DEARBORN: ‘Today he looms a powerful and enigmatic figure on the political horizon’, says the New York Times. Updated photographs of Henry Ford have been sent out to automobile dealerships around the country. Copies of his new autobiography have been procured. Estimates are made of the increase in sales the Dearborn Independent might expect if he were to announce his candidacy for the presidency. The campaign machinery is primed. ‘Ford for President’ associations have started sprouting up across the country. But no one knows whether he will run.
MOSCOW: Vladimir asks his secretary to retrieve from his safe the short secret notes on the future of the regime he wrote at the end of the year. He has a codicil to add. Perhaps he is fleetingly aware of the irony. It was supposed to be workers’ rule, dictatorship of the proletariat. Now all that really matters is who is on top–who is in, who is out. Personality, it turns out, is essential.
Vladimir dictates: ‘Stalin is too rude and this defect, while fully tolerable in the milieu and company amongst us Communists, becomes intolerable in the post of General Secretary’. The Georgian has accumulated too much power. He ought to be removed. Vladimir has left it very late.
ROME–LAKE GARDA: His picture is everywhere: on postcards, in newsreels, on bars of soap. Italy’s illustrated magazines cannot get enough of him. Photographers follow him everywhere, whatever he is doing: arriving at a train station, going for a walk. The camera loves him; he loves the camera. No one knows what Adolf looks like, but pretty much everyone in Europe knows the face of Benito Mussolini.
Benito the former journalist–the management of Il Popolo now passes to his brother–knows the importance of getting his image right. He has read books about the psychology of the crowds, about how they need to be fed on illusions of omnipresence and omnipotence for a politician to become a cult figure. Benito is obsessed with the news (even the headlines that his own press office has created). His lieutenants claim he gets through dozens if not hundreds of newspapers a day. Every reporter in Italy is thus put on notice that they are being watched. Mussolini is the most written-about man in the country. Celebrity-watchers declare him magnetic. Church leaders call him providential.
And yet, as omnipresent as he is becoming on the pages of the newspapers, Benito’s position as Italy’s leader is not unassailable. He is still a politician rather than a dictator: he must still flatter to survive. His authority–even over the Fascist movement–cannot be taken for granted. If Mussolini falters, others may pounce. Fascism’s regional bosses remain as difficult as ever–they have grown too used to deciding matters for themselves. And then there is the man Benito really worries about. Gabriele D’Annunzio, although a brooding offstage presence these days, is a potential lightning rod for opposition, a national icon beloved of millions of Italians. Out of sight, but not out of mind.
In early January, Benito writes Gabriele a long telegram, asking him to publicly disavow rumours that he is not one hundred per cent behind the new regime. Such stories are damaging to the hardest-working government Italy has seen in fifty years, Mussolini writes, a government that is ‘restoring the spirit and the backbone of the nation’. D’Annunzio responds with an alarming boast. ‘Is it not the case that the best of the so-called “fascist” movement was generated by my spirit?’ he asks Benito: ‘was today’s national revanche not announced by me a good forty years ago?’
Such self-confidence is dangerous in a rival. The man must be watched.
OUTSIDE MUNICH: One weekend at the beginning of the year, a hundred men dressed in army-surplus gear march along forested country lanes outside Munich. They wear Austrian ski-caps and swastika armbands. They carry flags and beat drums. In bad weather they are given the use of an army drill-hall by a sympathetic officer.
The serial swindler Kurt Lüdecke supervises the drill, hoping to provide a great surprise for Adolf Hitler on a Nazi Party day planned for a few weeks hence: his own special troop of the SA professionals. He stores the uniforms and boots at home. He buys guns and grenades on the black market. All quite cheap for those with a bit of foreign currency.
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA: Reverend Eason, a long-time thorn in Marcus Garvey’s side, is shot leaving a political meeting in a Louisiana church. One bullet hits him in the back. A second enters his skull by his right eye. The reverend was shortly expected to testify against Garvey in a trial in which the UNIA leader stands accused of using the mail service for the purposes of selling stock in a fraudulent venture. Before he dies, Eason is able to make public his suspicions about who is responsible for the attack on his life. ‘I am positive’, a local newspaper reports him saying, ‘that my assailants were acting on instructions to put me out of the way and prevent my appearing as a witness.’
Marcus Garvey announces a fresh speaking tour. Du Bois writes another piece in The Crisis, calculating the membership of the UNIA in thousands rather than the millions claimed. Harlem is more split than ever between the two men.
CANNES: Has Winston had his moment? Here is a forty-seven-year-old man with a somewhat chequered career and a reputation for warmongery to live down. He is out of office and his party is out of power.
The black dog gnaws at Winston. Over the winter, he throws himself headlong into other activities: painting and writing, in particular. He meets with his cousin Clare, now writing her memoirs of her life during the last year. She tells him how beastly Mussolini was to her. She gets her revenge by writing a rather comical piece for the American newspapers, comparing Benito’s daily dress to that of a magician at a second-rate Christmas party (it becomes front-page news in California).
In January, under a familiar French sun, Winston’s spirits begin to revive. One day he meets an old friend on a beach and enquires what he is up to. Painting, and trying to forget the war, the Frenchman replies–and you? Churchill explains that he is finishing the first volume of his memoirs of the Great War. His French friend finds the subject of the last war ‘like digging up a cemetery’. ‘Yes’, replies Winston Churchill, a little twinkle in his eye, ‘but with a resurrection.’
SMYRNA: Mustafa Kemal’s mother dies in İzmir. Her son hears the news while touring the country to drum up support for the political party he has founded. He sends others to arrange the funeral. His priority is the nation.
As Mustafa rides from town to town across barren Anatolia, he sells his vision of a modern, secular Turkey arising from a decade of war. He talks of the change he wishes to see, nothing less than the cultural revolution he spoke of in Karlsbad all those years ago, when he was just a humble servant of the Sultan. Now the Sultan is no more, and Kemal’s radicalism has come of age. The country will no longer bow and scrape to anyone, he says. It will regain its national self-confidence. Turkish, rather than Arabic, will be the national language. The nation, rather than religion or class, will be the organising principle of society. The strength of Kemal’s convictions is intoxicating.
Traditions that can be harnessed for national renewal will be embraced. Those that prevent the country’s development will be discarded. Clare Sheridan will be proved wrong: Turkey will be a country filled with sculptures, he declares, unafraid to represent the human form in stone for fear the people will mistake them for false gods. Religion will be repurposed. ‘I do not like the clerics’, Kemal says frankly. A few weeks later he gives a sermon in a mosque, suggesting they should become agents of change rather than dead weights on society.
Change, Mustafa Kemal tells his rapturous audiences, is inevitable and irrevocable. ‘The law of the revolution is above all existing laws’, he announces, and the blood spilled in the wars of independence is proof of the people’s vitality and determination. When he finally visits his mother’s grave in İzmir, he swears he will give his own life for Turkish sovereignty if necessary. As negotiations continue on the country’s final peace deal in Lausanne, such rhetoric carries particular meaning.
Two days later Mustafa Kemal does something he said he never would: he marries. The marriage ceremony is conducted by an Islamic cleric, but according to Mustafa’s instructions. Lâtife is his joyous bride. There is no honeymoon. In Germany, Fikriye is distraught when she hears the news. To Kemal’s fury, she decides to return to Turkey without his permission.
MOSCOW: Vladimir orders books to his bedside. The subjects vary: organisational theory by the American time-and-motion man F. W. Taylor, a history of the Russian cooperative movement, a book about imperialism in China. Nadya hovers around her husband. He succeeds in dictating a few articles for Pravda a few minutes a day over several weeks. It is hard work. His secretaries note his frustration. If he is interrupted in mid-sentence, he loses his train of thought entirely and has to start again.
The articles go over familiar ground. Vladimir dictates a review of a history of the revolution of 1917 (which he castigates for being pedantic in its interpretations of Marxism). He complains about bureaucracy and singles out the inspectorate of which Stalin has been commissar for particular criticism. (The Politburo, not wanting the public to have any idea of political disagreement at the top, consider blocking this article, or even producing a single dummy version of Pravda for Vladimir personally in order to make him believe it was published.) He returns to the promise of electrification. New power plants are being built, he writes. It is coming.
Stalin occasionally phones to ensure Lenin is not doing any work of a political nature, worried that he is preparing to ambush him at a party congress planned for March, perhaps with Trotsky’s help. The great drama of the Russian revolution has turned into a three-sided palace farce: the sick Tsar Vladimir; the sly politicians Stalin and the other members of the anti-Trotsky bloc; and the arrogant soldier-prince Leon, who still expects things to go his way.
ESSEN, THE RUHR VALLEY, GERMANY: Using the pretext of the late delivery of a certain amount of timber and telegraph poles–part of Germany’s in-kind reparations–French and Belgian troops enter the Ruhr valley, the industrial heartland of western Germany. British protests are overruled. The French parliament votes almost unanimous support.
In diplomatic correspondence with Berlin the occupation is presented by Paris as a civilian, purely technical matter. The presence of so many machine guns and tanks is explained as a matter of ensuring the security of the engineers needed to make Germany’s coal mines fulfil the terms of the Versailles Treaty. French newspapers emphasise the moderation of the French approach, in strict conformity with the law, with no motive other than to enforce the treaty terms.
The Germans denounce French cynicism. The French premier, notes one of Germany’s leading papers, ‘gives the impression of a man who realises he and his country are falling into the most awful stupidity, and tries to salvage something at the last minute by claiming an invasion is not an invasion and an occupation not an occupation’. ‘It would seem like a joke, were it not so ridiculous’, the paper concludes. In London, the unilateral French move is considered a seismic shift in European relations ‘as far reaching in its effects as the declaration of war in 1914 or the armistice of 1918’. Mussolini’s attempts to play the peacemaker change nothing.
The streets of Essen, the Ruhr’s main city, are quiet when the French cavalry ride in. A statue of Alfred Krupp, once owner of Europe’s biggest steelworks, surveys the occupation in silence. The Mayor of Essen refuses to break off his wife’s birthday party to greet the arriving French general. When the two men meet the general is met with a protest speech against the occupation and Versailles. In a message to the German people from Berlin, President Ebert calls for passive resistance: ‘The welfare or misery of the whole depend upon the iron self-control of each individual.’ He admits he has no idea how long the occupation may last.
Over the next few days, the invasion proceeds in carefully planned stages. The French make clear they expect the German police to keep doing their job and public services to run as usual. French military law will be applied if needed. A protest by a few hundred nationalist youths in Essen is broken up by local police. One evening in Bochum a German civilian is killed when a French guard-post comes under attack. The French want to keep down the costs of the occupation. Apartments are requisitioned. Private houses taken over for the higher ranks. In one case, French soldiers demand the German local authorities provide a large quantity of barbed wire. The demand is refused.
MUNICH: Adolf Hitler spits rage. He knows who to blame for the occupation of the Ruhr: German politicians who have chosen to disarm the country rather than resist. He harps back to the war. The roots of 1923, he argues at a meeting in the Zirkus Krone on the day the French cross into the Ruhr, lie in 1918.
‘Germany was unconquered’ in that year, Hitler shouts, ‘in four and a half years, twenty-six enemies could not bring Germany to her knees’. Defeat came only when the ‘November criminals’–the Social Democrats and revolutionaries–‘stabbed the old army in the back’. The country’s politicians have left Germany without weapons and without honour: ‘France treats our Germany as less than one of its African colonies’. The speech is carried in all the main newspapers in Munich. It is even reported as far away as Berlin. ‘The National Socialists want to organise an army of revenge for the Fatherland’, one newspaper tells its readers. Adolf refuses to sign up to the idea of national solidarity and passive resistance under the leadership of the current government in Berlin, the political heirs of the traitors of 1918.
There are ‘two fronts’ on which patriotic Germans must fight now, Hitler declares, one in the Ruhr and one behind the lines against the Jews. ‘We know that if they get to power our heads will roll in the sand’–just like the French aristocrats who went to the guillotine in the French Revolution. ‘But let me tell you something’, screams the mangy field-runner, ‘if we are at the helm it is their heads which will roll–and misery upon them’.
Copies of the German translation of Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew, are piled high at Nazi headquarters.
VIENNA: Sigmund Freud, the eminent psychoanalyst, swallows hard. With his tongue he feels around the inside of his mouth. There! He is sure of it. There again! A roughness inside his mouth, a faint pressure, something swollen. Dark premonitions fill Freud’s mind. He banishes them and keeps quiet. Inwardly, he wonders whether he will ever make it to Egypt.
He writes to Sam in Manchester with family news. ‘Oliver had got a position at Duisburg on the Rhine and expected to enter on February first’, Freud tells his nephew, ‘but he could not get there as the French have broken all communications.’ A family wedding is planned, ‘but who can fix any date in such a time’?
ACROSS IRELAND: The government has learned its lesson: there is no hope of conciliation. An end to the civil war can only be brought about by the application of overwhelming–and if necessary, brutal–force. Military courts dispense summary justice. Anyone found with a weapon is liable to be shot. Reprisals are undertaken, both officially and unofficially. Old British methods are applied by Irish forces.
Republicans adopt a scorched-earth policy, blowing up bridges and sabotaging infrastructure. More grand houses are burned down in rural areas, to warn landowners against supporting the Free State. (In Dublin, Yeats’s house receives an armed guard.) The IRA expand their list of legitimate targets, as if a greater whirlwind of destruction will yield better results. It is a strategy born from weakness and desperation. The facts are plain: the republicans hold no Irish towns and are outnumbered everywhere.
ESSEN–BERLIN–MUNICH: In the Ruhr, Berlin’s call for passive resistance is being heeded. The directors of the Ruhr’s main industrial concerns declare that they will not obey orders from the French, and are taken into custody. Civil servants receive instructions to ignore French commands. Everything is to be done to make the occupiers’ task as hard as possible. Company archives are hidden. Statistical records are destroyed and empty trains redirected to unoccupied Germany. Hotels and restaurants close their doors to foreigners. Newspapers refuse to publish French directives.
Sometimes passive resistance turns active. The signalling system of the Ruhr valley railway network is sabotaged. Telephone lines are cut. By early February, goods transport has frozen up entirely. A wave of strikes closes down mines and factories. No coal is sent to France and Belgium.
Berlin claims the invasion of the Ruhr is itself a breach of Versailles: Germany is not the aggressor, but the victim. German aid committees take out full-page appeals for help in American newspapers. In Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm sympathetic articles appear suggesting that the French are creating famine conditions in Germany. German papers portray the French as rapacious, mindless, evil, subhuman. The presence of African colonial troops in the French army of occupation in the Rhineland–though not in the Ruhr–is considered a particular source of shame by some in Germany, sharpening nationalist fury at the French occupation with a racial edge and giving rise to the casual use of racist imagery across the board. The cover of Simplicissimus, a liberal satirical magazine published in Munich, depicts a French trooper as a monkey with a dagger between its teeth and a blood-smeared sabre dangling by its feet.
Inside, the same issue of Simplicissimus sports a satirical ode ‘To Adolf Hitler’, mocking him and his followers for exploiting the crisis with their prophetic airs, rather than rallying around the government:
He is the saviour! He is the prophet!
So whisper the excited old-timers,
Speaking of heavenly apparitions,
And God’s path marked out
The magazine costs two hundred and fifty marks these days. One year ago, it cost just thirty-six.
SAN SEBASTIAN, BASQUE COUNTRY, SPAIN: Zita Habsburg settles with her family in a little corner of paradise tucked between France and Spain, where the Pyrenees meet the Atlantic Ocean. Her house is bought for her by a local charitable committee. The family’s private income–from its share of a Rhineland winery–does not meet the bills of the imperial household. In Paris, a submission is made to the representatives of the victorious wartime powers requesting a stipend for Zita of no less than seventy thousand Swiss francs a month.
A suite of tutors teach the Habsburg brood in exile. The older children receive Hungarian lessons–just in case. Little Otto’s tenth birthday is celebrated by thousands in Budapest, Zita is informed by a Hungarian loyalist. He does not tell her that the church service was conducted by a junior priest, and that Horthy ostentatiously stayed away.
There is little immediate hope of restoration. Like Lenin in exile, Zita often uses code names in correspondence with the outside world. Little by little, anything Charles and Zita took with them into exile is sold.
ROME: What should a Fascist leader who has won power through a show of force, but then been appointed as premier serving a constitutional monarch, wear to work? Should he play to his base: the Fascist blackshirts and disappointed D’Annunzians? Or should he try to appeal to big business and the political centre?
When Benito meets the King, he generally opts for a morning suit and top hat, the clothes his respectful predecessors would have worn. This presents Mussolini as a pragmatic builder, not a wrecker. His quotidian attire is more workaday, a hint of radical chic coupled with the sobriety of a statesman: a starchy wing-collared shirt (Mustafa Kemal likes these too) and a black (or powder-grey) bowler hat. (This becomes his standard get-up until, years later, watching one of the American movies he so loves, Benito has the horrible realisation that the only people who still wear bowler hats these days apart from British stiffs are Laurel and Hardy, his favourite comedians.)
Sometimes he spices things up by wearing a black shirt–thus thrilling the hardcore Fascists and demonstrating that he is still really one of them, rather than a toady to the establishment. One day in January, having incorporated the blackshirts into a formal national volunteer force under the authority of the premier, Benito appears for the first time in military uniform–as a corporal of the militia.
LAUSANNE: İsmet Pasha plays billiards and drinks green chartreuse. He tells the Americans he would like to see the United States one day. Of course, State Department officials say–just as soon as he has signed the peace treaty. İsmet slaps his knee, laughs uproariously and takes another swig. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, tries to reason with him, demanding he accept that foreigners in Turkey must retain their special status before the courts, given all the stories of mistreatment and abuse. Curzon ends up smashing his cane against the wall in making his point.
Finally, one Sunday afternoon, İsmet Pasha is called to Curzon’s suite at the Hotel Beau Rivage for a make-or-break discussion. The Orient Express leaves on the dot of nine that evening, the Foreign Secretary announces, and he intends to be on it whatever the outcome. (The tactic worked for Lloyd George with the Irish, why not for Curzon with the Turks?) İsmet is presented with a final draft treaty for him to sign. He goes off to consult with his advisers. When he returns, he rejects the treaty. Nothing less than full sovereignty, he declares.
Curzon has his train held at Lausanne for half an hour in case the Turks regret their decision. The Americans work on İsmet to bring him round. He seems willing to concede a point or two, subject to further discussion. The Americans race to the station to try and haul the British back to the negotiating table. Five minutes too late. The Orient Express has gone.
MUNICH: The Nazis plan a series of fascisti-type events around town on what they call a ‘Party Day’. The Bavarian authorities suspect the planned demonstrations are cover for a coup attempt. Some want the demonstrations (and the SA) banned. Others warn that a ban could backfire, giving the Nazis more free press coverage and making the government look afraid. The authorities draw up strict limitations instead. Adolf reacts badly, warning the police that the dedication of the SA’s standards must be allowed to go ahead as planned and that if force is used to try to prevent it then he, Adolf Hitler, is willing to be killed on the spot defending his men. Such action by the government would only embolden the Communists. A single bullet against his SA men, Hitler warns, and Bavaria’s government will be overthrown in two hours.
In Munich there is crisis meeting after crisis meeting to decide how to handle matters. The generals are asked their view. Bavaria’s patriotic associations, energised by events in the Ruhr, are sounded out. A state of emergency is declared. The police hold a last-minute meeting with Hitler. It is too late now to cancel the event, he says: the guests are already on their way. But he promises–on his honour–that there will be no violence. The SA will not march through town in formation. He warns the Bavarian police of negative consequences should the event not be allowed to go ahead. Surely the authorities would not want to see several thousand angry citizens just let loose on the streets.
The party day goes ahead with few modifications. The government looks weak. Hitler gives a dozen triumphant speeches around Munich. The serial swindler and one-time Nazi ambassador Kurt Lüdecke does not hear any of them. Tipped off about his paramilitary training activities, the police take him in for questioning that morning. Lüdecke’s apartment is turned upside down. Police find a Mexican passport and a stash of foreign currency. Adolf does not bother to visit or get in touch with him during the weeks he is in jail. The serial swindler is abandoned.
JERUSALEM, BRITISH MANDATE OF PALESTINE: Albert Einstein is ferried around in a chauffeur-driven motor car that used to belong to the Kaiser.
What a change there has been from the Palestine of 1898, when Wilhelm visited the place on an imperial tour, rode into Jerusalem on horseback in emulation of a medieval pilgrimage, declared his fondness for the absolute rule of the Ottoman Sultan, briefly raising and then dashing the hopes of the Zionist Theodore Herzl that Germany might throw its weight behind the idea of a semi-autonomous Jewish homeland in the ancient land of Israel. The German Empire is no more. The Ottoman Empire is defunct. The British are in charge now, and the promise of a Jewish homeland is underwritten in London rather than Berlin.
The British High Commissioner shows Albert around old Jerusalem, walking along the city’s ancient battlements to point out the sights. Einstein is not sure he likes it much, at first. He describes Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall as ‘people with a past but without a present’. He prefers the striking modernity of Tel Aviv, where he is taken to a power station and a brick factory. This is what excites Albert most: things being built, harmony through work, a certain egalitarianism of the classes and the sexes. ‘The common people know no nationalism’, he jots down in his travel diary after spending time first with a Jewish settler and his Arab friend, then with an Arab writer and his German wife. Surely this is reason for hope?
The highlight of Albert’s visit to Palestine is a lecture on relativity in the auditorium of the British Mandate Police School on Mount Scopus, billed as the first scientific lecture in the temporary halls of the new Hebrew University. In order to ensure he is best understood by a mixed audience consisting of local Arabs and Jews as well as the British, Albert speaks in French. Towards the end of his trip he visits a kibbutz by Lake Tiberias, set up by Zionists inspired by the principles of socialism. Will he come back? people ask him. ‘My heart says yes but my reason says no’, Einstein writes.
CHAMBY, SWITZERLAND: Up in the Alps, Ernest stops shaving. He lays off the journalism for a while. With the loss of the valise, he wonders what to do about his writing–his proper writing. A few of his poems are published over the winter in Chicago. That’s it.
Ezra Pound calls the loss of the manuscripts an act of God. He advises Ernest to rewrite what he can remember. It will be better that way anyhow. ‘Memory is the best critic’, he explains. By way of thanks, the Hemingways decide to visit Rapallo, searching out Pound and his wife in the Hotel Riviera Splendide. Somewhere along the way, Hadley reveals that she is pregnant. Ernest feels trapped.
NEW YORK–WASHINGTON DC: The rivalry between Marcus Garvey and William Du Bois has now developed into bitter enmity. Garvey regularly calls Du Bois a traitor to the race, an ‘unfortunate mulatto’ who wishes he were French. In February, Du Bois describes Garvey as ‘a little fat black man, ugly, but with intelligent eyes and a big head’. He declares that Garveyism is a ‘bubble’ which now finally has burst, however appealing the ideas behind the Black Star Line or the undoubted appeal of the back-to-Africa refrain. The two men have never even met.
Du Bois hears the same dismal message from all over the world, he writes: the warning that race war is inevitable and that segregation, ghettoisation, emigration and separation is the future. Racism has always been there, but now new and dangerous theories of race have arisen, to be exploited by the unscrupulous and the foolish, white and black, from the pavement pundits of Harlem to the beer-hall orators of Munich. Race superiority has become a cult, and its acolytes are everywhere. Two pathways now lie ahead. For a thousand years, Du Bois writes, ‘from the First Crusade to the Great War’, the barriers between nations and races have been breaking down. The reversal is recent, and can and must itself be reversed. Those who prophesy race war, Du Bois warns, will bring upon themselves ‘a death-struggle whose issue none can surely foretell’. And yet every day, a different human story is under way: ‘Races are living together,’ he writes, ‘buying and selling, marrying and rearing children, laughing and crying.’ The struggle to break down barriers between the races may be long and weary. But that is the path that humanity must take.
In February, the Supreme Court reviews the trial of several black men accused of murdering a white railway guard in Arkansas in 1919, in the midst of what some call a massacre and others an insurrection. The black men were convicted within minutes, by an all-white jury, with a white mob baying for their blood outside. Now, four years later, the Supreme Court decrees: ‘there never was a chance for the petitioners to be acquitted; no juryman could have voted for an acquittal and continued to live in Phillips County, and if any prisoner by any chance had been acquitted by a jury, he could not have escaped the mob’. Justice cannot be so abridged. Every American has a right to a fair trial under the constitution. Mob rule outside the courthouse cannot be allowed to so trample on legal due process inside. If the states do not guarantee the rights of their citizens, appeal may be made to federal courts.
In America, by this faint light, Du Bois’s pathway is again lit up amidst the darkness of the world around.
MUNICH: While Lüdecke languishes in a prison cell, Adolf Hitler and Putzi Hanfstaengl get to know one another better. Adolf now seems to drop round Putzi’s apartment almost every day for lunch or dinner.
The Hanfstaengl residence is not particularly grand: three rooms on Gentzstrasse and rather haphazardly furnished. But Hitler’s place on Thierschstrasse has just one room, with a single bedhead which blocks out part of the window and a small collection of books. (When Putzi comes to visit he notices a book by Ludendorff, a biography of Wagner, some American thrillers and a well-thumbed History of Erotic Art.) By contrast, the Hanfstaengl home has life within its walls. There is a happy family at its core–very different from Adolf’s own.
Hitler particularly enjoys the company of Helene Hanfstaengl, Putzi’s elegant German-American wife. Adolf thinks her the most beautiful woman he has ever met. Helene likes his blue eyes, which flash so brightly when he starts telling stories about the past. He takes an immediate shine to little Egon, Helene and Putzi’s son. One day, when the boy hurts his knee against a wooden chair leg carved into the form a lion, Adolf slaps the naughty wooden beast to stop it from ‘biting’ the child in future. Egon and Adolf become fast friends. ‘Please Uncle Dolf, spank the naughty chair’, the infant cries whenever Hitler turns up. Sometimes Helene, Putzi and Adolf go to the movies together. The mangy field-runner enjoys greatly a film about Fredrick the Great, the Enlightenment-era King of Prussia who catapulted his kingdom from backwater to one of Europe’s foremost military powers.
With Putzi, Adolf talks about history, politics, the Prussian war theorist Clausewitz–and America. He expresses fascination with its skyscrapers and admiration for both Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan. With Helene, Hitler is more relaxed. One day, he tells her of the time he dressed up in his mother’s apron and mounted a stool in the kitchen as if giving a sermon from a pulpit. He wanted to be a preacher, Adolf explains. The one thing he will not talk about is his time in Vienna. Something must have happened to him there, Helene surmises. The Hanfstaengls often wonder about Adolf’s sexuality. There are rumours he is having an affair with his driver’s sister. Helene cannot believe it. ‘I tell you,’ she says to her husband one night, ‘he is a neuter.’
Despite his success as a public speaker at the Zirkus Krone, where his common-man-as-messiah routine goes down so well, the thirty-three-year-old Adolf is still socially awkward. He feels uncomfortable in small groups, particularly amongst those of higher educational or social status where he is not the natural centre of attention. His fawning attempts at politeness to those for whom he feels a natural deference come off as gauche. His shaky understanding of dining etiquette is frequently remarked upon. Here is a man who heaps sugar in the finest Gewürztraminer wine to sweeten it. When confronted with an artichoke, he is totally stumped, having to ask his hostess–in hushed, embarrassed tones–how he should eat such a strange-looking thing.
Helene and Putzi introduce him to rich and powerful friends who may be useful to Adolf. They teach him social graces and educate him on the various distinctions within the upper classes, giving him the antennae to tell the difference between a man on the make such as Lüdecke–useful to the party, but not a true blue-blood–and men and women of real class, like themselves. Putzi also gives Adolf money to turn the Völkischer Beobachter from a weekly into a daily rag. Adolf feels he is going up in the world. The wife of a wealthy piano manufacturer from Berlin invites him to dinner in her hotel suite where only champagne is consumed, and where she prevails on the frumpish Nazi leader to purchase a dinner jacket and patent-leather shoes. For a brief period Adolf wears the shoes whenever he can.
Through the Hanfstaengl connection, Hitler makes the acquaintance of a Benedictine abbot of strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic views, who hopes Adolf, being Austrian, will somehow be able to help the Habsburg cause. The SA too starts attracting men of a different calibre from the normal roughnecks. A dashing Great War air ace named Hermann Göring joins the SA and is swiftly appointed to run it. (A period in Denmark after the war flying loop-the-loops for money and then selling planes in Sweden only seems to add to his cachet amongst the Nazis.) Hermann’s Swedish-born wife Carin is as thick as thieves with Helene.
Before one of Adolf’s trips to see the police, Putzi soothes the mangy field-runner’s nerves by playing some Bach on the piano in the hallway outside Hitler’s apartment. Adolf wants something more stirring. Putzi plays the overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Hitler hums along, marching up and down the corridor. Another time, Putzi entertains him with a rendition of various Harvard songs used to whip up the crowds before a football game, when the cheerleaders twirl their batons. ‘This is it, Hanfstaengl, this is what we need for the movement’, Adolf enthuses.
‘Rah, rah, rah!’ becomes ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!’
MOSCOW: At the beginning of March, against her better judgement, Nadya admits to her husband how Stalin treated her on the phone last year. Vladimir is livid. At once, he writes a sharp note requesting that the Georgian apologise to his wife, or else he will break off relations. It is the behaviour of a nineteenth-century gentleman, faced with a slight to his honour and an offence to politesse. But despite all the terror he has overseen over the years, such things still matter to Vladimir. He is punctilious that way. Nadya and Maria are in two minds whether they should allow this letter to be delivered to the General Secretary. They wait a day, then pass it on.
Stalin is shocked. He sends back a half-apology. ‘If my wife were to behave incorrectly and you had to punish her, I would not have considered it my right to intervene’, the Georgian writes, ‘but inasmuch as you insist…’ He says that he is willing to apologise if that will make Nadya and Vladimir feel better–but writes that he has no idea what it is he is really supposed to have done to provoke such a reaction.
The wily Georgian delays the upcoming congress of the Communist Party. Who knows what a few days more may bring for Comrade Lenin’s health?
ST. LOUIS: She is dressed smartly. She knows herself. She knows the world (a little). In March 1923, Josephine Baker arrives back in her home town, three years after she left to tour America with the Dixie Steppers. Her return, as part of the line-up for Shuffle Along after successful runs in Boston and Chicago, earns a four-line entry under ‘Negro News’ in the St. Louis Star, next to reports that Woodrow Wilson may be back on the campaign trail in 1924.
She takes a taxi to her old home, where her family still live. Here, Josephine is still Tumpie. The light still comes from a kerosene lamp, not from electricity. The communal bathtub is in the middle of the kitchen. Josephine hands out tickets for the show at the American Theater (whites take the stalls, and blacks the balcony).
Josephine’s mother is angry to see her daughter in a line-up with so much naked flesh. ‘All you can see are their legs’, Baker retorts to her mother’s moralising. Her own role is more cross-eyed comedy than sex. The next day Josephine returns for a family celebration with a bottle of prohibition whiskey to fire things up. As she leaves that evening she promises to send money for clothes, and for the children’s education.
MUNICH: There is no doubt that Henry Ford would get Hitler’s vote for the American presidency–should he decide to throw in his hat. ‘I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections’, a Chicago reporter is told: ‘We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascisti movement in America.’
But, Hitler tells an American diplomat sent to investigate, Ford’s financial largesse has not yet been extended to him. He hopes this will change in the future.
MONAVULLAGH MOUNTAINS, CO. WATERFORD, IRELAND: Like characters in an ancient Irish play, a group of warriors meet on a hillside to discuss their fate. They fear capture by the enemy at any moment. A tall bearded figure–he has travelled partway on horseback to this remote corner of the land–asks that he might be permitted to try negotiations with the enemy. The warriors split on the issue; they plan to meet again.
Éamon de Valera’s journey back to Dublin is no easier than his journey out. Wind and rain make the going tough. ‘Stuck my left leg in a boghole up to the groin’, he writes in his diary. ‘Arrived in the morning. Clothes and leather jacket all ruined.’
ESSEN: The situation in the Ruhr deteriorates sharply as winter turns to spring. There are conflicting stories of what is going on. In one incident in February, a German policeman reportedly refuses to salute two French soldiers and is shot in the street. The two Frenchmen are attacked in turn. A few days later there is another confrontation between local police and the French in Recklinghausen. The German police are now disbanded and disarmed–all filmed for the Paris newsreels–and their dependants told to clear out of the Ruhr entirely. There are reports that six French soldiers have raped a young girl about to be married. The Germans lodge an official protest with the French authorities–though with little expectation that any action will be taken.
Adolf rails against the policy of passive resistance. If nothing more is done, Germany will go under just like the ancient city of Carthage. ‘It is perfectly clear what the French are planning’, he tells a local party meeting. ‘They are waiting for the warm season to send an African army of eight or nine hundred thousand in to complete Germany’s violation.’
As passive resistance spirals up in the Ruhr, Paris responds with harsher and harsher measures to try and regain control. If German railwaymen refuse to do their jobs, they must be forced to work or else be replaced with French cheminots. If communication lines are cut, the saboteurs will be made to pay with their lives. German newspapers report the use of horsewhips against miners to get them to do their job. Viewed from the French capital, the principle at stake is non-negotiable: a defeated power cannot be allowed to rewrite the peace. Paris cannot afford to back down without prompting a crisis at home. And whatever the French or Belgian occupying forces do now in the Ruhr, it is no worse than what German forces did in Belgium and France during the war.
PARIS: At the Rue Fontaine, Breton’s surrealist seances are getting out of hand. Some attendees seem addicted, turning up day and night begging to be put into a trance. One regular attendee, reportedly on drugs at the time, tries to stab Ezra Pound in a café one evening, mistaking him for someone else. As news of the soirées gets around, a number of Americans–the Greenwich-on-the-Seine expatriates that Hemingway so despises–ask if they can come along to watch. (Going the other way, one American on the fringes of Breton’s group returns to New York that summer to take on an extremely Dadaist job full of promise: he becomes a stockbroker on Wall Street.)
When one of the frequent visitors of the club, supposedly in a hypnotic sleep, locks some other participants up in a room for several hours against their will, Breton decides to call a halt. Things have gone too far. André feels that he is at risk of repeating the mistakes of Dada and descending into pointless spectacle. For a while, he proclaims his intention not only to stop the seances but to stop writing altogether. ‘Literary possibilities are no more interesting than political possibilities,’ André tells a newspaper interviewer; ‘only spontaneous forces interest me.’
It looks as if surrealism may be over before it has even begun.
LONDON–ROME: The latest diplomatic communication from the British Ambassador to Italy arrives in London.
Despite his occasional fits of temper, the ambassador believes that Benito Mussolini is an able statesman whose vaulting ambitions–whether to be the founder of a new Roman empire, or to be Europe’s peacemaker–can be contained. Admittedly, he can be a little eccentric. He has recently been seen driving around the Italian capital at great speed in a two-seater automobile with a lion cub he has been given. ‘The Italians seem to like this sort of thing’, the diplomat notes wryly.
MOSCOW: Vladimir’s headaches return. He sits with his sister Maria talking about the past. He recalls the time when he had to stay in a hut outside Petrograd in 1917, hiding out during the turbulent times when things could have gone either way. They reminisce about the assassination attempt in 1918.
He suffers another stroke. Vladimir’s right side is paralysed. Doctors huddle around him. The Politburo summons a Swedish specialist at vast expense. Someone suggests a Tibetan doctor should be called in. It must be shown that everything possible is being done. As he sits at a table in his Kremlin apartment, a pen, spectacles and a paper-knife are arranged in front of Vladimir, who is no longer able to speak at all. He is asked to hand over the spectacles. He does. Good. He is asked to hand over the pen. He reaches for the spectacles again. Not good.
Stalin can breathe easily again. Lenin is kaput.