Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature, is a meticulously detailed account of a few crucial weeks in German history, as seen from the perspective of writers, poets, journalists, playwrights, actors. These few weeks – from 28 January 1933 to 15 March 1933 – are the period during which an insecure Hitler, finding himself at the head of the tottering Weimar regime assembles, with bewildering speed, the legal and bureaucratic apparatus of the Nazi state.
“Everything happened in a frenzy. Four weeks and two days elapsed between Hitler’s accession to power and the Emergency Decree for the Protection of People and State, which abrogated all fundamental civil rights. It took only this one month to transform a state under the rule of law into a violent dictatorship without scruples,” writes Wittstock.
With Hitler installed as Fuhrer for life, this regime only came to an end full twelve years later, with Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker. Wittstock’s account has been assembled from an extensive archive of writings both published and personal, from letters and diaries. It is in that sense a scholarly work of archival research.
Except – mercifully – that it isn’t.
The author declares that he has used some – albeit a bare minimum, he assures us – literary licence in order to render the context accessible, and the narrative plausible. For all that, the scale of the horror he documents is so extreme as to appear impossible- except that the factual basis of this work is rock solid.
The narrative opens in late-January, at the annual Press Ball in Berlin’s post Hotel Adlon. The ball is one of the most glamorous events of the season, and the place is studded with celebrities, and celebrity-hunters, with the great and the good, and with those who gawp at them. But there is a curiously brittle quality to the gaiety, an unmistakable sense of partying on the edge of the abyss. Many of the people gathered there, in desperate conviviality, are destined never to meet again.
Off-camera, as it were, the Weimar Republic is in its last throes. The political energies of a deeply polarised society are finding expression not in the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate, nor in the backroom business of negotiation and compromise, of deals and favours, but in street violence. It is in this situation that German conservatives, seeking to fend off the socialists and the communists, who are in any case at war with each other, agree to install Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of the Republic.
Germany’s old guard believed that Hitler could be used to create political stability, contained and then jettisoned. The idea was quite clearly understood to be that once some order has been restored, Hitler and the NSDAP would be eased out and power restored to more respectable political parties. It soon became apparent that Hitler and his Nazi Party – the NSDAP – had other ideas. But it is established beyond doubt that the German elites handed Hitler the “keys to power”.
Carefully orchestrating street violence, stabbings and shootings, through the para-military and quasi-lumpen institutions allied to the NSDAP like the SA, through disrupting theatrical performances and literary events in the name of “Germanic” values, the regime creates the ground for eroding and then erasing civil rights of assembly and expression.
The elaborate legal apparatus of fascist state repression is well on its way to being established when the climactic event of this orchestrated violence – the Reichstag Fire – takes place on 27 February. Instantly blamed on the communists, it provides the pretext for a comprehensive crackdown on all kinds of dissent. Further emergency decrees are enacted for – well, naturally, for “national security” and the defense of the sacred “nation”.
Within days, the prisons are overflowing, and more than a hundred “informal” detention centres sprout in Berlin alone, manned by the louts of the SA – the para-military arm of the NSDAP. Here their hapless and bewildered prisoners are tortured and kept in conditions so dire that when, eventually, the official apparatus takes over the business of incarceration, the hardened German police, no softies themselves, are shocked by the scenes they encounter in these informal detention centres.
“When we entered, these living skeletons were lying on rotting straw, one after the other, with festering wounds. There was not one whose body did not bear the blue, yellow, and green marks of inhuman beatings from head to toe. Many had eyes swollen shut, and crusts of congealed blood stuck beneath their nostrils. There was no groaning or lamenting any more: just a numb waiting for the end, or for more beatings,” writes Wittstock.
And in any case, the SA are themselves soon accorded quasi-legal legitimacy, and officially made part of the repressive apparatus of the state. Pious affirmations about letting the law taking its course, have to be understood in this context, by taking account of the anti-liberal, fascist course that the apparatus of the law itself takes under the control of the Nazi Party, in these momentous weeks. Of course, the fundamental question – are such laws legal at all? – doesn’t really get formulated until the end of the war, at Nuremberg.
And all this is, in any case, mere prelude to the general election that Hitler has got von Papen to consent to. The idea is to end the political uncertainty and create political stability through establishing a legitimate regime with a clear mandate. As is well-known, the resultant “stability” far exceeds the bounds of parliamentary democracy.
Hitler actually wins the eventual election – even though it is rigged by innumerable formal and informal means – and promptly instals an authoritarian regime with himself as its head, its Fuhrer. But the conditions on the ground are degrading with such rapidity that by the time the first session of the newly-elected Assembly is convened, all the 81 Communist deputies who have been elected are either dead, or in prison.
Against this darkening, blood-soaked background, Wittstock gives us snapshots of writers, poets, dramatists, actors, playwrights. These are figures that are flamboyant and ironic and – like Thomas Mann – grave; they are eloquent, witty and eccentric, but for all the extravagant variety and charm of these individuals, the overwhelming impression one gets is of their innocent naivete, their sheer inability to comprehend the gravity of the crisis that is about to engulf them.
Even among those who decide to go away, to seek shelter in France and Switzerland and Austria, there is a distinct sense that the crisis will soon pass. Hitler will be tamed – weeks and months is all they are prepared to give him. And in any case, as a friend in Frankfurt tells Heinrich Mann, Hitler’s influence will not cross the river Main, it will not cross over into southern Germany, and the south will have nothing to do with this Berlin madness, it is believed.
The naivete of the literary protagonists – even the ones who were political – is one of the themes that emerges from this archive. But the other great theme is the speed at which things happened, the paralysing swiftness with which the apparatus of fascism – the legal apparatus, the physical infrastructure, the coercive cadre – was put together in barely a few weeks. Anxious innocents were still processing yesterday’s horrors when they were hit by a fresh wave of trans-legal and legal and legalistic outrages, a fresh daily quota of outrages – new actions, new Acts.
But perhaps what is most unnerving in this painful history is a theme that emerges most clearly in one particular event that is rendered in considerable detail. This is the operation at the Laubenheimer Platz on March 15. The target is a group of three apartment blocks, which contain about 500 apartments. These are occupied mainly by culture workers of various kinds – and what the place lacks by way of style and comfort is compensated for by a high degree of community feeling.
It is, in effect, a metropolitan artists’ colony. It also has, by the same token, a leftist social reputation. It is known, informally, as the “Red Blocks”. The buildings were surrounded and stormed, ambush-style, simultaneously. The residents were crammed into waiting trucks, and their apartments sacked. Letters, books, photographs, manuscripts were all flung out into the square, and set on fire. The raiding SA forces are violent, of course, but the remarkable – and deeply depressing thing is the alacrity with which ordinary citizens are willing to join in the violence.
A passing old man, who can barely walk with the help of his stick, still hobbles across the street, and into the centre of the lynch mob beating up the prisoners in the truck, so that he can swing his stick at helpless people, in the defence of his sacred “nation”. And the SA “guards” in the foreground merely smile benignly.
“This large-scale raid”, Wittstock writes, “gives a sense of how much constitutional restraint has dwindled even now, six weeks after Hitler’s takeover, both among officers who are now collaborating with Hitler’s private army as though it were a matter of course, as well as among citizens who identify with the Nazis.”
Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932), the great novel about the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the end of “old Europe”, summarized the situation in a letter to Stefan Zweig: “I fear the worst for our lives. Letting barbarism assume rule bore fruit. Do not delude yourself. Hell reigns.”
Prescient, Roth was already on the train to Paris on 30th January, hours before Hitler was installed as Chancellor.
Alok Rai is a writer who doesn’t teach in Delhi any more.
