ACROSS EUROPE–NEW YORK: The Tsar’s mother has returned to her native Denmark. Wrangel and his family take up residence in a rented villa by the Danube outside Belgrade. Denikin is in Budapest and Yudenich in the south of France. White Russians circulate in ever-smaller social circles, whirling with intrigue. Moscow has set up a fake monarchist organisation to make the whole thing spin faster into oblivion, wasting the émigré community’s time on the chimera of anti-Communist resistance from within the Soviet Union.
In certain cafés in Paris and Prague, more Russian is spoken than French or Czech. ‘New York has so many Russian nobles that they are in danger of losing their identity merely by force of numbers’, the New York Times reports. Titled ladies take up new jobs as seamstresses. The former editor of Petrograd’s leading newspaper is now said to be working in a hospital laundry uptown. Whatever they do, White Russians stick together: ‘They gather in restaurants, pull down the shades, close the doors, dim the lights and are in Russia again–that lost, magical, mystical Russia of yesterday.’
MUNICH: ‘What does Hitler look like?’ asks the magazine Simplicissimus (price seven hundred and fifty marks, up by half since April). There are no photographs of him so people must use their imagination. Some imagine him fat, others imagine him thin. Some have heard about the fanatical gleam in his eyes, others about the prominence of his mouth. Does he have a jutting chin, or a prominent forehead? Not all these mental pictures can be accurate. When the magazine’s cartoonist travels up to Berlin for a few days, he is asked all kinds of questions about the true appearance of Bavaria’s new far-right Wunderkind.
In response, the cartoonist draws sixteen very different-looking pictures of Hitler, focusing on the attributes others ascribe to him. One depicts a well-defined mouth, in mid-rant, looming out of an otherwise faint and featureless face. Another shows a washed-out figure where the only noticeable feature is a pair of large ears: to better hear the voice of the people. The cartoons grow more absurd. One shows a man with a flowing beard dressed in a prophet’s smock, reflecting one Berliner’s question as to whether Hitler looks, in fact, a little bit like the Nordic god Wotan. ‘Is it true’, asks another, ‘that he only ever appears in public wearing a black mask?’
‘Hitler is not an individual at all’, the cartoonist writes in the caption under his last representation of him: an abstract jumble of Bavarian beer mugs, a knife (about to plunged in an imaginary back, perhaps), a handgun, a swastika and black thunderclouds above: ‘He is a condition–only the Futurists can draw him.’
PARIS: Trying to revive his flagging fortunes, his Parisian novelty value now well and truly worn off, Tristan Tzara decides to stage a new show. Banned from booking any theatres himself, he has to take on a few Russian partners for the enterprise.
The plans which emerge from this joint effort are for a rather tame avant-garde variety show, a far cry from the Dadaist événements of previous years: some light music by Stravinsky and a few readings. There is nothing here to shock a Parisian audience brought up on The Rite of Spring. Tzara does not bother to ask Breton’s poet friends whether he can use their work; he puts them in the programme anyway. André is furious.
NEW YORK: One Friday in early summer, Marcus Garvey’s trial for mail fraud finally gets under way.
The atmosphere is tense. Garvey supporters are said to have stockpiled weapons. The captain of one of the Black Star Line ships is said to have been intimidated with threats of violence to ensure his testimony is favourable. After discovering that his own lawyer thinks he should plead guilty to secure a reduced sentence, Garvey opts to conduct his own defence. In his last speech to his followers before heading to his trial, Garvey name-checks himself fifty-six times, and compares his courage going into battle with that of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914. ‘I am saying to those who think they are getting even with Garvey, when Garvey dies a million other Garveys will rise up’, he declares. ‘Garvey goes to court like a man.’ He claims it will be the biggest trial in American court history.
He is not as good a lawyer as he is an orator. Garvey is jailed for five years. There is no sympathy from William Du Bois. ‘I think that Mr Marcus Garvey had an unusually fair trial and that, all things considered, he got a very lenient sentence’, Du Bois writes to a friend in Florida.
ESSEN–SCHÖNAU– MUNICH: Schlageter’s body is transported back to his home town in the Black Forest. Wherever the train carrying his corpse stops it is greeted by processions of nationalist associations. The rector of Giessen University, just outside Frankfurt, announces that ‘the name of Schlageter will be inscribed in our hearts, where he lives as a glorious example of love of the Fatherland, of unwavering belief in the future of the German people, and inspiring heroic loyalty to the death.’ In the student town of Freiburg, thirty thousand people turn out. The family ceremony in Schönau is overwhelmed. Schlageter’s name is mentioned even in Moscow, where the Comintern debates whether to treat him as a hero struggling against French profiteers.
In Munich, nationalist associations hold their own commemorative ceremony with Ludendorff in attendance. Hitler claims that Schlageter’s death proves that freedom will only come through armed action. At the city’s St Boniface church, a religious service honouring Schlageter is held and SA standards are sprinkled with holy water.
Schlageter becomes a Nazi icon. The Völkischer Beobachter publishes and republishes accounts of the martyr’s last hours, emphasising his Christ-like composure in the face of death. An SA motorbike parade to pay homage in Schlageter’s home town is organised. Schlageter trinkets are produced. Putzi contributes with a song. ‘Our movement is a restless force’, Hitler tells a crowd in the Bavarian town of Passau, after another flag-waving procession, ‘and those who come to us are those ready for battle’. After the May setback, membership starts rocketing up again.
PARIS: On the night of Tzara’s show, the spark that sets thing off is, strangely enough, the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. As part of the spectacle, the artist’s name is maliciously recited on stage as if he were a war victim: ‘Pablo Picasso, dead on the field of honour’. Breton rushes up to defend the Spaniard from being treated this way and orders the reader to vacate the premises. When he refuses, Breton strikes out with his cane, breaking the poor man’s arm.
Tzara, the anti-establishment, anti-everything founder of Dada, then does what any impresario would in such a situation: he calls the police. (He later instructs a lawyer to seek damages, too.) Breton and his companions are chucked out onto the street. But it is Tzara’s reputation which is in tatters. He is no longer shocking. But nor is he commercial. The theatre owner cancels the show’s second night. The Russians split. André takes himself on a well-deserved holiday to Brittany for a spot of fishing and ponders his next move.
ESSEN: A full-blown terrorist campaign is now under way in the Ruhr. Belgian soldiers are shot while checking passes. A curfew is introduced which forbids Germans from using their gardens at certain times of the day and requires them to keep their windows shut; curfew-breakers are liable to be shot. Later, locals are banished from the trams, and cafés are shut down. When two French adjutants are shot in Dortmund, six German civilians are summarily executed in return. On the last day of June another railway bridge is dynamited. Nine Belgian soldiers die. The morale of the occupying forces begins to crack.
Attempts at diplomatic resolution fail. Paris sticks to its guns, insisting it has no political goals in the Ruhr, while making plain that, whatever happens next, the mechanisms of economic control may remain there for a long while to come. The French are willing to negotiate, but only if German resistance ends first. Berlin cannot budge for fear of a nationalist backlash–and how can it call off a resistance movement it does not control? London tries to break the deadlock, calling for level heads and common sense. Such efforts are rebuffed. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, the French respond. Moreover, when it comes to reparations, ‘the German government will never recognise any amount as just and reasonable, and if it does, will deny it on the following day.’ They cannot be trusted.
An edict is announced requiring German officials be kept within the blast zone while improvised explosive devices are dismantled in the Ruhr. They are also required to be the first to physically investigate them, in case they are booby-trapped. Hostages are forced to ride the region’s trains to discourage night-time attacks.
GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN: Seven months after the award of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, Einstein finally gets around to giving his Nobel lecture in Sweden–on the subject of relativity. He also tells the audience about his ambition to formulate a unified field theory connecting electromagnetism to gravity, the strong and the weak forces of nature: the holy grail, in other words. It is a speculative quest, led by mathematics. A unified theory must, he intuits, be mathematically beautiful.
But there is not much time for such thoughts in the summer of 1923. Einstein is distracted. ‘One nearly goes mad from all the visitors, the letters and the phone calls’, he writes to a friend. Throughout the early summer, Einstein fights with Mileva and his sons about where the Nobel Prize money earmarked for them should be kept. Nineteen-year-old Hans-Albert tells him: ‘You don’t know how much you’re always frustrating and upsetting Mama with this business, and I too find your handling of business affairs like this really inconsiderate.’ And then there is politics. In July, he attends a pacifist rally in Berlin with a French friend, in support of Franco-German reconciliation and against the occupation of the Ruhr. (The police warn that the Frenchman’s safety cannot be guaranteed if he tries to give a speech.)
It is only at the end of the summer that Albert is reconciled with his son. They travel to Kiel together and go sailing. It takes rather longer to settle matters with Mileva–three apartment blocks are eventually purchased in Zurich. But by then Albert has other family problems to manage.
LAKE GARDA–ROME: Gabriele D’Annunzio enjoys the latest addition to his palace garden: several large boulders from sites of Italian victories in the Great War. He has a new French mistress, over thirty years his junior.
In Rome, Benito continues his work to make his government impregnable against all challengers and prepare the way for the next stage of his conquest of power. He tightens up the country’s media laws, making it easier for the government to close down newspapers. In June, he sets off on a nationwide tour. He is trailed by journalists who dutifully report on the adoring crowds at his speeches–and the black-shirted Fascist militias who turn out to be inspected by their leader.
Step by step, Benito wears down those who oppose him, making it harder and harder for them to regain the initiative. In July, under heavy intimidation, the Italian parliament passes a new electoral law providing for the party which wins one quarter of the vote in a future election to be automatically awarded two thirds of the seats in parliament. Men armed with daggers and guns sit in the public gallery to make sure all goes as planned.
All this is helpful, but Mussolini has another trick up his sleeve, something he learned from D’Annunzio. Benito needs to win a little theatrical war. He must have his own Fiume. The target is chosen as the Greek island of Corfu. Now all he needs is an excuse to invade it.
BERLIN: By the beginning of June, a copy of Simplicissimus costs one thousand marks. By the beginning of July its price is up by half again. Inflation distorts everything. No one knows how much things should cost. In spring, a woman working as a porter in Baden railway station charges Ernest Hemingway fifty marks to help him with his luggage; in Mannheim the same day, a porter charges him a thousand marks, protesting that it is barely the cost of a glass of schnapps. Factory workers demand higher and higher wages, to be adjusted monthly, weekly, daily so that their pay keeps pace with the rising cost of living. Factory owners either close down or comply. (The sharper ones turn inflation into profit, paying their workers in falling German marks, and selling goods abroad for hard currency.) Those with savings in marks are impoverished. Unemployment rockets up.
Government attempts to stop the fall in value of the mark are ineffective. The Reichsbank spends its remaining gold and foreign currency reserves achieving virtually nothing. New banknotes are produced: the old thousand-mark bill is retired, and a new series with denominations up to fifty million is produced. There are stories of Americans unable to change a five-dollar bill because no one could possibly provide so much money in German currency. Currency speculators thrive. The black market flourishes. Huge shipments of banknotes are required for employers to pay the workers. Riots break out if they haven’t arrived. The state daily teeters on the edge of insolvency.
As in 1919, sometimes it is the very unity of the German nation which seems to be at stake in all these interlocking financial and political crises. On a Sunday at the end of July, in Koblenz in the Rhineland, occupied by the French since 1918, several thousand separatists gather to express their anger at still being shackled to the German basket-case. They demand a new currency for the Rhineland and popular self-determination. ‘We are free citizens of the Rhineland; we do not want to be sold; we want to determine our own future’, one speaker says. Prussia may want war, but the people of the Rhine want peace. French newspapers report the main slogan of the meeting: ‘Los von Berlin!’–‘Away from Berlin!’
In early August, the Chancellor makes a speech in the Reichstag on the crisis in the Ruhr. ‘In a few days,’ he starts–‘the dollar will be worth ten million’, interrupt the Communists–‘it will be the end of seven months of occupation’. He counts the cost in lives lost, refugees, the number who have lost their homes. The French have earned the contempt of all true Germans, he says. In return they have got less than one fifth of the coal they could have received from free German labour. They have started a ‘process of annihilation’. Discussions with London to help restrain the French have gone nowhere. ‘We stand alone and must and will help ourselves’, he says. In 1918, Germans hoped for a peace of understanding. There is no such hope now, ‘and so the fight goes on’.
The Chancellor notes the rise of extremisms on the left and right. Both sides seem to have grown closer to each other in recent months, both willing the collapse of the centre so as to impose their vision of the future. ‘The government is on guard’, he declares, ‘and will clamp down on unrest–from whichever side it comes–with all its force’. To stir up civil war at a time like this is criminal. ‘For as long as you–the representatives of the people–place your trust in me, I will serve until the last day of my strength’, the Chancellor concludes. He is gone within a week.
SAN FRANCISCO–WASHINGTON DC: President Warren Harding, the younger and more energetic man who succeeded Woodrow Wilson in March 1921, dies of a heart attack at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco. Marcus Garvey sends his condolences from jail. Vice President Coolidge, the man who made his name in the Boston police strike of 1919, takes over.
Sixty-six-year-old Woodrow Wilson is in better health than for years. He resumes regular visits to the theatre with Edith. After one play, several hundred fans gather by the stage door. Woodrow is serenaded with the Marseillaise. ‘There’s the man you can’t forget’, cries a well-wisher. A curious thought enters Woodrow’s mind. The White House seems wide open again.
LAUSANNE: The Turkish delegates wear top hats for the occasion. After six months of negotiation–and the dramatic failure of the previous attempt–a treaty is finally signed between Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey and the victors of the Great War (albeit without the United States).
Obstinacy has paid off. The Turks achieve sovereignty within the country’s borders. There is no mention of an independent Kurdistan or Armenia. The Straits are governed by another international agreement. The compulsory exchange of Greek and Muslim populations is ratified by both sides, with an exception made for the Greeks of Istanbul.
A little glimmer of peace in a continent still torn apart by conflict.
DEARBORN: Henry Ford grants an interview. He has still not said whether or not he will run for President in 1924, but he allows speculation to continue. ‘I certainly couldn’t run the government the way I run my business’, he says, with obvious regret. There is too much waste; too few facts. Perhaps industry will take over government in the future, he says. ‘The industrial organism has more life flowing through it, more energy.’
Whereas industry understands the need to serve the consumer–it is a question of survival–politicians seem to know only how to serve themselves. ‘Would you substitute autocracy?’ the journalist asks. No, he wouldn’t–but personally he would be prepared to wipe the slate clean somehow: ‘I’m sure we’re going to get rid of all these dead cells as soon as the time comes to get rid of them.’
BERLIN–THE RUHR: A new German Chancellor is appointed at the head of a left–right coalition to try and manage the worst crisis in Germany since the war.
He faces an impossible task. Passive resistance has yielded nothing. France seems to be in no mood to negotiate except on its own terms, and only once passive resistance is called off. The economy is collapsing. By the end of August the price of Simplicissimus has reached eighty thousand marks.
On the face of it, the country is awash with money, more money than anyone has ever seen. Over the summer, the central Reichsbank starts printing banknotes worth one hundred million marks. Before 1914, that sum would have bought three Dreadnought battleships, the most powerful and most expensive weapons in the world; now a shopkeeper might make the same amount in a quiet morning selling a few dozen loaves of bread. The boss of the Reichsbank boasts that, armed with enough zeroes, paper and ink, the bank will soon be able to issue, almost every day, banknotes of a value equal to the entire current stock in circulation.
But despite–or because of–this ever-increasing flood of money, no one ever seems to have enough. Each banknote printed reduces the value of the rest. Local communities try to escape the madness by creating their own currencies pegged to something–anything–which can still be trusted as a store of value. Some become fantastically rich in these months; most become poor. They look for scapegoats.
PAMPLONA, SPAIN–PARIS: While André Breton is fishing in Brittany, and Albert and his son are sailing in the Baltic, Hadley Hemingway is five months pregnant and Ernest has a new hobby.
It began earlier in the summer, when Hemingway travelled to Spain with a few friends, stayed in a bullfighters’ pension in Madrid, and got hooked on the idea of bull and man, the grandeur and the tragedy of the struggle of life and death represented by the corrida. ‘It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you’, he writes to his friend Bill.
Ernest decides that he will return with Hadley. On the advice of Gertrude Stein, the two of them attend the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, renting a room in an old house for five dollars a night, with walls as thick as those of a fortress. Neither Hadley nor Ernest speaks much Spanish. They do not meet a native English-speaker for a week. But in Pamplona, Hemingway feels more alive than he has in years. The two of them are up at dawn every morning, roused by military music and by the prospect of seeing the bulls run through the cobblestone streets. Fireworks, drums, drink and music fill their days. And blood, of course. By mid-July, Hemingway claims he has seen twenty fights at least. They fill his writing, offering precisely the kind of short, sharp encounter which suits the style he has been trying to develop for the last year: stark, precise, momentary–like a flash photograph.
When the two of them get back to Paris, as pregnant Hadley’s demands for different kinds of exotic food become more and more exacting, and the date of their return to America to have the baby comes closer and closer, Hemingway’s thoughts turn back to Spain and freedom. He can barely believe that he is on the point of leaving it all behind. On the morning of 5 August, the proofs come in for Hemingway’s first book–a few poems and a couple of short stories in a volume so thin it has to be filled out with blank pages. ‘No body will buy a book if it is too goddam thin’, Ernest writes to his publisher.
Two weeks later, Mr and Mrs Ernest M. Hemingway, lately of Paris, France, sail to Canada aboard the SS Andania.
BOUILLON, BELGIUM: Captain de Gaulle, now halfway through his training to be a senior officer in the French army, decides to take some leave with his wife Yvonne in Belgium. Together, they visit the town and fort of Bouillon in the Ardennes, which Charles proclaims should by rights really be part of France rather than Belgium.
Another day, Charles returns to the battlefield of Dinant, where he was wounded in August 1914. Like Hemingway’s return to Fossalta, the visit is an anticlimax. De Gaulle finds himself in a group of thirty men of whom he is the only one who fought in the war. It is strange for the conflict to seem already so far away, and yet so close. In his notebook, de Gaulle jots down the latest aphorism he has picked up from his reading: ‘Peace is the dream of the wise, but war is the history of humanity.’
DRESDEN: In the state opera house in Dresden, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich addresses an assembly on the fourth anniversary of Germany’s new Weimar constitution. ‘1919 is long ago’, he says with a mournful shake of the head. In the Germany of 1923 the power of capital has become overwhelming. Capital is the insatiable beast whose needs drive everything else now. The spirit of 1919 has been distorted and nationalism has returned. ‘A country on whose soil stand the armies of foreign powers can never know domestic peace’, Heinrich declares. Germany’s children are starving. Its people are emotionally exhausted. The Ruhr is being bled dry so foreign companies can boost their profits. ‘The German world is being bought up piece by piece.’
But, he warns, ‘to blame everything on blind fate and a cruel enemy is cheap talk, too cheap for these expensive times’. But what else is there? The Reichstag has become a conference of ghosts, unable to manage the crisis, floating in thin air.
ENNIS, CO. CLARE, IRELAND: The Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. A couple of thousand people come from all over the country to this small village to see a miracle, a divine apparition. The sceptical and the simply curious jostle with the fanatical.
The apparition arrives in a small, open-top car. Out steps Éamon de Valera wearing a blue overcoat and soft hat. No beard now. This is the old de Valera–the President of the republic, as some would have it. He mounts the platform to give a speech and has barely opened his mouth before an armoured car roars up. Free State soldiers fire in the air. Panic ensues amongst the crowd. De Valera falls. Has he fainted–or has he been shot?
He is arrested that day and taken into Free State custody. Now they will have to decide what to do with him. Putting him on trial is one possibility–but on trial for what? Too dangerous, politically speaking. Éamon de Valera might welcome an opportunity to play the martyr, to present his cause as that of the heroic underdog against an overbearing state. He is already halfway to being considered a saint amongst republican devotees. He must not be allowed to garner further public sympathy.
Pending a final decision on his fate, de Valera is sent to jail–one he remembers from when it was run by the British–and placed in solitary confinement.
GORKI: His room is as it was before. The pictures are taken off the wall. A chair is put by the window. Vladimir enjoys sitting here, looking out over the park towards the town.
A therapist is employed to try and restore Vladimir’s faculty of speech. One day he is highly enlivened when he is visited by an acquaintance he has not seen since the 1890s, a man with whom he once debated the merits of Marxism. Conversation is animated in facial expressions and intonation, but limited in vocabulary. ‘Look’, ‘what’, ‘go’–each word a fragment of a thought that no one can decipher. Vladimir starts learning to recite the alphabet again. On good days, he is able to half mumble his way through the Internationale or ‘In a Valley of Dagestan’.
Nadya tries to teach him to write again, with his left hand, but without success. He attempts to read Pravda, but finds it hard to get beyond the headlines. He is frustrated, frequently depressed and cries when he thinks no one is looking. Once, Nadya is so angry and upset that she begins to weep herself. Vladimir instantly produces his handkerchief to help her wipe her eyes.
Some days in September, when he is feeling a little better, Vladimir and Nadya are driven out into the countryside to feel the thrill of the air rushing past them. At other times, Vladimir goes out into the forests with the male staff of the estate. They take guns to do a little shooting. They never go very far.
LONDON: Clare Sheridan publishes her memoir of 1922. She pokes fun at Mussolini and declares she has definitively fallen out with fascism. ‘My own impression of fascism is that if it were to succeed internationally it would turn the whole world into the conditions of Mexico and Ireland,’ she writes, ‘where every young man, instead of thinking of work, says: “Give me a gun”.’ Her cousin Winston, she suggests, thinks fascism is merely the shadow of Bolshevism, and he would prefer to be ruled by the former than the latter. Clare hints that some people think Churchill would make a good fascist leader himself.
MUNICH: ‘Democracy is a joke’, Hitler tells an American reporter from the New York World. ‘Just as Americans call for America for the Americans’, he says, ‘so we call for Germany for the Germans.’ It is not material factors, but psychological ones that truly matter: ‘What Germany really lacks is not guns–but will’.
THE ALBANIAN–GREEK BORDER: Benito gets his pretext. An Italian general working with a League commission to demarcate the brigand-infested Albanian–Greek border is murdered one morning on the road to the border post at Kakavia.
The basic outline of the ambush is all too familiar: a roadblock in remote countryside, in an area from which there is no easy escape and where the victims can be attacked without difficulty. But the motives are unclear. Who would have done such a thing? No one claims responsibility. Investigators find that no personal valuables have been removed. If it was a political murder, was the Italian the intended victim or was it Greeks who were supposed to die that morning? The order of vehicles in the convoy was changed at the last minute when the Ford carrying the Greek party broke down and the Italian Lancia was sent on ahead. Coincidence or conspiracy?
The answer to such questions does not matter much in Italy. Spontaneous anti-Greek riots break out across the country. Demonstrators urge swift action against the perpetrators–whoever they may be–or, if they cannot be identified, against the Greek government (held responsible for the murder because it occurred on Greek territory). Benito prepares an ultimatum. The terms are deliberately harsh, if not impossible. Greece is given five days to conclude its investigation. As an act of penance, Athens is required to organise a state funeral for the slain Italian general in the Greek capital’s Catholic cathedral. The Greek navy must pay homage to the Italian fleet. An indemnity of fifty million lire is demanded, to be paid within five days.
Full acceptance of the ultimatum is demanded within twenty-four hours. It is assumed that the Greeks will reject these terms. What sovereign nation could accept them? But Benito calculates that he wins either way. If his terms are accepted, he will have shown that, under his leadership, Italy protects its own and will not be pushed around. If Italy’s terms are rejected, Benito will have a pretext for some short, sharp military action in an operation that his military has assured him they can pull off without much difficulty. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Fiume adventure will soon be a distant memory. Italians will have a new military hero. Mussolini’s political position will be unassailable. In order to avoid any last-minute snafus, Italy’s diplomats consult with their British and French counterparts. Rome rapidly concludes that Paris and London will do nothing material to prevent Italy dealing with the Greeks exactly as she pleases.
The clock ticks down towards the expiry of the ultimatum. Athens protests its innocence of any involvement in the murder of the Italian general and accepts some of Rome’s terms–but not all. It’s not enough. Within three days of the ambush on the windy mountain road to Kakavia–and within hours of Athens’s partial rejection of the ultimatum–Italian forces land on the island of Corfu. Italy has a new daring hero to admire, and the world has a full-blown international diplomatic crisis on its hands. Although the Italian occupation of the island is supposed to be peaceful, a delay in the landing means the Italian officers in charge have to rely on brute force to ensure their troops are in full control by nightfall. The warning given to Greek authorities (and foreign representatives) is cut from two hours to thirty minutes. Thirty-five shells are fired at Corfu’s old hilltop fortress, now a refugee camp for Armenians and Greeks expelled from Anatolia following Mustafa Kemal’s triumph. Sixteen are killed. Many more are wounded.
The Greeks take the matter to the League of Nations. The new world order is being tested.
WESTERHAM, KENT–BAYONNE, FRANCE: One rainy English summer’s day, still suffering from a persistent sore throat, Clementine is in a philosophical mood. Reports suggest that an earthquake in Japan has just killed tens of thousands of people in and around Tokyo and Yokohama. ‘The Kaiser and Mussolini seem quite benevolent & humane compared to the Almighty when he lays about Him’, she writes to her husband, currently gambling and yachting in France with a friend. ‘In one day He kills as many people as in six months of the Great War.’
Both Clementine and Winston find their attention drawn to Corfu. The Greeks have asked the Council of the League of Nations to intervene. Rome has rejected internationalisation, arguing that the matter should be determined by the Great Powers alone. (It assumes that France–not wanting the League on its back in the Ruhr–will back up Italy on the matter.) But how can anyone have faith in a new world order, if only the strong get to decide how it works?
‘The poor League of Nations is on trial’, Clementine writes. ‘I hope it prevails & is not made a laughing stock.’ But what can it do? It has no army or navy of its own. The League is only as strong as the resolve of its members. If the Great Powers abandon it when it comes to the crunch (or when their own interests are at stake), it can do nothing. ‘Poor devil,’ Winston replies sympathetically to his wife, ‘it is life or death for it now.’
ROME: A talkative group of Americans from Cincinnati engage a German couple–a man in his late sixties and a woman who appears to be his daughter–in an unwanted conversation on the train from Florence to Rome. As they approach the city, one of the Americans mistakes the Apennines for the Urals. Another asks the Germans (who they mistake for being Italian) about where to buy pearls in Rome. Sigmund Freud groans inwardly. Americans!
For the next three weeks the recovering patient is indefatigable in taking his daughter around the city. Every day is packed with sightseeing. On one afternoon alone Freud takes his daughter to see Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the Bocca della Verità, two Roman temples and a Roman victory arch. On another they walk out along the Via Appia Antica to visit the catacombs where Rome’s dead used to be buried. Not bad for a recovering cancer patient. Only once is Anna able to escape from her father’s punishing schedule, to go to the cinema with the daughter of the owner of their hotel. Italy revives Freud. Can it be that he has cheated death?
The rumble of the international crisis over Corfu does not disturb their fun. Nor does it disturb their business. In amongst all the sight-hopping, Sigmund finds time to compose a brief letter to his nephew Edward in New York complaining about late royalty cheques from America, and appointing him his agent.
MUNICH–NUREMBERG: Ludendorff has fallen in love again. Erich has eyes only for Mathilde, a psychiatrist who was supposed to help his wife with her morphine addiction but ended up charming the general instead. Under Mathilde’s guidance the general, who once believed his July 1918 offensive failed because he recited the wrong prayer, is coming around to the startling conclusion that Christianity, with its glorification of the weak rather than the strong, is the spiritual ballast holding Germany back from its true potential. The country does not just need a new politics, Mathilde tells him, it needs a new religion.
In Nuremberg, Germany’s nationalist groups hold a large rally. The French are still in the Ruhr and the German mark is worth virtually nothing any more. But there is a sense that the world is going their way. A national mood is sweeping Europe. The defeated are rising up again. Events in Corfu have energised things. The peace of 1919 is under fire from all sides. ‘The fate of Turkey shows extraordinarily many similarities to our own’, reads an article in a nationalist newspaper. ‘If we want to be free then we will have no choice but to follow the Turkish example in one way or another.’
A huge field Mass is held. Tens of thousands of grizzled veterans of the Great War and the Freikorps are joined by those too young to have fought, but infected by their elders’ stories of heroism and betrayal from France to the Baltic to the fight against Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Berlin. A Protestant clergyman gets the audience to swear they will not rest till the French have been thrown out of the Ruhr. Then they sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’.
The Nuremberg gathering brings together all the strands of the German nationalist movement. Hitler attends with five hundred members of the SA. But his name is far from the most prominent. Ludendorff is the most senior soldier on display. A nationalist admiral–once Kaiser Wilhelm’s top naval man and a firm advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917–reminds the audience of the global ambitions represented by the imperial fleet. Several members of Germany’s royal families are present. The seventeen-year-old son of Hermine, the Kaiser’s wife, goes down on one knee to receive a silver chalice of wine from Ludendorff. It is as if 1918 never happened.
Adolf gives a firebrand oration claiming that only violence can help Germany defeat its external and internal enemies. Such a statement is bound to stir things up. An American journalist reports his words back to the United States. ‘We need another revolution’, Hitler says: ‘not that socialist, bourgeois and Jewish revolution of 1918, but a nationalist revolution.’ The only way to save Germany, he announces, is through ‘blood and sword’.
In the middle of festivities, an alliance is struck between a local Freikorps group called the Bund Oberland, active during the crushing of the Bavarian Soviet in 1919 and then again in Silesia in 1921, and the Nazi Party’s SA. The two groups (along with a third splinter group) agree a manifesto. They declare eternal opposition to the Weimar constitution, reparations, international capital and the ‘nation-destroying’ dogma of class warfare. They claim to be the embodiment of the fighting spirit of 1914. They take Leo Schlageter–the martyr of the Ruhr–as their model.
The manifesto is mostly conservative, demanding better treatment of war veterans and confirming private property (a far cry from Adolf’s early speeches). It requires that henceforth all German art–film, painting, theatre–should be mobilised for Germany’s national renewal. The national interest must determine everything. The alliance calls itself the Kampfbund, the Battle League.
Adolf is delighted. The Kampfbund can call on thousands of members, many of them with war experience. It is a far cry from the few hundred SA heavies in Austrian ski-hats training outside Munich at the beginning of the year, or the loose nationalist alliance of May. Though not under his sole command, Hitler now has the beginnings of a real army. The question now is, what to do with it?
MONZA–ROME: There is another German besides Freud who shows up in Italy during the glorious late summer of 1923. Former jailbird Kurt Lüdecke bears a slip of paper signed by Hitler which declares him to be the Nazi Party’s official representative on the Italian side of the Alps.
Benito is in Monza for the start of the European Grand Prix, where he is photographed talking seriously–as one daredevil to another–to the racing-car drivers. He later gives an interview to the influential British Daily Mail, a newspaper quite sympathetic to the virile blackshirts. Lüdecke (arriving in Italy via meetings with anti-Versailles groups in Budapest) tries to catch up with Mussolini in Milan. He accosts him on the steps of the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia. When that fails to produce much more than a vague nod of the head from Benito–who is that man?–the German follows him on to Rome, hoping for an audience there. It seems much harder to meet Benito now that he is premier.
Mussolini is wary. ‘The fall of the Empire has left a void in the German mind’, he writes in the preface to a new book about Germany that September. The political consequences of this upheaval will not be decided by whether there are machine guns hidden in forest caves, ‘but the mood of the new German generation’. The current situation is hard to read. Benito will always have time for emulators and admirers from abroad, but is too savvy to get himself mixed up too deeply in their intrigues. Germany has never been a country he has had much fondness for. In its current state he views it as dangerous and unpredictable. Why meet with a Munich emissary who, not being in power, can make no concrete promises in the way of territorial concessions, but whose mere presence in Italy will raise question marks about Benito’s diplomacy?
Premier Mussolini has more immediate matters to think about: whether France and Britain will back him on Corfu or let the League of Nations become involved.
MADRID, SPAIN–DOORN: A coup d’état in the Spanish capital brings a right-wing military government to power. General Primo de Rivera proclaims himself dictator. The King of Spain offers his support. (A nationalist army officer serving in Morocco–Francisco Franco–is doubtful of the new man.) On the day of his coup Primo de Rivera composes a message to be sent over the Mediterranean. ‘Please convey to His Majesty the King of Italy, to Mussolini, and to the Italian navy my sympathy for the example they have set to all the peoples who know how to save and redeem themselves’.
Clare Sheridan races to Madrid to add Europe’s latest strongman to her tally. She is not impressed. Primo de Rivera is no Trotsky, Mussolini or Kemal. He seems a copy rather than a true original. But if he is something of a low-grade dictator, imagine what this says about the King of Spain who has called on him to rule the country. Madrileños call the King ‘Secondo de Rivera’ now. He responds by calling his general-dictator ‘mon petit Mussolini’.
In Doorn, the latest right-wing coup convinces the Kaiser that his time is finally coming. After the false dawn of 1920, he now pins his hopes on 1923. Italy and Spain are blazing a trail for Germany. Democracy is played out. What the world needs now is an iron hand in a velvet glove, military might and monarchy. Wilhelm expects the call from Berlin at any moment. Hermine is less sure: she finds herself cold-shouldered on a trip home. The Kaiser’s son is the more popular monarchist choice now.
MUNICH: Adolf asks his secretary to get in touch with the author of several recent articles about Mustafa Kemal. He wants advice. ‘What you have witnessed in Turkey’, his secretary writes on Hitler’s behalf, ‘is what we will have to do in the future as well in order to liberate ourselves.’
Hitler now has a series of takeover models to choose from. There is the Ankara model: secure a minor city as your base and then use populist appeal and a national army to take over the rest of the country. There is the Rome model: a theatrical march on the capital backed up by paramilitary force and completed with co-option of the existing order. Now there is the Madrid model: military coup d’état sanctified by royal blessing. He seems to be edging towards the Ankara template. First Bavaria, then Germany–then the world.