Du Bois carries on alone to Geneva, to speak with those who still see in the League of Nations the embryo of a new global order. The League has settled only one dispute so far: the ownership of a group of forested islands in the Baltic claimed by both Sweden and Finland. But Du Bois has a shimmering goal in sight: acceptance of the Pan-African Congress as the legitimate representative of black aspirations around the world. He takes up residence in the Hôtel des Familles, not far from Geneva railway station. An Englishwoman with a history of being helpful to worthy causes–in India, she once tried to find Gandhi an appropriate substitute for cow’s milk–uses her contacts to help the editor of The Crisis get access to the people who matter on Geneva’s diplomatic circuit. Du Bois pays social calls on possible supporters. He gives a talk to the English Conversation Club which goes down a storm. He presents the resolutions of the Pan-African Congress to the British Secretary-General of the League in person and counts this as a major success.
MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary ploughs through books of statistics, makes recommendations for improvement, points out the errors of others–and sees virtually no one. He is too ill, he says. Not a word about the famine on the Volga.
Meanwhile, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church donates all unconsecrated vessels to be sold to feed the hungry.
HILDESHEIM, GERMANY: After a summer darting around Germany and Austria almost as if the war had never happened–Bad Gastein, Seefeld, Hamburg, Berlin–in September Freud finds himself in the Harz mountains of central Germany with his most trusted colleagues on a group holiday.
In Hildesheim, the group check into the rather grand Hôtel d’Angleterre, and then explore the town. Together they traipse to the town’s two main churches–one Romanesque and one Gothic–while Freud pontificates about the relevant qualities of the architecture. At a local museum with a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities Freud quizzes the curator about ancient burial rituals. Over the next few days this merry band of psychoanalysts explore the area by train, bus and on foot.
Much in the planning of their excursions is calculated to please the proclivities of the doctor from Vienna. On one day they walk past the house where Goethe stayed in the 1770s, and where he wrote an important section of Faust. On another day, the group ascend the Brocken, a local mountain larded with mystical associations as the annual meeting place of the world’s witches (that is to say, women who have had sex with the Devil). Freud takes the opportunity to play a practical joke on the group, getting them all to stand at the top of a tall tower with their eyes closed and leaning forward over a rickety railing with their hands behind their backs–before telling them the railing has disappeared and watching their flailing responses.
In among the practical jokes and the camaraderie, Freud returns to one of his pet subjects: telepathy. It is impossible, he tells the group, to avoid investigation of what others might call ‘occult’ phenomena. Such is the spirit of the times, so to speak. ‘It is a part expression of the loss of value by which everything has been affected since the world catastrophe of the Great War’, Freud explains. It is also an indication of ‘the great revolution towards which we are heading and of whose extent we can form no estimate’.
The discovery of radium and Einstein’s theory of relativity have contributed to this trend of belief in unseen powers or hidden means of communication, Freud asserts. The war has for ever blown up any easy certainties. Earlier that summer Freud admitted to an English investigator of psychic phenomena that ‘if I were at the beginning rather than at the end of my scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research, in spite of all difficulties’.
Freud foresees a time when certain hypotheses currently derided as ‘occult’ are proved right. Psychoanalysis cannot afford to be left on the sidelines. His acolytes are split on the matter.
DOORN: The Hungarians and the Finn have moved on. A German aristocrat hangs around a little longer as company for the mourning Kaiser. Now it is a local Dutch aristocrat named Lili van Heemstra who catches Wilhelm’s attention. Over the summer, she visits almost every day (eating considerably into the Kaiser’s wood-chopping duties).
The two become inseparable. They whisper sweet nothings at each other during a movie night at Huis Doorn, to the obvious annoyance of everyone else. Wilhelm’s aides describe the young lady as ‘Baroness Sunshine’, in reference to the Kaiser’s own description of her as a delightful ray of sunlight in his dark world. (He takes her advice on financial matters, too, now that the money from Berlin seems to be drying up.)
Will Wilhelm actually marry her? He protests not. His wife has been dead less than six months, and Lili is nearly thirty years younger than him. But his mind is wandering in that direction. To the shock of some, he is certainly prepared to countenance the idea of marrying a non-royal in the future. After all, he tells an aide one day, ‘if one considers that cousins and Catholics are out of the question, there is hardly anyone left’.
AUTUMN
STOCKHOLM: This is getting embarrassing. Riven by indecision, the Nobel Prize Committee decides not to award the physics prize to anyone at all in 1921.
MUNICH: Ludendorff finishes the manuscript of his latest magnum opus. ‘International, pacifistic, defeatist thinking’ is in the dock for the defeat of 1918. The same spirit can be detected everywhere. ‘The un-German is within us and around us,’ the general writes, ‘principally in the form of insufficient race-consciousness.’ The book ends with the words of an uplifting Dutch song about conquering evil through belief. ‘God turns a pious people’s enemy into its prey, however great the enemy’s realm.’ Erich’s wife Margarethe increasingly takes refuge in morphine.
MOSCOW–PETROGRAD: Over the first weeks of autumn, the contradictions in Lenin’s Russia become acute.
There is famine in the Volga region and in Ukraine. But in Moscow and in Petrograd, shops open up stocking imported goods no one has seen for years outside the Kremlin. A regime which has sworn itself to be the eternal enemy of capitalism receives its first delivery of food aid from capitalist America. (Much of the shipment is promptly stolen by dock workers while the guards look the other way.) A government ideologically committed to the principles of communism once again legalises private trading for anyone over the age of sixteen. The hustlers and the hucksters that the impatient revolutionary once condemned as parasites now come out of the shadows, with their leather jackets, shiny shoes and their creed of buying cheap and selling high. Bright new cafés for the rich appear alongside drab canteens for the workers and the first American-run soup kitchen for the destitute. The sweet smell of fresh pastries is in the air. But only for those who can pay.
Old Bolsheviks tear up their party cards in disgust.
VIENNA: The value of the Austrian crown collapses further every week. Visitors from abroad find that their foreign currency makes them virtual millionaires in crisis-hit Vienna. A young New York psychoanalyst who comes to the city to be analysed by Freud–the precondition for being considered a true Freudian–thinks nothing of hiring a pianist from the Vienna Philharmonic to play the entire score of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier to a group of friends one evening, on a whim. Sigmund insists on charging ten dollars an hour for his services, to be paid in hard currency.
He is inundated with Anglo-Saxon student-patients, mostly budding psychoanalysts. What was once a quiet family apartment has been turned into a psychoanalytic assembly line–or a menagerie, perhaps. Freud’s pupils debate and discuss amongst themselves. One gives a paper on the spider as the symbol of the female genitalia, another expounds on the interpretation of dreams, a third talks about sexual perversion. A man in his mid-thirties, whom the other patients call ‘the imitation Freud’ on account of his trimming his beard and smoking his cigar in exactly the same way as the great man himself, delivers lectures on Jewish mythology.
But it is Freud himself they all want to spend time with, to whom they want to pour out their dreams and their desires. For Freud’s students he
is the master. For him, they are material, and sometimes disappointing material at that. An American from Atlanta comes to see Freud with a dream of being in a carriage pulled by two horses, one black and one white, to an unknown destination. Sigmund, who fancies himself an expert on America on the basis of his journey there ten years before, tells him that the dream clearly means that his Southern patient cannot decide whether to marry a white or a black woman. The American dares to question this interpretation. The two men argue. Freud eventually cuts him off and tells him to leave. Why should he waste his time on those who do not understand their true predicament? Fools–American ones at that–should not be suffered gladly.
How times have changed. Before, it used to be that Freud had to convince others of psychoanalysis; his supporters were few and far between. Now, the problem is the other way around. He must ensure that his science, his psychoanalysis, is not distorted by his over-keen acolytes. There are many who parrot his work these days, but few who really understand it. He is surrounded by pygmies. There has not been anyone like Jung in years–and he, of course, was a traitor.
At the end of listening to a particularly long-winded paper from one of his students on chess and the Oedipus complex, an enraged Freud tells the presenter that it is such meaningless papers that will bring about the fall of psychoanalysis. ‘Please desist from writing such papers again’, he fumes. ‘It is not productive and I do not want it.’ On another occasion, when fellow psychoanalysts break into a dispute over whether some have plagiarised Freud’s works–the worst epithet between them is to call each other ‘unanalysed’–Freud smashes his fist on the table at the cheek of it all. Why have they not consulted him, he asks? ‘I take this to be an insult’, he tells the shocked group, ‘because if this is what you do when I am still among you, I can imagine what will happen when I am really dead’.
MUNICH: If Hitler has learned one lesson from his political rise thus far it is this: extremism works. Provocation is an effective political technique. Violence now becomes the party’s second calling card besides anti-Semitism. When Nazi thugs break up a rally of Bavarians who want to separate from Germany, Adolf is delighted. The Bavarian leader was literally ‘dragged down from the podium by the outraged masses, and kicked out of the room’, he writes gleefully. Hitler is briefly held in police custody for incitement.
The nineteenth-century Prussian theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz once wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Hitler turns this famous dictum on its head, and suggests that the party needs to apply the tactics of Flanders in 1918 to the streets of Munich in 1921. ‘Just as during the war we moved from a war of position to a war of attack, so it must be now’, says the mangy field-runner when he meets members of the euphemistically named gymnastics and sports units of the party: ‘You too will be trained as storm-troopers’, he tells them. The Nazi militia is henceforward called the Sturmabteilung, or SA for short.
Adolf Hitler seeks to turn the national socialist movement into a political army: disciplined, regimented and uniformed. Local chapters are encouraged to sell swastika lapel pins at five marks each to be worn at all times. (‘If any Jew takes offence’, the party leader writes in an NSDAP circular, ‘he is to be manhandled ruthlessly’.) Hitler personally designs new party armbands: ten centimetres wide, blood red, with a nine-centimetre-diameter white circle in the middle and a black swastika. ‘The red is social, the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic’, he explains. ‘Honour these colours.’
MOSCOW: Go-siz-dat. Glav-kom-trud. Go-elro. Nar-kom-zem. Tsek-tran. Tsentro-soyuz. The workers’ republic has become a forest of acronyms. To enter it too deeply is to lose oneself amongst its trees, even if one has planted them oneself.
There are, of course, the acronyms that everyone in Moscow knows. Sovnarkom: the Council of People’s Commissars, the state body of which the impatient revolutionary is chairman. Politburo: the Communist cabal at the top of the party structure where things really get decided. Orgburo: its slightly less grand operational twin. (Stalin serves on both.) Comintern: the body charged with making the revolution happen worldwide, based in a Moscow mansion, and with an almost unlimited budget for global troublemaking. (‘Don’t economise’, Lenin instructs, ‘spend millions, many millions’.) Revoyensoviet: the revolutionary military council, Comrade Trotsky’s stomping ground. Cheka (soon to become the GPU): the ones you do not want to stop you in the street. Narkompros: the Commissariat of Enlightenment, charged with educating the masses and ensuring that they think the right way.
But those are just the tallest trees in the forest of acronyms. Then there are saplings like Rabrkin: the anti-bureaucracy commissariat set up by Lenin. Finally, there are the trees that are really more like weeds, the ones that grow in the shade, and do not seem to suffer from the lack of light. These carry acronyms most people have never heard of: Orgotdel, Uchraspred. They are the internal bodies of the Communist Party, the personnel department, the file keepers, the accountants, the administrative link between centre and periphery, those who assign jobs and shuffle people around the constantly growing apparat (the apparatus, as the Communist Party’s organisation is charmingly known).
And, when he is not dealing with nationalities’ issues for which he is also responsible, it is in amongst these obscure but powerful bodies that Comrade Stalin is to be found, toiling selflessly away in the forest undergrowth–and just occasionally tweaking matters to serve his own interests. (It is around this time that the Georgian gets his wife expelled from the party in the hope that this will persuade her to spend more time at home.) Stalin is perfect for these kinds of jobs. He remembers people’s names; Trotsky never would. You want someone to organise an agenda for the next Politburo? Stalin is your man. Someone who knows his way around the acronyms, who understands how everything links up? Stalin, again.
And it is from within this forest of acronyms that another soon arises–the nomenklatura, the list of Communist Party members to whom the choicest jobs will be doled out, with the grandest privileges and the best future prospects. With these jobs come automobiles and telephones. And loyalty to whoever put them there.
DOORN: The Kaiser’s entourage is split. Some think Lili a positive influence on old Wilhelm. (This group includes the Crown Prince, despite the fact that Lili used to be his mistress.) Others are more doubtful.
They worry about the press coverage if word should leak out that the Kaiser is now gallivanting around with a much younger woman. A recent book by an English guest at Amerongen paints a rather undignified and gossipy picture of the Kaiser’s home life, after all. A story about a young admirer would not help to solidify Wilhelm’s credentials as a heroic slave of the German nation, in mourning for both his country and his wife. And what if things with Lili go further? Wilhelm’s hopes of restoration would surely suffer if he were to commit himself to a partner deemed unsuitable by conservative monarchists at home.
There is a collective sigh of relief when the Kaiser eventually suggests Lili go on a trip to Germany to bag herself a Prince from the royal house of Hesse. Lili spills out her heart to a friend. ‘Best of all I’d like to marry the Kaiser’, she confesses, ‘as soon as possible really, seeing as he probably won’t live much longer… but if that isn’t possible, I’d be happy to take on one of the princes.’
LOS ANGELES, THE UNITED STATES: Clare Sheridan tours the stage sets of Hollywood’s film studios, travelling from ancient China to Russia to the Wild West just by stepping around a corner.
Clare likes Los Angeles. It is warm and pleasant and full of creative people. She likes the fact that nobody here seems to mind the rules too much, particularly when it comes to the prohibition on alcohol. One evening, Clare finds herself drinking absinthe in a Californian speakeasy. Another, she is taken to Venice Beach, where she tastes chewing gum for the first time.
The name on everyone’s lips in Los Angeles is Charlie Chaplin. People who have never met him talk about him quite intimately, as if they were clos
e friends. That is the price of fame: everyone thinks they know you, everyone thinks they own you. Clare is delighted to learn that Charlie has apparently read her books on Russia and the Bolsheviks and pronounced them rather good. There is no better publicity.
After a few weeks in the sun–and a trip up to San Francisco–Clare hits the jackpot. Charlie Chaplin has just returned from England–his first trip home since becoming a star. (In London, he tries to visit his old school incognito but ends up being mobbed, and declares the city a much sadder place than he remembers from before the war.) Clare is granted an audience with the hottest property in Hollywood. The two instantly become friends. They talk about their childhood memories. They watch The Kid together at a private screening, with Charlie occasionally tiptoeing up to the harmonium to add in music when he thinks the movie needs it. They discuss politics. Despite the rumours, Chaplin is not a Bolshevik, Clare discovers, just an instinctive internationalist who sees a world made up of millions of individual souls and wishes they would all get on. Winston’s cousin eventually persuades Charlie to sit for a sculpture of his head.
He dresses in a brown dressing gown for the occasion. When he gets fidgety, he stands up and wanders around the room playing the violin for a while, or the two of them break off for a cup of tea. Charlie examines the work in progress. ‘I find him very interesting, this fellow you have made!’ he tells her. ‘It might be the head of a criminal, mightn’t it?’ (Chaplin has a theory, Clare learns, that master criminals and artists have a similar psychological make-up: a desire to be bound by their own rules, rather than those of others.)
The two decide to set off on a camping trip along the Californian coast. A chef, Charlie’s secretary and some tents travel in a second automobile behind them. Chaplin is delighted to be referred to as ‘brother’ by the waiter in a roadside restaurant along the way. (Clare sees this as evidence that working men’s comradeship is alive and well in the United States.) They find a beautiful spot to camp and, for a day or two, an atmosphere of freedom and playfulness descends. Charlie rolls down the dunes with Clare’s son. He does comic impressions of the great Russian ballet dancers.
Crucible Page 54