Berlin 1936

by Oliver Hilmes

  Fast-forward to August 1936. Perhaps Goebbels has been thinking of his family by marriage—his mother-in-law, Oskar Ritschel and Richard Friedländer. And now there’s the news of Magda’s affair with Lüdecke. Goebbels writes in his diary: “It will take me a long time to recover from this.” In fact his recovery takes exactly three days.

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “Newspapers are requested to make clear that there is enough accommodation available in Berlin, even for one- or two-day visits.”

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  For Adolf Hitler, the man of the hour may be Erich Borchmeyer, but the majority of the 100,000 spectators in the Olympic Stadium see things quite differently. For them, the star of the show is Jesse Owens, a spectacular 22-year-old American sprinter from Oakville, Alabama. At 5 p.m., after the qualifiers, the quarter-finals and semifinals, the final of the men’s 100-meter race will be held. The original thirty-six competitors have been whittled down to the six fastest men in the world. Owens is the favorite, but the Führer is pinning his hopes on Germany’s Borchmeyer.

  The entire stadium watches, transfixed, as the six runners make their way to the starting blocks. Owens has drawn the innermost lane next to Sweden’s Lennart Strandberg, Borchmeyer and the Dutchman Martinus Osendarp. The Americans Frank Wykoff and Ralph Metcalfe occupy lanes five and six. Then there is Franz Miller. With his white apron, he looks like a butcher or the owner of a successful pharmacy. But his job is unique: Miller is the race starter. With all the calm in the world, the corpulent man explains the starting command to the athletes. The Berlin Olympics are using a stop-motion camera system developed by the Zeiss Ikon and Agfa companies. When Miller fires the starting gun, he’ll also send an electrical signal to start the race clock and the camera at the finish line. After around 10 minutes, the judges will be able to inspect visual images of the race.

  It’s almost 5 p.m., and the runners are about to take their positions. Osendarp looks nervous, scuttling to and fro, while Metcalfe crosses himself before kneeling down in the blocks. A dead hush has descended over the stadium. You can hear Miller’s voice: “On your marks…get set…” Then the starting gun echoes through the arena. Just before the race Owens’s coach told him to imagine he was running over hot coals, and he seems to have taken that advice. Owens’s feet scarcely appear to touch the ground. He flies across the track, taking the lead immediately. After only half the race, he is a good 2 yards ahead of Osendarp and Wykoff. No one can compete with him, it seems, but suddenly Metcalfe makes up ground, and the two men run neck and neck over the final yards. Owens crosses the finish line in 10.3 seconds—Metcalfe and Osendarp follow at respective intervals of one-tenth of a second. Adolph Borchmeyer—Adolf Hitler’s great German hope—comes in fifth.

  There are wild celebrations in the Olympic Stadium, with the spectators chanting “Jesse!” The object of their admiration looks into the stands, as if he can’t believe his eyes, and waves to his fans. In the Führer’s box, however, the mood is as sour as a bad hangover. Hitler turns around and grumbles something to the men sitting behind him. The official Olympic newspaper will describe the hopes raised before the race in words that no doubt also applied to Hitler and his entourage: “Although we could see how dominant the Americans were from the times recorded in the qualifiers—could there not be a miracle? Could the 32-year-old Borchmeyer not by sheer willpower make it to the top three?” Obviously not.

  There are various rumors about what happens next. Some people say that Hitler refuses to congratulate the race winner, but there’s nothing to that story. After the Führer had received the winners of the women’s javelin competition on his own initiative during the first day of the competition, the IOC informed him that congratulations from the head of state violated protocol. Hitler has therefore already ceased offering his personal congratulations to the winners.

  Nonetheless, it’s true that Hitler will have avoided a personal encounter with Owens at all costs. When Schirach suggests that he have his picture taken with the athlete, Hitler snarls: “The Americans should be ashamed of letting Negroes win their medals. I’m not shaking hands with this Negro.”

  Hitler, the patron of the Berlin Olympic Games, has his own explanation for why Owens wins the day. His favorite architect, Albert Speer, will recall the following remark: “People whose forefathers came from the jungle are primitive—more athletically built than civilized white people,” Hitler says, shrugging his shoulders. “They’re not fair competition, and thus they should be excluded from future Games and other sporting competitions.” But by no means will this day spell the end of the bad news for Hitler. The 100-meter race won’t be the only event in which Jesse Owens wins the gold medal.

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  The news of Owens’s triumph spreads like wildfire. In Southampton, England, a certain “J. M. Loraine” mails a letter to the sprinter. It asks Owens to say the following when he is presented with his gold medal: “It was an honor for me to represent my country and a joy to test myself against the best runners in the world. But I must refuse with loathing a prize from your government, which preaches racial hatred.” Owens will never receive this letter. Mail to the athletes is intercepted and opened. The original letter is kept in a Gestapo file, and a copy sent to the Reich Security Main Office director, Reinhard Heydrich.

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “As welcome as German victories are, it is not appropriate only to mention excellent German performances in the headlines. Foreign triumphs should not be downplayed. The racial perspective should not be applied in any form to discussions of sporting results, and in particular, Negroes should not be attacked on their sensitive points. Even less well-known members of the international and national Olympic committees should be mentioned occasionally.”

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  A man of the world. That’s what everyone thinks on meeting Mustafa El Sherbini for the first time. His shoes are polished to perfection, his stylish suit (double-breasted, as is the fashion in 1936) sits flawlessly, and his jet-black, slightly curly hair is cut neatly to the back. No question about it: the 28-year-old Egyptian makes quite the impression. If only he didn’t wear that disturbingly sardonic smile all the time. On close inspection, you might take the young man for a gigolo, and that’s by no means inaccurate. Like Leon Henri Dajou, Sherbini also began his career as a dance partner. We don’t know when he left the city of his birth, Cairo, for Berlin. In any case, at some point he has arrived here, smiling his way into the hearts of the city’s females. One of the many ladies who succumbs to the handsome young dandy’s charms is Yvonne Fürstner.

  Yvonne’s parents, Alice and Solman, got divorced when she was young, and Alice married the extraordinarily wealthy Count Konrad von Frankenberg und Ludwigsdorf. The aristocrat had no children of his own, so he adopted Yvonne and her sister Lieselotte, making them into countesses and providing them with hefty allowances. Yvonne von Frankenberg, as she was now known, was a very eligible young woman, but she was incapable of settling down. Her marriage to merchant Robert Treeck ended in divorce, as did her union with the considerably older music publisher Otto Fürstner. Yvonne Fürstner was in her early 30s when she met Sherbini, and before long the two were a couple.

  Sherbini dreamed of opening his own establishment—a chic place, preferably a bar and grill, as is all the rage right now. And of course, there had to be a stage for bands and amusing little variety acts. If Sherbini had his way, Berlin’s high society would meet at his place. And together, his ambition and Yvonne Fürstner’s money laid the foundations for the Sherbini Bar at Uhlandstrasse 18, an ideal location not far from Kurfürstendamm. The trendy art deco venue opened its doors in September 1933. By that point Adolf Hitler had been German chancellor for six months.

  Hitler will never set foot in the Sherbini Bar, nor, almost certainly, will he ever learn of its existence. The things that go on there are abhorrent to the Führer.
“Times haven’t changed here,” the Nazi newspaper Berliner Herold wrote. “Here the Kurfürstendamm world looks just as it did before 1933. Hot jazz, Negro dancing, exorbitant prices, foreign languages—you’d almost think you were in Montparnasse and not in Berlin.” The hack who wrote these words for the Herold was condemning the Sherbini Bar, but Yvonne and Mustafa take his lines as a compliment. Although it was only established after Hitler’s rise to power, the bar comes to symbolize the antithesis of the Nazi “people’s community.” In this tiny microcosm, a world that has gone extinct elsewhere in Berlin continues to flourish.

  The Sherbini Bar’s patrons are artists, actors, industrialists, diplomats and politicians. Ernst Udet frequents the place, as does tennis star Gottfried von Cramm and Martha Dodd, the socialite daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, who enjoys the male company she finds on Uhlandstrasse. The bar is also a meeting place for Egyptian expats, of whom there are quite a few in Berlin. People attached to the Egyptian embassy on Tiergartenstrasse regularly visit Sherbini and his establishment. Occasionally Ahmed Mustafa Dissouki, the owner of the ritzy Ciro Bar, will call in to see his friends Mustafa and Yvonne. Another good customer is the 22-year-old student Aziz de Nasr from Egypt’s Gharbia Governorate. Aziz sublets a room from a certain Mrs. Luise Oppenheim and can’t really afford such an expensive watering hole. But somehow he made his way to Sherbini’s place, where he fell head over heels in love with Yvonne. He visits the bar as often as he can, tracking his beloved’s every movement with stares of romantic longing.

  From the very beginning, there’s been a clear division of labor in the bar. Sherbini plays the role of conférencier, organizing the entertainment and being the face of the établissement. Yvonne runs the business in the background, keeping tabs on everything, and prepared to get tough when things get out of hand. Sometimes there is trouble when a customer loses control or refuses to pay his tab. For such occasions, Yvonne keeps a thick rubber truncheon behind the bar. Thankfully she doesn’t have to use it all that much. Far more frequent are noisy arguments at home. Sherbini has the looks of a dandy and the temperament of an Eastern potentate. Yvonne calls him her “wild love,” which sums up his two primary characteristics, for he can be both lovable and savage. “As far as my wild love goes, I don’t think he’ll ever change,” Yvonne writes to her sister. “You have to judge wild men by different standards.”

  In August 1936, the Sherbini Bar is one of the hottest nightspots in Berlin. Although business usually declines in the summer months, Yvonne hopes that the Olympic Games will bring in more customers. Mustafa will greet patrons from Germany and abroad, smile a lot, trade quips with the gentlemen and gallantries with the ladies, while Yvonne stays close to her truncheon and avoids the spotlight. Three years after the Nazis assumed power, there are good reasons for Yvonne to take a back seat. She’s Jewish.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “At Salzburgerstrasse 6, a swastika flag hanging from a balcony was set on fire, as was a poster featuring the Olympic flag at Berch­tesgad­eners­trasse 14. Investigations have thus far only revealed that the burning remnants of the flag were used to try to set on fire a car with the registration number IA 100 060. The suspected perpetrator is the baker Hermann Ronne of Bornemannstrasse 3.”

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  The “Magician”—which is what his children call the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann—hasn’t been feeling well all day. Küsnacht near Zurich, where he resides, is enjoying better weather than Berlin, and Mann complains about the “oppressive sun.” The “greenhouse air” spoils even his daily walk with his wife, Katia. Mann only recovers when things cool down late in the evening, which, as is his wont, he spends listening to the radio. He takes in a classical concert with works by Mozart and Schubert, paying particular attention to a short piano composition by Richard Wagner. The piece, Albumblatt, is “very authentic in its appropriately sensual indulgence,” yet “rather impoverished in terms of content.” Last but not least, Mann listens to the news from Berlin, noting in his diary: “Recordings of the 100-meter race, in which two American Negroes triumphed. Very nice!”

  It is only thanks to enormous technological effort that Mann can follow the goings-on in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium from far-off Switzerland. The 1936 Summer Games are a global media event the like of which has not been seen before. Eighteen hundred journalists from 59 countries are reporting on the competitions; in addition, 125 accredited photographers will produce around 16,000 images. Along with daily newspapers, radio plays a leading role in the coverage. The technological command center is located directly underneath the Führer’s VIP box. A 65-foot-long switchboard can simultaneously handle eighteen connections throughout Europe and ten overseas. Twenty-four stations in total provide live coverage of the Games. Some of the reports are broadcast directly over the airwaves; others are recorded on shellac and later played back. All told, German stations will broadcast more than 500 reports—foreign stations will bring their audiences no fewer than 3,000.

  Spectators in the Olympic Stadium will discover, next to the Führer’s box, a 7-foot-long contraption that resembles an anti-aircraft gun. It’s one of three electronic cameras allowing the brand-new medium of television to broadcast live from the arena. It takes two strong men to change the 110-pound lens with a diameter of 16 inches on the “iconoscope” built by the Telefunken company. Another novelty is the so-called intermediary film lorry of the Reich Post Office: a Mercedes transport vehicle with a cinematic camera mounted on the roof. Exposed celluloid runs through a completely darkened duct into the lorry’s interior, where it is developed, fixed, dried and scanned. With a delay of only 58 seconds, Olympic competitions flicker across screens in twenty public television salons in Berlin, Potsdam and Leipzig. Three times daily—from 10 to 12 a.m., 3 to 7 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m.—these primitive TV sets show film coverage. “Attention, attention!” goes the announcement. “This is the Paul Nipkow television station in Berlin with a special Olympic broadcast with sound at 7.06 meters and pictures on 6.77 meters in wavelength.”

  The National Socialists spare nothing in their attempts to impress the world. The more Thomas Mann in his exile in Küsnacht listens to radio broadcasts from Berlin, the more uneasy he becomes. The Magician knows that the enormous technological effort is being employed to intimidate, indeed overwhelm the rest of the world. Hitler wants to demonstrate his power. The implicit message is that others should beware of messing with an industrial nation capable of such engineering feats. When Mann hears the recordings of the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony, he feels physically ill. “An unpleasant business,” he writes in his diary. “Fraught nerves. Worried about my appendix. But it’s probably, as usual, my large intestine.”

  The American writer Thomas Wolfe experiences a summer of contradictions during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “Thomas Wolfe came, and his effect was like an earthquake.” Credit 4

  Tuesday, 4 August 1936

  REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: Partly cloudy, with isolated light showers. Gradually lessening winds from the west during the day. Somewhat cooler, with highs of 18°C.

  It’s early in the morning, and Thomas Wolfe has only been in bed a couple of hours when his alarm clock goes off. German clocks sound different from American ones, he thinks. They’re louder, and more pitiless and aggressive. Maybe, realizing how sleepy he still is, he just turns the damn nuisance off—or he throws it into the corner of his room in anger. The latter seems more likely, since when he’s ripped from his sleep Wolfe is not just tired but also has a raging hangover. And yesterday evening began so harmlessly, with Wolfe being invited to dinner by Ernst Rowohlt. Slowly he begins to remember and realizes what happened.

  The previous evening Wolfe left his hotel, glancing as always to his left up at the tower clock on the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. He walked across the street past the cosmopolitan Kakadu Bar, turned right down Joachimsthaler Strasse, then left onto Augsburger Strasse, then right d
own Rankestrasse. All in all he went no further than 500 yards. On the way, he bought some flowers for Rowohlt’s wife, Elli.

  Rowohlt lives at Rankestrasse 24 in a magnificent building constructed in 1898. When Wolfe got there and stared up at the ornate, imposing façade, a funny feeling came over him. It wasn’t anxiety he felt at seeing his German publisher again, more like a mixture of caution and respect. Wolfe was on his mettle. He was all too aware from the previous year that being invited to dinner at the Rowohlts’ is like confronting a force of nature. Born in Bremen in 1887, Rowohlt is a powerful giant of a man, with blond hair, blues eyes and a handshake that could crush stones. He’s a man with the sort of energy that can set life spinning like a dizzying carousel. But for Rowohlt, Wolfe will later write, intoxicating excess is preceded by civilized understatement. “Today you’ll come to my place for a meal,” he told his guest earlier, nodding with satisfaction. “No one else will be there, just my wife and I. We’ll have a quiet conversation and a peaceful evening. We’ll eat and talk, but there’ll be no drinks, no alcohol. You’ve had enough of that already. Or maybe…”—here he waved his massive fingers in a conciliatory gesture—“…we’ll drink a simple wine. None of the hard stuff, just a simple, light Rhineland wine. I take the occasional glass for my kidneys. And we’ll see that you get home early.” The evening proceeded as announced. Elli had made a wonderful meal—the sort of simple, hearty German food Rowohlt is fond of—and they drank white wine for the benefit of their kidneys. Wolfe did indeed get home early—early in the morning, that is. It was 5 a.m. before he stumbled out of Rankestrasse, across Augsburger Strasse and Joachimsthaler Strasse and back to Kurfürstendamm. As he did so, the Rowohlts’ maid was disposing of “fourteen delicately thin empty bottles of splendid Rüdesheimer Riesling.”