Reporting from the Ruins

George Orwell’s war reports have never been collected before in one volume, although Penguin published four themed volumes of his writings, under the editorship of Professor Peter Davison (Orwell’s England, Orwell In Spain, etc). Now the small German publisher Comino has taken advantage of the end of copyright restrictions to issue Ruins (a title inspired by Orwell’s report from April 25, “Future of a Ruined Germany”). They have an additional advantage in including a previously unknown report, making this collection even more desirable. The cover claim to have a second article “reprinted here for the first time” is misleading as Professor Davision included that in The Lost Orwell, the book that acts as Volume 21 to the Collected Works, though it remains little known.

On February 15^th 1945 George Orwell was issued the uniform of an authorised war correspondent and crossed to France. Paris had been liberated six months before, but heavy fighting continued inland, and French political hostages and Prisoners Of War remained in German fortresses and camps. Orwell was reporting for The Observer in London, and the Manchester Evening News, both newspapers for which he was already working as a journalist and reviewer. In all The Observer published 14 of his reports, and 6 appeared in the MEN. It is not clear if there was some agreement between the papers, but two things are noticeable: each report was original with neither paper’s content appearing in the other, and the MEN articles appeared mid-week, not at weekends where they would contend with The Observer on a Sunday.

Orwell was never in the front line and was never under fire, though he followed the troops closely, sometimes entering a captured town within a day of its fall while dead bodies lay in the streets. Despite this his biographers have given little coverage to this period, partly perhaps because it sounds unadventurous, partly because, in England, his wife Eileen’s health was collapsing. In fact, she died while Orwell was abroad and on March 31st he broke his journey to return to organise Eileen’s funeral and make arrangements for their recently adopted son, before returning to the continent.

Orwell’s first seven reports were by-lined Paris, the first dated February 24^th, in which he spoke of the shortages of food and fuel, and the disappearance of both foreign workers and beggars. In passing, in later reports, he mentions that he had arrived bringing coffee and soap with him. His reports go on to describe the re-appearance of newspapers (and the heavy censorship which left pages blank), the prospects for the political parties, including support for the Communist Party, but also the dominance of General De Gaulle.

At the time of these reports Orwell could not have known the ultimate significance of his subjects. Hindsight allows us greater vision, but Orwell showed his own early insight when he dedicated his March 18^th column for The Observer to De Gaulle’s speech on his intention to keep French Indo-China – this was, of course, the start of wars that would devastate that area for another thirty years or more.

A week later and Orwell was reporting from Cologne on the devastation he found (Paris, remember, had been an “open city” and consequently not heavily bombed). The only roads open had been bulldozed so by the American forces, and there was no piped water, no gas and no transport. The Americans had found some non-Nazis to run the city, including its Jewish former (pre-1933) police chief (whom the editors have identified in a footnote as Karl Winkler), and de-nazification courts were running: Orwell had attended a trial of a Hitler Jugend social secretary who had been hiding the membership rolls.

Karl Winkler, from the NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne

All of Orwell’s reports went through SHAEF censorship, which seems to have precluded the mention of many of the places he visited. In his Cologne report he compares the better appearance of the Germans with their near neighbours in France and Belgium, yet does not say he has been in Belgium. His observations, though, after his initial remarks on the lack of food and fuel in France, tend to reinforce the belief that Hitler and the Nazis did ensure that the Germans fared better than the people of the countries the Herrenvolk had occupied, even those near neighbours.

The next report is one previously unknown, “’Displaced’ Are Allied Problem”, based on his visit to a Displaced Persons camp near Aachen. The numbers of D.P.s was already enormous, though these seem not yet to have been released Concentration Camp prisoners, but to be directed workers (the French STO-ers) and refugees whom the Germans had kept fed. Then follows “Future Of A Ruined Germany”, with its line “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation”.

During his time in Europe Orwell was based at Hotel Scribe in Paris, though he was not there continuously (we know separately from the letters that did and did not reach him). He returned to reporting on France in mid April, when the general election would be the first in which women had the vote, but he may have written that on the move as by April 21^st he was in Nuremberg and a week later in Stuttgart (he was travelling roughly but directly east from Paris). In early May he was back reporting on the French political situation but at the end of the month he was writing from Austria, though clearly travelling into southern Germany, too. By May 24^th he had returned to London, where he met Fredric Warburg, but his reports continued to appear in The Observer until June 10^th, when his last on the war situation was one more on the problems of Displaced Persons.

The editors then include extracts from some of Orwell’s London Letters to Partisan Review only indirectly mentioning his experiences in Europe. He explains this lacunae: “… if I touch directly on anything I saw abroad I shall have to submit the letter to SHAEF censorship” but he goes on to discuss political attitudes to Russia (still sympathetic) and the experiences of Allied Prisoners of War who saw Russian POWs being mistreated and told Orwell about it.

The final article is “Revenge Is Sour”, effectively one of Orwell’s “As I Please” columns given a title. It recounts his visit to an internment camp for SS officers in southern Germany in which an officer, a Viennese Jewish enrollee, assaulted a prisoner. As far as I’m aware neither the US officer nor the SS General have been identified, despite the SS man having an almost unique deformity. There is room for more research and more annotation in Orwell’s work. Despite Professor Davison’s best efforts, for instance, he had not identified the Cologne Police President as Karl Winkler, which Seeliger and Kearney have done, but this final identification seems to have escaped them.

What is astonishing about the biographers’ failure to deal with this period of Orwell’s career is the simple fact of its extent: he travelled long distances, perhaps 3500 miles, in the four months, when the railways had been destroyed and he was in a bumping military vehicle, sometimes taking over a day to reach his destination. In addition to his meetings, interviews, travel, writing-up, Orwell was continuing his other work. His major essay “Notes On Nationalism”, for instance, was finished while he was in southern Germany. And given his concerns for his wife, his concentration on the task in hand was extraordinary.

Although not large (a 14 page Introduction and 90 pages of Orwell’s journalism in this paperback), a collection such as Ruins is another reason to examine every part of George Orwell’s work in close-up and depth. There is much more to be drawn from it.

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Ruins: Orwell’s Reports as War Correspondent in France, Germany and Austria from February until June 1945, George Orwell, Preface by Paul Seeliger, Introduction by Stephen Kearney (Comino Verlag, 2021, ISBN13: 9783945831311)