One Sunday in January 1926, Melita Maschmann and her brother were shaken awake by their parents at midnight and carried into the dining room to the wireless set, a wooden box with headphones. Their parents sat them down in front of it, stroked Melita’s tousled hair out of her face and put the headphones over her ears. Through the atmospheric crackle, she heard a distant but carrying sound. Bells tolling, heavy, deep, admonishing. ‘The din from the headphones was terrifying,’ she said. ‘My parents had tears in their eyes and we children felt in our hearts that this Germany must be a dreadful and glorious mystery.’
Melita was just eight years old, and her parents were anxious for her to hear the bells of Cologne Cathedral, ringing for Germany because the last British soldiers had left the Rhineland, which had been occupied by the victorious Allies since the end of the First World War. Even after this partial withdrawal, much of the Rhine country remained in French hands. For many Germans, the occupation was symbolic of the fate suffered by their homeland since defeat in 1918—humiliating and arbitrary. In the Maschmanns’ conservative household, it was even considered a personal disgrace, because Frau Maschmann came from Darmstadt in Hesse, just outside the occupation zone.
The first time Melita and her brother had visited Darmstadt with their mother, they were still small children, not yet at school. On the train through the Rhineland they had encountered black soldiers and fled the compartment. Their mother had impressed it upon them that the ignominious Treaty of Versailles had destroyed Germany’s border regions, plundered its economy and sullied its culture with their foreign ways. ‘She loved Germany as unquestioningly as she loved her hometown or her parents. But there was no joy in her love,’ Melita observed. Her mother knew no peace. Political discussion at that time, no matter what one’s social class, was always grounded in the same wrenching anger at the Treaty of Versailles. Indignation at the ‘Diktat’ forced on Germany at the end of the First World War is a dominant motif in the memoirs and diaries of the time.
For the young Melita Maschmann, Germany was, more than anything, a feeling—a dark, tragic feeling for her homeland, instilled in her by her parents. ‘Even before I knew the meaning of the word “Germany”, I loved it as something mysteriously overshadowed by grief, something infinitely dear and vulnerable.’
The bleeding wound that was Germany shaped the childhood and youth of an entire generation.
• • •
When Gerhard Starcke went to university in Berlin at the end of the 1920s, he too had already been shaped by the political atmosphere at home and in school. Like Melita, he had travelled to the occupied Rhineland with his parents as a teenager. On the Rhine Bridge at Mannheim they’d had to submit to inspections by soldiers from the French colonies and walk on the road, because Germans were forbidden from using the footpath on the bridge. Gerhard had never forgotten it. The situation seemed to him symbolic of the humiliation of Versailles. At university, he came into contact with alumni of his fraternity, veterans who spent their evenings extolling reactionary ideas over beer and dreaming of revenge. The occupation of the Rhineland had been forced on them by the ‘Diktat’, along with reparations, and, worst of all, unmitigated responsibility for the war. The veterans blamed not only the victorious powers, but also the politicians who had signed the treaty in Germany’s name.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum were the radical left, who threw stones at Gerhard if he wore his fraternity armband and cap in public. ‘That’s how wide the gulf was in German society,’ Gerhard said. And yet the left, too, deeply resented the imposition of the treaty on their country—perhaps the only thing uniting the two sides at a time of rampant extremism. More than forty years later, Gerhard Starcke would write in his memoirs:
One belief was widespread in Germany on both the right and the left: that the injustice of Versailles was to blame for EVERYTHING.
• • •
The German Revolution of 1918 started in early November, when sailors began to mutiny against naval command in the last days of the war, rapidly leading to civil unrest across Germany. A republic was proclaimed on 9 November, and Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands the next day. Germany’s new status as a parliamentary democracy was confirmed in February 1919, when, after a national assembly held in the town of Weimar in central Germany, Friedrich Ebert was elected president.
But the new ‘Weimar Republic’, as it was known, was controversial. Born of defeat, it was fiercely opposed by millions of soldiers who felt Germany had surrendered needlessly, and that they had been betrayed by ‘enemies of the homeland’. At school, Gerhard Starcke had imbibed a contempt of the republic from his German teacher, a reserve officer. The new democracy was also opposed by those on the left who had hoped to see power vested in Soviet-style workers’ councils. While communists advocated revolution, conservatives longed for a return to empire—but both sides agreed that the Weimar Republic was fatally compromised by the Treaty of Versailles, signed only a few months later, in June 1919.
• • •
The age into which he is born is defined by the madness of Versailles, a treaty predestined, through its stipulations and consequences—unemployment, the enslavement of the German people and shortage of land—to start a new world war.
With these words Ilse Cordes begins her account of the life of her only child, Hermann-Friedrich Cordes, born in 1921. She has a curious style of writing, alternating between maternal devotion and political pathos as she traces the life of her son and all the highs and lows of the age that he has had to contend with—the flames of hate and the keenness of hope. Ilse Cordes writes of herself in the third person as ‘the mother’, and the text reveals more about her than about her son. Hers is the voice of a generation of disappointed parents who foisted their own desires for a better future onto their children. But here and there, when she recalls happy times spent with her little boy, a tenderness pervades the writing.
The pair of them are almost inseparable. Until he’s old enough to start school, they go for a walk every morning and every afternoon, chattering away to one another like two little friends. And woe betide anyone who hurts his darling mother!
Hermann-Friedrich Cordes grew up in the intensely military atmosphere fostered by his father, a publisher’s salesman who had trouble settling down to civilian life when he returned home from the war. Sometimes he earned a lot and sometimes nothing at all, and he was almost always drunk. Members of the volunteer corps came and went like conspirators, but little Hermann-Friedrich was never sent out of the room; his parents preferred him to stay and listen to the men who’d been cheated of the rewards they believed were their due. Two million dead comrades—their deaths mustn’t be in vain! Before Hermann-Friedrich had learnt to recite his times tables, he knew all about German discontent—and what was to be done about it.
And so, from an early age, through the things he sees and hears in his parents’ house, there grows silently and unawares in the boy the will to devote himself to the duty whose fulfilment shall be the crowning of his life.
At the elementary school that he attended from 1927, Hermann-Friedrich got into fights with the children of communists. On holiday at the seaside, much to his parents’ delight, he decorated his sandcastle with the black, white and red imperial battle flag. But his parents were growing further and further apart. His father was drunk or away from home; his mother spent days on end in bed. Sometimes the bailiff would knock at the door and carry off a piece of furniture, and soon their voices were bouncing off the bare walls. Hermann-Friedrich learnt to go without. He became quiet and withdrawn. ‘Day after day, mother and son return from their walks to the dark, empty flat. Only the comfort of her untiring little companion kept his mother from despair.’
• • •
Despite the frequent crises of the early years and the trauma suffered in 1923 due to disastrous hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic managed to attain economic and political stability by the mid-1920s, and important steps were taken to lead the country out of political isolation. But after the stock market crash of 1929, the nation was hit by the most severe shock wave the global economy had ever known.
At the Maschmanns’, Melita’s father screwed a sign to the front door that read ‘No Beggars, No Hawkers!’ but beggars rang the bell anyway, and the tunes of careworn buskers drifted up from the street. ‘It wasn’t possible to forget, even for a moment, that we’d been born into a poor country,’ Melita said. Sometimes the neighbours’ son lay drunk in the backyard. He was unemployed and spent his dole money on booze. One day, Melita met him on the street, dressed in his shabby military coat, barefoot and blank-faced. In his arms, he carried a small dog. A few hours later, she heard a scream. His mother had found him in the yard, his wrists slashed.
Gerhard Starcke’s father, who ran a handicraft business and was saving for the petty-bourgeois dream of a house of his own, was terrified of losing everything. ‘It was an awful time in Germany—a time when many people, some of them by no means unaccomplished, were so desperate that they saw the gas tap and the rope as the last, bitter resort.’ Little by little, all prospects vanished. Gerhard, who was studying German and history, watched radical nationalism gain a foothold among students. He developed views of his own on the best way out of the predicament. Like many others, he had a romanticised notion of life in the trenches, with its promise of heroic togetherness: ‘One for all and all for one!’
Renate Finkh from Ulm was the youngest of three children. In the early 1930s, she was still too young to grasp that the war had driven a wedge between her parents—too young to understand why her father inspired more fear in her than trust, or why her darling mother was in such poor health. Nobody ever had time for Renate. That was her first conscious feeling, when she was only four: ‘I know I’m lonely.’ She was always hearing that there was no money left. No money for school, no money for tram tickets or butter. It was a relief to see that there were others who were even worse off. Sometimes there were poor children in the hall at the Finkhs’, clinging to the skirts of their mothers—grey, skinny, ugly women, foul-smelling, too. Renate watched the maid put leftovers into the pots and pans they’d brought with them. ‘But there was something threatening about the poor,’ she said. ‘Even when they’d been given food. I felt that more and more keenly.’
When Renate saw them from her window, marching in long rows down the street, she shuddered at the sight of them. ‘The men wore peaked caps and had wild looks on their faces. Some of the women pushed black, high-wheeled prams. They had straggly hair and curiously large eyes.’ One evening they came from all sides and gathered on Lindenhof. Communists, Renate’s sister told her. Then their mother burst into the nursery and turned out the lights. Strangely stirring music rose from outside. There was a rattling noise; somebody screamed. Renate hid under the covers.
• • •
Any foreigner coming to Germany at this time was overwhelmed by the contradictions and high emotion of public life—and nowhere more than in Berlin. Sefton Delmer came to the city in September 1928, aged twenty-five. He wasn’t exactly a foreigner. Although a British citizen, the son of Australian parents, he had been born and schooled in Berlin, where his father was a professor of English literature. This meant that he learnt German before he learnt English, and even after he and his family were sent to England in a prisoner exchange during the First World War, Germany never lost its fascination for him. When Delmer eventually returned to Berlin as a reporter for an English newspaper, he found all that a journalist could wish for: ‘Sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed. Particularly bloodshed.’ The rivalry between left and right had escalated into deadly enmity, with noisy, bloody clashes between their militants. Ten years on, Germany’s nationalists still didn’t regard the war as over. They saw the Treaty of Versailles as a mere ceasefire, an opportunity to fight the enemy within.
Recalling the heady mix of hedonism and lusty youthfulness of those years, Delmer writes: ‘Looking back on it now, I see the mad whirl of this Berlin of 1928 and 1929 as a kind of Pompeian revel on the eve of the Vesuvius eruption.’
Two years later, Stéphane Roussel came to Berlin as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper Le Matin. She had got the job by chance, through an acquaintance, and knew nothing of Germany when she arrived in the city; the torrent of confused impressions and the mix of different doctrines was almost more than she could cope with. Everything seemed politically charged and Roussel had trouble making sense of it all.
On the one hand there was Berlin’s hedonistic high life, with a niche for every kind of pleasure, every vice: ‘Complete liberty reigned, but so, too, did the German obsession with compartmentalising.’ And then, on the other hand, there was the sweaty male fug of the city’s backrooms and beer cellars, where the legend of an undefeated Germany rumbled on. By day, the men from the beer cellars were to be seen in Berlin’s offices, where the same clerks who’d conducted business before the war did so still, mourning the old times and wishing democracy to hell. What struck Roussel most was that nothing was hidden: high life and low life alike were played out in full public view.
Raimund Pretzel—a writer who would later publish under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, and would famously describe Hitler as ‘the potential suicide par excellence’—was still in Berlin at that time. He had observed over the years that beggars were as much a part of the city’s street life as passers-by, and he read in the newspapers of suicides and desperate dramas. On one occasion he saw an old woman sitting on a park bench, strangely stiff. A small knot of people had gathered in front of her and he heard the words ‘dead’ and ‘starved’ detach themselves from the general murmur. After a quick glance, he turned away. ‘It did not surprise me particularly,’ he said. ‘At home, we often went hungry too.’
Pretzel didn’t live in one of the city’s poorer districts. His father, Carl Louis Albert Pretzel, was a headmaster who also held a post at the Ministry of Culture. Carl saw himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian official, didn’t understand his son’s enthusiasm for the campaigns of the Great War, never speculated on the stock market, and unfailingly fulfilled his professional duties. He shook his head at the noise and impetuousness of left and right alike. ‘Indeed,’ Raimund Pretzel wrote, ‘my father was one of those who did not, or did not wish to, understand the times.’
The young man understood them better. He had acute judgment and a sharp eye for the suggestive detail, the telltale nuance. Perhaps that was the reason he decided to study law. As a schoolboy in the grip of war euphoria, he had seen the Germans’ tendency to mass hysteria—‘the uncurbed, cynical imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in the impossible for its own sake, and the energy that has become an end in itself’. He didn’t exclude his younger self from this characterisation. Now he was a twenty-year-old law student and it struck him that, like the rest of his generation, he had got used to a public life punctuated by eruptions.
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having their entire lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills—accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos and peril.
When the Great Depression hit, civil unrest broke out again, worse than before. Hardship robbed people of their dignity and self-respect. Men and women stood on street corners with signs around their necks: ‘Seeking Any Kind of Work’. Blank-faced people queued outside the soup kitchens—family men, grandmothers, schoolchildren. Gangs of youths loitered in the city’s squares; parents sent their children begging. The state might collapse at any time, and people waited almost indifferently for it to happen.