Berlin 1936 Read online

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  At 11 a.m. the venerable Prussian Academy of Sciences is welcoming a prominent visitor. Sven Hedin, the famous Swedish explorer and traveler, is scheduled to hold a talk at the invitation of the Olympic Organizing Committee. Originally, scholars from each of the continents taking part in the Games were supposed to speak, but this plan was canceled early on. The only speaker left is Hedin, who is considered a friend to Germany and admirer of Hitler. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry has declared the visit by the 71-year-old to be a sensation. Yesterday the aging explorer gave a rousing address to “the youth of the world” at the Olympic Stadium during a break in the competition. His topic today, however, is considerably less spectacular: the role of the horse in Asian history. Hitler and Goebbels politely excuse themselves for not being able to attend—important commitments have got in the way. At the end of Hedin’s lengthy lecture, Theodor Lewald makes an unintentionally funny remark. He is certain, he tells the visitor from Sweden, that in 2,000 years people will still remember Hedin’s talk to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

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  Austria’s ambassador to Germany, Stephan Tauschitz, writes to the state secretary for foreign affairs in Vienna: “The leader of the Austrian team, Baron Seyffertitz, is unhappy about the athletes being overly pampered in the Olympic Village. Their every wish—perhaps without intent—is being read from their faces.”

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  That morning, Thomas Wolfe drinks his first beer in Café Bristol. It won’t be his last drink of the day. He prefers beer in the morning, switches to white wine over lunch, takes whisky during the afternoon and goes back to white wine in the evening. But sometimes he alters the sequence. It’s easy to think that Wolfe has a drinking problem, but he doesn’t look at it that way. As he sees it, he drinks purely to celebrate life. Since last year, he knows a number of Berlin cafés, restaurants and bars, which he visits regularly. Of the city’s cafés, Wolfe loves the Bristol above all. It’s only a few hundred yards from his hotel and has a large terrace giving out onto the street. For Wolfe, it’s like sitting in a theater box with a perfect view of the action on stage, and the piece being performed is “Kurfürstendamm in Summer.” Every minute, hundreds of people pass the Bristol’s terrace, coming from the left and the right, mingling, avoiding one another and stopping. There are the young and the old, women with prams, businessmen hurrying to appointments, Hitler Youths, flâneurs and countless tourists from every country under the sun.

  For the duration of the Games, loudspeakers have been mounted in the trees lining Kurfürstendamm so that people can follow the action in the Olympic Stadium. As Wolfe sits on the Bristol’s terrace and drinks his beer, it’s as though the trees were talking to him. The traffic noise and the murmurings of passersby merge with a tinny voice bringing people up to date on preliminary, intermediate and final races, spitting out names of athletes all the while. The activity on Kurfürstendamm and the talking branches exercise a special magic that Wolfe cannot resist.

  He is being joined now by Heinz Ledig. Rowohlt has charged his son and employee with taking care of the publisher’s American visitor during the Games. Rowohlt’s solicitousness is pragmatic. Wolfe may love Germany with a passion, but his knowledge of the language is limited. His “taxi driver’s German,” as he calls it, is sufficient to order a drink or to give directions in a cab, but nothing more. Heinz speaks good English, albeit with a strong accent that Wolfe can imitate to comic effect: “Zis little man with hiss pipe—do you not s’ink it str-a-a-nge?”

  But Ledig is more than just Wolfe’s interpreter. The two men met the previous year and quickly struck up a friendship, although on the face of it they’re complete opposites. On the one hand, there’s Wolfe, a physical giant with boundless energy and an unquenchable thirst for life. On the other, there’s Ledig, eight years Wolfe’s junior, spindly, shy and rather nondescript. But it’s precisely their differences that bring the two men together. When Wolfe and Ledig sit in the Café Bristol, stroll down Kurfürstendamm, visit a restaurant or drink their way through Berlin at night, they’re like two very different brothers.

  In the bustle in front of the Café Bristol, Ledig spots a newspaper boy. “Tageblatt…get your Berliner Tageblatt,” the kid cries, waving a copy of the paper in the air. Like a fishwife hawking her wares at a market, the boy reads out the front-page headlines: “Six gold medals. Four for the U.S., one for Germany, one for Italy! The Führer again present in the stadium.” Ledig motions for the boy. “One Tageblatt, please.” “That will be 20 pfennigs, sir.” Ledig opens the paper, excitedly flipping through the pages until he finds the interview with Wolfe. He scans the article. The anecdote about Wolfe’s visit to the Oktoberfest is there, as is his praise of German introspection. Very nice, thinks Ledig, every inch a publisher. The article is good advertising for the Rowohlt author and his books. Satisfied, Ledig folds up the paper and slides it over to Wolfe. But the writer isn’t interested in the interview and puts the paper in his jacket pocket without a word. Wolfe would rather listen to the trees. In any case, he hasn’t got much time. That afternoon, Wolfe has an appointment in the Olympic Stadium.

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  At 3 p.m. the finals of the women’s fencing begin. Each of the eight athletes who qualified for the last round of the competition face one another—there are seven bouts in all. With six wins and one loss, Hungary’s Ilona Schacherer-Elek is at the head of the pack. But one of the most intriguing bouts is still to come: Germany’s Helene Mayer against Austria’s Ellen Preis. In the Domed Hall, you can hear a pin drop. The competition’s outcome is still uncertain. If Mayer wins, she’ll draw level with Schacherer-Elek, and there will be a tie-breaker. If Preis wins, the Hungarian will take the gold medal. Eighteen years after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Habsburg monarchy is briefly reborn in the sporting arena. The Austrian Preis beats Mayer, helping the athlete from Budapest to top honors. “Helene Mayer lost the decisive bout,” the Olympia-Zeitung newspaper writes. “Oh well, silver for Germany is nothing to turn your nose up at.” Indeed, second place is perfectly respectable. But was the medal really won for Germany?

  Many years ago, Helene Mayer was one of Germany’s top fencing prospects, winning the first of many gold medals at the 1925 German championships at the age of 14, and finishing first every year between then and 1930. In 1928, she won her first Olympic gold medal at the Amsterdam Summer Games. Two years later she enrolled at the University of Frankfurt and began studying law. When her sporting days are over, she once said in an interview, she wants to become a diplomat. By that point Helene Mayer is already a star. She possesses something you can neither buy nor learn: charisma. You can feel it when she enters the sports arena. And in her white fencing outfit, her hair done up in fashionable blond plaits, she also looks stunning.

  For a long time, Mayer is the pride of Germany. She’s presented with the Honorary Prize of the Reich Government over tea by German President Paul von Hindenburg. But then comes 30 January 1933. Within less than three months, the fencing club of Mayer’s hometown of Offenbach strikes her name from its rolls. According to the ideology of the new regime, Helene Mayer is a “half-Jew.” She learns of her club’s decision in California, where she has a scholarship as an exchange student. She decides not to return to Germany, and at her college in Oakland she is given an unexpected career opportunity. In the autumn of 1934 she begins teaching German and fencing.

  That could have been the end of the story. Helene Mayer could have stayed in the United States, received American citizenship and continued her career under the Stars and Stripes. But things turned out differently.

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  In Venice, Mitja Nikisch says farewell to life. Once upon a time in Berlin, Mitja was a star who performed with his dance orchestra in the most elegant clubs in the city. Under normal circumstances, he would be enjoying a series of triumphant engagements in the German
capital during the Olympics. But what’s normal when Adolf Hitler is Reich chancellor and you yourself are dying?

  Mitja is the son of Arthur Nikisch, the former main conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Under his father’s strict gaze, Mitja was trained as a pianist at the Leipzig Conservatory. His debut in 1917 at the age of 18 with the Berlin Philharmonic, with his father wielding the baton, marked the beginning of a meteoric career. Mitja played with all the great musicians of his time. His speciality was the grand works for piano—the concertos of Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Many a female heart melted when the young man with his aristocratic good looks and dreamy, melancholy eyes took to the stage.

  In the mid-1920s, Mitja discovered jazz and enjoyed a run of success with the Mitja Nikisch Dance Orchestra. For many fans, he was Berlin’s best bandleader in the early 1930s. But the group fell apart when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Many of the members were Jews, who were forced to emigrate. Mitja returned to playing the piano, hoping to pick up where he had left off with his career as a concert performer. Initially, things looked good. In December 1933, Mitja played again for the first time with the Berlin Philharmonic. The conductor was none other than Wilhelm Furtwängler. A short time later, he and the orchestra recorded a Mozart piano concerto for Telefunken. His private life was also looking up. He had fallen in love with a woman from Moscow called Alexandra Mironova. Twelve years his junior, she had made a name for herself as a soubrette in Berlin’s Schillertheater under the pseudonym Barbara Diu. Mitja was utterly enamored, but he didn’t like his lover’s Russian name and called her Barbara instead. The two planned to get married. Then destiny intervened.

  On summer holiday in northern Italy, Mitja was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. He knew he didn’t have long to live, but nonetheless he began to compose a piano concerto. His illness released enormous amounts of energy, and working in an intoxicated frenzy, he devoted several hours a day to his magnum opus. The result is a 40-minute piece in three movements: andante et romanza, scherzo and fantasie pathétique. You don’t need much imagination to spot the biographical elements in this work.

  The introductory romanza is a love letter to Barbara, with the music coming in strings of gentle, contemplative pearls. In the scherzo the composer calls to mind his rich musical career and many triumphs. Lasting only four minutes, the movement is a musical recollection of an all-too-brief life. The concluding fantasie pathétique begins with cutting dissonance that can be interpreted as Mitja’s cancer diagnosis. What follows is a masterpiece of sorrow. At times, the music could hardly be any more downbeat before surging aggressively. At other times, it’s full of pained tenderness. Mitja’s desperation becomes palpable as chords come together to form cascades, seemingly asking: Why? Why me? A wild solo piano cadence introduces the finale. Kettledrum and snare drum provide the orchestra with an unrelenting beat, the cellos and violas intone a mysterious melody, and the piano joins the action with some arabesque figures. At this point in the score, Mitja wrote the word “maestoso.” The drums beat out the tempo as loudly as they can, there are layers upon layers of sound, and the music seems to march inexorably toward a dark ending. Here, the composer literally loses his composure.

  Today, Mitja Nikisch finishes his piano concerto and dies. He is 37 years old. In Berlin, the newspapers are full of reports about sporting achievements and tips for entertainment. The journalists won’t spare a single drop of ink for the death of the most gifted and best-known musician the city had before 1933. Barbara is in London on business when her fiancé passes away. When she returns to Venice, she’ll find the handwritten score of the piano concerto with the following dedication:

  For my wife Barbara Nikisch

  Pause for a bit, wanderer,

  I am home.

  In my sphere

  The stars shine bright.

  Think of me,

  You are only a guest

  On this earth,

  Where everything is in vain.

  Take your ease, pick a flower

  And continue on your way.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “The trains that arrived at 3:30 and 8:45 p.m. at Anhalter Station were subjected to a thorough search. No stickers or inflammatory pamphlets were found.”

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  “Afternoon. Stadium. Running and jumping events,” Goebbels records in his diary. “No rewards for us. I put that Riefenstahl woman in her place. She behaved indescribably badly. A hysterical woman. Nothing like a man, that’s for sure.” Leni Riefenstahl is directing the official film about the 1936 Olympic Summer Games. She was commissioned a year ago by Hitler himself to fulfill the duty of the host country, as per IOC stipulations, to capture the sporting event on celluloid. The 33-year-old Riefenstahl is Hitler’s go-to solution when he needs a film made. She has already shot three documentaries about Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg to the dictator’s great satisfaction and is practiced in the art of stylizing the Führer as a semidivine figure. The Olympic film will, of course, have to serve the interests of propaganda, but at the same time, with an eye toward viewers abroad, the political message shouldn’t be too transparent. Hitler wants the film to present the rest of the world with a seemingly objective picture of an open-minded, cosmopolitan and peaceful Germany. He’s given Riefenstahl a blank check to this end. No one—not even Propaganda Minister Goebbels—is allowed to interfere in the project. The jealous Goebbels naturally chafes under this restriction and keeps a sharp eye on the director.

  Riefenstahl will eventually receive the enormous sum of 2.8 million reichsmarks to shoot her film. She herself is initially paid 250,000 marks—a sum that will be increased to 400,000. To conceal the fact that the Reich government has commissioned and is paying for the film, a holding company called Olympiade-Film has been formed; its managing partners are Riefenstahl and her brother Heinz. Some 200 people, including 45 cameramen, are part of the film crew, and over the course of the Games they will shoot more than 400,000 yards of celluloid. Riefenstahl has towers constructed and foxholes dug in the Olympic Stadium to capture the action from unusual perspectives. A specially built catapult camera races on tracks alongside the sprinters, yielding unprecedented images. Riefenstahl also uses handheld cameras to get up close to the athletes. She ties other cameras to balloons to get aerial shots, employs underwater equipment for the swimming events and experiments with slow-motion footage.

  This gigantic amount of effort comes at a price that’s more than just financial. Riefenstahl’s cameramen often get in the way, hindering athletes and referees, and blocking the view for the general public and even the guests of honor with their massive equipment. Riefenstahl doesn’t care whether her spotlights and flashbulbs blind the sportsmen and -women and spook the horses in the equestrian events. On numerous occasions she and Goebbels quarrel loudly. The propaganda minister may claim to have read the director the riot act, but she doesn’t put up with any nonsense and fights back. Indeed, Riefenstahl seems to enjoy conflict. She wears long gray flannel trousers, a stylish blazer and a kind of jockey’s cap, making her look like a Hollywood star. Two photographers follow her every step; their only task is to capture images of her at work. Leni Riefenstahl knows what she’s doing.

  “Every now and then she’d sit down next to the Führer,” the Jewish journalist Bella Fromm will recall. “She had a curdled smile like on the cover of a glossy magazine, and her head was crowned by a halo of importance.” When the director isn’t ostentatiously posing at Hitler’s side, she runs from camera team to camera team, barking instructions and gesticulating wildly. The people who work for her grin and bear Riefenstahl’s vanity. Whenever she discovers photographers in the press section threatening to steal her show, she sends a messenger with one of her feared notes: “Leni Riefenstahl calls upon you to remain in your spot when you take images. Do not move around. If you ignore these instructions, your press pass will be revoked.” It’s no wonder that the director isn’t very popular in the Olympic
Stadium. Members of the audience seem to enjoy mocking her personal vanity. “Leni, Leni, show yourself,” they chant, only to sneer when the director poses and gives them a wave: “Boo, you old cow, you old cow.”

  The writer Carl Zuckmayer calls Riefenstahl the Reich’s “glacial crevasse” in reference to the fact that she originally made her name with films about mountain climbing and skiing. “In her defense, you must admit she’s no apostate,” Zuckmayer will write from American exile in 1943–44. “She always believed in Hitler as a savior. When he awarded her the Golden Laurel or something similar for her work on the Olympic film or one of the films about the Nuremberg Rallies, she nearly fainted from excitement. Although she didn’t succeed in collapsing into the Führer’s arms. Instead she sank to the ground at his feet, whereupon he, visibly disgusted, had to step over her and make his exit.”

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  Good things come in threes. Jesse Owens doesn’t doubt for a second that he’ll win his third gold medal. The final of the 200-meter race is set for 6 p.m. Owens only has two serious competitors in the discipline, Eulace Peacock and Ralph Metcalfe. Peacock is recovering from a thigh injury 3,500 miles away in New Jersey, while Metcalfe had failed to qualify for the event. So what could go wrong? Owens’s only concern is the weather. It’s already rather chilly early in the evening. When one of the race marshals checks the thermometer shortly before the race, it reads 13.3°C (55°F). The ground is also wet after a brief afternoon shower. Not the best conditions for the 200-meter race.