In 1943, the year in which Churchill finally granted Hansel Pless his release from Brixton, the Prime Minister still felt – understandably – savage enough to demand, at a private party, three encores of Noël Coward’s musical indictment of appeasement: ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’. Nevertheless, Churchill was beginning to look ahead, and to display prudent concern that the mistakes of Versailles should not be repeated. In 1943, he asked his ministries to supply ideas about how (after a war that he betrayed little public fear of losing) co-operation with Germany could best be achieved.
The answer, put forward by Churchill’s deputy PM, Clement Attlee, and subsequently endorsed both by the War Cabinet and by the Foreign Office, was that the job had already begun. The process of the re-education of German POWs was being actively pursued, although on an informal basis, in various prison camps. What was required, in Attlee’s strongly expressed view, was to put this admirable but disorganised project onto a systematic basis, give it a home, and provide it with funding.
The British government had, in fact, by the end of 1943, already anticipated the conclusion that Herbert Sulzbach would summarise on the BBC in 1948, following his own unique contribution towards the task of reconciliation. ‘The German POWs going home to Germany now’, Sulzbach told his audience, ‘will become the best envoys for peace and understanding between our two countries.’
Attlee was right. Herbert Sulzbach, working first at Comrie in Scotland, and then at Featherstone in Northumbria, between 1945–8, had achieved extraordinary results, among hardened men, through his quiet commitment to the cause of reconciliation, and through the force of his unique personality. But if steps were to be taken towards leading Germany back to democracy, and towards a return to her place in Europe, then a formal, government-backed programme was required.
On 18 September 1943, Churchill’s government approved plans for the Foreign Office to employ the German branch of its political intelligence unit (led by Richard Crossman, an ardent Germanophile) to ensure that financial support was found for the re-education of German POWs. On 12 January 1946, the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, approved Ivone Kirkpatrick’s choice of the man – and the place – for an adventurous new step towards the maintaining of peace. A new attitude for a new era was best summed up by a young Dutch resistance fighter. ‘The last war’, this unidentified young woman had stated to Sir Robert Birley, one of the scheme’s supporters, ‘was the kind of war that one can only win after one has won it.’1
The man that Kirkpatrick, with Crossman’s approval, had picked to head a complex and diplomatically delicate mission was a naturalised German Jew. His name was Heinz Koeppler.
Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, after a family friend gave him a free ticket out of Germany in 1933, Heinz Koeppler fell in love with the university, its social life, its architecture and – as a man who was a scholar to his energetic fingertips – its sense of intellectual vitality. Subsequently appointed to Magdalen as a lecturer in history, Koeppler had settled in well enough by 1938 to make sure, when he brought his sister Hanni across from Germany to join him, that she was given house-room at the home of his friend Richard Crossman (away writing a book in Greece) and that Hanni met up with Gilbert Murray, one of his warmest allies.
Koeppler, implausibly disguised as ‘Professor King’, had already started giving well-received pep talks to POWs when Bevin approved the choice of location in which to form alise the process known – Koeppler hated the term – as ‘re-education’. The place was Wilton Park, a handsome country house that had been most recently used as an MI19 interrogation centre. Although hardly welcoming (the rooms were bugged; the gardens were filled with Nissen huts; plumbing and lighting were in the raw), Wilton Park was offered to Koeppler as the working centre for a scheme that, so Crossman and Kirkpatrick believed, only a man as remarkable as their protégé could induce to work.
It’s not hard to see why. Koeppler, in contrast to the tiny, delicate-boned Herbert Sulzbach, was a massive figure, with a personality to match it. Towering, intelligent, assertive and furiously energetic, the cigar-loving Koeppler shared with Sulzbach only a fondness for being well dressed (he always wore a rose in his buttonhole) and a determination to do his utmost for the two countries to which he belonged.
Oxford was Koeppler’s chosen model and Wilton Park, from its beginnings in January 1946, might just as well have been called Koeppler College. Lectures were thrust aside in favour of chaired debates; participants were instructed to be ‘brief, trenchant and, if possible, witty’. There were just over 200,000 German POWs in the UK in 1946; 300 of them, initially taken from local POW camps, were recruited for courses lasting six weeks. Students were given civilian clothes and a ration of fifteen cigarettes a week. Access was guaranteed to a broad range of newspapers, radio in several languages and a library – a characteristic Koeppler touch – that placed Churchill’s works alongside Mein Kampf. Food was adequate and plentiful, a bonus in ration-ruled times. The provision of actual beds was looked upon as an unexpected luxury.
As fiercely opposed as Herbert Sulzbach to any form of censorship, Koeppler gave his students the greatest surprise when he told them that agreement with his views was not required. Students on a spring course in 1947 took their course leader at his word when, invited to accept that the Third Reich merited a degree of blame, they left the room. Normally, Koeppler relied upon his good humour and relish for intellectual combat to win through. ‘He was astonishingly adept with words, and ideas,’ Heinz Koeppler’s family doctor told Richard Mayne, the historian of Wilton Park. ‘That was one of the things that made him very formidable . . . I don’t think he was in awe of anyone.’
Six courses were held each year, with daily lectures and debates. Women students were introduced in 1947; as speakers, women were there from the start. Nancy Astor, haranguing the POWs in 1947 upon the subject of dictatorships, drew the awed comment from Max Dalhaus, editor of a Communist newspaper, Die Freiheit, that ‘such a person would be unthinkable in Germany’.
Bertrand Russell, Jennie Lee, Lord Longford, Tony Benn, Harold Nicolson, Victor Gollancz: the list of those who came, unpaid, to speak at Wilton Park testifies to the widespread faith in the value of Koeppler’s project during the early post-war years. Returning to their camps, the POWs became enthused ambassadors for the idea that Germany and England could work together. ‘These are certainly the spearhead, who are ahead of public opinion,’ Alfred Klug (a POW recruit) wrote on 29 March 1946 to friends in Germany. ‘It is to be hoped that the German people realise this, and that they do not push aside these helping hands . . . We must first of all give proof of our sincerity, and only then can the German nation be admitted into the community of peace-loving nations.’
Scepticism was not, however, tossed overboard. Was Lothar Hegewisch angling for an early release when he announced on 17 September 1946 that a mere six weeks at Wilton Park had transformed the resident POWs into ‘full citizens of a democracy such as many of them had not experienced even in the Weimar period’? Did Engelbert Brandt hope to improve his prospects when he assured his tutors on 25 September, in that same year, that ‘today I see politics in quite a different light, and above all far more clearly’?2
A measure of cynicism was necessary; the evidence of an enduring influence was, however, clear. Herbert Sulzbach, following his departure from the Featherstone Camp in 1948, received over 3000 letters of thanks from ex-prisoners who, having already been released, had nothing to gain from their gratitude. It is worthy of note that the Featherstone Park Association, set up after the war in Düsseldorf with the support of former POWs, was still actively involved in the task of furthering Anglo-German reconciliation when Sulzbach himself was eighty years old.
Sulzbach never ceased to strive for the time when a united Britain and Germany might put an end to what he still sorrowfully perceived, in 1984, as the ‘old distrust’.3 He died the following year. Neal Ascherson, writing in the Observer on 7 July 1985, stated that Herbert von Sulzbach ‘did more than any other human being to bridge the gulf of bitterness which the last war left between the British and the Germans’.
Sulzbach had always preferred to work independently, trusting to his own faith in humanity to bring about the desired results. Heinz Koeppler, by 1950, had become used to running what was effectively a private university. Aghast when the Foreign Office, doubtless planning to close the organisation down, announced that they wished to reclaim Wilton Park, the dauntless Koeppler set out to find his college a new home.*
He found it in a building that would have pleased both Mary Portman and Philip Lothian, whose heir would speak there at the Jubilee Conference of 1971. Wiston House was an Elizabethan family home, complete with gables, mullioned windows and a medieval chapel, set at the top of a sweeping drive and standing under the soft bulk of the Sussex Downs. It was ravishingly symbolic of a time that was vanishing from view. Koeppler fell instantly in love with it. From 1950 on, Wilton Park (the name was preserved) resettled itself at Wiston House.
Not everybody approved. A concept that had seemed magnifi-cent to Mary Portman in 1914, and to Philip Lothian in 1930, felt uncomfortably elitist during the pinched climate of the fifties. America, however, provided welcome additional funding and, by broadening the scope of Wilton Park’s ambitions, Koeppler steered his way through perilous times. Wilton Park, as he defiantly announced in 1971, was indeed elitist; its elite was comprised of the brightest and the best of those young men and women of all societies who believed that free discussion, in any true democracy, lay at the heart of every governmental decision.
Koeppler was knighted in 1978 and died the following year. Wilton Park, however, remained faithful to his ideal. Willi Brundert, a POW who arrived at Wilton Park from Sulzbach’s Featherstone Camp and later became mayor of Frankfurt) summed that ideal up. Wilton Park, so Brundert declared, had given its German students the opportunity denied them in their pre-war life both ‘to think for ourselves . . . and to understand the other fellow’s point of view’.4
Known today as the Executive Agency of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Wilton Park has maintained its close links with Germany, while providing a discreet forum for international conferences. In the 1980s, when black majority rule in South Africa was under discussion, black African leaders used Wilton Park to meet and debate with members of the ruling National Party. During that same decade, it was recorded that a Soviet interpreter had burst out of his booth to join a passionate Wilton Park debate about Russia’s political future; in 1988, a Roumanian speaker predicted the collapse of Communism, a full two years before Germany’s re-unification. Throughout its life, Wilton Park has never (in the words of its historian, Richard Mayne) lost sight of Koeppler’s enlightened purpose: ‘to turn ignorance into understanding, prejudice into appreciation, suspicion and hatred into respect and trust’.5
It was no coincidence that Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten were both public supporters of the Featherstone Camp mission of reconciliation between England and Germany presided over by Herbert Sulzbach. Britten, an ardent pacifist and lifelong admirer of the Quakers, had voluntarily accompanied Menuhin to give a series of concerts, directly after the war, to the survivors of Belsen.6 It was an experience, according to his biographer, Paul Kildea, that marked all of Britten’s subsequent work and confirmed the Suffolk-born composer’s deeply felt belief that all war (as he and Peter Pears proclaimed in a 1949 programme note) was ‘immoral’.7
In 1952, when a performance of Billy Budd was being given at Wiesbaden in Germany, Britten’s close friends, the Earl and Countess of Harewood, asked two of their own friends, the Prince and Princess of Hessen-Darmstadt, whether (in return for taking them to the opera) they could bring the British composer along on a visit to Wolfsgarten.
The Wiesbaden Billy Budd performance was a disaster. Redemption came back at Wolfsgarten, where Britten unforgettably imitated the attempt of an intoxicated pianist to play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Visiting Aldeburgh later that year, Prince Lu and his wife confirmed a friendship that would form an important part of their personal and gallant endeavour, after the war, to use their German home as a place for cultural bridge-building between two devastated nations. For Britten, as for Peter Pears, Wolfsgarten would become both a precious refuge and a source of inspiration.
On the evening of 11 September 1944, Prince Lu had been standing in the wooded park of Wolfsgarten, the secluded college-like building (it is built around the equivalent of a small quad) standing about ten miles outside the medieval city of Darmstadt, when he heard the low roar of bombers. Helpless, the prince watched the sky over Darmstadt turn from red to the glaring yellow of a burning city, targeted by 222 Lancaster Bombers and 14 Mosquitos on a night raid.
The Hessen-Darmstadt family’s city palace, along with all its treasures, was obliterated in an attack that left more than half the little city homeless. No convincing justification was forthcoming. This had been a practice run, a try-out before striking a bigger target.
Hospitable, Anglophile and ardently musical, Lu and Peg displayed no rancour and did all they could to help with the reconstruction of Darmstadt. At Wolfsgarten, they quietly set out to transform their surviving home, with its great golden concert room (the Saal) extending along the whole of one wing of the house, into a source for peaceful reconciliation.
And they succeeded, to a remarkable degree. Wolfsgarten, according to the German composer Hans Werner Henze, swiftly became the kind of haven to which Mary Portman had long ago aspired: a house where musicians, writers, painters, historians, composers and philosophers were welcome. There were frequent concerts, played by the best instrumentalists of the time, and friends of the house were often invited to stay with Lu and Peg.8
Benjamin Britten had been charmed in 1952 to be shown Marie Antoinette’s portrait of one of Lu’s ancestors, furniture left behind by Napoleon, photographs of royal holidays in the Crimea and the signature, cut into a window pane, of the murdered Tsar Nicholas. Returning the following Christmas, he couldn’t hide the glee behind his groan that the Hesses had compelled him to sit through a dinner with no less than seven European princes seated around him at the table.
Wolfsgarten, throughout the years, became a second home in Germany to both Britten and Peter Pears. (Their names joined that of Tsar Nicholas on a window pane, keeping company with Elizabeth and Philip, Edward Heath and Golo Mann.) Holidays were taken with Lu and Peg to Greece, to India and – in Peg’s widowhood – to Australia; visits were paid to Schloss Tarasp, the couple’s hilltop castle in Switzerland. But it was in the dusty golden serenity of the Saal at Wolfsgarten that this Anglo-German friendship had set down its roots. At Wolfsgarten, the sometimes tormented spirit of Britten seems always to have found peace. His sense of ease is reflected in the fact that he chose the Hesses’ home, during a month’s visit in 1974, as the scene in which to create one of his most candidly English works: Suite on English Folk Tunes. Six years earlier, in the same rooms, he composed a more Germanic tribute for Prince Lu’s sixtieth birthday: Sechs Hölderlin Fragmente.
For Prince Lu, so German in his habits, so English in his loyalties, it was difficult to find a way to offer, beyond the gift of his surviving home, some token of reparation for what England had suffered. A starting point was found during one of the first visits that he and Peg paid to Aldeburgh. Back in those early years of the festival, recitals and concerts were presented either in unheated local churches or in the cramped darkness of Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. To Lu and Peg, Britten’s wheezing audiences appeared to suit their surroundings far too well. Everybody, so the cheerful Princess remarked, seemed so ancient, while Britten’s music – surely? – spoke to youth.
A solution was found. The founding of the Hesse Fellowships ensured that musically talented young people could attend all the concerts free of charge and, better still, organise a concert as a way of displaying their own virtuosity.
Arrangements were set up, in 1959, to sponsor a dozen promising students over a two-week summer period; within three years, that number had tripled. Prince Lu (his artistic father’s son) proudly designed them an insignia, a Hesse Student Badge; Peg, following her husband’s death in 1968, created a lecture series in the Prince’s honour. As a president after the festival moved to Snape, Peg Hesse was praised both for the loyalty of her support and for the unstinting nature of her encouragement. Thirteen years after her death, the Hesse Student Scheme is still going strong. Its successes have included Jane Glover, Steven Isserlis, Michael Chance and Iain Burnside.9
Earlier, during the thirties, George Christie had found it easy to welcome the German refugee trio of Busch, Bing and Ebert to his new home for opera at Glyndebourne. A spirit of reconciliation and mutual understanding did not need to be sought, back before the war. The achievement being wrought at Aldeburgh and at Wolfsgarten was of a different and more fragile kind. It was threatened, at all times, by the simmering bitterness of the recent past.
Reconciliation, during the harsh post-war years when Britten first visited Wolfsgarten, in 1952, still felt remote. Britten’s own greatest gift towards the hope of its eventual achievement would come ten years later, in a period still spiritually poised between the devastated, churchless cities of Coventry and Dresden.
Officially, War Requiem paid homage to Sir Basil Spence’s new Coventry Cathedral, built beside the dark ruins of its predecessor. Unofficially, Britten drew inspiration from Wilfred Owen’s poetry to make an appeal, through the meeting of two ghostly soldiers and the call that arises from the music, following their needless deaths, for peace.
Speaking to his sister, Barbara, after War Requiem received its premiere in 1962, Britten praised not his music, but Owen’s poetry. Of his own creation, he used the only words that, repeated here, can hope to count, in a history of noble endeavour and bitter loss; in the story of two countries that once thought of themselves as united by bonds – not only of blood – but of goodness, commitment and faith.
‘I hope’, Britten said to his sister, ‘that it will make people think a bit.’10
Footnote
* Wilton Park, once reclaimed, was demolished and replaced by a modern building.