Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (9 page)

Most of the press coverage that followed, at home and abroad, quickly wrote off Hitler and the Nazis. The Beer Hall Putsch had been laughably amateurish, and now all that awaited the arrested leaders was a trial and certain convictions.

Few people realized then that the trial and even imprisonment would serve Hitler surprisingly well. And only a few insiders knew then that it was a young American woman, the wife of one of his earliest followers, who may have prevented him from taking his own life—an act that would have delivered humanity from the devastating consequences of his political resurrection later. It was Helen Hanfstaengl, née Niemeyer, who, in the worst possible way, may have changed the course of history.

Like Knickerbocker who quickly became a close friend, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the
Chicago Daily News
was a new arrival in Berlin in 1923, showing up late that year and staying for a decade, right through Hitler’s rise to power. And, like Knickerbocker, Wiegand and other correspondents, he was as much intrigued by the German capital’s dynamism in the
arts as by its chaotic politics. The city was “
a cultural riot
, the wilder for the lack of such deep traditions as still had held sway in Paris and London,” he recalled. Along with his British-born wife Lilian, he was quickly swept up in that cultural riot.

At the annual Press Ball in the huge Zoo Restaurant, the Mowrers had the chance to mingle with everyone from top government officials and the high-society crowd to the playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Carl Zuckmayer, composer Richard Strauss when he was visiting from Vienna to conduct an opera, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The event brought together “the leaders of totally different worlds,” Mowrer wrote. “It was as though Paris had merged the Elysée, the Opéra, and the
Beaux Arts
Ball into one vast get-together that opened with the dignity of a state reception and ended in a bacchanal.”

Initially, Lilian Mowrer had been distinctly unimpressed with Berlin when she followed her husband after wrapping up the couple’s affairs in Rome, their previous assignment. Arriving in March 1924, she was depressed by the figurative and literal cold and the contrast to Italy, where spring flowers were already in bloom. “
In Berlin ice
still covered the ponds in the Tiergarten, and the atmosphere was leaden,” she noted. She was depressed, too, by “the ugliness of the city,” the heavy Victorian architecture, the pompousness of public buildings—and by “the unlovely figures of the people!”

In the apartment they rented, she found canvases painted by their landlord, female nudes “in the violent tones and formless composition of the German Expressionist school” featuring massive torsos and backsides. “As if we don’t see enough horrors in the street,” she complained. Then there was the matter of food. “There is a great deal in the German cuisine that needs getting used to,” she archly noted. Even the fact that the mark had finally stabilized had its downside as far as she was concerned: prices were now much higher for foreigners than a few years earlier.

Soon, however, Lilian began to see her new home in a different light. German Expressionism was still a puzzle to her, “
but something in
the passionately contorted figures and faces was beginning to arouse my interest.” She loved Italian art but realized that in Rome she had been living artistically “entirely in the past.” By contrast, “German modern work, half
metaphysical, half barbaric, was a stimulating challenge.” As for German theater, she quickly recognized it as “
the most vital
in Europe” and Germans as “the greatest theater-goers in Europe.” And she loved the fact that Berlin was full of foreign productions as well, from the classic Comédie Française to the daring new Russian offerings of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, which she found particularly exciting. “
Nowhere in the world
was there such hospitality to foreign talent as in Germany,” she wrote.

Lilian’s happiest discovery, though, was how open many Germans were to foreigners in everyday life, not just on the stage. “
They were so wonderfully
hospitable, those Weimar Republicans, they did not wait to make a
bella figura
with receptions and parties, they invited us to take potluck with them in the friendliest manner.” She found everyone—bankers, politicians, writers—inquisitive, expansive and often entertaining.

Another striking aspect of life in Weimar Germany, she observed, was the role of women. At the time of her arrival, the Reichstag boasted 36 women parliamentarians—more than anywhere else. Women were studying a broad array of subjects at the universities—law, economics, history, engineering—and were entering professions once reserved for men. Lilian even met “
a full-fledged
slaughterer” in Berlin: Margarethe Cohn, who could kill a steer with a single blow of the mallet. “A woman could do what she liked in Weimar Germany,” Lilian concluded.

Lilian was far more than just an observer of life in Berlin. She wrote articles for
Town and Country,
and she appeared in the first “super-talkie” German film,
Liebeswalzer
(The Love Waltz), which had both an English and a French version. The German actress who had been cast for the role didn’t speak English as well as she claimed, and Lilian was asked to try out for it. She passed the screen test easily, but her initial elation faded when she saw how monotonous much of the work of endless reshooting was. Still, there were consolations. At another studio lot, Marlene Dietrich was shooting
The Blue Angel
, and Lilian saw her often eating lunch at the same restaurant where she took her meals. She recognized Dietrich from the stage, where she played leads in “sophisticated” musical reviews and comedies. When
The Blue Angel
catapulted her to stardom on the big screen, Lilian wasn’t impressed. “
It was the greatest
waste of material to condemn her forever to vamp roles,” she wrote.

Lilian and Edgar got to know many of the city’s other most famous inhabitants, from the artist George Grosz to Albert Einstein. Meeting the physicist, Edgar asked him about a part of his relativity theory he found illogical. Einstein smiled and replied: “
Quit bothering
your mind about it: mine is a mathematical, not a logical theory. Here . . .” At that point, he took his violin and began playing Bach.

Little wonder that Lilian soon conceded: “
I was becoming
reconciled to Berlin.”

American officials played a key role in bringing about the return to apparent economic normalcy that newcomers like the Mowrers immediately noticed. Ambassador Houghton had been more than just sympathetic to Germany’s plight; he defied isolationist voices back home by arguing that the United States was to blame for not acting more decisively to support Germany’s democratic government. “
All in all
, Europe is in a sorry mess,” he wrote to State Department European Division Chief William Castle on February 12, 1923. “We ourselves had at one time the power to stabilize conditions . . . unless something of a miracle takes place, we may look forward confidently and happily to a time not far off when another war may lay prostrate what is left of European civilization.”

Repeatedly urging Washington “
to save what is
left of German capital and German industry,” Houghton was driven to near despair observing the devastating impact of hyperinflation on his host country, along with the strikes, riots and clashes of extremists of the left and the right. In the summer of 1923, he watched Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government collapse after less than a year in office. “
I feel as if
I had come back into the same old building, but found the beams and rafters steadily decaying and the floors increasingly unsound, and that unless steps were speedily taken to repair it, the roof and walls must before long inevitably fall in,” he wrote to Secretary of State Hughes.

Those pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. With backing from the Coolidge Administration, Houghton began to make progress on his push for a new reparations settlement and other measures aimed at stabilizing Germany. In his public pronouncements, Houghton avoided chastising France and
denied any intention of seeking to block her “
just claims
,” but he stressed that Germany’s economic recovery was the key to the continent’s recovery. Working closely with Germany’s Gustav Stresemann, who served briefly as both chancellor and foreign minister in 1923 and then stayed on as foreign minister in eight successive governments, he won support in Berlin and other European capitals for a more active American role.

The result was the Dawes Plan, named after Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, one of a group of American experts who tackled the reparations question. The plan did not fix an exact amount of reparations that the Germans still owed, but it allowed them to make reduced annual payments until their economy improved. Accepted at the end of August 1924, the Dawes Plan immediately triggered a flood of American loans to Germany that would continue until the Depression hit. The stabilization of the currency and the subsequent economic recovery were a direct result of those measures. Speaking to the Reichstag on May 18, 1925, Stresemann left no doubt who was responsible for this dramatic turnaround. “
The United States is
that nation from which emanated the most important efforts directed toward the reconstruction of the economy and, beyond that, the pacification of Europe,” he declared. “For no country can those efforts be more welcome than for Germany.”

American loans and direct investments, coupled with growing U.S.-German trade, meant that the two countries felt increasingly linked with each other. Germany was not only open to Americans but to the broader trends identified by a new term characterizing their country’s economic, social and cultural influence. “
The Americanization
of Europe proceeds merrily apace,” Wiegand reported in a feature that was given prominent play in the
Washington Herald
on June 14, 1925. “Half in wonderment, half in protest this tired old group of nations is falling under the magic sway of that babulous ‘dollar land’ across the ocean.”

As his article pointed out, the average German exhibited a decidedly schizophrenic attitude toward the new money culture, mass production and mass entertainment, including a flood of American movies. He is “resentful of the intrusion of a staccato pace into the easy comfort of his existence and growls and mutters guttural curses against the Americanization of his civilization,” Wiegand wrote. “Then he goes and forgets his
troubles to the tune of an American jazz band, beating a savage tom-tom in any of the thousand amusement places.” The German listening to a band playing “My Sweetie Went Away,” he added, was likely to be dressed in a brand-new suit “cut on Yale lines.”

Germans flocked to the Scala variety house, where the hit of the moment was an American troupe that Wiegand described as “the eighteen dancing, prancing Gertrude Hoffman girls.” In his 1925 article, he noted one key reason for the Americans’ popularity. “Their slender legs and waists are not of the pattern usually favored in Berlin,” he wrote.

Berlin was also beginning to experience American-style traffic problems, he reported, and had installed its first traffic lights on Potsdamer Platz, “winking its flirtatious American eyes at the street car conductors, taxi drivers and chauffeurs who get flustered in the tangle of this place where five important streets meet.”

Mowrer echoed those sentiments. “
By the early twenties
signs of Americanization were appearing all over Europe, and nowhere so conspicuously as in Germany,” he wrote. In his reports, he called 1925 “the first great American year in Europe” and explained how “that complex of factors, personal democracy, technique and standardization of practice,” along with new flashy ads, “had bitten deep into the German soul.” He quoted an American economist as saying that mass production was transforming Germany into “the United States of Europe.”

All of which contributed to the lure of Berlin for American expats. While Paris was still their favorite city in Europe, many of them visited the German capital in the 1920s. Josephine Baker and her
Revue Nègre
took their act to Berlin, holding their opening show at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürstendamm on December 31, 1925. Although there were protesters outside denouncing the black entertainers, and Nazis called Baker subhuman, she was elated by the enthusiasm of the audiences. “
It’s madness
. A triumph. They carry me on their shoulders,” she said.

Berlin was the city where Baker received the most gifts: she was showered with jewelry, perfume, furs. After her regular shows, the Nelson Theater was turned into a cabaret, and Baker would continue to perform. She also happily accepted invitations to other parties, at times wearing nothing more than a loincloth. Berlin’s wild nightlife has “an intensity
Paris doesn’t know,” she declared—and she loved it. She even considered settling in Berlin but was lured back to the French capital to star at the Folies Bergère.

Both for American visitors and residents, Germany’s racy sexual life was a source of constant fascination. As Edgar Mowrer put it, “
The period immediately
following the war saw throughout the world a sexual exuberance which, in Germany, reached an almost orgiastic intensity . . . If anything, the women were the more aggressive. Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice.” And when it came to “
sexual perversions
,” Mowrer added with open amazement, old laws were simply ignored. “It is hard to conceive a much more tolerant society.”

Ben Hecht, who had reported from Berlin for the
Chicago Daily News
a few years earlier, described what his successor was hinting at. He met a group of homosexual aviators at an Officers’ Club. “
These were elegant
fellows, perfumed and monocled and usually full of heroin or cocaine,” he recalled. “They made love to one another openly, kissing in the café booths and skipping off around two
A.M
. to a mansion owned by one of them. One or two women were usually in the party—wide-mouthed, dark-eyed nymphomaniacs with titles to their names but unroyal burns and cuts on their flanks. At times little girls of ten and eleven, recruited from the pavements of Friedrichstrasse, where they paraded after midnight with rouged faces and in shiny boots and in short baby dresses, were added to the mansion parties.”