n the January 24, 2008 edition of the
London Review of Books, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm published an
interesting essay of personal reminiscences of the Weimar Republic. He was a
teenager in the Berlin public school system at the time and is thus a rare
resource for persons with an interest in this rich period of German history. The
essay was brought to my attention by Eva Liddell, for which I am grateful.
As one of those interested persons myself, I discovered, in reading
Hobsbawm's essay, that I could contribute material to it. The following is my
commentary which can be read before or after Hobsbawm's essay, which is
appended.
Rosa Luxemburg
|
Hanna Arendt
|
Walter Hasenclever
|
Lotte Lenya
|
Lisa Meitner
|
Klaus Fuchs
|
Richard Sorge |
|
- Having been born in Manhattan and having lived in Germany on the eve
of WWII myself, his relative comparison [Berlin : England :: Manhattan :
Omaha] gave me a chuckle.
- His only comment on the origin of the Weimar Period is its
"murderous birth-period." It would have enriched the essay considerably
had he gone even a little more into its origins. I would have said, as a
minimum, that the fatal flaw which doomed the Weimar Republic from its
very beginning was that it was a hated compromise between a discredited
bourgeoisie and a revolutionary proletariat which was weakened at the
instant of the revolution itself by the betrayal of the SPD.
An
essential part of the "murderous birth-period" was the murder of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the WWI anti-war movement,
founders of the KPD and leaders of the German Revolution, on January 15,
1919 in Berlin. The perpetrators, members of the German Army, received
only light sentences. It was this miscarriage of justice, revealing the
power of the counterrevolutionary elements in the Weimar Republic, which
set the stage for their resurgence under Hitler in 1933.
- In recounting the rich intellectual life of the Weimar Republic's
émigrés driven from Germany by the Nazis, he might have added the names
of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the prolific writer Kurt
Tucholsky and his friend and dramatist Walter Hasenclever. Tucholsky
emigrated to Sweden and Hasenclever to France. Hasenclever, among other
things, wrote the screenplay for the German version of Eugene O'Neill's
1922 play Anna Christie which was filmed in Hollywood in 1930 and
was Greta Garbo's first sound movie. Tucholsky killed himself on 21
December 1935 in Göteborg, Sweden. Hasenclever killed himself on 22 June
1940 in Aix-en-Provence, France.
- I was surprised to see him mention Carl Schmitt in the same breath
with the others. Schmitt was a German professor of law and philosophy of
law. He was also a member of the NSDAP. He is rather infamous for having
formulated a philosophical rationale for Hitler's edicts, in the absence
of legislation, having the force of law. This eased a problem for the
judges in the Third Reich's judicial system who sometimes were confused
as to what the law actually was. Schmitt's concept, as I recall, was
that the Fuehrer made law by his actions because he embodied the state
and acted in the name of the people. This concept bears a remarkable
similarity, in its effect, to the Bush Justice Department's views on
presidential powers.
- He mentions the Catholic Center Party but fails to mention that they
were the swing party that provided the critical votes Hitler needed to
pass the Enabling Act. Had they voted with the SPD it would not have
passed. The murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht on January 15, 1919 and
the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933 may be taken as
markers for the beginning and end of the Weimar Republic.
- He mentions the Brecht-Weill musical The Three Penny Opera.
In connection with it he should have mentioned the singer/actress Lotte
Lenya and her haunting rendition of the hit song Mackie Messer
[Mack The Knife] from that show. Weill and Lenya married and ultimately
wound up in New York. They are both buried in Haverstraw, NY.
[I made
a 3½ minute music video out of Mack The Knife called Memories
of Weimar. It can be accessed by clicking here.]
- In his reference to Berlin as a way station for Russian refugees
from the Russian Revolution, he should have mentioned Vladimir Nabokov
who lived there for several years and contributed to the émigré
literature there before moving to the US.
- His paragraph on science was good, but he could have said a lot
more. He should at least have mentioned Lisa Meitner, the co-discoverer
of nuclear fission who was driven to exile in Sweden on July 13, 1938.
He mentions Werner Heisenberg, but doesn't mention the controversy that
still swirls around him in regard to the Third Reich not
developing an atomic bomb. He might also have mentioned the German
physicist Klaus Fuchs, who emigrated to England in the mid-30's, was
recruited to the British "Tube Alloys" (atomic bomb) project, and then
recruited for Soviet intelligence by Ruth Werner, a German national who
was a Soviet agent who was herself recruited in Shanghai by the famous
German Soviet agent Richard Sorge. Sorge, who had been a soldier in WW
I, was at the famous Frankfurt School in the 1920's, and set up a spy
network in Tokyo. He correctly reported that Japan would not attack the
USSR, thus freeing Red Army forces in the Far East. He was apprehended
by Imperial Japan's counterintelligence police on October 22, 1941 and
executed in Tokyo on November 7, 1944.
In this same vein one should
also mention Olga Benario who engineered the dramatic breakout of the
German communist Otto Braun from the Moabit prison in Berlin on April
11, 1927 and spirited him to Moscow. As a Comintern agent she was sent
to Brazil to assist in an ill-fated leftist insurrection which was
defeated on November 27, 1935. She was arrested in Rio de Janeiro on
March 5, 1936 and, with the assistance of the Gestapo, the FBI, and the
US State Department, she was identified and returned to Germany where
she was interred in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was killed
in a gas chamber in Bernsburg in February 1942.
- He mentions the failure of everyone to correctly estimate the danger
of Hitler and his NSDAP. In this connection he recalls a phrase from the
publication Tagebuch, "Lasst ihn heran!" which he translates as
"Let him in!" This isn't quite right. A better translation would be,
"Let him try!" or, literally, "Let him at it!" The implication being
that Germany's economic problems were intractable and that Hitler, like
the chancellors who preceded him, was bound to fail. Here's a
contemporary cartoon which shows that not "everyone" failed to estimate
Hitler correctly.
Der Spiegel
The title of the cartoon is, "Hugenberg's
Driving School."
The caption says, "Hugenberg to Papen: 'Let that newcomer up
front think he's doing the steering, the real control of the
economy is in our hands!' "
[Hugenberg and Papen were two prominent capitalists who were
also members of Hitler's
cabinet.] |
For others who "got it" one might mention Georgi Dimitrov [see quote at
top of page], one of the three acquitted defendants in the Reichstag Fire
trial, and the Comintern.
OTTO
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Karl Liebknecht
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Kurt Tucholsky
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Karl Schmitt
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Vladimir Nabokov
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Werner Heisenberg
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Ruth Werner
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Olga Benario
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Georgi
Dimitrov | |
LINK
24 January 2008
Eric Hobsbawm
Diary
Eric Hobsbawm
I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a
Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar
Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German
interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a
travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the
survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant
St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old
suddenly translated to this country in 1933. ‘Imagine yourselves,’ I told my
fellow Old Philologians, ‘as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and
transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to
England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated,
intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The
place was a terrible letdown.’
The cover of Eric Weitz’s excellent and splendidly illustrated Weimar
Germany: Promise and Tragedy brings back memories.[*] It shows the old Potsdamer Platz long before its
transformation into a ruin at the hands of Hitler and into Disneyland
architecture in the reunified Germany. Not that daytime cafés full of men in
trilbys like my uncle were the habitat of Berlin teenagers. We were more likely
to think of boats on the Wannsee, a place not yet associated with planned
genocide.
It is hard to remember, though Hitler made it the staple of his rhetoric in
the ironic plethora of voting that took place in its last year, that the
republic lasted only 14 years, and of these just six, sandwiched between a
murderous birth-period and the terminal catastrophe of the Great Slump, had a
semblance of normality. The massive international interest in it is largely
posthumous, the consequence of its overthrow by Hitler. It was primarily this
that raised the question of Hitler’s rise to power and whether it could have
been avoided, questions that are still debated among historians. Weitz
concludes, with many others, that ‘there was nothing inevitable about this
development. The Third Reich did not have to come into existence,’ but his own
argument drains most of the meaning out of this proposition. In any case, it was
clear to those of us who lived through 1932 that the Weimar Republic was on its
deathbed. The only political party specifically committed to it was reduced to
1.2 per cent of the vote and the papers we read at home debated what room there
was in politics for its supporters.
It was also Hitler who produced the community of refugees who came to play a
disproportionately prominent part in their countries of refuge and to whom
Weimar’s memory owes so much. Certainly they were far more prominent, except in
the world of ballet, than the much larger post-1917 Russian emigration. They may
have made little impact on the old entrenched professions – medicine, law – but
their impact on more open fields, and eventually on science and public life, was
quite remarkable. In Britain émigrés transformed art history and visual culture,
as well as the media through the innovations of Continental publishers,
journalists, photographers and designers.
For the basic achievements of the Weimar Republic and the reasons non-Germans
take an interest in it are not political but intellectual and cultural. The word
today suggests the Bauhaus, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, the
great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks
out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar
theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily add,
say, Carl Schmitt on the (rare) intellectual right, Ernst Bloch on the far left
and the great Max Weber in the middle.
In 1933 only Thomas Mann and a few films had made much of a stir beyond the
narrowest of niche-publics outside Central Europe, and possibly a small
homosexual subculture which discovered the attractions of Berlin in the final
Weimar years. Mann was, of course, an established master even before 1914. He
won the Nobel Prize in 1929, though not for his Weimar masterwork, The Magic
Mountain, so much as the more ancient Buddenbrooks. But who in
England had heard of Franz Marc, whose blue horses adorned the corridor of my
Gymnasium until the new regime removed them, together with our republican
headmaster?
At that time Paris was the unquestioned capital of the visual arts, Vienna
still the native home of both heavy and light music. German was not widely
spoken in the West outside the transatlantic diaspora or read outside classical
scholarship. Even today only German speakers recognise Brecht not just as a
dramatist but as one of the great 20th-century lyric poets. About the only
branch of Weimar literature that broke out of the Central European enclosure was
the anti-war fiction of the late 1920s, headed by Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front. Naturally, it was filmed by Universal, the only
Hollywood studio headed by a native German.
What, looking back, was so characteristic about the culture of a shortlived
German republic that nobody had really wanted and most Germans accepted as faute
de mieux at best? Every German had lived through three cataclysmic experiences:
the Great War; the genuine, if abortive German revolution which overthrew the
defeated Kaiser’s regime; and the Great Inflation of 1923, a brief manmade
catastrophe that suddenly made money valueless. The political right,
traditionalist, anti-semitic, authoritarian and deeply entrenched in the
institutions carried over from the Kaiser’s Reich (I still remember the title of
Theodor Plivier’s 1932 book, The Kaiser Went, the Generals Remained),
refused the republic totally. It regarded Weimar as illegitimate, the Versailles
Treaty as an undeserved national shame, and aimed at getting rid of both of them
as soon as possible.
But almost all Germans, including the Communists, were passionately against
Versailles and the foreign occupiers. I can still recall as a child seeing from
the train the French flag flying on Rhineland fortresses, with a curious sense
that this was somehow unnatural. Being both English and Jewish (I was ‘der
Engländer’ at school) I was not tempted into the German nationalism of my
schoolfriends, let alone into Nazism, but I could well understand the appeal of
both to German boys. As Weitz shows, the authoritarian right was always the main
danger both politically and, through their persistent and popular hostility to
‘Kulturbolschewismus’, culturally.
The major centrist thinkers – Mann, Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, none of them
instinctive democrats, but urged on by fear of the gun-happy right – managed to
justify a democratic republic as the necessary successor to an unrestorable
Reich. So, of course, did the main parties of the system: the majority Social
Democrats, who had not actually wanted the Kaiser to go, and the Catholic
Centre, transformed by the revolution from a confessional pressure group into a
government party. Beyond these the political left, shaped largely by revulsion
against the Great War, shock at the failed revolution of 1918, and hatred of the
old ruling class that survived it so well, was no less rejectionist than the
right. Joined by half of the anti-war independent breakaway from the Social
Democratic Party, the Communist Party acquired a mass base of intransigent
working-class opposition. Large enough to block the fashioning of a lasting
non-right Weimar regime, this left did not wish to contribute anything to its
practical politics except disgust.
For understandable reasons creative artists, radicalised by the horrors of
war and the hope and fury left behind by lost revolution, were attracted to it;
indeed, there are Weimar figures whose lasting achievement rests primarily on
the force of their distaste for the republic. Even genuine high talents like
George Grosz and Kurt Weill ceased to be very interesting when, after 1933, they
arrived in the US and felt at ease. This was even more the case with lesser
talents among the Expressionist writers and artists moved by pain and outrage to
find temporarily memorable ways to express humourless emotion at the top of
their voices. It was partly against these that Weimar found the nearest thing to
its own voice after the Great Inflation, hard-nosed, unsentimental, passionate
but cabaret-cool, in the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (‘New Sobriety’). For me, Weimar
still speaks now, as it did in 1932, with the voice of Mahagonny and
The Threepenny Opera, of Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz, of the underrated Erich Kästner, or of the pawky
political chansons of Erich Weinert.
But Weimar was more than a German phenomenon. Weitz, whose book is a superb
introduction to its world, probably the best available, gets so many things
about it right: not least the Berlin-centredness of Weimar culture, as distinct
from pre-1914 Germany with its flourishing artistic centres in Munich and
Leipzig. Yet he underestimates its role as a crucible for what after 1917 was
the major generator of intellectual and artistic innovation: post-revolutionary
Central and Eastern Europe. The prestige of Paris, ‘capital of the 19th
century’, obscured the fact that it no longer had major innovations to offer
between the wars except for Surrealism, itself largely derived from the
multinational Dada of the Zurich Central European refugees.
With its seven thousand-plus periodicals, 38,000 books (in 1927) and the most
formidable movie industry outside Hollywood, Germany was a vast market. With the
fall of the Habsburg Empire it naturally absorbed the large surplus talent of
what remained of Austria. Where would Weimar films be without Vienna, without
Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Wilder, Preminger or, for that matter, Peter Lorre? Its
stable of stars – Conradt Veidt, Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Elisabeth
Bergner – were trained under the Viennese Max Reinhardt, the chief influence on
the German-language theatre business. In Berlin my family, themselves migrants
from Vienna, went on living a social life largely centred on other Austrian
expatriate relatives and friends.
For different but equally obvious reasons Germany was Russia’s major window
to the west. Berlin was both the main centre of the anti-Soviet emigration and
the first stop on the western excursions of the new Soviet intellectuals and
artistic revolutionaries, some of whom published a multilingual review there.
Nor indeed should we forget that, in vain expectation of the German revolution,
the official language of the Comintern was not Russian but German.
Inevitably, this cultural mix fertilised Weimar and eventually Western
culture. The Bauhaus was throughout its existence a collective of Germans,
Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Swiss and Dutch. It is characteristic that what
amounted to a ‘Constructivist international’, as John Willett described it, was
set up by a collection of Hungarians, Dutch, Belgians, Romanians, Soviet
Russians and Germans at a meeting in Weimar with prospective headquarters in
Berlin. This was the culture that German émigrés imported into their countries
of refuge.
The central international role of Weimar Germany in 20th-century science is
equally easy to overlook. Einstein and Max Planck gave glory to Berlin, while
Göttingen under Max Born was, with Cambridge, the catalyst of the revolution of
quantum mechanics, the ‘boy physics’, whose communal idiom, like the language of
international Communism, was German. Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi, Oppenheimer,
Teller all worked or studied there. The most dramatic evidence for the
centrality of Weimar Germany are the 15 science Nobel Prizes won by Germans in
its 14 years, a number it took the subsequent fifty years to equal.
This was the last time Germany was at the centre of modernity and Western
thought. It might have held out better if the Weimar Republic had been followed
not by Hitler’s wrecking crew but by a more traditional reactionary government.
Yet in retrospect this option was as unreal as was the prospect of stopping
Hitler’s rise by a comprehensive anti-Fascist union. The fact is that no one,
right, left or centre, got the true measure of Hitler’s National Socialism, a
movement of a kind that had not been seen before and whose aims were rationally
unimaginable. Not even his intended victims fully recognised the danger. After
the summer election of 1932 which left the Nazis as much the largest party, but
short of a majority, the (Jewish) editor of the Tagebuch, a
left-liberal weekly we took at home, published an article whose headline struck
me even then as suicidal. I still see it before me: ‘Lasst ihn heran!’ (‘Why not
let him in!’) A few months later, with very different intentions, the
reactionaries around the aged President Hindenburg manoeuvred Hitler into office
thinking that he could be controlled.
All attempts to make the Weimar Republic look more firmly established and
stable, even before the world economic cataclysm broke its back, are historical
whistling in the dark. It moved briefly through the debris of a dead but
unburied past towards a sudden but expected end and an unknown future. For our
parents it promised only an unrecoverable past, while we dreamed of great
tomorrows; my ‘Aryan’ schoolmates in the form of a national rebirth, Communists
like myself, as the universal revolution initiated in October 1917.
Even its few years of ‘normality’ rested on the temporary quiescence of a
volcano that could have erupted at any time. The great man of the theatre, Max
Reinhardt, knew this. ‘What I love,’ he said, ‘is the taste of transience on the
tongue – every year might be the last.’ It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It
sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence
unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death. Moments when
one knows history has changed are rare, but this was one of them. That is why I
can still see myself walking home from school with my sister on the cold
afternoon of 30 January 1933, reflecting on what the news of Hitler’s
appointment as chancellor meant. A few days later someone brought the
duplicating machine of the SSB, my Communist schools organisation, to store
under my bed. They thought it would be safer in the flat of a foreigner. But
from now on nowhere was safe. Still, it was a strange and wonderful time in
which to discover oneself and the world in a Berlin that looked like the
potential capital of the 20th century, until the barbarians took over. When I go
there today, I still feel it has never recovered from 1933.
Note
* Princeton, 425 pp., £17.95, September 2007, 978 0 691 01695 5.
From the LRB letters page:
[ 7 February 2008 ] Andreas
Wesemann.
Eric Hobsbawm’s most recent book is Globalisation, Democracy and
Terrorism.
Other articles by this contributor:
ISSN 0260-9592
Copyright © LRB Ltd.,
1997-2008
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