21,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
It all happened in a flash. February 1933 was the month in which the fate of German writers, as for so many others, was decided. In a tensely spun narrative, Uwe Wittstock tells the story of a demise which was predicted by some but also scarcely thought possible. He reveals how, in a matter of weeks, the glittering Weimar literary scene gave way to a long, dark winter, and how the net drew ever closer for Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and countless others. Monday, January 30: Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Joseph Roth cannot wait any longer to learn what today's paper will report. He leaves for the station early in the morning and takes the train to Paris; bidding Berlin farewell comes naturally to him. Meanwhile, Thomas Mann barely spares a thought for politics during the next ten days, focusing instead on his forthcoming speech on Richard Wagner. Weaving an intimate portrait of the major figures whose lives he follows day by day, Wittstock shows how the landslide of events which immediately followed Hitler's victory spelled disaster for the country's literary elite. He resurrects the atmosphere of the times, marked by anxiety for many, by passivity and self-betrayal for some, and by grim determination for others. Who will applaud the new dictator, and who will flee, fearing for their life? Drawing on unpublished archival material, this important work is both a meticulous historical narrative and a timely reminder that we must remain vigilant in the face of the forces that threaten democracy, however distant the prospect of totalitarianism may seem.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 496
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Figures
Dedication
Stepping off the Cliff
* The month in which the die was cast
The Republic’s Last Dance
* Saturday, January 28
Hell Reigns
* Monday, January 30
Axes at the Door
* Tuesday, January 31
Inferior Foreign-Blooded Trash
* Thursday, February 2
Tongue-Tied
* Friday, February 3
Not Sure What to Do
* Saturday, February 4
Burial in the Rain
* Sunday, February 5
Meeting Routine
* Monday, February 6
Hideous, Violent Little Creatures
* Friday, February 10
Schutzstaffel
for Writers
* Sunday, February 12
Men in Black
* Monday, February 13
Fever and Flight
* Tuesday, February 14
Slamming the Door
* Wednesday, February 15
The Little Schoolteacher
* Thursday, February 16
I’m Leaving. I’m Staying
* Friday, February 17
No Treasure in the Silver Lake *
Saturday, February 18
What’s the Point of Writing?
* Sunday, February 19
Pay up!
* Monday, February 20
Pretty Good Cover
* Tuesday, February 21
Surviving the Coming Weeks
* Wednesday, February 22
A Minister in the Audience
* Friday, February 24
Civil War Tribunal and Police Protection
* Saturday, February 25
Travel Advice
* Monday, February 27
Dictatorship Is Here
* Tuesday, February 28
Fading from the World
* Wednesday, March 1
The Fake Mother
* Friday, March 3
Don’t Open the Door! *
Saturday, March 4
Casting a Ballot
* Sunday, March 5
The Emigrant’s Solitude
* Monday, March 6
Courage, Fear, and Fire
* Tuesday, March 7
Nothing but Goodbyes
* Wednesday, March 8
Unexpected Attacks
* Friday, March 10
Final Days
* Saturday, March 11
Departures
* Monday, March 13
The Sight of This Hell
* Wednesday, March 15
What Happened Afterward
* 33 Life Sketches
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1:
From left to right, Ernst Udet, Ehmi Bessel, and Carl Zuckmayer at the 1933 Berlin Press Ball
Figure 2:
Kadidja Wedekind in 1932
Figure 3:
Erich Maria Remarque in 1929
Chapter 3
Figure 4:
Anhalter Bahnhof
Figure 5:
Torchlight parade in Berlin on the evening of January 30, 1933
Chapter 4
Figure 6:
Thomas Mann in his Munich villa, 1932
Chapter 6
Figure 7:
Else Lasker-Schüler around 1933
Figure 8:
Carl von Ossietzky reports for his jail term in Tegel Prison on May 10, 1932. The photo shows, from left to right, Kurt Grossmann, the journalist Rudolf Olden, Carl von Ossietzky, and the two attorneys Alfred Apfel and Kurt Rosenfeld
Chapter 8
Figure 9:
Christiane Grautoff and Ernst Toller
Chapter 9
Figure 10:
November 1929 meeting of the Division for the Art of Poetry in the Prussian Academy of the Arts, from left to right: Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Ricarda Huch, Bernhard Kellermann, Hermann Stehr, Alfred Mombert, Eduard Stucken
Chapter 11
Figure 11:
Leonhard Frank in his study, 1930
Chapter 14
Figure 12:
Max von Schillings (center foreground), with Hermann Göring standing behind him
Figure 13:
Ricarda Huch in 1934
Chapter 18
Figure 14:
Klaus and Erika Mann
Chapter 19
Figure 15:
Alfred Döblin in 1929
Figure 16:
Gottfried Benn in 1934
Chapter 22
Figure 17:
Therese Giehse in 1933
Chapter 23
Figure 18:
Gustav Hartung in 1930
Chapter 24
Figure 19:
Mascha Kaléko in 1930
Figure 20:
Theodor Wolff and Albert Einstein in Switzerland in 1927
Figure 21:
The Mossehaus, home of the
Berliner Tageblatt
Chapter 25
Figure 22:
Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht, Denmark 1936
Figure 23:
Babette Gross and Willi Münzenberg
Chapter 28
Figure 24:
Gabriele Tergit and Heinrich Reifenberg
Chapter 29
Figure 25:
Mirjam Sachs and Oskar Maria Graf
Chapter 30
Figure 26:
Nelly Kröger and Heinrich Mann in 1936
Chapter 31
Figure 27:
Book burning under police protection after the storming of the
Dresdner Volkszeitung
by SA troops, March 8, 1933
Chapter 35
Figure 28:
Bertolt Brecht, Henry Peter Matthis, Margarete Steffin, and, at far right, Brecht’s and Weigel’s son Stefan, Sweden, 1939. From 1939 the writer Henry Peter Matthis was a board member of the Swedish Writers’ Association and in April 1939 helped the Brecht family obtain entry visas to Sweden
Chapter 36
Figure 29:
Raid on the artists’ colony at Laubenheimer Platz, March 15, 1933. Those arrested are detained in open police vehicles
Figure 30:
Berlin-Kreuzberg, Hedemannstrasse 31, December 1931
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vii
viii
ix
x
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
February 1933
The Winter of Literature
Uwe Wittstock
Translated by Daniel Bowles
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Februar 33. Der Winter der Literatur
© Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, München 2018
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5379-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945588
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
Many people have assisted me in my work on this book in different ways. I would like to thank Karin Graf and Franziska Günther at the agency Graf & Graf; Stefanie Hölscher for outstanding copyediting and Martin Hielscher whose friendship means a great deal to me; the Brecht connoisseurs Jürgen Hillesheim and Stephen Parker for their reliable information; Joaquín Moreno, who provided me with unpublished material from the estate of Ferdinand Bruckner; Christoph Buchwald for advice in dealing with Walter Mehring’s recollections; Thomas F. Schneider of the Erich Maria Remarque-Friedenszentrum at the Universität Osnabrück for his precise references; Marie Schmidt for the tip about Gabriele Tergit’s visit to Carl von Ossietzky; Thomas Medicus for his support in searching for a letter from Carl Zuckmayer to Heinrich George; Holger Hof for information about Gottfried Benn; and Christoph Marschner, who ascertained for me life-saving train connections into exile from Germany in February and March 1933 with down-to-the-minute accuracy.
Without the vast treasury of holdings at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main and the collections of the Deutsches Exilarchiv in Frankfurt am Main, it would have been impossible for me to write this book. Sylvia Asmus, Regina Elzner, Katrin Kokot, and Jörn Hasenclever supported me there with great patience and expertise. I give them my sincere thanks. I likewise used the archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Monacensia at the Hildebrandhaus in Munich, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. I would also like to offer them my gratitude. And I thank Christine and Heinrich Michael Clausing for their esteem and for an incredible month at the Bleiche.
Figures
Endpapers: Anhalter Bahnhof (© ullstein bild – Herbert Hoffmann)
1 From left to right, Ernst Udet, Ehmi Bessel, and Carl Zuckmayer at the 1933 Berlin Press Ball (Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
2 Kadidja Wedekind in 1932 (© akg-images)
3 Erich Maria Remarque in 1929 (© Bundesarchiv/Bildstelle/Georg Pahl (Bild 102-10867))
4 Anhalter Bahnhof (© ullstein bild – Herbert Hoffmann)
5 Torchlight parade in Berlin on the evening of January 30, 1933 (© Sammlung Berliner Verlag/Archiv/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
6 Thomas Mann in his Munich villa, 1932 (© Bundesarchiv/Bildstelle/Scherl (Bild 183-R15883))
7 Else Lasker-Schüler around 1933 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
8 Carl von Ossietzky reports for his jail term in Tegel Prison on May 10, 1932. The photo shows, from left to right, Kurt Grossmann, the journalist Rudolf Olden, Carl von Ossietzky, and the two attorneys Alfred Apfel and Kurt Rosenfeld (© Bundesarchiv/Bildstelle/Agentur Heinz-Ulrich Röhnert, Berlin (Bild 183-B0527-0001-861))
9 Christiane Grautoff and Ernst Toller
10 November 1929 meeting of the Division for the Art of Poetry in the Prussian Academy of the Arts, from left to right: Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann, Ricarda Huch, Bernhard Kellermann, Hermann Stehr, Alfred Mombert, Eduard Stucken (© bpk / Erich Salomon)
11 Leonhard Frank in his study, 1930 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
12 Max von Schillings (center foreground), with Hermann Göring standing behind him (Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
13 Ricarda Huch in 1934 (© dpa/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)
14 Klaus and Erika Mann (© Münchner Stadtbibliothek/Monacensia, EM F 275 (Archiv Erika Mann, Foto: Hannes Bender))
15 Alfred Döblin in 1929 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
16 Gottfried Benn in 1934 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
17 Therese Giehse in 1933 (© History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)
18 Gustav Hartung in 1930 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
19 Mascha Kaléko in 1930 (© DLA, Marbach)
20 Theodor Wolff and Albert Einstein in Switzerland in 1927 (© Bernd Sösemann, Berlin/Photo: Richard Wolff)
21 The Mossehaus, home of the Berliner Tageblatt (© akg-images / Dieter E. Hoppe)
22 Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht, Denmark 1936 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
23 Babette Gross and Willi Münzenberg (© Bundesarchiv/Bildstelle/SAPMO (Bild 10-775-1227-67))
24 Gabriele Tergit and Heinrich Reifenberg (© Jens Brüning)
25 Mirjam Sachs and Oskar Maria Graf (© Münchner Stadtbibliothek/Monacensia, OMG F 6/8)
26 Nelly Kröger and Heinrich Mann in 1936 (© ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Thomas-Mann-Archiv / Unknown photographer / TMA_0947)
27 Book burning under police protection after the storming of the Dresdner Volkszeitung by SA troops, March 8, 1933 (© SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek / Unknown photographer)
28 Bertolt Brecht, Henry Peter Matthis, Margarete Steffin, and, at far right, Brecht’s and Weigel’s son Stefan, Sweden, 1939. From 1939 the writer Henry Peter Matthis was a board member of the Swedish Writers’ Association and in April 1939 helped the Brecht family obtain entry visas to Sweden (© Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Fotoarchiv 07/151, Photo: Henry Peter Matthis)
29 Raid on the artists’ colony at Laubenheimer Platz, March 15, 1933. Those arrested are detained in open police vehicles (© KünstlerKolonie Berlin e. V. (kueko-berlin.de))
30 Berlin-Kreuzberg, Hedemannstrasse 31, December 1931 (© ullstein bild – ullstein bild)
Dedication
In memory of Gerta Wittstock (1930–2020)
who was two years old in February ’33
Stepping off the CliffThe month in which the die was cast
These are no tales of heroes. They are stories of people facing extreme peril. Many of them refused to acknowledge the danger, underestimated it, reacted too slowly, in short: they made mistakes. Of course, it is easy for anyone paging through history books today to say such people were fools if they could not comprehend in 1933 what Hitler meant for them. And yet such a notion would be unhistorical. If the claim that Hitler’s crimes are unimaginable has any meaning, then it must hold true first and foremost for his contemporaries. They could not imagine or at best could only suspect what he and his people were capable of. Presumably it is in the very nature of a breach of civilization to be difficult to imagine.
Everything happened in a frenzy. Four weeks and two days elapsed between Hitler’s accession to power and the Emergency Decree for the Protection of People and State, which abrogated all fundamental civil rights. It took only this one month to transform a state under the rule of law into a violent dictatorship without scruples. Killing on a grand scale did not begin until later. But in February ’33 it was decided who would be its target: who would fear for her life and be forced to flee and who would step forward to launch his career in the slipstream of the perpetrators. Never before have so many writers and artists fled their homeland in such a short time. The first exodus of escapees, lasting into mid-March, is also the subject of this story.
From varying perspectives, historians of different stripes have described the political conditions that facilitated Hitler’s seizure of power. Several common factors play a role in all analyses: the growing influence of extremist parties, which divided the country; overheated propaganda that drove the wedge deeper and deeper and inhibited compromise, together with the indecisiveness and weakness of the political center; the civil-war-like terror from right and left; the raging hatred of the Jews; the hardships of the global economic crisis; and the rise of nationalist regimes in other countries.
These days circumstances are different, happily. Yet parallels may be found to many elements: growing social divisions and the persistent indignation on the internet that exacerbates them; the cluelessness of the bourgeois center about how to rein in the appetite for extremism; the growing number of acts of terror committed by the right and sometimes by the left; increasing anti-Semitism; the risks for the global economy posed by the financial crisis and the coronavirus; the rise of nationalist regimes in other countries. Perhaps it is not a bad time to remind ourselves what can happen to a democracy after a catastrophic error in political decision-making.
In February ’33 it wasn’t just writers and artists staring down danger. The situation may have been even more perilous for others. The first casualty of the Nazis, the very night of Hitler’s swearing-in as Reich Chancellor, was the Prussian police sergeant Josef Zauritz, a loyal republican and union man, according to the Vossische Zeitung. This story will recount his murder as well. But we know incomparably more personal details about writers and artists in February ’33 than we do about any other group. Their diaries and letters have been collected, their notes archived, and their memoirs published and vetted by biographers with investigative zeal.
Their experiences give a sense of how people fared while attempting to defend democracy and the rule of law. They show how difficult it is to comprehend the point at which everyday life turns into a fight for survival and when a historical moment necessitates personal decisions about one’s very existence.
For everything recounted here there are historical records. It is a factual report despite a few interpretative liberties, without which the historical or biographical contexts would not lend themselves to narrative. Of course, not everything that happened to writers and artists back then can be reproduced in this mosaic either. Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Ricarda Huch, George Grosz, Heinrich Mann, Mascha Kaléko, Gabriele Tergit, Gottfried Benn, Klaus and Erika Mann, Harry Graf Kessler, Carl von Ossietzky, Carl Zuckmayer, or the Academy of the Arts in Berlin – all who appear here are merely exemplars. A complete panorama would be too large for any book.
Many a career that began so full of hope never recovered from this month. All too many writers faded into silence and vanished almost without a trace. It was a life-and-death turning point for everyone.
The Republic’s Last DanceSaturday, January 28
Berlin has been freezing for weeks. Shortly after New Year’s Day a stinging frost set in – even the largest lakes, the Wannsee and Müggelsee, have disappeared beneath solid sheets of ice – and now, to add insult to injury, it has snowed. Carl Zuckmayer is standing before the mirror in his attic flat across from the Schöneberg district’s municipal park, wearing a tuxedo and tugging his white bow tie into place over his shirt collar. The prospect of leaving the house tonight in eveningwear is not enticing.
Zuckmayer has no great love of large parties. He is usually bored and stays only just long enough to be able to vanish without a fuss into a random dive bar together with his friends. The Press Ball, however, is the most important social event of Berlin’s winter season, a spectacle of the rich, the powerful, and the beautiful. It would be a mistake not to make an appearance; the ball will benefit his reputation as an up-and-coming star in the literature business with many irons in the fire.
The memory of the hardships during his first years as an author is all too vivid for Zuckmayer to turn his back on opportunities like this one. When he was completely broke, he got work as a barker, trolling adventure-hungry visitors to Berlin from the streets after curfew to conduct them to the illicit sideshow bars in backstreet courtyards. In some of these, the girls were half naked and not demure when it came to their guests’ desires. Once he even dabbled as a dealer on Tauentzienstrasse by night with a few packets of cocaine in his pockets. It wasn’t long before he called it quits; he’s a sturdy fellow and unafraid, but even for him such business was too dangerous.
All that is behind him since The Merry Vineyard. After four pathos-laden and thoroughly miscarried dramas, all of which flopped, he tried his hand at his first comedic subject, a German screwball comedy about a vintner’s daughter looking for marriage in the boondocks of Rhine-Hesse, Zuckmayer’s homeland. In the milieu of wine growers and merchants, he knows every detail. In his treatment the whole transformed into a kind of folk play in which every inflection clicked and every joke landed. Initially, Berlin’s stages were above such pastoral comic fare, but when the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm hazarded the premiere shortly before Christmas of 1925, the seemingly featherweight farce bared its claws, to everyone’s surprise. The vast majority of the audience howled with laughter – and a smaller portion with rage – at the satiric bite with which Zuckmayer mocked the völkisch prattle of bone-headed war veterans and saber-rattling corps students. Their fury only made The Merry Vineyard more famous and heightened its success. It became a real blockbuster, perhaps the most staged play of the 1920s, and it was adapted for film as well.
Now, seven years later, not one but three plays by Zuckmayer are on the season schedules of Berlin theaters; the Freie Volksbühne will stage Schinderhannes, at the Rose-Theater in Friedrichshain they’re showing his sensationally successful Captain of Köpenick, and at the Schillertheater Katharina Knie. For Tobis Film he’s working on a fairy-tale picture, and the Berliner Illustrirte will soon begin serializing his tale Eine Liebesgeschichte [A Love Story], which is to appear right afterward in book form. Things are going swimmingly for him. Few authors in their mid-thirties have enjoyed the success he’s already had.
Gazing from his rooftop terrace he can see Berlin’s lights, from the radio tower to the cupola of the Cathedral. Together with the house outside Salzburg he purchased with the royalties from The Merry Vineyard, the apartment is Zuckmayer’s second residence. It’s of manageable size – an office, two tiny bedrooms, a nursery, kitchen, bathroom, nothing more – but he loves it and especially its views over the city rooftops. He bought it off Otto Firle, the architect and graphic artist who designed, among other things, the flying crane, Lufthansa’s insignia. In recent years Firle has become favorite architect to the wealthy Berlin Grand Burghers and educated classes and no longer outfits attic apartments, instead contriving villas by the dozen. In two years – although Zuckmayer of course cannot anticipate such a thing tonight – Firle will build a country home on the Darss peninsula in the Baltic Sea for a newly wealthy and powerful minister named Hermann Göring.
The last Saturday in January is reserved for the Press Ball, a Berlin tradition for years now. His publisher, Ullstein, sent Zuckmayer his complimentary tickets, after which his wife Alice went about searching for a new evening gown straightaway. This year his mother has come from Mainz to visit for a week. She, too, is wearing a new dress, which he gave her for Christmas: silver gray with lace appliqué. It’s her first big Berlin ball, and he can sense her excitement.
For now, though, they’re planning to dine at a fine restaurant first. The evening will drag on, and it’s better not to begin a night at the ball too early, and never on an empty stomach.
*
With regard to his evening plans, Klaus Mann has bet on the wrong horse: a masked party in Westend at a Frau Ruben’s, quite normal and wretched. He feels out of place.
For three days now he’s been in Berlin, living as usual in the guesthouse Fasaneneck. At Werner Finck’s cabaret Katakombe he ran into Moni, his sister, who then encumbered him with the invitation to this Frau Ruben’s. He found Finck’s program wanting and without spark, but all the same he got to see Kadidja on stage again, the shy one of the two Wedekind sisters. He likes her. She’s almost an ex-sister-in-law to him.
Klaus Mann has been frequenting cabarets of late, out of professional interest, since he himself is involved in one now in Munich, the Pfeffermühle, founded by his sister Erika, together with Therese Giehse and Magnus Henning. With Erika he writes couplets and sketches, Erika, Therese, and two others appear on stage, and Magnus furnishes the music. Klaus could really use inspiration for new scripts, but the acts in Katakombe left him empty-handed, and when Finck’s actors started teasing him from the stage with interspersed taunts and little improvised jokes, it turned him off, and he left before the program ended.
He’s making quick work of Frau Ruben’s masked party as well. Instead of continuing to endure boredom, he leaves quite early despite knowing how unmannerly it is. A lame evening: so back to the guesthouse it shall be, where for his evening entertainment he will treat himself to a dose of morphine, and a large one at that.
*
In Erfurt’s Reichshallentheater today, the premiere of Brecht’s learning play The Measures Taken, with music by Hanns Eisler, is scheduled to take place. The police, however, terminate the performance by the Kampfgemeinschaft der Arbeitersänger [Action Group of Worker-Singers] with the justification that the play is “a communist-revolutionary depiction of the class struggle for the purpose of bringing about global revolution.”
*
When Carl Zuckmayer pulls up in front of the Zoo Ballrooms with Alice and his mother, at first glance everything seems as it was in years past. Over 5,000 visitors are expected, of whom 1,500 are invited guests with complimentary tickets like himself. The others, well, they are curious onlookers who pay horrendous prices to mingle for a night among the country’s celebrities.
In the foyer new arrivals must first squeeze past two magnificent automobiles, an Adler-Trumpf cabriolet and a DKW Meisterklasse, both polished to a high gloss: the grand prizes in the raffle for the welfare fund of the Berliner Presseverein [Berlin Press Association]. Just beyond the entrance, the stream of people disperses while tangos, waltzes, and boogie-woogie emanate from the ballrooms and corridors. Zuckmayer shepherds his ladies toward the waltzes. Provisions have been made for nearly every gastronomic predilection; there are bars with the ambience of a club, plush coffee parlors and beer counters, or quieter, more intimate side halls featuring solo musicians.
The grand two-story Marble Hall, festooned with fresh flowers and with antique Persian carpets draping the balustrades, has the most luxurious decorations. Couples twirl around the dancefloor in front of the stage with the orchestra. From above, in the gallery, one can watch as the parade of visitors elbows its way between the ballroom’s side loges and the long rows of tables in the middle.
This year, a fact not to be overlooked, the most elegant ladies are sporting bright colors. And apparently the dernier cri is a long evening gown with small décolleté but a back neckline that plunges to the waistline, or even beyond.
Zuckmayer breaks off from the torrent of visitors as soon as they reach the Ullstein loge. There’s more air here, less shoving, and right away the waiters procure him and his companions a table, glasses, and beverages. One of the publishing directors welcomes them with “Drink, drink up, who knows when you’ll be drinking Champagne in an Ullstein loge again,” thereby verbalizing what everyone is more or less feeling, while still all somewhat in denial about it.
Sometime around midday the cabinet of Kurt von Schleicher, who has only been Reich Chancellor since the beginning of December, stepped down: an absurdly brief tenure, not even two whole months, that, apart from new cabals, yielded the country not a whit – time lost during one of the most vicious economic crises. This evening, news spread that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg had, of all people, tasked Schleicher’s predecessor in office, Franz von Papen, with forming a new government. The perplexity of these politicians is palpable. A member of the Centre Party, Papen nevertheless has no appreciable power base in parliament. Like Schleicher, he has landed in office solely by virtue of Hindenburg’s good graces and via emergency decree after the parties were unable to rally a majority against the extremists in the KPD and the NSDAP. That pompous, politically unwitting Papen, however, is more liable to stage a coup d’état than to muster the aptitude for restoring the republic to reasonably stable democratic footing.
Just last summer, likewise with only the sanction of an emergency decree, he dismissed the Prussian government. Since then, the largest state in the empire has been administered by caretaker cabinets subordinate to the imperial government. Referred to as the “Preußenschlag,” or Prussian putsch, that very act was a kind of coup that undermined the empire’s federal foundations with the result that now, after Schleicher’s resignation, Prussia is also left leaderless.
The government loge in the Marble Hall directly abuts the Ullstein partition. From his seat Zuckmayer can comfortably glance over at it and see it is nearly deserted. Idle waiters loiter about between the empty plush chairs as unopened bottles of sparkling wine jut from their ice buckets. In years past ministers or state secretaries would hold court there, drawing editors and columnists into conversation as if by chance and explaining to them the world as they saw it. Yet now, apparently, no one feels charged to attend to even such easygoing affairs of government anymore.
All that’s left is the pleasure of keeping an eye out for famous faces in the throng. The tall, ascetic frame of Wilhelm Fürtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is easy to spot, and with him, severe, almost always with a somewhat melancholic aspect, Arnold Schönberg, who gives the impression of being oddly out of place amid the festive hustle and bustle. Gustaf Gründgens and Werner Krauß have apparently made their way here just after their performance at the Schauspielhaus on Gendarmenmarkt where they’re currently playing Mephisto and Faust. Also making an appearance: the hairless skull of Max von Schillings, a composer who hasn’t produced anything new for quite some time and since recently holds the office of President of the Prussian Academy of the Arts.
A photographer intrudes, inviting Zuckmayer to exit the loge for a moment to pose in a group photo with a curiously motley cast: two young stage actresses along with the opera diva Mafalda Salvatini and Professor Bonn, a businessman and government advisor wearing on his chest, as rector of the Handelshochschule [College of Commerce], a rather silly gold chain of office with a medallion.
The director of The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg, emerges briefly from the crowd, surrounded, as would befit his station, by bright young blonde starlets. Marlene Dietrich stayed behind in Hollywood without him. In days gone by Zuckmayer had collaborated on the script for The Blue Angel and thereby came to know Heinrich Mann, who penned the novel upon which it was based, Professor Unrat. He likes that stuffy old boy and admires his book. And yet in his eyes Mann made a fool of himself by trying to replace Marlene Dietrich in the lead role with his then-mistress Trude Hesterberg. In his prim handwriting he drafted letters to the producers that revealed more about his infatuation with Hesterberg than about her qualities as an actor.
Back in the Ullstein loge Zuckmayer bumps into a stocky, exuberant man: Ernst Udet, and his companion Ehmi Bessel. Udet and Zuckmayer are overjoyed; they’ve known each other since the war. In those days Zuckmayer was often deployed to the foremost front lines as an observer, or he would repair shredded telephone lines while under fire. He’s a man with steady nerves, but he’d never compare himself with Udet, a fighter pilot with the presence of a matador, elegant, cocky, cavalier – a mixture of a scoundrel and a gunslinger. When they met for the first time, Udet had already been given command of a fighter squadron at age twenty-two and been draped with medals by generals like a sacrificial animal is with flower garlands. He shot down his enemies in man-to-man dogfights: a modern-day knight riding off to the joust, an adrenaline junkie. By the time the war had ended, he’d brought down sixty-two planes. Only one other German pilot had been more successful in this deadly business: his commandant, Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron.” He, however, had died a few months before war’s end from ground fire and was later replaced by a commandant named Hermann Göring. While not as talented a pilot, he had a surefire knack for making the right political connections.
Zuckmayer’s mother especially is enraptured by Udet. Alice has known him for longer and is aware of the swashbuckling charm he exudes. As a real showman, Udet does not depend on his bleak wartime fame. These days he performs all over Europe and America in aerobatic shows, presenting nose dives, spirals, and loop-the-loops in which he turns off his propeller. Or he flies so close to the turf that he can pick up handkerchiefs from the ground with his wing. He is and remains a jolly daredevil. UFA has discovered him independently and cast him in several adventure films with Leni Riefenstahl in which he lands in the high mountains on glaciers or flies through a hangar with his plane as bystanders fling themselves to the ground. Berlin’s gossip rags love Udet, his affairs with actors like Ehmi Bessel, his sportscar known all over town, a Dodge, and his publicly celebrated friendships with film stars like Riefenstahl, Lilian Harvey, or Heinz Rühmann.
Figure 1: From left to right, Ernst Udet, Ehmi Bessel, and Carl Zuckmayer at the 1933 Berlin Press Ball
There’s no possibility of boredom with Udet, but Zuckmayer never talks about the war with him, so when they meet up, they drink instead. Now, too, they’re switching from Champagne to cognac. Udet notices with surprise how many ball guests are wearing their medals and badges on their tuxedos: “Take a look at those numskulls.” In former years the Press Ball had a more civilian tone. Suddenly emphasis is placed on having a military past. Even Udet is wearing the highest order of merit he has, Pour le Merité, but since he never likes doing what everyone else is doing, he spirits it away into his pocket. “You know what,” he suggests to Zuckmayer, “let’s both pull down our pants now and hang our naked butts over the balustrade here.”
Alice and Ehmi are alarmed at once. They don’t put much past the men, especially when they’re drunk and goading each other. And, in fact, they’ve gone straight to unbuttoning their suspenders. But Alice knows her role on such occasions and entreats the two not to cause a scandal, and thus, without losing face, the men may refrain from further disrobing.
Sometime after midnight, speculation spreads that Hitler is to be named Reich Chancellor. The calculation is simple. If Hindenburg finally intends to put the government back on halfway solid parliamentary footing but the SPD still will not participate under any circumstances, then in essence he and Papen are left with only the NSDAP as a partner. As leader of the largest parliamentary contingent in the Reichstag, Hitler, however, is unwilling to content himself with a ministerial position, as he has made categorically clear. He claims the chancellorship, or else he will remain in the opposition. It’s all or nothing.
Such thoughts do not make the ball more cheerful. People dance and drink as in past years, but the unsettling feeling remains that something unforeseeable is headed their way. The mood is one of peculiarly phony gaiety. By now Sunday has long since begun, and Udet invites Zuckmayer and his two companions to an afterparty at his apartment. His conspicuous Dodge is parked in front of the Zoo Ballrooms like a billboard for himself. Outside, in the bitter cold, he seems sober, but everyone knows he is not. Zuckmayer and his wife prefer to hail a taxi. Only Ehmi and Zuckmayer’s mother are brave enough to ride along in Udet’s car and afterward report with effusive excitement that they didn’t so much drive as fly through the streets.
Udet’s flat is bursting with trophies from countries in which he’s already filmed. Hanging just inside the foyer are a taxidermy rhinoceros and leopard head, along with a few sets of antlers. In the apartment there’s even a shooting booth; several newspapers have been reporting that Udet shoots cigarettes out of the mouths of friends who trust him implicitly. That, however, is something for stag nights. Today Udet invites his guests to join him at a small bar he’s set up, his “Propeller Bar,” and entertains the ladies with anecdotes from the life of a pilot and about the film industry. Now and again Zuckmayer takes Udet’s guitar from the wall and sings a few drinking songs as he did back when he bar-hopped through Berlin to earn a meal as a ballad minstrel.
These are good-humored but not carefree early morning hours, for in the end they mark a farewell. Only once more will Zuckmayer and Udet see one another after this night. In 1936 Zuckmayer musters considerable courage and a pinch of recklessness to travel to Berlin from his home outside Salzburg. The Nazis haven’t forgotten how effectively he panned the military in The Merry Vineyard and The Captain of Köpenick and have long since listed his plays and books on their Index. Still, Zuckmayer cannot be dissuaded and travels anyway to meet actor friends Werner Krauß, Käthe Dorsch, and Ernst Udet, as well. The latter might always label himself an unpolitical person, but three months after the night of the Press Ball, he has joined the NSDAP and launched his career in the Ministry of Aviation under his old squadron commandant Göring.
It turns into a somber final encounter in a small, unobtrusive restaurant. The two luxuriate one more time in reminiscences, but then Udet implores his friend to leave the country as soon as possible: “Go out into the world and never come back.” When Zuckmayer questions why he is staying, Udet replies that flying simply means the world to him and talks about the tremendous opportunities as a pilot that his work for the Nazis provides him: “It’s too late for me to quit. But one day the devil will come for us all.”
In November 1941 Udet shoots himself in his Berlin apartment. Göring held him responsible for the failures of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Someone has to be the scapegoat. Before Udet kills himself, he writes on the headboard of his bed in red chalk as a rebuke to Göring: “Iron One, you have forsaken me!”
The Nazis pass off his death as an accident, and Zuckmayer learns of it in exile on his farm in Vermont. The news bothers him for a long while, he later recalls, until he finally sits at his desk and writes the first act of his play The Devil’s General in under three weeks. It tells the tale of a charismatic Luftwaffe general who despises Hitler but serves him out of a mistaken love of Germany and flying. When the war is over, the play is finished. It becomes one of Zuckmayer’s greatest successes.
*
Kadidja Wedekind feels ill at ease. She allows the throngs of visitors to push her through the ballrooms, proud to number among the invitees already at just twenty-one, among the literati, but the crush in the corridors doesn’t sit well with her. She likes to be by herself and in the background. She prefers to observe from a distance than to have to fight her way forward with the others.
That sort of shyness is otherwise unknown within her family. Her parents, Tilly and Frank Wedekind, once belonged to the towering figures of the German theater world and were always up for a bit of pandemonium. Her father Frank, who passed away back in 1918, was a tireless provocateur, a theater berserker who delighted in disparaging virtuous citizens’ repressed rules of etiquette in his plays. There was not a taboo he didn’t put on stage: prostitution, abortion, masturbation, sadism, homosexuality. He possessed the unerring talent of being able, anytime and anywhere, to unleash an impromptu scandal. Not even his friends were safe from his flashes of temper. Over some years Tilly was a much-sought-after actor who primarily performed in her husband’s plays and shone in the role of Wedekind’s Lulu, an uninhibitedly libidinous girl who both abuses men for her pleasure and lets herself be abused by them. Together Tilly and Frank could have enjoyed the life of an admired and feared theatrical couple. But Wedekind made life a hell for his wife – and thus also for himself – with fits of rabid jealousy. Twice he drove Tilly to attempt suicide. She has been widowed for fifteen years now.
Kadidja’s sister Pamela, five years her senior, inherited some of their parents’ temperament as well as some of their talent. Since her youth she’s felt at ease on stage, has a pretty voice, and likes to perform her father’s songs, which she sings as he used to with lute accompaniment. She has everything Kadidja lacks: courage, initiative, assertiveness. “Pamela,” Kadidja writes one day in her diary, “is quite a strong personality and tremendously talented; with my meekness I’ve got to take a backseat to her.”
After their father’s death in 1918, Pamela and Kadidja made the acquaintance of the oldest Mann children in Munich, Erika and Klaus. They almost lived in the same neighborhood, not a half hour on foot from one house to the other. The Mann siblings were entranced by Pamela’s abilities and fell instantly in love with her. Kadidja was as yet too young to be able to keep up with the others. The three formed a precocious (to the adults: somewhat sinister) trio and impelled each other to ever more novel dandyish actions. Klaus, who wore makeup and made no pretense about being gay, got engaged to Pamela in 1924 and within two weeks had written the chamber play Anja and Esther, which was brimming with allusions to the lesbian love affair between Pamela and Erika. The play didn’t account for much – it was just a sketch, not a well-thought-out work; a couple of boarding-school pupils wallow in their melancholy search for love and the meaning of life. But Gustaf Gründgens, one of the greatest theater talents in the country, was enthusiastic about it, sent an ardent telegram, and persuaded the three to stage the early work together with him and take it on tour throughout Germany.
The play garnered scathing reviews, with critics unwilling to forgive the son of the great Thomas Mann any youthful indiscretion. Nevertheless, the theatrical sensation was perfect, and every theater sold out. The lively activities of these poets’ progeny and their scarcely clear-cut erotic entanglements stoked the public’s curiosity, particularly as Erika then also married Gründgens despite his notorious attraction rather to men. For several weeks the four featured in all entertainment columns and society pages; they tugged at the strings, and every newspaper jumped like a marionette. Who or what might better have embodied the wild, the lustful, the uninhibited twenties than this ménage-à-quatre?
Figure 2: Kadidja Wedekind in 1932
Kadidja is neither able nor willing to keep in step with her sister’s pace of life. Even her mother, engaged more and more seldom by the great stages and for important roles, throws herself into one new love affair after the other. For a time Udet the pilot, whom Kadidja saw in the loge of Ullstein Verlag, was Tilly’s favorite. Zuckmayer, who’s sitting with Udet, also visited her mother now and then. Kadidja was twelve at the time, and Zuckmayer would play Cowboys and Indians with her. She would waylay him in the dim foyer right after he came in, leaping onto his neck from the linen closet, while holding a long kitchen knife to scalp him.
For a few years now, though, her mother has maintained a more solid relationship with a doctor who is also an author, named Gottfried Benn. Tilly is rather infatuated with him, but Benn keeps her at a distance. Whenever he finally has time for her and they go out, Tilly is as excited as a little girl. She even earned her driver’s license, bought a little cabriolet, an Opel, and went on excursions with Benn to the country over the summer. Once, Benn’s daughter Nele was also there. Kadidja got along famously with her.
But Kadidja does not care for this dismal Benn. One time she visited him in his Berlin flat on Belle-Alliance-Strasse at the corner of Yorckstrasse, which he also uses as his medical practice. Granted, he is an interesting man, but ultimately he sickens her. For the most part there is nothing about Benn’s and her mother’s relationship she understands. Once, when she arrived home at night unannounced, the lights were on in every room, but no one was around – until Hans Albers stepped out of her mother’s bedroom.
Such affairs are not for her. Kadidja thinks differently and wants above all to be a good person who makes others’ lives easier. And yet she often lacks the energy necessary for that. She cannot understand where others derive the strength to attend to their work every day. This was a problem for her back in school, and then all the more so when in 1928 she went off to the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. She could, her teachers attested, become a remarkable painter, if she would work more. But she finds it insanely difficult; self-discipline and diligence are not her strong suits, this she knows.
She felt happiest during the holidays in Ammerland on Lake Starnberg. An actress friend of her mother’s, Lilly Ackermann, keeps a house there, and a few years earlier Kadidja regularly spent her days there in reverie or playing with Georg, Lilly’s son. At the time he was ten, but that didn’t matter to Kadidja. On a whim she established a kingdom with him called Kalumina. Here, in this fantasy realm, things would finally unfold according to her ideas. Her will was law, and so she had herself crowned Empress Carola I by Georg and his friends. Together they designed a flag and a constitution. Georg was named chief of the general staff and had to muster an army. It continued on like that for three whole weeks, and when they met again for the subsequent holidays, they kept tinkering with their fantasy world.
It is this time she recalls when she is about to continue her studies at the Berlin Academy. She has been recommended to Emil Orlik, who counts George Grosz among his students. The very attempt to compile a portfolio of her work from Dresden, however, fills her with pure dread. The stink of sheer aversion washes over her with every single page. She’d rather sit down and write the story of her kingdom Kalumina. That might turn into a novel, she thinks. After all, it’s about ancient, classical themes: taking leave of one’s youth, the travails of becoming an adult, the first premonitions of love. Her father had always wanted to write a novel, but he never managed to. Her ambition is all the greater, and for the first time she cultivates self-discipline and willpower. She senses the old themes in her manuscript taking on a new, an airily light allure.
To her own surprise Kadidja has uncovered a talent in herself she never imagined she had. She can write. She has, if she is given time, a poetic sensibility. Scherl Verlag is convinced by her ability, too, and has added her book to its catalogue: Kalumina: The Novel of a Summer. A thousand-mark advance! Nine hundred of that she passes along to her mother who earns less and less acting and has already secretly had to pawn jewelry to be able to make rent.
What is much more important to Kadidja than money is her newly sprouted talent, together with the hope that it may meet with favorable weather in the future and might blossom. All the acquaintances she runs into between loges and tables amid the tumult of the ball buoy her. Initially she won’t believe what she hears, embarrassed and ashamed as she so often is. But then she enjoys herself more and more. Resisting so much encouragement is impossible. For a moment she allows herself to be persuaded that even she might be something special. She senses unimagined confidence, overconfidence even. I am, she thinks, I am the Empress of the Press Ball.
*
Erich Maria Remarque was also unable to resist the invitation, especially since he has just completed the rough draft of a new novel, Three Comrades. He’s treating himself to a little relaxation after such a slog. He hasn’t been living in Germany for months now, but there is always plenty of business to take care of in Berlin, and so he has traveled here to meet people, to check off appointments, and, finally, to fight his way through the ball crowd.
He glimpses Zuckmayer in the Ullstein area, but he seems to be fully engrossed in Ernst Udet. Remarque and Zuckmayer have known each other for almost exactly four years. When Remarque was almost finished with his war novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1928, he sent the manuscript first to the most important German publishing house, S. Fischer, but they passed. At Ullstein, however, the editors were enthusiastic and mobilized the entire company to give the book the launch it deserved in their eyes. First, it was serialized in the Vossische Zeitung, which belonged to Ullstein. Then, when the novel arrived in bookstores, the Berliner Illustrirte, likewise part of the Ullstein concern, moved up its usual publication date by a few days, from Sunday to Thursday, in order to print an article on Remarque’s book by Ullstein author Zuckmayer in time for the first date of sale.
It was not a review in the customary sense, nor was it the standard effusive praise from among authorial colleagues. Zuckmayer’s article was a drumroll, a fanfare, a clarion call, and also a prophecy: “There is now a book, written by a man named Erich Maria Remarque, lived by millions, and it will be read by millions too, now and for all time … This book belongs in schoolrooms, reading rooms, universities, in every newspaper, on every radio broadcaster, and all that is still not enough.”
All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of a frontline soldier in the First World War, from his emergency early graduation in 1914 to his death in 1918. Remarque had written it in terse, unpoetic, and yet emotion-laden sentences, had recounted the panic and dying in the trenches, the dread of spending entire nights under a barrage of detonating grenades, of the madness of storming into enemy machine-gun fire, and of bayonet slaughter in close combat.
Zuckmayer had experienced much of this himself but had never been able to find a viable language for it. His excitement for All Quiet on the Western Front was all the more intense now: “This is what Remarque offers here, for the first time, clear and indelible – what went through the minds of these people, what was happening internally …” The novel gave literary form to the confused, murderous, nerve-wracking experiences of an entire generation and in this way made them communicable. For Zuckmayer – and he suspected not only for him – this was akin to being liberated from an incubus. “We all have experienced time and again that nothing can be said about the war. There is nothing more deplorable than when someone recounts his wartime experiences. That’s why we remain silent and wait … Here with Remarque, however, fate itself – the entirety of it – takes on a form for the first time. What was behind it, what was burning underneath – what remains. And written, crafted, lived in such a way that it becomes more than reality: truth. Pure, valid truth.”
Indeed, hundreds of thousands of people felt as Zuckmayer did, not only former frontline fighters, but others, too, who hadn’t been soldiers, yet who’d wanted to comprehend the experiences these veterans lived with. After only a few weeks the novel had reached a print run of half a million. That same year it was translated into twenty-six languages. An international hit.
And a provocation for all who were trying to sugarcoat war and the death of soldiers, meaning mostly for the German Nationalists and National Socialists. They did battle with the novel and its author with populist lies obstinately repeated and thus hammered into the public imagination; the book debases the fallen, mocks their sacrifice for the Fatherland, drags everything noble about being a soldier through the mud. Because Remarque only spent seven weeks at the front and lay wounded in a field hospital after that, he is a fraud who never really participated in the war, who doesn’t know war at all in fact. Because his name was originally Remark, they called him a traitor to the people who derived his pen name Remarque from, of all places, the language of France, the language of the archenemy. Such a one as he has no right to write about the heroism of men who gave their young lives for Germany’s honor.
The propaganda battle escalated when the 1930 American film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front arrived in German cinemas. The day after the premiere, Goebbels sent his SA thugs into movie theaters in Berlin and other cities where they threw stink bombs, released white mice, and threatened or beat viewers until the showings had to be cut short. Instead of protecting the film and its audiences, however, the authorities bowed to pressure and after five days banned further showings “for endangering German prestige.” Goebbels triumphantly celebrated the Nazis’ first large campaign success: “It was a battle for power between Marxist asphalt democracy and German-conscious state morality. And for the first time in Berlin, we are able to record the fact that asphalt democracy was brought to its knees.”
Months afterward, the film will in fact be released again in a considerably abridged version. That, however, can no longer assuage Remarque’s disappointment in his country. And regardless of what he does, says, or writes, he remains a favorite enemy of the right wing. Luckily, All Quiet on the Western Front made him a rich man. He purchases a villa on Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, a few kilometers outside Ascona, and puts behind him a Germany he finds more and more alien.
Figure 3: Erich Maria Remarque in 1929
That’s why, after the Press Ball, Remarque spends only one brief night in a hotel. Who the new chancellor after Schleicher will be basically no longer affects him at all, no more than the question of whether this ball is the last dance of the republic. Early Sunday morning right after breakfast he gets in his car, a Lancia Dilambda – he loves fast cars and high speeds – and sets off toward the Swiss border. It is a long, cold drive, from north to south, through wintery Germany. It will be almost twenty years before he sees his homeland again.
In just a few weeks, emigrants will circulate his address on Lago Maggiore among themselves like an insider tip. Remarque is known as a generous man. He gives shelter to refugees, slips money into their hands, procures tickets for them to Italy or France. Ernst Toller visits him. The Jewish journalist Felix Manuel Mendelssohn numbers among his guests as well. He stays with him for a few days. In mid-April he is found dead in a ditch near Remarque’s estate, with a fractured skull. Did he fall, or was he beaten to death? Swiss newspapers write of an accident. Reading the accounts, Thomas Mann is certain: it was a Nazi attack gone awry. In the dark, young Mendelssohn was “probably mistaken for Remarque” by the assassins.
Hell ReignsMonday, January 30
Joseph Roth does not intend to wait for the news the day will bring. First thing in the morning he heads to the station and boards a train to Paris. Saying goodbye to Berlin comes easily to him. For years he has worked as a reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and being on the road has become second nature for him. He has been living out of hotels and guesthouses for years. “I believe,” he once claimed boastfully, “that I would be unable to write if I had a permanent residence.”
Four months earlier, toward the end of September 1932, Roth’s The Radetsky March appeared in print, a masterful novel that, like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, tells the story of a family’s downfall over the course of several generations: that of the Trottas, who rise under Franz Joseph I, ruler of Austria-Hungary, and perish with him in the First World War. It is one of his most significant books. Roth worked hard on it and thus has reason to restrain himself from making political statements so as neither to inflame anyone against him, nor to endanger the sale of his novel in Germany.
