Contemporary accounts of the Scheunenviertel rioting interpreted this episode in very different ways. Vorwärts argued that it was “a pogrom” orchestrated by the right and the far-left to destabilize the Weimar Republic. The liberal Vossische Zeitung charged that Berlin’s business barons had fomented the rioting to distract people from the fact that heavy industry was profiting immensely from the collapse of the mark. The rightist Deutsche Zeitung insisted that the riots were the spontaneous outgrowth of popular rage over the “unscrupulous profiteering of the Jews in a time of widespread misery.” The Jewish community itself was split between those who saw the upheaval as “a fateful signal to German Jewry” and those who believed it was a momentary outpouring of economic frustration, focused solely on eastern Jews. Finally, the Nazi paper, the Vdlkischer Beobachter, claimed on November 8 that the riot proved that the Berliners were coming to their senses regarding the evils of the Jews. “The tumult in Berlin,” said the paper, “shows clearly that all the signs today point to a coming storm.”
On that very night and the following day Hitler staged his “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich, which was designed to pave the way for a march on Berlin and the overthrow of the government. As is well known, the putsch failed, and Hitler was forced to put off his seizure of power for almost a decade. The Munich putsch and the Scheunenviertel riot were not directly connected, but both pointed up the widespread malaise and extreme instability of the early Weimar Republic. And in retrospect, of course, we can see that the Völkischer Beobachter was correct, if a little premature, about the “coming storm.”
In the Jungle of Cities
The Great Inflation did not dull Berlin’s cultural and intellectual scene in the early years of the Weimar Republic. On the contrary, the collapse of the mark was one of the factors that helped make Berlin, for the first time in its history, a true world capital of the arts. The city’s cultural industry profited from people’s need for distraction in a time of general misery. The low cost of living attracted legions of foreign artists for whom the German capital was now a bargain. The climate of social improvisation accompanying the collapse of the economy encouraged experimentation, and there was now no reigning political orthodoxy to impose restraints. Budgetary cuts did hurt the city’s great universities and scientific institutes, but these survived the inflation to become even more dominant on the world scene. Of the twenty-five Germans who won the Nobel prize between 1918 and 1944, only two were not associated with Berlin. Chancellor Gustav Stresemann could justifiably call the city “a metropolis of brain power.”
Yet Berlin in the early 1920s was anything but an unalloyed paradise for the artists and intellectuals who worked there. As the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer recalled:
This city hungered after talents and human energies with unprecedented voracity, only to chew them up and spit them out with equal gusto. Like a tornado it sucked in everyone in Germany who wanted to get to the top, the genuine articles as well as the impostors, and at first it showed them all the same cold shoulder. Those who had not yet made it in Berlin spoke of the city as a desirable woman, known for her coldness and coquetry, all the more worthy of curses the less likely she was to yield.
Berlin had certainly “yielded” to Albert Einstein, and in the postwar period he began to yield to her, shedding some of the distaste he had long harbored for his native land. As a democrat, he believed that the Weimar Republic deserved every chance to prosper; if it succeeded, he thought, Germany might become the kind of place in which a citizen of the world would be proud to live. Thus when Max Planck urged him to stay on in the German capital despite tempting offers from Zurich and Leiden, he agreed “not to turn [his] back on Berlin.”
Einstein made this decision at a time when he was becoming internationally famous for his general theory of relativity. Few laymen understood this theory, but they knew that it challenged basic assumptions about the structure of the universe. With Einstein becoming the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine profiles, the world learned that he was the perfect “weird scientist”: a Chaplinesque figure with wild hair, luminous eyes, and disheveled clothes. People also learned a little about his nonscientific endeavors—his work on behalf of international understanding, world peace, and Zionism.
The very qualities and ideals that made Einstein a world celebrity made him persona non grata among some elements at home. Right-wing nationalists attacked him as an internationalist Jew who was endangering the interests of German science. In 1920 an anti-Einstein movement calling itself the Study Group of German Natural Philosophers attacked the general theory as a hoax. On August 27, 1920, they rented the Berlin Philharmonic Hall to present their views. Their spokesman, a charlatan named Paul Weyland, claimed that the uproar about relativity was hostile to the German spirit. Einstein himself showed up at the meeting, sitting in the back and giving mock applause to all the inanities. “That was most amusing,” he said at the end.
But in reality the matter was not so funny. As the attacks continued Einstein felt obliged to reply to his detractors in a long article in the Berliner Tageblatt, an unprecedented gesture that struck some of his friends as demeaning. To such criticism he replied: “I had [to respond in public] if I wanted to remain in Berlin, where every child recognizes me from the photographs. If one is a democrat, one has to acknowledge the claims of publicity.” Einstein’s stance was not without an element of bravery, for the campaign against him was becoming increasingly vicious. Anti-Semites accosted him outside his apartment, denouncing him as a purveyor of “Jewish science.” Rightist students disrupted a lecture he was giving at the university, one of them shouting, “I’m going to cut the throat of that dirty Jew.” A racist demagogue offered a reward to anyone who would assassinate the scientist. His family worried that he might meet the same fate as his friend Walther Rathenau. Without his knowing it, his wife hired a bodyguard to watch over him.
Einstein stayed on in Berlin largely because he was committed to Weimar democracy, but he was motivated also by the belief that no other place was so culturally rich. Why should he leave, he asked, when the city was being sought out by some of the most exciting people in the world?
Among the exciting people who settled in Berlin in the early Weimar years was the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who joined an already thriving Russian colony that had gathered in the Spree metropolis in the wake of the Russian revolution. At the time of Nabokov’s arrival in 1922 some 200,000 Russian émigrés lived in Berlin, clustered primarily in Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf. Their presence brought dozens of Russian cafés and restaurants, a theater, and over one hundred Russian-speaking taxi drivers. Berliners complained that in parts of Charlottenburg, which they nicknamed “Charlottengrad,” one heard only Russian in the streets. One could certainly read a lot of Russian: there were eighty-six Russian-language publishing houses and eight Russian newspapers. The largest of the publishers was Slovo (Word), which was backed by Ullstein and managed by a colleague of Nabokov’s father (also named Vladimir), while the most important paper, Rul’ (The Rudder) was edited for a time by Nabokov senior. Before moving to Berlin from Cambridge, where he had studied, young Nabokov insisted that he had no desire to live in Germany. In a way he never did. The Berlin milieu that he inhabited was so thoroughly Russian that he barely learned German and made few German friends. He might have agreed with his fellow émigré, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who described Berlin as “the stepmother of Russian cities.”