The Shadow of Things: A Berlin Diary
Journalist Bella Fromm’s Berlin diary from 1930s Germany is a cry from the past to do something NOW to stop fascism
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“Went to Berchtesgaden yesterday. The SA had a monster parade. The word ‘monster’ is fitting, I think. The brown monster rolled along the road from Reichenhall to Berchtesgaden. The pounding of their boots haunted my mind all night long. Will there be anybody who can stop the stamping of their feet all over Germany? When I was small, I loved parades. I hate them now. The feet pound, pound, pound, and under their thunderous, insensitive impact lies my beautiful country.”—Bella Fromm, July 13, 1932
I have never buried my head in a book — literally — but on page 55 of Blood & Banquets I collapsed.
I felt the smooth coolness of the pages, written a century ago — warning words, blinking lights, cutting through denial and propaganda and getting to the cold truth.
It can happen here. It is happening here.
Will we be the people who stop it or will future historians see us as enablers of monsters — those of us who resisted lost in the mists of time.
Bella Fromm was a Jewish political columnist in Berlin during the rise of Hitler. She knew these monsters, and published Blood & Banquets in 1943, after escaping to New York. She was warned to leave Berlin for years, but stayed until 1938. She was well-liked and well-connected and was able to save many lives. At one point, she helped 37 people get out of Buchenwald.
Finding her Berlin social diary referenced in a book I’m reading, The Gravediggers, was like being handed a gift from the past to help guide me in this moment.
Fromm’s wit and clarity as she documents her personal reflections of the diplomats, political leaders, wives and mistresses she befriended is a reminder that there is no arc of history, as Timothy Snyder has taught us. It doesn’t bend one way or the other. It’s what people do or don’t do.
In her news print columns, she wrote of events, and who’s who, and where and when. In her personal diary, she wrote of monsters, and of the people who did not stop them. She called it her ‘double pen.’
“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary
It’s been a minute since I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting. I burned through 300 pages and three highlighters.
I cried when she was trapped and had to salute Hitler. She had defied him and his gangsters every step, but there was one moment she couldn’t escape, and I could feel decades evaporating between us — I was a witness in that room in that moment, and it was devastating.
She had already sent her daughter to America and knew it was time for her to leave.
She had inherited her family’s wine fortune, and lost nearly everything in 1923, during the inflation that devastated Weimar Germany. She parlayed her connections into becoming a journalist and worked her way up from the society pages to the political pages.
When the Nazis came to power, her newspaper group was crushed, denying her the ability to work, so she went back into the wine business, and then was banned from that business due to her non-Aryan status. Once she could no longer earn a living, she knew she had to get out. She stayed as long as she could to help as many people as she could.
As you read her diary, you will find the banality of evil sewn into its DNA. You will read about the escalation of racism, and how people became comfortable disparaging Jewish people — people she had known her entire life and who never had a bad word to say about anybody until the ‘Austrian psychopath’ appeared on the scene.
She called Goebbels ‘a raging dwarf.’ She knew Hess, and Goering, Heydrich, and Himmler, she knew Leni Riefenstahl — a social climber who put her name on other people’s work. She knew the wives of high-ranking party members, including the one who defied her husband and helped friends escape the carnage.
And all along the way, she watched people fall in line, as a mad cruelty descended over Germany, where her ancestors had lived for 500 years.
“The language has been almost the hardest to give up, the mother tongue that expressed thoughts, the language in which I wrote. Then the Nazis started to violate that language. They did with it what they have done with culture, the rights of man, the privileges of human beings. They used words in a strange, brutal fashion. They used slogans that were made of German words, slogans that had no place in the mind of anyone who was accustomed to the words of Goethe and Heine… new meanings based on injustice, lack of reason, violence and force.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets
I recall the day I understood what so distressed me about the way Trump used words. I have Kim Campbell to thank for that. The former Prime Minister of Canada (and Bette Dangerous charter member) explained in 2016 how Trump spoke in the vocabulary of misogyny. Like the Nazis, Trump violates language.
“I saw, long before they came to pass, the shadow of things that were to darken the civilized world.”—Bella Fromm
As a columnist in the Los Angeles Times, in 1996, I referred to Trump as a has-been. As an investigative producer for Fox 11 news, I discovered in 2006 that Trump was a fake rich guy, who profited off of ponzi schemes, stealing from the poor until lawsuits forced out of court settlements.
Too often, women reporters who live in the midst of politics and document what they see, are written out of history, overshadowed by their male peers. Bette Dangerous has been writing them back into history, while also celebrating the work of my contemporary colleagues.
What follows are excerpts from my highlighted sections of Blood & Banquets, interspersed with commentary. I have been reading history books on Nazi Germany since I was ten years old, relatives sent me books from Germany upon my request.
Cruelty must be stopped by humans, we can’t leave it up to the stars.
“The same skies were overhead, the same sun and stars were in the sky, the same winds blew, but they all seemed touched with an inhuman, impersonal coldness, as though they had nothing in common with what went under them.”—Bella Fromm
Born in Nuremberg in 1890, Bella Fromm had kept a diary since she was ten years old. In 1917, she wrote to her childhood friend ‘Rolf’ — later he would become a Nazi party member who assisted her from the inside — that she “saw little hope for the future of civilization… as to the Jews, I dread an era of medieval darkness.”
She often dreamed the future, as do I. Perhaps it’s a writer’s fate.
A Heavy Fog
In 1918, she wrote how a “heavy fog spread over the country. Despair was written in the faces of people.”
On March 20, 1920, she wrote about growing anti-Semitism and “how armed clashes by ‘fighters legions’ with patriotic and chauvinistic names have sprung into being.”
Two years later, in 1922, she said her divorce lawyer predicted “in ten years, the anti-Semites would rule Germany.”
May 20, 1923—Kitzingen: “A strange wind blows from Munich and Nuremberg. National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei is stirring up plenty of trouble in Munich. It is lead by Adolf Hitler. They say he has almost hypnotic power.”
February 28, 1925: “The first president of the German republic is dead… but our Germany remains, and one wonders which direction our country will turn—toward democracy or reaction? Either is possible.”
In 1928, she enters journalism and is told her writing is too flippant.
This is when she adopts the ‘double pen.’
She became successful quickly, employs two secretaries, and her daughter, Gonny, becomes her photographer.
She describes what fun she had in the early months, before the “Austrian psychopath came too close.”
As her entries continue, she documents the frequency she now hears people referencing complaints about Jews. She reminds her acquaintances that she is Jewish, and they fumble for excuses.
In 1929, she documents how a man named Alfred Hugenberg bought and built a publishing house into a “tremendous organ of Nazi propaganda, through newspapers, books, magazines, and films.”
By 1930, Hitler’s National Socialist Workers party gained 107 seats in the Reichstag election.
As I read this, I thought how critical it is to get every single MAGA QAnon Trump appointee out of government and off of our courts.
September 19, 1930: “The Nazi party members arrived at the first session of the newly elected Reichstag wearing brown shirts and shouting ‘Germany awake! Judea perish!’”
It was also in 1930 when she began noticing women wearing swastika pendants made in rubies and diamonds.
At a fashion show in Paris, a friend commented on the similarity between the National Socialists and the Communists. “Their arguments are so alike that you have to wait until the end to see whether the raised hand is open or clenched.”
A Touch of Panic
At the end of 1930, conservative media is floating the idea of Hitler’s inclusion in government, which Fromm calls “the symptom of some very grave disease.”
There’s a touch of panic in the air as the possibility becomes more real.
February 10, 1931: “Attended Reichstag session… we wanted to hear Doctor Joseph Goebbels. He is a Nazi party deputy, and very greedy for power… he hobbled up to the speaker’s desk… the way he uses the language, a kind of combination of Mephisto and Savonarola, sinister and frantic… fanatically obsessed… a raging dwarf.”
By 1932, Hitler has secured the industrialists, and is financed by Fritz Thyssen, who had inherited his father’s coal, iron, and steel business. 1932 is also the year, German president Paul von Hindenberg orders the disbanding of private armies by emergency decree only to lift the ban a few months later.
January 29, 1932: “People from the upper crust are turning to Hitler.”
Fromm floats between presidents and diplomats, foreign correspondents and charity balls, as the “brown plague is becoming more contagious.”
An English diplomat questions why Hitler — the agitator — was naturalized rather than kicked out of the country along with his whole mob.
The radical propaganda escalates to angry mobs, painting swastikas and racial slurs in the streets, and when caught, they blame the communists.
When she tells her publisher her fears about the brown shirt parade she witnessed, he tells her she’s “beginning to hear voices. You should do something about your nerves.”
Allow me to pause to send a resounding “fuck you” to every editor who downplayed the instincts of women reporters.
August 30, 1932: “The inevitable has happened! Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s intimate associate, has been appointed president of the Reichstag.”
August 30, 1932: “The brown shirts strutted around like peacocks, happily unaware of their absurdity… a low murmur filled the lobby and, of a sudden, ‘Manitu,’ their Fuehrer, appeared. His face bearing a seriously warlike expression. Heil boomed.”
She recognized him immediately as an evil shaman that “bodes nothing good for decent people.”
Throughout her diary, she is told things in confidence and proves herself trustworthy, a requirement for columnists.
December 14, 1932: “Party of Ernst Lubitsch, a brilliant, witty motion picture man… I asked whey he’s (leaving). ‘I’m going to the United States,’ he said. ‘Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.’”
Radical Propaganda
It’s worth noting that the Nazis were scaring the rich by warning of a ‘Red Tide.’
Throughout the diary, we learn that party members were continually erasing their genealogy, as Jewish ancestors often appeared. We also learn that youth indoctrination was occurring en masse.
1933
Hitler becomes chancellor, the Reichstag fire occurs, Goebbels becomes the minister of propaganda and public enlightenment, ‘boycott-Jew day’ organized all over Germany, and Goebbels orders the burning of 20,000 books to “cleanse German literature of alien element.” Hitler declares party and state as one unit.
As you can see by the above, when I write about history haunting the present, I’m not trying to be cute. History is haunting our present moment.
January 19, 1933: “It’s maddening to watch this mass blindness.”
She writes how Hitler “took ten minutes to form his cabinet” and how neither “Hitler and Goering make decisions without consulting their astrologers.”
“Adolf looks more like an unemployed hairdresser than a Caesar,” commented one of his astrologers, who was later murdered by the Nazis.
Fromm noted that the Reichstag fire was the pretext for mass arrests of workers and leftist voters and that a Goebbels collaborator is known to be correcting ‘defective’ ballots.
Among her interesting observations from 1933 was how many of the high-ranking Nazis back-stabbed each other. How Hitler never forgets an adverse word and how women were relegated to breeding machines. She also documents the mass building of concentration camps.
March 17, 1933: “I have never believed the rumors of homosexuality that have been spread about Hitler. I rather believe that he is asexual or perhaps impotent, finding a sexual sublimation through cruelty.”
March 20, 1933: “Rolf said: ‘Goebbels propagandistic method sweeps away the minds. It dopes the masses. It will be too late when they return to their senses. The German people are, tempermentally, made to order for just that kind of mental poison.”
March 29, 1933: “It has become accepted practice for Jewish victims to be dragged from their beds before dawn and taken away. The German states are now ‘coordinated.’ The newspapers are unanimous of their praise of the Fuehrer for this. They are starting to work on the German mind.”
Kissed by Hitler
On March 30, 1933, Hitler kisses her hand at a party thrown by vice chancellor Franz von Papen, causing her nausea. “Weird ideas flashed through my mind. Why did I not have my little revolver with me?”
Among her observations about him: “He did not know what to do with his hands.”
She had to craft a paragraph in her newspaper column that mentioned Hitler was there, which was no easy feat. And when the editor cut it out of her column, she told him he was nuts, and asked if he was trying to get her in trouble.
Cruel But Not Original
The weekly cocktail parties she threw for diplomats were now being threatened by Nazi mobs, and her close associates keep telling her to get out of Germany. It would be another five years before she left.
October 8, 1933: US Ambassador Dodd has been observing the Nazis too keenly for their comfort… ‘The Nazis are cruel, but not original… They did not invent anti-Semitism. They simply were the first to organize it so it could be used as an effective weapon against the state.”
By the end of the year, her friends are starting to kill themselves.
December 13, 1933: “I met Hess for the first time, a gloomy morose individual with an air of intimidating people… Black Grete as his comrades call him… somewhat effeminate looking.”
Jewish Round-Survey
By now, she had gotten used to the ‘Jewish Round-Survey’ — which is when people scan the room before speaking with her.
She is still working as a correspondence for the Ullstein newspapers, because Goebbels decided he’d handle the ‘case of Bella Fromm’ by enmeshing it in red tape. Fromm had given Magda, his wife, ink in the fashion sections.
1934
New Nazi laws, like the forced sterilization of the ‘unfit.’ Hitler is now leader and chancellor, and everyone is taking loyalty oaths to him. A new law regulating writers extends to the working press.
January begins with a Nazi publication trashing Fromm’s work as “the destructive Bella Fromm.”
That hits close to home.
Red Tape and Malice
As she fights for her job and continues to help the oppressed escape, she struggles on in “grim determination, groping (her) way through the tangle of red tape and malice.”
Although she writes that she has always been a lover of peace, she questions why the Germans are not waging war against Hitler, because she sees no other way out.
The Heroic Deeds of Tiny Men
February 2, 1934: “Our new literature describes the heroic deeds of tiny men.”
Her allies in France describe “a wave of insanity going around the world.”
March 5, 1934: At a party: “My stomach slowly turning sour in me at the sight of Fritz Thyssen and other big industrial figures dancing eagerly in a stately and humiliating minuet around their Nazi masters.”
Wholesale Butchery in Full Swing
Her newspaper is forced to close its doors, and she sends her daughter to the US. She notes the tragic brainwashing of the youth is escalating.
For the further details of her writing, I encourage you to read the entire diary, but I just want to flag a bit more by year.
1935
German Jews lose all political rights.
1936
Charles Lindergh tours German airplane plants. Olympic games held in Berlin.
1937
Mussolini’s first visit to Berlin. (Fromm writes of ‘The Roman Imperator’ and the ‘German Imitator’).
1938
Hitler appoints himself Supreme War Lord; German army marches into Austria. Hitler demands Sudetenland. New wave of ‘Jew-baiting.’
As more of her friends take their own lives, and more of her allies urge her to leave, she writes that she is sorry to see her beloved Germany “thrown back into medieval darkness” — just as she predicted in 1917.
New York, New York
Although she initially finds menial work, she writes that dignity comes from within. She is hunted in New York, by Nazis who regret allowing her to leave Germany. Her assailants are captured by New York detectives, assigned to keep her safe. A German spy ring is busted, and she no longer fears what’s around the corner.
“Even now, there are those who say it cannot happen here in America. But it can. It can happen here! It can happen anywhere, unless you do something about it ruthlessly. The secret of these so-called supermen is bluff; their potent formula is to weaken through fear. Call their bluff… they are only men, cruel men, power-greedy men; and they can be disposed of the way any band of criminals is disposed of.
“We who have lived through this in Germany perhaps feel it more keenly than you do. Yet there was a time when we were as you, when the gangsters had not yet made us prisoners, when the bullies had not yet cowed us. That would have been the time to stop them there. And now is the time to stop them here.”—Bella Fromm, New York City, 1943
I took the time to document Fromm’s work for you, because we are no longer engaged in politics. A party aligned with foreign enemies has declared war on us. They are using a cruel and effective playbook.
We have allowed them to trample on our democracy, and if we continue to allow them to do so, we will not have a democracy.
I’d like to think we can vote our way out of this, but history and the present moment are telling us more must be done.
Now is the time to stop them here.
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My wife’s family escaped Mannheim Germany in 1938, crossing the border to Switzerland in the nick of time. The patriarch was in the steel business, an assimilated middle class German Jewish man who saw what was coming more clearly than his less perspicacious neighbors. All are gone now, but the memories they shared of the rising tide of Nazism in the 30’s are kept alive in our family. Trump is no Hitler, but the parallels are too close for comfort. Now is the time to turn the tide on Trumpism here.
Thank You Heidi. I have to find this book.