eyewitness account / the night of broken glass

Poster [detail] © Roy R. Behrens

Among the most despicable events in modern history is what is known as Kristallnacht (German for “Crystal Night”), or, as more commonly translated, “the Night of Broken Glass.” It refers to massive overnight rioting (a pogrom), instigated by the Nazi Party on November 9-10, 1938. It was carried out against Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, schools, hospitals, as well as people on the street, and is said to have been triggered by the murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by a 17-year-old assassin of Jewish ethnicity. It is estimated that 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses and 267 synagogues were destroyed, at least 90 citizens killed, and 30,000 Jewish males arrested. It was a foreboding of the insidious (and all but successful) attempts by Adolf Hitler and his many devotees to—in essence—recover from the humiliation of World War I, and to "make Deutschland great again." Visiting in Berlin that night was an American artist and writer named Ione Robinson (1910-1989). Eight years later, in an autobiography, she recalled what happened that horrible night, in the passages below.

•••

Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946—

There is still a feeling of suspense that something will happen in Berlin. We saw large groups of Storm Troopers about the city, but Freddie [a journalist friend] said they were probably ordered out to clap at some meeting.

Berlin, November 10, 1938 [the following day]
This morning the telephone rang at four o'clock. I could hear Freddie speaking quietly, and knowing something about the lives of newspapermen, I paid little attention to being awakened at such an early hour.

Later at breakfast I found Freddie sitting over his coffee, staring at the wall in from of him. Dorothy [his wife] was still in her dressing gown. There was a frightful silence when I entered thc room. I thought that someone must have died during the night.

Finally Freddie said, “Well, it has started and God only knows where it will end.” When I asked what had started, he told me calmly, “Another Jewish pogrom–because of vom Rath.”

Coming from a war, one’s nerves are atuned to violence, and I was surprised to find myself turning to Dorothy like a scared rabbit. She seemed to accept the thing that was about to happen like a trained nurse accustomed to caring for a lunatic.

Later in the morning I drove through the city with her. Everything was quiet, and the morning was so cold and damp after an hour of this cruising around that Dorothy decided the whole thing had been called off. I wanted to buy a Contax camera. I asked her to take me to a camera store. While I was examining the Contax I heard a splitting crash, followed by the noise of breaking glass. I started to run for the door of this shop but the salesman held my arm. He begged me not to look and said, “You are an American. I don’t want you to look at this Germany—these aren’t the people of my country doing this thing!”

In the furniture store across the street there was a group of young boys like our American college students. They had hatchets and crowbars in their hands and they were singing while they went about the most vicious piece of wrecking I have ever seen. They were not content just to smash an object—they methodically ground every conceivable thing to pieces; not even the walls of the store were left untouched. Long splinters of wood were left hanging like icicles. When this gang, which was comparatively small, and which any group of able-bodied men could have beaten to smithereens, had finished this store, they went singing down the street unmolested, searching out another victim.

By the time we had reached the Unter den Linden, every Jewish shop was being hacked to pieces. I was amazed at the coolness with which a wrecker would swing his ax into large plateglass window without the slightest fear of being cut by the falling glass. These people were like cold demons. They were wild with a sadistic kind of delirium. The pavements began to look as if an earthquake had struck Berlin. Objects of every description were strewn over the pavements. But the people just stood there; their faces looked dead. No one spoke a word and the police made no attempt to stop the wrecking or the looting…

I walked over to the Kurfurstendamm, which is one of the fashionable shopping streets…the same thing was happening there. I stood in front of one shop and watched the owner—an old Jewish man—being forced to pick up, piece by piece, the broken debris in front of his store. While he was doing this, the wreckers grabbed the only object that had not been torn to bits, a family photograph, and hung it on a wire in front of the doorway. And then they all took turns spitting on this picture! A baby started to cry in the arms of a young woman onlooker. She scolded the baby for crying and held it high in the air to have a better look at this “national glory!”

Towards evening, clouds of smoke curled over Berlin. The synagogues had been set on fire. I drove with Dorothy across the city to find the wife of a Jewish newspaperman working for the UPI [United Press International]. While I waited in the street I saw a man being chased by fifteen Storm Troopers. He didn't have a chance. They closed in on him like hounds after a fox. When they grabbed him he was thrown to the pavement and his skull bashed until he lay there completely unconscious. The Troopers walked calmly away, brushing off their uniforms. I stood by the car, numb with fear, and hating myself for having watched such a ghastly scene; then I realized what could happen to the hearts of men if they permitted themselves not only to indulge in such sadism, but to become passive spectators of such hideous crimes.
 

hot water fed by volcanic underground springs

how shifts of attention enable innovation

In so many, all but countless ways, let us hope that our fortunes are better this year.

Casey Clabough, Elements: The Novels of James Dickey. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 2002, pp. 93-94—

In a memorable description of Adolph Hitler and fascism, Arthur Koestler declares: “Half of Hitler’s genius consisted in hitting the right unconscious chords [aka "dog whistles"]. The other half was his alert eclecticism, his flair for hyper-modern avant-garde methods in Economy, Architecture, Technique, Propaganda and Warfare. The secret of Fascism is the revival of archaic beliefs in an ultra-modern setting. The Nazi edifice was a skyscraper fitted with hot water pipes which drew on underground springs of volcanic origin.”

Willi Baumeister cartoon / Hitler in electric chair

Schlemmer (left) and Baumeister

Above Margrit Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister 1929 in Frankfurt am Main.

Willi Baumeister, in Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a dictatorship. New York: Octagon Books, 1973, page 87—

My friends in Wuppertal, Oskar Schlemmer among them, sent me humorous letters and postcards from time to time, with paste-up pictures and surrealist texts. I sent them, rather naively, a cartoon, cut from a US newspaper, of an electric chair with Hitler on it. Suddenly I was summoned to Gestapo Headquarters. I was confronted by the Gestapo censor with my entire correspondence for the last year and a half. Thank God, Hitler in the electric chair was not among the intercepted letters. I extricated myself by writing a long report to the Gestapo, explaining that these were plans for a book dealing with color modulation and patina, in connection with an especially resistant paint for the camouflaging of tanks and pill boxes.

today I bought a dress that is made out of wood

Where is the fifth pig?

Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, p. 373-374, while visiting Berlin, from a letter dated November 8, 1938 (less than a year in advance of the start of World War II) —

Today I bought a dress that is made out of wood. I still can't believe it. In fact, there was not one “natural” item in this department store; everything was synthetic. In an arcade on Unter den Linden, I spent a long time looking at photographs of Hitler and I bought a series of tiny "flap” [flip book] photos which, when you riffle them fast, make him come to life like a miniature movie. The one I have shows him making a speech and if you riffle the pages slowly the gestures are so calculated and ridiculous they make you laugh—although that is one thing I have not seen people do in this city. 

The people in the streets [of Berlin] look worn and tired. Life is completely regulated. There are signs every few feet, telling one what to eat and believe. Money is controlled. Four dollars a day is about all you can spend. In a certain sense, this makes life very simple—you know exactly what you can and cannot do. Even though certain things could be achieved through such a system, I don't see how anyone could be happy. I begin to feel as though I were living in a well-run jail. There is the same security of a bed at night, something to eat, and a few hours of “forced” recreation. But the realization that one must constantly yield to the will of a single man takes all the incentive and moral force from a human being.

How will the good people of Germany vote?

 Agnes Elizabeth Benedict, Progress to Freedom: The Story of American Education, 1942—

Whenever someone speaks with prejudice against a group—Catholics, Jews, Italians, Negroes—someone else usually comes up with a classic line of defense: “Look at Einstein!” “Look at Carver!” “Look at Toscanini!” So of course, Catholics (or Jews, or Italians, or Negroes) must be all right.

They mean well, these defenders. But their approach is wrong. It is even bad. What a minority group wants is not the right to have geniuses among them but the right to have fools and scoundrels without being condemned as a group.

Les Coleman's Doors

Above An ominous drawing by British artist/writer Les Coleman, titled Shadow (c2007). Copyright © Les Coleman, all rights reserved.

Film Review  |  The Architecture of Doom a film by Peter Cohen, 1991. VHS video. 119 minutes. Color. Available from First Run / Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn NY 11201.

There are countless historical videos on Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the circumstances of the death camps, but this is undoubtedly one of the best. From its beginning moments, which consist of a drawn-out, completely mute flight over a tranquil German village, this film demands our attention, then holds us firmly by the throat for a full two hours. Its power in part is undoubtedly due to the night-marish subject matter (I couldn't sleep after watching it). Yet, few accounts of World War II Germany are as memorable, which I think is mostly attributable to the images used (photographs, revealing documents, artworks, and rare and often shocking film footage, especially that made by the Nazis), the artfully insistent pace of the editing, and the persuasive clarity of the narration. It is not a film that is summarized easily, but its underlying premise is that Hitler (who had initially wanted to be an artist, then an architect) was not entirely irrational, but rather that the things he did, while outrageous and revolting, were seemingly logical methods by which he could "art direct" or "design" society. A devotee of Darwinian natural selection, he believed that the natural process by which the weak (or unfit) are self-exterminating was being subverted by permissive social practices, which he also perceived as analogous to the threat of contagious diseases. Like many of his contemporaries, he was a great admirer of the composer Richard Wagner, especially his elaborate operas, which combined different arts (music , theatre, literature and visual art) into a harmonious single event, for which Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk (German for "total work of art"). Surprisingly, this film does not mention that famous word, although it was widely and commonly used by turn-of-the-century architects and designers, among them Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, and Frank Lloyd Wright (who called it "organic form"). In those days, when the finest architects were asked to design a building, they were likely to refuse to make only the rudiementary shape or shell. Instead, they tended to design the entire building (much as William Morris did with (at least) the interior of his own residence, Red House), to make it consistent by also designing the furniture, the fittings, the dinnerware, and, in some cases, even the ideal clothes to be worn by the building's residents. This was taken one step further in 1899 when Josef Maria Olbrich was invited to design (as a deliberate Gesamtkunstwerk) the setting and most of the houses for an artists' colony in Darmstadt, Germany. This film does not mention that colony, but it does say that, as Chancellor, Hitler began to imagine himself as the set designer, director and leading actor (or perhaps what designers now commonly call the "corporate designer") of a colossal Wagnerian opera called the Third Reich, for which he really did design certain uniforms, flags, standards and buildings. It also claims that, in addition to Hitler, at least half of his leading officials had direct and significant links to the arts. Those artistic involvements were not incidental, the film argues, because the Third Reich was in certain ways an aesthetic movement—a perversely misguided attempt to improve the world for the German Volk, and to reunite art with everyday life.—RB more>>>

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).