Hitlerland

Mowrer echoed those sentiments. “By the early twenties signs of Americanization were appearing all over Europe, and nowhere so conspicuously as in Germany,” he wrote. In his reports, he called 1925 “the first great American year in Europe” and explained how “that complex of factors, personal democracy, technique and standardization of practice,” along with new flashy ads, “had bitten deep into the German soul.” He quoted an American economist as saying that mass production was transforming Germany into “the United States of Europe.”

All of which contributed to the lure of Berlin for American expats. While Paris was still their favorite city in Europe, many of them visited the German capital in the 1920s. Josephine Baker and her Revue Negre took their act to Berlin, holding their opening show at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfurstendamm on December 31, 1925. Although there were protesters outside denouncing the black entertainers, and Nazis called Baker subhuman, she was elated by the enthusiasm of the audiences. “It’s madness. A triumph. They carry me on their shoulders,” she said.

Berlin was the city where Baker received the most gifts: she was showered with jewelry, perfume, furs. After her regular shows, the Nelson Theater was turned into a cabaret, and Baker would continue to perform. She also happily accepted invitations to other parties, at times wearing nothing more than a loincloth. Berlin’s wild nightlife has “an intensity Paris doesn’t know,” she declared—and she loved it. She even considered settling in Berlin but was lured back to the French capital to star at the Folies Bergere.

Both for American visitors and residents, Germany’s racy sexual life was a source of constant fascination. As Edgar Mowrer put it, “The period immediately following the war saw throughout the world a sexual exuberance which, in Germany, reached an almost orgiastic intensity… If anything, the women were the more aggressive. Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice.” And when it came to “sexual perversions,” Mowrer added with open amazement, old laws were simply ignored. “It is hard to conceive a much more tolerant society.”

Ben Hecht, who had reported from Berlin for the Chicago Daily News a few years earlier, described what his successor was hinting at. He met a group of homosexual aviators at an Officers’ Club. “These were elegant fellows, perfumed and monocled and usually full of heroin or cocaine,” he recalled. “They made love to one another openly, kissing in the cafe booths and skipping off around two A.M. to a mansion owned by one of them. One or two women were usually in the party—wide-mouthed, dark-eyed nymphomaniacs with titles to their names but unroyal burns and cuts on their flanks. At times little girls of ten and eleven, recruited from the pavements of Friedrichstrasse, where they paraded after midnight with rouged faces and in shiny boots and in short baby dresses, were added to the mansion parties.”

Although Hecht may have embellished some of his descriptions for his autobiography, there’s no question that Berlin boasted a flourishing gay scene. For visiting young gay Americans like Philip Johnson, this was an exhilarating discovery. Drawn to Germany by the Bauhaus movement and other forms of architectural modernism emerging there in the 1920s, the future famous architect was quickly enchanted by much more than his professional interests. “The air we breathed, the people we came to know, the restaurants, the Kurfurstendamm, the sex life were all new, all thrilling to a young American,” he recalled. “The world was being created here.”

In a letter to his family back home, Johnson wrote: “I think if it can be told from the platform of a Berlin cabaret, it can be written to one’s mother. How prudish I am getting, my, my! Recently in Berlin, it seems, the law against homosexual relations has been repealed, apropos of which the conferencier said that at Easter the law against relations with animals will also be repealed and the normal relation only will be prohibited. The audience thought it very funny, as I did myself, but then of course, I would not admit it.”

And Johnson, like other Americans, found the Germans extremely welcoming, irrespective of sexual preferences. “The Americans were the conquerors of old Germany and the young Germans were eager to accommodate them,” he recalled. “Paris was never that gastfreundlich.”

After the aborted Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis were no longer considered a major story. But then, in early 1924, Hitler was put on trial along with Ludendorff and the others accused of treason. Hitler used the occasion to openly proclaim his goal of overthrowing the Weimar Republic, elaborating on his stab-in-the-back theory about how its treacherous politicians were responsible for Germany’s humiliating defeat and for the subsequent economic disaster. “Treason to the Republic is not treason to the real Germany,” he insisted.

As the judges gave him free rein to dominate the proceedings and even cross-examine witnesses, Hitler scored point after point, ridiculing the Bavarian authorities for initially going along with him before turning against the putsch. Since everyone knew the Bavarian leaders had denounced and defied the central government in Berlin on countless occasions, Hitler sounded convincing when he testified that they “had the same goal that we had—to get rid of the Reich government.” They had discussed that goal before the putsch, he added.

The clear message: Hitler had acted on his convictions, shared by all those who despised Germany’s current rulers, while the Bavarian authorities had played a double game. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court,” he told the judges. “For she acquits us.”

Observing Hitler for the first time as he covered the trial, Mowrer was clearly impressed. “He spoke with humor, irony and passion,” he reported. “A little dapper man, he sometimes resembled a German drill sergeant, and sometimes a Viennese floor walker.” His oratory “literally tore to pieces” the claims of the Bavarian authorities. When he had finished his impassioned speech, “there was scarcely a spectator or a correspondent who did not want to applaud him,” he concluded.

Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, the minimum sentence for treason, and Ludendorff was acquitted altogether. Murphy of the American consulate summed up his conclusions in a report to Washington dated March 10, 1924: “While the putsch in November 1923 was a farcical failure, the nationalist movement behind it is by no means extinguished in Bavaria. It has simply been delayed… It is contemplated that upon completion of his term Hitler, who is not a citizen, will be expelled from the country. Further nationalist activity on his part, for the present at least, appears to be excluded.”

In his memoirs that were published in 1964, Murphy wrote that this conclusion was “not too bad.” Specifically, he contrasted it with the single mention of Hitler in the memoirs of Lord D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Germany from 1920 to 1926. The future German leader’s name appeared only in a footnote, which claimed that after his release from prison, Hitler “vanished into oblivion.”

Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison after serving less than nine months in pampered conditions, which allowed him to use the time to dictate his autobiography Mein Kampf. His jailers treated him like a guest of honor, allotting him a comfortable large room with a lovely view and allowing plenty of visitors and packages from well-wishers. After his release, he was not expelled to his Austrian homeland.

Still, Hitler’s movement was beset by internal feuds during his absence, and, even when he began to mobilize his followers again and the ban on the party was lifted, the country’s improved economic situation diminished its appeal. In the December 1924 elections for the Reichstag, the Nazis won a paltry 14 seats as compared to 131 for the Socialists and 103 for the German Nationalists, a less radical right-wing movement.

During the presidential elections in April 1925, the right-wing parties backed Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who easily won despite the fact that he was already seventy-seven. As Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs who was visiting Germany at the time, recalled in his memoirs, the most interesting part of that presidential campaign was that the Nazis did not figure “even as a side issue.” Hitler was out of prison but still barred from public speaking and, as Armstrong added, “as far as I can remember, nobody, either German or American, so much as mentioned his name to me.”

In the May 1928 parliamentary elections, the Nazis dropped even lower, winning only 12 seats. The Socialists raised their tally to 152 seats, and the Nationalists dropped to 78. Little wonder that both American diplomats and correspondents, who had briefly focused on Hitler during the run-up to the Beer Hall Putsch and then through his trial, largely ignored him afterward. There was no line for interviews, no urgent queries about him from Washington to the diplomats or from the editorial home offices to the foreign correspondents.

At times, the Americans residing in or passing through Berlin appeared to be as much preoccupied with each other and fellow expats as with their surroundings. Writing to a friend on November 14, 1927, Knickerbocker tossed in this teaser: “Hemingway by the way is here in Berlin just now, hobnobbing with Sinclair Lewis.” Lewis, who in 1930 would become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, spent a good deal of time in