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The Germ of Brecht’s Anti-Stalinist Iconoclasm: The Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle
- Edited by Markus Wessendorf, University of Hawaii, Manoa
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- The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 47
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- 15 June 2023
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- 22 November 2022, pp 170-189
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The prologue will say different things to different people as to what has already been achieved and where, but to all it conveys Brecht's belief that the new age is possible. What his audience is to be haunted by is not a memory, a fantasy, or a dream, but a possibility.
—Eric Bentley, The Brecht CommentariesAt the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin's crimes against the Soviet people, denounced the cult of personality, and urged a return to Lenin's path. Ailing from heart disease at his Brandenburg retreat, Brecht began a cycle of poems appraising Stalin's legacy, a continuation of the Buckower Elegien (Buckow Elegies) critical of SED leadership after the Berlin Uprising of June 1953. These late poems would serve as his final testament: in six months he was dead. They depict Stalin variously as maggot-ridden god, butcher of the people, and Lenin's star pupil who then punched his mentor's chops. In Brecht's 1930 drama Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken), a political Lehrstück cited by his congressional inquisitors in 1947, he himself argued for the absolute imperative of party discipline, even to the point of murdering a comrade if need be. Then Marxism was mainly a theoretical exercise for him. He came to know firsthand from his 1935 visit to Moscow and from his perilous passage in 1941 through Stalin's empire to the US that Soviet communism had become something hideous.
Scenes from the prologue of Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), written in exile in Santa Monica and New York, were the last thing Brecht rehearsed with the Berliner Ensemble in the days before his death on August 14, 1956, a little over a year after he had returned to Moscow to accept the Stalin Peace Prize. Frail and failing, on his last legs, Brecht nonetheless insisted on directing. The bipartite play's heroine is Grusha, a proletarian woman who rears highborn Michael Abashvili, “the son of the tiger,” to humility and compassion. Its hero is Azdak, the judge-by-default who pronounces Grusha true mother to Michael and appropriates the vast Abashvili estates for the long-suffering populace of Grusinia. A disenfranchised intellectual who must denounce himself, take part in a series of show trials, and bow and scrape before a succession of tyrants to avoid the gallows becomes the unlikely instrument of sublime poetic justice.
18 - Wretched Superfluity: Divided Loyalties (1915–1916)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 317-331
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ON NEW YEAR's DAY 1915 Eisner reviewed for the Post Eugen Kilian's curious minimalist production of Much Ado about Nothing at the Royal Residence Theater. Although Eisner praised the comic genius of Albert Steinrück in the role of Dogberry, the lightning repartee of Mathieu Lützenkirchen and Emma Berndl as Benedick and Beatrice, and the exquisite charm of Berta Neuhoff's Hero, he questioned the stark sets and absence of orchestra, particularly in light of the court theater's profitability before the war, undiminished state funding, sustained attendance, and cost savings from a program truncated by two days a week. This “strategic financial retreat” unwarranted by actual necessity deprived personnel—carpenters, costumers, musicians, and stagehands—of muchneeded income in a time of need. The issue exceeded the aesthetic considerations of stagecraft: “Ultimately it would be of sociopolitical value at the moment to expend something on settings and thereby support callings on which the war's economic burden weighs more heavily.”
At midmonth the commanding general of the Eleventh Army Corps at Kassel banned publication of the Social Democratic Volksblatt of Gotha for repeated transgressions against the censorship policy. For the most part, though, party newspapers blithely acquiesced in the Burgfrieden. On the sixteenth Eisner used his review of Ludwig Biro's comedy Der letzte Kuß (The Last Kiss) to call attention to the acerbic critique of the hawkish press by Biro's Dual Monarchy compatriot Karl Kraus. For months following the Sarajevo assassinations Kraus suspended publication of his Viennese journal, Die Fackel. On 5 December 1914 it reappeared with the essay “In This Great Time,” scathing the bombardment of cathedrals, submarine warfare, military manipulation of the media, cultural war-profiteering, and the complicit journalism that he deemed “the most murderous weapon of all.” Indeed, the horrors of combat paled in comparison to “mankind's intellectual self-mutilation by its press.” In one brilliant sentence Kraus registered his full scorn: “In the realms of impoverished fantasy where man perishes from mental starvation without feeling the pangs of hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, what cannot be imagined must be done, but what can only be imagined is unspeakable.”
15 - Something of a Party Offiziosus in Bavaria: Political Editor at the Münchener Post (1910–1911)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 272-288
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AS EISNER HAD SURMISED PRIVATELY, his candidacy for Dessau's Reichstag seat was effectively doomed. Friday, 1 July 1910, Heinrich Peus appeared in Nuremberg to investigate firsthand the rumors of professional dissolution and personal dissipation. Adolph Hoffmann, whom Eisner counted among the ruinous “Berlin clique,” had offered to stand in his place. Confronted by Peus with what Karl Fentz and Max Walther had said of him, Eisner resisted the impulse to withdraw on the spot and remarked coolly that Peus would have done better to speak with people “other than scoundrels.” After interviewing members of Eisner's camp, Peus returned to Dessau incensed at Fentz's willful misrepresentations. Eisner went first to Berlin then to Dessau to shore up his campaign, but the damage could not be undone. On 5 July Peus met with Albert Südekum in Bitterfeld to assess the sustainability of Eisner's candidacy. Once Südekum had voiced his opinion, Peus proposed Julius Kaliski in Eisner's stead. Südekum suggested Wolfgang Heine. Heine visited Südekum on the eighth and consented to stand. One month later the Social Democratic Press Bureau in Berlin announced that a “change of his professional and personal circumstances” impelled Eisner to resign his candidacy in favor of Heine.
Resettled in the Bavarian capital with Else Belli and their infant daughter, Kurt Eisner at age forty-three struck out in new directions. Although he continued to speak at party functions near and far, Eisner channeled rejuvenated energies into his freelance writing, fresh family life, and a position on Adolf Müller's editorial staff at the Münchener Post. The change of scene restored him. He resumed professional contact with Joseph Bloch and Heinrich Braun and immersed himself in South Bavarian activism. Bernhard Grau observes that “astonishingly soon Eisner fell in step again and found his place in the political and social life of the city and the local party organization.” Gone was the despair he had confessed to Kaliski just three months earlier, dispelled the inability to work that had plagued him in the final days at his desk on Breitegasse. In a letter to Social Democratic newspaper editors he outlined an expansion of the Arbeiter-Feuilleton to provide reviews of books and journal articles of topical interest.
12 - So Suspect a Heretic, as Surely I Am: New Bearings in North Bavaria (1908)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 224-242
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IN LATE FEBRUARY 1908 Eisner relished his immediacy in Germany's Catholic South to Karneval, the week-long festival of wanton indulgence preceding Lent. For one long fascinated by the spiritual and psychological affects of holidays, the bacchanalian abandon heralding spring and the rebirth of the natural world spoke to a troubled soul poised to slip the emotional confines of his stagnant marriage. Both the packed schedule of lectures, which Joseph Bloch regarded as suspect, and the effort to broaden the scope of his political pursuits were symptomatic of Eisner's need to redefine and reinvigorate himself by venturing out from his home in Behringersdorf and his office at Luitpoldstraße 9. Direct personal contact with the working-class public, a diversion he savored during Paul Bader's campaign in Marburg fifteen years earlier and for which he carved out time in Berlin, afforded welcome respite and inspiration.
At Vorwärts Eisner wrote an annual observance of the March Revolution of 1848. This year, having had the opportunity to witness the pre-Lenten merriment in Munich, he related the life force of Karneval to revolution itself. “Being loosed from all constraints, leaping exuberantly over all barriers are common to the forceful stirrings of head and heart. Life itself enters into all its power. Nature and natural law triumph. Races such as the French, who engender not only new constitutions, new social order, but new dances as well, who die for freedom with grape leaves in their hair, whose mass will finds joy's rhythm and desire's dynamic in the yearning for freedom, can never be completely oppressed.” On the Saturday and Sunday before Ash Wednesday the citizenry of Bavaria's capital were caught up in the riot of ecstasy, class distinctions obscured by the celebrants’ masks. Awed by the spectacle and its sociological context, Eisner noted particularly the colossal business done by the city's pawnbrokers during the festivities—“What does man need when freedom's intoxication lays hold!”—and the disproportionate number of births each year in November, nine months after the mass “affirmation of life.”
Contents
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp vii-viii
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5 - Making the Leap: Back to Berlin as a Social Democrat (1898–1900)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 67-88
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BACK IN MARBURG Eisner renewed contact with the Cohen circle and cast about to reestablish himself in journalism. On 20 August 1898 at Haspelstraße 37 he drafted a general letter of application in which he cited years of experience as an editor, offered to make available reviews of his work as Tat-Twam and Sperans, and listed as references—in addition to Professors Cohen, Natorp, and Rathke—Dr. Fedor Mamroth, theater critic and feuilleton editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and the dramatist and critic Dr. Ludwig Fulda of Berlin. In return for his services Eisner stated that he expected an annual salary in the range of 5,000 marks. Adrift, he sought to reaffirm his viewpoint in a two-part article that would not be published until the following year in Neue deutsche Rundschau (New German Review), journal of the People's Free Stage. The setting for both parts is a wineroom where three friends sit late in the evening debating the import of the fin de siècle and speculating on the shape of things to come. Eisner presents his own views in the third person, literally, for the participants are a teacher, a doctor, and “the third one, who was nothing.” Although he hardly could have anticipated it then, he framed a debate that came to rule his life for the better part of the next decade, for in their discussion the three intimates consider issues of “reforming and revolutionizing.”
The teacher at the gymnasium, a pedantic grammarian in an unhappy marriage, decries modern culture with its celebrated advances in science and technology as a dehumanizing abomination that has made mankind the subject of a perverse experiment in acceleration, extirpating all sense of tradition and community. “When we return after two years’ absence to a city where we lived, we cannot recognize it anymore: … instead of the earlier pedestrians we see bicyclists, automobiles, electric streetcars shielded from the indecent nakedness of the cloudless sky by a sieve of telephone wires….
10 - The Complete Parity of My Experiences: From Exile to Nuremberg (1905–1907)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 185-205
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WRITING TEN YEARS AFTER Bavarian head of state Kurt Eisner had been felled by an assassin's bullets, Austrian comrade and colleague Stefan Großmann eulogized him for the Berlin journal Tagebuch (The Diary) as “the most refreshing, brightest, most vital journalistic talent that ever worked in the Social Democratic Party.” To attain that station, Großmann explained, Eisner had to rise above an organizational structure and culture that succored mindless mediocrity and worse. “Thus it is understandable that Germany's greatest party did and does not possess a single robust, readable, and truly read daily newspaper…. In the first decade of this century Kurt Eisner tried to make a great paper of Vorwärts. He might well have succeeded, had not an underground war been mounted against him one fine day, which no one who experienced it then can forget.” Accusations and denials were exchanged publicly and privately for a month after the purge, protests organized, old bonds dissolved, and new links forged.
Heinrich Braun, cofounder of Neue Gesellschaft, headed an influential group of party editors and journalists opposed to the radical agenda who, deploring the unsavory conspiracy and peremptory deposals, considered launching a strike of their own. The summary cashiering was denounced by its victims as a lockout engineered by the party executive, a cry that resonated in the trade-union press. In the final week of October Kautsky adamantly disputed the right of party journalists to bring to print personal political views that deviated from the party's official stance or that of their governing bodies. The dissident who “represents a view or represents it in a way contrary to the convictions of the organization” should be dismissed for the breach of party discipline. The next week Kautsky ran in Neue Zeit an article by Georg Ledebour disparaging the actions of the six deposed Vorwärts editors as a “revolt of the literati.” Ledebour claimed that in an organizational meeting of the Workers’ Press Association at the Hanover party congress of 1899, Eisner, in his first year at Vorwärts, had advocated the journalists’ strike as means of undermining a domineering press commission—a proposal that alienated the tried and true comrades among the audience.
7 - My Life's Purpose: Molding the Readership (1902–1903)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 115-137
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THE RUTHLESSNESS OF MEHRING and Luxemburg in consolidating control at the Leipziger Volkszeitung and converting it into the organ of the extreme Left angered many besides the purged staff, and soon the contentious coeditors turned on each other. By early summer they were scarcely on speaking terms, yet in an attempt to discredit Eisner's moderate leadership of the central organ, they printed a series of attacks on Vorwärts by Parvus, pen name of Alexander Helphand, an unstable Russian émigré who served as Bebel and Kautsky's cudgel against anyone they suspected of harboring revisionist sympathies or even of willingness to hear the reformist viewpoint. Eisner protested directly to Mehring in a letter dated 14 July. “Whenever the L.V. prints now Comrade Parvus's hallucinations that we—infinitely insidious and base conduct on our part—schemed hypocritically to compromise and undermine the L.V. or indeed the view it represents, I fail to understand how a serious paper can repeat obsessive accusations of that kind. At the least I would move simultaneously that the fellows pushing such a filthy agenda at Vorwärts be expelled from the party at once. I have enough sense of party camaraderie to want every party paper, including the L.V., to be so superior as to serve as a model for us colorfast Vorwärts editors.” Eisner was particularly concerned about public perceptions of discord among the leadership with the annual congress set to convene in September in Munich. He considered this meeting of crucial importance in preparation for the elections of 1903. “This time,” he wrote in the lead of 31 July, “we have no time to appear divided.”
In the same article Eisner proposed for discussion at Munich two measures he deemed prerequisite for success in the coming elections. The first was the development of a strategy to overturn state suffrage statutes depriving the proletariat of its rightful voice, as Prussia and Saxony could no longer simply be forfeited to the “unchecked forces of reaction.” The second was a concerted campaign to break the Center Party's stranglehold in Catholic states on wards with sizable constituencies of industrial workers, miners, and farm laborers.
Index
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 543-576
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19 - War for War's Sake: Political Alienation and Realignment (1916–1917)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 332-346
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MAURICE HANKEY, secretary of the War Council in London, advised Prime Minister Asquith in June 1915 that Britain's blockade of Germany would work in time “when the psychological moment arrives and the cumulative effects reach their maximum.” Anticipating problems in supply and distribution of foodstuffs, the German government had implemented controls in the first months of the war and sought alternatives to customary staples. In January 1915 potatoes replaced grain as the source of flour in Kriegsbrot (war bread), an Ersatz, or substitute, for the genuine article. Dearth and greed combined to drive speculation. The cost of a liter of milk in the capital went up by 175 percent in 1915, from 12 to 33 pfennige. During the Berlin “butter riots” in mid-October angry crowds smashed shop windows and fought with police over shortages and exorbitant prices. Vorwärts reported unrest in Münster and Aachen as well. With the failed potato crop of 1916 conditions worsened. Germany's increasing reliance on imports of foods such as herring, pork, and cheese prompted the British and French to buy up critical stores from neutral Sweden and Holland. Although the troops and munitions workers were adequately fed, the civilian populace was in dire need. The press was rife with accounts of food-profiteering, which the Far Right in particular attributed to parasitic Jewish middlemen. In an attempt to silence criticism from the Left, the military governors tightened state-of-siege restrictions, banning Social Democratic meetings and harassing members of the opposition with searches of domiciles and seizure of papers.
In April 1916 Kurt Eisner witnessed proof of Hankey's prophesied psychological moment when an emaciated cart-horse collapsed on a Munich street. Despite the best efforts of the driver, a policeman, and well-meaning bystanders, the beast could not be coaxed back up. “It lay there as though dead, only the labored, anxious breathing and sad black eyes betrayed that it still clung to life.” A crew of six fireman arrived, assembled a steel tripod, and by means of block and tackle succeeded in lifting the limp horse and lowering it onto a truck. A wag in the crowd shouted that fresh horsemeat would be on sale the next day.
9 - Revolutionizing Minds: The Scorched Middle Ground (1905)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 160-184
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EARLY IN 1905 THE SOCIALIST PARTIES of Europe fixated on events in Russia. The strike in St. Petersburg in mid-January, led by the prison priest Georgi Gapon, unexpectedly unified forces for reform from the salon to the stable. As Vorwärts reported on the fateful Sunday of 22 January, 96,000 workers at 174 concerns in and around the capital had struck in support of the workers’ rights movement that had its impetus in the dismissal of 4 workers from the Putilov Iron Works for belonging to a workers’ association founded by Gapon the previous year. On the fifteenth the dismissed workers’ comrades unsuccessfully demanded their reinstatement. The next day Gapon led a delegation of 84 workers presenting much broader demands, including an eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, double pay for overtime, improved sanitation, and election of a workers’ council to help set wages and determine grounds for dismissal. On 17 and 18 January workers struck to impress the urgency of their grievances.
What had begun as an economic issue, Eisner noted with evident satisfaction, had escalated to a political action. Vorwärts reported that workers planned a demonstration march to the Winter Palace, where they would present their grievances in the form of a petition to the tsar. Bourgeois intellectuals had met Saturday evening to urge Nicholas to accept the document. Ominously, he called for three regiments of cavalry and a division of infantry to reinforce the garrison of 50,000 troops and four regiments of artillery. Ignorant yet of what was already unfolding on Bloody Sunday, the Vorwärts public read the correspondent's speculation that bloodshed seemed inevitable.
The next issue appeared on Tuesday, 24 January, with horrifying details of the massacre in St. Petersburg. History records that the peaceful demonstration “was dispersed by troops with a cynical brutality unusual even for Russia.” Commanded by Prince Boris Vasilchikov, the military formed a cordon on the square before the Winter Palace. The correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt wired that shortly before noon a procession of at least 15,000 workers crossed the square, singing a hymn and bearing crosses and portraits of the tsar. At their head was Gapon, who advanced to hand the petition to an officer. Rebuffed, Gapon returned to the ranks of the workers, who moved forward toward the cordon. They were met with a withering fusillade that felled 600 in an instant.
4 - Dictatorial Megalomania: Lèse Majesté and Plötzensee Prison (1896–1898)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 51-66
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IN 1894 LUDWIG QUIDDE, editor of the Imperial Reichstagsakten (Reichstag Record) in Munich and former head of the Royal Prussian Historical Institute in Rome, published in Die Gesellschaft an article titled “Caligula: A Study of Roman Dictatorial Megalomania.” It was reprinted the same year by Wilhelm Friedrich of Leipzig, Eisner's publisher, as a twenty-page pamphlet. Although the article purported to portray the notorious Roman despot in his madness, the reader readily recognized it as a deftly veiled tract against the “personal regime” of Wilhelm II. Convicted of Majestätsbeleidigung, or lèse majesté, Quidde lost his position as editor and was jailed for three months in 1896. Typically, however, the law was brought to bear on less prominent critics of princes. In the 1 February 1896 issue of Die Kritik, a review of news items of the past week compiled by Mephisto deplored that a twenty-year-old worker had been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for shouting “Hurrah for anarchy!” while Wilhelm made an inspection tour of a warship under construction at the Hamburg shipyard of Blohm and Voß.
The attorney Max Falkenfeld of Fürstenwalde wrote in the 13 September issue that the concept of lèse majesté was a product of the late Roman Empire, which had also endowed the word “Byzantine” with its modern, negative connotation. He looked back to when the great Friedrich II ordered that handbills against him posted at riders’ eye level be lowered that the populace might better read them. Friedrich's Berlin was a capital of the Enlightenment; in the present, Falkenfeld lamented, a “mystical twilight rules the minds.” Every German citizen except the sovereign, he observed, could choose whether or not to seek legal redress for defamation. The sovereign alone had no say in the matter; the law and the state prosecutor relieved him of that right. Even more ironically, in cases of lèse majesté the accused was forbidden from arguing the merit his assertion before a judge, on the premise that ‘every deprecating assault on the inviolability of the sovereign is necessarily illegal.’ Since the well-educated critic—by far the most dangerous—usually masked his criticism well enough to avoid prosecution, whereas the poor fool venting his spleen went to jail, Falkenfeld concluded that justice would be best served by striking lèse majesté from the code.
3 - Refuge of All Idealists: Through Cohen to Kant toward Marx (1893–1896)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- 25 May 2018, pp 34-50
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THE LEFT LIBERAL JOURNALIST Hellmut von Gerlach remarked that Eisner, in his four-year tenure as political editor of the General- Anzeiger, won for the publication “a significance extending far beyond the range of a provincial paper.” Hesse had been annexed by Prussia after siding with Austria in Bismarck's war for Schleswig-Holstein; in its intellectual capital Eisner gloried in deprecating the Prussian arrogance and ambition personified by the German emperor. In lead articles for the paper, Berlin weeklies, and the liberal daily Vossische Zeitung ([Christian Friedrich] Voß Newspaper) he achieved his earmark style “somewhere between Heinrich Heine and Kurt Tucholsky.” In light of Eisner's coruscating wit and irony historian Allan Mitchell surmised: “Had he not been the editor of a provinical newspaper, he might well have earned his living by writing for one of Berlin's political cabarets.” Eisner's years in Marburg were in many respects the happiest of his life, a period of both respite and preparation, alive with the promise of family, friendship, intellectual growth, and meaningful work. A regular income freed him from the anxiety of the past, Lisbeth gave birth to three of their children there, and Eisner was drawn into the circle of intellectuals around philosophy professor Hermann Cohen, master of the neo-Kantian Marburg School whose thinking shaped a generation of “reform” socialists. The association with Cohen, his colleagues, and students channeled Eisner's already strong philosophical and political inclinations; “he began to define his socialism as a Kantian ethical socialism.” And through his political involvement with Bader he learned the practical application of his ideas.
Hermann Cohen had succeeded his patron Friedrich Albert Lange, enunciator of ethical socialism, as philosophy chair at Marburg in 1876. Once Eisner was settled, he determined to take advantage of his proximity to the great Jewish scholar who, continuing Lange's work, was in the process of explicating systematically that socialism has both its moral justification and philosophical fundament in Kantian ethics rather than in Hegel's ideal metaphysics or Marx's historical materialism. Cohen believed that philosophy, not science, is the vehicle for studying ethics, and that man—specifically, the individual and his associations—is the focus of the discipline. The principles that govern the conduct of individuals in their dealings with others are ethics, and moral values determine politics and economics rather than vice versa.
13 - Dear Little Whore: Personal and Professional Turmoil (1909)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- 25 May 2018, pp 243-258
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BACK IN NUREMBERG after his brief holiday respite in Dachau, Eisner ran the usual year-end retrospectives in the Tagespost. Pride of place was accorded Georges Weill's two-part article on Germany's woeful foreign policy in 1908, citing in particular the kaiser's Daily Telegraph interview and the “one defeat after another” that national prestige suffered from Bülow's inept meddling in Morocco. Tuesday, 5 January, Eisner drafted a proposal to Vorwärts Press in Berlin. His resolve “to withdraw from all editorial endeavors” and to devote himself to literary pursuits was impracticable at present, but he would devote “every spare moment” to the multivolume overview of world literature he had been invited to provide. He ventured that the undertaking would attract considerable interest, as no “cultural-social history of literature” existed. In addition, he was working on a history of the nobility and planned a continuation of Das Ende des Reichs, a project he had discussed with Comrade Bernhard Bruns. The latter he could deliver by 1 July 1912. Moreover, he had made considerable progress on a study of Fichte, a project that had occupied him for some years already, and he would gladly forward copy of the lecture series on Marx he was to present in the spring.
That night Eisner wrote to Belli from his room at the Schneider Hotel that he intended to meet with his wife the next afternoon to finalize some arrangement. Lisbeth wanted to leave Nuremberg, and he thought that she would do well to relocate to a small town such as Jena. “I will renounce everything, even the children. I know now that they love me but will go with their mother.” Once his family vacated the field, he saw no reason that Belli should not be with him in Nuremberg. “Then in a few months I shall present the people with the choice of losing me or having me and you.” He announced that he would arrive in Munich late Friday afternoon and asked her to take the train from Dachau to meet him at the main station. They could then ride back to Dachau together, “where we might hope to find a nest for us two.” On the twenty-sixth he would begin a tour of the electoral district in Dessau, but would visit her the weekend prior to departure.
Introduction
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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IN NOVEMBER 1918 in the Catholic stronghold of Munich a transplanted Jewish Berliner, just released from prison, led a nonviolent revolution that deposed the ancient Wittelsbach dynasty and established the Bavarian Republic, effectively ending both the Second German Empire and the First World War. The local head of the breakaway Independent Socialists, Kurt Eisner, had been jailed for treason in February after organizing a munitions workers’ strike to force an armistice. Before his incarceration he served as arts critic for the Münchener Post, organ of the Social Democratic Party, having been demoted from political editor for opposing the war. For a hundred days as Germany spiraled down into civil war and the victorious Entente powers deliberated their vengeance, Eisner fought as head of state to preserve calm in the South while implementing a peaceful transition to democracy and reforging international relations. On 21 February 1919, on the way to submit his government's resignation to the newly elected constitutional assembly, he was shot by a protofascist aristocrat. The senseless murder shattered a tenuous equilibrium, plunging Bavaria into the political chaos from which Adolf Hitler would emerge to herald a new epoch—one that culminated in 1945 with the citizenry of Dachau, their faces clouded by complicit ignorance and worse, burying the concentration camp dead on orders from its American liberators.
For many mired in the tradition of Catholic, monarchist Bavarian politics, including the resident Majority Social Democratic leadership, it was unthinkable that a diminutive Prussian intellectual of mosaisch heritage could mount an uprising that toppled one of Europe's most fixed ruling houses literally in an afternoon. But during the war an influx of North German labor had been channeled to Munich to drive the armaments industry, significantly radicalizing the urban proletariat. At the height of the British blockade the Wittelsbachs stood accused of war-profiteering by selling goods from the royal Leutstetten dairy at inflated prices. The western front was breached, the German Army in retreat, and still the very parties that championed the kaiser's preserve called for a levée en masse for national defense. People were war-weary, hungry, disillusioned, malcontent.
22 - The Terror of Truth: Forging the Republic, Combatting Reaction (1918)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Book:
- Kurt Eisner
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 380-399
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DURING THE NIGHT OF 7/8 November 1918 the Bavarian ancien régime desperately sought to perpetuate itself. Interior Minister Brettreich summoned Erhard Auer for consultation as to how the revolutionary uprising might be quelled. Meeting with Brettreich past midnight, Auer and the trade-union secretary Gustav Schiefer assured him that the workers of Munich would establish order. Although Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council forces had seized the telephone exchange, General von Hellingrath was able to reach the garrison commander at Landsberg and request reinforcements. Bavarian infantry and Prussian reserve units were dispatched by train to Pasing on Munich's outskirts. At dawn Lieutenant Königsberger, whom Herzog dubbed “the savior from Schleißheim,” had his men take up positions in defense of the Landtag, now Eisner's command center. Accompanied by three of his staff officers, Hellingrath personally met his presumed loyalist reinforcements at Pasing, but the reserves were soon persuaded to join the Revolution by a carload of men dispatched by Eisner once he learned of Hellingrath's plan.
After a night of celebration with his friend Anthony van Hoboken, Oskar Maria Graf tottered through Schwabing's empty streets, bawling his approval of the sea change. By midmorning a notice, printed black on a red background, was placarded on walls and advertisement columns across Bavaria: “In order to rebuild after years of destruction, the people have seized the power of the civil and military authorities and taken control of the government. The Bavarian Republic is hereby proclaimed. The supreme authority is the popularly elected Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council (Arbeiter-, Soldaten- und Bauernrat, or ASB), provisionally empowered until a definitive representative body is constituted. It has legislative power. The entire garrison has placed itself at the Republican Government's disposal. Military and police headquarters are under our command. The Wittelsbach dynasty is deposed. Long live the Republic!”
The morning edition of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten led with the revolutionary proclamation addressed to the citizenry by Kurt Eisner as Council chair. “The terrible fate visited upon the German people has led to an elemental movement of Munich's workers and soldiers. A provisional Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Council was formed in the Landtag the night of 8 November.
6 - No Idle Dreamer: At the Helm of Vorwärts (1900–1902)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 89-114
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THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER 1900 saw Eisner transported from the sleepy seaside village back to Berlin and then on to Mainz for the annual party congress and the renewal of debate, as Liebknecht had brokered a year earlier, on participation in Landtag elections. The second pressing topic was Germany's colonial policy. “After the nerve-racking discussions in Hanover,” Eisner readied readers of Vorwärts on 16 September, “the congress in Mainz will be of no less significance.” By its end the reformists would hold sway on one debate and suffer short-term defeat on the other, and the cracks in Social Democracy's ideological pedestal would widen. Providing a brief history and overview of the coming electoral debate, Eisner recounted that the party's traditional tactic against Prussian three-class suffrage had been the boycott. As party ranks swelled, though, some members determined that the Conservatives could be trumped in the House of Deputies despite the stacked deck if Social Democracy backed Left Liberal candidates or even put forward candidates of its own.
Bebel supported the boycott, as had Liebknecht. The party radicals generally had no use for either the Reichstag or the Landtag, both of which they regarded as trappings of the ruling-class state and as such fundamentally incompatible with the interests of the worker: collaboration and eventually power sharing would inevitably vitiate the party's raison d’être. The radicals’ weapon of choice for advancing the revolutionary cause was the general, or political, strike. Historian Peter Gay writes: “To them proletarian mass-action was an end in itself and was to serve as a substitute for parliamentarism.” The general strike to achieve political concessions rather than economic benefits or improved working conditions was opposed particularly by the trade unionists as counterproductive, playing havoc with the lives of the rank and file. The theorists who advocated the strike as a political tool were too removed, they charged, from the workers’ real needs. The trade unionists were skilled labor, and it was they who drove reformism. Their representatives considered participation in Landtag elections an effective means of expanding the party's influence and broadening its base of support. Once again Eisner took it upon himself to plaster the cracks: “Today many of our best fighters still consider this beginning extremely questionable…. If, though, the congress decides for general electoral participation, the minority is prepared to enter the fray as well….
20 - The Most Beautiful Days of My Life: Leading the Opposition (1917–1918)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 347-359
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WEDNESDAY MORNING, 18 April 1917, Friedrich Ebert opened a meeting of the Majority expanded advisory council with the announcement that the first item of business would be the split formalized at Gotha, superseding consideration of food shortages, electoral reform, and peace initiatives. In the ensuing discussion Paul Reißhaus of Erfurt reported that most of his Thuringian comrades feared that their organization was rapidly evolving into a national-social party. Other speakers downplayed the threat posed by the Independents. Hermann Beims ventured that in Magdeburg the opposition's numbers were insignificant, perhaps 150 adherents. Erhard Auer too believed the Independents’ strength overrated. “Munich was represented at Gotha as well, by Eisner. He was not elected but rather appointed a delegate at a meeting of 22 people—11 masters and 11 misses, almost all of them Jewish elements.” The insult induced ripples of laughter. In 1982 historian Freya Eisner remarked that many Munich Jews blamed her grandfather's revolution for a surge of anti-Semitism unknown in Bavaria to his contemporaries. Auer's demeaning characterization of Kurt Eisner's cadre suggests, however, that Jew-baiting was already manifest among his professed comrades in the South.
Upon his return from the founding congress of the USPD Eisner felt reinvigorated, refocused as he resumed his critiques for the Münchener Post. In a review of Rudolf Franz's book on contemporary drama he reaffirmed the necessity of social and political engagement of both artist and critic, applauding Franz's attempt to apply Marxist historical materialism to interpretation of theater. Reprising the premise of his 1896 essay “Party Art,” Eisner stated: “In the age of the proletarian class struggle the great artist must himself be a socialist. The more profoundly and ardently his entire personality is shaped by this worldview, the clearer and bolder he examines men and matters from this perspective, the greater his artistic stature will become through socialist virtue and insight.” The next week a dance performance by Lisa Kresse, Primavera and Beatrice Mariagraete, and Lala Herdmenger evoked the observation that “even today there is still something that one may call feeling for life.” And on Monday, 30 April, Eisner hailed as a revelation the Chamber Players’ premiere of Georg Kaiser's 1912 expressionist masterpiece on the spiritual poverty of material greed, Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight).
Kurt Eisner
- A Modern Life
- German History in Context
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 25 May 2018
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The first comprehensive biography in English of the leader of the Bavarian Revolution and Republic of 1918/19, the first Jewish head of a European state and a man who embraced and embodied modernity.
14 - To Find a Lost Life: From Nuremberg to Munich (1909–1910)
- Albert Earle Gurganus
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- Kurt Eisner
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 15 August 2018
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- 25 May 2018, pp 259-271
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IN THE FINAL WEEKS OF HER PREGNANCY Else Belli moved into a neat, two-storey house acquired by her father in a quiet southwestern suburb of Munich. The residence at Lindenallee 8 was situated at the edge of the vast Forest Cemetery in Großhadern, twenty minutes by tram from the city's hub. As much as Eisner would have liked to be with her, he was beset by press deadlines, speaking engagements, professional affronts, political squabbles, and personal anxieties in the North. On 1 October 1909 he wrote from Nuremberg, concerned for his estranged wife's state of mind. “If I had the money, I would send Lisbeth to Pastor Blumhardt in Bad Boll for a few months. In such surroundings her devastated soul could recover perhaps, and she might finally come to grips with the inevitable.” He worried too that the strike at the Ferdinand Wolff confections factory, for which the local party was responsible, might turn ugly. His level of involvement was such that he could “think of little else,” but other woes soon arose. In midmonth the Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer, founder of the secular, egalitarian Escuela Moderna, was executed by firing squad at Barcelona's Montjuich Fortress in the aftermath of the “Tragic Week” riots. Protests erupted across Europe. The Fränkische Tagespost announced on Saturday, the sixteenth, three days after Ferrer's martyrdom, that Eisner and Georges Weill would address the German Center Party's shameful endorsement of “this eruption of medieval benightedness and barbarism” at separate demonstrations the following day.
Sunday morning Eisner spoke to a packed house of solemn mourners at the Saxon Manor Inn on Neutorstraße. Afterward he had walked out to the Forest Café and emptied his purse for a cup of tea. He planned to spend the evening “utterly alone and destitute” at his office poring over Ibsen's just-published literary remains. Worse than poverty and solitude was the current rumor that his personal circumstances were causing him to neglect his work. “When Haller insinuated the like yesterday,” he wrote to Belli, “I declared that for one year I have enjoyed the happiest and most productive period of my life. When I was completely shattered two years ago and on the brink of suicide, my editorship was extolled….