When democracy held Nazism at bay
The insurrection failed. The system held — at least for a time. In November 1923, when a young demagogue named Adolf Hitler tried to start a Nazi revolution from a Munich beer hall, his attempted coup was so disorganized that it swiftly degenerated into bumbling confusion. One participant later testified that the operation was such a farce that he whispered to others, “Play along with this comedy.”
Instead of seizing power, Hitler acquired a dislocated shoulder and a short stint in prison. But in “Germany 1923,” historian Volker Ullrich reminds us that the haphazard events of the so-called Beer Hall Putsch “were eminently serious.” A decade later, Hitler would be appointed Germany's chancellor, and the Weimar Republic — the country's first experiment with democracy — would come to an end. In November 1933, a report in The New York Times described the Nazis gathering in celebration: “Leaders Rejoice in Munich at Resurrection of the Movement `Killed' There 10 Years Ago — Jubilant Over Steins.”
Ullrich is the author of an excellent two-volume biography of Hitler. In “Eight Days in
May” (2021), he wrote about the week between Hitler's suicide and Germany's unconditional surrender. “Germany 1923,” translated into crisp English by Jefferson Chase, recounts a “critical year” that began in crisis and ended, against all odds, with a measure of stability. As historian Mark William Jones puts it in “1923,” another centennial book published this summer, 100 years ago, “democracy won.”
It was a year that started inauspiciously, with France and Belgium marching into Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley after Germany defaulted on its reparations payments for World War I. The occupation provoked a moment of harmony between the left and the right, with one industrialist remarking, “The people are beginning to join together in common suffering and common hatred.”
But this “wave of German solidarity” was short-lived. Germany's chancellor at the time responded to the occupation with a policy of “passive resistance,” encouraging Germans in the Ruhr Valley not to work and printing ever more money in order to pay their wages once businesses shut down.
Money issue
Germany had already been printing money to finance the world war it failed to win. But 1923 was when hyperinflation seemed to take on a life of its own. Ullrich makes pointed use of people's journals to convey the bewildering experience of prices rising not by the day but by the hour. “The money issue is becoming increasingly dark and impenetrable,” philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer wrote in February 1923, a month when the exchange rate reached a startling 42,240 marks per dollar. By June, it had nearly tripled to 114,250. With each additional zero, a psychological dam was breached. “Abruptly the mark plunged down,” writer Stefan Zweig would later recall, “never to stop until it had reached the