MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD
NICOLSON
THE Air Ministry on Tuesday published its estimate of the effect upon Berlin of the six great raids up to December 17th. It is clear that the whole administrative centre of Berlin, from the Friedrichsuasse to the Savigny Platz, is now in ruins. Architec- turally, this is no great disaster. Nobody need regret the disappear- ance of the Mauerstrasse, Berlin's grim Wall Street, dominated by the powerful and ugly building of the Deutsche Bank. Nobody need regret the destruction of the Ministry of Education or of the drab tenement which housed the Prussian Home Office. Nobody need regret the elimination from the Tiergartenstrasse of those Victorian residences which defaced an agreeable site. Nobody need regret the collapse of the British Embassy which, behind a frontage of some style, concealed some of the ungainliest rooms in Europe. Nobody would feel regret if Hitler's palace, or Goering's Ministry, were laid low. But it is sad that the old Foreign Office, which consisted of three houses facing on the Wilhelmstrasse, may also have been destroyed. The Austviirtiges Amt did, in fact, stand for something different from the Berlin of William H and the Berlin of Hitler. It was small ; it was quiet ; it was unpretentious. It was almost the only building in Berlin which could boast of any ancestry. It had been built in the days of Frederick William I, and Frederick the Great when a boy must often have passed its windows, riding unhappily in the company of Lieutenant Katte and Lieutenant Keith. It had been remodelled in the days of Kfinigen Luise, and its old fashioned windows may well have rattled as Napoleon's travelling carriage shook the cobbles outside. No. 76, the third of the three houses, had been the home, not only of the dancer Barberina, but also of Bismarck himself. Inside were grey marble corridors with a few white statues, a few portraits of Prussian Kings, a few sofas of white wood and scarlet plush. The rooms of the Foreign Secretary and of the Secretary of State looked out upon the garden, which ran down to what was once the Budapester Suasse, and then the Gustav Stresemann Strasse, and is now the Hermann Goering Strasse. And in this garden was the official residence of the Foreign Secretary, a jolly little house, as it might be in St. John's Wood, known as " The Villa."
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It was in The Villa that Stresemann would entertain his guests. His wife and sons would be present, and the devotion which they all felt for each other gave to their parties a domestic feeling. Stresemann, being a great, though dying, man, would on such occasions defy his doctor's orders. There would be Mosel wine and much food and many thick cigars. Stresemann would preside over these functions with the geniality of a man whose father had been a publican and who had started life as the Manager of the Saxon Union of Chocolate Manufacturers,—surely the most gemutlich function that could be conceived. He would be bois- terous and indiscreet, shy and arrogant, gay and gloomy. His wife would watch him with delight and anxiety in her eyes. He would speak of art, about which he knew little ; of music, about which he knew much ; and about politics, which he approached with subtle rage. His physical appearance was disconcerting. He had a thick neck, a small bullet head, and eyelids which were fringed with pink. His frame was massive, his shoulders powerful, his whole architecture of the heavy type. Yet he walked delicately ; his hands were the hands of a woman ; his lips sensitive and extremely mobile. One would sit there, wondering what epithet could apply to the impression of sinuosity which he produced. " Feline? "—no, he was too jovial to be feline ; "reptilian? "—no, he was far too fine for that ; the impression rather was that of a bull-terrier which suddenly adopts the stalking position and becomes lithe and tense.
• * * * It is not the buildings only of the German Foreign Office which have been devastated. The tradition which hung about those walls was not in any sense the Hitler, or even the Bismarck, or even the Billow, tradition. It was certainly not the Holstein tradition, since that paranoiac had left behind him memories of distaste and shame. With the permanent officials of the old Austabliges Amt,—with
men like Schubert, or Ow-Wachendorf or Richthoven—one could deal reasonably and honourably as with civilised beings. EN= after the advent of Hitler, Baron von Neurath sought hard to pro- tect that tradition from the histrionics of the Nazi system. Over the way was established a horrible caricature of the Auswarrtiges Amt in the shape of the Bureau of Herr von Ribbentrop. And one night Neurath was dismissed and Ribbentrop transferred .him- self and his belongings to No. 76 across the road. He did not occupy The Villa itself, although he took from it the plate, the glass, the linen and the staff which had knowt the Stressemann times. The Villa was too unpretentious, too rd(olent of wiser days, to suit the drama of the Nazi adventure. And the old officials of the Foreign Office were drilled into giving the Hitler salute and were thrown most miserably into uniforms designed by Ribbentrop himself.
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I have been reading this week a study of this horrible man written by Dr. Paul Schwarz and published by Julian Messner, Inc. of New York. The large, the gay, the joyous Dr. Schwarz did not in the very least care for Herr von Ribbentrop or his ways. When summoned to return to Berlin he decided that it would be far far wiser to become an American citizen. Rejoicing in this decision he has amused himself by writing against Ribbentrop one of the wittiest and most damning indictments that could be com- posed. Frau Henkell, whose daughter Ribbentrop married, once described her son-in-law as " an extremely dangerous fool." It is on the basis of this thesis that Dr. Schwarz has designed the biography of his former chief and friend. He represents him in the guise of a " half-baked, Cagliostro," as " an irresponsible and reckless nincompoop." He describes his curious career in Canada ; his astuteness as a wine-merchant ; his subtle social ambitions which, according to Herr Schwarz, enabled him to mingle " with the lower ranks of post-war café society." He indicates how, by buying wine in the black market during the post-war years, he was able to make the acquaintance, and acquire the support, of the industrialist Ottmar Strauss. This manoeuvre cost him six cases of Moet et Chandon Ponsardin x911: but it brought him into contact with Adolf Hitler. Dr. Schwarz then traces with jovial malice the stages by which Ribbentrop was able to supplant Rosenberg as Hitler's chief adviser on foreign affairs ; how he became the Fiihrer's Ambassador at large : his Ambassador in London ; his Foreign Secretary. The diplomatic triumphs which Ribbentrop appeared to achieve, and notably the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, did much to strengthen, his influence. Until finally the whole machine, unguided and un restrained, drove straight towards the abyss.
* * * * Dr. Schwarz's analysis of the purposes and methods of Nazi diplomacy is shrewd and well informed. He is enraged by its " infantilism " ; he deplores its constant self-dramatisation and the unwary exploitation of success : he is shocked by its cynicism, reck- lessness and stupidity. He is even more interesting when he exposes its basic unreality. To him Ribbentrop is the most .dangerous, because the most plausible, architect of this tragic fantasy. " Ribben- trop," he remarks acutely, " is the sort of German who has lost himself and is looking for a substitute." To the " dangerous vagaries of this disintegrated personality " he attributes many of the disasters which have fallen upon the world. He has no illusions at all regarding the success of Ribbentrop's mission to London, which seemed at the time so da77ling to all German, and to some British, eyes. He analyses the failure of that mission with con- siderable insight. To his mind Ribbentrop when in London was acting, not as the representative of a healthy Power, but as " the living bad conscience of a conspiracy." But above all he cannot forgive Ribbentrop's moral destruction of the Austviirtiges Amt:-- " the rape of a once decent institution." Dr. Schwarz may derive some slight sad comfort from the fact that the German Foreign Office may now have been physically as well as morally destroyed ; and that Nos. 74, 75 and 76 Wilhelmstrasse can be defiled no more
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