Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

2 Up in the Air

When Putzi Hanfstaengl arrived at the Kindlkeller on the evening of November 22, 1922, the hall was already packed with people who looked like shopkeepers, civil servants, young people and artisans, many dressed in traditional Bavarian costume. Once he worked his way through the crowd to the press table, Putzi asked a reporter to point Hitler out. Looking at the future leader of Germany, Hanfstaengl was distinctly underwhelmed. “In his heavy boots, dark suit and leather waistcoat, semi-stiff white collar and odd little mustache, he really did not look very impressive—like a waiter in a railway-station restaurant,” he recalled.

But after he was introduced to loud applause, Hitler straightened up and walked past the press table “with a swift, controlled step, the unmistakable soldier in mufti,” noted Putzi, who was seated only about 8 feet away from the platform that Hitler now occupied. Since Hitler had recently spent a short stint in prison for incitement and he knew police agents were in the crowd, he had to be careful in choosing his words. Still, the atmosphere was “electric,” as Putzi described it, and he found the orator a master of “innuendo and irony.” Looking back at the first performance that he witnessed, Putzi reflected: “In his early years he had a command of voice, phrase and effect which has never been equaled, and on that evening he was at his best.”

After starting in an almost light conversational tone, Hitler warmed to his subject and sharpened his rhetoric. He attacked the Jews for profiteering and contributing to the misery all around them—“a charge which it was only too easy to make stick,” Hanfstaengl claimed. He denounced the Communists and Socialists, whom he accused of undermining German traditions. And he warned that anyone who was an enemy of the people would be eliminated.

Putzi saw that the audience was enjoying his speech immensely—“especially the ladies.” As Hitler talked about everyday life, Putzi observed a young woman who could not tear her eyes away from the speaker. “Transfixed as if in some devotional ecstasy, she had ceased to be herself and was completely under the spell of Hitler’s despotic faith in Germany’s future greatness.” When Hitler took a swig from a mug of beer that was passed up to him, the crowd burst into new applause and it was clear he had mesmerized them.

“Impressed beyond measure,” Putzi later claimed he was already calculating how best he could guide and educate this skillful orator who “was clearly going to go far.” Observing Hitler’s entourage, Putzi saw no one who could “bring home to him the picture of the outside world he manifestly lacked, and in this I felt I might be able to help.” In particular, he saw that Hitler had no idea how critical America’s entry into World War I had been and how Europeans had to take into account the United States as a rising power. As a “half American,” he viewed this as his mission.

Putzi made his way to the platform, where Hitler stood, drenched with sweat but relishing his triumph. The newcomer introduced himself and conveyed Smith’s best wishes. “Ah, you are the friend of that big captain who called this morning,” Hitler replied, dabbing his wet forehead with a handkerchief.

Declaring his admiration, Putzi added: “I agree with 95 per cent of what you said and would very much like to talk to you about the rest some time.” In an interview long after the war, he would claim that the 5 percent he was referring to was “of course the Jews and all that,” but he wanted to be careful not to hurt Hitler’s feelings by spelling that out.

“Why, yes, of course,” Hitler replied. “I am sure we shall not have to quarrel about the odd five per cent.”

Putzi shook hands with him, feeling that here was someone who was “modest and friendly.” After he went home, he couldn’t fall asleep for a long time as he kept thinking about the evening and what it represented. He saw Hitler as a self-made man who could reach ordinary Germans with a non-communist program. But he hadn’t liked the look of some of his followers, including “dubious types” like party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg—“a sallow, untidy fellow, who looked half-Jewish in an unpleasant sort of way.”

Nonetheless, Putzi found reassurance in a quote from Nietzsche that he remembered: “The first followers of a movement do not prove anything against it.”

Putzi’s wife, Helen, or Helene as she was known in Germany, would play a role unlike any other in Hitler’s rise to power. In her fragmentary, unpublished notes about her dealings with the Nazi leader, she wrote that her husband had returned that evening from his first encounter with him full of enthusiasm, talking about “the earnest, magnetic young man.” While Putzi maintained that the second time he heard Hitler speak he was “less impressed,” he quickly threw his lot in with this agitator who he felt could go very far. He started to play the role of his propagandist and press advisor, but his initial involvement was as much social as it was political. And it was very much tied to Hitler’s evident attraction to Helen—an attraction that would not be hurt in the least by the fact that she was an American.

Putzi claimed that he first introduced Helen to Hitler when he took her to see him speak, striking up a conversation afterward. The future dictator, according to Putzi, “was delighted with my wife, who was blonde and beautiful and American.” In her notes, Helen offered a different recollection, asserting that she met Hitler on a tram. She and Putzi were going downtown when Hitler got on and her husband introduced them. After a brief conversation, she invited him for lunch or dinner whenever he had the time. Whichever version is correct, both Putzi and Helen’s stories agree that the first encounter ended with Helen extending an open invitation for him to come to their home. Hitler soon became a frequent guest in their apartment in Gentzstrasse, where they lived with their young son Egon; the Hanfstaengls jokingly referred to it as the Café Gentz.

“From that day he was a constant visitor, enjoying the quiet, cozy home atmosphere, playing with my son at intervals, and talking over for hours his plans and hopes for the renaissance of the German Reich,” Helen recalled. With more than a trace of pride, she added in her postwar notes, “It seems he enjoyed our home above all others to which he was invited.”

According to Helen, Hitler was dressed in a cheap white shirt, black tie, a worn dark blue suit and an “incongruous” brown leather vest, topped off by a beige trench coat “much the worse for wear,” cheap shoes and an old, soft grey hat. “His appearance was really quite pathetic,” she wrote. But she found the person in those clothes to be quite appealing: “He was at that time, a slim, shy young man, with a far-away look in his very blue eyes.”

She maintained that she was able to see Hitler from an “absolutely different” side than others would in later years. “He was a warm person,” she insisted in an interview in 1971. “One thing was really quite touching: he evidently liked children or he made a good act of it. He was wonderful with Egon.” One afternoon as the little boy ran to meet Hitler, he slipped and bumped his head against a chair. With a dramatic gesture, Hitler then beat the chair, berating it for hurting “good little Egon.” Helen remembered this as “a surprise and a delight,” which prompted the boy to ask the visitor to go through the same act each time he came over. “Please, Uncle Dolf, spank the naughty chair,” Egon would plead.

Helen was fascinated by Hitler’s inclination “to talk and talk and talk,” as she put it. “Nobody else had the chance to say anything. I remember, too, that he couldn’t stand anyone who wanted to talk. He was the one who talked; the others listened. That was why he couldn’t stand some people: because he talked too much.” Whether it was in her home or at rallies in this early period, she continued, “his voice had an unusually vibrant, expressive quality, which it later lost, probably through over-exertion… It has often been said that his voice had a mesmeric quality, and this I can verify, from my own observation.”

Her fascination was in no way diminished by the main subject that Hitler focused on. “The one thing he always raved against was the Jews,” she admitted. He went on about how Jews had prevented him from getting jobs when he was living in Vienna. Helen believed these experiences generated his anti-Semitism. “It began as personal but he built it up politically,” she said.

Who was this American who began hosting Hitler in her home on a regular basis, offering him meals or his favorite duo of black coffee and chocolate—seemingly unconcerned about his dark side? Born in 1893 in New York City, Helen Niemeyer was the daughter of German immigrants, who made sure she spoke German and was aware of her German heritage. But her American identity is on full display in family photos of her dressed as “Liberty”—decked out like the model for the Statue of Liberty and holding a large American flag on the steps of Hoboken’s City Hall. Dated 1912–1913, the photos show her as a young woman of nearly twenty, accompanied by little girls in white dresses and sashes bearing the names of different states.

Soon after they began to see each other socially, Hitler asked Helen: “How do you manage here as an American?” Helen explained about her family roots, noting that she spoke German as fluently as she did English and that she also considered herself “really half and half” in terms of her nationality, despite her U.S. passport.

Putzi told Kay Smith that Helen had walked into his family’s Fifth Avenue shop one day and he had been immediately smitten. “He had been so struck with her beauty he had followed her home,” she recalled. Helen wasn’t film-star beautiful: she was five feet nine inches tall, big-boned, and somewhat matronly looking at an early age. But she had an expressive face with lively blue eyes, kept her hair stylishly back, and wore conservative but chic clothes. Helen and Putzi married on February 11, 1920, their marriage certificate issued by the city clerk in Queens. A year later, after Egon was born, they moved to Munich.

Their marriage wasn’t easy from the beginning. When the Hanfstaengls came to Berlin for a visit and stayed with the Smiths, Kay found Putzi boisterous to the point where she had to keep him in check. At a dinner party the two couples attended, he played the piano magnificently, she noted. “He might have been a concert pianist had he wished to concentrate on that but… he did not work very hard at anything.” When they returned to the Smiths’ apartment on Olivaer Platz, he swung back into action. With a bottle of cognac at his side, he banged out “Harvard, Fair Harvard,” at the same time declaring, “Ah, there’s nothing like Wagner.”

Both Truman and Helen slipped off to their respective bedrooms to go to sleep, but Kay only managed to stop Putzi after four in the morning. Kay recalled that it felt like she had barely fallen asleep when she heard the piano again. Throwing on some clothes, she got him to stop, since Truman and Helen were still sleeping. To keep him from returning to the piano, she convinced Putzi to accompany her on a walk through the nearly empty Tiergarten in the cold early morning hours, telling him that he had to give his wife and her husband some time to rest.

“Ah, the little Helene is always exhausted,” he told her.

“I don’t wonder. You are an exhausting person,” Kay responded. Once Helen finally left Putzi more than a decade later, Kay observed that she had found him “too exhausting.”

But when Helen was new to Germany, she shared many of the same feelings as her husband. She was struck by the economic misery of the postwar period and the political turmoil. “What wonder that in all this chaos a man like A.H. should successfully attract the attention of desperate Germany,” she wrote in her precise handwriting. “His plans for the renaissance of the country sounded ideal for most citizens…”

Among the new American reporters in Germany at that time, there was far from universal agreement that Hitler was a force to be reckoned with. One of the best known was Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, a red-haired, hard-charging Texan who had already worked in Moscow before moving to Berlin in 1923, although he was only twenty-five when he arrived in the German capital. During the ten years that he was based there, H. R. Knickerbocker, as his byline usually read, published six books in German, wrote regular columns for German newspapers, while still attending to his primary duties initially as a reporter for the International News Service and then for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. As John Gunther, another famous itinerant correspondent and author of that era, recalled, he became “a definite public character in German political life.”

When Knickerbocker first saw Hitler in August 1923, rallying his supporters at the Cirkus Krone in Munich, his reaction was one of comic disbelief. “The first impression he makes on any non-German is that he looks silly… I broke out laughing,” Knickerbocker recalled. “Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to say, ‘He looks like a caricature of himself.’” He noted not just the mustache and the lock of hair, but also “the expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes, and the foolish set of his mouth in repose… Other times he clamps his lips together so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.”

There was something else that also gave Knickerbocker and many of his colleagues pause. “He is softly fat about the hips and this gives his figure a curiously female appearance,” he wrote. “It is possible that the strongly feminine element in Hitler’s character is one of the reasons for his violence.”

By contrast, Putzi Hanfstaengl was in full agreement with his wife about Hitler’s appeal, taking him very seriously. He quickly joined Hitler’s entourage and began regularly playing the piano for him, especially after the Nazi leader’s frequent run-ins with the police, who were increasingly monitoring his activities. The first time Putzi played, he tried out a Bach fugue, but Hitler didn’t show any interest. Then, he launched into the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger and he suddenly had Hitler’s full attention. “He knew the thing absolutely by heart and could whistle every note of it in a curious penetrating vibrato, but completely in tune,” Putzi recalled. Hitler started marching up and down, waving his arms as if he were conducting. “This music affected him physically and by the time I had crashed through the finale he was in splendid spirits, all his worries gone, and raring to get to grips with the public prosecutor.”

Hanfstaengl also introduced Hitler to Harvard marching songs, explaining how the music and the cheerleaders were used to whip up the crowds to the point of “hysterical enthusiasm.” He played Sousa marches, and then some of his own improvisations that added the marching beat of American tunes to German ones. “That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,” Hitler exclaimed, prancing about the room like a drum majorette. Putzi would later write several marches that were used by the Brownshirts, including the one they played when they marched through the Brandenburg Gate on the day Hitler took power in 1933. “Rah, rah, rah! became Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil! but that is the origin of it and I suppose I must take my share of the blame,” Putzi wrote in his autobiography. In fact, this sounded like a case of scarcely concealed pride of authorship.

Putzi contributed to Hitler’s movement in other ways, too. After selling his share of the family art gallery in New York to a partner, he put up $1,000 to turn the four-page Nazi propaganda weekly Völkischer Beobachter into a daily. Hitler complained that regular newspapers ignored him and believed that such a transformation could help overcome that problem. Aside from providing the funding, Putzi hired a cartoonist to design a new masthead. He also claimed credit for thinking up its slogan Arbeit und Brot, work and bread. Although Putzi told Hitler that the $1,000 was a no-interest loan, he would never get it back.

As part of Hitler’s circle of advisors, Putzi tried to act on his initial impulse to explain more of the world to this young firebrand—particularly the growing importance of the United States. Pointing out that it was America’s entry into World War I that determined the final outcome, he told Hitler, “If there is another war it must be inevitably won by the side which America joins.” All this, he continued, made it vital for Hitler to advocate a policy of friendship with the United States. While Hitler conceded his point, he didn’t really seem to register it. Putzi concluded that his ideas about America were “wildly superficial.” The only American who interested him then was Henry Ford, since he saw him as a fellow anti-Semite who might be tapped for funds. He was equally interested in the Ku Klux Klan. “He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own,” Putzi noted.

By the fall of 1923, Hitler was openly calling for a revolt against the government. Inflation had turned into hyperinflation, and Putzi recalled that when he pushed his way into the Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, the night of what would go down in history as the beginning of the Beer Hall Putsch, the price for the three beers he ordered was 3 billion marks. He handed one to Hitler, who took a sip even though he already considered himself a nondrinker. With three top Bavarian officials sitting at the speaker’s platform, Hitler—wearing his Iron Cross over his trench coat and grasping a whip—ordered his Brownshirts to seize control of the hall. “Quiet!” he shouted. When the crowd continued to talk in the general confusion that followed, he jumped on a chair and fired a shot into the air. “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded!” he proclaimed.

Even greater confusion followed. Hitler marched the Bavarian officials out to a side room, telling them he wouldn’t accept anything but their support for his putsch. He would reward them with top positions, he vowed; if they refused, the alternative would be grim, he warned. “Gentlemen, not one of us shall leave this hall alive! There are three of you, and I have four bullets. That will be enough for all of us if I fail.” By some accounts, he held a pistol to his head as he said so. No one seemed impressed, and General Ludendorff, who had arrived late but dressed in his full Imperial Army uniform, allowed the Bavarian officials to slip away after supposedly securing their assurances that they were on the plotters’ side.

Hanfstaengl held an impromptu press conference, telling foreign correspondents that a new government had been formed. Cabling from Berlin, Wiegand accepted that version of events as fact and ran with it. “REBELS IN COUP SEIZE BAVARIAN RULE, BEGIN ARMED MARCH AGAINST BERLIN” proclaimed the giant two-line headline across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in its November 9, 1923, edition over his story. He reported that after “the long expected coup,” Hitler’s storm troopers were in control of key communications in Munich and had cut off contact with Berlin, Ludendorff had taken charge of the army, and Hitler had proclaimed the end of the republic.

In reality, Hitler and Ludendorff had lost control of events as soon as the Bavarian officials had left the beer hall. Overnight, the officials made arrangements to put down the rebellion. Although they had largely tolerated Hitler’s movement up till then and sympathized with some of its aims, they weren’t about to let him dictate to them. By the time Hitler and Ludendorff had ordered their troops to march from the Bürgerbräukeller to the center of the city around noon on November 9, the state police was lined up to stop them, with two machine guns at the ready. Confident that they wouldn’t open fire on a war hero like Ludendorff, both the general and the ex-corporal proceeded with their plan, leading the march. They were met with machine-gun fire. Fourteen Nazis died on the spot, along with four policemen.

The American consul Robert Murphy and his German colleague Paul Drey had rushed to the scene to see what was happening. “I can testify that both Hitler and Ludendorff behaved in an identical manner, like the battle-hardened soldiers they were. Both fell flat to escape the hail of bullets,” Murphy recalled. In the brief pandemonium, it was hard to see what actually transpired—and Hitler may have dropped to the ground for another reason. One of those struck by the hail of bullets was Scheubner-Richter, Hitler’s close aide, who was marching with him arm-in-arm. Killed instantly, he may have jerked Hitler to the ground. In any case, the Nazi leader fled the scene with a dislocated shoulder.

Several top Nazis were immediately arrested and Ludendorff surrendered to the authorities, but he was set free after giving his officer’s word that he wouldn’t evade trial. Putzi, who had missed the shooting, rushed to see the outcome, and a Brownshirt medic he encountered told him that Hitler, Ludendorff and Goering were all dead. “My God, Herr Hanfstaengl, it’s too terrible,” he said. “It is the end of Germany.” Believing all was lost, Putzi advised other Nazis he met to get out of Munich immediately, crossing the border into Austria. And he promptly followed his own advice.

In fact, Hitler had managed to escape to his waiting car, along with Walter Schultze, the chief doctor for the storm troopers and others. And, unlike Putzi, he sought refuge in the Hanfstaengls’ country house in Uffing, about an hour from Munich. “The last place it would have occurred to me to go was my own home in Uffing, where I surely would be caught and arrested,” Putzi noted later.

In Hitler’s case, that’s exactly where he ended up, although apparently not by initial design. Still, he probably went there in part because, as Putzi put it, Hitler had developed “one of his theoretical passions” for Helen. Putzi was quick to suggest that Hitler was impotent, and that Hitler’s infatuation with his wife never went beyond hand-kissing and bringing her flowers. “He had no normal sex life… somehow one never felt with him that the attraction was physical,” he declared. Helen agreed that her admirer was probably “a neuter,” but she had no doubt that he was strongly attracted to her.

Whatever the reason, Helen suddenly found herself with an unexpected house guest on the evening of November 9. She had been hearing reports about the putsch and the rumors that Hitler and Ludendorff were dead, but she didn’t know what to believe. While she and Egon were having supper in the upstairs living room, a maid reported that someone was knocking softly on the door. Helen went downstairs and, without opening the door, asked who was there. “To my utter amazement, I recognized the weak but unmistakable voice of Hitler,” she recalled.

Helen quickly opened the door and found herself facing a very different Hitler than the one who normally showed up: “There he stood, ghastly pale, hatless, his face and clothing covered with mud, the left arm hanging down from a strangely slanting shoulder.” The doctor and a medic were holding him up from both sides, but they, too, looked “pathetically rampaged.” Once inside, Helen asked Hitler about Putzi. He told her he wasn’t in the confrontation because he was working on putting out the party newspaper and that he’d probably show up soon. Hitler kept talking, despondent about the deaths of his aides and possibly of Ludendorff, and furious about what he called the treachery of the Bavarian officials. He also swore to her that “he would go on fighting for his ideals as long as breath was in him.”

Hitler was running a temperature and in pain from the dislocated shoulder, so the doctor and the medic eased him upstairs to a bedroom. From there, Helen heard him moaning as they tried to push his arm back into his shoulder.

During the night, the doctor explained to Helen that they, too, had tried to flee to Austria, but their car had broken down. When the driver couldn’t fix it, Hitler had suggested going to Hanfstaengl’s house since they could reach it by foot, although it was a long, difficult walk for the three worn-out men. What that story didn’t explain was how Hitler imagined he could stay hidden in the house of one of his well-known followers.

The next morning, Hitler sent off the doctor to Munich to see if he could arrange for another car to pick him up and still get him to Austria. His arm was in a sling and he appeared to be in less pain than the previous evening, but he was pacing nervously about in a blue bathrobe, asking where the car might be. Helen’s mother-in-law called to say that the police were already in her nearby house. Suddenly, an official cut her off and took the phone himself, telling Helen that he and his men would be arriving at her house next.

Helen went upstairs to let Hitler know that he was about to be arrested. Standing in the hallway, he looked devastated by the news. “Now all is lost—no use going on!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. Then, with a quick motion, he picked up his revolver from the cabinet. “But I was alert, grasped his arm and took the weapon away from him,” Helen recalled.

Alarmed that he might have shot himself, she shouted: “What do you think you’re doing? After all, are you going to leave all the people that you’ve gotten interested in your idea of saving the country and you take your life… They’re looking for you to carry on.”

Hitler hadn’t resisted when she grabbed the gun, and he sank into a chair, burying his head in his hands. While he was still sitting like that, Helen quickly took the gun away to dispose of it, settling on a large flour bin where it easily vanished from sight as she pushed it down deep inside. Returning to Hitler, she urged him to dictate to her all his instructions for his followers before the police arrived; that way, they would know what to do while he would be in prison. She added that he could then sign each sheet containing instructions and she would make sure they would be delivered to his lawyer. “He thanked me for helping him remember his duty to his men, and then dictated the orders which were to be of such importance in carrying on the work,” she recalled.

Soon, the police with guard dogs surrounded the house. Helen answered the knock at the door, and a shy young army lieutenant, accompanied by two policemen, apologetically explained that he had to search the house. Helen told them to follow her upstairs and she opened the door to the room where Hitler was standing. Startled, the three men took a step back for a moment. The Nazi leader had regained his confidence and immediately began berating the lieutenant in a loud voice, particularly when he told him he had to arrest him for high treason.

There was no use arguing, however, and even Hitler realized that. Refusing Helen’s offer of Putzi’s clothes to shield him from the cold, he was still dressed in the blue bathrobe, with his own coat draped over his shoulders, as the men led him down the stairs. At that moment, little Egon ran out, calling, “What are the bad, bad men doing to my Uncle Dolf?” Looking moved, Hitler patted Egon on the cheek. Then he shook hands with Helen and the maids before going out the door. Helen caught a last glance at his face when he was seated in the police car. It was “deathly pale,” she remembered.

Most of the press coverage that followed, at home and abroad, quickly wrote off Hitler and the Nazis. The Beer Hall Putsch had been laughably amateurish, and now all that awaited the arrested leaders was a trial and certain convictions.

Few people realized then that the trial and even imprisonment would serve Hitler surprisingly well. And only a few insiders knew then that it was a young American woman, the wife of one of his earliest followers, who may have prevented him from taking his own life—an act that would have delivered humanity from the devastating consequences of his political resurrection later. It was Helen Hanfstaengl, née Niemeyer, who, in the worst possible way, may have changed the course of history.

Like Knickerbocker who quickly became a close friend, Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News was a new arrival in Berlin in 1923, showing up late that year and staying for a decade, right through Hitler’s rise to power. And, like Knickerbocker, Wiegand and other correspondents, he was as much intrigued by the German capital’s dynamism in the arts as by its chaotic politics. The city was “a cultural riot, the wilder for the lack of such deep traditions as still had held sway in Paris and London,” he recalled. Along with his British-born wife Lilian, he was quickly swept up in that cultural riot.

At the annual Press Ball in the huge Zoo Restaurant, the Mowrers had the chance to mingle with everyone from top government officials and the high-society crowd to the playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Carl Zuckmayer, composer Richard Strauss when he was visiting from Vienna to conduct an opera, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. The event brought together “the leaders of totally different worlds,” Mowrer wrote. “It was as though Paris had merged the Elysée, the Opéra, and the Beaux Arts Ball into one vast get-together that opened with the dignity of a state reception and ended in a bacchanal.”

Initially, Lilian Mowrer had been distinctly unimpressed with Berlin when she followed her husband after wrapping up the couple’s affairs in Rome, their previous assignment. Arriving in March 1924, she was depressed by the figurative and literal cold and the contrast to Italy, where spring flowers were already in bloom. “In Berlin ice still covered the ponds in the Tiergarten, and the atmosphere was leaden,” she noted. She was depressed, too, by “the ugliness of the city,” the heavy Victorian architecture, the pompousness of public buildings—and by “the unlovely figures of the people!”

In the apartment they rented, she found canvases painted by their landlord, female nudes “in the violent tones and formless composition of the German Expressionist school” featuring massive torsos and backsides. “As if we don’t see enough horrors in the street,” she complained. Then there was the matter of food. “There is a great deal in the German cuisine that needs getting used to,” she archly noted. Even the fact that the mark had finally stabilized had its downside as far as she was concerned: prices were now much higher for foreigners than a few years earlier.

Soon, however, Lilian began to see her new home in a different light. German Expressionism was still a puzzle to her, “but something in the passionately contorted figures and faces was beginning to arouse my interest.” She loved Italian art but realized that in Rome she had been living artistically “entirely in the past.” By contrast, “German modern work, half metaphysical, half barbaric, was a stimulating challenge.” As for German theater, she quickly recognized it as “the most vital in Europe” and Germans as “the greatest theater-goers in Europe.” And she loved the fact that Berlin was full of foreign productions as well, from the classic Comédie Française to the daring new Russian offerings of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, which she found particularly exciting. “Nowhere in the world was there such hospitality to foreign talent as in Germany,” she wrote.

Lilian’s happiest discovery, though, was how open many Germans were to foreigners in everyday life, not just on the stage. “They were so wonderfully hospitable, those Weimar Republicans, they did not wait to make a bella figura with receptions and parties, they invited us to take potluck with them in the friendliest manner.” She found everyone—bankers, politicians, writers—inquisitive, expansive and often entertaining.

Another striking aspect of life in Weimar Germany, she observed, was the role of women. At the time of her arrival, the Reichstag boasted 36 women parliamentarians—more than anywhere else. Women were studying a broad array of subjects at the universities—law, economics, history, engineering—and were entering professions once reserved for men. Lilian even met “a full-fledged slaughterer” in Berlin: Margarethe Cohn, who could kill a steer with a single blow of the mallet. “A woman could do what she liked in Weimar Germany,” Lilian concluded.

Lilian was far more than just an observer of life in Berlin. She wrote articles for Town and Country, and she appeared in the first “super-talkie” German film, Liebeswalzer (The Love Waltz), which had both an English and a French version. The German actress who had been cast for the role didn’t speak English as well as she claimed, and Lilian was asked to try out for it. She passed the screen test easily, but her initial elation faded when she saw how monotonous much of the work of endless reshooting was. Still, there were consolations. At another studio lot, Marlene Dietrich was shooting The Blue Angel, and Lilian saw her often eating lunch at the same restaurant where she took her meals. She recognized Dietrich from the stage, where she played leads in “sophisticated” musical reviews and comedies. When The Blue Angel catapulted her to stardom on the big screen, Lilian wasn’t impressed. “It was the greatest waste of material to condemn her forever to vamp roles,” she wrote.

Lilian and Edgar got to know many of the city’s other most famous inhabitants, from the artist George Grosz to Albert Einstein. Meeting the physicist, Edgar asked him about a part of his relativity theory he found illogical. Einstein smiled and replied: “Quit bothering your mind about it: mine is a mathematical, not a logical theory. Here…” At that point, he took his violin and began playing Bach.

Little wonder that Lilian soon conceded: “I was becoming reconciled to Berlin.”

American officials played a key role in bringing about the return to apparent economic normalcy that newcomers like the Mowrers immediately noticed. Ambassador Houghton had been more than just sympathetic to Germany’s plight; he defied isolationist voices back home by arguing that the United States was to blame for not acting more decisively to support Germany’s democratic government. “All in all, Europe is in a sorry mess,” he wrote to State Department European Division Chief William Castle on February 12, 1923. “We ourselves had at one time the power to stabilize conditions… unless something of a miracle takes place, we may look forward confidently and happily to a time not far off when another war may lay prostrate what is left of European civilization.”

Repeatedly urging Washington “to save what is left of German capital and German industry,” Houghton was driven to near despair observing the devastating impact of hyperinflation on his host country, along with the strikes, riots and clashes of extremists of the left and the right. In the summer of 1923, he watched Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government collapse after less than a year in office. “I feel as if I had come back into the same old building, but found the beams and rafters steadily decaying and the floors increasingly unsound, and that unless steps were speedily taken to repair it, the roof and walls must before long inevitably fall in,” he wrote to Secretary of State Hughes.

Those pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears. With backing from the Coolidge Administration, Houghton began to make progress on his push for a new reparations settlement and other measures aimed at stabilizing Germany. In his public pronouncements, Houghton avoided chastising France and denied any intention of seeking to block her “just claims,” but he stressed that Germany’s economic recovery was the key to the continent’s recovery. Working closely with Germany’s Gustav Stresemann, who served briefly as both chancellor and foreign minister in 1923 and then stayed on as foreign minister in eight successive governments, he won support in Berlin and other European capitals for a more active American role.

The result was the Dawes Plan, named after Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, one of a group of American experts who tackled the reparations question. The plan did not fix an exact amount of reparations that the Germans still owed, but it allowed them to make reduced annual payments until their economy improved. Accepted at the end of August 1924, the Dawes Plan immediately triggered a flood of American loans to Germany that would continue until the Depression hit. The stabilization of the currency and the subsequent economic recovery were a direct result of those measures. Speaking to the Reichstag on May 18, 1925, Stresemann left no doubt who was responsible for this dramatic turnaround. “The United States is that nation from which emanated the most important efforts directed toward the reconstruction of the economy and, beyond that, the pacification of Europe,” he declared. “For no country can those efforts be more welcome than for Germany.”

American loans and direct investments, coupled with growing U.S.-German trade, meant that the two countries felt increasingly linked with each other. Germany was not only open to Americans but to the broader trends identified by a new term characterizing their country’s economic, social and cultural influence. “The Americanization of Europe proceeds merrily apace,” Wiegand reported in a feature that was given prominent play in the Washington Herald on June 14, 1925. “Half in wonderment, half in protest this tired old group of nations is falling under the magic sway of that babulous ‘dollar land’ across the ocean.”

As his article pointed out, the average German exhibited a decidedly schizophrenic attitude toward the new money culture, mass production and mass entertainment, including a flood of American movies. He is “resentful of the intrusion of a staccato pace into the easy comfort of his existence and growls and mutters guttural curses against the Americanization of his civilization,” Wiegand wrote. “Then he goes and forgets his troubles to the tune of an American jazz band, beating a savage tom-tom in any of the thousand amusement places.” The German listening to a band playing “My Sweetie Went Away,” he added, was likely to be dressed in a brand-new suit “cut on Yale lines.”

Germans flocked to the Scala variety house, where the hit of the moment was an American troupe that Wiegand described as “the eighteen dancing, prancing Gertrude Hoffman girls.” In his 1925 article, he noted one key reason for the Americans’ popularity. “Their slender legs and waists are not of the pattern usually favored in Berlin,” he wrote.

Berlin was also beginning to experience American-style traffic problems, he reported, and had installed its first traffic lights on Potsdamer Platz, “winking its flirtatious American eyes at the street car conductors, taxi drivers and chauffeurs who get flustered in the tangle of this place where five important streets meet.”

Mowrer echoed those sentiments. “By the early twenties signs of Americanization were appearing all over Europe, and nowhere so conspicuously as in Germany,” he wrote. In his reports, he called 1925 “the first great American year in Europe” and explained how “that complex of factors, personal democracy, technique and standardization of practice,” along with new flashy ads, “had bitten deep into the German soul.” He quoted an American economist as saying that mass production was transforming Germany into “the United States of Europe.”

All of which contributed to the lure of Berlin for American expats. While Paris was still their favorite city in Europe, many of them visited the German capital in the 1920s. Josephine Baker and her Revue Nègre took their act to Berlin, holding their opening show at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürstendamm on December 31, 1925. Although there were protesters outside denouncing the black entertainers, and Nazis called Baker subhuman, she was elated by the enthusiasm of the audiences. “It’s madness. A triumph. They carry me on their shoulders,” she said.

Berlin was the city where Baker received the most gifts: she was showered with jewelry, perfume, furs. After her regular shows, the Nelson Theater was turned into a cabaret, and Baker would continue to perform. She also happily accepted invitations to other parties, at times wearing nothing more than a loincloth. Berlin’s wild nightlife has “an intensity Paris doesn’t know,” she declared—and she loved it. She even considered settling in Berlin but was lured back to the French capital to star at the Folies Bergère.

Both for American visitors and residents, Germany’s racy sexual life was a source of constant fascination. As Edgar Mowrer put it, “The period immediately following the war saw throughout the world a sexual exuberance which, in Germany, reached an almost orgiastic intensity… If anything, the women were the more aggressive. Morality, virginity, monogamy, even good taste, were treated as prejudice.” And when it came to “sexual perversions,” Mowrer added with open amazement, old laws were simply ignored. “It is hard to conceive a much more tolerant society.”

Ben Hecht, who had reported from Berlin for the Chicago Daily News a few years earlier, described what his successor was hinting at. He met a group of homosexual aviators at an Officers’ Club. “These were elegant fellows, perfumed and monocled and usually full of heroin or cocaine,” he recalled. “They made love to one another openly, kissing in the café booths and skipping off around two A.M. to a mansion owned by one of them. One or two women were usually in the party—wide-mouthed, dark-eyed nymphomaniacs with titles to their names but unroyal burns and cuts on their flanks. At times little girls of ten and eleven, recruited from the pavements of Friedrichstrasse, where they paraded after midnight with rouged faces and in shiny boots and in short baby dresses, were added to the mansion parties.”

Although Hecht may have embellished some of his descriptions for his autobiography, there’s no question that Berlin boasted a flourishing gay scene. For visiting young gay Americans like Philip Johnson, this was an exhilarating discovery. Drawn to Germany by the Bauhaus movement and other forms of architectural modernism emerging there in the 1920s, the future famous architect was quickly enchanted by much more than his professional interests. “The air we breathed, the people we came to know, the restaurants, the Kurfürstendamm, the sex life were all new, all thrilling to a young American,” he recalled. “The world was being created here.”

In a letter to his family back home, Johnson wrote: “I think if it can be told from the platform of a Berlin cabaret, it can be written to one’s mother. How prudish I am getting, my, my! Recently in Berlin, it seems, the law against homosexual relations has been repealed, apropos of which the conférencier said that at Easter the law against relations with animals will also be repealed and the normal relation only will be prohibited. The audience thought it very funny, as I did myself, but then of course, I would not admit it.”

And Johnson, like other Americans, found the Germans extremely welcoming, irrespective of sexual preferences. “The Americans were the conquerors of old Germany and the young Germans were eager to accommodate them,” he recalled. “Paris was never that gastfreundlich.”

After the aborted Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis were no longer considered a major story. But then, in early 1924, Hitler was put on trial along with Ludendorff and the others accused of treason. Hitler used the occasion to openly proclaim his goal of overthrowing the Weimar Republic, elaborating on his stab-in-the-back theory about how its treacherous politicians were responsible for Germany’s humiliating defeat and for the subsequent economic disaster. “Treason to the Republic is not treason to the real Germany,” he insisted.

As the judges gave him free rein to dominate the proceedings and even cross-examine witnesses, Hitler scored point after point, ridiculing the Bavarian authorities for initially going along with him before turning against the putsch. Since everyone knew the Bavarian leaders had denounced and defied the central government in Berlin on countless occasions, Hitler sounded convincing when he testified that they “had the same goal that we had—to get rid of the Reich government.” They had discussed that goal before the putsch, he added.

The clear message: Hitler had acted on his convictions, shared by all those who despised Germany’s current rulers, while the Bavarian authorities had played a double game. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court,” he told the judges. “For she acquits us.”

Observing Hitler for the first time as he covered the trial, Mowrer was clearly impressed. “He spoke with humor, irony and passion,” he reported. “A little dapper man, he sometimes resembled a German drill sergeant, and sometimes a Viennese floor walker.” His oratory “literally tore to pieces” the claims of the Bavarian authorities. When he had finished his impassioned speech, “there was scarcely a spectator or a correspondent who did not want to applaud him,” he concluded.

Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, the minimum sentence for treason, and Ludendorff was acquitted altogether. Murphy of the American consulate summed up his conclusions in a report to Washington dated March 10, 1924: “While the putsch in November 1923 was a farcical failure, the nationalist movement behind it is by no means extinguished in Bavaria. It has simply been delayed… It is contemplated that upon completion of his term Hitler, who is not a citizen, will be expelled from the country. Further nationalist activity on his part, for the present at least, appears to be excluded.”

In his memoirs that were published in 1964, Murphy wrote that this conclusion was “not too bad.” Specifically, he contrasted it with the single mention of Hitler in the memoirs of Lord D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Germany from 1920 to 1926. The future German leader’s name appeared only in a footnote, which claimed that after his release from prison, Hitler “vanished into oblivion.”

Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison after serving less than nine months in pampered conditions, which allowed him to use the time to dictate his autobiography Mein Kampf. His jailers treated him like a guest of honor, allotting him a comfortable large room with a lovely view and allowing plenty of visitors and packages from well-wishers. After his release, he was not expelled to his Austrian homeland.

Still, Hitler’s movement was beset by internal feuds during his absence, and, even when he began to mobilize his followers again and the ban on the party was lifted, the country’s improved economic situation diminished its appeal. In the December 1924 elections for the Reichstag, the Nazis won a paltry 14 seats as compared to 131 for the Socialists and 103 for the German Nationalists, a less radical right-wing movement.

During the presidential elections in April 1925, the right-wing parties backed Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who easily won despite the fact that he was already seventy-seven. As Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs who was visiting Germany at the time, recalled in his memoirs, the most interesting part of that presidential campaign was that the Nazis did not figure “even as a side issue.” Hitler was out of prison but still barred from public speaking and, as Armstrong added, “as far as I can remember, nobody, either German or American, so much as mentioned his name to me.”

In the May 1928 parliamentary elections, the Nazis dropped even lower, winning only 12 seats. The Socialists raised their tally to 152 seats, and the Nationalists dropped to 78. Little wonder that both American diplomats and correspondents, who had briefly focused on Hitler during the run-up to the Beer Hall Putsch and then through his trial, largely ignored him afterward. There was no line for interviews, no urgent queries about him from Washington to the diplomats or from the editorial home offices to the foreign correspondents.

At times, the Americans residing in or passing through Berlin appeared to be as much preoccupied with each other and fellow expats as with their surroundings. Writing to a friend on November 14, 1927, Knickerbocker tossed in this teaser: “Hemingway by the way is here in Berlin just now, hobnobbing with Sinclair Lewis.” Lewis, who in 1930 would become the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, spent a good deal of time in Berlin because of Dorothy Thompson, who had moved there in 1925. One of the first female foreign correspondents with celebrity status, Thompson reported for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, and she shared a duplex apartment on Händelstrasse with the Mowrers.

Knickerbocker, who would later take over her Berlin job for the Philadelphia and New York papers, conveniently introduced Thompson to Lewis at a tea given by the German foreign minister. To make things juicier, some accounts claim that Thompson and Knickerbocker were more than colleagues, briefly linking them romantically.

Thompson had just divorced Joseph Bard, a Hungarian who had a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer, and Lewis’s marriage to Grace Hegger was in a state of collapse. The acclaimed author and the pioneering woman foreign correspondent were immediately infatuated with each other. Thompson called Lilian Mowrer one evening. “Do come on up, I have a jolly crowd here,” she told her. Mowrer came to the other part of the duplex apartment they shared to find Lewis, fresh from his triumphant publication of Elmer Gantry, delivering sermons “in the manner of his ecclesiastical hero” to the small gathering. Turning his collar back to front, he let loose with a torrent of words, damning his listeners for their sins. “It was an amazing tour de force, and we quaked, deliciously conscious of our shortcomings,” Lilian recalled. Lewis and Thompson soon became lovers and, once his divorce came through, they married in 1928.

That kind of social scene, along with Germany’s openness to “Americanization,” meant that Americans felt very much at home in Berlin. In 1928, even Hitler—then the leader of what still looked like an inconsequential party—pointed out that “Americanization” was leaving its mark in numerous ways. “International relations between nations have become so easy and close through modern technology and the communication it makes possible, that the European, often without being conscious of it, applies American conditions as a standard for his own,” he declared. It was a rare case of Hitler acknowledging a new trend without immediately denouncing it.

The talk of Americanization was shorthand for what now is called globalization. It was a genuine opening up to the world. That, as much as any specifically American characteristics, represented the real attraction of Berlin. “These were the brilliant, feverish years when Berlin was, in a cultural sense, the capital of the world,” Thompson wrote, repeating the sentiments of the banjo virtuoso Michael Danzi and other artists. “These were the days when the German mind was open to every stream of thought from every part of the earth. Every current beat upon Berlin.”

While American reporters continued to cover the political and economic situation, the stories that stand out in this period—and thrilled readers the most—were the lighter features. And none more so than the first transatlantic passenger flight of the Graf Zeppelin in October 1928, a 112-hour voyage in the rigid airship from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Chicago Herald and Examiner issued a special booklet with all the articles of the two Hearst correspondents on board. The introduction called the compilation “an authentic record of a voyage that today is second only to that of Columbus in importance.”

One of the Hearst correspondents on board was Wiegand. The other was Lady Drummond-Hay, who was hailed as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Both reporters filed extensively, and it was the pairing of their stories that added to the sense of adventure and romance about the voyage. Lady Drummond-Hay’s writing was particularly evocative:

“The Graf Zeppelin is more than just machinery, canvas and aluminum,” she filed. “It has a soul—every man who worked to build it, every man who worked to fly it, every one of us who have made this journey, has contributed to the humanization of the aerial colossus. I love the airship as if it were something alive… I have been supremely happy on the Zeppelin. The journey has contributed richly to my emotional life.”

Some readers may have guessed another source of Lady Drummond-Hay’s emotional life: the romantic attachment between her and her colleague Wiegand. In 1923 at the age of twenty-eight, the Englishwoman had married the former diplomat Sir Robert Hay Drummond-Hay, who was fifty years older than she was. Three years later, he died, leaving her a young aristocratic widow who focused on her journalistic career. Working for Hearst, she met Wiegand, and their relationship quickly became much more than professional. Wiegand was married, but, as a gallivanting foreign correspondent, he was often separated from his wife.

After the two met in 1926, they tried to cover stories together as often as they could—including the first around-the-world zeppelin voyage in 1929. When separated, the duo wrote constantly to each other. Their correspondence leaves no doubt about the nature of their relationship. “You have indeed cared for me ‘tenderly’ Ol’ Bear, and the Cubbie-wubbie is fully appreciative and will stick close beside the Old Bear for comfort and protection, and love all her life… I love you very dearly and very truly,” the Englishwoman wrote in one of her first letters in 1926, signing it “Cubbie-wubbie-Tum-Tum.”

The Hearst newspapers loved trumpeting the exploits of the “brilliant British woman” and the “internationally-known newspaper correspondent” Wiegand. And they had no hesitation about focusing on stories about air travel when the situation on the ground looked better than it had since the beginning of the previous war. As Dorothy Thompson wrote later, the period from 1924 to 1929 seemed “full of promise… In that brief five years, truly remarkable progress was made in Germany.” It seemed to make perfect sense to illustrate that progress with dramatic narratives about people soaring across oceans, invoking visions of a peaceful, more harmonious world.

Even in that era full of promise, many Americans in Germany sensed that, despite surface similarities, “the Germans” were different from them and many other Europeans. “Though externals of American life were becoming increasingly popular—quick-lunch bars, flashy slogans, sky-scrapers, even chewing-gum—the mental attitude towards them remained purely Teutonic,” Lilian Mowrer observed. Those “Teutonic” differences were sometimes odd, sometimes comic, and, occasionally, hinted at something troubling, something sinister.

The Mowrers investigated a German social phenomenon that, at first glance, looked titillating. “Where but in Germany could one find 150,000 organized nudists?” Edgar wrote. But after visiting several nudist colonies, Lilian pointed out: “They all had the same un-erotic, purposeful atmosphere.” She wrote off the more lurid stories of sexual shenanigans there as nothing more than rumors and detected something more philosophical. “These Germans were swayed by feelings half primitive, half religious, with hopes of a saner humanity in some remote future yet undreamed.”

She was troubled by “the loose emotional fervor” the nudist movement engendered and its “ardent yearning for something ‘different.’” Most of the young people she met at the nudist colonies voted Communist, thinking this represented the path to human betterment. Those feelings, she concluded, “could be just as easily canalized and turned in any other direction by an unscrupulous leader interested in using it for his own ends.”

Thompson was struck by the German public’s fascination with gruesome crimes, as evidenced by the popularity of a police exhibition chronicling a series of murders that had captured the headlines. It included a reproduction of the bedroom of a man who had trolled for his twenty-six young male victims in the toilets of the Hannover train station. “If one wants a glimpse of the miserable den in which this monster killed his victims, if one longs to see the cot where he strangled them, the table where he carved them, the buckets in which he stored them, one must stand in line for half an hour,” she observed.

Americans were equally intrigued by other forms of extreme behavior. The Mowrers were taken aback by the assistant in the Daily News bureau who pursued a “natural” diet with almost no liquids that he claimed would ensure him a much longer than normal life span. He did so with such fervor that he lost forty pounds, his productivity dropped by 50 percent and he looked “like a death’s head.” When he broke down and ordered a meal of pork, potato salad and apple pie, along with plenty of beer, his body swelled up enormously and he had to be hospitalized. Still, after a six-week recovery, he declared that he simply hadn’t found the right diet to prolong his life. “If only I could devote all my time to the search…” he said.

“Do you think Germans are madder than any other peoples?” Lilian asked her husband. “They seem so unbalanced… so hysterical.”

“They lack coherence,” Edgar replied. “They are so rich in intellect and poor in common sense. And there is almost nothing they can’t persuade themselves to believe.”

In an era of rampant anti-Semitism, Weimar Germany wasn’t always viewed as a special case. In fact, Hecht, who claimed to be the only Jewish correspondent in the American press corps in Berlin during his stay from 1918 to 1920, offered this somewhat startling reflection about his experiences: “The strange bit of history I have to report is that in my two years in Germany, I, a Jew, saw and heard no hint of anti-Semitism. Not once in the time I spent in Germany did I hear the word Jew used as an epithet… There was less anti-Semitism to be heard, seen, felt or smelled in that postwar Germany than at any time in the U.S.A.”

Hecht may have had a couple of reasons for deliberately overlooking the anti-Semitic rhetoric that would have been hard to miss. First, he wanted to make the point that Americans had no cause to feel smugly superior on this score. Second, writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, he was setting up his thesis that what led to this disaster was a national characteristic of the average German. No matter how educated or sophisticated the German appeared to be, Hecht claimed, “In him all morality was secondary to this morality of obeying a leader.” Or put differently, it wasn’t the doctrine of a leader that made Germans follow him; it was simply the fact that he demanded their allegiance and they blindly complied.

There was no denying how receptive Americans were to anti-Semitism in the aftermath of World War I. Or how energetically some Americans not only embraced anti-Semitic propaganda but promoted it. The most prominent American to do so was Henry Ford. The automaker was also a crusading pacifist who had proclaimed his worldview as early as 1915. “I know who caused the war—the German-Jewish bankers,” he told Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jewish peace activist. “I have the evidence here. Facts!”

In 1919, Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, a small weekly that promptly launched a virulently anti-Semitic campaign, championing the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent exposé of the alleged Jewish conspiracy to take over the world that had circulated earlier in Europe but only reached American shores at that time. The series of articles were soon published as a notorious pamphlet called The International Jew. When Annetta Antona, a columnist for the Detroit News, interviewed Hitler on December 28, 1931, at the Brown House, the Nazi headquarters in Munich, she noticed the large portrait of Ford above his desk. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told her.

Too much can be read into that statement of the future leader of Germany. Hitler had lived and breathed anti-Semitism long before he became acquainted with Ford’s views. And his admiration of Ford had at least as much to do with his pioneering work as an automaker as with his prejudices. Once in power, Hitler would transform his idea of the Volkswagen—the “people’s car”—into reality, crediting “Mr. Ford’s genius” for demonstrating that the motor car could be an instrument for uniting different classes rather than dividing them.

Still, the Ford record and other manifestations of American anti-Semitism serve as useful reminders that Germany was far from unique in harboring such sentiments in the 1920s. In fact, some Americans in Berlin were just as likely as their German counterparts to let their prejudices show. In a letter dated February 23, 1921, to Vivian Dillon, an aspiring American opera singer, Wiegand expressed shock that she was considering marrying “a prosperous, energetic, Jewish manager.” He inquired “why must it be a Jew, or have you come to the conclusion that there are no others, who are prosperous and energetic?”

But anti-Semitism in Germany wasn’t just a matter of all-too-ordinary bias. On June 24, 1922, Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, the most prominent Jew in high office, was assassinated in Berlin, and other acts of right-wing violence became increasingly commonplace. Diplomat Hugh Wilson blamed a combination of factors: millions of veterans returning to a Germany where jobs were scarce and the rich and powerful included “a high proportion of Jews.” Bolshevism was seen as dominated by Jews, he pointed out, as were some of the democratic parties in the Reichstag. “One could sense the spreading resentment and hatred,” he wrote.

Once the country appeared to be getting back on its feet in the mid-1920s, many Americans in Germany were less alarmed by the anti- Semitic diatribes of the Nazis and other extremists. But they hardly could be as oblivious to them as Hecht claimed to be years earlier. Particularly when they were in the presence of German Jews, they were acutely conscious of the growing tensions.

One evening in 1928, S. Miles Bouton, the Baltimore Sun’s Berlin correspondent, ran into Thompson and Lewis at the Berlin Municipal Opera. Bouton was there with a daughter of a Jewish family that lived in his apartment building. He had not met Lewis before, and Thompson introduced them during the intermission. Since the young woman spoke no English, Lewis used only his fluent German, and at one point made a reference to Jews. He hadn’t said anything critical, but Bouton was worried enough to caution him quietly in English: “Look out. The girl with me is a Jewess.”

Lewis gave no indication he had heard him, but then casually remarked: “You know, lots of people won’t believe that my father was a rabbi.” The young woman was suddenly all aglow. “Your father was a rabbi?” she asked.

Writing about this encounter a few years afterward, Bouton recalled: “There was still no indication in 1928 of the coming pogroms that were to sully Germany’s repute five years later, but songs about spilling Jewish blood were being sung by uniformed marchers, and the swastika, emblem in Germany for hatred of the race, was ever more in evidence.” For this young woman, the highlight of the evening was not only meeting the famous American writer, who in reality was the son of a Wisconsin country doctor, but hearing the white lie that he was Jewish. “I hope she has never been undeceived,” Bouton concluded, “but be that as it may, Lewis’s alertness and kindness of heart brought more cheer to one unfortunate than he will ever know.”

In 1925, Jacob Gould Schurman succeeded Houghton as ambassador. A former New York politician, Schurman had studied in Germany, spoke excellent German and worked hard to maintain the good will that his predecessor had earned. One of his initiatives was to raise money from wealthy Americans for a building fund for Heidelberg University; among the contributors was John D. Rockefeller, who donated $200,000 of the total gift of $500,000. Such activism made Schurman a very popular envoy.

So did his pronouncements praising the German government’s commitment to peace and democracy. Early in his tenure, he argued that “the will to war was dead in Germany” and he later touted Germany’s signing on to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war. On a visit to New York that same year, he declared, “The Republic has in general commended itself to the people and grows with such strength and vitality that its permanency may now be taken for granted.”

Schurman wasn’t as blind to the dangers of more turmoil as his public pronouncements suggested. He noted during his first year in Berlin that American financial institutions were aggressively pushing their highinterest loans, disregarding the risks involved. His embassy reported that the “itch to pour unproductive millions into German municipal coffers is rapidly becoming pathological.”

American correspondents like Mowrer also began to question what was happening. Economist David Friday, who had been one of Mowrer’s instructors at the University of Michigan, came to Berlin representing an investment firm eager to pump funds into Germany. Puffing on a cigar after a dinner with the Mowrers, he explained his mission: “You see we consider these people a sound proposition: hard-working, solid… we’re going to put them on their feet again.”

“At nine per cent?” asked Mowrer.

“Well, of course, we are no philanthropists,” Friday replied.

As Lilian Mowrer pointed out, the influx of what appeared to be easy money from the United States and other countries led to “an orgy of spending.” Traveling frequently around the country for her Town and Country pieces, she mentioned one example: “the stunning new railway cars and streamlined monsters on the Reichsbahn track.” She also realized that “the entire rolling stock of the country had just been equipped with the new Kunze-Knorr air brakes, a little luxury that had cost close to one hundred million dollars.” Britain, she added, had considered equipping its railroads with those new brakes, but had concluded it couldn’t afford to.

Germany was also using loans to make reparation payments, and Schurman openly sympathized with German complaints that the financial burden was unsustainable. Even before the Wall Street crash, there were plenty of ominous signs of the shakiness of the German economy. In March 1929, Schurman received a warning from the chairman of the Reichstag Budget Committee that the country’s finances were in the worst shape since the near meltdown in 1923.

Soon the Dawes Plan was replaced by the Young Plan, named after American banker Owen D. Young, the chairman of another group of experts. They produced a plan in 1929 to further reduce reparation payments but stretch them out all the way until 1988. Ferdinand Eberstadt, the most knowledgeable of the American experts about Germany’s finances, bluntly told Young right at the beginning of their deliberations with the French and others: “Hey, this thing’s a fake—it will bust up because they are playing politics and have no concern for economics.” German officials complained the payments were still too high, and Hitler and other opposition figures denounced the whole scheme.

The Wall Street crash of October 1929 changed everything. Although the German government formally approved the Young Plan in March 1930, allowing it to receive about $300 million in new American loans, the plan was effectively stillborn. Faced with the sudden drying up of foreign loans and the domestic credit market followed by mounting unemployment, the Socialist government collapsed that same month. A new minority coalition led by the Center Party’s Heinrich Brüning failed to win support for its economic program. Frustrated by the gridlock in the Reichstag, he called for new elections in September.

The stage was set for the return of the agitator from Munich.