The Weimar Triangle (7 page)

Someone asked Lothar what his friend Hindenburg collected. Kitschy reproductions of Madonna and Child, Lothar laughed. And old decorations and uniforms, probably. He reminded us that Hindenburg had fought for Prussia at the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 when he was nineteen, beating the Austrians, and then again, in the Battle of Sedan during the war of 1870, beating the French. No doubt he needed a new uniform for the great event he attended in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, after the French defeat, when Bismarck proclaimed the unification of the Empire. Don’t forget, Lothar said, that in 1870 the reluctant old Kaiser wanted to remain king of Prussia, which was good enough for him, and not become emperor of a united Germany. That would mean a lot more work for him.

If only the Kaiser had had the courage to say no to Bismarck, Irmgard said. We would still have twenty-two states and three free cities and there would never have been a great war!

For the rest of the meal, right through the roast duck, red cabbage and apple sauce, and the cheese soufflé that Minna served, the subject was Hindenburg
—
the darling of the conservative right wing, the legendary, revered stone-faced war hero, the object of almost universal admiration during the war, the victor of the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914, which stopped the Russians from invading East Prussia, the arch-monarchist, who in 1925, to the horror of every sensible person, was persuaded to become a candidate for the presidency of the Republic when the incumbent Friedrich Ebert died, and won.

Oh, I forgot to mention that our old friend Friedrich Rumpert also was at the table. He moves in the highest circles in Berlin. He told us that he had an interesting conversation when he had tea with Gustav Stresemann at his private residence, just after Hindenburg was nominated, but before he accepted. By the way, he said, he found that Frau Stresemann’s new
Bubikopf
suited her perfectly, although that bobbed hair style by no means suits every middle-aged woman
—
far from it. Her husband had fought against the nomination tooth and nail but he had made a number of tactical errors and was outmanoeuvred. He had vehemently opposed the nomination because he was afraid of the message that would be sent to the world if the very incarnation of German militarism became president. It was therefore a tremendous relief, to him and to all rightminded people, when it became known that Hindenburg had refused to accept the nomination. He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life quietly in Hanover, resting on his laurels and grumbling about the Republic. After all, he was eighty years old. A communiqué to that effect was about to be released by the news agencies. But nobody knew that Tirpitz had secretly gone to Hanover and persuaded his old colleague to change his mind. It was not difficult to imagine the argument Tirpitz used, that it was the field marshall’s sacred duty to accept because that was the only way to prepare the ground for the eventual return of the Kaiser or of one of his sons. So the old monarchist, no doubt with a deep sigh, allowed his name to be put on the list, no doubt hoping he would be defeated.

He would have been, Irmgard said, shaking her head in sorrow, if the communists had not put up a candidate of their own, Ernst Thälmann. They had a lot of answer for! As it happened, Hindenburg was only elected with a narrow majority.

So the old man took his collection of kitschy Madonnas, Lothar said, moved to Berlin and, with a heavy heart, swore to be faithful to the Weimar Constitution, just as he had sworn an oath to the Kaiser, an oath he broke in November 1918 when he stayed on in his post as chief of the general staff, after he had advised the Kaiser to abdicate and flee to Holland.

The big question is when Hindenburg would break his new oath, Rumpert said. It would depend entirely on who would win the old man’s confidence. If we had to rely on his own judgement, or
—
worse
—
on his dubious character
—
we might as well say good-bye to the Weimar Republic. Hindenburg still believed the army was stabbed in the back in 1918. A man of character took responsibility for his actions. During the last two years of the war Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised a joint dictatorship in Germany. The Kaiser was an insignificant figurehead. On August 8, 1918, Ludendorff realized he could not achieve the absolute military triumph he had hoped for but he never accepted a defeat. In November Hindenburg left the armistice negotiations to civilians whom he despised. After the armistice he blamed them for the defeat. The delegation was led by the head of the Catholic Centre Party, Mathias Erzberger, whom right-wing extremists later assassinated in August 1921 while he was holidaying in the Black Forest. The assassins were spirited out of the country to safety. In early November 1918, after the mutiny of the German high seas fleet in Kiel, when it became necessary to inform the Kaiser that the army, too, no longer stood behind him, it was not Hindenburg, the chief of the general staff, who performed this unenviable task but his subordinate General Wilhelm Groener, who was ordered to do it for him.

One more thing, Rumpert said. You may remember that in 1919, after his retirement, Hindenburg was subpoenaed to appear before a commission of the Reichstag investigating the causes of the defeat. He refused to answer questions but was spared a citation for contempt because, after all, he was a war hero. He read a statement to the commission saying that the German army had been on the verge of winning the war. The defeat had been precipitated by certain elements on the home front and by unpatriotic politicians. After reading the statement he walked out of the room.

With this horror story, our friend Friedrich Rumpert had effectively ruined the
déjeuner
.

E
NTRY 8:
S
ATURDAY
, J
ULY 9, 1927

Today Karli mentioned
en passant
that yesterday at school during recess a classmate asked him half-seriously how much the French were paying his father for spreading pacifist propaganda. Karli was prepared to let the remark go. Obviously the boy did not think for a minute the French were paying his father a sou or he would not have asked the question.

Hermann’s reaction was strange. He cross-examined Karli as though he was a witness in his courtroom. Who was the boy? Was Karli on good terms with him? What did he know about his family? Karli happened to know that the boy’s father was an accountant who had spent the war years in Belgium as an officer attached to the German occupation, in the quartermaster’s office. Did Karli know anything about his politics? Yes, Karli said he was on the right of Stresemann and voted
deutsch-national
. Was he sure he wasn’t an extremist? Yes, Karli said, he was pretty sure.

Personally, I did not think the incident was worth all that fuss. It was untypical of Hermann. He knows perfectly well that when you make a speech on a touchy subject such as war memorials there will be consequences.

At the
déjeuner
, a heated argument erupted over the proper way to eat asparagus. Casimir Roloff, the Egyptologist from Berlin whom I had invited to meet some of our museum people, insisted on eating it with his fingers, letting the hollandaise drip on his plate. He did this with the greatest skill, without spilling a single drop on the tablecloth, which the rest of us who use knives and forks do regularly. He chastised me for not providing finger bowls. There was the usual anti-Berlin talk, which he bore with fortitude. He said in imperial Rome people in provincial Greece also thought Romans were
nouveaux riches
, crude and vulgar. Envy, envy, nothing but envy.

It turned out that Roloff plays the clarinet and is a good friend of Felix Deutsch, Walther Rathenau’s successor and the president of A.E.G. Hermann has done a great deal of work on the trial of Rathenau’s assassins and the outrageously light sentences imposed on them. Roloff came from Berlin to see the exhibition and hoped that Deutsch would also have the time to have a look at it. Roloff said that Richard Strauss always stays at the Deutsch house in the Tiergarten when he is in Berlin. He thinks it may be the only private mansion in the city with an organ installed in the music room, which in fact is a small concert hall. He, Roloff, has never quite understood why. Was it because Felix Deutsch was the son of a cantor in Breslau? But since when was an organ part of traditional Jewish heritage?

Hermann then wanted to talk about the painting of a street scene by Kirchner that he had seen at Goldschmidt’s. It was one of Kirchner’s best and he desperately wanted to buy it. When he gets excited about a painting he has trouble thinking about anything else. He even forgot the repercussions of his speech last week about the war memorials. The other evening, at a dinner party at the Eulers’, he could not take his eyes off a Paul Klee and paid no attention at all to the conversation! I wanted to poke him in the ribs, but I was seated at the other end of the table. Today he said something that had never occurred to me, that Kirchner’s Expressionism did not come out of the war at all, but had its origins in the years before the war. The same was true of much of contemporary music. Think of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
, he said. The first performance took place in 1913, when it caused a riot. Its violence anticipated the war
—
it did not come out of the war. It was a reflection of the enormous tension in the air. But at the same time, Hermann said, without the war we would not have all the excitement we have today. The art is so good, because of the suffering and the explosive anger that led to it.

Wolfgang Herzog decided a change of subject was required. He said he still needed time to recover from the lightning speed they played the scherzo of the D minor Mendelssohn trio last night. The score was clearly marked
molto allegro quasi presto
. So why play it
prestissimo
? He thinks the only way to cure musicians of their addiction to playing too fast was to force them to compose something at the same speed in which the music was to be played.

E
NTRY 9:
S
ATURDAY
J
ULY 16, 1927

I was delighted that Marie-Laure de Noailles did what she was told to do
—
telephone me from the Frankfurter Hof on arrival from Paris. Catherine Plamondon had given the
vicomtesse
my number and informed her that I had a salon in Frankfurt comparable to hers in Paris. Which of course is outrageously misleading
—
I am not the sole heiress of a rich German banker like her grandfather Bischoffsheim, who left her a massive bank account and a collection of old masters. And Hermann is not a beautiful young aristocrat like her husband, the
vicomte
, a leader of fashion and an avid sportsman. They are both about twentyfive, Catherine wrote, and friends of Picasso and Salvador Dali. Their palatial house on the Place des États-Unis is a home for surrealists, avant-garde artists and film makers like Luis Buñuel. Marie-Laure is highly musical, Catherine wrote, loves jazz and is a great friend of the composers Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric. She is dying to see the exhibition. Thanks to her grandfather she speaks excellent German. Catherine added that I should be prepared: the young lady loves to shock people.

What a triumph it would have been had I been able to invite Richard Strauss or Wilhelm Furtwängler to meet this dazzling
vicomtesse
, but Strauss had not arrived in Frankfurt yet and Furtwängler was in rehearsal. Nor could I persuade Ernst Krenek to come here down from Kassel. He would have been perfect. I thought about inviting Hans Pfitzner, although he is not in Frankfurt at the moment. But even if he were it would not have been a good idea
—
too pedestrian and old-fashioned even if admittedly he is a major composer. As to painters, no doubt she has heard of Max Beckmann and probably seen his work. I spoke to him but he could not come. I suspect he is having lunch with Lili von Schnitzler in the Westendstrasse. She collects his paintings and we don’t.

What about women? Marie-Laure is probably not interested in women. Anyway, no names came to mind. There is an ample supply of female music lovers and actresses in Frankfurt, but none seemed right.

Would she be interested in eccentric members of the dethroned but still well-endowed German aristocracy? Unforgivably, our politicians ignored the so-called revolution of 1918 and 1919 and left their estates intact. Incredible, but true. Somewhere, in some castle, perhaps even nearby in the Rhineland, there must be an ex-prince or an ex-princess who loves modern art. There must be, but I do not know any. Whom could I consult? Kurt Hahn is close to the grand-ducal House of Baden and knows everybody, but I do not know him well enough. So we would have to confine ourselves to commoners.

Hermann suggested the physicist Klaus Kolmar, who loves modern art and collects paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. He is an impressive character, he said, and apparently a good conversationalist. So I went ahead and invited him. His chic wife, Stella, I was told, might set off sparks with her sharp tongue. And of course Georg Swarzenski, who as director of the Städel art gallery is familiar with the Paris art scene and whom Marie-Laure may know already. I like his wife. I also took the risk of inviting the often incomprehensible young music and philosophy student Teddy Wiesengrund again. As it turned out, it was a risk worth running. One of these days we will call himself Teddy Adorno, he says, using his mother’s maiden name, because it sounds better than Wiesengrund.

Marie-Laure is a striking woman. She has an oval, pale, aquiline face and a mop of black hair. She wore a simple, dark blue dress and a stunning silver necklace consisting of cubes of various sizes. She immediately recognized the Kirchner hanging in the hall and asked me whether we had a blue horse by Franz Marc, which we do not.

She said she was most excited by her first day at the exhibition and called it a great achievement. She has always had a soft spot for Frankfurt, she said, which she had visited several times as a child with her late grandfather. He would always take her to the Schirn in the Altstadt to eat the famous sausages. She would invariably get mustard all over her dress. She went there again yesterday and relished the sausages once again
—
and this time got through the experience without a spot. She emerged absolutely
immmaculata
, she said. Latin with a French accent sounded agreeably exotic to Frankfurt ears.