Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt 3: May Day, 1929
If I had more self-discipline, I would wait and tell this story in chronological order, after several other stories from the Weimar Republic that already have a place in my blog post editorial calendar.* But I found this story absolutely amazing when I read it over the course of several days’ articles in the Chicago Tribune of 1929. Sometimes I’ve just got to share the story NOW. Pull up a seat.
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One of the recurring themes in Weimar Germany, as it appears in Sigrid Schultz’s Tribune articles, is street fighting between different political factions and police intervention in the battles. The combinations involved vary from day to day, but the pattern is clear: one group has something to celebrate, a second or sometimes third group objects, fisticuffs (or gun shots) ensue, the police come in. The article always includes the numbers dead, wounded, and arrested.
What was later described as the battle of May Day in 1929 didn’t follow that pattern.
Anticipating trouble, the Berlin police revoked the right to march on May Day that labor unions and the socialist and communist parties had won under the former kaiser’s regime.** (This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Violent demonstrations broke out in several neighborhoods on the days leading up to May 1, which confirmed the wisdom of the order as far as the police were concerned. The socialist party accepted the police mandate and rented large halls in which to hold their May Day meetings—though I assume they grumbled about it. The communists were going to march, dang it.
On April 30, communist party members went from house to house, asking people to turn out for the parade and telling them not to carry weapons because this was going to be a peaceful demonstration. Meanwhile, the police mobilized all their reserves and armed them with machine guns, tear gas bombs, and armored cars. (You can see where this is going, right?)
On May 1, an estimated 80,000 communists and their allies turned out for a parade and open air meetings. After some fights with the police, the communists built a barricade using sewer piping that was stacked by the side of the road. The police stormed the barricades with machine guns and armored cars. The communists retaliated by throwing stones.
Despite the inequality of weapaons, the battle continued for four days, with a rising number of dead and wounded on both sides. On the last day, some of the policemen had had enough. To quote Miss Schultz: “The riot-swept district of Wedding was the scene of the first open outbreak of the policemen’s dissatisfaction at the way they have been driven by Junker officers in the last few days. Defying their superior officers’ orders, the men took off their steel helmets, laid aside their hand grenades and entire equipment, and proceeded to fraternize with the crowd by singing popular songs.” (Sound familiar?)
It’s a nice image, but the impact of the May Day battle didn’t end when the fighting stopped. Blutmai (Bloody May) is considered one of the events that contributed to the political instability of the Weimar Republic.
*A rather grand description of something that is basically a list of documents in a Scrivener file.
**I don’t know about you, but I grew up learning about May Day as a time when you made a basket,*** filled it with flowers, and gave it someone in the morning. (Usually your mother.) It was a nice craft project for an elementary school classroom or a Bluebird troop. No one mentioned a word about May Day as an international celebration of the labor movement.
***Often woven out of strips of construction paper. Though the crafty websites these days seem to be going with the much simpler paper cone.
The Hunt for History
I am not a collector of anything in any meaningful sense of the word.* I am certainly not a collector of historical ephemera. Which means that I had my doubts when my stack of books to consider for review for Shelf Awareness for Readers included The Hunt for History: On the Trail of the World’s Lost Treasures—from the Letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings Onboard JFK’s Air Force One by rare documents dealer Nathan Raab. At best, I hoped for a glimpse into a subculture of which I know little.
While I, in fact, got at a look at (and greater understanding of) the world of collecting historical documents (broadly defined), The Hunt for History was more than I had expected.
Raab tells spellbinding stories of tracking down and identifying rare historical documents and artifacts—the announcement of Napoleon’s death from a British admiral stationed on St. Helena, an outraged letter from Susan B. Anthony to a clueless autograph dealer,** and, yes, previously unknown recordings made on Air Force One on November 22, 1963. (He also shares heartbreaking stories of telling someone their family treasure is neither valuable nor authentic.)
But despite its title, The Hunt for History is more than a series of treasure hunts. Writing in a light, conversational style, Raab uses the stories of individual documents to illustrate both his education as a documents dealer, and his growing fascination with history. Working alongside his father, he learns to authenticate documents, to identify forgeries, and to recognize whether an authentic document has the historical significance of a major find. At the same time, he comes to understand how a piece of the past can provide an attachment to history. That understanding becomes deeply personal in the penultimate chapter of the book, in which Raab describes a historical discovery that changed him —the letters and library of a Jewish scientist smuggled out of Germany prior to WWII.
In the end, The Hunt for History is a delightful account of one man’s engagement with the past.
* Even my growing collection of reference books is entirely random, with no organizing principle beyond “this would be useful” and “that looks interesting”.
**From my perspective, this story made the book worth reading all by itself.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt 2: Born in Revolution
As I mentioned in a previous post, I went into my newest project a year ago with an astonishing degree of ignorance about the Weimar Republic. As I got into the reading, I was both shocked and embarrassed about how little I knew. And one of the things I didn’t know was how the Weimar Republic began. My best guess, had someone asked me, would have been that the Republic was established as part of the Versailles Treaty. (After all, both the Austrian and Ottoman empires were dissembled in the peace talks, creating the modern states of Austria and Turkey. Why not the Hohenzollern empire?*
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In October, 1918, Germany’s old absolute monarchy was effectively dead, though Kaiser Wilhelm was still on the throne. The (relatively) liberally minded Prince Maximillian, appointed Imperial Chancellor, joined forced with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to alter Germany’s constitution. Together they were in the process of creating a true constitutional monarchy and reforming electoral law. (In theory Germany had universal male suffrage before the war, but the man in the street wasn’t allow to vote for anything that mattered so it wasn’t worth much.)
On October 29, the hope of an orderly transfer of power blew up in their faces when sailors in the port city of Kiel mutinied. Several days later, delegations of sailors traveled by railroad to big cities across the country, spreading the word of their revolt against the officers, stupid orders, the war, and the empire. By November 7, the mutiny turned into a rebellion, as striking workers and mutinous soldiers joined forces with the sailors. Borrowing from the Russian Revolution, the workers and servicemen elected councils that negotiated with local authorities. It was grassroots democracy in a country in which most people had no experience of political participation.
On November 9, Prince Maximillian, hoping to restore order, turned over the position of chancellor to Friedrich Ebert, the head of the SPD. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated.**
The old Reich was dead, but the new Republic was on shaky ground. At 2 o’clock that afternoon, Philip Schiedemann, speaking for the new provisional government, proclaimed the end of the empire from the balcony of the Reichstag building to cheering crowds. Several hours later, Karl Liebnecht, a radical socialist leader, stood on the balcony of the royal palace, and proclaimed the creation of a socialist republic.
On November 11, Ebert and his colleagues formed a new government in coalition with the more radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). (You caught that, right? Two governments in two days.) Despite the shaky start, the new republic began with a rush of political reforms. Spurred by the energy of the mass movements in the streets, they passed laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, suffrage reform (include suffrage for women!) and amnesty for political prisoners.
The Weimar Republic was on its way and things were looking good.
*Did I mention that the depth of my ignorance was embarrassing? I’m not even sure that old stand-by “not my field” is an excuse.
**Possibly with his fingers crossed behind his back. Royal attempts to regain power in Germany are a recurring theme in newspaper articles of the 1920s.