Munich 1919 by Victor Klemperer

Author:Victor Klemperer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509510627
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Third Revolution in Bavaria

(From our A.B. correspondent)

Munich, April 9 [1919]

Rumors. – The indifference of the bourgeoisie. – Dr. Quidde. – The men of the day. – Levien, Landauer, Epp. – No “Leipzig-style” general strike. – “Prussian and Jew.” – The plane.

By the time this dispatch reaches you – phone calls and telegraphs “abroad” are being monitored, the threat of the revolutionary tribunal is reiterated on every street corner and in every possible context, and the reason I have little desire to wear the martyr’s crown for the Bavarian bourgeoisie will become clear from my account – so by the time you receive my dispatch, we may already be on our fourth or fifth partner here. My report has no major news to offer from Munich, but it can relate a few things to make the heroically epic seem a little bit more human.

Anyone who has experienced the fine equanimity of Munich’s bourgeoisie will not be overly surprised by the successful coup de main of the council party. The bourgeoisie and all of the moderates were not unsuspecting this time; there had been whispers everywhere for weeks, and then in April “it” happened. But the good burghers decided that they had been politically agitated for long enough, and at some point a man had to have “his peace.” So they concerned themselves with butter and eggs instead of Mühsam and Landauer. The soviet people were more sensible, they combined business with – business: namely, foraging trips with educational speeches in the countryside. I know about these propaganda trips; they’ve been at work out there, and in Munich’s military barracks as well. Now the Munich garrison marches through the city with red flags to demonstrate for the Council Republic, and the third revolution can boast of having triumphed literally without firing a single shot or spilling a drop of blood. So far, at least – because the majority is gradually realizing that it has just been ambushed.

Such a characteristic scene last Friday evening. A Democratic assembly. Dr. Quidde,168 the Democrat and parliamentarian for Weimar, was supposed to talk about Bavarian foreign policy, while a local member of the State Parliament would talk about Bavarian domestic policy. The assembly was very well attended by bourgeois standards; probably half a thousand attentive and pleasantly quiet and peaceful listeners (even their interjections were peaceful), sitting with beers. The local delegate who was meant to talk about Munich politics was “unfortunately indisposed with hoarseness,” but Dr. Quidde – tall, refined, balding, graying, with a sharp little beard and sharp (prototypically Bavarian!) enunciation, you could hear the s-alient points and elegant thought ex-periments – kept us most entertained. There was a “provisional statement of accounts from Weimar,” which became a hymn of praise to Weimar, where there was actually much less talk and much more action, where they had given the Reich a leadership and an emergency constitution, where they had cautiously begun to nationalize. Cautiously, and if Bavaria, with its devastated economic life, preferred to move at a different pace – “then we’ll wait!” And that is just what we did, we waited.

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