Captain, my Captain

Köpenick's memorial to its Captain

Picture this.  In 1906 a man named Wilhelm Voigt, a life-long petty criminal, was released from his latest term of imprisonment.  Now in his late fifties he’s had enough of his former life.  He wants to go straight.  He wants a job.  He wants a place to live.  But Wilhelm Voigt is invisible.  He has no identity papers.  Without identity papers he cannot get a residence permit.  Without a residence permit he cannot get a job.  Without a job he cannot get a residence permit, and so on in an endless vortex.  He is lost, a little like the Flying Dutchman, seemingly doomed forever to be tossed around on waves of bureaucratic idiocy. 

In one final attempt to break to break the bars of the prison outside prison, he dons a military uniform, that of a captain.  As if by magic he ceases to be invisible.  The clothes have made the man.  He orders some passing troops to fall in, marching them to the town hall, hoping to trace his missing papers.   

On the way he stops at the police station, there ordering the officers to ‘care for law and order’ by preventing all telephone calls to the capital for the next hour.  In the town hall both the mayor and the treasurer are arrested for ‘crooked bookkeeping’.  The Captain orders the safe to be opened.  When the mayor asks for a warrant he points to the bayonets of his soldiers, saying ‘These are my authority’, a line in any other country in the world that would have exposed him as a fake.  The safe is opened and the mayor relieved of a fairly large amount of cash.  A receipt is provided, of course.  After all, this is a society built of paper. 

I know this seems like a fairy story but it really happened.  You may very well have guessed where from the name of the Captain.  Yes, this is Germany, the Germany of Kaiser Bill, Prussia, to be precise, a place obsessed with uniforms and tied tight in regulations, a place where to hear is to obey, a place where everyone only obeys orders.  The little drama took place in the town of Köpenick to the east of Berlin, from which Voigt was ever after known as the Captain of Köpenick. 

He was caught and faced another lengthy term in prison.  But his exploit captured the imagination of a people not generally noted for their sense of humour.  Bit by bit he was transformed in to a German version of Robin Hood, and as such he is still celebrated today.  Even the Kaiser was amused, later pardoning Voigt as an ‘amiable scoundrel.’  But Bill was not a subtle man; the irony and absurdity of the incident and all that it told of the Second Reich was lost on him.  He was pleased, rather, by the obvious reverence that a military uniform carried among the people at large.

A quarter of a century later Carl Zuckmayer, a playwright, wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick – The Captain of Köpenick -, a satire based on the incident.  First performed in Berlin in 1931, it was a commentary on contemporary society as much as the past, a commentary and a warning.  Two years later it was banned and Zuckmayer went into exile.  The Kaiser, unsubtle or not, had a sense of humor.  Hitler had none.

The Captain of Köpenick is a play not that well-known outside Germany.  I don’t suppose there is any great surprise in this, in that the humour does not travel that well, or German humor, to say the least, tends to be a little bit on the heavy side.  But it has made one of its rare foreign excursions to London’s National Theatre, which is where I saw it at the weekend. 

In a new English language version by Ron Hutchison and directed by Adrian Noble, it stars Anthony Sher as the eponymous anti-hero.  It was a commendable performance, just as I have come to expect from Sher, an actor of range and depth.  Here he could embrace comedy and pathos with equal ease, as he was transformed from a real nobody into a fake somebody, the talented Herr Voigt! 

Set in the National’s Olivier Theatre, the play made good use of all the technical wizardry at the director’s fingertips, allowing for rapid scene changes, including some wonderful expressionist-cum-cubist Berlin cityscapes in the style of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

The Captain of Köpenick is as relevant today as it was when first performed.  The continual flow of bureaucratic absurdity from Brussels is sufficient proof of that.  I could only wish that it had been handled with greater skill.  I found Hutchison’s updated version irksome and silly at points rather than funny, descending now and again into outright vulgarity.  More than that, Zuckmayer’s message is obvious enough, the satire biting enough, without the need for the continual reminders, and certainly without the need for the climatic “hysterical Dance of Death.”

This is a play, as I wrote above, that does not travel well.  It might have travelled better with a little more discipline, a little less reverence and a lot less Teutonic stodge!  Still, Sher, along with some of the supporting cast, makes the experience all worthwhile.  If you are in London, and minded to go, the Captain will be goose-stepping around until 4 April. 

The Ugly German Returns

The Greeks, unhappy at the austerity regime imposed as part of the ongoing euro crisis, accuse the Germans of being Nazis.  Now the Germans are accusing the Germans of being Nazis!  The Germans here are the editors of Der Spiegel, the country’s leading news magazine.  For them the past is not a foreign country; it’s part of a living present.

Last month they published an article by one Dirk Kurbjuweit, lamenting that the ‘ugly German’ has once again reared his head, the ‘ugly German’ being racist, arrogant and in thrall to the nation’s Nazi past (Why Germany Can’t Shed Its Troubling Past, 10 December). 

It was so different a few years ago.  In 2006, when Germany hosted the soccer World Cup, the country was in a party mood.  It was all wonderfully inclusive; everyone was invited to join – “Sixty years after World War II and the Holocaust, the nation of perpetrators seemed to have come out from under its depression, and the world seemed prepared to take these Germans into its heart.”  Alas, no longer; now darker shadows have been cast along the land, at least according to Herr Kurbjuweit. 

This self-flagellation comes not long after the publication of I Sleep in Hitler’s Room: an American Jew Visits Germany by Tuvia Tenenbom, a theatre director in New York.  Actually the German title, Allein unter Deutschen (Alone among Germans), is a lot less controversial.  I’ve not read this but according to another piece in Der Spiegel it’s a “bold, funny and often outrageously absurd travelogue.”  Bold, certainly, in “outing the Germans as anti-Semites”, though the Germans in question seem to be fairly marginal, the sort of cranks and oddballs one might find in some dingy bar in, say, New York.

This makes no difference to the masochists of Der Spiegel.  Whip! Whip!; how awful we are, the magazine laments.  Germans are the gloomy Germans once again, it says, though what exactly has changed in six years I can’t quite pinpoint.  OK, there is the aforementioned crisis with the benighted European single currency but Germany seems to be riding that very well.  There is no parallel here with the Great Inflation of the early 1920s, which gave the Nazis an early boost, and the Great Depression of the 1930s, which brought Hitler to power. 

The simple fact is that Der Spiegel doth protest too much.  It casts its eye over 2012, uncovering “much that hints at the country’s Nazi past.”  If I tell you that one of the ‘hints’ was a lengthy debate whether a Russian opera singer with a swastika tattoo should be allowed to sing at the Bayreuth Festival, the annual Wagner Party Rally, that might just give a hint over how ‘obsessed’ the Germans actually are. 

The truth is simple enough, though far too simple for the editors of Der Spiegel.  There is indeed a neo-Nazi fringe in Germany but that’s exactly what it is – a fringe.  Contrary to what Kurbjuweit alleges, the Germans are particularly anxious to shed their horrific past, too anxious, it might be said, when it leads, as it has in the past, to a collective amnesia. 

Der Spiegel is certainly right in asserting that the Nazi story will be with Germany for a long time to come, but their story is, quite frankly, a lot of sensationalist rubbish.  The scandal, they say, is that young Germans in the twenty-first century “feel the need to be neo-Nazis”, thereby corralling all young Germany in a loutish, skin-head dead end. 

The one thing Der Spiegel has not rid itself of is a tendency to reach for tired old stereotypes, the same tendency clearly being demonstrated by Tuvia Tenenbom, a tendency, one might even say, to demonise people, which was indeed a tragic part of the German past.  It’s clearly been revived as part of a cynical attempt to increase this tiresome magazine’s circulation.  This is not serious journalism.  There may very well be more Nazis in New York than the whole of Germany, something Der Spiegel and Mister Tenenbom might do well to consider.  

A King for All Seasons

Writing in the present edition of the Spectator William Cook says the Germany is rediscovering a once taboo part of its heritage (From Prussia with Love, 26 May).  It’s reflection on a new exhibition being held in the Neues Palace in Potsdam.  Under the title of Friederisiko, this celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great, Prussia’s greatest and most delightfully paradoxical monarch. 

The suggestion is that that the rebirth, and rebranding, of Frederick is somehow a recent phenomena.  It’s actually nothing of the kind.  In an article I wrote last year (Praising Prussia, 9 March) I touched on the fact even in the old communist German Democratic Republic Frederick was resurrected from the crypt in its twilight years.  It was all part of an attempt to root the decrepit pseudo-state in German history.  An equestrian statue of the king, previously removed from central Berlin in the 1950s, rode right back to prominence in the 1980s.

It’s difficult not to admire a monarch who managed successfully to be all things to all people; who could be admired by Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker; who could be an avatar for the Third Reich and the Communist Reich.  This was a man, moreover, whose sexuality, for all his military militancy, was as ambiguous as that of England’s Edward II. 

It’s not just Frederick who is undergoing a renaissance in the new Germany.  The old state of Prussia, formally abolished by the Allies in 1945, is also being reappraised with fresh enthusiasm.  Of course this is not the militaristic Prussia, the imperial Prussia, the very thing that Frederick would have been most proud of, but a gentle, cultured and artistic Prussia, the antithesis of the commonly accepted stereotype. This is the Prussia of the Piccolo not the Pickelhaube.  This is not the Frederick of the Seven Years War but the amateur musician and composer, the friend of poets and thinkers, Plato’s philosopher king at his finest. 

Friederisiko is scheduled to run until 28 October.  The chief focus, as I say, is not on his martial but his cultural exploits.  After all, here was a king as much at home in the salon as the battlefield; here was a King who could hobnob with men like Goethe and Voltaire.  The exhibition apparently makes much of his tolerance and philo-Semitism. “All religions are equal”, he said, “Everyone must find salvation in their own way.” 

We invariably recreate the past and past heroes in our own image.  The Potsdam Frederick is most certainly not Hitler or Honecker’s Frederick; he is far too laid back and arty for that!  But it’s comforting to note that he has not been completely divested of his Prussian starkness.  He is the Frederick for this season, for Angela Merkel’s season. He has become, as Cook suggests, a symbol for the current campaign to save the euro, a Spartan figure whose grim asceticism fits perfectly with Auntie Angela’s austerity programme. 

The king himself is buried in the grounds of the nearby Sanssouci Palace.  Apparently those who come in tribute place not flowers on his grave but potatoes!  Yes, that’s right, because it was Frederick who brought the spud to Prussia, a functional symbol for a functional king. 

Alles oder nichts – all or nothing – was Old Fritz’s battle cry, even so far as potatoes.  Personally I’m more than happy for Germany to reclaim him as the philosopher king and gentle aesthete.  But so far as the euro is concerned it may be as well to look to the warrior king, and not to the Battle of Rossbach but to Kunersdorf.  The House of Brandenburg may be a miracle, but the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg is one of those things in history that is unlikely to occur twice.  

Foul Rose

Ida Siekmann was 58 when she died, jumping from a third floor window in the summer of 1961. Chris Gueffroy was only 20, shot while trying to swim across a canal in the winter of 1989. What's the connection between the two? Simply that they were the first and the last victims of the Berlin Wall, killed trying to escape from a bleak communist tyranny. Gueffroy's death was particularly tragic, not just because of his age, but because a few months later the Wall came a-tumbling down, the greatest revolution of the twentieth century, a true springtime of the people and of liberty.

Siekmann and Gueffroy were the overture and finale of a long tragedy. We will never know exactly how many people were killed between their deaths, between August 1961 and February 1989. The official figure stands at 136, though it is thought to be higher. Overall up to seven hundred people are estimated to have been killed in attempts to escape from the old East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, at various points along the border. It’s also worth noting that the guards who shot them earned a bonus for each and every kill, money and time off, something they can reflect on as they enter the twilight of life.

Earlier this month, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its construction, Berliners along with people from elsewhere in Germany gathered in the city's Bernauer Strasse, the scene of many escape attempts, where a memorial is now situated, visited by half a million people every year. "We bow our heads in remembrance of all who died at the Wall and of the hundreds who died on the inner German border", said Christian Wulff, Germany's president. "The dead and wounded", he continued, "the hundreds of thousands who were imprisoned and politically harassed aren't the only victims of this Wall. Millions were also forced to renounce the lives they wanted to live."

The construction of the Wall was an act of monumental bad-faith. Only two months before it went up, Walter Ulbricht, the hatchet face of a hatchet regime, announced that "no one has any intention of building a wall." The concrete and the barbed wire were already on order.

It was on the early hours of 13 August that 'Operation Rose' was launched. Like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, this is another day which will live in infamy, a Sunday, deliberately chosen to catch people off-guard as they enjoyed a summer day off. Up to this point Berlin was the only place in the world where people could move with relative ease from the communist East to the free West.

As I said here recently, the new structure was described officially by the government of the East as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall", when it should more accurately have been called "We Have to keep our Miserable Citizens in Wall.” Some 3000 had been leaving every month up until that point. Amazingly 2.5 million of a population of 19 million left in the brief thirteen years the German Democratic Republic had been in existence.

There is little left now either of the Wall or of the ideological perversions that conjured it into existence. The so-called wave of the future is now the ripple of the past. The sections that are left are quite rightly being preserved as a memorial, a way of ensuring that Ida Siekmann, Chris Gueffroy and all the other victims of Communism are never entirely forgotten.

Sonata of a Good Man

It’s fifty years since construction began on the Berlin Wall in August, 1961, dividing a city, dividing families, dividing lives. Built by the government of the then German Democratic Republic, it was described absurdly as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall”, when it should really have been called the “We Have to Keep our Miserable Citizens in Wall.”

It stood for so long as the ultimate symbol of the abject failure of communism. I have no great opinion of John F. Kennedy, but his Berlin speech summed up the situation with poetic intensity;

There are many people in the world who really don't understand--or say they don't--what is the greatest issue between the free world and Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

There are some who say that "communism is the wave of the future." Let them come to Berlin!

And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere, "we can work with the Communists." Let them come to Berlin!

And there are even a few who say "yes, that it's true, that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress." Lass' sie nach Berlin en kommen! Let them come to Berlin!

Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us!

No, we did not.

It was the Wall I was thinking about recently, not just the physical wall but the wall that states like the GDR constructed in the minds of people, a wall of secret and lies intended to hide hypocrisy and corruption. I saw Das Leben der Anderen – The Lives of Others – when it was first released in 2006, before I started this blog. I decided to revisit it recently on DVD on this anniversary year.

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, the movie tells the story of a Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), an idealist, a patriot, a believer…and an officer in the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police. He is assigned to spy on one Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright, one of the state’s cultural icons. Why? Well the simple secret policeman finds out the secret: it’s because the Minister of Culture (Thomas Theime) wants to get his fat paws on Dreyman’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), and it would be ever so helpful if the inconvenient artist could be removed from the equation.

Bit by bit, in the course of his surveillance of Dreyman, a sordid reality chips away at Wiesler’s idealism, as the system is exposed in all its corruption, the corruption not just of the politician but also of his immediate superior in the Stasi, who would destroy a man’s life simply to advance his own career.

His disillusion is matched by that of Dreyman, hitherto a committed Communist, who sees a colleague, blacklisted by the state, driven to suicide. The two men, unbeknown to Dreyman, enter into a silent collaboration, with the policeman acting less as a spy and more as a protector, deliberately sabotaging the investigation and hiding evidence of the playwright’s exposure of suicide rates in the GDR in an article published anonymously in the West. As a consequence his own career is ruined.

Fast forward to the new united Germany. The ex-Stasi agent is now working as a postman. Dreyman, now a novelist, discovers that he had been placed under surveillance. Not just that but a case could never be made against him because he had his own guardian angel, HGW XX/7, Wiesler’s Stasi code, which he finds in archives now open to the public. The novel he then writes, Sonate vom Guten Menschen, carries a simple dedication: To HGW XX/7 with gratitude.

It’s a tremendous piece of cinema, a simple and moving story, proof that lies have a lease as short as summer, that goodness and virtue can survive even the worst forms of criminal turpitude.

Dada History

Throughout history there have been periods of calm between storms, to use the cliché, though these might be better described as illusions or mirages. I’m thinking of Weimar Germany, specifically of the period from the end of the post-war inflation in 1923, a time which saw the revaluation of all values, and the Great Depression of 1929, a time which saw the devaluation of all lives.

This was the golden age, to use yet another cliché, a period when the country flourished, sustained by short-term credit allowed for under the Dawes Plan, a scheme to stabilise the German economy and thus secure a continuing stream of reparation payments to the victorious allies. The whole thing was built on an absurdity that simply could not last, a belief in no tomorrows.

But that today, while it lasted, produced a mini-renaissance almost without parallel in history. It was the time of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, the time of George Groz, Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, Arnold Schoenberg, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Marlene Dietrich and so many others, architects, musicians, scientists, writers, actors, singers, players of all sorts who strutted and fretted their hour upon a brilliant stage. What players; what a theatre.

In Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s Otto Friedrich comes as a spectator, charmed, captivated and bewildered all at the same time. I have mixed feelings about this book, an interesting though somewhat uneven treatment of an important subject. Although it is offered as a portrait of Berlin, and a good bit of the action is set there, it’s really more of a general cultural and political history of Weimar Germany, one not confined to the 1920s.

It’s quite an old book now, originally published as long ago as 1972 at a time when many of the people who witnessed life in Germany before the rise of Hitler were still alive and able to give accounts of their experiences. There are artists, intellectuals and scientists. But where are the ordinary people, where are the ordinary Germans, the Berliners themselves? If you are looking for a fluent social history this is not it.

What is it exactly? Let me put it this way. The chapter dealing with the new scientific theories of the day – God Does Not Play at Dice – shows how all certainty seemed to vanish, all notions of predictability and Newtonian law. Instead the universe was depicted by Werner Heisenberg and others as something quite random, a bit like a Dada montage, after the artistic movement more given to anarchy than order. Well, this is a Dada book, with bits and pieces falling here and there!

I hope I’m not being too harsh; there is certainly a lot here to intrigue and charm, but it lacks focus - the overall treatment is far too random. Friedrich does not seem clear over what he is trying to achieve. There is a bit of everything: a bit of political history, a bit of social history, a bit of intellectual history, of the arts, of music, of architecture, of the theatre, of the cinema. All are visited but with no real thoroughness.

The anecdotes of people like Lotte Lenya are certainly interesting but in the end I felt a sense of frustration. The lengthy account of the political intrigues and machinations which saw Hitler emerge as Chancellor in January 1933 is really quite pedestrian, material far better handled elsewhere.

The problem is the author is not true to his subject. There is no real intimacy and too much incidental chatter. After over three hundred pages I was no closer to understanding what life was like at this time in the German capital than I was at the outset. Although far less sweeping in scope, Roger Moorhouses’s Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital, 1939-45 is a much more assured, mole’s eye view of life in the city.

I did enjoy Before the Deluge to a degree but it did not satisfy my hunger, a hunger to know what life was really like in one of the most intriguing cities in one of the most intriguing times in history. I want to know what it was like to be there on the opening night of Die Dreigroschenoper – The Three Penny Opera – specifically at the point when the Kanonen-Song was heard for the first time, turning the mood of the audience, the creation of one of the theatre’s greatest spectacles. That would have been something. Alas, I shall just have to wait. :-)

Interesting Times

May you live in interesting times, some Chinese sage is alleged to have said at an indeterminate point in the past. It’s a kind of curse; for the time when history is at its most active is also the time that it is at its most dangerous. Actually I quite like the idea of living in interesting times, or at least in times more interesting than the present, a time of tepid mediocrity. I like the idea, for instance, of living in Weimar Germany.

I’ve been reading Before the Deluge: a Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich. Oh bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young, and visit exciting cabarets, was very heaven! I’m only half way through, so I’m not in a position to write a review at the moment. No, I just want to alight on one or two interesting snippets of information.

It’s the paperback edition I have with an introduction by the author written in 1995. However, the text itself has not been updated from the cloth version, published as long ago as 1972, when Berlin was still a divided city, when there were people still alive who could remember events in the 1920s; people who could remember the city of Gustav Kapp, Walther Rathenau and George Grosz, whose images of this time still make compelling art.

It’s the chapter headed A Kind of Madness that I find particularly compelling, that which deals with the post-war inflation. It did not tell me anything that I did not already know, that the mark was effectively worthless by the end of 1923, that savings had been destroyed, that printers were struggling to get an infinity of noughts on to paper that carried greater worth than the currency. No, it was more what people reported, more the practical implications of this human disaster. This was a time when whole apartment blocks could be bought in Berlin for a handful of US dollars.

One of the people the author spoke to was a seventy-five year old journalist who still lived in the city, though now long dead I imagine. “Yes”, she said, “the inflation was the most important event of this period. The inflation wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realise what they meant. There was not a single girl in the entire German middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry. Even the maids – they never spent a penny of their wages. They saved and saved sp they could get married. When money became worthless, it destroyed the whole system of getting married, and so it destroyed the idea of remaining chaste until marriage.”

The point is here that while the upper class never lived up to their own standards, and the working class had standards of their own, the bourgeois had always obeyed the rules in outward respectability. One did not have to be a virgin when one married, though it was generally expected. Now the inflation effectively destroyed the price of chastity. In other words, virginity no longer mattered, a form of liberation for women, I suppose, at least Friedrich’s old lady thought so!

The events of 1918, the revolution that was not a revolution, is far from being the most important thing about this time. No, that was the inflation, that revaluation of all values which, as the historian Alan Bullock wrote, undermined the foundations of German society in a way that the war or the collapse of the Kaiserreich or even the Treaty of Versailles had not. The inflation was the real German Revolution, the most interesting time in the country’s history.

Praising Prussia

Not long before it sank into the sands of time the German Democratic Republic, the old communist pseudo-state created out of the post-war Soviet zone of occupation, decided that it really needed to root itself in history. The people’s state, in other words, tried to graft itself on to the people’s affections by discovering a tradition, an honourable and identifiable past.

The Third Reich was clearly out of the question and the Weimar Republic problematic, so back and back they went. The Second Reich, the adolescent empire of Kaiser Bill, may have been better than what came after, though not by much.

Onwards, ever onwards, through successively disappointing layers until the old pre-unification state of Prussia, formally abolished in 1947, emerged in the light. That was to be the tradition, not just Prussia but Frederick the Great, the very icon of Prussian militarism, was the new avatar, right up there with Karl Marx, history’s oddest couple.

East Germany has gone but Prussia lives, undergoing a second revival in the bold new Germany, uncertain about its future and anxious about its past. It’s such an odd thing to be a communist or a conservative in Germany, for so long a nation without memory, without pride in the past, without a proper sense of place.

It’s almost impossible to get over the ruinous colossus of Hitler, strewn across the path, other than by a Prussian route. After all, it was the Prussians in the military who offered some spark of honour in the bungled Bomb Plot of July, 1944.

Other icons are emerging, notably Luise, queen consort to Frederick William III, Prussia’s very own Queen of Hearts, famous for her courage in trying to save the country from a vengeful Napoleon after the defeat at Jena in 1806. She was among other women featured in Preussens Eros – Preussens Musen (Prussia’s Eros – Prussia’s Muses), an exhibition which opened in the old garrison town of Potsdam last September, dedicated to those who demonstrated strength in times of crisis.

There is more than nostalgia at work here in this reengagement with history. The Germans have been lied to so often by politicians drawing on the fear of past sins. It’s not that long ago that Helmut Kohl, the former Chancellor, was absurdly telling the nation that the only alternative to monetary union was a Europe at risk of war, a point made by Roger Boyes in the latest issue of Prospect magazine.

It’s difficult to believe that he could get away with such abject nonsense. Just imagine the ridicule that would greet a British politician who said that the only alternative to abolishing the pound would be war! But for a nation fearful of its militant past, fearful of history, such a Jeremiah-like warning clearly had a certain persuasive power.

Not any longer. A fresh appraisal of aspects of the past has been encouraged by concerns about the future, concerns about the very existence of Germany as a nation, concerns about the validity of the Euro-zone, about European policy as a whole. Last year Thilo Sarazzin, a former member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and a socialist politician, published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany abolishes itself), raising serious concerns over immigration policy and German identity. The book has been a huge success.

This comes on top of the new Prussian pride, which, in addition to exhibitions and books, is seeing the reconstruction of the old Berlin palace of the Hohenzollern princes, destroyed by the communists after 1945. The crown jewels of the old monarchy are also being returned to the Charlottenburg Palace. Meanwhile the call has gone out for the remains of the last Kaiser, buried in Holland, to be reinterred in his native land.

I can see so many positive aspects in this Prussian revival, not just for Germans but for all the peoples of Europe. Nations can only exist with a proper sense of who they are, where they have been and where they are going. Nations can only exist with active and committed citizens. The cosmopolitan idea, the idea that people can be managed like children by lying politician, by technocrats and by civil servants, the wretched ideal of the wretched European Union, is not enough; it could never be enough. Prussia as an ideal has so much positive value; a land not just of soldiers but of thinkers; the land not just of Frederick the Great but of Immanuel Kant.

Being there

A few days before Christmas the BBC broadcast Taking Sides, a movie based on a play of the same name by Ronald Harwood. Directed by István Szabó, it’s based on the post-war interrogation of Wilhelm Furtwängler, best known as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, part of the denazification process instituted by the Allies in the wake of their victory over the Third Reich.

Furtwängler himself is played by Stellan Skarsgård, with Harvey Keitel taking on the role of Major Steve Arnold, his US Army inquisitor. In the minor key it’s about the clash between two contrasting personalities; in the major it explores the relationship between art and politics or, better said, the artist and politics. It’s also about taking sides.

It made me take sides, but not quite in the way that I expected. Szabó has previously explored the relationship between artistic integrity and moral corruption in Mephisto, a clever movie full of subtle ambiguity. I found Taking Sides to be neither subtle nor ambiguous. Whether it was the director’s intention or not, my sympathies were all with Furtwängler, a controlled performance by Skarsgård, confronted by an interrogator who turned out to be a spiteful and petty-minded philistine.

There is a message here, certainly, though I can’t be quite sure what the message was. At one point it even appeared to suggest that the art itself was corrupt, that the high culture of Beethoven and Schubert was evidence of corruption, listened to in docile silence by the Germans, cut and contrasted with American army personnel jitterbugging to a band performing Route 66.

Furtwängler essentially stood condemned by one thing: he stayed when so many others left. Not only did he stay in 33 but he became one of the prize trophies of the Nazi Regime, Hitler’s favourite ‘band leader’, as Major Arnold puts it, a monolith in what had been turned into a cultural desert. Many of those who did leave, particularly Thomas Mann, never forgave the conductor for his ‘apostasy’. Furtwängler’s defence, one that he offers to Arnold, was that he believed it possible to separate art from politics and – just as important – he could not abandon his country in the midst of spiritual darkness.

He was naïve, yes, but was he culpable? After all, he did not have the perfect knowledge of 1945, the knowledge of men like Arnold, whose self-righteous indignation is given added fire by footage of bodies being bulldozed into burial pits at Belsen Concentration Camp. Arnold, who previously announced that “I’m gonna get that fucking bandleader”, proceeds to try to pin him down as an active Nazi collaborator, though all the evidence is to the contrary: he may have performed for the regime but he kept his distance, never joining the Party, never giving the Hitler salute, helping Jewish musicians as he was able.

There is a germ of a first class idea here, effectively ruined by Keitel’s bombastic performance. I have no idea if this is a true representation of the real Major Arnold, but in the movie he’s depicted as a loud-mouthed bully, one whose petty humiliations of Furtwängler, looking ever more vulnerable, even alienates his assistant, a young Jewish lieutenant, and his German typist, herself a victim of the regime. Keitel’s Major Arnold, no matter how well-intentioned his motives, no matter how justified he is in his contempt for the morally blind, is no more than a self-important and abusive little philistine. He is no more, to put it another way, than a Nazi.

Although Furtwängler was finally exonerated of all ‘charges’ against him by a later denazification trial the movie ends with a voice-over by Arnold, saying that he had ‘winged’ him and that he was never allowed to conduct in the United States. But then, over the closing credits, footage of the real Furtwängler is shown, performing to an audience which includes Joseph Goebbels. At the conclusion the Propaganda Minister shakes his hand. The conductor is then shown surreptitiously wiping that same hand with a cloth.

I think I should finish with the testimony that he himself gave when he was examined by a German court, words I imagine beyond the comprehension of Major Arnold and all who walk in his shadow;

I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like.

Does Thomas Mann really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them.

Exorcising the past

I saw from a report in the press on Saturday that the exhibition on Hitler and the Nazis, currently on show in the Berlin Historical Museum, is drawing the crowds, hardly surprising, considering that it’s the first time ever such an event has been staged. It’s part of a ‘coming to terms’ process long delayed in Germany, which suffered for so many years from a self-induced historical amnesia.

Now comes Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Ministry and the Past), an official publication by the Foreign Ministry detailing the department’s activities during the Nazi era. Das Amt has caused a minor stir; it even featured in the main evening news broadcast here not so long ago. The issue is this: the official line long taken by the Foreign Ministry is that it was not complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime; that it was manned by ‘gentlemen’ in every way different from the downmarket fanatics in other branches of government. This is far from being the case, as Das Amt has confirmed. The Foreign Office was complicit in the very worst crimes, including the Holocaust.

I have to say that I was more than a little surprised at this ‘revelation.’ The historical record is absolutely clear. Though there were certainly diplomats who took an active part in resisting and undermining the regime, most were complicit even in the basest actions. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister himself, was convicted and hanged on a charge of crimes against humanity, amongst other things. During the War, when normal diplomatic activity all but ceased, one of the remaining functions of the Ministry was to ensure the co-operation of Germany’s allies and satellites in the deportation of their Jewish populations to the death camps.

Das Amt, from what I have read, really only provides additional empirical support without breaking any new ground. It seems to be of greater use as an exercise in myth-breaking, in destroying a cosy and rather snobbish departmental consensus. The way it came about is rather interesting in itself. Joschka Fisher, the first foreign minister from the Green Party, a man with particular sensitivity over Holocaust issues, was disturbed by the self-congratulating complacency of the department, which even saw diplomats eulogising former Nazis in obituaries. The details have destroyed all remaining illusions. Eckart Conze, one of the four authors of the 880-page Das Amt, has gone so far to describe the Ministry under the Nazis as a “criminal organisation” in an interview with Der Spiegel.

The past is a ghost only ever put to rest by understanding, not denial.

Heia Safari!

Having mentioned Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in passing I now feel obliged to say a little more about him, the last of the German cavaliers; to say why I find him so admirable as a soldier and as a man. There is really no secret: he was as courageous as he was resourceful, carrying on a single-handed war in East Africa against superior Allied forces, keeping his small army in the field throughout the First World War, almost completely cut off from the Fatherland and any possibility of resupply.

Hunted from place to place, he raided Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese East Africa, always avoiding capture and escaping pursuit. He made the most effective use of the country and of his Askari troops, who were devoted to him. In the end he was the last German commander to surrender because he only received news of the Armistice in Europe after it was signed, formally laying down arms, undefeated in the way that his European colleagues were not undefeated, at Mbal in what is now Zambia on 23 November, 1918.

With a small contingent of German officers and non-commissioned offices, the backbone of his army were the Askaris, only some 2,500 men to begin in fourteen schutzttrupe, though additional recruitment would take his strength up to some 14,000, still only a fraction of those available to Jan Smuts and other Allied commanders. Lettow-Vorbeck, who could speak fluent Swahili, treated his soldiers with considerable respect at a time when African soldiers were viewed in colonial armies with racist and snobbish condescension. He told them that there was no difference between his white and his black soldiers, that they were all Africans. True to his perception, he appointed black officers, so far as I can gather the first European commander to do so.

Clearly he was driven by necessity here, though there really is not very much doubt that he valued his men as men. In the end he had only 1600 Askaris left, but he had achieved his aim of pinning down as many enemy troops as possible in an African 'side show', far from the Western Front. It seems to me that his action in deploying and using inferior forces in the most effective way possible bears comparison with that of General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, particularly during the Valley Campaign of 1862 - hit and run, hit again, and hit again; advance where the enemy is weak, retreat when he is strong.

In Guerrilla: Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany's East African Empire Edwin Hoyt described his four year campaign as "the greatest single guerrilla operation in history, and the most successful." After a brief interment he returned to Germany with his European troops, only some 120 survivors, in March 1919. For a demoralised nation the return of the Africans was the occasion for a brief moment of celebratory pride, as the they paraded down Unter den Linden in their faded and tattered colonial uniforms, Lettow-Vorbeck at their head mounted on a black charger.

Lettow-Vorbeck was soon caught up in the political chaos Weimar Germany, induced by left-wing adventurism. As a serving soldier he performed valuable service in suppressing the communist Spartacus rising in Hamburg, but his career came to an end in 1920 after he became a leading figure in the right-wing Kapp Putsch, whose aim was to install a military dictatorship intended stop the country's political anarchy.

Although he later sat in the Reichstag as deputy for the conservative German National People's Party, he was immensely distrustful of the Nazis. He avoided all personal compromise, even refusing Hitler's offer of the ambassadorship in London despite his straightened financial circumstances. In the 1960s a former schutztruppe officer was asked about this in an interview with the historian Charles Siller. "I understand that Lettow told Hitler to go fuck himself?", the question was put. "That's right", came the reply, "except I don't think he put it that politely." After this he was kept under surveillance by a regime, though he was still too well-respected in the country to suffer any further inconvenience.

Lettow-Vorbeck earned the respect of his former enemies. In 1929 he was even invited to London as the guest of honour at a reunion banquet for veterans of the East African campaign. There he met Jan Smuts for the first time, the two men remaining close friends until the latter's death in 1950. In 1953 he returned to East Africa, now the protectorate of Tanganyika, where he was received with full military honours by the British. But surely the greater honour, the greater source of pride, is that the surviving Askaris all turned out to greet him, singing Heia Safari, their old marching song.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck died in 1964, now well into his nineties. He was buried with full military honours, two of his Askaris being flown to Germany to attend the ceremony. To mark the occasion the Bundestag agreed to pay back pay to all of the surviving African soldiers, a move he would have approved of, as he tried unsuccessfully to make this one of the conditions of his surrender in 1918.

Utopia on skulls

At the beginning of last month fifty-eight year old Verena Becker appeared in court in Stuttgart, charged as an accomplice in the murder over thirty years ago of Siegfried Buback, then Germany’s prosecutor-general, in a drive-by shooting. Becker, if you have never heard of her, was once a member of a collection of terrorist fanatics generally known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after the two principal leaders, though they preferred to call themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion – Red Army Faction – or the RAF.

These people had declared war on what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, Buback being a prime target, an agent of the ‘fascist’ state. The fact that Buback’s driver was also killed probably counted, if it counted for anything at all, as a terrorist version of ‘collateral damage.’

Becker and her crowd were part of a generation now known in Germany as the Achtundzechzigers – the 68ers – the student cohort of 1968, born to put the world to rights, born to compel their parents – the Auschwitz generation- to face the facts of their past, to face the fact that Germany had not been liberated at all in 1945, that the Federal Republic was not a true democracy merely a continuation of the Hitler state.

Knowing nothing about Becker and next to nothing about German urban terrorism I’ve had a quick and enlightening trot through Utopia or Auschwitz; Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundani, a London-based journalist. It’s quite a tale, a story of political pathology, intellectual delusion and sophistry of the most tortured kind imaginable. For me it simply confirmed something that I had long deduced: that when it comes to the supposed lessons of history nobody is more deluded or capable of self-delusion than those on the political left.

I say left but it in the end it’s impossible to determine where these people, the generation of 68, belong other than in a kind of bedlam. They started off with a radical Marxist agenda but there were always undertones of distinct forms of German nationalism, allowing them to perceive the United States as an occupying power in the West as the Soviets were in the East. They began in criticising Nazism with attitudes, outlooks and practices that were distinctly Nazi. They began to upholding Auschwitz as a symbol of absolute evil only to relativise it, placing it alongside the bombing of German cities and the sufferings of the Palestinian people, before, in some cases, wishing to forget it altogether, or even denying that it happened at all.

Yes, that was another of their favoured causes, Palestine in the wake of the Six Day War, an event that transformed Jews and Israel from history’s victims to history’s perpetrators. In an article published in The New Republic in August 2001 Paul Berman put it thus: “To the West German students Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms.”

It certainly did, not in Israel, not in the German State, but in people like Becker, people that Jurgen Habermas, once the doyen of radical thought in Germany, described as ‘left-wing fascists.’ The anti-Semitism was, of course, disguised in the usual dishonest way as ‘anti-Zionism’, a wholly enlightened process that saw a ‘selection’ of Jews by some 68ers following the Entebbe hijacking, that saw a bomb planted in a Berlin synagogue on 9 November 1969, which just happened to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Horst Mahler, an RAF activist who supported the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, is a Nazi. No, that’s not an insult; he is a leading neo-Nazi, currently in prison for using the Hitler salute and Holocaust denial, both of which are crimes in Germany.

It went on, the tortuous delusions went on, specifically in the sporadic murder campaign of the RAF, a substitute for action by the proletarian masses, ever immersed in ‘false consciousness’, who had to be shown how things were done, how things were to be done, how the inconvenient were to be done away with.

Becker’s trial will doubtless draw a curtain on one of the most shameful periods, on one of the most shameful generations, in German history, the real children of Hitler, people who saw murder as a means to an end, utopia on skulls. It seems to me that the capacity of power to corrupt is not nearly as great as that of idealism.

Fear and Loathing in Berlin

Amongst other things (always, always there are other things!) I’m reading Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundnani. I don’t want to say too much about it at the present, as I have it in mind to write an article on the legacy in Germany of the Baader Meinhof terrorist faction, born of profound ignorance, born of an ignorance of history. This was to produce some grotesque inversions, a type of poisonous relativism. It came to mind when I discovered that the Berlin Historical Museum has just opened and exhibition about Hitler, the first since 1945 to break a taboo subject.

I say it’s about Hitler but it isn’t really, at least not Hitler in isolation. There are still some taboos, you see, to be overcome. So, no Hitler; instead the ponderous and didactic Hitler and the Germans: the National Community and Violence. The museum authorities seem to have approached the subject with quite a high degree of caution, fearful that it might attract the Neo-Nazi fringe.

Because of this nothing directly connected with Hitler personally has been allowed, just a lot of Nazi-era brick-a-brack: uniforms, beer mugs with swastikas, cigar boxes, banners, posters and so on and on and on. No recordings of Hitler speeches because that would be well, too Hitler, and the busts have been placed in such a way that won’t allow people to pose beside them for photographs!

I was inclined to dismiss this as a rather futile display of Nazi kitsch but with all of the qualifications, all the ands and ifs and buts, it is intended to make a serious point. For too long the Germans failed to engage with their past, either because of a sense of shame or because of a convenient collective amnesia, fertile ground for the hysterical delusions of the 68ers.

The museum is attempting to show, in as wide a context as possible, how the nation was seduced by Hitler and what impact this had. In a country where the swastika is still banned history is being allowed to come back to life and at least to some extent speak for itself. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana wrote. An important step has been taken in remembering the past.

In writing this I was immediately reminded of a depiction of Hitler that is not likely to appear in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany, not in any immediate future that I can foresee. It happens to be my favourite image of a monster who, in the end, was no more than a man. It's called An Icon of Fear by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It caused a controversy when it was first exhibited because it seems to invite sympathy. At the risk of being misunderstood I have to say that it invited my sympathy, something I never thought I would feel for a man who destroyed so many futures and almost destroyed the civilization of Europe itself. But what sins he carries, what a terrible burden. I remember reading the words of a Jewish writer -unfortunately I can’t remember whom -, saying that he hoped that Hitler's tortured soul had at last found peace. When I look at An Icon of Fear, an image of the child as father of the man, an image of a penitent and frightened little boy, I can only echo these sentiments.

Von Sexy

Picture a late imperial court, picture, if you will, the decadence, the excesses and the orgies. We are in the realm of decline and fall, are we not, in the land of the Caesars? Yes, indeed, it’s the land of a Caesar except it’s not Rome, as you expected, it’s the court of Kaiser Bill, hitherto known for Victorian prudery rather than physical frolics.

Alas, nothing is sacred, for Wolfgang Wipperman, a German historian, has been burrowing away in the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin, there discovering that swinging is not a modern invention, or the sole preserve of the lower middle-classes. No, the German aristocracy were the pathfinders here, with a taste for late night sex parties, turning to blackmail.

Now imagine yourself in Jadgschloss Grunewald, a hunting lodge in the woods of western Berlin belonging to Princess Charlotte, the older sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It’s the early 1890s; there you are among the select guests, among the vons, drinking, dancing and experimenting in all sorts of sexual games. The details of these japes are currently being revealed in Der Spiegel, a taster for Wipperman’s Scandal in Hunting Lodge Grunewald, scheduled for publication later this month,

These gatherings may have remained hidden but for the fact that one of the participants – Wipperman suspects Charlotte herself – saw them as a way to make a spot of extra cash. Blackmail letters were sent out to the participants, with some rather helpful illustrations of their sexual preferences, provided, I imagine, just in case they were too drunk to remember. The author further speculates that Charlotte, who died in 1919 after lengthy psychiatric treatment, may have organised her orgies specifically with a view to entrapment.

Even in those days it was impossible to keep a good story down; and there is no story better than aristocratic sex. The attempted blackmail became public and, this being Germany, resulted not in laughter but in a major political scandal, going so far as the Reichstag.

The Kaiser, true to the humours of his grandmother, was not amused. I, in contrast, am; I simply can’t help but laugh to read that the Duchess of Hohenau was repeatedly described as a “randy tart.” It’s not really a surprise. After all, the poor woman needed some outlet for her sexual energies, given that she was married to the openly gay Friedrich von Hohenhau. Even before the Jadgscloss scandal her liaisons were notorious, including Herbert von Bismarck, son of the Iron Chancellor, and Max von Baden, destined to be the last Chancellor of Imperial Germany.

The blackmailer, whoever it was, possibly Charlotte, possibly not, has a go at others including Alide von Schrader who enjoyed lesbian affairs, Prince Aribert von Anhalt, who is accused of having sex with other men. It seems odd, though, that despite the scandal, despite the involvement of both Reichstag and Kaiser, the heart of the labyrinth remained unpenetrated (oops, sorry, perhaps not the best word to use in this context!) I’m not sure why and the report I read offers no explanation. It may be that it was Charlotte, which for Brother Bill would have been a scandal too far. To have a randy tart in the imperial family is one thing; to have a randy tart and a blackmailer quite another.

Battles then and battles now

The Hala Stulecia – Centennial Hall – is among the more noted of the architectural features of the Polish city of Wroclaw. It belongs to a different time, just as it once belonged to a different land. Designed by the architect Max Berg, it was constructed in 1913 in what was then the city of Breslau in Prussia, firmly part of the German Empire.

Prussia and the German Empire are long gone but the Hala Stulecia remains, one of the first buildings to make use of reinforced concrete and now a UNESCO world heritage site. Renamed the Hala Ludowa – the Hall of the People – when the communists controlled Poland, it was neglected for years before a partial restoration was carried out in the 1990s, at which time it returned to its old name.

Now a second restoration is underway which should be complete for the building’s own centennial in 2013. At this point history, never that far from Polish consciousness, has entered stage right. The centennial of the building might be all very well but people are focusing on the original centennial, the anniversary that it was built to commemorate, a cause of some national discomfort. For, you see, the Jahrhunderthalle, as it was originally called, was built to commemorate one of the great events in Prussian and German history – the War of Liberation.

It was in Breslau in March 1813 that King Frederick William III issued his famous appeal, An Mein Volk (To My People), addressed to both Germans and Prussians, the first such in the history of the Prussian royal house, calling them to rise up against Napoleon. It was here also that the order of the Iron Cross was established, here where the national colours of black, white and red were unfurled in that summer of destiny. As Roger Moorhouse said in a recent issue of History Today, all of this gives Breslau as much right as any to be considered as cradle of modern German nationalism.

This is where the problem arises. For when it comes to German nationalism the Poles, the only country in Europe to mention Napoleon in their national anthem, have particularly unhappy memories. So a little storm has blown up, with articles appearing in the national press accusing Wroclaw’s mayor of “excessive pro-German sentiment.” It has even been suggested that the director of the project, Dr Hana Cervinkova, a Czech academic, is ‘unhinged.’

I suppose this was all to be expected, not just because the hall marks a uniquely German event but because the War of Liberation did not bring liberation to Poland. Still there is far too much immaturity here. The Hall marks a great event in European History which, although it belongs to a German past, is part of a Polish present and a Polish future.

Das Dritte Reich

No, it’s not about that; it’s about a book!

One of the more interesting men to emerge from the radical right in Germany after the First World War, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck created an 'ideal' for a disappointed nation, an ideal he expressed in Das Dritte Reich, published in 1923. It's an organic myth, the image of Germany's 'Third Rome'- there will be no other.

For Moeller, Germany's great misfortune lay in the political system created by the Weimar Republic, one of competitive parties and liberal ideologies. An admirer of Mussolini, he looks for a strong leader. His Reich is not so much state in the sense that term is usually understood: it is the ideal condition, the only way in which the scattered German people can achieve a common purpose and destiny. But he does not look for the limited state, the Second Reich fashioned by Bismarck;

The Second Empire was an imperfect empire. It did not include Austria which survived on from our First Empire, side by side with our Second Empire. Our Second Empire was a Little-German Empire which we must consider only as a stepping stone on out path to a Greater German Empire.

The weak Weimar Republic, he argues, will have to be replaced by a new revolution, a revolution from the right. He looks also for a new political movement that will embrace both socialism and nationalism, a unique form of German Fascism. He takes all of his philosophical cues from the work of Nietzsche “who stands at the opposite pole of thought from Marx.” The one contemporary politician he admires above all others is Benito Mussolini.

The temptation, of course, is to see this difficult little book as an advocate for what was to come; but as always the gap between the ideal vision and the historical truth is virtually unbridgeable. On the eve of publication Moeller inserted a preface, in which he wrote that "The Third Reich is a philosophical idea not for this but for the next world. Germany might perish because of the Third Reich dream."

He believes Germany needs a Superman in the fashion described by Nietzsche, but that Superman is not Adolf Hitler. Soon after the collapse of the Munich Putsch he wrote;

There are many things that can be said against Hitler, and I have sometimes said them. But one thing you have to give him credit for: he is a fanatic for Germany. But he is wrecked by his proletarian primitive ways. He does not know how to give an intellectual basis to his Nazi party. Hitler is all passion, but lacks sense or proportion. A heroic tenor, not a hero.

Hitler, in other words, was not Mussolini. These were the last words he ever wrote before his suicide in 1925.

I might have recommended The Man who Invented the Third Reich, Stan Lauryssens' 'biography' of Moeller van den Bruck. I won't, because it's terrible.

Divinely Decadent

If there is a modern period in history that excites me in the way that no other does it has to be Weimar Germany, lodged between the stuffy Kaiserreich and the sadomasochistic Nazi state. It was a vibrant time, a creative time, an exciting time to be young, free and alive. Some of my favourite movies come from that period, dark, moody, expressionist; movies like Nosferatu and the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

It’s for some of these reasons and more than I have a particular fondness for Cabaret, the movie made in the early 1970s, which manages to recapture at least a little of the Weimar spirit, though in its decadent phase. Directed by Bob Fosse and based on Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, novels by Christopher Isherwood, and I am a Camera, a play based on these stories by John van Druten, it stars Liza Minnelli as the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, one of my absolute favourite characters, an uninhibited, delightful free spirit. Joel Grey is also really good as the master of ceremonies in the cabaret itself, the place Sally works. There are all sorts of wonderful allusions to the time, including the depiction of characters in the early scenes that may very well have come straight out of the paintings of Otto Dix.

I don't normally like musicals, the old Hollywood song and dance routines; but this is different, not only are the songs wonderful, but they are mostly presented within context, in the cabaret itself, not intruding into the unfolding drama outside. There is only one that is not, the Nazi song in the Biergarten, also perfectly within context. The story itself is really about a world tottering on the edge of destruction, with the Nazis, though never centre stage, making an increasingly intrusive appearance, brilliantly caught in the closing scenes, with more and more swastika armbands appearing in the cabaret itself, clearly no longer a place to leave one's troubles outside.

The Murdered Communist and the Headless Corpse

I was fascinated to discover in reading The Telegraph on Saturday that prosecutors in Germany are reexamining the case of Rosa Luxemburg, the communist leader who was murdered by the Freikorps after an abortive rising ninety years ago. It’s now being claimed that her corpse was replaced at the time with that of another woman.

Coroners from the state prosecutors’ office in Berlin are to perform an autopsy on a headless corpse found in the basement of the city’s Charité Hospital. In 1919 what was alleged to be the remains of Luxemburg was found in the Landwehr Canal, four months after it had been thrown in. There was never a positive identification and the government of the day, anxious to prevent any political fallout at a sensitive time, rushed through the investigation, putting pressure on the forensic examiner to go along with the official line.

Michael Toskos, the Charité’s head of forensic medicine, says that the 1919 corpse was the wrong dimensions for Luxemburg, going on to say that the body the hospital has fits all the right descriptions. The 1919 body was buried in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, along with that of Karl Liebknecht, at a spot where left-wing pilgrims gather in commemoration every 15 January.

The issue was so historically sensitive because although Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by a right wing militia it was acting on the authority of Friedrich Ebert, the Chancellor, and Gustav Noske, the Minister of Defence, both members of the mainstream SPD, the Social Democratic Party, who felt just as threatened by the extreme left. Captain Waldemar Pabst of the Freikorps' Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision, who gave the order for the execution, always maintained that his actions were specifically approved by Ebert and Noske. It was most certainly in their interests to have the aftermath dealt with in the most expeditious manner possible.

The question now remaining is that if the Charité corpse truly is Luxemburg who have the lefties been worshipping all these years; who is the unknown woman? We are never likely to know the answer.

Hitler-Power and Beyond

As the truly absurd contention that Hitler was 'democratically' elected tends to appear from time to time the point really needs to be clarified.

At its electoral peak the NSDAP obtained 37.4% of the popular vote in Germany. By November 1932, the last free election to the Reichstag, this had declined to 33.1%. So, even at their most popular the Nazis failed to impress 62.6% of the electorate, and they never achieved an overall majority in the Reichstag. Hitler was only appointed Chancellor by some shady political manoeuvring amongst the cabal surrounding President Hindenburg. More than that, he was appointed precisely because the NSDAP was showing signs of serious electoral decline. The fear shared by Franz von Papen and his reactionary clique, the real power brokers in January 1933, was that former Nazi voters would move en mass to the Communists, a fear given some support in the November elections, which saw the KPD gaining ground, just as the Nazis lost.

The early Hitler ministry, like every other since 1930, had no majority in the Reichstag, and was thus dependant on the continuing use of Artlcle 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed the President to overrule parliament. So, please, please, no more 'Hitler was elected' rubbish. This is the sort of garbage one only ever hears from ignorant old dilettantes. :-))

Now to a broader question: was Hitler a weak dictator? This has been the subject of detailed scholarly debate, and is by no means easy to answer. Hitler's style of dictatorship was so different from, say, that of Stalin or Mussolini in a way that makes comparison all but impossible. For one thing he was personally lazy, a vice for which he had been criticised in the early days of the Nazi movement by Gottfried Feder. Other than the exercise of power for its own sake, the Nazi Party, moreover, had little in the way of an organised programme, more a series of vague goals.

It was also Hitler's practice to appoint people to office with overlapping areas of authority, which turned the Nazi State into a jungle of competing interest groups and personalities. Hitler intervened rarely to sort out the ensuing mess. All of this contributed to Hans Mommsen's contention that Hitler was "in many ways a weak dictator." From the opposite political perspective David Irving even suggests that Hitler was "probably the weakest leader Germany has known this century" (Hitler's War, 1977, introduction). This view conflicts with others, from Alan Bullock to Klaus Hildebrand, who says that Hitler had both a programme and the power to carry it out.

So, what did the people who knew him best think of the Führer and his working habits? You can have this from the Memoirs of Albert Speer, the man who, perhaps, knew him best of all;

I would often ask myself did he really work? Little was left of the day; he rose late in the morning and conducted one or two official conferences; but from the subsequent dinner on he more or less wasted his time until the early hours of the evening. His rare appointments in the late afternoon were imperilled by his passion for looking at building plans. The adjutants often asked me 'please don't show any plans today'.

This lack of a systematic approach to work was made even worse in February 1938, after which cabinet meetings were no longer held. Germany, in a very real sense, ceased to have an effective government machine, with decisions being taken in a manner that allowed civil servants to act. Quite often Hitler was incommunicado in his remote mountain chalet near Berchtesgaden, so that "Ministers in charge of departments might for months on end, and even for years, have no opportunity of speaking to Hitler...Ministerial skill consisted in making the most of a favourable hour or minute when Hitler made a decision, this often taking the form of a remark thrown out casually, which then went its way as an order of the Führer." (J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism, 1919-1945, vol. 2, State Economy and Society, 1933-1939, 1984, p. 200)

The only argument here against the notion of a weak dictatorship is that this lack of system and structure somehow magnified Hitler's personal power; but it still reduced the effectiveness of the whole Nazi system. Charisma is a card that should never be overplayed. Decisions could and were made, sometimes quickly; but these tended to be in areas of immediate concern to the dictator, particularly over matters of foreign policy. However, on the Jewish question, a matter seemingly central to the whole Nazi programme, the policy was marked by muddle and confusion, until very late in the day. The very best that can be said of Hitler is that, if not weak, he was, as Ian Kershaw has argued, not "master of the Reich" in the sense of being all omnipotent.