Gordon A. Craig - The Germans

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

For Phyllis

Air mein' Gedanken, die ich hab', die sind bei dir...

Introduction

The first time I saw Germany was in 1935, when I went there at the end of my junior year in college to do research for the senior thesis that I was expected to submit in the spring of the following year. The subject that I had chosen for this piece of work was "The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Republic," for that ill-fated experiment in democracy had ended in failure two years earlier, and it was, in my view, high time that someone wrote the definitive account of its collapse. There was no doubt in my mind that a few months in Germany would enable me to uncover all the materials necessary to supply this felt want.

My naive expectations were in fact to be disappointed, for, although the essay was completed and accepted, my examiners showed no indication of believing that it was the last word on the subject. On the other hand, my time in Germany had brought its own rewards. It had given me an opportunity to see a good part of Germany and AustriaMunich most of all, where I attended courses in the university, the western lands from Cologne to Freiburg in Breisgau, Vienna, still in a state of shock after the February fighting and the abortive Nazi Putsch of the previous year, Nuremberg and the walled towns of Mittelfranken, and the cities of Saxony and Prussia. I had seen Albrecht Durer's "Four Apostles" in Munich's Old Pinakothek, become an admirer of the work of Cranach the Elder after a day in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and wondered at the treasures of the Green Vault in Dresden. I had heard my first Marriage of Figaro in that same city, the whole of The Ring of the Nibelungen, with Frida Leider and Wilhelm Rode, in Munich, and The Magic Flute and Der Freischiitz in the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden in Berlin. I had, despite my plodding German, puzzled out the plot of G'dtz von Berlichingen and Heinrich von Kleist's The Broken Jug, had been caught up in the rapt silence of the crowded Fountain Courtyard in the Munich Residenz as Elly Ney played Schubert, and, in Salzburg, had been overwhelmed by Max Reinhardt's production of Faust: Part One.

These masterpieces of high German culture made a deep and lasting impression on me, but no more so than the many examples that I encountered of abuse of culture and, indeed, of inhumanity and barbarism. Munich, where I spent most of the early summer, was a beautiful

8 The Germans

city of broad boulevards and leaping fountains, but its charms were not enhanced by banners on storefronts that read "He who buys at a Jewish concern is a traitor to his people!" or by the neatly lettered signs in the English Garden that said *'Jews are not wanted here." It was all too apparent that the university, once a symbol of German eminence in the works of the mind, had fallen on evil days. A course on Richard Wagner that I had looked forward to with enthusiasm turned out to be an exercise in nationalism and Nazi propaganda, in which much more was said about Hegel and Hitler than about the composer and in which the argument seemed to be that Hegel had invented the State and Wagner had dreamed up things for it to do, but that their work had been meaningless until Adolf Hitler had given the substance of power to their visions.

Nor was this the worst. One day I walked through the Lichtsaal (where seven years later Hans and Sophie SchoU were to shower their fellow students with anti-Nazi flysheets dropped from the upper floors, an action for which they were subsequently sentenced to death) and went to the Aula or Great Hall to listen to a lecture on National Socialist racial policy by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia. For three and a half hours, this gross bully, bulging in his brown uniform, poured forth floods of filth that I would not have thought possible in public oratory, let alone from a university lectern, and offered "scientific" evidence of the predatory nature of the Jews, at one point arguing insistently that, if one was attentive while visiting zoos, one would note that the blond-haired German children always played happily in the sandboxes while the swarthy Jewish children sat expectantly before the cages of the beasts of prey, seeking vicarious satisfaction of their blood-tainted lusts. The audience in the Aula was attentive, and many took notes.

Despite its offensiveness, the cruelty of Streicher's speech was somewhat attenuated by its generalized approach and the fact that there were no victims present. But one day, traveling from Jena to Dresden, I sat in a railroad compartment with two other passengers, a quiet, rather depressed looking man, who 1 noticed was wearing the ribbon that indicated that he was a veteran of the First World War, and a red-faced, stocky man with an air of self-confidence and a commanding voice. Seeing that I was a foreigner, the latter undertook to instruct me in the excellences of the regime and the wisdom of its policies, particularly that of anti-Semitism. He made much of the supposed role of the Jews in bringing the collapse of Germany in 1918; he insisted that the inflation of 1923 had been a plot of Jewish speculators; and he maintained that, under the Republic, the Jews had conspired to corrupt youth and undermine morality by means of their control of press, theater, and cinemaall of this accompanied by sly, sidelong glances at the other passenger. When the train slowed and stopped at Neumarck, the latter gathered his bags and departed with a polite farewell. As the door closed behind him, I saw that my interlocutor was beside himself with triumph. "He was one!" he cackled. "Did you see? He was a Jew! I knew it all the time!"

Introduction

Now and then, in a restaurant or a Kneipe one might fall into conversation with a sympathetic person who suggested indirectly that he disapproved of the anti-Jewish policy. But even these people were apt to slide away into exculpation of one kind or another, commenting irrelevantly that, after all, Hitler had solved the problem of unemployment, or that his foreign policy had restored Germany's self-esteem, or that he didn't know about the anti-Jewish excesses, which were the work of his subordinates. It was unwise to argue back, for that was likely to lead to references to lynching in the United States or to the lack of real civilization on the other side of the Atlantic. Xenophobia was never far beneath the surface and sometimes broke forth in ugly forms, as an American friend and I discovered in an inn in the village of Eschenlohe, fifteen kilometers from Garmisch, when menacing looks from a band of muscular hikers in brown shirts and audible sneers about foreigners persuaded us that it was expedient to go to bed early, and again, in a pub in Jena, when we were talking quietly in our own tongue and were interrupted by a drunken shout from a nearby table, "Speak German!"

There was no evidence in the summer of 1935 of any significant popular opposition to Hitler and his policies. The Leader's successful defiance of the Versailles Powers in March, when he repudiated the arms clauses of the Treaty and began a headlong program of rearmament, and his success in June in concluding a naval pact with Great Britain on his own terms had left the majority of the German people in a state of patriotic euphoria that was reflected in the newspapers, in the mood of theater audiences watching the newsreels, and in casual conversation. In those days in Munich, near the point where the Residenzstrasse empties into the Odeonsplatz, there was a plaque on the side of the Feld-herrnhalle to commemorate the death of the twelve Nazi "martyrs" who had fallen there in November 1923, when Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch had been put down. On either side of this memorial stood an armed sentry, and pedestrians were expected, when they passed, to raise their arms in the so-called Hitler Gruss. They always did so, and I was surprised to discover, the first time I walked up the Residenzstrasse, that, when buses went up the street, everybody aboard did the same drivers, conductors, and passengers together, all of the arms sweeping up in dedicated unison, giving the impression that the vehicle was lifting itself off the pavement. The effect was startling and, the first time, hilariously funny, but that feeling didn't last, and I began to regard the buses as depressing symbols of eager obedience to authority, comic but ominous illustrations of the phrase ''Fuhrer, befiehl! Wir folgenV ("Fuhrer! Command and we will follow you!")