minister and millionaire industrialist was gunned down as he drove to work in his open-topped car. The reason suggested was that he was part of a Jewish conspiracy.
There had already been three hundred seventy-six political assassinations since the war. Most of the victims were liberals; almost half were Jewish. More than three hundred fifty murders were carried out by right-wing groups; around twenty by the left. The average prison sentence for left-wingers, however, was fifteen years; the average for the right wing, four months.
And yet workers left their factories and took to the streets of every city in Germany to protest Rathenau’s murder. The labor unions declared a day of mourning. His body was laid in state in the Reichstag. Over a million mourners were recorded on the streets of Berlin, several million more in Hamburg and Frankfurt. It was an outrage, everyone agreed, a travesty, a crime of cowardice and misguided prejudice. Two of the assassins were tracked down; one was shot, the other shot himself. Thirteen years later, however, Himmler laid a wreath on their graves.
Although his mother claimed to have English roots, Edvard was a German of Jewish descent on his father’s side. Like Rathenau, he had fought in the war and been decorated. He was, however, heartened by the public’s collective outrage.
“You see,” he told Hanne. “It is a random act by schoolboy fanatics. Everyone knows that there is no such thing as a Jewish conspiracy. Germany is the Fatherland. I feel perfectly safe here.”
And, sitting in his drawing room, where decorative paintings and Venetian-glass mirrors still covered every wall—where the heavy oak furniture looked as if it had been there since the beginning of time and the clock ticked the smooth, peaceful hours away—it was impossible to imagine that in one short decade, all of it would be gone and that, only a few years after that, Edvard would be dead from a hole he himself had fired into the soft, cultured recesses of his very large brain. It was impossible to imagine. But it would happen.
Berlin was swarming with foreigners; Americans, French, Swiss, and Dutch businessmen all bought up flats by the block or occasionally by the whole street. They opened hotels, started literary magazines, and bought paintings. Some relocated from New York and Boston just to live cheaply and luxuriously on black-market caviar and crateloads of gin.
In October, Mussolini marched into Rome with thirty thousand Blackshirts and was handed power by King Victor Emmanuel III. In Munich, Adolf Hitler, the man who had taken over the leadership of the NSDAP and renamed it the Nazi Party, watched and was inspired. Gone were the endless committee meetings, and instead a single strong leader, Der Führer, now led the party. The party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, increased its production to twice a week and would eventually be published daily. Membership grew from six thousand to thirty-five thousand in under a year.
In late 1922, when a shipment of telegraph poles failed to arrive in France, French and Belgian troops invaded the Ruhr Valley and took over the steel factories, the coal mines, and the railways. To retaliate, the Weimar government ordered the workers to go on strike. Nothing was produced or ran in or out of the valley for months, and 150,000 people were forced out of their homes by the invading armies. The government started to print money to pay wages and cover living costs. Businesses were also allowed to print their own banknotes, and soon railways, factories, even pubs, were producing money. It was, however, soon worth less than it cost to print. One day a cup of coffee in a café might cost five thousand marks. An hour later it would have risen to eight thousand.You soon needed a suitcase of money to buy a sausage. At one point a dollar was worth over four billion marks.
In a matter of months, wealth that had taken centuries to accumulate became worthless. A former bank manager withdrew all his savings, used it to buy a U-Bahn ticket, and traveled round the city once before returning home to starve to death. A family of four who were used to dining at their mahogany table on beef stew and apple cake burned the table to keep warm and then drowned themselves in a lake. A local director borrowed money from a currency speculator and bought his own theater.The show sold out every night but he still ended up with debts that would take several lifetimes of hard labor to repay.
But the film industry managed to weather the inflation. New cinemas were opening daily, and for the starving, the homeless, and the cold they were still a place of escapism, of refuge, of warmth.
ne morning, a letter with a Russian stamp arrived in Ilya Yurasov’s mailbox. It had come via the consulate. He looked at it for several minutes before he opened it. My dearest Ilya, wrote Katya Nadezhda.
I am living in the Crimea but now I am alone. Since my last letter, my life has been intolerable in so many ways.We left with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. My darling daughter succumbed to typhus a few months ago. So much sadness. So much torment. But how I long to see you again, my dearest Ilya. I have your photograph in front of me as I write. You are all I have now. All sailings to the West have now been suspended but I have heard that it is still possible to escape through Poland. I know we will meet again soon. Wait for me.
Until then,
your beloved, Katya
The date, written in the top right-hand corner, was May 1920. It had taken more than two years to reach him.
Kinetic
Ina runs out from work two or three times a day to buy things, some-things, anythings: shoes that don’t fit, a couple of glass eyes, a pipe, or a pound or two of salt. Someone will want them someday, surely?
Tonight she has a date with a man she met in a queue.They meet at the cinema to see Dr. Mabuse, his choice, not hers. The curtains part and the show begins. Dr. Mabuse hypnotizes his victims. Dr. Mabuse is an evil tyrant, a megalomaniac, a cunning impersonator. Dr. Mabuse has gone mad in his basement workshop; his face is a white dot in a black background.Then, all of a sudden, that face rushes forward and fills the screen. Ina screams. She grabs the man’s hand. It is damp and clammy. She instantly lets it go again.
“Don’t you like me?” the man says later.
A deal is a deal. He paid for the tickets; she should let him kiss her. A tram is approaching. He lunges, his face is in her face, as big as Dr. Mabuse’s.The doors open, he grabs at her; he won’t let go. Ina jumps onboard as the tram starts to move off, and watches him recede, smaller and smaller, still holding her handbag with nothing inside but a lipstick, two glass eyes, and a bag of salt.
By the end of 1922, Lidi had made nine films. All of them were directed by Ilya Yurasov. She filmed on location at the brand-new amusement park and the Berlin Winter Palace. She had also filmed on sets dressed to look like nineteenth-century Paris with flats of Sacré-Coeur and Notre Dame, deep, dark forests with cardboard rocks and fake snow, and claustrophobic interiors where staircases led nowhere and the walls leaned in at strange angles.
She had played a bank teller, a coquette, a trapeze artist, and a serving girl; she had taken her own life twice, once by drowning herself in a river and once by taking poison, and killed her wayward lover three times. She had been both the object of desire and the objectifier, the betrayer and the betrayed, the lover and the beloved. It soon became obvious that there was something about Lidi’s manner that gave gravitas to even the flimsiest of plots.
“She is a pioneer,” Mr. Leyer was fond of saying.
Mr. Leyer would later argue that cinema was as important in the development of interhuman communication as the printing press. From the moment the lights lower and we begin to watch a drama unfold, we observe, in huge close-up, the faces, the reactions, the emotions of our chosen heroes and heroines. Of course, these people are only actors and they are directed to provoke a given response, but this passive observation could be regarded as something that would fundamentally change the way we perceive ourselves and the way we relate to others. As Horace M. Kallen pointed out in 1942, “Slight actions, such as the incidental play of the fingers, the opening or clenching of a hand . . . became the visible hieroglyphs of the unseen dynamics of human relations.”
I
n other words, a character’s interior life could be revealed in a way it had never been revealed before; the gibberish of human emotion could be translated, transcribed, embellished; the potential of any given situation could be tested, played out, concluded, without any real emotional cost. It was as if, Mr. Leyer would note, we had accidentally stumbled on the medium of our dreams.
But did this change the way we handle real love affairs and moments of crisis? he would ask. Did it give us new vocabulary to deal with heartbreak and euphoria? Of course it did, he would claim.What man could be spurned by his lover without consciously or unconsciously mimicking Harold Kraus in The Loveless Alley? And how many middle-class women aped Elisabeth Bergner in Husbands or Lovers? as they stared out of the window at strangers on the street below?
In the era before the big screen, there was declamation, gesture, and dialogue.The camera would employ all these elements, certainly, but the intimacy of the close-up, the jump cut, and the zoom could act as a much more accurate mirror for our souls. And Mr. Leyer would argue that we would never experience grief, love, jealousy, or despair in quite the same way again.
As Lidi’s popularity grew, at least three or four photographers would be waiting outside the studio. She refused to give interviews, but so many letters arrived every day that a secretary was employed part-time just to open them. And every premiere was met with rapturous applause and an increasingly hysterical crowd outside.
Stefan Mauritz always stood apart from the throng. He knew where she lived, he knew which route her drivers took to the studio. He knew which bars she went to on her nights off, and he knew that her best friend and former roommate was a lesbian. She had a lover, a Russian director, but she was still his wife. Why, he asked himself over and over, had Eva told him she was dead? Had Lilly asked her to? And if so, didn’t she realize he would see her now? Her face was all over the city, on billboards, on cinema posters, on the front covers of fan magazines. It didn’t make sense. But she had been dead and a part of him had died too. And now that she was alive, the dead part of him, his frozen, ugly part, still remained. He couldn’t approach her; the problem was insurmountable. He would try to forget her, forsake her, erase her. And yet no matter how hard he tried to resist, he was always drawn back, to the cinema, to her neighborhood, to the orbit of her world.
Lilly had noticed him, of course she had, but although there was something familiar about him, she couldn’t place him; he was only one specter or ghost from other, distant lives among many. Some of the young girls who sold themselves on Friedrichstrasse surely once were wards of St. Francis Xavier’s; the extras with their carnivorous eyes and beery breath all looked like the customers from The Blue Cat, and some of the women who shouted and waved so voraciously from behind the barricades at premieres resembled the women who punched one another at the Catholic hostel. All of them made her feel deeply uneasy, all of them gave her vertigo.
She decided to move out of the Adlon: too many people knew her there, too many people who always seemed to want more than she was able to give. The apartment she bought was modest. It was just off the Kurfürstendamm near Savignyplatz and had belonged to a Jewish concert pianist. After the murder of Rathenau he had decided to take up an invitation to teach at a conservatory in Paris. Lilly declined to take it furnished and moved in with only a bed, a bureau, and a vase for flowers. The rooms were all painted white. The floors were of polished wood. It was a blank canvas, a new start.
Ilya still lived in the same apartment near the station. He worked hard, harder than he had ever worked before, directing one film after the next without a break. And on the weekends he spent hours working on the script of a new project, a reworking of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, called The Queen of Sorrow.
Something of Lilly was always with him now: her scent, which lingered on his clothes, the echo of her voice in his ears, the ghost of her kiss. And the more he tried to push her out of his mind, the more he thought about her. Since he had received the letter, he had rehearsed what he would say to Katya, the sympathy and the reassurance. But how could he explain Lilly? He had once been a man of honor. Not anymore.
One weekend, shortly after she’d moved, Ilya took Lilly to a cabaret in the basement of the Café des Westens called Die Wilde Bühne, or The Wild Stage. It was a dark, smoky, cavernous room where performers and writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Trude Hesterberg sang “Ballad of the Dead Soldier” and “Song of the Stock Exchange” on a small, cramped stage.
“Everyone drilled in liberty,” one of the performers enunciated. “Liberrrteeee.”
One of the acts was by Kurt Gerron, a man who would end up performing on a stage in a death camp. Dressed as a circus trainer wielding a whip, he sang about trying to tame “the beast humanity.” This beast, apparently made up of anti-Semites and greedy capitalists, of politicians planning putsches and war-hungry generals, was eventually tamed and brought to heel.
Lilly laughed until she wept. Ilya barely smiled.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him.
“It’s not funny,” he said.
That night they fought as they walked back to her new apartment. And as they passed beneath the linden trees whose black branches clutched at the orange light that streamed onto the night pavements, it was suddenly clear to Lilly that something had changed. He was angry with her.
“Don’t you have any political views?” Ilya asked.
“Of course.”
“Or are you a Jew-hater, like all the rest of you Germans?”
She didn’t answer.The question was so clearly ridiculous. Most of their friends in the film industry were Jewish.
Later, Lilly would wonder what had gotten into her. Maybe it was the wine that had cost several million marks a glass. Maybe it was the inflation—of currency, of her public persona, but mostly of her feelings for Ilya—that made her act the way she did; she had offered herself to him unconditionally and he seemed not to have noticed. And so there, in the street, as the whores and pimps wandered by, as the taxis loitered and the last streetcars idled, everything suddenly unraveled.
“How dare you,” she said.
The first blow hit him across the cheek. The second on the chest. The third he caught in midair. Neither of them would look away. Neither of them would concede. The alleyway smelled of urine and damp. Up against a wall pitted with bullet holes and encrusted with old paint, Ilya tore her dress open. His grip was firm, her clasp was firmer; they were a single entity, one breath, one skin, one intent.
And then it was over, the point lost, the hurt scattered, nothing healed, everything dispersed.
Lilly closed the front door of her apartment behind her. And the rooms, so fresh and white during the day, now looked like an empty stage set, spartan, cold, impoverished. Her dress was ruined, her skin was bruised, her lips were raw. She lay on the floor and wept. anne was rich at first. Despite the fact that prices had been
steadily rising since the armistice, she bought clothes imported from Paris and smoked Italian cigarettes. She spent afternoons at the movies or shopping or taking tea. But in the evening, while her husband was otherwise engaged, at the cinema, or visiting his daughters, she would wander along the Friedrichstrasse and the Tauentzienstrasse, the streets around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and up and down the Kurfürstendamm. Here you could buy an envelope of morphine or pick up a tart. Young boys, their faces thick with powder and rouge, offered themselves to businessmen. Girls in school uniforms kissed each other in doorways or beckoned to passersby. The prettiest women were usually men, the ugliest were said to be the best in the sack, and everyone whispered the same phrase over and over, “Möchtest du spazierengehen?”—“Like to take a walk?”
One night at the Kleist Casino, the air heavy with the tickle of cocaine and the divans alive with the writhing of silk on bare flesh, as she placed her bets and took her chances, as the roulette ball rattled round with that low hum that promises everything, Hanne looked up and there, standing on the oppo
site side of the table with his hands in his pockets, was Kurt.
“Like to take a walk?” he whispered. By the time the ball had chosen its destination—zero, no winners—they were gone.
It was a Saturday in November, 1923. Every morning for weeks on end, a layer of ice had covered the city, frosting the rooftops and the threadbare branches of the trees. The freezing temperatures stilled the leaves, froze the grass into spikes, and glazed Lilly’s windows opaque with white. A horse and cart made its way to the market, the horse’s breath rising in plumes into the frigid air. A newspaper seller had set up outside the station and cried out, “Murder in Schiller, murder in Schiller, murder in Schiller Park!”
She rarely had visitors and that morning she wasn’t expecting anyone. So when there was an assertive knock on the door, she ignored it. A hand knocked again, more insistently this time.
“Please,” a man’s voice pleaded. “A moment of your time.”
Lilly immediately recognized Edvard’s voice. She opened the door and he stepped inside. Two months had passed since Lilly had last seen him, and he was quite changed. He wore a suit cut for a younger, slimmer man, with a bright blue neckerchief bought for him, she guessed, by Hanne. And yet his shirt was stained and his face had a sunken look.
“Hanne wrote down your new address. I hope you don’t mind?”
“Are you all right?”
Edvard nodded.
“May I sit down?”
Only there wasn’t a chair. Although he didn’t want to admit it, not there, not then, everything was not all right.The inflation had ruined him. Debts meant that he had been forced to sell his entire stock to a business acquaintance from New York who bought the lot for less than the cost of his return ticket. His former wife had gone to live with her mother and vowed she would never let him see his children again.
“I kept a record,” he began, and brought out a notebook. “As her only friend, I think you should know.”
The Glimmer Palace Page 30