The fact that the first German republic came about as a result of the defeat in World War I and was not a self-fought achievement represented a heavy burden for the new democratic beginning. The November Revolution of 1918 was not seen in the tradition of the freedom movement of 1848, but as betrayal in an imperial Germany that had been a great imperial power until 1914. The Forchheim Majority Social Democracy (MSPD) felt this when, in November 1920, they asked for permission to hold a “revolutionary celebration”.
Because the application had not been submitted by the deadline, she asked for a “polite” apology for the delay. Mayor Knorr responded somewhat harshly to the request, but noted that in the event of a repeat offense “penal action would have to take place”. Whether there was a celebration at all remains uncertain. There is no evidence of this in the archive. Instead, the city – and not only it – found other reasons to celebrate.
Patriotic celebrations
In the Weimar Republic, January 18 (foundation of the Reich in 1871) and September 2 (victory over the French at Sedan in 1870) were patriotic holidays, on which the past glory of the misery of a defeated nation was held up with flags and patriotic pathos. That was also the case on January 18, 1921, when the Forchheim state and local politician Hans Räbel invited “the entire population” to Forchheim to attend church services and an “extraordinary city council meeting” of the “50. Anniversary of the founding of the German Reich”. He requested that “the houses be flagged on this day” so that “our undiminished loyalty to the German fatherland and the German Reich … would be given a dignified expression”.
While the republic that emerged from the 1918 overthrow was endured as an immutable “necessity,” the city honored the authoritarian empire with flags and celebrations. In Forchheim, as in all of Germany, there were too few democrats who understood the parliamentary republic as their own. Too many had the notion of a socialist dictatorship or a return to monarchy in their minds. Was at least the staff in the former royal Bavarian authorities aware that their employer was no longer a monarch but the people themselves? Was it sworn to the new constitution? There are no documents about it. But a letter that the head of office authorized in 1923 (!) with a stamp that reads: “Königl. Bayer. District office Forchheim “. Whether negligence or consistent practice remains open, but raises reservations.
From the Kapp putsch to the cell of order
In March 1920, the extreme right made a first attempt at a coup against the republic. Because Germany, under pressure from the victorious powers, was supposed to reduce its army to 100,000 professional soldiers and disband its volunteer corps and militias, units affected by this rallied under the leadership of General von Lüttwitz, occupied Berlin on March 13, 1920 and forced the Reich government to flee. The putschists failed because government personnel refused to support them and the unions called for a general strike.
In Bavaria, however, Prime Minister Hoffmann had to resign because he refused to hand over executive power to the Reichswehr leadership in Munich. The Upper Bavarian government president Gustav Ritter von Kahr (1862 – 1934) – supported by the Reichswehr and military associations – now formed a new government without the MSPD, under which Bavaria became a refuge for right-wing organizations that were subverting it. Here, in the Bavarian “Ordnungszelle”, they could act unhindered, while they had been banned in the rest of Germany. They enjoyed the protection of Munich police chief Ernst Pöhner (1870 – 1925) – until he had to resign in September 1921.
Feme Morde
The most active of the right-wing organizations was the Escherich Organization (“Orgesch”), the umbrella organization for all German residents’ militias with almost two million members, and the “Consul Organization”, which the Freikorps commander Hermann Ehrhardt (1881 – 1971), who was wanted by an arrest warrant, led from built up from Munich. In its statutes, it threatened “feme” to “traitors” to arms depots or other “patriotic” activities. They are responsible for six terrorist murders in Bavaria alone.
In mid-1921 the situation escalated. Under pressure from the Reich government on June 8, Kahr also had to dissolve the residents’ militia in Bavaria. In the state parliament, the leader of the USPD parliamentary group, Karl Gareis (1889 – 1921), had already pushed through to investigate the Munich police’s connections to “right-wing extremist activities”. Gareis was declared a traitor to the fatherland by “national” circles because of his information about hiding weapons and was attacked with threatening letters, including by Ludwig Thoma, who vilified him in the Miesbacher Anzeiger as a “typical mental patient from the time of the revolution”.
On June 9, Gareis was shot down four times in front of his house in Munich on his way home and died that night in hospital. The assassin escaped undetected. The murder caused considerable unrest on the left. On June 10, the union called for a three-day general strike against the ban imposed by the Bavarian government, which took action with the police against the initiators in Munich. The next episode will show the consequences of the attack in Forchheim.
