Schrodinger by Walter Moore

Author:Walter Moore [Moore, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scientists, General, science, Physics, Nonfiction, history, biography, retail
ISBN: 9781107569911
Google: v6KNCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: CambridgeUP
Published: 2015-10-06T00:06:10.873522+00:00

Decline and fall of the Republic30

Early in 1929, the German postwar economic recovery began to falter. It was a bitterly cold winter in Berlin and schools had to be closed for a week in February. Unemployment rose to 450000 in the city and on May Day there was a huge demonstration at Alexanderplatz; the police used tanks to disperse the unemployed with thirty killed and many arrests. The Wall Street panic on Black Friday, October 25, signaled a worldwide economic collapse. In the elections for the Berlin city council in November, the Socialists held 64 seats, the Communists (K.P.D.) 56, the German Nationals 40, and the National Socialist German Workers Party (N.S.D.A.P. or Nazis) 13 (including one for Goebbels). Early in the new year 1930, there were bloody street battles between communists and Nazis, which neither the city nor the national government seemed able or willing to prevent. The Nazi army was better organized and more disciplined and usually gained the upper hand in battles for control of the German cities. On March 1, the SA leader Horst Wessel was killed in a communist attack on his house and the song in honor of this ‘martyr of the battle for Berlin’ became a rousing Nazi anthem. The government banned the SA but Goebbels merely told them to change their brown shirts for white ones and they continued much as before.

The republican parties appeared to fear the communists more than they did the Nazis and there was a growing feeling that the defense of any capitalist system might require the Nazi methods. In the national elections of September, the N.S.D. A.P. emerged as the second largest party, after the socialists, gaining 18.3% of votes nationally and 12.8% in Berlin. Most of the Nazi strength came at the expense of the German national parties, which represented Protestant middle-class interests, but the street fighters of the SA were mainly recruited from embittered unemployed war veterans. The power of the Nazis to control the streets of Berlin was demonstrated in December when they forced the closing of the movie All Quiet on the Western Front on the grounds that its antimilitaristic theme was an affront to the national honor. By 1931 Hitler’s private army the SA numbered 100000, and in the next two years its enrolment tripled.

As the depression deepened, 25% of the population of Berlin was on some kind of relief, and the city finances were tottering. Less than 5% of university students came from working-class families, but there was nevertheless considerable privation and even near starvation among the students. As the Nazis gained more adherents, there were riots on the university grounds and sometimes it was necessary to suspend classes. The students agitated especially for a quota limitation on enrolment of Jews. Viktor Weisskopf had an office from which he could survey the student fighting in the courtyard, and sometimes he would bring the victims of Nazi assaults into the building and help to clean their bloody heads. The police were not allowed to enter the university grounds so that no help could be expected from them.

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