coziness, roughness, and sloppy good nature in him—he was an abstract moralist, who wrote perfectly good drama criticism and no doubt terrible poems. Criticism and theory, though, do not make a ruler any more than they make an artist: one needs to be able to actually do it.6
What followed were two Soviet-style republics that plunged Munich into political chaos once and for all. The first, under Ernst Niekisch, leader of the “Munich Central Council of the Bavarian Republic,” dissolved the parliament and removed Eisner’s legal successor, the social-democratic prime minister. In accordance with the Soviet ideal, the government broke off all “diplomatic relations” with the German government. It lasted only one week. The government that followed, run by the Munich Communist Party and supported by the Soviet Union, lasted all of two weeks. Nevertheless, the concomitant violence, with bloody battles between the communist revolutionaries and their opponents, were to shape the political atmosphere for years. For example, street fighting in Munich on May 3, 1919, in which the German army and specially formed Bavarian Freikorps[4] units defeated the so-called dictatorship of the Red Army, cost the lives of more than six hundred people. The leaders of the Soviet-style republic were either killed by the Freikorps or received heavy sentences for high treason, as did the writers Ernst Toller and Erich Muhsam. Thousands of supporters of the “Spartacists” ended up in jail. The Bavarian capital thereby became the main stronghold of an extraordinarily pronounced anticommunism and radical anti-Semitism.7
Daily life in Munich suffered greatly during the early days of the revolution and the “reign of terror” after Eisner was assassinated. Many stores were closed, either because they could no longer obtain any food or because they were looted. Public transportation didn’t run, postal service was limited, there were curfews at times, private conversations on the telephone were prohibited, the mail was censored. During the battles between German troops and the second Munich republic, Munich was completely cut off from deliveries of food from anywhere else. Payments collapsed.
People saw these events, however, in very different ways, depending on the observer’s political views, age, career, gender, and social class.8 Thomas Mann, for example, recorded in his diary on May 17, 1919: “We’re only lacking groceries now. Will have to eat lunch in the hotel. The house is cold, so afraid of catching cold, namely feeling in my teeth. But my two little rooms are cozy, total peace and quiet.”9 For large numbers of the population, in contrast, hunger, lawlessness, armed street fighting, and murder, always in the context of the lost world war, constituted traumatic experiences that turned Munich into a breeding ground for an above-average number of Populist-nationalist groups. The gradual stabilization of the economic situation throughout Germany after 1924 did little to change that.
Even so, the later rise to power of the National Socialists cannot be seen as an inevitable development. The NSDAP’s political breakthrough did not take place until the start of the global economic crisis of 1929–1930, after all.10 There is no disputing, though, that anti-Semitism had become a “firm foundation” in the Bavarian city since the turmoil of the Munich republics, whose leaders often came from Jewish families.11 Even renowned newspapers such as the
It was considered the most reactionary place in Germany—a center of the counter-revolutionary tendencies smoldering all over Europe. Flippant editors in Berlin used to run the dispatches from Munich under the caustic heading: “From the Hostile Countries Abroad!” The people of Munich, in their turn, stubbornly believed that Berlin was ruled by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers and Bolshevist agitators.12
The truth is that the right-wing Bavarian state government under Minister President Gustav Ritter von Kahr, which came to power in 1920 and followed a path opposed to the Weimar Republic, made it possible for far-right enemies of democracy to become increasingly effective. Even Hitler was seen by Kahr—a former royal official and monarchist, and now a member of the Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei, or BVP)—not as a political opponent but as an ally in the fight against communism. The so-called Bavarian Defense Forces, too, which grew out of the Bavarian Freikorps bands from the battle against the communist republics, were oriented in a Populist- conservative direction and laid the foundation for the rise of an authoritarian, fiercely antidemocratic power structure in Bavaria. Without this unique political environment, along with the encouragement and financial support from influential Populist-nationalist circles in Munich society, Hitler’s rise would not have been possible.
Finally, the significance of the traditional Munich beer halls must not be underestimated as a factor in recruiting the majority of National Socialist supporters. The party life of the NSDAP played out in large part in the bars of the city. That was nothing new; pubs and inns had a long history in Germany as political gathering places. Nothing had changed in that regard since the Peasants’ War in the early sixteenth century, and especially since the civil revolution of 1848, with its “saloon republicans.” In Munich, too, the pubs formed a central part of the political culture. Thus it is no accident that the NSDAP was born from the “political regulars” in one of Munich’s many beer halls. Its predecessor, the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP), had been founded in the Furstenfelder Hof hotel on January 5, 1919. Hitler joined this little group of right-wing extremists less than a year later, on September 12, 1919; the following month, they opened their first place of business in a back room of the Sterneckerbrau beer hall, which also served as a weekly meeting place. Hitler announced the first Party program of the NSDAP in the famous Hofbrauhaus, with its thirty-five hundred seats—the same place where the communists had proclaimed the second Munich republic on April 13, 1919.
This institution, in the middle of the old city and originally established to supply the royal court with specially brewed beer, was already, since the turn of the century, a sightseeing destination for visitors to Munich from all over the world. The French journalist and travel writer Jules Huret wrote that you had to go to the Hofbrauhaus to “come into contact with the true beer drinkers….?A horrid smell of beer and tobacco fills the hall. Hundreds of drinkers are sitting side by side at heavy oak tables on rough benches, smoking cigars or long pipes. The crowd is from the People—laborers, handymen, coachmen, next to officials young and old, office workers, shopkeepers, the petty bourgeois….” The mood was “as free as could be, sometimes even boisterous”: the “lack of embarrassment and the naturalness” left “nothing to be desired.”13
With this sketch of the people who filled the Hofbrauhaus, Huret described, ten years before the NSDAP was founded, its social structure, drawn from every class of the population. Among the proclaimed goals of the Party’s “25 Point Program,” announced by Hitler to around two thousand people in the Hofbrauhaus on February 24, 1920, were the unification of all Germans into a “Greater Germany,” the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the demand for “land and soil” for the German People, and the declaration that no Jew is a legal citizen and that every “non-German” who had immigrated since the day of the German army’s mobilization (August 2, 1914) would be forced to leave the “Reich.”14 With this program, proclaimed in mass rallies, the NSDAP attempted to set itself apart from other German Populist factions. The “German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation” (Deutschvolkischer Schutz und Trutzbund), founded in Bamberg in 1919, still constituted the strongest organization of this type by far in Germany. It had 25,000 members by the end of 1919, while the NSDAP had only around 2,350 members a year later, at the end of 1920. Proof of “Aryan ancestry” was a prerequisite for membership in the Federation just as for membership in the NSDAP, and both far- right groups used the same symbol as an emblem: the swastika.15
But as early as 1920, Hitler was already proving himself to be a successful propagandist for his hitherto insignificant party. He made several public appearances a month, more than any other Party member—most often in Munich beer cellars or in Zirkus Krone, but also in Rosenheim, Stuttgart, and Austria—and he filled even the largest venues, flanked by his aggressive, paramilitary SA men. The truth was that his events offered the greatest “entertainment value.” Still, the NSDAP’s breakthrough needed more than Hitler’s “hypnotic rhetoric” and his power
