MUNICH: A mania has taken hold of him. One night in November Adolf gives speeches in five different beer halls. In December, he appears in ten different venues over a period of four hours talking on the same theme: Jews, Marxists and other gravediggers of the Reich. Adolf is a creature of the night.
His hyperactivity pays off. His name starts to crop up in Italian diplomatic correspondence. Hitler’s growing celebrity draws the Duke of Anhalt, a young and rather impressionable aristocrat, to see him in action. (The Duke, unused to being jostled by the sweaty crowds of a beer hall, soon makes a getaway in his white Mercedes.) In Berlin, rumours swirl that Henry Ford is now funding the Nazis. (The New York Times reports that there is a portrait of Ford in Hitler’s study.) It is surely a backhanded compliment that the party has now been banned in large parts of Germany. Adolf claims there is a price on his head.
An American military attaché is sent to Munich to check up on the situation. He finds himself having an afternoon tête-à-tête with Adolf, eager for the chance to get his message out. Suiting his argument to his audience, Hitler presents the Nazi movement as fully dedicated to the payment of reasonable reparations–once a national dictatorship has been brought to power in Germany to defend the country against Bolshevism, hopefully with American financial help. Not entirely convinced, the attaché asks an old German friend to check up on Hitler at one of his events–to see whether the afternoon and evening versions match.
The tall German who now turns up at the attaché’s request to see Hitler speak is certainly a cut above Lüdecke. At Harvard, he entertained rich Americans on the pianoforte, and crossed paths with both the red-hot revolutionary John Reed and the author of The Waste Land. During the war he ran a fashionable art shop in New York. He is on nodding terms with Franklin Roosevelt from his luncheons at the Harvard Club and claims both Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford as former clients. He finds his old German homeland rather depressing these days. But in Adolf Hitler, he likes what he sees: a common man able to give the masses something to believe in. He does not seem to mind Hitler’s rancid anti-Semitism. These are just words, after all.
The tall German introduces himself to the former field-runner after the talk. His friends call him Putzi. His real name is Ernst Hanfstaengl.
ROME: Around eight in the evening, a messenger arrives at Clare Sheridan’s room in the Grand Hotel. Benito Mussolini will see her for a private interview.
There are the remains of a light meal on the table. He does not eat much, Benito explains, pushing the plate away. His expression is one of cold disdain, as if the world bores him. Clare notes that his room is filled with photographs, of himself. Benito talks grandiosely about his origins, his disillusionment with socialism during the war, and his devil-may-care attitude towards death. He offers to give Clare a Fascist uniform for her seven-year-old son. The black shirt and the death’s head emblem, he explains, will teach him to despise death. His own heart is like a desert, he says. It is the only way for a leader to live, he rhapsodises: lonely, pure and strong. The only thing that means anything to him now is ‘le pouvoir’–‘power’. As he says this, he clenches his jaw and looks Clare long and hard in the eyes. The next night, he dares to kiss her hand. He seems determined to seduce her.
Clare suspects she is under Italian police surveillance during her time in Rome. The British Secret Intelligence Service considers her a person of interest too. Not much spying is required for the Rome station to make its report to London. At a party thrown for Clare by an Italian noblewoman, she publicly declaims the advantages of Bolshevism and free love in particular. Another night, in a restaurant where the British Ambassador is also dining she talks loudly–wishing to be overheard, clearly–about how Benito Mussolini has converted her from Bolshevism to fascism. She is already hard at work making a bust of the Fascist leader–for posterity, she claims.
The commission does not work out. Mussolini decides he has told Clare too much. She rejects his violent advances. He tells her not to write anything about him. He writes her a note in French asking her to return any preliminary work she has done on his bust. ‘J’aime pas les monuments faits aux vivants’, he writes, ‘leur résultat est de veillir’–‘I do not like monuments of the living; it makes them look old.’ Clare decides she does not like Italy, after all.
VIENNA: The work of Sigmund Freud is stopped by news from Egypt: the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. ‘Such important things and so tangible’, he writes to a friend in mid-December.
At home, things are rather less exciting. ‘Our money is stable and worth nothing’, Freud writes to his nephew Sam. ‘Vienna is left quiet and lonely. All eyes are turned to Germany and the impending collapse there’. To Manchester Freud sends a photograph of himself with his latest grandson. From London he orders the latest volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which psychoanalysis is fully detailed for the first time.
MOSCOW: Vladimir dictates a note to his wife Nadya, to be sent to Comrade Trotsky, thanking him for his recent support in the Politburo (against a position taken by Stalin). He begs Leon to continue such work. Finally, Lenin and Trotsky seem to be moving closer together again.
Stalin gets wind of Vladimir’s actions. Furious, he rings up Nadya. He accuses her of going against the express wishes of the party that Lenin be isolated from politics from now on. She is sticking her nose in where it is not wanted. She is risking her own husband’s health. Nadya is deeply upset at such treatment. She does not dare tell her husband what Stalin has said.
The impatient revolutionary is truly impatient again–desperate to get his thoughts on paper before it is too late, before the Politburo cabal takes over everything. It feels like that hurried departure from Zurich five years ago. So much to do. So little time. So many mistakes of others to be corrected. That sense of being the only man with the right answers–and yet far away from getting them through to where they matter.
He can only work in short bursts. He starts dictating a series of new notes to his secretary. He orders that they be kept strictly confidential. They are not. Stalin commands that the notes be burned. A new directive is issued limiting Lenin to five to ten minutes of dictation each day.
LAUSANNE: There is still no agreed draft treaty on the horizon. The victors of the Great War grow impatient. İsmet Pasha holds firm. He quotes Voltaire. The West has interfered with Turkey’s national development for centuries, he says. That must now stop. Only full sovereignty will do. No special rights for foreigners on Turkish soil. No foreign oversight of national finances, railways or waterways.
Behind each abstract term raised for discussion–nation, state, citizen, rights–lie the hopes and interests of hundreds of thousands of huddled Greeks and Turks on either side of the Aegean Sea, fearful for their future as a minority in someone else’s country. How can the problem be solved? An extraordinary solution is discussed: a compulsory trans-Aegean population exchange. Anatolia’s remaining Greeks will be swapped for northern Greece’s Muslims, ethnic cleansing sanctified by treaty and codified in law. The British Foreign Secretary calls it ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution’. But who wants to guarantee the rights of a Greek minority in Turkey, or a Muslim minority in Greece? And why should either state accept the possibility of an enemy people residing in its midst?
As the year winds down, conversation moves from the conference table to the dining room. The head of the Russian delegation in Lausanne sweet-talks the Scandinavians and the Americans over caviar and vodka, discussing painting, literature and other countries’ politics. ‘Mussolini’, Chicherin says, ‘has a passion, not a program’. The Italians throw a dinner party at which İsmet Pasha indulges in his taste for champagne. But the Turks remain as obstinate as ever. ‘You remind me of nothing so much as a music box’, the British Foreign Secretary tells İsmet Pasha one day: ‘you play the same old tune day after day until we are heartily sick of it–sovereignty, sovereignty, sovereignty.’
The holiday break is cancelled. The diplomats and politicia
ns struggle on.
MOJI, JAPAN–BERLIN: The Nobel laureate Albert Einstein has another photograph taken of him. It must be the ten thousandth picture, he calculates. In Moji, he plays the violin at a children’s Christmas party.
WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow instructs Dr Grayson in the pronunciation of the latest Italian word he has learned. The middle syllable, he insists, should be pronounced like ‘cheese’. ‘Fas-chees-ti’, he repeats, for his doctor’s edification. Has Grayson had time to study the photographs of Mussolini’s face, he asks? Woodrow has already drawn his own conclusions. ‘Shifty’, he decides.
MOSCOW: On the last day of the year, a new state officially comes into being: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As a consequence of war, disease and famine there are ten million fewer people in the Soviet Union than there were on the same territory in 1917.
1923
People are doing far too well. Only when things are going really badly will more people come over to us.
Adolf Hitler
WINTER
DEARBORN: ‘Today he looms a powerful and enigmatic figure on the political horizon’, says the New York Times. Updated photographs of Henry Ford have been sent out to automobile dealerships around the country. Copies of his new autobiography have been procured. Estimates are made of the increase in sales the Dearborn Independent might expect if he were to announce his candidacy for the presidency. The campaign machinery is primed. ‘Ford for President’ associations have started sprouting up across the country. But no one knows whether he will run.
MOSCOW: Vladimir asks his secretary to retrieve from his safe the short secret notes on the future of the regime he wrote at the end of the year. He has a codicil to add. Perhaps he is fleetingly aware of the irony. It was supposed to be workers’ rule, dictatorship of the proletariat. Now all that really matters is who is on top–who is in, who is out. Personality, it turns out, is essential.
Vladimir dictates: ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, while fully tolerable in the milieu and company amongst us Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary’. The Georgian has accumulated too much power. He ought to be removed. Vladimir has left it very late.
ROME–LAKE GARDA: His picture is everywhere: on postcards, in newsreels, on bars of soap. Italy’s illustrated magazines cannot get enough of him. Photographers follow him everywhere, whatever he is doing: arriving at a train station, going for a walk. The camera loves him; he loves the camera. No one knows what Adolf looks like, but pretty much everyone in Europe knows the face of Benito Mussolini.
Benito the former journalist–the management of Il Popolo now passes to his brother–knows the importance of getting his image right. He has read books about the psychology of the crowds, about how they need to be fed on illusions of omnipresence and omnipotence for a politician to become a cult figure. Benito is obsessed with the news (even the headlines that his own press office has created). His lieutenants claim he gets through dozens if not hundreds of newspapers a day. Every reporter in Italy is thus put on notice that they are being watched. Mussolini is the most written-about man in the country. Celebrity-watchers declare him magnetic. Church leaders call him providential.
And yet, as omnipresent as he is becoming on the pages of the newspapers, Benito’s position as Italy’s leader is not unassailable. He is still a politician rather than a dictator: he must still flatter to survive. His authority–even over the Fascist movement–cannot be taken for granted. If Mussolini falters, others may pounce. Fascism’s regional bosses remain as difficult as ever–they have grown too used to deciding matters for themselves. And then there is the man Benito really worries about. Gabriele D’Annunzio, although a brooding offstage presence these days, is a potential lightning rod for opposition, a national icon beloved of millions of Italians. Out of sight, but not out of mind.
In early January, Benito writes Gabriele a long telegram, asking him to publicly disavow rumours that he is not one hundred per cent behind the new regime. Such stories are damaging to the hardest-working government Italy has seen in fifty years, Mussolini writes, a government that is ‘restoring the spirit and the backbone of the nation’. D’Annunzio responds with an alarming boast. ‘Is it not the case that the best of the so-called “fascist” movement was generated by my spirit?’ he asks Benito: ‘was today’s national revanche not announced by me a good forty years ago?’
Such self-confidence is dangerous in a rival. The man must be watched.
OUTSIDE MUNICH: One weekend at the beginning of the year, a hundred men dressed in army-surplus gear march along forested country lanes outside Munich. They wear Austrian ski-caps and swastika armbands. They carry flags and beat drums. In bad weather they are given the use of an army drill-hall by a sympathetic officer.
The serial swindler Kurt Lüdecke supervises the drill, hoping to provide a great surprise for Adolf Hitler on a Nazi Party day planned for a few weeks hence: his own special troop of the SA professionals. He stores the uniforms and boots at home. He buys guns and grenades on the black market. All quite cheap for those with a bit of foreign currency.
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: Reverend Eason, a long-time thorn in Marcus Garvey’s side, is shot leaving a political meeting in a Louisiana church. One bullet hits him in the back. A second enters his skull by his right eye. The reverend was shortly expected to testify against Garvey in a trial in which the UNIA leader stands accused of using the mail service for the purposes of selling stock in a fraudulent venture. Before he dies, Eason is able to make public his suspicions about who is responsible for the attack on his life. ‘I am positive’, a local newspaper reports him saying, ‘that my assailants were acting on instructions to put me out of the way and prevent my appearing as a witness.’
Marcus Garvey announces a fresh speaking tour. Du Bois writes another piece in The Crisis, calculating the membership of the UNIA in thousands rather than the millions claimed. Harlem is more split than ever between the two men.
CANNES: Has Winston had his moment? Here is a forty-seven-year-old man with a somewhat chequered career and a reputation for warmongery to live down. He is out of office and his party is out of power.
The black dog gnaws at Winston. Over the winter, he throws himself headlong into other activities: painting and writing, in particular. He meets with his cousin Clare, now writing her memoirs of her life during the last year. She tells him how beastly Mussolini was to her. She gets her revenge by writing a rather comical piece for the American newspapers, comparing Benito’s daily dress to that of a magician at a second-rate Christmas party (it becomes front-page news in California).
In January, under a familiar French sun, Winston’s spirits begin to revive. One day he meets an old friend on a beach and enquires what he is up to. Painting, and trying to forget the war, the Frenchman replies–and you? Churchill explains that he is finishing the first volume of his memoirs of the Great War. His French friend finds the subject of the last war ‘like digging up a cemetery’. ‘Yes’, replies Winston Churchill, a little twinkle in his eye, ‘but with a resurrection.’
SMYRNA: Mustafa Kemal’s mother dies in İzmir. Her son hears the news while touring the country to drum up support for the political party he has founded. He sends others to arrange the funeral. His priority is the nation.
As Mustafa rides from town to town across barren Anatolia, he sells his vision of a modern, secular Turkey arising from a decade of war. He talks of the change he wishes to see, nothing less than the cultural revolution he spoke of in Karlsbad all those years ago, when he was just a humble servant of the Sultan. Now the Sultan is no more, and Kemal’s radicalism has come of age. The country will no longer bow and scrape to anyone, he says. It will regain its national self-confidence. Turkish, rather than Arabic, will be the national language. The nation, rather than religion or class, will be the organising principle of society. The strength of Kemal’s convictions is intoxicating.
Traditions that can be harnessed for national renewal will be embr
aced. Those that prevent the country’s development will be discarded. Clare Sheridan will be proved wrong: Turkey will be a country filled with sculptures, he declares, unafraid to represent the human form in stone for fear the people will mistake them for false gods. Religion will be repurposed. ‘I do not like the clerics’, Kemal says frankly. A few weeks later he gives a sermon in a mosque, suggesting they should become agents of change rather than dead weights on society.
Change, Mustafa Kemal tells his rapturous audiences, is inevitable and irrevocable. ‘The law of the revolution is above all existing laws’, he announces, and the blood spilled in the wars of independence is proof of the people’s vitality and determination. When he finally visits his mother’s grave in İzmir, he swears he will give his own life for Turkish sovereignty if necessary. As negotiations continue on the country’s final peace deal in Lausanne, such rhetoric carries particular meaning.
Two days later Mustafa Kemal does something he said he never would: he marries. The marriage ceremony is conducted by an Islamic cleric, but according to Mustafa’s instructions. Lâtife is his joyous bride. There is no honeymoon. In Germany, Fikriye is distraught when she hears the news. To Kemal’s fury, she decides to return to Turkey without his permission.
MOSCOW: Vladimir orders books to his bedside. The subjects vary: organisational theory by the American time-and-motion man F. W. Taylor, a history of the Russian cooperative movement, a book about imperialism in China. Nadya hovers around her husband. He succeeds in dictating a few articles for Pravda a few minutes a day over several weeks. It is hard work. His secretaries note his frustration. If he is interrupted in mid-sentence, he loses his train of thought entirely and has to start again.
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