In Europe (39 page)

Why the
Münchener Post
? Because the journalists of this social-democrat daily had, more than anyone else, kept an eye on the Nazis from the very start, had published all their findings and had treated the National Socialists for what they were: a gang of thugs.

Hitler called the paper ‘the vipers’ nest’. If the Führer had allowed himself a little splurge at a luxurious hotel in Berlin, the bill was printed the next day in the
Post
under the headline ‘How Hitler Lives’. When Hitler's niece and lover, the young Geli Raubal, committed suicide in September 1931, the
Münchener Post
immediately provided all the background information. The editors kept careful score on all political murders. Like some morbid syndicated column, they were published on the front page every day:‘New Victims of the Brownshirts’ Bloodlust’, ‘Firebomb for Social-Democratic Journalist’, ‘Nazi Terror Against Farmhands: Six Boys Killed’, ‘Because Christmas is a Time of Peace: Nazis Kill Communist’. On 14 December, 1931 the paper printed a full-page list of ‘Two Years of Nazi Killings’. Beneath the headline was a quote from Adolf Hitler: ‘Nothing takes place within the movement that I do not know about, and of which I do not approve. Even more: nothing happens without my desiring it!’ Then followed the names of sixty victims, most of them workers, who had been murdered or had died of grievous bodily harm.

A monument should be built to the
Münchener Post
, the American historian Ron Rosenbaum wrote in a commemorative piece, and I can only concur. The Nazis hated the
Post
with everything they had in them, and as soon as they were in power they tore it to the ground. On the evening of 9 March, 1933, an SA gang wrecked the editorial offices, threw the
typewriters out onto the street and destroyed the printing presses. That was the end of the paper. The editors ended up in Dachau, disappeared into exile or succeeded, with a great deal of luck, in making it through the Third Reich in one piece.

I make a little pilgrimage to Altheimer Eck, a winding little street behind the big department stores in the heart of Munich. At number 13 (formerly number 19) I recognise the gateway. This was the courtyard where the
Post
was made. The printing office in the basement moved away only a year ago, but a newspaper is still being made here: the
Abendzeitung
, an airy daily featuring the occasional glimpse of a female breast. The people who work there tell me that the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
had its offices here after the war, but these days no one knows anything about the
Post
. The paper's name has been obliterated by a thick layer of plaster above the gate. There is no trace of all that heroic spirit, no plaque, not even a dot on Simon Wiesenthal's map of heroes.

The only trace that does remain of the
Münchener Post
is the Bavarian State Library. I spend an entire day there, amid conscientious and flirtatious students, rolls of microfilm and badly printed pages of the
Post
. In the 1920s the paper's tone is simply soporific, with headlines like ‘The Future of Public Housing’, ‘Agreement on Funding Programme’ and ‘Employment Perspective under the Social Democrats’. The Nazis’ activities are usually dealt with briefly under miscellaneous regional news.

But, from 1929, the editors awaken. The headlines are accompanied more frequently by exclamation marks: ‘Voters, Think Twice!’, ‘Civil Servants, Wake Up!’ On 20 December, 1929 the paper recommends, ‘if necessitated by polling-place terror’, to render one's ballot void by crossing off both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The Nazi murders receive full attention, and the
Post
rapidly transforms itself from a staid party organ to a hard-hitting newspaper, with revelations on an almost weekly basis. On 5 July, 1932, for example, the front page contains a careful overview of the sums paid by the Nazis to a number of soldiers for their part in the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. A certain Oberleutnant Kriegel received 200 Swiss francs for his participation, a common soldier received about 15 francs. A total of 1,173 francs was paid out, a capital sum in those days. The money came largely from Helene Bechstein and her husband, the famous piano manufacturer.

In its forecasts, too, the
Münchener Post
is highly revealing. As early as 9 December, 1931, the paper succeeded in getting hold of a secret plan that was circulating among the SA top brass, in which the measures actually taken later against the Jews are summed up with astonishing accuracy, up to and including vague plans for a ‘definitive
Endlösung
’: ‘labour details’ in swampy areas, whereby ‘the SS in particular can play a supervisory role’.

One month later one reads of the first plans for the sterilisation campaign. On 12 January, 1932, the paper reports a speech by a Dr Stammberg from Chemnitz, ‘Racial Hygiene in the Third Reich’, in which he proposes a scoring system. The severely handicapped, prostitutes and professional burglars receive minus one hundred points, persons belonging to a non-European race receive minus twenty-five and the non-intelligent are given a minus six. Anyone receiving more than twenty-five minus points falls within the category of ‘persons with undesirable progeny’.

On 8 April, 1932, the
Post
reveals in considerable detail the Nazis’ plans for what they will do when they come to power: the local SA units will be given ‘free rein for a full twenty-four hours’ to round up their known opponents and ‘rid themselves of them’.

The most fascinating thing about the
Post
was and is its editorial premise: the editors considered the Nazis not only a political phenomenon, but above all a subject for their crime reporting.

In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw quotes top-ranking Nazi Hans Frank, who, as a twenty-year-old boy, went to hear Hitler speak in 1920. He saw a man in a threadbare blue suit and a rather loosely knotted tie, with flashing blue eyes and slicked-back hair, a plain speaker. At that point Adolf Hitler had been in politics for less than six months, but the public – the middle class shoulder to shoulder with workers, soldiers and students – lapped up every word. ‘He expressed everything that concerned him and us most deeply.’ His speech on 13 August, 1920 – entitled ‘Why are we anti-Semites?’ – was interrupted 58 times by cheers from the crowd of 2,000. The next day, the
Post
's city page reported on ‘a new attraction that has recently added lustre to the meetings of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party … a young fellow reminiscent of Heinz Bothmer, who
has been put forward with verve and vigour … a humble writer, as he calls himself’, a ‘zealous Mr Hitler’.

In the years that followed, the pages of the
Post
gradually revealed a glimpse of a movement closely allied with criminal circles, and with everything that went along with that: intimidation, mishandling, blackmail, forgery, even murder. On 12 July, 1931, under the headline ‘This is Hitler's Rank and File’, the paper published a prison letter from a disappointed Nazi who said his former comrades included ‘burglars, pimps, purse snatchers, cheats, blackmailers, thugs and perjurers’. Shortly afterwards one reads about a young woman who worked in a refreshment bar and was forced into prostitution by members of the SA. 27 December, 1932: ‘Yuletide sullied by bloody SA vs SS melee in Anhalter Strasse Nazi clubhouse’. 29 December: ‘Hitler Youth is Forger’. And these are only random selections.

Nowadays, the sinister birthplace of National Socialism is covered by a bare car park beside the Hilton Hotel on Rosenheimer Strasse, skilfully dynamited, demolished and smoothed over. This was the site of the famous Bürgerbräukeller, the giant beer hall where visitors ate and drank heavily, and where Adolf Hitler further honed his showman's talents. It was here, too, that he and General Ludendorff held their unsuccessful coup on 8 November, 1923. When the whole thing fizzled out, the beer hall claimed damages from this drunkards’ revolution: 143 broken beer mugs, 80 broken glasses, 98 stools, 148 pieces of missing cutlery, to say nothing of the bullet holes in the ceiling.

It was in that same year that Hitler began moving in more cultured circles. He may have been a beer-hall orator, but he was also a fervent lover of Wagner. That helped him to quickly make friends with the rich young publisher Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, who introduced him into high society as early as 1922. One year later he met Siegfried and Winifred Wagner at Bayreuth, and became a welcome friend of the family. Two fashionable Munich ladies entered into an ongoing rivalry to befriend the upand-coming young Hitler. Helene Bechstein, mentioned earlier, invited him to all her receptions. She also bought him neat shoes and respectable evening dress. Elsa Bruckmann, a Romanian princess by birth, taught him not to put sugar in his wine and other useful rules of etiquette. Both of them helped to mould him and make him ready for the bigger world.

Young Baldur von Schirach – later a prominent Nazi – saw how finally even his reserved, aristocratic father fell for Hitler's charms. Looking back on it, he could find only one explanation for this bewildering phenomenon: amid the prevailing mood of doom in the old German Empire, people from the upper reaches of society as well were desperately in search of a saviour. And Hitler, ‘like a sorcerer’, was able to forge together two concepts that had until then ‘been as irreconcilable as fire and water: nationalism and socialism’.

The eternally nagging question about Munich remains: how in the world could this friendly southern city, this uncommonly pleasant town, this centre of the arts and good cheer, have been the birthplace of such a fanatical and destructive movement? Here, after all, was where the NSDAP was set up, it was here that Hitler discovered his own charismatic powers, here that the movement's first martyrs fell in 1923, and it was here that the 1938 peace conference was held.

In the late nineteenth century, Munich, capital of the conservative kingdom of Bavaria, developed into a baroque city of refuge with broad boulevards and glorious palaces. It was a haven for the writers, artists and theatrical people who wanted to escape the confines of Berlin. The Schwabing district was a second Montmartre. There were more painters and sculptors working in Munich than in Vienna and Berlin: traditional artists, but also people like Franz Marc, Paul Klee and other avant-gardists involved in the almanac
Der Blaue Reiter
. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the twenty-four-year-old painter Adolf Hitler decided to move from Vienna to Schwabing in 1913. ‘Schwabing was a spiritual island in the great world, in Germany, mostly in Munich itself,’ wrote the Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky. From 1896 it served as the home base of the celebrated
Simplicissimus
, a satirical magazine with a red dog as its symbol, a publication full of jokes about emperor and church, as well as advertising pages with ‘power pills’ for men and detoxification cures ‘for alcohol, morphine, opium and cocaine’. After the magazine was banned, its circulation rose from 15,000 to 85,000 within a month.

Less than twenty years later Munich had become the official seat of the Nazi party, the second capital of the Third Reich. But this same Munich was also the city of the White Rose, one of the rare resistance groups in
Nazi Germany. It was in this town, in the midst of the war, that female students of the university booed the gauleiter of Bavaria when he called on them to leave school and bear children for the Führer. And in autumn 1939 it was in the Bürgerbräukeller, of all places, that the first attempt was made to assassinate Hitler, with a time bomb hidden in a cleverly hollowed-out pillar, the singular resistance of a cabinetmaker, Johann Georg Elser.

Schwabing today is a pretty posh neighbourhood of broad streets, almost Parisian-looking apartment buildings and countless restaurants, shops, bookstores and art galleries. Striking features are the massive office and school buildings from the early nineteenth century, of a size rarely seen in such surroundings. These are clarion calls from the past: here we are and here we shall remain, we kings of Bavaria.

With the exception of Amsterdam, Munich is the only major European city where even the mayor travels by bicycle. Bicycle paths have been built everywhere in recent years, and along them today a minority of the population bikes zealously, on professional-looking two-wheelers, at breathtaking speed. These Germans have embraced cycling in their own, thoroughgoing fashion. When one bicycles, then one Bicycles. Cycling here is a Deed, a Credo.

My own bike is simply tied to the back of my van. It is a straightforward Amsterdam nag, an implement full of dents and rust spots, a plain fellow amid the perfect racing machines of the believers. We feel a little out of place, both my bicycle and I.

And so I thread my way carefully through Athens-on-the-Isar, as Munich was often called before the First World War, the cultural pleasure garden of Henrik Ibsen, Wagner and the Bavarian monarchs Ludwig II and Luitpold. Creaking loudly, I cycle through old archways, past graceful fountains, the pseudo-Roman national theatre and the taut, nineteenth-century Ludwigstrasse. Look, it's still there, the Bayerische Hof, the hotel where Mrs Bechstein taught Adolf Hitler how to handle oysters and artichokes. And look, that was his apartment here in Munich, on the second floor of Prinsregentenplatz 16, now home to just another genteel Munich family. And here, the street in Schwabing where he started out, filled today with the exotic odours of Chinese, Indian,
Russian, Italian and Mexican restaurants, at Schleissheimer Strasse 34. The enormous plaque that once hung here is now concealed under a thick layer of mortar.

Schwabing was an island, Kandinsky so aptly observed. Until well into the twentieth century it lent Munich a certain fame, but it remained an island. The staid citizens of Munich were disgusted by this neighbour-hood full of prostitutes, students and anarchists. The residents of Schwabing, in turn, looked down on the coarse
Müncheners
who lived only for a plummy marriage and three litres of beer a day. According to the Bavarian historian Georg Frans, that divided Munich can be traced back to the trauma of the middle class concerning the period from 1919 up through Kurt Eisner's short-lived People's Republic of Bavaria. The rise of the Nazis in Munich, he says, was a direct result of that bloody civil war. David Large, in his account of Hitler's Munich, goes a few steps further. He feels that Munich's oft-praised urban culture has always had an anti-cosmopolitan and anti-liberal side.