A freely elected government, elected by a majority of the voters, is hated by a significant minority, egged on by the wealthiest. The main stream media is controlled by a handful of the super rich and denounces the elected government as oppressive and evil for initiating modest social reform. Students, union organizers, and political leaders are murdered, but right wing judges sentence the perpetrators to mere months in prison. A young and energetic national leader courageously defends democracy and denounces the hate mongering and violence of democracy's enemies. He succeeds, for a few months, and then is swept away.
Join me as we travel across the ocean, and back in time 88 years.
The date: June 24, 1922. The place: Berlin, Germany.
Three political parties, forming the "Weimar Coalition" have governed Germany over three years. Three political parties that unequivocably support democracy and the Weimar Constitution, control a majority of the Reichstag. The largest party is the Social Democratic Party, the SPD,equally devoted to Marxist Socialism and to democracy. The SPD governs in coalition with the German Democratic Party, the DDP,made up of middle class professionals, including the bulk of Germany's Jewish population, and with the Catholic Center Party, the "Center" which guards the perogatives of the Catholic Church in a majority Protestant country, but also supports the social reforms then advocated by liberals in the Church.
Together, the Weimar Coalition expands national health insurance and social security that had been instituted by Bismarck. State and local governments open free clinics, job training centers and schools. Together, the Weimar Coalition builds 2.5 million housing units that will be homes to 9 million Germans - these are garden apartments surrounded by parks and greenery designed by some of the world's greatest architects - such as Gropius and Mendelsohn, who would soon be driven from their homeland because they were Jews. Together, the Weimar Coalition fosters unions to increase wages and shorten the work day. Together, they work to show the workers of Germany that they should reject the false promises of the Communist Party - that democracy could work for them.
But for all these things, the Weimar Coalition is hated - hated by the landowning nobility, hated by the Army offiers, hated by the factory owners, hated by those who owned the nation's newspapers. And their instrument is the German National People's Party, the DNVP, promising to end the hated Weimar democracy and to replace it with a strong German state in which the wealthy rule and the workers submit, a Germany devoted to "traditional Christian values", a Germany free of the evil control of Jews and Socialists. It was the Socialists, and the Jews, who have led Germany to disgrace. Expel the Jews from government, cleanse Germany from this "trash and filth" and Germany will be reborn. According to Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany, Promise and Tragedy (2007), the DNVP
attacked Weimar and its supporters with the most virulent rhetoric. This was a radicalism of the powerful and well-situated - and they trafficked with those still further to the right . . . that included but went far beyond the Nazi Party. Their members were ideologues and agitators. They were, in the early 1920's not quite respectable, too wild and unpredictable for the nobles and businessmen of the DNVP . . . . But many of them found a few wealthy individuals to provide funds for their activities and army officers to spirit weapons to them. Not respectable, but also not beyond the pale. The more upper-class and well-situated Right and the less respectable radical Right shared a common belief system and common language marked by nationalism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of the republic.
It was these radicals who began their campaign of assasination, and it was their wealthy benefactors of the DNVP who from the Reichstag podium justified the murders:
Kurt Eisner- chancellor of the state of Bavaria, Bavarian leader of the SPD, and a Jew, murdered in 1919.
Hugo Haase, also a life long Socialist who broke with the SPD over the party's support of the First World War, but who served in the first federal cabinet formed after the war, also a Jew, also murdered in 1919.
Matthias Erzberger, national leader of the Catholic Center Party, President of the Reichsbank for the Weimar Coalition, murdered in August 1921. The respectable newspapers of the respectable DNVP gloated that
he has at last secured the punishment suitable for a traitor. . . . We must punish the domestic enemies of Germany with our hatred and our contempt. Compromise is impossible.
Back in April of 1921, 41 year old Joseph Wirth of the Catholic Center Party had become chancellor. In February of 1922, Wirth named Walter Rathenau, leader of the DDP, a wealthy but liberal businessman, and a Jew, as foreign minister. The DNVP and its lackies in the press wasted no time to begin their attack. Rathenau was a traitor, in the pay of the Allies during the war, and, being a Jew, unfit to represent Germany abroad. On June 22, 1922, he was brutally murdered.
A saddened, and angry, Chancellor Wirth stormed into the Reichstag. Turning to the deputies of the DNVP, he read their hate filled speeches, he read the praises of the murder published in their press, he denounced the "murderous atmosphere" that had infected the nation. He demanded an end to the "atmosphere of murder, of rancor, of poison." Pointing to the DNVP, Wirth thundered:
There stands the enemy - and about that there is no doubt. The enemy stands on the Right!
The Right retreated, for a few weeks. The Reichstag, including the DNVP, denounced the murder and appointed a commission to study the problem. But their wealthy supporters sneaked the murderers out of the country, and in a few weeks the right resumed their hysterical attacks on the republic and the decent people who supported it. And, eleven years later -