First published as the Wintermärchen in The World Stage [Die Weltbühne], on January 3, 1933. With thanks to the Hamburg Culture Foundation / Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, for their generous funding of the translation and recording of these essays.
INTRODUCTION
“The year ’32 started with the Nazi dictatorship knocking at the door, the air full of the smell of blood, the fulfilment of the Boxheim plan apparently only a question of time. By the year’s end the Hitler party had been shaken by a considerable crisis, the long knives were put back quietly into their sheathes, and the only thing still visible to the public were the Führer’s long ears.”
This is how the anti-fascist and journalist Carl von Ossietzky
began one of his last surviving takes on the NSDAP and fascism, his essay The
Winter Fairytale, first published in the German original on 3rd
January, 1933, and reproduced in my new translation below. Knowing with hindsight
that Hitler was sworn in as chancellor less than four weeks after the essay
came out reminds us how volatile Weimar Republic politics were. After claiming
nearly fourteen million votes in the July 1932 Reichstag election, the
NSDAP’s vote had slumped to under twelve million when the country went to the
polls again four months later. Votes for the SPD and the German Communist Party
(KPD) at the second 1932 election were, when counted together, over a million
more than those for the Nazis, giving the left parties twenty-five more seats
than the NSDAP in the Reichstag. The inability to turn this numerical
advantage into an effective united front to prevent the fascists taking over
the state, the strategy Ossietzky hoped for till the last, demonstrates that
too many definitive historical developments of this era took far removed from
ballot boxes and parliaments.
Beyond historians of Weimar, few people outside Germany today know
much about Carl von Ossietzky. He lived the last five years of his life imprisoned
in Nazi camps, where he was starved, tortured, and generally maltreated to such
an extent that, when finally released in May 1938, he died a few days later in
hospital. As chief editor of the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne [The
World Stage], Ossietzky had been one of the first to expose the illegal
rearmament that was proceeding apace in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles:
his decision to publish an article in March 1929 on the illicit building of
military aircraft earned him his first prison sentence, which he sat out
between May and December 1932. This was the deed, coupled with his unbowing
anti-militarist and pro-free speech stance, that ultimately won him the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1935, and the increased international attention that accompanied
it. He was not permitted to travel to collect the award.
Ossietzky was a white, male intellectual, stylistically brilliant
and extravagant. He regularly worked together with German communists and other
Marxists,[1] and
repeatedly took the communists’ side in print polemics. But he also criticized
the KPD leadership sharply, and specifically its Stalinism, which often
conflicted with the politics of its voters. The “von” in his surname is loaded
with aristocratic connotations; in reality he grew up in a working-class
district of Hamburg, his father a stenographer and café manager on a lowish
income, his mother from a German-Polish family. These biographical facts,
coupled with a number of idiosyncrasies, such as becoming a Freemason at the
age of thirty in 1919, will make him a figure initially suspect to some
leftists. It’s worth placing such doubts alongside attacks that have been made
on his reputation by social-democratic centrists. In 1983, the influential
German social historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler launched an arrogant broadside
against Ossietzky:
“Every democracy has to be able to cope with radical, journalistic
criticism. But the ethic of responsibility, which democratic journalists
possess, can not be allowed to cross the boundary into a principled animosity
towards the state. In his way, Carl v. Ossietzky and his Weltbühne
contributed to weakening further the Republic, which was already deeply under
attack…”[2]
I sympathise with Ossietzky’s animosity towards specific
elements of the Weimar state. This Republic was saturated with militarists
and anti-democrats in leading positions from day one, a wobbly construction
erected on top of scores of murdered revolutionaries, who had been brutally
eliminated in prolonged counter-revolutionary violence from early 1919. Wehler
implicitly accuses Ossietzky of a lack of loyalty and patriotism towards the
Republic. This is a telling contradiction, as Ossietzky referred to himself as
a “republican”, in the sense of committed to the democratic tenets of the
Weimar Republic’s constitution. Wehler’s is a criticism blind to the moral
rightness of what Ossietzky achieved. If, for example, Ossietzky had decided
instead to keep silent on illegal rearmament, would such collusion really have
been the kind of “strengthening” that the Weimar Republic required?
Modern day fascism in Scotland, in the UK, and beyond, is an
entity with a markedly different form to the one that Ossietzky battled so
courageously with in central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Scottish streets
are not yet–or should we say: not yet again–defiled by the targeted deployment
of uniformed paramilitaries, who intimidate anyone who still dares to be, act,
or think in a way that the fascists categorise as different. The UK hovering
between rank 35 and 40 in the World Press Freedom Index is hardly something
we’d post with pride on Facebook, but it would be a disrespect to the dead, who
suffered more, to construct too direct an analogy between present
circumstances, and the levels of violence that journalists and other
oppositionists were exposed to in Germany around a century ago, even before the
NSDAP imposed their stranglehold on power.
Recent theorists of fascism, the late and great Neil Davidson
notable among them, have warned cogently about the dangers of blanketly
applying the fascist label to all elements of the far right, both today and in
history. In an interview with Salvage magazine published July 2017,
Davidson identified three characteristics of non-fascist far right parties,
which distinguish them from the fascist groups they collaborate so closely
with:
“1) they are electoral and seek to attain office through the democratic
means… 2) they do not worship the state and… 3) they do not seek to
“transcend” class.”
It is a distinction worth
dissecting, when Ossietzky’s journalistic pieces on the far right and fascism
are read again today. In A Winter Fairytale, published in Ossietzky’s own magazine, Die Weltbühne,
Ossietzky takes both an economist’s and a satirist’s brush to his depiction of
the Right. His analysis that the National-Socialist movement would be
unthinkable without the success that Nazis had in funding it, and of what
economics meant for Nazi politics, is bang-on relevant: all strategies against
the far right today must place economics at their core. Ossietzky’s elaborate
satirical style, on the other hand, may make his ideas hard to access for
twenty-first century readers. Why, on the edge of the abyss, does he bother
with far-flung analogies, and playground-type slanders? (Goebbels gets brushed
aside as a ‘puny, hysterical flea.’)
While so much has changed in the linguistic battles
between Left and Right during the intervening century, some motifs that occur
in Ossietzky’s work are still brandished today. Readers encountering
Ossietzky’s satirical and sarcastic remark in Winter Fairytale about
‘Cultural-Bolshevism wreaking havoc’ might be put in mind of how the far right
and alt-right today talk about ‘Cultural Marxism’, in order to tether their
attacks on the Left to a popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Suella
Braverman, the Johnson-appointed Attorney General for England and Wales since
February 2020, announced at a Tory meeting in March 2019 that her party was ‘at
war with Cultural Marxism.’[3] Conscious
that to do so was to join a notorious company of people including Anders
Breivik, Eduardo Bolsonaro (the son), and Steve Bannon, Braverman exploited a
meme that for the last one hundred years has conflated Jewish people,
Bolshevism, and leftism more generally, in what Samuel Moyn has called ‘the
Judeobolshevik myth’.[4] That
we have such thinkers in crucial positions in our state leaves me speechless,
and wishing for Ossietzky’s linguistic virtuosity in retaliating.
Other images deployed by Ossietzky will leave
contemporary readers scratching their heads. When he compares Hitler to ‘a
Gypsy Virtuoso’, we could think Ossietzky is being anti-zyganistic, or is using
anti-gyspyism, to use the term adopted by the European Parliament. Actually,
Ossietzky is referring to the successful German-language operetta known in
English under that name, written by the Hungarian-Jewish composer Emmerich
Kálmán. Whether the operetta itself can be seen as an attack on Roma, Sinti, or
on Travellers, is worth debating. Crudely chosen as the metaphor may be,
Ossietzky’s target is none of these groups, but rather a demagogue who,
calamitously, knew how to pull at people’s heart strings, in a sentimental
musical kind of manner.
Good satire, and not the type that merely reinforces prejudices, is a weapon of last resort, to be used by the (almost) powerless against the (far too) powerful ruling-class. Unshakeable dissidents like Ossietzky, who continued to ridicule the Brownshirts even after people began to see how dangerous that was, lent hope –and can still lend us hope –through the most dismal of political epochs. Dictatorships, including the NSDAP one, legitimated by over seventeen million votes in March 1933, will, in time, fall. Ossietzky’s often obscure and over-literary references are worth explaining, as I do in the footnotes to what follows. His writings merit a place in the arsenal of non-quotidian resources anti-fascists can be enriched by. Right-wingers and fascists can away and listen uncritically to Wagner, or quote brainlessly from the very worst bits of Heidegger, or Goethe. Ossietzky proved it in his practice: leftists can create, and do deserve, better forms of art.
WINTER FAIRLY TALE
The Knights
The year ’32
started with the Nazi dictatorship knocking at the door, the air full of the
smell of blood, the fulfilment of the Boxheim plan apparently only a question
of time.[v] By
the year’s end the Hitler party was to be shaken by a considerable crisis, the
long knives had been put back quietly into their sheathes, and the only thing
visible to the public were the Führer’s long
ears. German development speeds along, but does not move smoothly.
As I was
saying my farewells more than seven months ago, Brüning was still ruling[vi]
alongside that Groener who has become legendary during my absence,[vii] and
who’s now heaving his larger than life figure up through the stage’s trapdoor,
down which his friend von Schleicher[viii]
had allowed him to disappear so elegantly. The gentlemen’s club and
authoritarian government has been established. A whole Arthurian court of
majorly confused knights swarmed out – and back in again, into well-paid
positions. And Lancelot of the Lake became chancellor, while Merlin the
sorcerer, disguised as Professor Wagemann, tried to use his black arts on the
economic crisis.[ix]
Hocus pocus, hocus pocus, and three times round for the black tomcat. All
ministries were suddenly headed by slim cavaliers, as if they had risen up from
pre-Raphelite tapestries, and had re-imposed the Middle Ages upon us. The only
item missing among the various edicts issued to lead us back consistently to
the more beautiful past was the reintroduction of jus
primae noctis.[x] Even
though, in the aftermath of the havoc wreaked by Cultural-Bolshevism, pickings
worth talking about could no longer be guaranteed.
Papen’s
regime[xi]
started with a hefty upswell. Before the eyes of an incredulent nation, determined,
reactionary activity unfolded, untrammelled by even a modest grasp of reality.
This is how the state, directed in a fundamentally new way, and only lacking a
nominally monarchical leadership, collided with what society had actually
assembled: the lords riding speedily flew head over heels into the ditches.
They withdrew quietly to their breakfast club, and looked for the blue flower[xii] in
the wine menu. The whole thing felt like a manifestation from beyond the grave,
as if the young people of today needed to be shown what the state of 1910 had
looked like, and what screamingly incompetent people had grabbed the jobs right
at the top back then.
And now Kurt
von Schleicher has finally become chancellor. An ambitious man has arrived at
his destination. If he’s able to use his elbows as vigorously in his
Fatherland’s best interests as he did in his own career, we’re headed for a
golden age.
The Rural
Labourers
Papen wanted
to create a sacrum imperium[xiii]
together with Hitler. Hitler refused this offer, and the imperial
president’s advisors were not in the mood to ride alone with the knight
Lancelot.
As von
Schleicher takes up his work, the Nazi party finds itself in the most
embarrassing situation possible, its instinctive drive to expand, coupled with its
fear of both legal responsibility and of revolutionary action, having led it to
absurd places. The Left, liberated from the eternal phantom of Hitler, greet
the new chancellor with a sigh of relief, and cheerfully ascribes to his
statesmanly genius that which is partly the achievement of anonymous social
forces, and partly the natural result of a dilettantish layer of leaders, whose
lips need to be scrutinized more than their fists need to be taken into
account. We do have to account for pockets, however, in the weeks ahead of us:
whoever is able to fill them will also get the party on their side.
The Nazi’s
crisis is principally a financial one. The layer in the party interested in
theories has always been extraordinarily thin. The intellectuals parted company
with the party along with Otto Strasser[xiv] and
Buchrucker already,[xv] or
gather in the Tat-network,[xvi] and
innumerable other conventicles. The majority of party members consist of the
dumbest of the dumb, with the brown-shirts’ cadres held together by cash
payments, and not by convictions. The party’s head office has been spending
like there’s no tomorrow, living off the attitude that it would spread itself
over the state with its plagues of locusts in the foreseeable future: it’s been
deceiving itself. The old hands that fed it from industry are either bankrupt,
or have been disappointed by a number of social-radical episodes. In the middle
of a dirt poor era, the party’s propaganda and the lifestyles of its leaders
were grounded in a level of opulence that failed to dazzle the socialist
workers. But it did manage to trick that putrefying petit bourgeoisie, which is
ready to stone any prophet who cannot afford a Mercedes and a suite at the Kaiserhof.[xvii]
This nouveau riche style is under threat, however; SA people, put up in
unheated barracks without wages, can smell a con of Klante-like proportions[xviii]
behind the Hitler Passion Play –and whine in response. It is not infeasible
that Adolphus[xix] and
those attached to him become more spiritual as the misery increases; but the
hungry, and those thirsty for the spoils of battle, who are counting on the
Nazis, can now hardly be bewitched by intellectual or spiritual incentives.
The conflict
between Hitler and Gregor Strasser has brought the party’s inner difficulties to
the fore. We choose not to dare to forecast the possible progress of this
dispute. It is even feasible that, according to the unfathomable code of honour
that these truly Teutonic individuals follow, a reconciliation will be possible
after a plentiful bombardment with mud. The man Gregor, as strong as a tree, is
unquestionably no louche whinge bag like big Adolf; but no one yet has got to
the bottom of what he actually wants, as a personality, separate from the
cohort around him. For a year and a day, Gregor’s sedulous friends have been
murmuring about him being the “Real Thing”–and not a mere blowhard and
Schlagododro[xx] for
meetings like the others–but rather a man carrying a ready-to-roll program for
the fraternity of all working people in his pocket. Only a few weeks ago, a
Gregorian surprised us with the news that a ‘trade union front’ existed, under
the command of this perpetually ‘coming man’.[xxi] We
have followed Gregor Strasser with that degree of interest that awakens
vitality, and have found nothing to justify either dread or hope. He simply
always presents himself as a widely moralizing rhetorician and interpreter of
social-conservative ideas, which are swept away from under the tables of
literary coffee-house tables today without a further thought; but, on the other
hand, he also presents himself as a thoroughly indeterminate politician, who
just as willingly plays the role of the national-revolutionary, as the part of
the conduit to Herr von Schleicher and to the Centre Party. Precisely because
this Gregor possesses likeable characteristics, you are inclined to scrutinize
him with a matter-of-factness that would be wasted on a puny, hysterical flea
like Goebbels: even though this scrutiny will bring nothing to light apart from
a sack full of fog.
It is of
course a grand spectacle that a party, which only a few months ago was
demanding everything, and was in a position to do so because of its dimensions,
today finds itself bent over with a painful stitch, and openly displays its
future dividing lines, determined by class. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate
to warn people against over the top expectations. The economic foundational
ground is still favourable for breeding desperadoes. The only thing capable of
thoroughly stripping national-fascism of its laurels would be a new period of
general economic growth, and even the most unconditional optimists don’t dare
to posit that this is possible soon.
It should not
be forgotten that a modern party represents a concentrated power structure, of
a kind previously unknown. We have experienced mutiny and secession, one after
the other, in different parties–and what has been the upshot? Whoever has the
key to the treasury chests, however empty these may be, has the gears of the
party in their hands and rules over the situation: these are also the people
who can chuck out any upstarts. The liberal and tolerant party member of the
old school is caught in the process of death; it is paragraphs in the program,
and not the manifesto, which is the Quran of the modern party. As long as
disciplinary judgements can be enforced, the omnipotence of party headquarters
remains unthreatened. The parties of Wels,[xxii] of
Thälmann,[xxiii]
and of Hugenberg[xxiv]
are much the same in this regard. Compared to them, the parties of August Bebel[xxv] or
Eugen Richter[xxvi]
were intellectual arenas. The form of the party today is determined by
Mussolini and Stalin. Recruiting stations are not places for discussion.
That said,
the crisis of National-Socialism contains a real political core, which is
admittedly not easy to see. An entropic process is under way, as the party
attempts to find its original base again. During its meteoric rise, it was
doing internships and scrounging wherever it could. It copied the KPD, and was
not shy of participating in a strike alongside them; Herr Göring defended the
rights of democratic parliamentarism in such ringing tones that you would think
his name was Erich Koch-Weser.[xxvii]
This period of social revolutionaries and republican escapades appears to be
definitely behind them, the mood now one of a Magdalene asylum entering into
the Brown House after too many excesses. The party, which in the recent past
still spread itself over various political camps, wants to become the party of
the Right again, and wants to tie its colours to the mast after a number of
zigzag moves. Brown has to turn itself back into yellow.
The Hitler
party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured
against conventional yardsticks. Even if it were to explode into smithereens
today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters.[xxviii]
It must satisfy not only a particular political need, but also a specifically
German emotional condition. Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness
have not acted as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated
unconditional and subservient followers. This fact remains, and cannot be
easily brushed aside.
The
National-Socialist Party fulfilled for fifteen million Germans exactly that
which these voters imagine under the heading of a political party. The German
bourgeoisie has never before been so honest–honest against itself–during any
saeculum[xxix]
as in these few years of national-socialist growth. The intellectual plaster
work no longer existed, the academic façade of wealthier decades was no longer
with us. In its crudeness, the economic collapse revealed the coarse
anti-intellectualism and the bourgeois societal layers’ hard greed for
power–attributes which had otherwise remained half-anonymous, or which had been
siphoned off into private spheres–for all to see. The only previous occasion on
which nationalistic bloodlust and political helplessness have celebrated a
wedding so thoughtlessly was at the start of the war. In this regard, the
National-Socialist Party is August 4, 1914,[xxx]
heralded in perpetuity. It carries forward the illusions of this saddest of
dates in German history most vividly, into an altered era.
The great,
nativist Führer, who has all the allures and outer appearance of a Gypsy
Virtuoso,[xxxi]
might have his box-office hit and fade with it. But the evil and ugly instincts
he has called up will not blow away so easily, and will plague the whole of
public life in Germany for long years to come. New political and social systems
will replace the old ones, but the after-effects of Hitler will also rise
again, and later generations will have to step up for the wrestling match that
the German Republic was too cowardly to fight.
The
Inbetweener
Schopenhauer
once mocked that academic philosophy has raised Socrates’ wisdom into an axiom,
because university philosophers produce no human work of their own to vouchsafe
their status. We wish to raise a similar question with regards to the gushing
articles about Herr von Schleicher’s statesmanly talents.
The big city
press doesn’t know the meaning of the word gratitude. Where are their old
favourites Brüning and Groener now? Didn’t Brüning sup on mystical gifts, a
figure who also wrestled with God’s angel in his chambers regarding the
forthcoming emergency decrees [Notverordnungen]? Wasn’t Groener
self-evidently seen as Hindenburg’s successor? Où
sont les neiges d’antan?[xxxii]
Herr
von Schleicher is essentially a behind-the-scenes personality, who’s performed
his way into the limelight in a masterly manner. His military achievement
consists of doing away with his frontmen by following the classic rules of an
elimination strategy. His political achievement has been to create a position
of absolute primacy for the military, inside the bourgeois state’s dying
manoeuvres. The main stages of his dazzling career are simultaneously the
Weimar Republic’s Stations of the Cross. Perhaps it is too severe to yank
critically at the laurels bestowed as an advance on a new man. The politer
English and French papers give a person a chance in such cases, and refrain
from laying traps, at first at least. One thing, however, does explain the
warmth that is being expended towards Herr von Schleicher: he’s Herr von
Papen’s successor. That makes it not very hard to count as a genius. And if,
instead of Schleicher, Michaelis[xxxiii]
would have stepped up soulfully from his peaceful old people’s home onto the
chancellor’s throne, everyone would again have happily cried: “hail Ceasar!”
In
the democratic press, freshly dusted Christmas angels continue to fly up to
proclaim a new liberal era. The short pause for breath over the public holidays
is overvalued. The parties are tired of elections and are taking up new
positions. It is not only von Papen’s political course that has brought
economic ruin but also Brüning’s, a fact people like to ignore. This road back
is also blocked. What should come into
being? A parliamentary regime is almost unthinkable, and the only possibility,
now that several alternatives have already been attempted, is the new, gruffer
dictatorship. And so we sit by the fireside, looking dreamily into the red
embers, and tell fairy stories about progress, freedom and reconciliation:
fairy stories that won’t last as long as this winter.
General
von Schleicher has become chancellor during a peculiar phase. Germany has shown
itself in this last summer to be as incapable of counterrevolution as it was of
revolution in 1918, and now a certain perplexity prevails amongst the Left:
that lot on the Right are neither cleverer nor more energetic than themselves.
It is thanks to this confusion that von Schleicher has gained a good chunk of
his new-found authority. His bards may claim that his head is veritably teeming
with political ideas, though it’s very hard to find any evidence of this, and
he carefully disguised any trace of them in his radio speech. It is, by
contrast, indisputable that he can draw on an exceptional range of personal
contacts, and practices passionately that diplomatic art that used to be called
“financing.” We can rest assured that disputes with his old breakfast guest
Hitler, and with the now resentful Brüning, will proceed in the most tried and
trusted forms of cabinet politics, which are no longer entirely modern. Lovers
of cabals of all varieties are going to get their two shillings shillings
worth–but will that fill the bellies of the unemployed?
Indeed,
it must be assumed that the less amusing dimension of politics will remain in
the hands of Herr Bracht,[xxxiv]
who had already demonstrated that the soul of a gendarme can be united most
happily with the fist of an old removals’ man: and who walks behind his jovial
lords like an executioner swinging his axe. After nice Christmas wishes have
rung out into emptiness, the last cabinet’s politics will be continued
faithfully, which favour the large landowners, and which mean job cuts for
social-democratic civil servants. Herr von Schleicher was the muscly arm of von
Papen’s government. In that role he may have learnt that it won’t do to switch
off your head completely; and that he certainly hasn’t been fetched to lead the
country because he’s seen as an immense political talent, but because he
represents the Wehrmacht, the single stable force amid the dissolution
of all other powers-that-be.
Which
brings us to the end of a masquerade that’s lasted for years, and from which
genuine power can step out unmasked. This will rule dictatorially, until a
newly-structured power opposes it. It would be presumptuous to want to make
predictions regarding von Schleicher’s person: the absence of noteworthy
counterweights from among the citizenry means that he’ll probably be able to
hold on for long, even if his advisors, helpers and casual labourers will
change frequently. One thing is certain, however: he opens the sequence of
Praetorian Guard[xxxv]
chancellors.
[1] See, for
example, Ossietzky’s article in the September 1930 issue of the monthly
communist magazine Der Rote Aufbau [The Red Construction]. Carl von Ossietzky, “Nationalsozialismus oder
Kommunismus”in Der Rote Aufbau, ed.
Willi Münzenberg, September 1930.
[2] Hans-Ulrich
Wehler, “Leopold Schwarzschild contra Carl v. Ossietzky. Politische
Vernunft für die Verteidigung der Republik gegen ultralinke ‚Systemkritik‘ und
Volksfront-Illusionen”, In: Ders.: Preußen ist wieder chic … Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays. Frankfurt
a. M. 1983, S. 77–83.
[3]
Bravermann cited in James Butler’s “Cumming’s Footprint” in the LRB Blog,
of 14th February, 2020.
[4] For Moyn’s account of the history of the
Right’s use of the term ‘Cultural Marxism’, see Samuel Moyn, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old” in The
New York Times, 13th November, 2018. Last accessed 3rd
September, 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html
[v] More
commonly referred to as the Boxheim documents, these were plans for a violent
seizure of power by NSDAP members, written on August 5, 1931 on the estate of
Boxheim, Hesse. Leaked to the public on November 25, 1931, the scheme caused
widespread outrage.
[vi] Heinrich
Brüning was chancellor from March 30, 1930 to May 30, 1932.
[vii] Wilhelm
Groener was Defense Minister from January 1928, a function he combined with his
role of Minister of the Interior from October 1931. He was toppled from power,
along with Brüning, in May 1932.
[viii] Kurt von
Schleicher had been General of the Infantry, before becoming the last
chancellor of the Weimar Republic, from December 3, 1932 to January 28, 1933.
Carl von Ossietzky encountered him in person in late 1931-early 1932, when von
Schleicher called at Ossietzky’s editorial office, advising him to flee
Germany: Ossietzky had been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment at the end of
1931, but his sentence had not yet been enforced. Von Schleicher’s plans to
achieve a so-called “third position” or cross-front government, which would
combine the far right and the far left to split the National-Socialist
movement, failed. President von Hindenburg refused to back the violent
dissolution of the Reichstag without new elections, which von Schleicher
was counting on to achieve his plan.
[ix] Ernst
Wagemann was an economist, and president of the Imperial Office for Statistics
from 1923-1933. In this function, he was also the chief returning officer for
the Reichstag elections between 1924
and 1933. The “black arts” to which von Ossietzky is satirically referring were
Wagemann’s plans, communicated in a public lecture of February 1, 1933, which
argued for an expansion of the total amount of money in circulation in the
national economy, and proposed changes to the German banking system. Wagemann’s
plans were rejected by the German govnerment in February 1932.
[x] Jus primae noctis was a supposed legal
right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with
legally ‘subordinate’ women, in particular on the women’s wedding nights.
[xi]
Franz von Papen (1879-1969) was chancellor between 1st June, 1932
and 3rd December, 1932.
[xii] The ‘blue flower’, commonly known as
cornflower, was a key symbol for Novalis and other German Romantic writers from
the start of the nineteenth century. Ossietzky’s image of the knights looking
for the blue flower in the wine menu is a criticism of the decadent
aestheticism of so many of his contemporaries.
[xiii] The Sacrum
Imperium Romanum, or Holy Roman Empire, also known unofficially as the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation, was the name given to the conglomerate of
territories and ethnicities in Central Europe, from the early Middle Ages until
its break up in 1806. German nationalists envisaged a Third Reich in this
tradition, with the German Empire from 1871-1918 conceived of as the Second
Reich.
[xiv] Otto
Strasser (1897–1974), working together with his brother Gregor Strasser
(1892–1934) represented a worker-based tendency within Nazism. Although it
clashed with Hitler’s leadership, it was just as viruently nationalist and
anti-Semitic as the prevailing wing of the party. Various branches of the
far-right in the UK have worked with Stasserist ideas, particularly since the
1970s.
[xv] Bruno
Buchrucker led the Küstrin Putsch on October 1, 1923, which tried and failed to
bring down the democratic government under Gustav Stresemann, and replace it
with a nationalist dictatorship. Buchrucker joined the NSDAP in 1926, and from
1928-1930 he wrote regularly for the magazines published by Otto Strasser.
Following conflicts between Otto Strasser and Hitler regarding the latter’s
decision to pursue a legal course to bring about a National-Socialist take over
of power, Strasser, Buchrucker and twenty-four others signed a declaration
entitled The Socialists Leave the NSDAP,
which they did in order to form the splinter group the Fighting Community of
Revolutionary National-Socialists.
[xvi] The
monthly magazine Die Tat–‘The Deed’–was an intellectual journal that
took up increasingly anti-democratic, nativist and nationalist positions from
September 1929, when Hans Zehrer took on the editorship of the publication.
Working closely together with Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, Ferdinand Fried, Giselher
Wirsing and others, Zehrer’s magazine had a circulation of almost 30,000,
roughly double the reach of von Osseitzky’s own Weltbühne. One of its
main opponents, the daily Berliner Tageblatt, referred to the Tat-network
as “National Socialism’s literary body guard,” and its members as “noble Nazis
or salon Nazis.”
[xvii] The Hotel
Kaiserhof , Berlin’s first luxury hotel, was Hitler’s permanent residence
from 1932, the year in which the hotel’s upper floor became the NSDAP’s
temporary party headquarters.
[xviii] Max
Klante, 1882/1883-1955, was one of the Weimar Republic’s most celebrated
con-men. Promising fantastical dividends, he used an investment scheme to trick
a total of 260 000 people out of money that would have a purchasing power of
around 25 million euro in today’s terms. He was sentenced to three years
imprisonment in December 1922, for this large scale fraud.
[xix] Ossietzky’s mocking name for Adolf Hitler.
[xx] Schlagododro is a protagonist in Friedrich
Spielhagen’s novel What Will Become of It? [Was will das werden],
serialized in 1886 in the widely read illustrated magazine Die Gartenlaube.
Osseitzky’s use of this popular cultural reference indicates that he sees
Schlagododro as someone who exists to make up the numbers: a put-down against
National-Socialist non-entities.
[xxi] The concept
of “the coming man” was much discussed in the period immediately before the
National-Socialist’s rise to state power. In the early 1930s, Hans Zehrer,
editor of the anti-democratic Die Tat was describing von Schleicher as
“the coming man.” (See Ebbo Demant, Hans
Zehrer als politischer Publizist. Mainz 1971, 110 ff.) The philosopher
Martin Heidegger also used the phrase ‘the coming man’, on this occasion about
Hitler, in 1931. See the critical edition of Mein Kampf, edited by
Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger and Roman Töppel, and
published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich 2016.
[xxii]
Otto Wels (15th September, 1873 – 16th September, 1939) was the chairman of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1919 until his death in 1939, and
a member of parliament from 1920 to 1933.
[xxiii] Ernst Thälmann (16th April, 1886 – 18th
August, 1944) was a German communist politician, and leader of the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933.
[xxiv]
Alfred Hugenberg (19th June,
1865 – 12th March, 1951) was
a major armaments capitalist and a politician, leading the German National
People’s Party from 1928, and serving in Hitler’s first cabinet as Minister of
Agriculture.
[xxv]
August Bebel led the Social Democratic Party of Germany, from 1892 until his
death in 1913.
[xxvi]
Eugen Richter (1838-1906)
[xxvii] Erich Koch-Weser (26th February, 1875 –
19th October, 1944) was the leader of the German Democratic Party between 1924
and 1930, serving in various Weimar Republic governments as a cabinet minister.
[xxviii]
Ossietzky has made a slight mistake here. The party won 13.7 million
votes at the July 1932 Reichstag election, well short of 15 million.
[xxix] Osseitzky is using the Latin concept of a saeculum
to characterize the period of rapid NSDAP growth as a distinct historical
epoch.
[xxx] The
German invasion of Belgium began on August 4, 1914.
[xxxi] Der
Zigeunerprimas (known as Sari
or The Gypsy Virtuoso in
English-speaking countries)is a
three-act operetta,
composed
by Emmerich Kálmán, which premiered
in 1912. It was adapted into a German silent film of
the same name, directed by Carl Wilhelm, in 1929.
[xxxii] Where are the snows of yesteryear?
[xxxiii] Georg Michaelis (8 September 1857 –
24 July 1936) was chancellor
of Germany for three-and-a-half months in 1917, from July
14 to November 1. He was the first chancellor not born into the aristocracy to
hold the office.
[xxxiv] Franz Bracht (November 23, 1877-November
26, 1933) was one of the chief decision-makers behind the Preusenschlag,
the coup to take over the Free
State of Prussia–the largest component state in the Reich–led by chancellor Franz von Papen on July 20, 1932. President
Hindenburg had already
gifted the coup constitutional weight on July 14, by signing an undated
emergency decree under Article 48 of the Weimar Republic’s constitution: it was
left up to von Papen when exactly to make use of this legal authority. Until
July 1932, Prussia had been ruled by a centre-left coalition headed by SPD
minister-president Otto Braun. Bracht, the coup’s strategist, became Reich
Commissioner for Prussia from July 20, 1932, making him effectively the
unelected governor of Prussia. On October 29, 1932, Bracht also became a member
of von Papen’s imperial cabinet, and remained a cabinet minister until Hitler became
chancellor on January 30, 1933.
[xxxv] The Praetorian Guard (Latin: cohortes praetoriae) was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members served as personal bodyguards and intelligence officers for Roman emperors. In this rather unfocussed analogy, von Ossietzky implies that the chancellors from von Schleicher on will merely be yes-men, providing cover for President Hindenburg and other far right forces that will essentially run the state.