Some of the atmosphere of the “German problem”—heavy with guilt, suspicion, smouldering resentments, and personal tragedy—is captured in these two brief glimpses: Alfred Polgar’s sketch of two court trials he witnessed recently in Munich, and F. S. Grosshut’s report on the events that led up to the suicide of Klaus Mann last year. Mr. Polgar, the distinguished German short story writer and critic, was born in Vienna but is now an American citizen. Mr. Grosshut, who has written criticism for many periodicals throughout the world, emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1933 and came to the United States last year. His permanent residence is in Haifa. Both these articles were translated from the German by Martin Greenberg.
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The scene is a middle-sized room with two windows. The court sits behind tables piled with books and papers. There are several rows of chairs occupied by reporters and the general public. Photographers move quickly around the room with their cameras, despite the great press of people. Both windows are closed. An iron coal stove gives off an intense heat. The whole room drips with perspiration.
In an armchair in front of the judge’s table sits the chief personage in the drama: Dr. med. Mathilde Frieda Karoline Ludendorff, widow of Erich Ludendorff, the defeated Commander-in-Chief of the German armies in the First World War. Here, before one of the so-called Spruchkammer—the “denazification courts”—Frau Ludendorff, philosopher and scholar, must defend herself against the charge of having materially contributed to the National Socialist program and the barbarization and brutalization of her compatriots.
Place: Munich.
Time: The Present.
The accused is seventy-two years old, correspondingly gray-haired, and wears eyeglasses. Physiognomically, there is nothing noteworthy about her. Even a scrutiny prompted by malice fails to discover a single distinctive quality in this utterly neutral face. With Mathilde Ludendorff’s identification photograph in her possession, not a woman of her age in all Germany but could go about with impunity. There is little of the military about the general’s wife, except perhaps her broad-brimmed black hat, something like a cloth helmet.
The president of the court, when he speaks of the accused, uses the very impersonal and strangely noncommittal expression “die Betroffene”—“the party concerned.” Of the dismay and confusion otherwise signified by this German word Frau Ludendorff never for a moment shows a trace. Wrapped in the impenetrable confusion of her doctrines and “discoveries,” she is proof against all objection. An untiring speaker, her voice never flags through the hour-long harangues she delivers (the same cannot be said of the audience’s attention). From time to time—when her subject is herself—there is a tremolo of emotion in it; otherwise the voice is unruffled, dispassionate, and uninhibited by the series of absurdities it is called upon to enunciate. She employs the vocabulary of an educated person, but her manner of speaking is of that oracular kind favored by the fortune-tellers of the Rummelplatz. You notice that Frau Ludendorff is accustomed to listeners not given to discriminating between sense and nonsense, and disposed from the start to accept such mental pabulum as she has to offer. This same pabulum, systematically dispensed by the Nazis, proved signally successful in the experiment of transforming men into beasts.
Among the doctrines which Frau Ludendorff, that seeker after God and the truth, preached to her people (and in part discoursed on before the Munich Spruchkammer) were the following: The Jewish bankers of America supported Hitler with hundreds of millions of dollars, so that he might come to power and destroy France, to the advantage of their Satanic financial schemes. The Jews are guilty of the deaths of Luther, Lessing, Mozart, and Schiller. The Jews taught the German students to be drunkards, so as to sap the strength and vitality of German youth; and the monasteries lent a hand in this plot by the establishment of their distilleries and breweries.
Frau Ludendorff did not, however, have these subjects all to herself; her legal counsel, too, were not without originality, one of them declaring before the Spruchkammer: “We know today that the outbreak of the World War in 1914 had already been decided upon at a congress of Jews and Freemasons in 1889; for the year 1914, because of its cabalistic numerical value, was particularly favorable for the establishment of the world hegemony of international Jewry.”
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There are many who think Frau Ludendorff believes what she says and writes, and who therefore infer the presence of soft spots in her brain. Others again think the lady a completely malignant creature possessed by a hatred and a greed for importance that stimulate her inventive faculties. Something halfway between the two opinions is probably the correct one. Be that as it may, after World War I, Mathilde Ludendorff’s book Vom heiligen Quell deutscher Kraft (“The Sacred Source of German Strength”)—in ten volumes!—sold eighty thousand copies; only the paper shortage kept this figure from going higher, and the number of adherents to her “populist idea” was and probably is in the several hundred thousands. All these good German folk, having swallowed the mixture of slops and poison that Frau Ludendorff brewed, found themselves to be of one mind—the right frame of mind for perpetrating, or assisting in the perpetration of, or at least lending their hearty approval to, those now infamous deeds which have made the German name a stink in the nostrils of God and man.
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During the few hours I spent as spectator at the Ludendorff proceedings, I was unable to shake off a feeling of oppression only partly to be explained by the infernally overheated stove. Later, however, outside in the cool dry air of the beneficent autumn, I hit upon the reason for my oppression. It was a witchcraft trial I had been witnessing in that small Munich room—a witchcraft trial in which accused and accuser had exchanged something of their roles. Here it was the magistrates who were ignorant of the devil’s existence, while the accused persevered in affirming his existence and claimed initiation into his sinister mysteries. Here it was the court that knew nothing of the hellish arts the devil practices against Christian bodies and souls, whereas the accused knew them as intimately as pious people know their catechism. Here it was the accused who proved to doubting judges her intercourse—though of a hostile kind—with demons and evil spirits, which appeared to her in the guise of “cosmopolitan powers.”
It smelt of inquisition and burning at the stake. Though the inquisitor, indeed—it was doubtless an oversight merely—sat not in the judge’s chair but in the chair of the accused. And the time was: 1949. Do witches still ride their broomsticks today?
Mathilde Ludendorff was sentenced on January 5, 1950 to two years of “special labor” and confiscation of her property. She continues to edit her magazine, Der Quell, published in Stuttgart, the instrument for carrying on her work of education and phi-
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On the same day, another trial was taking place in Munich, this time in a real courtroom. Frau Leni Riefenstahl, cinematic mainstay of the Third Reich, with which she had linked her fortunes for better (if not, however, for worse), feeling her reputation damaged by a newspaper article, had gone to court in quest of legal redress. The cheerful atmosphere prevailing here was a pleasant contrast to the spectral gloom of the other trial.
When I came in, the question was being debated whether, as the newspaper article had claimed, Leni Riefenstahl had herself picked out the gypsy concentration camp prisoners who had been forced to serve as extras in her film Tiefland (“Lowlands”), or whether someone else had done it for her. Opinions were divided. No one, however, disputed the fact that these same gypsy extras, women and children among them, not long after having contributed their bit to the cinematic career of Leni Riefenstahl, were shipped off to the gas chambers. The mention of this detail—it was, to be sure, beside the point so far as the legal suit was concerned—did not disturb the pleasant atmosphere of the trial. The idea of concentration camp prisoners working as movie extras was after all not without its amusing side. Witnesses with faulty memories made statements that led to many a comical exchange, evoking smiles from the entire courtroom, and from Leni Riefenstahl as well. When she smiled, her birdlike profile lost something of its sharpness. Yet even during these livelier moments, her mien did not lose its coldness. She had at one time made various films laid in settings of snow and ice. Perhaps this may account for the frostiness still present in her face.
Then there was a discussion of the four and a half million marks that had been spent in making Tiefland. Some of the things said on this point caused Frau Riefenstahl momentarily to adopt a defiant attitude. But really, she had no cause to pout; everybody was charming to her, even her adversary, even the judge. The entire courtroom listened with sympathy to her story of how only the Fuehrer’s interest in her had protected her from the intrigues of Goebbels. For the Fuehrer had set great store by Leni Riefenstahl, and Leni Riefenstahl had set great store by the Fuehrer. She saw a good deal of Hitler (so one gathered from what she said)—he needed her talents, and he was always there when she needed him. When she pronounced Hitler’s name—she spoke it often—it was as if something sweet were melting on her tongue.
For Goebbels, she had only bitterness. He had turned a cold shoulder to her. Incomprehensibly, he hadn’t been the least bit friendly. Why should this have been? Why should she, among all the lovely ladies in his moving-picture preserve, have been singled out for his disfavor? If she knew, she did not say.
The trial ended with the sentencing of the defendant journalist, Dr. Kindler, to a fine of six hundred marks. On two of the many points he had made in his article, he was unable to offer any clear proof.
Nobody need feel any anxiety about Leni Riefenstahl’s future. Her pockets—so she said in court—were full of contracts with foreign producers. With Argentinian producers, for example. And with Spanish producers. The aura of the Germany of yesterday surrounds her and assures her of sympathy, employment, respect, and success in the Germany of today. Her excellent relations with the Nazis assure her just such excellent relations with their successors. It is made all the simpler by the fact that so many of the successors are identical with their predecessors, having surrendered their positions only to make way for themselves.
No one laughed when the complainant’s lawyer in the suit against Dr. Kindler cried out: “Our country can be proud of Leni Riefenstahl!”
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