Against Decadence and Moral Decay
In June 1940, when the German army paraded down the Ghamps-Elysées after its stunning victory over France, Jean Cocteau worried about what was going to happen to his favorite opium dens and homosexual haunts. Many Berliners must have wondered the same thing when the Nazis marched down Unter den Linden in the early days of 1933. The city’s new rulers quickly closed the most prominent drug palaces and boy bars. Christopher Isherwood, gamely hanging on in the city, lost touch with most of his gay friends. The more prudent ones, he guessed, were lying low, while a few “silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms.” One pair of homosexual lovers, believing that “Germany was entering an era of military man-love,” declared proudly that they were Nazis, only to discover that Nazi Berlin was not the erotic paradise of their dreams. On the contrary, in addition to closing gay bars the Nazis began arresting homosexuals as “social deviants.” Meanwhile, the streets of the capital reverberated to the din of radio loudspeakers blaring speeches by Goebbels and Hitler. Berliners (again to quote Isherwood) “sat in front of the cafés listening to [the loudspeakers]—cowlike, vaguely curious, complacent, accepting what had happened but not the responsibility for it. Many of them hadn’t even voted—how could they be responsible?”
Another notable sound in the city was the tread of marching men, as in Old Berlin. To facilitate military parades, the Nazis cut down the lime trees in the center of Unter den Linden and paved over the Wilhelmsplatz. Grievous as such barbarities were, however, the Nazis’ most crippling assaults on Berlin were aimed not at its physical environment but at its culture. Just as they reshaped the political system to suit their needs, they sought to make over Berlin’s cultural life to their specifications. In the process, they also tried to construct a new image of Berlin more in keeping with their own vision of how a great capital should be represented in the world.
Throughout the Weimar period the Nazis had made abundantly clear that they despised the irreverence, diversity, and cosmopolitanism of Berlin’s cultural and intellectual scene. The most antiurban and antimodern among them—figures like Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and Walther Darre (who became Hitler’s minister of agriculture)—insisted that Berlin was hopelessly irredeemable and did not deserve to be the capital of the Third Reich. In their view, the nation would be better served with its capital in Munich, Hitler’s adopted hometown, or in some rustic village that encapsulated the Nazi movement’s close-to-the-soil values.
Such “fundamentalists,” however, were overruled by Nazi “pragmatists,” and above all by Hitler himself. The Führer, despite his ambivalent feelings toward Berlin, never considered moving the capital to another city, much less to a village; in his eyes, Europe’s greatest country had to be governed from Germany’s greatest city. He contended that Nazi Germany needed the “magical attraction” of its own “Mecca or Rome.” Later, in his wartime “Table Talks,” he claimed even to have “always liked Berlin,” which he said had given his movement more financial support on its road to power than “petite bourgeois Munich.” He also believed, however, that it was Berlin’s “misfortune” to have been “settled by people of Lower Saxon/Frissian stock,” who had failed to create a genuine “cultural foundation.” In his view, Berlin’s last true cultural leader had been Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Wilhelm I had had “no taste,” Bismarck had been “amusical,” and though Wilhelm II had had cultural pretensions, his taste was “decidedly bad.” Thus there was much that was “ugly” in Berlin, a lot of clutter to be “cast aside” and replaced by new additions that constituted “the best that is possible with today’s resources.”
