Читать книгу Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman - Страница 24

Harry’s Germanophilia, which turned S.A. men soliciting funds into part of a “pleasant” scene, was a triumph of wishful thinking. Already in March 1932, as Bella Fromm noted in her diary, “the brown plague” of S.A. Brown Shirts was spreading, with “gangs of roughnecks…painting swastikas and ‘we want Hitler’ signs on the streets and buildings.”133 Until events forced him to pay attention, Harry was less insistently aware of such details than Fromm, as shown in his responses to May Day, when demonstrations were always rife. His diary for May Day 1932 mentions an expedition with friends to Potsdam but not the demonstrations. On his second May Day, however, he went to Unter den Linden and photographed Nazi banners (at 5 pm, the crowds had thinned); that evening, he listened to Hitler’s speech on the radio. During his first year and a half in Germany, his diary and letters sometimes exhibit a self-involvement that dulled his response to what was going on before his own eyes. In November 1932, he failed to see the significance of a Berlin municipal transport strike during which a “united front of Red and Brown” caused chaos for several days at the time of the Reichstag election on 6 November (the alliance of Red Communists and Brown S.A. was not unusual).134 He did observe that the government-operated Stadtbahn was “unusually crowded,” because the rest of the system was shut down by the strike; but he wrote nothing about the strike as such.135 That the strike was not supported by labor unions and was indeed intended to break them and their SPD allies at the moment of the election, that there was considerable violence including several deaths, that the sponsors of the strike were radicals on the left and the right: all that went without comment in Harry’s diary and letters. That evening he saw three Schupos–police officers–standing “dark blue and substantial in the dim light of the lamp” at the corner near the Meyers’ building.136 It was the aesthetic qualities of the Schupos that struck him, not their possible connection with the strike.

What matters for our purposes, of course, is not what Harry omitted from his diary and letters but what he included. From the beginning, he took verbal snapshots of the politico-social atmosphere, finding significance in seemingly small details. He explained why students had to show their university ID to get in each of the three university gates: “to keep political agitators who are not students out of the place.” He noticed streets full of beggars and hardly a block “without moving vans, and no house without a for rent sign,” concluding: “Anybody looking for the end of an epoch could find material in Berlin.” In the Meyers’ building, three of the seventeen or eighteen apartments were vacant. Lutz Gottschalk, an idealistic teenager, was so eager to give money to the poor when the government curtailed unemployment relief that his father refused to give him any. The 603,000 unemployed people in Berlin in 1932 constituted over 10% of the national total.137

News sources are a constant subject of Harry’s diaries and letters. German newspapers, his major source of (mis)information, were ill informed and full of errors and misinterpretations. He considered only three German papers reliable for European news: the Vossische Zeitung; the august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; and the Berliner Tageblatt.138 To obtain breadth of coverage, he read–at first occasionally, and later obsessively–English and Continental papers. He liked the ironic toughness of a French columnist who went by the name of Pertinax, who “hoped Hitler would take the helm in Germany because then it would show the world how much of Germany’s pretended peacefulness was real.” As an American, he was interested in coverage of the United States. When Calvin Coolidge died, he read obituaries in three German papers and the Milan paper the Corriere della Sera: “The Corriere struck a far better note than the others–less self-conscious, less foreign.” Perhaps Italians were “more bound to the U.S.,…because in the waves of immigration, the last great surge came in great measure from Italy, thus creating personal ties and new sympathies.” For accuracy, he turned to two American news magazines, the Nation and the New Republic. They gave him “a feeling of pride,” for they were “critical, independent of parties, well written, and with wide interests.” One day, he went to the office of the Manchester Guardian, hoping to speak with their correspondent, Hermann Framm, who was out.139

Newspapers enabled Harry to construct an extensive account of a political crisis in the last two weeks of May 1932: “Today was not devoted to history–the history of a generation ago or centuries ago–but to the history of yesterday and the short time before that.”140 That history was complicated by the problem of sources. Getting “a coherent idea of a situation” from newspapers, he later wrote, was “like estimating the length of a sausage while it is coming link by link from the machine.”141 But it was all he had. Because “the German ones are notoriously partisan, or taciturn, or full of gaps,” he found information by reading twenty-one foreign papers as well as German ones: “papers of all parties in Germany, papers from Switzerland, England, and France. (And of course the Paris Herald, which can be called American).” By scouring the foreign press and “read[ing] between the lines” of the German papers, he inferred “the names of the people most German papers avoid naming” and pieced together what had happened. The issue was an emergency decree being constructed by the cabinet for the signature of President Hindenburg, who had never been “a brilliant intellect” and now, at eighty-five, was increasingly feeble. What interested Harry was the way Hindenburg was manipulated. By the time the political crisis was over, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had resigned, along with the entire cabinet. General Wilhelm Groener, the Minister of the Interior and Defense, who had banned demonstrations by the S.A. and the S.S. a month or so earlier, was one of the losers; his ouster was engineered by his former protegee, General Kurt von Schleicher, who succeeded him as Minister of Defense. After conferring with party leaders and spending “an unusually long time” with Hitler, Hindenburg named a new chancellor–Franz von Papen, a right-winger and former military attaché in Washington. Among the “various bits of contradiction, nonsense, absurdity, and rhetoric” that littered the political landscape, some commentators said that Hindenburg fired Brüning “because he was not severe enough against the Nazis,” while others said it was “because he was too severe against them.” Harry expected that with Papen as chancellor, the Nazis would get what they wanted, and they did: a revocation of the S.A.-S.S. ban, and new elections for the Reichstag on 31 July. In the weeks following the unbanning, Nazis killed ninety-nine people, most of them in Berlin.142

Observing events from a cool distance, Harry listened to Hitler on the radio and attended controversial films. He noted Hitler’s plan for a radio address on 14 June, the first time that the Nazis had breached “the democratic defense of the German democracy.” He attended a film created by Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eissler, and others that had been “3 times forbidden by censor.” This was Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World, the only Communist film made in Weimar Germany; the title derived from its setting in Kuhle Wampe, a workers’ colony. The censors feared that the film’s depiction of unemployment and the suicide of an unemployed worker might suggest the inability of the government to care for its citizens and thus provoke disturbances. Not suspecting the film’s eventual historical significance–it is now considered a classic of left-wing cinema–Harry thought it would turn audiences off because it was so “boring” and “dull”–surpassed “from the point of view of ennui… only by Richard Strauss’s opera ‘Ariadne auf Naxos,’ 2¼ hours long and much more than twice as long as a Wagner 5-hour affair.” Immune to Strauss’s lighter touch, Harry missed the aesthetic boat.143

In the weeks before the next election, on 31 July, political disturbances multiplied. Returning home one evening from Paul Gottschalk’s, Harry

heard the unmistakable sound of rhythmical nailed boots on pavement, and there came a group of Hitler’s S.A. swinging along. A second was following…. They looked young, husky, and determined, but more boy-scout marching style than West Point. There may be 350,000 of them in all, but France need not be particularly alarmed about them. For Strassenkravalle [street riots] they are suitable, but in all military aspects they would prove of absolutely no value, having neither the equipment nor training.144

Other private militias marched, each with its own uniform. “This uniform business is a great thing in German politics,” wrote Abraham Plotkin: “The moment a movement gathers momentum, up pops the uniform.” The gray uniform of the Steel Helmet (Stahlhelm, a nationalist veterans’ organization opposed to the Weimar Republic) resembled that of the Reichswehr; incomprehensibly, Harry’s collection of photographs included one of Walter Elberfeld in a Steel Helmet uniform.145 The colors of the Reichsbanner Schwartz Rot Gold (the Black Red Gold Banner of the Reich), which was loosely affiliated with the SPD, indicated its support of the Weimar Republic. The Iron Front (Eiserne Front), which was allied with the SPD and also with the Reichsbanner, had support from unions; marching “with a zip as effective as that of the Nazis,” it held a huge demonstration in Berlin the day before Hitler was named chancellor. The Rote Frontkämpferbund (the Red Front-Fighters League, the Communist paramilitary group) was declared illegal by the Papen government because it was anti-government. After Hitler took power, the brown S.A., the black S.S., and (briefly) the gray Steel Helmet remained--this last forced in 1934 to wear “the honorable brown” S.A. uniform, as Victor Klemperer remarked ironically, and dissolved completely in 1935.146

The contemporary militias resonated with Harry’s reading about the Thirty Years’ War, “in which private armies ravaged the land and set Germany two centuries–perhaps three–behind the rest of the western world.”147 He found parallels with the present situation: “Fanaticisms, local, racial, religious, economic class disturbances, barbarisms of assorted types, a vicious particularism engendering differences in whose acid all feeling of community disintegrates, gangsterism raised to a principle”–all this had been “chronic in German history since the 16th century.” War became “a profession, with families bred to it…–blood and iron were necessary for practical things.” When “slogans of professed humanity” became “coarse and crude…, the Denker und Dichter [thinkers and poets]…never protested–or rarely.”

The pursuit of scholarship occasionally drew Harry unwittingly to dangerous places. At the Vorwärts building, where he hoped to use the bookstore, he found the gates closed and the building guarded by “half a dozen healthy-looking men in khaki, Reichsbannermen.” Some hours after he left, there was “an attack on the building by 100-150 Nazis, two men were shot and a third badly hurt.” The neighborhood, an SPD stronghold, was like “a superheated steam boiler whose safety valve is being held down” by the government of Papen and Schleicher, “engineers [who] don’t arouse my confidence.” He was glad he hadn’t witnessed the attack and hoped to avoid all disturbances. If the university were closed– “either by the anti-Nazi government in order to prevent rioting or by the Nazis if they take the helm, to clean the faculty of non-Nazi professors”–it wouldn’t directly affect him as long as he could “get my Studienbuch signed, and…the libraries remain in operation.” By then attending only four hours of classes a week, he didn’t mind “that there was another Kravall [riot] in the university this morning, the first since last fall or early winter.”148 Two weeks later he saw “mobs of students clustered” by the closed gates–yet another Kravall. That particular riot alarmed Count Harry Kessler, who wrote in his diary that “the unbridled, organized Nazi terror” had “again claimed seventeen dead and nearly two hundred wounded as its victims.”149 Kessler added: “It is a continuous St Bartholomew’s Massacre, day after day, Sunday after Sunday.” Less emotional than Harry Kessler, Harry Marks maintained his customary ironic distance. For him, “the most serious factor is not the possible alteration of university organization but the fact that the Nazis want to interfere with the opera.”150 He didn’t really mean it, though.

In the lead-up to the election, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl replaced Groener as Minister of the Interior. Gayl, who was later to resist the Nazis, was willing to censor newspapers at the government’s bidding. The Vorwärts and a Cologne paper backed by the Catholic Zentrum (Center) party were both shut down for five days as punishment for their criticisms of the government. The Vorwärts had slyly suggested “that there was a connection between the new Nazi uniforms–very expensive–and the shortening of the relief payments,” and the Cologne paper had objected to foreign policy toward France. Harry reacted cynically: “I can’t work up any sympathy for anyone concerned…. I don’t suppose any SPD or Zentrum members have lost any tears over the almost equally arbitrary 5 day ban of the Berlin Nazi organ Der Angriff.” Finally, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” a “pitched battle…in Altona (Hamburg’s Hoboken),” which resulted in eighteen deaths, led Gayl to prohibit all demonstrations.151

Nazis and Communists thronged the streets. One Sunday the Kurfürstendamm, a major shopping street, was “swarming with uniformed Nazis. Walking in 3’s & 4’s, they lounged up and down and across the avenue…saluting acquaintances with the pseudoRoman gesture of the raised arm.” At a Communist demonstration on the following Tuesday,

a couple of miles of Communists marched down from the Red north of Berlin and sang the Internationale and other appropriate anthems, shouted couplets in unison against the Nazis and in favor of the KPD [German Communist Party], and raised their fisted hands in the Red salute or gesture of defiance. There were workmen’s bands, always red flags and banners with suitable inscriptions, and all ages and both sexes were among the marchers: unemployed looking a little shabby, employed men with white shirts, gray shirts, blue shirts, brown shirts, dirty shirts, hatless or with the nautical caps so much worn by all ages of men; girls in bright dresses, gray-haired women, thin women, fat women, school girls and stenographers, women in white with nurses’ caps and bags with contents for all emergencies, and, always, cops. Cops pacing alongside by twos, cops in five-seater open runabouts, cops in the familiar police department riot squad trucks, all in Alarmbereitschaft [emergency readiness], the bands of their helmets under the chin, the side boards of the trucks down to allow instantaneous action.

Such parades reinforced the marchers’ “community of feeling” but probably had no effect on the audiences lining the streets. Harry had a certain sympathy with “these hoarse marchers, with their shouts of ‘Was haben die Arbeiter? [What do the workers have?] Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! Was wollen die Arbeiter: Arbeit! Arbeit! Arbeit!’ [What do the workers want? Work! Work! Work!].”

After a ban on demonstrations, competing parties compensated by littering the street with fly sheets advertising their causes: “People stooped over, men and women, and picked them off the pavement or off the asphalt, and walked along reading them.”152 Harry had a personal experience of anti-Semitism when he and Heinz encountered “two boys handing out fly sheets. I put out my hand for one and the boy turned away and said–Nee–nicht für die Juden [No, not for Jews].”153 Heinz, unrecognized as Jewish, gave Harry his copy; Nazis, it seemed, were no more adept at recognizing Jews than the admissions officers at Harvard mentioned in Chapter 2. The government, too, practiced political hooliganism. On 20 July, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD politician, was forced to resign as police president of Berlin by a group of young officers sent by Papen; in a premonition of Nazi methods, they “forced their way in [to police headquarters], hand grenades in their leather belts.” Harry considered writing to Artz in Heidelberg: “How do you like living under a dictatorship?”154

On the eve of the election, having just left on his travels, Harry strolled the streets of Frankfurt, noting political flags. A neighborhood favoring the SPD and KPD was thick with “red flags with a white sickle and hammer,” in one area “completely ablaze and not unfittingly labeled by a sign over the entrance: Klein Moskau [Little Moscow]…. I thought, lord help a Nazi in this neighborhood, but there were none.”155 The “better off areas” displayed Nazi flags. He saw “a troop of Nazis” and then “a much larger group of the Iron Front.” When the election results came in, the Nazis, although the largest party in the Reichstag, did not have a majority, and Hindenburg refused to name Hitler chancellor. The government collapsed. New elections were called for 6 November when, as already noted, both the Communists and the Nazis ganged up against the SPD in the transport strike.

During his travels, Harry followed events in Germany through the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The “nationalist-militarist internal disposition” of the government, with its suppression of all leftwing thought and “collateral policy of strengthening right-wing opinion and parties,” was laying a firm foundation for the Nazis. The government attacked the KPD, whose national headquarters at Karl Liebknecht House “was searched and the Rote Fahne [Red Flag, the KPD newspaper] several times banned. Rewards are offered for information about illegal Communist literature–…now they set a price on its head.” The one certainty about the upcoming November elections was that the Papen government, which had bitterly criticized Hitler’s NSDAP, would face “some 500 or more hostile Reichstag members,” for only the DNVP supported Papen’s Zentrum. The Nazis lost ground in November, a temporary reprieve. Walking along the Kurfürstendamm a week before Hitler became chancellor, Harry saw “Nazis with 3 Hakenkreuz [“crooked cross,” swastika] banners marching in the snow, singing about Hitler unser Führer [our leader]. Sad demonstration of herd-mindedness.”156

That month, the brief and brilliant academic career of Ernst J. Cohn shuddered to a halt. A year earlier, Cohn had been named “ordinarius [full professor] on the law faculty of the Univ. Breslau…at the extraordinary age of 28” and entered into a torment predictive of later events.157 His colleagues didn’t mind that he was Jewish, but the Nazi students did. In December 1932, the governing body of the university bravely declared that they would not dismiss him–only to do so a week later:

Why? Because he had answered a newspaper’s request, made to a large number of people, to express an opinion whether or not Trotsky ought to be allowed to enter Germany. Cohn answered that he didn’t know the details of the matter, but that his principles would be: if Trotsky wanted to come to Germany for his health and as a private gentleman, he saw no reason for prohibiting his entrance. On the other hand, if he came as an agitator–We have enough of such already–Cohn said; Keep him out.

This statement, deliberately misinterpreted as a call for Germany to give Trotsky political asylum, gave the university an excuse to fire him. There followed “a great row and the Prussian Kultusministerium [Ministry of Cultural Affairs] intervened.” Cohn, having apologized, “was once more returned to the fold,” again requiring police protection. Harry concluded: “This is merely one incident out of many to illustrate the penetration of some of the universities by politics of the most vicious order.”158 Two weeks after Harry reported Cohn’s troubles, Hitler took over.