Berlin 1936

by Oliver Hilmes

  A few hours later, while Wolfe is beginning to recover with the help of an Alka-Seltzer, he contemplates what awaits him in the coming days in Berlin with a mixture of fascination and anxiety.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “The Italian Olympic athletes arrived at Anhalter Station in ten train cars bearing images of Mussolini and the inscription ‘Il Duce.’ On 4 August 1936, it was noticed that one of the Mussolini images had been indelibly defaced with a mustache, and that the words ‘Heil Moscow!’ had been scrawled on one of the posters. It was impossible to discover when and where the graffiti happened, as this state of affairs was first discovered when the train wagons in question arrived at Tempelhof shunting yard.”

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  “Will Owens win a second gold?” asks the front page of the tabloid B.Z. am Mittag the day after the American set a new world record in the 100-meter race. On the third day of competition, the focus in the Olympic Stadium is all on one man: Jesse Owens. At 10:30 a.m. the preliminaries for the long jump commence. Athletes have to record a jump of at least 7.15 meters to qualify for the finals in the afternoon. A little bit over 7 meters is child’s play for Owens, who’s been jumping that distance since he was in high school. The prospect of a second gold medal is nigh, but this time he has a serious competitor. Carl Ludwig Long—known as “Luz” from Leipzig is 23 years old, tall, blond and intimidatingly self-confident. For Owens, Long is a hated rival whom he watches with suspicion out of the corner of his eye. “How can he look so calm?” Owens growls at his coach. “Doesn’t he know who he’s up against?” Long is in fact well aware of the quality of the competition, but he is determined to keep his nerve and not betray the slightest hint of anxiety. Whereas Owens is visibly agitated, hectoring his coach, Long simply waits for his turn to jump, the very picture of calm.

  The Owens versus Long duel will become the subject of various rumors and legends. Owens himself will later tell the world that during the morning qualifiers his first jump was a foul and the second too short, before Long gave him a decisive bit of advice about how to hit the board. The truth is that both athletes qualified with their second jumps. Decades later, when asked about his version of events, Owens will simply say that it was the sort of story people wanted to hear.

  The showdown follows in the afternoon. More than 100,000 spectators eagerly await the beginning of the long jump finals. Among them are Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and the Italian Crown Prince Umberto. The weather has taken a turn for the worse. It’s cooler, and an unpleasant wind is blowing through the stadium. The athletes are getting cold. Everyone in the arena is holding their breath. Long jumps first—7.54 meters. Then Owens—7.74 meters. Long improves his best to 7.84, but Owens bests that by 3 centimeters: 7.87 meters. Long positions himself for his third attempt, runs and also leaps 7.87 meters—a new European record. “Jesse immediately ran over and congratulated me,” the German athlete will remember. As cheers break out in the stands, the two men embrace and laugh as they walk together for a few yards. Someone else in the arena is happy as well. “I looked up at the crowd which showed no signs of settling down and then up at the Führer’s box,” Long will recall. “The entire box was in a stir, and the Führer was applauding enthusiastically. I went over, stood below him and greeted my Führer with gratitude. And I could hardly believe it, but he got up and greeted me with his benevolent, paternal smile. I could tell from his eyes that his only wish was for me to win.” But Hitler’s joy is short-lived. In his final attempt, Owens sets a new world record of 8.06 meters. “I couldn’t help myself,” Long said afterward. “I ran up to him and was the first to congratulate and embrace him. He told me: ‘You forced me to give my best!’ ”

  During their duel a famous photograph was taken showing the two athletes lying on their stomachs on the ground of the stadium: two carefree, happy young men in their early 20s, seemingly inseparable. And then there’s the presentation of the medals. The images captured by countless cameras go around the world. For the second time in as many days, Jesse Owens, a black student, has beaten all comers and is looking up at the American flag being hoisted into the Berlin sky to the tune of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Owens salutes the flag, while Goebbels seethes with rage. “We Germans earn one gold medal to the Americans’ three, two of them won by a Negro,” the propaganda minister will complain to his diary. “It’s a disgrace. White humanity should be ashamed. But what does that matter in that country without any culture over there?”

  Goebbels is only too aware that Owens’s second victory contains a strong political message. For the propaganda minister, it is an affront to the idea of white superiority. The American’s extraordinary achievements might make even dyed-in-the-wool Nazis question the validity of the Aryan race’s claims to a privileged position. Such concerns don’t matter to Owens and Long. After the American national anthem has been played, they leave the athletics field arm in arm. This gesture of camaraderie will get Long into trouble. A short time later, he gets a visit from a representative of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who tells him that he should never again dare to “embrace a Negro.”

  ORDER OF THE BERLIN POLICE PRESIDENT: “In many parts of Berlin, the drying of laundry and clothing, and the airing of beds from front balconies, loggias, roofs and street-facing windows has developed into a deplorable custom that elicits disgust and outrage among decent people. This bad habit can no longer be tolerated, especially not during the Olympic Games.”

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  In the meantime, Thomas Wolfe has overcome the previous night’s excesses and is waiting to be interviewed by a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper. The Nazified German press is trying to put on an international face while the Olympics are going on. The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, for instance, is running articles about foreign and domestic cuisines. Readers can learn “How to make spaghetti and macaroni,” while the Third Reich’s foreign visitors are taught about the glories of traditional Berlin fare: “Pickled pork knuckle, known as Eisbein, when prepared properly, has always delighted diners, particularly Scandinavians, the English and the Dutch.” The truth of such an assertion is debatable.

  For its part, the Berliner Tageblatt is running interviews with notable visitors such as the Prince and Princess of Tripura, the Baltimore publisher William N. Jones and the top British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart and his wife, Lady Sarita. Wolfe has become well enough known in Germany that Rowohlt has little trouble convincing the newspaper to interview him. Today, the interview is conveniently being held in Wolfe’s hotel room and will focus on his relationship with Germany. The publisher rubs his hands. An interview with the Berliner Tageblatt is a fine—and cost-free—piece of advertising. Rowohlt knows that his author is very professional with journalists. Speaking, as they say, “in a polished style,” Wolfe has it down to a T. The paper asked whether the interviewer can bring along an illustrator. Sure, is the answer. Why not?

  When the knock comes at the arranged time at the door of his hotel room, Wolfe sees an unremarkable man, who introduces himself as the journalist from the Tageblatt, and a young woman who’s obviously the illustrator. Politely, almost bashfully, she introduces herself as Thea Voelcker. Wolfe shakes her hand and looks her straight in the eye. The journalist seems oblivious to the chemistry between the two and gets straight down to business. Used to the routine, he asks the American writer the standard questions. How does he like Germany? “It’s wonderful,” answers Wolfe, who’s having a hard time organizing his thoughts. “If Germany didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it. It’s a magical country. I know Hildesheim, Nuremberg and Munich, their architecture, their inner workings, the glory of their history and art.” As Wolfe heaps praise on Germany, which seems to please the journalist, Thea Voelcker observes the whole scene attentively in the background, trying to memorize every feature of the writer’s face while making her initial sketches. She’ll flesh them out later.

  Wolfe is telling the story of how
he became embroiled in a fight at the Oktoberfest in Munich and had a beer stein broken over his head, which ended with him having to spend a few days in the local university clinic. Although the incident happened eight years ago, the writer can still remember the name of the doctor who treated him: Privy Councillor Lexer. Wonderful, the journalist tells Wolfe. Those are precisely the stories that interest the readers of the Tageblatt. But Wolfe is distracted. He keeps looking over at Thea Voelcker.

  She’s an impressive woman. A “Norse Valkyrie” is what Wolfe thinks when he first lays eyes on her, although he knows little about Nordic mythology and has never heard of Wagner’s opera. “She had a mass of lustrous yellow hair braided about her head, and her cheeks were two ruddy apples,” he will write. “She was extremely tall for a woman, with the long, rangy legs of a runner, and her shoulders were as broad and wide as a man’s. Yet she had a stunning figure, and there was no suggestion of an ugly masculinity about her. She was as completely and as passionately feminine as a woman could be.” The appreciation is mutual. “I did not know your books, even not your name; but when I entered into your room and saw you, I stopped and said to myself: oh my God, here I am not afraid,” Thea will later confess to Wolfe in a letter. “I felt: here is a friend.”

  Life hasn’t been easy for Thea Voelcker. She’s had to endure an unhappy childhood, early psychological problems, an unsuccessful attempt to study art at university and a joyless marriage that ended in divorce after only four years. All of this has made her an unstable, extremely vulnerable woman. But Wolfe has no way of knowing any of this. After the interview is over, he’s obsessed by a single thought: how can he see Thea Voelcker again soon?

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  What does a woman of the world wear to the Olympic Games? The magazine Die Dame, a kind of 1930s German Cosmopolitan, has some important advice: “Particularly before noon, sporty clothing is just the thing in the various venues, from the stadiums to the Deutschlandhalle arena. Sporty from your hat to your shoes!” For the afternoon, too, the magazine recommends sporty attire—but with one caveat: “A skirt and blouse, worn without a jacket, are still not street clothes.” Women are supposed to be role models, Die Dame cautions. “The impression made by a city or a country depends to a large extent on the women seen there.”

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  Victor Müller-Hess has a job that gives many people the creeps, although he is an esteemed professor at the University of Berlin who is regularly invited to conferences, who publishes in respected journals and who has trained a whole host of students. What’s off-putting about his calling is that it’s focused on death—specifically the precise reason why someone left the here-and-now for the hereafter. Müller-Hess is a coroner.

  The Institute for Legal Medicine and Criminology, of which Müller-Hess is the director, carries out around 500 court-ordered autopsies every year. In addition, a growing number of human dissections are performed for scientific purposes. In 1936, the employees at the institute cut open around 3,000 corpses, an average of ten a day, six days a week. To deal with these numbers, the institute procured seven new autopsy tables the previous year. At the start of the procedure, doctors examine the bodies externally. Then comes the internal inspection, which involves opening the skull, the chest and the stomach cavity.

  The number of unusual deaths recorded in the autopsy reports in the first half of August 1936 is quite striking. The pensioner Herbert Fluder threw himself in front of a train in the Pankow district’s main station on 1 August. Fifty-eight-year-old August Heinemeyer was discovered hanging from a noose on 2 August, the same day that the medical doctor Wilhelm Iwan took an overdose of the sleeping tablet Veronal in Zehlendorf. Today, Tuesday, 4 August, Adolf and Erika Hahn succumb to gas poisoning in their apartment in Schöneberg. Mrs. Bertha Theil, née Haak, aged 37, will take her own life tomorrow. All in all, between 1 and 16 August 1936, twenty-seven people will die of gas poisoning, twenty-three from hanging, twelve will drown, six will be killed by firearms, four will be run over by trains, three will overdose on medication, and two will lose their lives to alcohol.

  Coroners need a strong stomach, yet there are always cases that get to even the most hardened physicians. Among the autopsies Müller-Hess and his colleagues will carry out today are those on the bodies of Martha and Gertrud Geidel.

  Martha Geidel is 36 years old, works as a seamstress and lives with her 9-year-old daughter Gertrud in a two-room flat on Scharnweberstrasse in the northern district of Reinickendorf. Several days ago she divorced her husband Ernst Emil, who earns his keep as a presser in a large launderette. Martha and Ernst Emil simply couldn’t stand one another anymore—the love that once brought them together had given way to deep-seated antipathy. They fight whenever they’re together—even in the divorce court there were ugly scenes between the two. The judge thinks Martha is unstable. More than that, he concludes that it’s not in the best interests of the child, Gertrud, that Martha be awarded custody, which goes to the father.

  Martha Geidel breaks down when the judgment is announced. Give up her child? Never! On the evening of 31 July she puts Gertrud to bed. Perhaps she reads her a story or gives the girl a goodnight kiss: we don’t know. We do know that she waits until the child is asleep, then goes into the kitchen, attaches a hose to the oven, opens the gas valve, takes the hose from the kitchen to the bedroom, shuts the door as best she can, fixes the hose to the head of the bed, gets into bed with her daughter and takes her in her arms.

  The following day, 1 August, when the strong smell of gas can be detected throughout the building, concerned neighbors break down the door of Martha Geidel’s flat. At the very same time, the opening ceremony of the Summer Games is coming to an end in the Olympic Stadium.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “On 4 August 1936, his Majesty the King of Bulgaria and the Queen of Bulgaria arrived in Berlin by passenger car under the aliases Count and Countess Rylski. His Majesty the King took up residence in the Hotel Bristol, while the Queen checked into the Berlin University Gynecological Hospital at Monbijoustrasse 2.”

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  At 5:30 p.m. the German team plays its first match of the Olympic football tournament. In the round of sixteen, national coach Otto Nerz and his men meet the team from the Duchy of Luxembourg. A crowd of 12,000 spectators in the Poststadium on Lehrter Strasse awaits kickoff. Among them is Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. It takes 16 minutes for Adolf Urban of Schalke football club to score the first goal, and on the half-hour mark, Munich’s Wilhelm Simetsreiter tucks away a pass for a second. The outcome of the match still seems open. The Luxembourgers are spirited opponents. But that changes after the break. Referee Pál von Hertzka has hardly whistled for play to resume when Simetsreiter makes it 3–0 in the 48th minute. From then on Germany starts scoring for fun. Further goals come in minutes 50, 52, 74, 75, 76 and 90. The final score is Germany 9, Luxembourg 0. The hosts qualify for the next round of the tournament, while the visitors from Luxembourg are out. “It was a battle between a giant and a dwarf,” writes the self-confident German press. “The Luxembourgers were brave, upstanding fighters who played out the game as best they could.” But pride comes before the fall.

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  The first few days of the Olympic competitions have seen anything but typical high summer weather. It rains, and temperatures remain cool. But for anyone who still needs to wet his whistle, the B.Z. newspaper can recommend a thirst-quencher using Germany’s famous brandy: “Asbach Uralt with sparkling water.”

  The Café Bristol on Kurfürstendamm is a popular spot for flâneurs. “The terraces of the cafés were always packed, and in these golden-sparkling days the air seemed to vibrate like music.” Credit 5

  Wednesday, 5 August 1936

  REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: Continuing cool temperatures and isolated showers. Partly cloudy, with stiff winds from the west. Highs of 18°C.

  “Ledig, you lazybones
, on the fifteenth it’s the first of the month!” How often has Heinrich Maria Ledig heard these words from Ernst Rowohlt? Sometimes his boss will tower over him threateningly, sometimes he’ll growl the words in passing, and sometimes he’ll yell them across the office: “Ledig, you lazybones, on the fifteenth it’s the first of the month!” It’s Rowohlt’s way of saying: Ledig, you’re fired! Ledig answers meekly: “Yes sir, Mr. Rowohlt.” Ledig, whom everyone calls Heinz, is an unremarkable man in his late 20s. His mother, Maria Ledig, used to be an actress in the theater in Leipzig who performed under the name Maria Lee; nothing is known, at least officially, about his father. Ledig has worked for the Rowohlt publishing house for a good five years. At first he was in charge of sales, then the press department, and gradually he’s made his way through all the company’s departments. No matter how often Rowohlt threatens to show him the door, he can’t do without the young man’s services.

  Ledig is not only Rowohlt’s most important employee. He’s also his illegitimate son. Both of them guard this secret carefully—especially from one another. “Of course, he has no idea he’s my son,” Rowohlt assured the writer Ernst von Salomon. “Promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut!” Salomon complies. A short time later, Ledig takes Salomon into his confidence. “Of course, he has no idea that he’s my father,” the young man tells the writer. “Promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut!” Salomon gives his word again. Last but not least, Salomon’s fellow writer Hans Fallada brings up the curious relationship between Ledig and Rowohlt. Salomon will write: “ ‘Do you know that Ledig is Rowohlt’s son?’ Hans Fallada asked me. I said: ‘You’re joking!’ Fallada replied: ‘No, I’m not. Rowohlt told me. He thinks Ledig doesn’t know. Then Ledig told me that he thinks Rowohlt doesn’t know. I had to swear on a stack of Bibles not to say anything. But the entire publishing house knows. And they laugh about the fact that neither man is aware that they all know the truth.’ ”