In Europe

week. When Hitler's political ally Ludendorff announced his candidacy for the presidential elections in 1925, he made no headway at all. In the 1920s, no more than 20,000 copies of
Mein Kampf
were sold.
    Nor did the results at the polls provide any indication of what was looming on the horizon. The 1925 elections were a triumph for the established order: Hindenburg, born in 1847, received 14.7 million votes, former chancellor Wilhelm Marx – the joint candidate of parties including the Catholic Centre Party and the SPD – received 13.8 million, and the communists’ Ernst Thälman took 1.9 million. Hitler's National Socialists achieved no more than 280,000 votes. In the next elections, in 1928, when the social democrats won for the last time, the Nazis did not do much better: of the 500 seats in the Reichstag, they received only twelve. Two years later, when ‘this rabid postman of fate’ (as Ernst von Salomon once referred to Hitler) made his breakthrough, the thinking part of the nation was – with only a few exceptions – taken completely by surprise.
    It was more than blindness alone. The intelligentsia, too, could summon up absolutely no enthusiasms for the established order. No one stood up for the Weimar Republic. Most of the nation's writers agreed with Thomas Mann, who openly declared war on politics as a whole ‘because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, obstinate and inhuman’. Later, by the way, he changed his tune. In cabarets like the Tingel-Tangel the republic was constantly ridiculed, while Hitler played the part of the harmless idiot. Kurt Tucholsky called the German democracy ‘a façade and a lie’.
    Most of the conservative
Bildungsbürger
had no notion of the under-currents in their society. The fact that no less than 50,000 Berlin studentshad taken to the streets during the Kapp Putsch to demonstrate in favour of that ultra-right wing coup did not register with them. And they did not even want to know what those students read: Ernst Jünger's books about the mystical
Männerbund
that arises between warriors, Alfred Rosenberg's stories about the Jewish conspiracy, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's treatise on the new Germany,
Das Dritte Reich
(1923), which envisioned a ‘spiritual
volk
community’ led by a single führer; each of these books were sold in huge numbers. They were blind, too, to the culture of political murders, to the intimidation to which a person like Albert Einstein, for example, was exposed. ‘I'm going to cut that dirty Jew's throat!’ a right-wing student had shouted during one of Einstein's lectures. Nor did they have a particularly clear view of the country's economic situation, shaky despite the seeming stability.
    In the cellars of Berlin police headquarters, close to Tempelhof airport, the dirty brown underworld of the 1920s is still on display for the rare visitor. Look, there we have Karl Grossmann, a fat butcher with a permanent shortage of domestic help. During a three-year period he scattered the pieces of twenty-three female corpses all over Berlin, in canals, in garbage pails, pieces of housemaid everywhere. He also had a colleague, Georg Haarmann, who specialised in young boys. After having sex with them he literally ripped their throats out. Perhaps twenty-five boys disappeared into the Leine. The police finally caught up with him after children playing in the area kept finding bones and skulls. And then there was Horst Wessel, whose name lives on in the celebrated Nazi anthem ‘Die Fahne hoch’, which chiselled his name in granite as a saint and a martyr of the swastika.
    On 17 January, 1930, SA-Sturmführer Wessel was found badly wounded in his rented room on Grosse Frankfurterstrasse. The authorities immediately suspected a political motive, but things were more complicated than that. The rumour going around the underworld was that Wessel had run foul of the pimp ‘Ali’ Höhler, concerning one of the whores Höhler protected. Meanwhile, Goebbels was busy moulding him into a new hero of the movement, a victim of the Red hordes. He wrote a moving account of his visit to the hospital bed of this ‘Christian and socialist’, and when Wessel finally died on 23 February, Goebbels organised a funeral the likesof which Berlin had rarely seen. In the long run, it turned out that Wessel had simply failed to pay a great deal of back rent, and that the ‘proletarian foreclosure’ instigated by his landlady had got a little out of hand. That, at