Metropolis

Author’s Note

Bernhard Weiss fled Berlin with his family just a few days before Hitler was made chancellor of Germany in 1933. He moved to London, where he opened a printing and stationery business and died in 1951. The forecourts at Friedrichstrasse railway station and the Alexanderplatzstrasse are named in his honor.[1]

All the members of the Schrader-Verband described in the early part of this book achieved positions of importance under the Nazis, not least Arthur Nebe, who commanded an SS-Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine that massacred some 40,000 Jews. His postwar fate remains something of a mystery.

Ernst Gennat remained in Kripo until his death in August 1939.

Frieda Ahrendt’s death was never officially solved by the Berlin police and remains open to this day.

Albert Grzesinski fled to Switzerland in 1933. It is not known to the author if Daisy Torrens went with him; he died in New York, in 1948. Her fate is also unknown.

The double-murderer Bruno Gerth remained in a Berlin mental institution for the remainder of his life.

The Berlin morgue was built on the site of the Charité hospital’s old cholera cemetery. The main viewing hall was twenty-five meters long. Bodies were displayed for three weeks and then buried by the city in a coffin that Berliners called a Nasequetscher (a nose crusher). The morgue was closed to the public; since the Nazis were now responsible for most of the murders in Berlin, it may be that they wanted to keep their crimes as quiet as possible.

George Grosz was one of the Weimar Dada movement’s leading artists. To say the least, his work, not to mention his appearance—he really did walk around the city dressed as a cowboy—was challenging for conservative-minded Berliners. Here he is in his words—and this goes a long way to explaining just why the Nazis thought his work was degenerate and banned it: “My drawings expressed my hate and my despair. I sketched drunks, puking men, men shaking their fists at the moon. I drew a man, his face filled with horror, washing blood from his hands. . . . I drew a cross section of a tenement house: through one window could be seen a man beating up his wife; through another two people making love; from a third hung a man, his body covered with flies. I drew soldiers without noses, war cripples with crab-like steel arms; I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit having a medical for military duty. I also wrote poetry.” He emigrated to the USA in 1933, returning to Berlin in 1956, where he died, in 1959.

Thea von Harbou was a German screenwriter married to Fritz Lang, the film director. Her screenplays include the Dr. Mabuse films, Metropolis, and M. She and Lang divorced in April 1933, soon after Hitler came to power. She was loyal to the new regime, which may have had something to do with it. Imprisoned by the British after the war and subject to denazification, she died in 1954. M was released in May 1931; the leading detective in the story, Inspector Karl Lohmann, is based on Ernst Gennat.

Theo Wolff was editor of the Berliner Tageblatt until 1933, when the Nazis took control of the paper. It was finally shut down by the Nazis in 1939.

Walter Gempp was head of the Berlin firefighting department at the time of the Reichstag fire, in February 1933; in March 1933 he was dismissed from the fire department for suggesting that the Nazis had had a hand in the fire. In 1937 Gempp was arrested and accused of malfeasance. He was sent to prison, where he was strangled in his cell.

The biggest criminal rings in Germany were the Grosser Ring, the Freier Bund, and the Frei Vereinigung; these were all part of a larger syndicate called the Middle German Ring.

The Sing Sing Club really did have an electric chair; it was closed down by the Nazis in 1933.

The Threepenny Opera opened at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928. Despite an initially poor reception, it became a great success and played almost four hundred times over the next two years. But both Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany in 1933. Lotte Lenya also left Germany in 1933; she and Weill remained together until 1933, when they divorced. But they remarried in New York in 1935, and the marriage lasted until Weill’s death in 1950. Lotte Lenya died in Manhattan in 1981.

Otto Dix was a friend and contemporary of George Grosz; his works are perhaps even more visceral: some remind one of Goya at his darkest. He was also regarded as a degenerate artist and was obliged to leave Germany in 1933; he did not return until after the war and died in Baden-Württemberg, in July 1969.

The Cabaret of the Nameless, which reminds me of Pop Idol and anything with Simon Cowell, was closed in 1932.