Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism. Carol Jr. Sicherman

Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman


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surliness, he dropped his reserve: “I remarked to a prosperous, well-fed and well-spatted fellow-traveller that the only really amiable frontier officials were the Austrians. He, being a Prussian, called them schlapp [spineless], I called them liebenswürdig [deserving love].”131 The Prussian said that the Austrians “had been rotten allies in the war,” but agreed that if the war had been fought with Austrian pastries–“Apfelstrudel, Kaiserschmarr[e]n, or whipped cream (Schlagobers)”–they would have triumphed.

      Three days later, Harry was in Berlin, “back at the old stand and open for business.” He was enraptured by the familiar scene:

      It is pleasant to see the yellow and brown & blue & brown Stadtbahn cars, the Zeitungsfahrer [newspaper distributor], the peddlers in boots, to hear street singing out of tune,…to see SA uniforms (they stand on street corners with red tin boxes with slots in them, jingling them for campaign contributions!)…

      How could it possibly be “pleasant” to see S.A. men? Surely the writer of these puerile words knew that the S.A. and the S.S. had been banned on 15 April and unbanned two months later, and that Nazis in S.S. uniforms had attended the first meeting of the Reichstag on 30 August. He seems to have turned a blind eye to these ominous developments, so thrilled was he “to eat bean soup with wurst, to be told at the PO on asking for some registered packages I sent from Italy: ‘Eengeschriebene Pakete? Aber so wat jibs nich.’”132 The packages weren’t there, the clerk told him in the Berlin dialect that Harry cherished. He equally enjoyed a visit to Paul Gottschalk’s, where Heinz joked and P.G. scolded him for not climbing the Alps.

      Paying attention to current events

      Harry’s Germanophilia, which turned S.A. men soliciting funds into part of a “pleasant” scene, was a triumph of wishful thinking. Already in March 1932, as Bella Fromm noted in her diary, “the brown plague” of S.A. Brown Shirts was spreading, with “gangs of roughnecks…painting swastikas and ‘we want Hitler’ signs on the streets and buildings.”133 Until events forced him to pay attention, Harry was less insistently aware of such details than Fromm, as shown in his responses to May Day, when demonstrations were always rife. His diary for May Day 1932 mentions an expedition with friends to Potsdam but not the demonstrations. On his second May Day, however, he went to Unter den Linden and photographed Nazi banners (at 5 pm, the crowds had thinned); that evening, he listened to Hitler’s speech on the radio. During his first year and a half in Germany, his diary and letters sometimes exhibit a self-involvement that dulled his response to what was going on before his own eyes. In November 1932, he failed to see the significance of a Berlin municipal transport strike during which a “united front of Red and Brown” caused chaos for several days at the time of the Reichstag election on 6 November (the alliance of Red Communists and Brown S.A. was not unusual).134 He did observe that the government-operated Stadtbahn was “unusually crowded,” because the rest of the system was shut down by the strike; but he wrote nothing about the strike as such.135 That the strike was not supported by labor unions and was indeed intended to break them and their SPD allies at the moment of the election, that there was considerable violence including several deaths, that the sponsors of the strike were radicals on the left and the right: all that went without comment in Harry’s diary and letters. That evening he saw three Schupos–police officers–standing “dark blue and substantial in the dim light of the lamp” at the corner near the Meyers’ building.136 It was the aesthetic qualities of the Schupos that struck him, not their possible connection with the strike.

      What matters for our purposes, of course, is not what Harry omitted from his diary and letters but what he included. From the beginning, he took verbal snapshots of the politico-social atmosphere, finding significance in seemingly small details. He explained why students had to show their university ID to get in each of the three university gates: “to keep political agitators who are not students out of the place.” He noticed streets full of beggars and hardly a block “without moving vans, and no house without a for rent sign,” concluding: “Anybody looking for the end of an epoch could find material in Berlin.” In the Meyers’ building, three of the seventeen or eighteen apartments were vacant. Lutz Gottschalk, an idealistic teenager, was so eager to give money to the poor when the government curtailed unemployment relief that his father refused to give him any. The 603,000 unemployed people in Berlin in 1932 constituted over 10% of the national total.137

      News sources are a constant subject of Harry’s diaries and letters. German newspapers, his major source of (mis)information, were ill informed and full of errors and misinterpretations. He considered only three German papers reliable for European news: the Vossische Zeitung; the august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; and the Berliner Tageblatt.138 To obtain breadth of coverage, he read–at first occasionally, and later obsessively–English and Continental papers. He liked the ironic toughness of a French columnist who went by the name of Pertinax, who “hoped Hitler would take the helm in Germany because then it would show the world how much of Germany’s pretended peacefulness was real.” As an American, he was interested in coverage of the United States. When Calvin Coolidge died, he read obituaries in three German papers and the Milan paper the Corriere della Sera: “The Corriere struck a far better note than the others–less self-conscious, less foreign.” Perhaps Italians were “more bound to the U.S.,…because in the waves of immigration, the last great surge came in great measure from Italy, thus creating personal ties and new sympathies.” For accuracy, he turned to two American news magazines, the Nation and the New Republic. They gave him “a feeling of pride,” for they were “critical, independent of parties, well written, and with wide interests.” One day, he went to the office of the Manchester Guardian, hoping to speak with their correspondent, Hermann Framm, who was out.139

      Newspapers enabled Harry to construct an extensive account of a political crisis in the last two weeks of May 1932: “Today was not devoted to history–the history of a generation ago or centuries ago–but to the history of yesterday and the short time before that.”140 That history was complicated by the problem of sources. Getting “a coherent idea of a situation” from newspapers, he later wrote, was “like estimating the length of a sausage while it is coming link by link from the machine.”141 But it was all he had. Because “the German ones are notoriously partisan, or taciturn, or full of gaps,” he found information by reading twenty-one foreign papers as well as German ones: “papers of all parties in Germany, papers from Switzerland, England, and France. (And of course the Paris Herald, which can be called American).” By scouring the foreign press and “read[ing] between the lines” of the German papers, he inferred “the names of the people most German papers avoid naming” and pieced together what had happened. The issue was an emergency decree being constructed by the cabinet for the signature of President Hindenburg, who had never been “a brilliant intellect” and now, at eighty-five, was increasingly feeble. What interested Harry was the way Hindenburg was manipulated. By the time the political crisis was over, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had resigned, along with the entire cabinet. General Wilhelm Groener, the Minister of the Interior and Defense, who had banned demonstrations by the S.A. and the S.S. a month or so earlier, was one of the losers; his ouster was engineered by his former protegee, General Kurt von Schleicher, who succeeded him as Minister of Defense. After conferring with party leaders and spending “an unusually long time” with Hitler, Hindenburg named a new chancellor–Franz von Papen, a right-winger and former military attaché in Washington. Among the “various bits of contradiction, nonsense, absurdity, and rhetoric” that littered the political landscape, some commentators said that Hindenburg fired Brüning “because he was not severe enough against the Nazis,” while others said it was “because he was too severe against them.” Harry expected that with Papen as chancellor, the Nazis would get what they wanted, and they did: a revocation of the S.A.-S.S. ban, and new elections for the Reichstag on 31 July. In the weeks following the unbanning, Nazis killed ninety-nine people, most of them in Berlin.142

      Observing events from a cool distance, Harry listened to Hitler on the radio and attended controversial films. He noted Hitler’s plan for a radio address on 14 June, the first time that the Nazis had breached “the democratic defense of the German democracy.” He attended a film created by Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eissler, and others that had been “3 times forbidden by censor.”


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