The Nazis’ assaults notwithstanding, Berlin still struck many Germans and foreign visitors as one of the best places in the world to witness cutting-edge creative work. Like a dying diva who belts out some of her best notes before collapsing on the stage, Berlin put on an exciting cultural show before the brown curtain descended in January 1933. In January 1931 Sergei Tretiakov, the Russian futurist poet and playwright, lectured at the Russischer Hof on “Writers and the Socialist Village.” In March Carl Zuckmayer’s satirical play Der Hauptmann von Kb’penick, based on the exploits of that great “Prussian officer” Wilhelm Voigt, opened at the Deutsches Theater. Zuckmayer’s and Heinz Hilpert’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, Farewell to Arms, also played at the Deutsches Theater. (Hemingway himself showed up for the premier and nipped steadily from a hip flask when he wasn’t asleep. Taken backstage during the intermission, he asked the leading lady, Käthe Dorsch, how much she charged for the night, adding that he would “pay one hundred dollars and not a cent more.”) Meanwhile, the Staatstheater mounted Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (Man is Man). Although the play’s run was brief, Tretiakov hailed it as a masterpiece of radical drama. Brecht also managed to produce his Die Massnahmen (The Measures), a long choral piece filled with Communist didacticism that required true ideological commitment and plenty of Sitzfleisch to sit through. Over at the Kroll Opera Otto Klemperer conducted the first German performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Witnessing it, Paul Hindemith predicted that “a new wave of serious music is on the way.” At the Potsdamer Platz a new building, perhaps Weimar Berlin’s most innovative structure, was going up: Erich Mendelsohn’s Columbushaus office block. With its clean-curved facade, which was illuminated at night by spotlights, the building was a frontal attack on architectural historicism—a floodlit rebuke to all those neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, and Romanesque piles that still dominated the Berlin landscape. To the question “What is this place,” the architect answered: “future time.”
In the year the Columbushaus was completed, 1932, Germany’s most innovative design and architectural school, the Bauhaus, moved to Berlin from Dessau. It had been founded in 1919 in Weimar but had relocated to Dessau in 1925 because that city promised a more congenial environment. And so it did, but not for long. In 1932 the Nazis gained control of Dessau’s city council and made it their first order of business to attack the Bauhaus as “Jewish-Marxist.” The then director, Mies van der Rohe, fled to the capital, setting up shop in an abandoned telephone factory in Steglitz. Mies hoped that the school could do its work relatively undisturbed in the big city, but the local Nazis did their best to prevent that from happening. Goebbels’s Der Angriff labeled the Bauhaus a “breeding ground of Bolshevism,” a clear sign that once the Nazis ran Berlin there would be no place for this innovative institution.
In the meantime, it was not just Nazi pressure that was putting the squeeze on avant-garde culture in Berlin. Other right-wing forces, sometimes in league with the Nazis and sometimes not, took up the fight against the leading figures and institutions of Berlin’s progressive cultural scene. At the urging of the military, Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist editor of Die Weltbühne, received an eighteen-month jail sentence for “espionage and treason” because his magazine had exposed secret subsidies from the Reichswehr to Lufthansa, the civilian airline. The Berlin police prevented the radical poet Erich Weinert from reading his poems on grounds of public security. The deepening depression also took its cultural toll, both by drying up revenues and by giving bureaucrats who were anxious to pacify the right an excuse to close down money-losing ventures. In summer 1931 Erwin Piscator’s latest radical theater collective went into bankruptcy, inducing the playwright to leave for the Soviet Union. A year later it was the turn of the Kroll Opera, which was afflicted with mounting deficits and a barrage of hostile criticism for its innovative programming. After the final curtain went down, the Berlin critic Oscar Bie wrote a fitting epitaph: “The four years [when Klemperer ran the Kroll] will remain a gleaming chapter in the history of opera, full of art and humanity, with human weaknesses and human error, but with all the grandeur of true endeavor and conscientious labor. May the devil take a time that cannot support that.”
