THEY'RE ONLY GOING TO HIRE HIS VOICE
At one-thirty in the afternoon of Thursday, January 11, 1923, the German mark was quoted at 10,450 to the dollar on the Berlin Stock Exchange. At three o'clock the rate had reached 11,600 marks to the dollar, but by desperate purchase operations the Reichsbank brought it down to 10,500. Turmoil. News had come by telephone: French troops were moving into Essen. The occupation of the Ruhr had begun. Everybody believed that the mark would continue to fall, so everybody was desperately buying shares, driving their prices up.
I didn't know all that on the afternoon of January 11, because I was standing in the icy gloom of the Potsdam Garrison Church, watching six Reichswehr troopers in cavalry boots and spurs carrying General Keith's coffin away from the candlelit tomb of Frederick the Great, up the aisle and out the door, as the organ boomed again, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott."
The faded banners of decommissioned Guard regiments moved gently above our heads. Some of the survivors stood in the pews. Death's heads grinned as the honorary pallbearers followed the coffin. Spurs and sabers clicked. Tight-lipped scowling old men, one of them a field marshal, walking upright, looking straight ahead. The flag draped over the coffin was the black-white-red of the Kaiser's Reich, not the black-red-gold of the Republic.
Frau Keith wore a black coat, a black cloche hat, a black veil. Christoph, whose arm she held, wore a civilian overcoat with a wide black ribbon around his sleeve, and his medals on his chest. Christoph limped.
Kaspar wasn't there. At least he wasn't in the church, and mine were not the only eyes carefully sweeping.
Helena, who walked with me, pulled down her veil as we came out into the blinding glare of the snow-covered parade, where a mounted military band began to play.
Ich hatt' einen Kameraden,
Einen bessern findst du nicht....
Steel helmets, kettledrums, snaredrums, trumpets and trombones. A squad of infantry presented arms. The coffin, still covered by the flag, was carefully strapped upon a caisson. Horseshoes clattered on the cobblestones; the band moved off, only the snaredrums beating now, beating slow march; horses snorted; the caisson began to roll. The infantry detail did a right-shoulder-arms, right- face, and stepped off to the beat of the drums.
The old men, putting on their shakos, their spiked helmets from 1914, their top hats, began to talk to each other.
Automobiles drew up. Christoph was helping his mother into one of them- a car with a military driver and General Staff pennants - when Helena grabbed my elbow:
"Quickly, look over there, the big tree where the coffin is passing now!"
I looked. I saw what she saw.
"Don't tell them!" said Helena. "Please don't tell them."
The mood at the Villa Keith was not mourning but patriotic outrage. On the way back from Potsdam, many people had bought newspapers, and Christoph had telephoned the Bank.
"An absolute act of war," said Dr. von Winterfeldt. "We are simply back at war!
"With an army of a hundred thousand men," said one of the generals.
"This is what comes of it," said another. "Policy of Fulfillment? Spineless appeasement! Socialists! Disbanded the Freikorps!"
"We're going to have to get those fellows back."
"It's being worked on."
"What?"
"Seeckt is working on it. Bringing them back, a few at a time, sending them out for training."
"Out where?"
The speaker moved his head. "Out beyond the sunrise. Far out."
Another voice cut in: "Gentlemen, don't you think Frau Keith serves exceptionally good coffee?"
A moment of puzzled silence.
"Do you know what a pound of real coffee costs today, in this glorious Versailles Republic of ours?"
It was interesting to watch their expressions, because they didn't all get the point at the same time. One by one, the faces turned to wood. Monocles glittered. The ancient field marshal glared across the room at me, looking like a furious child.
Frau Keith, without her hat and her veil, looked much younger than the wives for whom she was pouring coffee. Thinking about it for the first time, doing the arithmetic in my head, considering Christoph's age, considering Kaspar's age, considering that the General had served in the War of 1870...
"Christoph, do you mind if I ask? How old is your mother?"
"Interesting, we are thinking the same thing. She suddenly looks her real age today. She is fifty-five."
"That's -"
"That's over fifteen years younger than my father, yes. He was in no rush to get married. Good times as a bachelor."
"Speaking of getting married -"
"Speaking of getting married, I don't know exactly, of course we must wait a few months now, but I would like to ask you, Peter ... I would have asked before but continued to hope that Kaspar would return, that Kaspar would accept Helena, but since he did not even appear for his father's funeral -"
Why not tell him?
"I would like to ask if you will stand as best man for me?"
"Well of course, I'd be honored, but I'm sure that Kaspar--"
"No. He hates us. He thinks we betrayed Kern and Fischer."
"But we didn't. How can you betray somebody who isn't on your side?"
Christoph shook his head. "It's what he thinks. In any case, we compromised his position with the O.C. people, the Ehrhardt people, so he must prove he is really on their side.... I don't know, I just don't know, I try to put it out of my mind. At the moment, my biggest problem is not Kaspar but my mother. The Dollarkurs went over 11,000 this afternoon. Do you realize what that means?"
"My God, Christoph!"
"Of course it means different things to different people. To you it means you are richer today than you were yesterday. But for widows, for pensioners, for people living on their savings ... I don't have to explain what it means when a pair of shoes costs thirty thousand marks!"
"But why can't you do for your mother what you've been doing for me?"
"Well, of course to some extent we have been trying to. But she didn't have any dollars to begin with. She has some stocks, they have risen in value, we have put a mortgage on this house and borrowed money to buy Dutch guilders, there is a little gold and a little jewelry we can sell - it is a struggle, I am forced to speculate with her property in a way one should not speculate with the few things a widow has left, but I must or it will simply melt away! And at least I have my salary from Waldsteins', they have been decent about increasing it. But look at the other people in this room. Spent their lives serving their country. Officers, judges, civil servants. Not only served their country, they ran the country. Everybody honored them, bowed, saluted, received them at Court, gave them titles, gave them medals ... and they looked down their noses at people in business- not to mention banking. Moneylending! Playing the stock market! Not entirely clean. Probably something somebody must do, people from other classes. Like collecting the garbage. Served their country all of their lives on the assumption of a comfortable, honored old age. And now you know what's going to happen to them - unless they suddenly acquire the talents of Erich Strassburger and the capital to use those talents?"
Christoph looked at the men who had governed an empire. "They will be standing in the soup lines, with the workers from Neukölln and Moabit. Except that some of them will rather starve!"
"It's just like the War," said Miss Boatwright two weeks later. We were having dinner at the Adlon, as Whitney Wood's guests. He had called at the Villa Keith that morning to ask if I would meet her train at Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse because some conference at the Deutsche Bank might not be over in time. I could have his car, which meant his car and his driver, who by now knew where to find me among the tenements of Neukölln.
I'd had dinner with Mr. Wood a couple of times while Miss Boatwright was in the Ruhr, and after cocktails and a bottle of Riesling he told me about his wife, who was hospitalized with incurable schizophrenia somewhere on Long Island.
That's all he said about himself. He wanted to talk about German politics. He told me about his conversations with Hugo Stinnes, with Dr. Havenstein of the Reichsbank, with the Minister of Finance. . . . "The fact of the matter is they don't know what the hell they're doing. They're paying the government's debts by printing money as fast as they can print it. You know what this is? Proudly showed it to me yesterday: this is the first certificate for one hundred thousand marks. You know what it was worth when the market closed this afternoon? A little over five bucks!"
I already knew that, because I checked with Christoph twice a day now. The mark was falling so fast that everybody in Germany was checking the Dollarkurs twice a day.
"What they think they're doing," said Whitney Wood, "is keeping unemployment down. Keeping people at work, because they're sure that if they have more unemployed workers they'll get communism, and they're more afraid of communism than anything else. But Stinnes is talking out of both sides of his mouth: what he says is that he wants to keep his men at work, he wants to keep German products cheap so they can compete successfully abroad. That's fine. But what he's doing is encouraging the Reichsbank to print more and more money so the money's worth less every day. At the same time he borrows to the hilt, buys up every mine and every steel mill and every factory he can get his hands on - he's been doing that for years now - and then he pays back the loans with marks that are worth a fraction of what they were worth when he borrowed them. He's built an empire out of this inflation."
"But Mr. Wood, why do they lend him the money?"
"Because, they say, he's providing jobs. They don't want the men on the streets. They're afraid of revolution. Stinnes says his men are underpaid, but he claims he could triple their wages if they'd work ten hours a day. And since they won't do that, they've got to be forced, the way they were forced in the War."
"How is he going to force them to work ten hours a day? " I asked.
"Stinnes wants to install a dictator, but not some prince or some king or somebody like von Seeckt. Not somebody with a monocle and medals. He wants a man who speaks the people's language, as he puts it. A man who can rouse the people, set them on fire, persuade them that working sixty hours a week will bring Germany out of this mess."
"And where's he going to find such a man?"
"In Munich," said Whitney Wood. "Already been found."
"In Munich? You don't mean Hitler? Adolf Hitler?"
Whitney Wood nodded.
"Oh no," I said. "He's nuts. He's the one who's screaming about the Jews all the time. Everything that's happened to Germany was plotted by the Jews, he's obsessed -"
"Yeah, that's the part I don't quite understand, because of course I have to get all this through interpreters.... Why should Stinnes want to back this Hitler against his own people? I mean, how cynical can you -"
"What own people?"
"Well, Stinnes is a Jew."
"No. He's not a Jew."
"Sure he is. All you have to do is look at him."
"No, sir. He's not. Old family from the Ruhr. Coal mine operators."
"Who told you that?"
"Baron von Waldstein."
"Well, he ought to know." Whitney Wood looked thoughtful. "Okay, that makes the puzzle come together. Stinnes says that Munich is just about ready to blow up. The Bavarians hate Berlin, they hate the Republic, the town is swarming with people who want to overthrow the government, Bavarian monarchists who want their own king back, a dozen different Right-wing outfits - most of them armed to the teeth - and Hitler's gang - I can't remember exactly what they call themselves - they're disciplined, they carry out orders, they're getting uniforms and money, but most important of all, Hitler is a terrific speech maker, he draws crowds, he mesmerizes thousands of people at a time by yelling at them, he's a born orator, and Stinnes thinks he can get the workers away from communism, that he'll let the business people run the economy, get it back into some kind of order, and when they've done that, they'll be able to raise new capital abroad. And when he says 'abroad' you know where he means." Whitney Wood grinned. "I guess that's why Herr Stinnes is being so nice to me."
I shook my head. "This Hitler ... You know, he isn't even a German. He came over from Austria, he was a painter or something -"
"So what? The chancellor they've got now, Dr. Cuno, was the president of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. A painter couldn't do much worse, could he? And it isn't as if they're going to let him run anything. They're only going to hire his voice, to bring< some order. Germans like order, and what they've got now is chaos, and chaos could cause revolution."
Whitney Wood paused to light a cigar. "I mean from our point of view, Stinnes's plan is better than a Bolshevik Germany, isn't it?"
"It's just like the War," said Miss Boatwright when she had finished her hot bouillon. Her cheeks were red again. When she stepped off the train from Essen she looked gray and cold and very glad to see me on the smoky platform. I had persuaded her to come directly to the Adlon and to take a hot bath in Mr. Wood's suite while he and I had drinks downstairs.
"The Germans are trying a kind of passive resistance," said Miss Boatwright." They just refuse to work for the French. The mayor of Essen is in jail. Directors of the biggest steel companies are in jail. The plants are closed. The workers are wandering around the streets, getting into trouble with French soldiers. There's real hardship, real hunger again, just like 1919." Miss Boatwright looked around the blazing luxury of the Adlon's dining room. "Whitney, I must confess this place makes me uncomfortable. When I think what we could do with what this dinner is costing you ... "
"Dear girl, you've spent the whole day on a freezing train -"
"Oh, I know, and I do appreciate the way you take care of me, honestly I do, and why, after all, should you - either of you - deprive yourselves when it would just be a drop in the bucket? In any event, I'm glad you've come to know each other while I was away, because I'm very fond of both of you."
"Tell us more about the Ruhr," I said.
"Well, I think it was just despicable of the French to do what they did. In the first place, now the Germans simply can't pay any more reparations, and in the second place, this invasion drives all the Center Germans to the Right. It's exactly what the Nationalists want. They are streaming into the Ruhr, signing up recruits, blowing up the coal trains going to France, getting financial support from the big industrialists: Thyssen and Kirdorf and Krupp and those people. There are bonfires in the streets, rabble-rousing speeches, great crowds bellowing 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles' and 'Die Wacht am Rhein'-"
"That's happening all over Germany," I said. "Right here in Berlin and in Hamburg and in Munich."
"You can hardly blame them," said Whitney Wood. "There's absolutely no excuse for what the French are doing."
"Well, why can't we do something?" demanded Miss Boatwright.
"We? You mean Warren G. Harding? The American people are just not interested in all this. We've pulled our troops off the Rhine to show the French we disapprove, but that's as far as we're willing to go. What we might do, I think, is push for some changes in this reparations nonsense. The French and the British are never going to pay their war debts to us, and as you say the Germans obviously can't pay these ridiculous sums that have been assessed against them. So we'll have to work something out."
Whitney Wood paused to finish his coffee. Then he wiped his mouth and smiled across the table at us. "What amuses me, I must say, is to discover two Americans -- indeed, two Philadelphia Quakers -- who rushed to the defense of La Belle France even before we got into the War, now berating our gallant ally and shedding tears for the bloody Hun! Are you going native?"
PROLOGUE - THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
I. HOW I GOT THERE
1. PARIS 1922
2. VERDUN 1916
3. IT'S STEALING MONEY, ISN'T IT
4. WHERE WERE YOU IN 1919?
5. RELIABLE TROOPS
6. AN ISLAND
7. BISMARCK FOUND THEM USEFUL
8. INTRODUCTIONS
9. THE LITTLE HOUSE
10. INDIAN CROSSES
11. ANOTHER PART OF TOWN
12. A VIEW OF THE GENDARMENMARKT
13. TWO FOR TEA
14. ON THE TOWN
15. A VIEW OF THE HAVEL
16. REIGEN
II. WHAT HAPPENED
17. THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922
18. MONDAY, JUNE 19, 1922
19. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1922
20. FRIDAY, JUNE 23, 1922
21. SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1922
22. WHAT HAPPENED?
III. THE WITCHES' SABBATH
23. SILENCE WITH VOICES
24. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS
25. SAME SONGS, DIFFERENT SINGERS
>26. THEY'RE ONLY GOING TO HIRE HIS VOICE
27. INFLATION WORKS IN DIFFERENT WAYS
28. SMALL CHANGE
29. WHY NOT PAINT LILI?
30. COLD WIND IN MAY
31. ROLLING THUNDER
32. WALDSTEIN'S VOICE
33. THE MATTER OF A DOWRY
34. A RUSSIAN WORD AND A GERMAN WORD
35. THE MARCH ON BERLIN
36. A PIG LOSES MONEY ALL THE TIME
37. THE ARTISTS' BALL
IV. STRIKE TWELVE ZEROs
38. AMYTAL DREAMS
39. LETTERS
40. PROFESSOR JAFFA'S PROGNOSIS
41. THE OTHER SUBJECT
42. ROLLING HOME