Speculation in dollars and pounds and francs and other foreign moneys was mad. The corners of the principal streets were dotted with money-changing kiosks. Many who possessed foreign money developed a close-fisted psychosis. They didn't want to change their bills into marks until obliged to. And when they had to, it was with regret, for the next minute the dollar would be worth a few marks more. A German Communist friend told me about a certain Anglo-American comrade who would delay paying his bills even though long overdue until the dollar climbed to a new high. By that method he paid about one-half only of the cost of what he actually owed. Said the German Communist bitterly: "Even the foreign comrades are exploiting the German people." Nearly everybody was doing it. I remember a so-called radical publisher who had worked out a profitable plan of printing American books in Germany, because labor and material there were so cheap, and exporting them to sell in America.
My Japanese friend, Sen Katayama, had warned me against returning to Germany. He thought I would be molested because for a couple of years the press of Europe and America had been carrying atrocity stories about the doings of the French black soldiers on the Rhine. But I said I would go back to Germany. Personally, I had not sensed any feeling against me as a Negro in the fall of 1923 because of the black troops on the Rhine. Everywhere I had been treated much better and with altogether more consideration than in America and England. Often when I stepped into a café there were friendly greetings—"Schwartz' Mohr"—and free drinks. And now I felt that if Negroes were hated and mistreated by the Germans because of the black troops on the Rhine, I wanted to authenticate the changed sentiment for myself. I did not want to report by hearsay that the Germans were mistreating Negroes. And that was why I went from the free port of Hamburg to Berlin, instead of going directly to Paris.
Well, everywhere in hotels, cafés, dancing halls, restaurants and trains, on the river boats and in the streets, I met with no feeling of hostility. In spite of the French black troops on the Rhine I was treated even better in Berlin in 1923 than in 1922. Of course, Berlin was mightily depressed because of the French occupation of the Ruhr. In the hotel where I stayed there was posted a sign asking the guests not to speak the French language. The spirit of depression was expressed more eloquently in the exchanges than anywhere. The working people were not as prosperous and happy as in the fall of 1922, because the new inflation caused by the French occupation had cut down their wages to the bone. If Poincaré of Lorraine, consumed by an overwhelming fear and hatred of the Germans, had desired to perpetuate the hatred between the Germans and the French forever, he could not have devised a better way.
There was something sullen and bitter, hostile and resentful in the atmosphere of Berlin. And I believe Berlin expressed the resentful spirit of all of Germany. There were Wandervögel everywhere like a plague of flies. They had lost their romantic flavor. More imitation than real Wandervögel, with their knapsacks slung over their shoulders, casually taking to the streets as nature lovers take to the woods, and they gave one a strange impression of Berlin as a futuristic forest.
I do not know of anything that has rendered so perfectly the atmosphere, temper and tempo of the Berlin of that period than George Grosz's Ecce Homo. For me that book of drawings is a rare and iconoclastic monument of this closing era even as Rabelais is of the Renaissance. I had the unique and unforgettable honor and pleasure of knowing George Grosz in Moscow. His photograph and two pages of his drawings had appeared in the special pictorial section of Pravda, which also carried a photograph of myself. It was the first time I had seen any of Grosz's drawings. They gripped me. I sought an opportunity to meet him in the Congress Hall of the Kremlin.
When I returned to Berlin I hunted him up to ask him to sign a copy of Ecce Homo, which I had bought privately. The book was banned by the government of the Social Democracy. Grosz's remarkable personality gave not the slightest hint of the artistic type. And in his little apartment, his pretty and pleasant frau had surrounded him with the neatest of bourgeois comforts. He fitted respectably into the frame, and if you did not know he was an artist, you might have taken him for a responsible bank clerk. Yet there was a charming felicity and harmony in the ménage. It gave the impression that Grosz needed just that kind of domestic background from which he could swing up and out with his powerful artistic punches.
Grosz in his appearance seemed the perfect type of a conservative Prussian. But a careful study of his nervous-boyish and whimsical eyes revealed the revolutionary artist in him. He was a real inspiration to other artists. I heard many lyrical appreciations of his work, a fine tribute to the man, for the breed of artists (judging from my experience on The Liberator and among the cosmopolites in France) are hell-hard on their contemporaries. They are liberal and lavish in praise of the dead only or the great. Writers are perhaps more generous. Marsden Hartley, whom I happened across in Berlin, was ecstatic in praise of Grosz's work. But the two artists had never met, so I introduced them. Physically, Grosz was as impressive as his amazingly ruthless drawings, and Marsden Hartley was equally as ecstatic in praise of his person.
I met also Pierre Loving, the writer and critic, who spoke German and kindly hunted me up a large room, exactly right to live and work in. He introduced me to Josephine Herbst, who was very kind and helpful in a practical and also artistic way. Soon after I met again the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, selling newspapers in the street. Our meeting surprised both of us. We talked a little, but she had to sell her newspapers, for she said her rent was overdue. So we made a rendezvous for the next evening at the Romanisher Café.
It was a sad rendezvous. The Baroness in Greenwich Village, arrayed in gaudy accoutrements, was a character. Now, in German homespun, she was just a poor pitiful frau. She said she had come to Germany to write because the cost of living was cheap there. But she complained that she had been ditched. She didn't make it clear by whom or what. So instead of writing she was crying news. She wished that she was back in New York, she said. I was accompanied by an American student lad whom I had met at the American Express office. He came from one of the western cities. He professed a liking for me, because of my poetry, he said. He had plenty of money and was always treating me to more drinks than were good for me. I told him that the Baroness was a real poet and that he might give her a couple of dollars. He generously produced five, and we were all very happy for it.
I had completed my plans to go to Paris when, curiously, I began meeting a number of the comrades whom I had known in Moscow. One day in the Unter den Linden I bumped up against the Hindu youth who had vanished so strangely from the Lux Hotel in Moscow. "I thought you were dead!" I cried.