AUTUMN

HOF, GERMANY–BERLIN–MUNICH: Adolf holds another German Day gathering, this time in the north Bavarian town of Hof. Seventy thousand members of southern Germany’s nationalist groups march through town. The Nazi leader arrives in a shiny new red Mercedes-Benz.

Immediately afterwards, Hitler is driven in secret to fundraising meetings in Berlin, travelling through Saxony with handguns drawn, in case of a repeat of the incident earlier in the year. They reach the capital around two in the morning and tour the city. Hitler points out the royal palace and the Reichstag to his driver. ‘When we have our swastika flying over those two beautiful buildings,’ Adolf shouts over the automobile engine, ‘I will be the Führer of the entire nation.’

In Berlin, it is now clear that passive resistance against the occupation of the Ruhr has failed. The Chancellor tries a last roll of the diplomatic dice, offering all kinds of temptations to Paris and Brussels to get them to negotiate, from a long-term security deal to a share of German businesses. A French diplomat worries about the impact on international public opinion should France refuse to even discuss matters. But in Paris, the reasoning which applied in the autumn of 1918 remains strong: if the enemy is about to crack, stand firm to secure total victory. French support for Italy over Corfu is answered by Italian support for France over the Ruhr.

At the end of September, the Germans break. One Monday around midday the German Chancellor meets a delegation of one hundred and fifty representatives from the Ruhr. They are unanimous that the situation is untenable. On Wednesday, Berlin bows to the inevitable: ‘To secure the life of our people, we are today required, out of bitter necessity, to interrupt this fight.’ It is as if the country has been defeated a second time: first on the battlefield, now on the field of high politics and high finance. War, peace–what is the difference?

Back in Bavaria, Berlin’s decision to call off passive resistance brings matters to a head. After feeding the black crocodile of Germany’s radical right for so many years in an attempt to try and tame it, the authorities fear the beast may be about to bite them. They hoped that by allowing Munich to become the capital of Germany’s far right they would inoculate Bavaria against communism. They turned a blind eye to far-right infiltration of local army units, thinking this would buy the troops’ loyalty to the government in Munich. They allowed paramilitaries to acquire semi-official status as a last line of defence against the Communists. They allowed plotting against Berlin to take place under their noses. They coddled the black crocodile, they let it live. Now the beast is fat, and strong, and angry.

In the wake of the decision to abandon passive resistance in the Ruhr, Hitler is made political leader of the Kampfbund. A new raft of Nazi rallies are announced. Speculation mounts that they might be cover for a putsch attempt. In an act of desperation, the Bavarian establishment decide to pre-empt this by installing their own dictator. A hard-line, self-confident, anti-Semitic conservative named Gustav von Kahr is handed executive power by the authorities with a mandate to secure law and order. Troublemakers are to be deported. All political meetings are made subject to a stringent new system of approval, intended to prevent Nazis, Communists and even Bavarian nationalists from whipping things up.

The decision in Munich fractures relations with Berlin. But the situation demands action. The counter-coup seems to be working. Kahr suppresses the left and tries to woo the more traditional elements of the nationalist right. There are signs the Kampfbund may split.

CORFU, GREECE: After several weeks of diplomatic crisis played out between Rome, Paris, London, Athens and Geneva, the Italians consent to leave Corfu on terms agreed amongst the major powers. The League of Nations is sidelined.

As the date for Italian withdrawal nears, no one is the wiser about who actually murdered the general whose death caused the invasion in the first place. A commission comprising British, French, Italian and Japanese delegates is sent to investigate. Whether on his own initiative or on instructions from Rome, the Italian representative goes out of his way to disrupt anything which might portray the Greek response to the killing in a positive light. He imperiously takes charge of questioning the Greek officer who found the bodies, as if cross-examining him for murder. When the investigators visit the site of the attack he constantly interrupts proceedings to cast doubt on Greek honesty. There is only time to interview a few witnesses: a border guard, the local telephone operator, a shepherd and some goatherds.

The commission of inquiry makes a preliminary report to the major powers with some light criticism of Greek police work. The Italians–working on terms of reference that state that Greek culpability will be assumed unless proven otherwise–insist this is enough for Greece to be forced to pay fifty million lire, as demanded in Italy’s original ultimatum. The French back up the Italians. The British are unhappy with the Italian insistence, but accept it. The Greeks have no choice but to give in. This is not the high-minded embrace of international political principles that Woodrow had in mind when the League of Nations was founded. It is the acceptance of power as the true determinant of affairs, dressed up to look like ethical diplomacy. The British Ambassador in Paris is disgusted. Given the grubby reality of international affairs, it is only natural that the United States ‘enveloped in her white robe of virtue does not wish to soil it by rubbing shoulders with such an unclean crowd’, he writes.

Athens gives instructions to the Swiss National Bank to transfer fifty million lire to the Bank of Italy in Rome. Benito Mussolini claims victory. The hero of Fiume has been eclipsed by the hero of Corfu.

DOORN: Wilhelm is excited by the visit of a German cultural anthropologist, just returned from Africa. Under his spell, the Kaiser becomes an enthusiastic convert to the idea that Germany’s true destiny is not, as he had previously thought, to be the bulwark of the West against the various racial and political perils from the east, but to be natural leader of the Orient.

It is as if the scales have been lifted from his eyes, the Kaiser says. The British and the French, he has now realised, are not even white. They are ‘negroes and berbers’ masquerading as whites. Meanwhile, it is Germany’s purity of race which will make a natural leader of those other eastern nations who respect that kind of thing. It all clicks into place. So taken is the Kaiser by this latest visitor (and his latest theories) that he decides to give him a signed photograph the next day, scrawling grandly on it that ‘while the West may go under, Germany never will’. Germany’s true enemy is not the Bolsheviks. It is the same as it ever was–England!

BONN, GERMANY: ‘The Lower Rhine is wonderful despite the gloomy sky, the threatening level of the dollar, and the occupation’, Einstein writes to his new secretary, Betty, twenty years his junior. He has fallen in love with her. He writes her poems. Perhaps it is all part of Albert’s mid-life crisis, alongside the search for a perfect unified theory. To his wife, Albert writes in rather darker tones. He tells Elsa to hide the silver, in case the unstable situation in Germany leads to a fresh revolution, and advises her to use up a little Czech money they have at the bank.

MUNICH: Adolf gives an expansive interview to an American journalist explaining that while Germany could once have shared the world with England, those days are gone. ‘Now, we can stretch our cramped limbs only towards the east’, he says. ‘The Baltic is necessarily a German lake.’

He talks freely about his racial policies. ‘The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him’, Hitler says, reminding his interviewer that hand grenades and artillery shells during the war made no moral distinction between the pure and the impure.

He advocates patriotic ruthlessness. Syphilitics and alcoholics must not be allowed to reproduce. ‘The preservation of a nation is more important than the preservation of its unfortunates’, Adolf declares. ‘That, to me, is the essence of humanity.’

VIENNA: An Austrian surgeon, known for his ground-breaking work on the war wounded, writes up his case notes. ‘Operation at the Sanatorium Auersperg. Assistants: Dr Hofer and Dr Bleichsteiner’, he begins. ‘Cut through the middle of the upper lip, then around the nose till half height’, he scrawls, ‘after that broad cut around the buccal mucous membrane.’ Like a geologist, the surgeon records cutting through bone and chiselling teeth before he can get at what he needs to remove: ‘finally pulling forward the tumour and severing the nervus pterygoideus internus’, a nerve at the very back of the mouth, where the jaw meets the skull. Where the cancer has been cut out, a prosthesis is fitted. There is relatively little bleeding. The patient’s pulse is recorded as good: sixty-four. He must be fed through his nose. He is given injections of camphor for the pain.

It is a week before the patient writes a letter to his mother explaining his absence and warning that she may not see him for some time. When he returns home three weeks after his operation he admits to feeling ‘broken and enfeebled’. Not more than a month later, he must submit to the surgeon’s scalpel a second time. And then a third, this time to undergo a fashionable operation believed to boost his chances of recovery: the severing of his spermatic duct.

Freud avoids his friends. He cannot work. His speech recovers slowly, and when at last it does come back it sounds different, with the air whistling past his ill-fitting prosthesis as if between two reeds. His hearing is impaired. Is he half alive or is he half dead? Sometimes he does not know.

BAYREUTH, GERMANY: Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the well-known racist, Wagner family member and sometime correspondent of the Kaiser, is delighted that Bavaria’s nationalists have chosen Bayreuth, once home of Richard Wagner, as a site for one of their famous rallies. ‘Preparations for the German Day bring the house to life’, he writes in his diary: ‘wheel-chair ride through the flag-strewn town gave me a good deal of pleasure.’ Red, white and black flags of the empire are flown rather than the black, red and yellow of the republic. The purpose, a local newspaper explains, ‘is to show un-German elements that the time of hiding German patriotism in one’s heart, and not showing the German blood that runs in German veins, is over’.

Adolf arrives at a quarter past eleven on Saturday evening to be greeted with the rolling of drums and the sounding of trumpets. The following morning, festivities begin at six-thirty: ‘much activity from dawn till dusk’, Chamberlain notes. An open-air religious service evokes the spirit of 1914, followed by a march-past of the SA and other nationalist militias (estimates of the numbers involved vary wildly). Police patrol the event with rubber truncheons, on the lookout for left-wing protesters. Someone who shouts ‘Heil Moscow!’ is quickly bundled away. Cosima Wagner, the great composer’s widow, watches the procession from the terrace of the Wagner residence, Wahnfried.

That evening Adolf speaks at an indoor riding-arena. He is one of several nationalist speakers addressing the crowds around the city. The Bavarian authorities have warned them to avoid political controversy by criticising Kahr. They decide to court controversy instead. That night, Adolf visits Chamberlain, the idol of his youth. The old racist and young Nazi are both moved by their encounter. For Hitler, the meeting amounts to holy unction.

The next morning at ten-thirty, Chamberlain waits in his wheelchair outside Wahnfried to give Adolf a tour of the house and introduce him to the Wagner family: Cosima, her son Siegfried, and Winifred, Siegfried’s English-born wife. Adolf shows up in short Bavarian leather trousers, a check shirt and thick woollen socks. Cosima is unimpressed (she has seen more dramatic figures in her time). Siegfried, a composer like his father, is much keener on the visitor. Winifred, originally from the English coastal town of Hastings, is keenest of all. Adolf weeps at Wagner’s grave. He was twelve when he saw his first Wagner opera, Lohengrin, he remembers. The press are informed about Adolf’s meeting with the Wagners. It is another step in the creation of the Hitler myth, a symbolic fusing of Nazism with the traditions of high German Romanticism. It gives Nazism a cultural pedigree.

A week later, the emotion has still not worn off for Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Meeting you, he writes to Adolf, was like feeling the spirit of August 1914 all over again: ‘You have transformed the state of my soul’. ‘That Germany can produce a Hitler in its moment of direst need, is proof that it still lives.’ The letter feeds Adolf’s sense of himself as a national Messiah. Germany must be saved and he is its saviour.

DÜSSELDORF: The same day that the Nazis march through Bayreuth, a quite different sort of demonstration takes place in Düsseldorf, in the French zone of the occupied Rhineland.

Hundreds of green, white and red flags–the colours of those who want an independent Rhineland–flutter in the air. Thousands of activists gather to hear their political leaders. French observers watch proceedings at a discreet distance, not wanting the rally to look too much like a front for their own interests.

A little before four in the afternoon, having heard the rumour that the separatists are about to formally declare an independent Rhenish republic, members of the local German police sally forth to break things up, swords flashing, guns out. The demonstrators race into nearby alleyways to take cover. The Rheinlandschutz, a pro-separatist militia, fires at the police. A battle develops near the railway station. French troops restore order. The German police are disarmed. Three hundred protestors are locked up. There are numerous casualties on all sides: two hundred have been wounded, a dozen killed.

Some separatists claim that they have been betrayed by Paris. Others see the bloodshed as a stepping stone, proving the bloodthirstiness of the Prussian authorities and making the case for independence impregnable.

TORONTO: ‘It was a bad move to come back’, Ernest writes to his old Paris pal Gertrude Stein: ‘I have understood for the first time how men can commit suicide simply because of too many things in business piling up ahead of them.’

Hemingway is working for the Star again. He is not enjoying it. It seems like a step back into the past. Ernest hates his boss, Mr Hindmarsh, with a passion. There is no one he can talk to about serious writing other than a kid at the paper who is working his way through college. He misses Paris and finds Toronto duller than he remembered. Everyone he meets in North America seems so boring, a cardboard cut-out of a human being, compared to the strange and wonderful characters he came across every day in Europe.

When Hadley gives birth to a little baby boy at two o’clock in the morning on 10 October 1923 Ernest is travelling for work on a train somewhere in upstate New York. When he gets back he decides that their son bears a strong resemblance to the King of Spain. Ernie and Hadley decide to give their newborn the middle name Nicanor, after a famous Spanish matador, in addition to John (and the nickname Bumby).

It is a flash of the Hemingway bravado. But Hadley is worried. ‘I think we are going to leave here as soon as I am safely strong again’, she writes to a friend. ‘He is almost crazy and our hearts are heavy, heavy just when we ought to be so happy.’

Hemingway still dreams of being a literary writer. He keeps copies of his first collection of poems and short stories–only three hundred have been printed–in a cupboard ready to send out to any potential reviewers. At the Star, he boasts that his friend Ezra Pound told him his writing is ‘the best prose he has read in forty years’. In New York, Hemingway is able to lay his hands on a rare copy of a Paris literary journal, several months late, in which six of his short sketches are printed. Life is elsewhere.

PARIS: The latest edition of Littérature comes out in October, but its publishers worry about its long-term profitability. (The next edition will not come out until 1924.) Breton earns a crust working for a well-known art collector–who secretly he despises–and helping him expand his collection. He is a regular visitor to Picasso’s studio to see what the Spaniard is working on. Over the autumn, he starts writing poetry again.

MUNICH: Hitler’s Bildverbot–the ban on people taking pictures of him–is lifted. A Nazi photographer who has been begging Adolf to let him take his portrait for years suddenly finds his wish granted. A small picture of Hitler appears for the first time in the German press in the Berliner Illustrierte (alongside a feature on Germany’s most famous lion tamer and a picture of Soviet gymnasts formed into a five-pointed Soviet star). Postcards of Adolf Hitler are also produced. They catch the Nazi leader in a haughty, dynamic pose, sometimes in a dark suit, other times in a beige raincoat. His hair is brilliantined back. His toothbrush moustache–the same as Chaplin in his early films–suggests a man who looks forward into the twentieth century, rather than back to the Kaiser.

Adolf tries another tack to boost his image. With Ludendorff’s help, he hires someone to write a book about him. (In fact, Adolf writes most of it himself.) The task of being Hitler’s amanuensis falls on a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Prussian aristocrat with impeccable military credentials. Unlike the mangy field-runner, the young aristocrat actively helped crush the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919. He participated in the Kapp putsch, rather than flying in when it had already failed. He has just returned from an extended trip to Finland to study how the White Finns defeated the Reds. He is the perfect choice: another bridge between old-school conservatism and the Nazis.

The resulting tract–Adolf Hitler: His Life, His Speeches–is a modern hagiography. Hitler is described as a present-day Christ, whose suffering will expiate the sins of the nation. The gas attack of 1918 becomes a moment of spiritual awakening when a humble patriot realises his extraordinary fate. ‘This man, destined to eternal night’, reads one passage, ‘who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul–in the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendour, new life!’ Seventy thousand copies are printed. ‘One can surely expect that this book will find its way into the hands of all party comrades’, the Völkischer Beobachter notes confidently. It is on sale for only a few weeks before it is banned by the Bavarian authorities.

PARIS: Final preparations are made for a ballet premiere. Just a week of rehearsals before the opening night. How could it fail to succeed? The style is jazz. The writer is a long-expatriated white American called Cole Porter. The name of the show is Within the Quota. The subject is something of which many Europeans dream: emigration to America.

An immigrant arrives wide-eyed in America. He encounters all kinds of characters: a lady millionaire, a black vaudeville performer, a cowboy, a jazz-crazed youth, a sheriff, a Puritan. Eventually, of course, the immigrant becomes a movie star, just like Rudolph Valentino, the man who has begun to catch up with Charlie Chaplin in the American celebrity stakes. The message is clear: America, despite being a much harder country to emigrate to these days, is still a place where an outsider can become an insider, where a foreigner can make it, where what matters is who you want to be not who you are.

Ironic, then, that so many Americans should choose to leave. ‘It’s easier to write jazz over here than in New York’, Porter explains, freed from the influence of popular music. What’s more, in Europe, jazz does not belong to only one section of the population–here, jazz belongs to everyone.

MUNICH: ‘How can we measure the greatness of a man?’ Hitler asks a Nazi meeting. ‘A feeling for the heroic’, he answers. There have been three truly great German heroes, Adolf contends: Martin Luther, Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner. Is Kahr such a hero? At a rally in Nuremberg, Hitler calls the Bavarian leader a ‘decent chap’ and an ‘able civil servant’. But true heroes must have a hero’s instincts, they must have a hero’s will. ‘Kahr does not have such a will’, the mangy field-runner tells the Nuremberg Nazis.

Adolf declares himself personally unambitious. But he has sworn an oath of loyalty. ‘If everything were to fall apart,’ he says, ‘if others were to break their oaths of allegiance, if you yourselves deserted me one by one, and I were left quite alone in the world, know this: I will for all eternity be faithful to the German people’. Hitler portrays himself in terms Wagner would readily have understood: a figure upon a mountaintop who believes he has the power to bend nature to his will. Adolf has come to believe that he embodies Germany’s rebirth. All he needs now is the right moment to prove it.

AACHEN–SPEYER–HAMBURG: You wait for a putsch for months. Then several come at once.

At two o’clock in the morning of 20 October there is a clatter of boots in Aachen, in the Belgian zone of occupation in the Rhineland. Without a shot being fired, the city’s municipal buildings are occupied by a few hundred Belgian-backed Rhenish separatists. The following morning, a Sunday, they declare the Rhineland’s independence from Berlin. Separately, self-appointed Rhenish authorities also pop up across the French zone. At the same time, politicians in a wine-growing area known as the Bavarian Palatinate (a portion of Bavaria clustered around the Rhine and physically separated from the rest of the state) declare autonomy from Munich. Having already peacefully entered government in Saxony and Thuringia, the Communists now launch their own revolutionary putsch in Hamburg, taking over thirteen of the city’s police stations and holding them for two days against the police at the cost of forty lives. (Communist HQ tries to call off the rising at the last minute; word does not get through in time.) Germany’s political order is disintegrating.

Events in the Rhineland are opaque. The separatists themselves are badly split. Paris and Brussels rightly suspect each other of manipulating local sentiment to their own ends. London views the putsches and mini-coups along the Rhine as an attempt to revise the terms of the Treaty of Versailles by the back door, creating breakaway German states permanently independent of Berlin.

GORKI–MOSCOW: Vladimir sits in his motor car and demands to be taken to Moscow. His sister Maria remonstrates with him that he does not have the right permits any more. This produces a guffaw. Vladimir, Nadya, Maria, the doctors and some bodyguards eventually depart for Moscow, driving at much lower speed than the impatient revolutionary would like. On arrival, he goes to his old rooms in the Kremlin. He takes a mournful look at the Sovnarkom table around which he used to hold cabinet meetings. He seems emotional. There is talk about going to an agricultural exhibition. But the rain is too heavy. The group head back to Gorki. Vladimir will not return to Moscow.

Civil war is raging in Vladimir’s Communist Party. For months, a bloc in the Politburo has been manoeuvring to undermine Trotsky, worried that Lenin’s departure from the scene will turn his Napoleonic ambition into reality unless it is checked. He has more prestige than any other Politburo member. To many, he is Lenin’s natural heir. He expects his point of view to carry in debate, even when he is absent from the relevant discussions. His high-handed treatment of his colleagues, always willing to display his intellectual self-assurance in pointing out the mistakes of others, wins him few friends. Other Politburo members meet without Leon to caucus against him. The sniping is incessant.

In October, Leon finally strikes back. His supporters circulate a letter suggesting the party bureaucracy has become too strong, stifling open discussion and leading the country into an economic malaise in urgent need of correction. Greater freedom of expression is demanded for dissenters. Trotsky’s opponents accuse him of factionalism. To ask for a revision of party rules is to violate them. They cry heresy, disloyalty, treachery.

The Red Tsar has departed from the scene, but the soldier-prince is no longer assured a smooth succession. Then, out duck-hunting one Sunday, Trotsky catches cold after walking through a freezing bog back to his automobile. He cannot shake the illness off.

ISTANBUL–ANKARA–BERLIN–MUNICH: In Istanbul, a British army band plays ‘Long Live Mustafa Kemal Pasha’ (originally written during the war as ‘Long Live Enver Pasha’), Turkish troops enter the city and Mustafa Kemal’s national victory is sealed.

Within a matter of weeks, Turkey’s official capital has been shifted to Ankara, a republic has been proclaimed, with Islam as the state religion, and Kemal has been confirmed as head of both the executive and legislative branches of government. ‘We are returning to the days of the first Caliphs’, one conservative cleric declares, hopefully. That is not how Kemal sees it, of course. He wants to reform Turkey, not to govern it in the name of God. He does not intend to share power with the last Ottoman in Istanbul, even if he is now only Caliph and no longer Sultan.

The Berliner Illustrierte publishes pictures of Kemal’s troops parading through Istanbul for its cover in the autumn. On the inside pages a long article discusses the merits of dictatorship, illustrated with snaps of great authoritarian leaders of past and present from Julius Caesar and Napoleon to Mussolini, Lenin, the Chinese warlord Wu Peifu and Kemal. The implication is clear: sometimes, in times of crisis, only a strongman will do.

In Bavaria, the Heimatland newspaper demands ‘an Ankara government’. Bavarian army divisions should march on Berlin to proclaim a national revolution, it demands, just as Kemal marched from Ankara to Istanbul. The scheme is not so fantastical. Bavaria’s top general privately tells nationalist associations that a march on Berlin is ‘the first possibility’ to save the country. But the window of opportunity is brief. It must happen in the next two weeks.

MILAN: Benito Mussolini, the hero of the hour, finds himself amongst friends and colleagues, talking to an association of fellow journalists.

He explains to them his vision of their role in Italian society. ‘Journalism’, the former editor of Il Popolo explains, ‘is above all else, an instinct.’ You have to be born a journalist; it is very hard to become one. Journalists need to recognise the importance of, as Benito puts it, ‘collaborating with the nation’.

A few days later, from a balcony in Milan, he gives a forty-minute speech celebrating the first anniversary of the march on Rome, that by-now mythical event. It has been conveniently forgotten that Benito himself did not march at all, only joining his black-shirted legions once the gamble had been won. The gathered Fascists interrupt every second sentence of Mussolini’s speech with loud applause. He reminds them–and all of Italy–just how responsible they have been over these past twelve months. ‘We have not invaded or closed parliament’, he tells the baying blackshirts, ‘in spite of the inevitable nausea it has provoked in us.’ But such restraint might end if Benito’s enemies do not play along. ‘We have not created special tribunals’, he notes, ‘though they might have been useful to deliver a necessary dose of lead once in a while’.

Mussolini is the master of the crowd. Italy’s old bosses thought we would not last a week in office, Benito reminds the blackshirts, and yet they have already been in power for a year. ‘Do you think’, he asks, plucking numbers out of the air, ‘that our rule will last for… twelve years multiplied by five?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ the crowd replies. He talks about the ‘resurrection of the race’: the audience laps it up. He talks about national expansion: the blackshirts can hardly contain their enthusiasm. To those who still think that fascism created Mussolini, rather than the other way around, Benito has a message: I am the boss now and I will use my power as I like. ‘If tomorrow I told you that it was necessary to continue the march, and sent you off in… another direction, would you march?’ Il Duce bellows. The response is deafening.

Benito laps up the adulation. Viva il re! Viva il fascismo! Viva l’Italia! He is about to turn back inside. But he can’t resist an encore. He leans out over the balcony balustrade and silences the crowd with a single gesture of his hand.

‘To whom does Rome belong?’ he asks. ‘To us!’ the blackshirts reply.

‘To whom does Italy belong?’–‘To us!’

‘To whom does victory belong?’–‘To us!’

AACHEN–BERLIN–MUNICH: There is more chaos in the Rhineland. Now French-backed Rhenish separatists march into the Belgian zone of occupation, from whence the Belgian-backed putschists of a few weeks ago flee to safety. German police reoccupy Aachen’s town hall, defending it with fire hoses. The French-backed Rhenish separatists force them out. Belgian troops arrive to disarm them.

In Berlin, the Chancellor loses his majority in the Reichstag and the mark plunges to its lowest level yet. A few days later, anti-Semitic riots break out in the city, sparked by rumours that immigrants from the east are taking money destined for Germany’s unemployed. Jewish shop windows are smashed, tinkling onto the pavement like shattered dreams.

As the riots are in full swing, Einstein is forced to deny media reports that he is planning a trip to Soviet Russia. There are rumours that an attempt on his life is imminent. He decides to get out of town, taking a train to Holland, where he has a teaching position at Leiden. He writes to Betty suggesting that perhaps they should move to the United States together with his wife Elsa, living as a happy threesome somewhere in upstate New York. He pictures a little clapboard house somewhere, spacious enough for them all.

In Munich, Ludendorff and Hitler plot away. They are not the only conspirators. Almost everyone has their plan for a putsch–some seeking to co-opt Kahr, others to displace him, some intending to bring in the Nazis, others to exclude them. In this atmosphere, ears are cupped over neighbours’ walls to find out what is going on next door. Kahr orders enhanced surveillance of telephone, post and telegram networks.

‘There is no going back now, there is only forwards’, Adolf tells another rally. ‘We can all feel the moment coming. Only when a black, white and red swastika flag flies over the royal palace in Berlin will the German question have been resolved.’

TORONTO: Ernest’s newspaper articles look fondly back across the Atlantic to the Continent he has left behind. This autumn he writes one article on game-shooting in Europe, another on trout-fishing, several on Spain, one on Germany. Most read more like short stories than journalism: a literary escape from the drudge of the family and a job he does not care for any more.

It is hard to find inspiration in Toronto. Hemingway visits the offices of a newly founded League of Young Communists where an enthusiastic former suffragette is teaching her wards the difference between the communal life of bees and human beings. ‘The bees kill their non-producers’, the kindly Mrs Custance points out, admiring their apian good sense.

Ernest writes a poem entitled ‘I Like Americans’ for the newspaper. ‘They would like to have Henry Ford for president’, it suggests, ‘but they will not elect him.’

MUNICH: 4 November. Now here is a plan that cannot fail. Following a ceremony attended by local army units to dedicate a monument to Munich’s war dead, Adolf is to bound up the stairs of the army museum, confront Kahr and harangue him about the city’s food situation. Meanwhile, Ludendorff is to persuade the army to arrest the government.

Ludendorff does not turn up. The car meant to collect him did not arrive, he says. Hitler calls it off. That night, one of the conspirators attends a Breton-style seance to summon the spirits of the netherworld to tell them the future. The dead are sadly unavailable to help.

KILMAINHAM JAIL, DUBLIN: The prisoner asks for mathematical texts to pass the time. He takes an interest in the work of Albert Einstein.

Someone inscribes a name in capital letters above his prison door, using their bayonet point to score the paint: ‘MICK COLLINS’. Éamon de Valera is saddened when he sees what the vandals have done. The capital I is dotted; the N and the S are reversed.

He decides to have a word with the prison staff.

MUNICH: 8 November. Another day, another plan. Bavaria’s political elite are gathering in a respectable little beer hall by the river Isar to discuss the political situation and hear Kahr speak. A golden opportunity for the unscrupulous to strike.

Ludendorff double-checks that Bavaria’s senior army commander will be coming to the Bürgerbräukeller meeting that evening. To make sure that the Munich garrison is as dispersed as possible when the moment comes to launch the putsch, a number of officers are invited to a party that will never happen by putschists who will never show up. That evening, most of the army’s top brass are either in the beer hall or at home in civilian clothes. One senior officer is attending a lecture on trade with the United States.

Meanwhile, the putschists prepare. Members of the Kampfbund assemble in their favourite bars and bowling alleys. A little after eight a contingent is bussed to the Bürgerbräukeller. The police guarding Bavaria’s political elite are outnumbered. They soon give way. SA men surround the building. The moment has arrived.

Adolf Hitler theatrically throws away a pint of beer (which his friend Putzi has just bought him–for one billion marks) and elbows his way to the front of the hall. Clambering up onto a chair, he shoots into the ceiling with a pistol to get everyone’s attention and declares that a national revolution has begun. Hitler invites Kahr, Bavaria’s senior general and Munich’s police chief to parley in an adjoining room. He tries to persuade them to go along with the putsch rather than fight it.

In the beer hall, there is uproar. Hermann Göring, the air ace turned SA leader, calls for calm. Cries of ‘Mexico’ and ‘South America’ go up, likening the Bavarian putschists to bandits. Adolf gives an update from the negotiations. Kahr and the others have not yet been fully persuaded. But they will be. ‘Either the German revolution begins tonight’, he says, ‘or tomorrow we will all be dead.’ Ludendorff arrives in full dress uniform to apply pressure on Kahr and his associates. Who can say no to the man who lost the war? Kahr returns to the beer hall to announce that he is prepared to act as regent for the monarchy in a new government. Hitler is to be in charge of propaganda. He clasps Kahr’s hand to thank him for his words. While Adolf is off dealing with other matters, Ludendorff lets Kahr, the general and the police chief go.

In Munich, confusion reigns. Nobody is clear about the actual state of affairs between the army, the police and the putsch. Confusion leads to delay in the conspirators taking over vital buildings. And delay saps momentum. At one point, cadets who support the putsch and police who support Kahr face each other across the street outside Kahr’s headquarters. There is uncertainty about who is on whose side, or whether they are all in fact on the same side. A shoot-out seems imminent. Then an order comes in, supposedly from Ludendorff, countermanding earlier instructions to take the building.

At midnight, the putschists are still confident. They have the promises of Kahr, the army commander and the police chief. The odd miscommunication is to be expected. By four the next morning, the truth begins to dawn: they have been betrayed. Kahr and the others have decided to oppose Hitler and Ludendorff. A promise extracted at gunpoint is no promise at all. Munich army headquarters has already been in touch with other garrisons in Bavaria to ensure their loyalty. By eight, the Kampfbund members in the Bürgerbräukeller realise that they are not the vanguard of a national revolution, but the isolated remnants of a putsch which has failed before it even got off the ground. Ludendorff, having changed into civilian clothes, sips red wine. Someone orders the beer hall’s band to play some marching tunes. Putzi Hanfstaengl is engaged on liaison duties with the foreign press.

The putsch has lost momentum. But no counter-punch has knocked it out. Ludendorff goes back to his creed of 1918: it is a matter of nerves. Show the enemy one’s own defiance, and they will crack. ‘The heavens will fall before the Bavarian Reichswehr turns against me!’ he exclaims. A column of pro-putsch militia is organised, arranged a dozen abreast as if on a German Day march-past. On its way towards the city centre, the Kampfbund column sweeps through a line of armed police guarding one of the bridges, beating them up as it does.

A few minutes later, at the entrance to the Odeonsplatz, more armed police bar the way. The putschists–some armed, some not–are confident these police will be no different. Many are Nazi sympathisers, after all. Then the bullets start flying. It is a little after midday. There are snow flurries in the air. For twenty or thirty seconds, chaos reigns. There is firing in both directions. Machine guns are brought up. Most Kampfbund members hit the ground to avoid the bullets whizzing around. Adolf is pulled down by a Baltic Freikorps man, dislocating his shoulder in the process. Ludendorff keeps walking towards the police, arriving at their lines unscathed.

Fourteen bodies lie on the ground. Göring, wounded in the leg, takes cover behind a stone lion before limping away from the scene of the shooting as fast as he can. Hitler is carried to safety by a doctor and a medical orderly. He is then whisked off in an automobile–destination Austria.

‘It sounds very funny,’ Hemingway writes about the events in a letter to his pal Gertrude in Paris, ‘the early dispatches so far’. He is not the only one. ‘Ludendorff may never live down the laughter’, says the New York Herald. One wit calls the general’s gang so hopeless they would have been ‘repulsed by “Keep off the grass” signs’. In Paris, they laugh out loud at the putsch’s ‘vaudeville ending’ with everyone backstabbing everyone else. ‘An idol has fallen’, notes Le Matin, declaring Ludendorff irretrievably damaged and the entire revanchist movement leaderless. In Rome, Benito receives an account from the Italian consul in Munich describing the putchists as ‘buffoni’–‘clowns’. It has been a giant farce from start to finish.

In Germany, the putsch is treated as the natural result–understandable and perhaps even forgivable–of months and months of stretched nerves. ‘It was almost a mathematical inevitability’, notes the Berliner Illustrierte. When the moment of explosion finally comes, some find it almost a relief.

DOORN: Wilhelm follows events in Munich from a safe distance in Holland. His adjutant rushes over the latest newspapers for the Kaiser to look at while taking a break from wood-chopping. His entourage debates the merits and drawbacks of a civil war. Amongst the dispatches from Bavaria, the Kaiser also learns, to his dismay, that his son the Crown Prince has gone back to Germany without his father’s permission. ‘The stupidity of youth’, the Kaiser roars. ‘What was he thinking?’

Wilhelm seems almost relieved when the putsch fails. ‘Thank God, the whole stupid story has come to an end’, he tells his equerry. After all, while he is as happy as anyone to see the republic he hates take a black eye, what role would there have been for him if the putsch had been a success? ‘The new Reich’, Wilhelm writes to an old supporter a little later in the year, ‘will not come from a beer joint.’

He will just have to wait a little longer for his moment, the Kaiser tells himself. It is safer that way–look at what happened to stupid Charles in Budapest. Occasionally he contemplates a more dramatic course of action. If the French go any further, he tells a startled adjutant, then he will have to return whatever the cost, first to take up the sword against the Fatherland’s domestic enemies (the socialists) and then against the French. His advisers know better than to take such outbursts too seriously.

AMERICA: Through the hisses, haltingly, a voice. Apart from those who have attended the man’s speeches, America has not heard Woodrow Wilson before. Now, the day before Armistice Day 1923, the ex-President speaks over the airwaves. It is the voice of another age, the voice of a nineteenth-century Southern gentleman.

To some, Woodrow Wilson’s words sound suspiciously like a campaign speech. Does he still entertain political ambitions? President Coolidge and the Republicans are weighed down by rumours of wrongdoing under his predecessor’s administration. A scandal around the leasing of some oilfields back in 1921 and 1922 is brewing in Washington, with stories of ‘loans’ which were really kickbacks. The sage of Dearborn–if he were to stand as an independent–would be likely to further weaken the Republicans. Might a Democrat with experience manage to come through the middle?

Though delivered slowly and deliberately, Woodrow’s speech crackles with partisan indignation. The voice coming out of radio-sets across the country attacks the ‘sullen and selfish isolation’ into which America has retreated since the war. The Republicans, Woodrow claims, have no answers to America’s economic and social challenges. France and Italy, meanwhile, have made ‘waste paper’ of the Versailles Treaty. ‘The affairs of the world can be set straight only by the firmest and most determined exhibition of the will to lead’, he warns. He does not need to remind America that 1924 will be election year.

America hears the voice–but does not see the man. Wilson delivers his speech in his dressing gown. Though a table is set up in the library for him, he insists on standing behind the microphone, resting on a cane. Edith holds a carbon copy of the speech in case her husband should require a prompt. His eyesight in his good eye is failing. He can barely read. His mind is more one-tracked than it used to be.

INNSBRUCK AND KUFSTEIN, AUSTRIA–UFFING-AM-STAFFELSEE, GERMANY: The former air ace Hermann Göring escapes from Germany to Innsbruck, in terrible pain from the bullet wounds to his leg. Morphine is used to dull the pain during an emergency operation. (Göring develops a lifelong addiction as a result.) Putzi Hanfstaengl is helped across the Austrian border to Kufstein and spends the first night after the putsch attempt on the tiled floor of a flower shop.

Hitler does not make it so far. His escape vehicle breaks down halfway to the border and he seeks refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in the foothills of the Alps. Covered in mud from racing along country roads and hiding in a nearby wood till dark, he does not look like anyone’s idea of the Messiah. Helene gives him her husband’s blue bathrobe to wear. His dislocated shoulder makes it impossible for him to wear anything else.

The next morning, Hitler sends word to allies uncompromised by the Munich fiasco that he needs another car. Two-year-old Egon Hanfstaengl watches Uncle Dolf pace up and down as he waits. What is taking them so long? At five that afternoon, Helene’s mother-in-law calls. The police are nearby. Hitler grabs his Browning revolver as if to take his own life. Helene calmly disarms him and hides the gun in a flour jar. Adolf issues instructions for what to do if he is taken. Helene makes notes.

The police arrive an hour later. Hitler is taken into custody dressed in the oversized clothes of another man, covered by a raincoat pinned with his war medals. The Nazi leader briefly harangues the police, as if he were at one of his meetings again. Then he is led away–bedraggled, depressed, beaten.

On the way to Landsberg Fortress, where he is to be incarcerated pending trial, Adolf learns that Ludendorff has already managed to talk his way out of custody, claiming to be an innocent bystander caught up in someone else’s plan. It is exactly five years since the armistice of 1918.

MOSCOW–PETROGRAD–BERLIN: Clare Sheridan returns to Russia for the first time since 1920. The romance has gone. Enthusiasm turns to disillusionment.

The promise of the communist revolution once seemed so great, Clare remembers. Back then, utopia was something almost tangible. Now she feels that conviction has turned into cynicism. Clarity has become compromise. History used to gallop; now it seems to crawl. Under the skin, the new bureaucrats are the same as the old. The same instincts–greed, lust, love, hate–rule Russia as they do the rest of the world. Clare telephones one of the Bolshevik leaders she used to dine with, expecting to be invited back into their confidence, to start again where she left off. She is told bluntly: ‘You are not the type of newspaper correspondent we are accustomed to.’

Moscow is not a place for romantics like Clare Sheridan. What can they offer the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Moscow needs money, not sympathy. Instead of being put up in a VIP guesthouse in an old palace, Clare is forced to stay in a characterless hotel filled with tawdry British and American concession-hunters. Clare suspects the place is bugged.

She suggests a trip to the Caucasus. The authorities say no. Perhaps to Saratov? Too cold, the authorities respond. The Communists do not want foreigners roving around the country. Clare is finally given permission to visit Petrograd, and assigned a minder. To awaken her charitable instincts–a good use for Western journalists, this–Clare is shown around new hospitals which have no medicines and orphanages where she is asked for money. Another day, she is escorted to the former imperial palace of Tsarskoe Selo. Rasputin once walked here. Tsar Nicholas once slept there. Now the place is a museum. Groups of proletarians tramp through to gawp at the tastelessness of the Romanovs (and be told how much better off they are as a result of their removal).

Clare finds herself bored and frustrated. Her thoughts become disjointed. She feels alienated from her surroundings, alienated from her own past. Russia once seemed to throw up dynamic and imaginative revolutionary leaders by the dozen. But who is running Russia today? The country is crawling with capitalists, gamblers, men in sharp suits with rolls of cash. There are new Lenins now, and they are nothing like the old Lenin. They are functionaries, not revolutionaries.

Clare is distraught. It is one thing not to have ever believed in something, quite another to have believed and been disappointed. She decides to give up journalism entirely.

LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS: Albert decides to keep out of Germany for the moment. The situation there is too unsettled. He is working on a new theory, trying to address the quantum problem. His stomach problems have returned–nerves, a friend thinks. He has taken to writing aphorisms: ‘Children do not learn from the life lessons of their parents. Nations learn nothing from their history. Bad experiences must always be made anew.’

Albert reads books about Japan and prepares for a talk he is to give at an incandescent lamp factory in Eindhoven. Betty sends him photographs of herself to cheer him up.

ROME: A new political axis is being formed in southern Europe. ‘Excellency,’ Miguel Primo de Rivera tells Benito over lunch at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, ‘your figure is not just an Italian one, but a global one; you are the chief apostle of the campaign against dissolution and anarchy afflicting Europe.’ Glasses of sparkling wine are raised for the Spanish leader’s toast.

‘From Mussolini-ism’, the general says, ‘a belief, a doctrine of redemption is forming, with admirers and advocates all around the world.’ In a newspaper interview, he goes even further, declaring his hope that Spain follows in the footsteps of Italian fascism, which he calls a ‘universal phenomenon’ and a ‘living gospel’. In return, Benito conveys the fraternal greetings of all Italians now ‘marching along the open road of Fascist revolution’.

BERLIN–LANDSBERG FORTRESS: A magazine runs a cartoon showing two smartly dressed bourgeois men meeting on the street. One wears a strange badge on his lapel, multicoloured and multi-form. ‘What is it?’ his friend asks. ‘A swastika inside a Soviet star’, the man replies: ‘One never knows from which side a putsch will come.’

In the autumn, a new German currency is introduced. Prices begin to stabilise. Simplicissimus now sells for thirty pfennigs. By December, the movement for the independence of the Rhineland has lost any support it once had.

Visitors to Landsberg Fortress note how much weight Hitler has lost. He refuses the prison food. The Wagners send him care packages. He is overjoyed when his dog Wolf is brought to see him. Politically, the Nazi Führer is reduced to writing angry letters to the authorities through his lawyer. He rages to the prison psychologist about how Germany is not worth a damn: ‘Let them see how well they will do without me.’

GORKI: ‘Every day he makes a conquest’, Nadya writes to Inessa’s daughter, ‘but they’re all microscopic.’ Vladimir sits through a film of the sixth anniversary of the revolution, unable to say more than a few words. Nadya does all the talking now. An artist visits with the thought of doing a portrait of Lenin. But he finds a man in a wheelchair who looks nothing like the dictator he used to know.

Trotsky writes articles for Pravda and essays warning of an old revolutionary guard–Stalin and his cronies–unwilling to revise their past and of a new culture of servility in the party. ‘Any man trained merely to say “yes, sir” is a nobody’. The party must free itself from its own bureaucracy. Leon is desperately ill. He comes home exhausted every night. The doctors advise him to take a rest by the Black Sea.

TORONTO: A batch of copies of Ernest’s second book–called in our time, modishly printed out all in lower case–arrives in Canada in December. They contain a dozen literary sketches (some about bullfighting) to add to the six printed in the Little Review. Hemingway’s sister Marcelline orders a few copies as Christmas presents. Later, she decides that they are not quite right as family gifts. She sends them back to Paris where such literary creations belong.

Hemingway cannot bear it any longer. He hands in his resignation to the Star, effective 1 January 1924. The young journalist, still only twenty-five, has made a decision: the Hemingways are going back to Europe and he is going to become a full-time writer.

LAKE GARDA: Gabriele D’Annunzio donates his house, the Vittoriale, to Italy at the end of December. Benito sends a telegram to his old rival to thank him for his gift on behalf of ‘THE ITALY OF VITTORIO VENETO’ (that is to say, the Italy of the glorious final battle of 1918).

‘IN THE TOUGH DAILY WORK OF GOVERNMENT’, Mussolini continues, ‘I FEEL THAT YOUR DREAM OF VICTORY HAS BECOME THE DREAM OF THE ENTIRE ITALIAN PEOPLE.’ He promises to live up to it. It is a message from the man of the present to the man of the past.

VIENNA: Still weak from his ordeals, Sigmund Freud receives an early Christmas present, and a token of his growing fame: a copy of an unsolicited biography, the first to be written about him in any language. ‘I need hardly say that I neither expected nor desired the publication of such a book’, Freud writes back. He sends a list of corrections, in case there is a second edition.