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. 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.
[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 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 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 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 (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]
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.