The Nazis’ assaults notwithstanding, Berlin still struck many Germans and foreign visitors as one of the best places in the world to witness cutting-edge creative work. Like a dying diva who belts out some of her best notes before collapsing on the stage, Berlin put on an exciting cultural show before the brown curtain descended in January 1933. In January 1931 Sergei Tretiakov, the Russian futurist poet and playwright, lectured at the Russischer Hof on “Writers and the Socialist Village.” In March Carl Zuckmayer’s satirical play Der Hauptmann von Kb’penick, based on the exploits of that great “Prussian officer” Wilhelm Voigt, opened at the Deutsches Theater. Zuckmayer’s and Heinz Hilpert’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, Farewell to Arms, also played at the Deutsches Theater. (Hemingway himself showed up for the premier and nipped steadily from a hip flask when he wasn’t asleep. Taken backstage during the intermission, he asked the leading lady, Käthe Dorsch, how much she charged for the night, adding that he would “pay one hundred dollars and not a cent more.”) Meanwhile, the Staatstheater mounted Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (Man is Man). Although the play’s run was brief, Tretiakov hailed it as a masterpiece of radical drama. Brecht also managed to produce his Die Massnahmen (The Measures), a long choral piece filled with Communist didacticism that required true ideological commitment and plenty of Sitzfleisch to sit through. Over at the Kroll Opera Otto Klemperer conducted the first German performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Witnessing it, Paul Hindemith predicted that “a new wave of serious music is on the way.” At the Potsdamer Platz a new building, perhaps Weimar Berlin’s most innovative structure, was going up: Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus office block. With its clean-curved facade, which was illuminated at night by spotlights, the building was a frontal attack on architectural historicism—a floodlit rebuke to all those neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, and Romanesque piles that still dominated the Berlin landscape. To the question “What is this place,” the architect answered: “future time.”
In the year the Columbushaus was completed, 1932, Germany’s most innovative design and architectural school, the Bauhaus, moved to Berlin from Dessau. It had been founded in 1919 in Weimar but had relocated to Dessau in 1925 because that city promised a more congenial environment. And so it did, but not for long. In 1932 the Nazis gained control of Dessau’s city council and made it their first order of business to attack the Bauhaus as “Jewish-Marxist.” The then director, Mies van der Rohe, fled to the capital, setting up shop in an abandoned telephone factory in Steglitz. Mies hoped that the school could do its work relatively undisturbed in the big city, but the local Nazis did their best to prevent that from happening. Goebbels’s Der Angriff labeled the Bauhaus a “breeding ground of Bolshevism,” a clear sign that once the Nazis ran Berlin there would be no place for this innovative institution.
In the meantime, it was not just Nazi pressure that was putting the squeeze on avant-garde culture in Berlin. Other right-wing forces, sometimes in league with the Nazis and sometimes not, took up the fight against the leading figures and institutions of Berlin’s progressive cultural scene. At the urging of the military, Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist editor of Die Weltbühne, received an eighteen-month jail sentence for “espionage and treason” because his magazine had exposed secret subsidies from the Reichswehr to Lufthansa, the civilian airline. The Berlin police prevented the radical poet Erich Weinert from reading his poems on grounds of public security. The deepening depression also took its cultural toll, both by drying up revenues and by giving bureaucrats who were anxious to pacify the right an excuse to close down money-losing ventures. In summer 1931 Erwin Piscator’s latest radical theater collective went into bankruptcy, inducing the playwright to leave for the Soviet Union. A year later it was the turn of the Kroll Opera, which was afflicted with mounting deficits and a barrage of hostile criticism for its innovative programming. After the final curtain went down, the Berlin critic Oscar Bie wrote a fitting epitaph: “The four years [when Klemperer ran the Kroll] will remain a gleaming chapter in the history of opera, full of art and humanity, with human weaknesses and human error, but with all the grandeur of true endeavor and conscientious labor. May the devil take a time that cannot support that.”
The Berlin branch of the Nazi Party, which by the summer of 1931 had grown to 16,000 members, was proud of its disruption of the capital’s cultural and political life. Yet the party itself was in a state of turmoil in the first years of the new decade. The local SA was increasingly frustrated with the overall drift of the party, believing that Hitler, in his effort to come to power legally, was cozying up all too closely with establishment reactionaries. The Berlin Brownshirts tended to blame Munich for Hitler’s “conservatism”: the Bavarian town, in their eyes, was hopelessly provincial, stodgy, and backward-looking. They could not understand why Goebbels, once the champion of a more activist and radical posture, was meekly toeing the Munich line. In August 1930 they made their displeasure evident by smashing up their own party headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse. Goebbels, in fact, shared the SA’s frustration, denouncing “the scandalous pigsty in Munich,” but he did not include Hitler in his denunciation. When the Flihrer instructed him to conduct a purge of disruptive elements in Berlin, Goebbels responded: “Whatever you choose to do, I’ll back you.”
The principal target of the purge was Walter Stennes, chief of the Berlin SA. On April 1, 1931, Stennes was relieved of his post. He responded by staging a full-scale mutiny, taking over party headquarters, occupying the Angriff office, and justifying his action by claiming that the Munich leadership had blunted “the revolutionary ülan of the SA.” Goebbels, who was in Dresden when the mutiny broke out, hastened back to Berlin to restore order. But he needn’t have hurried, for the Stennes revolt collapsed on its own due to lack of support from the rest of the Nazi district organizations, which immediately pledged their support to Hitler. Stennes was permanently banned, and Goebbels could report by April 11 that the party apparatus in Berlin was “unshaken” in its commitment to Hitler’s policy of legality. This was a pious exaggeration, however; the Stennes revolt served to remind the Nazi leader that Berlin was treacherous ground, where loyalties could never be taken for granted.
In addition to internal problems, the Berlin branch of the Nazi movement had to contend with escalating attacks from the local Communists, who were not about to cede the streets of “their town” to the Brownshirts. There were rumors in summer 1931 that the KPD was about to stage a coup in the capital. No such action occurred, but a group of Communists terrorized Prenzlauer Berg, attacking pubs where Nazis were known to gather and killing two policemen. One of the Communist killers was none other than Erich Mielke, who would later become chief of the infamous East German secret police, the Stasi. These attacks generated some public sympathy for the Nazis, who claimed to be law-abiding victims of Red terror.
But not too law-abiding. On September 12, 1931, the new head of the Berlin SA, a dissolute nobleman named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, staged a mini-pogrom in broad daylight on the busy Kurfürstendamm. Driving up and down the boulevard in a car, he directed bands of SA thugs, dressed in normal street clothes, to attack and beat pedestrians who looked Jewish. After about two hours the police intervened and arrested Helldorf, who was obliged to spend a few days in jail. Soon he would be supervising that same jail as chief of police.