by Geert Mak
International relations, too, grew less tense. For the first time, the European governments were trying to use the League of Nations to resolve a number of issues: the consequences of the collapse of the Austrian economy, the Macedonian conflict between Greece and Bulgaria, the status of the cities of Danzig and Vilnius, the issue of the Saar and the former German colonies, and the administration of the trust territories of Syria and Palestine. The French minister of foreign affairs, Aristide Briand, was tireless in his efforts on behalf of Franco-German reconciliation. He launched an early initiative for something like a European federation, aimed at creating a lasting peace within a broader context as well.
The Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, in which the world ‘unconditionally and definitively’ renounced war as a political instrument, was signed by fifteen states, including France and Germany. The League of Nations, however, never implemented the pact. That was typical of the League's role: at Versailles, the Allies had left the solving of a number of thorny and potentially dangerous issues – the status of Danzig was one of those that finally precipitated the Second World War – to the League, but failed to give this new institution the power to implement decisions. The United States withdrew from the League at the very last minute, even though President Wilson considered the organisation to be the summit of his life's work. Once the war was over, the two other initiators, France and England, focused primarily on internal affairs. On every front, the League of Nations lacked all the necessary clout.
Jean Monnet, the former cognac dealer, was only thirty when the League was established. He became its deputy secretary-general. ‘We achieved results,’ he wrote later. ‘We overcame crises … we used new methods to administer territories, we stopped epidemics. We developed methods of cooperation between countries which had until then known only relations based on the advantage of power.’ But at the same time, he admitted, he and his fellow diplomats severely underestimated the problem of national sovereignty. ‘At every assembly the people spoke of common interests, but that was always forgotten again in the course of the discussion: everyone was obsessed with the impact a possible solution could have on them, on their country. As a result, no one really tried to solve the problems at hand: their greatest concern was to find answers that would not damage the interests of everyone seated around the table.’ The right of veto – by which any state could block any decision – was, he said ‘both the symbol and the cause’ of the League's inability to rise above national interests.
Today, one of the permanent exhibits at Berlin's Jüdische Museum is a clip from the film Menschen am Sonntag, a unique collage of Berlin street scenes from summer 1929. We see a calm, prosperous city with busy sidewalk cafés, with children playing in the streets and relaxed people out for a walk, with young people sunbathing on the shores of the Wannsee, and a little parade by the Reichswehr along Unter den Linden – with, and this is striking, many dozens of civilians marching along with the soldiers down both sides of the street.
Those summer Sundays of 1929 were Berlin's last peaceful moments. After 1924 Germany had grown calm. Politics had become an orderly affair, wages rose, food was good, and things could have stayed that way forever. ‘From 1926 on, there was really nothing worth talking about,’ Haffner recalls. ‘The newspapers had to go looking for their headlines among events abroad.’ Street life was marked by ennui, and everyone was ‘most heartily invited’ to be happy in his or her own fashion. The only problem – and one remarked upon as well by Rathenau before his death – was that, generally speaking, no one responded to that invitation to respectability. The young people of Germany had grown addicted to political excitation, unrest and sensation.
Later, the sociologist Norbert Elias would provide yet another explanation. In his view, the deep dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic had everything to do with the abrupt transition from the semi-absolutist regime of Wilhelm II to a modern parliamentary democracy. That process usually takes a number of generations, but in Germany the change came within two to three years.‘The personality structure of the German people was focused on the absolutist tradition that had governed them for centuries without interruption,’ Elias wrote. This was accompanied by the military order and obedience that had long permeated Prussian society, a way of thinking that is relatively simple in comparison with the complicated demands posed by life under a parliamentary democracy. What is more, the rules of a multi-party democracy emphasise precisely those values held in low esteem within military tradition. Like every parliamentary democracy, Weimar required a complicated culture of negotiation, self-restraint, mediation and compromise. The old, semi-absolutist Germany, however, abhorred the happy medium, it cried out for honour, loyalty, absolute obedience and firmness of principle. It created, in Elias’ words, ‘a landscape marked only by bans and rules’. And as the Weimar years wore on, many Germans felt a growing nostalgia for that old world.
This process was a slow one, and modern, intellectual, artistic Berlin had no idea what was going on at first. Dr Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Gauleiter in Berlin from 1926, went almost unnoticed during the first Weimar years. His newspaper, Der Angriff, sold scarcely 2,000 copies a week. When Hitler's political ally Ludendorff announced his candidacy for the presidential elections in 1925, he made no headway at all. In the 1920s, no more than 20,000 copies of Mein Kampf were sold.
Nor did the results at the polls provide any indication of what was looming on the horizon. The 1925 elections were a triumph for the established order: Hindenburg, born in 1847, received 14.7 million votes, former chancellor Wilhelm Marx – the joint candidate of parties including the Catholic Centre Party and the SPD – received 13.8 million, and the communists’ Ernst Thälman took 1.9 million. Hitler's National Socialists achieved no more than 280,000 votes. In the next elections, in 1928, when the social democrats won for the last time, the Nazis did not do much better: of the 500 seats in the Reichstag, they received only twelve. Two years later, when ‘this rabid postman of fate’ (as Ernst von Salomon once referred to Hitler) made his breakthrough, the thinking part of the nation was – with only a few exceptions – taken completely by surprise.
It was more than blindness alone. The intelligentsia, too, could summon up absolutely no enthusiasms for the established order. No one stood up for the Weimar Republic. Most of the nation's writers agreed with Thomas Mann, who openly declared war on politics as a whole ‘because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, obstinate and inhuman’. Later, by the way, he changed his tune. In cabarets like the Tingel-Tangel the republic was constantly ridiculed, while Hitler played the part of the harmless idiot. Kurt Tucholsky called the German democracy ‘a façade and a lie’.
Most of the conservative Bildungsbürger had no notion of the under-currents in their society. The fact that no less than 50,000 Berlin students had taken to the streets during the Kapp Putsch to demonstrate in favour of that ultra-right wing coup did not register with them. And they did not even want to know what those students read: Ernst Jünger's books about the mystical Männerbund that arises between warriors, Alfred Rosenberg's stories about the Jewish conspiracy, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's treatise on the new Germany, Das Dritte Reich (1923), which envisioned a ‘spiritual volk community’ led by a single führer; each of these books were sold in huge numbers. They were blind, too, to the culture of political murders, to the intimidation to which a person like Albert Einstein, for example, was exposed. ‘I'm going to cut that dirty Jew's throat!’ a right-wing student had shouted during one of Einstein's lectures. Nor did they have a particularly clear view of the country's economic situation, shaky despite the seeming stability.
In the cellars of Berlin police headquarters, close to Tempelhof airport, the dirty brown underworld of the 1920s is still on display for the rare visitor. Look, there we have Karl Grossmann, a fat butcher with a permanent shortage of domestic help. During a three-year period he scattered the pieces of twenty-three female corpses all over Berlin, in canals, in garbage pails, pieces of h
ousemaid everywhere. He also had a colleague, Georg Haarmann, who specialised in young boys. After having sex with them he literally ripped their throats out. Perhaps twenty-five boys disappeared into the Leine. The police finally caught up with him after children playing in the area kept finding bones and skulls. And then there was Horst Wessel, whose name lives on in the celebrated Nazi anthem ‘Die Fahne hoch’, which chiselled his name in granite as a saint and a martyr of the swastika.
On 17 January, 1930, SA-Sturmführer Wessel was found badly wounded in his rented room on Grosse Frankfurterstrasse. The authorities immediately suspected a political motive, but things were more complicated than that. The rumour going around the underworld was that Wessel had run foul of the pimp ‘Ali’ Höhler, concerning one of the whores Höhler protected. Meanwhile, Goebbels was busy moulding him into a new hero of the movement, a victim of the Red hordes. He wrote a moving account of his visit to the hospital bed of this ‘Christian and socialist’, and when Wessel finally died on 23 February, Goebbels organised a funeral the likes of which Berlin had rarely seen. In the long run, it turned out that Wessel had simply failed to pay a great deal of back rent, and that the ‘proletarian foreclosure’ instigated by his landlady had got a little out of hand. That, at least, is what the police files say.
In 1922 a list was published of recent political killings. Since 1918, the German extreme left was responsible for 22 murders, and the radical right for 354. Of the left-wing killings, seventeen culprits were punished. Of the 354 murders committed by right-wingers, 326 remained unsolved. Only two right-wing murderers were brought to trial. Of the convicted left-wing murderers, ten were executed and the remaining seven received prison sentences averaging fifteen years. The right-wing murderers received an average sentence of four months. The thin excuse ‘shot while trying to escape’ had already made its appearance. Assailants were becoming increasingly deft at ‘working over’ their political opponents.
The great hero of Berlin's police museum is Detective Ernst Gennat. It remains a mystery why no television series has yet been based on his life, for no premise could be more perfect. Ernst Gennat weighed 135 kilos and, together with his faithful secretary Bockwurst-Trüdchen, solved almost 300 murder cases between 1918–39. His size inspired confidence and awe, and he despised all forms of physical exertion. For his work in the field he had a special car built to serve as mobile police department and forensics lab. Gennat was also the founder of ‘forensic undertaking’, by which mutilated and half-decayed corpses could be reconstructed. He was absolutely opposed to the use of force:‘Anyone who touches a suspect is out on his ear. Our weapons are our brains and strong nerves.’ Shortly before his death he married, to make use of the police department's pension benefits for widows – but Trüdchen was not the lucky girl.
In those years, part of the Berlin underworld had organised itself under the guise of sports clubs, wrestling associations, sometimes even savings clubs. Their names reinforced the illusion of bourgeois respectability: the Ruhige Kugel, Immertreu and the Lotterie-Verein. They worked along the lines of a guild. When one of their members was arrested, his legal costs were paid. The wives of imprisoned members received a living allowance, and when one of them had to disappear from sight for a while, that was arranged as well. Reading about these Ringvereine, you see before you the gangs that would ultimately bring forth part of Berlin's brown-shirted SA, the clubs of the unemployed who were given uniforms by the Nazi leaders and paid for their services in beer and sausage. Wasn't the first SA unit in Wedding, for example, called the ‘Band of Robbers’? And the one in Neukölln the ‘Scoundrel's Bond’? And wasn't the Horst Wessel case a typical underworld vendetta?
In the course of the 1920s, former army officers moulded some of these unoffical clans into symbols of a new order, paramilitary groups that marched through the city, emanating a hitherto unknown élan with their gleaming uniforms and rigid discipline. The original handful of sympathisers with the Band of Robbers soon became thousands, then tens of thousands. In the working-class neighbourhoods, ‘SA marschiert’ became a household term. The unemployed housefather who joined the SA suddenly became someone, a part of a ‘powerful folk community’ and that lofty mood was raised to even greater heights with torchlight parades and other rituals. A new jargon arose in which words such as ‘pure’, ‘duty’, ‘soldierly’ and ‘fanatic’ took on a special, laudatory meaning. And there was equality. Within the SA there were no classes; that, too, was part of its attraction. ‘You had the son of the preacher, the son of the judge, the son of the doctor, the son of the lathe operator and of the unemployed man,’ a former SA member recalled years later. ‘We all marched side by side, all in the same uniform, all filled with the same ideals, shoulder to shoulder, without social distinction, without a sense of class conflict.’
It was on 17 August, 1924 that Harry Kessler became acquainted at first hand with this ‘new order’. In Weimar he found himself in the midst of the ‘German Days’ organised by the National Socialists. The shopping streets were filled with pennants and flags with swastikas on them, but he detected little enthusiasm as yet on the part of the population. On the balcony of the national theatre, amid a score of swastika banners, General Ludendorff made his appearance. Someone launched into a tirade against Stresemann's ‘Jewish republic’. Ludendorff gave a speech as well, but lost track of what he was saying halfway through and stopped. The general's face was saved when the band nearby struck up a fast march. This was followed by a parade of ‘swastika-bearers’: straight-backed older gentlemen carrying umbrellas, but very few veterans, few Iron Crosses, lots of foolish students.
The Nazis claimed that somewhere between 30–60,000 supporters had come to Weimar, but Kessler estimated that there were no more than 8,000. The reason for that, he said, was clear: a lack of money and a lack of good speakers. ‘No money and no spirit, that's not how one forges a popular movement, let alone a revolution.’ He was right about that. For it was precisely with regard to those two conditions that the Nazi movement was about to change beyond recognition.
On Black Thursday, 24 October, 1929, the Wall Street stock market collapsed. The crisis was felt everywhere in the world, but for Germany it came as a fatal blow. The country's cautious economic recovery, after all, was being financed largely from the United States. In effect, the Dawes Plan was little more than the forced circulation of money: Germany paid recompense to England and France, those two countries paid off their war debts to America, the United States then lent that money to Germany, and so on and on. From 1929, America suddenly kept the payments for itself, the pump broke down and the German economy collapsed once more.
In the course of January 1930, German unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. By April, Berlin alone had 700,000 unemployed. Shops closed by the hundred. The members of the lower-middle class, who had only just caught a whiff of prosperity, were forced back into the tenements, and the workers were put out on the street. Count Kessler lost almost his entire fortune, was forced to sell his publishing house, his Renoirs and Van Goghs, and finally even his books. In the woods around the city, thousands of the unemployed set up tent camps with collective kitchens, schools and playgrounds. In 1931, four million Germans were unemployed; by 1933 that figure had risen to six million.
Looking back on it, it is amazing to see how casually the peaceful Weimar period disintegrated. The first glimpse of decay is seen in the statistics. In summer 1929, Hitler's NSDAP had approximately 120,000 members. One year later, there were almost a million. The Nazis had expected to win a considerable number of parliamentary seats in the elections on 14 September, 1930, but even so were amazed to see their party skyrocket from twelve seats to more than a hundred. The NSDAP had suddenly become the second biggest party in Germany, after the social democrats. Financiers, particularly those from heavy industry, flocked to the party. The captains of Krupp, Klöckner and IG Farben were good for at least a million marks annually. After 1930, covert funding grew considerably.
1932 was the year of the great contest. First came the presidential elections. Hitler – after a great deal of hesitation – entered the ring against a fatigued Hindenburg. He lost the first round, but still received 11.3 million votes, which meant his constituency had doubled again in two years. Now the Nazis gave it their best shot. The party applied the most modern campaign techniques. Hitler was flown around the country in his own private plane, allowing him to visit twenty cities a week and speak to a quarter of a million people each day. Goebbels had films made of Hitler's speeches, and 50,000 gramophone records so that even the smallest meeting rooms and cafés could hear him speak. At the height of the campaign, Goebbels had – in today's money – a budget of more than half a million euros a week at his disposal: the industrial financiers had apparently become even more enthusiastic. In the long run, Hindenburg was re-elected (with 19.4 million votes), but Hitler (with 13.4 million) had won an additional two million supporters.
The Nazi campaign went on nonstop. The focus was now on Prussia, that great social-democrat stronghold where two thirds of the German population would be going to the polls in two weeks’ time. At one fell swoop, the Nazis became the biggest party there. With the support of the communists, they immediately entered a motion of no confidence against the prime minister, Otto Braun. The prudent social democrat withdrew from his post. A provisional government was set up; the SA provoked more and more disturbances; and after a few months Chancellor Franz von Papen, along with Hitler, seized the opportunity to place Prussia under political receivership. That step – in fact, an outright coup – was completely unconstitutional, but protest was to no avail. Political violence continued to mount, particularly from within the ranks of the SA. During the month of July alone, sixty-eight people were murdered and many hundreds assaulted. The victims were most often communists and socialists.