Travellers in the Third Reich E-Book

Julia Boyd

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 745

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Witness the rise of the Third Reich through the perspective of outsiders – extraordinary tales from visitors and travellers drawn to the 'New Germany' of the 1930s. The events that took place in Germany between 1919 and 1945 were dramatic and terrible but there were also moments of confusion, of doubt – of hope even. Without the benefit of hindsight, how did people interpret what was unfolding in front of their eyes? How easy was it to know what was actually going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by Nazi propaganda or predict the Holocaust? Travellers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts of outsiders drawn to the country, a multitude of voices and stories, including students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, journalists, fascists, artists, tourists, even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler – one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere. These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes and its ultimate destruction. ___ THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP THREE BESTSELLER AND WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE MONTH Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History 2018 One of the Daily Telegraph's Best Books of 2017 A Guardian 'Readers' Choice' Best Book of 2017 ___ 'A compelling historical narrative'Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating'Spectator 'Absorbing and stimulating'Mail on Sunday DISCOVER MORE STORIES OF ORDINARY LIVES AT THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY IN JULIA BOYD'S NEW BOOK A Village in the Third Reich – OUT NOW

Leseprobe

ForMackenzie, Harrison, Bella,Robbie, Edie, Sebastian,Matthew, Zoe, Jemimaand Clio

Contents

Introduction

Map

  1    Open Wounds

  2    Deepening Pain

  3    Sex and Sun

  4    ‘The Seething Brew’

  5    The Noose Tightens

  6    Monster or Marvel?

  7    Summer Holidays

  8    Festivals and Fanfares

  9    Heiling Hitler

10    Old Soldiers

11    Literary ‘Tourists’

12    Snow and Swastikas

13    Hitler’s Games

14    Academic Wasteland

15    Dubious Overtures

16    Travel Album

17    Anschluss

18    ‘Peace’ and Shattered Glass

19    Countdown to War

20    War

21    Journey’s End

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Archives Consulted

The Travellers

Notes

Index

Introduction to A Village in the Third Reich

Introduction

I magine that it is the summer of 1936 and you are on honeymoon in Germany. The sun is shining, the people are friendly – life is good. You have driven south through the Rhineland, admiring its castles and vineyards, and have watched fascinated as the huge, heavily laden barges ply their way slowly up the Rhine. Now you are in Frankfurt. You have just parked your car, its GB sticker prominently displayed, and are about to explore the city, one of the medieval architectural gems of Europe.

Then, out of nowhere, a Jewish-looking woman appears and approaches you. Radiating anxiety, she clutches the hand of a limping teenage girl wearing a thick built-up shoe. All the disturbing rumours you have heard about the Nazis – the persecution of Jews, euthanasia, torture and imprisonment without trial – are at that moment focused on the face of this desperate mother. She has seen your GB sticker and begs you to take her daughter to England. What do you do? Do you turn your back on her in horror and walk away? Do you sympathise but tell her there is really nothing you can do? Or do you take the child away to safety?

I first heard this true story from the daughter of the English couple, as we sat in her tranquil Cambridge garden sipping lemonade one hot summer afternoon. When Alice showed me the photograph of a smiling Greta holding her as a baby, confirming the remarkable and happy outcome of this particular traveller’s tale, I tried to place myself in her parents’ shoes. How would I have reacted had I found myself in the same situation? It took only seconds to conclude that, however touched by the woman’s plight and no matter how appalled by the Nazis, I would almost certainly have opted for the middle course. But although it is easy enough to imagine our response in such circumstances, do we really know how we would react? How we would interpret what is going on right in front of our eyes?

This book describes what happened in Germany between the wars. Based on first-hand accounts written by foreigners, it creates a sense of what it was actually like, both physically and emotionally, to travel in Hitler’s Germany. Scores of previously unpublished diaries and letters have been tracked down to present a vivid new picture of Nazi Germany that it is hoped will enhance – even challenge – the reader’s current perceptions. For anyone born after the Second World War, it has always been impossible to view this period with detachment. Images of Nazi atrocities are so powerful that they can never be suppressed or set aside. But what was it like to travel in the Third Reich without the benefit of post-war hindsight? How easy was it then to know what was really going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by the propaganda or predict the Holocaust? And was the experience transformative or did it merely reinforce established prejudices?

These questions, and many others, are explored through the personal testimony of a whole range of visitors. Celebrities like Charles Lindbergh, David Lloyd George, the Maharaja of Patiala, Francis Bacon, the King of Bulgaria and Samuel Beckett passed through, to name just a few. But also ordinary travellers, from pacifist Quakers to Jewish Boy Scouts; African-American academics to First World War veterans. Students, politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, poets, journalists, fascists, artists and, of course, tourists – many of whom returned year after year to holiday in Nazi Germany – all have their say, as well as Chinese scholars, Olympic athletes and a pro-Nazi Norwegian Nobel laureate. The impressions and reflections of these assorted travellers naturally differ widely and are often profoundly contradictory. But drawn together they generate an extraordinary three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler.

Many people visited the Third Reich for professional reasons, others simply to enjoy a good holiday. Yet more were motivated by a long love affair with German culture, family roots or often just sheer curiosity. Against a background of failing democracy elsewhere and widespread unemployment, right-wing sympathisers went in the hope that lessons learned from a ‘successful’ dictatorship might be replicated back home while those subscribing to a Carlylean worship of heroes were eager to see a real Übermensch [superman] in action. But no matter how diverse the travellers’ politics or background, one theme unites nearly all – a delight in the natural beauty of Germany. You did not have to be pro-Nazi to marvel at the green countryside, the vineyard-flanked rivers or the orchards stretching as far as the eye could see. Meanwhile, pristine medieval towns, neat villages, clean hotels, the friendliness of the people and the wholesome cheap food, not to mention Wagner, window-boxes and foaming steins of beer, drew holiday-makers back year after year even as the more horrific aspects of the regime came under increasing scrutiny in their own countries. It is, of course, the human tragedy of these years that remains paramount, but the extraordinary pre-war charm of such cities as Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt or Munich, highlighted in so many diaries and letters, serves to emphasise just how much Germany – and indeed the whole world – lost materially because of Hitler.

Travellers from America and Britain vastly outnumbered those from any other country. Despite the Great War, a large section of the British public considered the Germans close kin – in every way more satisfactory than the French. Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, expressed a common view when she remarked, ‘Unlike the French, the Germans weren’t thieves, they weren’t selfish and they weren’t impatient or cold or hard.’1 In Britain there was also growing unease over the Treaty of Versailles, which, as many now acknowledged, had given the Germans a particularly raw deal. Surely the time had come to offer this reformed former enemy support and friendship. Furthermore, many Britons believed that their own country had much to learn from the new Germany. So, even as awareness of Nazi barbarity deepened and spread, Britons continued to travel to the Reich for both business and pleasure. According to the American journalist Westbrook Pegler, writing in 1936, the British ‘have an optimistic illusion that the Nazi is a human being under his scales. Their present tolerance is not acceptance of the brute so much as a hope that by encouragement and an appeal to his better nature, he may one day be housebroken.’2 There was much truth in this.

By 1937 the number of American visitors to the Reich approached half a million per annum.3 Intent on enjoying their European adventure to the full, the great majority viewed political issues as an unwelcome distraction and so simply ignored them. This was easy to do since the Germans went to great lengths to woo their foreign visitors – especially the Americans and the British. There was another reason why American tourists were reluctant to question the Nazis too closely, particularly on racial matters. Any derogatory comment regarding the persecution of Jews invited comparison with the United States’ treatment of its black population – an avenue that few ordinary Americans were anxious to explore. Most tourists, looking back on their pre-war German holidays, genuinely believed that they could not have known what the Nazis were really up to. And it is true that for the casual visitor to holiday hotspots like the Rhineland or Bavaria, there was limited overt evidence of Nazi crime. Of course, foreigners noticed the profusion of uniforms and flags, the constant marching and heiling but wasn’t that just the Germans being German? Travellers frequently remarked with distaste on the abundance of anti-Semitic notices. But, however unpleasant the treatment of Jews, many foreigners considered this to be an internal matter and not really their business. Moreover, as they were so often themselves anti-Semitic, many accepted that the Jews did indeed have a case to answer. As for newspaper attacks on the Reich, these were often discounted since everyone knew journalists’ penchant for sensationalising the least little incident. People also remembered how German atrocities reported in the newspapers during the early weeks of the First World War were later proven to have been false. As Louis MacNeice put it,

But that, we thought to ourselves, was not our business

All that the tripper wants is the status quo

Cut and dried for trippers.

And we thought the papers a lark

With their party politics and blank invective4

While much of the above may have been true for the average tourist, what of those who travelled in the Third Reich for professional reasons, or who went specifically to explore and understand the new Germany? In the early months of Nazi rule, many foreigners found it difficult to know what to believe. Was Hitler a monster or a marvel? Although some visitors remained agnostic, the evidence suggests that, as the years went by, the majority had made up their minds even before they set foot in the country. They went to Germany (as indeed they did to Soviet Russia) intent on confirming rather than confronting their expectations. Surprisingly few, it would seem, underwent a change of heart as a direct result of their travels. Those on the right therefore found a hard-working, confident people, shaking off the wrongs they had suffered under Versailles while at the same time protecting the rest of Europe from Bolshevism. To them, Hitler was not only an inspirational leader but also – as one enthusiast after another was so keen to state – a modest man, utterly sincere and devoted to peace. Those on the left, meanwhile, reported a cruel, oppressive regime fuelled by obscene racist policies using torture and persecution to terrorise its citizens. But on one aspect, both could agree. Adored by millions, Hitler had the country totally in his grip.

Students form a particularly interesting group. It seems that even in the context of such an unpleasant regime, a dose of German culture was still considered an essential part of growing up. But it is hard to find an explanation for why so many British and American teenagers were sent off to Nazi Germany right up until the outbreak of war. Parents who despised the Nazis and derided their gross ‘culture’ showed no compunction in parcelling off their children to the Reich for a lengthy stay. For the young people in question, it was to prove an extraordinary experience, if not exactly the one originally proposed. Students certainly numbered among those who, on returning from Germany, tried to alert their families and friends to the lurking danger. But public indifference or sympathy with Nazi ‘achievements’, cheerful memories of beer gardens and dirndls, and, above all, the deep-seated fear of another war, meant that too often such warnings fell on deaf ears.

Dread of war was the most important factor in many foreigners’ responses to the Reich but this was especially acute among ex-servicemen. Their longing to believe that Hitler really was a man of peace, that the Nazi revolution would in time calm down and become civilised and that Germany’s intentions were genuinely as benign as its citizens kept promising, resulted in many of them travelling frequently to the new Germany and offering it their support. The possibility that their sons would have to endure the same nightmare that they had, against the odds, survived makes such an attitude easy to understand. Perhaps, too, Nazi emphasis on order, marching and efficiency was innately appealing to military men.

The spectacular torchlight processions and pagan festivals that formed such a prominent feature of the Third Reich were naturally much remarked on by foreigners. Some were repelled but others thought them a splendid expression of Germany’s new-found confidence. To many it seemed that National Socialism had displaced Christianity as the national religion. Aryan supremacy underpinned by Blut und Boden [blood and soil] was now the people’s gospel, the Führer their saviour. Indeed numerous foreigners, even those who were not especially pro-Nazi, found themselves swept up in the intense emotion generated by such extravaganzas as a Nuremberg rally or massive torchlight parade. No one knew better than the Nazis how to manipulate the emotions of vast crowds, and many foreigners – often to their surprise – discovered that they too were not immune.

All travellers to the Reich, no matter who they were or what their purpose, were subjected to constant propaganda: the iniquities of the Versailles treaty, the astonishing achievements of the Nazi revolution, Hitler’s devotion to peace, the need for Germany to defend itself, retrieve its colonies, expand to the East and so on. But arguably the Nazis’ most persistent propaganda message, and the one that they initially felt certain would persuade the Americans and British to join forces with them, concerned the ‘Bolshevik /Jewish’ threat. Foreigners were lectured incessantly on how only Germany stood between Europe and the Red hordes poised to sweep across the continent and destroy civilisation. Many became inured and stopped listening. Indeed, trying to figure out the precise difference between National Socialism and Bolshevism was for the more questioning traveller a confusing matter. They knew, of course, that the Nazis and communists were the bitterest of enemies, but what exactly was the difference between their respective aims and methods? To the untrained eye, Hitler’s suppression of all personal freedom, control of every aspect of national and domestic life, use of torture and show trials, deployment of an all-powerful secret police and outrageous propaganda, looked, superficially at least, remarkably similar to Stalin’s. As Nancy Mitford frivolously wrote, ‘There’s never been a pin to put between Communists and the Nazis. The Communists torture you to death if you are not a worker and Nazis torture you to death if you are not a German. Aristocrats are inclined to prefer Nazis while Jews prefer Bolshies.’5

Until 1937, when the anti-Nazi chorus grew much louder, it was the journalists and diplomats who, with some obvious exceptions, emerged as heroes. Travelling widely all over the country in their efforts to present an accurate picture, these men and women consistently tried to draw attention to Nazi atrocities. But their reports were repeatedly edited or cut, or they were accused of exaggeration. Many worked long years in Germany under nerve-racking conditions and, in the case of the journalists, with the knowledge that at any minute they might be expelled or arrested on trumped-up charges. Their travel accounts are very different from the joyous descriptions so often found in the diaries and letters of the short-term visitors who much preferred to believe that things were not nearly as bad as the newsmen made out. While it is natural that informed residents should perceive a country differently from the casual tourist, in the case of Nazi Germany, the contrast between the two viewpoints is especially striking.

From a post-war perspective, the issues confronting the 1930s traveller to Germany are too easily seen in black and white. Hitler and the Nazis were evil and those who failed to understand that were either stupid or themselves fascist. This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive study of foreign travel in Nazi Germany, but it does, through the experiences of dozens of travellers recorded at the time, attempt to show that gaining a proper understanding of the country was not as straightforward as many of us have assumed. Disturbing, absurd, moving and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, these travellers’ tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes and its ultimate destruction.

1

Open Wounds

‘GERMANY invites YOU’ announces the title of a travel brochure aimed at American tourists. On its cover a young man in lederhosen, a feather in his hat, is pictured striding above a wooded ravine. Over him towers a gothic castle; behind him snow-covered mountains gleam enticingly. The hiker, bursting with vigour, gestures welcomingly to an inset panel showing a liner docked at New York harbour where the sun – rising behind the Statue of Liberty – heralds a bright new future.

All very beguiling, but it is the date of the leaflet that makes it so striking. Printed only months after the end of the First World War, it was a brave attempt by Germany’s leading hotels (among them the Hotel Bristol in Berlin and the Englischer Hof in Frankfurt) to stimulate tourism. Naturally its few pages give no hint of the horror that had so recently consumed Europe and for which Germany was widely held responsible. Yet much of the leaflet’s upbeat message was true for, despite the war, Germany’s landscape was still beautiful and largely unspoiled. Because the fighting had taken place beyond its borders, most of Germany’s towns – physically at least – had emerged unscathed. The brochure highlights twenty cities but only in its description of Essen (‘once the world’s greatest arsenal but now a centre for the production of implements of peace’) is there any reference to the war. Appealing to the nostalgia of Americans who had known the country in happier times, it conjures up a returning traveller ‘in whose breast there rises the joyous wave of recollection’ of a romantic and poetic Germany; of its cathedrals and castles, of its art treasures, and of Bach, Beethoven and Wagner.

One such returning American was Harry A. Franck. Only twenty-seven, he was already an established travel writer* when in April 1919 (just five months after the Armistice) he set out to explore unoccupied Germany east of the Rhine. It was a bold venture for behind the brochure’s enticing vision there lay a grim reality. The youth on the cover may never have experienced a trench or seen his friends blown apart by an exploding shell, but for those who had, and for Germany’s millions of hungry citizens, the brochure’s cheerful propaganda must have seemed nothing more than a bad joke. While Franck could anticipate his travels with all the enthusiasm of a healthy young man, ordinary Germans – those with whom he so eagerly sought contact – had little to look forward to in the aftermath of war, but grief, hunger and uncertainty.

When representatives of the two-day-old Weimar Republic signed the Armistice on 11 November, Germany’s new leaders faced the nightmare of both external and internal collapse. Even before the war ended, revolution triggered by a naval mutiny in Kiel had spread rapidly across the country, bringing in its wake strikes, desertions and civil war. Pitted against each other were, on the one hand, the Spartacists (their name derived from the rebel gladiator, Spartacus), who soon formed themselves into the German Communist Party, and, on the other hand, the Freikorps, right-wing militias intent on destroying Bolshevism. The Spartacists (led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) stood little chance against the well-disciplined paramilitary bands of demobilised soldiers and by August 1919 the revolt was crushed, its leaders dead. However, with unrest still simmering across the country, even those not directly caught in the crossfire of the post-war violence faced a miserable future. They had lost faith in their leadership, dreaded communism and, with the wartime blockade still firmly in place, continued to starve. Far from being the alluring holiday destination as promised by the brochure, Germany in 1919 was a bleak and desperate place.

Germany’s new leader was the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert. The son of a tailor and himself a saddler by trade, he could scarcely have presented a greater contrast to Germany’s former head of state – Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, grandson of Queen Victoria. However, although the coarse-featured, thickly built Ebert lacked sophistication, foreigners at once warmed to his straightforward manner. One British observer noted how his ‘shrewd beady eyes twinkled with honest good humour’.1 On 10 December 1918, he had stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to greet the returning regiments of the Royal Prussian Guard. Lorenz Adlon, founder of the famous hotel that bears his name, had watched from a balcony as the soldiers responded to the order: ‘eyes right’. For monarchists like him, it was a bitter moment. No longer did the soldiers’ gaze fix upon the Kaiser resplendent in uniform and mounted on a fine horse, but on the squat figure of the Chairman of the Committee of the People’s Representatives (as Ebert was then), standing on a podium, in black frock coat and top hat. Nevertheless, even the staunchest monarchist must have taken heart on hearing Ebert cry out to the soldiers: ‘You have returned undefeated.’2

This conviction that the German army remained undefeated was deeply rooted – as foreigners soon discovered. Before Franck set out on his own travels, he had served as an officer with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Rhine at Koblenz. His duties involved interviewing scores of German soldiers who, to a man, he reported, believed that in terms of military prestige they were unquestionably the victors. It was only the treacherous politicians in Berlin who had stabbed them in the back, together with the lack of food caused by the cowardly Allied blockade that had forced Germany to surrender. Franck heard this argument repeatedly, as well as from his cousins in the northern city of Schwerin. ‘England starved us otherwise she would never have won,’ they told him. ‘Our brave soldiers at the front never gave way. They would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.’3 Franck could detect no sense of guilt. Indeed, he could not recall a single German ever expressing remorse: ‘They seemed to take the war as a natural, unavoidable thing,’ he wrote, ‘just a part of life, as the gambler takes gambling, with no other regret than it was their bad luck to lose.’4

Franck’s German roots made him particularly sensitive to the humiliations imposed on civilians by the military occupation of the Rhineland. ‘Occupation means a horde of armed strangers permeating every nook and corner of your town, your house, of your private life,’ he wrote. ‘It means seeing what you have hidden in that closet behind the chimney; it means yielding your spare bed … it means subjecting yourself, or at least your plans, to the rules, sometimes even to the whims of the occupiers.’5 He recorded that Germans were not allowed to travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph or publish newspapers, without American permission. Nor were they permitted to drink anything stronger than beer or wine, or to gather in a café unless given written consent. Regulations such as the rule compelling householders to keep their windows open at night were a reminder of just how deeply the occupation affected the most intimate details of civilian life.6 And in case anyone in Koblenz still needed reminding who was in charge, a colossal Stars and Stripes could be seen for miles around, floating above the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress that stands so commandingly above the east bank of the Rhine. It was ‘quite the largest flag in the Occupation’,7 one British colonel’s wife remarked tartly, a blatant standard of triumph.

In the countryside, roads became ‘rivers of Yankee soldiers’, their military vehicles displaying the motif of a German helmet sliced through with an axe. Everywhere small boys in cut-down uniforms proffered souvenirs – a belt buckle inscribed Gott mit uns [God with us] or a spiked helmet. Young men in tattered grey uniforms were to be seen once more in the fields, loading wagons with the fat, misshapen turnips that for much of the war had been all that stood between the Germans and starvation. If the roads were crowded with military traffic, the Rhine now swarmed with pleasure boats full of Allied soldiers turned day-trippers, singing anti-Boche songs as they cruised past the Rhine’s most famous landmark – the Rock of the Lorelei. ‘Baedeker himself’, commented Franck, ‘never aspired to see his land so crowded with tourists and sightseers as in that spring of 1919.’8

Another American officer, Lieutenant Truman Smith, who had seen much action in the war, and who like Franck subsequently served with the AEF, thought the Rhine ‘gloriously beautiful’ but also ‘dark and weird’ with its pine-clad hills, vineyards and ruined towers.9 A few weeks after the Armistice he wrote to his wife in New England, ‘I suppose you want to know all about the “Huns”, the feeling of the people etc. This is a difficult matter. One doesn’t know.’10 But he was soon describing the Germans as ‘Sphinx-like and proud’, observing how quickly they had reverted to their traditional industriousness despite their lack of proper tools. Smith also noted that, although they seemed to accept the American occupation without question, they regarded their new republic with deep cynicism, adding that ‘they live in deadly fear of Bolshevism’.11

Smith would certainly have endorsed the remarks made by another (anonymous) American observer who suggested that ‘the longer one remains in Germany the more one is astonished at the simplicity (sometimes pathetically naïve, sometimes exasperatingly stupid) and the friendliness of the people’. The unexpected human warmth puzzled this writer until a German woman living in the British sector in Cologne offered an explanation:

Before the English came we starved. Now there is money in circulation and the shops are filled with foodstuffs and even dairy products brought from England, France and Scandinavia. Many of the English officers and men we have found friendly. I have married one. I had two English officers billeted in my house. They invited some others to spend the evening and I made some punch. One of the guests tasted the punch and said he would not leave Cologne until I agreed to marry him. It was just like that.12

In the American sector there was a much stricter policy of non-fraternisation than in that administered by the British. However, this was difficult to enforce, as so many ‘doughboys’ (soldiers) were themselves of German stock. At the outbreak of war around 8 million Americans had German parents or grandparents. Although these young soldiers had been willing to fight the German state, they had no quarrel with its people. How could they when German housewives washed their clothes and baked them cookies just like their own mothers? As for girls, ‘the ordinary soldier doesn’t care whether she is a Mamselle or Fraulein’, commented Smith. ‘He just wants to carry her off and then go home.’13

The complexities of relations between the victors and the occupied fascinated Violet Markham, arch-liberal and granddaughter of the architect and gardener Sir Joseph Paxton. In July 1919 she accompanied her colonel husband on his posting to Cologne. She too was astonished by ‘the civility of these Germans among whom we live as conquerors … how can they, outwardly at least, bear so little grudge against the people who have beaten them?’14 Nor could she understand the ‘Boche’ habit of turning up in large numbers to every military event held by the English on the Domplatz, from which, she noted, the cathedral rose ‘grim and protesting’ above a sea of Allied khaki. ‘Can we imagine’, she wondered, ‘a German parade held in front of Buckingham Palace to which the inhabitants of London would flock?’ One such occasion was particularly poignant. On 11 November 1919, the first anniversary of the Armistice, she stood in the biting cold as trumpeters stepped forward on the cathedral steps and in a silence ‘broken only by the moaning of the wind’, played the Last Post.15

The home in which she and her husband were billeted was comfortable (like many others in Cologne, it was centrally heated), and, as time elapsed, relations with their ‘Frau’ grew increasingly friendly, although life below stairs was a different matter: ‘Gertrude, the cross cook, is a lump of respectability and virtue,’ commented Markham. ‘She hates the English with a complete and deadly hatred, hence a series of feuds with a succession of soldier servants.’16 Gertrude’s views were perhaps more commonly held than the likes of Markham were prepared to acknowledge. The writer Winifred Holtby certainly thought so. In a letter to her friend Vera Brittain, she described Cologne as ‘a heart-breaking city’ where

Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices “No Germans allowed.” The money for their food is all paid from German taxes, and the German children crowd round their brightly lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have ever seen.17

It is surprising that, so shortly after the war, soldiers like Franck and Smith should have made it clear how much they preferred Germany to France. Not only were the towns cleaner, the people more diligent and the plumbing better, in their view, but prices were also lower and, as Smith remarked, ‘one isn’t robbed’.18 In March 1919, he wrote to his mother-in-law:

I think that the vast majority of American soldiers are leaving France hating and despising her. It is a fact that they dislike the French attitude to monetary matters and they have been uncomfortable nearly all the time in France. Americans feel that they’ve been cheated right and left. All France’s destroyed churches and towns do not make half the impression on the doughboy as the charge of 15 francs for a handkerchief. And somehow or other in Germany Americans aren’t over-charged even where military control is loose.19

Given all that France had suffered at the hands of Germany this is a curious statement. Yet it was by no means unique. Such anti-French bias is a recurring theme in accounts of travel in Germany between the wars, and one repeated by commentators of every class and political hue.

Smith was soon recording his admiration of German efficiency. ‘There is very little old world charm here,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘One feels one is face to face with an energetic, hairy-nation, once arrogant and overbearing, now bewildered and wrestling with anarchy.’20 Germany may have been crushed by defeat, he went on, ‘but one can feel the strength and vitality in the air’.21 This was no doubt true in the relatively prosperous Allied-occupied Rhineland, but in the rest of Germany it was a different story, as Harry Franck was about to find out.

Bored with life in the AEF, he was impatient to shed his uniform and set off on his own. But, having at last received permission, he was to find entry into unoccupied Germany every bit as difficult after the Armistice as before. Thanks, however, to a mixture of luck, bravado and pure guile, Franck found himself on 1 May 1919, dressed in an ill-fitting Dutch suit (he had travelled by train into Germany via Holland), standing on the platform of Berlin’s Anhalter station eager to begin his adventure. With its cathedral-like arches and soaring vaults, the station was a dramatic introduction to Germany’s capital, exuding all the power and confidence of a great city. And in that respect, superficially at least, Berlin seemed to Franck little changed since his last visit a decade earlier. True, the Reichstag appeared to him ‘cold and silent’ and the Kaiser’s palaces now like ‘abandoned warehouses’, but the massive statues of his Hohenzollern ancestors still flanked the Siegesallee in the Tiergarten; shops were adequately stocked, people appeared well-dressed and the city’s numerous places of entertainment were full.22

Franck was not the only traveller in Germany during the immediate post-war period to be struck by this outward normality. But, as the defence minister, Gustav Noske (a former master butcher), explained to Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart Roddie, they were deceived in the same way that ‘a hectic flush gives the appearance of health to a patient who is in fact dying of galloping consumption’.23

Stewart Roddie had been sent to Berlin by the War Office in London to report on precise conditions in Germany. Given his fluency in the language (he had been partly educated in Saxony) and his affinity for both the country and its people, he was well suited to the task. ‘There was not a stratum of life into which we did not penetrate in order to satisfy ourselves that we were not forming a one-sided and biased opinion,’ he wrote. ‘Nowhere were we treated with anything but tolerance and courtesy.’ Stewart Roddie, who was to spend much of the next seven years travelling around Germany on various army assignments, went on: ‘It is perhaps a curious fact that although I had duties to perform which might, naturally enough, have made me an object of hatred and detestation to the Germans, I cannot recall one occasion on which I received rudeness or insult from them. Difficulties – yes. Obstruction – yes. Stupidity – yes. But never incivility – and never servility.’24

Like Stewart Roddie, Franck was also surprised at the tolerance Berliners showed their conquerors and at the way Allied soldiers were able to wander freely about the city unconcerned for their safety. ‘Doughboys were quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been strolling down Main Street in Des Moines,’ he wrote. However, the anti-communism and anti-Semitism that were to become such hallmarks of Germany’s inter-war years were already much in evidence. On every available wall were plastered virulently coloured posters warning of the blood-curdling deeds Bolshevism would inflict on the population should it ever succumb. A plea was made for volunteers and funds ‘to halt the menace that is already knocking at the eastern gates of the Fatherland’. Such messages resonated with Berliners since memories of the violent Spartacist uprising were still fresh in mind. Stewart Roddie had arrived at Berlin’s Potsdam railway station in the middle of it all: ‘The rattle of a machine-gun unpleasantly near caused me to hesitate for a moment as I stepped on to the platform.’25 Nor can he have been reassured when his cab driver informed him that the man firing the gun from the top of the Brandenburg Gate was one of ‘Roger Casement’s Irishmen’ who had come to Berlin to fight with the Red Army.

After the terms of the Versailles treaty became public in May 1919, Franck noticed even more vitriolic posters. He kept one bearing a typical message:

END OF MILITARISM

BEGINNING OF JEW RULE!

Fifty months have we stood at the Front honourably and undefeated. Now we have returned home, ignominiously betrayed by deserters and mutineers! We hoped to find a free Germany, with a government of the people. What is offered us?

A GOVERNMENT OF JEWS!

The participation of the Jews in the fights at the Front was almost nil. Their participation in the new government has already reached 80 percent! Yet the percentage of Jewish population in Germany is only 1½ percent!

OPEN YOUR EYES!

COMRADES, YOU KNOW THE BLOODSUCKERS!

COMRADES, WHO WENT TO THE FRONT AS VOLUNTEERS?

WHO SAT OUT THERE MOSTLY IN THE MUD? WE!

WHO CROWDED INTO THE WAR SERVICES AT HOME?

THE JEWS!

WHO SAT COMFORTABLY AND SAFELY IN CANTEENS AND OFFICES?

WHICH PHYSICIANS PROTECTED THEIR FELLOW-RACE FROM THE TRENCHES?

WHO ALWAYS REPORTED US ‘FIT FOR DUTY’ THOUGH WE WERE ALL SHOT TO PIECES?

Comrades, we wish as a free people to decide for ourselves and be ruled by men of OUR race! The National Assembly must bring into the government only men of OUR blood and OUR opinions! Our motto must be

GERMANY FOR GERMANS!

DOWN WITH JEWRY!

As well as the ubiquitous posters, Franck also recorded newspaper advertisements, many of which illustrated the thriving barter economy: ‘A pair of cowhide boots will be swapped for a Dachshund of established pedigree’ or ‘Four dress shirts will be exchanged for a working-man’s blouse and jumper’.26

But, as Franck and Stewart Roddie soon discovered, there was really only one issue that mattered to Berliners in 1919, and that was food. Any conversation quickly reverted to this topic, which, with the exception of profiteers and the very rich, permeated every aspect of everyone’s life. People were hungry all over Germany but in Berlin the situation was especially dire. Despite posters everywhere carrying the warning ‘DON’T GO TO BERLIN!’ the authorities could do little to stop people crowding to the city in search of work.

Because the Allies wanted to keep an arm lock on the Germans until the peace treaty was signed, the blockade imposed since 1914 remained rigorously in place – a cause of deep bitterness throughout the country. When Franck first crossed the border, he had witnessed the skill with which Dutch officials ferreted out foodstuffs no matter how meagre or ingeniously hidden. One woman even had her modest lunch confiscated. As she sat hunched in a corner of the compartment, silently weeping, two men, once safely into Germany, retrieved their respective contraband. The first drew a sausage out of a trouser leg while the second produced a tiny package of paper-soap leaves each no bigger than a visiting card. ‘He pressed three or four of them upon his companion. The latter protested that he could not accept so serious a sacrifice. The other insisted, and the grateful recipient bowed low and raised his hat twice in thanks before he stowed the precious leaves away among his private papers.’27

To foreign eyes, Berliners were at once identifiable by their prominent cheekbones, sallow colour and loose-fitting clothes. Nor was it just the poor who went hungry; for once the middle classes were equally affected. Stewart Roddie described how the market places had been converted into public kitchens where thousands of people from every class of society were fed daily. ‘Hunger is a great leveller. The rag-picker stood cheek by jowl with the professor. And what an extraordinary appearance they presented – miserable, gaunt, emaciated, shivering.’28 Comments such as ‘Why, how thin you are!’ were taboo, while in the schoolroom, Franck observed, ‘there were not enough red cheeks to make one pre-war pair, unless the face of a child recently returned from the country, shining like a new moon in a fog, trebled the pasty average’. Such was the general sensitivity to food, or rather lack of it, that meals could no longer be enacted on the stage as ‘the pretence of one was sure to turn the most uproarious comedy into a tear-provoking melodrama’.29

Franck found the musty-smelling ‘war’ bread particularly repellent, ‘half sawdust and half mud, heavier and blacker than an adobe brick’. ‘Yet on this atrocious substance’, he wrote, ‘the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No wonder they quit!’30 Even the occasional smear of turnip jelly or ersatz marmalade did little to improve it. And because such food contained so little nourishment, people’s ability to put in a full day’s work became seriously compromised. Nor was just food ersatz. Everything from rope to rubber, shirts to soap was an imitation, occasionally ingenious but more often useless. Germany, newspapers proclaimed, had become an ersatz nation.

Help was at hand, however. On Easter Sunday 1919, two trucks that had been allowed through the blockade arrived in Berlin. Their cargo consisted of unheard-of luxuries – blankets, beef dripping, condensed milk, cocoa, nappies and nightgowns. To each parcel a note was attached bearing the message: ‘A gift of love to the hungry babies and their poor mothers from the Society of Friends in England and their supporters.’31 Three months later, on 5 July, four ‘rather bewildered’ English Quakers (two men and two women) stood on a platform at Anhalter Station. There was no one to meet them and they had nowhere to go. Nor did they dare approach anyone for fear of drawing attention to themselves.32 But faith moves in mysterious ways and by nightfall it had installed them in the splendid, if un-Quakerish, residence of the last pre-war ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky. Joan Fry, the most prominent figure among the four, whose Bloomsbury Group brother, Roger Fry, had been a close friend of Princess Lichnowsky, recorded that their first action was to hold a Meeting in one of the Princess’s sumptuous bedrooms. For a woman who until she was forty-five had never left home unchaperoned or even been to the theatre (she was descended from eight generations of Quakers on both sides of her family), Fry appeared remarkably undaunted by their mission: to mitigate the suffering caused by the Allied blockade, and to demonstrate Quaker empathy with an utterly demoralised people.

The immediate aftermath of the First World War was not the best time for foreigners to be wandering around Germany. But for the few who, like Franck, Stewart Roddie, Smith and Fry, did manage to roam outside the occupied sectors, the experience was profound, often moving. They carried away memories of a proud, diligent people confronting their unhappy fate with characteristic stoicism – if not acceptance.

* By 1918 Franck had published five travel books, of which the best known is A Vagabond Journey around the World (New York: Century Co., 1910).

2

Deepening Pain

The Quakers wasted no time. Within days of arriving they hosted a picnic at a hospital where delicacies such as ‘Red Cross Glaxo, Miss Playne’s chicken jelly and a bunch of Dorothy Perkins [grapes]’ were dispensed. ‘It was delightful to ply them with thick slices of bread and margarine and lots of treacle,’ remarked one of Fry’s colleagues.1 A much larger party of American Quakers also arrived in Berlin to spearhead the ‘Child Feeding’, an aid programme supported by Herbert Hoover that at its peak provided nourishment for some 1.75 million children.

Joan Fry and her little band did not linger in Berlin. On 28 July 1919, just one month after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, she wrote home describing a journey to Essen and Düsseldorf, where they had been to investigate the shortage of coal. They were not encouraged. ‘The coal question meets us at every turn with a terrible insistence,’ Fry reported back to London. Lack of fuel meant that the hopelessly overcrowded trains on which they travelled often stopped for hours on end. ‘What can you expect?’ a stationmaster said to her. ‘When the French and the English take away the coal we can’t run trains.’2 Delays were not the only reason journeys were fraught. There was almost nothing to eat, carriage seats had long since been stripped of their plush covering to be recycled into clothing, while the windows, shorn of their leather straps, were jammed or broken. The Quakers were indefatigable travellers and this expedition was just the first of countless such journeys Fry and her companions were to undertake over the next seven years from their base in Berlin – organising relief work, attending conferences and spreading their message of peace and reconciliation to anyone who would listen.

For the few civilian foreigners who, like Joan Fry and Harry Franck, were travelling east of the Rhine during the summer of 1919, the shock and despair felt by ordinary people in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (signed on 28 June) was impossible to ignore. Firm in the belief that they had been honourably defeated and confident that President Wilson would guarantee them fair treatment, most Germans were quite unprepared for the humiliation it imposed on their country. Germany was to lose all its colonies (the most significant lay in Africa), its most productive industrial areas were to be under foreign control for at least fifteen years, and it would have to pay an unimaginable sum in compensation. Its army was to be reduced to 100,000 men and its navy also decimated. In order to give Poland access to the Baltic, the port of Danzig was to come under Polish control (although its population was predominantly German) and the ‘Polish corridor’ was to be created, thus dividing the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia. Furthermore, Germany had to sign the ‘guilt clause’ accepting responsibility for starting the war. But many people found the most degrading demand of all (in the event it was never met) the provision that the Kaiser and 1,000 prominent figures should be handed over to the Allies and tried for war crimes.

The conversations Franck and Fry held with their fellow rail passengers that summer were especially revealing. One old lady explained to Joan that, although she had felt no hatred during the war, the peace treaty aroused intense resentment: ‘To be treated as outcasts, as individuals with whom no relations are possible, is even worse than hunger or constant anxiety.’ Another woman stated how much in normal times she would have enjoyed speaking English, ‘but now a broken people does not want to hear it’.3 The women, Franck noted, were the most vitriolic against the Treaty in general while the old men minded most about the loss of colonies: ‘We would rather pay any amount of indemnity than lose territory … The Allies are trying to Balkanise us … they want to vernichten us, to destroy us completely … we believed in Wilson and he betrayed us.’ More ominously, others expressed their dread of the future: ‘Now we must drill hatred into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when the time is ripe….’4

Having lived among the Germans in the months after the Armistice and come to admire their virtues, Stewart Roddie and Truman Smith sympathised with these sentiments. Smith blamed the French for the harshness of the Treaty: ‘… certainly mercy and the future of the world cannot be expected from France. So we too must drink the bitter cup of despair. I had hoped a better era might be on the horizon and that our labour, sacrifices and separations from those dear to us might bear fruit in a “large” peace.’5 Stewart Roddie, writing later, believed that the Allies’ greatest mistake was letting fourteen months elapse between the Armistice and ratification of the Treaty in January 1920:

The right moment for the passing of the Allied verdict upon Germany had long passed. Germany had had time to sit in judgment upon herself and her former leaders, and had decided that the worst she and they could possibly have been charged with was manslaughter – but that was not admitted – and here she was accused, found guilty of, and punished for murder and robbery with violence.6

But, in the midst of all the gloom, there was the occasional glimpse of a brighter world. Joan Fry recalled the sight of nine teams of horses ploughing a single field as she journeyed across the great cornfields of Mecklenburg, and of the setting sun reflected in the vast stretches of water that lie north of the Elbe estuary. Nor would she ever forget – at a time when the ‘tiny shrunken limbs and old, ashen grey faces of starving babies’7 were an all too familiar reminder of human misery – the evening she sat under the stars, listening to her friend Albrecht Mendelssohn* playing his grandfather’s music on the piano. Violet Markham remembered the Rhineland as a ‘garden of enchantment’, delighting in the vivid green of the fields, the yellow splashes of mustard, the varied tints of tree, and bush, and blossom ‘all melting and glowing together in the clear sunlight’.8 Franck, too, had halcyon memories. Having decided to spend six weeks walking from Munich to Weimar, he spent the first night at an inn in the small village of Hohenkammer: ‘I cannot quite picture to myself’, he wrote, ‘what would happen to the man who thus walked in upon a gathering of American farmers, boldly announcing himself a German just out of the army, but something tells me he would not have passed so perfectly agreeable an evening as I did in the village inn of Hohenkammer.’9 The following day, in perfect weather, he set out across

gently rolling fields deep-green with spring alternating with almost black patches of evergreen forests, through which the broad, light-gray highroad wound and undulated as soothingly as an immense ocean-liner on a slowly pulsating sea. Every few miles a small town rose above the horizon, now astride the highway, now gazing down upon it from a sloping hillside. Wonderfully clean towns they were, speckless from their scrubbed floors to their whitewashed church steeples, all framed in velvety green meadows or the fertile fields in which their inhabitants of both sexes plodded diligently but never hurriedly through the labours of the day. It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and brutal warriors in modern history.10

On 28 February 1923, Violet Bonham Carter, accompanied by her maid, boarded a train at Liverpool Street Station in London. Daughter of Herbert Asquith (British prime minister, 1908–1916) and shortly to be elected chairman of the National Liberal Federation, she was bound for Berlin.

Her purpose was to investigate the French occupation of the Ruhr – an act she regarded as one of ‘dangerous insanity’. On 11 January 60,000 French and Belgian troops had marched into Germany’s industrial heartland intent on extracting the coal that their countries had been promised by the Treaty of Versailles but which Germany was failing to deliver. In Bonham Carter’s view, the reparations policy insisted on by France (by 1923 Germany’s debt to the Allies stood at £6.6 billion, the equivalent of £280 billion in 2013) was morally unjust and politically mad. Many in Britain and America agreed, believing that Germany’s economic collapse would only result in victory for the communists.

The journey to Berlin was unpleasant. The train was grubby and crowded. And because the coal was of such poor quality, it was also frustratingly slow. At the border, Violet experienced her first encounter with German inflation – soon to be hyperinflation. She received 200,000 marks for £2, ‘great bundles of paper-chase money which I could hardly carry’ and was not amused by ‘3 intolerable and grotesque Music Hall Americans’ who thought the exchange rate a huge joke (‘5,000 marks, that’s a nickel’). However, she enjoyed her chat with an Aberdeen fish merchant on his way to Germany to buy a German boat and to hire a German crew because, he explained, they were so superior to anything he could find at home. ‘I’m pro German now,’ he told her, ‘we all are.’11

At 10.30 p.m. on 1 March, after fifteen hours’ travelling, they arrived in Berlin and drove straight to the British Embassy, where Violet had been invited to stay with the ambassador, Lord D’Abernon, and his wife, Helen. ‘It was divine to arrive dirty and exhausted at the cleanliness and comfort of the Embassy,’ Violet wrote in her diary. ‘Dear Tyler opened the door and I was told Helen had gone to bed after the ball last night but that Edgar was up and alone. It was the greatest fun finding him in a big delightful room. The ballroom is yellow brocade with a lovely bit of tapestry hung over some hideous German embossments.’12 The Embassy, on the Wilhelmstrasse, was imposing if uninspiring. The front faced directly on to the street while towering over it at the back was the gloomy Adlon Hotel.

Lord D’Abernon, Britain’s first post-war ambassador to Germany, had been en poste since October 1920. Over six foot tall and Olympian in manner, he looked every inch an ambassador. His job may have been difficult but it was a good deal easier than that of the French ambassador, Pierre de Margerie, who, along with his fellow countrymen, faced social ostracism after the occupation of the Ruhr. The restaurant at the Adlon was the only one in Berlin still prepared to serve the French and Belgians. In almost every other shop window appeared the notice: Franzosen und Belgier nicht erwünscht [French and Belgians not wanted]. According to Bonham Carter, the situation was particularly painful for de Margerie, who had arrived in Berlin only weeks before ‘longing to be loved’.13

Lady D’Abernon, one of the great beauties of her generation, was also courageous, having worked as an anaesthetist nurse in France during the war. She was under no illusion as to the task in Berlin. ‘To try and re-establish relatively pleasant normal relations will require a mountain of effort and of persevering goodwill,’ she wrote in her diary on 29 July 1920. As she disliked Germany, and all things German, her role was to remain one of duty rather than pleasure. Whatever other attractions the city may have offered its visitors, charm was not high on the list. There were, in Lady D’Abernon’s words, ‘no narrow streets, no changes of level, no crooked passages, no unexpected courts and corners’.14 She did, however, take pleasure in the sight of horse-drawn sleighs gliding across the snow in the Tiergarten:

The horse is always covered with little tinkling bells and the harness is crowned by an immense panache of white horsehair, like the plume of a Life Guardsman’s helmet, only much larger. Frequently the sleighs are painted scarlet or bright blue and the occupants, who are often smothered in furs, contrive to look picturesque and rather French dix-huitième siècle [eighteenth century].15

Despite her personal reservations, Helen D’Abernon was to prove an astute observer. ‘In Berlin it is the fashion to make a parade of poverty and retrenchment,’ she wrote after meeting the foreign minister and his wife for the first time, ‘so in order to be in harmony with the prevailing atmosphere, I attired myself in a demure dove-coloured frock of Puritan simplicity.’16 Nonetheless, she abandoned all austerity for their first diplomatic reception, determined that the British Embassy should appear as splendid and dignified as it had before the war. The ballroom overflowed with flowers. The servants went about their duties resplendent in buff and scarlet liveries. Two pre-war retainers, Fritz and Elf, in cocked hats and long gold-laced coats, stood at the entrance, holding elaborate staves (surmounted with the royal coat of arms) in outstretched arms. These they thumped three times on the arrival of an important guest. Afterwards, Lady D’Abernon claimed that she ‘had not exchanged ten words of interest with anyone except a Bolshevist from the Ukraine’ whose political creed, she observed, ‘had in no way hindered his enjoyment of an ancien régime party’.17

She was not a sentimental woman and for the most part remained unmoved by German pleadings of hardship. Joan Fry failed to impress her. ‘Miss Fry is all self-sacrifice and burning enthusiasm,’ she noted, ‘but her compassion seems to be reserved almost exclusively for Germans. She shys [sic] away from any allusion to suffering and privations in Great Britain.’18 Nor did Lady D’Abernon leave Violet Bonham Carter in any doubt as to the true state of affairs in Germany: ‘Believe me,’ she told her, ‘the Germans are not suffering as they say. There is no great poverty here. 95% are living in plenty, 5% are starving.’ After visiting Berlin’s poorest district herself, Violet tended to agree, having seen ‘nothing one could compare to our slums. All the streets are wide, the houses big and built with windows the same size as the Embassy ones.’19

For Violet, as for so many other observers of inflation-ridden Germany, it was the plight of the middle classes that aroused her greatest sympathy. As no one could any longer afford their professional services, and as inflation had destroyed their capital, many were reduced to total penury. Within their neat, clean and respectable homes, Violet was informed, ‘terrible quiet tragedies’ were taking place each day. Having sold their last possessions, many of them, including doctors, lawyers and teachers, preferred to swallow poison rather than suffer the shame of starvation.20 When hyperinflation reached its peak in November 1923, even the sceptical Lady D’Abernon was moved at the ‘distressing spectacle of gentlefolk half hidden behind the trees in the Tiergarten timidly stretching out their hands for help’.21 Violet Bonham Carter found this dismal state of affairs hard to reconcile with the jewels, furs and flowers she saw in the expensive shops on Berlin’s smartest streets. But, as Lady D’Abernon explained, it was only the Schiebern [profiteers] – living like ‘fighting cocks’ in all the best hotels – who could afford such luxuries. She also pointed out how ‘their women wear fur coats with pearls and other jewels on the top of them, the effect of which is further emphasized by the surprising addition of high yellow boots’.22

The communist and British trades unionist Tom Mann was quick to spot the profiteers when he visited Berlin for a party conference in the spring of 1924. He noted ‘their typical bourgeois appearance and behaviour in eating heavy meals, smoking fat long cigars and generally behaving as though they had tons of cash’. But even more distressing for Mann was the worrying rift between the ‘young militants’ and the ‘old reactionary trades union officials’. He reported that the Communist Party was expecting to increase its members in the Reichstag from fifteen to fifty at the next election. He did not, he told his wife, think much of the general political confusion in Berlin – ‘Such a mix there is, no less than 15 political parties or sections running candidates.’ Much more satisfactory was the evening he spent at a performance of Die Meistersinger. ‘Betimes I thought the old cobbler had too much to say for himself,’ commented Mann, ‘but it was wonderfully well done … they had about 250 on a very large stage, not crowded, with the banners and regalia – and the chorus was grand.’23

He was certainly not the only foreigner to notice just how much music meant to ordinary Germans. ‘Music is their finest and most potent medium of expression in moments like this,’ wrote Violet Bonham Carter, ‘one can’t imagine any political demonstration in England opening with a very long string quartet.’24 After attending one such event herself, she returned to the Embassy to find Lady D’Abernon ‘nobly entertaining thirty English wives of Germans – such pathetic creatures’. One woman lived in a single room with her husband who had not spoken to her for a year. However, breezily sweeping aside her fellow countrywomen’s miserable predicament, Violet reported that ‘they were all much cheered when Colonel Roddie played the piano and sang, and they all had tea’.25 At dinner that evening she was placed next to Germany’s second president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. She was not impressed. ‘I sat between Hindenburg – rather a little man who I disliked – and an insignificant Italian.’26

In 1920 Stewart Roddie was appointed to the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control (headquartered in the Adlon) whose task it was to disarm Germany. But, judging from his memoir, Peace Patrol, he spent as much time comforting distressed members of the former imperial family as in tracking down illicit weapons. With his Rupert Brooke looks and sympathetic manner, the former music teacher from Inverness moved discreetly among them, listening to their woes, offering advice and occasionally intervening with his superiors on their behalf. Peace Patrol reads like an international Who’s Who. As well as the Hohenzollerns, its pages are crowded with the names of military and political celebrities, European royalty and the British aristocracy – all of whom, it seems, were on intimate terms with the ubiquitous colonel.