Hitlerland

Initially, Lilian Mowrer had been distinctly unimpressed with Berlin when she followed her husband after wrapping up the couple’s affairs in Rome, their previous assignment. Arriving in March 1924, she was depressed by the figurative and literal cold and the contrast to Italy, where spring flowers were already in bloom. “In Berlin ice still covered the ponds in the Tiergarten, and the atmosphere was leaden,” she noted. She was depressed, too, by “the ugliness of the city,” the heavy Victorian architecture, the pompousness of public buildings—and by “the unlovely figures of the people!”

In the apartment they rented, she found canvases painted by their landlord, female nudes “in the violent tones and formless composition of the German Expressionist school” featuring massive torsos and backsides. “As if we don’t see enough horrors in the street,” she complained. Then there was the matter of food. “There is a great deal in the German cuisine that needs getting used to,” she archly noted. Even the fact that the mark had finally stabilized had its downside as far as she was concerned: prices were now much higher for foreigners than a few years earlier.

Soon, however, Lilian began to see her new home in a different light. German Expressionism was still a puzzle to her, “but something in the passionately contorted figures and faces was beginning to arouse my interest.” She loved Italian art but realized that in Rome she had been living artistically “entirely in the past.” By contrast, “German modern work, half metaphysical, half barbaric, was a stimulating challenge.” As for German theater, she quickly recognized it as “the most vital in Europe” and Germans as “the greatest theater-goers in Europe.” And she loved the fact that Berlin was full of foreign productions as well, from the classic Comedie Francaise to the daring new Russian offerings of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, which she found particularly exciting. “Nowhere in the world was there such hospitality to foreign talent as in Germany,” she wrote.

Lilian’s happiest discovery, though, was how open many Germans were to foreigners in everyday life, not just on the stage. “They were so wonderfully hospitable, those Weimar Republicans, they did not wait to make a bella figura with receptions and parties, they invited us to take potluck with them in the friendliest manner.” She found everyone—bankers, politicians, writers—inquisitive, expansive and often entertaining.

Another striking aspect of life in Weimar Germany, she observed, was the role of women. At the time of her arrival, the Reichstag boasted 36 women parliamentarians—more than anywhere else. Women were studying a broad array of subjects at the universities—law, economics, history, engineering—and were entering professions once reserved for men. Lilian even met “a full-fledged slaughterer” in Berlin: Margarethe Cohn, who could kill a steer with a single blow of the mallet. “A woman could do what she liked in Weimar Germany,” Lilian concluded.

Lilian was far more than just an observer of life in Berlin. She wrote articles for Town and Country, and she appeared in the first “super-talkie” German film, Liebeswalzer (The Love Waltz), which had both an English and a French version. The German actress who had been cast for the role didn’t speak English as well as she claimed, and Lilian was asked to try out for it. She passed the screen test easily, but her initial elation faded when she saw how monotonous much of the work of endless reshooting was. Still, there were consolations. At another studio lot, Marlene Dietrich was shooting The Blue Angel, and Lilian saw her often eating lunch at the same restaurant where she took her meals. She recognized Dietrich from the stage, where she played leads in “sophisticated” musical reviews and comedies. When The Blue Angel catapulted her to stardom on the big screen, Lilian wasn’t impressed. “It was the greatest waste of material to condemn her forever to vamp roles,” she wrote.

Lilian and Edgar got to know many of the city’s other most famous inhabitants, from the artist George Grosz to Albert Einstein. Meeting the physicist, Edgar asked him about a part of his relativity theory he found illogical. Einstein smiled and replied: “Quit bothering your mind about it: mine is a mathematical, not a logical theory. Here…” At that point, he took his violin and began playing Bach.

Little wonder that Lilian soon conceded: “I was becoming reconciled to Berlin.”

American officials played a key role in bringing about the return to apparent economic normalcy that newcomers like the Mowrers immediately noticed. Ambassador Houghton had been more than just sympathetic to Germany’s plight; he defied isolationist voices back home by arguing that the United States was to blame for not acting more decisively to support Germany’s democratic government. “All in all, Europe is in a sorry mess,” he wrote to State Department European Division Chief William Castle on February 12, 1923. “We ourselves had at one time the power to stabilize conditions… unless something of a miracle takes place, we may look forward confidently and happily to a time not far off when another war may lay prostrate what is left of European civilization.”

Repeatedly urging Washington “to save what is left of German capital and German industry,” Houghton was driven to near despair observing the devastating impact of hyperinflation on his host country, along with the strikes, riots and clashes of extremists of the left and the right. In the summer of 1923, he watched Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government collapse after less than a year in office. “I feel as if I had come back into the same old building, but found the beams and rafters steadily decaying and the floors increasingly unsound, and that unless steps were speedily taken to repair it, the roof and walls must before long inevitably fall in,” he wrote to Secretary of State Hughes.

Those pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. With backing from the Coolidge Administration, Houghton began to make progress on his push for a new reparations settlement and other measures aimed at stabilizing Germany. In his public pronouncements, Houghton avoided chastising France and denied any intention of seeking to block her “just claims,” but he stressed that Germany’s economic recovery was the key to the continent’s recovery. Working closely with Germany’s Gustav Stresemann, who served briefly as both chancellor and foreign minister in 1923 and then stayed on as foreign minister in eight successive governments, he won support in Berlin and other European capitals for a more active American role.

The result was the Dawes Plan, named after Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, one of a group of American experts who tackled the reparations question. The plan did not fix an exact amount of reparations that the Germans still owed, but it allowed them to make reduced annual payments until their economy improved. Accepted at the end of August 1924, the Dawes Plan immediately triggered a flood of American loans to Germany that would continue until the Depression hit. The stabilization of the currency and the subsequent economic recovery were a direct result of those measures. Speaking to the Reichstag on May 18, 1925, Stresemann left no doubt who was responsible for this dramatic turnaround. “The United States is that nation from which emanated the most important efforts directed toward the reconstruction of the economy and, beyond that, the pacification of Europe,” he declared. “For no country can those efforts be more welcome than for Germany.”

American loans and direct investments, coupled with growing U.S.-German trade, meant that the two countries felt increasingly linked with each other. Germany was not only open to Americans but to the broader trends identified by a new term characterizing their country’s economic, social and cultural influence. “The Americanization of Europe proceeds merrily apace,” Wiegand reported in a feature that was given prominent play in the Washington Herald on June 14, 1925. “Half in wonderment, half in protest this tired old group of nations is falling under the magic sway of that babulous ‘dollar land’ across the ocean.”

As his article pointed out, the average German exhibited a decidedly schizophrenic attitude toward the new money culture, mass production and mass entertainment, including a flood of American movies. He is “resentful of the intrusion of a staccato pace into the easy comfort of his existence and growls and mutters guttural curses against the Americanization of his civilization,” Wiegand wrote. “Then he goes and forgets his troubles to the tune of an American jazz band, beating a savage tom-tom in any of the thousand amusement places.” The German listening to a band playing “My Sweetie Went Away,” he added, was likely to be dressed in a brand-new suit “cut on Yale lines.”

Germans flocked to the Scala variety house, where the hit of the moment was an American troupe that Wiegand described as “the eighteen dancing, prancing Gertrude Hoffman girls.” In his 1925 article, he noted one key reason for the Americans’ popularity. “Their slender legs and waists are not of the pattern usually favored in Berlin,” he wrote.

Berlin was also beginning to experience American-style traffic problems, he reported, and had installed its first traffic lights on Potsdamer Platz, “winking its flirtatious American eyes at the street car conductors, taxi drivers and chauffeurs who get flustered in the tangle of this place where five important streets meet.”