Читаем Berlin полностью

In early 1929 the police began to accumulate evidence of theft, fraud, and bribery against two high-profile Eastern European Jews, Leo and Willy Sklarek, who owned a textile firm in Berlin that supplied the city with uniforms and other equipment. Classical parvenus, the Sklareks lived in palatial West End villas, drove fancy cars, kept a stable of ponies at the track, and, to ensure a certain freedom in their business dealings, greased the palms of local officials. Apparently they did not spread their bribes quite widely enough, however, for the police eventually arrested them for trafficking in stolen goods. In assembling a case against them, the prosecutors discovered that the brothers had sent Mayor Böss a fur coat for his wife without including a bill. To his credit, the mayor had repeatedly offered to pay for the coat and was eventually billed for 375 marks, which he knew was far too low. He therefore sent the Sklareks an additional payment of 1000 marks, asking that they use the money to buy a painting for his beloved city museum. They did so, but since the actual cost of the coat was 4,950 marks the mayor still seemed to have turned the kind of deal not available to nonofficeholders. When the matter became public in September 1929, all the factions that had long opposed Böss’s liberal policies seized upon this issue to vilify him. The Communists called him a typical capitalist crook, while Goebbels’s Der Angriff branded him a bedmate of the Jews. The mayor happened to be traveling in America when the scandal broke and unwisely did not hasten back to face his accusers. When he finally did return he was accosted by a mob that tried to beat him up. Humiliated and disgusted, he took early retirement from his office, never to return. The Sklareks, for their part, got four years in jail.

Mayor Böss’s political career was not the only casualty in this affair. The Prussian Landtag conducted an investigation that treated the case as another example of “Berlin corruption,” thus reinforcing images of the city as one big sleeze-factory— Sklarekstadt. So tarnished was Berlin’s reputation that a circus impresario named Stosch-Sarrasani campaigned to replace Böss with the slogan, “A circus director can become mayor of Berlin, but a mayor of Berlin could never become a circus director.” The scandal played an important role in the communal elections of November 17, 1929, which saw the Communists gain at the expense of the SPD, and the Nazis win representation in the city assembly for the first time. Goebbels crowed that with the Nazi showing, his “boldest dreams” had come true. In fact, he was being more than a little hyperbolic, since the Nazis had garnered only 3.1 percent of the vote, a long way from their dream of controlling Berlin. Still, they had made a significant step forward, and every gain for them was a loss for Weimar democracy.

The Weimar Republic suffered another blow on October 3, 1929, with the sudden death of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, architect of the policy of reconciliation between Germany and the Western powers. His last service was the negotiation and ratification of the Young Plan, by which Germany reduced its reparations payments. For this he was reviled by the far right, which rejected reparations payments in principle. In Berlin it was widely understood that his death was a tragedy not just for the nation but for the capital. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, the largest such turnout since the death of Ebert. Kessler, learning of his friend’s demise while on a trip to Paris, mused in his diary: “It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen. . . . What I fear, as a result of Stresemann’s death, are very grave political consequences at home, with a move to the right by [Stresemann’s] People’s Party, a break-up of the coalition, and the facilitation of efforts to establish a dictatorship.”