Germania

by Simon Winder

  It is possible to see these as reflections of a reeling world heading for disaster, and there is definitely something unsettling, particularly in Fritz Lang’s hectic movies. There is also a sense of despair that the tap of German film was about to be turned off – the period of good German sound films is even shorter than the time spent by Germany in the League of Nations. But even before the Nazis came to power the great directors were leaving for Hollywood or were already dead. All of Lang’s films remain hypnotically good, whether silent or with sound, but the most alarming is definitely The Woman in the Moon (1929), his last silent picture. A science-fiction film of daft solemnity, it was based on the ideas of Hermann Oberth, a strange Transylvanian Saxon, who had come up with the fundamental breakthroughs that to travel to the moon a rocket would need to be made from a series of discardable stages and that rocket flight would render astronauts weightless. The film absorbs these ideas and suddenly becomes eerily modern (despite such oddities as the Moon having an atmosphere and all the characters in the rocket wearing travelling tweeds and sensible shoes). Lang lavished immense attention on his model rockets and had help and advice from Oberth’s Spaceflight Society, which had been experimenting in fields outside Berlin with very small chemical-filled projectiles.

  As part of the marketing budget for Woman in the Moon money was made available to the society to build something slightly more ambitious. This plan came to nothing, but among society members excited by Woman in the Moon was the teenage genius Wernher von Braun, a refugee from what had become Poland (the prominence of non-German Germans in rocket research is odd, but probably meaningless) who now joined up with Oberth. Woman in the Moon had echoes in von Braun’s morally horrifying but quintessentially twentieth-century career. This was perhaps most strangely expressed in the spoken ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1’ blast-off sequence in the film, which had been invented by Lang merely as a piece of ‘business’ but which was carried over as a seemingly vital part of von Braun’s V-2, Gemini and Apollo programmes. There can be few more complex cultural experiences than watching Woman in the Moon – a film into which, far more than Lang’s Metropolis, so much of the modern world seems to fit: from the tomb of the Nordhausen V-2 slave-labour factory to the generational wonder of the real moon-landings. In this one, in many ways very dopey movie, and in von Braun’s whole career, and indeed in so much of Weimar culture, there seems to lurk a range of issues too complex and worrying ever to be untangled.

  The death of science

  Whatever the appeal some aspects of Weimar Germany might have, there is an undeniable sense of silting-up and failure – that this is a long way from the country of the late nineteenth century. A painful and clear-cut example was in what had been the magic world of German technical and scientific knowledge. To look back nostalgically, before 1914 a large part of modern existence was carved out by an engaging mixture of clever individuals and huge laboratories. Germans raced through piles of chemicals, machine-tools and bits of electrical equipment in a frenzy of inventiveness and ideas. My favourite example (aside from the most blindingly obvious such as Daimler and Benz inventing motorcycles and cars or Haber inventing nitrogen fertilizer or Diesel inventing his engine – or Einstein for goodness’ sake!) is Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel spent his long and productive life as Darwin’s principal German champion and ensured widespread acceptance of evolutionary theory there, his role being as important as Thomas Huxley’s in Britain. He engaged in the same sort of scornful anti-religious bullying as Richard Dawkins today (indeed in Germany Dawkins is hailed as ‘the new Haeckel’) and popularized some extremely unattractive racial theories. Haeckel was also a microscope researcher of genius and his enthusiastic lectures and bestselling science books made legions of amateur and professional microscope obsessives. He could also claim to be perhaps the greatest German artist of the later nineteenth century – just as Maria Sibylla Merian had been the greatest at the end of the seventeenth century, if only the paintings and drawings of scientists were placed in the same mainstream as individuals painting, for example, landscapes. His mesmerizing pictures of protozoa, sponges and jellyfish were also a key inspiration for Jugendstil – a further reason for giving him an orthodox place in art history. It is fun to think of the ever more sclerotic military atmosphere in the German empire being invaded and undermined by a drifting, wispy almost narcotic decorative atmosphere thanks to unpoliticized wobbly objects scooped out of the sea off the Canary Islands.

  The strength of this science was its sense of being part of a hugely complex and smoothly run machine, both national and global. Experimentalists in places such as Jena could find enthusiastic students, amateur interest and industrial funding. The practical implications of chemistry or lens-making would be seized on to fuel ever more complex products which would then be sold everywhere. Germany poured out a dizzying array of useful things to the rest of the world, not unlike the United States. This highly interconnected system was devastated by the First World War and in its nature left little trace. It is only by looking back that one can see what goes missing.

  To carry on being nostalgic, one interesting survival (well, marvellous survival to be honest) is the more or less untouched range of galleries at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, one of the great repositories of pre-1914 learning. As every reader must have gathered by now I have a shaky-handed weakness for cabinets of curiosities, and the Vienna museum is the dizzying pinnacle – the natural-history equivalent of one of the great blast furnaces of Essen. Setting aside its unimprovably bulky sea-elephant in the entrance hall (‘shot in the Falkland Islands in 1901’) and what must be the biggest and most threatening collection of crocodiles, gharials and caimans anywhere, it is the decorative schemes in the rooms which are the most surprising survivals. In all the heaving late-Victorian decor there are some wonderful natural-history jokes – none better than having the caryatids decorating the top of the walls in the dinosaur section holding in their muscly arms wriggling pterodactyls and plesiosaurs.

  The centrepiece, however, is the mineral collection: case upon case of every conceivable hard but surprising object that could be dug from the earth. This labour was the work of many miners, researchers and industrial scientists and in very solid, chunky form it shows the sort of complex world which made German science great. On the walls are a series of paintings celebrating the mineral heritage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – the Slovene karst, the Tatras mountains, a Galician salt mine, an 1866 meteorite strike on Hungary, all these different zones conjuring up different miner-alogical excitements. Looking at these paintings it became clear that one of the real disasters of 1918 was the fracturing of this world – the arteries that had fed industries across Europe and which had grown up with the Industrial Revolution were now all choked up. The raw material now hid behind the borders of autarkic micro-states in economic crisis. The sources throughout Central Europe, shown in these paintings, which had fuelled Austria-Hungary’s industrial expansion had all gone and, even more seriously, the German motor, despite lopsided and febrile growth in the early 1920s, was fundamentally in ruins – its suppliers were gone, its old markets hostile or bankrupt. The scientific-industrial-commercial dream on the walls of the Vienna Natural History Museum had completely disappeared. The attempt to recreate it through depraved violence under the Nazis, helped by the machines and gases of the debased remnant of German science, ended in total defeat and a moral disaster. Under impossibly different conditions, the single market which had made Europe so inventive and prosperous before 1914, only drifted back into view after 1989.

  Science was not completely moribund under Weimar and there were numerous expressions of goodwill and international conferences to try to kick-start what had once been there. Einstein himself engaged heavily with the Weimar Republic, despite having now been for many years a Swiss citizen – but the sense of decay, antiSemitism and poisonous failure was in the end too much even for him, with a final move to the United States in 1932. Despite their protestations about modernity
and their excitement with science, the Nazis had anti-Semitism as a far more core value, and the Jewish scientists and some of their more liberal colleagues who had maintained so much of what had made German science so brilliant and had kept this going despite chronic setbacks and economic convulsion now all left. This transplant to Britain and the United States was so important that the scientific histories of both countries changed direction.

  Terminal throes

  The Great Depression, which rapidly sucked out of Germany both the American credits which had kept it stable and any faltering sense of obligation by many citizens to the Weimar Republic, was the next stage in the disaster that turned Germany into the destroyer of Europe and of itself. The disaster unfolded under the baffled eyes of Paul von Hindenburg, since 1925 the President of Germany. Other countries have voted for men on their military record, without this being sinister – France voted for de Gaulle, Britain for Wellington, the USA for Jackson, Taylor, Grant and Eisenhower. Hindenburg was odd, however, in having, with Ludendorff, led his country into total disaster in the Great War – the duumvirate through the latter part of the war having had the authority if not the imagination to have salvaged a peace which would have been far preferable to the final result. While Ludendorff was instrumental in raising Hitler from Bavarian obscurity, Hindenburg’s role was, however unwillingly, to provide the context for Hitler’s eventual takeover. This reverence for Hindenburg showed how a dangerous and stupid view of the war was really hard-wired into the republic, further reinforcing the idea that Germany had not really lost. Hindenburg took his job seriously, distrusted and disliked Hitler and tried to keep some form of democratic government going – but exhausted, very old and ill he only stood for re-election at all in 1932 as the only person capable of holding Hitler off, a sure sign that before Hitler’s actual seizure of power in early 1933 the republic was in ruins.

  This layer upon layer of catastrophe – the war, the Versailles Treaty, hyper-inflation, the Depression – provided so many individual German families with reasons to have collective nervous breakdowns that there is no point in hunting for deeper roots. Germany in 1914 had been a normal country, espousing much of the same racism, military posturing and taste for ugly public architecture that bedevilled the rest of the Continent. It would be possible to pick out mystical, fatalistic or mad trends anywhere in Europe in the preceding decades. A curious game could be played imagining Britain as the leper state of 1918 with hordes of German writers shuddering in disgust at the solipsism, medievalism, arrogance and anti-democratic disgust of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, the astonishing disregard for human life, violence, hypocrisy and greed of the Boer War, the absolutely unacceptable signs and symbols to be found in the writing of Newbolt, Kipling, Churchill, Gilbert and Sullivan. In many ways Britain and Germany had been mad twins – the two big European Protestant countries, sharing many ideas, economically and scientifically obsessed, and with superiority complexes on a level with the Mongol hordes. They shared a profound sense of pity for non-British or non-German nations, a rampant sense of imperial mission (more deeply rooted among Austrians and Britons, but profound nonetheless) and a frightening and enraging (to those outside the charmed circle) obsession with military shibboleths – the Royal Navy for the former, the army for the latter.

  The very different fates of the two countries can be pinned on the course and consequences of the Great War, not on some ‘special path’ trodden by German-speakers. Even as the appalling setbacks that devastated much of Europe from 1914 onwards played themselves out, there were always many Germans who resisted violence as a means of ending the ever more horrible impasse. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is no less characteristic of German responses than Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. The brutality that became endemic to German society was recoiled from by a great percentage of the population. Once the war itself had ended, the return of millions of fighters, whether cheering on or crushing the post-war revolutions, always gave the option to Germany to become again a militaristic state – but most veterans’ organizations were simply drinking clubs and even with the ‘stab in the back’ legend widely endorsed there was nothing necessarily sinister there.

  A curious example would be Kurt von Schleicher, a scheming monarchist former general who became the last chancellor before Hitler, having been a powerful figure in the highly unstable governments before his own. Schleicher could have been a traditional caudillo on the Central European or South American model, and he would have been right at home in Chiang Kai-shek’s China. His uniform-obsessed rallies had a superficially Nazi atmosphere, but in practice he tried to cooperate with the left and concluded that Germany probably needed the return of the Hohenzollerns for it to get back to normal. Schleicher’s lack of followers and lack of charisma meant, in Hindenburg’s most terrible error, his being sacked and, through several twists, replaced by Hitler – a figure who the traditional right thought they could control. This, of course, turned out not to be true. Schleicher’s Germany (if such a thing could ever have developed) would have been aggressive, would have broken out of the Versailles Treaty and would have potentially threatened its neighbours – but it seems an infinite distance away from Barbarossa, slave labour, gas chambers and the whole path laid out by a Nazi Party which had between the two elections of 1932, separated by only three months, already lost some two million of its voters and which could have ebbed away entirely without this very specific set of circumstances. Schleicher was murdered in 1934 along with many other of Hitler’s key enemies.

  It is often pointed out that the tragedy of Germany in the 1930s was the failure of the overwhelming majority to cooperate in facing down Nazism, but this failure was so fundamental to the nature of the republic that it is more of a weary given than material from which a tragedy could be made. This could not be clearer than in the work of John Heartfield. This remarkable communist artist changed his name from Helmut Herzfeld in the middle of the Great War to protest against the rabid nationalism and anti-British feeling in Germany, an eccentric but endearing gesture that showed, even in the midst of a sort of patriotic-bombastic maelstrom, that there was more variety than at first appears. His photomontages for AIZ, the Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper, published first in Berlin and then, after the Nazi seizure of power, in Prague, remain some of the most painful and eloquent images of an alternative non-Hitler Germany: Göring as mad butcher, a Christmas tree with its branches snapped into swastika-shapes, Hitler stuffed with gold coins.

  Many of the photomontages are great works of art, but it is hard not to notice how mistaken he is about virtually everything. Looking through all his AIZ work chronologically, the pattern that comes through is that the Social Democrats are no worse than the Nazis, that Hitler is simply the puppet of Big Business, that Hitler (the death’s head moth) is the linear descendant of his Weimar predecessors Ebert (the caterpillar) and Hindenburg (the dozing pupa), and that Hitler will readily be brought down when the time comes by the anger of the workers. At the beginning of 1933 Heartfield wished AIZ’s half-million or so readers a facetious happy new year with a photomontage dream, showing the Social Democrat Theodor Leipart and Adolf Hitler both tumbling down the same mountainside This was only weeks before Hitler seized power, arrested Leipart, closed AIZ and crushed Social Democrat and communist opposition. The wishful thinking which imagined Leipart and Hitler as deserving and getting the same fate sums up a powerful yet useless strand in German life.

  Germany’s experience of communist revolution in 1919 and the terror felt by the propertied classes over the USSR meant that in practice German communists were pathetically vulnerable if the state were to be single-mindedly harnessed against them. Having established himself in power through wholly extra-legal means, Hitler became through expunging the communists and ending the disunity of Weimar the darling of millions who had never dreamed of voting for him. AIZ’s readership was arrested, fled or saw the Nazi light – some, through innumerable twists and turns,
would find themselves under Soviet tutelage, in the surprising position of actually imposing their ideas in 1945, but this was in an almost unrecognizable country and continent.

  Ending

  This is the point where this book has to pack up, just as everybody who made Germany so remarkable a place packed up. The forces that took power in Germany in early 1933 were absolutely antithetical to what could be valued and mark a profound break. Nabokov’s Berlin novel Laughter in the Dark, written in the spring of 1931, inadvertently provides one of the last looks at this old Germany, just as the films of the late 1920s and early 1930s now have an absolute value way beyond their creators’ intentions. Laughter in the Dark is a cruel love story, but in the background can be glimpsed the Berlin of Weimar modernity – telephones, refrigerators, talkies, motorbikes, neon lighting, dance clubs. There is a constant wish to crane your neck and see round and behind the characters and enjoy more of the relatively benign Berlin they inhabit. When they visit the Berlin Sports Palace, it is just to see an ice-hockey game, not a Nazi rally. They are citizens still of a fractured, unhappy but plural Germany, run by Chancellor Brüning, Catholic, hard-working, contemptuous of the Nazis, but, like his contemporary Herbert Hoover (but with more fatal results) baffled and destroyed by the Great Depression. The Berlin Sports Palace at this time still held rallies for a wide range of political groups and the world of Laughter in the Dark seems a long way from the events which will in turn make the palace into one of Goebbels’ principal stages, let alone the palace in which the bodies of countless air-raid dead would be laid out in rows. Indeed, in the common and disastrous error of the period the political threat in Laughter in the Dark, which is only treated briefly, is from angry communist gang members.