“Nervous Breakdown”
Even today, people treat Berlin in the 1920s like a Rorschach test. There are those who immediately think of political paralysis and chaos, with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries battling each other in the streets. Others talk about hyperinflation wiping out lifetime savings, plunging millions of once solidly middle-class families into abject poverty. There are those who see an era of dizzying sexual free-doms—or, depending on who is doing the talking, a period of shameful degeneracy and perversion. And, finally, there are those who remember this era for its astonishing cultural renaissance, marked by an explosion of creativity in the arts and sciences, all made possible by a genuinely democratic system.
Oddly enough, all of those associations are right—all reflect a fairly accurate version of reality.
In the aftermath of World War I, Berlin was the primary political battlefield in the country—all too often, in the literal sense of that term. While unrest swept across other German cities, nowhere were the battles more intense than in Berlin. In February 1919, the newly elected National Assembly convened in Weimar to draft a new constitution precisely because they needed a less violent setting than Berlin. But the birth of the Weimar Republic quickly spawned violent revolts by both rightists and leftists, who shared a death wish for the country’s new rulers and their experiment in parliamentary democracy. Demagogues of every stripe found willing recruits among a people who were still reeling from their humiliating defeat, the staggering human toll of the war, and the punitive peace terms of the Versailles Treaty.
The political chaos fed off the mounting economic desperation. As the German mark plunged in value, living standards for those on fixed incomes plunged with it. Routine purchases—a loaf of bread, for example—required thousands, then millions, then billions and, finally, trillions of marks. The worthlessness of the currency was vividly captured by a sign at the box office of one of the city’s theaters: “Orchestra stalls: the same price as half a pound of butter. Rear stalls: two eggs.” Amid the general poverty, there were also, as always, those who made their fortunes and lived extravagantly.
The extravagance was particularly evident when it came to sexual mores. At one of the myriad parties in the city playwright Carl Zuckmayer attended, he reported that the young women serving drinks were dressed only in “transparent panties embroidered with a silver fig leaf”—and, unlike “bunnies” in American clubs, they “could be freely handled”; their pay for the evening covered those amusements as well. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.”
Such sexual free-for-alls were one reason why curious foreigners were drawn to the German capital, but the biggest draw was Berlin’s reputation as the most vibrant cultural hub. A city that boasted the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and George Grosz quickly became a magnet for those who were talented and creative, adventurous and opportunistic, including a growing number of Americans.
“People have forgotten that, after World War One, the greatest concentration of intellectuals and cultural innovators was not in Paris, and certainly not in London or New York—but in Berlin,” recalled Michael Danzi, a versatile American musician who played the banjo, every kind of guitar and the mandolin, and who spent most of the interwar years in the German capital. “Berlin was truly the capital of Europe—all the railroad tracks from any European city ended up in Berlin.”
From the beginning, many of the Americans were also drawn to the political and economic chaos, trying to understand the forces unleashed all over postwar Germany, particularly in Berlin, as they pondered the future of the new Weimar Republic. But just as in Christopher Isherwood’s stories and the resulting musical and film
From their earliest days as a small radical movement based in Munich, the Nazis viewed Berlin as an evil, decadent city, especially as compared to the Bavarian capital, where they enjoyed far more support. “The contrast [of Munich] with Berlin was marked,” noted Kurt Ludecke, who joined the party in the 1920s and became an ardent fund-raiser and activist, including on trips to the United States. “One was the Mecca of Marxists and Jews, the other the citadel of their enemies.” Even after Hitler took power and ruled from Berlin, he remained distrustful of the German capital and its inhabitants.
As far as the earliest American arrivals in postwar Germany were concerned, much of what was happening was endlessly intriguing—and totally mystifying. Ben Hecht, the future Broadway and Hollywood star writer, director and producer, came to Germany in 1918 as a twenty-four-year-old reporter for the
While most of their countrymen back home were only too happy to put World War I behind them and return to their domestic preoccupations, a new crop of American diplomats and military attaches were deploying to Germany to resume the official ties between the two countries. They were anxious to assess the mood of the German people and to see whether their new rulers had a chance of riding out the chronic political unrest and the deepening economic crisis, allowing their democratic experiment to succeed.
For a young diplomat like Hugh Wilson, Berlin during and after the war provided confirmation that his future should be in the foreign service, not in a return to the family business he had left behind in Chicago. Shortly before the war, he had decided to try to see what “a few years of experience and diversion” as a diplomat would be like. He had taken the foreign service exam, assuming that he could always return to his old life whenever he tired of his new one. But then the whole world changed.
After his first postings in Latin America, Wilson was assigned to the Berlin embassy in 1916. He only served a few months in that city, which appeared “to be in a state of siege with the whole world,” before the United States entered the war and the embassy staff was evacuated by special train to Switzerland. By the time he was reassigned to a defeated Germany, Wilson had made the decision to “call into play every atom of energy and intelligence I might possess” in what he now regarded as his life’s work. It would prove to be the second of three postings for him to Berlin. The third time, in the late 1930s, he would become the last U.S. ambassador to serve in Nazi Germany.
Wilson and his wife Kate arrived in Berlin in March 1920, just as the right-wing Kapp Putsch was taking place in full view of the small contingent of Americans at what was then the U.S. Embassy building at 7 Wilhelmplatz. Wolfgang Kapp, the German nationalist who was the nominal leader of the rebel forces, had set up his headquarters at the Leopold Palace on the other side of the square, which was strewn with wire and machine-gun placements. This particular revolt fizzled out quickly, but Wilson had plenty of chances to observe other outbreaks of violence that had peculiarly German attributes. “Rioting seemed to be strictly circumscribed and there appeared to be rules of the game which the rioters themselves respected,” he noted.
Wilson added: “I myself have seen fighting on one street with machine guns and rifles blazing at the other” while a few hundred yards away crowds went about their business in orderly fashion. On another occasion, he watched from his embassy window as thousands of Spartacists, as the Communists were then called, staged a protest in Wilhelmplatz in front of the Chancellery building. Although the demonstrators were “vituperative and angry,” he noted, no one stepped over the low railings marking off plots of grass and flowers. That would have violated their sense of order.
For Wilson and other Americans who had been to Germany before, the most striking feature of Berlin was how dilapidated and impoverished it looked. “The shabbiness of Berlin in that period had to be seen to be believed… Everything needed a coat of paint, everything needed to be cleaned out,” he recalled. “It was the only time that I ever saw this capital of a scrupulously clean people littered with newspapers and dirt.” Even the embassy building, where many staffers lived, was in dismal shape: the roof leaked profusely whenever there was heavy rain or melting snow. Because Washington had routinely denied requests for funds to make the necessary repairs, Wilson and his colleagues used to pray for rain when senators or congressmen arrived on visits so that they would see how bad things were.
This was nothing compared to the desperate plight of the local residents, including the wounded veterans begging in the streets. The wartime blockade of Germany had continued for several months after the end of the
