In Hitler's Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

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From acclaimed historian Michael Brenner, a mesmerizing portrait of Munich in the early years of Hitler's quest for power In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I and the failed November Revolution of 1918–19, the conservative government of Bavaria identified Jews with left-wing radicalism. Munich became a hotbed of right-wing extremism, with synagogues under attack and Jews physically assaulted in the streets. It was here that Adolf Hitler established the Nazi movement and developed his antisemitic ideas. Michael Brenner provides a gripping account of how Bavaria's capital city became the testing ground for Nazism and the Final Solution. In an electrifying narrative that takes readers from Hitler's return to Munich following the armistice to his calamitous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Brenner demonstrates why the city's transformation is crucial for understanding the Nazi era and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Brenner describes how Hitler and his followers terrorized Munich's Jews and were aided by politicians, judges, police, and ordinary residents. He shows how the city's Jews responded to the antisemitic backlash in many different ways―by declaring their loyalty to the state, by avoiding public life, or by abandoning the city altogether. Drawing on a wealth of previously unknown documents, In Hitler's Munich reveals the untold story of how a once-cosmopolitan city became, in the words of Thomas Mann, "the city of Hitler." Cover Contents Preface to the English-Language Edition 1. A Change of Perspective “The Whole Thing, an Unspeakable Jewish Tragedy" Jewish Revolutionaries Do Not a Jewish Revolution Make The Good Old Days? The “Jewish Question” Moves to Center Stage 2. Jewish Revolutionaries in a Catholic Land Hanukkah 5679 (November 1918) “It Has to Be My Jewish Blood That Is Incensed”—Kurt Eisner “My Judaism . . . Lives in Everything That I Start and That I Am”—Gustav Landauer “I Will Demonstrate Once More That I Am Someone from the Old Testament!”—Erich Mühsam “But Am I Not . . . a Member of That People That for Millennia Has Been Persecuted, Harried, Martyrized and Slain?”—Ernst Toller “Jewish Is How My Head Thinks, Russian How My Heart Feels”—Eugen Leviné “Foreign Bolshevik Agents”—Jews in the Fight against the Council Republic 3. A Pogrom Atmosphere in Munich Passover 5769 (April 1919) “We Don’t Want Any Bavarian Trotsky”—The Mood Shifts “A Government of Jehovah’s Wrath”—The Attitude of the Catholic Church “To the Gallows”—Radicalization in Word and Deed “The Trotskys Make the Revolution, and the Bronsteins Pay the Price”—Jewish Reactions 4. The Hotbed of Reaction Rosh Hashanah 5681 (September 1920) “The Movement . . . Needed a Site That Would Become an Example”—Hitler’s Laboratory “The Ostjuden Danger”—The First Expulsions of Jews “Travelers, Avoid Bavaria!”—Manifestations of Violence “Now Germany Has Its Dreyfus Trial”—A Legal Scandal and a Scandalous Legal System 5. The City of Hitler Sukkoth 5684 (September 1923) “All the Lazy and the Vicious . . . Rushed, as if Magically Drawn, to Munich”—The Capital of Antisemitism “Tomorrow You’ll All Be Hanging”—The Hot Autumn of 1923 “A Mockery of the German People”— Reverberations of 1923 6. A Variety of Perspectives Gravestones Life Journeys Interpretations Purim 5693 (March 1933) Timeline Acknowledgments Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index