BERLIN TODAY
[FROM A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT] Berlin, July 3rd.
BERLIN is bored. Of course, as the train trundles along from Charlottenburg to the Zoo, and from the Zoo to the Friedrichstrasse, one cannot help being bored : the very entry to Berlin, with its long hesita- tions at unwanted stations, and as now with its quota of disgruntled S.A. men hanging about the platform without their uniforms, tires one before the Friedrich- strasse is reached.
But the boredom is not merely Kantian, not merely a form of the mind. It is Hegelian too : it is a form of the State. On Saturday, so my friends tell me, the population of Berlin bought more evening papers than on any day since February, 1933, and the burning of the Reichstag. Today, which is Tuesday afternoon, I walked down the Wilhelmstrasse : it was packed, but not one man in twenty had a paper, though it was six o'clock. Gregor Strasser, once the Left-Nazi darling of Berlin when he wrote in the Nazi-Sozi—he might be dead, but what of that ? So were a lot of ruffians, and a lot of favourites—Reines for one class, Ernst for another. But there came no recurrence of the events that moved them on Saturday—the ghastly assassination of Von Schleicher and his wife, the stormy courage of Der Fiihrer. On Saturday the papers of the Propaganda Bureau had really told the truth : Schleicher was as dead as high-grade mutton, and Hitler had done something swift and dramatic, after his vacillations of the last few weeks. Then there was something true to read : but today, everyone in the train thought, whether they travelled first; second or third, that the papers were fibbing to suit the Propaganda Ministry and that when they told. everybody not to yarn about things that they knew nothing about, they were merely keeping good yarns from them.
Hence the boredom, so far as the State is concerned. To describe opinion is always a delicate operation, but of these Berliners' opinion one can say something definite. Externally, to the State, it was opinion ex- tinguished, the assertion of an almost offensive ignorance because it was so deliberate. Cowed it may have been, after the licence of the last few weeks : for after Von Papen's speech at Marburg tongues have wagged in Germany this way and that, and mostly against the Government. Saturday's drastic news has swept that sort of talk off the streets, which revert to Berliner boredom. But the Berliner home is becoming more active. It is cynical beyond all measure. The poor greet each other by saying " Now the S.A. and the Hitler Youth are safe for our children." The middle classes, true, if they are stupid, swallow the papers to the point of indigestion ; but the others, who are the greater part, smile. Why, they ask, if the Leader was so hot on a purge, did he not ,purge his party long before, especially when delay cost so much in actual marks to the State ? Or if they are unprincipled, and after a year of vagrant violence it is feared that many are unprincipled, they ask you what is the connexion between a moral purge and politics. Add a " plot " to charges of homosexuality, and they laugh in your face. Their laughter becomes real indeed when the papers quote, for the plot, a story told in last Sunday's Referee (a London production) and no more.
As for the upper class, they always were cynical, and now they are bitter. Such a condition is a dangerous one for Germany. Two things above all have embittered them—that is, apart from their dislike of Goebbels, against whom they have gradually set the feeling of the whole capital in which he was so popular a year ago. The first thing which disgusted them, and all Germany besides, was Frau von Schleicher's death. Of this I have heard universal condemnation, from friends of the Reichswehr who disliked her husband, from the ordinary middle classes, even from an émigré returning quietly to Germany who for a time thought that I was a member of Himmler's secret police. Schleicher was a " creeper," he intrigued, he may have had lists of Nazi victims ready, he probably deserved his death. But why kill a woman too ? A few ask, why kill at all ? But most agree with the callous and laconic officer who told me that " a few traitors had had their legs cut off from the necks downward."
Still more serious for the upper class is the case of You Papen. All of them realize that he has been under arrest, in fact, if not in name, this week-end : a few know that he has been forced to tender his resignation as Vice-Chancellor. Von Papen, admittedly, has few brains or principles. But he is a gentleman, and ever since the Marburg speed' and the day upon which the crowd cheered him and not Goebbels at the HairibUrg ' races, Von Papen has been acclaimed in the proper German metaphysical . fashion as the " representative of the hidden—that is, the evasive but real,'—Germany." So to the cynicism of all is added the disgust. of the old ruling class of Germany. Mix with that' the grief of the Berlin S.A. for their lost leader Ernst, and'you-liErVe only the . S.S. and the Reichswehr left to back the German rn govement. with a whole heart. The S.S. are terribly suspicions. As I write this article a party of them keep on casting their eyes in my direction, and one has just come to ask me if I am recording his conversation. Only 'among the Reichswehr is there any satisfaction—and learning too, it seems, for one of their soldiers spoke English, French and German to me this morning when I accosted him outside the Reichshauzelerei. He had a car- bine and a steel helmet and he felt not only safe but happy, On such men, one felt, the future of the Reich depends:
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