Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Du Bois hears the same dismal message from all over the world, he writes: the warning that race war is inevitable and that segregation, ghettoisation, emigration and separation is the future. Racism has always been there, but now new and dangerous theories of race have arisen, to be exploited by the unscrupulous and the foolish, white and black, from the pavement pundits of Harlem to the beer-hall orators of Munich. Race superiority has become a cult, and its acolytes are everywhere. Two pathways now lie ahead. For a thousand years, Du Bois writes, ‘from the First Crusade to the Great War’, the barriers between nations and races have been breaking down. The reversal is recent, and can and must itself be reversed. Those who prophesy race war, Du Bois warns, will bring upon themselves ‘a death-struggle whose issue none can surely foretell’. And yet every day, a different human story is under way: ‘Races are living together,’ he writes, ‘buying and selling, marrying and rearing children, laughing and crying.’ The struggle to break down barriers between the races may be long and weary. But that is the path that humanity must take.

  In February, the Supreme Court reviews the trial of several black men accused of murdering a white railway guard in Arkansas in 1919, in the midst of what some call a massacre and others an insurrection. The black men were convicted within minutes, by an all-white jury, with a white mob baying for their blood outside. Now, four years later, the Supreme Court decrees: ‘there never was a chance for the petitioners to be acquitted; no juryman could have voted for an acquittal and continued to live in Phillips County, and if any prisoner by any chance had been acquitted by a jury, he could not have escaped the mob’. Justice cannot be so abridged. Every American has a right to a fair trial under the constitution. Mob rule outside the courthouse cannot be allowed to so trample on legal due process inside. If the states do not guarantee the rights of their citizens, appeal may be made to federal courts.

  In America, by this faint light, Du Bois’s pathway is again lit up amidst the darkness of the world around.

  MUNICH: While Lüdecke languishes in a prison cell, Adolf Hitler and Putzi Hanfstaengl get to know one another better. Adolf now seems to drop round Putzi’s apartment almost every day for lunch or dinner.

  The Hanfstaengl residence is not particularly grand: three rooms on Gentzstrasse and rather haphazardly furnished. But Hitler’s place on Thierschstrasse has just one room, with a single bedhead which blocks out part of the window and a small collection of books. (When Putzi comes to visit he notices a book by Ludendorff, a biography of Wagner, some American thrillers and a well-thumbed History of Erotic Art.) By contrast, the Hanfstaengl home has life within its walls. There is a happy family at its core–very different from Adolf’s own.

  Hitler particularly enjoys the company of Helene Hanfstaengl, Putzi’s elegant German-American wife. Adolf thinks her the most beautiful woman he has ever met. Helene likes his blue eyes, which flash so brightly when he starts telling stories about the past. He takes an immediate shine to little Egon, Helene and Putzi’s son. One day, when the boy hurts his knee against a wooden chair leg carved into the form a lion, Adolf slaps the naughty wooden beast to stop it from ‘biting’ the child in future. Egon and Adolf become fast friends. ‘Please Uncle Dolf, spank the naughty chair’, the infant cries whenever Hitler turns up. Sometimes Helene, Putzi and Adolf go to the movies together. The mangy field-runner enjoys greatly a film about Fredrick the Great, the Enlightenment-era King of Prussia who catapulted his kingdom from backwater to one of Europe’s foremost military powers.

  With Putzi, Adolf talks about history, politics, the Prussian war theorist Clausewitz–and America. He expresses fascination with its skyscrapers and admiration for both Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan. With Helene, Hitler is more relaxed. One day, he tells her of the time he dressed up in his mother’s apron and mounted a stool in the kitchen as if giving a sermon from a pulpit. He wanted to be a preacher, Adolf explains. The one thing he will not talk about is his time in Vienna. Something must have happened to him there, Helene surmises. The Hanfstaengls often wonder about Adolf’s sexuality. There are rumours he is having an affair with his driver’s sister. Helene cannot believe it. ‘I tell you,’ she says to her husband one night, ‘he is a neuter.’

  Despite his success as a public speaker at the Zirkus Krone, where his common-man-as-messiah routine goes down so well, the thirty-three-year-old Adolf is still socially awkward. He feels uncomfortable in small groups, particularly amongst those of higher educational or social status where he is not the natural centre of attention. His fawning attempts at politeness to those for whom he feels a natural deference come off as gauche. His shaky understanding of dining etiquette is frequently remarked upon. Here is a man who heaps sugar in the finest Gewürztraminer wine to sweeten it. When confronted with an artichoke, he is totally stumped, having to ask his hostess–in hushed, embarrassed tones–how he should eat such a strange-looking thing.

  Helene and Putzi introduce him to rich and powerful friends who may be useful to Adolf. They teach him social graces and educate him on the various distinctions within the upper classes, giving him the antennae to tell the difference between a man on the make such as Lüdecke–useful to the party, but not a true blue-blood–and men and women of real class, like themselves. Putzi also gives Adolf money to turn the Völkischer Beobachter from a weekly into a daily rag. Adolf feels he is going up in the world. The wife of a wealthy piano manufacturer from Berlin invites him to dinner in her hotel suite where only champagne is consumed, and where she prevails on the frumpish Nazi leader to purchase a dinner jacket and patent-leather shoes. For a brief period Adolf wears the shoes whenever he can.

  Through the Hanfstaengl connection, Hitler makes the acquaintance of a Benedictine abbot of strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic views, who hopes Adolf, being Austrian, will somehow be able to help the Habsburg cause. The SA too starts attracting men of a different calibre from the normal roughnecks. A dashing Great War air ace named Hermann Göring joins the SA and is swiftly appointed to run it. (A period in Denmark after the war flying loop-the-loops for money and then selling planes in Sweden only seems to add to his cachet amongst the Nazis.) Hermann’s Swedish-born wife Carin is as thick as thieves with Helene.

  Before one of Adolf’s trips to see the police, Putzi soothes the mangy field-runner’s nerves by playing some Bach on the piano in the hallway outside Hitler’s apartment. Adolf wants something more stirring. Putzi plays the overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Hitler hums along, marching up and down the corridor. Another time, Putzi entertains him with a rendition of various Harvard songs used to whip up the crowds before a football game, when the cheerleaders twirl their batons. ‘This is it, Hanfstaengl, this is what we need for the movement’, Adolf enthuses.

  ‘Rah, rah, rah!’ becomes ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!’

  MOSCOW: At the beginning of March, against her better judgement, Nadya admits to her husband how Stalin treated her on the phone last year. Vladimir is livid. At once, he writes a sharp note requesting that the Georgian apologise to his wife, or else he will break off relations. It is the behaviour of a nineteenth-century gentleman, faced with a slight to his honour and an offence to politesse. But despite all the terror he has overseen over the years, such things still matter to Vladimir. He is punctilious that way. Nadya and Maria are in two minds whether they should allow this letter to be delivered to the General Secretary. They wait a day, then pass it on.

  Stalin is shocked. He sends back a half-apology. ‘If my wife were to behave incorrectly and you had to punish her, I would not have considered it my right to intervene’, the Georgian writes, ‘but inasmuch as you insist…’ He says that he is willing to apologise if that will make Nadya and Vladimir feel better–but writes that he has no idea what it is he is really supposed to have done to provoke such a reaction.

  The wily Georgian delays the upcoming congress of the Communist Party. Who knows what a few days more may bring for Comrade Lenin’s health?

  ST
. LOUIS: She is dressed smartly. She knows herself. She knows the world (a little). In March 1923, Josephine Baker arrives back in her home town, three years after she left to tour America with the Dixie Steppers. Her return, as part of the line-up for Shuffle Along after successful runs in Boston and Chicago, earns a four-line entry under ‘Negro News’ in the St. Louis Star, next to reports that Woodrow Wilson may be back on the campaign trail in 1924.

  She takes a taxi to her old home, where her family still live. Here, Josephine is still Tumpie. The light still comes from a kerosene lamp, not from electricity. The communal bathtub is in the middle of the kitchen. Josephine hands out tickets for the show at the American Theater (whites take the stalls, and blacks the balcony).

  Josephine’s mother is angry to see her daughter in a line-up with so much naked flesh. ‘All you can see are their legs’, Baker retorts to her mother’s moralising. Her own role is more cross-eyed comedy than sex. The next day Josephine returns for a family celebration with a bottle of prohibition whiskey to fire things up. As she leaves that evening she promises to send money for clothes, and for the children’s education.

  MUNICH: There is no doubt that Henry Ford would get Hitler’s vote for the American presidency–should he decide to throw in his hat. ‘I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections’, a Chicago reporter is told: ‘We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascisti movement in America.’

  But, Hitler tells an American diplomat sent to investigate, Ford’s financial largesse has not yet been extended to him. He hopes this will change in the future.

  MONAVULLAGH MOUNTAINS, CO. WATERFORD, IRELAND: Like characters in an ancient Irish play, a group of warriors meet on a hillside to discuss their fate. They fear capture by the enemy at any moment. A tall bearded figure–he has travelled partway on horseback to this remote corner of the land–asks that he might be permitted to try negotiations with the enemy. The warriors split on the issue; they plan to meet again.

  Éamon de Valera’s journey back to Dublin is no easier than his journey out. Wind and rain make the going tough. ‘Stuck my left leg in a boghole up to the groin’, he writes in his diary. ‘Arrived in the morning. Clothes and leather jacket all ruined.’

  ESSEN: The situation in the Ruhr deteriorates sharply as winter turns to spring. There are conflicting stories of what is going on. In one incident in February, a German policeman reportedly refuses to salute two French soldiers and is shot in the street. The two Frenchmen are attacked in turn. A few days later there is another confrontation between local police and the French in Recklinghausen. The German police are now disbanded and disarmed–all filmed for the Paris newsreels–and their dependants told to clear out of the Ruhr entirely. There are reports that six French soldiers have raped a young girl about to be married. The Germans lodge an official protest with the French authorities–though with little expectation that any action will be taken.

  Adolf rails against the policy of passive resistance. If nothing more is done, Germany will go under just like the ancient city of Carthage. ‘It is perfectly clear what the French are planning’, he tells a local party meeting. ‘They are waiting for the warm season to send an African army of eight or nine hundred thousand in to complete Germany’s violation.’

  As passive resistance spirals up in the Ruhr, Paris responds with harsher and harsher measures to try and regain control. If German railwaymen refuse to do their jobs, they must be forced to work or else be replaced with French cheminots. If communication lines are cut, the saboteurs will be made to pay with their lives. German newspapers report the use of horsewhips against miners to get them to do their job. Viewed from the French capital, the principle at stake is non-negotiable: a defeated power cannot be allowed to rewrite the peace. Paris cannot afford to back down without prompting a crisis at home. And whatever the French or Belgian occupying forces do now in the Ruhr, it is no worse than what German forces did in Belgium and France during the war.

  PARIS: At the Rue Fontaine, Breton’s surrealist seances are getting out of hand. Some attendees seem addicted, turning up day and night begging to be put into a trance. One regular attendee, reportedly on drugs at the time, tries to stab Ezra Pound in a café one evening, mistaking him for someone else. As news of the soirées gets around, a number of Americans–the Greenwich-on-the-Seine expatriates that Hemingway so despises–ask if they can come along to watch. (Going the other way, one American on the fringes of Breton’s group returns to New York that summer to take on an extremely Dadaist job full of promise: he becomes a stockbroker on Wall Street.)

  When one of the frequent visitors of the club, supposedly in a hypnotic sleep, locks some other participants up in a room for several hours against their will, Breton decides to call a halt. Things have gone too far. André feels that he is at risk of repeating the mistakes of Dada and descending into pointless spectacle. For a while, he proclaims his intention not only to stop the seances but to stop writing altogether. ‘Literary possibilities are no more interesting than political possibilities,’ André tells a newspaper interviewer; ‘only spontaneous forces interest me.’

  It looks as if surrealism may be over before it has even begun.

  LONDON–ROME: The latest diplomatic communication from the British Ambassador to Italy arrives in London.

  Despite his occasional fits of temper, the ambassador believes that Benito Mussolini is an able statesman whose vaulting ambitions–whether to be the founder of a new Roman empire, or to be Europe’s peacemaker–can be contained. Admittedly, he can be a little eccentric. He has recently been seen driving around the Italian capital at great speed in a two-seater automobile with a lion cub he has been given. ‘The Italians seem to like this sort of thing’, the diplomat notes wryly.

  MOSCOW: Vladimir’s headaches return. He sits with his sister Maria talking about the past. He recalls the time when he had to stay in a hut outside Petrograd in 1917, hiding out during the turbulent times when things could have gone either way. They reminisce about the assassination attempt in 1918.

  He suffers another stroke. Vladimir’s right side is paralysed. Doctors huddle around him. The Politburo summons a Swedish specialist at vast expense. Someone suggests a Tibetan doctor should be called in. It must be shown that everything possible is being done. As he sits at a table in his Kremlin apartment, a pen, spectacles and a paper-knife are arranged in front of Vladimir, who is no longer able to speak at all. He is asked to hand over the spectacles. He does. Good. He is asked to hand over the pen. He reaches for the spectacles again. Not good.

  Stalin can breathe easily again. Lenin is kaput.

  SPRING

  PARIS–ESSEN: In between articles about the health of Vladimir Lenin, and a story that Gabriele D’Annunzio has now bought a villa outside Rome which used to belong to the Kaiser, the French nation is told to keep calm and remain resolute. One journalist expresses his new-found love of the word ‘Non!’–a word he says France should use against both the Germans and the British who want to negotiate some kind of compromise. ‘“No” is a strong syllable; for the moment, it is the right syllable’, the article reads. The war was ended too soon in 1918, when the Germans were on the run and the whole Rhineland could have been simply taken by France. ‘If only on November 11th 1918 we had been smart enough to say–“Non!”’

  In the Ruhr, the crisis risks becoming a humanitarian disaster. Food becomes a weapon. French authorities forbid the offloading of grain transported along the Rhine, insisting two hundred thousand children will have to be evacuated. The search begins for foster parents in the rest of Germany, or for empty rooms in private hostels. Local councils are left to decide who stays and who goes. Trains carry thousands away, identity tags around their necks and their eyes full of tears.

  Berlin sends in money to try and keep the Ruhr afloat. The French confiscate it as soon as possible, to try and force the Germans to give up. Cash becomes an illicit commodity: it is smugg
led in from unoccupied Germany as if it were a drug. French spies sniff it out and track it down. The army raids government offices and regional headquarters of the German central bank to seize hidden stocks. The supply of fresh banknotes struggles to keep pace. A new, financial front opens up in the struggle for the Ruhr. And as more money is printed, and Germany’s gold reserves run down, inflation spirals up across the country. Simplicissimus cost two hundred and fifty marks this February, in March it costs three hundred and fifty, by April, a staggering five hundred marks–a tenfold increase in just one year.

  Pending the total collapse of the German economy–which surely must force Berlin to give in–the French authorities decide on a series of further measures to tighten the screws. Prominent local citizens are taken hostage or expelled. When two officers are shot in Buer, a French general declares the local mayor will be shot without trial if there is any more trouble. Passive resistance turns active. Reprisals follow. What was once intended to be a peaceful occupation degenerates into a low-level war. It feels like Ireland in 1920. At the end of March, a dozen German workers are shot dead by French soldiers pinned down in a Krupp factory they were searching.

  Freikorps veterans flock to the Ruhr. Former comrades from the Baltic campaign or the struggle against the Munich republic regroup. One of these is Leo Schlageter, a twenty-something-year-old who gave up student life in Freiburg in 1919 to become, in succession, a Baltic Freikorps trooper, an anti-Bolshevik paramilitary in the Ruhr, a mercenary in Lithuania, a nationalist warrior against a Polish uprising in Silesia and finally an undercover putschist in Free State Danzig. Sent into the Ruhr from a guerrilla base in unoccupied Germany, he now runs a campaign of sabotage in the Essen region.

  In March, he dynamites a railway bridge on the line between Düsseldorf and Duisburg. In April, he is arrested.