MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WHEN I lived in Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic I used to be Impressed by the manifold activities of the publishing house of Ullstein. In that vast congregation of buildings was assembled every device which science could contrive for the rapid reception and distribution of news and information. Upon the roof the slim antennae of a wireless installation throbbed with messages from Vancouver or Bangkok ; inside the building pneumatic tubes hurled little bombs of paper from one department to another ; as one was speaking to an editor or manager there would come a sudden gasp from an orifice beside him and with a faint plop a leading article would drop into the steel basket by his side ; and at dawn each day six aeroplanes would rise from 'Templehof to carry the words of Ullstein to the remotest provinces of the Reich. There was no limit to the enterprise which the House of Ullstein displayed. They published the B.Z am Mittag, which was rushed so rapidly through the Press that the fingers of the newsvendors in distant Dahlem would be stained by the wet ink. There was a fat fashions magazine containing elaborate paper patterns which, when unfolded upon the floor, became life-size. Attached to this magazine was a dressmakers' shop in the editorial offices themselves, where clumsy readers would see exactly how these patterns should be expressed in terms of muslin or of tweed. There was the Berliner Hlustrirte which provided many sticky pages of wonderful news photographs, and was the rival of the Woche. Books were also published, and among them such famous best-sellers as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and the popular novels of Vicki Baum. The House of Ullstein was a hive of industry, invention, experiment and success.
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The most serious of its undertakings was the Vossische Zeitung, affectionately known to Berliners as "Tame Voss." Georg Bernhard, the editor of this most formidable journal, was a remarkable man. He was a firm believer in the possibility for Germany of profitable collaboration with her former enemies, and especially with the French. He believed that Germany, in the realms of art and science and commerce, could, under the auspices of the League, recover the prestige and influence which she had lost by het defeat. He was a great European and a great journalist ; he was a constant influence for good. When talking with him, or with his great rival Theodor Wolff (who died recently "in a Berlin hospital" after his arrest in Nice), one felt that it was not true that Germany could produce no major political intelligence. But Bernhard I am told, is in America ; and Theodor Wolff is dead ; and Albrecht Montgelas, who served the Vossische loyally while their correspondent in London, is eating his heart out behind barbed wire in the Isle of Man. And the great House of Ullstein is itself no more.
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Among their many publications, ranging from the Blatt der Haus- frau to Uhu, from the Vossische to the B.Z., the most advanced and the most attractive was the Querschnitt. This little magazine had been started by the art dealer Flechtheim, with the assistance of a Hanseatic patrician of the name of Wcdcrkop. Flechthcim, although he ran his gallery with skill and taste, was not a man of business, and the finances of the Querschnitt became disordered ; Wederkop, his mind divided between the tombs of his ancestors at Liibeck, and the more recent confections of Savile Row, was a brilliant rather than an assiduous editor ; and thus the management of the Querschnitt was finally transferred to the calm and competent hands of the House of Ullstein. It was in truth an agreeable magazine, and fully expressive of the gay and daring cosmopoli- tanism of the Weimar intellectuals. Perhaps the most attractive of all German qualities is their unfailing inquisitiveness, and the Querschnitt ministered to that appetite with unflagging energy. A photograph of Tolstoy's dressing-room would be flanked by one of Maillol's bicyclist ; a photograph of Rimbaud's mother at Charleroi would be matched by one of the garden at Somersby rectory. Appealing as it did to a highly educated audience, the Querschnitt did not trouble to translate the articles it published ; one could read Virginia Woolf in English and Mauriac in French. Wide indeed was the gulf which separated the Querschnitt and its readers from the beery brutes of the Steineckerbrau or the Brenessel, whom Hitler was then gathering around him. • Wide also the distance between Berlin's Bohemia and the rancorous and monocled officers • who saw in von Secckt the secret architect of a new and better Reichswehr. It may well have been that the Querschnitt, when taken over by the Ullstein brothers, lost something of the careless rapture which it had enjoyed under the undisciplined management of Wederkop and Flechtheim ; but it remained a gay and vivid publication till the end.
The end of the House of Ullstein was typical of many Nazi liquidations. The full story has now been told in a most interest- ing book written by Herman Ullstein, under the title The Rise and Fall of the House of Ullstein (Nicholson and Watson, los. 6d.). The first sign of trouble came with the discovery that within the publishing house itself there existed a Nazi "cell," led and organised by an employee of the name of Clausner. Almost immediately after the Reichstag fire this man began to show his hand. He organised demonstrations against the management ; he forced the staff to stop work while Hitler's speeches were being broadcast ; he made no secret of the fact that he possessed a full list, not only of those of his employers who were Jews by race or connexion, but also of all those who had. in the past manifested or expressed demo- cratic sentiments. Inch by inch the Ullstein family were pushed out of the central control. Nazi " advisers " were imposed upon them ; insulting inscriptions denouncing the five Ullstein brothers were scribbled on the walls ; and the whole process of intimidation and delation was set in movement. Herman Ullstein and his wife refused to be daunted ; they remained on in their fortress in the Kochstrasse. The wave of Nazi emotionalism began to affect the circulation of their newspapers. The Vossische, with its liberal reputation of two hundred and twenty-seven years, began to show a deficit ; the Vossische was being run at a loss of two million marks a year. They were obliged to suspend publication.
Gradually things went from worse to worse. The Ullstein brothers being of Jewish extraction, were forced to sell their holdings to " Aryans " at a tenth of their real value. One by one the brothers died in misery. Herman Ullstein and his wife were obliged to part from their children, who found an asylum in America. But still, doggedly and persistently, they remained on in their house in the Grunewald. And then came the murder of Vom Rath in Paris, and the final persecutions. The Ullsteins were stripped of what remained of their fortune, being obliged 'to pay a final bribe of one hundred thousand marks to the chief of the police. They left Germany with test marks apiece in their pockets.
In this vivid and well-balanced account of his misfortunes Herr Herman Ullstein does not spare his colleagues of the Press. "The very same editors," he writes, "who a short while ago had insisted on nothing but the truth, now published Hitler's lies without batting an eyelid." "There is no denying the fact," he writes again. "that the Press failed. The writer of these lines, himself a man of the Press, admits it frankly, and by so doing accuses himself." It is easy for us, who live in "the inviolate island of the sage and free," to reproach them with cowardice. The Germans, who possess such magnificent military courage, have always been moral and civic cowards. But it didn't happen in exactly that way. The whole sudden onrush of the Nazi machine seemed so incredible that no sane man believed that it could last. The hurricane would pass by, and meanwhile it was wise to bow to the storm. It was not cowardice of which they were guilty so much as optimism.
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