Someone inscribes a name in capital letters above his prison door, using their bayonet point to score the paint: ‘MICK COLLINS’. Éamon de Valera is saddened when he sees what the vandals have done. The capital I is dotted; the N and the S are reversed.
He decides to have a word with the prison staff.
MUNICH: 8 November. Another day, another plan. Bavaria’s political elite are gathering in a respectable little beer hall by the river Isar to discuss the political situation and hear Kahr speak. A golden opportunity for the unscrupulous to strike.
Ludendorff double-checks that Bavaria’s senior army commander will be coming to the Bürgerbräukeller meeting that evening. To make sure that the Munich garrison is as dispersed as possible when the moment comes to launch the putsch, a number of officers are invited to a party that will never happen by putschists who will never show up. That evening, most of the army’s top brass are either in the beer hall or at home in civilian clothes. One senior officer is attending a lecture on trade with the United States.
Meanwhile, the putschists prepare. Members of the Kampfbund assemble in their favourite bars and bowling alleys. A little after eight a contingent is bussed to the Bürgerbräukeller. The police guarding Bavaria’s political elite are outnumbered. They soon give way. SA men surround the building. The moment has arrived.
Adolf Hitler theatrically throws away a pint of beer (which his friend Putzi has just bought him–for one billion marks) and elbows his way to the front of the hall. Clambering up onto a chair, he shoots into the ceiling with a pistol to get everyone’s attention and declares that a national revolution has begun. Hitler invites Kahr, Bavaria’s senior general and Munich’s police chief to parley in an adjoining room. He tries to persuade them to go along with the putsch rather than fight it.
In the beer hall, there is uproar. Hermann Göring, the air ace turned SA leader, calls for calm. Cries of ‘Mexico’ and ‘South America’ go up, likening the Bavarian putschists to bandits. Adolf gives an update from the negotiations. Kahr and the others have not yet been fully persuaded. But they will be. ‘Either the German revolution begins tonight’, he says, ‘or tomorrow we will all be dead.’ Ludendorff arrives in full dress uniform to apply pressure on Kahr and his associates. Who can say no to the man who lost the war? Kahr returns to the beer hall to announce that he is prepared to act as regent for the monarchy in a new government. Hitler is to be in charge of propaganda. He clasps Kahr’s hand to thank him for his words. While Adolf is off dealing with other matters, Ludendorff lets Kahr, the general and the police chief go.
In Munich, confusion reigns. Nobody is clear about the actual state of affairs between the army, the police and the putsch. Confusion leads to delay in the conspirators taking over vital buildings. And delay saps momentum. At one point, cadets who support the putsch and police who support Kahr face each other across the street outside Kahr’s headquarters. There is uncertainty about who is on whose side, or whether they are all in fact on the same side. A shoot-out seems imminent. Then an order comes in, supposedly from Ludendorff, countermanding earlier instructions to take the building.
At midnight, the putschists are still confident. They have the promises of Kahr, the army commander and the police chief. The odd miscommunication is to be expected. By four the next morning, the truth begins to dawn: they have been betrayed. Kahr and the others have decided to oppose Hitler and Ludendorff. A promise extracted at gunpoint is no promise at all. Munich army headquarters has already been in touch with other garrisons in Bavaria to ensure their loyalty. By eight, the Kampfbund members in the Bürgerbräukeller realise that they are not the vanguard of a national revolution, but the isolated remnants of a putsch which has failed before it even got off the ground. Ludendorff, having changed into civilian clothes, sips red wine. Someone orders the beer hall’s band to play some marching tunes. Putzi Hanfstaengl is engaged on liaison duties with the foreign press.
The putsch has lost momentum. But no counter-punch has knocked it out. Ludendorff goes back to his creed of 1918: it is a matter of nerves. Show the enemy one’s own defiance, and they will crack. ‘The heavens will fall before the Bavarian Reichswehr turns against me!’ he exclaims. A column of pro-putsch militia is organised, arranged a dozen abreast as if on a German Day march-past. On its way towards the city centre, the Kampfbund column sweeps through a line of armed police guarding one of the bridges, beating them up as it does.
A few minutes later, at the entrance to the Odeonsplatz, more armed police bar the way. The putschists–some armed, some not–are confident these police will be no different. Many are Nazi sympathisers, after all. Then the bullets start flying. It is a little after midday. There are snow flurries in the air. For twenty or thirty seconds, chaos reigns. There is firing in both directions. Machine guns are brought up. Most Kampfbund members hit the ground to avoid the bullets whizzing around. Adolf is pulled down by a Baltic Freikorps man, dislocating his shoulder in the process. Ludendorff keeps walking towards the police, arriving at their lines unscathed.
Fourteen bodies lie on the ground. Göring, wounded in the leg, takes cover behind a stone lion before limping away from the scene of the shooting as fast as he can. Hitler is carried to safety by a doctor and a medical orderly. He is then whisked off in an automobile–destination Austria.
‘It sounds very funny,’ Hemingway writes about the events in a letter to his pal Gertrude in Paris, ‘the early dispatches so far’. He is not the only one. ‘Ludendorff may never live down the laughter’, says the New York Herald. One wit calls the general’s gang so hopeless they would have been ‘repulsed by “Keep off the grass” signs’. In Paris, they laugh out loud at the putsch’s ‘vaudeville ending’ with everyone backstabbing everyone else. ‘An idol has fallen’, notes Le Matin, declaring Ludendorff irretrievably damaged and the entire revanchist movement leaderless. In Rome, Benito receives an account from the Italian consul in Munich describing the putchists as ‘buffoni’–‘clowns’. It has been a giant farce from start to finish.
In Germany, the putsch is treated as the natural result–understandable and perhaps even forgivable–of months and months of stretched nerves. ‘It was almost a mathematical inevitability’, notes the Berliner Illustrierte. When the moment of explosion finally comes, some find it almost a relief.
DOORN: Wilhelm follows events in Munich from a safe distance in Holland. His adjutant rushes over the latest newspapers for the Kaiser to look at while taking a break from wood-chopping. His entourage debates the merits and drawbacks of a civil war. Amongst the dispatches from Bavaria, the Kaiser also learns, to his dismay, that his son the Crown Prince has gone back to Germany without his father’s permission. ‘The stupidity of youth’, the Kaiser roars. ‘What was he thinking?’
Wilhelm seems almost relieved when the putsch fails. ‘Thank God, the whole stupid story has come to an end’, he tells his equerry. After all, while he is as happy as anyone to see the republic he hates take a black eye, what role would there have been for him if the putsch had been a success? ‘The new Reich’, Wilhelm writes to an old supporter a little later in the year, ‘will not come from a beer joint.’
He will just have to wait a little longer for his moment, the Kaiser tells himself. It is safer that way–look at what happened to stupid Charles in Budapest. Occasionally he contemplates a more dramatic course of action. If the French go any further, he tells a startled adjutant, then he will have to return whatever the cost, first to take up the sword against the Fatherland’s domestic enemies (the socialists) and then against the French. His advisers know better than to take such outbursts too seriously.
AMERICA: Through the hisses, haltingly, a voice. Apart from those who have attended the man’s speeches, America has not heard Woodrow Wilson before. Now, the day before Armistice Day 1923, the ex-President speaks over the airwaves. It is the voice of another age, the voice of a nineteenth-century Southern gentleman.
To some, Woodrow Wilson’s words sound suspiciously like a
campaign speech. Does he still entertain political ambitions? President Coolidge and the Republicans are weighed down by rumours of wrongdoing under his predecessor’s administration. A scandal around the leasing of some oilfields back in 1921 and 1922 is brewing in Washington, with stories of ‘loans’ which were really kickbacks. The sage of Dearborn–if he were to stand as an independent–would be likely to further weaken the Republicans. Might a Democrat with experience manage to come through the middle?
Though delivered slowly and deliberately, Woodrow’s speech crackles with partisan indignation. The voice coming out of radio-sets across the country attacks the ‘sullen and selfish isolation’ into which America has retreated since the war. The Republicans, Woodrow claims, have no answers to America’s economic and social challenges. France and Italy, meanwhile, have made ‘waste paper’ of the Versailles Treaty. ‘The affairs of the world can be set straight only by the firmest and most determined exhibition of the will to lead’, he warns. He does not need to remind America that 1924 will be election year.
America hears the voice–but does not see the man. Wilson delivers his speech in his dressing gown. Though a table is set up in the library for him, he insists on standing behind the microphone, resting on a cane. Edith holds a carbon copy of the speech in case her husband should require a prompt. His eyesight in his good eye is failing. He can barely read. His mind is more one-tracked than it used to be.
INNSBRUCK AND KUFSTEIN, AUSTRIA–UFFING-AM-STAFFELSEE, GERMANY: The former air ace Hermann Göring escapes from Germany to Innsbruck, in terrible pain from the bullet wounds to his leg. Morphine is used to dull the pain during an emergency operation. (Göring develops a lifelong addiction as a result.) Putzi Hanfstaengl is helped across the Austrian border to Kufstein and spends the first night after the putsch attempt on the tiled floor of a flower shop.
Hitler does not make it so far. His escape vehicle breaks down halfway to the border and he seeks refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in the foothills of the Alps. Covered in mud from racing along country roads and hiding in a nearby wood till dark, he does not look like anyone’s idea of the Messiah. Helene gives him her husband’s blue bathrobe to wear. His dislocated shoulder makes it impossible for him to wear anything else.
The next morning, Hitler sends word to allies uncompromised by the Munich fiasco that he needs another car. Two-year-old Egon Hanfstaengl watches Uncle Dolf pace up and down as he waits. What is taking them so long? At five that afternoon, Helene’s mother-in-law calls. The police are nearby. Hitler grabs his Browning revolver as if to take his own life. Helene calmly disarms him and hides the gun in a flour jar. Adolf issues instructions for what to do if he is taken. Helene makes notes.
The police arrive an hour later. Hitler is taken into custody dressed in the oversized clothes of another man, covered by a raincoat pinned with his war medals. The Nazi leader briefly harangues the police, as if he were at one of his meetings again. Then he is led away–bedraggled, depressed, beaten.
On the way to Landsberg Fortress, where he is to be incarcerated pending trial, Adolf learns that Ludendorff has already managed to talk his way out of custody, claiming to be an innocent bystander caught up in someone else’s plan. It is exactly five years since the armistice of 1918.
MOSCOW–PETROGRAD–BERLIN: Clare Sheridan returns to Russia for the first time since 1920. The romance has gone. Enthusiasm turns to disillusionment.
The promise of the communist revolution once seemed so great, Clare remembers. Back then, utopia was something almost tangible. Now she feels that conviction has turned into cynicism. Clarity has become compromise. History used to gallop; now it seems to crawl. Under the skin, the new bureaucrats are the same as the old. The same instincts–greed, lust, love, hate–rule Russia as they do the rest of the world. Clare telephones one of the Bolshevik leaders she used to dine with, expecting to be invited back into their confidence, to start again where she left off. She is told bluntly: ‘You are not the type of newspaper correspondent we are accustomed to.’
Moscow is not a place for romantics like Clare Sheridan. What can they offer the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Moscow needs money, not sympathy. Instead of being put up in a VIP guesthouse in an old palace, Clare is forced to stay in a characterless hotel filled with tawdry British and American concession-hunters. Clare suspects the place is bugged.
She suggests a trip to the Caucasus. The authorities say no. Perhaps to Saratov? Too cold, the authorities respond. The Communists do not want foreigners roving around the country. Clare is finally given permission to visit Petrograd, and assigned a minder. To awaken her charitable instincts–a good use for Western journalists, this–Clare is shown around new hospitals which have no medicines and orphanages where she is asked for money. Another day, she is escorted to the former imperial palace of Tsarskoe Selo. Rasputin once walked here. Tsar Nicholas once slept there. Now the place is a museum. Groups of proletarians tramp through to gawp at the tastelessness of the Romanovs (and be told how much better off they are as a result of their removal).
Clare finds herself bored and frustrated. Her thoughts become disjointed. She feels alienated from her surroundings, alienated from her own past. Russia once seemed to throw up dynamic and imaginative revolutionary leaders by the dozen. But who is running Russia today? The country is crawling with capitalists, gamblers, men in sharp suits with rolls of cash. There are new Lenins now, and they are nothing like the old Lenin. They are functionaries, not revolutionaries.
Clare is distraught. It is one thing not to have ever believed in something, quite another to have believed and been disappointed. She decides to give up journalism entirely.
LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS: Albert decides to keep out of Germany for the moment. The situation there is too unsettled. He is working on a new theory, trying to address the quantum problem. His stomach problems have returned–nerves, a friend thinks. He has taken to writing aphorisms: ‘Children do not learn from the life lessons of their parents. Nations learn nothing from their history. Bad experiences must always be made anew.’
Albert reads books about Japan and prepares for a talk he is to give at an incandescent lamp factory in Eindhoven. Betty sends him photographs of herself to cheer him up.
ROME: A new political axis is being formed in southern Europe. ‘Excellency,’ Miguel Primo de Rivera tells Benito over lunch at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, ‘your figure is not just an Italian one, but a global one; you are the chief apostle of the campaign against dissolution and anarchy afflicting Europe.’ Glasses of sparkling wine are raised for the Spanish leader’s toast.
‘From Mussolini-ism’, the general says, ‘a belief, a doctrine of redemption is forming, with admirers and advocates all around the world.’ In a newspaper interview, he goes even further, declaring his hope that Spain follows in the footsteps of Italian fascism, which he calls a ‘universal phenomenon’ and a ‘living gospel’. In return, Benito conveys the fraternal greetings of all Italians now ‘marching along the open road of Fascist revolution’.
BERLIN–LANDSBERG FORTRESS: A magazine runs a cartoon showing two smartly dressed bourgeois men meeting on the street. One wears a strange badge on his lapel, multicoloured and multi-form. ‘What is it?’ his friend asks. ‘A swastika inside a Soviet star’, the man replies: ‘One never knows from which side a putsch will come.’
In the autumn, a new German currency is introduced. Prices begin to stabilise. Simplicissimus now sells for thirty pfennigs. By December, the movement for the independence of the Rhineland has lost any support it once had.
Visitors to Landsberg Fortress note how much weight Hitler has lost. He refuses the prison food. The Wagners send him care packages. He is overjoyed when his dog Wolf is brought to see him. Politically, the Nazi Führer is reduced to writing angry letters to the authorities through his lawyer. He rages to the prison psychologist about how Germany is not worth a damn: ‘Let them see how well they will do without me.’
GORKI: ‘Every
day he makes a conquest’, Nadya writes to Inessa’s daughter, ‘but they’re all microscopic.’ Vladimir sits through a film of the sixth anniversary of the revolution, unable to say more than a few words. Nadya does all the talking now. An artist visits with the thought of doing a portrait of Lenin. But he finds a man in a wheelchair who looks nothing like the dictator he used to know.
Trotsky writes articles for Pravda and essays warning of an old revolutionary guard–Stalin and his cronies–unwilling to revise their past and of a new culture of servility in the party. ‘Any man trained merely to say “yes, sir” is a nobody’. The party must free itself from its own bureaucracy. Leon is desperately ill. He comes home exhausted every night. The doctors advise him to take a rest by the Black Sea.
TORONTO: A batch of copies of Ernest’s second book–called in our time, modishly printed out all in lower case–arrives in Canada in December. They contain a dozen literary sketches (some about bullfighting) to add to the six printed in the Little Review. Hemingway’s sister Marcelline orders a few copies as Christmas presents. Later, she decides that they are not quite right as family gifts. She sends them back to Paris where such literary creations belong.
Hemingway cannot bear it any longer. He hands in his resignation to the Star, effective 1 January 1924. The young journalist, still only twenty-five, has made a decision: the Hemingways are going back to Europe and he is going to become a full-time writer.
LAKE GARDA: Gabriele D’Annunzio donates his house, the Vittoriale, to Italy at the end of December. Benito sends a telegram to his old rival to thank him for his gift on behalf of ‘THE ITALY OF VITTORIO VENETO’ (that is to say, the Italy of the glorious final battle of 1918).
‘IN THE TOUGH DAILY WORK OF GOVERNMENT’, Mussolini continues, ‘I FEEL THAT YOUR DREAM OF VICTORY HAS BECOME THE DREAM OF THE ENTIRE ITALIAN PEOPLE.’ He promises to live up to it. It is a message from the man of the present to the man of the past.
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