MOSCOW: Vladimir is too fragile to be moved to Gorki. He is attended by a legion of doctors and nurses day and night. He confuses ‘yes’ and ‘no’. His conversation is reduced to the repetition of single words–‘here-here’, ‘congress-congress’–to which are added facial expressions to try and get his meaning across. Nadya is the best at interpreting Vladimir’s wishes, followed by his sister. For everyone else, the man is an invalid. One can expect nothing from him. Certainly not a campaign to remove the General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party from his post.
Only a few weeks after his stroke, the authorities in Moscow create a Lenin Institute to collect anything he has ever written. Vladimir would surely approve of the thoroughness of the approach, if not perhaps the creation of a cult. He is being treated as if he were dead. Politically, he is already a corpse.
At the party congress in Moscow, Comrade Stalin gives a clever speech, accepting parts of Comrade Lenin’s criticisms and assuring the party that the leadership is united. He retains his post as General Secretary with ease. Leon Trotsky does not strike. He turns down an offer to deliver the Congress report–the speech traditionally given by Lenin. He does not want to give the impression that he expects to rule in Lenin’s place.
LONDON: ‘I must confess myself more interested in the past than the present’, Winston writes in a letter to a cousin. The first volume of his account of the Great War is published in the spring. It is an instant success. ‘Remarkably egotistical’, judges one reviewer.
AMERICA: Ford boosters are hard at work. In several Midwestern states where life has been transformed by the arrival of a tractor or a Model T automobile, petitions circulate to put Henry Ford’s name on the ballot for the presidential primaries, without the man himself even declaring whether or not he wants to run. ‘Let them go ahead with it and see what happens’, the sage of Dearborn tells his secretary. ‘We might have some fun with these politicians.’
At a patriotic congress in Washington his wife tries to set the record straight: ‘Mr Ford has enough and more than enough to do to attend to his business in Detroit.’ She then phones up Dearborn to berate her husband’s staff. ‘You got him into it,’ she shouts at Henry Ford’s secretary, ‘so you can get him out of it.’ If her husband goes to Washington, she announces, she will go to England. Henry Ford is not concerned. ‘Oh well, don’t pay any attention to Mrs Ford,’ he says, ‘she’ll get over it.’
DELITZSCH, SAXONY, GERMANY: On the Berlin road, just north of Leipzig, left-wing militia are inspecting vehicles travelling north, looking out for conspirators against Saxony’s socialist-led regional government.
Hitler’s driver gulps when he sees them up ahead. Adolf grips the handle of his riding crop a little tighter. The Nazi Party is illegal in Saxony. The car’s number plate has been smeared with oil to make it unreadable. But if he is identified, Adolf will not receive the kid-glove treatment he gets in Bavaria. As the motor car slows to a halt, one of the other passengers decides on a little play-acting. Putzi Hanfstaengl flourishes a Swiss passport in the faces of the militia and, putting on a deliberately awful German-American accent, claims loudly to be a paper manufacturer on a business trip to the annual Leipzig Fair. He points to the silent Adolf. ‘This is my valet’, says Putzi in a commanding foreign voice. They are waved through. Hitler looks up admiringly.
In Berlin, Adolf attends meetings with one of the party’s main funders. In his free time, he takes Putzi round the military museum in the Zeughaus on Unter den Linden, showing off his in-depth knowledge of Prussian military campaigns. He admires a statue of Fredrick the Great. He is fascinated by the death masks of soldiers from earlier wars. Later Adolf leads Putzi through the national art gallery, triumphantly declaring Rembrandt an Aryan and misattributing a Caravaggio to Michelangelo.
That evening, at Luna Park, they watch some ladies’ boxing (Adolf is fascinated, but does not approve). Someone recognises Hitler and snaps a photograph. He is outraged. Photographs are dangerous. If his likeness is published, travel through Germany will become ever more dangerous. Hitler tries to smash the camera. Eventually, the photographer agrees not to develop the film.
VIENNA: Freud is afraid. He visits a doctor friend to ask about the swelling in his mouth, who promptly tells him to give up smoking, an unwelcome recommendation. A second friend is consulted. ‘Be prepared to see something you won’t like’, Freud warns him before opening his mouth wide to let himself be examined. The recommendation now is even worse: an operation, immediately, to remove the growth.
A few days later, without telling his family, Freud takes himself to hospital to be operated on by a well-known surgeon. The first Anna learns of it is a message received from the clinic, asking that Freud’s family bring anything necessary for an overnight stay to the hospital at once. Anna finds her father sitting on a kitchen chair in a small room, covered in blood, unable to speak.
BERLIN–ESSEN–MUNICH: Albert Einstein resigns from the League of Nations’ international committee on scientific cooperation, in protest at the League’s failure to take action against the occupation of the Ruhr. (He also writes a letter to a friend suggesting a second motive: dislike of Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who chairs the committee and who has written a book containing ‘serious blunders–may God forgive him’–on the subject of relativity.)
The German Communists are split on whether to blame capitalism or the French for the situation. The knee-jerk reaction of local Communists in the Ruhr to the Krupp shootings is to blame the firm’s management and nationalist provocateurs for the tragedy. Party headquarters in Berlin–and the Comintern in Moscow–order a different course. German Communism cannot afford to look pro-French.
Adolf has a broader target in his sights. He blames democracy itself for the unacceptable situation in the Ruhr. He gives an interview to Spain’s leading newspaper in which he argues that the parliamentary system should be abolished entirely. (The journalist also notes Hitler’s opposition to unlimited press freedom and his demand for greater censorship of the theatre, cinema and women’s clothing; no mention is made of his anti-Semitic agenda.) In the Zirkus Krone one evening in April, in front of ten thousand people, Adolf declares moderation to be the real crime. ‘Whoever follows only the path of the golden mean will never reach their goal’. He embraces the idea of a popular uprising, the Götterdammerung that did not occur in 1918. What would the French do, Hitler asks, ‘if faced with seventy million standing up to them in a life or death struggle?’
Fanaticism is no crime when the life of the nation is at stake. Paris wants to cut Germany’s population down by another twenty million, he claims. They want the Rhineland for themselves. Moreover, if Germans do not fight now and recover their strength, they will soon find the Bolsheviks standing over the ruins of Germany’s shattered culture. The choice has come to this: either the Nazi swastika or the red star of Communism.
Hitler now feels strong enough to challenge the Munich authorities directly. Germany’s highest federal court has issued an order for the arrest of Hitler’s mentor, Dietrich Eckart, for a violent verbal attack on President Ebert on the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter. Adolf challenges the Bavarian government to reject the arrest order. When the government does not follow the mangy field-runner’s advice, he responds by threatening to hold another large-scale Nazi demonstration in Munich on the first of May–a date cherished by the right as the day of Munich’s liberation from the Soviet in 1919 but celebrated by the left as the day of workers around the world. Should both left and right be allowed to march on the same day, bloodshed is inevitable.
On his birthday, towards the end of April, flowers and cakes are delivered to Adolf’s sparse living quarters. The headline of the Völkischer Beobachter proclaims him Deutschland’s Führer. Eckart contributes a poem:
Five years of hardship, unequalled in human history!
Five years of dirty excrement and mountains of sordid infamy!
The glow of pride and purity that great
Bismarck left us–
Quite annihilated.
And yet–even as we are almost overcome with sickness,
A reminder:
Was this land not–unless the legends lie–a German land?
Can such a land be ended thus?
Have we no strength left to seize victory?
Lift up your hearts! Who wants to see, will see!
The strength is here before us, that will yet banish night!
Putzi drops by to congratulate his friend Adolf, having made the effort to look up beforehand all the other great men with whom the mangy field-runner shares a birthday, including Napoleon III and Oliver Cromwell, the king-slayer of the English Civil War. He finds Adolf in a state of some agitation. Hitler fears that his birthday cakes might be poisoned. He waits for Putzi to try them first, before launching himself onto the sugary peaks.
WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow sends an article he is writing to a friend. The friend responds to Edith instead. ‘Speaking quite frankly, and from the bottom of my heart, the article is far from being what it should be’, he writes. ‘What the article lacks’, as he puts it, ‘is body’. It is unsuitable as the statement of Woodrow’s return to public life. He asks Edith to destroy his letter before her husband sees it.
A few days later, on their daily drive along the Potomac, Edith brings up the subject. The article isn’t quite good enough for publication, she tells Woodrow–yet. It might need to be expanded a little, she suggests (or edited down, another passenger chimes in unhelpfully). Woodrow loses his temper: ‘I have done all I can, and all I am going to do.’ Later, Edith is in tears: ‘I just want to help and I just don’t know how to help.’
THE OCCUPIED RUHR: On a mid-April morning not long after dawn, crowds gather in the streets of Essen to watch as the coffins of the Krupp workers shot by panicking French soldiers a few days before are paraded through the city. Flags with patriotic emblems flutter besides banners bearing socialist slogans. An image of the Virgin Mary is carried above the heads of the mourners. A group of men in top hats carry a five-pointed star adorned with a hammer and sickle. The capitalist Krupp, about to go on trial for his role in the incident, gives a speech lauding the patriotism of the men who died. The only sour moment comes at the cemetery, when one Communist agitator attempts to hijack proceedings to make a party-political speech on the grave of one of his fallen comrades.
‘I have heard at least fifteen different accounts of what actually happened’, Hemingway writes of the Krupp tragedy; ‘at least twelve of them sounded like lies.’ The most solid thing he finds in the Ruhr is the hatred. ‘It is as definite’, he writes, ‘as the unswept cinder-covered sidewalks of Düsseldorf or the long rows of grimy black cottages.’ No one is winning this war. ‘France refused in 1917 to make peace without victory’, Ernest writes. ‘Now she finds she has victory without peace.’
In his prison cell near Düsseldorf, Leo Schlageter pens a letter to his parents telling them that if he is shot by the French for sabotage they should imagine it was just a sudden illness which carried him off. ‘A few years earlier than expected’, he writes, ‘but it often happens that way.’ He is ready to confront death. ‘If I were alone on this earth, I truly do not know what could be more beautiful than to die for the Fatherland.’
DOORN: Worried that he will try to abscond, the Dutch government refuses permission for the Kaiser to visit the tulip fields of Haarlem (they are too near the open sea). Instead, he is allowed to take a road trip to the town of Tiel, the first time he has left the immediate vicinity of Doorn in months. Each time Wilhelm sees a pig in a field–and there are many in this particular part of Holland–he raises his hat to it, and bids it good day. It is a superstition, his equerry explains to a bewildered guest, supposed to bring good luck in foreign lands.
Back at Doorn the Kaiser alternates between rage at all those who have forsaken him and confident assertions of his imminent return to Germany. Visitors mention Hitler as a man to watch. They wonder about the possibility of a Mussolini-style dictator coming to power in Germany who will invite Wilhelm back as a symbol of continuity. From one of his guests, Wilhelm is delighted to learn of the commercial success of his memoirs in America. In Mexico, he is told, the effect is such that Germany is considered to be quite free of any responsibility for the war. ‘What thanks do I get?’ Wilhelm asks aloud. ‘Filth and rubbish.’
MUNICH–BERCHTESGADEN: Paula Hitler leaves Austria for the first time in her life, to visit her brother Adolf in Bavaria.
Hasn’t he done well? The party leader has a bright red car these days, and a driver. Paula briefly entertains the idea of working for Adolf, even living with him and taking care of his household. He does not seem so keen on the idea. He asks a party member to put his sister up while she is in town. She will not stay long.
Adolf invites his sister on an impromptu trip into the Alps, taking the car up to Berchtesgaden (one of Freud’s favourite mountain hideaways). Once there, Paula discovers her brother has other plans. She is dumped in town with a female chaperone. Hitler heads further up into the mountains with his chauffeur.
His intention is to pay a surprise visit on Dietrich Eckart, currently on the run. After a strenuous climb up through the snow, Adolf and his chauffeur reach the Pension Moritz, a simple guesthouse run by a retired racing-car driver and his wife, a six-foot-tall blonde whom Adolf admires as a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood.
‘Diedi, the wolf is here’, Hitler shouts through Eckart’s door, identified by the lack of proper hiking boots outside. The poet appears in his nightgown, quite touched by his young protégé’s decision to pay him a visit in his mountain hideout. Hitler wakes up early the next morning to see the sun rising over the mountains, and to enjoy the best view in Bavaria.
MOSCOW–GORKI: Nadya writes to Inessa Armand’s daughter. ‘I’m kept alive only by the fact that Volodya is glad to see me in the mornings, he takes my hand, and sometimes we talk about different things which anyway have no names.’
In May, the invalid is finally moved to Gorki. He is pushed around in a wicker wheelchair.
MUNICH: Hitler’s threat to crush the socialists on May Day comes to nothing. In the event, the police warn that they are ready to shoot either way–left or right–should there be any trouble. The socialists march in strength and Communist flags are unfurled without permission (but also without trouble). But a few days later Hitler is on the attack again. ‘The only thing that can save Germany is a dictatorship of national will and national purpose’, he announces. There is no point trying to search for the saviour, Hitler says: he will come from the heavens, or he will not. ‘Our job’, he says modestly, ‘is to make the people ready for the dictator, for when he comes.’ That day is near: ‘German people, awake!’
VIENNA: A week after his operation Freud celebrates his birthday. ‘Nothing but visitors and celebrations’, he writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé. ‘I can now inform you that I can again speak, chew and work, indeed even smoking is permitted–to a certain moderate, cautious so to speak petit bourgeois degree’, Freud reports. The birthday itself is celebrated ‘as though I were a music hall star’. Or perhaps, he adds, ‘as though it were to be my last’. Freud’s doctor gives him a new cigar-holder.
Uncertainty and anxiety now hover over Freud’s whole existence. He is treated with radium and X-rays. He has not been told the diagnosis of cancer, but he suspects it. Then more calamity. Freud’s grandson Heinz Rudolf, the son of his daughter Sophie, visits from Hamburg, falls ill with tuberculosis and is dead by June. ‘I don’t think I have ever experienced such grief,’ Freud writes; ‘perhaps my own sickness contributes to the shock.’ For the first time in his life, he admits to full-scale depression.
DUBLIN: Ireland’s civil war draws to its sad close. There are more internments and executions; the killing of the IRA’s chief commander in the mountains of County Waterford; an order to dump arms (Yeats initially suggests the Vatican look after the weapons); a grudging IRA ceasefire.
‘
Soldiers of the Republic, legion of the rearguard,’ Éamon de Valera writes from hiding, ‘the Republic can no longer be successfully defended by your arms.’ Bitter reality has spoiled the dream. Those loyal to the cause will now be rewarded only with suffering. But therein lies redemption, de Valera writes: ‘What you endure will keep you in communion with your dead comrades.’ From defeat will spring a moral victory. The war is to be continued–but by other means.
Ireland is a broken country. But it is, at long last, at peace. The soldier becomes a politician again.
GOLZHEIMER HEATH, GERMANY: A little after four o’clock one morning at the end of May, after a hurried Holy Communion, a final letter to his parents, and a shot of rum to protect against the cold, the former Freikorps trooper Leo Schlageter is blindfolded, forced to his knees and executed by a French firing squad in a quarry outside Düsseldorf. He dies with a crucifix in his hands. The prison chaplain notes the sound of a lark singing in the morning air.
French newspapers report the accuracy of the French riflemen, their bullets guided to their target by their patriotism. No fewer than ten bullets hit Schlageter’s heart, they say–he must have died instantly. German accounts suggest a far more messy execution, and that a French officer had to administer a final shot to the head from close range. Within twenty-four hours of his death a birch cross has appeared on Golzheimer Heath at the place of Schlageter’s death. The man has become a martyr.
LAKE GARDA–VENICE: Gabriele D’Annunzio is smothered with gifts and surrounded by spies. Whatever he asks for, he gets. For the moment, Benito has no choice. He must indulge the myth of the hero of Fiume–or he must create his own. Only rarely does he dare push back. In May, Gabriele suggests a nearby hill should be flattened to make way for a private airstrip. To this, at least, Benito does not respond.
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