IN THE MONTHS FOLLOWING Rathenau’s murder the instability of the German government, in combination with the mounting threat from organized squads of right-wing toughs, help persuade Harry Kessler to increase his involvement with the international pacifist movement. As honorary chairman of Germany’s branch of the World Youth League and as a board member of the prominent German Peace Society (to which he gives a good deal of money), Kessler is widely called on to lecture, especially on the League of Nations and the issue of reparations. He believes, as had his friend Rathenau, not only in the “Policy of Fulfillment” but in Germany’s moral obligation to aid in rebuilding areas in France heavily destroyed during the war.
The more often Kessler speaks publicly, the more in demand he becomes. His success is due as much to style as content; fluent in English and French, trim, elegant, impeccably dressed—his moustache discreetly waxed, his cravat flawlessly creased—able to conjure up anecdotes from his own longstanding contact with Europe’s political and artistic elites, Kessler’s manner on the platform is cosmopolitan, modest, subtle, and balanced—accurately reflecting the persona of an essentially decent, truth-telling man.
Though he sometimes has to deal with hecklers from both the Far Right and Left, and is several times warned that he’s in personal danger, Kessler accepts speaking engagements from all over Germany, and occasionally elsewhere. Yet he hesitates when, in 1923, an invitation arrives from Munich University. In the same mail is a request for an interview following his speech from a young man named Hermann Esser, who describes himself as a freelance journalist in Munich. Kessler thinks it’s “curious” that the young man doesn’t identify himself as a student at the university, for how else would he know of the invitation to speak? Could the university have publicized it before he’d made up his mind about whether to accept? That seems unlikely.
Kessler’s unease is heightened by ongoing events in the city. Munich over the past few years, as with Berlin, has seen a brutal, seesaw battle between the forces of the militant Left and Far Right, a battle symbolic of the political turmoil roiling all of Germany, and not yet resolved. Antipathy to the Berlin central government is more pronounced in Bavaria than elsewhere in Germany, further fed by the region’s historic antipathy to Prussian domination. Violence and rioting have been widespread, Munich’s famed beer halls resonating with enflamed oratory.
During the revolutionary upheavals of 1918 and 1919, it had been Munich, not Berlin, that for a time had seen the Left—led by Kurt Eisner, an unkempt, unprepossessing drama critic—gain triumphant control of the city. Socialists of various stripes had combined forces into a Council of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants, and had elected Eisner its chairman. Two successive Soviet-style regimes had controlled city government, but Eisner, unlike Lenin, was a true egalitarian and lacked the Russian leader’s ruthlessness in liquidating “enemies of the proletariat”—and lacked, too, his political skill in dealing with the widespread exhaustion and misery among the populace. Besides, Eisner was Jewish—not, for right-wingers, an appealing attribute; as one Munich newspaper put it, “This Jew should no longer stand at the head” of the city government.
That was a message Count Anton Arco auf Valley took to heart. Outspoken against the revolutionary Left, he’d confidently applied for admission to the paramilitary Thule Society, a semi-secret group aimed at overthrowing the left-wing Munich government; but Arco-Valley had been rejected for membership when it became known that his mother was Jewish. He thought he knew how to get the decision reversed. Stalking Eisner, he came up behind him on the street and shot him at point blank range in the head and back. Eisner died on the sidewalk, but one of his bodyguards managed to wound Arco-Valley as he fled from the scene. A leading German surgeon operated on him that same day and saved his life. The Thule Society sent a bouquet of roses to Arco-Valley’s hospital room.
A new left-wing consortium, the Central Council, takes over the government and rejects rule by a Russian-style “soviet” in favor of a more centrist parliamentary system. Thousands of radical workers and soldiers threaten a general strike in the name of restoring a more militant administration, and subsequent weeks see a constantly shifting battle of manifestos, alliances, deliberations, rallies, threats, and takeovers that briefly includes the proclaiming of a soviet republic dedicated to the nonviolent overthrow of capitalism. That, in turn, is forcibly supplanted by a faction insisting it represents true communism—a proposition heartily endorsed by the swelling ranks of the right-wing Bavarian Freikorps dedicated to its destruction.
Authoritarian and racist, the well-trained Munich Freikorps is affiliated with the Thule Society and headed by Franz von Epp and his right-hand man, Ernst Röhm, the future head of Hitler’s storm troopers. The communists are unable to mount effective resistance; the Freikorps quickly seizes control of Munich and goes on a savage killing spree. When it’s over, the right-wing is in control, but below the surface Munich remains an embittered battleground.
Harry Kessler is well aware of Munich’s recent history when he receives the invitation to speak at the university’s Schwabing campus. Most of his friends advise against accepting. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who has himself recently fled Munich after learning that the Freikorps—having found some of his poetry in the apartment of a left-wing leader—is about to arrest him, warns Kessler that it would be foolhardy in the current climate for him to set foot in the city.
“But it’s the Schwabing campus,” Kessler protests uncertainly—“Schwabing, for heaven’s sake—the artists’ district.”
“Yes,” Rilke replies with a bleak twinkle. “But artists don’t attend lectures on the League of Nations.”
Kessler laughs, but remains unconvinced. “After all,” he tells Rilke, “Munich’s university has for centuries been a prestigious center of learning. Surely I can expect a respectful audience even if a portion of it disagrees with what I say.”
Rilke tries another tack, reminding Kessler that, after the Bavarian government pardoned Arco-Valley, the great sociologist Max Weber was threatened by far-right students at Munich University for having protested the decision. No less a figure than Albert Einstein has recently canceled a scheduled lecture at the university following threats of an anti-Jewish demonstration. “If anything,” Rilke adds, “the climate at the university is today worse.”
Kessler hears variations of Rilke’s warning from a wide assortment of friends, yet, to his own puzzlement, something inside him—he can’t quite put his finger on it—resists their advice. He knows what it isn’t. It isn’t a sense of invulnerability. Yes, he escaped injury during the war, but he saw enough mutilated bodies to get the strong sense that he’d soon be among them if he stayed in a combat zone. Nor is it physical bravado. He’s never had much of that. He prefers verbal dueling, at which he feels a gentleman’s advantage. No, if he has to guess, he’d ascribe his decision to go to Munich to some kind of political itch. Yes, to politics of all things, to see with his own eyes what’s going on, what this “right-wing threat” is all about—even though he can sense that, with Rathenau’s death, he’s already turning away from the public arena and returning to his earlier absorption in the arts.
Besides, he could take Max with him. What an excellent idea! Max is fearless, loves travel, and is always a lively companion. “Max” is Max Goertz, the young soldier Kessler had an idyllic affair with during the war and with whom he’s unexpectedly renewed contact. They’ve recently been seeing a good deal of each other. They’ve gone to the theater a number of times, including the opening night of the Moscow Experimental Theater, and Kessler has also taken Max to see the Ballets Russes perform in Berlin, introducing him afterwards at supper to Diaghilev, Serge Lifar, and Boris Kochno.
Yes, Kessler enthusiastically decides, he’ll take Max to Munich, show him Ludwig II’s castle at Neuschwanstein, and perhaps the Nymphenburg Palace where the ruling House of Wittelsbach had once idled away their summers. Or, a more leisurely idea, he thinks they might simply stroll the Marienplatz, Munich’s central square since the 12th century. True, Max isn’t especially drawn to architecture, or to history for that matter, but Kessler feels the exposure might awaken his interest.
And so it’s decided. Kessler not only accepts the invitation to speak but also agrees to Hermann Esser’s request for an interview, thinking he’ll turn it into a two-way exchange that might contribute to his understanding of Munich’s enflamed political scene. As for Max, he’s delighted with the idea, never having been to Munich and further glamorized by Kessler’s insistence that they stay at the Vier Jahreszeiten, the city’s finest hotel. With the lecture scheduled for late afternoon, with the Esser interview to follow, they arrive in Munich early enough to stroll the Marienplatz. Kessler does his best to make the bustling thoroughfare interesting to Max, recounting some of the highlights in the area’s history, pointing out the varied shifts in architectural style over the centuries. Max dutifully grunts appreciation but is clearly bored. When they veer off into the narrow streets radiating from the central square, the dense congestion of cyclists and pedestrians noisily bumping into each other soon has Max pleading amiably for a break. Kessler decides a special treat is in order—sampling Munich’s famed “white” sausages. Max gamely gives them a try—resulting in a hasty retreat to the hotel bathroom to cope with a case of the runs.
It’s an inauspicious start. And Kessler’s lecture that afternoon fails to improve matters. His announced topic, “Germany and the League of Nations,” draws a disappointingly small crowd, no more than 50 people. Kessler’s finely-wrought exposition of why the League should forswear the sovereign identity of nation-states in favor of self-governing economic corporations consisting of producers and consumers—a proposition Rathenau had raised much earlier—mostly produces yawns. It’s only when he starts to talk about the necessary steps Germany must take in order to fulfill its treaty obligations and gain entry to the League, that the somnolent crowd becomes energized. When he daringly declares that “Germany bears the largest share of blame for armed hostilities breaking out in the first place,” several people are immediately on their feet, shouting their displeasure. The furor catches Kessler off-guard; his famous poise briefly fractures. Turning to the friendly student who introduced him, now seated on the side of the stage, the expression on Kessler’s face is a clear plea for help. The student immediately gets up and tries to quiet the ongoing ruckus, but, when the crowd ignores him, he points to one of the men in the audience who’s stood up, calling him, his voice quavering, by name: “Professor Feder, do you have a question for our speaker, or a statement you wish to make?”
Those who hear the student say “Professor Feder” quickly quiet down. The sudden slackening in the noise level leads others to turn towards Feder, letting their agitated voices, without quite knowing why, subside as well. Feder, rather nondescript—a balding, portly, middle-aged man—remains standing, exuding authority as he waits for the noise to subside further, as he seems confident it will. Then he speaks, his voice solemn and detached:
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he begins, staring directly at Kessler.
“I am Professor Gottfried Feder of Munich University. As some members of this audience apparently know,” Feder continues, his voice resonant with self-satisfaction, “I am both a professor of economic theory and a citizen active on behalf of the well-being of the German people.”
By now Kessler’s ingrained composure has resurfaced. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” he urbanely responds. “I apologize for not being familiar with your work or your political views,” Kessler adds, deliberately lying, “but I’d be glad to hear which of my remarks you disagree with.”
“I disagree with all of it,” Feder replies, matching Kessler in suavity. “I can’t be bothered to refute your absurd presentation point by point, since it’s clear to me that truth is of no concern to you. I do, however, wish to note one bizarre feature of your speech: you made not a single reference to the Jews. I can only conclude that you are a Jew yourself.” Feder sits down abruptly, to loud applause.
Kessler is nonplused, but his instincts quickly kick in. “As I am a Count, my dear professor, you must be aware that I could not be Jewish. The ranks of the aristocracy have long been closed to people of the Jewish faith. Perhaps now, under the Weimar Republic, that discriminatory practice, of a piece with the barbaric hierarchy of privilege that has long dominated our society, will be permanently set aside.” (Kessler has not forgotten his own casual if marginal anti-Semitism when younger, but he’s not about to reference it in front of this crowd).
As an angry buzz sweeps through the auditorium, Feder again rises slowly to his feet. “You may not be a Jew, sir, but it is very clear to me that you are not a German.”
“Not by your definition perhaps, which seems to center on irrational hatred.” Kessler starts to move away from the podium, as if to signal that the session is at an end. But Feder has different plans.
“Have you ever heard, sir, of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the ‘NSDAP,’ as we call it?”
“No, I have not.”
“It is rapidly becoming the largest political formation in Bavaria.”
“Perhaps one day it will be important enough to reach Berlin,” Kessler says with smooth condescension. “Thus far we know nothing of it.”
“You Northern Germans haven’t heard of much,” Feder responds, as laughter erupts in the audience. “You have heard, I presume, of Benito Mussolini’s recent March on Rome?”
“In ‘Northern Germany’ most of us regard Italian fascism as the first step in the counter-revolution. Mussolini rejects democracy and glorifies the autocratic rule of the Leader. It seems to me we’ve already had quite enough of that with Kaiser Wilhelm. Mussolini is a danger to Europe.”
“He is a model for Europe,” Feder replies. “What Mussolini has been able to do in Italy, we can do in Bavaria—in Germany as a whole. Yes, Mussolini is anti-democratic, and rightly so. He glorifies instead, as you correctly note, the principle of Leadership. That much you do seem to understand—which is rather surprising for a Berliner. Not to mention an artistic Berliner.” The appreciative laughter from the audience puzzles Kessler. Is Feder implying something more than the fine arts?
“I do not make art,” Kessler replies, “but yes—I do appreciate it. I hadn’t realized that was a character failure.”
“We gather that you especially appreciate art when packaged in a well-proportioned human form.” The noise in the room grows louder. There’s now no mistaking Feder’s meaning, or rather double-meaning. Kessler catches sight of Max shifting uncomfortably in his chair in the back of the auditorium.
“What you do not appreciate,” Feder continues, “is Germany’s overwhelming need for a Leader made in Mussolini’s mold.” Feder’s tone has turned steely. “Someone hard, ruthless, direct. A man who can purge Germany of traitors and cowards, of the Jews and Bolsheviks who now run it—and ruin it—a Leader who can restore the Fatherland to its former greatness.” There’s a sprinkling of applause in the room. “The time, I assure you, is not far distant . . .” As Feder sits back down, the applause increases. Kessler makes an instant decision to end the session. He hastily thanks the audience for having attended, and quickly leaves the stage, a chorus of boos greeting his exit.
Kessler and Max haven’t been back in the hotel room more than a few minutes when the telephone rings. The desk clerk informs Kessler that a man named Hermann Esser has arrived. Is it alright to send him up? Yes, yes, Kessler says, and would the clerk please see to it that some hors d’oeuvres and perhaps a good brandy, be sent up as well? Hanging up the receiver, Kessler turns distractedly to Max.
“Good Lord—we’ve barely had a minute to collect ourselves. What an ordeal!”
“It wasn’t pleasant.” Max is given to understatement. “I mean—what a bunch of thugs.”
“At least my wish has been granted—I’ve learned something about what passes for public opinion in Munich. Berlin will be a welcome relief.”
“The sooner the better.”
“I’m so sorry, Max. I thought this would be a pleasant excursion for you.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s that bloody audience.”
There’s a brisk knock on the door. “Not already?! That’s the fastest room service on record. Oh—perhaps it’s the interviewer,” Kessler says, adding with a smile: “Let’s hope our Mister Esser is at least attractive.”
When Kessler opens the door, his surprise is obvious. “Esser? Are you Mister Esser or . . . or . . . the bellboy?”
“Mister Esser, I assure you.” The young man smiles broadly as Kessler gestures for him to enter the room.
“I’m so sorry, do come in,” Kessler mumbles. “You see, we ordered some refreshment, and you . . . you—”
“—seem so young?” Esser completes the sentence. “Well yes—I am,” Esser smiles ingratiatingly. “I look like a schoolboy, I know, but I assure you I’m all of twenty-two.”
Kessler gestures for Esser to take a seat. “And already a freelance journalist? My, my, you must be very gifted.”
“‘Committed’ would be more to the point,” Esser replies, with a sudden flash of belligerence that he quickly covers over. “What a charming suite,” he says, barely glancing around the room. “Very grand. Must cost a pretty penny.”
Kessler ignores the overtone of hostility. “Do have a seat. What paper did you say you write for?”
“I didn’t say.” Esser smiles. There’s an awkward pause. “Actually I write for several papers. The life of a free-lancer, you know—in these difficult times, we pick up what work we can get.”
“Journalism has always seemed to me a most insecure profession.” Kessler feels a twinge of uneasiness but can’t pinpoint why. He knows that he wants to get this over with. “Well then,” he says, “how can I help you? What is it you’d like to know?”
“I write mostly for the Völkischer Beobachter,” Esser volunteers. “Occasionally for Auf gut Deutsch as well. Do you know them?”
“No, I don’t know either one.”
“You will, before long,” Esser says with an ill-concealed smirk. “At the lecture, when Professor Feder mentioned the—”
“—you were at the lecture?”
“Yes indeed.”
“How curious. I didn’t notice you. Usually in a crowd that small nearly all the faces register.”
“I was seated in the back.”
“I see.”
“As I started to say, when Professor Feder brought up the NSDAP, you said you hadn’t heard of that either.”
“The NSDAP? Sorry—could you refresh my memory?”
“The National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the NSDAP.”
Kessler brightens on hearing “Socialist.” “No, it isn’t familiar to me. But if its orientation is socialist, I assume it’s affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, no?”
“No.” Esser can’t conceal the trace of a malicious grin. “It’s not that kind of ‘socialism.’”
“Socialism does take many forms,” Kessler genially responds. “I call myself a socialist, but I’m not a traditional Marxist. What I favor is a structure of self-governing industrial cooperatives.”
“In other words, the New Economy as worked out by your friend, Walther Rathenau.”
A startled Kessler is slow to reply. “Well . . . yes . . . my views owe a great deal to Rathenau. How did you know we were friends?”
“Is it supposed to be a secret?” Esser leaves the question hanging. A considerable silence ensues, which Kessler finds somehow ominous. “Why in heaven’s name would our friendship be a secret?” he finally asks. What he wants to say, but doesn’t, is “I think I know what you’re driving at, young man. And in regard to Rathenau, it may not even be true.”
Esser picks up on Kessler’s unease, and decides to press further. “Rathenau had a destructive influence on German politics. You and he apparently shared views—and even, shall we say, had a certain commonality in regard to your personal lives.”
“Did you ever meet Rathenau?”
“I was denied that honor,” Esser replies sarcastically. “Apparently he had a bloated sense of self-importance, was full of fuzzy abstractions. You, on the other hand, present yourself as direct and modest. Yet”—he gestures around the room—“you luxuriate in the unearned privileges of your class.”
Kessler inadvertently gasps in astonishment. Esser, unflappable, smiles ingratiatingly, “What are you to make of me?” He flashes an impish, gamin-like smile.
“I have no wish to make anything of you!” Kessler sounds in equal parts startled and angry.
“Oh come now, Count Kessler, that’s not what I heard . . .” Esser’s tone is coquettish. “But to spare you further embarrassment, I suggest we—”
“—‘embarrassment’? You flatter yourself, young man!”
“I often do, it’s true. But to return to the NSDAP . . .” Esser doesn’t wait for Kessler’s response. “In the NSDAP,” Esser continues, “we define socialism, unlike you and Rathenau, to include a strong devotion to the interests of industrial capitalism, the economic backbone of the state. ‘National Socialism’ also means the subordination of economics to the service of politics—to the struggle for a new world order.”
“Which includes, I presume, extending Germany’s borders.”
“Of course. In the NSDAP we speak of a ‘Greater Germany,’ one that will reunite the Teutonic tribes of old.”
“You make the boundary lines sound far more distinct than historians do.”
In response, Esser merely smiles. There’s another considerable silence. Why in heaven’s name, Kessler asks himself, didn’t I make inquiries about this offensive young man before agreeing to be interviewed? The point now is to get rid of him quickly without being overtly rude.
“To extend Germany’s borders,” Kessler offers, “would necessitate further wars. Wars of conquest. Such a scenario is in no one’s best interest.”
“All in due time.” Esser continues to exude confidence and ease. It unnerves—and angers—Kessler.
“Few Germans,” he says, “share your bellicose views.”
Esser laughs derisively. “Not the sissies in petticoats! Our German people ridicule pacifism—as they do a League of—”
“—precisely who is ‘our’?”
“Those who understand that our first priority must be regaining control of Germany from the international cabal of finance capitalists who now control it.”
“A moment ago you were applauding capitalism,” Kessler replies.
“I defended industrial capitalism. You aren’t listening.”
The uncivil remark incenses Kessler. He wants to tell this outlandish fellow that the interview is over, but Esser continues without pause: “Finance capitalism, not industrial capitalism, is our enemy.”
“The distinction is false. Central to capitalism of every kind is the exploitation of workers.”
“Behind finance capitalism stands—”
Kessler completes Esser’s sentence “—yes I know: the international force of a Jewish world conspiracy. I’ve heard it all before. And don’t need to hear it again.” He stands up abruptly, signaling that the interview is over. Esser stands as well. Max had been sitting well off to the side, but, suddenly realizing that Esser might try to injure Kessler, rises quickly.
“Now, now,” Esser says in a placating tone. “There’s no need to be uncivil. I’m only trying to elicit your opinions.”
“You seem to have a good many of your own,” Kessler icily replies.
“Should I have kept them to myself? I thought that would be dishonest.”
“Or polite.” He thinks Esser does have a point, but is using it to prevaricate. “You haven’t, after all, probed my views very deeply.”
“May I have one final chance?” Esser disarmingly says, sounding for all the world like a sweet-natured supplicant. It throws Kessler off-guard, despite his better judgment.
“A chance for what?” he asks, trying to resist his own temptation to say yes.
“To get your opinion on another issue of great concern these days.” Kessler and Max exchange anxious glances.
“Namely?” Kessler asks.
“The troubling question of women’s role in the political world.”
Kessler’s taken aback—the question seems to come from out of the blue. All three men are still standing.
“Very well. In brief—and this interview is then over—women are fully capable of participating in all aspects of public and professional life that are currently the exclusive domain of men. There—we are finished.” He moves towards the door. Esser remains stock still.
“You sound exactly like Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld,” Esser says. “I presume you are—how shall I put it?—a co-religionist?”
“Doctor—who? Did you say Hirschfield?” Kessler knows perfectly well who Hirschfeld is, but is determined not to follow Esser down that particular garden path.
“Magnus Hirschfeld. The founder of the Institute for Sexual Science.”
“Oh yes—I’ve heard of it.”
“And what of the name Ernst Röhm? Have you heard of him as well?” The swift verbal punches are making it difficult for Kessler to follow the drift, let alone to give a considered reply.
“I believe so . . .” Kessler says, aiming for a tone of bored indifference, but falling short of the mark.
“Ernst Röhm is a prominent figure in our party. Second only to our undisputed leader, Adolf Hitler. Röhm heads the ‘Storm Division’, our paramilitary wing. They both believe—and I share the view, though I am nothing compared to them—that women belong in the home. In public life only the soldierly male virtues can rescue Germany. The virtues of loyalty, physical violence—and hatred.”
Esser suddenly moves to the door, before Kessler can speak or move. Opening it, Esser turns back into the room: “And that is the world we band of brothers are giving birth to.”
Kessler insists on the last word. “Should that birth come to pass,” he shouts at Esser’s receding back, “we will be headed into the darkest chapter in German history.”
The year 1923 opens with the French marching into the industrial Ruhr district in response to Germany falling behind on its reparations payment. The move sets off a profound crisis. When thousands of German workers walk out of the Ruhr factories, the government in Berlin announces its support for a campaign of “passive resistance,” promising to cover lost wages. To meet that pledge, it sets 2,000 presses to work producing paper currency, heightening an inflationary spiral already wildly out of control. As the price of a single egg rises towards 10 billion marks, the currency loses all value. Misery and malnutrition are widespread. Only those with access to foreign currency or gold—dentures accepted—can avoid destitution.
The NSDAP—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—in Munich announces a “Reich Party Rally” featuring its gifted orator and emerging leader, Adolf Hitler, to take place at the end of January 1923. Hitler is not among the starving. His growing legion of supporters include a number of well-placed, well-fed luminaries: Putzi Hanfstaengl, descended from wealthy German-American stock (Putzi is a Harvard graduate); Helene and Edwin Bechstein (of piano fame); Elsa and Hugo Bruckmann, publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose racist theories endeared him to the Kaiser; and Winifred and Siegfried Wagner (son of Richard, whom Hitler greatly admires). These well-placed friends do more than feed Hitler—they housebreak him, make him suitable for presentation in their high society circles. Elsa Bruckmann teaches him how to eat artichokes and lobster—and how to kiss a “lady’s” hand. The more practical-minded Helene Bechstein presents him with what becomes his steady companion, a leather dog whip.
In his speech at the Reich Party Rally, Hitler—dressed in his trademark gangsterish trench coat and, yes, carrying his dog whip—releases a torrent of abuse at the “real enemy,” the “treacherous Jewish-Marxist regime in Berlin,” for its weakness in allowing French troops to invade Germany’s Ruhr district at will. “France thinks less of Germany,” Hitler rages, “than she does of a nigger state.” Over the next few days, at a series of feverish rallies, large crowds cheer Hitler as their “savior,” echoing the longstanding conviction among right-wing nationalists—Hermann Esser, the young man who interviewed and outraged Harry Kessler, is one—that only a strong man can rescue and restore Germany’s prestige.
Simultaneously, Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s closest associate, forms a “Working Community” of right-wing paramilitary groups, a “warrior” elite that includes his own storm troopers, the SA. Röhm shows immense ingenuity in secretly building up an arsenal of small arms—including rubber truncheons, bombs, and grenades—in direct contravention of the strict armament limits set by the Treaty of Versailles. As an ex-Army officer, Röhm keeps Generals von Seeckt and Ludendorff informed of the NSDAP’s growing prominence.
The impatient, agitated Hitler starts mulling over the prospect of direct action, an armed assault on—here the focus blurs—the French? the Bavarian government? the Socialists? the SPD in Berlin?—“the enemy.” Out of a gigantic rally in late spring 1923 emerges—thanks to Ernst Röhm—the new German Combat League (the Kampfbund), with Hitler at its head. Hermann Esser is high in its ranks. Among the Kampfbund members, swastika armbands and gray ski caps are widely sported, along with flags declaring “Germany Awaken!” Hitler declares that “no member of that race which is our foe and which has led us into this most abject misery, no Jew, shall ever touch this flag.”
The title of the anonymous pamphlet Magnus Hirschfeld finds in his mail immediately catches his eye: “The Insane Asylum or the Gallows? The Truth about the Mass Murderer Haarmann of Hanover.” The case of Fritz Haarmann, the homosexual serial killer, petty crook, and police informant, has been all over the newspapers for weeks, and Hirschfeld, like almost everyone else, has been inundated with the ghastly details of how Haarmann lured stray young men to his apartment and often killed them by biting them in the neck, sucking their blood, and then dismembering their bodies. (According to one rumor that sweeps the country, Haarmann cuts the flesh from his victims’ bodies, puts it through a grinder, and sells it in expertly-wrapped packages as horsemeat). As hysteria mounts, a chilling rhyme makes the rounds:
Wait with patience, little mouse,
Fritz will soon come to your house,
With his axe so sharp and neat,
He’ll make you into red chopped meat.
Hirschfeld rapidly concludes that Haarmann is simply deranged, a nightmarish freak of nature. What more is there to say? These days, he supposes, when a mountain is made of every molehill, some tiresome pedant will conjure up an international conspiracy of one sort or another, though in Haarmann’s case it would take some doing. He puts the pamphlet to the side, thinking he’ll glance at it at some idle point in the day, should that ever arrive.
That same afternoon, Hirschfeld is deeply absorbed in reading over a draft of his short book on birth control methods, when Karl Giese comes bursting into the room, already talking at the top of his voice.
“—an outrage, dear Papa, it’s nothing less than an outrage! It has to be the work of Moll! Who but Albert Moll could employ such detestable language against you! Who but Moll could—”
“—calm down, dear Karl, do be calm, please . . . Can’t you see that I’m at work, that I’m deep into—”
“—you mean you haven’t seen it?!” Karl, near tears, collapses into an armchair. “Oh, my poor Papa . . .”
“Karl, my dear, you must collect yourself. I don’t know what it is I should have seen, but I’ll never know if you don’t—”
“—the pamphlet on Haarmann! Every staff member at the Institute has received it in the—”
“—ah, now I see. That pamphlet . . . yes . . . Where did I put it?” Hirschfeld starts rummaging around his desk and quickly puts his hands on it. He reads the title aloud: “‘The Insane Asylum, or the—”
“—yes, yes, that’s it! Do you mean to say you haven’t read it?!” Karl stands up and reaches for the pamphlet.
“Give it here. I know which page it’s on . . .” Karl quickly finds the passage and hands the pamphlet back to Hirschfeld. “Read it aloud, read it aloud . . .” Karl begins to pace the room.
“‘Magnus Hirschfeld and his allies, with the conscious backing of the Jewish press, are unleashing a contagious plague. By promoting deviant sexuality—’” Hirschfeld, aghast, stops and looks up. “Good heavens, Karl! Is the author blaming me for the crimes of Fritz Haarmann? That’s too far-fetched even for a confirmed anti-Semite!”
“Not if you’re convinced that Jews are literal vampires who suck the life blood out of the German body politic. Haarmann, you remember, bit his victims—his pure Aryans—in the throat, sucking—”
“—oh my . . . yes, yes, I see . . . I see.”
“And for years, it now comes out, Haarmann has been on the police payroll as an informant. In other words, this ‘homosexual Jewish beast’ is directly connected to the state, to the Weimar Republic that all right-wingers despise. Jews, homosexuals, the Republic—all mashed together as if one.”
“Which helps to explain why Haarmann’s trial was so short,” Hirschfeld pensively adds, “and his execution immediate—the same swift treatment that the Munich NSDAP recommends for dealing with the enemies of the German people.”
“Now, Papa.” Karl’s tone verges on condescension. “You’re doing it again. Worrying about all kinds of issues that divert you from your life’s real mission—the acceptance of homosexuals.”
“Should I forget that I’m also a Jew?”
“Of course not. How could you? But the Jewish people, compared to homosexuals, are not suppressed. They’re everywhere, even including the government. Do you think Walther Rathenau could have become Foreign Minister if he’d been homosexual?”
Hirschfeld’s smile carries a touch of secrecy. “My dear Karl . . . surely the regular rumors about Rathenau must have reached even your pretty ears?”
“What rumors? Are you telling me that the esteemed Rathenau—handsome devil, except for that pot belly—was one of us?”
“That’s not for me to say. Let us return to your earlier point about ‘all kinds of issues.’”
“You can’t do everything at once. Fight every battle, take on every cause. You need to be less cosmopolitan! To make headway in our struggle you need to concentrate on our issue. And I don’t mean feminism, good as I am with occasional eye shadow.”
Hirschfeld attempts an indulgent smile, but a frown supersedes it. “We’ve been over this before, Karl,” he says softly. “Think about this, if you will: The press portrays Fritz Haarmann as a homosexual vampire. Adolf Hitler talks to ever larger crowds about how the Jewish vampire is sucking the life blood out of the German people. He links the evil Jew to the diseased homosexual and the ‘liberated’ woman as the tripartite plague of poisons that threaten the racially pure German people. Hitler promises to cleanse Germany of all such elements at the same time.”
“Are you about to defend Haarmann?!”
“Now you’re being silly. Of course not. Most serial killers are heterosexual men. Haarmann was deranged. Homosexuality is not. All the linkages Hitler has invented must be revealed for the fictions they are. Those of us sewn onto Hitler’s tapestry of evil must hold all the threads together. If you defend only this patch or that, the entire tapestry unravels. I ask you to think further about all this, Karl.”
“I’ve heard it a thousand times,” Karl responds, his tone a mixture of boredom and petulance.
Hirschfeld sounds resigned: “Very well, then. Let me get back to my manuscript. I have only two days left to correct it.”
Karl moves towards the door, an irritable expression on his face. “You are going to print a response to the pamphlet, aren’t you?”
“No. It would only give the anonymous author a second chance to denounce me.”
“I think you’re making a mistake.”
“It won’t be for the first time,” Hirschfeld gently responds.
Hirschfeld stares at the letterhead in disbelief. “DOCTOR KARL-GÜNTHER HEIMSOTH.” What can he possibly want? Hirschfeld wonders. It’s years since I’ve seen the man, and the last run-in—when he said he regards me as an “enemy”—was hardly pleasant.
The letter is brief, pointed, and surprising. “I write to you,” it begins, “fully cognizant of the wide divergence in our views about homosexuality and about politics in general. Despite this, I hope you will meet my request for a private interview. The matter I wish to discuss is of the utmost importance and confidentiality. I will be glad to come to the Institute on any afternoon you choose.”
Glad indeed! Hirschfeld thinks. Up to now Heimsoth’s been adamant in refusing to step foot in here. What can possibly have induced an about-face? Something extraordinary must have happened, or is about to happen. I’ll see him of course. From curiosity alone.
Four days later the two men sit opposite each other in Hirschfeld’s study. Their initial greetings have been stiff, not to say glacial. But Hirschfeld, warm and welcoming by nature, can’t maintain the icy charade for long. He knows that he should wait for Heimsoth to bring up the reason for his visit, but his own amiability wins out over his unpleasant memories of the man.
“It might be well to begin, Heimsoth, with some attempt to air the past grievances which necessarily color this occasion.”
“I wouldn’t call them ‘grievances,’” Heimsoth coldly replies, “but rather differences of opinion.”
“Perhaps that’s because I was the aggrieved party, not you.” The remark sounds blunter than Hirschfeld intended and he softens it with a quick smile. “I was thinking back to your article in the Völkischer Beobachter denouncing what you call my ‘bizarre, unscientific’ views on homosexuality.”
“I’m surprised to hear that you read the Beobachter. I didn’t know,” he says with amusement, “that you’d joined the Nazi Party.”
“A colleague sent me the article. Along with a note warning me, as he put it, that ‘although Heimsoth is himself homosexual, he does not share our views or goals.’”
Heimsoth’s starchy expression remains unchanged. “None of that could have surprised you.”
“Quite so,” Hirschfeld says quietly. There’s an awkward pause.
“My views are unchanged,” Heimsoth begins. “Those of us who belong to the League for Human Rights—which has a far larger membership, I might add, than the Scientific Humanitarian Committee—do not believe, as you do, that homosexuality is a biological phenomenon.”
“The number of members an organization has is not a reliable gauge of its importance.” For the first time there’s an edge to Hirschfeld’s voice. “The Scientific Humanitarian Committee has for many years been in the forefront of the fight to remove Paragraph 175.”
“Yes it has—and with remarkably little success.” Heimsoth’s bearing remains taut, his expression wooden.
“Perhaps because,” Hirschfeld responds, “so many homosexuals refuse to fight on their own behalf.”
“I believe it would be more accurate to say that they refuse to fight in the manner and according to the ideology that you prefer. The many homosexuals who read Der Eigene or belong to the League for Human Rights stress above all the spiritual dimensions of male friendship—its superiority to what can ever pass between a man and a woman.”
Heimsoth and Hirschfeld can’t resist lecturing each other, though each knows what the other will say.
“And does the spiritual never evolve into the erotic?” Hirschfeld pointedly asks.
“The passionate bonds of male friendship represent the highest possible emotional connection, whether the men involved are homosexual or heterosexual.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Your question is pointless. Intimate friendships between adult men take many different forms. When you link sexual acts to passionate friendship, you bring friendship into disrepute. Our greatest heroes—Goethe, Schiller—spoke openly about their love for other men, embraced and kissed their friends, and did so in terms of profound endearment.”
Hirschfeld smiles distractedly. “You take me back many years . . . to the Eulenburg trials. He and von Moltke used the same words you do in describing their ‘friendships.’ And then Max Harden tracked down that fisherman Riedel and it turned out that ‘friendship’ can be irreducibly carnal.”
“Are you saying that profound male friendships must include the carnal? I find that preposterous!”
“It is—the way you put. It is you who insist that sexual acts between men somehow brings friendship into ‘disrepute’—to use your word.”
“I was attempting to rescue the possibility of deep male bonding that does not include sex. It’s precisely your inability to understand that distinction that makes you un-German.”
“Really, my dear Heimsoth, your penchant for insult is remarkable. I should perhaps warn you that it doesn’t predispose me to do you any favors. Which is why you’ve come, I presume.” Hirschfeld smiles. “Surely, as a psychiatrist, you must know that aggressive behavior doesn’t provoke a warmhearted response. Unless, of course, one is a masochist. Which I am not.”
There is a pause.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have come. I very nearly didn’t.”
“But you have.” Hirschfeld’s tone isn’t adversarial. “Having set aside this time to see you, it would be unintelligent not to use it.”
“Yes, I agree.” There’s a hint of relief in Heimsoth’s tone, though he zealously guards against letting it suggest gratitude. “Does the name Ernst Röhm mean anything to you?”
“Of course. He and Hitler head up the NSDAP—the Nazi Party, with its swastika armbands.”
“No, that’s not quite right. Hitler heads the party. Röhm is his chief of staff and closest friend. Röhm is also a close friend of mine.” Hirschfeld thinks he detects a suggestive overtone of sexual partnership, but decides not to ask for clarification.
“So you are here on behalf of Ernst Röhm?”
“In a sense.”
“In what sense? You must be more explicit. I don’t know much about Röhm—other than the role he played in the failed Munich Putsch—the ‘beer hall putsch,’ isn’t that what they’re calling it?—but what little I do know doesn’t predispose me in the man’s favor.”
“Röhm is much misunderstood. He served nobly in the war and has a disfiguring facial scar to prove it. He is a highly capable officer, immensely popular with his men.”
“If he is as capable as you say, why then did the Munich Putsch fail?”
“It’s a fair question. The answer is complicated. Hitler can perhaps be faulted for forcing the event precipitously. It turned out that the Bavarian police, as well as the Reichswehr, had an agenda significantly different from Hitler’s. They feared that if Hitler succeeded in Munich, his paramilitary force would then march on Berlin—which the police opposed. But throughout, Röhm and his associates behaved in an exemplary manner—and for his pains he served jail time. He bears not a drop of blame for the failure, as Hitler well understands.”
“The quality of their friendship is of no concern to me. I can only hope that the wretched business in Munich puts an end to their benighted careers.”
Heimsoth visibly stiffens. “On that point we will never agree.”
“How is it possible that you, a man openly homosexual, can sympathize with a party hostile to your very being?”
“On this matter you are not well informed. I myself am acquainted with a considerable number of homosexual men whose sympathies are with the Nazi Party.”
“I believe you, much as I regret the fact. We have had several homosexual Nazi Party members come to us at the Institute for counseling. Theirs is a sad plight. It’s well-established that a certain number of people will react to oppression by identifying with their oppressor.”
“They are German nationalists first, and homosexuals second. Many German nationalists—including many Nazis—glorify the beauty of the male body; the well-proportioned, powerfully-built warrior is on a pedestal.”
“You know how it is with pedestals—they cannot touch one another.” Hirschfeld is clearly amused at his own remark. Heimsoth remains stony-faced.
“Smirk if you will,” Heimsoth says angrily. “The glorification of male military bearing is erotically charged for many homosexuals who will have nothing to do with your feminized Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Your appeal is to Helene Stöcker, not Hermann Esser.”
“Who is Hermann Esser? I’ve never heard of him. Why do you bring his name up?”
“He’s an emerging young leader. Not homosexual. Though many homosexuals find him very attractive.”
“I thought we were discussing Ernst Röhm. More particularly, the party’s reaction to his homosexuality.”
Heimsoth looks alarmed. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“Röhm is hardly circumspect.”
“The Aryan view is that sexuality is for procreation. Those who do not procreate are not useful to the state.”
“Does that mean that all single people who do not produce babies are anathema? Or merely second-class citizens?” Hirschfeld is having a fine time. “Can you be a storm trooper if you’re not also a father?” Hirschfeld chuckles merrily. “Goodness, is Hitler a father? I’ve forgotten.”
“We were speaking of homosexuality.”
“What more is there to say?”
“The official party view is that homosexuality is not a biological phenomenon, as you would have it, but the product of decadence. It’s dangerous because infectious, capable of spreading even among the most masculine natures.”
“The notion of ‘infectious’ has always puzzled me. It seems to imply that heterosexuality is so fragile that it’s easily overpowered—even by adolescent experimentation. I find it similar to the way the Nazis describe women—that they must be kept sequestered from public life lest they effeminize German men. Manhood sounds as fragile as heterosexuality. It makes the German ‘warrior’ seem rather delicate, don’t you think?—a vulnerable reed.”
“I don’t find this line of inquiry productive.”
Hirschfeld looks amused. “I dare say not. These contradictions must be bothersome.”
“I see no contradictions. I see word games. And I don’t appreciate them.” Heimsoth reminds himself that he’s come to ask a favor, and tries to contain his anger. “I would prefer to turn to the reason for my visit.”
“Quite so. As interesting as these other matters are to me, I mustn’t take advantage of your good nature and pursue them too rigorously.”
There’s a pause, during which Heimsoth gets the distinct feeling that Hirschfeld is mocking him.
Hirschfeld breaks the silence. “Now then, you’ve come to me, I deduce, to discuss some matter relating to Ernst Röhm. That much is correct, is it not?”
“It is.”
“Frankly, my own political views are so contrary to Captain Röhm’s that it’s difficult to see how I—”
“—did you know that Röhm is a member of our League for Human Rights? What’s more, he’s let it be known that he favors the repeal of Paragraph 175.”
“How strange that in all these years I’ve never heard his name mentioned once in regard to the movement for repeal.”
“Ernst Röhm is a discreet man.”
“Really? I’ve heard quite the opposite—that he’s a roustabout.”
“He likes his food and drink, if that’s what you mean.”
“That, and perhaps, too, his carousing—is that the right word? I’m told he’s especially fond of the bathhouses.”
“He might occasionally have been seen in the Marien Kasino or the Eldorado . . . Yes, in fact he told me frankly that he derives a good deal of contentment from the bathhouses.”
“‘Contentment?’” Hirschfeld barely suppresses the urge to laugh.
“Captain Röhm doesn’t conceal his sexual inclinations from his friends, sometimes not even from casual contacts. But he is above all loyal to Hitler. And Hitler to him. Are you aware that Röhm is the only member of the Nazi leadership who addresses Hitler with the familiar ‘Du’?”
“No, I’m not aware. How would I be?” Hirschfeld asks, with just the trace of a smile.
“That should give you some measure of the esteem with which Röhm is held.”
“By Hitler, you mean.”
“Yes, Hitler. Of course. Who else?”
“Does that mean Hitler approves of Röhm’s, er, activities?”
“He’s tolerant of them.”
“How surprising—given official Nazi disapproval of homosexuality.”
“Tolerance is not approval. Hitler believes that a man’s private life is nobody else’s business. He scoffs at what he calls ‘the League of Virtue.’ He’s a man-of-the-world. And loyal to his friends.”
“I have it on good authority that both Himmler and Goebbels despise Röhm. And have no tolerance for homosexuality. In tolerating Röhm, isn’t Hitler being disloyal to Himmler and Goebbels?”
“You’re playing with me again, Hirschfeld. I don’t appreciate it.”
Hirschfeld acts surprised, wounded even. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m sincerely interested in these matters.”
There is another pause. Heimsoth quiets down.
“May I come—at long last—to the point of my visit today?”
“By all means.” Hirschfeld’s tone is conciliatory.
“It is well known that you give expert legal testimony in court cases.”
“Many times.”
“Captain Röhm wishes to talk with you about a legal matter in which he is involved.”
“What is its nature?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss details with you. I’ve been delegated to arrange a meeting at which no one will be present other than Captain Röhm and yourself. Are those terms agreeable?”
“I see people all day long, of various genders and all sexual persuasions. No one is ever turned away.”
“Then the answer is ‘yes’?”
“Yes.”
It is three days later. Röhm and Hirschfeld are in conversation. Röhm is dressed in full uniform, complete with several rows of medals and a black-white-red cockade on his cap. He is a fleshy man of medium height, with green eyes, dark hair, and a pronounced scar that runs from his cheek across his broken nose. His manner is hyper-masculine and direct. Hirschfeld is in mid-sentence:
“ . . . and I believe you spent some time in prison when the putsch failed. Isn’t that so?”
“I’m a military man. Prison is run along military lines, orderly and prescribed. If one wants an item not part of standard issue, one has to apply in writing for it. I refused. I do not make requests. I respond to them. I do not take orders, I give them.”
“That must have made your life in prison difficult.”
Röhm laughs. “Not at all. Most of the wardens are old soldiers who gladly bent the rules for me. My cell was always scrupulously clean. The wardens prided themselves on scrubbing it daily. During the brief time I spent in jail I never heard a disrespectful word.”
“You were fortunate. The people I know who’ve been in prison tell horrifying tales of mistreatment.”
“Perhaps they were scum.”
Hirschfeld isn’t sure he’s heard right. “What did you say?”
“The guards do not respect some prisoners. We were in a special category. The wardens knew we’d been imprisoned for political reasons—that we are patriots attempting to restore the vitality of the German nation.”
“As you define it.”
“Of course. What else? But let me be clear: I am no defender of the prison system. Most of the men have been locked up for crimes against property—the result of misery, need. Many Germans are starving. They have no work, they cannot feed their families. Their so-called ‘crimes’ are minor. The real crooks, the big crooks, are the bourgeoisie who rule Germany. They never go to jail. Not yet anyway. But we have plans for them.” Röhm’s smile is closer to a sneer.
“You seem to see yourself as an outlaw. Mind you, I’m often treated as one myself.” Hirschfeld chuckles over his own clever linkage.
“Official—bourgeois—morality is a lie. I take it as a point of pride not to be ‘morally upright.’ I’m no goody-goody, and don’t much care for those who are. They’re usually lying. What matters to me as a soldier is whether a man can be depended on—not how much he drinks or whores.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Hirschfeld says, somewhat to his own surprise. “I know nothing about soldiers, of course. What I agree with is the notion that state enforcement of middle-class morality is doomed to fail. It too often goes against individual instinct, punishing creative non-conformers, stifling dissent.”
“Well said, Doctor Hirschfeld. It is a battle against hypocrisy. The mask must be torn away.”
“I must say, Captain Röhm, you sound very much like a man of the Left.”
Röhm smiles enigmatically. “The Left and the Right do not disagree about everything. But do not mistake me: I don’t champion all outcasts. I pick and choose. While in jail I met many political prisoners. The Communists impressed me most—their loyalty and devotion to their principles. They, too, hate appeasement. They are like our German nationalists—pledged to a cause, ardent in their commitment.”
“I believe the Social Democrats are equally devoted to a cause—the cause of democracy.”
Röhm looks affronted. “The SPD is impotent. It cannot manage its own party, let alone the government. But I’m not here to offend you, Dr. Hirschfeld. After all, I’ve come to ask for your help. But I cannot pretend to agree with anything you say. Salvation for Germany can only come through a strong leader.”
“Adolf Hitler?”
“Precisely. Adolf Hitler and his fervent love for the Fatherland.”
“Or for certain segments of it. Those who believe in democracy also passionately love Germany—all of it.”
Both men seem suddenly on the verge of boiling over—and both pull back.
“Perhaps,” Hirschfeld offers, “you should tell me straightaway why you’re here. An argument over politics isn’t likely to advance your mission, whatever it may be.”
“Very well then. The story is this: As Heimsoth has made clear, and as I have never denied, my inclinations are homosexual. I’ve slept with women, many times in fact—and have had three cases of gonorrhea to prove it. But my basic nature is homosexual.”
“As is mine. There—we have found a second thing in common.”
“I would add a third: We both have a rebel’s temperament. Mine is less pious, perhaps.” He catches himself: “But let us not get sidetracked again . . .” Röhm clears his throat. “It comes to this . . . in the course of my wanderings, I met a young man in one of Berlin’s bars. I—”
“—which bar?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I try to keep an up-to-date list.”
Röhm burst out laughing. “So the busy doctor likes a bit of fun too, eh?”
“The police commissioner and I confer from time to time, so we can warn our members to stay away from the places that cater to hustlers—and blackmail. The worst, I hear, is a tobacco shop—a backroom brothel, not a bar at all.”
“You wouldn’t know the one I speak of. It’s working class, north of the Museumsinsel.”
“Of course I know it. It’s on Kleine Hamburger Strasse, owned by fat Franz. ‘Rita,’ the piano player, likes to wear drag. The place is notorious. You should stay away.”
“No doubt you’d recommend some respectable place like the Mikado, where I’m told you ‘homosexual rights’ types hang out. I hear they took the bathroom door off its hinges to prevent ‘indecent’ activity. No thanks. Boring.”
“And the young man you were telling me about . . . not boring, I presume . . .”
“A ex-soldier. My sort of man. I invited him to return with me to my hotel room. When I was in the bathroom, he stole a luggage check out of my pants pocket and ran off. Went straightaway to the baggage terminal and retrieved my suitcase. I suppose he thought I’d never go to the police and have him arrested for fear he’d divulge our sex together. But I did go to the police. No guttersnipe will prevent Ernst Röhm from seeking his rights.”
Röhm pauses, as if expecting to be patted on the back.
Hirschfeld finally speaks: “I fail to see how any of this relates to me.”
“That should be obvious. Heimsoth says you’ve given expert testimony many times in cases of blackmail.”
“Many times. And often with the result that the blackmailer receives severe punishment.”
Röhm’s eyes sparkle with relief. “Heimsoth was right! You are the man for me.”
“Perhaps. But you should know that in nearly every instance my testimony has been on behalf of a man terrified of having his homosexuality revealed, of being socially and financially ruined. That doesn’t seem the case with you. You’ve already given away the information that the blackmailer feels he holds over you. Often a homosexual victim will commit suicide rather than have the truth of his sexuality publicly revealed.” Hirschfeld smiles: “One might say that yours is the only known case of a man volunteering to commit suicide—and living to tell the tale. Thus far, anyway.”
Röhm stares at him blankly, as if not grasping the point. “The courts,” he finally says, “what is the disposition of the courts? Are they, too, in the hands of the Jews? From that swindling bunch, I don’t expect any sympathy.”
The boldness of the insult startles Hirschfeld. “You do know, Captain Röhm, do you not, that I am a Jew?”
“Of course I know. All I had to do was look at you. Not exactly an Aryan Adonis, eh? No matter. There are Jews and there are Jews. I am not obsessed by the matter.”
Hirschfeld shakes his head from side to side in disbelief.
“You dumbfound me,” he says quietly.
“I speak my mind directly, as I said. Why should the truth ‘dumbfound’ you?”
Hirschfeld inhales deeply. “I can tell you how I would advise your young blackmailer to testify. Perhaps that will be enlightening. I would have him throw himself on the mercy of the court, declare that he’d gone with you only because he hadn’t eaten in three days; or because his mother was dying and couldn’t afford a doctor; or because he couldn’t buy his beloved child a toy. Any defense along those lines would be persuasive. A merciful court would almost certainly set the poor lad free.”
Röhm’s eyes narrow. “Are you poking fun, Dr. Hirschfeld? That isn’t something I tolerate well.”
“I was picking up on the eloquent plea you made earlier. Remember? You spoke with great sympathy for all those prisoners you met who’ve been locked up for ‘crimes against property’—those who stole out of desperate need. Perhaps your young blackmailer genuinely falls within that category. Would you not be forced—as a matter of principle—to let him off the hook?”
“You are toying with me, Hirschfeld.”
“I am merely quoting you.”
“I did say that millions of Germans are going hungry, yes; and that they deserve our sympathy. But one must then ask why they go hungry, why they suffer. It isn’t because of Ernst Röhm or the Nazi Party. They live in misery because the Jewish stock exchange has artificially manipulated the money supply, throwing millions out of work. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
“A few Jews are wealthy. A few even belong to the stock exchange. But the vast majority of the Jewish people are part of the suffering masses you describe. I’m not a particularly political person, but if I had to start apportioning blame for the plight of Germany’s poor, I’d begin by singling out a capitalist economic system controlled by a small number of right-wing, Christian industrialists.”
“You’re wise to stay out of politics. I mean, given your ignorance.”
Hirschfeld is taken aback. “Perhaps it’s a match for your own.”
Röhm can’t help but smile at Hirschfeld’s bravado. He could thrash him then and there, he thinks, but feels a kind of pungent amusement at listening to the man’s freakish audacity.
“You know nothing of the working class,” Röhm says. “Here you live”—he gestures around him—“in the lap of luxury, in this villa”—he spits the word out—“while the Social Democratic government treats workers like step-children.”
“I’m not part of the government, but I know this much: Hitler’s no defender of the working class, no socialist. He vows to protect private property from what he calls ‘radical working-class scum’—and promises to disband all trade unions.”
“Race is what is central to our mission, not class.”
“Now that I do believe.”
“It’s the Jews who stabbed Germany in the back—handed us over to the Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds! That game is over—the Jews will pay for their treason! A new Germany is rising and it will make sure that—”
Hirschfeld stands up abruptly from his chair: “—I cannot, will not, listen a minute longer to your disgusting, your—your words stink of the barnyard! This interview, Captain Röhm, is over—”
Röhm jumps up from his chair, his face flushed. “Words, words!” he shouts. “It’s actions you should worry about!—actions to stop Jewish racketeers once and for all from sucking the German people dry! Then you’ll know what it’s like to be afraid. You will long for the return of Ernst Röhm!”
He turns towards the door. “I should have known better than to seek you out.”
“I told your emissary, Dr. Heimsoth, that at the Institute we have never turned away a single person seeking our help.” Hirschfeld enunciates every word: “It gives me great pleasure to break that rule today for the first time.”
“Many more rules will soon be broken.” Röhm stalks from the room.
Röhm’s well-placed friends see to it that his blackmailer is found guilty and sent to prison. “I didn’t need that damned Jew’s help after all,” he tells himself, gratified. The trial does, however, produce some unwanted publicity—as well as additional details to confirm rumors about Röhm’s proclivities. In his own deposition to the Munich police he tells them that he’s “bisexually oriented”—a legitimate-enough claim if his early history of affairs with women can be credited.
Röhm also tells the police that he’s masturbated with other men but has never had “intercourse” with any of them—a claim conceivably true, though a sexual life rigidly confined to mutual masturbation would be highly atypical. Besides, constraint isn’t one of Röhm’s defining characteristics. In making the distinctions he does to the police, Röhm is shrewdly tailoring his behavior to fall within permissible legal limits. Paragraph 175 of the German penal code makes “activities resembling sexual intercourse” between two men punishable—but not mutual masturbation.
What the law technically finds innocuous, German public opinion does not. When Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee conducts a survey in the late 1920s of political parties’ attitudes towards Paragraph 175, it concludes that “the sole party which has represented the SHC’s standpoint without any reservations . . . is the Communist Party,” the KPD. In point of fact, the small league of German anarchists also shares that view. Its leading figures, Senna Hoy and the literary Bohemian and revolutionary Erich Mühsam, argue against any legal limitations on the sexual behavior of consenting adults. Mühsam denounces the persecution of homosexuals as based on “medieval delusion”; when the Nazis come to power, they declare Mühsam an enemy of the Reich and consign his printed work to a bonfire.
Neither anarchism nor communism, however, has anywhere near the political clout in Germany that the various forms of socialism do—and, in particular, the Social Democratic Party brand. At the turn of the century the SPD’s foremost spokesmen, Eduard Bernstein and August Bebel, had been among the earliest signers of the petition to repeal Paragraph 175, Bernstein stoutly rejecting any attempt to categorize homosexuality as “unnatural” or “corrupt.”
In the succeeding three decades the SPD (with Magnus Hirschfeld now affiliated) continues to lend official support for repeal, but does so with increasing ambivalence. The onset of the Great Depression and the deepening of economic misery leads to a vigorous revival of scapegoating, typified by one SPD member’s reference to homosexuality during a Reichstag debate as a “constitutional disorder,” a degenerate deviation from the norm. In tandem, there’s a mounting emphasis within the SPD on the traditionalist assumption that heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the family are the necessary cornerstones of “civilized” life. This retreat to orthodoxy leads the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to request a statement from the SPD reiterating its support for the repeal of Paragraph 175.
The SPD replies that, at the moment, a public statement of support might have an adverse affect on the Party’s current campaign to denounce the Nazi Party as a hothouse of homosexuality: The leading SPD daily, Vorwärts, has been excoriating the Nazis as a haven for “lustful perverts and their appalling harlotry,” while the largest SPD daily in Bavaria, the Münchener Post—which earlier helped to destroy Prince Eulenburg—has been publishing a series of articles on what it calls “the 175ers” in the Nazi Party, focusing on Röhm and his SA storm troopers. With friends like the SPD, Hirschfeld muses, who needs enemies?
In pushing its campaign to link homosexuality and Nazism, the SPD is knowingly overstating the extent of homosexuality within SA ranks, as well as ignoring the abundant denunciations in the Nazi press of “this sickness.” The leading Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, defines homosexuality as an “aberration” and lists it among the “evil propensities of the Jewish soul.” And so the double campaign proceeds: the Nazis are zealously linking homosexuality to Judaism, while the Social Democratic Party, alternately, is actively coupling it with Nazism.
As early as 1925, Harry Kessler has become increasingly aware on the streets of Berlin of “swastika-carrying youths, with heavy cudgels, blonde and stupid as young bulls.” The death of President Ebert from a ruptured appendix in February of that year has thrown open the office of President to an election—thanks to a provision in the 1919 Weimar Constitution—by popular vote. Kessler predicts that the marker of impending disaster for the country would be the election of Field Marshal Hindenburg—that exemplar of militaristic conservatism—to replace Ebert. Such an event, in Kessler’s view, would inaugurate “a return to philistinism” and a farewell to the vision of a more just society.
Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister and Kessler’s old friend, shares his apprehension. At lunch one day in April 1925, he tells Kessler that Hindenburg, who’s getting on in years, isn’t at all keen to run for the office. But Stresemann fears that he’ll be persuaded (in the upshot, he is)—and if so, Stresemann feels “in despair” over the catastrophic prospect. Kessler urges him to speak out forcefully against Hindenburg’s candidacy, but Stresemann feels it would prove counterproductive.
It’s a serious miscalculation. Given Weimar’s political fragmentation, the right-wing parties are able to unite behind Hindenburg—and he wins the Presidency by a clear majority. “The sequel,” Kessler writes despairingly in his diary, “is likely to prove one of the darkest chapters in German history.” On May 12, Kessler attends Hindenburg’s swearing-in at the Reichstag. Wearing a frockcoat, Hindenburg looks for all the world like the throwback to an earlier day that he is. The Communist delegates in the hall shout out “Long live the Soviet Union!”—and march out in a body. “Farewell progress,” Kessler writes in his diary, “farewell vision of a new world which was to be humanity’s conscience money for the criminal war.”
Over the next four years—years that see the flowering of Weimar culture and the (superficial) sense that democracy is taking firm root—the army, the civil service, and the economic elite remain as reactionary as ever, and increasingly powerful. The parties on the Left seem stuck in a prewar mindset that assumes the eventual overthrow of capitalism has been mandated in heaven and they need merely await the day’s inevitable arrival. Yet the inevitable rarely arrives on schedule, and the Left is in no condition to hasten it. Following the violent upheavals of 1919–1922, the Independent Socialist Party has fallen apart; the Centre Party is deploying most of its energy on defending Catholic interests and fighting “pornography”; and the middle-class and industrial workers who constitute the backbone of the Social Democratic Party are gradually, perhaps inexorably, deserting the fold.
Harry Kessler clearly sees the warning signs: “Power lies in the hands,” he writes in his diary, “of precisely the same set as before and during the war.” The death of Paul Cassirer, the pioneering art gallery owner, early in 1926, deeply upsets him; it seems an omen, somehow, of the end of modernism, the foreboding onset of a reactionary spirit. When he visits Elisabeth Förster-Nietszche a month later, she’s “bursting with the news of her Mussolini friendship”—and isn’t pleased when Kessler tells her that he considers Mussolini “a danger to Europe.”
He continues to give and attend elegant dinner parties that often include celebrated and influential figures like Albert Einstein (“his eyes still sparkle with almost childlike radiance and twinkling mischief”), Josephine Baker (who dances a solo for the other guests “with brilliant artistic mimicry and purity of style”), Max Harden, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, George Grosz, Erwin Piscator, Jacques Maritain—and assorted other prominences from a variety of glamorous worlds. For much of 1927, Kessler travels with Max to Spain, to Italy, to Capri, to Zürich (where they celebrate his 59th birthday). They go to opera and the ballet, frequent the theater, are guests at any number of lively gatherings and dinner parties.
Yet Kessler’s heart is no longer quite in it; the joie de vivre that in the past always accompanied his socializing now has an element of strained obligation. By mid-1927, he’s reached the conclusion that “an increasing proportion of the nation regards the republic for the time being as an incontestable fact, whereas the great majority of the ‘captains of industry,’ the powerful financiers, the civil service, the Reichswehr, the bench, the large and medium-sized landowners (Junkers), and university professors and students are hostile to the republic.” If Kessler is mildly depressed over conditions, the multitudes of those less fortunate than he are closer to desperation. The sharp reduction in economic productivity in combination with the burden of reparations produces a hyperinflation so grotesque that, in the years immediately following the war, salaries have to be carried home in wheelbarrows—that is, until banknotes lose their meaning entirely. In the early 1920s, literal starvation looms as an imminent threat—90 percent of an average family’s budget goes to food—and even salaried middle-class Germans have to sell possessions (and in some cases loot stores or scavenge crops in the countryside).
In mid-1923, an international committee under the chairmanship of the American economist Charles Dawes re-negotiates the reparations schedule, and provides a large loan to Germany, allowing its central bank to issue a new currency based on the gold standard. The tide finally begins to turn. But for a significant number of middle-class creditors, the reconstruction entails ruinous losses, and support for the Social Democratic government declines in tandem. Not that industrialists and financiers are immune from economic troubles; the sharp deflation which ensues after the 1923 readjustment leads to widespread bankruptcies among those firms that had used borrowed money to over-invest in heavy machinery; Hugo Stinnes’s financial empire is among those negatively affected.
Following the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, the Nazi Party goes through a period of division and declining fortunes. In Bavaria, Ernst Röhm manages to unite the wild assortment of paramilitary organizations, but, as late as the Reichstag elections in May 1928, the party is still split into squabbling factions and polls a mere 2.5 percent of the vote—and in Berlin a meager 1.4 percent. Hitler continues to rant about Jews being a pestilence “worse than the Black Death” and, sounding another favorite theme, about the need of the German people for “living space”—for expansion to the East. Yet the Nazis are aware that they must broaden their electoral appeal if they’re to come to power, and they put new emphasis on unifying the ultra-nationalist Right and on regional organizing.
They meet with some success, yet, at the end of 1927, the party still has only 75,000 members and has managed to elect only seven deputies to the Reichstag. Shrewdly—and here the organizing skills of Hitler’s associate, Paul Joseph Goebbels, become of critical importance—the Nazis latch on to the urban economic plight of prolonged unemployment and reduced salaries among the lower middle-class, and in the countryside of peasants and small farmers the simultaneous suffering from a decline in agricultural prices and a rise in government taxation. By identifying the party with such sizeable pockets of discontent, the Nazis steadily grow in strength, particularly in rural areas like Schleswig-Holstein. By October 1928, party membership has doubled to 150,000, and, in June 1929, the party in Coburg wins control of a municipality for the first time.
The racial aspects of Nazi ideology are also strengthened and stressed. The German people—the Volk—must be protected, the Nazis angrily declare, from those who would infect the Fatherland with degenerate ideas and practices; the purity of the Aryan race must be preserved from Communist criminality and Jewish perversion—from “maggots in the decomposing body of Germany.” The message takes hold: in the Reichstag election of 1928, the Nazis receive 800,000 votes. Two years later their vote soars to 6.4 million, and 107 Nazi candidates are elected to the Reichstag—thereby becoming the country’s second-largest party.
The results, Harry Kessler writes in his diary, are “a black day for Germany, a national crisis.” He sees the Nazi insurgency as “lunacy and infamy, a delirium of the German lower-middle class—shopkeepers, farmers, small businessmen, and the like”—and he lucidly foresees that the “poison of its disease may . . . bring down ruin on Germany and Europe for decades ahead . . . The former epoch is dead and done with.”
One evening that fall Kessler and his lover Max Goertz board a train in Berlin to take them to Kessler’s house in Weimar. In the station, they find themselves in the midst of a crowd of carousing young SA recruits. The “snotty-nosed brats,” as Kessler calls them, are everywhere—on the platform, down the stairs, in the waiting rooms—drunkenly singing “patriotic” songs, abusing other passengers, clearly spoiling for a fight. Ten days later, Kessler runs into a much larger contingent of Nazis in Berlin’s Leipziger Strasse, zestfully smashing windows in the Jewish-owned department store Wertheim, shouting “Germany Awake!!” and “Death to Judah!!” This time Kessler becomes enraged: “The vomit rises,” he writes in his diary, “at so much pigheaded stupidity and spite.” As Nazi ranks swell and street brawls escalate, some of Kessler’s friends confidently predict that—as one of them puts it—“the Hitler movement has passed its peak and is already on the way down.” Even as late as 1932, his radical friend Fritz von Unruh assures Kessler that, should Hitler come to power, he will be unable to fulfill his many promises, and in short order the Communists will take over. In any case, Fritz tells him, a revolutionary state of mind prevails in Germany and the tepid Weimar Republic is doomed; Kessler at least agrees that the country “is coming apart.” Unruh helps to found the anti-Nazi Iron Front, and Kessler, attending one of its rallies in the Lustgarten, is gratified at the size of the crowd, which he estimates at no less than 100,000.
By 1932, with unemployment rampant due to the depression, membership in the Communist Party (the KPD) does rapidly grow, tripling in number from 1929, with three-quarters of the jobless new recruits deeply antagonistic not only to the Nazis but to the dithering, irresolute Social Democrats as well, whom they see as having betrayed their own party’s earlier egalitarian promise. At the same time, support for the Nazis—with Hitler claiming that “our fight against Marxism will be relentless”—grows among middle-class professionals as well as among the older generation of conservative nationalists who despise the Republic and fear a Bolshevik takeover.
Some of Kessler’s long-standing aristocratic friends have begun openly to side with Hitler. When he attends, as so often in the past, an evening at Helene and Alfred von Nostitz—friends of some 30 years—he finds the atmosphere “reeks of Nazism.” He dares to raise objections—and a cold, embarrassed silence ensues. Six weeks later, as the guest of the American Guggenheim family at Hiller’s restaurant, he’s seated next to Wanda Prittwitz, the daughter of old friends. She tells him excitedly that all her relatives are now Nazis, and isn’t it splendid that so many young people have joined the movement?—“They share such a wonderful spirit of camaraderie.” She shamefacedly confesses that she’s not yet joined the Nazi Party but instantly adds—as if to salvage her reputation—that she is of course an anti-Semite. She assumes that he is too. “No,” Kessler replies, “If I was I wouldn’t be here tonight—the guest of a Jew.” To his astonishment, she misses his stiletto thrust and goes gushingly on.
At the same dinner party, the Baroness Rebay, whose father was a general in World War I, tells Kessler that she, too, has strong Nazi leanings, though as a painter herself she scolds the party on one count: it should not have closed down the Bauhaus at Dessau. Never mind, she goes on, the wonderful thing about the Nazis is that they’re teaching ordinary people that they, too, must make sacrifices—“whereas during the war it was only ‘our sort’ who sacrificed.” Kessler’s impeccable manners crack: “Several million ordinary folk,” he tells the Baroness, “were killed in the war and several hundred thousand starved to death; none of our acquaintances died of hunger.”
In the July 1932 Reichstag election, the Nazis more than double their vote—from 6.4 million to 13.1 million—making them, with 230 seats, the country’s largest party. The centrist coalitions largely disappear, but the Social Democrats still retain 133 seats and the Communists 89. In yet another election a few months later, the Nazis lose some ground but still remain the largest party. The Left and the Right are faced off against each other more starkly than ever before. Some among the Nazi leaders, especially Goebbels, grow impatient; it is time, they argue, to employ “extralegal” methods.
Violence now becomes a daily occurrence. The Nazis conveniently lump the Social Democrats and Communists together as dangerous “Marxists” and unleash a harsh campaign of terror against them. SA and SS troopers rampage through the streets, brutally beating and often killing anyone who even seems like an opponent, destroying presses, interrupting meetings, occupying and smashing offices—including those of Fritz von Unruh’s Iron Front, which dissolves. Hitler rejects any suggestion that he signal his willingness to accept a cabinet seat; he insists on nothing less than the Chancellorship.
In late January 1933, Hindenburg capitulates and invites Hitler to become Reich Chancellor.