An excerpt from Gordon Sander’s book, The Frank Family That Survived.
CHAPTER 2
Ultra-Dada Days
A terrorist revolution under the leadership of Dr Liebknecht, the Radical Socialist, will break out Friday evening, according to reports. Liebknecht, the reports say, has 15,000 men well-armed. The population of Berlin is at the mercy of gangs of marauders, and there appears to be no authority there.
The New York Times, 5 December 1918
There comes a moment in the life of every man, be he good or bad, when appalled by the monotony and drabness of his daily life, his soul yearns for something different - he longs for the unknown, for the glamour and excitement he imagines to be the lot of the other man; the man in the street.
The opening text from the German melodramatic film, The Street (1923)
Jedermann sei eigner Fussball
Title of a German dadaist publication from
the early 1920s, meaning 'Everyman his own
football'
The 1905 edition of Baedeker's Berlin, written when the ancient settlement on the river Spree was coming into its own as one of Europe's great cities, if not yet Germany's capital, draws an inviting portrait of a dynamic, light-dappled city, a young city, a city on the move.
Berlin's transformation from a minor crossroads into the great metropolis of central Europe, with a population - then - of just over three million, had been a quick one. As late as 1860, when the city contained fewer than 800,000 people, Henry Adams, the well-known American writer, and diplomat, described Berlin, still laboring in the shadows of its more successful sister city, the port of Hamburg, as a "poor provincial town - simple, dirty, uncivilised, and in most respects disgusting. Not anymore. 'Almost every part of Berlin offers a pleasing picture, declared the German guidebook writer.
Its streets enjoy model cleanliness. There are few dark lanes or alleys even in the oldest parts of the city. Nearly all the newer houses have balconies, gay in summer with flowers and foliage. The public squares are embellished with gardens, monuments, and fountains. The centres of traffic, with their network of railway lines, and the navigation on the river, offer scenes of remarkable animation.
It is a new city, the newest I have ever seen,' rhapsodized Mark Twain, the American writer, who visited booming post-Bismarck Berlin several times. To Twain, the Midwesterner, the bustling, new-fangled Berlin of the 1890s and early 1900s reminded him most of America's then metropolis-on-the-move, Chicago, although he liked Berlin even more.
Like many foreigners, Twain was most taken with the city's enormous boulevards. Unter den Linden and the Kurfürstendamm had been built
wide by Frederick the Great in order to accommodate military manoeuvres, but now, like the Champs Elysées or Fifth Avenue, had taken on a life of their own. Only parts of Chicago are stately and beautiful,' enthused Twain, whereas all of Berlin is stately and substantial, and it is not merely in parts but uniformly beautiful.'
Above all, alongside the 'new Berlin's contagious energy and 'animation', there was peace and order and a respect for old values - Einechristliche Weltanschauung, as Germans say. This was the beguiling, even if somewhat staid, pre-1914 Berlin, the Berlin of the Kaiserzeit, before the Kaiser and his armies, including several hundred thousand patriotic Berliners - and thousands of equally patriotic German-Jewish Berliners - marched off to war and the abyss.
But in March 1919 that Berlin was quite dead. George Renwick, correspondent for The New York Times, found the Großstadt - the Great City- still dazed from the recent upheaval, as well as suffering from the extended Allied food blockade. "The civil strife in Lichtenberg' - an eastern district of Berlin, where thousands of left-wing 'Spartacist fighters had died fighting the right-wing Freikorps army units who (somewhat incongruously) had come to the aid of the shaky five-month-old Social Democratic-led republic - was, the American hopefully noted, ‘most at an end. There [is] evidence of increasing order. The trains [are) working and the underground trains [are] running.
Still, taking a taxi through the city, Renwick was taken aback by the contrast between the gloomy city he found and the upbeat one he once knew:
…Then began a ride through a phantom city for that describes Berlin today. The streets and long avenues were dimly lighted, and boys were dashing on roller skates. Shadowy people moved slowly about aimlessly, it would appear.
Now and then I heard the hoarse call of some street vendor.
The benign, light-dappled Wilhelmian Berlin was now a dark, menacing place where many buildings still bore bullet holes from the recent street battles between the well-trained, well-armed Freikorps and the reds, whose leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, had been shot and bludgeoned in the Hotel Eden and dumped in the Tiergarten (not far from where the Franks would shortly set up house) just a few weeks before. Luxemburg's bloated, unrecognizable body turned up floating in the Landwehr Canal. It was a hungry, disease-ridden city: the cruelly extended Allied blockade had only just been lifted after the victors had extorted massive payments from the prostrate Germans in return for resuming emergency food shipments, a precursor of the vindictiveness shortly to emanate from the Versailles Peace Conference; the frightening, macabre city that was the inspiration for the soon-to-be-released silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Calgari, in which Cesare, cinema's first zombie, blindly follows his murderous master's voice and kidnaps an innocent young woman - presumably a Berliner - and carries her over the city rooftops like King Kong until, somewhat inscrutably, he drops dead from exhaustion. But there is no logic to these things.
Neither was there much logic to postwar Berlin, where the self-proclaimed "dada' artist George Grosz celebrated the void with his scabrous, unforgettable etchings of the city, with power-hungry right-wing generals and monocled capitalists milling contentedly about while veterans begged for change. The new, nihilistic art/anti-art movement had taken the nonsense word 'dada' for its unlikely name. Grosz himself
carried a mocking but accurate banner: DADA ÜBER ALLES.
"Not now brightly lighted cafés and restaurants, brilliant streets, and the crush of traffic,' bemoaned the stricken Renwick. Overall was an underworld gloom. How different all this was when compared with the bright and busy lights of Berlin before the war!'
Just beneath Renwick's depressing report was an equally apocalyptic dispatch from the Associated Press noting that Germany's food stocks would be exhausted by the end of May.
This was the Berlin that greeted Myrtil Frank in December of that tumultuous first postwar year when he moved into his new flat in Brückenallee, a leafy street just off the Tiergarten, and prepared to take up his duties as one of the newly hired managers of the all-important municipal food rationing office.
To be sure, the very fact of the storm-tossed republic's continued existence itself was no small miracle. In June, just as the echoes of the last shots of the Spartacist revolt had died away, the government and the country were shocked by the promulgation of the terms agreed upon at Versailles as the final price of peace. Amongst the many onerous provisions of the treaty - or Diktat, as the document was quickly dubbed were requirements that Germany cede Alsace-Lorraine back to France. No great surprise there - but also the Saar, Upper Silesia, and other parts of her territory, as well as all the former German colonies.
Additionally, under the terms of Versailles, the German army would be reduced to a rump force of 100,000. On and on the humiliating terms went, as Germans read with dismay. The German air force would be abolished. The Rhineland, including the Palatinate, was to be demilitarised and occupied by French troops: the Hünsruck, the Franks and their Breitenheim neighbours learned would soon be swarming with Zouaves.
Only in the creation of a League of Nations to arbitrate future conflicts was the influence of Woodrow Wilson's idealistic Fourteen Points seen. However, in the terms specifically regarding Germany, the vengeful British and the even more vengeful French had already won the day.
All this was bad enough. But the provisos that stuck the most in Germany's collective craw were Articles 227 to 232, the so-called honor clauses, particularly 231, the 'war guilt clause', which declared Germany responsible "for causing all the loss and damage' suffered by the Allies, strongly implying that she was solely responsible for the war. Article 231 was used to justify the next clause, 232, which created a commission to determine reparations - eventually set at the ludicrous figure of 132 billion gold marks, about 32 billion gold dollars. Germans were outraged. Certainly, few believed that Germany was solely responsible for the war. Here, ready-made was Hitler's soapbox.
As Herbert Hoover, the head of the American relief mission (and future US president) noted: Hate crawled in [to the Versailles negotiations] with demands for punishment, revenge, indemnities, and reparations ... We and our world must live with these seventy million Germans. Hoover, who, ironically, would be cast out of office by American voters in 1932 for his own perceived callousness, went on to caution, 'No matter how deeply we may feel at the present moment, our vision must stretch over the next hundred years.'
But Hoover's idealistic vision, as well as Wilson's original one, failed at Versailles. Hatred triumphed. The hatred would be returned.
The provisional government in Weimar was thrown into turmoil by the publication of the proposed terms. 'What hand would not wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?' cried Philipp Scheidemann, its first president, who had declared the 'accidental' republic six months before; he resigned rather than sign the offending document. Only an ultimatum from Paris that made it plain that the Allies were prepared to invade Germany brought a reluctant German delegation - including a brave German Jew, Matthias Erzburger, who was vilified and then assassinated for his efforts - to sign the Diktat on 28 June 1919.
In August the still-concussed government's prestige was bolstered by the formal promulgation of the new ultra-democratic (if perhaps not entirely thought through) Weimar constitution. Combining elements drawn from both the American presidential system and the British and French parliamentary ones, the highly idealistic document, drafted by Hugo Preuss - a professor of law at the University of Berlin, a liberal and another Jew - included provisions for popular initiative and referendum, as well as : a strong president elected by the whole people, and a chancellor responsible to the legislature.
Unfortunately, the Weimar constitution also contained the means of its own demise, including provisions for the autonomy of local state governments - which would soon allow Bavarian state authorities to allow the Nazis to flourish under their lenient rule - and, more fatally, Article 48, which empowered the president to rule by decree, the same provision which would eventually lead to the installation in the Chancellery of a one-time Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler, then recovering from his wounds in hospital, and the end of the democratic Second Reich.
At the time, however, the new constitution seemed to offer Germany the basis for a new start. In September, the new republican advisers, deeming it safe to come back to the capital, if not quite safe enough to hold national elections, returned to Berlin from Weimar to - gently - take up the reins.
But Berlin wasn't really safe yet, either for governments or for ordinary people. The food distribution system that Myrtil had been hired to help straighten out was still hopelessly fouled-up. In August, to cite but one example of the ambient chaos, 75,000 food retailers closed their shops to protest at the imminent commercialisation of food supplies. There were
dozens of other strikes, some serious, some frivolous. Street crime was rampant. Karl Baedeker's gay, animated Berlin was gone. This, now, was Dr Caligari's Berlin, and it would remain so for some time.
Brückenallee, the once elegant street near the Tiergarten where Myrtil had found an apartment for Flory and himself, was somewhat grim. If one looked around, one could still find bullet holes from the recent rebellion. There were plenty of ghosts.
Not long before, during the war, the leafy street had reverberated with the sound of hearses ferrying the coffins of the war dead from the nearby Bellevue tram station. At night, this morbid spectacle had been followed by the spine-chilling cries of the animals at the once great, now abandoned Berlin zoo, being killed and devoured by starving Germans. If one listened closely enough, the Franks' neighbours swore, you could still hear the bellowing beasts.
All in all, it was not the most auspicious place to begin a new life. But the Franks refused to be disheartened. Myrtil's new, responsible position with the Berlin food administration was his chance, their chance too, and with Flory's backing, he resolved to give it everything he had, chaos be damned.
The first few years of the Weimar Republic - 1920, 1921, 1922 - coincided with the first few years of the Franks' married lives, as well as their lives as independent adults and as bona fide Berliners. It was a happy and exciting period, a flourishing in the void. In the outside
world, the world of everyday Berlin, dada - chaos - still ruled all, but inside their world, at Brückenallee 4, things were fairly gemütlich.
Myrtil's work with the city food administration continued to be arduous, as he and his fellow logistical workers did their best to distribute the poorly coordinated supplies they received while coping with the chaos. Despite his and his staff's energetic efforts to keep Berlin fed, the general social and economic situation continued to be extremely volatile and the prospect of a complete breakdown in the system was never far away.
In January 1920, a month after Myrtil began his logistical duties, The New York Times reported that, as a result of late-arriving rural food stocks, the food situation in the capital remained 'critical'. Another Spartacist revolt was imminent, the paper reported.
Somehow, however, the desperately needed supplies were found, transported, and distributed. Although Berliners - including both the general citizenry and the food merchants who had to comply with the new rationing rules - continued to grumble, there was no recurrence of the food riots that had ravaged the city the previous autumn. Catastrophe was averted. The Spartacists, or what was left of them, stayed at home.
Nevertheless, the threat of mass famine continued to hang over Berlin, and over the work of Myrtil and other senior food officials, for some time. The sight of Berlin families rummaging through the rubbish in order to supplement their meager rations was common throughout the early 1920s. In January 1921, a then-noted Swiss-based observer of world affairs by the name of F. Forster publicly declared that because of the continued shortages Germany was on the verge of anarchy. Should Germany continue to suffer so acutely from underfeeding,' the professor warned, 'she will develop into a terrible powder magazine, threatening all Europe.' The near-famine conditions of the early 1920s, which were to a great degree the direct result of Allied spite (a factor in explaining why that shameful episode is all but forgotten in the West today) - the same dreadful conditions that Myrtil and his fellow workers labored to ameliorate were amongst the underlying resentments that eventually led to the Nazi explosion.
In the meantime, according to the same article that carried Dr. Foerster's doomsday prediction, at least one eminent Berlin physician was advising young Berliners that it was their duty not "to bring children into such a world? Such a world, indeed.
The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the many Russian artists and intellectuals who traveled to Berlin during the immediate postwar period a distinguished group that included such luminaries as painter Wassily Kandinsky, who joined the inaugural faculty of the avant-garde Bauhaus school in Weimar, as well as others - was shocked by the violence and misery he found when he arrived in Berlin in 1921. The Germans were living as though they were at a railway station,' the amazed Russian wrote. 'No one knew what would happen from one day to the next. Shopkeepers changed their price tickets every day: the mark was falling. Herds of foreigners wandered along the Kurfürstendamm: they were buying up the remnants of former luxury for a song.‘
However, factory chimneys continued to smoke, bookkeepers neatly Wrote out astronomical figures, and prostitutes painstakingly made up their faces. At every turn, there were small Diele, dance halls, where lean couples conscientiously jiggled up and down. Jazz blared. Popular songs proclaimed: 'Yes, we have no bananas, and 'Tomorrow's the end of the world'. However, the end of the world was postponed from one day to the next.
And Myrtil and Flory were never happier, or more in love. Frustrating though Myrtil's job at the rationing office might be at times, it also empowered him. It was distressing, of course, to pass the line of crippled veterans selling matches or begging for change on Friedrichstrasse every day, as he went to work. Still, as Myrtil calculated the logistics of feeding Berlin - his Berlin - he felt he was making a contribution. Moreover, the pay wasn't bad. And every day he was making new connections, connections that would stand him in good stead in the career he wanted: as a stockbroker on the Berlin exchange.
All in all, it was not bad for a young whippersnapper, particularly a Jew out of Breitenheim. When Myrtil arrived home, after walking the short distance from the Bellevue tram station, he was, more often than not, in an upbeat mood, and so was his beautiful young wife.
These were also the years when Myrtil and Flory got to know each other for the first time. There were some surprises, most of them nice.
For one thing, as Flory found, her leonine husband was still in touch with his silly side, a rarity in such a serious man. In years to come, Myrtil would entertain his grandchildren by placing a silver tray on his head for no particular reason and walking around; now he performed similar stunts for Flory. He also had a huge, yelping laugh that seemed to come out of nowhere. When 'Til was business, he was all business, but when he wasn't, he was game for anything and his eyes shone with a slightly manic glee.
Flory had her own quirks, as Myrtil similarly discovered. Already a born optimist, she was a fan of autosuggestion - or self-conscious auto-
suggestion, as it was technically called - the popular system of self-help that was all the rage then in Europe and America, particularly amongst suggestible young middle-class women. Devised by the French pharmacist Emile Coué, this easy-to-use, if somewhat fatuous system of self-help - a precursor of today's positive thinking - revolved around the
repeated use of the lullaby-like phrase: Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Flory's extreme aestheticism, the legacy of her teenage Parisian sortie, was also an aid of sorts. When she wasn't playing the piano, the musically inclined young Frankfurt native liked to hum. Flory was a great hummer. She also loved to decorate. This was welcome, except when her husband's more garish and her somewhat more sedate tastes clashed. On
the rare occasion when this occurred, Myrtil, in awe of his wife in many ways, was happy to defer to her more educated judgement. After all she had spent a year in Paris!
It was not a perfect match - Myrtil's easy-going personality jarred somewhat with Flory's more conservative, controlling one - but it was a good one, and would remain so for some time. If the high-spirited Myrtil was schnapps, to put it in bibulous terms, Flory was Dubonnet. And together they made quite a party.
If all else failed, the Franks could also join the growing number of Berliners who chose to escape reality by going to the cinema. If postwar Berlin was jazz-mad, it was also movie-mad, taking to the new-fangled medium with gold-rush-like enthusiasm: in 1919, while the social fabric of revolutionary Berlin came close to disintegrating, dozens of movie
palaces were erected around the city, lavish sanctuaries in which the anxiety-ridden masses could lose themselves for an hour or two as the
silent images flickered before them, more often than not to live musical accompaniment.
Premièring in 1920, the aforementioned Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a hit with the young cinema-going audience. Even more popular, however- and more to Flory's classical tastes, when they attended the opulent Palast am Zoo located nearby - were the great historical epics, like Madame du Barry and The Loves of Pharaoh, which the renowned director Ernst Lubitsch had created for UFA, the pioneering Berlin film studio. Otto Friedrich writes in his bestselling 1972 book Before the Deluge:
Almost every day in the streets of Berlin ... there were crowds of demonstrators marching to and fro for one cause or another, but inside the shelter of the UFA Palast am Zoo, where a symphony orchestra of seventy musicians provided the accompaniment, Berliners could escape into an imaginary world in which Lubitsch's crowds were storming an artificial Berlin, or besieging an artificial Tower of London.
The Franks had each other. This was important, particularly on those occasions when the once reliable city lights really did go out, as they briefly did during the five-day-long Kapp Putsch.
In 1919 it had been the revolutionary left's turn to try to seize the government. It was only a matter of time before the revolutionary right attempted to do the same thing. On 13 March 1920, Berlin and the world were startled to learn that a group of right-wing soldiers, led by an obscure politician named Wolfgang Kapp, had seized the Chancellery and set up machine-gun posts around the governmental district. Backing Kapp was the veteran Ehrhardt Brigade, a battle-hardened unit which had fought in the Baltic during the Great War, and had also seen service as a Freikorps unit during the suppression of the Spartacist rebellion. The rebels also reportedly had the support of General Ludendorff, the German commander during the Great War, still acting very much his old imperious self.
On the day that the attempted coup d'état took place, the displaced republican government called a general strike. To its surprise and delight, the strike was heeded, as the unions, left-wing militants, the government
and Berliners themselves combined to put the coup down. Berlin was already used to strikes, but this was the first time absolutely nothing worked. Not even the movies. For five days Berliners stayed at home, read by daylight and dined by candlelight.
In the end the Kapp Putsch proved more opéra bouffe than coup d'état. The hapless Kapp, who had no experience of government (as manifested by his decision to dissolve and un-dissolve the Prussian State Legislature on the same day), spent most of his time walking around the darkened, abandoned government offices in a semi-daze, before being persuaded to give up and fly to Sweden.
'If only we had shot more people every thing would have been all right,' one soldier who supported the short-lived coup said later.
On 20 May 1920, the day after Kapp flew into Swedish exile with his sobbing wife, the men of the Ehrhardt Brigade (whose battle flag was adorned with the diminutive pre-Nazi swastika) dutifully filed out of the government compound, lustily singing their barracks songs, just as they had done when they had entered five days before.
The failure of the Kapp Putsch gave Ebert, the Socialist chancellor, a last chance to carry out basic, desperately needed reforms in the civil service and armed services. Nonetheless, these changes were only partly popular with the German public, which was still divided between left and right. The government coalition failed to win a majority in the June 1920 elections, resulting in a divided Reichstag, the first of the divided Reichstags that would burden the doomed republic for the remainder of its thirteen-year existence.
But the republic survived; the end of the world was postponed. And the thin, love-possessed couples at the Diele continued to dance away to the tune of 'Yes, we have no bananas'
On 27 December 1920, Myrtil's twenty-seventh birthday, Flory presented him with their first child, a daughter. An Anglophile and a Francophile, the internationally minded (but still deeply patriotic) Flory decided to name her brown-haired, hazel-eyed daughter Dorrit, after
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, one of her favourite books: a gesture of true Anglo-German rapprochement.
True to her Dickensian roots, the Franks' beautiful daughter, who was soon gleefully waddling around the big apartment at Brückenallee 4, would turn out to be the great romantic of the family. Outspoken, strong- willed, temperamental, adorable: Dorrit was an admixture of her high-spirited father and her grande dame-like mother. Cassandra-like physicians be damned: Flory and Myrtil were very glad that they had decided to bring such a sparkling child into their world.
Still, certain worrying developments in the world beyond the Hansa Viertal or Hansa Quarter, as their smart neighbourhood was called, could not be wished away, notably the return of anti-Semitism to German public life.
This pernicious development coincided with a rise in anti-Semitism both in Europe and worldwide. This was the same period when Henry Ford, the brilliant industrialist and rabid Jew-hater, was frequently proclaiming his belief in The Protocols of Zion - the counterfeit nineteenth-century document supposedly 'proving' that Jews were linked with an ancient conspiracy to take over the world - in the pages of his friendly home-town newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Many Americans believed him.
Meanwhile, Eastern Europe was consumed by a new wave of anti-Semitic fervour. In Hungary, so-called 'white terror' gangs attacked Jews on the streets of Budapest, while the avowedly anti-Semitic government ordered the expulsion of all Jews who had entered since 1914. Poland, historically the country most receptive to anti-Semitism, was racked by such pogroms, as was Czechoslovakia.
In heady, 'anything goes', democratic Weimar, Jews were no longer held back, but they were no longer protected by the power of the Crown as they had been under Bismarck and the Kaiser. There was more opportunity than ever before - witness Myrtil's fairly prominent position, for example - but there was also more exposure.
Attacks on Jews in public - when the attackers were sure they had a bona fide Jew in their clutches - were commonplace during this turbulent time, as a German Jew by the name of Conrad Rosenstein relates in his memoir:
I was on a train one night on my way home from Frankfurt. The train was pitch dark. The lights were out, nothing uncommon after the war when German railroads were in utter disrepair and few things functioned orderly. It was either in 1919 or 1920, during one of the early periods of violent anti-Semitic acts which might occur anywhere, and when a Jew who had the guts to fight could become embroiled in a vicious brawl. It happened often enough on a train and it was difficult not to react to the slander and the smears poured over you. That night, we were seven or eight people in the dark, fourth-class compartment, sitting in utter silence till one of the men started the usual refrain: 'Those God-damned Jews, they are the root of all our troubles.'
Enraged, Rosenstein challenged the bullies in the dark with the fact that he was a Jew.
That was the signal they needed. Now they really went after me, threatening me physically. I didn't hold my tongue as the argument went back and forth. They began jostling me till one of them next to me and near the door, probably more encouraged by the darkness than by his own valour, suggested: Let's throw the Jew out of the train.'
At which point Rosenstein wisely decided not to provoke them further.
Attacks on Jewish public officials - and not merely verbal ones - also escalated during this incendiary period. Were three quarters of the
German nation still on the side of the Jews and against the anti-Semites, as Rickert had so loudly asserted in the Reichstag forty years before? It was getting hard for Jews to tell.
One anti-Semitic attack that threatened the fragility of the Weimar Republic was the cold-blooded murder in June 1922 of Walther Rathenau, then the German Foreign Minister.
The noted industrialist and Renaissance man had not initally rallied to the republic nor vice versa. At the 1919 constitutional assembly, a move to nominate Rathenau as president produced jeers from the right. Stricken, the great man withdrew his name. The Parliament of any other civilised state would have shown sufficient respect for a man of recognised intellectual standing; he protested, somewhat preciously. But the Parliament of the German republic greeted (me] with roars and shrieks of laughter.’
Nevertheless, Rathenau, who helped the German Democratic Party, was a convinced democrat, and the new goverment found that it could not spare his gifts for long. In May 1921 he became Minister of Reconstruction, and in January 1922 was appointed Foreign Minister. He became a symbol for the republic, and, as its most eminent Jew, the perfect scapegoat for German nationalists who were disgruntled with it, as well as those who wished to avenge the alleged Jewish-perpetrated 'stab-in-the-back' that had led to the humiliation of Versailles.
Rathenau's policies only increased resentment against him from the right. In his controversial first speech to the Reichstag as Minister of Reconstruction, he advocated fulfilment of Germany's obligations under Versailles, however distasteful, as the best means of 'linking up with the world again'. He continued his programme of linking up with the outer world, including Germany's former enemies, by signing the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, thus re-establishing economic and political relations with its ex-foe. A deft move, the treaty signified Germany's re-emergence as an independent agent in the arena of foreign affairs.
Unfortunately, by linking arms with the same Bolshevik government that had sponsored the Spartacists, he also opened himself up to criti-
cism from the right that he was some sort of Communist agent - in addition to being a Jew. As it turned out, the far-sighted rapprochement with the Soviets - which, ironically, in the light of conservative opposition, wound up playing a catalytic role in German rearmament, as the Soviets secretly began to help the Reich rebuild its military - turned out to be the German-Jewish diplomat's death warrant.
By the spring of 1922, Rathenau had become the target of numerous death threats. In May, Karl Wirth, then the German Chancellor, was distressed to receive confirmed intelligence of a murder plot against his idealistic Foreign Minister. Worried, Wirth shared the news with Rathenau, insisting that the latter accept police protection. After a long
pause to take in the news, Rathenau refused. 'Dear friend,' he reassured Wirth, putting both of his hands on the worried Chancellor's shoulders, 'it is nothing. Who would do me harm?'
On the morning of 24 June 1922, as Rathenau was being driven to work in his open car from his villa in Grunemald, a group of three
Freikorps veterans, led by a rabid former naval lieutenant by the name of Erwin Kern, shot him as they passed in another vehicle, and tossed a
grenade at the mortally wounded politician for good measure.
Rathenau's murder, Weimar's equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. stunned Germany. This atrocious crime has struck not only Rathenan declaimed President Ebert in his oration to the fallen cabinet minister, "but the German people!' An estimated two million Berliners - more than half the city's population - lined Rathenau's funeral route or marched in simultaneous protest. As historian David Lange writes, Jews and Gentiles alike understood that the fragile new republic couldn't afford to lose true patriots like him.
Amongst the Berliners who lined Rathenau's funeral route were Flory and Myrtil Frank. For cultured and assimilated Jews like the Franks, the murder of Rathenau - the ultimate child of German Bildung - was earth-shaking. For the first time in their adult lives, the Franks felt unsafe as Jews in Germany.
That same year, ruinous hyperinflation destroyed the German currency. In July, the mark, already battered by Germany's economic and political unrest, stood at 670 to the dollar, compared with 331 a mere few weeks before.
The republican government, in an understandable, if not particularly well-thought-out desire to act against the French government, which was still occupying the Ruhr Valley, decided to subsidize 'passive resistance to the occupation by paying the salaries of striking workers there. However, the Weimar treasury, already near-bankrupt from the strain of reparations, had nothing to back up the specie it continued to print.
The mark now went into freefall. In February it hit 12,000 to the dollar and that was only the start. By August, it hit a million - and kept going. A tram ride that had cost 3,000 marks in July soon cost 10,000; then 50,000; then 100,000. Restaurant prices changed while diners were in the middle of their meals. If anyone needed the proof that dada truly ruled
in Germany, this was it.
Middle-class citizens who lived on a fixed income and had dutifully put their money into savings accounts simply couldn't keep up. A few didn't even try. In a typical horror story, a disconsolate Berlin writer was said to have spent his entire life savings on a last subway ride through the city. Then he went home and starved himself to death.
Amongst those patriotic, hard-working Germans who were wiped out by the galloping inflation was Max Frank, who was now forced to sell the family vineyard, a move that doubtless hastened his death several years later at the relatively young age of sixty-three.
Taking in the chaos around him - including his father's bankruptcy- Myrtil in October 1923 carefully packed his wife and two-year-old daughter into a waiting taxi, accompanied them to the train station and placed them on an express train for Lugano, the Swiss resort, where he had arranged for them to stay in a chalet for the duration. Remaining behind - after all, he still needed to try to make a living - he promised to telegraph once things calmed down.
But the madness continued. At the beginning of November, the mark stood at a billion to the dollar.
Some tried to lay the blame for the tragic economic state of affairs at the doorstep of Berlin's growing Jewish community, particularly the large number of conspicuously unassimilated Jews from Eastern Europe who
had recently settled in Berlin. Retaining their distinctive dress, speech and customs, the so called Ostjuden settled in Berlin's Scheunenviertel during the early 1920s, turning it into a kind of ghetto, and making themselves an anti-Semitic lightning rod.
‘In addition to finding the Ostjuden distasteful,' Lange writes, Berlin's assimilated Jews worried that this highly noticeable community might fan the fires of anti-Semitism, perhaps provoking the kind of pogrom-like violence that Germany had hitherto avoided.' And so they did. On 5 November 1923, a pogrom-like riot broke out in the old Jewish quarter, as scores of enraged unemployed men fell upon the bearded residents, who they believed - falsely - had bought up the funds guaranteeing their jobless benefits at usurious rates.
Up and up the mark soared, while down below chaos reigned. 'Now,' writes historian Sebastian Haffner in his poignant memoir, Defying Hitler, 'we expected the downfall of the state, even the dissolution of the Reich. There had never been so many rumours: the Rhineland had seceded; the Kaiser [then in exile in Holland] had come back; the French had marched in. It was difficult to distinguish the possible from the impossible. People disappeared [by] the dozens ... Saviours appeared everywhere, people with long hair and hair shirts declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world.'
By now the mark had virtually disappeared. Sojourning in Hamburg that month, the American painter Marsden Hartley, fascinated and appalled at Germany's collective nervous breakdown, wrote a letter to his friend Alfred Stieglitz on the back of three ten-million-mark notes; he told Stieglitz that it was cheaper to do that than to use regular stationery.
Faster and faster the couples at the Diele danced. Perhaps, they shrugged, tomorrow indeed would be the end of the world.
On 15 November the mark stood at 4.2 billion to the dollar. Three days later, in what seemed to many a poor replay of the Kapp Putsch, Adolf Hitler, the corporal-turned-politician, made his first appearance on the German political stage, issuing a call for a national right-wing revolution in a beer hall in Munich. The self-proclaimed revolutionary and avenger of Versailles managed to get a few of his fledgling National Socialist Party comrades killed before he was hauled away by the Bavarian police. He wore short hair rather than long, but he didn't seem all that different from the other wild-eyed saviours who had preceded him.