November 9th
Nov. 9th, 2008 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSometimes, 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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 12:02 pm (UTC)I remember well when the wall fell. Most clearly I remember Genscher standing on the balcony of the embassy in Prague, announcing to the thousands of GDR citizens that they'd been cleared to depart to the west.
And I remember how all the time before that, 'when the wall comes down' was used in the same way as the English 'when hell freezes over'.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 06:59 pm (UTC)And I remember how all the time before that, 'when the wall comes down' was used in the same way as the English 'when hell freezes over'.
Exactly. When we talked about it in school, we never expected it to happen. Never.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 01:12 pm (UTC)I was twenty one when the wall came down, and I remember hardly beliving it could happen. I kept thinking that any second tanks would roll in and it would be Budapest or Prague all over again. I was less relieved than terribly frightened for all the people my age I saw on camera, out beating on the wall with sledgehammers and dancing. I kept thinking that any moment the guard towers would open up and the bullets rip through. I saw the same things on the faces of the American guards at the checkpoints, standing there with the most incredulous looks on their faces, afraid to celebrate because in a second the entire thing could turn and then they would be standing helpless again, watching people bleeding to death in no man's land.
And then it didn't happen. I don't think I actually believed it for a week.
My grandmother was in the east visiting friends when the wall went up. She was let out, of course, as the wife of an American officer, but she never heard from her friends again. She was afraid to write to them for fear of calling bad attention to them. She died in 1988. I wished she had lived a year longer to see the world their grandchildren could have. To see the world mended.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:03 pm (UTC)I think the moment the last bit of me accepted it was for real and for good was when we were able to cross the border on January 1st, which was when the East German goverment allowed West Germans to cross without any visa as well. I had been in East Germany before, but only en route to West Berlin, on the Transitautobahn where you were not allowed to stop except at one particular licensed petrol station, and in East Berlin where you were allowed to stay for 24 hours if you came from West Berlin, but no longer. And suddenly we could cross over like in any Western country, and there were these signs saying "Welcome", "We are one people" and "Freedom".
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 01:19 pm (UTC)It comes back to the telescoping of time as one ages, and the way that it's taken most of my life to realise that the Second World War, which seemed such distant history when I was a child in the 1960s, was really a very recent event.
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Date: 2008-11-09 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 04:39 pm (UTC)Though maybe now we're safe. *hopes*
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Date: 2008-11-09 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 04:50 pm (UTC)I was speaking to one of my maternal aunts yesterday and she said she was so happy Obama had been elected. Why? I asked a trifle wearily. "You remember our old train station at Chatou? It had a telephone booth which during the war had a sign saying 'Forbidden to Jews, blacks and dogs.' I had to use it because we had no telephone, and since I had my dog with me I was doubly scared. We were five Jews in Chatou, and there were no blacks." Tthat's a better reason than most to be happy.
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Date: 2008-11-09 07:18 pm (UTC)I can't resist adding here "and so did Margaret Thatcher". As opposed to Bush the Elder who got it right, I hasten to add with all due gratitude as a citizen of the country that benefited from him getting it right and telling M & T as much.
As soon as West Germans were allowed to cross over without visa, which was January 1st, my father packed all of us in a car and we made this big trip to Dresden, with stops in Weimar and Erfurt, being filled with wonder and joy every meter on the way.
I also have the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the 9th in Berlin, where he replaced Freude with Freiheit in the Ode to Joy for this occasion. (Sidenote: this was actually Schiller's original text - Freiheit schöner Götterfunke - when he wrote the poem one the occasion of the French Revolution breaking out - but he changed it once the terreur started.)
I salute your maternal aunt. You know, one of the things that most struck me from the audience watching Obama's acceptance speech was the face of Jesse Jackson, crying. Not that I'm a fan of J.J., but I couldn't help renembering, at that moment, he had been with Martin Luther King when King was shot. He and everyone still alive from his generation all had started their lives in an America where Rosa Parks refusing to rise for a white man in a bus was a crime, and now they were living in an America where a black man has been elected to the highest office, and if that's not a reason to be happy and to cry, independent of party affiliation, what is?
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 05:06 pm (UTC)Anyway, thanks for the timely reflection.
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Date: 2008-11-09 07:25 pm (UTC)Me too. I mean, of course there will be always some people who fall for it. But I do believe it won't be the majority anymore, and that most of us did learn this lesson.
1938 was the year of Guernica, too, wasn't it? Talk about dark German and Spanish history.
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Date: 2008-11-09 05:11 pm (UTC)Thank you for this post. I've been trying for the last month to write exactly this entry. These interconnected dates signify both the best and the worst of 20th century Germany.
Before 1933 there was a Jewish community of 80 or so people in my home town. Now, all that is left is a memorial.
I personally only remember the aftermath of 1989. It was something of my political awakenening at the age of eleven. I know my older sisters marched in the streets in Berlin, and my father was prepared to go hide in the woods because as a reservist he could've been sent out to shoot at his children.
PS. It's Günther Schabowski.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:29 pm (UTC)and my father was prepared to go hide in the woods because as a reservist he could've been sent out to shoot at his children.
Which says all about the state and the system which would have made this possible. Your sisters were very brave.
In my hometown, there were more than 300 - with a long history - two of the most beautiful buildings were build by Jews, and we also have an old medieval Synagogue which after 1938 was changed into a Protestant church - , and after the war, none. Now, there is a small Jewish community again, which I'm very glad for.
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Date: 2008-11-09 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-12 06:46 pm (UTC)I was in college (in the U.S.) when the Wall came down, and eyebrow-deep in schoolwork. From my perspective, it seemed like the whole thing happened so fast it was over before I noticed it was happening. One day, this monolithic barrier was an inescapable part of the world, and the next day, it was just... gone. And the world seemed like a different place.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:08 pm (UTC)so thank you for connecting the dots.
even though i'm half German, i didn't grow up with my German parent and moved to the US when i was 4 years old. while i've been back to Germany 5 times since then, i don't really know much German history. nor do i speak the language anymore, except for a few words and phrases, much to my dismay. so i enjoy reading your journal to get the perspective of a young German.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 07:55 pm (UTC)Thank you for this post.
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Date: 2008-11-10 06:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 08:09 pm (UTC)I am old enough to remember the uprisings in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia, and John Kennedy in Berlin, and of course, that amazing moment when the Wall came down.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-09 10:43 pm (UTC)I shall now date myself: I was 24 when the wall came down, the Iron Curtain had been part of the universe for my entire life. When I was a child watching Mission Impossible, they referred to it so often I thought it was an actual wall of metal. *g*
Anyway, I have a vivid memory of sitting in my car at a train station in November of 1989, waiting for a friend, and weeping as I listened to reports from Berlin. It was astonishing, equal in impact to the events of this week--and even more driven by grass-roots, people-powered protest. Individuals insisting that the world be changed--and it was.
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Date: 2008-11-10 06:22 am (UTC)The wall falling: I was 21, so we're the same age group, and oh, did I cry, too. And only then realized how utterly for granted I had taken the Iron Curtain and all it implied.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-10 02:21 am (UTC)And I had no idea about Elser attempting to assassinate Hitler.
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Date: 2008-11-10 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-15 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-15 12:55 pm (UTC)