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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julia Boyd
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June 29 - August 5, 2018
Then on 24 October 1929 – Black Thursday – the Wall Street stock market crashed and with it Germany’s hopes of sustained prosperity.
When I was shown these splendid new constructions … these spacious tenement houses grouped round tree-lined courtyards, or the charming one-family houses of the new residential quarters, I would compare them with what I saw in other countries. The reconstructed areas in France looked very cheap and mean beside all this German opulence.27
But, as Mowrer realised, the fatal flaw in this ‘carnival of public spending’ was its dependence on short-term American loans so that, when the bubble burst and the debts were called in, the consequences for Germany were catastrophic.
‘They are really not able to afford to return the hospitality shown to them by foreigners but, besides this, they are no doubt rather afraid of the reaction which a photograph of a big banquet might have on officials whose salaries they are cutting … the plenturous [sic] feasts offered by Jewish bankers, which have hitherto been a feature of the Berlin season, will not be given this year. All this will be of immense benefit to one’s digestion.’
‘Frenchmen returning from Berlin are full of the incredible extravagance and manifest luxury which exist there,’ the writer André Gide told Harry Kessler.29 And Emily Pollard, dining at Goslar in the summer of 1930, was able to enjoy ‘a regular feast for the gods’ that included among its six courses green turtle soup and dressed crab.
who a year after the crash was lodging in a tenement slum with his current boyfriend’s family, was closer to the truth when he later wrote: ‘Here was the seething brew of history in the making – a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles treaty and other potent ingredients.’31
She identified envy as the prime cause of Judenhetze [hatred of Jews]:
A people that has suffered and is bitterly poor sees a race that climbs and flourishes upon the ruin of its own fortunes. Small wonder if envy does stir in its heart and it snarls accusations of profiteering against all who belong to the race. Is it not because he has fattened on the miseries of others that Israel today dwells lordly in the Kurfüstendamm which was once the aristocratic quarter, the Mayfair of imperial Berlin?
Wyndham Lewis, writer, artist, co-founder of the Vorticist movement, or – as Auden described him – that ‘lonely old volcano of the right’,40 went a step further by dismissing the whole subject as a ‘racial red herring’:
The violence, he told his readers, was entirely instigated by the communists, who also abetted the police in shooting innocent Nazis.
Lewis was present at ‘a monster meeting’ in the Sportpalast where Hermann Göring, newly elected to the Reichstag, and propaganda genius, Joseph Goebbels, addressed a crowd of twenty thousand. ‘There was something like the physical pressure of one immense indignant thought,’ he observed.
‘Long before we reached the Potsdamerstrasse, our taxi was halted by outposts of brown-shirted stalwarts, who allowed us to pass only after examining our invitation card,’
Wyndham Lewis was still able to write, ‘It is essential to understand that Adolf Hitler is not a sabre-rattler.’44 And to underline the point, he headed one of his chapters ‘Adolf Hitler: A Man of Peace’.
he reported to the foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, that whatever happened to the National Socialists, their determination to improve Germany’s position both nationally and internationally ‘was here to stay and would act as a spur to this or any other German Government of the future’.
Tourism was badly hit, with holiday resorts recording a 30 per cent drop in visitors during the summer of 1930. The Depression caused similar problems across Europe but Germans felt particularly aggrieved since they bore the additional burden of reparations.
In the mistaken belief that Chaplin was Jewish, Nazis gathered outside the Adlon to yell abuse at him, while a group of communists threatened to smash the Adlon’s windows if he didn’t receive their delegation.7 The
Der Angriff, edited by Goebbels, which called him the ‘Jew Chaplin’ whose ‘typically Jewish screen figure was leading German youth away from the heroic ideal of the manly German Siegfried’, thus ‘undermining the future of the German race’.
when it came to apportioning blame for their misfortunes, many Germans believed that France lagged not far behind the Jews or the government.
Germany at a time of acute economic distress. The failure of an Austrian bank in May 1931 had triggered a financial collapse across Europe, intensifying the already severe depression. Misery and fear multiplied, adding yet more grist to the fascist mill.
Even affluent young men like Tony Rumbold’s Oxford friends would turn up unexpectedly at the Embassy unable to afford a hotel.
Despite diminishing funds, the Rumbolds continued to entertain such visitors in style; however, outside the Embassy everything, Lady Rumbold observed, was paralysed. ‘People can’t travel or buy anything, and there is great fear of food shortage. Of course they are very nervous remembering the days of the inflation. It all appears quite quiet, but people look sad and worried, and the skies are grey and depressing.’
In March 1932 a presidential election was held. This was an event of real importance because, in reaction to the Weimar government’s growing instability, Hindenburg’s powers had been significantly increased. He was now able to legislate by decree and dismiss or appoint governments at will.
‘It might very well be his last official dinner, as he may not be re-elected as President.’ Pitted against the old gentleman were Adolf Hitler and the communist leader Ernst Thälmann. In the end Hindenburg was comfortably reelected
Hitler was an alarmingly strong runner-up.
As Spender later wrote, they had entered the ‘Weimardämmerung [twilight in Weimar]’. ‘Tugged by forces within and without, by foreign powers and foreign money-lenders, industrialist plotters, embittered generals, impoverished landed gentry, potential dictators, refugees from Eastern Europe, the government reeled from crisis to crisis, within a permanent crisis.’
Twenty-two-year-old Geoffrey Cox happened to be in Berlin for the July 1932 federal election. Although this gave the Nazis great gains (230 seats) and made their party the largest in the Reichstag, they still did not have a majority.
Public meetings were banned so there were no big crowds, just many people in the streets buying newspapers and waiting for results. There were plenty of armed police about, and sentries at Hindenburg’s door. Occasionally a police car would dash by with a group of police in it holding rifles and bayonets and a bugler blaring furiously for the traffic to clear aside. Afterwards came a whole horde of cars, cycles and motorcycles, all eager to see the fun. I think they rather like all this, though the position is undoubtedly desperate. I give Germany six months more before she either goes
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Shortly after noon on 30 January 1933, the new Reich chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his cabinet assembled in the president’s rooms. Standing before Hindenburg, Hitler swore to uphold the Constitution, to respect the rights of the president and to maintain parliamentary rule. In fact, exactly fifty-two days later, on 23 March, the Enabling Act was passed marking the end of the Weimar Republic. The Act gave Hitler the right to rule without the Reichstag, thus in effect handing him complete power. If his elevation to chancellor did not technically bring an end to the Weimar Republic, the oath he
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But whatever else it may have been, the spectacular torchlight procession that followed Hitler’s inauguration on 30 January 1933 was not dull.
The column of light started like a glittering serpent through the avenues, beneath the Brandenburg Gate, across the Pariser Platz and in to the Wilhelmstrasse. All the youth of Germany was on the march that night. Six abreast they came in their brown shirts, each man carrying a flaming torch and there was no break in the procession for five long hours. The torches cast a weird, pink dancing light over the usually austere grey street and huge distorted shadows played on the walls of houses. Blood red banners splashed by crooked swastikas fluttered in their hundreds, from vast ones carried
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the Nazi marching songs and raucous shouts of ‘Deutschland erwache; Kommen die Juden [Germany awake; the Jews are coming]’ or the ‘triumph rampant on every face’. ‘Pressed up against the houses, jostling each other on the pavements,’
As they went upstairs to bed, Sir Horace wondered where it would all lead. It was a rhetorical question, for it was clear to Constantia that ‘no-one who had witnessed the soul of Germany marching that night could be in any doubt’.4 However, it was to be several months before Hitler could enforce his dictatorship. In order to pass the Enabling Act that would give him complete power, he needed a more convincing mandate. A federal election was called for 5 March.
‘Strange as it may seem and it seemed strange to me, they were not concerned very much now that Hitler has come to the front. Their attitude is that it was bound to come … and that it is best perhaps that the Hitler fire run its course.’
I asked a dozen alternative questions – what would happen if Hitler did this or did that – to all of which he smiled and said that every one of the questions I raised had been fully discussed and the possibilities weighed … Hindenburg would not tolerate any dictatorship that was established either through sheer terror or through unconstitutional means … Nothing we could and did say disturbed his placid calm.8
Half an hour later Jones and Delmer were 6,000 feet above Berlin – the only non-Nazis on the flight. ‘If aeroplane should crash,’ Jones scribbled in his notebook, ‘the whole history of Germany would change.’ As
Four days later, at five past nine on the evening of 27 February, Denis Sefton Delmer, now back in Berlin, received a telephone call from a garage attendant with the startling news that the Reichstag was on fire. Running
Delmer, ducking under ropes, managed to reach one of the Reichstag entrances just as Hitler leapt from his car and, followed by Goebbels and his bodyguard, ‘dashed up the steps two at a time, the tails of his trench coat flying, his floppy black artist’s hat pulled down over his head’. Inside they found Göring – more massive than ever in a camel-hair coat, his legs astride ‘like some Frederician guardsman in a UFA film’. He informed Hitler that communists had started the fire and that an arrest had already been made.
‘God grant that this be the work of the communists. You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history, Herr Delmer. This fire is the beginning.’
she reported to her mother that, although it was unlikely anyone would ever get to the bottom of it, most people, even Hitler’s supporters, assumed the fire had been started by the Nazis themselves in order to discredit the communists before the election.
gathered there to pool news of the latest atrocities. Robert Bernays, a recently elected Liberal MP, at first thought the conspiratorial atmosphere of the Taverne faintly absurd until he realised that the correspondents really were in danger, not least from trumped-up charges of espionage. They did not, however, impress Tweedy – ‘a rather grumpy, messy lot reminding me of Bloomsbury at its worst’.
As another British visitor in Berlin during the election campaign put it, ‘Fear made cowards of us all.’13
‘The election has completely altered Germany both outwardly and inwardly so much that it is hard to realise that we are in the same country that we entered a month ago. The Nazis are out-fascismising Fascismo.’ Two days later they left Berlin, thankful to escape the post-election turmoil.
Our fellow roisterers were great fun. The Weal Shooting Club literally pouring beer down their necks, old ladies with far away looks thinking of the good old days which now might return, students, whole families and one girl in a sort of Nazi uniform. It was terribly noisy but good fun and very good-tempered.
Two days later, on 24 March, Hindenburg signed the Enabling Act handing Hitler all the powers he had so persistently sought. With the Reichstag now redundant, the last flicker of democracy had been snuffed out.
Soon the boy bars began to disappear. The more intelligent boys went to ground while ‘the silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms’.15 As it was common knowledge that the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, was homosexual, the more optimistic in the gay community must have felt that their time had come. But within weeks hundreds were murdered or incarcerated – ‘for their own protection’ – in the newly opened concentration camp at Dachau.
On the morning of 1 April, storm troopers all over Germany took up positions in front of Jewish shops, blocking their entrances. They held placards exclaiming ‘Deutschland erwache: die Juden sind unser Unglück [Germans awake: the Jews are our disaster]’.
a lorry crammed with household goods at the adjacent pump. Talking to the owner, he discovered that he and his wife were ‘Jews on the flit’. After months of intimidation they had decided to cut their losses, shut up shop and head for Switzerland.
Less than a month since the election, Tweedy had learned enough about Hitler’s Germany to make sure that before submitting his luggage to examination by the border police he had obliterated the names of all the people recorded in his diary.
It soon became clear to foreigners that many of their German acquaintances, whatever their former political views, were signing up with the Nazis, simply to survive.
Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about ‘Der Führer’ to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.17
