Exile and Resistance

Last Sunday morning, Red Baron attended a matinee dedicated to the exile years of the Zentrum politician Dr. Joseph Wirth.

Red Baron has blogged about events at the Winterer Forum in the Municipal Theater before, i.e., about a staged production of the negotiations that preceded the Rapallo Treaty, which Reich Chancellor Joseph Wirth and his foreign minister, Dr. Walther Rathenau, negotiated with the Soviet Union.

 
Another time, it was a fictitious interview with Joseph Wirth on his political positions.

Peter Haug-Lamersdorf and Dr. Ulrike Hörster-Philipps on stage.

A well-rehearsed team again organized last Sunday's matinee. Historian Dr. Ulrike Hörster-Philipps introduced and presented the historical context during Joseph Wirth's years in exile. The actor Peter Haug-Lamersdorf quoted from Joseph Wirth's notes and letters and recited appropriate passages from Bertolt Brecht's works.

 

As always, singer Juliane Hollerbach excelled with her chansons from the 1920s and 1930s,  and Anita Morasch sang along to her accordion.

Thank you, Juliane, Peter, Ulrike, and Anita, for this memorable morning

Joseph Wirth's political rise began in the Weimar Republic on May 11, 1921, with his appointment as Reich Chancellor. He formed a coalition government of Social Democrats, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Zentrum, which had to implement the oh-so-harsh and unpopular policy of fulfilling the Treaty of Versailles.

During these years, right-wing extremists murdered Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the "fulfilment politician" Matthias Erzberger, so that Wirth also had to fear for his life. The lines of the following hate song were sung to the well-known St. Nicholas tune:

Let's be merry and cheerful, Bashing Wirth's head in. Merry, merry trallerallala, Soon, Emperor Wilhelm will return! Once the emperor is back, We'll beat Dr. Wirth to a cripple. The guns will bang, bang, bang On the black and the red pack. Hit Wirth always hard! Knock his skull so hard that it clung! And gun down Walther Rathenau, The goddamned Jewish swine!

Laßt uns froh und munter sein, Schlagt dem Wirth den Schädel ein. Lustig, lustig trallerallala, Bald ist Wilhelm wieder da! Wenn einst der Kaiser kommen wird, Schlagen wir zum Krüppel Dr. Wirth, Knallen die Gewehre tack, tack, tack Aufs schwarze und das rote Pack. Haut immer feste auf den Wirth! Haut seinen Schädel, daß er klirrt! Und knallt ab den Walter Rathenau, Die gottverfluchte Judensau!

Ultimately, Wirth had to resign with his first government but soon formed his second cabinet. He aimed to break the chains of the Treaty of Versailles. Would a rapprochement with Germany's eastern neighbor, Russia, which, with its communist regime, saw itself completely isolated from the rest of Europe, be a solution?. Words of a common destiny between Germany and Russia began to circulate.

The French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré took an unbending stance on fulfilling the Versailles provisions. This tough French position was particularly evident at the economic conference in Genoa in 1922, where Germany and Communist Russia were completely isolated.

This led to the rapid signing of the Treaty of Rapallo between the two pariah states, the preliminary draft of which had already been worked out in lengthy negotiations. Wirth and his foreign minister Rathenau thus demonstrated to the world that Germany was free to act, albeit to a limited extent.

In Germany, the right-wing circles were up in arms. In particular, that a Jew, Rathenau, was representing the government of the Reich as foreign minister was a provocation that could no longer be surpassed.

On June 24, 1922, Walther Rathenau, riding in his car, was "executed" with a submachine gun. In a speech to the members of the Reichstag, Wirth turned to the right and exclaimed in despair, "There stands the enemy, dripping his poison into the wounds of our people. - There stands the enemy - and there is no doubt about it: this enemy stands on the right."

After Hitler seized power at the end of January 1933, political parties in Germany were gradually eliminated. The Zentrum dissolved itself, but its politicians were still unsafe from persecution. At the beginning of June, the Freiburg daily Nazi newspaper Der Alemanne reported: "These days, in pursuit of the great purge in Germany, the former Reich Chancellor Dr. Joseph Wirth was to be taken into protective custody. Unfortunately, the bird had already flown. As reported to Switzerland ... This Zentrum leader hardly differed from a Marxist in the words and deeds of his many years of inglorious political activity," yet Wirth was a devout Catholic.

As such, he was well connected with the Vatican and endeavored to have the Church issue a public statement against Germany's anti-Semitic policies.

During the war, Wirth maintained contacts with German resistance groups. From 1942 onwards, he developed concepts for organizing a democratic Germany after the end of the war together with exiled social democrats.

The French occupation forces only allowed Wirth to return to Freiburg in 1949, realizing his left-wing political views. After his return, he clashed with Konrad Adenauer, as his policies were western-oriented and cemented Germany's division. Instead, Wirth believed in reviving the Rapallo spirit, so he traveled to Moscow in 1951.

The Federal Republic refused to pay him a pension because of his contacts with the East. The GDR supported Wirth with small grants and awarded him the German Peace Medal in 1954.

Dr. Joseph Wirth died in Freiburg in 1956.

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Academic Freedom

Red Baron is an old man, so only a few things in the news can still excite him. These include the civil war in South Sudan and the fight for academic freedom in the USA.

I find the war in South Sudan, for various reasons, more atrocious than the Ukraine war and totally insane in a world full of bloody conflicts. Perhaps I will get around to explaining my reasons for this "choice" to my readers.

What concerns me at the moment are the defensive struggles of many American universities against the Trump administration's influence on their research and teaching.

Paul Krugman wrote a clever essay that takes the tone that the Trump administration is taking up arms against the elites:

 
Above all, Trump clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they're smarter or better than him.

And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it's obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites - a group that, as they see it, doesn't include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists, and experts of any kind.

Krugman even draws a parallel between Mao's Cultural Revolution and what is currently happening in the US.

Once you've seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China's Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories.

The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. [...] The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences.

Right now we're all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don't expect them to care or even to acknowledge what's happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.  

Why science, when I say what is true?

Krugman covers a lot of ground here. As I wrote before, I would like to limit myself to the situation at universities.

What always upsets me is when authorities interfere with university teaching, especially when it comes to liberal ideas.

Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers University professor, called the Trump administration's demands "arguably the greatest incursion into academic freedom, freedom of speech, and institutional autonomy that we've seen since the McCarthy era. "

Kris Manjapra, professor of history at Tufts University, said, "We are witnessing a series of challenges to academic freedom and the rise of what seems to be a fascist coalition, and we are clearly seeing the beginning of reprisals against different institutions that are essential to the functioning of our democracy."

Not all American universities stiffened their spines but caved in when they received note of cut funding, an attitude David North described as an American Trumpian version of what the Nazis called "Gleichschaltung" - the official subordination of intellectual and cultural life to Nazi ideology.

Another of those terrible German words, Sabine Hossenfelder used when
she reasoned about the Trump Administration's pressure on American universities.

Red Baron knows of many historical attempts to decree what should be taught.

At the beginning of the 19th century, triggered by a stupid political murder, the Carlsbad Resolutions, instigated and implemented by the Austrian Chancellor Klemenz von Metternich in 1819, were a theatrical means of suppressing the national and liberal aspirations in Germany at the time. These Resolutions included press and book censorship, police supervision of the universities, the closure of gymnasiums, and the banning of student fraternities. Liberal and nationally minded lecturers were threatened with being banned from their profession.

University lecturers who spread teachings that were thought to be hostile to public order or undermined the foundations of the existing state institutions, such as the natural scientist Lorenz Oken, were dismissed, and some were even arrested, such as historian Ernst Moritz Arndt and the Father of Gymnastics (Turnvater) Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

Nevertheless, the University of Freiburg tried several times to win Oken as a professor. When the government finally agreed to the appointment after much insistence, Baden's interior minister, Ludwig Georg Winter, referring to Karl von Rotteck and Carl Theodor Welcker, could not resist the remark, "Yes, you could still use Oken in Freiburg; you probably don't have enough liberals yet."


When, in November 1833, Ernest Augustus of Hanover, King by the Grace of God, suspended the liberal Hanoverian constitution by executive order, seven professors at the University of Göttingen protested against this dictatorial act on grounds of conscience. The king dismissed the "Göttingen Seven" and expelled three from the country.

Commemorative stamp (©Stefan Klein and Olaf Neumann)

A broad public at home and abroad followed the events. It supported the "Seven", whose courageous act made a decisive contribution to the emergence of a bourgeois civil society and the creation of democracy in Germany.

Strangely enough, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the majority of the student body was National Socialist. There were no liberal student protests. On the contrary, in Freiburg students eagerly marched behind their university teacher Martin Heidegger, who exhorted them to follow him in invoking the forces of blood as the only preservers of German culture: "The essence of the German university only comes into clarity, rank and power when first and foremost and at all times the leaders themselves are led - led by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people into the imprint of its history."

Rector of the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger, with the chain of office
framed by taller colleagues and students in vollem Wichs (full regalia)
at the opening of the winter semester 1933/34 (©BZ)

"The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: From now on, every thing demands a decision and every action demands responsibility."

And the Scholl siblings? Hans and Sophie were students at the Munich university and members of the White Rose, a resistance group against the National Socialist dictatorship, which was essentially based on Christian and humanist values. Academic freedom was not their primary goal. It had ceased to exist in 1933, when all German universities were gleichgeschaltet (brought into line).

Convicted of Wehrzersetzung (undermining the fighting spirit of the German army), Hans and Sophie Scholl were sentenced to death on February 22, 1943, and hanged on the same day.

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Mox habebimus regnum novum

In the good old days, a coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) was called a GroKo because both parties together, supporting a black-red government, had majorities of up to 80% in the German Bundestag (parliament).

Coccinella septempunctata crawling (©Miltoncontact)

In the recent federal election, the voters reduced the CDU/CSU to 208 seats and the SPD to 120 seats. The formerly dominating parties agreed to form a coalition, but their so-called Ladybug Coalition merely holds 52% of the seats in the new Bundestag of 620.

 
The two coalition partners completed their 146-page contract in less than two months. They named the paper “Responsibility for Germany,” which should send “a very strong and clear signal to the citizens of our country and to our partners in the European Union.”

The problems to be dealt with in the next four years - provided the coalition lasts this long - are numerous:

1. Economic stability and competitiveness

- The German economy has been stagnating for over two years. Industry, particularly the automotive sector, has structural problems and is experiencing a decline. Causes include high energy prices, a shortage of skilled workers, and excessive bureaucracy. On top of this looms the potentially catastrophic impact of new US tariffs and a trade war.

- Inflation and cost of living: Inflation and the cost of living remain a dominant topic, although with the euro, it is a European problem watched by the European Central Bank.

2. Migration and integration

- Although the number of asylum applications has declined in the past year, the numbers are still high, burdening local authorities. The majority of Germans demand efficient action on migration policy.

- The integration of migrants into society and the job market is a long-term challenge, particularly regarding language and education. However, from a medium-term perspective, the stressed German labor market will profit.

3. Social policy and demographic change

- As the baby boomer generation enters retirement, the financial pressure on pension and care systems is increasing. Around 58,000 additional carers will be needed by 2025.

- As in most countries, the gap between rich and poor is growing. Reforms are needed to ensure a more balanced distribution of income and resources.

4. Housing market and infrastructure

- There is an estimated shortage of 700,000 homes in Germany. Affordable housing is particularly scarce in large cities.

- The investment backlog in infrastructure affects areas such as digitalization, transport, and energy.

5. Education and skilled workers

- The education system needs comprehensive reforms to ensure equal opportunities and meet the demands of a future labor market.

- Demographic change is leading to a decline in the potential workforce. Strategies to secure skilled workers, including targeted immigration, are necessary.

6. Climate protection and energy transition

- Despite international commitments, climate protection has lost priority in the public perception. Nevertheless, measures to reduce emissions and promote renewable energies must and will continue.

Securing an affordable and sustainable energy supply—nuclear and coal power are already or will be phased out—remains a key task, especially given geopolitical tensions.

7. Trust in state institutions

- 70% of citizens believe the state is overburdened, particularly regarding refugee policy, education, and internal security.

- Bureaucracy must be reduced, and administration modernization is a prerequisite for regaining trust in state institutions.

In Germany, like in many countries, the ladybug is associated with luck, love, and fertility.

Let it be so.

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A Black Wednesday for the World Trade

Bye-bye Toblerone

Day of Liberation, so called it Trump. The European translation reads Day of Despotism.

Trump's tulips are watching their master's ceremony

The tariffs announced in the Rose Garden of the White House will restrict exports to the US and make imported goods more expensive. The logical consequence iś that consumer prices will increase in the United States.

Most economists predict the new tariffs will lead to more bankruptcies and rising unemployment figures in many countries. The tariffs could plunge the world into a dangerous trade war in which there will be only losers.

This view is not shared by Ms. Miller Wellington, who sells candies in Delta, a village of around 3000 people less than 100 miles south of Detroit. She is unfazed by the possibility of price increases predicted by most economists. "Sometimes you have to walk through fire to get to the other side," she says, echoing the president's main argument: "If tariffs bring companies and business back to hard-working people like the ones who live here, then it's worth it."

The Washington Post writes," Wall Street worries Trump tariffs could wreck the souring economy." 

Let Stephen Colbert enlighten us: 

"And Trump's toadies are out there defending the tariffs. Here's Louisiana Senator John Kennedy on FOX Business arguing that ultimately nothing is knowable, 'The truth is that nobody knows. I've listened to economists for the last month. Some say this will cause a recession; his tariffs will cause a recession. Others say it will cause growth. In my eight years in Washington, I've learned that for every economist, there's an equal and opposite economist.'"

(Laughter from the audience) And Stephen continued, "Sounds crazy, but it is actually true. For example, Milton Friedman was always opposed by the equal and opposite economist Friedmil Manton."

"Most experts dispute the idea that these tariffs would lead to any growth at all. Instead, they say we could be looking at a prolonged recession, higher prices, and higher unemployment. Okay, a little more practice. Man, awww, damn, these grapes smell like wrath."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,200, and the S&P 500 tumbled 6% as Wall Street's worst crisis since the COVID crash deepened after China matched President Donald Trump's big raise in tariffs announced earlier this week. 

Still, leaving Washington to watch a golf tournament at Mar-a-Largo, the "stable genius" claimed in one of his chopper talks:

Like this?

To be continued ...

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Freiburg and the Breisgau in the Peasants' War

Organization, execution, and consequences of peasant violence against castles, towns, and monasteries 1524/1525

Red Baron blogged about the Peasants' War before, and there is no end to it yet. This two-day conference was highly professional and too specialised for a physicist. Still, I found two lectures devoted to Freiburg.

The evening before the conference proper, aimed to present a history book: The Peasants' War in Freiburg and the Breisgau. A reader on the history of a crisis. This book, written by experts, formed the basis for the lectures of the following two days.

A lecture followed the book presentation: Punishing and Killing - Excessive Violence in the Peasants' War. There was looting, arson, rape and the occasional homicide on the part of the peasants, but the reaction of the authorities was excessive.

What held the authorities back from a general massacre of the peasants was that they were needed for food production.

A letter from the patrician and Nürnberg councillor Caspar Nützel to AlbrechtFriedrich of Prussia documents the authorities' overreaction, "... I do not think that anyone with any sense can deny how unjustly, unchristianly and even too excessively the authorities have torn the hair of their subjects, whom they are supposed to shepherd, provide for, govern and not oppress. Whether the punishment they inflict by disemboweling, burning, taking their possessions, driving them into misery making widows and orphans, and other cruel persecutions or even imposing penalties on the guilty and the innocent without any prior truthful inquiry and hearing of their answers and excuses is in proportionate to the ignorant acts of the subjects, Your Reverend Grace, as a praiseworthy and understanding prince, has to judge*."
*Mark Twain wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, "Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

Massacre of peasants in an open field

On the other hand, Thomas Müntzer referred to the Old Testament and called for open violence: Do not take pity on yourselves, even if Esau suggests good words to you (Genesis 33).

 
Do not look on the wretchedness of the wicked. So they will ask you kindly, weeping and pleading like children. Do not be pitied, as God commanded through Moses and has revealed to us (Deuteronomy 7).

Violence begets counter-violence. In the south of the Reich, the high-born prince, Margrave Casimirius of Ansbach, came with horsemen and several servants and attacked the new noble peasants from the Ries. A horseman drove a spear through the one who wore the chasuble, thus mocking it. The spear was left stuck until the third day, so God's punishment was revealed.

The next day, Red Baron listened to a lecture on Conquer Freiburg. Threatening, besieging, and liberating: a praxeology of the Peasants' War.

The people of Freiburg's greatest fear was that they would not know when the peasants would march against the city. The peasants played on their psychological warfare skillfully:

The Freiburg chronicler Huldrichus Zasius complained, "I would gladly write to Mr. Montaigne [...] if it were not for the unfortunate unrest that is shaking our city and indeed the entire province at the hands of the peasants; for all around us is so full of fear, sadness, danger and attack that hardly an hour goes by when we do not fear destruction."

To scout and find out where the enemies are.
Write to cites and neighbors and have a good correspondence with each other.

Still, the city council puzzles: 

Since Friday, we have received several messages from the forest and have truly learned that the peasants are gathering heavily against Bonndorf. Yesterday, 80 people from Löffingen came to gather against Bondorf. They let it be known that they want to go to Breisgau next. They know their way around here well and will take the region.

Freiburg prepares:

       

Furthermore, all guildsmen, young or old, physically able, when they hear the storm, shall really leave, with their armor, and hurry to the fish market under the banner.

A servant identified as a spy was captured and interrogated, but the rumors she had spread made Freiburg's citizens extremely nervous:

Peasants with heavy equipment are aiming at the Freiburg Minster church.

After I returned to the city from the peasants' camp, I spread the rumor among the community and publicly announced the power with which the peasants were equipped. They had everything at hand that was needed for a field camp and an assault: sound cannons, powder, fire, bullets, and even more provisions. They were so well equipped that it would be impossible to hold the city. 

 Eventually, the peasants who wanted to emancipate themselves in Lutherey, Ketzerey, and Uffrur went on the offensive. First, they diverted the Dreisam's water for the city's mills and cut off its drinking water supply. On May 23, 1525, the peasant bunch from the Black Forest occupied the Carthusian monastery and climbed up the Schlossberg. 

 "It was a beautiful May evening", recounts the eyewitness Huldrichus Zasius. "The lords were sitting, as usual, on the cathedral square in front of their guildhall 'Zum Ritter' when suddenly several hundred shots from arquebuses announced that the peasants had occupied the Schlossberg. Immediately, the citizens took up arms." 

 From the top of the Schlossberg, the leader Hans Müller, dressed in a red cloak and red beret, fired shots at the spire of the cathedral tower until it fell to the ground, to the great jubilation of the attackers: "We shall lay Freiburg's church tower, like that in Kirchzarten." 

 Müller called on the city to join the Christian Union so that the Gospel would be spread according to the wording and the peasants would be freed from illegitimate levies. Eventually, facing the city walls, the peasants made themselves big: 

So we want to live with our other brothers and relatives closer to you and break into your city. Therefore, we admonish you fraternally to stand by us today so that much bloodshed, great ruin, and evil, mainly the ruin of the vines, will be avoided. 

 Help from the Habsburg authorities for Freiburg did not come. The final decision to surrender was possibly due to the announcement that the vines would be uprooted: 

Dear friends, you see that we lost the Schlossberg, and for five days, we have had neither a well nor a cup. Moreover, they have shot into the spire of the cathedral. Although we have been assured that help has been sent to us, we see that no one has come to us. For the preservation of our lives, our honor, our property, and our lives, we are obliged to come to an agreement with the peasants. 

The peasants marched into Freiburg on May 24. They forced the city council to join the Christian Union in establishing a general peace and eradicating the unjust grievances of the gemeiner Mann (common man) against the word of God and the holy Gospel imposed on him by the spiritual and secular authorities.

When the authorities eventually gained the upper hand in the German territories, the peasants left Freiburg.

In June, a municipal delegation traveled to Innsbruck to the Austrian government. It declared that Feiburg had only joined the peasants' Christian Union to avert harm to the city and its citizens:

Furthermore, no one should become involved with the Lutheran sect. Still, everyone who wants to live in Freiburg should stick to the Christian statutes that have been commonly held for hundreds of years until the authorities and those allowed to do so order otherwise.

The Innsbruck authorities were not satisfied with this excuse.

But that is another story.

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