The Berlin that Kastner described in Fabian was already menaced by the Nazis, who had been making their presence felt in the city since 1926, when Joseph Goebbels arrived to take over the Gau (Nazi district) of Berlin-Brandenburg. Before that moment the Berlin branch of the party had been divided and directionless. At first the oily little Rhinelander was not entirely pleased with his assignment. After walking Berlin’s nocturnal streets he wrote in his diary: “Berlin last night. A sink hole of iniquity. And I’m supposed to plunge into this?” But plunge he did. Aware, as he put it, that “Berlin needs sensations as a fish needs water,” he orchestrated a campaign of violence and intimidation designed to shock even the most jaded sensibilities. He immediately scheduled propaganda marches in working-class districts like Wedding and Neukolln. As they marched, members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA, Stormtroopers) sang “Die Rote Front, schlägt sie zu brei / SA marschiert. Achtung, die Straβe frei (Beat the Red Front to a pulp. The SA is marching: keep off the streets).” To further goad the left, Goebbels advertised these marches with huge blood-red posters. Predictably, the Communists sought to defend their turf, resulting in bloody brawls in which both sides made ample use of blackjacks, brass knuckles, iron pipes, and even pistols. On March 21, 1927, a band of 600 to 700 SA men stormed a railway carriage containing twenty-seven Communists at the station in Lichterfelde-Ost. After beating the Communists, the Nazis marched into the center of the city and assaulted Jewish-looking persons on the Kurfürstendamm. In another provocative move, Goebbels founded a weekly newspaper called Der Angriff (The Attack), which took aim especially at the Jews. “This negative element must be erased from the German reckoning, or it will always soil that reckoning,” declared an editorial. In a piece in his journal on the area around Berlin’s Gedacht-niskirche, Goebbels blamed the Jews for the capital’s “asphalt democracy” and lack of a true German culture: “The eternal repetition of corruption and decay, of failing ingenuity and genuine creative power, of inner emptiness and despair, with the patina of a Zeitgeist sunk to the level of the most repulsive pseudoculture: that is what parades its essence, what does its mischief all around the Gedächtniskirche. One would so gladly believe that it is the national elite stealing day and night from the dear Lord on Tauentzien Avenue. It is only the Israelites.” The publicity generated by the Nazis’ provocations helped attract new members to the movement. The police estimated that in March 1927 the Berlin branch of the Nazi Party had about 3,000 members.
Joseph Goebbels, Berlins Gauleiter, 1932
Of course, for all their frenetic activities, the Nazis were far from turning Red Berlin into a brown bastion. In fact, the disruptiveness of their campaign prompted the authorities to ban the organization in Berlin-Brandenburg for an eleven-month period between May 1927 and March 1928. In the May 1928 Reichstag elections the party did poorly across the Reich and especially poorly in Berlin, where it won only 1.5 percent of the vote. Goebbels nonetheless remained determined to prevail in the city, for he knew it was crucial to the Nazis’ campaign for control of Germany as a whole. As he wrote in his memoir, Kampf um Berlin (The Struggle for Berlin): “The capital constitutes the center of all political, intellectual, economic, and cultural energies of a country. From it emanate influences which leave no province, small town, or village untouched.”
It was precisely those aspects of the cosmopolitan metropolis most despised by the Nazis—homosexuality, avant-garde art, left-wing politics, jazz, lascivious cabaret— which at the end of the decade drew in a pair of young English writers, W. H. Au-den and Christopher Isherwood, to the German capital. Both found Berlin simultaneously liberating and depressing. Isherwood would later provide a detailed record of this experience in his famous Berlin novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, which served as the basis for the play I am a Camera and the musical and movie Cabaret. Like so many chronicles of late Weimar Berlin, these works evoke an atmosphere of impending doom, of dancing-on-the-volcano.
