A couple of months later the Nazis staged another demonstration in Berlin that signaled their growing confidence and determination to register their influence in the national capital. The occasion was the showing of the American-made film version of Erich Remarque’s antiwar novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). Remarque’s book, which graphically captures the horrors of the trench experience and the wrenching psychological separation between the front generation and society at home, had become a phenomenal best-seller, proving that this was a message that readers were ready to hear after a decade of living with the war’s consequences. No doubt sales had also been helped by the German publisher Ull-stein’s aggressive marketing campaign, which included plastering Berlin’s Litfass pillars with advertisements and serializing the story in the Vossische Zeitung. Predictably, the primary criticism of the book had come from the political extremes, with the Communists deriding it as bourgeois sentimentality and the Nazis attacking it as un-German decadence. Given such glamorous but controversial material, it is not surprising that the film version, which had already won the Academy Award in America, would ignite even greater passions. When it opened at the Mozartsaal on Nollendorfplatz on December 3, there was palpable tension in the air. Somehow, the premier passed without incident. On the next evening, however, 150 Nazis showed up, with Goebbels in the lead. The film had barely begun when mayhem broke out. Leni Riefenstahl, who was in the audience that night, recalled: “Quite suddenly the theater was ringing with screams so that at first I thought a fire had started. Panic broke out and girls and women were standing on their seats, shrieking.” They were shrieking because Goebbels and his thugs had thrown stink bombs from the balcony and released white mice in the orchestra. Then they ran up and down the aisles shouting “Jews get out!” and slapping people they assumed were Jewish. The police eventually waded in to clear out the Nazis, but (it was later revealed) 127 members of the police force that had been mobilized at the station refused to participate in the action—a dangerous sign of Nazi infiltration of the Berlin Schutzpolizei.
On the following two evenings the Nazis continued to demonstrate around the Nollendorfplatz, singing their “Horst Wessel Song” and beating up people trying to get into the theater. Hitler himself came up from Munich to “review” a Nazi protest march. Goebbels exulted in his diary: “Over an hour. Six abreast. Fantastic! Berlin West has never seen anything like it.” The Berlin police commissioner, Albert Grzesinski, had pledged to protect the film from all disruptions, but after a few more days of nonstop violence he declared that the police could not guarantee public security as long as the film was running. The National Film Board withdrew approval of the movie on grounds that it was a “threat to Germany’s honor.” On December 16 the Prussian Landtag took up the issue and banned the film in Berlin. Goebbels was understandably elated at this government cave-in, speaking of a victory “that could not have been greater.”
