Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  The articles go over familiar ground. Vladimir dictates a review of a history of the revolution of 1917 (which he castigates for being pedantic in its interpretations of Marxism). He complains about bureaucracy and singles out the inspectorate of which Stalin has been commissar for particular criticism. (The Politburo, not wanting the public to have any idea of political disagreement at the top, consider blocking this article, or even producing a single dummy version of Pravda for Vladimir personally in order to make him believe it was published.) He returns to the promise of electrification. New power plants are being built, he writes. It is coming.

  Stalin occasionally phones to ensure Lenin is not doing any work of a political nature, worried that he is preparing to ambush him at a party congress planned for March, perhaps with Trotsky’s help. The great drama of the Russian revolution has turned into a three-sided palace farce: the sick Tsar Vladimir; the sly politicians Stalin and the other members of the anti-Trotsky bloc; and the arrogant soldier-prince Leon, who still expects things to go his way.

  ESSEN, THE RUHR VALLEY, GERMANY: Using the pretext of the late delivery of a certain amount of timber and telegraph poles–part of Germany’s in-kind reparations–French and Belgian troops enter the Ruhr valley, the industrial heartland of western Germany. British protests are overruled. The French parliament votes almost unanimous support.

  In diplomatic correspondence with Berlin the occupation is presented by Paris as a civilian, purely technical matter. The presence of so many machine guns and tanks is explained as a matter of ensuring the security of the engineers needed to make Germany’s coal mines fulfil the terms of the Versailles Treaty. French newspapers emphasise the moderation of the French approach, in strict conformity with the law, with no motive other than to enforce the treaty terms.

  The Germans denounce French cynicism. The French premier, notes one of Germany’s leading papers, ‘gives the impression of a man who realises he and his country are falling into the most awful stupidity, and tries to salvage something at the last minute by claiming an invasion is not an invasion and an occupation not an occupation’. ‘It would seem like a joke, were it not so ridiculous’, the paper concludes. In London, the unilateral French move is considered a seismic shift in European relations ‘as far reaching in its effects as the declaration of war in 1914 or the armistice of 1918’. Mussolini’s attempts to play the peacemaker change nothing.

  The streets of Essen, the Ruhr’s main city, are quiet when the French cavalry ride in. A statue of Alfred Krupp, once owner of Europe’s biggest steelworks, surveys the occupation in silence. The Mayor of Essen refuses to break off his wife’s birthday party to greet the arriving French general. When the two men meet the general is met with a protest speech against the occupation and Versailles. In a message to the German people from Berlin, President Ebert calls for passive resistance: ‘The welfare or misery of the whole depend upon the iron self-control of each individual.’ He admits he has no idea how long the occupation may last.

  Over the next few days, the invasion proceeds in carefully planned stages. The French make clear they expect the German police to keep doing their job and public services to run as usual. French military law will be applied if needed. A protest by a few hundred nationalist youths in Essen is broken up by local police. One evening in Bochum a German civilian is killed when a French guard-post comes under attack. The French want to keep down the costs of the occupation. Apartments are requisitioned. Private houses taken over for the higher ranks. In one case, French soldiers demand the German local authorities provide a large quantity of barbed wire. The demand is refused.

  MUNICH: Adolf Hitler spits rage. He knows who to blame for the occupation of the Ruhr: German politicians who have chosen to disarm the country rather than resist. He harps back to the war. The roots of 1923, he argues at a meeting in the Zirkus Krone on the day the French cross into the Ruhr, lie in 1918.

  ‘Germany was unconquered’ in that year, Hitler shouts, ‘in four and a half years, twenty-six enemies could not bring Germany to her knees’. Defeat came only when the ‘November criminals’–the Social Democrats and revolutionaries–‘stabbed the old army in the back’. The country’s politicians have left Germany without weapons and without honour: ‘France treats our Germany as less than one of its African colonies’. The speech is carried in all the main newspapers in Munich. It is even reported as far away as Berlin. ‘The National Socialists want to organise an army of revenge for the Fatherland’, one newspaper tells its readers. Adolf refuses to sign up to the idea of national solidarity and passive resistance under the leadership of the current government in Berlin, the political heirs of the traitors of 1918.

  There are ‘two fronts’ on which patriotic Germans must fight now, Hitler declares, one in the Ruhr and one behind the lines against the Jews. ‘We know that if they get to power our heads will roll in the sand’–just like the French aristocrats who went to the guillotine in the French Revolution. ‘But let me tell you something’, screams the mangy field-runner, ‘if we are at the helm it is their heads which will roll–and misery upon them’.

  Copies of the German translation of Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew, are piled high at Nazi headquarters.

  VIENNA: Sigmund Freud, the eminent psychoanalyst, swallows hard. With his tongue he feels around the inside of his mouth. There! He is sure of it. There again! A roughness inside his mouth, a faint pressure, something swollen. Dark premonitions fill Freud’s mind. He banishes them and keeps quiet. Inwardly, he wonders whether he will ever make it to Egypt.

  He writes to Sam in Manchester with family news. ‘Oliver had got a position at Duisburg on the Rhine and expected to enter on February first’, Freud tells his nephew, ‘but he could not get there as the French have broken all communications.’ A family wedding is planned, ‘but who can fix any date in such a time’?

  ACROSS IRELAND: The government has learned its lesson: there is no hope of conciliation. An end to the civil war can only be brought about by the application of overwhelming–and if necessary, brutal–force. Military courts dispense summary justice. Anyone found with a weapon is liable to be shot. Reprisals are undertaken, both officially and unofficially. Old British methods are applied by Irish forces.

  Republicans adopt a scorched-earth policy, blowing up bridges and sabotaging infrastructure. More grand houses are burned down in rural areas, to warn landowners against supporting the Free State. (In Dublin, Yeats’s house receives an armed guard.) The IRA expand their list of legitimate targets, as if a greater whirlwind of destruction will yield better results. It is a strategy born from weakness and desperation. The facts are plain: the republicans hold no Irish towns and are outnumbered everywhere.

  ESSEN–BERLIN–MUNICH: In the Ruhr, Berlin’s call for passive resistance is being heeded. The directors of the Ruhr’s main industrial concerns declare that they will not obey orders from the French, and are taken into custody. Civil servants receive instructions to ignore French commands. Everything is to be done to make the occupiers’ task as hard as possible. Company archives are hidden. Statistical records are destroyed and empty trains redirected to unoccupied Germany. Hotels and restaurants close their doors to foreigners. Newspapers refuse to publish French directives.

  Sometimes passive resistance turns active. The signalling system of the Ruhr valley railway network is sabotaged. Telephone lines are cut. By early February, goods transport has frozen up entirely. A wave of strikes closes down mines and factories. No coal is sent to France and Belgium.

  Berlin claims the invasion of the Ruhr is itself a breach of Versailles: Germany is not the aggressor, but the victim. German aid committees take out full-page appeals for help in American newspapers. In Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm sympathetic articles appear suggesting that the French are creating famine conditions in Germany. German papers portray the French as rapacious, mindless, evil, subhuman. The presence of African colonial troops in the French army of occupation in the Rhineland–th
ough not in the Ruhr–is considered a particular source of shame by some in Germany, sharpening nationalist fury at the French occupation with a racial edge and giving rise to the casual use of racist imagery across the board. The cover of Simplicissimus, a liberal satirical magazine published in Munich, depicts a French trooper as a monkey with a dagger between its teeth and a blood-smeared sabre dangling by its feet.

  Inside, the same issue of Simplicissimus sports a satirical ode ‘To Adolf Hitler’, mocking him and his followers for exploiting the crisis with their prophetic airs, rather than rallying around the government:

  He is the saviour! He is the prophet!

  So whisper the excited old-timers,

  Speaking of heavenly apparitions,

  And God’s path marked out

  The magazine costs two hundred and fifty marks these days. One year ago, it cost just thirty-six.

  SAN SEBASTIAN, BASQUE COUNTRY, SPAIN: Zita Habsburg settles with her family in a little corner of paradise tucked between France and Spain, where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic Ocean. Her house is bought for her by a local charitable committee. The family’s private income–from its share of a Rhineland winery–does not meet the bills of the imperial household. In Paris, a submission is made to the representatives of the victorious wartime powers requesting a stipend for Zita of no less than seventy thousand Swiss francs a month.

  A suite of tutors teach the Habsburg brood in exile. The older children receive Hungarian lessons–just in case. Little Otto’s tenth birthday is celebrated by thousands in Budapest, Zita is informed by a Hungarian loyalist. He does not tell her that the church service was conducted by a junior priest, and that Horthy ostentatiously stayed away.

  There is little immediate hope of restoration. Like Lenin in exile, Zita often uses code names in correspondence with the outside world. Little by little, anything Charles and Zita took with them into exile is sold.

  ROME: What should a Fascist leader who has won power through a show of force, but then been appointed as premier serving a constitutional monarch, wear to work? Should he play to his base: the Fascist blackshirts and disappointed D’Annunzians? Or should he try to appeal to big business and the political centre?

  When Benito meets the King, he generally opts for a morning suit and top hat, the clothes his respectful predecessors would have worn. This presents Mussolini as a pragmatic builder, not a wrecker. His quotidian attire is more workaday, a hint of radical chic coupled with the sobriety of a statesman: a starchy wing-collared shirt (Mustafa Kemal likes these too) and a black (or powder-grey) bowler hat. (This becomes his standard get-up until, years later, watching one of the American movies he so loves, Benito has the horrible realisation that the only people who still wear bowler hats these days apart from British stiffs are Laurel and Hardy, his favourite comedians.)

  Sometimes he spices things up by wearing a black shirt–thus thrilling the hardcore Fascists and demonstrating that he is still really one of them, rather than a toady to the establishment. One day in January, having incorporated the blackshirts into a formal national volunteer force under the authority of the premier, Benito appears for the first time in military uniform–as a corporal of the militia.

  LAUSANNE: İsmet Pasha plays billiards and drinks green chartreuse. He tells the Americans he would like to see the United States one day. Of course, State Department officials say–just as soon as he has signed the peace treaty. İsmet slaps his knee, laughs uproariously and takes another swig. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, tries to reason with him, demanding he accept that foreigners in Turkey must retain their special status before the courts, given all the stories of mistreatment and abuse. Curzon ends up smashing his cane against the wall in making his point.

  Finally, one Sunday afternoon, İsmet Pasha is called to Curzon’s suite at the Hotel Beau Rivage for a make-or-break discussion. The Orient Express leaves on the dot of nine that evening, the Foreign Secretary announces, and he intends to be on it whatever the outcome. (The tactic worked for Lloyd George with the Irish, why not for Curzon with the Turks?) İsmet is presented with a final draft treaty for him to sign. He goes off to consult with his advisers. When he returns, he rejects the treaty. Nothing less than full sovereignty, he declares.

  Curzon has his train held at Lausanne for half an hour in case the Turks regret their decision. The Americans work on İsmet to bring him round. He seems willing to concede a point or two, subject to further discussion. The Americans race to the station to try and haul the British back to the negotiating table. Five minutes too late. The Orient Express has gone.

  MUNICH: The Nazis plan a series of fascisti-type events around town on what they call a ‘Party Day’. The Bavarian authorities suspect the planned demonstrations are cover for a coup attempt. Some want the demonstrations (and the SA) banned. Others warn that a ban could backfire, giving the Nazis more free press coverage and making the government look afraid. The authorities draw up strict limitations instead. Adolf reacts badly, warning the police that the dedication of the SA’s standards must be allowed to go ahead as planned and that if force is used to try to prevent it then he, Adolf Hitler, is willing to be killed on the spot defending his men. Such action by the government would only embolden the Communists. A single bullet against his SA men, Hitler warns, and Bavaria’s government will be overthrown in two hours.

  In Munich there is crisis meeting after crisis meeting to decide how to handle matters. The generals are asked their view. Bavaria’s patriotic associations, energised by events in the Ruhr, are sounded out. A state of emergency is declared. The police hold a last-minute meeting with Hitler. It is too late now to cancel the event, he says: the guests are already on their way. But he promises–on his honour–that there will be no violence. The SA will not march through town in formation. He warns the Bavarian police of negative consequences should the event not be allowed to go ahead. Surely the authorities would not want to see several thousand angry citizens just let loose on the streets.

  The party day goes ahead with few modifications. The government looks weak. Hitler gives a dozen triumphant speeches around Munich. The serial swindler and one-time Nazi ambassador Kurt Lüdecke does not hear any of them. Tipped off about his paramilitary training activities, the police take him in for questioning that morning. Lüdecke’s apartment is turned upside down. Police find a Mexican passport and a stash of foreign currency. Adolf does not bother to visit or get in touch with him during the weeks he is in jail. The serial swindler is abandoned.

  JERUSALEM, BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE: Albert Einstein is ferried around in a chauffeur-driven motor car that used to belong to the Kaiser.

  What a change there has been from the Palestine of 1898, when Wilhelm visited the place on an imperial tour, rode into Jerusalem on horseback in emulation of a medieval pilgrimage, declared his fondness for the absolute rule of the Ottoman Sultan, briefly raising and then dashing the hopes of the Zionist Theodore Herzl that Germany might throw its weight behind the idea of a semi-autonomous Jewish homeland in the ancient land of Israel. The German Empire is no more. The Ottoman Empire is defunct. The British are in charge now, and the promise of a Jewish homeland is underwritten in London rather than Berlin.

  The British High Commissioner shows Albert around old Jerusalem, walking along the city’s ancient battlements to point out the sights. Einstein is not sure he likes it much, at first. He describes Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall as ‘people with a past but without a present’. He prefers the striking modernity of Tel Aviv, where he is taken to a power station and a brick factory. This is what excites Albert most: things being built, harmony through work, a certain egalitarianism of the classes and the sexes. ‘The common people know no nationalism’, he jots down in his travel diary after spending time first with a Jewish settler and his Arab friend, then with an Arab writer and his German wife. Surely this is reason for hope?

  The highlight of Albert’s visit to Palestine is a lecture on relativity in the audit
orium of the British Mandate Police School on Mount Scopus, billed as the first scientific lecture in the temporary halls of the new Hebrew University. In order to ensure he is best understood by a mixed audience consisting of local Arabs and Jews as well as the British, Albert speaks in French. Towards the end of his trip he visits a kibbutz by Lake Tiberias, set up by Zionists inspired by the principles of socialism. Will he come back? people ask him. ‘My heart says yes but my reason says no’, Einstein writes.

  CHAMBY, SWITZERLAND: Up in the Alps, Ernest stops shaving. He lays off the journalism for a while. With the loss of the valise, he wonders what to do about his writing–his proper writing. A few of his poems are published over the winter in Chicago. That’s it.

  Ezra Pound calls the loss of the manuscripts an act of God. He advises Ernest to rewrite what he can remember. It will be better that way anyhow. ‘Memory is the best critic’, he explains. By way of thanks, the Hemingways decide to visit Rapallo, searching out Pound and his wife in the Hotel Riviera Splendide. Somewhere along the way, Hadley reveals that she is pregnant. Ernest feels trapped.

  NEW YORK–WASHINGTON DC: The rivalry between Marcus Garvey and William Du Bois has now developed into bitter enmity. Garvey regularly calls Du Bois a traitor to the race, an ‘unfortunate mulatto’ who wishes he were French. In February, Du Bois describes Garvey as ‘a little fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head’. He declares that Garveyism is a ‘bubble’ which now finally has burst, however appealing the ideas behind the Black Star Line or the undoubted appeal of the back-to-Africa refrain. The two men have never even met.