The regime began its campaign to reinvent Berlin with a crackdown on the press, which had long been fundamental to Berlin’s anarchic and internationalist spirit. In 1933 Berlin had over fifty newspapers, not including the small journals restricted to individual neighborhoods. The Nazis could not summarily eliminate all but their own organs in the city, for at that point they had only two: Goebbels’ Der Angriff and the recently established Berlin edition of the Völkischer Beobachter. Berliners were notoriously dependent on their daily newsprint fix, the sudden withdrawal of which might have shocked them out of that convenient complacency noted by Isherwood. Thus the regime, through the agency of Goebbels’ new Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda, took a more subtle tack: it initially forbade outright only the Communists’ Rote Fahne and the Socialists’ Vorwärts, while forcing other papers to muzzle themselves editorially and to dismiss most of their Jewish and leftist staff. Given the traditional liberal values and strong Jewish presence in the mainstream Berlin press, this amounted to a major purge.
In early 1933 the Berliner Tageblatt had to fire its famed chief editor, Theodor Wolff, who as a Jew and outspoken liberal personified in Nazi eyes all that was foul in the Berlin newspaper world. (As an added offense, Wolff had once denied Goebbels a job on the Tageblatt.) Deprived of its best personnel, the Tageblatt staggered on until 1938, steadily losing money. Its parent house, the Jewish-owned Mosse Verlag, which had declared bankruptcy in late 1932, passed into the hands of a liquidation agency that sold off the profitable parts of the business to well-connected Aryans.
The Vossische Zeitung, flagship of the Ullstein Verlag, tried to keep the Nazis at bay by purging most of its Jewish reporters. But Goebbels was not satisfied with partial self-emasculation. In preparation for a planned Reich-wide boycott of Jewish businesses, the Vossische Zeitung and other Ullstein papers were forced to print anti-Semitic articles, replete with the slogan, “Die Juden sind unser Ungllick (The Jews are our Curse).” Remaining Jewish staff writers, even those who tried hard to adjust to the new circumstances, were soon forced out. Thus society columnist Bella Fromm was informed by her editor in June 1934 that the paper could no longer run articles under her byline. Appeals from her conservative friends Franz von Papen and War Minister Werner von Blomberg failed to persuade Goebbels to reverse this decision. In any event, the Vossische was a sinking ship; it went down a year later. Other Ullstein papers suffered a similar fate because many Berliners feared to been seen reading them in public, and many businesses refused to advertise in them. The Ullstein Verlag remained afloat a little longer only because some of its weekly papers and magazines, especially the mass-market Berliner Illustrierte, continued to earn a profit. But in 1935 Goebbels imposed a three-month ban on all Ullstein publications, which forced the publisher to liquidate.
Die Weltbühne, that provocative and independent voice on the left, was on uncertain ground as soon as the Nazis came to power. Shortly thereafter, the paper had the temerity to lecture Hitler on how to survive in office. Ossietzky editorialized that the Nazi regime could “last a generation” if it sided with the working class and did not tamper with welfare reforms. But it was the Weltbühne journalists whose days were numbered. As we have seen, Ossietzky was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire; so were two frequent contributors to the journal, Erich Mühsam and Heinz Poll. “Journalists today gaze with envy at the practitioners of such unrisky professions as tightrope walking,” lamented a Weltbühne writer on February 21, 1933. Two weeks later, on March 7, the SA raided the offices of the journal and confiscated its property.
Nazi-orchestrated book-burning on Berlin’s Opernplatz, May 10, 1933
The right-wing nationalist press made no effort to practice journalistic tightrope walking: its feet were planted solidly on the Nazi line from the beginning. The papers operated by the Scherl Verlag, which was now owned by the Hugenberg empire, continued to earn money for their opportunistic proprietor. Yet Hugenberg and his editors were always aware that their survival depended on never straying too far from the pro-Nazi line that they had so compliantly toed in 1933.
Ironically, the Berlin papers catering exclusively to the Jewish community were given broader latitude than the rest of the city’s press. As long as they did not directly attack the regime’s policies, papers like Der Jüdische Rundschau, Israelit, and Der Nationaldeutsche Jude were pretty much left alone. The logic here was that the purely Jewish press could not be expected to conform to higher Aryan standards since its writers were racially incapable of doing so. The relative lack of censorship allowed the Jewish papers to be more factually accurate than their “German” competitors. Realizing this, some non-Jewish Berliners began reading the Jewish press. The circulation of the Jüdische Rundschau actually increased in the early years of the Third Reich.
In the end, however, even limited diversity in Berlin’s newspaper world was unacceptable to the Nazi regime, and more and more papers were forced to close due to political or economic pressures. Between 1933 and 1938 Berlin lost twenty-nine of its papers. By the beginning of World War II, aside from those owned by Hugenberg, only ten papers survived, all of them under direct Nazi control. Berlin’s days as Europe’s greatest newspaper city were over.
Journalists were the first to feel the heat of Nazi censorship because they obviously shaped public opinion. But imaginative writers, whose influence was less obvious, also had to watch what they wrote if they did not want to end up on the regime’s “black list,” which at the very least could mean a prohibition on publication. Rather than attempting to conform, a host of novelists and poets left Germany in the early years of the Third Reich, following the example of those who had already emigrated in the waning days of Weimar. Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, who had moved from Munich to Berlin in the mid-1920s to escape the growing influence of volkisch barbarism, now quit Germany entirely, decamping first to France, then to America. Their final landing place was Los Angeles, which became the exile home for dozens of other German émigrés: a kind of Berlin-on-the-Pacific. Another prominent German writer who ended up in Los Angeles was Heinrich’s brother Thomas. He began his long exile in February 1933 after being branded a traitor by his fellow intellectuals in Munich for allegedly besmirching the good name of Richard Wagner. In addition to Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger, the literary hemorrhage from Berlin in the first years of the Third Reich included Kurt Tuchol-sky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Alfred Döblin, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Werfel, Anna Seghers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig—the list reads like a Who’s Who of German literature. They constituted the first wave of a cultural exodus that grew with the years until that dreadful moment when it became no longer possible to leave—except in a boxcar. Those who got out in time were the lucky ones, though the dislocation of exile proved too much for some. Among the prominent literary suicides from Berlin were Benjamin, Hasenclever, Stefan Zweig, and Tucholsky.