Red Orchestra (9 page)

Young Goebbels submitted
Michael
to leading publishers, only to have it rejected by all. He wrote two plays—one of them,
Der Wanderer (The Wanderer),
was based on the life of Jesus Christ—but they went un-produced. Goebbels offered dozens of articles to
Berliner Tageblatt.
But the paper turned down Goebbels's articles as well as his application for a job as reporter.

Goebbels finally found acceptance in the embrace of the Nazi Party. He attended a Munich rally in 1922, and he joined the Rhineland branch of the party soon after. He became one of Hitler's strongest supporters, driven by passionate personal loyalty.
¹⁸
The party, in turn, acknowledged his literary talents (as the German publishing industry had not) and assigned him to edit party publications.

In 1926, Hitler sent Goebbels to “Red Berlin.” This was a challenge; the city's well-entrenched Socialist and Communist culture was more resistant to Nazi ideology than the countryside. Shortly after he arrived, Goebbels founded a weekly called
Der Angriff (The Attack),
which conveniently let him publish as much of his own writing as he pleased. He won his seat in the Reichstag in 1928, and became the party's chief strategist for propaganda, which allowed him to pursue his passions for the dramatic arts, the cult of celebrity, and the mass media.

Goebbels was a born propagandist, and is often credited with the creation of the myth of Hitler as all-powerful Führer. He also had a talent for stagecraft, imbuing the Nazi movement and Hitler's personality cult with perverse mutations of Catholic pageantry and iconography.
¹⁹

Over the 1920s, the German news media underwent a massive consolidation process. The resulting concentration of ownership benefited the Nazis. Many media properties ended up in the hands of conservative media baron Alfred Hugenberg. By the end of the decade, his holdings included a major book and magazine publisher, a newspaper chain, an international wire service, and Germany's leading film company, Universum-Film (UFA). Hugenberg began to court the Nazis. They
quickly took over his empire and used it to transform the German mass media environment, with Goebbels in charge.

In November 1930, Goebbels won party financing to take his newspaper from a weekly to a daily publication, which also allowed him to lower the newsstand price and expand the content. (One of his first new features was serial fiction, launched with his own novel,
Michael.)
²⁰
Goebbels used
Der Angriff
‘to fashion a parallel Nazi universe of ideology, behavior, and myth. Like other newspapers, it covered political and economic issues, but Goebbels added women's pages, book and music reviews, even sports coverage, all of it delivered from a Nazi perspective. As scholar Russel Lemmons writes,

Perhaps not even Goebbels realized it at the time, but his vision of
Der Angriff
would serve as a blueprint for the Nazis' future policy of
Gleichschaltung:
“shaping everything into conformity” by reaching into every sector of society to root out dissent and envelop the public in Nazi values.
²²

Goebbels's focus transcended the argumentative realm of print. He worked closely with Hitler in staging mass rallies for outlying cities, offering a thrilling spectacle to the beaten-down audiences, and showcasing Hitler's oratory.

Goebbels saw infinite promise in the movies. A failed playwright, he paid close attention to plays and films and systematically reviewed them in his journal, taking special note of the 1930 film production of Brecht's
Threepenny Opera.
Goebbels was engrossed in the question of how film
could be adapted as a political tool, and he considered
Threepenny Opera
to be a negative model. Although it projected the Communists' message of solidarity with the poor and the powerless, he believed that the polemic was diluted by humor and cynicism.

Still, Goebbels recognized that the Communists were several steps ahead of the Nazis in politicizing the arts and the media. One reason for this lay in the extraordinary figure of Willi Münzenberg, the media czar of the left. Münzenberg, who cultivated the scruffy image of his working-class past, was also a public relations genius. He soon parlayed the relief initiative into his own mass media consortium known as the Münzenberg Trust. Over the next nineteen years it grew into an international media empire that included two daily newspapers, a mass-circulation weekly, and a collection of trade magazines. He also financed Erwin Piscator's agitprop theater for the masses, and founded Prometheus Productions to underwrite left-wing films.

But Münzenberg lacked the Nazis' rapacity and financial expertise. His occasional cinematic successes were interspersed with turgid propaganda-laden flops.
²³
In 1931, as the political situation approached a boiling point, Münzenberg decided to produce a script coauthored by Bertolt Brecht. The proletarian epic was called
Kuhle Wampe
(literally translated as “Cold Stove,” but also Berlin slang for “empty belly”), and told the story of a family of unemployed workers and their refuge in a tent city outside Berlin.

The film's young heroine was played by Marta Wolter, the delicate nineteen-year-old actress who had recently joined the KPD. It was to be the first and last feature role of her career. The Nazi cataclysm was only months away, and with it, leftist filmmaking would come to an abrupt end. Münzenberg and Brecht would be flung to opposite ends of the earth. Marta Wolter would stay in Berlin and learn a new role as part of the resistance.

Kuhle Wampe
was released in 1932. The Nazis banned the film within the year, but they examined it closely nonetheless. Some authors have speculated that
Kuhle Wampe
's scenes of workers' rallies and athletic contests inspired similar tableaus in the Nazis'
Olympiad
and
Triumph of the Will.
Earlier, Joseph Goebbels had borrowed from Brecht's
Three-penny Opera.
The propaganda minister, who played a little piano himself,
told his diary that he abhorred the film, especially the jazz-influenced score by Jewish composer Kurt Weill. All the same, he gave orders to make similar popular music available to the German public on the Reich radio system.
²⁴
It was easy enough to censor cultural expressions, but sometimes it was more useful to co-opt them.

I
T GREW HARDER, EVEN FOR MODERATES, TO IMAGINE HOW DEMOC
racy in Germany could survive. Mildred Harnack, a captive audience to Berlin's ugly dramas, was stirred to indignation by events on the streets. In January 1932 she witnessed a fracas between the Nazis and the Communists in front of the Karl Liebknecht Haus, which served as KPD headquarters as well as the
Rote Fahne
newspaper offices. Mildred wrote home expressing her outrage at the government response. “The police openly assisted and protected the Fascists, struck at the protesting workers with their rubber batons, and put a great cordon about the whole square, allowing only Nazis to get through.”
¹

It wasn't enough for the Nazis to gather strength; in order to take over they required a breakdown of the status quo. On this count, the fates obliged them at every turn. Violent police actions were only one symptom of the social collapse. The same October that witnessed the Crash on Wall Street brought the death of Foreign Minister Gustav Strese-mann, Germany's most gifted statesman. Stresemann had brokered economic and political treaties that led to recovery in the mid-1920s, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with French foreign minister Aristide Briand in 1926. Now, in the midst of crucial negotiations with the French, he died suddenly at the age of fifty-one. Stresemann had urged his quarrelsome colleagues to unite against extremists, warning, “We are dancing on a volcano and we are facing a revolution, if we are unable to achieve conciliation by a wise and decisive policy.”
²

There was a critical vacuum in leadership. Part of the problem was structural. The 1919 constitution endowed the office of president with many powers, including the ability to call parliamentary elections, to appoint a chancellor, and, in cases of emergency, to rule by decree. Since 1925 these powers had been held by Prussian field marshal Paul von Hin-denburg. The old general had been a war hero, but he had no idea how to respond to the growing political chaos. After 1928, Hindenburg went through four chancellors in four years.

The parliament was equally unstable. There had been five parliamentary elections in the nine years following the founding of the Republic in 1919. But now the political upheavals produced four elections in the two and a half years between September 1930 and March 1933. Each election saw a decline in the Social Democratic Party's standing, and growth for the radical parties trying to displace it.

The German Communist Party (KPD) was one of the parties that gained parliamentary seats. The party recruited angry unemployed workers to carry out Stalin's orders to sabotage the Social Democrats. They were met by gangs from Nazi paramilitary organizations: the SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squad), founded as a retinue of Hitler bodyguards, and the SA (
Sturmabteilung,
or Storm Division), known as the “brownshirts.” Communists and Nazis knocked heads frequently and sometimes fatally. The brawls were called
Zusammenstösse
(collisions). Police often, but not always, favored the Nazis.

It was still barely possible for middle-class Berliners to mind their own business and hope it would all blow over. Adam Kuckhoff, for one, was busy with another professional reincarnation. In 1931 he quarreled with the management of the Staatstheater and left his position as dramaturge to become a freelance writer. He coauthored a comedy aptly called
Wetter für morgen veränderlich
(
Changeable Weather Tomorrow
) that was produced in Berlin in 1932. Then he started on a new novel and picked up extra work as a reader for Ullstein's book division.
³

The Harnacks also clung to normalcy. Mildred resumed her studies at the university in Berlin, and was delighted to get an offer to lecture there on American literature. She happily set about getting to know her husband's family, while Arvid joined his wife exploring Berlin's lively American community.

It must have been a welcome island of sanity. Berlin was teeming with American and British expatriates, attracted by the highly favorable exchange rate and the exotic atmosphere. Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender came in search of the “divine decadence” that Isherwood subsequently portrayed in his Berlin stories. Mildred and Arvid's activities were more wholesome: luncheon lectures at the American Women's Club, supper forums at the American Church, and U.S. embassy teas. The American community was a mixed bag of students, tourists, and businessmen, but many members held a liberal perspective, reflecting the dawn of the Roosevelt administration back home.

The Harnacks shared a keen interest in the Soviet Union, like many of their German and American counterparts. Mildred was thrilled by Russian fiction and cinema and inspired by news of Soviet social reforms, especially those affecting women. She eagerly shared her views with her students. Arvid was more convinced than ever that the Soviets' experiments in centralized planning offered hope for the West. After all, he pointed out, the Soviets were impoverished, but they had escaped the worst of the Great Depression. Arvid decided to set up a new study group called ARPLAN, a German acronym for the Working Group for the Study of Soviet Economic Planning. It was launched in January 1932, with Arvid as secretary and a number of prominent German scholars as members. They were assisted by two Soviet officials posted to Berlin, Sergei Bessonov, a leading economist, and Alexander Hirschfeld, an embassy official.
⁴
The Soviets had instructed Bessonov to recruit German technocrats for visits to the USSR, and to extract useful information for the Soviet trade legation.
⁵

It was clear that 1932 was going to be a decisive year. The Social Dem ocrats were in disarray, and the Nazis and the Communists were both on the rise. Germany held presidential elections on March 13, with a runoff on April 10. The three leading candidates for president were Hinden-burg, Hitler, and Communist Party candidate Ernst Thälmann, a rough-hewn dockworker and Stalin loyalist.

President Hindenburg was still Germany's power broker, but he was ill-served by aides who convinced him that Hitler could be easily manipulated. Equally grave, at eighty-four, he was tired and increasingly senile. Still, in the public mind, the field marshal represented order and
discipline in the face of growing turmoil. Despite an ugly campaign, Hindenburg won the runoff elections easily, with the support of every major party other than the Nazis and the Communists. Hitler came in a distant second, with Thälmann trailing an even more distant third. Altercations between Nazis and Communists sharpened, with a mounting death toll. A political chill set in, and the influence of the Nazis began to reach beyond the streets.