Abstract
Consisting of a brief introduction (pp. 7–12) and three broad sections – ‘Kurt Hiller und Berlin’ (pp. 13–62); ‘Ausstrahlungen nach Hamburg und München’ (pp. 65–218); and ‘Ausstrahlungen in die Region’ (pp. 221–84) – that involve ten chapters, this volume of specialist essays forms an informative source work for anyone who is interested in the political upheavals that inaugurated the Weimar Republic. Some of the chapters deal with well-known subject-matter; others explore less familiar ground.
In Chapter 1 (pp. 13–36), Wolfgang Beutin traces Kurt Hiller’s progress from conservative monarchism to revolutionary pacifism via a period of ambivalence (p. 16). In Chapter 2 (pp. 37–62), Michael Buchholz gives detailed accounts of how Hiller and four significant early members of the Freie Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung, a moderately left-wing Berlin student organization, behaved politically during the abortive Revolution of 1918–19: Otto Landsberg (1869–1957) and Paul Hirsch (1868–1940) moved from the SPD nearer to the centre and developed a tolerance for free-market liberalism; Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) and Oskar Cohn (1869–1934) remained parliamentarians but moved to the left, with the former moving further in that direction than the latter until he joined the Communist Party when it was founded at the end of the war and was murdered by members the proto-Fascist Freikorps; and Hiller, who firmly believed that intellectuals were a free-ranging elite for whom party programmes were a cage, stayed uncommitted apart from a brief period when he associated himself with the highly fissiparous Independent Socialist Party (USPD) (1917–22) (pp. 59–62). Chapter 3 (pp. 65–134), by Rolf von Bockel, discusses what happened when the German Revolution reached Hamburg and provides us with extensive information on all-but-forgotten organizations such as the short-lived Geistigen-Räte (Intellectuals Councils) (pp. 86–8) and the Werkbund Geistiger Arbeiter which grew out of the Councils (pp. 89–134). He also has much to say on such forgotten local heroes as the future academic Albert Görland (1869–1957), the jurist and civil servant Carl Mönckeberg (1873–1939) and, most importantly, the retired judge Gustav Schiefler (1857–1935). Schiefler was also an unusually broad-minded patron of the arts and culture, a promoter of visual Expressionism, and a supporter of Hiller’s Activist doctrines (pp. 75–85) who edited Die Literarische Gesellschaft for many years, starting in 1915. Chapter 4 reprints the full text of ‘Ein Deutsches Herrenhaus’ (A German Dynasty) (pp. 137–84), a long, mind-bruising speech by Kurt Hiller that sets out his political beliefs, and in Chapter 5 (pp. 186–91), Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin discusses how Hiller’s ideas were received at the time. The speech was first published in summer 1918 (pp. 135–6), and first delivered in Hamburg’s Konventgarten on 8 October 1918 before an audience of well over a thousand, many of whom showed their appreciation by walking out of an uninspired performance that was made even worse by the initial effects of Spanish influenza (p. 190). The poor response may also have been connected with Hiller’s central theses that democratic equality was a myth, ‘thought up by the mob for the mob’ (p. 149), and that society would do better to be governed by an aristocratic elite of rational intellectuals and philosophers. In Chapter 6 (pp. 193–206), Heidi Beutin compares and contrasts the politico-historical views of Hiller and the Expressionist dramatist Ernst Toller (1893–1939), both of whom became leading members of the Gruppe Revolutionärer Pazifisten (Group of Revolutionary Pacifists) (1926–33). And in Chapter 7 (pp. 207–18), Lütgemeier-Davin argues that their views overlapped because both understood that the democratic surface of the Weimar Republic concealed a traditional and highly authoritarian social structure that had remained pretty well intact since the collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918.
The book’s three concluding chapters move away from well-charted events of the two revolutionary years (1918–19). Chapter 8, by Gerd Biegel (pp. 221–44), plots the course of the political upheavals in Braunschweig that culminated on 8 November 1918 in the deposition of Ernst Augustus (1857–1935), the Duke of Braunschweig und Lüneburg (1913–18), one of the duchy’s Hanoverian line. Chapter 9, by Elisabeth Benz (pp. 245–56), focuses on the Swabian Arbeiterdichter (Worker Poet) Fritz Rück (1895–1959), who was also active as a left-wing journalist during the revolutionary years. As very little is known about him and no trace of his grave remains in Stuttgart’s Prager Friedhof, Dr Benz’s meticulous search though local newspapers and official archives in Stuttgart, Berlin and Braunschweig has yielded a large amount of new information that enables one to form a good impression of his life and political work. And the book’s concluding chapter, also by Lütgemeier-Davin, sets out the political situation in post-revolutionary Braunschweig with particular reference to Hiller’s part in the debate about compulsory military service that took place there at the General Assembly of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (30 September 1920) and the Ninth Congress of German Pacifists (1–3 October 1920) (pp. 261–76). Although by then Hiller was disillusioned by the failure of the revolutionary impulses of 1918–19, he was still determined, as an ‘Intellektueller’ (p. 264), to play his strident part in the business of social reform, and in a brilliant speech at the Braunschweig Congress he set out a series of ‘Leitsätze’ (theoretical principles) which the author describes as ‘rhetorische Glanzpunkte der Braunschweiger Tagung’ (rhetorical highlights of the Braunschweig Conference). But in the longer term, Hiller’s brilliance was of very little benefit – either to him or the DFG, for when it met again in Braunschweig in late September 1929, both the liberal pacifists around Ludwig Quidde (1858–1941) and the radical pacifists around Hiller were marginalized. Not for the first or the last time, Hiller’s brilliance as a stylist and dialectician had got him into trouble with those who were less endowed with such formidable gifts.