Saturday, 1 August 1936

The telephone is ringing softly in Henri de Baillet-Latour’s hotel suite. ‘It’s 7.30 a.m., Your Excellency,’ the porter says. ‘Bon,’ the count replies. ‘I’m already awake.’ The employees at the Hotel Adlon where Baillet-Latour is residing treat their guest with irreproachable deference. He is something like a head of state, although he doesn’t lead a nation, preside over a republic or rule a monarchy. Henri de Baillet-Latour is the president of the International Olympic Committee, the IOC. Today, at precisely 5.14 p.m., the Olympic flag will be raised at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, and the 60-year-old Belgian will assume a kind of sovereignty over Berlin’s sporting venues for the next sixteen days.

In the meantime, Baillet-Latour has a busy schedule. He has to attend a religious service with his colleagues from the Olympic Committee, review a Wehrmacht guard of honour and place a wreath at Berlin’s Memorial to the Fallen in the Great War. After the military ceremony, Hermann Göring – in his capacity as the state premier of Prussia – will officially welcome the IOC members.

It’s now 8 a.m., and the sound of marches, wake-up calls and the song ‘Freut euch des Lebens’ (Rejoice in Life) are sounding on Pariser Platz in front of the hotel. The ‘Great Wakening’, as this ritual is known, is one of many ways the National Socialists are seeking to honour the IOC. As Henri de Baillet-Latour stands at the window of his suite, watching the action, he no doubt feels like a head of state, with the Adlon as his seat of government. The IOC has taken up quarters in one of Berlin’s best neighbourhoods. The hotel is located directly across from the French embassy; on the left is the Brandenburg Gate, and directly adjacent to Berlin’s most famous landmark is Palais Blücher, property of the United States of America. That spacious building is normally the home of the American embassy, but it is still being rebuilt after a fire in 1931. To the right of the Adlon on Pariser Platz is Berlin’s venerable Academy of Fine Arts, while next to it on Wilhelmstrasse is Palais Strousberg, which contains the British embassy.

Baillet-Latour has now finished breakfast and is preparing to leave the hotel. To celebrate this special day, the count has dressed formally in grey trousers, a dark cutaway jacket, gaiters, a top hat and a magnificent chain of office. When Joseph Goebbels sees him, the German propaganda minister can only shake his head, later noting in his diary: ‘The Olympians look like the directors of a flea circus.’¹

Pauline Strauss is someone who speaks her mind. The wife of the famous composer Richard Strauss is not chary about telling total strangers precisely what she thinks of them. Even friends and acquaintances aren’t exempt from her legendary tactlessness. ‘Mrs Strauss, who contrary to her usual self had been quite charming over tea, now had another of her semi-hysterical fits of impoliteness,’ Count Harry Kessler would later recall of their encounter in a Berlin gourmet restaurant. The tables are covered with expensive china, luxurious silver cutlery and hand-ground glasses. Liveried waiters move about almost noiselessly, and the diners are all conversing in hushed tones. Everyone except Pauline Strauss, that is. As Kessler relates an apparently not very interesting anecdote about a famous Parisian restaurateur, Mrs Strauss loudly interjects: ‘He’ll be long dead by the time you finish this story! How can someone tell something so bland so slowly! You should feast your eyes on that fattened pig over there instead.’ The diners look around in bewilderment. ‘The fat pig, that overweight officer over there.’ Mrs Strauss points at a rather corpulent lieutenant sitting at the next table. ‘What’s the problem? I’m just flirting with that pig,’ says Mrs Strauss, continuing to stare before adding triumphantly, ‘You see, the fattened pig is looking at me as though he’s in love. I think he’ll come over and sit with us.’ The rest of the group is mortified. The writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal stares down at his plate, at a loss for words, while Richard Strauss turns first white, then red. But Strauss doesn’t comment on his wife’s scandalous behaviour, no doubt in order to avoid exacerbating the situation. It is rumoured that once, when he had chastised her for making a similar scene, she had said loudly enough for everyone present to hear: ‘One more word from you, Richard, and I’ll take to Friedrichstrasse and go off with the first man who crosses my path.’²

It’s no wonder that Pauline Strauss is the nightmare of all hotel porters, waiters and servant girls. The Strausses, accompanied by their housekeeper Anna, arrived in the Hotel Bristol yesterday. The Bristol is only a stone’s throw away from the Adlon on Berlin’s splendid boulevard Unter den Linden. As goes without saying, the hotel offers all the most modern conveniences. The spacious rooms and suites are appointed with exquisite furniture, and all have their own bath. Moreover, the hotel’s public rooms are particularly splendid. The library, for instance, is done out in the Gothic style, while the tea salon is full of heavy English leather furniture.

Richard Strauss has had little opportunity to enjoy the amenities of his hotel. Yesterday he was busy with rehearsals, this afternoon he has the world premiere of a new composition, and tomorrow morning he’ll leave Berlin and return to Bavaria. As one of the most important contemporary composers, Richard Strauss is always a busy man. The previous March he went on a concert tour of Italy and France. In April he conducted orchestras in Paris and Cologne, and in June in Zurich and once again in Cologne. In between performances, the 72-year-old Strauss somehow finds the time to compose new works. The piece that he’ll debut in a few hours is called ‘Olympic Hymn’ and was commissioned by the IOC for the opening ceremony today. Strauss has boasted about being capable to put anything to music. ‘If you want to be a true musician, you have to be able to set a restaurant menu to music,’ he once mockingly remarked. For Strauss, writing music is a matter of hard work and discipline. With stoic calm, he sits at his desk creating work after work. Years later Theodor W. Adorno will disparagingly call him a ‘composing machine’. Strauss, Adorno will write, betrayed modernism and sold out to a mass audience, becoming a master of superficiality who only composed what he could sell for hard currency.

The ‘Olympic Hymn’ for choir and large symphony orchestra definitely falls into that category. Strauss couldn’t care less about sport. Skiing, he once opined, is an activity for rural postmen in Norway. In February 1933, upon learning that the town where he lived in Bavaria, Garmisch, was planning a special levy to finance the Winter Olympics, Strauss protested vehemently. In a letter to the district council, he wrote: ‘On the assumption that it will go to covering the costs of this sports foolishness and total unnecessary Olympics propaganda, I object to this new tax on citizens. Since I don’t use any sporting facilities – bobsleigh runs, ski jumps and the like – and can do without a triumphal arch at the train station, I ask to be freed from this tax, which should be passed on to all those who have an interest in the Olympic Games and similar sorts of swindles. My wallet has been burdened enough by government taxes to support layabouts in the name of so-called social security and all the door-to-door beggars rampant in Garmisch.’³

Such objections didn’t deter Strauss from demanding 10,000 reichsmarks for composing a hymn to ‘sports foolishness’. That fee, however, was well beyond the Olympic Committee’s budget, and in the end, after some negotiations, Strauss agreed to forgo his honorarium. So it’s hardly surprising that he was less than enthusiastic about the job. ‘I’m keeping the Christmas boredom at bay by composing an Olympic hymn for the proletarians,’ Strauss wrote to the writer Stefan Zweig in December 1934. ‘I am a dedicated enemy of sport. I despise it. It’s true: the devil makes work for idle hands.’⁴

The lyrics were chosen in a public competition, won by the unemployed actor and occasional poet Robert Lubahn. Some of the lines were changed after Goebbels complained that Lubahn’s poem didn’t reflect the spirit of the Third Reich. ‘Peace shall be the battle cry’, for instance, became ‘Honour shall be the battle cry’. ‘The rule of law is the highest thing’ was altered to ‘Loyalty to one’s oath is the highest thing’. However much he may have disliked the changes, Lubahn had to accept them, and the IOC, as the body that had commissioned the hymn, voiced no objections. Richard Strauss presumably didn’t care one way or the other.

In December 1934, immediately after finishing the four-minute composition, Strauss contacted Hans Heinrich Lammers, the director of the Reich Chancellery, and asked if he could play the piece for Hitler. ‘As the Führer and the patron of the Olympic Games, it’s especially important that he likes it,’⁵ Strauss wrote. After a bit of back and forth – Hitler was less eager for a meeting than the composer – a date was set for late March 1935. After the private performance in Hitler’s Munich flat, Strauss presented ‘his Führer’ with an autographed copy of the sheet music, which the dictator gratefully accepted.

There were concrete, practical reasons why Strauss cosied up to the regime. His new opera, The Silent Woman, was set to premiere in Dresden in June 1935. Goebbels opposed this work because the libretto was written by the Jewish author Zweig, a persona non grata in the Third Reich, but Hitler gave special permission for the opera to be performed. The ‘Olympic Hymn’ was Strauss’ way of saying thank you. Nonetheless, a short time later, the world-famous composer got himself into trouble after the Gestapo intercepted a letter in which he made fun of his position as the president of the Reich Music Chamber. In mid-July 1935, Strauss was forced to step down, and The Silent Women was only performed three times. The incident would have spelled the end for a lesser-known artist. But Strauss is too high profile for the Nazis to do without him. Now, one year later, in the summer of 1936, the whole affair has been forgotten, and Strauss is being allowed to direct the first ever public performance of the ‘Olympic Hymn’. As the composer and his wife take breakfast in the Hotel Bristol’s terrace salon, and Pauline bullies the staff as usual, Strauss imagines what it will be like to conduct in front of more than 100,000 proletarians this afternoon.

*

‘Where exactly are we?’ Max von Hoyos asks his companion Hannes Trautloft. Max has just woken up and has no idea how long he’s slept. He yawns, rubs his eyes and stretches out his arms. ‘Still on the River Elbe,’ Hannes answers. Max doesn’t seem particularly surprised. ‘I’m starving!’⁶ he exclaims, swinging himself out of his bunk. The two young men are sharing a berth aboard the steamship Usaramo on its way from Hamburg to Spain. They and more than eighty others are part of a group called the Travel Club Union. This exclusively male party behaves somewhat oddly, keeping its distance from the other passengers. When asked about the purpose of their journey, they say nothing. They don’t seem stylish enough to be affluent tourists on a cruise. They could almost be mistaken for soldiers, if they weren’t wearing civilian clothing. They have a conspicuous amount of luggage. What do all the large crates loaded onto the ship in Hamburg contain? Again, no answers are forthcoming. One thing is for sure: something isn’t right about the Travel Club Union.

*

At noon, the Hitler Youth holds a rally in Berlin’s Lustgarten. Some 29,000 boys and girls stand at attention. The roof of the City Palace affords a good view of the broad stretch of land between the Old Museum, Berlin Cathedral and the palace itself. It’s impossible to make out individuals. All you can see is a mass of people. Like so many things these days, the rally is a powerful demonstration aimed at foreign visitors. Adolf Hitler can rely on Germany’s youth – that’s the message. It can also be understood as a warning.

The various items on today’s agenda interlock like a welloiled mechanism. The ceremony welcoming the members of the IOC ends on time, and the guests of honour only need to walk a few metres from the domed hall of the Old Museum to get to the Lustgarten. A speaker’s podium has been installed on the steps outside the building. One after another, Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, Reich Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, Education Minister Bernhard Rust and Joseph Goebbels address the Hitler Youth. ‘An imposing spectacle,’ the propaganda minister records in his diary. ‘How can you say something original about it? Then the Olympic flame arrives. A moving moment. It’s raining slightly.’⁷

The journey of the Olympic torch, of which the Lustgarten is the penultimate stop, is not the Ancient Greek tradition it is often taken to be. It’s the brainchild of a sports official from the southern German city of Würzburg. The 52-year-old secretary general of the Olympic Organising Committee, Carl Diem, is one of the central figures behind the Berlin Games. In his inventive eyes, the 3,000-kilometre-long trip the torch has made from Athens to Delphi, Thessaloníki, Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Dresden and Berlin connects antiquity with the present day. It doesn’t matter that there were no torch processions at the original Olympic Games. Diem is only interested in depicting the Berlin event as a particularly solemn occasion. At the Propaganda Ministry, which has been responsible for organising the Hitler Youth rally, Goebbels was immediately enthusiastic about the idea. At Goebbels’ behest, the athlete carrying the torch runs through the ranks of the Hitler Youth up to the Old Museum, where he lights an altar of fire. Then the young man continues to the City Palace and ignites a second flame at what is called the ‘Banner Altar of Nations’.

A fleet of limousines is now ready to chauffeur the IOC representatives and other guests of honour to the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. There, Henri de Baillet-Latour thanks Hitler for Germany’s hospitality. The dictator keeps his reply short, stressing the ability of the Olympic Games to bring various peoples together. Under 2 p.m., the itinerary for the day simply reads: ‘Snack’.

*

Between 3.00 and 3.07 p.m., Hitler’s guests leave the Chancellery and head to the Olympic Stadium. The lines of limousines turn from Wilhelmstrasse onto the ‘Via Trumphalis’. That’s what the organisers of the Games call the 11-kilometre-long, extremely wide thoroughfare from the Lustgarten in the east of the city to the Olympic Stadium in the west. The original Via Triumphalis in Rome was where victorious generals could ceremoniously re-enter the city. In Berlin, Hitler glides along it in an open Mercedes on his way to the Games, which will take place in an arena modelled on a Roman amphitheatre. Bread and circuses.

The entire route is lined with gigantic swastikas and Olympic flags and is guarded by 40,000 SA men. Behind the paramilitaries are hundreds of thousands of curious onlookers hoping to get a glimpse of the event planned on the itinerary for 3.18 p.m.: ‘Führer departs for the Olympic Stadium’.

Somewhere in the crowd is a 35-year-old American named Thomas Clayton Wolfe. Tom, as friends call him, is from Asheville, North Carolina and has only just arrived in Berlin. About 2 metres tall and weighing 120 kilograms, he is hard to overlook. He might be taken for a shot-putter. But Wolfe is a writer, and a fairly famous one at that, whose first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, appeared in German translation in 1932. The book was a major success for his publisher Ernst Rowohlt. The critics were enthusiastic about the young author from the New World, and within the space of a few years the book sold 10,000 copies.

Wolfe first travelled to Germany in late 1926, spending two weeks in Stuttgart and Munich. Since then, he’s returned nearly every year. In 1935 he visited Berlin for the first time, confiding to his notebooks: ‘I had an experience that cannot happen to me often now. It was my experience again to enter for the first time one of the great capital cities of the world. This time the city was – Berlin.’ The following weeks in the capital of the Third Reich were ones of total intoxication: ‘A wild, fantastic, incredible whirl of parties, teas, dinners, all-night drinking bouts, newspaper interviews, radio proposals, photographers, etc. …’⁸ With Wolfe and Berlin it was love at first sight. The writer initially seemed to care little that Berlin was the epicentre of a brutal dictatorship that persecuted, imprisoned and murdered its political enemies. Although his views would later change, the American author praised the Germans as the ‘cleanest, kindest, warmest-hearted, and most honourable people I’ve met in Europe’⁹.

Wolfe left Berlin in mid-June 1935, determined to return as soon as possible. Now he’s back. Rowohlt has just published the German translation of his novel Of Time and the River, and publicity needs to be done. The fact that the Olympic Games are taking place in Berlin was another good reason for the American author and sports fan to make the boat trip across the Atlantic.

As he did the year before, Tom takes a room in the Hotel am Zoo. It’s not considered one of Berlin’s best addresses, but it does have its advantages. Wolfe prefers its easy-going comfort to the fussiness of the Adlon, the Bristol or the Eden. He especially likes the fact that Hotel am Zoo is on Kurfürstendamm. What is there to do at the Brandenburg Gate? Kurfürstendamm is where the real Berlin is. Tom always feels that it’s a magical moment when he leaves his hotel, looks left and sees the golden tower clock of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Every time he’s seized by Berlin’s special magic, and he realises that he’s fallen under the city’s spell. Kurfürstendamm is crammed with cafés, restaurants and bars, and for Tom, the boulevard is one great coffee house: ‘The crowds sauntered underneath the trees on the Kurfürstendamm, the terraces of the cafés were jammed with people, and always, through the golden sparkle of the days, there was a sound of music in the air.’¹⁰ Wolfe wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in Berlin.

Right now, though, he’s standing like many others along the Via Triumphalis, waiting. ‘The Leader came by slowly in a shining car,’ Wolfe will remember, ‘a little dark man with a comicopera moustache, erect and standing, moveless and unsmiling, with his hand upraised, palm outward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.’¹¹

*

At precisely 1 p.m. the gates of the Olympic Stadium open. The roughly 100,000 spectators from all over the world have been instructed to get to their seats by 3.30. A 246-metre-long Zeppelin, the Hindenburg, one of the biggest airships ever built, is circling above the stadium. Down below, inside the arena, the Olympic Symphony Orchestra is entertaining people with a concert. Along with Franz Lizst’s magnificent Les Préludes, the programme features the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger – there’s no avoiding Hitler’s favourite composer in the Third Reich. The great clock on the tower of the stadium’s Marathon Gate reads 3.53. Trumpets and trombones positioned high up in the arena suddenly break out into a fanfare. Seven minutes later, at exactly 4 p.m., Adolf Hitler enters the stadium and descends the Marathon Gate’s massive steps. He is accompanied by members of the International and German National Olympic Committees. The fanfares die down, and the orchestra strikes up Wagner’s ‘Homage March’. The event’s organisers grit their teeth and put up with this piece of music, one of Wagner’s most vapid, written in honour of the Bavarian king Ludwig II. The title of the piece is more important than the music. The point is to show reverence for Hitler, who is striding through the arena to his box seat like a Roman emperor. The Führer has to pause briefly when Carl Diem’s five-year-old daughter steps in front of him, proffering a bouquet of flowers. ‘Heil, my Führer,’ the girl is reported to have said. Both her father and Hitler himself act pleasantly surprised, as if they were caught off guard by this hardly spontaneous little interruption.

Once Hitler has reached his box seat, the orchestra begins to play the ‘double anthem’ introduced by the Nazis, consisting of the first verses of both the German national anthem and the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, the hymn to a street brawler who was considered one of the Nazi movement’s first martyrs. The flags of the nations competing at the Olympics are raised, and the Olympic bell rings out from across the Maifeld, the large sports field next to the stadium. With that, the Olympic nations march into the stadium, led by Greece and concluding with Germany. The British athletes are given a rather cool reception – ‘very embarrassing’, Goebbels will note in his diary – but the French, who extend their right arms in salute, are greeted with veritable ovations. French representatives will later claim that their athletes were performing the Olympic salute, and not the Nazi greeting, but the two are scarcely distinguishable. The people in the stadium, at any rate, think the French are executing a Hitlergruss.

Henri de Baillet-Latour has taken his seat to Hitler’s right. On the Führer’s left is an older gentleman whom Goebbels would probably consider a typical flea-circus director: Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Organising Committee. Together with the secretary general Diem, the 75-year-old lawyer and sports official is the driving force behind the eleventh Olympic Games. Without Lewald and Diem, there would be no event in Berlin. His Excellency, as Lewald is respectfully referred to, is allowing himself to be used by the Nazis. Lewald is what the anti-Semites call a ‘half Jew’. In these Olympic Games, he serves as a token, a symbolic figure intended to demonstrate to the global public that the regime is not meddling with the sporting competition. In truth, Lewald’s days are numbered. But before he resigns his post, as he has already agreed to do under duress, His Excellency will be allowed to fulfil his duties.

Shortly after 5 p.m. Lewald steps up to the microphone to begin a speech that lasts fifteen minutes. He has chosen his opening words with great care. He could have started with ‘My dear Reich Chancellor’, which would have been in line with protocol. He could have welcomed Henri de Baillet-Latour and the other major Olympic officials and greeted the ambassadors in attendance. Such an opening would have conformed to diplomatic niceties. But Lewald has decided to go for a briefer salutation. ‘My Führer’ is all he says.

Hitler speaks next. Baillet-Latour has instructed him carefully on how to inaugurate the event. According to Olympic protocol, the head of state of the host nation is to say: ‘I declare open the Games in Berlin to celebrate the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era.’ The Führer is said to have replied: ‘Count, I will try to learn this sentence by heart.’¹² But Hitler’s Austrian grammar gets in the way. What he says is ‘I declare the Games in Berlin to celebrate the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era as being opened.’ These are the only words he will publicly utter during the event.

The Olympic flag is raised, artillery guns fire a salute and some 20,000 white doves are released into the heavens above Berlin. Richard Strauss is sitting on a chair next to the orchestra, his legs crossed, looking bored. Someone whispers in his ear, telling him the time has come. At 5.16 p.m., Strauss gets up, climbs onto his conductor’s platform and signals to the brass players up on the Marathon Gate. A brief fanfare echoes through the arena before the entire orchestra joins in. The Olympic Symphony Orchestra consists of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Orchestra. The choir has been put together from various ensembles and numbers 3,000 male and female singers. Joseph Goebbels is a great admirer of Strauss’ ‘Olympic Hymn’. ‘It is truly wonderful,’ he gushed after one of the rehearsals. ‘That fellow really can compose.’¹³ Hitler, too, is satisfied with Strauss, telling one of his assistants to summon the composer to be congratulated after the ceremony. ‘Handshake with Hitler,’¹⁴ Pauline Strauss will note in her diary.

Spectators get no respite. As Strauss is still climbing down from his platform, the torch bearer charged with taking the Olympic flame the final kilometres from the Lustgarten to the stadium arrives through the Eastern Gate, runs across the oval track to the Marathon Gate and ignites a giant bowl of fire. Then Spyridon Louis, the gold medallist in the marathon at the first modern-day Games in Athens in 1896, presents Hitler with a symbolic olive branch from Olympia in Greece. At the end of the ceremony, the athletes – represented by the German weightlifter Rudolf Ismayr – take the Olympic oath. After reciting the vow, he waves a swastika flag instead of the Olympic one. Baillet-Latour is appalled at this violation of protocol. But what can he do?

The opening ceremony is almost over. Before Hitler leaves the stadium at 6.16 p.m., the musicians perform the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah – the final item on the programme. As the choir sings ‘And he shall reign for ever and ever, king of kings and lord of lords for ever, hallelujah, hallelujah’, the Polish ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski, discreetly taps Baillet-Latour on the shoulder. ‘We have to be on our guard against a people with such a talent for organisation,’ Lipski whispers in the count’s ear. ‘They could mobilise their entire nation just as smoothly for war.’¹⁵

*

Austria’s ambassador to Germany, Stephan Tauschitz, also files an unsettling report about the Olympic opening ceremony to the state secretary for foreign affairs in Vienna, writing: ‘A former Austrian officer residing in Berlin, who came to be seated amidst spectators from Austria in the Olympic Stadium, told me that in Germany he had rarely seen people as fanatical as these Austrians. The calls of “Heil Hitler!” and “Sieg heil!” from the Austrians, particularly the female ones, were a series of hoarse cries that could not have been any more fervent … An elderly visitor from Vienna who was seated not far from our source said that he had been unable to see Hitler because when the Führer entered the stadium his eyes were filled with tears.’¹⁶