He considered only three German papers reliable for European news: the Vossische Zeitung; the august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; and the Berliner Tageblatt.138 To obtain breadth of coverage, he read–at first occasionally, and later obsessively–English and Continental papers. He liked the ironic toughness of a French columnist who went by the name of Pertinax, who “hoped Hitler would take the helm in Germany because then it would show the world how much of Germany’s pretended peacefulness was real.” As an American, he was interested in coverage of the United States. When Calvin Coolidge died, he read obituaries in three German papers and the Milan paper the Corriere della Sera: “The Corriere struck a far better note than the others–less self-conscious, less foreign.” Perhaps Italians were “more bound to the U.S.,…because in the waves of immigration, the last great surge came in great measure from Italy, thus creating personal ties and new sympathies.” For accuracy, he turned to two American news magazines, the Nation and the New Republic. They gave him “a feeling of pride,” for they were “critical, independent of parties, well written, and with wide interests.” One day, he went to the office of the Manchester Guardian, hoping to speak with their correspondent, Hermann Framm, who was out.139
Newspapers enabled Harry to construct an extensive account of a political crisis in the last two weeks of May 1932: “Today was not devoted to history–the history of a generation ago or centuries ago–but to the history of yesterday and the short time before that.”140 That history was complicated by the problem of sources. Getting “a coherent idea of a situation” from newspapers, he later wrote, was “like estimating the length of a sausage while it is coming link by link from the machine.”141 But it was all he had. Because “the German ones are notoriously partisan, or taciturn, or full of gaps,” he found information by reading twenty-one foreign papers as well as German ones: “papers of all parties in Germany, papers from Switzerland, England, and France. (And of course the Paris Herald, which can be called American).” By scouring the foreign press and “read[ing] between the lines” of the German papers, he inferred “the names of the people most German papers avoid naming” and pieced together what had happened. The issue was an emergency decree being constructed by the cabinet for the signature of President Hindenburg, who had never been “a brilliant intellect” and now, at eighty-five, was increasingly feeble. What interested Harry was the way Hindenburg was manipulated. By the time the political crisis was over, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning had resigned, along with the entire cabinet. General Wilhelm Groener, the Minister of the Interior and Defense, who had banned demonstrations by the S.A. and the S.S. a month or so earlier, was one of the losers; his ouster was engineered by his former protegee, General Kurt von Schleicher, who succeeded him as Minister of Defense. After conferring with party leaders and spending “an unusually long time” with Hitler, Hindenburg named a new chancellor–Franz von Papen, a right-winger and former military attaché in Washington. Among the “various bits of contradiction, nonsense, absurdity, and rhetoric” that littered the political landscape, some commentators said that Hindenburg fired Brüning “because he was not severe enough against the Nazis,” while others said it was “because he was too severe against them.” Harry expected that with Papen as chancellor, the Nazis would get what they wanted, and they did: a revocation of the S.A.-S.S. ban, and new elections for the Reichstag on 31 July. In the weeks following the unbanning, Nazis killed ninety-nine people, most of them in Berlin.142
Observing events from a cool distance, Harry listened to Hitler on the radio and attended controversial films. He noted Hitler’s plan for a radio address on 14 June, the first time that the Nazis had breached “the democratic defense of the German democracy.” He attended a film created by Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eissler, and others that had been “3 times forbidden by censor.” This was Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World, the only Communist film made in Weimar Germany; the title derived from its setting in Kuhle Wampe, a workers’ colony. The censors feared that the film’s depiction of unemployment and the suicide of an unemployed worker might suggest the inability of the government to care for its citizens and thus provoke disturbances. Not suspecting the film’s eventual historical significance–it is now considered a classic of left-wing cinema–Harry thought it would turn audiences off because it was so “boring” and “dull”–surpassed “from the point of view of ennui… only by Richard Strauss’s opera ‘Ariadne auf Naxos,’ 2¼ hours long and much more than twice as long as a Wagner 5-hour affair.” Immune to Strauss’s lighter touch, Harry missed the aesthetic boat.143
In the weeks before the next election, on 31 July, political disturbances multiplied. Returning home one evening from Paul Gottschalk’s, Harry
heard the unmistakable sound of rhythmical nailed boots on pavement, and there came a group of Hitler’s S.A. swinging along. A second was following…. They looked young, husky, and determined, but more boy-scout marching style than West Point. There may be 350,000 of them in all, but France need not be particularly alarmed about them. For Strassenkravalle [street riots] they are suitable, but in all military aspects they would prove of absolutely no value, having neither the equipment nor training.144
Other private militias marched, each with its own uniform. “This uniform business is a great thing in German politics,” wrote Abraham Plotkin: “The moment a movement gathers momentum, up pops the uniform.” The gray uniform of the Steel Helmet (Stahlhelm, a nationalist veterans’ organization opposed to the Weimar Republic) resembled that of the Reichswehr; incomprehensibly, Harry’s collection of photographs included one of Walter Elberfeld in a Steel Helmet uniform.145 The colors of the Reichsbanner Schwartz Rot Gold (the Black Red Gold Banner of the Reich), which was loosely affiliated with the SPD, indicated its support of the Weimar Republic. The Iron Front (Eiserne Front), which was allied with the SPD and also with the Reichsbanner, had support from unions; marching “with a zip as effective as that of the Nazis,” it held a huge demonstration in Berlin the day before Hitler was named chancellor. The Rote Frontkämpferbund (the Red Front-Fighters League, the Communist paramilitary group) was declared illegal by the Papen government because it was anti-government. After Hitler took power, the brown S.A., the black S.S., and (briefly) the gray Steel Helmet remained--this last forced in 1934 to wear “the honorable brown” S.A. uniform, as Victor Klemperer remarked ironically, and dissolved completely in 1935.146
The contemporary militias resonated with Harry’s reading about the Thirty Years’ War, “in which private armies ravaged the land and set Germany two centuries–perhaps three–behind the rest of the western world.”147 He found parallels with the present situation: “Fanaticisms, local, racial, religious, economic class disturbances, barbarisms of assorted types, a vicious particularism engendering differences in whose acid all feeling of community disintegrates, gangsterism raised to a principle”–all this had been “chronic in German history since the 16th century.” War became “a profession, with families bred to it…–blood and iron were necessary for practical things.” When “slogans of professed humanity” became “coarse and crude…, the Denker und Dichter [thinkers and poets]…never protested–or rarely.”
The pursuit of scholarship occasionally drew Harry unwittingly to dangerous places. At the Vorwärts building, where he hoped to use the bookstore, he found the gates closed and the building guarded by “half a dozen healthy-looking men in khaki, Reichsbannermen.” Some hours after he left, there was “an attack on the building by 100-150 Nazis, two men were shot and a third badly hurt.” The neighborhood, an SPD stronghold, was like “a superheated steam boiler whose safety valve is being held down” by the government of Papen and Schleicher, “engineers [who] don’t arouse my confidence.” He was glad he hadn’t witnessed the attack and hoped to avoid all disturbances. If the university were closed– “either by the anti-Nazi government in order to prevent rioting or by the Nazis if they take the helm, to clean the faculty of non-Nazi professors”–it wouldn’t directly affect him as long as he could “get my Studienbuch signed, and…the libraries remain in operation.” By then attending only four hours of classes a week, he didn’t mind “that there was another Kravall [riot] in the university this morning, the first since last fall or early winter.”148 Two weeks later he saw “mobs of students clustered” by the
