‘We must remember the most elementary truth: “this past did not know what we now know.”’
FRITZ STERN, FIVE GERMANYS I HAVE KNOWN (2006)
‘People who wanted to know could find out about it early, in the beginning.’
TISA SCHULENBURG, MEMOIRS
Hitler became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. London’s Foreign Office had already been warned what to expect.
In the summer of 1928, Horace Rumbold, a seasoned second-generation diplomat with the blinking gaze of a sleepy koala bear and a mind as sharp as a needle, replaced Edgar D’Abernon as British ambassador to Berlin. During the four years of turbulence, despair and radical change that preceded Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship, Sir Horace never faltered in his articulately expressed reservations about the Nazi Party and its leader. Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in London – and thus the man in charge of Britain’s international diplomacy between 1930 and 1938 – took Rumbold’s bulletins seriously. Vansittart’s own anxiety about the rapid growth and rise in Germany of the Nazis, the violent extremists of the right, was shared, back then, by Sir John Simon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
Rumbold’s previous stay at the British Embassy, working under the affable leadership of Sir Edward Goschen, had ended abruptly in 1914, with rocks splintering the windows along the street side of the Embassy building. In 1928, Britain’s new ambassador to Germany returned to a Berlin flush with money, hot with politics and still – despite the handsome injection of foreign loans – fiercely resentful of the reparations payments from which Chancellor Stresemann had deliberately made no attempt to extricate his nation at the Treaty of Locarno. (Stresemann was, nevertheless, trying to get the payments reduced.)
Harold Nicolson, stationed at Berlin as a chargé d’affaires in 1928–9, took a dim view of his superior at the Embassy. Sir Horace, who was nearing sixty, struck his younger colleague (Nicolson himself was an active forty-two) as being both slow and dim: ‘an old bumble-bee’ was the actual phrase used in his diaries. When placed beside Etheldred (Ethel) Fane, his horse-faced wife, Rumbold seemed to his worldly compatriot ‘so appallingly English that it is almost funny’.1 Harold Nicolson may have come to repent a carelessly formed judgement. Bella Fromm, an attractive and well-born Jewish society journalist who worked for the massive Ullstein Press in Berlin, proved more astute.
It took only one visit to the spacious British Embassy (Bella especially admired the splashing fountains in the grand two-tier marble entrance hall) for the Nuremberg-born writer to detect that the kindly Rumbolds were not the simple creatures that they seemed. Both husband and wife, for a start, spoke impeccable German. Lady Rumbold, a diplomat’s daughter, made no secret of her anger at the way that Nazi thugs had already begun, in 1930, to target Jews; Sir Horace indicated where his sympathies already lay by offering Bella immediate and privileged access to visiting foreign diplomats. Such access, during a time of increasing censorship in Germany, would enable at least one journalist in Berlin to tell the nation how Germany was being viewed from beyond her boundary lines.2
Horace Rumbold was not alone in his concern about where Germany was heading during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Robert Bruce Lockhart (a former diplomat who had set up an anti-Bolshevik spy network during the first years of Soviet Russia) was working as a banker in Central Europe during the late twenties. In September 1928, Lockhart recorded his belief that a second war was already on its way. Talking to Gustav Stresemann the following year, Lockhart noted that the Chancellor thought Germany’s only chance of maintaining peace in Europe (‘for a hundred years’) lay in a change back to the pre-war Polish border with Germany. This reversion, as Stresemann acknowledged (and as Lockhart agreed), was unlikely to happen. How could Germany expect Poland, a geographically vulnerable new republic, to surrender its protecting corridor and the crucial access that it provided, for a land-locked country, to the sea? To ask such a sacrifice, as both men understood, would be tantamount to requesting Poland to commit suicide.3
Germany’s jovial, port-swilling Chancellor died in 1929. With him, in the increasingly apprehensive view of Harry Kessler, Germany had lost both its last great statesman and its hopes of a secure future. On 3 October, Count Kessler soberly recorded his belief that the ascent of the Nazi Party, leading to a dictatorship, had become unstoppable.
Events of the next three years would confirm Kessler’s fears. As America’s Depression struck home, panic-stricken US banks began recalling their German loans. A new chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, was briefly licensed by President Hindenburg to rule without control by the Reichstag. Desperate to save the Reichsmark at a time when Germany had no reserves upon which to draw, Brüning dared not devalue. Instead, taxes were raised, while wages were cut. The result was a disaster. Between 1929 and 1932, devastation swept across rural Germany. Unemployment figures in Berlin alone increased by a terrifying 2000 per cent. By 1932, six million Germans were out of work and the country was once again experiencing the miseries of 1923.
Industrialists like Fritz Thyssen, whose steel works in the Ruhr had been badly affected during the Weimar years, shared the furious feelings of many Germans about the Treaty of Versailles and welcomed the prospect of working with the Nazis; by 1932, Hitler’s backers also included a substantial number of landowners and several of the former Emperor’s clan. (The Emperor’s most cultured son, Auwi – August Wilhelm – had joined the Nazi Party early on, as had Siegfried Sassoon’s former lover, Philipp, and his brother, Prince Christoph of Hessen-Kassel.) Their interest was self-serving; the Nazis appeared to offer no threat – as the Communists most certainly did – to the estates that the Junker landowners, of whom Hindenburg himself was one, continued to guard with jealous zeal. While uncharmed by the rough habits of his followers, these aristocrats placed their faith in Hitler as a friendly little chap who could be easily controlled. Lady Rumbold, disgusted, observed the ease with which the Nazi leader took them in. Hitler had, she told her mother, both a ‘very human’ smile and a genius (possibly borrowed by a known film enthusiast from Chaplin’s famous Tramp) for gracefully conveying ‘the courage of the little fellow . . . They all feel they want to protect him and help him on his difficult way.’4
The first hint of how the Nazis might behave when in power came in September 1930, six months into Brüning’s chancellorship, when the pain of withdrawn funds from abroad was being acutely felt – and a scapegoat sought. That month, 107 brown-shirted Nazis gained seats in the Reichstag. Marching along Berlin’s Leipziger Strasse in broad daylight, twenty of the new delegates paused to hurl cobbles through the windows of – and only of – the Jewish-owned stores. Asked to explain themselves to their stunned – but troublingly uncritical – colleagues, the Nazis coolly declared that these ‘spontaneous outbursts’ had taken place in response to attacks by Communists. Bella Fromm, who had begun to write her diary on flimsy sheets of paper that she could safely conceal in letters to friends abroad, expressed her scepticism about that dubious explanation.5
The ‘Standstill’ (by which a six-month moratorium was imposed on repayments, leaving only interest to the loaning banks to be kept up) came too late to stave off trouble.* It helped to stem the flight of money from Germany. It failed to halt the nation’s steady movement to the right, in search of the authoritative command that only Adolf Hitler – freshly boosted by massive injections of funds from multinational concerns like I. G. Farben, and from magnates like the steel baron Fritz Thyssen – seemed able to offer at his increasingly well-orchestrated rallies.
Robert Brand, as a prime mover for the Standstill, was obliged to make regular visits from Lazard’s Bank out to Berlin during the early thirties. Shocked by the evidence of escalating violence, secret beatings-up and even murders, Brand expressed his fears about the increasing dangers of a Nazi-governed Germany. A young Welsh journalist called Gareth Jones issued more inflammatory warnings, publishing them in the American press.
Jones, a lively, dark-haired and attractive young man, had already been noticed by the circle of politicians and economists among whom Robert Brand moved when visiting his wife’s sister at Cliveden. In 1930, Jones had been appointed as private secretary to Lloyd George and given a useful introduction to The Times by Philip Kerr (newly become Lord Lothian and the uneasily left-wing owner of a raft of glorious country homes). Writing for the New York American on 29 November 1931, Jones warned that the economic annihilation of Germany’s most stable force, its influential middle class, pointed towards the imminent rise of ‘a Nazi dictatorship’. Jones’s only error was to suppose that the Nazis would be in power by the spring of 1932.6
Jones predicted Hitler’s rise to dictatorship in November 1931. Five months earlier, a chance encounter occurred that might easily have swept Adolf Hitler from sight.
Neither a darkening political scene nor the daily tragedies brought about by a financial crisis could impede the steady arrival in Munich, Berlin and Dresden of a horde of fresh-faced boys and girls from England. Most were straight out of school and eager for a stimulating combination of culture, sport and socialising, spiced by the occasional sense of a peril that threatened no harm to these guileless innocents from abroad. Among the summer’s intake was John Scott-Ellis, a cheerful eighteen-year-old who had three months left to fill (he had just returned from inspecting family estates in Kenya with his father) between leaving Eton and going up to Cambridge.
A week or two into his summer sojourn at Munich, Scott-Ellis purchased a small, scarlet Fiat. His driving skills were shaky. Haupt von Pappenheim, a rosy-faced and newly hard-up Nazi aristocrat, offered his services as a guide on a practice drive around the city.
Edging cautiously up the Ludwigstrasse, the inexperienced driver turned into a side street too fast. Down, right under his wheels, sank a small, toothbrush-moustached man who seemed to have blundered straight off the pavement without seeing the car. The man got up and, although displeased, appeared unharmed; John’s passenger offered frantic apologies. Hands were shaken; partings taken. Told that his victim was a man called Adolf Hitler, John registered only that Haupt Pappenheim had been appalled by the incident. Sweating hard by the time they reached John’s Munich lodgings, the self-appointed driving instructor beat a rapid retreat.7
While Pappenheim’s reaction indicates how powerful Hitler had become by 1931, a more intriguing question is posed by the uncharacteristic absent-mindedness of a politician famous for the obsessive care with which he avoided danger. One possibility presents itself as an explanation.
A few weeks after the brief encounter between young Scott-Ellis and the future dictator, Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, co-habitant of his princely Munich apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, shot herself, using her uncle’s revolver, at their flat. The precise nature of the intimate relationship between Hitler and his half-niece remains unclear, but a domestic drama had surely been reaching crisis point if a preternaturally cautious man was too distracted to spot the approach of a bright-scarlet foreign car in a city where, especially in straitened times, private motor vehicles remained rare.
This author’s own German connection owes everything to John Scott-Ellis’s first visit to Munich, a city that never ceased to charm my uncle with its airy informality and its glistening distant views of the Bavarian Alps. Today, walking through the neglected garden of the charming new house on Biedersteiner Strasse that a sculptor (Hans Albrecht Harrach) and his wife Helene (Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s artistic sister) moved into during 1926, it’s still possible to come upon a circular pool, presided over by Anadyomene, a graceful naiad sculpted by Hans Albrecht himself. This little pond was a favourite meeting spot for the young English visitors who, as paying guests, were given cultural tours of Munich by one of the Harrachs’ five daughters. Scott-Ellis, invited over by one of the guests for a swim, conspired in a prank. A large live fish was purchased and surreptitiously slipped into the pool as a surprise companion for the giggling bathers. John’s punishment for such impudence was to be invited to return the following day and join the family for a lunch made from their ‘catch’.
The fish, in hard times, provided a splendid feast; Irene, the Harrachs’ youngest daughter, made an impression that John Scott-Ellis would never forget. She was cleaning the stairs, Cinderella-style, when he walked up the house’s steps and in through the columned entrance. For a shy young man, gazing at an exceptionally pretty young woman across a large, bright entrance hall filled with Hans Albrecht’s sculptures (his head of Helen Keller had won tributes at a recent exhibition in New York) and Helene’s witty drawings and sketches, it was love at first sight.
Between 1931 and 1934, John became a regular visitor to the Harrachs’ home in Munich. Sadly, an affable man’s good-humoured memoirs and family recollections reveal little of a city that was experiencing extraordinary times. Conversations with Count Harrach about Keyserling, whom Hans Albrecht admired, and Spengler, whom he mistrusted, were vaguely mentioned. (John himself became sufficiently interested in Spengler to give a talk about him at Cambridge.)
One memory lingered. Driving through Bavaria on one of his regular visits to Munich, the young Englishman lost his way. Motoring through deep woods, he blundered upon a military exercise that was being conducted with armoured tanks. Back in England, his reports were laughed away. The tanks were of a kind that the German Army (in theory) did not then possess.
Otherwise, for John – as for the majority of bright-eyed youngsters who visited Munich and Berlin during the early thirties – Germany presented itself as a country seen through thick protective glass. They were there to enjoy themselves. The country’s politics were not their affair.
In August 1932, President Hindenburg had fiercely refused Hitler’s demand to be given the chancellorship. Half a year on, a mentally enfeebled President (as a despairing Bella Fromm noted on 10 April 1933: ‘he grasps nothing’) endorsed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany. The date was 30 January 1933. A month later, the Reichstag went up in flames and a young Dutch Communist took the blame. Many suspected a set-up (there had been rumours of a planned fake attack on Hitler’s life), and that an excuse was required for the vicious reprisals that were swiftly carried out as leading Communists were swiftly rounded up for beatings, imprisonment, or both.
On 23 March, President Hindenburg put his signature to the Enabling Act. Back in 1930, Chancellor Brüning had been allowed to rule without the Reichstag during a period of financial emergency. The 1933 Enabling Act removed the need for such emergencies: Germany’s new chancellor was free to make what laws he wished, and without consultation.
All resemblance to a normal life in Germany now started to unravel with alarming speed. Jewish tombs were vandalised. Churches erected swastikas on their spires. In Berlin, Bella Fromm watched her own chauffeur from Ullstein shouting death to the Jews as he marched down the street. Back in uniform by the end of the day, the same chauffeur opened the limousine door for his ‘Miss Bella’ and not a word was said.
On 1 April, a national boycott was imposed, backed by the watchful presence of bully-boys in uniform, on all Jewish-owned shops. (Ethel Rumbold made a point of shopping at the Jewish stores in Berlin that day.) On 6 April, citizens learned that German literature was to be purified by fire; on 10 May, Nazified students and teachers joined in the fun of hurling books from the windows of schools and libraries and then setting them ablaze. Among the 25,000 books considered important enough for incineration were the works of Ernest Hemingway, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jack London, Heinrich Heine, Helen Keller, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Erich Maria Remarque. The writings of Helene Harrach’s sister, Mechtilde Lichnowsky, joined the pyre. ‘Spontaneous protests’ meanwhile guaranteed that the film of Remarque’s classic anti-war book, All Quiet on the Western Front, followed the fate of Die andere Seite (the German remake of Journey’s End) in taking a swift departure from the German screen.
The union of state and party as a single unit (‘Partei und Staat sind eins’) came on 1 December, following the suspension of all parties other than the Nazis. All this had been achieved in less than a year.
The exodus, not surprisingly, had already begun.
Hitler had become chancellor at the end of January 1933. Within less than a month, Tisa Schulenberg’s Marxist sculptor friend, Emil Fuchs, heard that his life was in danger. ‘We had laughed at the small man’s desire at marching about in a queer brown shirt,’ Tisa Schulenburg stated in her memoir, but she did not laugh when a terrified Fuchs knocked at her door just after the Reichstag fire, begging for sanctuary and for a car to get him away before the police arrived. (Fritz Hess drove their friend to the borders; the SA arrived at Fuchs’s house a few hours later, and moved on to conduct a thorough search of Tisa’s studio.) That same month, warned that his passport was about to be seized, Germany’s leading theatre and literary critic, Alfred Kerr, left without a moment’s hesitation (his family followed him within the year). Harry Kessler, tipped off in March about an imminent arrest, fled to Paris; in April, he learned that a trusted servant had discovered an old flag, rolled up in the Count’s attic. It was enough. Harbouring non-Nazi icons had become evidence of treason. Kessler’s house was confiscated the following year. With it went all his treasures: the books, the paintings, the Maillol sculptures among which Josephine Baker had once gleefully danced.
In Paris, on 7 June 1933, Count Kessler and Count Keyserling, a fellow exile, could still ponder whether Hitler might yet restrain a party that seemed hell-bent on destruction.
Horace Rumbold suffered from no such illusions. Devastating in the quiet moderation of his tone, the British Ambassador despatched reports that left the Foreign Office in London in no doubt of the extremes to which Germany’s new leaders were prepared to go. Unlike the optimistic Prussian Junkers, he did not believe that Hitler would endeavour to hold them back.
In March, 1933, Rumbold told Robert Vansittart and his colleague Sir John Simon that law and order had been suspended in Berlin; that Bruno Walter had been forbidden to conduct; and that Einstein’s house – contrary to Wyndham Lewis’s confident declaration in 1931 that the Nazi leaders would always cherish the geniuses among the Jews – had been ransacked.* 8 A month later, on 5 April, Rumbold informed the Foreign Office that all non-Aryan Germans were now excluded by law from taking paid employment; that large camps for Jews and other ‘unsuitables’ had been erected; and that one, Dachau, built over the grounds of a former artists’ colony close to Munich, was designed to hold 5000 prisoners. Writing more informally to Margot Asquith that same week, Rumbold passed on the news that Marxists and pacifists now qualified as common criminals and were being sent to Dachau. Tisa Schulenburg, meanwhile, learned from her old school head at Heiligengrabe that the women who did the cleaning for a nearby prison camp complained about regularly having to wash clothes that were sodden with blood.9
Even theatregoing had become a crime for Germany’s newly created underclass. Writing to his son on 23 April, Rumbold described with disgust how a Jew attending a fundraising concert conducted by Furtwängler had been forced to his feet and elbowed out of the building by a couple of Nazi guards. Nobody protested. The risk of being seen to do so had become too great.
Rumbold’s last effort to persuade Britain to pay attention came in what is known as the ‘Mein Kampf Despatch’. Sent to Sir John Simon on 26 April and read by both Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain, the 5000-word document argued that Mein Kampf offered a clear blueprint for the Germany that Hitler had now begun to create. Racial purity; forceful repossession of lost territories; the creation of a powerful military machine: all of this had been proclaimed in a book that Rumbold (wrongly, in this respect) imagined that a Hitler grown ‘cautious and discreet as he was formerly blunt and frank’ would now wish to bury.* Hitler stated that he wanted a ten-year peace; Rumbold believed that the decade would be spent in re-arming Germany. ‘The outlook for Europe is far from peaceful,’ he warned, ‘if the speeches of the Nazi leaders, especially the Chancellor, are borne in mind.’ Rumbold did not ask Britain to intervene; what he implored was that England’s leaders should pay attention.10
The reward for Rumbold’s strenuous endeavours was not what he might have anticipated. The Foreign Office ordered the Ambassador home that summer and replaced him with a potentially more malleable figure: Robert Vansittart’s own brother-in-law, Sir Eric Phipps.
Sir Eric Phipps, a decent man whose own increasing distaste for the Nazis would lead to a similar recall within a couple of years, must have wondered what he had done to deserve such a fate. On 28 June 1933, on the verge of his departure from Berlin, Rumbold confessed to a personal friend, Clive Wigram (private secretary to George VI) that ‘many of us here feel as though we were living in a lunatic asylum’. Addressing the Foreign Office for the last time two days later, Rumbold grimly observed that Hitler’s good fortune was to preside over a people who, desperate for a moral leader, no longer cared what that morality might be.
‘There is no doubt,’ Rumbold added, ‘that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal.’11
Fond though Sir Horace’s playful half-brother Hugo was of entertaining John Scott-Ellis’s parents and their friends by dressing up as a duchess for dinner parties, the Ambassador himself was a man of conventional habits and tastes. It’s unlikely, although they were in Berlin at the same time, that Sir Horace ever encountered the clever, cultured, left-leaning group of young men who appear, thinly disguised, in Stephen Spender’s The Temple (begun in Berlin in 1928) and in Christopher Isherwood’s poignant evocation of a vanishing world, Goodbye to Berlin (1939).
Isherwood, invited to Bremen by a donnish cousin in 1928, was lazily beguiled by a schoolboy-annual world of rose-brick walls, bicycles and yachting caps. ‘My vision of Germany is utterly the boys’ country,’ he wrote in his diary on 21 May; the following year, still struggling to master the language, but fascinated by the people, Isherwood settled into a room near Berlin’s Tiergarten. Stephen Spender, urged on by a German-speaking grandmother who wanted him to visit her cherished homeland, settled nearby. Together with their friends Wystan Auden and John Lehmann, who paid regular visits from Vienna, the young Englishmen savoured the freedom of a society in which homosexuality was not yet a crime (the Nazis would soon make it a criminal offence) and in which, before censorship set in, the culture was headily diverse.
Politics came far below sex for Isherwood during the time he spent living in Germany; Spender, ranging excitedly between Hölderlin and Goethe, Reinhardt and Brecht, focused on culture, while saving an occasional sigh for the hardships being imposed on Berliners by the economic slump.
Had Isherwood, Auden and Spender fallen under the spell of a man like Janos Almasy, it’s possible that they, like Tom Mitford, would have opted for a state of political detachment that leaned towards favouring the Nazis. Instead, they met Wilfrid Israel.
Tall, fair-haired, softly spoken and spectacularly rich, the London-born Israel owed his impeccable English to the fact that his mother, Pauline Solomon (also born in England), refused to have German spoken at her table. At the time that he met up with Auden, Isherwood and Spender, all of whom were a shade younger than himself, this cultured and enigmatic man was beginning to take over the family empire. (Nathan Israel was one of the largest and most respected department stores in Berlin, employing over 7000 people, among whom a modest 10 per cent were Jews.) A collector of Oriental art, Israel was a pensive dandy and aesthete of dual nationality. At the time that he met the young English writers, Israel was beginning to ponder how he could best use his own privileged position as a dual national to help the vulnerable majority of Jews who were more directly threatened than himself by the new and ugly politics of Germany’s ultra-right wing.
Spender, partly Jewish himself, instantly recognised Israel’s exceptional qualities. (‘Dass Sie für diese Welt zu gut seien,’ Einstein would write to Wilfrid on 7 June 1939, at the time of his escape: ‘You are too good for this world.’) Isherwood, put off by the air of elusive detachment, portrayed Israel as the impassive aesthete Bernhard Landauer in his novel about Berlin and, when he came to revise the portrait in 1977, still failed to inject the character with any warmth. (It seems almost as though Isherwood, who had so artfully impersonated detachment through his literary motif of the camera’s eye, felt threatened when he met the real thing.) Wilfrid Israel, however, liked the clever and appealing young English writers enough to meet up with them both in Berlin and – travelling up to the fringes of the North Sea in 1932 – in the silvery, pine-scented oasis of Rügen Island that had enchanted Elizabeth von Arnim during her years in Germany.
Isherwood later politicised his memories of Rügen by adding the striking image of a small naked boy carrying a swastika flag along the sandy shore and singing ‘Deutschland über alles’ to the groups of cosy Germans who snuggled deep within the wicker hives of their wind protectors, out by the side of an oyster-grey sea. But Rügen, above all, was a place for doing nothing: day after day, the young men from England sunbathed, read, talked and went for strolls. Occasionally (if Isherwood’s fiction is based on fact), they fell into conversation – and maybe something more – with Nazi boys who loved their Führer and burned to please him.
It was at Rügen, in 1932, according to Stephen Spender’s recollections in World Within World, that Wilfrid Israel first persuaded him to study the Nazis’ literature. Whatever Israel produced as reading material (Spender’s account is not specific), it proved effective and determining. Finally, the visitors from England were compelled to take notice of a programme that amounted to something far more dangerous than random bullyings and a bit of censorship.
It can’t be claimed that Auden and his friends took up a position of marked nobility at a challenging time. It can, however, be noted that the young writers grew less detached and more attentive after the Rügen holiday. John Lehmann, watching the Reichstag go up in flames, understood enough to see an omen of future conflagration. A few months later, Stephen Spender recorded with dismay the transformation of Germany’s traditional midsummer bonfires into a series of witches’ sabbaths at which even Erich Kästner’s innocuous books – newly identified as a threat to racial purity – were cast into the flames. Only Emil and the Detectives escaped destruction, thanks to its immense popularity among German readers.
For Christopher Isherwood, there may have been as much self-interest as heroism in his endeavours to get a young Jewish lover, Heinz Neddermeyer, out of the country in the summer of 1933, but Isherwood was already making a record of the bullyings and ill-treatment, the racism and the violence, that he saw taking place around him. (‘How quickly fear set in,’ wrote Fritz Stern, remembering the shock he had felt on learning from his family that he himself was one of the newly designated inferior race: a Jew.12) Isherwood’s observations, first published in magazine form between 1935–7, were later incorporated into his novel Goodbye to Berlin, but the last chapter of an earlier work from 1935 (Mr Norris Changes Trains) had already provided a powerful account of a society headed for terminal breakdown.
Isherwood left Germany in 1933. A year later, Wystan Auden and two friends crossed Germany during the hot August weeks that followed the octogenarian President Hindenburg’s death. His successor, already hailed as ‘Your Majesty’ by the bewildered old man, had wasted no time in seeking divine rights. Two hours after Hindenburg’s death, on 2 August, Hitler announced his self-appointment as Germany’s first all-in-one chancellor and president. What Auden witnessed – as did a bronzed young Patrick Leigh Fermor, striding through a swastika-spattered Fatherland on his colourful pilgrimage to Constantinople – was the utter lack of freedom with which Germany yielded an enforced consent, in the summer of 1934, to the apotheosis of Adolf Hitler.
Auden may have had Wilfrid Israel to thank for the lucidity with which he recognised an atmosphere not of joy, but of terrified compliance: ‘every house waves a flag like a baby’s rattle . . . Every shop has pasted a notice, “We are all going to vote yes.”’ A hotel owner, hearing the advancing stamp of the Labour Corps, broke off from chatting to his English visitor to throw open the window and beam out. The moment had arrived, Auden wrote, for a prudent businessman ‘to show a welcome face’.
Auden failed, however, to grasp the situation’s full gravity. This was the summer during which a horrific massacre had recently taken place in Munich (the Night of the Long Knives, catchily named after one of Hitler’s favourite marching songs). And yet, the English poet was still ready to compare the Nazi assassins to ‘the sort of school prefect who is good at Corps’. Listening to one of the most menacing speeches of Hitler’s career, Auden could only come up with another schoolroom image: a boy gabbling phrases learned off by rote.* 13
The fact that they had little direct dealing with Germans except within the intimate world of personal friendships enabled Isherwood, Auden and Spender to keep out of politics. John Heygate, returning to Germany in 1932 to work at Babelsberg as a supervisor on British films, registered events from a less detached angle.
Good-looking, amoral and enterprising, Heygate had already taken a couple of motor jaunts around Germany when the invitation came to work at UFA. Heygate’s autobiographical novels suggest that he revelled in the glamour of working alongside Laurence Olivier’s elegant first wife and the effortlessly bilingual and German-born Lilian Harvey, while the male stars interested him rather less. He loved being entertained at a movie mogul’s sumptuously modern home in Berlin’s Grunewald; he relished cabaret evenings spent watching Jean Ross (Isherwood’s Sally Bowles) crooning to bemused businessmen in a raucous cockney accent, while presenting them with an act that, as Heygate noted with amusement, ‘was their idea of Piccadilly and Broadway with a touch of Harlem rolled into one’.14
Heygate’s novels, while less successful than those of his friends Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, have the merit of being written by somebody who was not an outsider (as were Isherwood, Spender and Auden), but who was working among Germans, in an industry that employed a great many Jews. In Talking Picture (1934), Heygate is speaking from experience when he describes how the new ban on Jewish workers has thrown the film studio into panic. One cameraman, however, looks quite jaunty: ‘Braun jumped to his camera . . . he was one of the only pure Aryans in the studio and had nothing to fear from Hitler.’ The Babelsberg film sets are put to fresh use in the novel, offering memorably symbolic images of a country locked in the bitter grip of winter’s rule. Behind the wreckage of Front Line 1918, a street of summery flowers from Vienna lies buried deep in snow. Nearby, on Fritz Lang’s old Nibelungen sets, reduced to a wilderness of tangled power cables and planks, the lake in which Siegfried once battled with the dragon has become an ice-bound wasteland.
Writing in 1934, by which time Germany had experienced a full year of rule by ruthless force, Heygate refused to romanticise his feelings for a country that had once enchanted him. Asked by two anxious stormtroopers what people in England think about the brave new Germany, the narrator offers them no reassurance. For himself, he has no choice but to quit a country that now fills him with dismay. ‘The road – the road to England opened before me. There was no other.’
The narrator never went back, but John Heygate did. Returning for the Nuremberg Rally of 1935 with the ardently pro-German novelist Henry Williamson at his side, Heygate was still keen to register his disapproval. Typically, English visitors to the Nazi rallies praised the clockwork precision of the marching troops; Heygate, pointedly, dwelt upon the beauty of the old medieval city. Comparing national anthems, he observed that while Britain aspired only to rule the seas, Germany ‘says that she will rule the world’. Shown a torture instrument similar in design to the legendary iron maiden, Heygate saw a perfect symbol of the new Nazi soldier: lean, soulless, and brutally efficient.15
It is harder for a novelist to send clear signals of current affairs from abroad than for a foreign correspondent working for a major paper.
Gareth Jones had begun visiting Germany on walking tours in 1923, when he was eighteen years old and reading French, German and Russian at the Welsh university of Aberystwyth. Astar reporter for one of Britain’s largest provincial papers, the Western Mail, Jones was offered the chance to speak to a wider audience when Philip Lothian, having heard Jones speaking authoratively about his impressions of Stalinist Russia, provided an introduction to his friend Geoffrey Dawson, the long-standing editor of The Times. Dawson, advised by the Foreign Office not to antagonise Soviet Russia, rejected Jones’s firsthand 1932 reports on famine in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, when Jones expressed a wish to report on the rise of the new Germany, Dawson promised to do what he could.16
Six years after his first visit to Germany, there was still no doubting Gareth Jones’s affection for the country. ‘Hurray! It is wonderful to be in Germany again, absolutely wonderful,’ he wrote to a family who were used to such characteristic outbursts of enthusiasm. (In one charming early letter, Jones had fantasised about sending his favourite Welsh aunt’s fine cake around all the great houses of Germany, for a special tasting in which they would all share his own relish for her cooking, and hail the finest cake-maker in the world.)
Jones put his connections with The Times to good use during his time in Berlin. Invited by Putzi Hanfstaengl to accompany Hitler on a plane trip from Berlin to Frankfurt, the young Welsh reporter found himself sharing the honours with Sefton Delmer, putting his own fluent German to good use as a correspondent for the Daily Express. Delmer’s chatty report focused on the presence on the Richthofen (Germany’s fastest plane, travelling at 142mph) of Auwi von Preussen, Emperor Wilhelm II’s third son, morosely eating his way through the chocolates that Hitler, always terrified of being poisoned, refused to touch. Jones was more intrigued by the presence of a giggling, twinkling Goebbels, and by the transformation of the private Hitler (a pale and flabby introvert) into the public figure who climbed out of the plane: the man whose oratory ‘is in colour one blazing red which makes the people mad’.17
Jones suffered from no illusions about the man who had taken control of Germany. From the moment of Hitler’s election as chancellor, he spoke out with a clear warning to his British readers. ‘The personality of Hitler arouses no confidence in the calm observer,’ Jones wrote on 9 February 1933. ‘It is hard to reconcile his shrieking hatred of the Jews with any balanced judgement.’ In the months that followed, the young journalist sent home accounts of the bonfires of books, the banning of Jews from public jobs and the corrupt rewriting of German history to fit the deceits of propaganda. He wrote about the military music that was played through every hour on the radio and relayed through megaphones into city centres, beach resorts and public parks. He described, as a personal witness, the power of the speeches for which he rated only Hermann Goering as comparable to Hitler in his eloquence.
In June 1934, Jones’s tone grew more urgent. He wrote that German newspapers were boasting of the 10,000 planes that stood ready for action on every frontier. On 22 August, he described the ongoing creation of a military monster: ‘a super-regimented, forcefully cemented people, who are to speak with one voice, think with one brain, and march at a single command’. On 3 October, describing what he called ‘a cleansing’, Jones added, in chilling understatement, as if he feared to say more: ‘There is a lot going on under the surface.’18
The Western Mail, proud of their star Welsh reporter, published every one of Gareth’s articles. Geoffrey Dawson, sharing the Foreign Office’s anxiety not to offend the new Germany, published none of them. The Times would prove equally reticent in 1935 when Jones, whom Stalin had banned for life, was kidnapped by bandits while travelling through Mongolia with a German journalist. The German was released. Jones, who had just turned thirty, was murdered. No obituary, nor even a mention of Jones’s death, appeared in The Times.
Yet Gareth Jones had made his mark. Writing for the Berliner Tageblatt on 17 August 1935, a German journalist mourned the untimely loss of a ‘splendid’ man and seized the chance to plead for more of such honest reporting on Germany’s tragic situation. ‘The International Press is abandoning its colours,’ Paul Scheffer declared, ‘– and in some countries more quickly than others . . . The causes of this tendency are many. Today is not the time to speak of them.’
Such a mildly measured statement, published in a prominent German newspaper, by the summer of 1935, was enough to lose an author his liberty, and perhaps his life. Sadly, Scheffer’s muted words had no noticeable effect on Geoffrey Dawson, an editor who had committed himself, where both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were concerned, to a policy of suppression and censorship.
It was Jones’s misfortune that he had been given an introduction to The Times, rather than to the Daily Telegraph, the far more open-spirited newspaper for which Graham Greene’s cousin, Hugh, started writing from Berlin in 1934.
The Greene family had proudly asserted their German links throughout Hugh’s life. Two tall tribes of Greenes had grown up in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted as cousins and friends. Hugh and Graham belonged to one clan; the other, thanks to their Brazilian-born German mother, Eva Stutzer, an ardent pacifist, had been taught German as their first language.
Ben, Eva’s eldest boy, had led the way in 1920, when he followed up his studies at Berlin University by travelling around Germany, before briefly joining a Quaker aid-mission in Soviet Russia. Graham, during his studies at Balliol, had paid a fact-finding visit to the Ruhr in the company of an Oxford chum, Claud Cockburn, who shared Graham’s impression that the French strategy for post-war occupation was calculated to inflict maximum discomfort on a defeated nation. (The presence of a large number of black Senegalese troops struck the two young men as especially inflammatory.)
In 1928, an eighteen-year-old Hugh Greene went to Marburg, where he fell in love simultaneously – and enduringly – with German cinema and German girls. Five years later, Hugh returned to Germany to act as a stringer in Munich for Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman. In 1934, the long-legged, myopic and astonishingly curly-headed young man was given the journalistic plum he craved: a job writing for the Daily Telegraph from Berlin.
Greene’s timing was impeccable. The thirties was a golden decade for the foreign correspondent, and Hugh arrived in Berlin alongside William Shirer, Edgar Mowrer and H. R. Knickerbocker. Norman Ebbutt, working for The Times, was an old hand, widely regarded as the best reporter of them all. Ebbutt, resigned to the fact that his own reports were invariably spiked or rewritten by Dawson as soon as they reached London, was happy to share some of his most remarkable scoops. Hugh Greene, throughout the Nazi years, was delighted to make use of them.
Ebbutt and Greene were returning from a city tennis match one morning in late June 1934 when the two journalists spotted something untoward: Goering’s state police were herding a group of Ernst Röhm’s stormtroopers into a van, before rapidly driving away. It was the eve of the massacre in Munich.
Events developed at speed. Hitler, travelling to Munich, announced that action must be taken to forestall an attempted coup. Ernst Röhm was killed in his bedroom; Kurt von Schleicher, the chancellor who preceded Hitler and whose attitude had remained critical of the Führer, was lunching at home with his wife when a group of SS officers burst in and shot them both dead.
Officially, the victims had been planning a revolt. Unofficially, it was apparent that the SA were not popular with the German Army and that Hitler, preparing to seize power from Hindenburg – and unaware that the ancient President was about to die from natural causes – had done a deal with the military. In Germany, Goebbels praised a heroic act by a great leader who had dared to venture into the traitor’s den; on 13 July, the official explanation for Röhm’s death was announced in one of Hitler’s most truculent speeches. Delivered in the Reichstag, it was broadcast across the nation. Unity Mitford, horrified for the Führer (he had just honoured her with a personal salute during one of his regular teatime visits to Munich’s Carlton Hotel), thought he had been tremendously brave. ‘Poor Hitler. The whole thing is so dreadful.’19
Foreign journalists had not, as yet, been killed in Germany; expulsion, however, was always possible. With considerable courage, Hugh Greene wrote and sent off his despatch. Appearing in the Daily Telegraph on 4 July (a full week before Hitler made his official announcement at the Reichstag), Greene’s report described a brutally executed set-up. It was, he wrote, splendid for Goebbels to describe Hitler as having bearded savage lions in their den, but what courage was needed to kill families at their lunch table or sleeping in their beds? And what kind of conspirators employed no guards and trustingly opened their doors to strangers?20
Hugh’s report was ill-received in Berlin. The following week, all copies of the Daily Telegraph in Germany were confiscated. Temporarily forbidden to listen to Hitler’s speeches in the Reichstag, and informed on 14 July that the Telegraph was to be banned from circulation in Germany for a further fortnight, Hugh was unfazed.
Hindenburg died, obligingly, on 2 August. Hugh’s account of the carefully orchestrated state funeral did full honour to the ironies of the occasion. Beginning with an account of the black-draped building and the massing of the troops, the young reporter described how Hitler had dedicated a great president to his rightful place in Valhalla before – as a rousing chorus of the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ was sung in honour of the Reich’s favourite martyr – a massive hawk that had been hovering over the ceremony like a presiding spirit rose with a shriek into the sky. The hawk, as Greene later cheerily admitted, was a touch that had been added by a London editor; he himself had taken pains to shape his account into a warning of the new Germany that was coming into being. The sheeted building had loomed up ‘like some sinister dream of the future’; the tightly ranked parading troops had offered an image of complete invincibility: ‘uniformed strength’.21
Goebbels, while launching furious attcks on what he called Greene’s ‘revolver journalism’, allowed Britain’s most outspoken correspondent to remain in place for a further five years. Hugh himself believed that his fate was sealed on the day in 1939 when, standing on a station platform in Berlin, he was afforded the pleasing spectacle of a burly guard scooping the tiny Minister of Propaganda up in his arms and popping him through the carriage window of a departing train ‘with his short legs kicking in the air’.22
The knowledge that his humiliation had been witnessed, and by an English journalist, was too much for a vain man to bear, or so Hugh Greene avowed. Ordered to leave the country in May 1939, the ebullient young journalist departed in style, waving a fencing foil and shouting to his friends that he intended coming back – ‘als Gauleiter!’23
Footnotes
* It remains debatable whether the annual renewal of the Standstill Agreement (it remained in place until shortly before the Second War) was motivated by appeasement or, closely linked to appeasement, by the realistic awareness that Hitler had no intention of repaying loans that implied ‘War-guilt’.
* Wyndham Lewis’s enthusiastic short life of Hitler (1931) had been commissioned by Lady Rhondda, the right-wing extremist who owned Time and Tide.
* Mein Kampf, made mandatory reading and encouraged as a suitable gift to wedding couples, became a useful source of revenue for Hitler.
* Back in England the following year, Auden performed the more useful service of marrying Erika Mann (Thomas’s lesbian daughter) – a ceremony that took place during a lunch break at the country school where he was teaching. Auden’s motives were mixed: while glad to save a member of the Mann family from potential persecution, the alliance also provided a valuable literary link for an ambitious writer.