Year Zero by Ian Buruma Page A

women than men in Germany by about a 16 to 10 ratio, and the men who were left were often old, crippled, or despised. As the young German says in Rossellini’s brilliant film
Germany Year Zero
, shot in the ruins of Berlin: “We were men before, National Socialists, now we are just Nazis.”
    Benoîte Groult in her literary memoir of liberated France could not resist comparing the “beauty of Americans” to “the Frenchmen who all look gnarled, swarthy, and undernourished to me.” 43 The demoralization of German and Japanese men was of course worse. Typical was the attitude of a German waitress interviewed by Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright and screenwriter (
The Blue Angel
) who returned to his native land as a U.S. cultural attaché in 1946. This waitress wouldn’t touch German men, she said: “They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.” 44
    For me, the most memorable account of masculine humiliation is by Nosaka Akiyuki, a novelist who was himself a teenager in 1945, hanging around the black markets of Osaka. His brilliant novella,
American Hijiki
(
Amerika Hijiki
, 1967), concerns masculinity as well as race. The main character is a Japanese of his own age. At school during the war he was told that Western men were taller than Japanese but weaker, especially around the hips, due to their soft habit of sitting on chairs, instead of Japanese tatami floors. They could be physically bested by any tough little Japanese with muscular thighs. The schoolboys were frequently reminded of the squat, bullnecked General Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya,” who accepted the surrender of Singapore from the British general Percival, whose rather absurd-looking spindly legs were not flattered by his khaki shorts.
    But then the Japanese teenager sees the real thing up close, theunforgettable sight of an American soldier, “his arms like logs, his waist like a mortar . . . the manliness of his buttocks encased in shiny uniform pants . . . Ah, no wonder Japan lost the war.” 45 Clearly, not all Allied soldiers were so big and brawny, and many Japanese men were far from puny. But the perception, that first impression of a hungry teenage boy, would last as the melancholy memory of a war that had been presented to the Japanese as a racial contest between noble Asian warriors and the arrogant white race. This made the first confrontation after the war between victors and the defeated more shocking in Japan than in Germany.
    In Germany, the Western (but not the Soviet) authorities did their best to enforce a nonfraternization policy at first. “Pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory,” announced the American Forces Network. “Soldiers wise don’t fraternize,” warned
Stars and Stripes,
the military paper, or “Don’t play Samson to her Delilah—she’d like to cut your hair off—at the neck.” 46 Lifting the ban, said the
Times
of London, “would probably distress a large number of women at home.” 47 But none of this was convincing to men on the spot. The “Mistress Army” was a popular expression for the Western Allies at the time. This referred to the many German mistresses attached to American officers (more than to British officers, for some reason; the British appear to have preferred drinking). This, in turn, led to jealousy in the lower ranks, a feeling expressed in bitter jokes such as, “The policy is just to give the brass the first crack at all the good-looking women.” 48
    General George Patton, like General MacArthur, saw no merit in the ban. Should well-fed American soldiers really refuse to give candy to hungry kids? Were all Germans truly Nazis? (It should be said that Patton was a great deal more indulgent to Germans, even if they
were
Nazis, than towards the communist allies, or indeed to Jews.) Even the
New York Times
, not always in