BERLIN: An Italian arrives in the German capital on a fact-finding trip. Or is it tourism? Benito Mussolini, now one of the most powerful men in Italy, is taken on a guided tour of the city, affirms its title as ‘the world capital of bad taste’ and writes up his observations in Il Popolo d’Italia.
He takes in a play at one of the city’s theatres and marvels at the Germans’ appetite in its restaurants. ‘It’s incredible how much these people eat!’ he writes, half-admiringly. He is impressed by Berlin’s underground railway, and by the apparent prosperity of the city (despite being accosted by a number of war-wounded beggars). He wonders at the Germans claiming that they cannot pay reparations when there are so many motor cars on the street.
Mussolini enjoys being an observer. He hangs around the Brandenburg Gate for half an hour to verify whether it is true, even now, that no one dares go through its central arch–a privilege reserved for the Kaiser–and delightedly concludes that it is. He is unconvinced by claims of republican stability. The current form of German government, he notes, seems to please neither the militarists who want a return to the old regime, nor the extreme left who would like to see the country ruled by workers’ Soviets. The majority accept the republic, maybe–but they certainly do not love it.
As part of his tour Benito visits the imperial palace–a huge, imposing but artistically ‘mediocre’ building, he tells his Italian readers. In one of the rooms hangs a portrait of a King, the canvas slashed with a knife. ‘Bolshevik vandalism’, his guide tells him. Looking at a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm, with his moustache in its full, bristling, wartime glory, Mussolini asks the guide: ‘Do you believe that the Kaiser will come back to this castle?’ ‘Never’, the guide responds: ‘Men like me who spent five years fighting in the war don’t want that man back here.’
On his return to Italy, Benito prepares for the third anniversary of the foundation of the Fascist movement in Milan. There are rallies and marches, like those D’Annunzio used to hold in Fiume. But who cares about D’Annunzio now? Mussolini is the man to watch.
NEW YORK: Edward Bernays reports the latest sales figures of Freud’s lectures in America. Over seven thousand books have been sold.
KORZINKINO VILLAGE, NEAR MOSCOW: Two and a half million Russians are being fed by the American Relief Administration every day. Vladimir decides it is time to strike at another Russian institution.
Plans have been prepared for churches and monasteries to be raided and stripped of their icons, their gold, their crosses. The peasants will be too hungry to protest, Lenin reasons, and the gold and silver can be sold abroad and the money used for electrification and other things (certainly not to buy food, though that will be the excuse). The campaign begins. But there is resistance. Lenin insists it must continue. ‘It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh,’ Lenin writes, ‘that we can (and therefore should) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.’
Resistance will be crushed. The Patriarch will be spared for the moment, but the GPU keeps an eye on his friends and acquaintances. The more priests who are executed, the better, Lenin writes. ‘We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare to even think of any resistance for several decades.’ The letter is to be kept secret, he instructs. No copies.
DOORN: The park around Huis Doorn is looking rather bare from the Kaiser’s tree-chopping exertions this spring. A visitor suggests he take a break. Wilhelm explodes in anger. How dare he! ‘It’s been like this my whole life!’ he shouts. ‘Whenever I’ve had a plan, someone else comes along who claims to know better and tells me to back off… Those times are over’.
When not outside chopping things with an axe, the Kaiser wields his pen instead, writing angry notes in the margins of the slew of war memoirs now being published in Germany. He is livid at how his actions are so misrepresented. Wilhelm’s own memoirs are published that year and slated as a transparent exercise in self-justification–though they sell rather well. His ego is massaged by a visit from his Finnish lady-friend from the previous year. ‘If German women were like Finnish women’, she coos, ‘they would have worked on their husbands to convince them to make sure of Your Majesty’s return to the homeland’.
Surrounded by sycophants, unquestioning old retainers and those who share his conspiratorial world view, the Kaiser sinks deeper into the morass of his own prejudices. People are sensible chaps if they agree with him, and dunces if they do not. Exile strengthens his predispositions to believe what he wants to, and dismiss the rest. He imbibes the latest racist or anti-Semitic tracts from Germany or elsewhere–the works of Henry Ford in particular–with enthusiasm.
On the side, Wilhelm starts writing to a German Princess whose husband has recently died. This will be his secret, he determines. Neither his family nor his entourage are told of the burgeoning epistolary romance. They would probably tell him to stop it, if they knew.
WEXFORD, CO. WEXFORD, IRELAND: ‘Our country is now in a more lawless and chaotic state than it was during the Black and Tan regime’, Michael Collins admits in April. Wherever he goes, roads are blocked and railway lines torn up by those who hate the treaty he has signed. He is heckled when he speaks. The air is thick with recrimination. Would-be assassins weigh up their chances. Intimidation is rife.
In Dublin, a contingent of the anti-treaty IRA occupies the Four Courts, the heart of the Irish legal system, and fortifies it against recapture. ‘We are absolutely independent of Mr de Valera’s political organisation’, their leader claims. De Valera welcomes their defiance nonetheless. He needs their support, he needs their fury. ‘Yours is the faith that moves mountains’, he tells a meeting of his followers, ‘the faith that confounds cowardly reason and its thousand misgivings.’ He treads a delicate path: one moment seeming to support outright insurrection against Michael Collins’s provisional regime, the next proposing national unity–but on his terms. ‘Ireland is yours for the taking’, de Valera urges: ‘Take it.’ So the country slips and slides towards civil war–without quite slithering over into the abyss.
Any historic transition brings a certain amount of disorder, Collins tells an American journalist. ‘In Poland, Germany, Estonia, Finland and in practically all of the European countries that underwent change as the result of the European war,’ he notes, ‘there were many months of fierce civil war which was only put down after vigorous fighting and appalling loss of life.’ Nothing so bad has happened–or will happen–in Ireland: ‘Our methods may be different but the results will be equally satisfactory.’
Neither side wants to take the blame for the fatal, final step towards a civil war. Collins and de Valera meet to try and paper over their divisions and give unity a second chance (and take the fight to the British in the north). Collins is frustrated with his erstwhile friends. ‘We did nothing at the conference yesterday–except talk, talk, all the time’, he writes to Kitty. ‘And the country! But they never think of the country at all–they only think of finding favour for their own little theories, they only think of getting their own particular scheme accepted.’ Nonetheless, in May a deal is struck. An election will be held. Both pro- and anti-treaty sides will participate. An electoral pact between them should mean that the outcome will give both sides roughly the share of the seats in the Dáil that they have currently. A Sinn Féin stitch-up, it is true, but one which keeps the possibility of party unity alive a little longer. (Churchill gets wind of the idea and warns of the ‘worldwide ridicule and reprobation’ such a deal would bring–so far removed from the principles of a democratic, open vote.)
An agreement here, a pact there, a statement somewhere else: Michael Collins has made too many promises to too many different people to keep all of them at bay. His promises are like a house of cards, waiting for a gust of wind to make them collapse. In London, the British worry whether he will ever be strong enough to enforce the treaty terms he signed half a year ago–or whether he intends to dishonour that agreement now, by preparing an Irish constitution which tries to circumvent it. They plan for the worst.
MUNICH: On balance, Munich’s mainstream politicians conclude, it is better not to turn the scoundrel into anything more than he is. Hitler should not inadvertently be turned into a martyr by over-zealous suppression. It is better to ignore him. He is allowed to stay in Bavaria. But the political sages have not reckoned with Hitler’s own view of himself. His martyr complex is fully formed. In the run-up to his thirty-third birthday, it turns into something even grander.
After a few weeks’ absence, Hitler is back in public–giving speeches, choosing enemies, picking fights, slandering all and sundry. The audience in the Bürgerbräukeller laugh at the mention of Bavaria’s current premier, who declared in a recent parliamentary debate that, ‘as a human and as a Christian’, he could not be an anti-Semite. He has got it all wrong. Speaking for himself, Adolf explains that it is because he is a Christian that he must be an anti-Semite. ‘My Christian faith’, he announces gravely, ‘tells me that my master and saviour was a fighter.’
‘We have been called–no, decried–as rabble-rousers’, Hitler tells party members. But what about Jesus Christ? Did he not chase the moneylenders out of the temple? ‘Two thousand years on, I can see the true enormity of His struggle for this world, against Jewish poison,’ Adolf announces, ‘for which He had to bleed on the cross’. Just as Jewish leaders chose to denounce Christ two thousand years ago, Hitler shouts triumphantly, so they are denouncing anti-Semites today. Nothing has changed, the mangy field-runner cries: Jesus Christ was an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser who argued against the worship of money, and the Nazis are just the same.
On Adolf’s birthday, a week or so later, a little surprise party is organised. He is delighted to receive one particularly special present: a German Alsatian dog, a replacement for the little canine friend he lost during the war. The dog is named Wolf. Hitler’s bodyguard takes care of him for a while. There is not enough room for Adolf and his dog in the Führer’s one-bedroom apartment.
PARIS: As his train arrives from Belgium at the Gare du Nord, Albert Einstein is advised by a friendly French policeman that a crowd of journalists is waiting to ambush him. He escapes across the railway tracks and makes it to his hiding place–a fifth-floor flat on the Rue de Humboldt, near Montparnasse–without being intercepted. Albert has been entrapped by journalists too many times. A famous German scientist in Paris cannot be too careful. If his trip is to be a success, he must be disciplined.
As it turns out, Albert has a wonderful time in Paris. He lectures at the Collège de France–in French–to a carefully selected audience. The great Polish-French scientist Marie Curie is there, along with the cream of France’s scientific elite and a former French War Minister. (No Germans are invited.) When, as he puts it, he has trouble ‘extracting from his throat’ a particular French word, he is prompted or else replaces it with an English one. Such liberties are excused, for the French find him nonetheless a captivating speaker, with the far-off look of a mystic seer in his eyes, talking without notes, his voice low and vibrating with energy, his hands constantly moving as if drawing out the invisible thread of his argument. There is no shortage of French scientists who want to show him the town: on his last night in Paris Einstein stays out till two in the morning. He is taken to the theatre to see Molière’s The Miser and Marivaux’s A Game of Love and Chance (the racy Les Fauvettes is long forgotten now). A caricaturist trawling the cafés of the Left Bank for business produces a comic portrait of Albert for free. A pretty young Frenchwoman asks Einstein whether it is true what she has read in the papers–that he has the most powerful mind in all of human history. It seems genius is an aphrodisiac.
To his new French friends, Albert admits to having felt apprehensive about the trip. The new nationalist French government is determined to ensure Germany pays its financial dues in full, and has little sympathy with German requests for leniency. In Germany, Einstein has been accused of disloyalty for visiting the land of his country’s enemies. Albert takes the precaution of writing a letter to the German Academy of Sciences before he goes, emphasising that he has sought advice from Walther Rathenau himself. But by the end of his Parisian sojourn, he is sure he made the right decision. The French he meets seem open-minded and friendly. (A debate with the philosopher Henri Bergson, who sees philosophy as having some say in the interpretation of phenomena such as time, is civilised: both sides feel they have made their point.) The old spirit of internationalism seems alive and well in Paris. If his visit can help improve political relations between France and Germany, so much the better. Albert obviously does not come across Léon Daudet, editor of Action française, de Gaulle’s paper, who writes a scathing series about the trip in which he refers to Einstein as ‘our inter-stellar visitor’ and ‘the Moses of Calculus’. Daudet asks how many bombed-out houses will be restored by Einstein’s visit: none. Anti-relativists exist in France, too.
But Daudet is too quick to judge. Before returning to Germany, Albert goes on a pilgrimage. Leaving Paris one morning at the crack of dawn, he is driven out to the region of Dormans. The scene is not quite the same as back in 1917, when Churchill drove up and down the front here, and saw nothing but a sea of ensanguined mud. Nor the summer of 1919, when Woodrow and Edith picnicked by the bleached skeleton of a war horse. Such remains have been cleared up by now, or nature has turned them to dust. In some places, the line of the trenches is only visible through the wheat as a continuous gentle dip in the landscape, as if tracing an ancient Roman road. It is the ruined buildings which are more shocking. And the sad trees, left bare by the lingering effects of poison gas. ‘German students–no, students from all over the world–should be taken here to see how ugly war is’, Einstein remarks to his French hosts. It is one thing to read about it, but you need to see it with your own eyes.
The cathedral at Reims is still missing its roof, blown off by German artillery in 1914. At lunch, Albert refuses wine. In the afternoon, travelling north across the landscape towards Saint-Quentin, where there are no trees at all any more, he is silent. That evening, Einstein is put on board a train to Cologne. ‘I will tell everyone there what I have seen here’, he shouts by way of a farewell as the train pulls out.
MOSCOW: Vladimir orders imported German sedatives from the special Kremlin pharmacy, off-limits to outsiders. ‘My nerves are still hurting.’
He toys with the idea of going on holiday to the Caucasus as a rest cure. He enquires about a possible spot. Quiet, and not too high in the mountains would be best (Nadya’s heart could not manage it, and they must go for walks). On the other hand, he worries about the goings-on in the capital which may have to draw him back. There is the upcoming diplomatic conference to worry about. He has given clear instructions for how it is to be handled: the goal is to secure a trade deal and ensure there is no rapprochement between Germany, France and Britain. But who can be trusted these days? Lenin and Trotsky are squabbling like hens again about reform. Why are they not more like eagles?
One of Vladimir’s doctors proposes an operation to remove the bullets still lodged in the impatient revolutionary’s body from that assassination attempt back in 1918. There are concerns he is suffering from lead poisoning. Some think that perhaps the bullets were dipped in some kind of slow-working poison, a fiendish idea cooked up by his political enemies. An operation is arranged for the day after Vladimir’s fifty-second birthday. A German surgeon is brought in from Berlin.
At least the party is now in safer hands. Comrade Stalin is made General Secretary of the Communist Party in April, becoming its coordinator-in-chief, the man to cut through the chaos and make things work. A hard job, but someone has to do it. And he is virtually doing it already, with all the different posts he holds, with the way he is always there to help. Not like Trotsky, who has developed the annoying habit of ostentatiously studying English during Politburo meetings, only piping up irregularly to make the odd withering remark about how one or other of his fellow colleagues has screwed something up.
CHICAGO–GENOA, ITALY: A postcard arrives at the Hemingway family residence, with a picture of a European hilltop fort. ‘If you’ve read the Daily Star you know all about this town’, Ernest scribbles home to his father.
The town in question is Genoa, an industrial port in northern Italy, chosen as the venue for a major diplomatic conference, the first where the Soviets are invited to attend as a semi-recognised power. British ambitions in the lead-up to the conference are high. They hope that the United States, the new master of world finance, can be prevailed upon to financially underwrite the architecture of what would amount to a revised European peace. Germany will be brought in from the cold, and a moratorium placed on its reparation payments. The French will be kept sweet by Russia being forced to repay Tsarist-era debts. The Soviet presence at the conference is unpalatable but unavoidable: after all, how can the Bolsheviks be made to pay the debts of the Tsars if no one will speak to them?
It is a crowded agenda. It proves impossible to line up all sides behind a new deal. The French are unimpressed by what they see as a manoeuvre to let the Germans wiggle out of reparation payments while they are left to cover the cost of rebuilding their country (and remain on the hook for their debts to the Americans). Everyone knows that the Russians cannot be trusted and will make whatever mischief they can. In the end, the Americans do not even bother to attend the Genoa conference, dashing hopes that the United States will play a constructive role in resetting Europe’s affairs.
The conference goes ahead anyway. For weeks Ernest is run off his feet trying to figure out what the hell is going on, attempting to get the right accreditations for the right meetings, gossiping with the other journalists over Chianti in a local trattoria and guessing who will do what next. The British and French delegations strive to keep things serious and dull. The Germans, though more desperate for some kind of breakthrough, seem no more exciting. Ernest finds the Russians most interesting to watch.
Some see the Soviet regime as little better than a gang of criminals. Stories of Soviet excesses–starvation, murder, repression–are commonplace. It is well established that Soviet agents and sympathisers are actively working to overthrow the governments of Europe and America. To have even been invited to Genoa is, therefore, a magnificent Soviet propaganda coup. It gives legitimacy to Lenin’s regime. It confirms the practical recognition–if not the formal acceptance–that the Communists are firmly in charge in Moscow. It also stirs the hornet’s nest of Italian politics. Nervous soldiers patrol the city in pairs, a warning to leftist troublemakers to stay indoors. Hemingway notes the graffiti on the streets of the working-class parts of Genoa: Viva Lenin! Viva Trotsky! (The possibility of an assassination attempt–Polish agents, perhaps–is considered too great for Vladimir or Leon to attend in person.)
Ernest hangs around the villa housing the Soviet delegation–safely located some miles outside town–as much as possible. It may not be as magnificent or so well located as other residences, but the cast of characters is unbeatable. Take Louise Bryant’s friend Alexandra Kollontai, the Bolshevik feminist who advocates sexual revolution as the necessary accompaniment to social and political revolution. Consider the case of Chicherin, the former anti-war activist turned Commissar of Foreign Affairs who once spent time in London’s Brixton jail (and who later that year pays a visit to D’Annunzio at his new palace by Lake Garda). Then there is the businessman-turned-Bolshevik Krasin, a man as familiar with the techniques of bank-robbing as he is with German industrial management (and who was once sculpted by Clare Sheridan). ‘Four years ago, they were hunted, fleeing men,’ Hemingway writes enthusiastically; ‘now they sit at the table with representatives of every great power, except the United States.’ It is hard not to find these characters more interesting than the stuffed shirts down the road. (The young journalist’s commentary on the attractiveness of Russian secretaries leads to the screaming headline back home, ‘Russian Girls at Genoa’.)
In the end, it is the Russians and the Germans–the two outsiders at the conference–who manage to steal the show, by signing their own separate agreement, a few miles from Genoa in Rapallo. Germany formally recognises the Soviet regime and renounces any financial claims on Russia. Both sides proclaim their goodwill towards the other and their intention to cooperate on economic matters. (Inevitably, German nationalists call Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau a traitor for signing up to what they consider to be a Communist stitch-up, unaware of secret military protocols allowing for a new German army to be trained on Soviet soil and for a secret poison-gas facility to be built.) The British and French are taken by surprise. They had not expected such audacity. Their worst nightmare is now taking shape: the two enemies of the Versailles Treaty in alliance.
Though the main conference stumbles on, it is beginning to look like a fiasco. The British are embarrassed; the French are worried. ‘What was the use of four years of war?’ asks one French nationalist newspaper: ‘What was the point of losing one and a half million French lives?’ Having won the war, is the French government now losing the peace? Some blame the British, accusing London of failing to back up Paris sufficiently on the matter of reparations, and thus opening the way for German adventurism. The wartime alliance is looking a little rocky now. The French view the British as unreliable backsliders; the British worry that France’s reparation anxieties are just a cover for their intention to establish the border on the Rhine which they had been unable to achieve at Versailles.
In a speech in the eastern province of Lorraine–directed as much at London as Berlin–the French premier makes clear his concerns. Poland is directly threatened by German–Russian rapprochement, he notes. The threat to France is more indirect, but no less real. ‘France, which clearly sees the dangers of tomorrow, will try to convince our allies that the best way to avoid their realisation is to never answer intimidation with weakness’, he says. ‘As for us, we are resolved to do whatever it takes to keep what was given to us in a treaty paid for by our heroes’ blood.’ The message is clear. France is prepared to act alone, if necessary.
Meeting in the occupied Rhineland, French political and military leaders dust off old plans to occupy the valley of the Ruhr. If Germany cannot be made to pay, France will take what is hers by force.
MOSCOW: Vladimir’s operation has been a success. The doctors congratulate the patient. One bullet was three millimetres from his carotid artery, it turns out. The course of history was almost very different.
Lenin’s physical recovery is slow. The dictator’s body is weak. He suffers relapses. But he will not let this keep him from his duties. There is always more work to do. His mind races. He writes a celebratory article for the tenth anniversary of Pravda, crowing that imperialism is now on the run all around the globe. The so-called Great Powers have been fatally weakened by the war. They are helpless to resist the awakening of the peoples of the world against their overlords. ‘The present “victors” in the first imperialist slaughter have not the strength to defeat small–I might say, tiny–Ireland.’ Rebellion in India and anti-imperialist revolt in China will be next. The ‘not far distant’ triumph of the world proletariat is a matter of historical inevitability, Lenin writes.
But there can be no let-up in the struggle just yet. Around the world, ‘the bourgeoisie is still able freely to torment, torture and kill’. And enemies of the revolution are everywhere, plotting and scheming. Barely risen from his sickbed, the dictator’s thoughts return to the need to eliminate potential sources of opposition at home. Traitors must be rooted out. No weakness and no remorse. A show trial of fifty Orthodox priests and laymen is organised in Moscow in front of an audience of two thousand to make the point. Eleven are condemned to death. A trial of Lenin’s old socialist rivals is planned along the same lines.
One day, the dictator writes to the head of the GPU with a still-bolder proposition: the wholesale deportation of intellectuals deemed anti-regime. He suggests that each member of the Politburo spend two or three hours a week looking through periodicals and magazines to identify potential candidates for expulsion: economists, anyone with religious convictions, socialists who still seem to think that Bolshevism is up for debate. The charges against them need not be precise. What a person thinks may be just as dangerous as what they do.
Particular attention should be paid by the security services to collecting information on the personal lives of professors and writers. ‘Assign all this to an intelligent, educated and scrupulous man at the GPU’, Lenin instructs. Again, no copies.
VIENNA: Anna Freud becomes a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis after the successful reading of a paper to the Vienna psychoanalytic society on ‘Beating Fantasies and Day Dreams’. Vienna’s first private psychoanalytic clinic–the ‘Ambulatorium’–opens its doors around the same time.
AMERICA: Marcus Garvey is on tour again, speeding through the Midwest on his way to California, untroubled by the multiple crises he has left behind in New York.
In Washington, the anti-lynching bill is still stuck in Senate committee where Southern Democrats want to kill it dead and Republicans worry about its constitutionality, unwilling to pass a law which the Supreme Court may then slap down. Some blame the President for raising unrealistic expectations.
In Florida, a UNIA commissioner, sent to proselytise in the black churches of the South, is kidnapped in broad daylight by members of the Ku Klux Klan. ‘I tried to let out a cry, but was struck in the mouth by a man weighing 200 pounds’, he writes to Garvey. They horsewhip him to within an inch of his life then tell him to get out of town. Battered and bleeding, he struggles three miles to the nearest town. He can barely walk for weeks.
In Texas, three blacks are burned alive for the alleged murder of a seventeen-year-old white girl. The newspapers run the story for a day. Then it disappears. There is no investigation.