In June 1945, Munich was in ruins. Dachau concentration camp, liberated a few weeks previously, was in the throes of a typhus epidemic. Food across the city was scarce.
Amid the death and destruction, Munich’s new American masters ordered the removal of 16 bodies in cast-iron display sarcophagi in the city centre. These were the human remains of the Nazi “martyrs” of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. General Eisenhower commanded that the structure above them — the Ehrentempel (Honour Temple) — be destroyed.
The purpose was clear: to eliminate a centrepiece of the origin story of the Third Reich. In Nazi telling, the attempted putsch in Bavaria on 8-9 November 1923 — five years to the day after the military and political collapse of Imperial Germany — was a heroic waypoint on the path to national salvation. The date of November 9 acquired an additional meaning after Hitler came to power, when commemorations of the putsch were used to launch the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.
In Germany, the centenary of 1923 has provoked a bout of what the historian Marko Demantowsky dubs “Jubiläumitis” — anniversaryitis. Alongside a slew of works in German — Christian Bommarius has written the most literary — these include two notable titles in English: 1923 by Irish historian Mark Jones, and Germany 1923 by the Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich.
One of the virtues of these books is to do something the Americans failed to achieve with their 1945 bodysnatching: to help decentre Hitler’s failed putsch from the narrative of 1923, one of the most turbulent years of the chaos-studded Weimar Republic. As both Jones and Ulrich make clear, 1923 wasn’t the year of a single crisis, or even a crescendo to a single crisis, but rather a polycrisis year.
The pace and confusion of interlocking events in 1923 left many contemporaries bewildered. Historians face a dilemma: whether to simply convey the chaos as it was experienced, or try to unpick and explain the tangle of events. Like 1923 itself, it’s a high-wire act.
For German contemporaries, the leitmotif of 1923 was uncertainty. At different times the country seemed on the brink of civil war, communist revolution, military dictatorship, societal implosion, or a combination of the above. As the academic Victor Klemperer noted in his diary: “Every day you say that a catastrophe must arrive, without knowing which one”.
The year began with the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr — Jones pointedly uses the word invasion. France’s ostensible aim in sending troops into western Germany’s industrial heartland was to enforce its claim to war reparations. But there were other motives, including potentially redrawing the European map in a way France hadn’t managed at the 1919 peace conference. Who were the revanchists now? Berlin or Paris?
Jones’ vivid, crisp, impressively sustained narrative captures the shocking panorama of violence of the Ruhr story. Having grown up in the shadow of the Troubles in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, Jones writes with a keen eye to the chaotic, intimate nature of it all: the sexual violence directed against wives of German police officers, the hostage-taking of the occupying authorities trying to suppress German partisans (often with military or far-right links).
Worse than a crime, the invasion of the Ruhr was a mistake. But it exacted its price. In Germany, it turned inflation into hyperinflation.
Ullrich’s depiction of the social effects is acute. Daily life became a race to spend any cash before it lost yet more of its value. Bourgeois mothers pimped their daughters to get enough to eat. Workers battled with business owners. Gaudily glad petty criminals became the jaunty symbols of a frenzied time. The aftereffects of Germany’s experiences with hyperinflation can be found in the hawkish, anti-inflationary policies of the Bundesbank and, now, the eurozone.
The financial crisis fed a political crisis. Many Germans never liked the Weimar Republic, viewing it as the misbegotten child of an unjust peace and an alien system of parliamentary government. In 1923, assailed by foreign invasion, hyperinflation and regional separatism, it looked as if the republic might disintegrate. The loyalty of the army was uncertain.
While an independence movement in the Rhineland burnt out and Bavaria edged towards far-right dictatorship more or less independently of Berlin, a Socialist-Communist coalition in Saxony was effectively deposed through the exercise of emergency powers by central government. The use of extra-parliamentary tools of government was normalised, easing Hitler’s path to power through quasi-constitutional means a decade later.
Hitler’s putsch wasn’t the only attempt to win power through violence in 1923. It wasn’t even the bloodiest. It just happened to be the last. After all his angry speeches through the year, by November Hitler said he had no choice but to act: “We couldn’t inflame them constantly”. His subsequent trial was a travesty. He served just over eight months in jail. It was, writes Jones, “a terrible error”.
But, by then, people wanted to move on. The immediate danger had passed. The Republic had survived. A new currency — and sheer popular exhaustion — brought hyperinflation to an end. A new international political constellation led to a deal on reparations in 1924 and withdrawal of French troops from the Ruhr the following year.
On the surface, Germany had stabilised. The illusion lasted barely half a decade. Those who had lost everything had nothing more to lose. The trauma of the polycrisis year remained deep in the German psyche.
Those looking for Babylon Berlin won’t find it in these two books. (Ullrich has an excellent but somewhat orphaned chapter on Weimar culture; Jones sticks to politics and violence). Both works would sometimes benefit from a wider frame. Germany was not the only place in turmoil in 1923, as the aftershocks of war and the rise of strongman culture swept the globe.
What readers will find is a warning from the past with lessons still apposite today: crisis breeds crisis; democracy is hard work; scapegoating needs to be addressed early; norms, once broken, are hard to repair; the socio-economic effects of inflation can be deadly. And, when a large portion of the population questions the fundamental legitimacy of a regime, that regime is inevitably at the mercy of events.
Hitler failed in 1923 but succeeded in 1933. The erosion of democratic norms can be fatal, even if its effects are delayed. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup by Mark Jones John Murray £25, 416 pages
Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis by Volker Ullrich WW Norton £25, 448 pages
Charles Emmerson is the author of ‘Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924’
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