Читаем Berlin полностью

In July 1930 Brüning promulgated his new budget by emergency decree, and when the Reichstag demanded that the decree be abrogated he dissolved the body and called new elections, hoping to gain a broader mandate for his austerity policies. Plenty of voices in Berlin and elsewhere warned him of the foolhardiness of holding elections in the midst of a deepening depression, but he was deaf to all objections: he trusted the German people to do the right thing. What they did was to increase the representation of the extremes at the expense of the liberal center and moderate conservatives. The KPD garnered 4,600,000 votes and 77 seats; the Nazis, who had polled only 809,000 in the Reichstag elections of 1928, jumped to 6,400,000 votes and 107 seats. In Berlin, hitherto the strongest bastion of Weimar democracy, the triumph of the extremes was even more striking. The KPD edged past the SPD to compile the highest percentage of the total vote (27.3), while the Nazis became the third largest party in the city with 14.6 percent—four times what they had managed in 1928. Significantly, the Nazi Party did well in all districts, including supposedly “Red” enclaves like Kreuzberg and Köpenick.

On October 13, when the new Reichstag was called into session, the Nazis celebrated their success by terrorizing the center of Berlin. Kessler recorded the scene in his diary:

Reichstag opening. The whole afternoon and evening mass demonstrations by the Nazis. During the afternoon they smashed the windows of Wertheim, Grünfeld, and other department stores in the Leipzigerstrasse. In the evening they assembled in the Potsdamer Platz, shouting ‘Germany awake!’ ‘Death to Judah’, ‘Heil Hitler/ Their ranks were continually dispersed by the police, in lorries and on horseback. . . . In the main the Nazis consisted of adolescent riff-raff which made off yelling as soon as the police began to use rubber truncheons. . . . These disorders reminded me of the days just before the revolution, with the same mass meetings and the same Catilinian figures lounging about and demonstrating.

Another witness to the Nazi celebrations was Bella Fromm, a society columnist for the liberal Vossische Zeitung. As a Jewess, Fromm has reason to be alarmed at the Nazi electoral success, and to be distressed over the fact that Germany’s various Jewish organizations, still sharply divided by philosophical rifts, were unable to agree on which of Hitler’s adversaries to support. Now, in the wake of the election results and the Nazi demonstrations in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary that “There’s a touch of panic in certain quarters. Should one leave Germany and wait outside to see what will happen?” But the journalist, like so many deeply assimilated Jews, could not yet fathom the idea of cutting and running. “Surprising,” she wrote in her diary, “how many people feel that it [going into exile] might be the prudent thing to do.”