Albert Einstein, Germany’s most famous scientist, also felt the pressure to leave Berlin as the political, economic, and intellectual climate turned hostile to the kind of creative work he prized. He even had to wonder whether the city that had once enthusiastically adopted him still valued his presence. True, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 1929 the city government had sought to honor him with the gift of a house on the banks of the Havel River. But it turned out that the house was already occupied, obliging the city to come up with a different prospect, which also fell through. The mayor then proposed that Einstein pick out a property he liked, which the city would buy for him. By the time Einstein found a suitable plot in the suburb of Caputh, the depression had settled in, causing the city council to debate whether it could now afford to present him with a gift at all. Understandably miffed, the scientist bought the property in Caputh with his own money and built a house there. He and his wife moved in just in time to see the election results of 1932 make an extended stay there look doubtful. A Nazi delegate to the Prussian Landtag announced that after Hitler had cleaned house in Germany, “the exodus of the Children of Israel will be a child’s game in comparison,” adding that “a people that possesses a Kant will not permit an Einstein to be tacked on to it.” Einstein took the threat seriously, telling a friend in summer 1932 that he believed Papen’s military-backed regime would only hasten the advent of “a right-radical revolution.” The scientist had been teaching on and off at Cal Tech and Princeton since 1930, and in November 1932, preparing to sail once again to America, he told his wife to take a good look at their dream house outside Berlin. When she asked why, he replied: “You will never see it again.”
The Berlin that these illustrious figures left behind still had the capacity to excite and amuse casual visitors. The British writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, who spent a few days in the city in summer 1932, was impressed, like so many others before him, by the restless movement of cars, trams, flashing lights, even zoo animals pacing in their cages. There was a throbbing air of expectancy, especially at night: “Everybody knows that every night Berlin wakes up to a new adventure.” Nicolson also appreciated the city’s no-nonsense frankness. If London was like “an old lady in black lace and diamonds,” Berlin was “a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face, Hölderlin in her pocket, thighs like those of Atalanta, an undigested education, a heart that is almost too ready to sympathize, and a breadth of view that charms one’s repressions from their poison, and shames one’s correctitude.”
An unemployed man sifts through garbage in search of food, 1930
For hundreds of thousands of ordinary Berliners, however, the only adventure to be faced now was the challenge of getting by without regular employment. In April 1932 the city registered 603,000 million unemployed, which constituted over 10 percent of the total unemployment in Germany. Many of these people had long since exhausted their unemployment benefits and had gone on welfare, which was the responsibility of the cities to fund. Berlin’s Sozialhilfe caseload climbed steadily in 1932, from 316,000 in April to 323,000 in September. Unable to cover the escalating welfare costs, Berlin received some assistance from the Reich, but many citizens were obliged to get by on their own, one way or another.
Christopher Isherwood, delaying his own departure from Berlin to document the growing despair, wrote in late 1932:
Morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as best they could contrive: selling bootlaces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging around urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway.
Conditions for unemployed workers were so grim that many of them preferred to live outside the city in tent-camps. The largest of these was Kuhle Wampe, on the shores of the Muggelsee. Brecht made it famous by writing a film about it in summer 1932. Visiting the scene shortly thereafter, the French leftist writer Daniel Guerin was surprised to discover how tidy everything was: “Spread along the lakeshore, under the pines, the tiny dwellings all looked alike: simple wooden posts covered with white or zebra-striped tent canvas. All were well lit, clean, and well kept. The builders rivaled each other in ingenuity and whimsy. Miniature gardens surrounded the most beautiful constructions. At the moment of my arrival, an elderly unemployed couple stood in ecstasy, motionless, watering can in hand, before three still-dripping geraniums.” Many of the residents of Kuhle Wampe seemed to think of their stay there as a kind of vacation from the horrors of the ravaged metropolis. They told Guerin: “You see, the air at Kuhle Wampe is better than in our neighborhoods, and this is a vacation that doesn’t cost a thing. We prefer to cycle to Berlin once a week to pick up our unemployment benefits. And we also want to show that proletarians know how to live an intelligent and liberated life.”
While thousands of Berlin’s proletarians were fleeing to the countryside to find a more dignified existence, the Nazis were pursuing their destiny in the halls of power in the capital. On September 12, 1932, the newly elected Reichstag, the one in which the Nazis had the largest number of delegates, convened for the first time. In the chair was Hermann Göring, head of the Nazis’ parliamentary delegation and new president of the Reichstag. To Daniel Guerin, who was sitting in the visitors’ gallery, Göring looked like “a kind of large, beardless doll with a disturbing jaw—half executioner, half clown.” But there was nothing clownish about Göring’s agenda that day: he intended, with the support of the Communists, to pass a no-confidence resolution against Papen’s government and thereby to bring it down. To avert such a scenario, Papen showed up with a presidential decree dissolving the parliament. Göring, however, refused to recognize the chancellor until the Communists’ no confidence resolution was voted upon, which went against the government, 512 to 42. Now, when Papen presented his dissolution decree, Göring ruled it constitutionally invalid on grounds that the chancellor had been voted out of office. In fact there was nothing constitutional about Göring’s ploy, for parliament could not cashier a chancellor; only the president could do that. Hindenburg did not want to jettison Papen, whom he personally liked and even admired. Thus the dissolution decree was imposed after all, with new elections scheduled for November 6.
Reichstag president Hermann Göring (left) and two Nazi parliamentary deputies, Wilhelm Frick (middle) and Hans Eugen St. Fabricius, 1932
Before the new contest could take place, the Nazis and the Communists seized upon another opportunity to raise joint havoc in Berlin. When the government decreed a slight reduction in wages for Berlin’s transport workers, Goebbels directed the Nazi employees of the BVG to go out on strike. Goebbels said this would show that the Nazis were serious about offering “a conscious rejection of bourgeois methods.” The KPD, not to be outdone by the Nazis, instructed their people in the transport union also to walk off the job. The leader of their strike team was Walter Ulbricht, later to become dictator of East Germany and architect of the Berlin Wall. On November 2, as the strike began, Nazis and Communists paraded together in front of Berlin’s rail yards, beating up scabs and wrecking any busses or streetcars that were still running.