Another political evacuee that year was the left-wing writer Arthur Koestler, who had moved to Berlin from Paris on September 14, 1930, the date of the Nazis’ first electoral breakthrough. As he took up his duties as science editor at Ullstein’s
Certain that both his career at Ullstein and Weimar democracy were on the chopping block, Koestler left Berlin immediately after Papen’s coup in Prussia. His destination was not New York but Moscow, that other distant lode star in Weimar Berlin’s ideological firmament. Of course, horrifying developments were afoot in Moscow as well, and Koestler would soon find himself moving on again, ideologically as well as physically. He wrote his great novel on the Stalinist purges,
Albert Einstein, Germany’s most famous scientist, also felt the pressure to leave Berlin as the political, economic, and intellectual climate turned hostile to the kind of creative work he prized. He even had to wonder whether the city that had once enthusiastically adopted him still valued his presence. True, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 1929 the city government had sought to honor him with the gift of a house on the banks of the Havel River. But it turned out that the house was already occupied, obliging the city to come up with a different prospect, which also fell through. The mayor then proposed that Einstein pick out a property he liked, which the city would buy for him. By the time Einstein found a suitable plot in the suburb of Caputh, the depression had settled in, causing the city council to debate whether it could now afford to present him with a gift at all. Understandably miffed, the scientist bought the property in Caputh with his own money and built a house there. He and his wife moved in just in time to see the election results of 1932 make an extended stay there look doubtful. A Nazi delegate to the Prussian Landtag announced that after Hitler had cleaned house in Germany, “the exodus of the Children of Israel will be a child’s game in comparison,” adding that “a people that possesses a Kant will not permit an Einstein to be tacked on to it.” Einstein took the threat seriously, telling a friend in summer 1932 that he believed Papen’s military-backed regime would only hasten the advent of “a right-radical revolution.” The scientist had been teaching on and off at Cal Tech and Princeton since 1930, and in November 1932, preparing to sail once again to America, he told his wife to take a good look at their dream house outside Berlin. When she asked why, he replied: “You will never see it again.”
The Berlin that these illustrious figures left behind still had the capacity to excite and amuse casual visitors. The British writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, who spent a few days in the city in summer 1932, was impressed, like so many others before him, by the restless movement of cars, trams, flashing lights, even zoo animals pacing in their cages. There was a throbbing air of expectancy, especially at night: “Everybody knows that every night Berlin wakes up to a new adventure.” Nicolson also appreciated the city’s no-nonsense frankness. If London was like “an old lady in black lace and diamonds,” Berlin was “a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face, Hölderlin in her pocket, thighs like those of Atalanta, an undigested education, a heart that is almost too ready to sympathize, and a breadth of view that charms one’s repressions from their poison, and shames one’s correctitude.”
