goal of the journey was Rome, his purpose to teach himself Italian: “The language…doesn’t look too perplexing–just the usual painful drudging until a necessary amount of stuff is stored up in the memory, that treacherous lumber room of uncertain vagaries.” He had a grammar, a dictionary, Frau Meyer’s 1000 Worte italienisch (A Thousand Italian Words), and a comic novel in English and in Italian translation. Avoiding a teacher was part of his plan for isolation. Nonetheless, one aspect of his surroundings pleased him: he “saw people smiling–imagine a Prussian caught smiling out of doors!” This good humor was vanquished by armies of bedbugs (later joined by fleas) and by the omnipresent Catholic Church. Counting his bites each morning, he attacked the bugs ineffectively with Flit and wished he could annihilate the Church. The bugs descended the moment he entered Italy. In Verona, he kept a “scorecard” of “mosquitoes killed” and “Bedbug Bites”–fourteen of the former, seventeen of the latter. When he “made the terrible discovery of 25 bed bug bites” a year later in Berlin, he got rid of them successfully.128
In Rome, Harry spent his mornings on Baedeker-guided tourism and his afternoons learning Italian through P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Carry On, Jeeves (Avanti! Jeeves), reading the Italian along with the English original: “In this way I have plunged thru sixty pages of Italian in two afternoons–and with the greatest of pleasure.” By the end of a month he was “able to read the Messagero [a Roman daily newspaper] without difficulty.” He witnessed war games: sirens, airplanes, increased police presence, and many Black Shirts; neither the police nor the Black Shirts bothered Harry or the Romans, who instead of “ducking into doorways, [were] boldly parading thru the streets just as if nothing were going on.”129 From Rome he took his Baedekers to Siena, Florence, Ravenna, Padua, and Venice. But he kept his mind trained on Germany.
No sooner had Harry left Italy than the bedbugs and fleas that had set up residence in his clothing decamped. He was back in German-speaking cities–Vienna, Prague, and Dresden–blissfully speaking and hearing German. In Vienna, he saw the renowned actress Elisabeth Bergner in a new film: she “acts with such shivering honesty that you are overwhelmed, crushed, and exalted.” Not all was well elsewhere in the city: “The University [of Vienna], to make me feel at home here, has been closed the last three days because of rioting”; clashes between Social Democrats and Nazis that left two Nazis and a policeman dead had been followed by attacks on Jewish students and the closure of the university. Moving on to Prague, he felt ill at ease. At the famous Altneu Synagogue, the janitor asked “if I was a Česky [Czech] or understood German; I said German. He asked me if I was a Jew and I said yes. Well, then, said he, you’d better put your hat on. Haven’t any, I said.” The janitor offered a yarmulke, but Harry “wasn’t going to associate with other people’s fleas.” He refused on different grounds to put his handkerchief on his head, as a quasi-hat:
But you’ve got to wear a hat, you’re a Jew, he complained. Oh hell, I said, I’m not religious, consider me a heathen…. Look here, said [a] bystander, you’ve got to do what the ritual requires. Yes, went on the janitor, see, there’s a Christian and he wears his hat. I won’t wear a hat, I answered. The bystander said–Look here, I’m a Jew and this peeves me (ich bin gekränkt). Sorry, I said. Well then, will you be good enough to leave? asked the janitor. Goodbye I said, and boiled away.130
Why should he accede to Jewish practice when he had “never been thrown out of a Catholic church for not crossing myself or kneeling before the altar”?
In Czechoslovakia and Austria, Harry was so pleased to be traveling in German-speaking countries that, when not afflicted by his own surliness, he dropped his reserve: “I remarked to a prosperous, well-fed and well-spatted fellow-traveller that the only really amiable frontier officials were the Austrians. He, being a Prussian, called them schlapp [spineless], I called them liebenswürdig [deserving love].”131 The Prussian said that the Austrians “had been rotten allies in the war,” but agreed that if the war had been fought with Austrian pastries–“Apfelstrudel, Kaiserschmarr[e]n, or whipped cream (Schlagobers)”–they would have triumphed.
Three days later, Harry was in Berlin, “back at the old stand and open for business.” He was enraptured by the familiar scene:
It is pleasant to see the yellow and brown & blue & brown Stadtbahn cars, the Zeitungsfahrer [newspaper distributor], the peddlers in boots, to hear street singing out of tune,…to see SA uniforms (they stand on street corners with red tin boxes with slots in them, jingling them for campaign contributions!)…
How could it possibly be “pleasant” to see S.A. men? Surely the writer of these puerile words knew that the S.A. and the S.S. had been banned on 15 April and unbanned two months later, and that Nazis in S.S. uniforms had attended the first meeting of the Reichstag on 30 August. He seems to have turned a blind eye to these ominous developments, so thrilled was he “to eat bean soup with wurst, to be told at the PO on asking for some registered packages I sent from Italy: ‘Eengeschriebene Pakete? Aber so wat jibs nich.’”132 The packages weren’t there, the clerk told him in the Berlin dialect that Harry cherished. He equally enjoyed a visit to Paul Gottschalk’s, where Heinz joked and P.G. scolded him for not climbing the Alps.
Paying attention to current events
Harry’s Germanophilia, which turned S.A. men soliciting funds into part of a “pleasant” scene, was a triumph of wishful thinking. Already in March 1932, as Bella Fromm noted in her diary, “the brown plague” of S.A. Brown Shirts was spreading, with “gangs of roughnecks…painting swastikas and ‘we want Hitler’ signs on the streets and buildings.”133 Until events forced him to pay attention, Harry was less insistently aware of such details than Fromm, as shown in his responses to May Day, when demonstrations were always rife. His diary for May Day 1932 mentions an expedition with friends to Potsdam but not the demonstrations. On his second May Day, however, he went to Unter den Linden and photographed Nazi banners (at 5 pm, the crowds had thinned); that evening, he listened to Hitler’s speech on the radio. During his first year and a half in Germany, his diary and letters sometimes exhibit a self-involvement that dulled his response to what was going on before his own eyes. In November 1932, he failed to see the significance of a Berlin municipal transport strike during which a “united front of Red and Brown” caused chaos for several days at the time of the Reichstag election on 6 November (the alliance of Red Communists and Brown S.A. was not unusual).134 He did observe that the government-operated Stadtbahn was “unusually crowded,” because the rest of the system was shut down by the strike; but he wrote nothing about the strike as such.135 That the strike was not supported by labor unions and was indeed intended to break them and their SPD allies at the moment of the election, that there was considerable violence including several deaths, that the sponsors of the strike were radicals on the left and the right: all that went without comment in Harry’s diary and letters. That evening he saw three Schupos–police officers–standing “dark blue and substantial in the dim light of the lamp” at the corner near the Meyers’ building.136 It was the aesthetic qualities of the Schupos that struck him, not their possible connection with the strike.
What matters for our purposes, of course, is not what Harry omitted from his diary and letters but what he included. From the beginning, he took verbal snapshots of the politico-social atmosphere, finding significance in seemingly small details. He explained why students had to show their university ID to get in each of the three university gates: “to keep political agitators who are not students out of the place.” He noticed streets full of beggars and hardly a block “without moving vans, and no house without a for rent sign,” concluding: “Anybody looking for the end of an epoch could find material in Berlin.” In the Meyers’ building, three of the seventeen or eighteen apartments were vacant. Lutz Gottschalk, an idealistic teenager, was so eager to give money to the poor when the government curtailed unemployment relief that his father refused to give him any. The 603,000 unemployed people in Berlin in 1932 constituted over 10% of the national total.137
