In Europe

caused to be indebted to him’. The Mann family left for France, and from there for California. Joseph Roth began his melancholy wanderings across Europe, until he met his end at the Parisian Café de la Poste, felled by wine, Pernod and cognac.
    The Romanisches Café emptied out. The writer Hans Sahl saw the last customers reading, playing chess, consulting maps and railway timetables, and writing letters. ‘Blessed was he with an uncle in Amsterdam, a cousin in Shanghai or a niece in Valparaíso.’ In March of 1933, Sebastian Haffner was still enjoying idyllic afternoons with a Jewish girlfriend in Grunewald. ‘The world was very peaceful and springy.’ Every ten minutes a cheerful class of schoolchildren would pass by, led by a prim teacher wearing a lorgnette, and each class greeted him enthusiastically and in unison: ‘
Juda verrecke!
’ In the end, he was able to escape to London in 1938.
    Some had drawn their conclusions earlier, however, and had left the country after the 1932 elections. Albert Einstein left for California. George Grosz, who had already received threats, had a nightmare about the coming disaster and immediately, impulsive as he was, bought a ticket for America. Marlene Dietrich had harboured a deep hatred of the Nazis from the start. After 1932, she never set foot in Berlin again. She became a beacon to the German exiles in Hollywood and Paris, and during the war she performed on all the Allied fronts, a soldier among the soldiers. Only after her death, sixty years later, did she return to her city, to Schöneberg cemetery. She received flowers and many tributes, a squareclose to the Tiergarten was named after her, but there were also those who spat on her grave, and furious letters appeared in the papers:‘Whore!’ ‘Traitress!’
    The last relatively normal parliamentary elections were held a month after Hitler took power: this time, the Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote. A new secret police force, the Gestapo, was formed. The first concentration camp was built at Dachau two weeks later. In his diary, the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer noted that the maid of one of his Jewish colleagues had already quit her job. ‘She had been offered a safe position, and Herr Professor would soon probably no longer be able to afford a maid.’ At a chemist's he saw a tube of toothpaste with a swastika on it. ‘People have not yet started to fear for their lives, but they fear for their daily sustenance and freedom.’
    A few days later, on 31 March, the Reichstag – already sorely decimated after the arrests of communists and social democrats – granted Hitler dictatorial powers. Special penal courts, the
Sondergerichte
, were now established and a new category of crimes coined, including
heimtückische Angriffe
, foul criticism of the government. The first anti-Semitic measures were announced: Jews were to be dismissed from posts at schools and in public offices, and Jewish businesses were to be boycotted. New words were heard everywhere:
Gleichschaltung, Rassenschande, Belange, Artfremd
. Käthe Kollwitz was dismissed from the Academy of Arts. For being a member of the social-democrat association of physicians, her husband Karl lost all his national health patients in one fell swoop. One month later, on Opernplatz, across from the university, the books of Walter Rathenau, Heinrich Heine, the Mann brothers, Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig and others were burned. Bella Fromm wrote: ‘Not a day goes by without the Gestapo arresting an “unreliable” colleague.’ Meanwhile, ‘
Heil
Hitler!’ had become the mandatory greeting, the Horst-Wessel song the mandatory hymn:
    Die Strasse frei den braunen Bataillonen!
    Die Strasse frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!
    Es schaun aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen.
    Der Tag für Freiheit en für Brot bricht an.
    That summer, the term ‘total state’ first began to appear in Nazi speeches. Shortly afterwards, the NSDAP was declared the only legal party in Germany. Under pressure from the Nazis, the German Evangelical Church replaced the newly chosen Reichsbischof Friedrich von Bodelschwingh with army chaplain Ludwig Müller. Shortly after his appointment, Pastor Müller had himself photographed in a toga, his arm stretched out in the Nazi salute; it was in protest against this coup that the Bekennende Kirche was established.
    In July 1933, Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican guaranteeing the autonomy of the Catholic Church in Germany,