KESSLER IS HARD AT WORK on what will be a brilliant biography of Walther Rathenau when Max barges into his study with the news of Hitler’s appointment; Kessler is “astounded”—he hasn’t anticipated that the climactic event would happen so soon. To his annoyance, the Nazi concierge downstairs hosts an exuberant celebration, and all of Berlin seems to join in as Goebbels—brilliant organizer that he is—coordinates jubilant revels throughout the country. A torchlit parade of thousands of SS and SA troopers marches boisterously through the streets, as festive crowds shout encouragement. Three days later the Reichstag is dissolved and new elections are called for March.
The transformation long prefigured now sweeps rapidly over Germany. The torching of the Reichstag late in February 1933 by a young Dutchman who’d belonged to a Communist Party organization in his youth provides the perfect excuse for launching one of Hitler’s declared goals: the destruction of the powerful KPD, the German Communist Party. Wild press statements and phony police “discoveries” deliberately spread fear that the Bolsheviks are on the verge of carrying out a violent overthrow of the government. SA and SS legions escalate their reign of terror, rounding up, savagely beating, torturing, and murdering not only KPD officials and sympathizers but Social Democrats, trade unionists, Jews, and left-wing intellectuals as well. Opposition presses are silenced. The trade unions are dissolved. Kessler acidly comments that the struggle against “Marxism” turns out to mean “the struggle against the worker’s right to self-determination.”
In the March election Kessler—like Magnus Hirschfeld—votes for the Social Democratic Party. This time around, the Nazis win 288 seats; in combination with the Nationalists, they now constitutionally control the government. Kessler’s left-wing friend Wieland Herzfelde tells him that he’s heard from reliable sources that the Nazis are planning to fake an attempt on Hitler’s life in order to settle some old scores. Another friend tells Kessler that he’s on a list of those being rounded up and urges him to leave the country, at least until matters settle down. His manservant Friedrich resigns, on the grounds that his Nazi father insists there will be “unpleasantness” in the Kessler household soon and he doesn’t want his son harmed. Kessler tells Friedrich that he has no desire to imperil him, and wishes him well. It’s not the last he will hear of Friedrich.
Kessler realizes that the time has come to leave Berlin, at least until matters regarding his personal safety clarify. With the Nazis in undisputed control of the country, he concludes that Germany “is to become a snug stable where all obedient domestic animals will feel happy and, as necessity requires, allow themselves to be tamely led to slaughter. I cannot think of any idea which would seem to me more degrading and revolting.”
In early March 1933, Kessler leaves for Paris.
A week later, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science is visited by a posse of Nazi troopers; they’ve come, they tell the receptionist, to look through the questionnaires that they’ve learned people have filled out over the years for various purposes, including surveys and applications for counseling. The receptionist politely tells them that the material is confidential and that researchers, unless affiliated with the Institute, have to formally request access in advance. The leader of the group is carrying what appears to be a stick or a whip in his right hand and he silently begins to tap it against the glove of his other hand. Unnerved, the receptionist politely asks what the nature of their research interest might be.
“You could say,” the trooper spits out, “to learn about members of our party who might be in need of further ‘counseling.’” The others in his group laugh appreciatively. The receptionist nervously replies that “the Archivist is currently out of the country, but if you’d like to come back in, say, a month’s time, I’m sure he’ll be glad to help you.”
“Oh he’ll help us awright.” More laughter as the group noisily leaves.
Karl Giese is indeed out of the country—aware of the Institute’s vulnerability under the new government, he’s been going back and forth to Paris with as many of the Institute’s files as he can manage to cart away for safekeeping. Two days later, the Institute’s librarian arrives for work with a swastika on his lapel. He announces to the staff that he and two other administrators have sent a letter to Göring testifying to their loyalty, and advises them to do the same. No one else does.
Hirschfeld himself has long been on extended leave, traveling the world to lecture, to meet distant colleagues, and to satisfy his own expanding awareness of the fallacy of equating “sexual science” with European mores. He started his travels in the late 1920s partly out of exhaustion from his own productivity and from the ongoing internal tensions within the Institute. But he’s primarily propelled out of his familiar—overly-familiar, he recognizes—comfort zone by a growing conviction that sexual behavior cannot be understood solely by studying the bourgeois-bound West; its norms must be evaluated through comparison with those of other cultures.
Over the years Hirschfeld—like Kessler and, until his death, Rathenau—has moved further and further to the Left. An admirer of the Soviet Union and a passionate opponent of Western imperialism, Hirschfeld increasingly questions Europe’s smugly-grounded confidence that its own mores and institutions represent the summum bonum of human achievement. His absorption in the Institute for Sexual Science—revolutionary at its inception—has by the late 1920s opened out into the creation of a new organization, the World League for Sexual Reform, that better represents his own expanded horizons.
Yet during his extended wanderings of these years, begun in 1928 at age 60, Hirschfeld always, always, intends to return to Germany.
The SPD’s Bavarian daily, the Münchener Post, runs a series of articles on the mounting scandal surrounding Ernst Röhm’s indiscriminate run-ins with hustlers and payoffs to blackmailers. The Post also refers to him as “the passionate proclaimer of the Third ‘Röhman’ Reich”—hinting at his excessive ambition. Röhm threatens to sue the Post but then says he doesn’t give a damn what lies about him the sick socialists make up. As the press attacks continue, they’re paralleled by a rising tide of anger within the Nazi Party at the damage Röhm—since 1931 the SA’s chief of staff—is doing to the “cause.” The joke spreads that Hitler Youths are warning each other, “Arse to the wall, Röhm’s on roll call.”
In an effort to curtail the damage, Röhm does somewhat rein in his activity. He stops going to the baths—his favorite haunt till then—and uses a go-between to pick up young men, having sex with them in the apartments of various friends. Röhm’s chief enemies within the party, Himmler and Goebbels, are bringing increasing pressure on Hitler to rein him in; Röhm, they warn, has become a liability; the man must be gotten rid of or—at the least—demoted. Himmler detests Röhm and is jealous of his power; he thinks homosexuality is a “contagious disease,” a vice that, if allowed to spread, “will spell the end of Germany.”
Hitler also despises homosexuality, but thus far has dealt with the accusations against Röhm through a combination of denial and distant “toleration.” Early in 1931, he even issues a circular letter to high party functionaries which—though never mentioning homosexuality—declares the private lives of Nazi leaders off-limits and, in what many take as a reference to Röhm’s SA, applauds the party’s “rough and ready fighters.” That leads the SPD’s Münchener Post to attack Hitler for sidestepping Röhm’s “carryings-on”; oppositely, some leaders of the homosexual rights movement applaud Hitler for his “sound judgment.”
Röhm might have been expected to take what was essentially a public vote of confidence from Hitler with becoming modesty. Instead, he loudly boasts that “the German Revolution has been won not by philistines, bigots, and sermonizers, but by revolutionary fighters . . . It is the SA’s task not to keep watch on the attire, complexion, and chastity of others, but to haul Germany to its feet by dint of their free and revolutionary fighting spirit.”
By this point, neither affection nor tolerance is primarily guiding Hitler’s attitude towards Röhm. What continues to stay his hand for a while longer is a shrewd awareness that the SA has been undergoing a period of immense growth, that its legions remain intensely loyal to Röhm, and that Röhm, despite his public assertion of loyalty to Hitler, has never fully subsumed his paramilitary organization to the political needs of the Nazi Party. Prominent figures in the Reichswehr (the regular army), are watching the increasing strength of the SA—membership has risen from 300,000 to half a million—with growing alarm. Hitler knows that Röhm’s ultimate ambition is for the SA to replace the Reichswehr, that several of the army’s leading officers are furious at his presumption, and that the growing conflict between the two could conceivably turn the Reichswehr against the Nazi Party. As early as 1929, Hitler had established the SS “blackshirts” under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler as a counterweight to the SA, but it has remained comparatively small.
As Hitler’s earlier trust and affection for Röhm gradually converts into a decision to abandon him, one hears a ghostly echo of the earlier, parallel relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Prince Eulenburg.
We enter the critical year of 1933.
SA violence explodes on the streets. The brownshirts unleash their brutal attacks without warning against a host of perceived and real enemies—against Communists, Socialists, and, above all, against Jews. Using rubber truncheons and iron bars, the storm troopers grab their selected victims unawares, beat them badly, then cart them off to their own makeshift prisons. Entering one of them, even the SS Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels is appalled at the scenes of depraved torture, at seeing “living skeletons with festering wounds” lying motionless on rotting straw. Even General Erich von Ludendorff—himself a right-wing specialist in violence—reports to Hindenburg that the SA’s “unbelievable” attacks, still “mounting up in horrifying fashion,” mark “the blackest time in German history.” Complaints against Röhm and the SA pour in, but Hitler still bides his time. The torture of Jews and Communists leaves him unmoved.
Then Röhm makes a major misstep: He lets loose with a rip-roaring broadside that Hitler cannot ignore. Calling for “a second revolution,” Röhm declares in a Nazi publication that the SA “will not allow the German Revolution to fall asleep or be betrayed halfway there by the non-fighters . . . Whether they like it or not, we will carry on our struggle. If they finally grasp what it is about, with them! If they are not willing, without them! And if it has to be: against them!”
In advocating a “second revolution” Röhm is sounding a theme familiar from Trotsky’s advocacy of a “permanent revolution”—and risks suffering Trotsky’s fate. Röhm is vague about the specifics of his “second revolution” but he’s known to sympathize with the view that the estates of the old aristocracy should be confiscated and worker control of certain major industries extended—notions that put him directly at odds with most of Hitler’s supporters among the German elite. Hitler is finally on full alert. He announces that the Nazi revolution has never been designed as a permanent revolution; it must be channeled into “the secure bed of evolution.” Göring, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders take to the hustings to reinforce Hitler’s message.
Röhm chooses not to hear it. As the leader of an organization with nearly half a million members ready and eager to do his bidding, he demands a more central decision-making role in Nazi councils; should he be denied, he hints at the possibility of the SA defecting—and not to establish another neutral Switzerland. Hitler comes up with what he views as a conciliatory gesture: henceforth Röhm will sit in the cabinet as Reich Minister without Portfolio. Röhm accepts the post, telling himself that it will lead in short order to his becoming head of the Defense Ministry—a clear case of pipe-dreaming, given the Reichswehr’s unyielding opposition to his ambition. It doesn’t help that Röhm’s gregarious, boozy personal style is distinctly at odds with the Prussian emphasis on proper decorum—just as his belief in promoting officers on the basis of ability, not birth or connections, stands in direct opposition to the Reichswehr’s historic insistence on aristocratic bloodlines.
The ball is now back in Hitler’s court. Remarkably, he again hesitates. He knows that Röhm remains a brilliant organizer and manager of men, as well as a kind of genius in securing and hiding extensive weaponry in violation of the Versailles Treaty; Hitler continues to feel—though uncertainly—that he still needs Röhm on his side. He tells himself that the animosity between the SA leader and the Reichswehr will gradually dissolve. What Röhm tells himself is quite different: that the unswerving loyalty of his SA legions might swerve if rank-and-file brownshirts don’t soon see some of the financial rewards long promised but still withheld. He’s aware that his own luxurious Munich villa, replete with paintings and antique furniture—Röhm isn’t the one-dimensional loud-mouth vulgarian his enemies claim, or not solely that at any rate—has created grumbling among some SA troops, though his men believe that Röhm’s talk of a “second revolution” will finally put them on top of the heap.
General Blomberg, head of the Reichswehr, angrily informs Hitler about Röhm’s latest provocation—his reckless notification that henceforth the SA, not the army, will control decisions relating to national defense. Blomberg may have made up the story to force Hitler to take decisive action; whether he did or not, it works. Hitler has an agreement drawn up between Blomberg and Röhm, putting the Reichswehr firmly in charge of defense and assigning border protection and military training to the SA. Both Röhm and Blomberg sign the agreement; champagne flows. But the geniality is fake. Röhm is later heard to remark, “what the ridiculous corporal”—i.e., Hitler—“declares doesn’t apply to us. Hitler has no loyalty and has at least to be sent on leave. If not with, then we’ll manage the thing without Hitler.”
Röhm’s remarks are passed on to Hitler. The die is finally cast. On June 21, 1934, Reich President Hindenburg, nearing the end of his life, grants Hitler an audience. Hindenburg makes it clear that he stands behind the Reichswehr and tells Hitler “to bring the revolutionary trouble-makers”—the SA—to heel. Hitler, for his own reasons, decides to interpret that as a license to kill.
Within days, he announces that a meeting of all SA leaders will take place on June 30 at Bad Wiessee. That morning at 6:30 a.m. Hitler and his entourage—which includes 25 of Himmler’s SS men—arrive at the Hotel Hanselbauer. Röhm and his SA lieutenants are still asleep. Hitler bursts into Röhm’s room, shouting that he is a traitor and is under arrest. Röhm attempts to protest, but Hitler peremptorily orders him to get dressed, then leaves Röhm under the guard of two SS men. They accompany Röhm down to a foyer, where he sits silently by the fireplace.
Hitler drinks coffee while his cohorts, including Goebbels, rouse other SA leaders in their rooms; Edmund Heines (the notoriously violent head of the SA in Silesia) and his chauffeur-lover are found lying naked in bed—the mere sight, Goebbels later reports, made him want to vomit. The prisoners are locked up in the hotel’s cellar. Hitler tells his entourage—falsely—that Röhm has planned a putsch; he calls the plot “the worst treachery in world history.” His assembled loyalists express their horror at the revelation and demand that Hitler have all the prisoners shot.
Shown a list of those being held, Hitler marks an X next to six names. Röhm’s is not among them. The six are shot in the hotel courtyard, loaded onto a lorry, and cremated the same day. By pre-arrangement, Goebbels telephones Göring and whispers “Kolibri” (“Hummingbird”), the agreed-upon signal to proceed to the next stage of the “cleansing process”—the revenge killings of more than 100 additional people in repayment for Hitler’s old grudges. The victims include Dr. Karl-Günther Heimsoth, who’d played intermediary for Röhm with Hirschfeld; Kurt von Schleicher, the previous Chancellor of the Weimar Republic; Gregor Strasser, a close associate of Hitler’s during the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, whose pro-trade union sympathies have put him out of favor; and August Schneidhuber, member of the Reichstag and head of the police in Munich. Gustav von Kahr, the Prime Minister of Bavaria in the early 1920s who repudiated the Beer Hall Putsch, is hacked to death near the new Dachau concentration camp.
When the massacre—later named “The Night of the Long Knives”—is over, Ernst Röhm is still alive. In a moment of weakness Hitler mumbles something about “sparing him because of his services.” But under pressure from Göring and Himmler, Hitler “comes to his senses” and agrees that Röhm must be liquidated. Hitler decides that Röhm will be allowed to kill himself—a residual gesture for his many years of loyalty. Röhm, however, refuses to oblige. Two SS men leave a pistol in his cell at Stadelheim Prison and tell him he has 10 minutes to act. They wait outside the cell. No shot is heard. Re-entering the cell they see the pistol is still on the table where they left it. Röhm stands bare-chested in the center of his room, and starts to say something. The SS men draw their guns, take careful aim, and shoot. One bullet strikes Röhm in the chest, another in the neck. He’s pronounced dead.
Röhm’s ashes are sent to his devoted mother. Hitler offers her a pension, but she angrily refuses what she calls “blood-money.” Her son, she insists, was not a traitor, and not a homosexual.
Adorning himself with the mantle of morality, Hitler issues a new directive:
“ . . . I should like every mother to be able to allow her son to join the SA, Nazi Party, and Hitler Youth without fear that he may become morally corrupted in their ranks. I therefore require all SA commanders to take the utmost pains to ensure that offenses under Paragraph 175 are met by immediate expulsion of the culprit from the SA and the Party. I want to see men as SA commanders, not ludicrous monkeys.”
Harry Kessler has no illusions about what the execution of Röhm and the clear ascendancy of Hitler means for Germany, and for himself personally. Even this late in the political game, many are continuing to predict that “the little corporal” has scant chance of retaining the Chancellorship for long. Kessler isn’t among them.
He’s barely gotten settled in Paris when Max Goertz, using a diplomatic courier to avoid prying eyes, writes to warn him that “something is afoot” that spells danger to his person should he reappear in Berlin. (Max is now married, but he and his wife Uschi remain close to Kessler).
An old friend in the Foreign Office confirms Max’s warning: it is absolutely necessary, the friend writes, that Kessler prolong his stay in Paris; should he return to Germany, the government might well imprison him under the pretext of “protecting” him from “possible violence from irresponsible young men.”
The German émigré community in Paris is growing, and includes a number of Kessler’s old acquaintances, among them the banker Hugo Simon, his pacifist friends Ludwig Quidde and Annette Kolb, the journalist George Bernard, and the philosopher Hermann Keyserling. An embittered Bernard tells Kessler that he no longer regards himself as a German and never wants to return. Quidde confides his belief that only an army putsch can free Germany from “the brownshirt plague”—a curious suggestion, he acknowledges, coming from an old pacifist. The verbose, energetic Keyserling is among the more pessimistic: the regime, he tells Kessler, “has come to stay”—in his estimate, a full 70 percent of the German people “is delighted with what is happening.”
Rudolf Hilferding, the brilliant SPD finance minister who will himself die at the hands of the Nazis, describes to Kessler the fate of their mutual friend, Wilhelm Sollmann, an SPD Reichstag deputy and a leading figure in the party in Cologne: attacked and beaten up in his own home by the SS, Sollmann was then taken to local Nazi headquarters and tortured for two hours before being hospitalized. “A clear case of sadism” is Kessler’s reaction—“the pathology of power.” Where once the “sick soul of the sexual murderer” was confined to an occasional Jack the Ripper or a Fritz Haarmann, it is now, in Kessler’s opinion, “suddenly active among hundreds of thousands.”
When he hears reports of the mounting number of round-ups and murders of Jews, Kessler feels sickened at (as he writes in his diary) this “criminal piece of lunacy.” Not knowing what else to do, he carries on his daily round, revises his book on Rathenau, socializes with both his French and German émigré friends—and often feels as if he’s sleepwalking, “going through an evil dream from which I shall suddenly awaken . . . All the time I am aware of a muffled pain throbbing like a double-bass.”
Then comes news from Max that Kessler’s manservant Friedrich—who, at his father’s insistence, had “regrettably” resigned—has been stealing him blind in Weimar; for an encore, Friedrich has told the Nazis where to find Kessler’s safe and filled them with exaggerated tales of his employer’s “traitorous” activities. Max also reports that the grounds of the house in Weimar remain indescribably lovely, the roses in magnificent flower, the magnolias “weighed down with blooms.” To Kessler, it sounds like a combination nightmare and fairy-tale, a painful reminder of the garden of Eden from which he’s been forcefully evicted.
His anxiety is compounded—for the first time in his life—by financial problems. They’d begun much earlier, as a result of his large outlay of money in the 1920s when he started—in line with his longstanding fascination with fine printing—the opulent Cranach Press. Kessler had spared no expense, hiring the finest artisans and using the costliest materials. His sister Wilma—whom he’s seen infrequently through the years—has helped to support the Cranach Press, and it publishes two magnificent books, Hamlet (Gordon Craig’s heralded version) and Virgil’s Ecologues. The onset of the Great Depression, however, has destroyed any hope that the enterprise can continue, let alone earn back Kessler’s investment. Wilma’s resources, once plentiful, notably shrink, and the Press has to close its doors. Kessler continues to hope, forlornly, that he can someday restart it.
The Cranach closing proves the tip of the iceberg. The more the Nazis solidify their power and the longer Kessler is forced to live abroad, the more his assets dwindle. He has always spent extravagantly, confident—like most people born into wealth—that the coffers will magically refill. As early as the mid-1920s, faced with a temporary financial crunch, Kessler sold off Seurat’s Les Poseuses for a tiny fraction of what it would later bring.
Using his substantial remaining collection as collateral, Kessler starts to take out more and more loans, especially from his sister, but also from the art dealer Eduard von der Heydt. Kessler tries desperately to hold on to the rest of his fabled collection; it has never been primarily a status symbol for him but simply a source of pleasure. Yet the day inexorably arrives when von der Heydt threatens a lawsuit unless Kessler makes an immediate payment on his longstanding debt. There’s nothing to do but sell off a van Gogh—for $25,000—which does cut his indebtedness to von der Heydt in half, giving Kessler some temporary breathing room. He accepts a publisher’s offer of an advance for his memoirs, and begins work on them, without any real confidence that potential sales will bring in large enough royalties to pay off his creditors.
Perhaps, he thinks, he should sell the house in Weimar, along with its elegant furnishings—or what remains, after Friedrich’s predations. Or perhaps, he thinks, the solution to his financial troubles might be a lecture tour—to the United States possibly. He’s heard that the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—whom he’s never met—has been making his way around the world profitably lecturing on topics like “The Sexual Needs of Our Time.” (Why, Kessler wonders, has sex become a subject for academic study rather than simply a pleasurable activity? Discussing sex has always struck him as absurd).
Should he attempt a tour in the States? He’s done a good bit of lecturing in his day, and has been to the United States on four separate occasions. He gives the prospect real consideration, sifting through his mostly unpleasant memories of the place and wondering if he could bear another prolonged stay there. He recalls that when he docked in New York on his first trip, when only 23, he’d found the city full of “nervous haste and unrest. People don’t walk, they run, most while reading a newspaper.” He did admire the bold way American women freely led conversation, but found the American male appalling: “The older ones are often vulgar, the younger for the most part boring, loud, and suffering from ulcers.”
On later trips, after his political consciousness had been awakened, he’d been horrified at the bitter poverty that surrounded the gilded upper crust: “The poor hungry creatures who you see are really suffering, beg quite softly so that your heart breaks.” He also found the endemic nativism and racism deplorable, and thought the country’s promise, such as it was, lay with its outsiders, its non-European elements—in particular, with the Indians in New Mexico and their “aesthetic relation to the world,” and also with the rich culture of American blacks. No, Kessler finally decides, a return to the States is out of the question; “The more I mull over the idea, the less it appeals to me.”
But what to do, where to go? Paris is expensive, and his resources are dwindling. A return to Germany is out of the question. With each dispatch from Berlin the prospects worsen. Rearmament has quickened, civil liberties are suspended, the Reichstag dissolved, violence endemic—a reign of terror has been unleashed against all “enemies of the state,” Jews in particular.
Kessler seizes on someone’s suggestion that he try Palma, on the Spanish island of Mallorca; it’s described as all at once inexpensive and cosmopolitan. He succeeds in finding a small house for rent—pleasantly furnished and situated on a hill overlooking the sea—and he decides to take it. He invites Max and his wife Uschi to come with him. Both feel deeply loyal to Kessler—also, he’s been encouraging about Max’s prospects as a writer—and the young couple agrees to join him. On arriving, they soon discover that many other Germans have made the same move; Kessler is wary, though, of fraternizing with them until he can learn more about their politics. Max and Uschi begin to put the house in order. Kessler settles in to write his memoirs.
As part of his own world tour, Magnus Hirschfeld spends many months in the United States and, unlike Kessler, finds quite a bit to admire. He sees the country, of course, under different auspices and with different eyes. His sponsor, Harry Benjamin—a longtime associate of the Institute who will become famous in the 1950s as a pioneering advocate of transgender people—sees to it that Hirschfeld gives a lecture at the American Society of Medical History in New York and that a dinner is held in his honor. Hirschfeld has always had a flair for publicity and he’s pleased at the way his talk is introduced: “Sexology as a rational science belongs almost wholly to the twentieth century, and in this field there is no name more honorably conspicuous than that of Magnus Hirschfeld.”
The introduction and the speech are both reprinted in the New York press. Hirschfeld’s tour is off to a flying start.
He travels widely and lectures often. In his early 60s, and suffering from diabetes, his energy seems somehow unimpaired: in three and a half months he lectures 60 times and does some 40 interviews. He’s a more natural orator than Kessler, more straightforward and passionate, though also less nuanced. It helps his popularity that he lectures on topics like “The Natural Laws of Love”—whereas poor Kessler had stuck to the non-gonadal subjects of “Austro-Serbian Relations in 1914” and “Towards a Franco-German Coal and Iron Trust.” Besides, Hirschfeld shows slides—particularly to illustrate his talks on “Sexual Intermediaries.”
Hirschfeld reciprocates his audiences’ enthusiasm. He comes away from his tour convinced that the United States is now the world’s leading power; Kessler thinks that might well happen in the near future, but rather hopes not. What the two men centrally share—and what sets them light years apart from the vast majority of their contemporaries—is their emphasis on the positive contribution that outsiders, both domestic renegades and foreign immigrants, have had and are still having on America’s innovative spirit.
Hirschfeld travels alone. He and Karl Giese remain deeply bonded emotionally but are no longer sexual partners. Both men feel it’s less important for Karl to accompany Hirschfeld abroad than it is for him—a non-Jew who can travel back and forth to Germany with relative ease—to devote his time to transporting to Paris as many of the Institute’s treasures as possible in case the morally hidebound brownshirts should suddenly descend.
When Hirschfeld reaches China midway on his world tour, a 23-year-old named Tao Li (Li Shiu Tong) attends his first lecture and asks Hirschfeld if he may accompany him as interpreter and guide for the rest of his trip. A graduate in philosophy and medicine from Hong Kong University, Tao (as he is called by everyone) comes from a large, ennobled family. The two men quickly become attached, at least emotionally, perhaps sexually. Tao’s father gives his warm consent; he expressly approves the relationship between Hirschfeld and his son, though may not be aware of all its dimensions.
Hirschfeld’s insatiable curiosity hasn’t diminished with age, and Tao helps him explore some uncommon byways in the cultures of Asia, including a visit to the miniature golf links in Tientsin to watch women dressed in men’s clothes court each other; a trip to the matriarchal highlands of Java, where husbands take their wives’ names and live outside the home—except when summoned for sexual intercourse; and several nights spent as the guests of various wealthy Jewish families in Baghdad—including one at the spectacular Marble Hall mansion of the well-known magnate Elly Kadoorie. Throughout, Hirschfeld remains keenly aware—and is outspoken against—Western imperialism and its devastating impact on local culture.
Everywhere he and Tao go, Hirschfeld’s reputation precedes him. In Calcutta he’s invited to meet the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, whom Hirschfeld describes as “a painting in white and silver.” Also in India he renews acquaintance with Nehru, whom he’d met briefly years before in Germany, and again finds him brilliant and charming—departing from the Nehru family at the train station, Hirschfeld waves the flag of Indian Independence. In Egypt he meets with Nahas Pasha, a former president who currently leads the opposition to English occupation. Hirschfeld’s pleasure on these occasions is diluted by the oppression of women that he sees everywhere, and, when in Egypt, he goes out of his way to greet representatives of the country’s Women’s Movement.
His travels further convince Hirschfeld of his long-held view that “no ‘pure’ race exists on this earth. The belief in a pure racial type,” he writes, “leads to the arrogant idea of a master race—to Nazism.” Visiting the Jewish settlement of Beth Alpha in the Emek Valley, Hirschfeld is impressed with the experiment in collective living, and is appreciative of those who long for a Jewish homeland. Still, Zionist talk of creating a permanent state in Palestine seems to him misguided: the Arabs, he predicts, will never agree to it and, without the goodwill of their neighbors, Palestine will settle into protracted warfare. One young member of Beth Alpha argues the issue with him: “This land is ours, and no worldly power will ever take it away from us.” “Establishing a Jewish state,” Hirschfeld replies, “is not our historic mission. We are meant,” he says—as if channeling Walther Rathenau’s spirit—“to live in many different countries, and through that diaspora invigorate many cultures—even as we intermarry with local people and adapt to many of their customs.” Hirschfeld is describing and defending what many German Jews long believed was their historic role in their own country, a belief now rapidly unraveling.
Three weeks after arriving in Mallorca, Harry Kessler is sitting in front of the fireplace reading a newspaper when he’s suddenly aware of feeling unwell. Minutes later blood starts to ooze from his mouth. He calls out feebly to Max and Uschi, who are on the terrace planting geraniums. Rushing to Kessler’s side, Max phones the local doctor while Uschi tries to comfort Kessler and clean the blood off his face. But it continues to stream forth, and he loses consciousness. Minutes later, the doctor arrives and gives Kessler an injection that revives him and stops the flow of blood. He tells Kessler that it’s from the right lobe of his lungs, but offers no specific diagnosis. He’s lost more than a liter of blood; his clothes are soaked, the floor and nearby furniture bespattered. The fastidious Kessler deplores the “disgusting” sight. The doctor, somewhat gratuitously, advises “rest.”
And for several months rest is nearly all that Kessler can manage. Rest, and omnipresent worry about the increasingly perilous state of his finances. He’s gotten an advance on his memoirs, and small additional sums have come in for translations he undertakes into French and English. But the news from Weimar is bleak. In his haste to depart Germany Kessler forgot to pay his local taxes, along with other bills that were outstanding. Since he’s now widely known in conservative circles by the disreputable moniker “The Red Count,” the authorities feel entitled to let his creditors cart away whatever items from his home they deem “equivalent” to what he owes them. In July 1935 word reaches Kessler that the remainder of his furnishings—his sister Wilma has saved some items—are being auctioned off. He’s heartbroken at the loss of his home, yet faces the fact that his failing health, in combination with Hitler’s now-solidified power, means that his chances of ever returning to Germany are slight.
The Nazis are entrenched and powerful, not—as so many had predicted—a transient phenomenon. Hitler is now more and more sounding the theme of Lebensraum—room to live. “Pure-blooded” Germans, it seems—this has long been a central feature of the Far Right’s doctrine of Pan Germanium—are wretchedly cramped for space. They cannot breathe. The superior Aryan race is being smothered by aggressive Jews in cahoots with Bolshevists. Hitler has come up with a double-barreled solution: destruction of the Jews within Germany’s “overpopulated” internal borders, in tandem with an expansionist war against “Bolshevism” in Russia and elsewhere. This will take time, but a good start has been made: the completion of the first concentration camp at Dachau.
At the end of his marathon world tour, Magnus Hirschfeld, like Kessler, hungers for home. After nearly two years away, his boat finally arrives in Athens and Karl Giese is waiting dockside. He and Hirschfeld have an emotional reunion, and Karl greets Tao cordially, having learned all about him from Hirschfeld’s letters.
Karl brings chilling news. The Institute hasn’t fared well in Hirschfeld’s absence. After their first appearance, the Nazis have returned frequently; all Jewish and non-Aryan personnel have been fired, and some arrested. Kurt Hiller, the courageous lawyer and poet who’s headed the Institute during Hirschfeld’s absence, has been carted off to the Oranienburg concentration camp and repeatedly tortured. Three staff members with Nazi affiliations had briefly been put in charge to oversee what little activity remained, but before long the Nazis had descended in force, ransacked the premises, taken away the card index listing all members of the World League for Sexual Reform, burnt most of the Institute’s books in an auto-da-fé held in the courtyard—tossing in for good measure a bronze bust of Hirschfeld that had been presented to him on his 60th birthday—and locked the Institute’s doors.
Karl also tries to make it clear to Hirschfeld that, as a Jew and a homosexual, he cannot hope to return to Germany within the foreseeable future. Hirschfeld isn’t immediately convinced; having survived denun-ciation and physical attack in the past, he wonders if his luck might not hold out a bit longer—long enough, say, to get the Institute back on its feet.
Karl tries to let him down gently: “Please, Papa, you must accept the fact that you’ve been out of touch with what is going on in Germany. You can hardly imagine how bad things are.”
“I do know, and not just from what you’ve been telling me. I’ve kept up with the newspapers here and there. Besides, we’ve long understood what the Nazis would be capable of should they come to power.”
“They’re in power. And it’s much worse than we anticipated.”
“We came so close in 1929,” Hirschfeld says quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“When the parliamentary committee finally brought in a bill to strike down Paragraph 175.”
“Oh—that!” Karl has trouble concealing his impatience. “For heaven’s sake, Papa, that bill failed—and under the Nazis there’s certainly no hope of resurrecting it!”
“I know,” Hirschfeld says sadly. “How clever of the Nazis to have conjoined anti-Semitism and anti-homosexuality.”
“Just today, Papa, just today . . . Here, here on the front page!” Karl draws a newspaper out of his pocket and slaps his hand against it angrily. “Wilhelm Frick speaking in the Reichstag.” He reads from the newspaper: “‘Men practicing unnatural lechery between men must be persecuted with utmost severity. Such vices will lead to the disintegration of the German people. Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.’”
“Terrible . . . terrible,” Hirschfeld mutters.
“There’s no hope for us in Germany, not any longer. They’re rounding up so-called ‘sexual vagrants’ and putting us in camps. Gruesome stories have been leaking out. It’s mostly Jews in the camps. And Communists. Homosexuals are a minority, but all kinds of homosexuals are being mixed together—exceptional people along with hustlers and blackmailers.”
“Who are also exceptional people,” Hirschfeld says in rebuke. “Exceptionally unlucky. I’m surprised at you, Karl. We do not look down on anyone. Social outcasts are us. You know that.”
“I’m sorry, Papa . . . that came out wrong . . . but you do see, I hope, that there is no chance whatsoever of you returning to Germany. Not for a long time.”
“ . . . It breaks my heart.”
After considering their options, the trio decide to go to Switzerland. Within a short time of their arrival, they discover that many pro-Nazis, especially in the German cantons, form a kind of fifth column, constituting a threat to Hirschfeld’s safety. They quickly leave Switzerland and seek refuge in Paris.
Harry Kessler is already there, having left Mallorca. His ongoing loss of weight has left him gaunt and fragile, yet still determined to make progress on his memoirs. Max and Uschi are deeply concerned about the state of his health and finally persuade him to consult a specialist in Paris. Old friends express shock at his appearance. Gordon Craig runs into him at the Café de la Paix and is dismayed to find Kessler—“the only man who never failed me”—“so altered as to be almost unrecognizable, his life has been disintegrating around him.” The composer Nicolas Nabokov similarly describes Kessler as a ghost of his former self, a man despondent over the loss of his home, gloomily predicting that Hitler’s rule “will be long” and that he would not live to see the end of it.
Kessler manages to make the trip outside of Paris to Marly in order to see Maillol again, and he’s impressed when the sculptor shows him the large statue he’s at work on, commissioned for the upcoming World Exhibition. But his pleasure at again seeing an old friend gives way to melancholy: Maillol’s “house, the garden, and the studio,” Kessler writes, “put me in a pretty sadly reminiscent frame of mind.” Returning to Paris, he visits another old friend, André Gide, just returned from the Soviet Union and “aghast” at Stalin’s “show trials.” “Freedom of intellect,” Gide tells Kessler, is “undergoing an even more horrible suppression in Russia than in Germany.” To Kessler, it’s the devil and the deep blue sea. All that he knows for certain is that his hopes for social democracy in Germany and for the empowerment of the working class in Russia have alike proven illusory. The signposts of life as he knew it, and dreamed it, are sundered.
Hirschfeld, with the help of the archival material Karl earlier managed to spirit across the border, attempts to set up a version of the Institute in Paris. But the enterprise is lifeless from the beginning. The French seem disinterested in combining sex and science, and fail to share the German passion for categorizing pleasure. By this time Karl has decided to pursue academic credentials in medicine; initially he thinks of attending university in London, but ultimately settles on Vienna. Hirschfeld is sad to see him go, yet understanding; he helps pay for Karl’s tuition. Tao remains at Hirschfeld’s side and is a great comfort to him.
Hirschfeld soon decides formally to dissolve the moribund French Institute and to move to the warmer climate of Nice for his health. In March 1935, accompanied by Tao, he rents an apartment and begins to make what seems a good adjustment to his new surroundings. It helps that visitors keep arriving to seek counsel and pay respects, and that he’s acquainted with a number of other Germans who have settled in Nice—two in his own apartment building. Hirschfeld again starts thinking about restarting the Institute. As spring arrives on the Riviera, he’s overcome with the beauty of his surroundings and decides that he can make a good new life in Nice.
On May 14, 1935—the day of his 65th birthday—Hirschfeld celebrates modestly with a few friends at a café. Leaving them, he turns the corner leading to his apartment house—and suddenly falls to the sidewalk with a fatal stroke. He never regains consciousness, and dies that same day. Karl Giese returns from Vienna for the funeral, and in his oration aptly describes Hirschfeld as “a gentle fanatic.” Tao returns to China. Three years later, when Nazi troops occupy Austria, Giese commits suicide.
For Harry Kessler, life has come down to discomfort and defeat. Walther Rathenau’s hopes for the fundamental reshaping of the economic order along egalitarian lines no longer captures much attention. Political reality is now focused on the military uprising in Spain in July 1936, led by General Franco and his fascist minions. It means, among much else, that Kessler cannot return to Mallorca, as he’d planned. He gets word from friends on the island that the Spanish fascists are conducting roundups, even executions. He’s left behind on the island all the source material he needs for his memoirs, and it is now beyond reach. What to do? Where to go?
He asks his sister Wilma—not easy for a proud man—if he can come to her home at Fournel in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France. He would be no bother, he assures her; he’d require only a few warm vests, a thick sweater, snow boots, and a woolen scarf. Wilma suggests that instead she arrange for him to live in a boarding house she owns in the town of Pontanevaux, near Lyon. Having no other option, he accepts her offer and moves alone into the boarding house. He’s soon referring to it as “a spiritual desert.” By 1937 Wilma’s own financial problems become critical and she is forced to sell the boarding house.
Kessler returns to Paris, moving from one inexpensive hotel to another. Not only are his funds low but he again hemorrhages from the nose, nearly choking on his own blood. His heart has also begun to give out: “I cannot go up stairs,” he writes Wilma, “cannot walk more than a few steps, cannot hold any long conversations with anybody.” He refuses to give in to invalidism, continues to fight against its claims. He visits Misia Sert, whose salon he once regularly attended; takes tea with his old pacifist friend Annette Kolb; has lunch with Gordon Craig, recently returned from Moscow and full of the dispiriting news that spies “dogged his every step”; visits with the young lawyer and post-Nazi Foreign Minister of Germany, Heinrich von Brentano, widely rumored to be homosexual, whose comfortable study gives Kessler the strange, sad feeling of finding himself “once more in a proper, well-furnished” room.
Early in March 1937, Kessler awakens with a fever. Three days later he’s taken to a nursing home with borderline pneumonia and an intestinal hemorrhage. After repeated transfusions, he’s operated on—a gruesome ordeal, since he cannot be properly anaesthetized due to his heart condition. Yet he survives, and two and half months later is able, shakily, to leave the nursing home. He soldiers on for a few more months. At one point he has to go to the town of Marvejols for a special X-ray; the little village, “old-fashioned and picturesque,” reminds him of his beloved Weimar. The resemblance is afflicting; he aches with the memory. Two months later, he’s dead of a heart attack.
Legacies? We mostly ignore and deny them, certain that the ground we traverse is unique, that there are no antecedents—none worth recalling, at any rate.
Perhaps a catchphrase or two will be allowed to substitute for a didactic moral, each representing the man at high ground rather than during the inevitable fallings-off of daily life.
For Eulenburg, a prime example of how personal loyalty can resemble an art form, yet an example, too, of how geniality and deference may assure arrival but are insufficient to sustain it—especially when social mores enforce a double life that allows for secret pleasures, but ultimately extracts its punishment.
For Rathenau, the insistence that being born into privilege should carry with it the obligation to work for the abolition of privilege; that economic ease and comfort are a trust, not an entitlement. And also, how standing constant guard against the risk of emotional invasion, never lowering the guarded gate, can dry up all the water in the moat.
For Kessler, the unself-conscious refusal of categories: a modernist in art co-habiting with a traditionalist in manners—and a renegade in sexual behavior; a man of humane values who can nonetheless give way, if briefly, to combative “patriotism.” An aesthete, moreover, insistent on engaging in a political life aimed at winning some victories for humanity. And a tale, too, of how a trail of privilege can unwind under the blows of circumstance.
For Hirschfeld, the belief that tabooed subjects are those most in need of airing; that “normalcy” is a socially agreed-upon fiction of transient currency; that outsiders, homosexuals, say, or Jews, are often the catalysts for cultural renewal.