The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (12 page)

In the U.S., a general hysteria and suspicion fed rumors that German-born Americans, loyal to Germany rather than the U.S., had laid solid concrete foundations in the cellars and garages of their homes, enabling them to hide guns and other weapons that they planned on sending their countrymen across the ocean. Fearing that the German-Americans might also take up arms against the U.S. within its borders, U.S. citizens invaded the homes, posse-style, to root out these German armaments and sympathizers. As the war continued,
anti-German sentiment grew more bizarre—Americans refused to use the words sauerkraut, German measles, or dachshund.

Soon food shortages began and rationing was initiated. In 1918, U.S. Food Administrator Herbert Hoover, later to become president, called for wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, and porkless Thursdays and Saturdays. He also proposed a per person limit of two pounds of meat per week, and issued twelve rules for public eating places that included no bread until after the first course and a maximum half ounce of butter per person.

In Baltimore, industry was booming because of the war. The city became a hub for steelmaking and shipbuilding, as well as a center for ammunitions and explosives manufacturing. In fact, just several blocks from Etta's apartment, a firm was making ammunition that would be used to attack the German army.

The war in Baltimore not only brought new commerce, but also widespread mistrust. Police searched the homes of unnaturalized Germans, and the telephone company asked its employees to sign a pledge of patriotism.

Given that atmosphere, it can be safely assumed that questions were raised about the Cone family's loyalty—their sister, after all, was still living in Germany, the country to which the entire family traced its roots. It would have been impossible to explain that Claribel remained in a belligerent country because it was too inconvenient to leave.

But whether questions were raised specifically about the Cones is not known. What is known is that the previously harmonious mixing of gentiles and Jews along the Eutaw Place corridor began to break down during the war. The Jewish community had many ties to Germany, and though supportive of the Allied effort, was less virulent in its attacks on Germany than its gentile neighbors.

Etta, viewing her own war-time situation, could only have imagined the worst for her sister in Germany. There was no fighting on U.S. soil, and yet its food-deprived people had been whipped into a frenzy. What could Claribel be suffering inside Germany, which had been isolated from the rest of the world and engaged in fierce battles for three years?

In fact, the war was finally becoming a reality for Claribel. Denied access to her own U.S.-based money, she was forced to borrow funds from her relatives in Germany. Long lines had begun forming at Munich food stores, and schools were closed to make room for the returning wounded. Italian planes had dropped scattered bombs on the city, and there was a flu epidemic and a housing shortage.

From her perch at the Regina Palast, she watched the grand city bow to the pressure of battle and war. The glorious façades remained the same, but Munich was wounded from without and rotting from within.

The Schwabing taverns that once echoed with the verses of poets were home to new groups obsessed with the politics of the extreme left and right. The leftists wanted to bring Bolshevism to Germany and to do away with its firmly entrenched class system. The rightists, in search of the glory days of old, wanted to rid the country of those elements they believed had made Germany weak.

In 1912, in a published book called
If I Were Kaiser,
Dr. Cheinrich Class ominously predicted, “Jews who had not obtained German citizenship would be expelled from the country ruthlessly and to the last man.”

That theme was taken up by rightists in the Schwabing taverns. Alfred Schuler called for “an apocalyptic purging of all Jewish elements from the world” in order to purify it. The tide of the war was turning against Germany, and some factions of its society were looking for someone to blame.

We're turning everything upside down, we're tearing it all to pieces.

—Weiss Ferdl, 1918

I
f Germany seemed a dark place in 1917, it was a completely black place in 1918. Pride in Germany's war-machine had given way to demonstrations demanding an end to the fighting. In November 1918, Munich's streets were filled with a hundred thousand people demanding the overthrow of King Ludwig and his government, as well as an end to the war.

As the crowd marched, its numbers swelled. The army soon joined the protest. The rumble of thousands of feet and the chant of the disenfranchised proved to be too much for Ludwig and his royal family, who fled Munich. The crowd was triumphant. Like the czar in Russia the previous year, the German king had been toppled from his throne by a popular uprising.

The demonstration was choreographed and led by the drama critic Kurt Eisner, who, with no previous political experience, was declared minister president of the newly freed state of Bavaria. Soldiers waving red flags raced through the city, occupied the rail station and the ministries, and set up machine guns on street corners. Almost overnight, the relative
calm of wartime Munich was shattered by social revolution.

Claribel's hotel was in the middle of the chaos. From her balcony, she could see government buildings and royal palaces, and she could watch the throbbing, shrieking masses below. But at the core of the “new Bavaria” movement was a kind of idealism that might have even appealed to her. Kurt Eisner, a Jewish intellectual, had stated with great eloquence his decision to end the suffering of global war. Despite the guns and the soldiers, the appeal had a touch of nobility about it that may have piqued Claribel's interest and earned her respect.

Claribel's American family, meanwhile, read news reports that Germany was going to pieces. Unable to contact her directly, they worried that she, too, might have perished in the tumult.

Things were not much better in Baltimore. In addition to local soldiers killed in battle, Baltimore in 1918 had the highest death rate in the United States from an influenza epidemic. Cold weather prevented the burial of flu victims, and rotting corpses piled up. Everywhere was death and deprivation, and there was no reason to assume Claribel, in a Germany far worse off, had been spared the indignity of either.

In fact, she had not, though war and revolution were proving to be great levelers. In Munich, there was an almost total lack of the “things” Claribel and the wealthy upper-class had previously taken for granted. By 1918, Munich's markets were bare, clothing and other essentials unavailable, and money increasingly meaningless. Nearly everyone in Munich suffered.

In a letter written several years earlier, Claribel had said that one of war's lessons to her was that, in peacetime, people ate too much. Munich had been on a war diet for four years, and it looked as though the post-war years were to bring even greater hardships. From inside their grand homes, the city's
wealthy watched with apprehension as the world war ended, and a civil war erupted in their midst.

Claribel watched, too.

For all its death and destruction, the first World War, from the vantage point of Munich, was a relatively orderly affair—it saw the inexorable march of thousands of uniformed troops armed with cumbersome weapons. There were clear enemies and battlefields, clear winners and losers.

But with the outbreak of post-war revolution, rag-tag troops followed dozens of minor leaders, each with its own sets of allies and adversaries. The rules changed daily, and anyone and everyone was a potential victim. The revolution-related violence gripping Munich was being felt intimately—neighbor to neighbor—and it was terrifying.

In the first weeks of November 1918, Germany crumbled. Kaiser Wilhelm fled into exile on November 10, after the German Republic was declared. Fritz Ebert, a former saddle maker, was pronounced Germany's new chancellor.

The next day, on November 11 at 11 a.m., the armistice went into effect, signaling Germany's defeat, and burdening the country with crippling post-war reparations to the victorious Allies. Throughout the country, posters proclaimed the arrival of Bolshevism. A once proud Germany had been brought to its knees. Munich was in an uproar.

New voices were added to the chorus of malcontents. Eisner's government was denounced by a growing band of German nationalists, who blamed him and his supporters for an odious armistice agreement that would cost Germans dearly. The press dismissed Eisner and his followers as “strangers, carpet baggers, and Jews.”

But while demonstrators on the left and the right roamed
the streets, shouting their slogans and demands, another, much more insidious group was meeting quietly in the upper floors of a Munich hotel. The Thule Society was Pan-German, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic. It called the revolution in Germany the work of its deadly enemy Juda, and vowed “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Gradually, Thule agents filtered into the Eisner government, and hundreds of thousands of anti-Semitic leaflets were hurled into the streets of Munich from speeding vehicles. The messages bore the Thule Society's emblem—a swastika.

Thule, its labor offshoot the German Workers Party (which would grow into Hitler's National Socialist Party), and numerous German nationalist groups blamed the Jews in Germany for losing the war, and for permitting the influx of Bolshevism immediately afterward. As the confusion of revolution grew, the chief target of the groups’ hatred became increasingly clear. To them, eradicating the Jews would bring back the glory of pre-war Germany.

On February 21, 1919, a half-Jewish military officer, rejected by the Thule Society because he was not “pure,” assassinated Eisner outside the Diet. Once spilled, the blood began to gush. During a eulogy to Eisner that same morning, an opposition leader was shot and wounded, a guard killed, and another delegate murdered. The new Bavarian government of Kurt Eisner ceased to exist.

A state of siege was declared in Munich, and a worker-soldier-peasant central council assumed governmental power. Placards throughout the city warned citizens to stay indoors, and a 7 p.m. curfew was imposed.

Prominent citizens and aristocrats were arrested and held hostage. Trucks mounted with machine guns roamed the streets. Public buildings, banks, and hotels were occupied by Red troops and armed workers. A group of revolutionaries
declared Bavaria a Soviet Republic.

This time, the revolution literally came to Claribel's door. Her hotel, the Regina Palast, was occupied by soldiers who arrived at her suite to conduct a room-to-room search. Claribel must have been terrified. She was a Jew, an American, and wealthy, which made her a target for all sides of the raging street battle. Even the stoic doctor would likely have been rattled by the appearance of the soldiers, who could take from her what they wanted without fear of reprisal.

Whether she acted out of fright, or whether she was actually intrigued by the filthy troops in her doorway, is not known. In either case, she did not panic, but assumed the role of the gracious hostess, inviting the soldiers in. She told them she had nothing they would want and nothing illegal, but they searched her room anyway, and, in a Spanish chest, found some candy Claribel had forgotten about.

Using cooking equipment in her room, she made the soldiers hot chocolate, divided up the confiscated bonbons, and engaged them in a chat. Claribel's tea-time visit with the occupying forces left her unperturbed.

The revolutionists had established their base at the Wittelsbach Palace, a half mile from her hotel. Claribel's balcony was like a theater box seat from which she could view the revolutionary drama unfold. Shortly after the brief and civil intermission with the soldiers in her room, an armed overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet-style government failed, after which street gunfighting erupted. The already bad situation worsened.

The
putsch
ushered in a new group of hard-line Communists who issued decrees for the confiscation of private and corporate bank accounts, business profits, and food supplies. According to one historian, “a state of hysterical panic” gripped the middle and upper classes as armed patrols searched private homes.

By the spring of 1919, the situation became so grave that old residents began packing up their possessions and moving out of Munich. In the “war after the war,” Munich was precisely as described—an “insane asylum.”

The nationalists, who had been plotting to win back Germany from the Bolshevists, surrounded Munich with 20,000 troops in April and pushed into the city from all sides. Soviet rule fell and martial law was enacted. The liberation of Munich had come, but there was evidence that an even darker chapter would soon begin. In the aftermath of the takeover, the city's streets were littered with corpses, and the victorious troops charged with maintaining order wore swastikas on their helmets.

A general call for doctors was made to help treat the wounded in Munich. Claribel told an interviewer years later it was “with some surprise” that she remembered she was a doctor. The woman who bragged she had had only one patient was rolling up her sleeves and treating the victims of Munich's bloody street battles.

By August, the first trickle of mail from America began to reach Claribel. The relief she must have felt at hearing from her family can only be imagined. Claribel wrote to Etta, “The close of the war and the opening of the mails was a godsend to me—naturally I was worried until I got word of your well being and of that of our other dear ones. I dread to hear of the changes that have taken place in the two and a half years in which no message came to me from home. I trust that most of these changes have been for the better.” Also in her response, Claribel asked Etta to send her 10,000 marks.

The value of the mark plunged drastically during the
post-war years in Germany. On the day the European war ended, the mark was worth 7.45 to the dollar. By 1919, it was worth 35.45 to the dollar. Because of rampaging inflation, the money her family sent Claribel—the requested 10,000 marks—was only enough to pay her hotel bill or her debt to her German relatives. Even if she had received more money, the city's stores shelves were empty.

Oddly, despite the turmoil and deprivation, Claribel was not immediately ready to leave Germany even then. In September 1919, she wrote to Etta that she didn't know when she would be returning to the United States because there was a long list of people awaiting passage.

“This will probably shove my homecoming to the winter. As I do not feel equal to traveling in cold weather I fear I must wait till the spring. As usual I have taken such deep roots into the place where I happen to be living that it will take more than horses to drive me away. . . I have gotten so out of the habit of traveling that I scarcely know how to pick up again. I feel much like a person who has sat for a long time in a cramped position and tries suddenly to get up again—you know what that is—well that is my mental state as to moving on—a very cramped one. . . .”

That fall, while Claribel resumed her correspondence with Etta, a newcomer in the German nationalist movement began making his first speeches in Munich. Adolf Hitler had joined a small group of nationalists and quickly emerged as its leader.

In September 1919, he wrote his first political treatise—its topic was the Jew. “True anti-Semitism,” he wrote, “should consist of a deliberate, planned campaign to deprive the Jews of the rights that they, unlike other foreigners, were enjoying in Germany.” In November, Hitler made his first public anti-Semitic speech. He received thundering applause.

As the situation in Munich grew more tense, Claribel took steps to leave. In October, she contacted the Spanish consulate to secure passage, but was told she could only leave if she offered satisfactory “evidence” that a physical disability had prevented her from quitting Germany at an earlier time.

With no sure way of leaving the country, she instead turned to Etta to see if she could provide some of the things she was unable to get and at least make her involuntary stay in Germany more tolerable.

“. . . you were so kind as to ask can you send me something and if you have the opportunity I will ask you please to send me—a pair of rubber shoes! number 8 probably best. I used to wear 7 but my shoes are so big—(I have one pair of shoes)—that it takes the larger size to go over them. Oh yes, yesterday in preparing my trunks for travel purposes I found a pair of big so-called “ground grippers”—a pair of orthopedic shoes so big and so ugly I had not ventured to wear them.