Quote of the Day (Philip Kerr, on Jesse Owens Thwarting an Early Attempt at Olympic Marketing)

“At the gun Jesse Owens was away to a good start, and by the first thirty metres he was powering fluently into a clear lead. In the seat next to me the matron was on her feet again. She had been wrong, I thought, to describe Owens as a gazelle. Watching the tall, graceful negro accelerate down the track, making a mockery of crackpot theories of Aryan superiority, I thought that Owens was nothing so much as a Man, for whom other men were simply a painful embarrassment. To run like that was the meaning of the earth, and if ever there was a master-race, it was certainly not going to exclude someone like Jesse Owens. His victory drew a tremendous cheer from the German crowd, and I found it comforting that the only race they were shouting about was the one they had just seen. Perhaps, I thought, Germany did not want to go to war after all. I looked towards that part of the stadium that was reserved for Hitler and other senior party officials, to see if they were present to witness the depth of popular sentiment being demonstrated on behalf of the black American. But of the leaders of the Third Reich there was no still sign.”—British mystery novelist Philip Kerr (1956-2018), March Violets (1989)

I am not the type of person to sit in front of a TV for a fortnight to watch the Olympics. But there are evidently enough such people to lead host countries to consider it a golden marketing opportunity to showcase their sites to potential tourists worldwide.

You can almost see, for instance, French officials wide-eyed at the possibility of holding the opening ceremonies at this year’s Olympics on the Seine River. 

Who needs a clunky ol’ stadium when you could have the traditional parade of athletes this time on boats sailing on the “lifeblood of Paris”—all surely presaging throngs booking flights with romantic cruises in mind?

The preparation to make this all happen—the necessity to make the high cost of hosting the games pay off without the slightest blemish—is enormous. It’s especially so if you consider the event not just a marketing opportunity but a potential propaganda bonanza, as Nazi Germany did in the summer of 1936.

It started with the construction of a spanking-new stadium and state-of-the-art village for housing the athletes, with Leni Riefenstahl directing (in a production overseen by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry) the documentary Olympia.

But, as Philip Kerr makes clear periodically in his marvelous detective novel set during this period, March Violets, cleaning up Berlin’s omnipresent signs of intolerance extended to taking down display cases for the notoriously anti-Semitic journal Der Stermer.

“It’s for the Olympiad,” a couple of workers tell Kerr’s German stand-in for Philip Marlowe, Bernie Gunther. “We’re ordered to take them all down so as not to shock the foreign visitors who will be coming to Berlin to see the Games.”

Even books normally censored by the regime, Gunther learns later, are allowed to appear in shops for the duration of the Olympics.

The campaign to showcase the Aryan “master race” didn’t work out quite as the Nazis planned.  German athletes came away with the most medals of any country, but that wasn’t enough for Goebbels.  He grumbled in his diary after the second day of competition, about the electrifying performance of African-American runner Jesse Owens:

"We Germans won a gold medal, the Americans three, of which two were Negroes. That is a disgrace. White people should be ashamed of themselves."

Overall, though, the games succeeded in whitewashing Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Most visitors saw no confirmation of the various reports they’d read in newspapers or heard on the radio about mistreatment of Jews.

Increasingly, 21^st-century authoritarian regimes like Russia and China hope that hosting the Olympics will scrub their image clean as thoroughly as the Berlin games. As Victor Matheson and Andrew Zimbalist note in this April 2021 article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, voters in a number of Western democracies, given the choice in referendums, are rebelling at the “spiraling costs and…financial risks that the Olympics place on host cities.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin had no such compunctions about holding the events in Sochi in 2014, nor did China’s Xi Jinping with Beijing two years ago. 

It’s citizens of those countries who have had to swallow in silence the systematic harassment, disappearances, and deportations of anyone daring to question what it takes to make ugly authoritarian look picture-perfect for a world audience.

Quote of the Day (Klaus Mann, on a Real Figure of Horror)

“The minister of propaganda, overlord of the spiritual life of millions, limped nimbly through the glittering throng which bowed down before him. An icy wind seemed to blow as he passed. It was as though an evil, solitary and cruel god had clambered down among the everyday bustle of pleasure seeking, cowardly, pitiful mortals. For several seconds the whole company remained as if paralyzed with horror….Hate and humility shone in the timid gazes turned on the fearsome dwarf. The object of attention tried an affable smile, which stretched his thin-lipped mouth from ear to ear, to soften the dreadful spell he cast about him. With a friendly expression in his sly, deep-set eyes, he was at pains to charm and placate. Dragging his clubfoot gracefully behind him, he moved agilely through the room, showing these two thousand slaves, fellow-travelers, swindlers, dupes and fools the profile of a bird of prey. All the while his eyes bore a malicious, abstracted smile as they flitted over the group of millionaires, ambassadors, regimental commanders and film stars. It was when he came to the director of the state theater, Hendrik Hofgen, privy councillor and senator, that his glance at last came to rest.”—German novelist Klaus Mann (1906-1949), Mephisto, translated by Robin Smyth (original publication, 1936; English translation, 1977)

When I was considering a literary work that conveyed an essential quality associated with Halloween, I thought of how the horror genre in fiction and film often acted as a metaphor for the terror of everyday life. Then I imagined instances of how actual historic terror needed little artifice. Nothing to my mind surpasses the rise of Nazism and the monstrous evil it unleashed on the world.

The Faust legend of bartering one’s soul to the Devil, which originated with an actual historical German alchemist of the Renaissance, has long fascinated intellectuals and entertainers in the land in which he was born, but few figures as much as Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann and his son Klaus. Both made their Faust stand-in a member of the German culturati: the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas' four-decade saga Doktor Faustus, the actor-turned-theater director Hendrik Hofgen in Klaus’ Mephisto.

Despite choosing the same legend as the source of their work, Thomas and Klaus treated their subjects quite differently. Doktor Faustus is oblique, even elliptical in tying the fate of its protagonist to that of the Third Reich as a whole. In contrast, as seen here, Mephisto is a searing satire of intellectuals exchanging what are ostensibly supposed to be their greatest ideals for personal advancement.

In the opening chapter from which the above quote comes, Klaus Mann gives no names to the members of the Nazi hierarchy, but he identifies them by title and physical appearance so exactly that nomenclature is unnecessary. 

That’s particularly the case with minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels—rendered here in all his physical and moral deformity, in a fashion perhaps only surpassed by King Richard III as dramatized by William Shakespeare.

The figure approached by Goebbels at the end of this quote—making his stage entrance, as it were—is Hendrik Hofgen. The actor-director, about to be complimented by both Goebbels and the propaganda chief’s rival in Adolf Hitler’s circle, Herman Goering, has achieved a career zenith with his production of Goethe’s Faust, in which he has played Mephistopheles, the wily devil who lures Faust into surrendering his soul.

That production will become a defining one, as Hofgen bargains away what he cares for the most—his art—in an attempt to ally with the evil regime stalking his nation.

If the portrait of Hofgen becomes so lacerating, it is partly because Mann knew his subject at close range. The real-life inspiration for Hofgen, Gustaf Gründgens, was in fact Mann’s onetime brother-in-law and fellow sympathizer with the left, but had long since yielded both the family connection and his politics. 

Klaus shared the opinion of his sister Erika that Grundgens’ Weimar-era leftism was “insincere, snobby, and quasi-opportunistic.”

“Opportunistic”—maybe one of the best adjectives one can come up with to describe how the monsters marauding geopolitics came to establish their shadowy dominion. A monster does not rise unaided, but instead with what Klaus Mann aptly summarized as “slaves, fellow-travelers, swindlers, dupes and fools.”

Hitler may have used Goebbels to spread hatred and untruths through radio, movies and theater, just as Donald Trump has employed Steve Bannon to broadcast “alternative facts” through social media. But propaganda mavens need their own henchmen. Bannon has found his among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill too terrified of their once and future Presidential standard-bearer.

In the 1930s, Germany—the land that had given the world Martin Luther, the author of The Freedom of a Christian—found itself under the sway of Goebbels, “overlord of the spiritual life of millions.” Those intellectuals and entertainers who, unlike the Mann family, did not go into exile soon learned to look the other way, then bend, smile and fawn over the thugs now running their country. 

The “dreadful spell” cast by Goebbels and his minions continues to be felt by the all too susceptible members of our world, three-quarters of a century after the fall of the prematurely named “Thousand-Year Reich.”

This Day in World History

February 27, 1933—A fire that destroyed the seat of government for Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, provided Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his newly installed Nazi Party the flimsy pretext they needed to crack down on civil liberties; wipe out their principal political opponents, the Communist Party; and end their nation’s fledgling democratic republic.

Best known today for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach” and other stories for children, the British writer Roald Dahl also wrote a series of brilliantly unnerving short stories and teleplays for adults in the 1950s. One such story, “Genesis and Catastrophe,” seems at first to be a conventional tale of how a mother kept faith, even after three miscarriages, until she was safely able to deliver her fourth child. The twist comes at the end, when it is revealed that the infant who lived was none other than Adolf Hitler.

If the birth of Hitler was the “genesis,” then the Reichstag fire might mark the point at which the governing style of Hitler – the “catastrophe,” if you will--came into unmistakable being. It featured thuggery, the search for a convenient scapegoat, opportunistic exploitation of events, and, most of all, a massive superstructure of lies.

Empty since December, the immense Reichstag was awaiting the results of new elections scheduled for March 5. A little after 9 on the night of Feb. 27, a fire broke out in the building, and within a half hour all that was left were the walls.

Today, nobody knows exactly what happened—largely because at least a few people at the heart of the mystery turned up dead, probably on orders of Hitler.

Two witnesses at the postwar Nuremberg trials—one from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, the other from the Gestapo—indicated that Joseph Goebbels (sporting the Orwellian title of “Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda”) and Reichmarshal Herman Göring, respectively, had advance knowledge of the blaze. Feeding the suspicions was the fact that an underground passageway led from Goring’s office to the Reichstag.

However, the British historian A.J.P. Taylor—a leftist with no motive for exonerating the Nazis—did not believe that Hitler’s men manufactured evidence against the Communists in the subsequent trials after the event. Though five Communists were put on trial subsequently for setting the fire, all but one was acquitted.

That one was a half-crazed 24-year-old Dutch construction worker, Marinus van der Lubbe, who had been making his way toward the Soviet Union—a state he had come to admire—when he circled back to Germany, hoping to rouse the dormant working class with a spectacular action.

According to the careful account of the incident in the highly praised The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans, van der Lubbe chose the Reichstag as “the supreme symbol of the bourgeois political order that, he thought, had made his life and that of so many other unemployed young men a misery.” He spent his last bit of money on the 27th for matches and firelighters.

When apprehended by the non-Nazi Prussian political police, van der Lubbe readily confessed to sole responsibility for the blaze. Hitler and his men, however, were having none of it. The Chancellor declared to the group gathered around him on a balcony above the Chamber: “There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.” The Communists would be “shot,” “hanged,” “arrested,” he vowed.

He was as good—or as bad—as his word. An emergency decree was drafted by Goring aide Ludwig Grauert, providing legal cover for the wholesale arrest of Communists that were taking place. An additional clause, added by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, enabled the Cabinet, rather than the German President (an office then in the hands of non-Nazi, but superannuated, Paul von Hindenburg), to intervene in affairs of the federated states. Hitler presented the decree to his cabinet the morning after the fire and promptly secured Hindenberg’s agreement.

Within three weeks, 10,000 Communists had been put in custody. For all intents and purposes, after the emergency decree took effect on February 28, the Communists were outlawed.

In 1932, the Communists gave as good as they got from the Nazis in the street fighting that swirled around that year’s elections. The Reichstag fire, however, took them completely by surprise. Their removal from Hitler’s path also marked, in a larger sense, the end of any organized opposition to Germany’s new dictator, for socialists and anarchists were also rounded up and a variety of other political organizations and newspapers were shut down.

In January 1934, after being chained for up to seven months in his cell and undergoing a hunger strike to protest his conditions while in detention, Marinus van der Lubbe was beheaded. In January of this year, a German prosecutor overturned the guilty plea of the luckless Dutchman. The arsonist had been inadvertently overlooked for nearly 10 years after a 1998 law provided for pardons for people convicted by the Nazi regime, under the assumption that Nazi law “went against the basic ideas of justice.”