TORGAU: A BRIEF MOMENT OF SANITY
In a German town called Torgau, one war ended and another refused to begin. An impressive memorial, in a park bordering the River Elbe, marks the event. Frozen in time are American and Russian soldiers shaking hands, in commemoration of their meeting on April 25, 1945. During the Cold War that memorial was irony cast in bronze, a mocking reminder of shattered alliance.
The early spring of 1945 found Soviet and American armies racing toward the Elbe from opposite directions, squeezing the Wehrmacht in the jaws of a mighty vise. At 11:30 on April 25, a US Army patrol led by Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue came across a lone Soviet cavalryman, near the town of Leckwitz. Kotzebue had been ordered not to proceed further than the Mulde River, but, sensing destiny, he decided to press on to the Elbe. At the village of Strehla, he spotted Soviet soldiers on the east bank.
The air was thick with the odor of lilacs and the anticipation of peace. Shouts of “Americanski!” drifted across the water. The two forces traded friendly greetings and flashed the V-for-victory sign. Searching the bank, Kotzebue found a small sailboat chained to a dock. He broke the chain, then gathered five men for the ceremonial crossing. On reaching the opposite bank, they were greeted by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gardiev, commander of the 175th Rifle Regiment.
In Kotzebue’s party was rifleman Joseph Polowsky. He and his comrades were fully aware that they had stumbled upon destiny. “[We felt] this exaltation of being alive, after all those days trapped in a trench war. There were even jokes that we were approaching the River Jordan, crossing into Canaan.” Someone remarked on the delightful coincidence that the UN Charter was being signed on the very day they crossed that river of concord.1
Near the bank was a scene of carnage. Hundreds of bodies were stacked like cordwood. Polowsky did not know who was responsible and, under the circumstances, did not want to know. He would forever remember a single image: “a little girl clutching a doll in one hand . . . . She couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. And her mother’s hand in the other.”2
None of the Americans spoke Russian; none of the Soviets spoke English. Their common language was, ironically, German. Messages of peace and goodwill were fired back and forth between the relay points of two German speakers. “It was very informal,” Polowsky recalled, “but it was a solemn moment. There were tears in the eyes of most of us. Perhaps a sense of foreboding that things might not be as perfect in the future as we anticipated. We embraced. We swore never to forget.”3
After solemn oaths came raucous celebration. Wine, beer, and vodka appeared. “We were real drunk, but not because of the liquor.” Accordions and guitars materialized. Girls liberated from nearby labor camps broke into traditional Russian dances. Americans sang “Yankee Doodle.” “I was so captivated by the event,” Polowsky confessed, “that it took possession of me for the rest of my life.”4
The world found out about Torgau two days later, when photographs of the historic handshake were emblazoned on newspaper front pages. Writing in Stars and Stripes, the journalist Andy Rooney remarked: “The Russian soldiers are the most carefree bunch of screwballs that ever came together in an army. They would best be described as exactly like Americans, only twice as much . . . . You get the feeling of exuberance, a great new world opening up.”5
In fact, the world was closing. Doors briefly ajar were slammed shut, locked, and bolted. Differences, not similarities, suddenly came to the fore. Alliances, having outlasted their usefulness, were quickly dismantled. Away from the battlefront, politicians carved spheres of influence amid an atmosphere thick with distrust.
The harmony that remained was vaporized in the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6. For President Harry Truman the atom bomb seemed the best way to end the Pacific war, but also a chance to make a point to the Soviets. “It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered,” he remarked of the Bomb, “but it can be made the most useful.”6
In 1949, the British physicist Patrick Blackett called Hiroshima “not so much the last military act of the Second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” Joseph Stalin concurred: “Hiroshima has shaken the world. The balance has been destroyed.” That was precisely what Truman intended. His secretary of war, Henry Stimson, saw the Bomb as a “master card” in a great game of international poker. “I called it a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it.”7
Winning at poker depended on the United States’ retaining the best cards. American “experts” predicted that decades would pass before the Soviets would develop their own bomb, since, as the joke went, they could hardly build tractors. In the meantime, the United States could use the Bomb, as Stimson suggested, “to bring the world into a pattern in which . . . our civilization can be saved.” In fact, the American monopoly was short-lived. Thanks in part to the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, the USSR exploded a bomb in 1949. Truman reacted by demanding a new, more terrible weapon. The thermonuclear bomb, or Super, was born in 1952, but this time the Soviets matched America atom for atom. Nuclear arsenals became a measure of distrust. Bombs were canisters of virility.8
During the war, the American propaganda machine had difficulty working out how to portray the Russian allies and their alien political system. The problem was solved by treating them as ordinary individuals—a people, not a nation. They were drawn as decent, hardworking, God-fearing ordinary folk who loved their country—solid, simple people rather like Midwesterners. The propaganda worked. Polls showed that a majority of Americans felt more in common with the Russians than with the stodgy British. Stalin was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1943.
Then, suddenly, Americans were encouraged to hate their erstwhile allies. The Russians became Commies—an extension of their government, by definition evil. Time and Life provided a constant stream of stories about the horrors of the Soviet Union, while films like A Foreign Affair (1947), Iron Curtain (1948), and I Married a Communist (1949) encouraged viewers to be vigilant about the Red Menace. The shift of emotion left some people confused. “In 1951 I was going to grade school,” Bob Dylan reflected.
One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air raid sirens blew because the Russians could attack us with bombs. We were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It’s one thing to be afraid when someone’s holding a shotgun on you, but it’s another thing to be afraid of something that’s just not quite real.
The “duck-and-cover” generation did not have to experience the catastrophic war their parents had witnessed. But they were forced to live with an entirely new type of fear. For the first time in history, humans possessed the capacity to render themselves extinct.9
Polowsky never forgot his Russians, never learned to hate. He went to his grave believing that something wonderful had happened on the Elbe, when men met as human beings rather than as representatives of antagonistic systems. “I always felt that American-Russian relations were plagued by bad luck right from the beginning. If we had gotten publicity with the oath of the Elbe, there would have been a certain depth in the feelings. Just think of the millions who died on the Russian side and the tremendous effort on the American side, amidst all those dead women and children and that little girl clutching the doll in her hand.” For the rest of his life, Polowsky waged a lonely effort to revive the good feelings felt near Torgau. He remained in contact with his Russians, and occasionally visited them, the trips funded by wealthy benefactors from the American peace movement. Every April 25, he stood on the Michigan Avenue Bridge in Chicago distributing leaflets calling for reconciliation with the Soviet Union. He worked tirelessly for nuclear disarmament. He could never understand the ease with which the Russians were transformed into enemies. In order to keep propaganda at bay, he refused to buy a television. Though an intelligent and skilled man, his political views impeded his gainful employment. “My father was a brilliant man, but his obsession for world peace kept him from being able to keep a normal job,” his daughter Melissa thought. “He was haunted by what he saw in the war.”10
Polowsky, who died in 1983, had always insisted that he wanted to be buried in Torgau. But by that time the town was in East Germany, a place not very welcoming to Americans—dead or alive. His family was nevertheless determined to honor his wish, the cost of which ran to $40,000. The money was raised from sympathetic benefactors in the United States and Germany. Later, a school in Torgau was named in his honor.
“He hoped somehow he would make a difference,” said his daughter.11 In that aim, he failed completely. His attempts to encourage understanding resulted in his being labeled a crank, a traitor, a Commie. While people on both sides of the Iron Curtain obediently indulged in hate, Polowsky refused to march in line. In the history of the Cold War, he is a significant anomaly, symbolic of a road not taken.
Toward the end of 1945, millions of men made their way home. In America alone, a soldier returned from the war every five seconds. Many went home to wives they hardly knew and children they had never met. Not surprisingly, the family stumbled navigating the ruins of war. Wives surrendered to men who seemed unfamiliar, while children suddenly had to share their mother’s attention with a stranger. Marriages made in haste frequently crumbled.
Pressures increased because women had been changed by war. Those who did important work gained a sense of self-worth, not to mention unaccustomed affluence. Female independence frightened those who worried about social stability. A revival of conventionality seemed imperative. Jobs went to returning soldiers, while women who clung to wartime positions were accused of being unpatriotic. In some countries, “baby bounties” were paid to women who had more than one child. State-run daycare centers closed. Child development experts advised that children in crechès were prone to delinquency; those same experts had, during the war, argued that crechès fostered self-reliance.
Saving the family became the responsibility of women. Salvation would come if wives devoted themselves to the home. “Women have many careers, but one vocation—motherhood,” Agnes Meyer argued in the Atlantic Monthly in 1950. “It is for women as mother, actual or vicarious, to restore the security in our insecure world.” In 1955, Adlai Stevenson advised the highly educated women of Smith College that, in the Cold War struggle, “there is much you can do . . . in the humble role of housewife—which, statistically, is what most of you are going to be whether you like it or not just now—and you’ll like it!”12
Civil defense literature advised women that surviving an atomic attack was more likely in a clean home than in a filthy one. Women’s magazines, which during the war had published quick recipes for wholesome meals that Mother could make after her shift at the factory, were suddenly filled with elaborate dishes taking hours to prepare. Articles warned of a new enemy—the germ—and advised Mother to be ever vigilant. Labor-saving devices like the washing machine and vacuum cleaner did not radically reduce time spent on housework, since minutes saved were reinvested in order to satisfy rising expectations of cleanliness.
Wars are always followed by a surge in the birthrate. No wonder, then, that the biggest war in history was followed by the biggest baby boom. Though feminist historians have seen a patriarchal plot, for many women motherhood seemed an affirmative gesture in harmony with the desire to build a new world. Millions got pregnant immediately after the war for the very simple reason that they wanted to be mothers. Men scattered over the battlefields of Europe and Asia felt similar yearnings. Amid the torn metal, screaming shells, and shredded flesh, soldiers kept sane by imagining a little house, a quiet garden, and a child at play.
Ever since 1947, when its true extent became apparent, the baby boom has been like a piglet slowly passing through a python. At each stage in the life of the postwar generation, its effect has been rudely apparent. More births at first meant more beds in maternity wards, more obstetricians, more midwives. Then came a boom in the toy industry, followed by a demand for more primary schools. Suddenly there had to be more Little League and soccer teams, more Brownie and Scout troops. In the 1960s, more universities were needed. Not long after the boom ended, the boomers started having babies, thus producing another blip. Eventually, there will have to be more pension administrators and assisted-living centers, the halls of which will echo with Dylan’s “Forever Young.”
A large percentage of baby boomers grew up in suburbia. Between 1950 and 1980, 83 percent of America’s growth was absorbed by the suburbs, which gained 60 million people. By the end of the 1960s, more people were living in suburbs than in inner cities. In Europe, also, the suburban migration was striking. “It’s like heaven,” one English suburbanite remarked. “People today don’t know of the time when we had to live in old broken down houses because we could afford nothing better . . . . Today we are given nice little houses to live in.” The Architectural Review did not, however, agree, warning in 1955 that “by the end of the century, Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows.”13
In the suburbs, wrote one cynic, “you too can find . . . people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversations, dress, possessions, perhaps even blood types are almost precisely like yours.” Suburbanites, said the left-wing philosopher C. Wright Mills, had been turned into “cheerful robots.” Nor did criticism come exclusively from the left. Fearful of the decline of American individualism, the evangelist Billy Graham warned that “mass-produced machinery has given rise to mass-produced man. We are inclined to think like the Joneses, dress like the Joneses, build houses like the Joneses, and talk like the Joneses.” The folksinger Malvina Reynolds put that message to music:
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
Critics shouted loudly, but the weight of opinion was against them. Happy suburbanites, freed from the dark recesses of the city, entered their version of paradise. They wanted uniformity, be it in houses, burgers, or beer. If their houses were all alike, that hardly mattered, since so too were their ambitions. For Sam Gordon, who left New York City, Harbor Isle was “heaven on earth.” He told his wife: “It’s like everyone who is going to live here is the same. Hundreds of families, it’s like we all have the same kind oflife.”14
For women, however, the suburban dream often turned sour. Fathers went off to work, children went to school, but mothers stayed in identical boxes, making instant cakes and burning frozen steaks. Many turned in desperation to “Mother’s Little Helpers”—tranquilizers designed to help them cope with the grinding monotony. Newsweek remarked on the profound dissatisfaction felt by the typical American housewife. “Her discontent is deep, pervasive and impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand.” The journalist Betty Friedan wrote of the “problem that has no name,” the symptoms of which were “a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning search that is going on in the minds of women.”15
Friedan feared that the baby boom and suburbanization would together erase the progress women had made since 1900. She pointed out that by the end of the 1950s, the typical American woman was married by the age of twenty, while average family size steadily increased. In consequence, the proportion of women in higher education was lower in 1958 than in 1920. Among those who did enter university, a high percentage dropped out after they found a man and got married. “What’s college?” an ad for the New York department store Gimbel’s asked. “That’s where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing.”16
Other critics argued that mothers were spending too much time mothering, with the result that children were growing up soft, expecting every wish to be fulfilled. Anger was directed in particular at Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was first published in 1946. Spock encouraged mothers to feed their babies whenever they cried for food, and to cuddle them when they seemed distressed. His methods militated against the working mother, to him an abomination. Nevertheless, for parents desperate to demonstrate their love, his ideas seemed a benediction. By 1956, one-fourth of American parents were religiously following his advice, and European parents were similarly enthusiastic. Spock’s ideas harmonized perfectly with the widespread desire among parents to give their offspring a better childhood than they themselves had enjoyed.17
The 1950s witnessed a war for the soul of society in which the main battleground was the home. Sociologists, alarmed by the new strains on the family, provided endless advice on how to survive modernity. According to them, the biggest problem was “atomizing”—a term appropriate to an atomic age. The nuclear family seemed in a state of fission. Experts worried that outside attractions would dissolve the bonds that held families together. While the warnings were probably excessively alarmist, many of the crises they foretold did materialize. The family was indeed atomized by an array of enticements. Children did rebel, without apparent cause. Many left home, some with flowers in their hair. By the end of the 1960s, communes were gaining in popularity as a realistic alternative to the nuclear family. The popularity of marriage declined; that of divorce rose.18
In truth, however, there were simply too many variables to take into account when trying to understand why baby boomers rebelled. The simple explanation is probably the best. Children born after 1945 grew up in a world profoundly unlike that of their parents. Theirs was an affluent world, even though not all of them enjoyed its riches. It was also generally peaceful. Conflict usually took the form of small wars fought in distant places. Nor was economic depression a concern. “We had no sense of the Depression,” Steve McConnell, born in 1947, recalled. “Parents talked about it, but it had no meaning . . . . I had not been aware that this country had ever suffered economically. I’ve never had a sense of what people go through when the economy goes to hell.”19
Work was not, therefore, an all-consuming obsession for the middle-class baby boomer. Peter Roberts, who grew up in Britain, recalled his carefree attitude:
You could bum around without doing any work and then you’d think: “Shit! I’d like to go to Morocco so I’d better get a job for a few weeks”—and the job was there to be had. Whenever you wanted to work, there was a job there. You could give up a job just like that . . . . You’d say, “Oh, God, I don’t feel like working any more, I don’t like the guy, I want to go off, I’ve got too much heavy enjoying to do, I haven’t got time for work . . .” Then after a while you’d find yourself broke and you’d go and get another one. Like you can buy potatoes in a supermarket. You don’t need to hoard them, because you know there’s always going to be a bag of potatoes there.
Baby boomers in Europe benefited from a security unknown to their parents. Across the Continent, postwar governments built social welfare systems to cushion the blows of economic hardship. Free medical care, free education, and subsidized housing encouraged a sense of well-being and a belief that opportunities abounded. “We’d the full force of the Attlee administration behind us,” Angela Carter recalled. “All that free milk and orange juice and cod-liver oil made us big and strong and glossy-eyed and cocky, and we simply took what was due to us whilst reserving the right to ask questions.”20
In Britain, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told his people that they had never had it so good. In the United States, Professor David Potter argued in his book People of Plenty, that affluence defined the American experience. “We have, per capita, more automobiles, more telephones, more radios, more vacuum cleaners, more electric lights, more bathtubs, more supermarkets and movie palaces and hospitals, than any other nation. Even at mid-century prices we can afford college educations and T-bone steaks for a far higher proportion of our people than . . . anywhere else on the globe.” Abundance did not necessarily spell contentment. Parents who had lived through the 1930s undoubtedly appreciated more affluent times, but their children seldom shared their cozy satisfaction. To the young, the older generation’s aspirations seemed prosaic; there was, surely, more to life than wall-to-wall carpets and T-bone steaks. An angry seventeen-year-old German complained in 1963 that “this disgusting economic miracle” had given rise to an older generation unable to recognize its superficiality. Young existentialists had a hard time accepting that their parents were actually happy. “Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity,” asserted the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society. “But might it not better be called a glaze above deeply held anxieties about their role in the new world?” Differences of opinion over the definition of “happiness” defined the generation gap.21
“To be young in those days,” wrote the novelist Sheila MacLeod, “meant to be idealistic, enthusiastic and full of optimism about a future which was to be so dazzlingly, liberatingly different from the hidebound parental past.” Baby boomers, once they reached puberty, began questioning their parents’ ethos. Voicing the misgivings of his generation, Tom Hayden derided the “material paradise with all things provided, all choices made, everything laid out neatly.” Anne McDermid felt herself revolting against the “stultifying complacency of Christian, white, middle-class and aspiring, suburban family life, two children plus a dog and a cat, squeaky clean housewife/mum, firm but kind breadwinning dad, obedient but cheeky children.”22
Marsha Rowe felt she was living out the “youthful irresponsibility that our parents, who had grown up knowing only war, thrift and responsibility, had been denied.” That might have been true—but for most parents, denial had become habit. The older generation did not feel the desire for freedom and frivolity, because asceticism had been forced upon them by circumstances; it became a way of life preserved long after those circumstances improved. “When I want to go out at night,” a young German girl complained in 1962, “[my parents] say: ‘We were not allowed to go out when we were young.’ Thus, I have to stay at home, too. Or, for instance, I would like to have a record player. Then they say: ‘We did not have one.’ . . . Thus, I do not get one.” Parents knew the exact price of a pint of milk long after its cost became irrelevant. That asceticism made it impossible for them to understand their reckless children. To the young, however, parents seemed self-indulgently Spartan—emissaries of denial who reassured themselves that sacrifice was its own reward. The young revolted against a way of life no longer logical. They were able to revolt because affluence made life more secure and provided the choices essential to the experiment with freedom.23
The young fashioned their own identity. They dressed differently from their parents, in clothes calculated to offend. They developed a fondness for weird hairstyles, rock and roll, coffeehouses, skiffle bands, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. In the mid-1950s, there was a sudden explosion in the number of young people applying to art schools or buying guitars. Sex was part of the package—sex for pleasure, not for procreation. It became fashionable to feel alienated, to perfect a scowl and to look back in anger. Almost every teenager understood the angst of Holden Caulfield, even if they hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye. Those who were lonely, bored, neurotic, self-obsessed, or simply hung over now had a glamorous diagnosis for their malady—namely, alienation—an ailment all the more wonderful because it was so utterly resistant to cure.
The parents of the baby boomers were the “Greatest Generation”—or so they told themselves. They had made the ultimate sacrifice in defending democracy against despotism. The best years of their lives had been spent fighting a horrible war. In time, their sacrifice would, like vintage wine, grow ever more sublime. People would forget that most World War II soldiers had been conscripts, that not all had gone to war willingly, or fought nobly. The Greatest Generation set a standard of conduct their children could never possibly equal. Their children had to live in a different age, with entirely different challenges, yet were judged by the values of the 1930s and 1940s. The fact that the young opposed war and questioned their inheritance rankled with their parents. “My father’s generation believed . . . that they had defended democracy against foreign despotism,” wrote Hayden. “We believed that we were defending democracy from its enemies at home.”24
Something was happening, Mr. Jones, and it was happening all over the world. Christopher Booker called it a “psychic epidemic”—a mass indulgence in novelty. The young went looking for a new world without much idea of what they hoped to find. The characters in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road perfectly express that naive optimism:
“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
“Where we going, man?”
“I don’t know but we gotta go.”
Unlike their parents, baby boomers did not have to grow up quickly; they could indulge themselves at leisure, safe in a protective cocoon. A “rap session” conducted between German teenagers and their parents perfectly encapsulated the generation gap:
A number of young men suggested that parents should lazily hang around a whole day with them, dance, have fun, “relax,” or debate radical political alternatives. “But this is impossible,” a father protested to silent approval of the other parents, “I have to go to the office.” Once the students suggested he should skip work, he became agitated. Then he would be dismissed and who would earn the money? That they had such a good life was due to him . . . . By and large all parents present were of the opinion that toil and drudgery were the sacrifice that one had to endure for oneself and one’s progeny.
The Sixties was a time when the young were addicted to being different; it was a long, exciting summer between youth and maturity when the lure of fantasy had yet to be conquered and novelty was sacred. The times were a-changin’, Dylan warned. Parents should get out of the road. “It is your task to acknowledge the hate of your compatriots and to investigate its real origins,” the young Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch advised the older generation. “And you will have to do that with the somber realization that your long-term attempts to prop up Christendom have been undone. You are old people. Your indignation and your hate are too old for us. Even your good qualities, which exist primarily of good intentions, are too old for us. You are too old for us. In twenty-five years, thank god, you will be extinct.”25
Against this onslaught, the older generation felt besieged, as an editorial in the Sunday Mail revealed: “For years now we’ve been leaning over backwards to accommodate the teenagers. Accepting meekly on the radio and television it is THEIR music which monopolizes the air. That in our shops it is THEIR fads which will dictate our dress styles . . . . We have watched them patiently through the wilder excesses of their ban-the-bomb marches. Smiled indulgently as they’ve wrecked our cinemas during their rock and roll films.” On April 30, 1965, an anguished writer in the Weekend Telegraph complained that the young had “captured this ancient island and took command in a country where youth had always before been kept properly in its place. Suddenly, the young own the town.” Parents were mystified. How had their comfortable world disappeared so quickly? Philip Roth’s character Swede Levov despairs at “the daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral—into the indigenous American berserk.” The Dutch version of that pastoral was called kleinburgerlijk and came with its own smell—spruitjeslucht—the odor of cooked Brussels sprouts. To the young, that smell evoked perfectly the “sickening, small-minded virtue of bourgeois Holland.”26
Ambition was a measure of ego. “We’re right at the center of everything,” one girl remarked. “It’s us, we’re right in the center reading about ourselves in the newspaper. It’s youth. Everything is youth and us.” Through rebellion, baby boomers marked out the boundaries of their milieu. For most, rebellion was short-lived, self-centered, and tame, expressed in growing sideburns, wearing jeans, smoking pot, wearing black eyeliner, or listening to the Rolling Stones. Yet for a small number, revolt became seriously political. Wini Breines believed “we could achieve an egalitarian, free and participatory society . . . . We were going to make a revolution.” For that group, disenchantment with the world of their parents fueled an all-consuming desire to create a perfect world of their own.27