The Coming of the Third Reich (29 page)

The monarchy is my banner, I long for the old German power, I want all the time to strike once again against France. But-what kind of disgusting company one keeps with the German racists! It will be even more disgusting if Austria joins us. And everything we now feel was felt with more or less justification by the French after 70. And I would not have become a professor under Wilhelm II, and yet ...
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Already in 1925 he was regarding the election of Hindenburg as President as a potential disaster, comparable to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. ‘Fascism everywhere. The terrors of the war have been forgotten, the Russian terror is driving Europe into reaction.’
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As time went on, Klemperer grew weary of the constant political excitement. In August 1932, as the Weimar Republic entered its final turbulent phase, he wrote:

Moreover: I don’t need to write the history of my times. And the information I provide is dull, I am half repelled, half full of a fear to which I don’t want to surrender myself, completely without enthusiasm for any party. The whole thing is meaningless, undignified, miserable - nobody plays a part for himself, everyone’s a puppet ... Hitler before the gates - or who else? And what will become of me, the Jewish professor?

He preferred instead to write about the small black kitten that had wandered into their house, and instantly became their pet.
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Under the influence not only of the threatening political situation, but also of his wife’s serious, clinical depression and frequent illnesses, Klemperer wrote less and less, and seemed by the end of 1932 on the verge of abandoning his diary altogether.

Klemperer’s political pessimism owed a lot to the personal troubles he was experiencing. Yet his attitude was shared by many patriotic, liberal-conservative German Jews who felt ill at ease amidst the conflicts of the Weimar Republic. Beyond that, his distaste for the extremes of politics and his disquiet at the violence and fanaticism that surrounded him was surely characteristic of many middle-class Germans, whatever their background. His Jewish ethnicity not only caused him to suffer some adverse discrimination, but it also gave him a sharp and sardonic eye for political developments that were ominous for the future, as he rightly guessed. Yet he did not suffer unduly from antisemitism, he did not experience any violence, indeed, he did not record a single instance of a personal insult in his diary at this time. In formal terms, Jews such as Klemperer enjoyed far more freedom and equality under the Weimar Republic than they had ever done before. The Republic opened up new opportunities for Jews in the civil service, politics and the professions as well as in government: a Jewish Foreign Minister like Walther Rathenau would have been unthinkable under the Wilhelmine Reich, for instance. The Jewish-owned parts of the press, particularly the newspapers controlled by the two liberal Jewish firms of Mosse and Ullstein, which together produced over half the newspapers sold in Berlin in the 1920s, strongly supported the liberal institutions of the Republic. The arts’ new-found freedom from censorship and official disapproval brought many Jewish writers, painters and musicians to prominence as apostles of modernist culture, where they mingled easily with non-Jewish figures like the composer Paul Hindemith, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, or the artists Max Beckmann and George Grosz. Jews signalled their support for the Republic by voting particularly for the Democrats, and to a lesser extent for the parties of the left.
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On the other hand, partly in reaction to these developments, the 1920s also witnessed a broadening and deepening of the currents of antisemitism in German politics and society. Even before the war, the Pan-Germans _ and others on the right had pumped out propaganda accusing the Jews of undermining the German nation. This kind of racist conspiracy theory was more than shared by military leaders such as Ludendorff. It found notorious expression during the war in the so-called Jewish census of October 1916, ordered by senior army officers who hoped it would give them support in refusing Jews admission to the officer corps once the war was over. The aim was to reveal the cowardly and disloyal nature of the Jews by showing statistically that Jews were under-represented in the army, and that those who had joined up were over-represented in desk-jobs. In fact, it showed the reverse: many Jewish Germans, like Victor Klemperer, were nationalist to the core, and identified strongly with the Reich. German Jews were over- rather than under-represented in the armed forces and at the front. Confounding the expectations of antisemitic officers to such a degree, the results of the census were suppressed. But the knowledge that it had been ordered caused a great deal of anger among German Jews, even if the attitudes it revealed were not shared by the majority of rank-and-file troops.
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After the war, the widespread belief on the right that the German army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionaries in 1918 translated easily into antisemitic demagogy. It was, men like Ludendorff evidently believed, ‘the Jews’ who had done the stabbing, who led subversive institutions like the Communist Party, who agreed to the Treaty of Versailles, who set up the Weimar Republic. In fact, of course, the German army was defeated militarily in 1918. There was, as we have seen, no stab-in-the-back. Leading politicians who signed the Treaty, like Matthias Erzberger, were not Jewish at all. If Jews like Rosa Luxemburg were over-represented in the Communist Party leadership, or, like Eugen Levine in the revolutionary upheavals in Munich early in 1919, they were not acting as Jews but as revolutionaries, alongside many non-Jews (such as Karl Liebknecht, whom many right-wingers thought instinctively must be Jewish because of his ultra-left political views). Most Jewish Germans supported the solid liberal parties of the centre, or to a lesser extent the Social Democrats, rather than the revolutionary left, whose violent activism shocked and appalled a respectable citizen like Klemperer. Nevertheless, the events of 1918-19 gave a boost to antisemitism on the right, convincing many waverers that racist conspiracy theories about the Jews were correct after all.
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Alongside extreme right-wing propaganda scapegoating Jews for the catastrophes of 1918-19, there also emerged a more popular form of antisemitism, directed particularly at war profiteers and the small number of financiers who managed to get rich quick in the throes of the inflation. Antisemitism had always surged at times of economic crisis, and the economic crises of the Weimar Republic dwarfed anything that Germany had witnessed before. A fresh source of conflict arose in the gathering pace of immigration on the part of impoverished Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic violence and civil war in Russia. There were perhaps 80,000 ‘Eastern Jews’ in Germany before the First World War, and their arrival, along with that of a much larger number of immigrant workers from Poland and elsewhere, had led the Reich government to introduce a virtually unique kind of citizenship law in 1913, allowing only those who could show German ancestry to claim German nationality.
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After the war there was a renewed influx, as the Bolshevik Revolution swept across Russia, prompting antisemitic pogroms and murders on a huge scale by the Revolution’s Tsarist opponents. Although the immigrants acculturated quickly, and were relatively few in number, they nevertheless formed an easy target for popular resentments. At the height of the hyperinflation, on 6 November 1923, a newspaper reporter observed serious disturbances in a district of Berlin with a high proportion of Jewish immigrants from the East:

Everywhere in the side-streets a howling mob. Looting takes place under cover of darkness. A shoe-shop at the corner of Dragoon Street is ransacked, the shards of the window-panes are lying around on the street. Suddenly a whistle sounds. In a long human chain, covering the entire width of the street, a police cordon advances. ‘Clear the street!’ an officer cries. ‘Go into your houses!’ The crowd slowly moves on. Everywhere with the same shouts: ‘Beat the Jews to death!’ Demagogues have manipulated the starving people for so long that they fall upon the wretched creatures who pursue a miserable goods trade in the Dragoon Street cellar ... it is inflamed racial hatred, not hunger, that is driving them to loot. Young lads immediately follow every passer-by with a Jewish appearance, in order to fall upon him when the moment is right.
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Such a public outburst of violence was symptomatic of the new preparedness of antisemites, like so many other groups on the fringes of German politics, to stir up or actively employ violence and terror to gain their ends, rather than remaining content, as they mostly had been before 1914, with mere words. A wave of still imperfectly documented incidents of personal violence against Jews and their property, attacks on synagogues, acts of desecration carried out in Jewish cemeteries, was the result.
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It was not just an unprecedented willingness to translate vehement prejudice into violent action that broadly distinguished post-1918 antisemitism from its prewar counterpart. While the overwhelming majority of Germans still rejected the use of physical force against Jews during the Weimar Republic, the language of antisemitism became embedded in mainstream political discourse as never before. The ‘stab-in-the-back’, the ‘November traitors’, the ‘Jewish Republic’, the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy’ to undermine Germany - all these and many similar demagogic slogans could be regularly read in the papers, whether as expressions of editorial opinion or in reporting of political incidents, speeches and trials. They could be heard day after day in legislative assemblies, where the rhetoric of the Nationalists, the second largest party after the Social Democrats during the middle years of the Republic, was shot through with antisemitic phrases. These were more extreme and more frequently employed than they had been by the Conservatives before the war, and were amplified by splinter groups of the right that collectively enjoyed much more support than the antisemitic parties of Ahlwardt, Böckel and their ilk. Closely allied to many of these groups was the German Protestant Church, deeply conservative and nationalist by conviction and also prone to outbursts of antisemitism; but Catholic antisemitism also took on new vigour in the 1920s, animated by fear of the challenge of Bolshevism, which had already launched violent attacks on Christianity in Hungary and Russia at the end of the war. There were large swathes of the German electorate on the right and in the centre that fervently desired a rebirth of German national pride and glory after 1918. They were to a greater or lesser degree convinced as a result that this had to be achieved by overcoming the spirit of ‘Jewish’ subversion that had supposedly brought Germany to its knees at the end of the war.
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The sensibility of many Germans was so blunted by this tide of antisemitic rhetoric that they failed to recognize that there was anything exceptional about a new political movement that emerged after the end of the war to put antisemitism at the very core of its fanatically held beliefs: the Nazi Party.

3

THE RISE OF NAZISM

BOHEMIAN REVOLUTIONARIES

I

When Kurt Eisner was released from Cell 70 in Munich’s Stadelheim gaol under a general amnesty proclaimed in October 1918, there was little indication that he was soon to become one of Germany’s leading revolutionaries. Best known as a theatre critic, he personified the bohemian lifestyle associated with Munich’s Schwabing district, close to the city centre.
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His appearance advertised his bohemianism. Small and heavily bearded, he went around wearing a black cloak and a huge, broad-brimmed black hat; a pair of little steel-rimmed spectacles was perched on his nose. Eisner was not a native Bavarian, but came from Berlin, where he was born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1867. He was identified with the right-wing fringe of the Social Democratic Party, losing his job with its local newspaper in the early 1900s because of his support for the ‘revisionists’ who wanted the Social Democrats to abandon their Marxism. Like many ‘revisionists’, however, Eisner was opposed to the war. He took a leading role in forming the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party and subsequently organized a series of strikes in January 1918 to try to bring an end to the conflict.
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When things began to fall apart on November 1918, it was Eisner who, thanks to his gift for rhetoric and his disdain for political convention, took the lead in Munich. As the Majority Social Democrats proposed a traditional political march through the Bavarian capital in an orderly demonstration for peace, led by a brass band and carrying banners, Eisner jumped onto the speakers’ platform and told the crowd to occupy the army barracks and take control of the city. Accompanied by a group of followers, Eisner proceeded to do just that, meeting with no resistance from the soldiers. Obtaining authorization from the local revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ council, Eisner proclaimed Bavaria a Republic and established a revolutionary government staffed by Majority and Independent Social Democrats, with himself at its head. But his government failed utterly in the basic tasks of maintaining food supplies, providing jobs, demobilizing the troops and keeping the transport system going. The conservative Bavarian peasantry, outraged at the events in Munich, were withholding foodstuffs, and the Allies had requisitioned most of the railway locomotives. Workers began to heckle Eisner and shout him down at meetings. In cabinet, Eisner was angrily told by one of its members: ‘You are an anarchist ... You are no statesman, you are a fool ... We are being ruined by bad management.’
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Not surprisingly, therefore, elections held on 12 January resulted in a crushing victory for the Majority Social Democrats and a humiliating defeat for Eisner’s Independents.