Berlin Diary

By Sam Halper

BEFORE THE DELUGE: A PORTRAIT OF BERLIN IN THE 1920'S by OTTO FRIEDRICH 418 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

The Weimar Republic sort of happened about lunchtime, Nov. 9, 1918.

Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democratic Party's deputy leader, was having a bowl of potato soup in the Reichstag dining room when he was told that the Kaiser had abdicated and that Karl Liebknecht, the left-wing firebrand, was about to proclaim Germany a Soviet republic. To head him off, Scheidemann hurried to a balcony and shouted to the crowd below: "Workers and soldiers. The cursed war is at an end. The Emperor has abdicated . . . Long live the German Republic!" That night, over a secret line from GHQ in Belgium, came a message for the Socialist leaders from the chief of staff: "The officer corps expects the government will fight against Bolshevism and places itself at the disposal of the government."

So the revolution of 1918 was not a revolution but a maneuver. The Socialists took over the government and created the Weimar Republic. The real power, however, remained with the conservative army and the career bureaucrats in Berlin. It was later handed over to the political right and to Adolf Hitler. But before that happened, Berliners lived through one of history's extraordinary decades. Rid of its tasteless Hohenzollern constraints, and at the same time having avoided the constricting new dogmas of Marxist revolution, Germany blossomed intellectually. In the liberal, democratic '20s, Berlin was feverish with new ideas in atonal music, Einsteinian physics, Freudian psychoanalysis, expressionist art, Bauhaus architecture, Brechtian theater, not to mention kinky sex and despairing occultism, all pursued against a counterpoint of political riot and assassination.

Vivid Portrait. The city and the decade provide a nostalgic paradox that has fascinated novelists, scholars and citizens from Christopher Isherwood and Hannah Arendt to the long lines currently waiting to see Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Otto Friedrich has combined history and cultural journalism to produce the most vivid portrait of the period yet written. Weaving back and forth in time and place between Marlene Dietrich and Joseph Goebbels, between Berlin and Hollywood, between 1920 memoirs and 1971 interviews, the author, who is a former managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post and now a TIME senior editor, has recreated Berlin, and his city moves.

The culture is plentiful and the gossip spicy. Yet Friedrich is never far away from the presentiment of the horror to come. What turns out to be most significant about the era is not its spectacular vulgarity and lust, or the brilliance of its art, but its sheer inattention to what was really happening--the long struggle between Communists, Socialists and Nazis. The popular stance in politics was a traditionally stolid German "Ohne mich"--"Include me out." Friedrich describes a night when, despite fighting in the streets, U.F.A., Germany's giant movie company, went ahead with its press preview for Carmen, starring Pola Negri and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. "The champagne was chilled to perfection," Miss Negri recalled. "We sat down and the film began. I heard a faint sound in the distance . . . gunfire." Had he heard it too? Miss Negri asked Lubitsch. "Shh," said Lubitsch. "There's nothing anybody can do. Watch the picture."

Most men of culture and science wore blinders. When the Nazis eventually forced Conductor Bruno Walter to flee Germany in 1933, he was nonplused: Why him? "I had never taken an active part in politics." In his Reflections of a Non-Political Man, written in 1918, Thomas Mann proclaimed that he was unpolitical and proud of it. He changed his mind later. The pit of politics was left to ambitious drones or dregs. In the end it was a couple of wellborn smart-alecks, General Kurt von Schleicher and ex-Lieut. Colonel Franz von Papen, both conservatives, both of good regiments, who delivered Weimar over to the Nazis. They were also both favorites of the republic's beloved 85-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg (who at least had the excuse of senility), and cronies of his incompetent, corruptible son Oskar. Confidently they set out to grab power and outflummox that ex-Corporal Adolf Hitler.

First the two got Hindenburg to fire the incumbent Chancellor and replace him with Von Papen. The delighted Hindenburg beamed: "Now I can have a Cabinet of my friends." Then, in a double-cross, Schleicher had Von Papen ousted and became Chancellor himself, planning to rule Germany by splitting the Nazi Party and taking over a third of Hitler's Reichstag deputies. The plan had some merit; large numbers of Nazis, including at one time Berlin Party Chief Joseph Goebbels, thought Hitler had sold out to the capitalists.

But Von Papen contrived Schleicher's fall and convinced Hindenburg that the way to neutralize Nazi power was to give Hitler the chancellorship and then surround him with conservative ministers. Within a year Schleicher had been killed and Germany belonged to the Fuehrer.

Was it all inevitable? No, says Friedrich, "it could have been avoided up to the very day on which Hitler took power," and his book creates an agonizing, step-by-step awareness of how things might have gone differently. Hitler thought so too; just two months before he came to power in 1933 he was threatening suicide in despair over an impending split in the Nazi Party. Shortly before that, in Germany's last free election, the Nazis lost 2,000,000 votes, and dropped 34 Reichstag seats.

This ground has been gone over a billion times, with a billion tears and a billion regrets. But it is still fascinating. For, in its foolishness, its richness and its disorder, Weimar haunts our times --now more than ever.

. Sam Halper

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