Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39

Florian Illies, Simon Pare (trans.), Profile Books, June 2023, 336 pages, £20

KEN BELL says Weimar-era Bohemians failed to respond to the Nazi threat

On one level, Florian Illies’ Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War comes over as yet another lockdown volume produced from the writer’s own resources when trapped in his home. Thus, it draws exclusively on previously published sources, presumably pulled from Illies’ shelves at home, with whatever could be found on the internet added for good measure. I have reviewed quite a few such works over the past year, and I suspect that lockdown works have become almost a niche in their own right. That said, this is a work that transcends its lockdown limitations and presents the reader with a lyrical account of bohemian, intellectual life in the decade that ended with the outbreak of war in 1939.

Love in a Time of Hate is not divided into chapters; instead, the whole work is presented in three sections named Before, 1933 and finally After. Josephine Baker features prominently in the first section as a warning sign of what was to come. As a dancer in the 1920s, this Black-American woman was both famous and popular in Germany, yet when she returned in 1929, the press was outraged when she danced with a White German girl. The Volkischer Beobachter, never one to be outdone in the crude attack stakes, described her as a “half-ape”, and SA men then set off stink bombs at one of her performances. By then, the Jewish producers of the show had come under attack, so Miss Baker cancelled the tour and fled back to Paris in the early summer of 1929.

Others, perhaps the majority, were far more sanguine. Christopher Isherwood travelled to Berlin in his Cambridge tie because he knew that the city “meant boys” whose seductive company he longed for. Ruth Landshoff continued to be the good time that was had by all, and introduced Charlie Chaplin to her favours. Ruth loved swinging both ways and had enjoyed a dalliance with Marlene Dietrich, so spoke with authority when she advised one of her casual lovers: “Go for Dietrich. She has legs you’ll want to run your fingers along all day.”

Looking at this cast of characters, the reader is amazed at just how indifferent they seemed to be to the political events that swirled around them. The hedonism on display in a country where the bulk of the population were struggling to survive, against a backdrop of a state that to many people was only semi-legitimate, was not calculated to make them very popular with the average man in the street or his wife. Unfortunately, the role of the bohemian intellectuals in the rise of the Nazis is not a theme Illies discusses.

Of course, 1933 marked the start of the intellectual exodus from Germany, with George Grosz leading the stampede, leaving for the States even before Hitler came to power on the 30^th of January. His satirical drawings – “the fat bellies, the top hats, the naked dancers, the madness and the poverty” – depicted Weimar with searing acuity. As Illies notes, “Someone who kept such a close eye on the age is able to sense when it is over.”

Second only to Grosz in the Nazi hate list was probably Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, who drove wildly for the Swiss border on the 29^th of January and settled into a comfortable exile in his palatial home. By May of that year, his book had been banned in Germany and all copies in private hands had to be handed in to the authorities. Soon after, Remarque moved to the USA where he spent most of his remaining life bedding film stars and barmaids. The Nazis took vicious revenge in 1943 by beheading his sister.

The exodus that began with Grosz and Remarque continued throughout the 1930s, but it is interesting that very few of these exiles ever got involved in anti-Nazi activities. Some did, such as Marlene Dietrich, but she was quite the exception rather than the rule. Most, such as Remarque, just seem to have settled down into a comfortable exile and lived the same hedonistic lifestyle that they had enjoyed in 1920s Germany. Illies should have made that point. Actually, most of the 1920s bohemians would have made a pretty poor example of a resistance movement, but it says a lot about them, that so few even tried to create one.

Of course, the vast majority of writers, dancers and film makers made their peace with the Nazis, and continued to live and work in Germany. Leni Riefenstahl is the one Illies mentions, which may give the impression that she was exceptional; actually, she was the norm, since most people desire a quiet life and go along with whatever governments want.

Florian Illies has produced a mellifluous account of the final days of post-Great War German bohemianism, without fully analysing just what role hedonistic bohemianism may have played in helping to create the terrible reaction. That seems a pity, in what is otherwise a fine work about a doomed world.