HAIFA, Israel — In the Middle East, the Jews defeated a superior enemy force in six days. In Europe, a Jew could only hold the head of state for six days. A 25-year-old poet, a Jew by nationality, was president of a European country for six days. The rule of philosopher kings was Plato’s utopia. To be kings in Europe was the dream of a people who had emerged from the ghetto, who wanted to realize a messianic ideal and who took Europe for Judea, where God’s anointed one would come, and that savior would be him, the Jewish hero, the fighter against injustice.
In November 1918, German Jews HAD joined the struggle for the reorganization of Germany. From the speculative realm, the Jews moved into the realm of social accomplishment. Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner were practitioners of the German socialist revolution. From 1918 to 1933, the Jews tried to remake Germany, to make it tolerant of their people, unacceptable in terms of the racial ideology of renewed German antisemitism. The dreams of the Jewish converts were colored in the red of socialism.
The German poet of Jewish origin, Ernst Toller, was portrayed by Lyon Feuchtwanger in his novel “The Thousand Nine Hundred Eighteen Year” (1920) as Thomas Wendt. The writer portrayed his friend and colleague Toller, one of the leaders of the Bavarian Revolution, as a noble champion of justice who failed to keep people “from going wild” and refused to give up power.
Ernst Toller, son of Mendel Toller, a grain wholesaler, was born in Zamotrzyn in 1893. In 1914 he began his studies at the University of Grenoble, but the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand brought him back to Germany. He was mobilized into the first Bavarian Infantry and Artillery Battalion and in March 1915 he found himself on the Western Front. In his diary he wrote, “How happy I am to be going to the front to contribute at last.” After six months of service, he asked to be sent to the trenches. His desire was not due to heroism, but to the anti-Semitic persecution of his platoon commander. He served at Verdun, the bloodiest place of World War I, but even in the hell of military battles antisemitism lived on. When the wounded poet was awarded the Iron Cross, his commander said: “You must see (in this award. – A. G.) as compensation for the negative image of your ancestors.”
Shocked by the massacre, Toller questioned the validity of nationalist propaganda. He wrote: “People have no imagination. If they could imagine the suffering of others, they would not inflict that suffering on others. What separates the German mother and the French mother? Slogans that drown us out so that we cannot hear the truth.” In May 1916 Toller was discharged and enrolled at Heidelberg University. There he began to write political poems in which he denounced the war. By 1917 Toller, who had become a socialist and pacifist, organized the Cultural and Political League of German Youth, which called for an end to the war. Toller’s political activities resulted in his expulsion from Heidelberg University.
Toller supported the German revolution that began on October 29, 1918, when the sailors in Kiel refused to follow orders and engage the British fleet. In November 1918, there was a revolution in Munich led by Kurt Eisner, a Berlin Jewish journalist, socialist, and chairman of the Munich council of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Toller became one of the leaders of the Bavarian Socialist government. He was undoubtedly an idealist. In 1926, he recalled, “Today they laugh at words like humanity and freedom […] and forget how they stirred our hearts in 1918 after 51 months of war, how they enlightened our minds. Toller was referring to his fellow Jews, the ministers of the Bavarian government, the poet Erich Mühsam, the philosopher and literary critic Gustav Landauer. This was a government of Jews, responding to Plato’s ideas of “philosopher-kings.”
On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was established. Toller became its president, and Eugene Leviné, a Russian-born Communist of Jewish origin, became prime minister. Six days after the declaration of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Toller, seeing Leviné’s extremism, resigned. He told Leviné, “I welcome the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it must be a dictatorship of love, not hatred.”
For a short time, Toller was commander of the Red Guard. He spoke out against the extremist Communist leaders, the leaders of the Second Bavarian Soviet Republic: “I believe that the present government is a disaster for the working masses.” Taking command of the Red Guard in Munich, Toller refused to be shot. Meanwhile, the troops of the German central government were advancing on Munich. On May 1, they entered Munich and defeated the Red Guard. Landauer was brutally murdered. Approximately 700 people, including Leviné, were executed. For months Toller hid from the authorities, aided by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Eventually Toller was arrested and convicted of treason. Max Weber and Thomas Mann testified in his favor. He would have been sentenced to death, but with the help of an international campaign, supporters saved his life. The court found him guilty under extenuating circumstances and sentenced him to five years in prison.
After his release from prison, Toller decided to learn about the struggle for a new life away from Germany. In 1925 he visited Palestine. Although he rejected Zionism, he was interested in the kibbutzim. On March 5, 1926, he came to Moscow at the invitation of Olga Kamenev, the first wife of Bolshevik Jew Lev Kamenev and sister of Trotsky, who headed the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. The press in 1926 printed excerpts from Toller’s autobiographical stories and a message about the imminent arrival of the writer, released from a bourgeois prison. The guest was to spend about two months in the USSR and meet with readers. The celebrated playwright and revolutionary was warmly welcomed and his play was shown at the Leningrad Drama Theater. The magazine “Spotlight” came out with a large portrait of Toller.
However, the humanity and pacifism displayed during the Bavarian Revolution cost Toller dearly in the homeland of the “real,” that is, bloody revolution. In those days, the Sixth Congress of the Executive Committee of the Communist International was taking place in Moscow. Its German delegate Paul Werner published in the newspaper Pravda an article entitled The Truth about Ernst Toller, in which he presented the poet as a renegade of the German revolution, guilty of its failure. Toller was called a “fantasist,” “adventurer,” “demagogue,” “traitor,” “disorganizer” of the forces of the Soviet Republic, and committed treason by not agreeing with Communist Leviné. Pravda apologized to its readers for the note and the publication of the portrait in Spotlight. After Werner’s article, Toller became an undesirable figure in Moscow. He went to give a widely advertised talk, but the Kamenev Institute building was closed in front of him. His visit to the USSR was cut short.
It is not only in the USSR that Toller becomes persona non grata. On April 1, 1933 Goebbels declared Toller an enemy of the Third Reich: “Two million German soldiers will rise from their graves in Flanders and Holland to brand the Jew Toller, who wrote that ‘the ideal of heroism is one of the most idiotic ideals.” In September 1933, the poet emigrated to London, where he published his autobiography, I Was a German. He was German and realized that his Germanness was an illusion. He wrote articles in English newspapers and screenplays for the American film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1936 he traveled to the United States to lecture, where he intensively helped raise funds for the Republicans in Spain. In 1939 he fell into a depression upon hearing of Hitler’s victories, and especially after receiving the news of his sister and brother being sent to a concentration camp.
On May 22, 1939, Toller committed suicide in a New York hotel on the day of General Franco’s victorious march of supporters to Madrid. An obituary published by Otto Schusler, a German communist and Trotsky supporter, in August 1939 states: “Toller’s fall symbolizes the fall of the democratic-pacifist ideology. His end coincides with the end of the illusions concentrated in the slogan: “There will be no more wars!” The victory of the nationalists, who later became members of the Nazi party, showed Toller that he was a stranger in his own country, that the Jewish community, whose affiliation he had pushed aside in every way, was severely persecuted and in mortal danger, that he had served a nation that refused to internationalize. The proletarians of Germany did not want to unite with the Jews, they united against them.
Of belonging to Jewry, Toller wrote: “A Jewish mother gave birth to me, Germany nurtured me, Europe educated me, the earth is my home, and the whole world is my homeland.” The cosmopolitan Toller excluded himself from Jewishness. This is evident in his early, first play, “Transfiguration” (1919), written in the Expressionist style, in which a young Jew of petty-bourgeois origin, the young Friedrich (the author’s surrogate), a revolutionary who goes to the front, appears. Shaken by the horrors of war and moved away from German nationalism, he devotes himself to revolution and the liberation of mankind. Toller shows in the play the goal of the modern Jew: not emancipation, but the transformation of the world for the benefit of the workers. The author of “Transfiguration” failed to transfigure the world.
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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 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.