and nearly two hundred wounded as its victims.”149 Kessler added: “It is a continuous St Bartholomew’s Massacre, day after day, Sunday after Sunday.” Less emotional than Harry Kessler, Harry Marks maintained his customary ironic distance. For him, “the most serious factor is not the possible alteration of university organization but the fact that the Nazis want to interfere with the opera.”150 He didn’t really mean it, though.
In the lead-up to the election, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl replaced Groener as Minister of the Interior. Gayl, who was later to resist the Nazis, was willing to censor newspapers at the government’s bidding. The Vorwärts and a Cologne paper backed by the Catholic Zentrum (Center) party were both shut down for five days as punishment for their criticisms of the government. The Vorwärts had slyly suggested “that there was a connection between the new Nazi uniforms–very expensive–and the shortening of the relief payments,” and the Cologne paper had objected to foreign policy toward France. Harry reacted cynically: “I can’t work up any sympathy for anyone concerned…. I don’t suppose any SPD or Zentrum members have lost any tears over the almost equally arbitrary 5 day ban of the Berlin Nazi organ Der Angriff.” Finally, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” a “pitched battle…in Altona (Hamburg’s Hoboken),” which resulted in eighteen deaths, led Gayl to prohibit all demonstrations.151
Nazis and Communists thronged the streets. One Sunday the Kurfürstendamm, a major shopping street, was “swarming with uniformed Nazis. Walking in 3’s & 4’s, they lounged up and down and across the avenue…saluting acquaintances with the pseudoRoman gesture of the raised arm.” At a Communist demonstration on the following Tuesday,
a couple of miles of Communists marched down from the Red north of Berlin and sang the Internationale and other appropriate anthems, shouted couplets in unison against the Nazis and in favor of the KPD [German Communist Party], and raised their fisted hands in the Red salute or gesture of defiance. There were workmen’s bands, always red flags and banners with suitable inscriptions, and all ages and both sexes were among the marchers: unemployed looking a little shabby, employed men with white shirts, gray shirts, blue shirts, brown shirts, dirty shirts, hatless or with the nautical caps so much worn by all ages of men; girls in bright dresses, gray-haired women, thin women, fat women, school girls and stenographers, women in white with nurses’ caps and bags with contents for all emergencies, and, always, cops. Cops pacing alongside by twos, cops in five-seater open runabouts, cops in the familiar police department riot squad trucks, all in Alarmbereitschaft [emergency readiness], the bands of their helmets under the chin, the side boards of the trucks down to allow instantaneous action.
Such parades reinforced the marchers’ “community of feeling” but probably had no effect on the audiences lining the streets. Harry had a certain sympathy with “these hoarse marchers, with their shouts of ‘Was haben die Arbeiter? [What do the workers have?] Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! Was wollen die Arbeiter: Arbeit! Arbeit! Arbeit!’ [What do the workers want? Work! Work! Work!].”
After a ban on demonstrations, competing parties compensated by littering the street with fly sheets advertising their causes: “People stooped over, men and women, and picked them off the pavement or off the asphalt, and walked along reading them.”152 Harry had a personal experience of anti-Semitism when he and Heinz encountered “two boys handing out fly sheets. I put out my hand for one and the boy turned away and said–Nee–nicht für die Juden [No, not for Jews].”153 Heinz, unrecognized as Jewish, gave Harry his copy; Nazis, it seemed, were no more adept at recognizing Jews than the admissions officers at Harvard mentioned in Chapter 2. The government, too, practiced political hooliganism. On 20 July, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD politician, was forced to resign as police president of Berlin by a group of young officers sent by Papen; in a premonition of Nazi methods, they “forced their way in [to police headquarters], hand grenades in their leather belts.” Harry considered writing to Artz in Heidelberg: “How do you like living under a dictatorship?”154
On the eve of the election, having just left on his travels, Harry strolled the streets of Frankfurt, noting political flags. A neighborhood favoring the SPD and KPD was thick with “red flags with a white sickle and hammer,” in one area “completely ablaze and not unfittingly labeled by a sign over the entrance: Klein Moskau [Little Moscow]…. I thought, lord help a Nazi in this neighborhood, but there were none.”155 The “better off areas” displayed Nazi flags. He saw “a troop of Nazis” and then “a much larger group of the Iron Front.” When the election results came in, the Nazis, although the largest party in the Reichstag, did not have a majority, and Hindenburg refused to name Hitler chancellor. The government collapsed. New elections were called for 6 November when, as already noted, both the Communists and the Nazis ganged up against the SPD in the transport strike.
During his travels, Harry followed events in Germany through the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The “nationalist-militarist internal disposition” of the government, with its suppression of all leftwing thought and “collateral policy of strengthening right-wing opinion and parties,” was laying a firm foundation for the Nazis. The government attacked the KPD, whose national headquarters at Karl Liebknecht House “was searched and the Rote Fahne [Red Flag, the KPD newspaper] several times banned. Rewards are offered for information about illegal Communist literature–…now they set a price on its head.” The one certainty about the upcoming November elections was that the Papen government, which had bitterly criticized Hitler’s NSDAP, would face “some 500 or more hostile Reichstag members,” for only the DNVP supported Papen’s Zentrum. The Nazis lost ground in November, a temporary reprieve. Walking along the Kurfürstendamm a week before Hitler became chancellor, Harry saw “Nazis with 3 Hakenkreuz [“crooked cross,” swastika] banners marching in the snow, singing about Hitler unser Führer [our leader]. Sad demonstration of herd-mindedness.”156
That month, the brief and brilliant academic career of Ernst J. Cohn shuddered to a halt. A year earlier, Cohn had been named “ordinarius [full professor] on the law faculty of the Univ. Breslau…at the extraordinary age of 28” and entered into a torment predictive of later events.157 His colleagues didn’t mind that he was Jewish, but the Nazi students did. In December 1932, the governing body of the university bravely declared that they would not dismiss him–only to do so a week later:
Why? Because he had answered a newspaper’s request, made to a large number of people, to express an opinion whether or not Trotsky ought to be allowed to enter Germany. Cohn answered that he didn’t know the details of the matter, but that his principles would be: if Trotsky wanted to come to Germany for his health and as a private gentleman, he saw no reason for prohibiting his entrance. On the other hand, if he came as an agitator–We have enough of such already–Cohn said; Keep him out.
This statement, deliberately misinterpreted as a call for Germany to give Trotsky political asylum, gave the university an excuse to fire him. There followed “a great row and the Prussian Kultusministerium [Ministry of Cultural Affairs] intervened.” Cohn, having apologized, “was once more returned to the fold,” again requiring police protection. Harry concluded: “This is merely one incident out of many to illustrate the penetration of some of the universities by politics of the most vicious order.”158 Two weeks after Harry reported Cohn’s troubles, Hitler took over.
