In the weeks before the next election, on 31 July, political disturbances multiplied. Returning home one evening from Paul Gottschalk’s, Harry
heard the unmistakable sound of rhythmical nailed boots on pavement, and there came a group of Hitler’s S.A. swinging along. A second was following…. They looked young, husky, and determined, but more boy-scout marching style than West Point. There may be 350,000 of them in all, but France need not be particularly alarmed about them. For Strassenkravalle [street riots] they are suitable, but in all military aspects they would prove of absolutely no value, having neither the equipment nor training.144
Other private militias marched, each with its own uniform. “This uniform business is a great thing in German politics,” wrote Abraham Plotkin: “The moment a movement gathers momentum, up pops the uniform.” The gray uniform of the Steel Helmet (Stahlhelm, a nationalist veterans’ organization opposed to the Weimar Republic) resembled that of the Reichswehr; incomprehensibly, Harry’s collection of photographs included one of Walter Elberfeld in a Steel Helmet uniform.145 The colors of the Reichsbanner Schwartz Rot Gold (the Black Red Gold Banner of the Reich), which was loosely affiliated with the SPD, indicated its support of the Weimar Republic. The Iron Front (Eiserne Front), which was allied with the SPD and also with the Reichsbanner, had support from unions; marching “with a zip as effective as that of the Nazis,” it held a huge demonstration in Berlin the day before Hitler was named chancellor. The Rote Frontkämpferbund (the Red Front-Fighters League, the Communist paramilitary group) was declared illegal by the Papen government because it was anti-government. After Hitler took power, the brown S.A., the black S.S., and (briefly) the gray Steel Helmet remained--this last forced in 1934 to wear “the honorable brown” S.A. uniform, as Victor Klemperer remarked ironically, and dissolved completely in 1935.146
The contemporary militias resonated with Harry’s reading about the Thirty Years’ War, “in which private armies ravaged the land and set Germany two centuries–perhaps three–behind the rest of the western world.”147 He found parallels with the present situation: “Fanaticisms, local, racial, religious, economic class disturbances, barbarisms of assorted types, a vicious particularism engendering differences in whose acid all feeling of community disintegrates, gangsterism raised to a principle”–all this had been “chronic in German history since the 16th century.” War became “a profession, with families bred to it…–blood and iron were necessary for practical things.” When “slogans of professed humanity” became “coarse and crude…, the Denker und Dichter [thinkers and poets]…never protested–or rarely.”
The pursuit of scholarship occasionally drew Harry unwittingly to dangerous places. At the Vorwärts building, where he hoped to use the bookstore, he found the gates closed and the building guarded by “half a dozen healthy-looking men in khaki, Reichsbannermen.” Some hours after he left, there was “an attack on the building by 100-150 Nazis, two men were shot and a third badly hurt.” The neighborhood, an SPD stronghold, was like “a superheated steam boiler whose safety valve is being held down” by the government of Papen and Schleicher, “engineers [who] don’t arouse my confidence.” He was glad he hadn’t witnessed the attack and hoped to avoid all disturbances. If the university were closed– “either by the anti-Nazi government in order to prevent rioting or by the Nazis if they take the helm, to clean the faculty of non-Nazi professors”–it wouldn’t directly affect him as long as he could “get my Studienbuch signed, and…the libraries remain in operation.” By then attending only four hours of classes a week, he didn’t mind “that there was another Kravall [riot] in the university this morning, the first since last fall or early winter.”148 Two weeks later he saw “mobs of students clustered” by the closed gates–yet another Kravall. That particular riot alarmed Count Harry Kessler, who wrote in his diary that “the unbridled, organized Nazi terror” had “again claimed seventeen dead and nearly two hundred wounded as its victims.”149 Kessler added: “It is a continuous St Bartholomew’s Massacre, day after day, Sunday after Sunday.” Less emotional than Harry Kessler, Harry Marks maintained his customary ironic distance. For him, “the most serious factor is not the possible alteration of university organization but the fact that the Nazis want to interfere with the opera.”150 He didn’t really mean it, though.
In the lead-up to the election, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl replaced Groener as Minister of the Interior. Gayl, who was later to resist the Nazis, was willing to censor newspapers at the government’s bidding. The Vorwärts and a Cologne paper backed by the Catholic Zentrum (Center) party were both shut down for five days as punishment for their criticisms of the government. The Vorwärts had slyly suggested “that there was a connection between the new Nazi uniforms–very expensive–and the shortening of the relief payments,” and the Cologne paper had objected to foreign policy toward France. Harry reacted cynically: “I can’t work up any sympathy for anyone concerned…. I don’t suppose any SPD or Zentrum members have lost any tears over the almost equally arbitrary 5 day ban of the Berlin Nazi organ Der Angriff.” Finally, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” a “pitched battle…in Altona (Hamburg’s Hoboken),” which resulted in eighteen deaths, led Gayl to prohibit all demonstrations.151
Nazis and Communists thronged the streets. One Sunday the Kurfürstendamm, a major shopping street, was “swarming with uniformed Nazis. Walking in 3’s & 4’s, they lounged up and down and across the avenue…saluting acquaintances with the pseudoRoman gesture of the raised arm.” At a Communist demonstration on the following Tuesday,
a couple of miles of Communists marched down from the Red north of Berlin and sang the Internationale and other appropriate anthems, shouted couplets in unison against the Nazis and in favor of the KPD [German Communist Party], and raised their fisted hands in the Red salute or gesture of defiance. There were workmen’s bands, always red flags and banners with suitable inscriptions, and all ages and both sexes were among the marchers: unemployed looking a little shabby, employed men with white shirts, gray shirts, blue shirts, brown shirts, dirty shirts, hatless or with the nautical caps so much worn by all ages of men; girls in bright dresses, gray-haired women, thin women, fat women, school girls and stenographers, women in white with nurses’ caps and bags with contents for all emergencies, and, always, cops. Cops pacing alongside by twos, cops in five-seater open runabouts, cops in the familiar police department riot squad trucks, all in Alarmbereitschaft [emergency readiness], the bands of their helmets under the chin, the side boards of the trucks down to allow instantaneous action.
Such parades reinforced the marchers’ “community of feeling” but probably had no effect on the audiences lining the streets. Harry had a certain sympathy with “these hoarse marchers, with their shouts of ‘Was haben die Arbeiter? [What do the workers have?] Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! Was wollen die Arbeiter: Arbeit! Arbeit! Arbeit!’ [What do the workers want? Work! Work! Work!].”
After a ban on demonstrations, competing parties compensated by littering the street with fly sheets advertising their causes: “People stooped over, men and women, and picked them off the pavement or off the asphalt, and walked along reading them.”152 Harry had a personal experience of anti-Semitism when he and Heinz encountered “two boys handing out fly sheets. I put out my hand for one and the boy turned away and said–Nee–nicht für die Juden [No, not for Jews].”153 Heinz, unrecognized as Jewish, gave Harry his copy; Nazis, it seemed, were no more adept at recognizing Jews than the admissions officers at Harvard mentioned in Chapter 2. The government, too, practiced political hooliganism. On 20 July, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD politician, was forced to resign as police president of Berlin by a group of young officers sent by Papen; in a premonition of Nazi methods, they “forced their way in [to police headquarters], hand grenades in their leather belts.” Harry considered