Epoch in three biographies: under the spell of the permanently excited crowd

Can a book be like an exhibition, asks Peter Michalzik, in which one can move freely and still follow the chronology of events?

He tried a similar principle of composition for his book about Germany in the years 1926-1938.

For this he focuses on the writer Ödön von Horváth, the actress Marianne Hoppe and Adolf Hitler.

A museum that would present this trio together would need a few good curatorial arguments.

In his foreword, Michalzik, who has been a theater critic for many years and is now a university lecturer, explains why: He wants to convey “the feeling of an epoch”, since the three biographies are not only connected in time, but also through the phenomenon of the masses, which for him are relevant social phenomenon at the beginning of the last century, appeared "in marches, in stadiums, in squares and finally in the war so emphatically".

"The Permanently Excited Mass" reminds him of our present, which offers it a global forum with social media.

Points of contact between the CVs

These considerations have a certain logic, which, however, only includes the title characters to a limited extent.

It is well known that Hitler knew how to mobilize and manipulate the masses.

It is well known that the emerging art form of film became popular culture in these years.

The fact that Marianne Hoppe's cinema career began in 1933, when Hitler came to power, and that Horváth got off the rails as a result, is not enough to support the book.

Michalzik bravely tries to show points of contact between the biographies, or at least to affirm them, allowing Hitler to have his say mainly in his speeches and describing – without seeming particularly inspired – their rhetorical strategies: “It was always phantasms, constructs of some groups of people ( the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Aryans, the French, the English, the Jews) that Hitler spread, with whom he worked and with whom he got excited.” He also quotes texts by Elias Canetti, José Ortega y Gasset or Martin Heidegger to depict the crowd as a dynamic organism that Hitler both despised and dominated.

Some things can be waved through as gossip

The connection to Ödön von Horváth, who knew how to watch the crowd so closely that one is willing to recognize the artificial language he put on their tongues as an original dialect, seems quite far-fetched.

However, the analyzes of his career and work are the most stimulating to read, here Michalzik is in safe theater-scientific and philological waters: “Horváth’s central literary method consists in the fact that he lets mass people become characters.

In doing so, he is reversing the development of society, so to speak.” A study of Horváth alone would probably have been much more convincing.

There would also have been room for Marianne Hoppe, because she admired Horváth, had an affair with him and probably had their child aborted.

One would also have wished for more careful editing.

Some unnecessary repetition of words, grammatical crudities (“The rise of the Nazis and the film actress Marianne Hoppe ran parallel”) and redundancies in terms of content are sloppiness – neither is it explained who Carl Dreyfuss actually was (except for Marianne Hoppe’s Jewish lover, who temporarily lived in her apartment hidden), nor the name of the sister of the writer Erich von Mendelssohn, with whom Horváth is said to have "had a relationship".

This can be waved through as amusing gossip, after all, Horváth, who is considered

, spent a few days in the Mendelssohn Villa in Berlin in 1931 after the premiere of his “Tales from the Vienna Woods”.

From exhibition analogy to film dramaturgy

But what can one do with Michalzik's claim that the actress Käthe Dorsch "was once married to Hermann Göring"?

Shouldn't this extremely surprising message have been checked in the archives of a registry office?

Or in the not scarce literature about Goering?

There is no footnote.

And then Michalzik suddenly switched from the exhibition analogy to film dramaturgy, because the turbulence of 1933 made this seem advisable to him: "There is, so to speak, a large camera pan over the whole event before we zoom into the scenes." Something went wrong there.

And nobody intervened.

One wonders.

So his book remains a promise that unfortunately is only partially kept: a lot of work, little profit.

Peter Michalzik: "Horvath - Hoppe - Hitler".

1926 to 1938 – The age of the crowd.

Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2022. 304 p., ill., hardcover, €26.