Читаем Berlin полностью

For hundreds of thousands of ordinary Berliners, however, the only adventure to be faced now was the challenge of getting by without regular employment. In April 1932 the city registered 603,000 million unemployed, which constituted over 10 percent of the total unemployment in Germany. Many of these people had long since exhausted their unemployment benefits and had gone on welfare, which was the responsibility of the cities to fund. Berlin’s Sozialhilfe caseload climbed steadily in 1932, from 316,000 in April to 323,000 in September. Unable to cover the escalating welfare costs, Berlin received some assistance from the Reich, but many citizens were obliged to get by on their own, one way or another.

Christopher Isherwood, delaying his own departure from Berlin to document the growing despair, wrote in late 1932:

Morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as best they could contrive: selling bootlaces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging around urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway.

Conditions for unemployed workers were so grim that many of them preferred to live outside the city in tent-camps. The largest of these was Kuhle Wampe, on the shores of the Muggelsee. Brecht made it famous by writing a film about it in summer 1932. Visiting the scene shortly thereafter, the French leftist writer Daniel Guerin was surprised to discover how tidy everything was: “Spread along the lakeshore, under the pines, the tiny dwellings all looked alike: simple wooden posts covered with white or zebra-striped tent canvas. All were well lit, clean, and well kept. The builders rivaled each other in ingenuity and whimsy. Miniature gardens surrounded the most beautiful constructions. At the moment of my arrival, an elderly unemployed couple stood in ecstasy, motionless, watering can in hand, before three still-dripping geraniums.” Many of the residents of Kuhle Wampe seemed to think of their stay there as a kind of vacation from the horrors of the ravaged metropolis. They told Guerin: “You see, the air at Kuhle Wampe is better than in our neighborhoods, and this is a vacation that doesn’t cost a thing. We prefer to cycle to Berlin once a week to pick up our unemployment benefits. And we also want to show that proletarians know how to live an intelligent and liberated life.”

While thousands of Berlin’s proletarians were fleeing to the countryside to find a more dignified existence, the Nazis were pursuing their destiny in the halls of power in the capital. On September 12, 1932, the newly elected Reichstag, the one in which the Nazis had the largest number of delegates, convened for the first time. In the chair was Hermann Göring, head of the Nazis’ parliamentary delegation and new president of the Reichstag. To Daniel Guerin, who was sitting in the visitors’ gallery, Göring looked like “a kind of large, beardless doll with a disturbing jaw—half executioner, half clown.” But there was nothing clownish about Göring’s agenda that day: he intended, with the support of the Communists, to pass a no-confidence resolution against Papen’s government and thereby to bring it down. To avert such a scenario, Papen showed up with a presidential decree dissolving the parliament. Göring, however, refused to recognize the chancellor until the Communists’ no confidence resolution was voted upon, which went against the government, 512 to 42. Now, when Papen presented his dissolution decree, Göring ruled it constitutionally invalid on grounds that the chancellor had been voted out of office. In fact there was nothing constitutional about Göring’s ploy, for parliament could not cashier a chancellor; only the president could do that. Hindenburg did not want to jettison Papen, whom he personally liked and even admired. Thus the dissolution decree was imposed after all, with new elections scheduled for November 6.

Reichstag president Hermann Göring (left) and two Nazi parliamentary deputies, Wilhelm Frick (middle) and Hans Eugen St. Fabricius, 1932