By Alex Gordon, PhD
HAIFA, Israel — This man fulfilled the typical dream of Jews who wanted to remake the world and their country of residence ‒ he became prime minister of a European state. Unlike Disraeli, he was not a baptized Jew. Born May 14, 1867, in Berlin to a Jewish family, Kurt Eisner became prime minister of Bavaria at age 51.
Eisner made his first act of struggle against those in power in 1890, when he was editor of the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. He was convicted for publishing an article against Kaiser Wilhelm II and imprisoned for nine months. The Empire, against which Eisner, a member of the Social Democratic Party, rebelled, applied a lenient punishment to him for insulting majesty. Eisner’s family was wealthy. It is often the children of wealthy families who rebel against the authorities who favor them. Kurt had philosophical thoughts and remorse about living too well and the plight of the proletariat. He came to a solution when he decided to study in the philosophy department at the University of Marburg. His studies shaped his worldview: He joined the left-wing of the German Social Democratic Party and was a supporter of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mering, Clara Zetkin, and Karl Radek.
Eisner was in solidarity with the supporters of Karl Marx and opposed the position of Eduard Bernstein. In book Evolutionary Socialism (1899), Bernstein defended the theses, a critique of which later became part of the curriculum of Marxist-Leninist philosophy classes in Soviet universities. Soviet students knew how “deluded” Bernstein was, who believed that the path to socialism was the path of trade union and parliamentary struggle, not the accomplishment of revolution. Soviet students had no right to doubt the fallacy of Bernstein’s views, who claimed that Marx’s doctrine was not a science and that the welfare of workers in capitalist countries was growing and that the polarization between the oppressed proletariat and capitalists was not reaching the monstrous proportions predicted by the founder of “scientific communism.” Eisner was not convinced by Eduard Bernstein’s “moderate” socialism. He longed to make a revolution: for the second time, Eisner, now a member of the radical Independent Socialist Party, spent nine months in prison for calling for a strike.
In Bavaria the concentration of Jewish revolutionaries was particularly high. On November 8, 1918, a revolution took place there. Eisner became its main leader. He, the chairman of the Munich workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ council, drew workers, peasants’ and soldiers to his side and seized power in Bavaria, becoming prime minister and creating a “revolutionary parliament.” The parliament met in one of Munich’s large beer cellars (one such cellar was the site of the failed Nazi “beer” putsch five years later). It consisted of workers, peasants, soldiers and “revolutionary intellectuals”. The parliament proclaimed the formation of the Bavarian Republic. The establishment of the new republic was celebrated in the Munich National Theater. Bruno Walter conducted Beethoven’s Leonora overture, followed by Eisner, who drew an analogy between his revolutionary overture and Beethoven’s music. As Eisner walked through the streets of old Munich, huge crowds greeted him fervently as a national hero.
A Munich resident and witness to these events, the writer Lion Feuchtwanger met Eisner in the working-class quarter of the city and noticed how an elderly Munich man asked his comrades, the workers of the steelworks, to pray for “our Eisner’s health.” A short, thin, bald intellectual in battered pants and jacket, wearing glasses without frames, the lenses of which wobbled and could at any moment fall out, interrupting his speech. Not a Bavarian with a typical Jewish appearance, he won the hearts of tens of thousands of Bavarians and became Prime Minister of the Republic, overthrowing King Ludwig III of the Wittelsbach dynasty, which ruled the country for 700 years. Not a single person died during the revolution. The Jew defeated the king. The Jew and socialist Eisner overthrew the reactionary regime of one of Germany’s rulers, fulfilling Heinrich Heine’s dream. The pacifist, who did not shed a drop of blood, was condemned to failure, but believed in the victory of his cause. Bloodless revolutions were doomed to failure. He dreamed of creating a regime that rejected German militarism and Teutonomania.
“We were dreamers, idealists, poets,” Eisner said, ̶ “but within four and a half years (during World War I. ‒ A. G.) we idealists and dreamers turned out to be right (by opposing the war. ‒ A. G.), while other cold-blooded and practical ones confess now that they spent four and a half years in self-deception.” It was a revolution unique in history, a bloodless revolution. Eisner explained that the Bavarian Revolution was different from the Bolshevik Revolution, for private property would be protected by the new government.
At first, Eisner’s regime (“neither Bolshevik nor bourgeois”) was fully accepted by the majority of Munich and rural areas inhabited by Catholics and conservatives. The old government machinery cooperated with the Eisner regime. However, Eisner’s desire to preserve the independence of Bavaria, even at the cost of seceding from the empire, made him many enemies. He believed that it was necessary to break with the German past. By blaming Germany for starting the war, he hoped to secure better terms and lesser contributions for Bavaria in future negotiations with the victorious allies. He was convinced that the other German states should also admit their guilt for the past war. He demanded that the Entente powers believe in the new face of the German people: “The people are not to blame for the crimes of the past. Their only fault is that they let lies lead them astray. We are free and therefore able to speak the truth. For this reason, we can demand to be treated sympathetically.”
When Eisner’s assistants discovered documents in the Bavarian State Archives denouncing Germany for starting the war, for encouraging Austria’s aggressiveness, he did not hesitate to publish them. The publications angered the country’s new central government. Conservatives and anti-Semites considered the publications as treason. A propaganda attack on the “Jewish Republic” began. When Eisner spoke of “we were dreamers, idealists, poets…,” he was referring to his fellow Jews, the ministers of the Bavarian government, the poets Erich Mühsam and Ernest Toller, the philosopher and literary critic Gustav Landauer. It was a government of Jews that met Plato’s standards of ̶ “philosophers-kings.” It was as if the Jews had descended from the pages of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to confirm the Judophobic thesis of Jewish control of the affairs and destinies of non-Jews. Eisner’s position fomented anti-Semitism, for it struck at a defeated Germany, on which its author held responsibility for its misfortunes. Eisner was faithful to the policy of condemning Germany for starting World War I. In a speech at the Socialist Congress in Switzerland, he spoke of Germany’s duty to help rebuild the devastated battleground in northern France. By this, he restored his opponents against himself even more. When he returned to Bavaria, a bodyguard was assigned to him.
In February 1919, fighting broke out between Bavarian separatists and central government units. On February 21, 1919, after his electoral defeat, as Eisner was walking to the newly elected Bavarian parliament to announce his resignation as prime minister, he was shot in the back. The man who attacked him on Promenadenstrasse was a lieutenant in the Bavarian Infantry Life Regiment, twenty-two-year-old Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Eisner died instantly. Before his murder, Valley said, “Eisner is a Bolshevik, a Jew. He is not German, he does not feel German. He undermines patriotic thoughts and feelings. He has betrayed this country.” The background to the murder was the hatred of Jews that was raging in Germany. In the case of Valley, the hatred was much stronger than usual. The young count had been expelled from a pre-Nazi organization for hiding the fact that his mother was Jewish. In this murder, the Jewish question reached an unusually high temperature of emotion. The murderer feared the scorn of the German nationalists far more than he feared justice. Valley wanted to wash away the “shame” of being Jewish with Eisner’s Jewish blood. The Jewish background of the murdered man and the murderer further increased the drama of what happened.
Eisner’s social-democratic regime fell. On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic (BSR) was proclaimed, led by the Social Democrat poet Ernst Toller, and later ̶ a Jewish Communist, Russian-born Eugene Leviné. Russian Bolsheviks, the biologist Max Levin and Lenin’s “sealed wagon” passengers Toviy Axelrod and Alexander Abramovich, specialists in organizing the “world revolution” and bank expropriation, arrived in Munich to help the Communist leadership in Bavaria. Johann Hoffmann, Minister-President of the Bavarian government-in-exile, whose troops were besieging Munich, gave orders to distribute leaflets condemning the BSR leadership as follows: “To the people of Munich! Suddenly and brutally the hopes of the communist and semi-communist dreamers, who in their arrogant fanaticism had promised that with the announcement of the Soviet Republic the kingdom of social freedom and justice would come. Instead of unselfish, noble people, the leading positions in the government were occupied by rapists and partly criminal individuals. Many houses were burned down, and large sums of money disappeared forever. Arrests were carried out indiscriminately. The government unceremoniously interfered with the supply of food to the population. The existence of an entire class of small people was at stake. Munich was cut off from the rest of the world. Supplies were stopped. The lives of infants, the sick and the weak were in grave danger. Coal had become a rarity in the kitchen of the poor man. In three weeks, a crushing oppression was hanging over the whole economic and spiritual life of Munich. A revolutionary tribunal persecuted citizens for every free word against the shameful mismanagement of foreign rabble. The hostages were brutally murdered.”
The “foreign rabble” were Jews. Leviné was not troubled by thoughts of starving children. “What would happen,” he asked, “if there was less milk in Munich for a few weeks? In any case, most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie. We have no interest in seeing them survive. It would do no harm if they died ‒ they would grow up to be enemies of the proletariat.”
The Munich newspapers called the leadership of the BSR “a gang of lunatics, fantasists, fanatics and criminals” and “vain alien agitators.” The poetess and writer Isolde Kurtz called the Communists Levine, Levin and Axelrod a “terrorist group.” The Republic lasted a month. The BSR was destroyed by horrified Germans. Thomas Mann was shaken by the possibility of victory of the Bavarian Revolution. In the final hours of the BSR he wrote in his diary: “We talked about whether European culture could still be saved […] or whether the Kirghiz idea of annihilation would win. We also talked about the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the international movement, this explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism with Slavic Orthodox fanaticism. The world, which has not yet lost its instinct for self-preservation, must with all its might, and in a short time under the laws of war, take action against this breed of people.”
In his book The Story of a German (2002), the journalist Sebastian Haffner gives the testimony of a Freikorps soldier, one of the revolutionary executioners in Berlin and Munich: “He spoke with a certain good-natured sympathy about the victims who fell by the hundreds on the battlefield or were ‘shot dead trying to escape’. “It was the color of the working youth,” he said thoughtfully and melancholically; evidently this was the formula under which the events were imprinted in his brain. ‒ They were the flower of working-class youth,” he repeated, “fine, brave fellows, unlike those in Munich in 1919: there were scoundrels, Jews and idlers. I had not the slightest sympathy for them.” Most of the leaders were not Bavarian, and some were foreigners, outsiders, Russian Jews who sought to bring the Bolshevik revolution to Germany.
All the Jews who led the Bavarian Republic did not die of their own accord: Kurt Eisner was murdered by a right-wing extremist in 1919, Gustav Landauer was mauled by punishers in 1919, Eugene Leviné was shot by order of the Bavarian tribunal in 1919, Erich Mühsam was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1934, Max Levin and Tovia Axelrod fled to Russia and were shot there by Stalin’s executioners in 1937 and 1938 respectively, Ernst Toller committed suicide in 1939, having come to the conclusion that the Nazis had won.
Eisner, Toller, Mühsam, and Landauer were naive outsiders, outsiders in German patriotic society. Their socialism was not needed in a nation hungry for revenge, suffering humiliation, deprived of its national assets by the victors. The anti-militarist and anti-nationalist views of the leaders of the revolution alienated them from the masses. Eisner called himself and his Jewish supporters “dreamers-idealists, poets.” At the moment he said this, he did not realize how right he was. The Jews in Bavaria took over the affairs of others on a colossal scale unprecedented in history. They ruled the country, imposing their principles and ideals on a people who regarded them with distrust, suspicion and dislike. They were regarded as outsiders, and their policies were perceived as alien Jewish policies.
“The Idealist” paid with his life for interfering in German affairs. Kurt Eisner might have lived if he had not sought to remake German society. His transformations were unsuccessful and led to the only successful act, the elimination of their author. Franz Kafka was right when he wrote to Max Brod about the Jewish revolutionaries: “They were always pushing Germany toward things which she could perceive slowly and only in her own manner, but which were doomed to be rejected because they came from people from outside.”
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 8 books and about 500 articles in paper and online, was published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English and German.