Hitlerland

by Andrew Nagorski

Berlin was also beginning to experience American-style traffic problems, he reported, and had installed its first traffic lights on Potsdamer Platz, “winking its flirtatious American eyes at the street car conductors, taxi drivers and chauffeurs who get flustered in the tangle of this place where five important streets meet.”

  Mowrer echoed those sentiments. “By the early twenties signs of Americanization were appearing all over Europe, and nowhere so conspicuously as in Germany,” he wrote. In his reports, he called 1925 “the first great American year in Europe” and explained how “that complex of factors, personal democracy, technique and standardization of practice,” along with new flashy ads, “had bitten deep into the German soul.” He quoted an American economist as saying that mass production was transforming Germany into “the United States of Europe.”

  All of which contributed to the lure of Berlin for American expats. While Paris was still their favorite city in Europe, many of them visited the German capital in the 1920s. Josephine Baker and her Revue Nègre took their act to Berlin, holding their opening show at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürstendamm on December 31, 1925. Although there were protesters outside denouncing the black entertainers, and Nazis called Baker subhuman, she was elated by the enthusiasm of the audiences. “It’s madness. A triumph. They carry me on their shoulders,” she said.

  Berlin was the city where Baker received the most gifts: she was showered with jewelry, perfume, furs. After her regular shows, the Nelson Theater was turned into a cabaret, and Baker would continue to perform. She also happily accepted invitations to other parties, at times wearing nothing more than a loincloth. Berlin’s wild nightlife has “an intensity Paris doesn’t know,” she declared—and she loved it. She even considered settling in Berlin but was lured back to the French capital to star at the Folies Bergère.

  Both for American visitors and residents, Germany’s racy sexual life was a source of constant fascination. As Edgar Mowrer put it, “The period immediately following the war saw throughout the world a sexual exuberance which, in Germany, reached an almost orgiastic intensity… If anything, the women were the more aggressive. Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice.” And when it came to “sexual perversions,” Mowrer added with open amazement, old laws were simply ignored. “It is hard to conceive a much more tolerant society.”

  Ben Hecht, who had reported from Berlin for the Chicago Daily News a few years earlier, described what his successor was hinting at. He met a group of homosexual aviators at an Officers’ Club. “These were elegant fellows, perfumed and monocled and usually full of heroin or cocaine,” he recalled. “They made love to one another openly, kissing in the café booths and skipping off around two A.M. to a mansion owned by one of them. One or two women were usually in the party—wide-mouthed, dark-eyed nymphomaniacs with titles to their names but unroyal burns and cuts on their flanks. At times little girls of ten and eleven, recruited from the pavements of Friedrichstrasse, where they paraded after midnight with rouged faces and in shiny boots and in short baby dresses, were added to the mansion parties.”

  Although Hecht may have embellished some of his descriptions for his autobiography, there’s no question that Berlin boasted a flourishing gay scene. For visiting young gay Americans like Philip Johnson, this was an exhilarating discovery. Drawn to Germany by the Bauhaus movement and other forms of architectural modernism emerging there in the 1920s, the future famous architect was quickly enchanted by much more than his professional interests. “The air we breathed, the people we came to know, the restaurants, the Kurfürstendamm, the sex life were all new, all thrilling to a young American,” he recalled. “The world was being created here.”

  In a letter to his family back home, Johnson wrote: “I think if it can be told from the platform of a Berlin cabaret, it can be written to one’s mother. How prudish I am getting, my, my! Recently in Berlin, it seems, the law against homosexual relations has been repealed, apropos of which the conférencier said that at Easter the law against relations with animals will also be repealed and the normal relation only will be prohibited. The audience thought it very funny, as I did myself, but then of course, I would not admit it.”

  And Johnson, like other Americans, found the Germans extremely welcoming, irrespective of sexual preferences. “The Americans were the conquerors of old Germany and the young Germans were eager to accommodate them,” he recalled. “Paris was never that gastfreundlich.”

  After the aborted Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis were no longer considered a major story. But then, in early 1924, Hitler was put on trial along with Ludendorff and the others accused of treason. Hitler used the occasion to openly proclaim his goal of overthrowing the Weimar Republic, elaborating on his stab-in-the-back theory about how its treacherous politicians were responsible for Germany’s humiliating defeat and for the subsequent economic disaster. “Treason to the Republic is not treason to the real Germany,” he insisted.

  As the judges gave him free rein to dominate the proceedings and even cross-examine witnesses, Hitler scored point after point, ridiculing the Bavarian authorities for initially going along with him before turning against the putsch. Since everyone knew the Bavarian leaders had denounced and defied the central government in Berlin on countless occasions, Hitler sounded convincing when he testified that they “had the same goal that we had—to get rid of the Reich government.” They had discussed that goal before the putsch, he added.

  The clear message: Hitler had acted on his convictions, shared by all those who despised Germany’s current rulers, while the Bavarian authorities had played a double game. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court,” he told the judges. “For she acquits us.”

  Observing Hitler for the first time as he covered the trial, Mowrer was clearly impressed. “He spoke with humor, irony and passion,” he reported. “A little dapper man, he sometimes resembled a German drill sergeant, and sometimes a Viennese floor walker.” His oratory “literally tore to pieces” the claims of the Bavarian authorities. When he had finished his impassioned speech, “there was scarcely a spectator or a correspondent who did not want to applaud him,” he concluded.

  Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, the minimum sentence for treason, and Ludendorff was acquitted altogether. Murphy of the American consulate summed up his conclusions in a report to Washington dated March 10, 1924: “While the putsch in November 1923 was a farcical failure, the nationalist movement behind it is by no means extinguished in Bavaria. It has simply been delayed… It is contemplated that upon completion of his term Hitler, who is not a citizen, will be expelled from the country. Further nationalist activity on his part, for the present at least, appears to be excluded.”

  In his memoirs that were published in 1964, Murphy wrote that this conclusion was “not too bad.” Specifically, he contrasted it with the single mention of Hitler in the memoirs of Lord D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Germany from 1920 to 1926. The future German leader’s name appeared only in a footnote, which claimed that after his release from prison, Hitler “vanished into oblivion.”

  Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison after serving less than nine months in pampered conditions, which allowed him to use the time to dictate his autobiography Mein Kampf. His jailers treated him like a guest of honor, allotting him a comfortable large room with a lovely view and allowing plenty of visitors and packages from well-wishers. After his release, he was not expelled to his Austrian homeland.

  Still, Hitler’s movement was beset by internal feuds during his absence, and, even when he began to mobilize his followers again and the ban on the party was lifted, the country’s improved economic situation diminished its appeal. In the December 1924 elections for the Reichstag, the Nazis won a paltry 14 seats as compared to 131 for the Socialists and 103 for the German Nationalists, a less radical right-win
g movement.

  During the presidential elections in April 1925, the right-wing parties backed Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who easily won despite the fact that he was already seventy-seven. As Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs who was visiting Germany at the time, recalled in his memoirs, the most interesting part of that presidential campaign was that the Nazis did not figure “even as a side issue.” Hitler was out of prison but still barred from public speaking and, as Armstrong added, “as far as I can remember, nobody, either German or American, so much as mentioned his name to me.”

  In the May 1928 parliamentary elections, the Nazis dropped even lower, winning only 12 seats. The Socialists raised their tally to 152 seats, and the Nationalists dropped to 78. Little wonder that both American diplomats and correspondents, who had briefly focused on Hitler during the run-up to the Beer Hall Putsch and then through his trial, largely ignored him afterward. There was no line for interviews, no urgent queries about him from Washington to the diplomats or from the editorial home offices to the foreign correspondents.

  At times, the Americans residing in or passing through Berlin appeared to be as much preoccupied with each other and fellow expats as with their surroundings. Writing to a friend on November 14, 1927, Knickerbocker tossed in this teaser: “Hemingway by the way is here in Berlin just now, hobnobbing with Sinclair Lewis.” Lewis, who in 1930 would become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, spent a good deal of time in Berlin because of Dorothy Thompson, who had moved there in 1925. One of the first female foreign correspondents with celebrity status, Thompson reported for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, and she shared a duplex apartment on Händelstrasse with the Mowrers.

  Knickerbocker, who would later take over her Berlin job for the Philadelphia and New York papers, conveniently introduced Thompson to Lewis at a tea given by the German foreign minister. To make things juicier, some accounts claim that Thompson and Knickerbocker were more than colleagues, briefly linking them romantically.

  Thompson had just divorced Joseph Bard, a Hungarian who had a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer, and Lewis’s marriage to Grace Hegger was in a state of collapse. The acclaimed author and the pioneering woman foreign correspondent were immediately infatuated with each other. Thompson called Lilian Mowrer one evening. “Do come on up, I have a jolly crowd here,” she told her. Mowrer came to the other part of the duplex apartment they shared to find Lewis, fresh from his triumphant publication of Elmer Gantry, delivering sermons “in the manner of his ecclesiastical hero” to the small gathering. Turning his collar back to front, he let loose with a torrent of words, damning his listeners for their sins. “It was an amazing tour de force, and we quaked, deliciously conscious of our shortcomings,” Lilian recalled. Lewis and Thompson soon became lovers and, once his divorce came through, they married in 1928.

  That kind of social scene, along with Germany’s openness to “Americanization,” meant that Americans felt very much at home in Berlin. In 1928, even Hitler—then the leader of what still looked like an inconsequential party—pointed out that “Americanization” was leaving its mark in numerous ways. “International relations between nations have become so easy and close through modern technology and the communication it makes possible, that the European, often without being conscious of it, applies American conditions as a standard for his own,” he declared. It was a rare case of Hitler acknowledging a new trend without immediately denouncing it.

  The talk of Americanization was shorthand for what now is called globalization. It was a genuine opening up to the world. That, as much as any specifically American characteristics, represented the real attraction of Berlin. “These were the brilliant, feverish years when Berlin was, in a cultural sense, the capital of the world,” Thompson wrote, repeating the sentiments of the banjo virtuoso Michael Danzi and other artists. “These were the days when the German mind was open to every stream of thought from every part of the earth. Every current beat upon Berlin.”

  While American reporters continued to cover the political and economic situation, the stories that stand out in this period—and thrilled readers the most—were the lighter features. And none more so than the first transatlantic passenger flight of the Graf Zeppelin in October 1928, a 112-hour voyage in the rigid airship from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Chicago Herald and Examiner issued a special booklet with all the articles of the two Hearst correspondents on board. The introduction called the compilation “an authentic record of a voyage that today is second only to that of Columbus in importance.”

  One of the Hearst correspondents on board was Wiegand. The other was Lady Drummond-Hay, who was hailed as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Both reporters filed extensively, and it was the pairing of their stories that added to the sense of adventure and romance about the voyage. Lady Drummond-Hay’s writing was particularly evocative:

  “The Graf Zeppelin is more than just machinery, canvas and aluminum,” she filed. “It has a soul—every man who worked to build it, every man who worked to fly it, every one of us who have made this journey, has contributed to the humanization of the aerial colossus. I love the airship as if it were something alive… I have been supremely happy on the Zeppelin. The journey has contributed richly to my emotional life.”

  Some readers may have guessed another source of Lady Drummond-Hay’s emotional life: the romantic attachment between her and her colleague Wiegand. In 1923 at the age of twenty-eight, the Englishwoman had married the former diplomat Sir Robert Hay Drummond-Hay, who was fifty years older than she was. Three years later, he died, leaving her a young aristocratic widow who focused on her journalistic career. Working for Hearst, she met Wiegand, and their relationship quickly became much more than professional. Wiegand was married, but, as a gallivanting foreign correspondent, he was often separated from his wife.

  After the two met in 1926, they tried to cover stories together as often as they could—including the first around-the-world zeppelin voyage in 1929. When separated, the duo wrote constantly to each other. Their correspondence leaves no doubt about the nature of their relationship. “You have indeed cared for me ‘tenderly’ Ol’ Bear, and the Cubbie-wubbie is fully appreciative and will stick close beside the Old Bear for comfort and protection, and love all her life… I love you very dearly and very truly,” the Englishwoman wrote in one of her first letters in 1926, signing it “Cubbie-wubbie-Tum-Tum.”

  The Hearst newspapers loved trumpeting the exploits of the “brilliant British woman” and the “internationally-known newspaper correspondent” Wiegand. And they had no hesitation about focusing on stories about air travel when the situation on the ground looked better than it had since the beginning of the previous war. As Dorothy Thompson wrote later, the period from 1924 to 1929 seemed “full of promise… In that brief five years, truly remarkable progress was made in Germany.” It seemed to make perfect sense to illustrate that progress with dramatic narratives about people soaring across oceans, invoking visions of a peaceful, more harmonious world.

  Even in that era full of promise, many Americans in Germany sensed that, despite surface similarities, “the Germans” were different from them and many other Europeans. “Though externals of American life were becoming increasingly popular—quick-lunch bars, flashy slogans, sky-scrapers, even chewing-gum—the mental attitude towards them remained purely Teutonic,” Lilian Mowrer observed. Those “Teutonic” differences were sometimes odd, sometimes comic, and, occasionally, hinted at something troubling, something sinister.

  The Mowrers investigated a German social phenomenon that, at first glance, looked titillating. “Where but in Germany could one find 150,000 organized nudists?” Edgar wrote. But after visiting several nudist colonies, Lilian pointed out: “They all had the same un-erotic, purposeful atmosphere.” She wrote off the more lurid stories of sexual shenanigans there as nothing more than rumors and detected somethin
g more philosophical. “These Germans were swayed by feelings half primitive, half religious, with hopes of a saner humanity in some remote future yet undreamed.”

  She was troubled by “the loose emotional fervor” the nudist movement engendered and its “ardent yearning for something ‘different.’” Most of the young people she met at the nudist colonies voted Communist, thinking this represented the path to human betterment. Those feelings, she concluded, “could be just as easily canalized and turned in any other direction by an unscrupulous leader interested in using it for his own ends.”

  Thompson was struck by the German public’s fascination with gruesome crimes, as evidenced by the popularity of a police exhibition chronicling a series of murders that had captured the headlines. It included a reproduction of the bedroom of a man who had trolled for his twenty-six young male victims in the toilets of the Hannover train station. “If one wants a glimpse of the miserable den in which this monster killed his victims, if one longs to see the cot where he strangled them, the table where he carved them, the buckets in which he stored them, one must stand in line for half an hour,” she observed.

  Americans were equally intrigued by other forms of extreme behavior. The Mowrers were taken aback by the assistant in the Daily News bureau who pursued a “natural” diet with almost no liquids that he claimed would ensure him a much longer than normal life span. He did so with such fervor that he lost forty pounds, his productivity dropped by 50 percent and he looked “like a death’s head.” When he broke down and ordered a meal of pork, potato salad and apple pie, along with plenty of beer, his body swelled up enormously and he had to be hospitalized. Still, after a six-week recovery, he declared that he simply hadn’t found the right diet to prolong his life. “If only I could devote all my time to the search…” he said.

  “Do you think Germans are madder than any other peoples?” Lilian asked her husband. “They seem so unbalanced… so hysterical.”