Gottfried von Cramm and wife Lisa, the fashionable Berlin couple
Tennis in Weimar – and after
DURING HIS GLORY YEARS BILL TILDEN lived the celebrity life. He hung out in London with actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Bea Lillie and basked in the limelight when seen escorting the silent-screen femme fatale, Pola Negri. But the city in which he felt most at ease was Berlin. He loved the unbuttoned lifestyle and atmosphere in Weimar Germany.
Baron Gottfried von Cramm described late-night partying with Tilden in Berlin. Tilden always stayed at the Hotel Eden where his entourage gathered in the rooftop bar. The evening would develop with everyone except Big Bill downing cocktails. Tilden never touched alcohol and was so famous for drinking iced water that a glass of water came to be known as a ‘Tilden’ or a ‘Tilden cocktail’. On the other hand, he would demolish several beef steaks in the course of an evening and also chain-smoked and sustained himself on strong coffee. The party would proceed from one bistro or nightclub to the next and at the end of the evening – or night – Tilden would entertain the survivors back at the Eden once more. He appeared to need almost no sleep, for following these activities he would be out practising on the tennis court early the next day.1
The nocturnal excursions were always at Tilden’s expense. He not only beat allcomers on the tennis court; he beat everyone to the draw when it came to paying the bill for these hedonistic explorations of the most modern city on earth.
The liberal Jewish politician Walter Rathenau joked that while Berlin had been an elegant ‘Athens on the Spree’ in the nineteenth century, by 1920 it was more like ‘Chicago on the Spree’; all too true in his case as in 1922 he was assassinated when extreme right- wingers gunned him down. The city was the epicentre of a fervid culture clash. It was the headquarters of sexual freedom, of emancipated women, of cabaret, nightclubs and revolution. There were more gay and lesbian clubs in 1920s Berlin than in New York in 1980. Every kind of artistic avant garde flourished: decadent dance-theatre, expressionist film, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, movements for sexual liberation and political satire.
Yet the mask of modernity was deceptive. For a few years, the illusion could be maintained that the new, the radical, the shocking and the modern had won, but the political and social differences within and between classes and interest groups were irreconcilable. Long before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the ‘great inflation’ of 1923 had destroyed the German middle class. Nazis and communists fought on the streets; the various fragmentary political parties spoke only for narrow constituencies. The divisions between the urban workers and rural peasants, between a radical intelligentsia and the conservative petite bourgeoisie became ever more bitter. National unity was impossible, until gradually the sinister, compelling figure of Adolf Hitler rose above the turmoil and announced himself as the man beyond politics, the saviour of the German race.
The new fashion for tennis epitomised German modernity. The Germans had originally preferred drill and gymnastics to organised sports, but gradually the sporting mentality gained ground. Before 1914 tennis had been played seriously only at spas such as Bad Homburg, but in the 1920s it became an irresistible and glamorous addition to Weimar culture. Clubs sprang up everywhere and the fashionable Rot Weiss club in Berlin was the headquarters of the sport in Germany. Tennis and its fashionable profile could be seen as one expression of the freedom of movement and the liberation of the body that the times demanded.
The game, as elsewhere, trailed clouds of social cachet. It also brought Weimar androgyny to the court. The male player was an internationalist and cosmopolitan, a glamorous figure, elegant rather than manly, the men’s game one of artistry rather than pugilism. But women players such as Cilly Aussem, who won both the French national tournament at Roland Garros and Wimbledon in 1931, belonged to a race of Amazons, and played in an aggressively modern style. They expressed the new, sexually liberated Germany found above all in Berlin – but the whole ethos of tennis was utterly contrary to the German tradition, which associated masculine athletic activity with ‘strict self denial and abstinence from food, alcohol, sex and pleasure’. Tennis shockingly celebrated an androgynous model of masculine sexuality and heterosexual flirtation.2
Elsewhere, far from the capital, landowners and peasants lived as if the nineteenth century had yet to begin. Baron Gottfried von Cramm came from just such a milieu.3
Born in 1909, Baron Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt Freiherr von Cramm was the third of the seven sons of Baron Burchard von Cramm. The family had owned land in Lower Saxony since the thirteenth century and Gottfried’s mother, Jutta von Steinberg, was sole heiress to the fortune of another ancient landed family. Gottfried was born at the family estate in Nettlingen and brought up in the castle at Brüggen inherited by his mother. Every summer the family transferred to a third castle, at Oelber.
As a student at Oxford, Gottfried’s father had noticed how important sport was to the English and continued to interest himself in sport on his return, encouraging his sons to play games and keep fit. He had a tennis clay court laid out at Oelber and invited the top German Davis Cup doubles pair, Robert and Heinrich Kleinschroth, to stay and to play tennis with the whole family and their guests.
Burchard von Cramm had served in the cavalry reserve, but the lives of these aristocratic landowners were relatively untouched by the war. Nor did the Junkers, the land-owning class, suffer from the Great Inflation as did the middle classes; land actually became even more valuable.
The cultured Cramm family seems not to have followed the stereotype of the militaristic, ultra-bellicose and right-wing German ruling class. Burchard von Cramm was involved in a number of peace initiatives after the end of the war. Instead of being sent to one of the fearsome authoritarian German boarding schools, Gottfried was educated at home, for a time by the governess who had taught the prince who was to become Edward VIII.
Gottfried became fascinated by tennis from an early age and when the Kleinschroth brothers brought Bill Tilden with them to Oelber in 1927, the American quickly saw how promising this cadet of the family was. Keen, though, as the boy’s father was on sport, the family did not regard tennis as an appropriate full-time career, even as an amateur. Indeed, dedicated but well-connected players often used a pseudonym when they entered a tournament. (King Gustav of Sweden, for example, played as ‘Mr G’.) Gottfried was destined for the diplomatic service.
He arrived in Berlin in 1928, aged nineteen, ostensibly to study law, but once there spent most of his time at the Rot Weiss club and rapidly emerged as the most promising German star, which was soon noted when he played on the Riviera circuit. He formed friendships both with the seventy-year-old tennis fanatic, King Gustav, and with Daniel Prenn, the number two German player, soon to be his doubles partner. By 1930 it was becoming clear that Gottfried’s future lay with tennis rather than diplomacy. As he wrote to his mother, ‘Prenn is trying to commandeer me for tennis’ – and Gottfried was only too happy to be commandeered.
American sports writer Allison Danzig described Cramm’s style as elegant and a bit stately. His drives were wide and clean and his ‘offensive’ service was mechanically perfect. What he lacked was ‘a certain subtlety, an ability to break up the other fellow’s game’. He struck the ball very quickly, but ‘must have his feet planted and must address the ball, whereas a player such as [Don] Budge or Perry can perform miracles on the run’. But he could hit startling winners and could ‘blind’ the gallery with his flat backhand.4
Perry described the German’s style more sardonically in recalling a match between him and Bunny Austin: ‘Austin believed in the purity of stroke play . . . it should be straight out of the instruction manual, line for line, word for word. To see him and Cramm play a match, as I did at Wimbledon once, was like reading a book on tennis. Nothing much happened, but it was lovely to watch.’
In September 1930 Gottfried was married to Lisa von Dobeneck, the daughter of a neighbouring landed family. Like her new husband, Lisa, at eighteen, was sports mad, a tennis and hockey player who also skated, swam and danced. She absolutely typified the New Woman of Weimar Germany. Installed in Berlin, she and Gottfried became Germany’s most glamorous couple. She was as dark as Gottfried was fair; indeed with his wheat-coloured hair, cold blue eyes and tall, elegant figure, he was ‘a new star fallen from heaven’ and was soon to outdo the German boxing champion, Max Schmeling, as Germany’s most popular sporting idol.
When Cramm became fully aware that his erotic desires inclined him towards men is not recorded. Not that it mattered very much, for same-sex love was as fashionable as tennis and the young couple were perfectly in tune with the polymorphous sexual culture of Berlin, frequenting dives that catered to every sexual taste. Sooner or later, though, Gottfried did discover his true nature and seems to have embarked on an affair with an actor, Manasse Herbst.
The cocktail-circuit life was not allowed to interfere with his tennis, which went from strength to strength. Germany had been readmitted to the International Tennis Federation in 1927 and with Cramm the rising star these were great years for German tennis. In 1931 he won his first international title in Athens, where he also played mixed doubles with Lisa and in 1932 he joined the German Davis Cup team. Cramm and Prenn won through five rounds and then, astonishingly, defeated Britain in the interzone final. Gottfried was easily defeated by Fred Perry, but won his match against Bunny Austin. Finally Prenn pulled off the miracle of defeating Perry, who was shortly to become ‘world champion’ and although the Germans didn’t win the Davis Cup, their heroic triumph over the British meant that Gottfried von Cramm became a household name.
Cramm was the perfect gentleman, but his background differed from Tilden’s. Tilden came from an upper-middle class or bourgeoisie made up of professional men, such as lawyers and successful industrialists and businessmen. Some acquired land, but they did not conform to the European notion of a landed gentry or aristocracy. Cramm, by contrast, was the aristocrat of aristocrats and his point of view essentially that of the paternalist landowner who owes a duty to his peasantry in a reciprocal relationship with rights and responsibilities on both sides.
Cramm explained this view to the American player, Don Budge, the first time they met, which was during the Wimbledon fortnight, when they were to play each other the next day. Cramm took the young American to task, in the nicest possible way, for his lack of sportsmanship. Budge was astounded because he had done what Tilden always did and what he had believed was the essence of good sportsmanship. During a big Wimbledon match against Bunny Austin, Budge was convinced that the linesman had made a wrong call that had gone in his, Budge’s, favour and he therefore deliberately and ostentatiously threw the next point, eliciting approving applause from the crowd. Budge assumed he’d done the right sporting thing, but Cramm disabused him: ‘Absolutely not. You made a great show of giving away a point because you felt the call had wronged Bunny. But is that your right? You made yourself an official, which you are not, and in improperly assuming this duty so that you could correct things your way, you managed to embarrass that poor linesman in front of eighteen thousand people.’ 5
In January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The perfect aristocratic Baron from Hanover presented the Nazis with a dilemma. Some, Heinrich Himmler in particular, loathed the land-owning upper class, the Junkers, and their steely grip on the army. Others, Hitler included, were more ambivalent. They were so Germanic! The very essence of das Volk, the true Germans, descended from the Vikings. Cramm, furthermore, so very much looked the part. He was the epitome of the Aryan ideal.
Gottfried, the Prince Charming of tennis, was, however, no Prince Charming of fascism. The family of brothers, wrote Tatiana Metternich, who knew them well, were patriotic Hanoverian monarchists, who hated the Prussians.6 Some politically active German aristocrats did hope to see the return of the Kaiser, but Gottfried’s views are not known; he had never seemed interested in politics. However, although many of Gottfried’s class held very right-wing views, that did not mean they liked the Nazis, who, after all, were vulgar, low-bred, vicious upstarts, many of them downright criminal. Besides, the grandfather of Cramm’s wife was Jewish.
One of Hitler’s first orders on coming to power was to ban all non-Aryans from every form of sporting club and institution. Cramm’s doubles partner, Daniel Prenn was a Lithuanian Jew from Vilnius, who with his family had escaped the continual persecution of the Jews both before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution and arrived in Berlin in 1920. Then, Berlin had appeared as a haven of tolerance. Now he disappeared from the Rot Weiss tennis club and was barred from every German tournament.
Bunny Austin and Fred Perry protested in a letter published in The Times, but international protest was otherwise shamefully non-existent. Luckily for Prenn, Simon Marks, head of Marks and Spencer, was a tennis fan, as well as being Jewish. He sponsored Prenn and his wife Charlotte, enabling them to leave Germany for Britain and avoid the fate of so many of their fellow Jews. The up-and-coming Henner Henkel replaced Prenn as Gottfried’s doubles partner. Gottfried himself was now Germany’s number one player.
He achieved outstanding successes between 1933 and 1937. In 1933 he won the Wimbledon mixed doubles with Hilda Krawinkel, who also reached the women’s final, losing to her countrywoman Cilly Aussem. He twice won at Roland Garros, beating Fred Perry in 1936. But Perry twice beat him in Wimbledon finals – although in 1936 this was partly due to Gottfried having strained a leg muscle in the first game of the match and being virtually unable to compete thereafter.
In 1935 Germany came close to triumphing over the United States in the Davis Cup in the interzone final. In the last set of the final (and decisive) doubles match with the Germans they actually reached match point. Then, however, came the most famous example of Gottfried’s legendary sportsmanship and fair play. He was serving. It was a near ace, but the American on the other side of the net just managed to get it back. Gottfried’s doubles partner, Kai Lund, appeared to hit an unreturnable stroke off the weak return. But Gottfried spoke quietly to the umpire to point out that his own racquet had touched the ball before Lund hit it. Therefore the point was the Americans’. No one but von Cramm had noticed this. The Germans lost the match and their hopes of meeting Britain in the Challenge Round.
Two years later, in 1937, Gottfried was again at Wimbledon. He had again lost in the singles final, this time to Budge. Now the two were to meet again in another Davis Cup interzone final to see which team would face the British holders in the challenge round. It was almost taken for granted that the British, weakened by Perry’s departure to the professional ranks, would lose to whichever team won the tie, so this was effectively the contest for the cup.
One thing had changed. The swastika flew over the All England Club. However reluctantly, Gottfried was representing the Nazi regime. Don Budge reports in his memoirs that before the match Gottfried received a telephone call from the Führer himself and that Cramm held the handset, repeating ‘Ja, mein Führer’ several times, afterwards saying that Hitler had wanted to wish him luck. The Baron’s biographer, Egon Steinkampf, disputes this. Gottfried’s friend, Wolfgang Hofer cast doubt on the story, and said that Cramm himself had called the story a ‘fairy tale’, so it may well be one of the many myths that attach themselves to famous matches. (Marshall Jon Fisher, whose book, A Terrible Splendor is built round the match, researched the anecdote exhaustively and shares Steinkampf’s scepticism.) 7 This match was for many years held to have been the greatest ever played, played at the highest level between two friends until the very last point that clinched the final set 8–6 in Budge’s favour.
There was a third defeat for Cramm at the hands of Budge, when the American again beat him at Forest Hills for the US Open title. Budge was now on his way to winning his ‘calendar’ grand slam. Cramm was on the first swing of a world tour with Henner Henkel, Heinrich Kleinschroth and the new German woman number one, Marlies Horn. After New York they travelled by train to California, Hollywood and the Pacific Southwest Tennis Tournament at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.
The tennis-loving Hollywood stars had planned to walk out of Cramm’s first match in order to demonstrate their outrage at what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Yet when Gottfried appeared, smiling and golden, not a soul stirred. Groucho Marx told Budge later that he had only to see Cramm to feel ashamed of what had been planned. What convinced them that the dashing blond German was not a Nazi the moment they set eyes on him we cannot know, especially given his stereotypically ‘Aryan’ looks. Their instincts were correct, however, and later in the tour, after the Germans had visited Japan and arrived in Australia, Cramm took the risk of criticising the German government to the extent of saying that the three years’ military service all German youth had to serve was a bad idea that delayed their improvement in tennis. He also attended a screening of The Road Back directed by the gay British director, James Whale. This, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s sequel to his more famous anti-war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was banned in Germany.
On his return, he was arrested and questioned by the Gestapo and then charged with having an illegal sexual relationship with Manasse Herbst. That he avoided the concentration camps may have been due to Göring’s intervention. It was Heinrich Himmler who was the chief scourge of homosexuals. Göring was not only more easygoing morally, he was also a tennis fan and member of the Rot Weiss club. He had tried to enlist Gottfried as his protégé and to persuade him to join the Nazi party. Gottfried always refused and it was known that his family was unsympathetic to the Nazis. If Germany had won the Davis Cup and if Gottfried had won Wimbledon it would have been impossible to arrest him, given his popularity at home. Even as it was, his execution or disappearance would have been an international scandal, but he was lucky to get off with a year’s imprisonment in a Berlin prison for moral turpitude and to be found not guilty of a second and even more serious charge of illegal foreign-exchange dealings.
Cramm’s biographer points out that there is no evidence of a homosexual relationship with Herbst, other than the Gestapo records of the interrogation – during which Cramm confessed to the relationship – or of relationships with other men. It seems certain that the tennis player was instrumental in securing Herbst’s escape from Germany and this was followed with sums of money that he managed to spirit out of the country (hence the accusation of illegal money dealings). After the war Herbst, now married, returned to Germany in order personally to thank Cramm for having saved his life.
In fact it was widely known that Cramm was a lover of men. He discussed his sexuality with Don Budge and was quite open about it; and while in London he had an affair with Geoffrey Nares, a young British actor, described by Cecil Beaton as ‘elf like’ and a ‘sad, striving, rudderless young man’. (Geoffrey was the son of the famous matinée idol, Owen Nares, who was so enraged by his son’s sexual preference that he had Geoffrey’s name obliterated from his own entry in Who’s Who.)
Released from prison, Gottfried returned to tennis in the months before the outbreak of war. By this time Budge had turned professional and the top American amateur was now Bobby Riggs. Cramm beat Riggs easily in the final at the Queen’s Club tournament. But he was disbarred from Wimbledon on account of his conviction; Riggs won the Championship.
In spite of being one of the greatest tennis players never to have won Wimbledon, Cramm was in a sense a lucky man. With war under way he was deemed unfit to be an officer in the Wehrmacht and as a private was in 1941 sent to the Russian front, but, suffering from frostbite, he was invalided home. He had been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, but was given a dishonourable discharge. That mattered little, given that he was now reunited with what was left of his family (his father had died and two of his brothers were killed) and he remained in Germany until the end of the war, spending most of his time in Berlin or in Brüggen with his mother.
He also paid at least three visits to Sweden, an unusual freedom for a man distrusted by the government. True, he played tennis there and visited his friend King Gustav; and the Nazis may have viewed the handsome aristocrat as a suitable ambassador to speak up for the German government as it sank further and further into the frozen mud outside Stalingrad. Tatiana Metternich, however, was confident that Cramm was acting as courier for the small German resistance movement led by fellow aristocrats, most famously Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. ‘He was often away on trips as messenger for the opposition,’ she wrote. Her sister, Marie Wassiltschikow, became a close friend of Cramm during the time when both were staying in Berlin with Heinz and Maria von Gersdorff. She wrote in her war diary of the intensity of their friendship in the anxious days after the Stauffenberg assassination attempt had failed. The Gersdorff home acted as a social centre for opponents of the Nazis, among them Adam von Trott, who had contacts with the Swedish Wallenberg brothers who were active in helping Jews to escape from Germany.
Seen purely in tennis terms, Gottfried von Cramm might appear as an unlucky player. Although brilliantly gifted, he was unfortunate to play in the same years as Fred Perry and the even more gifted Don Budge. It was also unlucky – and rather shameful – that the Wimbledon authorities refused him leave to play in the singles in 1939, which many felt was his best chance finally to win the title.
On the other hand he was a homosexual anti-Nazi who survived the war. Thereafter he led an active and successful life both as a tennis player and as a businessman, developing a successful cotton import–export firm based on his contacts in Egypt, where he was held in enormous esteem.
He almost single-handedly revived German tennis, finally returning to Wimbledon to great acclaim in 1951 and playing once more on the Centre Court, still wearing long trousers. (While in London he also had a reunion with Daniel Prenn.) Later, he did all he could to ease relationships, at least so far as tennis was concerned, between East and West Germany and more generally tried to improve sporting relations between the West and Eastern Europe and the USSR.
He was even briefly remarried, to the Woolworth heiress, Barbara Hutton. (He and Lisa had divorced before the war, but remained lifelong friends.) Barbara Hutton was the archetypal ‘poor little rich girl’ of the period, regularly in the news on account of her marriages to various displaced European princelings and also to Cary Grant. She conceived a hopeless passion for Cramm, which seems to have haunted her for most of her life, but inevitably their marriage was doomed.
The marriage baffled his friends as he was apparently neither in serious need of money nor of a wife to conceal his sexuality. Perhaps he acted out of misplaced kindness, for no one spoke ill of him – and he was often kind. He helped some of his maimed fellow soldiers and his former doubles partner, Kai Lund, who returned from battle minus a limb, purchasing for the latter a hotel in Baden Baden. Perhaps it was just as Barbara Hutton wrote: ‘We were such good friends for so long, but friendship and marriage don’t particularly go together.’
Gottfried was killed in a car crash on the road between Alexandria and Cairo, in 1976 at the age of sixty-seven. He had always said he would prefer to die an unnatural death rather than suffer from protracted illness, so in this respect too, it would seem that his luck never ran out.