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Sometimes the great moments of history are the small moments of history. Such is the case with the short-lived Munich Revolution. Compared to the world wars or the Russian Revolution, it seems like a footnote about a failed adventure. But its significance is far greater: it was a social earthquake whose aftershocks marked the twentieth century, and whose ideas and reasons remain pertinent to our own volatile and unjust century. It unfolded from November 1918 to May 1919 in three stages of increasing radicalism —social-democratic, anarchist, communist — until it led to a military, nationalist, and anti-Semitic reaction that gave rise to the Nazi Party. Perhaps no other European episode of its time contains a similar historical density.
It began the day after the German defeat in the Great War. Over four savage and disillusioning years, the initial exaltation, the patriotic intoxication, the promise of glory, with which the conflict began all ended in a hell of rationing, hunger, plague, and one million seven hundred thousand dead soldiers, four million wounded, and one million prisoners. While the fate of Germany depended on France, England, and the United States (Bolshevik Russia had made peace with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), the old order collapsed forever. In Weimar, a republic was declared on November 9, to be led by the Social Democratic Party, the SPD. But parliamentary democracy was an inadmissible outcome for the German revolutionaries who sought to emulate — and correct, and surpass — Lenin’s recent feat. Several pockets of rebellion were ignited in ports and cities. In Berlin, two legendary leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founded the Spartacus League aimed at creating a free socialist republic. On January 15, 1919, they were murdered by soldiers of General Gustav Noske, whose army, notable for its discipline and ferocity, included four thousand paramilitary Freikorps, composed of the Sturmtruppen, elite troops hardened in war. But by then a peaceful revolution had triumphed in Munich, capital of the independent kingdom of Bavaria.
Two months earlier, the ancient Bavarian monarchy had fallen in five days under the impetus of a peaceful mobilization of tens of thousands of workers and soldiers, led by the least likely of political leaders, a fifty-one-year-old Jewish intellectual named Kurt Eisner. Imprisoned in early 1918 for his militant pacifism and released in October, Eisner became the hero of the hour. In the squares, auditoriums, assemblies, and beer halls of Munich, his speech electrified “the masses,” a key term in the vision and the vocabulary of the revolution. (It should be noted that, at the height of the revolution, those mobilized masses numbered perhaps ten percent of the population). On November 8, pending elections in the Bavarian parliament, the Provisional National Council declared Kurt Eisner the first minister-president of the Free State of Bavaria.
Suddenly that peaceful, cultivated, and dynamic city became the stage on which the twentieth century was being rehearsed. The novelty of a revolutionary government took everyone by surprise. And the effects were immediate. Eisner espoused women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday. Elated, the workers’ councils, headed by intellectuals, won allies among the soldiers recently returned from the front. But the main parties from the center to the right, the bureaucracy, the middle classes, the majority press, the Catholic clergy and other religious groups (including the Jewish community), the ultra-nationalist secret brotherhoods, a significant portion of the university teachers and students, the diplomatic legations of the countries allied to Germany, and most of the farmers (predominant in Bavaria) — all saw the revolutionary government as an intolerable anomaly.
An almost unbelievable cast gathered in that Babel of ideas and ideologies. Alongside Eisner, a major presence was the great anarchist thinker and editor Gustav Landauer. (If he is remembered at all today, it is as the unlikely grandfather of Mike Nichols.) Several other prominent intellectuals, literati, and bohemians, but also economists of renown such as Edgar Jaffe, Lujo Brentano, and Otto Neurath, and pedagogues such as F. W. Foerster, would join the government, believing that the revolution was nothing less than a new dawn in history. The most fierce critic of the revolution and its leaders was Max Weber, who dissected their political romanticism in a legendary lecture delivered to the Munich Liberal Students Union, entitled “Politics as a Vocation”. Among the students in his audience were the young philosopher Karl Löwith and Max Horkheimer, who would be one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. Also attending was Carl Schmitt, who would become one of the main political theoreticians of Nazism. The hotbed of Munich included Spartacist revolutionaries and Lenin’s agents, as well as several future Nazis, such as Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, sent back reports to the Vatican. The first-hand witnesses of the turbulence included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Klemperer, Martin Buber, and Lion Feuchtwanger. And an obscure twenty-nine-year-old veteran soldier of the war named Adolf Hitler, a failed painter, was wandering confusedly around the rallies and barracks looking for where and how to pour out his hatred. In Munich he found the answers he was looking for.
The Munich revolution was a dizzying theater of ideas — not pure ideas but armed ideas. Yet the violence was slow to break out. When Weber delivered his lecture on January 28, 1919, barely ten weeks had passed since Eisner’s accession to power. The revolution was seeking its course and the republican order was being maintained with difficulty. Weber considered Eisner’s government disastrous. Before addressing his audience, he remarked, “This does not deserve the honorable name of revolution: it is a bloody carnival.” In fact, his rejection of the present was the measure of his anguish for the future. He was persuaded that the history of his country, and that of Europe, would be decided there and then. In 1919 in Munich, Weber saw the Aleph of the century, and was horrified. A historical drama and a personal drama came together to imbue his words with the gravity of a prophetic revelation. His lecture, designed to have an effect on political circumstances, was an enduring lesson, and one of the sacred texts of modern liberalism. It has come down to us as a warning against the converging influences of demagoguery, unchecked charismatic leadership, and ideological fanaticism.
“What is the ethical home for politics?” Weber asked. The key, as is well known, lay in the contrast that he drew between an “ethics of conviction” and an “ethics of responsibility.” For Weber — who, while recognizing the gravity of the former, favored the latter — a genuine “political vocation” meant a passionate embrace of a cause, but without vanity or overflowing, with restraint and distance, and above all with a high sense of responsibility. Only a politician with such mettle deserved to “put his hand on the wheel of history.”
He hastened to point out that this was not the case with the demagogues of his time, who “acting under an absolute ethic, feel responsible only for the flame of conviction, the flame, for example, of protest against the injustices of the social order.” If their action does not achieve the desired end, “they will hold the world responsible, the stupidity of men or the will of God who made them so.” Weber drew an analogy between the German revolutionaries and the ancient prophets of the seventeenth century confident in the imminent coming of Christ: the same sense of “orgiastic chiliasm,” the same certainty in an “eschatological opening of History.” Demagogues, revolutionaries, and prophets announced a radiant future that was yet to come, and in order to hasten it any means seemed legitimate. But even the most intense subjective conviction about the absolute value of the ends did not justify, much less sanctify, irresponsible disregard for the objective consequences of the means.
Nor were the pacifists — those perennial votaries of inaction — spared by the indictment. Given that the inescapable and specific means of power is force, Weber lamented “the naiveté of believing that from good comes only good and from evil only evil.” Often, he said, “the opposite is true, and anyone who did not see this was a child, politically speaking.” This paradox led him to emphasize the existence of “a tragic warp in the human condition,” and in no activity was this distortion more evident than in politics. That is why he defined politics as “a slow drilling of hard boards.” Weber did not preach quietism, conservatism, or reaction. Nor did he offer paths of salvation or recipes for happiness. He opened a passionate but realistic way to act with prudence and inner strength in defense of the highest human values. That is what the “ethics of responsibility” consisted of. The unnamed demagogues, revolutionaries, and pacifists of his lecture, emblems of the “ethics of conviction,” were Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and most of all Kurt Eisner. People recalled him mentioning them in his lecture, but days later, in the printed version, he omitted their names. But there was another less obvious and unnamed character in his lecture: the “pure type” of the politician who embodied the “ethics of responsibility.” That character was Weber himself.
Max Weber was then fifty-four years old. Highly respected as a sociologist and social philosopher, he had a monumental, though mostly unpublished, body of work behind him. He came to Munich in November 1918 to take up academic work, which he had been forced to suspend many years earlier owing to a protracted and painful depression. His political position was difficult to pigeonhole. He had been, like so many, an enthusiastic supporter of the war. “No matter what the outcome, this war is great and wonderful,” he wrote in August 1914. He was not driven by pan-German romanticism, but by a realism that revealed for him an inevitable geopolitical destiny: whereas Switzerland could be the guardian not only of “freedom and democracy but of much more intimate and eternal cultural values,” Germany had no choice but to assert its power against Tsarist Russia and Anglo-American hegemony. According to Ernst Bloch, Weber used to dress as a soldier every Sunday. He would have liked to serve at the front. His consolation was to direct, with the same disciplined passion that he put into his research, the military hospitals in Heidelberg.
Very soon, though, the political, diplomatic, and military decisions seemed to him not only wrong but spectacularly stupid. He deplored the conversion of a war that he considered defensive (especially because of Russian imperialism) into a senseless expansionist enterprise spearheaded by military “madmen” and their industrial allies. He criticized annexationist measures in Belgium, and warned that submarine attacks on civilian ships would draw — as in fact they did — the United States into the war. No protagonist was up to the task, neither the Kaiser, whom he despised, nor the successive chancellors who bowed down before military stubbornness and arrogance: “There is not a single statesman, just one, to manage the situation! And to think that this man who does not exist is indispensable,” he wrote in November 1915 to his old friend, the pastor and liberal politician Friedrich Naumann. For a long time, Weber thought that that statesman could be him.
In 1916 he spent time in Berlin in an attempt to put his “hand on the wheel of history,” but his wishes were frustrated. Neither his diagnoses of the economic outcome of the war, nor his plans to informally represent Germany in Poland (granting that occupied country the necessary autonomy), received the slightest attention. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything in it for me,” he complained. His most devoted friends, such as Karl Jaspers, complained about the time that he wasted on such pursuits, diverting him from his work. But he regretted more his life as a vicarious politician. And although he confessed to being “fed up with bursting into people’s offices to ‘do something’,” he did not lose hope: “Everyone knows that, if they need me, I will always be at hand.”
For Weber, politics at that time had only one purpose: to secure peace in order to build the future. But not peace at any price, let alone the undignified peace that, in his view, the pacifists were proposing. The viability of the German parliamentary republic depended on the possibility of a dignified peace. This republican and constitutional option was as opposed to pan-Germanic and militaristic hegemony as it was to social revolution in any of its facets, from the “general strike” to anarchist, Spartacist, and Bolshevik insurgencies. Since the revolution of 1905 in Russia, and with greater urgency after Lenin’s triumph in October 1917, Weber wrote abundantly about socialism, criticizing it in terms of practical possibility: he saw no way in which the prophecies of the the Communist Manifesto could be fulfilled.
Politics, he would have said, was his secret love, and would remain so until the end. But politics evaded him. If he could not advise, influence, act, or command, he could at least teach outside the professoriate, while taking up his great Sociology of Religion. Fortunately, there were the young people: could he bring them clarity and objectivity about the historical moment? Two years before dictating “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber presided over two seminars at Lauenstein Castle attended by several well-known writers of various political positions and a group of students of liberal, socialist, and pacifist tendencies. What happened there — vividly recorded by his wife, Marianne Weber, in her admirable biography, which is rich in personal testimonies and letters — was the rehearsal of the generational clash that would take place two years later in the streets of Munich.
One of these young men was an intense and tortured poet named Ernst Toller. (There is a moving photograph of the young Toller looking up at a hatted Weber in a group of attendees.) A veteran of the war, seriously wounded in battle, he had gone from psychiatric hospitals to prisons because of his active pacifist militancy. His concern, Toller wrote in his memoirs, went “beyond the sins of the Kaiser or electoral reform”, subjects of which Weber spoke. He and his comrades wanted to “create a new world, to change the existing order, to change the hearts of men.” They respected — Marianne recalls — Weber’s “controlled ethos” and his “sober incorruptibility,” but they hated “that scientific mind which was incapable of offering a simple way to solve problems and which asked itself about every ‘social ideal’ by what means and at what price it could be achieved.” Weber did not despair. He was willing to be their teacher, as long as they were prepared to “crack the hard nuts” of scientific work, to seek knowledge of themselves and the world through objective data, configurations, and connections, and emphatically not through “revelations.”
Weber disbelieved in social prophecies and yet — according to Marianne’s testimony — his deepest identification was not with the misunderstood fathers of science but with the prophet Jeremiah, a “titan of invective” who cried out against his king and against his people without waiting for or getting an answer, without a retinue of apostles to follow him, sure of the truth of his criticism. “He was enveloped,” Marianne recalls, “by the pathos of inner solitude.” What was the ultimate origin of this attitude? We would have to call it tragic realism. From a young age he knew that he was not susceptible to the spell and the comfort of religion or its ideological substitutes. He understood that spell and made it into the subject of some of his greatest work, but he was spurred by the world to its opposite — to the scientific vocation to demystify the world. In Weber’s universe there was no room for fantasies or reductions: through the comprehensive sieve of his “pure types”, economic forms, juridical institutions, religious ethics, the sources of political domination in the entire history of East and West, all acquired meaning. But if anything characterized the human fabric, it was the inevitability of conflict. In the face of this harsh and irreducible condition, the highest vocation of which Weber could conceive was that of the politician, because no other activity touched the tragic core of life as it did. And exercised at the highest level, it could touch people, the moral quality, even the nobility, of their existence.
This was the man who had arrived in Munich in November 1918 only to discover that the young people to whom he preached the “ethics of responsibility” were following a leader animated by the “ethics of conviction,” a demagogue from out of Weber’s own pages: Kurt Eisner.
Eisner was the villain of Weber’s conference at Laustein Castle. Gustav Landauer, his friend and close collaborator, described Eisner thus: “this modest, pure, honorable man, who has earned his living as a precarious writer, is suddenly the spiritual leader of Germany by the mere fact that this courageous Jew is a man of spirit.” A militant worker shared this opinion: “He is the sword of the revolution, he has overthrown the twenty-two kingdoms of Germany, he is our brilliant leader, I will defend him to the death.” The person who recorded that worker’s words was the retired sergeant Victor Klemperer, professor of ancient languages, a Jewish convert to Protestantism, and the author of one of the most extraordinary diaries of the German cataclysm. In those early days of exaltation, however, he himself drew in his diary a less flattering portrait of the leader:
Eisner is a delicate, diminutive, fragile, corseted, small man. From his head, bald and not at all imposing, his hair hangs down to his neck, as dirty and gray as his reddish, graying beard. His gray, misty eyes look through his glasses. There is nothing brilliant, venerable or heroic in his appearance. He is a mediocre, worn-out man who looks sixty-five although he is barely over fifty. His look is not particularly Jewish, let alone Germanic. But the way he jokes around the stage (he doesn’t stand behind the podium) reminds me of typical caricatures of Jewish journalists.
Eisner had even implied — anticipating Groucho Marx’s joke — that he would not vote for a party that had him as a candidate. How was it possible, Klemperer wondered, that such a character could provoke such ecstasy when speaking of “the renewal of the spirit”?
Max Weber had the answer. It could be summed up in a single word: charisma. Eisner possessed that rare and non-transferable gift that the sociologist had studied in his work as one of the three legitimate sources of political authority. Charismatic leaders, he observed, flourished above all in times of exception:
Charismatic leadership is always born out of unusual situations — especially political and economic ones — or out of extraordinary psychological states, especially religious ones; or out of both at the same time. It arises from the collective excitement produced by extraordinary events and from prostration before heroism of any kind.
Eisner, the “pure type” of the charismatic leader, alarmed Weber because he sharply represented the “ethics of conviction” which, enamored of its principles, was capable of proclaiming: “The world seems torn to pieces, lost in the abyss. Suddenly, in the midst of darkness and despair, trumpets sound announcing a new world, a new humanity, a new freedom.”
Who was Eisner? He had studied in Magdeburg under Hermann Cohen, a Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher who postulated the convergence between the moral categories of Kant and the message of the biblical prophets. An inspiration for liberal and Reform Judaism in Germany, and the author of perhaps the greatest modern book on the philosophical meanings of Judaism, Cohen elaborated the doctrine of an “ethical socialism” as a possible stage of universal concord. Eisner revered Cohen and made this doctrine his own, but his vocation was far less speculative or contemplative. Long before leaping into the political arena, Eisner had been the editor-in-chief of Vörwarts, the influential newspaper founded by Karl Liebnecht’s father and a voice of the Social Democratic Party. There he also served as a political commentator, storyteller, theater critic, and superb satirist. His hilarious articles on the sexual “peccadilloes” of the royal family brought him national fame, but led to his dismissal. During the war he earned his living as a freelance writer. He was a convinced pacifist.
Such a transition from journalism to politics did not surprise Weber, who in his political sociology anticipated a growing affinity between the two professions, while warning of the risks of moving from one to the other. Only after his investiture did Eisner come to understand that criticizing power was different from exercising it. As minister-president he became Hamlet in Munich. Politically, he would live torn between the revolutionary Workers’ Councils and the Bavarian parliament. “The masses” demanded to overcome parliamentarianism (a “bourgeois relic”) as a minimum step to establish a socialist regime. The parliamentarians were the representatives of the parties, ranging from the nationalist right to the left of the USDP (an independent offshoot of the SPD, chaired by Eisner), with the moderate nationalist and liberal-democratic tendency between them. The parliament, with a social democratic majority, favored social and economic reformism.
Although he was overwhelmed by his verbal hyperbole, the truth is that Eisner never departed from the convictions and the responsibilities of a social democrat: he criticized but did not nationalize the press, and he did not lay a hand on private property (which he distrusted). Still, he managed to introduce some substantial reforms aside from women’s suffrage and Sunday rest, such as the ordered transport of prisoners and the end of conscription. Inspired by the anarchist philosophy of Gustav Landauer, he proposed an ambitious program of cultural and educational “spiritual renewal,” which included secular education outside the powerful Church (Bavaria was mostly Catholic). But he ended up pleasing no one. His left wing pushed him toward a communitarian or communist revolution, which he considered premature. The bourgeoisie rejected his social reforms en bloc. The Church opposed his educational reforms. The Bavarian regionalists denounced his Prussian origins. And the nationalists deplored his Jewishness.
One of Eisner’s boldest steps was to publish confidential documents that proved the German culpability for the outbreak of the recent war. His hope was to soften the severity of the Allies’ demands for reparations, especially with Bavaria. Broad sectors of German and Bavarian society repudiated this policy. That it was a Jew who propounded such allegedly abject arguments fed the myth of the “stab in the back” that “the Jews” would perpetrate against the German fatherland, by handing it over simultaneously to the imperial powers of the West and the Russian Bolsheviks. Weber, of course, did not share in such humbug, but Eisner’s program of atonement, of German repentance, seemed to him counterproductive, dishonorable, and unbecoming of a statesman. A classic example of the “ethics of conviction.” Weber held Eisner responsible “for bringing peace, not war, into disrepute.”
By the time Weber delivered his lecture in late January 1919, Eisner’s popularity had been waning rapidly and with it his already limited power. What was most salient in German daily life was unemployment, inflation, the scarcity of basic commodities, transportation paralysis, and the like. He finally had to admit the fragility of his situation and opted to call elections. They were held on January 19, 1919, with disastrous results for his party, the USPD. Eisner promised to leave office. Nine days after, Weber spoke to the students.
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A nation in turmoil, a polarized and feverish city, a charismatic demagogue in decline, a fragile parliament, a revolution that sought immediately to reach its ultimate apotheosis, a military and nationalist reaction that steadily gathered undetected forces: This historical and biographical situation accounted for Weber’s vehemence before his young listeners, romantics of the revolution. He was a prophet-scholar crying out in the wilderness: “Whoever seeks the salvation of his soul and that of others should not do so by the path of politics, whose tasks are very different and can only be accomplished by force.”
Weber’s criticism of the practitioners of the “ethics of conviction” was based on recent paroxysms of violence:
Are we not seeing that the Bolshevik ideologues and the Spartacists produce the same results as those of any military dictator precisely because they use this means of politics? How does the government of the councils of workers and soldiers differ from that of any ruler of the old regime if not in the person of the one who holds power and in his amateurism? How do the attacks of most representatives of (supposedly new) ethics on their adversaries differ from the attacks made by any other demagogue?
In Moscow, the Bolsheviks had triumphed. In Berlin, the Spartacists had failed in their assault on power. In Munich, however, the “amateur” Eisner ruled. The “attacks” to which Weber referred had been suffered by himself, when on November 4, 1918, he was interrupted at a rally by two furious representatives of “the new ethics,” the literati (Weber’s sardonic word) Erich Müsham and the Russian Leninist Max Levien:
Will it be said that they are distinguished by their noble intention! Well, but what we are talking about here is the means used, and the adversaries being fought also claim for themselves, with total subjective honesty, the nobility of their ultimate intentions.
Although he planned to write a “Sociology of Revolution,” which he did not carry out, in his lecture he traced the arc of degradation that he saw unfolding before his eyes. Once the leader — that is, Eisner — unleashes the passions, it is difficult to tame them. They are no longer within his control. Even if he is inspired by a pristine ideal, his action rests on the apparatus that he has formed, and that apparatus is not composed solely and mostly of pure beings, but of “the red guards, the rogues, and the agitators” who would demand internal and external rewards:
In the conditions of the modern class struggle, the leader has to offer as an internal reward the satisfaction of hatred and the desire for revenge . . . the need to defame the adversary and accuse him of heresy.
The external rewards for the apparatchiki were “power, spoils, perks”: “let us not deceive ourselves,” he pointed out, applying Marxism to the Marxists, “the materialist interpretation of history is not a chariot that is taken and left at whim, and does not stop at the authors of the revolution.”
In closing his lecture, knowing perhaps that the young listeners would be carried away by their conviction at the expense of their responsibility, he quoted from Goethe’s Faust: “The devil is old; become old to understand him.” His repeated invocation of “demonic forces” in politics had a vatic tone. He envisioned that, for various reasons, “an Age of Reaction would be enthroned in less than ten years.” And then all the noble goods to which they aspired (and which Weber confessed to longing for) would be no longer attainable. He was issuing a warning. What Germany awaited was not “the dawn of summer, but a polar night of icy harshness and darkness.” His young listeners were as dismayed by his message as Toller had been in Lawenstein. Karl Löwith remembered: “Weber tore away all the veils of illusory thinking, and yet no one could fail to feel that at the heart of that clear mind beat a deep human earnestness.” But they did not want to surrender the illusion. Max Horkheimer recalled: “Everything was so precise, so scientifically austere, so free of values, that we returned home completely desolate.”
The illusion continued, but it was Weber who got it right. Three weeks later, on February 21, 1919, Eisner made his way to parliament to tender his resignation. He never made it. A young aristocrat named Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley assassinated him. The assassin acted to legitimize his German identity in front of the Thule Society, an extreme right-wing nationalist group that had rejected his incorporation because he had a Jewish mother. The “carnival” was just beginning to deserve the adjective “bloody.” Although he did not live permanently in Munich until June 1919, Weber witnessed the beginning of the tragedy. The “polar night” was looming on the horizon.
The main eulogy at Eisner’s tumultuous funeral was delivered by Gustav Landauer. He compared his friend to Jesus and Jan Huss, who were “executed for stupidity and ambition,” and added: “Kurt Eisner, the Jew, was a prophet because he sympathized with the poor and downtrodden, and saw the opportunity and the need to end poverty and prostration.” In the days following, Bavaria seemed to enter a state of contrition. Crowds filled the streets. People laid wreaths at the site of the assassination. Even the churches rang their bells in mourning. Eisner became a symbol — charisma frozen in time. The revolutionaries harbored a new hope. Eisner had not shed his blood in vain.
Landauer had spent months of intense activity with Eisner, trying unsuccessfully to encourage him to deepen the “revolutionary intervention”, to break definitively with parliamentarianism, representative democracy, the secret ballot, all mechanisms “of the oppressive condition of the past”. It was also necessary to break with the Weimar Republic in order to give way to “a union of independent republics based on direct democracy”. Yet nothing was to be accomplished by violence. Bavaria could become the cradle of a “new spirit,” of a “new humanity,” aimed at “salvation” and “redemption.” What kind of revolutionary was this forty-eight-year-old who spoke openly in evangelical tones and eschatological concepts? Among his letters from Munich, one stands out that reveals the meaning of his words and his project:
. . . if I was able to endure the horrors of war, it was because I always hoped to have what we have now . . . If we have learned anything from this war, it is this: Men only do what is right and necessary when the misery has become unbearable and when it is no longer possible to do wrong. Taking this into account, they will probably not seize this opportunity to save themselves, no matter how much we push them. Rather, they are likely to rush toward disaster. But, sooner or later, the revolution will give the people impetus and fire, a blazing and intense life, the culmination of the moment and of the centuries, as well as a historical existence . . . The process that has now begun will take us much further. It will lead us to what Buddha and Jesus have already taught us: the unity of humanity.
Landauer was an anarchist thinker touched by a messianic mysticism. Like some kabbalists of yore, and like many Christian traditions ancient and modern, he believed that salvation would be preceded by the apocalypse. The apocalypse of the recent war was not enough. One had to suffer more, to die better. But always in the distance there was a flickering light, the end of history, and if it offered “openings” it was necessary to penetrate through that crack, to take advantage of it. The Munich revolution was one of those openings.
Although he spoke and wrote in biblical images, Landauer had little to do with the Judaism of his parents. His training was secular and his readings were eclectic: Meister Eckhart (of whom he wrote profusely), Hölderlin (he theorized about his poems and edited his humanist letters of 1793), Whitman (the individualistic poet of the collective American self), Shakespeare (whom he translated), and the late Tolstoy, the Christian anarchist. Later he would recognize as a mentor Martin Buber, who published his writings in his journal Der Jude. Buber’s writings and compilations on Hasidism restored Landauer to the Jewish tradition. This heterogeneous mixture of influences and authorities somehow fused in his mind. He saw them as heralds of a possible humanity — foreshadowed in Paris in 1789, 1848, and 1871 — in which the individual and the community are united and realized on a higher, indivisible plane of love and harmony. In that future map of the universal soul there was no room for races or nations, there was room only for cultures. Two concepts abound in his writings: spirit and people, geist and volk. In his mystical interpretation (and entirely blind to the long career of anti-Semitism in Germany) Landauer saw geist and volk dialectically incarnated in two spiritual peoples, the Jewish and the German:
My German quality and my Jewish quality do not get in the way of each other, but do each other a lot of good. Just as two brothers, the firstborn and the youngest, loved by a mother — not in the same way, but with the same intensity — and just as those two brothers live in harmony with each other, whether they have a common path or advances along his own, I experience this strange and intimate duality in unity as something precious.
He defined himself as an anarchist. Above all, an anarchist opposed to communists: “they are pure centralists, like Robespierre,” he wrote, referring to the Spartacus League. “Their aspiration has no content, they only know power.” The military regime for which they advocate would be the most frightful ever seen in the world. “The dictatorship of the proletariat in arms? I prefer Napoleon!”
His anarchism was essentially pacifist. As much as he was repulsed by Bakunin’s violence, he agreed with the constructive models of Kropotkin (whom he knew well in London) on the convergence between the countryside and the city, between farms and factories. He envisioned the mass but voluntary exodus of workers from the city to the countryside. His utopia — an exact reversal of the Weberian state, that “legitimate holder of violence” — was a state without a state, a society of pure fraternal cooperation. The precondition to achieve it was revolution, conceived not as an act of bloodshed but as an educational process, a change in the spirit of the people so that it would recover its purity. In these ideas there was a mysticism of history that aspired to integrate the “I” into a primeval “we.”
Like Proudhon, Landauer lived in the world of print: books, magazines, manuscripts, and translations. Separated from the family, from business, from the universities in which he fleetingly studied or from which he was expelled, he worked for a “theater oriented to the people” and above all for Der Sozialist, a magazine he edited in various periods over almost twenty years. His anarchist militancy was intense but intermittent. His natural disposition was to philosophical seclusion. Through Separation to Community, he titled one of his books. He was a loner who saw the realization of the individual in loving memberships, from the family and the local community to the universal community. His solitude was not that of the ascetic but that of the mystic who seeks the inner voice to announce it to the world and transform it.
In November, 1918, his wife Hedwig Lachmann died of pneumonia, leaving Landauer with their two daughters in a state of desolation that could only be alleviated by revolutionary hope. Landauer heard Eisner’s call to join the Munich revolution as the herald of a new era. His charisma was different from Eisner’s, more religious and ethereal. The photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who had captured Eisner’s melancholic idealism in a famous image, would do the same with the mystic Landauer. Klemperer could have written the caption when he described him in his diary: “tall, slender, with beautiful, fine features, bearded like Christ, with an energetic forehead and visionary eyes looking into the utopian distance.” Before the tragic death of his friend, he had fluctuated several times between extreme exaltation and the greatest despondency. He regretted nothing more than Eisner’s defeat in the January 1919 election. He was puzzled by the “overvaluation of the vote.” To him, the SPD was simply a counterrevolutionary and militaristic party. Even his mystical faith in the German people collapsed: “What an exultant acclamation of the authoritarian government: in these years it has been a very dubious honor to be German, now it is even more so.” Nevertheless, at the first workers’ demonstration, hope was reborn.
Eisner, for all his idealism, recognized the limits and admitted the reality: they were a minority. Landauer did not. And yet they did not quarrel. Their bond went beyond politics, an activity that was basically alien to them. Two writers, two editors possessed by the “ethics of conviction”: the socialist and the anarchist, the journalist and the thinker, the humorist and the mystic, the idealist and the messianic. At bottom, they were two heterodox Jews pursuing, by different paths, the utopia of universal brotherhood.
After Eisner’s death, Munich was in turmoil and Landauer was at the center of events. Weeks later, the Bavarian Parliament elected a new Social Democratic government under Johannes Hoffmann, Eisner’s minister of education, who had to face the same tensions, which have been exacerbated by the recent triumph of the Hungarian revolution led by Bela Kun. The deceptive tide of history seemed to favor the revolution once again. In the workers’ councils of Munich — which, significantly, were no longer frequented by soldiers, students, or peasants — the voice of the Bakuninian militants was increasingly heard closing ranks with the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, which, headed by the poet Eugen Leviné, sought to replicate the Bolshevik example. The demand of both in the general assemblies was the establishment of the Räterepublik (a Republic of Councils) equivalent to the original plan of the Soviet Republic, with all that it implied: nationalization of factories, expropriation of land, suppression of “bourgeois parliamentarianism,” the judiciary, and the free press, and immediate collaboration with “the glorious pioneers of world liberation in Russia.” Landauer, for whom the Communists were “tragic fools” possessed of “Marxist madness,” opposed the motion, which was then postponed by “the masses.”
The Hoffmann government, for its part, took its social democratic vocation seriously. The Austrian economist Otto Neurath, its prestigious minister of economics, wanted to centralize the economy, concentrate it on the generation of commodities, and — as a gesture of genuine openness towards the anarchists — to finance communes in the Bavarian countryside. The purpose was to demonstrate to the majorities that the collectivist experiment could work. Landauer, a disciple of Kropotkin and therefore a supporter of rural anarcho-socialism, favored it. The radicals did not want to depend on government handouts. They demanded political autonomy for these communes. This project was also rejected by the “masses.” Finally, the tension between the government and the workers’ councils reached the streets. The shadow of repression (and his own revolutionary mysticism) led Landauer to utter a memorable sentence: “In the whole of natural history, I have not encountered a creature that I find more repugnant than the Social Democratic Party.”
Hoffmann opted to leave Munich and settle in Bamberg. Munich remained a revolutionary stronghold. Against Landauer’s opinion, and without the participation of the Communists (who were waiting their turn), the “masses” finally, on April 6, 1919, decreed the establishment of the First Republic of Bavarian Councils, an anarchist idyll that would not shed a drop of blood and wanted to create a new world, like God, in seven days. At the head of the government would be none other than Ernst Toller. Although some members of the cabinet had a more professional profile, the highest authority was held by the dreamy Landauer, who lived the anarchist paradox of exercising power from the repudiation of power:
I am now the people’s delegate for propaganda, education, science, arts and other things. If I have a few weeks, I hope to accomplish something. However, most likely I will only have a few days and then all this will have been like a dream.
In those days, Klemperer interviewed him: “A modest man in a black overcoat, with black hair and the tone of a prophet,” Landauer defined himself as a “non-political politician.” He justified the Räterepublik as “the only way of ‘salvation’ to honor the memory of Karl Liebknecht, his murdered friend, and to put an end to the Weimar lie . . .” The comparison with Eisner was inevitable, as was his Weberian conclusion about the inexorable presence of force:
An idealist, like him; bohemian, like him; poet like him; and like him, miles away from all real political needs . . . His hands as clean of blood and money as those of Einser. He will surely be forced, like Eisner, to engage in acts of violence himself or to resign by force, violently, by the action of others.
Toller called this anarchist dream “the amorous republic.” Although there was no shortage of utopian measures (issuing money with an expiration date) or delusional ideas (declaring war on Switzerland for refusing to sell arms), the government concentrated on socializing education and the theater rather than the economy, and the person in charge of this spiritual transformation was Landauer. His priority was to reform the university, so he suspended classes until the summer. He established a Revolutionary University Council, a libertarian community of students, parents, and teachers. The cornerstone of the curriculum would be Walt Whitman: “Every ten-year-old Bavarian child will recite it by heart.” He planned to promote a communal cultural life instead of the traditional isolation of artists. He planned to abolish the law faculty (which would be dedicated instead only to training public servants) and to legislate socialist teaching, “so long muzzled in the universities.” The professors of economics were to be all socialists. Naturally, Landauer wanted to close the doors to the “arch-reactionary Max Weber”.
His coercive measures were neither light nor democratic nor liberal, but compared to those of the Bakuninian anarchists they were merely pious, almost cosmetic. A mystic to the end, Landauer had no thought of destroying capital or church by the violence of the state, which he considered inherently illegitimate, inhuman, and immoral. His utopia was to be reached by the cultural evangelization of “the people,” who would find in the spirit of communal life its true and full realization. On April 12 he wrote to a colleague:
Although it is possible that our lives will be short, the wish I have, and it is a wish you share with me, is that we leave lasting effects in Bavaria . . . so that we can hope that, when authoritarianism returns, among discerning circles it will be said that we did not have a bad start during the Räterepublik and that it would not have been bad if we had been allowed to continue our work. This is in case we collapse.
They collapsed two days later.
On Palm Sunday, April 14, the Second Räterepublik was declared in Munich. The third period of the “bloody carnival” had arrived, the time of “the Russians,” as they were known from their country of origin: Comrades Eugene Leviné, Tobias Axelrod, and Max Levien. (Leviné and Axelrod were Jews, Levien was not.) The first had participated in the revolution of 1905 in Russia and in the founding of the Spartacus League. The latter, an expert in information and intelligence work, was such a close collaborator of Lenin that he had traveled with him on the famous sealed train to the Finland Station. Dr. Levien, an intellectual and military man, an early Spartacist and also close to Lenin, was the toughest of the three. When Klemperer complained about the shortage of milk in Munich, he heard him remark that “he was indifferent” because “it nourished above all the bourgeois children, and their survival was of no interest to us.” At another point Levien bluntly stated: “The middle class and the capitalist bourgeoisie in Germany does not number more than one hundred thousand people. Their representatives in the National Assembly keep the people in ignorance and stupidity. To spill a little more of their blood makes no difference.”
None had any doubts about the justification of the means to achieve the end. After what they called the “impostor republic” of the anarchists, the dictatorship of the proletariat was at last opening the way. Their plans were radical: “in every house where there are twelve bourgeois, we will immediately install twenty proletarians”. The expectations were even greater: “There will be no more prostitution because only the bourgeoisie is guilty of its existence.” The measures were categorical: property was confiscated; cars, jewelry, bank accounts were seized; the free press was shut down so that there was no news from abroad, only the newsletter of the Central Committees. As a consequence, Klemperer noted in his diary, “postal services and trains, industry and trade were almost completely stopped.” Munich was under siege.
Although he never changed his opinion of the communists — “their aspiration is power” — Landauer offered them cooperation in confronting the counterrevolution. After two days he would exchange a letter of “mutual repudiation” with them and withdraw, but Klemperer managed to visit him in his office. They did not talk about French literature (their shared passion) but about the aborted educational redemption. He was struck by Landauer’s fastidious disdain for the practical affairs of his office: “he had thrown all the day’s correspondence into a laundry basket next to his desk: a high school was asking permission to devote a day to sports; the gymnasium of a girls’ school needed repairs; a preparatory school needed to replace its recently deceased prefect.” The liberal Klemperer — a perceptive psychologist — concluded that Landauer was less equipped for politics than Eisner himself, and judged him in Weberian terms:
He is an entertainer, a journalist, gifted with great talent but a childish talent. But even the most talented child can inflict harm when he plays irresponsibly with adult objects. He is a child, and I hope for his sake (and for all of ours) that no one ends up turning him into a martyr.
By then civil war had broken out. The Leviné government appointed his predecessor Toller as Minister of War, who marched to confront, with temporary success, Hoffman’s troops. (Toller refused to execute the defeated.) But Hoffman would eventually win the support of Berlin. The army of General Noske and the Freikorps, which included several future Nazi officers such as Rudolf Hess and Ernest Röhm, intervened in an offensive against Munich.
The final battle began on April 27 and was resolved in a few days. Everybody revealed their true character. The “Russians” Levien and Axelrod fled, leaving their troops without courage or defense. Leviné went underground. Toller, the brave pacifist-turned-general, learned with horror of the imminent execution of ten prisoners, several of them belonging to the ultranationalist Thule Society. He was unable to stop it. “Once the crime had been committed,” Klemperer noted, “they could not expect forgiveness.” The revenge would be atrocious. More than a thousand people were executed, most of them innocent or alien to the government.
Among them was Gustav Landauer. His friends implored him to leave Munich. He had the chance to go to Switzerland and join his two daughters, Charlotte, twenty-four, and Brigitte, thirteen, who lived in a nearby town. Revolutionary hope never left him, but evidently it did not include his own survival. After the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he sent his daughters a remarkable letter:
It is because of you, my daughters, that I remain alive. I will not yield. It is for my Ethos and my hopes for humanity that I oppose the methods of violence and revenge, and that I work instead for the passionate but peaceful creation of socialism. Do not fear at all! I will continue on my path, as I have done up to now.
When the civil war broke out, Landauer urged his family to take refuge with an uncle, who “would gladly receive them.” On May 1, shock troops raided the house and seized him. The next day some soldiers executed him, after insulting him (“dirty Bolshevik”), humiliating him, and torturing him mercilessly. Some testimonies report that he said: “I have not betrayed you. You do not know the terrible degree to which you have been betrayed.” Others affirmed that his final words were: “So kill me. And to think that you are human . . .” In 1925 the anarcho-syndicalists in Munich erected a monument to Landauer, with an epitaph taken from his own work: “It is time to create a different martyr, not heroic but discreet, an unpretentious martyr, who offers an example of life.” The Nazis destroyed the monument in 1933.
All the revolutionary leaders in Munich died in a similar way. Leviné was executed in June 1919, shouting, “Hail to the Revolution” in front of the firing squad. The poet Erich Müsham, who founded the anarchist magazine Kain, was jailed for fifteen years and then brutally murdered in a concentration camp in 1934. Axelrod and Levien died in Stalin’s purges. Toller, jailed until 1925, became a successful exponent of Expressionist theater, but was exiled after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, and in 1939 committed suicide at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Only one of the main protagonists would survive: Ret Marut, the editor of the anarchist magazine Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brick Burner). Under different identities, he would end up living a secret life in Mexico, writing novels of high social and revolutionary content, many of them about the indigenous people of Chiapas, that were widely read in Mexico; we remember him now as B. Traven, who wrote the screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre based on his own novel. The paradox of the Bavarian Revolution was to conclude in the country of a revolutionary peasant who was an enemy of power and communism, a Mexican figure so close to anarchism that Landauer, years before, had written about him: Emiliano Zapata.
Weber also was to die before his time. Back in Munich since June 1919, after very brief and unsuccessful incursions into politics, he witnessed the virtual takeover of the university and the city by xenophobic, nationalist, militaristic, and anti-Semitic authorities, all driven by the passions that he detested. Setting himself up as an example of the Protestant ethic that he was then researching, he tirelessly returned to writing, lecturing, issuing liberal and unpopular opinions that earned him the (unfair) label of “godfather of the Soviet Republic.” (And all this in the context of family dramas unbearable even for a man of his stoic temper: the suicide of his widowed sister, who left four children, and his tortured love affair with Else Jaffe, a former disciple, wife of his colleague Edgar Jaffe, with whom he edited the legendary journal Archiv für Sozialwisenschaft und Sozialpolitik.) Weber was particularly offended by what he described as “the mad anti-Semitism” that poisoned even his colleagues. And to show his moral independence, he acted nobly towards his former adversaries. “The great philo-semite” — as Leo Löwenthal, a future founder of the Frankfurt School, described him — successfully defended Otto Neurath in the courts. He did the same with Toller, arguing that “in an act of rage, God made him a politician.” (Thomas Mann also testified on Toller’s behalf.) Moreover, he publicly recognized Eisner’s good faith and decisively defended several other imprisoned leaders, explaining before the judges the meaning of the “ethics of conviction.” It was for that reason that he had not included his name in the printed version of “Politics as a Vocation.”
Weber’s prophecy was more than fulfilled. The Munich revolution, with all its generosity and idealism, proved that, indeed, “good does not follow good, but often the opposite.” Demagogues, socialists, pacifists, anarchists, communists, many in good faith, had committed the greatest political sin: the sin of unreality. No, “the masses,” i.e. the working masses, were not even remotely in the majority in Bavaria, nor in Germany. No, the political vocation did not consist in devising plans of salvation by neglecting the annoying practical problems. No, the factories did not conform to the socialist order but to capitalist continuity, under other bosses: bureaucratic and military. No, not all the followers of Eisner and Landauer were idealists like them: many quickly changed sides and sought their “internal and external rewards” at the side of the new winners on the ultra-right. No, the real enemy of the dreamers of the revolution was not the Social Democratic Party — which they condemned as lukewarm and reformist — but the pan-Germanic militarism whose reaction Weber foresaw but the revolutionaries did not. As for the young students who would create the Frankfurt School, they announced the definitive decline of the West, but to save themselves they migrated to the United States, where they freely consolidated their school of thought, in many ways contrary to the economic order of the country that hosted them. The revolutionaries preferred to believe that the liberal, constitutional, and parliamentary order proposed by Weber (along lines similar to his friend, the Austrian-Jewish political and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen) had been forever liquidated. But by attacking and banning the “arch-reactionary Weber,” they opened the door to the real reactionary: Carl Schmitt.
And yet, granting the political unreality that blinded those Romantic revolutionaries, was Weber entirely right in his condemnation? I think so, but with nuances. There were gradations among them that Weber failed to recognize. Eisner, the socialist, was a German Kerensky, never a German Trotsky. Neither was the anarchist Landauer, a utopian mystic who detested the will to power of the Marxists. In political terms, one might ask: was Eisner’s pacifist stance so irresponsible? If it persisted, wouldn’t it have softened the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? On the other hand, were Landauer’s communal living projects unrealizable, at least on a small scale? (Consider the young kibbutzim in Israel.) In his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” delivered in 1917, Weber had assumed the impossibility of restoring “enchantment” to the secular post-Enlightenment world. Eisner and Landauer, on the other hand, stuck with enchantment, in the form of their utopian hope. Eisner and Landauer practiced the “ethics of conviction” to the limit. They sacrificed their lives for it.
Weber died in June 1920, a victim of pneumonia. Fury against the Treaty of Versailles (where he was present) and political exhaustion were not unrelated to his end; though he never lost his inner strength, the loneliness of the battle surely weakened him. He did his part in defending a constitutional and parliamentary path for Germany from the forces of unbound revolutionary passion and crude dictatorship. But even he could not foresee the diabolical extremes to which both forces would converge in the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Was this the “polar night” he foretold?
3
There was something else that those radical leaders did not see: the centuries-old monster of the German hatred of the Jews. Weber did see it, since the beginning of the revolution: “separatism is raising its head,” he wrote to Else Jaffe, “and it is going to embellish itself with anti-Semitism.” In Munich, especially in the wake of the failed revolution, that hatred reached insane proportions. That is the subject of Hitler’s Munich, the admirably researched and deeply saddening book by the historian Michael Brenner. His subject is not so much the Munich Revolution as the tragedy of its leaders, almost all of them Jews, and the turning of that revolutionary dawn into the human pyre of Nazism. Brenner seeks to answer three questions: What was the relationship of these leaders with Judaism? How did Bavarian society react to their rise? How did Munich develop from a liberal and “healthy and lively” place into a city that Thomas Mann — by then the famous author of Buddenbrooks, who was gradually awakening from his Apollonian apoliticism — described as “blood poisoned by anti-Semitic nationalism”?
Given the pervasiveness of the old anti-Semitism in that city and that time, Eisner’s attitude is puzzling. As he experienced the revolution as the awakening of humanity, his office received an avalanche of vexatious letters. The predominance of Jewish leaders in the movement unleashed an ominous propaganda that grew after the crushing of the revolution: graffiti in synagogues and cemeteries, cruel caricatures, editorial commentaries, all riddled with the old commonplaces of anti-Semitism — the Bolshevik Jew, capitalist, exploiter, usurer, stateless. The Jew was the “enemy within” who had stabbed Germany in the back, bringing about its defeat in the War. Eisner and his comrades despised all this; but as Brenner shows, they awakened the beast. The tragic fact is that their movement changed the historical place of the “Jewish Question”: although Jews constituted only around one percent of the population, the anti-Semitic waves that had broken out in 1819 and 1848 came to occupy the center of the Bavarian stage in 1919, never to leave it again — until, that is, the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945.
As Brenner documents, blaming Eisner and his collaborators for the bloody outcome of the revolution was the predictable reaction of various sectors: the victims, not the victimizers, became responsible for their own deaths. Max Weber did not concur in this widespread judgment. A student of ancient Judaism, he found inspiration in the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Book of Job. He lived surrounded by Jewish colleagues, disciples, and friends. Sociologically, Weber attributed the revolutionary proclivity of some Jews to the ancestral condition of belonging to a “pariah people” yearning for redemption. There is a grain of truth in this, but only a grain. The Jewish revolutionaries of Munich were not acting as Jews but as people with a universal vocation. They represented a minority, a marginal and heterodox fringe, what Isaac Deutscher later called the “non-Jewish Jew.”
In Brenner’s vivid and moving portraits of the revolutionaries, this heterodox factor is decisive. Despite their ideological differences, what characterizes the two main figures, Eisner and Landauer, as well as Mühsam, Levien, and Toller, is the secular eschatological aspiration that was typical of many Jews on the margins of Judaism, all of them heirs of Spinoza, Heine and Marx. “The Jewish Messiah is the moral humanity of the historical future,” Eisner had written to his teacher Hermann Cohen. In November 1918, Landauer had asked Martin Buber to study Jewish participation in the revolution. He was convinced of its significance: “The prophets are more relevant today for understanding the Jews than the momentary experiences of their brittle lives.” Speaking of the revolutionaries he was speaking also of himself. For all these reasons, when, days before Eisner’s murder, Buber met him and Landauer in Munich, his presentiment on leaving them was one of theological desolation:
As for Eisner, to be with him was to peer into the tormented passion of his divided Jewish soul; nemesis shone from his glittering surface; he was a marked man. Landauer, by dint of the greatest spiritual effort, was keeping up his faith in him and protected him, a shield-bearer terribly moving in his selflessness. The whole thing, an unspeakable Jewish tragedy.
The secularization of messianism, however glamorous it now seems, was by no means the prevailing temper in German Jewish life. Brenner provides irrefutable evidence for this. The Jewish community of Munich — a very small minority, eleven thousand out of a total of six hundred thousand inhabitants in Bavaria — felt as German as the Germans, and created companies such as the Löwenbrau Brewery and soccer teams such as Bayern Munich. It was they who were most concerned about the effects of the revolution. “The Trotskys make the revolution and the Bronsteins pay the price,” they used to say. Consequently, the communal authorities and their publications publicly distanced themselves from the Räterepublik; the rabbis supported the conservative party; and in the extreme, there appeared cases of anti-Jewish Jewish intellectuals possessed by what Theodor Lessing called in 1930 Judische Selbsthaas, or Jewish self-hatred, whose twisted and influential trajectory Brenner records in painful detail. Eisner’s murderer, a half-Jewish far-right nationalist, was not alone in being ashamed of his roots and acting accordingly. Brenner cites the case of Rahel Lydia Rabinowitz, a famous Jewish doctor who published a repudiation of Eisner in which she pointed out that Jews should have no more political representation in Bavaria than that corresponding to their minuscule demographic weight. This text was so influential that in 1942 Hitler remembered it: “In 1919 a Jewess wrote ‘what Eisner is doing now will be passed on to us Jews’.” With clear reference to the systematic murder of the Jews then in progress, Hitler added: “This is a rare case of clear-sighted foresight.”
Several decisive figures of the twentieth century crystallized their ideas, convictions, and prejudices in the stormy days of Munich. For Heinrich Mann, “the hundred days of the Eisner government brought forth more ideas, more joys for reason, more animation of the spirits, than that of fifty years before.” His brother Thomas disagreed — in those years he was a political work-in-progress that he later documented in Confessions of an Unpolitical German — but the events shook him enough to dust off the manuscript of The Magic Mountain and begin to rework it. Brenner records the case of the Vatican nuncio Eugenio Pacceli, who sent regular reports of the changes in Germany that ominously foreshadow his indulgence of the Nazis decades later as Pope Pius XII: Eisner he described as “a Galician Jew who was repeatedly sentenced to prison for political crimes,” and the revolution as part of the “Jewish-Bolshevik global conspiracy” based on “the idea of a Jewish world government.” And just one year after the events Carl Schmitt published Dictatorship, his vindication of an executive power capable of suspending the constitutional order at will to deal with exceptional circumstances, such as revolutionary threats. It is difficult to imagine his rabid and permanent anti-Semitism, his hatred of “Jewish debaters” (beginning with “Spinoza, the first liberal”), without the Munich experience.
But perhaps the greatest disaster of the Bavarian revolution was the appearance of Hitler. He had arrived in Munich in November 1918. Several biographers have dated the origins of his anti-Semitism to his youthful years in Vienna; others, such as Ian Kershaw, locate its beginnings in Munich. Hitler electrified the crowds in the very same locations where Eisner had electrified “the masses” months before. Was the fascist demagogue emulating the socialist demagogue? Weber’s theory of charisma was now vindicated by both extremes. Is that Hitler in the blurry photographs of Eisner’s funeral? Between September 1919 and November 1923, Hitler gave one hundred and eighty-eight speeches, one hundred and thirty-two of them in Munich. In July 1923, in the run-up to Hitler’s ill-fated putsch, Thomas Mann remarked that Munich is “Hitler’s city.” One of those bewitched was Heinrich Hoffmann, the author of the Eisner and Landauer images. He became Hitler’s official photographer and in 1925 captured his delirious gesticulations in front of the mirror. The pathetic photographer of charisma.
Just as the assassination of Eisner foreshadowed that of Walter Rathenau in 1922, the experience of 1919 heralded the collapse of the Weimar Republic and reverberated in various times and countries, when the contempt of the various left-wing currents for parliamentary politics outweighed their sense of alertness to the advance of militarist and ultranationalist reaction. History repeated itself in Spain, where ideological hatreds and disdain for liberal democracy — identical to the anti-democratic contempt of Landauer and the Communists — weakened the republic and strengthened the nationalist right, leading to the triumph of Franco, who reigned for four decades. In Latin America the pattern was replicated several times, notably in Chile in the 1970s and in Venezuela in the 1990s.
And the cycle is not yet spent. Who would have believed that our liberal societies would now be faced with dangers of which Munich 1919 is a cautionary example? But here we are, drowning in what is politely called populism. The Weberian category of the charismatic authoritarian leader is ubiquitous. (I suppose I should exempt Putin, who represents the uncharismatic authoritarian leader.) Regardless of their ideological sign, tinged to different degrees with charisma, convinced of the purity of their convictions or secretly cynical about them, Chavez and Lopez Obrador, Trump and Orban and Modi, do not correspond to the strong democratic president bounded by parliament (Weber’s conception) but to the dictator of the Schmittian friend-enemy thesis. Some countries that have not yet entirely forgotten the lessons of World War II (France, England, Italy, Germany) have so far resisted the autocratic temptation, but not by much, and the United States, shockingly, is in real danger of succumbing to it. 1919, 2025: Who would have imagined that the postwar warnings of Adorno and Horkheimer, German students in Munich during the convulsion, in The Authoritarian Personality would become valid in the run-up to the two-hundred-and fiftieth anniversary of American independence?
Populist leaders are not the only ones who now regard politics through the flattening and darkening and polarizing Schmittian lens. It is shared by many university students in the United States and Europe, imbued with a new and more inarticulate version of the “ethics of conviction.” But which convictions? Unlike the revolutionaries of 1919, who impatiently dismissed Weber’s message because they sought to build a world of social and economic justice, today’s students seem to confuse altruism with narcissism. Those young people joined the revolution and, like Eisner and Landauer, many of them died for it. What risks do the insurrectionists of the Ivy League run? (They demonstrate for their own amnesty!) Other students of 1919 turned away from active politics, not to escape their responsibility as intellectuals but to elaborate a theoretical construction of social utopia. What is the utopia of today’s youth? They display nothing more than the ecstasy of their own sensibility: what is good for what I feel is good for humanity. As David Rieff has written, “the political emergency merges with the psychological emergency.”
But there is one cause that obsesses them the most. It is the Palestinian cause, a perfectly legitimate cause were it not for the fact that it drifts too easily into support for Hamas and anti-Semitism. The tents and the banners in the quads can seem merely like an expression of sensibility, except that there is nothing merely symbolic about the global eruption of contemporary anti-Semitism: if contemporary anti-Semitism does not justify looking away from the carnage in Gaza, neither does the carnage in Gaza justify looking away from anti-Semitism, not to speak of the Hamas pogrom itself. All this is yet another serious echo of 1919. If the idealists of Munich believed that the triumph of their revolution would open an era of universal concord that by itself would dissolve the ancient hatred of the Jews, we, the postwar Jewish generations, believed with a similar naiveté that the Holocaust — the reality of it and the memory of it — would overcome the millenarian prejudice or at least open an indefinite truce. It did not happen for many reasons, because of the hostile and murderous response to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Nazi inspiration of many Palestinian leaders, religious and secular, has been abundantly documented. In the decades since, there has been progress toward peace, with the conclusion of peace treaties with Arab states and the current work toward a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia — but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains trapped in atavisms and hatreds. In that conflict the Schmittian perspective grows larger, not least for the addition of theological animosities.
A long time has passed since 1919, but not long enough. Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” is now a twenty-first-century document, as valid now as when he spoke the words in the castle. It is a call to keep reason and a clear head in volatile times like these, in times of confusion and despair. It helps us to recognize that the apocalypse is not a historical inevitability but a choice. Only heroic spirits, said Weber, filled with a conviction guided by responsibility, could overcome the polar night that he foresaw. Fortunately for our recent ancestors, there was no shortage of heroes in the democracies of the West, who dared to look “the tragic warp of history” in the face and brought the dawn with them. Who are the heroes now? Must Volodymyr Zelensky lead us all? As I strolled the streets of Munich recently, I noted occasions for hope: its memorials to Eisner and Landauer, for example, and the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, with its exhibits about the Munich Revolution, its hopes and its horrors, which now stands near the place where the headquarters of the Nazi Party once stood. And in the immediate aftermath of October 7, in the midst of the war in Ukraine, I saw people in its main square listen to a troupe of Jewish singers intoning melodies in Yiddish while in the Old Town Hall of Marienplatz the flags of Germany, Ukraine, and Israel fly together. All is far from lost. But the struggle against a new polar night is far from over.
