Hitlers first hundred da.., p.24
Hitler's First Hundred Days, page 24
Before long, Goebbels, the propaganda minister, promoted films that would provide “a showplace for strong feelings and cheerful diversions” rather than “realistic tableaux or topical thematics.” He wanted to nestle the Third Reich in a comforting normality, which meant abandoning the political agenda of the years of struggle.75 Even so, Hitlerjunge Quex, “a film by Germany’s youth for Germany’s youth,” remained the standard film to depict the ideals of National Socialism. The pedagogue Hartmut von Hentig remembered his own childhood: “Like other boys, I both loved and envied Quex. I too would have liked to fight and die for a great cause; I also wanted to prove myself and longed to be among the strong who would build the community.”76
Given Heinrich George’s stature, Hitlerjunge Quex was as much about the famous actor as about Heini or Völker. In the months that followed the film’s opening, George provided proofs of his “Aryan” ancestry, the birth certificates of his parents, which noted the religion of his four grandparents. These sorts of declarations were necessary as the Nazis purged German film and theater of Jews and politically unreliable professionals, hundreds of whom ended up emigrating abroad. One in every three of Germany’s leading directors and actors left the country, including Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Peter Lorre (who reassembled in Hollywood, so that Germany’s loss was the United States’ gain). Goebbels saw them off with a contemptuous snarl: “Let them flail about a while longer in the waters, the fine people in the émigré cafes of Vienna and Paris; their lifelines have been cut; they are corpses on holiday!”77
It was, in fact, European exiles, actors as well as characters, who convened in Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, the greatest World War II film—one that told the Allied story, not the German one. The movie premiered in New York City just two weeks after the liberation of Casablanca in Operation Torch in early November 1942. Consider the cast. Conrad Veit, the somnambulist in the classic 1920 expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, had left Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933; the highest-paid member of the cast, he starred as Major Heinrich Strasser. Peter Lorre, the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M, was a Jew who emigrated in 1933—he played Signor Ugarte, who procured visas. Paul Henreid, who emigrated from Vienna in 1935, was cast as Victor Laszlo, the resistance figure. And Curt Bois, also a Jewish émigré from Germany, picked the pockets at Rick’s.
George joined in the public “Declarations of German Artists for Adolf Hitler,” which Goebbels instigated in November 1933, writing (rather obscurely), “I breathed a sigh of relief, as if waking up from a nightmare, when our Führer, our wonderful people’s chancellor and his government, once again gave the world a direct, divinely clear answer to what had apparently been irresolvable and thereby broke the first ground in the hearts of millions of slumbering German comrades on this and the other side of the ocean.”78 George had had a hard time finding well-paying work at the beginning of 1933 due to his reputation as a Communist, but by August he and his wife had lined up lucrative contracts with the Prussian State Theater in Berlin. In 1937 Hitler personally engaged him as the director of the newly renovated Schiller Theater. He established himself as one of Germany’s most prominent and wealthy artists, thanks to the state patronage he enjoyed.
Goebbels and Hitler deliberately cultivated a star system to illuminate the Third Reich. They captured Babelsberg, Germany’s Hollywood, and the stars whom Hitler gathered around him were the same ones featured on the postcards that German fans tacked up on the wall, as one English traveler noticed when he bunked down in a bargeman’s lodging house in Cologne at the end of 1933: Anny Ondra, Lilian Harvey, Brigitte Helm.79 The Führer’s choice was the people’s choice. Göring even married the actress Emmy Sonnemann in a pompous wedding ceremony in April 1935. Her colleague, the exiled Klaus Mann, tried to imagine what this union between the gangster and the celebrity meant. He wrote Sonnemann a public letter:
Aren’t you ever nauseated? And if you are not nauseated, aren’t you scared? There must be hours when you are alone—the wedding hoopla can’t last forever, and there isn’t a dinner party every night. Your fat honorable spouse is out on business—perhaps he is sitting in his office, signing death sentences or planning bombing sorties. It is now dark, and you are alone in your villa. Do ghosts visit you? Behind the luxurious curtains, do you ever see those beaten up in the concentration camps, the mangled bodies of the dead, the prisoners shot while trying to escape, the suicides? Hasn’t a bloody corpse already appeared. Perhaps Erich Mühsam—a poet—and wasn’t it your profession to quote the lines of poets before you became the first lady of a damned country that clubs to death or banishes the bravest of its poets?80
The careers of many stars took off in 1933 thanks to the patronage of Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. With generous fees, frequent invitations to meet Goebbels or Hitler, and unprecedented awards and honors, something Weimar governments had never thought of doing—in 1937 Heinrich George was named “state actor”—actors acquired riches and rank as no other artists or intellectuals did. They composed “high society” in the Third Reich and were required to play their parts in making and performing the nation’s history.
It fell to stars such as George to participate in winter charity events and travel as VIPs to the Nuremberg rallies. In public events, George was delighted to appear as his favorite character, the free-spirited sixteenth-century imperial knight Götz von Berlichingen, whom Goethe popularized in his eponymous 1773 drama. Standing in a suit of armor and holding his sword, Heinrich George bellowed out Götz’s most famous words: “You can lick my ass.” These performances typified George’s attitude in the Third Reich: loyal but a little bit naughty. The naughtiness represented the zone of artistic freedom he managed to establish for himself; the “little no” validated the declarations of loyalty, the “big yes” that he signed off on.
It took pressure to get Heinrich George to take on the role of the unscrupulous Duke of Württemberg in the 1940 anti-Semitic feature film Jud Süss; George, Werner Krauss, and the other actors were not so much concerned about their involvement in Nazi racial propaganda as about the Jewishness that might rub off onto their reputations because of the parts they played. George himself proved unscrupulous when, at the very end of the war, he insisted on a fee of 150,000 marks, rather than the 120,000 at first offered, to play the patriotic mayor in a 1944 Durchhaltefilm (or last-ditch defense film) depicting the 1806–1807 French siege of the Pomeranian fortress of Kolberg.81 Kolberg was an extravaganza: it featured a cast of extras numbering nearly 200,000, a total second only to Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. The patriotic feature had its premiere in Berlin, as well as in the besieged French naval port of La Rochelle, on the twelfth anniversary of the Third Reich, January 30, 1945. Despite its incendiary lines—“the people rise up; the storm breaks out”—more people probably acted in the movie than watched it. By 1945 audiences saw through the false sentimentality of “everything great is born in pain.”
George himself was what the Germans call unübersehbar: someone you can’t overlook. George, a critic remarked, was “the German as such; you couldn’t invent him.”82 He was not a romantic figure like the actor Heinz Rühmann, whose photograph Anne Frank kept pasted to the wall of her room in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam. Given his imposing presence, George could speak with collective passion. During the war, it was George, as an emblematic spokesman for the nation, who concluded New Years’ Eve programming on the German radio with an address “To the Soldiers,” upholding the moral value of resistance at any price. He cited Carl von Clausewitz’s 1812 “Profession of Faith,” which Hitler himself revered. “I believe and declare,” George’s low voice rasped the radio waves, “that people have nothing to honor more than the dignity and liberty of their existence, that they must defend these to the last drop of blood.” “I believe and declare,” he continued, “that I would be only too happy to find a glorious death in the magnificent fight for the freedom and dignity of the fatherland.” The pealing of the bells in Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche punctuated the end of George’s words, which must have struck home in a particularly poignant way at the end of 1944. For his part, Goebbels recognized that “George is still the old valiant warrior for our cause, who will go along with us for good or ill.”83
George could not have been surprised on the occasion of a hastily organized propaganda rally held in the Sportpalast—it was early in the afternoon on Thursday, February 18, 1943, the day Goebbels delivered his “total war” address to the nation in response to Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad three weeks earlier—that black limousines chauffeured by SS drivers parked outside his house on the Wannsee to pick him up or that uniformed personnel met him in the arena to escort him and his wife to seats at the front of the hall along the aisle so that the cameras could film his display of loyalty for the newsreels. George was repeatedly reassigned the role he had played years earlier when Heini Völker’s father discovered “our Germany” in Hitlerjunge Quex.
The Sportpalast rally marked a pivotal moment in the making and unmaking of George’s reputation. One biographer insists that photographs of him applauding Goebbels were fabricated and subsequently spliced in; other witnesses reported seeing a clapping George half rise out of his seat in a burst of enthusiasm. This last scenario seems unlikely since George was more the type to forget to give the Hitler greeting or to do so perfunctorily. But what really got George in trouble was his appeal to the German people to resist the “enemy’s barbaric mania of destruction,” which was published in the Völkischer Beobachter on April 7, 1945. He opened with a Zola-like indictment—“We accuse!”—and concluded by exhorting, “We are stuck in the boots of our hard duty.… Great pathetic words no longer resonate. Actions decide!” To the Soviet “barbarians” who occupied Berlin a few weeks later, George stood out as a “typical representative of fascist art.”84
These three characters played by Heinrich George tell us a great deal about Heinrich George’s motivations in 1933, and film audiences understood the significance because George was so closely identified with the characters he played. As Franz Biberkopf, George certainly understood that he was escorting Döblin’s hero into the Third Reich when he agreed to star in Hitlerjunge Quex. George knew the public regarded him as a leftist, even if he had come to reject Communist agitprop for diminishing artistic standards. His past became a burden once the Nazis came to power. George also had financial problems. He had a young family to support and a newly acquired villa on the Wannsee, an automobile, and servants to pay for. From this perspective, it made sense to “run with the wolves.” Hitlerjunge Quex was the perfect opportunity for George to rewrite his autobiography by demonstratively playing himself, the Communist who discovers the truth in the National Socialist cause. Generous fees and state patronage subsequently eased whatever compromises George felt he had to make.
George’s identification with Götz von Berlichingen suggests that through the force of his personality and the power of his reputation, he had created liberties for himself that others could not afford in the Third Reich. But George-as-Götz may also have thought that the Third Reich was in fact the realm in which the free nobility could prosper. Like so many other Germans, George certainly did not endorse everything the Nazis did, but that did not keep him from cherishing life in the Third Reich.
Since George made out so well as a “state actor,” focusing on his opportunism is easy. According to a fellow prisoner held by the Soviets in 1945, George himself admitted, “Back then, I simply could not see the suffering of the persecuted because personally I was doing so well. And, if I have to be honest,” he added, “maybe I also did not want to see. A man in splendor easily becomes near-sighted.”85 Nor did he fully realize what an effective figurehead he was for the Nazis.
Yet George had also learned the same geography and history lessons that Germans like Völker had in 1933. He had been raised in a conservative middle-class family in Stettin; his father, a retired naval officer, used to spruce up the picture of Wilhelm II hanging on the wall with flowers on the occasion of the kaiser’s birthday.86 Although already an aspiring actor, George was encouraged by his father to enlist in 1914 and served honorably, completing an officer reserve training course in Spandau and earning the Iron Cross, before being discharged after a nervous breakdown in March 1917. The three weeks he spent in a sanatorium allowed George to represent himself as someone who embraced the Weimar Republic’s “new humanity.” But three years a soldier also provided him the credentials to work in the Third Reich.
Long before the Nazis came to power, George had renewed his emotional connections to “our Germany.” Like many other successful actors, he was lured to Hollywood, where in spring 1931 he filmed the German production of The Big House. But George did not feel at home in California, and he would not or could not learn English. “In my bungalow,” he wrote to Drews, “I am not happy in this world so bright and sunny; even though I get all the money, the ocean is still and I have a chill.” After he returned home, he explained, “I can only work here; this country is the source of my art, its blood; for better or worse I am with Germany.”87 Germany became the Third Reich in 1933, but that did not fundamentally change George’s Germany. For Heinrich George, Germany always remained the same place with its olden imperial past (his father), its struggles in the war (his difficult youth), and its present-day potential (his successful career). Adolf Hitler was Germany, but Germany was also Germany with or without Hitler, a conclusion that explained collaboration in the dark years and the sense of innocence after 1945. Heinrich George, along with his characters, followed the millions of Germans who accepted the Nazis as legitimate stewards of Germany’s tradition and Germany’s future.
CHAPTER SIX
“Your Jewish Grandmother”
FRANZ GÖLL, a thirty-three-year-old Berliner, worked in the print shop at Julius Springer Publishers. He first took note of the “Hitler movement” in September 1932. Considering the “movement for the renewal of the German people,” he predicted that a “radical confrontation” with Jews, the declared enemy of the Nazis, would take place.1 Göll was right. Just eight weeks after Adolf Hitler assumed power, the Nazi Party organized a headline-grabbing nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses under the slogan “Germans, Defend Yourselves!”
It was an astonishing moment in German history. One citizen was designated for persecution to protect another. Six days after the April 1 boycott, the government itself issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The “restoration” was a purge of politically unreliable people as well as Jews, who, with the stroke of a pen, lost their equal rights as citizens. For German Jews, the terrifying events of April 1933, which, days before the celebration of Passover on April 11, mocked the Lord’s “passing over” of Moses’s Jews in his punishment of the Pharaoh’s Egyptians, came as sudden shocks that completely changed the course of their lives. Over a few weeks, German Jews became one thing only: Jews.
The cumulative effect of the boycott and the civil service law closed off Germans (or “Aryans”) from Jews, who were designated as both alien and dangerous. All the lively, inconclusive discussions present since 1918 about the characteristics of Jews, their place in German society and the economy, and their parts in war and revolution calcified into inalterable front lines along which most Germans came to believe they were defending their lives. As Germans converted to National Socialism so they could participate in the new community, the community itself was defined in exclusive racial terms. In other words, consent was generated through coercion, inclusion and uplift through exclusion. The “Jewish question” was posed not only forcefully in 1933 but as a matter of life and death. Consider the chants of the previous years: “Jews, Drop Dead!” and “Germany, Wake Up!” Call and response, cause and effect. The boycott on April 1 put forward the conceptual outline of the Holocaust for the first time. It was Day 61 of the Third Reich.
As revealed by the thoughts of an ordinary man like Franz Göll, Germans associated National Socialism with anti-Semitism. Nazis and other right-wing nationalists obviously relied on ethnic and racial categories, and as the Nazis got bigger and bigger, Germans thought more and more carefully about how the collective nouns “Germans” and “Jews” functioned. In 1932, German Jews suddenly became the attentively inspected “object of political theories” about the future and fate of the nation. This scrutiny prepared the selections of the “Final Solution.”2 Intellectuals debated the “Jewish question” in books and on radio programs—but not the “anti-Semitism” question. Citizens like Franz Göll scrutinized shared, supposedly defining traits with complete confidence in the legitimacy of their inquiry. Not everyone was an anti-Semite, but thinking about Jews provided powerful lessons in civics: What was Germany? How were countrymen bound together? In what ways was the community imperiled?
