November 9th
Sometimes, it seems the 9th of November is when all of German history in the 20th century happened. Some of the worst, some of the best, and some of the big might have beens. I wonder whether there'll be such a jinxed day in the 21st century. Consider:
November 9th 1918: after four years of a war on a devastating scale never experienced before, an uprising of soldiers and workers ends the German monarchy and brings in the first German Republic. (I don't think too many people outside of Germany or for that matter inside are aware that the Republic didn't start after the armistice but days before.) It's hard to say whether the Weimar Republic ever had a chance. With hindsight, it doesn't look that way, and yet I like to think history is never that inevitable. It does leave a lump in my throat, reading Philipp Scheidemann's speech from the Reichstag: "Workers and soldiers, be aware of the historical significance of this day: something unprecedented happened. All for the people. All through the people. The old and corrupt, the monarchy, has broken down. Long live change! Long live the German Republic!"
November 9th 1923: it must have looked like a local provincial thing at the time. The head of an obscure right wing extremist party together with a disgruntled general and some local militia in Bavaria tries to play Mussolini, proclaims a "march to Berlin" and actually never makes it out of Munich, his wannabe coup d'état crushed easily. But if Hitler instead of being punished by a few measly months in prison - with the judge declaring that the accused clearly acted from the most noble of motives - had either been sent back to Austria (he wasn't a German citizen at the time, and didn't aquire German citizenship before 1932, when he needed it in order to run for the presidency against Hindenburg) or received a proper sentence, say a decade or two - what then? Maybe the Nazis would have remained obscure. WWII probably would have happened anyway, because of the leftover baggage of WWI, but the Holocaust wouldn't. In any case, the fact that a judge could declare an attempt to overthrow the goverment in favour of a proposed dictatorship to be something noble and patriotic was a sinister and accurate omen of one of the major reasons why the Weimar Republic failed: so many of the public servants who should have carried and protected said republic were instead either leftover monarchists or future fascists.
November 9th 1938: the most terrible date of all. This was the so-called "Reichskristallnacht", the "night of the broken glass", in which 1406 Synagogues were destroyed, 7500 shops were plundered, more than 1300 people died, and more than 30 000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. All of which masked as a "spontanous revenge action" for the death of a German diplomat in Paris (who had been shot by a Jewish adolescent), but of course in reality thoroughly organized by Goebbels and Hitler. In addition to the horror of the acts that did happen, there is the horror of what did not happen: parts of the population showing solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, or trying to protect them. Showing courage. It didn't happen. Even though we're talking about neighbours and former friends. I asked my grandparents about it; I think most of my generation did that as long as the grandparents were still around, just like our parents asked their parents, sooner or later. My paternal grandmother remembered it very clearly. She had worked as a shopgirl in a store that specialized in hats; the owner was Jewish, the shop had been through smears and boycotts as early as 1933-1335, which was when the shop owner took his family, sold the store and left for Switzerland, thereby saving his and his family's lives, as it turned out. Some people still remembered the shop used to have a Jewish owner in 1938, and there were smashed windows, though nothing worse. My grandmother said she was afraid. She never claimed to have hidden or protected anyone. "We'd have been too afraid," she said, of my grandfather and herself. "But we knew. That it was just the start, and that it it would get worse. That night, we knew."
November 8th/9th 1939: In the night of November 8th, Hitler attended the annual celebration of his aborted coup from 1923 in Munich and left more than an hour earlier than was usual at these celebrations. When a few minutes after his departure a bomb exploded, he wasn't there. The bomb had been made by a carpenter named Georg Elser, not a soldier, not a member of any party, but someone who when interrogated about his motive after his arrest just said: "Someone has to stop this man, can't you see that?" He was sent to Dachau where he was executed on April 9th 1945, just a month before the war ended. If the inaction of the population in 1938 is still terrible to contemplate, Elser is that rare example of a citizen who wasn't afraid or convinced he couldn't do anything anyway, but who tried. He failed, Hitler was even more convinced of being a man of destiny and lived on to organize mass murder for another six years.
November 9th 1989: And we come full circle. This was the night when Günther Schabowski, member of the GDR Politbüro, announced that the prohibitions against East German citizens travelling abroad were nullified. Which came after months of demonstrations, and East Germans filling the West German embassies in Hungary and Czecheslovakia. This was the night the Wall fell. I don't think people who didn't grow up with the East and West division as the status quo, like I did, will ever get the full emotional impact of this. Or the extraordinary courage of the East Germans before when they went on these demonstrations. Sure, it was glasnost time in Russia, but the last few times there had been periods of thaw in the East they had ended like the "Prague Spring" had done in 1968, with tanks and people shot down. It was entirely possible this would happen this time as well. But they demonstrated and demanded their freedom anyway. It was a successful revolution, alright, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung of this weekend, quoting the historian Hans Mommsen, said this at last was the end the November revolution of 1918 should have had, and that if you changed only a few terms from Scheidemann's speech, replaced "monarchy" by "SED regime", it would still have fitted. For the people and through the people. Long live change.
November 9th 1918: after four years of a war on a devastating scale never experienced before, an uprising of soldiers and workers ends the German monarchy and brings in the first German Republic. (I don't think too many people outside of Germany or for that matter inside are aware that the Republic didn't start after the armistice but days before.) It's hard to say whether the Weimar Republic ever had a chance. With hindsight, it doesn't look that way, and yet I like to think history is never that inevitable. It does leave a lump in my throat, reading Philipp Scheidemann's speech from the Reichstag: "Workers and soldiers, be aware of the historical significance of this day: something unprecedented happened. All for the people. All through the people. The old and corrupt, the monarchy, has broken down. Long live change! Long live the German Republic!"
November 9th 1923: it must have looked like a local provincial thing at the time. The head of an obscure right wing extremist party together with a disgruntled general and some local militia in Bavaria tries to play Mussolini, proclaims a "march to Berlin" and actually never makes it out of Munich, his wannabe coup d'état crushed easily. But if Hitler instead of being punished by a few measly months in prison - with the judge declaring that the accused clearly acted from the most noble of motives - had either been sent back to Austria (he wasn't a German citizen at the time, and didn't aquire German citizenship before 1932, when he needed it in order to run for the presidency against Hindenburg) or received a proper sentence, say a decade or two - what then? Maybe the Nazis would have remained obscure. WWII probably would have happened anyway, because of the leftover baggage of WWI, but the Holocaust wouldn't. In any case, the fact that a judge could declare an attempt to overthrow the goverment in favour of a proposed dictatorship to be something noble and patriotic was a sinister and accurate omen of one of the major reasons why the Weimar Republic failed: so many of the public servants who should have carried and protected said republic were instead either leftover monarchists or future fascists.
November 9th 1938: the most terrible date of all. This was the so-called "Reichskristallnacht", the "night of the broken glass", in which 1406 Synagogues were destroyed, 7500 shops were plundered, more than 1300 people died, and more than 30 000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. All of which masked as a "spontanous revenge action" for the death of a German diplomat in Paris (who had been shot by a Jewish adolescent), but of course in reality thoroughly organized by Goebbels and Hitler. In addition to the horror of the acts that did happen, there is the horror of what did not happen: parts of the population showing solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, or trying to protect them. Showing courage. It didn't happen. Even though we're talking about neighbours and former friends. I asked my grandparents about it; I think most of my generation did that as long as the grandparents were still around, just like our parents asked their parents, sooner or later. My paternal grandmother remembered it very clearly. She had worked as a shopgirl in a store that specialized in hats; the owner was Jewish, the shop had been through smears and boycotts as early as 1933-1335, which was when the shop owner took his family, sold the store and left for Switzerland, thereby saving his and his family's lives, as it turned out. Some people still remembered the shop used to have a Jewish owner in 1938, and there were smashed windows, though nothing worse. My grandmother said she was afraid. She never claimed to have hidden or protected anyone. "We'd have been too afraid," she said, of my grandfather and herself. "But we knew. That it was just the start, and that it it would get worse. That night, we knew."
November 8th/9th 1939: In the night of November 8th, Hitler attended the annual celebration of his aborted coup from 1923 in Munich and left more than an hour earlier than was usual at these celebrations. When a few minutes after his departure a bomb exploded, he wasn't there. The bomb had been made by a carpenter named Georg Elser, not a soldier, not a member of any party, but someone who when interrogated about his motive after his arrest just said: "Someone has to stop this man, can't you see that?" He was sent to Dachau where he was executed on April 9th 1945, just a month before the war ended. If the inaction of the population in 1938 is still terrible to contemplate, Elser is that rare example of a citizen who wasn't afraid or convinced he couldn't do anything anyway, but who tried. He failed, Hitler was even more convinced of being a man of destiny and lived on to organize mass murder for another six years.
November 9th 1989: And we come full circle. This was the night when Günther Schabowski, member of the GDR Politbüro, announced that the prohibitions against East German citizens travelling abroad were nullified. Which came after months of demonstrations, and East Germans filling the West German embassies in Hungary and Czecheslovakia. This was the night the Wall fell. I don't think people who didn't grow up with the East and West division as the status quo, like I did, will ever get the full emotional impact of this. Or the extraordinary courage of the East Germans before when they went on these demonstrations. Sure, it was glasnost time in Russia, but the last few times there had been periods of thaw in the East they had ended like the "Prague Spring" had done in 1968, with tanks and people shot down. It was entirely possible this would happen this time as well. But they demonstrated and demanded their freedom anyway. It was a successful revolution, alright, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung of this weekend, quoting the historian Hans Mommsen, said this at last was the end the November revolution of 1918 should have had, and that if you changed only a few terms from Scheidemann's speech, replaced "monarchy" by "SED regime", it would still have fitted. For the people and through the people. Long live change.