The Weimar Triangle (20 page)

L
EVI
: You mean because she happened to have been born in Poland?

G
ILLER
: Yes. Surely that made a difference.

L
EVI
: Not at all. Rosa was a true internationalist. All manifestations of nationalism were anathema to her. In her family, they did not read the Talmud but the European classics. Her first literary effort, a contribution to a German brochure for the First of May, could not be printed because it was written in hexameters.

G
ILLER
: (Laughs.) That is truly remarkable. Now, as to the case against Paul Jörns, the judge who shielded her murderers, are you working with
Herr Doktor
Hermann Geisel?

L
EVI
: Yes, very much so. He has considerable experience in that field. Jörns is not the only judge who behaved in this way.

G
ILLER
: In a few words, could you tell us something about the circumstances of Rosa Luxemburg’s death?

L
EVI
: Rosa and Karl Liebknecht were arrested in Wilmersdorf on January 15, 1919, by a
Freikorps
commando that called itself the
Einwohnerwehr
[Citizen’s Defence]. The militia men had recently returned from the western front and belonged to the
Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision
. You may recall that the GKSD continued to observe army discipline even though all military authority had collapsed. This was six weeks after the end of hostilities and the collapse of the monarchy. Had I not been in prison I have no doubt I would have been their victim, too. There had been the usual invective against the two leaders, calling them
Lumpen
and so on. Let me tell you what happened to Rosa. Every detail had been prepared beforehand
—
nothing was left to chance. Rosa was driven to the Eden Hotel where the commando had its headquarters. The pretence was that she was to be taken to the prison in Moabit. But the officer in charge
—
we have his name, Captain Petri
—
had given the order that
die Luxemburg
should not arrive in the prison alive. His order was scrupulously obeyed. She was first stunned by a blow on the head with a rifle butt on arrival and later, in the car, shot and her body dropped from a bridge into the
Landwehrkanal.
What happened to Liebknecht was essentially the same.

G
ILLER
: The police were nowhere in sight?

L
EVI
: No. For weeks nothing happened to pursue the murderers.
Herr Doktor
Geisel has very precise information
—
more precise than mine
—
on all the steps the judicial authorities took to protect the murderers, and in some case actually to help them and their accomplices escape to Holland with false papers. Finally, there was a proceeding before a military court, a
Feldkriegsgericht
. The name and character of the court, and all the personnel, were the same as in the Kaiser’s days. Judge Paul Jörns was the
Untersuchungsrichter
[investigating judge]. With three exceptions all the accused were acquitted. The exceptions were convicted on minor charges.

G
ILLER
: Was that the end of it?

L
EVI
: It certainly was not. The judge is protected for ten years from any proceedings against him arising from the misconduct in 1919 of which he is accused. In 1929 we will act.

From a note written by Konrad Elder in 1935:

In 1929 the liberal monthly Tagebuch carried an article, published anonymously, with the heading Kollege Jörns, written as though it was addressed by a judge to his colleague. It contained many of the facts Paul Levi and Hans Geisel had gathered. By now Paul Jörns had been promoted to the exalted rank of Oberreichsanwalt, as Levi
had predicted. Jörns sued for defamation. The case came before the Schöffengericht Berlin-Mitte, the old red-brick building near the Alexanderplatz. Levi defended the Tagebuch. At the conclusion of the trial he delivered a historic four-hour speech that has been compared to oratory by Danton and Zola.

It was one of the great moments of the Weimar Republic.

He won the case.

Jörns appealed. During the trial in February 1930, Levi fell seriously ill with pneumonia in his apartment on the Lützowufer, not far from the Landwehr Canal where Rosa Luxemburg’s body had been dumped. On the sixth night, perhaps in a state of delirium, perhaps not, he fell to his death from the balcony.

During a moving tribute to Levi, both the Nazis, whose party was to become the second largest in the Reichstag in the June election, and the communists walked out.

In due course the Nazis appointed Paul Jörns to the position of prosecutor in the infamous Volksgerichtshof [People’s Court].

T
HE
T
URNING
P
OINT

Handwritten Note:

The autograph of Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 28 in A major, opus 101, exhibited in showcase no. 30, evoked in my memory the earlier piano sonata no. 12 in A flat major, opus 26, which contains the funeral march anticipating the second movement of the Eroica. The march was played at a memorial I attended for foreign minister Walther Rathenau after his assassination on June 24, 1922.

Transcript of a seminar held by Doctor Hermann Geisel in the Volksbildungsheim [Home for Adult Education] at the Eschersheimer Turm in Frankfurt at the conclusion of the trial of the surviving murderers of Rathenau and their accomplices in the Reichsgericht [Germany’s highest court] in Leipzig in the fall of 1922:

Question: Herr Doktor Geisel, you are known as one of our severest critics of the administration of justice. What do you think about this trial?

A
NSWER
: I would say that I suspect the court refrained from revealing the full dimensions of the conspiracy because of the state’s own involvement with right-wing elements.

Q: Can you prove this?

A: No, I cannot. What I have just said is a suspicion, based on my experience in these matters. You asked me what I thought and I told you. By the nature of things, we will have to wait for a generation or two before evidence will emerge to substantiate my suspicion. By then the picture will be clear. It will also be clear why Rathenau’s assassination was the turning point in the history of our republic and a wake-up call to the nation. He gave us hope that stability and decency would follow the agony we all endured in the preceding years. That is why no event since the end of the war has shaken the country to the same extent. At the special session in the Reichstag to pay tribute to Walther Rathenau, Chancellor Joseph Wirth exclaimed with deep emotion that “the danger comes from the right.” He meant the
völkisch,
the right-wing nationalists who, with good reason, were assumed to have conspired to commit the murder.

Q: Why do you think he was singled out?

A: Because he stood for reconciliation with our former enemies, for
Erfüllungspolitik
, for the policy of fulfilling the peace treaties as much as possible and integrating Germany into an international post-war economic system. Although he had been foreign minister for only four and a half months before he was shot, most Germans understood that this was the only sensible policy under the circumstances. They also agreed that this was also in the interest of our former enemies since Germany was still the most important economic power on the continent, even taking into account the territories we have lost.

Q: We can see that the
völkisch
people would not like that conciliatory policy at all. There may be a few of them in this seminar. Are there?

A: I see three hands have gone up. But, no, on second thought I do not want to waste time on a political battle here in this room. In any case, it was not only extremists who opposed him. Moderate conservatives did too. On the other hand, the communists were his friends, ever since April 26 in Genoa, when he had surreptitiously left an international economic conference to go to nearby Rapallo to make a historic deal with the Soviets behind the back of the Western powers. For decades he had stressed the long-term importance to Germany of, first, imperial Russia and later, since 1917, the Soviet Union. He did this in the spirit of Bismarck who, he thought, would have done the same.

Q: Do you think, on the whole, Rathenau was a success as foreign minister?

A: No, he was not allowed the time. The French, and to a lesser extent the British, did not understand that it was in their longterm interest to make life easier for him. The Americans were more enlightened, but they had withdrawn from Europe. None of them grasped the intensity of the hatred the right wing had for Rathenau, not only because he was in favour of building bridges with Germany’s former enemies but also because he was a Jew. Already in the previous August, five months before he became foreign minister,
Freikorps
units in Upper Silesia sang “
Schlagt tot den Walther Rathenau, die gottverdammte Judensau
” [“Beat to death Walther Rathenau, the goddamned Jew-pig”]. The evening before he was assassinated, he was so crushed by the latest setbacks the French had just inflicted on him that in despair he decided to reverse his position, give up the policy of fulfillment, just as his conservative critics had urged, and
—
for the moment
—
stop making any further reparations payments. We will never know whether his murderers would have changed their plans if they had known. Somehow, I doubt it. He was still a Jew.

Q: So he knew his life was in danger?

A: Oh, absolutely. He was entirely fatalistic about it and consistently refused police protection, on the grounds that he could not tolerate such a restriction of his freedom. He thought it would be useless anyway. One day the chancellor came to him in a state of high agitation and pleaded with him to change his mind. A priest had travelled to Berlin from the south especially to tell him that a man had confessed to him he had been chosen to kill him. Of course, the priest could not name the man. Still, Rathenau would not change his position. I think he expected to be killed.

Q: Was he a religious man?

A: He was, above all, a complicated man. As a politician, as a powerful industrialist who sat on dozens of boards, as a thinker and writer about serious philosophical and political matters, he took different positions at different stages of his life. Very early in his career, he wrote an essay titled
Höre, Israel
, the title evoking the first line of the Hebrew prayer known by all Jews who receive a religious education, which pleaded for the assimilation of Jews in such language that he was called anti- Semitic. But at no time was he prepared to be baptized, even though at an early age he left the Jewish community. Later, he moderated his position on Jewish matters, under the influence of Martin Buber, among others. He knew everybody of note personally, incidentally, and not only in Germany. The painter Max Liebermann, our only major impressionist and, as you may know, a famous Berlin wit, was his second cousin. Liebermann once invited Rathenau to visit him so that he could “talk him out of his anti-Semitism. “After all,” Liebermann wrote, “the Jews have produced quite a number of respectable people, the author of the psalms, for example, Jesus Christ, Spinoza. And your cousin.”

To come back to your question of whether Rathenau was a religious man, I would say he was a man who took spiritual values seriously, as he made clear in his book
Vom Reich der Seele
[
Of the Kingdom of the Soul
], which was a polemic against materialism, against the mechanization, the dehumanizing of the world. He thought that these unfortunate manifestations of modernity were inevitable but would eventually be overcome. In short, he was not a pessimist, in the long run. As to his feelings about the masses, on one occasion, when there was a demonstration outside his window against right wingers and someone suggested he should really go down and participate, he said “To be frank, I cannot abide the smell of little people.”

Q: What did he think of Marxism?

A: Once again, the answer is complicated. His father, Emil Rathenau, was the powerful founder of the A.E.G., and Walther himself had great organizational gifts and acted as top manager until his father named Felix Deutsch to succeed him. But Wal ther remained chairman of the board. By the way, one reason why he was such a strong proponent of close relations with Russia was that he hoped that A.E.G. could play a major role in developing the country’s electrical industries. One would have thought that a man in that position would be an unqualified opponent of Marxism. But this was not the case, partly because many patriotic Marxists admired him. At the beginning of the war he was asked to take charge of the mobilization of raw materials for the war effort. He performed that gigantic task for a year with such brilliance that in October 1915 the London
Times,
of all papers, singled him out as deserving as much credit for the early successes of the German military as Hindenburg and Ludendorff. This experience taught him an invaluable lesson about the advantages of public enterprise in the national interest, a position with which Marxists could not quarrel. If you have read his bestseller
Von kommenden Dingen
[
In Days to Come
] you will recognize this attitude. You may recall it received much praise from leading liberals when it was published in 1917. It was popular among soldiers at the front who were wondering what the world would be like after the expected German victory. Rathenau did not share Marx’s views on the way history works and believed psychological factors determined the course of events rather than the class struggle. Nor did he single out decadent left wingers for the decline of the West, as Oswald Spengler was to do a year later. But, like Spengler, he thought blond Nordic types were singularly well equipped to assume positions of leadership.