Part Three:
The Anti-Republic

SELECTIONS FROM HERMANN GEISEL’S PAPERS

A Letter to Konrad Elder

Monday, July 11, 1927

I did not have time last night when we met at the Max Reger concert to thank you properly for the material you sent me on the Gerhard case. Now I can document that, in the first two years of the Republic alone, from 1919 to 1921, the twentytwo political murders committed by left wingers led to thirtyeight, not thirty-nine, convictions. But the fact remains that there were about three hundred political murders of left-wing, mostly working-class, victims committed by the right, the vast majority of whom were never prosecuted at all.

Hanni and I were dazzled by your virtuoso performance in the case of Beethoven’s Lock. Our ingenious friend Erwin Herzberg thinks of you as a mystery man with a genius for detection whose source of income is unknown, in order to squeeze you into his metaphysical theory of the detective story. One day you may clear up that mystery for him.

At the moment I am making a few notes for an after-dinner speech at the Savigny Club next Tuesday. As you know, I can never resist talking about the things that matter most to you and me when addressing lawyers and it occurred to me that the circumstances when we first met may be a good starting point.

I have one question: what was the full name of the carpenter-apprentice the Freikorps men threw into the back of their truck on January 14, 1919, and then beat to death in the cellar of the Scharnhorst barracks? Every detail has to be right. Was it Franz or Wilhelm Bauer? You may remember that the murder was discovered by a reporter from the Generalanzeiger, so the police had to take notice. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds of insufficient evidence and never called the reporter as a witness. What upset you so much, as I remember, was that the judge said there was no question the victim had admitted he sympathized with Rosa Luxemburg, who had been murdered in Berlin a week earlier. The Bauer case opened your eyes. You were young and innocent — I think you were eighteen and intended to study law — and you were not prepared to discover that for the judge, not the murderer but the victim was guilty. By then I was already collecting clippings and whatever documents I could find about the way the judiciary was behaving in cases of this nature, in order to publish the facts later. Which I did. You offered your help in gathering the material I needed. I accepted and have been grateful for your help ever since.

I intend to add in my little speech that by then I was already in my late thirties, was married to Hanni, the father of two boys, and had been excused from further military duties during the war after having been conveniently shot in the shoulder at the Battle of the Marne in early September 1914. As a wounded war veteran our undefeated patriots considered me persona grata. I was working in my father’s successful and profitable law practice. Since he was — and still is — more interested in justice than in law, he did not object to my spending so much of my time on important matters. On the contrary. Hanni encouraged me, too. You may also remember that you found out that in the Bauer case the murderer’s name was Franz von Ollwitz. The learned judges were administering class justice as well as political justice.

Don’t worry — my language will be guarded. Rhetoric has never been my thing. I prefer cold facts. One of these facts is that in those years without close but well-concealed relations to the Reichswehr [the small military force permitted by Versailles], the volunteer Freikorps could not have operated at all.

At the end of my speech, before I sit down, I will ask this question:

Can we have a democracy without the rule of law?

THE TELEPHONE CALL

Extract from Hermann Geisel’s

1925 Unpublished Memoirs

Katrin’s father was the director of the Frankfurt Opera and had been a guest several times at Hanni’s déjeuners. She was fifteen years younger than I, but we got on splendidly from the moment she decided that I was Radames and she Aida. I found this immensely flattering although I have nothing in common with a handsome Egyptian captain of the guard with a tenor voice.

Katrin had opera in her blood but her education about other things — literature, politics, history — left a good deal to be desired. I do not think she quite realized this until she met me. She had a very high opinion of me — naturally I did nothing to disabuse her of that — and was very good about listening to me talk. She was nearly twenty when the war ended but only remembered the basic facts and was fascinated when I told her the details and their implication.

One day, as we inspected the opera exhibits together, she made a discovery (that was amazing to her): at least five of Friedrich Schiller’s plays, all on historical themes and highly political, had been turned into operas: Wilhelm Tell, Die Jungfrau von Orléans, Maria Stuart, Kabale und Liebe (Luisa Miller) and Don Carlos. So why didn’t I write a play about the end of the war about which I was always lecturing her? Then we could proceed together to find a composer to set it to music — Richard Strauss, of course, or perhaps Kurt Weill, about whom everybody was talking, or Paul Hindemith, or Ernst Krenek, or even Hans Pfitzner. Too bad Puccini had died in 1924. After all, Katrin’s father had all the right connections.

I protested vehemently. I had never written a play, I said, and I simply did not have the talent. Nor the time. But she would not take no for an answer. Terrified that I might lose her, I eventually softened and sat down to sketch out a scenario. I could not call the play Two Days that Shook the World, because that title, substituting ten for two, had already been taken by John Reed in relation to events that had taken place in 1917 in Petrograd exactly thirteen months before our two days in Berlin in 1918. Our play would have two acts: the first would take place on November 9, the second on November 10. I decided to make the Groener-Ebert telephone call the pivotal event, rather than the Kaiser’s abdication. I did not wish to create sympathy for that kitschy nonentity. À propos kitsch, I would refrain from inventing a love story, the stock-and-trade of opera, because, frankly, I could not think of any that would make sense, nor could I think of any female roles, certainly not in the preliminary sketch I undertook to write. If later the opera people insisted on squeezing in a love story or two, and female roles, I may dream up something.

The Telephone Call

DRAMATIC PERSONAE

Wilhelm Groener, Ludendorff ’s successor as deputy chief of staff, in Spa, the German army headquarters in occupied Belgium. In charge of railways during the war, with good relations to the transportation unions. Career army man.

Friedrich Ebert, saddler, son of a tailor, Marxist but not a revolutionary, moderate social democrat. Suddenly, unconstitutionally, on November 9, improvised successor to Chancellor Prince Max of Baden and head of a coalition government, later president. Unprepared for historic role.

Karl Liebknecht, leader with Rosa Luxemburg of the radical Spartacist League, formed in August 1914 and dedicated to ending the war through revolution. The only member of the Social Democratic Party, which evolved into the Communist Party, to vote against the war. Assassinated on January 15, 1919, the same day as Rosa Luxemburg.

OVERTURE

German democracy, the result of military defeat, was born not in November 1918, but in October — thanks to the addition of a few words to the German constitution, to please American president Woodrow Wilson.

The play has two acts. The story line was to be carved out of the elements described below.

ACT 1: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9

The German navy had begun its mutiny in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven on October 29, followed by a wave of strikes and the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils across Germany, led primarily by moderate social democrats. No resistance. Only in Munich had a radical regime taken power and ended the Bavarian monarchy. On November 7, a delegation had been sent from Spa to an unknown place in France to negotiate an armistice. On the same day, in Berlin, the moderate social democrats sent an ultimatum to the chancellor, demanding the abdication of the Kaiser and the crown prince or else they would resign. A split in the government would endanger the negotiations for a truce. On November 9, Karl Liebknecht’s Spartakusbund, afraid that Ebert and his moderates would swamp them and perhaps even join forces with non-Marxist parties, planned a general strike for eleven o’clock. There was reason to believe Liebknecht would also call for a nation-wide revolution modelled on the Soviets for Monday, November 11. The stakes could not be higher.

However, around two in the afternoon, the news spread that Liebknecht was going to seize the initiative right away and proclaim a soviet republic. Without a clear intention to pre-empt this move, but intending to say something, Ebert’s colleague Philipp Scheidemann stepped on the balcony of the Reichstag. Swayed by the crowd below and caught up in the excitement of the moment, he made a rousing speech. He ended it by shouting, “Long live the free German Republic!” Liebknecht’s proclamation, two hours later, of a free socialist republic from the balcony of the Schloss was an anticlimax.

It was widely reported that Ebert was displeased by his friend Scheidemann’s speech, on the grounds that a proclamation ending the monarchy could only be made by a constituent assembly.

In the evening radical soldiers held a meeting in one of the Reichstag chambers and called for a gathering of the councils’ representatives next day in the Zirkus Busch to pass a resolution establishing a provisional revolutionary government, i.e., not a parliamentary one. Such a government, they assumed, would naturally include the bourgeois parties and therefore — because only number of votes counted — distort the true power relationship between the classes and be incompatible with the interests of the proletariat.

ACT 2: SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10

Army Headquarters, Spa, occupied Belgium. There were reports that in the east there were Soviet incursions into East Prussia and Polish incursions into West Prussia, Posen and Silesia.

The army faced its most serious crisis since the defeat by Napoleon in the Battle of Jena in 1806. It saw itself as the invisible seat of ultimate power, above the government, above the parties, above the constitution. It was now without a head. Yesterday, after news of the developments in Berlin had reached army headquarters, the chief of staff, Field Marshall Hindenburg, had asked his deputy, Wilhelm Groener, to tell the Kaiser that the army no longer stood behind him. Early on the morning of November 10 the Kaiser abdicated and, with a small retinue, crossed the Dutch border into exile. In subsequent days Hindenburg did nothing to suggest publicly that he, Hindenburg, ever admitted military defeat.

For Groener, the only sensible solution was to make a deal with the chancellor, Friedrich Ebert. Only Ebert, he thought, was in a position to guarantee the army a continuation of its traditional role.

In the evening Groener made a telephone call to Chancellor Ebert in Berlin.

Ebert was sitting at Bismarck’s desk. Groener offered to place the army at the disposal of the government. In return, the government would pledge support to the High Command in its efforts to maintain law and order.

Ebert accepted the offer.

By the evening of November 10 the Weimar Republic had taken shape. The moderates in the social democratic party had won the race with the radicals. The price for this victory was the predominant role of the military within the state.

AND NOW — THE MURDERS

Handwritten note:

Doctor Paul Levi is a social democratic member of the Reichstag and one of the most prominent and eloquent defence lawyers in Berlin. He returned to Frankfurt where he had defended Rosa Luxemburg before the war when she was accused of seditious and antimilitary activities. Doctor Levi is a collector of Egyptian art and came to Frankfurt to see the Egyptian exhibits at the International Music Exhibition. He is also in the city to exchange views with his colleague Doctor Hermann Geisel on the case against Paul Jörns, the judge who in 1919 had obstructed the proceedings against the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg.

Transcript from the Archives of Radio Frankfurt, Stamped “Copy”. The interviewer is staff announcer Rolf Giller.

GILLER: Herr Doktor Levi, how does it feel to be back in Frankfurt?

LEVI: Very good. I have always had the warmest feelings toward Frankfurt. I began my practice here, you know, in 1908, when I was twenty-five.

GILLER: But you were born in Hechingen, in Württemberg. Isn’t that where the Hohenzollerns originally came from?

LEVI: (Laughs.) Yes. Their medieval castle is still there, on top of a mountain.

GILLER: Did that mean anything to you, when you were a child?

LEVI: Of course. The romance of the middle ages. Troubadours. Minnesänger. Barbarossa. But what meant much more to me was that in my area the peasant revolt began in 1514. That appealed to my rebellious nature. But if you meant, did I have any special feelings for the Kaiser and his ancestral family, then or later, the answer is no. I have been on the opposite side as long as I can remember.

GILLER: Do you know why?

Levi: A well-developed sense of justice, that is all — not uncommon in southern Germany. My father was a small textile manufacturer. We were comfortably off but we always had a strong social conscience.

GILLER: I can still hear the Swabian in your voice.

LEVI: I hope I will never lose it. It helps immensely in my practice in Berlin.

GILLER: Well now. You have been involved in radical politics and at one point were a close associate of Lenin.

LEVI: Just a second, Herr Giller. I assume that you use the word “radical” in its true sense, meaning that I like going to the root of things. As you know, the word is derived from the Latin radix, meaning root. I am sure you cannot mean that I have ever been in favour of throwing bombs just for the hell of it.

GILLER: Not just for the hell of it. You associated with Lenin in Zurich. You have often spoken about it. He certainly was prepared to use force to achieve his aims — and in due course did so, quite effectively. You must have had something in common with him, Herr Doktor. Tell us about it.

LEVI: What we had in common was that we were both Marxists and Marxists believe that when a revolutionary situation arises force may have to be used. As to my association with Lenin, that began during the war. I was called up. My regiment was sent to Alsace. I staged a slow hunger strike, for many weeks, lost a lot of weight and was eventually discharged. One of my sisters lived in Zurich. I managed to cross the border and join her. There were many kindred spirits in Zurich. We helped a number of people desert from the army. Our associates included Russian revolutionaries, among others Lenin. In 1917, I was at the station to see him off, when he left on that famous sealed train through wartime Germany to Finland Station in Saint Petersburg, with a visa from the German military authorities in his pocket. They hoped that this firebrand would provide — how shall I put it? — a certain élan to the revolution and therefore take Russia out of the war. Of course, the revolution was already in progress. That calculation was one of the few the German military made during the war that turned out to be eminently correct. The next time I saw him was in the summer of 1920, after Saint Petersburg had become Petrograd, and two hundred thousand men were marching past him.

GILLER: And what were your relations with him at the time?

LEVI: This is too big a subject for this interview. Let me just say that toward the end of the war I joined the Spartacist League, which, in December 1918, evolved into the Communist Party. After the assassination of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in the following month, I became their successor. In that capacity I headed the German delegation to the second congress of the Comintern in Moscow. The Russians thought all countries in Europe were ripe for revolution. Only France and England might prefer to remain capitalist for a few more years. In our view, so did Germany. The moment for revolutionary action had come and gone. On November 9, 1918, we communists had the power in our hands, for a few hours. But already the next day, after Scheidemann had made his proclamation, it became clear that the majority of social democrats were ready to make their accommodation with the bourgeois state and agree to calling a constituent assembly. Elections for the assembly were held on January 19, four days after the assassinations. As to my relations with Lenin, let me just say that there was a clash between his autocratic approach to the party and the Marxist humanism Rosa Luxemburg had advocated for many years. After her death, her old associates and I tried to maintain it among German socialists. In due course I was expelled. Since then I have tried to contribute whatever I can to the left wing of the social democratic party, which I represent in the Reichstag.

GILLER: Do you think there is a chance that the two parties on the left, the social democrats and the communists, can be reconciled, perhaps under your leadership since you have been prominent in both?

LEVI: Not while the Russians call German social democrats social fascists and while German communists blindly follow Moscow’s party line. Should a serious threat arise in Germany, perhaps in the form of a determined condottiere à la Mussolini, I would agree, in view of the relative strength of the bourgeois parties, that the only chance of resisting such a threat would be through a reconciliation and a merger. Together we could outvote any conceivable combination of right wingers in the Reichstag. I would certainly do my utmost to bring it about.

GILLER: Do you see such a threat on the horizon?

LEVI: Fortunately I do not. But I do not think it is beyond the range of possibilities that a marginal figure like that Austrian who tried a putsch in Munich with Ludendorff four years ago — I have forgotten his name — might one day emerge again and become a serious danger. Or others like him. Depending on the circumstances. As Goethe used to say, if there is a rose in one garden, the chances are there are roses in other gardens.

GILLER: You knew Rosa Luxemburg already before the war, didn’t you?

LEVI: Yes, in 1913 she chose me as her lawyer. She was a few years older than I and already very well known at the time. I was greatly flattered. She had made a speech not far from here, in Bockenheim, that the police did not like. I was very impressed by her revolutionary spirit, by her high moral standards, her humanism, her superior intelligence and her effectiveness as a public speaker. She was a clear thinker and a superb writer.

Giller: What was it in her thinking that you particularly admired?

LEVI: As a follower of Karl Marx, she identified herself entirely with the interests of the working class, here and everywhere else in the world. She was convinced that after the revolution a socialist system could be established that was truly democratic and would guarantee freedom of thought and encourage self-criticism. I agreed with her entirely that a parliamentary government in a capitalist society was incompatible with the interests of the working class. The bourgeois parties could always outvote the workers’ parties. However, by the time she was assassinated, the decision had been made to call a constituent assembly and establish parliamentary government. She would have played her part in it, just as I do, until another opportunity arose to end the capitalist system.

GILLER: And she felt just as German as you and I?

LEVI: You mean because she happened to have been born in Poland?

GILLER: Yes. Surely that made a difference.

LEVI: Not at all. Rosa was a true internationalist. All manifestations of nationalism were anathema to her. In her family, they did not read the Talmud but the European classics. Her first literary effort, a contribution to a German brochure for the First of May, could not be printed because it was written in hexameters.

GILLER: (Laughs.) That is truly remarkable. Now, as to the case against Paul Jörns, the judge who shielded her murderers, are you working with Herr Doktor Hermann Geisel?

LEVI: Yes, very much so. He has considerable experience in that field. Jörns is not the only judge who behaved in this way.

GILLER: In a few words, could you tell us something about the circumstances of Rosa Luxemburg’s death?

LEVI: Rosa and Karl Liebknecht were arrested in Wilmersdorf on January 15, 1919, by a Freikorps commando that called itself the Einwohnerwehr [Citizen’s Defence]. The militia men had recently returned from the western front and belonged to the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision. You may recall that the GKSD continued to observe army discipline even though all military authority had collapsed. This was six weeks after the end of hostilities and the collapse of the monarchy. Had I not been in prison I have no doubt I would have been their victim, too. There had been the usual invective against the two leaders, calling them Lumpen and so on. Let me tell you what happened to Rosa. Every detail had been prepared beforehand — nothing was left to chance. Rosa was driven to the Eden Hotel where the commando had its headquarters. The pretence was that she was to be taken to the prison in Moabit. But the officer in charge — we have his name, Captain Petri — had given the order that die Luxemburg should not arrive in the prison alive. His order was scrupulously obeyed. She was first stunned by a blow on the head with a rifle butt on arrival and later, in the car, shot and her body dropped from a bridge into the Landwehrkanal. What happened to Liebknecht was essentially the same.

GILLER: The police were nowhere in sight?

LEVI: No. For weeks nothing happened to pursue the murderers. Herr Doktor Geisel has very precise information — more precise than mine — on all the steps the judicial authorities took to protect the murderers, and in some case actually to help them and their accomplices escape to Holland with false papers. Finally, there was a proceeding before a military court, a Feldkriegsgericht. The name and character of the court, and all the personnel, were the same as in the Kaiser’s days. Judge Paul Jörns was the Untersuchungsrichter [investigating judge]. With three exceptions all the accused were acquitted. The exceptions were convicted on minor charges.

GILLER: Was that the end of it?

LEVI: It certainly was not. The judge is protected for ten years from any proceedings against him arising from the misconduct in 1919 of which he is accused. In 1929 we will act.

From a note written by Konrad Elder in 1935:

In 1929 the liberal monthly Tagebuch carried an article, published anonymously, with the heading Kollege Jörns, written as though it was addressed by a judge to his colleague. It contained many of the facts Paul Levi and Hans Geisel had gathered. By now Paul Jörns had been promoted to the exalted rank of Oberreichsanwalt, as Levi had predicted. Jörns sued for defamation. The case came before the Schöffengericht Berlin-Mitte, the old red-brick building near the Alexanderplatz. Levi defended the Tagebuch. At the conclusion of the trial he delivered a historic four-hour speech that has been compared to oratory by Danton and Zola.

It was one of the great moments of the Weimar Republic.

He won the case.

Jörns appealed. During the trial in February 1930, Levi fell seriously ill with pneumonia in his apartment on the Lützowufer, not far from the Landwehr Canal where Rosa Luxemburg’s body had been dumped. On the sixth night, perhaps in a state of delirium, perhaps not, he fell to his death from the balcony.

During a moving tribute to Levi, both the Nazis, whose party was to become the second largest in the Reichstag in the June election, and the communists walked out.

In due course the Nazis appointed Paul Jörns to the position of prosecutor in the infamous Volksgerichtshof [People’s Court].

THE TURNING POINT

Handwritten Note:

The autograph of Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 28 in A major, opus 101, exhibited in showcase no. 30, evoked in my memory the earlier piano sonata no. 12 in A flat major, opus 26, which contains the funeral march anticipating the second movement of the Eroica. The march was played at a memorial I attended for foreign minister Walther Rathenau after his assassination on June 24, 1922.

Transcript of a seminar held by Doctor Hermann Geisel in the Volksbildungsheim [Home for Adult Education] at the Eschersheimer Turm in Frankfurt at the conclusion of the trial of the surviving murderers of Rathenau and their accomplices in the Reichsgericht [Germany’s highest court] in Leipzig in the fall of 1922:

Question: Herr Doktor Geisel, you are known as one of our severest critics of the administration of justice. What do you think about this trial?

ANSWER: I would say that I suspect the court refrained from revealing the full dimensions of the conspiracy because of the state’s own involvement with right-wing elements.

Q: Can you prove this?

A: No, I cannot. What I have just said is a suspicion, based on my experience in these matters. You asked me what I thought and I told you. By the nature of things, we will have to wait for a generation or two before evidence will emerge to substantiate my suspicion. By then the picture will be clear. It will also be clear why Rathenau’s assassination was the turning point in the history of our republic and a wake-up call to the nation. He gave us hope that stability and decency would follow the agony we all endured in the preceding years. That is why no event since the end of the war has shaken the country to the same extent. At the special session in the Reichstag to pay tribute to Walther Rathenau, Chancellor Joseph Wirth exclaimed with deep emotion that “the danger comes from the right.” He meant the völkisch, the right-wing nationalists who, with good reason, were assumed to have conspired to commit the murder.

Q: Why do you think he was singled out?

A: Because he stood for reconciliation with our former enemies, for Erfüllungspolitik, for the policy of fulfilling the peace treaties as much as possible and integrating Germany into an international post-war economic system. Although he had been foreign minister for only four and a half months before he was shot, most Germans understood that this was the only sensible policy under the circumstances. They also agreed that this was also in the interest of our former enemies since Germany was still the most important economic power on the continent, even taking into account the territories we have lost.

Q: We can see that the völkisch people would not like that conciliatory policy at all. There may be a few of them in this seminar. Are there?

A: I see three hands have gone up. But, no, on second thought I do not want to waste time on a political battle here in this room. In any case, it was not only extremists who opposed him. Moderate conservatives did too. On the other hand, the communists were his friends, ever since April 26 in Genoa, when he had surreptitiously left an international economic conference to go to nearby Rapallo to make a historic deal with the Soviets behind the back of the Western powers. For decades he had stressed the long-term importance to Germany of, first, imperial Russia and later, since 1917, the Soviet Union. He did this in the spirit of Bismarck who, he thought, would have done the same.

Q: Do you think, on the whole, Rathenau was a success as foreign minister?

A: No, he was not allowed the time. The French, and to a lesser extent the British, did not understand that it was in their longterm interest to make life easier for him. The Americans were more enlightened, but they had withdrawn from Europe. None of them grasped the intensity of the hatred the right wing had for Rathenau, not only because he was in favour of building bridges with Germany’s former enemies but also because he was a Jew. Already in the previous August, five months before he became foreign minister, Freikorps units in Upper Silesia sang “Schlagt tot den Walther Rathenau, die gottverdammte Judensau” [“Beat to death Walther Rathenau, the goddamned Jew-pig”]. The evening before he was assassinated, he was so crushed by the latest setbacks the French had just inflicted on him that in despair he decided to reverse his position, give up the policy of fulfillment, just as his conservative critics had urged, and — for the moment — stop making any further reparations payments. We will never know whether his murderers would have changed their plans if they had known. Somehow, I doubt it. He was still a Jew.

Q: So he knew his life was in danger?

A: Oh, absolutely. He was entirely fatalistic about it and consistently refused police protection, on the grounds that he could not tolerate such a restriction of his freedom. He thought it would be useless anyway. One day the chancellor came to him in a state of high agitation and pleaded with him to change his mind. A priest had travelled to Berlin from the south especially to tell him that a man had confessed to him he had been chosen to kill him. Of course, the priest could not name the man. Still, Rathenau would not change his position. I think he expected to be killed.

Q: Was he a religious man?

A: He was, above all, a complicated man. As a politician, as a powerful industrialist who sat on dozens of boards, as a thinker and writer about serious philosophical and political matters, he took different positions at different stages of his life. Very early in his career, he wrote an essay titled Höre, Israel, the title evoking the first line of the Hebrew prayer known by all Jews who receive a religious education, which pleaded for the assimilation of Jews in such language that he was called anti- Semitic. But at no time was he prepared to be baptized, even though at an early age he left the Jewish community. Later, he moderated his position on Jewish matters, under the influence of Martin Buber, among others. He knew everybody of note personally, incidentally, and not only in Germany. The painter Max Liebermann, our only major impressionist and, as you may know, a famous Berlin wit, was his second cousin. Liebermann once invited Rathenau to visit him so that he could “talk him out of his anti-Semitism. “After all,” Liebermann wrote, “the Jews have produced quite a number of respectable people, the author of the psalms, for example, Jesus Christ, Spinoza. And your cousin.”

To come back to your question of whether Rathenau was a religious man, I would say he was a man who took spiritual values seriously, as he made clear in his book Vom Reich der Seele [Of the Kingdom of the Soul], which was a polemic against materialism, against the mechanization, the dehumanizing of the world. He thought that these unfortunate manifestations of modernity were inevitable but would eventually be overcome. In short, he was not a pessimist, in the long run. As to his feelings about the masses, on one occasion, when there was a demonstration outside his window against right wingers and someone suggested he should really go down and participate, he said “To be frank, I cannot abide the smell of little people.”

Q: What did he think of Marxism?

A: Once again, the answer is complicated. His father, Emil Rathenau, was the powerful founder of the A.E.G., and Walther himself had great organizational gifts and acted as top manager until his father named Felix Deutsch to succeed him. But Wal ther remained chairman of the board. By the way, one reason why he was such a strong proponent of close relations with Russia was that he hoped that A.E.G. could play a major role in developing the country’s electrical industries. One would have thought that a man in that position would be an unqualified opponent of Marxism. But this was not the case, partly because many patriotic Marxists admired him. At the beginning of the war he was asked to take charge of the mobilization of raw materials for the war effort. He performed that gigantic task for a year with such brilliance that in October 1915 the London Times, of all papers, singled him out as deserving as much credit for the early successes of the German military as Hindenburg and Ludendorff. This experience taught him an invaluable lesson about the advantages of public enterprise in the national interest, a position with which Marxists could not quarrel. If you have read his bestseller Von kommenden Dingen [In Days to Come] you will recognize this attitude. You may recall it received much praise from leading liberals when it was published in 1917. It was popular among soldiers at the front who were wondering what the world would be like after the expected German victory. Rathenau did not share Marx’s views on the way history works and believed psychological factors determined the course of events rather than the class struggle. Nor did he single out decadent left wingers for the decline of the West, as Oswald Spengler was to do a year later. But, like Spengler, he thought blond Nordic types were singularly well equipped to assume positions of leadership.

Q: What did he think of Wilhelm?

A: Not much. They had a number of conversations. He considered him grossly inadequate as a leader. However, he thought the role the Kaiser played corresponded closely to the role most Germans wanted him to play. He thought as a person the Kaiser was quite interesting and congenial. Rathenau considered the Prussian aristocracy, the class the Kaiser represented, an anachronism in the modern world and he was appalled that, in spite of the rapid industrialization of Germany in recent decades, it was still dominant in the military, in the public service and in society generally.

Q: Did he support the war in 1914?

A: This is hard to say. He certainly did not share the almost universal enthusiasm in August 1914. When the Americans entered the war in 1917 he predicted that Germany would be defeated. This was long before most other observers.

Q: After giving up the job organizing raw materials, what did he do for the rest of the war? Other than being chairman of the board of the A.E.G.?

A: He kept in close touch with top members of the government, sent them frequent memoranda and wrote articles for the press, urging greater efforts to mobilize the economy since he believed both the government and the public underestimated the efforts required to achieve victory. Since there was an acute shortage of labour he favoured transporting seven hundred thousand workers from occupied Belgium to be used in German factories, even if this lowered German prestige abroad. But he did not always take such a tough line. In 1916 he warned in vain against conducting unrestricted U-boat warfare, which he thought was likely to bring the Americans into the war.

As I said, by1917 he had given up hope for victory. He felt increasingly isolated and was concentrating on conditions after the war. By then he had established a personal relationship with Ludendorff, who exercised almost dictatorial powers and whom he considered extraordinarily able as a strategist, almost a genius, but devoid of any political sense. Ludendorff had been receptive to many of his ideas. Rathenau spent much time at the Schloss Freienwalde, an hour by car from Berlin, a forgotten and neglected architectural jewel built in the classical style at the end of the eighteenth century for the widow of Friedrich Wilhelm II, king of Prussia, the successor of Frederick the Great. He had bought the property in 1909 and had it fully restored.

Q: So when in November 1918 the Western Front collapsed, he wasn’t surprised?

A: No. But he was devastated by the way it happened. By the end of September 1918 the military situation was so disastrous that Ludendorff — until that moment a man of iron — suffered a nervous breakdown and demanded an end to hostilities and a restructuring of the government in Berlin. A formal request for a truce followed. Rathenau stated publicly in a newspaper that this move was premature, that Germany still had many means of resistance left, that there should be a levée en masse, a huge national uprising, in order to get better terms and avoid a Diktat by the Allies. A few notables agreed with him but the public at large, and the government, did not: the country was exhausted. Once Ludendorff recovered, he agreed with Rathenau and, without checking with Berlin, gave an order to resist. As a result, Ludendorff was discharged.

Q: And how did Rathenau behave during the revolution?

A: For the conservatives he was too revolutionary, for the revolutionaries too conservative. Few people listened to him. He became frustrated and embittered. However, he remained in the public eye in Berlin as a writer mainly on economic issues and as a founding member of the Democratic Party. This phase ended when he joined the Wirth cabinet in 1921 as minister of reconstruction. Later he became foreign minister.

Q: Now please let us return to the Leipzig trial, Herr Doktor Geisel. Are you saying there was a miscarriage of justice?

A: No. It would have been difficult to obstruct the course of justice openly in this case, in view of the state of public opinion. There was huge interest in the proceedings. The court room was always crowded and there was not a major newspaper in the country that did not send reporters to cover the trial. Two of the main perpetrators killed themselves while fleeing from the police. I should add that it was an impressive achievement of the police in Berlin to have identified and arrested more than a dozen participants in the crime in merely six weeks.

Q: But there was no doubt that there was a widespread conspiracy? That this was not the work of one or two fanatics?

A: None. One of the conspirators came from Kiel, another from Chemnitz, a third from Berlin, several from Frankfurt. A manufacturer in Freiberg in Saxony had provided the Mercedes the assassins used to shoot down Rathenau, who was being driven from his house in suburban Grunewald to the ministry in the Wilhelmstrasse in an open car.

Q: So what is your criticism of the trial?

A: My criticism is that the judges refrained from demonstrating the political dimensions of the conspiracy.

Q: Could they have done so?

A: Yes, if they had the integrity required of a truly independent, republican judiciary. Since they were what they were — namely, survivors from the previous régime — it would be unrealistic to expect them to behave differently.

Q: If you had sat on the bench, what would you have done?

A: I would have made sure the public understood that the murder of Walther Rathenau was a culminating act in a serious of murders and political actions designed to overthrow the government and undo the Weimar constitution and that this amounted to an attempted counter-revolution. I would have made sure that everybody understood that there was a connection between the conspirators and certain dubious elements of the Reichswehr, and that these dubious elements were tolerated if not actually supported by the government for its own reasons — and that it was the job of a truly independent judiciary, and of a responsible press, to expose this connection. I would have made sure that due attention was paid to the evidence presented in court that showed that ex-officers involved in the conspiracy had associated themselves with organizations that contained units that called themselves Terror-Kommandos.

Q: And you believe that in due course this will be proved?

A: I have no doubt. Unless, of course, one of these days the counter-revolution succeeds and the memory of Walther Rathenau will be extinguished. At that moment we will all lose our freedom.

PUTSCHING WITH PUTZI

Notes for an Operetta in Three Acts, written by an unknown composer-librettist, most probably inspired by the Johann Strauss Exhibits in Showcase 33.

Characters

SEPPL, Headwaiter, Café Luitpold, and Chief Prison Guard, Fortress Landsberg-am-Lech, bass

PUTZI Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s massive, piano-playing, half-American patron, baritone

RUDOLF, a handsome storm trooper, a nephew of Putzi Hanfstaengl, tenor

KAETCHEN, soprano, niece of Erich Ludendorff

FRAU HANFSTAENGL, Putzi’s mother, mezzo-soprano

Act 1, Scene 1

Café Luitpold in Munich, afternoon of November 8, 1923

SEPPL (in a solo recitative, points to a man immersed in a newspaper): Do you see this man? He comes here every afternoon. Very good tipper. His name is Alois and he talks to nobody except me. He likes me and I like him. He says we are on the brink of chaos. The world is in such a mess, he says, that nothing can save us but a return to the monarchy. True, the inflation is over, but the damage has been done and the famous German “republic” is falling apart. The French are still occupying the Ruhr, and the communists are taking over Saxony and Thuringia. They have both declared they won’t take any more orders from Berlin.

Nor will we. Alois says Chancellor Gustav Stresemann himself may not be a social democrat, but he has them in his cabinet, and that’s bound to lead to Bolshevism. And he has resumed paying reparations to the French! Yes, we want our Catholic Wittelsbacher back, Crown Prince Rupprecht, the son of our last king, Ludwig III, a great war hero, who commanded the sixth army in Lorraine. Also, through his mother, a direct descendent of King James II of England. The English call this the Jacobite succession. I think the crowns of Bavaria and England would go very well together, don’t you? He has no more use for the Prussians in Berlin than Alois and I do. They call us separatists and that’s what we are.

The National Socialists — Nazis, Alois call them — are not separatists. Never mind that nobody outside Bavaria has ever heard of them. They don’t want to separate; they want to dominate. Here in Munich, there is an armed Nazi brownshirt at every corner. Herr Gustav von Kahr doesn’t like them or their plebeian leader Adolf Hitler and his big mouth, and neither, of course, does our beloved crown prince. But on the other hand, they believe he can be useful to them, when the time is ripe. Which, for all you know, may be tonight. And to make things even more lively — there’s the greatest of all our legendary war heroes, Erich Ludendorff. He may well make a dramatic appearance, presumably in a trench coat and a fedora hat. He will work with anybody if that will can help him destroy the despised Republic. Even with Adolf, hoping no doubt that, if he succeeds, he will push Adolf aside and become dictator himself.

Tonight there is a meeting at the Bürgerbraukeller when State Commissioner Gustav von Kahr will speak to three thousand people on the fifth anniversary of the revolution. The Commander of the Seventh Division of the Reichswehr, General Otto von Lossow, will be there as well, and so will be the head of the Bavarian state police, Colonel Hans von Seisser. They are the Big Three. Is it true, Alois, that Adolf Hitler and his storm troopers will also make an appearance?

ALOIS: (nods).

SEPPL: There will be fireworks!

Act 1, Scene 2

PUTZI makes a grand entrance and is greeted by everybody. Walks straight to the piano. Solo aria, in the manner of Figaro’s Largo al factotum della città, complains of the trouble he has grooming Adolf to make him fit for High Society: basic table manners — his were too crude even for storm troopers — clean fingernails, no brown shoes with navy blue pants, kiss the hands of beautiful ladies, etc. But what talent! Knows all of Wagner by heart. Has seen Tristan and Isolde thirty times. No wonder Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred Wagner is crazy about him. Good thing she’s pure Aryan. You see, Adolf doesn’t like Jews. Winifred doesn’t care — this season Wotan is sung by a Jew. Oh, the trouble I went through with him: when he first arrived, not yet fully recovered from the time he spent in the military hospital following being blinded in a British air attack, and waking up only to find unbeaten Germany had been betrayed by Jews and socialists. Bowled over by mesmerizing speeches in beer halls. It’s amazing what it does for a man to find out that he has a hypnotizing effect on others.

Act 1, Scene 3

RUDOLF in S.A. uniform, and KAETCHEN wearing an alluring traditional Bavarian dirndl come in. They are in love. They sit down and sing a love duet. They want to elope as soon as possible. Uncle PUTZI is their ally. However, Uncle Erich (Ludendorff) is against their marriage, on the grounds that he doesn’t want a storm trooper in the family.

A loud barking voice offstage interrupts to summon RUDOLF to join his unit, for action.

Act 2, Scene 1

Later that day, in the drawing room of the Hanfstaengl family mansion.

Before going to bed, while putting out the lights, FRAU HANFSTAENGL, born in the United States, sings a melancholy aria vaguely reminiscent of the Countess’s Porgi, amor at the beginning of Act 2 of The Marriage of Figaro. She is profoundly impressed by Hitler, an extraordinary person, she thinks. She can fully understand Putzi’s attachment to him, even though there is a vast social and cultural gulf between them. After all, her grandfather was a Civil War general and Putzi’s classmates at Harvard were Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee for vice-president in 1920, and the poet T.S. Eliot. But this man Hitler is so vehement! So uncouth! So unequipped for the real world! Surely he can’t pull off what he intends to do — seize power in Bavaria and then march on to Berlin, to topple the government, annul the constitution and take over? True, that’s not so different from what Mussolini did last October 29 when he marched on Rome. But is Hitler ready? Putzi is doing is best to groom him, but surely a lot more time is required to smooth out the extremely rough edges. She goes to bed. The lights go out.

Act 2, Scene 2

PUTZI comes in, together with RUDOLF, in high spirits. They perform a virtuoso duet, recounting vividly the high drama of the evening, with the refrain: “It all seemed to be going to well!”

Under the direction of Hermann Göring storm troopers had surrounded the beer hall. At eight thirty, while von Kahr is speaking, Hitler and his armed men stormed in and caused instant panic. Hitler fired a shot in the air with his Browning and yelled “Silence!” to the stunned crowd. Hitler and Göring forced their way to the podium. Kahr yielded. Hitler shouted: “The national revolution has begun. No one must leave the hall. Unless there is immediate quiet I shall have a machine gun mounted in the gallery. The Bavarian and Reich governments have been removed and provisional governments formed. The barracks of the Reichswehr and of the police are occupied. The army and police are marching on the city under the banner of the swastika.” Nobody in the hall could possibly have known that none of this was true.

Hitler then ordered Gustav von Kahr, Hans Seisser and Otto von Lossow — the Big Three — to go to a back room. There he informed them they were to join his revolution and would be part of his government. But to Hitler’s great surprise they just glared at him and said nothing. Hitler then pulled his pistol and said, “I have four bullets, three for you and one for myself.”

Hitler left the room and jumped on the podium again and announced that the Reich president and the “November criminals” — meaning the government — had been removed. A provisional new national government would be named that day in Munich. A new German army would be formed immediately. It would be the task of the provisional government to organize a march on Berlin, sweep away the Judenregierung [Jew-government] and save the German people.

Everybody believed that the Big Three had given in. Then Ludendorff arrived. Hitler asked him to go to the backroom and persuade the Big Three to back him. Ludendorff ’s prestige was so high that he succeeded. They all came out, climbed up to the podium and declared they are loyal to Hitler. Hitler was euphoric.

That was the high point of the evening. Hitler will be the new leader of Germany.

The crowd sang “Deutschland Deutschland über Alles.”

Word came that Reichswehr soldiers in the barracks were resisting the storm troopers. Hitler left the hall to survey the field. The Big Three slipped out of the hall, after telling Ludendorff they were backing Hitler. And that’s where things stand at the moment.

Act 2, Scene 3

KAETCHEN rushes in, straight into RUDOLF’s arms. In a coloratura aria she tells him how proud she is of him. She has heard that Uncle Erich is the hero of the evening — it was he who had turned things round when he swayed the Big Three to back Hitler. Things are going so well that, thanks to Uncle Erich, Hitler and his men will now definitely represent the future of Germany. Uncle Erich is bound to give his blessing to their union.

Act 2, Scene 4

Early afternoon the following day, by which time it is clear the revolution has unravelled. Complete change of mood. PUTZI rushes in to announce that the Big Three have issued a statement saying that their declaration of loyalty to Hitler was invalid since it was extracted from them at gun point, that all the barracks — except the one at the War Ministry — resisted, that throughout the night bands of storm troopers were roaming the city, and that in the morning Erich Ludendorff suggested to the frantic Hitler he take over the city by marching from the centre at the Odeonsplatz on to the Feldherrnhalle with a cadre of armed storm troopers to force a showdown. So that’s what he tried to do at eleven that morning — with disastrous results. There was a bloody confrontation with about a hundred armed policemen. Several storm troopers and a few policemen were killed, in less than five minutes of gunfire. Göring was shot in the groin. Ludendorff was livid when Hitler ordered his men to surrender, which they did not do. Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder when a man he had locked arms with was shot. He crawled along a sidewalk out of the line of fire and scoots away to a waiting car. Ludendorff, true to form, faced the bullets, confident, with good reason, that no one would dare to shoot him. He walked straight into the police ranks and is duly arrested. Hitler declared he would commit suicide.

A bell rings. PUTZI goes the door. There are confused noises — several men seem to be there. PUTZI says: “Yes, please bring him in. Just the shoulder? We’ll look after it. I’ll call a doctor” — when the curtain falls.

Act 3, Scene 1

The empty dining room of the Fortress Landsberg-am-Lech. Same musical style as in Act 1.

SEPPL (reminiscent of Frosch in Act 3 of Die Fledermaus): Surprised to see me here? Three times the money I made in the Café Luitpold. They pay prison guards very well in Bavaria, and as their boss I get all kinds of perks as well, with frequent trips to Munich’s beer cellars and agreeable visits to the houses of joy nearby. And some of the prisoners are very generous. Especially our prize prisoner, Adolf. He is extravagantly appreciative for making life comfortable for him. He says I may be appointed Gauleiter when the time comes.

Do you see this table over there? Under the swastika banner? He sits at the head of the table, for lunch and dinner every day, with his entourage, brave men who were arrested and tried for high treason with him. Not breakfast. I allow him to sleep in. They have their breakfast, sausages and beer, without him.

I make sure his visitors feel at home here.

FRAU HANFSTAENGL: Putzi went to the trial every day but I only accompanied him a couple of times. I wish he wasn’t so involved, more than ever, but I continue to be hugely impressed by his friend’s amazing theatrical skills. Where did he acquire them? Surely not in the dreary asylums for the homeless in Vienna in which he spent his time. Political skills he still has to pick up. Ludendorff certainly won’t help him — he has none himself and anyway he will never speak to him again. He thinks Hitler is a coward who ran away when things got a little hot for him.

Hitler certainly made spectacular use of his trial for high treason in the former infantry school in the Blutenburgstrasse. According to one reporter he turned it into a political carnival. At one time Hitler appeared at a window of the courtroom to show himself to the cheering crowd.

He never denied any of the basic facts and grandly assumed full responsibility for everything that happened. But he vehemently denied committing high treason — such a thing was impossible against the men who themselves had betrayed their country in 1918. He was a German patriot, nothing else. He only desired what was best for the people, that was all. His oratory was so effective that very soon the roles of accuser and accused were reversed and the prosecution was on the defensive. The highly sympathetic presiding judge, who had acquitted Ludendorff, was so impressed that when eventually he sentenced Hitler to a mere five years in Landsberg, he quickly added that he would be eligible for parole long before the expiration of his sentence.

I certainly hope that when he is released Putzi will have turned a page and will be so involved in our art reproduction business that he will have lost his taste for this man’s seductive charms.

SEPPL (pointing to a table laden with flowers, food parcels, books, swastikas in all forms, and even a crucifix or two): These are the gifts that arrived today for my prize prisoner’s thirty-fifth birthday. No doubt they will be generously distributed to his friends, the governor, myself and the prison staff.

PUTZI: What a stroke of luck! For Adolf, November 8 and 9 — since 1918 already historic dates — will now assume a double significance. They will be the days when the party received its baptism of fire and its first martyrs. The party was suddenly known all over Germany, no longer only in Bavaria, and so was he! And the things he learned! When he fell on the ground before the guns of the police, he learned that he could not achieve his ends through violent means. From now on he would only work within the law, peacefully, using only political means and propaganda. He would be a model citizen, just as he is now a model prisoner. He will represent law and order. He has learned that this is the way to win over the country’s dignitaries and institutions, including the Reichswehr and the police. No more romantic dreaming. From now on — Realpolitik.

SEPPL: Too bad I can’t introduce you to Frau Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law. She has been a visitor several times. She is very fond of our man. Sometimes she brings the children. They call him Wolf. I don’t know why. Is there a wolf in one of the Wagner operas?

RUDOLF (wearing a suit): Without our Führer it’s pointless to be a storm trooper. At our meetings we fight each other and if we wear our uniform on the street people laugh at us. So I prefer to leave it in the cupboard. Its time will come again. Kaetchen thinks so, too. We eloped and got married two weeks ago. Kaetchen pretends not to mind that Uncle Erich is very upset, but I think she does mind and hopes he will come around after we have our first child.

KAETCHEN: I often walk in the garden with the Führer and listen to him. He is usually quite shy with women, especially with Frau Wagner, and I don’t think he really notices me, but I let him talk, and that’s what he wants to do. He says he finds this time invaluable — he can think things through and do a lot of reading. He likes philosophers and the memoirs of the war leaders, on our side and on the enemy’s side. He is getting a university education at the state’s expense, he says, and he has very good ideas of what he wants to do once he has power. He wants to build great highways throughout the country, which he will call Autobahnen and he wants to make sure everybody has a little car, which he calls Volkswagen.

PUTZI: Did I mention that he’s writing a book? He’s not really writing it — he is dictating it to Rudolf Hess, a nice storm trooper who was born in Alexandria in Egypt, of all places, and some of Hitler’s men are typing it out, so if you hear the clutter of typewriters, that’s what they’re doing. I haven’t seen any of it, but from what they tell me, it’s extremely boring and longwinded. I am sure they’re right, and it will be forgotten the moment it comes out. If it comes out. He wants to call it “My Efforts,” or something like that.

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The following is a typewritten note with no author indicated.

Among the Richard Wagner autographs assembled at the International Exhibition of Music were the first draft of the Lohengrin libretto, the proofs of the Preislied in the Meistersinger with Wagner’s corrections and an inscription of Wotan’s Farewell from the album of the Princess Carolyne of Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress in Weimar, but nothing from the Götterdämmerung. This might have been a matter of regret for Hermann Geisel because such an exhibit would have pleasantly recalled his short and exhilarating romance with Ingrid P., the graduate law student and intern in his office, seven years earlier, in the spring of 1920.

Letter from Ingrid P.

Berlin, April 15, 1923

My dear Hermann,

Last week, at the end of the Götterdämmerung at the Staatsoper, I could not help thinking about you and Oswald Spengler. The Rhine maidens had just retrieved the ring and Walhalla was burning to the ground destroying the gods — the world — that world — had come to an end — but the music suggested a faint and highly enigmatic ray of hope for the future. It was your thoughts about Spengler that made me fall in love with you! Never before had a man like you paid attention to me, a man with a first-class legal mind, excited by big ideas and aware of their implications! No doubt you have since then swept many other impressionable young ladies off their feet and opened their eyes. The more, the better. They should be as grateful to you as I am. You are a one-man university and a great benefactor.

As you no doubt remember, the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West had come out just before the end of the war. (I have not read the second volume, which appeared recently.) For some years it was hugely successful and everybody talked about it. I recall you pacing the floor of your office in a state of high agitation deploring the way the public was misunderstanding its main message. Spengler had started writing the book in 1911, you said, and worked on it right through the war, convinced, like everybody else, that Germany would win. Still, he predicted the decline of the West of which victorious Germany was obviously going to be a part. It was doomed to decline in the long run, he said, just as had the Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman and all the other cultures. Since there was no need to get excited about the long run, people asked, why did that make him a pessimist in the short run, in our lifetime? And you said that question entirely missed the point, just as people would have missed the point if they had asked Richard Wagner whether he was a pessimist when he made Walhalla go up in flames. Just like Wagner, you said, Spengler had something to say about the state of the world and he had found a way to say it. Unlike the Ring, however, his meaning was crystal clear.

It was decadence, you said, that was in Spengler’s view the cause of the decline of all previous cultures, as it was going to be the decline of ours, decadence in our case in the form of liberalism, rationalism, materialism, egalitarianism, parliamentary institutions or their equivalent, and, above all, non-comprehension of the universal truth that war was essential for the survival of civilization. That message, you said, put him in the same camp as the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, even if personally Spengler was a perfectly agreeable, harmless amateur scholar who would not hurt a fly.

Other people devoted countless hours and hundreds of pages trying to explain what you said with your usual crispness in a few sentences.

I miss you. You established the highest standards in every respect. No wonder my subsequent lovers have laboured hard, but in vain, to approach them.

Gratefully yours,

Ingrid

Draft Letter to Ingrid P.

Frankfurt, April 20,1923

Dear Ingrid,

It was lovely to hear from you. You flatter me too much. I don’t believe for a moment what you said about your “subsequent lovers.” If you introduce me to at least one or two of them next time I come to Berlin maybe I can give them a few tips.

Ah, Oswald Spengler. How amazing that his big book was such a huge success. I understand by now sales have reached a hundred thousand. Obviously the book touched a nerve, not only because of its politics. I am sure that if we had won the war we would have resisted the idea that we were ultimately doomed to decline anyway and the book would have been a flop. So Spengler is one of the many writers who benefited from the defeat. Some of the others are decadent pacifists like me and therefore his mortal enemies. I doubt very much whether many people read it from cover to cover. Yet they were awed by the erudition and impressed by the immense ambition of the book. Suddenly the boring lessons they learned at school about Sumerians and Hittites — not to mention the Carthaginians and Nubians — made sense! Almost without exception academics attacked it as the misguided work of a pretentious amateur but they would have said that about any outsider invading their turf. The public did not care. Vox populi vox dei.

I won’t blame you for not mentioning his revealing political tract, Prussianism and Socialism, which was published in 1919 while the National Assembly in Weimar was drawing up the constitution for a parliamentary government. No doubt he hoped it would influence the discussions. It attracted some attention only, I am sure, because it was written by the famous author of Decline. But now the tract is forgotten, so there is no reason why you should have mentioned it. I think of it often only because I spend so much of my energy trying to document the murders masterminded by men whose thought processes ran along similar lines.

Spengler observed that although socialists of one kind or another had played the leading roles during the revolution a few months earlier, a socialist system was not being established in Weimar. Instead a parliamentary system was being devised that neither conservatives like him nor the influential left-wing socialists wanted. What had gone wrong?

It was all the result of colossal misunderstanding, Spengler found. Conservatives and socialists thought they were bitter enemies. In fact, they were both heirs of the same Prussian tradition. Their hostility had concealed the fact that they were really in fundamental agreement. Their common enemy was parliamentary democracy. Once they understood that, they could easily forget their differences and make common cause to overthrow it.

Spengler said he had tried to show in Decline that each of the European nations had developed a specific ideal: the Spanish militant Catholicism, the English a commercial notion of imperialism inherited from their Viking ancestors and the Prussians the bureaucratic service state founded on the interplay between command and obedience. The Prussian tradition of military and bureaucratic discipline went back to Frederick William the First whom Spengler called the first conscious socialist. His son Frederick the Great, as we all learned in school, called himself the first servant of the state. The leaders of the vast industrial cartels and, on the other side, of German social democracy and their trade unions, followed in the same tradition. Therefore, the efforts in Weimar to establish a parliamentary system were, as it were, an act of treason against the Prussian tradition.

I don’t remember whether you and I discussed this tract in detail. There were so many other things to talk about. But I think of it often. Its reasoning explains, among many other things, why our military officers have so little trouble finding common ground with their Soviet counterparts who are equally opposed to the western democracies.

It will be good to see you again.

Most cordial greetings,

Hermann

THE VICTOR OF GORLICE

Letter to Klaus Limburg, former classmate at the Goethe Gymnasium, now cellist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Dear Klaus,

Thank you for your compliments. Yes, my most recent publication about the horrendous miscarriages of justice between 1918 and 1923 received some favourable attention in the legal community and in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Vossische Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblat and a few others. I was of course abused by right-wing papers — the usual thing — and I also received a few poisonous letters, which I try to ignore, although I do not always succeed. I pass the worst ones to the police. In dramatic contrast to the judges, the police are often quite sympathetic to my cause, reflecting the solidly republican spirit of our local government.

I am sorry that in my last letter I made an obscure reference to The Black Reichswehr, a painful subject on which I have done a good deal of research. How could you know what that means? How stupid of me. Most people here have not heard of it either. You will know what it means by the time you have finished reading this letter. I am glad you asked. I wanted to write to you about Zorbach anyway. Since I am a frustrated novelist I hope you don’t mind if this letter will seem like a chapter from a novel.

You remember Horst Zorbach? How could you forget the unforgettable Horst Zorbach, the master-mimic of our — ah so mimicable — teachers. (The only one he could never do, as you no doubt recall, was Hahn. Horst was too terrified of him.) It was Zorbach who burst into the Latin classroom, shouting gaudeamus igitur or in dolci jubilo, or something appropriate like that, when conveying the happy news that old goat-face Biegler had just been run into by a cyclist and was being taking away in an ambulance.

Well, two weeks ago I saw Zorbach again, the first time since before the war. I hardly recognized him. His face was deeply lined and he had white hair. He had lost an arm on the Russian front. He is now a highly successful lawyer in Berlin, moving in exalted circles. I saw him at the exhibition, in the room devoted to exotic musical instruments from Asia, admiring a nagasuram, which is, as you every child knows, an oboe from South India.

Zorbach was in top form.

“I demand to see one of the flutes played by Frederick the Great,” he addressed the guard, emulating a sergeant major on the drilling grounds of Potsdam.

The amiable guard shrugged and shepherded him to the nearest curator. I went along.

The curator leafed through the catalogue.

“I am sorry,” he shrugged, “we don’t have any.”

“You have the gall,” Zorbach exclaimed with magnificent indignation, “to exhibit this” — he bent down to look at the label and pronounced full of contempt — “this nagasuram and you don’t have a single flute played by Frederick the Great? I cannot believe it. I will take this up with the highest authorities.”

Since Zorbach is a kind man at heart, and thoroughly republican, he reverted to his normal civilized self before the curator could think of a suitable reply and said to him, and to the guard, “This was a cruel joke. I am sorry. You must forgive me. It is a bad habit of mine. It causes me no end of trouble.”

All of us had a good laugh.

“Are you free for dinner?” Zorbach asked me a few minutes later.

I said nothing would please me more.

“My wife and I are staying at the Hessische Hof. They have a perfectly respectable dining room. Why don’t you come around seven.”

I did.

Martha Zorbach was a lively, imposing blonde, beautifully dressed, a little older than we are, and clearly very much at home in Berlin’s high society, not at all the kind of woman I would have expected Zorbach to marry. I would have thought he would pick a long-legged beauty in one of Berlin’s sleazier cabarets. Martha was the precise opposite.

She endeared herself to me right away by telling me she had seen an excellent Kirchner cityscape in one of the galleries on the Kaiserstrasse, which she wanted to buy. She could have no idea that I collected Kirchners and had seen it, too. But I had one very much like it, so I had left that one alone.

Our devotion to Kirchner bonded us. Over a few drinks in the bar we made small talk about Kirchner, about the exhibition, about the performances by the hugely popular tenors Richard Tauber and Jan Kiepura and about Gertrude Ederle who had recently swum across the English Channel. We were just discussing the admirable brand-new Stadion, the sports facilities and outdoor swimming pool in the Stadtwald, the municipal forest, when an elderly, slightly stooped, officer of the Reichswehr, wearing a monocle and a grey mustache, approached Martha and clicked his heels.

“Gnädige Frau, may I disturb you?”

“How delightful,” she exclaimed, obviously highly pleased. She turned to us. “May I introduce Konrad von Witzleben — my husband, Horst Zorbach. And this is Herr Doktor Hermann Geisel. They are both eminent lawyers, so you can feel quite safe with us. Please do join us.”

“I am afraid I cannot. Are you staying in the hotel?”

Martha nodded.

“Let me call you tomorrow. I would very much like to see you again. How many years has it been?”

“Oh, two or three, at least. Too long, anyway.”

“I am happy to meet your husband at last,” he said, bowing to Zorbach. “I have heard a good deal about him.”

“Do you see much of Hans?”

“No longer. Until last October I reported to him at least three times a week. That was more than enough,” he smiled. “Now if you excuse me…”

Konrad von Witzleben — I never asked what his rank was — left. This time I don’t think he clicked his heels.

“I note that you didn’t play any of your games with him, Zorbach,” I observed. “Respect for German officers is bred in the bones. Right?”

“Wrong. I was about to enact the Hunchback of Notre Dame but Martha kicked me hard under the table.”

“Who is Hans?” I asked.

“General Hans von Seeckt,” Zorbach replied. “The victor of Gorlice. Until the government had enough of him last year, supreme master of the Reichswehr. Martha’s first boyfriend, before the war. At that time he liked young girls of good family. Maybe he still does. I don’t know. Martha was, and still is, twenty years younger than the general.”

I stared at her, for once tongue-tied. I knew a good deal about Hans von Seeckt. In May 1915, as chief of staff of the Heeresgruppe led by August von Mackensen, he had master-minded the decisive breakthrough at Tarnów-Gorlice, which led to the collapse of the Russian southwest front. The son of a Prussian officer, von Seeckt had advanced rapidly to senior positions in the army before the war, and during the war had been general staff officer in various capacities, including chief of the general staff of the Turkish army. In these functions he was unusually successful as a strategic and operational planner, never as commander in chief, a job he avoided because it would have run against his nature.

Martha was amused by my reaction.

“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “I would have married him if he had asked me. But he did not. It was his loss.”

“Martha likes unusually intelligent men,” Zorbach said.

“Quite true,” she nodded.

“I am sure Horst is more entertaining,” I said.

“I willingly concede the point,” she smiled.

“I understand from your exchange with Herr von Witzleben that you don’t see much of the general any more?”

“That is true. Konrad knows a little about our history. It is no secret. It may very well be the only thing about Hans that is not secret. We went our separate ways. But we never quarrelled. I have followed his career with the greatest interest and know exactly how his mind works. If you like, I will tell you all about it at dinner.”

I could hardly wait. We went to the dining room. Zorbach ordered a modest Riesling. As we sipped our consommé Martha told us about a meeting of officers on December 20, 1918, in the building of the general staff in Berlin, chaired by an undersized, bald major by the name of Kurt von Schleicher, who represented the Oberste Heeresleitung [the top army command]. The economy would only recover, Schleicher said, once order had been re-established. Only then, after a number of years, would it be possible to assert any measure of power in the world. Once Schleicher finished, Hans stood up. He wore a civilian dark suit, was tall and pale and monocled. Many people had only heard of him and never seen him in the flesh. He contradicted Schleicher in short, clear sentences. The need for the re-establishment of order was self-evident, he said, but it was impossible to restore the economy while the country was powerless. The first priority was, therefore, to rebuild the Wehrmacht, at least to the extent that Germany would once more be bündnisfähig, capable of being somebody’s else’s valuable ally. The assembly was deeply impressed.

“How do you know what he said?” Zorbach asked his wife sharply. “Did he tell you?”

“I have my sources,” she smiled. “You don’t have to know everything about me, you know.”

By now sole meunière was being served.

“So, in March 1920, Hans was appointed chief of the Heeresleitung, and from that moment on the Heer, meaning the Reichswehr, and the Republic lived parallel lives, side by side. Hans did everything in his power to avoid the suggestion that the Reichswehr was in any way subordinate to the Republic, even though there happened to be a minister responsible for the Reichswehr in the cabinet. Hans was perfect for the role. The ‘sphinx with the monocle’ he was called.”

“A highly charged situation.” I remembered those days.

“So it was,” Martha continued. “As you know, the Treaty of Versailles only permitted an army of a hundred thousand men. At the end of the war the army contained four hundred thousand. So three hundred thousand men, including officers, had to be dismissed. Hans used the opportunity to purge the army of all elements he considered political, which included nationalists of all stripes. Freikorps men had to go and become dangerous, murderous freelancers; so did former volunteers; so did men who were nostalgic about the happy days at the front. And, of course, Nazis and communists. They were all thrown out. For him, it was almost a religious dogma that the army stood above all the parties, that it was a politically neutral, quasi-sovereign force. So naturally his relationship to the republican constitution was, let us say, cool. To a few confidants he said, ‘For me the constitution is not noli me tangere,’ meaning untouchable.”

“It sounds better in Latin,” Zorbach remarked.

“Not to me. As you know very well, only boys learned Latin at school. Anyway, Hans restored the number of Prussian aristocrats in the officer corps to their pre-war position. Did I say ‘restore’? Sorry, a careless mistake. He did much better than restore. He doubled them. I happen to know the figures. In 1913 twenty-four percent of officers came from the Prussian aristocracy. Now there were forty-eight percent.”

“A considerably higher percentage than among social democrats,” Zorbach observed wryly.

“That is undoubtedly true,” Martha smiled. “Do you remember the fall of 1923, when the country was about to disintegrate, with Saxony and Thuringia rebelling and Ludendorff and Hitler attempting a putsch in Bavaria, and the French still in the Ruhr and the Rhineland, when a break-up of the country, disintegration, civil war and anarchy were real, tangible possibilities? How could we forget? At that moment the government, frightened out of its mind, gave the Reichswehr dictatorial power to deal with the situation. Which it did, most effectively. Hans handed it back in February 1924, to the deep disappointment of the nationalists. For Hans the idea of the army assuming political responsibility was unthinkable. Establishing a military dictatorship was for him absolutely out of the question. He had other objectives.”

“Such as?” Zorbach asked.

“To circumnavigate the military prohibitions of Versailles. That is why he filled the ranks with Prussian aristocrats and former staff officers, preconditioned by birth and tradition to take command of additional, illegal troops. This has to be seen in perspective. All political parties agreed that there was nothing morally wrong with doing everything possible to evade and, if possible, undo Versailles, on the grounds that the treaty was invalid because the German delegation had to sign it under duress. Hans was highly skilful in exploiting the situation and, with the tacit consent of some crucial members of the government, created and financed the Black Reichswehr, para-military troops to perform para-military tasks — black in the sense that if you sneak by the conductor on the tram without buying a ticket you are a ‘black’ passenger. It was not only members of the government of the Reich but also of the Länder who whispered to Hans to go ahead, who winked and looked the other way.”

The main course of the lunch consisted of sautéed calves brains with creamed carrots and new potatoes. It was delicious. Zorbach ordered another bottle of Riesling.

Let me add that a great deal of information about the Black Reichswehr was revealed by the social democrat Philipp Scheidemann in the Reichstag last year. That was when pacifists like me, inside and outside Germany, learned with horror about the U-boats and the warplanes that were being built in Spain, in Sweden and in the Netherlands for German firms, on the assumption that under cross-examination their clever lawyers would argue that they were needed by Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. I have a thick dossier about these matters in my office, but I wanted to hear Martha say more about it.

“Your former fiancé is fixated on Russia,” I said. “Isn’t he?”

“We were never formally engaged,” Martha corrected me. “Hans does not like commitments, public or private. But you’re right. He may not actually be enamoured of the distinctly unsavoury ideology of Russia’s current rulers but he believes Russia is the only great power with which we have no immediate difficulties, that we have in common that we were both defeated in the war, and that we will have no future at all unless we have excellent relations with whoever runs it. Rathenau believed that, too, when he went to Rapallo. I suppose when you said Hans was fixated on Russia you were thinking of the secret agreements he concluded with the Soviets to have them produce forbidden arms for us and to have our officers and Soviet officers trained jointly. Yes, these were daring, highly significant moves. The French were not amused to read rumours about them in their newspapers, nor were the social democrats at home. The communists, of course, were delighted.”

“And another reason why he was fixated on Russia,” I continued, “was surely that Germany and Russia have in common a profound, ancient hostility to Poland. Would you not agree with that?”

“You know, Geisel,” Zorbach objected, “you’re not in court now. I will advise my witness not to answer your question.”

“Don’t interfere,” Martha admonished her husband. “I enjoy talking to your friend. Yes, Herr Doktor,” she said. “We Prussians are no more fond of Poles than the Russians, especially if we have estates near the Polish borders, as so many of us do, and we do not like it when we hear that the Poles bully their German minorities just as the Russian do not like to hear what the Poles are doing to their minorities.”

“Hence the Arbeitskommandos, financed by the Reichswehr,” I said. “Right?”

I knew that in the areas bordering Poland thousands of men in civilian clothes, the Arbeitskommandos, help with the harvest and put in irrigation systems and perform all kinds of useful tasks. But their real purpose is something else. They protect our borders and prevent Polish incursions. After all, Polish attacks on East Prussia in the west or on Ukraine in the east were entirely conceivable, if the wind blew in the right direction. The commandos also thoroughly enjoyed guarding our secret arms and munitions depots.

“You will have to agree,” I said, picking up her tone, “that the spirit prevailing among these super-patriots is very different from that in the Reichswehr. There is nothing elitist about them. They are wild nationalists. Many of them worship the swastika. And we all know what happened in the dark days in the fall of 1923 when Hans was asked to assume charge.”

This was a reference to the radical right-wing unit of the Black Reichswehr, which under Major Buchdrucker tried to stage a putsch against the Reichswehr proper and attempted to occupy a government building in Berlin. When this miscarried, the major and his men sought refuge in the fortresses of Küstrin and Spandau and had to be forced to capitulate after considerable loss of life.

“Yes,” Martha smiled. “I was quite sorry for Hans. The sorcerer had trouble controlling his apprentice.”

“Well, I was not sorry for him,” Horst snapped. “Good thing we were not married then. And a good thing most of these Arbeitskommandos have been dissolved by now.”

“Ah, here comes the dessert,” Martha greeted the waiter who brought us strawberries with whipped cream and a plate of an assortment of cheeses.

“And have gone underground,” I said, “waiting for another day. One wonders how the sphinx with the monocle will behave when that day comes.”

“He won’t be on the side of the rabble,” Martha said. “You can be sure of that.”

I am sorry, Klaus, I forgot myself. This letter has gone on far too long. Why should a cellist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra be interested in all this when he can play for Al Capone?

But I have to add a coda to this story. Finally, last year the government asserted itself. It had enough of the general’s assumption of sovereignty. Of course it had had the legal power to dismiss him all along. But this time, when it finally decided to get rid of him, it was a measure of its weakness that it first had to obtain the support of the president and of the press.

It was not hard to get Hindenburg to agree, whatever the occasion, because during the war he had learned to detest him. Hans had made it easy for the government to find a pretext to sway the press. He had recently invited the oldest son of the former crown prince to take part in infantry exercises. The government knew that this was anathema to the mainstream newspapers even if many of their readers were nostalgic for the good old days under the Kaiser. So it leaked the juicy morsel to them. There was the expected outcry of virtuous indignation. So Hans was dismissed and the government lived happily ever after.

Enjoy playing for Al Capone.

Yours as always,

Hermann

ORANGE BLOSSOMS

Hermann Geisel’s journal of June 28, 1927 (edited and expanded for publication)

I have always known there is no one like Jeanne for pillow talk and I do not mind at all that she says it is the best part of sharing my bed. She adds that none of her other lovers listens as well as I do.

Last night I had a feast.

I had not seen her for two years. That is why I had not yet heard her reminisce about Locarno. I knew that in October 1925 she accompanied her boss to the conference as his secretary. Her bed was the perfect location for a first-hand account. Her boss was a second-rank fonctionnaire on the Quai d’Orsay. Since she has a remarkable, beautifully sculpted face, with high cheekbones and a prominent chin, buys her clothes in the finest shops of the Faubourg Saint Honoré and comes from a much better family than he does, he owed much of his prestige to her. When I first met her she was an interpreter in the legal department of the French regiment stationed in Mainz. Her mother is German, so she was highly qualified. I represented three clients who were involved in prisoner exchanges. One thing led to another. We had to be discreet. If it had become known that she was practising her pillow talk with a German lawyer, no French lawyer could have saved her. She would have been thrown out on the spot.

“Why are you in Frankfurt?” I asked.

“I am on a sentimental journey,” she said.

“Res ipsa loquitor,” I replied. “The facts speak for themselves. Thank you.”

“No, they do not. Not entirely, anyway,” she said. “I was thinking not only of you.”

It was below my dignity to ask the obvious question.

“You are in good company,” she resumed. “I was also thinking of Beethoven.”

“How nice,” I observed.

“My mother sent me. I have never told you I was brought up with Beethoven.”

“That can’t have been easy. He was a somewhat difficult character.”

“So he was. Do you know Romain Rolland?”

What a question!

“One of my role models,” I replied, with some agitation. “I wish I did. The conscience of Europe. I will never forget the superb open letter he published in late August 1914 to his German fellow intellectuals, imploring them to protest against German barbarism in Louvain where the Germans had destroyed the ancient Belgian university and irreplaceable libraries, the common property of all of Europe. The answers he received pleaded that he was the victim of anti-German propaganda. I have read every volume of Rolland’s monumental novel Jean-Christophe, comparable to War and Peace, and many of his other works. Why do you ask?”

“My mother met him in Rome when she was quite young, a year or two before I was born. They have been in touch ever since. She was studying the viola; he was working on the early history of opera. He is twenty years older than she. No, I am not the daughter of Romain Rolland. As far as I know, their friendship was platonic. They both knew the legendary Malwida von Meysenbug.”

I was hugely impressed. I knew a great deal about her — she was a friend of Wagner and Nietzsche.

“Ah — now I remember,” I said. “He wrote a book about Beethoven. At about that time.”

“So he did. And Jean-Christophe Krafft, the character in Rolland’s book, has many of the features of the young Beethoven, which you may not have noticed.”

“No, I did not.”

“For Romain Rolland,” she continued, “Beethoven is the quintessential European hero. Because of deep suffering and years of struggle — gigantic achievements. His whole life — the Eroica. So a couple of weeks ago Rolland wrote to my mother suggesting that she might wish to go to Frankfurt on his behalf. But she is not well enough to travel so she sent me. He wanted her to celebrate Beethoven’s centenary for him and look at his manuscripts and sketchbooks and report back. So here I am.”

“So you have seen the Beethoven exhibit?”

“I have.”

She paused. I expected her to tell me how moved she was to see his scribblings in his sketchbooks after his hearing had gone and to see the scores in his own handwriting. But after a long pause she dumbfounded me by saying something quite different.

“I kept thinking of your foreign minister Gustav Stresemann.”

“But, but, but…” I stuttered, “Stresemann is the exact opposite! His opponents never got tired of mocking him for having written his dissertation on the bottled-beer trade in Berlin, to which he should have stuck, having been brought up in his father’s tavern.”

Quite rightly, she considered this foolish observation unworthy of a reply.

“I kept thinking of Stresemann,” she said, “because his struggle was so similar.”

I mulled this over for a few moments. The comparison seemed to me a little far-fetched but I did not want to make a fool of myself again. Stresemann, a rotund, bald man, often seen smoking a cigar, was born around 1880. Before he entered politics he had a career in industry as a high-level consultant. He was mildly reformist in internal matters, solidly anti-socialist, and in external matters after 1914 a super-patriot and an ardent monarchist, Ludendorff ’s young man, he was called. In November 1918 he was among those who founded the right-of-centre German People’s Party. The party was fundamentally opposed to the revolution.

Soon he became its chairman. He became an excellent parliamentarian, much admired for his persuasive skills.

So Jeanne was probably thinking that to come to terms with the socialist-dominated republic while still a monarchist at heart required a momentous internal struggle.

I tried this out on her.

“Oh you are so clever, Hermann,” she said, giving my left shoulder a little squeeze.” That’s exactly what I was thinking. Of course Beethoven was much younger when he went through his ordeal, when he noticed that he was going deaf. He was in his early thirties.”

I did not want to tell her that I still thought her comparison was odd but there was no point in dwelling on it. I wanted her to talk about Locarno.

“So you were impressed by Stresemann?”

“I was full of admiration. I was told by those who knew him well that he was still a monarchist but that he was a man of reason who understood that the Republic was here to stay and that he had to do everything in his power to make it work. I have nothing good to say about your Kaiser, but I can see that there was nothing boring about him, and, my God, when I read about the republicans who are now running your country and see their photographs in the papers, what a drab, pedestrian, boring lot they are! A bunch of beer bottlers! Compared to them, Stresemann is a giant! He has personality! I understand the opponents of the Republic don’t give him a moment’s peace. That they are absolutely brutal with him. They do not see what he sees — that only through reconciliation can Germany achieve respectability again. That this is a matter of cold, calculating reason. They call him an appeaser. Isn’t that right?”

“Alas, yes. I am amazed how well informed you are. They do not understand that their aims are the same as his, to mitigate the effects of Versailles, to reduce it piece by piece until it becomes ancient history, but he grasps that this can be done by diplomacy only.”

I was becoming increasingly aware that, after all, her bed was perhaps not the most appropriate location for such highlevel political talk.

“Don’t you think we should discuss these things tomorrow and go to sleep?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she shot back. “Never procrastinate! I am wide awake. This is the time and place!”

“Just as you wish,” I laughed.

So we continued. There was no point wasting time telling her things she obviously knew as well as I did, that for Germany diplomacy could only work if German representatives sat down with their former adversaries as equals. This could not be considered while the war continued in another form, while the French where occupying the Rhineland and the Ruhr. Also, German reparation payments first had to be rationalized.

The psychological moment came on February 9, 1925. On that day the French press reported the sensational, totally unexpected news that the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann had proposed a security pact between Germany, France and Belgium, to be guaranteed by England and Italy, outlawing any attempt to change the current borders between them by force. That would mean, among other things, that Germany would give up, once and for all, its historic claim on Alsace and Lorraine. At first, the Quai d’Orsay did not believe it. Mistrust of Germany had become endemic. It took them four months to reply. The British, too, were cool, The conference did not take place until October, in Locarno, a small Swiss resort at the northern end of Lago Maggiore, which up to then was little known.

“It is a lovely place, Hermann. Have you been there?’

“I only went through it once on my way for a brief holiday in Ascona, a favourite for artists and writers — and pacifists.”

“So you probably don’t know the charming city hall, where the conference was held. So there they sat, on one side Stresemann and the German chancellor Hans Luther, and opposite them our delegation, headed by Aristide Briand, the foreign minister, with his walrus mustache, who, thank Heaven, was not as pathologically obsessed with security as his predecessors had been, and my boss’s boss, Philippe Berthelot, who was just extricating himself from a major scandal connected with the Industrial Bank of China, in which not he but his brother was involved. The British delegation was led by their new foreign minister Austen Chamberlain, widely regarded as pro-French and anti-German, and given to long-winded speeches, in contrast to Briand who was succinct, amiable and ironic. I thought Stresemann struck just the right note of relaxed seriousness in his speeches.”

“I suppose this must have been a great moment for him,” I mused.

“Oh yes. The first time that a German faced his former enemies not as the accused in the dock, or as a recalcitrant debtor, nor or as a petitioner, but as an equal. This meant the war was really over, once and for all. The conference had been called as a result of his initiative, to examine a proposal of his from which all of Europe would benefit, even though the future of Germany’s eastern borders was still to be discussed. And everybody knew that Stresemann’s initiative had come under furious attack from his opponents at home, that he was risking his political life. Maybe, in view of the fate of another foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, not only his political life. He had real courage. I kept humming the main theme of the Eroica as I listened to them.”

This time I gave her left shoulder a little squeeze.

“Stresemann did not only have courage,” she went on, “but he was also a strategic genius. The conference was winding down, but there were still a number of difficult topics to be resolved. So he hired a motor boat for a cruise on Lake Maggiore for all the major conference participants to resume the conference on board and told the captain not to return until he gave him the signal — that is, not until all the topics had been resolved to his satisfaction. The boat was called Orange Blossoms.

“They did not return until late in the evening. I can’t swear to it, but Briand exclaimed as they landed, ‘Thank God we’re home. I don’t know how many more concessions I would have made if the cruise had taken even longer.”

AN EXCUSE FOR WRITING ABOUT RICHARD STRAUSS AND THOMAS MANN

Erwin Herzberg’s Feuilleton in the Frankfurter Zeitung, July 29, 1927 (clipped from the newspaper)

The municipal planners of the exhibition deserve our collective gratitude for inviting Richard Strauss to Frankfurt to conduct six of his operas. It is indeed a fitting climax to the Summer of Music. The world honours him, as it should, as Germany’s leading composer. No doubt many of those assembled in the Opernhaus breathed a sigh of relief that at last they were hearing agreeably accessible music.

At the turn of the century, the Wagnerians in Bayreuth thought Elektra and Salome had polluted the opera stage forever. Siegfried Wagner, speaking of Strauss’s use of the orchestra, said his father would turn in his grave if he knew. The sounds Richard Strauss asked his players to make, he said, “seem to be have been composed during attacks of feverish delirium.” He was referring specifically to the requirement that the violinists, when so requested, touch “the poor strings” upside down, with the wood of their bows, rather than the hair. This was at the fin de siècle when, as a young and sardonic anarchist, he was the foremost representative of international modernist decadence.

In 1911 the Rosenkavalier was a return to tradition. One was not surprised that this opera was deplored by Stravinsky who never had any use for Strauss and blasts him still as the master of “triumphant banality.” All his operas should be sent to purgatory, Stravinsky says. “Ariadne evokes in me the desire to scream.” The Rosenkavalier upset some people for non-musical reasons — the Kaiserin, for example. The empress took exception, in the opening scene, to the rumpled double bed at the centre of the stage and to the post-coital duet between the two lovers, a young single man, sung by a soprano, and a mature lady, married, a mezzo-soprano. The Kaiserin would have been even more upset if she had noticed that the short overture depicted a sexual climax.

Who is the real, essential Richard Strauss? Can one tell from the subjects he chooses for his compositions?

In the early tone poems, and in the opera Feuersnot, Strauss, himself a rebel, orchestrated a rebellion against Philistines. Elektra and Salome were deliberate shockers. The Sinfonia Domestica, on the other hand, celebrated the joys of bourgeois family life. The Rosenkavalier was a touching meditation on morality and mortality in a style deliberately reminiscent of Figaro, and included, among others, a gross character driven by lust and greed. Ariadne auf Naxos is a dream-opera, a playful combination of the French eighteenth century and Greek mythology. Intermezzo a portrait of himself and his family. Die Frau ohne Schatten, a quasisurrealist, many-layered, moralistic fairy tale, deliberately post-Wagnerian and suggestive of The Magic Flute.

This array suggests admirable diversity, rich imagination and high European cultivation. Strauss’s music is as original and personal as that of Schumann and Brahms. He has prodigious musical intelligence and inventiveness, and a remarkable gift for melody and for expressing tenderness, as all of us who treasure his Lieder know. Moreover, he has a special facility for writing for female voices, and it has been remarked that his operas are sprinkled with strong women who dominate their men. This may be a reflection of Strauss’s own relation to his adored wife, Pauline, his formidable partner in an exemplary marriage, a singer herself, whose worldly sense of business is the topic of many amiable anecdotes among musicians. (“Richard! Sit down! Compose!”)

Until 1914 Strauss worked with great ease and, as far as we know, without any unusual inner struggle. His friend and competitor Gustav Mahler thought there was something hard and cold in his personality. No doubt others felt differently. After 1914 he had greater difficulties composing. When labouring on Die Frau ohne Schatten he often doubted his ability to do justice to the beauty of his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic libretto, and he was gravely dissatisfied with himself. He never lacked courage and he was a gambler from the beginning. What a gamble that blood-curdling sex-and-violence horror-opera Salome was! It outraged the Kaiser but was a box office success. “I am sorry that Strauss composed this,” the Kaiser was reported to have said. ”Naturally, I am very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage.” Strauss often told this story, adding, “Thanks to the damage, I was able to build myself a villa in Garmisch.”

Audiences always liked Strauss better than the critics. Many of us heard stories for years about his lovable habit, during intermission, of taking a pack of cards out of his tails’ pocket and playing a round of skat with kindred gamblers in the orchestra.

And what about his politics? His philosophy of life may have been expressed in his early opera Guntram, which opposed the “beautiful dream” of liberal humanity. “The laws of my mind determine my philosophy of life,” Guntram sang. None of his operatic subjects was as political as Mozart’s prerevolutionary Figaro or Beethoven’s anti-authoritarian Fidelio. Though Bavarian in origin and European in scope, he adapted quickly to the Kaiser’s Berlin. However, the sardonic-anarchist strain in him persisted until 1921, when he proposed to the astute and influential Berlin critic Alfred Kerr the idea of a political operetta, set against the chaos of post-war Germany and revolving around a composer who carries on love affairs with conservatory students. Nothing came of it, perhaps because it approached Weimar culture from a point of view unattractive to Kerr. Later, Strauss met Mussolini several times — he was not the only respectable German who did — and seemed to have shared with Mussolini a distaste for modernism. By then he had turned his back on the Weimar Republic and moved to Vienna, where, in 1919, he accepted the position of artistic director of the Hofoper. For a Bavarian, Vienna at any time, but particularly at this time, was more congenial than Berlin.

As I was strolling through the exhibition this morning humming one of the Rosenkavalier waltzes — I had attended the performance the night before — I saw in the Wagner room the back of a tall and slightly stooped middle-aged man in a welltailored brown suit scrutinizing the first edition of Tannhäuser. I was sure it was Thomas Mann. I have never met him but I had seen many photographs of him even before I heard him read from The Magic Mountain at the university a few weeks ago. I had been thinking about him, for some mysterious reason, during the performance, wondering why in the many essays by him, and the dozens of articles about him, and the interviews with him I had read, I could not recall a single instance when he told us what he thought of Richard Strauss. So I did some research and found three references. In 1895, when Mann was twenty, he named Strauss as one of his favourite composers, but in 1909 he expressed his astonishment when a magazine nominated him as the “the king of German music.” In 1911 he congratulated Hofmannthal on his “enchanting” libretto for the Rosenkavalier, “so light and graceful,” in contrast to the four hours of noisy and turbulent music, including the “anachronistic waltzes,” which he said drowned out the exquisite text. He should have assumed, I thought, that Hofmannsthal and Strauss were friends. This struck me as an uncharacteristically tactless observation.

There is no record of Thomas Mann and Richard Strauss ever meeting each other, although for some years they were near neighbours in Munich.

Thomas Mann is profoundly musical and often said that if he had not become a writer he would have become a composer. He once wrote to Bruno Walter that if he had, he would compose like César Franck. He had opinions about many of the major artists on the scene and often touched on musical subjects.

But as I stood there in the Wagner room, the question arose in my mind whether I would dare to accost the great man and ask him what he thought of Richard Strauss. I would, of course, first identify myself. He probably knew my name, from having read my feuilletons. Perhaps we could go to the café around the corner and have a cup of coffee together. Just as I was about to say something the man turned around.

He was one of the clarinetists in the symphony orchestra.

So that was that. I now have no choice but to speculate on the subject without having had a chance to put a direct question to him. But before going out on a limb I must say something about my attitude toward Thomas Mann. Many of my left-wing friends take a jaundiced view of his politics, which, however ambivalent, qualified and oscillating, must be labelled conservative. In early 1918 he published a book of reflections — Reflections of an Unpolitical Man — in which he supported the war Germany was waging against shallow liberal civilizations in the name of German Kultur. It was a book-length argument with his left-wing brother, Heinrich, also a novelist. But in 1921 Thomas Mann came out in favour of the Republic. Since then he has repeatedly declared that there had merely been a change of emphasis and that, in any case, it was not he who had changed but the world. Whatever my friends — and I, for that matter — think of his politics, I consider him a unique storyteller and a perceptive and profound analyst of ideas in the twentieth century.

So what about his attitude toward Strauss’s operas? At first glance one key would be the comment we have — that to Mann the music of the Rosenkavalier sounded heavy and ponderous in relation to the text. A second glance would reveal a deeper explanation. Since Strauss is indisputably the most successful composer of German operas in the twentieth century, he must be compared to his predecessor, Richard Wagner. In Mann’s view, the two should not be mentioned in the same breath. Quite apart from the relative quality of the music, which was hard to articulate in words, Wagner, as an artist, innovator and thinker, had a depth, significance and consistent seriousness entirely lacking in Strauss. Wagner was a giant, Strauss — to Mann — an immensely gifted but superficial, facile, hollow and tasteless opportunist.

This brings me to The Magic Mountain, a subject entirely relevant to this discussion of composers. Mann consciously approached his novel as though he was writing a symphony, with elaborate counterpoint and Wagnerian Leitmotifs that he described as “the magic formula that works both ways, that links the past with the future and the future with the past.” We can assume, even if he never said so himself, that he would regard The Magic Mountain as a model of what a work of art should be.

I happen to agree with his judgement.

It began as a short story. In 1912 Mann’s wife was suffering from a lung complaint, not a serious one. But it was considered necessary for her to spend six months at a high-altitude tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos in the Swiss Alps. He visited her there for three weeks, in the spring. After ten days, one afternoon, sitting on the balcony in damp weather, he caught a troublesome bronchitis. He consulted the doctors — nowhere were they more available. It was considered he had a “moist spot” in the lung and was advised to stay for six months. If he had followed the advice, the experience would have changed the course of his life as it did that of Hans Castorp, the ordinary young engineer of good family from Hamburg who became the central figure of The Magic Mountain and who had received the same diagnosis and stayed for seven years, having arrived there for no reason other than to visit his cousin.

Instead of following the advice, however, Mann wrote The Magic Mountain — two thick volumes — which took him, off and on, twelve years. He had begun it in 1912, but during the war put it aside while writing the Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.

Very soon after he had arrived at the sanatorium, the mixture of death and lightheadedess he observed struck him as a suitable background for a humorous companion piece to his novella Death in Venice. It would be about the same length.

Thomas Mann is most at ease when he can split the world into opposites and then mediate between them. This ambivalence enables him to accept and reject, to love and hate, at the same time. From it he derives the ironical detachment that characterizes his art and enables him to stand back from his characters and look at them with dry amusement. The most important of his opposites is spirit and nature. By intensifying the conflict between man’s spirit and his nature, disease “may recommend itself,” he says, as a “highly dignified human phenomenon.” Is man not more noble, he asks, the more estranged he is from nature, that is, the more diseased he is? When, in Death in Venice, an epidemic threatens Gustav Aschenbach, he secretly welcomes it and disregards the many warnings he receives. Similarly, Hans Castorp is soon drawn into the community of the sick and is strangely reluctant to make an effort to regain his health. Moreover, in the selfindulgent luxury of the enchanted mountain, he soon loses his sense of time — time and its relation to music form one of the many themes of the novel — and his sense of reality generally. What matters to those down in the valley becomes more and more remote. Talk and ideas dominate him.

Once he started, Mann soon discovered that he was writing a pedagogical novel, a Bildungsroman, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a novel of initiation. To friends he wrote that it was actually a parody of a Bildungsroman and that he was trying to present death as a comic figure.

The new experience of the power of ideas was overwhelming for Castorp. He became the target of an increasingly bitter battle for his soul between the engaging, loquacious, progressive Italian humanist Lodovico Settembrini and the unprepossessing, witty, acid-tongued, sardonic half-Jewish Jesuit Leo Naphta, a radical reactionary with a razor-sharp mind. For Naphta, liberalism was a dangerous illusion. The disputations between the two had been foreshadowed in Mann’s Reflections, but had he not got his self-analysis — brought about by the war — off his chest in that book, the Settembrini-Naphta dialogues would no doubt have been overburdened with topical references to the war and would have culminated in arguments for and against the Weimar Republic. For that reason, the two antagonists could concentrate on timeless universals.

As was likely in a pedagogical novel, the inexperienced Castorp was also introduced to the theory and practice of love. The lady entrusted with this task was the exotic French-Russian Madame Clawdia Chauchat, who had the attractive high cheekbones of a Tatar princess. The consummation of their passion took place after the inebriated celebration of carnival. Even the doctor-in-charge wore a funny hat. In the spirit of carnival, the love making was conducted in French, like a mask, to suspend the sense of responsibility, Castorp said, which he had only when he spoke his own language. The picture of Madame Chauchat’s X-ray, which she gave to him as a present, triggered in him ecstatic raptures. The morning after, she left for her home on the other side of the Ural mountains, because, so she said, the doctors could not help her any more. However, she returns later in the novel, on the arm of the white-haired, harddrinking Mynheer Peeperkorn, an immensely rich Dutchman who has trouble finishing a sentence and is the very incarnation of virile vitality. At the very end of the novel he takes poison.

Nowhere does the life-death opposition appear more dramatically than in “Snow,” the climactic chapter toward the end of the book. On a solitary skiing expedition begun when the sun was shining Castorp is caught in an unexpected, violent snowstorm, loses his way, eventually finds shelter in an abandoned shed and falls asleep. His dream is a death-experience, described at great length in extraordinary detail. Castorp wakes up, having finally conquered his sympathy with death in the name of life, goodness and love.

Thomas Mann never intended the novel to describe the world as it was, or as it is. It is more abstract than concrete, more like a leisurely, evocative piece of music than a work of literary realism, in spite of the rich abundance of memorable and believable characters and innumerable and often amusing details.

It ended not in a redeeming C-major chord but slowly faded out as we heard — since the time is 1914 — the rumbling of distant thunder.