Our Town: What the rise of Nazism looked like in Baltimore during the 1930s

A few years ago I was working on the second story of a rowhouse in the Woodbourne-McCabe neighborhood, east of York Road, when a coworker shouted over the din of a reciprocating saw to come see what she had found written behind the wall. This house had been vacant for many years—decades, maybe—and it was only a shell the day we were running around inside it, hopping over holes in the floor and keeping our eyes on the groaning roof above. The last bits of lath and framed wall had just been removed from one section of what had once been a bedroom, exposing a large patch of plaster stuck to the bricks. There on the plaster was a Nazi swastika drawn in black pigment, dated the year 1940 and signed with a name I can't remember except that it was German-sounding, like mine. We covered it up with a coat of mortar, a coat of latex paint, a new wall with Sheetrock, a coat of primer, and then two coats of interior matte white paint.

We know very well the type of person who would draw a swastika today; someone in your area code may be doing the equivalent and much worse on the Internet right now. Who would do it in Baltimore on the eve of World War II, though? Someone, a German-American like me, who spent the past 7 years watching events overseas with the feeling that things might be going their way for a change, who felt like they belonged, finally, to a winning team.

This month is a good time to revisit the 1930s in Baltimore, years of incredible volatility, uncertainty, passion, and optimism in politics. Imagine every vacant rowhome you've ever seen here but with a light on and a family inside: That was the size of the city in the 1930s. Among large numbers of people, faith in liberal democracy and market capitalism to solve the problems of the day was evaporating by the hour. Thousands of Baltimoreans identified themselves with constituencies of race, class, and nationality that extended far beyond the boundaries of their neighborhoods; their connection to the country of their parents' birth, say, or their feelings of kinship with people they had never met in Russia or Ethiopia, deeply colored the American lives they led here. Nearly all the immigrants in Baltimore were from Europe—the various tribes of white America—and while they benefited from the city's Jim Crow regime that oppressed 145,000 of their black neighbors, they also challenged the boundaries of what it meant to be an American in complex ways. This became truest of all in the 1930s for German-Americans, forced by events in Europe to choose carefully where each of their two identities ended. But the choice was given to them.

The accounts that follow—assembled from archival materials—are just a handful of days from that decade in Baltimore, barely within living memory, and the names mentioned are only a few of the ones that were written down. We live in the same city as these people, walk their same streets, and sleep in their same houses. At this moment we might find it useful to strip back the paint and plaster left on top of them and look at what they did in their time.

Read more: http://www.citypaper.com/news/features/bcpnews-our-town-what-the-rise-of-nazism-looked-like-in-baltimore-during-the-1930s-20170214-htmlstory.html