In Hitler’s Munich. Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner (review)

Reviewed by: In Hitler’s Munich. Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner Andrea Löw Michael Brenner. In Hitler’s Munich. Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 378 pp. Michael Brenner’s study is oppressively topical. Not only is a century from the infamous Beer Hall Putsch being commemorated this year, but the author’s preface to the English-language edition, written after January 6, 2021, clearly connects the events and developments of 1920s Munich with the situation in the United States and elsewhere today: “Germany during the 1920s offers crucial lessons for us today about how democracies become imperiled. History never repeats itself, but in this case it does rhyme. The German example warns us that knocking down an insurrection does not mean the fight for democracy has been won yet” (xi). Brenner describes how Munich turned into the capital of antisemitism and Hitler’s testing ground for Nazism, a city that Thomas Mann characterized as “the city of Hitler” in June 1923 (213). But In Hitler’s Munich is much more; it is a story about Jews in Munich in these crucial years, about their reactions and interpretations and an intellectual history of the 1920s in Munich, Bavaria, and beyond. Brenner asks about the relationship of the Jewish revolutionaries to their Jewishness and how Munich Jews and non-Jews saw them and reacted to what they did. In retrospect, it seems all too easy to see the rise of antisemitism in what would turn into the capital of Nazism as a direct result of the revolutionaries’ political actions. Yet Brenner notes that if history had turned out differently, we might today see this period as “a success story for German Jews, as an episode of pride rather than of shame” (6). Never before and never since have so many Jewish politicians been in the public eye as in Munich during the years following World War I. Large parts of the Jewish community, however, distanced themselves from the revolution, even publicly opposed it, but this role was hardly ever mentioned in the years to follow. Politically conservative German Jews faced a dilemma. Still, there was an extremely wide range of revolutionary protagonists with Jewish background—men and women—and Brenner presents their stories. None of them celebrated Hanukah, still, they felt like outsiders in Catholic Bavaria and they actually were outsiders. It is this very outsider perspective Brenner describes so well in this study, using a wide range of sources, presenting an intellectual history of revolutionary Jews like Kurt Eisner, Erich Mühsam, and Ernst Toller. He also describes the rise of the antisemites who held all prejudices against Eisner against Jews overall. In a rather personal way, Brenner writes about the hate letters to Eisner as one “of the most depressing archival finds in connection with the revolution in Munich” (109). The verbal radicalization becomes very clear in these letters, but also in many other documents from these years. By quoting from all different sides, Brenner offers a thick description of the atmosphere of this important period. Brenner analyzes Hitler’s political attitude back in Munich and how the loyalists who surrounded him then would later all play an important role. As the atmosphere grew tenser, Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1921: “Travelers, Avoid [End Page 486] Bavaria!” (192). In fact, Jews in Munich no longer felt secure, and this culminated in the putsch of November 1923. Brenner makes clear that this was a turning point: “For most of Munich’s Jews, this night represented their first real confrontation with the life-threatening horror of National Socialist terror. They came to realize that, should there be a real seizure of power by Hitler, the National Socialists seriously intended to turn their antisemitic rhetoric from words into deeds” (255). The narrative of the events analyzed in this book has shifted over time and also Brenner’s approach is a special perspective; he concentrates on the Jews themselves and the rise of antisemitism. As he rightly states at the end: “But whichever way we look at it, the city of Munich—with its increasingly...