‘It’s a fine book,’ I say. ‘But, and of course there are very understandable reasons for this, it says nothing about the Thule Society.’ He has been very serious, and suddenly he laughs. Embarrassed, perhaps, or reluctant. Perhaps he suspects me of an indecent enthusiasm. He says, ‘Oh, them. Well you know they are perhaps not my kind of people. Let us say there are different religions, you know, different beliefs, and those people had a very different religion indeed. A religion thankfully no longer observed by many people today. You know there are all sorts of people, unpleasant people, and they were here once, in the past. It is for that reason we don’t mention them,’ he says.
‘What reason?’ I ask.
‘The reason,’ he says, laughing nervously again. ‘You know. There is a country with the Star of David on its flag, and these people would not really have got along with the people of that country. You understand what I mean now? I don’t want to say what they were, but you know they were not pleasant people.’
‘So you feel it is best they are forgotten?’
He is silent for a few seconds, then he says: ‘A few years ago a production company from America wanted to come here, to make a film which included scenes about those meetings of the Thule Society. They wanted to film in our hotel, in the place where the society met. There was some debate about it, whether it was a good thing; you know, there is always the argument for talking about these things, to make sure people know the things that happened. But we said no in the end.’
‘Where were they going to film?’
‘Well, this society met in the Old Bar. That’s where they met,’ he says. ‘So I suppose they might have filmed there. But we decided it is not something we want the hotel to be associated with.’ He is still laughing, in a slightly odd way, as if I have opened a conversation that is slightly unacceptable, made something of a faux pas, but he is trying to help me out of the embarrassment.
He’s employed to help, to answer enquiries, and he knows a lot about the history of the hotel. But he is in a difficult position. He’s eager that I shouldn’t push the questions further. He is hardly going to take me off to the Old Bar and show me where the proto-Nazis sat. He smiles and laughs as I thank him for his help. We move on to other subjects—afternoon tea, the weather outside. He stands politely, attentively, while we discuss the tapestry behind the bar. Then, he says uneasily: ‘You say you knew about the Thule Society, somehow, meeting here. How did you know?’ he asks. When I explain, he laughs with something like relief, a full-throated laugh this time, no trace of nerves.
Hotels, bars, restaurants are neutral places, where anyone can eat or sleep without being asked whether they are a potent force for evil or an innocuous passer-by. The Thule Society had sat in the hotel, talking bitterly about the supremacy of the Germanic race, and then they had vanished, to be replaced by other guests. Munich was full of places where unsavoury figures had sat, eating, drinking and plotting national resurgence. Places still trading, still serving up food and drink without asking questions of their customers. Practical necessity had extended the lives of many of these buildings after the war. As well as the Führer Building, there was the Haus der Kunst, another Nazi complex of columns and slabs, which was still standing by the river and was used for exhibitions and theatre productions. Many of the restaurants and inns where Hitler ranted and hectored were still serving up beer and noodles to their customers. The Four Seasons was still standing in central Munich, available for use. The Thule Society members had faded into obscurity, and no one was more eager to forget them than the polite concierge.
The concierge smiles as I wander off. He knows where I’m going, but he doesn’t try to stop me. I walk along an opulent corridor with mirrors on the ceiling and pillars at intervals. It runs through the older part of the hotel, behind the reception. There are Maximilian salons in pale cream and white, with teacups and wine glasses ready in the corner, the curtains drawn against the damp day. Everything is bright and well washed, cleanly painted in light shades, except for the Old Bar, which has wooden panels and dark leather armchairs, with glass cabinets full of antique plates and cups and sculptures of birds. There’s a portrait on the far wall of a woman riding side-saddle in long skirts. There’s a round table set with a white cloth, surrounded by red-backed chairs. With an effort of the imagination, I could summon a collection of anti-Semites to the place; I could imagine them finding the close confines a pleasant place to conspire, to worship the ancient heritage of the ‘Aryan’ tribes. I could imagine their absurd evenings of Nordic song and dance, the high ceremony of a self-appointed elite. But in the intervening years the place has been bombed and rebuilt, renovated and restored. The room has no eerie atmosphere, no trace of the polemical vileness of the Thule Society. It’s just a neatly restored room, in a luxury hotel, with a table set for tea.
Outside, the bells chimed across the city, the cars queued at the lights. The crowds were pouring into the Pinakothek, drifting past the Altdorfers and the Cranachs, past the painted landscapes. The crowds were surging onto the trams, travelling through the reconstructed city, stopping for cakes and ices at the cafés. The tarmac gave off a wave of heat as I walked along Maximilianstrasse, and the cars sounded like industrial noise, their tyres clanging on the tram tracks. I walked along lethargic streets, past cafés with their outdoor tables packed with people. In a crowded beer garden I waited for Ursula to come to the table. I’d been sent to see her by a professor at the university, who told me she knew everything about the Thule Society. Ursula, the professor had told me, knew all about interwar Munich, about the faction wars and militias and the seedy conspiracies. The professor thought, though he wasn’t sure, that a member of Ursula’s family had been in the Thule Society. It was perhaps best, the professor had added, if I didn’t ask Ursula too much about this. When I called Ursula, she said she would talk to me, on the condition that she was neither exposed nor named.
The restaurant was filling up, but as Ursula sauntered through the door of the restaurant she looked six feet tall, imposing as she moved in high heels, dropping her coat into the arms of a waiter.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
We nodded, we sat down; there was a curious air to the encounter, as if we were meeting in secret. Without any preamble, without ordering anything to drink or eat, she started talking.
‘Everything is in darkness,’ she said. ‘It remains in darkness, it will always remain in darkness,’ she said. ‘Sebottendorff was a dubious man. A much-travelled adventurer. He had affairs, he lived in Turkey; he dabbled in Sufism, alchemical and Rosicrucian texts, he took Turkish nationality, he was accused of bigamy and of marrying for money. He was obsessed with the esoteric. The Thule Society had all of his chaos and obscurity.
‘Sebottendorff said Thule was found by Pytheas in around 400 B.C.; Thule was probably Iceland, Sebottendorff thought. He knew Thule had been discussed as a real place. He knew Iceland was where the Sagas were set. The Sagas, he said, had made possible the development of the Germanic religion.’
We were sitting in the Hofbrauhaus, another place where Hitler had delivered speeches. The ceilings were plastered with paintings of pigs and platters, knives and forks. Women in Bavarian costume were moving between the tables, delivering mugs of beer and plates of food. In the beer garden the checked tablecloths were flapping in the breeze and a fountain trickled water. The doors of the restaurant swung open, and the sound of a brass band drifted across the court-yard. Ursula seemed not to notice. She screwed her eyes up against the sun. She fumbled in her bag for sunglasses. Then she spent a long time trying to light a cigarette. Shaking the lighter and inhaling, she said: ‘You said you knew something about Thule. But these Germans, these Thule Society members, they took this idea of a last land in the north and made it the cradle of German history.’ She paused briefly, and a waiter approached. ‘Coffee,’ she said.
‘The Aryans, they thought, had knowledge of the magical power of the runes. The old runes,’ sai
d Ursula. ‘As well as Hitler, Hess and Rosenberg, the other members and associates included Johannes Hering, Hermann Pohl, Theodor Fritsch, all anti-Semites, members of the Münchener Hammer-Gemeinde, the Wotan Lodge; they were all obsessed with the Sagas. All were listed by Sebottendorff as members of the Thule Society,’ she said. ‘Hering called the Thule Society “die Treffpunkt”—the meeting place. It’s even confusing who was a member and who wasn’t. Sebottendorff lied about everything. The Nazis Wilhelm Frick and Julius Streicher were named as members, also the publisher Gottfried Feder. In some accounts the chief of police was mentioned, and the Oberbürgermeister. Aristocrats, top officials, political agitators, millionaires. But the Thule Society was perhaps one of many small, unpleasant groups they joined.’ The coffee came and Ursula drank it down.
‘And a member of your family was also a member?’ I asked.
She tapped her fingers on the table, a gesture of irritation, perhaps. ‘We don’t know. I said the lists are not reliable. It is possible, unlikely but possible. I don’t think it is worth talking too much about,’ she said, quietly. ‘An ancestor of mine saw the Thule Society crest among her husband’s papers a few times. But after the death of her husband, she went through his effects and never found it. By then it was the late 1920s; he might of course have lost these papers, or burnt them. He might just have been approached by the Thule Society and never actually signed up. I really don’t know. It was the sort of society he might have joined, from what we know about this man. You of course understand that if you start rummaging through family histories in Germany you often find compromised figures, figures who allied themselves with all of this.’ She said “this” with a curl to her lips.
‘Could someone have attended meetings without realizing what the Thule Society was really about?’ I asked.
‘Unlikely,’ she said, briskly. ‘Sebottendorff used to give lectures blaming the Jews for the revolution in Bavaria. He spoke like this: “Our order is a German order. . . . Our God is Walvater; his rune is the Ar-rune. The Ar-rune means Aryan, primal fire, the sun, the eagle.” A few years later this was the sort of language used by the SS. And later there was an element of planning that went on at these meetings.’
After Eisner’s death the elected government fled, replaced for a short time by a collection of anarchists and afterwards by Communists, who declared Bavaria a Soviet republic. There were skirmishes between Freikorps soldiers and the Bavarian Soviets, and the Thule Society had links with the Freikorps. Their offices were raided, and some Thule Society members were captured and shot by the Communists in April 1919. Sebottendorff hailed them as martyrs; he later claimed they were the first people to die in the cause of Nazism.
The Thule Society began to decline, even as its members prospered. One of the founders of the German Workers’ Party, Karl Harrer, was a Thule Society member, but once he created his own group he left the Sebottendorff circle. By the late 1920s Thule Society members were a mere handful, and by 1930 the society had disintegrated entirely. Sebottendorff lost influence over the Thule Leute, and was dropped by his own members. He disappeared in the 1920s, roaming around the world again, as he had done as a younger man. He was bitter about their betrayal even in 1933, when he published his autobiographical account, Before Hitler Came, long after the Thule Society had become irrelevant. I had read his autobiography in the Bavarian State Library, a book printed in a typescript so Gothic the words seem to be trying to contort themselves off the pages. Sebottendorff’s writing style was littered with archaisms, sudden explosions into ranting and blatant exaggeration. ‘The Thule People died as the first sacrifices for the Swastika,’ he wrote. ‘The Thule people were those to whom Hitler first came, and the Thule People were those with whom Hitler first allied himself.’ Sebottendorff struggled to prove he had created Nazism, listing the key Nazis who had formerly been Thule Leute. In Sebottendorff’s version of history the Thule Society had been cruelly cast aside as the German Workers’ Party became more powerful. With his self-hagiography, Sebottendorff tried to airbrush himself into history.
Sebottendorff’s insistence on the origin of all things Nazi in the Thule Society was an unwise political move by 1933. The second edition of his book was confiscated by the Nazis; he was arrested by the SS, and encouraged to leave Germany. He disappeared on another global tour, arriving in Turkey, where he stayed.
‘Sebottendorff lived out the war in Istanbul,’ said Ursula. ‘At least that’s what I think. He drowned in the Bosphorus on 9 May 1945, shortly after the end of the war. Most likely he had killed himself.’ She stubbed out the cigarette. ‘You would, I suppose, if you had supported the Nazis in everything, even after they cast you out. If you believed, really believed, that you had created the movement which had died in the dust of Berlin. And he knew there was nothing for him once Nazism was over. His life was over. Ironically, you might call him one of Hitler’s most loyal supporters, though Hitler had discarded him.’
We shook hands in the beer garden, squinting at each other in the brightness. ‘You could go to the Residenz,’ said Ursula. ‘The riches are amazing. You see what the Nazis coveted; you see their longing for castles and palaces.’ She walked away. As she pushed through into the beer hall, the sound of cheers and roars echoed around the cloisters, then the door swung back again and the sound died.
The sun was fading when I reached the Residenz. As the sky became sallow I walked through the Hofgarten, a small palace park. There was a Diana temple in the centre, where a lone busker was playing the violin. I trod on gravel, passing low hedges and pruned trees. There was a fence, its posts shaped like treble clefs, running through the park. The steady sound of footsteps echoed around the cloisters. The Residenz complex was being built as early as the fourteenth century, and a long line of prince-electors and later kings contributed their designs to its shape. After Maximilian IV Joseph declared Bavaria an independent kingdom at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the palace became increasingly opulent. Much of it was the work of Leo von Klenze, working through the nineteenth century, taking his influences from neoclassicism. The Wittelsbachs left it all behind at the end of the First World War. The last Wittelsbach king left Munich even before Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated from the German throne in Berlin. The Wittelsbachs tripped down the stairs of their stone palace, past the stylish trompe l’oeil designs, abandoning rooms of family treasure and luxurious suites furnished with classical statues, moving through their dark courtyards, the stonework casting grotesque shadows. They closed the doors and left the palace to the crowds.
The Residenz swiftly became a museum. The National Socialists left it alone even as they began the building of ‘temples’ and monuments throughout Munich. But the war destroyed the place; in 1944 the Residenz was gutted by fire after a bombing raid on the city.
Inside, the restored rooms were vast treasure chambers. The ceilings gaped. There was a grotto with thousands of seashells stuck into the stone and a bronze statue of Mercury at the centre. The vaulting of the hall showed faded paintings, traces of past finery, fragmented scenes from Ovid. The windows were scratched and ancient, twisting the light, warping the view of the courtyards. There was a lot of fine wood in the place: beautiful cabinets in rose-wood with a dozen secret compartments and tables decorated with intricate carvings and enamel pictures of Venice. In the Antiquarium, a long tunnel-like room, looking like an underground station with arched windows, there were classical busts lining the walls. The colours on the ceiling were subdued, because of damage during the Second World War, said a guide. But there were grotesque pairs of putti cavorting on the ceiling, and sketchy portraits of Bavarian cities and castles. The busts were of old Romans—a chronological series of imperial families. There were the wives, daughters and ancestors of Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar’s women, Nero’s wives, the wives of Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. Then there were the emperors, from Julius Caesar to Valerian, some of them with the names mixed up, a few losses sustained to the series. It was a grand
iose piece of cataloguing, a decorative triumph for ambitious regional rulers. Among the emperors were random classical statues—a Hellenistic torso, a head of Hermes, a Diana with a broken nose, and an Aphrodite. There was a wooden fireplace, with the date of completion of the room carved onto it—1600—and the name of the man who finished it all, Duke Maximilian I.
There were rooms leading into further rooms, opulently decorated with trompe l’oeil ceilings, and pictures of Napoleonic battles. There was a portrait of Ludwig I, staring benevolently at his riches. There were rooms filled with plates, plates with Roman heads on them, plates with rustic scenes of girls under bowers and cherubs, plates with Bavarian views on them. Rooms full of gold and silver in cabinets, candlesticks and serving dishes, everything slightly tarnished. There were rooms decked in tapestries, showing hunting scenes in forests. There was an audience room, with its walls coated in portraits of worthy peasant labourers, scything crops and tending cattle like virtuous subjects. There were stone rooms, with their floors coated in marble and everything else in muted shades of grey and blue and dark red. There were painted allegories—of the four seasons, of the elements, of the universe, of the church. There had been a painted allegory showing man as the conqueror of nature, but it was destroyed in 1944. There were great empty tables, cold fireplaces, everything sealed off, guarded by figures in uniforms.
There were rooms kept in semi-darkness, covered with faded tapestries showing battles and high points in the history of the Wittelsbach family. There were rooms which were almost empty, their furniture lost, except for a single sumptuous object, like a table with carved lion paws and a bestiary of mythical winged creatures for decoration. There were suites full of tortoiseshell cabinets, there were rooms plastered with gold paint, their ceilings lavished with pictures of putti riding horses, putti riding lions, putti holding onto other putti, putti playing with hearts, putti gambolling in every florid way available. The quantity of treasure was hard to absorb; I found myself walking swiftly past jewel-encrusted cabinets and delicately restored furnishings, simply because it was impossible to stand solemnly in front of everything. In the family gallery the Wittelsbachs stared from their portraits, ringed around with gold paint. Straight-backed men in fur-lined robes, sporting hats and beards as fashions required, and their wives, staring out at the empty room.
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