Weimar Years: These Are the Things I Remember

Gerhard moved from Tubingen to Frankfurt in 1922, turbulent times that followed the First World War, with the fledgling Weimer Republic under siege from both the left and the right, and with economic instability leading to the devastating hyperinflation of 1923. Though he focused largely on his studies, his life was profoundly affected by events surrounding him. He recalled several major issues.In these postwar years Gerhard became aware of anti-Semitism in ways he had not experienced before. "The early signs were that, with the general decay of, we could say, Victorian formalities in life after the war, the expressions of political opinion became more and more vulgar.... With the unfavorable economic developments after the First World War, many political parties looked for a scapegoat to blame; and the Jews-not only in Germany-were a fabulous scapegoat for such expressions."Political parties with frankly anti-Semitic platforms had campaigned in Germany since late in the nineteenth century, and conservative parties expressed anti-Semitism even when it was not part of their official platform;1 but growing anti-Jewish sentiment expanded late in the Great War, when chauvinistic pro-war nationalists charged that Jews contributed to armisticeseeking initiatives and that Germany lost the war because she had been stabbed in the back by internal forces, Jews prominent among them. In response to the armistice initiative, a pro-war German nationalistic Fatherland Party was formed in 1917.2 That party was dissolved after the 1918 revolutions, but in the next year one of its members, Anton Drexler, led formation of the German Workers Party, which later became the National Socialist Workers Party. Until the end of the war, Gerhard recalled, expressions of anti-Semitism in most walks of life were heard but were muted by a general code of civility. With defeat in the War, the expression of anti-Semitism, as of all political differences, grew more vulgar, and discourse often was displaced by violence.Moreover, after the war, anti-Jewish and anticommunist feelings reinforced each other, and anti-Semitic ultranationalists made Jews and communists their common targets. Although the vast majority of Jews were politically moderate, voted with Social Democrats and centrist parties, and loathed communism, some Jews had leading roles in the short-lived radical socialistcommunist Spartacist uprising in Berlin at the beginning of January 1919. The uprising was quashed fiercely by January 12 (with assent of the new and still unstable Ebert government) by the paramilitary Freikorps (Free Corps), a group of private armies formed by former senior army officers. The Spartacist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, both Jews, were assassinated on January 15,1919. At about the same time, Kurt Eisner, a Jew, had declared and led a short-lived Bavarian Socialist Republic on November 7, 1918; he was assassinated on February 21, 1919, by a fanatical nationalist aristocratic student, Anton Graf von Arco. In the confusion following the assassination, a Social Democrat cabinet tried unsuccessfully to rule in Bavaria, and a communist leader of Russian Jewish origin, Eugen Levine, proclaimed a Bolshevik regime in Munich.By March, a Red Army assembled by the communists was routed in an invasion by 30,000 troops of the Free Corps, who established a "White" counterrevolutionary government in Munich. Wolfgang Kapp, a founder of the Fatherland Party, led a 5,000-member force of the Free Corps in an attempted government takeover in Berlin, in March 1920, forcing the elected leader of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, to flee temporarily. Heeding a call from the government, however, workers across the country did not accede to the Kapp forces' demands and went on a general strike. The putsch attempt was defeated. Kapp fled to Sweden.Jews who had prominent government positions in the Social Democratic administration of the Republic were also targets of right-wing assassins. …