by Peter Watson
His masterpiece was Erfolg (Success), 1930, a roman à clef about Weimar Germany, where Johanna Krain, a young woman, seeks to secure the release of her lover, Krüger, from prison. He is a museum curator who has offended the Bavarian authorities by showing two controversial paintings, one of which is a nude. Krüger is tried for adultery with the woman who posed for the painting and for breach of public morality. Several well-known figures and institutions are identifiable in the book (Hitler, Brecht, IG Farben). Krüger dies in prison but not before Feuchtwanger exposes and predicts all the corruptions and specious rationalizations of the world giving rise to the Third Reich.
Feuchtwanger’s assets were seized by the Nazis, but he fled to France where, in 1940, he was held in a concentration camp. This time he escaped dressed as a woman and went first to Spain, then to the United States (“God’s own country”), where he joined the growing band of talented exiles who would become known as “Hitler’s Gift.”18
In Chapter 29, we saw that the experiences of men in modern technological warfare in the Great War were so extreme as to bring about a whole new set of psychological problems among the admittedly brave men in the trenches. Do these subconscious anxieties account for the delay in the appearance of so many war-related novels, a delay that occurred on both sides? Ford Maddox Ford’s No More Parades was published in 1925, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, about an injured war veteran, appeared in 1926, while Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, was not released until 1930. Between these last two, in 1928, there was the most successful of them all, at any rate commercially—Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), by Erich Maria Remarque.
Christine Barker and R. W. Last argue that All Quiet is one of the most important books of the twentieth century, but neither one of the greatest, nor yet the best work of Remarque himself. Born in 1898 in Osnabrück, Remarque was dogged by controversy, in particular concerning what he actually did in World War I and whether he won the medals he said he did. He was never stationed at the Front, but it appears he did perform heroically, helping carry wounded soldiers out of danger.
After the war he began writing short stories and sketches, moved to Berlin in 1925, and worked as a journalist on Sport im Bild (Sport in Pictures).19 All Quiet was written two years later, serialized in the Vossische Zeitung at the end of 1928 (eleven other papers turned it down) and appeared between hard covers in January 1929, where its overnight success altered Remarque’s life forever.20
The novel tells the story of a class of young men who are sent to the war, are much depleted, and carry on the fight with older, more experienced men. There are many passages when the men/boys contemplate life back home, and the world of love which—for most of them—hasn’t really opened up yet. The claustrophobia of war gradually closes in on the men as, out of the original eight school friends, only one remains. Remarque explores the different ways that the men/boys are alienated, as they try to grasp whether they are cowards or heroes, individuals or comrades-in-arms, proud combatants, or ashamed and disappointed. They come to realize how being in such a terrible war has cut them off from people who will never have this experience. Although the book has it share of clichés, some of the images have become famous, as that of the dying cigarette hissing on the lips of its already-dead owner.21
All Quiet was bleak, very bleak, but it stimulated a boom in war novels and provoked enormous controversy, for its writing style, its “defeatism,” and its unpatriotic depiction of war. About a year after publication, by which time the book had sold close to a million copies and been translated (or was in the course of translation) into several languages, the Nazis turned on Remarque, making the book into a political issue because he had challenged the myth of individual heroism in armed conflict. The campaign was spearheaded by Goebbels himself and began when Hitler Youth disrupted the screening of the American film of the book in 1930.22
Remarque left Germany and eventually reached America. His bank account was seized, but he had wisely already moved most of his money, together with his collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings—Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, Renoir. All Quiet was burned in the notorious book-burning in Berlin in May 1933, but in some ways Remarque had the last laugh. In America he went to Hollywood, where he formed firm friendships with Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. He even acquired the title “King of Hollywood” because of the number of films made from his books, including The Road Back, Three Comrades, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Heaven Has No Favorites, and Shadows in Paradise. For Remarque, in these books nothing endures—each individual is alone, there will never be any clear answers to the problems and mysteries that trouble us; life may have its moments of extreme beauty and even happiness, but that is all they are, moments. Remarque said he believed that human nature in Germany was especially bleak and that it had been so since Goethe and Faust.23
A DISAPPEARING HOMELAND WHERE ONLY THE CHILDREN ARE INNOCENT
While we may attach more importance now to completed or fully realized books, at the time of the Weimar Republic, two writers in Germany made more of a name for themselves from more traditionally ephemeral skills—satirical squibs in newspapers and magazines, songs and skits for cabaret, pointed book reviews, savage poetry, and whimsical—and not so whimsical—newspaper columns. In Berlin, in their way, Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) and Erich Kästner (1899–1974) were the equivalent of Karl Kraus in Vienna. They form a bridge between the full-time authors considered above and the full-time dramatists, considered next.
Both of them filled almost entire magazines (again like Kraus) using many noms-de-plume, both were much influenced by their mothers (though Tucholsky’s relationship was strained), and both were turned into pacifists by their experiences in World War I.
In their writings, however, both were extremely combative. Tucholsky, born in Berlin but brought up in Stettin (now in Poland) was precocious, poking fun at Kaiser Wilhelm’s taste in art when he was just seventeen. At twenty-three, he started writing for the theater magazine Die Schonbühne, later renamed Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), which he was subsequently to edit, and which under him became one of the most colorful Weimar journals. Tucholsky wrote all manner of articles—poetry, book reviews, lead articles, aphorisms (“Either you read a woman or you embrace a book”), even court reports—in the course of which he denounced the military, the judiciary, the censor, the bourgeoisie, and in particular the series of political murders carried out by the conservative revolutionaries, which he felt were inciting the “mob” in Germany into a mood where only the National Socialists would profit.
He badly wanted the Weimar Republic to succeed but, as Erich Kästner was to remark, Tucholsky was a “little, fat Berliner” who sought to “prevent a catastrophe with his typewriter.” In 1924 he became Paris correspondent (and coeditor) of Die Weltbühne, paralleling the exile, and Francophilia, of his idol and fellow Jew, Heinrich Heine. From France he eyed Germany—and its changes—no less sharply, so much so that he was several times sued by victims who judged they had been libeled in his attacks.
His work culminated in Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, bitter social criticism, illustrated by John Heartfield, in 1929, which he nonetheless claimed was a work of love for his disappearing homeland. “They are preparing to head towards the Third Reich,” he wrote prophetically.
His typewriter was less effective than he hoped, and in 1930 he moved permanently to Sweden. Die Weltbühne itself had come under increasing fire. Carl von Ossietsky, who had replaced Tucholsky as editor, had run an investigation in the periodical revealing the Reichswehr’s illegal air rearmament and been imprisoned. Although he considered it, Tucholsky didn’t return to Germany to support Ossietsky, and always regretted this failure (he had himself been indicted for writing a piece in which he declared that “soldiers are murderers”). He never believed—as others did—that Hitler’s regime would disintegrat
e and, weakened by chronic sinusitis, he took an overdose of sleeping pills in December 1935. Before his death he had campaigned for Ossietsky to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, a campaign that was successful, but only a year after Tucholsky’s suicide.
Kästner was born in Dresden, the son of a saddle maker and a hair stylist. He found his military training very brutal (he was only fifteen when World War I broke out), much preferring history, philosophy, literature, and theater, which he studied at the University of Leipzig after the war. He became a journalist on the Neue Leipziger Zeitung, using several pseudonyms, but was in Berlin from 1927, publishing poems, articles, and reviews in a variety of outlets, including the respected Vossische Zeitung and Die Weltbühne. He became a leading figure in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement which, despite its sober style, was a satirical force in Weimar.
The work for which he is most well known is Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives; 1928), which sold 2 million copies in Germany alone and set up a genre of children’s detective stories. (R. W. Last described Kästner as “one of the greatest writers for children of all times.”) But he wrote for adults too, to such effect that his works were banned in 1933 and burned along with those of Brecht, Joyce, Hemingway, and the Mann brothers. He was twice arrested by the Gestapo but stayed in Germany where he was eventually banned from writing.
Fabian, his best known work for adults, was originally titled Der Gang vor die Hunde (Going to the Dogs) and surprised many who only knew him through his Emil stories. Published in 1931, the novel is set in Berlin: “In the east resides crime, in the centre swindling, in the north misery, in the west lechery, and to all points of the compass destruction lurks.” Fabian is employed as an advertising copywriter by a cigarette company, charged with conceiving slogans to perpetuate a corrupt, disabling system. Loose sexuality, fetid family relationships, and unemployment come together in a pessimistic satire condemning the Germany that would allow Hitler’s rise, a world where, taking Fabian and Emil together, only the children are innocent.
At the same time Kästner breathed new life into poetry, much of which appeared in cabaret, becoming known as “public poetry,” holding up a mirror to the age:
Was man auch baut—es werden stets Kasernen
Whatever is built—always turns into barracks.
The fact that Kästner wrote in many different forms was a reflection of his understanding that the situation in Weimar Germany was urgent. He was less interested in creating “art” than in having an effect on his readers. What he said about Tucholsky was equally true of himself: he wanted to prevent the cataclysm he saw coming with his typewriter. Although he (and Tucholsky) failed in that, as Clive James has said, the journalists in Weimar Germany nevertheless enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the “stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flying thesis.”
A NEW GRAMMAR FOR MUSIC
Edgar Vincent, Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an “epoch of splendour” in the city’s cultural life. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theaters providing, according to one observer, “unparalleled mental alertness.” It was also a golden age for political cabaret, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theater, Franz Lehar’s operettas, jazz, and Josephine Baker, though Harry, Count Kessler, in his diary, says he found her unerotic even when naked (he was homosexual).
Among this concatenation of talent, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called “a new way of musical organisation.” Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, announced he had discovered “something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.”24 This was what became known as “serial music.” Serialism is not so much a style as a “new grammar” for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalizing the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal center, as in traditional music with a key. Its melodic line was often jerky, with great leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Huge variations were possible under the new system—including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. Rudolf Serkin spoke for many when he said he loved Schoenberg the man “but I could not love his music.”25
The first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Alban Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas, Woyzeck and the “stately but brutal” Lulu, have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on Woyzeck, which was based on the short unfinished play by Georg Büchner (see Chapter 14), in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin.26 Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of Romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and Woyzeck is very rich in moods and forms—rondo, lullaby, a military march, each character vividly drawn.27 The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after “an unprecedented series of rehearsals,” but even so the opera created a furor. It was labeled “degenerate,” and the critic for Deutsche Zeitung wrote, “We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.” Yet it received “ovation after ovation,” and other European opera houses clamored to stage it. Schoenberg was jealous.28
Lulu is in some ways the reverse of Woyzeck. Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress “who ruins all she touches.” Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind (see Chapter 27), this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the “evangelist of a new century,” killed by the man who fears her. The opera’s setting was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.
Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film, and Charlie Chaplin in particular. Brecht was always fascinated by America and American ideas—jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later.29
Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he dropped) grew up in Augsburg as a self-confident and even “ruthless” child with, according to one observer, the “watchful eyes of a raccoon.”30 Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to “impose himself” on others, “smelling unmistakably of revolution.” He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart Hauptmann, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who “looked like a tadpole,” Peter Lorre. In his twenties Brecht gravitated toward theater, Marxism, and Berlin.
War themes were not popular in the theater in Weimar Germany, and Brecht’s early works, like Baal, steered well clear, earning him a reputation among the avant garde.31 But it was with Die Dreigrosch
enoper (The Threepenny Opera) that he first found real fame. This was based on a 1728 ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay, which had been revived in 1920 by Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. John Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, but after Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht, he cleverly moved the action to Victorian times—nearer home—and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image.32
Rehearsals were disastrous. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. The first night did not start well. The barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function, and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse, though “orchestra” is putting it a bit strongly—the show was scored for seven musicians playing twenty-three different instruments).33 But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown, reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, “It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the nouveau riches.” Another reason for the show’s success was the fashion in Germany at the time for Zeitoper, opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage (Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry; Jonny spielt auf, by Ernst Krenek; Max Brandt’s Maschinist Hopkins; and Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen.
