Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

by Julia Boyd

There was another reason why American tourists were reluctant to question the Nazis too closely, particularly on racial matters. Any derogatory comment regarding the persecution of Jews invited comparison with the United States’ treatment of its black population – an avenue that few ordinary Americans were anxious to explore.

But that, we thought to ourselves, was not our business All that the tripper wants is the status quo Cut and dried for trippers. And we thought the papers a lark With their party politics and blank invective4

But arguably the Nazis’ most persistent propaganda message, and the one that they initially felt certain would persuade the Americans and British to join forces with them, concerned the ‘Bolshevik/Jewish’ threat. Foreigners were lectured incessantly on how only Germany stood between Europe and the Red hordes poised to sweep across the continent and destroy civilisation.

‘England starved us otherwise she would never have won,’ they told him. ‘Our brave soldiers at the front never gave way. They would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.’3 Franck could detect no sense of guilt. Indeed, he could not recall a single German ever expressing remorse: ‘They seemed to take the war as a natural, unavoidable thing,’ he wrote, ‘just a part of life, as the gambler takes gambling, with no other regret than it was their bad luck to lose.’4

The sometime poet and critic – more often drunk and embittered – Brian Howard made his feelings quite clear when he wrote to a friend from the Hospiz der Berliner in October 1927: I am very depressed and very lonely. I hate Berlin so much that I am coming home almost immediately. It is unbearably ugly, and quite quite awful . . . I don’t know where anything is, I have no money and this hotel is appalling . . . When I arrived they were singing hymns. No one speaks and my smoking is considered an outrage . . . The Unter den Linden is awful. Everything is noisy, vulgar, overcrowded and commercialised. The buses go at 50 mph and are veritable death traps . . . The homosexual life of Berlin is fantastic from a psychologist’s point of view but very dreary from the point of view of a human being. God how alone I feel. 30

This letter has me dying. Also, I fear this book is making me realize I am in the minority when it comes to liking Berlin