Hitler's Last Hostages Page 9
Hitler increased the frequency of his Nazi rallies after recognizing their propaganda power. He arranged for security at each, and his security teams calmly and routinely removed protesters to the jeers of the raucous crowds.25 By 1922, Hitler was holding up to twelve rallies in a single night to satisfy demand, sweating so much that his underwear soaked up the moisture from sweat and spilt beer. The electrifying rallies fueled the party’s rapid growth, but Hitler retained control by allowing the NSDAP to establish chapters only in locations where he found leaders personally loyal to him and who could proselytize not only to the working class but also to the bourgeoisie. Hitler recognized that previous radical right-wing parties had failed to succeed because they had appealed exclusively to one group or the other.
The academic classes generally preferred to discuss politics behind closed doors, in reserved tones, so Hitler began courting them in their parlors. In such sophisticated surroundings among trusted friends, the intellectuals felt comfortable entertaining controversial notions, including eugenics, anti-Semitism, social Darwinism, and censorship of controversial art. To them, the graphic, provocative art of Berlin’s avant-garde was morally disturbing, and they agreed with Hitler that that these works were inspired by a breakdown of and declining pride in German culture.
Crucial to legitimizing Hitler as a serious thinker was Catherine Hanfstaengl, an urbane American married to a German, who invited him to speak in her home. Catherine and her friends were amused by the quirky politician’s obsequious behavior, finding him to be an entertaining breath of fresh air. Particularly bemusing was how Herr Hitler would arrive sporting rather odd color combinations; one memorably arresting outfit included a blue suit, a purple shirt, a brown vest, and a crimson tie.26 Despite not arriving by horse, Hitler would routinely set down a riding crop after entering the house, even placing a holster with a gun in it on the coat rack. He would bring vast bouquets of flowers, bow low, and kiss the women’s hands dramatically before ranting against the “Jewification” of art and culture. He used politically offensive rhetoric that the women would never use themselves, infusing the discussions with seemingly harmless excitement.27
Hitler was thrilled that the wife of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the English racist whose books he had read in Vienna, attended these salons. He was also impressed by Catherine’s son Ernst, nicknamed “Putzi,” a dapper Harvard graduate who spoke native German and English. He noted to himself that Putzi would be perfect for a future NSDAP role and began ruminating over what it should be. Kurt Ludeke, a jet-setting rake born in 1890, described Hitler’s draw for young sophisticates like Putzi and himself, employing religious language as many others did. “His appeal to German manhood was like a call to arms, the gospel he preached a sacred truth,” Luedeke explained. “I was a man of thirty-two, weary of disgust and disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause, a patriot without a channel for his patriotism, a yearner for the heroic without a hero.”28
France soon provided Hitler with a tragic incident that allowed him to argue that Germany was still under attack from foreign powers and he was the hero behind whom Germans should unite to reclaim their lost national sovereignty. After Germany repeatedly defaulted on paying war reparations, French troops occupied the Ruhr region in January 1923. This was the center of German coal, iron, and steel production, and the French aimed to intimidate Germany into resuming reparation payments. After fighting with a crowd of workers at the Krupp steel plant in Hessen, however, the French began shooting into the crowd, killing three and wounding over thirty. Enraged by what they viewed as a French invasion of their country, half a million Germans participated in funeral demonstrations. The German government’s tepid response to the shootings disgusted many Germans, making the Nazis appealing to many who had previously been wary of the upstart party. Hitler harnessed the incident to his advantage; within a few weeks Hitler-backed paramilitary groups stole weapons from the government, which limply asked for them back but did not pursue the theft further. The Sturmabteilung (SA), the NSDAP’s paramilitary wing, accordingly gained support from Germans who saw the incident as proof that the government was impotent and interpreted Hitler’s brazen act as a sign of competence and strength.
By autumn 1923, Hitler felt emboldened to attempt a putsch. His initial plan had been to march into Munich’s center on 11 November and declare a dictatorship, but he expedited his plot after learning on the evening of 8 November that a rival in the party, Karl Lossow, was making a speech in the Bürgerbräukeller, the cavernous basement beer hall where the Nazis routinely congregated for rallies. Incensed that Lossow might take attention away from him, Hitler rushed to the Bürgerbräukeller, grabbed a beer stein, took a gulp, and dramatically threw the stein to the floor. He brandished a pistol, jumped on a table, and, as beer glasses went crashing down, fired a shot into the ceiling. Absurdly, he announced that he had overthrown the national and Bavarian governments.
“I have four bullets in this pistol; three for my collaborators should they desert me and the last bullet for myself,” he said glancing down at his top three rivals. The room went quiet. Karl Alexander von Müller, an academic who had attended salons that Catherine Hanfstaengl had hosted for Hitler, was in attendance. He was shocked and horrified; when Hitler had first rushed in, Müller had mistaken him for a disgruntled waiter. Yet, once Hitler began to speak, Müller became mesmerized. Hitler transformed “the mood of the meeting completely inside out, like a glove, with just a few words,” he noted.29
Hitler was convinced that his rivals were now behind his plan for a putsch, and they separated, ostensibly to prepare forces for that very night. Yet, once out of Hitler’s sight, they shrank away. A light, wet snow began to fall. After midnight, Hitler realized his confidence in his fellow conspirators had been misplaced. Furious, he nevertheless roused supporters for a demonstration at Odeonsplatz in central Munich. The group began attacking policemen, and Hitler’s arm was wrenched from its socket when a fatally wounded man fell on him. The police killed sixteen Nazis, and Hitler fled to the residence of Putzi Hanfstaengl and his wife, Helene.
“There he stood, ghastly pale, hatless, his face and clothing covered with mud, the left arm hanging down from a strangely slanting shoulder,” Helene would later recall. Distressed, Hitler took out his revolver to shoot himself, but Helen convinced him otherwise. “What do you think you’re doing?” she admonished him. “They’re looking for you to carry on!” she said of his devout followers. Hitler reluctantly backed down from suicide and was soon arrested after convincing the officer to pin his Iron Cross on his chest before he faced the public.30
During his trial in February 1924, Hitler maintained that he had not committed treason because the new republic was not a legitimate government. The senior judge openly sided with him on this point, and the junior judges, responsible for issuing a verdict, only did so after the senior judge promised that it would not be enforced. They sentenced Hitler to five years in prison, but made him eligible for parole after only six months. Though he was Austrian, they spared him from deportation, saying his love of Germany was admirably ardent.31
Politically observant Germans who opposed Hitler assumed that the scandal would break Hitler’s successful streak. George Grosz, for his part, was not fooled for a second.
After the failed putsch, the government chose not to focus on far-right uprisings or the issues that led people to join them. Instead, they launched a second, extremely public investigation into Grosz, prosecuting him for obscenity. Grosz countered that he was not creating works of obscenity in their own right; rather through his artwork he was exercising his freedom of speech to comment on corruption that in his view was undermining the government’s political legitimacy. The judiciary found Grosz guilty and confiscated several of his printing plates.
Undaunted, Grosz continued producing critical images of both the government and the Nazis. Grosz created and actively promoted his 1924 work For the Fatherland, to the Slaughter House. While the Nazis were portr
aying themselves as the positive alternative to war profiteers in league with the current government, this work argued that both groups were equally bad for Germany: in the black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing with soft, broad lines, a Nazi militant and an amoral war profiteer lead the masses into a new world war. The works resonated with ordinary Germans and sold widely throughout the country. “George Grosz’s cartoons seemed to us not satires but realistic reportage: we knew those types, they were all around us,” political theorist Hannah Arendt would later write.32
Berlin was now home to the Western world’s largest variety of sexual mores and practices, including a new emphasis on sexual autonomy and pleasure for women. For artists, this provided opportunities to portray female sexuality that were unprecedented in Western history. Grosz had recently married Eva Peter, who had caught his eye on the campus of Berlin’s Universität der Künste, where she briefly took classes. “Between ourselves, I shit on the idea of depth in women,” he had once written to a male friend.33 Yet courting Eva and then as her husband, he came to respect her mind while also encouraging her to express herself sexually with him as an autonomous, sexually unique individual.
Female artists aiming to chronicle both the benefits and pitfalls of this sexual revolution were freer to do so in the mid-1920s than at any previous time in the history of Western art, facing an unprecedented lack of resistance from male artists in the avant-garde. Hannah Höch, who had been part of the Dada movement with Grosz during the Great War, resolved in the 1920s to earn an independent income as a single woman after two illegal abortions due to a relationship with Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dada artist who was married. Still pained by her decision to terminate the pregnancies, she created the oil painting Imaginary Bridge. In the work, painted in dark browns and blues, she and Hausmann, represented only by their heads, open their mouths to kiss only for a tiny infant to fall out of Hausmann’s mouth, terrified and clutching itself. Despite her pain, Höch considered herself fortunate that, unlike Hausmann’s wife, she could escape her destructive relationship with him. After breaking with Hausmann, she blatantly stated, “I would like to blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us,” adding, “I paint pictures in which I try to make this evident, tangible.”34 She began creating collages from photographs and illustrations cut from German fashion magazines to comment on women’s fashion and sexuality. Though several of these pieces celebrated women’s sexual empowerment, many others reiterated the warning in Imaginary Bridge. In The Coquette, a woman in a fashionable flapper dress sits staring down at a group of men leering up at her, their human bodies replaced via collage by those of rotund animals.
Jeanne Mammen, a German-born artist, had grown up and studied in France before fleeing for The Hague during the Great War to avoid internment by the French government, which confiscated her father’s property due to his German citizenship. Mammen subsequently moved to Berlin in 1916 at the age of twenty-six. There, she developed a far more positive view of female sexuality and women’s empowerment than she had experienced before. She focused on sensual depictions of strong women thriving in traditionally male realms. Mammen’s watercolor and pencil on velum work At the Shooting Gallery depicts a fashionable woman in a chic cardigan confidently selecting a rifle at a shooting range. The man overseeing the transaction, by contrast, is hardly the paragon of a masculine, skilled shooter; he has weak, flabby skin and tired eyes, in contrast to her strong cheekbones and steely gaze.
Living near the Kurfürstendamm, with its myriad clubs, cafés, and cabarets, Mammen prided herself on seeking out adventurous female dancers and singers and convincing them to pose for her. One of her most popular portraits depicts the famous Jewish German cabaret artist and silent cinema star Valeska Gert. Though a trained and talented dancer who often gave wild, frenetic performances, Gert was also known for stunts such as “Pause,” in which she simply went onto the stage and stood there, seeing how uncomfortable she could make the audience as they waited for something to occur. Her costumes were equally bizarre. In Mammen’s portrait, Gert’s short, spiky black hair mirrors her outlandish high-necked collar, which fans out behind her scarlet dress with its plunging neckline. Mammen admired how Gert was a self-made woman who designed her own acts down to the tiniest details and successfully managed her own finances.
At the same time that Berlin-based female artists such as Höch and Mammen were creating their artworks exploring female sexuality in all its complexity, ordinary middle-class Germans based outside Berlin simply craved stability and a return to what they considered the prewar status quo. Normalcy finally seemed attainable for the first time since the Great War had broken out twelve years before. Though hardy ideal, life was far less hellish than in the months following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The Dawes Plan was functioning, ensuring that Germany could receive foreign loans and make its reparations payments in installments.
Otto Dix finally published the most significant series of his career, The War, in the midst of this optimistic wave of economic recovery that was sweeping the nation. In contrast to most other artists who served in the Great War, Dix downplayed his wartime experiences in both his professional and private lives. By 1923, he had settled down with his partner, Maria, with whom he had a child in 1923. Dix found it unsettling that the more he nurtured a happy home life, the more his nightmares about his service in the Great War increased. He frequently awoke from nightmares in which he was crawling through the wreckage of bombed and burnt-out buildings. “The rubble was always there in my dreams,” he told a friend.35
In 1924, Dix finished the fifty etchings that comprised The War, based on over four hundred preliminary sketches. He meticulously planned the technique for each etching in advance of its execution in order to produce a myriad of textures, from gentle and soft to harsh and jagged. In Horse Cadaver, the corpse of an equine rots on the battlefield, her ribcage prominently exposed as her chest decomposes. In an eerily similar work, Corpse in Barbed Wire, a soldier rots in a trench, his body hopelessly tangled in metal cords. On the battlefield, Dix argues, there is little difference between the bodies of man and beast.
The works were well received by art world elites, not only for their content but due to Dix’s mastery of so many intricate types of etching. “No creation in contemporary art has depicted the apocalyptic face and the naked grimace of war with such intensity and immediacy,” wrote a critic for the respected Süddeutsche Zeitung.36 Yet the works met largely with extreme discomfort from ordinary Germans, and the portfolio made little money with which Dix could support his new family.
Politicians were also eager to suppress Dix’s depictions of wartime, considering them bad for postwar morale. Shortly after Dix created The War, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne bought The Trench, a painting that Dix had concurrently created. Upon learning this, Cologne’s mayor, Konrad Adenauer, forced the museum to return the artwork, finding its topic too depressing for his newly peaceful and prosperous city. Twenty years later, Adenauer would become the first Chancellor of West Germany after the war, responsible for cleaning up the havoc that Hitler would wreak. He would say little of his censorship of artwork in the years before Hitler took power.
In spring 1925, Germans elected Paul von Hindenburg, a revered seventy-seven-year-old general and statesman who embodied the prewar conservative family values for which most Germans yearned. Hindenburg even allowed the imperial flag to be used on diplomatic missions abroad, trips that had regained some of their prewar legitimacy as Germany was finally admitted to the League of Nations. Germans began to feel proud to be German again.
Hitler was alarmed by Hindenburg’s rise. After founding his paramilitary force, the Schutzstaffel (SS) on 9 November 1925—the second anniversary of his failed putsch—the aspiring dictator continued to spout the same hate-filled rhetoric as before but now knew that he needed another crisis to gain traction. While Hitler was biding his time, the press
and most Germans began to see his radical movement as a thing of the past.
Grosz, however, worried that Hitler was continuing to proselytize to middle-class Germans in hopes that a crisis, whether genuine or manufactured, would soon arise. The artist doubted that the elderly Hindenburg could handle such a volatile political situation. His angst only increased when he began journeying to remote areas and observed how entrenched the Nazi message was there.
On a trip in July and August 1926 to Osteseebad Leba, Poland, a favored resort for artists and the bourgeoise located 1,100 miles from Hitler’s base in Munich, Grosz observed several flag poles bearing official German flags with swastikas painted over them. Anti-Semitic comments were openly accepted; anti-Semitic publications littered the tables of mainstream bars and cafés, where patrons openly worried that the tolerance of legally assimilated Jewish Germans had tainted German culture, particularly the art world. “I wouldn’t come here if I were Jewish; who knows why from time to time some of them have the boldness to defy the medieval-style ostracism they face,” Grosz wrote a friend.37
Grosz aimed to work harder to combat the growing threat that not only the Nazis but also complacency about politics represented to his country. The task was daunting; he drank more, worked harder, and succeeded in creating some of the most trenchant works of artistic political commentary to come out of the Weimar Republic. Uniquely, they criticized not only the growing Nazi movement but also the violent Far Left and the political incompetence of the establishment that enabled the rise of these polarized groups.
In response to this growing anti-Semitism, Grosz created two detailed works in 1926 that came to define his career in the eyes of both his supporters and his detractors: The Pillars of Society and Eclipse of the Sun. The Pillars of Society took its name from an 1877 play by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. The protagonist in Ibsen’s controversial Pillars gets away with murder because of his power and influence in society. Grosz chose the title to posit that corruption and collusion were similarly dominant in Weimar Germany. Representing the press, which Grosz argued had grown complacent and was in the pockets of politicians and businessmen, was the archetype of a reporter: a journalist clutches the most popular newspapers of the day but is falling asleep with his pen in his hand. Next to him, a parliamentarian for the Social Democrats, the party of Hindenburg, waves the prewar imperial flag that Hindenburg had reinstated. On his head is a steaming pile of dung. Dominating the picture is a Hitler supporter, sporting a tie with a swastika pin at its knot. Behind the trio of societal “pillars,” a clergyman looks at the pandemonium and raises his hands high, inciting his congregation to join in at worst, allowing them to turn a blind eye at best.