by Philipp Blom
Uncertainty and Possibility
OF COURSE, WEIMAR BERLIN was much more than the capital of decadence and a fertile breeding ground for political violence and thugs of all stripes. Away from this atmosphere of menace and dark desires was the modern, productive city, which was experiencing an unparalleled artistic and intellectual blossoming and attracted first-rate talents from everywhere. The lives of the demimonde were chronicled by artists such as Otto Dix and Georges Grosz, and by a younger generation including John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch. Dada and expressionism had almost run their course, but a new, starkly objective way of seeing things—Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity—was all the rage, and the coolly factual perspective on a world in meltdown was mirrored by the aesthetic ideas of the Bauhaus movement, whose unadorned designs of architecture, furniture, and items of daily use were beginning to conquer not only the living rooms of the bourgeoisie but also the skylines of German cities.
Berlin attracted the best talents of the German-speaking world. At the Großes Schauspielerhaus on the Schiffbauerdamm, the Viennese theater director Max Reinhardt produced plays whose coherence and depth of characterization would decisively influence an entire generation of directors and actors; Bertolt Brecht wrote and directed plays and revolutionized the conception of the drama. At the Philharmonie, the country’s most prestigious concert hall, Wilhelm Furtwängler produced legendary performances as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; he was the acknowledged master of a generation that also included Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, and the young Bruno Walter. Albert Einstein continued to do his research here, as did the aging Max Planck. Writers such as Alfred Döblin and Erich Kästner translated the city’s buzz into literature, and Kurt Tucholsky’s articles, essays, and poems articulated the cynical, alert, and weary Lebensgefühl, the feeling of the time. Perhaps not only in spite of but partly also because of the volatility of the atmosphere, the German metropolis was abuzz with creativity.
A new kind of woman: August Sander’s portrait of a secretary at a radio station in Cologne.
This Berlin appeared to be full of future, pregnant with possibilities. A city that had never quite defined its identity now proved to be open for new identities. More than any other city in Europe, it looked modern and embraced the aesthetics and the promise of the future. The bright neon lights at the Potsdamer Platz rivaled the legendary glitter of New York’s Times Square, and at the Haus Vaterland, the world’s biggest entertainment palace and the flagship of the burgeoning Kempinski empire, eight thousand people could amuse themselves at any one time, thirty-five hundred meals could be served at once, and after a refurbishment in 1928 the establishment greeted its millionth visitor within a year. The Alexanderplatz was crawling with traffic day and night, and architectural iconoclasts were beginning to reshape the aspect of the city with daring new structures such as the Karstadt department store in Neukölln (1929) and with unrealized designs such as the astonishing steel-and-glass skyscraper designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Friedrichstraße.
This Berlin was light-years away from the imperial capital with its uniforms, endless parades, and marching bands—or rather, this Berlin inhabited the same space as another city full of nostalgia, anger, and humiliation that had never gotten past the loss of its former greatness, exemplified by the mustachioed figure of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the aging president of the young republic.
Berlin was also a youthful city; a third of its inhabitants were under twenty. They had been small children during the war and now were eager to build a future for themselves. The shell shock that had gripped their parents and grandparents was nothing but a secondhand memory for them, represented by the sight of mutilated veterans begging in the streets, whispered conversations overheard at night, angry rhetoric from teachers and from drunks, penny-dreadful novels about heroism, and films.
But the memories persisted, and were also stirred up and questioned by a young generation of artists. The movie All Quiet on the Western Front reached the cinemas in 1930 after Erich Maria Remarque’s eponymous 1929 novel had already caused a scandal. The story of a group of classmates who enthusiastically volunteer for service in 1914 only to find themselves trapped in the nightmarish reality of trench warfare powerfully communicated the message that the official values preached in schools and churches were nothing but a cynical lie and that heroism was impossible in the face of modern artillery producing death miles away. Toward the end of the novel only one of the protagonists survives, dulled by constant fear and indifferent to the living and the dead. When he, too, is killed just before the end of the war on a day without major military action, the official report for that day simply reads: “All quiet on the Western Front.”
The Hollywood production that was released quickly to capitalize on the fame created by the novel had been severely cut for German release, and in a cowardly attempt not to enrage the anti-Semitic right, the names of Jewish actors starring in the film had been omitted from the credits. These changes were concessions to a hardening climate of public opinion in Germany, and especially the noisiest, most threatening presence in the streets: the rising National Socialist Party and its shrewd propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. Sensing an opportunity to seize the debate, he fulminated against the “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” work and directed members of the party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteiling or SA, to do everything possible to disrupt performances by tossing smoke bombs, releasing mice and other vermin in the cinemas, and beating up audience members. Exploiting this situation, Goebbels claimed in the press that the film not only damaged Germany’s reputation and honor but also caused public disruption. By December the authorities had retracted their approval for the film, which meant it could no longer be shown publicly.
All Quiet on the Western Front assaulted and questioned the official memory of the war not only because it showed war as inhuman but also because there were no heroes. The protagonists were ordinary young men with ordinary desires and few principles left after their first experiences at the front. They were victims in a vast game, but instead of being stylized as paragons of lost innocence and nostalgic nationhood, they were shown as cynical, angry, and afraid. As characters, they repudiated everything the growing National Socialists sought to propagate and stood for everything the party and its followers hated.
Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), the film version of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat, had a similarly rocky ride with the press, even if cinema-goers immediately loved it. The right-wing press fulminated against the loose morals and lewd pictures; the left criticized director von Sternberg’s decision to leave out Heinrich Mann’s original social criticism. In his publication Weltbühne the well-known socialist journalist Carl von Ossietzky called it “a film against Heinrich Mann.”7 But everyone agreed about the delicate, naked thighs of the young star, Marlene Dietrich. Even those opposed to so much alluring flesh, such cinema, and the endangerment of impressionable minds nevertheless contributed to their fame, and the reader’s galloping ideas, by devoting column inches to Dietrich’s legs.
Opposing Forces
IN BERLIN, THE CITY OF CONTRADICTIONS and of underworlds, of shape-shifters and gender-benders, the androgynous diva Marlene Dietrich became a sexy symbol of the time’s ambiguous identities. The seismic pull of opposing forces—of ideologies and necessities, of possibilities and lost certainties—seized the lamentable Professor Raat in Der Blaue Engel, revealing him as a bankrupt character, a former petty tyrant who finally becomes what he has secretly always been: a pathetic clown.
No longer held back by a morality that had been comprehensively discredited, no longer believing in anything more than the possibilities of getting laid and getting by, no longer really hoping for anything much, the amorphous sense of self in this postwar society was turned into an immense field for experimentation, and many strange flowers blossomed on this field. Some of them were among the finest German culture had produced; other
s—from erotic floor shows to paid quickies in public toilets—were signs of another kind of inflation, in which love had lost its currency and was replaced with a smaller, harder coin. Yet others, the commercial and ideological exploitation of human destructiveness, began to herald things to come.
In Berlin itself neither the burgeoning creativity nor the delicious decadence of the German capital could disguise the fact that the political climate was slowly but surely sliding into violence. Clashes between Nazis and Communists during demonstrations, in bars, and on the streets routinely bloodied the pavements and frequently left people dead, and when the interior minister forbade the wearing of brown shirts the Nazi militia simply switched to white shirts and continued to impose their political world with jackboots, truncheons, and knives.
In 1930, the movement gained an important martyr in Berlin, a hero whose name would adorn one of the most important National Socialist battle songs. Horst Wessel was an SA man who lived with his girlfriend, a prostitute, in the Friedrichshain neighborhood of Berlin. When he refused to pay his share of the rent, his woman asked a bruiser from Communist Red Front to make him see sense. Wessel was killed in the ensuing brawl, and Joseph Goebbels seized the opportunity to transform a brutal pimp into a noble fighter for the great cause who had been assassinated because he had been tirelessly working for a better Germany. A song written by him became the official battle hymn of the SA: “Oh, raise the flag and close your ranks up tight! / SA men march with bold determined tread. / Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in fight / March at our side, in spirit never dead.”8 The heavy, plodding tune of the “Horst Wessel Lied,” ideal for marching, was intoned during torchlit processions, Party meetings, and daytime rallies, usually with the tone-deaf anger of soccer hooligans, and it became the ire-filled hymn of the burgeoning National Socialist movement.
As social tensions escalated, a time of enjoyment was slowly becoming a time for marching and for political rallies. The streets were full of men with nothing better to do. The country’s fragile recovery had been made possible to a large extent through investment and loans from the United States, which saw Germany, with its high interest rates, as an attractive opportunity. Thanks to Germany’s strong exports and productivity the loans had mostly been repaid, but even before the crash, the US economy had begun to retract, and there was less money to invest. Now the existing loans were being called in and few new ones given.
Germany’s industry and its political stability had depended on these loans, which had paid for the reparations, unemployment benefits, infrastructure, and industrial investments. As this lifeline was withdrawn, the country began floundering dangerously. Factories reduced production, workers were laid off, businesses closed. In 1928, 1.3 million Germans had been unemployed; three years later, the jobless totaled more than three million, and by 1932 the figure had reached almost six million, not counting the countless workers who had to make do with menial labor, reduced pay, or part-time jobs. Children could be seen playing “signing on” games in the courtyards of Berlin, Essen, and Hamburg, pretending to be unemployed workers at a labor exchange. Hungry, frustrated, and desperate, many grasped at the promises of political parties. Membership in the Communist Party surged from 117,000 to 360,000 within four years, and 80 percent of the new members were out of work. The rise of Hitler’s National Socialist Party was even more spectacular: 109,000 strong in 1928, it topped one million members in 1932.
The atmosphere was hardening, and not just in Europe’s largest and most central economy. Germany’s industrial production slumped by 42 percent, while that of Great Britain fell by 11 percent. Unemployment in Britain was at 3.5 million, and a quarter of the population lived below subsistence level. In France production declined by almost a quarter, but there was less unemployment—the country had lost more than a million men in the war and many more were invalids, leaving more work for the others. Helped by German reparations, the country had even seen an economic upturn in the preceding years, and the crisis would take longer to bite here than elsewhere in Europe.
The immense energies transforming the lives of Europeans and Americans since the turn of the century were continuing to plow through the societies of the West. The war had brutally accelerated for millions the experience of living in a modern world, and the forces of the new had asserted themselves triumphantly in a postwar Europe shaken to its moral core. Their mainspring was in the factories, and they had announced themselves through smoking chimneys, mass production, and flourishing cities.
As the industrial base of this flood of change began to weaken, the social effects of the great transformation continued to make themselves felt. The currents of change turned inward, pitting classes, clans, and countries against one another. There was no going back, no viable alternative to life in the city for those who had cut off their ties with the countryside. There was no retreat from modernity, from its mass-produced goods, its cinemas, its opportunities.
Even if prophets and doom-mongers blamed the mechanistic and soulless nature of modernity for all the world’s ills, hardly anyone was ready to live without it. Women enjoyed new freedoms, people who still had jobs lived better than before, and the dreams fostered by films and advertising, the horizons opened by education, and the desires awakened by shop windows were there to stay. The very fabric of life had changed since 1900, and there was no end in sight.
Now, trapped in a crisis in which there seemed to be no hope of escape and little prospect of improvement, this new, modern life began to look cold and threatening. As many retrenched into clannishness and united against common, often imaginary enemies, the postwar years began to pivot, beginning to feel again like prewar years. A decade earlier, in 1919, many observers, John Maynard Keynes and French president Paul Deschanel among them, had prophesied a second world war growing out of the deeply flawed peace. As the atmosphere hardened across Europe, the energies of modernization seemed to turn against those at the bottom of society, and millions sought refuge in ideologies that were viscerally hostile to one another, it seemed that another war (the same conflict renewed, perhaps) was only a question of time.
For the young Marlene Dietrich the 1930 premiere of The Blue Angel was only the beginning of her career, one that would take her out of Germany on the very night of the film’s premiere. The great and the good had turned up for the first showing, expecting the famous Emil Jannings to be the star of the evening and finding to their surprise that the androgynous, amused-looking, and worldly beauty of an unknown starlet stole the show. But while Dietrich was celebrated and increasingly raucous toasts made to her and to the huge success of her appearance in Germany’s second talkie, she carried in her pocket a contract with Paramount Pictures and soon would travel west to Hollywood.
She left behind a city seething with anticipation of things to come, as the British writer Stephen Spender noted: “Berlin was the tension, the poverty, the anger, the prostitution, the hope and despair thrown out on the streets. It was the blatant rich at the smart restaurants, the prostitutes in army top boots at corners, the grim, submerged-looking Communists in processions, and the violent youths who suddenly emerged from nowhere into the Wittenbergplatz and shouted: ‘Deutschland, Erwache!’ (Germany, awaken!).”9
·1931·
The Anatomy of Love in Italy
The feeling that the world is ending has given way to the sense of a new beginning. The ultimate goal now stands out unmistakably within the field of vision now opening up before us, and all faith in miracles is now harnessed to the active transformation of the present.
Julius Petersen, Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich
in Deutscher Sage und Dichtung
(The Longing for the Third Reich), 1934
LITTLE IS KNOWN OF MICHELE “MICHAEL” SCHIRRU, THE ANARCHIST who traveled from his adopted home in America back to his native Italy with the plan to assassinate Il Duce. The only two known photos tell two stations of his story with startling immediacy. In one, his passport photo, a man o
f some thirty years stares intensely into the camera. He is wearing a dark jacket, white shirt, and tie. His hair is short at the sides and longer on top. In his eyes are challenge, anger, perhaps fear: the face of someone who does not want to tell too much about himself.
The second image is a police mug shot. In this pitiless portrait, his right ear appears to be missing, the hair around it shaven or torn off, the right eye deeply bloodshot. He is unshaven and wears an undershirt and a prisoner’s jacket. The photo was taken on or shortly after February 3, 1931, when he had shot two police officers and then had turned his gun against his right temple and pulled the trigger.
Michele Schirru, who failed in his bid to assassinate Mussolini, before and after his arrest.
According to his own testimony, Schirru was born in 1899 into the abject poverty of rural Sardinia, “a disheveled and savage youngster.”1 Forced to leave school at the age of ten and apprenticed to a blacksmith, the boy grew to hate the powers that kept him and his kin poor and ignorant, and at fifteen he left his native island to find work and wider intellectual horizons in the dockyards of Turin. In 1917, he enlisted in the Italian army and fought on the gruesome Alpine front, only to find after his return that the soldiers’ sacrifices were not honored and their hopes for their own country were dashed as the Fascists began to win the battle on the streets. The young man was involved in some of these battles and devoted his life to political agitation. Known to the police as a troublemaker, he finally had to return to his native Sardinia.