Imagine a flood of young men who are uprooted, lack perspective, unable to find employment, frustrated by promises of improvement that never materialized, psychologically fragile because they feel displaced by others who they deem less deserving, and burdened with shame for an uncontrollable situation. Provide them with weapons, and encourage them to band together for ideological causes that clearly identify an “other,” a defined enemy, a target in a deeply divided country. Provide them with markers that signal belonging (to an in-group) like hats, or insignia. What have you got?

No, wrong, country, wrong century, not the Proud Boys and their ilk.

I want to talk today about the German Freikorps, armed paramilitary groups that wreaked havoc in the the years after WW I, from 1918 to about 1923 during the Weimar Republic. About 3 million soldiers returned to Germany from Belgium and France after the armistice in November 1918, experienced by them as a shameful loss. The treaty of Versailles reduced the numbers of German soldiers in a standing army to 100.000 down from a total of 6 million before the war. Many of the former soldiers, in fact almost half a million, kept their weapons after formal decommissioning, and were soon organized into militias that were financed by the government interested in defending Eastern borders, in Poland and the Baltics, and crushing sectarian uprisings in Germany itself.

In a starkly polarized country where the left as well as strongly reactionary forces hoped for political change (and the right-wing myth that the left had betrayed the army stoked hatred,) the armed members of these right-wing militias started to kill members of the opposition, both everyday Germans and famous political players. Leftists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were among them because they had been publicly anti-war. The Bavarian Senat president Kurt Eisner was killed because he was a pacifist. Matthias Erzberger (from a centrist party) was murdered because he had signed the armistice of Compiègne as a government representative. Foreign minister Walther Rathenau was killed because he was Jewish. The militias supported (failed) coups, like the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch where reactionary forces under Kapp tried to destroy the government. Anti-semitism became a battle-cry, Jews being even more abhorred than communists who were active participants in the struggle for political representation.

Fearing a civil war, the government did not punish the Freikorps members who had supported the coups and let them retreat, and even paid their wages. Many of these now floating veterans organized themselves loosely afterwards and eventually drifted into a growing Bavarian party: the NSDAP. In total, and that in itself a frightening fact, in a few years about 354 radicalized right wing killers where systematically protected by the German legal system, getting away with murder without punishment, while 10 of the 22 leftist killers received the death penalty. (Ref.)

That’s a political assassination every four days or so in a country smaller than Montana across the span of four years. We are not living in these times.

“Born of war, defeat and compromise, the new German republic was reeling from the effects of wartime rationing, material deprivation and the millions killed or wounded. The horrors of the Somme, the Marne and Verdun did not end so much as trickle back into whole towns, villages and cities, which had to accommodate the countless returning invalids, with their missing limbs and gashed faces, their damaged psyches and shell-shocked nerves.….more than four million people died as a result of armed conflicts throughout Europe in the first five years after the war, a number greater than the combined wartime casualties of France, Britain and the United States. Vicious cycles of civil war, revolution and counterrevolution meant that, between 1918 and 1923, the European continent was “the most violent place on the planet.” (Ref.)

But there are parallels that we ignore at our own peril. We do see numerous electoral successes by right-wing and authoritarian candidates in the United States, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and countries in South America. The resentment towards globalization and cultural pluralism, combined with racist and anti-semitic ideas attitudes, echo the invective aimed at the Weimar Republic by nationalists and conservatives during the 1920s. We also face a disturbing increase in right-wing political violence across the world. A long but brilliant description by Anne Applebaum of the current slide towards autocracies can be found here.

In our own country cries for violence to be permitted are on the rise. So are little veiled comments by politicians that foment chaos and violence – just look at the January 6th evidence. And we have no way yet to measure the psychological ramifications of a pandemic that has blanketed us with death and given further rise to political division around the (enforced) mechanisms to combat the scourge.

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Without invoking an analogy, we can still learn from the mistakes that were made in the 1920s, (in)actions that promoted if not installed a dictatorial regime that claimed to provide a way out of the chaos and reinstate power hierarchies of yore, so desperately longed for by the shaken German people. We can look at the role of the legal system.

“One of the most crucial failures of the Weimar Republic was the failure of its courts to uphold and defend the constitution. Court judges and state prosecutors tended to side overwhelmingly with right-wing offenders; the Kapp Putsch of 1920, for instance, in which right-wing nationalists attempted to overthrow the government, resulted in just a single conviction.”

I don’t know if the train has left the station already. The appointment of ideologically biased judges, the vagaries of the American Jury system that is so open to manipulation, the fact that politicians get away with explicit calls for violence without major legal ramifications, are cause for worry. As congress-woman Ocasio-Cortez, after being the target of a video from a republican congressman depicting her being killed, said: “core recognition of human dignity, value and worth is a line that cannot be crossed.” If we forgo accountability, we open the floodgates.

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This point is acknowledged even by some truly conservative thinkers. Aaron Sibarium, associate editor at the Washington Free Beacon, writes about the “Weimarization of the American Republic” here. I don’t agree with his both-sides are extremist approach, but he has interesting things to say about the fact of and mechanisms towards polarization that are implicated in rising threats of violence, the judiciary included.

Not mentioned, of course, is the very pragmatic, rational first step a country could take: curtail the absurd amount of lethal weapons that have deadly consequences in political violence. For all we know, our very own Supreme Court will march in the opposite direction come June. As I said: look at the legal system…the parallels there are frightening. Germany turned brown, the signature color of the Nazis. We know who contributed.

Photographs today are from the city of Weimar, from a trip I took there some years back.

The LA Philarmonic had a program last year called “The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933″, selected by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here are two of the pieces that were part of it (I only found them performed by other companies.) Kurt Weill’s Berliner Requiem and Hindemith’s strange one act-opera Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.

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