In Hitler's Munich by Michael Brenner

In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism
Michael Brenner, translated by Jeremiah Riemer
Princeton University Press 2022

Before the Revolution of 1918, Munich was the cultural capital of Germany- a more open, tolerant, and liberal city compared to Berlin. After the Revolution and the short lived governments that followed it, Munich increasingly became home to right wing extremists and antisemites. By 1923, the year of the Beer Hall Putsch, Thomas Mann called Munich “the city of Hitler.” In Hitler’s Munich Michael Brenner, translated by Jeremiah Riemer, explores the creeping terror of Munich’s descent from the liberal city it had been to the birthplace of Nazism during the years 1918 to 1923 by predominantly using Jewish voices.

The book begins by looking at the revolutionaries who descended from Jews and their leading roles in the Revolution of 1918 and the brief Council Republics that followed. The book then moves to exploring the rise in antisemitism. Finally, the book looks at how the Bavarian government and Munich police and judicial authorities enacted antisemitic policies, provided a safe haven for extremists, and catered to those extremists, including the Nazis.

The Revolution of November 1918 saw the centuries long, and seemingly popular, rule of the Wittlesbachs swept away by a small number of revolutionaries led by Kurt Eisner, a member of the USPD. Other prominent revolutionaries of Jewish descent who supported both Eisner’s government and at least one of the two brief, radical, Council Republics that followed include: Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller, Erich Musham, and Eugen Levine. The popular responses to the Revolution and subsequent revolutionary governments were tepid to hostile among many of the sources Brenner uses.

The largely oppositional stance from the sources and Brenner’s largely supportive position of the Revolution and Council Republics leads to one of the few weaknesses of the overall narrative. The dissonance between the historian and the sources, and the handling of the first few months of the Revolution and its aftermath, leads to some confusion as to what exactly happened.

With the destruction of the second Council Republic, antisemitism increasingly became a feature of life in Munich. Antisemtic newspaper articles, defacing synagogues with graffiti, brutal assaults (including on Magnus Hirschfeld and Seigmund Fraenkel), etc. led to Munich’s tourist industry declining in these years. And the rise in antisemitism led to many of the people Brenner focuses on expressing increasing amounts of fear, to the point of leaving Munich during the later 1920s and early 1930s.

The explosion of antisemitism in Munich was not confined to a growing extremism. The Bavarian government led by Gustav von Kahr sought on numerous occasions to expel exclusively Eastern European Jewish refugees who lived in Bavaria. This policy was vigorously opposed by many Bavarian Jews as well as by the surrounding German and other states. While the first Kahr government was stopped, the second Kahr government was more successful in expelling a number of Eastern European Jews.

The Kahr governments and the other right-wing Bavarian governments of the time did nothing to stem the rise of right wing extremism, including the Nazis. Indeed, these governments did everything they could to, at best, turn a blind eye to the crimes of the extremists and, at worst, actively curry favor with the far right extremists. The most prominent example of this, in addition to the expulsion policy, is the active role Pohner, a high ranking official in the Munich police, played in the Nazi party.

Taking advantage of favorable conditions and further stoking those conditions, a number of far-right extremists made Munich their home, their spiritual capital. This state of affairs led to Munich losing much of its reputation as an open, welcoming city. Eventually, Munich became “the city of Hitler.”

The book ends with a look at the graves of Eisner, Landauer, Levine, Lurch-Rabinowitz, and Fraenkel and what happened to those graves in the years and decades after the events of 1918-1923. Brenner also looks at what happened to a number of the people he follows throughout the book. Many of them, recognizing what was happening, managed to leave Munich and ultimately fled Germany with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power. Many of them survived. But so many more did not. Not even erstwhile allies to the Nazis like Kahr and Paul Nikolaus Cossman ( a prominent former Jew who did much to aid the far right).

In Hitler’s Munich is a powerful, harrowing tale of the rise of Nazism and of how catastrophe can reveal hatreds barely concealed by a veneer of tolerance.

—James Holder holds a BA in English Literature. He lives in Texas.