‘When God wills it, even a broom can shoot!’
May 1937
Reports of a new political scandal have spread across Germany. Putzi Hanfstaengl,[20] scion of the well-known Munich publishing family, and until now enfant gâté of Nazidom, has fallen out of favour. It happened quickly. One cold February morning, he boarded a plane ostensibly bound for Spain. In mid-flight, the plane went into a series of loops designed to throw him out of it and when this failed he was set down, in the midst of a swirling snowstorm and with the temperature ten degrees below freezing, somewhere in the forests of Thuringia, and wearing a business suit. He got back to Berlin, and found that his office there—he had been information officer for the entire foreign press—was closed. The English Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, who had previously interceded in the Röhm Putsch in favour of Brüning and Treviranus, the Cabinet Minister, helped him get away to England.
The reason for this rather unusual method of obtaining a resignation from office is said to be that Hanfstaengl was much too critical of German intervention in Spain, and also that a film company of his infringed on Goebbels’ territory. Another story is that he drank too much in a Paris café, and was overheard talking about a connection between Tukhachevsky and the others now involved in the Moscow trials and Himmler, and that this led to the uncovering of the whole plot. In any case, Hanfstaengl, with whom I dined at the Regina in Munich only a few weeks ago, and whom I consider a man of courtesy and breeding, is now in England. Since he knows the answer to the mystery that surrounds, or is supposed to surround, the burning of the Reichstag,[21] Berlin fears the worst. Hanfstaengl’s eighty-year-old mother has been sent to London to bring him back, carrying with her the salva guardia of the German government, and the special guarantee of Herr Göring in default thereof. . . .
In default! The Hanfstaengls are tied to Germany by every economic link, their assets are here, and they are open to whatever action the government may decide to take against them. So the mother went, but the son would not play the game, and declared that he knew exactly how much the word of a Hitler or a Göring was worth. And there this edifying little trifle rests for the moment.
With Herr Arno Rechberg,[22] I breakfasted at the home of Putzi’s sister, Erna. Erna hid Hitler after the Nazis’ attempted coup at the Feldherrnhalle years ago,[23] and could therefore bear the title of ‘Patroness of the Third Reich’. Now, however, the lady is raging at Goebbels, whom she accuses of envy and personal rancour, and charges with an old matter so far known only in broadest outline.
It seems that in the late autumn of 1933, at a time when she was living in an extremely isolated villa east of Munich, on the very edge of suburban Bogenhausen, her house was entered while she was away. She went to Herr Himmler about this, and he later informed her that the entry had been ordered by an official so high up no redress was possible and further that it had not been her letters only they were after, but her life. He therefore declined to have anything further to do with the matter and urged her to move to the centre of town. She followed this advice, and now told me that the official was Herr Goebbels, and that he had ordered the search for the purpose of obtaining certain letters which Hitler had sent her, these letters to be employed in case of emergency—as, for example, the loss of his post and consequent flight abroad—against his lord and master, Hitler.
An amusing story, since our somewhat stunted Great Chief thus supposedly strove for the love of this generously proportioned lady: Erna Hanfstaengl, in contrast to Hitler, represents the typical Munich Bavarian.
Thus we live in Germany today.
With us at Erna Hanfstaengl’s was a young Englishwoman, a type somewhere between archangel and model for a toilet soap ad. Her name is Unity Mitford,[24] and her usual perch is atop the Obersalzberg, in the court of Herr Hitler. Her purpose is to become Queen of Germany, with the aim of bringing about reconciliation between Germany and England.
This forceful lady, and Hitler: Bon Voyage. . . .
Meantime, I have been in Berlin—Berlin, centre of all diligence, activity, and perfection—by its own statement. In my humble opinion, however, it is like an immense machine, all sound and fury and producing nothing.
I do not believe in any of it. I know all about ‘telephoning with both hands and feet’, about appointment pads on which every minute for the next three months is scheduled for engagements and ‘conferences’. I know all about production-at-any-price, and the desperate hankering after a pseudo Americanism. It is the viewing of all life as a kind of gigantic Army barracks which has brought on us the aversion of the whole world. As long as this country allows itself to be represented by this basically hopeless city, we will go from one foreign policy disaster to the next.
I do not believe there is any substance to the idea that people in Berlin work harder than elsewhere. They have a hysterical drive to keep moving, probably an indication of a flight from the knowledge of their own inner emptiness. I believe that it is the same kind of false front trickery that turns the slave-driver of two barmaids into a ‘Herr Director’, the backyard shack of every housing project into a ‘Garden Pavilion’, and every discussion on how to cheat a customer on a shipment of dehydrated soup into a ‘conference’.
I believe in what really has substance in Berlin, what is productive and really works: the workers of Berlin-East, the streetcar conductors, the mail carriers and the truck drivers. I believe in the taxi driver, like a good and concerned father, who, when I told him the suburb I wanted him to take me to, warned me about the fare for the trip, and in a burst of Prussian thrift advised me to take the elevated. . . . Oh, I believe in the grumpy soundness of the Berlin concierge, I believe in the kind of humour that placed at the foot of the statue of sabre-waving Blücher:
‘There’s only room for one on this stove.’[25]
What I do not accept is this disgusting dry rot which has set in here in the last ninety years . . . these females with their sunglasses, their yard-wide backsides, and huge bosoms, playing at being ladies . . . these Herr Directors with their appointment books—in short, the busyness and officiousness of all these book-keepers, patent attorneys and lottery-ticket sellers with their triple-locked briefcases like embassy attachés, when all they are carrying about are three dried out cheese sandwiches.
What is most typical of Berlin is deception: functional form, without solidity in either materials or execution; mechanics’ apprentices who are above mere careful workmanship, and at once declare themselves fully fledged inventors or builders: streamlined kiddie cars with brittle imitation leather, ‘functionally’ constructed flashlights with inoperative connections, and the ‘New Functionalism’ which would make desks and beds out of reinforced concrete, and is really infinitely less practical than the so-called ‘romantic’ excesses of the past. And a few other items:
‘Economy In Construction’ and the junk called ‘unfinished goods’; the ersatz-wool suit which is not warm and cannot be cleaned; and that snake poison made of sulphur and sugar and treated by all the hellish arts of I.G. Farben, which is sold by the glass as wine in the restaurants of the Westend: wine—this brew that is supposed to look and smell like the real thing, to have both body and flavour while costing next to nothing, which provides the unwary on the morning after with the legacy of a truly monstrous hangover.
No, I do not believe that there are many cities in which as much time is lost in useless bureaucratic reorganisation, rejoinders of ‘On the other hand . . .’, purposeless chatter, and directorial pontification as in Berlin.
‘When I am called to Babelsberg to show my rough script,’ a film writer, a man of repute and titanic energy, told me recently, ‘I find gathered around a large green table seven elderly gentlemen who obviously all have high blood pressure and who all have boxes of pills handy on the table before them. These gentlemen are all enchanted with my script. Then, just as everything appears settled, out of the shadows springs a dramatist’s apprentice in horn-rimmed glasses. This is a type perfectly
aware of his own superfluity, and so expends vast efforts in an attempt to find something wrong, and thus provide at least the shadow of a justification for his paltry 300 marks a month.
‘This gentleman rises to say that the script is certainly wonderful, but that such and such scenes might give offence to the pressure group organised by the German wallpaper manufacturers, and that such and such other place in the script would not be comprehensible to inhabitants of Mars, prospective civil servants, or stenographers who had not graduated from high school. The reply that whatever purports to cover every contingency actually covers none, has no effect. The signal has been given for the elderly gentlemen to awaken from their lethargy long enough to attempt to legitimise their own, much higher, salaries. Each now racks his brain to add his own “now, on the other hand . . . ” to the discussion. And so begins the nerve-racking period of weeks of smoke-filled story conferences, telephone calls, breakfasts, and still more story conferences which is known to every author working at the Babelsberg studios, and which ends finally in the complete junking of the original script. The new version has carefully eliminated every natural association in favour of a super-clever artificiality. In accord with the principle “Why have things simple when they can just as easily be complicated”, an attempt is made to fly to the moon.
‘Finally, all concerned are ready for a sanatorium, and the monstrous structure compounded of impotent intellectuality collapses of its own impossibility. There is a pause for a deep breath, and then the “simple, sound, completely satisfying solution” is found—in every detail, the same as in the original script.
‘This fact is admitted amidst many apologies, tendered with hearty slaps on the back, and perhaps a certain faint embarrassment. The unfortunate part of it is that in the meantime the original impetus has been lost, and that four weeks of the three months assigned to making the film have been lost in useless discussion—weeks that must now be made up with frantic, hasty work.’
Isn’t this Berlin? Isn’t this the principle which has underlain all that has happened in this deeply hopeless city for the last sixty years . . . industry, the arts, and not least, statesmanship, as well?
A General Staffer told me recently about an experience of his during the hot summer of 1917 on the Balkan front. ‘It was July,’ he told me, ‘and we were under heavy pressure, so much so that sometimes we were no longer sure how we stood, when during a few minutes’ time out for breakfast I was called to the telephone: the Chief himself. I recognised Ludendorff’s voice, and despite the distance I could hear quite clearly. Astonishing to hear the question over the receiver, coming from beyond the Vosges Mountains, the Danube, the Rhine, and down the slopes of the mountains of the Balkans, repeated over and over: “Are there strawberries there?”
‘I truly did not know what our lord and master was referring to. Was he, I wondered, enquiring after the menus of our frugal breakfasts, or could it be that he was no longer all there. Finally, after a period of painful confusion I grasped what he was after.
‘He had heard that the land surrounding our occupied positions was eminently suited to raising strawberries. Concerned as he was with the state of the German economy, and at the same time with providing suitable employment for German soldiers who might at the moment be idle, he had conceived the idea of having us plant strawberries, proceeds from the sale of which should then go to bolster foreign exchange balances. It did no good at all for me to protest that we were being heavily pressed by the enemy and needed every available man—he had to have his strawberries.
‘And he got them, too. We had to withdraw troops urgently needed at the front to do the planting. We did it with great misgivings, and had vast trouble afterwards to close the gaps so created. He actually got his strawberry acreage and the next year a bountiful yield, which he intended to have preserved in Berlin and sold abroad. The crop was really first-rate, but when it got to Berlin it was completely rotten, fermented, and mouldy. It had been shipped on the overtaxed railroads under heavy freight loads. All of it had to be thrown away.’
Thus my informant. Today, I dined at the little Italian restaurant on Anhalter Street, where I saw four higher-ranking SA officers, all thoroughly drunk, who kept yelling into the cars of the owner, who looked like a character in a Verdi opera, and at his Neapolitan waiters. The word they continually roared, on account of the newly concluded German-Italian friendship pact, was ‘Collaborazione’ . . . probably the only Italian word they knew. At the same time, behind me, another little scene, hardly less rich acoustically than the first, was being enacted. In this one, two ladies of the Berlin bourgeoisie, of the type described earlier, were deep in conflict over an evening coat which had fallen from the back of a chair to the floor. While the little Neapolitans watched, grinning, one of these ladies accused the other of deliberately throwing the garment down. At this, the second screeched: ‘I beg your pardon, madam! I am a German woman!’
And thus it goes in Berlin.
At this moment, exhausted by the endless turning and clamour of this mill grinding on emptiness, I am back in my room in a hotel close to the Anhalter station. The place is furnished with the mass-produced junk of the years just before the war, and has walls that appear to be as thick as my finger. If I, here in my cell baked by the summer heat on the fourth floor, were for some reason to utter the word ‘No!’ even slightly louder than usual, I am certain that from the depths of the ground floor an oily baritone would respond in Balkan accents: ‘Ah, perhaps you will think it over.’
And so it goes in the city of Berlin. This is a place of formulas and stereotypes. The only things that bloom here have to do with numbers, columns, formulas, and patterns. And with it all, there is this repulsive poverty, which has nothing to do with simplicity, which is merely a cover for inferiority and stupidity. Sparse and skimpy is the motto of this land. When I was still in short pants, I read that Frederick the Great’s grenadiers wore waistcoats that were not waistcoats at all but merely triangles of red cloth which had been sewn to their doublets. And whether this story is true or not, I see these triangular pieces of cloth everywhere, in big things and small. Appearance, artifice, a patched-on thing, and with it all the deeply ingrained idea of being something special. Why? Because they have the urge to rob and pillage—which is characteristic of all who live meanly.
‘Germany is never satiated; with no sense of form or taste, lacking all idea of what comforts and pleases in life, it has just one ambition: for more. And when it finally has more than it can possibly use, it puts what is left to one side, and woe to him who touches it! A nation of pirates, making its forays on dry land, but always with Te Deums, for the greater glory of God or the Faith. For there has never been a shortage of inscriptions to put on its flags in this land.’
Is this a Rhine Confederation intellectual speaking? Is this Bavarianism in the style of Doctor Sigl? No, this is Theodor Fontane, claimed by this city as one of its very own, a Prussian pur sang, as they say. I can cite myself here. I, too, am of old Prussian stock, although my mother was of Austrian descent.
I think back. My grandfather (‘Who can be what his father was?’ Hamsun says) . . . my grandfather was a reserved and cultured man who lived the contemplative life, read Christian Garve and Humboldt, and retired at fifty to spend his remaining years hunting and fishing in otium cum dignitate. He represented the last of the genuine conservatives, the true Junkers—wonderfully cultivated, widely travelled, and sceptical of all bombast—whether out of the mouths of Hohenzollerns, or, as the East Prussians derisively called them, ‘Nurembergians’.
It was the generation of the Franco–Prussian War, returning bloated with success from that militarily most wonderful but in its effects most unfortunate of all German wars, that broke the form. By a series of rich marriages, they allied themselves with industry and finance, and so opened the way for both to influence the government on a scale never known before. Let no one counter that the same thing happened in England during the early Victorian per
iod, and in France during the Restoration. The medicine was absorbed by England without ill effect; it was harmful for France; and it proved to be a deadly poison for this country, which can and must base itself on agriculture and a pastoral economy. In 1853, Bismarck, standing at the graves of the dead of 1848, ‘could not even forgive the dead’. Yet, eighteen years later, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he helped make the National Liberalism of these same dead the dominant ideology of Germany. Thus by his drive for industrial prosperity he undermined the foundations of the very state he had created.
Bülow, whose coarse-grained memoirs I read recently, described the effects of Bismarck’s policy with ‘Nul tisséerand ne sait ce qu’il tisse’ . . . a quotation which of course throws a great deal of light on the tragedy of a Reich formed without regard to geography. The ‘form’ (to use a Spenglerian concept) of this nation required that it avoid the expedients of industrial expansionism and capital investment. Everything that has befallen us since derives from the time when the Prussian oligarchy took industrial capital for its concubine. This is responsible for the breakdown of all the basic societal ties so necessary to a healthy Germany, and for making this a politically amorphous nation.
Beginning with that time, a geopolitically based policy for Germany was tossed overboard, and foreign policy was increasingly geared to the export market. Result: the First World War, waged completely ‘against geography’. . . . Even before this, there was the unmitigated cynicism with which, around 1840, a generation brought up in the atmosphere of the student clubs and ‘Turnvater Jahn’ threw overboard its entire spiritual heritage . . . the unbridled indulgence in dreams of a special, Teutonically embroidered prosperity, a shallow and irresponsible concentration on one generation, an unheard-of destruction of irreplaceable natural resources, of our cultural and ethical substance—a stockbroker’s philosophy, already apparent in the sixties and seventies, which blocked out every thought about tomorrow. . . .
Diary of a Man in Despair Page 3