At eleven-thirty on the Monday morning-half an hour late through a last-minute squabble over the tantalizingly ripened fruits of office-a ragbag of politicians trooped from the room of State Secretary Otto von Meissner to the audience chamber of the Presidential Palace in Berlin. Only three of the dozen were Nazis, all subdued in dark suits. There was the beetle-browed shy policeman Wilhelm Frick, who had spied on his own headquarters at Munich. Hermann Gцring, with a pearl tie-pin. And Adolf Hitler, displaying nothing more minatory than a party badge in his lapel.
The gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen did the honours of introduction. The President leaning on his stick, grown pettishly impatient, vitalized the new Imperial Cabinet by breathing upon it a few platitudes. He had still to appoint his new Chancellor. The office had been the gift of Kaiser Wilhelm, the Weimar constitution had subjected it to the Reichstag, but there were hands ready to twist the constitution into any desired shape. The appointment was open to doubt until sealed by the oath of office. Goebbels and the other top Nazis were waiting in the nearby Kaiserhof Hotel, extremely nervously. Only the previous Thursday, Hindenburg had sworn again that he would never invest with the mantle of Bismarck a Bohemian corporal. He never even offered Hitler a chair when he called.
But Hindenburg saw the corporal as a prisoner in a coalition. He would be defused. He would be disposed of. Only a fortnight previously, von Schleicher had declared Hitler no longer a danger, nor even a political problem, but a thing of the past. So had the Socialist messiah Harold Laski in London. The corporal became the Chancellor. Later, he became the President. He was the last before Adenauer. In between, the world entered times when God and his saints slept, as men once said about those of King Stephen.
I was unaware of stepping across three days which shakily bridged the new Europe from the old. I was far more concerned taking Gerda to the pictures. This was partly because the trivia of human existence continue with the resilience of human life itself. And partly because citizens of the British Empire had the reputation for walking the world with an air of supreme indifference towards the natives.
We went to the cinema the following Thursday night. Gerda changed from her habitual serge to a blue and white cotton dress in bold stripes reaching almost to her ankles, which I self-flatteringly suspected to be new and perhaps even bought for the occasion. A small round fur-trimmed hat turned her disquietingly from a good-looking schoolmistress to a pretty girl. The family and the two maids gathered in the hall to wave us off. We might have been starting on our honeymoon.
We took the Schwebebahn for ten stops to the Old Market station across at Barmen. We found the market square itself packed with an excited crowd. There was another Nazi demonstration, a march of the Sturmabteilungen, the SA, Hitler's Storm Troopers, the Brownshirts. Germany had been locked for years in a brawl of private armies, the Sturmabteilungen against the Communists' Rote Frontkampfer, squads of the ex-Servicemen's Stahlhelm and the Social Democrats' Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold waiting to be at somebody's throat in the sidelines. The Storm Troopers of 1933 well outnumbered the troops of the German army. They were recruited from street corners and given clothing, food and a sense of identity, when the Government signally failed to provide all three. England had luckily rid herself of such bands with the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. America escaped them-the Civil War was a far more official affair. Ulster suffers them to the day I write. Much that I then saw in Germany reminded me of Ireland during the worst of the Troubles, which coloured the daily papers of my childhood.
We could hardly move in the square. Everyone was shouting and jerking their right arms into the Nazi salute. The Storm Troopers wore brown shirts, breeches and jackboots, the Sam Browne leather crossbelt of British officers and the peaked cap of American baseball players. Germans bathe voluptuously in the warmth of crowds, losing their identity and insecurity. They love and honour uniforms, they instinctively obey rank. I stood on the pavement, tucking my Trinity scarf into my lapels against the cold. I remembered the story about the extras in a German war film, lunching in the AGFA studio canteen, automatically dividing into actors playing officers at the head of the table and other ranks below the salt.
The Brownshirts were of course nothing like the clean-cut stern-faced ranks of the party photographs and posters. In common with the rest of mankind, Storm Troopers came in all sizes, skinny and paunchy, lanky and dwarfish, adolescent and middle-aged. People in the crowd were singing snatches of the _Horst Wessel Lied,_ the Nazi anthem written by a Berlin pastor's son who went to the bad and got himself killed in the streets, and achieved like many other stupid people only martyrdom. The tune's one virtue seemed to me a capability of being sung by absolutely everybody, like _It's a Long Way to Tipperary._
They tramped in columns of four, at their heads drummers and flags. The swastika had been familiar enough in German streets since the summer of 1920, when it was suggested to Hitler as an emblem by his dentist, and run into a flag on a housewife's sewing-machine. As Gerda half-saluted and half-waved, I noticed her eyes wide and brilliant in the gaslight. 'You see,' she said excitedly, stimulated by the show and infected with the surrounding emotion, 'now we can start taking pride in our country again.'
My only feeling was pain that foreigners behaved in so exaggerated a manner. It occurred to neither of us that the force embodied in that procession would shortly leave Europe strewn with corpses like autumn leaves, as casually to be gathered and burnt.
We pushed our way through the onlookers. I bought Gerda some chocolate. We sat at the back of the cinema and she let me hold her hand, which soon became very damp. She stared at the Hollywood musical with the same innocent admiration as at the marching Storm Troopers. Anonymous and unseen in the darkness, she became unnaturally-or perhaps naturally-girlish. It may have been Wirklichkeitsflucht, a flight from reality, from the joyless and inhibited life of an ill-paid State employee in the rigid society of Wuppertal, forever whispering over its fences and peeping through its lace curtains. Nazism itself had foundations of the same fantasy.
Then something happened, an incident so trivial and unhurtful in its gruesome context that it invited only forgetfulness. But hair-triggers fire heavy charges in the human mind. Perhaps it saved a ripe soul from the Nazis.
The Nazis disapproved of _Blondie of the Follies._ It was American, it was bourgeoise, it was degenerate, it had the fingerprints of Jews all over it. They had a well-tried technique for exhibiting such displeasure. In summer, they loosed moths which flew into the limelight. In winter, they let free mice or rats. We were in for a different demonstration. Two men in raincoats, to which they had added swastika armbands, jumped to the stage with its screen amid the potted palms, and ripped the material to ribbons with sheath-knives. The projector flickered out. The house lights went up. Everybody fell dumb. Once visible, the pair appeared as barely grown boys, who contented themselves with flinging jeers at the heads of the audience and made off. Within a month or two, such cinematic entertainments were to be banished from German soil, until Betty Grable arrived on the heels of the American Army.