Authors: Ian Buruma
In 1936 it was Hitler’s turn to host the Olympic Games, in Berlin. He was, in a perverse way, the perfect man to carry out Coubertin’s vision. Hitler also had classicist fantasies. He thought the Germans were descended from the blond and blue-eyed ancient Greeks. His capital city, to be renamed Germania, would be a classical metropolis with acres of Doric columns and vast temple domes. No one before Hitler had managed to replace party politics with pageantry, pagan rituals, and torchlight parades on such a grand scale. His was the moral order from hell, and his ways of rebronzing the Germans after their humiliation at Versailles caused many to doubt the wisdom of staging the Olympic Games in his capital. The I.O.C. had no such doubts.
The president of the I.O.C. was a tall, slim, dapper
notable
of
Coubertin’s kidney, a Belgian named Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour. The Americans, in particular, insisted that he visit Germany in 1935 to check on the rumors that all was not well, especially in race relations. The count, who had worked briefly with the Prince of Wales and listed racing and hunting as his chief recreations, spent two days in Berlin, where he had a meeting with Hitler. He was satisfied that allegations of anti-Semitism were old hat. Opposition to the Berlin Olympics, he said, was political. The I.O.C. was nonpolitical. And criticism of Hitler’s Germany was based on assertions “whose falsity it has been easy for me to unmask.”
There is a photograph of Comte de Baillet-Latour, wearing a frock coat, a pair of elegant gloves, a gray top hat, the I.O.C. chain, and a foolish grin, as Hitler receives a bunch of flowers from Gudrun, the five-year-old daughter of Carl Diem, another Hellenist, and the organizer of the Berlin Games. The “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland über Alles” roared out from the crowd, and thousands of arms shot up. Banners were unfurled, the Olympic bell tolled, and the athletes came marching into the stadium. The French raised their arms, the British did not, for they decided the Olympic salute was too close to the Nazi one and wished to avoid misunderstandings. After the German team was greeted with another rousing chorus of the “Horst Wessel Song” the crowd went quiet. And the recorded voice of Coubertin, quivering with age (and perhaps emotion), was played over the loudspeakers. It was his special message for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games: “The important thing at the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not to conquer, but to struggle well.” It went on for a long time in a similar vein, none of it objectionable, all of it grotesquely out of tune with the time and place. Coubertin had become as absurd as “King Henri V” brooding in his South Tyrolean home.
The point here is not that Coubertin, or Baillet-Latour, or the other gentlemen Coubertin once called the “disinterested high priests of the Olympic idea” were proto-Nazis. Whatever their politics (or lack of them), Nazis they were not. Maurras’s ethnic chauvinism was closer to Nazism than Coubertin’s sporting visions. But Coubertin’s quasi-Platonic brand of Anglophilia, with its worship of the muscular English gentleman, the Corinthian sportsman, the spiritual aristocrat who rules a world without politics by dint of his moral superiority, cultivated
by cricket and Dr. Arnold, is dangerously naïve. Ideals of unity unchecked by democratic politics lead to tyranny. Nostalgia for aristocratic rule, untouched by the selfish materialism of common men, is easily manipulated by malevolent demagogues. Some very grand English gentlemen found their ways to Hitler and Göring during the 1930s, not always in bad faith. The ease with which Hitler turned Coubertin’s Olympic dream into a Nazi festival was the final consequence of a noble vision that took
Tom Brown’s School Days
too seriously.
C
HAPTER
N
INE
W
AGNERIANS
M
Y GREAT
-
GRANDFATHER
H
ERMANN
R
EGENSBURG ARRIVED
in England on the afternoon of January 8, 1882. It had been a rough Channel crossing: for three hours out of six, he had been sick; the lavatories were flooded; most of the space along the railings was taken. He still felt groggy as he emerged from Charing Cross Station in the evening and caught his first whiff of the “sickening, stinking air” of London. Nevertheless, that same night, after enjoying a hearty dinner at his elder brother Adolph’s house, he headed straight for the German Gymnastic Society—the
Turnverein
—on Paneras Road, behind King’s Cross Station.
Hermann Regensburg, from Frankfurt am Main, had come to London to find a job. Adolph, originally Adolf, but now simply “Ad,” had already established himself there as an increasingly prosperous stockbroker. He lived in a fine Nash house on Regent’s Park. In the drawing room was a full-length portrait of his wife, Frances, painted by a fashionable society artist. Frances was born in Budapest. She spoke English in a husky drawl. Her clothes were very expensive and a little overelaborate. She liked to be known to her friends as “Lady Ad.”
It was only natural for Ad to take his brother to the
Turnverein
. They were, after all, German Jews, and the place to meet other Germans was the Gymnastic Society. I doubt that they spent any time
turning
. Hermann joined the society’s Literary Section, which specialized in amateur theatricals—mostly German farces, some in the original language, some translated into stilted English. Although he soon learned to speak English precisely and became a British subject (in 1887), a Tory, and a member of the Junior Constitutional Club, Hermann never lost his German tastes. His favorite amusement was Skat, a three-hand card game. And in a good mood, surrounded by family in his Hampstead home, with
apfelstrudels
all round, and a fine cigar smoldering readily at hand, he would lean back and recite random lines from old comic sketches, popular in the Frankfurt of his youth, chuckling softly to himself.
The story of my family, on the British side, is a story of assimilation. When Voltaire suggested that we should start planting coconuts, he was talking only about laws and institutions. But those who believe that political or legal institutions merely reflect only native traditions tend to be suspicious of assimilation. Immigrants, or the children of immigrants, are often suspected of having weak or divided loyalties. They wouldn’t be prepared to die for their country, for it isn’t, so to speak, in their blood. To prove such accusations wrong, some “assimilated” Jews have gone out of their way to hide or deny their family histories. At times, this was demanded of them. I think the fact that my grandparents did not, on the whole, feel obliged to do so explains their British patriotism. But they were discreet about their background, which may have been another sign of their Britishness—I hesitate to say Englishness—or it may point to a sense of unease that never quite went away.
Hermann Regensburg was, so far as I know, not an Anglophile while he was growing up. The Regensburgs were solid, middle-class Jews who wanted nothing more than to be solid, middle-class Germans. Hermann’s father changed his name from Loeb to Leopold and gave his children solid German names—Adolf, Hermann, Moritz. German Jews often went in for names with a Wagnerian ring: Sigmund and Siegfried were typical examples. The Regensburgs were not religious, but to have taken the final step toward assimilation and convert
would have seemed abject to them. To wish to be German was natural. To profess a faith in Christ would have smacked of opportunism.
Culture, not religion, was the Regensburg business. Quite literally. Leopold sold musical instruments. If you needed a piano, you went to Regensburg in the Schnurgasse. But music was more than a business; it was a sign of education,
Bildung
. To be educated—to know your German classics, to be musical—was the secular route to assimilation. Jews would not just adopt German culture, they would be its guardians. Culture, especially music, took the place of religion; in some ways it
was
a religion. That may be why so many Jews loved Wagner, whose art was elevated, not least by the composer himself, into a religious cult. Although Wagner’s Teutonic paganism was streaked with Christianity, you did not have to be Christian to be swept away by it.
The problem for people like the Regensburgs was that German nationalism, fueled by Wagnerian mythology, pseudoscientific flimflam, and economic anxiety, was becoming overtly racialist toward the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the most poisonous racial nonsense was promoted by an English Wagnerian, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who settled in Bayreuth and became a German citizen in 1916, by which time my great-grandfathers had long gone and their sons were at war with their fathers’ native land.
Wagner himself, like Luther, still believed that a Jew could, as he put it with customary charm, “annihilate” his Jewishness by repudiating his ancestry, converting, and worshiping at the shrine of Bayreuth. So in theory a Jew could be a German. Some (perhaps more than some) Jews took this all too seriously. A man named Joseph Rubinstein, from the Russian city of Kharkov, begged Wagner to cure him of his “wretched” Jewish condition. Wagner apparently took a kind interest in the young man’s misfortune. But to the mystical chauvinists, like Chamberlain, who took a tribal view of Germanness, even radical, Wagnerian assimilation could never be enough: the Jew was an alien virus to be purged from the national bloodstream. The more a Jew took on the habits and thoughts of his gentile compatriots, the more he was to be feared. One of the first measures under the Third Reich was to force Jews to add the name Israel or Sarah to their other names, so there could be no more misunderstanding.
I have a photograph of one of my other great-grandfathers, Richard
Schlesinger, also from Frankfurt, also an emigrant to Britain. The photograph was taken sometime in the late 1870s, in the studio of Otto van Bosch, “royal court photographer, Frankfurt and Paris.” Richard is dressed in the yellow and blue uniform of a Prussian soldier, his mustache curled in the military style. His face is set in an expression of manly fortitude that now looks theatrical: the attempt of a German Jew to adopt the Wilhelminian swagger. He must have tried his very best, Richard Schlesinger: patriot, soldier, and ardent enthusiast of Wagner’s music. And yet Richard was never given a commission. When he enquired about this, an officer expressed surprise at the young man’s naïveté. “But surely you must understand: you are a Jew.” Richard’s feeling of rejection must have been deep enough for it to become embedded in family lore. It is one of the few stories he left behind, as a warning of patriotism betrayed.
The situation for German Jews became more difficult after the stock market crash of 1873. Leopold Regensburg was no longer alive. He died in 1871, when Hermann was only twelve, the victim of a smallpox epidemic spread by Prussian troops passing through town after their victory at Sedan. The stock market crash, and its consequences, were blamed on greedy Jewish speculators. Officially, Jews still enjoyed all the rights of gentiles. Unofficially, army commissions and high-ranking jobs in government service were almost always out of reach. You could prosper in the cities, in business, journalism, the “free professions,” or the arts, but full assimilation remained elusive, no matter how hard you tried. Trouble was always lurking in the German forest. When Jews got together in public places, especially in small towns, they kept their voices down and said “Italians” when they spoke of Jews.
Such was the atmosphere when Hermann and Adolf were invited to tea by two elderly English ladies who were living in Frankfurt, because life was cheaper there and they could manage on their modest English incomes. The Regensburgs practiced their English, ate homemade cakes, and played croquet on the lawn. Perhaps the ladies’ hospitality reinforced the common image of England as a civilized country that was good for the Jews. Had not England, at the peak of its power, had a Jewish prime minister? A Jewish earl, no less. The English gentleman, with his fine clothes and his fine manners, was a figure to look up to. Not only did he rule the world, but he was honest and believed
in fair play. An English gentleman, so it seemed to many Jews all over Europe, was something to be.
One of the most extraordinary Anglophiliac documents about life in Wilhelminian Germany was written by a German Jew named Willy Ritter Liebermann von Wahlendorf. He was only a few years younger than Richard Schlesinger and Hermann Regensburg and wrote his memoirs in London, in 1936. He couldn’t resist calling it
Mein Kampf
, a title his posthumous publishers wisely dropped.
*
Liebermann came from a much grander family than the Schlesingers or the Regensburgs. His father was a retired industrialist with an aristocratic title, a famous art collection, and connections with the kaiser himself. Max Liebermann, the painter, was a cousin, as was Walther Rathenau, the industrialist, who kept the German economy going during the First World War. Rathenau’s patriotism was repaid after the war with the slogan “Shoot down Walther Rathenau, the Goddamned Jewish swine!” A gang of right-wing zealots proceeded to do just that in 1922, by lobbing a hand grenade into his open limousine and shooting off an automatic gun as he passed down the Königsallee near his house in Berlin.
Willy Liebermann was a typical upper-class Berlin buck: scarred in student duels, dressed in elegant English suits, endowed with an unlimited supply of cash, and able to indulge his taste for horses and fine women, he cut a dash in high society—that is to say, mostly Jewish high society. Even at the highest level, borderlines were still observed. That even the Jewish grandees of Berlin, with their dueling scars, their wealth, and their patriotism, were keeping, or rather, were kept much to themselves, is rather astonishing. But perhaps this says more about Berlin at the time than about Germany. Gentile high society consisted mostly of Prussian Junkers, some of whom married Jewish girls for the money, but who otherwise would have had little in common with the more cultured Jews.