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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julia Boyd
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June 29 - August 5, 2018
Germany’s new leaders faced the nightmare of both external and internal collapse. Even before the war ended, revolution triggered by a naval mutiny in Kiel had spread rapidly across the country, bringing in its wake strikes, desertions and civil war. Pitted against each other were, on the one hand, the Spartacists (their name derived from the rebel gladiator, Spartacus), who soon formed themselves into the German Communist Party, and, on the other hand, the Freikorps, right-wing militias intent on destroying Bolshevism. The Spartacists (led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) stood little
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hearing Ebert cry out to the soldiers: ‘You have returned undefeated.’2 This conviction that the German army remained undefeated was deeply rooted – as foreigners soon discovered. Before Franck set out on his own travels, he had served as an officer with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Rhine at Koblenz. His duties involved interviewing scores of German soldiers who, to a man, he reported, believed that in terms of military prestige they were unquestionably the victors. It was only the treacherous politicians in Berlin who had stabbed them in the back, together with the lack of
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A few weeks after the Armistice he wrote to his wife in New England, ‘I suppose you want to know all about the “Huns”, the feeling of the people etc. This is a difficult matter. One doesn’t know.’10 But he was soon describing the Germans as ‘Sphinx-like and proud’, observing how quickly they had reverted to their traditional industriousness despite their lack of proper tools. Smith also noted that, although they seemed to accept the American occupation without question, they regarded their new republic with deep cynicism, adding that ‘they live in deadly fear of Bolshevism’.11
The unexpected human warmth puzzled this writer until a German woman living in the British sector in Cologne offered an explanation: Before the English came we starved. Now there is money in circulation and the shops are filled with foodstuffs and even dairy products brought from England, France and Scandinavia. Many of the English officers and men we have found friendly. I have married one. I had two English officers billeted in my house. They invited some others to spend the evening and I made some punch. One of the guests tasted the punch and said he would not leave Cologne until I agreed
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Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices “No Germans allowed.” The money for their food is all paid from German taxes, and the German children crowd round their brightly lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have ever seen.17
Franck was not the only traveller in Germany during the immediate post-war period to be struck by this outward normality. But, as the defence minister, Gustav Noske (a former master butcher), explained to Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart Roddie, they were deceived in the same way that ‘a hectic flush gives the appearance of health to a patient who is in fact dying of galloping consumption’.23
Like Stewart Roddie, Franck was also surprised at the tolerance Berliners showed their conquerors and at the way Allied soldiers were able to wander freely about the city unconcerned for their safety. ‘Doughboys were quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been strolling down Main Street in Des Moines,’ he wrote. However, the anti-communism and anti-Semitism that were to become such hallmarks of Germany’s inter-war years were already much in evidence. On every available wall were plastered virulently coloured posters warning of the blood-curdling deeds Bolshevism would
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After the terms of the Versailles treaty became public in May 1919, Franck noticed even more vitriolic posters. He kept one bearing a typical message: END OF MILITARISM BEGINNING OF JEW RULE! Fifty months have we stood at the Front honourably and undefeated. Now we have returned home, ignominiously betrayed by deserters and mutineers! We hoped to find a free Germany, with a government of the people. What is offered us? A GOVERNMENT OF JEWS! The participation of the Jews in the fights at the Front was almost nil. Their participation in the new government has already reached 80 percent! Yet the
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Because the Allies wanted to keep an arm lock on the Germans until the peace treaty was signed, the blockade imposed since 1914 remained rigorously in place – a cause of deep bitterness throughout the country. When Franck first crossed the border, he had witnessed the skill with which Dutch officials ferreted out foodstuffs no matter how meagre or ingeniously hidden. One woman even had her modest lunch confiscated. As she sat hunched in a corner of the compartment, silently weeping, two men, once safely into Germany, retrieved their respective contraband. The first drew a sausage out of a
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For the few civilian foreigners who, like Joan Fry and Harry Franck, were travelling east of the Rhine during the summer of 1919, the shock and despair felt by ordinary people in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (signed on 28 June) was impossible to ignore. Firm in the belief that they had been honourably defeated and confident that President Wilson would guarantee them fair treatment, most Germans were quite unprepared for the humiliation it imposed on their country. Germany was to lose all its colonies (the most significant lay in Africa), its most productive industrial areas were to be
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the ‘Polish corridor’ was to be created, thus dividing the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia. Furthermore, Germany had to sign the ‘guilt clause’ accepting responsibility for starting the war.
found the most degrading demand of all (in the event it was never met) the provision that the Kaiser and 1,000 prominent figures should be handed over to the Allies and tried for war crimes.
One old lady explained to Joan that, although she had felt no hatred during the war, the peace treaty aroused intense resentment: ‘To be treated as outcasts, as individuals with whom no relations are possible, is even worse than hunger or constant anxiety.’
normal times she would have enjoyed speaking English, ‘but now a broken people does not want to hear it’.
The Allies are trying to Balkanise us … they want to vernichten us, to destroy us completely … we believed in Wilson and he betrayed us.’ More ominously, others expressed their dread of the future: ‘Now we must drill hatred into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when the time is ripe….’4
In Bonham Carter’s view, the reparations policy insisted on by France (by 1923 Germany’s debt to the Allies stood at £6.6 billion, the equivalent of £280 billion in 2013) was morally unjust and politically mad. Many in Britain and America agreed, believing that Germany’s economic collapse would only result in victory for the communists.
However, she enjoyed her chat with an Aberdeen fish merchant on his way to Germany to buy a German boat and to hire a German crew because, he explained, they were so superior to anything he could find at home. ‘I’m pro German now,’ he told her, ‘we all are.’
‘but her compassion seems to be reserved almost exclusively for Germans. She shys [sic] away from any allusion to suffering and privations in Great Britain.’18 Nor did Lady D’Abernon leave Violet Bonham Carter in any doubt as to the true state of affairs in Germany: ‘Believe me,’ she told her, ‘the Germans are not suffering as they say. There is no great poverty here. 95% are living in plenty, 5% are starving.’ After visiting Berlin’s poorest district herself, Violet tended to agree, having seen ‘nothing one could compare to our slums. All the streets are wide, the houses big and built with
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For Violet, as for so many other observers of inflation-ridden Germany, it was the plight of the middle classes that aroused her greatest sympathy.
Within their neat, clean and respectable homes, Violet was informed, ‘terrible quiet tragedies’ were taking place each day. Having sold their last possessions, many of them, including doctors, lawyers and teachers, preferred to swallow poison rather than suffer the shame of starvation.
When hyperinflation reached its peak in November 1923, even the sceptical Lady D’Abernon was moved at the ‘distressing spectacle of gentlefolk half hidden behind the trees in the Tiergarten timidly stretching out their hands for help’.21
smartest streets. But, as Lady D’Abernon explained, it was only the Schiebern [profiteers] – living like ‘fighting cocks’ in all the best hotels – who could afford such luxuries.
But even more distressing for Mann was the worrying rift between the ‘young militants’ and the ‘old reactionary trades union officials’. He reported that the Communist Party was expecting to increase its members in the Reichstag from fifteen to fifty at the next election.
He was certainly not the only foreigner to notice just how much music meant to ordinary Germans. ‘Music is their finest and most potent medium of expression in moments like this,’ wrote Violet Bonham Carter, ‘one can’t imagine any political demonstration in England opening with a very long string quartet.’
In 1920 Stewart Roddie was appointed to the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control (headquartered in the Adlon) whose task it was to disarm Germany.
When Stewart Roddie visited Friedrichshof, he had been outraged ‘to find the place over-run by black troops’. Indeed, France’s deployment of colonial soldiers provoked a chorus of criticism – and not just from Germans. In those unashamedly racist times, many British observers saw it as a conscious attempt by France to heap yet further humiliation on Germany. Joan Fry noted the rising resentment among the Germans who had to provide extra homes for ‘the many unwanted brown babies, who cannot be put in such homes as are provided for white children’.
An American Quaker, Dorothy Detzer, was shockingly outspoken: I arrived at Mainz about four in the afternoon, on September 3rd. When we climbed off the train to the platform I suddenly went sick at the sight which greeted our eyes all along the platform. One had heard so much of the French occupation, and I was expecting to see troops like our southern darkies. Instead we found savages. I lived for over a year in the Philippine Islands and my first reaction was that here was Moco-land again – only that the natives were in uniforms instead of g-strings as would be their native ‘costume.’ And I
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She was equally horrified by a huge torchlight parade in Wiesbaden composed of African soldiers carrying posters depicting caricatures of ‘Hun heads’. A French bystander informed her that such parades were held frequently, their purpose being to remind the Germans who had won the war. ‘I shall never forget’, wrote Detz...
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The German workforce, backed by the government, had chosen to defy the French in the only way open to them – passive resistance. Not that their protests were always that passive. On 1 February Benoist-Méchin recorded 1,083 acts of sabotage.
Germans from all walks of life told them repeatedly how betrayed they felt – by the Kaiser, their politicians and generals and especially by President Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles.
And how were they to explain all this to the next generation, to their undernourished, rickety children who, thanks to the so-called peace treaty, now faced a future under the heel of Bolshevists and Jews? Although
Too many Germans, in their experience, were hungry, cold and without hope.
Smith, now assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Berlin, had gone there to report on the National Socialists. This political party was not thought to be of much importance but the American ambassador wanted more information.
Three days later, Smith pencilled into his notebook: ‘Great excitement. I am invited to go with Alfred Rosenberg to see the Hundertschaften [companies of 100 men] pass in review before Hitler on the Cornelius Street.’ Afterwards he wrote: A remarkable sight indeed. Twelve hundred of the toughest roughnecks I have ever seen in my life passed in review before Hitler at the goosestep under the old Reichflag, wearing red armbands with Hakenkreuze … Hitler shouted ‘Death to the Jews’ etc. and etc. There was frantic cheering. I never saw such a sight in my life.
Two days later back came the response. According to the British source, there was nothing to be alarmed about. The National Socialist Party was just a fire in the straw that would vanish as quickly as it had materialised. The men involved were Bavarian separatists of no significance and with no possibility of influencing events outside Bavaria.
In fact, Hitler might even be worth encouraging since he wanted to claim independence for Bavaria, which might lead to the reinstatement of the Wittelsbach monarchy and possibly even the break-up of the German Reich. ‘And by the way,’ the message continued, ‘Hitler’s first name is Adolf – not Aloysius.’
On 10 November 1923, almost exactly a year after Smith’s interview with Hitler, Lady D’Abernon recorded in her diary that her husband had been woken in the middle of the night by a senior German diplomat, anxious for advice on how to deal with an uprising in Munich. The c...
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Passive resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr may have eased German humiliation but because the government had to print money to pay the strikers, it also fuelled hyperinflation.
Although the putsch had failed, Hitler’s subsequent trial attracted huge publicity, providing him with a perfect opportunity to present his views to the nation. He was sentenced to five years but in fact served only nine months in prison, where he was comfortably lodged, allowed visitors – and provided with plenty of paper to write his book Mein Kampf.
If hyperinflation and Hitler’s putsch were not challenging enough, the government – itself riven with dissent – had also to deal with separatists in the Rhineland, communist insurrection in Saxony, and an army on whose loyalty it could not depend.
Convinced that the only way forward for Germany was a coalition of the political middle ground, Stresemann struggled to contain extremists on both left and right. Recognising that passive resistance was inflicting more harm on Germany than on France, he ended the strike in September 1923, thereby taking the first step in stabilising the mark.
After the treaty and Germany’s entry into the League of Nations in 1926, the recovery gathered pace with such speed that only ten years after the Armistice Germany could claim to be the world’s second-greatest industrial power.
other foreigners who visited or lived in Germany during the heady years between Locarno and the Wall Street Crash took a different view. Suddenly, Germany (especially Berlin) was modern, innovative, sexy and exciting. Even the chronic political instability gave life there an edge – particularly appealing to those keen to escape the staid conventionality of Britain.
‘The great thing in Germany today is the emergence of the new type of person. One sees them everywhere – sunburnt, wearing sensible clothes and of splendid physique. There are innumerable physical culture clubs and bathing societies etc. and every attempt is made to get people out into the open.’ He went on to praise the way people dressed:
There is no mention in Emily Pollard’s diary of such avant-garde delights as cross-dressing, jazz or Josephine Baker’s banana dance, and it is quite likely that she had never heard of Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht or the Bauhaus. Her travel account is a reminder that much of Weimar Germany remained untouched by the liberal modernism that has come to symbolise its fifteen-year existence.
However, on closer inspection these youthful cartels were not quite as innocent as they seemed. Cicely Hamilton sounded a note of caution. ‘There is danger in the Youth Movement,’ she wrote, ‘which may be summed up in the one word – Politics.’ She had been quick to notice that the majority of these groups were junior branches of existing church societies or political parties intent on indoctrinating the young with their own particular brand of sectarianism.
‘Some of these young people’, Hamilton noted, ‘are taking to their politics early and taking to them vigorously.’
‘The Brown Shirts are the most striking example of youth trained to partisan thinking,’ she observed, adding, ‘They are not an unfavourable example.
‘the young Brown Shirts were a branch of the National-Socialist-German-Workers-Party’, a title, as she points out, that is much too long for everyday use so ‘has mercifully been shortened to – Nazi’.
Although still a peripheral figure in the late 1920s, Hitler now regularly denounced Jewish musicians. For Bruno Walter, conducting the young Yehudi that night, the clock was already ticking.
