Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (22 page)

It was, in fact, the other way round. It was Ludendorff, suddenly aware the game was up, and determined to preserve the army intact while there was still time, who insisted on an armistice. It was his successor, General Wilhelm Groener, who gave the Kaiser his marching-orders, telling him the army was going home in good order ‘but not under the command of Your Majesty, for it stands no longer behind Your Majesty’.
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And it was the army, having helped to engineer the war, having raised the stakes and ensured that the defeat was calamitous, which then slipped out of its responsibilities and handed back authority to the civilians. They were left with the task and the odium of arranging the armistice and signing the peace, while the generals prepared their stab-in-the-back exculpation.

Thus, by a curious piece of national myopia, containing elements of self-deception, the Germans exonerated those who had got the country into the fearful mess in which it found itself. The Allies dropped their notion of war-crimes tribunals. They even backed down on extraditing German officers known to have broken The Hague Convention. These men were released to appear in German courts where they received ridiculously small sentences, and were then allowed to escape, returning to their homes as heroes.

Instead, it was the Socialists and the politicians of the Centre who got the blame for Germany’s troubles. The Socialists had been the biggest party in the Reichstag before the war, but they were never admitted to government; and because parliament had inadequate control over finance – the central weakness of pre-war German ‘democracy’ – they could do nothing effective to stop German imperialism, though they voted against it. They were the only party to oppose Germany’s annexations in Russia in early 1918. When the war ended, they briefly held power at last, but merely as the legal receivers of a bankrupt empire, whose sins they were made to bear. When the Centre politicians took over, as they soon did, they too were tainted with defeat, surrender, of being ‘the men of the Allies’.

To a greater or lesser degree, indeed, the stigma of Versailles was attached to all the politicians of the new Republic, and even to the notion of the Republic itself, and so to the whole idea of parliamentary democracy. For the first time the Germans had the chance to run themselves. Everyone over twenty, male and female, had the vote. Elections to all public bodies were henceforth equal, secret, direct and according to proportional representation. The censorship was abolished. Rights of assembly were guaranteed.
Trade unions were recognized by employers. The eight-hour day was made mandatory.
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When the first elections were held in January 1919, three-quarters of those who took part in the 80 per cent poll favoured a republic.

The new Weimar constitution was drawn up under the guidance of the great sociologist Max Weber. It gave parliament full financial sovereignty for the first time. It was supposed to embody all the best features of the American constitution. But it had one serious weakness. The President, elected for a seven-year term, was not the head of government: that was the Chancellor, a party figure responsible to parliament. But the President, under Article 48, was endowed with emergency powers when parliament was not in session. From 1923 onwards this article was pervertedly invoked whenever parliament was deadlocked. And parliament was often deadlocked, because proportional representation prevented the development of a two-party system and absolute majorities. To many Germans, who had been brought up on the notion that Germany and the Germans were a metaphysical, organic unity, the spectacle of a divided, jammed parliament was unnatural. The argument that parliament was the forum in which quite genuine and unavoidable conflicts of interest were peacefully resolved was alien to them, unacceptable. Instead they saw the Reichstag as a mere theatre for the enactment of ‘the game of the parties’, while the real, eternal, organic and honourable Germany was embodied in the person of the President and Article 48. This constitutional cleavage was apparent even under the first president, the Socialist Friedrich Ebert. He preferred to use his power rather than force parliamentarians into the habit of settling their differences. It became far worse when Field-Marshal Hindenburg replaced him.

Although Ludendorff had run the war, Hindenburg had been the nominal war-lord and public hero. In 1916 a gigantic wooden image had been made of him, to symbolize German determination to win. If you bought a War Bond you were allowed to knock a nail into it. About 100,000 nails were thus hammered into the colossus. Immediately the war was over the statue was broken up for firewood, as though to symbolize the disappearance of the military and the reign of the civilians. It was they, Weimar, and especially parliament, which were identified with the Treaty and all the post-war difficulties and shame. When the wooden titan returned as President, he personified not only wartime heroism and German unity, as opposed to party disunity, but the anti-republican counter-principle embedded in the Weimar Constitution itself. And it was under Hindenburg that presidential prerogative was used to appoint and dismiss chancellors and dissolve the Reichstag, leading
in the last years to the virtual suspension of parliamentary government. Hitler climaxed the process by exploiting the article to lay the foundations of his dictatorship even before parliament disappeared in April 1933.

The cleavage within the constitution might not have mattered so much had it not reflected a much deeper division in German society, and indeed in German minds. I call this the East-West division, and it is one of the central themes of modern times, in so far as they have been influenced by Germany’s destiny. The principal characteristic of the pre-war German regime of princes, generals and landowners, the law-professors who endowed it with academic legitimacy, and the Lutheran pastors who gave it moral authority, was illiberalism. This ruling caste hated the West with passionate loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They wanted to keep Germany ‘pure’ of the West, and this was one motive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and settlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany which would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world system. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between ‘civilization’, which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immoral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and ‘culture’, which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authentic.
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Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East. The real Germany was not part of international civilization but a national race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the pull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the East, it fulfilled itself.

In point of fact, it was the Easterners who had ruled Germany throughout, who had created the war-anxiety, got Germany into war, and then lost it. In the minds of most Germans, however, the ‘stab-in-the-back’ mythology refuted this factual analysis because it attributed the loss of the war to the defeatism and treachery of the Westerners, who had then signed the armistice, accepted the disastrous peace, introduced the Republic and enthroned ‘the rule of the parties’. It was thus the Westerners who were responsible for all Germany’s misfortunes in the post-war world, as was only logical, for they were the puppets or paid agents of the politicians of the West in Paris and London, and of the international financial community in Wall Street and the City. Their outpost in Germany was the parliament in Weimar. But authentic German culture still had its redoubt within the Republic, in the person of President Hindenburg, an Easterner
par excellence
, and in the authority of Article 48. In time, that vital bridgehead could be extended.

For the moment, however, the Westerners were triumphant. Weimar was a ‘Western’ republic. It stood for civilization rather than culture: civilization was in office, culture in opposition. It is no coincidence, either, that German civilization reached its gaudiest flowering during the 1920s, when Germany, for a brief period, became the world-centre of ideas and art. This triumph had been building up for a long time. Germany was by far the best-educated nation in the world – as long ago as the late eighteenth century it had passed the 50 per cent literacy mark. During the nineteenth century it had progressively established a system of higher education which for thoroughness and diversity of scholarship was without equal. There were world-famous universities at Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Göttingen, Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. The German liberal intelligentsia had opted out of public and political life in the 1860s, leaving the field to Bismarck and his successors. But it had not emigrated; indeed, it had spread itself, and when it began to resurface just before the Great War, and took command in 1918, what was most striking about it was its polycentral strength.

Of course Berlin, with its 4 million population, held the primacy. But, unlike Paris, it did not drain all the country’s intellectual and artistic energies into itself. While Berlin had its Alexanderplatz and Kurfürstendamm, there were plenty of other cultural magnets: the Bruehl in Dresden, the Jungfernsteg in Hamburg, the Schweidnitzter-strasse in Breslau or the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. The centre of architectural experiment, the famous Bauhaus, was in Weimar, later moving to Dessau. The most important centre of art studies, the Warburg Institute, was in Hamburg. Dresden had one of the finest art galleries in the world as well as a leading European opera house, under Fritz Busch, where two of Richard Strauss’s operas had their first performance. Munich had a score of theatres, as well as another great gallery; it was the home of
Simplicissimus
, the leading satirical magazine, and of Thomas Mann, the leading novelist.
Frankfurter Zeitung
was Germany’s best newspaper, and Frankfurt was a leading theatrical and operatic centre (as was Munich); and other cities, such as Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Düsseldorf, saw the first performances of some of the most important plays of the Twenties.
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What particularly distinguished Berlin was its theatre, by far the world’s richest in the 1920s, with a strongly political tone. Its pre-eminence had begun before the war, with Max Reinhardt’s reign at the Deutsche Theater, but in 1918 republicanism took over completely. Some playwrights were committed revolutionaries, like Friedrich Wolf and Ernst Toller, who worked for Erwin Piscator’s ‘Proletarian Theatre’, for which George Grosz designed scenery. Bertholt Brecht, whose play
Drums in the Night
was first staged in
Berlin in 1922, when he was twenty-four, wrote political allegories. He was attracted to Communism by its violence, as he was to American gangsterism, and his friend Arnolt Bronnen to fascism; Brecht designed his own ‘uniform’, the first of the Leftist outfits – leather cap, steel-rimmed glasses, leather coat. When
The Threepenny Opera
, which he wrote with the composer Kurt Weill, was put on in 1928 it set an all-time record for an opera by receiving over 4,000 performances throughout Europe in a single year.
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But the bulk of the Berlin successes were written by liberal sophisticates, more notable for being ‘daring’, pessimistic, problematical, above all ‘disturbing’, than directly political: men like Georg Kaiser, Carl Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Bruckner and Ferenc Moinar.
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Sometimes the ‘cultural Right’ went for a particular play, as when it tried to disrupt the first night of
Der fröhliche Weinberg
by Carl Zuckmayer (who also wrote the script for
The Blue Angel).
But it was really the theatre as a whole to which conservatives objected, for there were no right-wing or nationalist plays whatever put on in Berlin. After watching a Gerhart Hauptmann play, a German prefect of police summed up the reaction of
Kultur-Germany
: ‘The whole trend ought to be liquidated.’
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Berlin was also the world-capital in the related fields of opera and film. It was crowded with first-class directors, impresarios, conductors and producers: Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Max Ophuls, Victor Barnowsky, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Leo Blech, Joseph von Sternberg (
The Blue Angel)
, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder
(Emil and the Detectives)
, Fritz Lang
(Metropolis).
In designing and making scenery and costumes, lighting-effects, the standards of orchestral playing and choral singing, in sheer attention to detail, Berlin had no rivals anywhere. When
Wozzeck
, a new opera written by Arnold Schoenberg’s gifted pupil Alban Berg, received its première at the Berlin State Opera in 1925, the conductor Erich Kleiber insisted on no less than 130 rehearsals.
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The 1929 Berlin Music Festival featured Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Furtwängler, George Szell, Klemperer, Toscanini, Gigli, Casals, Cortot and Thibaud.
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Against this background of talent, craftsmanship and expertise, Germany was able to develop the world’s leading film industry, producing more films in the 1920s than the rest of Europe put together; 646 in the year 1922 alone.
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Even more remarkable was Germany’s success in the visual arts. In 1918 Walter Gropius became director of the Weimar Arts and Crafts School and began to put into practice his theory of
Gesamtkunstwerk
, or total work of art, a term first used by Wagner but applied here, on the analogy of a medieval cathedral, to the integrated use of painting, architecture, furniture, glass and metal work, sculpture,
jewellery and fabrics. The notion sprang from the Gothic revival but the atmosphere at the Bauhaus was dictated by the functional use of the latest materials and construction techniques. As one of the teachers, Lothar Schreyer, put it, ‘We felt that we were literally building a new world.’ It attracted many fine talents: Klee, Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Oskar Schlemmer, Hannes Meyer; Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky were among the visiting artists.
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