Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Jew, though I could understand why it appealed to those who were neither. What was there left but the communists, especially for a boy who arrived in Germany already emotionally drawn to the left?

As I entered the school year 1932–3, the sense that we were living in some sort of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering. The presidential election of May 1932, the first of several in that ominous year, had already eliminated the parties of the Weimar Republic. The last of its governments, under Bruning, had fallen shortly after and given way to a clique of aristocratic reactionaries governing entirely by presidential decree, for the administration of Franz von Papen had virtually no support in the Reichstag, let alone even the makings of a majority. The new government immediately sent a small detail of soldiers to dismiss the government of the largest German state, Prussia, where a Social-Democratic–Centre Party coalition had maintained something like democratic rule. The ministers went like lambs, as Papen, trying to bring Hitler into his government, revoked a recent ban on the wearing of their uniforms by Nazi stormtroopers. Their deliberately provocative parades now became part of the normal street scene. Every day saw battles between the uniformed protection squads of the various parties. In July alone eighty-six were killed, mainly in clashes between Nazis and communists, and the number of those seriously injured ran into hundreds. Hitler, playing for higher stakes, forced a general election in July. The Nazis were returned with almost 14 million votes (37.5 per cent) and 230 seats – barely fewer than the combined strength of the Weimar parties (Social Democrats, Catholics and the now virtually invisible Democrats) and the communists with over 5 million and eighty-nine seats. For practical purposes the Weimar Republic was dead. Only the form of its funeral remained to be determined. But until there was agreement between the President, the army, the reactionaries and Hitler (who insisted on the Chancellorship or nothing), its corpse could not be buried.

This was the situation in which the school year began. If I remember my first year in Berlin in colour, my memories of the last six months are in darkening shades of grey with touches of red. The change was not only political but personal.

For as 1932 advanced, our prospects in Berlin dimmed. We became victims not of Hitler but of the ‘Great Crisis’ or, more specifically, of a new law vainly trying to stem the rising flood of unemployment by obliging foreign film companies (and no doubt other foreign enterprises) to employ a minimum of 75 per cent of German citizens. Sidney was dispensable. At least that is the most plausible explanation of what happened. Nothing came of the Polish proposal, but in the autumn of 1932, the Berlin job having evidently come to an end, Sidney took Gretl and Peter, then just seven, to Barcelona – whether on a mission for Universal, or with some local prospects in mind, I cannot say. I suspect that there were no firm prospects of permanence, for if there had been, the whole family would have moved. As it was, Nancy and I were left in Berlin for the time being to continue our schooling, until the outlook became clearer. It was the end of the new house and garden in Lichterfelde, an upmarket suburb to which we had moved from the Aschaffenburgerstrasse, next to someone in the music world who actually had the luxury of a small but genuinely private swimming-pool. Nancy and I moved in with the third of the Grun sisters, our peripatetic aunt Mimi, whose life had brought her, via various failed enterprises in English provincial towns (‘we have too few debts to make bankruptcy worth while and just have to carry on’ ⁴) to a sublet apartment by the railway line in Halensee, a Berlin district by the far end of the Kurfurstendamm. There, as always, she took paying guests, offering the English ones German lessons. That is where we spent our last months in Berlin and saw in the Third Reich.

This was probably the only time in our lives that my sister Nancy and I lived together outside a family setting, for Mimi, living from hand to mouth as always and anyway unused to children – she never had any herself – hardly counted as such. I can only guess how the absence of any effective parental authority in these last months in Berlin affected Nancy, but I am fairly certain that my political activities would have been a good deal more constricted if Sidney and Gretl had stayed in Berlin. Being three and a half years older than my sister, I felt responsible for her. There was no one else now. I had never previously bothered about how she went to school, but only about the daily trauma of being forced to cycle from Lichterfelde to the Gymnasium on a machine of which I felt ashamed as only a teenager can, namely my dying mother’s present, the black repainted secondhand bike with the bent frame. (I would arrive half an hour early at the bike-shed and sneak out late, afraid of being seen on it.) Now, however, we went to and came back from school together, for Halensee was a long way from Wilmersdorf (the PHG and the Barbarossaschule were virtually neighbours). Presumably we did so by tram, but I only recall the endless footslog during the dramatic four-day Berlin transport strike of early November. We were two youngsters alone. When she reached her twelfth birthday, I felt it was my duty to ‘enlighten’ her (as the German phrase went), namely to tell her about the facts of life, which she claimed she did not yet know. She may have been too polite to tell me she knew them already, or at any rate the part concerning women’s periods, which were then the most immediately relevant to a girl reaching puberty. I cannot say that those months brought us closer together than two siblings who have gone through the same traumatic experiences are anyway. We had very little in common except these traumas, and my intellectualism and lack of interest in the world of people gave me a protection she lacked. I did not recognize this then. She did not share my interests or my life, increasingly dominated by politics. I did not even know what her life at school was, who were her friends or if she had any. I suppose we gossiped about Mimi and the paying guests, played cards in the evening, and sent letters to Spain. I elaborated stories for young Peter on the basis of a combination of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle and Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Nasobem’, the animal that walks on its noses.

I seem to remember the Friedrichsruher Strasse only in grey or artificial light, presumably because in those months we were away from it for most of the day. In the evening we all met in the sitting room, which contained the original tenant’s bookcase, which allowed me, for the first time, to read Thomas Mann (Tristan) and a short novel by Colette. Mimi, familiar with these situations, showed a genuine interest in the lives of her lodgers and went through her usual social repertoire, palmistry and other forms of character- and fortune-telling, and conversation about the reality of psychic phenomena with examples. She had – it is one of the few concrete details of life in Halensee that sticks in my mind – tried to save money by buying potatoes by the sackful for cooking, sending me down to the cellar from time to time to fetch up the necessary supply. As always, she lived on a financial knife-edge. As time went on they began to sprout, and had to be peeled with care to conceal this.

5

Berlin: Brown and Red

Meanwhile my revolutionary inclinations moved from theory to practice. The first person who attempted to give more precision to them was an older social-democratic boy, Gerhard Wittenberg. With him I passed the initiation ritual of the typical socialist intellectual of the twentieth century, namely the shortlived attempt to read and understand Karl Marx’s Capital, starting on page one. It did not last long – at this stage of my life anyway – and, while we remained friends, I was attracted neither by German (as distinct from Austrian) social democracy nor by Gerhard’s Zionism, which led him, after Hitler came to power, to emigrate to a kibbutz in Palestine, and eventually – so I understand – to be killed on a return trip to Germany on a mission to rescue Jews. (Zionist militants in those days were, of course, overwhelmingly socialists, mostly of various Marxist convictions.)

The person who recruited me to a communist organization was also older than me. How we got in touch I cannot remember, but it is not unlikely that there would have been talk about the Englishman in the Untersekunda (lower second form) who announced his red convictions. As I remember him, Rudolf (Rolf) Leder was dark, saturnine and with a taste for leather jackets, and clearly took the Party’s idealized version of the Soviet bolshevik cadre as his model. He lived with his parents in Friedenau, and I can still visualize the two or three shelves on the narrow side of his small room on which he kept his books about communism and the Soviet Union. He must have lent me some – who else could I have borrowed them from – since I read several Soviet novels of the 1920s. None of them suggested a particularly utopian view of life in revolutionary Russia. In this they were like all Soviet fiction written before the Stalin era. Yet when I suggested to Rolf – I can still remember that conversation – that communism must run into problems because of Russia’s backwardness, he bristled: the USSR was beyond criticism. Through him I bought the special edition of a volume of documents and photographs celebrating the fifteenth