At the entrance you can see a steel helmet with a swastika under glass. An information board shows that it was worn during the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 by one of the soldiers who wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Here it becomes very clear once again that the Nazis did not invent the swastika. The NSDAP was just one of many groups within the ethnic movement. In view of new ultra-right threats, it is good that the topography of terror in Berlin is commemorating the “violence against Weimar” with a special exhibition.
Here, of course, you also meet one of the most important fighters of the time against the attacks on the young German democracy, the mathematician and journalist Emil Julius Gumbel, who demonstrated the right-wing bias of the judiciary in the Weimar Republic in his 1922 documentary “Four Years of Political Murder”. He counted 354 perpetrators from the anti-republican right-wing spectrum who – if they were not immediately acquitted – got away with extremely light sentences, while the 22 left-wingers who were accused during the same period were sentenced to disproportionately high sentences. Gumbel became a target of the right because of his writings. In 1930/31 they sparked riots at the University of Heidelberg so that Gumbel’s teaching license would be revoked – which is what happened.
Although this example in particular contradicts the equalizing doctrine of totalitarianism, it shines through in the exhibition. A text accompanying its announcement said: “It makes visible how extremists and separatists brought the Weimar Republic to the brink of civil war, what drastic measures the state used and how the language and literature of the time responded to the brutality of the events reacted.”
All critics of the Weimar Republic were supposed to have been extremists who brought about its end? Left and right opponents are named on display boards and the KPD and the NSDAP are repeatedly compared. Lines from the Nazi newspaper “Völkischer Observer” appear next to an excerpt from “Rote Fahne,” the Nazi race war is equated with communist calls for class struggle, and KPD election posters are shown next to those of the NSDAP and other right-wing parties. However, when the KPD propagated “mobilization of the German working class against Hindenburg,” it wasn’t so wrong after all! There were also comments in the independent weekly newspaper “Weltbühne” that saw the election of the monarchist Paul von Hindenburg as Reich President as heralding the end of the Weimar Republic. In fact, the former World War II general paved the way for Hitler to the Chancellery, also under pressure from leading business circles. But for the exhibition organizers, the only thing that matters is that the KPD sowed hatred with this call and made politicians contemptuous.
The social democrat and counter-revolutionary Gustav Noske is not criticized for his bloody actions against left-wing workers. It is only gently criticized that he used the forces of the day before yesterday to build up the Freikorps. These were largely the troops who, with the suppression of strikes with 1,200 deaths in East Berlin in March 1919 and a few weeks later in the Soviet Republics in Munich and Bremen, pre-exercised the terror against leftists, which became the government program when the Nazis came to power . Critical journalists like Sebastian Haffner have clearly recognized and named these connections. But the doctor of law, who was forced into exile in Britain as a Jew and an independent spirit, is not even mentioned in the exhibition. This special show is a disappointment that one is not used to from the Topography of Terror.
»Violence against Weimar – acid tests. The early republic 1918–1923″, Topography of Terror, Niederkirchnerstr. 8, 10963 Berlin, until September 1, 2024, daily 10 a.m. – 8 p.m
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