Tag: Weimar

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 3^rd January, 1933 and reproduced in my new translation below. Recalling that Hitler was sworn in as chancellor less than four weeks after this essay was published 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, 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 many definitive historical developments of this era took place 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 unbowed, 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 was often not in sync with its voters’ politics. Although the “von” in Ossietzky’s surname may prompt aristocratic associations, he actually 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 some idiosyncrasies, such as becoming a Freemason at the age of thirty in 1919, have led some leftists to view him with suspicion. Social-democratic centrists have taken a further step, and have attacked his reputation. 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 sympathize 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 categorize 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 target: 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 operetta known of 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 Travelers, 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, light-opera 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 rushes forwards, but does not travel smoothly.

As I was saying my goodbyes 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 established itself. 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-Raphaelite 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, untrammeled 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 Laborers

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 honor 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 favorable 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 colors 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 conjured 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 favorites 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 front men 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 maneuvers. 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 Caesar!”

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. 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 outlive 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 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 favor 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 laborers will change frequently. One thing is certain, however: he opens the sequence of Praetorian Guard[xxxv] chancellors.

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[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 14^th 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, 13^th November, 2018. Last accessed 3^rd 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 Boxheim estate in 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 government 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 1^st June, 1932 and 3^rd 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 breakup 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 virulently 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 bodyguard,” 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 conmen. 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 (19^th  June, 1865 – 12^th  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]          Ossietzky 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 center-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. Ossietzky uses this analogy to impy that German chancellors from von Schleicher on will be mere yes-men, providing cover for President Hindenburg and other far right forces that will run the state.

First published as “Rückkehr” [Coming Home] in Die Weltbühne [The World Stage] on December 27, 1932. With thanks to the Hamburg Culture Foundation / Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, for their generous funding of the translation and recording of these essays.

A spell in prison is a huge experience that no political human can erase from their being.

It provides a connection with a sequestered world that rises up, walled in amongst us, and about which we know less than about Tibet, or the Easter Islands. Prison as an institution, which in Germany today is no longer tasked with punishing, but rather with improving and educating, has, as it were, been promoted to the field-hospital of the bourgeois order. My encounter with prison was not with a house of intentional severity and traditional cruelties, but with what remains a house of lamentation nonetheless, in which one more sad globe circles behind every iron door, trapped in their orbits by the entanglements of fate. “Guilty?” is not a question uttered in this house, where only accommodates victims. As I walked out two days before Christmas, I had a retching feeling in my throat, like a bad conscience, because I was being allowed to return home, while others have to stay. 

I do not claim there’s anything special about this feeling. Countless others have sensed the same, while only one category of beings seems entirely free of such emotions, and that’s the judiciary. If those who pronounce judgements could just once be made familiar with the secret of solitary confinement, how different would sentencing have to become, even under bourgeois justice. During the recent amnesty debate in the Reichstag,[1] a German-National member of parliament[2] defended the opinion that frequent conditional discharges of prisoners would lame the judges’ ability to take pleasure in their profession. This parliamentarian is certainly a very upright fellow. But what a notion of how judges work!

It is better only to speak of certain happenings after the impressions received have really been worked through. For today, it falls to me only to provide a conclusion to a particular chapter.

There’s been slightly too much talk about me in the Weltbühne in the past weeks. Newspaper people should be heard, but not seen. I earnestly regret that this small lapse in style needs to be noted, and I hold circumstances responsible that are outwith the hands of any of our friendly authors. Now, where I return to the editorial office, I have a heart-felt need to express my thanks to all those who have supported my release through spoken and written words, through public affirmation, and through political action; I also thank all those who enabled a sign of their sympathy to reach my cell. It’s evident that a considerable part of this campaign was about the cause, and not about my person. The fight for the amnesty this time was not merely about a couple of individuals, as it still was in the Max Hölz case.[3] We know that it was the Social-Democratic parliamentary party that ultimately tipped the scales, by insisting that if the man convicted of high treason was not released, they would withdraw their support from the whole bill. When, later, the requisite two-thirds majority had been assembled, a Social-Democratic representative exclaimed resignedly: “so now he [Hölz] can abuse us again. Hmm.”

The Weltbühne can look back on six months rich in battles, during which it protected its intellect and its continuing existence. The Leipzig judgement from 23 November, 1931 has proven to be a dud shell.[4] This is what all the editorial staff, led by Hellmut von Gerlach, have achieved together. We do not want to lose ourselves in mutual adulation or talk about what great men we are: we’re a confederacy, if you like, but we’re certainly not a legally constituted association. We have come through a dramatic period together, even though separated physically, and that unites us more than statues or ceremonies.

The court is still in session.

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[1]             A debate on an amnesty for certain groups of prisoners had taken place on December 9, 1932. Von Ossietzky himself was released on December 22, 1932.

[2]             A representative for the German National People ‘s Party.

[3]             Max Hölz, 1889-1933, was a German Communist, who participated in several dynamite attacks against “symbols of the Reaction”, as he put it, in 1921. That same year, the Weimar authorities reacted by convicting him on trumped up charges of the manslaughter of a large landowner called Hess, for which he was given a life sentence in a hard-labor prison. Following letters sent by Hölz in 1927 to the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, a group of the Weimar Republic’s most prominent liberal and leftist intellectuals–including Bert Brecht, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann–published a demand to the authorities to re-examine Hölz’s sentence. Coupled with a sustained campaign by the German Communist Party against Hölz’s political imprisonment, this secured an amnesty, with Hölz released from prison in July 1928.

[4]             On 23 November, 1931, the high court [Reichsgericht] in Leipzig, passed judgement on Ossietzky and his staff writer, the aviation expert Walter Kreiser, who were both given an eighteen month prison sentence for “the national betrayal of military secrets.” This was the result of an article Kreiser had published under a pseudonym in Die Weltbühne in March 1929, which discussed the illegal and secret cooperation between the German armed forces and the aviation industry to produce new military aircraft. Unlike Ossietzky, Kreiser did not sit out his sentence, fleeing to France eight days after the verdict, and before it could be enforced.