Bands of Restless Men 2

1. Last week I started reading a book published in 1944. The first chapter talked about how a man named Alfred Rosenberg came across a book in Moscow that he was convinced was true. It told of a worldwide conspiracy by Jews to take over the world. Driven out of Moscow during the communist revolution, he found himself in Munich, Germany in 1918.

2. Munich in late 1918 was an extremely polarized place. There were the communists, who were energized by the Russian revolution a year earlier. (Lenin had actually spent some time in Munich previously.) But then there were also the discontented soldiers who had just returned from World War I, half infuriated, half demoralized.

War is heck, or something like that. In Bavaria in 1918, as in all Germany, there were many who had just returned defeated from World War I. Many of them had been sucked out of high school to fight, and all they knew was war. They had not trained for "normal" life. What they knew was how to kill.

Many of them were infuriated that the German leadership had surrendered. And what was worse, the terms were devastating. Germany was forced to pay the entire bill for all the Allied forces. It was a punishment they could not meet, that would have other consequences, as Keynes had argued.

3. On November 7, 1918, the anniversary of the Russian revolution, a Jewish socialist named Kurt Eisner marched through the city of Munich with a few hundred men and took over the government without a shot. The king fled. The generals and ministers fled. Eisner declared a republic.

Two months later he was shot dead on his way to resign. Three months after that the communists took over and declared Munich a Soviet Republic. A month later, the republic was restored, and Munich was reconnected to the rest of Germany.

4. The communists had killed ten people in all, in their final moments of power as the "White Army" marched on them. These were prisoners detained in conjunction with the assassination of Eisner. The author of my book even here says it was done by a fanatical subordinate against the will of the communist leaders.

The death toll on the other side made this act by a communist pale in significance. Fifty-three Russian prisoners from World War I all shot to death in a sandpit south of Munich. A priest in a village gave a list of twelve people who frightened him in town. The twelve innocent men were dragged to the Munich slaughterhouse and shot against a wall, along with several hundred others.

Heiden says this: "The drunken soldiery arrested, by mistake, Catholic workers, loyalists, enemies of the revolution and the republic; they murdered twenty-one persons in a cellar by order... of their captain" (22). The White Army went to one of the barracks. Every tenth man was shot at random. There was one person in the midst of the barracks, a spy, who quickly became the executioner--Adolf Hitler was his name.

5. After the republic was restored, these men went semi-underground, still discontented, still murderers. In public, the Allies were still around after the war, still watching. But there is a silent army of former soldiers, secretly stockpiling weapons. Anyone who might tell was eliminated. "One night we get into an automobile together. Two comrades 'happen' to be along. Out into the woods; we raise our gun to the fellow's head, and boom. That is how we fight against traitors" (24).

The minister who pushed for Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles--shot in a dark thicket of the Black Forest. Opponents were eliminated. Politicians were killed. Judges and police turned a blind eye. Harry Potter no doubt was imitating life when it had the early days of Voldemort be days when people just disappeared.

There were patriotic revolts, led especially by displaced middle-level German officers from the war. "A fatherland rises up within the fatherland" (26). It is no longer the Germany of Luther or poets. It is not the place of the cathedral. The disaffected do not feel like it is their land any more. They belong not to Germany but to its "army."

6. There was a man sending out the murderous deplorables in Bavaria. His name was Ernst Röhm. New groups with new names under varying leaders kept springing up, but Röhm stood in the background orchestrating much of it. He was the one who founded the National Socialist Worker's Party. He took the clubs of talkers in back rooms and made them political. Rosenberg's ideas became actionable, as these groups hunted down Jews and beat them.

"Events have taught me," Röhm wrote in an autobiography, "that the leading stratum of our society is incapable of giving the German people the will to freedom." (33). "Only he who is without possessions has ideals."

"A broken people, a broken army, broken men. The new movement rises out of wreckage... The gilded troop met in feebly lighted beer halls... Officers became conspirators... Now they were with workers. Not with the main body of workers... but with the flotsam, the stragglers living on the fringe of their class, the workers at odd jobs and the unemployed. The declassed of all classes came together; those of the upper and the lower classes made common cause."

Science/Culture Friday: Munich in Fall 2011

NPR has a show every Friday called science Friday.  I thought I might start something similar, but a little broader than just science. For example, I've started reading a book called, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.  But today I thought I would give some final reflections on the city of Munich as I experienced it in the Fall of 2011.

Any number of words and adjectives might immediately come to mind: Bavarian, artistic, historical, beer, catholic, cultured, scientific, expensive, bursting with people and foreigners, uncrowded for a big city.  But the peril of such words and phrases is always close at hand. A place has a past--things happened there, people wandered through there--but it is not inevitable that the past determine the future, at least not as far as conceptions are concerned.

And designations like this are often at best majority reports.  At worst they are individual impressions or the perceptions of those with the power to communicate their points of view.  There were Germans here who despised Hitler in the 40's, Germans who went to Dachau.  University students who were beheaded.  They just weren't the ones calling the shots at the time... literally.

So Munich is in Bavaria, and Bavaria is typically conservative.  But Munich is full of foreigners like myself as well.  Sometimes I have wondered how many actual Bavarians have handed me those precious baguettes, Schokocroissants, and Kirchtaschen.  It's not unfriendly for a big city.  I've experienced both friendly and unfriendly.  I've both had someone switch into Bavarian dialect to give me a hard time, and I've had a hard time getting away from an enthusiastic Elvis fan on a tram.

I loved the Pinakotheken, the art museums.  Munich is full of art from the Greeks to Cy Twombly, but I met a very educated German fellow here who has never visited them. The buildings are marvelous; the churches are everywhere, and they are all magnificent.  I am glad for the penchant the Bavarians of the past had to build them.  They are beautiful... and unused, and no doubt a less than helpful use of money the many centuries during which Bavaria was in horrible debt.

Munich is a great place to live if you have a good job, like big cities, and have the leisure to enjoy soccer ("football"), art, opera, history, ballet, theater, and like to reflect on culture and the meaning of life.  It's a good place to put a scientific research company.  It's a nice place to visit if you like Oktoberfest and Fasching.  It has great public transportation, great suburbs, and plenty of reasonably priced restaurants to fill your stomach with every form of pig intestine imaginable.

It is a place like no other place I've visited on earth.

White Rose vs. Hitler

Often mid-morning, I take the underground one station south of the university to Odeonsplatz, where I get my daily grande Filtercaffee at Starbucks with "kleinen Platz" for Kondensmilch.  I liked Odeonsplatz the first time I saw it, with its gaudy gold church and the palisade behind Starbucks where there is the start of the Englisher Garten.



What I didn't realize till today was that it was here at Odeonsplatz that Hitler's fumbled "putsch" came to an end in 1923.  And I also didn't realize that an area I regularly cross on my way to Starbucks was a cafe Hilter used to frequent before he came to power.

The garden with the palisades is the Hofgarten, which has a monument to the White Rose movement, a group of students (and a philosophy professor) from the University of Munich who distributed leaflets against Hitler from 1942-43.



All three of these were beheaded by guillotine after they were caught (Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst), along with others.  A stupid janitor turned them in.  Let his name stand here in disgrace: Jakob Schmidt.  Sophie flung a last bit of leaflets into the air in the atrium of the university, again, a place I walked through even today.  Janitor probably didn't like her making a mess... turned them into the Gestapo.

I thought it was a story worth telling.  And how bizarre to move through places with such significance for three months and not know it!  I think I'll seek out the White Rose monument tomorrow when I go for my daily Starbucks...

Afternoon at the Museum...

Yesterday afternoon we checked another thing off our "do before leaving Munich" list.  We went to the Deutsches Museum, which is full of actual planes, boats, submarines, space craft, etc.  You could actually climb into a lot of them.  I would have loved it as a child.

Maybe it's because I'm a little stressed in general but I was thoroughly depressed by the time I left for several reasons.  Here are just a few:

1. My kids won't be going/didn't go on field trips to anything like this from Justice/McCullough, or Marion High School.
2. The vast majority of American kids don't care about this sort of stuff... meaning America has no future in the world.
3. The accumulated knowledge this museum represents is way beyond anything I know... and I mean pick any point in time from some 1800 ship to the 1960 jet to the 1980's space craft.

Just thought I'd cheer everyone up on a Monday morning. ;-)