Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  The Italian premier is too busy with the real stuff of politics: sidelining his enemies, setting Fascist rivals against each other, opening highways, and establishing himself as the only game in town. ‘I am not so proud as to suggest that the man who speaks to you and fascism constitute only one identity,’ Benito tells a congress of Fascist women in Venice, ‘but four years of history have shown quite clearly that Mussolini and fascism are two aspects of the same nature, two bodies and one soul, or two souls and one body.’

  He talks about destiny. He explains how, although he is descended from the labouring classes, his soul is that of an aristocrat, which is why he recoils from the double-dealing of parliamentary governments. He rejects those who suggest he compromise his values. ‘I cannot abandon fascism’, Mussolini says, ‘because I created it, I brought it up, I protected it, sometimes I scolded it, and I still hold it within my fist: always!’

  SUMMER

  ACROSS EUROPE–NEW YORK: The Tsar’s mother has returned to her native Denmark. Wrangel and his family take up residence in a rented villa by the Danube outside Belgrade. Denikin is in Budapest and Yudenich in the south of France. White Russians circulate in ever-smaller social circles, whirling with intrigue. Moscow has set up a fake monarchist organisation to make the whole thing spin faster into oblivion, wasting the émigré community’s time on the chimera of anti-Communist resistance from within the Soviet Union.

  In certain cafés in Paris and Prague, more Russian is spoken than French or Czech. ‘New York has so many Russian nobles that they are in danger of losing their identity merely by force of numbers’, the New York Times reports. Titled ladies take up new jobs as seamstresses. The former editor of Petrograd’s leading newspaper is now said to be working in a hospital laundry uptown. Whatever they do, White Russians stick together: ‘They gather in restaurants, pull down the shades, close the doors, dim the lights and are in Russia again–that lost, magical, mystical Russia of yesterday.’

  MUNICH: ‘What does Hitler look like?’ asks the magazine Simplicissimus (price seven hundred and fifty marks, up by half since April). There are no photographs of him so people must use their imagination. Some imagine him fat, others imagine him thin. Some have heard about the fanatical gleam in his eyes, others about the prominence of his mouth. Does he have a jutting chin, or a prominent forehead? Not all these mental pictures can be accurate. When the magazine’s cartoonist travels up to Berlin for a few days, he is asked all kinds of questions about the true appearance of Bavaria’s new far-right Wunderkind.

  In response, the cartoonist draws sixteen very different-looking pictures of Hitler, focusing on the attributes others ascribe to him. One depicts a well-defined mouth, in mid-rant, looming out of an otherwise faint and featureless face. Another shows a washed-out figure where the only noticeable feature is a pair of large ears: to better hear the voice of the people. The cartoons grow more absurd. One shows a man with a flowing beard dressed in a prophet’s smock, reflecting one Berliner’s question as to whether Hitler looks, in fact, a little bit like the Nordic god Wotan. ‘Is it true’, asks another, ‘that he only ever appears in public wearing a black mask?’

  ‘Hitler is not an individual at all’, the cartoonist writes in the caption under his last representation of him: an abstract jumble of Bavarian beer mugs, a knife (about to plunged in an imaginary back, perhaps), a handgun, a swastika and black thunderclouds above: ‘He is a condition–only the Futurists can draw him.’

  PARIS: Trying to revive his flagging fortunes, his Parisian novelty value now well and truly worn off, Tristan Tzara decides to stage a new show. Banned from booking any theatres himself, he has to take on a few Russian partners for the enterprise.

  The plans which emerge from this joint effort are for a rather tame avant-garde variety show, a far cry from the Dadaist événements of previous years: some light music by Stravinsky and a few readings. There is nothing here to shock a Parisian audience brought up on The Rite of Spring. Tzara does not bother to ask Breton’s poet friends whether he can use their work; he puts them in the programme anyway. André is furious.

  NEW YORK: One Friday in early summer, Marcus Garvey’s trial for mail fraud finally gets under way.

  The atmosphere is tense. Garvey supporters are said to have stockpiled weapons. The captain of one of the Black Star Line ships is said to have been intimidated with threats of violence to ensure his testimony is favourable. After discovering that his own lawyer thinks he should plead guilty to secure a reduced sentence, Garvey opts to conduct his own defence. In his last speech to his followers before heading to his trial, Garvey name-checks himself fifty-six times, and compares his courage going into battle with that of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914. ‘I am saying to those who think they are getting even with Garvey, when Garvey dies a million other Garveys will rise up’, he declares. ‘Garvey goes to court like a man.’ He claims it will be the biggest trial in American court history.

  He is not as good a lawyer as he is an orator. Garvey is jailed for five years. There is no sympathy from William Du Bois. ‘I think that Mr Marcus Garvey had an unusually fair trial and that, all things considered, he got a very lenient sentence’, Du Bois writes to a friend in Florida.

  ESSEN–SCHÖNAU– MUNICH: Schlageter’s body is transported back to his home town in the Black Forest. Wherever the train carrying his corpse stops it is greeted by processions of nationalist associations. The rector of Giessen University, just outside Frankfurt, announces that ‘the name of Schlageter will be inscribed in our hearts, where he lives as a glorious example of love of the Fatherland, of unwavering belief in the future of the German people, and inspiring heroic loyalty to the death.’ In the student town of Freiburg, thirty thousand people turn out. The family ceremony in Schönau is overwhelmed. Schlageter’s name is mentioned even in Moscow, where the Comintern debates whether to treat him as a hero struggling against French profiteers.

  In Munich, nationalist associations hold their own commemorative ceremony with Ludendorff in attendance. Hitler claims that Schlageter’s death proves that freedom will only come through armed action. At the city’s St Boniface church, a religious service honouring Schlageter is held and SA standards are sprinkled with holy water.

  Schlageter becomes a Nazi icon. The Völkischer Beobachter publishes and republishes accounts of the martyr’s last hours, emphasising his Christ-like composure in the face of death. An SA motorbike parade to pay homage in Schlageter’s home town is organised. Schlageter trinkets are produced. Putzi contributes with a song. ‘Our movement is a restless force’, Hitler tells a crowd in the Bavarian town of Passau, after another flag-waving procession, ‘and those who come to us are those ready for battle’. After the May setback, membership starts rocketing up again.

  PARIS: On the night of Tzara’s show, the spark that sets thing off is, strangely enough, the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. As part of the spectacle, the artist’s name is maliciously recited on stage as if he were a war victim: ‘Pablo Picasso, dead on the field of honour’. Breton rushes up to defend the Spaniard from being treated this way and orders the reader to vacate the premises. When he refuses, Breton strikes out with his cane, breaking the poor man’s arm.

  Tzara, the anti-establishment, anti-everything founder of Dada, then does what any impresario would in such a situation: he calls the police. (He later instructs a lawyer to seek damages, too.) Breton and his companions are chucked out onto the street. But it is Tzara’s reputation which is in tatters. He is no longer shocking. But nor is he commercial. The theatre owner cancels the show’s second night. The Russians split. André takes himself on a well-deserved holiday to Brittany for a spot of fishing and ponders his next move.

  ESSEN: A full-blown terrorist campaign is now under way in the Ruhr. Belgian soldiers are shot while checking passes. A curfew is introduced which forbids Germans from using their gardens at certain times of the day and requires them to keep their windows shut; curfew-breakers are liable to be shot. Later, locals ar
e banished from the trams, and cafés are shut down. When two French adjutants are shot in Dortmund, six German civilians are summarily executed in return. On the last day of June another railway bridge is dynamited. Nine Belgian soldiers die. The morale of the occupying forces begins to crack.

  Attempts at diplomatic resolution fail. Paris sticks to its guns, insisting it has no political goals in the Ruhr, while making plain that, whatever happens next, the mechanisms of economic control may remain there for a long while to come. The French are willing to negotiate, but only if German resistance ends first. Berlin cannot budge for fear of a nationalist backlash–and how can it call off a resistance movement it does not control? London tries to break the deadlock, calling for level heads and common sense. Such efforts are rebuffed. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, the French respond. Moreover, when it comes to reparations, ‘the German government will never recognise any amount as just and reasonable, and if it does, will deny it on the following day.’ They cannot be trusted.

  An edict is announced requiring German officials be kept within the blast zone while improvised explosive devices are dismantled in the Ruhr. They are also required to be the first to physically investigate them, in case they are booby-trapped. Hostages are forced to ride the region’s trains to discourage night-time attacks.

  GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN: Seven months after the award of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, Einstein finally gets around to giving his Nobel lecture in Sweden–on the subject of relativity. He also tells the audience about his ambition to formulate a unified field theory connecting electromagnetism to gravity, the strong and the weak forces of nature: the holy grail, in other words. It is a speculative quest, led by mathematics. A unified theory must, he intuits, be mathematically beautiful.

  But there is not much time for such thoughts in the summer of 1923. Einstein is distracted. ‘One nearly goes mad from all the visitors, the letters and the phone calls’, he writes to a friend. Throughout the early summer, Einstein fights with Mileva and his sons about where the Nobel Prize money earmarked for them should be kept. Nineteen-year-old Hans-Albert tells him: ‘You don’t know how much you’re always frustrating and upsetting Mama with this business, and I too find your handling of business affairs like this really inconsiderate.’ And then there is politics. In July, he attends a pacifist rally in Berlin with a French friend, in support of Franco-German reconciliation and against the occupation of the Ruhr. (The police warn that the Frenchman’s safety cannot be guaranteed if he tries to give a speech.)

  It is only at the end of the summer that Albert is reconciled with his son. They travel to Kiel together and go sailing. It takes rather longer to settle matters with Mileva–three apartment blocks are eventually purchased in Zurich. But by then Albert has other family problems to manage.

  LAKE GARDA–ROME: Gabriele D’Annunzio enjoys the latest addition to his palace garden: several large boulders from sites of Italian victories in the Great War. He has a new French mistress, over thirty years his junior.

  In Rome, Benito continues his work to make his government impregnable against all challengers and prepare the way for the next stage of his conquest of power. He tightens up the country’s media laws, making it easier for the government to close down newspapers. In June, he sets off on a nationwide tour. He is trailed by journalists who dutifully report on the adoring crowds at his speeches–and the black-shirted Fascist militias who turn out to be inspected by their leader.

  Step by step, Benito wears down those who oppose him, making it harder and harder for them to regain the initiative. In July, under heavy intimidation, the Italian parliament passes a new electoral law providing for the party which wins one quarter of the vote in a future election to be automatically awarded two thirds of the seats in parliament. Men armed with daggers and guns sit in the public gallery to make sure all goes as planned.

  All this is helpful, but Mussolini has another trick up his sleeve, something he learned from D’Annunzio. Benito needs to win a little theatrical war. He must have his own Fiume. The target is chosen as the Greek island of Corfu. Now all he needs is an excuse to invade it.

  BERLIN: By the beginning of June, a copy of Simplicissimus costs one thousand marks. By the beginning of July its price is up by half again. Inflation distorts everything. No one knows how much things should cost. In spring, a woman working as a porter in Baden railway station charges Ernest Hemingway fifty marks to help him with his luggage; in Mannheim the same day, a porter charges him a thousand marks, protesting that it is barely the cost of a glass of schnapps. Factory workers demand higher and higher wages, to be adjusted monthly, weekly, daily so that their pay keeps pace with the rising cost of living. Factory owners either close down or comply. (The sharper ones turn inflation into profit, paying their workers in falling German marks, and selling goods abroad for hard currency.) Those with savings in marks are impoverished. Unemployment rockets up.

  Government attempts to stop the fall in value of the mark are ineffective. The Reichsbank spends its remaining gold and foreign currency reserves achieving virtually nothing. New banknotes are produced: the old thousand-mark bill is retired, and a new series with denominations up to fifty million is produced. There are stories of Americans unable to change a five-dollar bill because no one could possibly provide so much money in German currency. Currency speculators thrive. The black market flourishes. Huge shipments of banknotes are required for employers to pay the workers. Riots break out if they haven’t arrived. The state daily teeters on the edge of insolvency.

  As in 1919, sometimes it is the very unity of the German nation which seems to be at stake in all these interlocking financial and political crises. On a Sunday at the end of July, in Koblenz in the Rhineland, occupied by the French since 1918, several thousand separatists gather to express their anger at still being shackled to the German basket-case. They demand a new currency for the Rhineland and popular self-determination. ‘We are free citizens of the Rhineland; we do not want to be sold; we want to determine our own future’, one speaker says. Prussia may want war, but the people of the Rhine want peace. French newspapers report the main slogan of the meeting: ‘Los von Berlin!’–‘Away from Berlin!’

  In early August, the Chancellor makes a speech in the Reichstag on the crisis in the Ruhr. ‘In a few days,’ he starts–‘the dollar will be worth ten million’, interrupt the Communists–‘it will be the end of seven months of occupation’. He counts the cost in lives lost, refugees, the number who have lost their homes. The French have earned the contempt of all true Germans, he says. In return they have got less than one fifth of the coal they could have received from free German labour. They have started a ‘process of annihilation’. Discussions with London to help restrain the French have gone nowhere. ‘We stand alone and must and will help ourselves’, he says. In 1918, Germans hoped for a peace of understanding. There is no such hope now, ‘and so the fight goes on’.

  The Chancellor notes the rise of extremisms on the left and right. Both sides seem to have grown closer to each other in recent months, both willing the collapse of the centre so as to impose their vision of the future. ‘The government is on guard’, he declares, ‘and will clamp down on unrest–from whichever side it comes–with all its force’. To stir up civil war at a time like this is criminal. ‘For as long as you–the representatives of the people–place your trust in me, I will serve until the last day of my strength’, the Chancellor concludes. He is gone within a week.

  SAN FRANCISCO–WASHINGTON DC: President Warren Harding, the younger and more energetic man who succeeded Woodrow Wilson in March 1921, dies of a heart attack at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco. Marcus Garvey sends his condolences from jail. Vice President Coolidge, the man who made his name in the Boston police strike of 1919, takes over.

  Sixty-six-year-old Woodrow Wilson is in better health than for years. He resumes regular visits to the theatre with Edith. After one play, several hundred fans gath
er by the stage door. Woodrow is serenaded with the Marseillaise. ‘There’s the man you can’t forget’, cries a well-wisher. A curious thought enters Woodrow’s mind. The White House seems wide open again.

  LAUSANNE: The Turkish delegates wear top hats for the occasion. After six months of negotiation–and the dramatic failure of the previous attempt–a treaty is finally signed between Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey and the victors of the Great War (albeit without the United States).

  Obstinacy has paid off. The Turks achieve sovereignty within the country’s borders. There is no mention of an independent Kurdistan or Armenia. The Straits are governed by another international agreement. The compulsory exchange of Greek and Muslim populations is ratified by both sides, with an exception made for the Greeks of Istanbul.

  A little glimmer of peace in a continent still torn apart by conflict.

  DEARBORN: Henry Ford grants an interview. He has still not said whether or not he will run for President in 1924, but he allows speculation to continue. ‘I certainly couldn’t run the government the way I run my business’, he says, with obvious regret. There is too much waste; too few facts. Perhaps industry will take over government in the future, he says. ‘The industrial organism has more life flowing through it, more energy.’

  Whereas industry understands the need to serve the consumer–it is a question of survival–politicians seem to know only how to serve themselves. ‘Would you substitute autocracy?’ the journalist asks. No, he wouldn’t–but personally he would be prepared to wipe the slate clean somehow: ‘I’m sure we’re going to get rid of all these dead cells as soon as the time comes to get rid of them.’

  BERLIN–THE RUHR: A new German Chancellor is appointed at the head of a left–right coalition to try and manage the worst crisis in Germany since the war.