Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (25 page)

Almost inevitably, the abortive Left risings, leading to the legalizing of the
Freikorps
and the Right’s recovery of confidence, produced in turn an army
putsch.
It came in March 1920, under Wolfgang Kapp, an old friend of Tirpitz and co-founder with him of the Fatherland Party in 1917. About half the army supported Kapp but the Right politicians and the civil servants refused to join him, and after four days he fled to Sweden. Unfortunately, the Far Left had again opted for violence instead of backing the new republican institutions. In the Ruhr they raised a ‘Red Army’ of 50,000 workers, the only time in the whole history of Weimar that the Marxists were able to put a sizeable military force into the field. The emergence of this body gave the army command an uncovenanted opportunity to retrieve its reputation as the custodian of law and order. In April it marched into the Ruhr and reconquered it from the Marxists, after dreadful brutalities on both sides. As a result, control of the army passed from the hands of the one reliably republican general, Walther Reinhardt, into those of a
Junker
reactionary, General Hans von Seeckt, who was dedicated to the destruction of the Versailles Treaty. Seeckt immediately set about strengthening the ‘Russian connection’, evading the arms-limitation clauses of the Treaty by constructing secret arms factories in Russia, a process accelerated by the signing of the Rapallo Treaty in 1922. He also purged the army of its republican elements, cashiering the
NCOS
and privates who had opposed the Kapp
putsch
for ‘breaking discipline’.
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He turned the army from a politically neutral instrument into the matrix of a new, anti-republican state, which would implement the old programme of the Easterners. Thus the army slipped from Weimar’s control and moved into the opposition. When President Ebert asked Seeckt in 1923 where the army stood, he replied: ‘The
Reichswehr
stands behind me.’
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The resurgence of the Right was soon reflected in politics. In the June 1920 elections the Social Democrat vote collapsed, the old Weimar coalition lost power, and thereafter the men who had created the Republic no longer controlled it. More serious was the erosion of the rule of law. The judiciary, which had never liked the Republic, decided like the army to go into opposition. The perpetrators of the Kapp
putsch
were never brought to book in the courts. Moreover, the events of spring 1920 sharply increased a tendency already observable the previous year for judges to treat political violence, which had now become endemic in Germany, on a selective political basis. They reasoned that, since violence had originated with the Left, a violent response by the Right was in a sense designed to protect public order, and therefore justified. Thanks to Lenin’s terror, this view was widely shared in Germany, so that juries tended to back the judges. It was the same argument that allowed the presentation of anti-Semitism as ‘defensive’. But of course it played straight into the hands of the right-wing thugs of the
Freikorps
and
Bunds
and
Orden
, and helped the transformation of Germany from an exceptionally law-abiding into an exceptionally violent society. Statistics compiled in 1922 over a four-year period (1919–22) show that there were 354 murders committed by the Right and twenty-two by the Left. Those responsible for every one of the left-wing murders were brought to court; ten were executed and twenty-eight others received sentences averaging fifteen years. Of the right-wing murders, 326 were never solved; fifty killers confessed, but of these more than half were acquitted despite confessions; and twenty-four received sentences averaging four months.
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The Right, in short, could practise violence with little fear of legal retribution. Judges and juries felt they were participating in the battle between German culture and alien civilization: it was right to recognize that violence might be a legitimate response to cultural provocation. Thus when the great liberal journalist Maximilian Harden, who was also a Jew, was nearly beaten to death by two thugs in 1922, the would-be killers got only a nominal sentence. The defence argued that Harden provoked the attack by his ‘unpatriotic articles’, and the jury found ‘mitigating circumstances’.

Why did juries, representing ordinary middle-class people in Germany, tend to side with the Easterners against the Westerners? One chief reason was what they were taught in the schools, which itself reflected the political tone of the universities. The tragedy of modern Germany is an object-lesson in the dangers of allowing academic life to become politicized and professors to proclaim their ‘commitment’. Whether the bias is to the Left or Right the results are equally disastrous for in either case the wells of truth are poisoned.
The universities and especially the professoriate were overwhelmingly on the side of
Kultur.
The jurists and the teachers of German literature and language were stridently nationalist. The historians were the worst of the lot. Heinrich von Treitschke had written of Germany’s appointment with destiny and warned the Jews not to get in the way of the ‘young nation’. His hugely influential
History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century
, a Wilhelmine classic, went into another big popular edition in 1920. Contemporary historians like Erich Marcks, Georg von Below and Dietrich Schafer still celebrated the achievements of Bismarck (the anniversaries of Sedan and the founding of the empire were both public universities’ holidays) and the lessons they drew from the Great War centred around Germany’s lack of ‘relentlessness’. They provided academic backing for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth. The academic community as a whole was a forcing-house for nationalist mythology. Instead of encouraging self-criticism and scepticism, the professors called for ‘spiritual revivals’ and peddled panaceas.
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By sheer bad luck, the most widely read and influential book in 1920s Germany was
The Decline of the West
by Oswald Spengler, a foolish and pedantic schoolteacher. He conceived his book in 1911 as a warning against undue German optimism. He wrote it during the war in anticipation of a German victory. Its first volume actually appeared in 1918, when defeat gave it an astonishing relevance and topicality. Thus it became a best-seller. The essence of the book was social Darwinism. He defined eight historic cultures and argued that the ‘laws of morphology’ applied to them. The last, the culture of the West, was already showing symptoms of decay, such as democracy, plutocracy and technology, indicating that ‘civilization’ was taking over from ‘culture’. It seemed to explain why Germany had been defeated. It also heralded a coming age of cruel war in which would arise new Caesars, and democrats and humanitarians would have to be replaced by new élites of steel-hardened heroes who would look not for personal gain but for service to the community.
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He followed it up in 1920 with a sensational essay,
Prussianism and Socialism
, which called for a classless, national socialism, in which the entire nation worked together under a dictator. It was exactly the sort of argument Mussolini was beginning to put forward in Italy.

Neatly complementing Spengler’s analysis was the work of two other important Easterners. Carl Schmitt, Germany’s leading legal philosopher, who poured out a flood of books and articles during these years, constantly stressed the argument that order could only be restored when the demands of the state were given preference over the quest for an illusory ‘freedom’. The Reich would not be
secure until Weimar was remodelled as an authoritarian state around the principle embodied in Article 48.
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The point was restated in a historical perspective by the cultural historian Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in a brilliant book published in 1923. The Germans, he argued, were the leading European creators. Their first Reich, the medieval empire, had formed Europe. Their second creation, Bismarck’s, was artificial because it had admitted the corruption of liberalism: that, of course, was why it had collapsed under test. Weimar was a mere interlude of chaos. Now the Germans had another opportunity: by purging society of liberalism and capitalism, they could build the third and final state which would embody all Germany’s values and endure for a thousand years. He entitled this remarkable exercise in historical prophecy
The Third Reich.
⁵⁴

Spurred on by their professors, the German student body, which averaged about 100,000 during the Weimar period, gave an enthusiastic reception to these Easterner philosophies. The notion that the student body is in some constitutional way a depository of humanitarian idealism will not survive a study of the Weimar period. Next to the ex-servicemen, the students provided the chief manpower reservoir of the violent extremists, especially of the Right. Student politics were dominated by the right-wing
Hochschulring
movement throughout the 1920s until it was replaced by the Nazis.
⁵⁵
The Right extremists proceeded by converting half a dozen students on a campus, turning them into full-time activists, paid not to study. The activists could then swing the mass of the student body behind them. The Nazis did consistently better among the students than among the population as a whole and their electoral gains were always preceded by advances on the campus, students proving their best proselytizers. Students saw Nazism as a radical movement. They liked its egalitarianism. They liked its anti-Semitism too. Indeed, the students were more anti-Semitic than either the working class or the bourgeoisie. Most German student societies had excluded Jews even before 1914. In 1919 the fraternities subscribed to the ‘Eisenach Resolution’, which stated that the racial objection to Jews was insuperable and could not be removed by baptism. The next year they deprived Jewish students of the ‘honour’ of duelling. In 1922 the authorities at Berlin University cancelled a memorial service in honour of the murdered Walther Rathenau rather than risk a violent student demonstration. This policy of appeasement towards student violence became the pattern of the 1920s, the rectors and faculties always capitulating to the most outrageous demands of student leaders rather than risk trouble. By 1929 the universities had passed almost wholly into the Easterner camp.

Against this widely based array of social forces, what had the
Westerners to rely upon? Not many people were prepared to die for Weimar or even to speak out for it. The liberals, as one of them said, had ‘married the Republic without loving it’. To them it simply filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of the monarchy and pending the emergence of something better. Even Max Weber, before his death in 1920, admitted he would have preferred a plebiscitory democracy under a strong man to a parliamentary one he assumed would be weak or corrupt or both. As the liberal Munich lawyer Professor Hans Nawiasky put it, the Republic was a child born in sorrow in whose arrival no one could take pride.
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It could never be separated in people’s minds from its tragic and detestable origins.

The Left had most to lose if Weimar failed – indeed they had most to gain by making it work – but the Far Left, at least, could never be persuaded to appreciate the fact. The scars of 1919 never healed and the Leninist element hated the Social Democrats, whom they began to call ‘Social Fascists’ from 1923 onwards, more passionately than anyone to the right of them. They not only failed to recognize fascism as a new and highly dangerous phenomenon, but refused to draw any distinction between middle-class conservatives who were prepared to work within the rule of law, and political savages who were right outside it. The Marxists never grasped the significance of anti-Semitism either. Here again their minds had been numbed by Marx’s narcotic system. Marx had accepted much of the mythology of anti-Semitism in that he dismissed Judaism as a reflection of the money-lending era of capitalism. When the revolution came it was doomed to disappear: there would be no such person as a ‘Jew’.
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As a result of this absurd line of reasoning, the Jewish Marxists–Trotsky, Luxemburg, Paul Axelrod, Otto Bauer, Julius Martov – felt obliged to reject national self-determination for Jews while advocating it for everybody else.
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There was a grievous perversity in this crass denial of nature. As the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow put it: ‘How much a Jew must hate himself who recognizes the right of every nationality and language to self-determination but doubts it or restricts it for his own people whose “self-determination” began 3,000 years ago.’
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Seeing the Jews as a non-problem, the Marxists dismissed anti-Semitism as a non-problem too. They thus entered the greatest ideological crisis in European history by throwing their brains out of the window. It was a case of intellectual disarmament on a unilateral basis.

Nevertheless the destruction of the Republic was not inevitable. It would almost certainly have survived had not the radical Right produced a political genius. The central tragedy of modern world history is that both the Russian and the German republics, in turn, found in Lenin and Hitler adversaries of quite exceptional calibre,
who embodied the will to power to a degree unique in our times. Of course the arrival of such a figure came as no surprise to the
exaltés
of the German Right. All the disciples of Nietzsche agreed a
Führer
would be necessary and would emerge, like a messiah. He was envisaged as the Knight from Durer’s famous print,
Knight, Death and the Devil.
Wilhelm Stapel in
The Christian Statesman
presented him as ruler, warrior and priest in one, endowed with charismatic qualities.
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