Hitlerland

by Nagorski, Andrew

  Lilian and Edgar got to know many of the city’s other most famous inhabitants, from the artist George Grosz to Albert Einstein. Meeting the physicist, Edgar asked him about a part of his relativity theory he found illogical. Einstein smiled and replied: “Quit bothering your mind about it: mine is a mathematical, not a logical theory. Here . . .” At that point, he took his violin and began playing Bach.

  Little wonder that Lilian soon conceded: “I was becoming reconciled to Berlin.”

  American officials played a key role in bringing about the return to apparent economic normalcy that newcomers like the Mowrers immediately noticed. Ambassador Houghton had been more than just sympathetic to Germany’s plight; he defied isolationist voices back home by arguing that the United States was to blame for not acting more decisively to support Germany’s democratic government. “All in all, Europe is in a sorry mess,” he wrote to State Department European Division Chief William Castle on February 12, 1923. “We ourselves had at one time the power to stabilize conditions . . . unless something of a miracle takes place, we may look forward confidently and happily to a time not far off when another war may lay prostrate what is left of European civilization.”

  Repeatedly urging Washington “to save what is left of German capital and German industry,” Houghton was driven to near despair observing the devastating impact of hyperinflation on his host country, along with the strikes, riots and clashes of extremists of the left and the right. In the summer of 1923, he watched Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government collapse after less than a year in office. “I feel as if I had come back into the same old building, but found the beams and rafters steadily decaying and the floors increasingly unsound, and that unless steps were speedily taken to repair it, the roof and walls must before long inevitably fall in,” he wrote to Secretary of State Hughes.

  Those pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. With backing from the Coolidge Administration, Houghton began to make progress on his push for a new reparations settlement and other measures aimed at stabilizing Germany. In his public pronouncements, Houghton avoided chastising France and denied any intention of seeking to block her “just claims,” but he stressed that Germany’s economic recovery was the key to the continent’s recovery. Working closely with Germany’s Gustav Stresemann, who served briefly as both chancellor and foreign minister in 1923 and then stayed on as foreign minister in eight successive governments, he won support in Berlin and other European capitals for a more active American role.

  The result was the Dawes Plan, named after Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, one of a group of American experts who tackled the reparations question. The plan did not fix an exact amount of reparations that the Germans still owed, but it allowed them to make reduced annual payments until their economy improved. Accepted at the end of August 1924, the Dawes Plan immediately triggered a flood of American loans to Germany that would continue until the Depression hit. The stabilization of the currency and the subsequent economic recovery were a direct result of those measures. Speaking to the Reichstag on May 18, 1925, Stresemann left no doubt who was responsible for this dramatic turnaround. “The United States is that nation from which emanated the most important efforts directed toward the reconstruction of the economy and, beyond that, the pacification of Europe,” he declared. “For no country can those efforts be more welcome than for Germany.”

  American loans and direct investments, coupled with growing U.S.-German trade, meant that the two countries felt increasingly linked with each other. Germany was not only open to Americans but to the broader trends identified by a new term characterizing their country’s economic, social and cultural influence. “The Americanization of Europe proceeds merrily apace,” Wiegand reported in a feature that was given prominent play in the Washington Herald on June 14, 1925. “Half in wonderment, half in protest this tired old group of nations is falling under the magic sway of that babulous ‘dollar land’ across the ocean.”

  As his article pointed out, the average German exhibited a decidedly schizophrenic attitude toward the new money culture, mass production and mass entertainment, including a flood of American movies. He is “resentful of the intrusion of a staccato pace into the easy comfort of his existence and growls and mutters guttural curses against the Americanization of his civilization,” Wiegand wrote. “Then he goes and forgets his troubles to the tune of an American jazz band, beating a savage tom-tom in any of the thousand amusement places.” The German listening to a band playing “My Sweetie Went Away,” he added, was likely to be dressed in a brand-new suit “cut on Yale lines.”

  Germans flocked to the Scala variety house, where the hit of the moment was an American troupe that Wiegand described as “the eighteen dancing, prancing Gertrude Hoffman girls.” In his 1925 article, he noted one key reason for the Americans’ popularity. “Their slender legs and waists are not of the pattern usually favored in Berlin,” he wrote.

  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 add
ed 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-wing 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 Hitle
r—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.”