music. And we’re fighting the Germans. That’s something you’ll have to think about later on."

And thirdly, in ‘Listen to Britain’ there was a sequence of children in a school playground, playing games and walking round in a circle. This reminded me of a similar passage at the end of ‘A Defeated People’ which shows a group of German children holding hands, walking round in a circle.

By now, the message portrayed in ‘A Defeated People’ seems to be that children in Britain and children in Germany are really much the same, even after the most violent and bitter war in history.

The fifth film I viewed at the Imperial War Museum was quite different. ‘Your Job in Germany’ was a training film prepared by the US War Department, shown to all soldiers in the US army of occupation. I’ll talk about it in a later posting.

Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary films can be viewed, by appointment, at the Imperial War Museum. Copies are also held and can be viewed at the British Film Institute Library (subject to a viewing charge). Three of the films are available commercially (eg from MovieMail) on VHS video cassette, Listening to Britain, A Jennings Trilogy and a collection of four films on DVD: The Humphrey  Jennings Collection.

A Defeated People – what the film reviews said in 1946

14th October 2006

I spent last Wednesday at the British Film Institute library, looking for contemporary reviews of the film "A Defeated People," produced by the Crown Film Unit, part of the British Ministry of Information, and directed by Humphrey Jennings, probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. It was released to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London, on March 17th, 1946. (See my earlier post on Humphrey Jennings’s film: A Defeated People).

At first I was disappointed, for all I could find was a brief reference in the BFI’s ‘Monthly Film Bulletin’ for March 1946.

I then asked the librarian at the desk if they had any other journals with film reviews for 1946, and was amazed when she gave me a microfiche of the Ministry of Information’s press cuttings file for the film. In all, there were copies of 14 reviews published when the film was first released, from most of the major Daily and Sunday newspapers, including The Times, Manchester Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Express, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Daily Worker, Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Times, Sunday Express and Reynolds News.

Most of the reviewers were agreed that, in a week in which there was a shortage of good new feature films: "it is left to documentaries again to bring weight and dignity to the week’s screen" (News Chronicle) and the "most important film of the week is A DEFEATED PEOPLE" (Daily Worker).

The headline for the Reynolds News weekly film review column, by Joan Lester, was "A Documentary Film You Must See", and the News Chronicle said "It is a film we have all been waiting to see."

Here are some more extracts from the reviews:

"A DEFEATED PEOPLE, made by Humphrey Jennings for the Crown Film Unit, gives a picture of life in the British Zone of Germany all the more impressive for its restraint. The tone is agreeably free from gloating, and it would need a much more vindictive race than ours to see without sympathy women cooking amid the ruins and crowds studying huge boards covered with the names of missing persons." (Daily Telegraph)

"A Defeated People" (Tivoli, Sunday): an honest attempt by the Crown Film Unit to report to the British cinegoer just exactly what is going on in Germany today. If the report had been three times grimmer it would be about accurate." (Daily Express)

"This is camera-journalism on a brilliant level. The queues – the search for missing relatives – the life in the cellars of Berlin – the rest of the film you and I might see or imagine for ourselves: but it takes an observer with a touch of real inspiration to catch so memorably the spirit of cunning arrogance there even in defeat." (Daily Mail)

"Most important film of the week is A DEFEATED PEOPLE (Tivoli, Sunday), a Crown Film Unit excursion to British-occupied Germany. It is a fine piece of screen-craft directed by Humphrey Jennings. But how the subject screams for a wider, deeper approach." (Daily Worker)

"Two documentary films on modern Germany are the week’s best pictures, although both have been cut down to the bone. "A Defeated People" at the Tivoli to-day, is a fine example of British production in spite of having to prove its worth in 18 minutes." (Glasgow Herald)

"This film will stay in your mind and that is high praise of any film. Though it reeks of desolation and defeat it is infused with purpose. You will never obtain from any written or spoken narrative such an effect of empty misery and crushed aggressiveness, of a country so lost it is ripe for anything." (News Chronicle)

"Humphrey Jennings, Crown Film Unit director, has produced some gems in the short documentary field. A DEFEATED PEOPLE (Tivoli) must have been one of the most difficult films he has had to tackle. This deals with the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat." (Reynolds News).

"Many people wonder what it is actually like inside Germany today. This picture will show them a grim panorama of destruction and ruin, of shattered industries, of tattered people living in cellars and searching for lost relatives crowding limited transport and working amid incredible conditions." (Star)

"Once again the Crown Film Unit do an inspired job of reporting, this time about Germany today." (Sunday Dispatch)

"This sets out to show the workings of the government of the British Zone. If it has hardly the scope to do that fully, it does show with the inescapable persuasion of visual impact the nature and complexities of the task facing the administrators. And it shows the spirit in which these are being tackled – painstaking, just, practical, determined." (Sunday Express)

"Humphrey Jennings’s "A Defeated People," skilled though its mosaic of German problems – transport, health, food, housing, fuel and the dreadful search of a million families for their scattered members – remains oddly tantalising. The attempt to cover in half-an-hour the whole task of the Military Government in the British zone is hopeless." (Sunday Times)

"As a whole it is sensitively planned and much of it is memorable. Yet the very fact that it is impossible to fit such a vast subject into an over-short picture makes a ‘line’ a necessity, and we are given an elegiac insistence on personal reaction and personal bewilderment which may have been the only solution to the problem of compression, but which makes the entire thing seem a little fragile." (Tribune)

In summary, the reviews confirmed the high regard in which documentaries were held at the time, and the level of public interest in knowing what was going on in Germany after the war.

The reviews also confirmed my view that Nicholas Pronay was wrong when he said (in "Defeated Germany in British Newsreels: 1944-45" in K.R.M. Short & Stephan Dolezel, Eds, Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness) that "there was a basic consensus in Britain about Germany" after the war and that it was a "remarkable fact that, for once, the right-wing populist newsreels and the austerely elitist and left-wing documentarists presented an identical perception of Germany," that of a guilty people receiving their just deserts.

In fact there was a tremendous diversity of views. People recognised that the situation was difficult and complex, and there were no easy solutions.

As Joan Lester said in her review of ‘A Defeated People’ in Reynolds News: "Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity."

And as, the brief review of ‘A Defeated People’ in the Monthly Film Bulletin says, very far from agreeing with it, the film was trying to counter the view of those who said: "Leave the Germans alone: let them suffer and die as they have brought suffering and death to others."

‘A Defeated People’ was an official film. The Crown Film Unit, who produced it, were part of the government’s Ministry of Information. The film was made with the full cooperation of The British Control Commission for Germany and Military Government.

Humphrey Jennings, the director, had made some of the best and most popular wartime documentaries including ‘Britain Can Take It’, ‘Words for Battle’ and ‘Fires were Started’. A regional film officer, responsible for showing films in town halls and factories, described how the audience "sometimes wept as a result of his direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain."

I would argue this story shows there were many in Britain who knew that winning the peace, as well as winning the war, meant helping the former enemy, recognising that they too were suffering and needed help rebuilding their lives.