‘It is not freedom they are out to find, but communal bonds.’
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL, SPEAKING IN MUNICH, 1927
Hitler entered Landsberg’s elegant Art Nouveau fortress on 1 April 1924, when Germany was in ruins. Released in the early spring of 1925, he walked out into a transformed land.
Affection for a once powerful Germany had played less of a part than pragmatism in the decision, led by America, to come to the aid of a stricken nation. The Dawes Plan generously reduced the scale of Germany’s future reparations payments and imposed a four-year freeze in the interim. Less generously, it opened the way for American and British banks to compete against each other in offering their former enemy short-term loans at high interest rates. By the summer of 1925, thirty-three billion marks’ worth of foreign loans had been accepted and Berlin was filled, once again, with smart carriages, wealthy shoppers and a non-stop round of party-going for those who didn’t choose to ask from just where the money had come. Germany had experienced, according to one leading American economist of the time, ‘one of the most spectacular recoveries in the world’s entire economic history’.1
A hint of unfinished business still lingered in the air. ‘The English are easy and agreeable to work with,’ the president of the Reichsbank, Herr Schacht, was heard by Britain’s ambassador to remark before adding, with pointed care, ‘provided you do not question their position and hegemony.’2 Peaceful relations, however, were slowly being restored, smoothing the way for Germany to resume her place among the great powers who had controlled Europe since the defeat of Napoleon.
Symbolic of the new mood of rapprochement was the private meeting that took place in London, on 1 December 1925, between King George V and representatives of the German government. The setting was the magnificent, if rather shabby, ‘Golden Room’ of the British Foreign Office at Whitehall. Lord Londonderry, an ardent Germanophile who was thrilled to be present (if only as a humble privy councillor in Stanley Baldwin’s second Conservative government), made his own effort to smarten up the walls by producing a portrait of Lord Castlereagh, his illustrious ancestor, to supervise proceedings and conjure up auspicious memories of the Congress of Vienna.
The occasion was the signing of the Treaty of Locarno, by which reciprocal vows of support were pledged – Soviet Russia stood aside – while Britain and Italy committed themselves to protecting Germany’s new post-war boundaries in the West. (Few signatories, in 1925, troubled themselves with what Germany might wish to do in the East.) To Edgar D’Abernon, Locarno was long overdue. As ambassador to Berlin, he had tirelessly spoken out for the need to forgive and forget. Now, so it seemed to him, Britain had rightly made acknowledgement of that necessity. ‘It has’, the kindly Ambassador rejoiced, ‘been a wonderful negotiation.’3
The Dawes Plan and the Treaty of Locarno had eased Germany’s pain. Easement was not, however, good news for anambitious representative of the far right, emerging from prison into a more hopeful and relaxed country than the desperate land over which he had aspired to seize control in the autumn of 1923. Communism, Hitler’s most conspicuous adversary, remained a valuable bogeyman: in 1925, Berlin was teeming with the largest population of Communists of any city outside the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, on the May morning in 1925 when the 78-year-old war hero Field Marshal Hindenburg stepped briskly into President Ebert’s shoes (the unpretentious and increasingly unpopular Ebert had died in his mid-fifties), the chances of a Nazi leadership in Germany any time soon seemed remote.
Help was on hand from Hitler’s two most ardent supporters, both of English birth. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was still able to place a trembling hand upon the head of the man he considered most fit to lead the German nation towards Aryan supremacy. Winifred Wagner, a devoted visitor to the Landsberg during Hitler’s confinement, offered to provide hospitality to her hero, while he planned his future strategy, at Bayreuth.
Officially, Hitler was banned from giving political speeches for two years after his release from prison. Unofficially, haranguing the hired mobs who were regularly bussed in to make a show of party strength, he continued to deliver the fiery orations which left no doubt of his uncommon powers, both among his supporters in the Wagner clan, and in the fervent mind of a new recruit, Joseph Goebbels.
Germany’s new foreign secretary, Gustav Stresemann, had infuriated Goebbels during the Locarno negotiations by his tacit acknowledgement of Germany’s wartime defeat. ‘How can a modern German statesman accept these shameful statements!’ Goebbels raged in 1925, the year the pact was signed. ‘Stresemann is a perfect rogue!’4 Goebbels, educated in literature at Heidelberg (by two Jewish professors), had lately fallen under the spell of Dostoevsky and had only recently abandoned Marxism. Hitler, while far to the right of his own personal ideology, now appeared to be the only public figure with the charisma and the energy to rescue Germany from the humiliations of the recent past.
Goebbels himself could speak for four hours without stopping to an audience that, while always attentive, was seldom enraptured. It was not Hitler’s stamina, but his ability to arouse and then manipulate a group spirit in his listeners that enthralled his new admirer. Offstage, Goebbels found the 36-year-old demagogue captivatingly informal: ‘Hitler like a boy,’ he noted on 19 April 1926, ‘riotous, singing, laughing, whistling.’ Together again four days later, the two men celebrated Adolf’s thirty-seventh birthday, inspiring Goebbels to offer secret homage to his hero: ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you, because you are both great and simple . . . A genius.’
Visiting Bayreuth in Hitler’s company later in the same month, Goebbels was introduced to Stewart Chamberlain. The experience overwhelmed him, just as it had Hitler. Chamberlain, so it seems, was similarly affected: ‘Broken, mumbling, with tears in his eyes . . .’ Goebbels noted. ‘Trail blazer, pioneer . . . he weeps like a child.’* Winifred, graciously showing off Richard Wagner’s room while the new visitor recovered from his emotion, proved dazzling: ‘a thoroughbred woman . . . a fanatical partisan of ours . . . We are friends in no time.’
Winifred was impressive, but it was to Hitler that Goebbels was in thrall. Fascinated, he noticed the way that Hitler worked over speeches, rehearsing not what he said, but how to deliver the words until, as ‘a born whipper-up’, he had it off pat: ‘a wonderful harmony of gesture, histrionics and spoken word’. Helping to rally the troops for a Weimar speech-fest that summer, Goebbels was awed all over again. Hitler’s speech on this occasion was ‘deep and mystical. Almost like the Gospels . . .’ The crowds (trucked in for the event from a couple of Nazi strongholds) roared for more. A cynic might wonder if these same applauders had stood among the 13,000-strong mob who, back in 1922, earned themselves a few groschen as movie extras by hailing Ernst Lubitsch’s gilded ruler on the gigantic Berlin film set of The Loves of Pharaoh. If so, the experience had given them a taste for leader-worship. ‘The Third Reich is appearing,’ Goebbels exulted on 6 July 1926. ‘Germany is awakening . . .’5
Despite Goebbels’s excited reports and the energy that he now began to devote to shaping the image of his chosen leader, Germany’s recovery in the mid-twenties marked the quietest period in the gradual ascent of Adolf Hitler. Prosperity offered no pulpit to extremists. As the incoming tide of foreign loans was invested in transport and housing and – less ostentatiously (while ardent youths drilled for future combat within the country’s dark concealing forests) – in the costs of rearming a depleted country, Germany was prospering as never before.
Prosperity, to a left-wing aristocrat like Count Harry Kessler, evoked complicated emotions. Visiting England as a tourist in 1925 (his hopes of being made ambassador to the Court of St James’s had been thwarted by a governmental decision to retain the services of the quietly reliable Friedrich Sthamer), Kessler decided to explore the impoverished north. Oxford had depressed him with its air of monkish rectitude, but Manchester put Kessler in touch with ‘an archaic grandeur, grey and sombre, a soul compounded of coal dust, and yet with a hard, untameable energy . . . This is the real England, without the mask . . .’6 The decision not to replace Sthamer with Kessler had been prudent: a man who felt moved, in 1925, to hail medieval Durham as the hallowed cradle of white supremacy might not have served his country’s public image well.
A happier move by Kessler was the decision to resume his nation-bonding pre-war enterprise of publishing a magnificent new German edition of Hamlet, freely translated by the revered Gerhart Hauptmann and magnificently illustrated with eighty expressionist woodcuts by Edward Gordon Craig. Back in Berlin, the impish Count amused himself by inviting Josephine Baker to his home to watch her gyrate, as one goddess paying homage to another, around the voluptuous curves of one of his collection of Maillol sculptures. Art, rather than politics, was Harry Kessler’s natural habitat.
Chameleon-like in the way that he was able to adapt to changing times, Count Kessler stood in direct contrast to Tisa Schulenburg’s father, a military aristocrat of the old-fashioned school. By 1925, however, General Schulenburg had joined the Reichstag and pledged himself to serve a new and nationalistic Germany. His sons, all but the youngest, enthusiastically joined their father on a road that would lead them straight to becoming early supporters of the Third Reich. Wayward Tisa, meanwhile, having been refused parental permission to embroil herself with the futuristic enterprises and (as perceived by her conservative father) radical politics of the Bauhaus at Dessau, took herself off to study art and sculpture in Berlin.
Always keen to demonstrate her left-wing views, Tisa expressed dismay about the grimness of the concrete slums that had grown up on the outskirts of the city. Her own life soon led her elsewhere. ‘I courted lechery . . . Sealed doors, sealed lips, sealed conscience.’7 Later, naming no names, Tisa was willing only to say that she had spent a good deal of time at the house of Hugh Simon, a banker and art patron whose circle of friends included, in 1926, some of the best-known artists and writers of the time.
Countess Schulenburg, in search of informed opinion about the evident talent of her schoolgirl daughter, had long ago introduced Tisa to one of Germany’s greatest painters, Max Liebermann. Visiting Hugh Simon, Tisa met the ageing Liebermann again and began to make up for her lost youth in Mecklenburg by mixing with – among others – Bertolt Brecht, Erich Remarque, Thomas Mann and the Viennese Zweig brothers. Tisa, in the year before she married Fritz Hess (a wealthy, charming man with a magnificent collection of modern art), was having the time of her young life in Berlin, a city where the lights were never turned off and from which, even in those early days of aviation, a plane from Tempelhof Airport could whisk a traveller in a blink to any of fifteen foreign cities. To a wild, good-looking and adventurous young woman, Berlin, in 1926, felt glorious.
Daisy Pless, estranged from her husband since the Prince’s return from the war, had fared less well.
For an English wife, it had proved impossible to forget or forgive the relish with which a German husband had written to her, throughout the war, of his contempt for her countrymen and his desire for England’s defeat. It did not much grieve her when, in 1921, the philandering Hans Heinrich began proceedings for a divorce.
Daisy, aged forty-eight, was undergoing an experience of a far more terrifying kind: gradually, she was losing the ability to walk. (Her condition, not fully understood at the time, marked the rapid onset of multiple sclerosis.) Hans Heinrich, back in 1921, felt prosperous enough to guarantee a secure future for a woman who had grown tiresomely hysterical in her constant references to ill-health. Guided by Hansel, and eager to be rid of Daisy and her complaints, the Prince’s lavish promises included the maintenance of a villa (Les Marguerites) on the French Riviera, and sufficient funds to build a new town house in Munich, to be furnished from Daisy’s splendid former rooms at Fürstenstein and Pless. A lady’s companion would be hired to take care of Daisy and her league of ailments. Finally, a generous monthly income would guarantee that the status of a Silesian princess was maintained.
Inflation, combined with the imposition of increasingly stringent Polish taxes on what had formerly been Upper Silesia, swiftly reversed these lavish plans. By 1923, Daisy had become very frail indeed; by 1924, her ex-husband, hit by hyper-inflation and struggling to retain his legal ownership of the immense Silesian mines that now lay within the boundaries of Poland, was no longer willing to help or to provide more than the minimum of funds. The promised car and chauffeur were out of the question; deprived of transport, and with her legs now almost completely paralysed, Daisy was housebound and helpless. By the end of 1924, unable to cover even the cost of renting lodgings until the new house was built, she was threatened with eviction.
The villa in France was sold; the new home at Munich, when finally completed, was furnished with just two bedsteads. Nothing more, so the Prince’s representatives regretted to declare, could now be spared from His Highness’s homes. In letters that were invariably signed off by Pless’s new Polish administrators, Daisy was chillingly referred to as ‘a woman’. Ena FitzPatrick, an impoverished Irish cousin who had initially jumped at the opportunity to earn some money by nursing Daisy, began writing plaintive appeals to Pless for help, along with the wages that remained unpaid. Receiving only a cool recommendation to teach the improvident Princess to practise greater frugality in her housekeeping, Ena abandoned Daisy, to try her luck elsewhere.
Help came at last, but not from Pless. Young Hansel, put in charge of dealing with Pless’s Polish administrators because of his legal expertise, found it impossible either to convince them that his mother’s requirements were urgent, or to dissuade his father from continuing to live in a style to which Croesus might not have objected. Edgar D’Abernon, visiting Pless in 1924, was staggered by the grandiose standards that were still being upheld there. Taking a second wife in 1925, Hans Heinrich celebrated his new alliance with impenitent opulence. (Clotilde, the Prince’s 26-year-old Spanish bride, later married Hansel’s youngest brother, Bolko, and produced the two children that Hans Heinrich craved to carry on the family line.)
Daisy’s continuing problems are apparent from the heartfelt gratitude with which, in 1924, she accepted a cash gift of £300 from her former brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster. In 1925, she received a more enduring offer of assistance, one that would transform her life.
Dolly Crowther was a sturdy young Englishwoman who had looked after Patsy Cornwallis-West during her last bedridden years. Informed that Patsy’s daughter was in urgent need of care, Miss Crowther didn’t hesitate. Never having left England in her life, the resolute Dolly crossed the Channel, booked herself onto a train to Munich, tracked the Princess down and offered her services. Money was never discussed and a wage seems never to have been paid. Dolly, effectively, took over and, with quiet discretion, ran Daisy’s life. When Hans Heinrich’s advisors suggested that Daisy could be more economically housed above the gatehouse of Fürstenstein, all arrangements for the move were supervised by Dolly Crowther.
A solution of sorts had been found. Daisy, restored to familiar surroundings and greeted kindly by the nearby townspeople who had always liked ‘unsere Daisy’, grew happier. Money, however, was still pitifully short, and would remain so while Hansel, having taken Polish nationality (together with his father and brothers), struggled to appease both the tax-hungry administrators and the wage-starved workforce of miners.
Hansel’s endeavours to save the estates, care for the miners and dissuade his mother from spending the modest pittance she received on subsidising Lexel, Daisy’s second and favourite son, made a young man feel old before his time. Like his Hochberg uncles before him, Hansel dreamed of an escape to England. He remembered, with longing, the pre-war summers of hunting in the Shires. He thought of the cheerful English friends with whom, despite the war, his friendship had survived intact. England was where he belonged. ‘England!’ Hansel exclaimed with passionate conviction. ‘England shall have my bones!’8
Hansel Pless was still young enough to imagine himself setting forth on a new life. Hilda Deichmann, having seen her third, English-born daughter married to a suitable German spouse in 1921, toyed with the idea of settling on the picturesque Thuringian estate that, however dilapidated, had welcomed her back with such kindness after the war. Visiting Bendeleben in 1923, during the worst of the economic crisis, Hilda changed her mind. Nearing seventy, she went home and raised funds for Wilhelm by selling Abbey Lodge, that last family link to a gentler age. In 1925, Hilda moved, together with her unmarried sister, Marie de Bunsen, to a modest abode near the Thames. Here, in Chelsea, entertaining their Norfolk Quaker cousins and undertaking the quiet acts of charity to which the de Bunsen family had always felt themselves bound by conscience and by duty, two rather grand old ladies lived out their days in peace, their German origins long since forgiven by an affectionate band of English friends.
For Hilda’s niece, Emma Schröder, life at Dell Park had also begun to resume its old-fashioned pre-war pace by the mid-twenties. The Schröder Bank, whose annual revenue had plummeted to a dismaying £18,000 at the end of the war, climbed back, in 1924, to a million pounds a year. Bruno Schröder, having meticulously restored his wrecked hothouses of orchids and seen to the survival of his beloved hospital (funds from Germany had been severely depleted by the country’s fallen economy), embarked on a new mission. Rescuing medieval church masterpieces from their now destitute German owners, Bruno Schröder created, for England, what remains to this day one of the finest collections of European silverwork in the world. In 1930, demonstrating once again the spirit of philanthropy that had provided such a powerful bond between England and Germany in the past, the Schröders celebrated the marriage of their son, Helmut, by presenting – at the suggestion of Helmut’s bride – a handsome radio set to all the blind people in Gloucestershire, where Meg Darrell had worked as a volunteer. Many, poignantly, were former soldiers.
Visiting England in 1919, when they were entertained to dinner by the Londonderrys, Prince and Princess Lichnowsky had been heartened by the warmth of their welcome; enough so to decide that their son (like Gustav Stresemann’s) should finish his university education at Oxford, in the England for which both Mechtilde and Karl Max felt a profound affection. Back at home in Silesia, the Lichnowskys’ lives were as drastically affected as those of the Pless family by the war, by inflation and by the re-drawing of national boundaries. The great paintings were steadily sold off; the former friends who – with some justification – blamed Lichnowsky’s published admission of Germany’s war guilt for the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles, took care to keep their distance.
The Lichnowskys were not, however, forlorn. Certainly, their fortunes had fallen, while their vast network of social friendships had shrunk to the level where the high point might be the welcoming of a local pastor for his weekly game of chess with the wistful Prince. But, while Karl Max suffered a great deal from the sense of being cold-shouldered by his former peers, comfort was on hand in the form of his wife’s avant garde circle of intimates: the writers, musicians and artists with whom the Princess had made friends throughout her life.
Skilful caricaturists with a sharp and witty turn of phrase, both Mechtilde and her sister Helene (a gifted sculptor’s wife) had been brought up to embrace the modern world. Resuming her preferred form of life in Germany, Mechtilde continued to write memoirs, along with novels and poems, while maintaining a vivid correspondence with the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, to whose magazine, The Torch, she contributed drawings. With Kraus, Max Reinhardt, Alban Berg, Max Liebermann and Elias Canetti among the Lichnowskys’ friends and visitors, life at Kuchelna maintained the tradition that had begun over a century ago, when the ageing Prince’s forebears had taken under their gilded wings a prodigiously gifted German composer: Ludwig van Beethoven.
In 1928, Prince Lichnowsky died. His eldest son took over the depleted estates. Mechtilde – disgusted by the violent methods and the hate-filled speeches of a political party that was becoming increasingly visible in Germany – began to withdraw into a life abroad, and to rebuild her former English friendships.
Culture – coming to the rescue of the ageing Lichnowskys during a decade of political disgrace – had provided one of the first connecting strands between England and Germany after the war. In 1920, after devouring Blick ins Chaos, which included Hermann Hesse’s essay about Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot cited it in The Waste Land and invited Hesse to contribute essays on German poetry to his brand-new English quarterly magazine, The Criterion. D. H. Lawrence, in 1926, made a point of stressing how the Chatterleys’ respect for German culture had remained unshaken by the experiences of war. But it was cinema that provided one of the most potent of all links, at a time when the vast glasshouse studios of UFA at Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, began to produce, in the years of Germany’s greatest despair, some of the most remarkable films that the world had yet seen.
In London, an official ban prevented German films from being shown until 1922. Solutions could always be devised. In 1919, members of the Royal Automobile Club were invited to attend a private showing of Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang’s vision of a world controlled by a criminal mastermind. Visiting the home of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook in 1922, Duff Cooper was treated to a screening of the German horror masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
Even back in the years of war, Germany had provided the spark that ignited one remarkable career in English film.
Lieutenant James Whale had already completed a four-year course in Arts and Crafts when he enlisted. Following his capture by the Germans, Whale was sent to Holzminden, a prison in Lower Saxony that is best-known for one of the largest successful escape missions during the war. Whale, seeking a refuge from the bullying and the tedium that dogged his own four years at Holzminden, decided to put his pre-war training into use. Directing prison plays provided him, so he later remembered, with ‘a source of great pleasure and amusement’, while the enthusiasm of the (literally, captive) audiences proved ‘intoxicating’. Whale had discovered his metier.
Ten years later, a play written by R. C. Sheriff, starring a young Laurence Olivier and directed by James Whale, was being advertised along the side of every bus and train in the London area with the nifty slogan: ‘All roads lead to Journey’s End.’ Whale’s subsequent film of the play attracted interest in Germany, where, starring Conrad Veidt and still set in an English dugout, it was remade as the short-lived Die andere Seite. Whale, meanwhile, directed perhaps the greatest of all versions of Frankenstein, in a film that reveals in almost every shot the influence on its maker of German expressionist cinema.9
In England, following the end of the boycott, the new wave of German cinema caused few ripples. When Fritz Lang’s keenly anticipated triad of Nibelungen films reached England in 1924 as Dragon’s Blood, viewers fell asleep, waking up only when the largest mythical beast that had yet lumbered onto any film set in the world prepared to do battle with Siegfried.10 Alfred Hitchcock, despatched in 1924 by Gainsborough Films to work on an UFA-based film called The Blackguard, was unstirred to observe that a massive chunk of Nibelungen forest scenery had been destroyed to make room for a new set (involving scenes from the Russian Revolution).
It was in Germany, as Hitchcock gratefully acknowledged, that he learned many of his most characteristic techniques. The Lodger, a 1927 thriller set in London, opens with an angled through-the-keyhole shot that he took directly from German expressionism; the famous shower sequence in Psycho borrows from one of the most terrifying images in Murnau’s 1922 classic vampire film, Nosferatu. Like his spoken German (which remained impeccable until the end of the British filmmaker’s life), the skills and methods that Hitchcock brought back to Britain from his pivotal apprenticeship in Germany were never forgotten.
Cinema stood high among the attractions that were bringing a new and specifically post-war category of visitor to Berlin. Charles Ball and Ernest Tennant had travelled out to Germany from motives of duty and social concern; John Heygate, arriving in 1923, was among the first of the flood of rebellious young who wanted to distance themselves from a war that had not been of their making and in which they themselves had played no part.
Nothing in Germany was as John Heygate had been led to expect. His father talked at home about ‘“the hated Huns”’; the son found it impossible to reconcile such violent words with the quietly respectable people – ‘this mild bespectacled man . . . this Frau with her hair done in a high bun . . .’ – that he met along the way. Such couples seemed as if they might have been his own parents, while the family with whom Heygate first lodged in Berlin impressed him with their quiet dignity, taking in lodgers and showing no envy of the tourists who – thanks to hyper-inflation – could live like kings.11
Heygate loved Germany for its people and for its culture. As a keen young motorist, he was also delighted by the new ruler-straight roads (many of them laid out by Russian POWs) that offered such freedom after the winding lanes, hay carts and high hedges of Old England. Most of all, returning with his friend Anthony Powell in 1929, Heygate relished the mixture of squalor, sex and danger offered by Berlin. It’s ‘a beast of a city’, he wrote with glee: ‘utterly inhumane, and yet I love it’.12 Loelia Ponsonby was fascinated, on her first visit to Berlin, by the spectacle of two sedately rouged old German gentlemen executing a neatly dexterous tango together (an image that evokes the vicious caricatures of George Grosz); another visitor from England in the late twenties watched a row of caviare tubs bobbing their way across a luxurious swimming pool (the occasion was a party being given at one of the elegant diplomatic homes near the Tiergarten).
Heygate and Powell, while no strangers to the charms of the erotic dance clubs and exotic cabarets, preferred the informal tranquility of an afternoon spent sunning themselves beside one of the city lakes, where families of Berliners and clusters of young people casually stripped off to swim, to lounge, or to offer a lithe display of gymnastics. This was the genial, seedy, cosy and frequently violent metropolis with which Isherwood, Auden and Spender – and a young Hardy Amies, enjoying time off from teaching English in the Rhineland – fell in love; the recollections of Heygate and Powell serve as a useful reminder that having sex with azure-eyed German boys, at a time when homosexuality remained taboo in England, formed only a part of the charm of Berlin.
Back home in Britain, by contrast with the exuberant sense of freedom they could find in Berlin in 1929, the young felt trapped in a staid world of the past. The war had shaken the established world and slaughtered its children – and for what? For a mere nine months, in 1924, England had accepted a government of the left; for a paltry nine days, in 1926, she had experienced the thrill of mutiny: a general strike. Promises had been made. Nothing had been gained. In 1929, the year that Powell and Heygate left for Germany, Britain’s miners, if working at all, were actually receiving less money for longer hours. Ramsay MacDonald’s brief moment of Labour rule had been followed up by five slow years of Stanley Baldwin and the Tories. In England, life at the end of the twenties smelt of prudence and the past; in Germany, the scent of progress was as heady as the novelty of diesel fumes.
Progress was in the air; progress, here, felt to the visitors as if it had reached up to the airy heights of the magical, futuristic city sketched out at the Bauhaus in 1923 by Paul Citroen, a drawing from which Fritz Lang borrowed the image for his 1927 cinema masterpiece, Metropolis. And, as in that extraordinary film, down below the glittering surface and the ultra-modern skyscrapers, there lay an underworld of anarchy, poverty and exploitation.
In 1928, a young English aristocrat, Tom Mitford, was studying law in Berlin. Visited by his sister, Diana, and her husband, Bryan Guinness, Tom announced that if he were a German, he would want to be a Nazi.13 By 1928, the Nazis were already linked to acts of extreme aggression, including public cudgellings and brutal private killings. Asked by his gentle brother-in-law how he felt about the violent tactics of his chosen party, Tom coolly answered that their tactics had nothing to do with him. It was, so Diana remembered her brother saying, ‘their own affair’.14
Their own affair. Nobody else’s affair, and most certainly not the affair of an English visitor to a country about which Tom – and so many like him – entertained feelings of deep guilt, engendered by what seemed to almost everybody, back then, to have been a most vicious treaty.
Tom Mitford’s declared determination to stand aside, to let Germany do whatever she wished, so long as England was left out of it, exactly matched the image that Hitler had so confidently projected in Mein Kampf: a tacit understanding for the division of power to suit both countries, leaving Germany in control of her own destiny in Europe, and with nobody to gainsay her across the Channel, in Britain.
Today, we call that dangerous posture of knowing – and increasingly culpable – laissez faire, for lack of any better word, ‘appeasement’.
Footnote
* Making the most of a good press opportunity in which Goebbels played a part, Hitler arranged to be present in Bayreuth the following year, joining brown-shirted stormtroopers as they carried Stewart Chamberlain’s coffin through the streets (one of which bore Chamberlain’s name until long after World War II).