No one realized that evening that the curtain was actually falling on Dietrich’s Berlin career. Thinking that she was simply a vulgar tramp with no talent, UFA’s directors had allowed her to sign a contract with Paramount. That very night, with the ovations still ringing in her ears, she boarded the boat train that would take her to America and a new life as a Hollywood legend. She returned to Berlin briefly in 1931—to hear the Nazis denounce The Blue Angel as “mediocre and corrupting kitsch”—but she did not come again until after World War II, and then only for a visit.
The Berlin that Dietrich left behind was becoming an increasingly violent place, as Nazis and Communists made the streets a stage for their bloody battles. The brown-shirted SA, though still outnumbered by the Communist Red Front, often took the initiative in these encounters. On May 16, 1930, twelve SA men trampled a Communist to death at the Innsbrucker Platz. Hoping to contain the violence, Minister of the Interior Carl Severing banned the wearing of Nazi brown shirts in public, so the Nazis simply shifted to white shirts and went about their business as usual.
In early 1930 the movement acquired its most important martyr since the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The fallen hero was a Berliner named Horst Wessel, chief of the SA branch in proletarian Friedrichshain. The cause for Wessel’s martyrdom was utterly banal but perfectly fitting. It seems that he had been trying to avoid paying rent by sharing a flat with his girlfriend, a prostitute. The landlady doubled the rent; and when Wessel refused to pay his share she asked a friend of hers, a Communist Red Front thug, to put some muscle on him. Happy to oblige, the Communist accosted Wessel at his flat and shot him in the mouth. The SA man died a month later. At his funeral a group of Communists showed up with a sign saying “A Last Heil Hitler to the Pimp Horst Wessel.” Goebbels, meanwhile, had been busy turning this tawdry affair into the stuff of legend. He put out the story that Wessel had died heroically battling the Communists. At the funeral he eulogized Wessel as a “Christlike socialist,” whose deeds proclaimed “Come unto me, and I will redeem you.” The SA adopted a song Wessel had written as its fighting hymn: “Oh, raise the flag and close your ranks up tight! / SA men march with bold determined tread./ Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in fight/ March at our side, in spirit never dead.”
In July 1930 Brüning promulgated his new budget by emergency decree, and when the Reichstag demanded that the decree be abrogated he dissolved the body and called new elections, hoping to gain a broader mandate for his austerity policies. Plenty of voices in Berlin and elsewhere warned him of the foolhardiness of holding elections in the midst of a deepening depression, but he was deaf to all objections: he trusted the German people to do the right thing. What they did was to increase the representation of the extremes at the expense of the liberal center and moderate conservatives. The KPD garnered 4,600,000 votes and 77 seats; the Nazis, who had polled only 809,000 in the Reichstag elections of 1928, jumped to 6,400,000 votes and 107 seats. In Berlin, hitherto the strongest bastion of Weimar democracy, the triumph of the extremes was even more striking. The KPD edged past the SPD to compile the highest percentage of the total vote (27.3), while the Nazis became the third largest party in the city with 14.6 percent—four times what they had managed in 1928. Significantly, the Nazi Party did well in all districts, including supposedly “Red” enclaves like Kreuzberg and Köpenick.
On October 13, when the new Reichstag was called into session, the Nazis celebrated their success by terrorizing the center of Berlin. Kessler recorded the scene in his diary:
Reichstag opening. The whole afternoon and evening mass demonstrations by the Nazis. During the afternoon they smashed the windows of Wertheim, Grünfeld, and other department stores in the Leipzigerstrasse. In the evening they assembled in the Potsdamer Platz, shouting ‘Germany awake!’ ‘Death to Judah’, ‘Heil Hitler/ Their ranks were continually dispersed by the police, in lorries and on horseback. . . . In the main the Nazis consisted of adolescent riff-raff which made off yelling as soon as the police began to use rubber truncheons. . . . These disorders reminded me of the days just before the revolution, with the same mass meetings and the same Catilinian figures lounging about and demonstrating.
Another witness to the Nazi celebrations was Bella Fromm, a society columnist for the liberal Vossische Zeitung. As a Jewess, Fromm has reason to be alarmed at the Nazi electoral success, and to be distressed over the fact that Germany’s various Jewish organizations, still sharply divided by philosophical rifts, were unable to agree on which of Hitler’s adversaries to support. Now, in the wake of the election results and the Nazi demonstrations in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary that “There’s a touch of panic in certain quarters. Should one leave Germany and wait outside to see what will happen?” But the journalist, like so many deeply assimilated Jews, could not yet fathom the idea of cutting and running. “Surprising,” she wrote in her diary, “how many people feel that it [going into exile] might be the prudent thing to do.”
A couple of months later the Nazis staged another demonstration in Berlin that signaled their growing confidence and determination to register their influence in the national capital. The occasion was the showing of the American-made film version of Erich Remarque’s antiwar novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). Remarque’s book, which graphically captures the horrors of the trench experience and the wrenching psychological separation between the front generation and society at home, had become a phenomenal best-seller, proving that this was a message that readers were ready to hear after a decade of living with the war’s consequences. No doubt sales had also been helped by the German publisher Ull-stein’s aggressive marketing campaign, which included plastering Berlin’s Litfass pillars with advertisements and serializing the story in the Vossische Zeitung. Predictably, the primary criticism of the book had come from the political extremes, with the Communists deriding it as bourgeois sentimentality and the Nazis attacking it as un-German decadence. Given such glamorous but controversial material, it is not surprising that the film version, which had already won the Academy Award in America, would ignite even greater passions. When it opened at the Mozartsaal on Nollendorfplatz on December 3, there was palpable tension in the air. Somehow, the premier passed without incident. On the next evening, however, 150 Nazis showed up, with Goebbels in the lead. The film had barely begun when mayhem broke out. Leni Riefenstahl, who was in the audience that night, recalled: “Quite suddenly the theater was ringing with screams so that at first I thought a fire had started. Panic broke out and girls and women were standing on their seats, shrieking.” They were shrieking because Goebbels and his thugs had thrown stink bombs from the balcony and released white mice in the orchestra. Then they ran up and down the aisles shouting “Jews get out!” and slapping people they assumed were Jewish. The police eventually waded in to clear out the Nazis, but (it was later revealed) 127 members of the police force that had been mobilized at the station refused to participate in the action—a dangerous sign of Nazi infiltration of the Berlin Schutzpolizei.
On the following two evenings the Nazis continued to demonstrate around the Nollendorfplatz, singing their “Horst Wessel Song” and beating up people trying to get into the theater. Hitler himself came up from Munich to “review” a Nazi protest march. Goebbels exulted in his diary: “Over an hour. Six abreast. Fantastic! Berlin West has never seen anything like it.” The Berlin police commissioner, Albert Grzesinski, had pledged to protect the film from all disruptions, but after a few more days of nonstop violence he declared that the police could not guarantee public security as long as the film was running. The National Film Board withdrew approval of the movie on grounds that it was a “threat to Germany’s honor.” On December 16 the Prussian Landtag took up the issue and banned the film in Berlin. Goebbels was understandably elated at this government cave-in, speaking of a victory “that could not have been greater.”