In Europe (34 page)

Then, suddenly, the whole crisis was over. Within three months a new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, had the Germany economy back on its feet. On 15 November, 1923 a new currency was issued: drab little banknotes on which was printed ‘Rentenmark’. The value of the new currency was supposedly based on collateral consisting of Germany's total gold reserve, ground and other property. In reality, none of that was true, but the fact that the Germans believed it turned out to be enough. On Saturday, 17 November the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
cost ‘90 billion marks = 15 Goldpfennige’. On Friday, 22 November the paper cost ‘150 billion marks = 15 Goldpfennige’. Two weeks later, it was still 15 Goldpfennige. The currency held its ground. Within a month the new mark was back on a normal footing with the dollar, at an exchange rate of 4.2:1.

With the arrival of the Rentenmark, things quieted down. The pressure imposed by the reparation payments was eased by means of an ingenious plan drawn up by the American banker Charles Dawes. American money was actually being invested in the country. In 1925, Stresemann was replaced as chancellor, but continued to play an important role until 1929 as minister of foreign affairs. General Hindenburg was elected president in 1925, and even the conservatives began gaining a little confidence in Weimar under the reign of this surrogate kaiser.

International relations, too, grew less tense. For the first time, the European governments were trying to use the League of Nations to resolve a number of issues: the consequences of the collapse of the Austrian economy, the Macedonian conflict between Greece and Bulgaria, the status of the cities of Danzig and Vilnius, the issue of the Saar and the former German colonies, and the administration of the trust territories of Syria and Palestine. The French minister of foreign affairs, Aristide Briand, was tireless in his efforts on behalf of Franco-German reconciliation. He launched an early initiative for something like a European federation, aimed at creating a lasting peace within a broader context as well.

The Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, in which the world ‘unconditionally and definitively’ renounced war as a political instrument, was signed by fifteen states, including France and Germany. The League of Nations, however, never implemented the pact. That was typical of the League's role: at Versailles, the Allies had left the solving of a number of thorny and potentially dangerous issues – the status of Danzig was one of those that finally precipitated the Second World War – to the League, but failed to give this new institution the power to implement decisions. The United States withdrew from the League at the very last minute, even though President Wilson considered the organisation to be the summit of his life's work. Once the war was over, the two other initiators, France and England, focused primarily on internal affairs. On every front, the League of Nations lacked all the necessary clout.

Jean Monnet, the former cognac dealer, was only thirty when the League was established. He became its deputy secretary-general. ‘We achieved results,’ he wrote later. ‘We overcame crises … we used new methods to administer territories, we stopped epidemics. We developed methods of cooperation between countries which had until then known only relations based on the advantage of power.’ But at the same time, he admitted, he and his fellow diplomats severely underestimated the problem of national sovereignty. ‘At every assembly the people spoke of common interests, but that was always forgotten again in the course of the discussion: everyone was obsessed with the impact a possible solution could have on them, on their country. As a result, no one really tried to solve the problems at hand: their greatest concern was to find answers that would not damage the interests of everyone seated around the table.’
The right of veto – by which any state could block any decision – was, he said ‘both the symbol and the cause’ of the League's inability to rise above national interests.

Today, one of the permanent exhibits at Berlin's Jüdische Museum is a clip from the film
Menschen am Sonntag
, a unique collage of Berlin street scenes from summer 1929. We see a calm, prosperous city with busy sidewalk cafés, with children playing in the streets and relaxed people out for a walk, with young people sunbathing on the shores of the Wannsee, and a little parade by the
Reichswehr
along Unter den Linden – with, and this is striking, many dozens of civilians marching along with the soldiers down both sides of the street.

Those summer Sundays of 1929 were Berlin's last peaceful moments. After 1924 Germany had grown calm. Politics had become an orderly affair, wages rose, food was good, and things could have stayed that way forever. ‘From 1926 on, there was really nothing worth talking about,’ Haffner recalls. ‘The newspapers had to go looking for their headlines among events abroad.’ Street life was marked by ennui, and everyone was ‘most heartily invited’ to be happy in his or her own fashion. The only problem – and one remarked upon as well by Rathenau before his death – was that, generally speaking, no one responded to that invitation to respectability. The young people of Germany had grown addicted to political excitation, unrest and sensation.

Later, the sociologist Norbert Elias would provide yet another explanation. In his view, the deep dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic had everything to do with the abrupt transition from the semi-absolutist regime of Wilhelm II to a modern parliamentary democracy. That process usually takes a number of generations, but in Germany the change came within two to three years.‘The personality structure of the German people was focused on the absolutist tradition that had governed them for centuries without interruption,’ Elias wrote. This was accompanied by the military order and obedience that had long permeated Prussian society, a way of thinking that is relatively simple in comparison with the complicated demands posed by life under a parliamentary democracy. What is more, the rules of a multi-party democracy emphasise precisely those
values held in low esteem within military tradition. Like every parliamentary democracy, Weimar required a complicated culture of negotiation, self-restraint, mediation and compromise. The old, semi-absolutist Germany, however, abhorred the happy medium, it cried out for honour, loyalty, absolute obedience and firmness of principle. It created, in Elias’ words, ‘a landscape marked only by bans and rules’. And as the Weimar years wore on, many Germans felt a growing nostalgia for that old world.

This process was a slow one, and modern, intellectual, artistic Berlin had no idea what was going on at first. Dr Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Gauleiter in Berlin from 1926, went almost unnoticed during the first Weimar years. His newspaper,
Der Angriff
, sold scarcely 2,000 copies a week. When Hitler's political ally Ludendorff announced his candidacy for the presidential elections in 1925, he made no headway at all. In the 1920s, no more than 20,000 copies of
Mein Kampf
were sold.

Nor did the results at the polls provide any indication of what was looming on the horizon. The 1925 elections were a triumph for the established order: Hindenburg, born in 1847, received 14.7 million votes, former chancellor Wilhelm Marx – the joint candidate of parties including the Catholic Centre Party and the SPD – received 13.8 million, and the communists’ Ernst Thälman took 1.9 million. Hitler's National Socialists achieved no more than 280,000 votes. In the next elections, in 1928, when the social democrats won for the last time, the Nazis did not do much better: of the 500 seats in the Reichstag, they received only twelve. Two years later, when ‘this rabid postman of fate’ (as Ernst von Salomon once referred to Hitler) made his breakthrough, the thinking part of the nation was – with only a few exceptions – taken completely by surprise.

It was more than blindness alone. The intelligentsia, too, could summon up absolutely no enthusiasms for the established order. No one stood up for the Weimar Republic. Most of the nation's writers agreed with Thomas Mann, who openly declared war on politics as a whole ‘because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, obstinate and inhuman’. Later, by the way, he changed his tune. In cabarets like the Tingel-Tangel the republic was constantly ridiculed, while Hitler played the part of the harmless idiot. Kurt Tucholsky called the German democracy ‘a façade and a lie’.

Most of the conservative
Bildungsbürger
had no notion of the under-currents in their society. The fact that no less than 50,000 Berlin students
had taken to the streets during the Kapp Putsch to demonstrate in favour of that ultra-right wing coup did not register with them. And they did not even want to know what those students read: Ernst Jünger's books about the mystical
Männerbund
that arises between warriors, Alfred Rosenberg's stories about the Jewish conspiracy, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's treatise on the new Germany,
Das Dritte Reich
(1923), which envisioned a ‘spiritual
volk
community’ led by a single führer; each of these books were sold in huge numbers. They were blind, too, to the culture of political murders, to the intimidation to which a person like Albert Einstein, for example, was exposed. ‘I'm going to cut that dirty Jew's throat!’ a right-wing student had shouted during one of Einstein's lectures. Nor did they have a particularly clear view of the country's economic situation, shaky despite the seeming stability.

In the cellars of Berlin police headquarters, close to Tempelhof airport, the dirty brown underworld of the 1920s is still on display for the rare visitor. Look, there we have Karl Grossmann, a fat butcher with a permanent shortage of domestic help. During a three-year period he scattered the pieces of twenty-three female corpses all over Berlin, in canals, in garbage pails, pieces of housemaid everywhere. He also had a colleague, Georg Haarmann, who specialised in young boys. After having sex with them he literally ripped their throats out. Perhaps twenty-five boys disappeared into the Leine. The police finally caught up with him after children playing in the area kept finding bones and skulls. And then there was Horst Wessel, whose name lives on in the celebrated Nazi anthem ‘Die Fahne hoch’, which chiselled his name in granite as a saint and a martyr of the swastika.

On 17 January, 1930, SA-Sturmführer Wessel was found badly wounded in his rented room on Grosse Frankfurterstrasse. The authorities immediately suspected a political motive, but things were more complicated than that. The rumour going around the underworld was that Wessel had run foul of the pimp ‘Ali’ Höhler, concerning one of the whores Höhler protected. Meanwhile, Goebbels was busy moulding him into a new hero of the movement, a victim of the Red hordes. He wrote a moving account of his visit to the hospital bed of this ‘Christian and socialist’, and when Wessel finally died on 23 February, Goebbels organised a funeral the likes
of which Berlin had rarely seen. In the long run, it turned out that Wessel had simply failed to pay a great deal of back rent, and that the ‘proletarian foreclosure’ instigated by his landlady had got a little out of hand. That, at least, is what the police files say.

In 1922 a list was published of recent political killings. Since 1918, the German extreme left was responsible for 22 murders, and the radical right for 354. Of the left-wing killings, seventeen culprits were punished. Of the 354 murders committed by right-wingers, 326 remained unsolved. Only two right-wing murderers were brought to trial. Of the convicted left-wing murderers, ten were executed and the remaining seven received prison sentences averaging fifteen years. The right-wing murderers received an average sentence of four months. The thin excuse ‘shot while trying to escape’ had already made its appearance. Assailants were becoming increasingly deft at ‘working over’ their political opponents.

The great hero of Berlin's police museum is Detective Ernst Gennat. It remains a mystery why no television series has yet been based on his life, for no premise could be more perfect. Ernst Gennat weighed 135 kilos and, together with his faithful secretary Bockwurst-Trüdchen, solved almost 300 murder cases between 1918–39. His size inspired confidence and awe, and he despised all forms of physical exertion. For his work in the field he had a special car built to serve as mobile police department and forensics lab. Gennat was also the founder of ‘forensic undertaking’, by which mutilated and half-decayed corpses could be reconstructed. He was absolutely opposed to the use of force:‘Anyone who touches a suspect is out on his ear. Our weapons are our brains and strong nerves.’ Shortly before his death he married, to make use of the police department's pension benefits for widows – but Trüdchen was not the lucky girl.

In those years, part of the Berlin underworld had organised itself under the guise of sports clubs, wrestling associations, sometimes even savings clubs. Their names reinforced the illusion of bourgeois respectability: the Ruhige Kugel, Immertreu and the Lotterie-Verein. They worked along the lines of a guild. When one of their members was arrested, his legal costs were paid. The wives of imprisoned members received a living allowance, and when one of them had to disappear from sight for a while, that was arranged as well. Reading about these
Ringvereine
, you see before you the gangs that would ultimately bring forth part of Berlin's brown-shirted
SA, the clubs of the unemployed who were given uniforms by the Nazi leaders and paid for their services in beer and sausage. Wasn't the first SA unit in Wedding, for example, called the ‘Band of Robbers’? And the one in Neukölln the ‘Scoundrel's Bond’? And wasn't the Horst Wessel case a typical underworld vendetta?