MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT has not been easy during this past week to keep one's mind away from Berlin. The name of that sinister and tragic capital has formed a sombre rhythm, keeping pace with one's movements and one's thoughts. And indeed pressure such as has been applied is bound to cause a condensation of gases ; there are a great many irresponsible people with boxes of matches in their hands. It has been curious to reflect how that word " Berlin " has, within my own lifetime, assumed successive shapes of significance. Before the first war it meant little more to my undergraduate mind than the place where one spent the night on the way to Russia ; a little later it began to threaten with all the silver-eagled panoply of William II ; then came the crash of 1914 and the four years waiting ; thereafter the unreal interlude of the Weimar Republic ; and in the end the horror of the Nazi system and the final drama in the Chancellery garden. At every stage of these forty years the word " Berlin" has evoked for me entirely different associations ; associations of dislike, of amusement, of hatred and fear. I have often found that one's first impression of a place remains detached in one's memory from all the subsequent impressions which have accrued. The image, for instance, of a house in which one has lived for years is composed of a number of superimposed impressions, which—in that they are a fusion of sight-memories, sound-memories and scent- memories—create no outline in the mind. Yet often one is able to recall the picture of that house as one first saw it, a picture which is distinct from all subsequent pictures and one in which the walls, the passages and the garden walks assume different proportions. The reason for this is, of course, that on one's first visit one did not- know what lay around the corner ; that the passage, which became for one later " the dining-room passage," was then only a corridor with a distinct identity of its own ; and that the path which leads to the orchard was then a path leading one knew not where.
In this manner I can recall my first picture of Berlin as something wholly distinct from all .the other pictures which have since been superimposed. It was in the year 5905 and I was on my way from Switzerland to St. Petersburg. A general strike was threatening in Russia and through communications had been suspended ; we were turned out of our train at the Friedrichstrasse station at five in the morning. I deposited my luggage and walked out into the street ; it had been raining heavily during the night and the wet pavements reflected the coming dawn. The railway bridge was above me and there were a few lights shining in little shops. The place seemed to me to possess a narrow meagre air. I did not know at the time that I had descended into the old part of Berlin and that but a few yards from where I stood was the wine cellar of Lutter and Wegner in which Hoffmann had composed his tales. All cities tend to spread westward, but I did not realise that Berlin had jumped the intervening spaces and started a completely new life around the Zoo ; it was as if London stopped suddenly at Piccadilly Circus and then began all over again at South Kensington. In that wet dawn I walked as far as the Unter den Linden and on to the Brandenburg Gate. I then returned to the station, dis- covered that there was a train leaving for the Russian frontier, and rumbled out of the city through those vast areas of sand and pine which stretch across Eastern Europe. A railway arch with the light of a red signal shining on a wet pavement—that was what the word " Berlin " meant to me in 19o5. My second picture is equally detached. The next summer, on my way back from Russia, I spent two nights in Berlin. I was strolling along the Unter den Linden when suddenly there came the sound of a high motor siren, scream- ing like an enraged nightingale ; the citizens of Berlin paused and took off their hats ; in a vast Mercedes the Emperor William II dashed past us on his way to Potsdam. He wore a spiked helmet and a light grey military coat ; he leant back in the car looking arrogant and pale ; the sentries at the Brandenburg Gate saluted like automatons. The sound of the siren warbling echoed in the air long after he had entered the Tiergarten. These two pictures are wholly detached in my memory ; the first black and scarlet, the second silver and grey. The years passed, the first war came and went, the Weimar Republic was established and in 1928 I found myself back in Berlin, this time for a period of two years. It was the Berlin of Hindenburg and Stresemann, of Theodor Wolff and Georg Bernhard, of Fritzi Massary and Elisabeth Bergner, of Reinhardt and Alfred Kerr. It was a Berlin which was just recovering from inflation, which was determined to forget the past and to think only of the future, and which sought to compensate for defeat and republican dullness by indulging in every known brand of physical and intellectual experiment. There certainly did exist in those days an ingenious activity of mind. In the Planetarium one could watch the stars in their slow courses ; in the Wellenbad one could battle with Atlantic seas in the confined space of a swimming bath ; at the Funkturm one could eat one's meals perched high above the lights of the city ; at the Sportspalast one could watch bicycle marathons which seemed unending ; and in the restaurants and night-clubs of the Kurfiirstendamm some new device or gadget was invented every week. Hitler in those days was regarded as a man who had passed out of history ; he spoke with a comic Bohemian accent, he had displayed cowardice at the time of the Ludendorff Putsch, he was suspected by the army of having in 1919 acted as a police spy against his comrades ; there was no possible chance that such a man could again acquire any influence. There were many who believed that under the benign effigy of Hindenburg the Weimar system and even the Treaty of Versailles would prove acceptable, Germany would again find her place in the comity of nations as a placid bourgeois republic, Berlin would become a second Paris in the realm of artistic and intellectual enterprise.
* * * This optimism was not shared by everyone. There were some observers who contended that the apparent acceptance of the Weimar constitution and of the policy of fulfilment was nothing more than a device for gaining time. The great mass of the German people, so said these augurs, were determined to destroy the peace settlement by dismembering it as an artichoke, leaf by leaf : first would come reparation, then demilitarisation, then the Rhineland, then the colonies, and finally the Polish corridor ; each one of these demands would be pressed successively accompanied by the assurance that this was positively the last request ; and one day a divided coalition would wake up to find that all that remained of the vegetable was the choke. Behind all this apparent levity in cinema and theatre and night-club lay a dark tide of resolution. Already there existed disturbing signs ; the Reichstag was overtly nationalistic ; organisa- tions such as the Stahlhelm were by no means innocuous ; and General von Seeckt, with his quiet elegance, was planning the forma- tion of a new officers' corps and the cadres of a new army. The pre- dominant position acquired since the war by the Jewish element in Berlin was in itself bound to produce a reaction ; the banks, the Press, the theatre, the cinema, the entertainment industry, the restaurants were all in Jewish hands. At Peltzer's in the Neue Wilhelmstrasse, which in the Kaiser's day had been the resort only of -the senior officers, every table was arrogantly occupied by Jews. The Prussians would not for long tolerate such conditions ; and if inflation again threatened, the middle classes and the masses would lose their heads.
* 61, 45, * * There were few who took these glum prognostications seriously. It was far more agreeable to tumble in the Wellenbad, to spend summer Sundays on the Havel or the Tegeler See, or to attend the cocktail parties of Joachim von Ribbentrop. The river of events slides so continuously that it is difficult at any given moment to notice that it is changing its colour or its speed. Berlin seen as a street in a provincial capital in a wet dawn ; Berlin imperially arrogant ; Berlin in a civilian suit becoming nervously bohemian ; Berlin a shattered tomb ; Berlin the focus of an even vaster crisis— assuredly my pictures of Berlin have been much, much superimposed.
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