The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (175 page)

This perilous illusion was not limited to France’s intellectual community. Barbusse’s shocking novel of the trenches,
Le Feu
, reached millions who had never heard of Sartre, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, André Gide, or Paul Eluard. Barbusse died in 1935, just as Hitler was becoming a household name in French provinces; over 300,000 readers followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Insulated in their Gallic world, the people for whom the Führer and his Reich were sharpening their swords assumed that everyone who had suffered in the trenches, or knew and loved those who had, shared their disgust of fighting. They should have been more attentive. There is a revealing vignette in
La Force de l’âge
. Sartre and de Beauvoir are boating down the Elbe to the rock of Heligoland. Sartre strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a forty-year-old German wearing a black peaked cap and a morose expression. The German tells Sartre that he had been a sergeant in the Great War, and, his voice rising, says: “If there is another war, this time we shall not be defeated. We shall retrieve our honor.” Sartre thinks the poor fellow feels shamed because his side lost; being simple, the ex-sergeant needs reassurance that war’s horrors lie in the past, never to return. He mildly remarks that there is no need of war; everyone wants peace. But he is facing a
sorte
he has never seen before: a real
Kämpfer
(warrior), incapable of forgetting or forgiving. Glaring, the man replies, “Honor comes first. First we must retrieve our honor.” De Beauvoir wrote: “His fanatical tone alarmed me…. Never had I seen hatred shine so nakedly [
à nu
] from any human face.” She tried to reassure herself “with the reflection that an ex-serviceman is bound to hold militaristic views,” yet added, “How many such were there, who lived only for the moment when the great day of revenge would come?”
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C
hurchill was warning of Germany’s yearning for revenge, but the casual visitor to Berlin that fall of 1932 would have seen few signs of it. The Zitadelle—the monumental government buildings over which the kaisers had reigned—seemed more effete than Paris and devoid of that indefinable tone which had once given the city its Lutheran ambience: an air of hard, clean, righteous high purpose, of noble masculinity, of spartan Prussian virtues at their most demanding and most admirable. Now all that was gone. Berlin was, in fact, conspicuous for its lack of any virtue whatever. It had become the new Babylon.

Before the Great War it had been Paris which had seethed with sinful romance, illicit intrigue; if you wanted to spend a weekend with your young secretary, you asked Cook’s to book you a suite near the Place de l’Étoile. In those days Pigalle, the mean streets behind
Les Halles
, the notorious
maisons de joi
in the winding little rue de la Huchette, a block from Notre Dame, had been the most lurid attractions for those exploring what then passed for European decadence. No more: it now was Berlin. “Along the Kurfürstendamm,” wrote Stefan Zweig, “powdered and rouged young men sauntered, and in the dimly lit bars one might see men of the world of finance courting drunken sailors”; while at transvestite balls, “hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eye of the police.”
²⁷

Over two million young German women were destitute widows. The more desperate (and attractive) of them became prostitutes, seeking prey in the alleys near the Hauptbahnhof. Among them were muscular whores with whips and mothers in their early thirties, teamed with their teenaged daughters to offer
Mutter-und-Tochter
sex. Tourists were shocked by the more infamous night spots: the Kabarett Tingle-Tangle, the Apollo, the Monokel (“
die Bar der Frau
”—for lesbians), and the White Mouse, whose most sensational performer, and the role model for thousands of German girls in the Weimar years, was Anita Berber, who danced naked, mainlined cocaine and morphine, and made love to men and women sprawled atop bars, bathed in spotlights, while voyeurs stared and fondled one another. Anita was dead at twenty-nine. So, by then, was the Weimar Republic.

It was in these years that Europeans began importing not only movies but also the most trivial and seamiest exports of American mass culture. Everyone knew about Prohibition gangsters, and how they led to political corruption. That made them attractive, even fascinating. Viennese, Romans, Berliners, and Parisians formed cults around
les bandits américains
, as they were called in France, and, in one Lutzow-Platz graffito, “
die Häuptlinger der Chicagoer und New-Yorker Unterwelt—Al Capone, Jack Diamond, und Lucky Luciano
.” So sedulously had they been aped in Italy that twenty-two-year-old Alberto Moravia devoted his first novel,
Gli indifferenti
(
The Time of Indifference
), to a devastating parable of depravity in Rome. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras was the model for Germany’s new
Faschingszeit
; the Tiller Girls at Berlin’s Scala Theater were a frank imitation of the Ziegfeld chorus line; a clever wisecracker was a
Schnauze
(big mouth). Night clubs featured bands mimicking—and sometimes unintentionally parodying—American jazz combos. Week after week an advertisement ran in Munich’s
Süddeutsche Monatshefte
crying: “
So dürfen Sie nicht Charleston tanzen!
”
²⁸

It had become fashionable to blame the global Depression on the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange three years earlier. Certainly the Crash was an important link in the chain; but the causes, the implications, and the sequence of events were international and too complex to be within the range of understanding then. The Great War had impoverished victors and vanquished alike. The Allies, however, believed they could recover their losses by making the losers pay. It was one of history’s more tragic errors.

Once they began computing the cost of civilian property damage—not to mention what was called “the estimated capitalized value” of the five million Allied fighting men killed in the war—the Allied statesmen found themselves dealing with stupendous sums, billions of dollars. At Versailles they finally arrived at a rough figure: $31,530,500,000. This was their reparations bill, they declared, and Germany must pay it. The Allies, under the threat of renewed fighting, demanded an immediate down payment of five billion dollars—nearly thirty-three billion in 1980s currency. Also, the Germans must pay off Belgium’s war loans. Also, interest on the unpaid balance. Also, a 26 percent tax on all German exports.

The terms were exorbitant, vindictive, and preposterous. John Maynard Keynes denounced Versailles as “a Carthaginian Peace.” Churchill, who disapproved of the entire treaty, especially the punitive clauses, called the reparations “monstrous” and “malignant.” Actually, there was no way that the leaders of the new German republic, struggling to find its feet in Weimar, could meet this absurd bill. They tried. But their government had no international credit. Germany’s prewar commercial system had been destroyed by the Allied blockade. Rich Germans, anticipating heavy taxation, were fleeing abroad with their fortunes. After seven months, the mark sank to an all-time low: five million to the dollar. Then it dropped out of sight.

As the worldwide economic crisis deepened, Americans rescued the tottering German republic, first with loans and then with outright gifts of over ten million dollars. Once the New York stock market crashed, however, Wall Street had to look to its own. Helpless, Weimar staggered on the brink of ruin, maintaining the appearance of solvency by feats of legerdemain. Anti-Americans, forgetting the huge gifts, blamed Germany’s plight on the United States. Some Tories even resented the fact that Churchill’s mother had been American. Stanley Baldwin spoke contemptuously of “the low intellectual ability” of people in the United States; Neville Chamberlain agreed with him.

On one count Americans were guilty. European respect for U.S. diplomacy had been skidding since President Woodrow Wilson’s departure from Versailles. In 1919 the U.S. Senate had rejected the Versailles covenants, including membership in the League of Nations, Wilson’s creation, and his pledge to guarantee France’s borders. After Wilson’s death a succession of Republican presidents, reflecting the mood of U.S. voters, had been turned inward, devoting their attention to domestic issues. During the interwar years this doctrine was christened isolationism. At the same time, America’s leaders kept nagging their former allies to pay their unpayable war debts. England could easily have paid her war debts to the United States had France paid
her
debts to England. But France was flat broke, which meant the British were stuck, which meant hands-across-the-sea met in a clammy grasp. Washington was unsympathetic. President Calvin Coolidge didn’t want to hear about the Exchequer’s problems; he wanted cash. He said: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Before the war Americans had been popular in Europe. But by the early 1930s Washington’s repeated insistence that the hired money be repaid merely heightened the tension Over There.

Even more troubling was the U.S. absence from Geneva. It had dealt a devastating blow to the League of Nations. But in turning their backs on the problems of other great powers American isolationists were not alone. Immediately after the signing of the peace treaties in 1919 London drifted into a mild form of the American introversion, and one by one the chancelleries on the Continent followed their example, leaving the intricacies of external affairs to their foreign ministries.

The professional diplomats, delighted, turned to what they did best, assembling in huge conferences, immaculate in their striped trousers, wing collars, and pince-nez, solemnly initialing pacts and protocols which were later signed, on their recommendation, by their governments. By the end of the 1920s plenipotentiaries had bound the Continent in a fantastic web of signed documents bearing waxed seals and streaming ribbons, documents which, had they been honored, would have kept the peace. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania were linked in the Little Entente. France was pledged to the defense of Poland; Italy to Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary, and Austria. The climax was the cluster of pacts solemnized at Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925. Locarno guaranteed the German-French and German-Belgian frontiers and provided for the arbitration of any disputes between Germany on the one hand, and France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia on the other. Finally, to assure the territorial integrity of the Czechs, France signed a separate treaty promising to declare war on Germany if the Germans violated Czechoslovakia’s borders. Italy and Britain joined in the mutual guarantee of peace in western Europe, and though British obligations were vague, Britain was already pledged to stand by France in any war.

The Wilhelmstrasse had sent a delegation to Locarno. Its legates moved gracefully through the great halls, elegant and charming, clicking heels, kissing hands, and in the “spirit of Locarno,” as it was being hailed, added their signatures to the others on December 1, 1925. Foreign correspondents were baffled. Why were Germans there? These pacts were negotiated by nations with armies and navies. As a military power Germany had ceased to exist. The Treaty of Versailles had drawn the Junkers’ teeth. Their army, or Reichswehr, as it had been renamed, could not exceed 100,000 men, including officers. Even tiny Belgium outnumbered them. They were allowed no military aircraft, no General Staff, no conscription, and no manufacture of arms and munitions without written permission from the triumphant Allies. Their navy was restricted to six battleships, six light cruisers, twelve torpedo boats—and no submarines. Weimar Germany was forbidden fortification of her own frontiers, and a demilitarized buffer zone, the Rhineland, separated her from the French and Belgians. Violation of any of these provisions were to be regarded as a declaration of war, punishable by an Allied military occupation of the German republic. Thus manacled, the defeated country constituted a threat to no one. Her delegation, the inquiring newspapermen were told, had been invited to Locarno as a gracious gesture, a sign that the wounds of 1918 were healing.
²⁹

Veteran correspondents were skeptical. The foreign policies of great powers, they knew, are not guided by generosity. Nor were they in this instance. The fact was that the Germans had acquired their invitations by diplomatic blackmail. Versailles had stigmatized not one, but two great nations; the victors had turned their backs on both the defeated Second Reich, excluded from the peace conference, and the new Soviet Union, which in 1917 had taken Russia—then an Allied power, fighting Germany—out of the war. Walter Rathenau, a brilliant Weimar statesman, had seized his chance. Taking advantage of a Genoa conference at which European diplomats were discussing the economic prospects of the Continent, he had slipped away to meet a Bolshevik delegation at nearby Rapallo. Since the Russians had not participated in the 1919 peace settlement, they could join Germany in renouncing all war claims. Extensive agreements, signed at the same time, drew them closer together. Two months later, on June 24, 1922, Rathenau was murdered by right-wing German nationalists. But the Rapallo Treaty stood.
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