The challenge facing the modest and quietly spoken Friedrich Ebert as the first president of Germany’s new Weimar Republic was considerable. In 1920, the President was briefly deposed during a right-wing coup supported by Erich Ludendorff, an embittered general who dreamed, ahead of Hitler, of a vastly expanded Germany, filled with soldiers and emptied of Jews. In 1922, it was Ebert’s task to calm the country after anti-Semitic right-wingers assassinated, in open public view, Germany’s foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. (Rathenau, a remarkable man, was the nephew of one of Germany’s greatest artists, Max Liebermann.) In 1923, Ebert and Gustav Stresemann, his able and intensely Anglophile new Chancellor, struggled to retain control during the terrifying inflation surge, when family fortunes were destroyed overnight and when Germany faced starvation for a time. President Ebert faced a challenge of a different order in the November of that year when Adolf Hitler embarked on his first attempt to seize power for the emerging Nazi party, in a Republic where support for the right remained strong and the swastika was already becoming a familiar symbol of the union, in wavering times, between firm conviction and brute force.
Hitler’s name was still unknown back in the Berlin of 1920, where a twenty-year-old Hansel Pless was studying for his law exams. Up at the family homes of Fürstenstein and Pless, a dinner jacket remained essential attire even for a quiet supper alone with the ageing Prince Heinrich, while a ventured remark about powder-headed footmen being just a little out of date could lead to a growl of contempt for such ‘Bolshevik’ notions. In Berlin, Hansel found lodgings with a hard-up widow (‘a very kind and intelligent Jewess’) whose brilliantly academic sons, when not entertaining Professor and Mrs Einstein to tea, cordially addressed each other across the table as ‘You so-and-so Jew’. Hansel, while initially startled, decided that he preferred such directness to the ornate courtesies required at Pless.1
Hansel was a young man who took life as it presented itself. He didn’t consider it especially odd that a young man whose family castle had served as the eastern headquarters of the German Army was welcomed, during his time in Berlin, as a daily visitor to the British Embassy. Here, when no official event was in progress and no legal lectures required Hansel’s attendance, Lord D’Abernon and his guest passed the time by playing badminton in the vast and chilly ballroom, pausing only when Ribbentrop, the Ambassador’s obsequious wine merchant, paid an unscheduled visit and, unwanted, lingered on.
As the half-English son of a German prince, Hansel took his own welcome on the Wilhelmstrasse for granted; later, he came to appreciate that Lord D’Abernon’s friendly manner had been part of a general endeavour to help the cause of reconciliation. Recalling his years at the Embassy in Berlin in 1929, at a time when Germany faced a new financial crisis, Edgar D’Abernon urged readers of his memoirs to forget the past and to treat Germany ‘as a great power and not as an outlaw’. Paying tribute to Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s wise foreign minister since 1924, D’Abernon praised the Weimar Republic’s leadership as both ‘reliable and strong’ and added, warmly, ‘What greater praise is there?’2
Friendships between the young in both countries had already begun to heal the wounds. Siegfried Sassoon’s post-war friendship with the fallen Emperor’s nephew, Prince Philipp of Hessen-Kassel, was inspired by the fact that Philipp had grown from a shy schoolboy at Bexhill into a handsomely bisexual young man. It also sprang from a conscious decision (Sassoon had narrowly escaped court-martial in 1917 for his anti-war pronouncements) to embrace – quite literally – the enemy. Sassoon made this thought explicit by requesting Philipp to send a special photograph of himself in battledress, as he would have appeared across the lines of war. The Prince, nothing loth, obliged.3
The friendship began when the two men met, in 1921, at a dinner in Rome, given with who knows what ulterior motives by Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West. Three days later, Philipp moved into Sassoon’s rooms. Back at the grief-drenched Friedrichshof, where his mother was still in mourning for her two lost sons, Philipp wrote wistfully to dear ‘Sig’ of the kindness that the gods had shown, and of the happiness he had experienced in two small hotel rooms . . .
One reason for Sassoon’s interest in Philipp was a sense of kinship that bridged the trenches (both young men had lost beloved brothers in the war). Another was culture. Sassoon, moving politically to the left after the war, had been appointed as literary editor of George Lansbury’s Daily Herald. He was thus able to act as a patron of literary and artistic work that he admired, but about which he was conscious of being underinformed. Help was at hand.
Philipp, at the end of the war, had gone to study art and architecture at Darmstadt, while being housed by his Anglophile (and half-English) Uncle Ernst of Hessen-Darmstadt. Here, in the course of almost forgetting German, since Ernst preferred to speak English, Philipp had acquired an old-fashioned appreciation of Greek sculpture and mythical figures. Sassoon, an instinctive traditionalist himself, was happy to be guided by his friend’s artistic preferences and reassured to see that Philipp met with the approval of Gerald Berners and the Sitwells. On 29 July 1922, Sassoon announced that he wanted his charming German prince to become ‘my link with Europe’.
Perhaps it was as well for the poet’s own future reputation, given how deeply committed both Philipp and his brother Christoph would become to Adolf Hitler, that Sassoon, shortly after this grand declaration, started to cool off. By September, he was expressing disapproval of the young German Prince’s fondness for ‘cocktail bars’ and for listening to what the English poet primly referred to as ‘filth stories’. A month later, Sassoon ended the relationship, in part, so he confessed, because he was bored by Philipp’s romantic obsession with his own royal lineage. (A portrait of the Prince by the society artist, Philip de László, depicted him as a seventeenth-century nobleman, dressed in a doublet and ruff.)
Easygoing by nature and gentle in his personality, Philipp bore no grudge and suffered no heartbreak. In 1925, while studying art in Rome, he became betrothed to Mafalda of Savoy (a daughter of Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy), and – like Sassoon – applied himself with reasonable success to becoming a family man.
Sassoon, during the warmest phase of friendship with his fellow officer Robert Graves, made romantic plans to join him, after the war, in one of those rural communes about which young men from both sides dreamed as they murdered each other in ravaged landscapes. While that project remained unfulfilled, Rolf Gardiner, after inheriting an uncle’s Dorset farm in 1927, was able to bring a similar fantasy to practical fruition. Back in 1922, however, a youthful Gardiner was taking time off from reading modern languages at Cambridge to lead a group of English folk-dancers on a tour of Germany while looking for links between the old songs of England and Germany.
Rolf Gardiner would pay many more visits to Germany, but it was during this first adventure that he became fascinated by the various German youth movements, and by the interest that their followers shared – in times of great privation – in bestowing upon themselves the muscular bodies of athletes. Gardiner, a devoted reader of D. H. Lawrence, was both impressed and inspired. Back at Cambridge, he began to edit Youth magazine and to spread word of the cult that was spreading like wildfire across a starved and myth-fed Germany, of the pure spirit in the perfect body.
The hand of friendship that Charles Ball extended to Germany in 1923 was more pragmatic.
Born in 1893, Ball had been one of Robert Graves’s contemporaries at Charterhouse. After studying engineering and being sent out to Gallipoli with the Royal Artillery, Ball travelled to post-war Germany as a member of the grandly named Inter-Allied Commission of Control. His dispiriting task was to investigate and then dismantle the impeccably preserved chemical factories of the Rhineland. Ernest Tennant had already put in a plea that the factories should not be destroyed; Ball carried out the orders for demolition, while shrewdly calculating a way to be of assistance both to his host-land of Germany and to the country that he represented.
Stationed at Gallipoli during the war, Ball had noted with fascination the uncommon resilience of a shard of spent shell, of German origin. It interested him so much that he took it back with him to England. Later, talking to some of the industrialists whose factories he had been sent to the Rhineland to destroy, Ball learned more about ‘the miracle metal’ and discovered that it was a magnesium alloy.
Returning to England in 1923, as inflation spiralled out of control in Germany, Ball had no difficulty in attracting German backing for a Manchester-based plant at which he promised to employ only German workers. Their job would be to produce the miraculous alloy once again, but for use by the British military. In the summer of 1939, Ball was still employing a German workforce whose loyalty was entirely given to the country that had become their homeland. The wartime order for their deportation could not be gainsaid, but Ball, talking in later life about his past with members of his family, spoke with unshaken affection and respect about the German engineers and metalworkers alongside whom he had worked in Manchester for sixteen years.4
The enlightened attitude of Ball, Gardiner and Sassoon was representative of a cultured group, not a multitude. Few visitors to post-war Munich were charmed – for example – by the sight of Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, a cheerful giant with the drooping cheeks of a bloodhound, bellowing Harvard college songs as he wove through the town centre on an old Swift bicycle dating back to the Boer War.
Half-American, half-German, from a family who had served as privy councillers to the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg, Putzi’s fifteen years in America had come to an abrupt halt in 1921, when Germanophobia led to the vandalising of his father’s elegant art gallery (an offshoot of the family’s main business of publishing art books). Returning home to Bavaria with his American-born German wife, Helene, he became reunited with a favourite sister, Erna. (The entire tribe of Hanfstaengl siblings had been given names that began with an ‘E’ in deference to Ernst II, their father’s ducal patron.)
Putzi was plotting a new future as a popular historian and looking into the story of Count Rumford and Munich’s English Garden (Rumford designed it) when a chance commission changed his mind. American diplomats, during that volatile post-war period, were gathering reports on local politics in Munich. Putzi was asked by a friend from the Embassy to go to a political meeting and take stock of a right-wing demagogue who seemed to be attracting increasingly large crowds.
Later, Hanfstaengl would credit Adolf Hitler with ‘a miraculous throat construction’ that allowed him to hold a crowd enthralled until they fell into a state of unified ecstasy. Attending that early speech in a Bierkeller on the evening of 21 November 1922, Putzi was himself enthralled by the visionary words of a mesmerising orator who held out a prospect of hope to a broken and embittered Germany.
From 1922, Ernst Hanfstaengl began to plot how best to offer help. The nascent Nazi party had no money and no obvious access to funding; Putzi, while personally short of cash, possessed a formidable range of contacts who included both the wealthy Bechstein family (makers of the celebrated pianos) and their friends, the even more famous Wagners.
One of Putzi’s greatest charms, for his Wagner-loving protégé, would always lie in his willingness to sit down at the piano and thunder out, with tireless good will, snatches from the great overtures and Lohengrin – the opera by which a youthful Hitler had first become enthralled, or so he himself claimed. Putzi, together with the Bechsteins, was quick to see the value in promoting a friendship between a man whose gift for oration far outranked his modest education, and the family whose name represented the cultural Parnassus of Bayreuth. The Wagners, to put it plainly, would add the touch of class and credibility that a scruffy and poorly mannered Hitler, back in 1922, visibly lacked. It was perceived by all as a bonus, at a time when the bridge to England was being rebuilt, that Siegfried, the composer’s son, possessed an English wife, while his sister Eva was married to the English-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Putzi – witty, shallow and well born – inspired no more than a flicker of mistrust among England’s post-war visitors to Munich. Even blessed with more sterling attributes, he might still have found it hard to gain acceptance, back in the twenties, in their homeland.
Portents for reconciliation had boded well, in 1919, when Edith Londonderry welcomed the Lichnowskys to a grand reception and Beecham put Wagner back on the concert programmes. Sadly, the Germanophobic attitude represented by Barty Redesdale’s second, surviving son, David, father of the Mitford gang, proved to have a loyal following. When Lexel Pless, Hansel’s younger brother, was permitted to visit his dying grandmother in England after the war, a butler threatened to quit rather than serve food to a German schoolboy. At Bushey, not a voice was raised or a hand lifted as the late Sir Hubert Herkomer’s film studio, rose gardens and splendid house fell into disrepair. Attending the State Opening of Parliament in 1921, young Loelia Ponsonby expressed her approval of how resolutely the English peeresses turned their backs on the wife of Friedrich Sthamer, Germany’s new ambassador. Harry Kessler, visiting England in 1923 to seek help in desperate times for homeless children from the Ruhr, was told by the Quakers, famous for their philanthropic ways, that no assistance could be provided. The explanation was blunt: ‘a part of the nation, although a dwindling one, still remains in a wholly belligerent frame of mind’.5
Count Kessler was shocked, and understandably so. Back at home, all the signs pointed towards a genuine desire for rapprochement with a once cousinly nation. English had recently replaced French on the German school curriculum; Charley’s Aunt (first performed in London in 1892) was playing to capacity in Berlin; asked to name their favourite writers, Germans of the early post-war period regularly cited Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome and George Bernard Shaw. Joseph Goebbels, no Anglophile, was using everyday parlance when he drawled into his diary, ‘Nur Mut, Old Boy’ (‘Chin up, old boy’).6 Surely, Kessler thought, England would not abandon a country to which her bonds had always been so close? Surely, England would not fail to understand the peril in which Germany now stood?
Britain’s economists and bankers, while not necessarily the most soft-hearted of men, had been viewing Germany’s predicament with concern ever since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Both Maynard Keynes and Robert Brand paid regular visits to Berlin during the post-treaty period, armed with a clear remit to advise on the need for currency reform. Keynes took the view that swift action was required; Brand disagreed. Harry Kessler’s proposal for a loan to Germany of five billion gold marks was dismissed out of hand; writing to his wife, Phyllis, from Berlin, Brand simply said: ‘We shan’t.’7
Bob Brand hatched a plan of his own. His proposal for a two-year moratorium on Germany’s reparations payments came, however, with a sting in its tail. In exchange for Brand’s first Standstill offer (his better-known six-month version would be implemented for a later crisis in 1931), Germany must cut back on spending and raise taxes. Such a notion horrified the anguished leaders of the Weimar Republic. Cut spending? Raise taxes? Had a country in utter chaos not suffered enough?
Nothing was done.
The threat of massive inflation was already looming over Germany in January 1923, when France moved 60,000 troops into the Ruhr as a punishment for the non-delivery of newly mandated supplies of coal and timber. When industrialists like Fritz Thyssen decided on a policy of passive resistance (a refusal of any cooperation with the French workers who came in and tried to run the factories themselves), angry Germans across the nation demonstrated their approval. Terrified of further disturbances, Ebert’s government fell into line, selling the country’s borrowed funds to support a crippling policy of stasis. In the spring of 1923, the German mark, already plunging, crashed. Hyper-inflation ensued, with inevitable – and terrible – consequences.
Hilda Deichmann, visiting Wilhelm’s family from England that year, found that discussing money ‘in millions and trillions’ had become the unnerving order of the day. The local Thuringian shops had all closed down; everything in the countryside around Bendeleben – including concert tickets, which cost two eggs per seat – had to be purchased by barter. Banks locked their doors; great houses stood empty. ‘We heard of sad suicides,’ Hilda wrote, ‘the result of ruin and despair.’8
Robert Brand, paying a concerned visit to Dr Marten, a distinguished German doctor with a former practice in London’s New Cavendish Street, found his elderly friend famished and shivering in the unheated farmhouse rooms he now shared with a railway contractor, a tailor and a mechanic. Stories were told of mothers allowing their children to trade the use of their bodies for a loaf of bread, and of great works of art being exchanged for a couple of sacks of rye. In Silesia, the Lichnowskys sold Picassos and Kokoschkas, along with their Old Masters, in order to pay for winter fuel. Up at Tressow, Tisa Schulenburg experienced not just the sense of daily hunger, but the despair of daily helplessness as her father turned once again to the subject from which there was never an escape. ‘The nation was now seen in a romantic, a religious light. For ever, the talks revolved around one theme: Germany. The loss of the War. The result of this loss.’9
Hints of what lay ahead glint through the recollections of a strong-willed young woman who was torn between the high ideals of her conscientious mother and her own shamed eagerness to get away from the poverty and the endless desire to look back, as if – Tisa reflected – the old imperial world had been, after all, truly worth fighting for. How pleasant, she thought, as she gave English lessons to Fritz Dietlof, the brother nearest to her in age, to go away and live in England and hear no more about Germany’s woes. ‘We even toyed with the idea that he [Fritz], born in England, might claim English nationality whenever he wanted.’10
No invitation to England was forthcoming.
Despatched, instead, to learn the practicalities of housekeeping from two old ladies in Lemgo (one of the Hanseatic trading towns), Tisa was overjoyed when the order came for her to join a political youth group – the Deutsch-National Jugendbund – belonging to the extreme right. Politics counted, at this point, for less than the opportunity to escape a drab existence. Dancing barefoot, while singing the haunting songs of the Wandervogel (the hikers who embodied the spirit of freedom among the youth of post-war Germany), and wearing, in approved völkische style, a cotton dress that was dyed saxe blue, Tisa joined in the group’s discussions of a topic that was becoming disturbingly popular: it was not the Allies who had brought misfortune upon a great nation, but the Jews.11
Tisa’s memoir ducks the question of what her own contribution might have been to these discussions. Given the fact that her future husband, Fritz Hess, would be Jewish, it seems unlikely that she supported the anti-Semitic faction.
It was during this intensely volatile period in Germany’s history that Adolf Hitler made his first, abortive stab at seizing power. On 26 September 1923, orders were given by Germany’s new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, to end the disastrous policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr. To the eyes of the far right, mostly established within Bavaria, it seemed that Germany was knuckling under to the French; this, to the sixty or so small parties who shared the Nazis’ unwaveringly nationalistic outlook, was unforgivable.
Later that same September week in 1923, a short, plainly suited man with a slick of brown hair and a penetrating, almost glaucous blue stare, addressed a crowded hall at Bayreuth. This was Hitler’s first speech in the town that would embrace him with such fervour. His theme was dictatorship: the need to replace endless parliamentary hagglings with a single voice of truth. Hitler’s voice, self-trained to ascend from a stern but calming monotone to a sustained crescendo shriek, compelled an emotional response. The Bayreuthers, revved up by a well-planned day of marches and parades, reacted with enthusiasm. Climbing the hill to a roar of acclaim, Hitler was ushered into the room where Houston Stewart Chamberlain, syphilitic, bed-ridden and venomous as ever, was waiting to confer his blessing: ‘with you all parties disappear, consumed by the flame of love for the Fatherland’.12
At Wahnfried, the hallowed home of Wagner’s comatose but still conscious widow, Cosima, an awed Hitler was introduced to another immediate convert. Winifred Williams had been brought over to Germany by the Klindworths, ardent Wagnerians who, in 1914, had readily supported a match between their adopted seventeen-year-old English daughter and Siegfried, Wagner’s 45-year-old heir. The marriage, while not passionate – Siegfried’s lengthy bachelorhood tells its own tale – nevertheless led to four children, all born by the time that Hitler visited Bayreuth.
Winifred’s response to Hitler was immediate and intense; Siegfried, who seldom disagreed with his handsome and forceful wife, shared her conviction that they had met a remarkable man. Within days, Hitler had confided in the couple about his plans for the overthrow of President Ebert on 9 November 1923, the fourth anniversary of the abdication of the German Emperor. The message would be clear: a rightful successor had appeared. The Wagners, thrilled, arranged to travel to Munich and witness, at first-hand, the triumphant ascent of their new friend.
On 8 November, the intended coup got off to an impressive start. Hitler’s ally, Ernst Röhm, leading 600 stormtroopers, hijacked an evening address being given by the emergency leader of Bavaria; Hitler, seizing the platform, won applause (he even gained the support of the deposed speaker) after announcing that he had received the personal blessing of General Ludendorff. By the following morning, however, brisk orders from Berlin brought Bavaria’s dazed government back to its senses.
Hitler’s own confidence in his success is apparent from the fact that he was wearing a tailcoat under the shabby clothes in which (accompanied by Putzi Hanfstaengl, Ernst Röhm and the two war heroes Hermann Goering and Erich Ludendorff) the aspiring leader paraded ahead of his faithful troops through the centre of Munich on the morning of 9 November. An ambush had been set. Sixteen Nazis and three policemen were killed during the gunfire that caught the rebels by surprise. Hitler, fleeing to the Hanfstaengls’ home for refuge, was captured two days later and convicted in March 1924. The swift commuting of an appropriate five-year sentence to a mere eleven months says as much about the lenient attitude of a powerful Old Guard in Germany towards rebellions on the right as it does about the weakness of a faltering government that was still – just – being led by Friedrich Ebert. (Ebert died in office the following year.)*
The eleven months of Hitler’s imprisonment at Landsberg-am-Lech (home to Hubert Herkomer’s gold-topped medieval turret of maternal tribute, the Mutterturm) were both fruitful and pleasant. Surrounded, according to Putzi Hanfstaengl, by reverent visitors and enough luxury food to set up a small delicatessen, Hitler was gratified (as the months wore on) to learn that his request had been met for a new grey Mercedes-Benz to be held ready for his release. The car helped to inspire thoughts for a new and more contemporary look: a smartly belted motoring coat, set off by knee-high boots and a riding crop.
Hitler’s principal reading matter during his stay in prison seems to have been the autobiography of Henry Ford, whose depressingly popular book, The International Jew, was also on Hitler’s reading list. Possibly, Ford’s self-regarding writings were intended to focus the prisoner’s thoughts on the autobiography that had been promised to his eager publishers.
The searing life story of a rising young politician was what Hitler was expected to produce. What the publishers got instead (dictated by Hitler and taken down in prison by one of his most ardent admirers, Rudolf Hess) was Mein Kampf.
Everybody has a vague idea of what Mein Kampf (My Struggle) contains: that it champions an Aryan race and that it explains how – by reducing their status from that of citizens to subjects – Germany’s Jews are to be deprived of all their rights. Less generally known is how much Hitler looked to England’s most recent prime minister as his model for powerful leadership. Lloyd George was singled out, not for his achievements, but for his skills as a demagogue. Truth, as Hitler was never afraid to state, was unimportant: what mattered for Hitler, as for his Welsh-born hero, was to kindle his listeners’ emotions.
The other aspect of British politics that attracted Hitler’s interest was the quality of ruthlessness. Ruthlessness, so he asserted in Mein Kampf, was always allied to self-interest; a ruthless England would therefore gladly join forces with a Germany that shared, but did not encroach upon, her own ambitions for world dominion. England, so Hitler declared, could keep her empire; Germany would ask only for a free hand in Europe. And Britain, safely protected by Germany’s regained might from the looming threat of Soviet Communism, would not object.
Living the life not of a prisoner, but a prince-in-waiting, Hitler warmed to his vision of an England of which he had no personal knowledge (he spoke no English), but which, strategically, in his opinion, ‘can be compared to no other state in Europe’. The conclusion that he drew was clear and would not change. For the Germany he intended to create, ‘the last practicable tie remains with England’.13
Myth had become an intoxicating substitute for religion in the literature of a desolate post-war world. Here, in the mad vision of Hitler’s terrible book, myth found its darkest form. Britain’s ruthless Beowulf was to ride forth to battle at the side of Germany’s unsullied Siegfried. United in self-interest through their shared faith in the Aryan supremacy, two great nations would conquer and rule the world.
Footnote
* The old judges of the empire kept their positions after the revolution. Mostly from privileged backgrounds and with close links to the right and the officer class, these men were notoriously biased. Thus, between 1918 and 1922, seventeen of twenty-two assassinations by left-wing elements in Germany were punished by harsh sentences. Ten merited the death penalty. In the same period, of the 354 murders committed by right-wing extremists, one resulted in a serious sentence and none were punished by the death penalty.