MONTREUX–BERLIN–AMERONGEN: Harry Kessler is in a bookshop in Montreux, Switzerland, when he hears the news. An old German lady wanders into the shop in a state of some excitement. The counter-revolution has begun in Berlin, she splutters: Hindenburg is to be head of state.
Harry rushes to the newspaper displays. It is a Saturday. There is little fresh from Germany; but at first glance it looks as if a coup has taken place in Berlin. A Prussian nationalist politician called Wolfgang Kapp–known for his links to the old regime, Russian émigrés and the Freikorps–has declared himself Chancellor. Telephoning Zurich, Harry learns that several leading centrist German politicians have been arrested and the Social Democrats have called a general strike. The country seems on the brink of civil war. Foreign intervention cannot be ruled out. Harry strongly suspects Ludendorff’s involvement.
In Berlin, Kapp’s troops have no difficulty taking over government buildings. Ebert’s ministers flee to Dresden. A quick-thinking civil servant is said to have absconded with as many government stamps as possible to prevent the impostor Chancellor from issuing official-looking decrees.
In Amerongen, Wilhelm calls for champagne. Surely it is only a matter of time before he is summoned back. He always knew his people would do the right thing in the end.
PRANGINS, LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: Wilhelm is not the only Emperor who thinks that 1920 may be the year of his restoration. Charles Habsburg is no less expectant.
Charles’s hopes rest on the Hungarian Admiral Horthy, a guest at Charles and Zita’s wedding in 1911 and a man who, with tears in his eyes, swore his personal loyalty to the Habsburg cause in 1918 even as the imperial family fled Vienna. Now that Horthy has re-established order in Budapest, surely it is only a matter of time before a full-scale restoration takes place.
Yet something is not quite right. Charles issues royal proclamations to his Hungarian subjects from Prangins, sending them on to Horthy for publication. For some inexplicable reason, however, the admiral decides these proclamations are best kept secret. Charles sends letters asking Horthy when, in his estimation, would be the most propitious moment for his return to the royal palace in Budapest. Horthy replies evasively, or not at all.
The Habsburg family keep themselves afloat selling their jewellery. Some rubies are sold in January, a jewel-encrusted hairpin in March.
AMERONGEN–BERLIN: The situation in the German capital turns out to be more complicated than Wilhelm imagined. The coup has stalled.
On the one hand, Kapp’s putsch cannot be easily put down. The army high command is unwilling to order troops to open fire, fearing that the soldiers will refuse to shoot Freikorps comrades they have fought with to rid Munich of the Bolsheviks, crush a Polish rising in Silesia and defend German interests in the Baltic. On the other hand there is no evidence of widespread popular support for Kapp. His coup is more bluster than substance.
A young American diplomat whose weekend plans to visit Warsaw are spoiled by the events expects the government back in charge before long. ‘If you want a tame revolution instead of the opera,’ he writes to his friend, ‘you may have to come soon.’
CORK, CO. CORK, IRELAND: ‘Thomas MacCurtain prepare for death’, reads the letter to the new Lord Mayor of Cork and local IRA commandant: ‘You are doomed’. A few days later, armed men with blackened faces enter his home. ‘All right, I’ll be out’, the Lord Mayor says as he appears on the landing, his trousers quickly pulled on, his shirt half open. He is killed in front of his wife.
Though the British authorities in Dublin blame dissident republicans–the threatening note is on Dáil notepaper–a local jury in Cork places the blame for the murder at the feet of the British government. The evidence is circumstantial. The killers are said to have spoken with English accents.
The police do not bother to investigate. The law is crumbling. British civilian administration is halfway to collapse. The hunters have become the hunted.
BERLIN: Coups, like revolutions, depend on momentum: either they establish themselves before anyone can crush them or they fail. The Kapp putschists hoped their action in Berlin would spark copycat uprisings across Germany. Within days, it is clear the would-be masters of Germany’s counter-revolution are alone.
A messenger sent from Berlin to Munich to try and enlist high-level army support in Bavaria is met with frosty rejection. No one wants to risk association with a failed coup. Except the desperate. Encouraged by an officer in the army’s propaganda department, two informal emissaries fly to Berlin to see if some kind of link can nonetheless be established between the putschists in the capital and like-minded circles in Munich.
They travel in disguise, as a paper merchant and his accountant visiting Berlin on business. Dietrich Eckart, whose nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda Kapp once supported financially, plays the paper merchant. The role of junior accountant goes to the mangy field-runner, who dons a Lenin-style fake beard. Terrified of heights and unused to flying, Adolf throws up constantly on the bumpy ride north over the frozen forests of Bavaria. By the time he and Dietrich get to Berlin, it is obvious Kapp’s coup cannot possibly succeed. They travel home by train.
ISTANBUL–ANKARA–SAN REMO, ITALY: A guerrilla campaign has begun against the French in the south, and the Greeks in the west. Mustafa Kemal has become the focus of nationalist resistance in Ankara. The newly elected parliament in Istanbul, filled with nationalists, stakes out the borders it expects from the final peace. It declares its opposition to any foreign encroachment. The Ottoman Empire seems to be slipping from submission to resistance.
British soldiers shut down the Ottoman parliament. High-ranking opponents of the occupation–and those intellectuals and journalists deemed a danger to it–are detained and shipped off to Malta. The Sultan is powerless to prevent it. He seems dreamily unaware of the consequences of these events for his own prestige. Cocooned from reality by the thick carpets of the palace, he declares the Turkish people but a flock of sheep, and himself their eternal, divinely appointed shepherd. When his choice of a new Grand Vizier is disputed, Vahdettin responds that ‘if I wanted I could give the office of grand vizier to the Greek or the Armenian Patriarch, or the Chief Rabbi’.
In Ankara, Kemal follows developments by telegraph. He issues a circular ordering that there be no retribution against non-Muslims for the British action. Then he issues another proclamation. ‘The forcible occupation of Istanbul today has destroyed the seven-centuries-old existence and sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire’, reads the text. ‘Consequently the Turkish nation is compelled today to defend its rights, its independence and its entire future.’ It is not an appeal to Ottoman loyalty but to the Turkish people. The implication is clear: that legitimacy derives from the nation, not from the dynasty. Nationalists now flock to Ankara not just to escape arrest, but to form a new national assembly, free from foreign influence. The Istanbul parliament is dissolved.
The Sultan, in his religious role as Caliph, orders a fetva to be issued against Kemal and his associates. They are declared infidels. Ankara’s senior mufti responds with his own fetva, backed by the clerisy of Anatolia, declaring Vahdettin a hostage of hostile powers. Revolution is in the air. But Kemal must be careful. He is not a general now. As a politician–and diplomat–he must weave and wind, he must charm and convince. Turkey is a conservative country. At the opening of the new national assembly in Ankara, Kemal swears–in the name of God and the Prophet–that he is no rebel to the Sultan-Caliph. He simply wishes Turkey to avoid the fate of India and Egypt, both under the thumb of foreigners. The next day, a fraternal greeting is sent from Ankara to Moscow, suggesting cooperation against the common imperialist enemy. Mustafa must be everything to everyone: radical, traditionalist, conservative, revolutionary, loyalist, Bolshevik.
Meanwhile, a world away, in a seaside town in Italy, representatives of the Allied powers meet to finalise the shape of the peace they wish to impose on the Ottoman Empire. It has taken them this long. For the Arab lands, the powers agree a combination of Arab kingdoms under foreign protection and a series of League of Nations mandates. The French take Syria (including Lebanon). The British are granted Mesopotamia and Palestine, where their mandate includes the promise of a Jewish national homeland. Anatolia is to be partitioned. The Ottoman Empire is to become the Hungary of the Middle East, a shadow of its former self, weak and surrounded.
Drawing lines on a map is one thing, policing vast territories another. Jerusalem has already been shaken by violence between Arabs and Zionist Jews, newly arrived from Europe, schooled in the need for self-defence by Russian pogroms, and determined to carve out their own destiny in dusty Palestine. Tribal revolt is brewing in Mesopotamia. In Syria, a national congress echoes the Istanbul parliament in declaring its independence. Considerable numbers of men and guns will be needed to quell all these trouble-spots at the same time.
Anatolia is one problem amongst many. Only the Greeks seem to have the appetite for it.
MOSCOW: The bloom is coming off the old revolutionary dream. And it is the workers who are unhappy now. There are strikes across the country.
Down with the commissar! That is a charge heard more often now. The workers’ state seems to have grown new bosses, not much different from the old. The tendency from collective decision-making to one-man rule is hardening across state, party and factory floor. The old Soviets have been hollowed out; party officials run the show these days. They are the ones who make appointments and issue orders. Very few of them are proper workers. And who guards against corruption within the party? Why, the party itself, of course. (This is one of Comrade Stalin’s jobs, the omnipresent party mechanic.) In everything, power seems to flow one way now: down, not up.
Perhaps this was right for wartime, but is it really needed now the civil war is over? A simple question of good management, Lenin explains. Nothing personal. ‘The will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary.’ He wrote about this in 1918. Was no one paying attention? Trotsky wants to go further. Workers should be treated as if they were in the army–conscripted into labour battalions, made to follow orders and then shot if they desert. They ‘must be appointed, rerouted and dispatched in exactly the same way that soldiers are’. The workers must grasp that the party understands their interests better than they can themselves. The man who joined the Bolsheviks so late now demands absolute submission to party rule. To some this all looks like a new serfdom, a dictatorship of bureaucrats.
WASHINGTON DC: A final vote in the US Senate. American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles is dead. ‘The President strangled his own child’, one Senator remarks. Next day’s papers agree. ‘If I were not a Christian’, Woodrow remarks, ‘I think I should go mad.’
ACROSS GERMANY: In the chaos surrounding Kapp’s coup, leftist radicals spy an opportunity to rekindle the workers’ council movement and return Germany to the path of full-on revolution.
The Communists demand that the strikes first launched in resistance to the putsch are now used to launch Germany leftward towards Bolshevism. They are sickened at the idea of negotiations between the putschists and the Social Democratic government. ‘The strike must continue until the clique of officers have been totally defeated, and until the workers and employees have been armed against any possible further aggression’, reads a Communist Party statement.
In western Germany, the industrial Ruhr region is convulsed with political and social unrest. In the city of Duisburg, where the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers meet, a workers’ council proclaims the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The mines are closed. A volunteer Red army is formed. Fighting breaks out. The region is spinning out of control again. After attempts to break the deadlock through political negotiation fail, Freikorps units join the regular army to restore order.
In the south, the conservative right in Bavaria present their region as a bulwark against revolution. While Kapp flees to Sweden, Ludendorff moves to Munich. The city that once seemed the capital of Marxist radical chic now becomes a magnet for Europe’s counter-revolutionaries: militarist Prussians and Baltic Germans who feel that Berlin has betrayed them, and White Russians who dream of a return to power in Petrograd.
The left bank of the Rhine remains under Allied occupation.
PARIS: Breton’s mother turns up unannounced in Paris at the end of March, brandishing a newspaper account of the various Dadaist japes her son has been getting up to. She issues an ultimatum: either he will give up Dada or his financial support will be stopped. André very nearly buckles. His allowance is cut off the following day.
MUNICH: Around the same time, Adolf finally leaves the army. A party supporter finds him a small, cheaply furnished room to rent. He sleeps late and reads a lot.
One day he talks himself into the home of the former director of the Bavarian Royal Opera House, a Baron. Hitler turns up wearing gaiters, a large hat, and carrying a riding crop in one hand, dressed as his idea of a Bavarian country gentleman. He sits awkwardly in his chair, not quite able to relax. He stays for more than an hour–well beyond the time he is welcome. He tries to make conversation but ends up making a speech. The noise brings the servants rushing in, thinking their master is being attacked.
SEBASTOPOL, CRIMEA: Following all the other commanders who have come and gone in Russia’s kaleidoscopic civil war, General Denikin decides to leave the scene. The Western powers have abandoned him. His forces have been pushed back to the shores of the Black Sea. An evacuation to Crimea is a disaster. There is much intriguing amongst the generals. There have been a number of suicides among the rank and file. ‘God has not given my troops victory’, Denikin writes.
After being blessed with an icon of the Virgin Mary, a new and much younger soldier, the forty-two-year-old General Wrangel, takes over as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Southern Russia. The position is quite hopeless. There is hardly any coal or oil for the ships, no horses for the cavalry, no petrol for the aeroplanes and no proper equipment for the troops. ‘I have shared the honour of its victories with the Army’, Wrangel writes, ‘and cannot refuse to drink from the cup of humiliation with it now.’
The general–tall, aristocratic, the very model of the dashing White officer, a man most often seen in a Circassian tunic and fur hat, with a string of bullets around his neck–sets about trying to reform those areas still under White Russian control in order to turn them into a solid base from which to continue the war against the Bolsheviks. At the same time, he sets out to win over the French and the British, to persuade them that he is not as hopeless as his predecessor (nor as anti-Semitic). ‘I’m struggling’, Wrangel writes to his wife Olga, already in exile in Istanbul. He thanks her for the icon she has sent him. He is so busy, so tired. ‘I go to bed at two or two thirty in the morning and wake up at 7’, he writes. ‘I only have a rest at lunch time and dinner time, but even then, I’m distracted incessantly.’ He travels up to the front: ‘If only God helped me and gave me the time to finish the job’.
COLÓN, REPUBLIC OF PANAMA–BOSTON–PHILADELPHIA: The Black Star Line’s Yarmouth is renamed the Frederick Douglass, in honour of the great American abolitionist and former slave. It sails, quite slowly, through the Caribbean, meeting with local adulation (and British colonial suspicion) wherever it weighs anchor.
There is little business value to the voyage. There are few cargoes to pick up or drop off. Passenger numbers vary hugely. Though there are hints that Cuban sugar exporters would be prepared to switch to the Black Star Line if enough good ships were available, the current voyage has more the character of a royal progress than a serious commercial venture.
In Cuba, the President throws a party for the crew at the presidential palace. In Colón, Panama, thousands greet the Frederick Douglass, carrying baskets of fruit and vegetables as gifts to the heroic (and somewhat dazed) arrivals, while five hundred black workers cram aboard to escape the appalling conditions of servitude under which they suffer in the country. In Kingston, Jamaica, the captain decides to take seven hundred tons of ripe coconuts on board in the hope that their prompt arrival in America might allow the Black Star Line to turn at least some minor profit from the ship’s Caribbean peregrination.
But Garvey abrogates the commercial imperative to get the cargo home as fast as possible and orders the Frederick Douglass to make a courtesy call in Costa Rica instead. The ship is then sent to call at Boston and Philadelphia–where UNIA meetings are being planned–rather than head straight for New York. By the time the vessel arrives at its final destination, the coconuts are spoiled.
Back in the United States, Garvey works up his audiences with fresh vistas of black empowerment, with the Black Star Line as a symbol and advert of that process. The impression of successful enterprise trumps the reality. His self-confident self-help message is being heard. In Boston, Garvey talks of how it is the human will which is the deciding factor in the history of the world these days. Power is a psychological question, he says. Whites are born with the consciousness of what they can achieve; blacks have been told that they can do nothing. And therein lies the perniciousness of those who talk down the Black Star Line, he says. Naysayers, black or white, are as bad as each other. (A cartoon in the Negro World suggests that ‘white interests’ are the puppet-masters behind some so-called black community leaders.) It is self-belief that matters most. That is what Garvey is there to provide.
His own self-belief is not in doubt. His oratory is grandiose. His vision scopes the widest horizons of the future. His speeches are immoderate, intemperate affairs. In the last war, Garvey tells his supporters, the Kaiser wanted a place in the sun. ‘Now we also want a place in the sun’, he proclaims, noting that if sixty million Germans could last five years of war, ‘four hundred million ought to be able to do it a little longer’. Africa must be reclaimed. A race war must be fought and won.
The British were Roman slaves once, Garvey notes, and now they rule the world. He imagines a new black aristocracy arising from the present struggle, a Duke of the Nigerias and an Earl of Lagos ennobled by the fight ahead just as Arthur Wellesley became the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo. Garvey lacerates the lies of whites who have led blacks to believe they must serve and never rule. In front of a crowd of six thousand in Philadelphia, he promises that ‘no power on earth can stop the great onward rush of the UNIA’. ‘The black men of the world have fought the last war for others’, he says. The next war will be one for freedom.
He promises a convention will be held in New York in August to elect a leader for the black race. Garvey may be bombastic and he may be vain, but to many blacks he tells it like it is. He makes them proud. He does not pull his punches. He stands up for what he believes in. He is willing to shake things up–and maybe that is just what is needed.
WASHINGTON DC: In the spring of 1920, the League fight over, Woodrow Wilson meets his cabinet for the first time since the summer of 1919.
The President looks tired. He seems distracted. His voice is scratchy. As the meeting drags on, Woodrow’s doctor looks meaningfully at the door to indicate things should be drawn to a close. It is Edith who finally breaks things up, bustling into the room and suggesting it is time to go. ‘This is an experiment, you know’, she tells the cabinet as she ushers the men out.
Woodrow hears about Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s raids for the first time. It is unclear how much he understands of them. He pronounces himself neither in favour, nor against. He asks only that Palmer not let the country ‘see red’.
MOSCOW: Vladimir protests at the fuss everyone is making over his birthday. Still, he does not stop them, all the same.
The newspapers are full of stories of peasants going to visit the Kremlin, and Vladimir greeting them like a father. Trotsky, travelling across Russia trying to sort out the railway network, writes an article declaring his old rival the unquestioned leader of the proletariat, comparing him favourably to Marx. The poet Mayakovsky composes a poem honouring the great leader: ‘like a bomb the name explodes: Lenin! Lenin! Lenin!’ (Vladimir hates Mayakovsky.) Not just one but two celebratory biographies are published. Two hundred thousand copies are printed.
Celebrations are organised by the party leadership. The Georgian bank-robber makes a speech praising Vladimir for his modesty, his willingness to correct his mistakes. The birthday boy arrives after all the speeches are over and then scolds the party, warning it against getting a big head. That only contributes further to the growing cult around Lenin, a man who virtually no one had heard of three years ago: Lenin the simple toiler in the Kremlin, Lenin the people’s servant (no grand titles, please!), even Lenin the worker (despite his minor aristocratic heritage).
There are other matters he has to think about: such as the imminent arrival of an eclectic delegation of British leftists–a Labour parliamentarian, a trades unionist, a famous suffragette, a philosopher, a Quaker–sent to investigate true conditions in Soviet Russia. The purpose of their trip is to help the British left take a view on the issue which has split Europe’s socialist movement in two: whether or not to join the Comintern. Anticipating difficulties with some of these mushy-minded middle-of-the-road types, Vladimir instructs their interpreters to stick to them like glue. He secretly proposes a newspaper campaign to discredit the least pro-Soviet and a variety of old tricks–the usual planted questions–so the whole event can be stage-managed for propaganda. He has not forgotten the lessons of Potemkin.
There is bad news at the end of April. Marshal Piłsudski’s Poles cut a deal with nationalist Ukrainians and invade Red Ukraine, beating Lenin to the punch he had intended to land on them. A city for a city: Polish troops will recapture Kiev on their behalf and, in return, the Ukrainians will renounce their claim to the mixed city of Lviv and the surrounding province of eastern Galicia. The Red Army is in retreat again. Trotsky calls for ‘drastic measures’. The Poles advance with barely a shot fired. The birthday celebrations sour.
DOORN, THE NETHERLANDS: Count Bentinck sighs deeply. The wonderful day has at last arrived: Wilhelm and his entourage move out of Amerongen and into their new house down the road.
Wilhelm’s personal taste is in ample evidence at Huis Doorn. He surrounds himself with family treasures. ‘Busts, paintings and etchings of Fredrick the Great, Grosspapa and Papa’ line the walls, he writes enthusiastically, ‘and pictures of the Prussian army in the moments of its greatest triumphs’. He even gets his old writing chair back, in the form of a saddle. It is almost as if he were still really Kaiser.
He has already got to work on the estate’s forest over the last few months while overseeing the renovations. Some four hundred and seventy imperially felled logs lie in a pile before the Kaiser and Kaiserin even move in.
WASHINGTON: Mitchell Palmer is an angry man. Most of the alleged dangerous radicals picked up in January have now been released for lack of evidence. The raids are beginning to look like a fiasco. He blames a liberal magazine editor named Louis Post, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, whose department is responsible for enforcing immigration law. He will only issue deportation orders with proof of intent to harm America. Palmer tries to get him impeached.
In April, Palmer publicly warns that he has knowledge of a wave of assassinations to occur on 1 May. Leave is cancelled for the nation’s police forces. Public buildings are put under heavy guard. In Chicago, a further three hundred and sixty suspected radicals are locked up for twenty-four hours as a security measure. Then–nothing happens.
Palmer is made to look foolish. ‘Everybody is laughing at A. Mitchell Palmer’s May Day “revolution”, says the Boston American. During the first step in his impeachment hearings, Post points out that despite the arrest of several thousand supposed radicals in January, only three handguns have been found.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: While nothing much is happening in America, on May Day in the birthplace of the revolution a stupendous agitprop performance takes place on the steps of the former stock exchange in Petrograd.
The world is shown in the state it was before the war, with Kings and Queens feasting up above, and the enslaved masses toiling below, staggering under the weight of huge boulders. A red flag appears and disappears, waved by a solitary agitator. Then August 1914 arrives, to the strains of ‘God Save the King’ and the abandonment of the working classes by its socialist representatives. Now comes 1917, red flags everywhere, the storming of the Winter Palace, peals of joy as a new world is created.
Across Russia, brightly painted agitprop trains spread the gospel of Bolshevism, armed with pamphlets, film projectors and posters. In Moscow, Lenin speaks to Red Army soldiers about to be sent off to Ukraine to fight Piłsudski’s Poles. He calls the rumour that the enemy is on the outskirts of Kiev the ‘sheerest fabrication’, remarking that he was on the telephone to the local Red commander only hours ago.
Kiev falls to the Poles the following day.
VIENNA: Anna Freud and her cousin Mausi are in torment. Summer is fast approaching, the time of year when two twenty-something young girls should be enjoying themselves. But in Vienna there is nothing to do. The shops are empty of goods. The theatres may close at any minute. In January a fuel shortage and a ban on lighting after three in the afternoon prevents any evening entertainment at all for a week.
Then Anna and Mausi hit on an idea. It is healthy, cheap and fun. It is an activity for two, or more, depending on how it is played. It requires only sunlight, something which even the government of Austria cannot ration. They are going to play tennis. But there is one problem. There are no tennis balls in Vienna, or none which Anna and Mausi can afford. Anna composes a letter to Sam in Manchester. ‘I know that it must sound rather bad of us’, she writes, in the perfect script of a schoolteacher, ‘our wanting superfluous things like tennis balls when things are as bad and as serious as they are now.’ But then, ‘there is so very little pleasure to be had for young people in Vienna now.’ She asks Sam to send a dozen balls. But only if they are not more than one pound. Six would do.
Two weeks later Anna countermands her order. It is too frivolous. ‘Mausi and I decided to give up tennis’, she explains.
MUNICH: Adolf hones his speaking technique. He tries out different lines on the disillusioned who gather at party meetings, turning from anti-British remarks to anti-capitalist ones before testing out anti-Bolshevism on his audiences, talking gravely about Russia’s economic collapse and the mass murder of the intelligentsia. Invited to give a talk in Stuttgart, he savages the Versailles Treaty. In Munich, he talks about interest slavery and launches a bitter attack on the British Empire and its subjugation of India.
When he senses the audience drifting away, Adolf shifts gears from a simulacrum of analysis to an accusatory and finally a messianic tone. ‘The day will come’, he exclaims, ‘when the sun will shine through once more.’ He calls for a new kind of leader. ‘We need a dictator’, he says bluntly, ‘who is at the same time a genius’. There are echoes of Mussolini here. Adolf increasingly singles out one root cause for Germany’s ills, something for his audiences to focus on: the Jews. This always seems to get a warm reaction.
Even in Munich’s crowded political market, where politics has become a blood sport, civility is long gone, wild conspiracies find willing believers and the so-called ‘Jewish question’ is widely discussed, the vociferousness of Hitler’s anti-Semitic rants marks him out. Adolf decides not just to ride Munich’s wave of anti-Semitism, but to make himself its most ardent exponent. His fanaticism becomes part of his brand.
A Hitler speech without reference to the Jews is simply not a Hitler speech. Building on a public perception during the war, but without any basis in fact, Adolf denounces German-Jewish soldiers for having shirked their patriotic duty at the front and then conspired to bring about revolution behind it. He accuses Jews of using finance and the media to control society. Some of this is familiar. The Thule Society newspaper, now renamed to take account of its role in the ethno-nationalist völkisch movement as the Völkischer Beobachter, runs excerpts of the Protocols this spring, suggesting it should be published in the millions and made essential reading for patriotic Germans.
When it comes to dealing with this imagined, conspiratorial, ever-present influence Hitler urges followers of the German Workers’ Party–now renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Na-zis–to think strategically about the future. ‘We do not want to be the kind of sentimental anti-Semites who create a pogrom atmosphere’, he tells his followers: ‘we want to grasp at the very root of this malignancy and eradicate it, stump and stalk.’ These slogans become the defining feature of the party, the tools with which to activate the crowds. ‘All means are justified in reaching this goal,’ the mangy field-runner says, ‘even if it means making a pact with the devil himself.’
LONDON: An English version of the Protocols is printed in London, causing quite a stir. The Times does not pronounce on the authenticity of the document. Instead it asks a leading question which resounds amongst its readership. If not true, ‘whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in parts fulfilled, in parts far gone by way of fulfilment?’ The forgery continues its world tour.
BERLIN: Will Einstein stay in Germany, or will he leave? In Germany’s fevered atmosphere, where morality and sound money seem both to have gone up the spout, the question takes on political proportions. Departure might be seen as a betrayal of Germany at its moment of weakness. It might reflect badly on Germany’s Jews.
Yet with a dirty campaign against him, must Einstein just put up with it? He could make more money and have more peace elsewhere: in Britain perhaps, maybe even in America or (worst of all) in France. As much as he loves the beautiful world of German science–and supports it as much as he can by acting as its unofficial representative–there is his own well-being to think about, and that of his family. ‘My situation is like that of a man who is lying in a beautiful bed, tortured by bed bugs’, Albert explains one day. ‘Nevertheless, let us wait and see how things develop.’
In early summer, he departs with Elsa on a Nordic tour, to lecture in Oslo and in Copenhagen.
DEARBORN: Henry Ford is not an educated man, but he is a highly successful businessman. He believes in what he calls ‘facts’.
A fact, Ford writes, is like granite: ‘winter will not freeze it, summer will not melt it, rains will not wash it away’. The key is finding one’s own facts and then sticking to them. Ford is fascinated by theories about what happened in the past, but we are missing the right facts to prove. He is quite taken with the idea that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin did not die in a shoot-out as everyone thinks, but escaped to become a saloon keeper in Texas and then a house painter in Oklahoma. Ford is a superficially inquisitive man, but not discriminating in what he draws on to back up his feelings about things. He believes what he wants to, and takes attempts to persuade him otherwise as propaganda. He is a contrarian who believes in his own truths. He trusts his instincts rather than the views of others. He is primed for conspiracy theories.
Henry Ford’s magazine, the Dearborn Independent, is not making as much money as he would like. It is distributed through his Ford dealerships, and they are everywhere across America, but he is persuaded that an attention-grabbing campaign of some sort might help him to reach a wider readership. In the summer of 1920, Ford’s prejudices and credulity combine with the sharp pen of a journalist and the influence of Ford’s German secretary, well acquainted with the Russian who hawked the Protocols around America two years ago. Henry Ford launches an anti-Semitic campaign on the pages of the Dearborn Independent.
The campaign presents itself as an inquiry into why Jews are persecuted. In pretending to simply ask why this might be, the magazine explores and repeats any anti-Semitic slander it can find. ‘Persecution is not a new experience to the Jew’, says the Independent, ‘but intensive scrutiny of his nature and super-nationality is’. The magazine claims that it is revealing a necessary truth which others want to hide: ‘efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for general discussion’. Anyone disclaiming the conspiracy must clearly be part of it.
Ford’s own brand of anti-Semitism springs from personal experience. He believes that financiers on Wall Street are making things difficult for his business. And everyone knows that Wall Street is run by Jews. He blames the embarrassment of his peace attempts during the war on a Jewish associate. He concludes that the Jews must have wanted the war to continue so as to line their pockets with the profits to be made. And then, of course, there is the popular association of the Jews with Bolshevism. In Ford’s mind, this all seems to fit together.
A hired journalist writes up Ford’s prejudices into long, superficially researched articles, finding new angles when the old ones get tired, playing on concerns about immigration, jobs and terrorism. After a few weeks, the Independent’s campaign is being picked up by other newspapers and magazines, just as planned. The spark has been provided. Now the fire is catching. Disinformation thrives on repetition. In July, the case of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is raised.
Some Jews wonder if Ford himself can be personally involved in spreading such stuff, imagining that someone behind the scenes must be taking advantage of him. A few send in protest telegrams, hoping Ford will realise what is being perpetrated in his name. ‘These articles shall continue’, replies the Independent to one complainant. ‘When you have attained a more tolerable state of mind we shall be happy to discuss them with you.’ The magazine blames Jews for ‘supersensitivity’. The campaign seems to have hit a nerve; the truth must be close at hand.
Ford seems genuinely surprised when, in June, a local rabbi returns a special Model T the car manufacturer gave him recently, with a letter hoping the mogul will realise the ‘enormity of the injury’ he is causing. Ford telephones the rabbi and asks him what is wrong. ‘Has something come between us?’ He seems to think it is a personal matter.
Meanwhile, the campaign continues. Sales of the Independent begin to rise. It all seems to be a great success.
PETROGRAD: Dressed in their oldest clothes–so as not to embarrass their Russian hosts–the British Labour Delegation arrives in Russia. A special train is laid on for them, decorated with red bunting, Communist slogans and pine sprigs. As it crosses the border, the most ardent members of the delegation break out into the Internationale. They have reached the promised land. They have heard so much about the great experiment. At last they can see it for themselves. One of the travellers, the suffragette Ethel Snowden, describes the sensation of peering behind an iron curtain.
ÅBO: John Reed is finally released from his Finnish jail after payment of a fine for smuggling (and a campaign by Louise). Unable to travel to America–the State Department will not issue him a passport–he returns to Petrograd and is put up in the Hotel International to recover from his ordeal. He is not a well man, after being fed on a diet of dried fish. He is much thinner than he used to be. His eyes are sunken.
Further east, in Siberia, after several Cheka interrogations, Maria Bochkareva is executed.
PARIS: Three friends are walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg. They run into a girl one of them knows. She is introduced to the others. ‘I’m not a Dadaist, you know’, Simone Kahn tells André Breton. ‘Neither am I’, André replies, with a smile which suggests that he may or may not be telling the truth.