Berlin 1936 Page 14

  Giese’s hands are bound behind his back as he stands in the yard of the court. A Catholic priest approaches, murmurs a short prayer and administers absolution. Then an officer of the court reads out the judge’s verdict and issues the command: “Executioner, do your duty!” Everything else happens swiftly. The executioner’s assistants seize Giese by the arms and shoulders, march him to the chopping block and strap him to it. A few seconds later, the executioner’s ax falls and severs Giese’s head from his body. In Berlin, day 12 of the Olympics is getting underway, and Hans Eduard Giese is dead.

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “Today in Bonn, the child kidnapper Giese has been executed. In light of the Olympics, the German press service report about this incident should not be blown into something big. Commentary is to be avoided.”

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  Hannes Trautloft, Max von Hoyos and the other German legionnaires have left Cádiz and have arrived in Seville, where, at the nearby Tablada Airport, they reassemble the airplanes they’ve brought with them. Temperatures reach 40°C (104°F) or more in the shade at this time of year in Andalusia, so it’s not surprising that the reassembly procedure takes longer than anticipated. During the day, you can hardly move outside. Only when the sun begins to set do things get somewhat more pleasant. Unsuitable tools also slow down the work, and to make things worse, many of the German soldiers aren’t used to Mediterranean food and spend more time on the toilet than in the airplane hangars. The Spaniards take it easy in the midday heat, which their guests from Alemania interpret as a lack of work ethic. The two groups have trouble communicating, and the mood is constantly threatening to turn sour.

  “We’ve learned more about our mission and aren’t very pleased,” writes Trautloft in his diary. “We are to instruct Spanish pilots on how to fly our warplanes.” Trautloft is very disappointed—he was hoping to fly the planes himself. But Hitler has given the Germans strict orders not to actively participate in any fighting. Not yet at least. Goebbels confides in his diary: “The Führer would like to intervene in Spain. But the situation’s not ripe. Maybe the time will come. First we need to bring the Olympics to a happy conclusion.”

  In the meantime, both the Spanish putschists and the Republicans have launched brutal attacks on one another. Thousands of people have been tortured and murdered. At first the German press restrained itself, but as the Olympics approach their conclusion, the newspapers publish more and more articles about real and purported Republican atrocities. The reporting is completely biased. General Franco isn’t exactly treating his adversaries with kid gloves, but German readers don’t learn anything about that. Instead, they’re given copious accounts of the “bestial horrors” meted out by the Spanish government in the name of promoting Bolshevism. “Every morning more executions,” reads one headline. “Seventy soldiers executed in a bullfighting arena.” The reports are often based on nothing more than word of mouth and cannot be confirmed, but that doesn’t stop Goebbels from passing on hearsay as fact. Many of the atrocities are described as taking place in churches and monasteries. There are reports of nuns being raped in public or having their breasts cut off by the “Reds,” while monks are made to dance until they collapse from exhaustion. Furthermore, there are accounts of men, women and children being crucified in places of worship, and priests being burned alive on pyres made of wooden pews.

  True or not, such horror stories are very useful to the propaganda minister. Goebbels has no love for priests, monks and nuns, but he knows only too well how a mixture of sex and violence can influence popular opinion. Sadistic treatment of innocent members of the clergy represents a level of moral depravity with which Goebbels hopes to whip up fear of Bolshevists in his own country. What he’s really interested in is gradually preparing the German people for a war against the Soviet Union.

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “Once again a magazine has published an inappropriate article on the race problem, an excerpt from a book entitled Sport and Race, which effectively argues that only Teutons have a chance to win the decathlon. Racial science has certainly not been enriched by this publication, but it has irritated some of our Olympic guests. Thus the publication was highly inappropriate and should be censured…By the way, it is also inappropriate to call peoples ‘exotic’ in the context of the Olympic Games. The word is to be avoided, particularly as we are hosting the Games under the motto of Olympic equality for all nations.”

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  Germans drink too much alcohol—at least that’s what Dr. Theo Gläss thinks. Every day Gläss travels from his home in the suburb of Britz to Linienstrasse in the city center to renew his battle against intoxicants. The 40-year-old is the chief executive of the German Order of Good Templars, a self-help organization originally from the United States that preaches abstinence. With some 32,000 members in 1,150 local chapters, the Good Templars are the largest but not the only group of their kind. In 1936 there are more than twenty anti-alcohol groups, including the German Association for the Fight against the African Brandy Trade, the German League of Abstinent Pastors and the Evangelical Reich Working Community for the Fight against Alcohol Affliction.

  Alcoholism in the Third Reich is considered neither a disease nor a personal weakness: as Gläss called it in one of his pamphlets, dependence on alcohol is nothing short of “a crime against national health” and “terrible enemy of our race.” It’s no wonder that Gläss approves of the compulsory sterilization of alcoholics under the Law for the Protection against Genetically Ill Descendants.

  How much do Germans really drink during the Olympic year of 1936? The fact is that, after hitting a low in 1930, alcohol consumption is on the rise. In 1933, 6 million bottles of sparkling wine were consumed. By 1936 that figure is 14.2 million bottles. Brandy consumption rose over this period from 15 to 20 million gallons, while beer drinking went up from 898 million to 1 billion gallons. Is the Third Reich a nation of drunks? In isolation, the figures might support that notion, but on closer examination, the amounts drunk in 1936 don’t measure up to those further in the past. In 1908, Germans drank 68.7 million gallons of brandy, while in 1919 almost 16 million bottles of sparkling wine were sold in German shops. German beer consumption was highest in 1901, when 1.8 billion gallons were drunk. In other words, more alcohol was consumed in the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic than in Nazi Germany.

  Nonetheless, it’s also true that Germans’ increasing consumption of alcohol is an expression of a deep-seated unease. In a summer issue of the monthly Germany Reports, a magazine published by the Social Democratic Party in exile in Prague, one author mentions for the first time a “particular mood of the moment” in Germany. “There’s more beer being drunk than in the Weimar Republic,” reports an observer from Bavaria. “In small pubs, you encounter more and more little groups of workers drinking.” The worst thing, the anonymous observer writes, is that young people are being systematically depoliticized by ritualized celebrations and drinking. “And the older people?” the observer asks. “You see many of them sitting in pubs buying young people beer, and then trotting out all of their tired old war stories. All the suffering of war has been forgotten, and they bask in the enthusiasm for their heroic deeds of yesteryear in the glowing eyes of adventure-seeking youngsters.” The author’s prognosis for the future is bleak. “The basic mood of today’s youth, both in the country and the city, is that there’s nothing like being a soldier.”

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  The post office at Lietzenburger Strasse 235. It’s early afternoon when Mascha Kaléko arrives to pick up her daily love letter. The sender is Chemjo Vinaver. He’s twelve years older than Kaléko and works as a musicologist and a conductor. The two of them have crossed paths a number of times in the past few years: in the theater, in the Romanisches Café, which Kaléko frequents, at evening lectures or simply on the street. Once they met in front of Kaléko’s house. It wa
s raining cats and dogs, and she was on her way to an appointment. What terrible weather, Vinaver was about to say, trying to start a conversation, but Kaléko had no time and hopped away through the puddles. Years later, Vinaver will recall that this and other chance meetings weren’t as accidental as they may have seemed. In fact he followed Kaléko sometimes just to get a glimpse of her, although he didn’t dare confess his feelings because Kaléko was married. But at some point in 1935, a spark must have been ignited between the two of them. Mrs. Kaléko and Mr. Vinaver became lovers.

  Kaléko suffers from the situation, from all the hiding, the keeping of secrets and her betrayal of her husband, Saul. The two have a relatively modern, open relationship, but Mascha doesn’t want to cheat on him. Once Saul wrote her the lines

  I don’t care if you are true

  But I don’t want to lose you.

  Be as untrue as you want to be.

  But don’t you ever tell me.

  Mascha answered with a poem entitled “For Someone,” which read:

  The others are the deep blue sea

  But you are the port.

  Believe me, you can be at peace.

  It’s you I steer toward.

  But such mutual declarations of affection are ringing ever hollower. Less than two weeks ago, on 31 July 1936, Mascha and Saul Kaléko celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary, and Mascha feels very sad. The more she visits the post office, the more clearly she realizes that she doesn’t love Saul anymore, and probably never did. And as if that weren’t enough, something she’s suspected has recently been confirmed: she’s pregnant with Vinaver’s child. Mascha doesn’t have the strength to tell Saul the truth. Instead, she prefers to keep living a double life, with the post office on Lietzenburger Strasse as a relay station. Saul believes he’s the father. He’s understandably thrilled and begins making plans for the future. The flat is too small for a child, he decides. It would be best to move before the birth. No sooner has the decision been made than he finds a place—a larger flat on nearby Bleibtreustrasse in the Charlottenburg district. He rents it for Mascha and himself from October.

  Mascha sits in the post office, holding Vinaver’s latest letter in her hands and staring at the linoleum. Her eyes seem to fix on a single point in the gray floor covering, motionless, but in truth Mascha is staring into nothingness. Her future is as devoid of color as the ground beneath her feet. She knows that she doesn’t want to live with Saul and is afraid that as a Jew she soon won’t be able to live in Germany anymore. “I have suffered more than humanly possible in the last two years,” she will recall in 1938. While Mascha sits there, lost to the world, a number of people enter and leave the post office. When the door opens, the noise from the street fills the room. In front of the building a newspaper boy calls out the headlines of the official Olympic paper. Snatches can be made out. “Great day for Japan’s swimmers,” the boy cries. “Two gold medals.” Etcetera, etcetera. The Olympic Games? Mascha Kaléko doesn’t care a whit about them. She has much bigger things to worry about.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “A division director of the German Labor Front reported that in the Siechen Bar on Behrenstrasse a German woman from a white-collar background made a disparaging remark to an Olympics guest about the Führer and the state.”

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  At the Schauspielhaus theater on Gendarmenmarkt square tonight, they are putting on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The cast is first-rate: Gustaf Gründgens is playing Hamlet, Hermine Körner, Queen Gertrude, and Käthe Gold, Ophelia. The performance is part of the cultural program accompanying the Olympic Games, and many international guests are expected. The play has naturally been sold out for weeks, and Gründgens is nervous. It’s by no means a given that the 36-year-old actor will be allowed to take the stage tonight. Until recently, he seemed to be headed for disaster. Gründgens, who’s considered politically unreliable and is also homosexual, is a thorn in the side of influential circles around the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. It’s no secret among elevated party members that Thomas Mann’s unloved former son-in-law is drawn to the same sex. “The Führer doesn’t like Gustaf Gründgens,” notes Goebbels. “He’s too unmasculine for him.” Hitler knows best. But Gründgens has a powerful patron in Hermann Göring, who is in charge of the Prussian State Theater. As different as Göring and Gründgens are, they share a personal affinity. “His relationship to Göring was one of genuine admiration, even friendship,” recalled one contemporary of the actor. “Toward all other leading Nazis he had a skeptical and ironic attitude, which in the case of Streicher, Ley and most definitely Himmler, turned into disregard, even hatred.” In the autumn of 1934, Göring appointed his protégé the director of the State Theater and granted him numerous privileges. That sticks in the craw of Rosenberg and his clique.

  In the months before the Olympics, Gründgens’ detractors sensed that their chance was at hand. In early May the Völkischer Beobachter ran a malicious attack on the actor’s homosexuality. It’s scarcely credible that this journalistic assault could have been printed without Rosenberg’s approval. After all, he’s the editor-in-chief of the Nazi daily. Waldemar Hartmann, the author of the article, was very clever in any case, jabbing at Gründgens’s weak spot without actually naming it. With false guilelessness, Hartmann warned his readers against seeing Hamlet as a sixteenth-century Dorian Gray. The implications were obvious, and the attack hit its mark. Gründgens felt directly threatened by the reference to the homosexual dandy Oscar Wilde and his most famous novelistic hero.

  Without doubt, Gründgens’ situation is perilous. In 1934, his fellow actor Kurt von Ruffin was found guilty of homosexuality and sentenced to nine months in the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Saxony, where he suffered terribly. The fate of Bruno Balz, the well-known poet and popular music lyricist, who was confined for eight months in the Plötzensee concentration camp, was no better. After he was released, Balz quickly had to marry a blond peasant woman from Pomerania. Untold thousands of homosexuals are being sent to camps, mistreated and murdered. What if the regime doesn’t shy away from arresting the great Gustaf Gründgens?

  Gründgens immediately flees to friends of his in Basel. At the same time, Göring receives a letter from the actor, informing him in no uncertain terms that he has emigrated. Most probably, Gründgens has no intention of leaving Germany forever: he’s just creating some drama. The writer Carl Zuckmayer considers the actor an inveterate gambler with an intrinsic desire to take risks. “His relationship to power is thoroughly cynical,” Zuckmayer writes, “and he thus always puts himself in danger.” Just before the start of the Olympic Games, Gründgens’s tactics pay off. Göring calls his favorite actor in Switzerland to assure him of his safety, promising him a dizzying rise in salary and the arrest of Waldemar Hartmann. Once Gründgens returns to Berlin, Göring appoints him a Prussian state councilor—a politically empty title that does, however, carry immunity from legal prosecution. Gründgens has won his own personal test of strength.

  Just to be on the safe side, Gründgens proposes marriage to his fellow actress Marianne Hoppe, who is ten years his junior. It’s unclear whether the proposal comes at Göring’s insistence, but Gründgens and Hoppe truly do feel a deep personal affection for one another. “There was something about Gustaf,” Hoppe will later recall. “He was really a friend you could rely upon.” The wedding takes place in late July 1936. Berliners joke: “Hoppe and Gründgens / Won’t have any children / And if Hoppe has some children / They sure won’t be from Gründgens.”

  Having overcome the threat to his own person, you’d have thought that Gründgens would play it safe and avoid provoking his adversaries. But he can’t resist playing with fire. During tonight’s performance of Hamlet, he takes center stage, faces the audience and starts the famous sentence: “Man delights not me…” He suddenly pauses, and the audience holds its breath. You can hear a pin drop. What is he trying to do? Gründgens scans the rows of seats as if h
e is trying to look each audience member directly in the eye. After a few seconds, he continues: “…no, nor Woman neither.” The effect is huge. When the curtain comes down shortly after 11 p.m., the actors receive wave upon wave of ovations.

  In the audience is 16-year-old student Marcel Reich, who under the name Marcel Reich-Ranicki will go on to become West Germany’s most influential literary critic. As he will remember Gründgens’ performance: “He particularly stressed Hamlet’s words ‘the time is out of joint’ and ‘Denmark is a prison’—or at least it seemed that way to me. Could the Nazis’ cultural leaders and journalists fail to notice that this Hamlet could also be understood as a political manifesto, as a protest against tyranny in Germany? No, of course not.”

  Aenne Maenz’s bar on Augsburger Strasse is a favorite among intellectuals and artists: “Maenz agitat molem!” Credit 13

  Thursday, 13 August 1936

  REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: Mostly cloudy, isolated showers and somewhat cool, with westerly breezes. Highs of 20°C.