Some separatists claim that they have been betrayed by Paris. Others see the bloodshed as a stepping stone, proving the bloodthirstiness of the Prussian authorities and making the case for independence impregnable.
TORONTO: ‘It was a bad move to come back’, Ernest writes to his old Paris pal Gertrude Stein: ‘I have understood for the first time how men can commit suicide simply because of too many things in business piling up ahead of them.’
Hemingway is working for the Star again. He is not enjoying it. It seems like a step back into the past. Ernest hates his boss, Mr Hindmarsh, with a passion. There is no one he can talk to about serious writing other than a kid at the paper who is working his way through college. He misses Paris and finds Toronto duller than he remembered. Everyone he meets in North America seems so boring, a cardboard cut-out of a human being, compared to the strange and wonderful characters he came across every day in Europe.
When Hadley gives birth to a little baby boy at two o’clock in the morning on 10 October 1923 Ernest is travelling for work on a train somewhere in upstate New York. When he gets back he decides that their son bears a strong resemblance to the King of Spain. Ernie and Hadley decide to give their newborn the middle name Nicanor, after a famous Spanish matador, in addition to John (and the nickname Bumby).
It is a flash of the Hemingway bravado. But Hadley is worried. ‘I think we are going to leave here as soon as I am safely strong again’, she writes to a friend. ‘He is almost crazy and our hearts are heavy, heavy just when we ought to be so happy.’
Hemingway still dreams of being a literary writer. He keeps copies of his first collection of poems and short stories–only three hundred have been printed–in a cupboard ready to send out to any potential reviewers. At the Star, he boasts that his friend Ezra Pound told him his writing is ‘the best prose he has read in forty years’. In New York, Hemingway is able to lay his hands on a rare copy of a Paris literary journal, several months late, in which six of his short sketches are printed. Life is elsewhere.
PARIS: The latest edition of Littérature comes out in October, but its publishers worry about its long-term profitability. (The next edition will not come out until 1924.) Breton earns a crust working for a well-known art collector–who secretly he despises–and helping him expand his collection. He is a regular visitor to Picasso’s studio to see what the Spaniard is working on. Over the autumn, he starts writing poetry again.
MUNICH: Hitler’s Bildverbot–the ban on people taking pictures of him–is lifted. A Nazi photographer who has been begging Adolf to let him take his portrait for years suddenly finds his wish granted. A small picture of Hitler appears for the first time in the German press in the Berliner Illustrierte (alongside a feature on Germany’s most famous lion tamer and a picture of Soviet gymnasts formed into a five-pointed Soviet star). Postcards of Adolf Hitler are also produced. They catch the Nazi leader in a haughty, dynamic pose, sometimes in a dark suit, other times in a beige raincoat. His hair is brilliantined back. His toothbrush moustache–the same as Chaplin in his early films–suggests a man who looks forward into the twentieth century, rather than back to the Kaiser.
Adolf tries another tack to boost his image. With Ludendorff’s help, he hires someone to write a book about him. (In fact, Adolf writes most of it himself.) The task of being Hitler’s amanuensis falls on a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Prussian aristocrat with impeccable military credentials. Unlike the mangy field-runner, the young aristocrat actively helped crush the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919. He participated in the Kapp putsch, rather than flying in when it had already failed. He has just returned from an extended trip to Finland to study how the White Finns defeated the Reds. He is the perfect choice: another bridge between old-school conservatism and the Nazis.
The resulting tract–Adolf Hitler: His Life, His Speeches–is a modern hagiography. Hitler is described as a present-day Christ, whose suffering will expiate the sins of the nation. The gas attack of 1918 becomes a moment of spiritual awakening when a humble patriot realises his extraordinary fate. ‘This man, destined to eternal night’, reads one passage, ‘who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul–in the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendour, new life!’ Seventy thousand copies are printed. ‘One can surely expect that this book will find its way into the hands of all party comrades’, the Völkischer Beobachter notes confidently. It is on sale for only a few weeks before it is banned by the Bavarian authorities.
PARIS: Final preparations are made for a ballet premiere. Just a week of rehearsals before the opening night. How could it fail to succeed? The style is jazz. The writer is a long-expatriated white American called Cole Porter. The name of the show is Within the Quota. The subject is something of which many Europeans dream: emigration to America.
An immigrant arrives wide-eyed in America. He encounters all kinds of characters: a lady millionaire, a black vaudeville performer, a cowboy, a jazz-crazed youth, a sheriff, a Puritan. Eventually, of course, the immigrant becomes a movie star, just like Rudolph Valentino, the man who has begun to catch up with Charlie Chaplin in the American celebrity stakes. The message is clear: America, despite being a much harder country to emigrate to these days, is still a place where an outsider can become an insider, where a foreigner can make it, where what matters is who you want to be not who you are.
Ironic, then, that so many Americans should choose to leave. ‘It’s easier to write jazz over here than in New York’, Porter explains, freed from the influence of popular music. What’s more, in Europe, jazz does not belong to only one section of the population–here, jazz belongs to everyone.
MUNICH: ‘How can we measure the greatness of a man?’ Hitler asks a Nazi meeting. ‘A feeling for the heroic’, he answers. There have been three truly great German heroes, Adolf contends: Martin Luther, Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner. Is Kahr such a hero? At a rally in Nuremberg, Hitler calls the Bavarian leader a ‘decent chap’ and an ‘able civil servant’. But true heroes must have a hero’s instincts, they must have a hero’s will. ‘Kahr does not have such a will’, the mangy field-runner tells the Nuremberg Nazis.
Adolf declares himself personally unambitious. But he has sworn an oath of loyalty. ‘If everything were to fall apart,’ he says, ‘if others were to break their oaths of allegiance, if you yourselves deserted me one by one, and I were left quite alone in the world, know this: I will for all eternity be faithful to the German people’. Hitler portrays himself in terms Wagner would readily have understood: a figure upon a mountaintop who believes he has the power to bend nature to his will. Adolf has come to believe that he embodies Germany’s rebirth. All he needs now is the right moment to prove it.
AACHEN–SPEYER–HAMBURG: You wait for a putsch for months. Then several come at once.
At two o’clock in the morning of 20 October there is a clatter of boots in Aachen, in the Belgian zone of occupation in the Rhineland. Without a shot being fired, the city’s municipal buildings are occupied by a few hundred Belgian-backed Rhenish separatists. The following morning, a Sunday, they declare the Rhineland’s independence from Berlin. Separately, self-appointed Rhenish authorities also pop up across the French zone. At the same time, politicians in a wine-growing area known as the Bavarian Palatinate (a portion of Bavaria clustered around the Rhine and physically separated from the rest of the state) declare autonomy from Munich. Having already peacefully entered government in Saxony and Thuringia, the Communists now launch their own revolutionary putsch in Hamburg, taking over thirteen of the city’s police stations and holding them for two days against the police at the cost of forty lives. (Communist HQ tries to call off the rising at the last minute; word does not get through in time.) Germany’s political order is disintegrating.
Events in the Rhineland are opaque. The separatists themselves are badly split. Paris and Brussels rightly suspect each other of manipulating local senti
ment to their own ends. London views the putsches and mini-coups along the Rhine as an attempt to revise the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by the back door, creating breakaway German states permanently independent of Berlin.
GORKI–MOSCOW: Vladimir sits in his motor car and demands to be taken to Moscow. His sister Maria remonstrates with him that he does not have the right permits any more. This produces a guffaw. Vladimir, Nadya, Maria, the doctors and some bodyguards eventually depart for Moscow, driving at much lower speed than the impatient revolutionary would like. On arrival, he goes to his old rooms in the Kremlin. He takes a mournful look at the Sovnarkom table around which he used to hold cabinet meetings. He seems emotional. There is talk about going to an agricultural exhibition. But the rain is too heavy. The group head back to Gorki. Vladimir will not return to Moscow.
Civil war is raging in Vladimir’s Communist Party. For months, a bloc in the Politburo has been manoeuvring to undermine Trotsky, worried that Lenin’s departure from the scene will turn his Napoleonic ambition into reality unless it is checked. He has more prestige than any other Politburo member. To many, he is Lenin’s natural heir. He expects his point of view to carry in debate, even when he is absent from the relevant discussions. His high-handed treatment of his colleagues, always willing to display his intellectual self-assurance in pointing out the mistakes of others, wins him few friends. Other Politburo members meet without Leon to caucus against him. The sniping is incessant.
In October, Leon finally strikes back. His supporters circulate a letter suggesting the party bureaucracy has become too strong, stifling open discussion and leading the country into an economic malaise in urgent need of correction. Greater freedom of expression is demanded for dissenters. Trotsky’s opponents accuse him of factionalism. To ask for a revision of party rules is to violate them. They cry heresy, disloyalty, treachery.
The Red Tsar has departed from the scene, but the soldier-prince is no longer assured a smooth succession. Then, out duck-hunting one Sunday, Trotsky catches cold after walking through a freezing bog back to his automobile. He cannot shake the illness off.
ISTANBUL–ANKARA–BERLIN–MUNICH: In Istanbul, a British army band plays ‘Long Live Mustafa Kemal Pasha’ (originally written during the war as ‘Long Live Enver Pasha’), Turkish troops enter the city and Mustafa Kemal’s national victory is sealed.
Within a matter of weeks, Turkey’s official capital has been shifted to Ankara, a republic has been proclaimed, with Islam as the state religion, and Kemal has been confirmed as head of both the executive and legislative branches of government. ‘We are returning to the days of the first Caliphs’, one conservative cleric declares, hopefully. That is not how Kemal sees it, of course. He wants to reform Turkey, not to govern it in the name of God. He does not intend to share power with the last Ottoman in Istanbul, even if he is now only Caliph and no longer Sultan.
The Berliner Illustrierte publishes pictures of Kemal’s troops parading through Istanbul for its cover in the autumn. On the inside pages a long article discusses the merits of dictatorship, illustrated with snaps of great authoritarian leaders of past and present from Julius Caesar and Napoleon to Mussolini, Lenin, the Chinese warlord Wu Peifu and Kemal. The implication is clear: sometimes, in times of crisis, only a strongman will do.
In Bavaria, the Heimatland newspaper demands ‘an Ankara government’. Bavarian army divisions should march on Berlin to proclaim a national revolution, it demands, just as Kemal marched from Ankara to Istanbul. The scheme is not so fantastical. Bavaria’s top general privately tells nationalist associations that a march on Berlin is ‘the first possibility’ to save the country. But the window of opportunity is brief. It must happen in the next two weeks.
MILAN: Benito Mussolini, the hero of the hour, finds himself amongst friends and colleagues, talking to an association of fellow journalists.
He explains to them his vision of their role in Italian society. ‘Journalism’, the former editor of Il Popolo explains, ‘is above all else, an instinct.’ You have to be born a journalist; it is very hard to become one. Journalists need to recognise the importance of, as Benito puts it, ‘collaborating with the nation’.
A few days later, from a balcony in Milan, he gives a forty-minute speech celebrating the first anniversary of the march on Rome, that by-now mythical event. It has been conveniently forgotten that Benito himself did not march at all, only joining his black-shirted legions once the gamble had been won. The gathered Fascists interrupt every second sentence of Mussolini’s speech with loud applause. He reminds them–and all of Italy–just how responsible they have been over these past twelve months. ‘We have not invaded or closed parliament’, he tells the baying blackshirts, ‘in spite of the inevitable nausea it has provoked in us.’ But such restraint might end if Benito’s enemies do not play along. ‘We have not created special tribunals’, he notes, ‘though they might have been useful to deliver a necessary dose of lead once in a while’.
Mussolini is the master of the crowd. Italy’s old bosses thought we would not last a week in office, Benito reminds the blackshirts, and yet they have already been in power for a year. ‘Do you think’, he asks, plucking numbers out of the air, ‘that our rule will last for… twelve years multiplied by five?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ the crowd replies. He talks about the ‘resurrection of the race’: the audience laps it up. He talks about national expansion: the blackshirts can hardly contain their enthusiasm. To those who still think that fascism created Mussolini, rather than the other way around, Benito has a message: I am the boss now and I will use my power as I like. ‘If tomorrow I told you that it was necessary to continue the march, and sent you off in… another direction, would you march?’ Il Duce bellows. The response is deafening.
Benito laps up the adulation. Viva il re! Viva il fascismo! Viva l’Italia! He is about to turn back inside. But he can’t resist an encore. He leans out over the balcony balustrade and silences the crowd with a single gesture of his hand.
‘To whom does Rome belong?’ he asks. ‘To us!’ the blackshirts reply.
‘To whom does Italy belong?’–‘To us!’
‘To whom does victory belong?’–‘To us!’
AACHEN–BERLIN–MUNICH: There is more chaos in the Rhineland. Now French-backed Rhenish separatists march into the Belgian zone of occupation, from whence the Belgian-backed putschists of a few weeks ago flee to safety. German police reoccupy Aachen’s town hall, defending it with fire hoses. The French-backed Rhenish separatists force them out. Belgian troops arrive to disarm them.
In Berlin, the Chancellor loses his majority in the Reichstag and the mark plunges to its lowest level yet. A few days later, anti-Semitic riots break out in the city, sparked by rumours that immigrants from the east are taking money destined for Germany’s unemployed. Jewish shop windows are smashed, tinkling onto the pavement like shattered dreams.
As the riots are in full swing, Einstein is forced to deny media reports that he is planning a trip to Soviet Russia. There are rumours that an attempt on his life is imminent. He decides to get out of town, taking a train to Holland, where he has a teaching position at Leiden. He writes to Betty suggesting that perhaps they should move to the United States together with his wife Elsa, living as a happy threesome somewhere in upstate New York. He pictures a little clapboard house somewhere, spacious enough for them all.
In Munich, Ludendorff and Hitler plot away. They are not the only conspirators. Almost everyone has their plan for a putsch–some seeking to co-opt Kahr, others to displace him, some intending to bring in the Nazis, others to exclude them. In this atmosphere, ears are cupped over neighbours’ walls to find out what is going on next door. Kahr orders enhanced surveillance of telephone, post and telegram networks.
‘There is no going back now, there is only forwards’, Adolf tells another rally. ‘We can all feel the moment coming. Only when a black, white and red swastika flag flies over the royal palace in Berlin will the German question have been resolved
.’
TORONTO: Ernest’s newspaper articles look fondly back across the Atlantic to the Continent he has left behind. This autumn he writes one article on game-shooting in Europe, another on trout-fishing, several on Spain, one on Germany. Most read more like short stories than journalism: a literary escape from the drudge of the family and a job he does not care for any more.
It is hard to find inspiration in Toronto. Hemingway visits the offices of a newly founded League of Young Communists where an enthusiastic former suffragette is teaching her wards the difference between the communal life of bees and human beings. ‘The bees kill their non-producers’, the kindly Mrs Custance points out, admiring their apian good sense.
Ernest writes a poem entitled ‘I Like Americans’ for the newspaper. ‘They would like to have Henry Ford for president’, it suggests, ‘but they will not elect him.’
MUNICH: 4 November. Now here is a plan that cannot fail. Following a ceremony attended by local army units to dedicate a monument to Munich’s war dead, Adolf is to bound up the stairs of the army museum, confront Kahr and harangue him about the city’s food situation. Meanwhile, Ludendorff is to persuade the army to arrest the government.
Ludendorff does not turn up. The car meant to collect him did not arrive, he says. Hitler calls it off. That night, one of the conspirators attends a Breton-style seance to summon the spirits of the netherworld to tell them the future. The dead are sadly unavailable to help.
KILMAINHAM JAIL, DUBLIN: The prisoner asks for mathematical texts to pass the time. He takes an interest in the work of Albert Einstein.
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