Alone, 1932-1940

  They pondered Benito Mussolini’s popularity in Italy, where, by 1932, he had been ruling for ten years. It had been a good decade for Italians. Il Duce’s dreams of building another Roman Empire evoked a tepid response, but his managed economy had prospered; his countrymen’s standard of living had risen. His goals, a biographer notes, had “a great appeal to many people in Italy in the years immediately following World War I; the Russian Revolution had terrified the leaders of the Italian financial and industrial community, and Mussolini’s program seemed to many of them to be an effective means of countering any similar development in their own country.”

  British intelligence reported that in Germany, also suffering from the Depression, Adolf Hitler was following the Duce’s lead, presenting himself to the Ruhr’s Schlotbarone (smokestack barons) as a shield against the Reds. Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, “Nazi” for short—had remained obscure as long as the German economy flourished. Now the country’s industrialists, alarmed by the growing strength of communism in the working class, looked upon the Nazis with increasing approval.

  At the time, the fear of Moscow was understandable. The Soviet Comintern, dedicated to the overthrow of other governments, was not just noisy; it was working, undermining the foundations of Western civilization from within. Communism was still new, virile, and virulent; cheerful tributes to it by leftists in the democracies drove democratic rightists, who were equally blind, toward Hitler. As T. R. Fehrenbach neatly states, “The Conservative Government of Great Britain, the one real order-keeping power in the world, was too intent upon the threatened social revolution to see the imminent nationalist revolt Hitler’s Germany was mounting against the democratic world.” They persuaded themselves, as Fehrenbach puts it, that a Germany ruled by Nazis could become “a counterpoise against the national and revolutionary ambitions of the Soviet Union.”19

  This was the rationale for the policy emerging in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay, of befriending the dictator states and appeasing their resentment of their postwar plight. The signs in Germany, to the men in high Tory councils, were encouraging. They pointed to the imminent establishment of a strong anti-Soviet regime in Berlin. Should that happen, they intended to befriend its leaders. Together, they believed, Englishmen and Germans had the stamina to forge a shield Comintern agents could never penetrate.

  If Britain succeeded in courting Germany, His Majesty’s Government would have a lot of explaining to do, much of it to Englishmen who had been targets of Mausers and Krupp howitzers for four years and could never have prevailed without the gallant poilus who fought with them shoulder to shoulder, even when the Allied line nearly collapsed in the last spring of the war. An understanding with Berlin would mean the rejection of Britain’s fellow democracy. Questions in the House would be endless. But as the new men saw it, the time had come to put wartime bitterness aside. France, they felt, lacked vigor, determination, and sound business sense.

  The French were exhausted. In France même—France outside Paris—the country was quiescent. The fertile northern provinces had been transformed into a wasteland of crumbling trenches and rusting barbed wire; over half the Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two—1,385,000—had been killed there between 1914 and 1918. The survivors were too maimed, or too feeble, to lift the tricolor in triumph. To be sure, the City of Light, the nation’s capital, still glowed. Under the chestnut trees of the Champs Élysées, fashion reporters who had penetrated the closely guarded private openings of the city’s grand couturiers forecast lower waists, straighter lines, fuller sleeves, and high, wide, and handsome shoulders. Hats were to be saucy: Arab fezzes, clown and cossack caps. Chanel would offer gloves of 18-karat spun gold, Regny an evening gown which could be converted into a bathing suit, and Rouff a naughty evening gown, with a zipper extending from the throat straight down to the bottom hem “for moonlight bathing,” or, as cynics pointed out, “swift coupling.”

  In all world capitals it was assumed—it had, indeed, become a newspaper cliché—that France possessed “the finest army in the world.” In London those pushing for a divorce from Paris and a remarriage in Berlin spread rumors of plans for a French preemptive war against the new German state. The Times, possibly floating a trial balloon, warned: “In the years that are coming there is more reason to fear for Germany than to fear Germany.”20

  Actually, confidence in the army of the Third Republic had been illusionary since 1917, when fifty-four French divisions—750,000 men—had mutinied. Officers had been beaten and even murdered; an artillery regiment had attempted to blow up the Schneider-Creusot munitions plant; trains had been derailed; 21,174 men deserted outright. Trenches were abandoned, and had the Germans known there was no one on the other side of no-man’s-land, they could have plunged through and won the war. The bitterness of the poilus survived the Armistice; their leaders told them their side had won, but they knew, in Churchill’s words, that victory had been “bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.”21

  Gallic military thinking was now wholly defensive. On January 4, 1930, both houses of the National Assembly had voted to build, on the Franco-German border, a great wall to be named for the minister of war, André Maginot. It would cost seven billion francs when completed in 1935. To be sure, the line did not protect the wooded Ardennes, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed fears for the forest: “Elle est impénétrable.” This judgment by the hero of Verdun was unchallenged. To young journalist William L. Shirer, arriving at the Arc de Triomphe in 1925, it seemed that “no other country on the Continent could challenge France’s supremacy. The nightmare of the German threat, which had haunted the French for so long, had been erased.” Their ancient foe, prostrate in defeat, its army reduced to a token force, its leadership “forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to build warplanes or tanks, or heavy guns or submarines or battleships, and saddled with the burden of reparations, was no longer a menace.”22

  That, too, was illusion. Germany was not the Germany the Allies thought they had created at Versailles, and France seemed to be drifting into a strengthless oubli. Alistair Horne, the popular British historian, saw “the urge for national grandeur” replaced by “a deep longing simply to be left in peace.” In its capital, however, the mood quickened. It could be felt in the Café Flore and the Deux Magots, for example, the haunts of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir; in the rêves fantastiques of Jean Giraudoux and Jean Cocteau; in the Revue Nègre, the Ballet Suedois, the Ballet Russe, the extravagant theatre of Sergey Diaghilev, the fox trot dansomanie, Josephine Baker, Inkichinoff’s film La Tête d’un homme, the Prevert brothers’ film L’Affaire est dans le sac; and—the favorites of all the left-wing critics—the new stars Gilles and Julien, a pair of pacifist anarchists who performed in a Montmartre cabaret and then on the stage at Bobino’s, wearing black sweaters and making songs like “Le Jeu de massacre” instant hits after singing them just once. The manic mood, Horne wrote, was “Anything for spectacle.” This was the France of legend: the land of tumbling francs, tumbling governments, and saucy, tumbling filles.23

  La Force de l’âge (The Prime of Life), Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of the late 1920s and early 1930s, provides a more perceptive picture. Her depiction of French intellectuals contrasts starkly with the rising Nazi Wildheit in Berlin, where the excesses and decadence of the postwar decade were yielding to a flirtation, and then a lethal embrace, between philistinism and savagery. To be sure, there was ferocity in the French capital, too, as Communist gangs fought with members of the Croix de Feu, the Action Française, the Jeunesse Patriotes, and, later, Le Francisme, the most bizarre of the leagues. But they were a lunatic fringe; the intelligentsia considered them vulgar and so never mentioned them or even acknowledged their existence. “Peace seemed finally assured,” de Beauvoir wrote in the fall of 1929. She felt she was living in “a new ‘Golden Age,’ ” that the swelling of the Nazi ranks
across the border was “a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance.” She, her lover Sartre, and their friends watched the Nazi seizure of power “quite calmly,” she later wrote, and while she briefly noted the Nazi expulsion of Einstein, she was more dismayed by the closing of Berlin’s Institute of Sexology.24

  “We refused,” she later wrote, “to face the threat which Hitler’s behavior constituted to the world.” Henri Barbusse wrote in Le Monde that the Nazis could not possibly put Germany’s economy back on its feet; it was doomed, and after the collapse the German proletariat would reclaim its heritage. Marianne, a radical-socialist weekly, preached a steady pacifist line, coupled with announcements that if Hitler became chancellor he would soon be overthrown. In 1932 Romain Rolland drew up a manifesto, published in Le Monde and Europe and signed by André Gide, among others, which called upon all members of the French intelligentsia to vow “resistance against war.” Writers, thinkers, academicians, continued to predict—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—that the two nations were moving toward a Franco-German rapprochement. Every leftist, every intellectual, was shouting simultaneously: “Down with fascism!” and “Disarmament NOW!” Even as Germany’s army swelled with illegal recruits, France’s intelligentsia, de Beauvoir wrote, saw “no threat to peace”; the only danger was “the panic that the Right was spreading in France, with the aim of dragging us into war.” In 1914 “the whole of the intellectual elite, Socialists, writers, and all,” had “toed a wholly chauvinistic line.” Their lesson “forbade us to envisage the very possibility of a war.”25

  This perilous illusion was not limited to France’s intellectual community. Barbusse’s shocking novel of the trenches, Le Feu, reached millions who had never heard of Sartre, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, André Gide, or Paul Eluard. Barbusse died in 1935, just as Hitler was becoming a household name in French provinces; over 300,000 readers followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Insulated in their Gallic world, the people for whom the Führer and his Reich were sharpening their swords assumed that everyone who had suffered in the trenches, or knew and loved those who had, shared their disgust of fighting. They should have been more attentive. There is a revealing vignette in La Force de l’âge. Sartre and de Beauvoir are boating down the Elbe to the rock of Heligoland. Sartre strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a forty-year-old German wearing a black peaked cap and a morose expression. The German tells Sartre that he had been a sergeant in the Great War, and, his voice rising, says: “If there is another war, this time we shall not be defeated. We shall retrieve our honor.” Sartre thinks the poor fellow feels shamed because his side lost; being simple, the ex-sergeant needs reassurance that war’s horrors lie in the past, never to return. He mildly remarks that there is no need of war; everyone wants peace. But he is facing a sorte he has never seen before: a real Kämpfer (warrior), incapable of forgetting or forgiving. Glaring, the man replies, “Honor comes first. First we must retrieve our honor.” De Beauvoir wrote: “His fanatical tone alarmed me…. Never had I seen hatred shine so nakedly [à nu] from any human face.” She tried to reassure herself “with the reflection that an ex-serviceman is bound to hold militaristic views,” yet added, “How many such were there, who lived only for the moment when the great day of revenge would come?”26

  Churchill was warning of Germany’s yearning for revenge, but the casual visitor to Berlin that fall of 1932 would have seen few signs of it. The Zitadelle—the monumental government buildings over which the kaisers had reigned—seemed more effete than Paris and devoid of that indefinable tone which had once given the city its Lutheran ambience: an air of hard, clean, righteous high purpose, of noble masculinity, of spartan Prussian virtues at their most demanding and most admirable. Now all that was gone. Berlin was, in fact, conspicuous for its lack of any virtue whatever. It had become the new Babylon.

  Before the Great War it had been Paris which had seethed with sinful romance, illicit intrigue; if you wanted to spend a weekend with your young secretary, you asked Cook’s to book you a suite near the Place de l’Étoile. In those days Pigalle, the mean streets behind Les Halles, the notorious maisons de joi in the winding little rue de la Huchette, a block from Notre Dame, had been the most lurid attractions for those exploring what then passed for European decadence. No more: it now was Berlin. “Along the Kurfürstendamm,” wrote Stefan Zweig, “powdered and rouged young men sauntered, and in the dimly lit bars one might see men of the world of finance courting drunken sailors”; while at transvestite balls, “hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eye of the police.”27

  Over two million young German women were destitute widows. The more desperate (and attractive) of them became prostitutes, seeking prey in the alleys near the Hauptbahnhof. Among them were muscular whores with whips and mothers in their early thirties, teamed with their teenaged daughters to offer Mutter-und-Tochter sex. Tourists were shocked by the more infamous night spots: the Kabarett Tingle-Tangle, the Apollo, the Monokel (“die Bar der Frau”—for lesbians), and the White Mouse, whose most sensational performer, and the role model for thousands of German girls in the Weimar years, was Anita Berber, who danced naked, mainlined cocaine and morphine, and made love to men and women sprawled atop bars, bathed in spotlights, while voyeurs stared and fondled one another. Anita was dead at twenty-nine. So, by then, was the Weimar Republic.

  It was in these years that Europeans began importing not only movies but also the most trivial and seamiest exports of American mass culture. Everyone knew about Prohibition gangsters, and how they led to political corruption. That made them attractive, even fascinating. Viennese, Romans, Berliners, and Parisians formed cults around les bandits américains, as they were called in France, and, in one Lutzow-Platz graffito, “die Häuptlinger der Chicagoer und New-Yorker Unterwelt—Al Capone, Jack Diamond, und Lucky Luciano.” So sedulously had they been aped in Italy that twenty-two-year-old Alberto Moravia devoted his first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), to a devastating parable of depravity in Rome. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras was the model for Germany’s new Faschingszeit; the Tiller Girls at Berlin’s Scala Theater were a frank imitation of the Ziegfeld chorus line; a clever wisecracker was a Schnauze (big mouth). Night clubs featured bands mimicking—and sometimes unintentionally parodying—American jazz combos. Week after week an advertisement ran in Munich’s Süddeutsche Monatshefte crying: “So dürfen Sie nicht Charleston tanzen!”28

  It had become fashionable to blame the global Depression on the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange three years earlier. Certainly the Crash was an important link in the chain; but the causes, the implications, and the sequence of events were international and too complex to be within the range of understanding then. The Great War had impoverished victors and vanquished alike. The Allies, however, believed they could recover their losses by making the losers pay. It was one of history’s more tragic errors.

  Once they began computing the cost of civilian property damage—not to mention what was called “the estimated capitalized value” of the five million Allied fighting men killed in the war—the Allied statesmen found themselves dealing with stupendous sums, billions of dollars. At Versailles they finally arrived at a rough figure: $31,530,500,000. This was their reparations bill, they declared, and Germany must pay it. The Allies, under the threat of renewed fighting, demanded an immediate down payment of five billion dollars—nearly thirty-three billion in 1980s currency. Also, the Germans must pay off Belgium’s war loans. Also, interest on the unpaid balance. Also, a 26 percent tax on all German exports.

  The terms were exorbitant, vindictive, and preposterous. John Maynard Keynes denounced Versailles as “a Carthaginian Peace.” Churchill, who disapproved of the entire treaty, especially the punitive clauses, called the reparations “monstrous” and “malignant.” Actually, there was no way that the leaders of the new German republic, struggling to find its feet in Weimar, could meet thi
s absurd bill. They tried. But their government had no international credit. Germany’s prewar commercial system had been destroyed by the Allied blockade. Rich Germans, anticipating heavy taxation, were fleeing abroad with their fortunes. After seven months, the mark sank to an all-time low: five million to the dollar. Then it dropped out of sight.

  As the worldwide economic crisis deepened, Americans rescued the tottering German republic, first with loans and then with outright gifts of over ten million dollars. Once the New York stock market crashed, however, Wall Street had to look to its own. Helpless, Weimar staggered on the brink of ruin, maintaining the appearance of solvency by feats of legerdemain. Anti-Americans, forgetting the huge gifts, blamed Germany’s plight on the United States. Some Tories even resented the fact that Churchill’s mother had been American. Stanley Baldwin spoke contemptuously of “the low intellectual ability” of people in the United States; Neville Chamberlain agreed with him.

  On one count Americans were guilty. European respect for U.S. diplomacy had been skidding since President Woodrow Wilson’s departure from Versailles. In 1919 the U.S. Senate had rejected the Versailles covenants, including membership in the League of Nations, Wilson’s creation, and his pledge to guarantee France’s borders. After Wilson’s death a succession of Republican presidents, reflecting the mood of U.S. voters, had been turned inward, devoting their attention to domestic issues. During the interwar years this doctrine was christened isolationism. At the same time, America’s leaders kept nagging their former allies to pay their unpayable war debts. England could easily have paid her war debts to the United States had France paid her debts to England. But France was flat broke, which meant the British were stuck, which meant hands-across-the-sea met in a clammy grasp. Washington was unsympathetic. President Calvin Coolidge didn’t want to hear about the Exchequer’s problems; he wanted cash. He said: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Before the war Americans had been popular in Europe. But by the early 1930s Washington’s repeated insistence that the hired money be repaid merely heightened the tension Over There.