Chapter Seven—
Writers at Large
The demarcation line between the Russian and American sectors neatly divided the part of Berlin's center usually referred to as the newspaper district—Kochstrasse, Zimmerstrasse, Jerusalemer Strasse, Schützen-strasse. This, the material inheritance of Berlin's press industry, fell into the hands of the two main victorious powers in equal parts; Great Britain and France, with not a rotary press between them in their respective sectors, came out empty-handed.
The newspaper district, like the city center as a whole, had been heavily bombed during the war. Yet the destroyed buildings, cellars, and machine rooms housed some functioning machinery that could be reassembled for new purposes. This piecemeal principle of repairs soon put at the Russians' disposal a respectable metropolitan print capacity. Two months after the conquest of Berlin, four daily newspapers with a total circulation of approximately 400,000 copies had been established: the Tägliche Rundschau, published by the Red Army; the Berliner Zeitung, under the leadership of the returned exile Rudolf Herrnstadt (its official publisher was the Magistrat); the KPD's Deutsche Volkszeitung (Paul Wandel and Fritz Erpenbeck); and the SPD newspaper Das Volk (Karl Germer and Otto Meier). All four had their seat in the Russian sector, although a considerable portion of their technical facilities had been dismantled in and transported from the neighboring American part of the press district.
When the press division of American Information Control moved
into their offices on Milinowskistrasse in Zehlendorf to confront this discouraging situation, they also found reason to celebrate. In the middle of the American sector, in the Tempelhof district, stood the printing facilities of the former Ullstein Verlag, built in the 1920s. Though damaged by bombings and prey to postwar Russian raids, the building was sturdy enough for reassembly and repairs to produce a satisfactory print capacity with relative speed.
Reassembling the intact parts of Berlin's journalistic personnel proved a more difficult and slower process, a fact the press officer in charge of establishing the first newspaper in the American sector confirmed. Peter de Mendelssohn numbered among the émigrés from the 1930S who returned to their homeland with the Allied armies. He was thirty-seven years old in 1945. In 1930, at age twenty-two, he had published his first novel, Fertig mit Berlin (Finished with Berlin ), which appeared with some success, as the reviews and the fact of a second edition show. His career as a journalist in Berlin before 1933 had begun with promise: at eighteen he had begun in the editorial department of the respected Berliner Tageblatt, then worked in the Berlin office of the United Press news agency, eventually serving as a correspondent in London and Paris for the Berliner Tageblatt and other newspapers. Then came 1933 and emigration, leading Mendelssohn to Paris and Vienna on his way to London. In 1944 he joined the British-American division of psychological warfare, and in this position he was charged with seeking out German journalists for the first of the American-licensed newspapers in Berlin.
For a young man like Mendelssohn, who lived with and within literature, the situation must have seemed the fulfillment of a Rastignac-like fantasy: half of the newspaper district now lay at the feet of a man who twelve years before had been but a small cog in the great wheel of Berlin's press industry. In 1945, when many a lieutenant in the Allied occupation army was entrusted with decisions usually left only to business moguls and state secretaries, this was not an exceptional occurrence. During these years another exiled writer three years Mendelssohn's junior, Hans Habe, ruled over, as he later said with more accuracy than modesty, the "greatest newspaper empire in the world" (i.e., the entirety of the U.S. Army division's published newspapers for the German population: a circulation of 4.6 million).[1] The meeting between Habe and Mendelssohn in Berlin in the summer of 1945, at least in Peter de Mendelssohn's view, also bore traces of a certain romanticism. They had met in Vienna as young men. Habe, known at the time as the scandalous
rake Hans Bekessy, had been involved with a literary-minded young woman named Hilde Spiel,[2] who was later to marry Peter de Mendelssohn. In July 1945 Mendelssohn described to his wife Habe's arrival in Berlin as "a complete circus" carried out "in full prima-donna style."[3] Habe came to Berlin to establish the last of his army newspapers. When the erstwhile youthful friends and rivals met again as newspaper founders, the feeling of competition between them rose to a new level. "I am quite determined," Mendelssohn wrote to his wife, "to show him what a newspaper is and what it isn't. It is too funny and absurd that we should finally meet for the great contest in the same field on equal terms. The whole thing makes me laugh when I think how it all started."[4]
Habe's newspaper—which was really run by his collaborator Hans Wallenberg[5] —started appearing soon after under the title Allgemeine Zeitung and was a great success. Even Mendelssohn joined in the general praise: "His [i.e., Habe's] circus has really performed extremely well, they have done a superb job.... Everybody is simply green with envy."[6] The format and intellectual quality of the Allgemeine Zeitung recalled bourgeois intellectual papers like the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt . Anyone not apprised of the fact that it was an American military newspaper might not have noticed. However, the army newspapers were meant to be only a transitional phase toward a German-run press industry, and their duration was limited from the outset. Mendelssohn, with a commission to establish a permanent German newspaper, had the upper hand over Habe this time.
Ten days after his arrival in Berlin and ten days before Habe arrived, Mendelssohn had already completed his proposal for a newspaper and formulated it in a memo. It anticipated the Allgemeine Zeitung by several weeks. References to German precedents like the Frankfurter Zeitung, Vossische Zeitung, and Berliner Tageblatt were unmistakable. The paper to be established was supposed to address an educated, bourgeois audience and, as Mendelssohn wrote in his memo to General McClure, was to be "of the highest standards and highest possible quality." It was presumed that this kind of journalistic venue would provide the most expedient means of influencing public opinion. Mendelssohn's hopes increased when Berlin's reading public—having endured twelve years of the gleichgeschaltete Nazi press, indeed sensitized by this very experience—showed little trust in the four newspapers published in the Russian sector because of their pro-Soviet stance. There was a readership in Berlin, Mendelssohn continued, "from the pre-Hitler period which was accustomed to a well-rounded, polished press of high intel-
lectual standards." Mendelssohn's plan was modeled after, indeed envisioned a resumption of, newspaper culture prior to 1933. This held true in personnel matters as well. "The group to be licensed.... on the basis of the democratic tradition it represented in the pre-Hitler period ... should be accorded respect and authority in the journalistic field. It should not be a collection of completely unknown men, however good and honorable their intentions might be."[7]
When he presented his memorandum to McClure and the latter accepted it despite resistance within Information Control,[*] Mendelssohn had already contacted media figures from the Weimar period. Two days after his arrival in Berlin he held his first discussion with Heinz Ullstein, the only member of the Ullstein press and publishing dynasty who had remained in Berlin during the Third Reich. To Mendelssohn, this "calm, modest, unassuming man [with] a balanced cosmopolitan outlook and, for a German, remarkably clear grasp of the present world situation"[8] seemed to offer an ideal link to the pre-1933 newspaper world. The Ullstein name stood for liberal and democratic traditions in Germany, and issuing the first newspaper license to the last Berlin representative of a family dispossessed and banished by the Nazis[9] would be something of an "act of reparation and clear moral justice" (Mendelssohn). Negotiations with Heinz Ullstein stretched over several weeks, and it looked as though the reestablishment of the Ullstein house were only a matter of time. Not only did most of these meetings occur in the former Ullstein printing house, but Ullstein himself had recruited most of the prospective journalists: Paul Wiegler, the critic and former head of the literary division in the Ullstein Verlag; Rudolf Kurtz, an author of film books who now collaborated with Wiegler; and Ernst von der Decken. Ullstein was the youngest in this circle of sixty-year-olds. After several discussions, Mendelssohn noticed that Ullstein and his associates were more interested in a tabloid than in his plans for a serious newspaper. His eyes were opened to the journalistic ethos of the group by Rudolf Kurtz, who remarked with indifference that instead of a tabloid "something like the Vossiscbe Zeitung could of course also be done, if that was Mendelssohn's intent."[10] The first round ended with Mendelssohn's
[*] In Mendelssohn's later account, several members of Information Control were "against the creation of a high-caliber 'intellectual' newspaper ... and advocated a popular paper with the greatest possible mass impact" (Zeitungsstadt Berlin, 533). Though Mendelssohn never mentions it, it is also conceivable that the circles in Information Control still hoping for a quadripartite newspaper published in collaboration with the Russians were against setting up an American-licensed paper altogether.
recognition that the Weimar press, at least in its Ullstein incarnation, was not the shining model he had hoped for but "a journalistic tradition ... dated, outmoded, and even discredited."[11] Their subsequent parting of the ways did not follow on such good terms as were later described by Mendelssohn and Ullstein in their memoirs. "Herr Ullstein," Mendelssohn reported to McClure in fall 1945, "was persuaded, after most difficult negotiations, to make way."[12]
While negotiating with Ullstein, Mendelssohn had contacted another interested party headed by the writer Hermann Dannenberger, known under the pen name Erik Reger. Born in 1893, Reger also belonged to the older generation of journalistic figures, but unlike Ullstein, Wiegler, and Kurtz, he did not come from the press milieu. In the 1920s and early 1930s he was an independent writer who occasionally contributed to the Frankfurter Zeitung, Vossische Zeitung, and Berliner Tageblatt without bowing to journalistic constraints and the routine of newspaper publishing. He had proven his independence with a 1931 novel that established his name in the literature of the late Weimar Republic. Union der festen Hand presented the economic and political power structure in the Ruhr industry but avoided the usual manner of moral and social critique. As one critic wrote, Reger's interest was the "sovereignty of the phrase," in all its uses, ramifications, and effects he had grown familiar with as a publicist for the Krupp Company. His novel was a "pathography of the journalistic existence ... a tale of suffering between self-hate and melancholy, bouts of omnipotence and attacks of resignation."[13] Reger was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1931. One of his notable journalistic achievements before 1933 was the article series "A Natural History of National Socialism," published in the Vossische Zeitung in August and September 1931. After temporary exile in Switzerland (1934–36), he spent the Nazi period in Germany. In 1938 he joined the Deutscher Verlag (as the former Ullstein Verlag was renamed in 1937) as an editor and worked in the printing house in Tempelhof. Beginning in 1943 he lived in Mahlow, south of Berlin, and there he witnessed the war's end. His first encounter with the Russians, for which he armed himself with the Russian edition of his novel, ran smoothly.
Reger was among those writers who—motivated by both moral and material considerations—were determined after the war not simply to supply publications, newspapers, and magazines but to become publishers themselves. Only a few days after the Russians occupied Mahlow, on May 15, he sought out the local commandant to discuss the possibilities for implementing this plan.[14] The four-and-a-half-page "memo-
randum" he composed afterward, which he apparently understood as an application for a license, proposed the establishment of a "publishing company for journalism and literature." Its purview would be everything from journalistic daily events to literary book production. His declared overarching aim was the desire to contribute to the reeducation of the German people.[15] The project did not move beyond this stage, and the only trace of it, Reger's memo, is now lying in the Archiv der Akademie der Kfinste in Berlin.
In retrospect it is clear why Reger was not the right man for the Russians. He neither belonged to the KPD nor sympathized with it, had no contact with any of its members, and kept his distance from the other parties that received newspaper licenses from the Russians in the summer of 1945 (the SPD, CDU, and LDPD). He did not fit into the Russians' newspaper plans. American ideas of a liberal and independent press published by well-known Germans, on the other hand, seemed cut out for an independent mind of his sort.
So how did Peter de Mendelssohn and Erik Reger cross paths? Heinrich von Schweinichen, a wholesale paper merchant whom Reger had met during the war through the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, served as the catalyst. Schweinichen, a successful businessman and devout Christian, had used his connections during the war to siphon off large amounts of paper to print the works of his friend and Catholic philosopher Reinhold Schneider—a dangerous undertaking given the strict paper ban on religious publications. Even riskier was his collaboration with Fritz Kolbe ("George Wood"), the most important German agent in the OSS, the American secret service. Schweinichen passed along information through Kolbe and by means of his numerous business and personal trips to Switzerland (his wife, Nelly, was Swiss).[16] After the Americans arrived in Berlin, the OSS asked him to draw up a list of Germans not suspected of Nazi involvement and suitable for prominent positions. Presumably Reger's name was on the list, but it is unclear why it took so long for Mendelssohn to contact him. Either the OSS list did not end up in his hands, or he had overlooked Reger's name. In any case, the collaboration between Information Control and the OSS did not seem to be particularly good. It is conceivable that, for reasons of institutional jealousy, Information Control made a point of ignoring all suggestions originating from the OSS. The two accounts Mendelssohn later gave of his meeting with Reger support speculation of this sort.[17] However uncertain the details, it is clear that Heinrich von Schweinichen was responsible for introducing Erik Reger to Mendelssohn.
Reger had meanwhile elaborated upon the plans presented to the
Russians in his memo. The new proposal was thirteen typed pages in length and carried the title "On the Reconstruction of the Press in Post-Hitler Germany."[18] It must have provoked an intellectual coup de foudre in Mendelssohn. As he later wrote, it showed "clear, courageous, uncompromising thought and apparently came from someone fundamentally engaged with the problem, joining boldness of thought with a strong feeling of responsibility, imagination, and a sense of style with practical knowledge and experience"[19] —in short, everything Mendelssohn had sought in vain from the Ullstein group.
As in his memorandum to the Russians, Reger again stated as his principal goal the reeducation of the German people, but this time in a more comprehensive way. He argued that Germany's disastrous course in the twentieth century was the result of its misguided development reaching back to the nineteenth century. His proposed newspaper would have as its most important task enlightening and correcting those errors and leading the Germans back to the path of Western culture. The process would not be an externally imposed reeducation but a German self-purification arising from within and leading to national maturity.
The Tagesspiegel, as the newspaper Reger received a license for was named (certainly not without an allusion to the earlier Tageblatt ), would have been something like the Kulturbund's program for "democratic revival" in newspaper form.
Their shared goals seemed to promise a sympathetic relationship in which both would complement each other in the most harmonious way. And indeed for the first three months, up until the controversy over the KPD/SPD merger, this was the case. As Susanne Drechsler, a communist editor who left the Tagesspiegel in February 1946, wrote, "There were lengthy meetings every day, attended by all of the members of editorial staff, including the volunteers and archive workers. Every political, economic, and cultural issue would be discussed together and handled according to a majority decision ... the operative guideline was non-partisanship, allowing equal say for all political orientations. In the forefront: educating the Germans to democracy.... There was particular importance put on impeccable German style. All expressions that recalled the phrases of the previous twelve years were forbidden."[20] Very soon, however, the Tagesspiegel produced the first and sharpest critique of the Kulturbund, and conversely, from the circles around the Kulturbund emerged the sharpest rejection of the Tagesspiegel . At a time when ideological and political oppositions were still contained within relatively civilized discussions, there was no restraint when it came to
the Tagesspiegel . The communists called it a "reactionary mouthpiece" and a "forum for all underground fascist tendencies," claiming that the publication had "no right to exist" in the new Germany.[21] This reaction was understandable, as the Tagesspiegel for its part accused communist politics of Nazi methods. The Tagesspiegel contributed to the accelerating political polarization through its early and uncompromising identification of National Socialism with communism, a stance Reger had adopted even before 1933.[22] By calling events like the KPD/SPD merger and institutions like the Kulturbund totalitarian and comparable to Nazism, in the eyes of the communists the antifascist front was abandoned—and not only in their eyes. In late 1945 Ferdinand Friedensburg wrote to his friend Edwin Redslob, who had meanwhile become a copublisher of the Tagesspiegel: "You must certainly be aware or suspect that, whatever its isolated shining achievements, the Tagesspiegel is not exactly making friends among all those who, like me, have been actively yoked to the task of political and material reconstruction."[23] Surveys conducted by the American military government also revealed that many readers judged the newspaper's orientation too decisively Western and irreconcilable toward the East. "The American national observer," "one hundred percent American," "more papal than the Pope," the verdicts ran.[24] For adherents of East-West conciliation in Information Control, Reger's quarrelsome attitude also exceeded the allowable limit. They desired fewer "pin-prick attacks" against the other side and more substantive discussions with it.[25] Leftist liberal Americans also had reason to rank the founding of the Tagesspiegel a political defeat. For Peter de Mendelssohn was not the only American press officer who came to Berlin in the summer of 1945 to issue the first American license. While Mendelssohn had set about his task, Cedric Belfrage, who had already made a name for himself as the founder of the leftist Frankfurter Rundschau, turned up in Berlin to explore the possibilities for a paper like the Rundschau . In a meeting between Belfrage and Wilhelm Pieck, Erik Reger's name was mentioned as a possible candidate for publisher, which suggests just how unstable the journalistic situation still was.[*]
[*] The only trace of Belfrage's mission, a handwritten note of August 24, 1945, is in the Wilhelm Pieck estate of the former SED party archive. Belfrage and his collaborator Adler (it is not clear whether this was Ernst W. Adler or Eric J. Adler) are referred to not as officers from Information Control but as "American journalists." This may have been a misunderstanding, or an indication that the men were not on an official mission but on a secret one. As there is no record of this in the OMGUS files, the latter seems possible. It is also conceivable that Belfrage and Adler represented circles in Information Control who advocated the idea of a quadripartite newspaper in Berlin. (See chap. 5 above.) The note states expressly that the new newspaper was to be "similar to the Frankfurter Rundschau ." The other candidates for the position of publisher in addition to Reger were Walther Karsch, Stefan Heymann (KPD), Siegfried Nestriepke (SPD), Otto Nuschke (CDU), and Georg Handke (KPD).
Herbert Sandberg's memoirs provide additional evidence that there were plans to set up an American-licensed "leftist" daily paper in the summer of 1945. While in the concentration camp in Buchenwald, Sandberg had met Emil Carlebach, a communist and later the copublisher of the Frankfurter Rundschau . Apparently Carlebach, accompanied by two American officers, sought out Sandberg in Berlin in the" summer of 1945 and offered him a "license for the cultural editorship of the Tagesspiegel ." Herbert Sandberg, Spiegel eines Lebens (East Berlin, 1988), 59. Since editorial posts were not licensed, this must be an error on Sandberg's part: either Carlebach offered him the cultural department of the Frankfurter Rundschau, or the two American officers who visited him in the summer of 1945 were Belfrage and Adler, trying to win him over for their proposed Berlin newspaper.
Reger was unimpressed by both the communists' noisy polemic and the quiet criticism of several OMGUS officers. Moreover, he found new and reliable support in Mendelssohn's successor Bert Fielden, one of the anticommunists in Information Control. Reger pursued the three entrenched viewpoints of his political stance: strict antifascism coupled with equally strict anticommunism; the rejection of any suggestion in any form of continuing "Germany's special course"; and the consistent, complete, and unconditional identification with the West. The assertion that Reger continued on unflinchingly does require some qualification. He was the most important publisher of the Tagesspiegel but, according to American licensing practices, not the only one. Officially the three copublishers at his side shared equal power: Heinrich von Schweinichen, the art historian and former Reichskunstwart[*] Edwin Redslob, and the journalist and critic Walther Karsch (who had also been Carl von Ossietzky's final collaborator on Die Weltbübne ). After a short stint with the KPD in the summer and fall of 1945, Karsch had come round completely to Reger's ideological and political view. More interested in art and literature—that is, the feuilleton section—than in politics, he very gladly left that domain to Reger. From the very beginning, Edwin Redslob was only an ornamental honorary for the Tagesspiegel, being involved in entirely different projects (principally, estab-
[*] The office of Reichskunstwart was created in 1919. Its task Edwin Redslob described as consisting of the "Formgebung des Reiches" (visual design of the Reich), roughly the equivalent of today's corporate-image making. In this function he selected the artists and designers for banknotes, coins, stamps, seals, posters, and so forth, as well as the architects for public buildings. Redslob, the only person to hold this office, was fired in 1933.
lishing the Free University). Heinrich von Schweinichen, the businessman whose skills had earned him responsibility for the financial side of the undertaking, seemed the least likely of the copublishers to offer competition or opposition. He had secured contractual assurance of editorial responsibility for "the cultivation of the religious sentiments of the German people" from his partners, but they regarded this dismissively as their business partner's private idiosyncrasy.[26] It was known that Schweinichen's devout Catholicism was the result of a personal crisis a few years before upon receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.[27] Reger, Redslob, and Karsch had even more reason to indulge their colleague in this small matter when he advanced all three the initial capital of five thousand reichsmarks each and defrayed the start-up costs from his own pocket.[28]
The first sixth months of the Tagesspiegel 's operation passed without any discord among the publishers, essentially because they had hardly any contact with one another. Reger, considered a difficult and even unpleasant person, was avoided by all and handed a carte blanche; Karsch focused on his theater reviews; and though the edifying articles by Schweinichen that appeared occasionally looked odd, they were not a serious bother to anyone.
Hence Information Control's decision in June 1946 to revoke Heinrich von Schweinichen's license, effective immediately, was that much more surprising. In and of itself, this was nothing unusual. Licenses were frequently revoked when their holders later turned out to have been involved with the Nazis or no longer fit into the political landscape of the commencing Cold War, like the leftist publisher of the Frankfurter Rundschau . Reger's partisanship in the debate over the KPD/SPD. merger in 1946 had already exposed him to the threat of revocation by clashing with the reigning American policy of neutrality.[29] But what did the Americans find so dangerous about the upright businessman and devout Catholic Heinrich von Schweinichen that one day he was simply shown the door?
The official explanation cited no concrete grounds, merely stating that he had "acted in a completely irresponsible manner ... [and] not only conspired against his co-licensees but ... also endeavored to thwart the goals of the American military government. Driven by selfish motives, he let himself become a tool of foreign interests."[30] There was little indication of what these foreign interests might have been. Schweinichen had supposedly made himself "the spokesman for politically very active
rightist groups who sought to influence the Tagesspiegel 's standpoint." Given the handful of articles Schweinichen had published in the Tagesspiegel up to that point, this charge seems to have rested on as little truth as the official explanation for Gustav von Wangenheim's later dismissal from the Deutsches Theater.
There has been no explanation of the Schweinichen case to this day. His name is missing from the Tagesspiegel 's masthead, which includes the names of the other founding publishers. The only evidence of his presence in the Tagesspiegel archives is a few of his articles. Erik Reger's papers make no mention of him at all apart from a remark in a private letter that his case was "tragic."[31] There is also no trace in the few papers left behind by Bert Fielden, the control officer for the Tagesspiegel . The court records of the civil suit Schweinichen later filed against his copublishers no longer exist, and with the exception of his extensive correspondence with his friend and mentor Reinhold Schneider (which contains no mention of his case), there is no archive of Schweinichen's papers. Last but not least, the document that prompted his fall no longer exists: a sixteen-page report on the Tagesspiegel written by one Jasper Petersen. A few days after Schweinichen had passed along the report (which he apparently identified with, though he later denied this) to his colleagues, his license was revoked.
The few extant documents and information from other sources do nevertheless offer an approximate reconstruction of how the man largely responsible for Reger's successful move into newspaper publishing collided with him and was probably booted out at Reger's bidding. The head of Information Control in Berlin, Colonel Leonard, relayed the contents of the Schweinichen-Petersen report with the following remark: "It [i.e., the Tagesspiegel ] should become more nationalistic and less pro-American in its trend."[32] What was meant by Schweinichen's "nationalism"? Was this the correct term for his ideological and political outlook? Had a nationalistic wolf merely donned the guise of Christian lamb for the Americans and Reger? The answer is that Heinrich von Schweinichen was businessman, Catholic, and German patriot in equal parts—a patriot not in a nationalist sense, but comparable to Ferdinand Friedensburg in his views. Schweinichen believed that Germany, and the newspaper he copublished, should ally itself with neither East nor West but pursue its own independent course. Though he and Reger agreed in their antifascist and anticommunist standpoint, he must have realized that his views violated two of Reger's three unwritten rules. Reger must also have known that his plans for renouncing all thoughts of
Germany's independence and promising unconditional alliance with the West would meet with opposition from Schweinichen, whose convictions were well known to Reger. Schweinichen came from the same circles of the Silesian nobility that had produced the Kreisauer Circle, and though not himself a member of this resistance group, he was close to prominent members like Hellmuth von Moltke[33] and must have shared their outlook on Germany. In Reger's view these German resistance fighters had been discredited as opportunists who served the Nazis as long as it benefited them and broke away in protest only once the situation ceased to work to their advantage. "We can't use these people," Reger wrote in his diary in the spring of 1945,[34] and this ultimately came to be his opinion of Heinrich von Schweinichen as well. From Reger's political perspective, whoever did not support strict identification with the West entertained the dangerous old vacillating political course that (as he had described in his memorandum) was responsible for everything and should be opposed in all forms by the means of the newspaper entrusted to him. In June 1946, Reger triumphed over his colleague and former patron. Ironically, only six months earlier it might have turned out just the opposite. With his objection at the time that the Tagesspiegel had abandoned its nonpartisan and objective position through its stance in the KPD/SPD controversy ("we have become a pamphlet for the SPD"),[35] Schweinichen then was toeing the American line of party neutrality much more loyally than Reger, who for this very reason had also nearly lost his license.
Kurtz
In 1945–46, failure to obtain a license from one Allied power did not mean remaining forever on the sidelines in the quadripartite city of Berlin. Unlike the zones of occupation, which were ruled by a single power, Berliners always had three alternatives and, operating like a collective Talleyrand (in Isaac Deutscher's terms), took full advantage of them.
After his first failed attempt, Heinz Ullstein did not even need to switch sectors. A few months later, apparently as a kind of consolation prize, he received an American license for a women's magazine (Sie ) and could pursue his popular press concept without interference from intellectual puritans like Mendelssohn. Each member of the Ullstein group soon found a niche in the new media venues that cropped up between fall 1945 and spring 1946: at the French-licensed Kurier and the
British-licensed Telegraf; in the ever expanding Berliner Rundfunk; at the new American station DIAS/RIAS; in the Berlin branch of the British station NWDR; at the Berlin edition of the American Neue Zeitung; or at one of the numerous new magazines. Rudolf Kurtz, who had declared the group's accommodating stance if a revived Vossische Zeitung were preferred over a tabloid, also found his place in the fall of 1945.
At sixty-one Rudolf Kurtz, whom one colleague once called a "comic figure" and an "energetic simpleton,"[36] was a man long past his prime. "Discovered" shortly before World War I by Alfred Kerr, he was one of the young talents of the first years of Berlin's literary expressionism. He authored the editorial of the first issue of Sturm and, pursuing his early interest in film, wrote a book on the subject, Expressionismus und Film (1926). In the 1920s he became chief editor of the magazine Lichtspielbühne, and later turned his attention to writing comedies. He seems to have enacted his descent into the routine of established literary figures like an aging Brechtian Baal.
The newspaper that appeared for the first time on December 7, 1945, with Kurtz's name as chief editor, looked like the tabloid that he and Ullstein had wanted to create under Mendelssohn. The Nacht-Express was slick and superficial, a casual, frivolous, and entertaining newspaper that readers, as Kurtz supposedly once said, should be able to "buy at Alexanderplatz and toss away by Friedrichstrasse."[37] The sports section commanded considerable space, and the feuilleton section was disproportionately large for a newspaper of this type. The latter was edited by Paul Wiegler, Kurtz's friend in the Ullstein circle. Since the failure of that project, Wiegler had been busy in various positions, writing theater reviews for the Allgemeine Zeitung, editing the literary section of the Kulturbund's magazine Aufbau, and working as a manuscript reader for the Aufbau Verlag. He was apparently on such good terms with Johannes R. Becher that the two later in 1948 founded the magazine Sinn und Form .[38] When his work at the Allgemeine Zeitung ended with the paper's discontinuation in late 1945, Wiegler saw a welcome replacement in the Nacht-Express, recently founded by his friend Kurtz.
The feuilleton section of the Nacht-Express was a one-man show in the first year of the paper's publication. The only signed articles, mostly theater reviews, were by Wiegler. Everything else had been previously published: poems, short stories, and essays by well-known authors of the past. This changed slowly in the course of the following year. The Nacht-Express 's feuilleton grew more concerned with contemporary
events. New and younger colleagues joined the staff, none of whom, however, was able to achieve the prominence of Wolfgang Harich at the Kurier (later at the Tägfiche Rundschau ), Walther Karsch at the Tagesspiegel, and Friedrich Luft at the Neue Zeitung . The only person to represent the paper on the Berlin feuilleton scene remained Wiegler, a sixty-seven-year-old man long past his creative youth in the Wilhelmine period and ready for retirement, who now spent his days writing harmless feuilletons and well-wishing reviews with no bite.
In distinction to the omnipresence of Paul Wiegler in the feuilleton, contributions by chief editor Rudolf Kurtz were absent. Only the masthead indicated that this man held the position. This oddity had to do with the veiled operation of the tabloid. If political commentaries appeared at all, they were unsigned. But even if all articles had been signed, it would have been impossible to find Rudolf Kurtz's name among them. For the chief editor of this newspaper was the least enterprising of its journalists. His friend Klaus Poche offered (with no malicious intent) the following description of the Nacht-Express 's chief editor: "He spent the entire day in his pajamas. We had a large conference room.... Kurtz lived next door to this conference room. He read in there or dozed or fussed with his housekeeper.... When he came to visit us, he simply pulled on his suit over his pajamas." And regarding participation in daily editorial conferences: "Kurtz came from his room in his bathrobe. Kugler [local editor and chief of staff] said: 'All right, I can sum it up briefly. A fantastic issue. The format is right on, the weather is beautifully laid out, the local page is where it should be, the supplement as good as always. The masthead is correct.' Kurt took a brief look and said merely: 'Fantastic!'"[39]
How had this Oblomov landed the post of chief editor? And what allowed the Nacht-Express to function with Kurtz in this position? Berliners who picked up the first issue of this new evening paper on December 7, 1945, did not have an easy time making sense of it. Apart from being printed on Mohrenstrasse—that is, in the Russian sector—there was no indication of its origin or background. The lack of any kind of editorial commentary in the political section gave the impression of distanced objectivity. Representation of both Eastern and Western news agencies, with perhaps a slight leaning toward the Western side, added to this impression. When American Information Control surveyed opinions on the Nacht-Express in a poll in June 1946, only 23 percent of those asked considered it a Russian-controlled paper; the remaining 77 percent considered it an independent paper.[40]
The Nacht-Express was a Russian creation. Its four German publishers, including Rudolf Kurtz, received both their licenses and the start-up capital from the SMAD.[41] The arrangement resembled that of Defa with its blend of Russian capital and Russian control over a medium made by Germans for Germans. But unlike Defa's boss, Alfred Lindemann, there was no dominating German figure at the Nacht-Express . The position of chief editor, which Rudolf Kurtz occupied sleeping or dozing, was in fact filled with great vigor by a Major Feldmann of the SMAD, who had started up the undertaking, serving as its brains and motor until his mysterious disappearance in 1949. As Eugenia Kazeva, a colleague of his in the SMAD, recalls, Feldmann was one of the Jewish intellectuals from Leningrad so numerous in the intelligence division, a "small, round, mobile, and very clever man."[42] The Western press speculated about his sudden disappearance, voicing suspicions that he had fled to the West.[43] It is more likely that, like many of his Jewish colleagues, he fell victim to the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1940s. A German mistress may have served as the pretext for his arrest. Feldmann established the paper's political standpoint with such a subtle hand that its presence remained hidden to most readers. Presenting news reports taken from Western agencies without commentary had the desired effect of provoking readers' own reactions. The column "Voices of the Press" took on an important function at the Nacht-Express . Contrary to usual practice, it appeared on the front page, selecting from Western coverage of political events—from the New York Times to the Daily Worker —everything that criticized Western politics and presented Eastern politics in a favorable light.
Among themselves, the German editors who worked under Feldmann called the Nacht-Express the "evening edition of the Tägliche Rundschau ."[44] Though untrue in terms of personnel and financial matters, the comparison captured accurately the character and function of Feldmann's paper. The Nacht-Express resembled less the SMAD's heavy-handed official mouthpiece than the type of newspaper conceived by Willi Münzenberg in the 1920s to break out of the KPD's journalistic ghetto. The papers Münzenberg had created—Welt am Abend, Berlin am Morgen, and Neue Montagszeitung —were at first glance tabloids: heavy doses of sports and entertainment, with political coverage served up only on the side and indirectly. The readers of Ullstein and Scherl's mass publications, whom these animated papers were supposed to lure away, were as unaware of this strategy in the 1920s as the read-
ers surveyed by Information Control in 1946 who failed to recognize the subtle alignment of the Nacht-Express . The aim of Münzenberg's newspapers, "winning over indifferent readers" (Rolf Suhrmann),[45] was apparently also what the Russians attempted with the Nacht-Express . Alexander Dymschitz formulated it like this: "It is very important for us that if possible the majority of Berliners considers the Nacht-Express an American paper."[46]
And what about Rudolf Kurtz? The old bohemian had never shown an interest in politics, still less in communism, and was even reported as saying, "Marxism is nothing but rubbish."[47] When he entered Russian service after the American license failed to materialize, he was as indifferent to the change of sides as he had been earlier about the question of whether he produced for Mendelssohn a tabloid or a paper styled after the Vossische Zeitung . Concerns about involving himself with a Russian Trojan horse seem not to have occurred to him. But what motivated the SMAD to put a man notoriously that unsympathetic to their ideology in this position[48] The duration of this strange relationship (lasting eight years, until the Nacht-Express ceased publication in 1953) belies the possibility of a mistake or oversight by the party. It was a partnership advantageous for both parties or, more precisely, a barter: for his name on the masthead Kurtz was guaranteed the comfort of his lounging pajama existence. His tenure at the Nacht-Express was an example—carried to the point of caricature—of what Sheila Fitzpatrick has described as the system of bartering interests between the party and intellectuals that had developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and, after the war, began to characterize the society and culture of the Russian zone in Germany.
Die Weltbühne
Among the intellectuals who roamed between the political spheres in Berlin in the years 1945–48, Erik Reger's copublisher Walther Karsch was one of the most agile. Early in the summer of 1945 he joined the newly founded KPD. Later that summer he became a copublisher of the Tagesspiegel, and when the newspaper's political stance became clear in the fall, he left the KPD again.[49] Who was this man whom the Eastern side henceforth labeled "Chameleon Karsch"?[50]
At the age of thirty-nine in 1945, Karsch belonged to the generation of intellectuals and literary figures who were about to enter public life
in 1933 when their careers were cut short by the Third Reich. Karsch's leftist tendencies had emerged early. While a student at Berlin University (where he studied German literature, history, and philosophy) he had joined the independent socialist Roter Studentenbund. From 1931 onward, he worked as the assistant to Carl von Ossietzky at Die Weltbüne . The period before the outbreak of the Third Reich was too brief for him to have made his name as a Nazi opponent and potential enemy of the state. Karsch spent the next twelve years renouncing all writing and journalistic activity—that is, in a strict sense, in inward emigration—at times unemployed, and occasionally working as a commercial representative.[51]
His inclination to consider the KPD his new political home after the war is as understandable as his effort to pick up where he had left off in 1933. Toward that end, regarding himself as the legitimate heir to the Weltbühne 's last editors Ossietzky and Tucholsky, he hoped to relaunch the flagship of Germany's independent leftist intelligentsia.
On July 3, 1945, he wrote to Johannes R. Becher ("Dear Comrade Becher"), the newly elected president of the Kulturbund, with his proposal. Explaining that he had worked "very closely with Carl von Ossietzky at the Weltbühne up until the day of his arrest," Karsch said that he now wanted "to revive the old Weltbühne in a new form, but entirely in the Ossietzky spirit.... I believe I have earned this right by renouncing the further pursuit of my literary career in 1933 and remaining silent for 12 years—in the conviction that for an activist writer from the left with a polemical disposition, any attempt to continue publishing under the Nazis must have ended unfailingly in intellectual corruption."[52] Karsch's request that Becher find "a few moments of time for the question of the Weltbübne "—that is, discuss the possibility of reestablishing the magazine—seems not to have been granted or at least not to have resulted in the support Karsch had hoped for. The only indication that Becher spoke with Karsch, thereby sustaining his hopes, is an article Karsch wrote about Ossietzky for Aufbau, the magazine Becher copublished. The piece made broad hints of Karsch's intent: "He [Ossietzky] demanded of us ultimate clarity, ultimate precision of expression, ultimate purity of thought. And that is precisely what we most have need of today after 12 years of intellectual and linguistic degeneration, when we undertake with the pen to do our part toward solving the immeasurable tasks of our time."[53]
By the time these lines appeared however, Karsch had already found his position at the Tagesspiegel, and the Weltbühne project was over for
him. Unbeknownst to him, in the summer of 1945 another figure from Carl von Ossietzky's life emerged with plans to revive the publication.
After caring for her husband until his death in 1938 in a hospital in Berlin, Maud von Ossietzky, née Woods, spent several months in a nerve clinic. Thrown off the track of an orderly bourgeois existence, she was shadowed and troubled by the Gestapo and led an unsteady life. Born the daughter of a British colonial officer in India in 1888, she had been a self-confident and independent suffragette in her youth. Her marriage to Ossietzky in 1913 and relocation to Germany had given her life a new focus. With Ossietzky's death she lost her greatest source of stability and became an alcoholic.[54]
One of the few people with whom she had contact after 1938 was Hans Leonard, a former salesman for a publishing house and now himself thrown from the bourgeois track by the Nazi racial legislation. After the war ended, the name Ossietzky, which at the order of the Gestapo Maud Woods was no longer allowed to use after 1938, acquired a new resonance, and their initially passing acquaintance altered. People showed interest in the widow of the mythical Ossietzky. According to Maud's (admittedly unreliable) memoirs, a swindler ("Jack a.k.a. Franz Krüger") tried to capitalize on it. Hans Wallenberg, formerly an editor at Ullstein and now the founder and chief editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung, apparently visited her to discuss the possibilities of a new Weltbühne .[55] There was a general interest in making Ossietzky's widow the starting point of a new Weltbühne project.
Employed as a civil servant in the Pankow district in the summer of 1945, Hans Leonard had long assisted Maud von Ossietzky in practical matters and now entertained similar thoughts. He was no intellectual, rather a salesman with leftist tendencies and cultural interests, both prompted by his family background. His father was Hugo Leonard (originally Lewysohn), a composer and conductor, and his parents had been friends of the Liebknecht family. Until 1933 Leonard had no express party affiliation, but after the war he declared a commitment "in spirit to.... the adherents of the USPD and later the KPD" in his curriculum vitae.[56] His career had led him through several of Berlin's music and theater publishers and included a job under Siegfried Jacobsohn, the publisher of the Weltbühne . Like Walther Karsch, Leonard survived the Nazi period as a commercial representative and joined the KPD at the about the same time. He was forty-three years old when the war ended.[57]
At first Leonard pursued the Weltbühne project alongside his official position in Pankow. One of his first actions was to rid Maud von Ossietzky of the swindling "Jack a.k.a. Franz Krüger." Moreover, he saw to it that she received a spacious apartment at No. 10 Lützowplatz, large enough to house the planned editorial rooms as well. He drew up the application for a license, which Maud, who still possessed British citizenship, then submitted to British Information Control. And, once the granting of the license seemed assured and merely a question of time, he undertook the first practical business steps toward implementing the new magazine. Negotiations with the manager of the printing house in Tempelhof—where in these months the Allgemeine Zeitung was printed and the Tagesspiegel prepared—revealed that it was ready and technically in a position to accept a commission to print the new Weltbühne . The matter was pursued so quickly and optimistically that Leonard soon received the first offprints of the cover.
As 1945 drew to a close, everything suddenly came to a standstill. Although Maud von Ossietzky received the license applied for, it was revoked soon thereafter. The explanation given was a preexisting title on the name Die Weltbühne .[58] The name was the legal property of two émigrés living in New York, Hermann Budzislawski and Helene Reichenbach. They had read of plans for the Weltbühne in the New York newspaper Aufbau and immediately lodged a protest at British Information Control, stating that they had bought all the rights to the Weltbühne (published in exile in Prague after 1933) from Siegfried Jacobsohn's widow in 1934. The legal ghost of the Weltbühne name, which was to stir up confusion again in 1990, after the fall of the wall, made its first appearance in 1946.[59]
The protest from New York led to a hurried search for substitute titles back in Berlin. Versions like "Carl von Ossietzky's Weltbühne" and "Carl von Ossietzky—Welttribüne" were suggested, and their circumstantial subtitles proclaimed what thin copyright ice they were on. Two examples: "A Magazine for Politics, the Arts, and Science in the Spirit of the Founding of Siegfried Jacobsohn and His Successors Carl v. Ossietzky and Tucholsky, Published by Maud v. Ossietzky"; "A Magazine for Politics, Arts, and Economy. Dedicated to Carl v. Ossietzky, the Last Leader of the Weltbühne ."[60]
While Hans Leonard debated the sense and nonsense of such formulations with British control officers, he realized that his own partnership with Maud von Ossietzky lacked all legal basis. His next step was to contractually formalize their common interests and respective ob-
ligations. The ten-year contract signed between Leonard and Ossietzky's widow on February 17, 1946, established that Maud would serve as publisher of "Carl v. Ossietzky's Weltbühne " and Hans Leonard as the magazine's executive editor (with a monthly salary of four hundred reichsmarks). A few months later, Leonard's functions were defined more precisely—"director, executive editor, designer"—by an additional agreement. The business shares in the new venture were fixed at 60 percent for Maud and 40 percent for Leonard.[61]
A look at the financial side of their undertaking, which Leonard had meanwhile also taken charge of, shows how much the personal friendship had become a business partnership. Unlike large licensed publications such as the Tagesspiegel and Nacht-Express, which received material support from their respective occupational powers, the Weltbühne was a private initiative pursued by two individuals who could expect nothing from the military government beyond a license. None of the Western powers were interested in financing the revival of an intellectual magazine from the Weimar period. The situation was different in the KPD, which granted its member Hans Leonard an interest-free loan of twenty thousand reichsmarks on January 15, 1946, for his project.[62] On March 9, Leonard transferred this sum to the recently established Maud von Ossietzky Verlag at an interest rate of 3 percent. It was stipulated by contract that this loan was made on the condition that Maud received the British license and would be canceled in the event she did not.
The first issue of the magazine, which came out in early June after all of these obstacles and delays, brought a further surprise—this time for British Information Control. As though there had been no protest from New York and no wearisome negotiations over a new name, the title appeared as it had in the original application: Die Weltbühne . And the license under which the magazine was published was not the British one applied for, but a Russian one. Hans Leonard later explained this sudden change of sides by claiming that the English had thwarted his plans in spring 1946 for political reasons. He also suspected the British and Americans of wanting to outmaneuver him and create a Western version of the Weltbühne .[63] Accordingly, nothing was more natural than to anticipate this development with his own tactical move. Given the dates, what occurred was more likely a matter of hasty scrambling than careful planning. On May 29, 1946, the British press officers received a written notice from Maud von Ossietzky "that I have decided ... not to use ... the license granted to me." The authorities who
had granted the new license were not named. A few days later, in early June, the first issue of the Weltbühne appeared. Given the production schedules of the time, the issue must have been put together and printed before May 29. Nor could the Russian license indicated in the masthead have been issued by the time of printing: it bore the date June 1 and was not received until days after the publication of the first issue on June 6.[64]
The circumstances of the revival of the Weltbühne and the circle of people who assisted in it suggest that the new version, despite the marks of identity (format, graphics, color), had little in common with its predecessor. Even the production site—in the building of the Nacht-Express on Mohrenstrasse—did not particularly evoke confidence in this respect. Was the Weltbühne supposed to function among intellectual magazines like the Nacht-Express in the tabloid press?
Walther Karsch's initial reaction shows that Hans Leonard's project was at first not seen as such even by critical contemporaries. His livelihood meanwhile secured as a publisher, Karsch followed Leonard's activities with a reaction of both indifference and goodwill; indifference because he was himself no longer involved, goodwill because it concerned the Weltbühne .
The only whiff of sour grapes after his unsuccessful approach to Becher was a declaration of disinterest in the new Weltbühne and a claim that "I had considered the whole idea completely preposterous."[65] Karsch was evidently still interested enough to keep himself updated on events at Lützowplatz through his friend and fellow critic Wolfgang Harich. Moreover, in February 1946 he wrote an article for the new Weltbühne about its predecessor, titled "Kantstrasse 152," the seat of Ossietzky's original publication.
Karsch's article never appeared. His authorship as copublisher of the Tagesspiegel had meanwhile become "intolerable"[66] for the KPD and hence also for Hans Leonard. What followed was open enmity. The Weltbühne ran articles that referred to Karsch as "Chameleon Karsch" and sought to ridicule his name and discredit him through the implication of dishonorable actions. Karsch revenged himself with a polemic, "On the Misuse of a Name," in which he reproached Leonard's Weltbühne for having abandoned the independence always maintained by Ossietzky and turning the magazine into an instrument of the SED.[67]
But such antagonism was the exception in the Weltbühne 's first year of publication. The majority of the contributors to the old Weltbühne hailed its reappearance as a significant event and the magazine as a se-
rious forum. As late as 1949 Leonard received assurances from Thomas Mann "that the Weltbühne under Jacobsohn and Ossietzky could have looked no different than it does under the present global circumstances."[68] A look at the authors published that first year gives the impression of an unorthodox publication composed of liberals and communists: Erich Weinert, Erich Kästner, Herbert Ihering, Axel Eggebrecht, Gert H. Theunissen, Karl Korn, Wolfgang Harich, Karl Schnog, Friedrich Luft, Curt Riess, Horst Lommer, Günther Brandt, Paul Rilla, Albert Norden, Günther Weisenborn, Paul Merker, Herbert Eulenberg, Egon Erwin Kisch, Fritz Erpenbeck, Kurt Hiller, Edgar Morin, Alfred Kantorowicz, Lion Feuchtwanger, Wolfgang Leonhard, Kurt R. Grossmann, Ralph Giordano, Walther Kiaulehn, Alexander Abusch.
In September 1946, as part of the run-up to the Magistrat elections, the Weltbühne published an article by SPD member Josef Grunner about SED/SPD relations. Thereafter it renounced discussion of explosive topics of this sort. In 1947 the pluralistic reservoir dried up more and more. One after the other, authors living in the West ended their collaboration, maintaining silence like Erich Kästner or protesting loudly like Kurt Hiller.
In Leonard's opinion, Hiller provided an important voucher for the continuity of the old Weltbühne, just as Maud von Ossietzky did as co-publisher. However, Hiller did not let himself be so easily used as Ossietzky's widow. When Leonard suggested that he write about "topics of a pacifist character" since he lived in London and would likely not be able "to take a timely stance on every issue of the day,"[69] Hiller refused and posted an ultimatum. Forewarned by Karsch, with whom he was in contact, Hiller made his continued collaboration contingent upon the fulfillment of two conditions Leonard could not meet: first, the Weltbühne was to apologize to Karsch for the libelous statements printed against him; and second, it was to print an open letter of Hiller's to Wilhelm Pieck "in which I suggest a pairing of liberal socialists and communists and other progressive groups, but first I declare it absolutely necessary to cleanse the party of a certain clique of Stalinists that has returned."[70]
This silencing of liberal and independent voices on the left corresponded to the ever-increasing presence of the SED. Günther Brandt, an independent leftist on the Berlin intellectual scene of 1945–48 forgotten today, was a regular commentator in the Weltbühne 's first year of operation, almost something like the paper's chief columnist. When he ended his involvement with the magazine, Alexander Abusch, the
official party censor of the Weltbühne, took his place in 1947 to provide supervision and commentaries.[71] However, before ranks closed completely, there was a final attempt to take seriously and revive the old Weltbühne 's tradition of independence, which Leonard from the very beginning had worn on his lapel like an ornamental badge. It was undertaken by a young man who like no other embodied the caprices and vicissitudes of Berlin's intelligentsia in the transition from the Third Reich to the Cold War.
Harich
When the twenty-two-year old Wolfgang Harich entered the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden in June 1945 as Paul Wegener's personal assistant, it was the beginning of a career that was soon to make him one of the most influential public voices on culture in postwar Berlin. At Schlüterstrasse Harich became acquainted with Berlin's cultural scene and what had remained of its leading representatives. When the Kammer's end approached, he joined the French-licensed newspaper founded in the fall of 1945, Der Kurier . As a theater critic, he soon made his name as an enfant terriblement intelligent with his casual polemic and caustic style. He once accused Rudolf Pechel, publisher of the Deutsche Rundschau, of collaboration with the Nazis, although Pechel had been a concentration-camp prisoner during the Third Reich. Pechel revenged himself with a character sketch that appeared under the title "From Himmler to Harich" and referred to Harich as "a pure intellect on two legs, a kind of homunculus," continuing his description:
No self-control, no inhibition, no reverence, intolerant to the last, no respect for human dignity, for other people's convictions and achievements, no self-discipline or self-criticism, no heart or emotional capacity. Looking for a fight for fight's sake, a manipulator of thoughts, protean, and of use everywhere since he has no convictions to change. Quick to make friends, quicker to make enemies. A cold flame, which emerges most painfully when he takes a stand on something: the phrases merely bubble from his mouth, he himself remains completely uninvolved.... Like everyone without substance he requires an opponent he can propel himself off of.... All in all of an amusing malevolence, an ingenious wunderkind who might be pardoned for much, even his own inner senility, and indulged like a court jester.[72]
Ernst Niekisch, who had no personal feud with Harich, called him "a mobile talent, but without true creative depth."[73] As the case of Gus-
tav von Wangenheim shows, his reviews seemed capable of destroying. Another of his victims, Käthe Dorsch, responded with a slap in the face delivered publicly in the club Die Möwe. The incident became the talk of the town and a part of the image in which Harich and Berlin's cultural public apparently all took pleasure. At any rate it was no exaggeration when Harich esteemed himself one of "the most popular journalists in Berlin" in 1946.[74] He was a friend of Friedrich Luft, his peer and colleague who also found quick success on the cultural scene. Harich later claimed that both were aware at the time that the fulfillment of their youthful dreams was due to the fact that the older critics who should have occupied such positions had emigrated or been murdered or discredited.
Like all young intellectuals not satisfied with earning their bread by writing feuilleton articles, Wolfgang Harich and Friedrich Luft also made plans to found a magazine. Die Brücke was meant to remain independent of the occupation powers and pursue a third way.[75] The critic Werner Fiedler, who had impressed both young men during the Nazi years as one of the few writing what Harich later characterized "reviews and not Kunstbetrachtungen, "[*][76] was supposed to assume the journalistic leadership, and Fritz Hellwig, former publisher of the fashion magazine Die Neue Linie, to oversee the technical and organizational management of the project. According to Harich, the application for a license was submitted to the British.[77] In fall 1945, Harich and Luft were so certain of the outcome that Harich registered himself as the representative of Die Brücke on the attendance list for a press conference at the Kammer der Kulturschaffenden.[78]
When, however, for reasons that according to Harich were connected to the magazine's intended independent course, plans for Die Brücke came to nothing, he set his sights on—this time without Luft—Leonard's Weltbühne project as a replacement. His participation in discussions with Hans Leonard and Maud von Ossietzky from January 1946 onward was so regular that the three essentially formed a trio. For Leonard, who was not exactly familiar with Berlin's intellectual and literary scene, Harich seemed precisely what was missing. With his influence,
[*] Kunstbetrachtung, the term the Nazis substituted for Kritik (criticism), implied the absence of any element of what they referred to as "destructive intellectualism." Since works of art requiring fundamental opposition were (in the Nazi understanding) not supposed to enter the public realm anyway, everything that did enter was automatically entitled to the pacificity of Kunstbetrachtung . Literally, the word means "looking at art."
contacts, and good nose for the cultural zeitgeist, Harich could approach potential collaborators and serve as the magazine's necessary scout on the intellectual scene. The question was whether this spoiled salon intellectual, accustomed to equal success in Berlin-Mitte, Zehlendorf, and Karlshorst, would be satisfied with the role of scout as Leonard understood it.
After his own plans for Die Brücke sank, the temptation to jump aboard Leonard's Weltbühne was too great for Harich to resist. The project could offer everything Die Brücke had failed in securing: a license, financial backing, organization, even—to take Leonard at his word—the intention of continuing Ossietzky's independent path. And Harich took Leonard at his word. The KPD/SPD merger in 1946—particularly the role the KPD played in this—prompted Harich to present Leonard with his conception of the Weltbühne 's autonomy. His eight-page letter to Leonard of April 7, 1946, was a veritable declaration of independence. Harich favored the merger, but not through the methods of pressure, intimidation, and haste used by the KPD leadership and the SMAD. The errors of both sides—the KPD and SPD—should be censured. ("We will often have to deal out sharp criticism of both parties ... and often even deride functionaries on both sides.") About the magazine's autonomous course he wrote:
We have the task of creating a synthesis between bolshevism and Western, bourgeois liberal democracy.... The condition is that the proletarian mass movement converts to the fair playing rules of democracy and to radical socialism.... The Weltbühne has never been opportunistic. It must seize the chance here in Berlin, where the four world powers have come together, to unite the various currents into one living movement.... In this effort, neither the British license nor the receipt of orders in Berlin-Mitte [i.e., at KPD/SED headquarters] can be decisive, nor the fact that I live in Dahlem, that Weinert is returning from exile in Moscow, or that Karsch is a concessionaire at the Tagesspiegel .[79]
Perhaps Harich did not yet know at this point that the SED man Leonard could never accept such demands. Perhaps he wanted to see how far he could go before Karsch's lot caught up with him. In the spring of 1946 Leonard apparently still found Harich too indispensable to advise him of the situation or part ways with him. And since matters were still in an unbinding planning stage, Harich's statement of opinion was simply filed away without further ado.
The situation changed in June 1946, when the matter became con-
crete with the first issue of Die Weltbühne appearing under Russian license. Without repeating the plans for autonomy proclaimed two months earlier, Harich now requested for himself the position of executive editor "under your supervision and following your orders," as he assured Leonard. At the same time he also made clear that he regarded Leonard as responsible solely for the organizational aspects of publication and himself for conceptual and editorial concerns.[80] When Leonard issued him a flat refusal ("An editorial position is out of the question," he wrote to him, though, he added, he would "gladly ... count you among our regular collaborators"),[81] Harich did not give up, but went all out, trying to achieve his aim via a detour to Karlshorst. Harich apparently had friends and patrons there, SMAD officers who valued him for his intelligence, amiability, and contacts to the Zehlendorf intelligentsia (including American control officers). Shortly after Leonard's refusal, Harich was summoned to Major Davidenko,[82] the officer responsible for the Weltbühne in the SMAD's propaganda division. A few weeks later Leonard described to his party friends what happened there, speaking of himself in the third person:
Herr Harich and Comrade Leonard both appeared before Major Davidenko. Herr Major Davidenko disclosed to Comrade Leonard the SMAD's wish that, given the enormous significance of the Weltbühne, a large number of intellectually prominent collaborators should be carefully brought together, including Wolfgang Harich, considered very capable. Comrade Leonard replied that for months there had been extensive collaboration between the Weltbühne and Herr Harich, but in the course of the discussion Herr Major Davidenko seemed to stress closer collaboration.[83]
Davidenko decided that Harich should write and present Leonard with a proposal of his plans and demands. Harich had apparently already prepared such a report, and he appeared with it the following day in the editorial offices on Mohrenstrasse. As Leonard wrote in his report to the party, an "excited discussion" ensued. With the SMAD supposedly covering his back, Harich now demanded unlimited editorial control. His proposal did include an "advisory editorial board," but the editor—that is, Harich—was "to be absolutely independent in his work" and Leonard given no say in editorial decisions. ("Concerns himself only with the business side of the undertaking.... Apart from his seat on the advisory editorial board, Herr Leonard has no influence whatsoever on the editor in everyday editorial work.")[84]
Harich was probably unaware of the true power relations he attempted to influence in the summer of 1946, just as he would be ten years later when he delivered a report directed against the Ulbricht leadership to the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, Puschkin.[85] His protest in 1946 did not lead, as in 1956, to immediate arrest, but it provoked a chain of reaction similar to that later event. Leonard mobilized the SED leadership (Weinert, Ackermann) and presumably pulled strings in the SMAD far beyond and above Major Davidenko. The result was that at the next meeting Leonard and Harich were summoned to, Davidenko no longer insisted on increasing Harich's prominence at the magazine, but instead suggested that he be satisfied with the role of freelance collaborator.
Either this statement was too diplomatically worded or Harich was too deaf to note it. There is no other explanation for his again approaching Leonard four weeks later. He repeated his old demands, this time spiced with strong language and personal invectives. He called the previous editions of the Weltbühne "dilettantish muddling," a "miserable mess" produced "with a lot of phlegm and great internal uncertainty," and though Leonard himself was "a good publisher ... I consider you completely incapable of any kind of editorial work.... Therefore in the interest of the Weltbühne it is urgent that you step down as chief editor and make way for another."[86] Given his lack of backing in Karlshorst, the move seemed a quixotic challenge or the harmless threat of a child. Informed of Harich's true lack of influence, Leonard could now assume the role of the discreet and forbearing adult, and simply ignore the young man's statements and demands. This was the quiet and anticlimactic end to the struggle for the Weltbühne that Wolfgang Harich had begun so stridently and dramatically. He continued to work for Leonard as a freelance feuilletonist, both men behaving as though a dispute had never occurred between them. Did this confirm Rudolf Pechel's judgment? Had the "manipulator of thoughts" so "quick to make friends and quicker to make enemies" quickly reconciled himself to the situation, swiftly forgetting the whole thing as nothing more than an escapade of the "ingenious wunderkind ... indulged like a court jester"? The disapproval that Harich like a magnet continued to attract until his last days was surely based on his peculiar blend of seriousness and capricious youthful posturing. The scale of reactions stretched from the slap given to him by Käthe Dorsch to the prison sentence handed down by Walter Ulbricht in 1957. Harich's reaction to all this perhaps confirmed his childlike mentality. He endured his pun-
ishments with equanimity, and almost with a touch of satisfaction, as though he saw in them a confirmation that acknowledged and dignified his pranks.[*]
After Harich's attack was successfully countered, Die Weltbühne experienced a short-term upsurge beyond all expectations, only to sink again rapidly. In the second half of 1946 the net profit totaled 235,000 reichsmarks, but for the whole of the following year only 198,000 reichsmarks. The net profit of 52,000 reichsmarks in the first six months of 1948 dropped to 12,000 reichsmarks in the second half of the year.[87] The currency reform, a death knell for many magazines, explains the decline in 1948. But the decline in 1947 was due to the disappointment of many readers of the old Weltbühne . An eager welcome for the return of Ossietzky's magazine had resulted in the unexpectedly high circulation in the first year of publication. However, as one independent author after another ceased collaboration and the magazine's declared autonomy proved merely empty talk, the readership dissolved. What followed was predictable. When the decimated profits first became a loss in 1949, the SED once again stepped in to provide financial backing—but this time not as the provider of a loan. As Leonard explained in a later report to Zentrag, the holding company for all party firms: "The press was reclaimed by the party, Comrade Leonard confirmed as executor, director, and chief editor. The press was subordinated to Zentrag."[88]
The final remaining connection between the Weltbühne and the name Ossietzky was also dissolved with this overhaul by the party. Though
[*] Among Rudolf Pechel's papers is a document—setting aside the question of its authenticity—that bears on this point and deserves attention. A number of statements Harich supposedly made about himself were reported by a man named Willy Huhn, who introduced himself to Pechel as an old friend of Harich's. Making reference to Pechel's article "From Himmler to Harich," Huhn wrote a letter to Pechel on November 2, 1946, containing passages "for your personal information" from an autobiographical sketch made by Harich in 1944. The following are selections from the letter: "I am more a gossip than a philosopher! Without gossip and the morbid society that continually provides it with new material, I would rather not live. It is also terribly amusing. It is of psychological note that when caught up in amusing gossip the feeling of one's own amusing nature increases beyond all measure. ... I will confess to a familiarity with chicanery and hysteria in my own nature. When in moments of depression, which is not unknown even to a blithe favorite of the gods like me, I see through myself, chicanery and hysteria open their arms to receive me.... Without chicanery I would never have gotten into the consulate, nor become Admiral N's secret council and MT's lover. I need chicanery to get to 'the right places' because I am still so young, but once there, I need it to be able to show what positive impact I am capable of, whether ... in the consulate, as a lover or as a philosophical student.... I would also like to bring to your attention Thomas Mann's Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull published by Insel." Pechel Archive, vol. 42, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.
Maud von Ossietzky had never really been active as a publisher and had left everything to Hans Leonard (though complaining at times about this situation),[89] in 1950 she withdrew completely from the enterprise run in her name. For a monthly settlement of one thousand reichsmarks she renounced all rights to the magazine and Carl von Ossietzky's literary estate, and agreed to fashion "her planned memoirs only in harmony with the political course of the Weltbühne [and] the policies of the GDR" and have it published "by a GDR-licensed press."[90]