By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In 1973, a book by German writer Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) The Defeat of the Revolution: Germany, 1918-1919 was published in Berlin. The author writes: “Eugen Leviné was an impulsive young man of wild energy, and unlike Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, probably had the qualities of the German Lenin and Trotsky.” Haffner is referring to the chairman of the government of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919, a doctor of economics, a Communist, a Jew, and a native of Russia.
The Bavarian Revolution flashed a bright red light across Germany. Thomas Mann was one of those who were shocked by the possibility of the Bavarian Revolution’s victory. In the last days of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he wrote in his diary: “We talked about whether the salvation of European culture was still possible […] or whether the Kirghiz idea of annihilation would win. We also talked about the type of the 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 the instinct of self-preservation, must take measures against this breed of people with the exertion of all its strength and in a short time, according to the laws of wartime.”
A month after the victory of the counter-revolution, the chairman of the government of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Eugen Leviné, was condemned and shot; the Minister of Public Education, the philosopher and writer Gustav Landauer, was lynched. Three months before the end of the republic in Bavaria, the prime minister of the Bavarian Social Democratic government, Kurt Eisner, was assassinated by an aristocratic officer. The Bavarian Revolution was led by Jews Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, Erich Musam, Gustav Landauer and Russian-born Communists Eugen Leviné and Max Levin.
Eugen Leviné was born on May 10/23, 1883 into the family of a wealthy St. Petersburg merchant, Julius Leviné, an Italian Jew, a businessman, alien to politics and aspirations for public activity, and his wife Rosalia Goldberg. After the death of his father, his mother took her son at the age of 13 to Germany, where she placed him in a privileged closed school in Wiesbaden.
In 1902, Eugen finished his secondary education and returned to Russia. But he stayed there for a short time, because his mother feared the harmful influence of Russia and St. Petersburg on her son. In Germany, Leviné entered the University of Heidelberg at the Faculty of Law, but listened to lectures on ethics, art and the history of literature at the Faculty of Philology. He actively participated in the organizations of the Russian colony in Heidelberg and was the initiator of charitable evenings in favor of revolutionaries. In Heidelberg Leviné intensively studied the works of Marx.
In the winter of 1904, he transferred to the University of Berlin. In August 1905, Eugen went to Russia with a certificate of correspondent of the newspaper Frankfurter Volksstimme. Under the cover of a foreign journalist’s license, he engaged in revolutionary activities, but was forced to go underground.
What image in the underground did the scion of a wealthy family, the educated, assimilated Jew Eugen Leviné, take? He acquired a passport in the name of the cattle dealer Benzion Greenmuth and tried in every way to imitate this type. In conversation with outsiders he deliberately spoke Russian poorly, inserting Jewish words, swearing and cursing his “competitors” at every turn.
It was difficult for an outsider to guess that under the guise of a typical bourgeois from a Jewish village in the settled area a revolutionary was hiding. But his rapprochement with the Jewish people was a masquerade. His Jewish appearance, typical national manners, accent and gesticulation were only a mask to serve the cause of the revolution. After three years of underground activity, in 1908 in Minsk, Leviné was arrested by the police. The bribes of his mother, who came from Germany, helped to free Eugen from prison and his return to Germany. At the university he transferred from the Faculty of Law to the Faculty of Economics and defended his doctoral thesis in economics.
Two years before the war, Leviné took Baden nationality in Mannheim and as a “German” was drafted into military service. Because of his knowledge of the Russian language he was not sent to the front, but was appointed interpreter at the camp for Russian prisoners in Heidelberg. He was a censor of the letters of prisoners of war. Leviné‘s ability to inspire confidence in prisoners of war suggested to his superiors the idea of using him as an agent to elicit from the captured Russian officers military secrets of their army, but he refused to cooperate: “I am a socialist and a spy will never be!” After that he was soon demobilized.
In 1915 Leviné married Rosa Broido, the daughter of a Polish rabbi, who became a Communist and his assistant in revolutionary work. He fully embraced the October Bolshevik Revolution. At the beginning of the German Revolution in 1918, Eugen joined the Spartacist Union, the future Communist Party of Germany. After the defeat of the communist uprising in Berlin, he was intensively searched for by the police. In March 1919 he arrived in Munich. Fyodor Stepun, Eugen’s university classmate, doctor of philosophy of history, later professor of Russian cultural studies at the University of Munich testifies: “In his views, he was a humanitarian atheist, had a typical Jewish appearance with an almost aristocratic long face, beautiful melancholic eyes. […] During our friendship he showed himself to be an unusually mild, even sentimental young man, writing poems about the autumn rain drumming on the roofs of the workers’ houses.”
In 1919, Bavaria had 7 million inhabitants. It had the second largest number of inhabitants among the German states after Prussia. A few days before his appearance in Munich, the Prime Minister of the Bavarian government, Kurt Eisner, a Jew and Berlin journalist, was assassinated. Eisner had become head of the government by overthrowing King Ludwig III of the Wittelsbach dynasty, which had ruled the country for 700 years. Not a single person died during the revolution. The Jew defeated the king. He dreamed of creating a regime that rejected German militarism and Teutonomania. A pacifist who did not shed a single drop of blood, he believed in the victory of his cause, but was condemned to failure: bloodless revolutions were doomed to defeat.
On April 7, 1919, the Bavarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed, led by the leader of the Independent Social Democrats, the poet Ernst Toller. A meeting of the Communists discussed their partnership in government with Leviné’s Independent Social Democrats. Leviné demanded “the immediate seizure of the banks by the proletarian Red Guard.” Toller was opposed to the hardline communist line. Rosa Leviné called him “the Bavarian Lenin,” but “the Bavarian Lenin” was her husband.
Meanwhile, the troops of the deposed Bavarian government of Johann Hoffmann were moving on revolutionary Munich. Communists led by Leviné issued an appeal to the proletariat: “Overthrow the central council and Toller!” After six days as president of the republic, on April 14, Toller resigned, and the Communists, Eugen Leviné, Max Levin and Paul Werner, seized power. Bolsheviks from Russia, passengers of Lenin’s “sealed car” — meaning the “sealed car” of the train that brought Lenin from Switzerland to Russia on the eve of the October Revolution of 1917 — the Jews Tovia Axelrod and Alexander Abramovich, whom Eugen had met during a six-month stint in the information department of the Soviet embassy in Berlin, arrived in Munich to help Levine. They were specialists in the workings of the “world revolution.”
The pacifist Eisner was first succeeded by the pacifist Toller. Justifying his resignation, Toller said: “I consider the present government to be a catastrophe for the laboring masses.” “The catastrophe government” of the Bavarian Soviet Republic was headed by Leviné, who announced the seizure of eleven hostages and sent a radio telegram to Lenin announcing the establishment of a “genuine proletarian dictatorship” in the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
Bavarian Soviet ministers nationalized banks, took apartments from the rich and gave them to the poor, 10,000 rifles were distributed to the workers on Leviné‘s orders, hostages were taken and shot. Munich was cut off from the rest of the world. The transportation of food stopped. The lives of infants, sick and weak people were in grave danger. Leviné was not troubled by thoughts of starving children. “What happens,” he asked, “if for a few weeks there is less milk in Munich? In any case, most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie. We have no interest in their surviving. There is no harm if they die – they would have grown up to be enemies of the proletariat.”
“A humanitarian atheist,” a “sentimental young man,” in Stepun’s words, Leviné began to turn into an inhuman believing communist and a murderous ruler. However, on May 3, troops of the former government captured Munich. On May 5, the last pockets of resistance of the revolutionaries were liquidated.
The Bavarian middle class was frightened by the revolution and responded with violent antisemitic terror to the red terror of the “outsiders” to their expropriation of capitalist property. Leviné was an ideological communist, a rapist and a destroyer. After the suppression of the revolution he went into hiding, but it was important for the counter-revolutionaries to find and destroy him. A large cash reward was announced for his capture.
About ten days after the defeat of the revolutionary detachments, Leviné was arrested. In the death sentence there are these words: “The proclamation of the Soviet Republic was a rebellion against the existing legitimate government. […] Leviné took full responsibility for this course of action, which is a crime called treason. Leviné was a foreigner who had entered Bavaria, whose state-legal relations did not concern him in any way. He pursued his own aims without regard to the good of the population at large, though he knew that the country was in urgent need of internal peace. With his high mental endowment he fully foresaw the consequences of his actions. If someone so orders the fate of the people, it can be considered firmly established that his way of acting arises from a dishonorable way of thinking. On this basis, the defendant was denied the recognition of mitigating circumstances. On the contrary, the court considers the strictest punishment as an imperative requirement of justice. On these grounds, in accordance with Article 3 of the Martial Law, the court sentences the accused to death.”
In his last word, Leviné said: “I personally would still like to object to the reproach made not by the prosecutor’s office, but from the outside, but which was partly joined by the prosecutor, the reproach that they were all ‘strangers.’ I know very well that I am Russian by origin, I am a Jew, I am not from Bavaria. How could I dare to accept a post about which the defense counsel said that it was equal to the post of Minister-President if I accepted the post offered to me, it was only because I believed that I, by virtue of my previous activities, I am able to navigate in economic matters, and also because I considered myself personally entitled and imputed to myself even in the duty, as long as there is no one else, to take this post. As long as I held it, I was obliged to fulfill my duty to the German and international proletariat and to the Communist revolution.”
The death sentence was carried out on June 5, 1919. Before his death, Leviné shouted: “Long live the world revolution!” He was 36 years old.
Under the leadership of Eisner and Toller, the Bavarian Revolution was bloodless. Leviné‘s rise to power brought it into a bloody phase. The Bavarian Soviet Republic lasted two weeks. During this time Munich’s newspapers were closed, the telegraph and telephone lines were out of order, the railroad station was seized and access roads were blocked, leading to food shortages in the city. Hotels were turned into armories, strikes paralyzed businesses, and there was fighting in the city. Soviet rule in Bavaria as a phenomenon shook German society.
The revolution that took place after the lost World War I frightened many Germans. Anarchy, bloodshed, economic paralysis, the liquidation of private property, and the blood-red specter of Soviet Russia alienated Bavarians from the socialist revolution and its leaders, most of whom were Jews.
The Munich newspapers called the leadership of the Soviet Republic “a gang of lunatics, fantasists, fanatics and criminals” and “vain agitator strangers.” The poet and writer Isolde Kurtz, who wrote reports on the Munich events, called the Communists Leviné, Levin, and Axelrod “a terrorist group.” Kurz characterized Leviné as “the most dangerous, the most ruthless, and probably the most significant among the leaders.” She called Axelrod “the terror of all banks.” He demanded the immediate confiscation of all valuables stored in banks and the breaking of bank boxes whose owners did not open them voluntarily.
Journalist and writer Sebastian Haffner, in his book A German’s Story (2002), quotes the testimony of a soldier of the Freikorps, the “Free Corps,” one of the punishers of the revolutions in Berlin and Munich: “Not without some good-natured sympathy, he spoke of the victims who fell by the hundreds on the battlefield or were ‘shot while trying to escape.'”
“It was the color of working youth,” he said thoughtfully and melancholically; this was evidently the formula under the sign of which the events were imprinted on his brain ” These were our best working youth,” he repeated, “fine, brave fellows, not like Munich in 1919: there were scoundrels, Jews, and idlers. For them I had not the slightest sympathy.”
Most of the Jewish leaders were not Bavarians, some were foreigners, outsiders, Russian Jews seeking to bring the Bolshevik revolution to Germany. The foreigners, Jews, killed the hostages, among them German aristocrats, members of the Thule Society (Thule-Gesellschaft). Eisner’s murderer Count Arco Walley, had been a member of the Thule Society until his mother’s “disgraceful” Jewish ancestry was discovered.
The Thule Society members murdered by the Bavarian revolutionaries were German nationalists who extolled the origins of the “Aryan race” and considered Germans to be a “master race.”
The Thule Society was founded in 1918 in Munich. Its members were fierce opponents of the Bavarian revolutionaries and forerunners of the National Socialist Party. Their motto was, “Remember that you are a German! Keep your blood pure!” They espoused extreme nationalism, mysticism, antisemitism, the concept of German racial superiority, and were preachers of the pan-German idea of a powerful new German Reich. In the cradle of the Thule Society, in Munich, the center of extreme German nationalism, the “Jews,” the “outsiders,” the “Bolsheviks” took a swing at the “honor of the German nation!”
The Jews who led the Bavarian Republic did not die their own death: Kurt Eisner was murdered by a right-wing extremist in 1918, Gustav Landauer was massacred by the Punishers in 1919, Eugen Leviné was shot by order of the Bavarian Tribunal in 1919, Erich Musam was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1934, Max Levin and Tovia Axelrod fled to Russia and were shot there in 1937 and 1938 respectively, Ernst Toller committed suicide in 1939 after concluding that the Nazis had won.
Leviné suffered because of his Jewish ancestry as a child in wealthy German boarding houses. He, first subconsciously and then consciously, processed childhood insults and humiliations of antisemitic content into pictures of the unjust oppression of all people of low social standing. Leviné‘s philosophy was that the existence of the Jews as a people was a fantasy that emerged from a warped socio-economic system and was a caricature of history, its ugly nightmare, and that the Jewish problem would be solved by correcting society through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Then the Jew will become an ex-Jew, an ordinary man.
Not only Leviné, but thousands of highly intelligent, well-educated Jews believed in this theory and acted according to its principles. They hated their Jewishness and fought for revolution as a highly moral means of getting rid of Jewishness on “legal grounds.” This deliverance was, they believed, a noble way of liberating humanity from exploitation, suppression and humiliation, whereby “Jewish isolation” would disappear.
The terrible end of the Bavarian Revolution wrenched from the depths of Leviné‘s soul a deathly disillusionment with society. In the last hours of his life, he saw clearly the reason for his defeat: he was a foreigner, a Russian, a Jew, not a Bavarian, who had swung to rule a foreign country. The Bavarian Revolution was a complete failure, but its defeat was not without consequences. It inspired extremists to form the National Socialist Party. Frightened by the revolution, the German nationalists of Munich joined the struggle to turn the Weimar Republic into the Third Empire of the German nation. The brown poisonous fog emanating from the Aryans of the Thule Society in Munich became the air that Germany and Europe would breathe for 12 years.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.