Britain and the Weimar Republic: The History of a Cultural Relationship

Colin Storer teaches modern history at the University of Warwick and the University of Nottingham. He holds a PhD in Modern History from the University of Nottingham.

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INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY HISTORY Series ISBN: 978 1 84885 227 3 See www.ibtauris.com/ILTCH for a full list of titles 29. Britain and the Weimar Republic: The History of a Cultural Relationship Colin Storer

35. Constructing a Post-War Order: The Rise of US Hegemony and the Origins of the Cold War Andrew Baker

978 1 84885 140 5

978 1 84885 636 3

30. Cyprus in World War II: Politics and Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean Anastasia Yiangou

36. The Rise of Women’s International Activism: Identity and Sisterhood Between the World Wars Marie Sandell

978 1 84885 436 9

978 1 84885 671 4

31. Britain and Cyprus: Key Themes and Documents since WWII William Mallinson

37. An Island in Europe: The EU and the Transformation of Cyprus James Ker-Lindsay, Hubert Faustmann and Fiona Mullen (Eds)

978 1 84885 456 7

32. Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy during the Great Game Christopher M. Wyatt

978 1 84885 678 3

38. Russian Imperialism and Naval Power: Military Strategy and the Build Up to the Russian-Japanese War Nicholas Papastratigkis

978 1 84885 610 3

33. Non-Alignment and its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge Rinna Kullaa

978 1 84885 691 2

39. Chelmno and the Holocaust: A History of Hitler’s First Death Camp Patrick Montague

978 1 84885 624 0

34. Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars Daniel Laqua (Ed)

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40. Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation Leo Zeilig

978 1 84885 469 7

978 1 84885 724 7

ii

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BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC The History of a Cultural Relationship COLIN STORER

TAURIS ACADEMIC STUDIES an imprint of I.B.Tauris Publishers

LONDON●NEW YORK

Published in 2010 by Tauris Academic Studies An imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2010 Colin Storer The right of Colin Storer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Twentieth Century History 29 ISBN 978 1 84885 140 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press (India) Camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

To my parents, for all they have done for me.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Abbreviations

x

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

1. ‘Germany Wants to See You’: British Travel and Tourism in Weimar Germany

11

2. ‘Don’t let’s be Beastly to the Germans’: British Attitudes towards Germany in War and Peace

34

3. Occupational Hazards: British Intellectuals and the Occupation of the Rhineland

58

4. Sexual Mecca, City of Doom or Cosmopolitan Capital? British Attitudes towards Berlin

84

5. ‘A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine’: Female Intellectuals and the Weimar Republic

106

6. Creating a Weimar Stereotype? Representations of Weimar Germany in Fiction

123

7. ‘The German Fascisti’: British Attitudes towards Nazism in the 1920s

148

Conclusion

173

Appendix: Biographical Notes

183

Notes

194

Bibliography

221

Index

242

viii

List of Illustrations

Between pages 105 and 106 1. ‘Germany Wants to See You’: early 1930s poster (Mary Evans Picture Library) 2. British tanks outside Cologne Cathedral, 1921 (Mary Evans Picture Library) 3. British officers watching a military parade alongside their German wives, Cologne, 1926 (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-01640/Photo: O. Ang.) 4. ‘The Reckoning’ by Bernard Partridge, first published in Punch, April 23, 1919 (Punch Picture Library) 5. ‘“Kamard!” – The New Gesture’ by Bernard Partridge, first published in Punch, March 10, 1926 (Punch Picture Library)

Abbreviations

BL

British Library

CAB

Cabinet Office Papers

DBFP

Documents in British Foreign Policy 1919-1939

ESW

Sackville-West Papers

FAV

F. A. Voigt Papers

FSC

Film Society Collection

GA

Guardian Archive

IWM

Imperial War Museum

KV

Records of the Security Service

TCA

Thomas Cook Archive

WHC

Winifred Holtby Collection

WHD

W. H. Dawson Papers

Acknowledgements

The present volume, like another much more famous book, was a tale that grew in the telling. It began life as postgraduate research into British perceptions of the German Revolution of November 1918, grew into a PhD thesis on the attitudes of British intellectuals towards the Weimar Republic and from there mutated into the work you now hold in your hands. During this long drawn out process I have incurred many debts and it is only fitting that those who have provided me with help and support are acknowledged here. A great many thanks are due to a number of individuals who aided me in the production of this book: Professor Dick Geary for his encouragement, enthusiasm and above all his patience while supervising the doctoral research on which it is based; Professor Chris Wrigley who first suggested I look at the works of W. H. Dawson and whose comments and advice were invaluable to me; and Professor Jonathan Osmond who provided me with helpful comments and suggestions. I have benefited from conversations with Dr. Christian Haase of the University of Nottingham and Dr. Nicole Robertson of the University of Northumbria who also provided support and encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the debt I owe to numerous friends and relatives who displayed an interest in the project and/or put up with my absorption in it, particularly Dr. Margaret Stone and Mr. Paul Peros who read the manuscript at various stages and provided kind and constructive criticism and suggestions. My research could not have been completed without the aid and assistance of numerous hardworking librarians and archivists and I owe a great deal to the staff of the various libraries and archives visited during

the course of my research. I would particularly like to thank all the staff of the University of Nottingham’s Hallward Library, and their interlibrary loan staff in particular, for all their help over the years. I would also like to express my gratitude to David Smith and all the staff at Hull Central Library, James Turtle and the staff of the Gloucester Public Records Office, Paul Smith of the Thomas Cook Archive, the staff at the British Film Institute’s National Film Library, the staff at the British Library and the National Archives, and the staff of the Special Collections Departments of Birmingham University Library and the John Rylands University Library of Manchester for their help and courtesy. Special thanks is also due to Mr. Edward Upward, Mrs. E. E. Barquin and Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre who all answered my enquiries with good grace and provided me with much helpful information that would otherwise have been unavailable to me. I would like to thank the Holtby literary executor for permission to quote from papers in the Winifred Holtby Collection; Robert SackvilleWest (Lord Sackville) for permission to quote from the papers of Edward Sackville-West; The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust for permission to quote from letters written by Wyndham Lewis and held in the British Library; and the National Archives for permission to quote extracts from Cabinet Office Papers. Extracts from the letters and poems of W. H. Auden are printed with the permission of the estate of W. H. Auden. I have attempted to contact the holders of copyright on the works of individual writers, but unfortunately some of my enquiries have remained unanswered. If I have inadvertently infringed the copyright of any person I apologise sincerely. Much of what now makes up chapter five was first presented as a paper to the ‘Home, Nation and Empire: Reading Gender from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day’ conference at the University of Manchester in July 2007 and subsequently appeared as ‘Weimar Germany as seen by an Englishwoman: British Women Writers and the Weimar Republic’ in the German Studies Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2009). Some of the material in chapters three, five and six has also already appeared in print in the German Studies Review and the Journal of European Studies and I would like to thank those publications for permission to reproduce that material here. Finally, I would like to thank my family, and in particular my parents, to whom this book is dedicated, for their unfailing encouragement and support: I owe them more than they can ever know.

xii

Introduction

When he came to draft his autobiography in the mid-1940s, the pianist, novelist and critic Edward Sackville-West wrote that [t]he young Englishman of my generation (that of 1900), since he was the heir of predominantly northern ideals, often began by feeling more at home in Central Europe than in any Latin country. Fascinated by the Gothic ambiguities of the German heart, and charmed by the cosiness of the bourgeois interior, he surrendered willingly to an atmosphere that permitted him to absorb its strangeness by easy stages.1 Sackville-West was far from being alone in finding ‘the Gothic ambiguities of the German heart’ fascinating. Large numbers of his contemporaries were also ‘keenly interested … in German life and character’2 during the 1920s. Indeed, the Germany of the Weimar Republic (and in particular its capital, Berlin) exercised a peculiar fascination for young Britons born after 1900, but it also attracted the attention of British men and women born in the last forty years of the nineteenth century in almost equal numbers. This seems to have been particularly true for those actively

‘GERMANY WANTS TO SEE YOU’

engaged in the fields of art, literature and journalism, to the extent that any list of intellectual visitors reads like a who’s who of British literary and artistic talent of the interwar period. Why should this be the case? What made a country that had recently been the enemy in the most destructive conflict Europe had ever known so attractive and fascinating to British intellectuals of the 1920s? One simplistic answer might be that it was ever thus. As John Mander points out, there was virtually no concept in Britain of a homogenous German ethnic or cultural, let alone political, entity before Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813), which was instrumental in introducing German literature to the British.3 Thereafter, amid English translations of Goethe, Schiller and Hoffmann, intellectuals were the most enthusiastic British advocates for German culture. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a notable enthusiast for German romanticism; Thomas Carlyle, the historian of the French Revolution and biographer of Frederick the Great, ‘became a key cultural importer of German ideas into Victorian Britain’, doing much to establish ‘the “German idealist” school [of philosophy] in the British imagination’4; and Marian Evans (better known as George Eliot) translated Strauss’s Leben Jesu and works by Feuerbach. Similarly, the poet, critic and educationalist Matthew Arnold admired Prussian bureaucratic efficiency and educational standards,5 while a later generation of British statesmen and bureaucrats, Alfred Milner and R. B. S. Haldane among them, were steeped in German culture. Throughout the nineteenth century Prussia, and then Germany, attracted the admiration of British thinkers, educationalists and policymakers, while German scholarship – especially in the fields of theology, philosophy, philology and archaeology – was required reading among those in Britain wishing to keep up with the latest research in their fields.6 Yet by the turn of the century the mid-tolate Victorian enthusiasm for Germany and German culture had waned. The image of the soulful German professor was being replaced by that of the Prussian militarist; growing naval rivalry and economic competition soured relations between the two countries. And although Germany (or, more accurately, the Rhineland or the Black Forest) was a popular holiday destination for the Victorian middle and upper classes, it never represented serious competition to France (and especially Paris) in attracting British bohemians and intellectuals. Munich before the First World War might have been visited by art students like Wyndham Lewis, but Berlin was openly regarded as a home of stuffy philistinism and ‘too many signposts and plaster statues’7. So was the enthusiasm of British intellectuals for Germany in the Weimar period merely an example of cyclical cultural fashions, a rediscovery of a Germany of something other 2

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

than soldiers and schnitzel? Or was it that the postwar settlement and the formation of the Weimar Republic marked a turning point in German history, placing her at the heart of international developments in politics and the arts and making her seem new and exciting, a nation somehow uniquely in tune with the zeitgeist of the 1920s? Much mention has been made thus far of ‘intellectuals’, but what do we actually mean by the term in this context? In many ways, it is a troublesome appellation: indeed, it has been suggested that Britain has never really produced any intellectuals of her own.8 The term itself has traditionally been ill-defined and retained various shades of meaning for different people at different times. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an intellectual as ‘a person possessing a highly developed intellect’, but this definition does not carry the added inference of intellectual and creative endeavour usually implied by the term. Indeed, the noun ‘intellectual’ carries a whole range of associations and assumptions relating to the levels of education, social background, cultural and intellectual interests, professional activities and even political engagement. For the purposes of the present study the current prevailing sense of the word, that of ‘the leading cultural figure, the creator of ideas and the shaper of opinion’9, has been adopted. More specifically, it is used throughout as a shorthand, catch-all term encompassing writers (of both fiction and non-fiction), artists, academics, critics and some journalists. While this study will mainly focus on professional writers of one sort or another (creative writers, journalists, critics and commentators), it also at times makes reference to some memoirists who, while not strictly speaking intellectuals, made important observations in their writings which reflect and/or contradict general themes in British opinion on Germany. At the same time, in order to highlight the wider diversity of British interaction with the Republic, and to place the opinions of intellectuals in context, it will also, on occasion, make reference to other Britons involved with Weimar Germany such as civil servants, military personnel and public figures. The study of the attitudes of British intellectuals towards the Weimar Republic also presents us with a twofold difficulty. On the one hand, the discussion of British attitudes towards Germany in this period alone is necessarily artificial: links between Britain and Germany had been extensive before the First World War, and British travel to, and interest in, Germany did not abruptly come to an end with Hitler’s installation as Chancellor in January 1933.10 It might therefore be argued that to examine British intellectual interaction with Germany in this period alone divorces this study from its wider historical and cultural context. Nevertheless, such a focused study is both of value and long overdue. The Weimar period 3

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saw a significant shift in British attitudes towards Germany in all spheres. At the official and governmental level, the pre-war fear of Germany dominating Europe and usurping Britain’s economic and naval hegemony was replaced by the wish to see a stable and prosperous German state that could act as a counterbalance to French power on the Continent and as a bulwark against Bolshevism. In the cultural sphere, wartime prejudices against all that was (or sounded) German began to break down very quickly after 1918 and were replaced by an avid interest in the former enemy, with translations of German books – war memoirs, histories, fiction – finding a ready market in the United Kingdom. Similarly, where Wilhelmine art and architecture had been dismissed as boastful and vulgar, the tremendous flowering of Weimar culture attracted the attention of British artists, writers and bohemians who looked to Berlin as the home of the avant-garde and all that was new and exciting in the arts and sciences. All this led to changes in the nature of British travel to Germany: for the first time Berlin became the destination of choice for British visitors, attracted by a desire to witness and experience for themselves the perceived modernity and youthful exuberance of the Republic and its capital. While those Britons who had come before wrote of Romanticism or militarism, and those who came after weighed the merits and disadvantages for the German people and the wider world of the Nazi revolution, those who visited in the 1920s looked on the Weimar Republic with a mixture of hope and foreboding, and all too often saw it as a nation in tune with the wider cultural trends of the period, the exemplar of the spirit of the age. However, a discussion of British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic also raises other questions. Few, if any, contemporary commentators used the term, referring instead to Germany, much as we today would talk of Germany rather than the Federal Republic of Germany. It is therefore often difficult to know to what extent contemporary commentators were displaying attitudes towards the Republic (its system of government, culture, society etc.) or to broader conceptions of Germany and the German character. But, more than this, the term ‘Weimar Republic’ itself is a construct of historians, a designation awarded to distinguish the German Republic of 1919–33 from its more enduring postwar successor.11 Officially, Germany was known in this period as the Deutsches Reich (German Empire) or the German Republic12, only becoming known as the ‘Weimar Republic’ to history because this was the name of the Thuringian town in which the National Constituent Assembly convened in January 1919 to approve a new constitution.

4

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Much of the previous research into the relations of British intellectuals with Weimar Germany has tended to focus, almost exclusively, on Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, their immediate circle of friends, and their attempts to live a bohemian lifestyle in Berlin.13 Much attention has been lavished upon the sexual proclivities of this circle of writers, and their touring of the bars and nightclubs of Berlin’s homosexual underworld, as well as their dabbling with left-wing politics, their posing as proletarians and their self-conscious bohemianism – so much so that Isherwood’s Berlin has come to be seen as the archetypal image of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking world. The centenary of his birth and new (and controversial) productions of Cabaret in Berlin and London have in recent years led to a minor revival of interest in Isherwood and his friends, as well as comparisons between ‘his’ Berlin and that of the early twenty-first century.14 However, this focus on Isherwood and his circle does not present a comprehensive, or even representative, picture of British travel to or attitudes towards Germany in the Weimar period. Among the first things to strike one when one begins to look into this topic is the sheer number of British intellectuals who visited Germany in this period, and the diversity, in terms of background, age group and interests, of these visitors. This being the case, a deliberate decision has been taken to shift the focus of this study away from the Isherwood–Auden group. To ignore them completely would leave a significant gap in any discussion of British intellectuals and their attitudes towards the Weimar Republic, but the amount of literature already dealing with them means that close discussion of them would involve merely going over old ground. Similarly, there is a dearth of detailed material on other British visitors to Germany during this period, particularly women. While research has focused on Isherwood and his friends, the visits of other prominent British intellectuals to Weimar Germany are more often than not relegated to single chapters, brief mentions or footnotes in biographies or studies of their work, while others have been forgotten almost entirely. For example, the account of Virginia Woolf’s visit to Berlin in January 1929 takes up just a little over a page in Hermione Lee’s recent biography, despite the fact that the trip would appear to have marked a defining point in the writer’s relationship with her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West and brought on a mental and physical collapse.15 Other similar cases abound, while some authors whose writings on Germany were both popular and influential at the time have now faded into obscurity. And where attention has been paid to particular intellectuals’ visits to, work on, and interactions with Germany in this period, it has all too often been on a highly individual basis and not 5

‘GERMANY WANTS TO SEE YOU’

discussed in relation to wider themes or the attitudes of their like-minded compatriots. Taking all this into account, in this book I seek to present a broader view, comparing a wider range of British intellectuals’ perspectives on Weimar Germany than hitherto, and focusing on some of lesser-known figures (about whom biographical information can be found in the appendix) who have been unjustly ignored. This has necessarily affected the selection of the sources on which this study is based. A comprehensive coverage of this topic, making use of even a fraction of all the available archival and published source material, would take up several volumes. The archival research which forms the basis of the present study has therefore been focused on a number of individuals who, while less familiar than Isherwood and his friends to modern readers, are nevertheless more representative of British attitudes towards Weimar Germany. This unpublished material is complemented by a broad survey of published primary sources, including books, articles and autobiographies, as well as published letters and diaries. However, the use of such source material has not been without its difficulties. Autobiographies, written in most cases twenty or thirty years or more after the event are, almost by definition, highly unreliable and need to be viewed as such, with a certain scepticism and in conjunction with other sources. Even then, some incidents are going to be unverifiable and one must make a decision as to whether the author is to be believed or not. Thus, where possible, autobiographical material has been used alongside other sources, but at times some unverifiable comments (especially those relating to personal thoughts and feelings) have been taken at face value. The use of fictional works as historical sources has been even more problematical. These need to be treated with care, because they are, after all, fiction, and one must not fall into the trap of taking views expressed by characters, or even narrative comment, as necessarily being representative of the author. Even fictional works that are, like Isherwood’s Berlin novels or Robert McAlmon’s Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales), ostensibly autobiographical to one extent or another must be carefully treated as fiction and not as autobiography. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that the representations of Germany and the Germans in such works are of sufficient interest to make them of use to the historian attempting to gauge the ways in which their writers viewed the world around them and the prevalent cultural and social attitudes of the time. The correspondence and diaries of individuals would, at first glance, seem to be of most use in getting to grips with the activities and the thoughts and feelings of individual intellectuals regarding life in Germany during this period. However, even these ostensibly private documents 6

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

need to be treated with care when used as primary sources. Where these individuals are forthcoming about their attitudes, it must be remembered that many of them were or would later become, for the most part, prominent in their chosen fields and that most of them made living through writing. As John Worthen has pointed out, the letters of literary figures are often ‘creative work, never simply confessions’.16 One must therefore be mindful that, either consciously or unconsciously, their art often seeps into and colours even mundane and matter-of-fact letters or diary entries. It must also be borne in mind that private correspondence and diaries might not be as open about certain matters as one might think – letters are designed to be read and therefore reveal only what the writer wishes to reveal to the recipient; of which activities, thoughts or feelings the reader might disapprove will most probably be excluded or veiled. This is not to say that the importance or usefulness of these sources is in any way diminished, but to point out that such sources need to be selected and used carefully and such considerations are critical when reviewing this material. In the present study I approach this topic neither chronologically nor by looking at individuals in turn, but rather thematically. In an attempt to stress both the diversity of British interaction with the Republic and the areas of commonality in the attitudes of these intellectuals, it will look at the perspectives of individuals in the context of reactions to certain places, events or phenomena or in the context of certain groups. Each chapter will therefore cover a different aspect of British intellectual engagement with, and discourse on, Weimar Germany, identifying key themes and common attitudes that tell us much about how these individuals viewed the Republic. Chapter 1 begins by looking at British travel and tourism to, and within, the Weimar Republic. Germany proved a surprisingly popular destination for British travellers immediately after the First World War, but, in contrast to the extensive literature on British tourism and Nazi Germany, little has been written on British travel to Germany in the Weimar period. Yet alongside the tourists and holiday-makers who visited the Rhineland and the Black Forest, there was a steady influx of authors, journalists and commentators who were keen to see for themselves postwar conditions in Germany, while increasing numbers of artists, bohemians and pleasure seekers were attracted by tales of the wild nightlife of Berlin and/or the favourable exchange rate provided by postwar economic crises. In the light of this, this chapter includes discussion of patterns of British travel with a particular emphasis on motivations, favoured destinations, and 7

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activities of British visitors. I assess the degree of continuity and change between pre-war and postwar travel to Germany, and discuss why the highpoints of British travel to the Republic should have coincided with its periods of crisis, before looking at the extent to which intellectual ‘travel’ can be distinguished from straightforward tourism in this period. The First World War was a seminal event in the lives of most of those who participated in it, and for many life was never the same again. Similarly, the experience of war was instrumental in shaping British attitudes towards post-war Germany. In Chapter 2 I look at those individuals whose attitudes towards the Germany in the interwar period were heavily influenced by their experiences during the Great War, as well as the impact that German writings on the war had on British authors and memoirists. I then consider the profound effect that the post-war peace settlement had on British attitudes towards Germany, arguing that attitudes towards the peace were in many cases instrumental in shaping attitudes towards the Weimar Republic. The twin issues on which the debate on Treaty revision centred in the early 1920s were reparations and the occupation of Rhineland. In accordance with Article 428 of the Treaty of Versailles, British, French, Belgian and American troops had marched into the Rhineland in December 1918; there they were to remain until 1929. The occupiers found a population struggling to cope with political unrest, food shortages and economic dislocation, none of which were much improved by the presence of foreign troops who needed to be fed, billeted and entertained. The picturesque Rhineland had always been a favoured destination for British travellers to Germany and this, together with the fact that many felt that events and conditions in the region were symptomatic of the situation in Germany as a whole, made the occupied area attractive to those Britons who wished to see for themselves how the Germans were faring under the conditions and constraints laid upon them at Versailles. In Chapter 3, therefore, I look at the outpouring of books and articles by British intellectual visitors to the occupied Rhineland and examine how they viewed the different zones of occupation, arguing that there were important, and hitherto unacknowledged, differences in the ways in which various individuals responded to the occupation. The vast majority of British travellers to Germany in this period headed straight for Berlin, and for many British visitors, as for many subsequent historians, ‘Weimar was Berlin, Berlin Weimar.’17 This being the case, in chapter 4 I further explore the Berlin-centric nature of so much British travel to the Republic and argue that the limited nature of much British travel in Germany in this period meant that attitudes towards the Weimar 8

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Republic were very often actually attitudes towards its capital. This chapter covers the attractions of the city for many visitors – modernity, nightlife, avant-garde art and perceived liberal social attitudes, particularly towards sex and sexuality – but also questions some of the received views of Weimar Berlin. In particular it questions the image of the city as a ‘sexual mecca’ and ‘city of doom’, arguing that accounts of Berlin’s hedonistic nightlife and violent street-battles were often grossly exaggerated and contradicted by many less well-known observers, or were the product of hindsight. Most of the previous literature on this topic has concentrated on Christopher Isherwood and his friends. It has therefore focused overwhelmingly on male (and often homosexual) visitors to Germany at the expense of their female compatriots. Little or nothing has been written on the attitudes of British women writers towards the Weimar Republic, despite that fact that many well-known and high-profile women writers of the interwar period visited and left interesting accounts of their impressions of Germany. In Chapter 5 I seek to redress this imbalance by looking at the attitudes of British female intellectuals towards the Republic and assessing whether and to what extent their attitudes and interests differed to those of male visitors. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), are the best known fictional representations of the Weimar Republic in the English language, frequently read not as fiction, but as works of contemporary reportage, or even of history. Yet, despite his later assertions to the contrary, Isherwood was not the only British (or American) writer to produce works of fiction with a German setting in this period. An array of authors produced fiction set in the Weimar Republic, works which often shared themes and attitudes with the plethora of non-fiction books and articles dealing with Germany that appeared between 1918 and 1933. In Chapter 6 I therefore examine contemporary fictional representations of Germany and the Germans during the Weimar Republic and assess the degree of continuity and change in pre-war and postwar representations, and the extent to which a distinctive ‘Weimar stereotype’ can be said to have emerged from these novels and stories. Politics and an ever-present sense of crisis pervade much of British writing about Weimar Germany, both then and now, and in chapter 7 I tackle the question of the extent to which the collapse of the Republic and its replacement by a Nazi regime was regarded as inevitable at the time. It questions the common perception of the Weimar Republic as a doomed democratic experiment, and argues that contemporary British 9

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commentators saw nothing inevitable in its collapse and were far from regarding a Nazi dictatorship as assured or even likely. On the contrary, for much of the 1920s Hitler and the Nazis were ignored by many British observers, viewed as nothing more than a minority group and a regional party in the complicated milieu of German politics. Among those intellectuals who did take notice of the National Socialists, opinions were varied, and at times contradictory, but it is clear that they often reflected both the changing fortunes of the Nazi Party and the shifting and contradictory nature of Nazism itself. Perceptions of National Socialism were often confused – especially over whether the Nazis were a party of the political left or right – and tended to reflect wider themes in British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic such as youth, decadence, modernity and victimhood. What follows is therefore intended to provide the first broad comparative study of the attitudes of British intellectuals towards Weimar Germany, examining the diversity of these attitudes, at the same time looking for areas of commonality in the discourse on the Weimar Republic. Such a study, it is hoped, will provide an insight into why the Republic was so appealing to this particular section of British society.

10

1 ‘Germany Wants to See You’: British Travel and Tourism in Weimar Germany

The interwar period was, in many ways, a golden age of travel. On land it saw the last gasp of luxury rail travel, and one could travel in style on the Orient Express to Istanbul, to the South of France on the Blue Train, or down the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland on the Rheingold Express. By sea it was the age of the luxury liner, and the big shipping lines vied with one another to win the prestigious Blue Riband, awarded for crossing the Atlantic in the shortest possible time; while in the air, the 1920s and 1930s saw the beginnings of civilian passenger air travel. All these were the preserve of the wealthy, but the interwar period also saw the further democratization of travel, as technological developments and social and economic changes made foreign travel more available to more people than ever before. Arrivals and departures abound in the literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Travel, movement and speed were hallmarks of modernity and modernism, symptoms of the restless spirit of the age. Travel was exciting and adventurous, and often seen by the young as the best means of escaping a postwar Britain to whose weather, food, morals and culture they were deeply apathetic. While many chose to escape to the warmer climes of the Mediterranean, or more exotic destinations such as China or

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Africa, there were still those who sought diversion in Europe, and many of these found their way, sooner or later, to Weimar Germany. As the recently defeated enemy and the perceived home of ‘liberalism, modernism and hedonism […] avant-garde art and architecture […] social deviance and sexual decadence’,1 Germany was of particular interest to British travellers. Moreover, Germany – and in particular Berlin – was a hub of European travel, the point through which all roads, east and west, north and south, passed en route to their eventual destination. Lilian Mowrer, the British-born wife of the Chicago Daily News correspondent in Berlin, wrote that ‘Berlin sometimes reminded me of a huge railway station; it was a stopping-off place between East and Western Europe; everyone, travelling from Paris to Moscow, sooner or later, came there’.2 Similarly, Claud Cockburn watched ‘the packed buses, the racing taxis and the limousines and huge German touring cars, roaring eastwards and westwards on the Charlotenburger Chaussee’3, which he saw as just part of the east-west axis, the ‘highway which ran from Amsterdam to Moscow’4 on which Berlin stood. For others the newly built Tempelhof airport provided the best way to arrive in and depart from the capital of the Republic, the most modern, as well as the most comfortable and convenient, way to travel in style to the new Germany.5 Yet British travel to Germany did not begin with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, nor even with the Armistice of November 1918. Travel and tourism in the Weimar Republic was in many ways a continuation of a much older tradition of British travelling in Central Europe which provided the backdrop for cross-cultural encounters and cultural interaction in the interwar period. The British may not have had any clear concept of Germany before the nineteenth century, but that does not mean that there were not strong and longstanding cultural, economic and political links between the British Isles and the German states. Although Victorian historians and ‘AngloSaxonists’ liked to trace the roots of British (or at least English) values, institutions and freedoms to the Germanic tribes who colonised the British Isles in the fifth century, the British and the Germans had only very vague ideas about one another (not to mention their own national identities) during the Middle Ages. All that began to change with the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. German theologians had some influence on their English brethren, and while Britain generally had stronger links with Dutch Protestantism, the Reformation ‘did initiate a lengthy period in which northern Germany and parts of the Rhineland were viewed as potentially reliable allies in the lengthy international cold war between Protestants and 12

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Catholics’.6 This religious and cultural association was to endure well into the nineteenth century, bolstered by periodic political and dynastic alliances, which led ultimately to the accession of Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, as King George I in 1714. The Hanoverian connection served to strengthen the cultural, commercial and strategic links between Britain and Germany, but it was only with the advent of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century that Britons began to travel to Germany in large numbers for activities other than making war. The Grand Tour ‘was essentially a trip to Paris and a tour of the principal Italian cities’7 which had become popular in the late seventeenth century as a means of ‘round[ing] out the education of young men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artefacts and ennobling society of the Continent’.8 However, ‘there was little rigidity in the itineraries’ of the Grand Tour9, and Continental tourists were just as likely to visit regions and cities such as Holland, Hanover, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich and Geneva as they were Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples. The accession of George I increased interest in northern and western Germany, and the stunning military successes of Protestant Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War helped to draw British attention to north-eastern Germany for the first time. The Protestant courts of Hanover, Berlin and Dresden attracted increasing numbers of tourists in the eighteenth century, and by 1797 Dresden had a significant British colony. Between 1763 and 1789 such literary luminaries as James Boswell, Edward Gibbon and Laurence Sterne visited the German states, blazing a trail for later post-Napoleonic enthusiasts for Germany such as Coleridge and Carlyle. Nevertheless, Germany enjoyed a less than savoury reputation amongst the British for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and with some good reason considering the upheavals of the Thirty Years’ War), being regarded as dangerous, despotic and backward. ‘German roads and inns were proverbially the worst in Europe, and difficulties were increased by the multiplicity of princely authorities’ that complicated free movement between the various German states.10 In 1830 Thackeray dismissed Cologne as ‘beastly’11, and complained that German wine ‘had an unpleasant effect on my internals’12; while as late as 1891 the British humorist Jerome K. Jerome was noting the poor quality of German hotels. He grumbled about the stingy provision of washing materials in his Cologne hotel room13, and moaned that ‘[t]he German bedstead … is built in the form of a shallow, open box, and the victim is thus completely surrounded by solid pieces of wood with sharp edges’.14

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Until the nineteenth century continental travel remained the preserve of the wealthy, but after 1815 British travel to Germany was increasingly democratised by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The arrival of the age of steam made travel by both land and sea quicker, easier and cheaper, and this, in conjunction with the social and economic changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, meant that travel, once the preserve of a privileged elite, became available to more people than ever before. There was a thirst for travel amongst the British in the years after 1815, engendered by the isolation imposed on them by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and this was not restricted to the aristocracy – increasingly the middle classes availed themselves of the new opportunities for domestic and foreign travel that were being opened to them. Steamers began to cross the Channel in 1821, and by 1840 it is estimated that as many as 100,000 people a year were making use of the cross-Channel service15, while the growth of first British and later Continental railways made overland travel quicker and easier than it had been in the days of the Grand Tour. New features of travel and tourism also sprang up to cater for the needs of this influx of visitors to the continent. Chief among them were the professional travel agent and the guidebook. The Leicestershire cabinet maker Thomas Cook first conceived of organising excursions by train about the Midlands for a shilling per head in 1841, and in 1845 arranged a trip by rail from Leicester to Liverpool with accommodation included in the price. A decade later the firm of Thomas Cook and Son was well established in Britain and ready to spread across the English Channel. A visit to the Paris Exhibition of 1855 was organised, and the operation was expanded throughout the 1860s and 1870s to include not only tours of Switzerland, Italy and Germany, but also of Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Turkey. By 1873 Cook and Son were publishing a monthly continental railway guide, and from 1874 issuing traveller’s cheques to British tourists.16 At about the same time, the modern guidebook was being developed independently by publishers in Britain and Germany. Karl Baedeker produced his first guidebook, a guide to the Rhineland between Mainz and Cologne, in 183217, while John Murray III published A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent in 1836.18 Such guides were invaluable to the new middle class travellers of the nineteenth century: they told tourists with limited time and resources ‘what ought to be seen at each place’19, an important issue in an age in which travel was still largely utilitarian in purpose, geared towards education and personal development rather than fun and frivolity. Yet the gradual emergence of mass tourism in the nineteenth century also brought about a growing desire to distinguish between ‘travellers’ and 14

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‘tourists’. As what had once been the preserve of an aristocratic elite became increasingly democratised, ‘serious’ travellers (aristocrats, businessmen, diplomats, explorers and intellectuals) sought to distinguish themselves from the mass of tourists. As early as 1799 William Wordsworth put disparaging comments about ‘these tourists’ into the mouth of one of the characters in ‘The Brothers’, while in 1826 the Westminster Review complained that as soon as the Napoleonic Wars had ended Britons ‘poured, in one vast stream, across the Pas de Calais into France’.20 Half a century later, the Rev Francis Kilvert complained that ‘Of all noxious animals […] the most noxious is a tourist’.21 In his account of a visit to see the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1890 Jerome K. Jerome poured scorn not only on the trappings of modern tourism – the guide book and the travel agent22 – but also on his fellow tourists, observing that the English-speaking people one meets with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most disagreeable contingent. One hardly ever hears the English language spoken on the Continent, without hearing grumbling and sneering. [But] [t]he women are the most objectionable. […] The average female English or American tourist is rude and self-assertive, while, at the same time, ridiculously helpless and awkward.23 Nevertheless, whatever the literati might have thought of them, British tourists on the Continent were far from being representatives of ‘the masses’. Foreign travel was still limited to those who possessed both free time and a disposable income, which in reality meant the middle classes. Jerome might have suggested in his autobiography that in the 1870s and 1880s Continental travel was well within the means of an ordinary railway clerk and that ‘one could spend a holiday [in Europe] much cheaper than in England. Ten shillings a day could be made to cover everything’,24 but this must have been doing things on the cheap. Cook’s tours of Germany started at £25 in the 1890s, dropping to five guineas in the early 1900s, prices that were beyond the means of many in British society. Moreover, despite the fastidious disdain for the average tourist by writers such as Jerome, Continental tourism in the nineteenth century remained bourgeois in outlook and purpose: travel was aspirational and educational rather than for pleasure alone. The post-Napoleonic boom in continental travel coincided with a period of heightened interest in Germanic culture and society. Madame de 15

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Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813) introduced German Romanticism to a British audience at a time when Prussia and Austria were key allies in the struggle against Napoleon, and began an intellectual love-affair with German high culture that was to last into the twentieth century. Translations of German literature found a ready market in Britain, to the extent that six different editions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales were published in 1827 alone, while Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries were lauded not only by British intellectuals like Coleridge and Thackeray, but also by ordinary tourists and sightseers. Close dynastic ties between the British Royal Family and the Protestant courts of Germany – Hanover and Prussia in particular – helped to make all things German fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century, while German philosophy, science, theology, music, educational methods and social policy all attracted large numbers of British admirers, who flocked to Germany to learn and absorb all they could of German high culture. Similarly, Germany – or at least the favoured destinations of the Rhineland and the Black Forest – appealed to tourists steeped in Victorian Romanticism and Medievalism, while fashionable spas and health resorts attracted wealthy invalids and hypochondriacs from all over Europe. By the turn of the century Germany was attracting large numbers of British visitors, not just tourists and holiday-makers, but also writers, artists, soldiers and statesmen. Nevertheless, these visitors continued to adhere to the regions of the Reich that had been attracting British travellers for two centuries or more. For the British tourist of the Edwardian period ‘a German holiday meant, nine times out of ten, the Rhine, and if he went further than the Rhine and its neighbourhood it was to the Black Forest or a spa, such as Kissingen or Homburg’.25 Berlin, in particular, held little attraction for British travellers before 1914, who preferred the antique charms of more established urban centres such as Heidelberg, Dresden, Munich or Nuremberg. The First World War brought about a temporary rupture in AngloGerman relations and brought an abrupt halt to British travel not only to the German Empire, but also to much of the rest of Continental Europe. However, British travel to Germany resumed very quickly after the Great War and took a multiplicity of forms. In addition to the large numbers of visitors who chose to visit the Reich, there were also many Britons who travelled to the newly-constituted Weimar Republic in an official capacity as members of the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, the Allied Control Commission or the British diplomatic community; or as correspondents of British newspapers or representatives of British firms.

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Among the first Britons to enter Germany after the First World War – and certainly the first to arrive in any numbers – were the military personnel who made up the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland or who were members of the Allied Control Commission (ACC). The British representatives attached to the ACC arrived in Berlin immediately after the Armistice and were based in Berlin (initially at the Adlon Hotel), with various sub-commissions situated in provincial and state centres such as Munich, Königsberg and Kiel to oversee the implementation of the military terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including German disarmament, and to administer plebiscites in Upper Silesia, North Schleswig and Eupen-Malmédy. In December 1918 they were followed by the troops who made up the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland. They soon established a sizeable and largely self-contained community based in Cologne which included not only serving soldiers, but also members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), as well as the ‘YMCA, Church Army, and half a dozen organisations’.26 In addition to the military personnel and their families, a sizable civilian ‘colony’ soon grew up in Cologne around the Army of Occupation. These ‘Colognials’ (as they quickly became known) numbered around 2,500 by 1922, many of them ex-officers and soldiers who, when faced with returning home to demobilization and unemployment, opted to remain in Cologne. However, there were also many businessmen attracted by ‘the potential significance of Cologne as the major commercial centre of Western Germany’.27 By as early as 1920 ‘the British business community in Cologne was large enough to support three banks “employing between a hundred and a hundred and fifty clerks” and a Chamber of Commerce’.28 Two years later that Chamber of Commerce was made up of 47 different firms and it was estimated that a quarter of the British civilians living in the Cologne region were engaged in some form of business. But the colony did not last. As British military forces gradually withdrew from the Rhineland, the numbers of civilians living and working there also dwindled. The occupying troops and the ‘Colognials’ in the Rhineland were soon joined by a sizable diplomatic community. As normal relations between the two former enemies were resumed, British diplomats and officials, together with their wives, families and servants, re-established themselves throughout Germany. Lord Kilmarnock, who had held junior consular posts in Imperial Germany prior to the outbreak of war, was dispatched to Berlin as British chargé d’affaires in January 1920, taking with him the embryo of the British diplomatic community. However, it was felt that 17

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Kilmarnock did not have sufficient authority to deal with both the German government and the British military authorities in Cologne, and on 30 June 1920 it was announced that he was to be replaced by Edgar Vincent, 1st Viscount D’Abernon, who would represent Britain as ambassador to Berlin.29 Under D’Abernon and his successors, Sir Horace Rumbold and Sir Eric Phipps, the British diplomatic community in Germany flourished, playing host to visiting luminaries, from the Duke and Duchess of York to Oswald Mosley and Augustus John, and reporting on events until the outbreak of war in September 1939 severed relations between Britain and Germany once again. Many of the Britons living and working in Germany during the Weimar period therefore had little or no choice in the matter: they went where the Army or the Foreign Office sent them. But this was not the case for all, or even the majority. Journalists and commentators interested in conditions within Germany began to arrive soon after the Armistice was signed (Morgan Philips Price, formerly the Manchester Guardian’s special correspondent in Russia, crossed the Russo-German border in December 1918), and many of the more adventurous British travellers on the continent sooner or later found their way to Berlin. As the political and economic situation stabilised, Germany once again became a popular destination for British tourists and holiday-makers, and British travel agents began to offer package tours to traditional tourist destinations such as the Rhineland and the Black Forest from the mid-1920s onwards. Statistics giving the numbers of Britons travelling to Germany during the Weimar period are not available, but an examination of documents in the archive of the travel agent Thomas Cook gives some indication of the availability and popularity of Germany as a holiday destination in this period. Thomas Cook made arrangements for British tourists to see the 1922 Oberammergau Passion Play but, perhaps unsurprisingly, Cook’s 1923 ‘Summer Holidays’ brochure contains no tours of Germany – after all, a country in economic meltdown and at the centre of an international crisis over the default in reparations payments would not have been the natural choice for a relaxing holiday destination. However, from 1925 onwards The Traveller’s Gazette, the firm’s in-house magazine, began to feature increasing numbers of articles on German subjects. The popularity of Germany with British tourists – or at least Cook’s determination to market it as such – can be seen in that, except in 1923–24, Germany was featured in every monthly issue of The Traveller’s Gazette between 1921 and 1938, with an average of three to four articles each, but often more (the 12 issues published in 1930 featured a total of 15 articles on Germany). Interestingly, these articles focused heavily on tried and tested destinations 18

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such as the Rhineland and the Black Forest, or spa-towns and resorts like Baden-Baden, suggesting that the traditional bias amongst British tourists towards western and southern Germany was still in place throughout the 1920s and 1930s.30 This conclusion is supported by the fact that the only guidebook produced by Thomas Cook in the interwar period was a Handbook to the Rhine and Black Forest (With Extensions into Bavaria).31 Nor were these tours restricted to the most wealthy of tourists: a return journey to the Munich Wagner Festival in 1930 cost £7 7s 1d (second class) or £11 17s 6d (first class), while a five-day holiday in Aachen cost as little as £5 10s in 1931. Holidays in Germany were therefore within the means of most middle class families. Similarly, on the assumption that supply was based on demand, there was evidently a popular market for holidays in the Weimar Republic. By the time that they published their ‘Summer Holidays 1931’ brochure, Cook and Son were offering 20 different tours of Germany, encompassing major cities such as Berlin and Cologne as well as more traditional and bucolic destinations such as the Rhineland and the Black Forest. It is against this background of military occupation, renewed diplomatic and political engagement, and popular tourism that we must view British intellectual travel to the Weimar Republic. An increasing number of British and American writers, artists and bohemians visited Germany in the 1920s, and clear patterns can be detected in British intellectual interaction with the Republic. Firstly, intellectual travellers often favoured different destinations to ordinary holiday-makers. It is clear that wherever pleasure-seekers and holiday-makers might have chosen to travel, the destination of choice for British intellectual visitors was the Reich capital, Berlin. As we shall see in Chapter 4, attitudes towards the German capital were diverse and often contradictory, but they were also instrumental in shaping perceptions of the nation as a whole. In the Weimar period Berlin came to be seen, for the first time, as an important cultural and social centre on a par with London, Paris or Vienna, rather than a ‘provincial’ city, a parvenu capital of kitsch and ugly statuary, and this attracted artists, writers and critics in large numbers. Secondly, the timing of visits made by intellectuals is interesting. There was a steady trickle of intellectual visitors to Germany throughout the Weimar period. The duration of these visits was usually short (sometimes no longer than a matter of days). They were frequently made in groups, and often they were inspired by the accounts given by friends and acquaintances from home. However, this trickle swelled to a flood at two distinct periods: roughly from 1921 to 1924 (with a definite high point in 19

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1923–24) and again from around 1929 to 1933. These periods of heightened intellectual interest in and travel to Germany coincided with the moments of acute crisis in the life of the Republic, suggesting that it was this very sense of instability and unrest that attracted intellectual tourists. These points help to underline some of the differences, real or imagined, between intellectual travellers and ordinary tourists. Like many nineteenth century travellers most, if not all, of these intellectual ‘travellers’ would have been horrified by the suggestion that they were ‘tourists’, feeling, like Evelyn Waugh, that ‘the tourist is the other fellow’.32 There was a strong strain of snobbery in the attitudes of intellectual ‘travellers’ towards their countrymen abroad. Just as the emergence of mass publishing and mass culture at the end of the nineteenth century led to the emergence of Modernism as a culture apart from ‘vulgar’ mass culture, the emergence of modern tourism led intellectual tourists to style themselves ‘travellers’ in order to distance themselves from the travelling masses.33 For them, tourism was a product of the ‘proletarian age’34 and the tourist a ‘temporarily leisured person’, who travelled for a variety of vulgar motives: ‘to raise social status at home and to allay social anxiety; to realise fantasies of erotic freedom; and, most important, to derive secret pleasure from posing momentarily as a member of a social class superior to one’s own’.35 In contrast, intellectual visitors to Germany were travellers, ‘and thus superior by reason of intellect, education, curiosity, and spirit’.36 As far as they were concerned, travel was serious while tourism was frivolous, and by distancing themselves from tourists and holiday-makers these intellectual travellers sought to establish their own cultural and social superiority, which harked back to a perceived age of ‘unscripted travel’, freewheeling ‘bummeling’ undertaken by effete aristocrats unconstrained by the tyranny of the guidebook or the timetable. This can be seen in clearly in intellectuals’ stated reasons for journeying outside their homeland. Few intellectual visitors to Germany would have admitted travelling for pleasure alone, and certainly individual authors and commentators journeyed to the Reich for a wide variety of reasons. Nevertheless, some common motivations for travel to Weimar Germany can be discerned from an examination of the writings of British intellectual travellers. One of the most important of these, in the early years of the Republic at least, was the desire amongst British commentators to see for themselves the effect that the war and the Treaty of Versailles were having on living conditions in the homeland of the recently defeated enemy.

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Politics were of central importance to many British visitors to Germany in the interwar period, and politics was never far away even in the writings of the least politicised of foreign visitors. As Lilian Mowrer noted, ‘Germany was in the main stream of history’,37 at the centre of Europe geographically, but also at the heart of many of the issues that bedevilled European politics in the interwar period – reparations, disarmament, security and stability, and the rise of political extremism. The Weimar Republic was born amidst political and social revolution and was characterised throughout its lifetime, for many foreign observers, by an exaggerated political polarisation between left and right: a regime under threat simultaneously from Bolshevism on the one hand and conservative nationalism, monarchism and latterly fascism on the other. Reports of the various economic and political challenges that the Republic faced gave Germany a reputation among British observers for political and economic instability. But, perhaps somewhat bizarrely, all this attracted rather than repelled British travellers and tourists: visiting Germany was exciting and adventurous, attractive to thrill-seekers and earnest political commentators alike. This was particularly true for intellectuals on the political left. The November Revolution and the fate of German social democracy was of huge interest to left-wing commentators such as Morgan Philips Price and H. N. Brailsford; while conditions ‘under the Treaty’ and in the Occupied Rhineland were keenly observed by liberal and left-wing writers who regarded the Treaty of Versailles as a ‘Carthaginian peace’. Similarly, as a hub of European road, rail and air travel, Berlin in particular was an ideal stopping place for Britons travelling across Europe from east to west. This, and the increasing polarisation of German politics (or at least the perception of it), made it a favoured port of call for Britons bound to and from Moscow. Indeed, such was the extent of liberal and left-wing travel to Germany in order to see the struggle between labour and capital, left and right, communism and fascism, being played out before their very eyes, that one of the key motivations for British travellers might best be termed as ‘Left Tourism’. This deep and abiding interest in the turbulent politics of the Weimar period helps to explain why British travel to Germany peaked during the Republic’s years of crisis. Journalists and commentators flocked to the occupied Rhineland (and often took the opportunity to visit the German capital as well) in 1923–24 to observe for themselves the political, economic and social effects of the Ruhr Crisis; while the increased polarisation of German politics as the Republic entered what proved to be its terminal crisis after 1929, together with the cumulative effect of a 21

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decade of stories of exciting social and cultural developments in Germany, acted as a draw to British visitors at the tail end of the Weimar period. But there were also other aspects of the German situation that made the Republic attractive to foreign visitors. During the early 1920s, and in the period of hyperinflation in particular, the favourable exchange rate made travel to, and life in, Germany fantastically cheap for British and American tourists. Possession of the pound or the dollar gave foreign visitors unprecedented access to German culture and huge purchasing power. The literature in English dealing with the period of hyperinflation abounds with tales of hedonism and high living on the cheap: in 1921 the pound was worth 350 marks (before the war it had been worth 20), while by the end of 1922 ‘[c]hampagne could be bought for 2d a bottle and an overcoat for 3s’,38 and ‘[a] deck of “snow”, enough cocaine for quite too much excitement, cost the equal of ten cents.’39 Hugh Walpole spent ten days at the Bayreuth Festival for a total cost of only three shillings in 1924, while Ernest Hemingway reported that in September 1922 ninety Canadian cents was sufficient for ‘a day of heavy spending’.40 Yet it was more than just food and drink and entertainment that were available to affluent British and American visitors to Germany. If the accounts left by foreign visitors are to be believed, prostitution was rife in the major cities of the Republic. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Roddie recalled in his memoirs that almost from the moment he and the other members of the British Military Mission arrived in Berlin in January 1919 they were accosted by ‘ladies of the pavement’ keen ‘to resume friendly relations’ and willing to sell their bodies for a cake of soap.41 By the late twenties the Berlin authorities estimated that there were over 20,000 fulltime prostitutes plying their trade in the Reich Capital. But this was only the tip of the ice berg: the hardships caused by the war, the Allied blockade and the economic, social and moral chaos of the immediate postwar years forced many respectable women (not only women) to sell their bodies in order to make ends meet.42 It was a simple matter of market economics, of supply and demand. In the worst days of the hyperinflation, when German currency was virtually worthless, Germans became prepared to sell whatever they had in order to secure foreign currency. Even after the stabilization of the German economy in the mid1920s, prostitution was a way for young women and men to keep body and soul together or to earn a little extra on the side.43 Christopher Isherwood later wrote that he remembered ‘hearing of a boy who told a psychiatrist quite seriously that he was “homosexual – for economic reasons”’,44 while the American writer Djuna Barnes noted that the

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German capital was ‘[f]ull of buggers [sic] from America who bought boys cheap’.45 These formed the basis of the stories of the ‘wickedness’ and ‘decadence’ of Berlin (and, by association, Weimar Germany as a whole) that filtered through to British readers via word of mouth, newspaper reports, books by British visitors to the Republic and translations of contemporary German works, capturing and titillating imaginations. Even works such as Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler (1931), which denounced the iniquities and perversions of Germany’s sex industry, took a prurient and sensationalist delight in describing the details of this aspect of German life. This created an image of the Weimar Republic in the British mind that proved incredibly attractive at least to some, and motivated them to travel to Germany in search of sexual adventures. Berlin in particular became attractive to bohemians, a place where they could express themselves artistically and sexually, free form the constraints of bourgeois morality; but also attracted sex tourists in search of a cheap thrill or uncomplicated and anonymous sexual encounters in a foreign land. On one level there was nothing new in this: as Ian Littlewood has pointed out, sex and travel have always had a close association. Freud noted a link between rail travel and sexuality, while ‘[d]ifferent forms of transport – ships, coaches, trains, planes – have long been favourite sites for pornography’ as ‘both a context for sexual encounters and a facilitator of them’.46 Littlewood argues that there was always a private, erotic side to foreign travel that has largely been ignored by mainstream histories of tourism with their ‘usual preoccupations with social change and technological progress.’47 It certainly seems true that, at least since the emergence of the Grand Tour, the British have had a tendency to seek extramarital or otherwise transgressive sexual encounters in foreign climes, or at least to seize the opportunities for such encounters that travel provided. However, what was new in the interwar period was the choice of Germany (particularly Berlin) as a destination for sex tourism. Just as Paris had been a more popular destination for British travellers and tourists than any German city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was Paris or the ‘sultry climates’ of southern Europe and the Mediterranean to which British tourists in search of sexual encounters travelled before the First World War.48 This changed to some extent in the 1920s. While Paris, the Mediterranean, and even more exotic destinations such as Mexico and the Far East, continued to attract sunworshippers and sex tourists, increasing numbers of Britons and Americans availed themselves of the earthly delights offered by Weimar Berlin’s sex and entertainment industries. This was particularly true of 23

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British and American homosexuals. In previous ages Italy had been regarded as ‘the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy’,49 but in the Weimar period Germany came to be seen as a Mecca for homosexuals. Berlin was the home of a sizable gay and lesbian subculture, as well as the Institut für Sexual-Wissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) and the World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis, both of which, under the auspices of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the equal treatment of ‘sexual minorities’. The apparent availability of same-sex encounters – according to George Mosse the number of bars catering for an exclusively homosexual clientele (or to curious tourists and onlookers) doubled between 1914 and 1929 from 40 to 8050, while W. H. Auden put the number of gay brothels ‘under police control’ at 17051 – and the free debate on issues of sexuality in the Republic led many homosexual Britons to view Weimar Germany as ‘brave and honest […] the land of the free’.52 Nevertheless, this aspect of British interaction with Weimar Germany has perhaps been overstated in previous studies. While it is true that the perceived sexual freedom and ‘moral bankruptcy’ of Weimar Berlin feature heavily in many contemporary British accounts, there is also considerable evidence that these accounts were often exaggerated and that the ‘vice’ and ‘decadence’ of the German capital were not as ubiquitous as some commentators would have us believe. W. H. Auden, who spent what today would be called a gap year in Berlin in 1928–29, might have regarded the German capital as ‘a Buggers [sic] daydream’53 and been enticed by tales of its ‘wickedness’,54 but he was also enthralled by the artistic and political ferment in the city. His letters to his friend Christopher Isherwood were full of his sexual adventures among the working class youths of the Hallesches Tor district, but this should not give the impression that Auden devoted his time in Germany to nothing more than cruising Berlin’s gay bars. While in Berlin, Auden was not only taking the opportunity to express himself through ‘mildly rebellious selfindulgence’55 but also absorbing the cultural atmosphere of Weimar Germany. The freedom to experiment with his lifestyle and live as he pleased, together with the literature, cinema, music and theatre that he encountered, inspired Auden and allowed him to ‘grow creatively’.56 During his sojourn in Berlin he was working on the poems which would be collected in his first published anthology, and themes and influences from his German experiences are reflected in these early poems. Frederick Buell cites the time Auden spent in Berlin as the source of political imagery and motifs in his work,57 but he was also beginning to write in German, especially after he returned to Britain and took up his job as a 24

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schoolmaster in Scotland.58 Even Isherwood, who has perhaps done more than any other author to shape the image of the Weimar Republic in the Anglo-American imagination, and who ‘felt an instantaneous sexual attraction to Germany as the home of so many desirable boys’,59 was also drawn by the sense of personal and artistic freedom that he felt there. Furthermore, that not everyone was aware of Germany’s reputation for sexual excess can be seen in the fact that Francis Bacon’s father thought that a trip to Berlin in the company of a family friend might help (literally) to straighten his errant son out (in the event, the attempt failed miserably – the young Bacon soon ended up in bed with the man into whose care he had been entrusted)60; while, as we shall see, there were large numbers of British writers – many of them women – who did not regard German morals and Berlin nightlife to be particularly shocking, or who made no mention of these aspects of German life at all. Even so, there is no doubt that many Britons – and not all of them ‘intellectuals’ – travelled to Weimar Germany in search of sexual gratification of one sort or another.61 This, as we have seen, was part of a long-standing tradition of British travelling, but it was also regarded by many young intellectuals in the interwar period as a means of selfexpression and an explicit rejection of their upper-middle-class backgrounds and upbringings. Just as leisure travel has been seen as an escape from, and rejection of, the experience of work and day-to-day activity,62 travel and tourism have also been interpreted as a rejection and critique of the conventions of bourgeois society. In his “Theory of Tourism”, Hans Magnus Enzensberger argues that modern tourism has its roots in the development of both Romanticism and ‘industrial civilization’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but is at the same time based on a rejection of the very societal forces that gave birth to it. For Enzensberger, tourism is ‘a gigantic escape from the kind of reality with which our society surrounds us’, driven by a ‘blind and inarticulate rebellion’ against modern industrial society. Thus, tourism in itself is a physical form of social critique.63 Similarly, it has been argued more recently that the writings of British literary figures travelling between the wars can be seen as a rejection of the ‘imperial masculinities’ displayed by Victorian travellers, and the presentation of an ‘alternative Englishness’.64 Such constructions of travel as a form of revolt are interesting when considered in the light of British travel and tourism in the Weimar Republic. Ordinary tourists and holiday-makers might have been participating in Enzensberger’s ‘gigantic escape’ unconsciously, but for many young British intellectuals travel to Germany was a conscious and explicit act of revolt against what they regarded as the staid and old25

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fashioned morals and conventions of their homeland. Foreign travel itself was regarded as quintessentially modern, associated with the latest technological innovations and feats of engineering such as the aeroplane and the motor-car, while foreigners and ‘Abroad’ were still regarded with some suspicion by many in Britain. Lord Redesdale, father of Nancy, Diana and Unity Mitford, ‘was not untypical of his generation’ in regarding most foreigners as contemptible and indecent. “Abroad” was “unutterably bloody”, a place fit only for perverts and pinkos; if you didn’t fall foul of the bad drains you were liable to be shot by anarchists or buggered by dagos. It was a place where people spat in railway carriages, where the food was full of nasty garlic and grease, and where you were lucky if you just got away with flatulence and rancid indigestion.65 These were just the sort of attitudes that interwar travellers set out to reject and scandalise. Thus, travel was at the same time exciting and rebellious, tied up with the contemporary preoccupation with speed, and often seen by the young in terms of exploration and discovery. To travel abroad was not only to leave behind the insular attitudes of parents and polite society, but also to embark on a voyage of self-discovery through encounters with new countries and cultures. And Germany in particular had an added frisson for British visitors as the recently defeated enemy, so reviled by the ‘older generation’ in wartime propaganda. Germany’s growing reputation for sexual freedom and artistic innovation meant that it also proved attractive to a generation of intellectuals who had ‘misgivings about contemporary French culture’ and who wanted to escape from the moral ‘stuffiness of contemporary England’.66 Edward Sackville-West, when ruminating on his youthful trips to Germany and Austria, wrote that ‘[p]robably, for most of us […] the decision to go abroad is among our first acts of independence’,67 and that travel to Central Europe ‘freed me, for a time, from the iron clutch of my own country’.68 Berlin offered Sackville-West the opportunity to throw off the shackles of his respectable British background and indulge in his taste for cross-dressing and casual sexual encounters with working class men. W. H. Auden recalled that he elected to go to Berlin rather than Paris in 1927 because ‘I felt out of sympathy with French culture, partly out of temperament and partly in revolt against the generation of intellectuals preceding mine, which was strongly Francophile’,69 but he also had other reasons. At Oxford he had indulged in homosexual affairs ‘quite 26

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unrestrained by conventional morality’,70 and in a way his decision to go to Berlin was a continuation of this revolt against acceptable upper-middleclass codes of behaviour. By visiting the capital of the nation against which his father and elder brother had been fighting less than a decade before, and by consorting with working class youths in rough and seedy bars, he was thumbing his nose at the mores of the bourgeoisie in general and his parents in particular. Indeed, he was explicit in his rejection of not only the morals of his elders, but also their intellectual tastes. On arriving in Berlin Auden lived with the Muthesius family in the Potsdamer Chaussee, whom he liked to present dull and conventional, the epitome of bourgeois respectability. But they were in reality anything but a typical upper-middle-class family. Anna Muthesius, the matriarch of the family, was a former professional soprano who designed her own clothes and extolled feminist principles. The widow of Anglophile architect Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), founder of the Deutscher Werkbund (a kind of German version of William Morris’s arts and crafts movement), she had close links with Berlin’s social and cultural elite, and she and her family were apparently well aware of Auden’s sexual preferences and tolerant of them.71 However, to admit this would not have suited the image that Auden wished to present of himself as a bohemian and rebel against his own very conventional middle-class upbringing. He told the wife of his Oxford friend William McElwee that ‘[t]he German proletariat are fine, but I dont [sic] like the others much, so I spend most of my time with Juvenile Delinquents’.72 Nor was Auden alone in associating Germany with rebellion against his class and country. Christopher Isherwood admitted that ‘[o]ne of my chief motives for wanting to visit Berlin was that an elderly relative had warned me against it, saying that it was the vilest place since Sodom’.73 So determined was he to escape the cloying atmosphere of his homeland and his background, that he spent much of the interwar period travelling, and eventually turned his back on Britain for good, settling in California in 1939. Moreover, Isherwood, by his own account, could not ‘relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation’,74 and thus Berlin offered him liberation from his hang-ups and the freedom to explore his sexuality. And of course his residence and behaviour in Berlin had the added advantage of being an explicit rejection of his mother, with whom he had a combative and difficult relationship, and all that she stood for – indeed, he took a malicious delight in describing the details of his lifestyle to her, actively courting her disapproval and deliberately trying to scandalise and upset her.

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But it was not only young homosexual writers and artists who were attracted to Weimar Germany by the aura of rebellious self-expression that clung to the Republic and its capital. As we shall see in a later chapter, there were also a number of British women for whom the German capital held an exotic fascination. Moreover, there were several British intellectuals born in the last decades of the nineteenth century who saw the rebellious and frenetic German capital as a spiritual home. Attracted by a country that seemed to embody his dictum from The Book of the Law that ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’,75 Aleister Crowley, poet, ‘magus’, artist, bisexual drug addict and founder of the ‘new religion’ of Thelema, made several visits to Germany during the Weimar period and lived in Berlin from April 1930 to June 1932. There, Crowley could indulge his addiction to heroin and cocaine and pursue his affairs with both male and female partners, interspersing a life of hard drinking and drug abuse with various magical ‘workings’ and writing. Similarly, Gerald Hamilton, who shared a flat with Crowley and later became the model for Isherwood’s ‘Mr Norris’, found himself at home among the bohemian expatriate community in Berlin, throwing lavish parties and supplementing his income by spying on Crowley for the British and German authorities.76 Thus, although a wish to rebel against conventional bourgeois propriety was an important factor in motivating many British intellectuals to visit the Weimar Republic, it was not a consideration that was restricted to the young. Aleister Crowley (born 1879), as much as W. H. Auden (born 1903), was self-consciously rejecting the moral and social landscape in which he was raised, and Berlin seemed the ideal place in which to do so. All this was underpinned by a sense of the exciting and attractive modernity of Weimar Germany. It was not merely the very newness of the Republican system, nor the political ferment that surrounded it, nor the perception of more liberal attitudes towards sex, that engendered this sense of modernity, but also the sense of cultural and artistic experimentation that was attached to Germany. Even before the First World War, economic and technological developments within Germany – particularly in the chemical and electrical industries – had been the envy of many in Britain. But now, in the Weimar period, the Reich once again became a cultural and artistic centre on a scale not seen since the Romantic period. Exciting new developments in the visual arts, in literature, theatre, music and film, as much as modern architectural styles and new ideas in science, technology and medicine, led British observers to regard Weimar Germany as a place of new ideas and new ways of living, in tune with the modern world and singularly open to experimentation in art, in science and in lifestyle. New visual styles 28

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intrigued artists like Wyndham Lewis and Vanessa Bell (although both ultimately preferred Germany’s old masters to her modern artists), while German authors such as Erich Maria Remarque and Stefan Zweig attracted a wide readership in Britain. Cicely Hamilton and Lilian Mowrer, both connected with the theatre themselves, wrote admiringly of developments in German drama; while Alfred Hitchcock and the film critic and founder of the London Film Society Ivor Montagu were attracted by the technological and artistic virtuosity of Weimar cinema. Developments in physics, chemistry and optics also attracted the interest of British scientists working in those fields, while the modern sciences of psychology and sexology also attracted their share of British adherents. John Buchan and Edward Sackville-West both consulted the same psychiatrist, a Dr Marten of Freiburg, in the 1920s (albeit for very different reasons – Buchan wanted to discover whether or not his digestive problems were psychological rather than physical in origin, while Sackville-West was sent to Dr Marten in the hope that he might be cured of his homosexuality).77 The aesthete and socialite Brian Howard also underwent psychoanalysis in Frankfurt and Berlin,78 while John Layard, the anthropologist and sometime disciple of disgraced American psychologist Homer Lane, sought psychiatric help in Berlin between 1926 and 1930.79 Similarly, the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre sought treatment at Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexual-Wissenschaft and there became involved in the politics of the Institute and the World League for Sexual Reform.80 British intellectuals therefore travelled to Weimar Germany for a variety of reasons, many of which were not shared by most ordinary holidaymakers. But in reality how different were they from the large numbers of other British visitors to the Reich in this period? Much depends on how we define the term ‘tourist’. The word first entered the English language at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was often used in a derogatory fashion, but apparently was not in widespread usage until the middle of the twentieth.81 The standard dictionary definition of a tourist as ‘a person who is travelling or visiting a place for pleasure’ seems straightforward enough, but is actually quite limited in comparison to the definitions provided by scholars working in this area. In one of the earliest serious academic accounts of ‘the tourist movement’, F. W. Ogilvie defined tourists as ‘in the first instance, people who move their quarters temporarily, meaning to return’. By this definition, people become tourists ‘by the bare fact of leaving home for business, religion, health or any other reason, and of returning home again within a limited period of time’. Ogilvie went on to suggest that the accepted dividing line between the 29

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migrant and the tourist was ‘the period of a year. By the usage of the United Kingdom and many other countries, migrants are commonly defined as persons who change their residence for a year or more: tourists, therefore […] may be defined as persons who stay away from home for any period not exceeding one year’. 82 Forty years later A. J. Burkart and S. Medlik offered a very similar definition, writing that [t]ourism denotes the incidence of a mobile population of travellers who are strangers to the places they visit and where they represent a distinct element from the resident or working population. All tourism includes some travel, but not all travel is tourism. The temporary short-term character of tourism distinguishes it from migration, which represents a long-term population movement with a view to taking up permanent residence.83 The breadth and inclusiveness of these definitions is interesting in this context, as it means that tourism can be said to encompass most of the activities undertaken by the individuals discussed in this study. By Burkart and Medlik’s definition, most intellectual visitors to Weimar Germany were tourists, even those for whom the trip was in some sense connected with their work and their art. The only exceptions would be those individuals like Frederick Voigt, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent, lived and worked in Berlin between 1920 and 1933, who would be classed as migrants. Nevertheless, applying this definition in the present context yields some interesting results. Christopher Isherwood would be classed as a migrant, despite the fact that his stated reason for leaving his homeland – the pursuit of sexual gratification – might best be defined as ‘pleasure’, because for much of the period between 1929 and 1933 he was resident in Berlin; while Wyndham Lewis would be classed as a tourist during his 1921 visit to Berlin the purpose of which was to explore the possibility of an exhibition of his paintings at the Sturm Galerie in the Potsdamerstrasse because of its short duration. However, another defining factor in categorising a visitor to a foreign land as a tourist or not would seem to be, at least according to Burkart and Sedlik, not so much length of stay, or whether or not the purpose of the visit was business or pleasure, but rather where income is derived from. Burkart and Sedlik, following Ogilvie’s lead, assert that ‘[i]n tourism money earned in one’s normal domicile is spent in the places visited and on the way to these places.’84 By this criterion, Isherwood is made a migrant by the length of his stay, but the fact that he was reliant on financial support from his mother and his Uncle Henry makes him a tourist. Similarly, Voigt might be considered a migrant by virtue of the 30

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length of his residence in Germany, but the money that he spent on travel, accommodation, and other necessities and luxuries was provided by the British newspaper that employed him. It can therefore be concluded that labels such as ‘traveller’, ‘tourist’ and ‘migrant’ are not particularly helpful in the context of this study. A rigorous application of the definitions of tourism advanced by Professor Ogilvie, and, more recently, by Burkart and Sedlik, would class the vast majority of the individuals discussed here as tourists, no matter how offended they would have been by the idea. Yet there are clear distinctions to be drawn between the itineraries, activities and attitudes expressed by intellectual travellers and those of diplomats, occupiers and holidaymakers. As has been noted, the patterns of travel of British intellectual visitors often differed considerably from those of ordinary holiday-makers – for example, large numbers of British writers and commentators actively elected to visit the Rhineland during and immediately after the Ruhr Crisis because of the potentially dangerous events that were occurring in that particular place at that particular time. In contrast, tour operators such as Thomas Cook offered no holidays to Germany at all in the years 1923–24, because, naturally enough, ordinary holiday-makers were unlikely to pay to spend what little leisure time they possessed in a country or region in the grip of political and financial crisis. Similarly, intellectual visitors tended to travel to Berlin – the home of national politics and of new ideas and avant-garde attitudes – from the very beginning of the Weimar period, while it was only towards the end of the lifespan of the Republic that the Reich capital began to attract large numbers of British tourists. Furthermore, it is questionable how many ordinary middle-class holidaymakers, tourists in the sense of the dictionary definition of people travelling for relaxation and pleasure, paid much attention to the vagaries of German politics, or to developments in the arts and science in contrast to many intellectual visitors who were attracted to Weimar Germany specifically by the opportunity to observe political developments of international importance and/or to drink in the vibrant cultural life of the Republic. The question of the nature and extent of British travel and tourism in Weimar Germany is complicated. Nevertheless, we are able to draw certain conclusions about this aspect of British interaction with the Republic from an examination of the sources available. Britain and Germany had longstanding political, cultural and economic links, and the German states had been attracting visitors from the British Isles from at least the eighteenth century. The First World War had strained, but not 31

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broken, the links between the two countries, and British travel to Germany rapidly resumed in the 1920s. There was much continuity between pre-war and postwar travel and tourism, with British tourists returning to cities and regions favoured by Victorian and Edwardian visitors such as Dresden, Munich, Baden-Baden, the Rhineland and the Black Forest, but there was also a degree of change. The growth of the importance of Berlin to British visitors was a new phenomenon that had much to do with wider perceptions of the modernity of the Weimar Republic, while the presence of large numbers of British military personnel serving with the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland and the Allied Control Commission also added a different dynamic to British interaction with the Reich. One of the main differences between pre-war and postwar British interaction with Germany was perhaps the number of intellectual visitors that were drawn to the new Republic. Germany had always attracted literary travellers such as Boswell, Coleridge, Thackeray and Jerome, and German universities had supplemented the education of a number of British academics before the war, but in the 1920s and 1930s the Reich was visited by unprecedented numbers of writers and commentators. There were a variety of reasons for this: some intellectual visitors were tourists in the most straightforward sense (Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant visited Berlin in January 1929 for no other reason than to visit friends and ‘see the sights’); others, like D. H. Lawrence, went for familial reasons (Lawrence’s wife Frieda was German and the couple stayed with her mother on several occasions in the 1920s). Still others, like Alfred Hitchcock and Elizabeth Wiskemann, went in search of new career opportunities, while others sought out medical help. Some travelled to Germany in a professional capacity, as correspondents for newspapers or in order to gather material for books and articles, while many simply wanted to see for themselves developments in German politics, culture and society. But there were also other features of the Weimar Republic that proved attractive to self-consciously bohemian and rebellious British intellectuals: the fact that for much of the period the precarious economic state of the Republic made life in Germany incredibly cheap for those in possession of foreign currency was a draw to many impoverished bohemians who wanted to have a good time on the cheap; while Berlin quickly gained a reputation for frenetic nightlife, risqué cabarets and an openness to deviant sexuality that made it attractive to large numbers of British homosexuals and sex tourists. These intellectual visitors to Germany were often keen to distance and differentiate themselves from the mass of tourists, but to what extent were 32

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the differences between ‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’ valid? We have noted that in some important respects – most notably in their motivations, patterns of travel, itineraries and activities – ‘intellectual’ visitors differed from the majority of ordinary British holiday-makers, but we have also seen that, according to the definitions of tourism provided by academics such as Ogilvie, Burkart and Medlik, many, if not all, of the writers, artists, academics and commentators who visited Germany in the Weimar period can be classed as tourists. The distinctions between ‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’ were in any case always in some sense exaggerated (if not completely artificial) and self-imposed. The extent to which those ‘travellers’ who visited the Rhineland to see for themselves postwar political, economic and social conditions in Germany, or who sought sexual freedom and fulfilment in the gay bars of Berlin, were different from those ‘tourists’ who wanted to see for themselves the natural beauty and gothic architecture of Germany, or who sought pleasure and relaxation on the beaches of the Baltic coast or the resorts and spas of the Black Forest, is highly debatable. It is perhaps better in the present case to dispense with such labels altogether and seek a new set of criteria with which to differentiate between visitors to the Weimar Republic. All such distinctions are necessarily artificial, but for the present study it is perhaps best to view British interaction with Germany in terms of diplomats, occupiers, holiday-makers and intellectuals rather than in terms of ‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’. We can therefore conclude that British travel and tourism in Weimar Germany was extensive, complex and diverse. There was both continuity and change between pre-war and postwar British travelling to Germany, as well as identifiable differences between the itineraries, activities and attitudes of the occupying forces, the diplomatic community, holidaymakers and intellectual travellers. But there were also significant differences between the activities and attitudes of those travellers who might be said to have been within the ranks of intellectual visitors to the Weimar Republic.

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2 ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’: British Attitudes towards Germany in War and Peace The First World War was a transformative experience for the nations of Europe, no less than for the individuals who fought in it, and the Paris Peace Conference of January 1919 to August 1920 re-ordered Europe more radically than any event since the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15. New states were given life and old empires humbled: the Habsburg Empire, which had dominated Central Europe for almost a thousand years, was dismembered; the Ottoman Empire, which had governed most of the Middle East since the fifteenth century, was similarly broken up; while Germany, the economic and military giant of Continental Europe before 1914, was forced to submit to the will of the victorious Allies. Even more radically, the peace-makers sought to formulate an enduring peace ‘by renouncing war, respecting international agreements and establishing “open, just and honourable relations between nations”’.1 But the war and the subsequent peace settlement also had important long-term social, economic and psychological effects that were to reverberate throughout the interwar period and beyond: for the nations of Europe and the soldiers who had participated in the conflict, life was quite simply never the same again. That this was the case was particularly evident in Anglo-German relations. The First World War was accompanied by a war of words and

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images which rumbled on long after hostilities had formally ended and which both reflected and shaped contemporary attitudes towards the enemy for years afterwards. Similarly, the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles loom large in the writings of British intellectuals in the interwar period, with attitudes towards Germany often entwined with attitudes towards the peace settlement as a whole. An examination of British perceptions of Germany in war and peace, and attitudes towards the peace itself, are therefore important to an understanding of how British intellectuals viewed Germany during the Weimar period. As we have seen, Britain had close ties with the German states stretching back to the sixteenth century and beyond. It is perhaps because of these close links that the opprobrium heaped upon one another after war broke out in 1914 was so bitter. Despite years of mounting tension between the two nations occasioned by Germany’s dramatic industrial expansion and the naval arms race which was seen to threaten Britain’s economic, maritime and imperial hegemony,2 few people seriously envisioned a war between Britain and Germany before 1914.3 Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, was incredulous that Britain should be willing to go to war over ‘a scrap of paper’,4 while Kaiser Wilhelm II was incensed by Britain’s ‘betrayal’.5 Yet once war had been declared, both Britain and Germany fixed upon one another as the enemy. That Britain should focus on the Germans as her primary opponents is less surprising than that England should be singled out as the ‘sinister power, which – for reasons of envy and greed – loomed as the driving force behind the hostile coalition against Germany’,6 given the traditional hostility between Germany, France and Russia. Nevertheless, Britain was on the receiving end of some of Germany’s most vituperative propaganda. In October 1917, 93 German academics and intellectuals publicly denounced Britain for supporting ‘“half-Asiatic” Russia’ and turning the European conflict into a world war,7 while Ernst Lissauer’s Hassgesang gegen England, better known as the Hymn of Hate, called down divine retribution on perfidious Albion by crying Gott strafe England (‘may God punish England’). Nor were the British any less hyperbolic in denouncing their German ‘cousins’. The conflict was presented as a war for civilization and against barbarism, liberal democracy versus authoritarian ‘Prussianism’. Soon after the outbreak of war, G. K. Chesterton denounced the Germans as ‘the enemy of civilization by design’,8 possessed of ‘an actual itch for tyranny and interference’.9 Arnold Bennett regarded the destruction of German cities as just retaliation for the damage done in Belgium and northern France, while, shockingly, the Bishop of London preached genocide from the pulpit.10 As the war progressed, anti-German 35

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feeling in Britain became so inflated as to be faintly ridiculous to the modern reader: dachshunds were stoned in the streets, there was a ban on the performance of German music, and ‘German measles’ was renamed ‘Belgian flush’. More seriously, German butchers, brokers and waiters were all expelled from their jobs and there were anti-German riots in several English towns and cities. Nor were the great and the good exempt from this anti-German hysteria: R. B. S. Haldane lost his Cabinet post and was hounded from public life for his supposed German sympathies (he was a student of German philosophy, a ‘good friend’ to Wilhelm II and, in a rather backhanded compliment to the Supreme War Lord, called his dog ‘Kaiser’11). Similarly, Prince Louis Battenberg lost his job as First Lord of the Admiralty, and even the King famously found it prudent to change his name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Things became even worse as the war progressed. After the sinking of the Lusitania and the slaughter on the Somme, ‘the English’, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, ‘began to hate’.12 In these circumstances anti-German feeling in Britain became even more bitter, and there was widespread acceptance of tales of the most appalling violence committed against civilians. Although, as John Horne and Alan Kramer have pointed out, the Germans did commit atrocities in occupied Belgium, it was the more fantastic tales of German outrages that raised the greatest public fury: stories of Germans throwing babies into the air and spearing them on their bayonets, of a Canadian soldier captured and crucified in the Ypres salient in 1915 or of ‘corpse factories’ where ‘the Germans were rendering the bodies of their dead soldiers for use in various kinds of war production’.13 Yet even in this climate of rabid anti-German sentiment there were dissenters. When the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell spoke out fiercely against the war and the unrestrained hatred of the Germans he lost his Cambridge Fellowship and was twice imprisoned for his pains.14 Nor was he alone in finding the anti-German mood unpalatable: such literary luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy, as well as academics like J. J. Thomson and G. M. Trevelyan, deprecated German militarism while also deploring general anti-German feeling, which sought to demonise a whole nation. Such attitudes reflected a civilian response to the war and the enemy not necessarily shared by those who had donned uniform and were active on the front line. There has been some debate over the degree to which British soldiers had strong feelings about their enemies,15 but there is much evidence to suggest that attitudes towards Germany and the Germans were less violent in the trenches than they were on the home 36

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front. As Richard Holmes points out, ‘Two general truths define the British soldier’s relationship with his enemy on the Western Front: the first is that he generally had a high regard for the Germans, and the second that the fighting man rarely felt a high degree of personal hostility towards them’.16 A kind of professional comradeship developed between the opposing armies, to the extent that after the war the British Legion was ‘prominent in its support for Germany […] based on the camaraderie among those who had fought, even on opposing sides, during the First World War’.17 Robert Graves observed that ‘Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience’18, who also dismissed stories of German atrocities against civilians as ridiculous and more often than not invented by French and Belgian civilians in order to garner sympathy.19 Similarly, those on active service seem to have been better able, or more willing, to differentiate between the German government and its policies, and the individual German soldier. According to Graves, they tended to be opposed to governments everywhere, including their own, rejecting completely the ‘old men’ who had started the war and seemed to be doing nothing to bring it to an end, while to some extent accepting the Germans in the trenches opposite as being in much the same situation as themselves: unwilling tools of the war mongers. 20 For many of those who lived through it the First World War was the defining experience of their lives. As well psychological and physical traumas many veterans of the conflict had their political and social views profoundly altered by the experience of war. There was ‘a sense that the war had in some ways purged Europe’21 and that the continent could now be made anew, that old rivalries and inequalities could be put aside and ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’22 forged from the bitter experience of 1914–18. This was linked to a dogged determination to prevent a repetition of the Great War, a feeling that inspired many to join the various groups that sought to promote better understanding between Britain and Germany during the interwar period. One British intellectual for whom this was the case, and whose postwar attitude towards Germany was in many ways profoundly shaped by the experience of the First World War, was Wyndham Lewis. Prior to the war Lewis travelled widely in Continental Europe but took little or no interest in politics and international relations. The distinctly political stamp of his postwar writings was a consequence of a change in attitude brought about by his experiences during the war. For Lewis the war was ‘[m]ore than anything […] a political education’23, and he wrote that ‘[o]n the battlefields of France and Flanders I became curious […] 37

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about how and why these bloodbaths occurred – the political mechanics of war’.24 Quite simply, the war had cut him off from the life he had lived before; it ‘put up a partition in one’s mind: it blocked off the past literally as if a huge wall had been set up there’.25 Yet this profound transformation and politicisation was not brought about through the archetypal experience of the British soldier on the Western Front. Unlike Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and scores of others, Lewis did not serve in the trenches as an infantryman. Ill health and disinclination delayed Lewis’s enlistment in the army until 1916, and even then he was not motivated by an excess of patriotism or passionate hatred of the enemy. In his 1937 autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis wrote that: [m]y attitude to the war was unsatisfactory. That has to be faced. I experienced none of the conscience-prickings and soul-searchings, none of the subtle anguish, of so many gentlemen whose books poured out simultaneously upon the market about ten years ago. I half thought that indeed it might be a war to make the world safe for Democracy, which I thought, sometimes, I liked. This must seem extremely absurd. I thought the German Empire stood for an oppressive efficiency, over against the ‘free’ inefficient nations. This was tempered with an inclination to turn my back upon the soft things in life. But I fear that I was callous, and flung myself into trigonometry and ballistics as light-heartedly as Leonardo did, when he designed siege-sledges for the Florentine General Staff.26 Typically, Lewis was in this passage striking a pose: emphasising his rebelliousness in distancing himself from the ‘conscience-prickings’, ‘soulsearchings’ and ‘subtle anguish’ of the likes of Robert Graves, Sassoon, Henry Williamson and Frederic Manning, who had published their war memoirs in the boom of war books published between 1928 and 1930. In seeking to distance himself from these writers Lewis was being entirely characteristic, acting in his post-war role of ‘the Enemy’, a one-man crusade against what he regarded as a left-wing clique that dominated cultural life in England in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet it is perhaps only fitting that Lewis should have distanced himself from such writers; his experience of war was not the same as theirs. While the likes of Graves and Sassoon were infantrymen on the front line, enduring bombardment and hand-to-hand combat in the cramped conditions of the trenches, Lewis enlisted as an artilleryman, later being commissioned as an artillery officer and, in the final stages of the war, as an official war artist. Fittingly 38

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for one who had done much to introduce Futurism to Britain, Lewis’s experience of the First World War was one of warfare at its most mechanised: of artillery duels between massed batteries of heavy guns, and of maintenance and logistics of the artillery. Although he saw destruction and death (he watched as his friend and fellow artillery officer T. E. Hulme’s battery was shelled in 1917 and Hulme killed), he did so from behind the lines, killing in a more distanced and impersonal way than the infantry in the trenches. Yet still war affected him deeply. As he wrote later, ‘I started the war a different man to what I ended it’.27 The effect of the war on Lewis’s life and work cannot be understated. Paul Edwards is of the opinion that [t]he First World War was the decisive event that shaped the remainder of Wyndham Lewis’s life and art. […] It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the whole of Lewis’s work after 1918 was an attempt to provide a cultural response to the war that would leave it understood and impossible of repetition.28 The deaths of friends like Hulme and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the monotony and soullessness of modern warfare and the influenza epidemic that killed his mother convinced Lewis of the futility and meaninglessness of the war. He came to see the war as ‘the breakdown of our civilized manners’,29 a tragedy that had been engineered by the twin forces of old and ignorant politicians and big business. Despite his assertion that ‘it was not war per se that I objected to, I was not forgetful of the fact that most wars had been stupid, and had only benefited a handful of people’30, as the interwar period progressed Lewis became almost obsessed with the necessity of preventing another war, and this influenced his opinion of Germany and led him into the dangerous waters of praise for Adolf Hitler and the nascent Nazi regime. Lewis believed that the Treaty of Versailles was a pernicious document, not because he felt any particular affinity for Germany and the Germans, but because he became convinced that it would be the cause of a second Great War, more destructive and catastrophic than the first. In books such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Hitler (1931), Left Wings Over Europe (1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (1937) Lewis outlined a developing political philosophy that led him to extol the virtues of Hitler and the Nazis as the only force that could save Germany and Europe from another apocalyptic war.31 Lewis’s attitude towards Nazism will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, but it was very much linked his determination to do all he could to popularise some kind of understanding 39

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between Britain and Germany and therefore prevent another war. This, Lewis’s overriding obsession in the 1920s and 1930s (he was to declare later that all his post-war books ‘were to do with war, and all were antiwar’32), coloured his writing on the Weimar Republic and led him to advocate Hitler as a valid alternative to what he regarded as the weak and decadent German democracy that could not stand up for itself on the world stage. Lewis was far from being pro-German (‘My own interest in Germany has always been slight. I have preferred the Latin mind to the German mind. I am no pro-German’33), but he, like many others, became convinced in the 1920s that Germany was the key to maintaining peace and stability in Europe. If the Treaty of Versailles could be revised, if Germany’s grievances addressed, if some kind of Anglo-German agreement could be reached, Lewis believed, another war would be made much less likely, if not impossible. The First World War was, therefore, deeply influential in shaping the postwar attitudes of those who fought in it, but it also had lasting consequences for those who were not old enough to have seen action on the Western Front. The autobiographical writings of those born after 1900 show that the First World War dominated the lives of those who were children […] as much as it did the lives of their elders. Perhaps more so, for the young had no real experience of the Edwardian world before the war; for them awareness of the world and awareness of the war came at the same time.34 As Valentine Cunningham has demonstrated, the war had a lasting psychological effect on the younger generation – though they were too young to have seen active service – which manifested itself in the prevalence of violence and the language of warfare in the writing of the 1930s,35 as well is in other more personal ways. The loss of fathers and elder brothers, either temporarily on active service or permanently through being killed in action, had a deep and lasting effect on many of ‘the Auden generation.’ Cunningham points out that ‘Auden explicitly blamed his homosexuality on the absence of his father during the war years’,36 and is prepared to ascribe the sexuality of a number of intellectuals (Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster among them) to the early and enforced absence of their fathers. He goes on to suggest that the preference for working class and/or German lovers among British homosexuals might also have something to do with the lasting influence of the First World War: 40

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The whole thing [homosexuality] was as enticingly risky in fact as having a German boyfriend was outrageous to decent British opinion. And the ’30s homosexuals […] went in keenly for Germanic lovers, the boyfriend defiantly sought amongst the recent wartime foe. It was all a way of being, so to say, in the First World War by proxy, a participation in a murky underground substitute for the uniformed world of the military father and elder brother, a wasteland place that was legally and physically dangerous, where one’s pacifist conscience could be appeased in a parody of the Christmas Day 1914 fraternization with the enemy, and one’s guilt over missing the war could be assuaged in submission to the father and elder-brother substitute as chastiser.37 George Orwell wrote that as time went on he and those like him ‘became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed’ and that he ‘felt […] a little less than a man’ as a consequence.38 Similarly, Isherwood was deeply affected by feelings of guilt at having missed the chance to fight. In his early semi-autobiographical novel The Memorial (1932), these feelings of guilt at having survived the war while other, better men have perished are ascribed to the character of the neurotic, homosexual war hero Edward Blake, while Isherwood’s resentment of his mother and the older generation is evident throughout the book. Similarly, in his youthful autobiography Lions and Shadows (1938) we learn that as an undergraduate Isherwood became obsessed with the notion of ‘The Test’, a heroic and adventurous trial ‘of your fundamental “Manhood”’39 to replace that which he had missed by being too young to fight in the First World War. It is possible in this context to see his later departure for Germany as part of this ‘test’ as well as an act of rebellion against his mother’s middle-class values. Such sentiments were by no means restricted to British youth, as Richard Bessel has demonstrated,40 and in some sense they help to explain the often combative relationship between the ‘younger generation’ and the ‘old men’ who dominated public and cultural life in Britain between the wars. The lasting influence of the Great War upon both British intellectuals and the public at large can also be judged by the numbers of books dealing with the war which were published in the interwar period. Novels and stories about the war had rolled off the presses in increasing numbers even while the fighting continued41 and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict they were joined by a plethora of war books of all kinds: official histories, war memoirs, biographies of generals and commanders, analyses of individual battles and campaigns, as well as fictional works on a war 41

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theme. From the end of the war until 1921–22 there was a cathartic outpouring of war literature (not only in Britain but in the other combatant nations as well), in which writers and readers alike pored over every aspect of the wartime experience. In addition to books dealing with the British experience of war, there was also a ready readership for translations of the war literature of other countries not least, perhaps surprisingly, works by German authors. In her analysis of the reception of German literature in Britain between the wars, Ariela Halkin points out that of all the foreign war books published in Britain after the First World War, ‘it was undoubtedly the German books that were the centre of English critical discourse’.42 There was a particular fascination in the early 1920s with German non-fiction on a war theme, particularly the memoirs of the leading actors on the German political and military stage such as the Kaiser, Crown Prince, and General Ludendorff. The popularity of such works gives an indication of how wartime attitudes towards Germany informed those of peacetime: as Halkin puts it, ‘they seem to have provided the only answer to what can only be described as the Englishman’s voracious need to know the enemy who had wreaked so much havoc and who was still perceived as constituting a threat’.43 But these works also informed contemporary British debates and controversies about the war and, more importantly, the peace. Although the accuracy of these works was often viewed with some suspicion by reviewers, the view of the Treaty of Versailles presented in them informed debate on these issues in Britain and helped to keep them alive in the public consciousness. After the initial flood of war fiction, poetry, memoirs and histories in the first years of the peace, the appetite for war literature in Britain diminished somewhat in the mid-1920s. However, a second upsurge in the popularity of war books occurred in the last years of the decade, with the publication of books such as Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928) and its sequel Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1930) and Eric Partridge’s Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (1930). The 1920s were therefore book-ended by two outpourings of war literature (it is surely no accident that Frederick Voigt’s war memoir, Combed Out, was first published in 1920 and rereleased in 1929). It was as though the first round of war books had been a cathartic exorcism of feelings about and impressions of the war, a subject which was so painful that it could only be returned to, analysed and discussed at the end of the decade. Yet this second round of writing on a war theme was also, at least in part, a response to German war novels 42

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which had been appearing in English throughout the 1920s, and in particular Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1928). Like German war memoirs, German war fiction had been popular in Britain throughout the decade after the war and was influential in helping to shape postwar attitudes towards Germany. Two particularly popular novels, Fritz von Unruh’s The Way of Sacrifice and Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa (both 1928) provided their audience with sympathetic characters and an un-stereotypical view of the German soldier which ‘enabled English readers to focus their animosity on the bigwigs and the old orders while allowing them to indulge in somewhat patronizing sympathy for the simple German soldier victimized by his society’.44 But All Quiet on the Western Front did more than that: it was hugely influential among British intellectuals because in a sense it liberated British veterans and allowed them to write about the war as it actually had been for them in all its horrific and sordid glory. Remarque’s novel – which owed much to both Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit in its focus on subjective emotional responses to the horrors of war described in a objective manner – and others like it inspired British authors into similarly frank explorations of their wartime experiences. So British writing on the war at the end of the 1920s was influenced, at least in part, by developments in the arts within Weimar Germany.45 The Great War thus had a long lasting effect on both those who served in it and those who did not. Among the other effects on British society, the war deeply affected attitudes towards Germany and the Germans, but it was no less monumental in this respect than the peace that followed it. The Great War was rivalled in its influence on attitudes by what Wyndham Lewis called the ‘great peace’,46 the peace formalised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which had so much opprobrium heaped upon it not only in Germany but also by many in Britain as well. The peace proved controversial from the start. Passions had run high during the war, whipped up by the ‘patriotic’ and right-wing press, and these passions had a significant effect on attitudes towards Germany when it came to peace making. There was some controversy over when and under what circumstances hostilities should be halted and what kind of peace should follow. For the vast majority of the population, the answers to these questions were simple: nothing short of total and unconditional surrender from the Germans was to be followed by a punitive peace treaty that addressed such issues as Germany’s responsibility for the war and British commercial concerns arising from the conflict. Indeed, ‘in the last months of the war […] three demands were pressed on the Government by economic and nationalist pressure groups: a punitive indemnity, the 43

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protection of British industry and the retention of the German colonies’47. However, for some on the left these issues were by no means as clear cut. Many Liberals, who had had the war sold to them as a crusade against German militarism and authoritarianism and accepted it as such, were uneasy about the rabid vengefulness of much of the rhetoric from the right, especially after the Revolution of November 1918. Unable to ascertain exactly what was happening in Germany, they saw the installation of first a Liberal Government under Prince Max of Baden, and then the more left-wing Council of People’s Representatives, as a victory for the Allied forces. To many left-leaning intellectuals in Britain, as well as some public figures, this was what they had been fighting for all along: ‘Prussianism’ had been vanquished and replaced by more representative government. If this was the case, why should hostilities not cease immediately given that the stated British war aim had been achieved? In addition, any peace treaty should be aimed at achieving reconciliation and fraternal goodwill between the nations: after all, it was not fair to make the German people and their new democratic government pay for the sins of the Kaiser and his minions. A number of pamphlets, articles and books published during the last years of the war and first year of the peace espoused such a programme, not least among them Problems of the Peace (1917) by the historian, and sometime advisor to Lloyd George, W. H. Dawson. But those in power were not convinced of the sincerity of the German change of government, and after the Revolutionary upheavals of November 1918 the spectre of Bolshevism made the British establishment even more suspicious. In addition to this, a peace without indemnities and annexations was not considered a good policy for a coalition government under pressure to protect British industry and commercial interests while seeking re-election in December 1918. On the whole Lloyd George felt that a promise to squeeze the Germans ‘until the pips squeak’ was more likely to appeal to the war-weary and vengeful popular mood than a promise to treat the enemy with consideration and magnanimity.48 It was in this atmosphere of popular hatred and vengeance that the British peacemakers departed for Paris to help thrash out the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Lloyd George and the British delegation’s position was to soften somewhat in comparison to those of their allies (especially the French), they remained committed to maintaining their hold on occupied German and Ottoman colonies in Africa and the Middle East, some protection for British commercial interests and a share for Britain of any reparations to be paid by the Germans. Yet those in power recognised the necessity of a speedy resumption of good relations with Germany in order to provide a European trading partner and market for 44

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British goods, and to counterbalance French power and influence on the Continent. Moreover, a strong, stable and prosperous Germany would act as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism from the east. Public opinion was slower to undergo significant change. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge pointed out twenty years later that popular hostility against Germany still ran high in the years immediately after the war: ‘[n]othing known to be of German origin could be sold in the shops and even the war-time ban on German classical music remained in force for some time. The popular press continued to refer to the Germans as Huns even so late as 1920’.49 Yet public opinion did change. Once the vengeful frenzy brought about by the intoxication of victory wore off, a more balanced, if not always sympathetic, popular attitude towards Germany began to be displayed. This was especially true once reports of conditions inside Germany began to filter back to Britain from reporters and those serving with the Army of Occupation. Descriptions of the hardship brought about by the continued blockade of Germany began to appear in British newspapers from the end of 1918 and helped to foster some sympathy for the suffering of innocent women and children within Germany. This change in attitude can be detected in the fact that not only traditionally liberal papers such as the Manchester Guardian spoke out against the continuance of the blockade but also, as Douglas Newton points out, more conservative organs such as the Spectator began to acknowledge the plight of the Germans.50 It was against this background that the British delegates in Paris helped to frame the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and set their signatures to it on 28 June 1919. Among the personnel of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference were several men employed as advisors or civil servants whose later writings on the deliberations at Paris would be instrumental in shaping public opinion towards the Treaty and, by association, towards the Germans. Harold Nicolson had been employed by the British Foreign Office since 1909 and had held posts in the British embassies in Madrid and Constantinople before the war, but it was at the Peace Conference that he took up his first major role and earned a reputation as one of the ablest among the Foreign Office’s up-and-coming young officials. Even though his rank was relatively low, Nicolson nevertheless played an important advisory role within the British delegation, being mainly concerned with the Balkans, East-Central Europe and the relationship between Greece and Turkey. He was at first enthusiastic for the prospects of a just and lasting peace and was a passionate believer in President Wilson’s promises of a ‘new diplomacy’, seeing the Conference as an opportunity to break with the past and re-order Europe along more 45

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equitable lines. But as the work of the Conference progressed he became disappointed and disillusioned with the process of peacemaking; with what he described in his diary as ‘[t]he sham cordiality of it all; the hand-shakes; the maps; the rustle of papers; the tea in the next room; the macaroons’.51 By March 1919, as he saw his dreams of a magnanimous and equitable peace rapidly evaporating, he was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, that I am so depressed about the way the Conference is going. […] It is so disheartening as there is no time to waste. Every day makes it less likely that that the Germans will accept our terms. They have always got the trump card, Bolshevism. They will go Bolshevist the moment they feel it is hopeless to get good terms. The only hope, therefore, is to give them food and peace at once, and if we are going to stop and argue – what will be the good or the hope? It will be too awful if, after winning the war, we are to lose the peace, and I must say it all looks as if there was a good chance of our doing so. In fact, I am very depressed about it.52 In his letters home he railed against ‘this bloody bullying peace’,53 and denounced the ‘ignorant irresponsible men’ who ignored ‘the happiness of millions’ in their deliberations, concluding that ‘[t]heir decisions are immoral and impracticable’.54 Nicolson was acutely disappointed by the harsh and punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, believing that, in squandering the opportunity the Peace Conference provided for them to rehabilitate Germany and re-order Europe in accordance with Wilsonian principles, the Allies were merely storing up trouble for the future. Yet in his later assessment of the Peace Conference and Treaty, Peacemaking 1919 (1933), Nicolson stated that, under the circumstances, devising a just peace would have been impossible: ‘Given the atmosphere of the time, given the passions aroused in all democracies by four years of war, it would have been impossible even for super-men to devise a peace of moderation and righteousness’.55 Matters were further complicated and confused by the conflicting aims and objectives of the victorious Allies. Even though he continued to believe that the Treaty had been too harsh and an opportunity missed in 1919, he also revised his opinions regarding the ‘new diplomacy’, coming to believe that many of the flaws of the Versailles settlement were due to failures in the decision making process, his final thesis being that diplomacy and peacemaking were simply too important to entrust into the

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hands of politicians and should have been left to the ‘experts’ behind the closed doors of the Foreign Office.56 Nicolson was not the only expert advisor to the British delegation who was deeply disappointed by the Treaty as it eventually appeared, and viewed the prospects for a lasting peace with great concern. He was joined in this view by the historian and writer W. H. Dawson, whose sympathy and consistently positive perception of Germany and the Germans, based on his ‘admiration for German culture and German achievements in education, industry and social welfare’,57 as well as his deep aversion and opposition to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, would lead him to become a vociferous advocate of appeasement in the 1930s. The outbreak of war with Germany in 1914 was a great shock to Dawson (as it was to other British Germanophiles) and brought his personal and emotional attachment to Germany into direct conflict with his patriotism. Nevertheless, he supported the British war effort and in his published books and articles adopted a position which stressed the iniquities of Prussian militarism and the policies of the German Government, while at the same time distancing these from what Dawson regarded as the true nature of Germany and the Germans. In a letter to The Times, Dawson was at pains to point out that [e]veryone is agreed that in fighting Germany we are fighting militarism, whose foul fruits are sheer lust of aggression and the substitution of brute force for treaty law in international affairs. But unanimity upon this point involves recognition of the further fact that the evil spirit of militarism is not characteristic of Germany and the Germans as a whole. No-one would dream speaking of Bavarian, or Saxon, or Wurtemberg militarism, the words would not fit. The growth is a purely Prussian growth, and it is the excrescence of a system of government and an order of political ideas which are to a large extent alien to the rest of the country.58 In accordance with his Liberal principles, Dawson argued that ‘[t]he spirit which underlies Prussian militarism is the spirit […] that stifles free thought, cripples the freedom of the universities, and regards the schools, art, letters, the drama, even religion itself as mere feeders and dependents of the dominant political system’59. The Kaiser and his Government, acting under the spirit of Prussian militarism, might have brought about the war, but there was, according to Dawson, another Germany, a liberal Germany untainted by – indeed opposed to – militarism and

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authoritarianism, which, he believed, should not be punished after the war for the sins of the old Imperial regime. This was broadly the thesis of Dawson’s Problems of the Peace (1917). It was here that he set out his views on the shape a future peace should take before the war even ended. While accepting German responsibility for the war, the need for an end to Prussian militarism (and installation of a functioning parliamentary democracy in Germany) and for a decisive victory over the Central Powers, Dawson’s central argument was that there should be a non-vindictive peace, in which a liberal democratic Germany would be rehabilitated and brought into the community of nations for the benefit of Europe and the world.60 National considerations and ambitions should be put aside and peace made dispassionately and with detachment so that an equitable and just settlement could be reached. Like President Wilson, Dawson argued for an end to the old Bismarckian ‘Balance of Power’ and the settlement of differences through a ‘new diplomacy’ with reference to a supranational ‘Congress of States’.61 Legitimate national grievances (such as the issue of Alsace-Lorraine) should be settled and redressed at the coming Peace Conference, as far as possible in accordance with the principle of self-determination. ‘Longstanding national aspirations and rightful national claims’62 should be satisfied, but ‘[t]he idea of dismembering or unduly weakening States whose existence is necessary to civilization [by which he meant Germany] should be repudiated’.63 According to Dawson, Britain had a duty and a responsibility to ensure that a just peace was negotiated at Versailles and that democratic Germany should not be punished but instead nurtured and encouraged by the peacemakers. It was with this attitude that Dawson set off for Paris in 1918, but he was sorely disappointed by the peace that was eventually signed. The problem was that Dawson was consistently and irredeemably proGerman. However much he might acknowledge German responsibility for the war (an idea he later repudiated) and the need to fight militarism, he could not bear the thought of Germany being punished or losing any territory in the peace, and he framed his advice to the British delegation accordingly. In a memorandum sent to the Prime Minister in December 1918 he underlined ‘the uneasy feeling which has been aroused in circles represented by the organisations with which I am associated owing to the extravagant territorial demands which the French Government are understood to be making against Germany’.64 He strongly objected to a French annexation of the Rhineland or any kind of Rhenish buffer-state independent from Germany on the grounds that ‘[t]he territory in question is historically German territory’, and that ‘[t]he severance of this 48

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territory from Germany could only be effected by a flagrant violation of the principle of self-determination’.65 Moreover, he argued that any such move would be both against stated British aims and ‘certain to stir up in Germany undying hatred and an unquenchable thirst for revenge’.66 Although the British delegates seem to have agreed with Dawson in this instance, this was the exception rather than the rule – so much so that he was deeply dissatisfied and disillusioned by the final terms of the Treaty, especially the clauses relating to reparations, territorial readjustments (and the Polish Corridor in particular) and war guilt. In a succession of journals and newspaper articles which appeared in 1919 Dawson made this disappointment clear, presenting the Treaty of Versailles as both a missed opportunity and a document which papered over the cracks in the international situation while solving nothing finally.67 Thereafter Dawson devoted much of his time and energy to the cause of treaty revision, and much of his published writings and correspondence from the 1920s and 30s were given over to the subject. Nicolson and Dawson were by no means the only British intellectuals, whether attached to the peacemaking delegation or not, who reacted strongly against the Treaty of Versailles, but nor were they necessarily representative. Dawson in particular was unusual, if only because his Germanophilia informed his attitude towards the peace (rather than the peace altering his views on Germany, which was a much more common occurrence) and led him to call for a much more lenient handling of Germany than possibly any other member of the British delegation to Versailles. If Dawson’s recommendations had been accepted Germany would have lost no territory (Alsace and Lorraine would have been subject to plebiscites, which, Dawson predicted, ‘would result in them wanting to remain with Germany’68, and a new Polish state would be created out of Russian Poland, without the Polish provinces of Prussia or Austria), and would have retained most, if not all, of her colonies and had to pay no reparations. Yet there were many others who, like Dawson and Nicolson, had been advisors to the peacemakers, and were deeply unhappy with the final settlement both because they felt that their expert advice had been ignored and because they felt their ideals had been betrayed and an opportunity for lasting peace had been squandered. Perhaps the best known of these and arguably the most successful was the young economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was born in 1883, the son of a Cambridge academic, and educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where he studied first mathematics and then economics. After leaving Cambridge Keynes worked in the India Office before gaining a Fellowship at his old College. 49

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During the First World War, he worked for the Treasury’s Finance Division, which was primarily concerned with the financial direction of the war. To Keynes, the Great War was a war for civilization, though not perhaps in exactly the same way as for other Liberals. To him the war was not a moral crusade, but a catastrophe that threatened to destroy all that he held most dear. After the Armistice, Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference as Chief Treasury representative of the British delegation, until in April 1919 he walked out in disgust. He watched as the peacemakers wrangled and haggled with one another over colonies and reparations, as they sat in judgement over delegations from peoples across the world and as they reset boundaries and redrew maps. But what disgusted and incensed Keynes more than anything, and led to his eventual departure from Paris, was what he regarded as the mishandling of the financial arrangements for the new Europe, especially the punitive and inflated demands for reparations from the Germans. As far as Keynes was concerned, the Allied commission on reparations was determined, against expert advice (much of it his own), to demand a sum from Germany that was beyond her means would eventually lead all of Europe into financial and social ruin. Once back in England he channelled all of his anger and disgust at what was being done in Paris into his great polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). In this he attacked the Treaty and published for the world to see the expert advice that the peacemakers in Paris had rejected, setting forth both his economic and his moral arguments against the Treaty, couched in the most belligerent of language. He set out to demonstrate how ‘the war had damaged the delicate economic mechanism by which the European peoples had lived before 1914, and how the Treaty of Versailles, far from repairing this damage had completed the destruction.’69 This, Keynes argued, would have the worst possible consequences for Europe: the impoverishment of Germany would upset the delicate financial balance of Europe to such an extent that there would sooner or later be economic disaster, widespread social upheaval and revolution throughout the Continent. As far as Keynes was concerned, the Treaty of Versailles, rather than returning peace and prosperity to Europe, ensured only turmoil and impoverishment for the future: in his words, with the signing of the Treaty, ‘[g]reat privation and great risks to society have become unavoidable.’70 Keynes’s scheme for averting this predicted collapse of European civilisation had three main branches. First he argued for a widespread revision of the Treaty to dissolve the Allied Reparations Commission, fix 50

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reparations payments at £2000 million, absolve Austria from the responsibility of paying reparations and establish a Europe-wide free trade union under the auspices of the League of Nations. Secondly, he called for the cancellation of all inter-Allied war debts; and thirdly, he suggested that the USA should grant reconstruction loans to European states (including those formerly of the Central Powers) in order to stave off immediate economic hardship. The Economic Consequences of the Peace became an almost instant bestseller, with sales in England reaching 7700 by January 1920, and it was translated rapidly into 11 languages. However, the reception was not universally good and the book proved controversial from the start. Reviews in Britain were divided almost along party political lines: ‘[t]he Liberal and Labour press was laudatory; but the right-wing Sunday Chronicle of 21 December called Keynes a representative of “a certain … dehumanised intellectual point of view” which failed to accept that Germany had to be punished’.71 The accusation that Keynes was at best soft on the Germans and at worst actively pro-German was widespread in the right-wing and ‘Coalition’ press, with one reader of the Saturday Review of the opinion that he should be awarded an Iron Cross.72 But to what extent was Keynes ‘pro-German’? Does the criticism of The Economic Consequences of the Peace square with his attitude towards Germany as expressed in the book? Certainly, he seems to have had some sympathy for the plight of German civilians. At one level his argument was that the Treaty would lead to the general impoverishment and starvation of Germany first and then all of Europe, that ‘those who sign this treaty will sign the death sentence of many millions of German men, women and children’.73 In addition to this he was keenly aware of the unfairness of the economic terms of the treaty, that economic reconstruction would be deterred by the fact that ‘anything which they may produce beyond the barest level of subsistence will for years to come be taken away from them’,74 and that ‘year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled, and that she must be ringed round by enemies’.75 Yet this by no means made Keynes pro-German, if that is taken to mean that he was in sympathy with aims and objectives of the German state. As John Mander suggests, ‘that he was nothing of the kind is evident from the opening words of his pamphlet: it was by their own recklessness that the Germans had brought such miseries upon themselves. Keynes does not question the orthodox view about this’.76 If this was so, Keynes was in keeping with much Liberal opinion at the time: to distinguish between the German state and the German people, to be opposed to the statesmen and policies that had taken Germany into the 51

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war but to sympathise with the plight of the German people in its aftermath. It is also instructive to look at the descriptions of the German representatives that Keynes met in January 1919 in his ‘Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy’, written and presented to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in 1920 but not published until after his death in 1946, to ascertain his attitudes towards the Germans. With the best will in the world, Keynes’s description of ‘[Matthias] Erzberger, fat and disgusting in a fur coat’ and ‘a Sea-Captain with an iron cross round his neck and an extraordinary resemblance of face and figure to the pig in Alice in Wonderland’77 hardly reads like the writings of man in wholehearted sympathy with the Germans; likewise his comment that ‘[t]he personal appearance of that race is really extraordinarily against them.’78 Yet even here one can detect some of Keynes’s sympathy or pity for the defeated enemy in his description of the German financial representatives as ‘[a] sad lot […] with drawn dejected faces and tired staring eyes, like men who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange’.79 Even so, by urging moderation and a fairer treatment of Germany for the sake of all Europe, Keynes was out of step with the jingoistic mood of the popular press and much of the population, and attacks on him and his supposed sympathies continued in the press. For the most part he seems to have ignored them, but he was sufficiently needled in June 1920 to reply to what he termed ‘imputations on my motives and […] denunciation[s] of […] “pro-Germanism”’80 in the National Review. In his letter to the editor he explicitly refuted accusations of being pro-German, stating that his intention in writing The Economic Consequences of the Peace was to ‘emphasise the solidarity of Europe as a whole’ and to show the Treaty of Versailles to be ‘at the same time unwise, dishonourable, and impossible, and […] a breach of honour on the part of my own country’.81 Keynes, then, might be said to be anti-Treaty but not pro-German. However, once he had let off his broadside against the Treaty of Versailles he did not abandon his arguments for a more moderate settlement that might avert the European financial and social catastrophe that he predicted. Even if he was motivated in his attack on Versailles not by any deep feeling for the sufferings of Germany under the terms of the Treaty, but by the threat that these sufferings might pose to European civilization, Keynes continued to interest himself in the twin issues of reparations and a revision of the Versailles settlement. The Economic Consequences of the Peace was followed in 1922 by A Revision of the Treaty, in which Keynes restated the arguments in his earlier work, himself admitting that ‘I have nothing very new to say on the fundamental issues’.82 One of the few differences 52

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was, as Alan Sharp suggests, the view that the Americans take the place of the French as the villains of the piece for their lack of a coherent economic plan for solving the reparations question.83 Throughout the 1920s Keynes devoted much of his time to looking into the issue of reparations and writing numerous articles on the subject for a variety of publications, but his relationship with German banker Karl Melchior and his activities in 1922–23 perhaps show us the most about his feelings towards Germany and the Germans in the Weimar period. Keynes and Melchior first met in January 1919 when they both travelled to Trier as members of opposing delegations charged with negotiating the financial aspects of the transition from war to peace, especially the controversial issue of how Germany was to be provisioned with the Allied Continental Blockade still in place and how the Germans were to pay for this much-needed humanitarian assistance. Melchior, a partner in the Hamburg banking firm of M. M. Warburg, made a deep impression on Keynes, whose descriptions of him in ‘Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy’ are uniformly complimentary and in contrast with his comments regarding Melchior’s fellow Germans. While Melchior apparently spoke ‘in moving, persuasive, almost perfect English […] always deliberately but without pause, [and] in a way which gave one an extraordinary impression that he was truthful’,84 his fellow delegates were ‘eager to jump in with little undignified misplaced appeals, or foolish ad hominem insincerities which couldn’t have deceived the stupidest American’.85 In short, it was Keynes’s opinion that, of all the German delegation, only Melchior ‘upheld the dignity of defeat’.86 Indeed, Melchior made a curious and longlasting impression on Keynes, the latter recalling later that ‘[i]n a sort of way I was in love with him’.87 Keynes and Melchior met twice at Trier in January and February 1919 and then again at Spa, each time the negotiations stalling due to the inflexibility of both sides. Finally at Spa they contrived to meet privately and cooked up a scheme designed to break the deadlock and allow the Allies to start supplying much-needed food to the Germans. They ‘agreed a form of words, for Admiral Hope to present to the German delegation, to the effect that, if the Germans agreed to hand over their merchant marine, the Allies would agree to supply the food the Germans required’,88 but the plan failed due to the intransigence of the German government in Weimar. Nevertheless, it was the first step in a curious friendship between the two and a prologue to a second, more successful attempt to guide Anglo-German relations to some sort of agreement. The two men met several more times at the Paris Peace Conference and afterwards, but their most important contact took place in 1922–23, when they ‘turned the 53

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“curious intimacy” they had established at Spa in 1919 to the task of securing an Anglo-German agreement’.89 In a series of meetings and a vital correspondence (now lost) Keynes and Melchior again circumvented normal diplomatic channels and used their personal association to try to come up with a deal that would break the impasse that had been reached by British and German officials. While Keynes attempted to guide German negotiating tactics with constructive criticism from the outside, Melchior fed Keynes ‘inside’ political and economic information, which he could use in discussion with British policymakers. In this way the two men ‘hoped to attune their own governments to each other’s wavelength’,90 and to a certain extent they seem to have been successful: it is the opinion of Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, that ‘[b]y helping to crowd out direct Franco-German negotiations, the Keynes-Melchior initiative paved the way for eventual American intervention, which resulted in the Dawes Plan’.91 Thus Nicolson, Dawson and Keynes all came to regard the Treaty of Versailles as unjust and to display some sympathy towards Germany and the Germans in the postwar period. However, it is interesting that, in all three cases, the need for revision of the treaty was not based on a rejection of the principle of German war guilt. Perhaps somewhat strangely, considering that it was of such central importance to German opposition to the Treaty, Article 231 was not of major importance to the majority of British critiques of the peace settlement – indeed, many of the most outspoken opponents of the Treaty, including Nicolson, Dawson and Keynes, accepted German responsibility for starting the war while still arguing that the peace was both unjust and harmful to the future peace and prosperity of Europe. For them, the issues of reparations and the territorial adjustments in Central Europe were of much more importance, not least because they seemed to contradict Britain’s stated aim of restoring peace and stability to the Continent. It is similarly clear that sympathy for Germany and the Germans in the interwar period was not necessarily predicated on a political sympathy towards the Weimar Republic. In the writings of Keynes in particular, we can see a distinction between attitudes towards Germany more generally and attitudes towards the Weimar Republic in particular. He may have had more sympathy towards a liberal democratic German state than he did towards the authoritarian monarchy of the Kaiser, but it is clear from his writings that Keynes’s concern is primarily with the plight of starving women and children and the threat posed to European ‘civilization’ by a bankrupt and embittered Germany. Similarly, Dawson was initially sympathetic towards the Republic, and argued that the new regime should 54

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not be punished for the sins of the old, but as time went by he increasingly came to see the modern, cosmopolitan Republic as being in opposition to his conception of German values. Like Wyndham Lewis, Dawson ultimately came to regard the Republic as too weak and divided to achieve the necessary revision of the Treaty and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, he transferred his support to the Nazis whom he saw as the agents of Germany’s revival as a world power. British opposition to the Treaty of Versailles and conceptions of German victimhood therefore had little to do with the German political system or constitution, focusing rather on the plight of groups or individuals struggling to survive in the face of the economic and political changes imposed on them by Versailles. The experts who felt their advice was ignored in 1918–19 were not, however, the only Britons to express unease about the peace settlement. Numerous liberal-minded intellectuals and policy makers argued against the folly of a harsh peace. Bertrand Russell, like Keynes, called for a peace without lasting enmity, warning that ‘if the war ended in bitterness, postwar artistic, social and scientific progress would all be impossible’.92 And as time wore on the belligerent public mood of 1918 and early 1919 subsided, to be replaced by a more sympathetic attitude towards the Germans. The agitation for a fairer treatment of Germany (if only for the sake of the rest of Europe) did not soon die down. Throughout the 1920s the peace, and matters arising from it, continued to exercise a fascination for many in Britain. The perceived political and economic instability of the Weimar Republic – in particular the hyperinflation and mass unemployment of 1923–24, the Kapp Putsch of 1920, paramilitary violence, unrest in the Rhineland in 1923 and the political assassinations of figures such as Walther Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger – were often ascribed to the strain placed on the fledgling Republic by the Treaty of Versailles. This concern with conditions within Germany led, at least in part, to an influx of British visitors to Germany who desired to see for themselves how the Germans were faring under the shadow of the Versailles settlement, and was instrumental to shaping the attitudes of British commentators on the European situation. Thus, throughout the 1920s and 1930s issues arising from the peace settlement continued to keep events within Germany in the public eye and contributed to perceptions of German victimhood and political instability. In general, this continuing interest engendered a widespread sympathy for the Germans within and beyond artistic and intellectual circles. On an individual basis this may have been modified by varying attitudes towards 55

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culture, modernity and politics, but in general it was based, to some extent, on the feeling that the Germans were being treated shamefully and unfairly and in an unsporting and ‘un-British’ manner. It was felt by many that through Versailles the Germans were being kicked while they were already down. Keynes was not alone in considering Britain’s claims to reparations inflated and grasping, considering that no British territory had been occupied or despoiled. Nor were such feelings confined to one side of the political spectrum: left-wingers such as Morgan Philips Price and Claud Cockburn, Leonard Woolf and Vera Brittain were joined in their expositions of the hardships that the Treaty forced on Germany by former military-men of more conservative opinions such as Lieutenant Colonel W. Stewart Roddie and Geoffrey Moss. Even the High Tory John Buchan, one of the men in charge of the British propaganda effort during the war, acknowledged the unsatisfactory nature of the Treaty and the difficulties it caused for Germany and Europe in his postwar writings.93 Moreover, the calls for a revision of the Treaty were still being made well into the 1930s. Eighteen years after Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, Wyndham Lewis was going over old ground in books like Count Your Dead: They Are Alive!, in which he argued for the right of Hitler to aggressively seek a revision of the Treaty. Likewise, when pioneering female journalist Shiela Grant Duff (who had lost her father and two uncles in the First World War) left university in 1934, ‘she was unambivalent about what she wanted to do with her life: prevent the outbreak of a second world war’,94 which, she felt, was made infinitely more likely by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which left Germany embittered and vengeful. Her feelings on the subject of Germany’s shabby treatment at Versailles were so strong that when she took up journalism in the mid-thirties her mentor, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, was ‘shocked to hear the extent of her pro-German, anti-French views […] and gave her the sobriquet “Hitler’s girlfriend”’.95 The peace treaty was influencing attitudes towards Germany right up until the outbreak of war in 1939. But in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the Treaty, two issues dominated British debates on the peace settlement: reparations and the occupation of the Rhineland. Once the blockade of Germany had been lifted and the war officially ended there was a veritable flood of British visitors to the Weimar Republic, all of them intent on discovering for themselves the long-term effects of wartime and postwar hardships on ordinary Germans. Between 1920 and 1925 the Allied occupation was singled out for particular attention. Scores of British intellectuals and commentators visited the occupied areas and recorded impressions of what they saw there in an effort to influence the debate on the peace 56

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settlement. It is to these differing and often contradictory accounts that we shall turn in the next chapter.

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3 Occupational Hazards: British Intellectuals and the Occupation of the Rhineland

British troops crossed the German frontier on 1 December 1918 and reached Cologne six days later amidst ‘pouring, shivering rain’.1 They were not welcomed, but nor were they subjected to any physical or verbal assault or resistance. One British soldier noted that as the first occupying troops arrived in Cologne the local population wore a ‘mask of indifference’ and ‘went about its business as usual’.2 So began the eleven years of British occupation of the Rhineland, during which time the Germans became very far from indifferent to the foreign troops in their midst. Indeed, the occupation became a central issue in the tangled relationship between Britain, Germany and France in the interwar period, not least because it highlighted (and helped to widen) the cracks in the Anglo-French entente. But the occupation of the Rhineland was also instrumental in changing British official and public opinion towards the Weimar Republic. Just as attitudes towards Weimar Germany were often shaped by the British experience (and memory) of the war, and intimately related to attitudes towards the Treaty of Versailles, so the experiences of British servicemen and their civilian counterparts living cheek-by-jowl with the Germans in the Rhineland did much to popularise a more sympathetic attitude towards the former enemy. Yet, as we shall see, the British presence in the Rhineland was not uncontroversial, and not all

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observers were in agreement over the extent to which the occupation was successful or even necessary. The decision to occupy the Rhineland was taken at a relatively late stage in the armistice negotiations and originated with the French. After the suggestion that France should annex all the territory on the left bank of the Rhine was rejected by her allies, Marshal Foch instead proposed that the Rhineland, and especially the bridgeheads at Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz, ‘should be occupied by a joint Allied force as a guarantee for the payment of reparations’.3 The idea was first discussed by the Allied leaders on 25 October 1918, but there was much resistance to it in the British and American delegations. Nevertheless, on 1 November, Lloyd George at last agreed in principle to a plan whereby the four Allied armies (French, Belgian, American and British) would administer their own separate zones of occupation for a total of 15 years, with a reduction of troops after five and ten years. Once the armistice came into effect on 11 November 1918, the Germans were given six days in which to retire beyond the Rhine before Allied forces began their march into German territory to take up their positions along the left bank on the river. The Allies occupied a swathe of territory stretching from Emmerich near the Dutch border in the north to Saarbrücken and Weißenburg on the border of Alsace in the south. This territory was initially divided into four zones, each occupied and administered by one of the allied armies. The British established themselves in a zone centred on Cologne with an army of 3.5 million men, but the number of British troops soon dwindled to 220,000, and by the time of the move to Wiesbaden in 1926 the British contributed only 8,118 men out of a total occupying force of 76,000. The French always made up the largest proportion of this force (30 divisions in 1918) and occupied the largest zone of the Rhineland stretching from the river Mosel to Strasbourg in Alsace. Between the French and British zones, the American Forces in Germany (as they were officially known) numbered around 240,000 men, less than one third of the total Allied force, spread over an area of 2,500 square miles centred on the ancient city of Koblenz. Finally, the Belgians occupied a strip of territory along the Dutch border with five divisions. Until the signing of the peace treaty, martial law operated throughout the occupied Rhineland, but after ratification restrictions on both the occupying troops and the local population were relaxed (particularly in the British and American zones). Although each of the occupying powers was responsible for the administration and maintenance of law and order in its respective zone, from June 1919 the occupation as a whole was presided 59

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over by a civilian authority, the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission (IARHC). This international body was established by the Rhineland Agreement, signed alongside the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, and was based at the Oberpräsidium in Koblenz. It was to be made up of one representative from each of the occupying powers and ‘existed solely to protect the occupying forces’ rather than to perform an administrative role.4 Day-to-day matters of state remained in the hands of local German officials, while the German police were responsible for ensuring the continuance of law and order, apart from in cases involving members of the occupying armies or their civilian support staff. Nevertheless, the High Commission potentially had extensive powers, with the authority to issue any ordinance deemed necessary to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the occupiers, and to declare martial law whenever necessary. Decisions were taken by majority vote, and meetings of the IARHC were chaired by the French Commissioner who acted as the president and who held the casting vote in the event of a deadlock. It had been hoped that the creation of an inter-Allied civilian body would both make the occupation more palatable to the Germans and rein in France’s ambitions in the Rhineland, but in practice the IARHC soon became dominated by the French. The failure of the Americans to ratify the Treaty of Versailles meant that the United States technically remained at war with Germany and was denied full representation on the IARHC. Until the withdrawal of American troops from the Rhineland in January 1923 the US representative was a non-voting Commissioner (rather than High Commissioner) who was in practice little more than an observer. This, together with the casting vote of the French representative, meant that the British could do little to prevent the passage of ordinances issued by the French, who were almost always supported by the Belgians. This became abundantly clear during the recurring crises that plagued Germany between 1918 and 1925. There were frequent clashes between the British and French representatives on the High Commission and British observers were often highly critical of what they perceived as the harsh and unjust treatment of the civilian population in the French zone of occupation; but the most consistent source of tension between the Allies was French support for Rhenish separatism. Almost as soon as he arrived in the Rhineland, the French High Commissioner Paul Tirard, backed by Paris, began operating a policy of ‘“gradual infiltration and support for autonomist tendencies”, and looked to economic as well as military measures and reparation guarantees, which could include French control of mines, forests and customs in the Rhineland’.5 French officers supported an ill-judged and abortive attempt to proclaim an ‘autonomous 60

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Rhenish Republic’ in June 1919, a precursor to a more serious separatist putsch staged in the French and Belgian zones in October 1923. Events in unoccupied Germany also had an impact on the occupied areas. The Kapp putsch of March 1920 raised the spectres of nationalism and militarism as well as triggering a left-wing revolt in the Ruhr. In April 1920 the French ignored British and American protests and occupied Frankfurt and Darmstadt in response to the uprising and the incursion of paramilitaries into the demilitarized zone. The continuing economic crisis in Germany and the German insistence that reparations payments would not be forthcoming left the British with no choice but to acquiesce to the occupation of Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhort by French troops in March 1921. This action was a prelude to a more serious crisis which erupted when, against the wishes of the British, France and Belgium sent troops to invade and occupy the Ruhr in January 1923. The Ruhr Crisis, and the policy of passive resistance by which the German government sought to deal with it, sent the German economy into freefall and threatened to break the fragile Anglo-French entente once and for all. Furthermore, it resulted in increased hardship for an already weakened and demoralised population and, as one historian has suggested, left the Weimar Republic ‘fatally wounded, a weakened body that soon enough would be overwhelmed by the Nazi virus’.6 Yet it also led to the formation of the Dawes plan and brought an end to French ambitions on the Rhine. The Ruhr adventure had been a gamble on the part of the French and for a moment it had looked as though it might pay off. But the venture left France exhausted, and without British financial backing she had no choice but to seek a negotiated settlement and accede to the Anglo-American suggestion of the establishment of a financial commission chaired by American financier Charles Dawes. The resultant plan brought some much-needed stability to the relationship between Britain, France and Germany and paved the way for the Locarno Agreements of October 1925, which did much to rehabilitate Germany as a great power. In the wake of Locarno the occupation was increasingly seen as unnecessary and out-of-date and was correspondingly unpopular with the British public. In March 1928 the British Army of the Rhine was denounced in the House of Commons as a ‘lost legion’ and an ‘expensive anachronism’,7 and the formation of a Labour Government in June 1929 and the election of Aristide Briand as French President in July paved the way for an agreement on the early withdrawal of the occupying forces. The new Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson made no pretence of his government’s determination to bring the occupation to an end, and it was 61

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agreed at the Hague Conference in August 1929 that British troops would leave Wiesbaden by the end of the year and that the last French soldiers would by withdrawn by 30 June 1930. The occupation of the Rhineland was therefore intimately connected with the issues that dominated European politics in the 1920s. Born out of the First World War and the subsequent peace settlement, the occupation was at the heart of debates over revision of the Treaty of Versailles. From the start it was regarded (by the French at least) as a means of guaranteeing the delivery of reparations payments and German disarmament (the staged withdrawal of Allied troops being dependent on Germany demonstrating that she was complying with the terms of the Treaty), while at the same time ensuring security from future aggression for France, particularly in the absence of the promised Anglo-American military guarantee.8 As such it attracted much attention from political commentators in Britain and elsewhere. But the Rhineland was, until the mid-1920s, also the vantage point from which many British visitors to Germany observed political, economic and social developments within the Reich, a fact that has not always been fully appreciated in studies of Anglo-German relations in the Weimar period. The publication of British accounts of the occupation in the interwar period in some ways mirrored the production of the books dealing with the war that were discussed in the previous chapter. Although reflections and reports on the situation in the Rhineland continued to appear throughout the occupation, by far the greatest number of accounts written and published between 1918 and 1925. After the resolution of the Ruhr Crisis and the Locarno Conference interest in the occupation largely dried up and published accounts dwindled to very occasional pieces in the press such as G. E. R. Gedye’s ‘playful’ 1928 article for the Daily Express on ‘Britain’s Lost Legion’ in Wiesbaden.9 However, after the final withdrawal of British troops in 1929 many of the officers who had served with the Army of Occupation, as well as a number of civilian observers, published their own accounts of the ‘British Watch on the Rhine’. ‘Initially the very novelty of the occupation inspired some of the participants to write racy and often informative accounts of the British in the Rhineland’.10 The earliest contemporary accounts of life under the occupation often demonstrated surprise at the friendliness of the local population and sympathy for the problems that they faced, at the same time highlighting the detachment of the garrison. These can be seen to reflect the ‘voracious need’ to understand the war and the enemy that continued to grip the British reading public in the immediate aftermath of 62

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the Great War,11 but also as an attempt to make sense of the changing political and economic circumstances of the postwar world. But often they also had a more or less explicit political purpose, in seeking to make the public aware of conditions within postwar Germany and in particular the plight of women and children suffering under the Allied blockade and the economic upheavals of the postwar ‘years of crisis’. However, ‘by the early 1930s the occupation was [increasingly] seen as a “postscript to the Western front”’,12 as more and more authors began to write about the war again. Even so, the early 1930s saw the publication of a number of eye-witness accounts of the occupation including Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Roddie’s Peace Patrol (1932), Gedye’s The Revolver Republic (1930), Robert Coulson’s The Uneasy Triangle (1930) and Ferdinand Tuohy’s Occupied 1918-1930 (1931). To some extent these reflected an upsurge of interest in Germany and the Germans at the beginning of the decade, but they also represented an attempt to analyse and reflect upon an episode in British history that had attracted controversy at the time and been seen by some as to have been ultimately a failure. Taken as a whole these accounts of the occupation provide us with a valuable alternative perspective on how the British saw the Weimar Republic. Unlike later British writing on Germany which focused attention on the perceived decadent nightlife and political instability of Berlin, writing on the occupation demonstrated a concern with wider issues and links to pre-war travel to and interaction with Germany. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Rhineland was familiar territory for British travellers and tourists, and many of those who wrote of their experiences during the occupation had visited the area before the war.13 At the same time, the occupation was inextricably linked with the Treaty of Versailles and the wider geopolitical issues that arose from the peace settlement. As such it attracted much attention from those interested in what was happening in Germany after the war and the conditions under which ordinary Germans were living. The occupied Rhineland therefore proved attractive to intellectual visitors to Germany for two reasons: because it was a relatively ‘safe’ environment from which to observe conditions and events in Germany as they unfolded,14 and because it was a focal point for issues arising from the Treaty and postwar peace settlement. The issue that most exercised these commentators in the months between the British entry into the Rhineland and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles was the continuation of the wartime blockade. Shortages of food and fuel had become a familiar feature of German life during the war,15 but the revolutionary upheavals of the winter of 1918–19 in conjunction with the continuing blockade and the rapid spread of Spanish 63

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influenza through a population already weakened by years of poor nutrition led to a humanitarian crisis not just in Germany, but throughout Central Europe. Largely unaware of the severity of the shortages suffered by German civilians during the war, British observers were horrified by the conditions in which they found the Rhinelanders living. A report written from Frankfurt by G. E. R. Gedye while he was still serving with the Army of Occupation concluded that ‘[t]he poor people are undoubtedly suffering misery and hardships through lack of food. The rich people are able to supplement their rations, to a certain extent, by buying luxuries at exorbitant prices, but they are by no means well off’, and that ‘[t]he Town lighting and water supply have been several times in danger of complete [sic] closing down owing to shortage of coal’.16 It was further noted that poor diet, and the shortage of fuel and clothing, had led to the outbreak of disease amongst German children of epidemic proportions. One official report noted that malnutrition had ‘given rise to new diseases (eg., war oedema and “mangold wurzel disease”), besides aggravating the previously known ones’.17 Tuberculosis was particularly prevalent,18 as was rickets, which was so closely linked with the food shortages caused by the blockade that it became popularly known as ‘the English disease’.19 All this was profoundly worrying to British personnel in the Rhineland. Besides the humanitarian considerations, there was a very real fear that unless something was done soon to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population Germany would undergo another round of revolution. Gedye was of the opinion that ‘[i]f food is not sent in the near future disorders are bound to occur’,20 while the authors of one report to the War Office suggested that ‘the need for revictualling [sic] Germany is urgent […] either famine, or Bolshevism, probably both, will ensue before the next harvest, if help from outside is not forthcoming’.21 Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Roddie considered that Germany was ‘on the brink of a volcano which may erupt at any moment’ and that any such eventuality would have dire consequences for the whole of Western Europe.22 It was also noted that by the high command that the sight of starving women and children was having a disastrous effect on the morale of the occupying troops.23 So while there was real sympathy for the situation in Germany, there was also a degree of self-interest behind British concern at the suffering of German civilians. There was a widespread fear that starvation and unemployment would lead to unrest and revolution, which would then ‘infect’ the warweary troops of the Army of Occupation and spread not just throughout Western Europe but to Britain as well.

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However, such issues were not only being discussed in official dispatches and Cabinet briefings. Increasingly the plight of the German people living under the blockade was being presented to the general public in the newspaper columns, books and pamphlets produced by the British journalists who had flooded into Central Europe after the ending of hostilities. While it is true that, as the correspondents for left-wing newspapers, many of these authors had a political axe to grind, this does not in any way lessen the impact of their reporting. Indeed, correspondents such as H. N. Brailsford, Morgan Philips Price, J. G. Hamilton and A. G. Gardiner did much to bring the suffering of civilians in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian successor states before a mass readership in the pages of periodicals such as the Daily News, the Daily Herald, the Manchester Guardian, and the Nation, and played as important a role as any in changing British opinion towards the Germans after the First World War. In a series of articles for the Daily News based on his visit to the occupied area and Berlin that were later collected and published as What I Saw in Germany, Gardiner wrote that it is a tragic thing to be born a German child to-day. He is born into a hungry world and a hard life. […] As you go through the schools, stand in the class-rooms, watch the children at work, you have sense of a whole generation stricken by a blight. It is revealed in the puckered brows, the lustreless, uncertain eye, the anaemic faces, the bandy legs, the dry, cracked, flabby skins, the swollen abdomens, the universal air of exhaustion. It is a generation who have never known what a sufficiency of food means.24 But as serious as they were, it was not only the physical effects of the blockade that were noted by British journalists. Brailsford, who travelled widely in Central and Eastern Europe between February and May 1919, recalled a conversation with ‘a group of Bavarian ladies from a little country town’ who told him that conditions were much worse than they had been while hostilities were still going on: ‘“During the war we had hope. We knew it must end one day. Now there is no hope.”’25 He further observed that [n]o one is surprised to hear of the physical consequences of nearly five years’ progressive under-feeding. […] These things can be measured and proved by statistics. The more elusive nervous consequences of malnutrition are no less obvious, when one has seen 65

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these defeated peoples in the mass at public meetings or in street demonstrations. The discipline of North Germany, the geniality of South Germany are no longer characteristic. Thinking is active, feverish, and destructive.26 This manifested itself in a new interest in radical politics, but also in a wider moral and social change in which [a]n elaborate social structure has fallen into decay, like a farm which returns to the wilderness when cultivation ceases. The once incorruptible civil service of Germany, with its tremendous pride in the ethics of the official caste, is no longer proof against bribes. Theft and even robbery have become frequent, as they were not in the old days, and one heard of girls who would sell themselves for a cake of soap. We are pleased to talk of Huns, but when history tells the whole story of the working of this blockade from the Urals to the Rhine, in the hospitals that lack drugs, linen, and anaesthetics, in the garrets where dying children call to unemployed fathers, in the streets where desperate mobs pillage under the fire of brutalised troops, the next generation will ask with probing curiosity what devastation it was that Attila wrought to compare with this achievement of ours.27 Brailsford was correct in predicting both the changing attitude towards the blockade in Britain and the possible long-term effects of post-war poverty and starvation, but he was not alone. British commentators were keen to point out that a whole generation of children were ‘starting their life with a physical and mental inefficiency that will make life a burden’.28 The historian G. P. Gooch noted how poverty and malnutrition had affected the education and, therefore, the future life chances of German children,29 while later commentators came to blame military defeat, the blockade, the Treaty of Versailles and the political, social and economic upheavals that followed for the rise of extremism and the demise of the Republic. The journalist Vernon Bartlett argued that the hardships of the early Weimar period had destroyed ‘all standards and bases of judgement […] among the Germans of the younger generation’ and made them ‘morally […] unhealthy’,30 while writers such as Geoffrey Moss and W. H. Dawson pointed to the ‘psychological trauma’ of the immediate postwar years as one of the key reasons for the growing support for the National Socialists after 1928.

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Taking all this into account it might be thought that the British presence in the Rhineland was keenly resented by the local population. Yet many British observers were quick to point out that good relations existed between occupiers and occupied in the British zone. But how amicable were things really? When British troops entered Cologne in December 1918 their senior officers were well aware that potentially they were marching into a powder-keg: the 45,000 strong garrison of Cologne had mutinied and formed a revolutionary council on 7 November, and the British government and high command were afraid of the effect that the political atmosphere would have on their own war-weary troops. For this reason, until the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1920, the administration of the occupied areas was a purely military matter and strict rules and regulations were imposed on the local population. The attitude of the British was that [t]he population could go about its business as far as possible uninterfered with, and the normal life of the city would be allowed to run on within limits, but there was to be no nonsense of any kind. […] Accordingly, the city was immediately put in what was tantamount to a state of siege. Fully-manned machine-gun nests appeared at nodal points in the busy streets […] Armoured cars […] patrolled continuously. […] Pilots flew to and fro aloft […] Batteries of Horse Artillery […] parked themselves at strategical [sic] centres. Cavalry in battle equipment trooped here and there incessantly. Finally, infantry with fixed bayonets marched to temporary quarters or stacked arms in the open street. […] Khaki was everywhere, armed to the teeth.’31 Furthermore, a 7pm curfew was imposed; all private telephones were disconnected; letters, newspapers and cinemas were censored; and a ban on strikes and public meetings was proclaimed. At the same time, until it had established its own facilities the British Army on the Rhine was accommodated in temporary billets in schools, former barracks and private homes. The troops therefore found themselves living cheek-byjowl with the local population, a circumstance which often caused tension between occupiers and occupied, but also increased the British troops’ sympathy for the hardships being suffered by the Germans. Yet despite all this, these were what one veteran of the occupation described as the ‘good old days’, when the Army was in ‘gala mood’ and ‘[t]he cafes and beer-halls would be packed every minute of opening hours’.32 A number of contemporary observers noted that what tension 67

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there was between the British and their reluctant hosts tended to be domestic rather than political, caused by the awkwardness of British personnel being billeted in private homes.33 Moreover, the privileged economic position of the British troops meant that they were much sought after by German women, so much so that ‘Cologne became the Klondike of Whoredom’,34 where women ‘turned whores for food, not money’ and ‘[o]ver a thousand newcomers to the oldest feminine trade were signalled in Cologne inside of a few weeks. The Höhenstrasse teemed with them. For half a tin of bully [beef], for a few potatoes, for a piece of soap, they offered themselves’.35 This being the case, there were strict restrictions placed on the occupying troops: officially all ‘fraternization’ with German women was banned in the British zone, but with typical British hypocrisy there soon developed an arrangement whereby ‘what happened in private was abidingly different to what transpired in public’.36 Troops caught with German women in the streets or in cafes were likely to be arrested, but a blind eye was turned to ‘fraternization’ as long as it was done with discretion. After the signing of the peace treaty martial law was lifted and power over everyday administration within the British Zone devolved to the local German authorities, within the guidelines provided by the IARHC. But the conclusion of the peace also brought about a greater distance between the occupiers and the occupied. By 1920 the British Zone of occupation had become ‘a kind of Anglo-German Gibraltar in the Rhineland’,37 a selfcontained world in which the ‘Army, an island of British folk in an ocean of foreigners, settled down to the routine of an ordinary overseas garrison life’.38 Few British officers took an active interest in German affairs and, insulated from outside influences by a regimental system in which their battalion was their entire world, life in Cologne was, for most officers and men, no different from any other posting: as one officer wrote, ‘I might have been at Aldershot or Rawal Pindi’.39 This appearance of normality was cemented once the families of servicemen were allowed to join soldiers serving in the Rhineland after July 1919. With the arrival of wives and children the character of the garrison changed: when the wives and daughters of the regiment appeared on the scene, their presence worked a social revolution. Billets, from bricks and mortar, became homes. And the B.A.O.R. [British Army of the Rhine] began […] to tingle, and to assume that self-contained, almost segregated air which was to characterize it for the remainder of its life.40

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Thereafter, the garrison ‘developed its own shops and cafes and theatres and clubs in the wide and diversified community which made up the Greater Cologne’.41 These included a military store in the Höhenstrasse, a bookshop, an off-licence, and even ‘a bakery which specialised in scones, crumpets and white bread’.42 ‘The principal club in Cologne, with staff complete, was requisitioned as an officers’ club’;43 two of the city’s theatres were taken over by the British troops so that they could stage their own performances; and swimming baths, the Zur Post Hotel and some sporting grounds (including the golf course) were requisitioned so that the British might not run the risk of having too much contact with the local population.44 Cinemas were appropriated for the exclusive use of the British troops and the garrison had its own newspaper, the Cologne Post, and leisure and social organisations for families such as the Mothers’ Union and Scouts and Guides. Indeed, one British officer later observed that ‘I need not have been concerned with the problem of whether to avoid Germans or not; there was no question of any contact with them’.45 Nevertheless, it might have been expected that, however much the personnel of the Army of the Rhine and their families tried to remain aloof from the local population, the very fact of the occupation would have been a source of tension between the British and the native population. After all, as Robert Coulson noted, ‘[a]n army occupying a foreign country in time of peace is in a strange position. It is neither really at peace, nor is it at war. There is consequently no definite attitude to determine its relationship with the population of the occupied country. It depends to a great extent on the personal factor’.46 Yet many visitors to the Rhineland in the years immediately after the First World War expressed their surprise at the amicable relations which existed between the Germans and the British. The historian Sir Charles Oman recalled that when he arrived in the Rhineland to give a series of lectures in March 1919, ‘the Cologne district was absolutely quiet under our very considerate and easygoing rule, whose mildness was a source of intense amazement to the natives’.47 Nor was he alone in feeling that the occupation, in the British Zone at least, demonstrated ‘the half-unconscious genius of our race for government’48 through the fact that the Germans bore no animosity towards their former enemies and had welcomed them with open arms. In one of the first accounts of the occupation published in English, Violet Markham emphasised the ‘comfort and security’49 of life in the Cologne zone, describing it as ‘a land of perfect order’50 where life was ‘very pleasant for the occupying army’,51 while the ‘Germans on their side have learnt fully to appreciate the merits of British rule’.52 Indeed, according to Markham, the occupied area was a haven for international 69

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co-operation and reconciliation. She remembered attending an open air concert at the zoological gardens in Cologne in August 1919 at which French, English and Germans all sat together in harmony to enjoy a ‘peaceful happy gathering, with laughter, and music, and beer – the music and the beer both of excellent quality’.53 For her, [t]he outstanding fact in the occupied territory, and one which fills an English visitor with ever-growing amazement, is the complete acquiescence of the Germans in the situation. Life is astonishingly normal. Khaki soldiers have replaced grey-coated soldiers. Otherwise everything seems to go on exactly as before. These amazing people, outwardly at least, do not appear to mind that their country is occupied by hostile armies.54 This same impression was repeated in numerous British accounts of the occupation. The Anglo-Irish writer Katharine Tynan recalled that she arrived in Cologne in 1923 expecting to find sullen and resentful enemies, but in fact was met with only courtesy and consideration.55 Morgan Philips Price, the Daily Herald’s correspondent in Germany, wrote in January 1922 that after extensive conversations with ‘all classes of the German population’ in the Rhineland he had heard little complaint against the British army of occupation, noting that ‘I think it is beyond doubt that the British authorities have been considerate to the inhabitants, as far as possible’.56 Similarly, Cicely Hamilton wrote that she was not ‘horrified or revolted by the methods of British administration; on the contrary, taken all round, it seemed to me decent and considerate; the worst I saw was occasional bad manners on the part of individuals and very occasional bullying’.57 Indeed, she asserted that ‘the British soldier in the occupied areas was doing more to heal the wounds of war and promote good feeling between ex-enemies than many professedly “international” agencies’ and that ‘the fact remains that the British Army of Occupation … left no legacy of hatred behind it’.58 These accounts of the essentially harmonious relations which existed between the occupying forces and the population of Cologne and its environs were in contrast to the adverse comment on the behaviour of the occupying forces in the French Zone frequently to be found in British accounts of the occupation. The difference between the two zones was noted explicitly by Tynan, who wrote that [t]he British Occupation must have had its best chance of being popular in the fact that it was side by side with the French. […] The 70

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French soldiers walked through the streets of Rhenish towns – stalked, one might say – with an austere aloofness. They never forgot that they were the victors.59 Similarly, Ferdinand Tuohy recalled that the French delighted in asserting their position as conquerors: they flew the tricolour everywhere, held military parades, played ‘the Marseillaise on the Marktplatz on Sundays and on but slight provocation on other occasions’.60 There were numerous petty insults and inconveniences: at Trier only French soldiers were allowed to use the central entrance to the railway station, in Koblenz the best seats in church were reserved for the occupiers, and barracks and sports grounds were named in honour of French victories over the Germans. However, there were also more serious reasons for grievance such as ‘the requisitions, the quartering of the troops, [and] the Draconian infliction of the full meaning of the word “Occupation” in matters material’.61 This vision of the harsh French occupation juxtaposed with the benevolent regime in the British Zone was popularised by British writers such as Geoffrey Moss. The first three stories included in Moss’s collection Defeat (1924), as well as the first section of his 1933 novel I Face the Stars, were primarily concerned with the perceived iniquities of the French occupation. ‘The Souvenir’ is the story of a French officer who shoots a German prisoner when he refuses to hand over a golden matchcase (the ‘souvenir’ of the title), only to be murdered himself in revenge; ‘Moi, Je Suis Français’ tells of M’Poo, a fundamentally decent African, who is corrupted by French chauvinism and eventually turns to murder; while the title story, ‘Defeat’, is the story of Graf Hasso von Koekritz, an officer in the ‘Green Police’ in the Rhineland, and of his death at the hands of a mob supported by French troops. In all of these stories the French are portrayed as rapacious, vengeful and cruel, determined to make the most of their position as conquerors and occupiers, while the Germans are presented as innocent victims, ordinary people at the mercy of impersonal forces that they can neither control nor understand. A similar picture is presented in I Face the Stars, in which the hardships suffered by the Germans under the terms of the Treaty and the French occupation are made clear to the reader – both the practical problems such as the inflation and food shortages, but also the more spiritual sufferings caused by defeat and occupation: the loss of national pride, humiliation and resentment of the occupiers, moral dislocation and hedonism. Here the petty bureaucracy, spitefulness and intransigence of the French occupation are again underlined,62 while one of the key 71

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components of the first section of the novel is the discussion of how the Germans should respond to the occupation. In particular much attention is given to the illegal but patriotic activities of the ‘Ruhr Resistance Fighters’. The extent to which the latter were either wise or successful is an important question in the first section I Face the Stars, and Moss seems to be suggesting that while the resistance ultimately failed to produce practical results, it was the only way in which the old conservative German patriots could respond to the humiliations of defeat and occupation. Indeed, Moss seems to regard the resistance as admirable, a way for sections of German society to preserve the values of family honour and patriotism which were rapidly being swept away by the tide of postwar materialism and pleasure-seeking. Although little known today, Moss’s German stories proved hugely influential with his contemporaries. Defeat reached a wider readership than many of the more serious non-fiction accounts of the occupation of the Rhineland, not least because one of the stories contained within it was made into a feature film by D. W. Griffith. At the same time the collection was praised by other British intellectuals with an interest in conditions in Germany and Treaty revision. The feminist and pacifist writer Helena Swanwick recommended Defeat, in a letter to her friend Winifred Holtby, as an exemplary exploration of conditions within postwar Germany;63 while Harold Nicolson, who wrote the Preface to the 1932 edition of Defeat, declared that [b]ooks like Major Moss’s “Defeat” […] serve a humane purpose. […] They constitute a warning and an encouragement. They show us that human nature, if exposed to protracted violence, is apt to revert to a savage condition. Yet they show us that individual character can triumph over the most crushing of disasters, over the most humiliating of human defeats.64 But perhaps the most interesting example of Moss influencing a fellow writer is the case of Graham Greene. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Greene stated that reading Defeat roused in him an indignation at the cruelties visited on the Germans by the occupying forces and inspired him to offer his services ‘as a propagandist’ to the German Embassy.65 Greene received a visit from the German First Consul and it was duly arranged that he should visit the Rhineland in order to gather impressions for a series of articles on conditions in the occupied area. In due course Greene, his friend and co-conspirator Claud Cockburn and Greene’s cousin ‘Tooter’ set off for Germany, travelling ‘inexpensively by the Hook’66 and 72

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eventually visiting Cologne, Essen, Bonn, Trier and Mainz. Furnished with letters of introduction by the German Embassy, they met with Dr Hennings, owner of a dye factory, and ‘a man called Waldenheim, who was the political organizer in the German Volkspartei’,67 but as three undergraduates abroad on an all expenses paid trip they were more concerned with adventure than closely observing social and political conditions. In Essen they went to a Cabaret and watched as ‘a rather fat naked woman did a symbolic dance of Germany in chains’,68 and flirted with danger, touring Essen by night with shots going off all around them, Cockburn ‘scared shitless’ and Green ‘striding boldly along, oblivious to danger’.69 Later, when they visited Bonn, Greene recalled that, ‘inspired by the atrocity stories we had heard in Cologne, we followed innocent Senegalese soldiers in the hope of seeing a rape, which never occurred’,70 and in Heidelberg they encountered ‘a kindly middle-aged man in plusfours […] who frankly explained to us […] He was a kidnapper’,71 who arranged for ‘collaborators’ within the French zone to be bundled over the border so that they might be ‘tried’ for high treason. All this excitement seems to have gone to Greene’s head to some extent and he toyed for some months after his return with the idea of becoming a secret agent in the pay of the Germans. According to his autobiography he even went so far as to offer his services as a courier for secret nationalist groups or as an informer within separatist groups within the zone occupied by the French. However, he never got the chance to undertake further assignments on behalf of the German government. As he put it ‘[t]he Dawes Plan was formulated, the Great Powers met together at some Swiss resort, agreements were reached, guarantees were given, and one insignificant recruit to the ranks of espionage was told to fall out – his services no longer required’.72 Greene later claimed that this was his introduction to the world of espionage, but at times it seems to have been closer to an undergraduate drinking holiday than a serious investigation of conditions in the occupied areas or an apprenticeship in the murky world of espionage. Accounts of the hardships and iniquities of the French occupation were therefore of vital importance in shaping British attitudes towards postwar Germany. But perhaps the single issue which caused most controversy was the use of colonial troops from France’s African and Far Eastern imperial possessions in the occupation of the Rhineland. As Morgan Philips Price observed, one of ‘the principle grievances of the Rhinelanders is the presence of coloured troops in their country’;73 and the issue was rapidly taken up by British commentators who saw it as

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further evidence of the vindictiveness and unscrupulousness of their erstwhile allies. Leading the charge of British outrage was the Edmund Dene Morel, left-wing Liberal journalist, founder of the Union of Democratic Control and Labour MP for Dundee between 1922 and 1924. Morel had achieved a degree of fame, as well as a reputation as an expert on African affairs, for his efforts to bring an end to the atrocious Belgian regime in the Congo while he was editor of the Africa Mail. But in April 1920 he published an article in the Daily Herald in which he unambiguously attacked the French policy of employing ‘primitive African barbarians’ in the occupying forces in a deliberate attempt to ‘ruin, enslave, degrade, dismember [and] reduce to the lowest depths of despair and humiliation a whole people’.74 From this point until his death in November 1924 Morel kept up a constant stream of pamphlets and journal articles attacking the deployment of French Colonial troops in the occupied Rhineland in which he repeated his claims that these soldiers were responsible for a ‘ghastly outbreak of prostitution, rape and syphilis’.75 In The Horror on the Rhine (1920) he asserted that between thirty and forty thousand African troops were stationed in the Rhineland and claimed to have evidence that brothels had been established and maintained at the expense of German taxpayers for the exclusive use of coloured troops in various Rhenish towns and cities, and to have the ‘details of some eighty cases of rape and attempted rape’ consisting of victims testimonials and witness statements.76 These included ‘two cases of indecent assault upon young boys aged seven and eleven respectively’77, alongside numerous other examples of the ‘barely restrainable bestiality of the black troops’.78 Morel was far from being alone in his condemnation of the deployment of ‘coloured’ troops in the Rhineland, although he was perhaps the most strident in his attacks on the policy. The issue was taken up by the political left in Britain as part of its crusade against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and copies of Morel’s The Horror on the Rhine were distributed to delegates to the Trades Union Congress conference in September 1920. Questions were asked in Parliament and numerous other writers and commentators joined the debate. With staggering hypocrisy, many on the left thundered against ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ while at the same time insisting that ‘[i]t wasn’t a question of colour […] it was simply a “question of development”’.79 Yet the fact that the issue of race was so readily seized upon by the political left is not as surprising as it might at first appear: the use of colonial troops in the Rhineland gave added ammunition to those seeking a revision of the treaty, and was more likely to elicit sympathy from the 74

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white population in Europe or North America than many other instances of French unreasonableness. Furthermore, this issue needs to be understood in the context of the racial attitudes of the day. There was widespread acceptance of the concept of a hierarchy of races in which a people’s position on the evolutionary ladder was indicated by skin colour. That this thinking was increasingly being challenged as independence movements gathered pace in Africa and India after the First World War made the white population of European imperial powers such as Britain cling even more tenaciously to it. And there can be little doubt that such attitudes were at the heart of British opposition to the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine.’ One of the key planks of Morel’s argument was that by giving ‘negroes’ a degree of mastery over their supposed racial superiors in Germany, the French were endangering the established racial and political order in Europe and Africa.80 Similarly, Gedye saw the use of colonial troops in the Rhineland as part of a wider ‘deliberate decision to support the declining French race with coloured – even with Negroid elements – from Africa’81 and therefore objected to it on purely racial grounds. In a 1924 letter he wrote that despite the repulsion which it inspires in all non-Latin Europeans, men of colour are still placed in authority over so highly developed a race as the Germans. In 1923 and 1924, these coloured men – the French will not have them called black because the pure negro regiments were withdrawn in 1921 as they could not stand the European climate – were largely used in the French attempt to separate the Rhineland from Germany through the subjugation of the country to a terrorist Government of German and other criminals and nonentities. […] As the world knows, the hope failed [… but] Coloured men […] are still armed and used by France in times of peace to occupy this beautiful country inhabited by a highly civilized and disarmed population and all the degradation accompanying the long-continued use of armed coloured troops as the conquerors of a proud and progressive white race is forced upon the Rhineland – in the course of an occupation in which we share.82 The fact that British opposition to French policy was based almost entirely on racism is further underlined by the terms in which colonial troops were described in many accounts. Crude racial stereotypes abound in British accounts of the occupation, where colonial troops are almost without exception portrayed as stupid and aggressive, sullen, mulishly 75

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intransigent or servile.83 Even the character of M’Poo in Moss’s “Moi, Je Suis Français”, who is essentially portrayed as being as much the victim of French militarism and chauvinism as the German engineer that he murders, is a caricature African with his ‘woolly head’ and childish delight in his uniform and Hessler’s pet white mice.84 Furthermore, British observers had a marked tendency to exaggerate the scale of the ‘Black Horror’ and misrepresent the racial origins of the colonial units stationed in the Rhineland. Sir Charles Oman claimed that Trier was ‘flooded with African troops’85 when he visited in March 1919 and Morel wrote of tens of thousands of ‘African negroes’ being deployed. And while it is true that French records suggest that there were around 45,000 colonial troops in the Rhineland in the spring of 1921 (when the deployment of such regiments was at its height), this number had dwindled to 2,000 in 1927 and by 1929 ‘the “Black Horror” involved [only] 767 extremely wellbehaved Anamese and 320 Arabs’.86 There was some confusion over the racial origins of many of the troops stationed in the Rhineland. Although both German propaganda and the majority of British accounts represented colonial troops as coal black savages from the African jungle […] The only true blacks stationed in the Rhineland were a brigade of Senegalese and a few Sudanese, who left on 1 June 1920. The remainder of the ‘Black Horror’ consisted of a division of Moroccans composed of Frenchmen, Arabs, and Berbers of mixed blood; about 3,000 Malagasies from Madagascar, predominantly Malays, although some were of mixed blood; a brigade of Spahis and one of Zouaves, both Algerian; various Tunisian and Algerian units of colonial Frenchmen and Arabs; occasional creoles from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion; and a sprinkling of Annamese from Indochina.87 Moreover, as Sally Marks has demonstrated, there is much contemporary evidence to refute the more hysterical allegations of rape, murder and abduction to be found in Morel’s writings. Morgan Philips Price reported in 1922 that [l]ocal Social Democratic and trade union leaders […] assured me that the workmen in several places had quite friendly relations with the coloured troops. In the villages of the Trier district the smaller peasants have asked the Moroccan soldiers to help them in the vine harvest, and often a sturdy darkie in French colonial uniform can be

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seen carrying a German child on his arm and playing with him in the village street when he is off duty.88 Similarly, one British official of the Rhineland High Commission reported that the Rhinelanders actually preferred the colonial troops to those recruited from metropolitan France because ‘French soldiers hated Germans and acted as conquerors, with all that implied. Indigenous troops neither hated the Rhenish nor lorded it over them. Also, despite occasional incidents, these forces were better behaved because the French army meted out draconian punishments to non-white offenders’.89 Claims of wrongdoing were exhaustively investigated as the propaganda war between Paris and Berlin over the issue of the occupation intensified. The French authorities noted that in general ‘non-white troops behaved better than white occupation forces and pre-war German garrisons’, and many British and American officials grudgingly agreed.90 Nevertheless, this was not enough to stop complaints, both British and German, about the use of colonial troops in the Rhineland, which continued until the withdrawal of Allied troops in 1929 and beyond.91 The standard perception of the occupation of the Rhineland in British accounts was therefore one in which the orderly and amicable nature of relations between the occupiers and the local population in the British zone was contrasted with the harsh and vindictive treatment of the Germans in the French and, to a much lesser extent, Belgian zones. However, not all British intellectuals interpreted the occupation in this way. We have already seen how Morgan Philips Price provided an alternative view of relations between the Rhinelanders and French colonial troops, but a much wider ranging alternative view of the occupation, challenging many of the assumptions made by the authors of other accounts, can be found in the writings of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. It was on a return journey from the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1924 that Brittain and Holtby made the tour of the occupied areas recounted by Brittain in Testament of Youth (1933) and by Holtby in her letters to her friend Jean McWilliam. This visit affected both women deeply: like many other British commentators they had travelled to Germany ‘to see for themselves the effect of the blockade, and the postwar miseries and humiliations’92 of the German people. They entered Germany with clearly established pre-conceived ideas of what they would encounter there, gleaned from the press and official reports. Nevertheless, the trip was not a pleasant one, and Brittain wrote that what she saw in Germany ‘frightened and disturbed her’.93 77

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Brittain’s recollection of her experiences in Saarbrücken mirror closely the standard British interpretation of the French occupation: she noted the widespread antagonism toward the Treaty of Versailles and the Allies – especially the French – amongst the German population, and observed that shopkeepers and local officials proved hostile and unhelpful until they realised that she was English, not French.94 Yet her travelling companion’s impressions of the French zone could not have been more different. Holtby wrote of the good quality of life and social care enjoyed by the Germans in the French zone, noting that [i]n Saarbrucken [sic] the people are prosperous; the miners live in little white houses with gardens outside and window-boxes filled with pink geraniums, amazingly clean and well-liking [sic]. There are hospitals in the fir woods for the children, cripples and the sick, fitted with most modern equipment. […] All the people were bright and interested, with only the shadow of sadness behind them.95 Similarly, in an unpublished short story from this period, entitled ‘The Cow’, Holtby struck an unusual note of hope for the future. The story is set in the Ruhr during the French occupation and concerns a little German boy called Paul, who has been evacuated from his home by the French authorities, and misses the family cow. He fears that she has been killed or otherwise mistreated by the occupiers, so he runs away and makes his way back to the family farm at Büdheim, where he finds the animal safe and well in the barn. When discovered by the French couple who now live on the farm, he explains to them that he is there because he feared for the safety of the cow. The couple understand ‘more deeply than the clash of language fundamentally the loyalty of the men who live by the soil to the beasts who serve them’96 and send him back to his mother with ‘a certificate of the safety of dottschen [sic], the Cow. It was a peace-treaty, between two peoples of the soil’.97 This is fascinating because it is in complete contrast with so many other British accounts – both fiction and non-fiction – of the occupation. Firstly, the story is unusual in that its central characters are German and French. As we shall see in Chapter 6, almost all other British and American fiction set in Weimar Germany is focused on expatriate life in Berlin. This is true of Christopher Isherwood’s novels, but also of Robert McAlmon’s stories set in Berlin that were being written at roughly the same time as Holtby was working on ‘The Cow’. Even in the work of Moss, who was similarly concerned with the plight of the Germans living under occupation, the anxieties and hardships of the Germans are often 78

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filtered through the reactions or observations of British characters and narrators.98 Secondly, the ending of ‘The Cow’, with its focus on reconciliation and the internationalism of ordinary people working on the land, is in complete contrast to all other contemporary British writing on the French occupation. It is particularly interesting to compare Holtby’s French characters to those who appear in Moss’s stories ‘The Souvenir’, ‘Moi, Je Suis Français’ and ‘Defeat’. These stories, written concurrently with Holtby’s draft, present the French as being venal, chauvinistic, petty and cruel, a very different picture to that of Holtby’s sympathetic and understanding French couple. However, if they disagreed in their interpretation of the French zone, Holtby and Brittain were in complete agreement with one another (if not with the majority of their compatriots) in their comments on the British zone of occupation. When they moved on to Trier and Cologne from Saarbrücken, Brittain and Holtby themselves experienced something of the animosity that they had sensed was directed toward the French in the Saarland. Brittain wrote that upon arriving in Cologne she and Holtby ‘immediately encountered, in the demeanour of porters and taxi-drivers and hotel servants, a hostility which reminded us that we, the selfrighteous British, had become to Cologne exactly what the French were to the Rhineland and the Saar’99. She noticed the ‘dark, decaying houses’100, the ‘cloud of depression upon the city’101 and the hardships suffered by the local population. She felt intimidated by ‘the latent hostilities and the unmistakable sufferings of this fierce, unhappy city’102 and recalled writing in her diary that ‘[i]t makes me miserable to be in the midst of a whole population who feel bitterly towards me’.103 Similarly, Holtby found Cologne ‘a heart-breaking city’ containing ‘all the sorrow and dignity of a conquered people’.104 In her correspondence she pointed out the casual insensitivity and unconscious arrogance of the occupiers, writing: [n]ever believe any one when they tell you that it is more dignified to win than to be defeated. It isn’t true. Here in streets lit no more brightly than London in war-time, English Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices “No Germans allowed.” The money for their food is all paid from German taxes, and the German children crowd round their brightly lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have ever seen.105

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According to Holtby, in this ‘strange, darkened country’106, ‘the hospitals are full of children suffering from rickets and tuberculosis’107 and the people are polite but defensive, ‘as though they expected to be insulted or patronised’.108 The writing of Holtby and Brittain’s presents the reader with a clear picture of German victimhood – ordinary Germans suffering and at the mercy of the Treaty of Versailles and the armies of occupation – a common theme in much other writing on Weimar Germany. Yet unlike that of authors such as Markham, Hamilton and Moss it does not absolve the British from the responsibility for German suffering. In Holtby’s account the resentment of native Rhinelanders, suffering under food shortages and economic dislocation, towards the comfortable and well fed occupying troops in Cologne is palpable. Nevertheless, according to Brittain and Holtby the suffering experienced in the British zone was of a different order to that found in the areas occupied by the French. The active and conscious cruelties of the French zone contrasted with the casual, almost unconscious humiliations caused by the commandeering of German shops and hotels and the condescending attitude of the occupiers that Brittain and Holtby observed in the Cologne. These differing perspectives may have much to do with the time in which Brittain and Holtby made their journey. In the immediate wake of the Ruhr Crisis tensions were still high in the Rhineland and it may be that Brittain and Holtby arrived in Cologne at a particularly bad time. It is clear that after the implementation of the Dawes Plan and the signing of the Locarno Agreements the relationship between occupiers and occupied did change significantly. As Germany began to recover from the political and economic upheavals of the immediate postwar period and to normalise her relations with her former enemies, the Rhinelanders began to see the occupation more as a hindrance to normal economic development than a bulwark against the revolutionary upheavals and political violence that had beset the rest of the Reich between 1918 and 1923. With the introduction of the Rentenmark in November 1923 the Germans began to show a new self-confidence that had been lacking up until that point, and while the British had once been able to take full advantage of the privileged financial position that possession of foreign currency gave them, they were now treated much less obsequiously by tradesmen and waiters. The Annual Report of the British High Commissioner in 1924 stated that ‘cases of insolent behaviour were not infrequent. Germany had now become a “hochvaluta” land, with a currency which could hold its own with the dollar; her sons adopted a patronising attitudes and made contemptuous remarks

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about the weakness of sterling and the depreciation of the French and Belgian franc’.109 As Coulson recalled, [p]olicemen looked more important and controlled traffic with greater authority and answered questions more abruptly. Even the street crowds, shabby as they were, seemed to take on a new air of selfrespect. We began to find that it was just a trifle less easy to be “top dog” in Cologne since we had ceased to be millionaires.110 Relations deteriorated further after the postponement of the British withdrawal from Cologne in January 1925, after which Coulson wrote that ‘[f]or the first time since I had been on the Rhine I had the unpleasant feeling that we were really unpopular’,111 while Tuohy recalled that ‘the natives had grown to be thoroughly unpleasant’.112 Indeed, relations between occupiers and occupied soured to such an extent that the official historian of the occupation wrote that by 1926 the British were the ‘despised conquerors’ and subject to ‘frivolous and insolent’ claims for compensation when they set out to move from Cologne to Wiesbaden.113 The occupied Rhineland was therefore a magnet for British journalists, writers, and political commentators who wished to see for themselves events as they unfolded in Germany during the tumultuous early years of the Weimar Republic. No other region of the Reich except for Berlin attracted British visitors in such numbers during the first half of the 1920s, and while the Reich capital was, and continued to be, the destination of choice for hedonists and pleasure seekers, the Rhineland was the favoured haunt of those who wanted to see first hand the effects of the post-war peace settlement on the German population. This was partly because the presence of British troops and their wartime allies made the Rhineland a relatively safe vantage point from which foreigners could examine the political and economic upheavals that beset the new Republic, but it was also a consequence of the close relationship between the occupation and the other major issues in international politics at the time: the debate over revision of the Treaty, reparations, and disarmament. British writing on the occupied area is therefore useful for a number of reasons in an examination of British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic. Firstly, the focus on an area outside Berlin is valuable and interesting because so much other British writing was concentrated on the capital. But we should not think that British accounts of events in the Rhineland necessarily give us a more realistic picture of what was happening in Germany as a whole. The very fact of the occupation 81

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insulated the Rhineland to some extent from some of the political and economic difficulties being experienced elsewhere in the Reich, while the experience of living under foreign dominion for over a decade naturally helped to formulate attitudes which were not present in areas which had not been occupied. Secondly, it is clear that British writing on the occupation was instrumental in challenging wartime stereotypes and presenting the public with an alternative image of the Germans. In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, British writers focused on the poverty, starvation and disease that were regarded as a consequence of the continuing Allied blockade of Germany. These stories, along with official reports and letters home from servicemen stationed in and around Cologne did much to overcome the wartime stereotype of the ‘Hun’ in the popular imagination and replace it with a more sympathetic attitude towards postwar Germany. Thus began the process by which the recent enemy was increasingly seen as the victim of an unjust peace settlement, in which British politicians had colluded with the French to impose a harsh and vindictive treaty upon a population who were already suffering from the economic and social dislocations caused by war and revolution. As time went on the petty and vindictive nature of the occupying authorities in the French Zone, the French policy of supporting the Rhenish separatist movement and in particular the use of colonial troops from Africa and the Far East were increasingly deployed by intellectual commentators on the occupation in order to support the argument that the Treaty was unjust and in desperate need of revision. This further bolstered the theme of German victimhood to be found not just in the fiction of authors like Geoffrey Moss, but also in the writings of serious political commentators such as H. N. Brailsford and W. H. Dawson. Nevertheless, there is much contemporary evidence to suggest that the view of the occupation presented by the majority of British observers, and accepted by historians ever since, was not the whole story. While most of those who wrote accounts of the occupation stressed the suffering of the local population and the iniquities of the French, while at the same time underlining the good relations that existed between occupiers and occupied in the British Zone; there were others who called into question the benign nature of the British occupation. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby presented a very different picture of Cologne under the British occupation than that found in the writings of many of their contemporaries, while Holtby also called into question the widespread notion that the German population in the French Zone around Saarbrücken were oppressed by a cruel and implacable French regime. The 82

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reasons for this are not entirely clear: it may be that Brittain and Holtby were simply more sensitive to the feelings of the Rhinelanders than their compatriots, but there is some evidence to suggest that in the period when they visited Cologne and the British area of occupation – October 1924 – saw an upsurge of anti-British feeling. What is certain is that they provide a radically different vision of life in the British Zone and one that should perhaps lead us to call into question the assessment of relations between the occupiers and the local population to be found in many official reports and contemporary newspaper accounts and memoirs. British writing on the occupation of the Rhineland has often been overlooked in accounts of intellectual attitudes towards the Weimar Republic, whose focus on the Berlin-based escapades of Isherwood and his circle or the activities of campaigners for Treaty revision such as Keynes. Yet, as we have seen, to do so is to ignore an important aspect of the British discourse on Weimar Germany and one that was instrumental in shaping how British writers and commentators, as much as the British public, viewed Germany in this period. If nothing else the occupation, together with the linked issues of reparations and disarmament, kept Germany at the forefront of the British mind in the years immediately after the First World War. And for many authors – Moss, Greene, Brittain and Holtby among them – it was their observations of life in the occupied Rhineland that provided their primary point of contact with interwar Germany and so shaped their attitudes towards the nation and its inhabitants as a whole. The occupation was thus, for a number of key commentators on the Weimar Republic, central to shaping attitudes towards Germany and the Germans.

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4 Sexual Mecca, City of Doom, or Cosmopolitan Capital? British Attitudes to Berlin Twenty years ago John J. White published a paper1 in which he argued that a clear pattern could be discerned in the ways in which AngloAmerican authors of the interwar period portrayed Berlin in their writings. White’s thesis was that, while British, Irish and American writers of the 1920s represented the German capital as a city of lax morals and a haven of liberated attitudes towards sex and sexuality, those of the 1930s and 1940s saw it first as the capital of the Nazi Empire and then as a doomed metropolis, whose destruction had been made inevitable by the political and economic upheavals of the previous twenty years. There is much that is true in this assessment, but it is also in many ways a somewhat simplistic picture of British attitudes towards Berlin, in the Weimar period at least. In particular White’s analysis is let down by an over-reliance on a limited range of sources, in which the names Isherwood, Auden and Spender loom large. As we shall see, there were certainly British visitors who were keen to portray the German capital as a sexual Mecca which attracted pleasure-seekers from across Europe, or as a ‘City of Doom’ beset by political and economic crisis and terrorized by crime and paramilitary violence. But this was not the whole story. The writings of a number of British visitors cast a very different light on life in the capital of Weimar Germany, often explicitly contradicting the more familiar portrayal of a decadent and doomed Berlin populated by gangsters and hedonists.

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Berlin had not traditionally had a good reputation amongst the British. While the grand tourists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often visited Hanover, Vienna and Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia attracted ‘relatively few British visitors prior to the reign of Frederick II “the Great” (1740–86)’,2 when Prussian military success, close diplomatic ties and its proximity to Hanover and Saxony created more interest in Berlin. Even then most British visitors would have agreed with Nathaniel Wraxall, who found Berlin ‘magnificent, but not an agreeable city […] deficient in those spectacles and amusements common in capitals, and consequently […] dull and unpleasant [… with] a kind of gloomy grandeur and sombre magnificence that strikes, but does not pleasingly affect the mind’.3 This prejudice against the Prussian capital was to continue throughout the nineteenth century, when, as we have seen, British tourists and holidaymakers much preferred the bucolic charms of the Rhineland and the Black Forest, or the more established and aesthetically pleasing surroundings of Dresden or Munich, to the dubious delights of Berlin. Jerome K. Jerome, who was by no means an uncritical enthusiast for Germany, described the capital of the recently established German Empire as a disappointing town; its centre overcrowded, its outlying parts lifeless, its one famous street, Unter den Linden, an attempt to combine Oxford Street with the Champs Elysée, singularly unimposing, being much too wide for its size […] its opera house unworthy of it; its two music halls, with an unnecessary suggestion of vulgarity and commonness about them, ill-arranged and much too large for comfort.4 Such perceptions were to continue well into the twentieth century: Cicely Hamilton recalled that before the First World War most British tourists regarded Berlin as ‘a militarised and upstart city; adorned at intervals with somewhat boastful monuments, and with none of the charms, and few of the traditions of the elder capitals of Europe’.5 Yet all this was to change after 1918. In the 1920s Berlin became the destination of choice for British intellectuals visiting the Weimar Republic, so much so that it came to replace other urban centres as the acknowledged capital of German culture. For the first time Berlin came to be regarded as a hugely important European cultural centre, at the forefront of modern art, literature, music and architecture. What is more, the German capital came to be seen as thoroughly modern, in tune with, 85

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even exemplifying, the spirit of the age. By the end of the Weimar period it had come to eclipse other cities as a favoured destination for British tourists and pleasure-seekers. This was especially true of intellectual travellers, who were attracted to the city by tales of lax morals and avantgarde experimentation in the arts, or by the chance to establish valuable political, business or social contacts. Moreover, Berlin, as the centre of national politics, was the base for British diplomats and journalists, while its newfound status as an international cultural centre made it first port of call for artists, writers, collectors and bohemians. Indeed, Berlin seems to have been regarded both as a city embodying the spirit of the 1920s and as a sort of cosmopolitan meeting place and international hub upon which European events were apt to turn. This being the case, British attitudes towards Berlin are of central importance to understanding their attitudes towards the Weimar Republic as a whole: all too often the Berlin-centric nature of travel to Germany in this period led intellectuals to make sweeping statements about the nation as a whole based only on their observations of life in the capital, which should perhaps cause us to question some of the generalizations that were made about the Republic by British visitors. Berlin in the Weimar period had very quickly gained a reputation amongst the British for ‘wickedness’ and ‘vice’. Before setting out for Berlin in 1928 the poet W. H. Auden wrote to a friend declaring his intentions and asked hopefully ‘Is Berlin very wicked?’6 It is a question that might have been asked with the same sense of expectancy by many of his contemporaries, for in the 1920s Berlin became, like Paris, a place where the British middle classes could go to do things and live in ways that they felt they could not at home. This was partly due to a perception of Berlin as being more permissive in matters of sex, particularly as regards homosexuality. Indeed, it almost seems that while Paris remained the destination of choice for the British middle-class bohemian in search of heterosexual encounters, Berlin became in the Weimar period the favoured haunt of his homosexual counterpart. But it was not just the perception of Berlin’s liberated attitude towards sexuality that earned the city its reputation for hedonism. There was a popular perception amongst Britons that Berlin was a city given over entirely to pleasure, where life was one long round of frenetic activity, as if the Berliners had collectively gone mad and were participating in one enormous non-stop orgy. This, of course, is an exaggeration and a grotesque caricature of the reality of life in Weimar Berlin – ‘most of its people lived the way most people live in other times and in other cities, going to work in the morning and returning home at night, worrying 86

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about taxes or not worrying about taxes, eating and drinking and marrying and dying’7 – but it is a caricature that persists as the popular and generally accepted picture of Weimar Berlin in the English-speaking world, even today. Foreign visitors were particularly attracted to Berlin by tales of its wild nightlife and stories of nightclubs and cabarets where anything went. American writer Robert McAlmon wrote of Berlin in 1922 that ‘there was no telling whom one might encounter […] visitors flocked into Berlin, and even hardened Berlin night-lifers could not tell with certainty how the tone or quality of a nightclub might change from week to week’.8 This was an assessment of Berlin’s nightlife endorsed by British visitors to the city. Lieutenant Colonel Roddie wrote that ‘[i]n the countless “Lokals” […] danses macabres were nightly, hysterically and wantonly held’.9 These nightspots mirrored the modernity of the Weltstadt and not merely in their relaxed social attitudes and their tolerance of nudity and/or homosexuality. The bars, nightclubs and cabarets of Berlin in the 1920s were home to the latest dance sensations and avant-garde cabaret acts, as well as the new jazz tunes from America. Many of the entertainments that attracted or repelled British visitors to Berlin were not home-grown, but imported. One of the highlights of Berlin nightlife was the American dancer Josephine Baker, who moved her Revue Negresse from Paris to Berlin in the mid-1920s in the belief that the German capital was the place to be for a woman of her talents. Similarly, the famous Tiller Girls, who wowed audiences with their ‘coordinated kicklines, often moving up and down stairs’,10 originated in England under the auspices of impresario Joseph Tiller. Still, most of the customers of Berlin’s various night establishments did not care where their entertainment came from, it was enough for them that it was there at all. And whatever else was on offer, it was sex in particular that sold. Nudity was especially popular in the revues, cabarets and nightclubs of Weimar Berlin, and shows in which naked women danced or posed in mock-ups of historical or mythological scenes were common. Many British bohemians and intellectuals were undoubtedly attracted to Berlin by the promise of its sensational nightlife. In the early 1920s it was common for members of the Anglo-American community in Paris such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon to take trips over the FrancoGerman border in order to sample Berlin’s nightlife and take advantage of the cheapness of the entertainment on offer, before returning to the more traditional bohemian stamping ground of Paris. For some Britons, like Vita Sackville-West, the Berlin cabaret scene was one of the few good points about a city they regarded as ‘too depressingly German’.11 Similarly 87

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her cousin, Edward Sackville-West, chose to settle in Dresden rather than Berlin for the five months he spent in Germany between October 1927 and March 1928 because he found the Reich capital ‘ugly & squalid’.12 In Dresden he seems to have thought that he would be better able to follow his musical and literary interests, while Berlin seems to have held entirely different attractions for him.13 It is clear from Sackville-West’s diaries and correspondence that beautiful baroque Dresden with its old-world charm appealed to his higher artistic instincts, while aesthetically displeasing Berlin was the place to go to indulge his carnal instincts. While writers like Isherwood and Stephen Spender were drawn to the capital of the Republic by tales of its wild nightlife and sexual tolerance, and celebrated the freedom and hedonism of Weimar Berlin in their novels, poems and memoirs, other British writers made their disapproval of such things quite clear. To Lieutenant Colonel Roddie the bars and nightclubs that ‘offered waters of lethe to those who desired to forget the past and were, for the moment, unwilling to contemplate the future’14 were hysterical, wanton and ‘[s]ordid indeed’,15 sentiments that were mirrored in the stories of Geoffrey Moss.16 Similarly, despite having declared himself ‘rather disappointed at not seeing half the fabled “vice” of Berlin’17 during his 1921 visit, Wyndham Lewis lambasted the ‘Niggerdance luxury-spot[s]’,18 the ‘night-circuses, Negertanz palaces, naktballeten, flagellation-bars, and sad wells of super-masculine loneliness’19 of Weimar Berlin with their ‘sexish bottom-wagging’20 by homosexuals and transvestites. In spite of Lewis’s declaration that ‘[t]he sex-moralist is not only a bore, but should, I think, always be suspect,’21 the first three chapters of his book Hitler (1931) were devoted to a diatribe against what he called ‘the Haupstadt of Vice’.22 He attacked Berlin’s homosexual subculture in particular, opining that ‘Berlin […] is as everybody knows the quartier-général of dogmatic Perversity – the Perverts’ Paradise, the Mecca of both Lesb and So’.23 He described in detail an encounter in the notorious transvestite bar the Eldorado and railed against what he regarded the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, where, he argued, lax morals were encouraged because they were good for the tourist trade. In short, according to Lewis, [p]re-Hitler Berlin was a sink of iniquity – the fingers of any moderately fussy patriot must have itched to spring-clean it. Its male prostitutes alone, with their India-rubber breasts and padded hips – the fairy hostesses of the Eldorado – were a standing invitation to the Prussian to organise a “March on Berlin”.24

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This ‘fabled vice’ was to some extent regarded at the time as evidence of the sexual revolution taking place in Germany in which ‘the “tired bourgeois morals” of the pre-war era’25 were being abandoned in favour of freer and more ‘modern’ attitudes towards sex and sexuality. At the forefront of this revolution was the sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld (the influence of whose ideas can be gauged by the fact that his Institute for Sexual Science was established in 1919 with the help of a grant from the Social Democratic government of Prussia, and was ultimately handed over to the state in 192426), who sought to make debate about sexuality respectable by framing it in the terms of serious academic and scientific research, while at the same time agitating for a change in social attitudes and the law on homosexuality. And while Hirschfeld was unsuccessful in his attempts to get Paragraph 175 of the Reich legal code, which made homosexual acts between men illegal, repealed, under the Weimar Republic ‘[t]here was […] a degree of cautious liberalisation in social mores and the law: the homosexual subculture was granted a certain measure of tolerance … particularly in Berlin’.27 By the middle of the 1920s it had became ‘a necessity of avant-garde fashion to arrive at parties or go to the opera with a member of the same sex’,28 but the extent to which this is evidence of a widespread change in social attitudes is debateable. The police may have turned a blind eye to homosexual activity, but the fact that it remained officially illegal demonstrates that there was no great popular appetite in Germany as a whole for a change in the law. It should also be borne in mind that to some extent there were two types of gay nightlife on offer to British visitors to Weimar Berlin, that of bourgeois fashion designed to titillate wealthy foreign tourists to be found in the gaudy nightclubs of the Kurfürstendamm and Berlin’s ‘West End’, and the more ‘authentic’ subculture to be found in seedy bars such as Isherwood and Auden’s favourite, the Cosy Corner. The lines between the two were often blurred, but both were regarded as enticingly risky, as well as risqué, by many visitors, especially as they all too often brought those who went in search of Berlin’s fabled nightlife into contact with the city’s criminal underworld. As with many other large cities, the clubs and bars of Weimar Berlin were closely connected not only with drugs, prostitution and illegal gambling, but also with Berlin’s organised crime syndicates. Thus many British intellectuals, often unknowingly, would rub shoulders with Berlin gangsters on their trips to the nightclub or revue that they currently favoured. If both official figures and the accounts of British visitors to the city are to be believed, prostitution was rife in Weimar Berlin. Just as the removal 89

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of wartime censorship filled the cabarets with ever more racy and risqué acts, the material hardship caused by wartime shortages filled the streets and bars with women and men willing to sell their bodies in order to make ends meet, a phenomenon which was repeated as mass unemployment set in after 1929. As David Clay Large puts it Weimar Berlin’s commercial sex scene did not change much in its fundamentals from the imperial era, but the number of folks selling their bodies went up substantially. Police estimated the number of prostitutes at 25,000, but this included only the full-timers. According to one observer, all sorts of young girls “from so-called good families” were turning into whores, and countless marriages had become “a façade for the most wanton sexual chaos”.29 British visitors to Berlin could not fail to notice this plethora of women willing to sell themselves, especially as in the immediate postwar period foreigners in particular were solicited as foreign currency – unlike the mark, which was rapidly becoming worthless – retained its value. Lieutenant Colonel Roddie remembered that, when walking in Berlin with other British personnel of the Allied Control Commission in 1919, ‘ladies of the Pavement followed us, eagerest of all to resume friendly relations’,30 while almost a decade later Elizabeth Wiskemann lodged with ‘a middleaged woman of aristocratic family [… who] had a son and a daughter, both about 20 and both Nazis, and both very willing to sell their bodies for homosexual purposes’.31 Indeed, so common had it become for young girls to turn to prostitution that, according to Stephen Spender, there was a popular joke ‘that one of the stone lions outside the palace at the end of the Unter den Linden roared whenever a virgin walked by’.32 But the foreign visitor to Berlin had to remain wary, for ‘[a]t nights along the Unter den Linden it was never possible to know whether it was a woman or a man in woman’s clothes who accosted one’.33 Prostitution was the most obvious way for many to help make ends meet, but there were other ways of making a little money that were outside of both the law and the rules of polite society. The hardships and desperation of the immediate postwar period caused many of Berlin’s citizens from ordinarily respectable backgrounds to turn to some of the city’s more unsavoury professions in order to keep body and soul together: ‘[e]veryone was on the fiddle. Crime was everywhere’.34 One visitor to Berlin in the early 1920s noted that

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[d]opes, mainly cocaine, were to be had in profusion at most night places. A deck of ‘snow’, enough cocaine for quite too much excitement, cost the equal of ten cents. Poverty-stricken boys and girls of good German families sold it, and took it, as they congregated in the dreary night clubs for the warmth not available in their homes, if they had homes.35 There was also the prospect of employment in one of the many illegal or shady gambling clubs such as the Harmonie in Charlottenburg or the Klub Neuberlin in the Bülowstrasse. These were popular amongst both foreigners and native Berliners, and were places where their patrons could socialise and gamble in style: ‘the best clubs were very well equipped, with their own hairdressing salon, bath and sitting rooms. Visitors to illegal clubs were treated to a three course, candlelit meal before being ushered to the gaming tables’.36 As with much else in Berlin during the Weimar period, the observations made by British visitors of the German capital’s criminal underworld provide us with two sides of the same story. Wyndham Lewis wrote that ‘gang-violence in Berlin abounds, the armed Zuhälter or ponce fattens and flourishes’,37 and he compared the city to Chicago with the size and violence of its criminal gangs. Conversely, Roddie’s dealings with Berlin’s gangsters were on the friendliest of terms. He noted that on a visit to ‘the “social” centre of the criminal fraternity’38 in the early 1920s, the clientele ‘behaved decently, dressed decently, danced decently – urged by some moral instinct to cling to some appearance of respectability’.39 His impressions of Berlin’s organised crime fraternity were similarly favourable when in 1932 he attended, along with a friend, a ‘criminals’ ball’ held in one of Berlin’s suburbs. His friend explained to him that [t]he criminals, outcast from ordinary society, had about a dozen years ago, founded a Society of their own and called it the “Steadfast”. Members paid a small subscription. The Society buried those who died destitute, and looked after the wives and families of such members as might be temporarily removed from the sphere of their labours. Twice annually a ball was given, admission to which was a definite recognition of social distinction. […] At these balls everything was above suspicion – except the members.40 Roddie was impressed by the comradeship he witnessed amongst the criminals, as well as the respectability and decorum of the proceedings. It was a good night for him: not only did he get to see an aspect of Berlin 91

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society not often witnessed by foreigners and had the opportunity to gather interesting material for his memoirs, he also won half a sow in the tombola. However, as with so much else, the writings of British intellectuals about Berlin’s criminal fraternity express the perception rather than the reality of events in the German capital. Lewis may have spoken airily of the rampant criminality and gang violence of Weimar Berlin, comparing it (as other British commentators did) to Chicago, but the reality of crime and policing could not have been more different, as James F. Richardson demonstrated in his comparative study of the Berlin and US police forces of this period. Not only were the Berlin police better trained and educated than the average American policeman, but the success rate of criminal investigations was also higher: the Berlin police solved 39 out of the 40 murders committed in 1928, as opposed to the 63 out of 79 murder cases solved by the police in Cleveland, a city nowhere near as big as the German capital.41 Thus it would appear not only that violent crime was less common in Berlin than in Cleveland, but the police were more effective as well. It has also been suggested that Lewis’s writings in Hitler were not so much based on what he had seen as what he had read: ‘Frederick A. Voigt, declared that Lewis had been taken in by the Nazi press’ and accused him of ‘regurgitating Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter’42 in his accounts of gang and political violence. It should be borne in mind that the attitudes towards Berlin formed by British intellectuals are not always based on personal observation or objective sources and can therefore be far removed from the reality of life in Weimar Berlin. Politics was ever present in Weimar Berlin, and was never far away even in the writings of even the least politicised of foreign visitors. The Weimar Republic was born amidst political and social revolution and was buffeted by a series of political and economic crises throughout its lifetime. This led many British witnesses to regard Berlin and the German political scene in general as ‘crisis-central’,43 characterised by political violence in the streets and weak politicians in the Reichstag. Some British intellectuals were attracted to Berlin precisely because of the permeation of politics into every aspect of life, while for others it was only something that they encountered once they reached the city and saw for themselves the events that were taking place there. Some journalists, in particular, found Berlin a godsend – after all, political murders, the formation and collapse of administrations and the bickering of the various political parties made for good journalistic copy. However, it must be stressed that not all journalists felt like this. Frederick Voigt, the Manchester 92

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Guardian’s correspondent in Berlin throughout the Weimar era, wrote to his editor complaining about the exaggerated and sensationalist tone of reports in the British press on street-fighting and paramilitary violence, adding that [i]t is, of course, true that people are continually being killed and wounded both here and in other German towns and that this is a phenomenon that needs explaining. [However] It would, I think, be possible to make the average English reader understand how things are pretty bad here in certain limited respects but that Berlin is by no means like a sector of the Western Front each week end.44 Both Voigt and his opposite number at The Times, Norman Ebbutt, seem to have regarded the Daily Express as particularly guilty of this sensationalism,45 which was increasingly in favour amongst editors as newspaper sales fell and a ‘circulation war’ set in between 1931 and 1934. Nor were Voigt and Ebbutt alone in their feeling that what was happening in Germany was being misrepresented and that Berlin was not as dangerous as it was painted. The British Ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold, to some extent echoed Voigt’s comments when he wrote that ‘[c]onsular reports confirm the impression that, in the German press, accounts of the excesses are inclined to be exaggerated and sensational, while, notably in the English and American press, they are often grossly so’.46 Berlin was, for many British visitors, a playground or a freak show. It was a place that one went to in order to sample forbidden delicacies, to indulge one’s wildest desires or simply to goggle in disbelief at the unusual sights on display. There was something voyeuristic in many portrayals of Weimar Berlin, even in some of the soberest and most objective of journalistic accounts. Many who wrote of Berlin in the 1920s would have claimed they were just telling things as they were, but as we have seen, there were often (at least) two sides to each story, and the truth was often obscured by the perspective of the reporter. Yet the thing that most accounts by British observers of Berlin in this period by British observers have in common is an underlying sense that behind the glitter and the glamour ‘the German capital could be quite depressing and tawdry’.47 Elizabeth Wiskemann regarded Berlin as ‘a place where “lust” meant pleasure’ and she ‘was taken aback by a certain ruthlessness in the atmosphere’;48 while Robert McAlmon, who had visited the city almost a decade previously, noted that after a while he ‘began to know that Berlin was getting under my skin and depressing me. The innumerable beggars, 93

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paralytics, shell-shocked soldiers and starving people […] became too violent a depressant’49 and he returned to Paris. This feeling was summed up by Stephen Spender who later recalled that ‘[t]here was a sensation of doom to be felt on the Berlin streets’.50 In addition to this sense of doom and depression beneath the glamour of the city, there was a perception, to be found in the writings of many British intellectuals, of the fragility of the life they were leading. Claud Cockburn expressed it as the sense of impermanence, of foolish vulnerability in the face of inimical and indifferent forces of destruction, which could always be felt so strongly in Berlin. In Berlin you felt that the deluge was always just around the corner. […] in Berlin you could without difficulty believe in a day when the toads and perhaps worms and snails would, after so long awaiting their opportunity, note that the human defences had collapsed, and take over.51 He was by no means alone in this view. There was a general feeling among British visitors that Weimar Berlin could not last, a feeling that they were ‘dancing on the edge of a volcano’. Spender felt that in the early 1930s ‘the background of our lives in Germany was falling to pieces’, and that the Reich ‘reeled from crisis to crisis within a permanent crisis’.52 This, however, is an attitude to be found mostly in autobiographical writings, a phenomenon of hindsight (a notable exception is to be found in Robert McAlmon’s 1923 collection of stories Distinguished Air). As we shall see in Chapter 7, few British intellectuals thought that the Republic was likely to collapse at the time. Thus, while Berlin was to many British observers both a ‘sexual Mecca’ and a ‘City of Doom’, neither viewpoint was by any means universal. Opinion was divided, even within discussions of the ‘wickedness’ of the German capital or the prevailing social and political conditions there. Nevertheless, an examination of these viewpoints does not provide us with a comprehensive view of Weimar Berlin through British eyes. For while discussions of Berlin nightlife and paramilitary violence loom large in many British accounts of the city, such accounts can also present us with another view of Berlin – an image of an important cultural centre, a place of opportunity and a modern cosmopolitan capital city. Although it had been the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia for over two centuries and the home of central government in the German Empire since 1871, Berlin in the 1920s was still a new capital. Yet the foundations for the political and cultural predominance that it enjoyed in the Weimar 94

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period had been laid before the First World War. Germany’s rapid industrial expansion in the late nineteenth century brought about a massive increase in the size of the city and its population and made the German capital an important industrial and economic centre.53 At the same time the city authorities attempted to deal with the problems caused by this growth through progressive social policy and city planning. There were moves towards a modern and integrated transport system, and attempts were made to provide housing for the influx of workers for Berlin’s growing industrial base through the building of apartment blocks and tenements. In addition to this, Berlin in the early twentieth century was already a home to modern art and architecture: the Leipziger Platz façade of the Wertheim Department Store (1903–4), the AEG Small Turbine Factory in Berlin’s Wedding District (1910–13) and the Knorr Brake Works in the Lichtenberg District (1913–17) were all examples of modern architecture applied to commercial and industrial projects in the years before the First World War,54 while modernism in painting and sculpture was pioneered by, among others, the Berlin Secessionists of the 1890s and early twentieth century artists such as Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Lesser Ury and Käthe Kollwitz.55 All this laid the foundations for the explosive expansion of Berlin in the 1920s and the new and innovative building and artistic projects that went with it. Under the auspices of the Social Democratic city authorities, who felt that modernisation and rationalisation could bring social harmony and advancement, Berlin enjoyed an unprecedented period of expansion. Young architects such as Bruno Taut were commissioned to design affordable housing in the modern style to accommodate the city’s growing population: four million people by 1925 – one-fifteenth of Germany’s total population – and still growing by eighty to one hundred thousand people each year. By 1928 Berlin was the third largest city in the world, after London and New York. Investment was poured into public building projects, the city’s transport system was overhauled and the latest technology applied to the overhead and underground railway (S-Bahn and U-Bahn) networks. Berlin was at the forefront of modern design and technology: in 1924 the Tempelhof parade ground became the site of a civilian airport, making the city a crossroads for air traffic as well as road and rail traffic; in 1926 the Funkturm radio tower was erected, putting Berlin at the centre of Germany’s modern broadcasting and communications industries; and in 1928 the Kempinski Haus Vaterland amusement park was opened on the Potsdamer Platz, an example of modern technology applied to popular entertainment. Mass spectator sports also became popular, with millions attending Sunday football 95

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matches, and sportsmen like Max Schmeling, world heavyweight champion in 1930, becoming national heroes.56 There was a distinctly modern feel to this sporting mania: six-day bicycle races and motor racing at the Avus racing track were hugely popular and drivers such as Manfred von Brauschitsch and Fritz von Opel became household names.57 Weimar Berlin also became a beacon of modernity in the arts to both Germans and foreigners. As Peter Gay has demonstrated, the foundations for much of what we now regard as Weimar modernity and Weimar culture had been laid in the years before the First World War.58 This was especially true in the field of visual art. The Secessionists had made way for the young painters who made up Die Brücke, who moved to Berlin from Dresden in 1910, and who launched Expressionism as a new movement with a new philosophy of art in the journal Der Sturm. Emotion was all-important to this new movement – it was not thought important to present a realistic, accurate or aesthetically pleasing representation of a subject, but rather to capture emotional reactions to objects and events through vivid, powerful colours and dynamic compositions. Expressionism was more or less fully developed before 1914 and by the time the Weimar Republic came into existence ‘art and culture were entirely under [its] influence’.59 Over time the movement had been embraced by other art forms, most noticeably theatre and film, with plays like Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919) and George Kaiser’s trilogy The Coral (1917), Gas (1918) and Gas II (1920) and films like Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1919) demonstrating both an Expressionist aesthetic and Expressionist themes such as a rejection of bourgeois values and spiritual awakening. In the first years of the Republic, particularly in the Revolutionary period of 1918–19, Expressionism was complemented by a number of other avant-garde movements, most notably the anti-art movement Dadaism. However, by 1922–23 there was a move away from Expressionism towards ‘a more sober and practical approach to everyday reality’.60 This manifested itself in a new naturalism in art, literature and cinema, which has become known as Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. This was in many ways ‘a style with no particular artistic programmes or manifestos’,61 rather than a clearly defined artistic movement such as Expressionism, and encompassed socially critical ‘Verists’ such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and Christian Schad, as well ‘Classicists’ such as Georg Schrimpf. Even so, the naturalist aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit – the detached, objective portrayal of warts-and-all reality, often accompanied by an implicit social criticism – filtered through, much as Expressionism had, into literature and cinema, and can be seen in novels such as Alfred

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Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and films such as Lupu Pick’s Scherben (1921) and Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (1924). British visitors to Berlin did not fail to notice this aura of modernity that hung over the city. Many Britons commented on the material and technological advances of the German capital, and others on the cultural modernity or the modern social attitudes to be found in the city. Indeed, this sense of Berlin being a home of the new and the innovative, was what attracted many British intellectuals, especially those of the younger generation, to the city. As Carl Zuckmayer put it, ‘Berlin had a taste of the future about it’.62 In the late 1920s Cicely Hamilton dismissed the British tourist’s traditional disdain for Berlin, writing in glowing terms of the city’s pleasant location ‘in the midst of wood and marsh’63 and of the beauty of the Tiergarten, ‘which in June is a park of parks’.64 Yet she also noted the modernity of Weimar Berlin, albeit in different terms than some of her contemporaries. In Berlin she discovered the latest thing in dining, the ‘mechanised’ slot restaurant without waiters where you mostly eat standing and everything is a penny or twopence […] you see all the dainties and choose before you purchase […] They are visible through glass, which keeps them clean and fresh and inaccessible; and having made your selection, you drop in your coin […] and out comes the dainty of your choice.65 She also visited Tempelhof airport and noted that it was superior to its London counterpart not only for efficiency and accessibility, but also for the amenities available for travellers such as restaurants, barbers and ‘beds where travellers may turn in and sleep when they arrive in the small hours of the morning’.66 She concluded that Tempelhof at that time was ‘not only an airport but a sight and a place of amusement for the Berlin citizen’.67 Her overall impression of the airport and the city it served was extremely favourable. The bustling and happy city at ease with itself in its pleasant wooded surroundings is a far cry from the ‘modern Babylon’ which appeared in some contemporary reports. Hamilton was not alone in noticing the modernity of Weimar Berlin. The journalist and historian Elizabeth Wiskemann wrote that upon arriving in Berlin in 1928 she was ‘astonished to find how much new building the injured Germans could afford’,68 while Claud Cockburn noted that the German automotive industry seemed to be doing brisk business.69 Yet most British visitors did not dwell in their writing on the physical modernity of the city: they were less concerned with the new ‘garden city’ 97

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housing estates, the integrated transport system or the slot restaurants than with the modern ideas and attitudes that were circulating in the city. To them ‘Berlin was a state of mind, a sense of freedom and exhilaration’,70 or, as David Clay Large puts it, ‘a kind of laboratory of the apocalypse where modern Europeans tested the limits of their social and cultural traditions’.71 This sense of the future about Berlin proved attractive to German intellectuals as much as foreigners, and many German artists, writers, architects, musicians and others flocked to the capital of the Reich even if they did not remain long. The artistic experimentations of these German intellectuals and the willingness of Berlin gallery owners or art dealers and publishers to exhibit, sell or print new work in the modernist style filtered through to British artists and writers through press reports and the letters or writings of those who had been in the German capital.72 Berlin soon gained a reputation amongst British intellectuals as place where new ideas and experimentation in the arts and in lifestyle were accepted and encouraged, and many travelled to Germany to absorb this artistically charged atmosphere and revel in the freedom and opportunities that they believed were on offer in Berlin. Other Britons did not seek to unleash their creative endeavours on an unsuspecting world in Berlin but were content merely to soak up the atmosphere of the city in order to regurgitate it later in their writings (as did Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender) or to meet, drink, dance and exchange ideas with Germany’s artistic elite. Elizabeth Wiskemann recalled being introduced to poet Stefan George at the Romanisches Café and that she ‘somehow met also the architect Erich Mendelsohn, the artist George Grosz, and Arthur Köstler, then a young journalist in Berlin’.73 She thought that ‘Berlin in the twenties was the centre of a real flowering of modern art in all its manifestations’,74 a view shared by some – but by no means all – of her contemporaries. Wyndham Lewis, who had studied art in Munich before the War, first travelled to the German capital in late summer of 1921 with the aim of ‘[e]stablishing further contact with [Herwarth] Walden [editor of Der Sturm], and perhaps negotiating an exhibition at his Sturm Galerie in the Potsdamerstrasse’.75 In Berlin Lewis was introduced to a number of up-and-coming artists then resident in the city, but he was not overly impressed with what he saw of the art scene: ‘Walden and his pictures […] do not compare favourably, I think, with the Paris dealers. As to the stuff on his walls, it is like a rather dashing London Group show’.76 Lewis was no Germanophile, nor was he entirely in sympathy with the Expressionist art in vogue in Germany at that time: Lewis’s modernism was always more classical – more ordered and less 98

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organic – than the sinuous, rebellious, anarchic Expressionism of the likes of Grosz, Dix or Kirchner: ‘Lewis was a classicist, and stands […] for the classical conception of life and art’.77 If Berlin was the home of avant-garde architecture, literature, theatre and visual art, it was also witnessed key developments in the most modern of modern art forms: cinema. After the First World War the German film industry showed itself to be at the forefront of cinematic innovation and experimentation in Europe, successfully shrugging off cinema’s lowbrow image and applying modern technology to film production. In films such as Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1919), Scherben (1921), Nosferatu (1922), Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), Der Letzte Mann (1924), Metropolis (1926), Die Büchse der Pandora (1928) and Der Blaue Engel (1930) German film makers combined an aesthetic vision that borrowed from contemporary trends in the arts with high production values and the latest developments in special effects. Berlin was at the centre of this: Ufa (Universum Film AG), Germany’s largest production company in the Weimar period, had a huge studio complex at Neubabelsberg, where the foremost directors and technicians of the period, including Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and G. W. Pabst, made some of their greatest films. And, as the home of Germany’s biggest film company with the largest and most modern studios in Europe, Berlin naturally attracted British directors and film enthusiasts, including perhaps the most well known British director of the period, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock served his directorial apprenticeship in Berlin in 1924, as assistant director on the Gainsborough-Ufa co-production The Blackguard,78 and his first two projects as director in his own right were also Anglo-German co-productions made in Germany, The Pleasure Garden and The Mountain Eagle (both 1926). Hitchcock ‘was swept away by the controlling style and pictorial mood of German expressionism’79 and he frequently mentioned his admiration of, and indebtedness to, German cinema in interviews. In later years he also voiced his admiration for German culture and the influence it had upon him and his films. Hitchcock’s biographer Donald Spoto asserts that during his time in Berlin in 1924 and in Munich and Austria in 1925–26, Hitchcock ‘absorbed the prevailing images that German culture exploited to express its sense of post-war horror, social unrest, and the emotional dislocation and ubiquitous fear of madness that lurked just behind […] and just ahead’.80 Certainly something that might be identified as a Teutonic gloominess and taste for psychological horror and uncertainty (what Lotte H. Eisner calls ‘The German soul [that] instinctively prefers twilight to daylight’81) seems to have been present in Hitchcock’s psyche and in his 99

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later work. While in Germany Hitchcock ‘became fascinated with the world of the Grimm brothers’82 and admired the works of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who, like himself, used a ‘technique of blending humour and horror, interweaving closely the nightmare world with the everyday world of office and kitchen’.83 Hitchcock learnt from F. W. Murnau (‘the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known’84) by watching him at work while in Berlin, and he regarded Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann as ‘almost the perfect film’.85 He also singled out Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod (1921) as a film he particularly admired. He was the first to admit the debt that he owed to the style and aesthetic of German cinema of the 1920s, declaring that ‘[m]y models were forever after the German filmmakers of 1924 and 1925. They were trying very hard to express ideas in purely visual terms’ and that they were ‘a tremendous influence on me’,86 something that can clearly be seen in Hitchcock’s British and American films, especially The Lodger (1927), the first film he made after returning from Germany. For this film Hitchcock adopted a certain Expressionist aesthetic, a visual style where ‘the physical world [appears] as a dark, frightening, violent and unstable place […as] shown through striking set designs and lighting effects as well as subjective camera shots’.87 In this, ‘der erste spannende Film von Hitchcock’,88 he displayed many of the themes that would later reappear in his work, such as ‘what might be called the innocence of guilt and the guilt of innocence’ which was also ‘a recurrent theme of the German films of the 1920s’.89 As well as the visual style of his films and the ‘great visual inventiveness’90 that Hitchcock learnt from the Germans, they also informed his theoretical approach to film making. Sidney Gottlieb argues that Germany and its cinema were instrumental in helping Hitchcock to develop what might be called his “idea of cinema”: his definition of what cinema is, and what it should be; his understanding of the cultural and commercial aspects of films and filmmaking; and his vision of the ideal studio and the role of the director in film production.91 According to Gottlieb, Hitchcock gained his appreciation that cinema could be both an art form and a means of mass entertainment, that it could be both commercially successful and a ‘serious, challenging, innovative and complex’92 means of expression, directly from the German directors and producers of the 1920s. To some extent he saw Ufa as his ideal film company operating his ideal studio: an environment that 100

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combined technical knowledge and resources and artistic talent and inventiveness with shrewd business sense and marketing ability. Berlin provided Hitchcock with the opportunity to embark on his career as a director and he remained indebted to German cinema and the techniques he learned while in Germany for the rest of that career. It also provided the opportunity for other British film enthusiasts to view the latest offerings of the German avant-garde: Edward Sackville-West made frequent trips to the cinema on his visits to the German capital,93 as did both Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. What is more, Weimar cinema inspired the establishment, in 1925, of Britain’s premier forum for avant-garde cinema, the London Film Society. On a visit to Berlin in the autumn of 1924, director and critic Ivor Montagu and his friend Angus MacPhail ‘saw Nju (Jannings, Veidt, Bergner) and other stuff they knew their friends at Cambridge would give their eyes to see’.94 As a consequence Montagu and MacPhail, together with the actor Hugh Miller, came up with the idea of a Film Society that would showcase ‘films no one in England would see otherwise’95 but which they regarded as being of huge artistic and technical quality and significance. This point was made clear in the original manifesto for the Society which declared that although such intelligent films as Nju or The Last Laugh may not be what is desired by the greatest number of people, yet there can be no question but that they embody certain improvements in technique that are as essential to commercial as they are to experimental cinematography.96 Montagu and his friends were correct in assuming that there were others who wanted to see the types of films shown by the society, and ‘though the popular press jeered, the Film Society became fashionable with the intelligentsia, the Bohemian “beau monde” made up of “young men with beards and young women in home-spun cloaks”’.97 Founder members included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Augustus John (men with beards, if not young men with beards) and the membership list for 1927 reveals that members included the artist Roger Fry, writers such as Lord David Cecil, John Maynard Keynes and Edward Sackville-West, and actors like John Gielgud and ‘Ivor Novelloe [sic]’, as well as director and film-maker Anthony Asquith.98 The society soon established a reputation as not only a haunt of London’s intellectuals but also for being decidedly left-wing in its politics and faintly communist, so much so that in the 1930s ‘the Society was accused [by the popular press] of being an agent of Moscow’.99 101

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Throughout the 1920s ‘there was a distinct bias towards the German cinema’100 in the Film Society. Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari, regarded even then as an expressionist classic, was given its first full British performance in its original form by the Film Society.101 Their second season in 1926–27 consisted mostly of German films including Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922), G. W. Pabst’s Die Freundlose Gasse (1925) and the world’s first animated feature film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926); in the programme for 1927–28 all the films shown except one were German, including Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), a Neue Sachlichkeit film which attempted to provide the viewer with a cross-section of the society of the German capital. Indeed, the Film Society was instrumental in securing general releases in Britain for a number of German films, including Prince Achmed, Berlin, Tartuffe (1925) – ‘after having been in England for five years without anyone showing much interest in it’102 – and Waxworks (1924). Berlin, home of Europe’s most avant-garde and artistically and technologically advanced film industry, therefore supplied opportunities for work for British directors and producers, as well as providing the inspiration for the Film Society, which was instrumental in bringing Weimar cinema to a wider and appreciative audience in Britain. In this way the city’s reputation as a home of technological innovation and avant-garde culture was further underlined. There were, as we have seen, a variety of British intellectual visitors to Berlin during the Weimar period. Between them these figures observed many (but by no means all) facets of life in the capital of the Weimar Republic, and formed a range of opinions about the city that they saw. Perhaps the most well known of these attitudes, and the one that has passed into the popular consciousness, is that of Weimar Berlin as ‘sexual Mecca’, a place of decadence, of bright lights, jazz, drink, drugs and sex, of sleazy nightclubs and cabaret. This is ‘the decadent city […] described by Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains,’ a caricature which ‘has […] percolated down, in diluted form, to a far broader public via I am a Camera and Cabaret’.103 References to Berlin’s already notorious nightlife and commercial sex scene were common in the writings of British authors of the 1920s and 30s, and indeed many were attracted to the city by the promise of its ‘wickedness’. This can be attributed in part to the simple fact that then, as now, sex sold. Even in the writings of those who sought to take a high moral tone or were condemnatory of this aspect of Berlin’s culture one can sense a horrified fascination, sometimes bordering on the prurience and sensationalism that one might expect to find in today’s tabloid newspapers. Indeed, it is not 102

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difficult to imagine Wyndham Lewis’s attacks on the Berlin as the ‘pervert’s paradise’ in the terms of modern tabloid headlines. Yet, while Lewis and others fulminated against the decadence of Weimar Berlin, and particularly its homosexual subculture, others were attracted to the city by these very aspects of life there. Large numbers of British intellectuals travelled to Berlin in the 1920s expressly to sample the dubious delights of Berlin nightlife as what would today be termed ‘sex tourists’. For them Berlin was a place where they could do as they pleased sexually much more freely than they could at home. The hardships caused by war, revolution and economic instability also made Berlin a place where sex was freely available to foreign visitors for cash, especially during the period of hyperinflation when foreign currency was much sought after. Germany’s plight made it cheap and easy for British tourists of the 1920s to have a good time, and many took advantage of this. For still others, this side of Berlin did not exist, or, if it did, they did not see anything of it. This is interesting because it undermines the popular perception. So much was written by British visitors about Berlin’s nightclubs, prostitutes and homosexuals that one might imagine no-one could step outside their front door without bumping into some example of Berlin’s ‘vice’ and ‘decadence’, but this was obviously not the case. To begin with this ‘wickedness’ was restricted to a relatively small geographical area of Central Berlin and it seems clear from many accounts that it was perfectly possible for the British tourist to visit Berlin without ever coming across anything even approaching ‘vice’. Berlin’s fabled nightlife was therefore by no means as all-pervasive in the Weimar period as writers such as Lewis on the one hand or Isherwood on the other would have us believe. Berlin was also seen as the epitome of twentieth century modernity. References to the city’s modern architecture, the practical application of modern technology to its integrated transport system or places of leisure, and its acceptance of modern social attitudes were common in the writings of British observers. There was a feeling that Berlin was more liberal in its attitude to homosexuals, and that the subculture was much nearer to the mainstream and more tolerated there than in Great Britain. For many this modernity was regarded as being in direct contrast to the stuffy and staid cultural and social atmosphere of interwar Britain. Not for nothing did Harold Nicolson write that London is an old lady in black lace and diamonds who guards her secrets with dignity and to whom one would not tell those secrets of which one is ashamed. […] But Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much 103

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powder on her face, Hölderlin in her pocket, thighs like those of Atlanta, an undigested education, a heart that is almost too ready to sympathize, and a breadth of view that charms one’s repressions from their prison, and shames one’s correctitude.104 One thing on which it is safe to say that all British commentators on Berlin were agreed was Berlin’s status as a cultural centre and a home to the latest ideas in the arts and sciences. Not only did British artists and writers travel to Berlin in order to meet their German counterparts and to soak up the artistic atmosphere, but they also saw Berlin as a place of opportunity, where gallery owners, publishers, art dealers and film studios were willing to take on innovative, controversial or challenging works in the modernist style, where their London equivalents were not. Linked to this perception of Berlin as a centre of modernity and modernism, as much as to its reputation for ‘wickedness’, was the idea that Berlin was quite a daring place for British intellectuals to visit. In the early Weimar period this was tied to the fact that Berlin was the capital of the recent enemy, and a capital in revolution at that, but as the 1920s progressed and a new generation of intellectuals came of age, a trip to Berlin could almost be seen as an act of rebellion and defiance. In the 1920s ‘going abroad was the bohemian thing to do’,105 and Berlin with its reputation for wild nightlife, freely available sex and political upheaval looked a particularly exciting place for the up and coming Bohemian. A trip to Berlin would be guaranteed to shock respectable opinion at home and had the added advantage, as W. H. Auden recognised, of distancing one from the Francophilia of an earlier generation of artists and writers. Berlin became to some an expression of their rejection of the values of their own country and their determination to live life on their own terms. However, sooner or later the attraction of Berlin paled for many of those British intellectuals who visited it during the Weimar period. Life in Berlin for these visitors ‘was flamboyant and it was fun, but it was also essentially rootless’106 and many of them eventually began to feel that Berlin depressed them. In the period of Revolution and hyperinflation from 1918 until 1924 this sense of depression was often caused by witnessing the wretchedness of the people of Berlin and the lengths to which they were driven by circumstances beyond their control. Throughout the 1920s there can be found the feeling that British or American visitors could only put up with so much of Berlin’s famous hedonism and ‘wickedness’ before it began to depress them. Even in the novels of Christopher Isherwood there is a sense of Berlin as a place of alienation and decay, the capital of a civilization covering its bankruptcy 104

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with glitter and hurtling towards disaster. This same sense of impending doom can be found in the later autobiographical writings of most British intellectuals who experienced life in Berlin towards the end of the Weimar period, and especially those who were writing of the period after the Wall Street Crash and Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor. In this chapter we have identified a number of common trends and themes in the attitudes of British intellectuals towards Weimar Berlin. Perhaps the most common of these themes, and the one which might be seen to underpin all the others, is that of modernity – in terms of architecture, technology, entertainment, the arts and lifestyle, Berlin in this period was seen as being quintessentially modern. Yet there are also other areas of commonality in British writings on the German capital, such as youth, rebelliousness, ‘decadence’ and instability and crisis. All of these themes were not restricted to discussion of Berlin, but can be found throughout the general discourse on the Weimar Republic as a whole. This is due, at least in part, to the ‘Berlin-centric’ nature of most British travel to Germany in this period that led to many British visitors falling into the trap, which Christopher Sidgwick was keen to avoid, of ‘thinking that what is seen in the capital […] is representative of that country’.107 Nevertheless, it would appear that British attitudes towards Weimar Berlin were emblematic of attitudes towards the Republic as whole, just as the German capital was widely regarded in this period as emblematic both of the country in general and, to some extent, of the zeitgeist of the 1920s.

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5 ‘A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine’: Female Intellectuals and the Weimar Republic Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that ‘[i]t is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex […] Yet it is the masculine values that prevail’.1 Whatever the truth of this statement in literature, there certainly seems to be some justice in it when one looks at the study of British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic. If the study of the attitudes of intellectuals other than Christopher Isherwood and his friends has been largely neglected hitherto, the study of what female intellectuals made of the Republic has been virtually non-existent. This is despite the fact that a number of well-known and high-profile women writers of the interwar period chose to visit Weimar Germany and record their impressions of what they saw there. Although it is true that the actress and journalist Jean Ross has attracted some attention along with the rest of the Isherwood clique, this is due to her apparent status as the model for Isherwood’s Sally Bowles2 rather than as a talented actress and left-wing campaigning journalist in her own right, and she seems to have been viewed as a secondary figure in almost all of the literature dealing with this group. Indeed, she is almost entirely eclipsed in the minds both of Isherwood biographers and the public at large by the fictional character. Elsewhere the visits of British women to Weimar Germany have been mentioned in

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passing in biographies, but have not been looked at in any detail or subjected to any kind of comparative study to assess their range of opinions and how they differed from or resembled those held by male intellectuals. Ostensibly, there were significant similarities between the motivations, experiences and topics of interest of male and female intellectuals travelling to the Weimar Republic. Travel itself was, in the interwar years, regarded as quintessentially modern and rebellious, especially for women. As young male authors such as W. H. Auden and Edward Sackville-West noted, to travel abroad and immerse oneself in a foreign culture was often an explicit rejection of British bourgeois values and the perceived oldfashioned and stultifying conventionality of British life between the wars.3 This was especially the case for women. Sidonie Smith has pointed out that traditionally travel and travel writing had been the province of men, with male mobility contrasting with female ‘sessility’,4 but in the early twentieth century increasing numbers of women embarked on travel abroad and published their reflections on both the experience of travel and their observations of foreign cultures. Female travel and travel narratives can therefore be seen to have reflected changes in the roles and opportunities available to women in the early twentieth century, as well as a more general rejection of the rules governing British bourgeois society. That Germany in particular had an added frisson for British visitors (as a nation with whom they had recently been at war and as the perceived home of sexual licence and avant-garde art and literature) was as true for women as for men, and Britons of both sexes were attracted to the Weimar Republic by its aura of danger and modernity. Furthermore, as we have seen, Germany was often seen as a place of opportunity by those who were interested in the arts or wished to live an ‘alternative lifestyle’ outside of traditional bourgeois conventions. Perceived as a freer and more open society than that of Britain, Germany attracted gay men like Isherwood and Auden, but also young women like Jean Ross and Elizabeth Wiskemann, who wanted to throw off convention and ‘learn about life’5 or pursue careers that were all but closed to them in the United Kingdom. If male and female commentators seemed to share similar motivations for travelling to Germany in this period, they also tended to travel at similar times and to similar places. Broadly speaking, the pattern of women’s travel to Weimar Germany is more or less identical to that of their male compatriots. They were well represented in the influx of British visitors to Weimar Germany during the 1920s, as the wives of military personnel and diplomats and as holiday-makers. Similarly a number of 107

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female writers and commentators travelled to Germany almost from the moment that hostilities between Britain and Germany ceased in 1918. Among the first accounts in English of the dramatic political and social changes taking place in Germany in the wake of the First World War were Princess Blücher’s An English Wife in Berlin and Violet Markham’s A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (both 1920). Later, Berlin became the focus of travel for British visitors to the Republic and this was as true for women as it was for men. As with their male compatriots, women writers were particularly in evidence at the periods of crisis in the life of the Republic: 1923–24 and 1929–33. As a consequence, themes of German victimhood, crisis and instability, feverish activity – particularly in the realm of entertainment – and youth and modernity are to be found in the writings of both male and female intellectuals. Yet there are, as we shall see, significant differences between the topics explored and attitudes expressed in the writings of British women and those of their male compatriots. Although writers like Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Cicely Hamilton and Lilian Mowrer were just as concerned as their countrymen with issues such as the Treaty of Versailles and the occupation of the Rhineland, they were also interested in topics largely ignored by male commentators, such as conditions within ordinary German homes, and what Holtby referred to as ‘women’s questions’6: the roles of women in society and politics, childcare and education, and reproductive issues. As we have seen, attitudes towards the Treaty of Versailles and the postwar peace settlement were often of central importance in shaping the attitudes of British intellectuals towards Germany and the Germans in the Weimar period. This was no less true of women than of men. The feeling that Great Britain had abandoned her traditions of fair play and support for the underdog, and had conspired with France to impose a harsh and vindictive peace on Germany, was widespread, particularly amongst those who moved in liberal and left-wing circles. Beatrice Webb mirrored the feelings of many of her compatriots when she wrote in her diary that the Treaty was a ‘hard and brutal peace, made more intolerable by the contumely of circumstances deliberately devised, in the method of its delivery to the representatives to the German people’.7 She was explicit in her opinion that her country had acted in an unjust manner, writing that ‘[w]hat disgusts me most is the fact that Great Britain gets the cleanest cut of all out of the possessions of her fallen enemy’,8 and going on to say that ‘[w]e are all so disgusted with the Peace that we have ceased to discuss it – one tries to banish it from one’s mind as an unclean thing that will be swept away by common consent when the world is again sane’.9 108

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Nor was Webb alone in being deeply disappointed by the peace – many other commentators saw it as a missed opportunity for Germany to be rehabilitated and the wounds of the previous four years of warfare healed, and as a deliberate insult to a people who were already in the grip of starvation, political unrest and economic turmoil. As we have seen, such feelings were particularly acute amongst those Britons who had first hand experience of the sufferings that the Germans had endured during the last years of the war and the immediate postwar period. This was true of observers such as Stewart Roddie, Morgan Philips Price, Alfred Gardiner and H. N. Brailsford, who all recorded the situation in Germany in their journalism, official communiqués and memoirs; but a more complete picture of the sufferings of ordinary Germans can perhaps be found in the writings of Evelyn, Princess Blücher. The daughter of English gentry, Evelyn Stapleton-Bretherton married the Anglophile Count Gebhard Blücher von Wahlstadt in 1907 and the couple lived in London until the outbreak of war in 1914 compelled them to return to Germany. As the wife of a German aristocrat, she found herself torn during the First World War between her love for her homeland and sympathy with her countrymen (especially her brothers and cousins active as combatants) on the one hand, and her love for her husband and feelings of duty towards his compatriots on the other. She wrote movingly of ‘the mental suffering and agony I endured’10 during the war due to these conflicting loyalties, but neither she nor her husband were particularly sympathetic towards the German cause. Nevertheless, her experience of living among the German people dayto-day for the four years of war caused her gradually to alter her opinion of them. In 1914, on her arrival in Germany, she viewed the Germans as ‘a warlike race […] stirred out of their morose dullness and […] their everlasting heaviness’11 by the call to arms. To her they seemed to be an orderly and martial people, possessed of ‘a military genius which is unequalled among other nations’, who took ‘to war like a duck takes to water’.12 Yet war and the material discomforts that it brought led Princess Blücher to revise this opinion. By the winter of 1917–18 she recognized that the Germans, whom she had once regarded as being almost the orderly, militaristic automatons of British propaganda, had become a demoralised and starving people on the brink of defeat and revolution. Even those like her with wealth and connections were not immune to wartime hardship: as she commented wryly, ‘we are all gaunt and bony now’.13 By November 1918 as the first wave of Revolutionary fervour swept towards Berlin from Kiel she wrote

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I never felt so deeply for the German people as I do now, when I see them bravely and persistently trying to redress the wrongs of the war, for which they were in truth never responsible. The greater part of them were men fighting blindly to guard the “Heimat”, some patch of mother earth. […] This everything, that meant “home” to them, they were told was in danger, and this they went out to save. I feel that in the past I have sometimes misjudged this people, torn by the conflicting feelings of love and admiration for my own native land.14 Her role as witness to developments within Germany during and after the war, together the shared experience of wartime hardship, changed Princess Blücher’s opinion of the Germans, sweeping away her preconceived prejudices and leaving behind only human sympathy. In this she was no different from many Britons who had close ties with Germany and/or who saw for themselves the conditions under which the Germans were living in 1918–19. An English Wife in Berlin ends with Princess Blücher’s departure for England in 1919, and therefore does not deal with her attitudes towards the Weimar Republic as such, but it does include her observations on the peace settlement and particularly the reaction to it in Germany. In November 1918 she had written of her feeling that, in her opinion, ‘a spirit of justice and good feeling is the only power that can heal the hideous gaping wounds of the nations’,15 yet she soon came to fear that such a spirit was lacking in the Allied attitude towards peacemaking. She became convinced that the First World War had ‘loosened or torn asunder all those finer ties which bound the members of different countries in friendship and kindly intercourse with one another’,16 leaving only suspicion, mistrust and a desire for revenge. Before leaving Germany she noted that [a]t this eleventh hour I cannot refrain from writing down some of my doubts as to the policy of the Entente towards Germany. I have listened to the voices of every class of people here, and I sometimes fear that that England has missed the right moment for restoring touch with the German people, and laying the foundation for a lasting peace in Europe. After the revolution, in the great wave of reaction against the war which set in here, the Entente could have done anything with the German people had they made the slightest overture towards reconciliation. People were ready here to make reparation for the wrong done by their leaders. But now they say that Wilson has broken his word, and an undying hatred will be 110

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smouldering in the heart of every German. Over and over again I hear the same refrain “We shall hate our conquerors with a hatred that will only cease when the day of our revenge comes again.”17 In this she very much mirrored the sentiments of many Britons, both male and female. Princess Blücher’s attitudes towards the peace were largely representative of British intellectual opinion in the interwar period. What is more, her expressions of sympathy the Germans seem to have been echoed by many other British women in the postwar years. Princess Blücher’s ‘Diary’ is interesting and unusual as one of the earliest accounts in English of conditions in Germany during and immediately after the First World War, as well as perhaps the only account by an Englishwoman of events in Berlin during the November Revolution. But what really set her apart from her male contemporaries is not so much her attitudes towards the peace, as her interest in the domestic and the mundane, the conditions under which ordinary Germans were living and the everyday struggle for survival in a country where food, fuel and the necessities of life were scarce. In this she was not alone. On the whole, female visitors to the Republic were intensely interested in domestic conditions and how they affected the lives of German women and children. Vera Brittain was deeply moved by the plight of the wife of a Lutheran pastor she met in Cologne, a patient, beautiful wife [… who] seemed almost exhausted by the constant battle with stringent economy and the care of three thin but riotous little sons. Her eldest child, a daughter […] had died during the blockade; she had been a delicate baby and it had not been possible to obtain sufficient milk.18 Brittain also devoted much space to detailing the living conditions in the pension in which she and Winifred Holtby stayed in Berlin, where the ‘food-obsession’ of the other guests reminded her of ‘our rationed days in the summer of 1918’.19 Similarly, Winifred Holtby wrote to her friend Jean McWilliam from Berlin that ‘I am being terribly tormented by a flea’, before going on to write with irony Heaven knows where it found me! At this time of year, too, and in such a respectable pension. I dare not confess my torments. We have a real baroness at our table and to insinuate that I should have caught a flea under the same roof as her august person – oh, impossible!20

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Similarly, Cicely Hamilton took an interest in the domestic conditions of those living in the occupied Rhineland. She remembered feeling awkward billeted in the houses of local Germans, and the occasional ill feeling of proud German Hausfrauen at having their homes and domestic routines upset by the arrival of enforced houseguests. However, she also noted, somewhat patronisingly, that such women could be easily placated through little acts of kindness or friendliness and good manners.21 All this is in marked contrast to the writings of male intellectuals. True, some journalists, such as Morgan Philips Price and Alfred Gardiner, did make occasional references to the effects on German women and children of the poverty caused by the Allied blockade and then postwar economic dislocation, but they did so only to make broader political points, rather than because they were interested in the everyday lives of German women. The importance of the domestic and the everyday to women writers has been noted by feminist historians,22 and Gillian Rose has argued persuasively that female travel writers often used an examination of the mundane to help distance themselves from the ‘masculine’ preoccupations of male travel narratives;23 but in the present case it seems clear that this interest was largely motivated by the fact that, as feminists, many of these women were deeply interested the issues and difficulties confronting German women in the new and changing social, economic and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. One of the attractions of Weimar Germany, as far as Lilian Mowrer was concerned, was that ‘a woman could do what she liked’ there. Mowrer wrote approvingly that when she arrived in Berlin in 1924 [t]hirty-six women sat in the Reichstag: more women parliamentarians than in any country of the world. Here indeed was a land which should be a woman’s paradise. No profession was barred to her. At the universities, where the student corps had hitherto lived for centuries in almost monkish seclusion, women students were multiplying annually. Hundreds elected [sic] law, economics, pharmacy and history and afterwards found ample opportunities to practice. There were women electrical engineers, civil engineers, machineconstructors; I even met a full-fledged slaughterer in Berlin.24 Yet for all this, Mowrer noted that there was still not complete equality between the sexes in Germany. In particular, she observed that, apart from one or two exceptions, ‘[e]ven in parliament, the women confined themselves very largely to work relating to women and child welfare, housing and feeding etc.’ and that ‘after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg 112

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[…] there was hardly [… a female Reichstag Deputy] who ventured into the realm of national and international politics’.25 The perception that in Weimar Germany a woman could carve out a career for herself in whatever sphere she chose had a powerful attraction to many young middle-class British women. Among these were the historian and writer Elizabeth Wiskemann, who began her journalistic career in Berlin, and Jean Ross, who supported herself in Berlin as a nightclub singer, actress and journalist. The move to Berlin was significant for Wiskemann: not only did it facilitate her career as a serious journalist – a path that she would not have pursued without it – it also contrasted sharply with her experience of Cambridge. Her miserable experience of prejudice during her postgraduate research could not have been more different from her time in Berlin, where she felt that she was valued and accepted in the artistic and intellectual circles in which she mixed as much for her intelligence, outspokenness and independence, as for her charm and vivacity. Similarly, Ross was emphatic that her move to Berlin was an explicit rejection of her upbringing and background and the limited opportunities that they afforded her: ‘we were all utterly against the bourgeois standards of our parents’ generation. That’s what took us to Berlin. The climate was freer there’.26 These women were not alone in seeing Germany as a place where new and exciting career opportunities were available to them, but their decision to seek these opportunities in Berlin is significant. Firstly, it highlights a shift in the motivations of British women travelling to the Weimar Republic and the places they chose to visit once they arrived there. Brittain and Holtby had travelled to Germany in 1924 in order to observe for themselves living conditions within a defeated nation, while in 1928 Wiskemann and Ross went in search of adventure and opportunity. Similarly, while Brittain and Holtby made the Rhineland their first port of call, women like Wiskemann and Ross headed straight for Berlin. This in part reflects the political realities of the time – in the wake of the Ruhr crisis and in the midst of the occupation, the Rhineland was a much more important destination to those interested in conditions in postwar Germany than it would be to later travellers – but it also reflects the British identification of Berlin with modernity. Both Wiskemann and Ross instinctively saw Berlin as the spiritual home of the independent and sophisticated ‘new woman’, a place where a young woman could carve out a career for herself and interact with the modern world on her own terms. In Berlin in the late twenties and early thirties they saw modern women much more in control of their own lives:

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Suddenly modern girls were sachlich and could drive cars, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, take drugs and have sex before marriage. There were many impudent flappers and nude dancers on the Berlin stages, but the liberation also gave women greater freedom. They worked for a salary and spent their money “on the town”, and although few could expect to live up to the glossy image of the vamp portrayed in the new women’s magazines they had a changed role in society. They too fed on the new consumerism sweeping Berlin.27 These were the young women portrayed in the novels of Irmgard Keun or on the silver screen by Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich. Such women could also be found in London or in any other major city in Britain or western Europe, but in Berlin they seemed to take on a special significance as the embodiments of the liberated ‘new woman’ who was fully in tune with the thrusting modernity and materialism of Weimar Germany. Nevertheless, in perceiving Berlin in this way British women were somewhat behind the times. As Katharina von Ankum has pointed out, by the time that Wiskemann and Ross were making their way to Berlin in the late 1920s, a movement away from ‘[r]epresentations of pioneering women driving sports cars, flying planes, or working in laboratories’ and towards ‘the resurrection of traditional notions of (German) womanhood’ was already taking place in Germany.28 Even so, there was widespread interest amongst British feminists in how German women’s lives had changed under the Republic. It is clear from her published journalism and personal papers that Winifred Holtby was keenly interested in, and favourably disposed towards, the Weimar Republic’s attitude towards its female citizens. She kept an eye on developments within Germany, and wrote extensively on the opportunities open to German women. In an article which appeared in The Yorkshire Post in July 1927, Holtby commented on the visit of two prominent German female politicians to Britain, presenting them as ambassadors for the importance of the role of women in decision-making at a national level. She used the occasion of the visit to opine that the presence of 35 women in the Reichstag and 40 in the Prussian Diet (compared to only four female MPs elected to the British House of Commons in 1924) was evidence that, in contrast to their British cousins, ‘German women have been coming forward to take their place in public life.’29 Moreover, unlike Lilian Mowrer, Holtby felt that ‘once in Parliament, the German women make their presence felt’30 by interesting themselves in issues such as town planning and Treaty revision. Yet there was also a note of caution in the piece: according to Dr Elizabeth Spohr 114

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(one of Holtby’s ‘Visitors from Germany’) the presence of so many women in the German parliament was due ‘not to the greater advance in Germany towards ideas of equality, but to the German system of election’ in which male voters were willing to ‘vote for a woman as part of a little group, when they would never return her as the sole representative of their constituency’.31 Nevertheless, Holtby looked on the greater opportunities available to German women with approval. In September 1927 she praised the German government for its enlightened stance on allowing women into the police forces of the various Länder, while regretting that women ‘can [still] only be entrusted with special and partial duties, more especially in the sphere of welfare work’.32 Similarly, in a set of handwritten notes dating from the mid-1930s, Holtby noted with disapproval how the National Socialist regime had brought about a ‘backward movement’ in the fortunes of women by overturning the principals of the Weimar Constitution, and encouraging German women to leave the workplace and return to their traditional roles of wife and mother.33 In a similar vein, Cicely Hamilton was intrigued by the increased interest in sport and physical activity amongst young women in Germany. In the emergence of what Hamilton called the Sportmädel she saw a shift from traditional ideas about the education of women towards a new, more broadly-defined view of young women’s prospects and capabilities. This interest in sport, physical education and the athletic development of the body she saw as being an indication of ‘new aims and ambitions – more personal and less sentimental’34 than those held by the German women she met in her youth. She saw this development as going hand in hand with the enfranchisement of women and the encouragement of them to take an interest in matters outside the home – a broadening of the outlook of women sanctioned and encouraged by the state and the educational establishment, women taking control of their own bodies and the ways in which they spent their leisure time. Yet Hamilton’s positive response to the Sportmädel was not shared by all of her fellow feminists, particularly those in the German women’s movement. Lilian Mowrer noted that there were deep divisions within German womanhood, and that between the ‘young amazons’ who congregated in the swimming pools and ‘luxuriously equipped sport-palaces’ of Berlin, and the female parliamentarians who represented them, ‘there was a difference of almost two generations, and neither made any effort to bridge the gulf’.35 These comments reflected German anxieties over the role and behaviour of young women in Weimar society, particularly their sexual behaviour,36 anxieties that Hamilton and Mowrer evidently did not share. For them, the range of careers and leisure 115

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activities open to young women were an indication of the new wider freedoms they enjoyed under the Weimar Republic. Hamilton and Mowrer do not seem to have shared the misgivings of many within the older German women’s organizations about the mores and behaviour of the ‘new woman’.37 This can also be seen in Hamilton’s comments on Carl Credé’s piece of pro-abortion agitprop Paragraph 218, which she saw in Stuttgart in July 1929. This was one of two plays on this theme by left-wing writers directed by Erwin Piscator38 that caused a furore by contributing to the campaign for the abolition of article 218 of the German Penal Code, which made abortion illegal and punishable by up to five years imprisonment.39 Hamilton was well aware that what she was watching was propaganda (‘a good deal less of a play than a public meeting, an excited public meeting illustrated by scenes on the stage’40) but she did not think any less of it for that. On the contrary, she seems to have agreed wholeheartedly with the play’s message, that not only did article 218 deny women control over their own bodies, but also that it was only the poor who suffered because, while the rich could always find doctors willing to testify that an abortion was necessary for their health, those for whom the birth of a child would mean poverty or social ostracism would be condemned to bear the child or court imprisonment or death through backstreet abortions.41 Even the more unpleasant scenes of squalor and bodily functions she thought helped to enhance the impact of the play: Ugly as some of these episodes were, I did not once find them repellent; in part, I am sure, because the actors treated them as they should be treated, straight-forwardly and without a trace of the selfconsciousness that would have given them undue emphasis. And in part because no single incident was dragged in pointlessly; one and all had their purpose in creating for the tragedy its background and atmosphere of squalor.42 Hamilton retained her affection for Germany and the German people which she had acquired as a schoolgirl in Bad Homburg and was deeply interested in postwar developments, especially in the area of women’s social roles and their rights and duties within the broader society. She still found much to attract her in the Germany of 1929–1930, despite the onset of the Depression and the rise of political violence and extremism (she was scornful, like Holtby, of the Nazis’ policy on women43) and ended Modern Germanies As Seen By An Englishwoman (1931) with the confident prediction that ‘whatever their failures, their mistakes and their 116

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difficulties, these German people will surely, in the end, pull through’.44 But her favourable view of Germany and the Germans was by no means shared by all of her contemporaries. As we have seen, Vera Brittain was sympathetic towards the suffering of the Germans in the occupied Rhineland, but also sensed a resentment and hostility that left her feeling frightened by them. Others failed to find even this sympathy towards the Germans. To them the country and its inhabitants alike were almost uniformly ugly, coarse, vulgar and bereft of any beauty and soulfulness: such were the views of British novelist Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West visited her husband, the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, in Berlin for the first time in December 1927, and her initial impressions of the city were not favourable. Even before setting foot in Germany she was referring to Berlin as ‘that beastly place’,45 purely because her husband’s posting to the German capital had taken her away from her beloved England. Nor did personal experience of the city alter her feelings, and she spoke of it as ‘a bloody place’46 or ‘that filthy, filthy place’47 and complained repeatedly in her letters about almost everything: the cold (severally),48 the people and the surroundings. Everything was ‘too depressingly German’49 for her and she could not wait to return to her home at Long Barn in Kent, near her beloved childhood home. Yet, despite all her complaints about the vulgarity and philistinism of Berlin and its people, her experience of the German capital was not uniformly bad. In 1928 she embarked on a project to translate Rilke into English and she dined and met frequently with both Germans and foreign visitors who were interested in literature and the arts, including Count Harry Kessler and the American novelist Sinclair Lewis. Some of the sights of modern Berlin also seem to have attracted her attention and praise, particularly those exemplifying elements of Weimar modernity, such as the ‘lovely aquarium’,50 the museums and the planetarium, and she obviously was not immune to the sporting mania that infected the city in the Weimar period, writing as she did of six-day bicycle races and ice hockey played by artificial light. Certainly Vita took a keen interest in Berlin’s cabaret scene and its homosexual underworld. This was one of the things that made life in Berlin bearable for her. She wrote excitedly to Virginia Woolf of her experiences in cabarets and nightclubs, recounting with glee an anecdote about ‘the nigger who was really a man not a woman; but had all the graces of a cocotte, and the temper too’,51 of attending ‘a revue last night in which two ravishing women sing a frankly Lesbian song’,52 and of ‘a bookstall which deals entirely in homosexual literature, which sounds even

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funnier in German than it does in English’.53 These amusements, she said, were her consolation for the cold, ugliness and philistinism of Berlin. These views, to some extent, mirrored Woolf’s own. The two had first met in 1922 and their friendship matured slowly, but eventually the two became lovers and Vita was immortalised as the eponymous hero/heroine of Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928). Their letters to one another throughout the latter half of the 1920s were often extremely passionate and it would seem that the trip to Berlin Vita arranged for Virginia in January 1929 was the occasion for the relationship to reach something of a climax. She was accompanied to Germany by her husband, Leonard, her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, and the artist Duncan Grant. It was ‘a large and awkward party’,54 and the trip was not entirely successful, partly because of the differing interests and expectations of the visitors: Virginia wrote before they left England that Vita has promised to show us the night life in Berlin; my sister and Duncan Grant have it on their conscience that German galleries should be visited. Leonard wants to hear every opera ever written. I shall go to a thing called the Planetarium (or some such name) where you can see the stars as they are – so imagine us at our different occupations, meeting to drink at intervals, coffee, beer, all wrapped in rugs and bearskins for it is said you can’t shock the Germans by uncouthness.55 The differing ‘occupations’ of the group might not have caused such a problem, if it had not been for the clash of personalities. Leonard Woolf was irritated by Vita, while Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were completely out of sympathy with the Nicolsons and had as little to do with them as possible. All in all the visit was ‘too “rackety” and stressful’56 for Virginia and on her return she suffered a mental and physical collapse, for which her husband blamed Vita. The motivation for the visit (if only in Virginia’s case) was to visit Vita rather than to see and experience Berlin – the setting for the reunion was almost immaterial – but this did not prevent her from giving her impression of the city in her letters to friends. The visit only lasted five days, and Woolf must have had a full itinerary: as well as trips to the opera and various dinners and lunches, there were visits to the Funkturm radio tower, the Wellenbad indoor swimming pool and Frederick the Great’s palace of Sanssouci.57 Yet all this did nothing to improve her impression of Germany and the Germans: Berlin was, to her, ‘hideous, and highly respectable in the midst of all its vice’58 and ‘the ugliest of cities’.59 118

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Woolf and her companions were therefore basically tourists, despite their status as some of the leading lights of London’s literary and artistic scene. Unlike Hamilton, Holtby and Brittain, they were travelling for pleasure, not to see for themselves conditions within Weimar Germany, and the impressions that they recorded naturally reflect this. They focus on the typical tourist ‘sights’ – the planetarium, the opera, the museums, cabarets and cafes – rather than living conditions, the political situation or the freedoms and opportunities open to German women. But Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf were also somewhat unusual in their interest in Berlin’s homosexual underworld. One area in which the majority of British women writers tended to differ from their countrymen when discussing Weimar Germany was in their attitudes towards Berlin nightlife. Previous research, following the lead of contemporary accounts, has tended to stress the sense of sexual liberation in 1920s Berlin and make much of the perceived decadence, wickedness and moral bankruptcy of the Republic as described by both foreigners and Germans. As we have seen, contemporary accounts by male writers of Berlin’s commercial sex industry – from Wyndham Lewis’s splenetic assaults in Hitler (1931) to Christopher Isherwood’s more celebratory portrayal in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) – were common enough, but an examination of the writings of British female commentators visiting Weimar Germany casts a very different light on the supposed prevalence and extremity of risqué nightlife. Lilian Mowrer wrote that in the early 1920s ‘Germany seemed frightfully “middle-class”’,60 despite the artistic ferment and racy cabaret shows of the capital, and dismissed Berlin nightlife as insincere and all for show: rather than being evidence of a genuine rejection of old-fashioned bourgeois morality, she regarded the hedonism and sexual freedom encountered by foreigners as a cynical commercial venture, designed to maximise the returns from the tourist industry.61 Elizabeth Wiskemann thought the sexual morals of Berlin no more shocking than those of her Cambridge or London acquaintances,62 while Cicely Hamilton asserted that she had seen nothing of this ‘fabled vice,’ and that to her ‘Berlin after dark is very like Golders Green at the same hour’.63 Similarly, writers such as Brittain and Holtby made no mention at all of this aspect of German society. There are a number of possible reasons for this apparent lack of interest in Berlin’s nightlife and sex industry. It may be that these women felt it was not seemly to write about the wickedness of Berlin in their published works. Yet none was particularly prudish – as we have seen Hamilton in particular wrote with a breezy candour about abortion in Modern 119

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Germanies64 – so this does not seem a very convincing explanation. It may also be that there was nothing on offer in Berlin for these women: it would certainly seem that Berlin’s nightlife was very much geared towards a heterosexual male, gay or lesbian audience, so perhaps there was nothing that appealed to heterosexual women such as Brittain, Holtby and Mowrer, although this looks unlikely in the light of the apparent prevalence of prostitutes and establishments catering to any and all tastes. Or it may simply have been that these women were in fulfilling long-term relationships and so had no desire for sexual stimulation outside of them. But by far the most convincing explanation is that they simply regarded such things as unimportant and uninteresting. Whatever the reasons for this difference in the treatment of Berlin’s nightlife, it demonstrates that Berlin’s decadence was perhaps not as common or extreme as some British writers would have us believe. All of the women discussed here were from upper middle class families. They were all articulate and well-educated and had some degree of proficiency in the German language.65 All these factors meant that the interests and experiences of these women were very different from those of ordinary tourists visiting Germany, even if the absence of accounts by working class women makes a direct comparison impossible. But to what extent did their writing differ from that of their male compatriots? Perhaps the most obvious difference between the writings of male and female commentators on Weimar Germany is the attention given to issues relating to women. British women visiting the Weimar Republic wrote extensively not only of the changing roles of women in German society, public acceptance (or the lack of it) of these changes, and the role of women in public life, but also of the more mundane aspects of domestic life and the pressures put upon them within the family unit by economic instability, military occupation and social change. In contrast to this, there was little interest among male writers in the changes taking place in the lives of German women. This is not wholly surprising when one considers that Brittain, Holtby, Hamilton and others were all active in feminist politics of one kind or another in Britain, but it is more surprising that the (male) correspondents of national newspapers should have paid so little attention to these important issues, especially as they were the subject of public debate in both Britain and Germany at the time. There were also important differences, as we saw in Chapter 3, not only between male and female writers, but also between individual women writers, in the ways in which they wrote about the British occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War. Vera Brittain and Winifred 120

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Holtby wrote of the hostility they sensed emanating from the people of the occupied area, while almost all other writers, of both sexes, commented on the amicable relations between occupiers and occupied. The worst that Cicely Hamilton could say was that she felt awkward at being a member of a victorious nation in the land of the defeated, while male writers on the occupation tended to make no mention of any ill feeling against the British: rather, according to these commentators, all resentment and hostility – even in the British zone – was directed against the French. It may be that Brittain and Holtby were merely more sensitive to the feelings of the Rhinelanders than their compatriots, or that in the period that they visited Cologne and the British area of occupation (October 1924) there was an upsurge of anti-British feeling, but, for whatever reason, they present an alternative view to the occupation from the majority of their fellows. This affected Brittain’s attitude toward Germany: while she felt sympathy towards the plight of those in the occupied area, her abiding view was of a resentful and vengeful nation, and this led her to predict a war of revenge against Britain and France in the near future – a very different view from those who came to regard Germany as a modern country of artistic innovation, increased personal freedom or decadent nightlife. We find another key difference between the writings of British women and men on Weimar Germany in the realm of Berlin nightlife and the perceived moral degeneracy of the German capital. Isherwood and his circle tended to stress the idea of Berlin as a ‘sturmfrei’ city of sexual freedom and frenetic entertainment, while authors like Moss and Lewis attacked it for its degeneracy and moral bankruptcy. This is in marked contrast to the writings of female intellectuals. Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby and Cicely Hamilton made no mention at all of the Berlin’s nightlife, while others found it sordid and commercialized, put on for show to attract foreign tourists, or no more shocking than that of London. The reasons for this difference in attitudes towards Berlin nightlife – and, more importantly, the absence of any discussion of this in the writings of Brittain, Holtby and Hamilton – is not entirely clear, but it does point to the fact that Berlin’s decadence was perhaps not as pervasive as some British writers would have us believe. The experiences of women travelling to the Weimar Republic were far from uniform. The women surveyed above visited Germany for a variety of reasons and often recorded different impressions of what they saw there. There is therefore no standard response towards Weimar Germany to be found in the writings of British female intellectuals who visited the Republic. However, there are clear trends and themes running through the 121

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writings of these women, which allow us to generalise to an extent about the attitudes of British women writers, if not women more generally, as a group. Moreover, in many cases these themes – such as the interest in the changes to the lives of women taking place in German society – are not reflected in the writings of male commentators on the Republic. Women writers can be seen as contributing to the general British discourse on Weimar Germany, at the same time providing us with a parallel discourse of their own. The writings of female commentators on Germany in this period therefore doubly highlight the diversity in British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic – by differing from one another and by differing from the majority discourse provided by their male compatriots. But can it be said that gender helped to shape British attitudes towards the Republic? This is a problematic question, not least because it would be difficult to define what constituted a gendered response to a place, people or time. What would constitute a male or female, masculine or feminine, response or attitude towards Weimar Germany? And would the gender of the individual in question be more of a determining factor in shaping attitudes than other factors such as nationality, sexuality and age group? While the differences in the writings of male and female intellectuals on Weimar Germany are certainly interesting and enlightening, providing us with a more rounded view of British attitudes towards the Republic, the extent to which these differences were predicated by gender is questionable. It seems clear that the fact that writers discussed above were women meant that they were naturally interested in the conditions in which German women were living, while their feminist credentials meant that they were deeply interested in issues relating to women’s suffrage, political engagement, employment opportunities and leisure activities. But beyond this there is little which is particularly feminist, let alone feminine, in their observations of life in the Republic. So it seems that while the gender of these observers might have influenced the areas of German life in which they took an interest, it cannot be said to have been a defining factor in shaping attitudes towards the Republic. Nevertheless, an examination of the attitudes expressed in the work of British women writers is instructive, as it helps to provide a more varied and well-rounded idea of Weimar Germany as it was seen through British eyes.

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6 Creating a Weimar Stereotype? Representations of Weimar Germany in Fiction

In what has become one of the most famous passages in twentieth century literature, the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Christopher Isherwood’s novel set in the last days of the Weimar Republic, claims that ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’.1 This statement has often led subsequent generations to read the novel and its companion, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), as works of contemporary reportage, or even of history, rather than fiction.2 They have come to be regarded as the archetypal vision of the Weimar Republic in English literature, ‘classic accounts of Weimar Berlin in English’.3 However, despite his later assertions to the contrary, Isherwood was not the only British (or American) writer to produce works of fiction with a German setting and/or which covered issues relating to the precarious political and economic situation faced by the Germans in the interwar period. Such diverse authors as John Buchan, Robert McAlmon and Winifred Holtby produced fiction set in the Weimar Republic, works which often shared themes and attitudes with the plethora of non-fiction books and articles dealing with Germany that appeared between 1918 and 1933. These fictional representations of the Republic and its citizens not only provide us with a prism through which we can discern how authors viewed Germany and the Germans, but they can also give an indication of

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prevalent cultural, social and political attitudes, and of the attitudes and expectations of the intended audience of the work. As we shall see, the level of continuity and change in the ways in which the Germans were represented in pre-war and postwar fiction reflects the changing nature of Anglo-German relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but to what extent can it be said that British fiction in the interwar period was responsible for, or contributed towards, the creation of the stereotype of the Weimar Republic that endures to this day? According to John Mander, ‘[b]efore 1800 it would broadly be true to say that the English had no definite concept of “the Germans”’,4 thinking instead in terms of Hanoverians, Rhinelanders, Prussians, Bavarians and so on. This was to change in the nineteenth century as nationalist and unification movements within Germany campaigned for a single German state and as the power of Prussia, and Britain’s diplomatic and military contacts with her, grew. Throughout the nineteenth century many in British public life (intellectuals, policy makers, educationalists etc.) found much to admire in Germany, from German poetry and music, to German scholarship and educational methods, ideas of social policy, and even German fighting prowess and military efficiency. Such admiration and interest in all things German was encouraged during the reign of Victoria: her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and further dynastic alliances (such as the marriage of the Princess Royal to the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858) helped to make all things German fashionable, at least for a time. In addition to this, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the development of a passion for all things Teutonic amongst certain sections of the British elite. Inspired in part by Victorian Romanticism and Medievalism, in part by attempts (similar to those also taking place in Germany, Finland, Scandinavia and elsewhere) to forge or discover the roots of a national British culture, and in part as a reaction against Hellenism and Classicism, many British intellectuals embraced what has been termed Anglo-Saxonism.5 This stressed the notion that British democratic ideas and institutions (as much as Victorian values of manliness, hard work, honour, duty and justice) had their origins with the fifth century Germanic colonisers of the British Isles, alongside the notion that all the Germanic peoples (including the English, Dutch and Scandinavians) shared a common cultural and racial heritage. Whig historians like E. A. Freeman and J. R. Green extolled the view that ‘the origins of English parliamentary liberties were seen to lie in the forests of North Germany’,6 while T. H. Huxley and his followers classified the British into two main races: the Celtic ‘Melanochroi’ and the Teutonic ‘Xanthochroi’.7 124

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Such notions naturally impacted upon the ways in which Germany and the Germans were represented in Victorian fiction. In the years before German unification the British tended to think of the Germans in cultural rather than political or national terms: German Romantic poetry had been hugely popular in Britain in the early nineteenth century, while Germany was rightly regarded as the home of the foremost European composers and musicians, and German philosophy and scholarship (particularly Biblical scholarship) were highly regarded amongst academics and the intelligentsia. This being the case it is hardly surprising that for the Victorians the popular archetypal German was thought of as being industrious and generally pacific, a soulful, intellectual creature, ‘much given to lyric poetry, music, science, abstruse philosophy, and beer’.8 Indeed, [e]arly Victorian travellers like Thackeray had tended to regard Germany as a benign and ineffectual joke, peopled by absent-minded professors, long-haired musicians and bewigged courtiers bustling to and fro at the behest of Ruritanian rulers.9 Furthermore, much British (and some American) literature saw Germany as a Romantic, often Gothic place, in every sense: a country of mountains, rivers and gloomy pine forests, of graveyards and fairytale castles, of superstitious peasants, of romance, adventure and melodrama. This is the image of Germany (and more broadly Central Europe) which appeared in Anglo-American fiction from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1813) or Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (1838) right up to Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). However, as Peter Edgerly Firchow has pointed out, by the turn of the century, there had emerged a tendency in Britain to separate the Germans into two categories, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.10 As Anglo-German relations deteriorated and Britain and Germany found themselves increasingly in competition economically and politically, the literary world saw a progressive deterioration in the way that the Germans were depicted. A growing number of British authors adopted an increasingly hostile tone towards Germany and the Germans and represented them accordingly. This can be seen most clearly in the increasing amount of popular fiction predicting the course of an ‘inevitable’ military contest between the British and German Empires which appeared in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. As Anglo-German relations began to sour after 1890, Germany began to be seen as an increasing threat to British interests and ambitions, and 125

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‘[f]rom 1900 onwards, the possibility – for many, the probability – of a war between Great Britain and Imperial Germany provided both sufficient reason and abundant material for an unprecedented outpouring of […] tales of the great European conflict’.11 This deluge was only encouraged by the diplomatic revolution that took place in the Edwardian era, which saw Britain realigned with her traditional enemies, France and Russia, against Germany and her allies, who were increasingly seen as the enemy most likely to be faced in ‘the next Great War’. The Germans that appear in stories such as The Spies of the Wight (1899), The Invasion of 1910 (1906), The Enemy in Our Midst (1906), The Death Trap (1907), When England Slept (1909) and Spies of the Kaiser (1909)12 were far removed from the soulful professors or noble Teutons of Victorian stereotype. Instead, they blended boorishness, vulgarity and philistinism with a ‘Hunnish’ aggression, violence and militarism. These Germans were dangerous warmongers, savage and aggressive, arrogant and selfish, with no sense of the value of human life, underhand and ungentlemanly in the pursuit of war and without mercy towards their defeated enemies. By 1914 the British regarded the archetypal German to be efficient, disciplined, humourless; cold yet paradoxically sentimental; dull, vulgar, and barbaric, yet inordinately proud of its “Kultur”; viciously cruel on “principle”; unbearably arrogant when victorious, abjectly cringing in defeat. In short, it was the “Hun”.13 This image was seized upon by the makers of wartime propaganda, and amidst the anti-German hysteria that gripped Britain during the First World War the popular perception of Germany and the Germans sank to a new low. Yet while authors such as G. K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling and Cicely Hamilton joined in the denunciations of the wickedness and brutality of ‘the Hun’,14 some writers, such as John Buchan – perhaps unexpectedly – presented more complex portrayals of the Germans in their writings during the Great War. It might seem unusual that Buchan, the son of a Presbyterian minister and future Conservative MP and Governor-General of Canada, presented a far from simplistic view of the Germans in some of his wartime fiction, especially given that he was employed by the British War Propaganda Bureau and the Intelligence Corps throughout the First World War, and from 1917 was Director of Information at the Ministry of Information. Nevertheless, in the novels that he wrote in parallel to his wartime propaganda work (and even more so in his postwar writings) Buchan presented his readers with some surprisingly sympathetic portrayals of 126

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German characters. His most famous novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), had been a more or less standard story of a true-blue English gentleman stumbling over a German spy-ring (the Black Stone) and foiling their plot shortly before the outbreak of the war. However, its sequel, which saw its hero journey through Germany, Austria and the Balkans in search of a German ‘secret weapon’ that threatens the survival of the British Empire, is much more complex, not least in its treatment of the Germans. Greenmantle (1916) presents the reader with a surprisingly sympathetic picture of some of its German characters, not least among them the supreme War Lord himself, Kaiser Wilhelm II.15 Buchan’s representation of German characters in Greenmantle reflected both the prevailing negative wartime image of ‘the Hun’, and a more reasoned and sympathetic view of the Germans. In this we can see the roots of the sympathetic attitude towards postwar Germany which Buchan expressed in later novels such as The Three Hostages (1924) and A Prince of the Captivity (1933). In addition to this, it could be argued that in Greenmantle Buchan was doing during wartime what other British writers were to do in their representations of Weimar Germany: making use of existing stereotypes, but at the same time undermining them in order to present a different image of Germany and the Germans to the negative one which had dominated the popular imagination since the turn of the century. 16 But what of literary representations of Germany and the Germans in fiction after the war? While postwar novels such as Cicely Hamilton’s William – An Englishman (1919) and Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918), both partly written during the war, presented their readers with essentially prewar or wartime portrayals of boorish, violent, philistine Germans (in Hamilton’s case this is surprising given her close affinity with Germany and her attempts, in her postwar non-fiction, to explode popular stereotypes of the Germans17), other British authors presented alternative views of the Germans in the Weimar period. In their representation of German characters and in many of their broader themes and attitudes, William and Tarr are both essentially pre-war or wartime books. The same cannot be said of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages or A Prince of the Captivity, Geoffrey Moss’s Defeat, Robert McAlmon’s Distinguished Air or Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. That the world had been irrevocably changed and the old certainties broken down by the Great War is one of the underlying themes of Buchan’s fourth Richard Hannay adventure, The Three Hostages (1924). In this instalment, Hannay has retired into the life of an English country gentleman and is living in peace at his country house with his wife and 127

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their young son – that is, until he is called upon by his old spy-master Sir Harry Bullivant to help recover three hostages taken by the villainous Dominic Medina, an Irishman with sinister hypnotic powers and a grudge against the British Empire, who cloaks his evil intent with a mantle of respectability. This is something of a departure for Buchan: his villains in the earlier Hannay novels, even when disguised and working ‘undercover’, had been outsiders assailing the bastion of British power and values from without. In dealing with an enemy within the British establishment in The Three Hostages Buchan revealed his anxiety about the precarious state of postwar politics and society. It is also interesting that the only German to appear in the novel is a ‘good’ German, Gaudian, the engineer from Greenmantle, Hannay’s positive assessment of whom is borne out in The Three Hostages when they work together to rescue one of the hostages of the title. The novel also contains an interesting passage, which reveals something of Buchan’s attitude towards Weimar Germany, when Gaudian talks to Hannay about the conditions within the Fatherland: Gaudian gave me a grisly picture of the condition of his own country. It seemed that the downfall of the old regime had carried with it the decent wise men like himself, who had opposed its follies, but had lined up with it on patriotic grounds when the war began. He said that Germany was no place for a moderate man, and that the power lay with the bloated industrials [sic], who were piling up fortunes abroad while they were wrecking their country at home. The only opposition, he said, came from the Communists, who were halfwitted, and the monarchists, who wanted the impossible.18 This is Buchan’s assessment of the condition of Germany in the years up to 1924. It is perhaps what one might expect from an old-fashioned Tory who loathed big business and Communism in equal measure, and bears out the assessment of Buchan’s biographer that ‘The Three Hostages plays on widespread post-war fears and uncertainties, the concern at the shattering of old regimes, and the fragility of the new’.19 However, her assertion that ‘[t]he powers of evil which Hannay is called on to destroy in The Three Hostages are not Germans […] but the consequences of the war which the Germans made’20 is only partially true. Gaudian tells to Hannay that [r]eason is not listened to, and I fear there is no salvation till my poor people have passed through the last extremity. You foreign powers have hastened our destruction, when you had it in your hands to save 128

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us. I think that you have meant well, but you have been blind, for you have not supported moderate men and by your harshness played the game of wreckers among us.21 Here Buchan is acknowledging the shortcomings of postwar British policy (as he does elsewhere in the novel22) and the part that Britain and her allies had played in Germany and Europe’s postwar difficulties. This theme is further explored elsewhere in Buchan’s fiction. In the story ‘Tredebant Manus’ (1928) there is an aside condemning the ‘circus’ of Versailles and suggesting that ‘the soldiers […] Foch and Haig and Hindenburg […] would have made a cleaner and fairer’ peace treaty and avoided the pitfalls and recriminations of postwar Europe.23 Similarly, in ‘The Loathly Opposite’ (1928), Buchan further explores the differences between the Germans of wartime stereotype and the more prosaic reality. In this story a former British Intelligence officer learns that the enemy whom he imagined to be ‘a first-class Generalstaboffizier, as handsome as Falkenhayn, trained to the last decimal, absolutely passionless, with a mind that worked with the relentless precision of a machine’24 is, in fact, ‘a small man with a grizzled beard, a high fore-head, and a limp, rather like what I imagine the Apostle Paul must have been’,25 named Dr Christoph. Moreover, he learns that far from being the evil genius he had imagined him to be during the war, the doctor is actually eminently humane, devoted to his family, his homeland and his patients, with a life blighted by personal tragedy. The precarious state of the Weimar Republic also figures as a theme in A Prince of the Captivity (1933). The novel opens with its hero, army officer Adam Melfort, being condemned to two years’ imprisonment for an unspecified crime he did not commit. He is drummed out of his regiment, and on his release from prison ‘resolves to dedicate the rest of his life to expiation’.26 This ‘quest for a cause’27 leads him to work for the secret service in Belgium and Germany during the First World War and then into the role of a sort of guardian angel for a number of prominent international personages, who, if they exert their influence within their various countries, can help to forge a stable and prosperous postwar world to replace the chaos and instability that Buchan, as much as his fictional hero, saw around him. During the course of the novel, Melfort makes several trips to Germany, and the reader is presented with views of Weimar Germany which reflect the concerns of many non-fiction writers, such as youth (‘Wandervögel, you know […] A queer crowd, but a merry one – shorts and open shirts – determined to enjoy life though the ground was cracking under them’28), crisis and instability, and German 129

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victimhood. But the central German character in A Prince of the Captivity is the academic and politician Hermann Loeffler ‘who is bringing his country back to health and sanity’.29 Loeffler is a ‘good’ German who exhibits many ‘British’ values: ‘he was honest and courageous and reasonable, the sort of fellow one could work with’30 with ‘honest eyes and […] good manners’31 that make him respected and admired by the foreign politicians with whom he deals. He is personable and cosmopolitan, with ‘the gift for laying himself alongside different types of men’32 (a trait uncommon in the Germans, according to the narrator of Buchan’s Greenmantle), and is very different from the wartime image of the Hun, as are the merry German youths of the Wandervögel that Melfort encounters during the course of the novel. But Loeffler is not so admired within his own country and it is up to Melfort to save him from the murderous attentions of two rival camps of ‘bad’ Germans: the Communists and the extreme nationalists. Loeffler is a complex and composite character, bearing a striking resemblance to Gustav Stresemann (or at least British perceptions of him33), at one time considered the great hope for postwar Germany, and based in part on the German Chancellor Brüning and in part on Brüning’s economic advisor and Buchan’s friend Moritz Bonn. Loeffler is reasonable and a moderate, willing to work with the Allies and within the international system to benefit his country, and represents Buchan’s ideal cosmopolitan ‘good’ German, a ‘white man and a gentleman’34 on the British model. These novels, which continue to play with the concept of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ German, can be seen as linking those novels which displayed pre-war or wartime attitudes and those which attempted, in the interwar period, either to undermine and breakdown such traditional negative stereotypes or to create a new, more positive, German stereotype. A number of British writers attempted, either consciously or unconsciously, to overturn the traditional image of the Germans that had been engraved in the public consciousness by pre-war and wartime propaganda, and helped to forge a specific stereotype of the Weimar Republic that endures to this day. Here we will focus on three novelists whose works were influential both among other intellectuals and the general public: Geoffrey Moss, Robert McAlmon and Christopher Isherwood. These three are interesting because, although from very different backgrounds and writing different kinds of fiction, their works share a number of common themes and attitudes towards the Weimar Republic. Geoffrey Moss was, at best, ambivalent towards the Republic (even if he also opposed the Nazi regime that followed it), and deeply concerned about the plight of Germans living under French occupation. Based on Moss’s own experiences and observations of life in Germany, his short 130

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story collection Defeat (1924) and his novel I Face the Stars (1933) were intended to alert a British readership to the harsh realities of life in postwar Germany and to the culpability of the Allies in the hardship endured by the Germans. As such these stories were populated not by arrogant, aggressive Prussian militarists or even soulful and poetic Germans, but instead by characters that have become tied up with the image of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking world: war profiteers and cabaret artists, movie moguls, impoverished aristocrats and professors, hard-eyed fallen women and ordinary people pushed into extraordinary actions by economic, social and political forces beyond their control. They contain representations of Germany and the Germans that mirror wider themes in the British discourse on the Republic and contributed to the creation of an image of Germany and the Germans radically different from that of pre-war Prussian militarism. The stories in Defeat can be broadly separated into two categories: those that deal with the French occupation and its numerous indignities and iniquities, and those that concern the fates of decent people caught up in the indecencies of economic hardship and the inflation. The first group, consisting of ‘The Souvenir’, ‘Moi, Je Suis Français’ and the title story, ‘Defeat’, was discussed in Chapter 3. Falling into the latter category are ‘Löttchen of the Nacht Lokal’, the story of a innocent country girl in who is seduced by a wealthy Austrian; ‘The Wrong Receipt’, a love story, in which cabaret singer Freya marries the war profiteer Jacob Löwenstein, only to fall in love with impoverished aristocrat Graf Otto Waldeck. They cuckold Löwenstein, who tries to catch the lovers out, but they trick him and when Freya’s mother dies, she is free to leave her husband and run off with Waldeck. Finally, ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’ is the story of an uppermiddle-class German family impoverished by the peace and the inflation, and describes the impotence and desperation of ordinary people at the mercy of impersonal forces, over which they have no control. In the short stories collected in Defeat, there are a number of German characters who are victims in real, personal, and immediate ways. Löttchen is a country-girl, an innocent abroad in the new cosmopolitan and cutthroat world that is Weimar Berlin. Forced to leave her rural home and come to Berlin in order to make her way in the world (‘Everyone was poorer than they used to be. Everyone had to do something nowadays. If one wanted to do any good one had to go to Berlin’35), she finds herself a victim of the inflation, unable to go home for Christmas because the price of her train ticket has become beyond her means. It is a familiar story of the inflation: ‘[p]rices rose and wages rose more slowly. […] the mark fell day by day. Each week one’s wages bought less. It had become impossible 131

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to save. The money one had been putting by for shoes grew less in value though one had added to it each Saturday’.36 Löttchen is dutiful, thrifty and innocent, but is driven to despair by the thought of being unable to escape Berlin and return home. Seeing another girl from her office dressed expensively in clothes that have been bought for her by her wealthy lovers, Löttchen accepts a dinner invitation from an elderly Austrian businessman. He takes her to the cinema and then to a nightclub, where her youth and innocence are emphasised when the reader is told that she has never before drunk wine or cognac, and eventually the Austrian offers her money for sex. At first she refuses, but as he offers her more and more the thought of being able to afford to go home or buy a new coat makes her relent and she is ruined. Similarly, Freya, the cabaret singer in ‘The Wrong Receipt’, is forced to dance naked and marry the disgusting Löwenstein in order to obtain the money necessary to keep herself and her mother off the breadline. ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’ also has German victimhood as its central theme. Economic and political instability have made every German, from the highest to the lowest, a victim: all are suffering under unemployment and food shortages, all are struggling to adjust to the alteration in their circumstances brought by war, defeat and national humiliation. The focus of the story is on an upper-middle-class family in north-eastern Germany, which is trying to adjust to the loss of its old comfortable lifestyle. It is an archetypal example of the plight of the German middle class in the inflation era: the family has lost all its savings in the inflation, the territorial readjustments of the Treaty have led to unemployment and social dislocation for the Professor, the father of the family, and there has been a dramatic drop in their standard of living. They are forced by circumstances to compete for employment and the other necessities of life in a world that is entirely alien to them. The Professor finds himself bewildered and unable to cope with his new situation: he has gone from being a man of status with financial security, to being redundant, unable to find work and struggling to scrape together enough tobacco to roll his own cigarettes. Yet the middle classes are not the only victims in ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’. On the way home from their allotment, young lovers Hans and Inge are set upon by a gang of unemployed workers, who steal the potatoes from their cart. But Moss is at pains not to paint these men as simple villains, but as decent people driven to indecent acts by hardship. One of the robbers declares “Beasts we are! Beasts we’ve been made! Wives and children, and nothing to give them. Working for nothing. Others eating what we 132

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earn. Two loaves in my home this week; them and a handful of potatoes. We aren’t human any more. We’re beasts.”37 And later, the same man sobs “They’ve bled us dry. … They’ve broken us. … They’ve made beasts of us. … Nine mortal years of it, and not a hope to live for. … They’ve broken us. … They’ve bloody broken us. … Beasts we are!”38 These robbers are therefore also victims, and, according to Moss, the Germans, from the highest (in the form of the impoverished aristocrats in ‘The Wrong Receipt’ and ‘Defeat’) to the lowest (in the form of these starving workers), are at the mercy of the economic and social dislocation caused by reparations and territorial losses. But Moss is also making a broader point here, and striking a note of warning for his British readership: that those who are victimised will eventually be driven by necessity to make victims of others. Again, this can be seen in ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’, both in the desire of the Grandmother for a strong leader, in the mould of Frederick the Great or Bismarck, who might resurrect German national pride by standing up to the Allies and redressing the injustices of Versailles, and in the workmen driven by desperation to violence and theft. There is another theme in ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’ which is developed further in Moss’s later novel I Face the Stars and which is common in much other British writing on Weimar Germany: youth and inter-generational difference or conflict. From Auden, Isherwood and Spender eulogising over the blond youths of Berlin’s gay bars, to interest in the Wandervögel and political youth movements, there was a fascination, almost bordering on obsession, with German youth amongst British commentators on the Weimar Republic.39 Moss, like many other commentators, viewed the condition of German youth with a mixture of concern and hope. Ernst, the youngest son in ‘“Isn’t Life Wonderful!”’ has got in with a bad crowd, playing ‘with children of the lowest people’ and ‘running wild’;40 he is insolent and disobedient and cares only for pleasure and play. This is a precursor of the directionless and morally bereft von der Meldegg children in I Face the Stars, and points to some of Moss’s concerns about the moral effects of the Weimar Republic and the peace settlement on German youth. Moss also makes a point about how people of different ages respond to the upheavals brought about by the Treaty of Versailles. While the Grandmother yearns for a strong leader and a return of German 133

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greatness and power, her son the Professor is defeated and submits impotently to his fate, while his children try and make the best of a bad situation: young lovers Hans and Inge work in manual jobs and try to bolster the family’s meagre supply of food and luxuries by growing vegetables on an allotment or bartering with neighbours, and younger brother Theodore is struggling to finish his schooling by night and working by day. Moss seems to be suggesting that the younger generation in Germany are better able to adjust to postwar circumstances and that their ability to adjust, together with their drive, determination and refusal to be cowed, is the key to a German recovery. Generational conflict and the widening gulf between the values of men like the narrator and Maximilian von der Meldegg (and by implication Moss himself) – not to mention Maximilian’s uncle – and those of the younger generation is also a major theme in I Face the Stars. One of the themes of the 1923 section of the novel is Maximilian’s concern over the way in which his children are growing up – he laments that his children are overly concerned with the value of money and lack both national pride and a strong work ethic41 – and he urges his friend, the narrator, to see whether he can help to instil traditional values of patriotism, duty and honour into the boys. But the narrator makes little headway. He observes of Max-Egon that ‘like most German children of his age, he had been affected by the nervous state of those around him during the war years and by the tensity in which they had lived since’42 and that this has made him pessimistic and sensitive. In contrast, his brother Bodo is described as being ‘obstinate’43, anti-Semitic and ‘a damned little materialist!’44 Their sister is also, as far as the narrator is concerned, disturbingly modern. In passages which make uncomfortable reading for a modern audience she is presented as coquettish and prematurely sexualised, while the narrator states that she too is ‘a materialist’, abandoning thoughts of growing into the traditional roles of wife and mother in favour of being a beautiful film actress, going to Monte Carlo and owning ‘a motor-car, a white one’.45 All this is severely upsetting to Maximilian who comments that ‘[y]ou’d be ashamed if your children were growing up like that. No patriotism, no pride in our family and its traditions, no interest in the past, impressed by nothing. All they want to have is a good time’.46 Yet there is no confusion as to where the blame for this state of affairs lies: the breakdown of the old Imperial system and the establishment of a Republican government have robbed the Germans of their traditional role models and values: as Max puts it, ‘[i]f you haven’t anyone to look up to, then there isn’t any authority’47 or respect.

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Moss also contributes to the creation of perhaps the most widespread and well-known stereotype of Weimar Germany: that of a country (or at least a city, Berlin) that was the home of lax morals and a seedy yet frenetic nightlife. Although this is not a major theme within these stories, Moss does touch on it – demonstrating that it was already, in 1923, a wellestablished idea among the British – if only to underline the overriding theme of ordinary Germans forced into ways of life that they would not, perhaps, have contemplated had it not been for the economic upheavals caused by the war and its aftermath. The narrator in ‘Löttchen in the Nacht Lokal’ meets the eponymous central protagonist in a seedy Berlin drinking den, ‘dull even beyond the measure ordinary to a nacht lokal’48 and amidst the dancing and the foreigners drinking ‘the sweet compulsory Deutsche champagne’,49 he is drawn to the girl wearing a dress so revealing that it is ‘a matter between herself and the police of Berlin’.50 Löttchen is ‘new to the dancing clubs’,51 driven, as we have seen, into life as a professional nightclub hostess after she has been seduced and ruined. In a similar vein, Freya in ‘The Wrong Receipt’ initially gets employment in Berlin’s bars and cabarets for reasons of economic necessity. The narrator tells us that before she was twelve Freya was put on a cabaret stage, where she made enough to keep her crippled mother and herself. Then came the revolution, and with it an unheard of licence. To keep her job, the little dancer had to move with the times. Her mother still had to be kept and was not overly particular how this was done. So Freya, for the at least praiseworthy object of supporting her parent, was driven to make almost the same sacrifice as that made by Lady Godiva.52 Yet we are also told that such a life is the result of financial necessity and nothing more: To ask whether Freya liked this life would be absurd. The glitter of cabarets, to which she had been born, meant nothing to her. She hated the wine: the liqueurs scorched her throat: the smoke worried her eyes. The women she met were not the nicest. She saw men in their nastiest moments. But she loathed above all else the late hours.53 This, then, is no Sally Bowles. Indeed, as soon as she sees a means of escaping from this world through marriage to the war profiteer Löwenstein, she takes it. Moss therefore gives us glimpses of Berlin nightlife, sleazy and exploitative, a land of dimly-lit, grubby 135

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establishments, in which rich foreigners exploit the native population in an empty pursuit of fleeting pleasures. Yet in none of these stories is there is any explicit reference to, or even overt hinting at, something for which it would seem Berlin was already famous: homosexuality. It is interesting to compare Moss’s stories with those of some of his contemporaries. In particular, the American writer Robert McAlmon provides an interesting contrast to, and link between, the stories of Moss and those of Isherwood. McAlmon’s German stories, written and published almost simultaneously with Moss’s Defeat, are almost entirely different in their focus and their treatment of Germany and her people: if Moss only touched on Berlin’s nightlife and found it gloomy, empty, unhealthy and exploitative, McAlmon put it centre stage and both celebrated and ultimately rejected it. Robert McAlmon grew up in rural South Dakota, but as a young man moved to New York where he founded the literary magazine Contact with poet William Carlos Williams. In 1921 he relocated to Paris, where he set himself up as a publisher, and became a member of the sizable American literary/artistic community in the French capital. In the winter of 1923–24 McAlmon visited Berlin, and was inspired to write a collection of short stories based on what he saw there. Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy tales (1925), like Isherwood’s Berlin stories, drew heavily on real life, with characters modelled on friends and acquaintances of the author and episodes and incidents based on his own experiences and observations. The three thematically linked stories in the collection, ‘Distinguished Air’, ‘Miss Knight’ and ‘The Lodging House’, all deal with the adventures of foreign (almost all American) expatriates in Berlin and their decadent and debauched lifestyles. ‘Miss Knight’ is ‘more of a character sketch than a story’54 and concerns a flamboyantly camp American transvestite who consumes vast quantities of drink and cocaine until he disappears from the Berlin scene and moves on to New York. ‘Distinguished Air’ is an impressionistic account of an all-night trawl through Berlin’s low nightlife, from dinner at the Adlon Hotel to breakfast at the O-la-la Café, populated by drunks, drug addicts and hedonists. Finally, in “The Lodging House”, American expatriate Harold Files rents the back room in a Berlin lodging house where he encounters two lesbians, the American ‘Steve’ Rath and her Russian girlfriend. Together they go to a lesbian dance-hall where he and Steve hang around with other listless and debauched expatriates. Files later meets Hilda Gray and they have a brief and loveless affair, to which he is largely indifferent, and the story concludes with Files, Steve and Hilda all deciding that Berlin is getting them down and leaving for Paris. 136

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These ‘Grim Fairy Tales’ differ greatly from Moss’s short stories, as much in style and focus as in the way in which they represent Germany and the Germans. Moss’s stories have a clearly defined plotline, narrative arc and structure. In contrast, the stories in Distinguished Air are more abstract and have an Expressionistic quality about them. ‘Nothing much happens in McAlmon’s stories’,55 and they are concerned more with dialogue (‘period fairy jargon’),56 experiences, characterisation and abstractions than in traditional storytelling. The Modernist credentials of these stories can be discerned in the admiration that such giants of literary Modernism as James Joyce and Ezra Pound had for them. The focus of the stories is also different. Moss touches on and alludes to the hedonistic nightlife of Berlin, while McAlmon shifts it to centre stage; more importantly, Moss is writing about Berlin’s gay nightlife which exploits young girls, while McAlmon, in deference to his own personal preferences, focuses on the homosexual underworld of Weimar Berlin, where exploited and exploiter are locked together in an mutually detrimental and unhealthy embrace. McAlmon was free to do this: he was publishing his stories himself and could therefore deal with issues that a mainstream publisher of the 1920s would have been unlikely to countenance. Unlike Moss (or later Isherwood) he ‘did not need to consider the public’s tolerance because he published his own material. He could (and did) write honestly and openly about any topic without fear of editorial intrusion or refusal of publication’.57 McAlmon’s stories are therefore grittier and more frank than Isherwood’s novels, which provide us with a sanitised vision of the same world, cleaned up for a mainstream audience. McAlmon’s stories first appeared in 1925, but Isherwood was unable or unwilling to match their frankness about his involvement with Berlin’s homosexual nightlife until Christopher and His Kind in 1977. It is therefore important to bear in mind that while Moss and (to a lesser extent) Isherwood were writing mainstream stories for a mainstream audience, McAlmon was writing underground stories, dealing with an underground world for a very specific, audience. But greater than these differences in style, focus and audience, are the ways in which McAlmon represented the Germans in his stories. Moss’s characters, even when seen through the eyes of an English narrator, are mostly Germans in a clearly identified German setting, and Moss was evidently concerned with many aspects of German life in the early 1920s. In contrast, the focus of the stories that make up Distinguished Air is primarily on the American expatriate community in Berlin and its lifestyle, activities and ennui. Indeed, there are no really substantial German characters in these stories: the Germans that do feature are always 137

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secondary figures, the lovers of expatriates or patrons, pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers encountered in the bars, nightclubs and cafés of Berlin. More than this, the setting is almost secondary: it is sketchily described and one has the sense that the stories could have been set anywhere. The image of the Germans presented in them is not especially favourable and seems to point to what McAlmon regarded as an ingrained hypocrisy, decadence and corruption at the heart of the German nation and its people. This hypocrisy is indicated by a number of references to German police officers who turn a blind eye to homosexual behaviour because they are either taking bribes or are homosexuals themselves, and, more specifically, to the ‘German man and wife’ who leave Miss Knight’s Thanksgiving dinner ‘because, they explained later, though they did conduct a café for queer men they did not like seeing Foster Morris being unduly familiar with his soldier lover in front of them’.58 Elsewhere there are a number of German prostitutes or drug dealers who are both being exploited by, and are themselves exploiting, the Americans they encounter, using them as a source of ready cash. It is suggested that this is due to the unstable economic and political situation in Germany, but this is not explored in any detail and is dismissed altogether by one character who declares ‘[i]t’s all too tragic I suppose, but I can’t feel any further about that sort of thing. People will starve to death; people will die; or kill themselves, or drink themselves to death’.59 McAlmon therefore presents us with a different picture of Germany and the Germans to that of Moss. This might be attributed to that fact that their backgrounds and interests were so dissimilar: Moss the British, conservative, heterosexual former army officer, and McAlmon the American, homosexual, bohemian. Yet, for all the differences between McAlmon’s representation of Weimar Germany and that of Moss and others, a number of important themes common to British writing on Weimar Germany can be found in the stories in Distinguished Air. McAlmon’s vision, like that of many British visitors to and writers about Germany, is Berlin-centric. He is mainly concerned with the nightlife and sexual licence of Berlin, particularly its gay underworld. His Berlin stories are pervaded with a sense of futility and gloom, of feverish pleasure seeking behind which lie emptiness, unfulfilment and despair. Berlin, in these stories, is a cut-throat, commercial exploitative city: its inhabitants living like parasites off the wealth of foreign visitors, who in turn exploit the economic situation in pursuit of their own decadent and perverted pleasures. But, as such, it is above all a modern city, populated by characters with modern attitudes towards sex, money and life in general.

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McAlmon represents the Germans and their capital city in what is, by any estimation, a negative light. Yet it is not the old negative stereotype of the ‘Hunnish’ German that is found in these stories, but a new vision of the Germans. True, there is a nod towards the pre-war and wartime German caricature in the bullying concierge in ‘The Lodging House’ – an ‘ill-mannered ruffian’ who has ‘the surliness that a certain type of Prussian possesses, and utilizes, particularly on auslanders [sic]’60 – but mostly the Germans in these stories, particularly in ‘Distinguished Air’, are of a different type altogether: youthful, streetwise, exaggeratedly aware of the value of things and of the ways in which to get what they want, and parasitic. Yet there are hints that, if the Germans were parasites, it was at least not through their own fault, and that the author has some grain of sympathy for them, even if his characters do not. As McAlmon later noted in his autobiographical account of his years in Europe, Being Geniuses Together, ‘it was sad to know that innumerable young and normal Germans were doing anything, from dope selling to every form of prostitution, to have money for themselves and their families, their widowed mothers and younger brothers and sisters’.61 Nor is this negative treatment reserved for the Germans: the Americans in these stories do not escape the author’s ire. McAlmon is keen to reveal to the world ‘all the deluded, feebly talented, lost and abandoned men and women of a decaying world’62 who have arrived in Berlin, their spiritual home, whether they be German, American or English. There is a strain of misanthropy running through Distinguished Air and despite the author’s assertion that ‘[a]t any rate the stories did deal with variant types with complete objectivity, not intent on their “souls” and not distressed by their “morals”’,63 one does not have to dig deep into the text to find little nuggets of the author’s contempt for his fellow men. Moss and McAlmon were therefore, in their different ways, contributing to the creation of a new German stereotype, an image of Weimar Germany and its inhabitants that was distinct from previous notions and images of the country. Both of these authors, to some extent, portrayed the Germans as victims: both as a nation, unfairly and vindictively treated after the end of the First World War, and as individuals, at the mercy of forces beyond their control. But they also contributed towards the creation of the most common and most enduring of the interwar British stereotypes of the Germans: that of a youthful, modern and active nation, a people open to new ideas, which had thrown off the shackles of its past and was moving forward. The Germans were often characterised as no longer slaves to authority, order and convention, but socially, culturally and (perhaps above all) sexually free, free to 139

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experiment in art, literature and life. The image of Germany as a cultural and sexual utopia was one which found a place in the minds of many in Britain during the Weimar period; and the vitality, freedom and modernity of Germany and the Germans was often contrasted with the staid, sluggish and stagnating nature of British cultural, social, economic and political life.64 Yet such notions also had their downsides and their detractors: the Germans might be regarded as sexually liberated, but those who viewed this as a positive development were far outnumbered by those who saw it as a symptom of moral degeneracy. However, notions of German youthfulness and vitality were far from new: one of the reasons why the British felt so threatened by Germany before the Great War was that the youthful German Empire was regarded as being dangerously dynamic and industrious and in a position to threaten the older and slower British Empire’s commercial, industrial and military hegemony. There are echoes of the old fears and preconceptions about the Germans even in these new, post-war, stereotypes, in which the influence of, and a continuity with, older notions is still discernable. While the fiction of Buchan, Moss and McAlmon (and their contribution towards the creation of a Weimar stereotype) is largely forgotten today, ‘[i]t is the improbable figure of Christopher Isherwood […] who has created, more than any German writer, the image we have of Berlin in the 1920s’.65 This image, like those of Moss and McAlmon, was based on personal experience. But because Isherwood’s vision was based on life, because the real-life models for many of his characters have been identified and because of his style of writing, many have fallen into the trap of believing that the contents of these works are history rather than fiction. Yet, for all their stripped-down, journalistic style, Isherwood’s novels remain fiction. Indeed, in a prefatory note to Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood himself warned that ‘readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of real people’.66 Otto Friedrich noted that ‘in transferring Isherwood’s work to Broadway, the various creators of Cabaret decided that all the idiosyncratic characters of The Berlin Stories [sic] must become a series of types and thus caricatures’,67 but Isherwood’s stories themselves are not entirely free of caricatures. Thanks to the stage and screen adaptations of his work, the best-known of Isherwood’s characters, Sally Bowles, has, for many modern readers, come to represent – almost to personify – the decadence and hedonism of Weimar Berlin. But this character was loosely based on a real person, the young English expatriate Jean Ross, who was less than pleased to be identified as the ‘real Sally Bowles’.68 Yet she was also based 140

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on existing stereotypes of the vamp, the ‘new woman’ and the femme fatale. Thus Sally Bowles has something of Marlene Deitrich’s Lola Lola about her, and in her outrageous behaviour, her ‘loose morals’, sexual freedom, and her pursuit of wealth and a good time, she is representative both of the freedom and decadence of the Weimar Republic and of the ‘new woman’ as found in the novels of Irmgard Keun. It is in this universality, precisely because she is, in part, representative of a type, that the enduring appeal of the character lays. The same can be said of Isherwood’s German characters, and therefore his vision of Weimar Germany as a whole: it is based on real life, but is also made up of and representative of types, of contemporary ideas of Germany and the Germans, to which he added his own twist. As we have seen, a number of stereotypes of Weimar Germany and its inhabitants were already in place by the time Isherwood settled in Berlin in 1929. That he was well aware of Berlin’s well-established reputation for vice can be seen from his later admission that one of his main reason for travelling to Germany was the perception that casual homosexual encounters might be more easily had in Berlin than at home.69 It has been suggested that ‘[i]n comparison to McAlmon’s stories, the Isherwood material is tame. […] the characters have been cleaned up for mass consumption’70 and up to a point this is true: Isherwood’s stories are less frank and gritty than McAlmon’s and much more guarded and ambiguous about their narrators’, and by extension author’s, sexuality. This could be seen as a flaw, but it means that the picture of Weimar Berlin presented by Isherwood is much more multi-faceted and ‘realistic’ than that by McAlmon: in Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin nightlife, sexual perversity, drug dealing and dissipation are just one aspect of life in the German capital, a single facet of the larger social, cultural and political life of Berlin, whereas in Distinguished Air they are the only aspect of this life presented to the reader. That is not to say that Isherwood downplays the debauchery of Weimar Berlin – he adds his own contribution to the stereotype of the German capital as a modern Sodom or Babylon. There are plenty of examples of party going, Berlin’s frenetic nightlife and sexual perversity in both Berlin novels: Mr Norris’s ‘singular pleasures’,71 his silk underwear (‘too fine for a man’72) and his prized collection of pornographic books (‘I stopped and read the titles: The Girl with the Golden Whip. Miss Smith’s Torture Chamber. Imprisoned at a Girls’ School, or The Private Diary of Montague Dawson, Flagellant. This was my first glimpse of Mr Norris’s sexual tastes.’);73 New Year’s Eve revels at ‘the Troika’ and a riotous party at Olga’s apartment; meetings with pimps, prostitutes and gay aristocrats, and, of course, the sexual adventures (real or imagined) of 141

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Sally Bowles, to name but a few. Isherwood was therefore aware of and influenced by the established reputation of Berlin as a place of sexual freedom and riotous nightlife (indeed, it was one of the things that attracted him to Berlin in the first place), the place for an Englishman to go for a good time, no strings attached and no questions asked. More than this he incorporated such ideas into his own work and added his own contribution to this stereotype of Weimar Germany as a place of sexual licence, moral bankruptcy and decadence. While the best known characters from his stories are British, Isherwood, unlike McAlmon, was interested in more than just the ups and downs of expatriate life in the German capital. While Distinguished Air is focused on the American community in Berlin and has few, if any, fully realised German characters, Isherwood broadens his focus and, appropriately enough for novels set in Germany, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin feature a number of important German characters. And it is often through these characters that we can see Isherwood’s debt, and contribution, stereotypes of the Germans. The youthful Communist, boxer and pimp Otto is an example of the young, dynamic and streetwise German, akin to some of the roughly-sketched hustlers in McAlmon’s ‘Distinguished Air’. He is undoubtedly based on the youths that Isherwood encountered in the gay bars of Berlin and is the forerunner of another character of the same name in Goodbye to Berlin, who will be discussed in more detail below. Similarly, Otto’s girlfriend Fräuline Anni, with her ‘self-possessed whore’s smile’ and her ‘long black boots, laced up to the knee’,74 and Olga, ‘an enormous woman’ with ‘waxy pink’ cheeks, ‘hair dyed tinsel-golden, so that it matched the glitter of the half-dozen bracelets on her powdered arms’ and her ‘staring china-blue eyes which did not laugh, although her lips were parted in a smile revealing several gold teeth’75, are stereotype whores, straight out of Otto Dix’s Three Women (1926) and Brothel Madame (1925), just as the masculine British journalist Helen Pratt brings to mind Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). But Olga is also more than just a bawd: she is ‘a woman of numerous occupations. […] a procuress, a cocaine seller, and a receiver of stolen goods’ and therefore a representative of Berlin’s dark side, but ‘she also let lodgings, took in washing and, when in the mood, did exquisite fancy needlework’.76 Probably before the war and inflation she was a reasonably respectable housewife, but, as Norman Page puts it, ‘in the social and moral chaos of “those bankrupt days”, it is clear, needlework and cocaine, laundry and prostitution, no longer belong to different worlds’.77 Olga therefore incorporates several elements of the Weimar stereotype in a single character: she is streetwise, commercially aware and 142

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determined to do what she must to make a little money, and a victim of circumstance, pushed into occupations that she perhaps would once have scorned by economic hardship. The character of Otto Nowak in the ‘On Ruegen [sic] Island’ and ‘The Nowaks’ sections of Goodbye to Berlin is another case of Isherwood expanding on, contributing to, and adapting existing stereotypes of the Germans, although there is perhaps more here that is originally Isherwood’s than elsewhere. Otto is based on Walter Wolff, one of Isherwood’s Berlin boyfriends, but he is also an archetype of German youth – the ideal ‘German Boy’ of Isherwood’s fantasies and desires, ‘[t]he Blond as the invader who comes from another land to conquer and rape him. […] the masculine yang mating with Christopher’s feminine yin’78 – and as such an amalgam of all the beautiful blond German youths that Isherwood encountered at his favourite night-haunt, the Cosy Corner. When first encountered Otto is lingeringly and lovingly described thus: Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is fair and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide, disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true. When he grins, two large dimples appear in his peachbloom cheeks.79 He is Isherwood’s ideal of male beauty personified, but more than that, he is an archetype of youth; the ideal of vibrant, dynamic and animalistic youth made literary flesh. He is frequently referred to as akin to an animal and as living in the moment with no thought for either the motivations for or consequences of his actions. He is unashamedly and wholly physical, not in the least cerebral like Isherwood and his friends – ‘Otto is his whole body […] Otto moves fluidly, effortlessly; his gestures have the savage, unconscious grace of a cruel, elegant animal’80 – and he is often described as performing strenuous physical activity: swimming, running, playing football or doing exercises in his bedroom. He is an uneducated working class lad, but he lives by his wits, he is streetwise and cunning, again like an animal, living by instinct and knowing just how to get what he wants. To Isherwood he is an ideal of animalistic working class ‘freedom’, unhindered by the hang-ups and worries that beset Isherwood as a middle-class British intellectual.81 Isherwood’s German characters owe much to existing ideas and stereotypes. Yet while Isherwood’s characters may be blends of ‘real’ people with established types or stereotypes, these are not necessarily German stereotypes. This is possibly one reason (along with its wide 143

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dissemination to through stage and screen adaptations) why Isherwood’s vision has become so popular in the English-speaking world: by populating his Berlin with easily identifiable types, he makes it both familiar and accessible to his British and American audience. It is perhaps for this reason that Isherwood’s work is now seen by many as the definitive vision of Weimar Berlin, summing up the essence of a particular place at a particular time, but more than that, many see it as a historical record rather than fiction. As we have seen, Isherwood was drawing the inspiration for his vision of Weimar Berlin and the characters that inhabit it from his own experiences and observations, but he was also building on and contributing to already well-established ideas and stereotypes that had been in existence, in one form or another, for at least a decade before his Berlin novels were published. This continuity with existing notions of Germany and the Germans in the British popular consciousness meant that his writings often coincided with what other contemporary writers were saying about life within Germany, giving them an extra gloss of realism. But his novels are no less fictional than other such works based on the personal experiences of other visitors to Germany and Berlin in the Weimar period. It is merely that through adaptation and self promotion (Isherwood’s claim to Otto Friedrich in the 1970s that ‘I was the only one there […] the only English-speaking writer to write a book about that period’82 is, as we have seen, ludicrous) that Isherwood’s works have reached a wider audience than those of many of his contemporaries who wrote about life within Weimar Germany. The texts that we have examined here are only the tip of the iceberg: there were many more books, both fiction and non-fiction, published both before and after the First World War dealing with life in Germany and with the Germans themselves. To assess in detail the full import of even the few most significant and interesting of these works would require an extensive study in itself. Nevertheless, we have been able to glean something of what these texts have to tell us about attitudes towards Germany and her people from the necessarily brief survey made here. Dating back to the early nineteenth century the British have had a longstanding tendency to view their German cousins as falling into two camps, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Until around 1870 and the unification of the German states under Prussian leadership, the image of the Germans uppermost in the British consciousness was essentially that of the ‘good’ German: the soulful, music-loving intellectual with a fondness for beer, romantic poetry and obscure philosophy, a harmless and essentially 144

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comical figure, at best cultured and well-mannered, at worst a kind of unsophisticated and uncouth country cousin. But after 1890, as fears about the threat posed to British commerce by the youthful and rapidly industrialising German Empire came to the fore, a number of works of fiction and non-fiction began to build up the image of the arrogant, militaristic, vulgar, obese, automaton-like, ‘Hunnish’, ‘bad’ German or Prussian in the British popular consciousness. By the outbreak of the First World War this stereotype of the evil inhuman German was firmly established as the primary image of the Germans in the minds of most Britons, a vision only hardened by tales of German atrocities and hysterical and vituperative propaganda articles published in the British and Allied press during the war. After the Great War, when passions had cooled and more sober judgements could once again be made, there emerged a new, more positive image of Germany and its inhabitants, based partly on the writings of British visitors or commentators and partly on German books translated into English and published in Britain. This change of heart and alteration in the way in which the Germans were portrayed undoubtedly had much to do with changing political and social attitudes in postwar Britain: a general feeling of guilt about the treatment of Germany at the postwar peace conference, the resulting harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the widely-reported sufferings of ordinary families certainly helped to fuel a change in attitudes, as did traditional British sympathy for the underdog (Germany was seen by many as standing up valiantly to French rapacity and aggression, much as Belgium had been characterised as pluckily standing up to the Germans in 1914) and official concerns to rehabilitate Germany both as a viable trading partner and a counterweight to French hegemony on the Continent. Yet there was more to it than that. Reports in the British press, and books coming out of Germany and those by British authors who had visited the Republic, helped to create and perpetuate the idea of the Weimar Republic as something quite different to the Germany of the Wilhelmine era and present its people in a completely different light. The stereotype of Weimar Germany was therefore complicated and multi-faceted. One of the earliest and most influential strands in this new image of Germany was the idea of the Germans as a victimised people, suffering at the hands of forces beyond their control and even comprehension. This idea saw the Germans as perpetually beset by hunger and hardship and the Republic in a permanent state of economic and political turmoil. This way of representing the Germans was to last throughout the Weimar period and can be found in books from Geoffrey Moss’s Defeat of 1923 to 145

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Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1938. The notion of the ‘great inflation’ of 1923 is one of the mainstays of this enduring vision of the Republic and its inhabitants lurching from one crisis to the next, but even this, an idea based on fact, came to be exaggerated and mythologized to the point where it became just another aspect of the German stereotype. Akin to this notion of the Republic beset by economic and political crisis and turmoil, and of its population as victims, was the notion of the Germans as dignified in defeat, suffering and beaten but unbowed. Many of the characters in works such as Moss’s stories are battling with hardship, but they do not give in; they maintain what little dignity they can muster and fight on, doing what they must to survive. Allied to, and emerging in conjunction with, this image of a crisisstricken and tumultuous Germany was the notion of the Weimar Republic as a youthful, vital, energetic and thoroughly modern nation, the home of new ideas and of unprecedented cultural and social (particularly sexual) freedoms. This image was often held up by the younger generation of British intellectuals as a contrast to what they regarded as a sluggish and stagnating Britain, devoid of the dynamic cultural and social impetus of the Germans. The most commonly described side of this picture of a new, freer and more liberal Germany was that of the frenetic and gaudy Berlin nightlife. The German capital was often characterised as a city of bright lights and low morals, in whose bars, nightclubs and cafés could be found pastimes and pleasures to suit any, even the most bizarre and degraded, tastes. The treatment of this side of German life ranged from the disgusted, stressing the moral bankruptcy and decadence of the Germans, to the prurient and titillating, to the celebratory and eulogistic. But even though there was an attempt, whether conscious or unconscious, among British intellectuals of the Weimar period to tear down the old stereotypes and set up new ones in their place, the old images died hard and echoes of them can be found throughout the interwar period. This is especially true of the years immediately after the end of the First World War, and it would appear that a period of gradual adjustment was required. Novels such as Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) presented postwar readers with a pre-war tale featuring pre-war stereotype German characters; Cicely Hamilton’s novel William – An Englishman (1919) is a more complex and interesting example, and novel containing stereotypically ‘Hunnish’ Germans, written by an author who was broadly sympathetic to Germany and its people and who sought to break down negative stereotypes of them in her non-fiction works. Similarly, the works of John Buchan contain both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans, most surprisingly in his wartime Richard Hannay adventure Greenmantle. However, broadly 146

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speaking, his image of the Germans is rooted in pre-war ideas and it is only gradually that he comes to present a more sympathetic vision of them, firstly in The Three Hostages and then in A Prince of the Captivity. Yet echoes of the old stereotype of authoritarian Prussians can be found in works from later in the Weimar period, and even some aspects of the broadly more positive stereotype of Weimar Germany contain traces of pre-war notions: the idea of the Germans as industrious, dynamic and commercially aware and of the Republic as a modern and energetic nation and potential economic and industrial powerhouse are strikingly close to pre-war fears of a German economic and industrial hare outstripping a moribund British economic tortoise. There was therefore both continuity and change in the way in which British writers and intellectuals represented Germany and the Germans in the Weimar period. Although a rash of new ideas and stereotypes emerged in this period, the British could never quite seem to free themselves completely from their ingrained pre-war images of Germany and its people. Indeed, many of these ideas remain with us to this day in the shape of stereotypes of Teutonic humourlessness or efficiency. Yet different ideas about Germany and the Germans did emerge during the Weimar period; and, even if they have been forgotten or subsumed by new stereotypes, they are still alive in the minds of anyone whose mental image of the Weimar Republic is of Sally Bowles, Berlin cabarets and political and economic crisis.

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7 ‘The German Fascisti’: British Attitudes towards Nazism in the 1920s

One of the most common perceptions of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking world is that of a doomed democratic experiment, a brief flowering of freedom between two tyrannies, whose eventual replacement by the National Socialist dictatorship was inevitable. This was a view popularised, at least in part, by the novels of Christopher Isherwood and the memoirs of other cultural refugees who had witnessed the last years of the Republic and the Nazi seizure of power. Yet these accounts were almost all written after the event and with the benefit of hindsight, when assertions about the inevitability of the Republic’s replacement with a Nazi regime were perhaps easier to make. In fact, British intellectuals were far from regarding a Nazi dictatorship as assured at the time. As we shall see, for much of the 1920s Hitler and the Nazis were largely ignored by British observers, viewed as nothing more than a minority group and a regional party in the complicated morass of German political groupings. Of those intellectuals who did take notice of the National Socialists, opinions were varied, and at times contradictory, but they often reflected both the changing fortunes of the Nazi Party and the shifting and contradictory nature of Nazism itself. As Richard J. Evans points out, ‘the Third Reich has burned itself onto the modern world’s consciousness as no other regime, perhaps fortunately, has ever managed to do’.1 While this perhaps means that later

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generations may be spared similar excesses to those of the Hitler’s regime, it also to some extent hampers attempts fully to understand and appreciate the reactions and opinions of those contemporaries of the Nazis who had no way of knowing how things would turn out, and made their assessments and prognostications accordingly. So familiar and ingrained in the popular consciousness have the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War become that with our knowledge of the violence and horrors of the 1930s and 1940s we wonder that the people of the 1920s could not see what was coming, and call upon them to make moral judgements that at the time would have been impossible. In his recent study of British responses to Nazism in the 1930s Dan Stone asserts that an imaginative leap is necessary for the modern reader fully to understand the reactions of British intellectuals and establishment figures to Hitler’s Reich before the Second World War.2 A similar exercise in imagination is necessary for anyone wishing to comprehend fully the writings of British intellectuals on the Nazis before 1933, but to appreciate these writings (or lack of them) in the 1920s one also needs to make a second imaginative leap: to a time before the National Socialists were a mass movement or even a national political party. To place the opinions of British intellectuals in context, we can look briefly at the ways in which the Nazi Party was treated in the British press. The number and frequency of articles in national newspapers about Hitler and the NSDAP before 1933, as well as the content of these articles, help to reveal to us how they were regarded prior to the seizure of power. A survey of articles which appeared in The Times between 1919 and 1933 is instructive. Although Adolf Hitler was mentioned by name in articles throughout the 1920s (albeit misspelt ‘Hittler’ until the second half of 1923), there was no specific reference to the National Socialists as a political party in their own right until after 1925; rather articles dealt with the ‘Fascisti’ or ‘German Fascists’, and even then both Hitler and his party were mentioned in the context of Bavarian, rather than national, politics. Hitler and the Fascisti attracted a certain amount of attention in the reports of reaction, ‘dictatorship’ and political violence in Bavaria in the early 1920s, with such reporting reaching a high-water mark in the year of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Between January and June 1923, 36 articles dealing specifically with Hitler and the Fascisti appeared in The Times, while between July and December this number rose to 57. Yet even in these articles dealing with Hitler’s first bid for power, he was seen almost as a marginal and secondary figure: The Times, and seemingly British readers in general, were much more interested in the role played by the more familiar figure of General Ludendorff in the failed coup d’état. From then until the 149

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end of the 1920s the number of articles dealing with Hitler and the Nazis dwindled to next to nothing: only eight articles dealing specifically with Hitler and the ‘German Fascists’ appeared in The Times during 1925, and these were still mostly concerned with the fall-out from the 1923 putsch. In 1927 the National Socialists appeared by name for the first time, but had only two articles devoted to them, while in 1929 there were nine articles relating to the party and a further four dealing specifically with Hitler himself. With the onset of the world economic crisis and the corresponding rise of the fortunes of the Nazi Party, coverage in the British press became more common, as one would expect, but it was still far from the detailed and blanket coverage that might be expected of a party deemed to be the next rulers of Germany and the inevitable destroyers of Weimar democracy. In 1930, with the Nazis taking 18.3% of the vote in the Reichstag elections, their best result so far, The Times devoted 24 articles to Hitler and 26 to the NSDAP; while the following year it ran 18 articles about Hitler and 66 about the National Socialists. In 1932, with the Nazis polling 37.3% and 33.1% in the year’s two Reichstag elections and with Hitler running for the Presidency of the Republic, the number of articles relating to Hitler rocketed to 131 and those relating to the NSDAP rose to 116; while in 1933, the year that Hitler became Chancellor, 125 articles were devoted to the Führer and over 123 to the Nazis. A similar pattern of reporting can be seen in the Manchester Guardian and, according to Brigitte Granzow, in the other British newspapers of the period.3 However, it should be noted that the tenor of these reports differed – the reporting in the Manchester Guardian was consistently much more hostile towards Hitler and the Nazis, while that in The Times tended to be more even-handed and non-partisan (without being necessarily either uncritical or favourable). This pattern of reporting was mirrored, almost exactly, by the writings of British intellectuals. There were very few references to Hitler and the National Socialists in the published or unpublished works of British writers, artists and academics before 1925, and virtually none before 1923. From the mid-1920s there does appear to have been some interest in the emerging NSDAP, but also considerable confusion as to just who the Nazis were and what they stood for (and for good reason). It was only really from 1927 onwards, and particularly after 1930, that Hitler and his party began to be written about by British intellectuals. This very much reflected the changing fortunes of the NSDAP as the 1920s progressed and, as we shall see, the comments of British writers on Germany all too

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often mirrored the contradictions, uncertainties and fluctuations of Nazi ideology. This lack of a presence in the international media in the mid-1920s is hardly surprising when one considers the circumstances of the party at the time: many of its early leaders were out of the picture (either in prison like Hitler and Rudolf Hess or in exile like Hermann Göring) and the party hierarchy and administration were in disarray. Even after his release from prison Hitler, arguably the party’s most valuable asset as a driving force and public speaker, was, as Richard J. Evans points out, ‘not allowed to speak in public in most parts of Germany until 1927’ and ‘was still banned in Prussia, which covered over half the Weimar Republic’s land surface and contained the majority of its population, as late as 1928’.4 Yet once this ban was lifted and after a period of re-organisation and a new commitment to winning power through legal means, the party began to gain a national profile and, starting to capitalise on the economic crisis in Germany after 1929, it again attracted the interest of the British press. One of the reasons for this was almost certainly the focus of British attention on Berlin throughout the Weimar era. As we have seen, British writers and journalists were overwhelmingly Berlin-centric in their travel and outlook, to the extent that they fell into the trap of regarding the Reich capital as representative of the nation as a whole. This meant that they were likely to overlook developments in Germany outside the capital. It is therefore hardly surprising that Nazism, which originated in Bavaria, failed to attract the attention of British observers in the first half of the 1920s. Only when the Nazi party began to build up a national profile in the second half of the decade did this change. The pattern very much reflected trends in British intellectual interaction with Germany. As we have seen, there were two major surges in the number of British intellectuals visiting the Weimar Republic, in 1923–24 and 1929–33. These high-water marks in British travelling to Germany coincided with periods of crisis in the political life of the Republic and, it is natural that British comment on the German situation includes an increased interest in extremist groups such as the Nazis. One of the few British intellectuals to take notice of the Nazi Party before 1925 was Morgan Philips Price. Indeed, in his autobiography he wrote that ‘I think that I can take some credit for having paid attention to the Fascist (later Nazi) movements which were growing up there [in Munich] and for mentioning Hitler and his activities exactly ten years before he actually came to power’.5 Price spent four years in Germany as a freelance journalist and correspondent for the Daily Herald, travelling widely and reporting particularly on the plight of the German working 151

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class and the vicissitudes of German politics in early years of the Republic. To this end he travelled to Bavaria, which was still suffering from the fallout of the events of 1918–19. After the defeat of the short-lived Independent Socialist and Soviet Republics and the subsequent White Terror (1919–21) in Bavaria, the political right was in the ascendant, a situation which was acutely worrying to the Allies. The British in particular feared either some sort of monarchist/Nationalist revival or a Bavarian secession from Germany, which would destabilise the region and potentially lead to a Bavarian-Austrian Anschluss.6 Bavaria was, in 1922–23, a hotbed of political intrigue, where battles between left and right and regional versus central authority were being played out and where, as the British thought, the crisis that would decide the fate of the Weimar Republic would probably take place. It was therefore the ideal place for a journalist deeply interested in the fate of German Socialism and the Republic it had helped to found. Price later recalled that once, in Bavaria, ‘I interviewed everyone who, I thought, would give me objective information on what was going on’7 and he was soon making his views on the situation in Germany known to British readers in a series of articles for the left-wing Labour Monthly and Daily Herald, as well as in a book, Germany in Transition (1923). As his daughter points out, Price was ‘at this time an avowed Marxist’8 and he therefore viewed the situation in Bavaria, and the Nazis, very much within his own ideological terms of reference at the time. He saw the events unfolding in southern Germany and the right-wing paramilitaries in Marxist terms, so much so that his pronouncements on the early Nazis are surprisingly like those of the official Communist explanation for Fascism and Nazism as laid down by Moscow at the 1928 Comintern Conference.9 In this vein, Price saw the situation in Bavaria in 1922–23 explicitly in terms of the class struggle and the conflict between the forces of revolutionary progress and reaction, of capitalism and labour. As far as he was concerned, the organisations of the right in Bavaria were simply the old Conservative forces of ‘agrarian reaction’ who had adapted to the political realities of the post-revolutionary 1920s by forming alliances with big business and adopting the name ‘Deutsche National’ rather than Conservative. Price believed that this ‘shows that the Junkers [Prussian aristocrats] no longer expect to win popular sympathy by harking back to the slogans of the old days’10 but had instead adopted a programme designed to appeal to the petit-bourgeois and agricultural workers by stressing traditional values, anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism, and therefore ‘appealing to the religious prejudices of the Middle Ages and using these prejudices as a means to entice those into its camp who would 152

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otherwise have been forced by poverty into the ranks of the Socialists and Communists’.11 Such a programme had not proved very successful in the industrialized north, but had been given a better reception amongst the ‘boorish, superstitious, good-natured, and politically backward’12 agrarian workers of rural and conservative Bavaria. As far as Price was concerned, Bavaria was the centre of monarchist reaction and right-wing ‘counterrevolution’ in Germany, the base from which the ‘Junkers and generals of the Hohenzollern army’ planned to ‘make […] the centre from which they could work for the re-establishment of the old régime in Prussia’.13 Price thus viewed the emergent National Socialists not so much as an independent grouping with a new and radical political programme, but rather as an offshoot of existing right-wing groups, explicable in terms of activity and ideology within the Marxist notions of class struggle and the evolution of human history through control of the means of production. Throughout his chapter on Bavaria in Germany in Transition, and in his journalism, Price used the catch-all term ‘German Fascisti’ to refer to a variety of right-wing Nationalist groups operating in southern Germany, of which the Nazis were just one example, and a minor example at that. And in this he was not particularly wide of the mark: at this stage in their development the Nazi Party had close links with other right-wing groupings in Bavaria and indeed fought the 1924 Reichstag elections as part of a Nationalist bloc (the Völkisch-nationaler Block).14 Price believed that extreme and virulent anti-Semitism, semi-pagan pan-Germanism and the wearing of the ‘Swiastika [sic]’ originated with the ‘impecunious sons of former Prussian officers’ at the top of the paramilitary ‘Organisation Consul’ or ‘Orgesch’.15 Price regarded this group, which had been set up by forester Georg Escherich in 1920, but was disarmed and disbanded in 1921 under pressure from the Allied Control Commission – as the precursor to the Nazis and their fellow ‘Fascists’. In an article which appeared in the January 1923 issue of Labour Monthly he wrote Another group arising out of the Orgesch is that centring round the socalled ‘National Socialists’ (NSDAP). To them have come what remains of the Organisation Consul and the Freikorps. As extreme anti-Semites they have reconstructed themselves under this new name and are organising terrorist expeditions against socialist industrial centres, attacks on Jewish shopkeepers and the plundering of banks and post trains. In fact even the Bavarian government has been forced to issue warrants for arrest for highway robbery against some of the leaders of this group. They represent the extreme Right of the Fascist Movement in Germany – the romantic robber barons of the 153

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Middle Ages transplanted into the twentieth century, with the selfimposed task of saving the capitalist system.16 He thus saw the Nazis as one group amongst many, as the ‘romantic Fascisti’,17 heirs to a right-wing reactionary tradition, and as terrorists and bank-robbers committing acts of violence and intimidation on a pretty minor scale. As one might expect, given the position of the party at this time, there was nothing in this depiction of the Nazis which suggested that there was anything special about them or that significantly distances them from the other groups that made up Price’s amorphous and ill-defined ‘German Fascisti’ or that they were a serious threat to the German Republic. Yet while Price regarded the Nazis as just one group amongst many and as being firmly in a tradition of counter-revolutionary and reactionary movements, he also recognised that there was something new about them which set them apart from other groups on the right. In Germany in Transition, Price drew a distinction between ‘the peasant clerical Bavarian reaction’ and ‘the heavy industry-Fascist Prussian reaction’18 and it is into this latter category – distinct from the pro-Catholic Church, monarchist, nationalist movements – that he placed the National Socialists. In much of what he wrote, Price prefigured the later orthodox Marxist ideological position on Nazism laid down by Moscow in the late 1920s and 1930s: that National Socialism represented the most extreme form of right-wing counter-revolution, the last gasp of the capitalist system in the struggle over the means of production. Yet he also noted the anti-capitalist element of Nazi ideology and propaganda and it is in this that he saw the real danger. Nor was he alone: many British observers in the 1920s and 30s found the socialist element of National Socialism much more worrying than its national side. But Price found this disturbing for different reasons – he worried that the socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Nazis would lure the workers away from left-wing German political parties. He wrote of ‘the so-called National Socialist Party under Herr Hittler [sic] and Herr Eckert, which aimed at organising, under a Fascist banner, those elements of the Trade Unions who were tired of the cowardice of the Social Democratic leaders’.19 Thus, as far as Price was concerned, the Nazis appealed – as the Social Democrats or Communists did not – both to the disgruntled and impoverished agricultural workers of East Prussia and Bavaria through their anti-Semitism, and to the unhappy urban working class through their anti-capitalist pronouncements. Here he was reflecting a key contradiction within Nazism: on the one hand it embraced elements of traditional right-wing ideology (anti154

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Semitism, overturning the Versailles settlement, völkische nationalism etc.), it was also a party in favour of the ‘small man’ and opposed to traditional social elites, with strong revolutionary and anti-capitalist elements. This was a contradiction which caused much confusion amongst British observers of the German political scene. Despite the precedent set by Mussolini’s Fascists in the early 1920s, the British found it incredibly difficult to grasp exactly who the Nazis were and what they stood for. This confusion, and the very same dichotomy between right and left wing elements within Nazism noted by Price, is to be found in the writings of British commentators throughout the interwar period. In October 1927 the diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson was appointed as First Secretary to the British Embassy in Berlin, following a spell as chargé d’affaires at the British legation in Persia. He remained in this post until he resigned from the Foreign Office at the end of 1929 and for much of this time he was the highest-ranking British diplomat in the German capital, ideally placed to observe the emergence of the NSDAP onto the national stage. In a letter to the then Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson, dated 20 November 1929, Nicolson noted that ‘[t]he outstanding feature of these elections [for the Prussian Landtag] is the wholly unexpected triumph, or more correctly emergence, of the NationalSocialists. These dangerous people are akin to the Hitlerites of Bavaria, and are red fascists, or left-wing jingoes’.20 He went on to state that ‘[t]heir programme, indeed, is not such as to commend itself to the Prussian Junker. They are anti-monarchist, but believe in a central dictatorship on extreme Socialist and aggressive lines. Their programme is vigorous, if utopian’.21 In this dispatch we can see that even as late as 1929 British observers were unfamiliar with the Nazis (and in particular did not know them by their correct name) and found them eminently confusing. This is not surprising when one considers that the NSDAP were only just emerging as a national party and presenting a programme (or programmes) which did not fit squarely into traditional political models of left and right. Nicolson, who later flirted with British Fascism, was much more ambivalent towards the Nazis than Price was, and was evidently attracted to their youthfulness and rejection of traditional bourgeois values (as he saw it), commenting on ‘[t]he refreshing vigour of the young NationalSocialist party [which] is certain to make an increasing appeal to German youth, who are always impressed by extreme idealism’.22 Yet he was also appalled by their methods, and recognised the danger posed to Weimar democracy by the growth of such extremist parties, writing that the electoral success of the National Socialists ‘will form a further disturbing 155

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element in an internal situation which, below an apparently healthy surface, shows symptoms of septic inflammation. It may, however, awake the bourgeois parties from their apparent apathy’.23 In December 1929 he returned to the theme, now a more negative view, writing that ‘[t]he increase in the National Socialist vote constitutes a real danger to public order, in that it augments the danger of irresponsible fascism’.24 Yet, like others, he did not think the collapse of the Weimar Republic inevitable; he had written in November 1929 that he felt that Germany was going through ‘a transitional stage’25 but that where it would end up was still unclear. Shortly afterwards, Nicolson left the Diplomatic Service to dedicate himself to his writing and journalism and, as a founder member of Oswald Mosley’s New Party and editor of its journal Action, he dabbled in a homegrown variant of Fascism. Yet he remained uncomfortable with the methods employed by Hitler and the Nazis and admired by the more extreme of his New Party colleagues. In a letter written to his wife while on a visit to Rome with Mosley, Nicolson went so far as to describe himself and his colleagues as ‘we British Hitlerites’, but he also noted with discomfort that Hitler had called upon the members of the New Party to abandon constitutionalism and ‘be harsh violent and provocative’, commenting that ‘I do not care for this aspect of my future functions’.26 From Rome, Nicolson moved on to Berlin where, surveying the political scene, he wrote in his diary that the Nazis appeared to be losing the support that they had gained over the preceding years: [t]here was a moment when Hitler stood at the crest of national emotion. He could have made either a coup d’etat or forced a coalition with Brüning. He has missed the moment. […] In Prussia it is true Hitler is gaining ground. But he is losing it in Bavaria and Würtemberg which are comparatively prosperous.27 Here again we can see the attitudes of British writers reflecting the changing fortunes of the Nazi Party. It is interesting that Nicolson should make this comment in January 1932, given the NSDAP’s electoral performances in that year. The Nazi share of the vote rose dramatically from 18.3% in 1930 to 37.3% in the Reichstag elections of July 1932, only to drop to 33.1% in the second election of the year, while in the two rounds of that year’s Presidential elections, held in March and April respectively, Hitler took 30.1% and 36.8% of the vote. Certain patterns can therefore be discerned in British writing on the Nazis, which mirror both the changing political fortunes of the party, as 156

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well as patterns of British travel to Germany that have been observed in previous chapters. What is more, the attitudes of British intellectuals appear to reflect the plasticity of Nazi ideology, whose contradictions and uncertainties caused confusion among British observers as to who the Nazis were, what they stood for, and where they were positioned on the traditional political spectrum. Although some commentators, such as Nicolson, detected a threat to German democracy within the rhetoric and activities of the NSDAP, there seems to be no evidence, contrary to what much later writing would have us believe, that the wholesale collapse of the Weimar system, let alone a Nazi takeover, was regarded as inevitable. This can be seen clearly in the writings of the German correspondents of the major British daily newspapers, and in particular in the writings and correspondence of Frederick Voigt. As befitted the Berlin correspondent of a left-leaning liberal newspaper, which had adopted an ‘intellectually independent position’,28 Voigt’s politics were to the left of centre, but by no means extreme. His political outlook has been described as that of ‘a typical left-wing journalist of the inter-war years’,29 but his old University College tutor was probably nearer the mark when he described him as ‘a first-rate and rather old-fashioned Liberal’.30 His experience of the First World War left him ‘a pacifist in the rational sense of the word’31 and his articles and letters were full of his indignation against injustice and political repression. In the 1920s and 30s Voigt increasingly directed his journalism towards the plight of oppressed groups in Central and Eastern Europe and ‘his special endeavour was directed towards the public exposure of political repression and terror’.32 This naturally led to much criticism being levelled at him by those who disagreed with his politics and the crusading trend of his journalism, both in the countries from which he reported and in Britain. For daring to criticise Wyndham Lewis’s favourable portrait of the Nazi leader in Hitler (1931) Voigt was accused of being a Communist (or at least being a sort of fellow traveller)33, but, as his writings in Unto Caesar (1938) prove, he was equally opposed to both totalitarian ideologies of the interwar period, regarding them as ‘secular religions’ threatening the cultural, spiritual and material life of Europe. Indeed, after 1933, disillusioned with the German left and depressed by the success of these ‘pseudo-religious’ ideologies, Voigt increasingly turned towards the Anglicanism of his youth and came to see Christianity as the only effective counter to Nazism and Stalinism. Although he was Manchester Guardian correspondent in Berlin from February 1920, I have been unable to find any reference to Hitler or the National Socialists attributable to Voigt from the period prior to the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. This is possibly due to the Berlin-centric nature 157

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of the British journalistic community, but Voigt seems to have been fairly good at travelling outside the capitals of the countries he visited in order to see for himself what was happening on the ground, so it seems more likely that his attention was engaged elsewhere. Indeed, during 1923 most of his time was taken up with observing and reporting on the occupation of the Ruhr and the response of the Reich Government in Berlin to these events.34 Voigt cannot therefore claim, as Price did, to be one of the earliest British intellectuals to comment on the rise of the Nazis or to recognise the threat they posed to the Weimar Republic. Indeed, I have found no references at all to Hitler or the National Socialists in his letters prior to the spring of 1930. However, once he did take notice of them, Voigt was an immediate and implacable opponent, taking the view that the violence and virulent anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their anti-Republican and anti-parliamentary stance made them a new and troubling development in the political life of the Republic. Voigt’s attitude towards Hitler and the Nazis can best be judged by his comments in the letters which he exchanged with the Manchester Guardian’s foreign editor W. P. Crozier throughout his time in Berlin. In a long letter on the German economic and political situation dated 2 February 1931 Voigt described the Nazis as ‘superb agitators and very good organisers, but […] poor politicians’ who were ‘very heterogenous [sic] and they live largely on emotions and it seems to me that they must achieve something real or spectacular or both, or else they will break up and decline’.35 As to their prospects and intentions he believed that [i]f the police and the army were to stand aside the Nazis would attempt a “march on Berlin” and there would certainly be civil war overnight. Within the limits imposed by the police (with the army in the background) there is constant fighting even now (though mostly with fists, sticks, and stones) between the Nazis and what they call the “Marxists”, that is to say the Communists and the Socialists (there are a score of killed and wounded almost every weekend). If, by securing the Ministries of the Interior in Bavaria and Prussia and so getting at least partial control of the police, the Nazis could get rid of many loyal [to the Republic] police officials and replace them by their own men.36 The reference to a ‘march on Berlin’ is interesting, and suggests that Voigt regarded the Nazis as essentially a revolutionary party and a party of action, determined to follow in the footsteps of Mussolini and act decisively to seize power if the opportunity arose. It also reflects the 158

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activities of the Party at this time: this was, as Voigt notes, a period of heightened tensions and paramilitary street-fighting, while, in referring to the possibility of the NSDAP gaining control of the Interior Ministries of Prussia and Bavaria, Voigt was probably thinking of Wilhelm Frick, whose appointment as Minister of the Interior in Thuringia had alarmed him the previous year.37 Equally, his comments on Nazi policy towards the outside world reflect their electoral propaganda of the time: ‘even if there is a Hitler dictatorship, I doubt whether they will be an international menace though they would doubtless cause a good deal of alarm. They hate the Socialists much more than they hate the French and the Poles and their primary aim is to smash Socialism and trade unionism’.38 When it came to Hitler himself, Voigt’s views, as expressed in a letter of 14 July 1932, prefigure those he expressed at more length in Unto Caesar regarding the almost religious fervour whipped up by the Nazi leader at his rallies: I cannot conceive of a Hitler in England, though [Horatio] Bottomly [sic] had something of the Hitler in him. One would probably find closer parallels in America, though as far as I know, so [word undecipherable] a charlatan never swept a whole country as Hitler has swept Germany. I have described him as mildly as possible in my article, simply because I want to avoid raising incredulity. I have watched him at close quarters and have often heard him speak. I have also met people who know him well and have studied all the more serious Hitlerite literature, but unless I toned down my real impression of him, I doubt whether I would be believed. Several times I have taken people who were incredulous to his (and other Nazi) meetings and in every case they have been astounded, especially at what I have referred to as the lynching spirit. A meeting addressed by Hitler, Goebbels, or the other leaders is simply a mob that lynches in the imagination.39 Nor was he alone in such conclusions: the writer of a report on a Nazi rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin held on 23 June that year had noted that ‘[a]s usual, the atmosphere was one of cheerful, almost good-natured, semi-religious fervour, as distinct from the sullen angriness of Communist gatherings’.40 Voigt had already noted that ‘people here are getting rather scared’41 due to Nazi assaults on Socialist Reichstag deputies and verbal attacks against Jews (who, he said, were ‘in a state of cringing terror of the Nazis’42) and other prominent figures on the left. He was thus aware of the methods employed by the Nazis and found them both disgusting and 159

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dangerous. In April 1932 there came an indication that his publicly stated views on the Nazis and their methods placed him in danger. After attending a Nazi rally Voigt was involved in a minor car crash and, when he returned to Berlin with his head bandaged and his arm in a sling, it was widely rumoured that he had been beaten up by Nazis incensed by his criticism of the Party.43 So Voigt was not only a vociferous and persistent critic of the National Socialists, but he also had a reputation as such which did not endear him to either the rank and file or the leaders of the party. Nevertheless, it seems from his letters that even until late in the day Voigt, like many others in both Britain and Germany, was convinced that although the Nazis were violent, morally repugnant and representative of all that was worst in the human psyche, a Nazi dictatorship was unlikely. In May 1930 he wrote to Crozier that ‘Germany is, of course, much more important [than Poland], but less dramatically interesting. Barring accidents, German politics are doomed to Conservative dullness for a long time to come – a kind of Baldwin era is setting in’;44 while in the Manchester Guardian he announced that ‘anything like dictatorship on the Italian model is quite inconceivable in Germany’.45 In a letter written a couple of weeks later, Voigt reiterated his view that a ‘Fascist’ dictatorship was unlikely but seems to have revised his opinions about the dullness of German politics, stating that ‘some quite big things are happening here though not in the form of events that are news’.46 He went on to predict that the Reichstag elections of 1930 would be quite indecisive and will open a very critical period in German history – towards the end of the year there may be a semi-dictatorship (not, of course, like Stalin’s or Mussolini’s, but quite a risky affair all the same) and it is also possible that there will be disorders (though hardly, I think, big enough to be called revolutionary).47 A month later he expanded upon this prediction, writing that [m]y impression of the German crisis is that it will be postponed till after Christmas […] There will then, I think, be a coup d’etat followed by a semi-dictatorship exercised by a kind of directorium [sic], a purely bureaucratic affair and, perhaps, so prosaic that little notice will be taken of it.’48 What he seems to have envisioned was a conservative cabal ruling by presidential decree, and in that he can perhaps be credited with having accurately predicted the Brüning, von Papen and Schleicher 160

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Chancellorships, but he also seems to have regarded this as a passing phenomenon, and that normal parliamentary government would be resumed sooner or later. Voigt continued to regard the prospect of a Nazi Government as unlikely (while never ruling out the possibility) and rejected the idea that the Republic was entering its final crisis in the years between 1931 and 1933. In his most forceful rejection of this idea he stated in August 1931 that I gather that people in England – in so far as they bother about Germany at all – think there’s going to be a revolution here or at least some sensational collapse (whatever collapse may mean). The menace of revolution, or rather counter-revolution, cannot be ruled out altogether, but to me seems very unlikely. It is not an immediate menace anyhow. Such a menace always produces defensive measure [sic], both official and private, and these are very strong in Germany.49 He repeatedly wrote that in his opinion the Nazis were a passing phenomenon and that, while they were certainly morally repugnant and a danger to the stability of the Republic, they would almost certainly never be in a position to form a Government. Ironically, he reported in an undated letter (probably from the last weeks of January or the first weeks of February 1932) that I’m told I shall never again get a visum [sic] for Poland and that I’m on Hitler’s expulsion list, so that my field may be narrowed down considerably – it’s quite likely, I think, the [sic] I won’t be readmitted to Poland, but as for Hitler, I very much doubt whether he’ll ever be in a position to expel anybody.50 In December 1932, only a month before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, he was writing that the future political makeup of Germany was too close to call, stating, with an eye on Schleicher’s negotiations with the Nazis, that ‘the Schliecher [sic] regime is an acknowledged transition regime, though transition to what is very dark. Perhaps to a Schleicher-Nazi regime’.51 Similarly, The Times’s correspondent in Berlin, Norman Ebbutt, viewed Hitler and the Nazis with concern, but was unsure as to how their bid for national power would end. He certainly does not appear to have predicted the demise of the Weimar Republic with any more accuracy than his colleagues. A ‘liberal of the old style’52 he was deeply opposed to the 161

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Nazis. He regarded Nazism ‘as a brutal and dangerous movement’53 and Hitler as a ‘Sergeant Major with a gift of the gab and a far-away look in his eyes’,54 but like many others in both Britain and Germany, he believed the Nazi leader to be more moderate than the rest of the party and forced into radical pronouncements in order to retain some sort of control over his unruly followers.55 However, like Voigt, he did not regard a Nazi government as being anything like inevitable. If the NSDAP ever were to come to power, Ebbutt believed – as did von Papen and many on right of German politics – that it would only be as part of a coalition government and that this, along with the Nazi fear of inflaming international opinion, would force them into a more moderate course and prevent them from any open persecution of Germany’s Jewish population.56 Voigt and Ebbutt were not alone in regarding the prospect of a Nazi government as remote. Lilian Mowrer detested the ‘insolent and swaggering’57 Nazis, whom she regarded as dangerous and morally repugnant, but, like Voigt and many others, she could not believe that they would ever actually form a government: [t]hat they could be a serious menace to the well-being of the nation was pretty obvious, but that they should ultimately prevail, win enough votes and adherents to their cause to be able to put their wild-cat programme into effect was considered generally unlikely. Intelligent observers applying the norm of reason to their judgements were simply inclined to discount the value of a party which talked like madmen and acted like hooligans.58 These are sentiments reflected in much of the other contemporary literature on the Nazis. Yet although British intellectuals tended to be sceptical of the chances of a Nazi government, let alone a complete overturning of the constitutional system, not all of them shared the feelings of Voigt, Price and Mowrer. In his novel I Face the Stars (1933), Geoffrey Moss was just as critical of the Nazis as Voigt and Mowrer, but he also demonstrated that he was as out of sympathy with Weimar Republic as he was with the Nazi regime. Published shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, the novel is separated into two halves, the first set in 1923 and the second in 1933, and deals with the involvement of its British narrator with the family of his old friend from before the First World War, Maximilian von der Meldegg. Moss’s view of the Republic was much more conservative than that of Voigt and he was especially critical of the breakdown of traditional morality and values and their replacement with a hedonistic consumerism, 162

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where everything and everyone could be bought. Yet, if Moss was not entirely comfortable or in sympathy with the Weimar Republic and its values and institutions, he viewed the Nazis with as much, if not more, concern. Unlike some British intellectuals, who, as we shall see, regarded the National Socialists as agents of German renewal and a revival of traditional values, Moss presented them as, at heart, just as alien to the old Germany as the Republic. The 1933 section of I Face the Stars opens with the statement that ‘the Nazi government had been established a few weeks, its acts had turned English sympathies strongly against Germany, and my own sympathies had turned with the rest’.59 The narrator later attends a Nazi rally and, in passages which mirror the sentiments of Voigt and Mowrer, he finds it, with its theatricality and militarism, both sinister and comical.60 A sharp distinction is drawn between the ‘old Germany’ of before the First World War and that of both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. At one point the narrator sees a band master conducting a band made up of serious and fanatical members of the Hitler Youth and notices something strange about the man. After thinking for some time Moss has him state that [s]lowly the truth came to me. He was of the past, of the generation of fat, jolly, beer-drinking Germans, who sang sentimental songs in chorus, who smoked pipes and could only, when disciplined and in numbers, force themselves to other than a genial life. While these others […] belonged to a generation which had been children during the last war and who had grown up watching what had happened to their country since then; to an age where songs had no joy, which when it drank, drank determinedly; and which, perhaps, because they had never known it, had turned against most that made life easy and beautiful.61 In many ways the Nazis were, for Moss, a product of the postwar German experience and heirs to the Republic. Like other commentators, such as the journalist Vernon Bartlett, he regarded the price of Weimar modernity as complete moral bankruptcy, the replacement of old values such as patriotism and filial piety with nihilistic and self-centred consumerism and hedonism. The Nazis, with their morally repugnant actions and ideas, were a result of this, while at the same time seeking to fill the moral vacuum left by the Republic with their own perverted patriotism, Führerprinzip and völkisch ideology.

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This is illustrated by the generational conflict that is apparent throughout the novel and is most clearly revealed in the characterisation of Maximilian von der Meldegg and his uncle Alexander, their ideas, values and personalities, and those of the younger generation of von der Meldeggs. ‘Uncle Lex’ is the traditional ‘good German’ personified: intellectual, unworldly, cultured and preferring endless conversation and intellectualisation to action. He is presented as the antithesis of his Nazi nephew Bodo and all he stands for, and in the end attempts suicide when it becomes clear that under the Nazis his Germany and his values of tolerance and culture have ceased to exist. Similarly, Maximilian von der Meldegg is a product of an aristocratic tradition which prides itself on patriotism, honour and duty, a tradition at odds with the agonised indecision of his eldest son, the dogmatic and brutal Nazism of Bodo, and the Weimar values of his daughter, who veers between innocent Bund deutscher Mädel and sexualised Weimar femme fatale. All of the intellectuals that we have examined so far in this chapter were opposed to the Nazis and their aims (as they understood them), but it should not be thought that British opinion was universally hostile. As we have seen, Nicolson was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the National Socialists, while other writers adopted much more favourable attitudes towards Hitler and his party, even going so far as to view them as the saviours of a crisis-ridden, morally bankrupt and victimised Germany and a bulwark against Bolshevism. Nevertheless, however much they might have desired it, there is no evidence that these enthusiasts for National Socialism thought the prospects of a Nazi government any more likely than their compatriots before 1933. Prominent among British intellectuals who came to see the Nazis as the best chance for a German national and spiritual revival was the historian W. H. Dawson, who maintained an overtly pro-German (if not always pro-Nazi) stance throughout the Weimar period and beyond. It took numerous changes of mind, shifts of emphasis and complicated circumlocutions in order to maintain such an attitude in the face of events and public opinion – one correspondent angrily declaring that ‘[i]t is a little difficult to discuss temperately with one who distorts history as you do, but I will do my best’.62 Indeed, Dawson’s pro-German (and anti-French) stance in the interwar years seems almost fanatical: in his papers deposited at Birmingham University there are numerous letters from friends (and enemies) in which they offer more balanced views of the international situation and of German affairs, but Dawson remained doggedly and determinedly pro-German to the extent that he would eventually become an apologist for National Socialism. 164

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As we have seen, as a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference Dawson’s gave ‘staunchly pro-German’63 advice and he was deeply disappointed and disillusioned by the final terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Thereafter, ‘[a]lthough Dawson was always willing to defend Lloyd George’s record at Versailles, his public pronouncements in the British press were full of gloomy forebodings about the future of peace in Europe’64 and, influenced by Keynes, ‘Treaty revision became Dawson’s prime concern in the 1920s and 1930s’.65 Although, as a Liberal, he had been initially a staunch supporter of a liberal and democratic Germany,66 as time went by and the Weimar Republic seemed unable to cope with the various crises that beset it, Dawson’s commitment to German democracy began to wane.67 By the time he toured eastern Germany in the early summer of 1931, gathering material for Germany Under the Treaty (1933), Dawson, it seems, was losing faith in the ability of the parties and politicians of the Weimar Republic to cope with and alleviate the problems facing them. It was on this visit that Dawson first became aware of the rise of the NSDAP, and he was impressed by what he saw of them. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian (for which he had been writing anti-Versailles articles throughout the Weimar era) dated 14 January 1932 Dawson asked ‘[w]ho are the Nazis […] and for what do they stand?’ before going on to answer his own question thus: ‘[t]hey consist predominantly of the youth and younger manhood of Germany, particularly of the educated sections of the community […] and they stand for the doctrine or principle of “Nonfulfilment”’.68 He then went on to state his admiration for their ideals, while having some concern over their methods: I took off my hat (metaphorically speaking) to those Nazis, respecting their scruples and believing them to be in the right, so long as they follow prudent, constitutional counsels, and particularly do not allow themselves to be led into foolish and dangerous quarrels with the Communists, since that would injure what in essence is, in my opinion, a legitimate cause.69 His thoughts on the Nazis and their appeal were further outlined in an article in Today and Tomorrow entitled “Germany’s Psychological Crisis”. Dawson advanced the opinion that Germany’s problems were not merely political and economic, but attributable to the ‘psychological’ trauma of losing the war and the humiliation of the Versailles settlement and the consequent loss of national self-esteem. As the children of a pariah nation, Dawson argued, German youth had become pessimistic and nihilistic and 165

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in consequence turned to the parties of the political extremes.70 Dawson clearly regarded the Nazis as being the agents of economic, political and moral renewal in Germany, the antidote to the ‘psychological crisis’ being experienced by the Germans and the means of a return to a Bismarckian confidence and national pride. They would save Germany ‘from the lawless elements’ through their ‘deep and elevated patriotism and […] genuine idealism.’71 To Dawson, Hitler and the Nazis were ‘a leader and a party pledged to reassert and maintain the national honour, self-esteem, and safety’72 and restore Germany to its former glory. Dawson seems to have had little trouble adapting his views to the changed political realities in Germany after 1933. The change of regime had no effect on his pro-Germanism and he simply shifted emphasis to keep up with the political situation: from his earlier championing of the idea of a democratic Germany working in concert with the League of Nations and the other European powers towards peaceful Treaty revision, he moved to a position which favoured a strong, self-confident, authoritarian Germany willing to act forcefully and decisively to wipe away the stain on national honour left by the Versailles settlement. After 1933 Dawson increasingly took on the role of advocate for the Nazis to his fellow countrymen explaining away the reports of their excesses. For Dawson, ‘Hitler was “both a big and a bold man”, who had “saved Germany from confusion and collapse” and might well prove “to have saved Europe from the same fate”’,73 a man who was able to get results where the democratic politicians of the Weimar Republic had been unable to do so. As the 1930s progressed he was unstinting in his praise for the Third Reich and welcomed each new success in the National Socialists’ more forceful approach to overturning the Versailles settlement. In an article entitled ‘Hitler’s Challenge’ which appeared in The Nineteenth Century and After in April 1936 he welcomed and justified the German march into the demilitarised Rhineland as a step on the road to undoing the wrongs done at the Paris Peace Conference74 and in 1938 he welcomed the Munich agreement. Even as late as 1941 he was calling for some sort of negotiated peace with the Third Reich and restating the argument that an early revision of the Treaty of Versailles would have averted a second world war.75 Stefan Berger suggests a number of reasons why Dawson adopted this favourable attitude towards the Nazis, including his strong personal contacts with Germany, his commitment to treaty revision and his ‘antiSlav, anti-Semitic and anti-Communist sentiments, which allowed him to downplay some of the nastiest aspects of the National Socialist dictatorship’.76 But perhaps the most important reason was ‘his persistent 166

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tendency […] to construct notions of an unchanging “national character”’.77 In direct contrast to Geoffrey Moss, who, as we have seen, regarded the vulgarity and brutality of the Nazis to be as much a break with traditional German values as the consumerism and modernity of the Republic, Dawson thought ‘the Nazis represented German tradition much better than the Weimar Republic which had remained alien to the German “national character”’78 and marked a return to German moral and cultural values. But more than that, Dawson seems to have come to regard the Germans as fundamentally unsuited to democracy and to be possessed of intellectual, cultural and social attributes which were set in stone: unchangeable, eternal and ingrained in the national character. In this way, politics were almost irrelevant: regimes and governments might change but the Germans as a national and racial group remained ultimately unchanged. This goes some way to explaining how Dawson could maintain his consistent pro-German stance in the face of changes in the political reality before, during and after the Weimar period, with only minor adaptations to accommodate alterations in the political landscape. A perception of German victimhood and instability was thus at the heart of Dawson’s conception of the Weimar Republic and his attitude towards it. He came to regard the Nazis as the best expression of the Bismarckian tradition and the German national ‘spirit’ and as the party best able to revitalise and regenerate a Germany victimised and beset by crisis. In this assessment he had much in common with the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis who, in the 1930s, published a number of books in which he flirted with fascism and advanced the idea that Hitler held all the solutions to Germany’s problems. Always combative and seemingly possessed of an at times bizarre determination to be in opposition to prevailing cultural and political trends, one might be forgiven for thinking that Lewis adopted a favourable attitude towards Hitler and ‘Hitlerism’ and produced his book Hitler (1931) – billed as ‘an unprejudiced and fairly detailed account’ of National Socialism79 – in an act of sheer bloody-mindedness and determination to antagonise the London’s liberal intelligentsia. However, an examination of Hitler alongside Lewis’s other political and autobiographical works does reveal certain similarities between some aspects of his political philosophy and elements of Nazi ideology. While it would be going too far to call Lewis a Nazi (or even a Fascist or fellowtraveller), it would certainly seem that at one time Lewis perceived in Nazism certain aims and ideas that mirrored concepts he had arrived at independently. To what extent Lewis was aware of the actual details of National Socialist ideas and policies is still a matter for debate, but it 167

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would appear that at least part of the appeal of National Socialism to Lewis was that here was a major European political movement that was espousing ideas he saw as being similar in many respects to some of his own. The articles which were later to be expanded to form the main thesis of Hitler originally appeared in Time and Tide in January 1931 and were based on Lewis’s impressions during a visit to Berlin the previous November. Whatever one might think about Lewis and the views expressed in the book, Hitler does have the distinction, as Lewis’s biographer points out, of being ‘the first book-length study in any language of Adolf Hitler and the phenomenon of National Socialism’.80 But that is not to say that it is the most incisive or the most detailed: Lewis was in Germany for less than a month in 1930 and relied heavily on the German press for much of his research into the political situation and the aims and objectives of the Nazis. The impetus for the writing of the book seems to have been Lewis’s attendance at a National Socialist rally at the Berlin Sportpalast which affected him deeply. However, unlike Lilian Mowrer, Frederick Voigt or Norman Ebbutt, Lewis responded favourably to the spectacle – writing that ‘it was impossible to be present and not to be amazed at the passion engendered in all these men and women, and the millions of others of whom they were only a fraction, by the message of these stormy platform voices’.81 Lewis’s material for Hitler may have been culled from the Nazi press,82 but his conclusions were in many ways representative of much British writing on the Weimar Republic of that time. Indeed, Lewis’s favourable attitude towards Hitler and the Nazis can be seen as the result of a single overriding concern: the determination that there should not be another Great War. As we saw in Chapter 2, Lewis had been politicised by his experience of the First World War and came to regard the Versailles Settlement as the chief obstacle to maintaining peace and stability in Europe. The main reason for this, he argued, was that the Treaty left Germany resentful and unstable, riven by social and political strife and economic instability. The first section of Hitler is an extended diatribe against Weimar degeneracy and instability. In pointing out the ‘decadence’ of Weimar Berlin (with its ‘pink-clothed backsides’,83 the ‘public orgasms’,84 and ‘Nigger-dance luxury spot[s]’85) and Germany’s victimisation by the vengeful Allies at Versailles, resulting in almost perpetual crisis and instability, Lewis was mirroring common themes in British writings on the Weimar Republic. Where he differed from many of his compatriots was in his conviction that Hitler and the Nazis held the solution to Germany’s ills. He regarded National Socialism as a force that 168

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would bring order, stability and unity to Germany, where Weimar democracy had failed to do so, as well as regarding Hitler as a ‘strong man’ who would forcefully push for a revision of the Treaty without resorting to war. Lewis, like Dawson, therefore regarded the Nazis as a force for national renewal, who would arrest and reverse the moral decline which had taken place under the Weimar Republic, and restore law and order in Germany. But he also recognised that they were not simply an old-fashioned conservative movement. He noted and approved of the youthfulness and energy of the Nazis, recognising that they represented a new force in German politics: he identified them (perhaps surprisingly) with democracy and socialism as well as nationalism – their militancy was ‘the militancy of an armed peasant, not the aristocratic militancy of a dispossessed aristocratic class; or that of a royalist intellectual’.86 As for Hitler himself, whom Lewis called ‘a sort of inspired and eloquent Everyman’87 and ‘a very typical “man of the people” […] the core of the teutonic character’,88 he too was considered both traditional and revolutionary. Like many other British intellectuals, Lewis took Nazi electoral propaganda at face value and seems to have convinced himself that Hitler was ‘a Man of Peace’,89 more interested in domestic problems than in foreign affairs, any rhetoric to the contrary being just that: mere grandstanding and bombast. If he had any aims in foreign affairs (according to Lewis), they would merely be the legitimate and understandable intention to overturn the Versailles settlement and reincorporate territory ‘stolen’ from Germany in 1919 into the Reich. All in all, Hitler was, in Lewis’s view, much more moderate than he liked to appear or foreign observers had given him credit for. Lewis has been described as ‘the intellectuals’ intellectual’,90 so what attracted him to the anti-intellectual Nazis whose attitudes towards art and culture are often thought to be best summed up by the apocryphal remark attributed to Hermann Göring: ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun’?91 In The Hitler Cult Lewis claimed that a dislike of Weimar ‘decadence’, civil disorder and Bolshevism, as well as their economic ideas, led him to see the Nazis as agents of a German national renewal,92 and there seems no reason to doubt this. Furthermore, as we have seen, he regarded a spiritually renewed Nazi Germany as best able to maintain peace and stability in Europe. But Lewis was also attracted to National Socialism because he saw it as equating with his own political ideas. The confusion between left and right that we have observed within Nazi ideology can also be found in the political polemics Lewis published throughout the 1920s and 30s.93 Hitler was of primary importance to Lewis’s understanding of Nazism; Lewis certainly seems to have been 169

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strongly attached to the Führerprinzip, the idea of a strong leader to whom all aspects of national life must be sublimated. John Carey, who has little sympathy for Lewis and his ideas, points out that Lewis ‘greatly admired’ Nietzsche as a young man,94 and he certainly seems to have had some sympathy for the notion of the Nietzschean ‘Superman’. Throughout his life Lewis regarded himself as being set apart from ‘the herd’ of ordinary people by his artistic and literary talents and to have had a strong inclination towards a Platonic ideal society ruled over by a ‘caste’ of ‘philosopher kings’. Yet Lewis also desired to be accepted as part of a homogenous national community and culture. National Socialism chimes in well with Lewis’s own idea of socialism as a strong, unified community based on shared ethnicity, language and traditions with a centralised economy for maximum efficiency, opposed to big business and international credit and capitalism. Lewis’s socialism, as expressed in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), bears a striking resemblance to Fascist ideas of the Nation, the Volk and the corporate state, all under a strong, central authority or leader. Furthermore, John Carey argues that ‘[t]he attraction of Fascist regimes for him seems to have been not so much political as aesthetic’,95 in that they fitted in with his conceptions of classicism as ‘strong, healthy masculinity, strenuous effort, and the kind of rigid control and hard, exact outline that he favoured in his writing on literature and art’.96 What then does all this tell us about the ways in which the Nazis were viewed by British intellectuals in the years prior to their seizure of power? Firstly, and most obviously, it is clear that opinions were diverse in the years before 1933 and attitudes differed considerably between individuals. While some, like Morgan Philips Price and Frederick Voigt were longstanding opponents of the Nazis on ideological and/or humanitarian grounds, others, like Geoffrey Moss, were equally opposed to them, but for more conservative reasons. Yet the Nazis did not earn universal opprobrium from British observers for their rise to prominence in German public life. Some intellectuals, like Harold Nicolson, were much less definite in their attitudes towards Hitler and his followers, vacillating between sometimes rueful admiration for aspects of National Socialism and horror at their violent methods. Other intellectuals came to view the Nazis with outright admiration, regarding them as potential saviours of Germany, agents of national, moral and cultural renewal, and the people best able to deal with the domestic and foreign problems besetting the country in the 1920s and early 1930s. Nevertheless, it is also clear that

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some general trends can be observed in the ways in which the British viewed the emerging National Socialist movement. As we have seen, British interest in the Nazis frequently mirrored the changing nature and fortunes of the party as well as some of the contradictions and uncertainties inherent in Nazi ideology. That the NSDAP was largely ignored by British writers and commentators for much of the 1920s is hardly surprising, given that until 1925 it was a regional movement based in Bavaria, far from the Berlin-centric British intellectual and journalistic communities. Far from being seen as a constant threat to the Republic throughout the Weimar period, the Nazis were presented (if at all) for much of the 1920s as a minority and regional party, set apart from other German Nationalist groups only by the vehemence of their anti-Semitism and their violent and noisy meetings. Only after 1927, as the National Socialists slowly built up a national profile, did the British begin to take serious notice of them. And even then there was much confusion as to who exactly the Nazis were and what they stood for. As we have seen in the attitudes of Price, Nicolson and Voigt, this confusion was often the result of the amorphous and contradictory nature of Nazism itself, especially when it came to judging whether the NSDAP was a party of the left or the right. As well as reflecting the fortunes and contradictions of Nazism, British attitudes towards the National Socialists also can be seen to reflect themes and patterns to be found throughout the contemporary literature on the Weimar Republic. Intellectual interest in the Nazis parallels the patterns of travel to the Republic that we observed in Chapter 1, while in perceptions of the Nazis we can see all the general themes that we have observed elsewhere in attitudes towards Weimar Germany. Notions of Weimar modernity and youth and of the moral bankruptcy of the Republic, which we have noted in previous chapters, all come through in British writing on the National Socialists, but it would appear that the most common of these themes to arise in connection with discussion of the Nazis is that of crisis and instability. And here we can see a key contradiction in British attitudes towards the Weimar Republic; it would appear that despite, and in many ways contrary to, the widespread perception of the Weimar Republic as beset by crisis after crisis and faced by almost insurmountable economic and political problems, few British intellectuals regarded it as being in terminal decline and, more importantly, few if any saw the Nazis as its inevitable, or even likely, successors. In December 1932 such experienced observers of the German political scene as Frederick Voigt and Harold Nicolson regarded a collapse of the Republic as unlikely and the chances of a Nazi government as very small indeed, the general feeling 171

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seeming to be that by this time they had passed their peak. This is in marked contrast to the later writings of figures such as Spender and Isherwood, who liked to present an image of the Republic as in a state of inevitable decline during their visits to Berlin, as evidenced by the ‘decadence’ that they chronicled. It should also be remembered that, although there was frequent speculation over the likelihood of a Nazi government (and repeated assertions that the chances of such a government being formed were very small indeed), this was always in the context of a Nazi government roughly within the template of the Weimar constitution. While some commentators, such as Voigt, might have believed that a Nazi government would lead to a change in the constitution, it is clear that none of these writers seriously envisioned a violent seizure of power or a total collapse of the Weimar system. Indeed, much of the comment in official and journalistic circles in the early 1930s seems to have regarded a possible Nazi administration as potentially marking a return to normal parliamentary legitimacy, as it could be argued that, as the largest party in the Reichstag in 1932, it had some kind of popular mandate, if not a parliamentary majority.97 Thus, despite the fact that it was widely regarded as being dangerously and excitingly unstable and ‘crisis-central’,98 few, if any, British intellectuals, not to mention many Germans, regarded a complete collapse of the Weimar system as likely, let alone inevitable. What is more, contemporary writing – rather than that produced with the benefit of hindsight – demonstrates that the Nazi seizure of power was far from being regarded as assured. But more than that, while the attitudes of British intellectuals in the 1920s towards Hitler and the National Socialists are interesting in themselves and shed light on how the movement was viewed in its early years by foreign observers, they also provide us with a fascinating reflection of broader attitudes towards the Weimar Republic as a whole.

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Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor on 30 January 1933 marked a turning point in Anglo-German relations, although perhaps not as dramatic a turning point as might be expected. Although in 1933–34 there was ‘initial fear of the Nazi regime and unease about the persecution it unleashed’,1 in many respects British interaction with Germany remained unchanged. Tourists and holiday-makers continued to travel to the Reich in ever greater numbers, while ‘Hitler becoming Chancellor did not end calls to right German grievances; in fact his assumption of power probably reinforced such ideas, since resentment about Versailles was thought to explain Nazi popularity’.2 Even intellectuals such as Isherwood and Spender, whose politics and lifestyle were inimical to National Socialism, did not abandon Berlin as soon as Hitler took up the Chancellorship. Nevertheless, while official policy did not change to any great extent, the passing of the Weimar Republic did lead to a shift in the social/cultural relationship between Britain and Germany. There was a widespread feeling amongst intellectual enthusiasts for Germany that the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Republic had been swept away to be replaced by the intolerance and militarism of the Third Reich. Edward Sackville-West wrote that he refused to return to Germany after 1933 because ‘National Socialism caricatured everything I had loved in romanticism and the specifically northern view of life’;3 while as early as

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September 1934 the American journalist William Shirer wrote ‘I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snub-nosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair […] who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion’.4 Returning to Berlin in 1945 after an absence of over a decade, Stephen Spender walked through the city’s West End trying to recapture something of the mood of the Berlin that he had known in the late twenties and early thirties, only to find that ‘all the city lay broken and exposed to the weather’ and that ‘an enormous sameness had blurred and covered the whole face of Berlin and that nothing which I knew existed any longer’.5 Comments such as these reveal that, even though interaction did not cease in 1933, Anglo-American enthusiasts for Germany did feel that a profound change had taken place with the Nazi seizure of power. They clearly regarded the Weimar Republic as a distinct era in German history with characteristics that set it apart from the authoritarian regimes that preceded and followed it. This suggests that there was some generally accepted view of what these characteristics were, of what the Republic stood for and what made it special. It has been the aim of this book to try to establish what these characteristics were and what made them so extraordinarily popular with British commentators. Although, as befits the subject, the focus throughout has been on individuals, it has tried to paint a broad picture of British intellectual attitudes towards the Republic, and to establish common themes and ideas running through the source material that has been used. Previous research in this area has tended to be exclusive, focusing on a small number of individuals in isolation, but this has failed to give a true and accurate impression of British intellectual involvement with the Weimar Republic. It has been the object of this study to take a more inclusive approach to the topic: striving to present a more accurate picture of British attitudes towards the Republic through the medium of a broad comparative analysis which stresses both diversity and areas of commonality in British intellectual interaction with Germany in this period. Far from being attractive merely to those born after 1900, the province solely of ‘the Auden Generation’, Weimar Germany was the destination of choice for a wide cross-section of British intellectuals. Indeed, it might almost be said that anyone who was anyone in the arts in Britain and America visited Germany at some point during the Weimar period, so much so that Lilian Mowrer compared the German capital to a huge railway terminus, a meeting place for peoples and ideas, where travellers 174

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from across Europe and the wider world were constantly arriving and departing.6 Weimar Germany attracted both sexes, all political and sexual persuasions, different age groups, social backgrounds, professions and interests; but this diversity has not always been reflected in the writing on this topic. One area in particular which has been unjustly overlooked has been the attitudes of female intellectuals towards the Republic. This is despite the fact that many prominent women writers travelled to there and published their impressions of how German society was changing, often revealing differences from their male compatriots. Although male and female writing on the Republic contained many of the same themes and preoccupations, there was intense interest amongst British feminist writers in the social and political rights accorded to German women in the Constitution of the Republic, as well as in the participation of women in politics and the workplace, and what have traditionally been thought of as ‘women’s issues’, such as abortion and childcare. This is in marked contrast to the focus of men’s writing on Germany. Where female intellectuals were keenly interested in domestic issues, in women’s participation in society, and changes in gender roles, there was little mention of any of these things in the writings of male intellectuals. Although the extent to which gender was a determining factor in shaping attitudes towards the Republic is debatable, the fact that the writings of British women writers on Weimar Germany have been largely ignored has meant that there has been a significant gap in our understanding of how British intellectuals viewed the Republic. What is more, British intellectual involvement with the Republic was not restricted to its last years, as much of the previous work on Isherwood, Auden and their circle would suggest, but can be seen throughout the period, almost from the moment the Armistice was signed in November 1918 (although, as we have seen, there were high points in British travel to Germany, most notably 1923–24 and 1929–33). If many Britons – members of the Army of Occupation or the Allied Control Commission, diplomats and journalists – had little or no choice but to travel to Germany, many British intellectuals, as we have seen, chose to travel to and settle for a time there, particularly in Berlin. There must therefore have been at least something about the Republic which had an appeal broad enough to transcend all of the ostensible differences between these individuals. If there was diversity amongst British intellectual travellers to Weimar Germany, there must also have been some degree of commonality: if only in the fact that they all found something about the

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Republic interesting enough to make it worth visiting and/or writing about. But before we go on to look at the characteristics commonly ascribed to Weimar Germany by British observers, it must be acknowledged that the British image of the Republic was in many ways an imaginative construction based on comparatively limited evidence and observation. Although some commentators – such as Frederick Voigt, Morgan Philips Price or W. H. Dawson – travelled widely throughout the Reich at different stages of the life of the Republic, the vast majority of British intellectuals visited select regions for limited periods and then formed their opinions on Weimar Germany as a whole based on what they observed. Until 1925 it was common for them to formulate their assessments of the Republic based on their observations of life in the occupied Rhineland, perhaps with a short trip to the Reich capital thrown in for good measure. But as the 1920s progressed Berlin increasingly became the first port of call for the British intellectual tourist: and all too often in their writings British observers fell into the trap of identifying Berlin too closely with Germany, and vice versa. In particular, the British often failed to appreciate the diverse nature of German politics, society and culture. Coming from a centralised nation themselves, they all too often regarded Berlin as the only major political and/or cultural centre in Germany, ignoring other cities such as Dresden or Munich. They failed to realise that these cities were, due to Germany’s more fragmented history, important social, economic and political centres in their own right, rather than simply large conurbations and industrial centres like Birmingham or Manchester. Used to a country where all cultural and public life was focused on London, the British, perhaps understandably, assumed that things were much the same in Germany and that Berlin would be the place to be to take part in the cultural life of the Weimar Republic. And to a degree, they were right: Berlin in the Weimar era did become, more than ever before, the premier cultural centre of Germany, but in bypassing other parts of Germany in favour of the Rhineland or the capital, Britons were missing out on developments elsewhere and came away with an erroneous impression of what life in Germany was like. One of the reasons that Berlin had a particular appeal in this period was because it was thought to embody the spirit of the new Republic, a spirit which could best be summed up in the single word: modernity. Germany was regarded as being a youthful and vibrant nation, and the Weimar Republic as a home to new ideas about culture, politics and society. This sense of modernity, which was focused on, but not confined to, the Reich capital, is to be found in the writings of most British visitors and appealed 176

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not only because it engendered a feeling of excitement, of being at the forefront of history, of innovation and change, but also because it allowed some among the younger generation to see themselves as rebels and adventurers, exploring new ground and opening new avenues that had been ignored and denigrated by – or closed to – their parents’ generation. In addition to this notion of Germany (and particularly Berlin) as being new ground for British travellers, Germany also held an attraction as a centre for innovation and experimentation in the arts and sciences. Built partly on a growing awareness and acceptance of pre-war modernism, Germany rapidly gained a reputation after the First World War as Europe’s premier centre for innovation in the arts. Expressionism, with its boldness and dynamism, its attack on bourgeois values and its emphasis on emotional response and spiritual awakenings, captured the spirit of postwar upheaval and uncertainty, just as later Neue Sachlichkeit mirrored the feelings of those who objectively surveyed the postwar order and found it wanting. The paintings of Klee, Kandinsky, Grosz and Dix, the novels of Mann, Döblin and Remarque, the plays of Toller and Brecht and films of Lang, Murnau and Pabst all seemed to reflect the spirit of the age and placed Germany at the forefront of the European avant-garde. All this contributed to a perception of a Germany boiling with new ideas and accepting and understanding of all that was modern and unique in art, literature and science. This must have been incredibly attractive to the creative Briton in search of inspiration or desperate to make his or her mark on the cultural world. All this is even more the case considering that the perilous economic state of Weimar Germany, in the first six years of its existence at least, provided an exchange rate very favourable to foreigners. Germany, at the same time it was acquiring its reputation as an international cultural centre, was also the place to go for the foreigner who wanted to have a good time ‘on the cheap’. British visitors were all too aware of the advantageous financial position that this offered and were eager to take full advantage of the opportunities that this afforded. Amidst the upheavals and instability of the immediate postwar period, Germany gained a reputation amongst the British for vice, decadent night-life and moral bankruptcy This may have been based on pre-war ideas but doubtlessly was hardened in the minds of British observers by the rash of salacious films and cabaret shows produced after the abolition of censorship in 1918, not to mention the apparent prevalence of prostitution caused by the economic hardships of wartime and the postwar period. Berlin’s supposedly ‘wicked’ nightlife soon became an attraction in itself, so much so that it seems as though Berlin in the Weimar period became a favourite destination for what today 177

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is called sex tourism. Some British intellectuals (like Isherwood, Auden and Spender) found this night scene equally as exciting and invigorating as the intellectual and artistic ferment that they perceived around them, regarding it as evidence of Weimar modernity, freedom and liberation; while others (like Wyndham Lewis, Geoffrey Moss and Vernon Bartlett) saw it as evidence of the ‘decadent’ nature of Weimar modernity and symptomatic of the moral vacuum caused by the war and revolution. However, a broad survey of British writing on the Republic reveals that this decadence was perhaps not as ubiquitous as both some contemporary writers and historians would have us believe. To begin with, this is a prime example of British observers forming conclusions about Germany as a whole based on experience of Berlin alone. Furthermore, previous research, perhaps because of its focus on a very particular group of British travellers to Berlin, has tended to emphasise both the availability and importance of sex, drugs and jazz to British intellectuals in Berlin. As we have seen, while it is true that comments upon Weimar decadence and wickedness abound in the writings of British intellectual visitors to Germany, there were a number of intellectuals (many of them women) who undermined this popular perception and/or made little or no mention of Berlin nightlife, or who explicitly denied its prevalence. Linked to this perception of a morally bankrupt Republic was the widespread feeling among British intellectuals that Germany was the home of a much freer society with more liberal and modern social attitudes than those to be found in Britain. This did not only apply to those artists and writers who wished to live a bohemian or alternative lifestyle, but also those who were interested in broader social trends, such as the changing roles of women. There was a view that in Berlin attitudes more tolerant towards homosexuality, while the entry of middle class girls into the workplace, the participation of women in politics, and the changing sexual attitudes and behaviour of young women were held up as examples of how the Weimar Republic was much more progressive in its attitudes towards women and gender roles than either Britain in the same period or the German regimes that came before and after. Although the influence of Weimar modernity on British attitudes towards the Republic, and especially towards Berlin, has been noted in the existing literature on the subject, it has not previously been fully appreciated how central it was to the attitudes of so many British intellectuals. Perceptions of modernity are a constant theme running through much of the British discourse on Weimar Germany. Yet this is not the only area of common ground to be found in British writing on the Republic: in addition to seeing it as quintessentially modern, the majority 178

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of British commentators also identified other areas which they associated particularly with the Weimar system and regarded as marking it out from the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich, areas such as youth and rebelliousness, crisis and instability, and victimhood. The first of these, the preoccupation – in many cases almost obsession – with German youth amongst British intellectuals, can be seen as a direct result of notions of Germany as a new, youthful and dynamic nation which was current in Britain both before and after the First World War. But it also tied in with a wider concern with the morals of the young in the interwar period. The 1920s have commonly, and stereotypically, been seen in the popular imagination as the ‘Roaring Twenties’, an era of youthful abandon after the horror of the First World War, the province of the ‘Bright Young People’. The rebellion against what were regarded as the bankrupt ideals of the ‘old men’ who had started and prosecuted the war seemingly without inclination to stop the carnage, and against Victorian bourgeois values, was key to the way in which many individuals perceived their work and lifestyles after 1918. This being the case, youth and its preoccupations loom large in much postwar writing, and nowhere more so than in the writings of British intellectuals on Weimar Germany. Nor is this restricted merely to Isherwood and Spender’s eulogising blond boys and nude sunbathing, or Auden’s poems to his ‘schöne junge’ with his ‘zwei nette Eier’ and ‘fein Schwanz’.7 Characters supposedly representative of German youth appear in much of the fiction dealing with Germany in this period, whether as Isherwood’s athletic and dynamic proletarian youths (although how specifically German any of Isherwood’s characters are is debatable); the von der Meldegg children in Geoffrey Moss’s I Face the Stars (1933); the fallen women and dignified hard-working young people of his stories in Defeat (1923); or the pimps, prostitutes and parasites of Robert McAlmon’s collection of ‘Grim Fairy Tales’, Distinguished Air (1923). German youth, and more particularly German youth movements, also made frequent appearances in the non-fiction of the period. Cicely Hamilton devoted a sizable section of her Modern Germanies As Seen By An Englishwoman (1931) to an examination of the Sportmädel, the various political youth organisations and the Wandervogel movement (which also makes an appearance in John Buchan’s 1933 novel A Prince of the Captivity); while W. H. Dawson dwelt on the consequences for German youth of the Versailles Treaty in several letters and articles in the early 1930s, a theme also taken up by Vernon Bartlett in Nazi Germany Explained (1933). Closely linked with ideas about, and the fascination with, German youth was the association, in the minds of some, especially those of the Auden 179

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generation, of Germany with youthful rebellion and revolt, not only against the values and aesthetic tastes of their parents’ generation, but also against their background and ‘Britishness’ as a whole. Travel itself was regarded as modern and rebellious by many Britons in the interwar period, and Germany – and, more broadly, Central Europe – were seen as risky destinations for a whole host of reasons. Close association with the recently defeated enemy was part and parcel of the young defining themselves as completely opposed to the values of their parents, much Germany’s attraction for them lay at least in part the fact that it was seen as having not been valued or explored by the older generation before the Great War. The appeal of Germany to the post-1900 generation also had much to do with general cultural and social trends in the interwar years. Generational conflict was a theme running through much of the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as through the biographies of many intellectuals who came of age after the First World War. Germany, seen as the home of liberated, modern attitudes, was often contrasted with the staid and old-fashioned Britain of the Baldwin era, and was viewed as the very antithesis of respectable upper-middle-class values. As the reputed home of experimentation in the arts and of decadence and vice, Berlin seemed like the ideal place to go to escape the confines of bourgeois values and scandalise respectable opinion back home, while the fact that it was the capital of the defeated foe only added to its attraction as a destination for rebellious self-expression. There was also a widespread tendency among British intellectuals to regard Weimar Germany as in a perpetual state of crisis and instability. This had much to do with perceptions of Weimar modernity, but it was also closely linked to British attitudes towards the Treaty of Versailles and conceptions of wider political and economic instability. Richard Overy, taking his lead from E. H. Carr, has pointed out that during the interwar period there was a widespread feeling that people of all European nations were living through a period of unprecedented instability, lurching from one crisis to another, due mainly both to unrealistic expectations of what the postwar order would be like and rose-tinted nostalgia for the pre-war world.8 Nowhere was this truer than Germany, where revolution, counterrevolution, political assassination, paramilitary violence, attempted coups, hyperinflation, unemployment and economic depression all beset the Republic in the space of only fifteen years. In later autobiographical accounts, written with the benefit of hindsight and in the full knowledge of the Nazi takeover in 1933, this sense of crisis and instability looms large, but it is also to be found in contemporary accounts. The feeling of instability and upheaval contributed to the frenetic artistic atmosphere, 180

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and the sense of rapid cultural and social change observed by British visitors. Yet this sense of crisis and even, at times, imminent collapse tended to attract rather than repel British visitors: it made German politics seem dangerous and exciting while British politics under Baldwin and Ramsay McDonald appeared tame and sedate. Besides anything else, economic instability, political assassination and unrest made good material for books and articles. British journalists and commentators were attracted to Weimar Germany, at least in part precisely because Germany was seen as being at the centre of international politics, exemplifying the crises, contradictions and failures of the postwar New World Order. Yet despite this widespread idea of a Weimar Republic beset by crises, few, if any, British intellectuals seriously envisaged a total collapse of the Weimar system at the time. Later accounts by those who visited Germany in the last years of the Republic liked to give the impression that the Nazi takeover had been inevitable, but an examination of contemporary diaries, letters and newspaper articles reveals that in fact even the most experienced and well-connected observers of German politics did not anticipate a complete overthrow of the Republic, and definitely did not seriously envisage the Nazis as its most likely successors. There is a contradiction here, as elsewhere, in British conceptions of Weimar Germany: British intellectuals felt that the Republic was inherently and dangerously (if excitingly) crisis-ridden and unstable, yet they did not at any time realistically expect its demise. For many British intellectuals the Republic’s instability was a direct result of its inauspicious beginnings and the dire economic condition after the First World War, both of which were widely seen as being the fault of the Treaty of Versailles and the postwar settlement reached in Paris in 1918–19. As the product of defeat in the First World War, the Republic was modern, a new state divorced from the old pre-war political order, and in a sense reflected, and was the product of, modern postwar trends and ideas. The fate of Germany and the Germans in general, and the Republic in particular, were often regarded by British observers as intimately bound up with the postwar settlement. Attitudes towards the peace, reparations and the occupation of the Rhineland were often instrumental in shaping British attitudes towards Germany: many British intellectuals visited Germany with the specific aim of seeing for themselves the dire economic and social results of Versailles and reparations, while those who visited the occupied areas during the early years of crisis (1918–24) felt compelled to set down in print what they had seen with the aim of agitating for a change in attitudes towards Germany, if not a wholesale revision of the Treaty. Personal experience of the 181

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hardships caused (or perceived to have been caused) by the iniquitous and unjust terms of the Versailles settlement, as well as the feeling that the Treaty was not in keeping with British notions of fairplay, engendered a sense of German victimhood and a deep sympathy for the German people. Authors like Geoffrey Moss, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby wrote passionately about the sufferings endured by the German people as a consequence of Versailles, while the likes of J. M. Keynes and W. H. Dawson devoted much of their energies in the interwar period to agitating for a revision of the Treaty. Germany was central to their understanding of the international situation in the period (and vice versa) and as such needed to be visited and understood in order to gain a proper understanding of the postwar settlement. Perceptions of German modernity were therefore at the heart of the attitudes most common amongst British intellectuals towards the Weimar Republic. The association of Germany with all that was new was the overriding theme running through British writing on the Weimar Germany. Different individuals responded to this sense of modernity in different ways – some, as we have seen, found it exciting and laudable, while others regarded it in a less positive light – but it was almost always present in one form or another. To many in Britain, ‘Germany was in the main stream of history’9 both in the sense that for much of the period issues surrounding reparations and the long term consequences of the Great War and the Versailles Treaty were high on the international agenda, and in the sense that Germany was perceived, in so many ways, as pre-eminently modern, representative of and in tune with the Zeitgeist of the 1920s. It is this notion of Weimar modernity that is at the centre of so much British writing on Germany in this period and is the key factor that made the Weimar Republic so appealing to British intellectuals. Germany was seen as a youthful nation (both in the sense of being a recent creation as a political entity and the home of a vibrant youth culture), the home of new ideas, innovation and experimentation in social, artistic and scientific ideas as politically, economically, socially and culturally unstable. As such it seemed in tune with the precarious nature of life in the interwar period and became a focal point for the fears and anxieties of those who lived through that ‘morbid age’. As British intellectuals sought to understand the rapidly changing world around them, Weimar Germany – or at least their own perceptions of it – was key. This being the case, a study of the views of these figures and what they made of the Weimar Republic is critical to us as we seek to map the imaginative landscape of the period and comprehend the ways in which our fore-bears saw the world around them. 182

Appendix: Biographical Notes

Blücher, Evelyn, Princess (1876-1960) Memoirist. The daughter of a wealthy Catholic landowner she married Count (later Prince) Gebhard von Blücher (1865–1931), the great-great-grandson of the famous Field Marshal who led the Prussian troops at the Battle of Waterloo, in 1907. The couple lived in England until the outbreak of war in 1914, when the Count’s nationality forced them to leave London and go to Germany. During the war they lived first in the Esplanade Hotel in Berlin and then on the family estate at Krieblowitz in Silesia. Princess Blücher devoted much time and effort to the care of British prisoners of war, as well as keeping a diary of her experiences of Germany in wartime, intended to be read by her mother. In 1920 she published an edited version of this diary as An English Wife in Berlin. She returned to live in England after the war and died in Kensington in 1960. Brailsford, H. N. (1873-1958) Journalist and author. The son of a strict Wesleyan minister, Brailsford was educated at Glasgow University, Balliol College, Oxford, and the University of Berlin. In 1896 he abandoned hope of an academic career and turned to journalism. Enlisting to fight alongside the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 led to his appointment as the Manchester Guardian’s special correspondent in Crete and Thessaly and a long career as a foreign correspondent. From 1914 he

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wrote for the New Republic and the Daily Herald as well as producing books dealing with current affairs. He toured Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary in February and March 1919, a trip that formed the basis of a series of articles in the New Republic and two books, Across the Blockade (1919) and After the Peace (1920). In the interwar period he repeatedly argued for a revision of the peace settlement and travelled widely, visiting America and the Soviet Union. Despite his abhorrence of fascism he retained an affinity for German culture and considered Nazism an aberration, a view which led him to argue for moderation in the treatment of Germany after the Second World War in Our Settlement with Germany (1944). Failing health limited his ability to undertake foreign assignments after the war, but he did visit India (1945), Germany (1947) and Yugoslavia (1950) before retiring from journalism. He died of a stroke at the West London Hospital in March 1958. Cockburn, (Francis) Claud (1904-1981) Writer and journalist. Cockburn was born in the British embassy in Beijing, but at the age of four he was sent to Scotland to be cared for by his Grandmother. He was educated at Berkhamstead School (where he met and befriended Graham Greene) and Keeble College, Oxford, where his friends included his cousin Evelyn Waugh and Brain Howard. Together with Greene he was involved in a number of undergraduate escapades, including a trip to the occupied Rhineland. In 1926 he won a travelling scholarship from Queen’s College, Oxford, and visited France and Germany, where his interests in politics and journalism were kindled. He acted as assistant to Norman Ebbutt of The Times while in Berlin, and later became that paper’s New York correspondent. In 1932 he resigned from the The Times and returned to England, joined the Communist Party and began producing a satirical news-sheet entitled The Week. He became diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Worker in 1935, reporting on the Spanish Civil War under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn. In the 1940s Cockburn became increasingly disillusioned with Marxism, but never formally renounced Communism. He moved to Ireland in 1946 with his second wife and devoted himself to writing novels and freelance journalism, contributing humorous articles to the Sunday Telegraph, Punch and Private Eye until his death in 1981. Dawson, W. H. (1860-1948) Journalist and historian. Dawson was born in Skipton and trained as a journalist, in which capacity he first went to Germany in 1885 to work as editor of a weekly trade review published in English. The following year he enrolled as a student at the University of Berlin. Around this time he also met his first wife, Anna Greutz, whom he 184

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married in 1889 (his second wife, Else Muensterberg, whom he married in 1912, was also German). Back in Yorkshire in the late 1880s and 1890s Dawson became an activist for the Liberal Party, and published a series of books and articles on German social policy. He entered the Civil Service in 1906, working first for the Board of Trade and later the Treasury, where he helped to draft the National Health Insurance Act of 1911. As a recognised expert on Germany Dawson was included as an advisor to the British delegation to Versailles (for which he wrote a booklet on German colonial administration). After World War One He returned to journalism and campaigned tirelessly for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles in his many books, articles and pamphlets. His affection for Germany and the Germans led him to support Hitler and the Nazis after 1933, a position that severely damaged his reputation after 1939. He died in Oxford on 7 March 1948 from complications arising from prostate surgery. Ebbutt, Norman (1894-1968) Journalist. Born in London, Ebbutt was educated at Willaston School in Nantwich, before following his father into journalism. Between 1911 and 1912 he was assistant correspondent in Paris for the Daily News and Leader and the Morning Leader, before working as a reporter for the Evening Standard. In 1914 he joined the staff of The Times, working as a sub-editor in the Foreign News section. During the First World War Ebbutt served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), mainly on the Atlantic Patrol and the North America Station. He returned to journalism after the war and continued with his sub-editorship until September 1925, when he was dispatched to Berlin as assistant correspondent. In February 1927 he was promoted to chief correspondent and, except for two sojourns as The Times’ special correspondent to the Hague Conferences in 1929 and 1930, he remained in Germany in this capacity until his expulsion by the Nazi Government in August 1937. A month later he suffered a severe stroke which left him partially paralysed. He died at his Sussex home on 17 October 1968. Gardiner, A. G. (1865-1946) Journalist. The son of a cabinet-maker, Gardiner left school at 14 to join the staff of the Chelmsford Chronicle. He worked on a number of local newspapers before becoming editor of the Daily News in 1902. Gardiner supported the decision to go to war in 1914, but as the conflict progressed he became disillusioned and was an uncompromising opponent of the Treaty of Versailles. Under pressure from its proprietor he resigned from the Daily News in 1919 but he continued to write for the paper until 1921. Thereafter he contributed to a

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range of periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic until his death at his Buckinghamshire home in March 1946. Gedye, G. E. R. (1890-1970) Journalist. Born in Somerset, Gedye was educated at Queen’s College, Taunton, and London University. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was commissioned as an officer in the Gloucestershire regiment and served on the Western Front, being wounded during the first battle of the Somme in September 1916. He joined the intelligence corps in 1918 and between 1918 and 1922 he served on the staff of the British military governor in Cologne and the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission. He became special correspondent to The Times and the Daily Mail in 1923, providing an eyewitness account of the Ruhr Crisis, before moving to Vienna in 1925 as the Central European correspondent for The Times. He moved to the Daily Express in 1926 and the Daily Telegraph in 1929, as well as writing for the New York Times and publishing a number of books on Central Europe. He was expelled from Austria by the Nazis after the Anschluss and briefly lived in Prague until the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. During World War Two he was employed on special military duties in the Middle East, but returned to journalism in 1945, reporting from Vienna for the Daily Herald, the Observer and the Manchester Guardian. He was awarded an MBE in 1946 and in 1954 became head of evaluation for Radio Free Europe. He retired and returned to the UK in 1961, settling in Bath, where he died on 21 March 1970, aged 80. Hamilton, Cicely (1872-1952) Author. The daughter of a professional army officer, Hamilton was educated privately at St. Leonard’s School in Malvern and Bad Homburg. She worked briefly as a student teacher and spent ten years as a character actress before becoming involved in the campaign for Women’s suffrage. Her stage play, Dianna of the Dobson’s (1908) was the first of a number of books and plays dealing with the issue of gender inequality, the most famous and enduring of which was Marriage as a Trade (1909), in which Hamilton argued that women were compelled to enter into marriage as it was the only profession for which they had been trained. During the First World War she worked for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, and from 1917 to 1919 she was a member of a touring company that performed plays for British troops in Flanders and the occupied Rhineland. During the interwar period she continued to campaign on women’s issues and wrote for the Yorkshire Post and Manchester Guardian, as well as Lady Rhonda’s Time and Tide. In the 1930s she travelled widely throughout Europe and published books detailing her 186

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impressions of Austria, Germany, Italy and Russia. She was awarded a civil list pension for services to literature in 1938 and died of heart failure in her London home in 1952. Hamilton, Gerald (1889-1970) Memoirist and critic. Hamilton was born in Shanghai of Anglo-Irish ancestry and educated at Rugby School. He claimed in his memoirs to have close links with the royalty and aristocracy of Europe (including the Romanovs, and Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria) and to have moved in Edwardian high society. He served a prison sentence ‘for gross indecency with a male person’ and anonymously published a homosexual novel, Desert Dreamers, in 1914. During the First World War he was interned for his pacifism and association with Roger Casement. After the war he had close links with the Irish expatriate community in Berlin and was active in charities offering famine relief to Central Europe. He travelled widely in Europe, Asia and Africa and was involved in various shady enterprises, including being implicated in the theft of a pearl necklace in Italy. Towards the end of the 1920s he was living in Frankfurt working as a broadcaster when he became a sales agent for The Times in Germany and opened an office in Berlin. The appointment was shortlived but brought him into contact with Christopher Isherwood, who later immortalized him as the eponymous Arthur Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). Hamilton later traded on this minor celebrity, publishing two volumes of memoirs – Mr Norris and I (1956) and The Way it was with Me (1969) – which reworked his colourful misadventures in Edwardian and interwar Europe. He died in 1970 at the age of 81. Holtby, Winifred (1898-1935) Author. The only daughter of a prosperous farmer, Holtby was born and brought up in Yorkshire, attending Queen Margaret’s School in Scarborough before going to Somerville College, Oxford in 1917. Leaving Oxford in 1922, Holtby began contributing to the feminist journal Time and Tide and became active in feminist and pacifist politics. She lectured for the League of Nations Union and toured Europe with her friend Vera Brittain in 1922-24 in order to observe post-war conditions. She published her first novel, Anderby Wold, in 1923 and this was followed a year later by The Crowded Street. These set the tone for many of her later works: witty and often satirical novels dealing with current social and political problems. A trip to South Africa in 1926 left Holtby with a life-long hatred of racism and she worked tirelessly to combat racial as well as sexual inequality. For the last four years of her life Holtby suffered from renal sclerosis (Bright’s disease)

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and she died in the London home she shared with Brittain and her family in September 1935. Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946) Economist. Keynes was born in 1883, the son of a Cambridge academic, and educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where he studied first mathematics and then economics. After leaving Cambridge Keynes worked as a Civil Servant with the India Office before gaining a Fellowship at his old College. During the First World War he worked in the Treasury’s Finance Division and in 1918-19 he was the Treasury’s chief representative at the Paris Peace Conference. He was disgusted by both the process of peacemaking and the Treaty that resulted, and his best known work, the polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), became a best-seller. Keynes worked tirelessly for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles and a solution to the reparations question, while continuing to publish books on economics and mathematics (including his magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)), and becoming a patron of the arts. He was elevated to the peerage as Baron Keynes of Tilton in 1942 and was instrumental in the establishment of the World Bank in 1945. He died of a heart attack at his holiday home in East Sussex on 21 April 1946. Lewis, Wyndham (1882-1957) Artist and writer. Lewis was educated at Rugby and studied painting at Slade School of Fine Art. In 1901 he spent time in Munich and Madrid before settling in Paris. He returned to London in 1909, and became a leading figure in the artistic avant-garde. In 1914 he formed the Rebel Art Centre and helped found the Vorticist movement. However, Lewis’s ambitions for the movement were frustrated by the outbreak of the First World War, in which he served as a gunner, artillery officer and official war artist. Notoriously quarrelsome, he increasingly set himself up in opposition to what he regarded as the leftwing clique that dominated the arts in Britain and published a series of political polemics in the interwar years. He visited Germany several times during the 1930s and praised Hitler and the Nazi regime in Hitler (1931), a position he later renounced in The Hitler Cult (1939). Lewis spent the Second World War in America and Canada, but returned to London in 1945 and took up an influential position as art critic for The Listener. Increasing blindness forced him to give up this appointment in 1951, but he continued to write fiction until his death in 1957. McAlmon, Robert (1896-1956) Writer and publisher. McAlmon was born in rural South Dakota but moved to Paris in 1921 to found his own 188

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publishing company, Contact Editions. An intimate of Ernest Hemmingway and James Joyce, he became a mainstay of the American bohemian community in Paris, but also travelled to Berlin in the winter of 1923-24. His experiences there inspired a collection of short stories, Distinguished Air: Grimm Fairy tales (1925), that described the hedonistic, but ultimately empty, life of American expatriates in the German capital. He published a number of works of poetry and fiction throughout the 1920s, as well as a memoir, Being Geniuses Together (1938). He returned to the USA in 1940, settling in California, where he died on 2 February 1956. Morel, Edmund Dene (1873-1924) Journalist and campaigner. Born in Paris of mixed Anglo-French parentage, Morel’s father died when he was four and he was educated in Eastbourne and Bedford. At the age of 15 he returned to Paris, where he worked in a bank until 1891, when he was given a clerkship with a Liverpool shipping firm. Morel became a naturalized British citizen in 1896 and soon afterwards began writing articles in defence of free trade in West Africa. He became increasingly radical and in 1900 he began campaigning against the brutal Belgian regime in the Congo. In 1903 he launched his own newspaper, the West African Mail, and in 1904 he founded the Congo Reform Association alongside Roger Casement. He became increasingly opposed to British and French foreign policy, campaigning for British neutrality in the First World War and founding the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) in 1914. Morel’s opposition to the war led to six months’ imprisonment and his abandonment of the Liberal Party in 1918. He continued to campaign against the Treaty of Versailles and Anglo-French policy towards Germany after the war, and defeated Winston Churchill to become Labour MP for Dundee in November 1922. He died of a heart attack two years later. Moss, Geoffrey (McNeill-) (1886-1954) Author. Moss was the son of a professional army officer and educated at Rugby and Sandhurst. He was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards in 1905 and commanded a battalion of the Gordon Highlanders during the First World War, before retiring with the rank of major in 1919. Thereafter he devoted himself to his writing, publishing roughly a book a year between 1923 and 1939. His time spent in post-war Central and Eastern Europe inspired his first and most popular novel, Sweet Pepper (1923), which displayed its author’s unease with the Versailles settlement and was adapted for the stage and performed at the Everyman Theatre in 1925. His anthology Defeat (1924) was inspired by his observations of life in post-war Germany and proved 189

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popular and influential, one of the stories in the collection being filmed by D. W. Griffith. Defeat was followed by two more collections of short stories, The Three Cousins (1928) and Wet Afternoon (1931), and a series of novels that he classified under the heading ‘Romances’. His final two books were works of non-fiction dealing with the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s ambitions in Eastern Europe. He died in August 1954. Mowrer, Lilian Thompson (1889-1990) Journalist and author. Born in London, Lilian Thompson was educated at the Sorbonne and Liverpool University. She married the Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer in 1916 and travelled with him on his European postings between the wars. After a spell in Italy the couple moved to Germany in 1923 and remained there until Mowrer was expelled by the Nazis in 1934. She then settled with her husband in the United States, where she established a reputation as a journalist in her own right, writing for Vanity Fair, Town and Country and various British and American newspapers. Her first book, Journalists Wife, was published in 1937 and was followed by several volumes dealing with current affairs and international relations which appeared between 1941 and 1973. She died in Chicago in September 1990. Nicolson, Harold (1886-1968) Diplomat and author. The son of a diplomat, Nicolson was born in the British legation in Tehran. He had a peripatetic childhood and was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford. After leaving university he spent time in France and Germany completing his language studies before entering the diplomatic service. He held posts in Madrid and Constantinople before returning to Britain in 1914. During the First World War he worked for the Foreign Office and was responsible for drafting the Balfour declaration, which committed Britain to supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After the war he was attached to the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, before serving as private secretary to the secretary-general of the newly created League of Nations. This was followed by a period working for the middle-east section of the Foreign Office (1920-5) and postings to Tehran (1925-7) and Berlin (1927-9). He had married the novelist Vita Sackville-West in 1913 and his marital difficulties greatly contributed to his decision to resign from the diplomatic service in September 1929. He had already published a novel and several literary biographies in the 1920s, but in the 1930s he produced a number of works on diplomacy, including his account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemaking 1919 (1933). He was elected to parliament as a 190

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National Labour MP in 1935 and held his Leicester West seat for a decade. Nicolson’s later years were dedicated to his writing and gardening and he died at his home, Sissinghurst Castle, in May 1968, following a stroke. Price, Morgan Philips (1885-1973) Journalist and politician. Price was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Chemistry, Geology and Botany and took a University Diploma in Agriculture. Upon leaving Cambridge in 1907 he became a director of the family timber business. He travelled widely before the First World War, visiting Denmark, Finland, Persia, Turkey and the Balkans, and reporting on economic and social conditions in European Russia and Siberia for The Economist. A founder member of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), Price was commissioned to go to Russia to report on the war and internal political situation as Special Correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1915. His experiences in Russia and observations of the Bolshevik Revolution radicalized him and he offered his services to the new regime as propagandist, a move which incurred the displeasure of the British government and led to the severance of his relations with the Manchester Guardian. From 1919 to 1923 he was the Daily Herald’s correspondent in Germany and maintained close contacts with the German left. He returned to England in 1923 and dedicated himself to farming, writing and left-wing politics. Price was elected to the Whitehaven constituency in 1929, only to lose his seat in 1931. He returned to parliament in 1935 and remained an MP until 1959, when he retired from active politics. He wrote a number of books dealing with historical and political themes, including histories of modern Turkey and the Russian Revolution, as well as several volumes of memoirs dealing with his eventful life. He died in September 1973 at the age of 88. Ross, Jean (1911-1973) Actress and journalist. Born in Alexandria, the daughter of an English expert for the Bank of Egypt, Ross was educated at Leatherhead Court, Surry (from which she got herself expelled by pretending to be pregnant) and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Going to Berlin in search of work, she earned a living modelling for fashion magazines and cabaret singing. During this period of her life she befriended Christopher Isherwood, who immortalised her as Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin (1939). She was visiting England when Hitler came to power and decided not to return to Germany, settling in London instead and joining the Communist Party. In the 1930s she met and began an affair with the journalist Claud Cockburn, who suggested she turn her 191

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hand to writing and got her a job with the Daily Express. On holiday in Spain when the Civil War broke out in 1936, Ross and Cockburn remained there, with Ross writing both her own reports for the Express and Cockburn’s for the Daily Worker after he joined the international brigades. After the birth of her daughter in 1939 she dedicated her life to looking after her child and left-wing politics. She died from cervical cancer in April 1973. Sackville-West, Edward (1901-1965) Critic and novelist. The eldest son of Major-General Charles Sackville-West (later the fourth Baron Sackville), Edward Sackville-West was a delicate child and suffered from telangiectesia, an abnormal dilation of blood capillaries, a condition that manifested itself in frequent nosebleeds. Educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford, Sackville-West displayed considerable talent as a pianist, but abandoned ambitions to be a composer in favour of a literary career while still at university. His first autobiographical novel, The Ruin, appeared in 1926 and was followed by four similar works, as well as a biography of Thomas De Quincy. He began writing reviews for the Spectator in 1924, the same year that he was dispatched to Freiburg to undergo psychoanalysis in order to ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality. He later contributed literary and music criticism to a number of publications, including the New Statesman. From October 1927 to early 1929 he lived in Dresden and Berlin and he made frequent trips to Switzerland, Vienna, Venice and the South of France. He worked for the BBC as a producer during the Second World War and afterwards resumed the life of writer, critic and country squire. He became the fifth Baron Sackville on the death of his father in 1962, but did not long enjoy the new title, dying of a seizure following an asthma attack on 4 July 1965. Voigt, Frederick Augustus (1892-1957) Journalist and author. The son of German parents, Voigt was educated at Haberdasher’s Aske’s School and Birkbeck College London. He graduated from King’s College, London, with a first class degree in modern languages in 1915 and worked briefly as a schoolmaster in Derbyshire before being called up for military service in 1916. His experiences on the Western Front provided him with the material for his first book, Combed Out (1920). From 1920 to 1933 Voigt was the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Germany, but he also travelled widely throughout Central and Eastern Europe, exposing instances of political repression and terror, particularly in Poland and the Ukraine. One of the first foreign journalists to draw attention to the true nature of National Socialism, he was a tireless opponent of totalitarianism. 192

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He was transferred from Berlin to Paris shortly before Hitler came to power, but remained in touch with German émigrés and German affairs were remained at the centre of his journalistic work in the 1930s. In 1934 he was appointed chief diplomatic correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and he served as editor of the Nineteenth Century and After between 1938 and 1946. His political views shifted to the right during the 1930s and he left the Guardian in 1940 to work as a German advisor to Britain’s propaganda and psychological warfare effort. After the Second World War he contributed to various periodicals but he increasingly suffered from ill health. He died in hospital in Guildford in January 1957. Wiskemann, Elizabeth (1899-1971) Journalist and historian. Wiskemann’s father had emigrated to Britain from Germany in the 1860s and she was brought up in an atmosphere of liberal debate. Disappointed when her thesis was awarded an MLitt rather than a PhD, she went to Berlin in the autumn of 1930 and began writing articles on the German situation for the New Statesman and other periodicals. She was expelled from Germany for her anti-Nazi views in 1936, but continued to travel in and comment on affairs in Central Europe. In 1937 she undertook a study into the problem of Germans in Czechoslovakia on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and this formed the basis of her first book, Czechs and Germans (1938). She spent the Second World War in Switzerland, officially as press attaché to the British legation in Berne, but was in fact responsible for gathering non-military intelligence from Germany and occupied Europe. She returned to journalism after the war, working as The Economist’s Rome correspondent, but during the 1950s she returned to academia. She was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Edinburgh University between 1958 and 1961, and tutor in European History at the University of Sussex from 1961 to 1964. In her later years her sight began to fail and rather than face a loss of her independence and unable to live a life in which she would be unable to read, she committed suicide in her London home in July 1971.

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Introduction Edward Sackville-West, ‘Sketches for an autobiography’ (c.1946), p. 53 (ESW Vol. XIII (ff.67), BL Add 68916) 2 Edward Sackville-West, quoted in Michael De-La-Noy, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West (London, 1988), p. 117 3 John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo-German Relations in the 19th & 20th Centuries (London, 1974), p. 55-56 4 Patrick Major, ‘Britain and Germany: A love-hate relationship?’, German History, vol. 26, no. 4 (2008), p. 459 5 See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1963 [1869]), pp. 126–7 6 See A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London, 2002), P. 348–350 7 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1920–1924 (London, 1978), p. 140 8 Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds (Oxford, 2006) deals with this question at length. 9 Ibid., p. 40 10 If anything, British travel to and interest in Germany increased during the Third Reich. A rash of books seeking to explain the National Socialist revolution to a British audience was published between 1933 and 1939, while tour operators offered trips specifically designed so that interested Britons could see for themselves the transformations brought by the new regime. See, for example, Vernon Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London, 1933); H. P. Greenwood, The German Revolution (London, 1934); John Brown, I Saw for Myself (London, 1934); Christopher Sidgwick, German Journey (London, 1936); and J. A. Cole, Just Back 1

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from Germany (London, 1938). For a critical discussion of these and other works see Angela Schwarz, ‘British Visitors to National Socialist Germany: In a Familiar or in a Foreign Country?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28/3 (1993), pp. 487–509 and Angela Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich. Britische Augenzeugen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1939 (Göttingen, 1993). 11 Perhaps the first historian to use the term was F. Feiedensburg in his Die Weimarer Republik (West Berlin, 1946), which was written in 1934 but not published until after the Second World War. 12 ‘The Constitution of the German Republic’ in Aton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, 1994), p. 46 13 There is a wealth of material on Isherwood and his friends, all of which deals extensively with their experiences in Weimar Germany. The most recent such works are the authorised biographies of Isherwood and Spender, Peter Parker’s, Isherwood: A Life (Basingstoke, 2004) and John Sutherland’s Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (London, 2004). Earlier biographical and critical studies such as Jonathan Fryer’s Eye of the Camera: A Life of Christopher Isherwood (London, 1993), Stephen Wade’s Christopher Isherwood (Basingstoke, 1991), Hugh David’s Stephen Spender: A Portrait with Background (London, 1992), Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. Auden: A Biography (London, 1981), Richard DavenportHines’s Auden (London, 1995), and Frederick Buell’s W. H. Auden as a Social Poet (London, 1973), all discuss the connection between Isherwood, Auden, Spender and Weimar Berlin at length, as does Norman Page’s book-length study Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (Basingstoke, 1998). Even general accounts such as John Ramsden’s Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 (London, 2006), John J. White’s ‘Sexual Mecca, Nazi Metropolis, City of Doom: The Pattern of English, Irish and American Reactions to the Berlin of the InterWar Years’ in D. Glass, D. Rösler & J. J. White (eds.), Berlin: Literary Images of a City (Berlin, 1989) and Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (London, 1974) focus to the point of exclusivity on Isherwood and his circle when discussing the attitudes of British intellectuals towards Weimar Germany. 14 See Damien McGuiness, ‘Hello Again, Berlin’, The Times T2 Supplement, 24 August 2004 15 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1996), p. 520–521 16 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London, 2005), p. 170 17 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007), p. 41 Chapter 1 Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (London, 2000), p.89 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife (London, 1938), p. 194 3 Claud Cockburn, I Claud … The Autobiography of Claud Cockburn (London, 1967), p. 55 1 2

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Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble (London, 1956), p. 91 See Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies as Seen by an Englishwoman (London, 1931), pp. 160–161, and ‘A great air service combine: the Deutsche Luft Hansa A.G. Air Services’, The Traveller’s Gazette, vol. LXXVI, no. 8 (August 1926), p. 17 (TCA) 6 John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 (London, 2006), p. 7 7 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 2004), p. v 8 James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)’ in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2002), p. 38 9 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad, p. v 10 John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, p. 19 11 Gordon N. Ray (ed.), The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Vol. I: 1817–1840 (London, 1945), p. 112 12 Ibid., p. 115 13 Jerome K. Jerome, Diary of a Pilgrimage (Stroud, 2006 [1891]), p. 73–4 14 Ibid., p. 77–8 15 James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After’, p. 47 16 For more on Thomas Cook and the evolution of Britain’s first modern travel agent see Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, 1991), especially chapters 4 and 5, and Paul Smith, The History of Tourism: Thomas Cook and the Origins of Leisure Travel (London, 1998), vol. 1-4. 17 In fact a French translation of an earlier guidebook, Rheinreise von Mainz bis Köln (Mainz, 1828) by Professor J. A. Klein. The Baedeker edition was entitled Voyage du Rhin (Coblenz, 1832). 18 John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: Being a Guide Through Holland, Belgium, Prussia, Northern Germany, and along the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland (London, 1836) 19 John Murray, quoted in Rudy Koshar, ‘“What ought to be seen”: tourists’ guidebooks and national identities in modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no. 3 (1998), p. 323 20 The Westminster Review, no. 4 (October 1826), p. 325 21 Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918 (Oxford, 1993), p. 2 22 Jerome K. Jerome, Diary of a Pilgrimage, p. 85, 128 and 157–159 23 Ibid., p. 159 24 Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (London, 1926), p. 187 25 Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies, p. 153 26 Violet R. Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, 1920), p. 9–10 27 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918-1930: The Reluctant Occupiers (New York, 1991), p. 213 28 Ibid., p. 213 4 5

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D’Abernon looms large in the diplomatic history of Anglo-German relations of this period but was an unusual and controversial choice for ambassador, and his appointment was attacked both by the Foreign Office and in the British Press. He had had a somewhat chequered career as a soldier, public servant, financial expert and MP but was not a professional or experienced diplomat and he could read, but not speak, German. He did, however, have a reputation as an expert in financial matters and industrial relations, and was a vehement anti-Bolshevik. He was therefore thought to be in a position to advise the German government as to how best to handle reparations payments and the threat from the extreme left while steering it in a course favourable to Britain. He agreed with many of the ideas about reparations and the Treaty of Versailles expounded by the economist John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), but his own ideas were ‘idiosyncratic and inconsistent’. Eccentric and untidy, he was well liked both by his staff and his contacts in the German government, but often not by officials in Whitehall. His three-volume collection of memoirs provides an interesting and informative, if not unbiased, account of AngloGerman relations in the first half of the 1920s. See Edgar, Viscount D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, 3 vols. (London, 1929–30), Gaynor Johnson, The Berlin Embassy of Lord D’Abernon 1920–1926 (London, 2002) and Gaynor Johnson, ‘Lord Curzon and the appointment of Lord D’Abernon as ambassador to Berlin in 1920’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 39, no. 1 (2004), pp. 57–70 30 See, among others, ‘The River of Legend’, The Traveller’s Gazette, vol. LXXV, no. 6 (June 1925), p. 20; ‘Baden-Baden, In the Legend Haunted Schwarzwald’, The Traveller’s Gazette, Vol. LXXVI, No. 6 (June 1926), p. 16; ‘Cologne’, The Traveller’s Gazette, vol. LXXVII, no.2 (February 1927), p. 9; ‘Mainz-on-Rhine’, The Traveller’s Gazette, vol. LXXVIII, no. 1 (January 1928), p. 20; and ‘Rhineland Tours’, The Traveller’s Gazette, vol. LXXXII, no.7 (July 1932), p. 14 (TCA) 31 Roy Elston, Cook’s Travellers Handbook to the Rhine and Black Forest (With Extensions into Bavaria) (London, 1931) (TCA) 32 Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 1 33 For the rise of Modernism as a reaction to mass culture, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880– 1939 (London, 1992). James Buzard discusses the emergence of the notion of the ‘traveller’ in opposition to the ‘tourist’ at length in The Beaten Track. 34 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York, 1980), p. 38 35 Ibid., p. 42 36 Ibid., p. 40 37 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife, p.157 38 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 210 39 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 (New York, 1968), p. 107 40 Ernest Hemingway, quoted in David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (London, 2001), p. 177 41 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol (London, 1932), p. 15 29

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See David Clay Large, Berlin, p.180, and Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 2001), p. 211–215 43 See Margot Klages-Stange, ‘Prostitution’ and Willi Pröger, ‘Sites of Berlin Prostitution’, in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 728–9 and 736. 44 Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations (London, 1966), p. 87 45 Quoted in Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York, 1995), p. 97-8 46 Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex since the Grand Tour (London, 2001), p. 3 47 Ibid., p. 1 48 See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison, 1985), pp. 20–22 49 Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (c.1728), quoted in Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates, p. 25. This pamphlet explicitly blamed a supposed increase in incidences of homosexuality in Britain on foreign travel, especially in Catholic countries, which exposed English youth to ‘effeminate customs from abroad’. 50 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p. 132 51 Letter to Patience McElwee, 31 December 1928 (BL Add 59618) 52 Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (1994 [1940]), p. 90 53 Letter to Patience McElwee, 31st December 1928 (BL Add 59618) 54 See Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London, 1981), p.84 55 Frederick Buell, W. H. Auden as a Social Poet (London, 1973), p. 80 56 Ibid., p. 98 57 Ibid., p. 80 58 See David Constantine, ‘The German Auden: six early poems’ in Katharine Bucknell & Nicholas Jenkins (ed.), W. H. Auden, ‘The Map of all my Youth’: Early Works, Friends and Influences (Auden Studies I) (Oxford, 1990) 59Jonathan Fryer, Eye of the Camera: A Life of Christopher Isherwood (London, 1993), p.66 60 See Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter: The Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1993), pp. 20–22 and Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London, 1996), pp. 26–32 61 The fact that John Chancellor’s mainstream guidebook How to be Happy in Berlin contains descriptions of ‘dark, dank establishments, conducted in semi-secrecy’, including the infamous El Dorado, is an indication that there were many ordinary British tourists who were curious about the more racy aspects of Berlin’s nightlife. See John Chancellor, How to be Happy in Berlin (London, 1929), pp. 98 and 124–137 62 See Max Horkheimer and W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1999 [1947]) and Rudy Koshar, ‘Seeing, Travelling, and Consuming: An Introduction’ in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure (Oxford, 2002), p. 16 42

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘A theory of tourism’, New German Critique, No. 68 (1996), p. 135 64 See Andrew Hammond, ‘“The Unending Revolt”: Travel in the era of Modernism’, Studies in Travel Writing, no. 7 (2003), pp. 169–189 65 Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (London, 2002), p. 224 66 Gerald Hamilton, Mr Norris and I: An Autobiographical Sketch (London, 1956), p. 16 67 Edward Sackville-West, “Sketches for an autobiography” (c.1946), p. 52 (ESW Vol. XIII (ff.67), BL Add 68916) 68 Ibid., p. 60 69 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 84 70 Ibid., p.89 71 Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (London, 1998), pp. 100–102 72 Letter to Patience McElwee, 31 December 1928 (BL Add 59618) 73 Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations, p. 86. This incident was later fictionalised by Isherwood in Down There on a Visit (London, 1974), p. 38 74 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (London, 1976), p. 10 75 Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (London, 1989), p.400 76 See Gerald Hamilton, The Way it was With Me (London, 1969), p. 56 and Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York, 2000), p. 361 77 See Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (London, 1965), p. 226, Michael De-La-Noy, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West (London, 1988), pp. 93–94, and Edward Sackville-West, Diary, January-March 1924 (BL Add 71871 C) 78 See D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940 (London, 2007), p. 180 and Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A narrative of ‘decadence’ in England after 1918 (London, 1977), pp. 293–295 79 For more on Layard, whose suicide attempt inspired an episode in Isherwood’s first novel, The Memorial (London, 1953), see Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood, pp. 129–138 80 See Ibid., pp. 115–128. For more information on Turville-Petre’s archaeological career, see Ofer Bar-Yosef and Jane Callander, ‘A Forgotten Archaeologist: The Life of Francis Turville-Petre’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly, vol. 129, Jan–June (1997), pp. 2–18 81 See F. W Ogilvie, The Tourist Movement: An Economic Study (London, 1933), pp. 3–4 82 Ibid., p. 4 83 A. J. Burkart and S. Medlik, Tourism: Past, Present, and Future (Second Edition) (London, 1981), p. 42 84 Ibid., p. 42. See also F. W. Ogilvie, The Tourist Movement, p. 4 63

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Chapter 2 Richard Overy, The Inter-War Crisis 1919–1939 (Harlow, 1994), p. 2 For a full examination of the deterioration of Anglo-German relations before the First World War, see Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (New York, 1980), Robert K. Massie, Dreadnaught: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (London, 2004), and John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 (London, 2006), Chapter 2. 3 H. G. Wells wrote that ‘I was taken by surprise by the war. I saw long ahead how it could happen, and wove fantastic stories about it, but at the bottom of my heart I did not believe that it would really happen.’ Quoted in John Ramsden, ibid., p. 93 4 Bethmann Hollweg’s dismissive way of referring to the Treaty of London of 1830 which guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality. The remark was made by the Chancellor during his last meeting with the British ambassador before the outbreak of war and reported in The Times on 28 August 1914. 5 Giles MacDonough, The Last Kaiser: William the Impetuous (London, 2000), p. 357 6 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 47 7 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998), p. 228 8 G. K. Chesterton, The Barbarism of Berlin (London, 1914), p. 28 9 Ibid., p. 93 10 John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, p. 92 11 Ibid., pp. 96–97 12 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Beginnings’, in A Diversity of Creatures (London, 1917), p. 442. See also Michael Howard, The Crisis of Anglo-German Antagonism 1916–17 (London, 1996) 13 John Horne & Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (London, 2001), p. 369. See also Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 232–233 14 See Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals (Manchester, 2002), pp. 52–73 15 See Martin Stephen, The Price of Pity: Poetry, History and Myth in the Great War (London, 1996), pp. 115–116 and 134–135, Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 344 and 363, and John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, p. 105–106 16 Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918 (London, 2004), p. 536 17 Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler (London, 2004), p. 53. For more on the British Legion’s links with German and Austrian ex-servicemen’s associations and its attempts to foster peace and reconciliation between former enemies in the interwar period see Brian Harding, Keeping Faith: The History of the Royal British Legion (Barnsley, 2001), pp. 142-64, and Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–9 (London, 1980), pp. 127–37. 18 Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That (London, 1981), p. 166 19 Ibid., p. 162 20 Ibid., p. 166 1 2

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Richard Overy, The Inter-war Crisis, p. 2 Speech by David Lloyd George, quoted in The Times, 25 November 1918 23 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London, 1937), p. 185 24 Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career up-to-Date (London, 1950), p. 138 25 Ibid., p. 137 26 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 8 27 Ibid., p. 185 28 Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, 2000), p. 199 29 Ibid., p. 185 30 Ibid., p. 186 31 Lewis’s political philosophy, as outlined in a series of polemical books that he published throughout the 1920s and 30s, was complex and contradictory. He longed for personal and artistic freedom, yet craved order and stability; he called for unity between young and old and between different races and cultures while at the same time lambasting the ‘old men’ who mismanaged political and cultural life in England and the ‘left-wing’ intellectuals, who (as he saw it) excluded him from London’s cultural life. Much debate has centred on whether or not Lewis was a Fascist, but such distinctions are too simplistic. Certainly there seems to have been much about Fascism which Lewis found attractive to some degree: the idea of a strong leader above parliaments or assemblies and calls for national revival and of national and cultural unity, for example. As a struggling radical movement in the 1920s Nazism might have also appealed to Lewis in his postwar role of ‘the Enemy’, the rebel and outsider championing the radical and modern in the face of mass opposition. However, Lewis was too much of a truculent individualist ever to involve himself wholeheartedly in any single political or artistic movement (especially one of which he was not the leader). It is perhaps fair to say that Lewis was a Fascist to the extent that he agreed with the Fascists as far as their ideas coincided with his own. Fascism was a ‘third way’ between parliamentary democracy and Soviet Communism. It called for strong leadership, for national renewal and for national unity and was ‘modern’ and ‘rebellious’, all key aspects of Lewis’s political philosophy in the 1920s. For more on Lewis’s politics see D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1972), Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, pp. 177–179, and John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London, 1992), pp. 182–208 32 Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment, p. 209 33 Wyndham Lewis, Count Your Dead: They are Alive! (London, 1937), p. 78 34 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London, 1976), p. 17 35 See Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford, 1988), pp. 55– 56 36 Ibid, p. 54 21 22

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Ibid, p. 55 George Orwell, ‘My Country Right or Left’, in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. I (London, 1968), p. 538 39 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (London, 1953), p. 77. See also Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 99-100 40 Richard Bessel, ‘The “Front Generation” and the politics of Weimar Germany’ in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict (Cambridge, 1995), p.130-135 41 See, for example, Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand (London, 1975 [1915]); ‘Sapper’ (H. C. McNeile), The Lieutenant and Others (London, 1915); John Buchan, Greenmantle (London, 2003 [1916]); and Lord Dunsany, Tales of War (Dublin, 1918) 42 Ariela Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed: German Popular Literature through British Eyes between the Two World Wars (Westport, 1995), p. 42 43 Ibid., p. 45 44 Ibid., p. 51 45 For more on the influence of All Quiet on the Western Front, see ibid., pp. 53–69 and Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 35–39 46 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 1 47 Douglas Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic 1918–1919 (Oxford, 1997), p. 140 48 See ibid., pp. 257–317 and p. 419, David French, ‘“Had we known how bad things were in Germany, we might have got stiffer terms”: Great Britain and the German Armistice’ in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman & Elisabeth Glaser, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years (Cambridge, 1998); Michael Graham Fry, ‘British Revisionism’ in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman & Elisabeth Glaser, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years (Cambridge, 1998); Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace (London, 2000), pp. 240–242 and Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers (London, 2002), pp. 200–201. 49 Robert Graves & Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 (London, 1994 [1940]), p. 21 50 See Douglas Newton, British Policy, p. 323 51 Nigel Nicolson (ed.), The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963 (London, 2004), p. 20 52 Ibid., p. 20 53 Ibid., p. 23 54 Ibid., p. 22 55 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (1964), p. 7 56 Ibid., pp. 207–209 57 Stefan Berger, ‘William Harbutt Dawson: The Career and Politics of an Historian of Germany’, The English Historical Review, vol. CXVI, no. 465 (2001), p. 111 58 W. H. Dawson, ‘Germany or Prussia – Which is the Enemy’, undated letter to The Times (WHD 2141/6) 59 Ibid 37 38

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W. H. Dawson, Problems of the Peace (London, 1917), pp. 8–9 Ibid., p. 304 62 Ibid., p. 100 63 Ibid., p. 101 64 Letter from W. H. Dawson to Lloyd George, 19 December 1918 (WHD 409) 65 Ibid 66 Ibid 67 See, for example, Letter from W. H. Dawson to The Pioneer, 4 April 1919 (WHD 2148/18); W. H. Dawson, ‘The Liabilities of the Peace’ in the Fortnightly Review, 1 July 1919 (WHD 2144/48); and W. H. Dawson, ‘The Treaty and the Future’ in the Fortnightly Review, 1 August 1919 (WHD 2144/88) 68 Stefan Berger, ‘William Harbutt Dawson’, p. 89 69 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (London, 2003), p. 238 70 John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. II: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1971), p.160 71 Robert Skidelsky, Keynes, p. 243 72 Ibid., p. 243 73 John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. II, p. 146 74 Ibid., p. 147 75 Ibid., p. 170 76 John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo-German Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, 1974), p. 243 77 John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. X: Essays in Biography (London, 1972), p. 394 78 Ibid., p. 394 79 Ibid., p. 395 80 John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XVII: Activities 1920–1922: Treaty Revision and Reconstruction (London, 1977), p. 19 81 Ibid., p. 19 82 John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. III: A Revision of the Treaty (London, 1971), p. xv 83 See Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War 1919–1923 (Second Edition) (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 205 84 John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 403 85 Ibid., p. 403 86 Ibid., p. 403 87 Ibid., p.415 88 Robert Skidelsky, Keynes, p. 223 89 Ibid., p. 311 90 Ibid., p. 311 91 Ibid., p. 312 92 Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals, p. 68 60 61

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See John Buchan, The Three Hostages (London, 2003 [1924]); pp. 166–167, John Buchan, ‘Tredebant Manus’ in The Runagates Club (London, 1928); p. 273, John Buchan, A Prince of the Captivity (Thursk, 2001 [1933]). 94 Anne Sebba, Battling for News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter (Reading, 1995), p. 74 95 Ibid., p. 76 93

Chapter 3 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied 1918–1930: A Postscript to the Western Front (London, 1931), p. 31 2 Ibid., p. 33 3 Margaret Pawley, The Watch on the Rhine: The Military Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–1930 (London, 2007), p. 1 4 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany 1918–1930: The Reluctant Occupiers (New York, 1991), p. 64 5 Margaret Pawley, The Watch on the Rhine, p. 53 6 Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis 1923-1924 (Oxford, 2003), p. 292 7 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, pp. 329–330 8 After much negotiation the British and Americans managed to persuade the French to abandon their insistence that only the outright annexation of the territory on the left bank of the Rhine could protect France from future aggression from Germany. Instead Lloyd George and President Wilson agreed to the temporary occupation of the Rhineland, the demilitarization of the territory east of the Rhine and a military guarantee that Britain and the USA would come to France’s aid if she were attacked by Germany. However, the failure of the US Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles meant that America was not bound to protect France, and Britain was unwilling to act as the sole guarantor of French security. Under these circumstances the promised Anglo-American military guarantee evaporated. See Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers (London, 2001), pp. 205–21 and David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 83. 9 See G. E. R. Gedye, The Revolver Republic (London, 1930), p. 250 10 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 2 11 Ariela Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed: German Popular Literature through British Eyes between the Two World Wars (Westport, 1995), p. 45 12 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 2 13 See, for example, ‘Apex’ (R. G. Coulson), The Uneasy Triangle: Four Years of the Occupation (London, 1931), pp. 58–65, 95 and 132 14 As several commentators noted, the British forces in Cologne were generally considered to be in less danger from attacks by the locals than British troops serving in Ireland in the same period. See, for example, Sir Charles Oman, Things I Have Seen (London, 1933), p. 255 1

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See Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 140–146 and Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany (Princeton, 2007), pp. 9–10 16 G. E. R. Gedye, Report on a visit to Frankfurt-am-Oder, 27–28 Feb. 1919 (IWM, Gedye Papers, GERG 8), p. 65. See also Gedye, The Revolver Republic, pp. 26–33 17 ‘Combined report on food conditions in Germany during the period 12 January – 12 February 1919’ (National Archives, CAB/24/76), p. 2 18 See A. G. Gardiner, What I Saw in Germany (London, no date), p. 39 and G. P. Gooch, Germany (London, 1925), p. 305 19 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol (London, 1932), p. 20 and A. G. Gardiner, What I Saw, p. 39 20 G. E. R. Gedye, Report on a visit to Frankfurt-am-Oder, 27–28 Feb. 1919 (IWM, Gedye Papers, GERG 8), p. 65 21 ‘Combined Report’ (National Archives, CAB/24/76), p. 2 22 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol, p. 22 23 Margaret Pawley, The Watch on the Rhine, pp. 28-9 24 A. G. Gardiner, What I Saw, p. 39 25 H. N. Brailsford, Across the Blockade: A Record of Travels in Enemy Europe (London, 1919), p. 106 26 Ibid., p. 113 27 Ibid., p. 114 28 A. G. Gardiner, What I Saw, p. 39 29 G. P. Gooch, Germany, p. 305 30 Vernon Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London, 1933), pp. 46–47 31 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied, pp. 38–9 32 Ibid., p. 56 33 David G. Williamson, ‘Cologne and the British 1918-1926’, History Today, vol. 27, no. 11 (1977), p. 701. 34 Ibid., p. 112 35 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied, p. 48 36 Ibid., p. 110 37 Julian Piggott, ‘The Rhineland Republic I’, History Today, vol. III, no. 12 (1953), p. 819 38 Brigadier-General James Edmonds, The Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–1929 (London, 1987), p. 117 39 ‘Apex’ (R. G. Coulson), The Uneasy Triangle, p. 7 40 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied, p. 220 41 Ibid., p. 223 42 David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 210 43 Brigadier-General James Edmonds, The Occupation of the Rhineland, p. 117 44 Ibid., p. 118 45 ‘Apex’ (R. G. Coulson), The Uneasy Triangle, p. 7 46 Ibid., p. vii 15

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Sir Charles Oman, Things I Have Seen, p. 240 Violet Markham, A Woman’s Watch on the Rhine (London, 1920), p. 21 49 Ibid., p. 12 50 Ibid., p. 8 51 Ibid., p. 26 52 Ibid., p. 34 53 Ibid., pp. 13–14 54 Ibid., pp. 6–7 55 Katharine Tynan, Life in the Occupied Area (London, no date), pp. 5–6, 59 and 61– 62 56 Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches from the Weimar Republic (London, 1999), p. 110 57 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London, 1935), p. 168 58 Ibid., p. 204 59 Katharine Tynan, Life in the Occupied Area, p. 121 60 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied, p. 88 61 Ibid., p. 89 62 See Geoffrey Moss, I Face the Stars (London, 1933), pp. 18–20, 139 and 154–157 63 Letter from H. M. Swanwick to Winifred Holtby, undated (early 1930s) (WHC:WH/5/5.21/04/01q) 64 Harold Nicolson, Preface to Geoffrey Moss, Defeat (London, 1932), p. 19 65 Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London, 1971), p. 137 66 Ibid., p. 138 67 Ibid., p. 139 68 Ibid., p. 139 69 Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One: 1904–1939 (London, 1989), p. 138 70 Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, pp. 139–140 71 Ibid., p. 140 72 Ibid., p. 143 73 Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches, p. 108 74 The Daily Herald, 10 April 1920 75 The Daily Herald, 12 April 1920 76 E. D. Morel, The Horror on the Rhine (3rd Edition) (London, 1920), pp. 11–13 77 Ibid., p. 14 78 The Daily Herald, 10 April, 1920 79 Robert C. Reinders, ‘Racialism on the Left: E. D. Morel and the “Black Horror on the Rhine”’, International Review of Social History, vol. XIII (1968), p. 7 80 E. D. Morel, The Horror on the Rhine, pp. 8 and 10–11 81 Typescript of an undated letter (c.1924) from G. E. R. Gedye to an unnamed newspaper (IWM, Gedye Papers, GERG 15) 82 Ibid. 83 See ‘Apex’ (R. G. Coulson), The Uneasy Triangle, pp. 27–29; Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol, p. 47; and Geoffrey Moss, I Face the Stars, pp. 18–19. 84 See Geoffrey Moss, Defeat, pp. 107–109, 115 and 136–141 47 48

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Sir Charles Oman, Things I Have Seen, p. 255 Sally Marks, ‘Black Watch on the Rhine: A Study in Propaganda, Prejudice and Prurience’, European Studies Review, vol. 13, no. 3 (1983), pp. 298–299. See also Keith L. Nelson, ‘The “Black Horror on the Rhine”: Race as a Factor in PostWorld War I Diplomacy’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 42, no. 4 (1970), pp. 611 and 625 87 Sally Marks, ‘Black Watch on the Rhine’, p. 298 88 Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches, p. 109 89 Sally Marks, ‘Black Watch on the Rhine’, pp. 299–300 90 Ibid., p. 310 91 See Reiner Pommerin, ‘The Fate of Mixed Blood Children in Germany’, German Studies Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (1982), pp. 315–323 and Raffael Scheck, ‘The Killing of Black Soldiers from the French Army by the “Wehrmacht” in 1940: The Question of Authorization’, German Studies Review, vol. 28, no. 3 (2005), p. 597 and Raffael Scheck, ‘“They Are Just Savages”: German Massacres of Black Soldiers from the French Army in 1940’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 77, no. 2 (2005), pp. 325–344 92 Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (London, 1995), p. 202 93 Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Oxford, 1996), p. 184 94 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London, 1984), pp. 631 and 632 95 Alice Holtby and Jean McWilliam (eds.), Winifred Holtby: Letters to a Friend (London, 1937), p. 280 96 Winifred Holtby, ‘The Cow’, unpublished short story (c.1923), p. 12 (WHC: WH/1/1.5/01a) 97 Holtby, ‘The Cow’, p. 12 98 As, for example, in Moss’s ‘Defeat’ (1924) and I Face the Stars (1933) 99 Vera Brittain, Testament, p. 633 100 Ibid., p. 633 101 Ibid., p. 635 102 Ibid., p. 635 103 Ibid., p. 636 104 Alice Holtby and Jean McWilliam (eds.), Letters, p.280 105 Ibid., p. 280 106 Ibid., p. 282 107 Ibid., p. 280 108 Ibid., p. 281 109 Quoted in David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, p. 277 110 ‘Apex’ (R. G. Coulson), The Uneasy Triangle, pp. 53-54 111 Ibid., p. 128 112 Ferdinand Tuohy, Occupied, p. 236 113 Brigadier-General James Edmonds, The Occupation of the Rhineland, p. 289 85 86

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Chapter 4 John J. White in ‘Sexual Mecca, Nazi Metropolis, City of Doom: The Pattern of English, Irish and American Reactions to the Berlin of the Inter-War Years’ in Derek Glass, Dietmar Rösler & John J. White (ed.), Berlin: Literary Images of a City (Berlin, 1989) 2 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the 18th Century (Stroud, 2004), p. 57 3 Quoted in Ibid., p. 57 4 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (London, 1999), p. 247 5 Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies As Seen By An Englishwoman (London, 1931), p.154 6 Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London, 1981), p.84 7 Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, p.12 8 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 (New York, 1968), p.107 9 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol (London, 1932), p.69 10 Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996), p.177 11 Louise De Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (London, 1984), p.293 12 Edward Sackville-West, Diary and Commonplace Book 1927-28 (ESW Vol. III (ff. 30), BL Add 68906) 13 See for example the letter from E. Sackville-West to Raymond Mortimer, dated 5 November 1928 in which he regales his friend with an account of his experiences amongst Berlin’s gay night haunts (ESW Vol. II (ff. 201) General Correspondence 1918-1965: BL Add 68905) 14 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol, p.69 15 Ibid., p.69 16 See ‘Löttchen of the Nacht Lokal’ and ‘The Wrong Receipt’ in Geoffrey Moss, Defeat (London, 1924). For a similar condemnation of German nightlife outside Berlin, indicating the British perception that hedonism and ‘moral degeneracy’ were rife throughout Weimar Germany as a whole, see, among others, Geoffrey Moss, I Face the Stars (London, 1933) and Stephen Spender, World Within World (London, 1951), p. 107–112 17 Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London, 2000), p.235 18 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London, 1931), p.28 19 Ibid., p.13 20 Ibid., p.14 21 Ibid., p.21 22 Ibid., p.14 23 Ibid, p.21 24 Wyndham Lewis, The Hitler Cult (London, 1939), p. 23 25 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (London, 1998), p.335 1

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See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003), p. 128 and Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 168 27 Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London, 1993), p.104 28 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, p.335 29 David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (London, 2001), p.180 30 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol, p.15 31 Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw (London, 1968), p.13 32 Stephen Spender, World Within World, p.126 33 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, p.110 34 Giles MacDonough, Berlin (London, 1997), p.436 35 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, p.107 36 Giles MacDonough, Berlin, p.436 37 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler, p.14 38 Lt. Col. W. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol, p.71 39 Ibid., p. 71 40 Ibid., p.72 41 James F. Richardson, ‘Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic: A Comparison With Police Forces in Cities of the United States’ in George L. Mosse (ed.), Police Forces in History (London, 1975), p.82. See also Hsi-huey Liang, The Berlin Police Force of the Weimar Republic (Berkeley, 1970), especially Chapters 3 and 4. 42 Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius, p. 298 43 David Clay Large, Berlin, p. 158 44 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 12 August 1931 (GA 205/217a-c) 45 See Ibid, and Frank McDonough, ‘The Times, Norman Ebbut [sic] and the Nazis 1927–37’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 27, no. 3 (1992), p. 411–412 46 E.L. Woodward, Rohan Butler & Margaret Lambert (eds.), DBFP, Second Series, vol. IV 1932–3 (London, 1950), p. 7 47 Davis Clay Large, Berlin, p. 181 48 Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw, p. 11 49 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, p. 110 50 Stephen Spender, World Within World, p. 129 51 Claud Cockburn, I Claud …The Autobiography of Claud Cockburn (London, 1967), p. 56 52 Stephen Spender, World Within World, p.129 53 The population of Berlin more than doubled between 1875 and 1910 and Berlin was a major centre of Germany’s growing engineering and electrical industries. In 1907, 53% of Berliners were employed in manufacturing and industry, well above the national average of 43%. In addition to this Berlin became a financial and commercial centre on a par with Paris or Vienna. See Dick Geary, ‘Revolutionary Berlin 1917–20’ in Chris Wrigley (ed.), Challenges of Labour (London, 1993), p. 25 54 See Bernd Nicolai, ‘Architecture and Urban Development [1871–1918]’ in Gert Streidt & Peter Feierabend (eds.), Prussia: Art and Architecture (Cologne, 1999), 26

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p. 416–455 See Annette Dogerloh, ‘Sculpture and Painting [1871–1918]’, in Ibid., pp. 474–489 56 Walter Laqueur, Weimar, A Cultural History 1918–1933 (London, 2000), p. 34 57 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, p. 356 58 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London, 1992), p. 6 59 Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (Second Edition) (Abingdon, 2005), p. 87 60 Ibid., p. 88 61 Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany 1919–1933 (Köln, 2003), p. 20 62 Quoted in Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (New Haven, 1997), p. 211 63 Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies, p. 154 64 Ibid., p. 155 65 Ibid., p.158 66 Ibid., p. 160 67 Ibid., p.161 68 Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw, p.11 69 Claud Cockburn, In Time of Trouble (London, 1956), p. 90 70 Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge, 1974), p. 8 71 David Clay Large, Berlin, p. 158 72 Ariela Halkin notes the massive upsurge in translation of German works into English in the Weimar period and attributes Berlin’s growing reputation as both ‘mecca of art and cesspool of morality’ at least in part to the image of the city presented in many of these works. See Ariela Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed (Westport, 1995), p. 72–74 73 Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw, p.14 74 Ibid., p. 16 75 Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius, p.234 76 Letter from Wyndham Lewis to Violet Schiff, 12 September 1921 (Schiff Papers Vol. IV (ff. 250): BL Add 52919) 77 D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1972), p.60 78 See Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (Chichester, 2003), p. 62–66 79 Ibid., p. 63 80 Donald Spoto, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (London, 1983), p. 69 81 Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (London, 1969), p. 51 82 Donald Spoto, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 70 83 Ibid., p. 71 84 Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, p. 97 85 Quoted in Donald Spoto, The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 68 86 Ibid., p. 68 55

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Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Early Hitchcock: The German Influence’ in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse (ed.), Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (Detroit, 2002), p. 38 88 Joseph Garncarz, ‘German Hitchcock’ in Sidney Gottlieb & Christopher Brookhouse (ed.), Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (Detroit, 2002), p. 60 89 Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Early Hitchcock ‘, p. 38 90 François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Revised Edition) (New York, 1983), p. 42 91 Sidney Gottlieb, ‘Early Hitchcock’, p. 52 92 Ibid., p. 53 93 See, for example, Edward Sackville-West, Diary, 15 and 23 February 1924 (BL Add 71871 C) 94 David Robinson The Career and Times of the Film Society, 3 vols. (August 1963), p. 267 (unpublished typescript, FSC Item 45) 95 Ibid., p. 267 96 Ibid., p. 267 97 The British Film Institute, The Film Society 1925–1939 (London, 1996), p. 2 98 Film Society List of members, 1927 (FSC Item 3) 99 The British Film Institute, The Film Society, p. 2 100 David Robinson, The Career and Times of the Film Society, p. 273 101 Ibid., p. 273 102 Ibid., p. 278 103 Emer O’ Sullivan, Friend and Foe: The Image of Germany and the Germans in British Children’s Fiction From 1870 to the Present (Tübingen, 1990), p. 237 104 Harold Nicolson, ‘The charm of Berlin’, in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (eds.) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, 1995), p. 426 105 Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (London, 2002), p.233 106 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, p.358 107 Christopher Sidgwick, German Journey (London, 1936), p. 81 87

Chapter 5 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London, 1945), p. 74 To what extent Ross was actually the model for Sally Bowles has been disputed, not least by Ross’s daughter. See, for example, Sarah Caudwell, ‘Reply to Berlin’, New Statesman, vol. 112, no. 2897 (1986), p. 28 3 See W. H. Auden, quoted in Carpenter, W. H. Auden (London, 1981), p. 84, and Edward Sackville-West, quoted in Michael De-La-Noy, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West (London, 1988), p. 117 4 Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: 20th Century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis, 2001), p. x 5 Iain Johnston, ‘The Real Sally Bowles’, Folio (1975) Autumn, p.33 1 2

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Winifred Holtby, ‘Visitors from Germany’ in The Yorkshire Post, 8 July 1927 (WHC: WH/2/2.25/03/05a) 7 Beatrice Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. III: 1905–1924: ‘The Power to Alter Things’ (London, 1984), p. 341 8 Ibid., p. 341 9 Ibid., p. 344–345 10 Evelyn, Princess Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin (London, 1920), p. 295–296 11 Ibid., p. 6 12 Ibid., p.14 13 Quoted in Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace (London, 2000), p.40 14 Evelyn, Princess Blücher, English Wife, p. 295–296 15 Ibid., p. 296 16 Ibid., p. 328 17 Ibid., p. 317 18 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London, 1984), p. 634 19 Ibid., p. 639 20 Alice Holtby and Jean McWilliam (eds.), Winifred Holtby: Letters to a Friend (London, 1937), p. 286 21 Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London, 1935), p. 169–171 22 See Susan Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’ in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2002), p. 230 23 See Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Oxford, 1993) 24 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife (London, 1938), p. 169 25 Ibid., p. 170 26 Ian Johnston, ‘The Real Sally Bowles’, p. 33–34 27 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (London, 1998), p.350 28 Katharina von Ankum, ‘Introduction’ in Katharina von Ankum (ed.), Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, 1997), p. 2–3 29 Holtby, ‘Visitors from Germany’ 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Winifred Holtby, ‘Women Police – World Attitude’ in The Yorkshire Post, 5 September 1927 (WHC: WH/2/2.25/03/07a) 33 Winifred Holtby, ‘Women in the 1930s’, p. 9 (WHC: WH/1/1.25/01h) 34 Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies as Seen by an Englishwoman (London, 1931), p. 74 35 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife, p. 169 36 See, for example, Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford, 1993) Chapter 8 (and pages 231–236 and 238–245 in particular) and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, ‘Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work’ in Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann & Marion Kaplan 6

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(eds.), When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984) 37 See Cornelie Usborne, ‘The New Woman and Generational Conflict: Perceptions of Young Women’s Sexual Mores in the Weimar Republic’ in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict (Cambridge, 1995), 144–149 38 See Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (London, 1992), p. 163 39 Ibid., p. 214. See also Anita Grossmann, ‘Abortion and Economic Crisis: the 1931 Campaign Against Paragraph 218’ in Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann and Marion Kaplan (eds.), When Biology Became Destiny 40 Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies, p.42 41 Ibid., p.43 42 Ibid., p.44 43 See ibid., p.147 44 Ibid., p.252 45 Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (London, 1983), p.187 46 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (London, 1984), p. 271 47 Victoria Glendenning, Vita, p. 196 48 See Louise DeSalvo & Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.), Letters, p. 297, 322 or 345 49 Ibid., p. 293 50 Ibid., p. 347 51 Ibid., p. 281 52 Ibid., p. 296 53 Ibid., p. 347 54 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1997), p. 520 55 Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III: 19231928 (London, 1977), p. 567 56 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 521 57 See Virginia Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV: 1929–1931 (London, 1978), p. 8 58 Ibid., p. 46 59 Ibid., p.21 60 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife, p. 160 61 Ibid, p. 220 62 Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw (London, 1968), p. 13 63 W. K. Rose (ed.), The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1962), p. 199 64 Hamilton, Modern Germanies, p. 40–48 65 Cicely Hamilton had become virtually fluent in German while at school in Bad Homburg, while Lilian Mowrer lived in Berlin for a decade between 1923 and 1933 and knew German well enough to conduct her everyday affairs, not to mention understand the speeches at political rallies. Elizabeth Wiskemann’s father was German and she learned his native tongue as a child, and Vita Sackville-West knew enough of the language to embark on a translation of

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Rilke. Brittain and Holtby seem to have had some knowledge of German, but it is not clear from their accounts to what extent they relied on an interpreter to assist in gathering information from interviewees. Only Jean Ross arrived in Germany with little or no knowledge of the language, but even she picked it up quickly enough to embark on a stage career. Chapter 6 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels (London, 1999), p. 243 For two recent examples of historians using Isherwood’s work as factual autobiographical writing rather than as fiction, see John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 (London, 2006), p. 150, and Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany (Princeton, 2007), p. 50–52 and 72 –73 3 John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War, p. 150 4 John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo-German Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, 1974), p. 8 5 For a definition of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, see Allen J. Franzen and John D. Niles, ‘Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism’ in Allen J. Franzen and John D. Niles (eds.), Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainsville, 1997), pp. 1 and 2. For the relation between Anglo-Saxonism, national identity and Victorian ‘Teutonism’ see Peter Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation” in midVictorian Thought’ in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore & Brian Young (eds.), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000) 6 Paul Rich, ‘The Quest for Englishness’ in Gordon Marsden (ed.), Victorian Values (Harlow, 1990), p. 217 7 Ibid., p. 217 8 Peter Edgerly Firchow, The Death of the German Cousin (London, 1986), p. 32 9 Jeremy Lewis, Introduction to Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel (London, 1999), p. xxiv 10 See Peter Edgerly Firchow, The Death of the German Cousin, p. 31 11 I. F. Clarke (ed.), The Great War with Germany 1890–1914 (Liverpool, 1997), p. 2 12 Headon Hill (pseudonym of Francis Edward Granger), The Spies of Wight (London, 1899); William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 (London, 1906); Walter Wood, The Enemy in our Midst (London, 1906); R. W. Cole, The Death Trap (London, 1907); Captain H. Curties, When England Slept (London, 1909) and William Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser (London, 1909). 13 Peter Edgerly Firchow, The Death of the German Cousin, p. 178 14 See G. K. Chesterton, The Barbarism of Berlin (London, 1914); Lord Dunsany, Tales of War (Dublin, 1918); Cicely Hamilton, William – An Englishman (London, 1999 [1919]); and Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’ in A Diversity of Creatures (London, 1917) 15 See John Buchan, Greenmantle (London, 2003 [1916]), p. 78 16 For more on Buchan’s representation of German characters in Greenmantle, see Colin Storer, ‘“The German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were 1 2

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up against”: German Stereotypes in John Buchan’s Greenmantle’, Journal of European Studies, vol. 38, no. 1 (2009), pp. 36-57 17 See, for example, Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies As Seen By An Englishwoman (London, 1931), p. 33 18 John Buchan, The Three Hostages (London, 2003 [1924]), p. 166 19 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (London, 1965), p. 261 20 Ibid., p. 260 21 John Buchan, The Three Hostages, p. 166 22 See, for example, Ibid., p. 67 23 John Buchan, ‘Tredebant Manus’ in The Runagates Club (London, 1928), p. 273 24 John Buchan, ‘The Loathly Opposite’ in The Runagates Club, p. 173 25 Ibid., p. 176 26 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan, p. 279 27 Ibid., p. 279 28 John Buchan, A Prince of the Captivity (Thursk, 2001 [1933]), p. 232 29 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan, p. 279 30 John Buchan, A Prince of the Captivity, p. 176 31 Ibid., p. 177 32 John Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 74 33 See, for example, The Times, 4 October 1929 and Edgar, Viscount D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. II: The Years of Crisis, June 1922 – December 1923 (London, 1929), pp. 115, 231–4 and 280. See also Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, 2002), pp. 3–4 , 339 (especially note 35) and 505-506 34 John Buchan, Greenmantle, p. 67 35 Geoffrey Moss, Defeat (London, 1924), p. 30 36 Ibid., p. 33 37 Ibid., p. 201 38 Ibid., p. 203 39 See Cicely Hamilton, Modern Germanies, pp. 120–152; W. H. Dawson, ‘Why young Germany follows Hitler’ in Everyman, 22 September 1932; G. P. Gooch, Germany (London, 1925), pp. 302–318; John Buchan, A Prince of the Captivity, p. 232; Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind (London, 1977), p. 11; and Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, pp. 334–335 40 Geoffrey Moss, Defeat, p. 163–164 41 Geoffrey Moss, I Face the Stars (London, 1933), p. 81 42 Ibid., p. 83 43 Ibid., p. 86 44 Ibid., p. 88 45 Ibid., pp. 95–96 46 Ibid., p. 90 47 Ibid., p. 89 48 Geoffrey Moss, Defeat, p. 9 49 Ibid., p.9

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Ibid., p. 9 Ibid., p. 10 52 Ibid., p. 76 53 Ibid., p.76 54 Robert E. Knoll (ed.) McAlmon and the Lost Generation (Lincoln, 1962), p. 224 55 Gore Vidal, Foreword to Robert McAlmon, Miss Knight and Others (Albuquerque, 1992), p. xiii 56 Ibid., p. xiii 57 Edward N. S. Lorusso, ‘Introduction’ to Robert McAlmon, Miss Knight and Others, p. xxiv 58 Robert McAlmon, Miss Knight and Others (Albuquerque, 1992), p. 11 59 Ibid., p. 26 60 Ibid., p. 60 61 Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930 (New York, 1968), p. 110 62 Robert E. Knoll (ed.), McAlmon and the Lost Generation, p. 225 63 Ibid., p. 225 64 See Ariela Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed: German Popular Literature through British Eyes between the Two World Wars (Westport, 1995), p. 26–27 65 Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge (London, 1974), p. 303 66 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 240 67 Ibid., p. 303-304 68 See Sarah Caudwell, ‘Reply to Berlin’, New Statesman, vol. 112, no. 2897 (1986), p. 28 69 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind, p. 10 70 Edward N. S. Lorusso, ‘Introduction’, p. xx 71 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 124 72 Ibid., p. 120 73 Ibid., p. 24 74 Ibid., p. 33 75 Ibid., p.33 76 Ibid., p.101 77 Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (London, 1998), p. 186 78 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind, p. 11 79 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 334–335 80 Ibid., p. 335 81 See Stephen Wade, Christopher Isherwood (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 55–57 82 Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge, p. 306 50 51

Chapter 7 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003), p. xxi Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933-1939 (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 4–6 3 See Brigitte Granzow, A Mirror of Nazism: British Opinion & the Emergence of Hitler 1929–1933 (London, 1964), p. 34 1 2

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Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 200 Morgan Philips Price, My Three Revolutions (London, 1969), p. 200 6 For details of the Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Bavaria see Richard Grunberger, Red Rising in Bavaria (London, 1973);, A. Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria 1918–1919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic (Princeton, 1965); Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918/19 (London, 1973), pp. 163–176; and F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918-1919 (London, 1972), pp. 178–209. For information on the ‘White Terror’ and right-wing paramilitaries in Bavaria see also David Clay Large, ‘The politics of law and order: A history of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr, 1918-1921’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 70, no. 2 (1980), pp. 1–87 and Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Post-war Germany 1918–1923 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), pp. 79–93. For British fears over Bavarian separatism see F. L. Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic (New York, 1984), Chapter 3. 7 Morgan Philips Price, My Three Revolutions, p. 200 8 Morgan Philips Price (Tania Rose, ed.), Dispatches from the Weimar Republic (London, 1999), p. 171 9 See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 241 10 Morgan Philips Price, Germany in Transition (London, 1923), p. 86 11 Ibid., p. 87 12 Ibid., p. 88 13 Ibid., p. 88 14 See Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (Reading, Massachusetts, 1996), p. 9 and Tim Kirk Cassell’s Dictionary of Modern German History (London, 2002), p. 458 15 Morgan Philips Price, Germany in Transition, p. 95 16 Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches from the Weimar Republic, p. 141–142 17 Ibid., p. 142 18 Morgan Philips Price, Germany in Transition, p. 95 19 Ibid., p. 98 20 W. N. Medlicott, Douglas Dakin and M. E. Lambert (eds.), DBFP, Series IA, vol. VII (London, 1975), p. 168 21 Ibid., p. 169 22 Ibid., p. 169 23 Ibid., p. 169 24 Ibid., p. 222 25 Ibid., p. 195 26 Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (London, 1993), p. 231 27 Nigel Nicolson (ed.), The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907–1963 (London, 2004), p. 89 28 F. R. Gannon, The British Press and Germany 1936–1939 (Oxford, 1971), p. 75 4 5

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Markus Huttner, ‘Voigt, Frederick Augustus (1892–1957)’ in H. C. G. Matthew and Brain Harrison (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 56 (Oxford, 2004), p. 589 30 Letter from H. Dore to C. P. Scott, 19 Feb 1919 (GA 204/76) 31 Ibid. 32 Markus Huttner, ‘Voigt’, p. 589 33 See W. K. Rose (ed.), The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1962), p. 44 34 See, for example, Letter from C. P. Scott to Frederick Voigt, 30 November 1923 (GA 204/92) and Markus Huttner, ‘Voigt’, p. 589 35 Letter from Frederick Voigt to E. T. Scott, 2 February 1931 (GA 205/152 a-l) 36 Ibid. 37 See The Manchester Guardian, 27 March 1930 and 5 June 1930 38 Letter from Frederick Voigt to E. T. Scott, 2 February 1931 (GA 205/152 a-l) 39 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 14 July 1932 (GA 206/207a-b). Voigt’s impression of Hitler as a maniacal prophet of hatred and violence is further underlined in Frederick Voigt, Unto Caesar (London, 1938), p.70 and pp. 84–86. 40 E.L. Woodward, Rohan Butler and Margaret Lambert (eds.), DBFP, Second Series, vol. IV 1932–3 (London, 1950), p.5 41 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 26 June 1932 (GA 206/181a-c) 42 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 10 April 1932 (GA 206/66a-c) 43 See Ibid. 44 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 2 May 1930 (GA 205/37b) 45 The Manchester Guardian, 22 August 1930 46 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 6 September 1930 (GA 205/70ab) 47 Ibid. 48 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 11 October 1930 (GA 205/89a-c) 49 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 12 August 1931 (GA 205/217a-c) 50 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, undated (GA 206/11b) 51 Letter from Frederick Voigt to W. P. Crozier, 4 December 1932 (GA 206/488ab) 52 F. R. Gannon, The British Press and Germany, p. 121 53 Frank McDonough, ‘The Times, Norman Ebbut [sic] and the Nazis 1927–37’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 27, no. 3 (1992), p. 413 54 Norman Ebbutt, memorandum, dated 19 March 1931, quoted in Ibid., p. 413 55 Ibid., p. 413 56 Ibid., p. 412 57 Lilian T. Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife (London, 1938), p. 234 58 Ibid., p.236 59 Ibid., p. 165 60 See Ibid., p. 224–230 61 Ibid., p. 186 29

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Letter from Oliver E. Bodington to W. H. Dawson dated 9 February 1923 (WHD 736). This letter is part of a heated correspondence between the two in which Bodington takes Dawson to task over an article by the latter which appeared in The Times of 26 January 1923 and in which Bodington believes that Dawson twisted and misrepresented the facts to suit his pro-German case. 63 Stefan Berger, ‘William Harbutt Dawson: The Career and Politics of an Historian of Germany’, English Historical Review, vol. CXVI, no. 465 (2001), p. 80 64 Ibid., p. 92 65 Ibid., p. 93 66 See W. H. Dawson, ‘The Constitution of New Germany’ in the Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1919 (WHD 2144/8) 67 See W. H. Dawson, ‘Mending the New German Constitution’ in the Contemporary Review, December 1921 (WHD 2144/58) 68 Letter to the Manchester Guardian dated 14 January 1932 (WHD 2148/12) 69 Ibid. 70 W. H. Dawson, ‘Germany’s Psychological Crisis’ in Today and Tomorrow, Spring 1932 (WHD 2144/36) 71 W. H. Dawson, ‘Why Young Germany Follows Hitler’ in Everyman, 22 September 1932 (WHD 2144/95) 72 Letter to The Times, 19 October 1933 (WHD 2148/30) 73 Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (London, 1980), p. 142 74 W. H. Dawson, ‘Hitler’s Challenge’ in The Nineteenth Century and After, April 1926 (WHD 2144/38) 75 Stefan Berger, ‘William Harbutt Dawson’, p. 103 76 Ibid., p. 105 77 Ibid., p. 105 78 Ibid., p. 112 79 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London, 1931), p. 4 80 Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London, 2000), p. 297 81 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Hitlerism – Man and Doctrine’ in Time and Tide, 17 January 1931 82 Paul O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius, p. 298 83 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler, p. 21 84 Ibid., p. 22 85 Ibid., p. 28 86 Ibid., p. 45 87 Ibid., p. 33 88 Ibid., p. 31 89 Ibid., p. 44 90 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1929 (London, 1992), p. 182 91 As Richard J. Evans points out, the original remark was ‘When I hear “culture”, I release the safety catch on my Browning!’ and comes from Hans Johst’s 1933 62

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play Schlageter, based on the story of Leo Albert Schlageter who had also appeared as a prominent character in Geoffrey Moss’s I Face the Stars. See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 417–418 92 Wyndham Lewis, The Hitler Cult (London, 1939), p. 26–27 93 See D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1972), p. 97 94 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 184 95 Ibid., p. 196 96 Ibid., p. 196–197 97 See, for example, E.L. Woodward, Rohan Butler and Margaret Lambert (eds.), DBFP, Second Series, Vol. IV, p.14–15 and 29–30 98 David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (London, 2001), p. 158 Conclusion John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans Since 1890 (London, 2006), p. 158 2 Ibid., p. 160 3 Edward Sackville-West, ‘Sketches for an Autobiography’ (c.1946), p. 64 (ESW Vol. XIII (ff.67), BL Add 68916) 4 William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary (London, 1941), p. 22 5 Stephen Spender, European Witness (London, 1946), p. 234 6 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife (London, 1938), p. 194 7 W. H. Auden, ‘Chorale’ [c.1930] published in David Constantine, ‘The German Auden: Six Early Poems’ in Katharine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (ed.), W. H. Auden, ‘The Map of all my Youth’: Early Works, Friends and Influences (Auden Studies I) (Oxford, 1990), p. 14 8 See R. J. Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009), Chapter 1, and R. J. Overy, The Interwar Crisis 1919–1939 (Harlow, 1994), P. 2 9 Lilian Mowrer, Journalist’s Wife, p. 157 1

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241

Index

‘Apex’, see Coulson, Robert All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), 43 America, United States of, 8, 9, 15, 19, 22-3, 29, 52, 53, 54, 59-62, 75, 77, 78, 84, 87, 92, 93, 100, 104, 117, 123, 125, 136, 137, 138, 139, 142, 144, 159, 174, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190 Anglo-French Entente, 58, 61, 110 Appeasement, 47, 166 Armistice, 12, 17, 18, 50, 59, 175 Auden, W. H., 5, 24, 26-7, 28, 40, 84, 86, 89, 101, 104, 107, 133, 175, 178 ‛Auden Generation’, 174, 17980 Baldwin, Stanley, 160, 180, 181

Bartlett, Vernon, 66, 163, 178, 179 Bavaria, 19, 47, 65, 124, 149, 151, 152-4, 155, 156, 158, 159, 171 Bell, Vanessa, 28, 32, 118 Berlin, 1, 5, 6, 17, 18, 63, 65, 77, 78, 83, 84-105, 108, 109, 111, 112, 117, 123, 131, 140, 144, 147, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 168, 171, 172, 173-4, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 209 n. 53, 210 n. 72, and modernity, 4, 09, 28-29, 94-99, 103-4, 105, 113-5, nightlife, 7, 22-7, 8692, 102-3, 117-20, 121, 133, 135-39, 141-3, 146, as a tourist destination, 2, 7, 8, 12,

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 30, 31, 32, 33, 81, 85-6, 103 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 35, 200 n. 4 Blücher, Evelyn Princess, 108, 109-11, 183 Bolshevism, 4, 21, 44, 45, 46, 64, 164, 169, see also Communism Brailsford, H. N., 21, 65-6, 82, 109, 183-4 Brittain, Vera, 56, 77-80, 82-3, 108, 111, 113, 117, 119-22, 182, 187, 213 n. 65 Buchan, John, 29, 56, 123, 12630, 140, 146-7, 179 Cabaret, 5, 102, 140 Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 13 Cockburn, Claud, 12, 56, 72-3, 94, 97, 184 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 13, 16, 32 Cologne, 13, 14, 17, 19, 58, 59, 67-70, 73, 79-1, 82-3, 111, 121, 186 Communism, 21, 128, 184, 201 n. 31, see also Bolshevism Coulson, Robert, 63, 69, 81 Crisis, 8, 9, 18, 19, 21, 31, 61, 63, 64, 84, 92, 94, 105, 108, 112, 129, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 164, 165-6, 167, 168, 171, 172, 179, 180-1 Crowley, Aleister, 28 D’Abernon, Edgar Vincent, Viscount, 17-8, 197 n. 29 Daily Herald, 65, 70, 74, 151, 152, 184, 186, 191 Dawson, W. H., 44, 47-49, 54-5, 66, 82, 164-7, 169, 175, 179, 182, 184-5, 218 n. 62

Decadence, 10, 12, 22-3, 24, 102, 103, 105, 119, 120, 121, 138, 140, 142, 146, 168, 169, 172, 178, 180 Dix, Otto, 99, 142, 177 Dresden, 13, 16, 31, 85, 88, 96, 176, 192 Ebbutt, Norman, 93, 161-2, 168, 184, 185 Eliot, George, 2 Erzberger, Matthias, 52, 55 Essen, 73 Expressionism, 43, 96, 99, 177 Fascism, 21, 152, 155, 156, 167, 184, 201 n. 31 First World War, 2, 3, 7, 8, 16, 23, 28, 31, 34-7, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 50, 56, 62, 63, 65, 69, 75, 82, 83, 85, 95, 96, 99, 108, 109, 110, 111, 120, 125, 126, 127, 129, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 157, 162, 163, 168, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191 France, 2, 4, 8, 11, 15, 26, 35, 37, 44-5, 48, 108, 121, 126, 145, 159, 184, 190, 192, and occupation of the Rhineland, 58-62, 70-3, use of Colonial Troops, 73-7 Frankfurt, 29, 61, 64, 187 Gardiner, Alfred, 65, 109, 112, 185-6 Gedye, G. E. R., 62, 63, 64, 75, 186 George I, King of England, 13 Gooch, G. P., 66 Goodbye to Berlin (1938), 9, 102, 119, 123, 127, 140-4, 146, 191 Graves, Robert, 37, 38, 42, 45 Great War, see First World War 243

INDEX

Greene, Graham, 72-4, 83, 184 Grosz, George, 96, 98, 99, 177 Haldane, R. B. S., 2, 36 Hamburg, 53 Hamilton, Cicely, 28, 70, 80, 85, 97, 108, 112, 115-7, 119-20, 121, 126, 127, 146, 179, 1867, 213 n. 65 Hamilton, Gerald, 28, 187 Hanover, 13, 16, 85, 124 Hindenburg, Paul von, 129 Hirschfeld, Dr Magnus, 24, 29, 89 Hitchcock, Alfred, 28, 32, 99102 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 10, 39, 40, 56, 88, 105, 148, 149-51, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 185, 188, 190, 191, 193 Holtby, Winifred, 72, 77-80, 823, 108, 111, 113, 114-5, 116, 119, 120-1, 123, 182, 187-8, 213 n. 65 Homosexuality, 5, 9, 22-4, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 40-1, 79, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 103, 107, 117, 119, 120, 133, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 178, 187, 192 Inflation, 21-2, 55, 71, 103, 104, 131, 132-3, 142-3, 146, 180 Institut für Sexual-Wissenschaft, 234, 29, 89 Isherwood, Christopher, 5, 6, 9, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 40-1, 78, 83, 84, 88, 89, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 119, 121, 123, 127, 130, 133, 136, 137, 140-4, 146, 148, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 187, 191 Jerome, Jerome K., 13, 15, 85

Keynes, J. M., 49-54, 55, 56, 83, 101, 165, 182, 188 Koblenz, 59, 60, 71 Lang, Fritz, 99, 100, 102 Lewis, Wyndham, 2, 23, 28, 30, 56, 88, 91, 92, 98-99, 103, 117, 119, 121, 127, 146, 157, 188, and the First World War, 37-40, 43, 55, attitudes towards Nazism, 55, 167-70, 178, 201 n. 31 Lloyd George, David, 44, 59, 165 London, 5, 19, 79, 95, 97, 101, 103, 104, 109, 114, 119, 121, 167, 176, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193 London Film Society, 29, 101-2 Manchester Guardian, 18, 30, 45, 65, 92-3, 150, 157, 158, 160, 165, 183, 186, 191, 192-3 Markham, Violet, 69-70, 80, 108 McAlmon, Robert, 6, 78, 87, 934, 123, 127, 130, 136-39, 140, 141, 142, 179, 188-89 Modernism, 11, 12, 20, 95, 9899, 104, 137, 177 Modernity, 4, 8, 10, 11, 28-29, 32, 56, 87, 96-8, 103-4, 105, 107, 108, 113-4, 117, 140, 163, 167, 171, 176-7, 178, 180, 182 Morel, E. D., 74-6, 189 Moscow, 12, 21, 101, 152, 154 Mosley, Oswald, 18, 156 Moss, Geoffrey, 56, 66, 71-2, 76, 78-79, 80, 82, 83, 88, 121, 127, 130-6, 137, 138, 139, 140, 145-6, 162-4, 167, 170, 178, 179, 182, 189-90 Mowrer, Edgar Ansel, 12, 56 244

BRITAIN AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

Mowrer, Lilian, 12, 20, 28, 108, 112-3, 114, 115-6, 119, 120, 162, 163, 168, 174, 190, 213 n. 65 Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), 9, 102, 119, 123, 127, 141-2, 187 Munich, 2, 13, 16, 17, 19, 31, 85, 98, 99, 149, 151, 157, 166, 176, 188 Munich Agreement, see Appeasement Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 97, 99, 100, 177 National Socialism, 10, 154, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 192 National Socialists, see Nazi Party Nazi Germany, see Third Reich, see also National Socialism, Nazi Party Nazi Party, 4, 7, 9-10, 39, 55, 61, 66, 84, 90, 92, 116, 130, 14872, 173, 174, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 193, British confusion over, 14849, 150, 152-6, 165, 171, electoral performance, 150, 156, probability of coming to power, 9-10, 160-2, 164, 1712, 181 Neue Sachlichkeit, 43, 96-7, 102, 177 New Objectivity, see Neue Sachlichkeit Nicolson, Harold, 45-7, 49, 54, 72, 103-4, 117, 155-6, 157, 164, 170, 171, 190-1 November Revolution (1919), 21, 44, 63-4, 67, 80, 96, 103, 104, 109-12, 135, 178

Oman, Charles, 69, 76 Orwell, George, 41 Paris, 2, 12, 13, 14, 19, 23, 26, 44, 45, 48, 50, 60, 77, 86, 87, 94, 98, 136, 181, 185, 188, 189, 190, 193 Paris Peace Conference, 34, 35, 45, 50, 53, 165, 166, 188, 190 Prague, 13, 186 Price, Morgan Philips, 18, 21, 56, 65, 109, 112, 176, 191, and the occupation of the Rhineland, 70, 73-4, 76-7, attitudes towards the Nazis, 151-4, 155, 158, 162, 170, 171 Prostitution, 22, 74, 89-90, 139, 142, 177 Prussia, 2, 13, 15, 16, 35, 47-8, 49, 85, 88, 89, 94, 114, 124, 131, 139, 144, 145, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 183 Rathenau, Walther, 55 Remarque, Erich Maria, 28, 43, 177 Reparations, 8, 18, 21, 44, 49, 50-4, 56, 59, 61, 62, 81, 83, 133, 181, 181, 188 Revolution, 4, 21, 50, 64, 68, 80, 82, 92, 103, 104, 109, 126, 135, 152, 155, 158, 160, 161, 169, 180 Rhineland, The, 2, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16-7, 18, 19, 21, 31, 32, 33, 48, 55, 56, 58-83, 85, 108, 112, 113, 117, 120-1, 124, 166, 176, 181, 184, 186 Roddie, W. Stewart, 22, 56, 63, 64, 87, 88, 90, 91, 109 Ross, Jean, 106, 107, 113-4, 1912, 213 n. 65 245

INDEX

Ruhr Crisis (1923), 21, 31, 61, 62, 80, 186 Russia, 18, 35, 49, 126, 184, 187, 191 Sackville-West, Edward, 1, 26, 29, 88, 101, 107, 173, 192 Sackville-West, Vita, 5, 46, 87-8, 117-8, 190, 213 n. 65 Spender, Stephen, 5, 84, 88, 90, 94, 98, 133, 172, 173-4, 178, 179 Staël, Madame de, 2, 15, Stresemann, Gustav, 130 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 13, 16, 32, 125 Third Reich, The, 7, 39, 179 see also Nazi Party, Hitler The Times, 47, 93, 149-50, 161, 184, 185, 186, 187 Thomas Cook (and Sons), 14, 15, 18, 19, 31 Tourism, 7-8, 11, 12, 14-5, 1921, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 178 Tuohy, Ferdinand, 63, 71, 81 Turville-Petre, Francis, 29 Tynan, Katherine, 70-1 USA, see America

Versailles, Treaty of, 8, 12, 17, 20, 21, 35, 39, 40, 42-50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 74, 72, 80, 108, 129, 133, 145, 155, 165, 166, 168, 169, 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189 Vice, 24, 86, 88-89, 103, 118, 119, 141, 177, 180 Vienna, 13, 19, 34, 85, 186, 192 Voigt, Frederick, 30, 42, 92-3, 176, 192-3, views on Hitler and the Nazis, 157-62, 168, 170-2 War Guilt, 49, 54 Webb, Beatrice, 108-09 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 35, 36, 127 Wilson, Woodrow, 45-6, 48, 110 Wiskemann, Elizabeth, 32, 90, 93, 97, 98, 107, 113-4, 119, 193, 213 n. 65 Woolf, Leonard, 56, 118 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 32, 106, 11720 Youth, 10, 24, 105, 108, 115-6, 129, 132, 133-4, 139-40, 143, 145, 146, 155-6, 157, 163, 165, 171, 179-80, 182

246