it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Here is Buffa's take on Otto Friedrich’s Before The Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s:
Otto Friedrich distinguishes himself from the typical historians who specialize, compartmentalize and would “mistrust any journalistic attempt to include movie stars and generals and bankers and poets in the same chronicle.” The story he wants to tell, “the story of Berlin in the 1920s permits no other approach.” What Friedrich calls his “journalistic attempt,” however, is precisely what a truly great historian tries to achieve. And that is what Otto Friedrich really was, a great historian, perhaps the greatest American writer of European history in the twentieth century. Like Jacob Burckhardt in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance In Italy, Friedrich gives more than a chronology of interesting events and biographies of important people; he paints a portrait of a place and time, a work of art that, in a way nothing else can, shows what it was like to live in Berlin, a city that before we have read the first page we know is doomed to destruction, and something more than that in the memory of those who remember what the Third Reich did to the world.Visit D.W. Buffa's website.
Otto Friedrich was not a professional historian, but he majored in history at Harvard, where his father, Carl Friedrich taught government, and became one of the best read men of his generation, a generation that still took reading seriously. In one of his other works, City of Nets, which tells the story Hollywood in the 1940s, he read five hundred books before he started to write; he read more than three hundred in preparation for Before The Deluge. This gave him the kind of familiarity with things - the different colors, and the different shades of colors - with which to paint the most vivid picture of Berlin in the 1920s we will ever have. It begins with the Russians.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian contingent in Berlin grew to perhaps as many as 50,000. “Russian restaurants and cabarets…opened everywhere.” Karl Radek, Lenin’s personal envoy to Berlin, “sometimes exchanged barbed remarks with the former grand dukes who waited on tables.” A young playwright, Carl Zuckmayer, happened to be in one of the Russian restaurants one evening when the great Russian ballerina, Pavlova, entered. All the talking stopped. Everyone stared in silence. Pavlova, who knew what she was about, acknowledged what they wanted and danced for five minutes, “floated above that narrow space like a phantom, then with a deep bow of her whole body sank to the stone floor. The cheers that burst out seemed on the point of shattering the vaulted ceiling, but she silenced them with another gesture of her lovely arms, then returned to the small sofa and her companions. Thereafter no one looked in her direction.”
The Russians, unfortunately, brought more than the marvelous dancing of Pavlova. They brought their politics, which meant their ideas, and their violent disagreements, about revolution. Rosa Luxemburg attacked Karl Radek for the Bolshevik’s use of terror. “Radek had the standard answer - Lenin applied terror, he said, only against ‘classes whom history has sentenced to death.’” Vladimir Nabokov’s father, a former member of the Russian parliament and the editor of the leading Russian daily newspaper in Berlin, opposed any compromise with Lenin and was shot and killed when he threw himself in front of an assassin’s bullet meant for Peter Miliukov with whom he was having a public debate on this very question. Even more troubling than the terror that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were willing to use against classes history had sentenced to death was what some Russians thought should happen to a race that, in their judgement, had no right to live. Fyodor Vinberg, a former Czarist officer, founded a newspaper in Berlin in which “He argued, quite emphatically, that all Jews should be killed.” He brought to Germany the first copies “of a provocative Russian work called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraud concocted in 1895, apparently by the Czarist secret police,’ alleging that a Jewish conspiracy existed to take over the world. A new edition sold 100,000 copies in Germany.
It would have been easy to dismiss this as the ravings of a lunatic fringe. Jews were proud to be German and no one was more patriotic. One of every six Jews, including women and children, had served in the German armed forces in World War I. One hundred thousand had entered the army; 35,000 were decorated for bravery. Twelve thousand had been killed. After the war, Walter Rathenau became“one of the most nationalistic of Germany’s foreign ministers.” Rathenau was also anti-Semitic. “I am a German of Jewish descent,” he explained. “My people is the German people, my fatherland is Germany, my religion is that German faith which is above all religions.” The Jewish refugees that had arrived from Eastern Europe were to him “an alien organism,” a problem that should be dealt with, not by making them “imitation Germans, but Jews bred and educated as Germans.”
When Rathenau, who was enormously popular, was murdered, a million people marched in protest. At the trial of those who had conspired to kill him, one of the defendants testified that he had been told that Rathenau belonged to a Bolshevist movement that was attempting to bring the world under the rule of the Jews. Some years later, on the eve of the Nazi take over, one of the conspirators hit Goebbels on the side of the face and shouted: “It wasn’t for swine like you that we shot Rathenau.” This did not stop the Nazis using his death for their own purposes, declaring that the murder of Rathenau was all in the “spirit of the SS.”
More than anything, what happened in Berlin in the l920s was because of the insistence of the victorious allies that Germany pay for the war. The reparation issue, which Winston Churchill called “A sad story of complicated idiocy,” produced increasing inflation as the government printed money to pay its debt. The German mark fell from 4.2 to the dollar in l918 to thousands, then millions, then billions to the dollar, falling so far and so fast that Bruno Walter, the conductor of the Berlin philharmonic, would take a break during rehearsal so the orchestra’s musicians could use their paychecks to buy what they could before prices were higher an hour, or even a few minutes, later. By the middle of the 1920s, “the whole of Germany had become delirious.” The savings of the middle and the working class were wiped out. All values changed; everyone did what they had to do to survive. Morality could no longer afford to exist.
Life went on anyway it could. And, strangely enough - or perhaps not strangely at all - the arts and architecture took a new turn. Walter Gropius saw that the machines which seemed to produce nothing but ugliness could be used to make beautiful things, and with that insight he began the era of modern furniture and modern design. With the same reasoning, Gropius imagined glass and metal skyscrapers, buildings that “were to be giant crystals,” and would change forever the shape of cities and the way in which people lived and worked in them. Everywhere the traditional was rejected in favor of the new and innovative; nowhere was this passion to abandon the past taken to a greater extreme than in classical music.
It did not matter what Bach or Beethoven or Mozart had done; it was time to do something different, a “whole new language for modern music,” something Arnold Schoenberg was certain he could do. The twelve tones of the chromatic scale were to be equal in value. They could be played in any sequence, but - and this was crucial - “no note could be repeated until the other eleven had been stated.” Schoenberg did not care if an audience hated it. That only proved he was right: The “laws of nature manifested in a man of genius,” he explained, “are but the laws of the men of the future.”
The pianist, Rudolph Serkin, loved Schoenberg. “But I did not love his music. I told him so, and he never forgave me.” Thomas Mann and Schoenberg were good friends. Mann wrote Dr. Faustus in which Schoenberg’s music is made to be the work of the Devil. Schoenberg never spoke to him again. Whatever one thinks about Schoenberg and his music, it is impossible not to admire what he did when the Nazis came to power. While he was in Paris working on an opera, he was informed that he had been dismissed as a professor at the Berlin Academy of Music and should not come back to Germany. Without a job, and without a country, Arnold Schoenberg, a German Catholic, changed his religion and became a Jew.
The incessant desire for change, the belief that everything is the creation of human genius, that the only rules are the rules we make and impose upon ourselves, found support, and had, as it were, its foundation, in what was happening in theoretical physics. Friedrich treats this with a clarity a specialist in science could never achieve. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Planck explained the Quantum Theory. “Light and energy, he said, do not move in continuous waves but in a flow of tiny particles.” Niels Bohr then applied Planck’s Quantum Theory to the problem of atomic structure, which in turn led to Werner Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy which “abolished, to state it simply, the whole idea of exact observation. There was no longer such a thing as a ‘scientific fact.’” The result was, that “If, basically, Einstein taught that all facts are relative, Heisenberg taught that all facts are purely momentary perceptions of possibilities.”
Everything is relative, there are no objective facts. Everything is subject to interpretation, and no interpretation is any better, any more true, than any other. As Nietzsche had foreseen, everything takes the shape of whoever has the power to enforce their belief on everyone else. It is the will to power that Nietzsche insisted gave meaning to the world; it is the will to power that, with the loss of belief in all objective standards, made Hitler so appealing. It was the reason that so many of the youth of Germany gave him such great support. Richard Lowenthal, who had studied at the University of Berlin in the twenties, told Friedrich that nearly two-thirds of the students “were already committed to the right.” Friedrich expressed astonishment. How could the Nazis “appeal so strongly to young students,” he asked, “when one usually thinks of young people as idealistic?” Lowenthal answered without hesitation. “Because the Nazis were idealistic, too.” They “promised national unity and national resurrection.” They “promised an alternative to what they called the corrupt plutocratic system.” But there was more involved than misguided idealism; there was a deep dislike of Jews. In l927, the Prussian Student Organization, Friedrich reports, was 77% against the admission of Jews. More than their parents, they were not just anti-Semitic, they were pro-Nazi, “60% by actual count - and ready for violence.”
None of this seemed to matter at the beginning of 1929. It was the year when Berlin, like much of Europe and America as well, basked in the glow of “euphoric prosperity.” The new technology, the speed of transport, the crossing of the Atlantic by air, seemed to mark the triumph of the machine age. Germany, finally, was on the road to recovery. Then, suddenly, on October 29, the stock market crashed and within weeks 750,000 of Berlin’s population of four million were out of work. Goebbels’ newspaper with its slogan, ‘For the Oppressed Against the Exploiters,’ had a new appeal. The National Socialist Party which had only 17,000 members in 1926, and 120,000 in the summer of l929, had at least a million members in 1930. In the election of that year, the Nazis, who had only twelve seats in the Reichstag before, won 107 and became Germany’s second largest party. More than the numbers changed inside the Reichstag. Enjoying parliamentary immunity, the Nazi members turned legislative debates into “a scene of shouted insults, loud singing, and threats of violence.” And then, in the next election, in 1932, the Nazis nearly doubled their vote, won a majority in the Prussian state election, forced Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and gave birth to the Third Reich.
The reaction in Germany was emphatic. Hans Gisevius, “who, as a young lawyer, shared in the national illusion,” explained years later that, “The glorious sensation of a new fraternity overwhelmed all groups and classes.” They had “suddenly learnedwhat seemed to be the greatest discovery of the century - that they were comrades of one race…. Above all, youth, youth was getting its due.”
Goebbels was not surprised. He claimed to have helped the Nazi cause “in four essential ways: by introducing Socialism into a middle-class group, by ‘winning Berlin,’ by working out the style of the party’s public ceremonies, and by the ‘creation of the Fuhrer myth. Hitler had been given the halo of infallibility.” It was a myth Hitler himself believed. When one of his followers told him he has mistaken about something, he angrily replied, “I cannot be mistaken. What I do and say is historical.” There was never any doubt about what Hitler meant to do, and how he meant to do it. He understood what he was working with, and what had to a be done to get what he wanted: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be repeated until every last member of the public understands what you want him to understand.”
Before The Deluge is an extraordinary book, a book that tells the story - the whole story - of what happened in Berlin a hundred years ago, and what happened to the rest of the world because of it. If that seems too far back in the past to have any relevance to the present situation, if it seems too far back in time to tell us anything about what our own future may hold, we would do well to remember that, as the author explained at the beginning, “people who forget the past are condemned to misunderstand it.” Anyone who does not see the parallels with what happened in Berlin in the l920s and what could happen here today has not read Otto Friedrich, and does not understand the past.
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome.
--Marshal Zeringue
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